Tyler Cowen - Why Society Will Collapse & Why Sex is Pessimistic
In this extensive interview, economist Tyler Cowen discusses a wide range of topics with host Spencer Greenberg. He reflects on the challenges of spotting talent, noting that early signals are often weak and that overconfidence plays a role in startup success but less so in other fields. Cowen critiques biographies for their tendency to "storify" lives and argues that reading them can still teach perseverance. He examines the limits of predicting success in fields like novel writing versus startups, and shares anecdotes about evaluating potential grant recipients such as Scott Aaronson. The conversation turns to effective altruism and existential risk, where Cowen acknowledges the importance of these issues but doubts the efficacy of many proposed solutions, favoring broader investments in talent, GDP growth, and science. He expresses a nuanced view of long‑term optimism: short‑term progress is encouraging, yet the more advanced humanity becomes, the easier it is to cause catastrophic damage, leading to a pessimistic outlook on civilization’s ultimate fate. Cowen also explores cultural topics: the role of public intellectuals, the dynamics of focality, the evolution of blogs versus Substack, and the value of continuous reading versus travel. He comments on risk aversion in academia, the modest impact of state capacity, and his belief that liberal democracy and capitalism will likely persist, though libertarian societies are improbable. Finally, he describes podcasts as high‑class entertainment that anesthetizes listeners, while also serving as a platform for intellectual exchange.
Chapters
So the existence of sex is the most pessimistic thing there is. I find that ironic. So I'm not the pessimist, sex is, right? 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. 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 standards, super small population. Feudal governance, lots of violence, rape, whatever. A lot of the IDW people have very clear peaks which now lie in the past, uh, 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. To ask Brian about, like, early and late Kaplan, and which ways are they not consistent? That's the kind of friendly jab.
Okay, interesting.
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? Yeah.
And like, hey, it no longer seems to be true, though it was true from the data Bryan took from. And second, Bryan doesn't think education really teaches you much.
So why is it making people free market? Yes.
Yeah, like it once did, even though it doesn't now. And if it doesn't now, it may teach them bad things, but it's teaching them something.
I have asked him this. So he thinks that it doesn't teach him anything, therefore that wokeism can't be a result of colleges. And then I've asked him, okay, at some point these were ideas in colleges, then they're in the 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.
Yeah. You can put this in the podcast if you want. It's up to you. So I like the pre-podcast talk often better than the podcast.
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.
Happy to be here. Thank you.
Okay, excellent. I want to get to talent in just a second, but I've got a few questions for you first.
Absolutely.
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?
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.
Right. But like, so the experience of reading a history book, you think it's somewhat substitutable for actually traveling to a place?
No, not at all. I think we understand the past very, very poorly. And if you traveled 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.
Oh, interesting. Okay.
So it's like travel versus history, and the historians lose.
Right. 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? Like, what do you think they're probably getting wrong?
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 like, you know, I was just in India for the 6th time. I hardly pretend to understand India, whatever that possibly might mean. But if I think like 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.
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?
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 have parts— 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.
Oh, interesting. So you don't think there's anything special about the intellectual life that tends to make people left-wing? It's a particular to our current moment?
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's left-wing, what's right-wing? Even 17th century England, There are 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.
Interesting. So maybe then what is left, 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. Something insightful I heard from Bernd 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.
Exactly. Or take the French Revolution, their equivalent of nonprofits then versus 1830 Restoration. 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, it seems to be a lot of cases where Conquest's Law is not so economical.
Right. Napoleon is a great example of this, where it's not sure whether— is he the most left-wing figure in history or the most right-wing figure in history?
Or maybe both somehow.
Yes. 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's not hardworking, for me, that seems like more of a moral judgment. So on that spectrum, where would you say talent lies?
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 like 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 the 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.
Okay. 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? Why is that such a common trope?
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, well, you need to have something to prove, and you only feel you need to prove something. You're Napoleon, you're short, you weren't always treated well. Like, that's possible. I don't rule it out. But you look at your Bill Gateses, your Mark Zuckerbergs, 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.
Yes. Is there anything—
The McCallisons, they have great parents. They did well.
It could just be that the examples that stick out in my mind of emotional neglect stick out in my mind particularly because— In this particular line.
Yes.
Exactly.
So I'd really like to see the data. I think it's 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 is a correlate for talent that you wish wasn't, or something like that?
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, but—
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? So at some point, Italy had a Renaissance and then Things that maybe get complacent over time.
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, you know, Hungarian Jews in mathematics, I don't know how much of a thing it still is, but certainly it's nothing close to what it once was.
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. The culture doesn't persist in some sort of, in an extended way.
But 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. India is still pretty poor.
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?
I think what is 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 sort of 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.
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?
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.
Okay. I want to play a game of overrated and underrated with you.
I'm here for that.
But we're going to do it with certain traits or certain kinds of personalities that might come in. When you're interviewing them.
Okay, but it's probably all going to be indeterminate, but go on.
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, mm, what's up with you? You're not really humble, are you?
Oh, so maybe the humility is a way of avoiding confrontation. 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, 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.
What is the difference? Let's say a 15-year-old is kind of arrogant versus 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?
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, right, 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?
Yeah.
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.
And then how arrogant can you be? So there's many 15-year-olds, if they're really into math, they're like, I want to solve P does not equal NP, or I want to build an AGI or something. Is there some level where you're just like, you clearly don't understand what's going on if you think you can do that? Or is it always a plus?
I haven't seen the level yet. Now, if a 15-year-old said to me, in 3 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.
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.
Okay. 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. Hmm. Again, some jobs conformity is great. But I get a little suspicious, at least for what I'm looking for.
Interesting.
But I wouldn't rule them out. For a lot of things, it's a plus, right?
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 trying to be a software engineer.
Yeah, there might be situations where it's so weird, so over the top, so conformist that it's actually total nonconformism. Like, I don't know anyone who's a conformist like you are. Maybe there They're not being a conformist, right? They're just some kind of nut. And then you're interested again.
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.
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 you'll see it with more time, I would just think.
Somebody who uses a lot of nootropics, so they're constantly using caffeine, but maybe on the side, multiple times a week, they're also using Adderall, modafinil, other kinds of nootropics.
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.
You don't drink caffeine, correct?
Zero.
Why?
I don't like it. And it might be bad for you.
Oh, really?
You think so? And people get addicted to it also.
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.
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, the soda, like we know is bad for you. So what's the problem I need to solve? Why do it?
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?
I don't know. I mean, both could be true, right? Definitely positive correlations between that stuff and artistic creativity. Causal, harder to say, but correlates. So you certainly should take the person seriously, but are they the best Starbucks cashier? I don't know.
Yeah. In the book, or I guess another podcast, you've 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 a 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—
Less homework.
Okay.
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 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.
I wanna 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.
Yeah, or Zoom. You could do Zoom too.
No, it'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.
I'm a big believer in the vividness. So Zoom is better than nothing. And a lot of people are at a distance, but many, 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.
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?
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.
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—
I'd like to see more data, but I suspect the best moral instruction is the teachers 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 7 virtues or something seems to me a waste of time and maybe even counterproductive.
Now, the way I read your book about talent, it seems like also a critique of Bryan's book, The Case Against Education.
Of course it is. Bryan describes me as the guy who's always torturing him, and in a sense he's right.
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 have intelligence and other conscientiousness and other traits. But if you can just learn that from a 1,500-word essay and a Zoom call, then maybe the college is not about the signal.
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 an 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, uh, I think Bryan overlooks how much people actually learn when they go to school.
How would you go about measuring, uh, the amount of context that somebody is getting in college? Is there like something you can point to that says, oh, clearly they're getting some context, otherwise they wouldn't be able to do this?
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, you know, this about astronomy and Kepler's laws and opportunity cost. People can't reproduce that 2 or 3 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.
Like, how would you falsify this claim though, that you are getting a lot of context? Is it just something that you had 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?
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.
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.
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.
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's going to be something. Gotta keep track of this guy right away.
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. Brian 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.
Interesting. So if that's the case, then it would have been interesting to meet somebody who is like Brian, but like a 19-year-old.
Yeah, and I did. So I was right.
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-earnest people start applying, you get a whole bunch of bad first selection, and then it becomes hard for you to run your program?
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 it does— 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.
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 you 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?
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.
Then what is the skill in particular that they have, if it's not the particular thing that they're working on?
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 art or music appreciation, but it's not a science, right? 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 just too chaotic of a thing to actually get your grips on?
I think it will always be an art. And if you look at the success rates of VCs, uh, 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, uh, so I think it will mostly remain an art, not a science. So people say, oh, genomics this, genomics that. We'll see. Somehow I don't think that will change this.
So you don't think like getting a polygenic risk score of, I don't know, uh, Drive that's going to be a thing that happens?
Maybe future genomics will be so different from what we have now, maybe, but it's not around the corner.
Yeah, yeah. Maybe the sample size is just so low on somebody like you that how are you even going to collect that data? How are you going to get the correlates of who the super talented people are?
Yeah, and how genomic data interact with each other. You can apply machine learning and so on. It seems quite murky.
If the best people get spotted earlier, and you can tell who is a 10x engineer at your company and who's 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 or going to be wanting to get paid proportionate to their skill?
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, right?
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—
A lot of 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, right? Did it work? And that has made it harder for people to get paid things they don't deserve.
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. Oh, absolutely. Yes.
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.
If talent is partly heritable, then the better you get at spotting talent over time, will the social mobility in society go down?
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.
Hmm. Um, 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?
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.
Let's talk about Emergent Ventures.
Sure.
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? So 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. Right? You see what I'm saying?
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.
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 the 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?
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's basketball history. Past a certain point, it just seems everyone wanted him, you know, 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 you're doing, it's not going to work. So I'm all for that selectively. But yes.
Yes. Why do you think that so many of the people who have led emergent ventures, as you said, interested in effective altruism.
There is like a moment right now for effective altruism where it is the thing. 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.
But you don't think it's persistent? Like, you think it comes and goes?
I think it will come and go, but I think EA will not vanish. Like, Like libertarianism, it will continue for quite a long time.
Is there any movement that has attracted young people and that has been persistent over time, or did they all fade?
Well, Christianity, right? Judaism, Islam. They're pretty persistent.
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?
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.
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's 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, they don't want to put their own capital into it, or maybe that they are too conformist, they need your approval before they go ahead?
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 a 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.
If you, uh, I remember, uh, 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 1,500 people that they had to reject that year, the next 1,500 they had to reject that year, then there would be no difference in the quality of the admits.
I would think Chicago's 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?
No, not at all.
How good is the 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.
I guess that makes it even rougher if you do get rejected because it wasn't like, oh, you weren't 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 were you on the edge of potential, you were just on the other edge of the curve.
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.
How much does the money part of emergent ventures matter? So if you just didn't give them the money?
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.
Right. And so what does the function of returns look like for that? If you like 10x the money or you 1x the money for some of these things? Do you think that you'd see significantly different results, or?
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.
Why are women often better at detecting deceit?
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.
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.
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?
Yeah.
Things that women do more of that help them be insightful.
Right. Why is writing skill so important to you?
Well, one thing is just I'm good at judging it, right? So lacrosse skill, 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 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.
Do you think it's a general fact that writing correlates with just general competence?
I do, but especially the areas that I'm funding, it's strongly true.
Okay, gotcha.
Whether it's true for everything is harder to say.
Can stamina be increased?
Of course. Oh, really?
Okay. Yeah.
It's one of the easier things to increase.
Huh.
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.
Okay. That's interesting. Um, in the—
you know, 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 cite from Robin Hanson about the stamina. I think his point of view was this is just something that's inherent to people.
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.
Have you read Haruki Murakami's book on running?
No, I've been meaning to. I'm not sure how interesting I'll find it. I will someday.
Maybe not that interesting.
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 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.
So, so you might have undervalued it.
Or not even that. Um, you say in the book that, uh, intelligence has convex returns and it matters especially for areas like inventors, right? Then you also say that if you look at some of the most important things in society, something like what, uh, Larry and Sergey did, they're basically inventors, right? So, so many of the most important things in society, intelligence matters more. And not only that, as 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.
Sure.
Awesome. So it seems like you should care about intelligence more given the evidence there, not less.
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.
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.
That's true, but I still 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.
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 in putting your stats on one skill. You'd want to diversify more, right?
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.
So you cite the data that Sweden collects from everybody that enters the military there. And then 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.
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.
Do you think it's just mutational load or like the actual act of—
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.
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. You don't have to look hard.
Are there other areas where I wouldn't expect it to be G-loaded, but it actually is like that?
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 there's 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, right.
There's hardly anyone I'd rather listen to, including on talent, than Charles Barkley. Huh.
That's really interesting.
And he's not that tall. You can't say, oh, he succeeded because he's 7'2". He was maybe top 6'4", and they called him the round mound of rebound. And 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.
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. Yes. Like YouTubers, even sex workers.
So whoever is the top gardener, I expect I would be super impressed by. Exactly right.
Now, all your books are in some way about talent, right?
So they are.
Let me read you the following passage from An Economist Gets Lunch.
Okay.
And I want you to tell me how we can apply this insight to talent.
Okay.
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.
Right. That's countersignaling, 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.
Well, how do we apply this to talent?
Well, with restaurants, you have selection pressure where you're only going to ones that have cleared certain hurdles.
Right.
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.
Right. So if I show up to an Emergent Ventures conference and I meet somebody and they don't seem especially impressive in a first impression, maybe I should think their work is especially impressive.
Yes, absolutely. Yes.
Okay. 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?
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 in different countries will be more like each other over time. Uh, 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 generation 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, uh, 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.
Interesting. What does Altshuler and Allen suggest about finding talent in a globalized world? And like in particular, if it's cheaper to find talent because of the internet, Does that mean that you should be selecting more mediocre candidates?
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.
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?
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. Uh, 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.
What do you think will change in talent spotting as society becomes older?
Society depends what you mean by society. Uh, I think the US, unless it totally screws up on immigration, will always have like a very seriously good flow of young people that we don't ever have to enter the, the aging equilibrium the way Japan probably already has. So I don't know what will change. I think, 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.
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 or?
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.
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.
We've got to say great man or great woman ethos, right? Or other, right? 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. Like, if that keeps you down, eh, I'm not so impressed by you. So I think it's fine. Let the woke reign. People can work around them.
But overall, if you have a culture like Europe's, do you think that has any impact on—
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 net, 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.
My question wasn't about wokeism. I just mean in general, if you have an egalitarian society, I think of Europe as less egalitarian than we are. Oh, really?
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. 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, is too few dimensions of status competition, not enough room for the proverbial village idiot.
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?
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.
Uh-huh.
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.
You think that'll happen to Emergent Ventures eventually, or?
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, 2. Now, 2 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, uh, 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, uh, low costs of exit. Whenever that time comes.
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?
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.
It's like a comedy routine. You got to write a new one each year.
That's right. But when, when your show's on the air, you do give it your best jokes, right?
Sure. Is somebody who's applying to Merchant Ventures, if they read your book, are they any better off or are they perhaps worse off because maybe they get misleading or like partial view into what's required of them?
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.
Right, in the sense that if 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? You know? Yeah.
Right. Are you worried that young people who 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 what they would have been.
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.
Is there something you can do about that or is that just baked in the cake?
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.
To what extent are the principles of finding talent timeless? So if you're looking for, let's say, a general in the French Revolution, how much does the advice change, or are the basic principles the same over time?
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, principles broadly stay the same.
You have a really interesting book about autism and systematizers. You think Napoleon was autistic?
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?
Right. And again, the issue is that the details that stick on my mind from reading the biography are the ones that make him seem autistic, right?
Yes. And there's a tendency in biographies to storify things. And that's dangerous too, right?
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, or I think 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?
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 eras, they might just be like mere millionaires.
What do you mean?
Oh, maybe they ran a car dealership.
Yeah.
And earned $3 million in 1966, which is a pretty good life back then. But it's not like what they have ended up being.
You quote Sam Altman in the book. I thought it 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, is that the result or the cause of being talented?
Maybe it's both, but keep in mind the context for Sam. Those are companies and they're startups, and 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.
Is that not true of other fields? Like if you're looking for an intellectual, right, 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.
I think more people stumble into it, for instance. And then there's more people who know early on they can do it, but not for Sam-like reasons of overconfidence. Just they, they kind of know it because they can, and there are enough early tests. So I still think it's different. And there's more, yeah, stumbling into it by accident.
And which better describes your intellectual journey? Like, were you, were you in some sense a little overconfident in your 20s?
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.
Interesting. I want to backtest some of your methods of finding talent on certain people. Okay. So we just talked about Haruki Murakami, right?
Yeah.
Let's use him as an example. In his 30s, I believe, he was just running a bar.
Who's the person?
Oh, the novelist, Haruki Murakami.
Oh, yeah, yeah, okay.
He was just running a bar.
Right.
So it doesn't have to be him in particular, but just generally, think of like 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.
Yeah.
How, like, what would the conversation look like where you would like identify if this person could be a great novelist or it could be a great anything?
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.
Interesting. Why is that?
There 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? Like 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.
Interesting. And what do you think makes, uh, novelists so hard to predict?
Like, if they can blossom much later, and very often they do, 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. Well, 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.
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 that's like it before. And the time horizon is maybe like 5 to 10 years. I don't know, maybe novel takes 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 like 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, 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, like I'm suggesting, maybe I could learn, but right now I'm totally at sea with that one.
Okay.
Joseph Conrad, like, was I going to get that? Herman Melville? I don't think so.
Hmm. Interesting. Okay. Let's backtest with another person.
Like, hey, Joe, you're from Poland. You're going to write in English? Like, You know, get real.
Scott Aaronson. So, as you know, he's a famous complexity theorist, computer scientist, and he was actually my 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 Aronson if he at that time had applied to Emergent Ventures?
I've never met Scott, but odds are very strong we'd fund him.
Yeah.
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 like, oh, if you ask 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.
Sure. Yeah, I agree. Let's talk about effective altruism and long-termism. You have expressed skepticism to the idea that you can use long-termism 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 of why you're skeptical of that kind of reasoning?
Well, I'd want to express my skepticism a little more clearly. I think existential risk matters much more than almost anyone thinks. And 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, trotting down a pretty familiar list of things that don't all have to be that long-term. 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.
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 is it like just— Do you just differ with them on how you actually go about solving existential risks?
Probably more the latter. I think they're not epistemically modest enough when it comes to existential risk. And they think 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. Yes.
Although it is surprising to the extent that the companies in the US that maybe care more than other entities about alignment are actually first currently, right? OpenAI is first.
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.
Right. I'm curious, just generally, why is the possibility of humanity serving for a very long time not something that is like a strong part of your worldview, given that you're a strong long-termist?
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.
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?
I'm all for things to make nuclear weapons safer, but it's hard to know exactly what you do. 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 long-termism that tells you what to do in Ukraine. Uh, and those people, if anything, tend to be kind of underinvested 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 US foreign policy establishment who think about all this stuff. Until recently, most of them had never heard of EA, maybe even still. It doesn't change the debate much.
I'm sure you've heard these arguments, but it seems with nuclear war, it's hard to imagine how it could kill like every single person. It probably won't.
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 standards, super small population, feudal governance, lots of violence, rape, whatever. And there's no reason to think like, oh, just so you like read a copy of the Constitution in 400 years, we're back on track. That's crazy wrong, I think.
But we did emerge from feudalism, right? So like, if it happened once, isn't that example enough?
We don't know. There's what, 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 it happened once means you always rebuild. I don't think it does.
Right. If it's not just the ideas being laden in the space, what would it take for our descendants to be able to recover industrial civilization?
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.
Right. I mean, I think of you as optimist, at least by temperament. But this seems like one of the most 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.
I wouldn't say never. You know, 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.
What do you mean?
I don't think of myself as a pessimist, but you can call it that.
Wait, can you explain that quote? The fact that sex exists is—
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 like the clearly winning model for at least larger things, right? 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, right?
Let's say I take your argument that economic growth is very important.
Yeah.
Does that imply anything in particular about what somebody should do with their life, or is it basically just an argument about policy?
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.
Right. Does it have to do with the fact that we don't know much about what causes economic growth, or is it just like, even if we knew that there's like, you can never offer like concrete advice about what you could do? To increase economic growth.
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. Right? So we know enough.
Right, right. But not enough to create an 80,000 Hours for progress studies. —what do you think? Or is that just fundamentally impossible?
What do you mean create an 80? You mean an institution? Well, there's Institute for Progress. No, no, no.
But here's a list. Here's the things you should consider doing with your career.
It's not the right way to think about it. What would you say more? 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? Nah, it's a little too EA static maximization for me. If you like focus more on learning about cultures, history, you're not going to like come up with some list as the way to approach that.
Oh, why are culture and history going to—
They show you how complex things are and the people who made very significant contributions, how complex the inputs were into that, or even did very terrible things like Napoleon, like understanding Napoleon, what he came from, ideas he had, super complicated. I don't really get the list version. Oh, here's the list for baby Napoleon. Don't invade Russia, or I don't know, beware Talleyrand or whatever. It just seems to miss the point.
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 most effective, do you think that's just going to teach them that things are more complex than they thought, or would that give them any practical I think both.
Napoleon's a good person to read biographies of. When I was young, like, 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. Like, if you just follow sports careers, That might be enough, but that's kind of like reading a biography, right? YouTube can do it. I don't like fixate on the biography. They seem in a way inefficiently long.
Is it like just having somebody having a blog and you follow along their blog on a weekly basis or a daily basis?
Absolutely. That's reading a biography. I've been blogging almost 20 years and there's, I hope there's some lesson in the constancy of that for people.
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 also how to ask good questions in a podcast. Yes, absolutely. Yes. Like, keep the conversation flow going, get them interested, talk about something that they're very interested in. Don't worry about changing the subject.
Right. Just get them on something where they're involved and excited. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
And so to what extent was that just informed from having a podcast? Oh, quite a bit.
And you can think of the podcasts in a sense as like interviews. They're kind of very judgmental. Like, how worthy are you? Right? Right, right. People are afraid more and more.
Now, you have a quite mellow personality, and 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?
I might be more creative, but I think I would be more wrong.
Interesting. Yeah. 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?
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 7:00 AM 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.
When you interviewed Andrew Sullivan, Tyler Cowen, 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 had 5 years to live, what is the book you would write? What is the argument you would make?
5 years from now, I think I would do more emergent ventures. Interesting. 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. Interesting. Though I will write more books.
So it's your late career that you think the most important thing is institution building and talent spotting?
Yes, at this point. And I've written 16, 17 books, so it's not like I haven't had my say. Sure.
One interesting thing about top performers in many fields is that they have intricate philosophies and worldviews. Peter Thiel, obviously, with the Girardian 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's like plus 4 standard deviations in verbal intelligence, one of the things they'll do other than being very successful is just create intricate worldviews?
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. You need a unique way of looking at the world.
Is that a correlate in the sense that it jolts you out of complacency?
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. Right.
But maybe the actual theory itself is not the edge. It's just like— Correct.
Now, sometimes it's the edge. So this is the famous story of Peter knew René Girard, saw Facebook would be a big thing. It's probably true, but it doesn't have to be the edge, I would say. Yeah.
So one thing I found really interesting in your book, What Price Fame? Was you had this interesting discussion where you cite your former, 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. Like in recent years, we've seen a lot of public intellectuals become a focal point in the culture war or in just general discussions. Right. Right. And so in some sense, this has happened to you as well. Right. 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?
Well, by doing something noteworthy, right? 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. What do you think—
what's the explanation for why they're— why they peaked so early?
Oh, I don't know if early is the word. Like Jordan Peterson was at it for a long time. Sure. 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 could say kind of market-based economics. Yeah. But it's not so radical. Yeah, like, we're still in a capitalistic society. So, like, 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, like, it's just not that obsolete. Sure, maybe it's not peak fashion now, but it's fine to be doing that.
They were overleveraging, they got margin called.
I'm not making a big bet on ivermectin is one way to put it.
Um, uh, Why doesn't tenure make academics less risk-averse?
I've thought about this quite a bit. 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, right? 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? Do you say demand curve slope upwards? Well, that's a 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—
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. And I think we've been remarkably successful at that.
Well, what is being taught that makes them more risk-taking?
Well, first of all, they observe what we all do. Sure. And 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, like, for someone on the Senate Banking Committee, like, we have people who've done that. We'll put them in touch. And so we don't have a class, but there's a very serious, focused effort that anyone with any interest in learning how to do things, take more risk, whatever, can get that here.
And it's free. How malleable is risk aversion?
I think a lot of the students we produce have done unusual things, uh, 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.
You had an interesting post in 2011 where you're talking about which public intellectuals have been the most influential, and 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.
Right. And 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.
Okay, I was just about to ask, is there a reason why you haven't adopted the strategy yourself? Yeah, it's— I don't like—
that's the way in which I am risk-averse. I don't have like the single issue, like for Andrew, gay marriage, like great, he won. That's It's amazing. I'm all for it. But in part he won because it is the thing he cared about most. And I don't have a comparable thing like that. The closest thing like that I have is like, here's my way of thinking, I'm going to show it to you. And I have done that pretty monomaniacally. And I think I've been somewhat successful.
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.
And I think that's true. Yes. Right. Yeah. I think so. Okay. So John Stuart Mill was super interesting and right about many, many things. Like he had some influence, but was there a single thing where he saw through and made it happen? I don't know. Yeah. Whereas Richard Cobden, not like a deep economic thinker, but for free trade against the Corn Laws, He and John Bright, they made that happen. I would say they were correct, but it's not that interesting to read them.
But do you think people just change people's worldviews in general? They might not have impacted any one person all that much. They're not going to become evangelists because they read this person, but just the broader cultural change in a way that's hard to measure. You think these people are especially influential over the long term?
I don't know. I hope there's some influence there, but very hard to say, hard to measure.
Much of the blogosphere, or like the legendary parts of it, were started in the 2000s, 2010s with people like you, Paul Graham.
Before 2010s, I would say, but go on.
Yes. You, Paul Graham, Scott Alexander. Right. You think the people who are starting blogs today, are they kind of just LARPing the new moment you had at the time, or you think that this is actually a format that can survive the test of time?
I think it will survive. So 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. Right.
But like you write on the internet on a regular basis.
Why not? Yes. 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?
Well, what, what do you see as the differences between a Substack and a blog?
Substack posts tend to be longer. Mm-hmm. Uh, you're a lot of blogs, you're very much editor and not just content creator. Mm-hmm. You're sometimes editor. In 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 editor. A lot of MR is just me as editor, or sometimes Alex as editor.
Are you worried that the same format and look of Substack will make people also intellectually, uh, less creative?
I think Substack encourages posts that are too long and too whiny and too self-reflective. Yeah. And too obsessed with a relatively small number of recurring topics. Yeah. 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.
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, I mean, if it's been consistent decades, we just have slowly deteriorating research productivity, that the only explanation can be that we just pick the low-hanging fruits.
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, and those you can replenish with new breakthrough general-purpose technologies. But that takes a long time. But I see that as the main reason and 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. Right.
And is it just like a sine wave that over, like, you'll just have periods of easy grab innovations and then harder to grab? Or is there something particular about this stagnation period?
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. Like, there's an awful lot of conformity, but it doesn't seem that absolute or extreme. And 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.
What I find interesting is that you are 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—
It's the same view. So the more progress, quote unquote progress, advances, the easier it is to destroy things. And the chance of an accident can be small. I think it is small, but again, bad things happen. Easier to destroy than create.
Right. Do you have an emotional reaction to the idea that the human story is almost certain to end? I don't know. We've only got 700 years of this left.
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. And I'm like, let's just wake up this morning and let's do some stuff now. And I'm going to do it. And I hope there's a payoff under all these different scenarios. Yeah.
Does state capacity just continue to decline? Is there some way— I don't know that it's declining.
Okay. It feels like it is, but it's a bit like being in the longest line at the supermarket. Like, you notice it more. And US 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.
So what is the explanation for why it gets better over time? Like, there's a public source theory explanation for why it might get worse, but to the extent that certain parts of it have gotten better over time.
The best explanation I have is so stupid I'm embarrassed to present it. What is it? It's that you have some people in the system who want to make it better and they make it better. Like, not very sophisticated. I don't know some deep way of tracing it to differential incentive structures or just like demand. Okay.
And then so are you optimistic about libertarianism in the long term if like state capacity continues to get better?
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.
Is there any difference between you and the Fukuyama view of the end of history, that the capitalist liberal democracy is— there's nothing more compelling than that?
Well, he's changed his view a number of times. So 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 of 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 it's like all these other Fukuyama restatements since then, it makes 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. 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— am I allowed to curse on your podcast? Yes. People spew so much bullshit and it's tribalism. And then it's like, are you short the market? And oh, well, I haven't bought anything lately. It's like they become morons when you ask them this question. They should just say, well, those are my tribalist sympathies. 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 is right in the sense that the last man that liberal democracy creates, he's like a neurotic mess. I think that's how somebody could characterize American politics, at least. Right. So is he right in a way that humans are not satisfied by liberal democracies?
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 no structure of society where people are not just generally a mess?
I haven't seen it. Yeah. Like, when would that have been? 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, right?
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 then why continue doing it if you already know many of the things that are in there?
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. But at the margin, I would rather travel more and read less. Absolutely.
And for that reason. Okay. Let me ask a meta question. What do you think podcasts are for? Like, what is happening?
To anesthetize people. Oh, interesting. To make them feel they're learning something. To put them to sleep so they can exercise and not feel like idiots. Occasionally to learn something. It's to keep themselves busy work of some kind.
Say more about the anesthetizing.
You want to feel you're imbibing the most important ideas. Yes. Right? And there's 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. Like maybe they just can't do it. So like one of the next best things is to listen to someone who at least pretends that they've done it. And it's like, okay, it's a substitute. Why not? What are you supposed to do? Watch TV? Okay.
But is your own podcast a complement, do you think, to actual intellectual inquiry? Or no, it's— I don't assume that it is.
I think of it as a very high-class form of entertainment more than anything. Right. Which I like, to be clear. I don't feel bad about that.
Yeah. But I do wonder if the substitute would actually be real engagement or if it would've just been just pure entertainment.
It'd probably be a lesser podcast, is my guess. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, on that note, Tyler, this is a lot of fun. And I do want to thank you especially for— you were my fourth guest on the podcast and having you on early was just a huge help in terms of, you know, growing the podcast. So happy to be on it again.
Extremely grateful. Yeah. Thank you for coming by. Yes, it's my pleasure entirely.
Great. Awesome. 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 Besaloue, for producing this podcast. And to Mia Ayana for creating the amazing transcripts that accompany each episode, which have helpful links, and 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.
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