Patrick McKenzie: evaluation

Transcript context

…You have a whole long career ahead of you. By avoiding becoming famous too early, you had this super hyped-up learning curve that you’re now still benefiting from. Is that true or false? I want it to be true. I think that it is falser than most people who would say that would give credit for. I know many people liked the musical Hamilton. I also liked the musical Hamilton, but the thing about the character, where he feels like he’s running out of time despite that maybe not being rational, is a struggle I’ve often had. I know, rationally speaking, I have at least 20-plus years in my career left, and also know that there is a level of energy and health that I had access to in my 20s that I no longer have access to. And so, I feel some counterfactual regret as to things that I actually spent that energy and health on, which was running the World of Warcraft III guild and being a Japanese salaryman for many years. I do not think that six years of Japanese salaryman optimized for me learning all things. I think I could have extracted most of the signal from that experience in six weeks to six months and then left, but felt myself socially constrained from doing so. I definitely don’t regret moving to Japan because of the other nonprofessional knock-on effects on my life. But the degree to which my career/impact on the world X personal life X family X raising two wonderful children and being married to a wonderful wife — the degree to which that is enhanced by my level of understanding of business Japanese or ability to function in a Japanese office environment, et cetera, et cetera, seems to be rather limited versus my ability to write well in English. I will say one thing about the experience, is that having a lot of free time on your hands in the evenings and no outlet for English was a great push in the right direction of writing more than most people do in their 20s. The compounding effects of writing more are responsible for both a lot of the good stuff that has happened to me and a lot of the good stuff that I’ve been able to accomplish in the world. Crypto questions. Why hasn’t Tether collapsed yet? We’ve run at it many times. Not too long ago, I think the price fell even to $93, which is dangerously low. It bounced back. It seems they could always redeem. What if it isn’t a fraud?…

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