Tyler Cowen: Economic Growth & the Fight Against Conformity & Mediocrity | Lex Fridman Podcast #174
the following is a conversation with tyler cohen an economist at george mason university and co-creator of an amazing economics blog called marginal revolution author of many books including the great stagnation average is over and his most recent big business a love letter to an american anti-hero he's truly a polymath in his work including his love for food which makes this amazing podcast called conversations with tyler really fun to listen to quick mention of our sponsors lynnode expressvpn simply safe and public goods check them out in the description to support this podcast as a side note given tyler's culinary explorations let me say that one of the things that makes me sad about my love hate relationship with food is that while i've found a simple diet playing meat veggies it makes me happy in day to day life i sometimes wish i had the mental ability to moderate consumption of food so that i could truly enjoy meals that go way outside of that diet i've seen my mom for example enjoy a single piece of chocolate and yet if i were to eat one piece of chocolate the odds are high that i would end up eating the whole box this is definitely something i would like to fix because some of the amazing artistry in this world happens in the kitchen and some of the richest human experiences happen over a unique meal i recently was eating cheeseburgers with joe rogan and john donahue late at night in austin talking about jiu-jitsu and life and i was distinctly aware of the magic of that experience magic made possible by the incredibly delicious cheeseburgers this is the lex friedman podcast and here is my conversation with tyler cohen would you say economics is more art or science or philosophy or even magic what is it economics is interesting because it's all of the above to start with magic the notion that you can make some change and simply everyone's better off that is a kind of modern magic that has replaced old-style magic it's an art in the sense that the models are not very exact it's a science in the sense that occasionally propositions are falsified are a few basic things we know yeah and however trivial they may sound if you don't know them you're out of luck so all of the above but from my outsiders perspective economics is sometimes able to formulate very simple almost like e equals c squared general models of how our human society will function when you do a certain thing but it seems impossible or almost way too optimistic to think that a single formula or just a set of simple principles can describe the behavior of billions of human beings well with all the complexity that we have involved so do you have a sense there's a hope for economics to to uh to have those kinds of physics level descriptions and models of the world or is it just our desperate attempts as humans to make sense of it even though it's more desperate than uh than uh rigorous and serious and actually predictable like a like a physics type science i don't think economics will ever be very predictive it's most useful for helping you ask better questions you look at something like game theory well game theory never predicted usa and ussr would have a war would not have a war but trying to think through the logic of strategic conflict if you know game theory it's just a much more interesting discussion are you surprised that we speaking of the soviet union and the united states and speaking of game theory are you surprised that we haven't destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons yet like that simple formulation of mutually assured destruction that's a good example of an explanation that perhaps allows us to ask better questions but it seems to have actually described the reality of why we haven't destroyed ourselves with these ultra powerful weapons are you surprised do you think the game of theoretic explanation is is at all accurate there i think we will destroy each other with those weapons eventually eventually look it's a very low probability event so i'm not surprised it hasn't happened yet i'm a little surprised it came as close as it did you know your general thinking realizing it might have just been a flock of birds or it wasn't a first strike attack from the usa we got very lucky on that one but if you just keep on running the clock on a low probability event it will happen and it may not be usa and china usa and russia whatever you know it could be the saudis and turkey and it might not be nuclear weapons it might be some other destruction bio weapons but it simply will happen is my view and i've argued at best we have seven or eight hundred years and that's being generous at worst how how long we got well maybe it's asking for arrival process right okay so tiny probability could come any time probably not in your lifetime but uh the chance presumably increases the cheaper weapons of mass destruction are so the poisson process description doesn't take in consideration the game theoretic aspect so another way to consider is uh repeated games iterative games so is there something about us our human nature that allows us to fight against probability reduce like the closer we get to trouble the more we're able to figure out how to avoid trouble the same thing is for when you take exams or you go you know and take classes the closer or paper deadlines the closer you get to a deadline the better you start to perform you get your together and actually get stuff done i'm really not so negative on human nature and as an economist i very much see the gains from cooperation yeah but if you just ask are there outliers in history like was there a hitler for instance obviously and again you let the clock tick another hitler with nuclear weapons doesn't per se care about his own destruction it will happen so your sense is fundamentally people are good but equilibrium is what we would call it trembling hand equilibrium that the basic logic is for cooperation which is mostly what we've seen even between enemies but every now and then someone does something crazy and you don't know how to react to it and you can't always beat hitler sometimes hitler drags you down to push back is it possible that the crazier the person the less likely they are and in a way where we're safe meaning like this is the kind of proposition i've had i had the discussion with my dad as a physicist about this where he thinks that uh like if you have a graph like evil people can't also be geniuses so his this is his defense why evil people will not get control of nuclear weapons because to be truly evil but evil meaning sort of you can argue that not even the evil of hitler were talking about because hitler had a kind of view of germany and all those kinds of there's like i he probably deluded himself and the people around him to think that he's actually doing good for the world similar with stalin and so on by evil i mean more like almost like terrorists where they want to destroy themselves and of the world like those people will never be able to be actually skilled enough to do to deliver that kind of mass scale destruction so the hope is that it's very unlikely that the kind of evil that would lead to extinctions of humans or mass destruction is so unlikely that we're able to last way longer than seven hundred and eight hundred years is that three it's very unlikely in that sense i accept the argument but that's why you need to let the clock dick it's also the best argument for bureaucracy to negotiate a bureaucracy it actually selects against pure evil because you need to build alliances so bureaucracy in that regard is great right it keeps out the worst apples but look put it this way could you imagine 35 years from now the osama bin laden of the future has nukes or very bad bio weapons it seems to me you can yeah and osama was pretty evil and actually even he failed right but nonetheless that's what the seven or eight hundred years is there for and there might be destructive technologies that don't have such a high cost of production or such a high learning curve like cyber attacks or artificial intelligence all those kinds of things so yeah i mean let me ask you a question let's say you could as an act of will by spending a million dollars obliterate any city on earth and everyone in it dies and you'll get caught and you'll be sentenced to death but you can make it happen just by willing it how many months does it take before that happens so the obvious answer is like very soon this is probably a good answer for that because you can consider how many millionaires there are how many you could look at that right right i have a sense that there's just people that have a million dollars i mean there's a certain amount but have a million dollars have other interests that will outweigh the uh the interest of destroying the entire city like there's a particular you know like the i mean maybe that's a hope it's why we should be nice to the wealthy too right yeah all that trash talking is bill gates we should stop that because uh that doesn't inspire the other future bill gates is to be nice to the world that's true but your sense is the cheaper it gets to destroy the world the more likely it becomes now when i say destroy the world there's a trick in there i don't think literally every human will die but it would set back civilization by an extraordinary degree it's then just hard to predict what comes next yeah but a catastrophe where everyone dies that probably has to be something more like an asteroid or a supernova and those are purely exogenous for the time being at least so i immigrated to this country i'm i was born in the the soviet union in russia and uh which one which is an important question well which you were born in the soviet union right yes i was born in the soviet union the rest is details but i grew up in moscow russia yeah but i came to this country and this country even back there but it's always symbolized to me a place of opportunity where ev everybody could build like uh build the most incredible things especially in the engineering side of things just invent and build and scale and have a huge impact on the world and that's been to me the that's my version of the american ideal the american dream uh do you think the american dream is still there uh do you think what do you think of that notion in itself like from an economics perspective from a human perspective is it still alive and how do you think about it the american dream the american dream is mostly still there if you look at which groups are the highest earners it is individuals from india and individuals from iran which is a fairly new development great for them not necessarily easy both you could call persons of color may have faced discrimination also on the grounds of religion uh yet they've done it that's amazing it says great things about america now if you look at native born americans the story's trickier people think energizer intergenerational mobility has declined a lot recently but it has not for native born americans for about i think 40 years it's been fairly constant which is sort of good but compared to much earlier times it was much higher in the past i'm not sure we can replicate that because look go to the beginning of the 20th century very few americans finish high school or even have much wealth there's not much credentialism there aren't that many credentials so there's more upward mobility across the generations than today and it's a good thing that we had it i'm not sure we should blame the modern world for not being able to reproduce that but look the general issue of who gets into harvard or cornell is there an injustice should we fix that is there too little opportunity for the bottom say half of americans absolutely it's a disgrace how this country has evolved in that way and in that sense the american dream is clearly ailing but it has had problems from the beginning for blacks for women for many other groups i mean isn't that the whole challenge of opportunity and freedom is that it's hard and the difficulty of how hard it is to move up in society is unequal often and that's the injustice of society but the the whole point of that freedom is that over time it becomes better and better you start to fix like uh fix the the leaks the issues and it gives that's he keeps progressing in that kind of way but ultimately there's always the opportunity even if it's harder there's the opportunity to create something truly special to move up to be to be president to be a leader in whatever the industry that you're passionate about to have it we each have podcasts right in english the value of joining that american english language network is much higher today than it was 30 years ago mostly because of the internet so that makes immigration returns themselves skewed so going to the u.s canada or the uk i think has become much more valuable in relative terms than say going to france which is still a pretty well-off very nice country if you had gone to france your chance of having a globally known podcast would be much smaller yeah this this is the interesting thing uh about how much intellectual influence the united states has i don't know if it's uh connected to what we're discussing here the the freedom and opportunity of the american dream or like does it make any sense to you that we have so much impact on the rest of the world in terms of uh ideas you know is it just simply because the english is the primary language of the world or is there something fundamental to the united states that drives the development of ideas it's almost like what's cool what's entertaining what's uh you know like meme culture the internet culture uh the philosophers the intellectuals the podcasts the movies music all that stuff driving culture there's something above and beyond language in the united states it's a sense of entertainment really mattering how to connect with your audience being direct and getting to the point uh how humor is integrated even with science yeah that is pretty strongly represented here much more say than on the european continent britain has its own version of this which it does very well and not surprisingly they're hugely influential in music comedy the most of the other areas you mentioned canada yes but their best talent tends to come here but you could say it's like a broader north american thing and give them their fair share of credit what about science you you know there's a sense uh higher education is really strong research is really strong in the united states but it just feels like culturally speaking when we zoom out you know scientists aren't very cool here like uh most people wouldn't be able to name basically a single scientist maybe they would say like they would say what like einstein and neil degrasse tyson maybe and neil degrasse tyson isn't exactly a scientist he's a science communicator so like there's not uh you know the same kind of admiration of uh science and innovators as there is of like athletes or actors actresses musicians well you can become a celebrity scientist if you want to may or may not be best for science and we have spock from star trek who is still a big deal but look at it this way which country is most comfortable with inegalitarian rewards yeah for scientists whether it's fame or money and i still think it's here some of that's just the tax rate some of it is a lot of america is set up for rich people to live really well and again that's going to attract a lot of top talent and you ask like the two best vaccines i know the fights are vaccine is sort of from germany sort of from turkey but it's nonetheless being distributed through the united states marderana an armenian ethnic armenian immigrant through lebanon first to canada then down here to boston cambridge area those are incredible vaccines and u.s nailed it yeah well that's that's more almost like the i don't know what you would call it engineering the sort of scaling that's what us is really good as not just inventing of ideas but taking an idea and actually building the thing and scaling it and being able to distribute it at scale i think some people would attributed that to the the the general award of capitalism uh i don't know if you would uh what what in your views are the pros and cons of capitalism as it's implemented in america i don't know if you would say capitalism is really exist in america but to the extent that it does people use the word capitalism in in so many different ways what is capitalism the literal meaning is private ownership of capital goods which i favor in most areas but no i don't think the private sector should own our f-16s or military assets government-owned water utilities seem to work as well as privately owned water utilities but with all those qualifications put to the side business for the most part innovates better than government it is oriented toward consumer services the biggest businesses tend to pay the highest wages business is great at getting things done usa is fundamentally a nation of business and that makes us a nation of opportunity so i am indeed mostly a fan subject to numerous caveats what's uh what's the con what's what are some negative downsides of capitalism in your view or some things that we should be concerned about maybe for long-term impacts of capitalism again capitalism takes a different form in each country i would say in the united states our weird blend of whatever you want to call it has had an enduring racial problem from the beginning has been a force of taking away land from native americans and oppressing them pretty much from the beginning um it has done very well by immigrants for the most part uh we revel in creationitarian creative destruction more so we don't just prop up national champions forever and there's a precariousness to life for some people here that is less so say in germany or the netherlands we have weaker communities in some regards than say northwestern europe often would that has pluses and minuses i think it makes us more creative it's a better country in which to be a weirdo than say germany or denmark but there is truly whether from the government or from your private community there is less social security in some fundamental sense on the point of weirdo uh what that's kind of a beautiful little statement what uh what is that i mean that that seems to be uh you know you could think of a guy like elon musk and say that he's a weirdo is is that the sense in which you're using the weirdo like outside of the norm like breaking conventions absolutely yeah and here that is either acceptable or even admired or to be a loner and since so many people are outsiders and that we're all immigrants is selecting for people who left something behind we're willing to leave behind their families we're willing to undergo a certain brutality of switch in their lives makes us a nation of weirdos and weirdos are creative yeah and denmark is not a nation of weirdos it's a wonderful place you know great for them ideally you want part of the world to be fully weirdos and innovating and the other part of the world to be a little kind of chicken risk-averse and enjoy the benefits of the innovation and to give people these smooth lives and six weeks off and free ride and everyone's like oh american way versus european way but basically they're compliments yeah that's fascinating i i used to have this conversation with my uh like parents when i was growing up and just others from the immigrant uh kind of flow and they use this term especially in russian is uh you know to criticize something i was doing that would suggest you know normal people don't do this and i used to be really offended by that uh but you know as i got older uh i realized that that's a kind of compliment because in in the same kind of uh i would say way that you're you're saying that is the american ideal because if you want to do anything special or interesting you don't want to be doing in one particular avenue what normal people do because uh because that won't be interesting so the russians i think fit in very well here because the ones who come are weirdos and there's a very different russian weirdo tradition like alyosha right in brothers carter or perilman the mathematician they're weirdos and they have their own different kind of status in soviet union russia wherever and when russians come to america they stay pretty russian but it seems to me a week later they've somehow adjusted yeah and the ways in which they might want to be like grumpier than americans not smile think that people who smile are idiots yeah like they can do that no one takes that away from them yeah yeah what are you uh on a tiny tangent uh i'd love to hear if you have thoughts about grisha pearlman uh turning down the fields medal is that something you admire does that make sense to you that somebody you know with the structure of nobel prizes of these huge awards of the reputations the hierarchy of everyone saying applauding how special you are and here's a person who was doing one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of mathematics it doesn't want stupid prize and doesn't want recognition doesn't want to do interviews it doesn't want to be famous what do you mean what do you make of that it's great look prizes are corrupting after scientists win nobel prizes they tend to become less productive now statistically it's hard to sort out the different effects there's aggression toward the mean does the prize make you too busy it's a little tricky but there's not enough nobel prizes either to to get gathering of data right but it's i've known a lot of nobel prize winners and it is my sense they become less productive they repeat more of their older messages which may be highly socially valuable but if someone wants to turn their back on that and keep on working which i assume is what he's doing that's awesome yeah i mean we should respect that it's like he wins a bigger prize right our extreme respect yeah uh well uh grecia if you're listening i need to talk to you soon okay i've been uh i've been trying and trying to get a hold of him okay uh back to capitalism i got to ask you just competition in general in this world of weirdos is competition good for the world you know this kind of uh seems to be one of the fundamental engines of capitalism right do you see as ultimately constructive or destructive for the world what really matters is how good your legal framework is so competition within nature you know for food leads to bloody conflict all the time the animal world is quite unpleasant to say the least if you have something like the rule of law and clearly defined property rights which are within reason justly allocated competition probably is going to work very well but it's not an unalloyed good thing at all it can be highly destructive military competition right which actually is itself sometimes good but it's not good per se what what what aspects of life do you think we should protect from competition so is there some you said like the rule of law is there some things we should uh keep away from competition well the fight for territory most of all right so violence anything that involves like actual physical violence right and it's not that i think the current borders are just i mean go talk to hungarians romanians they'll you know serbians bosnians they'll talk your ear off and some of them are probably right but at the end of the day we have some kind of international order and i would rather we more or less stick with it if catalonians want to leave they keep up with it you know let them go but what about space of like health care this is where you get into a tension of like between capitalism and kind of uh morse i don't want to use socialism but those kinds of policies they're less uh free market i think in this country healthcare should be much more competitive so you go to hospitals doctors they don't treat you like a customer uh they treat you like an idiot or like a child or someone with third party payment and it's a pretty humiliating experience often yeah do you think a free market in general is possible like a pure free market and is that a good goal to to uh strive for i don't think the term pure free market's well defined because you need a legal order the legal order has to make decisions unlike what is intellectual property more important than ever there's no benchmark that like represents the pure free market way of doing things what will penalties be how much do we put into law enforcement no simple answers but just saying free market doesn't pin down what you're going to do on those all important questions so free market is a is an economics i guess idea so there's no it's it's not possible for free marketers generate the rules they're like emergent like self-governing it generates a lot of them right through private norms through trade associations international trade is mostly done uh privately and by norms so it's certainly possible but at the end of the day i think you need governments to draw very clear lines to prevent it from turning into mafia run systems you know i've been hanging out with the co with other group of weirdos uh lately michael malus who's uh who espouses to be an anarchist anarchism which is like i i think intellectually just a fascinating set of ideas uh where the you know taking free market to the full extreme of basically saying there should be no no government what is it uh oversight i guess and then everything should be fully like all the agreements all the collectives you form should be uh voluntary not based on the geographic land you were born on and so on do you think that's just the giant mess like do you think it's possible for an anarchist society to work where it's um you know this in addition in a fully distributed way people agree with each other not just on financial transactions but you know on um on their personal security on sort of military type of stuff uh on healthcare on education all those kinds of things and where does it break down well i wouldn't press a button to say get rid of our current constitution which i view is pretty good and quite wise but i think the deeper point is that all societies are in some regards anarchistic yes and we should take the anarchists seriously so globally there's a kind of anarchy across borders even within federalistic systems they're typically complex there's not a clear transitivity necessarily of who has the final say over what uh just the state visa via its people there's not per se a final arbitrator in that regard so you want a good anarchy rather than a bad anarchy you want to squish your anarchy into the right corners and i don't think there's a theoretical answer how to do it but you start with a country like is it working well enough now this country you'd say mostly you'd certainly want to make a lot of improvements and that's why i don't want to press that get rid of the constitution button but to just dump on the anarchists is to miss the point always try to learn from any opinion you know and what in it is true i i'm just like uh marveling at the at the poetry of saying that we should squish our anarchy into the right corners love it okay uh i gotta ask i've been uh talking with uh uh since we're doing a whirlwind introduction to all of economics uh i've been talking to a few objectivists recently and just you know uh inran comes up as a as a person as a philosopher throughout many conversations a lot of people really despise her a lot of people really love her it's always weird to me when uh somebody arouses a philosophy or a human being arouses that much emotion in either direction does she make do you understand first of all that level of emotion and what are your thoughts about ayn rand and her philosophy objectivism is it useful at all to think about this kind of formulation of rational self interest if i could put in those words or i guess more negatively the the the selfishness where she would put i guess the virtue of selfishness ein rand was a big influence on me growing up the book that really mattered for me was capitalism the unknown ideal the notion that wealth creates opportunity and good lives and wealth is something we ought to valorize and give very high status it's one of our key ideas i think it's completely correct i think she has the most profound and articulate statement of that idea that said as a philosopher i disagree with her on most things and i did even like as a boy when i was reading her i read plato before i ran and in a socratic dialogue there's all these different points of view being thrown around yeah and who whomever it is you agree with you understand the wisdom is in the coming together of the different points of view yeah and she doesn't have that so altruism can be wonderful in my view humans are not actually that rational self-interest is often poorly defined to pound the table and say existence exists i wouldn't say i disagree but i'm not sure that it's a very meaningful statement i think the secret to iran is that she was russian i'd love to have her on my podcast if she was still alive i'd only ask her about russia which she mostly never talked about after writing we the living and she is much more russian than she seems at first even like purging people from the objectivist circles it's like how russians especially female russians so often purge their friends it's weird all the parallels so you're saying so yes so i um assuming she's still not around uh but if she is and she comes into your podcast see can you dig into that a little bit do you mean like the pers her personal uh demons around the social and economic russia of the time when she escaped the promise she suffered there yeah what she really likes in the music and literature and why she's looking literature and getting deeply into that her view of relations between the sexes and russia how it differs from america why she still carries through the old russian vision in her fiction this extreme sexual dimorphism but with also very strong women to me as a uniquely at least eastern european uh vision mostly russian i would say and that's in her that's her actual real philosophy not this table bounding existence exists and that's not talked about enough he's a russian philosopher yeah like she or soviet whatever you want to call it and if she wasn't so certain she could have been a dostoevsky where it's not that that certainty is almost the thing that uh brings of the adoration of uh millions but also the hatred of millions you became a cult figure in a somewhat russian-like manner yeah yeah it is it is what it is uh but i love the idea that i again you're just dropping bombs that are poetic that the wisdom is in the coming together of ideas it's kind of interesting to think that no one human possesses wisdom no one idea is the wisdom that the coming together is the wisdom like in my view boswell's life of johnson 18th century british biography it's in essence a co-authored work boswell and johnson it's one of the greatest philosophy books ever though it is commonly regarded as a biography john stuart mill who in a sense was co-authoring with harriet taylor a better philosopher than his realized though he's rated very very highly plato socrates a lot of the greatest works are in a kind of dialogue form curtis faust would be another example it's very much a dialogue and yes it's drama but it's also philosophy shakespeare maybe the wisest thinker of them all in your book big business speaking of iran big business a love letter to an american anti-hero you make the case for uh the benefit that large businesses bring to society can you explain if you look at say the pandemic which has been a catastrophic event right for for many reasons but who is it that saved us so amazon has done remarkably well they upped their delivery game more or less overnight with very few hitches i've ordered hundreds of amazon packages direct delivery food whether it's doordash or ubereats or using you know whole foods through amazon shipping again it's gone remarkably well switching over our entire higher educational system basically within two weeks to zoom zoom did it i mean i've had a zoom outage but their performance rate has been remarkably high so if you just look at resources competence incentives who's been the star performers the nba even just canceling the season as early as they did sending a message like hey people this is real and then pulling off the bubble with not a single found case of covid and having all the testing set up in advance big business has done very well lately and throughout the broader course of american history in my view has mostly been a hero can we engage in a kind of therapy session uh in in i i'm often troubled by the negativity towards big business and uh i wonder if you could help figure out how we remove that or maybe first psychoanalyze it and then how we remove it it it it feels like you know once we've gotten wi-fi on flights on airplane flights uh people started complaining about how shitty the connection is right yeah they take it for granted immediately yeah and then start complaining about little details uh another example that's more that's closer to like especially as a as aspiring entrepreneurs closer to the things i'm thinking about is jack dorsey with twitter you know to me twitter has enabled an incredible platform of communication and yet the biggest thing that people talk about is not how incredible this platform is uh they essentially use the platform to complain about the censorship of a few individuals as opposed to how amazing it is now you should also you should talk about how shitty the wi-fi is and how censorship or the removal donald trump from the platform is a bad thing but it feels like we don't talk about the positive impacts at scale of these technologies is there can you explain why and is there a way to fix it i don't know if we can fix it i think we are beings of high neuroticism for the most part yeah as a personality trait not everyone but most people and as a compliment to that if someone says 10 nice things about you and one insult you're more bothered by the insult than you're pleased by the nice things especially if the insult is somewhat true yeah so you have these media these vehicles twitter is one you mentioned there's all kind of messages going back and forth and you're really bugged by the messages you don't like most people are neurotic to begin with it's not only taken out on big business to be clear so congress catches a lot of grief and yeah some of it they deserve yes religion is not attacked the same way but religiosity is declining if you poll people the military still pulls quite well but people are very disillusioned with many things and the martin guri thesis that because of the internet you just see more of things and the more you see of something whether it's good bad or in between the more you will find to complain about i suspect is the fundamental mechanism here i mean look at clubhouse right it's to me it's a great service may or may not be like my thing but gives people this opportunity no one makes you go on it and all these media articles like oh is clubhouse gonna wreck things you know are they gonna break things new york times is complaining of course it's their competitor as well yeah i'm like give these people a chance like talk it up you may or may not like it like let's praise the people who are getting something done very ein randy in point as an economic thinker as a writer as a podcaster what do you think about clubhouse as what do you think about okay let let me uh just throw my feeling about it i used to use discord which is another service where people use voice so the only thing you do is just hear each other there's no face you just see a little icon that's the essential element of uh clubhouse and there's an intimacy to voice only communication that's hard that didn't make sense to me but it was just what it is which feels like something that won't last for some reason maybe it's the cynical view but what's your sense uh what is it about this mat the intimacy of what's happening right now with clubhouse i've greatly enjoyed what i've done but i'm not sure it's for me in the long run for two reasons first if you compare it to doing a podcast podcasting has greater reach than clubhouse so i would rather put time into my podcast but then also my like core asset so to speak is i'm a very fast reader so audio per se is not necessarily to my advantage i don't speak or listen faster than other people in fact i'm a slower listener because i like 1.0 not 1.5 x so i should spend less time on audio and more time reading and writing yeah it's interesting because you like you mention podcasts and audio books i you know the the podcasts are recorded and so i can skip things like i can skip commercials uh or i can skip parts where it's like ugh this part is boring with live conversations especially when there's a magic to the fact when you have a lot of people participating in that conversation but you know some people are like ugh this topic they're going into this thing and you can't skip it or you can't fast forward you can't go one 1.5 x or 2x you can't speed it up nevertheless there's a tension between that so that's the productivity aspect with the actual magic of live communication where anything can happen where elon musk can ask the ceo of robin hood vlad about like hey somebody like holding a gun to your head there's something shady going on the magic of that that's also my criticism of like there's been a recent conversation with bill gates that uh he won a platform uh and had a basic a regular interview on the platform without allowing the possibility of the magic of the chaos like uh so i'm not i'm not exactly sure it's probably not the right platform for you and for many other people who are exceptionally productive in other places but there's still nevertheless a magic to the chaos that can be created with a live conversation that gives me pause maybe what it's perfect for is the tribute so they had an episode recently that i didn't hear but i heard it was wonderful it was anecdotes about steve jobs that you can't do one-to-one right and you don't want control you want different people appearing and stepping up and saying they're bit yeah and clubhouse is 110 perfect for that the tribute i love that that should be but there's also the possibility i think uh there was a time when somebody arranged a conversation with steve jobs and bill gates on stage right i remember that happened a long time ago and you know it was very formal you know it could have probably gone better but it was still magical to have these people that obviously like had a bunch of tension throughout their history there's it's so frictionless to have two major figures in world history just jump on a clubhouse stage putin and elon musk and then that's exactly it so there's a language barrier there there's also the problem that in particular it's like like biden would have a similar problem it's like they're just not into new technology so it's very hard to catch the kremlin up to first of all twitter right uh but to catch them up to clubhouse you have to have the elon musk has a sense of the internet the humor the memes and all that kind of stuff that you have to have in order to to like use a new app and figure out like the timing the beat what is this thing about you know so that that's the challenge there but that's exactly it that that magic of have two big personalities just show up and i i i wonder if it's just a temporary thing that we're going through with the pandemic where people are just lonely and they're seeking for that human connection that we usually guess get elsewhere through our work but they'll stay lonely in my opinion you think so i do so it is a pandemic thing but i think it will persist and the idea of wanting to be connected to more of the world clubhouse will still offer that and all the mental health issues out there a lot of people have broken ties and they will still be lonely post-vaccines yeah i um from an artificial intelligence perspective i have a sense that there is like a deep loneliness in the world that all of us are really lonely like we don't even acknowledge it even people in happy relationships it feels like there's like an iceberg of loneliness in all of us like seeking to be understood like deeply understood understanding us like having somebody with whom you can have a deep interaction enough to where you can they can help you to understand yourself and they also understand you like i have a sense that artificial intelligence systems can provide that as well but humans i think crave that from other humans in in ways that we perhaps don't acknowledge and i i have a hope that technology will enable that more and more like clubhouse is an example that allows that are touring bots going to out-compete clubhouse like why not pro sort of program your own session you'll just talk into your device and say here's the kind of conversation i want and it will create the characters for you and it may not be as good as elon and vladimir putin but it will be better than ordinary club has yeah and one of the things that's missing it's not just conversation it's it's memory so long-term memory is what current ai systems don't have is sharing an experience together forget the words it's like sharing the highs and the lows of life together and the systems around us remembering that remembering we've been through that like that's the thing that creates really close relationships is going through some like go struggle if you survive together there's something really difficult that bonds you with other humans and this is related to immigration in the american dream in what way people who have come to this country however weird and different they may be they are their ancestors at some point probably have shared this thing right us is not going to split up it may get more screwed up as a country but texas and california are not going to break off yeah i mean they're big enough where they could do it but it's just never going to happen we've been through too much together yeah ah that's a hopeful message do you think uh you know some people have talked to eric weinstein you've talked to eric weinstein uh he has a sense that growth uh you know like the the the entirety of the american system is based on the assumption that we're going to grow forever the economy is going to grow forever do you think uh uh economic growth will continue indefinitely or will we stagnate i've long been in agreement with eric peter thiel robert gordon and others that growth has slowed down i argued that in my book the great stagnation appropriately titled but the last two years i've become much more optimistic i've seen a lot of breakthroughs in green energy and battery technology mrna vaccines and medicine is a big deal already it will repair our gdp and save millions of lives around the world uh there's an anti-malaria vaccine that's now in stage 3 trial it probably works crispr to defeat sickle cell anemia just space area after area after area there's suddenly the surge of breakthroughs i would say many of them rooted in superior computation and ultimately moore's law and access to those computational abilities so i'm much more optimistic than say the last time i spoke to eric i don't know he he moves all the time in his views i don't know where he's at now he's not he hasn't gained that's really interesting so your little drop of optimism comes from like there might be a fundamental shift in the kind of things that computation has unlocked for us in terms of like it could be a well spring of innovation that can that enables growth for a long time to come like eric has not quite connected to the computation aspect yet to where it could be a wellspring of innovation but you're very close to it in your own work i don't have to tell you that the work you're doing would not have been possible not very long ago but the question is how much does that work enable continue growth for decades to come for all their problems some version of driverless vehicles will be a thing i'm not sure when you know much better than i do maybe only partially but that too will be a big deal well one of the open questions that sort of the peter thiel school area of ideas is how much can be converted to technology how much how many parts of our lives can technology integrate and then innovate like can it replace uh healthcare okay you know can a replace the legal system can replace government not replace but like you know uh make it digital and thereby enable computation to improve it right that's the open question because many aspects of our lives are still not really that digitized there was a new york times symposium in april which is not long ago and they asked the so-called experts when are we going to get vaccines and the most optimistic answer was in four years yeah and obviously we beat that by a long mile so i think people still haven't woken up you mentioned my tiny drop of optimism but it's a big drop of optimism is it a waterfall yet i mean is it just well here's my pessimism whenever there are major new technologies they also tend to be used for violence directly or indirectly radio hitler not that he hit people over the head with radios but it enabled the rise of various dictators so the new technologies now whatever exactly they may be they're going to cause a lot of trouble yeah and that's my pessimism not that i think they're all going to slow to a trickle when was the stagnation book 2011 yes it was the first of these stagnation books in fact it's very interesting uh but even then i said this is temporary and i was predicting it would be gone in about 20 years time i'm not sure that's exactly the right prediction like 2030 but i think we're actually going to beat that so you think the united states might still be on top of the world for the rest of the century in terms of its economic economic growth impact on the world scientific innovation all those kinds of things that's too long to predict but i'm bullish on america in general got it um speaking of being bullish on america the opposite of that is uh you know we talked about capitalism talk about iran and her russian roots what do you think about communism why doesn't it what is it the implementation is there anything about its ideas that you find compelling or is it just a fundamentally flawed system well communism is like capitalism the words mean many things to different people yes you could argue my life as a tenured professor comes closer to communism anything that the human race has seen and i would argue it works pretty well yeah but look if you mean the soviet union it devolved pretty quickly to a kind of decentralized set of incentives that were destructive rather than value maximizing it wasn't even central planning much less communism so paul craig roberts and paulani were correct in their descriptions of the soviet system think of it as weird mixes of barter and malfunctioning incentives and being very good at a whole bunch of things but in terms of progress innovation and consumer goods it really being quite a failure and now i wouldn't call that communism but that's what i think of the system the soviets had and it required an ever increasing pile of lies that both alienated people but created an elite that by the end of the thing no longer believed in the system itself or even thought they were doing better by being crooks then by just say moving to switzerland and being an upper middle class individual like you would have a higher standard of living by gorbachev's time not gorbachev but if you're number 30 in the hierarchy you're better off as a middle-class person in switzerland and that of course did not prove sustainable and so it's uh what is it a momentum a bureaucracy or something like that it just builds up or you lose control of the the original vision and that naturally happens it's just people and you can't use normal profit and loss and price incentives so you get all prices or most prices set too low right shortages everywhere people trade favors you have this culture of bartered bribes sexual favors or you know family friends and you get more and more of that and you over time lose more and more of the information and the prices and quantities and practices and norms you had and that sort of slowly decays and then by the end no one is believing in it that would be my take but again you're the expert here the the russian scholar well perhaps no more an expert than iron rand uh it's more personal than it is scholarly uh or historic so stalin held power for 30 years uh vladimir putin has held power for 21 years where you could argue he took a little break uh but not much he was still holding power i think and it's still possible now with the new uh uh constitution that he could hold power from longer than stalin 30 longer than 30 years what do you think about the man the state of affairs in russia in general the system they have there is there something interesting to you as an economist as a human being about russia everything is interesting i mean he would be part of my take as you know the russian economy starting what 1999 2000 has really quite a few years of super excellent growth and putin is still riding on that it more or less coincides with his rise as the truly focal figure on the scene uh since then pretty recently they've had a bunch of years of negative four to five percent growth in a row which is terrible the economy is way too dependent on fossil fuels but the structural problem is this you need a concordance across economic power social power political power they don't have to be allocated identically but they have to be allocated consistently and the russian system under putin from almost the beginning has never been able to have that that ultimately his incentives are to steer the system where the economic power is in a small number of hands in a non-diversified way the system won't deliver sustainable gains and living standards anymore ever the way it's set up now that with fossil fuel prices go up they'll have some good years for sure and that is really quite structural what has gone wrong and then on top of that you can have an opinion of putin but you've got to start with those structural problems and that's why it's just not going to work but he had all those good years in the beginning so the number of russians say who live here or in russia who love putin and it's sincere they're not just afraid of being you know dragged away like that's a real phenomenon uh yeah i'm really torn on you know putin's approval rating real approval rating seems to be very high and i'm torn in whether that's has to do with uh the fact that there is uh control of the press or if it's which is the people i talk to who are in russia family and so on a genuine love of putin appreciation of what putin has done and is going to do with russia and a lot of that would go away if the press were freer i think yes well singapore realizes this anyone discussed by the press no matter who they are people in singapore have done a great job yes uh but if you're discussed by the press you don't look good tech company executives are learning this right it's just like a rule so in that sense i think the rating is artificially high but i don't by any means think it's all insincere but that high popularity i view as bearish for russia i would feel better about the country if people were more pissed off at him yeah that's right it's nice to see free speech even if it's full of hate uh i am also troubled on the scientific side and entrepreneurial side it seems difficult to be an entrepreneur in russia like it's not even uh in terms of rules it's just culturally the people i speak to it's not easy to build a business to uh no it's not easy to even dream of building a business in russia that's just not part of the culture part of the conversation you know it's almost like the conversation is if you wanna if you wanna be the next bill gates or elon musk or steve jobs or whatever you come to america that's the sense they have yeah and i don't three matters is his is it history or just structural problems of today what do you i mean it's all the same thing so a history of hostility to commerce which of course the old ussr is gone but a lot of the attitudes remain a lot of the corruption remains you have this legacy distribution of wealth from the auctioning off of the assets which is not conducive to some kind of broadly egalitarian democracy and so you have these small number of power points to try to control information and wealth and not really so keen to encourage the others who ultimately would pull the balance of political power away from the very wealthy and from putin and they support that culture and the return of interest in like orthodox church and all that it's all part of the same piece i think because the old orthodox church is not that pro-commerce you'd have to say but it's traditionalist it's pro-family those are safer ideas and then there's such a great safety valve the most ambitious smartest people like they probably will learn english they sort of can look like they belong in all sorts of other countries they can show up and blend in super talented they've probably had an excellent education especially if they're from one of the two major cities but even if not so even from siberia and they go off they leave they're not a source of opposition and that keeps the whole thing up and running for another generation yeah uh what do you make of the other the other big uh player china uh they seem to have a very different messed up but also functioning system they seem to be much better at encouraging entrepreneurs they're choosing winners but like what do you make of the entire chinese system uh like why does it work as well as it does currently what are your concerns about it and uh what are its threats to the united states or uh possible you know it's a what is it you said like wisdom isn't when two ideas come together is there some possible benefits of uh these kinds of ideas coming together it's amazing what china has done but i would say to put it in perspective if you compare them to japan south korea taiwan hong kong and singapore they've still done much worse not even close yes and that's both living standards or i hesitate to cite democracy as an unalloyed good in and of itself but there's more freedom in all those other places by a lot so china has all these problems of history but they've managed as actually the soviets did in the middle of the 20th century one of the two great mass migrations from the countryside to cities which boosts productivity enormously and will sustain totalitarian systems but they move from a totalitarian system to an oligarchy where the ccp is actually at least for a while he has been really good at governing have made a lot of very good decisions you have to admit that i don't know how long that streak will continue with one person so much now holding authority in a more extreme manner the selection pressures for the next generation of high-level ccp members probably become much worse you have this general problem of the state-owned enterprise is losing relative productivity compared to the private sector well we're going to kind of hold jack ma on this island and he can only issue like weird hello statements it kind of smells bad to me i don't feel that it's about to crash uh below but i don't see them supplanting america as like the world's number one country i think they will muddle through and have very serious problems but there's enough talent there they will muddle through is there ideas from china from anywhere in general of large-scale role of government that you find might be useful like andrew yang recently ran on the platform of ubi right uh universal basic income is there some interesting ideas of large-scale government sort of welfare programs at scale that you find interesting keep in mind the current version of the chinese communist party post mao dismantled what was called the iron rice ball so took apart the health care protections a lot of the welfare system a lot of the guaranteed jobs so the economic rise of china coincided with the weakening of welfare i'm not saying that's causal per se but people think of china as having a government that takes care of everyone it's very far from the truth and buy a lot of metrics i don't mean control over people's lives i don't mean speech but by a lot of metrics economically we have a lot more government than they do so what one means here by like government private control i don't think you can just add up the numbers and get a simple answer they've been fantastic at building infrastructure in cities in ways that will attract people from the countryside and furthermore they more or less enforce a meritocracy in this sense like if you're a kid of a rich guy you'll get unfair privilege that's unfair but systems can afford that if you are smart and from the countryside and your parents have nothing you will be elevated and sent to a very good school graduate school because of the exam system and they do that and they mean that very consistently it's like the soviets had a version of that like for jazz and romantic piano not for everything but where they had it like yeah again they were tremendous right yeah exactly so yeah chinese have it in so many areas a genuine meritocracy in this one way that moves people from the world to this big city and that's that's all that's a big boost of productivity for some amount of time and when they get there they're taken seriously jack ma was riding a bicycle teaching english in his late 20s he was a poor guy so not a society of credentialism or in america is way too much a credentialist society as we're talking about even with the nobel prize yeah but what do you think about these large government programs like ubi the one version of ubi that makes the most sense to me is the mitt romney version ubi for kids like kids are vulnerable if their parents screw up you shouldn't blame the kid or make the kids suffer i believe in something like ubi for kids maybe just cash but if you don't have kids even with ai my sense is at least in the world we know you should be able to find a way to adjust you might have to move you know to north dakota to work uh you know next to fracking say uh but look before the pandemic the two most robot intensive societies japan and the u.s u.s at least for manufacturing uh were at full employment so maybe there's some far off day where there's literally no work john lennon imagine it's piped you know everywhere and then we might revisit the question yeah but for now we you know we had rising wages in the trump years and full employment so i don't you don't see automation as a threat that fundamentally like shakes our society it's a threat in the following sense the new technologies are harder to work with for many people yeah and that's the social problem but i'm not sure a universal basic income is the right answer to that very real problem well that's also i i like the upi for kids it's also your definition or the line the threshold for what is vulnerable and what is basic human nature going back to russia you know life is suffering that you know struggle is a part of life and perhaps sort of changing maybe the what defines the 21st century is having multiple careers and adjusting and learning and right evolving and uh some of the technology uh in terms of uh you know some of the technology we see like the internet allows us to uh make those pivots easier you know allows later life education possible it makes it possible i don't know and your earlier point about loneliness being this fundamental human problem which i would agree with strongly ubi if it's at a high level will make that worse i mean say ubi or higher enough you could just sit at home uh people are not going to be happy they don't actually want that yeah and we've relearned that in the pandemic yeah the flip side the hope with ubi is you have a little bit more freedom to find the thing that alleviates your loneliness that's the idea so it's it's kind of an open question if i give you a million dollars or a billion dollars will you pursue the thing you love will you be would you be more motivated to pursu to find the thing you love to do the thing you love or will you be lazy and lose yourself in the sort of daily activities that don't actually bring you joy but you know pacify you in some kind of way where you can you just let the day slip by that's that's the open question but a lot of the great creators did not have huge cushions whether it's mozart or james brown or the great painters in history they had to work pretty hard and if you look at heirs to great fortunes maybe i'm forgetting someone but it's hard to think of any who have creatively been important as novelists or they might have continued to run the family business yeah but you know van gaal was not heirs not heir to a great family fortune it said that cushions get in the way of progress which is uh yeah so there's the same point about prizes right yeah inheriting too much money is like winning a prize we mentioned eric uh eric weinstein i know you agree on a bunch of things is there some beautiful fascinating insightful disagreement that you have that has yet to be resolved with him is there some ideas that you guys battle better battle it out on is it the stagnation question that you mentioned that's one of them but here's at least two others but i would stress eric is always evolving so i'm just talking about a time slice eric right i don't know where he's at right now yeah like i heard him on clubhouse three nights ago but that was three nights ago yeah but i think he's far too pessimistic about the impact of immigration on u.s science he thinks it has displaced u.s scientists which i think that is partly true i just think we've gotten better talent i'm like bring it on double down and look at kuriko you know who basically came up with mrna vaccines she was from hungary and was ridiculed and mocked she couldn't get her papers published she stuck at it an american might not have been so stubborn because we have these cushions so eric is all worried like mathematicians coming in they're discouraging native u.s citizens from doing math i'm like bring in the best people if we all end up in other avocations absolutely fine by me does it trouble you that we kick them out after they get a degree often i would give anyone with a plausible graduate degree a green card universally yeah that's i i agree with that it makes no sense it makes so strange that the best people that come here suffer here create awesome stuff here then when we kick them out it doesn't make any sense here's another view i have i call it open borders for belarus now russia is a big country i would gladly like increase the russian quota yeah by 3x 4x 5x like i not 20 but a big boost but belarus small country like why can't and they're poor and they have decent education and a lot of talent there why can't we just open the door yeah and convert a belarus passport to a green card open borders for belarus it's my new campaign slogan are you running for president 2024 well write-ins are welcome but what's the second thing you disagree with eric uh trade again i'm not sure where he's at now but he is suspicious of trade in a way that i am not i do understand what's called the china shock has been a big problem for the u.s middle class i fully accept that i think most of that is behind us national security issues aside i think free trade is very much a good thing eric i'm not sure he'll say it's not a good thing but he won't say it is a good thing and i know he's kind of that's like eric free trade but look on things like vaccines i don't believe in free trade you want vaccine production in your own country look at the eu they have enough money no one will send them vaccines what's different about vaccines is it there are some things you want to prioritize the citizenry on and they could argue it would be cheaper to produce all u.s manufactured vaccines in india they have the technologies uh obviously lower wages but look there's talk in india right now of cutting off the export of vaccines if you outsource your vaccine production you're not sure the other country will respect the norm of free trade so you need to keep some vaccine production in your country it's an exception to free trade not to the logic a bunch of things the navy uses you can't buy those components from china like that's insane but look it would be cheaper to do so right yeah let me uh completely shift topics on something that's fascinating it's all the same topic but great everything is interesting uh what do you think about what the hell is money and uh the recent the the recent excitement around cryptocurrency that um brings to the forefront uh the philosophical discussion of the nature of money are you bullish on cryptocurrency are you excited about it what does it make you think about how the nature of money is changing no one knows what money is probably no one ever knew go back to medieval times bills of exchange were they money maybe it's just a semantic debate gold silver what about copper coins what about metals that were considered legal tender but not always circulating yeah what about credit so being confused about moneyness is the natural state of affairs for human beings and if there's more of that i'd say that's probably a good thing now crypto per se i think bitcoin has taken over a lot of the space held by gold that to me seems sustainable uh i'm not short bitcoin i don't have some view that the price has to be different than the current price but i know it changes every moment uh i am deeply uncertain about the less of crypto which seems connected to ultimate visions of using it for transactions in ways where i'm not sure whether it be you know prediction markets or defy i'm not sure the retail demand really is there once it is regulated like everything else is i would say i'm 40 60 optimistic on those forms of crypto that is i think it's somewhat more likely they failed and succeed but i take them very seriously so we're talking about it becoming one of the main currencies in the world that's what we're discussing that i don't think will happen so but but the reality is that bitcoin used to be in the single digits of a dollar and now has crossed fifty thousand dollars for a single bitcoin do you think it's possible it reaches something like a million dollars i don't think we have a good theory of the value of bitcoin if people decide it's worth a million dollars it's worth a million dollars but isn't that money like you said isn't the ultimate state of money confusion or however beautifully you put it it's like valuing an andy warhol painting so when warhol started off probably those things had no value sketches early sketches of shoes now a good warhol could be worth over 50 million yeah that's an incredible rate of price appreciation bitcoin is seeing a similar trajectory i don't pretend to know where it will stop but it's about trying to figure out what do people think of andy warhol he could be out of fashion in a century maybe yes maybe no but you don't think about war halls as money they perform some money like functions you can even use them as collateral for like deals between gangs but they're not basically money nor is bitcoin and the transactions velocity of bitcoin i would think is likely to fall if anything so you don't think there will be some kind of phase shift will become adopted and become mainstream for the trend for for the main for one of the main mechanisms of transactions bitcoin no now i you know ether has some chance at that i would bet against it but i wouldn't give you a definitive no and you'll would bitcoin is too costly it may be fine to hold it like gold but gold is also costly uh you have smart people trying to make say ether much more effective as a currency than bitcoin and there's certainly a decent chance they will succeed yeah there's a lot of innovation i mean with smart contracts with uh nfts as well there's there's a lot of interesting like innovations that are plugging into the human psyche somehow just like money does you know money seems to be this viral thing our ideas of money right and if the idea is strong enough it seems to be able to take hold like there's network effects that just take over and like i i particularly see that with i'd love to get your comment on uh deutsche coin which is basically by a single human being elon musk has been created you know it's like these celebrities can have a huge ripple effect on the impact of money is it possible that in the 21st century people like elon musk and celebrities i don't know donald trump the rock whoever else can have can actually define you know the currencies that we use maybe can can deutsch going behind the primary currency of the world i think of it as like baseball cards so right now every baseball player has a baseball card and the players who are stars their cards can end up worth a fair amount of money yeah and that's stable we've had it for many decades uh sort of the player defines the card they sign a contract with tops or whatever company now could you imagine celebrities baseball players lebron james having their own currencies instead of cards absolutely and you're somewhat seeing that right now as you mentioned artists with these unique works on the blockchain but i'm not sure those are macro economically important if it's just a new class of collectibles that people have fun with again i say bring it on but whether there are use cases beyond that that challenge fiat monies which actually work very well yesterday i sent money to a family in ethiopia that i helped support in less than 24 hours they got that money digitally yes no not digitally through my bank my primitive dinosaur bank bb t mid-atlantic bank headquartered in north carolina you know chartered by the fed regulated by the fdac in the occ now you could say well the exchange rate was not so great uh i don't see crypto as close to beating that once you take into account all of the last mile problems fiat currency works really well people are not sitting around bitching about it and when you talk to crypto people the number who have to postulate some out of the blue hyperinflation where there's no evidence for that whatsoever that's to me is a sign they're not thinking clearly about how hard they have to work to out compete fiat currency there's a bunch of different technologies that are really exciting that don't want to address how difficult it is to out-compete the current accepted alternative so for example autonomous vehicles a lot of people are really excited yeah but it's not trivial to out compete uber uh on the cost and the effectiveness and the user experience and all those concepts correct sorry uber driven by humans yes uh and it's not you know that's taken for granted i think that look wouldn't it be amazing how amazing would the world look when the cars are driving themselves fully you know it's going to drive the cost down you can remove the cost of drivers all those kinds of things but it's when you actually get down to it and have to build a business around it it's actually very difficult to do and i guess you're saying your sense is similar competition is facing cryptocurrency like you have to actually present a killer app uh reason to switch from fiat currency uh to uh to ethereum or the biden people are going to regulate crypto and they're going to do it soon so something like d5 i fully get why that is cheaper or for some can be cheaper than other ways of conducting financial intermediation but some of that is regulatory arbitrage it will not be allowed to go on forever for better or worse i would rather see it given greater tolerance and but the point is banking lobby is strong the government will only let it run so far there'll be capital requirements reporting requirements imposed and it will lose a lot of those advantages what do you make of wall street bets another thing that recently happened that shook the world and uh at least me from the outsider perspective make me question what i do and don't understand about our economic system uh which is a bunch of different uh a bun a large number of individuals getting together on the internet and having a large-scale impact on the markets if you tell a group of people and coordinate them through the internet we're going to play a fun game it might cost you money but you're going to make the headlines and there's a chance you'll screw over some billionaires and hedge funds enough people will play that game yes so that game might continue but i don't think it's of macro economic importance and the price of those stocks in the medium term will end up wherever it ought to be so these are little outliers from a macroeconomics perspective they're they're not going to the these are not signals of of shifting power like from from centralized power to distributed power these aren't some fundamental changes in the way our economy works i think of it as a new brand of esports maybe more fun than the old brand which is fine right it's like push the anarchy into the corners where you want it it doesn't bother me but i think people are seeing it as more fundamental than it is it's a new esport more fun for many but more expensive than the old esports like chess is a new esport super cheap not as fun as like you know sending hedge funds to their doom but like what would you expect the poetry that i love it okay uh but macroeconomically it's not it's not fundamental okay i was gonna say i hope you're right because i'm uncomfortable with the chaos of the masses that's creates but uh i also think that chaos is somewhat real to be clear yes but it will matter through other channels not through manipulating you know gamestop or yeah amc so you're seeing the real macro phenomenon when people see a real macro phenomenon they tend to make every micro story fit the narrative and this micro story like it fits the narrative but it doesn't mean its importance fits the narrative that's how i would kind of dissect the mistake i think people are making oh do you do within the macro phenomena that are there do you mean everyone's weird now the internet either allows us to be weirder or makes us weirder i'm not sure what's the right way to put it maybe a mix of both you're probably right that it allows us to be weirder because well this is the other okay so this connects our previous conversation is does america allow us to be weirder or does it uh make us weirder like say we're weird and somewhat neurotic to begin with but the only messages we get are dwight d eisenhower and i love lucy and network tv like that's going to keep us within certain bounds yeah in good and bad ways that's obviously totally gone and the internet you can connect to not just q and on but all sorts of things many of them just fantastic right but in good and bad ways it makes us weirder so that maybe is troubling right like if someone's worried about that i would at least say they should give it deep serious thought and then it has a whole lot of ebbs and flows micro realizations of the weirdness that don't actually matter so like chess players today they play a lot more weird openings than they did 20 years ago like it reflects the same thing because you can research any weird opening on the internet but like does that matter probably not so a lot of the things we see are just like the weird chess openings and to figure out which are like the weird chess openings and which are fundamental to the new and growing weirdness like that's what a hedge fund investor type should be trying to do i just think no one knows yet it's like this itself this fun weird guessing game which we're partly engaging in right now exactly and i mean as eric talks about uh on the science side of things i mean i said uh like at mit especially in the machine learning field there's a natural institutional resistance to the weird it's very as they talk about it's it's difficult to hire weird faculty for example correct you want to hire you want to hire and give tenure to people that are safe and not weird and that's one of the concerns is like it seems like the weird people are the ones that push the science forward usually right and so like how do you how do you balance the two it's not obvious because there's another area where eric and i disagree as i interpret him he thinks academia is totally bankrupt yeah and i think it's only partially bankrupt how do we fix it because i i'm with you i'm i'm bullish on academia you need up-and-coming schools that end up better than where they started off and mit was once one of them yes now they're not in every area in some areas they have become the problem yeah you chicago you wouldn't call it up and coming but it's still different and that's great let's hope they managed to keep it that way uh the biggest problem to me is the rank absurd conformism at kind of second-tier schools maybe in the top 40 but not in the top dozen that are just trying to be like a junior mit but it's mediocre and copycat and they're the most dogmatic enforcers of weirdness that like harvard is more open than those second-tier schools and those second-tier schools are pretty good typically right yeah but the mediocrity is enforced there correct very strictly and the homogenization pressures clock try you know climb the rankings by another three places and be a little closer to mit though you'll never touch them yeah that to me is very harmful and you'd rather they be more like chicago more like caltech or the elder caltech all the more like pick some model be weird in it you might fail that's socially better yeah but so the problem with mit for example is the mediocrity is really enforced on the junior faculty yeah so like the people that are allowed to be weird or actually they just don't even ask for permissions anymore or more senior faculty and that's good of course but you want the weird young people uh you know i find to you know this podcast i like talking to tech people and i find the young faculty to be really boring they are they're the most boring of faculty their work is interesting technically technically but just the the the passion they are drudges and it's well some of them sneak by like you have like the max stag mark young version of max tegmark who knows how to play the role of boring and and fitting in and on the side he does the weird but they're not they're far and few in between which i i'd i'd love to figure out a way to shake up that system because as you look at mit's broad institute right and biomedical it's been a huge hit yeah i'm not privy to their internal doings but i suspect they support weird more than the formal departments do at the junior level yes that's probably true yeah i don't know what whatever they're doing is working but uh we need to figure it out because i think the best ideas still do come from the uh so forget uh my apologies but for the humanities side of things i don't i don't know anything about but the engineering and the science side i think there's so many amazing ideas that are still coming from universities it's not true that you don't know anything about the humanities you're doing the humanities right now we're talking about people there are no numbers put on a blackboard right there's no hypothesis testing per se no yes you have however many subscribers to your podcast all listening to you on the humanities every whatever your frequency is there but i'm not in the department of the humanities that's why it's innovative they have very different conversations there's the number of emails i get about listen i i really deeply respect diversity and the and the the the full scope of what diversity means and also the more narrow scope of different races and genders and so on it's a really important topic but there's a disproportionate number of emails i'm getting about meetings and discussions and that just kind of is overwhelming i don't get enough emails from people like a meeting about uh why are all your ideas bad let's let's uh for example let me call out mit why don't we do more uh why don't we kick stanford's ass or google's ass more importantly in deep learning and machine learning and ai research what cell for example used to be a laboratory is a laboratory for artificial intelligence research and why is that not the the beacon of what of greatness in artificial intelligence let's have those meetings as well diversity talk has oddly become this new mechanism for enforcing conformity yes exactly and right so it's almost like this conformity mechanism finds the hot new topic to use to enforce further conformity exactly oh boy i still have hope i remain optimistic the humanities have innovated through podcasts including yours and mine yeah and they're alive and well all the bad talk you hear about the humanities in universities there's been this huge end run of innovation on the internet yeah and it's amazing you're right i never thought i mean this is humanities this this podcast i've been speaking pros all one's life and didn't know it right uh yeah i am actually part of the humanities department at mit now i didn't not realize this and i i will fully embrace it from this moment on look you have this thing the media lab i'm sure you know about it done some excellent things done a lot of very bogus things but you're out competing them you're blowing them out of the water yeah like you are them yeah i mean and i'm talking to those folks and they they're they're starting well they're trying to figure it out i mean they had their issues with jeffrey epstein and so on but outside of that there's a i've actually gone through a shift with this particular podcast for example where at first it was seen as a one at the very first it was seen as a distraction second it was a source of like almost like a kind of jealousy like the same kind of jealousy you feel when junior faculty outshines the senior faculty and now it's more like oh okay this is a thing like we we should do more of that we should embrace this guy we should embrace this thing so there's a sense that podcasting and whatever this is and it doesn't have to be podcasting will drive some innovation within mit within different universities there's a sense that things are changing it's just that universities lag behind and my hope is that you know they catch up quickly they they they innovate in some way that goes along with the innovations of the internet um the internet will outrace them for a long time maybe forever well i mean but it's okay if they're as long as they keep in yeah and we're both in universities so we have multiple hats on here as we're speaking so yes we can complain about the universities that's like complaining about the podcast right yeah we view them but speaking on the weird you've uh uh in the best sense of the word weird you've written about and made the case that we should take ufo sightings more seriously so that's one of the things that uh i've been uh inundated with sort of the excitement and the passion that people have for the possibility of extraterrestrial life of life out there in the universe i've always felt this excitement of just looking up at the stars and wondering what the hell's out there but there's people that have more like uh more grounded excitement and passion of actually interacting with the with aliens on this here our planet what's the case they from your perspective for taking these sightings more seriously the data from the navy to me seemed quite serious i don't pretend that i have the technical abilities to judge it as data but there are numerous senators at the very highest of levels former heads of cia brennan i talked to him did an interview with him i asked him what's up with these what do you think it is he basically said that was the single most likely explanation was of alien origin now you don't have to agree with him but look if you know how government works these senators or hillary clinton for that matter or brennan they sat down they were briefed by their smartest people and they said hey what's going on here and everyone around the table i believe is telling them we don't know and that is sociological data i take very seriously i have not seen a debunking of the technical data yes which is eyewitness reports and images and radar again at a technical level i i feel quite uncertain on that turf but evaluating some of the testimony of witnesses it seems to me it's now at a threshold where one ought to take it seriously yeah there's a one of the problems with ufo sightings is that because of people with good equipment don't take it seriously it's such a taboo topic that you have just like really shitty equipment collecting data and so you have the blurry bigfoot kind of situation where you have just bad video and all those kinds of things as opposed to uh i mean there's a bunch of people uh avi lowe from harvard uh talking about amo amua it's it's just like people with the equipment to do the data collection don't want to help out and that creates a kind of divide where the scientists ignore that this is happening and there's the masses of people who are curious about it and then there's the government that's full of secrets that's leaking some confusion and it creates distrust in the government it creates distrust in science and it prevents the scientists from being able to explore some cool topics some exciting possibilities that they should be be curious kids like avi talks about even if it has nothing to do with aliens whatever the answer is it has to be something fascinating we already know everything's interesting but this is fascinating but look that all said i i suspect they're not of alien origin and let's let me tell you my reason the people who are all gung-ho they do a kind of reasoning in reverse or argument from elimination they figure out a bunch of things that can't be like is it a russian advanced vehicle no probably pretty good arguments there is it a chinese advanced vehicle no is it people like from the earth's future coming back in time no and they go through a few others they have some really good no arguments then they're like well what we've got left is aliens yeah this argument from elimination i don't actually find that persuasive you can talk yourself into a lot of mistaken ideas that way yeah the positive evidence that it's aliens is still quite weak the positive evidence that it's a puzzle is quite huge and then and uh whatever the solution to the puzzle is it might be fascinating and it's going to be so weird or fascinating or maybe even trivial but that's weird in its own way that we can't set up by elimination all the things that might be able to be yeah and just like you said the debunking that i've seen of these kinds of things are less explorations and solutions to the puzzle and more a kind of half-hearted dismissal and avi as you mentioned to him on your podcast with him he's been attacked an awful lot and when i hear the idea carrier attacked i get very suspicious of the critics uh if if he's wrong like just tell me why yeah like my ears are open i don't have a set view on omuamua you know i know i can't judge avi's arguments he can't convince me in that sense i'm too stupid to understand how good his argument may or may not be and not like you said ultimately in the argument is uh in the in the meeting of that debate is when we've where we find the wisdom like dismissing it that's one thing that troubles me there's a bunch of people like nietzsche sometimes dismissed this way ayn rand is sometimes dismissed this way oh here we go like the there's a as opposed to arguing against her ideas dismissing it all right and that that that's not productive at all uh she may be wrong in a lot of things but like laying out some arguments even if they're basic human arguments uh that's that's where we arrive at the wisdom i love that uh is there something um deeper to be said about our trust and institutions and governments and so on that has to do with ufos that there there's a kind of suspicion that the us government and governments in general are hiding stuff from us uh when you talk about ufos this is my view on that if we declassified everything i think we would find a lot more evidence all pointing toward the same puzzle there aren't some alien men being held underground yes there's not some secret file that lays out whatever is happening i think the real lesson about government is government cannot bring itself to any new belief on this matter of any kind and it's a kind of funny inertia like government is deeply puzzled they're more puzzled than they want to admit to us which like i'm okay with that actually they shouldn't just be out panicking people in the streets but at the end of the day it's a bit like approving the astrazeneca vaccine yeah like which does work and they haven't approved it like when are they going to do it like when is our government actually if only internally going to take this more than just seriously but like take it truly seriously yeah and i just don't know if we have that capability kind of mentally to sound like eric weinstein for another moment to stay on the same topic although on the surface shifting completely because it is all the same topic you have written and studied art why do you think we humans um long to create art human society in general and just the human mind well most of us don't really long to create art right i would start with that point you think so do you think that's the create i don't know that's the unique weirdness of some particular humans i think i don't know 10 percent of humans roughly which is a lot but it is somewhat weird yeah i don't aspire to create art you could say like writing non-fiction there's something art-like about it but it's a different urge i would say yeah so why do some people have it i think human brains are very different it's a different notion of working through a problem like you and i enjoy working through analytic problems for me economics for uai in other areas or your humanities podcast but that's fun yeah for that problem to be visual and linked to physical materials and putting those like on a canvas to me it's not a huge leap but i really don't want to do it like it would be pain if you paid me like 500 bucks to spend an hour painting i don't know uh is that worth it maybe but like i'm happy when that hour's over and would not be proud or happy with the results it would suck i don't think i would do it actually i i do you think you're suppressing some deep i mean absolutely not now when i was young i played the guitars you played the guitar and that i greatly enjoyed although i was never good but it helped me appreciate music much much more well this is the question okay so from the perspective of the observer and appreciator of art you said good is is there such a concept as good in art there's clearly a concept of bad my guitar playing fit that concept okay but i wasn't trying to be good i wanted to learn like how the chords work okay and it was a jazz improvisation work how is blues different classical guitar sort of physically how do you make those sounds yes and i did learn those things and you can you can't learn everything about them but you can learn a lot about them without ever being good or even trying to be that good but i could play all the notes so from the observer perspective what do you apologize to the absurd question but what do you use the most beautiful and maybe moving piece of art you've encountered in your life not an absurd question at all and i think about this quite a bit i would say the two winners by a clear margin are both by michelangelo it's the pieta in the vatican and the david statue in florence why historical context or just purity the the the creation itself i don't think you can view it apart from historical context and being in florence or in the vatican is that you're already primed for a lot right you can't pull that out but just technically how they express you the emotion of human form i do honestly intellectually think they're the two greatest artworks for doing that that's not all that art does not all art is about the human form but they are phenomenal and i think critical opinion not that everyone agrees but my view is not considered a crazy one within the broader court of critical opinion now in painting i think the most i was ever blown away was to see vermeer's artwork it's called the art of painting and it's in vienna in the queen's distortious museum and i saw that i think i was 23. uh it just stunned me because i've seen reproductions but live in front of you in huge a completely different artwork and again vienna primed yes and i was living abroad for the first time in vienna itself the city and so on now unlike the michelangelo's that is not my current favorite painting but that would be like historically the one i would pick what do you make in the context of those choices what do you make of modern art and uh i apologize if not if i'm not using the correct terminology but art that maybe uh is goes another level of weird outside of uh the art that you've kind of mentioned it breaks all the conventions and rules and so on and becomes uh something else entirely that doesn't make sense in in the same way that david might i think a lot of it is phenomenal and i would say the single biggest mistake that really smart people make is to think contemporary art or music for that matter it's just a load of junk or rubbish it's just like a kind of mathematics they haven't learned yet it's really hard to learn maybe some people can never learn it but there's a very large community of super smart well-educated people who spend their lives with it who love it those are genuine pleasures they understand it they talk about it with the common language and to think that somehow they're all frauds it just isn't true like one doesn't have to like it oneself just like puff house may or may not be your thing but it is amazing and for me personally highly rewarding and if someone doesn't get it i do kind of have the conceited response of thinking like in that area i'm just smarter than you are you yeah so the the interesting thing is as with most we get back to eric weinstein again yes who is in general smarter than i am yes i get but when it comes to contemporary artistic creations i'm smarter than he is so he's not a fan of contemporary art i don't want to speak for him i've heard him say he's revolving always he's evolving always i've heard him say derogatory things about some of it doesn't mean he doesn't love some other parts of it so i i wonder if if there's just a higher learning curve a steeper learning curve for contemporary art meaning like it takes more work to to appreciate the stories the context from which they're like thinking about this work it feels like in order to appreciate the art uh contemporary certain piece of contemporary art you have to know the story better behind the art i think that's true for many people but i think it's a funny shaped distribution because there's a whole other set of people sometimes just small children and they get abstract art more easily yeah you show them vermeer or rembrandt they don't get it yeah but just like a a wall of color yeah they're in love with it so yeah i don't think i know the full story again some strange kind of distribution the entry barriers are super high or super low but not that often in between but you were challenged saying that there's a lot to be explored in contemporary art is just you need to uh you need to learn yeah it's one of the most profound bodies of human thought out there and it's part of the humanities and yes there are people who also don't like podcasts right and that's fine yeah you've also been a scholar of food we're just going through the entirety of the human experience today on this humanities podcast uh another sort absurd question say this conversation is the last thing you ever do in your life i wearing the suit would murder you at the end of the conversation so this is your last day on earth but i would offer you a last meal what would that meal contain we can also travel to other parts of the world bro we have to travel because yeah my preferred last meal here i probably had like two nights ago which is what can you describe or not the best restaurant around here is called mama chang's and it's in fairfax and it's food from muhan actually and they take pandemic safety seriously in addition to the food being very good but this is what i would do i would fly to hermosillo in northern mexico which has some of the best food in mexico but i sadly only had two days there so somewhere like oaxaca puebla i think they have food just as good or some people would say better but i've spent a lot of time in those places so the scarce wait is it possible the scarcity of time contributed to the the richness of the experience of course but the point is that scarcity still holds yeah so i want one more dose yes the food from hammocio can we describe what the food is it's the one kind of mexican food that at least nominally is just like the mexican food you get in the u.s so there are burritos there's fajitas it doesn't taste at all like our stuff but again nominally it's the part of mexican food that made it into the u.s was then transformed yes but it's in a way the most familiar but for that reason it's the most radical because you have to rethink all these things you know and they're way better in harmony hardly any tourists go there like there's nothing to see in hermes nothing to do other than eat it's not ruined by any outsiders it's this long-standing tradition uh dirt cheap and the thing to do there is just sweet talk a taxi driver into first taking you seriously and then trusting you enough to know that you trust him to bring you to the very best like food stands so where's the where's the magic of that similar uh entity of the burrito where's the magic come from what is it is it the taxi ride is it the whole experience or is there something actually in the food well you can break the food down part by part so if you think of the beef the beef there will be dry aged just out in the air in a way the fda here would never permit like they dry age it till it turns green but it is phenomenal the quality of the chilies so here there's only a small number of kinds of jellies you can get in most parts of mexico there's quite a large number of chilies you can get they're different they're fresher but it's just like a different thing the chilies the wheat used so this is wheat territory not corn territory which is itself interesting uh the wheat is more diverse and more complex here it's more homogenized obviously cheaper more efficient but there it is better non-pasteurized cheeses are legal in all parts of mexico and they can be white and gooey and amazing in a way that here again it's just against the law you could legalize them the demand wouldn't be that great there's a black market in these jesus that latino groceries around here but you just can't get that much of it so the cheese the meat the wheat uh all different in significant ways the chilis i don't think the onions really matter much garlic i don't know i wouldn't put much stock in that but that's a lot of the core food and then it's cooked much better and everything's super fresh the food chain is not relying on refrigeration and this is one thing russia and us have in common we were early pioneers in food refrigeration and that made a lot of our foods worse quite early and it took us a long time to dig out of that because big countries right is there you've had an extensive rail system in russia ussr a long time which makes it easier to freeze and then ship what about the actual cooking the the chef is there an artistry to the simple i hesitate to call the burrito simple but and there's no brain drain out of cooking so if you're in the united states and you're very talented i'm not saying there aren't talented chefs of course there are but there's so many other things to pull people away yeah but in mexico there's so much talent going into food as there is in china which would be another candidate for last meal christians or india or oh india don't let's not even get started unbelievable uh you've also i mean there's a million things we could talk about here but you've written about giro dreams of sushi um it's just a really clean good example that people are aware of of mastery in the in the art of the simple in food what do you make of that kind of obsessive pursuit of perfection in in in creating simple food sushi is about perfection but it's a bit like the beatles white album which people think is simple and not overproduced yeah it's in a funny way their most over produced album but it's produced just perfectly it sounds simple it's really hard to produce music to the point where it's going to sound so simple and not sound like sludge like let it be album has some great songs but a lot of it sounds like sledge one after 909 that's sludge i dig a pony sludge like it's a bit interesting it's not that good it doesn't sound that good white album like the best half like dear prudence sounds perfect sounds simple cry baby cry it's not simple back in the ussr super complex so sushi's like that it's because it's so incredibly not simple starting with the rice you try to refine it to make it appear super simple and that's the most complex thing of all so do you admire i mean we're not talking about days weeks months we're talking about years generations of doing the same thing over and over and over again do you admire that kind of sticking to the it does that you know we talked about our admiration of the weird that doesn't feel weird that seems like discipline and dedication to like like a stoic minimalism or something like that i'm happy they do it but i actually feel bad about it i feel they're sacrificial victims to me which i benefit from but don't you ever think like gee you're a great master sushi chef wouldn't you be happier if you did something else uh doesn't seem to happen that might be something that a weird mind maybe it is weird people and maybe they're really enjoying it but like to learn how to pack rice for 10 years before they let you do anything else it's like these indian you know sarod players they just spent five years tapping out rhythms before they're allowed to touch their instruments well actually to to defend that it's kind of like graduate school right well i think graduate school perhaps i um graduate school is full of like every single day is full of surprises i would say uh i i did martial arts for a long time i do martial arts and i've always loved kind of the russian way of drilling is doing the same technique i don't know if this applies in into intellectual or academic disciplines where you can do the same thing over and over and over again thousands and thousands and thousands of times what i've discovered through that process is you get to start to appreciate the tiniest of details and find the beauty in them uh people who go to like monasteries to meditate talk about this is when you just sit in silence and don't do anything you start to appreciate how much complexity and beauty there isn't just a movement of a finger like you can spend the whole day joyously thinking about how fun it is to move a finger yeah and so and then you can almost become your full weird self about the tiniest details of life that's the thing you've got to wonder like is there a free lunch in there are the rest of us moving around too much yeah exactly that's they sure feel like they found a free lunch the people meditate they're on to something i tend to think it's like artists that some percent of people are like that but most are not and for most of us there's no free lunch like my free lunch is to move around a lot in search of lunch well you with all the food talk you made me hungry uh what uh what books three or so books if you can come if any come to mind technical fiction philosophical would you recommend had a big impact on you or you just drew some insights from throughout your life well two of them we've already discussed one is plato's dialogues which i started reading when i was like 13. another is iran capitalism the unknown ideal but i would say the friedrich hayek essay the use of knowledge in society which is about how decentralized mechanisms can work also why they might go wrong and that's where you start to understand price system capitalism and that was in a book called individualism and economic order but it was just a few essays in that book those are maybe the three i would cite can you elaborate a little bit on the say the price of copper goes up right because there's a problem with the copper mine in chile or bolivia so the price of copper goes up all around the world people are led to economize copper to look for substitutes for copper to change their production processes to change the goods and services they buy to build homes a different way and this one event creates this one tiny change in information this gets into your ai work very directly and how much complexity that one change engenders in a meaningful coherent way how the different pieces of the price system fit together hayek really laid out very clearly and it's it's like an ai problem and how well not for everything but for many things we solve that ai problem i learned i was i think 13 maybe 14 when i read hayek you're the distributed nature of things there and it's like your work on human attention like how much can we take in yes very often not that much and how many of the advances of modern civilization you need to understand as a response to that constraint i got that also from hayek and what's the title of the book again uh it's reprinted in a lot of books at this point but back then the book was called individualism and economic order but the essays online hayek use of knowledge in society there are open access versions of it through google and you don't need the whole book so it's a very good book again one of those profound looking over the ocean maybe sitting on a porch maybe with a drink of some kind um and a young kid comes by and asks you for advice what advice would you give to drink that's my advice i'm serious so okay after that uh what uh advice would you give to a young person today as they take on life whether career in academia in general or just a life which is probably more important than career most good advice is context specific but here are my two generic pieces of advice good first get a mentor both career but anything you want to learn like say you want to learn about contemporary art people write me this uh what book should i read it's probably not going to work that way you need a mentor yes you should read some books on it but you want to mentor to help you frame them take you around to some art talk about it with you so get as many mentors as you can in the things you want to learn and then can ask you a quick yeah a tangent on that uh presumably a good mentor of course is there begging the question in there it's complicated right well it is complicated is there a lot of damage to be done from a bad mentor i don't think that much because it's very easy to drop mentors and in fact it's quite hard to maintain them good mentors tend to be busy head mentors tend to be busy yeah and you can try on mentors and maybe they're not good for you but you still there's a good chance you'll learn something like i had a mentor i was an undergrad he was a stalinist he edited the book called the essential stalin brilliant guy i learned a tremendous amount from him was he like as a stalinist a good mentor for me fan of fayak well no but for a year it was tremendous hmm yeah he introduced me like to you know soviet in eastern european science fiction because he was a marxist like that's what i took from him among other things any advice on finding a good mentor daniel kahneman has somebody just popped this to mind as somebody who was able to find exceptionally good collaborators throughout his life there's not many bright minds that find collaborators they often um which i ultimately see what a mentor is yeah be direct and try it's not like a perfect formula but it's amazing how many people don't even do those things be interesting be direct and try like what you want from a better known person i would just say be very direct with them yeah beautiful what's the second piece of advice build small groups of peers they don't have to be your age but very often they'll be your age especially if you're younger with broadly similar interests but there can be different points of view people you hang out with which can include in a whatsapp group online and like every day or almost every day they're talking about the thing you care about trying to solve problems in that thing and that's your small group and you really like them and they like you and you care what you think about each other and you have this common interest that's for human connection or that's for development of ideas it's both they're not that different like beatles classic small group right uh but there's so much drama the florentine artists of course there's drama and small groups tend to split up which is fine just like mentoring relationships often end but it's remarkable how little has been done that was not done in small groups in some way so speaking of uh loss of a beautiful relationships what do you make of this whole love thing uh why do humans fall in love what's the role of love friendship family in life in a successful life or just life in general why the hell are we so into this thing there are multiple layers of understanding that question so kind of the lowest layer is the darwinian answer right if we weren't this way we wouldn't have been successful in reproducing and building alliances it's important to realize that's far from complete sort of the highest understanding would be poetic like read john keats or you know many other love powers is that so who do i go to to find out to learn about love in terms of poets or i would say start with john keats but given that you're fluent in russian um yeah let's go let's go russian literature for a second like what what what you you keep mentioning russia what uh what's your connection what's your love uh in russia well first it's all interesting but more concretely my wife was born in moscow sokolniki wow yeah wow and she grew up there i married her here uh my daughter i adopted her i'm not her biological father but i genuinely raised her she was born in russia though she came here when she was one wow uh my father you're basically russian no no no i'm a new jersey boy uh that's the same thing i'm very sorry to report my father-in-law passed away a week ago he lived with us for six years he lived in russia until he was oh seventy saw you know the stalinist era his father was brought to a camp lived through world war ii much much more uh had an incredible life never really learned how to speak english so i absorbed something russian from him as well he was part armenian so that's my connection to russia a bit of the russian soul too i don't think i have it i think i appreciate it but there's division of labor right others in the family take care of that i'm i'm more superficial you mentioned keats and uh that higher version that non darwinian love what's that about that it's the highest form of human connection and it's intoxicating and it's part of building a life and most of us are very very strongly drawn to it and it's part of the highest realization of you being what you can be yeah you mentioned you lost but ask a russian i mean this is a superficial new jersey boy who grew up listening to bruce springsteen uh what's your favorite bruce springsteen song i think the album born to run has actually held up the best though it's very fashionable to think the earlier or later works are actually better and that's the overproduced super pop album but the quality of the songs to be born to run is just far and away the best then darkness on the edge of town yeah and those are still my favorites is an incredible song yeah and perfectly produced in a phil spector kind of way every detail is right every lyric what else is on the album thunder road jungle land 10th avenue freeze out she's the one unbelievable yeah yeah bruce leading across the river i really like um i mean i like when he goes into love personally uh you know like i'm on fire that's a very good song dancing in the dark and a lot of the later work i find the percussion becomes too simple and kind of too white somehow and a little clunky and it's still good work he's super talented but it doesn't speak to me but when it all bursts open into the open road like it does on born to run that's magic yeah rosalita have you ever seen him live is it yes twice i wonder what he's like live when he was young right those years i saw him live when he was young i was young uh new jersey i was a little disappointed actually yeah i think what i like best from him is quite studio he certainly played well i don't fault his performance but it's like when i saw plant and page you know fled zeppelin tremendous creators and they showed up they were not drunk like they were paying attention but i was underwhelmed because led zeppelin like the beatles white album is much more of a studio band than you think it means and in the case of bruce springsteen i don't know about you but for me he's somebody that i connect with the most when i got that when i'm alone and there's like a melancholy feeling and actually driving my my folks live in philly i went to school in philly and so you know i've uh i i almost worthy of new jersey then yeah well you're you're almost worthy of russia so we're we can connect uh and then ask but i mean i love yours it's something i feel like um i feel like i don't know it's it's always there's this beautiful like there's a dying old goes diner they closed down i used to uh uh go there there's there's a melancholy feeling to me i mean of course a thickness to culture in that part of the world yeah which is oddly similar to some elements of the thickness of russian culture yeah and when you see like russian characters on the sopranos yeah it totally makes sense even though they're these complete outlines exactly it totally makes sense you've uh you mentioned you lost your father-in-law last week uh do you think about mortality do you think about your own mortality are you afraid of death i don't think about my own mortality that much which is probably a good thing i think death will be bad i wouldn't say i'm afraid of it for me the worst thing about death is not knowing how the human story turns out the full human story the full human story so if i could right before i die read like a wikipedia page called the rest of human history and have enough time just like a few days to absorb it think about it and know like oh well 643 years from now that's when all the atomic weapons went off and here's what happened between now and then i would feel much better dying because that's not how it's going to be right that's unlikely it's almost like the hitchhiker's guide they kind of have what is it they have a one or two sentence description of the human of what goes on on earth it's kind of interesting to think if there's a lot of intelligent civilizations out there that in the big encyclopedia that describes the universe humans will only have one sentence probably too true yeah that's the only one i can read and understand right and it may be hard to understand the human one past a number of centuries yeah yes like how many years from now will reading wikipedia be like trying to read chaucer which i almost can do but i actually can't i need a translation probably you can't do it at all yeah i mean maybe reading will be outdated it might be a very silly notion maybe we're fundamentally like we think language is fundamental to cognition but it could be something visual or something totally different exactly we'll plug in neural ink or yeah uh but in that story that wikipedia article do you think there'll be a section on uh the meaning of it i hope not because that section we could write now and it's just not going to be very good right what would you put in the section on the meaning of uh human existence i don't know links to a lot of other sections i don't think there are general statements about the meaning of life that have that much meaning i think if you study different cultures the arts travel mathematics like whatever your thing is yeah you'll get a lot about the meaning of life so like it's there in wikipedia in some bigger sense but i don't want to read the page on the meaning i bet they have such a page in fact the fact that i've never visited it none of my friends oh here tyler here's the page on the meaning of life i know you've been wondering about this you got to read this one no one's ever done that to you have they it probably has well actually gone to that page it does in fact have a lot of links to others uh so that that's it uh the meaning of life is just a bunch of self-referential or uh citation needed type of statements i think there's no better way to end it tyler's a huge honor i'm a huge fan um thank you so much for wasting all of this time with me it was one of the greatest conversations i've ever had thank you so much my pleasure and delighted to finally have met you and uh that we can do this thanks for listening to this conversation with tyler cohen and thank you to linode expressvpn simply safe and public goods check them out in the description to support this podcast and now let me leave you with some words from adam smith little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice thank you for listening and hope to see you next time