 Welcome everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. Hi Tyler. Hi Daniel So I'll start right away. What is a talent that you think you possess that is underrated by everyone else? Daniel, I think that's for you first Well pausing before answering a question is definitely a rare skill these days, but I think there's something about Something that's been helpful for me that I've kind of realized I have that I think many people have I don't know if it's totally ubiquitous is in the process of an interview Which you know you do in venture a lot like you know hundreds and thousands of times a year being able to sort of Build a grid of you know the person who's that's talking to you who they most kind of remind you of and the Outcomes that those people have had Is I think a pretty important skill and I think it's a pretty important skill for you know anyone you know searching for talent But certainly in the venture world That's kind of what you're doing when you meet these early-stage businesses is you're kind of trying to Build like some type of search map in your head That's more intuitive than it is rational. It's sometimes a bit hard to explain why X might remind you of Y But that's a skill that's a skill I think a lot of people have the the benefit I've had is I got Innocated in this world at a very young age and so I've had many many hours of reps You know just getting it in and mostly making mistakes, but occasionally getting it right I Don't think I have the talent of hesitating before answering the question But I think one thing I'm good at is turning problems into combinatorials and then within my head very rapidly searching for all possible combinations of factors that might Somehow fit together and spitting that out in well under a second I'm not even sure that's an underrated talent But I think it's a way to think about some of the talents I have that if it's an area where I can turn it into that I will typically do quite well But if it's a trying to work the microwave at home, which I cannot turn into some kind of combinatorial factorial analysis Then I'm like way below average at trying to work the microwave at home. So that's true So Daniel if you're looking for talent in Investing or finance, how does that look different from the talent in the startup world in the startup world? Yeah, what makes a good investor is very different for one makes a good founder and If you were to kind of make a scatterplot of it some of the attributes are completely diametrically opposed you know, for example, and I think very good investors are The kind of right degree of optimistic but also realistic Whereas founders are too optimistic, which they should be I mean at the end of the day like you know startups are a very funny activity when you think about it from a probability Stamp with most companies fail like all almost all companies fail and yet people came to be Seemingly doing this activity over and over they're jumping off a cliff over and over again You like look over the cliff and like everyone who jumped out of the cliff, you know It's just like on the ground dead but keep people keep on jumping off the cliff And so founders are kind of a you know almost too optimistic, but I think when you're evaluating a business, especially At later and later stages. I think optimism can be your enemy And often you see when a lot of founders later on in life And I am such a person who started a business sold it and then became an investor You actually have to be able to wear very different kind of psychometric hats And one of them is this continuum of realism and optimism And I'd probably say that's you know the starkest difference between kind of what makes a good start-up investor and a good founder There probably many others but that that's kind of the main thing that you look for So who's more likely to drink diet coke the two groups? That's a good question Yeah, I'd say I'd say you know Both I think are pretty likely to be of the you know, whatever diet coke signals, you know I don't know if some obviously here in San Francisco It's quadruple espresso, you know $25 coffee and you know, maybe the rest of America to diet coke But you know both are I think in the people that want more stimulants as opposed to depressants And that just depends on the stage at which they're at Yeah, I think so I think a stage location whatnot But you know the bit about it's very funny that that the you know You end up writing have the great gift of writing a book with someone like Tyler Cohen on a topic as expansive as talent And of course what comes out of it is everyone wants to talk to us about soft drinks And so, you know, sometimes I feel like we're like Michael Pollan wrote a book about dieting or something and everyone wants to talk about diet coke, but Yeah, I think it's it's probably a very common trait across all kind of active people investors need more red wine Don't they to regulate the mood Maybe yeah, maybe they're more, you know, totally trying to operate their amygdala with opposing You know drugs uppers and downers, but there's some skill to evaluating the wine Reflects skill in evaluating investments more than perhaps startups. That is probably true The startup founder would probably be the type that does not care what they're drinking You know as long as it gets them hydrated and in the right mood and the investor definitely has all sorts of theories about the colors and the Vintage's and the country's and all that They also have to do with disposable income. Yes, it may also have to do with the fact that one is not free Tyler both of us are at George Mason. You've been a professor there for more than 30 years You've been involved in a lot of hiring decisions and it's a strange place for more reasons than just the both of us are there It's a large state school. It's newish. It's not an Ivy League school But it's had an exceptional economics department, you know, we've had a couple of Nobel laureates. We've had people like you What is the secret sauce at George Mason that it manages to attract that kind of talent that other schools of comparable level are not able to I like to look for people who believe something very strongly That can't be the only qualification But other economics departments tend not to do that They look for people who can execute flawless 90-page papers with every possible robustness check now that too is important and useful But it's not what we do if you decide you will specialize in people who believe in something and pursue it passionately And want to sit around and argue and talk ideas and read books You will end up with one of the most interesting economics departments and we've built a sufficiently strong Consensus that we just keep on hiring people who believe things So they turn out being a little wacky, right? You're selecting for that But that in turn keeps you different So in how do you know how to screen for that? What's a question you're likely to ask at the AA meetings that you know that someone is like technically not unsound But they're also very interesting and they can't game it. Oh, I don't think you have to ask questions if they believe in stuff They will ask you questions You just have to show up in the room, right? So it's one case where you don't have to agonize over optimal interview questions And in fact the way we're supposed to interview now supposed to but do is where to ask everyone the same questions And we do but that doesn't matter. It's not actually a handicap It would be a handicap in almost any other situation But you can ask everyone the same questions and it will just come out who believes in something So Daniel at Pioneer one of the things you have tried to do is gamify the experience, right? and So when it comes to gamification do competitive games work better or do cooperative games work better You know to test for ambition and aspiration So about Pioneer is I mean principally a website, but it's an online startup accelerator Kind of a pre YC, which I would have to explain in most cities, but not in this one and Yeah, and so this many ways in in where it's kind of different and unique and one of them is that everyone on the platform gets A score every week for the work that they do and so you're sort of incentivized to make your score go up and there's in and so kind of the broad idea there is Trying to really address it a question so much related to talent Which is why aren't there more startups and many answers to this question But one of the reasons why there aren't more startups is as we were saying earlier the act of starting a company is completely Irrational and you tend to get a lot of negative stimulus before you get positive stimulus You know you start working at a new job You have a boss that boss kind of wants to hopefully make it a good experience for you You they tend to like build a map and a game for you basic game and quotes here Start up doesn't have that and so it tends to be you know You tend to hear no no no no no fail and then finally you might get somewhere But a lot of people don't crest beyond the you know the the j-curve really and they just drop it than a deer And so gamification in a way or some way to make something compelling You know ultimately with the goal of basically creating more startups is kind of the theory behind pioneer And someone like how you know Peloton gets more people to cycle and Heck I mean people in South Korea are literally dying of exhaustion because they're playing video games of death So like there is something very powerful about that effect Whether it's used positively or or negatively now you ask the question of what creates kind of more goodness basically competition or cooperation and you know we think Competition broad leak is what creates greatness and you tend to like the answer is both obviously because competition creates Cooperation within small groups that compete against each other now. It is true That not everyone who signs up for pioneer like wants to compete on a global leaderboard against everyone else in the world You know very good competitors. I think tend to have even the best Most competitive people tend to have a predictive model of like I'm only going to enter games I can win and So or at least games where I have like maybe a 40% chance of winning and so but but I strongly believe whether you want to Compete globally or not. Everyone wants to improve every single day And so it's very similar to Peloton in the sense that you can have a score and you could be playing against yourself I mean you could just be trying to grow your revenue a week over week or the amount of active users You have or any one of you know different metrics and KPIs or you could be competing globally And I think that kind of affords us all modalities because I really think there are very few people that don't want to improve at least themselves If not want to you know compete against others But of course every every form of competition. I mean usually will attend some form of local cooperation and I think it's a very good thing Because you know, I ultimately I think a lot of what a free market enables is for people To get excited about the idea of competing building a better product trying a new experience and you know many of those fail But occasionally those work and it creates, you know, the microphones that we're using the building that we're in and you know the City and world that we live in so I think both are necessary On a day-to-day basis though, you're trying to create a community, right? So does the leaderboard sort of create that off a little bit because people are just trying to Go further up does it turn it into a zero-sum game instead of forming a community? Yeah, it's a it's a good question and What we try to do is Make the other game not necessarily appears zero-sum so it is true that for every ending week at the end of the day if you have a sorted list someone will be at the top and someone you know won't but There's no direct reward function for being number one versus number two It's it's I mean you there is the glory of it and a lot of our founders love, you know Just you know send send us and tweet screenshots of you know their position on the leaderboard is you know, whatever It's it's great for them, but there's no like direct reward the guarantee pioneer gives you is that if you're in the top Decisal we will review your application But like you could be 25th or you know 30 second it doesn't matter we'll still review your application And so it just helps us in that case get a broad sort and because the game is not that zero-sum I think people still tend to at least cooperate on non-business related things And I think on business related matters like founders should either merge their companies or like compete and not cooperate That's totally fine And so you know, I think we managed to have bets of both worlds But I do think you know when constructing these universes and whatnot is quite important for it to not feel necessarily zero-sum You know you could go compete with someone on a running track And it really doesn't like ultimately they're running faster than you doesn't eat at away at any of your pie so to speak And I think that's important Because you know like everything it's a spectrum and We do want I mean a lot of these startup communities ultimately in San Francisco is one for better or worse It's basically a giant startup campus They sort of work because people do at the end of the day feel some form of even if it's not directly Related to their business, but some form of kinship with each other It's you know Silicon Valley lore is obviously littered with stories of the person who let me sleep on their couch You know one thing led to the next so we have both I hope How much of your time in Israel like growing up in Israel and sort of watching different kind of experimentation with Community building different kinds of communes Inform how you decided to build the pie. I'd love to be able to answer Yes to your question that that was somehow extremely informative to me I you know I grew up in a you know dark secluded corner of Jerusalem right outside the old city And so I can't really say had you know the most expansive you but in reality that the real place I I experienced growing up is the internet and you know You know many people now like to talk about how you know kind of bad social medias and how bad these online communities are but you know That's all that's a very nice thing to say when you're kind of Looking out into you know the rolling hills of Sonoma and this beautiful world that we live in here today and You know look obviously the place where I grew up is certainly not a third-world country But it's very different and isolating to be honest And I think there's many people who immigrated to San Francisco in California We feel similarly and the idea of growing up on the internet does let you see all sorts of experiments And yeah I mean I you know I grew up in the open source community writing code and so that you know to me was an interesting example of a Very different organizational model than many different companies Where the leadership in some of these open source projects is actually quite undefined and you really see tend to see those Struggle versus ones that have a defined leader and And and so yeah, I mean there's an infinite variety of you know forms of cooperation But I I can't really credit Israel to that. I probably really credit the the time You know 56 kilobyte dial up internet connection I had Speaking of internet connection so Tyler you're an early adopter One of the things that you've done which is a little bit niche but very fun is the ethnic dining guide That's your way of looking at the world through food You're not so good at desserts You you sort of go straight for chocolate ice cream, you know, that's that's your go-to move Is there something fundamentally different about people who write about food or you know Who are food critics versus people who write about dessert and are is there such a category there should be right desert critics? I don't quite consider desserts to be food So I think in a town like San Francisco there will be many dozens hundreds of places that are quite good There will be very few good desserts So in my perhaps backward view there are excellent desserts at Michelin starred restaurants most of all in Europe There are superb desserts in India and then there's very good chocolate ice cream and all other desserts Basically are bad and most chocolate ice cream is not good including in the city of San Francisco So the fact that desserts tend to be sweet right that was like a decision made in Western cuisine The French decided to segregate out the sweet stuff and make it separate from the meal or say Arabic food or even food still in Sicily today the sweets are integrated into the main courses much more readily parts of the Middle East as well and When you put all the sweet stuff in one place, it's not going to be good Unless it has a very high level of ingredient quality and composition So so it is a different kind of taste palette for someone to be appreciate to be able to appreciate desserts I think so and I don't cover desserts because I don't live in Calcutta I'm not covering Michelin starred restaurants and chocolate ice cream. There's not really that much to say about we all know where it's good And it's bad right and it's good in Italy Argentina Brazil some parts of the US most of all the Northeast It's very good in France actually especially Paris, but mostly it's bad We Went to Joe's ice cream last night. It was just awful You know I googled best chocolate ice cream San Francisco One of the top lists once you get past the Google ads It's like well Giardelli's is listed three times in the top ten What kind of insanity is that and then Swenson's is in the top ten and then there's some place called Mocha Which is like not even ice cream and then there was Joe's which was horrible and that was like five at the top ten So the internet has failed us San Francisco has failed us chocolate ice cream has failed us some combination of all those things I'd rather eat you know in Israel and Tel Aviv. There's excellent chocolate ice cream That's definitely better than in Jerusalem. I think yeah I don't want people to make of this my explanation for the bad chocolate ice cream last night was That San Francisco doesn't have enough kids like not enough people are having enough kids And and that's the reason for it aside from the benefit of torturing Tyler And not getting him good chocolate ice cream Right so one of the things I want to learn about is how you've influenced each other So one is exercise you both have like different ideas of exercise both very regular Daniel you run marathons. I believe on every continent and you've run one in Antarctica. Is that right? Yeah, I don't think it's I mean it's you know in a city like San Francisco where you know It's hard to go out and not see someone running I don't think it's particularly remarkable to be a runner, but Yes, I think we have very different philosophies when it comes to exercise that is a fair statement Okay, the last time I went on a hike with Tyler. He brought his book bag along With a lot of books So have you influenced each other on exercise at all do you talk about it? Have you changed your philosophy? What is your stated philosophy and exercise? I very much enjoy Games of skill such as tennis and basketball, right and those are exercise if it's sheer exercise I'm bored, but YouTube plus Peloton to the rescue that works for me Okay, so I very much like Peloton. That's your influence and Peloton with YouTube is great So you can watch Magnus Carlson and pedal away and Magnus is highly entertaining Yeah, that's definitely not what I do, but I Appreciate the sentiment How much do you think the gamification in exercise and like sort of the personalized customized version of Exercise has helped you or formed the way you think about running Yeah, I mean definitely It's formed to the way our product is built. I think everyone who works on our team is Either I'll kind of want to be Competitive athlete or a want to be competitive chess player and so everyone is in a way, you know Getting scores in their hobbies all the time and want to improve and so you know that obviously drives that product ideation forward so Yeah, I mean I I think Peloton was an interesting case study and It's an ongoing case study. I guess it's that's being evaluated every day in the market, but not positively It's an interesting case study and how much gamification kind of matters at all And it does seem like people are actually quite motivated by like whatever leaderboard and power mechanics they have out there and On the you know contrary side They released this thing that totally flopped I thought it was fascinating that it didn't work a priori if I were just to describe to you here Some type of thing you can use on an exercise bike and what it does is it? Responses the music that you're listening to and you know as the tempo of the music increases you pedal faster And as the tempo of the music decrease whatever it's all synchronized and it's fun like if I was pitching not I was pitching Not at like a venture firm I think people would say wow sounds great Peloton built this and and they launched it into this particular thing totally flopped so And I think people tend to really over complicated. I mean I think there are psychometric personalities Imagine like mine that are like relentlessly interested in improving and for that to getting a feed type feedback loop with any type of numerical score Is very good and very simple. I think there are people that Don't really care about that and want to watch YouTube and you know get the work in and move on so But ultimately yeah, I think it probably helps a certain type of personality Tyler do you think this kind of gamification would have made you a different chess player when you were young? I Think one significant difference between Daniel and myself Daniel I see as much more competitive than I am and I think I'm somewhat more obsessive than he is though He's quite obsessive So the areas I operate in for better or worse. I'm never asking myself Where I am on the leaderboard for instance, there's no other person or I could tell you how many Twitter followers I have I just have no idea But I can wake up every morning do my thing practice at it try to progress and just relentlessly Endlessly do that forever as I've actually done now for the last basically 46 years. So that's a kind of obsessiveness But I'm not competing very much at all and I don't know what my leaderboards are and I'm fine with that and You could describe yourself better than I could you But I think your experience is one of the world of gaming more fundamentally And I quit chess when I was 15 because in a way I found competing a little boring Actually, it wasn't obsessive enough in a funny way And the thing always comes to an end. Whereas what I do now it never comes to an end It's like a true extreme of relentlessness. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, yeah, definitely I Definitely, do you think if you'd be grew if you were kind of starting out in the era of you know The internet where things are much more interconnected and reflexive the whole chess thing is just much more in your face Do you think you'd play chess longer? No, I think I would have quit sooner interesting because I would have Accelerated to the point of frustration and boredom interest more rapidly and like quit at 13 rather than 15 So is it because when you were growing up? There was still a chance that humans had against computers while playing chess and now that's just it's over No, I never thought about that computers didn't worry about there was a chess playing computer back then called tinkerbell People lugged it around to tournaments. It was quite large like you had to pull on it It was on a cart you needed more than one person to pull on the car. It was a standing joke You had the option of not playing it, but you knew that if you played it you would beat it So very different mentality at the time I thought just playing computers was a very far-off thing that they would ever be good. Obviously. I was totally wrong I didn't understand how they would manage to copy intuition in different ways But I think that the kind of borehaze notion of the infinite Unending system, you know the infinite library is what really appeals to me and with the internet I would have found that more quickly indeed in the internet itself As I have in a sense now Ben Kaznoka once made to me the interesting point I'm the last generation to have lived in both worlds in a significant way with internet and without internet And I've lived to like 22-23 years with a lot of internet and then I lived well over 30 years without any internet at all and That's just not going to be a thing anymore So I feel very privileged actually to have grown up in libraries and not the internet But thank you have had the internet so one of the things I want to ask you is since we're in San Francisco and everything is Elon Musk and You know, we're always talking about what we're gonna do when we end up on Mars How do we screen or select for the first group of settlers? What are the interview questions we should ask them? That's a great question by the way Authorize a few ideas while you think You know, I think the sort of interesting question for Martian settlers is So, I mean any form of settler I mean anyone who wants to do that is saying a lot by self-selecting into it And that I think has been the case for people that have gone to new continents and to settle new nations and existing continents and whatnot So you're gonna get a lot of free selection effect by virtue of the person wanting to be an astronaut let alone, you know a interplanetary settler it's quite the LinkedIn and I think an interesting Brought a question for that colony will be what's going to keep people together during the hard times And if you look at like successful countries that were settled there were very strong religious ties That built that lore that helped create fabric And look maybe the conditions will be so harsh That that alone will create ties, but I'd sort of be looking and asking for Groups of people I wouldn't make no case on kind of what form of religion is the best but groups of people that are very connected on some very deep level Because otherwise I think you can end up with something that it sort of blows up But Tyler, what do you think? Diet Coke drinking Obviously, I'm an American and I'm personally very influenced by Puritan culture in my country's own background So I would look first and foremost for religion But it's a bit like the GM you hires if you have to ask someone yeah, like do you believe in some idea? It's already a bit hopeless You know you need to know that they already do before you have to ask them So in that sense, it's not an internet question, but I think simply whether the person is American Is to me of critical import for settling Mars I think Americans are fairly well situated to settle Mars pretty high level of trust frontier mentality A lot of us are crazy. We're relatively religious the notion of settling a hostile territory. Obviously is in our cultural DNA Israelis possibly it's a little more complicated because for Israel, it's a bit more about settling a specific place, which Mars is not yeah, but nonetheless There's the sense of raving the hostile elements So I religious Americans and Israelis would be my first cut at it And I would even consider, you know, LDS Mormons who tend to have beliefs about other worlds and that human beings should have some role in Colonizing other worlds that might help. I don't know if that's the strongest LDS belief, but it's not gonna hurt any So I you know I want to double down on the Americans and not say the Belgians nothing against the Belgians They have amazing chocolate ice cream and French fries and some other things, but I'm not really gonna send them to Mars. I'm sorry Is there like a screening question one screening question for me would be like do they want to have kids? How do they think about how many children they want to have and raise them? I think that would be like a key question, right Anything else we should screen for before we pack them up This I mean, I think there's probably a lot of physical stamina that would be necessary. It's just good old like You know Can you do 10 push-ups or whatnot? Like I I think it's it's probably non-trivial physically To get to Mars let alone settle it. So that might be an important one People who are careful with airlocks would be high on my last yes But just not making very stupid mistakes. Yeah with physical items Yeah, so people who are like bad at operating their vacuum cleaner. I wouldn't take to Mars. Yeah So the certain type of like almost like a carpentry skill that would be very useful Yeah, even though you don't need them to build things maybe the robots do that But you don't want them really pressing the wrong button very much. Yeah, you need a kind of MacGyver skill. Yeah But it's also a little bit like selecting a condo association board or something right like you don't want really annoying people for instance Or like people who just want to be contrarian for the sake of being contrary I mean, it's sort of also the same way we you hire for tenure in a in an Econ department You're gonna have lunch with these people the rest of your life We're in the puritan somewhat annoying like my intuition is you actually would want a lot of annoying people Because slanders from the Simpsons basically. Yeah. Yeah that friction would somehow keep them going. Yeah, and It's the people who don't argue with each other who could end up very badly off track on Mars that you need people who are arguing every day I Think yeah, I think you didn't ask like are we going or just they go Well, I'm not going anymore after the answers you guys have given me All these annoying carpenters who know how to run a vacuum I'm fine on earth a chocolate ice cream aside. I don't find space that interesting aliens I find interesting but just to put me somewhere empty where most prices are infinity, you know, I'll say no to that Coming back to the talent market Do you think Tyler it is in disequilibrium or there's some kind of market failure? Or there's different kinds of talent markets and some are in disequilibrium. Some have a failure This book sounds like there is disequilibrium in the talent market and a lot of the suggestions that you have given Can kind of push it towards that equilibrium I think there's massive market failure in most parts of the talent market But it's worth asking which parts work very well And I think actually many parts of gaming It doesn't cost that much to access Not that everyone in the world can play games, but really a considerable Number of people can performance can be measured There's a leaderboard. It's sort of obvious how well you're doing if you want to learn There's a lot of ways you can learn and get better I think chess is a pretty efficient market Especially now that many more people in India and China are playing well You play with computers you can become as good as quickly as you're able to But when it's intangibles, I think there's a common situation where when the time comes to make a hire you feel rather stuck But ex ante hardly anyone is doing all the right things in terms of Existing you know investing in pre-existing networks Honing their own abilities making themselves sufficiently inspiring Sort of figuring out how to attract the talented people to come to them Those are the more difficult tasks not like you sit on your throne and three candidates show up and you point to the one and You're only going to get so much better at that you can get better at that But I don't view that as the way to think about the market failure in most general terms If you find a great person you make them a lot better, but they capture a lot of that value So you under invest in doing that. That's the fundamental problem So whoever first spotted Elon Musk has basically no share in Elon's riches You could say well Peter TL at some modestly later stage spotted Elon and you know Earned some money from spotting Elon, but that's the actual problem. You can help people a lot and get nothing for it How much of the Sort of insights in the book have either of you managed to implement in your own organizations? Well when you write a book With a title of talent you certainly walk into every interview you do in your life Realizing that guy's thinking he's chatting with the guy who wrote a book called talent So you pretty much want to be on point in the interview So I think look we obviously already experienced some heightened awareness around an act Which most people I think are not sufficiently focused on which is the interview itself And so that only increases I think after something like the book comes out I think we have always kind of been trying different interview questions I mean the book is really just like a Cut from a very long list that keeps on growing and so I think we'll we continue to kind of iterate on that over time But I'd say that the biggest shift in my thinking in talent is a byproduct of working with Tyler has been on the value of things like Energy and sturdiness and industriousness over raw intellect and IQ Which I don't think is properly Certainly wasn't in my you know my mindset a couple of years ago, and I still don't still don't think is it kind of in the global mindset And you know we're certainly not saying that horsepower and IQ, you know don't matter. They certainly do but there is a Clearing bar at which which point for most roles I think people tend to overvalue it and kind of don't realize the logarithmic nature of the curve and Assume it's kind of linear, but I actually think you more early than many people realize You sort of want to switch to caring about Just how much how vigorous and how energetic that person is I think that is might be because I'd be curious if you'd agree that it's because for most tasks doing And so you'd rather have someone that will just do much more their learning rate should be much higher I Mean speaking for myself. I hired you right so you are in academia I think in academia. There's quite a few people who are significantly undervalued. You can't wait too long Or they're just totally ruined, but if they're given freedom to operate and actually do things There's already in a reasonable positive selection for smarts, right? And there's some people who really are thirsty to do things and run things and create and make a difference And those people are trapped in that trapped in academia because a lot of them can't see a way of supporting themselves Doing a different thing. So if you can set up structures where they have that support You can just find a lot of people who can become like 50 a hundred X more productive by simply not just being academics all the time and Your exhibit whatever I don't know what letter, but that's you You run a you know emergent ventures India and you Identify people in India and give them support and get them going with their own startups and projects and intellectual endeavors And that's like phenomenally way more productive and like are you smarter now than then? Well probably somewhat, but that's not the difference the difference is This ability to see like there's a difference you can make and really want to do it and be in a structure That allows that to happen So this is an example of how like the market for talent can be way more efficient not by like two X But by like a hundred X or more in many many cases Yeah, but I actually use the insights in the book for what I do So I'm asking you the same like outside of Evie. Is it easy to? Bring insights like this to like a university system the way we hire I mean not just an econ at George Mason or at Mercators because these are Institutionally kind of set in their ways Talent issues. I think about all the time I said before I'm an obsessive person if I'm waiting in line for my chocolate ice cream, whatever I'm thinking about like how's the staff organized who's doing a good job. Why why not? It's sort of pointless in a way But you can't help but do it and it's some form of practicing is just to always be on and Processing and thinking through like how is this working and why and I find that useful, but I know it's it's weird Like does it make a person happy? I'm not unhappy doing it. It's you know, it's part of being obsessive Daniel, how do you think this interview or conversation is going? Oh, thank you for asking. I Say it's going well. I appreciate The questions are very colorful but better than some of the questions we've gotten I think no one has today to ask us had a screen for more, you know, Martian settler human Martian settlers So I've been enjoying it. What about you? Better than I thought Yeah, I had this whole secret plan when they were when they were plugging the mic There were some loose buyers and I was like, it'll come in handy if things are going badly. Yeah, so so we're all still here How do you think about immigrants and talent? So the more specific question is how are immigrants different from children of immigrants? Is there anything that differentiates them? I see a lot of differences in the Indian community But I'd like to know more from from how you think about that Tyler. I'm a big fan of immigration For countries that can manage it For me that definitely includes the United States. I think immigrants bring more energy. There's plenty of data They do startups at higher rates But immigrant parents often are in difficult positions. They come without networks. They're starting all over Immigration can be much harder for men than women. There's a literature on this because If the woman is raising children her position in the family more or less remains intact But the man is starting all over again and very likely is underplaced in some significant way and spends quite a few years Just working to achieve like a decent Middle-class income But if you see persistence within families, whether you think it's you know genetic or upbringing or social cultural whatever But I strongly believe in persistence in families The children of the immigrants will start off like usually in decent enough schools Often in the suburbs could be Northern Virginia could be Ontario They'll develop sort of normally North American networks They'll be completely fluent in English in a very useful way and it can just be full speed ahead They're still not taking prosperity for granted their parents often are you know kicking their butt like you've got to succeed which is useful though not always happiness inducing and It's just a general group of people I'm extremely bullish upon and I think there's a lot of good reasons both sort of intuitively But that also show up in plenty of actual data and research studies Why we should be bullish on immigrants and try as a nation to take in more immigrants than what we're doing right now to what extent is the kind of Positive effect of immigrants true of people that immigrate within the United States. I Don't think it's very true anymore. I think it was a Long time ago say people who went to California right people who settled Utah But now to move across the United States. There's always internet supermarkets are the same They're definitely different things politically But if you're a dentist who lives in Denver rather than Columbus, Ohio Yeah, doesn't feel that brave to me like fine. Maybe there's some very modest positive selection But it's weakened considerably. It's quite weak. I think yeah, maybe people who never move But if a person only moves once and not that far, I don't feel that's negative selection. Yeah Like I grew up in New Jersey moved to northern Virginia, which is like what four-hour car trip away It's not really such a brave thing to do. I moved to more trees But still that seems fine. Yeah a marker. Yeah So an interesting thing that I see in the Indian diaspora is Sort of the first generation immigrants, especially probably the ones you're familiar with in the Bay Area They are not very risk-taking and entrepreneurial in the sense of they're not doing startups and stuff like that But they're very good at doing very well in big tech firms And sort of you know, like like very good at navigating a particular system It's the next generation sort of, you know American born From Indian families who end up being very very entrepreneurial Is that a good way of thinking about all children of immigrants or there's something funky going on with the Indian immigrants mostly children of immigrants just aren't that risk-taking I think there's something interesting going on with Indian immigrants in particular if you look at the executive leadership bench in tech There's massive overrepresentation of Indian immigrants or children of Indian immigrants and and I don't really know I don't know if you have a view, but there's something interesting going on there And so I think that's an interesting effect someone ought to study and Certainly with startup founders, which is maybe the area I'm most studied in You tend to see first generation immigrants But these are people that come to the United States usually not out of Kind of sheer desperation to have some basic form of economic success because they were somewhat suppressed in their origin country But more people in search of some sort of spiritual belonging That they believe they found in whatever technology they're working on And so they they look much more like kind of Religious migrants. I think then you're kind of typical immigrant. I'm trying to make it The founders at least that I meet to come out to San Francisco and some of them actually, you know are American just immigrating from, you know You know Iowa to SF Obviously many of them international too. The best ones are not necessarily that worried about making a buck tomorrow They're technical they found an interesting scene and they kind of want to belong So I think it's actually quite different from The kind of immigrant persona of you know, we took our whole family into the u.s We have two, you know screaming crying babies and we're just trying to survive I think those people for a very obvious reasons are very risk averse Um go ahead I'm strongly of the view that right now is a kind of golden age for the indian diaspora and also india So if you look say at Florence during the renaissance, or you look at central europe In the early decades of the 20th century You see remarkable truly remarkable levels of achievement that don't happen before don't happen after You know, it's not some kind of genetic thing, but somehow everything is coming together just right And I think part of talent is to realize when you hit these mother loads And then to figure well, we're just going to try to do a lot here as much as we possibly can So investing in you know potential mathematicians in hungarian high schools in 1916 was a really good thing to do You don't even have to be that good at picking talent So today for whatever reason I do think it's india possibly south asia more broadly I see the potential for parts of nigeria kind of joining that club. It's it's further away Maybe still contingent But for whatever reason Right now something remarkable is happening combination of level of aspiration internet is good enough enough people with enough english fluency Some kind of underlying flexibility of worldview But I think has made indians relatively well suited say to be CEOs and american companies in a way we might not have expected Say 30 years ago So I think something extraordinary is going on and it won't last forever And it was not the same say 40 years ago Maybe it started 20 30 years ago, but now we're seeing it all blossom. So to me it's very exciting I would agree. Evie india is a lot of fun There's for those of you who are investing or thinking of investing in india There are a lot of low hanging fruit A lot of the people that we picked for evie india if they were in the united states or canada They would have been in incubator programs and accelerator programs and magnet schools and Teal fellowship or something like that. But none of that exists in india the scouting or the incubation infrastructure doesn't exist So actually tyler and iron competition usually and I get far better quality of applications A higher average and a lower variance than than the ones that tyler gets from from the rest of the world But that's my simple explanation for what's happening In india So one of the things that both startups and economics departments have in common is failure I mean, this is both at the level of I mean startups. It's fairly obvious But in economics, you know, most people who start their phds don't finish or even the people You know the sorts that tyler is hiring for As professors in the econ department, they may stop publishing or they may give up at some point What is a good way to screen for who will handle failure? Well, or at least better than the others in the running I think in science we've allowed institutions to evolve to the point Where people have options of not failing at all So science ought to be more like startups like most ideas do fail Even published research papers and top journals If you ask researchers who really know and they're willing to speak honestly with you like, what's the chance that paper is actually true You'll get answers like 20 30 percent You don't get answers of 50 percent But we've created this veneer or cloak of if you do all the right things in terms of process We'll sort of all pretend to take this paper seriously You'll get tenure somewhere, maybe not at Harvard or MIT But like at some tier one research university And you'll be given all these bureaucratic duties and you have to referee a lot of papers and hire other people And it's the self replicating thing That insulates people from truly failing But also means that fewer people than ever before pursue true success And I think it's an example of gross talent misallocation and it is a better Lifestyle if you become an academic and if you work hard enough and you're smart enough you can't fail But we're doing ourselves a gross disservice And I think a lot of our sciences are badly out of whack for this reason And they should become more like startups again But structures tend to ossify and academia certainly is no exception to that Yeah there is um The look there's kind of classical answers to your question of you know, how do you You look for stories early on in someone's life a failure and whatnot and all that stuff is true There is uh, I think a great emotion to be on the lookout for in an interview in particular when assessing founders Is fear And sometimes you meet people and you just get their their kind of naked ambition Is so large and vast that I don't feel fear for my life, but I definitely feel a little bit of fear Being in the room with them and I think that's a very promising sign when one feels that emotion Um, and that I think is a good proxy towards, you know, will the person handle failure? And I think a lot of the The best founders I've had the pleasure of working with don't even really experience Like setbacks and failure the same way most people do or The degree of badness of the news for something to register in their mind is a true failure Is much higher than it is for most people. A lot of bad news is immediately misinterpreted as great news Um, you know, oh the market's down great, you know, a lot of talent, you know Will be fired and we'll be able to hire them or it's a correction will you know, you know creative destruction and whatnot So I think a lot of that comes kind of out of just a general sense of vigorousness and vitality That I think is somewhat correlated with this kind of sense of ambition too So I think about that a lot. I I generally I think about Kind of reflexively I try to think about how I feel when I interview someone and I I imagine actually everyone's doing that Um, some awareness to the process is quite helpful though Yeah Yeah, resilience is is somehow hard to test for Right, it just needs to be observed. It's one of those things you can figure out fairly quickly I just don't know if there's an interview question to figure it out Yeah, I mean one of the reasons why it's Founders, I think who are not strictly economically motivated and are motivated by some deeper belief are better is the the Underlying barometer of what they're going to be resilient about is much greater than the local game of like, oh This fundraising round felt through It's a much deeper. There's a much deeper game going on is basically. Oh, I told everyone I know I never felt like I ever fit into anywhere in life and now I've now gone around told all my friends family that I'm doing this company thing So like I'm doing the company thing the company thing cannot fail um And uh, I think you know that type of persevering look every single and every single great startup has had these dark moments of death or near death Uh, you know, and obviously everyone's talking about SpaceX, you know famously failed three launches couldn't fail the fourth But like every startup has that narrative and so you often need someone that's powered by a deeper reserve currency than like dollars In order to see through that Is your office messy or neat and when you walk into someone's office or workspace Do you judge them one way or another on how talented they are depending on how messy it is You know Steve jobs famously said someone asked him that question You said, you know, everyone says organized desk is an organized mind But most desks that I've seen that are organized are empty. So would you say an empty desk is uh, what mind? Uh, and uh, he famously had a very messy desk So I do think um zoom has created this kind of Although it has reduced the amount of entropy or information you're getting from someone in an interview I think everyone here can probably attest that a zoom interview is not as Uh enticing exciting revealing or interesting as a real world interview But it does reveal other information net net. You're still getting less But you're suddenly getting this new interesting information of the background the you know where they are There's like a the cats, you know wandering around. Okay, that's interesting and um And I don't know, you know, I don't know that are all of our mental models, you know built around, you know Decades of calibrating on real world interviews where you don't get that information Are now suddenly have to be readjusted to that and so I think it's a good question You know, you generally have you know, you're kind of obvious The desk is a reflection of the conscientiousness. I think of an individual I think for some roles conscientiousness to the extent it moves at a continuum that pulls down openness which You know, the big psychometric theories would disagree with you meaning they would say the big five aspects scale are totally independent of each other But you do really sort of wonder the person who's hyper conscientious who really dots every eye and crosses every teeth Exceedingly rare. I think to find someone that is really really conscientious and also really open um And so I kind of do tend to believe that they kind of affect each other a bit more than we realize and so You know, I think that can be a revealing thing in either direction I mean, I don't know that you necessarily want to say your product designer to have the Most organized desk that you know to steve jobs parlance is also quite to empty I don't know that I would want to see my accountant have an incredibly disorganized desk with all sorts of returns and post-its and You know papers flying around so much depends on the world What about your court and tyler, you know why I'm asking you this question I like the messy desk now I'm biased here to be clear But when I see the desk isn't messy It just looks to me like there's an input that's not being used that there's a lot of slack in the system And that the person tolerates slack without thinking well, how can I put this desk to better work? And then I get suspicious. Well, what what other inputs? Is there a lot of slack on their own labor their own effort their own intelligence? I don't know Uh, I do know some very successful people With very neat desks, but it rubs me the wrong way And I think of the messy desk is quite organized, of course There's like what's the average quality of organization? Versus what's the total amount of organization that went into this event of the desk? And the messy desk is going to have more total organization almost always Even if the average quality has higher variance There'd be an inefficiency in the symmetry required of a perfectly organized desk Meaning like everything can now only fit into squares, which means you can you have less total space Sort of like a bin packing problem. That's right. And to me, it's also a sign Yes, then there's the floor which tyler uses very well for the packing problem But there's a sign they're not using the physical dimension somehow and they're thinking And I'm a big fan of the physical dimension. Yeah sort of thinking with your body thinking with what you put on the floor Sort of filling out every like every computing device available to you space is a computing device And if you're not using space your computer is lying there passive fallow Who wants that? Now I know what you think when you walk into my office because there's nothing On any surface. It's pretty neat, but I assume at home. It's some huge sprawling mess, right? No Yeah, and I don't walk into tyler's office because there's no room to walk into and the door doesn't fully open and And other such things. No the one thing that the tyler's office does reveal is the obsessiveness It's like everything that is being read or worked on in that moment is right there So it is very much like a picture of what you're doing at that time And it's like a test for people like how will you react to this unbelievable mess and you'll see things that don't even Seem like they should belong in an office like a voodoo flag So you see a voodoo flag in an office and what does the person say? What do they think? That's useful too, right? Do they even notice it? I'm always interested in people who don't seem to notice the mess at all Like the repeat visitors like may not notice it anymore But people who go there for the first time and talk to me like i'm a normal human being that's fascinating It's like what's with them I don't think anyone talks to you like you're a normal human being but it has nothing to do with the mess in your office One of the things that i'm curious about is a lot of us are looking for good mentors What is a good way to figure out if someone will be a good mentor? Especially long term. Is there is there a way to interview for a good mentor? I um I I grew up outside of silicon valley and I was very interested in tech and there weren't really uh I mean my father talked computer science for a living so I mean he was a good Sort of didn't really teach me how to code but he set up a home with a lot of coding books And that was the only thing to read so that's what I did but um that aside I you know I I I remember a time before youtube, uh, and so i'm old enough to say that um, but i'm also young enough to say that I Remember once youtube came online I I just never stopped kind of watching content and lectures on it and so I think a lot of I find it's sort of interesting a lot of people here want you know The best real world mentors, but um, we do have this amazing product, uh that you know, I think 50 years ago people could barely dream of um where we have effectively an infinite amount of content from the world's best teachers investors mathematicians And for me, you know when I was running my business It was actually very helpful in specific ways like you learn specific tricks. Um, but also in ways that Just like watching, you know very charismatic leaders Talk is definitely a great thing to do the night before you have your all hands. Uh, and so I think the the amazing thing about the reality we live in today is yeah, you can interview literally millions of mentors on youtube, uh for free any basically anywhere in the world and um I found for for me that was a huge thing. Um, and uh You know, it's silicon valley in particular is is a very obviously it's a very porous place and and uh People are generally very helpful to each other and so you tend to have I wouldn't call them mentors But you know people who take a you know a step of you know Goodwill based on limited information they have on you They you know go out of their way to help you and someone did the same thing to them And you know in many ways I wouldn't be here without someone taking a bet and funding me And you know now i'm kind of trying to pay it forward to others and so You know those things kind of come into your lap I do worry a little bit when I meet people who are overtly searching for mentors for the sake of finding mentors I'm sort of wondering Whatever you're looking for like I I don't think that's quite going to satisfy it And to the extent one wants just like good mental models of like what is six What is like a really good salesperson look like or what is a really good math professor look like? That's available online in unlimited fashion. So tyler. I don't know if you have a different view, but If you want to find good mentors, I would say focus on yourself Don't focus too much on finding the manner So if i'm thinking of someone I might use fully manner And they would in turn, you know teach me things But I would wonder well if this person is curious as I am something like that would be a starting point And I do figure they can't fake that And they can't even like set out to become more curious or something a little forced about that But if they actually are very curious and just allow that to grow They will end up in a position where maybe I will end up having a connection with them So for it to happen organically and figure out what your strengths are And let those blossom And then just be out there, but again don't don't try to force the mentoring thing too much Because potential mentors can sniff that out and that to them is very boring someone who wants to be mentored It's like the most boring thing you can imagine Someone who wants to learn something can be very interesting. However Tyler you're a very good mentor and I think that has something to do with how generous you are How do you rate generosity on the on the scale for A good mentor? I don't know that I'm generous. I think of myself as pretty selfish And like people I mentor in some ways mentor me and I learn from them and I'm like Always trying to think obsessively. How can I learn from them? So I'm open to the notion of kind of selfishly a bit exploiting them And like for me to stay in touch or like stave. Either you run an organization that gives out money To people around the world. Yeah, how would you square that with the idea of you purporting to be selfish? Hyper first, it's fun. Yeah Second it is a source of social capital, which is very valuable. I'm not paid at the margin to do it But I learn Really an incredible amount and I get some sense of where the world is going And that to me is exciting I feel I have a higher like living standard than just about anyone I know And I know a lot of people with like very high net wealth I don't really think of them as richer than I am in terms of like time usage memories. I have like art music consumption of desserts, whatever I think of myself as like Wealthier than them in human capital terms For the most part, so I'm pretty selfish. All right, and I think I'm good at it At being selfish Well for me, it wasn't the fact that you give money away. It's the time I mean, it's an extraordinary time investment both in evi and everyone You know as the evi family grows more and more time is spent solving their problems and Helping them figure their life out But people are fun, right? And I certainly have enough time on my own You know locked in closets reading books and the like So I'm not giving that up If anything, I still have too much of that and should spend more time with people. Well, here's your chance Here we are, right? Yeah, so I think there's a good time to hear some questions from you If you have any you can just come up to the mic. There's one on either Side and just state your name and ask your question We also have go ahead You also have questions on the ipad, I believe Can I can I go please? Hi, Owen Evans from Oxford So I'm going to give a science fiction type scenario that maybe has some relevance to talent So imagine that say half of all people had an identical twin And some people have like 10 identical twins So we're in this very different world and talent identification in some sense is much easier What kind of impact does that would that have on say startups or like maybe other spheres where talent is important? I think there's somewhat less Information contained in identical twins than many people in the bay area would suppose I think maybe like America as a whole might underrate the role of genetic factors In talent But the people who think about it at all I think tend to overrate significantly how much it matters And there are plenty of identical twins with like very different outcomes There's quite a few of them while they're both law partners in Cincinnati But at the highest levels Those very small differences is like a multiplicative model You need to have like eight or nine very definite things go to an a or a plus level for you And it might happen for you and not for your identical twin So I think at the highest levels of achievement identical twins do not contain a lot of information And they would not be that useful in talent search And I wouldn't go around like oh like did someone clone Bill Gates? It's sort of like an identical twin whereas like the eight-year-old who was the clone Bill Gates I want to support that person with some VC money I mean it's still a better than average bet obviously But that would not be my obsession absolutely not there's some weird confluence of environment And genes and circumstance That maybe you know it when you see it, but ex ante trying to predict that by looking at any one of the factors I don't think you'll get very far Hello, I'm Andy from emergent ventures one of the many y'all You talk a lot about energy and vigor. I'm really struck by that and it makes me wonder Where do you think that comes from? Why is it so variable? Why so different between people? How plastic is it? That's an awesome question. Isn't it? You know, there's all those like toy studies about Gate, you know walking gate and like all other health You know telemetry with people generally correlating long jet correlates with longevity and whatnot And I don't know that anyone's run the regression on that an income, but I think it would be interesting Um, I don't know. I mean, I think sort of is energy plastic Tyler, I don't know if you'd have a different view. I think which I think is an awesome question is It's sort of a bit of a nature nurture biology ask question. Um, like there is some basic, you know Mitochondrial factory thing going on that seems like more efficient in some people than others and Uh, and so I think that just leads to more hours in the day of work more chance is taken You know, if you assume the batting average is roughly even there's just a higher chance of home run But uh, like when you read the interviews of paul mccartney You know or the documentary and he's just like, you know, add it. George Harrison is like again We have to go again. He's like 10 p.m. Again, and so you just and there's thousands of those stories, you know Steve jobs one out of of just People that are more shots on goal And so I think that's sort of must compound Tyler, do you think energy is plastic? I've never read a serious research paper on this question But my intuition is that energy And that kind of vitality is one of the most heritable of characteristics So i'm not saying you will be a copy of your parents, but whatever Was plugged into you at birth is what you have and if I think of myself or the other people I've known their entire lives Which is not that many people, but I just don't see that much change And the way I am my sense is I was that way at three or four at age two. I don't remember My mother always told me that Always kind of antsy wanting the next book something And I just don't think it's something I taught myself you can once you're that way Learn how to use your environment to make yourself better at that and get the genes environment interaction going And that is very much something you learn rather than something you're born with how to like multiply your interaction effects But that core something or other Paul mccartney was composing songs at age 14. He just finished a tour. He's finished a tour now. He's 80 He doesn't need the money Puts out an album every two years takes on massive projects art books everything Incredible you just read biographies of Paul. It just clearly seems he was born with it What do you think human core body temperature is dropping? You know in 2018 there was a famous study put out by the united states think military army That captured human core body temperature longitudinally over time And the u.s. Core body temperature at least is like dropping now You could say it's some type of odd measurement effect thermometers have changed, you know since the 1930s or whatnot But to the extent that's like an odd proxy towards energy I think we are declining in energy as a country putting immigrants aside, which is going to be a complex story in its own It may not be the same from all other places Uh, but the country to me seems to have much less energy than even it did earlier in my lifetime Just anecdotally. So I worry about that. Yeah Hi, I'm spencer. Uh, what if anything do you think we're doing wrong at a national level with our talent evaluation of politicians? Where are we going closer to DC than me? So I don't know where to start with that. I would just say In my basic view of politics the main problem usually is the voters not always But typically it's the voters. I think we're saying talking about this before in the green room I think senators as a whole Are actually fairly impressive. It doesn't mean I agree With what they do or say or changes they push for but just as sort of raw studies and talent They seem to be pretty good. I live right outside of washington dc I know or have met really very large numbers of people in politics chiefs of staff military agencies people on the board of the fed I think our talent in those slots is pretty good not perfect Uh, but that is not our national problem in my opinion at all I can name plenty of individual politicians who I think are just absolute train wrecks But again, I would think in terms of the main problem being the voter I think our political system does better at bringing in some talent than you would think And it's striking to me if you live in the dc area In how many families almost every family there's some notion of like doing national service That I actually find strikingly absent in the bay area. It may be in the whole us It's weakest here and strongest where I live Uh, but that sense of obligation to national service It kind of actually works. I think And u.s. Government still has has done a whole bunch of things properly. We did operation warp speed That would be one example We had a lot of talent there the economist heading it michael kramer. Nobel laureate one of the very best economists Alive on planet earth and he was running that side of operation warp speed. Well, how'd that happen? Like we're doing something, right? But at the end of the day, you know the voting inputs, I don't know. I I really do worry Daniel That's going to be a much better answer than when I can give you go for it I'd love to hear two or three anecdotes from the two of you on times in which Like specific moments in which you've really made a difference in somebody's ambition Or aspiration you talk about that at the back end of the book And I'd love to get a couple case studies of like how you did it how you zipped in there I think it's important not to self-deceive I've had like really quite a large number of people. I know some of whom are in this room. Tell me I made a big difference I'm quite convinced they're sincere But I'm not sure they know And I think there's something quite useful to just being obsessive and continuing And almost not trying to figure out too much There's some odd ways in which I think our society is too data driven And just keep on trying to do it and repeat and try to be a good example And if you're trying too hard to measure your marginal product, you'll maybe end up conforming too much Or doing too many things that are measurable And at the margin maybe the way to have an impact is to not worry too much about measuring your success Uh, I don't think that answer can work for everyone But it's how I've approached the problem And I sort of feel without measuring it that it's worked pretty well for me I think I think that is A very good philosophy that I mean oddly, I think the simplest thing I don't know about ev but certainly I find I've done over the course of my career that People seem to say has been useful for them is just either Funding or at least encouraging people to move As to Silicon Valley ideally if they're intact, but even just a new city Uh, and you know, you they tend to like mis-propagate that at me let go you to cause but it's actually I think like Well, first of all anyone hopefully would have nudged them at some point But it's really just that that movement and that immigration pattern is I think really important The shrewdie, what's your answer? I don't have a very good one I think so the one of the answers that people give me when I Talk to them and tell them or you receive the ev grant in India Is they say oh You believe me like not believe in me, but they can't even believe that someone Actually trust them with the money and like really trust the story that they are selling to me and and so on And and the first thing they say is I won't let you down So that's like the only thing I can pinpoint like a moment when I feel like Something is changing here. Uh, I don't think I'm responsible for it. I think it would have happened any way You know, they someone else would have given them funding or believed in them But pretty much almost all of them say that I mean that tells you more about how broken things are in India than about me Right, but but I can't think of that as a tangible thing where my faith in someone Is somehow such a big signal to them that they have You know, even if it's marginally higher self-belief, I it's it's worth it Hello, my name is Riley Tyler you had a conversation with mark andreason and you asked why peter teal could spot talent so well and he countered That this is a concept of a bad signal, you know, he throws up the bad signal and people come and you have your own bad signal You know, you have your own bad signal There's a portfolio of ideals through your blog all your books with pioneer might be this humanitarian aspect of gaming what not and I'm curious what Components of that bad signal that you think are the most effective people come to you and they say oh, man I really love this about your portfolio. I really love this about pioneer I think the bigger and more globalized more network the world gets the higher the returns to the bad signal And bad signals are still one of the most underrated ways to be effective That we have some kind of weighted average of how effective they were in the past And we apply the weighted average, but their importance is just rising very very sharply. I think even over the last five years So I think the world Like some kind of authenticity in bat signals So like don't think too hard about your bad signals Maybe now if they're bad to begin with and you don't think too hard, I guess they'll stay bad But like that that's great because then more people like my bad signal and maybe like they should be coming to me So, uh, I don't know I try not to overthink the bad signal And if I write a blog post like I was working on a post Earlier today like what's the difference in the 18th century scottish enlightenment and irish enlightenment Like that makes no sense as a topic like maybe someone in ireland will read it like okay But there's no way you could come up with an argument that that's what I should be sending out as my bad signal But like that will be the bad signal And I actually think it's fine I think the the one thing I'd add to that is that there's something Very the best people are ones that view you as a way to gain advantage for themselves And so they're not attracted to like you as the bad signal because they Like wanted to be near you you are they're going to step on you to get somewhere else and that's great And I think it's important nuance that you some people miss when they set out their bad signals I would say tyler's bad signal is not the difference between irish and scott Scottish enlightenment though that's interesting I think it's consistency I just recently found out that he's blogged every single day on marginal revolution for 19 plus years So I think that's the bad signal, right? That's part of it. Yeah And no day has that been hard. I think it gets to the authenticity point There's no day where I've said I have to blog today or I'll break the streak Hey, I'm uh, josh. Thank you for speaking. This is an awesome conversation One big topic in sf especially is on automation Are there any parts of the talent process that you think could be automated? Obviously, you know, ats is a thing And with the rise of automation, maybe it's pretty industry specific But are there any changes in how people seek talent that that will come as things get more and more automated I run a company that you know principally has I think for our little corner of talent Meaning venture tried everything under the sun in order to automate it and look, I you know, I think you can like many processes You basically split things into two There's basically the spam filtering process of basically Weeding out people that don't make any sense for us for whatever reason Like what they're working on is non-economic Or they don't have the quality like that you can probably do With software there's a second step of it Of basically okay. So like imagine this is gmail, right? So you've got written rid of the spam, but now it's like you got to pick what in the inbox is important That's a much harder task I'm sure it can be done in software But I think it's a bit more nuanced and like with the the really tricky thing in kind of in venture in particular is Like regressing on success is pretty hard Not just because the data points are pretty sparse like what great founders look like like maybe you have like 10,000 Which is not that helpful Um it machine learning skill. Um, but also because everything changes all the time So like the psychometric makeup of a great founder in say 2015 sass era You know is is someone like, you know, frank Lutty who started service now is basically a sales machine started a sales Empire it's very different from who's going to be a very good founder say working on Transformer models who's going to be much more like waz than steve. So you use everything kind of is shifting constantly So it's tricky. I assume a lot of automation can be done for that first step. I think for the second step You could but The final thing I'd say is I guess in venture in particular you are rewarded so aggressively uh for um making the right calls that you will be able to always, you know afford the salary for people to review it and Penalized of course very aggressively by errors of omission, uh not commission So I think you're gonna always end up with an economic model where you can have people This is obviously very different if you're like, you know, mcdonald's and whatnot and you're trying to figure out Okay, like who's going to be able to flip burgers a year in and but I don't know enough about that feel to a pine there Thank you for attending. Thank you tyler. Thank you daniel. This was thank you shiridi. Thank you shiridi