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

Tyler Cowen 0:00 So the existence of sex is the most pessimistic thing there is.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:03 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 0:03 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 0:23 Ah.

Tyler Cowen 0:23 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.

Tyler Cowen 0:53 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01 Okay, interesting.

Tyler Cowen 1:01 Yeah. Garrett Jones has tweeted about this in the past. So like in the myth of the rational voter, education is so wonderful.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:09 Uh, like it, it makes you more free market? I don't-

Tyler Cowen 1:10 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tyler Cowen 1:11 And like, A, it no longer seems to be true, though it was true from the data Brian took from.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:16 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 1:16 And second, Brian doesn't think education really teaches you much.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:19 So then why is it making people free market? Yes. (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 1:21 Yeah. Like it once did, even though it doesn't now. And if it doesn't now, it may teach them bad things.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:27 Right.

Tyler Cowen 1:27 But like it's teaching them something.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:29 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-

Tyler Cowen 1:38 Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:38 ... that they're in the broader world. What, what, what do you think happened?

Tyler Cowen 1:41 Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:41 Why, why did it transition from one to the other?

Tyler Cowen 1:43 Yeah. Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:43 I don't think he had a good answer to that.

Tyler Cowen 1:44 Yeah. You can put this in the podcast if you want. It's up to you.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:47 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 1:47 So I like the pre-podcast talk often better than the podcast.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:51 Okay. Well, yeah, we can just start rolling. Okay. Today it is my great pleasure to once again speak to Tyler Cowen, now about his new book, Talent: How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World. Tyler, welcome to The Lunar Society again.

Tyler Cowen 2:07 Happy to be here. Thank you.

Dwarkesh Patel 2:08 Okay, excellent. Um, I

Dwarkesh Patel 2:10 want to get to Talent in just a second, but I've got a few questions for you first.

Tyler Cowen 2:13 Absolutely.

Dwarkesh Patel 2:13 So in terms of novelty and wonder, do you think traveling to the past would be a fundamentally different experience to traveling to different countries today? Or is it kind of the same category of thing?

Tyler Cowen 2:25 You need to be protected against disease and have some access to the languages. And obviously your smartphone is not going to work, right? So if you adjust for those differences, I think it would be a lot like traveling today, except there'd be bigger surprises because no one else has gone to the past, right? Older people in a sense were there, but if you go back to ancient Athens or the peak of the Roman Empire, you're the first traveler.

Dwarkesh Patel 2:51 Right. But like, so the experience of reading a history book, you think it's somewhat substitutable for actually traveling to a place?

Tyler Cowen 2:57 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 3:11 Oh, interesting. Okay.

Tyler Cowen 3:13 So it's like travel versus history and the historians lose.

Dwarkesh Patel 3:17 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?

Tyler Cowen 3:28 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:02 Okay, interesting.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:03 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.

Tyler Cowen 4:08 Okay.

Dwarkesh Patel 4:08 So let me just ask you. What do you think is the explanation behind Conquest's second law? Why does any institution that is not explicitly right wing become left wing over time?

Tyler Cowen 4:15 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 5:15 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?

Tyler Cowen 5:23 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 6:05 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.

Tyler Cowen 6:27 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 6:47 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?

Tyler Cowen 6:53 Or maybe both somehow, yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 6:55 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?

Tyler Cowen 7:15 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 7:53 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?

Tyler Cowen 8:04 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 8:45 Yes. Um, is there anything you-

Tyler Cowen 8:48 You know, the Collisons, like, they have great parents. Uh-

Dwarkesh Patel 8:52 Yeah, it could just be-

Tyler Cowen 8:52 ...they did well, you know?

Dwarkesh Patel 8:54 It could just be the, the examples that stick out in my mind of emotional neglect stick out in my, in my particular because-

Tyler Cowen 8:59 They stick out in your mind, yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 8:59 Yeah, exactly.

Tyler Cowen 8:59 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 9:09 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?

Tyler Cowen 9:22 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 10:07 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.

Tyler Cowen 10:24 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 10:41 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-

Tyler Cowen 10:47 A big war obviously can destroy almost anything.

Dwarkesh Patel 10:50 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 10:50 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 11:03 Okay. So then I was worried, um, that talents... Uh, if you realize that some particular region has a lot of talent right now-

Tyler Cowen 11:09 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 11:09 ...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-

Tyler Cowen 11:21 Well, I think that might be true for where talent comes from-

Dwarkesh Patel 11:23 Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 11:23 ...but where it goes to, it just seems to show persistence.

Dwarkesh Patel 11:27 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 11:27 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 11:55 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 11:55 ...a very big place. It has a lot of centers. Uh, the things it has going for it, like not taking prosperity for granted, it will have for quite a while. Like, India is still pretty poor.

Dwarkesh Patel 12:06 What do you think makes ce- certain places the actual place where the clusters of talent, uh, congregate and places where, that are just a source of that talent? Like, what do- what- what makes something a source rather... uh, sorry, a sink rather than the source of talent?

Tyler Cowen 12:18 I think what is a, a place where people go is more or less obvious. You need money. You need a big city. You need some kind of common trait or linguistic connection. So New York, London, they are what they are for sort of obvious reasons, right? Path dependence, history. You'll make it in the Big Apple and so on. But where people come from, I think theory is, is very bad at understanding. Like, why did the Renaissance blossom in Florence and Venice and not in Milan? If you're going back earlier, it's- it wasn't obvious it would be those places. I've done a lot of reading to try to figure this out, but I find I've gotten remarkably not far on the question.

Dwarkesh Patel 13:00 The- the particular examples you mentioned today, like New York, San Francisco, London-

Tyler Cowen 13:04 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 13:04 ... these places, uh, like, it's- it... they have a high fixed cost if you wanna move there. It's expensive. Do you think that this is... they've, they've been, uh, sinks of talent despite this fact or because of it, that there... you need some sort, sort of exclusion in order to be a haven of talent?

Tyler Cowen 13:17 Well, I think this is a problem for San Francisco. It may be a more temporary cluster than it ought to have been. And since it's a pretty recent cluster, it can't count on the same kind of historical path dependence that, say, New York and Manhattan have. But a lot of New York still is not that expensive. Look at the people who, who work and live there. They're not all rich, to say the least. And that is an important part of why New York is still New York. Uh, London, it's much harder, but it seems to me London is a sink for somewhat established talent, which is fine, right? Uh, but in that regard, much inferior to New York.

Dwarkesh Patel 13:53 Hmm. Okay, I wanna play, uh, a game of overrated and underrated with you.

Tyler Cowen 13:56 I'm here for that.

Dwarkesh Patel 13:57 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.

Tyler Cowen 14:02 O- okay, but it's probably all gonna be indeterminate, but go on.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:05 Right. Okay. So somebody comes in, they're very humble.

Tyler Cowen 14:08 Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:08 Well, is- is- uh, uh, do you-

Tyler Cowen 14:09 Immediately, I'm suspicious.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:11 Why?

Tyler Cowen 14:12 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:19 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 14:20 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?"

Dwarkesh Patel 14:29 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-

Tyler Cowen 14:36 Right. Now, it might be efficient for them to avoid confrontation.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:39 Right.

Tyler Cowen 14:39 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:53 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-

Tyler Cowen 14:58 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 14:58 ... 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?

Tyler Cowen 15:03 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 15:14 Right.

Tyler Cowen 15:14 ... 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?"

Dwarkesh Patel 15:20 Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 15:20 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."

Dwarkesh Patel 15:27 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?

Tyler Cowen 15:41 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."

Dwarkesh Patel 15:48 Right.

Tyler Cowen 15:48 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:02 Oh, right. (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 16:02 I think he was 18 then. Like, that's pretty far out on the arrogant behavior spectrum, and we should be fine with that. Like, we know how the story ends. So it's really hard to be too arrogant. But once you say this, it's like the second-order effect. You start thinking, "Well, are they just being arrogant as an act?" And then in that... in the act sense, yes, they can be too arrogant.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:23 I- isn't the backstory there that he was, like, friends with Sean Parker and then Sean Parker had this beef with Sequoia and then-

Tyler Cowen 16:28 There's something like that.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:29 ... forgot about you. Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 16:29 I wouldn't want to say off the top of my head-

Dwarkesh Patel 16:31 Sure.

Tyler Cowen 16:31 ... exactly what, but there is a backstory.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:33 Okay. Um, somebody comes in professionally dressed when they didn't need to. So they've got a crisp cl- uh, clean shirt. They've got a nice watch. Uh, what do you think?

Tyler Cowen 16:39 How old are they?

Dwarkesh Patel 16:40 20.

Tyler Cowen 16:41 They're too conformist.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:43 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 16:43 Again, some jobs, conformity is great, but I get a little suspicious, at least for what I'm looking for.

Dwarkesh Patel 16:48 Interesting.

Tyler Cowen 16:49 But I wouldn't rule them out. For a lot of things, it's a plus, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 16:52 Yeah. I- is there a point, though, where you're a- in some way, uh, being conformist by dressing up in a polo shirt, like if you're in San Francisco, right? Now, y- y- uh, it seems like the conformist thing is not to wear a suit to an interview if you're, like, trying to be a software engineer.

Tyler Cowen 17:04 Yeah, there might be situations where it's so weird, so over the top, so conformist that it's actually total non-conformism.

Dwarkesh Patel 17:09 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 17:10 Like, "I don't know anyone who's a conformist like you are."

Dwarkesh Patel 17:12 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 17:12 And you go, maybe it's... they're not being a conformist, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 17:15 Right.

Tyler Cowen 17:15 They're just some kind of nut.

Dwarkesh Patel 17:17 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 17:17 And then you're interested again.

Dwarkesh Patel 17:18 Yeah. An overall sense that you get from the person that they're really content, almost like if Buddha came in for an interview.

Tyler Cowen 17:25 Again, it's-

Dwarkesh Patel 17:27 Like a sense of well-being.

Tyler Cowen 17:28 It's gonna depend on context. I- I don't think I'd hold it against someone, but I wouldn't take it at face value. You figure they're antsy in some way, you hope, and, like, you'll see i- it with more time, I would just think.

Dwarkesh Patel 17:41 Hmm. Somebody who uses a lot of nootropics, so th- they're constantly using caffeine, but maybe on the si... uh, like, me- multiple times a week, they're also using Adderall, Modafinil, uh, other kinds of nootropics.

Tyler Cowen 17:53 I don't personally like it, but I've never seen the evidence that it's negatively correlated with success, so I would try to put it out of mind. I sort of personally get a queasy feeling. Like, do you really know what you're doing? Is all this stuff good for you? Why do you need this?Uh, that's like my actual reaction. But again, at the intellectual level, uh, it does seem to work for some people, or at least not screw them up too much.

Dwarkesh Patel 18:15 You don't, uh, drink caffeine, correct?

Tyler Cowen 18:17 Zero.

Dwarkesh Patel 18:18 Why?

Tyler Cowen 18:19 I don't like it.

Dwarkesh Patel 18:20 But-

Tyler Cowen 18:20 Uh, and it's, it might be bad for you.

Dwarkesh Patel 18:22 Oh, really? You think so?

Tyler Cowen 18:23 And people get addicted to it also.

Dwarkesh Patel 18:24 So, so but, it, it, you're not worried it might make you less productive over the long term? It's, it's more about you just don't want to be addicted to something?

Tyler Cowen 18:30 Well, since I don't know it well, I'm not sure what my worries are. But the, the status quo regime seems to work. I observe a lot of people who end up addicted to coffee. Coke, the soda, like we know is bad for you. So like, what's the problem I need to solve? Why do it?

Dwarkesh Patel 18:47 Mm-hmm. A history of mental illness, like depression or anxiety, not that they're good, but at current margins, do you think that maybe they're punished too heavily or maybe that people don't take them seriously enough, that they're actually a bigger signal than the people are considering?

Tyler Cowen 18:59 I don't know. I mean, both could be true, right? So there's definitely positive correlations between that stuff and artistic creativity. Causal, harder to say, but correlates. So, uh, you, you certainly should take the person seriously. But, you know, are they the best Starbucks cashier? I don't know.

Dwarkesh Patel 19:19 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 19:20 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.

Tyler Cowen 19:37 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 19:38 What, like, how is the high school run by Tyler Cowen, especially for the very smartest people there? How is it run? Do you just-

Tyler Cowen 19:43 Less homework.

Dwarkesh Patel 19:44 Okay.

Tyler Cowen 19:44 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 20:22 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.

Tyler Cowen 20:29 Yeah, or Zoom.

Dwarkesh Patel 20:30 Sure.

Tyler Cowen 20:30 You could do Zoom too, yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 20:31 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.

Tyler Cowen 20:38 I'm a big believer in the vividness-

Dwarkesh Patel 20:40 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 20:40 ... 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 20:50 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 20:50 And there's plenty of local people, uh, where most of the good high schools are.

Dwarkesh Patel 20:54 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?

Tyler Cowen 21:03 I think they need some structure, but you have to let them rebel against it and do their own thing also. Zero structure strikes me as great for a few of them, but even for the super talented ones, not perfect. They need exposure to things, and they need some teachers as role models. So you want them to have some structure.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:22 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...

Tyler Cowen 21:31 I'd like to see more data, but I suspect the best moral instruction is the teachers actually being good people.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:36 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 21:37 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 21:46 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 21:46 ... and maybe even counterproductive.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:48 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.

Tyler Cowen 21:54 Of course it is.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:54 Okay, same way.

Tyler Cowen 21:55 Brian like describes me as the guy who's always torturing him. And in a sense, he's right.

Dwarkesh Patel 21:59 (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.

Tyler Cowen 22:19 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 22:57 How would you go about measuring, uh, the amount of context that somebody's getting in college? Is there like something you can point to that shows, oh, clearly they're getting some context, otherwise they wouldn't be able to do this?

Tyler Cowen 23:07 Well, I think if you meet enough people who did and didn't go to college, you'll see the difference on average. Uh, stressing the word "average." Now, there are papers measuring positive returns to higher ed. I don't think they at all show it's due to context, but I am persuaded by most of Brian's arguments that you don't remember the details of what you learned in class, right? Say, oh, you learned, you know, this about astronomy and Kepler's laws and opportunity costs. People can't reproduce that two or three years later. It seems pretty clear we know that, right? But they do learn a lot of context and networking and how to deal with different personality types.

Dwarkesh Patel 23:42 Like how, how would you falsify this claim though that you are getting a lot of context? Is it just something that you had to qualitatively evaluate? Or is there some way that you could say... It, it, like what would have to be true of the world for you to conclude that the opposite is true?

Tyler Cowen 23:54 Well, if you could show people remembered a lot of the facts they learned and those facts were important for their jobs, neither of which I think is true, but in principle they're demonstrable, uh, then you would be much more skeptical about the context being the thing that mattered. But as it stands now, that's the residual, and it's probably what matters.

Dwarkesh Patel 24:13 Right. So I thought that Brian showed in the book that actually people don't even remember m- many of the basic facts that they learned in school.

Tyler Cowen 24:18 Of course they don't, but that's not the main thing they learn. They learn some vision of how the world works, how they fit into it, that they ought to have higher aspirations, that they can join the upper middle class, that they're supposed to have a particular kind of job. Here are the kinds of jerks you're going to meet along the way. Here's some sense of how dating markets work. Maybe you're in a fraternity, maybe you do a sport and so on. That's what you learn.

Dwarkesh Patel 24:41 Uh, how did you spot Brian?

Tyler Cowen 24:43 Uh, he was maybe in high school even when I met him, and it was at some kind of IHS event. And I think he made a point of seeking me out. And I immediately thought, "Well, this guy is going to be something like, got to keep track of this guy right away."

Dwarkesh Patel 24:58 Uh, say more like what, what, what happened?

Tyler Cowen 25:00 Uh, his level of enthusiasm, ability to speak with respect to detail and just kind of bursting with everything was immediately evident as it still is. Brian has changed less than almost anyone else I know over what is now, he could tell you how many years, but a whole bunch of decades.

Dwarkesh Patel 25:18 Interesting. Um, so i- if that's the case, then it would have been interesting to meet somebody who is like Brian, but like a 19-year-old.

Tyler Cowen 25:24 Yeah, and I did. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 25:26 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 25:27 So I was right.

Dwarkesh Patel 25:28 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.

Tyler Cowen 25:46 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 26:15 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?

Tyler Cowen 26:38 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 26:58 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?

Tyler Cowen 27:04 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 27:21 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?

Tyler Cowen 27:40 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 28:04 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?

Tyler Cowen 28:09 Maybe future genomics will be so different from what we have now maybe, but it's not around the corner.

Dwarkesh Patel 28:15 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?

Tyler Cowen 28:24 Yeah. And how, how genomic data interact with each other. You can apply machine learning and so on. It just, it seems quite murky.

Dwarkesh Patel 28:32 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?

Tyler Cowen 28:53 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?

Dwarkesh Patel 29:09 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.

Tyler Cowen 29:15 I think a lot of this has happened already-

Dwarkesh Patel 29:16 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 29:17 ... 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 29:40 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.

Tyler Cowen 29:53 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 30:07 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?

Tyler Cowen 30:17 Depends how you measure social mobility. So is it relative to the previous generation?I mean, most talent spotters don't know a lot about parents. Like, I don't know anything about your parents at all, right? And the other aspect of spotting talent is the talent you mobilize, you hope does great things for people not doing anything at all. And that's a kind of automatic social mobility they get. But if you're measuring quintiles across generations, I don't know, the intuition could go either way.

Dwarkesh Patel 30:46 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?

Tyler Cowen 31:06 Well, like so many people from India seem to give back to India-

Dwarkesh Patel 31:09 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 31:09 ... 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 31:25 Uh, let's talk about emergent ventures.

Tyler Cowen 31:26 Sure.

Dwarkesh Patel 31:27 So I wonder if, um, if the goal of emergent ventures is to raise aspirations, does that still work given the fact that you have to accept some people, but reject other people, right? So in Bayesian terms, like, the updates up have to equal the updates down. Like, in some sense, you're almost transferring a vision, uh, uh, from the excellent to the truly great, right? You see what I'm saying?

Tyler Cowen 31:47 Well, you might discourage the people you turn away. But if they're really gonna do something, they should take that as a challenge, and many do. Like, "Oh, I was rejected by Harvard. I had to go to UChicago, but then I decided I'm gonna show those bastards." I think we talked about that a few minutes ago. So if I just crush the spirits of those who are rejected, I don't feel too bad about that. They should probably be in some role anyway where they're just working for someone.

Dwarkesh Patel 32:14 But let, let me ask you then the converse of that, which is if you do accept somebody, are you worried that if one of the things that drives people is getting rejected and then wanting to prove the people who rejected them wrong, are you worried that by accepting somebody when they're 15, you're killing that thing in them that wants to get some kind of approval?

Tyler Cowen 32:29 Plenty of other people will still reject them, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 32:32 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 32:32 Now, if everyone accepts them every step of the way, maybe they're just awesome. Sort of LeBron James's basketball history. Past a certain point, it just seems everyone wanted him, you know, for a bunch of decades now. I think deliberately with a lot of candidates, you shouldn't encourage them too much. And I make a point of chewing out a lot of people, just, like, light a fire under them. Like, "What you're doing, it's not gonna work."

Dwarkesh Patel 32:57 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 32:57 So I'm all for that, selectively, but yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 33:00 Yes. Why do you think that so many of the people who applied to emergent ventures, as you said, are, uh, interested in effective altruism?

Tyler Cowen 33:09 There is, like, a moment right now for effective altruism where it is the thing. Some of it is political polarization. Like, the main parties are so stupid and offensive. Those energies will go somewhere. Some of that in the 1970s, say, maybe went to libertarianism. Libertarianism has been out there for too long. It doesn't seem to address a lot of current problems like climate change or pandemics very well. So where should it go? Rationality community gets some of it. That's related to EA, as I'm sure you know. Just like the tech startup community gets some of it. That's great. It seems to be working pretty well to me. Like, I'm not an EA person, but maybe they deserve a lot of it.

Dwarkesh Patel 33:51 But you don't think it's persistent. Like, you think it comes and goes.

Tyler Cowen 33:54 I think it will come and go. But I think EA will not vanish. Like it, like libertarianism, it will continue for quite a long time.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:01 Is there any movement that has attracted young people and that has been persistent over time, or did they all fade?

Tyler Cowen 34:07 Well, Christianity, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 34:08 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 34:08 Judaism, I mean, Islam. (laughs) They're pretty persistent.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:13 Right. So to the extent that being more religious makes you more persistent, then the criticism of EA that it's kind of like a religion, can we view that as a plus?

Tyler Cowen 34:21 Of course, yeah. I think it's somewhat like a religion. To me, that's a plus. We need more religions.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:27 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 34:27 I wish more of the religions we needed were just flat-out religions. But in the

Tyler Cowen 34:32 meantime, EA will do.

Dwarkesh Patel 34:34 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?

Tyler Cowen 34:52 Things like this have happened. And I ask people flat-out, like, "Why do you want this grant from me?" And it is a forcing question in the sense that if their answer isn't good, I won't give it to them, even though they might have good level of talent, good ideas, whatever. So they have to be able to answer that question in a credible way. Some can, some can't.

Dwarkesh Patel 35:12 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.

Tyler Cowen 35:29 I would think Chicago's the one school where that's not true.

Dwarkesh Patel 35:32 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 35:32 But I agree that it's true for most schools.

Dwarkesh Patel 35:34 Do you think that's also true of emergent ventures, or-

Tyler Cowen 35:36 No, not at all.

Dwarkesh Patel 35:37 Like, how, how good is a marginal reject?

Tyler Cowen 35:39 Not, not good.

Dwarkesh Patel 35:40 Okay.

Tyler Cowen 35:41 It's a remarkably bimodal distribution as I perceive it. Now, maybe I'm wrong, but there aren't that many cases where I'm agonizing. And if I'm agonizing, I figure it probably should be a no.

Dwarkesh Patel 35:52 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.

Tyler Cowen 36:10 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 36:49 Hmm. How much does the money part of emergent ventures matter? So if you just didn't give them the money?

Tyler Cowen 36:54 There's a whole bunch of proposals that really need the money-

Dwarkesh Patel 36:57 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 36:57 ... uh, for capital costs, and then it matters a lot. For a lot of them, the money per se doesn't matter.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:02 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...

Tyler Cowen 37:13 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:28 Why are women often better at detecting deceit?

Tyler Cowen 37:32 I would assume for biological and evolutionary reasons, that there are all these men trying to deceive them, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 37:38 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 37:38 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:50 Hmm. One thing I heard from somebody, um, I was brainstorming these questions with-

Tyler Cowen 37:53 Mm-hmm.

Dwarkesh Patel 37:53 ... she suggested that maybe it's because women just discuss personal matters more, and so therefore they have, they have a greater library of-

Tyler Cowen 37:59 Well, that's certainly true, but that's subordinate to my explanation, I would say.

Dwarkesh Patel 38:02 Right.

Tyler Cowen 38:02 But definitely, there's a lot of intermediate steps, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 38:06 Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 38:06 Things that women do more of that help them be insightful.

Dwarkesh Patel 38:10 Right. Why is writing skill so important to you?

Tyler Cowen 38:13 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 38:38 Do you think it's a general fact that writing correlates with, um, just general competence? Uh, so it-

Tyler Cowen 38:43 I do, but especially the areas that I'm funding, it strongly trips.

Dwarkesh Patel 38:47 Okay, gotcha.

Tyler Cowen 38:47 Whether it's true for everything is, uh, harder to say.

Dwarkesh Patel 38:51 Can stamina be increased?

Tyler Cowen 38:53 Of course. Artic-

Dwarkesh Patel 38:54 Oh, really? Okay.

Tyler Cowen 38:55 Yeah. It's one of the easier things to increase.

Dwarkesh Patel 38:58 Huh. Oh.

Tyler Cowen 39:00 I don't think you can become superhuman in your energy and stamina if you're not born that way. But I think almost everyone could increase by 30%, 50%, like some notable amount.

Dwarkesh Patel 39:14 Okay, that's interesting. Um, in, in the-

Tyler Cowen 39:15 So, you know, putting aside maybe some disabilities or something, but people in regular circumstances.

Dwarkesh Patel 39:21 Okay. Yeah, I, I, that... I think that's interesting because in the, our blog post we cited from Robin Hanson about the stamina-

Tyler Cowen 39:26 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 39:26 ... I think he, yeah, his point of view was this is just something that's inherent to people.

Tyler Cowen 39:32 Well, I don't think that's totally false. The people who have superhuman stamina-

Dwarkesh Patel 39:35 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 39:36 ... 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 39:57 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 39:57 ... download or upload or goodness knows what with it.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:00 Um-

Tyler Cowen 40:00 He's a physicalist if there ever was one.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:03 Ha- ha- have you, uh, read Haruki Murakami's book On Running?

Tyler Cowen 40:06 No. Uh, I've been meaning to. I'm not sure how interesting I'll find it. Uh, I will someday.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:12 May- maybe not that interesting.

Tyler Cowen 40:12 I like his stuff a lot.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:14 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.

Tyler Cowen 40:21 And Magnus Carlsen would say the same for chess.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:24 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 40:25 Um, so being in reasonable physical shape is important for your mental stamina, which is another kind of simple proof that you can boost your mental stamina.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:34 Hmm. Now, um, after reading the book, I was inclined to think that intelligence matters more than I previously thought, not less. So-

Tyler Cowen 40:41 Good.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:42 So-

Tyler Cowen 40:42 You might have undervalued it. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 40:44 (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?

Tyler Cowen 40:52 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 40:52 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-

Tyler Cowen 40:59 Sure.

Dwarkesh Patel 41:00 ... 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-

Tyler Cowen 41:10 Sure. Sure.

Dwarkesh Patel 41:10 ... a barista at Starbucks.

Tyler Cowen 41:11 Sure. Awesome.

Dwarkesh Patel 41:12 So it seems like you should care about intelligence more given the evidence there, not less.

Tyler Cowen 41:15 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 41:30 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.

Tyler Cowen 41:36 That's true, but I still would say there's a lot of jobs that I actually hire for in actual life-

Dwarkesh Patel 41:42 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 41:42 ... where smarts are not the main thing I look for. Most jobs.

Dwarkesh Patel 41:46 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?

Tyler Cowen 41:58 I think the convexity of returns to intelligence is embedded in a multiplicative model, where the IQ returns only cash out for people good at all these other things. And for a lot of geniuses, they just can't get out of bed in the morning, and you're stuck, and you should write them off.

Dwarkesh Patel 42:14 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?

Tyler Cowen 42:45 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 42:54 Mm.

Tyler Cowen 42:54 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 43:05 Do you think it's just mutational load or, uh, like the actual act of-

Tyler Cowen 43:09 I think you actually have to be really smart-

Dwarkesh Patel 43:11 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 43:11 ... 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 43:23 Interesting.

Tyler Cowen 43:24 And you certainly see some super talented athletes who just go bust, or they may destroy themselves with drugs, or there's plenty of tales like that. Like, uh, you don't have to look hard.

Dwarkesh Patel 43:34 Are there other areas where y- you, I- I wouldn't expect it to be G-loaded, but it actually is like that?

Tyler Cowen 43:40 Uh, probably, but there's so many, like, I just don't know.

Dwarkesh Patel 43:42 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 43:42 But sports is something in my life I followed, so I definitely have opinions about it, and they seem incredibly smart to me. And when they're interviewed, they're not always articulate, and they're sort of talking yourself into it bias ex post. But I hear, like, Michael Jordan in the '90s, I thought, "That guy's really smart."

Dwarkesh Patel 44:00 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 44:01 So I think he is. Look at Charles Barkley. He's amazing.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:04 Right, right.

Tyler Cowen 44:04 There's hardly anyone I'd rather listen to, including on talent, than Charles Barkley.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:09 Huh. That's really interesting. May-

Tyler Cowen 44:10 And he's not that tall. You can't say, "Oh, he succeeded because he's seven foot two." He was maybe top six foot four, and they called him The Round Mound of Rebound. Now, how did he do that? He was smart. He figured out where the ball was going, the weaknesses of his opponents, how to nudge them the right way, and so on.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:26 Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 44:27 Brilliant guy.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:28 What I find really remarkable is, not just with athletes, but with many other professions, if you interview somebody who's at the top of that field, they, they, they come off really, really smart.

Tyler Cowen 44:37 Yes.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:37 Like YouTubers, even sex workers.

Tyler Cowen 44:40 So whoever is, like, the top gardener, I expect I would be super impressed by.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:43 Mm.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:44 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 44:45 Exactly.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:45 Right. Now all your books are in some way about talent, right? So-

Tyler Cowen 44:48 Of course they are.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:49 ... let me read you the following passage from An Economist Gets Lunch.

Tyler Cowen 44:52 Okay.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:53 And I want you to tell me how we can apply this insight to talent.

Tyler Cowen 44:56 Okay.

Dwarkesh Patel 44:58 "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."

Tyler Cowen 45:10 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:26 How do we apply this to talent?

Tyler Cowen 45:29 Well, with restaurants, you have selection pressure, where you're only going to ones that have cleared certain hurdles.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:35 Right.

Tyler Cowen 45:35 So this is true for talent, only for talents-

Dwarkesh Patel 45:38 Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 45:38 ... who are established. So if you see a persistent NBA player who's a very poor free throw shooter-

Dwarkesh Patel 45:44 Mm.

Tyler Cowen 45:44 ... 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:52 Sure.

Tyler Cowen 45:52 So there's not an analogous inference you can draw.

Dwarkesh Patel 45:55 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-

Tyler Cowen 46:01 You could upgrade them.

Dwarkesh Patel 46:01 ... is especially impressive.

Tyler Cowen 46:01 Yes, absolutely.

Dwarkesh Patel 46:02 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?

Tyler Cowen 46:27 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 47:34 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 47:35 That's not the question you asked, but it's how I would reconfigure the pieces of it.

Dwarkesh Patel 47:41 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?

Tyler Cowen 47:55 I think it means you should be more bullish on immigrants from Africa.

Dwarkesh Patel 47:59 Mm.

Tyler Cowen 47:59 So it's relatively hard to get out of Africa to the United States in most cases. So that's a sign the person put in a lot of effort and ability. Uh, maybe an easy country to come here from would be Canada, all other things equal.

Dwarkesh Patel 48:16 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 48:16 Uh, again, I'd want this to be measured. Uh, the people who come from countries that are hard to come from, India, actually, the numbers are fairly high, but the routes are mostly pretty gated.

Dwarkesh Patel 48:29 Right. Yes. Is part of the reason that talent is hard to spot and find today is that, um, that w- we have an aging population, so then we would have more capital, more jobs, more mentorship available for young people coming up than there are young people?

Tyler Cowen 48:44 I don't think we're really into demographic decline yet, not in the United States. Maybe in Japan that would be true. But it seems to me, especially with the internet, there's more 15-year-old talent today than ever before, by a lot, not just by a little. You see this in chess, right? Where we can measure performance very well. Uh, just a lot more young talent from many different places, including the US. So aging hasn't mattered yet. Maybe for a few places, but not here.

Dwarkesh Patel 49:11 What do you think will change in talent spotting as society becomes older?

Tyler Cowen 49:15 Society? Depends what you mean by society. Uh, I think the US, unless it totally screws up on immigration, will always have, like a very seriously good flow of young people that we don't ever have to enter the, the aging equilibrium, the way Japan probably already has. So I don't know what will change. I think, uh... And then there's work from a distance, there's hiring from a distance, funding from a distance. As you know, there's Emergent Ventures India, which is in India, and we do that at a distance. So I don't think we're ever gonna enter that world.

Dwarkesh Patel 49:50 Right, but then what does it look for, like for Japan? Um, is the re- is part of the reason that Japanese cu- uh, cultures and companies are arranged the way they are and do the recruitment their way do, is that linked to perhaps their demographics or...

Tyler Cowen 50:00 That strikes me as a plausible reason, but I don't think I know enough to say. But it wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be the case.

Dwarkesh Patel 50:06 Mm-hmm. To what extent do you need a, a sort of great man ethos and... in your culture, in order to empower the top talent? That if you have too much political and moral egalitarianism, you're not gonna give, uh, great people, like the real incentive and drive to strive to be great?

Tyler Cowen 50:25 We've got to say great man or great woman ethos, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 50:27 Right, right.

Tyler Cowen 50:27 Or, you know, other, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 50:29 Yes.

Tyler Cowen 50:29 Whatever, whatever all-purpose word we wish to use. I worry much less about woke ideology than a lot of people I know. Uh, it's not my thing, but it's something, you know, young people can rebel against. Like, if that keeps you down, eh, I'm not so impressed by you.

Dwarkesh Patel 50:46 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 50:46 So I think it's fine. Let the woke reign. People can work around them.

Dwarkesh Patel 50:51 But overall, like if you have a culture like Europe's, do you think that has any impact on, uh-

Tyler Cowen 50:55 Europe is not woke enough in a lot of ways, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 50:58 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 50:58 Europe is very chauvinist and conservative in the literal sense, and often quite old-fashioned. Depends where you're talking about. But Europe, I would say on that, is much less woke than the United States. I wouldn't say that's their main problem, but you can't say, "Oh, they don't inno- innovate because they're too woke."

Dwarkesh Patel 51:15 No, no, no-

Tyler Cowen 51:15 Like, hang out with some 63-year-old Danish guys and see how woke you think they are after everyone's had a few drinks.

Dwarkesh Patel 51:21 My question wasn't about woke-ism. I just mean in general, if you have a egalitarian society.

Tyler Cowen 51:25 I think of Europe as less egalitarian than here.

Dwarkesh Patel 51:27 Oh, really?

Tyler Cowen 51:28 I think they have bad cultural norms for innovation, but I don't think being too egalitarian is it. They're culturally so non-egalitarian.

Dwarkesh Patel 51:36 Huh.

Tyler Cowen 51:37 Again, depends where, but listen, Paris would be the extreme. Everyone is classified, right? And by status, and you need to wear your sweater the right way, and this and that. Uh, now how innovative is Paris? Actually maybe more than people think. But I still think they have too few dimensions of status competition, and that's a general problem in most of Europe, is too few dimensions-

Dwarkesh Patel 51:59 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 51:59 ... of status competition, not enough room for the proverbial, like, village idiot.

Dwarkesh Patel 52:04 Interesting. You say in the book the questions tend to degrade over time if you don't replace them. I find it interesting that Y Combinator has kept the same questions since they were started in 2005. Um, and of course your co-author is, uh, was a partner at Y Combinator.

Tyler Cowen 52:17 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 52:17 Do you think that works for Y Combinator, or do you think they're probably making a mistake?

Tyler Cowen 52:21 I genuinely don't know. There are people who will tell you Y Combinator, while still successful, has become more like a scalable business school and less like attracting all the top weirdos who do amazing things.

Dwarkesh Patel 52:32 Uh-huh.

Tyler Cowen 52:33 Again, I'd want to see data before asserting that myself, but you certainly hear it a lot. So it could be Y Combinator is a bit stale, but stale in the good sense. Like Harvard is stale, right? It dates from the 17th century, but it's still amazing. MIT is stale. Maybe Y Combinator has become more like those groups.

Dwarkesh Patel 52:51 You think that'll happen to Ve- Emergent Ventures eventually or...

Tyler Cowen 52:54 I don't think so, because, uh, it has a number of unique features built in from the front. So a very small number of evaluators, two.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:02 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 53:03 Now the two might grow a little bit, but it's not gonna grow that much. Uh, I'm not paid to do it, so that really limits how much it's gonna scale. And, uh, there's not like a staff that has to be carried where you're captured by the staff. There is no staff. There's a bit of free riding on staff who do other things, but there's no sense of, "If the program goes away, like all my buddies on staff get laid off." No. So it's kind of pop-up and, uh, low cost of exit, whenever that time comes.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:38 Do you personally have questions that you haven't put in the book or elsewhere because you want them to be fresh, uh, for asking somebody who's applying to a, uh, to the grant?

Tyler Cowen 53:46 Well, I didn't when we wrote the book-

Dwarkesh Patel 53:48 Okay.

Tyler Cowen 53:48 ... so we put everything in there that we were thinking of. But over time, we've developed more.

Dwarkesh Patel 53:54 It's like-

Tyler Cowen 53:55 And I don't generally give them in interviews because-

Dwarkesh Patel 53:57 Sure, sure.

Tyler Cowen 53:57 ... you've got to, you know, keep some stock. So yeah, there's more since then, but we weren't holding back at the time.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:02 It's like a comedy routine, you got to write a new one each year.

Tyler Cowen 54:04 That's right, but when, when your show's on the air, you do give it your best jokes, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 54:08 Sure (laughs) . Um, is somebody who's applying to Emergent Ventures, if they read your book, are they any better off or are they perhaps worse off because maybe they get misleading or like partial view into what's required of them?

Tyler Cowen 54:20 I hope they're not better off in a way, but probably they are. Uh, I hope they use it to understand their own talent better and present it better in a good way, uh, and not just to try to manipulate the system.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:35 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 54:35 But most people aren't actually that good at manipulating that kind of system, so

Tyler Cowen 54:40 I'm not too worried.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:41 Right, in the sense if they can manipulate the system, that's a positive signal.

Tyler Cowen 54:43 Of some kind, right? Like you could fool me, like-

Dwarkesh Patel 54:46 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 54:46 ... "Hey, look, what else have you got to say?" You know?

Dwarkesh Patel 54:48 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 54:48 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 54:49 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-

Tyler Cowen 54:58 Yes, I worry about the effect of this on me, that maybe a lot of my interactions become less genuine, or people are too self-conscious, or too stilted, or too something.

Dwarkesh Patel 55:09 Mm-hmm. I- i- is there something you can do about that, or is that just baked into the cake?

Tyler Cowen 55:13 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 55:37 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?

Tyler Cowen 55:50 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 56:02 You have a really interesting book about, uh, autism and systematizers. Do you think Napoleon was autistic?

Tyler Cowen 56:08 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?

Dwarkesh Patel 56:21 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 56:21 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-

Dwarkesh Patel 56:30 Right.

Tyler Cowen 56:30 ... they don't know, so how can I know?

Dwarkesh Patel 56:33 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?

Tyler Cowen 56:38 Yes, and there's a tendency in biographies to storify things.

Dwarkesh Patel 56:43 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 56:43 Um, and that's dangerous, too, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 56:46 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...

Tyler Cowen 57:19 Uh, maybe somewhat, but I don't think you can be top at anything (clears throat) or even most things.

Dwarkesh Patel 57:24 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 57:25 And a lot of these very successful people in other eras, they might just be, like, near millionaires.

Dwarkesh Patel 57:32 W- what, what do you mean?

Tyler Cowen 57:33 Oh, maybe they (clears throat) ran a car dealership-

Dwarkesh Patel 57:36 Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 57:36 ... and earned $3 million in 1966-

Dwarkesh Patel 57:39 Right. Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 57:40 ... which is a pretty good life back then, right? But it's not like what they have ended up being.

Dwarkesh Patel 57:46 Mm-hmm. Um, there, there's a quote, you quote Sam Altman in the book, um, I thought was really interesting. He says, "The successful founders I funded believe that they are eventually certain to be successful." To what extent is this self-belief, uh, is that the result or the cause of being talented?

Tyler Cowen 58:05 Uh, maybe it's both, but keep in mind the context for Sam. Those are companies and they're startups, and startups succeed at such a low rate that the successes really are selecting for people with quite a bit of overconfidence. In other sectors, you won't, in general, find that same level of overconfidence. So you have to be careful. I agree with Sam, but he's talking about one set of things, not everything.

Dwarkesh Patel 58:31 Is that not true of other fields? Like, if you're looking for a pub- uh, an intellectual, right, you're partially hoping for the outcome that they become remembered or they become, uh, their ideas have a lot of influence, and that's also a rare thing to be able to do.

Tyler Cowen 58:43 I think more people stumble into it, for instance, and then there's more people who know early on they can do it, but not for Sam-like reasons of overconfidence. Just, they, they kind of know it because they can and there are enough early tests. So I still think it's different, and there's more, yeah, stumbling into it by accident.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:07 And w- which better describes your, uh, intellectual journey? Like, were you, were you, in some sense, a little overconfident in your 20s?

Tyler Cowen 59:13 Well, there's an interesting break in my life that relates to stumbling into things. So I grew up with no internet.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:18 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 59:19 So I thought I would do quite well. In that sense, I was overconfident, but I had no notion that I would have large numbers of people listening to me. I just didn't think about the internet. So in that sense, I totally stumbled into the particular way in which I ended up doing well, yet was still, at a younger age, overconfident.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:38 Interesting. I wanted to, uh, back test, uh, some of your methods of finding talent-

Tyler Cowen 59:43 Okay.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:44 ... on certain people. Um, okay, so, uh, we, we just talked about, uh, Haruki Murakami, right? Um-

Tyler Cowen 59:49 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:49 Let's use him as an example. Uh, in his 30s, I believe, he was just running a bar. Uh-

Tyler Cowen 59:54 Who's the person?

Dwarkesh Patel 59:55 Oh, the novelist, uh, Haruki Murakami.

Tyler Cowen 59:57 Oh yeah, yeah. Okay.

Dwarkesh Patel 59:58 Yeah, yeah. Um, he was just running a bar.

Tyler Cowen 59:59 Right.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:00 So it doesn't have to be him in particular, but just generally, uh, think, think of, like, a 30-year-old. You, you go to Japan, you go to a bar, you start talking to the bartender, who also happens to own the place.

Tyler Cowen 1:00:07 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:08 How... Like, what, what would the conversation look like where you would, like, identify, "This person could be a great novelist," or it could be a great anything?

Tyler Cowen 1:00:14 I think my chance of identifying great novelists is very low-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:17 Ah.

Tyler Cowen 1:00:18 ... and it's one reason why it's not something I try to do.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:20 Interesting. Why, why, why is that?

Tyler Cowen 1:00:23 There seem... When I look at biographies, there seem to be so many instances of people who don't show obvious signs of promise early on.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:31 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 1:00:32 So maybe if I knew more such people, I could develop markers. It's possible, right? Like, my chance of being good at that is probably way above average, but I definitely don't think I'd be good at it now.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:44 Interesting. And what do you think makes, uh, novelists so hard to predict? Like-

Tyler Cowen 1:00:48 They can blossom much later-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:50 Uh-huh.

Tyler Cowen 1:00:50 ... and very often they do. A very high percentage of them are women whose earlier lives are interrupted, often by children, but not only. That gets back to the late bloomers thing,And there's something quite discrete about a novel, that until-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:06 Hmm.

Tyler Cowen 1:01:06 ... a person has done it, it's hard to tell how good they are. Or say a great non-fiction book. Well, like, you know, Taleb or Pinker or whoever, like, you could read their earlier blog posts and just see, flat out see, "Oh, they're really smart. Maybe they could write a great book." Like, I wouldn't say anyone could do that, but most people we know could do that, spot them earlier. But a novel? I can't.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:31 Do you think that's also true... Uh, the way you described it sounds very similar to a startup founder, even maybe the time horizon. Like, you haven't really done anything that's like it before and the, the time horizon is maybe like five to 10 years. Um, I don't know, maybe a novel takes shorter, but...

Tyler Cowen 1:01:45 There are more intermediate benchmarks with startups. Just how good a job do they do trying to raise their first round? There's a lot you can watch. It's not indicative of, like, product fit to the market and a bunch of other things, but you see a lot early on. How good is the pitch? The deck? Again, there's some great, great things that had terrible pitches, but, uh, I think you see way more early signs. Now, maybe novelists show early signs that I don't know about. So again, like, I'm suggesting maybe I could learn, but right now I'm totally at sea with that one.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:17 Okay. Look-

Tyler Cowen 1:02:17 Joseph Conrad, like, was I gonna get that Herman Melville? I don't think so.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:23 Hmm. Interesting. Uh, oh, okay. Let- let's back test with another person.

Tyler Cowen 1:02:29 Like, "Hey, Joe, you what? You're from Poland."

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:31 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 1:02:31 "You're gonna write in English?" Like, you know, get real. (laughs)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:34 (laughs) Uh, Scott Aaronson. So, a- a- as you know, he's a famous, uh, uh, famous complexity theorist, uh, computer scientist. And he was actually my f- uh, former professor. But-

Tyler Cowen 1:02:45 Great.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:02:45 ... he, he, um, he wrote in a blog post, uh, a- about standardized tests. This is what he wrote. "Uh, I was a 15-year-old with perfect SATs and a published research paper. But not only was I young and immature with spotty grades and a weird academic trajectory, I had no sports, no music, no diverse leadership experiences. I was a narrow, linear, A-to-B thinker who lacked depth and emotional intelligence. The exact opposite of what Harvard and Princeton were looking for in every way." Now, what would happen to Scott Aaronson if he, at that time, had applied to Emergent Ventures?

Tyler Cowen 1:03:15 I've never met Scott.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:16 Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 1:03:16 But odds are very strong we'd fund him.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:18 Yeah.

Tyler Cowen 1:03:18 From the sound of it.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:19 Right.

Tyler Cowen 1:03:19 But again, I don't know him at all.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:22 But the narrow, linear thinker? You, you, you-

Tyler Cowen 1:03:24 I don't know what that means.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:25 Okay.

Tyler Cowen 1:03:25 A lot of people misdescribe themselves.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:27 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 1:03:28 And they say, like, "Oh, if you ask me those questions, I would suck." And they're wrong. They wouldn't suck.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:32 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 1:03:33 I know they don't. And I suspect Scott's self-description is a bit off, but I think he would do very well at Emergent Ventures.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:40 Sure. Yeah. I agree. Uh, let, let's talk about, uh, effective altruism and longtermism.

Tyler Cowen 1:03:44 Sure.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:45 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?

Tyler Cowen 1:04:00 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:04:41 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?

Tyler Cowen 1:04:52 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?

Dwarkesh Patel 1:05:27 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 1:05:27 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:05:40 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-

Tyler Cowen 1:05:52 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)

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:05 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?

Tyler Cowen 1:06:17 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:34 But-

Tyler Cowen 1:06:34 I'm not a pessimist in any given year at all.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:06:37 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?

Tyler Cowen 1:06:47 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:07:31 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-

Tyler Cowen 1:07:37 It probably won't.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:07:37 ... on the planet.

Tyler Cowen 1:07:38 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:07:46 Ah.

Tyler Cowen 1:07:46 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:08:03 But we did emerge from feudalism, right? So why, well, like, if it happened once, isn't that example enough that-

Tyler Cowen 1:08:08 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:08:21 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...

Tyler Cowen 1:08:30 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:08:43 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.

Tyler Cowen 1:08:58 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.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:09:24 (laughs) Oh, what, what do you mean?

Tyler Cowen 1:09:25 So I don't, I don't think of myself as a pessimist, but you can call it that.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:09:29 Wait, wait, can, can you explain that quote, the, the fact that sex exists is-

Tyler Cowen 1:09:32 Well, anything that stands still gets destroyed by maybe parasites or destroyed by something.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:09:38 Uh-huh.

Tyler Cowen 1:09:38 So you've gotta randomize and change what you are through sex. That's, like, the clearly winning model for at least larger things, right? And that's a sign nothing survives for that long. So the existence of sex is the most pessimistic thing there is. I find that ironic.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:09:54 (laughs) Um-

Tyler Cowen 1:09:57 So I'm not the pessimist, sexiest, right?

Dwarkesh Patel 1:09:58 (laughs) Let's say I take your argument that economic growth is very important.

Tyler Cowen 1:10:02 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:02 Does that imply anything in particular about what somebody should do with their life? Or is it basically just an argument about policy?

Tyler Cowen 1:10:09 Uh, it can guide your life a bit. So to think m- just more carefully, how do you fit in? Maybe you could do something important. Maybe you could have higher aspirations. For most people, it won't matter. But again, certainly some people could do much more.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:23 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 1:10:24 And I do my best there to try to help that along.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:27 Right. Uh, i- does it have to do with the fact that we don't know much about what causes economic growth? Or is it just, like, e- even if we knew that there's, like, you could never offer, like, concrete advice about what you could do to increase economic growth?

Tyler Cowen 1:10:37 I give concrete advice to people all the time with a grain of salt. But I'll, like, tell people, "I think you should go to this school, not that school."

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:44 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 1:10:45 That's concrete advice. I, I don't think we know so little about growth. Uh, we certainly know a lot about how to wreck growth, right? So, uh, we know enough.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:10:58 Right, right, but not enough to, like, create an 80,000 Hours for, uh, progress studies, what do you think? Or is that just fundamentally impossible?

Tyler Cowen 1:11:04 What do you mean create an 80- you mean an institution? Well, there's Institute for Progress.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:11:08 No, no, no, but, like-

Tyler Cowen 1:11:09 Run by Caleb and Alec.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:11:09 ... here, here's a list, here's the things you should consider doing with your career.

Tyler Cowen 1:11:13 It's not the right way to think about it.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:11:14 Wha- what? Say more.

Tyler Cowen 1:11:15 You want to sit down with the person, understand the entire context, see what they could do, see if there's a way you could or should bend up the curve. But a list, no, that's... it's a little too EA static maximization for me. If you, like, focus more on learning about cultures, history, you're not gonna, like, come up with some list as the way to approach that.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:11:37 Oh, why, why, why are culture and history going to

Narrator 1:11:39 ... implement this?

Tyler Cowen 1:11:39 They show you how complex things are.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:11:41 Mm-hmm.

Tyler Cowen 1:11:42 And the people who made very significant contributions, how complex the inputs were into that. Or even did very terrible things, like Napoleon. Like, understanding Napoleon, what he came from, ideas he had, super complicated. I don't really get the list version. Oh, here's the list for baby Napoleon. Like, don't invade Russia or-

Dwarkesh Patel 1:12:03 (laughs)

Tyler Cowen 1:12:03 ... I don't know, (laughs) beware Tal, you know, Talleyrand or whatever. It just seems to miss the point.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:12:09 If

Dwarkesh Patel 1:12:10 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-

Tyler Cowen 1:12:17 Yeah.

Dwarkesh Patel 1:12:18 ... 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...

Tyler Cowen 1:12:23 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