[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with Tyler what we have for you today is an actual conversation I'm here with Daniel gross who is an angel investor venture capitalist he
entered the startup world at a very young age he ended up working for apple he founded a search engine called Q he was I think the youngest ever partner at y combinator he now is the founder and CEO of pioneer Adventure Capital firm but most importantly for me he is my very good friend and also co-author of our new forthcoming book called Talent how to identify energizers creatives and winners around the world Daniel welcome
thank you so much for having me Tyler let's start with a simple question talk us through what is a good interview question pick one and tell us why it's good you know we're going to get to that in a minute but I actually had a question on my mind for you sure as I sit here and I'm holding a can of Diet Coke in my hand that I'm gonna crack open I was wondering you know Bill Gates Elon Musk Lauren Summers Warren Buffett
John carac all of these people drink diet coke what do you think is going on with that I think they have habits of nervous energy and more energy than they know what to do with and there's no series of challenges you can present to them that exhaust all of their kind of nervous intellectual mental energy so it has to go somewhere some of them might twitch some of them just keep on working basically forever but also drinking diet
coke is a something you can do you feel it's not that bad for you it probably is really bad for you the quantities just get racked up I've seen this in many high Achievers what's your hypothesis yeah I don't know it's a good question of course you know I mean many people in America drink diet coke you know I don't exactly know what we're selecting for but that would be boring to just leave it there I I do wonder if
this amazing molecule we discovered called caffeine is really good and and maybe these very high Achievers are just slightly caffeinated all day long there's also something very you know neurotic about getting to worried about you know is aspan good for you bad for you regular Coke Cherry Coke just drink it and move on so there's a kind of sturdiness there maybe in fact it is really bad for you and the people who
manage to be very productive while consuming it you know are spectacularly good it's like deadlifting on Jupiter you know there's extra gravity yeah I think it's an interesting question I kind of do wonder how much of what we assume when we think about Talent you know how much of it is innate versus just you know Environmental I wonder if there isn't something super short time Horizon about a lot of very successful people that the task right
before them has to seem so important that they'll shove aside everything else in the world to maintain their level of energy and as a kind of collateral damage maybe some long-term planning gets shoved aside as well it just seems so imperative to win this Victory now there is something definitely I'm struck by when I meet a lot of the very productive people I've met in my life they seem to have extreme Focus but also
extreme ease of focus meaning it's not even difficult for them to Zone everything out and just focus on the thing that's happening now and you might ask them even like how do you do that and is that a special skill that you have and what type of drug are you taking and they look at you with a daed and confused face so anyway you asked me what is a good interview question but maybe you gave us one right so say you
gave the diet co question to someone who came to you with the startup what would count as a bad answer and why why would it be bad I think in interviews in General a very simple thing to look for I'm still by the way I should mention a preemptive huge asterisk that I'll only say Once on This podcast which is I may say different hypotheses that I have but they are opinions of a student not of a master so I'm still learning but all of
that said I think sometimes in interviews and when you meet people in general there's kind of just a sense of being asleep or awake and you know asleep is someone who doesn't really even you know have the idea to think about the world as just like you know maybe diet is something really good you know what actually drives that and someone who's awake has actually had that thought already so for me it's the
rejection of the question would really only be the bad answer and I think that's true in a lot of interviews in general you this very conversation we're having you can kind of tell like if people are having fun with each other's questions and whatnot or whether it's monotonous and you know someone who kind of locks up and freezes when you ask them if you know maybe Diet Coke is correlated to productivity which is a
bit of a silly question at the end of the day just the the fact that they're not having fun with it I think is something to look for so what's another good question the diet co question I like what else is good you know one thing I think we have both probably learned in interviews is the best interview questions break the fourth wall of the interview so to speak and the characters come out a little bit and
it's kind of the same Joy you have when a character breaks on on set or on stage watching some behind the scenes footage or something a blooper real and in good interview questions I think ultimately will have that property of breaking people out and so you know a really good one that we can't do now because we just got started in this conversation but you know about 34 of the way in just asking the question you know how do you think
this conversation's going is bit off pudding it's a bit funny it breaks the stress or the kind of fixed nature of the conversation which isn't fun so I always like having fun with that one I think another another interesting one that I learned from a friend of mine is do you have any good conspiracy theories you know that you're liking lately which is interesting because it's unusual and you know I find like at the end of the
day a lot of really good really productive people are constantly exploring kind of on the Fring and frontiers of all ideas so you end up with people that have odd theories I find creativity and interest in conspiracy theories to be correlated yeah that there's some innate desire to connect a bunch of different points a bunch of data is thrown at you like the JFK assassination or you know how Co 19 came to be and whatever you think the
truth is if your mind is sufficiently restless in the right way you won't be content with the regular stories right they seem not very satisfying like oh Jack Ruby he simply came along and killed Lee Harvey Oswald now maybe that's true right I'm no expert on this but if you're not irritated or pissed off by that event I think there's something wrong with you it's a sign you're taking too many things for granted do you think that maybe the
Simple Theory there that's a bit of a conspiracy theory is just true that Lee hary osel there operated by Russian agents he met while he was living in Russia I think there's some chance of that and I think there's room for a Hybrid Theory where actually they trained him they told him to go back and do terrible things one of the things mentioned might have been assassinating a president maybe they didn't even think
he was up to it like he didn't pass their diet coke interview questions and the KGB is pretty rough and tough right Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't someways apparently not a very impressive man but they let him go back and they're like oh you know it's like you let people try their startup and maybe you'll never hear from them and all of a sudden they wake up one day and it's like oh my goodness you know that's a unicorn from
the KGB point of view that is very true with startup companies where having invested in a lot of early stage businesses that got big but also worked at YC it's it's really humbling in fact where you'll meet a cohort of companies at Y comidor and you and all of you know these other partners who are very very smart people many of them smarter than me will kind of informally kind of vote on who you think is best and you're
almost always wrong almost always the Dark Horse and it's almost always not who the crowd favorite is there's a humbling lesson there that you can learn in the opposite direction about the JFK assassination you think Jack Ruby just strolled in one day and shot him or do you think there's something deeper there my suspicion is there's something deeper there but it may not be a full-blown conspiracy of the sort that would
satisfy actual conspiracy theories the ability of chaos to resemble conspiracy cannot be underrated I would say definitely definitely so take these committee procedures where the the Dark Horse is actually the excellent candidate and ends up being overlooked or not the most popular how do you think we can improve those processes to spot the effective Dark Horse more frequently well right so kind of take a step back
why are we even here and why would I even have a shred of you know an interesting opinion on talent and to the extent that I do I think it's because in the Venture business much more so than I think almost any other business you live in constant paranoia of missing out on great talent okay you might say well like that's true in every company and you know it's true at the Met You know when you're looking for someone to play
the orchestra too but in the Venture business unlike others great talent always looks very weird to whatever convention is and so like before Mark Zuckerberg came along that phenotype of the hoodie sweatshirt you know kind of slightly aspy kid was not the common phenotype now of course you know there was a phase 2013 14 15 where everyone started looking for that but then you know it kind of hit you again with a
very kind of weird looking person where vitalic is of a completely different elk than zck you know one very much as Julius Caesar and you know I think another one I didn't exactly know how you'd bucket vitalic maybe like an early Pope like a Russian holy Saint exactly and by the way not to mention not just the person is weird than whatever the conventional Norm is but the idea is weird too everyone listening to this
podcast probably understands ethereum at this point that's kind of priced in and the paranoia that Aller capitalist live in is of course the new thing is not going you know to be ethereum the thing that overtakes ethereum that will be bigger and more exciting will probably be I don't know it' be some weird biotech thing some weird thing that could be artificial intelligence you wouldn't even label it that way and so
you live in constant paranoia of some type of different Market or some type of different person you know becoming really big and really important and inventure of course your erors of omission not commission it's a good old Warren Buffett phrase and so you can't miss and so you're like deeply thinking about dark horses and the entire reason I even have this idea to share with you about YC and whatnot and the selection
and group consensus mechanic there is because there's deep paranoia and so you have this kind of reflexive effect where now everyone's looking for the Dark Horse so you know does the Dark Horse actually change or you know the system gets a bit dynamic in that way but that's I think the big innovation with Venture is that you're constantly hunting for kind of people that look different and you're rewarded to do so
much more I think than any other industry so you end up learning to appreciate the humility in all of it like you think although you know we'd recently very recently are about to publish a book on this topic and we
think we have something to share with the world I'm still you know deep in the dun and Krueger collapse in this topic and I think like the main idea in my mind about the book at a deep level of I think the impact it could hopefully have
is actually to reduce and to bring everyone down into the dun and cougar Abyss where we are now and kind of realize this is actually a much deeper topic than most people pay attention to I view our Central message in the book as right now the world is failing at Talent spotting and this needs to be a much more major topic of conversation and we have our ideas on how to do it better but if we can simply convince
people of that I will be relatively happy yeah and I think kind of to me proof of this is SpaceX look at the end of the day SpaceX until fairly recently wasn't really doing anything new from like a physics standpoint there weren't any new physics discoveries you know that Elon in a lab in La kind of fig figured out that like you know Von noyman couldn't figure out it's yesterday's technology it's just that he
is a better router and allocator of capital to the right talent and you see this time and time again I mean many Elon companies are this he just manages to put the right people doing the right thing so I think if you were to try to really explain to like a 5-year-old at a very basic level why aren't there more spacex's I think it kind of comes down to the right people don't have the right jobs for you know human progress and
once you start viewing the world through this lens it's really hard to unsee it oh the new book on SpaceX it indicates that Elon personally interviewed the first few thousand people hired at SpaceX to make sure they would get the right people that is a radical drastic move you know how much time that involves and energy and attention you know Jeff Dean who's probably the best engineer at Google used to work at
digital equipment company I think was the 10th or 11th engineer Google hired and you know was basically responsible for the fact that Google search works did crazy optimizations back in the day when this mattered like you know writing data that you're going to access a lot on the exterior side of the disc so it was a bit easier to access and anyway brilliant guy still works at Google amazing software engineer and he told me
once well he was just waiting for code to compile he would just go through a stack of resumes that Google was hiring this is back when Google had May 10,000 people and he still had you know a pulse on the type of people they were bringing in and you know you hear stories like this a lot but like very few organizations do it the best organizations tend to do it and so it really matters and it might matter more especially in the current market that
were're in it might matter more than Capital you know it's just allocating the right people to the right jobs one of the interview questions I've used quite successfully as of late it's a very simple one it comes from Peter teal I believe and it's simply to ask the person how ambitious are you and a yes or no answer actually is fine if they say no because they think you mean something Bland and a little mainstream
and they say no I'm not ambitious but I want to do this and they say it with great passion and Charisma that's excellent if they're just stuck dumped by the question they have no idea what they actually want to do that to me is a negative they might do fine in some jobs where they don't have much responsibility but they're not going to build something for you but if they can articulate some ambition and simply know
what you mean when you ask them I find it's a very hard question for people to fake that if they don't actually have the ambition their ability to articulate it with the requisite energy and detail and focus just isn't there because of course the great problem one faces in an interview is that people can fake their answers to questions right so if you ask them are you conscientious well you probably care about that but they're
just going to say yes right who would say now does it mean they're conscientious of course not another idea I think that we discuss in the book that works pretty well is repeating questions which is a bit uncomfortable to do but can kind of work especially if you're asking something that the person may not have an answer for because they're kind of thinking about it you know for the first time and that can be a way to get
something out of the like you know are you conscientious question which I agree is tough here's a very tough question for you let's say you're trying to hire not just a talent but a talent identify right what do you look for in a person to judge if they're a good talent identifier you know there's something about being able to do counterparty modeling which I actually find women in many cases are better than men at this
the ability to understand that person's motives and how they will act and react to an environment you know given particular set of incentives and you know I think that's like an an important thing to tease out in someone who will themselves be good at identifying talent because it lets you predict ultimately if someone has a good simulator you can kind of predict how that person will react in different places you can say
well okay how do I know if a person has that and I think one thing that is predictive of it is just having a bank of similar experiences and people that you've worked with to fall back on I think is pretty important so you know working with a large number of people that are very different is is really helpful because ultimately in the interview a lot of what you're doing I think what anyone's doing you know
subconsciously and consciously is what does this remind me of in good and bad ways it's a very potent system in the brain that you just can't and won't turn off and so a rich Bank of experience is important I mean I think there's like a base sense of sensitivity people have to just perceiving the small micro expression someone might have or you know the way they hold themselves and I don't know that everyone takes in
reality at that level of resolution but I think good Talent spotters do consciously or subconsciously they really see that and that affords them a much wider canvas to kind of pattern match on when trying to figure out you know who that person will be in a particular environment or place what about you consistent with that view I like to talk to people about drama so if they've read Shakespeare you know you can say well my hypothesis is that in
Romeo and Juliet Romeo and Juliet don't actually love each other at all does the play still make sense to see what they have to say it's a way of testing their second an order understanding of situations diversity of characters or talk to them about Moby Dick or you know whatever movie they might have seen you need to find something that you share with the person and just ask them about it give them a hypothesis see what they
come up with so for me I use culture very often when you talk about it what I'm hearing from you is you kind of almost use it as a way to test it's kind of like a play as chess for you in a way where there's different actors different motivations and you're really asking you know could the person extend the play basically could they write another final chapter with their understanding of the
intentions of the actors and Shakespeare himself does this in Hamlet when Hamlet puts on the play before the king to see how the king will react right so it's doubly Shakespearean in that sense but just get people talking about drama I I feel you learn a lot it's not something they can prepare for they can't really fake it right if they don't understand the topic well you can switch to something else but if you can't find
anything they can understand you figure well maybe they don't have that much depth or understanding of other people's characters one good thing you highlight in the book is just this idea in general of talking to people about you know media drama movies music and I think that works both because you know you can kind of learn a lot from what someone says they're not likely to make up a story but it's so fun and it is you know
a common thing many people share you know even in this era of HBO and Netflix and all I mean there's any given week in America and globally I actually find at this point you know there's like 10 shows that people are watching and so it does provide a fun common ground that I think is underused I mean people come into the interview you know with all these scripted questions and like you know what are your greatest weaknesses
but you know the idea that like might be better to ask someone about squid games I think is really underrated what are résumés still good for these days a very LinkedIn question right resumés are good for understanding how the person wants to be perceived by the broader world and so this is helpful for you both kind of the obvious things you know checking for typos and whatnot but also what they take pride in their identity you know I
love asking people sometimes you know out of what I see on kind of your LinkedIn or your resume what are things you were kind of trying to hide and what do you wish you could feature more and you know sometimes you have to really unpack that because people might not want to share on first blush you know what they want to hide but confident people will and you kind of can learn a lot that way another question you can
ask is you know instead of trying to actually dig into the weak points of the resume just ask what the weak points in the resume in their opinion are because it really gives you a sense you know it's the mirror that that person wants to have I think the actual content on the resume may not be as interesting I mean there's all sorts of things you can read you know between the lines for example I mean very common thing to look
for is person has multiple jobs that don't last long obviously there's something going on there so you want hear a good story but broadly it's that person's you know perception of themselves there's a theory that think there's a book about that a friend hadlen me to the just the selection of the profile photo on online social media media is predictive of some psychometric profiling method and I don't know if
that's true or not but the idea itself I think makes sense there's something pretty deep just about that alone so you know to me that's why the resume is interesting is it's a self-portrait and the Quest for talent do you think we are overvaluing smarts it kind of depends for what role I definitely think for the role of Founders the kind of one eye specialize in so looking for someone to start a business that has the chance of becoming
you know the next thermofisher or the next Facebook or the next apple yes I think intellect is very much overpriced or overvalued I think it's extremely important and definitely in the mega success scenarios you know if this was kind of a gardener 2 x two you would have like high intellect and high power or energy or ambition pick your word but if you had to pick you actually probably need energy because what you want is
multiple shots on goal from the individual because it is really difficult it's basically impossible I have not heard a story of someone never having to course correct and just like all their ideas were right from day one they just launched and got there you know for the most part you try a lot of things you spend most of your day getting negative reinforcement from the system until something starts working
and the reason most companies fail is with enough negative reinforcement the actor stops participating and so what you actually want is someone who has a lot of energy who's just going to keep on going and people I think tend to Discount that in favor of intellect but in your world Tyler is it any different I mean I could make the case actually that in Academia maybe intellect matters much more I mean you guys are solving
real problems versus us just you know pounding away at keyboards and you know trying to make numbers get bigger so doesn't intellect matter a lot are we always solving real problems I look for energy and durability and that combination and then here's another thing I look for I think it's very important especially in Academia but in many spheres does that person understand which are the correct hierarchies to be
climbing and this may be influenced by my own background as a chess player when I was quite young I knew a lot of super talented young chess players just brilliant people young kids full of energy to play chess but they always were just stuck on the notion that winning at chess was the game they should be playing and for Magnus Carlson that's true that's the game he should have been playing and he is still but
for most of those people if they stayed in the chess game their lives are miserable you know they're now old they don't have health insurance they're not top players anymore their lives are wrecked so you can have durability and energy at the wrong thing and the people who can understand this is the right path to get to some higher point where that higher Point actually makes sense I like to see if a person has that and I
think also getting them talking about drama you get a sense of how they organize hierarchies you know of status or achievement in their minds so those would be my top things along with smarts energy durability do they understand the hierarchies they should be climbing say you're looking at a young chess player and we're trying to figure out you know do you understand that like this isn't everything in life they're other
hierarchies de climb how much of that do you think is formed based on the environment that they're in versus kind of being innate I suspect it gets locked in fairly early say by age 13 or 14 I'm not convinced it's innate but by the time I would meet such people I think it may be a done deal and one good way to figure out the sense of hierarchies you know get them talking about science fiction are they interested in science
fiction well it doesn't have to be science fiction right but it ought to be something and then see how they've approached the study of those other things and if they're not coherent about other hierarchies that would be one cause for worry I would say that's interesting so you did games early right to an intense degree and you're probably still really good at games but how is it you switched out of doing only games do
you mean video games or all the different games you played you tell me look I committed the sins of anyone growing up in the 21st century I guess which is yeah IED a lot of video games and I have a lot of respect for them you know I think they're an incredible accomplishment actually of the human species where I mean when you think about it in the abstract to the extreme you know there's people in South Korea that are playing video games to
exhaustion to death in some cases so we've managed to create a collection of photons you know that we're projecting from screens into people's phobias that like manag to get them to ignore their most basic uary instincts and just like be in flow until they pass out so obviously that is bad but they deserve a lot of respect I think a lot about just this whole idea of gamification I mean it sounds kind of childish and silly but
if we kind of take that as a given that there are these pieces of software that like people really yearn to use if I told you an abstract I have this alien technology and it makes like no drugs are required but it's just like a thing on your computer and people really want to use it and when they're not using it they're just thinking about using it you say well that's impossible you need like a drug for that I say no it's called
video games can you know and how would you use that same type of thing in order to make yourself more productive in order to make productivity software more fun it's a thought everyone might have but no one really acts on and it all comes back to Talent at the end of the day if you ask like why isn't Gmail more fun why doesn't Gmail help you accomplish your goals not these simple stupid goals you have for the afternoon
of just clear out the inbox but your actual goals in life like the things you actually want to do you know write a book with Tyler you know try to have a little bit more fun in every day why isn't Gmail helping you do that and I think a lot of it at the end of the day you might think it comes down well this that profit incentive a lot of it comes down to talent and I think game designers are very underrated people in
that sense and by the way a small sidebar here software Engineers from the gaming industry are extremely underrated and there's a nice thread on the internet the other day about how effectively the entire starlink team who's building spacex's internet you know Network are gaming Engineers so I think that whole corner of the world is really overlooked by you know adults who view gaming as somewhat of a pejorative
but it's a very powerful sphere of human creativity and I think more of it needs to be brought into day-to-day life I think by the way just in general when you think about gaming and fun like more of that needs to be brought into day-to-day life there should be a MIM guide for having fun what are the best ways to have fun you know can I have fun by asking you a bunch of questions about tech and this is just I ask you answer
okay because I want to know the answers why do ad come companies keep on making their products worse over time right it's a good question to try and answer deeply I think companies when they're not founder L actually become brain dead and as a result they only maximize numbers that were set in place by the founder before that founder decided to you know go to Hawaii and you know retire or I don't know kit Surf and
whatnot why that is the case we'll get to that in a minute and so ad companies you know obviously end up focusing on Revenue which comes from engagement which comes from eyeballs they optimize for eyeballs and you can still ask I think you're asking like the question okay why don't they optimize for like enjoyment and eyeballs in the long term over the short term and you know companies just don't know how to do that
unless they're found or L why not kind of ask why again unpack that I think it's something about actually the founder might be the only person that has permission to focus on the long term even while you know in the short term you know it might hurt kind of metrics or revenue or whatnot and they end up hiring Executives that just don't feel like they have permission to question the basics and so you end up with this
result where you know it's actually very good for startups that large companies end up becoming these like autonomous you know planes that kind of fly until they run out of fuel and slowly Glide down and crash into the ocean which is totally what is happening today with Google search or Amazon search these products are impossible to use everyone's having the same thought that they're impossible to use I mean you
know try to buy a iPhone charger on on Amazon it's like walking through a shenzen flea market and everyone has the same thought that that's crazy Jeff besso stopped answering his emails because he's focused on his blue origin mailbox and so it's just like going to continue to get worse until some young startup you know will get started and say we're doing better product search and you know they'll get created and the
cycle will restart and the founder of that company will become super successful and then you know 50 years from now they'll work on their space company and that company will fail and so anyway we do these Cycles over and over again I don't know if there's any historical examples of this with like the East India trading company but yeah companies without Founders it's like a toy for kids or something and the battery pack is removed and it's like
slowly becoming more and more decrepit over time so it's a great question to ask and I'm trying to think now are there any examples of businesses in corporation history that have really been reborn without the founder and have done something to really threaten their profits in the hope of like you know long-term success because everyone talks about IBM but I don't know maybe in its restructuring days if there was like a a
risky move ever endeavored by a non-founder CEO that' be a good question how is crypto Talent different crypto Talent seems to be as far as I can tell I sit in all these chat servers Discord servers some of your listeners will know and I just observe what's going on and so I'm still learning but you know the internet I grew up on referred to by some people as web 0123 neg5 whatever that internet was significantly more innocent and so the
people that found themselves on these chat servers in say 2002 34 five were really just interested in building things there was no immediate commercial intent and it was just about kind of coolness and neat factor and the issue you have with crypto is that you still have those people but they're clouded by maybe two orders of magnitude more people that are just in it for a quick Puck and I don't exactly understand why
but the human psyche as far as I can tell really gets you know confused and degraded when it comes to making money fast and to some extent I think this is why we regulate lotteries and gambling it's because the human brain of the average person gets really confused by this thing or maybe a better way of saying it is the average scammer is much more intelligent than the average customer in these Dynamics and so you
know you end up with these out effects where you get a lot of people that are just in it for a quick buck and that person by the way a lot of people have this perjorative view of crypto of just like it's a bunch of people in it for a quick Buck backed by maybe like you know 100 vitalics really brilliant Engineers that are just trying to make something work I take a different view which is I respect that energy it's a mertile
energy someone can have of you know just effectively wanting to participate in a Ponzi scheme it's not very productive use of their talent but they have something deep there so you know I'd say you still have the Bedrock of curious people that you had say in the early internet days but you have this giant icing layer this molasses of kind of Hustler you know the people that were previously trying to flip homes you know
during the 2008 you know housing boom in that sense it is actually very different and you know you can take your spoon and kind of go all the way through the icing and just hit the you know core part of the cake and you'd still be fine but I think the icing part is full of air as icing usually or whipped cream usually is in which part of the world do you think Tech Talent is still the most underpriced we're obviously having this
discussion today as there's some action unfolding in Eastern Europe and in Ukraine and so that is definitely a part of the world that is still underpriced and I think that's a somewhat of a novel statement because a lot of people are excited about it now but there are extremely extremely capable Engineers there there's a variant of that question I think is also interesting which is how is like that top Tech Talent different
from country to Country to Country and I will say this one thing going on for America and I don't know how much of it is formed once you kind of are in you know California drinking the you know whatever lithium we have in our water I don't know how much of this is like formed by environment but there is something special about the top American talent in particular that's extremely rare to find anywhere else in the world
which is a sense of aesthetic and taste and so you could really meet the best software engineers in malova in Ukraine in Israel in China and they're not going to have the same degree of taste and finesse that software Engineers out here in California will have or New York and whatnot and I would like to believe it's a uniquely kind of American thing that you get either by being born here or coming here and I think it exists in
some other areas of Science and might explain a little bit why all the breakthroughs discoveries seem to happen you know predominantly in the United States and a lot of the fast follows seem to happen in China there's something about aesthetic and I think when looking at Founders actually that matters quite a bit I learn a lot by the quality of the homepage of a very early stage startup because that is signaling
to me that that person understands that that's like looking good is important and knows how to make something look good that's a huge huge difference like the actual IQ on like if you had to give me like an algorithm and you had to optimize it and whatnot you had you had people participate from every single country in the world sure you'd see some differences maybe some countries would be higher up some lower but I don't
think the bands would be that large the difference on taste and design would be you know the us would have a giant leap frog so we wrote this book together again it's called Talent yeah what is the user guide for Tyler Cowen I would say reply to emails very quickly and always be interesting and how do you mobilize Tyler Cowen or is that also how you mobilize him you sit at an information super highway there could
not have been a better time I think for you to be living given your goals like the internet is an amazing product and I Envision that you basically are sitting at your keyboard in in my mind I visualize it that you have a lot of monitors I realize you actually don't and it's just a straightforward laptop but I think it would be befitting to visualize 9 to 10 monitors kind of like Steve Cohen's trading setup and you're just getting information and
synthesizing it and that was a lot of the process of writing this book with you it's very easy to get access to you and I think yeah I think it's a great blessing for you that the internet exists like you are probably in the top desile of people taking advantage of the internet what is it you want to ask me I've asked you a bunch of things yeah I appreciate that question in itself how have your views on nature versus nurture
changed over time I have moved in the direction of thinking parents are especially important and I don't just mean as giving you their genes but just giving you an environment in which you feel you can succeed in some way and that if you don't have that I find that very hard to overcome and my estimation of the importance of that phenomenon has increased having written this book I value IQ less than I used to so there
was one study we talk about in the book they looked at the CEOs of top Swedish companies now to be clear these are not necessarily Founders but there CEOs right and their IQs are at the 83rd percentile which means ahead of 83% of the rest of the Swedish population on average now that's pretty good that's smarter than average right 50% would be average but it's not 99% if you had asked me before the research I would
have said well I think that number is going to come in like somewhere around 95% like they're just going to be much smarter than other sweds and it's 83% and if you take smaller companies the number gets lower yet so that's caused me to decrease the weight I put on IQ or smarts conscientiousness I view is a bit more of a mixed blessing clearly for many jobs I suppose most jobs you just outright want conscientiousness it's
positively correlated with wages but for people who are more creative Achievers like the diet coke habit it's not entirely conscientious maybe you want that they still throw their cans away where they ought to go but people can be conscientious about the wrong things like oh I can't work late tonight I have to get home and feed the cat well if you need to feed the cat I get that but it means you haven't arranged things in a
way where you're understanding what are the correct hierarchies for applying your conscientiousness and that kind of insight I hadn't really thought through well enough those would be a few examples what do you think of neuroticism is neuroticism good bad I think for the very highest level of top creative Achievers you want to look for some neuroticism and you see this most clearly in musicians and artists
the very greatest ones you read their biographies and you're like what you know he or she did that and they're weird they can in bad ways be abusive but there's some way in which seeing the world so differently just makes them be off but that said for most jobs you want it in some kind of check but there's a whole host of jobs where neuroticism is just a positive say you want someone who works in a nonprofit and their in
essence their job is to go out and complain about social injustice and they're going to be underpaid that person is probably going to be pretty neurotic they probably need to be they're underpaid they're satisfying their neuroticism you know let's run with that so thinking about how the context matters but don't consider it an unalloyed negative would be my key point there yeah that seems to make a lot of sense it does seem like at least now you
know from where we sit The Winds of Co have slowed a little bit but let's assume remote work is kind of here to stay let's buy that narrative for a moment does that change kind of how you think of what to look for in interviews at all I think there's a whole class of people who feel more confident when they're over Zoom there's no actual physical confrontation it's much easier to turn away your eyes it's in general
not clear where you're looking right obviously there's a kind of excuse built in for certain types of poor performance well you weren't fully charismatic well it was over zoom and those people can become more charismatic they might confide more share more of themselves be more open be more creative and just to Think Through when you've discovered one of those people maybe it's a bit like being in confession with the priest
where you don't see the priest priest doesn't see you therapist's couch you don't look the therapist straight in the eye in a lot of cases that sometimes Fosters more openness and to realize that the distance of the medium can be your friend and you also learn just how much there are some people and a lot of them are truly talented but they rely so much on the physical presence of their body to generate Charisma and that is
itself a valuable skill but I've learned how much I used to confuse that skill with skill in general and it's quite different and these people can't do that over zoom and they just have to say something that's pretty good and they're not all that great at it so that's a big thing I've learned is how to think better about Charisma very interesting yeah you could kind of imagine the perfect person for
Zoom sales the salesman with highest conversion rate and the salesman for real world highest conversion rate there's kind of a vent diagram there attributes that definitely are overlapped but there's things that are distinct that are kind of interesting obviously height being simple example but handshakes also so say you know we're both men you go to shake hands with the women it's not clear what the convention is what the handshake should
be like there's sort of a clear standard with other men and if the man matches that standard at least you know they're good at prep good at a certain kind of Conformity good at learning particular things but the handshake from a woman it's just a confusion and obviously it doesn't exist over Zoom and that's better I think if you had to give advice earlier you were just talking about Charisma how does one become more
charismatic hypothetically speaking you have an essay on this right so first let me say what I understand to be your theory is you need to take role models of other people and kind of run them through your mind on a very regular basis and not copy them that makes you too mechanistic but have those be live Vivid examples for your emotional imaginings of the entire world and there don't have to be people in your field
but just live in their worlds it could be Winston Churchill it could be George Orwell it could be Paul McCartney Magnus Carlson and that over time will make you more charismatic the approaches I think you don't like and I agree with you on this is when you read a book and it says like to be charismatic smile make eye contact the actual charismatic people I know often don't do those things they have their own weird setup which defies
description and indeed is weird and the weird Ness makes them charismatic and someone who tried to follow all those I suspect would only clock in at like a 6.5 on Charisma like they'd be fine but you wouldn't actually really be drawn to them if you had like pretty fussy standards for Charisma what do you think I very much think you're right I think you know asking someone charismatic how to be charismatic someone truly Charisma
like if you asked Bill Clinton who regardless of what you think about politics does have natural Charisma I think it'd be kind of like asking van noyman you know so how do you multiply five-digit numbers in your head and it obviously comes easily to them and I think you know someone like me who's just trying to learn and certainly doesn't have that natural gift yeah the idea of not trying to necessarily copy
but to kind of load kind of that person's cartridge into your mind is helpful and you know I think a lot of people certainly my parents View tv as a pejorative but to the extent that you know you can really grow up today on YouTube watching the most charismatic people at all times that's got to have somewhat of a a positive effect if you can you know intelligently kind of OTE not exactly copy but emulate what
they're doing I think just learning to channel your own enjoyment and be willing to let it show you know I've been a teacher Professor most of my life and the way you teach people well well of course you have to explain it properly but it's for them to see that you care and even bad students are such a wonderful audience for understanding if you don't care they sniff it out so quickly and so smart that you are sunk right away yeah I
think there seems to be a lot almost everyone seems to have a kind of system one Talent detection thing or mood detection thing you always sense it like in a meeting someone comes in who's like always effervescent and bubbling and happy and laughing and you really feel the mood change yeah it's important to try and be that type of person because I think all humans really pick up on that extremely quickly now you're an avid
Runner you run marathons you did like in a week you ran a marathon what on every continent or close to it I paced a friend I didn't do all of that he did all seven continents I just did three marathons back to back but yeah I like running and why do you think so many Highly Successful People are drawn to mastering Feats of endurance well running in particular and cycling I guess and swimming on maybe the
triathlon Sports first of all they're very numerical so there's a sense every day of numbers that you can work on that's nice a lot of these people are competitive not necessarily globally but just with themselves they want to improve and so there's a digit you can work on every single day and that's very helpful and gives sense of purpose and so to a high achieving person that's kind of cracked the second is well you
could say well like there are other numbers you could optimize for like you could try to optimize for the numbers of hours you sleep the challenge with that is the effort involved in that like if you really want to sleep perfectly every night it's not about difficulty and kind of pushing through which is what high Achievers always want to do it's a bit more about relaxing and taking it easy so you know with running and cycling and
swimming you know you end up in these Dynamics where you have these high Achievers at the highest level much higher than me and the main thing coaches do to these people slow them down not accelerate them because they really get pleasure out of just you know persevering and pushing through and I like that myself and you know for me and for a lot of other folks there's this idea that kind of like your idea earlier
that you can learn a lot about how to find good personalities by reading plays you can learn a lot about mental Fortitude by just putting yourself through a physically demanding experience and pushing through I think it's a very helpful thing to do you know the correct amount a lot of athletes overtrained but you know once a week really putting yourself in a physically demanding situation seems to be physically obviously very healthy but
psychologically it's just it's good to know you know that you can push through let me ask you a question that we both should answer and you tell me if you want to go first or second what do you think is our main disagreement if only of emphasis when it comes to identifying Talent we've written this book work together on this problem for years we agree on a lot of things but what's the residual disagreement and how do we boil
it down to a relatively small number of dimensions and I can go first if you want you should this is what I think it is for me I'm not sure of this but I think you are both more concerned with and much better at identifying competitiveness in people and I think I am more concerned with identifying obsessiveness in people so I have a comparative advantage in identifying people who are obsessive iive but not
necessarily extremely competitive and it's perhaps because I'm a bit that way myself and you have this different emphasis and it also relates to your interest in contests of endurance which have a kind of competitive element to them so I have obsessive desires to collect all this information but there's not really a benchmark for it like I have no idea how many books I've read it's not really compared to how much
some other person has read it's just this Obsession so this kind of competitiveness vers obsessiveness distinction is one thing that strikes me not quite a disagreement but a difference in emphasis and I think given what you do Venture Capital you should have the emphasis you have to be clear yeah that is very interesting here's a question for you maybe to find it another way we disagree if you kind of have to fill the pie chart if you
have to award points in terms of in Talent what matters most you have three categories you have nature you have nurture of say the first six years seven years or so then you have like just environment meaning not the way your parents treat you but just like the food you eat and the air that you breathe tell me how the pie chart looks between those three buckets I don't think sort of the food or the air matters that much
as long as you're in a livable situation what I put really a lot of weight on or who are the really smart energetic people or Role Models you were exposed to in something like ages 12 through 16 and that I put great deal of weight on and I put a great deal of weight on how old old were you when you first started to try to do something in some area you don't even have to have succeeded but you tried at something and if you tried
it something at 14 to me that's a big plus if you first tried it something later on again it would depend on the context but at least I want to start thinking about why it took the person so long what you've inherited quality of parenting but I don't think it ends at six I think those years 12 to 16 give or take I really put a great deal of stress on I don't know that we disagree on that but that would be my answer I think if
we were to maybe then Define the buckets a bit more simply nature you know nurture broadly and who you're around or whatever and then just physical environment what I'm hearing from you is between those last two categories you'd stack rank effectively the nurture effect I'd probably put the environment effect ahead of that I really think and this theory is is definitely not mine there's all sorts of researchers on
Twitter that are expert at this but I think a lot of what is driving American mood today or conversation today is a byproduct of you know lithium we put in the water Plastics we consumed when we were children so I think that might be one aspect of it that where we might swap not that it really matters that much but it is a difference here's a way I would put it I would say I look for signs that the person at an early age
tried to get nature and nurture working together in some kind of multiplicative fashion and that brings the question a bit away from nature versus nurture if they made a decision at age 13 to get nature and nurture compounding each other then I'm very impressed does that make sense to you I think that makes sense and I would probably say that I agree with that but I kind of think ultimately the you know mitochondrial
efficiency that that person has as a byproduct of the nutrition they got early on in life might actually be the one driving that but we can agree to disagree there we're about out of time just for our listeners and readers here is my book with Daniel Talent how to identify energizers creatives and winners around the world Daniel it's been an enormous pleasure and honor to have written this this book with you
really just a wonderful experience in my life and uh honored to have you on conversations with Tyler same here every conversation is a joy and I hope to have many more thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show [Music]