Tyler Cowen

This is Tyler Cowen, and I would like to personally thank Jane Street for sponsoring this podcast episode with Dvorkis Patel.

I've been visiting Jane Street for some number of years.

They're renowned for their brainy, challenging environment and also for their ability to spot and recruit talent.

Those are some of the reasons why, for me, those are the trips and the visits I look forward to the most.

I would just say this.

If it is an appropriate option for you, please do consider working there.

I've always had a blast during my visits, learned a lot, and I recall one time when I gave a talk, we all went out to dinner, and then quite late, well, people didn't go back home, but they all went back to the Jane Street office to play chess, bug house, and other games.

They're better at these games than you might think, so please update your other expectations accordingly.

Thank you again.

I see it differently from Patrick, and he and I have discussed this.

So I think there's basically increasing variance in the distribution.

So young people at the top are doing much better, and they're far more impressive than they were in earlier times.

And if you look at areas where we measure performance of the young, chess is a simple example.

We perfectly measure performance.

Very young people are just better and better at chess.

That's just proven, even like NBA basketball.

You have very young people doing things that they would not have been doing, say, 30 years ago.

And a lot of that is mental and training and application and not being a knucklehead.

So the top of the distribution getting much better.

You see this also in science, internet writing.