Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…If you had to give advice — earlier, you were just talking about charisma. How does one become more charismatic, hypothetically? You have an essay on this, right? First, let me say what I understand to be your theory. You need to take role models of other people and run them through your mind on a very regular basis. Not copy them — that makes you too mechanistic. Have those be live, vivid examples for your emotional imaginings of the entire world. They don’t have to be people in your field, but just live in their worlds. It could be Winston Churchill. It could be George Orwell. It could be Paul McCartney, Magnus Carlsen. That, over time, will make you more charismatic. The approach I think you don’t like — and I agree with you on this — is when you read a book and it says, “To be charismatic, smile. Make eye contact.” The actual charismatic people I know often don’t do those things. They have their own weird setup which defies description and indeed is weird. The weirdness makes them charismatic. Someone who tried to follow all those, I suspect, would only clock in at like a 6.5 on charisma. They’d be fine, but you wouldn’t actually be drawn to them if you had pretty fussy standards for charisma. What do you think? I very much think you’re right. Asking someone charismatic how to be charismatic — someone truly charismatic — if you asked Bill Clinton, who, regardless of what you think about politics, does have natural charisma, I think it’d be like asking von Neumann, “How do you multiply five-digit numbers in your head?” It obviously comes easily to them. Someone like me, who’s just trying to learn and certainly doesn’t have that natural gift — the idea of not trying to necessarily copy, but to just load that person’s cartridge into your mind is helpful. I think a lot of people — certainly my parents — viewed TV as a pejorative. But to the extent that you can really grow up today on YouTube, watching the most charismatic people at all times — that’s got to have somewhat of a positive effect if you can intelligently osmose, not exactly copy, but emulate what they’re doing.…

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