welcome everyone it's a pleasure to be here hi tyler hi daniel um so i'll start right away what is a talent that you think you possess that is underrated by everyone else daniel i think that's for you first well pausing before answering a question is definitely a rare skill these days but um i think um
there's something about uh something that's been helpful for me that i've kind of realized i have that i think many people have i don't know if it's totally ubiquitous is um in the process of an interview uh which you know you do in venture a lot like you know hundreds and thousands of times a year
being able to sort of build a grid of you know the person who's that's talking to you who they most kind of remind you of and the outcomes that those people have had uh is i think uh a pretty important skill and i think it's a pretty important skill for you know anyone you know searching for talent but certainly in
the venture world that's kind of what you're doing when you meet these early stage businesses is you're kind of trying to build like some type of search map in your head uh that's more intuitive than it is rational it's sometimes a bit hard to explain why x might remind you of why um
but that's a skill that's a skill i think a lot of people have the benefit i've had is um i got inculcated in this world at a very young age and so i've had many many hours of reps you know just getting it in and mostly making mistakes but occasionally getting it right i don't think i have the talent of
hesitating before answering a question but i think one thing i i'm good at is turning problems into combinatorials and then within my head very rapidly searching for all possible combinations of factors that might somehow fit together and spitting that out in well under a second i'm not even sure that's
an underrated talent but i think it's a way to think about some of the talents i have that if it's an area where i can turn it into that i will typically do quite well but if it's like trying to work the microwave at home which i cannot turn into some kind of combinatorial factorial analysis then
i'm like way below average at trying to work the microwave at home so that's true so daniel if you're looking for talent in um investing or finance how does that look different from the talent in the startup world in the startup world well yeah what makes a good investor is uh very different for one makes a good
founder uh and if you were to kind of make a scatter plot of it some of the attributes are you know completely diametrically opposed you know for example um i think very good investors are uh the the kind of right degree of optimistic but also realistic um whereas founders are too optimistic which they should be i
mean at the end of the day like you know startups are a very funny activity when you think about it from a probability standpoint like most companies fail like almost all companies fail and yet people came to be seemingly doing this activity over and over they're jumping off a cliff over
and over again you like look over the cliff and like everyone who jumped out of the cliff you know is just like on the ground dead but people keep on jumping off the cliff and so founders are kind of you know almost too optimistic but i think when you're evaluating a business especially
at later in later stages i think optimism can be your enemy and often you see when a lot of founders later on in life and i am such a person who started a business sold it and then became an investor you actually have to be able to wear very different kind of psychometric hats and one of them is this continuum
of realism and optimism uh and i'd probably say that's you know the starkest difference between kind of what makes a good startup investor and a good founder um there are probably many others but that's kind of the main thing that you look for um so who's more likely to drink diet coke the two groups
um that's a good question um yeah i'd say i'd say you know both are i think are pretty likely to uh be of the you know whatever diet coke signals you know i don't know something obviously here in san francisco it's quadruple espresso you know 25 coffee and you know maybe the rest of america
is a diet coke but you know both are i think in the people that want more stimulants as opposed to depressants and that just depends on the stage at which they're at yeah i think so um i think uh stage location what not but you know the bit about it's very funny that that the you know you end up writing uh have the
great gift of writing a book with someone like tyler cohen on a topic as expansive as talent and of course what comes out of it is everyone wants to talk to us about soft drinks um and so uh you know sometimes i feel like we're like michael pollan wrote a book about dieting or something and everyone
wants to talk about diet coke but uh yeah i think it's uh it's probably a very common trait across all kind of active people investors need more red wine don't they to regulate the mood maybe yeah maybe they're more you know totally um trying to operate their amygdala with opposing uh you know drugs
uppers and downers but there's some skill to evaluating the wine reflects skill in evaluating investments more than perhaps startups that is probably true the startup founder would probably be the type that does not care what they're drinking you know as long as it gets them hydrated and in the
right mood and the investor definitely has all sorts of theories about the colors and the vintages and the countries and all that may also have to do with disposable income yes it may also have to do with the fact that one is not free tyler both of us are at george mason you've been a professor there for more
than 30 years you've been involved in a lot of hiring decisions and it's a strange place for more reasons than just that both of us are there it's a large state school it's newish it's not an ivy league school but it's had an exceptional economics department you know we've had a couple of nobel
laureates we've had people like you what is the secret sauce at george mason that it manages to attract that kind of talent uh that other schools of comparable level are not able to i like to look for people who believe something very strongly that can't be the only qualification but other economics departments tend not
to do that they look for people who can execute flawless 90 page papers with every possible robustness check now that too is important and useful but it's not what we do if you decide you will specialize in people who believe in something and pursue it passionately and want to sit around and
argue and talk ideas and read books you will end up with one of the most interesting economics departments and we've built a sufficiently strong consensus that we just keep on hiring people who believe things so they turn out being a little wacky right you're selecting for that
but that in turn keeps you different so in how do you know how to screen for that what's the question you are likely to ask at the aea meetings that you know that someone is like technically not unsound but they're also very interesting and they can't game it oh i don't think you have to ask questions if
they believe in stuff they will ask you questions you just have to show up in the room right so it's one case where you don't have to agonize over optimal interview questions and in fact the way we're supposed to interview now supposed to but do is we're to ask everyone the same questions and we do but that doesn't
matter it's not actually a handicap it would be a handicap in almost any other situation but you can ask everyone the same questions and it will just come out who believes in something so at daniel at pioneer one of the things you have tried to do is gamify the experience right uh and so
when it comes to gamification do competitive games work better or do cooperative games work better uh you know to test for ambition and aspiration so about pioneer is uh i mean principally a website uh but it's an online startup accelerator uh kind of a pre yc which i i would have to explain in most
cities but not in this one um and um yeah and so um there's many ways in in where it's kind of different and unique and one of them is that everyone on the platform gets a score every week for the work that they do and so you're sort of incentivized to make your score go up and um there's um
and so kind of the broad idea there is trying to really address it a question somewhat related to talent which is why aren't there more startups and many answers to this question but one of the reasons why there aren't more startups is as we were saying earlier the act of starting a company is completely
irrational and you tend to get a lot of negative stimulus before you get positive stimulus you know you start working at a new job you have a boss that boss kind of wants to hopefully make it a good experience for you they tend to like build a map and a game for you basic game in quotes here startup
doesn't have that uh and so it tends to be you know you tend to hear no no no no no fail and then finally you might get somewhere but a lot of people don't crest beyond the you know the the j curve really and they just drop at the nadir and so uh gamification in a way or some way to make something compelling um
yeah ultimately with the goal of basically creating more startups uh is kind of the theory behind pioneer um and somewhat like how you know peloton gets more people to cycle and um heck i mean people in south korea are literally dying of exhaustion because they're playing video games to death so like
there is something very powerful about that effect whether it's used positively or or negatively now you ask the question of what creates kind of more goodness basically competition or cooperation and you know we think competition uh broadly is what creates greatness and i mean you tend to like
the answer is both obviously because competition creates cooperation within small groups that compete against each other now it is true uh that not everyone who signs up for pioneer like wants to compete on a global leader board against everyone else in the world you know very good competitors i think
tend to have even the best most competitive people tend to have a predictive model of like i'm only going to enter games i can win and so or at least games where i have like maybe a 40 chance of winning and so but but i strongly believe whether you want to compete globally or not everyone
wants to improve every single day and so it's very similar to peloton in the sense that uh you can have a score and you could be playing against yourself i mean you could just be trying to grow your revenue week over week or the amount of active users you have or any one of you know different metrics
and kpis or you could be competing globally and i think that kind of affords us all modalities because i really think there are very few people that don't want to improve at least themselves if not want to you know compete against others but of course every every form of competition i mean usually will intend
some form of local cooperation and i think it's a very good thing um uh because um you know ultimately i think a lot of what our free market enables is uh for people to get excited about the idea of competing building a better product trying a new experience and you know many of those fail but occasionally
those work and it creates you know the microphones that we're using the building that we're in and uh you know the um the city and world that we live in so i think both are necessary on a day-to-day basis though you're trying to create a community right so does the leaderboard sort of trade that off a little bit
because people are just trying to go further up does it turn it into a zero-sum game instead of forming a community yeah it's a good question um and uh what we try to do is uh make yeah the game not necessarily appears zero sum so it is true that for every ending week at the end of the day
if you have a sorted list someone will be at the top and someone you know won't but um uh there's no direct reward function for being number one versus number two it's it's uh i mean there is the glory of it and a lot of our founders love you know just you know send us and tweet screenshots of you
know their position on the leaderboard is you know whatever it's it's great for them um but there's no like direct reward the guarantee pioneer gives you is that if you're in the top decile we will review your application um but like you could be 25th or you know 32nd it doesn't matter we'll still
review your application so it just helps us in that case get a broad sword and because the game is not that zero sum i think people still tend to at least cooperate on non-business related things um and i think on business related matters like founders should either merge their companies or like compete
and not cooperate um that's totally fine um and so you know i think we managed to have best of both worlds but i do think you know when constructing these universes and whatnot it's quite important for it to not feel necessarily zero sum uh you know you could go compete with someone on a running track and it really
doesn't like ultimately they're running faster than you doesn't eat away at any of your pie so to speak and i think that's important um because you know like everything it's a spectrum and um we do want i mean a lot of these startup communities ultimately and san francisco is one for better or worse um
it's basically a giant startup campus they they sort of work because people do at the end of the day feel some form of even if it's not directly related to their business but some form of kinship with each other and you know silicon valley lore is obviously littered with stories of the
person who let me sleep on their couch and you know one thing led to the next so we have both i hope how much of your time in israel like growing up in israel and sort of watching different kind of experimentation with community building different kinds of communes inform how you decided to build the pipeline i'd
love to be able to answer yes to your question that that was somehow extremely informative to me i you know i grew up in a you know dark secluded corner of jerusalem right outside the old city and so i can't really say had you know the most expensive view but in reality um the real place i i experienced growing
up is the internet um and uh you know you know many people now like to talk about how you know kind of bad social medias and how bad these online communities are but you know it that's all that's a very nice thing to say when you're kind of looking out into you know the rolling hills of sonoma and this
beautiful world that we live in here today and um you know look obviously the place where i grew up is certainly not a third world country but um it's very different and isolating to be honest and i think there's many people who immigrate to san francisco and california who feel similarly and the idea of growing up on
the internet does let you see all sorts of experiments and yeah i mean i you know i grew up in the open source community writing code and so that you know to me was an interesting example of a very different organizational model than many different companies um where the leadership in some of these open
source projects is actually quite undefined and you really see tend to see those struggle versus ones that have a defined leader and uh and and so yeah i mean there's an infinite variety of you know forms of uh cooperation but i can't really credit uh israel to that i'd probably really
credit the the time you know 56 kilobyte uh dial-up internet connection i had yeah speaking of internet connection so tyler you're an early adopter one of the things that you've done which is a little bit niche but very fun is the ethnic dining guide that's your way of looking at the world through food
you're not so good at desserts uh you you sort of go straight for chocolate ice cream you know that's that's your go-to move is there something fundamentally different about people who write about food or you know who are food critics versus people who write about dessert and are is there such a category there
should be right dessert critics i don't quite consider desserts to be food so i think in a town like san francisco there will be many dozens hundreds of places that are quite good there will be very few good desserts so in my perhaps backward view there are excellent desserts at michelin-starred restaurants most of all
in europe there are superb desserts in india and then there's very good chocolate ice cream and all other desserts basically are bad and most chocolate ice cream is not good including in the city of san francisco so the fact that desserts tend to be sweet right that was like a decision
made in western cuisine the french decided to segregate out the sweet stuff and make it separate from the meal or say arabic food or even food still in sicily today the sweets are integrated into the main courses much more readily parts of the middle east as well and when you put all the sweet stuff in one
place it's not going to be good unless it has a very high level of ingredient quality and composition so so it is a different kind of taste palette for someone to be appreciated to be able to appreciate desserts i think so and i don't cover desserts because i don't live in kolkata uh i'm not covering michelin-starred
restaurants and chocolate ice cream there's not really that much to say about we all know where it's good and it's bad right and it's good in italy argentina brazil some parts of the u.s most of all the northeast uh it's very good in france actually especially paris but mostly it's bad
we went to joe's ice cream last night it was just awful uh you know i googled best chocolate ice cream san francisco one of the top lists once you get past the google ads it's like well giardelli's is listed three times in the top ten what kind of insanity is that and then swenson's is in the top 10 and
then there's some place called mocha which is like not even ice cream and then there was joe's which was horrible and that was like five of the top ten so the internet has failed us san francisco has failed us chocolate ice cream has failed us some combination of all those things
i'd rather eat you know in israel in tel aviv there's excellent chocolate ice cream that's definitely better than in jerusalem i think yeah i don't know what people make of this my explanation for the bad chocolate ice cream last night was that san francisco doesn't have enough kids like not enough people are having
enough kids and and that's the reason for it aside from the benefit of torturing tyler and not getting him good chocolate ice cream right so one of the things i want to learn about is how you've influenced each other so one is exercise you both have like different ideas of exercise both very regular
daniel you run marathons i believe on every continent and you've run one in antarctica is that right yeah i don't think it's i mean it's you know in a city like san francisco where you know it's hard to go out and not see someone running i don't think it's particularly remarkable to be a runner
but uh yes i think we have very different philosophies when it comes to exercise that is a fair statement okay the last time i went on a hike with tyler he brought his book bag along with a lot of books uh so have you influenced each other on exercise at all do you talk about it have you changed
your philosophy what is your stated philosophy on exercise i very much enjoy games of skill such as tennis and basketball right and those are exercise if it's sheer exercise i'm bored but youtube plus peloton to the rescue that works for me okay so i very much like pellet and that's your influence uh and
pelletin with youtube is great so you can watch magnus carlson and pedal away and magnus is highly entertaining yeah that's definitely not what i do but i appreciate the sentiment how much do you think the gamification in exercise and like sort of the personalized customized version of
exercise has helped you or formed the way you think about running um yeah i mean definitely uh it's formed the way our product is built i think everyone who works on our team is um either a kind of want to be competitive athlete or a want to be competitive chess player and so everyone is in a way you know
getting scores in their hobbies all the time and want to improve and so you know that obviously drives a product ideation forward so um yeah i mean i i think um peloton was a an interesting case study and it's an ongoing case study i guess uh it's that's being evaluated every day in the market but not positively but um
it's uh an interesting case studying how much gamification kind of matters at all um it does seem like people are actually quite motivated by like whatever leaderboard and power mechanics they have out there and on the you know contrary side um they released this thing that totally flopped
i thought it was fascinating that it didn't work a priori if i were just to describe to you here some type of thing you can use on an exercise bike and what it does is it uh responds the music that uh you're listening to and you know as the tempo of the music increases you pedal faster and as the tempo of the
music decree whatever it's all synchronized and it's fun like if i was pitching that i was pitching that at like a venture firm i think people would say wow sounds great peloton built this and and they launched it into this particular thing totally flopped so um i think people tend to really over
complicate it i mean i think there are psychometric personalities i imagine like mine that are like relentlessly interested in improving and for that getting um a feed type feedback loop with any type of numerical score uh is very good and very simple i think they're people that don't really care about that and want to
watch youtube and you know get the work in and move on so um but ultimately um yeah i think it probably helps a certain type of personality tyler do you think this kind of gamification would have made you a different chess player when you were young i think one significant difference
between daniel and myself daniel i see is much more competitive than i am and i think i'm somewhat more obsessive than he is though he's quite obsessive so the areas i operate in for better or worse i'm never asking myself where i am on the leaderboard for instance there's no other person where i
could tell you how many twitter followers i have i just have no idea but i can wake up every morning do my thing practice at it try to progress and just relentlessly endlessly do that forever as i've actually done now for the last basically 46 years so that's a kind of obsessiveness [Music]
but i'm not competing very much at all and i don't know what my leaderboards are and i'm fine with that and you could describe yourself better than i could you but i think your experience is one of the world of gaming more fundamentally and i quit chess when i was 15 because in a way i found competing a little
boring actually it wasn't obsessive enough in a funny way and the thing always comes to an end whereas what i do now it never comes to an end it's like a true extreme of relentlessness does that make sense to you yeah yeah definitely um definitely do you think if you'd be if you were
kind of starting out in the era of you know the internet where things are much more interconnected and reflexive the whole chess thing is just much more in your face do you think you'd play chess longer no i think i would have quit sooner interesting because i would have accelerated to the point of
frustration and boredom interest more rapidly and like quitted 13 rather than 15. so is it because when you were growing up there was still a chance that humans had against computers while playing chess and now that's just it's over no i never thought about that computers didn't worry about there was a chess playing
computer back then called tinker bell people lugged it around to tournaments it was quite large like you had to pull on it it was on a car you needed more than one person to pull on the car it was a standing joke you had the option of not playing it but you knew that if you played it you would beat it
so very different mentality at the time i thought just playing computers was a very far off thing that they would ever be good obviously i was totally wrong i didn't understand how they would manage to copy intuition in different ways uh but i think the the kind of borje's notion of the infinite
unending system you know the infinite library is what really appeals to me and with the internet i would have found that more quickly indeed in the internet itself as i have in a sense now uh ben kaznoka once made to me the interesting point i'm the last generation to have lived in
both worlds in a significant way with internet and without internet and i've lived like 22 23 years with a lot of internet and then i lived well over 30 years without any internet at all and that's just not going to be a thing anymore so uh i feel very privileged actually to have grown up in libraries and not the
internet but then to have had the internet okay so one of the things i want to ask you is since we're in san francisco and everything is elon musk and you know we're always talking about what we're going to do when we end up on mars how do we screen or select for the first
group of settlers what are the interview questions we should ask them that's a great question by the way um i'll throw out a few ideas well you think um uh you know i think the sort of interesting question for martian settlers is um so i mean any form of settler i mean anyone who wants to do that is saying a
lot by self-selecting into it and that i think has been the case for people that have gone to new continents and to settle new nations and existing continents and whatnot um so you're gonna get a lot of free selection effect by virtue of the person wanting to be an astronaut let alone you know a a uh interplanetary settler um
it's quite the linkedin and um uh i think an interesting broader question for that colony will be what's going to keep people together during the hard times um and if you look at like successful countries that were settled there were very strong religious ties uh that built that lore that helped
create fabric uh and look maybe the conditions will be so harsh uh that that alone will create ties but i'd sort of be looking uh and asking for groups of people i wouldn't make no case on kind of what form of religion is the best but groups of people that are very connected on some very deep level
because otherwise uh i think you can end up with something that sort of blows up um but tyler what do you think diet coke drinking obviously i'm an american and i'm personally very influenced by puritan culture in my country's own background so i would look first and foremost for
religion but it's a bit like the gmu hires if you have to ask someone yeah like do you believe in some idea it's already a bit hopeless you know you need to know that they already do before you have to ask them so in that sense it's not an internet question but i think simply whether the person is american
is to me of critical import for settling mars i think americans are fairly well situated to settle mars pretty high level of trust frontier mentality a lot of us are crazy we're relatively religious the notion of settling hostile territory obviously is in our cultural dna israelis possibly it's a little more
complicated because for israel it's a bit more about settling a specific place which mars is not yeah but nonetheless there's the sense of braving the hostile elements so i religious americans and israelis would be my first cut at it and i would even consider you know lds mormons who
tend to have beliefs about other worlds and that human beings should have some role in colonizing other worlds that might help i don't know if that's the strongest lds belief but it's not going to hurt any so i you know i want to double down on the americans and not say the belgians nothing against the belgians
uh they have amazing chocolate ice cream and french fries and some other things but i'm i'm not really going to send them to mars i'm sorry is there like a screening question one screening question for me would be like do they want to have kids how do they think about how many children they want
to have and raise them i think that would be like a key question right anything else we should screen for before we pack them up this i mean i think there's probably a lot of physical stamina that would be necessary just good old like you know can you do 10 push-ups or whatnot like i i i think it's it's probably non-trivial
physically um to get to mars let alone settle it so that part would be an important one uh people who are careful with airlocks would be high on my list yes but just not making very stupid mistakes yeah with physical items yeah so people who are like bad at operating their vacuum cleaner i wouldn't take to mars
yeah so a certain type of like almost like a carpentry skill that would be very useful even though you don't need them to build things maybe the robots do that but you don't want them really pressing the wrong button very much yeah you need a kind of macgyver skill yeah um but it's also a little bit like
selecting for your condo association board or something right like you don't want really annoying people for instance or like people who just want to be contrarian for the sake of being i mean it's sort of also the same way you hire for tenure in a in an econ department you're gonna have lunch with these
people the rest of your life weren't the puritans somewhat annoying like my intuition is you actually would want a lot of annoying people because flanders from the simpsons basically yeah yeah that friction would somehow keep them going yeah and it's the people who don't argue with
each other who could end up very badly off track on mars that you need people who are arguing every day i think yeah i think you didn't ask like are we going or just they go in and we want them to like well i'm not going any more after the answers you guys have given me all these annoying carpenters who know
how to run a vacuum uh i'm fine on earth a chocolate ice cream aside i don't find space that interesting aliens i find interesting but just to put me somewhere empty where most prices are infinity you know i'll say no to that coming back to the talent market do you think tyler it is in disequilibrium or
there's some kind of market failure or there's different kinds of talent markets and some are in disequilibrium some have a failure this book sounds like there is this equilibrium in the talent market and a lot of the suggestions that you have given can kind of push it towards that equilibrium i
think there's massive market failure in most parts of the talent market but it's worth asking which parts work very well and i think actually many parts of gaming it doesn't cost that much to access not that everyone in the world can play games but really a considerable number of people can a performance can
be measured there's leaderboards it's sort of obvious how well you're doing if you want to learn there's a lot of ways you can learn and get better i think jess is a pretty efficient market especially now that many more people in india and china are playing well you play with computers you can become as good as quickly as
you're able to but when it's intangibles i think there's a common situation where when the time comes to make a higher you feel rather stuck but exxonte hardly anyone is doing all the right things in terms of existing you know investing in pre-existing networks honing their own abilities making
themselves sufficiently inspiring sort of figuring out how to attract the talented people to come to them those are the more difficult tasks not like you sit on your throne and three candidates show up and you point to the one and you're only going to get so much better at that you can get better at
that but i don't view that as the way to think about the market failure in most general terms if you find a great person you make them a lot better but they capture a lot of that value so you under-invest in doing that that's the fundamental problem so whoever first spotted elon musk has basically no
share in elon's riches you could say well peter thiel at some modestly later stage spotted elon and you know earn some money from spotting elon but that's the actual problem you can help people a lot and get nothing for it how much of the sort of insights in the book have either
of you managed to implement in your own organizations well when you write a book uh with the title talent you certainly walk into every interview you do in your life uh realizing that guy's thinking he's chatting with a guy who wrote a book called talent so you pretty much want to be on point in the interview um
so i think uh look we obviously already experienced some heightened awareness around an act which most people i think are not sufficiently focused on which is the interview itself and so that only increases i think after something like the book comes out um uh i think we have always kind of been
trying different interview questions i mean the book is really just like a cut from a very long list that keeps on growing and so i think we'll we continue to kind of iterate on that uh over time um but uh i'd say the the biggest shift in my thinking and talent as a byproduct of working with tyler has been on the value
of things like energy and sturdiness and industriousness over raw intellect and iq uh which i i don't think is properly it certainly wasn't in my you know my mindset a couple of years ago and i still don't still don't think is it kind of in the global mindset um and you know we're certainly not saying
that horsepower and iq you know don't matter they certainly do but there is a clearing bar at which which point for most roles i think people tend to overvalue it and kind of don't realize the logarithmic nature of the curve and assuming it's kind of linear but i actually think
more early than many people realize you you sort of want to switch to caring about just how much how vigorous and how energetic that person is um i think that is might be because i'd be curious if you'd agree that it's for because for most tasks uh doing gleans far more information than thinking exactly yeah
and so you'd rather have someone that will just do much more their learning rate should be much higher i mean speaking for myself i hired you right so you are in academia i think in academia there's quite a few people who are significantly undervalued you can't wait too long or they're just totally ruined
but if they're given freedom to operate and actually do things there's already you know reasonable positive selection for smarts right uh and there's some people who really are thirsty to do things and run things and create and make a difference and those people are tracked and trapped in
academia because a lot of them can't see a way of supporting themselves doing a different thing so if you can set up structures where they have that support you can just find a lot of people who can become like 50 100 x more productive by simply not just being academics all the time and uh
your exhibit whatever i don't know what letter but that's you you run you know emerging ventures india and you identify people in india and give them support and get them going with their own startups and projects and intellectual endeavors and that's like phenomenally way more productive and like are you smarter now than then
well probably somewhat but that's not the difference the difference is this ability to see like there's a difference you can make and really want to do it and be in a structure that allows that to happen so this is an example of how like the market for talent can be way more efficient not by
like 2x but buy like 100 x or more in many many cases yeah but i actually use the insights in the book for what i do so you did it before you read the book too so so i'm asking you if you do the same like outside of evie is it easy to bring insights like this to like a university system the way we hire i mean
not just an econ at george mason or at mercatus because these are institutionally kind of set in their ways talent issues i think about all the time i said before i'm i'm an obsessive person if i'm waiting in line for my chocolate ice cream whatever i'm thinking about like has the staff
organized who's doing a good job why why not it's sort of pointless in a way but you can't help but do it and it's some form of practicing is just to always be on and processing and thinking through like how is this working and why and i find that useful but i know it's it's weird uh like does it make a person happy i'm
not unhappy doing it it's you know it's part of being obsessive fair daniel how do you think this interview or conversation is going on thank you for asking i say it's going well i appreciate uh the questions are very colorful better than uh some of the questions we we've gotten i think no one has to date
asked us how to screen for mars you know martian satellite human martian settlers um so i've been enjoying it what about you better than i thought yeah i had this whole secret plan when they were when they were plugging the mic there were some loose buyers and i was like it'll come in handy if things
are going badly yeah so so we're all still here um how do you think about immigrants and talent so the more specific question is how are immigrants different from children of immigrants is there anything that differentiates them i see a lot of differences in the indian community but
i'd like to know more from from how you think about that tyler i'm a big fan of immigration for countries that can manage it for for me that definitely includes the united states i think immigrants bring more energy there's plenty of data they do startups at higher rates but immigrant parents often are in
difficult positions they come without networks they're starting all over immigration can be much harder for men than women there's a literature on this because if the woman is raising children her position in the family more or less remains intact but the man is starting all over again and very likely is
underplaced in some significant way and spends quite a few years just working to achieve like a decent middle-class income but if you see persistence within families whether you think it's you know genetic or upbringing or social cultural whatever but i strongly believe in persistence in families
the children of the immigrants will start off like usually in decent enough schools often in the suburbs could be northern virginia it could be ontario they'll develop sort of normally north american networks they'll be completely fluent in english in a very useful way and it can just be full speed ahead they're still not
taking prosperity for granted their parents often are you know kicking their butt like you've got to succeed which is useful though not always happiness inducing and it's just a general group of people i'm extremely bullish upon and i think there's a lot of good reasons both sort
of intuitively but that also show up in plenty of actual data and research studies why we should be bullish on immigrants and try as a nation to take in more immigrants than what we're doing right now to what extent is the kind of positive effect of immigrants true of people that immigrate within the united states
i don't think it's very true anymore i think it was a long time ago say people who went to california people who settled utah but now to move across the united states there's always internet supermarkets are the same there are definitely different things politically but if you're a dentist who lives in
denver rather than columbus ohio it doesn't feel that brave to me like fine maybe there's some very modest positive selection but uh it's weakened considerable it's quite weak i think maybe people who never move but if a person only moves once and not that far i don't feel that's negative selection
yeah like i grew up in new jersey moved to northern virginia which is like what four hour car trip away it's not really such a brave thing to do i moved to more trees but still that seems fine a marker yeah so an interesting thing that i see in the indian diaspora is sort of the first
generation immigrants especially probably the ones you're familiar with in the bay area they are not very risk-taking and entrepreneurial in the sense that they're not doing startups and stuff like that but they're very good at doing very well in big tech firms uh and sort of you know like like very
good at navigating a particular system uh it's the next generation sort of you know american born uh from indian families who end up being very very entrepreneurial is that a good way of thinking about all children of immigrants or there's something funky going on with the indian immigrants
mostly children of immigrants just aren't that risk-taking i think there's something interesting going on with indian immigrants in particular if you look at the executive leadership bench in tech there's massive over-representation of indian immigrants or children of indian immigrants and and
i don't really know i don't know if you have a view but there's something interesting going on there um [Music] uh and so that i think that's an interesting effect someone ought to study and certainly with startup founders which is maybe the area i'm most studied in um you tend to see first-generation
immigrants but these are people that come to the united states usually not out of kind of sheer desperation to have some basic form of economic success because they were somewhat suppressed in their origin country but more people in search of some sort of spiritual belonging uh that they believe they found and
whatever technology they're working on um and so they they look much more like kind of religious migrants i think than your kind of typical immigrant i'm trying to make it um the founders at least that i mean to come out to san francisco and some of them actually you know are american just immigrating from you know
uh you know iowa 2sf and obviously many of them international too the best ones are not necessarily that worried about making a buck tomorrow they're technical they found an interesting scene and they kind of want to belong uh so i think it's actually quite different from the kind of immigrant persona of you
know we took our whole family into the us we have two you know screaming crying babies and we're just trying to survive i think those people for very obvious reasons are very risk-averse um go ahead i'm strongly of the view that right now is a kind of golden age for the indian diaspora and also india
so if you look say at florence during the renaissance or you look at central europe in the early decades of the 20th century you see remarkable truly remarkable levels of achievement that don't happen before don't happen after you know it's not some kind of genetic thing but somehow everything is coming
together just right and i think part of talent is to realize when you hit these mother lodes and then to figure well we're just going to try to do a lot here as much as we possibly can so investing in you know potential mathematicians in hungarian high schools in 1916 was a really good thing to do you don't even
have to be that good at picking talent so today for whatever reason i do think it's india possibly south asia more broadly i see the potential for parts of nigeria kind of joining that club it's it's further away maybe still contingent but for whatever reason right now something remarkable is
happening combination of level of aspiration internet is good enough enough people with enough english fluency some kind of underlying flexibility of worldview that i think has made indians relatively well suited say to be ceos and american companies in a way we might not have expected say 30 years ago
so i think something extraordinary is going on and it won't last forever and it was not the same say 40 years ago maybe it started 20 30 years ago but now we're seeing it all blossom so to me it's very exciting i would agree evie india is a lot of fun there's for those of you who are
investing or thinking of investing in india there are a lot of low-hanging fruit a lot of the people that we picked for evie india if they were in the united states or canada they would have been in incubator programs and accelerator programs and magnet schools and teal fellowship or something like that
but none of that exists in india the scouting or the incubation infrastructure doesn't exist so actually tyler and i are in competition usually and i get far better quality of applications uh a higher average and a lower variance than than the ones that tyler gets from from the rest of the
world but that's my simple explanation for what's happening in india so one of the things that both startups and economics departments have in common is failure i mean this is both at the level of i mean startups it's fairly obvious but in economics you know most people who start their phds don't finish or even the
people you know the sorts that tyler is hiring for as professors in the econ department they may stop publishing or they may give up at some point what is a good way to screen for who will handle failure well or at least better than the others in the running i think in science we've
allowed institutions to evolve to the point where people have options of not failing at all so science ought to be more like startups like most ideas do fail even published research papers and top journals if you ask researchers who really know and they're willing to speak honestly with you like what's the chance that
paper is actually true you'll get answers like twenty percent thirty percent you don't get answers of fifty percent but we've created this veneer or cloak of if you do all the right things in terms of process we'll sort of all pretend to take this paper seriously you'll get tenure somewhere maybe not at
harvard or mit but like it at some tier one research university and you'll be given all these bureaucratic duties and you have to referee a lot of papers and hire other people and it's the self-replicating thing that insulates people from truly failing but also means that fewer people than
ever before pursue true success and i think it's an example of gross talent misallocation and it is a better lifestyle if you become an academic and if you work hard enough and you're smart enough you can't fail but we're doing ourselves a gross disservice and i think a lot of our sciences are badly out of
whack for this reason and they should become more like startups again but structures tend to ossify and academia certainly is no exception to that yeah i there is um look there's kind of classical answers to your question of you know how do you you look for stories early on in
someone's life a failure and whatnot and all that stuff is true um there is uh i think a great emotion to be on the lookout for in an interview in particular when assessing founders um is fear uh and sometimes you meet people and you just get their their kind of naked ambition uh is so large and vast that
i don't feel fear for my life but i definitely feel a little bit of fear uh being in the room with them and i think that's a very promising sign when one feels that emotion um and that i think is a good proxy towards you know will the person handle failure and i think a lot of the best founders i've had the pleasure of
working with don't even really experience like setbacks and failure the same way most people do or the degree of badness of the news for something to register in their mind as a true failure is much higher than it is for most people a lot of bad news is immediately misinterpreted as great news um
you know oh market's down great you know a lot of talent you know will be fired and we'll be able to hire them or it's a correction we'll you know you know creative destruction and whatnot so i think a lot of that comes kind of out of just a general sense of vigorousness and vitality uh that i think is some what
correlated uh with this kind of sense of ambition too um so i think about that a lot i i generally i think about kind of reflexively i try to think about how i feel when i interview someone and i i i imagine actually everyone's doing that some awareness to the process is quite helpful though yeah
yeah resilience is is somehow hard to test for right it just needs to be observed it's one of those things you can figure out fairly quickly i just don't know if there's an interview question to figure it out yeah i mean one of the reasons why it's if founders i think who are not strictly
economically motivated and are motivated by some deeper belief uh or better is uh the the the underlying barometer of what they're going to be resilient about is much greater than the local game of like oh this fundraising round fell through it's a much deeper there's a much deeper game going on is basically oh i told
everyone i know i never felt like i ever fit into anywhere in life and now and i've now gone around told all my friends family that i'm doing this company thing so like i'm doing the company thing the company thing cannot fail um and uh i think you know that type of perseverance look every single and every
single great startup has had these dark moments of death or near death uh you know and obviously everyone's talking about spacex you know famously failed three launchers couldn't feel the fourth but like every startup has that narrative and so you often need someone that's powered by a deeper reserve
currency than like dollars in order to see through that is your office messy or neat and when you walk into someone's office or workspace do you judge them one way or another on how talented they are depending on how messy it is you know steve jobs famously said someone asked him that question and he
said you know everyone says organize desk is an organized mind but most desks that i've seen that are organized are empty so would you say an empty desk is a what mind uh and uh he famously had a very messy desk um so i do think um zoom has created this kind of although it has reduced the amount of entropy or
information you're getting from someone in an interview i think everyone here can probably attest to the zoom interview is not as uh enticing exciting revealing or interesting as a real world interview but it does reveal other information net net you're still getting less but you're suddenly getting this new interesting
information to the background the you know where they are there's like the cats you know wandering around okay that's interesting and um and i don't know you know i don't know that our all of our mental models you know built around you know uh decades of calibrating on real world interviews
where you don't get that information and now suddenly have to be readjusted to that and so i think it's a good question um you know you generally have you know you're kind of obvious the desk is a reflection of the conscientiousness i think of an individual i think for some roles uh
conscientiousness to the extent it moves at a continuum that pulls down openness which you know those big psychometric theories would disagree with you meaning they would say the big five aspect scale are totally independent of each other but you do really sort of wonder the person who's hyperconscientious who
really dots every eye and crosses every teeth exceedingly rare i think to find someone that is really really conscientious and also really open um and so i kind of do tend to believe that they kind of affect each other a bit more than we realize and so you know i think that can be a revealing thing in
either direction i mean i don't know that you would necessarily want say your product designer to have the uh most uh organized desk that you know to steve jobs parlance is also quite empty um i don't know that i would want to see my accountant have an incredibly disorganized desk with all sorts of
returns and post-its and you know papers flying around so much depends on the role what about your court and tyler you know why i'm asking you this question i i like the messy desk now i'm biased here to be clear but when i see the desk isn't messy it just looks to me like there's an
input that's not being used that there's a lot of slack in the system and that the person tolerates slack without thinking well how can i put this task to better work and then i get suspicious well what what other inputs is there a lot of slack on their own labor their own effort their own intelligence i don't know
i do know some very successful people with very neat desks but it rubs me the wrong way and i think of the messy desk as quite organized of course there's like what's the average quality of organization versus what's the total amount of organization that went into this event of the desk and the messy desk is going
to have more total organization almost always even if the average quality has higher variance there'd be an inefficiency in the symmetry required of a perfectly organized desk meaning like everything can now only fit into squares which means you can you have less total space sort of like a bin packing problem
that's right and to me it's also a science then there's the floor which tyler uses very well for the packing problem but there's a sign they're not using the physical dimension somehow in their thinking and i'm a big fan of the physical dimension yeah sort of thinking with your body thinking with what you
put on the floor sort of filling out every like every computing device available to you space is a computing device and if you're not using space your computer is is lying there passive fallow who wants that me now i know what you think when you walk into my office because there's nothing
on any surface it's pretty neat but i assume at home it's some huge sprawling mess right no yeah and i don't walk into tyler's office because there's no room to walk into and the door doesn't fully open and and other such things no the one thing that the tyler's office does reveal is the obsessiveness
it's like everything that is being read or worked on in that moment is right there so it is very much like a picture of what you're doing at that time and it's like a task for people like how will you react to this unbelievable mess and you'll see things that don't even seem like they should belong in an
office like a voodoo flag so you see a voodoo flag in an office and what does the person say what do they think that's useful too right do they even notice it i'm always interested in people who don't seem to notice the mess at all like the repeat visitors like may not notice it anymore but people who go
there for the first time and talk to me like i'm a normal human being that's fascinating it's like what's with them i don't think anyone talks to you like you're a normal human being but it has nothing to do with the mess in your office one of the things that i'm curious about
is a lot of us are looking for good mentors what is a good way to figure out if someone will be a good mentor especially long term is there an is there a way to interview for a good mentor i um i i grew up outside of silicon valley and i was very interested in tech and there weren't really uh i mean my father
taught computer science for a living so he was a good sort of didn't really teach me how to code but he set up a home with a lot of coding books and that was the only thing to read so that's what i did but um that aside i you know i i uh i remember a time before youtube uh and
so i'm old enough to say that um but i'm also young enough to say that uh i remember once youtube came online i i just never stopped kind of watching content and lectures on it and so i think a lot of i find it sort of interesting a lot of people here want you know the best real world mentors but um
we do have this amazing product uh that you know i think 50 years ago no people could barely dream of where we have effectively an infinite amount of content from the world's best teachers investors mathematicians and for me you know when i was running my business it was actually very helpful in specific
ways like you learn specific tricks um but also in ways that um just like watching you know very charismatic leaders talk is definitely a great thing to do the night before you have your all hands and so i think that the amazing thing about the reality we live in today is yeah you can
interview literally millions of mentors on youtube uh for free uh any basically anywhere in the world and um i found for for me that was a huge thing um and uh you know silicon valley in particular is is a very obviously it's a very porous place and and uh people are generally very helpful to each other and so you
tend to have i wouldn't call them mentors but you know people who take a you know a step of you know good will based on limited information they have on you that you know go out of their way to help you and someone did the same thing to them and you know i in many ways i wouldn't be here without
someone taking a bed and funding me and you know now i'm kind of trying to pay it forward to others and so you know those things kind of come into your lap i do worry a little bit when i meet people who are overtly searching for mentors for the sake of finding mentors i'm sort of wondering whatever you're looking for like i i
don't think that's quite going to satisfy it and to the extent one wants just like good mental models of like what is success what does like a really good sales person look like or what does a really good math professor look like that's available online in unlimited fashion so tyler i don't know if you
have a different view but if you want to find good mentors i would say focus on yourself don't focus too much on finding the manner so if i'm thinking of someone i might use fully manner and they would in turn you know teach me things but i would wonder well is this person as curious as i am
something like that would be a starting point and i do figure they can't fake that and they can't even like set out to become more curious or something a little forced about that but if they actually are very curious and just allow that to grow they will end up in a position where maybe i will end up having a connection with
them so for it to happen organically and figure out what your strengths are and let those blossom and then just be out there but again don't don't try to force the mentoring thing too much because potential mentors can sniff that out and that to them is very boring someone who wants to be
mentored is like the most boring thing you can imagine someone who wants to learn something can be very interesting however tyler you're a very good mentor and i think that has something to do with how generous you are how do you rate generosity on the on the scale for a good mentor i don't know that i'm
generous i think of myself as pretty selfish and like people i mentor in some ways mentor me and i learn from them and i'm like always trying to think obsessively how can i learn from them so i'm open to the notion of kind of selfishly a bit exploiting them and like for me to stay in touch or like
stay violent you run an organization that gives out money uh to people around the world yeah how would you square that with the idea of you purporting to be selfish first it's fun yeah uh second it is a source of social capital which is very valuable i'm not paid at the margin to do it uh but i learn
really an incredible amount and i get some sense of where the world is going and that to me is exciting i feel i have a higher like living standard than just about anyone i know and i know a lot of people with like very high net wealth i don't really think of them as richer than i am in terms of like time usage
memories i have like art music consumption of desserts whatever i think of myself as like wealthier than them in human capital terms for the most part so i'm pretty selfish all right and i think i'm good at it at being selfish well for me it wasn't the fact that you give money away it's the time
i mean it's an extraordinary time investment both in eevee and everyone you know as the eevee family grows more and more time is spent solving their problems and helping them figure their life out but people are fun right and i certainly have enough time on my own you know locked in closets reading books and
the like so i'm not giving that up if anything i still have too much of that and should spend more time with people well here's your chance here we are right yeah so i think this is a good time to hear some questions from you if you have any you can just come up to the mic there's one on either
side and just state your name and ask your question uh we also have go ahead you also have questions on the ipad i believe can i can i go please hi owen evans uh from oxford um so i'm gonna give a science fiction type scenario that maybe has some relevance to talent so imagine that say half of all people had an
identical twin and some people have like 10 identical twins um so we're in this very different world and talent identification in some sense is much easier what kind of impact does that would that have on say startups or like maybe other spheres where talent is important i think there's somewhat less
information contained in identical twins than many people in the bay area would suppose i think maybe like america as a whole might underrate the role of genetic factors in talent but the people who think about it at all i think tend to overrate significantly how much it matters
and there are plenty of identical twins with like very different outcomes there's quite a few of them while they're both law partners in cincinnati uh but at the highest levels those very small differences it's like a multiplicative model you need to have like eight or nine very definite things
go to an a or a plus level for you and it might happen for you and not for your identical twin so i think at the highest levels of achievement identical twins do not contain a lot of information and they would not be that useful in talent search and i wouldn't go around like oh like did someone clone bill gates
it's sort of like an identical twin whereas like the eight-year-old who was the clone bill gates i want to support that person with some vc money uh i mean there's still a better than average bet obviously but that would not be my obsession absolutely not there's some weird
confluence of environment and genes and circumstance uh that maybe you know it when you see it but ex ante trying to predict that by looking at any one of the factors i don't think you'll get very far hi andy yeah hello again i'm andy from emergent ventures uh one of the many uh y'all uh you talk a lot about
energy and vigor i'm really struck by that and it makes me wonder where do you think that comes from why is it so variable why is so different between people how plastic is it that's an awesome question isn't it um know there's all those like toy studies about uh gate you know uh walking gate and uh like all
other health uh you know telemetry with people generally correlating long correlates with longevity and whatnot and i don't know that anyone's running the regression on that on income but i think it would be interesting um uh i don't know i'm i mean i think sort of is energy plastic tyler i don't know
if you'd have a different view i think which i think is an awesome question is uh sort of a bit of a nature nurture biology ask question um like there is some basic you know mitochondrial factory thing going on that seems like more efficient in some people than others and uh and so i think that just leads to
more hours in the day of work more chances taken you know if you assume the batting average is roughly even just a higher chance of home run but uh like when you read the interviews of paul mccartney you know or the documentary and he's just like you know added george harrison is like
again we have to go again it's like 10 p.m again and so you just and there's thousands of those story you know steve jobs went out of just people that are more shots on goal um and so i think that's sort of must compound tyler do you think energy is plastic i've never read a serious research paper
on this question but my intuition is that energy and that kind of vitality is one of the most heritable of characteristics i'm not saying you will be a copy of your parents but whatever was plugged into you at birth is what you have and if i think of myself or the other people i've known their entire
lives which is not that many people but i just don't see that much change and the way i am my sense is i was that way at three or four at age two i don't remember my mother always told me that always kind of antsy wanting the next book something and i just don't think it's something i taught myself you can
once you're that way learn how to use your environment to make yourself better at that and get the genes environment interaction going and that is very much something you learn rather than something you're born with how do i like multiply your interaction effects but that core something or other
paul mccartney was composing songs at age 14. he just finished a tour he's finished gumpature now he's 80. he doesn't need the money puts out an album every two years takes on massive projects art books everything incredible you just read biographies of paul it just clearly seems he was born with it
why do you think human gore body temperature is dropping you know in 2018 there was a famous study put out by the united states i think military army that captured human core body temperature longitudinally over time and the u.s core body temperature at least is like dropping now you could say
it's some type of odd measurement effect thermometers have changed you know since the 1930s or whatnot but to the extent that's like an odd proxy towards energy i think we are declining in energy as a country putting immigrants aside which is going to be a complex story of its own and may not be the same from all
other places but the country to me seems to have much less energy than even it did earlier in my lifetime just anecdotally so i worry about that yeah hi i'm spencer uh what if anything do you think we're doing wrong at a national level with our talent evaluation of politicians you're closer to dc than me so i don't
know where to start with that i would just say in my basic view of politics the main problem usually is the voters not always but typically it's the voters i think we're saying talking about this before in the green room i think senators as a whole are actually fairly impressive it doesn't mean i agree
with what they do or say or changes they push for but just as sort of raw studies and talent they seem to me pretty good i live right outside of washington dc i know or have met really very large numbers of people in politics chiefs of staff military agencies people on the board of the fed i think
our talent in those slots is pretty good not perfect but that is not our national problem in my opinion at all i can name plenty of individual politicians who i think are just absolute train wrecks but again i would think in terms of the main problem being the voter i think our political system does better
at bringing in some talent than you would think and it's striking to me if you live in the d.c area in how many families almost every family there's some notion of like doing national service that i actually find strikingly absent in the bay area maybe in the whole us its weakest tier and strongest where i
live uh but that sense of obligation to national service it kind of actually works i think and u.s government still has done a whole bunch of things properly we did operation warp speed that would be one example we had a lot of talent there the economist heading it michael kramer
nobel laureate one of the very best economists alive on planet earth and he was running that side of operation warp speed well how'd that happen like we're doing something right but at the end of the day you know the voting inputs i don't know i i really do worry but daniel that's going to be a much better answer
than when i can give you girlfriend i'd love to hear uh two or three anecdotes um from the two of you on times in which uh like specific moments in which you've really made a difference in somebody's ambition or aspiration you talk about that at the back end of the book and i'd love to get
a couple case studies of like how you did it how you zipped in there i think it's important not to self-deceive i've had like really quite a large number of people i know some of whom are in this room tell me i made a big difference i'm quite convinced they're sincere but i'm not sure they know
and i think there's something quite useful to just being obsessive and continuing and almost not trying to figure out too much there's some odd ways in which i think our society is too data-driven and just keep on trying to do it and repeat and try to be a good example and if you're trying too hard to measure
your marginal product you'll maybe end up conforming too much or doing too many things that are measurable and at the margin maybe the way to have an impact is to not worry too much about measuring your success i don't think that answer can work for everyone but it's how i've approached
the problem and i sort of feel without measuring it that it's worked pretty well for me i think i think that is a very good philosophy the i mean oddly i think the simplest thing i don't know about ev but certainly i find i've done over the course of my career that people seem to say has been useful for them is
just either funding or at least encouraging people to move as to silicon valley ideally if they're in tech but even just a new city uh and you know you they tend to like mispropagate that at me like oh you did cause that is actually i think like well first of all anyone hopefully she
would have nudged them at some point but it's really just that that movement and that immigration pattern is i think really important shruti what's your answer i don't have a very good one uh i think so the one of the answers that people give me when i talk to them and tell them or you receive the evie grant in india
is they say oh you believe me like not believe in me but they can't even believe that someone actually trusts them with the money and like really trust the story that they are selling to me and and so on and and the first thing they say is i won't let you down so that's like the only thing i can
pinpoint like a moment when i feel like something is changing here uh i don't think i'm responsible for it i think it would have happened anyway you know someone else would have given them funding or believed in them uh but pretty much almost all of them say that i mean that tells you more about how
broken things are in india than about me right but but i can't think of that as a tangible thing where my faith in someone is somehow such a big signal to them that they have a you know even if it's marginally higher self belief i it's it's worth it hello my name is riley uh tyler you had
a conversation with mark andreessen and you asked why peter thiel could spot talent so well and he countered that this concept of bad signal you know he throws up the bat signal and people come and you have your own bat signal you know you have your own bat signal there's a portfolio of ideas through
your blog all your books with pioneer might be this egalitarian aspect to gaming what not i'm curious what components of that bat signal do you think are the most effective people come to you and say oh man i really love this about your portfolio i really love this about pioneer i think the bigger and more globalized
more networked the world gets the higher the returns to the bat signal and bad signals are still one of the most underrated ways to be effective that we have some kind of weighted average of how effective they were in the past and we apply the weighted average but their importance is just rising very very sharply i think even
over the last five years so i think the world likes some kind of authenticity in bat signals so like don't think too hard about your bad signals maybe now if they're bad to begin with and you don't think too hard i guess they'll stay bad but like that that's great because then more people like my
bat signal and maybe like they should be coming to me so uh i don't know i try not to overthink the batch signal and if i write a blog post like i was working on a post uh earlier today like what's the difference in the 18th century scottish enlightenment and irish enlightenment like that makes no sense
as a topic like maybe someone in ireland will read it like okay but there's no way you could come up with an argument that that's what i should be sending out as my batch signal but like that will be the bat signal and i actually think it's fine i think the one thing i'd add to that is
that there's something very the best people are ones that view you as a way to gain advantage for themselves and so they're not attracted to like you as the bad signal because they like want to be near you you are they're going to step on you to get somewhere else and that's great um uh and then i think it's important
nuance that you some people miss when they set out their bat signals i would say tyler's bad signal is not the difference between irish and scot scottish enlightenment though that's interesting i think it's consistency i just recently found out that he's blogged every single day on marginal
revolution for 19 plus years so i think that's the bad signal right that's part of it yeah and no day has that been hard i think it gets to the authenticity point there's no day where i've said i have to blog today or i'll break the streak hey i'm uh josh thank you for speaking
this is an awesome conversation uh one big topic in sf especially is on automation are there any parts of the talent process that you think could be automated obviously you know ats is a thing uh and with the rise of automation maybe it's pretty industry specific but are there any changes in how people seek
talent that will come as things get more and more automated i run a company that you know principally has i think for our little corner of talent meaning venture tried everything under the sun in order to automate it and look i you know i think you can like many processes uh you basically split things into two uh
there's basically the spam filtering process of basically weeding out people that don't make any sense for us for whatever reason um like what they're working on is non-economic uh or they don't have the qualification like that you can probably do um with software there's a second step
of it um basically okay it's like imagine this is gmail right so you've got rid of the spam but now it's like you gotta pick what in the inbox is important that's a much harder task um i'm sure it can be done in software um but i think it's a bit more nuanced and like with the the really tricky thing in
kind of inventor in particular is um like regressing on success is pretty hard not just because the data points are pretty sparse like what great founders look like like maybe you have like 10 000 which is not that helpful um it machine learning scale um but also because everything changes all the time
so like the psychometric makeup of a great founder in say 2015 sas era uh you know is someone like you know frank luddy who started service now is basically a sales machine started a sales empire it's very different from who's going to be a very good founder say working on transformer models who's
going to be much more like woz than steve so you use everything kind of is shifting constantly so it's tricky i assume a lot of automation can be done for that first step i think for the second step um you could um but um the final thing i'd say is i guess inventor in particular you are rewarded so aggressively uh for
making the right calls that you will be able to always you know afford the salary for people to review it and uh you're penalized of course very aggressively by arrows of omission uh not co-mission so i think you're gonna always end up with an economic model where you can have people it's obviously
very different if you're like you know mcdonald's and whatnot and you're trying to figure out okay like who's gonna be able to flip burgers a year in and but i don't know enough about that feel to a pine there thank you for attending thank you tyler thank you daniel thank you thank you [Applause]