Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #37 - Don't Start a Blog, Start a Cult - Mr. Money Mustache

Episode Date: September 27, 2017

Pete Adeney, more commonly known as Mr. Money Mustache, retired at 30 after working as a software engineer for about ten years.He blogs at MrMoneyMustache.com about how he saved money, where he invested it, and how he achieved "financial freedom through badassity".You can apply to the W18 batch of YC here - ycombinator.com/apply

Hey, this is Craig Cannon and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's guest is Pete Aedney, also known as Mr. Money Mustache. So Pete worked as a software engineer for about 10 years and then retired at the age of 30. He started blogging about it at Mr. Money Mustash.com, where he'd write about a saving strategy, where he invested the money, and how he thought about life. His blog became super popular, especially among engineers, so he's been one of the most requested guests for the podcast. I met up with Pete in Longmont, Colorado at the newly constructed Mr. Money Mustache

headquarters and had a blast talking with them. So I hope you enjoy this one. And before we get started, just want to let you know that the winner 2018 application is open. So if you'd like to apply to YC, the link is Ycombinator.com slash apply. All right, here we go. The first question I had for you, not on the, not on the paper, is if I want to start a cult like Mustachians, what are your pro tips? Man, that's a good question. And if I had prepared, I would have brought my little talk that I gave a few years ago at a blogger conference that was called Don't Start a Blog, Start a Cult. But anyway, I think the pro tips are you need to have a identifiable philosophy that's maybe a bit different than what the normal world is into. So because your people, your cult members are going to

organize around this cult. So you maybe want just a little bit of a feeling of us versus them and like, oh, we are, you know, we got these values and they're noble, but, but the other, the outside world doesn't quite support us. We're a little bit oppressed. So then you have the sense of identity. And then this is all stuff I stumbled on accidentally because really I was just saying, here's a good idea for living. Yeah. And then other people like, yeah, I like that idea too, but nobody agrees with me. So that's why I accidentally had this slightly cult thing going on. And other things that are useful, you know, a couple more pro tip. would include, like, use of terminology and silly words.

And that's true with, like, whether you're the cult of Star Trek or iPhone or the various religions, they all have these sort of special terminology. And it helps to have an identifiable leader, too. So a cult in which I actually became, yeah, but you got Steve Jobs or Captain Kirk or the leaders of the religions or the gods. All this stuff is handy for creating cult. people think of a cult is a bad thing because they're thinking of Waco, Texas and Kool-Aid, but really it's just a social organization structure, which is a basic built-in thing to human

beings, and it's what allows us to live together and cooperate. So if you can make your brand or your company or your blog have these cult-like properties, then that's probably a good thing for making it last and having a real audience. How do you feel about the cult of Elon Musk? Well, I'm part of it. So I think that's, I'm going to have a biased answer, but it certainly fits the description that we were saying, that I was just saying now about what a cult is. And he's definitely an identifiable leader. He's definitely got unusual ideas. But the reason I am so much in this cult is everything that guy says or writes, I just agree with it so almost fully.

and I really like the way he explains stuff. It's like, that, finally someone is running a company, and instead of just spewing like this corporate bullshit, like, we are considering the needs of our customers, and we will get back. You know, he's always like, no, I think there's a bug in like the 3.0 software. We'll get a release out next week. You know, like it's proper.

He speaks like a combination of an engineer, but with a much bigger perspective on everything, and he has these clear goals. So that's why I'm so favor. know, and so far he's done very little, like, evil. You know, like maybe he has personal issues in the sense that he's so driven that it's hard to relate to Elon Musk if you work directly for him. But his overall goal seem to be absolutely spot on for, you know, a good person.

That's the kind of cult I want to be on. Well, I was curious if the cult leader, you know, needs to be like somewhat maniacal in their pursuit. Like, they have to be polarizing to a certain extent. Probably a little bit, or they at least have to be so convinced that their way is the way or a viable way that they're going to get some disagreement from some people. You know, in my personal views, for example, have become more hardcore over the last year that cars are just like the biggest stupid inefficiency that we have in the United States and we need to just cut that whole shit down by at least 90%. And because 99% of people are completely car dependent, that makes me a problem. polarizing figure. They're like, what is this crazy bicycle sandals man trying to tell me to do? Like,

it's just so different from anything I can imagine. So in that way, that might be actually enhancing my status as an imaginary cult. Yeah. Well, are you excited about self-driving cars? I get the sense sometimes that they're just going to encourage mega commutes. Oh, yeah. That's a good question. Yeah. Even though it's a slight, you know, jump. I guess you were thinking Elon Musk and then you thought self-driving cars. So I think they're like a tool but not the only tool. And right now, this is the only place I disagree with the Elon Musk vision is that a car should be thought of as like a luxury racing wheelchair. So there's times in your life you want a luxury racing wheelchair. For example, when you're with your friends and you're all going up into the mountains in like high

altitude and a blizzard and you want to have some beers and your snowboards are in the back, perfect time for a car. But if you just want to, go to work four miles or even 40 miles, there's better ways to design your life. You know, don't go 40 miles to work. And so, yeah, if we can keep the self-driving cars around so that they can reduce our crash rate and they can make our cities not be filled with inefficient parking lots, then that's a win. But if you're just doing a mega commute from like Pleasanton over to San Francisco or something, that's a loss. And you're still a way. wasting all this land to make giant roads and the cars themselves take way too much space

because they're bigger than one person. So I hope that we can go both ways, like Denver cities, bike friendly, and then self-dropping cars to eliminate the dumb stuff we do with cars now. So we'll see. So one of the questions I was wondering is you have a lot of software engineer, you know, cult members or followers like entry-level cult members. We'll just call them readers now We're done with scaring people off with the cult label. One of the questions I was curious about is, you know, for people who are interested in retiring early or saving more of their money, you know, if you're living in a big city and say you're making like $30,000, what is your advice for people like that? Yeah, because I know it's easier when you're making $150 to save more of the money. Yeah.

Well, it's good to figure out why you're in that city in the first place, because, you can make $30,000 anywhere, including really affordable places or even working from home in the location of your choice in other countries. So that's the first thing, is like, are you willing to pay the premium to live in that city if you're actually going to make that wage that you could make just, you know, working as a manager at a fast food place or something? And then the second choice is, or the second answer is if that answer is yes or regardless of the answer, what are you going to do with that money? Because there's always hacks you can do to get your living to be cheap or to get your food to be cheap. There's a lot of people who live in San Francisco for little to no rent just through special arrangements.

Like they're friends with somebody who has a space or they're trading services for rent or they own a place and then Airbnb out the rest of it or whatever. So the less you earn in your regular job, the more valuable your time becomes in these frugality hacks of cutting down your expenses. and figuring out how to get around for free and where to get the food that is good for you, but not super expensive. Did you have a special arrangement? Because you moved to Colorado from Canada when you were just out of school, yeah? No, I worked a few years in Canada first. And so I did do a few things, even back then.

Like, instead of seeking out my own apartment, I was always splitting these nicer, bigger houses. I would go on to the equivalent of Craigslist back then, the Usenet groups, find stuff for rent, go there, like in my best clothes. And so, yeah, we'd like to rent this place. There's several professionals, young professionals that would like to use the bedrooms. And then the owners are like, okay, I guess we'll lent you our fancy house. And then all the boys would move in. And they were my co-workers as engineers that were friends. So we'd split a four-bedroom place among like four guys, for example. And then we would each pay $300 a month at the time when an apartment by yourself might be $700. So it was a win-win because we would have a

much nicer place with a huge kitchen, a nice backyard, but for less cost than you'd pay for a junky beige apartment and on like the 13th floor. So I did that from the beginning. And then when I moved to the U.S., even back at the time, I was probably making in today's dollars, like close to $100,000, I still went straight to Craigslist and got a roommate situation for the first year because I had to save up a down payment. And eventually I bought a house. And then, uh, I've chosen to live in houses that I own since then, but it's not necessary. I could still do rentals. We just, you know, we spend more on our housing because we find it to be a nice luxury. It's one of our many indulgences.

Now that you're at that point to afford it, I suppose. Yeah, and even earlier, like long before retirement, we still chose to live in a house. My girlfriend and I, now wife. So, yeah, we knew that it's just something that was worth it to us. and because I like working on houses, it kind of paid for it as well because I was increasing the value in my hobby time, which makes it easier to sell your house for more or later. And throughout this process, like, you know, when you were just starting to work, did you just happen to have, you know, you weren't spending the money,

so you were just looking for ways to take advantage of it as you were saving it? Like, why did you start connecting the dots and realize, like, what caused you to realize it that you could retire early? I probably started fairly early because I was a kid. I used to iron my dollar bills when I was a kid and put them in a photo album, like $5 for cutting the grass. I'd iron that five and stick it in. So I liked money as a concept, even when I was young. And then as I earned more money throughout my minimum wage jobs, I would not spend it all.

And although I did tend to blow it at the time because I didn't know about investment. So I would save up a bunch and then I'd buy like a dirt bike or motorcycle. Okay. And then I'd save up for another year and then buy a really expensive stereo system or whatever. But then eventually one of those things was paying for my education. You know, I saved up for the first year of tuition. So it was getting a bit more reasonable. But then at around 19, someone handed me like, I think it was like a wealthy acquaintance of one of my sisters, handed me this book on investing in wealth building. And I like burned through that whole thing in one day. And then I thought, ooh, investing is good. So then I kept reading books like that. And then I realized something else. could do with money. Yeah. By the time I was in my 20s, it made sense that the surplus money would

just go into investments. And at the time, to me, that just meant stock investments. And then I didn't do anything specially smart with them. But after reading more books over the years, I started to do less dumb things. And then that's why I kind of settled on this index fund model for stock investing nowadays. In that process of, you know, learning how to invest and getting going and then actually saving, like what 50% 60 70% of your income something like that yeah that's what it was towards the end we got it over into the 60s because our income was going up but our household spending wasn't going up yeah what what did that feel like socializing because we you know we posted this to twitter before we did the interview and a lot of people were really curious about the the social implications

of um you know you're trying to put away 50% while your friends you know your co-workers make the same amount of money roughly. What was that like? Well, at our level, it was pretty easy, you know, to be honest. It's kind of privileged when you have two tech salaries. You don't really have to give up any visible stuff in order. You can still go out to dinner. You can still have a ski pass and go skiing and everything. It was more on the hidden stuff that we cut out. For example, we would keep the same bike instead of upgrading our bikes all the time. And we would eat at lunch at our workplaces instead of going out to work and driving around all the time and waiting an hour just so you could spend $20 for lunch. Those kind of things don't cost you anything in social fun, but they're just more

efficient. And similar with cars, like we would keep our used cars and our friends would buy new cars. Your friends don't care what kind of car you have. So you're not getting any social cost by keeping your Honda Civic when your friends have like a brand new, you know, top of the line BMW. So there was basically no pain. Yeah, I think this addresses like the issue or rather the reason why so many people like your blog. It just feels much more relatable than many of the other early retirement blogs, which are, you know, like live in your van, eat ramen noodles forever. Were those around as you started to save money and you just found it inaccessible or did you not even realize that that was a thing? Right. I didn't even know that blogs existed to be honest. And,

there weren't really many blogs until the mid-2000s, maybe, and that's when I retired. So I just did everything according to my own strange values, and then retired just before it turned 31. So that's why I still claim I retired at 30 and then lived that way for about six years before even thinking of writing this down in the form of a blog. And then when I did, eventually I went to the search engine and I typed like early retirement frugality. And then there was this blog called Early Retirement Extreme by this super great frugal guy named Jacob. I was like, crap, I can't start a blog. This is already covered. So I totally, I'm not going to waste my time duplicating it. But then I read his whole blog and I'd already written

a bunch of articles kind of in advance, just stuff that I wanted to tell people. And it turned out that we had different takes significantly enough that I thought I was still worth publishing. And then Jacob and I ended up communicating quite a bit since then over the years. So yeah, I'm glad I published, but there weren't nearly as many financial and retirement blogs even when I started in 2011. Then there are now. I feel like now we have thousands of them. Who are you looking up to at the time? I don't know if I really operate on a role model basis like that. I'm kind of more of a strange, like floating around by myself in the ideas sphere. So like I really, I really, I read books, I was interested in the ideas in, for example, investing books.

Yeah. But I didn't really have any personal lifestyle role models because I didn't read any blogs. It was just, you know, I'm just an independent guy, had local friends, family, and I still don't really have any role models I clearly identify with and copy. I'm just interested. If people are good at stuff they're doing, like the Elon Musk example we used before, then I follow their, their, progress and I think, oh yeah, that's a good idea. But it's so different from the quest than I'm on that I don't really have any role models exactly like in how to be Mr. Money Mustache, for example.

And there wasn't even someone who you found was kind of blazing their own trail. And you're like, oh, you know, even like family members are like, oh, they kind of got figured out they're doing their own thing. No, I think that's maybe one of my advantages and disadvantages in life is that I don't even really look around to see what other people are doing. I just have these opinions. And sometimes they're considered quite crazy. Other times people find use in what I do.

But I'm kind of this, maybe I'm like a first principles person where I just look at something. And I'm like, well, that's bullshit. I'm not going to do that. And other times I look at other things and I follow it. And yeah, sometimes that gets me, I'm a misfit in society because of this, you know, like finding stuff to buy people exactly on their birthday, for example. I don't understand that tradition, so I don't do it. And then other people who expect that, they're like, well, that guy's not very thoughtful.

He didn't get me anything on my birthday, yeah. But I'll do stuff for people when I think of something they need or some service or help they need. So I'll do it whenever. I don't align it with the calendar stuff. So that's one example. I never understood fancy weddings is another one. Like I think marriage is a fine thing and parties are a great thing. so having a party for your marriage is great.

But the whole thing with like special flowers and arrangements and table stuff, that seemed like nonsense to me. Oh, and wedding rings. Oh, man. Yeah, you're not wearing a wedding ring. Yeah, that's true. Well, I'm not against wedding rings, but what I was thinking is the engagement ring, the whole tradition with like diamonds and expenses.

I came across that later in life. And I was like, man, that is total, total nonsense. Like, why, where did this tradition come from? So I just totally rejected it. Luckily, my girlfriend at the time also was a rejecter of that, so it didn't cost me. This is a super common question. People are like, you know, I'm, you know, following Mr. Money Mustache or anyone and or I'm just personally like you and like I'm just on my own.

Interested in retiring early. Interested in saving money. How do I get a partner on board? Do you have thoughts there? Well, it helps to pick that person in advance. So like there's two strategies. There's you are already committed to somebody. who has certain values and then that can go either way they may be flexible they may be diametrically

opposed to you on this stuff and so you got to figure that out separately but if you're still looking for a person or like in the circulating dating stage finding someone who has these similar lifestyle values is awesome and i've met so many couples now that are of that style and they they really are they get along well that's why um intram must intermustachian dating is really a good thing. And when I, when I have these events now and I see people getting together or even like on the forum through my website. It's a whole section. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And actually there is an app coming out made by Money Mustache readers. And the joke is that it's going to include a mustache and Tinder feature. That's great. And I was really adamant that

that is a valuable thing. Yeah. People want to meet each other. And when they do, when single, mustacheans meet each other, which sounds silly because if you don't understand the word mustache and they're like, well, that's just, that's just silly. But basically what it really means is unusually thoughtful people that have certain personality traits in common. And they're often, like, to be honest, quite clever because they're drawn from like tech workers or well-educated people for whatever reason. That type of person has a hard time finding their same type, especially ones that aren't blown out completely in consumerism and spending all their money and no concern for environmental or resource stuff. So when they meet each other, the sparks really fly.

So you might as well make that easier. If you're in my position, I would love to see more good relationships like that forming. Why do you think the, we talked about this a little bit, but why are engineer types? Why are these clever types as you put it interested in Mr. Money Must have. or interest in early retirement? Maybe because they like things to be logical, and they might have the same tunnel vision that I have in the sense that they don't just follow social norms. They try to evaluate things on a case-by-case basis,

like do I like this tradition of society, or do I like this one? And when they see somebody going through that same thought process, it resonates with them because that's not the same type of, it's not the same type of thing you'll see in like CNN news or you know or television shows and stuff well maybe now with you but yeah yeah if if mustache is on CNN news but everything else is very much like let's take society as it is and then just talk about it whereas mustachein principles is more like let's take human nature based on what we understand as a science and adjust our lives so that it they work well with our nature you know so society

is kind of irrelevant. That's more like a byproduct that's just formed through random processes and you don't have to follow that. I mean, if your goal is happiness, just understand yourself as a creature. Every podcast always boils down to this concept of it. Yeah, we should might as well just get into it right now. Yeah. Understand yourself as a creature and what's your goal? Well, that's living a happy life. What does that mean? It means having a series of happy days. And then figure out how to have the experiences in your life that lead to as many happy days as possible. And that's not going to be, that's not going to come from like car upgrades or following lame social traditions. It's more about, um, thinking deeply about what makes you happy and then doing it.

And it's this, it's not like what makes me happy is different from him or her. Like, we actually have much more overlap in what makes us happy than we would care to admit. So that's where some of these fundamentals really get useful, you know. So yeah, I mean, given that, obviously you like, uh, doing construction. You know, we're at the HQ, which we should talk about. But with happiness, if more things aren't in common than we think, what are the things that make you happy? And especially in the long... Because, like, you know, if eating pizza makes me happy, but that's not like my retirement strategy. Yeah.

Yeah. I'd say eating pizza doesn't make you happy. Eating pizza, you know, it makes you have, like, good, like, sensual experiences. You know, like, your salt and sugar buds are all, like, nicely tingles. but if you measure what happens in your happiness after like increasing your pizza consumption sort of do like a little experiment on yourself are you actually happier after a month long of eating more pizza and because there's other factors right there's your health and there's your activities you gave up in order to eat pizza and foods and everything so the stuff we have in common

though is we we have genuine social needs of a varying degree so we like to be connected with people. We like to smile at people and feel valued. So that's the social side, which many people say is the most important. So you want to feel like you're part of a community and that people value you and that you're contributing to that community. You're not just taking. And it really helps to read books on this stuff. So if you can find books on somewhat scientifically based things for human happiness, just grab them from the library and read through them because chances are it'll blow your mind if you haven't been studying this. All right. So then secondly, there's things like your personal health affects your happiness because it just changes the level of stuff that's circulating in your brain,

like just the plain old dopamine and related chemicals. So like walking, eating salads, sounds kind of boring, but it genuinely makes you happier. And third, on the self-actualization level, like being able to create stuff that you're proud of. So working on something that's difficult, overcoming challenges and then having something to show for it at the end and then continually doing that that's a really big happiness boosting activity so and that's why TV shows watching TV is not a life boosting activity to a certain extent it might have a second order effect of boosting happiness because you might get to talk about TV shows with your friends so then you're creating that social bond but if you throw that away and instead for example using the construction example

I solve problems in my little construction projects, and I do a lot of stuff with my physical body, which makes me healthier. And then I can bond over those activities with my other friends who are into that, like my carpenter friends. I have a lot of kind of Renaissance men friends who like carpentry, but they also like nerdy science experiments and money and engineering. So we can bond over like all the stuff we did in our construction projects and how that became a great rental house and how that became led to these neat experience. and then what the neighbors did in response.

So you get all the whole happiness project satisfied, pressing all the happiness buttons. Yeah. And that's why I keep doing construction is it's, for me, it's like this super smoothie, like, you know, power thing that I can chug that makes me happy in so many ways. And you kind of compartmentalize it. We were talking earlier before we recorded about doing this alone

in its similarities to engineering, like the time it takes to get into a flow state and, you know, you need like a block of time. Right. Do you try and, you know, like combine this stuff or if you've just found it's much more satisfying to kind of, you know, this is your social checkbox. This is your like hard work, you know, working out or carpentry or whatever it might be. Yeah. Yeah. I do try to put it in separate sections. Yeah. And make sure they're all addressed. So because it's daily routines kind of make things happen automatically. And when you don't have a daily routine, it's easy to forget stuff that's important to you. So I've got, I've been in for at least the last. six months since I bought this place. I've been a pretty neat daily routine where I get up, have a healthy breakfast, bike downtown where this building is, and then work for three or four hours, typically early when my family's still asleep for part of that time.

So I'm getting all these buttons pressed, like physical health, problem solving, you know, having time to, and I always listen to really good music will I do this too. So it's kind of like a nice zen flow state. and then you have something to show for it at the end of it. You have more of your building done and you can be like, I can imagine people are going to enjoy this feature later on when we open it up.

And then I bike back home and then to do family time where like I'm helping with my son and raising him and, you know, being a good dad and all that stuff. And then later on in the day, it'll be you might have friends over or do some stuff to help your friends

with their projects. Yeah, because that was a question from Twitter. David Lang, I may be mispronouncing. he's basically asking, you know, prior to HQ construction, did you have trouble finding this routine in your 9 to 5? Yeah, right. Like the daily routine. Yeah.

When I do have a daily routine, that's when I am happiest, I find, because I've been retired for a long time. So I've kind of had ups and downs. Longer than you were working, right? I might be at this point, yeah. You guys are full-time working. In 12 years, yeah, I've been 12 years since I quit real work. and then my total work career was about nine or ten years, depending how you count for the early years. So you're right. And the times that I've been most happy have been when I have a routine,

like right now. I'm kind of on a really nice high point of my life's happiness, I would say, over the last six months and especially this month. I never really have any downs, but I have like different levels of up. So this is a really high level of up. And I think it's because the routine has been really solid, like just super physical, lots of healthy stuff, not a lot of self-destructive things going on. Well, you're also bringing people together. Like, you just had two weeks of the pop-up business school, you know, helping other people get started. Like, it's all converging. Like, you're building a place to socialize. Yeah, that's true. So that really takes care of the social side because I had 85 people that I was hosting here in this building. So lots of talking and seeing

other people be happy. Yeah. So that's obviously a problem. pretty big advantage in making you feel like your life is worthwhile if you're surrounded by wonderful people yeah who are in your life's kind of buzzing with activity in fact it got to be too much for a while and I had to take a whole weekend of just like sleeping in and eating salads because there was no productive personal time which which I find is one of my building blocks is like I need to do stuff alone and think and plan and and have time for all the thoughts to kind of go together and that's because I'm kind of a partial introvert in recovery time, according to the Susan Cain book, Quiet, is I recharge with quiet time, whereas other people might recharge from like a Denver Broncos game

or something like that. Yeah, I'm the same way. Do you do much long-term planning? Because obviously, you know, within the next year, this place will be mostly completed, right? Yeah. Do you plan on what happens after that? I have a lot of tentative long-term plans. Like, I I like the idea of maybe expanding this place to take over another building so that we can just have a bigger co-working space. And then in the longer term, I have a bunch of maybe ideas. Like, can we start a town that's founded by on mustache and principles instead of car principles? Yeah. But I don't put dates on these things until I'm really ready. So I try to avoid like, oh, next year, do you want to do something huge? Then I say, well, let's find out, let's ask each other

next year and see if we still like it, then we'll put it like a week into our calendars, a week in the future. Okay. So I get stressed out a little bit with too much stuff on my calendar. Yeah. There's one thing that makes me different than most people I've learned is I don't like planning lunch for next week or three weeks from now. I like planning stuff less than 24 hours in advance, according to a bigger picture, though.

Well, I appreciate you scheduling this a couple weeks in advance. This was definitely an exception, but I just figured, you know, because there's nothing else I have planned this week, then it's probably okay for Craig to come over and podcast, but it could have gone either way. I could have last night been like, shit, I can't believe I told Craig to come over for the podcast. I can't do that. I have other stuff to do. I could just take a weird turn right now. So a handful of people asked online, like, what is the plan for the co-working space, the moustache and co-working space? Are you going to expand into other locations, not just literally the building, like other cities? Yeah, that's similar to.

to the question we just talked about, which is, in theory, it sounds good. I definitely don't want to make any fixed plans on it, especially this is the first Monday. The co-working space has even been open for normal people to just pop in and do some work. So if it continues to be fun for at least maybe six months or something, or three even, then we'll know if it's worthwhile expanding. And if it did, then I can personally expand this to another building. And then, um, and then, um, I can, um, and then another person asked in the question list, can we franchise this because they like the idea of when being in their town? And the answer to that is probably, as long as I don't have to do any of the work for it, if we just come up with principles that work for what we're now calling

triple M headquarters and the principles are really just like a place to hang out and you're not milking people for as much money as you can by running it. It's sort of cooperatively based. then yeah people can open them other places and I would support them in the sense of like making a directory of them so people can share with their community the biggest obstacle to making this in any town is that you have to reach the people who are interested and I had this advantage that I could just type some shit into the computer and then people immediately signed up it's wild and that's like a blog is a really really useful thing for creating yeah groups of people and if the other people starting it don't have their own blog, that means my job would be to use

mine blog, which is collectively helps everybody who reads it to find the places. Well, that was kind of related to another question on the expansion of mustachianism. So Lee Marshall asked if everyone in the world adopted it, would it help or hurt the U.S.? But, I mean, I think you can expand that to the whole world. Yeah, yeah, it depends on your definition of what they're adopting. And early in the days of the blog, people would say, well, if everybody just put all their money in index funds and then quit working and then never did anything again, productive, that would wreck our economy.

And then in that case, I do agree because that would be, there would be no workers in the system and the stock values would be inflated because we would have surplus demand for it. And, yeah, of course, that's not sustainable. But that's not really the definition of moustachianism or not even frugality. So what really happens is I'm an anti-waste blog, really. Like, I'm not against spending money, but I'm against wasting money, especially when there's external effects. So, like, if someone says, should I fill up my 40-gallon diesel pickup truck and then drive

up into the mountains to go ATVing all day, like, no, that's a waste in so many ways. You know, you're burning up these vehicles, you're burning up the fuel, you're not getting any physical exercise, and you're wrecking everybody else's life on the planet. So if you if less of that type of stuff happened, that doesn't hurt our economy at all. It just shrinks the fossil fuel section and the recreational motor vehicle section, which I would argue are just drains on human productivity, really. Now instead, if we spend our money on things like clean energy systems, you know, like instead of going ATVing, you could figure out solar panels and install them on your garage like I've done here,

that's just one like kind of really overly obvious example. or you could spend your money and time fixing stuff in your town that also brings you a lot of social fun and exercise and things or you might build trails and so anyway when you get a lot of money saved up and invested yeah that's just really a psychological you know springboard to give you the freedom to do what you want to do with your life okay but very few few people quit being productive at that point They just quit a job if they don't like it. Yeah. And then they typically will start another business doing something they like,

or they'll start volunteering more, or start being an interesting, better person in some other way. Yeah. Well, that was actually one of the things that I also was interested. And, you know, you were just saving the money while you were working. And I think what's more common is to start a business, right? You know, you're like, okay, I have 200K in the bank. I can just go.

I forget the exact wording of the question. Yeah, I mean, it's greener pastures. Ask how do you balance moustache and frugality with spending to start and grow a business? Yeah, that's a good question. And if you think about moustache and principles in starting your business, you might be more efficient in it. For example, you'd say, okay, I have a flower delivery business. A normal person might be saying, like, okay, I'm going to buy the biggest six-wheel pickup truck that I can and then put one little flower in the truck bed and drive that around because that's a business vehicle. and mustache and I'll say, well, I'm just going to buy like a used Ford Transit

Connect these little like van cars that are efficient and cheap on the used market. And so they're both accomplishing the same thing in flower delivery, but one of them is spending six times more money than the other one. So that's one partial answer to the question. And then the other thing is if you think about cash flow quickly in your business instead of like years of investment in hopes of finding your first customer, that's more of a risk to your money. Whereas if you think, how can I start my business small and go right to sales and then scale up only after I've proven it with sales, that reduces your risk. And that's kind of what the pop-up business school was about as well. Yeah. So one example that I didn't follow and I wish I had is when

I quit working, I immediately started a construction company because I said, I love building stuff and designing houses and I'm going to make some good. I got style. Yeah. Yeah. So we borrowed money to buy land and then borrowed money to build these big 3,000 square foot houses. And then they had to sell before you could even get your money back, let alone make a profit. Much better design, much better a design for business would have been. Just grab your tool belt and make sure you have good tools with almost no investment and then find customers to do stylish renovations on their houses and then watch that cash flow.

build up and if you still like it, then maybe you expand to building custom houses for existing people where they buy the land and they hire you as a builder. And then if you like that, then you might choose to expand by buying land and doing the craziest thing. But that would be only once you have so much money saved from it and so much confidence that it's not a big risk anymore. Right. So it's, yeah, it's all about lowering the risk and getting feedback along the way. Right. And I sure didn't know that when I first, even though I was supposedly kind of wise enough to have an early retirement. I still blew it when it came to starting my own business. And it was stressful and terrible and I lost a friend out of it, the business partner. So yeah,

you don't automatically know everything. Do you get involved on the other side? So Gabe.a.I. just a Twitter handle asked you what you thought about angel investing. Do you ever get involved in that? It sounds neat. I have this guy named a friend named Nords who has the early retirement for military retirees blog. And he talks about angel investing all the time. And it sounds great. But his stories are the only thing I know about it. So apparently it's a good use of,

you can think of it as like a business starting philanthropy if you don't make money on it. And then you can make money on it maybe as well. Okay. If you're good at it. But he says you should think of your first $100,000 or more as tuition in Angel investing school. So I think it's a good.

use if you have the money, but I wouldn't advise people to think of it as a money-making technique unless they are passionate enough about it to be quite good at it. Okay. And so basically what you do advise people, and another person, Laurent, asks, basically, what are the skills that someone ought to build up? Just at the bottom of that one. You know, obviously, you're pro-Vanguard index funds. Right.

So that's an investment strategy. your pro carpentry construction skills. What are the other skills you advise someone to learn? I would say get good at anything that you get good at producing anything that you like consuming, especially if it's expensive. So you might not care about getting good at producing lettuce, for example, unless you're passionate about it. But if you really like having a car, then you should get good at understanding cars and how to buy them and how to maintain them if you drive enough that maintenance is an issue. And then that part of your life can become free or even profitable.

If you don't really care about cars and use them very much, then you might skip that skill and, for example, just use bikes or just have a cheap car that you put minimal money into it. And I'm passionate about housing are like spaces and having a cool place for people to hang out and to host gatherings. So because of that, my skill at producing housing or buildings and maintaining them is more valuable than it would be for somebody who doesn't care about it because I can create these things and I get houses effectively for free because by finding them

cheap and putting my labor into them, then they can become profitable. So, yeah, basic skills, instead of saying everybody should have the same basic skills, it should really align with what you like to do. I mean, I guess cooking might be kind of a universal one because everybody eats. people eat yeah yeah so if you're really shitty at creating food but you really want to eat expensive food all the time and you just go to restaurants for it yeah that's a fundamental tax on your life unless you're good at making the money for that but most people specialize in buying restaurant meals and they don't have much income so that's a misalignment so it's no good um and then what what about

uh if you have kids what are you what skills are you focusing on teaching your son oh yeah so that's a good one. And it's kind of like the last question. So learning about parenting is a good thing if you have kids and not following the necessarily the social norms about raising kids because at least in wealthy areas of the U.S., there's this really weird tradition where people like to book up their kids and just have them do stuff all the time, like paid activities and you have to drive them around town. And that makes no sense at all to me because kids are learning machines. Like the reason kids are different than adults and the reason they like playing and playing with each other and stuff is because that's how they learn best is they need to be in an environment where they're stimulating

stuff that they can figure out how it works and have new experiences and none of that is part of kid evolutionary history like you know a forest or this is why lego is a good tool is it recreates a forest yeah stuff that you can put together to create different experiences so i would say if you have kids learn about learning and don't fall into the trap of booking up your kids' life with organized activities because then you're depriving them of all the real learning that they're built to do. And do you have any like forced mechanisms to ensure they're physically active or you just kind of you know you do stuff and he does stuff with you and that's just how it goes? Yeah, I try to make it, I try to make that happen because my son is very mentally based.

He loves computers and he loves computers. So, because he's 11 now. So I try to, but he also, we get along really well. So he loves his dad. So I try to make myself not available for computer activities with him. And if he wants to do stuff with me, it has to be physical. So I'm like, well, we can go play Frisbee in the park behind our house, or we can go down and play at the creek where we bike down to this natural area

and do forest, jungle, jungle guy stuff. And so that's how we get physical stuff more. And, you know, we encourage friends to do sporty things with them. And, yeah, some kids are naturally drawn to team sports. And in that case, you should support it. But my son is like me and that he just doesn't go for it. He's like, well, why would I obey an adult's rules on how to play a game? Like, that's lame.

I want to invent my own game. Okay. So I was always like that as a kid, too. So I have to have sympathy for that. Yeah, I'm definitely a solo sport kind of person as well. Yeah, so he likes biking and he likes tree climbing and hopefully he likes being strong. I think that's the real thing that'll keep you out of trouble as you grow up is if you have a desire to be healthy and strong, then that that'll affect your habits through the rest of your teenage years. I was kind of inspired as a kid

by like Arnold movies and stuff. Oh, really? Yeah, because I like the idea of like the tough, confident man, you know, as a kid because I was nerdy. So, so that got me into like the whole physical training and bodybuilding stuff. Yeah. And not that I was like a bodybuilder, but that was just inspiring to me. So I lived that way where I was like, you know, getting exercise and working on my health and stuff. And that really helped me avoid stuff that happens to people at my age now if I hadn't been like that throughout my life. Yeah, one pound a year. And then that's a lot from 20 to 60. Yeah, right. Yeah. And so what about his education? Do you have any thoughts on, you know, should he go to college?

Should he focus on, you know, obviously he's into computer? Should he be an engineer? Do you guide him in any way there? I would say no. Like, we definitely have explained the university model and why it was good for us, parents. And then it's up to him to decide if it's good for him. Because this stuff has changed so much.

the world of jobs and businesses. The internet has blown it apart to a degree that most people don't understand. But as I've become more of an internet person myself, and I see all the businesses that exist out there, it turns out almost everything is possible without schooling, formal schooling. You can probably do it better and learn it better yourself. It's only like the most traditional professions now, like medicine and other like certain types of law. require this really formal stuff yeah um and if you're a self-guided person like i think my son is he might not have the patience or the desire to go into any kind of traditional thing he's like i want to create when i want to create and sell it to whoever is interested in it yeah so i don't mind

if he doesn't go to formal uh university if he does i'll definitely support him in that way too but i would never force him because you know we're he's it's so easy to make a living in so many different ways that it's not there's no stress like oh you got to do this or you're going to be in the ditch okay living and by support him you mean support him uh not financially you mean mentally just like well i mean we would certainly pay for whatever needs to be paid for i do you wanted to go to a fancy liberal arts you know 70 000 or 100 000 a year school by the time he's 18 you're like all right i'm in well if there were we would talk about that with him okay i mean first of all, I think it's good for kids to pay for their own education to the most

degree that they can because it's good to understand the money part of it. Secondly, that sounds like kind of a, you know, that's beyond, because school kind of has like this exponential thing at the top of the cost where you get into ridiculous costs for no reason, like the private ones. Whereas you can go to like the Harvard, the Ivy League schools for pretty much free. If you're good enough to get in, then you generally don't have to pay a huge amount. to do it. So that would be another thing I'd encourage. But let's say hypothetically, like the only path that will make him have the best life is to pay the super tuition for this thing. And he can't

pay for himself. Then yes, we would pay for it. Okay. In our, in this situation, because we've come into extra money, in our old situation, if I hadn't, you know, if I was living off $25,000 a year and just had like the $1 million of savings and had never done any more work to build it, then we would say, no, we can't afford it. So we're not going to go into debt to pay for your school. Okay. I think that's a valid thing for parents to do. They should not pretend that they're multi-millionaires just because that's the American standard. People should pay for, they should buy the schooling that they can afford. I think it's really valuable for a kid to figure out how much it actually costs

before you, you know, sign the check. Like, this month is my last month of a expensive NYU student loan payments. And so it's become much clearer how expensive it was those four years. years after the fact. Yeah, people really, students don't really see the dollars. They just see it like vaguely in a number. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you should learn that from the beginning. I remember my first year of school, which I was paying for mostly myself, I went in with the attitude that you probably did where I was like, oh yeah, I guess these are the books I need. I'll just put them on the on the account or whatever. And then I was like vaguely had this vague feeling, man, this physics textbook is $89. That sounds like a lot, but I guess that's what you do.

Yeah. But then by the end of that year, I thought you could just sell them back to the bookstore, but you can't. The bookstore was like, yeah, we'll give you five bucks for that one and this one's obsolete. And I was like, are you kidding? Are you using the next version? Yeah, physics has changed. Yeah, I was so mad.

You stole my money. So then from that point on, I would look at it. I was like, no, books are five bucks. Like, I'm not going to buy this thing. And I would like share textbooks with multiple friends and we would photocopy them and have these nice binders of well-printed shared books. Yeah. Because that was my money.

I was like $89. That takes me nine hours at minimum wage to make that back in high school. So I'm not going to spend that just to have a giant book that should be on a digital format anyway. Because at that time, digital stuff was already invented, even though it was a long time ago. So why are they even giving us paper books? So you've got to get mad when things are expensive. Like housing, like you don't stay in the dorm room unless it's competitive with off-campus rentals. and sharing with roommates in both price and quality.

And you don't have a car when you're a student because you don't have any money. Cars are a rich luxury person's gas-powered racing wheelchair. So why should you have one when you don't even have enough money to pay cash for your student for your courses? So that kind of stuff cuts your bills a lot. Big time. Yeah. I mean, I think folks who take this gap year between high school and university, if they choose to do it, super valuable for many reasons and that's one of them. Like you see how much work it actually takes to pay for

a you know 50 grand a year education. Yeah if it's a gap working year. I mean I've also heard of taking gap years to travel to go drink beers in Thailand. Yeah. With other people's money and that's also something I was against as a kid. So this is where my non-privileged upbringing probably turned out to be an advantage because I was thinking well how could people go traveling like that costs money which I don't have. So that's automatically out of the question. And secondly, I need to get to the other side of this hump of the engineering degree because that's where the money is.

So I'm going to start as soon as possible. I don't want to delay it at all because then I won't have the money ever. That's a great point. So I'm just kind of curious what you think about planning for the future, given that you have such an influence now among millions of people. You know, if the, I assume millions of people. Yeah, I don't know. if that's, I would like to know the real number, but let's just say there's, if there is

influence, then yeah, what's the exact question? Well, I plan for it. Well, you're, because you can kind of be prescriptive to a certain extent, you know, say, you know, climate change happens or maybe the U.S. economy doesn't necessarily, like, keep up the pace it has been. What, how do you feel about that? How do you, how do you plan for it and how do you recommend other people plan for it? Oh, right. You mean, so if things are not, perfect like they have been since the last recession since we came out of it. Yeah, how do you make your life anti-fragile, I guess you could say. And luckily, the same principles that get you to early retirement in good times are the same ones that make you more crash-proof in bad times,

so which is not designing a bunch of costs into your life that don't have to be there and not you know, not compromising your health because that's just another cost if you get sick or if you're less productive because you're less healthy. So all the basic principles of moustachium, like building multiple skills, reduce so that increases your production, living to live, learning to live efficiently so that decreases your consumption, hanging out, you know, building social connections with people of all different sorts. So you have like a mesh of people to lean on and that you can help all that stuff is the same thing. we would do in the event of a zombie apocalypse as well. So it works in all times. Okay, cool. Well, I think

we're good. Do you have any closing words for mustachians or people on the road to early retirement? Oh, man, you just sprung that one on me. No, I don't have any closing words. I'm just a general words as they go, as life goes on type of person. So I'll be the next time I have words, they will appear on the blog. All right. Thanks, man. Thank you. All right, thanks for listening. So as always, the transcript and video are at blog.wikombinator.com. And if you'd like to apply to the winter 2018 batch, that link is ycombinator.com slash apply.