The Daily Stoic - Tyler Cowen on Identifying Talent and Self-Improvement

Episode Date: September 3, 2022

Ryan talks to economist and author Tyler Cowen about his new book Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World, the slow journey that is self-improvement, how to identify talent and build a great team, and more.Tyler Cowen is the author of several bestselling books and is widely published in academic journals and the popular media. Tyler’s latest book is Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. He writes a column for Bloomberg View; has contributed extensively to national publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Money; and serves on the advisory boards of both Wilson Quarterly and American Interest. Tyler is also the host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler.✉️  Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we explore at length how these stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

and most importantly to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stove Podcast. I was trying to think about this recently, how the sort of the right influence, the right bump, the right nudge, the right model at the right time changes everything, right?

Rousticus giving Mark Srelius epictetus. Markus Srelius being assigned Antoninus. These influences at the right time in your life, they make or break you. And they don't have to just be people you meet personally. I actually met today's guest for the first time like 10 or 12 years after I'd first become influenced by him after most of the heavy lifting of his influence

on me is done. Talking about Tyler Cowan, his blog, Margin Revolution, one of the first blogs I ever subscribed to, one of the first bloggers I ever emailed, he's an economist at George Mason University, I love this stuff so much in this idea that he was an academic, but he just explored ideas. He talked about him, that he was a voracious reader, that he had contrarian ideas, but also philosophical ideas, that he was an expert in one field, but also very much interested in a lot of disparate unrelated fields. And one of the most influential conversations I had with Tyler's, I just read meditations.

And I talked about this in today's interview. I found the date, which I'm forgetting by the time I'm recording this intro, but I emailed him and I said, hey, have you ever read meditations like it just totally shook me upside down? And he said, yes, that's called a quake book. And he said, one of the sad things is you encounter fewer of those as you get older.

And he's right. And that concept of quake books, books that shake you, that's what meditations was for me for so many of you. I'm sure I've heard from people that said, my books have been one of those, which is always overwhelming for me to hear. But Tyler himself was sort of a quake influence for me. And again, this is totally remote, totally at a distance.

It's mostly just from me reading his stuff. And I read marginal revolution every day. It's one of the few blogs I subscribe to cannot recommend it enough. I also really loved his new book Talent. How do I identify energizers, creatives, and winners all around the world? He writes a great column for Bloomberg view, which I subscribe to. You can also see him in the New York Times Wall Street Journal. Many other publications, he's been his research, which is underrated. I would suspect because most people don't even know him for that, has been published in the American Economic Review,

the Journal of Political Economy, Ethics, and Philosophy in Public Affairs. And I also love his podcast, Conversations with Tyler. I've listened to many, many, many episodes of it. His point where he says at the beginning of the episode, this is an interview for me, not for you. This is the conversation I want to have, not the conversation. You want to have something that shaped the Daily Stove podcast. And I love his other books,

Averages Over, was hugely influential to me. I can't recommend that one enough. His book An Economist Gets Lunch is also great. Seriously, if you're not reading Tyler Cowan, you're doing yourself a huge disservice. You can go to TylerCowin.com, marginalrevolution.com. You can follow him on Twitter at TylerCowin. Listen to conversations with Tyler and check out his new book, Talent. How do I identify energizers, creatives, and winners around the world? This is a conversation. I don't think I could have imagined many years ago ever having, and I feel so lucky and

grateful to have it and share it with you now. It's the conversation. I always wanted to have and I hope you enjoy it. I was I went back through my emails. I was prepping for this. I'm sure you have no recollection of it whatsoever. But the first email I sent you was in November of 2007 and I had shortly, shortly before that red, the Stoics, and I sent you some question about it, about books that change one's life, and you turned me on to a phrase that I think about all the time, which is you referred to Quake books, or books that shake everything you think you know about the world. My school doesn't save emails before 2013 anymore. But I actually think I remember that.

But what I remember, I don't know if it struck me as sad or it struck me as like you're so far down the path and I wondered if you still believe this. You said something like the problem is that as you get older and read more, there are fewer and fewer of those books. So now that 15 years or so has passed, do you still think that's true? Do you find fewer books turn your world upside down or shake you or have you been pleasantly surprised? Fewer and fewer books, but something else becomes more potent, and that's the notion of reading and clusters to learn how the different parts of an area fit together. And maybe that's as good as Quake Books.

Yeah, I've referred to that as sort of swarming a topic. You read everything you can in a short amount of time and you end up noticing connections or parallels things you didn't notice. Also I think you've talked about this. That is one of the only ways to actually speed read is that as you read a lot about a topic, you're able to skim because you actually, you know the basics and you don't need to hem and haul over every phrase and word. That's right. And sometimes reading in clusters slowly has its own benefits.

So rapidly is can be intoxicating, but you often see more connections if you do it over a year or two period and then what you read earlier has time to sink in. Yeah, and when I swarm a topic, I like to do a mix of fiction and nonfiction. And then you, you're able to understand so much of the subtext of the fiction that maybe the author didn't even think about, but is just sort of there in the blood. And maybe you travel somewhere, you meet an author, you podcast with someone, there's other things you do in between that make the later readings really much better than the earlier readings. The earlier ones are more exciting, right?

Yes, and I noticed that because you post like, hey, here's what I'm reading. I can, it's like, oh, he really went on an Ireland kick. Like, he fell hard for Ireland recently because he just read so much on the topic. And what I put up, like, it's maybe a 20th of what I've read on Ireland too. And yet, do you, so when you are swarming or clustering a topic, do you include like documentaries and music and all the other forms of art around the topic that you're trying to understand? Absolutely, and travel being the number one priority. If I can pull off getting to that place,

and indeed, next week, I am flying to Southern Ireland. There you go. Yeah, I like one of my favorite things. It's like an underrated pleasure is like, if you're reading a memoir like a musician, like let's say you're reading Bruce Springsteen's autobiography and you're listening to Bruce Springsteen at the same time, that this sort of audio and

literature, you know, that multiple mediums converging, I think you understand something totally different. That's correct. So also, contact with the people, even if you're not there, or listening on YouTube is very valuable as a complement to reading. Just seeing historical figures, what they were like filmed. Yes, yes, yeah, like I like that to where it's like, let's say you're going to read the Odyssey or something and I want to talk to you about your Emily Wilson interview in a sec. But let's say you're you're going to read the Odyssey and you're like, I've never read poems. I can't do this stuff. It's like, I think you should go watch Troy or one of the movies.

So then you can, as you're reading it, picture the characters as human beings as opposed to just these sort of names on the page. Like you're not having to, like, reading American Psycho and watching American Psycho, like you realize there's a whole other, your brain isn't as good as picturing what these people look like as the director and the costume designer and all these other people. It adds a richness to it. Yes, sometimes you don't want to spoil the reading with images because you're afraid the reading is so much better. So sometimes with Shakespeare, I prefer not to

see a movie. So like Orson Wells, Chimes at Midnight, for me, that's amazing. But I prefer the version of Hamlet in my head to any visualization of it I've seen, except possibly the Russian version of Hamlet. But most of the others feel flat to me. Interesting. One of my rules is I try, like, if I'm going to read a play or literature, I read the Wikipedia page first, so I understand the broad strokes of the event, of the arc of the story. So then I can really understand the language, and the characters, and the themes,

and I'm not like, wait, what happened? Because I don't have a college professor as someone being like, and in page not like, wait, what happened? Because I don't have a college professor as someone being like, and in page two here, like sometimes, if I'm just doing it myself, I'll realize I totally miss some major plot point, and I don't hesitate to spoil it first. So when you're reading Marcus Aurelius, which now you've read for quite some time,

what do you at the margin try to add to that experience that you haven't done already? Well, that was an interesting one right before the pandemic I was in Budapest. And I knew vaguely that Marcus Aurelius had died in Vienna and had gotten there on his way through Budapest. And then when you're in this little town that he lived, while he was writing it, you do get an extra sense of the place and the life.

But a big example would be, obviously, when I first read Mark Surrealist 15 years ago, I was thinking of Mark Surrealist as this philosopher who lived in ancient Rome and what I thought I knew of ancient Rome. And I vaguely understood that the Antonin plague was occurring while he was talking about it. But then as you go through COVID, you start to have a sense of how a thing like a plague would affect human beings and the economy and behavior and all of a sudden you understand the whole thing on a new level. I agree with that. I think plagues in particular, that's a historical memory that we plagues in particular, that's a historical memory that we had lost. I know HIV AIDS is still ongoing and in any case is fairly recent, but a lot of people correctly or not felt they

were not affected by that. Yeah, there's not a lot of institutional memory of plagues, which is weird, like as I was going back and reading about him, you know, you think about 1968 and all the civil unrest, but there was also a pandemic in 1968 that killed like 100,000 people. It's weird that it has been such a regular occurrence even in American history, but it's not part of our sort of cultural memory or experience the way that depression or world wars or recessions are. I'm not sure why that is.

It's also striking to me that so much of what we did this time around, vaccines excluded, was not that different from what people did in medieval times. Like, oh, we're going to stay inside. We're going to shut a bunch of things down. Whether you agree with all that or not, so much of our response was essentially medieval. Yeah, we're like, I live out in the country. I have a place in the city that I could live in, but I was like, I guess we're spending the next couple of years out here, right? And that is what people have been doing for thousands of years.

They're just like, stay away, let it burn itself out, and then life will kind of go back to normal. Yes. My favorite Marcus quote is he talks about how, this is one of the few explicit references to the plague, although his dying words, as he's allegedly dying of the plague, are something like, why are you weeping for me? Think about all the other people that have died.

But he says that there's two types of plagues. There's the plague that destroys your life and the one that destroys your character. And I thought that maybe was the greatest observation that holds true during COVID of any social commentator, philosopher, person that I heard throughout this whole experience. Now, if the Stoics had written a book on talent search, what do you think they would have recommended? Serious question. Well, it is in a sense one of the greatest talent, I guess what's the expression, the big problem in business is identifying one's successor, right? Not just hiring people, but how does a high performing CEO leader, find their successor. Steve Jobs, Tim Cook, being a good example of it going well. But what I think is fascinating about that period of Roman history is that

you have the five good emperors, and none of them have a male heir. And so it's five consecutive examples of them more or less getting it right. But Hadrian, who doesn't have a super great reputation, manages to not only pick Marcus Arrelius, but he realizes Marcus Arrelius is too young. And so he picks Antoninus Pius. He adopts Pius, who adopts Marcus, and sets in motion what some people think is the greatest moment of antiquity through a double choice of successor, which like never happens. Arguably we should have more political adoption today since we're seeing some family dynasties arise in politics, but none of them are adoption based, right?

Yes, it's good nepotism. It's better than the alternative nepotism. To say if you're an Obama fan, an Obama adopted someone to be his successor. That person would have an advantage. I don't think that's worse than whatever else might be done to choose a successor, putting aside whether you like or dislike Obama, but just as a point of logic. Well, you could argue that that is one of Obama's biggest failings is that he was an extremely

popular albeit polarizing politician, a relatively young one, who did not do a particularly good job, not only identifying a successor, but you could argue like my books have been popular in sports and I've really been fascinated with this expression. Like, his coaching tree, his coaching tree is not very good. Yes, and he chose the wrong candidate with Hillary because Biden probably would have beaten Trump. Do you think he, and perhaps that's even the issue, he didn't choose Hillary, he let whoever he thought

was most popular be his successor and he made a mistake. It wasn't a value based or an ideology based decision. It was who is the heir apparent, not who is my choice for an heir. I have heard that is how it has happened, but I don't actually know myself. Sure, sure. But yeah, that's what I think is so, like, what's so interesting about the Hadrian Marcus Aurelius line is,

first off, he chute, like, Antonyd is pious, and I'm just writing about this in the book that I'm doing now. He was, like, the great man of that time, the great elected leader, he's sort of the head of Rome's Senate and has worked his whole life to get there. And Hadrian identifies him, but says, I choose you for your talent, you've earned it, but you're not going to be anything more than a placeholder for the next generation.

And Antoninus agrees to this, but knowing what we know about kings, he could have just waited for Hadrian to die and then kill Marcus Aurelius, but he actually respects the decision and he spends almost 20 years training Marcus Aurelius to be emperor, and then Marcus Aurelius in turn chooses to adopt, chooses to appoint his stepbrother, co-emperor. It's a really remarkable thing that's never happened before or again. Singapore comes quite close to facing a version of this problem. So there's family succession. So far it's gone just great. There are doubts about how interested the next generation of family members would be. However, you think they'd be good or bad, but even if they want to do it, and asking the

question, what does governance look like when it's not a descendent of Lee Kwan Yew? There's a very good chance we'll find out pretty soon. Well, I think that does bring up the book in an interesting way, your book on talent, which is, you know, is the boy that Hadrian identifies in Marcus Aurelius? Is that the important part of the talent process, or is it the 20 years of training and cultivation and preparation that makes him ultimately right for the job? The times themselves were conducive to the creation or production of great emperors, but

I think the same can be said for American business. So various people are chosen or elevated or they do their own startup, but they're in an environment that if they're very good, they can learn lots very quickly. They have amazing peers to learn from. Marvelous competitive constraints, which someone will win, but they're tough enough that you really have to be pretty good. So the role of the environment is all important, I think, but there's still some initial active selection.

You're a venture capitalist. You may finance 100 different people. maybe two of those will pay off. Those are tough odds, right? Yes. Yes, sports is the other example of this, and like the coaches where, you know, how many assistant coaches, interns, etc. has a Nick Sabin or Bill Belichek had, they all go through the same system, but relatively few of them, almost none of them, end up having the stuff to be a successful head coach or ultimately become

a peer of the system or the program that they came from. Often the people keen to be complimentary pieces. They don't have enough charisma or sometimes not enough arrogance or not enough need to feel a kind of control premium because they're used to deferring to someone else, which is a highly useful skillless number two. But nonetheless, when the time comes, you're not ready. Well, I found this around the time I would have been emailing you. I was this sort of kid going places and I worked at this Hollywood talent agency.

And the way that system works is you would start as an intern. And if you showed promise, the mail room had, they basically gotten rid of the mail room at this point because there was no mail. But you start as an intern and then you would get promoted to work at desk. You would be someone's assistant. And I always found it interesting that they wanted to cultivate creative people, aggressive deal makers, networkers, etc. And then the selection process was, can you sit at a desk for 12 hours a day answering

phones and scheduling appointments, it couldn't, like the kind, I was able to do it for like six months, and I was like, I don't care how much money you will pay me in the future, this is the worst job in the world, I'm out. And now you're your own boss, right? That was your podcast, your books store, three different ventures related, but still distinct.

And in each one, you're your own boss, and that's no accident. Right. So it's oftentimes the systems that people want to cultivate talent in actually have an adverse selection bias for precisely the kind of people that would not be good leaders or trailblazers in that industry. Or maybe that's what the industry actually wants is cogs in the machine, not disruptive, talented people. I strongly believe that in American schools, we assign far too much homework.

It cultivates people who are conformists and conscientious, which is fine for many endeavors, but it harms their chance at leadership. And you're selecting for people who are willing to do what they're told. Yeah, I thought that was, it was interesting too when I was reading about the college admissions scandal, where all these rich parents were paying to get their kids into these elite institutions. I understand what an elite institution can do for a person, but it struck me as these families were already extremely connected, wouldn't nepotism already give them most of

the advantages that say a Harvard degree would give them? Do people often, I would have thought that there were other ways that the parents' money and status could have advanced their children that didn't involve, uh, bribing them into college. I feel at that level, what the parents are actually purchasing is the feeling that they've done everything possible. And that's a very dangerous feeling because it means that the margins you're wasting money. There's always something more you can do. But if you're successful in business or Hollywood, maybe along the way, you did do everything possible to make your start-up succeed. Okay, that may have gone great, but when you apply that same mentality to matters

of family, I think it's more often harmful than not. Well, I'm going to do everything possible to make sure my kid is best at piano. It's probably going to crush the spirit and initiative of the child. Yes. Yeah, you end up trying to give them things that you didn't have and therefore likely didn't need. And you're not really thinking about, this is my favorite question that you ask on your podcast is about, you know, the productive function, but specifically, you often ask people like, what are the scales that you practice to get good at what you do? It seems like if you were really trying to prepare a kid

or a mentor or et cetera for success in a field, you would spend your time trying to figure out what that thing they should be practicing is and then facilitate them doing a lot of that thing. Self-improvement, there's this tweet in your stream, a fairly recent one, something about time, being the ultimate source of value. That self-improvement needs some amount of time.

And mentally, psychologically, rich parents don't feel they're getting that for their kids in the same way they can purchase college admission So they're biased toward a certain kind of activism works against them What they should we're doing isn't stilling compound learning over long periods of time Right, you can hire a piano teacher, but you can't make your kid be passionate or interesting in a thing and they voluntarily spend hundreds of hours in their room trying to figure a thing out. This is partly why we have, you know, income mobility across generations.

That if your parents are too well off, on average, you're better off, but certain types of initiatives can end up being blunted. Yeah, Paul, did you read programs? I say what he's talking about how kids need a project? They like, they need something that they throw themselves into that's theirs. And that's how you learn the ability to get good at something, have ownership over it,

and figure out how things work. I'm a strong believer in that. And Daniel and I argue in our book talent that to look for kids who had projects fairly early in life, even if the project didn't succeed in every way, is one of the best ways of finding talent, because you know they're at least trying. They're setting out down that path, and they're learning something along the way. Yeah, like when I try to hire writers to work for stuff that I do, I don't really care where they went to school.

I don't care. I don't want to see their clips, like things that they've written. I want to see that they've published things. Like, it doesn't have to be in the New York Times. I want to see that they've been actively writing on a blog, even though nobody asked them to do it. They were just doing it because they genuinely like doing it and are good at it.

And with professional economists, when I'm involved in hiring them, I'm even happy if they submitted things at an early age. So someone says, oh, I tried submitting some pieces at age 18, but they weren't accepted. I'm delighted. Like you were in the game, man. You know, like great. You you were in the game, man. You know, like,

great. You're looking to learn more. Yeah. You're looking for precociousness, really? Correct. And drive and that element of selection that you cannot train into people that some burning desire to do something and stand out. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. You never know if you're just going to end up on Page Six or Du Moir or in court. I'm Matt Bellesai. And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where

each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us the first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lynn Spears when Britney's fans form the free Britney movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship Jamie Lynn's lack of public support it angered some fans a lot them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other. And it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed

to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. Yeah, James Altature, our mutual friend, he talks about choosing yourself. You want someone who chose themselves rather than waiting around to be given permission or some kind of anointment that says you're allowed to do this. When you hire people for your bookstore, what does it you look for in them? Because it may not depend on initiative, right? So writers, I think we agree, you're maybe supporting some other podcast or we probably would agree. How do you think about those people?

Well, the bookstore is a little different because it's sort of a small town bookstore. And you know, I'm not really, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, but when I hire people, I look for a couple things. Number one rule is you can't be crazy. I just don't have time for crazy. Right. Right. Number two is some sort of precociousness like we've talked about.

Like the first person that I hired for the bookstore, I was less interested that she'd previously worked at Barnes & Noble, and more that she'd started a blog to review books. But this was really just a way for her to get advanced copies of books from publishers, because she could point them to her link and say, I review books, please send me free copies of your books. I just, to me, that was exactly the kind of attitude. I was like, this person is a self-starter and actually loves literature and figures out

workarounds to complex situations. That's great. I would think for jobs like those, some blend of happiness and enthusiasm, it keeps them more productive on the job, but it also changes the mood within the store. It becomes a place your customers feel good about going to. Yes, that's right. And then I think the other thing I look for is,

you don't have to like the books I like, but you just have to genuinely have a passion for the thing. You have to really love books and reading and because otherwise work, you're clearly not working at a bookstore to get rich. So you better actually like books. Yes, yes. When you think about people that you're, you know, whether it's a grad student or an employer or whatever, I imagine you get a lot of people who are fans of your stuff, which I get, which brings up a problem I've been trying to solve for, which is I don't want to just hire a younger

version of myself in the sense that I don't want more people like me. I'm already here. I want people who are different than me, like diversity in the sense of not just race or gender, but diversity in that, like, they're just different and have a different set of experiences that I then benefit from being in my milieu. Fandom is a little dangerous in this regard, so I very much agree with the thrust of your comments. The people who are my biggest fans or your biggest fans

There are jobs they will be great at But they're not working for us jobs quite awesome. Yeah, and The people where I've done the best their people who know something about me They'll say something like oh a friend of mine loves your stuff Just over a backhand an insult, but it not. I get excited when I hear that, or I heard one of your podcasts once. It's another good line. Much better than I've heard all of your podcasts.

Now that latter person, I'm not saying is less talented, but they're not what I'm looking for. Would you find that those people often have preconceived notions of what it's going to be like? I find that like the people who are sort of vaguely interested, it turns out the job is really hard. If they're a hard worker, they stick around. I sometimes find the people who are fans, they thought it would be fun or interesting. And then when it turns out that it's also hard and a lot of work, those are the first ones that are out because they

they expected it to be easier and more fun than it is. And the very fandom for you or for whomever it is can be a kind of substitute for that person actually possessing your qualities. So if you're a great self-starter in part they're attracted to you because they feel one of your qualities is missing in them. And the fandom in you is a kind of substitute, like a playing card. Like, oh, well, I'm not going to be ambitious, but I'm going to just love some ambitious people out there. I heard a story about Alexander the Great after his death. You know, all these different generals were sort of vying to be Alexander's successor

because he did not choose one. And I think it's Plutarch. Plutarch is saying something like, you know, this one tried to cut his beard like Alexander, this one tried to walk like Alexander, this one tried to do this like Alexander. And he said, but none matched the thing that actually mattered in Alexander, which was his drive for conquest, meaning that they were sort of aping superficially at the person they admired, but they lacked the fundamental juice that made him great at what he did. I think that's exactly right.

And it had maybe not that juice. You're not looking for people who are all that mimetic. You want, you know, the anti-Jerardians. My co-author Daniel Grouse sometimes calls them the uncorrelated autists. There is half joking with that phrase. It's not that he thinks they're all autistic, but the citation of autism is a way of getting But the citation of autism is a way of getting at their immune from certain kinds of social pressures and have their own thing. Yes, you want you want someone who's sort of a fellow traveler but not a true believer

because you also want independence of thought and you want independent interests and you also I think want them to be able to question or challenge and then do the job. I imagine, again, with Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, they're clearly wired similarly in some ways, but then also have totally different world views, which is what the different eras of Apple ultimately needed. And that's a succession that worked.

Yes. But Microsoft goes through a lot of trouble before it settles on a valid successor, Sakiya, which they now have. That's gone just great for them, but it wasn't easy. Bill Gates cast a long shadow over that company. And but given how many billions or trillions of dollars are on the line, it seems weird that ego or micro-managing would still get in the way of the thing that's obviously in one's self-interest.

I think social perceptions are always primary, doesn't matter what the sum of dollars are. People have to interpret the data before them in the proper way to make the good decisions. Money alone, just don't do it. Do you sometimes think that temperament is more important? Sometimes when I'm hiring someone, it's less that they currently know how to do the job because I'm pretty confident, you know, I'm not doing surgery or programming or something. I can teach you how to do this thing pretty quickly, but do you have the temperament? Are you not crazy?

Do you have the pieces that can be put together? I'm more interested in that than whether you have all the qualifications and skills, but we're not a sort of a culture fit. Yes, I would put it this way. I'm an extreme optimist when it comes to people's abilities to improve themselves. I'm an extreme pessimist when it comes to their abilities to be something they're not and change their personalities. Most of the time they can't do it.

Yes, you can add competence, but probably not character traits. Now, you might find a different division of your enterprise where they fit. That's great. That works out pretty often. But you can't make them the thing they're not. I've never really seen that work.

Some people don't have leadership, some people don't have patience, and so on. Although I was thinking about this, I do this daily email also for parents called Daily Dad. And I was thinking about, and I can't remember where I heard it, but it was an interview with Malcolm Gladwell. He was talking about the MBA,

which I know that you love. I'm a Sacramento Kings fan, so it's been a long drought. You must really love the NBA. It's been a long drought for me. Well, so when I was in middle school and high school, the Kings were very, very good. That's the era that I grew up in. So it's been a long drought, basically, the entirety of my adult life. They've been awful.

But he was talking about the interestingness with which players who are infinitely talented, objectively skilled, will struggle at a team. And then they'll change teams or change coaches or change supporting staffs. And suddenly it clicks, right? And he was saying, how is it that we can have all, we understand that someone who has millions of dollars on the line, still environment and support, et cetera, is the determining factor.

And then with children, we go, oh, you're just not good at math because you failed fourth grade math. Or we say, oh, you're not cut out for this or that. I think he was saying that we're often very forgiving of talent at the extreme ends of the spectrum. And then in the middle of the pack, we make very definitive premature judgments as if talent is not malleable and flexible and you can't cultivate it. Some of those teams are toxic environments. So Spencer Dinwitty, he's on the Washington Wizards, he's not very good, they want to get rid of him. He shipped to Dallas,

all of a sudden he's amazing, part of a near championship team. But I do think there are players you can send them anywhere. I take Chris Weber from your beloved Sacramento games. Very talented player was on all-star many times, you know, deserved it. But at the end of the day, there was something missing in his game, and I don't think any team could have provided it. And basketball is a bit unusual, because you can't just leave a team because you don't like it. So there's a lot of players who are transformed by trades.

But for the most part, if you're in a toxic company, you can just leave it, you should leave it, you will leave it and in those cases i don't think you see that many transformations but what about someone like i reurving i think in that instance you have an extremely talented but toxic player who brings the toxicity with him to whatever organization he's a part of it lasts for a year then it falls apart he's like a john lennon figure john lennon one of most brilliant people in music, well that lasted for a bit more than a year, but at the end

of the day, Lennon becomes a heroin addict and it's just never going to work, right? So that is especially common and highly creative pursuits, the arts, music, poetry, so many writers, you read their biographies. It's like, your life is a mess. How did you manage, you know, fill in the blank? Most jobs, I think, though, aren't like that, and you rely too much on other people, and you can't just be that much of a wreck, and Kyrie's about as far as you can go. But he's ended up, like, I don't know that the Brooklyn that's wanted him anymore. I'm not sure how they can trade him, or for what? He's still super talent that he's not that old But it might all be over

Yeah, it's it's fascinating of when I talk about ego I think people often think that eat what I'm saying ego is the enemy if you have a big ego You can't be successful. It's not that it's that it's some kind of ceiling on your success I mean he probably he definitely cost himself multiple champions in championships in Cleveland. Probably could have won one with Boston. I mean, look where Boston is now. Clearly a great organization.

And then, I mean, blew apart the, the, maybe the greatest big three in the history of basketball. I did this book with Chris Bosch. I did a, I wrote, I helped him write a book called Letters to a Young Athlete. I was talking to him about the Brooklyn situation. I said, in retrospect, Eric Spolstra deserves a lot more credit than we perhaps gave him at the time. We thought, oh, anyone could win with these three guys. but in retrospect, maybe it's actually extremely hard to win with three guys that could.

I think that's exactly right, but I don't think they're the best trio of all time. If you mean Kevin Durant, Kyrie and James Harden, I mean, they wanted to get rid of Harden, they did. Now they wanted to get rid of Kyrie. What does that say about them? Who are Kevin Durant. Exactly. But he, for all his greatness as a player, maybe like the best scorer of all time, but he wasn't able as a leader to manage the other two.

And LeBron actually could manage Kyrie for at least a year, arguably somewhat more than that. Well, and conversely, to me, I think of Kevin Durant as a good example of how the grass is not always greener. And sometimes we think we want a certain amount of autonomy and control and responsibility when actually being the number two or part of an ensemble, although not ideal is vastly preferable than the chaos and uncertainty of being the top guy.

Matt Yaglacius used to always joke on Twitter as some of these trades were going on. Just imagine if they had a team of Russell Westbrook, James Harden and Kevin Durant all together wouldn't they be awesome. Well we had that team. They were good. They made the finals, but they were less than the sum of their parts. And Harden wanted out. The whole thing fell apart. Durant wanted out. Have you read the book, the captain's class by Sam Walker? I don't think so. What's it about?

I think he would really like his point is that often great teams are more than the sum of their parts, not because of a transcendent star, like say, Michael Jordan, but because Michael Jordan is on a team with Bill Cartwright, that the captain of great teams or businesses is often a less well-known individual, a less talented individual, but is the person that binds the culture together and allows

what might ordinarily be a dysfunctional trio or a collection of individuals to come together as an organization? And that person is credible with the star, as with the case with Cartwright, but is not always the case. That's right. And he wrote another piece in the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago that I think is another thing I think about with talent where he was talking about because it's sort of the Eisenhower paradox that often the great presidents didn't want to be president They were sort of drafted for it or pulled into it and that sometimes It's the leaders who want to be leaders very bad that we should be most skeptical of Hillary Clinton being a great example.

Yes, yes. Yeah, as we call it, you don't want someone who's too thirsty. That's right. And too pandering. And voters sniff that out also. It's harder for them to win. All right, you mentioned Gerard earlier. I have a Gerard question.

Wouldn't the ultimate proof of Gerard's theories be that it's actually total nonsense and We only like it because Peter Teal said it was good and that none of us actually understand it I would agree that none of us understand Gerard's theories. I suspect they're not falsifiable They're not traditional social science theories viable, they're not traditional social science theories, they're categories that draw your attention to something when it happens. And their categories worth knowing. I don't even think Mimesis is Gerard's best idea. So I would agree with much of that. And I think a lot of Gerard's popularity is because Peter Tiel and other people push it. But nonetheless, when I first read Gerard, which was in the 1990s, by the way, like before anyone talked about Gerard, I couldn't find another person who knew who Gerard was. And I thought, this is great. I love the book on Shakespeare. And most

of all, I love the understanding of Christianity. And Mimesis, I agreed with, but I felt I already knew it. I had read Veblin. I had read other things in economics. People copy each other for status. Yeah, of course. But it didn't feel new and fresh to me. That was my initial reaction to Gerard. And a lot of that is stuck with me. One of the weird things about Gerard is he feels like he's this figure from the past.

You mentioned Veblin. He feels like he's almost like from that era. But you can listen to him on podcast. He did podcast before he died. Like it's not that long ago. I recently recorded with Cynthia Haven, Gerard's biographer. That episode is not out yet in conversations with Tyler, but she portrayed Gerard as the super-old-fashioned man, loyally married to his wife for many, many decades, didn't like do things on the internet really,

and just was Renée Gerard, and that rings so much root of me. Well, I have a question about conversations with Tyler, which I really love, it's one of my favorite podcasts, but you had Emily Wilson on, and I loved her translation of the Odyssey. I also loved her biography of Seneca. But as you guys are going back and forth, you maybe seemed like you were not a Seneca fan. You had some pointed

questions about Seneca. I was curious about that. Seneca has never much influenced me. So Lucretius Epicetus on Marcus Aurelius, when I was young as a teenager, had a real impact on my thought. But somehow, Seneca didn't add much to that group. And he's a bit dubious to me. And I've tried reading the plays. I don't enjoy them. I admit that the fault might be mine.

I don't read Latin. I don't get all the historical context. But I feel I can read a lot of things and enjoy them. So no, I'm just not a huge Stenic fan. Well, you asked her, you said, why would you accumulate so much wealth if you're a true Stoic? I just thought that was an ironic question for an economist to ask. Yes, I do many things myself that are not well-femaking, even though I'm an economist, but I recommend

to other people that they do the same thing. So, Sennaka is telling people to understand their happiness is pretty flat with respect to a lot of life outcomes, and then he behaves some very different way, which possibly had more to do with power than wealth per se. It's not that he wanted to fly private to Maui, right? Well, he talks about how he's like, you're still stuck delayed when you travel. I thought it was remarkable that even 2,000 years ago, you have a rich person who's complaining about the equalizing frustrations of travel.

Yes. So, I mean, the Romans as a whole, I think Plutarch for me is an underrated figure, which is odd. In the 18th century, he was so huge, but it just seems entirely forgotten. Stoicism and atomism underrated doctrines, I wouldn't describe myself as adhering to any of them. Stoicism, I think, is not underrated anymore, but I guess but it partly due to you. But it had been for a long time, and unless people are like in your orbit or in a number of other Silicon Valley orbits, the stuff hasn't quite made the comeback. It deserves to. Well, certainly if you're compared to the popularity of, say, Buddhism, Stoicism is still very underrated.

That's probably just overrepresented in certain niches, but like if you think of the popularity of meditation and some of these Buddhist concepts, Stoicism is probably only a fraction of as popular as those ideas. And it's just heavily selected into people you and I might know. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think what's interesting about Seneca, Seneca's other biographer, James Rom, his book, Dying Every Day, you might like,

because it's specifically about Seneca in his time in Nero's Court. But he had this footnote in one of the books where he was talking about how Sennaka For most it was Sennaka the philosopher and Sennaka the playwright Were thought to be two different people because it was literally incomprehensible To modern historians that someone could have been so popular

He said he was like that would be like, if Emerson had written Faust, and then I would add, and served in Lincoln's cabinet. I think I'm more taken by Pascals and Adam Smith's criticisms of the Stoics, and that's why I'm not a Stoic. So if you take Pascale, like people are restless no matter what, and the goal is to channel

that restlessness and that if you try to deny that, it will come back and bite you. And Smith's version, is you're going to be captive to some set of local, abrobational incentives so you'd better choose the good ones rather than trying to deny that fact? So I'm much more of an 18th century thinker and the 18th century rebellion against the Stoics. I guess that's where I've ended up, but I still think they're like great, fantastic thinkers and writers. Well, I think Adam Smith's philosophy teacher was, or his main advisor was a translator of Epictetus. So he kind of got it straight from the source.

Smith, I think, understood the Stoics incredibly well, but ultimately he's a rebellion against them. So there's some native energy to truck and barter, to be commercial, and Smith thinks this is ultimately good. So if you can't be too passive, some other nation will take you over, and we just need to channel what people really are, a bit like Pascal, but more economically oriented. Yes, I think that's right. And you're not passive. You're super active. You have these three ventures.

I'm sure you do things I don't know about. You've channeled it all in this way that, I presume has gone really well for you. But that is the stereotype of the stoic being, as being the sort of withdrawn from the world. I mean, I've struggled to find a historical basis for that because, you know, Marcus really shows up for every day as the most powerful man in the world. Seneca is writing these plays. He's advising Nero. And then later, I think

when you get to the people who are, let's say, influenced by the Stoics, but not, let's say, exactly Stoic, whether it's Pascal or Adam Smith, Adele Craw, Frederick the Great, Thierry Roosevelt, the founders. I mean, Jefferson dies with Sennaka on his nightstand. So I think, I like the, I also like the sort of Victorian aerostatics, like the English, the British Stoics. You know, I like that vibe of,

the philosophy is something that shapes me personally, it's my sort of personal code, but I'm also a man or woman in the world's doing stuff. Stoicism is of most value to me when I'm stuck in traffic or waiting in line at the Whole Foods, and that's fairly often, right? Yes, well, I had John Macon, the podcast not that long ago, and he's been interested in the Stokes.

And we were talking about also this interesting idea, you know, a Heriocles, one of the Stokes talks about our circles of concern, that first we're obligated to ourselves, then family, country, it's this sort of bigger thing. And the idea is how do you make choices or take actions that bring your outer rings into the inner ring? But that isn't that interesting to me theoretically.

It's interesting to me watching someone who starts a small grocery store that in the process revolutionizes animal welfare or packaging or marketing of food products in a way that ripples out as having a large positive impact on a lot of people, whether they know it or not. A passive stoic was just studying it, to me, doesn't have the platform as the active stoic who's engaged in life.

One of the best things about the stoics for me is simply their notion that when you're building a philosophy, you don't have that many starting points to choose from. Like it's pretty sparse where you can go. So you read someone like Play-Doh and Tameyus or you read Platinas. Like my goodness, it's so complicated. Like where do they pull all this stuff from? You like can't even quite believe they fully mean it seriously. Yeah.

But you read the Stoics, they've so come to terms with the fact, there's sort of a few things you could consult. It could be something about your immediate experience or some very basic understanding of the human temperament, but there's not much you can pull from the sky. The idea that you should start your system with that approach, I find they embody in this marvelous and revolutionary way. Well, maybe that comes to us because instead of writing this complicated explanation

of the universe, which maybe they did, and it was just lost, you're saying that you used to us as a when you're stuck in traffic. That's what Marcus really is writing about being stuck in his version of traffic in meditations. He's talking about normal stuff. He's not talking about, you know, how do you know if we're living in a computer simulation

or something? Like, he's not talking about these abstract questions or where does knowledge come from. He's just like, what do you do when you're being annoyed by an annoying person? And then to address that with such a fundamental skepticism about the transcendental, again, whether you agree with it or not,

how deeply they thought through, what it means to have this skepticism about pulling things from the sky and sticking them into your theory. That to me is just fascinating in how they write. All right, so a couple more talent questions for you that I was thinking about. I was interviewing this guy at the bookstore the other day.

He wrote a great book, his name's Jack Carr. He's this Navy CEO who wrote these spy thrillers. They've been really, really popular. And he had sort of a very red, red-stady audience. And so I was sort of talking about this sort of bias now, this prejudice that we have towards elites, right? We sort of talk sneeringly of elites. But I was saying, you're an elite.

You're, what are the Navy SEALs, but the elites of the elites? It's the hardest thing to get into. They're the most practiced at the thing. They're the ones sent in to solve tough problems. When you think about talent, what do you think the knockdown effects of this kind of instinctive or negative impression we have of elites? To me, elites are who make the world go around. How do you have a successful society that doesn't worship elites?

Well, I would definitely agree that the elites are underrated, but I also think it's fine for them to be knocked down so many pegs. It gives people something to rebel against a way to maybe try to top the current elites. It leads to a greater churn or circulation and influence over time. It leads to a greater churn or circulation in influence over time. So if the elites are undervalued, I'm okay with that. And I am myself an elite in a funny way. You know, when I was 40 years old, I was not so well known. And I started blogging, which then was like, you know, what's this? And I became an elite through blogging, which now is ho hum.

But at the time, it was so weird. So I'm kind of a non-elite elite, but now I've become just an elite. I don't know what to think of all that, but there's something illuminating that when you go to Twitter and you read so many elite thinkers, you just think, well that stinks, they're not very objective.

They don't evaluate evidence better than I do. And people start thinking like, hey, like maybe I can do something then. I think that's fine. So maybe what we're talking about is not a rejection of elitism per se, but it's an understanding that there's been an atrophy among star elites, and they're not nearly as good or strong as they should be, be like finding out, hey, the Navy SEALs aren't actually the best in the world, there's all these things

they haven't been doing and they've been covering it up. But I would fully agree, people take it too far. You can't go down that path and stop at the optimal point where you're just at the truth. Once your emotions are all whipped up to be criticizing the elites, you're going to take it too far. So the question, like, do you prefer the world where we're too critical if the elites are not critical enough? I think I'm fairly comfortable in either, but right

now we're in the world where we're too critical. And people just fall apart because they read social media, how can it be this? Like John Hate of heterodox academy. Like he thinks some of the America's on the verge of ending. American civilization will dwindle in 10 or 15 years. I don't buy that at all. I think we'll muddle through the way things are now. Just like in the 1950s, we had too much respect for elites.

Walter Cronkryte was too big a thing in the 1960s, but I don't know. There's a lot of ruin in the nation to go back to Adam Smith, and that was one of his wives or insights. Yeah, I saw a meme that I bring up every once in a while. It's like the problem of studying history, people who, they say those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. And then it was like, the meme is like me studying history as I watch powerlessly as everyone

repeats it, right? I think one of the horrors of studying history is you know how bad it can get. But one of the upsides of having studied history is you're sort of reminded of how terrible things were in the past. And it reminds you that they're not as bad as you think they are right now. America made it through its own 19th century. Forget about the poverty, of course, the slavery, but even beyond that, just like our media were awful, super partisan, spreading lies and misinformation most of the time, not saying

that was good, but we're through it. We ended up coming out of that more democratic than when we started. We expanded the franchise. There was a civil rights movement, no guarantee that the happy outcome is going to repeat, but my goodness, look at how it went last time. That's one of the things that calms me down, you know, when people get really concerned about woke culture and how people are being radicalized, and they believe all these things that are contrary to a mere blah, blah, blah, blah.

I feel like if you really read any of the intellectuals from the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s, you see all these people we admire now, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, et cetera. And you see how utterly captured they were by communism and Marxism specifically, and how it just passed like a bad phase, it sort of reminds me that again to go to the elite, the elites get consumed by these sort of memes

or waves of thinking. And then if it doesn't, if it doesn't pass muster eventually they pass it and they move on. I think the current right wing is far too obsessed with criticizing wokeism. I would agree with most of those criticisms to be clear. But at the end of the day, it's not ending the world. There have been worse views in the past, and we've survived the past, and I don't find wokeism especially bad compared to other errors we've made. And it's just like a simple way to get hits online or to have people listening or podcast, the woke, the woke, the woke, you can demonize them.

Again, no one would consider me to be on the left. But I actually find something a bit admirable in the woke that if they can generate those responses, like they're on to something. And surely it's the case that in almost all the countries of the world, you world, gay people should have more rights by a large magnitude. And something like the Me Too movement for women is justified.

So if they won't get us that in other places, so much for the better. Well, you could argue at least their heart is in the right place, right? You know that expression, hypocrisy is the respect that vice pays to virtue or whatever it is. I'd rather have virtue signaling than whatever this alternative is where we try to be as rude or cruel or indifferent to people as possible. I'd rather at least pretend to be nice or signal that being nice is important, that be an asshole. In this way, I am in practice, I think, very, very stoic, that I preach to other people a form of emotional semi-detachment

when you're on social media. Treat it like the traffic jam, treat it like the line at Whole Foods. Of course, you don't like it, but step back, ask yourself, what can I do, go do that thing in the broader picture of your life, focus on that. And if you want to beat the woke, that's the way to do it. Yeah, I've found that too where people are like, you know, they're feminizing the world, and I have to walk on eggshells and blah, blah.

It's like, you also have, there's also a dress code in the world, and a whole bunch of dumb stuff. I'm not saying that that stuff's dumb. I'm just saying like, the whole world is silly rules that we have to operate by. That's what games are. The idea that you're gonna preemptively knock over the board because you think some of the new rules

are a little excessive or arbitrary. That strikes me as not the attitude of a winner or the attitude of someone who's good at adapting and thriving in new environments. And I suspect that some of the sort of Trumpian response to things that are happening in the world is it's largely like old people who are just saying like, I can't change. So I'm just going to be mad that people are trying to change things. I grew up in the 1970s and boy was that dumb. But at the end of the day, when you're in those years at the time, you're trying to think like, what can I take from this era?

And what can I learn from it? How can I use it to make me a stronger me? And just like always focus on the positive, the building, the positive sum. In that way, not exactly stoic, but the detachment element is the most stoic part of me. Don't let this stuff bug you so much is what I say. Yeah, and I think about some of these great thinkers from the past that had to live in this king's court, or was their patrons were the Medici's or the Pope or something. I've got to imagine there was just a bunch of ridiculous stuff that they had to pay lip service

to and pretend and rituals. They probably had to pretend to be more religious than they were or more deferential than they were. I think of Michael Angelo and Da Vinci having to play this game to get the things that they wanted. The idea that you just whine about it and take your ball and go home, I've always found that to be a little childish. The age I grew up, this is trivial in a way, but like disco dancing was the thing.

That was how you would date women. No one would call it woke, arguably a tanti woke, but that was awful. But in fact, you go back, you listen to Disco, some of it is actually really quite good. That's part of the point. So my last question about talent, because you talked about how things changed for you in your 40s when you started blogging, how much do you think about your rapid acceleration and the feedback loop of it is about the daily practice. You're one of the only people that still blogs every day, multiple times a day, or really,

you're one of the only people that blogs at all anymore. But I know I found this with my thing with the two daily things I write every day, I just found I'm exponentially better from the forced function of having to, the mandated output has raised my talent game in a way that if I operated on an old schedule or on my preferential schedule, I just would not have the reps that I've gotten. I fully gotten. I fully agree, and in my particular case, I think I have two other advantages. One is that I wasn't too famous too early, which can be good for your income, but it's

not necessarily good for your learning. And the other is that I'm the last generation who had a full part of my life without the internet and a full part of my life with the internet. And truly, like, lived in both worlds and tried to, masters, not the right word, no one masters anything, but tried to, like, do well learning in each. And that's not possible anymore. And there's plenty of people from the old world who never got the internet. And then younger people born now, they just can't really go to the old world. And I view that as a huge benefit in privilege.

Yeah, I got my first Facebook account after I graduated from high school. I had to wait to get a college email address to join Facebook. So I feel like I got my four minute of years, from one to 18 without social media. And that was a life changing. That allowed space for me to develop in a way that if I'd been forced to do it online, I'm sure there would have been benefits

to it too, but I got a taste of that old world in my formative years at least. I think I had my first email. I was 30 or almost 30. And we used to drive around my friend and I to use bookstores. And you wouldn't know where they were. So you'd look for a phone booth, ha-ha. And look for the phone book. And don't tell anyone this. But we would rip out the pages for like use books

and get the addresses. And then you would stop people in the street and ask them if they knew where it was. Like that is absurd. Multiple levels. Every step is absurd, multiple levels. Every step of that, you wouldn't consider doing today. But yeah, you would get to no cities in some manner. And you would remember where those stores were

because you had to find them. I try to think about, like, I think this would be a good, it's a good story, which is like, what is the, what is something about your life involving technology that a younger person would find utterly inconceivable? And your phone book story being a good example of that. And I still have such stories. Like I hardly ever use Google Maps.

I finally have learned how to use it, but I don't prefer it. There are times when I just need it, and I'll do it. And I don't text at all. You just do email. Now I will respond to a text if I get it. Like if I'm showing up for an event, the host text me, I'll respond back. I've arrived, but I will never text anyone. There's no person with whom I have a relationship with texting. If I had to initiate a text, I'm sure I could do it, but I would have to think about like the instructions before doing it. I can't just do it automatically.

And I have to tell you a email, a ton of what's app. Of course, it's better. What's app is better. But like a text on the cell phone, I just refuse to do that. And I think that's much better. I think about my favorite story in that regard is the truck that we had when I was growing up as a kid, so this would have been early 90s, it didn't have a clock in it, like no digital clock, no old clock.

And so like when we were driving to school, my mom to see if we were like on time or late, we would have to listen to talk radio because they said the time every quarter of an hour as part of the news update And like the idea that clocks were scarce that that was an upgrade feature in my parents car that they didn't have It would just be so inconceivable to my children now that they they would think that I'm making it up It's great how you call it an old clock like we call it a clock right? making it up. It's great how you call it an old clock. Like we call it a clock, right? An old clock. What would you call a Roman clock then? A very old clock? Yeah, right. It wasn't a sundial either, but it was a... Well, now, like, now if you have a fancy car, sometimes they put an analog clock in there just to be pretentious. That's right. Tyler, thank you seriously so

much. You have influenced me more than just about anyone I can think of. And I love the podcast. I love the books. And actually, wait, here, I have something. Sometimes when I find passages that I really like, I write them down, like sort of life advice, I print it out of passage and averages over where you said, in today's global economy, here is what is scarce. Quality land and natural resources, intellectual property or good ideas about what should

be produced. Quality labor with unique skills. And what is not scarce, unskilled labor, money in the bank or health and government securities which you can think of as simple capital, not attached to special ownership rights. I've gotta say, I found this to be very true when you wrote it like six or seven years ago, but given the inflation, the labor market, and the internet, you could not have called it better.

This is like a thousand percent spot on prediction. Thank you. Amazing. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members! You can listen to the Daily Stoic early and add free on Amazon music. Download the Amazon music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple podcasts.