Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Hello, my name is Riley. Tyler, you had a conversation with Marc Andreessen, and you asked why Peter Thiel could spot talent so well. He countered that this is the concept of a Bat-Signal. He throws up a Bat-Signal, and people come. You have your own Bat-Signal. Daniel, you have your own Bat-Signal. There’s a portfolio of ideas through your blog, all your books, with Pioneer. It might be this Turing aspect of gaming, whatnot. I’m curious, what components of that Bat-Signal do you think are the most effective? People come to you and they say, “Oh man, I really love this about your portfolio. I really love this about Pioneer.” I think the bigger and more globalized network the world gets, the higher the returns to the Bat-Signal, and Bat-Signals are still one of the most underrated ways to be effective. Now, we have some kind of weighted average of how effective they were in the past. We apply the weighted average, but their importance is just rising very, very sharply, I think, even over the last five years. I think the world likes some kind of authenticity in Bat-Signals. Don’t think too hard about your Bat-Signals, maybe. Now, if they’re bad to begin with, and you don’t think too hard, I guess they’ll stay bad. But that’s great because then, more people like my Bat-Signal, and maybe they should be coming to me. I don’t know. I try not to overthink the Bat-Signal, and if I write a blog post like I was working on earlier today, what’s the difference in the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment and Irish Enlightenment? That makes no sense as a topic. Maybe someone in Ireland will read it, like, “Okay.” But there’s no way you could come up with an argument that that’s what I should be sending out as my Bat-Signal. But that will be the Bat-Signal, and I actually think it’s fine. I think the one thing I’d add to that is that the best people are ones that view you as a way to gain advantage for themselves. They’re not attracted to you as the Bat-Signal because they want to be near you. They’re going to step on you to get somewhere else, and that’s great. I think it’s an important nuance that some people miss when they send out their Bat-Signals.…

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