"How Ambitious Are You?" | Tyler Cowen & Richard Hanania

Tyler Cowen needs no introduction. He joins the podcast to talk about his new book, co-authored with Daniel Gross, called Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. Richard asks him about whether intelligence is overrated or underrated, the idea of “State Capacity Libertarianism” as an improvement over old-fashioned libertarianism, cultural differences between China and India, how optimistic to be about the future of the United States, different kinds of courage, free speech, and whether the world has too much or too little wokeness. The conversation also covers the feminization of intellectual life, with Tyler being optimistic that we will get better over time at navigating gender-integrated institutions.

Richard closes by asking Tyler about how he sees his own role as a public figure. They discuss the Emergent Ventures grant interview for CSPI, and the benefits of asking an interviewee about their own ambition.

A lightly edited transcript of the conversation is available here.

Listen in podcast form or watch the episode on YouTube.

Links:

Tyler Cowen and Daniel Gross, Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World.

CEO Study from Sweden.

Econ Talk episode where Tyler and Russ Roberts discuss Germany.

Tyler on State Capacity Libertarianism.

Tyler Cowen, “Why Wokism will Rule the World.”

Eric Kaufmann. “Born This Way? The Rise of LGBT as a Social and Political Identity.”

Tyler Cowen, “My Personal Moonshot.”

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