Tyler Cowen: The AI Bears Are Asking The Wrong Questions

24:04Tyler Cowen:There's some data that have come out from the two main companies on how many tokens people are using per month. And that number has just been going crazy through the roof. So I don't think there'll be a demand crisis. At some point, there may be an energy sector crisis. Right now, the U.S. has a huge share of all the world's compute. There's no guarantee we keep that position. So to build out compute, secure the supply of chips largely through Taiwan, make sure that over time we increase our own energy and number of data centers against strong political opposition. Those are big challenges. I think we'll squeak by on all those fronts.

24:41Tyler Cowen:But again, you could definitely see things going wrong. All you would need is one decision from the Chinese Communist Party. And to invade Taiwan, we'd be living in a very different world, right? On the demand for tokens, which is true, I mean, the demand is going up significantly. One of the criticisms, or at least the concerns, though, is that that token usage or that token demand is currently being subsidized by the AI labs. I mean, Anthropic, OpenAI, they are losing money on every prompt that a user puts in to the system. And so I think there is a concern that if we were to not subsidize this, if Silicon Valley, if VCs, if big tech were not to basically support the business models of OpenAI and Anthropic, then maybe it would be different.

25:34Maybe the cost of tokens, of token usage would be higher and people would be less inclined to use as many tokens as they're using today. What do you make of those concerns? Do you think that they're valid?

25:51Tyler Cowen:In the short run, the price may well need to go up for the reasons you mentioned. And we already see what is possibly some rationing of compute. But that said, if you look at data, how much has the price of tokens fallen since, say, GPT-4? I forget the number, but it's more than 100x. So we're doing very well on making the systems more efficient. And we'll see, which curve outraces which other curve. But it's not that there's no progress in making the systems more efficient. There's been incredible progress. But in the short run, should the price go up? Probably. But aren't costs going higher for these companies?

26:26I mean, my understanding is that it's, I mean, it's hard to know because they're not public companies. We can't look at their audited financials. But my understanding is that Anthropica and OpenAI are spending more each year. Better model costs more, yeah. Right. Right. Which would assume, I mean, to me, that means that we're not necessarily going in the right direction in terms of making this a profitable business that is necessarily sustainable. To me, it seems like we're technically going in the wrong direction if we're talking about profitability, which we're losing more money.

26:59Tyler Cowen:Well, I'm not advising anyone to buy any particular asset. But the worst case scenario is that capital gives a massive subsidy to consumers and we end up still having the model and someone else buys it. That's a great outcome for an egalitarian, say. I don't think that will happen. I think the companies will do fine. There's a reason why people talk about Anthropic at$2 trillion. I'm not sure what the current number is for OpenAI, but I think it's over a trillion. Those are guesses, but those are smart people with real money on the line, and they're saying the companies are worth trillions. On average, we should believe them.

27:33Tyler Cowen:Why should we believe them in your view? Because it's their own money on the line. Once things go public, you'll have the chance to short them, right? You're free to do that. I'm free to do that. I have no plan to do that whatsoever. The way you really make money in markets is to go long. I believe in America. I believe in tech. I think artificial intelligence works. Again, I have no favorite horse in terms of which particular company, and I definitely think they're not all going to make it. But again, some of the big ones really well. I guess just from the economics perspective, regardless of whether someone wants to go long or short, because of how dependent the U.S.

28:11economy seems to have become on AI, or at least the AI build-out, the amount that S &P earnings growth is dependent on AI, the amount that the entire stock market is increasingly dependent on AI, and the extent to which the ecosystem itself does depend on those two companies, does that not make it bigger than, you know, some will win, some will lose? I mean, aren't we all implicated, whether we're long or short or not?

28:44Tyler Cowen:Well, for one thing, I don't think the U.S. economy is as dependent on AI as those numbers indicate. As you said yourself, it hasn't affected that many jobs. So there's a lot of money flows. But if somehow AI did not magically exist, the Transformers paper had never been written, that money would flow somewhere else, and you would still have a lot of GDP from some other set of activities. So we're investing more in AI and less in other places. That's a gamble, of course. But it's wrong to think that AI is currently this massive net contribution to US GDP, and that we would have nothing else if it weren't there.

29:20Tyler Cowen:So in that sense, we're pretty robust. Now, there's a transition issue. People are expecting AI to do well. If that all turned out to be horribly wrong, there'd be a lot of disappointment, big capital losses. Some of those losers have taken out a lot of debt. There'd be solvency issues. That'd be a big mess, right? But as messes go, I don't even think it would be close to the worst we've seen. Not close, say, to 2008. What is your biggest concern with AI then? I mean, I'd be interested to hear what you're optimistic about, but also, you know, if it's not a market event, some sort of crash, some sort of correction, that seems to be what a lot of people are concerned about with AI right now.

30:02What is it for you? What do you worry about? What should people be talking about more?

30:06Tyler Cowen:I think we see this already, and it's how disoriented people feel. The notion that you cannot say to your kid or grandkid, here's what you should do for a living. Here's how you prepare for it. Here's a more or less guaranteed path to success if you're smart and you work hard. I've grown up with that my whole life. People like those assurances. I don't think they exist in the same way they used to. There could be someone else equipped with AI or an AI-equipped firm that could outcompete you and who really can be a consulting partner or a lawyer or do the right thing in medicine and, you know, excel at an Ivy League school and walk into a job where they end up earning $2 million a year and living in Manhattan in a nice apartment.

30:48Tyler Cowen:I think those paths are now up for grabs. I think there's a lot more opportunity for the world as a whole, but there's a big status and somewhat income disruption for what is a favored class of people, and they don't know how to deal with it. What they do is they keep on running op-eds in the New York Times about how terrible this is, but they're not going to stop it. At the very least, there's Chinese open source, and I think so many parts of human life, whether it's entertainment or religion or just your own conception of your intelligence, it's going to change. And how we deal with that, it's up to us.

31:23Tyler Cowen:But historically, we're not always good at dealing with radical change. Do you think that that could be potentially a good thing to have a shakeup in the way that you're describing? Yes, but again, people don't like it. And the mere fact that people don't like it is discomfort, and that's a bad thing. And then you have to ask, what will the politics of this be. I don't have any specific predictions. I just could see it getting ugly and restrictionist and polarizing. That would hardly be a big surprise. So again, you already see this with the data centers. So I have big concerns. Yeah, Trump recently put out a tweet on data centers.

31:57I don't have the quote right here in front of me, but he basically said that if you try to stop data centers, talking about this data center backlash that we're seeing, it's becoming very, very politically popular in America right now, then you're getting in your own way. That's a recipe to become poorer, that we should be pro-data centers. What do you make of his comments, and what do you make of the politicization of AI and data centers in America right now?

32:24Tyler Cowen:Well, it's one of the small number of issues where I completely agree with Trump. So while I'm glad he's saying it, I worry that Trump embracing the cause does not in every way help it. Right. Fortunately, America has 50 states, and I think you'll always find at least five governors willing to cut a deal. And a lot of these governors seem to say very anti-data center things, and then they go ahead and they still want the deals. What they're saying or announcing is not really binding, like Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania. West Virginia is welcoming data centers. There's a place in southern Ohio. I think it was written up in the New York Times today.

32:59Tyler Cowen:So I think it will happen, but it will be very costly and there'll be lots of bargaining and lots of politics. But again, that's part of the beauty of federalism. There are indeed 50 states. And other countries that are federalistic, you know, Germany, Brazil, they don't have close to 50 states. It's a big advantage for America right now. Do you think that it's unreasonable to be anti-data center? Do you think there are merits to the arguments that building data centers is a bad thing or not at all? I live in Northern Virginia, right next to Loudoun County, which is ground zero for data centers for the entire world.

33:36Tyler Cowen:It's the wealthiest county per capita in the whole United States. The data centers pay, I think, half of the property taxes. There's no actual problem. The cost of power, electricity there, it's about it. National average is. It's actually slightly better. So I'm reluctant to say there are no valid concerns. Oh, maybe you think they're ugly or there's some slight humming noise. But man, they don't create a lot of traffic. They pay the bills. They make your place wealthy. We've been wanting re-industrialization for a long time. Labor unions typically support them. I say, let's go ahead and do this.

34:12What would the message, do you think the message should be to Americans? What should, if you are trying to make an argument and trying to convince people as to why data centers are ultimately a good thing, how would you change the messaging right now? Because clearly it's not working for most people.

34:32Tyler Cowen:I don't think any messaging is working. I think people don't trust their own elites for reasons like COVID and 2008. That's understandable. You can't overturn those perceptions. Maybe just talking about it less and having it happen in a few places and stop trying to persuade everyone. Some issues, the more you talk about it, you know, the deeper in you dig yourself. So you could try bribing citizens. Again, the 50 states, let's try that in one or two places. But sometimes that makes it worse. The people say, hey, if this is so great, why do you need to bribe me? But you can try it. I think some states are trying that.

35:08I think MET is trying it. I think they're paying out local communities to get them on board. reminds me of my favorite movie, There Will Be Blood. I'll pause it back to Scott. There's two trends of thought. And one is that a small number of people and investors who either own these assets or have the ability to leverage AI to the advantage of their enterprise are going to aggregate a disproportionate amount of the spoils resulting in greater income inequality. And then another line of thinking, which it feels like is incumbent in some of your comments, that this will attack the incumbents and be good or actually be a bit of an equalizer for other less qualified or less traditionally certified professions.

35:58Do you come out on either side of the spectrum there about what you anticipate happening?

36:03Tyler Cowen:I think the biggest losers will be parts of the upper, upper middle class, as I call them. Now, I love the upper, upper middle class. I'm a part of it. So it's the professionals who do intellectual work. And those people are not going to starve. They may have much lower status. They may earn much less. Maybe they can't all cluster in Manhattan or San Francisco. By their own standards, their lives might be worse. I think big winners will be teenagers, very small companies, people who master AI, a lot of immigrants, people from unusual places like Eastern Europe or Turkey who were never so bought into the old ways of doing things and decide, hey, I can get ahead by starting a company, two or three humans and a bunch of AI agents and they make it work.

36:49Tyler Cowen:Those people will be very wealthy. They'll have to work incredibly hard, but they're going to challenge people across the board. So there's pluses and minuses to all of that, but there will be amazing opportunities. But the people who now have influence in America, I could call them your listeners, will hate it on that. Incumbents. You said something I want to double-click on. Teenagers? I direct a philanthropic fund, and I see many applications from teenagers, often as young as 15, who are starting companies with AI agents. Whether those companies succeed this time around, I'm not sure. But they are learning incredible amounts.

37:26Tyler Cowen:They are learning things you cannot learn at Harvard or Princeton. and I think they'll be the wealthy people and the successful people of the future. Teenagers, yes, they have no stake in the established order and they're learning these things from scratch and they just do it by experimentation. Again, there's no one to teach them. To some extent, they teach each other. I think we take for granted that every technological innovation or disruption results in a small number of companies that are able to capture trillions of dollars in shareholder value. But there's also been industries where the technological or the technical results have been extraordinary.

38:05I think of jet transportation, vaccines, the PC, where I don't think you could argue that they weren't able, whatever it was, distribution or capital, weren't able to sequester shareholder value to a small number of companies. That the big winner was us, if you will. I'm sitting here in L.A. I think the biggest, the biggest, the most accretive technology in my life is jet transportation. And yet I think on average, in aggregate, airlines and jet manufacturers are just barely a break even to date. Do you think it's possible that the winners might be all of us, but we in fact overstate the industry's ability to capture shareholder value for a small number of companies?

38:47Tyler Cowen:I think it's likely. I mean, it's funny to me, the same people who say it's all a bubble, turn around and five minutes later, you know, want to say, oh, income inequality will go up massively because the companies will learn so much. Truly fundamental technologies like the printing press, fire, language, they tend to be enjoyed by everyone, at least over time. So there's a lot of medications that are expensive at first, then they become cheaper. I think that's what we'll see with AI, that eventually through energy innovation we'll get token costs down and it will be pretty cheap. And the people who benefit the most might be people in Africa who right now don't have access to quality services of legal advice, health care diagnosis and so on.

39:30Tyler Cowen:And they'll be getting it very soon or some are starting to get it already. They could be the very biggest winners. You mentioned education. I think a lot about higher ed. And I would argue that higher ed has never been more important. And at the same time, I agree with you that there's an opportunity for younger people to sort of skip the certification line and start a company on little or no capital that would have previously just been not possible. When you look at higher education, I see applications going up. I see, in my view, college and critical thinking becoming more important. and then a lot of people think that higher education is going to be massively disrupted by AI.

40:11What are your thoughts on AI as it relates to higher education?

40:14Tyler Cowen:I'm in higher education. I see schools and universities that are doing very little or nothing to adjust to the new reality. They just complain about students cheating. They don't rethink that they need to be teaching very different things. On average, the students often know more about AI agents than their professors do. So what are the professors supposed to teach. I think it's a huge mess. I agree with your view that education has never been more important, but the role of actually existing institutions in that is highly uncertain. In the short run, they'll become more and more about networking or golf courses or marriage markets or dating.

40:52Tyler Cowen:That's fine, in fact, but radical changes are needed, and so far, I really do not see those coming. We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, sign up for our newsletter at profgmarkets.com.

41:34There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state.

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42:42We're back with ProfG Markets. What one or two industries do you think will undergo the greatest shift, both to the upside and the downside, from the penetration of AI?

42:53Tyler Cowen:Well, programming clearly has been accelerated the most, right? There's a lot of evidence for that. It's not a hypothetical. and I don't think humans will disappear from programming, but they've already taken on a fundamentally different role. They're more like impresarios and they're consulted in the meantime, like, oh, is this going in the proper loop? Is the work actually being done? Is this the thing I asked it to do? Over time, more and more of that will be AIs themselves monitoring, but that's the clearest example of a very positive change. The biggest negative, I just think, will be cybersecurity.

43:28Tyler Cowen:There'll be a lot more hacks. There's plenty of evidence for this already. Those cost the world a lot. We'll spend more on cybersecurity. It won't be fixed quickly. And I think it's a very real concern. We need a national, international effort to really firm up all of our major institutions as quickly as possible. But there's so many institutions and, relatively speaking, so little expertise. It's going to be a very tough slog. It feels like we've always been on the precipice of this huge era of innovation in healthcare, that we keep getting seduced by this age of discovery where we're going to see an acceleration in pharmaceutical innovation treatments.

44:11Have you thought about AI's improvement of healthcare outcomes? Do you think it's overhyped, underhyped? What are your thoughts?

44:17Tyler Cowen:I think about this a lot. In my view, it's underhyped. I would make the point, you know, the phrase AI, we think we know what we mean, but in a number of contexts, it's not that well defined. If we just call it computational biology, it already gave us the mRNA vaccine against COVID in two days. That was an amazing breakthrough that probably saved millions of lives. So AI broadly construed, I think over the next 40 years, will beat back many of the things that kill people, and at least I think will live to 100. Scott, whether you and I do, I'm less certain. This anthropic notion that it will all come in a few years' time, I think, is badly off.

44:57Tyler Cowen:There's just a lot of testing and also regulation and trials and procedures that we both need to go through, but at the very least, we have to go through. So for me, it's more like a 20 to 40-year project. But there's already significant progress against, say, pancreatic cancer. That, too, came from computational biology. It's not from CLAWD or OpenAI, but it's happening. People don't really fully grasp this. So, Ed, please save a Accordingly, you may live to 100 and don't buy a motorcycle. I want to talk about what I'm worried is one of the really big downsides. It doesn't get much attention, and that is loneliness.

45:36And that is some of the deepest-pocketed, most talented companies are using AI to further sequester people, especially young men, from their relationships and their kind of offline lives. and that we're going to end up with perfect gaming, perfect entertainment, perfect facsimile of some sort of sexual experience with porn and that the real downside or the danger of AI is going to be loneliness. And I read that 20 to 30-year-old males are spending less time outdoors than prison inmates. Do you worry that we're evolving a new, potentially a new species of asocial, asexual youth?

46:17Tyler Cowen:I think we already had a loneliness problem. We already had what you could call a sex problem, a sex draught. I think our culture will adjust. People don't want to be lonely. If you go to Mexico, where I just was, the amount of time people spend outside with each other, it's much higher than in the United States. We need to be more like Mexico. Eventually, we'll get there. The AI economic dividend will help pay for that. But man, we actually have to do it, right? It doesn't happen automatically. So do more things with people. Coach Little League or have groups of people, you know, go on picnics, whatever it has to be.

46:55Tyler Cowen:Date more, ask women out more, whatever it takes. We need a significant cultural change very soon. Tyler, if you were president or emperor of America, if you had all the power, what are some economic policies that you would want to get done in america what are some of the problems that you would want to address and how would you like to address them well our current administration is doing many things to make high-skilled immigration much harder i would do many things to make it easier that is by far the number one change i would make i think economists agree about that on more or less a bipartisan basis we have potentially a fiscal crisis in this country.

47:38Tyler Cowen:My hope is that AI spurred economic growth will get us out of it. But the problem is, assuming AI does very well, take the most positive scenario, as it throws off these economic dividends, politicians will spend those also. They're just not responsible. So I don't know how to get our government on a responsible fiscal path. And even me as dictator, maybe as dictator, I could do it. But I don't see a feasible path from here to there, you know, with either party or a third party or anyway. The voters love debt and deficits because it means they consume a lot and pay lower taxes. It's a big problem.

48:15Do you think there's any way to solve it? Is there any way that we would ever get spending under control or is it just pretty much a lost cause at this point?

48:25Tyler Cowen:Well, we'll inflate away some of the debt. I don't like that solution, but it is partially effective in a funny, counterproductive sort of way. And then my hope is politicians are asleep on the AI dividend that it comes, pulls us out of our debt and deficits, as it did in the mid-1990s, by the way. And politicians just aren't efficient enough to be merrily spending it along the way, that it's a surprise to them. I think it's quite possible that happens. Certainly nothing close to guarantees, but that's the most optimistic scenario. Where does the U.S. debt and U.S. deficit sit in terms of your concerns about the U.S.

49:06economy and America's future? Like how far up the list does it rank for you in terms of your largest concerns?

49:13Tyler Cowen:Well, it's in the top tier. So our debt is now about$40 trillion. I understand our productive capacity is very, very high. We can carry that amount. but at some point you have to start paying parts of it back and we just keep on increasing the percentage of our GDP or government spending that goes to interest payments. Real interest rates are much higher now across the world. Our Fed is screwing up somewhat. We're in a very bad state. We've made major mistakes. They were all own goals, not caused by, say, another major war for the most part and we're going to suffer for that. I sometimes say, you know, our plan A is AI and we have no plan B.

49:53Yeah, it often feels as though the AI thing is sort of what a lot of our leaders lean on as their, I don't know, their bailout option. It's okay, we can keep spending, we can keep continuing down this seemingly very unsustainable fiscal path because AI is going to help us grow out of it. But to your point, I mean, it doesn't seem that anyone is really taking this seriously in Washington right now. What do you make of the fact that Trump said as one of his big policies, as part of his platform, that he would balance the budget? He said it over and over again. He seemed to convince a lot of people that that was actually what he was going to try to do.

50:37It was one of his biggest points in his address to Congress. Congress stands up and gives him a round of applause, and then suddenly, yeah, we do get this news that we've hit$40 trillion. What do you make of that?

50:52Tyler Cowen:Well, it was all lies to begin with. Anyone who believed it was a fool. For one thing, we had a first term of Trump, right? Now, I don't blame him for COVID. That was unfortunate. But still, there was no effort made even before COVID to address fiscal stability. And then Trump had an earlier career as a businessman, where he was rampantly in debt and went under a few times. So why expect fiscal sanity from Trump or for that matter from the Republicans or even the Democrats today? The real issue is the voters want what we have and they don't see there's a long run cost. How would you grade the U.S.

51:28economy right now? Given inflation, given debt, but also given the fact that GDP is growing, earnings are up, AI is rolling on, could you give it a letter grade?

51:42Tyler Cowen:Overall, it's still pretty awesome, I have to say. I know it sounds a little crazy. Can I give it a B plus? We're close to full employment. We used to think China would catch us in terms of aggregate GDP. China's actually falling behind. We've decisively pulled ahead of Europe. We have problems. We're the world leader in AI. We have by far the best tech sector. We're shooting ourselves in the foot 30 different ways. Corporate earnings are great, Like you said, stock market is more than fine. No recession so far, and it's full steam ahead. That makes me nervous itself, because there are inevitably recessions and corrections.

52:22Tyler Cowen:But if you want a grade, the grade is not a bad one. Are you surprised by how long things have appeared to be, I mean, at least from a market perspective, how long the market has been rallying, how long it's been since we've had a serious recession? Yes, I'm surprised. I've lost a lot of money. I should have been way more heavily into equities. I was a fool. Ex-ante, I don't feel it was a mistake, but ex-post, I was way too worried. What do you think was the cause of that? Some of it is the prospects of AI, but I just think there have been fundamental transformations that favor countries with scale.

53:01Tyler Cowen:And the only countries with real scale are the US and China, maybe someday India. And that's kept us going and been an extra kick in the pants in a positive way. And our tech sector has done great. And this is still the number one place to go for talented people. And there's this other fundamental change in the global economy that I had underestimated. And that is how quickly the notion of, I want to move to the U.S. and start a business spread. It's always been a thing, but it just came to more parts of the world more quickly than I would have thought. I mean, look at the number of people from India who are either CEOs or done startups that have just done great.

53:40Tyler Cowen:How quickly that spread, again, surprised me in a very positive way. The high-skilled immigration debate that you talk about and Trump's, it appeared that he was interested in it and then kind of went back on that. And you said that you would be a lot more welcoming. What are the dynamics you think are driving that? I think a lot of people believe that it's largely racism. I think a lot of people think that. But perhaps also this idea that we don't want to be recruiting people from other nations to come in and take jobs that should be for Americans. What do you make of sort of the political dynamics at play there?

54:20Tyler Cowen:I believe Trump outsourced that policy to Stephen Miller and that Stephen Miller genuinely believes that if you push out all these foreigners, what you might call native-born white Americans will rise to the occasion and do all the kinds of great things like they did in the 1950s and 60s. And it will be good for this country to go back somewhat to how we were culturally, ethnically, linguistically, in terms of religion, Christianity. I don't think you can get back to that earlier world. I think the idea of attracting more and more of the best foreigners and that they in many ways embody American values in the true sense, at least as well as our native-borns do, is a more promising path forward.

55:04Tyler Cowen:But look, it's a disagreement, and I just think the Trumpers have very strange cultural views without really much evidence behind them, and they've ended up being very nasty to a lot of foreigners, and we're just, we're really not getting anything for it. Do you think, would it be a fair characterization to say that you believe that at least a significant portion of our economic policy has been driven by nativism bordering on racism? Our immigration policy, yes. Does that concern you? Well, it's my number one worry. It's the number one thing I would change. So I think it's very bad. My fear is the Democrats won't reverse it.

55:45Tyler Cowen:I know they say they will, but I'm not sure they mean it. and immigration is often an issue they would just rather not talk about. So lurking in the background is this risk that it may be somewhat permanent. If you imagine a world where AI, looking back in retrospect, is increasing productivity, does not create the types of—the upside is much greater than the downside. What do you think are the biggest sources of friction from here to there? Is it too much regulation, too little? Is it insufficient power grid? Is it cybersecurity threats? You know, lack of cooperation. What do you see as the biggest obstacles to this kind of brave new world of AI?

56:31Tyler Cowen:I think the biggest obstacle is just at the institutional level, people really don't know how to use it. We all freelance with AI. We ask it questions, can write things for you. It can solve problems for you. So you have a company or a nonprofit, whatever, where each individual uses Quad or ChatGPP. They become more productive. But the idea that you have business flows at the institutional level, where AI contributes significantly to productivity, we're way behind on that, except, again, for programming. And I think that will take a long time. There's no one really who can teach it to you. It may happen by having startups slowly replace incumbent firms.

57:13Tyler Cowen:because startups are more likely to be AI native and start with small numbers of people and do things with AI from the beginning. But try going into some big company and telling people they need to change everything they do. You know, good luck with that. I think that's by far the biggest barrier. I don't doubt we'll over-regulate it at some point, but we over-regulate everything. Like, America actually can deal with that within reason. Just like, hey, what do we do next is the biggest problem. And when you think about when you try to, do you have kids, Tyler? Yes. One daughter, she's 36, two grandkids, a third on the way.

57:51Okay. So imagine, and you referenced this earlier, imagine your grandkids are going into junior high and high school and you're trying to prepare them. I thought what you said was really powerful about the traditional paths are no longer guaranteed or they just look more curved and less, you know, quite frankly, more opaque. Like, what skills would you emphasize that young people develop? And there's no way to future-proof yourself, but make it most likely that you, in fact, have or can register prosperity. How would you coach young people thinking about the skills they need to acquire?

58:30Tyler Cowen:I get this question multiple times every day. I never feel I have great answers. But one thing many people can do is just keep current on AI. it's no guarantee of anything, but it's better than falling behind. It does involve a lot, it does take a lot of involvement because it changes all the time. But being curious, learning initiative, and learning how to retrain yourself, and learning how to network, those have always been important, but I think they're truly the skills of the future. So I would encourage anyone, whether my grandkids or not, to invest in those. Like right now, everyone has the perfect cover letter, right?

59:09Tyler Cowen:So you apply, it means nothing. Like the system's broken. Who is it who can vouch for you? So networks and connections are far more important. Learn how to do that. Learn charisma. Learn how to command a room. Learn how to give a talk. Tyler Cowen is an economist, author, and podcaster at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. As the faculty director of the Mercatus Center, Tyler co-created Marginal Revolution University, a free online economics education platform that has reached millions. He's also founded Emergent Ventures, a multi-million dollar fund to support underrated people and projects.

59:44Tyler has blogged every day at Marjol Revolution since 2003, helping to make it one of the most widely read economics blogs in the world. He is the best-selling author of nearly 20 books and has been a regular columnist at The New York Times, Bloomberg, and now The Free Press. Tyler, we really appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks, Tyler. My pleasure. Thank you.

1:00:32to stay.

1:01:02In love.

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