Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Tyler Cohen,
00:00:02 an economist at George Mason University
00:00:05 and co creator of an amazing economics blog
00:00:08 called Marginal Revolution, author of many books,
00:00:11 including The Great Stagnation, Average Is Over
00:00:14 and his most recent Big Business,
00:00:17 A Love Letter to an American Antihero.
00:00:20 He’s truly a polymath in his work,
00:00:22 including his love for food,
00:00:24 which makes this amazing podcast
00:00:26 called Conversations with Tyler really fun to listen to.
00:00:30 Quick mention of our sponsors,
00:00:32 Linode, ExpressVPN, Simplisafe and Public Goods.
00:00:37 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
00:00:41 As a side note, given Tyler’s culinary explorations,
00:00:45 let me say that one of the things that makes me sad
00:00:48 about my love hate relationship with food
00:00:51 is that while I’ve found a simple diet,
00:00:53 plain meat, veggies, that makes me happy in day to day life,
00:00:58 I sometimes wish I had the mental ability
00:01:00 to moderate consumption of food
00:01:02 so that I could truly enjoy meals
00:01:03 that go way outside of that diet.
00:01:06 I’ve seen my mom, for example,
00:01:07 enjoy a single piece of chocolate
00:01:09 and yet if I were to eat one piece of chocolate,
00:01:12 the odds are high that I would end up eating the whole box.
00:01:15 This is definitely something I would like to fix
00:01:18 because some of the amazing artistry in this world
00:01:21 happens in the kitchen and some of the richest
00:01:24 human experiences happen over a unique meal.
00:01:27 I recently was eating cheeseburgers
00:01:29 with Joe Rogan and John Donahue late at night in Austin,
00:01:33 talking about jiu jitsu and life
00:01:35 and I was distinctly aware of the magic of that experience.
00:01:40 Magic made possible by the incredibly
00:01:42 delicious cheeseburgers.
00:01:44 This is the Lex Friedman podcast
00:01:47 and here is my conversation with Tyler Cohen.
00:01:50 Would you say economics is more art or science
00:01:54 or philosophy or even magic?
00:01:57 What is it?
00:01:58 Economics is interesting because it’s all of the above.
00:02:01 To start with magic, the notion that you can
00:02:03 make some change and simply everyone’s better off,
00:02:06 that is a kind of modern magic
00:02:08 that has replaced old style magic.
00:02:11 It’s an art in the sense that the models are not very exact.
00:02:14 It’s a science in the sense that occasionally
00:02:16 propositions are falsified.
00:02:18 Are a few basic things we know
00:02:20 and however trivial they may sound,
00:02:22 if you don’t know them, you’re out of luck.
00:02:24 So all of the above.
00:02:26 But from my outsider’s perspective,
00:02:28 economics is sometimes able to formulate very simple,
00:02:33 almost like E equals MC squared,
00:02:36 general models of how our human society will function
00:02:40 when you do a certain thing.
00:02:42 But it seems impossible or almost way too optimistic
00:02:47 to think that a single formula
00:02:49 or just a set of simple principles
00:02:51 can describe behavior of billions of human beings
00:02:56 with all the complexity that we have involved.
00:02:58 So do you have a sense there’s a hope for economics
00:03:01 to have those kinds of physics level descriptions
00:03:06 and models of the world?
00:03:08 Or is it just our desperate attempts as humans
00:03:10 to make sense of it even though it’s more desperate
00:03:12 than rigorous and serious and actually predictable
00:03:17 like a physics type science?
00:03:20 I don’t think economics will ever be very predictive.
00:03:24 It’s most useful for helping you ask better questions.
00:03:27 You look at something like game theory.
00:03:29 Well, game theory never predicted USA and USSR
00:03:32 would have a war, would not have a war.
00:03:35 But trying to think through the logic of strategic conflict,
00:03:38 if you know game theory,
00:03:39 it’s just a much more interesting discussion.
00:03:42 Are you surprised that we,
00:03:44 speaking of the Soviet Union and the United States
00:03:47 and speaking of game theory,
00:03:48 are you surprised that we haven’t destroyed ourselves
00:03:50 with nuclear weapons yet?
00:03:52 Like that simple formulation
00:03:54 of mutually assured destruction,
00:03:56 that’s a good example of an explanation
00:03:58 that perhaps allows us to ask better questions.
00:04:02 But it seems to have actually described the reality
00:04:06 of why we haven’t destroyed ourselves
00:04:08 with these ultra powerful weapons.
00:04:10 Are you surprised, do you think
00:04:13 the game theoretic explanation is at all accurate there?
00:04:16 I think we will destroy each other with those weapons.
00:04:19 Eventually.
00:04:20 Eventually.
00:04:21 Look, it’s a very low probability event.
00:04:24 So I’m not surprised it hasn’t happened yet.
00:04:26 I’m a little surprised it came as close as it did.
00:04:29 You know, you’re general thinking,
00:04:30 realizing it might’ve just been a flock of birds
00:04:33 or it wasn’t a first strike attack from the USA.
00:04:35 We got very lucky on that one.
00:04:38 But if you just keep on running the clock
00:04:39 on a low probability event, it will happen.
00:04:42 And it may not be USA and China,
00:04:45 USA and Russia, whatever.
00:04:47 You know, it could be the Saudis and Turkey.
00:04:49 And it might not be nuclear weapons,
00:04:50 it might be some other destruction.
00:04:51 Bio weapons.
00:04:52 But it simply will happen is my view.
00:04:55 And I’ve argued at best we have 700 or 800 years
00:04:58 and that’s being generous.
00:05:00 A worst?
00:05:01 How long we got?
00:05:03 Well, maybe it’s like a post on arrival process, right?
00:05:06 So tiny probability could come any time.
00:05:09 Probably not in your lifetime.
00:05:12 But the chance presumably increases
00:05:15 the cheaper weapons of mass destruction are.
00:05:18 So the Poisson process description doesn’t take
00:05:22 in consideration the game theoretic aspect.
00:05:24 So another way to consider is repeated games,
00:05:28 iterative games.
00:05:29 So is there something about our human nature
00:05:33 that allows us to fight against probability?
00:05:37 Reduce, like the closer we get to trouble,
00:05:40 the more we’re able to figure out how to avoid trouble.
00:05:43 The same thing is for when you take exams
00:05:46 or you go and take classes,
00:05:48 the closer or paper deadlines,
00:05:50 the closer you get to a deadline,
00:05:52 the better you start to perform
00:05:53 and get your shit together and actually get stuff done.
00:05:56 I’m really not so negative on human nature.
00:05:58 And as an economist,
00:05:59 I very much see the gains from cooperation.
00:06:02 But if you just ask, are there outliers in history?
00:06:05 Like was there a Hitler, for instance?
00:06:07 Obviously.
00:06:08 And again, you let the clock tick,
00:06:09 another Hitler with nuclear weapons,
00:06:12 doesn’t per se care about his own destruction,
00:06:15 it will happen.
00:06:16 So your sense is fundamentally people are good,
00:06:20 but outliers happen.
00:06:21 A trembling hand equilibrium is what we would call it.
00:06:23 Trembling hand equilibrium?
00:06:25 That the basic logic is for cooperation,
00:06:28 which is mostly what we’ve seen, even between enemies.
00:06:32 But every now and then someone does something crazy
00:06:35 and you don’t know how to react to it.
00:06:36 And you can’t always beat Hitler.
00:06:39 Sometimes Hitler drags you down.
00:06:41 To push back, is it possible
00:06:44 that the crazier the person, the less likely they are,
00:06:49 and in a way where we’re safe,
00:06:52 meaning like, this is the kind of proposition,
00:06:56 I had the discussion with my dad as a physicist about this,
00:06:59 where he thinks that like if you have a graph,
00:07:04 like evil people can’t also be geniuses.
00:07:08 So this is his defense why evil people
00:07:11 will not get control of nuclear weapons,
00:07:13 because to be truly evil.
00:07:15 But evil meaning sort of, you can argue that,
00:07:19 not even the evil of Hitler we’re talking about,
00:07:22 because Hitler had a kind of view of Germany
00:07:24 and all those kinds of, there’s like,
00:07:26 he probably deluded himself and the people around him
00:07:29 to think that he’s actually doing good for the world,
00:07:31 similar with Stalin and so on.
00:07:33 By evil, I mean more like almost like terrorists
00:07:35 to where they wanna destroy themselves and the world.
00:07:39 Like those people will never be able to be
00:07:42 actually skilled enough to do,
00:07:44 to deliver that kind of mass scale destruction.
00:07:47 So the hope is that it’s very unlikely
00:07:52 that the kind of evil that would lead to extinctions
00:07:55 of humans or mass destruction is so unlikely
00:07:59 that we’re able to last way longer than some 100, 800 years.
00:08:03 Is that?
00:08:04 It’s very unlikely.
00:08:06 In that sense, I accept the argument,
00:08:08 but that’s why you need to let the clock tick.
00:08:10 It’s also the best argument for bureaucracy.
00:08:13 To negotiate a bureaucracy,
00:08:14 it actually selects against pure evil
00:08:16 because you need to build alliances.
00:08:18 So bureaucracy in that regard is great, right?
00:08:21 It keeps out the worst apples.
00:08:23 But look, put it this way,
00:08:24 could you imagine 35 years from now,
00:08:26 the Osama bin Laden of the future
00:08:29 has nukes or very bad bio weapons?
00:08:32 It seems to me you can.
00:08:34 And Osama was pretty evil.
00:08:36 And actually even he failed, right?
00:08:38 But nonetheless, that’s what the 700 or 800 years
00:08:41 is there for.
00:08:42 And there might be destructive technologies
00:08:44 that don’t have such a high cost of production
00:08:48 or such a high learning curve.
00:08:50 Like cyber attacks or artificial intelligence,
00:08:53 all those kinds of things.
00:08:55 Yeah.
00:08:56 I mean, let me ask you a question.
00:08:57 Let’s say you could as an act of will,
00:09:00 by spending a million dollars,
00:09:01 obliterate any city on earth and everyone in it dies.
00:09:05 And you’ll get caught and you’ll be sentenced to death,
00:09:08 but you can make it happen just by willing it.
00:09:10 How many months does it take before that happens?
00:09:15 So the obvious answer is like very soon.
00:09:18 There’s probably a good answer for that
00:09:19 because you can consider how many millionaires there are,
00:09:21 how many you could look at that, right?
00:09:22 Right.
00:09:23 I have a sense that there’s just people
00:09:26 that have a million dollars.
00:09:30 I mean, there’s a certain amount,
00:09:31 but have a million dollars,
00:09:33 have other interests that will outweigh
00:09:39 the interest of destroying an entire city.
00:09:42 Like there’s a particular,
00:09:43 like, I mean, maybe that’s a hope.
00:09:46 It’s why we should be nice to the wealthy too, right?
00:09:48 Yeah.
00:09:51 Yeah, all that trash talking as Bill Gates,
00:09:53 we should stop that
00:09:54 because that doesn’t inspire the other future Bill Gates
00:09:58 is to be nice to the world.
00:10:01 That’s true.
00:10:01 But your sense is the cheaper it gets to destroy the world,
00:10:05 the more likely it becomes.
00:10:07 Now, when I say destroy the world,
00:10:08 there’s a trick in there.
00:10:09 I don’t think literally every human will die,
00:10:12 but it would set back civilization
00:10:14 by an extraordinary degree.
00:10:16 It’s then just hard to predict what comes next.
00:10:19 But a catastrophe where everyone dies,
00:10:21 that probably has to be something more like an asteroid
00:10:24 or supernova.
00:10:26 And those are purely exogenous for the time being, at least.
00:10:29 So I immigrated to this country.
00:10:32 I was born in the Soviet Union in Russia and…
00:10:36 Which one?
00:10:37 Which one?
00:10:37 I guess it’s an important question.
00:10:39 You were born in the Soviet Union, right?
00:10:41 Yes, I was born in the Soviet Union.
00:10:43 The rest is details, but I grew up in Moscow, Russia.
00:10:47 But I came to this country,
00:10:49 and this country even back there,
00:10:52 but it’s always symbolized to me a place of opportunity
00:10:55 where everybody could build the most incredible things,
00:11:01 especially in the engineering side of things.
00:11:03 Just invent and build and scale
00:11:06 and have a huge impact on the world.
00:11:08 And that’s been, to me, the…
00:11:11 That’s my version of the American ideal, the American dream.
00:11:14 Do you think the American dream is still there?
00:11:20 Do you think…
00:11:21 What do you think of that notion in itself,
00:11:23 like from an economics perspective,
00:11:25 from a human perspective, is it still alive?
00:11:28 And how do you think about it?
00:11:30 The American dream.
00:11:30 The American dream is mostly still there.
00:11:33 If you look at which groups are the highest earners,
00:11:37 it is individuals from India and individuals from Iran,
00:11:41 which is a fairly new development.
00:11:43 Great for them, not necessarily easy.
00:11:45 Both you could call persons of color,
00:11:48 may have faced discrimination,
00:11:50 also on the grounds of religion, yet they’ve done it.
00:11:53 That’s amazing.
00:11:54 It says great things about America.
00:11:56 Now, if you look at native born Americans,
00:11:58 the story’s trickier.
00:12:00 People think intergenerational mobility
00:12:03 has declined a lot recently,
00:12:05 but it has not for native born Americans.
00:12:08 For about, I think, 40 years, it’s been fairly constant,
00:12:11 which is sort of good,
00:12:13 but compared to much earlier times,
00:12:16 it was much higher in the past.
00:12:19 I’m not sure we can replicate that,
00:12:20 because look, go to the beginning of the 20th century,
00:12:23 very few Americans finish high school,
00:12:26 or even have much wealth.
00:12:27 There’s not much credentialism.
00:12:29 There aren’t that many credentials.
00:12:30 So there’s more upward mobility
00:12:33 across the generations than today.
00:12:35 And it’s a good thing that we had it.
00:12:37 I’m not sure we should blame the modern world
00:12:40 for not being able to reproduce that.
00:12:43 But look, the general issue of
00:12:45 who gets into Harvard or Cornell?
00:12:47 Is there an injustice?
00:12:49 Should we fix that?
00:12:50 Is there too little opportunity for the bottom,
00:12:52 say, half of Americans?
00:12:54 Absolutely.
00:12:55 It’s a disgrace how this country has evolved in that way.
00:12:58 And in that sense, the American dream is clearly ailing.
00:13:01 But it has had problems from the beginning,
00:13:04 for blacks, for women, for many other groups.
00:13:07 I mean, isn’t that the whole challenge of opportunity
00:13:10 and freedom is that it’s hard,
00:13:12 and the difficulty of how hard it is to move up in society
00:13:16 is unequal often, and that’s the injustice of society.
00:13:20 But the whole point of that freedom
00:13:23 is that over time, it becomes better and better.
00:13:25 You start to fix the leaks, the issues,
00:13:31 and it keeps progressing in that kind of way.
00:13:35 But ultimately, there’s always the opportunity,
00:13:37 even if it’s harder, there’s the opportunity
00:13:39 to create something truly special,
00:13:41 to move up, to be president, to be a leader
00:13:46 in whatever the industry that you’re passionate about.
00:13:49 We each have podcasts, right, in English.
00:13:51 The value of joining that American English language network
00:13:56 is much higher today than it was 30 years ago,
00:13:58 mostly because of the internet.
00:14:00 So that makes immigration returns themselves skewed.
00:14:03 So going to the US, Canada, or the UK,
00:14:07 I think has become much more valuable in relative terms
00:14:09 than, say, going to France,
00:14:11 which is still a pretty well off, very nice country.
00:14:16 If you had gone to France,
00:14:17 your chance of having a globally known podcast
00:14:20 would be much smaller.
00:14:21 Yeah, this is the interesting thing
00:14:24 about how much intellectual influence
00:14:27 the United States has.
00:14:28 I don’t know if it’s connected to what we’re discussing here,
00:14:31 the freedom and opportunity of the American dream,
00:14:34 or does it make any sense to you
00:14:37 that we have so much impact on the rest of the world
00:14:41 in terms of ideas?
00:14:45 Is it just simply because English
00:14:47 is the primary language of the world,
00:14:49 or is there something fundamental to the United States
00:14:52 that drives the development of ideas?
00:14:55 It’s almost like what’s cool, what’s entertaining,
00:14:59 what’s like meme culture, the internet culture,
00:15:06 the philosophers, the intellectuals, the podcasts,
00:15:09 the movies, music, all that stuff, driving culture.
00:15:13 There’s something above and beyond language
00:15:15 in the United States.
00:15:16 It’s a sense of entertainment really mattering,
00:15:19 how to connect with your audience,
00:15:20 being direct and getting to the point,
00:15:23 how humor is integrated even with science
00:15:27 that is pretty strongly represented here,
00:15:30 much more so than on the European continent.
00:15:32 Britain has its own version of this,
00:15:34 which it does very well,
00:15:36 and not surprisingly, they’re hugely influential
00:15:38 in music, comedy, most of the other areas you mentioned.
00:15:41 Canada, yes, but their best talent tends to come here,
00:15:44 but you could say it’s like a broader North American thing
00:15:47 and give them their fair share of credit.
00:15:50 What about science?
00:15:52 There’s a sense higher education is really strong,
00:15:56 research is really strong in the United States,
00:15:58 but it just feels like, culturally speaking,
00:16:01 when we zoom out, scientists aren’t very cool here.
00:16:07 Most people wouldn’t be able to name
00:16:09 basically a single scientist.
00:16:11 Maybe they would say like, they would say what,
00:16:13 like Einstein and Neil deGrasse Tyson maybe,
00:16:16 and Neil deGrasse Tyson isn’t exactly a scientist,
00:16:18 he’s a science communicator.
00:16:20 So there’s not the same kind of admiration
00:16:25 of science and innovators as there is of like,
00:16:30 athletes or actors, actresses, musicians.
00:16:34 Well, you can become a celebrity scientist if you want to.
00:16:38 It may or may not be best for science.
00:16:40 And we have Spock from Star Trek, who is still a big deal,
00:16:44 but look at it this way.
00:16:45 Which country is most comfortable
00:16:47 with inegalitarian rewards for scientists,
00:16:50 whether it’s fame or money?
00:16:52 And I still think it’s here.
00:16:53 Some of that’s just the tax rate.
00:16:55 Some of it is a lot of America is set up
00:16:57 for rich people to live really well.
00:17:00 And again, that’s going to attract a lot of top talent.
00:17:02 And you ask like, the two best vaccines.
00:17:05 I know the Pfizer vaccine is sort of from Germany,
00:17:08 sort of from Turkey, but it’s nonetheless
00:17:11 being distributed through the United States.
00:17:13 Moderna, an ethnic Armenian immigrant through Lebanon,
00:17:17 first to Canada, then down here to Boston, Cambridge area.
00:17:21 Those are incredible vaccines.
00:17:22 And US nailed it.
00:17:25 Yeah, well, that’s more almost like the,
00:17:28 I don’t know what you would call it,
00:17:29 engineering, the sort of scaling.
00:17:32 That’s what US is really good at,
00:17:34 not just inventing of ideas,
00:17:36 but taking an idea and actually building the thing
00:17:38 and scaling it and being able to distribute it at scale.
00:17:42 I think some people would attribute that
00:17:44 to the general word of capitalism.
00:17:49 I don’t know if you would.
00:17:51 Sure.
00:17:52 What in your views are the pros and cons of capitalism
00:17:57 as it’s implemented in America?
00:17:59 I don’t know if you would say
00:18:00 capitalism really exists in America,
00:18:03 but to the extent that it does.
00:18:04 People use the word capitalism in so many different ways.
00:18:08 What is capitalism?
00:18:09 The literal meaning is private ownership of capital goods,
00:18:13 which I favor in most areas.
00:18:15 But no, I don’t think the private sector
00:18:17 should own our F16s or military assets.
00:18:20 Government owned water utilities seem to work
00:18:23 as well as privately owned water utilities.
00:18:26 But with all those qualifications put to the side,
00:18:30 business, for the most part,
00:18:33 innovates better than government.
00:18:35 It is oriented toward consumer services.
00:18:38 The biggest businesses tend to pay the highest wages.
00:18:41 Business is great at getting things done.
00:18:43 USA is fundamentally a nation of business
00:18:46 and that makes us a nation of opportunity.
00:18:49 So I am indeed mostly a fan.
00:18:51 Subject to numerous caveats.
00:18:54 What’s the con?
00:18:56 What are some negative downsides of capitalism
00:19:00 in your view or some things that we should be concerned
00:19:03 about maybe for longterm impacts of capitalism?
00:19:07 Again, capitalism takes a different form in each country.
00:19:10 I would say in the United States,
00:19:12 our weird blend of whatever you want to call it
00:19:16 has had an enduring racial problem from the beginning,
00:19:20 has been a force of taking away land
00:19:22 from Native Americans and oppressing them
00:19:25 pretty much from the beginning.
00:19:30 It has done very well by immigrants for the most part.
00:19:35 We revel in championitarian creative destruction more.
00:19:38 So we don’t just prop up national champions forever.
00:19:42 And there’s a precariousness to life for some people here
00:19:45 that is less so say in Germany or the Netherlands.
00:19:48 We have weaker communities in some regards
00:19:51 than say Northwestern Europe often would.
00:19:54 That has pluses and minuses.
00:19:55 I think it makes us more creative.
00:19:57 It’s a better country in which to be a weirdo
00:20:00 than say Germany or Denmark.
00:20:02 But there is truly, whether from the government
00:20:05 or from your private community,
00:20:06 there is less social security in some fundamental sense.
00:20:10 On the point of weirdo,
00:20:11 what, that’s kind of a beautiful little statement.
00:20:16 What is that?
00:20:19 I mean, that seems to be, you know,
00:20:21 you could think of a guy like Elon Musk
00:20:23 and say that he’s a weirdo.
00:20:25 Is that the sense in which you’re using weirdo
00:20:27 like outside of the norm, like breaking conventions?
00:20:30 Absolutely.
00:20:31 And here that is either acceptable or even admired
00:20:35 or to be a loner.
00:20:36 And since so many people are outsiders
00:20:39 and that we’re all immigrants is selecting for people
00:20:41 who left something behind,
00:20:43 we’re willing to leave behind their families,
00:20:45 we’re willing to undergo a certain brutality
00:20:48 of switch in their lives,
00:20:50 makes us a nation of weirdos and weirdos are creative.
00:20:55 And Denmark is not a nation of weirdos.
00:20:58 It’s a wonderful place, you know, great for them.
00:21:01 Ideally you want part of the world
00:21:02 to be full of weirdos and innovating.
00:21:04 And the other part of the world to be a little
00:21:06 kind of chicken shit, risk averse
00:21:09 and enjoy the benefit to the innovation
00:21:12 and to give people these smooth lives
00:21:13 and six weeks off and free ride.
00:21:16 And everyone’s like, oh, American way versus European way,
00:21:19 but basically they’re compliments.
00:21:21 Yeah, that’s fascinating.
00:21:22 I used to have this conversation with my like parents
00:21:25 when I was growing up and just others
00:21:27 from the immigrant kind of flow.
00:21:29 And they use this term, especially in Russian is,
00:21:32 you know, to criticize something I was doing,
00:21:36 that was suggest, you know, normal people don’t do this.
00:21:41 And I used to be really offended by that,
00:21:44 but, you know, as I got older,
00:21:48 I realized that that’s a kind of compliment
00:21:51 because in the same kind of, I would say,
00:21:56 way that you’re saying that is the American ideal,
00:21:59 because if you want to do anything special or interesting,
00:22:02 you don’t want to be doing in one particular avenue
00:22:06 what normal people do, because that won’t be interesting.
00:22:12 Russians, I think fit in very well here
00:22:14 because the ones who come are weirdos.
00:22:16 And there’s a very different Russian weirdo tradition
00:22:19 like Alyosha, right?
00:22:20 And by this card, I miss off.
00:22:21 Or Perelman, the mathematician, they’re weirdos.
00:22:25 And they have their own different kind of status
00:22:27 in Soviet Union, Russia, wherever.
00:22:30 And when Russians come to America,
00:22:32 they stay pretty Russian, but it seems to me a week later,
00:22:35 they’ve somehow adjusted.
00:22:38 And the ways in which they might want to be like grumpier
00:22:40 than Americans, not smile,
00:22:42 think that people who smile are idiots,
00:22:44 like they can do that.
00:22:45 No one takes that away from them.
00:22:48 What are you, on a tiny tangent,
00:22:50 I’d love to hear if you have thoughts
00:22:52 about Grisha Perelman turning down the Fields Medal.
00:22:57 Is that something you admire?
00:22:59 Does that make sense to you that somebody,
00:23:02 you know, with the structure of Nobel Prizes,
00:23:04 of these huge awards, of the reputations,
00:23:06 the hierarchy of everyone saying, applauding,
00:23:09 how special you are, and here’s a person
00:23:12 who was doing one of the greatest accomplishments
00:23:14 in the history of mathematics.
00:23:16 It doesn’t want the stupid prize
00:23:17 and doesn’t want recognition,
00:23:19 doesn’t want to do interviews,
00:23:20 it doesn’t want to be famous.
00:23:22 What do you make of that?
00:23:24 It’s great.
00:23:24 Look, prizes are corrupting.
00:23:26 After scientists win Nobel Prizes,
00:23:28 they tend to become less productive.
00:23:31 Now, statistically, it’s hard to sort out
00:23:32 the different effects.
00:23:33 There’s aggression toward the mean.
00:23:35 Does the prize make you too busy?
00:23:36 It’s a little tricky, but.
00:23:38 There’s not enough Nobel Prizes either
00:23:39 to gather enough data.
00:23:41 Right, but I’ve known a lot of Nobel Prize winners,
00:23:45 and it is my sense they become less productive.
00:23:47 They repeat more of their older messages,
00:23:49 which may be highly socially valuable,
00:23:52 but if someone wants to turn their back on that
00:23:54 and keep on working, which I assume is what he’s doing,
00:23:58 that’s awesome.
00:23:59 I mean, we should respect that.
00:24:01 It’s like he wins a bigger prize, right?
00:24:02 Our extreme respect.
00:24:04 Yeah.
00:24:06 Wow.
00:24:07 Grisha, if you’re listening, I need to talk to you soon.
00:24:10 Okay.
00:24:11 I’ve been trying to get ahold of him.
00:24:15 Okay.
00:24:17 Back to capitalism.
00:24:18 I gotta ask you, just competition in general,
00:24:20 in this world of weirdos,
00:24:22 is competition good for the world?
00:24:24 This kind of seems to be one of the fundamental engines
00:24:29 of capitalism, right?
00:24:31 Do you see it as ultimately constructive
00:24:32 or destructive for the world?
00:24:34 What really matters is how good your legal framework is.
00:24:37 So competition within nature for food
00:24:40 leads to bloody conflict all the time.
00:24:42 The animal world is quite unpleasant, to say the least.
00:24:46 If you have something like the rule of law
00:24:49 and clearly defined property rights,
00:24:52 which are within reason justly allocated,
00:24:56 competition probably is gonna work very well.
00:24:58 But it’s not an unalloyed good thing at all.
00:25:01 It can be highly destructive.
00:25:02 Military competition, right?
00:25:05 Which actually is itself sometimes good,
00:25:07 but it’s not good per se.
00:25:09 What aspects of life do you think
00:25:11 we should protect from competition?
00:25:13 Is there some, you said like the rule of law,
00:25:16 is there some things we should keep away from competition?
00:25:19 Well, the fight for territory, most of all, right?
00:25:22 So violence, anything that involves
00:25:24 like actual physical violence.
00:25:25 Right, and it’s not that I think
00:25:26 the current borders are just.
00:25:28 I mean, go talk to Hungarians, Romanians,
00:25:31 Serbians, Bosnians, they’ll talk your ear off.
00:25:34 And some of them are probably right.
00:25:36 But at the end of the day,
00:25:37 we have some kind of international order.
00:25:40 And I would rather we more or less stick with it.
00:25:44 If Catalonians wanna leave, they keep up with it,
00:25:46 let them go, but.
00:25:48 What about a space of like healthcare?
00:25:50 This is where you get into a tension of like
00:25:52 between capitalism and kind of more,
00:25:56 I don’t wanna use socialism,
00:25:57 but those kinds of policies that are less free market.
00:26:02 I think in this country,
00:26:03 healthcare should be much more competitive.
00:26:06 So you go to hospitals, doctors,
00:26:07 they don’t treat you like a customer.
00:26:10 They treat you like an idiot or like a child
00:26:11 or someone with third party payment.
00:26:14 And it’s a pretty humiliating experience often.
00:26:18 Yeah.
00:26:19 Do you think a free market in general is possible?
00:26:22 Like a pure free market?
00:26:25 And is that a good goal to strive for?
00:26:28 I don’t think the term pure free market’s well defined
00:26:31 because you need a legal order.
00:26:33 Legal order has to make decisions
00:26:35 on like what is intellectual property
00:26:37 more important than ever.
00:26:38 There’s no benchmark that like represents
00:26:40 the pure free market way of doing things.
00:26:43 What will penalties be?
00:26:45 How much do we put into law enforcement?
00:26:47 No simple answers, but just saying free market
00:26:50 doesn’t pin down what you’re gonna do
00:26:52 on those all important questions.
00:26:53 So free market is an economics, I guess, idea.
00:26:56 So it’s not possible for free market to generate the rules
00:27:01 that are like emergent, like self governing?
00:27:03 It generates a lot of them, right?
00:27:05 Through private norms, through trade associations.
00:27:08 International trade is mostly done privately and by norms.
00:27:13 So it’s certainly possible, but at the end of the day,
00:27:16 I think you need governments to draw very clear lines
00:27:19 to prevent it from turning into mafia run systems.
00:27:24 You know, I’ve been hanging out with other group of weirdos,
00:27:29 lately Michael Malice, who espouses to be an anarchist,
00:27:34 anarchism, which is like, I think intellectually
00:27:39 just a fascinating set of ideas, where taking free market
00:27:46 to the full extreme of basically saying
00:27:48 there should be no government, what is it?
00:27:54 Oversight, I guess, and then everything should be fully,
00:27:57 like all the agreements, all the collectives you form
00:28:00 should be voluntary, not based on the geographic land
00:28:05 you were born on and so on.
00:28:07 Do you think that’s just a giant mess?
00:28:10 Like, do you think it’s possible for an anarchist society
00:28:13 to work where it’s, you know, in a fully distributed way,
00:28:18 people agree with each other,
00:28:20 not just on financial transactions,
00:28:22 but you know, on their personal security,
00:28:28 on sort of military type of stuff, on healthcare,
00:28:31 on education, all those kinds of things.
00:28:34 And where does it break down?
00:28:35 Well, I wouldn’t press a button to say get rid
00:28:37 of our current constitution, which I view is pretty good
00:28:40 and quite wise, but I think the deeper point
00:28:43 is that all societies are in some regards anarchistic
00:28:47 and we should take the anarchists seriously.
00:28:49 So globally, there’s a kind of anarchy across borders,
00:28:53 even within federalistic systems, they’re typically complex.
00:28:57 There’s not a clear transitivity necessarily
00:29:00 of who has the final say over what,
00:29:03 just the state vis a vis its people.
00:29:05 There’s not per se a final arbitrator in that regard.
00:29:09 So you want a good anarchy rather than a bad anarchy.
00:29:13 You wanna squish your anarchy into the right corners.
00:29:15 And I don’t think there’s a theoretical answer
00:29:18 how to do it, but you start with a country,
00:29:20 like is it working well enough now?
00:29:23 This country, you’d say mostly,
00:29:25 you’d certainly wanna make a lot of improvements.
00:29:28 And that’s why I don’t wanna press that
00:29:29 get rid of the constitution button,
00:29:31 but to just dump on the anarchists is to miss the point.
00:29:34 Always try to learn from any opinion.
00:29:37 What in it is true?
00:29:39 I’m just like marveling at the poetry
00:29:42 of saying that we should squish our anarchy
00:29:45 into the right corners of it.
00:29:48 Okay, I gotta ask, I’ve been talking with,
00:29:53 since we’re doing a whirlwind introduction
00:29:55 to all of economics,
00:29:57 I’ve been talking to a few objectivists recently
00:30:00 and just, Ayn Rand comes up as a person,
00:30:04 as a philosopher throughout many conversations.
00:30:07 A lot of people really despise her.
00:30:09 A lot of people really love her.
00:30:11 It’s always weird to me when somebody arouses a philosophy
00:30:14 or a human being arouses that much emotion
00:30:16 in either direction, does she make,
00:30:20 do you understand, first of all, that level of emotion
00:30:22 and what are your thoughts about Ayn Rand
00:30:25 and her philosophy of objectivism?
00:30:26 Is it useful at all to think about this kind of formulation
00:30:31 of a rational self interest,
00:30:34 if I could put it in those words,
00:30:36 or I guess more negatively the selfishness
00:30:43 or she would put, I guess, the virtue of selfishness.
00:30:46 Ayn Rand was a big influence on me growing up.
00:30:49 The book that really mattered for me was
00:30:50 Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal.
00:30:53 The notion that wealth creates opportunity
00:30:56 and good lives and wealth is something we ought to valorize
00:30:59 and give very high status.
00:31:01 It’s one of her key ideas.
00:31:02 I think it’s completely correct.
00:31:04 I think she has the most profound
00:31:06 and articulate statement of that idea.
00:31:08 That said, as a philosopher,
00:31:10 I disagree with her on most things.
00:31:12 And I did, even like as a boy, when I was reading her,
00:31:15 I read Plato before Ayn Rand.
00:31:17 And in a Socratic dialogue,
00:31:19 there’s all these different points of view
00:31:20 being thrown around.
00:31:22 And whomever it is you agree with,
00:31:24 you understand the wisdom is in the coming together
00:31:27 of the different points of view.
00:31:28 And she doesn’t have that.
00:31:29 So altruism can be wonderful in my view.
00:31:32 Humans are not actually that rational.
00:31:35 Self interest is often poorly defined.
00:31:38 To pound the table and say existence exists.
00:31:41 I wouldn’t say I disagree,
00:31:42 but I’m not sure that it’s a very meaningful statement.
00:31:46 I think the secret to Ayn Rand is that she was Russian.
00:31:49 I’d love to have her on my podcast if she was still alive.
00:31:52 I’d only ask her about Russia,
00:31:53 which she mostly never talked about
00:31:56 after writing We the Living.
00:31:57 And she is much more Russian than she seems at first,
00:32:01 even like purging people from the objectivist circles.
00:32:04 It’s like how Russians, especially female Russians,
00:32:07 so often purge their friends.
00:32:09 It’s weird, all the parallels.
00:32:11 So you’re saying, so yes,
00:32:13 so assuming she’s still not around,
00:32:17 but if she is and she comes onto your podcast,
00:32:20 can you dig into that a little bit?
00:32:21 Do you mean like her personal demons
00:32:26 around the social and economic Russia of the time,
00:32:31 when she escaped?
00:32:32 The traumas she suffered there,
00:32:34 what she really likes in the music and literature and why.
00:32:37 Music and literature, huh?
00:32:38 And getting deeply into that,
00:32:40 her view of relations between the sexes and Russia,
00:32:42 how it differs from America,
00:32:44 why she still carries through the old Russian vision
00:32:48 in her fiction, this extreme sexual dimorphism,
00:32:51 but with also very strong women,
00:32:53 to me is a uniquely, at least Eastern European vision,
00:32:57 mostly Russian, I would say.
00:33:00 And that’s in her, that’s her actual real philosophy,
00:33:03 not this table bounding existence exists.
00:33:06 And that’s not talked about enough.
00:33:07 She’s a Russian philosopher.
00:33:09 Or Soviet, whatever you wanna call it.
00:33:12 And if she wasn’t so certain,
00:33:14 she could have been a Dostoevsky where it’s not,
00:33:17 that certainty is almost the thing
00:33:19 that brings out the adoration of millions,
00:33:23 but also the hatred of millions.
00:33:25 She became a cult figure in a somewhat Russian like manner.
00:33:29 Yeah.
00:33:29 Yeah.
00:33:30 It is what it is.
00:33:32 But I love the idea that, again,
00:33:34 you’re just dropping bombs that are poetic,
00:33:37 that the wisdom is in the coming together of ideas.
00:33:40 It’s kind of interesting to think
00:33:42 that no one human possesses wisdom.
00:33:46 No one idea is the wisdom.
00:33:49 That the coming together is the wisdom.
00:33:52 Like in my view, Boswell’s Life of Johnson,
00:33:54 18th century British biography.
00:33:56 It’s in essence a coauthored work, Boswell and Johnson.
00:33:59 It’s one of the greatest philosophy books ever,
00:34:02 though it is commonly regarded as a biography.
00:34:05 John Stuart Mill, who in a sense
00:34:07 was coauthoring with Harriet Taylor,
00:34:10 better philosopher than is realized,
00:34:12 though he’s rated very, very highly.
00:34:14 Plato slash Socrates, a lot of the greatest works
00:34:18 are in a kind of dialogue form.
00:34:19 Curtis Faust would be another example.
00:34:23 It’s very much a dialogue.
00:34:24 And yes, it’s drama, but it’s also a philosophy.
00:34:27 Shakespeare, maybe the wisest thinker of them all.
00:34:31 In your book, Big Business, speaking of Ayn Rand,
00:34:35 Big Business, A Love Letter to an American Antihero,
00:34:38 you make the case for the benefit
00:34:41 that large businesses bring to society.
00:34:43 Can you explain?
00:34:45 If you look at, say, the pandemic,
00:34:46 which has been a catastrophic event, right,
00:34:49 for many reasons, but who is it that saved us?
00:34:52 So Amazon has done remarkably well.
00:34:56 They upped their delivery game more or less overnight
00:34:59 with very few hitches.
00:35:00 I’ve ordered hundreds of Amazon packages,
00:35:03 direct delivery food, whether it’s DoorDash or Uber Eats,
00:35:07 or using Whole Foods through Amazon shipping.
00:35:10 Again, it’s gone remarkably well.
00:35:12 Switching over our entire higher educational system,
00:35:15 basically within two weeks, to Zoom.
00:35:18 Zoom did it.
00:35:19 I mean, I’ve had a Zoom outage,
00:35:21 but their performance rate has been remarkably high.
00:35:24 So if you just look at resources, competence, incentives,
00:35:29 who’s been the star performers, the NBA even,
00:35:31 just canceling the season as early as they did,
00:35:34 sending a message like, hey, people, this is real,
00:35:37 and then pulling off the bubble
00:35:39 with not a single found case of COVID
00:35:41 and having all the testing set up in advance.
00:35:45 Big business has done very well lately,
00:35:47 and throughout the broader course of American history,
00:35:50 in my view, has mostly been a hero.
00:35:53 Can we engage in a kind of therapy session?
00:35:58 I’m often troubled by the negativity towards big business,
00:36:04 and I wonder if you could help figure out
00:36:07 how we remove that or maybe first psychoanalyze it
00:36:11 and then how we remove it.
00:36:12 It feels like once we’ve gotten wifi on flights,
00:36:20 on airplane flights, people started complaining
00:36:24 about how shady the connection is, right?
00:36:27 They take it for granted immediately
00:36:29 and then start complaining about little details.
00:36:31 Another example that’s closer to,
00:36:36 especially as an aspiring entrepreneur,
00:36:39 is closer to the things I’m thinking about
00:36:41 is Jack Dorsey with Twitter.
00:36:45 To me, Twitter has enabled
00:36:46 an incredible platform of communication,
00:36:50 and yet the biggest thing that people talk about
00:36:53 is not how incredible this platform is.
00:36:58 They essentially use the platform
00:37:00 to complain about the censorship of a few individuals
00:37:04 as opposed to how amazing it is.
00:37:06 Now, you should talk about how shady the wifi is
00:37:09 and how censorship or the removal of Donald Trump
00:37:12 from the platform is a bad thing,
00:37:13 but it feels like we don’t talk about the positive impacts
00:37:17 at scale of these technologies.
00:37:20 Can you explain why and is there a way to fix it?
00:37:23 I don’t know if we can fix it.
00:37:25 I think we are beings of high neuroticism for the most part
00:37:29 as a personality trait.
00:37:30 Not everyone, but most people.
00:37:33 And as a compliment to that,
00:37:34 if someone says 10 nice things about you and one insult,
00:37:38 you’re more bothered by the insult
00:37:39 than you’re pleased by the nice things,
00:37:41 especially if the insult is somewhat true.
00:37:43 So you have these media, these vehicles,
00:37:46 Twitter is one you mentioned,
00:37:48 where there’s all kinds of messages going back and forth,
00:37:50 and you’re really bugged by the messages you don’t like.
00:37:53 Most people are neurotic to begin with.
00:37:56 It’s not only taken out on big business, to be clear.
00:37:58 So Congress catches a lot of grief
00:38:01 and some of it they deserve, yes.
00:38:05 Religion is not attacked the same way,
00:38:07 but religiosity is declining.
00:38:09 If you poll people, the military still polls quite well,
00:38:14 but people are very disillusioned with many things.
00:38:17 And the Martin Gury thesis that because of the internet,
00:38:19 you just see more of things.
00:38:21 And the more you see of something,
00:38:22 whether it’s good, bad, or in between,
00:38:24 the more you will find to complain about,
00:38:26 I suspect is the fundamental mechanism here.
00:38:30 I mean, look at Clubhouse, right?
00:38:32 To me, it’s a great service, may or may not be like my thing,
00:38:35 but gives people this opportunity.
00:38:37 No one makes you go on it.
00:38:39 And all these media articles like,
00:38:40 oh, is Clubhouse gonna wreck things?
00:38:42 Are they gonna break things?
00:38:44 New York Times is complaining.
00:38:45 Of course, it’s their competitor as well.
00:38:48 I’m like, give these people a chance, talk it up.
00:38:50 You may or may not like it.
00:38:52 Let’s praise the people who are getting something done.
00:38:55 Very Ayn Randian point.
00:38:57 As an economic thinker, as a writer, as a podcaster,
00:39:01 what do you think about Clubhouse?
00:39:03 What do you think about…
00:39:06 Okay, let me just throw my feeling about it.
00:39:09 I used to use Discord, which is another service
00:39:12 where people use voice.
00:39:13 So the only thing you do is just hear each other.
00:39:16 There’s no face, you just see a little icon.
00:39:19 That’s the essential element of Clubhouse.
00:39:23 And there’s an intimacy to voice only communication.
00:39:26 That’s hard.
00:39:27 That didn’t make sense to me, but it was just what it is,
00:39:30 which feels like something that won’t last
00:39:33 for some reason, maybe it’s the cynical view.
00:39:36 But what’s your sense about the intimacy
00:39:40 of what’s happening right now with Clubhouse?
00:39:43 I’ve greatly enjoyed what I’ve done,
00:39:45 but I’m not sure it’s for me in the long run
00:39:47 for two reasons.
00:39:48 First, if you compare it to doing a podcast,
00:39:52 podcasting has greater reach than Clubhouse.
00:39:55 So I would rather put time into my podcast.
00:39:58 But then also my core asset, so to speak,
00:40:02 is I’m a very fast reader.
00:40:04 So audio per se is not necessarily to my advantage.
00:40:08 I don’t speak or listen faster than other people.
00:40:10 In fact, I’m a slower listener because I like 1.0,
00:40:13 not 1.5X.
00:40:15 So I should spend less time on audio
00:40:17 and more time reading and writing.
00:40:18 Yeah, it’s interesting because you mentioned podcasts
00:40:21 and audio books, the podcasts are recorded
00:40:28 and so I can skip things, like I can skip commercials,
00:40:32 or I can skip parts where it’s like,
00:40:34 ugh, this part is boring.
00:40:36 With live conversations, especially when,
00:40:40 there’s a magic to the fact when you have a lot of people
00:40:42 participating in that conversation,
00:40:44 but some people are like, ugh, this topic,
00:40:47 they’re going into this thing and you can’t skip it
00:40:50 or you can’t fast forward, you can go 1.5X or 2X,
00:40:53 you can’t speed it up.
00:40:56 Nevertheless, there’s a tension between that,
00:40:58 so that’s the productivity aspect,
00:41:00 with the actual magic of live communication,
00:41:04 where anything can happen, where Elon Musk
00:41:07 can ask the CEO of Robinhood, Vlad, about like,
00:41:11 hey, somebody holding a gun to your head,
00:41:13 there’s something shady going on, the magic of that.
00:41:16 That’s also my criticism of like,
00:41:18 there’s been a recent conversation with Bill Gates
00:41:20 that he won a platform and had a regular interview
00:41:26 on the platform without allowing the possibility
00:41:29 of the magic of the chaos.
00:41:32 So I’m not exactly sure, it’s probably not the right
00:41:36 platform for you and for many other people
00:41:38 who are exceptionally productive in other places,
00:41:40 but there’s still nevertheless a magic to the chaos
00:41:43 that can be created with live conversation
00:41:45 that gives me pause.
00:41:47 Maybe what it’s perfect for is the tribute.
00:41:50 So they had an episode recently that I didn’t hear,
00:41:52 but I heard it was wonderful.
00:41:54 It was anecdotes about Steve Jobs.
00:41:56 That you can’t do one to one, right?
00:41:58 And you don’t want control.
00:41:59 You want different people appearing and stepping up
00:42:02 and saying their bit.
00:42:03 And Clubhouse is 110% perfect for that.
00:42:07 The tribute.
00:42:08 I love that, the tribute.
00:42:10 But there’s also the possibility,
00:42:12 I think there was a time when somebody arranged
00:42:15 a conversation with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage.
00:42:18 I remember that happened a long time ago.
00:42:22 And it was very formal.
00:42:26 It could have probably gone better,
00:42:27 but it was still magical to have these people
00:42:30 that obviously had a bunch of tension
00:42:32 throughout their history.
00:42:35 It’s so frictionless to have two major figures
00:42:39 in world history just jump on a Clubhouse stage.
00:42:42 Putin and Elon Musk.
00:42:43 Putin and Elon Musk.
00:42:45 And that’s exactly it.
00:42:47 So there’s a language barrier there.
00:42:48 There’s also the problem that in particular,
00:42:52 it’s like Biden would have a similar problem.
00:42:55 It’s like they’re just not into a new technology.
00:42:58 So it’s very hard to catch the Kremlin up to,
00:43:01 first of all, Twitter,
00:43:03 but to catch them up to Clubhouse,
00:43:05 you have to have the,
00:43:07 Elon Musk has a sense of the internet,
00:43:08 the humor, the memes, and all that kind of stuff
00:43:10 that you have to have in order to use a new app
00:43:14 and figure out the timing, the beat,
00:43:16 what is this thing about?
00:43:19 So that’s the challenge there.
00:43:20 But that’s exactly it.
00:43:21 That magic of have two big personalities just show up.
00:43:27 And I wonder if it’s just the temporary thing
00:43:30 that we’re going through with the pandemic
00:43:32 where people are just lonely
00:43:35 and they’re seeking for that human connection
00:43:37 that we usually get elsewhere through our work.
00:43:40 But they’ll stay lonely, in my opinion.
00:43:42 You think so? I do.
00:43:44 So it is a pandemic thing, but I think it will persist.
00:43:48 And the idea of wanting to be connected
00:43:49 to more of the world, Clubhouse will still offer that.
00:43:53 And all the mental health issues out there,
00:43:56 a lot of people have broken ties
00:43:58 and they will still be lonely post vaccines.
00:44:02 Yeah, I, from an artificial intelligence perspective,
00:44:06 have a sense that there is like a deep loneliness
00:44:10 in the world, that all of us are really lonely.
00:44:13 Like we don’t even acknowledge it.
00:44:14 Even people in happy relationships,
00:44:16 it feels like there’s like an iceberg of loneliness
00:44:19 in all of us, like seeking to be understood,
00:44:22 like deeply understood, understanding us,
00:44:24 like having somebody with whom you can have
00:44:27 a deep interaction enough to where you can,
00:44:31 they can help you to understand yourself
00:44:34 and they also understand you.
00:44:36 Like I have a sense that artificial intelligence systems
00:44:38 can provide that as well, but humans,
00:44:42 I think crave that from other humans
00:44:44 in ways that we perhaps don’t acknowledge.
00:44:46 And I have a hope that technology will enable that
00:44:48 more and more, like Clubhouse is an example
00:44:50 that allows that.
00:44:52 Are touring bots gonna out compete Clubhouse?
00:44:54 Like why not sort of program your own session?
00:44:57 You’ll just talk into your device
00:44:59 and say here’s the kind of conversation I want
00:45:02 and it will create the characters for you.
00:45:04 And it may not be as good as Elon and Vladimir Putin,
00:45:07 but it will be better than ordinary Clubhouse.
00:45:09 Yeah, and one of the things that’s missing,
00:45:11 it’s not just conversation, it’s memory.
00:45:14 So longterm memories, what current AI systems don’t have
00:45:19 is sharing experience together.
00:45:21 Forget the words, it’s like sharing the highs
00:45:24 and the lows of life together
00:45:26 and the systems around us remembering that.
00:45:29 Remembering we’ve been through that.
00:45:31 Like that’s the thing that creates
00:45:32 really close relationships, is going through some shit.
00:45:35 Like struggle.
00:45:37 If you survive together, there’s something really difficult
00:45:41 that bonds you with other humans.
00:45:42 And this is related to immigration and the American dream.
00:45:46 In what way?
00:45:47 The people who have come to this country,
00:45:48 however weird and different they may be,
00:45:51 they or their ancestors at some point
00:45:53 probably have shared this thing.
00:45:58 Right, US is not gonna split up.
00:46:00 It may get more screwed up as a country,
00:46:02 but Texas and California are not gonna break off.
00:46:05 I mean, they’re big enough where they could do it,
00:46:07 but it’s just never gonna happen.
00:46:08 We’ve been through too much together.
00:46:10 Yeah.
00:46:11 Yeah, that’s a hopeful message.
00:46:14 Do you think, some people have talked to Eric Weinstein,
00:46:17 you’ve talked to Eric Weinstein.
00:46:20 He has a sense that growth,
00:46:23 like the entirety of the American system
00:46:26 is based on the assumption that we’re gonna grow forever,
00:46:28 that the economy’s gonna grow forever.
00:46:30 Do you think economic growth will continue indefinitely?
00:46:35 Or will we stagnate?
00:46:37 I’ve long been in agreement with Eric, Peter Thiel,
00:46:40 Robert Gordon and others, that growth has slowed down.
00:46:45 I argued that in my book,
00:46:46 The Great Stagnation, appropriately titled.
00:46:49 But the last two years, I’ve become much more optimistic.
00:46:52 I’ve seen a lot of breakthroughs
00:46:53 in green energy and battery technology.
00:46:56 mRNA vaccines and medicine is a big deal already.
00:47:00 It will repair our GDP
00:47:02 and save millions of lives around the world.
00:47:05 There’s an anti malaria vaccine
00:47:07 that’s now in stage three trial, it probably works.
00:47:10 CRISPR to defeat sickle cell anemia.
00:47:13 Just space, area after area after area,
00:47:16 there’s suddenly the surge of breakthroughs.
00:47:18 I would say many of them rooted in superior computation
00:47:22 and ultimately Moore’s law
00:47:23 and access to those computational abilities.
00:47:26 So I’m much more optimistic than say,
00:47:28 the last time I spoke to Eric.
00:47:30 I don’t know, he moves all the time in his views.
00:47:32 I don’t know where he’s going.
00:47:34 His views, I don’t know where he’s at now.
00:47:35 He’s not at, he hasn’t gained, that’s really interesting.
00:47:38 So your little drop of optimism comes from like,
00:47:44 there might be a fundamental shift
00:47:46 in the kind of things that computation has unlocked for us
00:47:49 in terms of like, it could be a wellspring of innovation
00:47:52 that enables growth for a long time to come.
00:47:55 Like Eric has not quite connected
00:47:59 to the computation aspect yet
00:48:01 to where it could be a wellspring of innovation.
00:48:04 But you’re very close to it in your own work.
00:48:06 I don’t have to tell you that.
00:48:07 The work you’re doing would not have been possible
00:48:10 not very long ago.
00:48:11 But the question is,
00:48:12 how much does that work enable continued growth
00:48:14 for decades to come?
00:48:16 For all their problems,
00:48:17 some version of driverless vehicles will be a thing.
00:48:20 I’m not sure when, you know much better than I do.
00:48:23 Maybe only partially, but that too will be a big deal.
00:48:26 Well, one of the open questions
00:48:28 that sort of the Peter Thiel School area of ideas
00:48:32 is how much can be converted to technology?
00:48:36 How much, how many parts of our lives
00:48:38 can technology integrate and then innovate?
00:48:40 Like can it replace healthcare?
00:48:43 Can it replace the legal system?
00:48:46 Can it replace government?
00:48:47 Not replace, but like, you know, make it digital
00:48:52 and thereby enable computation to improve it, right?
00:48:57 That’s the open question,
00:48:58 because many aspects of our lives
00:49:00 are still not really that digitized.
00:49:06 There was a New York Times symposium in April,
00:49:08 which is not long ago.
00:49:09 And they asked the so called experts,
00:49:11 when are we gonna get vaccines?
00:49:13 And the most optimistic answer was in four years.
00:49:17 And obviously we beat that by a long mile.
00:49:21 So I think people still haven’t woken up.
00:49:23 You mentioned my tiny drop of optimism,
00:49:25 but it’s a big drop of optimism.
00:49:27 Is it a waterfall yet?
00:49:28 I mean, is it just?
00:49:30 Well, here’s my pessimism.
00:49:32 Whenever there are major new technologies,
00:49:34 they also tend to be used for violence
00:49:36 directly or indirectly, radio, Hitler.
00:49:39 Not that he hit people over the head with radios,
00:49:41 but it enabled the rise of various dictators.
00:49:44 So the new technologies now, whatever exactly they may be,
00:49:48 they’re gonna cause a lot of trouble.
00:49:50 And that’s my pessimism.
00:49:51 Not that I think they’re all gonna slow to a trickle.
00:49:54 When was the stagnation book?
00:49:56 2011.
00:49:57 2011.
00:49:58 Yes.
00:49:59 It was the first of the stagnation books, in fact.
00:50:03 It’s very interesting.
00:50:05 But even then I said, this is temporary.
00:50:07 And I was predicting it would be gone
00:50:09 in about 20 years time.
00:50:12 I’m not sure that’s exactly the right prediction,
00:50:14 like 2030, but I think we’re actually gonna beat that.
00:50:19 So you think United States might still be
00:50:21 on top of the world for the rest of the century
00:50:22 in terms of its economic growth,
00:50:26 impact on the world, scientific innovation,
00:50:28 all those kinds of things?
00:50:29 That’s too long to predict,
00:50:31 but I’m bullish on America in general.
00:50:35 Got it.
00:50:36 Speaking of being bullish on America,
00:50:38 the opposite of that is,
00:50:43 we talked about capitalism,
00:50:44 we talked about Iran and her Russian roots.
00:50:47 What do you think about communism?
00:50:51 Why doesn’t it work?
00:50:53 Is it the implementation?
00:50:58 Is there anything about its ideas that you find compelling?
00:51:01 Or is it just a fundamentally flawed system?
00:51:06 Well, communism is like capitalism.
00:51:08 The words mean many things to different people.
00:51:10 You could argue my life as a tenured professor
00:51:12 comes closer to communism than anything
00:51:15 the human race has seen.
00:51:16 And I would argue it works pretty well.
00:51:19 But look, if you mean the Soviet Union,
00:51:21 it devolved pretty quickly
00:51:23 to a kind of decentralized set of incentives
00:51:27 that were destructive rather than value maximizing.
00:51:30 It wasn’t even central planning, much less communism.
00:51:34 So Paul Craig Roberts and Polanyi were correct
00:51:37 in their descriptions of the Soviet system.
00:51:39 Think of it as weird mixes of barter
00:51:41 and malfunctioning incentives
00:51:44 and being very good at a whole bunch of things,
00:51:47 but in terms of progress, innovation,
00:51:48 and consumer goods, it really being quite a failure.
00:51:54 And now I wouldn’t call that communism,
00:51:56 but that’s what I think of the system the Soviets had.
00:52:00 And it required an ever increasing pile of lies
00:52:04 that both alienated people, but created an elite
00:52:07 that by the end of the thing
00:52:08 no longer believed in the system itself,
00:52:12 or even thought they were doing better by being crooks
00:52:15 than by just say moving to Switzerland
00:52:17 and being an upper middle class individual,
00:52:18 like you would have a higher standard of living
00:52:20 by Gorbachev’s time, not Gorbachev,
00:52:23 but if you’re a number 30 in the hierarchy,
00:52:25 you’re better off as a middle class person in Switzerland.
00:52:27 And that, of course, did not prove sustainable.
00:52:31 And so it’s, what is it, a momentum of bureaucracy
00:52:33 or something like that, it just builds up
00:52:34 where you lose control of the original vision,
00:52:37 and that naturally happens, it’s just people.
00:52:40 And you can’t use normal profit and loss
00:52:41 and price incentives, so you get all prices
00:52:44 or most prices set too low, right?
00:52:46 Shortages everywhere, people trade favors,
00:52:49 you have this culture of bartered bribes,
00:52:52 sexual favors or family friends,
00:52:55 and you get more and more of that,
00:52:57 and you over time lose more and more of the information
00:52:59 and the prices and quantities and practices
00:53:03 and norms you had, and that sort of slowly decays,
00:53:06 and then by the end no one is believing in it.
00:53:09 That would be my take, but again, you’re the expert here.
00:53:12 The Russian scholar, well, I’m perhaps no more
00:53:17 an expert than Ayn Rand, it’s more personal
00:53:20 than it is scholarly or historic.
00:53:25 So Stalin held power for 30 years,
00:53:29 Vladimir Putin has held power for 21 years,
00:53:34 where you could argue he took a little break.
00:53:36 But not much, he was still holding power, I think.
00:53:39 And it’s still possible now with the new constitution
00:53:44 that he could hold power from longer than Stalin,
00:53:47 longer than 30 years.
00:53:48 What do you think about the man,
00:53:51 the state of affairs in Russia,
00:53:54 in general, the system they have there?
00:53:57 Is there something interesting to you
00:53:59 as an economist, as a human being, about Russia?
00:54:02 Everything is interesting.
00:54:03 I mean, here would be part of my take.
00:54:05 As you know, the Russian economy starting, what, 1999, 2000,
00:54:11 has really quite a few years of super excellent growth.
00:54:15 And Putin is still riding on that.
00:54:17 It more or less coincides with his rise
00:54:20 as the truly focal figure on the scene.
00:54:24 Since then, pretty recently, they’ve had a bunch of years
00:54:26 of negative four to 5% growth in a row, which is terrible.
00:54:31 The economy is way too dependent on fossil fuels,
00:54:35 but the structural problem is this.
00:54:37 You need a concordance across economic power,
00:54:40 social power, political power.
00:54:43 They don’t have to be allocated identically,
00:54:45 but they have to be allocated consistently.
00:54:49 And the Russian system under Putin,
00:54:51 from almost the beginning, has never been able to have that,
00:54:55 that ultimately his incentives are to steer the system
00:54:58 where the economic power is in a small number of hands
00:55:01 in a non diversified way.
00:55:03 The system won’t deliver sustainable gains
00:55:06 in living standards anymore ever the way it’s set up now.
00:55:11 Though if fossil fuel prices go up,
00:55:13 they’ll have some good years for sure.
00:55:15 And that is really quite structural, what has gone wrong.
00:55:20 And then on top of that, you can have an opinion of Putin,
00:55:23 but you’ve got to start with those structural problems.
00:55:25 And that’s why it’s just not going to work.
00:55:28 But he had all those good years in the beginning.
00:55:30 So the number of Russians, say, who live here
00:55:33 or in Russia, who love Putin and it’s sincere,
00:55:36 they’re not just afraid of being dragged away,
00:55:39 like that’s a real phenomenon.
00:55:41 Yeah, I’m really torn on Putin’s approval rating,
00:55:45 real approval rating seems to be very high.
00:55:49 And I’m torn in whether that has to do with the fact
00:55:54 that there is control of the press,
00:55:58 or if it’s, which is the people I talked to
00:56:01 who are in Russia, family and so on, a genuine love
00:56:04 of Putin, appreciation of what Putin has done
00:56:07 and is going to do with Russia.
00:56:10 And a lot of that would go away
00:56:11 if the press were freer, I think.
00:56:13 Yes, well, Singapore realizes this,
00:56:15 anyone discussed by the press, no matter who they are,
00:56:18 people in Singapore have done a great job.
00:56:20 Yes.
00:56:22 But if you’re discussed by the press, you don’t look good.
00:56:24 Tech company executives are learning this, right?
00:56:27 It’s just like a rule.
00:56:28 So in that sense, I think the rating is artificially high,
00:56:32 but I don’t by any means think it’s all insincere,
00:56:36 but that high popularity I view as bearish for Russia.
00:56:39 I would feel better about the country
00:56:40 if people were more pissed off at him.
00:56:43 Yeah, that’s right.
00:56:44 It’s nice to see free speech, even if it’s full of hate.
00:56:49 I am also troubled on the scientific side
00:56:52 and entrepreneurial side, it seems difficult
00:56:55 to be an entrepreneur in Russia.
00:56:58 Like it’s not even in terms of rules,
00:57:03 it’s just culturally, the people I speak to,
00:57:06 it’s not easy to build a business, no.
00:57:11 It’s not easy to even dream of building a business in Russia.
00:57:15 That’s just not part of the culture,
00:57:17 part of the conversation.
00:57:19 It’s almost like the conversation is,
00:57:21 if you wanna be the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk,
00:57:25 or Steve Jobs or whatever, you come to America.
00:57:28 That’s the sense they have.
00:57:29 Yeah, history matters.
00:57:34 Is it history, is it structural problems of today?
00:57:37 It’s all the same thing.
00:57:38 So a history of hostility to commerce,
00:57:40 which of course the old USSR is gone,
00:57:45 but a lot of the attitudes remain,
00:57:47 a lot of the corruption remains.
00:57:49 You have this legacy distribution of wealth
00:57:51 from the auctioning off of the assets,
00:57:53 which is not conducive to some kind of broadly egalitarian
00:57:56 democracy, and so you have these small number
00:57:59 of power points that try to control information and wealth
00:58:03 and not really so keen to encourage the others
00:58:06 who ultimately would pull the balance of political power
00:58:08 away from the very wealthy and from Putin,
00:58:11 and they support that culture,
00:58:13 and the return of interest in Orthodox Church and all that,
00:58:16 it’s all part of the same piece, I think,
00:58:19 because the old Orthodox Church is not that pro commerce,
00:58:22 you’d have to say, but it’s traditionalist,
00:58:24 it’s pro family, those are safer ideas,
00:58:27 and then there’s such a great safety valve,
00:58:29 the most ambitious, smartest people,
00:58:31 like they probably will learn English,
00:58:33 they sort of can look like they belong
00:58:35 in all sorts of other countries,
00:58:37 they can show up and blend in, super talented,
00:58:39 they’ve probably had an excellent education,
00:58:42 especially if they’re from one of the two major cities,
00:58:44 but even if not so, even from Siberia,
00:58:47 and they go off, they leave,
00:58:49 they’re not a source of opposition,
00:58:51 and that keeps the whole thing up and running
00:58:52 for another generation.
00:58:54 Yeah, what do you make of the other big player, China?
00:59:01 They seem to have a very different messed up,
00:59:05 but also functioning system.
00:59:09 They seem to be much better at encouraging entrepreneurs.
00:59:13 They’re choosing winners,
00:59:15 but what do you make of the entire Chinese system?
00:59:18 Why does it work as well as it does currently?
00:59:22 What are your concerns about it,
00:59:24 and what are its threats to the United States,
00:59:28 or possible, what is it you said,
00:59:32 wisdom isn’t when two ideas come together,
00:59:34 is there some possible benefits
00:59:36 of these kinds of ideas coming together?
00:59:40 It’s amazing what China has done,
00:59:42 but I would say to put it in perspective,
00:59:44 if you compare them to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan,
00:59:47 Hong Kong, and Singapore,
00:59:49 they’ve still done much worse, not even close.
00:59:53 And that’s both living standards,
00:59:55 or I hesitate to cite democracy
00:59:58 as an unalloyed good in and of itself,
01:00:00 but there’s more freedom in all those other places by a lot.
01:00:04 So China has all these problems of history,
01:00:07 but they’ve managed, as actually the Soviets did
01:00:09 in the middle of the 20th century,
01:00:12 one of the two great mass migrations
01:00:14 from the countryside to cities,
01:00:15 which boosts productivity enormously
01:00:18 and will sustain totalitarian systems,
01:00:21 but they moved from a totalitarian system to an oligarchy
01:00:24 where the CCP is actually, at least for a while,
01:00:29 hey, have been really good at governing,
01:00:31 have made a lot of very good decisions.
01:00:33 You have to admit that.
01:00:35 I don’t know how long that streak will continue
01:00:38 with one person so much now holding authority
01:00:43 in a more extreme manner.
01:00:45 The selection pressures for the next generation
01:00:48 of high level CCP members probably become much worse.
01:00:52 You have this general problem of the state owned enterprise
01:00:55 is losing relative productivity
01:00:57 compared to the private sector.
01:00:58 Well, we’re gonna kind of hold Jack Ma on this island
01:01:02 and he can only issue like weird hello statements.
01:01:06 It kind of smells bad to me.
01:01:08 I don’t feel that it’s about to crash,
01:01:10 but I don’t see them supplanting America
01:01:14 as like the world’s number one country.
01:01:17 I think they will muddle through
01:01:19 and have very serious problems,
01:01:21 but there’s enough talent there they will muddle through.
01:01:24 Is there ideas from China or from anywhere in general
01:01:26 of large scale role of government
01:01:29 that you find might be useful?
01:01:30 Like Andrew Yang recently ran on a platform,
01:01:33 UBI, right, Universal Basic Income.
01:01:37 Is there some interesting ideas of large scale
01:01:43 government sort of welfare programs at scale
01:01:47 that you find interesting?
01:01:51 Well, keep in mind the current version
01:01:54 of the Chinese Communist Party post now dismantled
01:01:57 what was called the iron rice ball.
01:02:00 So it took apart the healthcare protections,
01:02:02 a lot of the welfare system, a lot of the guaranteed jobs.
01:02:05 So the economic rise of China coincided
01:02:08 with the weakening of welfare.
01:02:10 I’m not saying that’s causal per se,
01:02:12 but people think of China as having a government
01:02:16 that takes care of everyone, it’s very far from the truth.
01:02:19 And by a lot of metrics,
01:02:20 I don’t mean control over people’s lives,
01:02:23 I don’t mean speech, but by a lot of metrics,
01:02:25 economically we have a lot more government than they do.
01:02:28 So what one means here by like government, private control,
01:02:32 I don’t think you can just add up the numbers
01:02:35 and get a simple answer.
01:02:36 They’ve been fantastic at building infrastructure in cities
01:02:40 in ways that will attract people from the countryside.
01:02:44 And furthermore, they more or less enforce a meritocracy
01:02:47 in this sense.
01:02:48 Like if you’re a kid of a rich guy,
01:02:51 you’ll get unfair privilege.
01:02:53 That’s unfair, but systems can afford that.
01:02:56 If you are smart and from the countryside
01:02:57 and your parents have nothing,
01:02:59 you will be elevated and sent to a very good school,
01:03:02 graduate school because of the exam system.
01:03:05 And they do that and they mean that very consistently.
01:03:08 It’s like the Soviets had a version of that
01:03:10 like for chess and romantic piano.
01:03:12 Not for everything, but where they had it,
01:03:14 like again, they were tremendous, right?
01:03:17 Yeah, exactly.
01:03:18 And Chinese have it in so many areas,
01:03:21 a genuine meritocracy in this one way.
01:03:23 That moves people from the rural to the big city
01:03:26 and that’s a big boost of productivity
01:03:29 for some amount of time.
01:03:30 And when they get there, they’re taken seriously.
01:03:32 Jack Ma was riding a bicycle,
01:03:34 teaching English in his late 20s.
01:03:35 He was a poor guy.
01:03:39 Not a society of credentialism.
01:03:41 Or in America, it’s way too much a credentialist society.
01:03:45 As we’re talking about even with the Nobel Prize.
01:03:47 But what do you think about these large government programs
01:03:51 like UBI?
01:03:53 The one version of UBI that makes the most sense to me
01:03:55 is the Mitt Romney version, UBI for kids.
01:03:59 Like kids are vulnerable.
01:04:00 If their parents screw up, you shouldn’t blame the kid
01:04:03 or make the kids suffer.
01:04:04 I believe in something like UBI for kids.
01:04:07 Maybe just cash.
01:04:09 But if you don’t have kids, even with AI,
01:04:13 my sense is at least in the world we know,
01:04:16 you should be able to find a way to adjust.
01:04:19 You might have to move to North Dakota to work,
01:04:24 next to fracking, say.
01:04:26 But look, before the pandemic,
01:04:28 the two most robot intensive societies,
01:04:30 Japan and the US, US at least for manufacturing,
01:04:33 were at full employment.
01:04:35 So maybe there’s some far off day
01:04:37 where there’s literally no work, John Lennon,
01:04:39 and imagine it’s piped everywhere.
01:04:44 And then we might revisit the question.
01:04:47 But for now, we had rising wages in the Trump years
01:04:51 and full employment.
01:04:52 So I don’t see the point.
01:04:54 You don’t see automation as a threat
01:04:57 that fundamentally shakes our society.
01:05:00 It’s a threat in the following sense.
01:05:01 The new technologies are harder to work with
01:05:04 for many people, and that’s a social problem.
01:05:07 But I’m not sure a universal basic income
01:05:10 is the right answer to that very real problem.
01:05:13 Well, that’s also, I like the UBI for kids.
01:05:16 It’s also your definition or the line,
01:05:20 the threshold for what is vulnerable
01:05:21 and what is basic human nature.
01:05:24 Going back to Russia, life is suffering.
01:05:27 That struggle is a part of life.
01:05:31 And perhaps sort of changing,
01:05:33 maybe what defines the 21st century
01:05:36 is having multiple careers
01:05:38 and adjusting and learning and evolving.
01:05:41 And some of the technology in terms of,
01:05:46 some of the technology we see like the internet
01:05:50 allows us to make those pivots easier,
01:05:55 allows later life education possible.
01:05:59 It makes it possible.
01:06:00 I don’t know.
01:06:01 And your earlier point about loneliness
01:06:03 being this fundamental human problem,
01:06:04 which I would agree with strongly,
01:06:07 UBI, if it’s at a high level, will make that worse.
01:06:10 I mean, say UBI were higher enough,
01:06:11 you could just sit at home.
01:06:14 People are not gonna be happy.
01:06:16 They don’t actually want that.
01:06:18 And we’ve relearned that in the pandemic.
01:06:21 Yeah, the flip side, the hope with UBI
01:06:24 is you have a little bit more freedom
01:06:26 to find the thing that alleviates your loneliness.
01:06:29 That’s the idea.
01:06:30 So it’s kind of an open question.
01:06:33 If I give you a million dollars or a billion dollars,
01:06:38 will you pursue the thing you love?
01:06:41 Will you be more motivated to find the thing you love,
01:06:45 to do the thing you love,
01:06:46 or will you be lazy and lose yourself
01:06:50 in the sort of daily activities
01:06:52 that don’t actually bring you joy,
01:06:54 but pacify you in some kind of way
01:06:57 where you just let the days slip by?
01:07:01 That’s the open question.
01:07:02 A lot of the great creators did not have huge cushions,
01:07:05 whether it was Mozart or James Brown
01:07:07 or the great painters in history,
01:07:10 they had to work pretty hard.
01:07:12 And if you look at heirs to great fortunes,
01:07:15 maybe I’m forgetting someone,
01:07:16 but it’s hard to think of any
01:07:18 who have creatively been important as novelists,
01:07:21 or they might have continued to run the family business.
01:07:25 But Van Gogh was not heir to a great family fortune.
01:07:30 It’s sad that cushions get in the way of progress.
01:07:37 It’s the same point about prizes, right?
01:07:39 Inheriting too much money is like winning a prize.
01:07:42 We mentioned Eric, Eric Weinstein.
01:07:45 I know you agree on a bunch of things.
01:07:47 Is there some beautiful, fascinating,
01:07:49 insightful disagreement that you have
01:07:51 that has yet to be resolved with him?
01:07:54 Is there some ideas that you guys battle it out on?
01:07:58 Is it the stagnation question that you mentioned?
01:08:00 That’s one of them, but here’s at least two others.
01:08:05 But I would stress Eric is always evolving.
01:08:08 So I’m just talking about a time slice Eric, right?
01:08:10 I don’t know where he’s at right now.
01:08:12 Like I heard him on Clubhouse three nights ago,
01:08:15 but that was three nights ago.
01:08:17 But I think he’s far too pessimistic
01:08:20 about the impact of immigration on U.S. science.
01:08:23 He thinks it has displaced U.S. scientists,
01:08:26 which I think that is partly true.
01:08:28 I just think we’ve gotten better talent.
01:08:30 I’m like, bring it on, double down.
01:08:33 And look at Kiriko, who basically came up
01:08:35 with mRNA vaccines, she was from Hungary.
01:08:37 And was ridiculed and mocked,
01:08:41 she couldn’t get her papers published.
01:08:42 She stuck at it.
01:08:44 An American might not have been so stubborn
01:08:47 because we have these cushions.
01:08:49 So Eric is all worried, like mathematicians coming in,
01:08:52 they’re discouraging native U.S. citizens from doing math.
01:08:56 I’m like, bring in the best people.
01:08:59 If we all end up in other avocations,
01:09:02 absolutely fine by me.
01:09:04 Does it trouble you that we kick them out
01:09:06 after they get a degree often?
01:09:08 I would give anyone with a plausible graduate degree
01:09:11 a green card, universally.
01:09:13 Yeah, I agree with that, it makes no sense.
01:09:17 It makes so strange that the best people that come here
01:09:19 suffer here, create awesome stuff here,
01:09:22 then when we kick them out, it doesn’t make any sense.
01:09:24 Here’s another view I have.
01:09:25 I call it open borders for Belarus.
01:09:29 Now Russia’s a big country.
01:09:30 I would gladly increase the Russian quota
01:09:33 by three X, four X, five X, not 20%, but a big boost.
01:09:39 But Belarus, a small country, and they’re poor,
01:09:44 and they have decent education, and a lot of talent there.
01:09:47 Why can’t we just open the door
01:09:50 and convert a Belarus passport to a green card?
01:09:53 Open borders for Belarus, it’s my new campaign slogan.
01:09:56 Are you running for president in 2024?
01:09:58 Well, write ins are welcome, but.
01:10:00 Okay, what’s the second thing you disagree with, Eric?
01:10:05 Trade, again, I’m not sure where he’s at now,
01:10:10 but he is suspicious of trade in a way that I am not.
01:10:14 I do understand what’s called the China shock
01:10:17 has been a big problem for the US middle class.
01:10:19 I fully accept that.
01:10:21 I think most of that is behind us.
01:10:24 National security issues aside,
01:10:25 I think free trade is very much a good thing.
01:10:29 Eric, I’m not sure he’ll say it’s not a good thing,
01:10:33 but he won’t say it is a good thing.
01:10:34 And I know he’s kind of, it’s like, Eric, free trade.
01:10:39 But look, on things like vaccines,
01:10:40 I don’t believe in free trade.
01:10:42 You want vaccine production in your own country,
01:10:45 look at the EU.
01:10:47 They have enough money, no one will send them vaccines.
01:10:50 What’s different about vaccines?
01:10:51 Is it, there’s some things you want to prioritize
01:10:54 the citizenry on.
01:10:56 You could argue it would be cheaper
01:10:58 to produce all US manufactured vaccines in India.
01:11:02 They have the technologies, obviously lower wages,
01:11:05 but look, there’s talk in India right now
01:11:07 of cutting off the export of vaccines.
01:11:09 If you outsource your vaccine production,
01:11:12 you’re not sure the other country
01:11:13 will respect the norm of free trade.
01:11:15 So you need to keep some vaccine production in your country.
01:11:20 It’s an exception to free trade, not to the logic,
01:11:24 a bunch of things the Navy uses.
01:11:26 You can’t buy those components from China.
01:11:28 That’s insane.
01:11:31 But look, it would be cheaper to do so, right?
01:11:34 Yeah.
01:11:35 Let me completely shift topics
01:11:37 on something that’s fascinating.
01:11:38 It’s all the same topic, but great.
01:11:40 Everything is interesting.
01:11:45 What do you think about what the hell is money?
01:11:48 And the recent excitement around cryptocurrency
01:11:56 that brings to the forefront
01:12:01 the philosophical discussion of the nature of money.
01:12:04 Are you bullish on cryptocurrency?
01:12:06 Are you excited about it?
01:12:07 What does it make you think about
01:12:09 how the nature of money is changing?
01:12:11 No one knows what money is.
01:12:13 Probably no one ever knew.
01:12:15 Go back to medieval times, bills of exchange.
01:12:17 Were they money?
01:12:19 Maybe it’s just a semantic debate.
01:12:21 Gold, silver, what about copper coins?
01:12:23 What about metals that were considered legal tender
01:12:26 but not always circulating?
01:12:28 What about credit?
01:12:29 So being confused about moneyness
01:12:32 is the natural state of affairs for human beings.
01:12:35 And if there’s more of that,
01:12:36 I’d say that’s probably a good thing.
01:12:38 Now, crypto per se, I think Bitcoin has taken over
01:12:42 a lot of the space held by gold.
01:12:45 That to me seems sustainable.
01:12:48 I’m not short Bitcoin.
01:12:50 I don’t have some view that the price
01:12:53 has to be different than the current price,
01:12:55 but I know it changes every moment.
01:12:58 I am deeply uncertain about the less of crypto,
01:13:01 which seems connected to ultimate visions
01:13:04 of using it for transactions in ways where I’m not sure
01:13:09 whether it be prediction markets or DeFi.
01:13:12 I’m not sure the retail demand really is there
01:13:16 once it is regulated like everything else is.
01:13:19 I would say I’m 40, 60 optimistic on those forms of crypto.
01:13:24 That is, I think it’s somewhat more likely
01:13:26 they fail than succeed, but I take them very seriously.
01:13:29 So we’re talking about it becoming
01:13:31 one of the main currencies in the world.
01:13:32 That’s what we’re discussing.
01:13:33 That I don’t think will happen.
01:13:35 So, but the reality is that Bitcoin used to be
01:13:40 in the single digits of a dollar and now has crossed $50,000
01:13:44 for a single Bitcoin.
01:13:46 Do you think it’s possible it reaches
01:13:48 something like a million dollars?
01:13:51 I don’t think we have a good theory of the value of Bitcoin.
01:13:54 If people decide it’s worth a million dollars,
01:13:56 it’s worth a million dollars.
01:13:57 But isn’t that money?
01:13:58 Like you said, isn’t the ultimate state of money confusion,
01:14:01 however beautifully you put it?
01:14:03 It’s like valuing an Andy Warhol painting.
01:14:05 So when Warhol started off,
01:14:06 probably those things had no value.
01:14:08 They were sketches, early sketches of shoes.
01:14:11 Now a good Warhol could be worth over 50 million.
01:14:14 That’s an incredible rate of price appreciation.
01:14:17 Bitcoin is seeing a similar trajectory.
01:14:20 I don’t pretend to know where it will stop,
01:14:23 but it’s about trying to figure out
01:14:25 what do people think of Andy Warhol?
01:14:26 He could be out of fashion in a century.
01:14:29 Maybe yes, maybe no.
01:14:32 But you don’t think about Warhols as money.
01:14:36 They perform some money like functions.
01:14:38 You can even use them as collateral
01:14:40 for like deals between gangs.
01:14:43 But they’re not basically money, nor is Bitcoin.
01:14:46 And the transactions velocity of Bitcoin,
01:14:48 I would think is likely to fall, if anything.
01:14:51 So you don’t think there’ll be some kind of phase shift
01:14:53 where it become adopted and become mainstream
01:14:55 for one of the main mechanisms of transactions?
01:15:00 Bitcoin, no.
01:15:01 Now, you know, ether has some chance at that.
01:15:03 I would bet against it,
01:15:04 but I wouldn’t give you a definitive no.
01:15:06 And you wouldn’t put us here.
01:15:07 Bitcoin is too costly.
01:15:10 It may be fine to hold it like gold,
01:15:12 but gold is also costly.
01:15:15 You have smart people trying to make, say, ether,
01:15:18 much more effective as a currency than Bitcoin.
01:15:22 And there’s certainly a decent chance they will succeed.
01:15:25 Yeah, there’s a lot of innovation.
01:15:26 I mean, with smart contracts, with NFTs as well,
01:15:30 there’s a lot of interesting innovations
01:15:33 that are plugging into the human psyche somehow,
01:15:36 just like money does.
01:15:37 You know, money seems to be this viral thing,
01:15:41 our ideas of money, right?
01:15:43 And if the idea is strong enough,
01:15:45 it seems to be able to take hold.
01:15:47 Like there’s network effects that just take over.
01:15:50 And like, I particularly see that with,
01:15:54 I’d love to get your comment on Dogecoin,
01:15:57 which is basically by a single human being,
01:15:59 Elon Musk has been created.
01:16:01 You know, it’s like these celebrities
01:16:03 can have a huge ripple effect on the impact of money.
01:16:07 Is it possible that in the 21st century,
01:16:11 people like Elon Musk and celebrities,
01:16:13 I don’t know, Donald Trump, The Rock,
01:16:16 whoever else, can actually define,
01:16:20 you know, the currencies that we use?
01:16:22 Maybe can Dogecoin become the primary currency of the world?
01:16:27 I think of it as like baseball cards.
01:16:29 So right now, every baseball player has a baseball card.
01:16:32 And the players who are stars,
01:16:34 their cards can end up worth a fair amount of money.
01:16:37 And that’s stable, we’ve had it for many decades.
01:16:40 Sort of the player defines the card,
01:16:42 they sign a contract with Topps or whatever company.
01:16:46 Now, could you imagine celebrities, baseball players,
01:16:49 LeBron James, having their own currencies instead of cards?
01:16:53 Absolutely, and you’re somewhat seeing that right now,
01:16:55 as you mentioned, artists with these unique works
01:16:58 on the blockchain.
01:16:59 But I’m not sure those are macroeconomically important.
01:17:02 If it’s just a new class of collectibles
01:17:04 that people have fun with, again, I say, bring it on.
01:17:08 But whether there are use cases beyond that,
01:17:11 that challenge fiat monies, which actually work very well.
01:17:15 Yesterday, I sent money to a family in Ethiopia
01:17:19 that I helped support.
01:17:21 In less than 24 hours, they got that money.
01:17:24 Digitally, yes.
01:17:26 No, not digitally, through my bank.
01:17:28 My primitive dinosaur bank, BB&T, Mid Atlantic Bank,
01:17:32 headquartered in North Carolina,
01:17:34 charted by the Fed, regulated by the FDAC and the OCC.
01:17:38 Now, you could say, well, the exchange rate was not so great.
01:17:44 I don’t see crypto as close to beating that
01:17:46 once you take into account all of the last mile problems.
01:17:50 Fiat currency works really well.
01:17:52 People are not sitting around bitching about it.
01:17:54 And when you talk to crypto people,
01:17:56 they’re crypto people, the number who have to postulate
01:17:58 some out of the blue hyperinflation,
01:18:00 where there’s no evidence for that whatsoever,
01:18:03 that to me is a sign they’re not thinking clearly
01:18:06 about how hard they have to work
01:18:07 to outcompete fiat currency.
01:18:10 There’s a bunch of different technologies
01:18:11 that are really exciting that don’t want to address
01:18:15 how difficult it is to outcompete
01:18:17 the current accepted alternative.
01:18:19 So for example, autonomous vehicles.
01:18:21 A lot of people are really excited.
01:18:24 But it’s not trivial to outcompete Uber
01:18:28 on the cost and the effectiveness and the user experience
01:18:32 and all those kinds of, sorry, Uber driven by humans.
01:18:34 And it’s not, you know, that’s taken for granted,
01:18:39 I think, that look, wouldn’t it be amazing,
01:18:41 how amazing would the world look
01:18:43 when the cars are driving themselves fully,
01:18:45 you know, it’s gonna drive the cost down,
01:18:47 you can remove the cost of drivers,
01:18:48 all those kinds of things.
01:18:50 But it’s when you actually get down to it
01:18:52 and have to build a business around it,
01:18:53 it’s actually very difficult to do.
01:18:55 And I guess you’re saying your sense
01:18:56 is similar competition is facing cryptocurrency.
01:19:00 Like you have to actually present a killer app reason
01:19:06 to switch from fiat currency to Ethereum or to whatever.
01:19:12 And the Biden people are gonna regulate crypto
01:19:15 and they’re gonna do it soon.
01:19:16 So something like DeFi, I fully get why that is cheaper
01:19:20 or for some can be cheaper than other ways
01:19:23 of conducting financial intermediation.
01:19:25 But some of that is regulatory arbitrage.
01:19:28 It will not be allowed to go on forever
01:19:30 for better or worse.
01:19:32 I would rather see it given greater tolerance.
01:19:35 But the point is banking lobby is strong.
01:19:37 The government will only let it run so far.
01:19:39 There’ll be capital requirements,
01:19:41 reporting requirements imposed,
01:19:43 and it will lose a lot of those advantages.
01:19:46 What do you make of Wall Street bets?
01:19:48 Another thing that recently happened
01:19:50 that shook the world and at least me
01:19:54 from the outside of perspective,
01:19:56 make me question what I do
01:19:58 and don’t understand about our economics.
01:20:01 Which is a bunch of different,
01:20:03 a large number of individuals
01:20:05 getting together on the internet
01:20:06 and having a large scale impact on the markets.
01:20:10 If you tell a group of people
01:20:11 and coordinate them through the internet,
01:20:13 we’re gonna play a fun game, it might cost you money,
01:20:16 but you’re gonna make the headlines
01:20:17 and there’s a chance you’ll screw over
01:20:18 some billionaires and hedge funds.
01:20:20 Enough people will play that game.
01:20:23 So that game might continue,
01:20:24 but I don’t think it’s of macroeconomic importance.
01:20:26 And the price of those stocks in the medium term
01:20:30 will end up wherever it ought to be.
01:20:32 So these are little outliers
01:20:34 from a macroeconomics perspective.
01:20:36 They’re not going to,
01:20:38 these are not signals of shifting power,
01:20:43 like from centralized power to distributed power.
01:20:46 These aren’t some fundamental changes in the way
01:20:49 our economy works.
01:20:50 I think of it as a new brand of eSports,
01:20:52 maybe more fun than the old brand.
01:20:54 Which is fine, right?
01:20:56 It’s like push the anarchy into the corners
01:20:58 where you want it.
01:20:59 It doesn’t bother me,
01:21:02 but I think people are seeing it
01:21:04 as more fun than it is.
01:21:05 It’s a new eSport, more fun for many,
01:21:07 but more expensive than the old eSports.
01:21:10 Like chess is a new eSport, super cheap,
01:21:13 not as fun as like sending hedge funds to their doom,
01:21:16 but like, what would you expect?
01:21:19 The poetry, I love it, okay.
01:21:22 But macroeconomically, it’s not fundamental.
01:21:24 Okay, I was going to say, I hope you’re right,
01:21:27 because I’m uncomfortable with the chaos
01:21:29 of the masses that’s creates.
01:21:32 But I also think that chaos is somewhat real to be clear,
01:21:36 but it will matter through other channels,
01:21:40 not through manipulating GameStop or AMC.
01:21:46 So you’re seeing the real macro phenomenon.
01:21:48 When people see a real macro phenomenon,
01:21:50 they tend to make every micro story fit the narrative.
01:21:54 And this micro story, like it fits the narrative,
01:21:56 but it doesn’t mean its importance fits the narrative.
01:21:58 That’s how I would kind of dissect the mistake
01:22:01 I think people are making.
01:22:05 The macro phenomenon that are there, do you mean?
01:22:07 Everyone’s weird now, the internet.
01:22:10 Either allows us to be weirder or makes us weirder.
01:22:12 I’m not sure what’s the right way to put it.
01:22:14 Maybe a mix of both.
01:22:16 You’re probably right that it allows us to be weirder
01:22:18 because, well, this is the other, okay.
01:22:21 So this connects our previous conversation.
01:22:23 Does America allow us to be weirder
01:22:26 or does it make us weirder?
01:22:29 Like say we’re weird and somewhat neurotic to begin with,
01:22:32 but the only messages we get are Dwight D. Eisenhower
01:22:34 and I Love Lucy and network TV.
01:22:37 Like that’s going to keep us within certain bounds.
01:22:40 In good and bad ways.
01:22:41 That’s obviously totally gone.
01:22:43 And the internet, you can connect to not just QAnon,
01:22:47 but all sorts of things.
01:22:47 Many of them just fantastic, right?
01:22:51 But in good and bad ways, it makes us weirder.
01:22:54 So that maybe is troubling, right?
01:22:56 Like if someone’s worried about that,
01:22:58 I would at least say they should
01:22:59 give it deep serious thought.
01:23:01 And then it has a whole lot of ebbs and flows,
01:23:04 micro realizations of the weirdness
01:23:07 that don’t actually matter.
01:23:09 So like chess players today,
01:23:10 they play a lot more weird openings
01:23:12 than they did 20 years ago.
01:23:14 Like it reflects the same thing
01:23:16 because you can research any weird opening on the internet,
01:23:19 but like, does that matter?
01:23:21 Probably not.
01:23:22 So a lot of the things we see
01:23:23 are just like the weird chess openings.
01:23:26 And to figure out which are like the weird chess openings
01:23:28 and which are fundamental to the new and growing weirdness,
01:23:31 like that’s what a hedge fund investor type
01:23:33 should be trying to do.
01:23:35 I just think no one knows yet.
01:23:36 It’s like this itself, this fun weird guessing game,
01:23:40 which we’re partly engaging in right now.
01:23:42 Exactly.
01:23:43 And I mean, as Eric talks about
01:23:46 on the science side of things,
01:23:47 I mean, I said like at MIT,
01:23:50 especially in the machine learning field,
01:23:52 there’s a natural institutional resistance to the weird.
01:23:56 It’s very, as they talk about,
01:23:58 it’s difficult to hire weird faculty, for example.
01:24:00 Correct.
01:24:03 You want to hire and give tenure to people that are safe
01:24:06 and not weird.
01:24:07 And that’s one of the concerns is like,
01:24:09 it seems like the weird people
01:24:10 are the ones that push the science forward usually.
01:24:13 Right.
01:24:14 And so like, how do you balance the two?
01:24:16 It’s not obvious.
01:24:17 Because it’s another area where Eric and I disagree.
01:24:20 As I interpret him,
01:24:21 he thinks academia is totally bankrupt.
01:24:24 And I think it’s only partially bankrupt.
01:24:27 How do we fix it?
01:24:28 Because I’m with you, I’m bullish on academia.
01:24:31 You need up and coming schools
01:24:34 that end up better than where they started off.
01:24:36 And MIT was once one of them.
01:24:38 Yes.
01:24:39 Now they’re not in every area.
01:24:40 In some areas, they have become the problem.
01:24:42 Yep.
01:24:43 UChicago, you wouldn’t call it up and coming,
01:24:45 but it’s still different.
01:24:46 And that’s great.
01:24:47 Let’s hope they manage to keep it that way.
01:24:51 The biggest problem to me is the rank absurd conformism.
01:24:55 I kind of second tier schools,
01:24:57 maybe in the top 40, but not in the top dozen,
01:24:59 that are just trying to be like a junior MIT,
01:25:02 but it’s mediocre and copycat.
01:25:04 And they’re the most dogmatic enforcers of weirdness
01:25:07 that like Harvard is more open
01:25:09 than those second tier schools.
01:25:11 And those second tier schools
01:25:12 are pretty good typically, right?
01:25:13 Yeah.
01:25:14 But the mediocrity is enforced there.
01:25:17 Correct.
01:25:18 Very strictly.
01:25:19 And the homogenization pressures.
01:25:21 Climb the rankings by another three places
01:25:24 and be a little closer to MIT,
01:25:25 though you’ll never touch them.
01:25:27 That to me is very harmful.
01:25:28 And you’d rather they be more like Chicago,
01:25:30 more like Caltech, or the older Caltech all the more,
01:25:33 like pick some model, be weird in it.
01:25:37 You might fail.
01:25:38 That’s socially better.
01:25:40 Yeah, but so the problem with MIT, for example,
01:25:43 is the mediocrity is really enforced on the junior faculty.
01:25:49 Yeah.
01:25:50 So like the people that are allowed to be weird,
01:25:52 or actually they just don’t even ask for permissions anymore
01:25:54 are more senior faculty.
01:25:56 And that’s good, of course,
01:25:57 but you want the weird young people.
01:26:00 I find too, this podcast, I like talking to tech people,
01:26:06 and I find the young faculty to be really boring.
01:26:08 They are.
01:26:09 They’re the most boring of faculty.
01:26:11 Their work is interesting technically,
01:26:13 technically, but just the passion.
01:26:18 They are drudges.
01:26:19 And some of them sneak by.
01:26:23 Like you have like the Max Tegmark,
01:26:24 young version of Max Tegmark,
01:26:26 who knows how to play the role of boring and fitting in.
01:26:31 And then on the side, he does the weird shit.
01:26:34 Sure.
01:26:35 But they’re far and few in between,
01:26:37 which I’d love to figure out a way to shake up that system
01:26:41 because as you look at MIT’s Broad Institute, right,
01:26:45 in biomedical, it’s been a huge hit.
01:26:47 I’m not privy to their internal doings,
01:26:49 but I suspect they support weird
01:26:52 more than the formal departments do at the junior level.
01:26:55 Yes, that’s probably true.
01:26:56 Yeah, I don’t know what, whatever they’re doing,
01:26:58 it’s working, but we needed to figure it out
01:27:03 because I think the best ideas still do come from the,
01:27:07 so forget, my apologies,
01:27:10 but for the humanities side of things,
01:27:11 I don’t know anything about,
01:27:12 but the engineering and the science side,
01:27:15 I think there’s so many amazing ideas
01:27:17 that are still coming from universities.
01:27:19 It’s not true that you don’t know anything
01:27:21 about the humanities.
01:27:22 You’re doing the humanities right now.
01:27:24 Talking about people,
01:27:25 there are no numbers put on a blackboard, right?
01:27:28 There’s no hypothesis testing per se.
01:27:30 No, yeah.
01:27:31 You have however many subscribers to your podcast,
01:27:34 all listening to you on the humanities.
01:27:37 Every, whatever your frequency is.
01:27:38 But I’m not in the department of the humanities.
01:27:40 That’s why it’s innovative.
01:27:42 They have very different conversations.
01:27:44 There’s the number of emails I get about,
01:27:48 listen, I really deeply respect diversity
01:27:51 and the full scope of what diversity means
01:27:56 and also the more narrow scope of different races
01:27:58 and genders and so on.
01:27:59 It’s a really important topic,
01:28:01 but there’s a disproportionate number of emails
01:28:03 I’m getting about meetings and discussions
01:28:05 and that just kind of is overwhelming.
01:28:08 I don’t get enough emails from people,
01:28:10 like a meeting about why are all your ideas bad?
01:28:15 Let’s, for example, let me call out MIT.
01:28:18 Why don’t we do more?
01:28:20 Why don’t we kick Stanford’s ass or Google’s ass,
01:28:24 more importantly, in deep learning and machine learning
01:28:26 and AI research?
01:28:28 What CSAIL, for example, used to be a laboratory
01:28:31 is a laboratory for artificial intelligence research.
01:28:35 And why is that not the beacon of greatness
01:28:42 in artificial intelligence?
01:28:43 Let’s have those meetings as well.
01:28:45 Diversity talk has oddly become this new mechanism
01:28:48 for enforcing conformity.
01:28:50 Yes, exactly.
01:28:51 And right, so it’s almost like this conformity mechanism
01:28:54 finds the hot new topic to use
01:28:56 to enforce further conformity.
01:28:58 Exactly.
01:28:59 Oh boy, I still, I remain optimistic.
01:29:03 The humanities have innovated through podcasts,
01:29:05 including yours and mine, and they’re alive and well.
01:29:08 All the bad talk you hear about the humanities
01:29:12 in universities, there’s been this huge end run
01:29:15 of innovation on the internet and it’s amazing.
01:29:17 You’re right.
01:29:18 I never thought of, I mean, this is humanities.
01:29:20 This podcast is right.
01:29:23 It’s like you’ve been speaking prose all one’s life
01:29:25 and didn’t know it, right?
01:29:28 Yeah, I am actually part of the humanities department
01:29:31 at MIT now.
01:29:31 I did not realize this and I will fully embrace it
01:29:35 from this moment on.
01:29:36 Look, you have this thing, the Media Lab.
01:29:37 I’m sure you know about it.
01:29:39 Done some excellent things, done a lot of very bogus things,
01:29:42 but you’re out competing them.
01:29:43 You’re blowing them out of the water.
01:29:44 Yeah.
01:29:45 Like you are them.
01:29:46 Yeah, I mean, and I’m talking to those folks
01:29:48 and they’re just trying to, well,
01:29:50 they’re just trying to figure it out.
01:29:51 I mean, they had their issues with Jeff Epstein and so on,
01:29:53 but outside of that, there’s a,
01:29:57 I’ve actually gone through a shift
01:29:59 with this particular podcast, for example,
01:30:02 where at first it was seen as a,
01:30:06 one, at the very first it was seen as a distraction.
01:30:09 Second, it was a source of like,
01:30:12 almost like a kind of jealousy,
01:30:13 like the same kind of jealousy you feel
01:30:15 when junior faculty outshines the senior faculty.
01:30:18 And now it’s more like, oh, okay, this is a thing.
01:30:22 Like we should do more of that.
01:30:23 We should embrace this guy.
01:30:25 We should embrace this thing.
01:30:26 So there’s a sense that podcasting and whatever this is,
01:30:30 it doesn’t have to be podcasting,
01:30:32 will drive some innovation within MIT,
01:30:35 within different universities.
01:30:37 There’s a sense that things are changing.
01:30:39 It’s just that universities lag behind.
01:30:41 And my hope is that they catch up quickly.
01:30:45 They innovate in some way that goes along
01:30:49 with the innovations of the internet.
01:30:51 Online.
01:30:52 I think the internet will outrace them
01:30:53 for a long time, maybe forever.
01:30:55 Well, I mean, but it’s okay if they’re,
01:30:57 as long as they’re keeping.
01:30:58 Yeah, and we’re both in universities.
01:31:00 So we have multiple hats on here as we’re speaking.
01:31:02 So we can complain about the universities,
01:31:05 but that’s like complaining about the podcast, right?
01:31:08 We be them.
01:31:09 But speaking on the weird,
01:31:12 you’ve in the best sense of the word weird,
01:31:16 you’ve written about and made the case
01:31:18 that we should take UFO sightings more seriously.
01:31:22 So that’s one of the things that I’ve been inundated with,
01:31:29 sort of the excitement and the passion that people have
01:31:36 for the possibility of extraterrestrial life,
01:31:39 of life out there in the universe.
01:31:40 I’ve always felt this excitement.
01:31:42 I was just looking up at the stars
01:31:43 and wondering what the hell’s out there.
01:31:46 But there’s people that have more like,
01:31:48 more grounded excitement and passion
01:31:52 of actually interacting with aliens
01:31:55 on this here, our planet.
01:31:57 What’s the case from your perspective
01:32:01 for taking these sightings more seriously?
01:32:05 The data from the Navy, to me, seem quite serious.
01:32:09 I don’t pretend that I have the technical abilities
01:32:11 to judge it as data,
01:32:13 but there are numerous senators
01:32:16 at the very highest of levels,
01:32:18 former heads of CIA, Brennan.
01:32:20 I talked to him, did an interview with him.
01:32:22 I asked him, what’s up with these?
01:32:24 What do you think it is?
01:32:25 He basically said that was the single most likely explanation
01:32:28 was of alien origin.
01:32:30 Now you don’t have to agree with him.
01:32:32 But look, if you know how government works, these senators,
01:32:35 or Hillary Clinton, for that matter, or Brennan,
01:32:37 they sat down, they were briefed by their smartest people,
01:32:40 and they said, hey, what’s going on here?
01:32:43 And everyone around the table, I believe,
01:32:45 is telling them, we don’t know.
01:32:48 And that is sociological data I take very seriously.
01:32:52 I have not seen a debunking of the technical data,
01:32:56 which is eyewitness reports and images and radar.
01:32:59 Again, I don’t pretend that I have the technical abilities
01:33:02 or again, at a technical level,
01:33:03 I feel quite uncertain on that turf.
01:33:06 But evaluating through the testimony of witnesses,
01:33:10 it seems to me it’s now at a threshold
01:33:12 where one ought to take it seriously.
01:33:15 Yeah, one of the problems with UFO sightings
01:33:18 is that because of people with good equipment
01:33:21 don’t take it seriously, it’s such a taboo topic,
01:33:25 that you have just like really shitty equipment
01:33:28 collecting data.
01:33:28 And so you have the blurry Bigfoot kind of situation
01:33:32 where you have just bad video and all those kinds of things.
01:33:35 As opposed to, I mean, there’s a bunch of people,
01:33:41 Avi Lo from Harvard talking about Oumuamua.
01:33:44 It’s just like people with the equipment
01:33:49 to do the data collection don’t want to help out.
01:33:54 And that creates a kind of divide
01:33:57 where the scientists ignore that this is happening
01:34:00 and there’s the masses of people who are curious about it.
01:34:04 And then there’s the government that’s full of secrets
01:34:07 that’s leaking some confusion
01:34:10 and it creates distrust in the government,
01:34:12 it creates distrust in science
01:34:15 and it prevents the scientists
01:34:16 from being able to explore some cool topics,
01:34:19 some exciting possibilities that they should be,
01:34:22 be curious kids like Avi talks about.
01:34:25 Even if it has nothing to do with aliens,
01:34:28 whatever the answer is, it has to be something fascinating.
01:34:31 We already know everything’s interesting,
01:34:32 but this is fascinating.
01:34:36 But look, that all said,
01:34:37 I suspect they’re not of alien origin.
01:34:39 And let me tell you my reason.
01:34:40 The people who are all gung ho,
01:34:43 they do a kind of reasoning in reverse
01:34:45 or argument from elimination.
01:34:47 They figure out a bunch of things that can’t be,
01:34:49 like is it a Russian advanced vehicle?
01:34:52 No, probably pretty good arguments there.
01:34:54 Is it a Chinese advanced vehicle?
01:34:56 No.
01:34:57 Is it people like from the earth’s future
01:35:00 coming back in time?
01:35:01 No.
01:35:02 And they go through a few others.
01:35:03 They have some really good no arguments.
01:35:05 Then they’re like, well, what we’ve got left is aliens.
01:35:07 This argument from elimination,
01:35:09 I don’t actually find that persuasive.
01:35:12 You can talk yourself into a lot of mistaken ideas that way.
01:35:16 The positive evidence that it’s aliens is still quite weak.
01:35:20 The positive evidence that it’s a puzzle is quite huge.
01:35:24 And whatever the solution to the puzzle is,
01:35:27 it might be fascinating.
01:35:28 And it’s gonna be so weird or fascinating
01:35:30 or maybe even trivial, but that’s weird in its own way,
01:35:33 that we can’t set up by elimination
01:35:37 all the things that might be able to be.
01:35:38 Yeah, and just like you said,
01:35:39 the debunking that I’ve seen of these kinds of things
01:35:43 are less explorations and solutions to the puzzle
01:35:49 and more a kind of halfhearted dismissal.
01:35:52 And Avi, as you mentioned to him on your podcast with him,
01:35:56 he’s been attacked an awful lot.
01:35:58 And when I hear the idea carrier attacked,
01:36:01 I get very suspicious of the critics.
01:36:04 If he’s wrong, like just tell me why.
01:36:07 Like my ears are open.
01:36:08 I don’t have a set view on Oumuamua, you know.
01:36:12 I know I can’t judge Avi’s arguments.
01:36:14 He can’t convince me in that sense.
01:36:15 I’m too stupid to understand
01:36:18 how good his argument may or may not be.
01:36:20 And like you said, ultimately,
01:36:23 in the argument, in the meeting of that debate
01:36:27 is where we find the wisdom.
01:36:30 Like dismissing it, there’s one other thing
01:36:32 that troubles me.
01:36:33 There’s a bunch of people,
01:36:33 like Nietzsche sometimes dismiss this way.
01:36:35 Ayn Rand is sometimes dismissed this way.
01:36:38 Oh, here we go.
01:36:38 Like there’s a, as opposed to arguing against her ideas,
01:36:43 dismissing it outright.
01:36:44 And that’s not productive at all.
01:36:48 She may be wrong on a lot of things,
01:36:49 but like laying out some arguments,
01:36:52 even if they’re basic human arguments,
01:36:55 that’s where we arrive at the wisdom.
01:36:57 I love that.
01:36:59 Is there something deeper to be said
01:37:03 about our trust in institutions and governments and so on
01:37:06 that has to do with UFOs?
01:37:08 That there’s a kind of suspicion
01:37:10 that the US government and governments in general
01:37:13 are hiding stuff from us when you talk about UFOs.
01:37:17 This is my view on that.
01:37:18 If we declassified everything,
01:37:20 I think we would find a lot more evidence
01:37:22 all pointing toward the same puzzle.
01:37:25 There aren’t some alien men being held underground.
01:37:28 There’s not some secret file that lays out
01:37:30 whatever is happening.
01:37:32 I think the real lesson about government
01:37:34 is government cannot bring itself to any new belief
01:37:38 on this matter of any kind.
01:37:40 And it’s a kind of funny inertia.
01:37:42 Like government is deeply puzzled.
01:37:44 They’re more puzzled than they want to admit to us,
01:37:46 which I’m okay with that, actually.
01:37:49 They shouldn’t just be out panicking people in the streets.
01:37:53 But at the end of the day,
01:37:54 it’s a bit like approving the AstraZeneca vaccine,
01:37:57 which does work and they haven’t approved it.
01:37:59 When are they gonna do it?
01:38:00 When is our government actually, if only internally,
01:38:06 gonna take this more than just seriously,
01:38:08 but take it truly seriously?
01:38:10 And I just don’t know if we have that capability,
01:38:13 kind of mentally, to sound like Eric Weinstein
01:38:15 for another moment.
01:38:17 And to stay on the same topic,
01:38:21 although on the surface shifting completely,
01:38:25 because it is all the same topic.
01:38:26 You have written and studied art.
01:38:29 Why do you think we humans long to create art,
01:38:34 human society in general and just the human mind?
01:38:38 Well, most of us don’t really long to create art, right?
01:38:41 I would start with that point.
01:38:43 You think so?
01:38:45 You think that’s a unique weirdness
01:38:47 of some particular humans?
01:38:49 I think, I don’t know, 10% of humans roughly,
01:38:52 which is a lot, but it is somewhat weird.
01:38:56 I don’t aspire to create art.
01:38:58 You could say, like writing nonfiction,
01:39:01 there’s something art like about it,
01:39:03 but it’s a different urge, I would say.
01:39:07 So why do some people have it?
01:39:10 I think human brains are very different.
01:39:13 It’s a different notion of working through a problem.
01:39:16 Like you and I enjoy working through analytic problems.
01:39:20 For me, economics, for you, AI and other areas,
01:39:22 or your humanities podcast, but that’s fun.
01:39:26 For that problem to be visual
01:39:29 and linked to physical materials
01:39:31 and putting those like on a canvas,
01:39:34 to me, it’s not a huge leap,
01:39:36 but I really don’t wanna do it.
01:39:38 Like it would be pain.
01:39:40 If you paid me like 500 bucks to spend an hour painting,
01:39:45 I don’t know, is that worth it?
01:39:48 Maybe, but like, I’m happy when that hour’s over.
01:39:53 And would not be proud or happy with the result.
01:39:55 It would suck.
01:39:57 I don’t think I would do it actually.
01:39:59 Do you think you’re suppressing some deep, I mean?
01:40:02 Absolutely not.
01:40:03 Now, when I was young, I played the guitar
01:40:06 as you played the guitar and that I greatly enjoyed,
01:40:09 although I was never good,
01:40:11 but it helped me appreciate music much, much more.
01:40:14 Well, this is the question.
01:40:15 Okay, so from the perspective of the observer
01:40:17 and appreciator of art, you said good.
01:40:20 Is there such a concept as good in art?
01:40:23 There’s clearly a concept of bad.
01:40:25 My guitar playing fit that concept.
01:40:29 Okay.
01:40:29 But I wasn’t trying to be good.
01:40:30 I wanted to learn like how do chords work?
01:40:33 Okay, analytical.
01:40:33 How does a jazz improvisation work?
01:40:35 How is blues different?
01:40:37 Classical guitar, sort of physically,
01:40:39 how do you make those sounds?
01:40:41 And I did learn those things.
01:40:42 And you can’t learn everything about them,
01:40:44 but you can learn a lot about them without ever being good
01:40:47 or even trying to be that good.
01:40:48 But I could play all the notes.
01:40:51 So from the observer perspective,
01:40:53 what do you, I apologize for the absurd question,
01:40:56 but what do you use the most beautiful
01:40:58 and maybe moving piece of art you’ve encountered
01:41:02 in your life?
01:41:02 It’s not an absurd question at all.
01:41:05 And I think about this quite a bit.
01:41:09 I would say the two winners by a clear margin
01:41:13 are both by Michelangelo.
01:41:15 It’s the Pieta in the Vatican
01:41:17 and the David statue in Florence.
01:41:20 Why?
01:41:21 Historical context or just purity, the creation itself?
01:41:25 I don’t think you can view it apart from historical context
01:41:28 and being in Florence or in the Vatican,
01:41:30 you’re already primed for a lot, right?
01:41:32 You can’t pull that out.
01:41:35 But just technically how they express
01:41:37 the emotion of human form,
01:41:40 I do honestly intellectually think
01:41:42 they’re the two greatest artworks for doing that.
01:41:45 That’s not all that art does.
01:41:46 Not all art is about the human form,
01:41:48 but they are phenomenal.
01:41:51 And I think critical opinion, not that everyone agrees,
01:41:54 but my view is not considered a crazy one
01:41:57 within the broader court of critical opinion.
01:41:58 Now in painting, I think the most I was ever blown away
01:42:02 was to see Vermeer’s artwork.
01:42:05 It’s called The Art of Painting and it’s in Vienna
01:42:09 in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
01:42:11 And I saw that, I think I was 23.
01:42:15 It just stunned me because I’d seen reproductions,
01:42:17 but live in front of you in huge,
01:42:19 a completely different artwork.
01:42:21 And again, Vienna, primed.
01:42:23 Yes, and I was living abroad for the first time
01:42:26 and Vienna itself, the city and so on.
01:42:28 Now, unlike the Michelangelo’s,
01:42:30 that is not my current favorite painting,
01:42:33 but that would be like historically the one I would pick.
01:42:35 What do you make in the context of those choices?
01:42:38 What do you make of modern art?
01:42:39 And I apologize if I’m not using the correct terminology,
01:42:44 but art that maybe goes another level of weird
01:42:50 outside of the art that you’ve kind of mentioned
01:42:52 and breaks all the conventions and rules and so on
01:42:55 and becomes something else entirely
01:42:59 that doesn’t make sense in the same way
01:43:02 that David might.
01:43:03 I think a lot of it is phenomenal.
01:43:05 And I would say the single biggest mistake
01:43:07 that really smart people make is to think contemporary art
01:43:12 or music for that matter is just a load of junk or rubbish.
01:43:15 It’s just like a kind of mathematics
01:43:17 they haven’t learned yet.
01:43:18 It’s really hard to learn.
01:43:20 Maybe some people can never learn it,
01:43:23 but there’s a very large community of super smart,
01:43:26 well educated people who spend their lives with it,
01:43:28 who love it.
01:43:29 Those are genuine pleasures.
01:43:30 They understand it.
01:43:31 They talk about it with the common language.
01:43:34 And to think that somehow they’re all frauds,
01:43:36 it just isn’t true.
01:43:37 Like one doesn’t have to like it oneself,
01:43:40 just like Love House may or may not be your thing,
01:43:42 but it is amazing and for me personally, highly rewarding.
01:43:45 And if someone doesn’t get it,
01:43:47 I do kind of have the conceited response of thinking
01:43:50 like in that area, I’m just smarter than you are.
01:43:54 Yeah, so the interesting thing is as with most…
01:43:56 We get back to Eric Weinstein again.
01:43:58 Yes.
01:43:59 He’s in general smarter than I am, this I get.
01:44:02 But when it comes to contemporary artistic creations,
01:44:05 I’m smarter than he is.
01:44:06 So he’s not a fan of contemporary art?
01:44:08 I don’t want to speak for him.
01:44:10 I’ve heard him say derogatory…
01:44:11 He’s evolving always.
01:44:12 He’s evolving always.
01:44:13 I’ve heard him say derogatory things about some of it.
01:44:16 Doesn’t mean he doesn’t love some other parts of it.
01:44:18 So I wonder if there’s just a higher learning curve,
01:44:22 a steeper learning curve for contemporary art,
01:44:24 meaning like it takes more work to appreciate the stories,
01:44:28 the context from which they’re like thinking about this work.
01:44:32 It feels like in order to appreciate the art contemporary,
01:44:36 certain pieces of contemporary art,
01:44:37 you have to know the story better behind the art.
01:44:41 I think that’s true for many people,
01:44:42 but I think it’s a funny shape distribution
01:44:45 because there’s a whole other set of people.
01:44:47 Sometimes they’re small children
01:44:49 and they get abstract art more easily.
01:44:51 You show them Vermeer or Rembrandt, they don’t get it.
01:44:56 But just like a wall of color, they’re in love with it.
01:45:00 So I don’t think I know the full story.
01:45:03 Again, some strange kind of distribution.
01:45:04 The entry barriers are super high or super low,
01:45:07 but not that often in between.
01:45:11 But you would challenge saying
01:45:12 that there’s a lot to be explored in contemporary art.
01:45:15 It’s just you need to learn.
01:45:20 Yeah, it’s one of the most profound bodies
01:45:22 of human thought out there.
01:45:24 And it’s part of the humanities.
01:45:26 And yes, there are people who also don’t like podcasts,
01:45:28 right?
01:45:30 And that’s fine.
01:45:31 Yeah.
01:45:32 You’ve also been a scholar of food.
01:45:35 We’re just going through the entirety
01:45:37 of the human experience today on this humanities podcast.
01:45:42 Another absurd question, say this conversation
01:45:45 is the last thing you ever do in your life.
01:45:47 I, wearing the suit, would murder you
01:45:49 at the end of the conversation.
01:45:50 So this is your last day on earth,
01:45:52 but I would offer you a last meal.
01:45:54 What would that meal contain?
01:45:57 We can also travel to other parts of the world.
01:45:59 Well, we have to travel
01:46:00 because my preferred last meal here,
01:46:03 I probably had like two nights ago.
01:46:05 Which is what?
01:46:06 Can you describe or no?
01:46:08 The best restaurant around here is called Mama Chang’s
01:46:11 and it’s in Fairfax and it’s food from Wuhan actually.
01:46:16 And they take pandemic safety seriously
01:46:18 in addition to the food being very good.
01:46:20 But this is what I would do.
01:46:23 I would fly to Hermosillo in Northern Mexico,
01:46:27 which has some of the best food in Mexico,
01:46:29 but I sadly only had two days there.
01:46:31 So somewhere like Oaxaca, Puebla,
01:46:35 I think they have food just as good
01:46:37 or some people would say better,
01:46:38 but I’ve spent a lot of time in those places.
01:46:41 So the scarce, wait, is it possible the scarcity of time
01:46:44 contributed to the richness of the experience?
01:46:46 Of course, but the point is that scarcity still holds.
01:46:50 So I want one more dose of the food from Hermosillo.
01:46:53 Can you describe what the food is?
01:46:55 It’s the one kind of Mexican food that at least nominally
01:46:58 is just like the Mexican food you get in the US.
01:47:00 So there are burritos, there’s fajitas.
01:47:02 It doesn’t taste at all like our stuff.
01:47:05 But again, nominally, it’s the part of Mexican food
01:47:08 that made it into the US was then transformed.
01:47:11 But it’s in a way the most familiar.
01:47:14 But for that reason, it’s the most radical
01:47:16 because you have to rethink all these things you know
01:47:18 and they’re way better in Hermosillo.
01:47:21 Hardly any tourists go there.
01:47:22 Like there’s nothing to see in Hermosillo.
01:47:24 Nothing you do other than eat.
01:47:26 It’s not ruined by any outsiders.
01:47:29 It’s this longstanding tradition, dirt cheap.
01:47:33 And the thing to do there is just sweet talk a taxi driver
01:47:36 into first taking you seriously
01:47:38 and then trusting you enough to know that you trust him
01:47:41 to bring you to the very best like food stands.
01:47:44 So where’s the magic of that nominally similar
01:47:51 entity of the burrito?
01:47:53 Where’s the magic come from?
01:47:55 Is it the taxi ride?
01:47:56 Is it the whole experience
01:47:57 or is there something actually in the food?
01:47:59 So well, you can break the food down part by part.
01:48:02 So if you think of the beef,
01:48:04 the beef there will be dry aged just out in the air
01:48:07 in a way the FDA here would never permit.
01:48:10 Like they dry age it till it turns green,
01:48:12 but it is phenomenal.
01:48:14 The quality of the chilies.
01:48:16 So here there’s only a small number
01:48:17 of kinds of chilies you can get.
01:48:19 In most parts of Mexico,
01:48:21 there’s quite a large number of chilies you can get.
01:48:24 They’re different, they’re fresher,
01:48:26 but it’s just like a different thing.
01:48:27 The chilies, the wheat used.
01:48:32 So this is wheat territory, not corn territory,
01:48:34 which is a self interesting.
01:48:37 The wheat is more diverse and more complex.
01:48:39 Here it’s more homogenized, obviously cheaper,
01:48:42 more efficient, but there it is better.
01:48:45 Non pasteurized cheeses are legal in all parts of Mexico
01:48:50 and they can be white and gooey and amazing
01:48:52 in a way that here again, it’s just against the law.
01:48:55 You could legalize them.
01:48:56 The demand wouldn’t be that great.
01:48:57 There’s a black market in these cheeses
01:48:59 that Latino groceries around here,
01:49:01 but you just can’t get that much of it.
01:49:03 So the cheese, the meat, the wheat,
01:49:06 all different in significant ways.
01:49:09 The chilies, I don’t think the onions really matter much.
01:49:13 Garlic, I don’t know.
01:49:14 I wouldn’t put much stock in that,
01:49:16 but that’s a lot of the core food
01:49:18 and then it’s cooked much better
01:49:20 and everything’s super fresh.
01:49:22 The food chain is not relying on refrigeration.
01:49:25 And this is one thing Russia and US have in common.
01:49:28 We were early pioneers in food refrigeration
01:49:31 and that made a lot of our foods worse quite early.
01:49:34 And it took us a long time to dig out of that
01:49:37 because big countries, right?
01:49:39 You’ve had an extensive rail system in Russia,
01:49:42 USSR a long time, which makes it easier to freeze
01:49:45 and then ship.
01:49:47 What about the actual cooking, the chef?
01:49:50 Is there an artistry to the simple?
01:49:53 I hesitate to call the burrito simple, but.
01:49:57 And there’s no brain drain out of cooking.
01:49:58 So if you’re in the United States and you’re very talented,
01:50:03 I’m not saying there aren’t talented chefs.
01:50:05 Of course there are,
01:50:06 but there’s so many other things to pull people away.
01:50:09 But in Mexico, there’s so much talent going into food
01:50:12 as there is in China,
01:50:14 which would be another candidate for last meal questions.
01:50:17 Or India.
01:50:18 Or, oh, India, let’s not even get started on India.
01:50:21 Unbelievable.
01:50:23 You’ve also, I mean, there’s a million things
01:50:24 we could talk about here,
01:50:25 but you’ve written about your own dreams of sushi.
01:50:28 It’s just a really clean, good example
01:50:30 that people are aware of of mastery
01:50:33 in the art of the simple in food.
01:50:39 What do you make of that kind of obsessive pursuit
01:50:41 of perfection in creating simple food?
01:50:45 Sushi is about perfection,
01:50:46 but it’s a bit like the Beatles White album,
01:50:48 which people think is simple and not overproduced.
01:50:51 It’s in a funny way their most overproduced album,
01:50:54 but it’s produced just perfectly.
01:50:55 It sounds simple.
01:50:57 It’s really hard to produce music to the point
01:50:59 where it’s gonna sound so simple and not sound like sludge.
01:51:03 Like Let It Be album, it has some great songs,
01:51:06 but a lot of it sounds like sludge.
01:51:07 One After 909, that’s sludge.
01:51:09 I Dig A Pony, it’s sludge.
01:51:11 Like it’s a bit interesting.
01:51:13 It’s not that good.
01:51:13 It doesn’t sound that good.
01:51:15 White album, like the best half, like Dear Prudence,
01:51:18 sounds perfect, sounds simple.
01:51:20 Cry Baby Cry, it’s not simple.
01:51:21 Back in the USSR, super complex.
01:51:25 So sushi is like that.
01:51:26 It’s because it’s so incredibly not simple
01:51:29 starting with the rice.
01:51:31 You try to refine it to make it appear super simple,
01:51:34 and that’s the most complex thing of all.
01:51:37 So do you admire,
01:51:39 I mean, we’re not talking about days, weeks, months.
01:51:43 We’re talking about years, generations
01:51:46 of doing the same thing over and over and over again.
01:51:49 Do you admire that kind of sticking to the,
01:51:53 we talked about our admiration of the weird.
01:51:56 That doesn’t feel weird.
01:51:57 That seems like discipline and dedication
01:52:01 to like a stoic minimalism or something like that.
01:52:05 I’m happy they do it, but I actually feel bad about it.
01:52:07 I feel they’re sacrificial victims to me,
01:52:10 which I benefit from.
01:52:12 But don’t you ever think like,
01:52:13 gee, you’re a great master sushi chef.
01:52:16 Wouldn’t you be happier if you did something else?
01:52:21 Doesn’t seem to happen.
01:52:23 That might be something that a weird mind would think.
01:52:25 Maybe it is weird people,
01:52:27 and maybe they’re really enjoying it,
01:52:29 but like to learn how to pack rice for 10 years
01:52:32 before they let you do anything else.
01:52:35 It’s like these Indian, you know, sarod players.
01:52:37 They just spent five years tapping out rhythms
01:52:40 before they’re allowed to touch their instruments.
01:52:43 Well, actually to defend that.
01:52:46 It’s kind of like graduate school, right?
01:52:48 Well, I think graduate school, perhaps.
01:52:53 Graduate school is full of,
01:52:54 like every single day is full of surprises, I would say.
01:53:00 I did martial arts for a long time.
01:53:01 I do martial arts, and I’ve always loved,
01:53:04 it’s kind of the Russian way of drilling,
01:53:06 is doing the same technique.
01:53:09 I don’t know if this applies
01:53:10 into intellectual or academic disciplines,
01:53:13 where you can do the same thing over and over and over again,
01:53:16 thousands and thousands and thousands of times.
01:53:19 What I’ve discovered through that process
01:53:23 is you get to start to appreciate the tiniest of details
01:53:27 and find the beauty in them.
01:53:29 People who go to like monasteries to meditate
01:53:32 talk about this, is when you just sit in silence
01:53:35 and don’t do anything,
01:53:37 you start to appreciate how much complexity and beauty
01:53:41 there is in just the movement of a finger.
01:53:43 Like you can spend the whole day joyously thinking about
01:53:47 how fun it is to move a finger.
01:53:49 And then you can almost become your full weird self
01:53:54 about the tiniest details of life.
01:53:56 As a thing, you’ve got to wonder,
01:53:57 like, is there a free lunch in there?
01:53:59 Are the rest of us moving around too much?
01:54:01 Yeah, exactly.
01:54:04 They sure feel like they found a free lunch.
01:54:06 The people meditate, they’re onto something.
01:54:09 I tend to think it’s like artists,
01:54:11 that some percent of people are like that,
01:54:13 but most are not.
01:54:14 And for most of us, there’s no free lunch.
01:54:16 Like my free lunch is to move around a lot.
01:54:19 In search of lunch, in fact.
01:54:20 Well, with all the food talk, you made me hungry.
01:54:24 What books, three or so books,
01:54:29 if any come to mind, technical fiction, philosophical,
01:54:33 would you recommend, had a big impact on you,
01:54:37 or you just drew some insights from throughout your life?
01:54:40 Well, two of them we’ve already discussed.
01:54:42 One is Plato’s Dialogues,
01:54:44 which I started reading when I was like 13.
01:54:47 Another is Ayn Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal.
01:54:51 But I would say the Friedrich Hayek essay,
01:54:53 The Use of Knowledge in Society,
01:54:56 which is about how decentralized mechanisms can work,
01:54:58 also why they might go wrong.
01:55:01 And that’s where you start to understand
01:55:03 the price system, capitalism.
01:55:05 And that was in a book called
01:55:06 Individualism and Economic Order,
01:55:08 but it was just a few essays in that book.
01:55:10 Those are maybe the three I would cite.
01:55:12 Can you elaborate a little bit on the…
01:55:14 Say the price of copper goes up, right?
01:55:16 Because there’s a problem with the copper mine
01:55:18 in Chile or Bolivia.
01:55:20 So the price of copper goes up.
01:55:21 All around the world, people are led to economize copper,
01:55:24 to look for substitutes for copper,
01:55:26 to change their production processes,
01:55:28 to change the goods and services they buy,
01:55:31 to build homes a different way.
01:55:33 And this one event creates
01:55:35 this one tiny change in information.
01:55:38 This gets into your AI work very directly.
01:55:41 And how much complexity that one change engenders
01:55:44 in a meaningful, coherent way,
01:55:47 how the different pieces of the price system fit together.
01:55:50 Hayek really laid out very clearly.
01:55:53 And it’s like an AI problem.
01:55:56 And how well, not for everything,
01:55:57 but for many things, we solve that AI problem.
01:56:00 I learned, I was, I think 13, maybe 14 when I read Hayek.
01:56:04 Yeah, the distributed nature of things there.
01:56:07 And it’s like your work on human attention,
01:56:09 like how much can we take in?
01:56:10 Yes.
01:56:11 Very often not that much.
01:56:13 And how many of the advances of modern civilization
01:56:16 you need to understand as a response to that constraint.
01:56:19 I got that also from Hayek.
01:56:21 And what’s the title of the book again?
01:56:23 It’s reprinted in a lot of books at this point.
01:56:26 But back then the book was called
01:56:27 Individualism and Economic Order.
01:56:30 But the essay is online.
01:56:31 Hayek, Use of Knowledge in Society.
01:56:34 There are open access versions of it through Google.
01:56:37 And you don’t need the whole book.
01:56:39 So it’s a very good book.
01:56:40 Again, one of those profound looking over the ocean,
01:56:46 maybe sitting on a porch,
01:56:47 maybe with a drink of some kind.
01:56:50 And a young kid comes by and asks you for advice.
01:56:55 What advice would you give to?
01:56:56 A drink.
01:56:57 That’s my advice.
01:56:58 I’m serious.
01:57:00 So, okay, after that,
01:57:05 what advice would you give to a young person today
01:57:09 as they take on life?
01:57:10 Whether a career in academia in general or just a life,
01:57:15 which is probably more important than career.
01:57:19 Most good advice is context specific.
01:57:22 But here are my two generic pieces of advice.
01:57:24 Good.
01:57:25 First, get a mentor.
01:57:27 Both career, but anything you wanna learn.
01:57:29 Like say you wanna learn about contemporary art.
01:57:31 People write me this.
01:57:33 Oh, what book should I read?
01:57:34 It’s probably not gonna work that way.
01:57:36 You need a mentor.
01:57:37 Yes, you should read some books on it.
01:57:39 But you want a mentor to help you frame them,
01:57:40 take you around to some art, talk about it with you.
01:57:43 So get as many mentors as you can
01:57:45 in the things you wanna learn.
01:57:47 And then…
01:57:48 Can I ask you a quick tangent on that?
01:57:52 Presumably a good mentor.
01:57:54 Of course.
01:57:55 Is there…
01:57:56 I’m begging the question in there.
01:57:56 It’s complicated, right?
01:57:59 Well, it is complicated.
01:58:00 Is there a lot of damage to be done from a bad mentor?
01:58:03 I don’t think that much
01:58:04 because it’s very easy to drop mentors.
01:58:06 And in fact, it’s quite hard to maintain them.
01:58:07 Good mentors tend to be busy.
01:58:09 Bad mentors tend to be busy.
01:58:12 And you can try on mentors
01:58:14 and maybe they’re not good for you,
01:58:15 but there’s a good chance you’ll learn something.
01:58:19 Like I had a mentor, I was an undergrad.
01:58:21 He was a Stalinist.
01:58:22 He edited the book called The Essential Stalin.
01:58:24 Brilliant guy.
01:58:25 I learned a tremendous amount from him.
01:58:28 Was he like as a Stalinist a good mentor for me?
01:58:30 Fan of Hayek?
01:58:31 Well, no.
01:58:32 But for a year it was tremendous.
01:58:34 Yeah.
01:58:38 He introduced me like to Soviet
01:58:40 and Eastern European science fiction
01:58:41 because he was a Marxist.
01:58:43 Like that’s what I took from him among other things.
01:58:45 Any advice on finding a good mentor?
01:58:47 Daniel Kahneman has…
01:58:50 Somebody just popped this to mind
01:58:52 as somebody who was able to find
01:58:54 exceptionally good collaborators throughout his life.
01:58:57 There’s not many bright minds that find collaborators.
01:59:00 They often, which I ultimately see what a mentor is.
01:59:06 Yeah.
01:59:07 Be interesting, be direct and try.
01:59:10 It’s not like a perfect formula,
01:59:11 but it’s amazing how many people
01:59:12 don’t even do those things.
01:59:14 Be interesting, be direct and try.
01:59:17 Like what you want from a better known person,
01:59:20 I would just say be very direct with them.
01:59:22 Yeah.
01:59:23 Beautiful.
01:59:24 What’s the second piece of advice?
01:59:26 Build small groups of peers.
01:59:29 They don’t have to be your age,
01:59:30 but very often they’ll be your age,
01:59:32 especially if you’re younger
01:59:33 with broadly similar interests,
01:59:35 but there can be different points of view.
01:59:37 People you hang out with,
01:59:38 which can include in a WhatsApp group online
01:59:41 and like every day or almost every day,
01:59:43 they’re talking about the thing you care about,
01:59:46 trying to solve problems in that thing.
01:59:48 And that’s your small group and you really like them
01:59:51 and they like you and you care
01:59:52 what you think about each other
01:59:53 and you have this common interest.
01:59:55 That’s for human connection
01:59:57 or that’s for development of ideas?
01:59:58 It’s both, they’re not that different.
02:00:01 Like Beatles, classic small group, right?
02:00:05 But there’s so much drama.
02:00:06 The Florentine artists, of course there’s drama
02:00:08 and small groups tend to split up, which is fine,
02:00:10 just like entering relationships off an end.
02:00:14 But it’s remarkable how little has been done
02:00:16 that was not done in small groups in some way.
02:00:19 So speaking of loss of beautiful relationships,
02:00:24 where do you make this whole love thing?
02:00:29 Why do humans fall in love?
02:00:31 What’s the role of love, friendship, family in life?
02:00:37 In a successful life or just life in general?
02:00:40 Why the hell are we so into this thing?
02:00:42 There are multiple layers of understanding that question.
02:00:44 So kind of the lowest layer is the Darwinian answer, right?
02:00:48 If we weren’t this way,
02:00:50 we wouldn’t have been successful
02:00:51 in reproducing and building alliances.
02:00:54 It’s important to realize that’s far from complete.
02:00:57 Sort of the highest understanding would be poetic,
02:00:59 like read John Keats or many other love poets.
02:01:03 So who do I go to to find out,
02:01:05 to learn about love in terms of poets or?
02:01:07 I would say start with John Keats.
02:01:10 But given that you’re fluent in Russian.
02:01:13 Yeah, let’s go Russian literature for a second.
02:01:16 Like you keep mentioning Russia.
02:01:18 What’s your connection?
02:01:21 What’s your love in Russia?
02:01:25 Well, first it’s all interesting,
02:01:26 but more concretely, my wife was born in Moscow.
02:01:29 So Kolniki was her neighborhood.
02:01:31 Yeah.
02:01:32 Wow.
02:01:33 And she grew up there.
02:01:34 I married her here.
02:01:36 My daughter, I adopted her.
02:01:38 I’m not her biological father, but I genuinely raised her.
02:01:41 She was born in Russia,
02:01:42 though she came here when she was one.
02:01:45 My father in law.
02:01:46 So you’re basically Russian.
02:01:47 No, no, no.
02:01:48 I’m a New Jersey boy.
02:01:49 That’s the same thing.
02:01:51 I’m very sorry to report.
02:01:52 My father in law passed away a week ago.
02:01:54 He lived with us for six years.
02:01:57 He lived in Russia till he was, oh, 70.
02:02:01 Saw Stalinist error.
02:02:04 His father was brought to a camp,
02:02:05 lived through World War II.
02:02:07 Much, much more.
02:02:09 Had an incredible life.
02:02:11 Never really learned how to speak English.
02:02:14 So I absorbed something Russian from him as well.
02:02:17 He was part Armenian.
02:02:20 So that’s my connection to Russia.
02:02:21 A bit of the Russian soul, too.
02:02:24 Do you?
02:02:24 I don’t think I have it.
02:02:25 I think I appreciate it.
02:02:27 But there’s division of labor, right?
02:02:29 Others in the family.
02:02:31 Take care of that.
02:02:32 I’m more superficial.
02:02:34 You mentioned Keats and that higher version,
02:02:36 that non Darwinian love.
02:02:38 What’s that about?
02:02:39 That it’s the highest form of human connection
02:02:42 and it’s intoxicating and it’s part of building a life.
02:02:46 And most of us are very, very strongly drawn to it.
02:02:50 And it’s part of the highest realization
02:02:52 of you being what you can be.
02:02:54 Yeah.
02:02:56 He mentioned you lost.
02:02:57 But ask a Russian.
02:02:58 I mean, this is a superficial New Jersey boy
02:03:01 who grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen
02:03:03 and that was his romanticism.
02:03:05 What’s your favorite Bruce Springsteen song?
02:03:09 I think the album Born to Run has actually held up the best.
02:03:14 Though it’s very fashionable to think
02:03:15 the earlier or later works are actually better.
02:03:18 And that’s the overproduced super pop album.
02:03:21 But the quality of the songs,
02:03:22 to me Born to Run is just far and away the best.
02:03:25 Then Darkness on the Edge of Town.
02:03:27 And those are still my favorites.
02:03:29 Born to Run is an incredible song.
02:03:33 And perfectly produced in a Phil Spector kind of way.
02:03:36 Every detail is right.
02:03:38 Every lyric.
02:03:39 What else is on the album?
02:03:40 Thunder Road, Jungle Land, Tenth Avenue, Freeze Out.
02:03:43 She’s the one, unbelievable.
02:03:46 Yeah, Bruce is amazing.
02:03:47 Leading across the river.
02:03:48 I really like when he goes into love personally.
02:03:55 Like I’m on fire.
02:03:57 That’s a very good song, Dancing in the Dark.
02:04:00 A lot of the later work,
02:04:01 I find the percussion becomes too simple
02:04:04 and kind of too white somehow.
02:04:06 And a little clunky.
02:04:08 And it’s still good work.
02:04:09 He’s super talented, but it doesn’t speak to me.
02:04:12 But when it all bursts open into the open road,
02:04:16 like it does on Born to Run, that’s magic.
02:04:19 Yeah.
02:04:20 Or Rosalita.
02:04:21 Have you ever seen him live?
02:04:23 Yes, twice.
02:04:26 I wonder what he’s like live when he was young, right?
02:04:28 Those years.
02:04:29 I saw him live when he was young.
02:04:31 I was young.
02:04:32 New Jersey.
02:04:34 I was a little disappointed actually.
02:04:37 I think what I like best from him is quite studio.
02:04:41 He certainly played well.
02:04:42 I don’t fault his performance.
02:04:44 But it’s like when I saw Plant and Page of Led Zeppelin.
02:04:47 Tremendous creators.
02:04:48 And they showed up.
02:04:49 They were not drunk.
02:04:50 Like they were paying attention.
02:04:52 But I was underwhelmed.
02:04:54 Because Led Zeppelin, like the Beatles White album,
02:04:56 is much more of a studio band than you think at first.
02:04:59 And in the case of Bruce Springsteen,
02:05:01 I don’t know about you, but for me,
02:05:03 he’s somebody that I connect with the most
02:05:05 when I’m alone and there’s like a melancholy feeling.
02:05:10 And actually, my folks live in Philly.
02:05:12 I went to school in Philly.
02:05:14 And so, you know, I’ve, I think I’ve.
02:05:18 You’re almost worthy of New Jersey then.
02:05:20 Yeah, well you’re, you’re almost worthy of Russia.
02:05:24 So we’re, we can connect.
02:05:27 And then ask, but I mean, I love Jersey.
02:05:28 This is something I feel like, I feel like, I don’t know.
02:05:34 It’s always, there’s this beautiful,
02:05:36 like there’s a diner, Olga’s Diner that closed down.
02:05:39 I used to go there.
02:05:41 There’s, there’s a melancholy feeling to me.
02:05:43 I mean, of course.
02:05:44 A thickness to culture in that part of the world.
02:05:47 Which is oddly similar to some elements
02:05:49 of the thickness of Russian culture.
02:05:51 And when you see like Russian characters on the Sopranos,
02:05:55 it totally makes sense,
02:05:56 even though there are these complete outliers.
02:05:59 Exactly, it totally makes sense.
02:06:01 You’ve, you mentioned you lost your father in law last week.
02:06:06 Do you think about mortality?
02:06:09 Do you think about your own mortality?
02:06:12 Are you afraid of death?
02:06:14 I don’t think about my own mortality that much,
02:06:17 which is probably a good thing.
02:06:19 I think death will be bad.
02:06:22 I wouldn’t say I’m afraid of it.
02:06:23 For me, the worst thing about death
02:06:25 is not knowing how the human story turns out.
02:06:28 The full human story.
02:06:29 The full human story.
02:06:30 So if I could, right before I die,
02:06:32 read like a Wikipedia page called The Rest of Human History
02:06:36 and have enough time, just like a few days,
02:06:38 to absorb it, think about it,
02:06:40 and know like, oh, well 643 years from now,
02:06:43 that’s when all the atomic weapons went off
02:06:45 and here’s what happened between now and then,
02:06:47 I would feel much better dying.
02:06:52 But that’s not how it’s gonna be, right?
02:06:54 That’s unlikely.
02:06:55 It’s almost like the Hitchhiker’s Guide,
02:06:57 they kind of have, what is it?
02:06:58 They have a one or two sentence description of the human,
02:07:01 of what goes on on Earth.
02:07:03 It’s kind of interesting to think
02:07:05 if there’s a lot of intelligent civilizations out there
02:07:07 that in the big encyclopedia that describes the universe,
02:07:10 humans will only have one sentence, maybe two.
02:07:13 Probably true.
02:07:15 Yeah.
02:07:15 But it’s the only one I can read and understand, right?
02:07:18 And it may be hard to understand the human one
02:07:20 past a number of centuries.
02:07:22 Yeah, with AI, yes.
02:07:26 Like how many years from now will reading Wikipedia
02:07:29 be like trying to read Chaucer,
02:07:31 which I almost can do, but I actually can’t.
02:07:33 I need a translation.
02:07:34 Probably you can’t do it at all.
02:07:36 Yeah.
02:07:37 I mean, maybe reading will be outdated.
02:07:39 It might be a very silly notion.
02:07:41 Maybe we’re fundamentally,
02:07:43 like we think language is fundamental to cognition,
02:07:46 but it could be something visual
02:07:47 or something totally different that we’ll plug in.
02:07:50 Neuralink or, yeah.
02:07:53 But in that story, that Wikipedia article,
02:07:55 do you think there’ll be a section on the meaning of it?
02:08:00 I hope not, because that section we could write now,
02:08:04 and it’s just not going to be very good, right?
02:08:07 What would you put in the section
02:08:08 on the meaning of human existence?
02:08:11 I don’t know, links to a lot of other sections?
02:08:15 I don’t think there are general statements
02:08:17 about the meaning of life that have that much meaning.
02:08:19 I think if you study different cultures,
02:08:21 the arts, travel, mathematics,
02:08:23 like whatever your thing is,
02:08:25 you’ll get a lot about the meaning of life.
02:08:27 So like it’s there in Wikipedia in some bigger sense.
02:08:30 But I don’t want to read the page on the meaning.
02:08:32 I bet they have such a page, in fact.
02:08:34 The fact that I’ve never visited it,
02:08:36 none of my friends, oh, here, Tyler,
02:08:37 here’s the page on the meaning of life.
02:08:39 I know you’ve been wondering about this.
02:08:40 You got to read this one.
02:08:41 No one’s ever done that to you, have they?
02:08:43 It probably has, well, I’ve actually gone to that page.
02:08:46 It does, in fact, have a lot of links to other pages.
02:08:48 Okay.
02:08:51 So that’s it.
02:08:52 The meaning of life is just a bunch of self referential
02:08:57 or citation needed type of statements.
02:09:02 I think there’s no better way to end it.
02:09:03 Tyler, it’s a huge honor.
02:09:05 I’m a huge fan.
02:09:07 Thank you so much for wasting all of this time with me.
02:09:10 It was one of the greatest conversations I’ve ever had.
02:09:11 Thank you so much.
02:09:12 My pleasure and delighted to finally have met you
02:09:15 and that we can do this.
02:09:17 Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tyler Cowen
02:09:20 and thank you to Linode, ExpressVPN,
02:09:23 SimpliSafe and Public Goods.
02:09:25 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
02:09:29 And now let me leave you with some words from Adam Smith.
02:09:33 Little else is requisite to carry a state
02:09:36 to the highest degree of opulence
02:09:38 from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes
02:09:42 and a tolerable administration of justice.
02:09:45 Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.