Average Is Over: Transcend Stagnation & Empower Economic Growth with Tyler Cowen

I would like to see the best of online education put on a par with face-to-face education. It is not a substitute, but should you be able to easily do 20% of your degree online and have it be fully accredited? Absolutely. At the K-12 level, it should be easier to do homeschooling, charter schools, micro schools, all kinds of innovations. They are starting now in part because of the pandemic, right? A lot of options were taken away. We had to let people experiment. So I'm hopeful for that future, but it still isn't here yet. And the product remains very costly and again, uncertain in quality.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before?

What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting?

Nothing is ever the same again.

Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the mind of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Stephen Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hi, Dr. Kahn. Welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio.

Happy to be here. Thank you.

Yeah, really, really great to have you here. I've been a huge fan since I first came across your work in 2019. You completely shifted my paradigm on a lot of different topics, so I've been really, really excited for this interview. And I'm going to start by reading your bio out so the audience have a sense of the, the work that you've done. So you are a hopefully I'm getting this pronunciation right, Albert Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University. Got it right. Good. And you serve as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center.

We say Mercatus, but Mercatus is ideally correct. Yes.

And then you're killing me, actually. There's another few tricky ones in this bio. Your colleague Alex Tabarak.

That's an Iranian name, though he's Canadian.

Okay, okay. So along with Alex, you are the co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution and co-founder of the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University. This isn't in your bio, but maybe you could quickly share how long you've been writing Marginal Revolution for, because I think that's a fascinating stat.

Oh, it's, I think, 19 years at this point. I've lost track, but it's closing on 20.

Yeah, it's amazing. And pretty much straight every day, I believe. Is that right?

Every single day. Not almost, but without exception.

Yeah. Okay. So we're going to come back to that for sure. That's— it blows my mind, that level of consistency. And so you are also the author of several bestselling books. You're widely published in academic journals and popular media. And your latest book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, was a really great book. And we'll dive into that a little bit as well. You are also the host of Conversations with Tyler, a popular podcast series featuring some of today's most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between. And you graduated from George Mason University with a BS in economics and received a PhD in economics from Harvard. And to start us off, Tyler, I want to read a quick quote to you from your book, Average Is Over, the subtitle of which is Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation. And the quote is, the measure of self-motivation in a young person will become the best way to predict upward mobility. And I would love to hear you dissect the thinking behind that quote. And if you could also speak to the impact of self-motivation in the younger population in general beyond upward mobility with respect to overall progress, that would be great as well.

Well, in today's world, there's more opportunity than ever before. There's more GDP, there are more ventures, there are more job openings. That's all wonderful, but at the same time, one has to notice that not everyone is doing extremely well. People are unhappy with the economy. They often feel their own situations are precarious. So I titled that 2013 book "Average Is Over" to suggest we were entering a world where people either do really well or don't do so well at all. It depends what part of the world you were born in. So if you're born in North Korea, the argument doesn't apply to you. But for people that grow up with some semblance of an education, there really is incredible opportunity. And that's now more countries in the world, more regions than ever before.

You wrote an article that I highly recommend everyone check out with Patrick Collison, who's also Irish— I'm Irish— who's the founder, one of the co-founders of Stripe. And the title of that article was We Need a New Science of Progress. Humanity needs to get better at knowing how to get better. And I would love to hear a breakdown on, on why you believe we need a new science of progress and what that could look like.

I think we've had a fairly stagnant last 40 years in some ways, not in the tech sector, but the economy as a whole. You look at healthcare, education, housing, they're way more expensive than before. They're a bit better, but they're not awesomely better the way, say, your computer or iPhone has become awesomely better. So I think we need new attitudes. We need more optimism. We need more building. We need more progress. In the academy, we need more people who are gung-ho about studying economic growth and progress and being forward-looking and wanting to do things. So it's a whole cultural shift I'm calling for. The kinds of attitudes that, say, helped America put a man on the moon, I think require a renaissance, higher status for science, Something like nuclear power, which would be highly useful in making our energy supplies greener. Well, Germany's just been getting rid of theirs. That was crazy, right? We need a pro, we can do this attitude, pro-progress. Where in Ireland are you from, by the way?

I'm from Dublin, but well, I'm from both Dublin and County Mayo. Are you really from Dublin?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, not really, actually. Yeah, I'm from the West Coast. So I grew up in a county called Mayo, and then I went to boarding school in Dublin. I went to college in Trinity College in Dublin as well.

Wonderful. That sounds amazing. I was just in Southern Ireland 2 months ago.

Oh, really? Which part?

Cork and Limerick. I've never seen them. I wanted to go. My next trip will be to the west of Ireland.

Yeah, come visit. I'll get my parents to make you a cup of tea or something. If you're in Mayo, you can drop in. So I've heard Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz talk about those 3 sectors before of healthcare, housing, and education. The way Ben Horowitz described it is that, look, you go and you look at flat-screen televisions, and if you graph out the price of a television over the last 40 years, it plummets and the quality of the product has exponentially improved. You look at education, you look at housing, you look at healthcare, the exact inverse is the case, both in terms of cost and arguably quality as well. In certain cases at least. What is it about those 3 buckets that have resulted in such stagnation, do you think?

Well, sometimes education is just hard to do because not everyone is a willing partner. But you look at healthcare, education, and housing together, they have this common feature: supply is restricted and demand is subsidized. And using basic economics, that is a recipe for higher prices and very often uneven quality. And that's what we see in those sectors. I mean, you mentioned Ireland. It's so hard to build in Ireland. It's become land of NIMBY. But so much of America is becoming land of NIMBY. So home costs, just the cost of buying a home to send your kid to a better than average school, it's much higher today than in the 1980s. So that's a major social failure. It's a big reason why so many Americans and some Irish people are upset.

NIMBY, by the way, stands for Not in My Backyard, I believe.

Yes, it's very hard to build important new structures in San Francisco, New York, many parts of Ireland. The price of rent can be astronomical. It cuts into middle-class living standards. It makes it harder to move into cities as an engine of opportunity. It results in greater, stronger class divisions. It's one of our worst policies.

So I love that breakdown. Supply is restricted, demand is subsidized. So to tackle that is one route I'm assuming that arguably could apply to all three of those categories is to unblock supply, which seems to be happening in education, not necessarily the kind of education that results in the prestige and reputation transfer that organizations when recruiting still look for, but at least in terms of just knowledge acquisition and skill acquisition, irrespective of having a specific diploma or certification, it seems to be happening, uh, that supply is becoming unrestricted there slowly, but a bit, yes. How do you, you know, what is it, what is the solution to, um, unrestricting supply or, uh, reducing the degree to which demand is subsidized?

Well, you need to start at every level. I would sooner unplug supply than get rid of demand subsidies, at least for now. It's not fair to take away people's subsidies when it costs so much. But let's take the very top schools: Harvard, Princeton. They barely take in more people than they did in the 1960s, '70s, and yet the world has so many more eligible people to go there. So I would like to see those schools expand their slots by 2x, 3x, 5x, whatever it takes. I would like to see the best of online education put on a par with face-to-face education. It is not a substitute, but should you be able to easily do 20% of your degree online and have it be fully accredited? Absolutely. At the K-12 level, it should be easier to do homeschooling, charter schools, micro schools, all kinds of innovations. They are starting now in part because of the pandemic, right? A lot of options were taken away. We had to let people experiment. So I'm hopeful for that future, but it still isn't here yet, and the product remains very costly and again uncertain in quality.

Yeah, it seems like reducing the bottleneck on education would likely help to solve the healthcare piece of the equation. Housing is trickier because you've got constraints at the level of physics, but I'm not sure about the extent to which those constraints are real. I read an article recently talking about a city in Japan versus New York, and it was emphasizing that the land constraints were the same in both of those cities, but the house of pricing, the price of housing, excuse me, in the Japanese city had slightly declined whilst in New York it had drastically increased over the last 50 years because of innovation in the buildings and freedom to innovate within this Japanese city. So I'm curious what the solve that you see is for housing. Is it building up? Is it, yeah, what does that look like?

Well, I think the market mostly should determine that. But if you look at Washington, DC, or for that matter, Dublin, They are not super tall cities. There's plenty of room to build up. I think it's fine to say we'll protect the historic core, say in the case of Dublin, but there's plenty of place to put new buildings. It's just hard to get them built for reasons of law. So, you know, when in doubt, if you want the price of something to come down, say food, you increase its supply. The same is true for buildings and rent. There is, in fact, in America, plenty of space. The Southeast in general has allowed a lot of building. It's a cheaper place to live. Texas, for the most part, allows a lot of building. It's a cheaper place to live. California, Washington, D.C., in this regard, they should be more like Texas.

So I was at an event in Miami that Elon Musk was looking at, and he was describing in detail what it was like to build the Gigafactory in Texas.

Yes.

And he got it done. He got the thing built. From start to finish, the guts of it at least, within 18 months. And it had been completed a number of months before he was giving this talk. And he was emphasizing that if he had tried to do it in the Bay Area, he still wouldn't have finished the first round of permits.

Correct.

Yet it's completely done in Texas. So what is it about the states that are making themselves accommodating to builders like Elon versus states like California that aren't? What are some of the key variables that either make a state conducive to building and creation versus not?

California is very complacent. People have their homes, say, in Marin County. They feel everything is perfect. They don't want anyone else stepping on their lawn. They don't want too many immigrants living near them. They don't want too many tall buildings that might block their view in a particular direction. But the end result is stasis and lack of opportunity. Texas has a more can-do attitude, not in every area, but certainly in this area, and a sense that they're the up-and-coming parvenu and they want the good new jobs. Think how many high-paying jobs that Elon Musk factory is creating. It's remarkable. Texas feels it needs those jobs. That's great. I worry Texas will end up becoming too much like California. And Californians are moving there. I hope they don't bring their bad ideas with them.

I think they do. I personally know so many Californians who moved to Texas but then vote exactly like they voted in California, which I find very ironic. I also think there's potentially some hypocrisy within NIMBYism in California because aren't a lot of the residents within Northern California, like Marin, very much so, you know, self-identified progressives and liberals? It seems to me that there potentially is some hypocrisy between holding those ideals or beliefs and then also having, when the rubber meets the road, the prioritization of the NIMBYism, the not in my backyard.

I consider myself the true progressive. I don't think they're actually progressives anymore. It's just a label they've picked up. They're anti-progress on many issues.

That's interesting. I would love to hear you break down what you see progressives— again, using progressive in the most conventional current sense of the word— where you think progressives are truly progressive and where they are potentially regressive, or at least not progressive.

They're a diverse group with many different views. Right. But I see a significant subset that is not a big advocate of economic growth. Not a big advocate of cities, suburbs actually changing and developing, wanting to freeze certain ways of life, making regulations tougher, making it harder to move to a new world of green energy. In spite of all the rhetoric, a lot of them are anti-nuclear. The Pacific Northwest, they're on the verge of closing down a bunch of hydroelectric dams, which will not all be replaced with solar energy. Is that progressive? In my book, it's not. So I don't mean to damn them all, but I think too many anti-progressive elements of thought have crept into the progressive movement.

Let's just touch for a moment on nuclear and then we'll come back up to the broader state of affairs in a moment. I would love if you could break down for folks why— I'm assuming at least that you're pro-nuclear because I think a lot of there's a consensus, it seems to be very anti-nuclear within environmental groups, even though based on the numbers, at least that I've seen, nuclear is one of the cleanest possible forms of energy.

France and Sweden have had long experience with it. They've done it safely. I fully agree we shouldn't put it into earthquake-prone areas. That's a significant qualifier. But climate change is one of the major worries of the world. It is an emergency. And in times of emergency, you need to be decisive. And look at Angela Merkel's Germany. They turned away from nuclear power. First, they start buying Russian gas, which supports a tyrant. How good is that? It funds the war in Ukraine. And now Putin is turning off the taps and they're screwed. They're going to try to burn more coal, but basically they're in for a cold winter and they won't turn nuclear back on. It is literally crazy. So the US has had a healthier policy, but we too have moved away from nuclear. You know, gas is certainly better than coal, but it still is somewhat dirty in terms of carbon emissions. So I'm all for solar and wind power. Another issue where I worry about the NIMBYs— I read it takes on average 7 years to get permits to do a wind farm for totally green energy. Neighbors don't like how it looks. It can kill some number of birds. I understand that, but if you take climate change seriously, I think we need to go full steam ahead. I want to see more wind farms. That to me is being the true progressive.

Yeah, Michael Shellenberger, I'm not sure if you're familiar with him, wrote a really interesting book on this topic called Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All. And he's very much so an environmentalist, but he is a little bit less, a little bit more unorthodox in his thinking than a lot of the common environmentalist movement. So, Toto, one thing I wanted to ask you is about your overall sentiment for the US over the next century or so. I just finished reading two books, one by someone who I believe is a friend of yours, Balaji Srinivasan. He wrote The Network State recently, just came out. And then someone who you, I'm assuming, are also familiar with, Ray Dalio, wrote a book called New World Order. Both of those books in one way or another point to the decline of the US and are at least with respect to the US, I think fairly pessimistic. And I'm curious if you share that sentiment and what your sense is for where the US is headed over the next few hundred years?

A few hundred years is a little hard to say. Even 100 years is hard to say. But for the foreseeable future, I'm very bullish on the entire Anglosphere, the US, Canada, also Ireland, Southern England, Australia, New Zealand. I think the English language is worth more and more. For all our problems, we have relatively functional forms of government with some accountability. And you look at China, people were praising it to the skies like Ray Dalio, and now they're stuck in this terrible zero-COVID policy headed toward a recession or depression, can't fix their falling birth rate, put a million people in concentration camps, arguably wish to invade and take over Taiwan, and they're still locking up their, you know, significant parts of their citizenry. What kind of system is that? So autocracy often looks good for a while. But information flows to the leaders get cut off, or you get a bad leader, and then they start making terrible major correlated mistakes. And that's what we're seeing with China. I'm not bullish on China at all.

That's really interesting. Yeah, I read recently that at its continued birth rate, China will have a population of 600 million by 2100, which was, was mind-blowing.

I would way rather live in Limerick than in Shanghai. That's one way to put it.

That definitely drives the point home for anyone who knows Limerick. What else is it that makes you bullish about the West, first of all? And then what changes, as per the argument that yourself and Patrick make within the Atlantic article, what changes would make you even more bullish on the West?

I'm a big believer in democracy. I fully understand on any given day it looks and sounds very ugly and you make a lot of mistakes, but its error correction properties over time, I think, are unparalleled. And if you look at US, Canada, Ireland, UK, Australia, New Zealand, those countries are very solidly democracies, and I think will be so for a long time. They are also mostly capitalistic. Now, I don't believe in unrestrained capitalism. But capitalism and big business and prosperity and growth and just doing things and entrepreneurship and startups are pretty strong in those parts of the world. And those parts of the world also, with some exceptions, but they don't have too many national security problems. That is, they're not next door to major enemies. Australia-China is a little tricky, but they're not Ukraine, they're not Belarus, they're not Poland. They're pretty secure, most of all US and Canada. And I think that will count for more in the near future.

Tyler, if you were— and I know this goes against your, your like of democracy, but let's just imagine as a thought experiment you were the unrestricted ruler of the US— what would be 3 initiatives or changes that you would institute to maximally accelerate progress?

I would have much more immigration into the United States. Both high-skilled and low-skilled. As a general rule, I would just have us treat our foreigners better when they show up at the border, even if they're tourists. I would radically reform science policy to make ours much more a government of science and raise the status of science and bring better management and more risk-taking into science. I would have more YIMBY rather than NIMBY, and in general, I would just try to make the regulatory state simpler, more transparent. I would say on climate, have tougher regulations, but simpler ones. So we need to do something, but regulations are so complicated. You start a business, you can't even tell whether or not you're breaking the law. And that to me suggests something has gone wrong.

Hmm. Simplification.

Simplification.

The tax code as well, I'm assuming.

Absolutely. More transparency. I think we have too many layers of government that have a veto. Over different things that happen. Too many layers of environmental review. It costs far too much to build a mile of subway track in New York City. Just so many veto points accumulate and they don't go away. So we need to reverse that. It's a hard thing to do as one person being— I guess you had me as dictator, president, whatever, but I would at least push in that direction.

Hmm. Are there any changes to the tax code specifically that you've thought a lot about or fantasized about that would really positively impact growth? Do you think?

Well, I think we did a good thing in cutting our corporate income tax rate. I worry that capital gains are not indexed for inflation. That matters more now that the rate of inflation is higher. In general, I would be fairly lenient on the taxation of capital income and encourage risk-taking. We have a lot of backdoor vehicles of having people save tax-free. Like, all things considered, it's better than nothing, but it's so complicated, so non-transparent, We ought to just make all that simpler and have more open, obvious, non-tricky ways of helping people save tax-free. I would consider personal savings accounts for some portion of medical expenditures. We had that briefly. Obama basically did away with it. It can't run your whole healthcare system, but at the margin, I think it's useful. Get people spending more of their own money rather than relying on third-party payment.

Hmm. One of the big arguments that I've heard around government spending is that the focus is on the spending and not on the value or the return that is generated from the spending, and that there is just enormous, enormous amounts of, of low-hanging fruit for increasing returns on government spending. So I'm curious if there's any changes with respect to visibility or accountability or approach that you would love to see in terms of government spending?

Well, as a general rule, each year we're spending more and more on the elderly. I would prefer that we skew our spending more toward younger people. So you can always argue how much should the government spend, but when you're spending more and more and more on the old, I think that's not healthy and we're neglecting our young and they're the seed capital for America's greatness in the decades to come.

So to double down for a moment then on the young, one of the big things that we do when we're training people to increase their access to flow state and improve their performance overall is to start to converge on a purpose that they can anchor toward and start to allocate their resources toward. And if you were let's say 20, 24, something like that, and you were wanting to find an avenue to focus on for 10, 20, 30 years to develop deep expertise on that is going to have as large of an impact as possible on as many as possible, what are some of the big avenues for impact that you, that you see and that you would recommend to a young person like that?

Well, obviously there's STEM, but everyone already knows that. I'm still a fan of the humanities. I think they help us understand our world, find ourselves, and bond better with other people. So I worry the humanities are falling somewhat into a state, a state of disrepair and neglect. I worry that rates of mental illness seem to be rising for younger Americans. I don't think there's any simple fix for that, but that obviously keeps people out of a beneficial flow state. And that to me is one of our major problems, just the mental state of America. To me seems too neurotic, too negative, too narcissistic, and fairly destructive at the moment. I don't think I, as dictator, or anyone as dictator, could fix that, but it is a major problem in my view.

Yeah, that's a great way to put it, the mental state of America. What are the undercurrents, do you think, that are most giving rise to the mental state that is present currently that you see as dysfunctional? And what do you think we could do to turn those around?

I feel I don't understand it very well. Clearly, some of it is we've actually had some very bad events. One of those would be the pandemic, but not the only one. But it seems to run deeper than that because it's even a lot of people who are pretty successful in life. And they'll say, like, oh, I've been going to my therapist for 10 years. I'm still going. I'm not that happy. And meanwhile, they come from like a top 20 school and they have a fair amount of money. Maybe they have an attractive partner or spouse. It's not just a problem of, say, poverty or obvious stress. There's something about the social fiber that to me is a kind of social contagion that has made many of us more neurotic. And I would readily admit I don't understand very well how that came about.

Pardon the interruption. Thanks for tuning in to Flow Research Collective Radio. If you're listening to this, here's a bold bet I'm willing to make about you. My guess is, even though you're a high performer, you're still only performing at about half of your capacity. Maybe even 10%. Now even if I'm wrong, assuming that you're performing at less than your full potential opens up the possibility for you to improve. And that's good news. When you've already outperformed most of your peers by a long shot, you've got a skill stack that people envy, it's why you earn what you earn, and yet you're just warming up. You know those days when you knock out more more in your morning than most do in an entire day? Well, what if you could perform at that level every day, reliably, consistently? What would that unlock for you? Now, here at the Flow Research Collective, we study the human nervous system when it's functioning at its absolute best. After training thousands of high performers, from Navy SEALs to Fortune 100 executives, here's what we've found: you're evolutionary hardwired to perform at your best. All it takes is pressing the right mental buttons and pulling the right biological levers, so to speak. It's about getting your neurobiology to work for you instead of against you. Now, if you want to make operating at a 10 out of 10 level as natural as breathing, just go to getmoreflow.com. I'll show you how to reliably trigger a flow state where you feel limitless and you do your very best work. This won't require any biohacking or nootropics or gadgets or caffeine guzzling. This higher gear is endogenous, which means it's a state that your brain produces on its own. No external stimulus is required. Just go to getmoreflow.com to learn how to get your biology working for you instead of against you so you can make peak performance second nature. All the best.

There's a quote that you may have come across from a veteran which goes along the lines of tough times create strong men or women. Strong men create easy times. Easy times create weak men and weak men create tough times, and that is sometimes articulated as a way of describing the trajectory of an empire's growth and eventual decline. I'm curious if you see that potentially being a factor in the mental state of America, that, uh, you know, easy times are potentially creating some of the mental turmoil that people are dealing with.

That is plausibly true. I don't know how to prove it. I'm struck by the fact when you measure, say, depression, mental depression in India, which is a much worse country to live in, their rates of depression are much lower than America's. Now, a lot of that might be a measurement issue. Maybe Indians don't report themselves as depressed, don't have money to see a therapist. But I don't feel that's all of it. It's something about the level of expectations. We expect too much. We seek happiness too directly. We're not sufficiently connected to communities. There's been a decline in organized religion. All that coming together does seem to have made us more neurotic and less in this flow state.

So touching on flow state a little bit, and I want to hear your personal experience with it. So having written Marginal Revolution every day for 19 years, you said?

Yes, and a fraction.

Yeah, which is mind-blowing. Um, I'd love to know what the internet even looked like at that point when you, when you got going. Um, do you, do you find yourself to be in a flow state when you sit down to write? What has, you know, your writing process looked like, and what are the variables that you would credit for the consistency and longevity of that, that writing practice?

I write every day. For me, it is a great joy. It is very much a flow state. I try to keep a backlog of 2 or 3 posts. So if I don't feel like writing, if writing for me is not going to be flow, that I have something I can fall back upon and put up. And that keeps writing for me consistently to be a form of flow that I look forward to and cultivate and just make a central part of my life. And that, that has worked for me.

I'm curious, Tyler, if you could talk a little bit about what your, what your average day looks like in terms of work, uh, in terms of the degree to which, you know, you are writing versus conversing with others versus consuming information through reading? What's the average day like for you these days?

I wake up at 7, I'm at work fairly quickly, I go through my feeds and email first thing, which everyone tells you not to do, but it's gone fine for me. Typically I'm writing 9 through 12 on something a Bloomberg column, a book, Marginal Revolution. Lunch at 12. Afternoon can be anything: meetings, reading, more writing, travel, whatever. I never know what might come in an afternoon. Exercise every day when I can. That's most of the time. Obviously, dinner. I'm married, have a nice home life, and just keep on reading and writing until it's, you know, 11 PM or 11:15. Then it's time for bed. That's my life.

Nice. How many hours?

I travel a lot, so at least a third of the time I'm on the road. Those days are a bit different because travel is its own thing. You can't always control when you go, but it's still a modified version of that schedule.

What is it that puts you on the road? Is it speaking? Is it—

Speaking, but ultimately curiosity, because I could say no to the speaking. I want to see other places. Just like 2 months ago, I wanted to see Cork and Limerick. I had never been. And it's like, if I die and I've never seen them, that to me feels like a policy failure. And travel also a form of flow. You're like, you're walking around, it's exciting. So stimulating, new things all the time. You know, mostly safe enough environments. My wife and I just did a trip to Colombia. And then next week, I'm going to India for some events.

Amazing. So a lot of it is travel for the sake of personal curiosity tied in with excuses to go to certain places for speaking and things like that.

Correct. But then when I'm traveling, I still have plenty of work I need to do and I do it. So I'm not just kind of out there with the camera for 9 hours during a day and sipping tea by the Eiffel Tower or something. Like, I consider my time at home as leisure and my travel time as my real work.

Yeah, that makes, that makes total sense. When it comes to reading, which is something that I think people struggle with tremendously as a habit and a behavior, how many hours a day would you say you tend to read?

I don't know, 6 or 7, really quite a few, maybe more, like all the hours I can. So there's stuff I have to do— teach, write my columns, write my blog posts, eat lunch, exercise. But all the rest is reading, reading, reading, reading. And I read very fast. So there's no end to that.

That's, yeah, that's amazing. And do you find that your retention is strong? And is there anything that you think has improved or changed your retention of what you read over time?

Well, I think the more you read, the more you retain because the more context you have. And it's context that makes things memorable and puts them into some kind of framework where you can handle them or apply them to settings. So I think it's increasing returns to scale to be reading.

That makes total sense. You build a latticework of mental models and things start to hang on to those.

Correct.

Was there, was there a point in your own personal intellectual journey and your own reading where you started to find a bit of an exponential upswing in terms of your ability to retain because linkage of ideas increased?

I think it's been my whole life. So I was a very early reader, very early, and always loved to read as a kid, teenager. And I feel I've been on that exponential curve the whole time. And now that I'm 60, that's a lot of years to have been on that curve. That's sort of my great comparative advantage. Is the number of quality years I've spent on that exponential upward moving curve.

Within that long journey and that exponential curve of knowledge acquisition, are there any things that immediately come to mind that you used to have a strong conviction about that you now feel very differently about?

Well, I think I've changed my mind about most things. So if you name a topic, I could maybe tell you how I've changed my mind on it.

Yeah, I'd be curious to know how you changed your mind on technological progress and then the progress studies topic in general over time.

In the 1990s, I just thought tech progress was a smooth, easy thing, and it would just continue, and for America it would be great. But then we get to, say, the first 5 or 6 years of the new millennium. And it seemed to me something had started to go wrong. Like living standards weren't going up very much. The internet was cool and fun and great for people like me, but a lot of people's lives weren't being improved that much by it. It was like a better form of TV, but not actually a game changer, though we all said it was. And we heard even as early as the '90s, well, genomics is going to come. We're going to sequence the genome, do all these amazing things. Years passed, nothing happened. So the science advanced, but in terms of what's in this for me, I think in America we saw a lot of stagnation. So I became considerably more pessimistic, and I thought we were stuck in a rut. And I kept that view, I mean, pretty much until 2020, 2021. And then I saw that we were innovating with the mRNA vaccines, which were, in my opinion, a major breakthrough. Have saved millions of lives around the world. So just like putting a man on the moon, we finally did this, this major thing that worked. It was very quick, and we pulled it off. It's one of the greatest things. It's not only an American innovation, of course, one of the greatest things the West has done ever. And that's made me more optimistic. I think in the biomedical sciences, we're seeing this incredible wave of follow-up innovation. Not just other mRNA vaccines, but fighting sickle cell anemia, CRISPR, fighting malaria. It seems to me we're on the edge of this new golden age. I wouldn't say it's a change in my mind, but it wasn't the case 5 years ago, and now I see that it appears to be the case.

Wow. And is it the fact that the accomplishment of the vaccine creation showed you that there is all this latent potential that is in the system that can be unlocked, or is it an actual shift in collective behavior that has occurred since COVID In other words, is it more a change or a revealing? Yeah.

And even before COVID that so many scientists, basically all scientists, had access to world-class computation, I think is a major breakthrough. Was not true until recently. And it will lead, in my opinion, to major advances in virtually all areas of the biosciences in matters that may or may not benefit me, but you and children— world will be very different. And a lot of areas I still don't see a lot of progress, like the NIMBY thing. But when it comes to the biomedical sciences, applying AI to them, neural nets, a lot of things are going on. I'm very bullish.

With respect to things like housing, education, healthcare, again, just to come back to those topics for a moment, I struggle to imagine that in 2050 or 2080, we're still— I live in Venice Beach in California. I struggle to imagine that prices are going to still be going up for these kind of 1960s mold-riddled small houses that are still here. Maybe that will be the case and it'll be even worse, but I I hope and imagine there'll be a fundamental shift within the nature of housing, but it is also tough to see how that will come about given how entrenched the current structures are. So I'm curious what you see unfolding within American cities on the housing topic specifically, and then potentially also on the other two.

Well, Venice in particular, it strikes me as very nimby, one of the very best places in the world to live. You would know better than I, And I think it will be crazy expensive more or less forever. We will solve that problem by striking out to new other cities. So now Nashville is amazing. It used to be kind of a dump. Now it's wonderful. So a place like Chattanooga might be next, and we'll just rotate around the country and find new places like the next Austin. Austin itself is likely to be ruined, but there'll be another Austin after Austin. So I'm not pessimistic overall. But if you're asking me about Venice Beach, I think what you see is what you get and it ain't going to change.

Wow. Yeah, that's interesting. Andrew Yang wrote a book called Smart People Should Build Things, which I like a lot as a title. And to mention Elon again, I've heard him talk about the fact that he sees it as a shame that more intelligent people don't go into direct creation of within STEM, potentially it's new drugs, within tech, potentially it's new products or new ways of doing things. And instead go into kind of these sort of slightly tertiary fields like consulting and law and things like that. I'm curious how you think about those categories of work and whether there is kind of a clear-cut line in terms of value to society and the economy between sort of directly building and creating things and some of these other industries that sort of circulate.

I have mixed feelings about that. I'm a big admirer of Elon Musk, and there's plenty of talented people I know, young people, and when they tell me like, oh, I'm going into consulting, I do feel kind of deflated. But at the same time, if you think about law and consulting, those fields, I call them engineers of incentives. They shape and change the incentives in the economy for other people. And America has so many people in law, so many people in consulting. We're one of the, you know, we're the richest, like, non-oil, non-financial haven country in the world. So it's not clear to me it's all worked out so badly. So I'm of two minds on that.

That's interesting. Yep. And maybe, maybe it's an overly simplistic, an overly simplistic view. There's a statistic from the World Health Organization that shows that poor worker mental health is going to result in 50 million years of lost productive workdays between now and 2030. And you recently wrote a book called Talent with Daniel Gross. And so I'm curious what you propose in that book and in general as some solutions to the worker mental health crisis and to freeing up and liberating human capital to be able to create more?

I don't know that we have solutions to the mental health crisis, but the key theme of the book is to tell you how to look for talent in other people. But an underlying sub-message is this is also about how to look for talent in yourself, how to figure out what you're good at, how to think about yourself. So if you have a better handle on yourself, and a better sense of how to boost your own aspirations and be on this higher trajectory. Daniel and I at least hope that contributes to solving mental health problems. It's not something we address directly, but our economy as a whole, I think, does a fairly poor job at finding and mobilizing and improving human talent, and we need to get better at it. And the key theme of our book is this how-to take like what can you do as an individual? It's not a policy book, it's a how-to book.

What are some of those key how-tos, some of the key levers that can more effectively mobilize talent?

Well, one simple point we make, you know, it's one thing to sit in your chair in an Olympian manner and try to select talent, but what you really want is talent looking for you. So a lot of institutions, they way underinvest in their soft networks of people who know who they are, people who might recommend them, people who might spread the word. So we recommend that a lot of institutions just invest a lot more in a kind of very sophisticated public relations. How do you get the talented people looking for you? Because you as a talent scout, no matter how good you are, you will be limited in your effectiveness. So that would— that's one place we start. But we have chapters on like how to interview people, You want to get them into the conversational mode. You don't just want to rely on questions that they've prepped for. How should men think about the talents of women? How should we think about finding talent in disabled individuals? How is an online interview different from an in-person interview? And so on.

There was an article in Forbes a number of years ago from a partner at Greylock arguing for what he called the flow state percentage, which is the percentage of time individuals spend directed towards productive activities in flow per day or per week. And he was arguing that that is really the key management metric for the 21st century. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on the importance of flow once you have good talent in place.

I agree with that perspective. I think one thing you want to do in the interview is get the person into their flow state and see what that looks like, how it feels. And if you just ask them prep questions, no matter how good a candidate they are, they're not getting into flow state. They're just spitting back. So like in economics, you ask people, well, summarize for us your job market paper. It's totally dull. But if you can engage them talking about some real-world issue, getting some opinion of theirs, conversational back and forth, you have a much higher chance of seeing what their flow is like.

Or even doing a direct trial task or work by product interview where you have them get into flow.

Absolutely.

Potentially as well.

Test the skill directly, whatever you can, is another motto Daniel and I try to promote.

That makes total sense. I know Daniel is a few years your junior, I believe.

Yes, he is. I think he's 31 now.

Okay, nice. Yeah, I'd love to hear. So my partner Stephen is similar age gap there between he and I, and I'm curious how you and Daniel came to working together and what the experience was like working with someone who just had that big of an age gap.

I consider Daniel a kindred spirit. When I'm with him, I don't really feel an age gap. He and I just love to shoot ideas back and forth very quickly. We first met at a San Francisco dinner hosted by Marc Andreessen and just hit it off, discovered we both love talking about talent and interviewing and questions, and had a bunch of meetings. And eventually it evolved into us writing this book.

Nice. Yeah, no, I always really appreciate when people are blind to age. And I've seen a lot of people benefit from being blind to age as well.

So, and Daniel's a great mentor for me. Like he's half my age, but I also think of him as a mentor. He was the youngest partner ever at Y Combinator, super successful investor and venture capitalist at an even younger age than he is now at 31. So obviously this is a guy I can learn a lot from. Same with Patrick Collison, who's also in his early 30s. I consider him a mentor. So one piece of advice I have for older people is, Go out there and get yourself some younger mentors.

That's a great— I love that. That's a great piece of advice. And it's funny, I had read all of Daniel's blog posts on his own personal website a number of years ago. And so when I saw that you had both co-authored a book, yeah, I was really excited. I didn't know that there was any relationship there. One thing I want to ask Tyler, just to bring us to an end here, is what we call the, the research genie question, which is a question about a question, um, and it goes as follows. So if you could click your fingers and instantly have all of the research or information or data needed to answer any big question that you've been pondering for a long time, what would the question be that you would immediately have answered?

How do you spot good talent spotters? So the book with Daniel is all about how do you spot talent? And we do our best, readers can judge, you know, how far we got, but we really don't consider, let's say you're just trying to hire talent spotters. How do you judge that as a skill? That is a frontier question. I've never seen a good research article on it. There's a kind of implicit Silicon Valley lore, but I would love to have firmer, sounder answers on that one because you want to scale the process of being good at spotting talent, right? But not everyone can do it. So how do you find those who can?

Love that. Yeah, that's a phenomenal one. Very specific as well. Fantastic, Tyler. Well, the final question I have for you is just what are you currently working on? If you're able to share, I'd love to hear what you're currently working on and what some of the biggest questions or things you're currently thinking about are.

Well, one is the question I just mentioned, but also the general issue, like once you found talent, how do you improve them? Daniel and I may write more on that, but a kind of sequel or follow-up like, yeah, it's great to find talent, but that's really just step 1 or step 2. You want to cultivate them, you want them to be loyal to your enterprise, you want to learn from them. And what do you do once you've found talent? So those are what is immediately on my plate for the next few years.

Amazing. What is it that has brought you into the talent realm as a focus specifically?

Doing or overseeing projects my entire life, and every single time finding the key constraint was not money, but talent. If you have talent, you can get money. Getting talent is very hard.

We mentioned earlier about supply restriction within those key domains, and I imagine there is an element of supply restriction to talent itself. I'm curious, you know, if you think there are some big fundamental levers. I mean, education is an obvious one. That can reduce the supply restriction of talent. Another example may be, like I mentioned at the start of the interview, instilling or awakening self-motivation potentially. I'm curious what some other ones may be.

I think just lack of ambition. So people who maybe could have ambition, but early in life they're never exposed to enough other people who have ambition or who did wonderful high-level things. And they're content just to have some job. There's some story I heard yesterday about a bunch of kids, poor kids, you know, taken to an art museum, and the big lesson they come away with is that being a guard at an art museum is a job you can have. Now, okay, that's something, but it's really not thinking high enough, I would say. So making sure that everyone at least has the chance to be ambitious with the proper role models. For me is a big priority for America and indeed most other countries.

Yeah, you would sort of want the kids to come away thinking that they could become an artist.

Yeah, not that most people can become an artist, but to think they could somehow change the world with ideas, with creations of their own, and not be one of the guards sitting in a chair getting paid.

Well, thank you so much, Tyler. Really, really appreciate it.

Yeah, it was really my pleasure. And, uh, Let me know when it's out. I'll blog and tweet it.

I will indeed. Okay.

Hey, it's Joshua with the production team. Now, if you're listening to this, you probably have a long track record of success. However, you also have a craving you can't ignore. It's the deep desire to do more and to take things to an even higher level than before. And when it comes to your performance, you're by no means inconsistent. However, you may have hit a plateau. The traditional ways of breaking through and gaining new ground just aren't working. If you're starting to wonder if you actually have it in you to get to where you want to go, maybe you can feel it. You're in the middle of an important stretch for your career. And the good news is there's a way to get at least 50% more out of what you're currently doing. You can gain the altitude needed to escape reactivity, to stay in the strategic zone and transcend stagnation, all without compromising what's truly important to you. That's precisely what we're here to help you do with the Flow Research Collective. We've done it for thousands of top-tier performers. Reviews and praise for our tools, our protocols, and our ideas have come in from the likes of Elon Musk, Arianna Huffington, and Bill Clinton. So if you'd like to train with us, go to getmoreflow.com. What you'll learn is backed by research from Harvard, DARPA, and Deloitte. These are the same peak performance protocols we teach to Navy SEALs and executives in Google and Facebook's boardrooms. Just go to getmoreflow.com.

If what you've heard on Flow Research Collective Radio has been helpful, please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people.