Ray Alejandro is the Access to Finance Leader, Endeavor, Mexico City. He’s passionate about figuring out better ways to signal skills and talent, optimizing for the things you want, inequality of opportunity, properly contextualizing ideas, improving the education system, navigating upward and social mobility in emerging regions, philosophy and ideas, and economics and that forms the basis of this episode’s discussion. You can catch Ray thinking out loud on Twitter and medium @rayalcas. Enjoy.

(1:52 – 10:54) Why you should treat life as a videogame; How Ray’s fundamental beliefs have been shaped by death, limitation, living in an emerging market, self-awareness, and trying to accomplish his goals via experimentation.  

(12:11 – 19:49) The role of credentials in emerging regions, such as Latin America, for aspects of life like mobility and social freedom; how these credentials are limited to certain aspects of the population and how knowledge of this limitation should guide your optimization process, such that you neither end up stuck nor end up enslaved by the glamorization of credentials.

(20:12 – 21:56) How Ray learned to avoid the hype offered by credential-based thought leaders; the importance of contextualizing and idea-debugging.

(23:15 – 27:40) Why the movement to liberate the lower class and create opportunities for social mobility of people of all classes should be supported just as strongly as movements such as feminism.

(31:50 – 35:50) Mexico City in 15 years: Ray’s projections on the effect of urbanization on the city, based on the current trends. (Hint: large tech companies currently have very little impact on the lives of the majority of individuals.)

(37:00 – 41:17) Why the education system is a cultural monopoly and how it holds the middle-class ransom to maintaining narrow forms of credentialing and signaling if they’re to experience any forward mobility; how this credentialing system is maintained by the inability, in most fields, to measure competency.

(46:46 – 53:04) Creating your own life philosophy vs copying the playbook of people who have what you want; how to navigate this tension, and having the self-awareness to define success for yourself.

(53:42 – 58:18) How Ray navigates consciousness, the sense of self, and personal identity and how he uses the insights he’s gained from studying this to deal with the struggles of life.