In this episode of Ziade and Ford sponsored by Aboard - Paul delves deep into his childhood in Milton Snavely's boarding school. His unstable childhood reset his brain, and instilled more empathy. Both Rich and Paul had unstable childhoods, still people find it hard to see past their successes.

I first discovered Paul Ford as a writer in the year 2000 actually.

Yikes.

Yeah.

Uh, really enjoyed the writing.

I, I viewed you as like a futurist.

Hmm.

Okay.

That's fair.

I was interested in like what's gonna happen with technology back

Yeah.

And it was, it was the Google Robot article that sort

of kicked it off and then

let's be clear, I was 24.

He was 24.

But you And there weren't a ton of writers on the internet yet.

No.

And I thought you were fascinating.

And then, you know, you'd, you'd sort of drift into view.

Cause I was an RSS freak.

I would follow feeds.

Uh, and then years later we met through a, through a mutual friend.

And what often comes to mind is like, wow, this guy must have.

Strolled around Princeton and thought big thoughts.

Yeah, that's a stretch.

So, um, folks split when I was 12.

Dad kind of vanished for a while and I ended up a coup, and it's like a couple

years fast forward at his school for poor kids called the Milton Hershey School.

Okay, so you're 12 now?

Well, no, now I'm actually like 14, 15.

Alright,

so we're, we're moving ahead

nothing.

Chaos never comes in a nice sequence, right?

Like it's just a couple years of

right, so you're 14, you're at the Milton Hershey School.

What is the Milton Hershey

So, uh, the.

Her, so Milton Snavely Hershey was the founder of, uh, what now is called

Herko, the Hershey Chocolate Company.

Okay.

Okay.

And you started that in, around, I think it was around 1910 in

Hershey, Hershey, Pennsylvania.

I wasn't, it wasn't called Hershey, Pennsylvania at that point.

It was Dairy Township.

And, uh, he got a, you know, he got a lot of milk, got a lot of cocoa,

um, got married and, and you know, like built a whole like in it.

Empire like this

a chocolate empire.

an absolute beast of a company, but his.

wife, who

who he loved very much.

Mm-hmm.

Could not conceive,

They couldn't have kids.

No.

Okay.

So they started an orphanage.

They're like, well, you know, here we are.

We're very fortunate.

We

help some people.

we have, you know, at that point, a hundred thousand

dollars or, you know, whatever.

Like a

whatever a billion is

Exactly.

It was like a couple million.

And, uh, they're like, all, well, well, they got a farmhouse together

and they, they put some kids in it.

And it was, um, orphans.

It was all orphans to start.

Okay.

And so, uh, so that kept growing over time.

And, and actually what is tricky, I think to understand what's very

interesting as a model of corporate governance, the school is, okay.

So Herko, you've, you've had a Hershey chocolate party, you don't like them.

Go ahead.

Talk about that.

Get that out.

It's a bad

Yeah.

You don't like chocolate, you don't like,

but they're also m and ms.

And I like a, I like a,

no, that's Mars.

You don't like mass consumer chocolate in general?

I like the pretzel m and ms at like two in the morning after too

No, it's not a Hershey product.

The, um, but Reese's is a Hershey product.

Okay.

I like Reese's pieces.

Mm-hmm.

There you go.

Anyway, so.

Okay.

built an empire,

and just American love.

American's lovingness to shove, shove sugar in their mouths.

Totally

makes sense.

One of the great industrial can have children, and so he starts

the orphanage and here we are.

And so like now he gives the whole company to a trust, right.

That runs the, uh, that, that the school kind of operates.

The trust exists to keep the school funded.

Right.

And so it's, it's worth noting, like it is hard coded into the charter,

essentially the guidelines of the trust that this school must be funded forever.

yeah.

So the size of the trust rich is about 4.5 billion to 17.4 billion.

That's what the web says, but let's just assume like an

unbelievable amount of money.

And it's, it's similar to the endowments, like it's smaller than

the endowments of Yale and Harvard, but similar to those of like Texas

a and m University, and it's for.

You know, one to 2000 depending on how the, how they're, how

they're doing it these days.

I, I'm not in super close contact with the school.

I don't keep close tabs on it.

Uh, it's, it's one to 2000, what they call social orphans.

Okay, so you don't necessarily, the criteria isn't a

hard criteria of not having parents.

Some

kids, some kids were orphans when I went to the school.

Um, but many, many were.

Not many.

I had one parent, I had both my parents living, but we were really

broke and there was just kind of no money and no stability.

So they're like, all right, well you're, you're a good candidate for this.

You're bright.

Come on

Was there, was there like testing criteria to make

sure you were bright enough to go

No, they basically, they wanted you to be about

average, like average or above.

Essentially.

They, they didn't want to be a place, it's not a place for special

kids.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or special needs.

Yeah.

Okay.

There wasn't an intelligence cap.

Let's be mindful.

Yeah,

But, but anyway, it's a strange experience and I, I went to some of those,

some kids go there as early as four.

Okay.

it really functions as like an orphanage and de facto family.

There were kids in,

okay, so to be clear, this isn't a school you're living there.

Yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a boarding school.

There are, there are no day students.

You live there.

They give you clothing, uh, they give you money for college.

After you leave you, you have, you live in a house with other

kids and the house parent,

Yeah.

uh, there's a, there's a set of house parents, married

couple who keep an eye on you and then you go to the school every day.

Okay.

And

you stay there often through the summer.

Okay, so you were living there, you were you, I mean,

this is, was this awful for you?

It was a very confusing time.

Like you're 14, 15 and suddenly you're gonna pick up and go to this weird pseudo

orphanage in the middle of Pennsylvania.

Nobody's there for good reasons.

Like nobody?

No, no.

Family is just like, well, this, you know, great news.

It didn't work out.

Is it only for Pennsylvania

No, no, it's for people from all over.

But it definitely is a con, like there are a lot of tough kids from Philly

and a lot of poor kids from farms.

it.

Okay.

Looking back

now, what did you learn?

Like,

Looking back, would you say There's no way I would be where I am today

had I not gone to the Hershey school?

It definitely was a full brain reset because I was in this, so before

I went there, I was in this kind of typical American suburban community and

indistinguishable from a thousand

Yeah, a little older, a little, you know, like Pennsylvania

has been around for a while and there was culture and there was a

university nearby and my dad taught.

So before all that fell apart, I definitely had a, like I grew

up in a house full of books and things like that, right?

So, so I definitely had a life where I had access to intellectual things.

I got to go to the, you know, library and use the computer.

But then I'm in an environment in which my peers and my fellow students are

from really messed up environments.

Um, kids whose parents had, uh, one, you know, like, like murder was not unusual

as a reason that a parent had passed away.

Like

and for you, you're a very empathetic person.

You're, you're definitely someone that, like, do you think that was shaped then

I see where you No, I see where you're going with that.

Now the funny thing is when you put people together who've been through a mess

Yeah.

They don't wanna talk about the mess.

No, they don't.

They wanna, um, you

move on.

Yeah.

They want to like throw football.

Yeah.

And, and, and that's, so that, which is, that's one thing, it's,

it's actually sometimes a little tricky for me in today's very modern

psychotherapy and trauma driven discourse

Mm-hmm.

because a lot of people who have been through it,

Just kind of want to move on.

And I feel that we have a discussion in our culture where like, you can't move on.

Yeah.

Yeah,

You can't.

Yeah.

And, and I, I worry about that actually.

I don't, I like, I get it.

I get that people need to process their stuff.

I spent time on that myself.

But another time, like the goal should be to move on, not to

continually revisit the trauma.

And sometimes that gets lost anyway, regardless.

You know what it actually taught me.

So here I am.

Okay.

And I, I'm, I'm aligning a lot of stuff that was going on in the world

around me at the time, but like I'm parachuted into this environment.

Um, and uh, there was a whole, so there were a few things.

First of all, there was a whole culture and set of norms that I had

to learn really quickly cuz I was a later student saying people have

been there since they were four.

Mm-hmm.

And suddenly there's,

up.

I have house parents.

There are rules.

There's, you know, when you get punished, you have to do dishes.

You do dishes for 15 kids, like you're, you, some people have breakfast duty.

I'm cleaning houses.

I'm cleaning toilets with a to toothbrush.

I'm waking up at 5:00 AM you know, and there's, there's stuff like that.

Um, it's a very athletic jockey.

Christian culture.

I'm going to church, uh, I'm going to like, I'm going to chapel.

I'm, you know, playing trombone in the band.

Like there's just like a whole world I'm

Yeah.

Okay.

And so, so

they taught you some work ethic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, no, no.

My, my brother was in the Navy at the time, and at graduation he was like, boy,

this reminds me of the military, right?

Like, it's just very like, service oriented, religious, et cetera.

Okay.

The, but the real thing that I think I learned, the thing that I go back to

the most often from that experience, and I don't think about it, I don't

think about high school as much is, you know, you, you, you get older,

was that I was parachuted into a vast and complicated bureaucracy.

Mm-hmm.

And the bureaucracy had a lot of money and resources and

there was a lot swimming around.

And as a high school student, I remember like.

Where am I in this?

And this place had unbelievable resources.

I'll give you an example.

There's 90 student homes.

Each one has like 14 kids.

And think about how schools usually operate.

And one day they went, you know, these, every student home should

have at least one computer.

And like a month later, a Mac lc shows up.

And

So it's just infinite resources

a hundred of them.

One for every classroom.

And you know, that would be like a five year thing in public school.

Yeah.

And here it was like, well, if we should do it, we should do

And they do it and, and so, so it sounds like you

really were very fortunate.

I'm incredibly fortunate throughout my entire life.

It was just a tough time.

And the, the school, the school itself was tough.

I remember afterwards, I remember there was another, I was, you know,

one of the, Smart, sensitive types in the school and it wasn't a place

that celebrated smart, sensitive

Sure, sure,

fine.

I'm sure everybody, you know, if any Milt is listening to this, they're

gonna go like, Hey, fricking was so, um, a lot of fist fights, a lot

of that stuff like, a lot of like

there's, there's a lot of kids working through stuff.

it's violent and it was a violent place.

Now I understand more, I have more empathy than I did after I graduated

for what that was all about.

But at the same time, you have vulnerable kids who end up in vulnerable

situations and the the instinct.

Of the culture and of that part of the world and of the school was to punish and

get them out of the system rather than address the challenges or, or avoid them.

They never, there was a, it, it wasn't always like focused on, on

managing, on diminishing harm and so, so it was all the regular stuff

and all the regular drama of the era.

So, but look.

Here's the thing.

I, for, for a while, I wore that as a badge.

I'm like, I was poor.

Right?

I was like, and it was kind of nice to be able to, to be a little

difficult about it in a room to be like, yeah, well I went to a school

for, you know, people would be talking about their high school experiences.

And I'd be like, well, I went to a school for poor kids.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Made you special.

And then I, as, as things got, uh, different in my life, I

just had to stop talking about it.

And I'll tell you why.

I was proud of it.

Proud of who I am.

Proud of where I came from, but no one could understand it.

What do you mean?

You just can't, you know, when you spend a lot of time with upper middle

class people building a career Yeah.

And you try to talk to them about what you came from and where you believe

Yeah.

They see exactly what is in front of them and they don't believe

that you came from anything else.

Interesting.

They don't believe you.

Well, it's, it's, it's really hard to process.

Yeah.

It's really, really hard to process.

Yeah.

People see me as just like a, a tall, white business guy who also is a writer.

That's weird.

Well,

you are those things.

I am.

I am.

And, and you know, I used to try to narrate and explain to people that my

background gave me a different context, maybe some different sympathy and empathy.

I don't, I can't anymore.

I just can't, I can't, I don't try.

And then people come to me and they're like, well, you want to invest in this?

And I'm like, all right.

This is the conversation you want to have with me.

Fine.

Yeah.

Um, I, I think you're touch, I mean, you zoomed out and

you're touching on something.

Uh, you know, I think pretty universal, which is people, people's interactions

with others are very much colored by themselves in their own lives, right?

And American business is an upper middle class enterprise.

I mean, it, it is and, and,

Like leadership is like when you go, your average leader went

to a pretty good college, had stable

for sure.

Well it's cuz it's safer to hire those,

Not your average employee.

Your average employee probably come like the middle class in

America is way more inclusive.

But once you go up one notch, oh my goodness.

It's a lot of men named Jeff and James.

it's funny because.

Some of the best people I've ever worked with were big gambles for me.

Like one of the best engineers I ever worked with had no college degree.

One of the best designers slash engineer unicorns literally lived

in the middle of the country and he is like, I'll drive over.

I think you guys are cool, but I don't have anywhere to stay

and I would like front of money.

Mm-hmm.

now he's managing 20 people.

I think what you're highlighting and, and I have a similar experience.

I didn't go to like fancy schools and I had my own kind of version of instability.

talked about it.

I mean, you're, you, you are an immigrant who left a war zone at age

Yeah.

And so

no money.

So start there and then here we

but echoing what you are saying here,

here,

no one wants to watch your autobiography movie directed by,

I'll tell you, it's a funny thing.

They actually, they don't like the, you'd think that America would

celebrate a little, like your story in particular, like self-made American

American

and every

the, I mean, Horatio Alger or whatever his

It's deeply out of fashion right now, so that's one

Is that true?

Yeah,

yeah.

Oh yeah.

You're only supposed to be, we like our, we, we want our rich people

to be anti-capitalist in 2023.

But hold on.

I'm going to take what you said and take it a little bit further.

So here is a, I, I mentored a guy for a long time.

I still mentor him, but he doesn't need me as much anymore.

He succeeded.

The mentorship worked really well When we started working together,

he was a little all over the place.

And he ended, uh, he's in engineering and he very ambitious, really smart.

I really respect this person.

I learned a lot from working with him, and he ended up inside of a giant company

and I actually think Giant company was the right place to go because Giant company

has already worked through all of its drama about different kinds of people.

They have, they're overt about their goals, they're overt

about bringing people in.

They're overt about career paths and journeys.

they want to do it, they

They wanna do it and they have the resources to do it, and they

have the resources to invest in you and.

If you want to get into this world, going to the biggest possible platform

as soon as possible is, is where you'll have the most opportunity for

growth and to figure out where you sit.

I think that's probably true.

I think the other part is it's harder, but you just gotta have a lot of conversations

because you gotta find that advocate.

Mm-hmm.

You need that advocate to be like, okay, I, it's like the agent

who like finds the up and coming Broadway star or off-Broadway star.

I was like, gonna make a bet on you.

Um, and that just takes a lot more conversation.

It's not that clear cut.

and I'm gonna

just applying for the job.

I'm gonna say a brutal thing related to me going to this school.

You being, um, you growing up broken, uncertain circumstances.

Uh, you don't get any credit for it.

You think you would, you think that the world would be like, wow, you've

actually worked a little harder than other people to figure stuff out for yourself.

Uh, they don't.

They just go, what can you do for me?

Yeah.

So you, you think that your narrative is gonna help you out, but it, it's,

you just gotta get in there and, and make contacts and figure out how you're

gonna be helpful if you wanna succeed.

All right, Richard, this was an uplifting one.

Let's, uh,

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Mm-hmm.

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All right, well, uh, hello.

It's the audi ford.com, at the Audi Ford on Twitter.

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take care.