Tyler Cowen and Paul Graham were talking recentlyas part of Cowen’s ongoing Conversations with Tyler series. Graham and especially Cowen are diverse men, who could hold forth with interest on a number of subjects; but both by vocation and apart from it the thing that seems to wind their respective clocks the most is thinking about, identifying, and helping to cultivate talent, in which pursuit they are both very successful. Talent takes up most of the talk, and their conversation crackles with the kind of invigoration you might expect when two people so passionate about the same thing are in one another’s encounter.
Of course, talent is often flagged (and sometimes false-flagged) by ambition; and for every Blaise Pascal, subordinating their astonishing gifts to ulterior interest and hobbling them for posterity, the most outsized talent is frequently, though not always, distinguished by being attached to outsized ambition. The most interesting part of Cowen and Graham’s conversation was when they came to ponder the relationship between talent and ambition, and more particularly the question: “Why is there not more ambition in the developed world?”