Tyler Cowen

Time is scarce.

And I do have some very cheap hobbies.

And I feel I'm in very good shape in that regard.

I don't know, like you can only focus on so many things.

So if I have like good deal flow in Emergent Ventures, which I'm not paid to do, like say I had a billion dollars from whatever, I wouldn't have any better way of spending that billion dollars than like buying myself a job doing Emergent Ventures or whatever.

So I'm sort of already where I would be if I could buy the thing for a billion dollars.

So I'm just not that focused on it.

And I think it's good that you limit your areas of focus.

And if some people, it's just money, I think that's great.

I don't begrudge them that at all.

I think it's socially valuable.

Let's have more of it, bring it on.

But it's just not me.

When I started my career, it was really unknown that an economist could really earn anything at all.

Like, there were no tech jobs with billionaires.

Finance was a low-paying field, like when I started choosing a career.

It was not a thing.

There wasn't this fancy Goldman Sachs.

It was a slow, boring thing.

Programmers were weird people in basements, like maybe, who knows, you know, that bad stuff.