Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…Ooh, that it’s very often mostly useful for one party and not the other, and often the party it’s supposed to help most, it doesn’t. That’s just the truth of mentorship. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking about reverse mentoring in organizations or Padawan and Master Jedi relationships in Star Wars, the party that’s supposed to be learning doesn’t always do the learning, and the party that should be teaching is often the one that gets taught. Now, as you know, you once had a six-year $17 million offer from the Los Angeles Lakers and you turned it down to stay with the Orlando Magic for what I think was $600,000 for one year and not a guarantee. What did your mentors tell you at the time? That it was stupid and that I should take the money, and that Los Angeles is nice to live in, and the weather is hot there, but I lived in Orlando so it was hot there, too. Yeah, most of the advice I had was that I should take the money and run. And people should understand, I don’t believe in loyalty, so I think it’s a ridiculous concept. It feels very quid pro quo to me and I’m not interested in that. But I am interested in principle and to me, Doc and the team had made a very strong decision to keep me when they need not have kept me. It happened that I played very well for them, but there was no reason for that. And I know that they kept me in part because I was cheaper than the veterans they cut. But they made a decision that it gave me a chance to do what I’d always said I wanted to do, which is to play a key part and play and start in an NBA team. And at the end of that year, I had an opportunity to be a person of principle and reward those who had rewarded me. And I knew that it would likely lead to my ejection from the team a year later when more sexy players came along. But in terms of Doc, I felt I had a principle to repay with that.…

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