--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: To ask Brian about early and late Caplan, and which ways are they not consistent. That's the kind of friendly jab.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Okay, interesting.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Garrett Jones has tweeted about this in the past. So like in *The Myth of the Rational Voter*, education is so wonderful. Like it makes you more free market?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: And like, hey, it no longer seems to be true. It was true from the data Brian took from. And second, Brian doesn't think education really teaches you much. So why is it making people free market?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah, like it once did, even though it doesn't now. And if it doesn't now, it may teach them bad things. Right. But like it's teaching them something. I have asked him this. So he thinks that it doesn't teach him anything. Therefore, that wokeism can be a result of colleges. And then I've asked him, OK, at some point, these were like ideas in colleges. They're in a broader world. What do you think happened? Why did it transition from one to the other? I don't think he had a good answer to that.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yeah. You can put this in the podcast if you want. It's up to you. So I like the free podcast talk often better than the podcast.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, well, yeah, we can just start rolling. Okay, today, it is my great pleasure to once again speak to Tyler Cowen, now about his new book, *Talent: How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World*. Tyler, welcome to the Lunar Society again.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Happy to be here. Thank you.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, excellent. I want to get to talent in just a second, but I've got a few questions for you first.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Absolutely.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So in terms of novelty and wonder, do you think traveling to the past would be a fundamentally different experience to traveling to different countries today? Or is it kind of the same category of thing?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: You need to be protected against disease and have some access to the languages. And obviously your smartphone is not going to work, right? So if you adjust for those differences, I think it would be a lot like traveling today, except there'd be bigger surprises because no one else has gone to the past, right? Older people, in a sense, were there. But if you go back to ancient Athens or the peak of the Roman Empire, you're the first traveler.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. But like, so the experience of reading a history book, you think it's somewhat substitutable for actually traveling to a place?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: No, not at all. I think we understand the past very, very poorly. And if you travel appropriately in contemporary times, it should make you more skeptical about history because you'll realize how little you can learn about the current places just by reading about them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, interesting. Okay. So it's like travel versus history and the historians lose.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Right.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So I'm curious, how has traveling a lot just changed your perspective when you read a work of history? In what ways are you skeptical of it that you weren't before? What do you think they're probably getting wrong?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, it may not be a concrete way, but first you ask, was the person there? Or if it's a biography, did he or she know the subject of the biography? And that becomes an extremely important question. So I was just in India for the sixth time. I hardly pretend to understand India, whatever that possibly might mean. But if I think back to before I went at all, I'd read a few hundred books about India. Like I didn't get nothing out of them. But in some sense, I knew nothing about India. And now the other things I read make more sense as well, including the history.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, interesting. So you've asked this question to many of your guests, and I don't think any of them have had a good answer. So let me just ask you, what do you think is the explanation behind Conquest's Second Law? Why does any institution that is not explicitly right wing become left wing over time?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, first of all, I'm not sure that Conquest's Second Law is true. So you have something like the World Bank, which is quite sort of centrist statist in the 1960s, but by the 1990s has become fairly neoliberal. Now, what's left-wing, right-wing in that? It's global. It's complicated. But it's not a simple case of Conquest's Law holding, right? So I do think for a big part of the latter post-war era, some version of Conquest's Law does mostly hold for the United States. But once you see it as not universal, you're just asking, well, why has the American intelligentsia shifted to the left? So there's a political science literature on educational polarization. I wouldn't say it's a settled question, but it's not a huge mystery, right? Republicans act wackier, Democrats sort more, the issues realign in particular ways. So I think that's why Conquest's Law locally is mostly holding.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Oh interesting. So you don't think there's anything special about the intellectual life that tends to make people left wing? It's particular to our current moment?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think by choosing the word "left wing" you're begging the question. There's a lot of historical eras where what is left wing is not even well defined, and in that sense Conquest's Law can't even hold there. So once I had a debate with Marc Andreessen about this. I think Marc tends to see left-wing, right-wing, wherever your views might be, as somewhat universal historical categories, and I very much do not. So in medieval times, what left, what right? Even 17th century England, there are like particular groups who on particular issues are very left or right wing. I don't know. It seems to me unsatisfying. And there's a lot of fluidity in how these axes play out over real issues.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. So maybe then what is considered left at the time is the thing that ended up winning, or at least looking back on it, that's how we categorize things. Like, something insightful I heard from Bern Hobart is that if the left keeps winning, then just redefine what the left is. So if you think of prohibition, right at the time, it was a left-wing cause, right? Now the opposite of prohibition is a left-wing cause. So then just change what left is. Or like take the French Revolution, their equivalent of like nonprofits then versus 1830 restoration. Like was everything moving to the left between Robespierre and 1830? I don't pretend to know, but it sure doesn't seem that way. Right? So again, there seem to be a lot of cases where Conquest's Law is not so economical.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Right. And Napoleon is a great example of this, where it's not sure whether he's the most left-wing figure in history or the most right-wing figure in history. Or maybe both somehow, yes.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, how much of talent, or the lack thereof, is a moral judgment for you? So just to give some context, when I think that somebody is not that intelligent, for me, that doesn't seem like a moral judgment. That just seems like a lot of the lottery. When I say that somebody is not hardworking, for me, that seems like more of a moral judgment. So on that spectrum, where would you say talent lies?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know. My default is that most people aren't that ambitious. I'm fine with that. It actually creates some opportunities for the ambitious. There might be an optimal degree of ambition, well short of everyone being sort of maximally ambitious. So I don't go around pissed off at those people or judging them in some moralizing way. I think a lot of me is on automatic pilot in terms of kind of morally judging the people at a distance. I don't wake up in the morning and get pissed off at someone in the Middle East doing whatever, even though I might think it was wrong. So same with talent.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. So when you read the biographies of great people, often you see there's a bit of emotional neglect and abuse when they're kids. Why do you think that is? Like, why is that such a common trope?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I would love to see the data, but I'm not convinced that it's more common than with other people. So, famous people, especially those who have biographies, on average they're from earlier times, right? And in earlier times children were treated worse. So it could be correlated without being causal. Now maybe there's this notion that you need to have something to prove, and you only feel you need to prove something if you weren't always treated well. Like that's possible. I don't rule it out. But you look at your Bill Gates's, your Mark Zuckerberg's, without pretending to know what their childhoods were like, it sure sounds like they were upper middle class kids treated very well, at least from a distance.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes. Is there anything... The Collisons, like they have great parents.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yeah, it could just be. They did well, you know. It could just be that the examples that stick out in my mind of emotional neglect stick out in my mind particularly.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes, so I'd really like to see the data. I think it's like an important, very good question. It seems to me maybe one could investigate it, but I've never seen an actual result. Is there something you've learned about talent spotting through writing the book that you wish wasn't so, that you find it disturbing or you find it disappointing in some way? For example, something as a core left for talent that you wish wasn't or something like that?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know. Again, I think I'm relatively accepting of a lot of these realities. But the thing that disappoints me a bit is how geographically clustered talent is. And I don't mean where it was born or I don't mean ethnically. I just mean where it ends up. So if you get an application, say, from rural Italy, where maybe living standards are perfectly fine. There's weather, there's olive oil, there's pasta. But it's just probably not that good. And certainly Italians have had enough amazing achievements over the millennia. But right now, the people there who are up to something, they're going to move to London, to New York, to somewhere. So I find that a bit depressing. It's not about really the people.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: To what extent is, when you do find a cluster of talent in a place, to what extent can that be explained by sort of like a cyclical view of what's happening in the region? In this sort of "hard times create strong men" sense. And so at some point, Italy had a renaissance, and then things maybe get complacent over time.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Again, maybe that's true for Italy, but most of the talent clusters have been such for a long time. So London, New York, it's not cyclical. They've just had a ton of talent for a very long time. They still do. Later on, they still will. Not literally forever, but it seems like an enduring effect. But if they leave, for example, with Central European Jews, right, then they don't stay there anymore. They leave. A big war obviously can destroy almost anything. So German scientific talent took a big whack. German cultural talent, Hungarian Jews and mathematics. I don't know how much of a thing it still is, but certainly it's nothing close to what it once was.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay. So then I was worried that talents, if you realize that some particular region has a lot of talent right now, then that might be like a one-time gain that you realize, oh, India or Toronto or Nigeria or something, they have a lot of talent. But that the culture doesn't persist in some sort of extended way.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think that might be true for where talent comes from. But where it goes to, it just seems to show persistence. So people will be going to London for centuries, almost certainly. Is London producing a lot of talent? That's less clear. That may be much more cyclical. So the 17th century in London is amazing, right? John Donne. London today, I would say I don't know, but it's not obvious it's coming close to its previous glories. So the current status of India, I think that will be temporary, but temporary for a long time. It's just a very big place. It has a lot of centers. The things it has going for it, like not taking prosperity for granted, it will have for quite a while. Like India is still pretty poor.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you think makes certain places the actual place where the clusters of talent congregate and places that are just a source of that talent? What makes something a sink rather than the source of talent?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think a place where people go is more or less obvious. You need money. You need a big city. You need some kind of common trade or linguistic connection. So New York, London, they are what they are for obvious reasons, right? Path dependence, history, you make it in the Big Apple and so on. But where people come from, I think theory is very bad at understanding. Like why did the Renaissance blossom in Florence and Venice and not in Milan? If you're going back earlier, it wasn't obvious it would be those places. I've done a lot of reading to try to figure this out, but I find I've gotten remarkably not far on the question.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: The particular examples you mentioned today, like New York, San Francisco, London. These places, they have high fixed costs if you want to move there. It's expensive. Do you think that they've been sinks of talent despite this fact or because of it? That you need some sort of exclusion in order to be a haven of talent?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, I think this is a problem for San Francisco. It may be a more temporary cluster than it ought to have been. And since it's a pretty recent cluster, it can't count on the same kind of historical path dependence that say New York and Manhattan have. But a lot of New York still is not that expensive. Look at the people who work and live there. They're not all rich, to say the least. And that is an important part of why New York is still New York. London, it's much harder, but it seems to me London is a sink for somewhat established talent, which is fine, right? But in that regard, much inferior to New York.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, I want to play a game of overrated and underrated with you.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I'm here for that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But we're going to do it with certain traits or certain kinds of personalities that might come in when you're interviewing them.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Okay, but it's probably all going to be indeterminate, but go on.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right, okay. So somebody comes in, they're very humble. Yes, well, is it immediately? I'm suspicious. Why? I figure most people who are going to make something of themselves are arrogant. If they're willing to show it, there's a certain bravery or openness in that. I don't rule out the humble person doing great. A lot of people who do great are humble. But I just get a wee bit like, what's up with you? You're not really humble, are you?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Oh, so like maybe the humility is a way of like avoiding confrontation. Like you don't have the confidence to actually show that you can be great. So you're just right now. It might be efficient for them to avoid confrontation. Right. But I would just say I start thinking I don't know the real story. When I see a bit of arrogance, I'm less likely to think it may in a way be feigned. But the feigning of arrogance is itself a kind of arrogance. And in that sense, I'm still getting the genuine thing.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How like what is the difference? Let's say a 15 year old is kind of arrogant versus like a 50 year old is kind of arrogant. And the latter has accomplishments already. The first one doesn't. Is there a difference in how you perceive humility or the lack thereof?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Oh, sure. The 50-year-old, you want to see what have they done. And you're much more likely to think the 50-year-old should feign humility than the 15-year-old. Because that's the high status thing to do, is to feign humility. And if they can't do that, you figure, well, here's one thing they're bad at. Like, what else are they bad at? Whereas the 15-year-old, they have a chip on their shoulder, can't quite hold it all in. You're like, oh, that's great. You know, fine. Let's see what you're going to do.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: And in how arrogant can you be? So there's like many 15 year olds, if they're really into math, they're like, I want to solve P does not equal NP. Or, you know, I want to build an AGI or something. Is there some level where it's just like, you clearly don't understand what's going on if you think you can do that? Or is it always a plus?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I haven't seen the level yet. Now if a 15-year-old said to me in three years I'm going to invent a perpetual motion machine, I would think like, no, you're just crazy. But no one's ever said that to me. You know, there's the famous Mark Zuckerberg story where he went into the VC meeting at Sequoia wearing his pajamas, and he told Sequoia not to give him money. I think he was 18 then. Like, that's pretty far out on the arrogant behavior spectrum and we should be fine with that. Like we know how the story ends. So it's really hard to be too arrogant. But once you say this, this like the second order effect, you start thinking, well, are they just being arrogant as an act? And then in that in the act sense, yes, they can be too arrogant.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Isn't the backstory there that he was like friends with Sean Parker, and then Sean Parker had a beef with Sequoia, and then there's something like that? I wouldn't want to say off the top of my head exactly what, but there is a backstory.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Um, somebody comes in professionally dressed when they didn't need to. So they've got a crisp, clean shirt. They've got a nice watch. How old are they? 20. They're too conformist. Again, some jobs conformity is great, but I get a little suspicious at least for what I'm looking for.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Interesting. But I wouldn't rule them out for a lot of things. It's a plus, right?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is there a point though, where you're in some way being conformist by dressing up in a polo shirt? Like if you're in San Francisco, right now, it seems like the conformist thing is not to wear a suit to an interview. If you're like trying to be a software engineer.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yeah, there might be situations where it's so weird, so over the top, so conformist, that it's actually total non-conformism. Like, I don't know anyone who's a conformist like you are. Maybe they're not being a conformist, right? They're just some kind of nut. And then you're interested again.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. An overall sense that you get from the person that they're really content, almost like if Buddha came in for an interview. Like a sense of well-being.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: It's going to depend on context. I don't think I'd hold it against someone, but I wouldn't take it at face value. You figure they're antsy in some way, you hope, and like you'll see it with more time, I would just think.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Somebody who uses a lot of nootropics. So they're constantly using caffeine, but maybe on the side, like multiple times a week, they're also using Adderall, modafinil, other kinds of nootropics.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't personally like it, but I've never seen the evidence that it's negatively correlated with success. So I would try to put it out of mind. I sort of personally get a queasy feeling like, do you really know what you're doing? Is all this stuff good for you? Why do you need this? That's my actual reaction. But again, at the intellectual level, it does seem to work for some people, or at least not screw them up too much.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You don't drink caffeine, correct?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Why?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't like it. And it might be bad for you.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, really? You think so?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: People get addicted to it also.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So, but you're not worried it might make you less productive over the long term. It's more about, you just don't want to be addicted to something.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, since I don't know it well, I'm not sure what my worries are, but the status quo regime seems to work. I observe a lot of people who end up addicted to coffee, Coke, soda, like we know is bad for you. So like, what's the problem I need to solve? Why do it?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: A history of mental illness, like depression or anxiety. Not that they're good, but at current margins, do you think that maybe they're punished too heavily or maybe that people don't take them seriously enough? That they're actually a bigger signal than the people are considering?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know. I mean, both could be true, right? So there's definitely positive correlations between that stuff and artistic creativity. Causal, harder to say, but correlates. So you certainly should take the person seriously. But, you know, are they the best Starbucks cashier? I don't know.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. In the book you, or I guess another podcast, you pointed out that some of the most talented people you see that are neglected are 15 to 17 year olds. How does this impact how you think, like, let's say you were in charge of high school, right? You're the principal of a high school, you know that there's like 2,000 students there. A few of them have to be geniuses. Right. What, like, how is the high school run by Tyler Cowen, especially for the very smartest people there? How is it run? Do you just-
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Less homework.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: No, I would work harder to hire better teachers, pay them more, fire the bad ones if I'm allowed to do that. Those are no brainers, but mainly less homework and have more people come in who are potential role models. So someone like me, I was invited once to a Flint Hill High School in Oakton. It's right nearby. I went in. I wasn't paid. I just figure I'll do this. It seems to me a lot of high schools don't even try and they could get a bunch of people to come in for free and just say, I'm an economist. Here's what being an economist is like, you know, 45 minutes. Is that so much worse than the BS the teacher has to spew? Of course not. So I would just do more things like that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I wouldn't understand the difference between these three options. So one is somebody like you actually gives an in-person lecture, like saying what this life is like. Or Zoom, you could do Zoom too. That's actually just about tasks. The second is Zoom. And the third is, it's not live in any way whatsoever. You're just kind of like maybe showing a video of the person.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I'm a big believer in the vividness. So Zoom is better than nothing. And a lot of people are at a distance. But I think you'll get more and better responses inviting people to do it live, local people. And there's plenty of local people where most of the good high schools are.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Are you tempted to just give these really smart 15-year-olds a hall pass to the library all day and some Wi-Fi access and then just leave them alone? Or do you think that they need some sort of structure?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think they need some structure, but you have to let them rebel against it and do their own thing also. Zero structure strikes me as great for a few of them, but even for the super talented ones, not perfect. They need exposure to things and they need some teachers as role models. So you want them to have some structure.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: And if you read old books about education, there's a strong emphasis on moral instruction. Do you think that needs to be an important part of education or is that just...
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I'd like to see more data but I suspect the best moral instruction is the teacher actually being good people. And I think that works. But again, I'd like to see the data. But that somehow you get up and lecture them about the seven virtues or something seems to me a waste of time and maybe even counterproductive.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Now the way I read your book about talent, it seems like also a critique of Bryan's book *The Case Against Education*.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Of course it is.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Bryan like describes me as the guy who's always torturing him. And in a sense, he's right.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, I guess more specifically, if you don't need, it seems that Bryan's book relies on the argument that you need a costly signal to show that you have talent or, you know, you have intelligence and other conscientiousness and other traits. But if you can just learn that from a 1500 word essay and a Zoom call, then maybe the college is not about the signal.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, in that sense, I'm not sure it's a good critique of Bryan. So for most people in the middle of the distribution, I don't think you can learn what I learned from, say, top EV winners through a written application and a half-hour Zoom call. But that said, I think the talent book shows you, my old saying, context is that which is scarce. And you're always testing people for their understanding of context. And most people need a fair amount of higher education to acquire that context, even if they don't remember the detailed content of their classes. So I think Bryan overlooks how much people actually learn when they go to school.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How would you go about measuring the amount of context that somebody is getting in college? Is there something you can point to that says, oh clearly they're getting some context, otherwise they wouldn't be able to do this?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, I think if you meet enough people who did and didn't go to college, you'll see the difference on average, stressing the word average. Now, there are papers measuring positive returns to higher ed. I don't think they at all show it's due to context, but I am persuaded by most of Bryan's arguments that you don't remember the details of what you learned in class. Right? Oh, you learned about astronomy and Kepler's laws and opportunity costs. People can't reproduce that two or three years later. It seems pretty clear we know that, right? But they do learn a lot of context and networking and how to deal with different personality types.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Like how would you falsify this claim though, that you are getting a lot of context? Is it just something that you have to qualitatively evaluate or is there some way that you could say, like what would have to be true of the world for you to conclude that the opposite is true?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, if you could show people remembered a lot of the facts they learned and those facts were important for their jobs, neither of which I think is true, but in principle, they're demonstrable, then you would be much more skeptical about the context being the thing that mattered. But as it stands now, that's the residual and it's probably what matters.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. So I thought that Bryan showed in the book that actually people don't even remember many of the basic facts that they learned in school.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Of course they don't, but that's not the main thing they learn. They learn some vision of how the world works, how they fit into it, that they ought to have higher aspirations, that they can join the upper middle class, that they're supposed to have a particular kind of job. Here are the kinds of jerks you're going to meet along the way. Here's some sense of how dating markets work. Maybe you're in a fraternity, maybe you do a sport and so on. That's what you learn.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How did you spot Bryan? He was maybe in high school even when I met him and it was at some kind of IHS event. And I think he made a point of seeking me out. And I immediately thought, well, this guy is going to be something. Got to keep track of this guy right away. I would say more like what happened? His level of enthusiasm, ability to speak with respect to detail and just kind of bursting with everything was immediately evident, as it still is. Bryan has changed less than almost anyone else I know over what is now. He could tell you how many years, but a whole bunch of decades.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Interesting.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So if that's the case, then it would have been interesting to meet somebody who is like Bryan, but like a 19 year old.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yeah, and I did. I was right.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. To what extent do the best talent scouts inevitably suffer from Goodhart's Law? Like has this been happening to you where your approval gets turned into a credential and so a whole bunch of non-people start applying, you get a whole bunch of bad selection, and then it becomes hard for you to run your program?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: It is not yet hard to run the program. If I needed to, I would just shut down applications. I've seen a modest uptick in bad applications, but it takes so little time to decide they're no good or just not a good fit for us, that it's not a problem. So the endorsement does get credentialized. Mostly that's a good thing, right? Like you help the people you pick and then you see what happens next and you keep on innovating as you need to.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You say in the book, the super talented are best at spotting other super talented individuals and there aren't many of the super talented talent spotters to go around. So this sounds like it's saying that if you're not super talented, much of the book will maybe not do so much good. "Results May Vary" should be maybe on the title. How much of talent spotting can be done by people who aren't themselves super talented?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, I'd want to see the context of what I wrote, but I'm well aware of the fact that, say, in basketball, most of the greatest general managers were not great players. Some were, like Jerry West, right? But say Pat Riley was not. So again, that's something you could study, but I don't in general think that the best talent scouts are themselves super talented.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Then what is the skill in particular that they have, if it's not the particular thing that they're working on?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Some intangible kind of intuition where they feel the right thing in the people they meet. And we try to teach people that intuition the same way you might teach like art or music appreciation, but it's not a science, right?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It's not paint by numbers. Even with all the advice in the book and even with the stuff that isn't in the book that is just your inarticulable knowledge about how to spot talent, all your intuitions, how much of the variance in somebody's true potential is just fundamentally unpredictable? And is it just too chaotic of a thing to actually get your grips on?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think it will always be an art. And if you look at the success rates of VCs, it depends what you count as the pool they're drawing from, but their overall rate at picking winners is not that impressive. And they're super high stakes, they're super smart. So I think it will mostly remain an art, not a science. So people say, "Oh genomics, this, genomics that." Somehow I don't think that will change this.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So you don't think getting a polygenic risk score of, I don't know, drive, is going to be a thing that happens?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Maybe future genomics will be so different from what we have now, maybe, but it's not around the corner.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yeah. Maybe the sample size is just so low on somebody like you that, how are you even going to collect that data? Like, how are you going to get the correlates of who the super talented people are?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yeah, and how genomic data interact with each other. You can apply machine learning and so on. It just seems quite murky.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: If the best people get spotted earlier, and you can tell who is a 10x engineer at your company and who is only a 1x engineer or a 0.5x engineer, doesn't that mean that inequality in a way that will get worse? Because now the 10x engineer knows that they're 10x, and everybody else knows that they're 10x, they're not going to be willing to cross-subsidize your other employees. They're going to be wanting to get paid proportionate to their skill.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, they might be paid more, but they'll also innovate more, right? So they'll create more benefits for people who are doing nothing. So my intuition is that overall inequality of well-being will go down. But you can't say that's true a priori. Inequality of income might go up.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: And then, but will the slack in the system go away for people who are not top performers? Like, as you can tell now, if we're getting better at talent spotting, this has happened already in contemporary America, as I wrote in *Average is Over*. And not due to super sophisticated talent spotting, though sometimes, but simply the fact that a lot of service sectors, you can measure output reasonably directly. Like, did you finish the computer program? Did it work? And that has made it harder for people to get paid things they don't deserve.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I wonder if this leads to adverse selection in the areas where you can't measure how well somebody's doing. So the people who are kind of lazy and bums, they'll just go in places where output can't be measured. And then so these industries will just be overflowing with the people who didn't want to work in measurable areas. And then the people who are talented in those sectors, maybe they'll leave and start their own companies and earn through equity. And no one is really ever measuring their labor power, but still what they're doing is working and they're making more from it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: If talent is partly heritable, then the better you get at spotting talent, over time will the social mobility in society go down?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Depends how you measure social mobility. So is it relative to the previous generation? I mean, most talent spotters don't know a lot about parents. Like I don't know anything about your parents at all. Right? And the other aspect of spotting talent is the talent you mobilize, you hope does great things for people not doing anything at all. And that's a kind of automatic social mobility they get. But if you're measuring quintiles across generations, I don't know, the intuition could go either way.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But this goes back to wondering whether this is a one-time gain or not. So maybe initially they can help the people who are around them. If you find somebody in Brazil, they help the people around them. But once they're found, they're going to go to those clusters you talked about, and they're going to be helping the people in San Francisco who don't need help. So is this a one-time gain then?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, so many people from India seem to give back to India in a very consistent way. People from Russia don't seem to do that. That may relate to the fact that Russia is in terrible shape and India has a brighter future. So it will depend. But I certainly think there are ways of arranging things where people give back a lot.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let's talk about Emergent Ventures.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So I wonder if the goal of Emergent Ventures is to raise aspirations, does that still work given the fact that you have to accept some people but reject other people? In Bayesian terms, the updates up have to equal the updates down. In some sense, you're almost transferring a vision from the excellent to the truly great. You see what I'm saying?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, you might discourage the people you turn away. But if they're really going to do something, they should take that as a challenge. And many do. Like, "Oh, I was rejected by Harvard. I had to go to UChicago. But then I decided I'm going to show those bastards." I think we talked about that a few minutes ago. So if I just crush the spirits of those who are rejected, I don't feel too bad about that. They should probably be in some role anyway where they're just working for someone.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But let me ask you then the converse of that, which is if you do accept somebody, are you worried that if one of the things that drives people is getting rejected and then wanting to prove that people who rejected them wrong, are you worried that by accepting somebody when they're 15, you're killing that thing in them that wants to get some kind of approval?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Plenty of other people will still reject them, right? Now, if everyone accepts them every step of the way, maybe they're just awesome. Sort of LeBron James' basketball history. Past a certain point, it just seems everyone wanted him for a bunch of decades now. I think deliberately with a lot of candidates you shouldn't encourage them too much. And I make a point of chewing out a lot of people. Just like light a fire under them. Like, "What are you doing? It's not going to work." So I'm all for that selectively. But yes.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Why do you think that so many of the people who have led Emergent Ventures, as you said, are interested in effective altruism? There is like a moment right now for effective altruism where it is the thing.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Some of it is political polarization, like the main parties are so stupid and offensive. Those energies will go somewhere. Some of that in the 1970s, say, maybe went to libertarianism. Libertarianism has been out there for too long. It doesn't seem to address a lot of current problems like climate change or pandemics very well. So where should it go? Rationality community gets some of it. That's related to EA, as I'm sure you know. Just like the tech startup community gets some of it. That's great. It seems to be working pretty well to me. Like I'm not an EA person, but maybe they deserve a lot of it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But you don't think it's persistent? Like you think it comes and goes?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think it will come and go, but I think EA will not vanish. Like libertarianism, it will continue for quite a long time.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is there any movement that has attracted young people that has been persistent over time or did they all fade?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, Christianity, right? Judaism, Islam. They're pretty persistent.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. So to the extent that being more religious makes you more persistent, then the criticism of EA that it's kind of like a religion, can we view that as a plus?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Of course. Yeah. I think it's somewhat like a religion. To me, that's a plus. We need more religions. I wish more of the religions we needed were just flat out religions. But in the meantime, EA will do.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Are there times when somebody asks you for a grant and you view that as a negative signal? So let's say they're, especially when they're well off, like let's say somebody is a former Google engineer and they want to start a new project and they're asking you for a grant, do you worry that maybe they're too risk averse? Do they want to put their own capital into it? Or maybe that they are too conformist, they need your approval before they go ahead?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Things like this have happened. And I ask people flat out, like, "Why do you want this grant from me?" And it is a forcing question in the sense that if their answer isn't good, I won't give it to them, even though they might have good level of talent, good ideas, whatever. So they have to be able to answer that question in a credible way. Some can, some can't.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I remember that the president of the University of Chicago so many years back said that if you rejected the entire class of freshmen that are coming in and accepted the 100 people that they had to reject that year, then there would be like no difference in the quality of the admits. I would think Chicago is the one school where that's not true. But I agree that it's true for most schools. Do you think that's also true of Emergent Ventures?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: No, not at all. Like how good is a marginal reject? Not good. It's a remarkably bimodal distribution as I perceive it. Now, maybe I'm wrong, but there aren't that many cases where I'm agonizing. And if I'm agonizing, I figure it probably should be a no.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I guess that makes it even rougher if you do get rejected because it wasn't like, "Oh, you weren't like a right fit for the job or you almost made the cut." It's like, no, we're actually just assessing your potential, not some sort of fit for the job. And not only did you, you weren't on the edge of potential. You were like, you're just on the other edge of the curve.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: But a lot of these rejected people and projects, I don't think they're so like spilling tears over it. Like you get an application, someone's in Akron, Ohio, and they want to start a nonprofit dog shelter. And they like saw EV on the list of things you can apply to. And they apply to a lot of things and like maybe never get funding, but it's like people who enter contests or something. And so they apply to EV. Nothing against nonprofit dog shelters, but that's kind of a no, right? And I don't know. I genuinely don't know their response, but I don't think they walk away from the experience with some deeper model of what they should infer from the EV decision.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How much does the money part of Emergent Ventures matter? So if you just didn't give them the money?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: There's a whole bunch of proposals that really need the money for capital costs, and then it matters a lot. For a lot of them, the money per se doesn't matter.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. So what is the function of returns for that? If you like 10x the money or you 0.1x the money for some of these things, do you think that you'd see significantly different results?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think a lot of foundations give out too many large grants and not enough small grants. I hope I'm at an optimum, but again, I don't have data to tell you, but I do think about this a lot and I think small grants are underrated.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Why are women often better at detecting deceit?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I would assume for biological and evolutionary reasons that there are all these men trying to deceive them, right? So, the cost of a pregnancy is higher for a woman than for a man on average, like by quite a bit. So women will develop defense mechanisms that men maybe don't have as much.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: One theory I heard from somebody I was brainstorming these questions with, she suggested that maybe it's because women just discuss personal matters more. And so therefore they have a greater library.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, that's certainly true, but that's subordinate to my explanation, I would say. But definitely, there's a lot of intermediate steps, right? Things that women do more of that help them be insightful.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Why is writing skill so important to you?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, one thing is just I'm good at judging it, right? So a lacrosse scale, I'm very bad at judging. So there's nothing on the EV application testing for your lacrosse skill. But look, writing is a form of thinking and public intellectuals are one of the things I want to support. And some of the companies I admire are like writing culture companies like Amazon or Stripe. So writing it is, I'm a good reader. So you're going to be asked to write.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you think it's a general fact that writing correlates with just general competence?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I do, but especially the areas that I'm funding, it's strongly true.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, gotcha.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Whether it's true for everything is harder to say.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Can stamina be increased?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Of course.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, really?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yeah. It's one of the easier things to increase. I don't think you can become superhuman in your energy and stamina if you're not born that way. But I think almost everyone could increase by 30%, 50%, like some notable amount.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Okay, that's interesting. Putting aside maybe some disabilities or something, but people in regular circumstances. Okay. Yeah, I think that's interesting because in our blog post we said from Robin Hanson about the stamina, I think his point of view was this is just something that's inherent to people.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, I don't think that's totally false. The people who have superhuman stamina are born that way. But there's plenty of margins. I mean, take physical stamina. You don't think people can train more and run for longer? Of course they can. Like that's totally proven. So it would be weird if it held for all these organs, but not your brain. That seems quite implausible, especially for someone like Robin, where your brain is just this other organ that you're going to download or upload or goodness knows what with it. He's a physicalist if there ever was one.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Have you read Haruki Murakami's book on running?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: No, I've been meaning to. I'm not sure how interesting I'll find it. I will someday. Maybe not that interesting.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I like his stuff a lot. But what I found really interesting about it was just how linked building up physical stamina is for him to building up the stamina to write a lot. And Magnus Carlsen would say the same thing for chess. So being in reasonable physical shape is important for your mental stamina, which is another kind of simple proof that you can boost your mental stamina. Now, after reading the book, I was inclined to think that intelligence matters more than I previously thought, not less. You might have undervalued it. Or not even that. You say in the book that intelligence has convex returns and it matters especially for areas like inventors.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Right.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Then you also say that if you look at some of the most important things in society, something like what Larry and Sergey did, they're basically inventors, right?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So many of the most important things in society, intelligence matters more. And not only that, it has increasing returns. And it seems like with Emergent Ventures or a venture like that, you're trying to pick the people who are at the tail, right? You're not looking for a barista at Starbucks.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Sure. Awesome.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So it seems like you should care about intelligence more, given the evidence there.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, more than who does. I mean, I feel what the book presents is, in fact, my view. And kind of by definition, I agree with that view. But yeah, there's a way of reading it where intelligence really matters a lot, but for a relatively small number of jobs.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. So maybe you just started off with a really high prior on intelligence, and that's why you downgraded. But maybe the average person should upgrade.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I would say there's a lot of jobs that I actually hire for in actual life where smarts are not the main thing I look for. Most jobs.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Does the convexity of returns on intelligence suggest that maybe the multiplicative model is wrong? Because if the multiplicative model is right, you would expect to see decreasing returns and putting your stats on one skill. You'd want to diversify more, right?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think the convexity of returns to intelligence is embedded in a multiplicative model where the IQ returns only cash out for people good at all these other things. And for a lot of geniuses, they just can't get out of bed in the morning and you're stuck and you should write them off.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So you cite the data that Sweden collects from everybody that enters the military there. And then, you know, the CEOs apparently are not especially smart. But one thing I found interesting from that same data was that Swedish soccer players are pretty smart. And the better a soccer player somebody is, the smarter they are. And I mean you've interviewed professional basketball players turned public intellectuals on your podcast and they sound extremely smart to me. What is going on there? Why anecdotally and with some limited amounts of evidence it seems that professional athletes are smarter than you would expect?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I'm a big fan of the view that top level athletic performance is super cognitively intense, that most top athletes are really extraordinarily smart. And I don't just mean smart on the court, though obviously that, but smart more broadly and that this is underrated. I think Michelle Dawson was the one who talked me into this. But absolutely, I'm with you all the way.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you think it's just mutational load or like the actual act of?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think you actually have to be really smart to figure out like how to lead a team, how to improve yourself, how to practice, how to outsmart the opposition, all these other things. Maybe not the only way to get there, but very G loaded.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. And you certainly see some super talented athletes who just go bust or they may destroy themselves with drugs or there's plenty of tales like that. Like you don't have to look hard. Are there other areas where you wouldn't expect it to be G-loaded but it actually is?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Probably, but there's so many like I just don't know. But sports is something in my life I followed, so I definitely have opinions about it and they seem incredibly smart to me. And when they're interviewed they're not always articulate and you're sort of talking yourself into it by a sex post, but I hear like Michael Jordan in the 90s I thought that guy's really smart. So I think he is. Look at Charles Barkley, he's amazing. Right? There's hardly anyone I'd rather listen to including on talent than Charles Barkley.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Huh, that's really interesting. And he's not that tall. You can't say, "Oh he succeeded because he's seven foot two." He was maybe top six foot four and they called him the Round Mound of Rebound. Now how did he do that? He was smart. He figured out where the ball was going, the weaknesses of his opponents, how to nudge them the right way and so on. Brilliant guy.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: What I find really remarkable is not just with athletes but with many other professions, if you interview somebody who is at the top of that field, they come off really, really smart.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes. Like YouTubers, even sex workers. So whoever is like the top gardener, I expect I would be super impressed by.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Exactly. Right.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Now, all your books are in some way about talent, right?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Of course they are.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So let me read you the following passage from *An Economist Gets Lunch*.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: "At a fancy restaurant, the menu is well thought out. The time and attention of the kitchen are scarce. An item won't be on the menu unless there's a good reason for its presence. If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good." That's counter-signaling, right? So anything that is very weird, they will keep on the menu because it has a devoted set of people who keep on ordering it and appreciate it. And that's part of the talent of being a chef, that you can come up with such things. How do we apply this to talent?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, with restaurants, you have selection pressure where you're only going to ones that have cleared certain hurdles.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: So this is true for talent, only for talents who are established. So if you see a persistent NBA player who's a very poor free throw shooter, like Shaquille O'Neal was, you can more or less assume they're really good at something else. But for people who are not established, there's not the same selection pressure. So there's not an analogous inference you can draw.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. So if I show up to like an Emergent Ventures conference and I meet somebody and they don't seem especially impressive in the first impression, I should think their work is especially impressive.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yes, absolutely.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: OK, so my understanding of your book, *Creative Destruction*, is that maybe on average, cultural diversity will go down. But in special niches, the diversity and ingenuity will go up. Can I apply the same insight to talent that maybe two random college grads will have similar skill sets over time, but if you look at somebody on the tails, their skills and knowledge will become even more specialized and even more diverse?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: There's a lot of different presuppositions in your question. So first, is cultural diversity going up or down? That, I think, is multidimensional. So say different cities and different countries will be more like each other over time. But that said, the genres they produce don't have to become more similar. They're more similar in the sense you can get sushi in each one. But like Nouvelle Cuisine in Dakar, Senegal might be taking a very different path from Nouvelle Cuisine in Tokyo, Japan. So what happens with cultural diversity? I think the most reliable generalization is that it tends to come out of larger units. So small groups and tribes and linguistic groups, they get absorbed. Those people don't stop being creative in other venues, but there are fewer unique isolated cultures and much more like thickly diverse urban creativity. That would be the main generalization I would put forward. So if you wanted to then apply that generalization to talent, I think in a funny way, you come back to my earlier point, the talent just tends to be geographically extremely well clustered. That's not the question you asked, but it's how I would reconfigure the pieces of it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. What does Alchian-Allen suggest about finding talent in a globalized world? And in particular, if it's cheaper to find talent because of the internet, does that mean that you should be selecting more mediocre candidates?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think it means you should be more bullish on immigrants from Africa. So it's relatively hard to get out of Africa to the United States in most cases. So that's a sign the person put in a lot of effort and ability. Maybe an easy country to come here from would be Canada, all other things equal. Again, I'd want this to be measured. The people who come from countries that are hard to come from, India actually, the numbers are fairly high, but the roots are mostly pretty gated.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. Yes. Is part of the reason that talent is hard to spot and find today is that we have an aging population? So then we would have more capital, more jobs, more mentorship available for young people coming up than there are young people.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't think we're really into demographic decline yet. Not in the United States. Maybe in Japan that would be true. But it seems to me, especially with the internet, there's more 15 year old talent today than ever before by a lot, not just by a little. You see this in chess, right? Where we can measure performance very well. Just a lot more young talent from many different places, including the US. So aging hasn't mattered yet. Maybe for a few places, but not here.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you think will change in talent spotting as society becomes older?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Society depends what you mean by society. I think the US, unless it totally screws up on immigration, will always have a very seriously good flow of young people that we don't ever have to enter the aging equilibrium the way Japan probably already has. So I don't know what will change. And then there's work from a distance, there's hiring from a distance, funding from a distance. As you know, there's Emergent Ventures India, which is in India, and we do that at a distance. So I don't think we're ever going to enter that world.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. But then what does it look like for Japan? Is part of the reason that Japanese cultures and companies are arranged the way they are and do the recruitment the way they do? Is that linked to perhaps their demographics?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: That strikes me as a plausible reason, but I don't think I know enough to say. But it wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be the case.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: To what extent do you need a sort of great man ethos in your culture in order to empower the top talent? That if you have too much political and moral egalitarianism, you're not going to give great people the real incentive and drive to strive to be great.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: We've got to say great man or great woman, or other, whatever all-purpose word we wish to use. I worry much less about woke ideology than a lot of people I know. It's not my thing, but it's something young people can rebel against. If that keeps you down, I'm not so impressed by you. I think it's fine. Let the woke reign, people can work around them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But overall like if you have a culture like Europe's, do you think that has any impact on...
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Europe is not woke enough in a lot of ways, right? Europe is very chauvinist and conservative in the literal sense and often quite old-fashioned. Depends where you're talking about. But Europe, I would say on that, is much less woke than the United States. I wouldn't say that's their main problem. But you can't say, "Oh they don't innovate because they're too woke." No, no, no. Like hang out with some 63-year-old Danish guys and see how woke you think they are after everyone's had a few drinks.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: My question wasn't about wokeism. I just mean in general, if you have an egalitarian society.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think of Europe as less egalitarian than the US.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Oh, really?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think they have bad cultural norms for innovation. But I don't think being too egalitarian is it. They're culturally so non-egalitarian.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Huh.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Again, it depends where. But listen, Paris would be the extreme. Everyone is classified, right? And by status. And you need to wear your sweater the right way and this and that. Now, how innovative is Paris? Actually, maybe more than people think. But I still think they have too few dimensions of status competition. And that's a general problem in most of Europe: too few dimensions of status competition. Not enough room for the proverbial village idiot.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. You say in the book that questions tend to degrade over time if you don't replace them. I find it interesting that Y Combinator has kept the same questions since they were started in 2005. And, of course, your co-author was a partner at Y Combinator. Do you think that works for Y Combinator, or do you think they're probably making a mistake?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I genuinely don't know. There are people who will tell you Y Combinator, while still successful, has become more like a scalable business school and less like attracting all the top weirdos who do amazing things. Again, I'd want to see data before asserting that myself, but you certainly hear it a lot. So it could be Y Combinator is a bit stale, but stale in the good sense. Like Harvard is stale, right? It dates from the 17th century, but it's still amazing. MIT is stale. Maybe Y Combinator has become more like those groups.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You think that will happen to Emergent Ventures eventually?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't think so because it has a number of unique features built in from the front. So a very small number of evaluators, two. Now the two might grow a little bit, but it's not going to grow that much. I'm not paid to do it. So that really limits how much it's going to scale. And there's not like a staff that has to be carried where you're captured by the staff. There is no staff. There's a bit of free riding on staff who do other things, but there's no sense of if the program goes away, like all my buddies on staff get laid off. No. So it's kind of pop up and low costs of exit whenever that time comes.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you personally have questions that you haven't put in the book or elsewhere because you want them to be fresh for asking somebody who's applying to the grant?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, I didn't when we wrote the book, so we put everything in there that we were thinking of. But over time, we've developed more. It's like, and I don't generally give them in interviews because you've got to keep some stock. So yeah, there's more since then, but we weren't holding back at the time.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: It's like a comedy routine. You got to write a new one each year.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: That's right. But when your show's on the air, you do give it your best jokes.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is somebody who's applying to Emergent Ventures, if they've read your book, are they any better off? Or are they perhaps worse off because maybe they get a misleading or partial view into what's required of them?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I hope they're not better off in a way, but probably they are. I hope they use it to understand their own talent better and present it better in a good way, and not just to try to manipulate the system. But most people aren't actually that good at manipulating that kind of system. So I'm not too worried.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. In the sense that they can manipulate the system, that's a positive signal of some kind, right? Like you could fool me, like, hey, what else have you got to say?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Are you worried that young people will encounter you now? They're going to think of you as a sort of a talent judge, and a good one at that. So they're maybe going to be more self-aware than you would have been.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yes, I worry about the effect of this on me. That maybe a lot of my interactions become less genuine, or people are too self-conscious, or too stilted, or too something.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is there something you can do about that, or is that just baking the cake?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know. If you do your best to try to act genuine, whatever that means, maybe you can avoid it a bit or delay it at least a bit. But a lot of it, I don't think you can avoid. In part, you're just cashing in. So I'm 60. I don't think I'll still be doing this when I'm 80. So if I have like 18 years of cashing in, maybe it's what I should be doing.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: To what extent are the principles of finding talent timeless? So if you're looking for a general in the French Revolution, how much does the advice change, or are the basic principles the same over time?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, one of the key principles is contextual. You need to focus on how the sector is different. But if you're doing that, then I think at the meta level, the principles broadly stay the same.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You have a really interesting book about autism and systematizers. You think Napoleon was autistic?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I've read several biographies of him and not come away with that impression. But you can't rule it out. Like, what do the biographers know? It gets back to our question of how valuable is history. Did the biographers ever meet Napoleon? Well, some of them did, but those people had such weak other intellectual categories. And the modern biographies, Andrew Roberts, whoever you think is good, they don't know, so how can I know?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. And again, the issue is that the details that stick in my mind from reading the biography are the ones that make him seem autistic.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yes. And there's a tendency in biographies to storify things. And that's dangerous too.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How general or cross-applicable is talent or just competence of any kind? So if you look at somebody like Peter Thiel, investor, great executive, great thinker. Even speaking of Napoleon, I think it was some mathematician, was it Lagrange or Laplace who he was studying under, they said that he could have been a mathematician if he wanted to. I don't know if that's true, but it does seem that the top achievers in one field seem to be able to move across fields and be top achievers in other fields. Is that a pattern that you see as well?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Maybe somewhat, but I don't think you can be top at anything or even most things. And a lot of these very successful people in other areas, they might just be like mere millionaires.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you mean?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Oh, maybe they ran a car dealership and earned three million dollars in 1966, which is a pretty good life back then, but it's not like what they have ended up being.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You quote Sam Altman in the book. That was really interesting. He says, "The successful founders I funded believe that they are eventually certain to be successful." To what extent is this self-belief the result or the cause of being talented?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Maybe it's both. But keep in mind the context for Sam. Those are companies and they're startups. Startups succeed at such a low rate that the successes really are selecting for people with quite a bit of overconfidence. In other sectors, you won't in general find that same level of overconfidence. So you have to be careful. I agree with Sam, but he's talking about one set of things, not everything.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is that not true of other fields? If you're looking for an intellectual, you're partially hoping for the outcome that they become remembered or their ideas have a lot of influence, and that's also a rare thing to be able to do.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think more people stumble into it, for instance. And then there are more people who know early on they can do it, but not for Sam-like reasons of overconfidence. They just kind of know it because they can and there are enough early tests. So I still think it's different, and there's more stumbling into it by accident.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: And which better describes your intellectual journey? Were you in some sense a little overconfident in your 20s?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, there's an interesting break in my life that relates to stumbling into things. So I grew up with no internet. So I thought I would do quite well. In that sense, I was overconfident. But I had no notion that I would have large numbers of people listening to me. I just didn't think about the internet. So in that sense, I totally stumbled into the particular way in which I ended up doing well, yet was still at a younger age, overconfident.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. I want to backtest some of your methods of finding talent on certain people. We just talked about Haruki Murakami. Let's use him as an example. In his 30s, I believe he was just running a bar.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Who's the person? Oh, the novelist. Haruki Murakami. Oh yeah, okay.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: He was just running a bar. It doesn't have to be him in particular, but just generally, think of a 30-year-old. You go to Japan, you go to a bar, you start talking to the bartender who also happens to own the place. What would the conversation look like where you would identify this person could be a great novelist, or it could be a great anything?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think my chance of identifying great novelists is very low, and it's one reason why it's not something I try to do.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. Why is that? You seem, when I look at biographies, there seem to be so many instances of people who don't show obvious signs of promise early on. So maybe if I knew more such people, I could develop markers. It's possible, right? My chance of being good at that is probably way above average, but I definitely don't think I'd be good at it now.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: And what do you think makes a novelist so hard to predict?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: They can blossom much later, and very often they do. A very high percentage of them are women whose earlier lives are interrupted, often by children, but not only. That gets back to the late bloomers thing. And there's something quite discreet about a novel, that until a person has done it, it's hard to tell how good they are. Or say a great nonfiction book. Like Taleb or Pinker or whoever. You could read their earlier blog posts and just see, flat out see, oh, they're really smart. Maybe they could write a great book. I wouldn't say anyone could do that, but most people we know could do that. Spot them earlier. But a novel, I can't.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you think that's also true? The way you described it sounds very similar to a startup founder, even maybe the time horizon. Like you haven't really done anything like it before. And the time horizon is maybe like five to ten years.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know. Maybe now we take shorter, but there are more intermediate benchmarks with startups. Just how good a job do they do trying to raise their first round? There's a lot you can watch. It's not indicative of product fit to the market and a bunch of other things, but you see a lot early on. How good is the pitch, the deck? Again, there's some great things that had terrible pitches, but I think you see way more early signs. Now, maybe novelists show early signs that I don't know about. So again, I'm suggesting maybe I could learn, but right now I'm totally at sea with that one. Joseph Conrad, was I going to get that? Herman Melville? I don't think so.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. Let's backtest with another person. Scott Aaronson. As you know, he's a famous complexity theorist, computer scientist, and he was actually a former professor. But he wrote in a blog post about standardized tests. This is what he wrote: "I was a 15-year-old with perfect SATs and a published research paper. But not only was I young and immature with spotty grades and a weird academic trajectory, I had no sports, no music, no diverse leadership experiences. I was a narrow, linear, A to B thinker who lacked depth and emotional intelligence, the exact opposite of what Harvard and Princeton were looking for in every way." Now, what would happen to Scott Aaronson if he, at that time, had applied to Emergent Ventures?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I've never met Scott, but odds are very strong we'd fund him from the sound of it. Again, I don't know him at all. But the narrow, linear thinker? I don't know what that means. A lot of people misdescribe themselves. And they say, "Oh, if you asked me those questions, I would suck." And they're wrong. They wouldn't suck. I know they don't. And I suspect Scott's self-description is a bit off, but I think he would do very well at Emergent Ventures.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Sure. Yeah, I agree. Let's talk about effective altruism and longtermism. You have expressed skepticism to the idea that you can use longtermism to say that existential risks matter more than everything else because we should be optimizing for the branch of the decision tree where we survive for millions of years. Can you say more about why you're skeptical of that kind of reasoning?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, I'd want to express my skepticism a little more clearly. I think existential risk matters much more than almost anyone thinks. In this sense, I'm with the EA people. But I do think they overvalue it a bit. I would just say I don't think there are many good things we can do to limit existential risk that are very different from looking for more talent, growing GDP, supporting science. It's a pretty familiar list of things that don't all have to be that longterm. And in that sense, I think they flip out about it a bit too much and have all these super specific hypotheses. But we should invest in good things now. I do favor an asteroid protection program, by the way.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: To the extent that there was a trade-off in that hypothetical, would you put the same weight on existential risk that they do? Or do you just differ with them on how you actually go about solving existential risks?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Probably more the latter. I think they're not epistemically modest enough when it comes to existential risk. And they have all these, some of them, not all of them by any means, these very particular hypotheses about AGI, and we've got to prevent this. And that's where I really differ from them. I think their ability to limit that risk, however great or small it might be, is basically zero. That if AGI is a risk, it's the worst set of procedures that will do you in. And you can't regulate those very well at all. And putting everyone at your favorite tech company through this training about alignment, I'm not against doing that. But come on, if it's going to happen, it's like handling pandemic materials. It's the sloppiest people you've got to worry about, and they are not sitting in on your class on AGI and alignment.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes. Although it is surprising to the extent that the companies in the U.S. that maybe care more than other entities about alignment are actually first currently, right? Like OpenAI is first.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yeah, but it won't matter because if that view is the correct one, and I don't think it is, the more screwed up successors will just come 10 years later and Skynet goes live, but 10 years later.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. I'm curious just generally, why is the possibility of humanity surviving for a very long time not something that is a strong part of your worldview, given that you're a strong longtermist?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think the chance of there being a major war with nuclear weapons or whatever comes next, while very low in any given year, you just have the clock tick, that chance adds up, and we're not going to be here for another 100,000 years. It's a simple argument. I'm not a pessimist in any given year at all.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right, but if the odds are sufficiently above zero, then do you just not buy the argument that anything above zero is just huge and we should be optimizing for that?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I'm all for things to make nuclear weapons safer, but it's hard to know exactly what you do. Like, what do we do in Ukraine now? We should be more tough, less tough. There's different arguments, but they're not that different from just the normal foreign policy arguments. There's not some special branch of EA longtermism that tells you what to do in Ukraine. And those people, if anything, tend to be kind of under-invested in historical and cultural forms of knowledge. So I just don't think you buy that much extra stuff by calling yourself worried about existential risk. There's plenty of people in the U.S. foreign policy establishment who think about all this stuff. Until recently, most of them had never heard of the EA, maybe even still. It doesn't change the debate much.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm sure you've heard these arguments, but it seems with nuclear war, it's hard to imagine how it could kill every single person on the planet. But I think we'll be permanently set back kind of forever. And in the meantime, we can't build asteroid protection or whatever else. And it will just be like medieval living standard, super small population, feudal governance, lots of violence, rape, whatever. And there's no reason to think that, oh, just so you read a copy of the constitution in 400 years, we're back on track. That's crazy wrong, I think.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: But we did emerge from feudalism, right? So if it happened once, isn't that example enough?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: We don't know. There's hundreds of thousands of years of human history where we seem to make diddly squat progress. We don't know why. But don't assume that because it happened once, it means you always rebuild. I don't think it does.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Right. Like, if it's not just the idea as being laden in the space, what would it take for our descendants to be able to recover industrial civilization? And I don't think we have good theories of that at all. I would just say we had a lot of semi-independent operating parts of the world, say circa 1500, and not that many of them made much progress.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I think of you as an optimist, at least by temperament, but this seems like one of the more pessimistic things I've heard overall anywhere. The idea that not only will human civilization be decimated almost surely, but that they will never be able to recover.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I wouldn't say never. Never say never, James Bond movie. But there's no reason to assume you just bounce back. I would say we don't know. Other problems will come upon us. Nuclear winter, crop failures, climate change. It just seems very daunting to me. And the overall history of mammalian species is not that optimistic. The fact that sex exists is biologically very pessimistic.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you mean? Can you explain that quote? The fact that sex exists?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, anything that stands still gets destroyed by maybe parasites or destroyed by something. So you've got to randomize and change what you are through sex. That's the clearly winning model for at least larger things. And that's a sign nothing survives for that long. So the existence of sex is the most pessimistic thing there is. I find that ironic. So I'm not the pessimist. Sex is.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let's say I take your argument that economic growth is very important. Does that imply anything in particular about what somebody should do with their life? Or is it basically just an argument about policy?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: It can guide your life a bit. So to think just more carefully, how do you fit in? Maybe you could do something important. Maybe you could have higher aspirations. For most people, it won't matter. But again, certainly some people could do much more. And I do my best there to try to help that along.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Does it have to do with the fact that we don't know much about what causes economic growth? Or is it just that even if we knew, you can never offer concrete advice about what you could do to increase economic growth?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I give concrete advice to people all the time, with a grain of salt. But I'll tell people, I think you should go to this school, not that school. That's concrete advice. I don't think we know so little about growth. We certainly know a lot about how to wreck growth. So we know enough.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Right. But not enough to create an 80,000 Hours for progress studies, you think? Or is that just fundamentally impossible?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: What do you mean, create an 80,000 Hours? You mean an institution?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, there's the Institute for Progress. No, no, no. Here's a list. Here's the things you should consider doing with your career.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: It's not the right way to think about it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What would you say more?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: You want to sit down with the person, understand the entire context, see what they could do, see if there's a way you could or should bend up the curve. But a list? No, that's a little too EA static maximization for me.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: If you focus more on learning about cultures and history, you're not going to come up with some list as the way to approach that. Why are culture and history going to help?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: They show you how complex things are. And the people who made very significant contributions, or even did very terrible things like Napoleon, understanding Napoleon, what he came from, the ideas he had. Super complicated. I don't really get the list version. "Here's the list for baby Napoleon: don't invade Russia, or beware Talleyrand." It just seems to miss the point.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: If a young person were to read a bunch of biographies, not necessarily as career advice, but just generally as trying to better understand how they could be more effective, do you think that's going to teach them that things are more complex than they thought, or would that give them any practical advice?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think both. Napoleon's a good person to read biographies of. When I was young, sports and chess players were my grist. And I feel I learned a lot from that. I don't know that it was any big lesson, but just you saw all these histories of people persevering and self-improving, and that's worth a lot. So I don't think it's a waste of time at all. I think it's probably essential. I don't know if you have to read biographies. If you just follow sports careers, that might be enough, but that's kind of like reading a biography. YouTube can do it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I don't fixate on the biography. They seem in a way inefficiently long. Is it like just having somebody have a blog and you follow along their blog on a weekly basis or a daily basis?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Absolutely. That's reading a biography. I've been blogging almost 20 years, and there's, I hope, some lesson in the constancy of that for people.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I was struck while reading your book that some of the advice you offer for how to ask good questions in hiring is actually great advice for how to ask good questions in a podcast.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Absolutely. Keep the conversation flow going to get them interested. Talk about something that they're very interested in. Don't worry about changing the subject. Just get them on something where they're involved and excited.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: To what extent was that just informed from having a podcast?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Oh, quite a bit. And you can think of the podcasts in a sense as interviews. They're kind of very judgmental. Like, how worthy are you?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: People are afraid more and more. Now, you have a quite mellow personality. I'm similar in that way. I wonder, do you think this has any sort of intellectual consequence? In the sense that if you were maybe if you could experience the exuberant highs or the incapacitating lows, you would be maybe less modest or moderate.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I might be more creative, but I think I would be more wrong.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. How much is that on that trade-off? Where should one be if they're trying to reason about important topics? Should you just try to increase the variance so you can get the important things right?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think it's, again, context specific. You want to understand where a person is. Understand they were probably born that way. You can only budge them so much, wherever you might think they should be, and just try to marginally improve how they're dealing with the flow coming their way. So I prefer to work with people's strengths and boost the strengths rather than have a list set out of how to reform them. I think it's a way more productive way to do things. And it's lower conflict. So you, as a coach or mentor or coworker, it's way less stressful for you because you're being very positive with them and it's sincere. So you'll just do more of it. Or if you're hitting them over the head like, "Why don't you wake up at 7 a.m. in the morning?" Maybe they should. It's like, come on, you have something better to do than that. If they can't figure that out for themselves, tell them something else that they can actually find useful.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: When you interviewed Andrew Sullivan, one of the things he said was that the reason he decided to write about gay rights was that he got HIV and he realized he might not have that long to live. And of course we see the consequence of that in society today. If you find out you only have five years to live, what is the book you would write? What is the argument you would make?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think I would do more Emergent Ventures.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I would finish the book I'm working on. And I might consider a sequel to *Talent*, depending on Daniel's plans. But my marginal thing, I don't feel, is writing more books.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Interesting. Though I will write more books. So it's like your late career, you think the most important thing is institution building and talent spotting?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yes, at this point. And I've written like 16, 17 books. So it's not like I haven't had my say.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: One interesting thing about top performers in many fields is that they have intricate philosophies and worldviews. Like Peter Thiel, obviously, with the Girard stuff, but even somebody like George Soros with the theory of reflexivity. To what extent do you think that these are very important in their success? Or to what extent do you think maybe if you just have somebody who is plus four standard deviations in verbal intelligence, one of the things they'll do other than being very successful is just create intricate worldviews?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: All the people I know who are like that, such as Peter, I feel it's important for their success. Soros, I don't know. But since all the people I do know, it seems to matter. My intuition is that it matters a lot more broadly. Like you need a unique way of looking at the world.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is that a correlate in the sense that it jolts you out of complacency? And it protects you from other people's idiocy. Your mimetic desires get channeled away from a lot of other things that might even be good overall, but they would distract you.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Right, but maybe the actual theory itself is not the edge. It's just like correct. Now sometimes it's the edge. So the famous story of Peter, he read Girard and saw Facebook would be a big thing. It's probably true. But it doesn't have to be the edge, I would say.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: One thing I found really interesting in your book *What Price Fame?* was you had this interesting discussion where you cite your former advisor Thomas Schelling about how certain celebrities can make themselves focal points in the culture. And I'm curious how we can apply this to public intellectuals. In recent years, we've seen a lot of public intellectuals become a focal point in the culture war or in just general discussions. In some sense, this has happened to you as well. We've seen this with many of your even former podcast guests, people like Jordan Peterson, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. How do public intellectuals make themselves focal points?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, by doing something noteworthy. So it can be an idea, but it can also be a form of performance art. And maybe performance art has become more important. I think of my own focality as having more to do with a kind of performance art than with any specific idea I have. And I think very carefully about how to stay somewhat focal for a long period of time. So it's quite unusual that I've mostly increased my focality over 20 years now. It's much more common that people come and go and decline. And I work quite hard not to do that. A lot of the IDW people have very clear peaks, which now lie in the past, and I suspect will have fairly rapid declines. I don't want that to happen to me. I want to be in the thick of things, just for selfish reasons.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What do you think is the explanation for why they peak so early?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know if early is the word. Like Jordan Peterson was at it for a long time. But they made extreme bets on very particular ideas. And maybe different people will disagree about those ideas. But I think a lot of them are losing ideas, even if they might be correct in some ways. I've done much less to bet on a single idea. You can say kind of market-based economics, but it's not so radical. We're still in a capitalistic society. So I have enough to say about new issues that come along all the time. And to be taking a mostly pro-capitalist point of view, it's just not that obsolete. Maybe it's not peak fashion now, but it's fine to be doing that. They were over-leveraged and they got margin called. I'm not making a big bet on ivermectin, is one way to put it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Why doesn't tenure make academics less risk averse? I've thought about this quite a bit.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think the selection filters are very strong. They're very pro-conformity. People care a lot what their peers think of them. You're selecting for conformists to begin with, and you're just literally not trained in how to take risk. It's not always that easy.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So let's say you're like, "F this tenure." I'm going to get up and take a risk. Like what do you do? You say demand curve slopes upwards? Well, that's your risk, but it's just not that easy. Is there something that would be analogous to a course on risk that makes people more risk-taking? Or is it...
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I would say at Mercatus, we have a lot of students come through here, and we do try to teach them all in different ways how to take more career risk. I think we've been remarkably successful at that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, what is being taught that makes it more risky?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, first of all, they observe what we all do. They just learn by example. But if they want advice, like how to run a podcast, how to write a blog, how to try to work for someone on the Senate Banking Committee, we have people who've done that. We'll put them in touch. So we don't have a class, but there's a very serious, focused effort. Anyone with any interest in learning how to do things, take more risk, whatever, I can get that here for free.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: How malleable is risk aversion?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think a lot of the students we produce have done unusual things, certainly relative to other programs. It could be better yet, of course. But us leading by example is the number one way we teach them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: You had an interesting post in 2011 where you were talking about which public intellectuals have been the most influential. One thing I noticed from the list was that the people you said who were most influential were people who were advocating for one very specific, narrow policy change their entire careers.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Right. A lot of those people fade now. The two I cited, Andrew Sullivan and Peter Singer, have not faded. But it's a risky strategy, and I would get bored too quickly doing that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is there a reason why you haven't adopted the strategy yourself?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yeah, that's the way in which I am risk averse. I don't have a single issue. For Andrew, gay marriage, great. He won. That's amazing. I'm all for it. But in part, he won because it is the thing he cared about most. I don't have a comparable thing like that. The closest thing I have is, "Here's my way of thinking. I'm going to show it to you." And I have done that pretty monomaniacally. I think I've been somewhat successful.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Does this imply that the most interesting intellectuals will never be the most influential? Because to be influential, you had to focus on just one thing.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: On average, that's true. I think so.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: John Stuart Mill was super interesting and right about many, many things. He had some influence, but was there a single thing where he saw through and made it happen? I don't know.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yeah. Whereas Richard Cobden, not a deep economic thinker, but for free trade against the Corn Laws, he and John Bright made that happen. I would say they were correct, but it's not that interesting to read them.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you think people can change people's worldviews in general in a way that's hard to measure? They might not have impacted any one person all that much, but just the broader cultural change. Do you think these people are especially influential over the long term?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know. I hope there's some influence there, but very hard to say. Hard to measure.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Much of the vlogosphere, or the legendary parts of it, were started in the 2000s, 2010s, with people like you.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: But before 2010s, I would say. But go on.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes, you, Paul Graham, Scott Alexander. Do you think that people who are starting blogs today are kind of just LARPing the moment you had at the time? Or do you think this is actually a format that can survive the test of time?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think it will survive. We have early bloggers: Samuel Pepys, James Boswell. They've survived, right? It's good material. That's 17th and 18th centuries. So why can't it survive today when the technology makes it easier and more readily preserved? Just the notion that you write and someone reads you seems to me extremely robust.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So many writers like writing on a regular basis, and it has some practical advantages. So I'd be very surprised if that went away. Now, at this moment, you could say Substack is bigger than blogs. It's a bit different, but it's broadly a similar thing, right? What do you see as the differences between a Substack and a blog?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Substack posts tend to be longer. On a lot of blogs, you're very much an editor and not just a content creator. You're sometimes an editor on Substack, but much less so. Something like what Instapundit has done, I don't think there's really a Substack version of that, for better or worse. You don't need one. It's done on blogs. He's mostly been an editor. A lot of MR is just me as editor, or sometimes Alex as editor.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Are you worried that the same format and look of Substack will make people also intellectually less creative?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think Substack encourages posts that are too long, too whiny, too self-reflective, and too obsessed with a relatively small number of recurring topics. So do I worry? But are there enough mechanisms in the whole thing for self-correction? Obviously. There's competition. Readers get sick of stuff that's not great. It cycles through whatever. It'll be fine.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is the reason that we've been seeing a decline in research productivity? Do you think that can be explained by the buildup of scientific bureaucracy? Or is it, if it's been consistent over decades, we just have slowly deteriorating research productivity. That's like the only explanation can be that we've just picked the low hanging fruits.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I think that's a reason, but I don't think it's the most fundamental reason. In this sense, maybe Patrick Collison would see it as more important than I do. I think exhausting the literal low-hanging fruits at the technological level is the main reason. Those you can replenish with new breakthrough general purpose technologies. That takes a long time. I see that as the main reason. The ongoing bureaucratization of science I fully accept and want to reform and want to change, but it's not literally my number one reason for stagnation.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is it just like a sine wave where you'll just have periods of easy grab innovations and then harder to grab? Or is there something particular about this stagnation period?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know what the function looks like. It just seems to me that today we have enough diverse sources of ideas, enough wealth, enough different universities, research labs, whatever, that it ought not to go too badly. There's an awful lot of conformity, but it doesn't seem that absolute or extreme. Something like mRNA worked, right? AI is making a lot of progress. Fusion is being talked about in a serious way. It doesn't seem that grim to me.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What I find interesting is that you're an optimist in the short term, given this uncertainty, but in the long term, given the uncertainty about the future of human civilization, you're a pessimist. Is there like a...
--:-- Tyler Cowen: It's the same view. The more progress advances, the easier it is to destroy things. The chance of an accident can be small. I think it is small, but again, bad things happen. Easier to destroy than create.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Do you have an emotional reaction to the idea that the human story is almost at an end?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know. We've only got 700 years left of this. I don't know what I can do about it. I try actually to do something about it. So I have a reaction, but I'm aware of the extreme fallibility embedded in all such projections. I'm like, let's just wake up this morning and let's do some stuff now. I'm going to do it. I hope there's a payoff under all these different scenarios.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Does state capacity just continue to decline?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know that it's declining.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: It feels like it is, but it's a bit like being in the longest line at the supermarket. You notice it more.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: The U.S. state has done a bunch of things well. If you look at the war against terror, I don't know who or what gets the credit, but compared to what we expected right after 9/11, it's gone okay, right? Operation Warp Speed went amazingly well. Just the local DMV works way better than it used to. So it's a very complex picture of state capacity. It's not flat out in decline, I would say.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: So what is the explanation for why it gets better over time? There's a public choice theory explanation for why it might get worse, but to the extent that certain parts of it have gotten better over time.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: The best explanation I have is so stupid I'm embarrassed to present it.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: What is it?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: It's that you have some people in the system who want to make it better, and they make it better. Not very sophisticated. I don't know some deep way of tracing it to differential incentive structures or just demand.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Are you optimistic about libertarianism in the long term, if state capacity continues to get better?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't think we'll ever have libertarian societies. I think there's quite a good chance we will get more good reforms than bad ones, and capitalism and democracy and broadly classical liberal values will advance. If that's optimistic, I think there's quite a good chance for that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Is there any difference between you and the Fukuyama view of the end of history? That capitalist liberal democracy is the most compelling system?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, he's changed his view a number of times. You can read the original Fukuyama as being quite pessimistic, that there's something about demand for esteem and self-respect that the end of history doesn't satisfy, and so it unravels. Then there's the Fukuyama view that the rest of history is all about how we'll manipulate biology, which seems to me significant. Maybe he overstated it, but I don't dismiss it at all. And then all these other Fukuyama restatements since then make me dizzy. I just ask the simple question: are you long the market or short the market? I'm long the market. I don't know what he is.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Very few people are short. So I hope he's long the market too. It's one of my favorite forcing questions. Are you long the market? Are you short the market? People spew so much bullshit and it's tribalism. And then it's like, "Are you short the market?" and they become morons when you ask them this question. They should just say, "Well, those are my tribalist sympathies. You know, I'm neurotic and overly stressed." What I do is pretty optimistic, of course. But the general fact that people are more neurotic, it seems like Fukuyama isn't right in the sense that the last man that liberal democracy creates is a neurotic mess. I think that's how somebody could characterize American politics at least. So is he right in a way that humans are not satisfied by liberal democracies?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't think people are satisfied by anything in that sense. He's right. I'm not sure it's a special problem for a liberal democracy. Probably less so. There are more other ways to anesthetize yourself or entertain yourself. So there's no form of government or structure of society where people are not just generally a mess. I haven't seen it. Maybe right after you win a war there's some kind of giddiness and desire to build for the future, but it can't last that long.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I'm curious why you continue to read. One of the reasons you say that reading is fast for you is because you know many of the things that are already in books. So why continue doing it if you already know many of the things that are in there?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Well, it's often frustrating, but I do try to read in new areas. I very much prefer traveling to reading as a way of learning things, but I can't always travel. At the margin, I would rather travel more and read less. Absolutely. And for that reason.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Let me ask a meta question. What do you think podcasts are for? What is happening? To anesthetize people?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Oh, interesting. I feel they're learning something to put them to sleep, so they can exercise and not feel like idiots. Occasionally to learn something, just to keep themselves busy, work of some kind.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: This is to say more about the anesthetizing. You want to feel you're imbibing the most important ideas.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Yes. And there are very costly, tough ways to do that, like to actually work on one of those problems as a researcher. But most people can't do that, through no fault of their own. Even if they're academics, maybe they just can't do it. So one of the next best things is to listen to someone who at least pretends that they've done it. It's a substitute. Why not? What are you supposed to do? Watch TV?
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: But is your own podcast a compliment, do you think, to actual intellectual inquiry?
--:-- Tyler Cowen: I don't know. I don't assume that it is. I think of it as a very high-class form of entertainment more than anything, which I like to be clear. I don't feel bad about that.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: I do wonder if the substitute would actually be real engagement or if it would have just been pure entertainment. It probably would be a lesser podcast, is my guess.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Well, on that note, Tyler, this is a lot of fun. I do want to thank you, especially because you were my fourth guest on the podcast. Having you on early was a huge help in terms of growing the podcast.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Happy to be on it again. Thank you for coming by.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Yes. It's my pleasure entirely.
--:-- Tyler Cowen: Great. Awesome.
--:-- Dwarkesh Patel: Hey, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed that episode, I would really, really, really appreciate it if you could share it. This is still a pretty small podcast, so it is a huge help when any one of you shares an episode that you like. Post it on Twitter, send it to friends who you think might like it, put it in your group chats, just let the word go forth. It helps out a ton. Many thanks to my amazing editor, Graham Bessalou, for producing this podcast, and to Mia Ayana for creating the amazing transcripts that accompany each episode, which have helpful links. You can find them at the link in the description below. Remember to subscribe on YouTube and your favorite podcast platforms. Cheers. See you next time. Thank you.
