Interesting post from Richard Hanania, “Sixteen Fun Facts about Me.” It’s too bad the article is paywalled after his fourth “fact,” but some parts are similar to or contrast with my own life.
I don’t have much contact with my family, and haven’t maintained contact with any friends from elementary school, high school, or college. I think it’s because I don’t like the person I was growing up. So every time I see someone from my past, it reminds me of that fact. It’s also an issue of not having much in common with them. I didn’t start meeting people of similar levels of smarts and intellectual curiosity until I was well into adulthood. But I do think I benefited from having some contacts with normies and proles growing up.
Same, but I think this applies to most people? People have really varied interests. It’s hard to keep in touch when people’s life trajectories go in totally opposite directions.
I had only one full year of high school. I remember finishing ranked something like 393 in the class out of 412, for either the first semester or the end of the year. And it wasn’t even a good high school. Most of my friends’ parents hadn’t gone to college. In retrospect, my failures in this area were kind of odd, since people generally want to play the status games that they’re good at. I could’ve easily been the best student in my high school, but instead I focused on hanging out with losers and doing drugs. I had contempt for scientists and admiration for rappers and professional athletes. I walked around with an implicit conviction that to be smart or bookish was gay and gaining status through some kind of physical achievement was cool. I don’t think that part of me has ever been completely excised.
This is not what I would have expected from him. School came easy and I excelled. At school people thought I was the smartest, but in my own mind I was average. Looking back, I think that was the correct assessment given the supporting evidence. Looking back though, I could ace exams cold by skimming the book at lunch. Or process a lecture without having to pay attention or take notes. I could read a large paperback in a day…stuff like that.
For example, someone would hand me an article to read and I would scan my eye down the page and hand it back 20 seconds later, which was met with disbelief I had read it. Or process a lecture without notes or paying attention, which was met with similar skepticism that I had understood it. This was from not reading ahead, but because I would learn it in the background with minimal mental horsepower. I could learn anything by only looking at it and intuiting how it worked. I would be like, “Just do this and that and then this.”
I’ve always watched silly cartoons. I liked The Simpsons and King of the Hill growing up, and today enjoy Family Guy, American Dad!, and Futurama. These shows are probably my least intellectually challenging forms of entertainment, and I will go to them when I am feeling satisfied and want to relax. I also like the futuristic neoliberal politics of Futurama, which are presented in a somewhat dystopian way, but in a package that I find appealing. Maybe I’ll write about that at some point.
I can relate. In high school everyone was making these weird cultural references, so out of curiosity I watched MTV, and was hooked like cigarettes. This followed a cartoon and sitcom habit, so it’s not as if TV was alien to me. Coursework was seen as an interruption between hours of uninterrupted media consumption. Later was lots of reality TV. I wouldn’t kick the TV habit for good until 2011, when the cable was finally disconnected despite having not paid for it for many years. No one is “above TV”. There is a reason it’s such a huge industry.
In high school I wanted to become a programmer because I thought they made a lot of money. But I found that I enjoyed creating algorithms more so than the coding aspect of it. So this led to the interest in math. Fast-forward to now. Wall Street pits the strongest minds against each other for profit. As mentioned, I developed the best hedging system known. No one else had come up with that idea.
How am I such a good forecaster and trader? Part of it is high IQ. This obviously cannot be taught. In part 1 I explain how I was one of the smartest, but this didn’t manifest as any particular skill, unlike music or chess prodigies. If Scott Greer can put his IQ in his Twitter handle, I can at least talk about it.
There was nothing to foreshadow that I would go on to be the greatest trader and macro forecaster. I didn’t have any particular talent at anything. My story is similar to Mr. Hanania, of nominally smart people who didn’t do that much until the opportunity presented itself. So we’re taking decades where nothing interesting happens, and then–boom–best forecaster, trader, and money manager. It was the right convergence of factors. There was no Bitcoin back then. Social media was in its infancy. When Facebook became big, I made money there too.
For Hanania, it was the intersection of Elon’s buyout of Twitter and the post-2022 woke backlash. Jan 6th further emboldened the “MAGA base,” combined with Biden’s inauguration, which similarly boosted the Left. But there were many people who opposed the Democrat’s COVID policies (e.g. school closures and mask mandates), but also disliked Trump. This was a niche that was greatly underserved between the woke vs anti-woke discourse that dominated for much of 2016-2021. There was a large market for “smart” discourse on either side of the aisle.
No one would put their money down on the guy who watches 4-5 hours a day of tv becoming the best macro forecaster, but it really do be like that sometimes. This goes to show the power of IQ, in either of our cases. For him, it was For myself, overcoming a tv addiction and not having any focus on anything. The smarter you are, the more chances you find to turn your life around or to pivot. You can wait. You can watch lots of tv for long periods of time and then develop the best trading strategy known. Or in his case, be a successful pundit.