← Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big! with Kevin Gentry
Going Big with Tyler Cowen: Unlocking Your Potential for Extraordinary Impact
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- [00:00]
Kevin Gentry
Hi there, I'm Kevin Gentry and welcome to the Going Big podcast where we'll explore some of the strategies that can help you transform your effectiveness by 10xing your fundraising. Each week we'll sit down with some of the most influential business leaders, CEOs and nonprofit visionaries to talk about leadership, the power of giving, and how you can make a real impact. If you want to make a transformational change to the cause you're working on, this is the place for that conversation. Also, take a Look at our website, 10xStrategies.com that's T E N X strategies.com for lots of free marketing and fundraising resources. And be sure to sign up for the free weekly fundraising tips. Now let's dive in. Well, happy New Year. What a great way to kick off 2025 with the going Big podcast. Then to have one of the most prodigious bloggers, New York Times bestselling authors, world renowned economist and cultural critic, Professor Tyler Cowen. Tyler, you are known for not only your provocative thinking, but really a lot of what you've done related to going big. I want to kick off why, in your judgment, is the United States still such a powerful force in the world Today?
- [01:25]
Tyler Cowen
The United States is the number one country when it comes to talent. I think the last 10 or 15 years have shown that, at least in contemporary times, scale really matters. We have scale. We're number one in soft power. We have clearly the world's strongest military, and we just haven't screwed it up too badly. I know that latter part may not sound true to a lot of people, but compared to the others, it is. We're still hanging in there. The last quarter we had 3.1 percentage economic growth for GDP. That's amazing for one of the world's wealthiest countries. And we're just still at it. And new sectors like artificial intelligence and a lot of the new biomedical innovations, US is playing a leading, I would say the leading role.
- [02:11]
Kevin Gentry
Well, you've already touched on a number of subjects that I want to dig in more deeply with. But Tyler, with respect to going big, do you think most people in a free society naturally want to do that and do that, or do you think they need to be prodded and encouraged?
- [02:29]
Tyler Cowen
I think most people are complacent. There's nothing wrong with that. They're risk averse. They want sound, safe lives. They want to take care of their families. They don't want to be thrown out into the street. And every society works based on that. But there's still a question your top 2, 3, 5% of people, whatever the number will be, how ambitious are they, how risk taking are they? And there you need a lot of, you could call it inspiration or educational investment to get your best people to be out there, starting companies, trying new ideas, doing something different. And that makes all the difference. It's the main difference between the United states growing at 3% and most of Western Europe growing at 0 to 1% and compounded over time, my goodness, that's going to matter for everything.
- [03:21]
Kevin Gentry
All right, so you've written, especially recently, a lot about identifying talent, talent, developing talent pipelines, but there are certain traits you talk about. You just talked about 3 to 5% who are especially ambitious. What do you see as some of the most important traits in someone with the, with the capability and desire to go big and the ability to go big?
- [03:43]
Tyler Cowen
Well, intelligence clearly matters, but it doesn't matter as much as many smart people believe. I think determination, being actually a little bit pissed off about something and just courage, willingness to fail, willingness to put yourself out there in a matchup. I would take those over iq, but again, you need the whole package basically, or big parts of it. And you need to be able to understand what kind of team do you need to make up for your own weaknesses. A lot of brilliant people are not good at that. So they maybe have five incredible traits. They fall down on a few others and they can't make up that difference.
- [04:22]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well, I want to dive in a little bit to some of your going big. So in 2003, you and Alex Tabrock started Marginal Revolution, certainly the most popular economics blog in the world today, still around 22 years later. But you started that at a time when many academics were skeptical about blogs. How did you sort of have that vision initially and, and had the desire to sort of take the risk and just go out there and do it?
- [04:50]
Tyler Cowen
Well, maybe I was a little pissed off at them, but I think also I was somewhat like in a catatonic trance and, and obsessive in my own little way and just not too tuned in to whatever they all might be talking about. And that was useful. I just thought I could reach a decent sized audience. It's turned out to be more than 10x larger than I ever imagined. And I would say a kind of like autistic quality. Like I'm just going to do my own thing. Not too connected to every single social network, not so worried about social pressures.
- [05:23]
Kevin Gentry
Well, and ladies and gentlemen, Marginal Revolution is the name of Tyler and Alex's blog. Take a look Tyler, you blog every day, I believe, even though you're traveling all over the world all the time, how do you keep up that dedication to it? And is that dedication key to its success?
- [05:42]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I learned so much from doing it. I find I never have to force myself to blog. If anything, I have to hold myself back from not blogging more. I hope that comes through to the readers, that it's truly my intellectual journey, my curiosity, I think that attracts people. I'm not sure I'm the one to ask, but it's a bit like with your podcast that we're talking on now. Highly successful, very rapidly. You didn't necessarily plan for that, but it was something you really wanted to do. And I strongly suspect that comes through to your listeners.
- [06:18]
Kevin Gentry
Well, thanks. Well, you. The conversational nature of your blog comes through. I can go there any place in the world, anytime and just feel like I'm there with you. But that evolved into your Conversations with Tyler, sort of your next stage. And now you have the Conversations with Tyler podcast. Tell us about that. How did, how did that happen next? And how is that part of your sort of next going big?
- [06:39]
Tyler Cowen
Well, this came out of my work at Mercatus again. I think I was just a little pissed off at something, like there were some people who weren't productive enough. And I thought, well, I should have Peter Thiel come in and read them the riot act, so to speak, and do a public event. So I asked Peter. I was shocked when he said yes. Actually, Peter then was not as famous as Peter now, but still it was not obvious he would say yes. So Peter came in, the thing was a big hit, including on YouTube. And then I asked Jeffrey Sachs, the famous economist, who back then was not crazy, he was very smart. And Sachs said yes. And I just thought like, hey, this is the thing we can do. And Julie Burden, you know Julie, of course you had a role in hiring her. Julie said we should make this into a thing and call it Conversations with Tyler. And I'm like, well, I can't say no to Julie Burden, can I? And now we, several hundred episodes later, you know, we've had on Mark Zuckerberg and Patrick Collison and Eric Schmidt and Margaret Atwood, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, many well known people. But a lot of my favorite episodes are the people who aren't really known at all.
- [07:47]
Kevin Gentry
What is your, what are your two or three most favorite episodes?
- [07:51]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I always like to say next one, but good one that stands out for me in particular is Katherine Rundell, who is a British women's author. Another would be a guy named Alexander the Great G R A T E, who's a homeless man in Washington D.C. and we did a podcast with him. What's it like being a homeless man who sleeps on a great G R A T E? And he was very interesting. But still the next one is the proper answer. That's what is the motivation is what you're going to learn from doing the next episode.
- [08:27]
Kevin Gentry
Oh, that's awesome. Appreciate your intellectual curiosity about it too. Ladies and gentlemen. Check out Tyler's podcast. Tyler mentioned being at the Mercada center at George Mason University, which is the really world's premier market oriented center for research and talent development. You've long time been the faculty director there too. You and I worked there for, for a long time. Really appreciate that you're just continually thinking through. You do a lot of different things, but you continue to think through these next new things. And I appreciate that you get agitated and want to go do something. You're sort of a contrarian by nature too. So tell us about Emergent Ventures and how that happened.
- [09:08]
Tyler Cowen
Let me just first say a word about George Mason and Mercatus. I think it was just yesterday a fellow named Lipton Matthews asked Grok, you know, Elon's AI engine, Who has been. Was it the most influential economists? And most influential economists on Twitter. And four of the top 10 were GMU or Mercatus affiliated.
- [09:29]
Kevin Gentry
Wow.
- [09:30]
Tyler Cowen
And that's from the whole world. And I'm not saying AI gives you perfect answers, but it doesn't lie. You know, it's reading everything being produced and making its own judgments. But I was very pleased to see that. So that's another way in which we've had kind of outsized impact. But anyway, Emergent Ventures goes back now about six years. It again stems from a story of me being pissed off. I was asking a major foundation for money. They've never given Mercatus money. I'm sure you've heard of them. I'm not going to say who they are. And I submitted a proposal and they liked the proposal and they gave me back comments wanting extensive revisions. And I calculated that the revisions would take me so long that I could actually myself earn the money more quickly than I could do the revisions. And it just seemed to me something is wrong with philanthropy. It's been too bureaucratized and we can't even blame the government for that. It's like our own fault. So I thought, well, how would I redesign at least one part of philanthropy from the ground up. So Emergent Ventures is a new program. There's a one page application. You get a decision right away. Young talent is extremely welcome. We have many teenage winners. You can ask for any amount of money. No sum is too small. But we also consider larger grants and it's just tell us who you are and what's your idea. No letters of recommendation and we never ask you where you went to college. People do get answers back, typically in well under two weeks. And we now have over 800 winners.
- [11:10]
Kevin Gentry
Well, that's extraordinary. And thank you for your commentary on philanthropy. It is maddeningly frustrating and thank you coming up with an alternative approach. But how do you fund Emergent Ventures? How do you raise money for Emergent Ventures?
- [11:26]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I go around and ask people is the too simple answer. But what's striking to me, personal Emergent Ventures relies a lot on the people trusting me personally. So the major donors are all individuals who know me personally and typically have known me for some time. Not all fundraising works that way. I think it makes sense for Emergent Ventures. They have to actually think that I'm a trustworthy, trustworthy judge of talent. So it's been a very unusual fundraising experience and typically it is not involved written proposals at all.
- [12:03]
Kevin Gentry
Well, you say it's an unusual fundraising experience. I think it's obviously very effective approach. But I agree with that approach. And I think people tend to overcomplicate fundraising in many ways. But, but let's come back to that in a minute.
- [12:15]
Tyler Cowen
People are either sold or they're not. And we've had seven figure grants just come in the mail, so to speak, from people I had not known about because they had heard about Emerging Ventures and you know, the, the winners and what we're doing. And those people I'm pretty sure are also frustrated with other philanthropic investments and all the bureaucracy, even as donors they have to go through. I realized this when we ran fast grants at Mercatus. The hardest thing about fast grants, which were grants to fight against Covid, was actually getting people to take the money in a timely fashion. Can you imagine that? That is insane. You'd make a grant to universities and they would make it difficult for you to give them money.
- [12:56]
Kevin Gentry
Tyler, we could do a whole episode on those kind of barriers to giving. And just as an example, at the end of a calendar year, a tremendous amount of online giving occurs, not surprisingly, for a variety of reasons. People procrastinate nature of the deadline, the giving spirit, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the number one impediment to their giving is the website of the recipient organization making it virtually impossible to make an easy contribution. That's one of them. The other is there aren't people there to pick up the phone or answer an email question the last week of the year. It's just nuts.
- [13:29]
Tyler Cowen
But anyway, there's so much room to improve the world is the lesson here. And we really need to take this to heart. The world is not efficient. It is not close to efficient. And yes, some of the problems are government or bad policy, but a lot of the problems are just us.
- [13:45]
Kevin Gentry
Well, I had a question about efficiency later on. You're jumping ahead. This is amazing. And by the way, the agreement that Tyler and I had was that I would share any questions with him ahead of time. But we always have fun on this kind of stuff. And I hope you're enjoying and appreciating what an interesting conversation with Tyler. Always is. All right, so, Tyler, back to your evaluation of these proposals. What sets apart a really good, ambitious, big, hairy, audacious goal versus one that's just. Yeah, man.
- [14:14]
Tyler Cowen
The person should show that they really want the world to be a better place in some way, but it's also fine if their motivation is quite selfish. So if they're upset about something or they have an extreme particular interest and they just want to set the world right, there's some burning sense of justice. And it's not all entirely altruistic. That's fine. It's typically good. I think it's also good, on average, if people want to make a lot of money. I applaud that motive when it is applied properly. And I think a good way to judge proposals is to just think about who is it this person already knows, who are their peers, which WhatsApp groups are they in? Which other young people might they be chatting with? That's the single best judge of a good application, is to consider the peers. Who wants to meet with this person is another way to put it.
- [15:09]
Kevin Gentry
Makes sense. Interesting. All right, in that same category, what do you think makes the difference between a good fundraiser and a truly great fundraiser?
- [15:22]
Tyler Cowen
A truly great fundraiser is authentic, sincere, obsessive, and is willing to put himself or herself out there on a very regular basis and enjoys the process. So if the person is too instrumentally motivated, they can be quite good. But I actually think that's a little suspicious. You want someone who's a bit, like, crazy about something.
- [15:50]
Kevin Gentry
Well, that's a great point. I think people misunderstand how just a real genuine passion for the cause is probably the number one most important initial factor. And the idea that someone is a, as a, as a just hired gunslinger can go out and raise funds for a cause, it just doesn't, doesn't work. But thank you. Great, great insights. All right.
- [16:12]
Tyler Cowen
Donors can tell the difference. That's the thing. I mean, donors have varying levels of perceptiveness or knowledge of what you're doing. But one thing like even very not intelligent humans are good at is sniffing out the insincerity of other people. Even if you meet someone you think like, oh, they're not impressive, they're not so smart, you should think they're very smart at sniffing out your own insincerity. And I bet they are.
- [16:39]
Kevin Gentry
That's pretty good. Well, you know, our friend Richard Vigory says, remember, donors aren't stupid. In fact, they're smarter because they're the ones with the resources. But, you know, I think you're absolutely right, and I think that's probably a key to your, your success with emergent ventures as well. And, well, as we talked about, podcast, Marginal revolution, et cetera. Okay, we're going to switch now to the speed round. This is something I love doing with you. We've done it sometimes at lunch or what have you. Again, these are questions. I, I just reached out to a lot of people yesterday and said, okay, I've got a conversation. I've got a conversation with Tyler. What question should I ask him? So here are some of the ones that were submitted. All right, first one, let's say there's a visitor to Earth for the very first time. They're human, like, but they have only seven days to see the world. What would you show them?
- [17:30]
Tyler Cowen
So this is an alien being from another planet? Yes, but I would show them a major city, I would show them a countryside. I would show them a scene of pure nature. I would show them some ocean, which is most of our planet's surface. Right. I would show them people at work producing ideas, and I would show them some manufacturing. Is that seven? Maybe that's six, but that's what occurs to me off the top of my head. I don't think showing them different countries is so important, though. To show them wealth and poverty. Yes, that I would do, too.
- [18:06]
Kevin Gentry
What if you had only one day?
- [18:09]
Tyler Cowen
Do I have supersonic jet travel? I mean, they can get around pretty quickly. So I'm going to hitch a ride with them and show them all those same things. Basically, I would show them how to connect to our AIs and have their AIs chat with our AIs. And then they would learn so much very quickly. Maybe that's the first thing you do.
- [18:31]
Kevin Gentry
If there are only three places, specific places in the world, where would you take them?
- [18:37]
Tyler Cowen
New York City, Tokyo, and Mumbai.
- [18:45]
Kevin Gentry
Interesting. All right. Some friends have heard you make this suggestion when going through a museum, especially an art museum. And so they said, okay, let's turn the tables. Tyler, if a security guard at any museum anywhere in the world would let you steal a piece of art, which one piece of art would you steal?
- [19:06]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I'd love to go to the Kunstartisches Museum in Vienna, and there's a painting there by Vermeer. In English. It's called the Art of Painting. Die Kunster Mallerai or something like that in Dutch. And that's the one I would want in my home. Putting aside the insurance, premia and all of that, I love that painting. I've been going to look at it for decades. That's my choice. I wouldn't say it's an easy question, but I do have a definite answer.
- [19:31]
Kevin Gentry
That's great. All right, what are the open tabs on your computer right now?
- [19:36]
Tyler Cowen
Well, there's so many, but there's three different AI systems. There's anthropics, Claude. There's GPT01 Pro model. There's the new Google model whose exact name I forget. It just came out a few days ago. I have my blogging software. I have bloomberg.com where I write a column for the Opinion section. I have my Gmail, I have my RSS feedback, and I have Twitter. And then I have on YouTube a few songs opened up whose names I forget, but I want to hear them again. And those are my open browser tabs right now. Plus. Oh, what else? Something else, but that's most of it.
- [20:18]
Kevin Gentry
All right, so in fairness, why don't you elaborate on this? You actually recommend this as an interview question?
- [20:24]
Tyler Cowen
Well, it tells you how people process information and it tells you what they're interested in. So if you hear those are my tabs, you actually know a lot about me. Not today, but often. I have ESPN.com NBA Open. That would tell you something about me. There's no major chess tournament going on this morning, but often that would be open. That would tell you something about me. It's a kind of coincidence that it's not open right now and that I'm AI obsessed and blogging obsessed and Twitter obsessed. Oh, and my email window, of course. I forgot to mention that I call myself an infovore, so that's a great Portrait of me. What I just said, who's the greatest.
- [21:05]
Kevin Gentry
Basketball player of all time?
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Tyler Cowen
LeBron James. He stuck with it when Michael Jordan, you know, basically quit for three years. Four rings to MJ6. But I think durability means he wins. There are no other competitors. Third would probably be Kareem Abdul Jabbar.
- [21:26]
Kevin Gentry
What's the most important movie you watched as a teenager?
- [21:30]
Tyler Cowen
It has to be Star wars because it made me rethink what cinema can be. And I saw it the first night my mother drove us at age 15 and it just leapt out from the screen and I thought, oh my goodness, I'm living in a different world now. And learning that feeling when you're young is very important because you will encounter it many times such as when you first try GPT4. Oh my goodness, I'm living in a different world now. People who don't have that feeling, they're not going to be significant creators.
- [22:01]
Kevin Gentry
Well, that's got a great going, big connection and we'll come back to that in a minute. What's the most, what's the most interesting, most important thing you've learned in the last six months?
- [22:11]
Tyler Cowen
Oh, just that the world can keep on surprising me so that what is called time scaling of artificial intelligence A would be so powerful and B can improve itself so quickly along three month time horizons. That's the most important thing I've learned in the last few months and it has shook my world. So OpenAI puts out a service, it's called O1 Pro. It along with some other benefits. It does cost $2,500 a year. It is the world's greatest bargain. It's smarter than you are, you can ask it anything and if you can afford it at all, all of you should be subscribing to this.
- [22:50]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well you've, you know a lot about artificial intelligence. That's another one of your people. People know you by that today and you've been talking about it for a long time. Are you, should we be fearful about it or optimistic about it?
- [23:06]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I'm not sure mood in the abstract makes sense. We should be optimistic about all the great things it can do by speeding the advance of science. It's already accelerating progress in biology. You already have at your fingertips a kind of answering machine. Again, it knows much, much more than you do and it's much better and more useful than Google and you can just keep on asking it follow up questions about pretty much everything. It translates languages. Fearful isn't the right way to put it. But you need to realize it's going to change the whole world. And if you do nothing, that's a problem. I don't think responding with fear is the right way to go, but you need to get your act together, I would say. And for your kids, your grandkids, they should be ready. Just like in earlier generations, people got ready for worlds with electricity, say, or automobiles. A lot of changes had to be made. You had to invest in some important new skills. So, yeah, time to change some things. Learn about AI. You want to be working with it, not competing against it is one simple way to put it. If you're competing against it, there's a good chance it will beat you.
- [24:22]
Kevin Gentry
All right, well, I want to close out with going back to your recommendations with respect to all of us about going big. Back to your point earlier about risk aversion and complacency. How would you recommend any of us shake ourselves out of a sense of complacency?
- [24:41]
Tyler Cowen
A lot of what people try in the short run is just that, a short run treatment effect that dissipates. On average, the best thing to do is to surround yourself with other people who are not complacent. And that has a greater chance of being durable. So think about your friendships, even your close relationships, and just ask yourself, are these individuals making me a better person, a more ambitious person, someone better situated to deal with the world to come? And no matter where you're at, just try to make ongoing improvements in that area. Who are the people you're talking with, spending time with? Are they serving this function for you? And some of that's instrumentalist, but I think that's fine. You'll have better relationships in the personal and emotional way when there's also this commonality of interest about the future.
- [25:33]
Kevin Gentry
So one of the things you've written about is that we tend to focus or over index on sort of small calculable benefits rather than sort of the big moonshot ideas. Is there any advice on how we can develop frameworks? And again, what you just said was great. But more frameworks about how we should push ourselves to think bigger.
- [25:54]
Tyler Cowen
Everyone needs more mentors. I don't care what your age is. I'm 62. I'm always looking for new mentors in every area. And they can be much younger mentors. One great thing about doing emergent ventures is how many brilliant teenagers I get to meet. And I learn a lot from most of them. I have incredible information flows largely because of them. Now, not everyone is in the position to do exactly that, but just Ask yourself again, who's mentoring me? And almost certainly you can do better. So do better. Do it. And that will expand your horizons, your scope, and give you compounding returns, basically for the rest of your life.
- [26:31]
Kevin Gentry
I love that. You know, Sir Isaac Newton said, I see further when I stand on the shoulders of giants. Is there someone in particular or who have been a couple of important mentors to you at any point in your life? And then I've got a follow up question about advice for others.
- [26:48]
Tyler Cowen
Well, one of my very first important mentors was Richard Fink. And you've worked for Rich. And one of the things he taught me was just how to think tactically and strategically about getting things done. And I first met Rich, I think I was 14, but got to know him much better when I was 17. And that was a huge influence on me. The notion that no matter what your field, you could be an academic, whatever, but you have to be a doer. You cannot escape being a doer. So that was a very early mentor. I was just at an Emergent Ventures event in India. We have several hundred winners from India. They're amazing. I think about 15 of them are still teenagers. And I met all of them and they told me about their product, their projects in robotics or AI or, you know, cleaning up the air in India or public health. And they're just incredible. And there's no one. They're fearless. There's no sense of, like, I can't do this. One of them, he now has a satellite company which just got funded by Y Combinator, and he's the youngest person in the current, you know, Y Combinator Crop. And he met a fellow Emerging Ventures winner from Israel, and they have this company together and now it's well funded and they're doing satellites, so we'll see how that goes. But I'm super optimistic about that. And it's just one example of many of what is possible. I think I met Onkar. He was first, maybe 16. Geffen I would guess was 16 or 17 when I met them. Now they're like a few years older. To me, they feel ancient, but it's like, oh, we're 19 now, or something like that. And they're just out there kicking butt. So, like, who should tell you what you can't achieve? Don't let them do it.
- [28:32]
Kevin Gentry
Yeah, it seems to be a running theme throughout your comments, Tyler. That's. That's good. Okay, so what advice would you give listeners to finding a mentor? And I mean, do you ask somebody to be a mentor?
- [28:45]
Tyler Cowen
You can ask, but I'm not sure asking is the most effective way. Be mentor worthy, be trustworthy. That's the single best advice. Whether you're a mentor or mentee, actually legitimately. Be trustworthy and then send out some kind of bat signal. What you want to do, what you care about, what your idea is. It's going to vary depending on your ventures. Be trustworthy, send out the bat signal. I'm not saying never ask, but asking is not the main thing and asking even puts off some people.
- [29:16]
Kevin Gentry
Well, I like your idea about having mentors younger. I've had that experience recently too. Perhaps just because as I get older, but I think that's a counterintuitive notion. All right, so one other bit of advice. The trade. Trade offs between. How important do you think establishing credentials are before going big or just going big, if that. That makes sense.
- [29:40]
Tyler Cowen
Yeah, it depends very much what you want to do. So one area I'm very bullish on is biomedical research. I think over the next 30 to 40 years, we're basically going to cure almost everything, like everything. Cancer, most of cancer. We won't be able to keep you alive forever, but most stuff, we're just going to beat it back with the help of AI. But if you want to do biomedical research, the odds are very high. You need a PhD from a major university and then you need the credential. It might change at some point. I think more and more we'll have AI experts managing biomedical research systems. That will be a different kind of credential. But on the other hand, if you want to have a highly successful podcast, credentials are either irrelevant or sometimes a negative. I'm not saying you have no credentials. You do. But what matters is that you know things. None of your listeners care where you went to school, though it was an excellent school where probably you learned a lot. And then don't worry about credentials per se, just try to be excellent. What are Joe Rogan's credentials? Well, I know he was on, I think reality tv. He did something with what, mixed martial arts? I'm not even sure, but I know people love his podcast and they don't know where he went to school or even if he went to school. So, you know, it's context specific. Make sure you understand the area you're working in now.
- [31:04]
Kevin Gentry
Thank you. All right, so what do you think? You've studied a lot of historical figures. What, what do you think are some of the biggest misconceptions we have about what it takes to go big?
- [31:15]
Tyler Cowen
There's not a single Formula. You don't learn it by formula. A lot has to go right for you. Luck matters, history matters. But you do have to be out there trying, and it's a better life. You know, whether or not you become like the next Napoleon or the next Elon Musk, most people won't, but that's not the way to think about it. You'll have some smaller but still very large impact. In most cases, just improving a few lives in a meaningful way makes your entire life worthwhile. But you have to try again. So just, you know, be there, be out there.
- [31:53]
Kevin Gentry
What do you think are some of the most undervalued or overlooked opportunities for going big transformational change right now?
- [32:02]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I like to start with what the person is interested in and not so much answer the question in the abstract. So even at pretty young ages, kids get obsessed with whatever, and I don't think it's universally true they should follow those interests. It's not that everyone who thinks they ought to be a rock star should try to be a rock star, but for areas where you can have viable careers in large numbers, I like to start there. What is the person interested in? Is there a meaningful way to cultivate that and not overthink too much, like the salary or other kind of more practical details, like, okay, you can't maybe try to be a rap star, but most areas that are normal careers, you can, and just start along those lines and see where you start making traction. Be willing to change and adapt, but in a sense, don't overanalyze it.
- [32:55]
Kevin Gentry
All right, Tyler Cowan, what is your next bhag, your big, hairy, audacious goal? What's your moonshot?
- [33:04]
Tyler Cowen
Well, I don't know if it's my next goal. My goal for some time now has been to be the economist philosopher who influences the thinking of the most people in the world in a good way. So Grok right now gives me a pretty high rating. I think I have to do better. Think I can do better. And maybe Grok's not the only relevant arbiter here, but that's my goal. I think that will be my goal till I'm no longer on this earth and I'm going to keep on at it.
- [33:37]
Kevin Gentry
Well, here, here. And I really applaud you for continuing to look for new and innovative platforms to. To get that message out, to have that influence. You're very, very effective. Okay, all right, last question. Final question for Tyler Cowan. What you know now, in life, if you could give advice to your younger self, what would advice would you do about doing anything differently, I would say stick with it.
- [34:03]
Tyler Cowen
It's going to work out. That would be my advice. I had this fairly long period where I was just doing a lot of investment. I enjoyed it a lot, but I, it didn't have massive returns in terms of my reputation, but it did pay off for me after the age of 40 essentially when the Internet came along. So I did stick with it. But that's what I would say. It's like, oh, it's going to work out nice.
- [34:29]
Kevin Gentry
All right. Tyler Cowan, what a pleasure as always. Looking forward to a great new year. Appreciate your optimism and we can all, I think you're right. Continue to push ourselves to go big.
- [34:41]
Tyler Cowen
Thanks a lot and our next lunch will be great. Take care and happy holidays, Kevin and everyone else. Bye.
- [34:48]
Kevin Gentry
Bye. Bye. Thank you. Tyler, thanks for listening to today's Going Big podcast. Hopefully you were inspired to go big for your cause. Remember, this is all about transforming your effectiveness by 10x ing your fundraising. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe or leave us a review at iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also catch this episode on YouTube. And also there are lots of resources available to you at my website, which is 10xstrategies.com. That's t e n x strategies dot com. You can sign up also for our free weekly fundraising tips. This is all about helping you get to the root causes of some of the biggest problems in society today by transforming your your fundraising and your effectiveness. Thanks again. We'll see you again soon. Bye. By.