My notes on a conversation between Tyler Cowen and David Perell.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7kLFzdAYCHSuKk8JJYDoPn?si=Lk9_vNULTwCjNNTKe0KWqg

Apple Podcasts

Overcast

Tyler’s (@TylerCowen) background: Tyler Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University. He runs the Mercatus Center, which bridges the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. He’s published a new post every day for the past 17 years on his blog called Marginal Revolution, where he writes about economics, arts, culture, food, and globalization. Beyond that, he also writes for Bloomberg and hosts his own podcast called Conversations with Tyler.

David Perell’s (@David_Perell) background: David Perell is a prolific writer and head of Write of Passage, the premier online course in learning to write online. His essays span everything from Peter Thiel to the audience-first products, all of which can be found at perell.com

Feel free to jump around:

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2:40 What Tyler considers his compounding advantage

What is Tyler's compounding advatage?

"I started early and I kept on going for many, many years."

• Having 45 years of truly full-time work is the best advantage.

Why aren't their more Tyler Cowen's in the world?

• Starting early and continuing fairly late have pros and cons. But what most people would consider cons, Tyler doesn't, like giving up childhood years to study something.

5:56 Why being born as an intelligent person is not as important as developing knowledge

Would you rather have knowledge without intelligence or intelligence without knowledge?

"There will always be people smarter than you."

• Figuring out early on that you're smart, but not that smart, is ironically the smartest thing you can do.

8:23 How Tyler maximizes the value of his consumption

<aside> 💡 I thought this was the coolest part of the episode, Tyler describing why he only eats three bites of chocolate ice cream!

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When you go out for dessert, how do you choose how much ice cream to have?

"A lot of the value of consumption is either memory or anticipation."