The Joe Walker Podcast - Talent Is That Which Is Scarce — Tyler Cowen

Episode Date: December 31, 2022

In the long run, talent allocation is almost everything. But as a society, we're not actually very good at it. The question of how to reliably match people with jobs they are well suited for is one of the big unsolved problems of our times.  Joe catches up with return guest Tyler Cowen to discuss the art of identifying talent. Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University and host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler. He is also the co-author of a new book, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. Full transcript available at: thejspod.com Episode recorded: 18 May 2022.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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select podcast, and then select the Jolly Swagman podcast at checkout. You're listening to the show. In this episode, I welcome the polymath and economist Tyler Cowen back to the podcast to discuss his new book co-written with Daniel Gross called Talent, How to Identify Energizers, Creatives and Winners Around the World. Talent was one of the books I most keenly anticipated and read this year. Working as I do in the startup world, in my experience, identifying and hiring talent is both the most important thing to get right at your company and also the hardest skill set to master. There's a mysterious quality to it.

It also matters crucially at the level of the macro economy. One way to interpret the global savings glut or the recent profligacy of venture capital. Indeed, one way to view the great stagnation is to realize that we have a scarcity of talent relative to capital. One of my intellectual shifts through my 20s has been to come to see that our ability to solve big problems is less constrained by money than by talent. And to be clear, it's not that the talent doesn't exist. It's that as a society, we're not really very good at matching the right people to the right problems. So the question of how to reliably allocate talent is one of the big unsolved challenges of our times. And yet Tyler has saturated the podcast market in promoting this

book. And so I wanted to have a conversation that was lighthearted and idiosyncratic. As Tyler says about his podcast chats, this is the conversation that I want to have. It's a fun, fairly quick chat to finish the year. Enjoy. Tyler Cowen, welcome back to the Jolly Swagman podcast. Very happy to be here. I wish I was in Sydney right now. I know. Well, I'm looking forward to you visiting one day. Would love to show you around the city.

But I wanted to thank you, firstly, for writing this new book with Daniel Gross called Talent. I really enjoyed reading it, as I've told you separately. I've also been able to implement some of the interview questions that you share in the book, fortunately, before the rest or most of the rest of the world was able to access those questions. I have a bunch of different questions I'd love to ask you, hopefully questions that you haven't been asked in any other interview so far. Great.

Both about talent and just other topics more generally. So let's dive in and maybe also Tyler, this could be an unstructured conversation. So feel free to ask me anything. A real conversation. What are the open tabs of your browser right now? The honest answer is zero because I closed them all in preparation for this interview so I'm not eating up too much bandwidth but what would they be what would they be yeah what would they be yeah I had literally hundreds of tabs open before I closed them um what would some of them have been I was reading an article from 1985 on the Benthamite political ideology of Australia. Yes. I was reading Marginal Revolution.

You're hired. That's enough, right? Yeah, I actually asked that question of a candidate in an interview about a month ago after having read a review copy of your book and I found I needed to kind of preface the question with sharing what was in my own tabs like for example I've got open because otherwise it can come off as a little bit creepy in an online interview but it is a great question. So Tyler, let me ask you, who is the most undervalued individual you've invested in? And you can think of invested in

a broad sense. It could be someone you've hired through the Mercatus Center, someone you've given a grant to through Emergent Ventures, or even just someone you've mentored informally. I would curse them if I named them. And it's like a mother or father being asked to name a favorite child. But I would say there's a double-digit number of Emergent Ventures winners, typically between ages 14 and 20, whom I think are extraordinarily promising. And I'm not very sure of my own ability to pick out the best, but I would double down on each one of those bets. And I'm extremely enthusiastic about them as a

whole. So that would be my answer. Shruti, who now runs Emergent Ventures India, she was an applicant to the original Emergent Ventures and then joined the Mercatus Center in 2019. How did you spot Shruti's talent? Shruti had been a graduate student at George Mason, and everyone liked her and thought she was quite smart. But she was way undervalued then, and she's still way undervalued today. She would be another plausible pick for most undervalued person. She is in her late 30s. She's not a teenager. She is herself a phenomenal judge of talent. And I got to know Shruti first. She was quite young.

I met her in India. I was giving a talk and she said, oh, I'm coming to George Mason University. I said, oh, when you get here, email me for lunch. So we had lunch Indian food. Over time, I discovered she has really just first-rate taste in Indian classical music. So I took that as a very strong sign of her ability to understand and manipulate these super complex symbolic systems. And that's what set me onto Shruti's talent, was talking about Indian classical music with her. And you were able to assess that she was the real deal when it came to Indian classical music because of your own interest in that topic. Yes. And also her work ethic is extraordinary. And she's actually not crazy. So I mean, crazy can be good for some things. But when you're

running a program, there's some ways in which you have to be absolutely non-crazy in the good sense. And that's Shruti also. And she's likable. When she speaks to, you know, she does Emergent Ventures India, which is Indian people alone. She, of course, is Indian. When she speaks to people in India, she can relate to them in a way that I would not be able to. And that's a huge edge for her. How do you filter for non-crazy? I don't think you can quite filter for it.

You can spot crazy rather quickly, but non-crazy, you have to know someone for a while. And I think I knew Shruti for almost 15 years before she came back to do Emerging Ventures India and be a researcher and fellow at Mercatus. So that's really the tougher one. When you have a long time frame, it works great. When you know someone for a week, you can't filter front on crazy. You can look for signs. Have you thought about the problem of hiring contractors? So like high frequency hiring and trying to spot red flags very quickly? Sure. Now, a lot of contractors I hire on the basis of other people recommending them. So the real evaluation I'm doing is, which other people whom I know do I trust? Rather than trying

to evaluate the contractor whom I won't meet until they show up. You don't have a plumber come over to your house and interview to fix your toilet, right? Maybe we should do it that way, but we're not going to. So which of your friends puts in the due diligence is really the question you're asking there. In Talent, you and Daniel mentioned that you went on some joint trips. Were these in pursuit of researching for the book? And if so, where did you go and what did you do there? Well, I'm a little reluctant to speak of the travel activities

of other people, but Daniel and I have roamed far and wide. The trips are multi-purpose trips to get to know each other, to talk through all kinds of ideas, but most of all to see the different places. So, for instance, Daniel and I have been to Alibella together in Ethiopia, and we met up with Jonas, saw the Yeldstone churches, did some wonderful things. I'm a big advocate of traveling with people when you can. That's one way in which, by the way, in a whole bunch of settings, it's much harder for men to serve as mentors to women

than it is for women to women or men to men for that reason. Much harder to travel with them in an acceptable way. How is Jonas, by the way? Well, the war is over and the food blockade has ended, so now he's sure he can eat. So he's much, much better, and tourism is starting to resume. But his plans have been set back by several years, and for a while he wasn't sure he had any future at all.

It was a question, you know, how does my family get food tomorrow? So, you know, we should all thank the blessings we have. The Tigrayan forces had invaded his particular part of Ethiopia, which people had not been expecting at the beginning. In Talent, you and Daniel write that you understand Peter Thiel is applying a very serious philosophical and indeed even moral test to people, and that Peter actually asks whether you deserve to succeed. Can you elaborate on that further? To be clear, this is my subjective impression

of Peter. This is not Peter describing Peter. Peter doesn't ask people flat out, do you deserve to succeed? But my sense is that's the question in his own mind. There's a kind of moral judgment, your work ethic, your wherewithal, your intellect. Are you worthy of success? And he brings to bear some kind of emotional slash moral judgment on the question that is in a way more powerful than just sheer intellectual questioning, like what do I think of this person? And Peter, to me, is the master of that. It's no accident that he's a Christian and deeply concerned with the humanities. And I think that's why he's arguably been America's very best talent spotter, maybe of all time. Have you tried to borrow that frame as well?

I don't think it's the right frame for me. So I think I'm quite a detached person. So I operate relatively well in detached frames of reference. And you have to specialize in what you're good at. So it might be good for me to be more like Peter, but I'm not. So no, I don't operate that way. I used one of the questions that you and Daniel share in the book in an interview with a job applicant last week. The question was, which of your beliefs are you least rational about? And they gave a great answer, which I thought really increased the trust between us and led to an interesting conversation. But

in an otherwise very rational dialogue, they said that their least rational belief was in crystals and manifesting things through belief. Which of your beliefs, Tyler, are you least rational about? Well, I think you would have to ask my peers, the people I hang out with, and they would probably say it's my belief that all of these UFO tapings and sightings, there's a reasonable chance that they're alien drone probes. Now, to me, that's quite rational. But like Alex Tabarrok, my co-blogger, he thinks I'm crazy brian caplan my friend thinks i'm crazy uh to me it makes a lot of sense but that's that's what i think other people would say that i watched too much star trek when i was a kid i'm in your camp on the ufo question tyler but what percent do you put it at i mean that's the key thing i you put it at? I mean, that's the key thing. I would put it at least 10%, but well below 50.

Yeah. I think in the past I've said about 20%. So we're pretty close, yeah. Yeah. But again, I mean, it could just be like, you know, the universe is stranger than we can think. It could just be something you know the universe is stranger than we can think it could just be something like totally unexpected right um which is why i'm i'm not not even close to to 100 even though i would

be be tempted to say that it's interesting the most common kind of rebuttal I get from people who want to debunk the UFO sightings is they talk about how the pilots like perceptions might be distorted or it might be hallucinating in some way but there's radar reading to ignore the yeah exactly multiple sensor data you know they had the hearings today everyone stressed this yeah so I feel like the people who are kind of trying to debunk it are probably being irrational. They just don't want to have to think about it. It's like people who want to think COVID is entirely over. Well, it's much better, but it's not entirely over.

So Tyler, you're an avid reader of biography as a genre, right? Well, I read everything. I'm not like a particular biography reader. I've never read the Caro books on LBJ. They're wonderful and brilliant, but they actually bored me. I felt, I know Texas politics is corrupt. I know LBJ was in a lot of ways a bad guy, and the detail didn't hold my interest. So am I a true biography reader? I don't know. Boswell's Johnson would be my favorite. And that's a quite trumped up biographical reading of a life, right?

Or Keynes' essays and biography would be another favorite. More as much about Keynes as about the people he wrote about. Yeah. And why was Boswell's Johnson one of your favorites? The way they had this small group that sat around the table and how they learned from each other and how part of that was real, but part of it is Boswell imagining Johnson and then improving him. And it's the synthesis of the two minds, the book, Boswell and Johnson. And arguably, Boswell is the greater of the two, but he puts himself in the background and puffs up Johnson. So it's even quite a Straussian book. And you're never sure what to trust. The narrator is highly unreliable. And it captures one of Britain's greatest ages, time of enlightenment, literary societies. It's witty throughout, highly quotable. I think it's just a phenomenal work.

Has the biography genre in particular taught you anything about talent and how to recognize it? I think when you read most biographies, you learn how different cases are and that talent spotting is an art, not a science. You usually cannot do it by formula, but if you have good frameworks, it's like art appreciation or music appreciation. You can do much it by formula, but if you have good frameworks, it's like art appreciation or music appreciation. You can do much better than if you know nothing. You know, try to explain to people what makes a good painting. You never say, oh, all the round ones are great, or look for the color red, or, right, those rules won't get you very far. But if you

look at all the paintings and talk them through with other smart people about the visual arts, you will in fact be better at spotting undervalued paintings. And biography teaches you in some way that that's true, how much it is not formulaic, a successful life. What about even just in the way that biographers or praise entrepreneurs, as you call them in What Price Fame, one of your much earlier books, they're kind of like talent spotters in a way, right? Like they compete to discover historical figures who are neglected but interesting. Sure, you have to judge which figures

will rise in importance or status and which other biographies, maybe it's already been done, but well, there's room for another one like is there room for another biography of Abraham Lincoln I don't know maybe not right what are you going to find at this point so uh it's quite a skill to pick the right subject and I think we have too many biographies of very successful people and not enough biographies of failures I wrote a biography myself of three brothers,

three Mexican brothers who were painters, and essentially were failures in the art world. And I looked at why they didn't succeed, even though they were all quite talented. Why didn't they succeed? In one case, the problem was alcohol. In two other cases, the problem was an unwillingness to leave one's native village and take more chances

and put oneself out there not having enough ambition and not being well connected and just some bad luck speaking of what price fame uh one of your much earlier books in that book you wrote about how some performers manipulate their style the style of their writing or their product to shift the incentives of critics to pay attention to them. And you cite Richard Posner, who in his book Cardozo, A Study in Reputation, lists Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Kafka as figures who were part of their reputation to the enigmatic and perhaps even contradictory nature of their writings. I'm curious, how do you kind of reconcile that claim with the claim you and Daniel make in Talent, which is that perhaps one way to spot path-breaking,

earth-shattering geniuses is to look for people who've developed their own language and terminology. You give Peter Thiel as an example. Another great example, I think, would be Nassim Taleb. Can you reconcile those two propositions? I think they're versions of the same view. So take Kafka or Keynes as writers who developed their own style, their own words, their own set of images, their own metaphors, but a very rich set of images and metaphors. So you can talk for a long time about what Keynes meant or how his different writings fit together. colonialism, how much a critique of technocratic society, a foreshadowing of totalitarianism, reflecting back on his upbringing as being Jewish and what he learned as a kid, and a lot of it's theological or is it existential, and you can go on and on.

And you can do that because they have their own language. If you read someone like Brian Kaplan, my colleague, whose writings I greatly admire, but Brian is crystal clear. He's a libertarian. He thinks education is wasteful and you should have more kids. You can only talk around that in circles so much. You can argue against it if you don't agree, but he lays it out flat on the table for everyone to see. So he's famous in a different way.

I think now that we have the internet, you're actually less reliant on critics to have enduring fame and maybe the more direct style now is being favored because your stuff is on the internet probably forever, right? So you're not reliant on someone writing for Times Literary Supplement agonizing over what Kafka meant. How can you separate the people who have developed an internally coherent language from people who are just making up their own terms to obfuscate and impress? Well, aren't they both versions of the same thing? You can be good at it to varying degrees, but what's to differentiate? That's what it is. There's people who do it poorly. I don't want to name names, mean it's most people out there writing right yeah yeah fair enough i once heard you say that you

set up like a multi-day seminar on henry george and i love that idea can you tell me all about that what What were the sessions? How was it structured? How you ran it? Who attended? I believe that was four years ago, but I could be off a tiny amount. I was talking with Peter Thiel about Henry George, and we both had an interest in it and just thought we should run a two-day seminar where we just march through all of progress and poverty. And we had a small group, I would guess maybe 16 people. Four or five of them you would broadly consider to be Henry George scholars. The others were people interested in land use or economists or somehow people who ought to be there, people in the, you know, Yimby movement.

And we just completely focused on Henry George. It wasn't that people showed up during break or looking at their phones. It was really an immersive experience, one of the best conferences I've ever gone to. What made it so good? Everyone there was fully committed to the enterprise. Everyone there was super smart, articulate, focused. The issues seemed relevant, indeed were relevant. And Henry George is, there's a way in which it's simple. Obviously, he's obsessed with land monopoly, single land tax, but there's a complex enough set of arguments that actually helps to have a group to work through them with. And that's not true for every book.

It is true for books like Adam Smith or Keynes or Tocqueville or Henry George or Plato, for instance. So we picked the right book to have a group crack at it. Was there a set of notes that you produced by the end of the seminar? I didn't. A bunch of people there took notes, which I presume they still have, but I don't have access to them. But I feel I internalized what I learned. So I don't like to take notes. I prefer to listen and think it through then on the

spot. Yeah. I'd like to bounce a potential false positive and a potential false negative off you in terms of identifying talent. And just do a thought experiment for each and see whether you would have picked this individual. So the potential false positive is Adam Neumann. So rewind to 2010, and maybe we should put ourselves in the shoes of your co-author, Daniel, who's a venture capitalist. So say it's 2010 and Adam Neumann comes to Daniel asking him to invest in WeWork.

And Adam Neumann has amazing energy, vaulting ambition. Maybe he even instills a bit of fear in Daniel just because of his sheer charisma. Should Daniel cut the check? Or what should Daniel ask Adam? Well, I wouldn't tell Daniel what to do. And for all I know, this happened. I have no idea if Daniel faced this or what decision he might have made. But I do think there are people, if they have low business ethics, that when you talk with them at some length, that comes out.

I've never met Adam. I don't know him at all. But I think those are issues that should be explored if you're talking with someone about a major investment. A lot of people turned him down, right? It's rare that there are no warning signs in advance. The question is whether you take them seriously enough. Are there specific questions you would ask to unearth their business ethics, or is it more about having a series of unstructured conversations and hoping that they shine through?

For me, it's unstructured conversations, but I like to ask people about novels and artworks, dramatic works, movies, the characters, the moral choices they face, to see how they think about it in a way where they're not too defensive about the business context. If you ask them, like, what do you think of insider trading? You're not going to get a real answer. They're going to say, oh, it's terrible, it's illegal, don't do it. That's just interview prep, right? Ask them, who made the best decisions in Star Wars?

Something like that. What should Obi-Wan have told Anakin Skywalker before he became Darth Vader? What would his best argument have been? See how convincing the person is. How do you answer that question? What should Obi-Wan have told Anakin? Yeah. I think Obi-Wan should have painted a better picture for Anakin of how he was likely to end up. And you never see him do that. So there are intoxications of power, but there are ways in which you

can convince power-mad people to moderate their demands on the world in their own interest. There's a kind of Laffer curve of power. And I never see or hear Obi-Wan trying to do that. Now, I haven't read all the books. There's probably more to the story than I'm aware of. But if you just look at what's in the movies obi-wan doesn't really have good arguments you're kind of rooting for darth right like old man what's with you you know where's your startup so let me ask you about the the false negative now So we'll rewind to 1819, 1820. Perhaps this can be just from your perspective this time, Tyler.

So we're talking with John Keats. And as you know, he dies in 1821 when he's 25. But while he's alive, critics pan his poetry. His poems aren't well received. But he wants a grant. He wants someone to sponsor him so that he can pay his rent and keep writing his poems. Do you back Cates or what would you ask him? I strongly suspect that if I chatted with Cates for half an hour on Zoom that I would be extremely

impressed and send him a wad of money. I'm not put off by the lack of practicality of what he might have put forward. If it were just give me money to write poetry, I think the chance is quite high I would have done it. And there are people I'm supporting. There's a female composer from Azerbaijan who she has technical skills, programming. She's in the biomedical world, but also wants support to just compose music. And she's extraordinarily impressive and gave her some support. We'll see how she does. I know it's highly speculative, but I'm certainly willing

in principle to do that. So, you know, it all depends on how he would have come across. But I think he was probably a very impressive guy. What are some examples of questions you might have asked him? And bear in mind, it's 200 years ago, so you can't ask what tabs he has open on his browser. Well, I would have asked him about Shakespeare. I would have asked him about Andrew Marvel. I would have asked him about Edmund Spencer.

I would have asked him to articulate what Spencer. I would have asked him to articulate what he found interesting in those works, John Donne. And I think he would have hit an A-double-plus home run. So I can't prove that, but those are the questions. And how can he not have done well on those, right? Yeah. So what has been the most surprising thing you've learned or improved upon as an identifier of talent through your experience with distributing Emergent Ventures grants? Have you gotten better through Emergent Ventures or have you just been kind of applying and crystallizing things you already knew? been doing hiring and talent search for most of my life, so whether at this margin I'm getting better is hard to say, but it's not a new thing for me, to be clear. Emergent Ventures is new. What surprised me the most is how few geographic areas the really talented people live in, or seem to live in. So I do think talent is evenly distributed in terms of where it comes from. But the people who are ambitious, how quickly they get themselves into a number of highly

predictable parts of the world and operate from there, that's a stronger effect than I had thought going in. That's been my biggest surprise. Right. And what are those parts of the world? Well, the obvious parts of North America, such as New York City area, Ontario, the Bay Area, a bit of Los Angeles, but even somewhere like Texas, Austin, you would think, well, they have plenty. I get very few applications from there. Now, the problem could be selection, but I still find it striking. There's plenty of people I talk to who are from Texas, and they've moved somewhere else. So I don't think it's that no one from Texas ever hears of Emergent Ventures. Southern England has an enormous number.

Continental Europe really has quite few, not zero. You could say, well, that's English language. But the talented people there tend to be pretty fluent in English. There's something with ambition where they don't quite match up to the program. So there's much less from continental Europe than I would have expected, and just more from migrants. And huge numbers from India, and that's run by Shruti, but it impressed me very early on. India was this huge and growing and incredible talent pool,

a bit like Central Europe was in the early to mid-20th century. So I thought, well, we need a separate India program. This is so good. And that I wasn't expecting. I certainly thought India would do well, but just its sheer dominance over all other emerging economies in terms of talent, people still don't fully grasp that. And how do you measure that?

Well, if you just want to count applications, we get a very large number of applications from India. And then when you speak to people, they're really quite credible. We don't yet know how many will do well. But if you took, say, five emerging economies, add them all up to have an equivalent population, and maybe from those economies we have five total applicants, you've measured it right there. Again, you could say it's somehow our fault, but we don't advertise anywhere. We don't reach out to anywhere. We rely on Twitter, social media, word of mouth. Those are the networks that are

super strong. I don't think it's just about emergent ventures. Tyler, one of my favorite or recent favorite ideas of yours is context is that which is scarce. And you had a Marginal Revolution blog post about this idea. And it articulated something that I think is very important that has kind of been central to a lot of what I do at work, but also with the podcast, with researching for interviews. And I want to talk to you about this idea,

but I thought maybe first I could share with you three of my current favorite examples of where context is important. The first one is the Sumerian bar joke. I'm not sure if you've heard this one. No, tell me. The joke. You have heard this one? No, no, I haven't heard it.

I want to hear it. Okay, okay. So straight from the cuneiform, it is a dog walked into a tavern and said, I can't see a thing. I'll open this one. Yeah, context is scarce for me there, A dog walked into a tavern and said, I can't see a thing. I'll open this one. Yeah, context is scarce for me there, but I think that means it's funny.

So I'll laugh. It's very good. Excellent. Yeah, so obviously it's completely unintelligible to us because we don't have the context, but you can imagine a couple of Sumerians giggling over that. But I think it's a very neat illustration of why context is important. The first thing that struck me was how long it took

to discover basic economics concepts that don't really surface until the 18th century. So you have Euclid very early on. Euclid is fantastically complex, right? You even have the calculus by the 17th century. So you have Euclid very early on. Euclid is fantastically complex, right? You even have the calculus by the 17th century. But supply and demand, my goodness, it takes humans so long. How can that be? I think that was my initial puzzle. And it's not that hard to teach. You can teach it to people who are really not that well educated or arguably not even that intelligent. And why did it take so long?

Context is that which is scarce. To see that it's important as a way of understanding the world is the place you first need to be before you can work backwards and put together the pieces of supply-demand curves. You could argue that truly proper understandings of supply and demand don't come until the mid to late 19th century. Adam Smith didn't quite get it right. John Stuart Mill is closer, but still not quite right. Those are really smart people, right? Not to mention the people who just didn't know any economics at all, and they still haven't quite mastered supply and demand. That to me is shocking. I'll give you my my second current favorite example this is from Jeffrey Blaney arguably Australia's greatest living historian I interviewed him in Melbourne a couple of weeks ago he's 92 he was the guy who wrote the book and coined the phrase the tyranny of distance oh great back in the 60s and this is a little book called

making history features three australian historians but jeffrey talks about a really interesting idea in his which is that uh one of the most difficult difficult tasks in history is finding out those things which were so obvious at the time that they were not recorded. Yes. So things that were just in the air, they were just cultural assumptions. And because of that very fact, they weren't actually documented. And so part of the role of the historian is, in Blaney's view, is furnishing himself or herself with that context

in order to properly interpret past events. And he gives a lovely example of this, Tyler. So before Federation in Australia, every town kept its own local time. In the 1860s, Melbourne was nearly 25 minutes behind Sydney and Queensland time was about eight minutes ahead of New South Wales time. So every colony in Australia until 1895 had its own time, which is just one of those things that you wouldn't really discover without searching for that context. You know, the US had its own version of this, but the railroads imposed uniform time on us because they wanted predictable schedules. Like the train leaves at eight, so there's going to be a clear eight o'clock. Same story, I think, in the UK and also,

I think, in Australia. It's amazing to me that the world as a whole, I mean, there are different calendars in Iran, other places, but what year it is, what day it is, what time it is, we pretty much all agree. And I don't take that for granted. It's one of our bigger achievements. And most people take it for granted because we didn't even have it internally until relatively recently. Yeah. Yeah. It's an amazing thing. My third current favorite example is Sarah Rudin, who you know, Tyler. I am interviewing her in a couple of weeks. Oh, wonderful. About the translation of the Gospels. Send me the link to that podcast once you've done it. I want to put it on Marginal Revolution.

Will do, will do. I don't think she's done many. No. I was hoping you might get her on conversations with Tyler eventually as well. I've been meaning to, but it's such a daunting prep. I've been putting it off like, oh, Sarah deserves, Sarah deserves.

And I'm like, oh, but how do you do you prep the gospels? You know, I guess you do know. So send it to me. I'm keen to hear it. Yeah, we'll do. But while I've been researching for that, I've discovered that one of the key themes that she hits on is furnishing herself with massive context in order to properly translate the Gospels. And I think she has an edge over other more prudish translators who, for example, won't look at classical texts that mention sex and some of the poets and writers who are a bit more out there, whereas she absorbs all of that and then has, I guess, has a unique context when she's translating the Gospels. So I thought that was an interesting example. That's just been something I've been thinking

about recently. That's very good. It's related to an idea I've had about travel. One reason you visit other countries is so that when you read newspaper articles about those countries, the article makes more sense to you. Like if I had never been to Australia, and I've been only twice, but twice is something, and then I read something about Australia, I just remember it better because I've been there. Yeah. I find the same with, I lived in Ireland for a year and I can happily read Irish news articles and understand what they're talking about. Even if you know nothing about the thing, you have some kind of background, you can put it into. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I find it's the same

with enjoying sport as well. Often I just simply won't enjoy watching a sport on TV until I've maybe played it a little bit, even just a little, and then I can instantly enjoy watching it. What's your favorite example of the importance of context with respect to talent? More and more often you're interviewing or possibly hiring people from other countries, other cultures, and that's much harder to do than if they're from your native culture or even your native region. So the necessity of investing some time and effort into learning at least something about those other areas so you have points of connection with them. And it's very hard to do. It's a big world. You can't really hope to crack through and understand any of these other cultures.

But just to not be at the zero point, I have found helpful. And I'd like to keep on doing that. And, you know, I've been to Ireland, I think, four times, which is not a lot, but it's something. And I've interviewed a number of Emergent Ventures winners from Ireland. And I do feel I have this connection with them. I can ask them where they're from or what do you think of this? The chat goes much better. And if it's Nigeria or Pakistan, it's all the more imperative.

A couple of random questions to finish. I've noticed that you often end emails or messages with ellipses. Yes. Dot, dot, dot. Yes. You do this much more than anyone else i know is this is this like a was this a conscious choice some decades ago or or why do you why do you do this it's totally intentional it suggests i'm still thinking about the matter and i hope

that i am not at some kind of closed book like here it is that's that so i love it it's open-endedness yeah yeah i think it also somehow conveys status how so maybe this is just the way i read ellipses but it is well i mean it's probably a different way of phrasing what you've already said, but you're saying that I haven't made my mind up on this yet and I don't need to, but maybe I will. Yeah, that makes sense. That's a high status thing to say, I suppose. Yes, and to be so open about it.

Yeah, yeah. A sense of, I don't have to justify my reasons. I just need to tell you that I have some and they're liable to change. Exactly. Second random question. I've been reflecting on kind of how Australia has responded to the pandemic and just Australia's culture more generally in recent months and perhaps how our culture fosters innovation, perhaps how it might limit innovation in Australia.

And I was wondering about the trade-off between countries with very collectivist cultures and countries with very like individualistic cultures. And I was wondering, do you think it's possible for a country to retain its ability to cohere and solve collective action problems while simultaneously becoming weirder, more innovative, less conformist? I think it's a trade-off. So the United States had a fatality rate about 10 times that of Australia. Arguably, we're more innovative even per capita. So there are some

kinds of cooperation problems we're better at, like working together to develop a new vaccine. Not that that was entirely American, but nonetheless, the U.S. is good at that kind of thing. But getting people to trust and obey social dictates, we've never been good at. We're still not good at it. And right now we're probably worse at it than before the pandemic started because levels of mistrust have gone up. So that's one reason why our fatality rate was so much higher than yours. And finally, Tyler, do you have a view on Australian talent or what might make Australian talent unique? I feel I need to spend more time in Australia. I've really just been to Sydney and Melbourne, which are wonderful cities. They're probably the parts of your country I would love the most,

even if I had been everywhere. But of course, they're not very representative. So what your weird outsiders are like, I don't feel I have a good grasp on it. How much of a brain drain issue Australia has, I don't feel I have a good grasp on it. I've lived in New Zealand for about a year and a half. I feel I understand New Zealand really much, much better than Australia. And I worry sometimes I view Australia too much through kind of Kiwi eyes. I guess on net, I'm surprised there's not obviously more talent from Australia, I think is where I end up. And it could just be I don't know about it. But you have a reasonable number of people,

and you're off there in the corner brewing up your own stuff. But not that much of it seems to break through, I think. So I apologize to the extent that's my ignorance. But that is my impression. And things like Patrick White and Robert Hughes and Jocelyn Morehouse, like I do know something about Australian culture. And I've listened to all the crowded house and I know Jeffrey Gurumal from the islands up north. But still, it seems to me there should be more somehow.

I think that's a reasonable impression. For a very rich, educated country with about 25 million people, we don't seem to have many kind of superstars or super successful companies breaking through, as you would expect. It could be that life there is too nice and you develop dimensions of status competition that are not too aspirational, but they're just like having this extremely nice life. And Sydney, maybe more than any other city I've ever been to, seems extraordinarily

well-suited to that, just having an extremely nice life, which of course I'm not at all against. But the way in which you have to struggle every day to deal with New York City doesn't seem to be a thing anywhere in Australia, as far as I can tell. Australia has a very strong equality of manners or social egalitarianism. And I don't think success is held or ambition are held in the same regard as they are in the US. If you stick your head up kind of too high, people are liable to want to cut you down. Yes. Whereas my experience in America is people are very supportive of bragging and ambition. Some of your creators are underrated, like Mel Gibson.

I know his actual views are quite noxious and objectionable, not contesting that. But Apocalypto is a phenomenal movie. The Christ movie is amazing. Mad Max, he's actually an incredible talent who's become underrated because he is so personally objectionable. And he's Australian. I don't know how much he's embraced in Australia. But again, if you go through the whole list, Australia is going to look better than if you just pull out the people you're proud of. Yeah. Yeah.

Agreed. Well, Tyler, I have really enjoyed chatting with you. Thank you again for writing this brilliant book with Daniel called Talent, How to Identify Energizers, Creatives and Winners Around the World. I recommend it to everyone. It is an excellent book and an incredibly practical one. But thank you again for coming back on the podcast and hopefully I'll see you in Australia or in America. My pleasure.

Come by for lunch to Virginia someday and I look forward to our next chat. Thanks so much for listening. Two quick things before you go. First, for links, show notes and the episode transcript, go to my website, thejspod.com. That's thejspod.com.

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Until next time, ciao.