Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
tyler cohen an economist at george mason
university
and co-creator of an amazing economics
blog
called marginal revolution author of
many books
including the great stagnation average
is over
and his most recent big business a love
letter to an american anti-hero
he's truly a polymath in his work
including his love for food
which makes this amazing podcast called
conversations with tyler
really fun to listen to quick mention of
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as a side note given tyler's culinary
explorations
let me say that one of the things that
makes me sad
about my love hate relationship with
food is that
while i've found a simple diet playing
meat veggies
it makes me happy in day to day life i
sometimes wish i had the mental ability
to moderate consumption of food
so that i could truly enjoy meals that
go way outside of that diet
i've seen my mom for example enjoy a
single piece of chocolate
and yet if i were to eat one piece of
chocolate the odds are high
that i would end up eating the whole box
this is definitely something i would
like to fix
because some of the amazing artistry in
this world
happens in the kitchen and some of the
richest human experiences
happen over a unique meal i recently was
eating cheeseburgers with
joe rogan and john donahue late at night
in austin
talking about jiu-jitsu and life and i
was distinctly aware
of the magic of that experience magic
made possible
by the incredibly delicious
cheeseburgers this
is the lex friedman podcast and here is
my conversation with tyler
cohen would you say economics is more
art
or science or philosophy or even magic
what is it economics is interesting
because it's all of the above
to start with magic the notion that you
can make some change and simply
everyone's better off
that is a kind of modern magic that has
replaced old-style magic
it's an art in the sense that the models
are not very exact
it's a science in the sense that
occasionally propositions are falsified
are a few basic things we know yeah and
however trivial they may sound if you
don't know them
you're out of luck so all of the above
but from my outsiders perspective
economics
is sometimes able to formulate very
simple almost like e equals c squared
general models of how our human society
will function
when you do a certain thing but
it seems impossible or almost way too
optimistic to think
that a single formula or just a set of
simple principles can describe
the behavior of billions of human beings
well
with all the complexity that we have
involved so do you have a sense there's
a hope for economics to
to uh to have those kinds of physics
level descriptions and models of the
world or is it just our desperate
attempts as humans to make sense of it
even though it's
more desperate than uh than uh
rigorous and serious and actually
predictable like a like a
physics type science i don't think
economics will ever be very predictive
it's most useful for helping you ask
better questions
you look at something like game theory
well game theory never predicted
usa and ussr would have a war would not
have a war
but trying to think through the logic of
strategic conflict if you know game
theory
it's just a much more interesting
discussion are you surprised
that we speaking of the soviet union and
the united states
and speaking of game theory are you
surprised that we haven't destroyed
ourselves with nuclear weapons yet like
that
simple formulation of mutually assured
destruction
that's a good example of an explanation
that perhaps
allows us to ask better questions but it
seems to have
actually described the reality of why we
haven't destroyed ourselves with these
ultra powerful weapons are you surprised
do you think the game of theoretic
explanation is is at all accurate there
i think we will destroy each other with
those weapons
eventually eventually look it's a very
low probability event
so i'm not surprised it hasn't happened
yet i'm a little surprised it came as
close as it did
you know your general thinking realizing
it might have just been a flock of birds
or it wasn't a first strike attack from
the usa
we got very lucky on that one but if you
just keep on running the clock on a low
probability event
it will happen and it may not be usa and
china usa and russia whatever
you know it could be the saudis and
turkey and it might not be nuclear
weapons it might be some other
destruction bio weapons
but it simply will happen is my view and
i've
argued at best we have seven or eight
hundred years and that's being generous
at worst how how long we got well maybe
it's asking for
arrival process right okay so tiny
probability
could come any time probably not in your
lifetime
but uh the chance presumably increases
the cheaper
weapons of mass destruction are so the
poisson process
description doesn't take in
consideration the game theoretic aspect
so another way to consider is uh
repeated games
iterative games so is there something
about
us our human nature that allows us to
fight against
probability reduce like the closer we
get to trouble
the more we're able to figure out how to
avoid trouble the same thing is
for when you take exams or you go you
know and take classes
the closer or paper deadlines the closer
you get to a deadline
the better you start to perform you get
your together and actually get
stuff done
i'm really not so negative on human
nature and as an economist i very much
see the gains from cooperation
yeah but if you just ask are there
outliers in history like was there a
hitler
for instance obviously and again you let
the clock tick
another hitler with nuclear weapons
doesn't per se care about
his own destruction it will happen so
your sense is fundamentally people are
good
but equilibrium is what we would call it
trembling hand equilibrium that the
basic logic
is for cooperation which is mostly what
we've seen
even between enemies but every now and
then someone does
something crazy and you don't know how
to react to it and you can't always beat
hitler sometimes hitler drags you down
to push back is it possible that the
crazier
the person the less likely they are
and in a way where we're safe
meaning like this is the kind of
proposition
i've had i had the discussion with my
dad as a physicist about this
where he thinks that uh
like if you have a graph like evil
people
can't also be geniuses so his this is
his defense why
evil people will not get control of
nuclear weapons because to be truly evil
but evil meaning sort of you can argue
that
not even the evil of hitler were talking
about because hitler had a kind of view
of germany and all those kinds of
there's like
i he probably deluded himself and the
people around him to think that he's
actually doing good for the world
similar with stalin and so on by evil i
mean more like almost like terrorists
where they
want to destroy themselves and of the
world
like those people will never be able to
be
actually skilled enough to do to deliver
that kind of
mass scale destruction so the hope is
that it's very unlikely
that the kind of evil that would lead to
extinctions of humans or
mass destruction is so unlikely
that we're able to last way longer than
seven hundred and eight hundred years
is that three it's very unlikely in that
sense i accept the argument
but that's why you need to let the clock
dick it's also the best argument for
bureaucracy
to negotiate a bureaucracy it actually
selects against pure evil
because you need to build alliances so
bureaucracy in that regard is great
right it keeps out
the worst apples but look put it this
way could you imagine 35 years from now
the osama bin laden of the future has
nukes or very bad bio weapons
it seems to me you can yeah and osama
was pretty evil
and actually even he failed right but
nonetheless
that's what the seven or eight hundred
years is there for and there might be
destructive technologies that don't have
such a high
cost of production or such a high
learning curve
like cyber attacks or artificial
intelligence all those kinds of things
so yeah i mean let me ask you a question
let's say you could as an act of will
by spending a million dollars obliterate
any city on earth
and everyone in it dies and you'll get
caught
and you'll be sentenced to death but you
can make it happen just by willing it
how many months does it take before that
happens
so the obvious answer is like very soon
this is probably a good answer for that
because you can
consider how many millionaires there are
how many you could look at that right
right
i have a sense that there's just people
that
have a million dollars
i mean there's a certain amount but have
a million dollars
have other interests that will outweigh
the uh the interest of destroying the
entire city
like there's a particular you know like
the
i mean maybe that's a hope it's why we
should be nice to the wealthy too right
yeah all that trash talking is bill
gates we should stop that because uh
that doesn't inspire the other future
bill gates is to be nice to the world
that's true but your sense is the
cheaper it gets to destroy the world
the more likely it becomes now when i
say destroy the world there's a trick in
there i don't think literally every
human will die
but it would set back civilization by an
extraordinary degree it's then just
hard to predict what comes next yeah but
a catastrophe where everyone dies
that probably has to be something more
like an asteroid or a supernova
and those are purely exogenous for the
time being at least
so i immigrated to this country i'm i
was born in the
the soviet union in russia and uh
which one which is an important question
well which you were born in the soviet
union right
yes i was born in the soviet union the
rest is details but i
grew up in moscow russia yeah but i came
to this
country and this country even back there
but
it's always symbolized to me a place of
opportunity
where ev everybody could build like uh
build the most incredible things
especially in the engineering side of
things
just invent and build and scale
and have a huge impact on the world and
that's been to me
the that's my version of the american
ideal the american dream
uh do you think the american dream
is still there uh do you think
what do you think of that notion in
itself like from an economics
perspective from a human perspective
is it still alive and how do you think
about it
the american dream the american dream is
mostly still there
if you look at which groups are the
highest earners
it is individuals from india and
individuals from iran
which is a fairly new development great
for them
not necessarily easy both you could call
persons of color
may have faced discrimination also on
the grounds of religion
uh yet they've done it that's amazing it
says great things about america
now if you look at native born americans
the story's trickier
people think energizer intergenerational
mobility has declined a lot
recently but it has not for native born
americans
for about i think 40 years it's been
fairly constant
which is sort of good but compared to
much earlier times
it was much higher in the past i'm not
sure we can replicate that because look
go to the beginning of the 20th century
very few americans finish high school
or even have much wealth there's not
much credentialism there aren't that
many credentials
so there's more upward mobility across
the generations than today
and it's a good thing that we had it i'm
not sure we should blame the modern
world
for not being able to reproduce that
but look the general issue of who gets
into harvard or cornell
is there an injustice should we fix that
is there too little opportunity
for the bottom say half of americans
absolutely
it's a disgrace how this country has
evolved in that way
and in that sense the american dream is
clearly ailing
but it has had problems from the
beginning for blacks for women for many
other groups
i mean isn't that the whole challenge of
opportunity and freedom
is that it's hard and the difficulty of
how hard it is to move up in society
is unequal often and that's the
injustice of society but
the the whole point of that freedom is
that over time it becomes better and
better
you start to fix like uh fix
the the leaks the issues and it gives
that's he keeps progressing in that kind
of way
but ultimately there's always the
opportunity even if it's harder
there's the opportunity to create
something truly special to move up
to be to be president to be
a leader in whatever the industry that
you're passionate about to have it we
each have podcasts right
in english the value of joining that
american english
language network is much higher today
than it was 30 years ago mostly because
of the internet
so that makes immigration returns
themselves skewed
so going to the u.s canada or the uk
i think has become much more valuable in
relative terms than say going to france
which is still a pretty well-off very
nice country
if you had gone to france your chance of
having a globally known podcast
would be much smaller yeah this this is
the interesting thing uh
about how much intellectual influence
the united states has i don't know if
it's uh connected to what we're
discussing here the the freedom and
opportunity of the american dream
or like does it make any sense to you
that we have so
much impact on the rest of the world in
terms of
uh ideas you know is it just simply
because the
english is the primary language of the
world or is there something fundamental
to the united states that
drives the development of ideas it's
almost like
what's cool what's entertaining
what's uh you know like meme
culture the internet culture uh
the philosophers the intellectuals the
podcasts the
movies music all that stuff driving
culture
there's something above and beyond
language in the united states
it's a sense of entertainment really
mattering how to connect with your
audience
being direct and getting to the point uh
how humor is integrated
even with science yeah that is pretty
strongly represented here much more say
than on the european continent
britain has its own version of this
which it does very well
and not surprisingly they're hugely
influential in music comedy the
most of the other areas you mentioned
canada yes but their best talent tends
to come here but
you could say it's like a broader north
american thing and give them their fair
share of credit
what about science you you know there's
a sense
uh higher education is really strong
research is really strong in the united
states but it just feels like
culturally speaking when we zoom out
you know scientists aren't very cool
here
like uh most people wouldn't be able to
name basically a single scientist
maybe they would say like they would say
what like einstein and neil degrasse
tyson maybe
and neil degrasse tyson isn't exactly a
scientist he's a science communicator
so like there's not uh you know the same
kind of admiration
of uh science and innovators as there is
of like
athletes or actors actresses
musicians well you can become a
celebrity scientist
if you want to may or may not be best
for science and we have spock from star
trek who is still a
big deal but look at it this way which
country is most comfortable with
inegalitarian rewards
yeah for scientists whether it's fame or
money and i still think it's here some
of that's just the tax rate
some of it is a lot of america is set up
for rich people
to live really well and again that's
going to attract a lot of top talent
and you ask like the two best vaccines i
know the fights are vaccine is
sort of from germany sort of from turkey
but it's nonetheless
being distributed through the united
states marderana
an armenian ethnic armenian immigrant
through lebanon first to canada then
down here to boston cambridge area
those are incredible vaccines and u.s
nailed it
yeah well that's that's more almost like
the
i don't know what you would call it
engineering the sort of
scaling that's what us is really good as
not just inventing of ideas but
taking an idea and actually building the
thing and scaling it and
being able to distribute it at scale i
think some people would attributed that
to the
the the general award of capitalism
uh i don't know if you would uh what
what in your views
are the pros and cons of capitalism
as it's implemented in america i don't
know if you would say capitalism is
really exist in america
but to the extent that it does people
use the word capitalism in in so many
different ways
what is capitalism the literal meaning
is private ownership of capital goods
which i favor in most areas but no i
don't think the private sector should
own our f-16s or military assets
government-owned water utilities seem to
work as well as privately owned water
utilities
but with all those qualifications put to
the side
business for the most part innovates
better than government it is oriented
toward consumer services
the biggest businesses tend to pay the
highest wages
business is great at getting things done
usa
is fundamentally a nation of business
and that makes us a nation of
opportunity
so i am indeed mostly a fan subject to
numerous caveats
what's uh what's the con what's what are
some negative
downsides of capitalism in your view
or some things that we should be
concerned about maybe for long-term
impacts of capitalism again capitalism
takes a different form in each country i
would say in the united states
our weird blend of whatever you want to
call it
has had an enduring racial problem from
the beginning
has been a force of taking away land
from native americans and oppressing
them
pretty much from the beginning um
it has done very well by immigrants for
the most part
uh we revel in creationitarian creative
destruction
more so we don't just prop up national
champions forever
and there's a precariousness to life for
some people here that is less so
say in germany or the netherlands we
have weaker communities in some regards
than say northwestern europe
often would that has pluses and minuses
i think it makes us more creative
it's a better country in which to be a
weirdo than say germany or denmark
but there is truly whether from the
government
or from your private community there is
less social security
in some fundamental sense on the point
of weirdo uh
what that's kind of a beautiful little
statement
what uh what is that i mean that that
seems to be
uh you know you could think of a guy
like elon musk and
say that he's a weirdo is is that the
sense in which you're using the weirdo
like outside of the norm
like breaking conventions absolutely
yeah and here that is
either acceptable or even admired or to
be a loner
and since so many people are outsiders
and that we're all immigrants is
selecting for people who left something
behind we're willing to leave behind
their families
we're willing to undergo a certain
brutality of switch
in their lives makes us a nation of
weirdos
and weirdos are creative yeah and
denmark
is not a nation of weirdos it's a
wonderful place you know great for them
ideally you want part of the world to be
fully weirdos and innovating
and the other part of the world to be a
little kind of
chicken risk-averse and enjoy the
benefits of the innovation
and to give people these smooth lives
and six weeks off
and free ride and everyone's like oh
american way versus european way but
basically they're compliments
yeah that's fascinating i i used to have
this conversation with my uh like
parents when i was growing up and just
others from the immigrant
uh kind of flow and they use this term
especially in russian is uh
you know to criticize something i was
doing that would
suggest you know normal people don't do
this
and i used to be really offended by that
uh
but you know as i got older uh
i realized that that's a kind of
compliment
because in in the same kind of uh i
would say
way that you're you're saying that is
the american ideal
because if you want to do anything
special or interesting you don't want to
be doing
in one particular avenue what normal
people
do because uh because that won't be
interesting so the russians i think fit
in very well here
because the ones who come are weirdos
and there's a very different russian
weirdo tradition
like alyosha right in brothers carter or
perilman the mathematician they're
weirdos
and they have their own different kind
of status in soviet union russia
wherever
and when russians come to america they
stay pretty russian but it seems to me a
week later they've
somehow adjusted yeah and the ways in
which they might want to be like
grumpier
than americans not smile think that
people who smile are idiots
yeah like they can do that no one takes
that away from them yeah
yeah what are you uh on a tiny tangent
uh
i'd love to hear if you have thoughts
about grisha pearlman
uh turning down the fields medal is that
something you admire
does that make sense to you that
somebody you know with the structure of
nobel prizes of these huge awards of the
reputations the hierarchy of
everyone saying applauding how special
you are and here's a person
who was doing one of the greatest
accomplishments in the history of
mathematics it doesn't want
stupid prize and doesn't want
recognition doesn't want to do
interviews it doesn't want to be famous
what do you mean
what do you make of that it's great look
prizes are corrupting
after scientists win nobel prizes they
tend to become less productive
now statistically it's hard to sort out
the different effects there's aggression
toward the mean
does the prize make you too busy it's a
little tricky but there's not enough
nobel prizes either
to to get gathering of data right but
it's
i've known a lot of nobel prize winners
and it is my sense they become less
productive
they repeat more of their older messages
which may be highly socially valuable
but if someone wants to turn their back
on that and keep on working which i
assume is what he's doing that's awesome
yeah i mean we should respect that
it's like he wins a bigger prize right
our extreme respect
yeah uh well
uh grecia if you're listening i need to
talk to you soon
okay i've been uh i've been trying and
trying to get a hold of him
okay uh back to capitalism i got to ask
you
just competition in general in this
world of weirdos
is competition good for the world
you know this kind of uh seems to be one
of the fundamental
engines of capitalism right do you see
as ultimately constructive or
destructive for the world
what really matters is how good your
legal framework is so competition within
nature
you know for food leads to bloody
conflict all the time the animal world
is
quite unpleasant to say the least if you
have
something like the rule of law and
clearly defined property rights which
are
within reason justly allocated
competition probably is going to work
very well but it's not an
unalloyed good thing at all it can be
highly destructive military competition
right
which actually is itself sometimes good
but it's not good per se
what what what aspects of life do you
think we should protect from
competition so is there some you said
like the rule of law is there some
things we should uh
keep away from competition well the
fight for territory most of all
right so violence anything that involves
like actual physical violence
right and it's not that i think the
current borders are just i mean go talk
to
hungarians romanians they'll you know
serbians bosnians they'll talk your ear
off
and some of them are probably right but
at the end of the day we have
some kind of international order and i
would rather we more or less stick with
it
if catalonians want to leave they keep
up with it you know let them go
but what about space of like health care
this is where you get into a tension of
like between capitalism and
kind of uh morse i don't want to use
socialism but those kinds of policies
they're less
uh free market i think in this country
healthcare should be much more
competitive
so you go to hospitals doctors they
don't treat you like a customer uh they
treat you like an idiot or like a child
or
someone with third party payment and
it's a pretty humiliating experience
often
yeah do you think a free market in
general
is possible like a pure free market
and is that a good goal to to uh strive
for
i don't think the term pure free
market's well defined because you need a
legal order
the legal order has to make decisions
unlike what is intellectual property
more important than ever there's no
benchmark that like represents the
pure free market way of doing things
what will penalties be
how much do we put into law enforcement
no simple answers but just saying free
market
doesn't pin down what you're going to do
on those all important questions
so free market is a is an economics i
guess idea so
there's no it's it's not possible for
free marketers generate the rules
they're like
emergent like self-governing it
generates a lot of them right through
private norms through trade associations
international trade is mostly done uh
privately and by norms so it's certainly
possible
but at the end of the day i think you
need governments to draw very clear
lines to prevent it from turning into
mafia run systems you know i've been
hanging out
with the co with other group of weirdos
uh lately michael malus
who's uh who espouses to be an anarchist
anarchism which is like i i think
intellectually just a fascinating set of
ideas
uh where the you know taking free market
to the full extreme of
basically saying there should be no no
government what is it
uh oversight i guess and then everything
should be
fully like all the agreements all the
collectives you form should be uh
voluntary not based on the geographic
land you were born on and so on
do you think that's just the giant mess
like do you think it's possible for an
anarchist society to work
where it's um you know this in addition
in a fully distributed way people agree
with each other not just
on financial transactions but you know
on
um on their personal security
on sort of military type of stuff uh on
healthcare
on education all those kinds of things
and where does it break down
well i wouldn't press a button to say
get rid of our current constitution
which i view is pretty good
and quite wise but i think the deeper
point is that
all societies are in some regards
anarchistic
yes and we should take the anarchists
seriously so globally there's a kind of
anarchy
across borders even within federalistic
systems
they're typically complex there's not a
clear transitivity
necessarily of who has the final say
over what
uh just the state visa via its people
there's not
per se a final arbitrator in that regard
so you want a good anarchy rather than a
bad anarchy
you want to squish your anarchy into the
right corners and i don't think there's
a theoretical
answer how to do it but you start with a
country like is it working
well enough now this country you'd say
mostly
you'd certainly want to make a lot of
improvements and that's why i don't want
to press that get rid of the
constitution button
but to just dump on the anarchists is to
miss the point always try to learn
from any opinion you know and what in it
is true
i i'm just like uh marveling at the at
the poetry of
saying that we should squish our anarchy
into the right corners
love it okay uh i gotta ask i've been
uh talking with uh uh since we're doing
a whirlwind
introduction to all of economics uh i've
been talking to a few objectivists
recently
and just you know uh inran comes up as a
as a person as a philosopher throughout
many conversations a lot of people
really despise her
a lot of people really love her it's
always weird to me
when uh somebody arouses a philosophy or
a human being arouses that much emotion
in either direction
does she make do you understand first of
all that level of emotion
and what are your thoughts about ayn
rand and her philosophy objectivism is
it useful
at all to think about this kind of
formulation of
rational self interest if i could put in
those words
or i guess more negatively
the the the selfishness where she would
put i guess the virtue of selfishness
ein rand was a big influence on me
growing up the book that really mattered
for me was capitalism the unknown ideal
the notion that wealth creates
opportunity and good lives
and wealth is something we ought to
valorize and give very high status
it's one of our key ideas i think it's
completely correct
i think she has the most profound and
articulate statement of that idea
that said as a philosopher i disagree
with her
on most things and i did even like as a
boy when i was reading her
i read plato before i ran and in a
socratic dialogue there's all these
different points of view being thrown
around
yeah and who whomever it is you agree
with you understand the wisdom is in
the coming together of the different
points of view yeah and she doesn't have
that so
altruism can be wonderful in my view
humans are not actually that rational
self-interest is often poorly defined to
pound the table and say
existence exists i wouldn't say i
disagree
but i'm not sure that it's a very
meaningful statement
i think the secret to iran is that she
was russian i'd love to have her on my
podcast if she was still alive
i'd only ask her about russia which she
mostly
never talked about after writing we the
living and she
is much more russian than she seems at
first even like purging people
from the objectivist circles it's like
how russians especially
female russians so often purge their
friends it's weird
all the parallels so you're saying so
yes
so i um assuming she's still not around
uh but if she is and she comes into your
podcast see
can you dig into that a little bit do
you mean like the pers her personal
uh demons around the
social and economic russia of the time
when she escaped the promise she
suffered there yeah what she really
likes in the music and literature and
why she's looking literature
and getting deeply into that her view of
relations between the sexes and russia
how it differs from america why she
still
carries through the old russian vision
in her fiction this extreme
sexual dimorphism but with also very
strong women
to me as a uniquely at least eastern
european
uh vision mostly russian i would say
and that's in her that's her actual real
philosophy not this
table bounding existence exists and
that's not talked about enough
he's a russian philosopher yeah like she
or soviet whatever you want to call it
and if she wasn't so certain she could
have been
a dostoevsky where it's not that that
certainty is almost the thing that uh
brings of the adoration of uh millions
but also the hatred of millions
you became a cult figure in a somewhat
russian-like manner
yeah yeah it is it is what it is uh but
i love the idea that
i again you're just dropping bombs that
are poetic
that the wisdom is in the coming
together of ideas
it's kind of interesting to think that
no one human
possesses wisdom no one idea
is the wisdom that the coming together
is the wisdom
like in my view boswell's life of
johnson 18th century british biography
it's in essence a co-authored work
boswell and johnson it's one of the
greatest philosophy books ever
though it is commonly regarded as a
biography john stuart mill
who in a sense was co-authoring with
harriet taylor
a better philosopher than his realized
though he's rated very very highly
plato socrates a lot of the greatest
works
are in a kind of dialogue form curtis
faust
would be another example it's very much
a dialogue
and yes it's drama but it's also
philosophy shakespeare
maybe the wisest thinker of them all
in your book big business speaking of
iran
big business a love letter to an
american anti-hero
you make the case for uh the benefit
that large businesses bring to society
can you explain if you look at say the
pandemic which has been a catastrophic
event right for for many reasons
but who is it that saved us so amazon
has done remarkably well
they upped their delivery game more or
less overnight with very few hitches
i've ordered hundreds of amazon packages
direct delivery
food whether it's doordash or ubereats
or using you know whole foods through
amazon shipping
again it's gone remarkably well
switching over our entire
higher educational system basically
within two weeks to zoom
zoom did it i mean i've had a zoom
outage
but their performance rate has been
remarkably high
so if you just look at resources
competence incentives
who's been the star performers the nba
even just canceling the season as early
as they did
sending a message like hey people this
is real
and then pulling off the bubble with not
a single
found case of covid and having all the
testing set up in advance
big business has done very well lately
and
throughout the broader course of
american history in my view has mostly
been a hero
can we engage in a kind of therapy
session uh in
in i i'm often troubled by the
negativity towards
big business and uh i wonder if you
could help
figure out how we remove that or maybe
first psychoanalyze it and then how we
remove it it
it it feels like you know once we've
gotten
wi-fi on flights
on airplane flights uh
people started complaining about how
shitty the connection is right
yeah they take it for granted
immediately yeah and then start
complaining about little details
uh another example that's more that's
closer to like
especially as a as aspiring
entrepreneurs closer to the things i'm
thinking about
is jack dorsey with twitter you know
to me twitter has enabled an incredible
platform of communication and yet the
biggest thing that people talk about
is not how incredible this platform is
uh they essentially use the platform to
complain about the censorship of a few
individuals
as opposed to how amazing it is now you
should also you should talk about
how shitty the wi-fi is and how
censorship or the removal donald trump
from the platform is a bad thing but
it feels like we don't talk about the
positive impacts at scale
of these technologies is there can you
explain why and is there a way to fix it
i don't know if we can fix it i think we
are beings of high neuroticism
for the most part yeah as a personality
trait not everyone
but most people and as a compliment to
that
if someone says 10 nice things about you
and one insult
you're more bothered by the insult than
you're pleased by the nice things
especially if the insult is somewhat
true yeah so you have these
media these vehicles twitter is one you
mentioned
there's all kind of messages going back
and forth and you're really bugged
by the messages you don't like most
people are neurotic to begin with
it's not only taken out on big business
to be clear so
congress catches a lot of grief and yeah
some of it they deserve yes
religion is not attacked the same way
but religiosity is declining
if you poll people the military still
pulls
quite well but people are very
disillusioned with many things and the
martin guri thesis
that because of the internet you just
see more of things and the more you see
of something whether it's good bad or in
between
the more you will find to complain about
i suspect is the fundamental mechanism
here
i mean look at clubhouse right it's to
me it's a great service may or may not
be like my thing
but gives people this opportunity no one
makes you go on it
and all these media articles like oh is
clubhouse gonna wreck things you know
are they gonna break things new york
times is complaining of course it's
their competitor as well
yeah i'm like give these people a chance
like talk it up
you may or may not like it like let's
praise the people who are
getting something done very ein randy in
point
as an economic thinker as a writer as a
podcaster
what do you think about clubhouse as
what do you think about
okay let let me uh just throw my feeling
about it i
used to use discord which is another
service where people use voice so the
only thing you do is
just hear each other there's no face you
just see a little icon
that's the essential element
of uh clubhouse and there's an intimacy
to voice only communication that's hard
that didn't make sense to me but it was
just what it is
which feels like something that won't
last for some reason maybe it's the
cynical view but what's your sense uh
what is it about this mat the intimacy
of what's happening right now with
clubhouse
i've greatly enjoyed what i've done but
i'm not sure it's for me in the long run
for two reasons
first if you compare it to doing a
podcast
podcasting has greater reach than
clubhouse so i would rather put time
into my podcast
but then also my like core
asset so to speak is i'm a very fast
reader
so audio per se is not necessarily to my
advantage i don't speak or listen
faster than other people in fact i'm a
slower listener because i like 1.0
not 1.5 x so i should spend less time on
audio and more time reading and writing
yeah it's interesting because you like
you mention podcasts and audio books
i you know the the
podcasts are recorded and so i can skip
things
like i can skip commercials uh or i can
skip parts where it's like ugh this part
is boring
with live conversations especially when
there's a magic to the fact when you
have a lot of people participating in
that conversation
but you know some people are like ugh
this topic
they're going into this thing and you
can't skip it or you can't fast forward
you can't go one
1.5 x or 2x you can't speed it up
nevertheless there's a tension between
that so that's the productivity aspect
with the actual magic of live
communication where anything can happen
where
elon musk can ask the ceo of robin hood
vlad
about like hey somebody like holding a
gun to your head there's something shady
going on
the magic of that that's also my
criticism of like
there's been a recent conversation with
bill gates that uh he won a platform
uh and had a basic a regular interview
on the platform
without allowing the possibility of the
magic of the chaos like
uh so i'm not i'm not exactly sure
it's probably not the right platform for
you and for many other people who are
exceptionally productive in other places
but there's still nevertheless a magic
to the chaos that can be created with a
live conversation
that gives me pause maybe what it's
perfect for is the tribute
so they had an episode recently that i
didn't hear but i heard it was wonderful
it was anecdotes about steve jobs that
you can't do one-to-one right and you
don't want control
you want different people appearing and
stepping up and saying they're bit
yeah and clubhouse is 110 perfect for
that
the tribute i love that that should be
but there's also the possibility
i think uh there was a time when
somebody arranged a conversation with
steve jobs and bill gates on stage right
i remember that happened a long time ago
and you know it was very formal
you know it could have probably gone
better but it was still magical
to have these people that obviously like
had a bunch of tension throughout their
history
there's it's so frictionless to have two
major figures in world history just jump
on
a clubhouse stage putin and elon musk
and then that's exactly it so there's a
language barrier there
there's also the problem that in
particular
it's like like biden would have a
similar problem it's like they're just
not
into new technology so it's very hard to
catch the kremlin up to
first of all twitter right uh but to
catch them up to clubhouse you have to
have
the elon musk has a sense of the
internet the humor the memes and all
that kind of stuff
that you have to have in order to to
like use a new app
and figure out like the timing the beat
what is this thing about
you know so that that's the challenge
there but that's exactly it that that
magic of have two big personalities
just show up and i i i wonder if it's
just a temporary thing that we're going
through with the pandemic where people
are just lonely and they're seeking for
that
human connection that we usually guess
get elsewhere through our work
but they'll stay lonely in my opinion
you think so i do
so it is a pandemic thing but i think it
will persist
and the idea of wanting to be connected
to more of the world clubhouse will
still offer that
and all the mental health issues out
there a lot of people have broken ties
and they will still be lonely
post-vaccines
yeah i um from an artificial
intelligence perspective
i have a sense that there is
like a deep loneliness in the world that
all of us are really lonely like we
don't even acknowledge it even people in
happy relationships
it feels like there's like an iceberg of
loneliness in all of us
like seeking to be understood like
deeply understood
understanding us like having somebody
with whom
you can have a deep interaction enough
to where you can
they can help you to understand yourself
and they
also understand you like i have a sense
that artificial intelligence systems can
provide that as well but humans i think
crave that from other humans
in in ways that we perhaps don't
acknowledge and i i have a hope that
technology will enable that more and
more like clubhouse
is an example that allows that are
touring bots going to out-compete
clubhouse
like why not pro sort of program your
own session you'll just talk into your
device and say here's the kind of
conversation i want
and it will create the characters for
you and it may not be as good as elon
and vladimir putin
but it will be better than ordinary club
has yeah and one of the things
that's missing it's not just
conversation it's
it's memory so long-term memory is what
current ai systems don't have
is sharing an experience together forget
the words
it's like sharing the highs and the lows
of life
together and the systems around us
remembering that
remembering we've been through that like
that's the thing that creates really
close relationships
is going through some like go
struggle
if you survive together there's
something really difficult
that bonds you with other humans and
this is related to immigration in the
american dream
in what way people who have come to this
country however
weird and different they may be they are
their ancestors at some point
probably have shared this thing
right us is not going to split up it may
get more screwed up as a country
but texas and california are not going
to break off yeah i mean they're big
enough where they could do it but it's
just never going to happen
we've been through too much together
yeah
ah that's a hopeful message do you think
uh you know some people have talked to
eric weinstein you've talked to eric
weinstein
uh he has a sense that growth
uh you know like the the the entirety of
the american system is based
on the assumption that we're going to
grow forever the economy is going to
grow forever
do you think uh uh economic growth will
continue indefinitely
or will we stagnate i've long been in
agreement with eric peter thiel
robert gordon and others that growth has
slowed down
i argued that in my book the great
stagnation appropriately titled
but the last two years i've become much
more optimistic i've seen a lot of
breakthroughs
in green energy and battery technology
mrna vaccines and medicine
is a big deal already it will repair our
gdp and save
millions of lives around the world uh
there's an
anti-malaria vaccine that's now in stage
3 trial it probably works
crispr to defeat sickle cell anemia
just space area after area after area
there's suddenly the surge of
breakthroughs
i would say many of them rooted in
superior computation
and ultimately moore's law and access to
those computational abilities
so i'm much more optimistic than say the
last time i spoke to eric
i don't know he he moves all the time in
his views i don't know where he's at now
he's not he hasn't gained that's really
interesting
so your little drop of optimism comes
from
like there might be a fundamental shift
in the kind of things that computation
has unlocked for us in terms of like it
could be a well spring of innovation
that can
that enables growth for a long time to
come like eric has not
quite connected to the computation
aspect yet
to where it could be a wellspring of
innovation but you're very close to it
in your own work
i don't have to tell you that the work
you're doing would not have been
possible
not very long ago but the question is
how much does that work enable
continue growth for decades to come for
all their problems
some version of driverless vehicles will
be a thing i'm not sure when you know
much better than i do
maybe only partially but that too will
be a big deal
well one of the open questions that sort
of the peter thiel school
area of ideas is how much can be
converted to technology
how much how many parts of our lives can
technology integrate and then innovate
like can it replace uh healthcare okay
you know can a replace the legal system
can replace government
not replace but like you know uh
make it digital and thereby enable
computation to
improve it right that's the open
question because
many aspects of our lives are still not
really that
digitized there was a new york times
symposium in april which is not long ago
and they asked
the so-called experts when are we going
to get vaccines
and the most optimistic answer was in
four years
yeah and obviously we beat that by a
long mile
so i think people still haven't woken up
you mentioned my tiny drop of optimism
but it's a big drop
of optimism is it a waterfall yet i mean
is it just well here's my pessimism
whenever there are major new
technologies they also tend to be used
for violence directly or indirectly
radio hitler not that he hit people over
the head with radios but
it enabled the rise of various dictators
so the new technologies now whatever
exactly they may be
they're going to cause a lot of trouble
yeah and that's my pessimism not that i
think they're all going to slow to a
trickle
when was the stagnation book 2011
yes it was the first of these stagnation
books in fact
it's very interesting uh but even then i
said this is temporary
and i was predicting it would be gone in
about 20 years time
i'm not sure that's exactly the right
prediction like 2030 but
i think we're actually going to beat
that so you think
the united states might still be on top
of the world for the rest of the century
in terms of its economic economic growth
impact on the world scientific
innovation all those kinds of things
that's too long to predict but i'm
bullish on america in general
got it um speaking of being bullish on
america
the opposite of that is uh
you know we talked about capitalism talk
about iran
and her russian roots what do you think
about communism why doesn't it
what
is it the implementation is there
anything about its ideas that you find
compelling
or is it just a fundamentally flawed
system well communism is like capitalism
the words mean
many things to different people yes you
could argue my life as a tenured
professor comes closer to communism
anything that the human race has seen
and i would argue it works pretty well
yeah but look if you mean the soviet
union
it devolved pretty quickly to a kind of
decentralized set of incentives that
were destructive
rather than value maximizing it wasn't
even central planning
much less communism so paul craig
roberts and paulani
were correct in their descriptions of
the soviet system
think of it as weird mixes of barter and
malfunctioning incentives
and being very good at a whole bunch of
things but in terms of progress
innovation and consumer goods
it really being quite a failure
and now i wouldn't call that communism
but that's what i think of the system
the soviets had and it required an
ever increasing pile of lies that both
alienated people but created an elite
that by the end of the thing
no longer believed in the system itself
or even thought they were doing better
by being crooks
then by just say moving to switzerland
and being an upper middle class
individual like you would have a
higher standard of living by gorbachev's
time not gorbachev but if you're number
30 in the hierarchy
you're better off as a middle-class
person in switzerland and that
of course did not prove sustainable and
so it's uh what is it a momentum a
bureaucracy or something like that it
just builds up or you lose control of
the
the original vision and that naturally
happens it's just people
and you can't use normal profit and loss
and price incentives so you get all
prices
or most prices set too low right
shortages everywhere
people trade favors you have this
culture of bartered bribes
sexual favors or you know family friends
and
you get more and more of that and you
over time lose more and more of the
information
and the prices and quantities and
practices and norms you had
and that sort of slowly decays and then
by the end no one is believing in it
that would be my take but again you're
the expert here
the the russian scholar
well perhaps no more an expert than iron
rand
uh it's more personal than it is
scholarly
uh or historic so stalin held power for
30 years
uh vladimir putin has held power for
21 years where you could argue he took a
little break
uh but not much he was still holding
power i think
and it's still possible now with the new
uh
uh constitution that he could hold power
from longer than stalin 30
longer than 30 years what do you think
about the man
the state of affairs in russia
in general the system they have there
is there something interesting to you as
an economist as a human being
about russia everything is interesting i
mean he would be
part of my take as you know the russian
economy
starting what 1999 2000 has really quite
a few years
of super excellent growth and putin is
still
riding on that it more or less coincides
with his
rise as the truly focal figure on the
scene uh since then pretty recently
they've had a bunch of years of negative
four to five percent growth in a row
which is
terrible the economy is way too
dependent on fossil fuels
but the structural problem is this you
need a concordance
across economic power social power
political power
they don't have to be allocated
identically but they have to be
allocated
consistently and the russian system
under putin from almost the beginning
has never been able to have that that
ultimately
his incentives are to steer the system
where the economic power
is in a small number of hands in a
non-diversified way
the system won't deliver sustainable
gains and living standards
anymore ever the way it's set up now
that with fossil fuel prices go up
they'll have some good years for sure
and that is really quite structural what
has gone wrong
and then on top of that you can have an
opinion of putin but you've got to start
with those structural problems and
that's why it's just
not going to work but he had all those
good years in the beginning
so the number of russians say who live
here or in russia
who love putin and it's sincere they're
not just afraid of being you know
dragged away
like that's a real phenomenon uh yeah
i'm really torn on
you know putin's approval rating real
approval
rating seems to be very high and i'm
torn in whether that's has to do with uh
the fact that there is uh control of the
press
or if it's which is the people i talk to
who are in russia family
and so on a genuine love of putin
appreciation of what putin has done and
is going to do with russia
and a lot of that would go away if the
press were freer i think
yes well singapore realizes this anyone
discussed by the press
no matter who they are people in
singapore have done a great job
yes uh but if you're discussed by the
press you don't look good
tech company executives are learning
this right it's just like a rule
so in that sense i think the rating is
artificially high but i don't
by any means think it's all insincere
but that high popularity i view as
bearish for russia
i would feel better about the country if
people were more pissed off at him
yeah that's right it's nice to see free
speech even if it's
full of hate uh
i am also troubled on the scientific
side
and entrepreneurial side it seems
difficult to be an entrepreneur in
russia
like it's not even uh in terms of rules
it's just culturally the people i speak
to
it's not easy to build a business
to uh no it's not easy to even dream
of building a business in russia that's
just not part of the culture
part of the conversation you know it's
almost like
the conversation is if you wanna if you
wanna be the next bill gates or elon
musk or steve jobs or whatever
you come to america that's the sense
they have yeah
and i don't three matters is his
is it history or just structural
problems of today what do you i mean
it's all the same thing so a history of
hostility to
commerce which of course the old ussr
is gone but a lot of the attitudes
remain a lot of the corruption remains
you have this legacy distribution of
wealth from the auctioning off of the
assets
which is not conducive to some kind of
broadly egalitarian democracy
and so you have these small number of
power points to try to control
information and wealth
and not really so keen to encourage the
others
who ultimately would pull the balance of
political power away from the very
wealthy and from putin
and they support that culture and the
return of interest in like orthodox
church and all that it's all part of the
same
piece i think because the old orthodox
church is
not that pro-commerce you'd have to say
but it's traditionalist it's pro-family
those are safer ideas and then there's
such a great safety valve
the most ambitious smartest people like
they probably will learn english
they sort of can look like they belong
in all sorts of other countries they can
show up and blend in
super talented they've probably had an
excellent education
especially if they're from one of the
two major cities but even if not so
even from siberia and they go off they
leave
they're not a source of opposition and
that keeps the whole thing up and
running for another generation
yeah uh what do you make of the other
the other big uh
player china uh they seem to have a
very different messed up but also
functioning system they seem to be much
better at encouraging entrepreneurs
they're choosing winners
but like what do you make of the entire
chinese system
uh like why does it work as well as it
does currently
what are your concerns about it and uh
what are
its threats to the united states or
uh possible you know it's a what is it
you said like
wisdom isn't when two ideas come
together is there some possible
benefits of uh these kinds of ideas
coming together
it's amazing what china has done but i
would say to put it in perspective
if you compare them to japan south korea
taiwan hong kong and singapore
they've still done much worse not even
close
yes and that's both living standards or
i hesitate to cite democracy as an
unalloyed good in and of itself but
there's more freedom in all those other
places
by a lot so china has all these problems
of history
but they've managed as actually the
soviets did in the middle of the 20th
century
one of the two great mass migrations
from the countryside to cities
which boosts productivity enormously and
will sustain totalitarian systems
but they move from a totalitarian system
to an oligarchy
where the ccp is actually
at least for a while he has been really
good at governing
have made a lot of very good decisions
you have to admit that
i don't know how long that streak will
continue with one person
so much now holding authority
in a more extreme manner the selection
pressures for the next generation of
high-level ccp members probably become
much worse
you have this general problem of the
state-owned enterprise is losing
relative productivity
compared to the private sector well
we're going to kind of
hold jack ma on this island and he can
only issue like weird hello statements
it kind of smells bad to me i don't feel
that it's about to crash
uh below but i don't see them
supplanting america
as like the world's number one country i
think they will muddle through
and have very serious problems but
there's enough talent there they will
muddle through is there ideas from china
from anywhere in general
of large-scale role of government that
you find might be useful like
andrew yang recently ran on the platform
of ubi
right uh universal basic income is there
some interesting ideas of large-scale
government sort of welfare programs
at scale that you find interesting
keep in mind the current version of the
chinese communist party post mao
dismantled what was called the iron rice
ball
so took apart the health care
protections a lot of the welfare system
a lot of the guaranteed jobs so the
economic rise of china coincided with
the weakening
of welfare i'm not saying that's causal
per se
but people think of china as having a
government that takes care of everyone
it's very far from the truth
and buy a lot of metrics i don't mean
control over people's lives
i don't mean speech but by a lot of
metrics economically we have a lot more
government than they do
so what one means here by like
government private control
i don't think you can just add up the
numbers and get a simple answer
they've been fantastic at building
infrastructure in cities
in ways that will attract people from
the countryside
and furthermore they more or less
enforce a meritocracy in this sense
like if you're a kid of a rich guy
you'll get unfair privilege
that's unfair but systems can afford
that if you are smart and from the
countryside and your parents have
nothing
you will be elevated and sent to a very
good school graduate school because of
the exam system
and they do that and they mean that very
consistently
it's like the soviets had a version of
that like for jazz and romantic piano
not for everything but where they had it
like
yeah again they were tremendous right
yeah exactly so yeah
chinese have it in so many areas a
genuine meritocracy
in this one way that moves people from
the world to this
big city and that's that's all that's a
big boost of productivity for some
amount of time
and when they get there they're taken
seriously jack ma was riding a bicycle
teaching english in his late 20s
he was a poor guy so
not a society of credentialism or in
america is
way too much a credentialist society as
we're talking about even with the nobel
prize
yeah but what do you think about these
large government programs like
ubi the one version of ubi that makes
the most sense to me is the mitt romney
version
ubi for kids like kids are vulnerable
if their parents screw up you shouldn't
blame the kid or make the kids suffer
i believe in something like ubi for kids
maybe just cash
but if you don't have kids even with ai
my sense is at least in the world we
know you should be able to find a way to
adjust
you might have to move you know to north
dakota to work
uh you know next to fracking say
uh but look before the pandemic
the two most robot intensive societies
japan and the u.s u.s at least for
manufacturing
uh were at full employment so maybe
there's some far off day
where there's literally no work john
lennon imagine
it's piped you know everywhere
and then we might revisit the question
yeah
but for now we you know we had rising
wages
in the trump years and full employment
so i don't
you don't see automation as a threat
that fundamentally like shakes our
society
it's a threat in the following sense the
new technologies are harder to work with
for many people
yeah and that's the social problem but
i'm not sure a universal
basic income is the right answer to that
very real problem
well that's also i i like the upi for
kids
it's also your definition or the line
the threshold for what is vulnerable and
what is
basic human nature going back to russia
you know life is suffering
that you know struggle is a part of life
and perhaps sort of changing maybe the
what defines the 21st century is having
multiple careers
and adjusting and learning and right
evolving
and uh some of the technology
uh in terms of uh you know some of the
technology we see
like the internet allows us to uh
make those pivots easier you know
allows later life education possible
it makes it possible i don't know and
your earlier point about loneliness
being this fundamental human problem
which i would agree with
strongly ubi if it's at a high level
will make that worse
i mean say ubi or higher enough you
could just sit at home
uh people are not going to be happy they
don't actually want that yeah and we've
relearned that in the pandemic
yeah the flip side the hope with ubi is
you have a little bit more freedom
to find the thing that alleviates your
loneliness that's the idea
so it's it's kind of an open question if
i give you a million dollars
or a billion dollars will you
pursue the thing you love will you be
would you be more motivated to pursu to
find the thing you love to do the thing
you love or
will you be lazy and lose yourself
in the sort of daily activities that
don't actually bring you
joy but you know pacify you in some kind
of way where
you can you just let the day slip by
that's that's the open question
but a lot of the great creators did not
have huge cushions whether it's mozart
or james brown
or the great painters in history they
had to work pretty hard
and if you look at heirs to great
fortunes maybe i'm forgetting someone
but it's hard to think of any
who have creatively been important as
novelists or
they might have continued to run the
family business yeah
but you know van gaal was not heirs not
heir to a great family fortune
it said that cushions get in the way of
progress
which is uh yeah so there's the same
point about prizes right
yeah inheriting too much money is like
winning a prize
we mentioned eric uh eric weinstein i
know you agree on a bunch of things is
there some beautiful
fascinating insightful disagreement that
you have
that has yet to be resolved with him is
there some ideas that you guys battle
better battle it out on is it the
stagnation question that you mentioned
that's one of them but here's at least
two others
but i would stress eric is always
evolving so i'm just talking about a
time slice eric
right i don't know where he's at right
now yeah like i heard him on clubhouse
three nights ago but that was three
nights ago yeah
but i think he's far too pessimistic
about the impact of
immigration on u.s science he thinks it
has displaced u.s scientists
which i think that is partly true i just
think we've gotten better talent
i'm like bring it on double down and
look at kuriko you know who
basically came up with mrna vaccines she
was from hungary
and was ridiculed and mocked she
couldn't get her papers published
she stuck at it an american
might not have been so stubborn because
we have these cushions
so eric is all worried like
mathematicians coming in they're
discouraging
native u.s citizens from doing math i'm
like
bring in the best people if we all end
up
in other avocations absolutely fine by
me does it trouble you that we
kick them out after they get a degree
often
i would give anyone with a plausible
graduate degree a green card
universally yeah that's i i agree with
that it makes no sense
it makes so strange that the best people
that come here suffer here
create awesome stuff here then when we
kick them out it doesn't make any sense
here's another view i have i call it
open borders for belarus
now russia is a big country i would
gladly like increase the russian quota
yeah by 3x
4x 5x like i not 20
but a big boost but belarus
small country like why can't and they're
poor
and they have decent education and a lot
of talent there why can't we just open
the door
yeah and convert a belarus passport to a
green card
open borders for belarus it's my new
campaign slogan
are you running for president 2024 well
write-ins are welcome but
what's the second thing you disagree
with eric
uh trade again i'm not sure where he's
at now
but he is suspicious of trade in a way
that i am not
i do understand what's called the china
shock has been a big problem for the u.s
middle class
i fully accept that i think most of that
is behind us
national security issues aside i think
free trade is
very much a good thing eric
i'm not sure he'll say it's not a good
thing but he won't say it is a good
thing
and i know he's kind of that's like eric
free trade
but look on things like vaccines i don't
believe in free trade
you want vaccine production in your own
country look at the eu
they have enough money no one will send
them vaccines
what's different about vaccines is it
there are some things you want to
prioritize the citizenry on
and they could argue it would be cheaper
to produce all u.s manufactured vaccines
in india
they have the technologies uh obviously
lower wages
but look there's talk in india right now
of cutting off the export of vaccines
if you outsource your vaccine production
you're not sure the other country will
respect the norm of free trade
so you need to keep some vaccine
production in your country
it's an exception to free trade not to
the logic
a bunch of things the navy uses you
can't buy those components from china
like that's insane
but look it would be cheaper to do so
right yeah
let me uh completely shift topics on
something that's fascinating it's all
the same topic but great
everything is interesting
uh what do you think about what the hell
is money
and uh the recent
the the recent excitement around
cryptocurrency
that um brings to the forefront
uh the philosophical discussion of the
nature of money are you
bullish on cryptocurrency are you
excited about it what does it make you
think about
how the nature of money is changing no
one knows
what money is probably no one ever knew
go back to medieval times bills of
exchange were they money
maybe it's just a semantic debate gold
silver what about copper coins what
about metals that were
considered legal tender but not always
circulating yeah what about credit
so being confused about moneyness is the
natural state of affairs for human
beings
and if there's more of that i'd say
that's probably a good thing
now crypto per se i think bitcoin
has taken over a lot of the space held
by gold
that to me seems sustainable uh i'm not
short bitcoin i don't have some view
that the price
has to be different than the current
price but i know it changes every moment
uh i am deeply uncertain about the less
of crypto
which seems connected to ultimate
visions
of using it for transactions in ways
where i'm not sure
whether it be you know prediction
markets or defy
i'm not sure the retail demand really is
there once it is regulated like
everything else
is i would say i'm 40 60
optimistic on those forms of crypto that
is i think it's somewhat more likely
they failed and succeed
but i take them very seriously so we're
talking about it becoming one of the
main currencies in the world
that's what we're discussing that i
don't think will happen so
but but the reality is that bitcoin used
to be
in the single digits of a dollar and now
has crossed fifty thousand dollars
for a single bitcoin do you think it's
possible
it reaches something like a million
dollars
i don't think we have a good theory of
the value of bitcoin if people decide
it's worth a million dollars it's worth
a million dollars
but isn't that money like you said isn't
the ultimate state of money confusion or
however beautifully you put it it's like
valuing an andy warhol painting so when
warhol started off
probably those things had no value
sketches early sketches of shoes
now a good warhol could be worth over 50
million
yeah that's an incredible rate of price
appreciation bitcoin is seeing
a similar trajectory i don't pretend to
know where it will stop
but it's about trying to figure out what
do people think of andy warhol he could
be out of fashion
in a century maybe yes maybe no
but you don't think about war halls as
money
they perform some money like functions
you can even use them as collateral
for like deals between gangs
but they're not basically money nor is
bitcoin
and the transactions velocity of bitcoin
i would think is likely to fall if
anything
so you don't think there will be some
kind of phase shift will become adopted
and become mainstream for the trend
for for the main for one of the main
mechanisms of transactions
bitcoin no now i you know ether has some
chance at that i would bet against it
but i wouldn't give you a definitive no
and you'll would bitcoin is too costly
it may be fine to hold it like gold but
gold is also costly
uh you have smart people trying to make
say ether
much more effective as a currency than
bitcoin
and there's certainly a decent chance
they will succeed yeah there's a lot of
innovation i mean with smart contracts
with uh nfts as well there's there's a
lot of interesting
like innovations that are plugging into
the human psyche somehow
just like money does you know money
seems to be this viral thing our ideas
of money
right and if the idea is strong enough
it seems to be able to take hold
like there's network effects that just
take over
and like i i particularly see that with
i'd love to get your comment on uh
deutsche coin
which is basically by a single human
being elon musk has been created
you know it's like these celebrities can
have a huge
ripple effect on the impact of money is
it possible
that in the 21st century people like
elon musk and celebrities i don't know
donald trump the rock
whoever else can have can actually
define
you know the currencies that we use
maybe can can deutsch going behind the
primary currency of the world
i think of it as like baseball cards so
right now every baseball player has a
baseball card
and the players who are stars their
cards can end up worth a fair amount of
money
yeah and that's stable we've had it for
many decades
uh sort of the player defines the card
they sign a contract with tops or
whatever company
now could you imagine celebrities
baseball players lebron james
having their own currencies instead of
cards absolutely and
you're somewhat seeing that right now as
you mentioned artists with
these unique works on the blockchain but
i'm not sure those are macro
economically important if it's just a
new class of collectibles that people
have fun with
again i say bring it on but whether
there are use cases beyond that
that challenge fiat monies which
actually work
very well yesterday i sent money
to a family in ethiopia that i helped
support
in less than 24 hours they got that
money
digitally yes no not digitally through
my bank
my primitive dinosaur bank bb t
mid-atlantic bank
headquartered in north carolina you know
chartered by the fed regulated by the
fdac in the occ
now you could say well the exchange rate
was not so great
uh i don't see crypto
as close to beating that once you take
into account all of the last mile
problems
fiat currency works really well people
are not sitting around bitching about it
and when you talk to crypto people the
number who have to postulate some out of
the blue hyperinflation
where there's no evidence for that
whatsoever that's to me is a sign
they're not thinking clearly
about how hard they have to work to out
compete fiat currency
there's a bunch of different
technologies that are really exciting
that don't want to address how difficult
it is to
out-compete the current accepted
alternative so for example autonomous
vehicles
a lot of people are really excited yeah
but it's not trivial to out compete uber
uh on the cost and the effectiveness and
the
user experience and all those concepts
correct sorry uber driven by humans
yes uh and it's not you know
that's taken for granted i think that
look wouldn't it be amazing
how amazing would the world look when
the cars are driving themselves fully
you know it's going to drive the cost
down you can remove the cost of drivers
all those kinds of things
but it's when you actually get down to
it and have to build a business around
it it's actually
very difficult to do and i guess you're
saying your sense is
similar competition is facing
cryptocurrency like you have to
actually present a killer app
uh reason to switch from fiat currency
uh to uh to ethereum
or the biden people are going to
regulate crypto and they're going to do
it soon
so something like d5 i fully get why
that is
cheaper or for some can be cheaper than
other ways of conducting financial
intermediation
but some of that is regulatory arbitrage
it will not be allowed to go on forever
for better or worse i would rather see
it given greater tolerance and
but the point is banking lobby is strong
the government will only let it run so
far
there'll be capital requirements
reporting requirements imposed
and it will lose a lot of those
advantages
what do you make of wall street bets
another thing that recently happened
that shook the world and
uh at least me from the outsider
perspective
make me question what i do and don't
understand about our economic system
uh which is a bunch of different uh a
bun a large
number of individuals getting together
on the internet and having a large-scale
impact on the markets
if you tell a group of people and
coordinate them through the internet
we're going to play a fun game it might
cost you money but you're going to make
the headlines and there's a chance
you'll screw over some billionaires and
hedge funds enough people will play that
game
yes so that game might continue but i
don't think it's of macro economic
importance
and the price of those stocks in the
medium term
will end up wherever it ought to be so
these are
little outliers from a macroeconomics
perspective they're
they're not going to the these are not
signals of of shifting power
like from from centralized power to
distributed power these aren't some
fundamental
changes in the way our economy works i
think of it as a new brand of esports
maybe more fun than the old brand
which is fine right it's like push the
anarchy into the corners where you want
it
it doesn't bother me
but i think people are seeing it as more
fundamental than it is it's a new esport
more fun for many but more expensive
than the old esports
like chess is a new esport super cheap
not as fun
as like you know sending hedge funds to
their doom but
like what would you expect the poetry
that i love it okay
uh but macroeconomically it's not it's
not fundamental okay
i was gonna say i hope you're right
because i'm uncomfortable with the chaos
of the masses that's creates but uh i
also think that chaos is somewhat real
to be clear yes but it will matter
through other channels not through
manipulating
you know gamestop or yeah amc
so you're seeing the real macro
phenomenon when people see a real macro
phenomenon
they tend to make every micro story fit
the narrative
and this micro story like it fits the
narrative but it doesn't mean its
importance
fits the narrative that's how i would
kind of dissect the mistake i think
people are making
oh do you do within the macro phenomena
that are there
do you mean everyone's weird now the
internet
either allows us to be weirder or makes
us weirder i'm not sure what's the right
way to put it maybe a mix of both
you're probably right that it allows us
to be weirder because
well this is the other okay so this
connects our previous conversation
is does america allow us to be weirder
or does it
uh make us weirder like say we're weird
and somewhat neurotic to begin with
but the only messages we get are dwight
d eisenhower and
i love lucy and network tv like that's
going to keep us within certain bounds
yeah in good and bad ways that's
obviously totally gone
and the internet you can connect to not
just q and on
but all sorts of things many of them
just fantastic right
but in good and bad ways it makes us
weirder so that maybe is troubling
right like if someone's worried about
that i would at least say they should
give it deep serious thought and then it
has a whole lot of
ebbs and flows micro realizations of the
weirdness
that don't actually matter so like chess
players today they play a lot more weird
openings than they did 20 years ago
like it reflects the same thing because
you can research any weird opening on
the internet but like does that matter
probably not so a lot of the things we
see are just like the weird chess
openings
and to figure out which are like the
weird chess openings and which are
fundamental to the new and growing
weirdness
like that's what a hedge fund investor
type should be trying to do
i just think no one knows yet it's like
this itself this fun weird guessing game
which we're partly engaging in right now
exactly
and i mean as eric talks about uh on the
science side of things i mean i said
uh like at mit especially in the machine
learning field
there's a natural institutional
resistance to the weird
it's very as they talk about it's it's
difficult to hire weird faculty for
example
correct you want to hire you want to
hire and give tenure to people that are
safe
and not weird and that's one of the
concerns is like it seems like the weird
people are the ones that push the
science forward usually right
and so like how do you how do you
balance the two it's not obvious
because there's another area where eric
and i disagree as i
interpret him he thinks academia is
totally bankrupt yeah
and i think it's only partially bankrupt
how do we fix it because i i'm with you
i'm i'm bullish on academia
you need up-and-coming schools that end
up better than where they started off
and mit
was once one of them yes now they're not
in every area in some areas they have
become the problem
yeah you chicago you wouldn't call it up
and coming but it's still different
and that's great let's hope they managed
to keep it that way
uh the biggest problem to me is the rank
absurd conformism
at kind of second-tier schools maybe in
the top 40 but not in the top
dozen that are just trying to be like a
junior mit
but it's mediocre and copycat and
they're the most dogmatic enforcers of
weirdness that like
harvard is more open than those
second-tier schools
and those second-tier schools are pretty
good typically right yeah
but the mediocrity is enforced there
correct
very strictly and the homogenization
pressures clock try
you know climb the rankings by another
three places and be a little closer to
mit though you'll never touch them
yeah that to me is very harmful and
you'd rather they be more like
chicago more like caltech or the elder
caltech all the more like
pick some model be weird in it you might
fail
that's socially better yeah but so the
problem with mit for example
is the mediocrity is really
enforced on the junior faculty yeah so
like the people that are allowed to be
weird
or actually they just don't even ask for
permissions anymore or more senior
faculty
and that's good of course but you want
the weird young people
uh you know i find to you know this
podcast i like talking to
tech people and i find the young faculty
to be really boring
they are they're the most boring of
faculty their work
is interesting technically technically
but just the the the passion
they are drudges
and it's well some of them sneak by like
you have like the max stag mark
young version of max tegmark who knows
how to play the role
of boring and and fitting in and on the
side he does the weird
but they're not they're far and few in
between which i
i'd i'd love to figure out a way to
shake up that system because
as you look at mit's broad institute
right and biomedical it's been a huge
hit
yeah i'm not privy to their internal
doings but i suspect
they support weird more than the formal
departments do
at the junior level yes that's probably
true yeah i don't know what
whatever they're doing is working but uh
we need to figure it out because i think
the best ideas still do come from the
uh so forget uh my apologies but for the
humanities side of things i don't i
don't know anything about but the
engineering and the science side i think
there's so many amazing ideas that are
still
coming from universities it's not true
that you don't know anything about the
humanities you're doing the humanities
right now
we're talking about people there are no
numbers put on a blackboard
right there's no hypothesis testing per
se no yes
you have however many subscribers to
your podcast
all listening to you on the humanities
every
whatever your frequency is there but i'm
not in the department of the humanities
that's why
it's innovative they have very different
conversations
there's the number of emails i get about
listen i i really deeply respect
diversity
and the and the the the full scope of
what diversity means and also the more
narrow scope of different races and
genders and so on it's a really
important
topic but there's a disproportionate
number of emails i'm getting
about meetings and discussions and
that just kind of is overwhelming i
don't get enough emails from people
like a meeting about uh why are all your
ideas bad
let's let's uh for example let me call
out mit why don't we do
more uh why don't we kick stanford's ass
or google's ass more importantly in deep
learning and machine learning and ai
research what cell for example used to
be a laboratory
is a laboratory for artificial
intelligence research
and why is that not the the beacon
of what of greatness
in artificial intelligence let's have
those meetings as well
diversity talk has oddly become this new
mechanism for enforcing conformity
yes exactly and right so it's almost
like this conformity mechanism finds
the hot new topic to use to enforce
further conformity exactly
oh boy i still have hope i remain
optimistic
the humanities have innovated through
podcasts including yours and mine
yeah and they're alive and well all the
bad talk you hear about the humanities
in universities
there's been this huge end run of
innovation on the internet yeah and it's
amazing you're right i
never thought i mean this is humanities
this this podcast i've been speaking
pros all one's life and didn't know it
right
uh yeah i am actually part of the
humanities department at mit now
i didn't not realize this and i i will
fully embrace it from this moment on
look you have this thing the media lab
i'm sure you know about it
done some excellent things done a lot of
very bogus things
but you're out competing them you're
blowing them out of the water yeah
like you are them yeah i mean and i'm
talking to those folks and they they're
they're starting
well they're trying to figure it out i
mean they had their issues with jeffrey
epstein and so on
but outside of that
there's a i've actually gone through a
shift with this particular podcast for
example
where at first it was seen as a
one at the very first it was seen as a
distraction
second it was a source of like almost
like a kind of jealousy
like the same kind of jealousy you feel
when junior faculty outshines the senior
faculty
and now it's more like oh okay this is a
thing
like we we should do more of that we
should embrace this guy we should
embrace this thing
so there's a sense that podcasting and
whatever this
is and it doesn't have to be podcasting
will
drive some innovation within mit within
different universities
there's a sense that things are changing
it's just that universities lag behind
and my hope is that you know they catch
up quickly
they they they innovate in some way that
goes along with the innovations of the
internet
um the internet will outrace them for a
long time maybe forever
well i mean but it's okay if they're as
long as they keep in yeah and we're both
in universities so we have
multiple hats on here as we're speaking
so yes we can complain about the
universities
that's like complaining about the
podcast right yeah we view them
but speaking on the weird you've uh uh
in the best sense of the word weird
you've written about
and made the case that we should take
ufo sightings
more seriously so that's one of the
things that
uh i've been
uh inundated with sort of
the excitement and the passion that
people have for the possibility of
extraterrestrial life
of life out there in the universe i've
always felt this excitement
of just looking up at the stars and
wondering what the hell's out there
but there's people that have more like
uh more
grounded excitement and passion of
actually interacting with the
with aliens on this here our planet
what's the case they from your
perspective
for taking these sightings more
seriously
the data from the navy to me seemed
quite serious
i don't pretend that i have the
technical abilities to judge it as data
but there are numerous senators at the
very highest of levels
former heads of cia brennan i talked to
him did an interview with him
i asked him what's up with these what do
you think it is he basically said that
was the single most likely explanation
was of alien origin now you don't have
to agree with him
but look if you know how government
works these senators or hillary clinton
for that matter or brennan
they sat down they were briefed by their
smartest people and they said
hey what's going on here and everyone
around the table i believe is telling
them
we don't know and that is sociological
data
i take very seriously i have not seen a
debunking
of the technical data yes which is
eyewitness reports and images and radar
again at a technical level
i i feel quite uncertain on that turf
but evaluating some of the testimony of
witnesses
it seems to me it's now at a threshold
where one ought to take it seriously
yeah there's a one of the problems with
ufo sightings
is that because of people with good
equipment don't take it seriously it's
such a taboo topic
that you have just like really shitty
equipment collecting data
and so you have the blurry bigfoot kind
of situation where you have just bad
video and all those kinds of things
as opposed to uh i mean there's a bunch
of
people uh avi lowe from harvard
uh talking about amo amua it's it's just
like
people with the equipment
to do the data collection don't want to
help out
and that creates a kind of divide
where the scientists ignore that this is
happening and there's the masses of
people who are curious about it and then
there's the government that's full of
secrets
that's leaking some confusion
and it creates distrust in the
government it creates distrust in
science
and it prevents the scientists from
being able to explore some cool
topics some exciting possibilities that
they should be
be curious kids like avi talks about
even if it has nothing to do with
aliens whatever the answer is it has to
be something fascinating
we already know everything's interesting
but this is fascinating
but look that all said i i suspect
they're not of alien origin and let's
let me tell you my reason the people
who are all gung-ho they do a kind of
reasoning in reverse or argument from
elimination
they figure out a bunch of things that
can't be like is it a russian advanced
vehicle
no probably pretty good arguments there
is it a chinese advanced vehicle
no is it people like from the earth's
future
coming back in time no and they go
through a few others they have some
really good no arguments then they're
like well what we've got left is aliens
yeah this argument from elimination i
don't
actually find that persuasive you can
talk yourself into a lot of mistaken
ideas that way
yeah the positive evidence that it's
aliens
is still quite weak the positive
evidence that it's a puzzle
is quite huge and then and uh whatever
the solution to the puzzle is
it might be fascinating and it's going
to be so weird or fascinating or maybe
even trivial but that's weird in its own
way
that we can't set up by elimination all
the things that might be able to be
yeah and just like you said the
debunking that i've seen
of these kinds of things are
less explorations and solutions to the
puzzle and more
a kind of half-hearted dismissal and
avi as you mentioned to him on your
podcast with
him he's been attacked an awful lot and
when i hear the idea carrier attacked
i get very suspicious of the critics
uh if if he's wrong like just tell me
why yeah like my ears are open
i don't have a set view on omuamua you
know
i know i can't judge avi's arguments he
can't convince me in that sense i'm too
stupid
to understand how good his argument may
or may not be
and not like you said ultimately in the
argument is uh in the in the meeting
of that debate is when we've where we
find the wisdom
like dismissing it that's one thing that
troubles me there's a bunch of people
like nietzsche sometimes
dismissed this way ayn rand is sometimes
dismissed this way oh here we go like
the there's a as opposed to arguing
against her ideas
dismissing it all right and that that
that's not productive at all uh she may
be wrong in a lot of things but
like laying out some arguments even if
they're basic human arguments
uh that's that's where we arrive at the
wisdom i love that
uh is there something um
deeper to be said about our trust and
institutions and governments and so on
that has to do with ufos that there
there's a kind of suspicion
that the us government and governments
in general are hiding stuff from us
uh when you talk about ufos
this is my view on that if we
declassified everything
i think we would find a lot more
evidence all pointing toward the same
puzzle
there aren't some alien men being held
underground yes there's not some secret
file that lays out whatever is happening
i think the real lesson about government
is government cannot
bring itself to any new belief on this
matter
of any kind and it's a kind of funny
inertia like government is deeply
puzzled
they're more puzzled than they want to
admit to us which like
i'm okay with that actually they
shouldn't just be out panicking people
in the streets
but at the end of the day it's a bit
like approving the astrazeneca vaccine
yeah like which does work and they
haven't approved it like when are they
going to do it like when is
our government actually if only
internally
going to take this more than just
seriously but like take it truly
seriously yeah
and i just don't know if we have that
capability kind of mentally
to sound like eric weinstein for another
moment
to stay on the same topic although on
the surface shifting completely
because it is all the same topic you
have written and studied art
why do you think we humans um long to
create
art human society in general and just
the human mind
well most of us don't really long to
create art right
i would start with that point you think
so
do you think that's the create i don't
know that's the unique weirdness of
some particular humans i think i don't
know 10 percent of humans
roughly which is a lot but it is
somewhat weird
yeah i don't aspire to create art you
could say
like writing non-fiction there's
something art-like about it but
it's a different urge i would say yeah
so why do some people have it i think
human brains are very different it's a
different
notion of working through a problem like
you and i enjoy working through
analytic problems for me economics for
uai in other areas or your humanities
podcast
but that's fun yeah for that problem to
be visual
and linked to physical materials and
putting those like on a canvas
to me it's not a huge leap but i really
don't
want to do it like it would be pain if
you paid me
like 500 bucks to spend an hour painting
i don't know uh is that worth it maybe
but
like i'm happy when that hour's over
and would not be proud or happy with the
results it would suck
i don't think i would do it actually i i
do you think you're suppressing some
deep
i mean absolutely not now when i was
young i played the guitars you played
the guitar
and that i greatly enjoyed although i
was never good
but it helped me appreciate music much
much more
well this is the question okay so from
the perspective of the observer and
appreciator of art
you said good is is there such a concept
as
good in art there's clearly a concept of
bad
my guitar playing fit that concept
okay but i wasn't trying to be good i
wanted to learn like how the chords work
okay and it was a jazz improvisation
work how is blues different
classical guitar sort of physically how
do you make those sounds yes
and i did learn those things and you can
you can't learn everything about them
but you can learn a lot about them
without ever being good
or even trying to be that good but i
could play all the notes
so from the observer perspective what do
you
apologize to the absurd question but
what do you use the most beautiful and
maybe
moving piece of art you've encountered
in your life
not an absurd question at all and i
think about this quite a bit
i would say the two winners by a clear
margin are both by michelangelo
it's the pieta in the vatican and the
david statue
in florence why historical context or
just purity
the the the creation itself i don't
think you can view it apart from
historical context and being in florence
or in the vatican
is that you're already primed for a lot
right you can't
pull that out but just technically how
they express you
the emotion of human form i do honestly
intellectually think
they're the two greatest artworks for
doing that
that's not all that art does not all art
is about the human form
but they are phenomenal and i think
critical opinion
not that everyone agrees but my view is
not considered a crazy one
within the broader court of critical
opinion now in painting
i think the most i was ever blown away
was to see vermeer's
artwork it's called the art of painting
and it's in vienna
in the queen's distortious museum and i
saw that i think i was 23.
uh it just stunned me because i've seen
reproductions
but live in front of you in huge a
completely different artwork
and again vienna primed yes
and i was living abroad for the first
time in vienna itself the city
and so on now unlike the michelangelo's
that is not my current
favorite painting but that would be like
historically the one i would pick
what do you make in the context of those
choices what do you make of modern art
and uh i apologize if not if i'm not
using the correct
terminology but art that maybe uh
is goes another level of weird outside
of
uh the art that you've kind of mentioned
it breaks all the conventions and rules
and so on
and becomes uh something else
entirely that doesn't make sense in
in the same way that david might i think
a lot of it is phenomenal and i would
say the single biggest mistake that
really smart people make
is to think contemporary art or music
for that matter
it's just a load of junk or rubbish it's
just like a kind of mathematics they
haven't learned yet
it's really hard to learn maybe some
people can never learn it
but there's a very large community of
super smart well-educated people
who spend their lives with it who love
it those are genuine pleasures they
understand it they talk about it with
the common language
and to think that somehow they're all
frauds it just isn't true
like one doesn't have to like it oneself
just like puff house may or may not be
your thing
but it is amazing and for me personally
highly rewarding
and if someone doesn't get it i do kind
of have the conceited response of
thinking like in that area
i'm just smarter than you are you yeah
so the
the interesting thing is as with most we
get back to eric weinstein again
yes who is in general smarter than i am
yes i get
but when it comes to contemporary
artistic creations i'm smarter than he
is
so he's not a fan of contemporary art i
don't want to speak for him
i've heard him say he's revolving always
he's evolving always
i've heard him say derogatory things
about some of it doesn't mean he doesn't
love some other parts of it
so i i wonder if if there's just a
higher learning curve
a steeper learning curve for
contemporary art meaning like
it takes more work to to appreciate the
stories the context from which they're
like
thinking about this work it feels like
in order to appreciate the art
uh contemporary certain piece of
contemporary art you have to know the
story better
behind the art i think that's true for
many people but i think it's a funny
shaped distribution
because there's a whole other set of
people sometimes just small children
and they get abstract art more easily
yeah you show them vermeer or rembrandt
they don't get it yeah but just like a a
wall of color
yeah they're in love with it so yeah i
don't think i know the full story again
some strange kind of distribution the
entry barriers are super high or super
low
but not that often in between
but you were challenged saying that
there's a lot to be explored in
contemporary art is just
you need to uh you need to
learn yeah it's one of the most profound
bodies of human thought out there
and it's part of the humanities and yes
there are people who also don't like
podcasts right
and that's fine yeah you've also
been a scholar of food we're just going
through the entirety of the human
experience today
on this humanities podcast uh
another sort absurd question say this
conversation is the last thing you ever
do in your life i
wearing the suit would murder you at the
end of the conversation
so this is your last day on earth but i
would offer you a last meal
what would that meal contain we can also
travel
to other parts of the world bro we have
to travel because yeah
my preferred last meal here i probably
had like two nights ago
which is what can you describe or not
the best restaurant around here is
called mama chang's
and it's in fairfax and it's food from
muhan
actually and they take pandemic safety
seriously in addition to the food being
very good
but this is what i would do i would fly
to hermosillo
in northern mexico which has some of the
best food in mexico but i sadly only had
two days there
so somewhere like oaxaca puebla
i think they have food just as good or
some people would say better but i've
spent a lot of time
in those places so the scarce wait is it
possible the scarcity of time
contributed to the
the richness of the experience of course
but the point is that scarcity still
holds
yeah so i want one more dose yes the
food from hammocio
can we describe what the food is it's
the one kind of mexican food that at
least nominally is just like the mexican
food you get in the u.s
so there are burritos there's fajitas it
doesn't taste at all like our stuff
but again nominally it's the part of
mexican food that made it into the u.s
was then transformed yes but it's in a
way the most familiar
but for that reason it's the most
radical because you have to rethink
all these things you know and they're
way better in harmony
hardly any tourists go there like
there's nothing to see in hermes
nothing to do other than eat it's not
ruined by any outsiders
it's this long-standing tradition uh
dirt cheap
and the thing to do there is just sweet
talk a taxi driver
into first taking you seriously and then
trusting you enough
to know that you trust him to bring you
to the very best like food stands
so where's the where's the magic of that
similar uh entity of the burrito
where's the magic come from what is it
is it the taxi ride is it the whole
experience or is there something
actually in the food
well you can break the food down part by
part so if you think of the beef the
beef there
will be dry aged just out in the air in
a way the fda here
would never permit like they dry age it
till it turns green but it is phenomenal
the quality of the chilies so here
there's only a small number of kinds of
jellies you can get
in most parts of mexico there's quite a
large number of chilies you can get
they're different they're fresher but
it's just like a different thing
the chilies the wheat
used so this is wheat territory not corn
territory which is itself interesting
uh the wheat is more diverse and more
complex here it's more homogenized
obviously cheaper
more efficient but there it is better
non-pasteurized cheeses are legal in all
parts of mexico
and they can be white and gooey and
amazing in a way that here again it's
just against the law
you could legalize them the demand
wouldn't be that great there's a black
market in these jesus that latino
groceries around here
but you just can't get that much of it
so the cheese the meat
the wheat uh all different in
significant ways
the chilis i don't think the onions
really matter much
garlic i don't know i wouldn't put much
stock in that
but that's a lot of the core food and
then it's cooked much better
and everything's super fresh the food
chain is not relying on refrigeration
and this is one thing russia and us have
in common
we were early pioneers in food
refrigeration and that made a lot of our
foods worse quite early
and it took us a long time to dig out of
that
because big countries right is there
you've had an extensive rail system in
russia ussr a long time
which makes it easier to freeze and then
ship
what about the actual cooking the the
chef
is there an artistry to the simple
i hesitate to call the burrito simple
but
and there's no brain drain out of
cooking so if you're
in the united states and you're very
talented i'm not saying there aren't
talented chefs of course there are
but there's so many other things to pull
people away yeah but in mexico there's
so much talent going into food as there
is in china
which would be another candidate for
last meal christians
or india or oh india don't let's not
even get started unbelievable
uh you've also i mean there's a million
things we could talk about here but
you've written about giro dreams of
sushi
um it's just a really clean good example
that people are aware of
of mastery in the
in the art of the simple in food
what do you make of that kind of
obsessive pursuit of perfection in
in in creating simple food sushi is
about perfection
but it's a bit like the beatles white
album which people think is simple
and not overproduced yeah it's in a
funny way their most
over produced album but it's produced
just perfectly it sounds simple
it's really hard to produce music to the
point where it's going to sound so
simple
and not sound like sludge like let it be
album
has some great songs but a lot of it
sounds like sledge one after 909
that's sludge i dig a pony sludge like
it's a bit interesting
it's not that good it doesn't sound that
good white album like the best half like
dear prudence
sounds perfect sounds simple cry baby
cry
it's not simple back in the ussr super
complex
so sushi's like that it's because it's
so incredibly not simple
starting with the rice you try to refine
it to make it appear super simple
and that's the most complex thing of all
so
do you admire i mean we're not talking
about
days weeks months we're talking about
years
generations of doing the same thing over
and over and over again
do you admire that kind of sticking to
the it does that
you know we talked about our admiration
of the weird
that doesn't feel weird that seems like
discipline
and dedication to like like a stoic
minimalism or something like that i'm
happy they do it but i actually feel bad
about it
i feel they're sacrificial victims to me
which i benefit from
but don't you ever think like gee you're
a great master
sushi chef wouldn't you be happier if
you did something else
uh doesn't seem to happen that might be
something that a weird mind maybe it is
weird people
and maybe they're really enjoying it but
like to learn how to
pack rice for 10 years before they let
you do anything else
it's like these indian you know sarod
players they just spent five years
tapping out rhythms
before they're allowed to touch their
instruments
well actually to to defend that it's
kind of like graduate school right
well i think graduate school perhaps
i um graduate school is full of like
every single day is full of surprises i
would say
uh i i did martial arts for a long time
i do martial arts
and i've always loved kind of the
russian way of drilling
is doing the same technique i don't know
if this
applies in into intellectual or academic
disciplines where you can do the same
thing over and over and over again
thousands and thousands and thousands of
times
what i've discovered through that
process
is you get to start to appreciate the
tiniest of details and find the beauty
in them
uh people who go to like monasteries to
meditate talk about this
is when you just sit in silence and
don't do anything
you start to appreciate how much
complexity and beauty there isn't just a
movement of a finger like you can spend
the whole day
joyously thinking about how fun it is to
move a finger
yeah and so and then you can almost
become
your full weird self about the tiniest
details of life
that's the thing you've got to wonder
like is there a free lunch in there are
the rest of us moving around too much
yeah exactly that's they sure
feel like they found a free lunch the
people meditate they're on to something
i tend to think it's like artists that
some percent of people are like that but
most are not
and for most of us there's no free lunch
like my free lunch is to move around a
lot
in search of lunch well you with all the
food talk you made me hungry uh
what uh what books
three or so books if you can come if any
come to mind technical fiction
philosophical
would you recommend had a big impact on
you
or you just drew some insights from
throughout your life
well two of them we've already discussed
one is plato's dialogues
which i started reading when i was like
13. another is iran capitalism the
unknown ideal
but i would say the friedrich hayek
essay the use of knowledge in society
which is about how decentralized
mechanisms can work also why they might
go wrong
and that's where you start to understand
price system capitalism
and that was in a book called
individualism and economic order but
it was just a few essays in that book
those are maybe the three i would cite
can you elaborate a little bit on the
say the price of copper goes up right
because there's a
problem with the copper mine in chile or
bolivia
so the price of copper goes up all
around the world people are led to
economize copper
to look for substitutes for copper to
change their production processes
to change the goods and services they
buy to build homes a different
way and this one event creates this one
tiny change in information this gets
into your ai work
very directly and how much complexity
that one change
engenders in a meaningful coherent way
how the different pieces of the price
system fit together
hayek really laid out very clearly
and it's it's like an ai problem and how
well
not for everything but for many things
we solve that ai problem
i learned i was i think 13 maybe 14 when
i read hayek
you're the distributed nature of things
there and it's like your work on human
attention like how much can we take in
yes very often not that much
and how many of the advances of modern
civilization you need to understand as a
response to that constraint
i got that also from hayek and what's
the title of the book again
uh it's reprinted in a lot of books at
this point but back then the book was
called
individualism and economic order but the
essays online
hayek use of knowledge in society there
are open access versions of it through
google
and you don't need the whole book so
it's a very good book
again one of those profound looking over
the ocean
maybe sitting on a porch maybe with a
drink of some kind
um and a young kid comes by and asks you
for advice what advice would you give to
drink that's my advice
i'm serious so
okay after that
uh what uh advice would you give to a
young person today as they take on life
whether career in academia in general or
just
a life which is probably more important
than career
most good advice is context specific but
here are my two generic pieces of advice
good first get a mentor both
career but anything you want to learn
like say you want to learn about
contemporary art
people write me this uh what book should
i read it's
probably not going to work that way you
need a mentor yes you should read some
books on it
but you want to mentor to help you frame
them take you around to some art
talk about it with you so get as many
mentors as you can in the things you
want to learn
and then can ask you a quick yeah a
tangent on that uh
presumably a good mentor of course is
there
begging the question in there it's
complicated right
well it is complicated is there a lot of
damage to be done from a bad mentor
i don't think that much because it's
very easy to drop mentors and in fact
it's quite hard to maintain them
good mentors tend to be busy head
mentors tend to be busy
yeah and you can try on mentors and
maybe they're not good for you but you
still
there's a good chance you'll learn
something
like i had a mentor i was an undergrad
he was a stalinist
he edited the book called the essential
stalin brilliant guy
i learned a tremendous amount from him
was he like as a stalinist a good mentor
for me
fan of fayak well no but for a year it
was tremendous
hmm yeah he introduced me like to you
know soviet in eastern european science
fiction
because he was a marxist like that's
what i took from him among other things
any advice on finding a good mentor
daniel kahneman has
somebody just popped this to mind as
somebody who was able to find
exceptionally good collaborators
throughout his life there's not many
bright minds that find collaborators
they often
um which i ultimately see what a mentor
is
yeah be direct and try
it's not like a perfect formula but it's
amazing how many people don't even do
those things
be interesting be direct and try
like what you want from a better known
person i would just say be very direct
with them
yeah beautiful what's the second piece
of advice
build small groups of peers they don't
have to be your age but very often
they'll be your age
especially if you're younger with
broadly similar interests but there can
be different points of view
people you hang out with which can
include in a whatsapp group online
and like every day or almost every day
they're talking about the thing you care
about
trying to solve problems in that thing
and that's your small group and you
really like them and they like you and
you care what you think about each other
and you have this common interest that's
for human connection or that's for
development of ideas
it's both they're not that different
like beatles classic small group
right uh but there's so much drama
the florentine artists of course there's
drama and small groups tend to split up
which is fine just like
mentoring relationships often end but
it's remarkable
how little has been done that was not
done in small groups in some way
so speaking of uh loss
of a beautiful relationships what do you
make of this whole love thing
uh why do humans fall in love
what's the role of love friendship
family in life
in a successful life or just life in
general why the hell are we so into this
thing
there are multiple layers of
understanding that question so kind of
the lowest layer is the darwinian answer
right if we weren't this way we wouldn't
have been successful in reproducing and
building alliances
it's important to realize that's far
from complete
sort of the highest understanding would
be poetic like read john keats
or you know many other love powers is
that so who do i go to to find out to
learn about love in terms of poets
or i would say start with john keats but
given that you're
fluent in russian um yeah let's go let's
go russian literature for a second like
what what
what you you keep mentioning russia what
uh what's your connection
what's your love uh in russia
well first it's all interesting but more
concretely my wife was born in moscow
sokolniki wow yeah wow and she grew up
there
i married her here uh my daughter i
adopted her i'm not her biological
father but i genuinely raised her
she was born in russia though she came
here when she was one
wow uh my father you're basically
russian no no no i'm a new jersey boy uh
that's the same thing i'm very sorry to
report my father-in-law passed away a
week ago
he lived with us for six years he
lived in russia until he was oh seventy
saw you know the stalinist era his
father was brought to a camp
lived through world war ii much much
more
uh had an incredible life never really
learned how to speak english
so i absorbed something russian from him
as well he was part armenian
so that's my connection to russia a bit
of the russian soul too
i don't think i have it i think i
appreciate it but there's division of
labor right
others in the family take care of that
i'm i'm more superficial you mentioned
keats and uh that higher version that
non darwinian love what's that about
that it's the highest form of human
connection and it's intoxicating
and it's part of building a life and
most of us
are very very strongly drawn to it and
it's part of the highest realization of
you being what you can be
yeah you mentioned you lost but ask a
russian i mean this is a
superficial new jersey boy who grew up
listening to bruce springsteen
uh what's your favorite bruce
springsteen song
i think the album born to run has
actually held up the best though it's
very fashionable
to think the earlier or later works are
actually better and that's the
overproduced super pop album
but the quality of the songs to be born
to run is just
far and away the best then darkness on
the edge of town
yeah and those are still my favorites
is an incredible song yeah and perfectly
produced in a phil spector kind of way
every detail is right every lyric what
else is on the
album thunder road jungle land 10th
avenue freeze out she's the one
unbelievable yeah yeah bruce leading
across the river
i really like um i mean i like when he
goes into love personally uh you know
like
i'm on fire that's a very good song
dancing in the dark and
a lot of the later work i find the
percussion becomes too simple
and kind of too white somehow and a
little clunky
and it's still good work he's super
talented but it doesn't
speak to me but when it all bursts open
into the open road
like it does on born to run that's magic
yeah rosalita have you ever seen him
live
is it yes twice i wonder what he's like
live when he was young right
those years i saw him live when he was
young i was young
uh new jersey i was a little
disappointed actually
yeah i think what i like best from him
is quite studio
he certainly played well i don't fault
his performance but it's like when i saw
plant and page you know fled zeppelin
tremendous creators
and they showed up they were not drunk
like they were paying attention
but i was underwhelmed because led
zeppelin like the beatles white album
is much more of a studio band than you
think it means
and in the case of bruce springsteen i
don't know about you but for me
he's somebody that i connect with the
most when i got that when i'm alone
and there's like a melancholy feeling
and actually driving my
my folks live in philly i went to school
in philly
and so you know i've uh i i
almost worthy of new jersey then yeah
well you're
you're almost worthy of russia so we're
we can connect uh and then ask but i
mean i love yours it's something
i feel like um i feel like
i don't know it's it's always there's
this beautiful like there's a dying old
goes diner they closed down i used to uh
uh go there there's there's a melancholy
feeling to me i mean
of course a thickness to culture in that
part of the world yeah
which is oddly similar to some elements
of the thickness of russian culture
yeah and when you see like russian
characters on the sopranos yeah
it totally makes sense even though
they're these complete outlines
exactly it totally makes sense you've uh
you mentioned you lost your
father-in-law last week
uh do you think about mortality do you
think about
your own mortality are you afraid of
death
i don't think about my own mortality
that much which is
probably a good thing i think death will
be
bad i wouldn't say i'm afraid of it for
me the worst thing about death is not
knowing
how the human story turns out the full
human story the full human story so if i
could right before i die
read like a wikipedia page called the
rest of human history
and have enough time just like a few
days to absorb it think about it
and know like oh well 643 years from now
that's when all the atomic weapons went
off and
here's what happened between now and
then i would feel much better dying
because that's not how it's going to be
right that's unlikely it's almost like
the
hitchhiker's guide they kind of have
what is it they have a
one or two sentence description of the
human of what goes on on earth
it's kind of interesting to think if
there's a lot of intelligent
civilizations out there
that in the big encyclopedia that
describes the universe humans will only
have one
sentence probably too true yeah that's
the only one i can read and understand
right and it may be hard to understand
the human one past
a number of centuries yeah yes
like how many years from now will
reading wikipedia be like trying to read
chaucer
which i almost can do but i actually
can't i need a translation
probably you can't do it at all yeah i
mean maybe reading will be outdated it
might be a very silly notion
maybe we're fundamentally like we think
language is fundamental to cognition but
it could be something visual or
something totally different exactly
we'll plug in neural ink or
yeah uh but in that story that wikipedia
article
do you think there'll be a section on uh
the
meaning of it i hope not
because that section we could write now
and it's just not going to be very good
right what would you put in the section
on the meaning of uh
human existence i don't know links to a
lot of other sections
i don't think there are general
statements about the meaning of life
that have that much meaning
i think if you study different cultures
the arts travel mathematics like
whatever your thing is
yeah you'll get a lot about the meaning
of life so like it's there in wikipedia
in some bigger sense
but i don't want to read the page on the
meaning i bet they have such a page in
fact
the fact that i've never visited it none
of my friends oh here tyler here's the
page on the meaning of life i know
you've been wondering about this you got
to read this one
no one's ever done that to you have they
it probably has well actually gone to
that page
it does in fact have a lot of links to
others uh
so that that's it uh the meaning of life
is just
a bunch of self-referential or uh
citation needed type of statements
i think there's no better way to end it
tyler's a huge honor i'm a huge fan
um thank you so much for wasting all of
this time with me it was one of the
greatest conversations i've ever had
thank you so much
my pleasure and delighted to finally
have met you and uh that we can do this
thanks for listening to this
conversation with tyler cohen and thank
you to
linode expressvpn simply safe
and public goods check them out in the
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and now let me leave you with some words
from adam smith
little else is requisite to carry a
state to the highest degree of opulence
from the lowest barbarism but peace easy
taxes
and a tolerable administration of
justice
thank you for listening and hope to see
you next time