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Tyler Cowen - Why Society Will Collapse & Why Sex is Pessimistic

It was my great pleasure to speak once again to Tyler Cowen. His most recent book is called Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World. We discuss how sex is more pessimistic than he is, why he expects society to collapse permanently, why humility, suits, intelligence, & stimulants are overrated, how he identifies talent, deceit, & ambition, & much much more! Episode website + Transcript: https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/tyler-cowen-2 Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3ft50xG Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3DVtGsO Buy Tyler's Book on Talent: https://amzn.to/3f8cl5s Follow Tyler Cowen: https://twitter.com/tylercowen Follow me: https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 Preview 0:53 Did Caplan Change On Education? 2:10 Travel vs. History 4:03 Do Institutions Become Left Wing Over Time? 6:55 What Does Talent Correlate With? 13:53 Humility, Mental Illness, Caffeine, and Suits 19:20 How does Education affect Talent? 25:27 Scouting Talent 34:32 Money, Deceit, and Emergent Ventures 38:09 Building Writing Stamina 40:34 When Does Intelligence Start to Matter? 44:44 Spotting Talent (Counter)signals 54:40 Will Reading Cowen’s Book Help You Win Emergent Ventures? 1:03:45 Existential risks and the Longterm 1:12:10 Cultivating Young Talent 1:15:55 The Lifespans of Public Intellectuals 1:20:29 Risk Aversion in Academia 1:25:47 Is Stagnation Inevitable? 1:32:16 What are Podcasts for?

Tyler CowenguestDwarkesh Patelhost
Sep 28, 20221h 34mWatch on YouTube ↗

EVERY SPOKEN WORD

  1. 0:00 – 0:53

    Preview

    1. TC

      So the existence of sex is the most pessimistic thing there is.

    2. DP

      (laughs)

    3. TC

      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.

    4. DP

      Ah.

    5. TC

      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, are losing ideas, even if they might be correct in some ways. I've done much less to bet on a single idea.

  2. 0:53 – 2:10

    Did Caplan Change On Education?

    1. TC

      To ask Brian about like early and late Kaplan, in which ways are they not consistent? That's the... It's a kind of friendly jab.

    2. DP

      Okay, interesting.

    3. TC

      Yeah. Garrett Jones has tweeted about this in the past. So like in the myth of the rational voter, education is so wonderful.

    4. DP

      Uh, like it, it makes you more free market? I don't-

    5. TC

      Yeah.

    6. DP

      Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    7. TC

      And like, A, it no longer seems to be true, though it was true from the data Brian took from.

    8. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    9. TC

      And second, Brian doesn't think education really teaches you much.

    10. DP

      So then why is it making people free market? Yes. (laughs)

    11. TC

      Yeah. Like it once did, even though it doesn't now. And if it doesn't now, it may teach them bad things.

    12. DP

      Right.

    13. TC

      But like it's teaching them something.

    14. DP

      I, I have asked him this. So he thinks that, um, 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 like ideas in colleges-

    15. TC

      Yes.

    16. DP

      ... that they're in the broader world. What, what, what do you think happened?

    17. TC

      Yes.

    18. DP

      Why, why did it transition from one to the other?

    19. TC

      Yeah. Yeah.

    20. DP

      I don't think he had a good answer to that.

    21. TC

      Yeah. You can put this in the podcast if you want. It's up to you.

    22. DP

      (laughs)

    23. TC

      So I like the pre-podcast talk often better than the podcast.

    24. DP

      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.

    25. TC

      Happy to be here. Thank you.

    26. DP

      Okay, excellent. Um, I

  3. 2:10 – 4:03

    Travel vs. History

    1. DP

      want to get to Talent in just a second, but I've got a few questions for you first.

    2. TC

      Absolutely.

    3. DP

      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?

    4. TC

      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.

    5. DP

      Right. But like, so the experience of reading a history book, you think it's somewhat substitutable for actually traveling to a place?

    6. TC

      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.

    7. DP

      Oh, interesting. Okay.

    8. TC

      So it's like travel versus history and the historians lose.

    9. DP

      Right. So I'm curious, how has, how has traveling a lot just changed your perspective when you read a work of history? In what ways are you skeptical of it, uh, that you weren't before? Like what do you think they're probably getting wrong?

    10. TC

      Well, it may not be a concrete way, but first you ask, you know, was the person there? Or if it's a biography, you know, 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 sixth 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 100 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.

    11. DP

      Okay, interesting.

  4. 4:03 – 6:55

    Do Institutions Become Left Wing Over Time?

    1. DP

      Um, so you've asked this question to many of your guests and I don't think any of them have had a good answer.

    2. TC

      Okay.

    3. DP

      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?

    4. TC

      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 is not universal, uh, 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, uh, the issues realign in particular ways. So, uh, I think that's why Conquest's law locally is mostly holding.

    5. DP

      Oh, interesting. So you don't think there's anything special about, um, the intellectual life that tends to make people left wing? It's, uh, particular to our current moment?

    6. TC

      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 bear. 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 like particular groups who on particular issues are very left or right wing. I don't know. It seems to me, uh, unsatisfying and there's a lot of fluidity in how these axes play out over real issues.

    7. DP

      Interesting. So maybe then what, what is left, considered left at the time, uh, uh, is the thing that ended up winning, uh, or at least looking back on it, that's how we categorize things. Like, um, I, something in- insightful I heard from Burne 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.

    8. TC

      Exactly. Or like, take the French Revolution, their equivalent of like, nonprofits then versus 1830 restoration. Like, was everything moving to the left between Robespierre and 1830? I don't pretend to know, but it just, it sure doesn't seem that way, right? So again, there seemed to be a lot of cases where conquest's law is not so economical.

    9. DP

      Right. No, and the point is... A great example of this where it's not sure whether is- is he the most left-wing figure in history or the most right-wing figure in history?

    10. TC

      Or maybe both somehow, yes.

  5. 6:55 – 13:53

    What Does Talent Correlate With?

    1. TC

    2. DP

      Yeah. (laughs) Um, 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, um, 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?

    3. TC

      I don't know. I mean, 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, uh, I don't go around like, pissed off at those people or, or judging them in some moralizing way. Uh, I think a lot of me is on automatic pilot i- 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, I might think it was wrong. So same with talent.

    4. DP

      Okay. Okay. Uh, so w- when you read the biographies of great people, often you see there's a bit of, uh, emotional neglect and abuse when they're kids. Why do you think that is? Like, why is that such a co- such a common trope?

    5. TC

      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, uh, 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.

    6. DP

      Yes. Um, is there anything you-

    7. TC

      You know, the Collisons, like, they have great parents. Uh-

    8. DP

      Yeah, it could just be-

    9. TC

      ...they did well, you know?

    10. DP

      It could just be the, the examples that stick out in my mind of emotional neglect stick out in my, in my particular because-

    11. TC

      They stick out in your mind, yes.

    12. DP

      Yeah, exactly.

    13. TC

      So I'd really like to see the data. I think it's like, an important very good question. It seems to me maybe one could investigate it, but I've never seen an actual result.

    14. DP

      Is there something you've learned about talent spotting through writing the book that, um, you wish wasn't so, that you find it disturbing or you find it disappointing in some way? You found, for example, something as a correlate for talent that you wish wasn't, or something like that?

    15. TC

      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, uh, certainly Italians have had enough amazing achievements over the millennia, but right now, the people there who are up to something, they're gonna move to London, to New York, to somewhere. So I find that a bit depressing. It's not about really the people, but-

    16. DP

      To, to, to what extent is... W- when you do find a cluster of talent in a place, to what extent does... Can that be explained by sort of like, a cyclical view of what's happening in the region that in this sort of hard times create strong men sense? So, uh, at, at some point, Italy was, uh... Italy had a renaissance and then things maybe get complacent over time.

    17. TC

      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.

    18. DP

      But if they leave, for example, with like, Central European Jews, right, then, then, then they don't stay there anymore. They leave, uh, they-

    19. TC

      A big war obviously can destroy almost anything.

    20. DP

      Hmm.

    21. TC

      So German scientific talent took a big whack. German cultural talent, uh, you know, Hungarian Jews and mathematics, I don't know how much of a thing it still is, but certainly it's nothing close to what it once was.

    22. DP

      Okay. So then I was worried, um, that talents... Uh, if you realize that some particular region has a lot of talent right now-

    23. TC

      Yeah.

    24. DP

      ...then that might be like, a one-time gain that you realize, oh, India or Toronto or, or Nigeria or something, they have a lot of talent. Um, but that the culture doesn't persist in some sort of, uh... In an extended way. Uh, but-

    25. TC

      Well, I think that might be true for where talent comes from-

    26. DP

      Yeah.

    27. TC

      ...but where it goes to, it just seems to show persistence.

    28. DP

      Hmm.

    29. TC

      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, the current status of India, uh, I think that will be temporary, but temporary for a long time. It's just-

    30. DP

      (laughs)

  6. 13:53 – 19:20

    Humility, Mental Illness, Caffeine, and Suits

    1. TC

    2. DP

      Hmm. Okay, I wanna play, uh, a game of overrated and underrated with you.

    3. TC

      I'm here for that.

    4. DP

      But we're- but we're going to do it with certain traits or certain kinds of personalities that might come in when you're interviewing them.

    5. TC

      O- okay, but it's probably all gonna be indeterminate, but go on.

    6. DP

      Right. Okay. So somebody comes in, they're very humble.

    7. TC

      Yes.

    8. DP

      Well, is- is- uh, uh, do you-

    9. TC

      Immediately, I'm suspicious.

    10. DP

      Why?

    11. TC

      I figure most people who are gonna make something of themselves are arrogant. If they're willing to show it, there's a certain bravery or openness in that.

    12. DP

      Hmm.

    13. TC

      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, "Hm, what's up with you? You're not really humble, are you?"

    14. DP

      Oh. So, like may- maybe the hu- humility is a way of, like, avoiding confrontation, like you don't have the confidence to actually show that you can be great, so you're just-

    15. TC

      Right. Now, it might be efficient for them to avoid confrontation.

    16. DP

      Right.

    17. TC

      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... like, 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.

    18. DP

      Um, how... like, what is the difference... l- let's say a 15-year-old that's kind of arrogant versus, like, a 50-year-old that's kind of arrogant-

    19. TC

      Yeah.

    20. DP

      ... and the latter has accomplishments already, the la- uh, the first one doesn't. Is there a difference in how you perceive humility or the lack thereof?

    21. TC

      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-

    22. DP

      Right.

    23. TC

      ... 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?"

    24. DP

      Yeah.

    25. TC

      Whereas the 15-year-old, they have a chip on their shoulder, can't quite hold it all in. You know, "Oh, that's great." You know, "Fine. Let's see what you're gonna do."

    26. DP

      And then how arrogant can you be? So there's, like, many 15-year-olds who, if they're really into math, they're like, "I wanna solve P does not equal NP," or, you know, "I wanna build an AGI," or something. I- is there some level where it's you're just like, "You clearly don't understand what's going on if you think you can do that"? Or is- is it always a plus?

    27. TC

      I haven't seen the level yet. Now, if the 15-year-old said to me, "In three years, I'm going to invent a perpetual motion machine."

    28. DP

      Right.

    29. TC

      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.

    30. DP

      Oh, right. (laughs)

  7. 19:20 – 25:27

    How does Education affect Talent?

    1. DP

      Um, in the book, you... or, or I guess another podcast, you pointed out that some of the most talented people you see that are neglected are 15 to 17-year-olds. How does this impact how you think? Um, 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.

    2. TC

      Right.

    3. DP

      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-

    4. TC

      Less homework.

    5. DP

      Okay.

    6. TC

      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, uh, 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, the bs the teacher has to spew? Of course not. So I would just do more things like that.

    7. DP

      I want to now understand the difference between these three options. So one is somebody like you actually gives an in-person, uh, lecture, like saying what this life is like.

    8. TC

      Yeah, or Zoom.

    9. DP

      Sure.

    10. TC

      You could do Zoom too, yeah.

    11. DP

      No, this is actually just about tasks. The second is Zoom. And the third is, it, it's not live in any way whatsoever, you're just kind of like maybe showing a video of the person.

    12. TC

      I'm a big believer in the vividness-

    13. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    14. TC

      ... 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.

    15. DP

      Hmm.

    16. TC

      And there's plenty of local people, uh, where most of the good high schools are.

    17. DP

      Are you tempted to just give these really smart 15-year-olds, uh, a hall pass to the library all day and some wifi access and then just leave them alone? Or do you think that they need some sort of structure?

    18. TC

      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.

    19. DP

      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, is that just...

    20. TC

      I'd like to see more data, but I suspect the best moral instruction is the teachers actually being good people.

    21. DP

      Hmm.

    22. TC

      And I think that works. But again, I'd like to see the data. But that somehow you get up and lecture them about the seven virtues or something seems to me a waste of time-

    23. DP

      (laughs)

    24. TC

      ... and maybe even counterproductive.

    25. DP

      Now, the way I read your book about talent, it seems like also a critique of Brian's book, The Case, The Case Against Education.

    26. TC

      Of course it is.

    27. DP

      Okay, same way.

    28. TC

      Brian like describes me as the guy who's always torturing him. And in a sense, he's right.

    29. DP

      (laughs) Well, I, I guess more specifically, if you don't need, um... It seems that Brian's book relies on the argument that you need a costly signal to show that you have talent or, you know, you have intelligence and other, uh, conscientiousness and other traits. But if you can just learn that from a 1500 word essay and a Zoom call, then maybe the, the college is not about the signal.

    30. TC

      Well, in that sense, I, I'm not sure it's a good critique of Brian. So for most people in the middle of the distribution, I don't think you can learn what I learned from, say, top EV winners through a written application and a half-hour Zoom call. But that said, I think the talent book shows you, you know 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 Brian overlooks how much people actually learn when they go to school.

  8. 25:27 – 34:32

    Scouting Talent

    1. DP

    2. TC

      So I was right.

    3. DP

      Yeah. To what extent do the best, uh, talent scouts ha- inevitably suffer from Goodhart's law? Like has this ha- been happening to you where your approval gets turned into a credential? And so a whole bunch of, um, non-earnest people start applying, you get a whole bunch of adverse selection, and then the, i- it becomes hard for you to run your program.

    4. TC

      Uh, 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, uh, that it's not a problem. So it do- the endorsement does get credentialized. Mostly that's a good thing, right? Like you help the people you pick and, uh, then you see what happens next and you inno- you keep on innovating as you need to.

    5. DP

      Hmm. Um, 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?

    6. TC

      Well, I'd want to see the context o- 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.

    7. DP

      Then wh- wh- what is the skill in particular that they have, i- if it's not the particular thing that they're working on?

    8. TC

      Some intangible kind of intuition where they feel the right thing in the people they meet. And we try to teach people that intuition the same way you might teach, like, art or music appreciation. But it's not a science, right? It's not paint by numbers.

    9. DP

      Even with all the advice in the book and even with the stuff that isn't in the book, that is just, um, 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, um, and is just, like, too chaotic of, uh, a thing to actually get your grips on?

    10. TC

      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. And so when people say, "Oh, genomics this, genomics that," we'll see. Somehow I don't think that will change this.

    11. DP

      So you don't think, like, uh, getting a polygenic risk score of, I don't know, uh, drive, that's going to be a thing that happens?

    12. TC

      Maybe future genomics will be so different from what we have now maybe, but it's not around the corner.

    13. DP

      Yeah. Yeah. Maybe the sample size is just so low on somebody like you that i- i- how are you even going to collect that data? Like, how are you going to get the correlates of who the super talented people are?

    14. TC

      Yeah. And how, how genomic data interact with each other. You can apply machine learning and so on. It just, it seems quite murky.

    15. DP

      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 s- in a way that will get worse because now that 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?

    16. TC

      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?

    17. DP

      And then, but will the slack in the system go away for people who are not top performers? Like, because you can tell now if we're getting better at talent spotting.

    18. TC

      I think a lot of this has happened already-

    19. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    20. TC

      ... 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, uh, that has made it harder for people to get paid things they don't deserve.

    21. DP

      I wonder if this leads to, um, adverse selection in the areas where you can't measure how well somebody is doing. So the people who are kind of lazy and bums, they'll just go in places where output can't be measured. And then so these industries will just be overflowing with the people who didn't want to work in measurable areas.

    22. TC

      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.

    23. DP

      Hmm. If, uh, talent is partly heritable, then the better you get at spotting talent, over time, will the social mobility in society go down?

    24. TC

      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.

    25. DP

      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 by, if you, like, find somebody in Brazil, they, they help the people around them. But once they're found, they're gonna go to those clusters you talked about, and they're gonna be helping the people in San Francisco who don't need help. So, is this a one-time gain then?

    26. TC

      Well, like so many people from India seem to give back to India-

    27. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    28. TC

      ... in a very consistent way. People from Russia don't seem to do that. Now, 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.

    29. DP

      Uh, let's talk about emergent ventures.

    30. TC

      Sure.

  9. 34:32 – 38:09

    Money, Deceit, and Emergent Ventures

    1. TC

      meantime, EA will do.

    2. DP

      Are there times when somebody asks you for, ask 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 wanna 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?

    3. TC

      Things like this have happened. And I ask people flat-out, like, "Why do you want this grant from me?" And it is a forcing question in the sense that if their answer isn't good, I won't give it to them, even though they might have good level of talent, good ideas, whatever. So they have to be able to answer that question in a credible way. Some can, some can't.

    4. DP

      If you... Uh, I, I remember, uh, that the president of the University of Chicago, so many years back, said that if he rejected the entire class of freshmen that are coming in and accepted the 1,500 people that they had to reject that year, uh, the, the next 1,500 that they had to reject that year, then there would be, like, no difference in the quality of the admits.

    5. TC

      I would think Chicago's the one school where that's not true.

    6. DP

      (laughs)

    7. TC

      But I agree that it's true for most schools.

    8. DP

      Do you think that's also true of emergent ventures, or-

    9. TC

      No, not at all.

    10. DP

      Like, how, how good is a marginal reject?

    11. TC

      Not, not good.

    12. DP

      Okay.

    13. TC

      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.

    14. DP

      Hmm. That, I, I, I guess that makes it even rougher if you do get rejected because it wasn't like, oh, you weren't, like, a right fit for the job or y- you almost made the cut. It's like, no, we're actually just assessing your potential, not some sort of fit for the job. And not only did you... Or you weren't on the edge of potential, you were, like, w- you were just on the other, the other edge of the curve.

    15. TC

      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 wanna 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, I, I don't... 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.

    16. DP

      Hmm. How much does the money part of emergent ventures matter? So if you just didn't give them the money?

    17. TC

      There's a whole bunch of proposals that really need the money-

    18. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    19. TC

      ... uh, for capital costs, and then it matters a lot. For a lot of them, the money per se doesn't matter.

    20. DP

      Right. Uh, the, then so what is the function of returns look like for that? If you like 10X the money or you w- uh, 0.1X the money for some of these things, do you think that you'd see significantly different re- uh, results or...

    21. TC

      Uh, 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.

    22. DP

      Why are women often better at detecting deceit?

    23. TC

      I would assume for biological and evolutionary reasons, that there are all these men trying to deceive them, right?

    24. DP

      (laughs)

    25. TC

      So (laughs) , uh, 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.

    26. DP

      Hmm. One thing I heard from somebody, um, I was brainstorming these questions with-

    27. TC

      Mm-hmm.

    28. DP

      ... she suggested that maybe it's because women just discuss personal matters more, and so therefore they have, they have a greater library of-

    29. TC

      Well, that's certainly true, but that's subordinate to my explanation, I would say.

    30. DP

      Right.

  10. 38:09 – 40:34

    Building Writing Stamina

    1. TC

    2. DP

      Right. Why is writing skill so important to you?

    3. TC

      Well, one thing is just I'm good at judging it, right? So, uh, lacrosse skill, I'm very bad at judging. So there's nothing on the EV application testing for your lacrosse skill. But look, writing's a form of thinking, and public intellectuals are one of the things I wanna support, and some of the companies I admire are, are like writing culture companies like Amazon or Stripe. So writing it is. I'm a good reader, so you're gonna be asked to write.

    4. DP

      Do you think it's a general fact that writing correlates with, um, just general competence? Uh, so it-

    5. TC

      I do, but especially the areas that I'm funding, it strongly trips.

    6. DP

      Okay, gotcha.

    7. TC

      Whether it's true for everything is, uh, harder to say.

    8. DP

      Can stamina be increased?

    9. TC

      Of course. Artic-

    10. DP

      Oh, really? Okay.

    11. TC

      Yeah. It's one of the easier things to increase.

    12. DP

      Huh. Oh.

    13. TC

      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.

    14. DP

      Okay, that's interesting. Um, in, in the-

    15. TC

      So, you know, putting aside maybe some disabilities or something, but people in regular circumstances.

    16. DP

      Okay. Yeah, I, I, that... I think that's interesting because in the, our blog post we cited from Robin Hanson about the stamina-

    17. TC

      Yeah.

    18. DP

      ... I think he, yeah, his point of view was this is just something that's inherent to people.

    19. TC

      Well, I don't think that's totally false. The people who have superhuman stamina-

    20. DP

      Hmm.

    21. TC

      ... 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 gonna-

    22. DP

      (laughs)

    23. TC

      ... download or upload or goodness knows what with it.

    24. DP

      Um-

    25. TC

      He's a physicalist if there ever was one.

    26. DP

      Ha- ha- have you, uh, read Haruki Murakami's book On Running?

    27. TC

      No. Uh, I've been meaning to. I'm not sure how interesting I'll find it. Uh, I will someday.

    28. DP

      May- maybe not that interesting.

    29. TC

      I like his stuff a lot.

    30. DP

      But what I find really interesting about it was just how linked, uh, building a physical stamina is for him to building up the stamina to write a lot.

  11. 40:34 – 44:44

    When Does Intelligence Start to Matter?

    1. TC

    2. DP

      Hmm. Now, um, after reading the book, I was inclined to think that intelligence matters more than I previously thought, not less. So-

    3. TC

      Good.

    4. DP

      So-

    5. TC

      You might have undervalued it. (laughs)

    6. DP

      (laughs) Or not, not even that. Um, you say in the book that, uh, intelligence has convex returns, that it matters especially for areas like inventors, right?

    7. TC

      Right.

    8. DP

      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-

    9. TC

      Sure.

    10. DP

      ... for... so many of the most important things in society, intelligence matters more, and not only that, has increasing returns. And it seems like with emergent ventures or a venture like that, you're trying to pick the people who are at the tail, right? You're not looking for-

    11. TC

      Sure. Sure.

    12. DP

      ... a barista at Starbucks.

    13. TC

      Sure. Awesome.

    14. DP

      So it seems like you should care about intelligence more given the evidence there, not less.

    15. TC

      Well, more than, 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.

    16. DP

      Right. So maybe you just started off with, like, a really high prior on intelligence, and that's why you downgraded, but maybe the average person should update.

    17. TC

      That's true, but I still would say there's a lot of jobs that I actually hire for in actual life-

    18. DP

      Hmm.

    19. TC

      ... where smarts are not the main thing I look for. Most jobs.

    20. DP

      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, like, wanna diversify more, right?

    21. TC

      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.

    22. DP

      Hmm. Um, so you cite the data about... that Sweden collects from everybody that enters the military there, and then, you know, the, the CEOs apparently are not especially smart. But one thing I found interesting from that same data was that Swedish soccer players are pretty smart, and the better 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 externally smart to me. Um, what is going on there? Why, anecdotally, and with some l-limited amounts of evidence, it seems that professional athletes are smarter than you would expect?

    23. TC

      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.

    24. DP

      Mm.

    25. TC

      And I don't just mean smart on the court, though obviously that, but smart more broadly, and that this is underrated. Uh, I think Michelle Dawson was the one who talked me into this. But absolutely, I'm with you all the way.

    26. DP

      Do you think it's just mutational load or, uh, like the actual act of-

    27. TC

      I think you actually have to be really smart-

    28. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    29. TC

      ... 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, uh, very G-loaded.

    30. DP

      Interesting.

  12. 44:44 – 54:40

    Spotting Talent (Counter)signals

    1. DP

      (laughs)

    2. TC

      Exactly.

    3. DP

      Right. Now all your books are in some way about talent, right? So-

    4. TC

      Of course they are.

    5. DP

      ... let me read you the following passage from An Economist Gets Lunch.

    6. TC

      Okay.

    7. DP

      And I want you to tell me how we can apply this insight to talent.

    8. TC

      Okay.

    9. DP

      "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."

    10. TC

      Right. That's counter-seasonally, 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.

    11. DP

      How do we apply this to talent?

    12. TC

      Well, with restaurants, you have selection pressure, where you're only going to ones that have cleared certain hurdles.

    13. DP

      Right.

    14. TC

      So this is true for talent, only for talents-

    15. DP

      Yeah.

    16. TC

      ... who are established. So if you see a persistent NBA player who's a very poor free throw shooter-

    17. DP

      Mm.

    18. TC

      ... 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.

    19. DP

      Sure.

    20. TC

      So there's not an analogous inference you can draw.

    21. DP

      Right. So if I show up to, like, an Emergent Ventures conference, and I meet somebody, and they don't seem especially impressive in the first impression, maybe I should think their work-

    22. TC

      You could upgrade them.

    23. DP

      ... is especially impressive.

    24. TC

      Yes, absolutely.

    25. DP

      Yes. Okay, so my understanding of your book Creative Destruction is that maybe on average, uh, cr- uh, 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, um, skills and knowledge will become even more specialized and even more diverse?

    26. TC

      There's a lot of different presuppositions in your question. So first, is cultural diversity going up or down? That, I think, is multidimensional. So say different cities and different countries will be more like each other over time. 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, that talent just tends to be geographically extremely well clustered.

    27. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    28. TC

      That's not the question you asked, but it's how I would reconfigure the pieces of it.

    29. DP

      Interesting. Well, what does Alchan Allen suggest about, uh, finding talent in a globalized world? And like, in particular, if it's cheaper to find, uh, talent because of the internet, does that mean they should be selecting more mediocre candidates?

    30. TC

      I think it means you should be more bullish on immigrants from Africa.

  13. 54:40 – 1:03:45

    Will Reading Cowen’s Book Help You Win Emergent Ventures?

    1. TC

      I'm not too worried.

    2. DP

      Right, in the sense if they can manipulate the system, that's a positive signal.

    3. TC

      Of some kind, right? Like you could fool me, like-

    4. DP

      (laughs)

    5. TC

      ... "Hey, look, what else have you got to say?" You know?

    6. DP

      (laughs)

    7. TC

      Yeah.

    8. DP

      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 they would whether it would have been-

    9. TC

      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.

    10. DP

      Mm-hmm. I- i- is there something you can do about that, or is that just baked into the cake?

    11. TC

      I don't know. If you do your best to try to act genuine, whatever that means, uh, 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 won't... 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.

    12. DP

      Hmm. Um, 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 are these, does the advice change? Or are the, are the basic principles the same over time?

    13. TC

      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 princles broadly, principles broadly stay the same.

    14. DP

      You have a really interesting book about, uh, autism and systematizers. Do you think Napoleon was autistic?

    15. TC

      I've read several biographies of him (clears throat) 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?

    16. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    17. TC

      Well, some of them did, but those people had such weak other intellectual categories. In the modern biographies, Andrew Roberts, whoever you think is good-

    18. DP

      Right.

    19. TC

      ... they don't know, so how can I know?

    20. DP

      Right. And again, the issue is that the details that stick on my mind when reading the biography are the ones that make them seem autistic, right?

    21. TC

      Yes, and there's a tendency in biographies to storify things.

    22. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    23. TC

      Um, and that's dangerous, too, right?

    24. DP

      How general or cross-applicable is talent, or just confidence of any kind? So like, if you look at somebody like Peter Thiel, uh, you know, i- investor, uh, great executive, um, g- great thinker, even. Or, you know, I, I think, speaking of Napoleon, I think it was, um, some mathematician, was it Lagrange or Laplace, um, who he was studying under, they said that he could have been a mathemation- a mathematician if he wanted to. Um, I don't know if that's true, but it does seem that the top achievers in one field seem to be able to, uh, be able to move across fields and be top achievers in other fields. Is that, is that, is that a pattern that you see as well, or...

    25. TC

      Uh, maybe somewhat, but I don't think you can be top at anything (clears throat) or even most things.

    26. DP

      Mm-hmm.

    27. TC

      And a lot of these very successful people in other eras, they might just be, like, near millionaires.

    28. DP

      W- what, what do you mean?

    29. TC

      Oh, maybe they (clears throat) ran a car dealership-

    30. DP

      Yeah.

  14. 1:03:45 – 1:12:10

    Existential risks and the Longterm

    1. TC

    2. DP

      You have expressed skepticism to the idea that you can use longtermism to say that existential risks matter more than everything else because we should be optimizing for the branch of the decision tree where we survive for millions of years. Uh, c- can you say more of why you're skeptical of that kind of reasoning?

    3. TC

      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 in- invest in good things now. Y- I do favor, like, an asteroid protection program, by the way.

    4. DP

      To the extent that there was a trade-off, in that hypothetical, would you, uh, would, would you, like, put the same weight on existential risk that they do? Or is it, like, just, uh, you're, y- do you just differ with them on, like, how you actually go about solving existential risks?

    5. TC

      Probably more the latter. I think they're not epistemically modest enough when it comes to existential risk. And they thi- they have all these part- some of them, not all of them by any means, these very particular hypotheses about AGI and, "We've got to prevent this," and, uh, that's where I really differ from them. I think, uh, 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, like, tech company through this training about alignment?

    6. DP

      (laughs)

    7. TC

      I'm not against doing that, but like, come on. You know, if it's gonna happen, it's like handling, uh, 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.

    8. DP

      Yes. Um, although it is surprising to the extent that, like, the, the companies in the US that m- maybe care more than other, uh, other, uh, entities about, uh, alignment are actually, like, first currently, right? Like, OpenAI is first and-

    9. TC

      Yeah, but it won't matter because, uh, if that view is the correct one, and I don't think it is, uh, the more screwed-up successors will just come 10 years later, and you know, Skynet goes live, but 10 years later. (laughs)

    10. DP

      Right. Uh, I- I'm curious just generally, why is the possibility of humanity surviving for a very long time, uh, not something that, uh, is, is like a strong part of your worldview, given that you're a strong longtermist?

    11. TC

      I think the chance of there being a, a major war with nuclear weapons or whatever comes next, while very low in any given year, uh, you just have the clock tick, that chance adds up. And we're not gonna be here for another 100,000 years. It's a simple argument.

    12. DP

      But-

    13. TC

      I'm not a pessimist in any given year at all.

    14. DP

      Right. But if the odds are, like, sufficiently above zero, then do you just not buy the argument that, like, anything above zero is just huge and we should be optimizing for that?

    15. TC

      I'm all for things to make nuclear weapons safer, but it's hard to know exactly what you do. Like, what do we do in Ukraine now? We should be more tough, less tough? There's different arguments, but they're not that different from just the normal foreign policy arguments. There's not some special branch of EA longtermism that tells you what to do in Ukraine.Uh, and those people, if anything, tend to be kind of f- under invested in historical and cultural forms of knowledge. So I just don't think you buy that much extra stuff by calling yourself worried about existential risk. There's plenty of people in the 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.

    16. DP

      Um, I, I'm sure you've heard these arguments, but it seems with nuclear war, it's, it's hard to imagine how it could kill, like, every single person-

    17. TC

      It probably won't.

    18. DP

      ... on the planet.

    19. TC

      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.

    20. DP

      Ah.

    21. TC

      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 a few, like, read a copy of the Constitution in 400 years, we're back on track. That's crazy wrong, I think.

    22. DP

      But we did emerge from feudalism, right? So why, well, like, if it happened once, isn't that example enough that-

    23. TC

      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.

    24. DP

      Right. Um, like, what, if, if it's not just the idea is being laden in the space, like, wha- what would it take for our descendants to be able to, like, recover industrial civilization and...

    25. TC

      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, uh, and not that many of them made much progress.

    26. DP

      Right. I mean, I think of you as optimist, uh, at least by temperament, but this seems like one of the most, uh, one of the more pessimistic things I've heard overall, a- anywhere, bec- the idea that, uh, not only will human civilization be decimated almost surely, but that they will never be able to recover.

    27. TC

      I wouldn't say never. You know, never say never, a 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, like, the overall history of mammalian species is not that optimistic. The fact that sex exists is biologically very pessimistic.

    28. DP

      (laughs) Oh, what, what do you mean?

    29. TC

      So I don't, I don't think of myself as a pessimist, but you can call it that.

    30. DP

      Wait, wait, can, can you explain that quote, the, the fact that sex exists is-

  15. 1:12:10 – 1:15:55

    Cultivating Young Talent

    1. DP

      you were to... if, like, a young person were to read a bunch of biographies, not necessarily as, like, career advice, but just generally as trying to, like, better understand how they could be more effective-

    2. TC

      Yeah.

    3. DP

      ... do you think that's just gonna teach them, like, uh, teach them that things are more complex than they thought? Or would that give them any practical...

    4. TC

      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, I don't, like, fixate on the biography. They seem, in a way, inefficiently long.

Episode duration: 1:34:56

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