Patrick Collison: recommendation

Transcript context

…A podcast, I’ve got a podcast. I think information dissemination is a really valuable thing in the world. The guy, who, last time I heard, was in the lead for Nat's Scroll Prize, learned about it, listening to your podcast. Increasing the catalytic surface area of certain kinds of information is a valuable thing in the world, so I'm very glad you're doing the podcast. Anyway, I don't presume to know what people should do with their lives. But in as much as I was trying to give advice, especially if they're reading my advice and not someone else's, maybe they're thinking about career paths that look directionally like mine, I think my advice might be: "Maybe you should do something like what I did or I'm trying to do. But there are other paths as well. A lot of really important inventions in the world and a lot of the things that I'm most happy are happening, require a very different trajectory from mine. There are counterfactual versions of my life, where I pursued that path and who knows how well it would have worked." Last point is that San Francisco is very status oriented. Everything is status oriented, so the previous statement is kind of tautological. I feel like in San Francisco the entrepreneurs are held in excessively high regard. Look, I like entrepreneurs as a group in the world. All the companies built in Stripe I think are great. But there's a strange emphasis placed on entrepreneurship in San Francisco, that should not be people's only fixation. What I like about this and what I admire about you is that you have this sense of contrarianism – the way you often challenge what people are expecting to hear from you in a given moment. You just really want to tell them the opposite. When EA was a little more popular, you were talking about the important problems, and when it was down in its depths, you were like: "Hey guys, pay attention." But on this particular piece of advice……

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