4 ms·

If there is an aspiring journalist in the audience, now would be a good time to track down Mr. Essien and the various other players involved, interview them and

by olefoo 16y ago

If there is an aspiring journalist in the audience, now would be a good time to track down Mr. Essien and the various other players involved, interview them and put together a definitive account of as much as is known. It would make a decent cover article for Fast Company, or do it as a blog with raw information dumps and crowdsourcing the factchecking.

maxklein 16y ago
You'd be rather disappointed, I think. I'm not secretly Michael Arrington. And any aspiring journalist should feel free to come question me - the details of how long it takes me to walk to work or how my back-ache is doing would make for an interesting story for me, but I'm not sure many will care otherwise. It's all rather undramatic, I'm afraid.
- olefoo 16y ago
  Undramatic? But, the knife fights, the tense meetings with corrupt Chinese officials who could have you thrown in jail, the forty thousand a month, the 5-star hotels; all of that, undramatic? The problem is that you are now an unreliable narrator; you may not even be the protagonist in your own story any more. Who is Max Klein? A cipher, a nobody, an anonymous entrepreneur sharing his tales from behind a veil of mild obfuscation? Or is he a device in a larger scheme? Perhaps he is an advertisement for a correspondence school? A scheme to defraud a Saudi prince? A character escaped from a novel, whom the author is desperately trying to contain? Who knows?
  - maxklein 16y ago
    Drama comes from the choice of words - every narrative can be told in an exciting way. Everybody has had similarly dramatic experiences, but they are not writing about them. My dramatic experiences, which are less than 10 articles, are spread out over 7 years. I'm sure anyone can find interesting things he has done in the last 7 years. I'm 29 years old. At 21 you may not have seen a lot, but at 29, you have enough independent years to have gone through a few adventures. And I've gone through a LOT more than the few I have written in my blog, those are just the ones that made sense for that blog.

by olefoo 16y ago

maxklein 16y ago

You'd be rather disappointed, I think. I'm not secretly Michael Arrington. And any aspiring journalist should feel free to come question me - the details of how long it takes me to walk to work or how my back-ache is doing would make for an interesting story for me, but I'm not sure many will care otherwise. It's all rather undramatic, I'm afraid.

olefoo 16y ago
Undramatic? But, the knife fights, the tense meetings with corrupt Chinese officials who could have you thrown in jail, the forty thousand a month, the 5-star hotels; all of that, undramatic? The problem is that you are now an unreliable narrator; you may not even be the protagonist in your own story any more. Who is Max Klein? A cipher, a nobody, an anonymous entrepreneur sharing his tales from behind a veil of mild obfuscation? Or is he a device in a larger scheme? Perhaps he is an advertisement for a correspondence school? A scheme to defraud a Saudi prince? A character escaped from a novel, whom the author is desperately trying to contain? Who knows?
- maxklein 16y ago
  Drama comes from the choice of words - every narrative can be told in an exciting way. Everybody has had similarly dramatic experiences, but they are not writing about them. My dramatic experiences, which are less than 10 articles, are spread out over 7 years. I'm sure anyone can find interesting things he has done in the last 7 years. I'm 29 years old. At 21 you may not have seen a lot, but at 29, you have enough independent years to have gone through a few adventures. And I've gone through a LOT more than the few I have written in my blog, those are just the ones that made sense for that blog.