Tyler Cowen: Economic Growth & the Fight Against Conformity & Mediocrity

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Tyler Cohen,

00:00:02.540 | an economist at George Mason University

00:00:04.900 | and co-creator of an amazing economics blog

00:00:08.220 | called Marginal Revolution.

00:00:10.300 | Author of many books, including The Great Stagnation,

00:00:13.460 | Average is Over, and his most recent, Big Business,

00:00:17.280 | a love letter to an American antihero.

00:00:20.260 | He's truly a polymath in his work,

00:00:22.540 | including his love for food,

00:00:24.300 | which makes this amazing podcast

00:00:26.460 | called Conversations with Tyler

00:00:28.460 | really fun to listen to.

00:00:29.960 | Quick mention of our sponsors,

00:00:32.680 | Linode, ExpressVPN, SimpliSafe, and Public Goods.

00:00:37.380 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

00:00:41.020 | As a side note, given Tyler's culinary explorations,

00:00:45.180 | let me say that one of the things that makes me sad

00:00:48.380 | about my love-hate relationship with food

00:00:51.020 | is that while I've found a simple diet,

00:00:53.860 | plain meat and veggies,

00:00:55.520 | that makes me happy in day-to-day life,

00:00:58.220 | I sometimes wish I had the mental ability

00:01:00.140 | to moderate consumption of food

00:01:02.060 | so that I could truly enjoy meals

00:01:03.780 | that go way outside of that diet.

00:01:06.140 | I've seen my mom, for example,

00:01:07.540 | enjoy a single piece of chocolate,

00:01:09.700 | and yet, if I were to eat one piece of chocolate,

00:01:12.520 | the odds are high that I would end up eating the whole box.

00:01:15.960 | This is definitely something I would like to fix

00:01:18.200 | because some of the amazing artistry in this world

00:01:21.860 | happens in the kitchen,

00:01:23.260 | and some of the richest human experiences

00:01:25.380 | happen over a unique meal.

00:01:27.560 | I recently was eating cheeseburgers

00:01:29.380 | with Joe Rogan and John Donaher late at night in Austin,

00:01:33.540 | talking about jiu-jitsu and life,

00:01:35.700 | and I was distinctly aware of the magic of that experience,

00:01:40.180 | magic made possible

00:01:41.720 | by the incredibly delicious cheeseburgers.

00:01:44.480 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,

00:01:47.140 | and here is my conversation with Tyler Cohen.

00:01:50.060 | Would you say economics is more art or science

00:01:54.400 | or philosophy or even magic?

00:01:57.080 | What is it?

00:01:58.100 | - Economics is interesting because it's all of the above.

00:02:01.440 | To start with magic,

00:02:02.720 | the notion that you can make some change

00:02:04.800 | and simply everyone's better off,

00:02:06.620 | that is a kind of modern magic

00:02:08.420 | that has replaced old-style magic.

00:02:11.020 | It's an art in the sense that the models are not very exact.

00:02:14.620 | It's a science in the sense

00:02:15.900 | that occasionally propositions are falsified.

00:02:18.540 | There are a few basic things we know,

00:02:20.860 | and however trivial they may sound,

00:02:22.340 | if you don't know them, you're out of luck.

00:02:24.580 | So all of the above.

00:02:26.480 | But from my outsider's perspective,

00:02:28.580 | economics is sometimes able to formulate very simple,

00:02:33.580 | almost like E equals MC squared,

00:02:36.100 | general models of how our human society will function

00:02:40.020 | when you do a certain thing.

00:02:41.740 | But it seems impossible or almost way too optimistic

00:02:47.420 | to think that a single formula

00:02:49.420 | or just a set of simple principles

00:02:51.620 | can describe behavior of billions of human beings.

00:02:56.040 | Well, with all the complexity that we have involved.

00:02:58.580 | So do you have a sense there's a hope for economics

00:03:01.220 | to have those kinds of physics-level descriptions

00:03:06.220 | and models of the world?

00:03:08.080 | Or is it just our desperate attempts as humans

00:03:10.060 | to make sense of it,

00:03:10.900 | even though it's more desperate

00:03:12.980 | than rigorous and serious and actually predictable

00:03:17.980 | like a physics-type science?

00:03:20.540 | - I don't think economics will ever be very predictive.

00:03:24.160 | It's most useful for helping you ask better questions.

00:03:27.260 | You look at something like game theory.

00:03:29.420 | Well, game theory never predicted USA and USSR

00:03:32.660 | would have a war, would not have a war.

00:03:35.060 | But trying to think through the logic of strategic conflict,

00:03:38.140 | if you know game theory,

00:03:39.480 | it's just a much more interesting discussion.

00:03:42.500 | - Are you surprised that we,

00:03:44.540 | speaking of the Soviet Union and United States,

00:03:47.420 | and speaking of game theory,

00:03:48.780 | are you surprised that we haven't destroyed ourselves

00:03:50.900 | with nuclear weapons yet?

00:03:52.020 | Like that simple formulation

00:03:54.280 | of mutually assured destruction,

00:03:56.320 | that's a good example of an explanation

00:03:58.960 | that perhaps allows us to ask better questions,

00:04:02.360 | but it seems to have actually described the reality

00:04:06.120 | of why we haven't destroyed ourselves

00:04:08.340 | with these ultra-powerful weapons.

00:04:10.840 | Are you surprised?

00:04:12.280 | Do you think the game theoretic explanation

00:04:14.440 | is at all accurate there?

00:04:16.880 | - I think we will destroy each other with those weapons.

00:04:19.920 | - Eventually?

00:04:20.760 | - Eventually.

00:04:21.920 | Look, it's a very low probability event,

00:04:24.320 | so I'm not surprised it hasn't happened yet.

00:04:26.720 | I'm a little surprised it came as close as it did.

00:04:29.480 | You know, your general thinking,

00:04:31.000 | realizing it might have just been a flock of birds

00:04:33.080 | or it wasn't a first strike attack from the USA,

00:04:35.680 | we got very lucky on that one.

00:04:38.040 | But if you just keep on running the clock

00:04:39.960 | on a low probability event, it will happen.

00:04:42.920 | And it may not be USA and China, USA and Russia, whatever.

00:04:47.160 | You know, it could be the Saudis and Turkey.

00:04:49.200 | - And it might not be nuclear weapons,

00:04:50.560 | it might be some other destruction.

00:04:51.560 | - Bio weapons.

00:04:52.720 | But it simply will happen is my view.

00:04:55.560 | And I've argued at best we have 700 or 800 years,

00:04:58.800 | and that's being generous.

00:05:00.240 | - At worst, how long we got?

00:05:03.040 | - Well, maybe it's like a Poisson arrival process, right?

00:05:06.400 | So tiny probability, could come any time.

00:05:09.560 | Probably not in your lifetime.

00:05:12.000 | But the chance presumably increases

00:05:15.720 | the cheaper weapons of mass destruction are.

00:05:18.760 | - So the Poisson process description doesn't take

00:05:22.400 | in consideration the game theoretic aspect.

00:05:24.360 | So another way to consider is repeated games,

00:05:28.080 | iterative games.

00:05:29.720 | So is there something about us, our human nature

00:05:33.440 | that allows us to fight against probability, reduce?

00:05:38.200 | Like the closer we get to trouble,

00:05:40.920 | the more we're able to figure out how to avoid trouble.

00:05:43.840 | The same thing is for when you take exams

00:05:46.120 | or you go and take classes, the closer,

00:05:49.320 | or paper deadlines, the closer you get to a deadline,

00:05:52.200 | the better you start to perform

00:05:53.480 | and get your shit together and actually get stuff done.

00:05:56.200 | - I'm really not so negative on human nature.

00:05:58.720 | And as an economist, I very much see

00:06:00.600 | the gains from cooperation.

00:06:02.880 | But if you just ask, are there outliers in history?

00:06:05.240 | Like was there a Hitler, for instance, obviously.

00:06:08.160 | And again, you let the clock tick,

00:06:10.000 | another Hitler with nuclear weapons,

00:06:12.280 | doesn't per se care about his own destruction,

00:06:15.160 | it will happen.

00:06:16.480 | - So your sense is fundamentally people are good,

00:06:19.340 | but outliers-- - A trembling hand equilibrium

00:06:22.240 | is what we would call it.

00:06:23.520 | - Trembling hand equilibrium?

00:06:25.440 | - That the basic logic is for cooperation,

00:06:28.520 | which is mostly what we've seen, even between enemies.

00:06:32.480 | But every now and then someone does something crazy

00:06:35.040 | and you don't know how to react to it.

00:06:36.840 | And you can't always beat Hitler.

00:06:39.540 | Sometimes Hitler drags you down.

00:06:41.720 | - To push back, is it possible

00:06:44.680 | that the crazier the person, the less likely they are,

00:06:49.680 | and in a way where we're safe?

00:06:52.960 | Meaning like, this is the kind of proposition,

00:06:56.520 | I had the discussion with my dad as a physicist about this,

00:06:59.620 | where he thinks that, like if you have a graph,

00:07:04.620 | like evil people can't also be geniuses.

00:07:08.240 | So this is his defense why evil people

00:07:11.080 | will not get control of nuclear weapons,

00:07:13.420 | because to be truly evil.

00:07:15.040 | But evil meaning, sort of you can argue that,

00:07:19.680 | not even the evil of Hitler we're talking about,

00:07:22.440 | because Hitler had a kind of view of Germany

00:07:24.480 | and all those kinds of, there's like,

00:07:26.480 | he probably deluded himself and the people around him

00:07:29.560 | to think that he's actually doing good for the world,

00:07:31.360 | similar with Stalin and so on.

00:07:33.200 | By evil, I mean more like, almost like terrorists,

00:07:35.760 | to where they want to destroy themselves and the world.

00:07:39.800 | Like those people will never be able

00:07:41.800 | to be actually skilled enough to do,

00:07:44.800 | to deliver that kind of mass scale destruction.

00:07:47.880 | So the hope is that it's very unlikely

00:07:52.720 | that the kind of evil that would lead

00:07:54.640 | to extinctions of humans or mass destruction

00:07:57.720 | is so unlikely that we're able to last

00:08:00.960 | way longer than 700, 800 years.

00:08:03.680 | - I agree it's very unlikely.

00:08:06.040 | In that sense, I accept the argument.

00:08:08.180 | But that's why you need to let the clock tick.

00:08:10.520 | It's also the best argument for bureaucracy.

00:08:13.200 | To negotiate a bureaucracy,

00:08:14.760 | it actually selects against pure evil,

00:08:17.000 | because you need to build alliances.

00:08:18.880 | So bureaucracy in that regard is great, right?

00:08:21.000 | It keeps out the worst apples.

00:08:23.320 | But look, put it this way,

00:08:24.340 | could you imagine 35 years from now,

00:08:26.980 | the Osama bin Laden of the future

00:08:29.680 | has nukes or very bad bio weapons?

00:08:32.560 | It seems to me you can.

00:08:34.160 | And Osama was pretty evil.

00:08:36.000 | And actually even he failed, right?

00:08:38.720 | But nonetheless, that's what the 700

00:08:41.000 | or 800 years is there for.

00:08:43.000 | - And there might be destructive technologies

00:08:44.960 | that don't have such a high cost of production

00:08:48.660 | or such a high learning curve.

00:08:50.760 | Like cyber attacks or artificial intelligence,

00:08:53.960 | all those kinds of things.

00:08:55.600 | So yeah.

00:08:56.440 | - I mean, let me ask you a question.

00:08:57.600 | Let's say you could as an act of will,

00:09:00.080 | by spending a million dollars,

00:09:01.680 | obliterate any city on Earth and everyone in it dies.

00:09:05.320 | And you'll get caught.

00:09:06.420 | And you'll be sentenced to death.

00:09:08.480 | But you can make it happen just by willing it.

00:09:11.000 | How many months does it take before that happens?

00:09:14.000 | - So the obvious answer is like very soon.

00:09:18.040 | That's probably a good answer for that

00:09:19.440 | 'cause you can consider how many millionaires there are,

00:09:21.480 | how many, you can look at that, right?

00:09:22.760 | - Right.

00:09:23.680 | - I have a sense that there's just people

00:09:26.600 | that have a million dollars.

00:09:28.620 | I mean, there's a certain amount,

00:09:31.420 | but have a million dollars,

00:09:33.640 | have other interests that will outweigh

00:09:37.800 | the interest of destroying the entire city.

00:09:42.080 | Like there's a particular,

00:09:43.520 | you know, like maybe that's a hope.

00:09:46.680 | - It's why we should be nice to the wealthy too, right?

00:09:49.040 | (laughing)

00:09:50.360 | - Yeah.

00:09:51.320 | Yeah, all that trash talking is Bill Gates.

00:09:53.960 | We should stop that 'cause that doesn't inspire

00:09:57.120 | the other future Bill Gates is to be nice to the world.

00:10:00.160 | It's true.

00:10:02.000 | But your sense is the cheaper it gets to destroy the world,

00:10:05.440 | the more likely it becomes.

00:10:07.480 | - Now when I say destroy the world,

00:10:08.960 | there's a trick in there.

00:10:09.780 | I don't think literally every human will die,

00:10:12.760 | but it would set back civilization

00:10:14.960 | by an extraordinary degree.

00:10:16.400 | It's then just hard to predict what comes next.

00:10:18.880 | - Yeah.

00:10:19.720 | - But a catastrophe where everyone dies,

00:10:21.600 | that probably has to be something more like an asteroid

00:10:24.120 | or supernova.

00:10:26.120 | And those are purely exogenous for the time being at least.

00:10:29.640 | - So I immigrated to this country.

00:10:32.200 | I was born in the Soviet Union in Russia

00:10:35.360 | and-- - Which one?

00:10:37.160 | - Which one?

00:10:38.000 | - Again, it's an important question.

00:10:39.640 | You were born in the Soviet Union, right?

00:10:41.480 | - Yes, I was born in the Soviet Union.

00:10:43.360 | The rest is details, but I grew up in Moscow, Russia.

00:10:46.680 | - Yeah.

00:10:47.520 | - But I came to this country

00:10:49.920 | and this country even back there,

00:10:52.160 | but it's always symbolized to me a place of opportunity

00:10:55.840 | where everybody could build the most incredible things,

00:11:00.840 | especially in the engineering side of things.

00:11:03.400 | Just invent and build and scale

00:11:06.600 | and have a huge impact on the world.

00:11:08.760 | And that's been to me,

00:11:10.160 | that's my version of the American ideal, the American dream.

00:11:14.120 | Do you think the American dream is still there?

00:11:19.140 | Do you think, what do you think of that notion in itself?

00:11:23.560 | Like from an economics perspective,

00:11:25.240 | from a human perspective, is it still alive?

00:11:28.240 | And how do you think about it?

00:11:30.080 | The American dream.

00:11:30.920 | - The American dream is mostly still there.

00:11:33.600 | If you look at which groups are the highest earners,

00:11:37.400 | it is individuals from India and individuals from Iran,

00:11:41.420 | which is a fairly new development.

00:11:43.360 | Great for them, not necessarily easy.

00:11:46.020 | Both you could call persons of color,

00:11:48.600 | may have faced discrimination,

00:11:50.360 | also on the grounds of religion, yet they've done it.

00:11:53.840 | That's amazing.

00:11:54.680 | It says great things about America.

00:11:56.600 | Now, if you look at native born Americans,

00:11:58.660 | the story's trickier.

00:12:00.660 | People think intergenerational mobility

00:12:03.720 | has declined a lot recently,

00:12:05.340 | but it has not for native born Americans.

00:12:08.640 | For about, I think 40 years, it's been fairly constant,

00:12:11.920 | which is sort of good,

00:12:13.800 | but compared to much earlier times,

00:12:17.000 | it was much higher in the past.

00:12:19.440 | I'm not sure we can replicate that,

00:12:21.040 | because look, go to the beginning of the 20th century,

00:12:23.540 | very few Americans finish high school,

00:12:25.740 | or even have much wealth.

00:12:27.920 | There's not much credentialism.

00:12:29.280 | There aren't that many credentials.

00:12:30.960 | So there's more upward mobility

00:12:33.120 | across the generations than today.

00:12:35.760 | And it's a good thing that we had it.

00:12:37.400 | I'm not sure we should blame the modern world

00:12:40.240 | for not being able to reproduce that.

00:12:43.400 | But look, the general issue of who gets into Harvard

00:12:46.840 | or Cornell, is there an injustice?

00:12:49.440 | Should we fix that?

00:12:50.760 | Is there too little opportunity for the bottom,

00:12:52.880 | say half of Americans?

00:12:54.400 | Absolutely, it's a disgrace

00:12:56.440 | how this country has evolved in that way.

00:12:58.800 | And in that sense, the American dream is clearly ailing,

00:13:02.040 | but it has had problems from the beginning

00:13:04.520 | for blacks, for women, for many other groups.

00:13:07.160 | - I mean, isn't that the whole challenge

00:13:09.120 | of opportunity and freedom is that it's hard

00:13:12.120 | and the difficulty of how hard it is to move up in society

00:13:16.880 | is unequal often, and that's the injustice of society.

00:13:20.340 | But the whole point of that freedom

00:13:23.180 | is that over time, it becomes better and better.

00:13:25.740 | You start to fix the leaks, the issues,

00:13:30.740 | and it keeps progressing in that kind of way.

00:13:35.240 | But ultimately, there's always the opportunity,

00:13:37.420 | even if it's harder, there's the opportunity

00:13:39.940 | to create something truly special, to move up,

00:13:42.820 | to be president, to be a leader in whatever the industry

00:13:47.640 | that you're passionate about.

00:13:49.100 | - We each have podcasts, right, in English.

00:13:51.540 | The value of joining that American English language

00:13:55.180 | network is much higher today than it was 30 years ago,

00:13:58.300 | mostly because of the internet.

00:14:00.340 | So that makes immigration returns themselves skewed.

00:14:03.900 | So going to the US, Canada, or the UK,

00:14:07.220 | I think has become much more valuable in relative terms

00:14:09.980 | than say going to France, which is still

00:14:11.900 | a pretty well-off, very nice country.

00:14:13.900 | If you had gone to France, your chance

00:14:18.180 | of having a globally known podcast would be much smaller.

00:14:21.780 | - Yeah, this is the interesting thing

00:14:23.700 | about how much intellectual influence

00:14:27.700 | the United States has.

00:14:28.600 | I don't know if it's connected to what we're discussing here,

00:14:31.960 | the freedom and opportunity of the American dream.

00:14:35.020 | Or does it make any sense to you that we have so much impact

00:14:40.020 | on the rest of the world in terms of ideas?

00:14:44.140 | Is it just simply because English

00:14:47.560 | is the primary language of the world,

00:14:49.780 | or is there something fundamental to the United States

00:14:52.140 | that drives the development of ideas?

00:14:55.140 | So it's almost like what's cool, what's entertaining,

00:14:59.820 | what's meme culture, the internet culture,

00:15:04.820 | the philosophers, the intellectuals, the podcasts,

00:15:09.260 | the movies, music, all that stuff, driving culture.

00:15:13.340 | - There's something above and beyond language

00:15:15.180 | in the United States.

00:15:16.660 | It's a sense of entertainment really mattering,

00:15:19.180 | how to connect with your audience,

00:15:20.980 | being direct and getting to the point,

00:15:23.740 | how humor is integrated even with science.

00:15:27.340 | That is pretty strongly represented here,

00:15:30.340 | much more so than on the European continent.

00:15:32.740 | Britain has its own version of this, which it does very well.

00:15:36.220 | And not surprisingly, they're hugely influential

00:15:38.380 | in music, comedy, most of the other areas you mentioned.

00:15:41.980 | Canada, yes, but their best talent tends to come here.

00:15:44.880 | But you could say it's like a broader North American thing

00:15:48.020 | and give them their fair share of credit.

00:15:50.260 | - What about science?

00:15:52.220 | There's a sense higher education is really strong,

00:15:56.740 | research is really strong in the United States,

00:15:58.640 | but it just feels like culturally speaking,

00:16:01.940 | when we zoom out, scientists aren't very cool here.

00:16:06.040 | Most people wouldn't be able to name

00:16:09.460 | basically a single scientist.

00:16:11.180 | Maybe they would say like, they would say what,

00:16:13.260 | like Einstein and Neil deGrasse Tyson maybe?

00:16:16.620 | And Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't exactly a scientist,

00:16:18.780 | he's a science communicator.

00:16:20.420 | So there's not the same kind of admiration of science

00:16:25.420 | and innovators as there is of like athletes

00:16:30.980 | or actors, actresses, musicians.

00:16:35.080 | - Well, you can become a celebrity scientist if you want to.

00:16:38.140 | It may or may not be best for science.

00:16:40.260 | And we have Spock from Star Trek, who is still a big deal.

00:16:44.420 | But look at it this way.

00:16:45.860 | Which country is most comfortable

00:16:47.500 | with inegalitarian rewards for scientists,

00:16:50.980 | whether it's fame or money?

00:16:52.500 | And I still think it's here.

00:16:53.500 | Some of that's just the tax rate.

00:16:55.460 | Some of it is a lot of America is set up

00:16:57.820 | for rich people to live really well.

00:17:00.340 | And again, that's going to attract a lot of top talent.

00:17:02.820 | And you ask like the two best vaccines.

00:17:05.300 | I know the Pfizer vaccine is sort of from Germany,

00:17:08.100 | sort of from Turkey, but it's nonetheless being distributed

00:17:12.200 | through the United States, Moderna,

00:17:15.060 | and ethnic Armenian immigrant through Lebanon,

00:17:17.980 | first to Canada, then down here to Boston, Cambridge area.

00:17:21.460 | Those are incredible vaccines and US nailed it.

00:17:25.300 | - Yeah, well, that's more almost like the,

00:17:28.900 | I don't know what you would call it,

00:17:30.060 | engineering the sort of scaling.

00:17:32.820 | That's what US is really good at,

00:17:34.780 | not just inventing of ideas,

00:17:36.220 | but taking an idea and actually building the thing

00:17:38.340 | and scaling it and being able to distribute it at scale.

00:17:42.700 | I think some people would attribute that

00:17:45.100 | to the general word of capitalism.

00:17:49.700 | I don't know if you would.

00:17:51.100 | What in your views are the pros and cons of capitalism

00:17:57.140 | as it's implemented in America?

00:17:59.700 | I don't know if you would say capitalism

00:18:01.180 | is really exist in America, but to the extent that it does.

00:18:04.780 | - People use the word capitalism in so many different ways.

00:18:08.340 | - What is capitalism?

00:18:09.820 | - The literal meaning is private ownership of capital goods,

00:18:13.500 | which I favor in most areas,

00:18:15.940 | but no, I don't think the private sector

00:18:17.700 | should own our F-16s or military assets.

00:18:20.840 | Government owned water utilities seem to work as well

00:18:24.240 | as privately owned water utilities.

00:18:26.820 | But with all those qualifications put to the side,

00:18:29.620 | business for the most part,

00:18:33.740 | innovates better than government.

00:18:35.280 | It is oriented toward consumer services.

00:18:38.120 | The biggest businesses tend to pay the highest wages.

00:18:41.260 | Business is great at getting things done.

00:18:43.660 | USA is fundamentally a nation of business

00:18:46.500 | and that makes us a nation of opportunity.

00:18:49.140 | So I am indeed mostly a fan, subject to numerous caveats.

00:18:54.000 | - What's the con?

00:18:56.300 | What are some negative downsides of capitalism in your view?

00:19:01.300 | Or some things that we should be concerned about

00:19:04.140 | maybe for long-term impacts of capitalism?

00:19:07.740 | - Again, capitalism takes a different form in each country.

00:19:10.860 | I would say in the United States,

00:19:12.940 | our weird blend of whatever you want to call it

00:19:16.120 | has had an enduring racial problem from the beginning,

00:19:20.160 | has been a force of taking away land from Native Americans

00:19:24.040 | and oppressing them pretty much from the beginning.

00:19:27.180 | It has done very well by immigrants for the most part.

00:19:35.020 | We revel in tributarian creative destruction more.

00:19:38.980 | So we don't just prop up national champions forever.

00:19:42.260 | And there's a precariousness to life for some people here

00:19:45.440 | that is less so, say in Germany or the Netherlands.

00:19:49.000 | We have weaker communities in some regards

00:19:51.800 | than say Northwestern Europe often would.

00:19:54.460 | That has pluses and minuses.

00:19:55.860 | I think it makes us more creative.

00:19:57.780 | It's a better country in which to be a weirdo

00:20:00.420 | than say Germany or Denmark.

00:20:02.380 | But there is truly, whether from the government

00:20:05.500 | or from your private community,

00:20:06.980 | there is less social security in some fundamental sense.

00:20:10.060 | - On the point of weirdo,

00:20:11.480 | that's kind of a beautiful little statement.

00:20:15.680 | What is that?

00:20:19.480 | I mean, that seems to be,

00:20:21.500 | you could think of a guy like Elon Musk

00:20:23.600 | and say that he's a weirdo.

00:20:25.180 | Is that the sense in which you're using the weirdo

00:20:27.180 | like outside of the norm, like breaking conventions?

00:20:30.420 | - Absolutely.

00:20:31.260 | And here that is either acceptable or even admired

00:20:35.300 | or to be a loner.

00:20:36.660 | And since so many people are outsiders

00:20:39.340 | and that we're all immigrants is selecting for people

00:20:41.980 | who left something behind,

00:20:43.220 | were willing to leave behind their families,

00:20:45.480 | were willing to undergo a certain brutality

00:20:48.220 | of switch in their lives, makes us a nation of weirdos.

00:20:53.060 | And weirdos are creative.

00:20:55.020 | And Denmark is not a nation of weirdos.

00:20:58.060 | It's a wonderful place, great for them.

00:21:01.100 | Ideally, you want part of the world

00:21:02.580 | to be full of weirdos and innovating.

00:21:04.460 | And the other part of the world to be a little

00:21:06.500 | kind of chicken shit, risk averse,

00:21:09.660 | and enjoy the benefits of the innovation.

00:21:12.020 | And to give people these smooth lives

00:21:13.980 | and six weeks off and free ride.

00:21:16.580 | And everyone's like, oh, American way versus European way,

00:21:19.340 | but basically they're compliments.

00:21:21.500 | - Yeah, that's fascinating.

00:21:22.340 | I used to have this conversation with my parents

00:21:25.660 | when I was growing up and just others

00:21:27.460 | from the immigrant kind of flow.

00:21:29.820 | And they used this term, especially in Russian,

00:21:32.420 | is to criticize something I was doing,

00:21:36.500 | they would suggest, normal people don't do this.

00:21:39.420 | And I used to be really offended by that.

00:21:43.520 | But as I got older, I realized that that's a compliment

00:21:49.500 | because in the same kind of, I would say,

00:21:56.740 | way that you're saying that is the American ideal.

00:21:59.860 | Because if you want to do anything special or interesting,

00:22:02.860 | you don't wanna be doing in one particular avenue

00:22:06.340 | what normal people do because that won't be interesting.

00:22:11.340 | - Russians, I think, fit in very well here

00:22:14.860 | because the ones who come are weirdos.

00:22:16.780 | And there's a very different Russian weirdo tradition,

00:22:19.100 | like Alyosha, Bridenbrothers Karamasov,

00:22:21.940 | or Perelman, the mathematician.

00:22:23.620 | They're weirdos.

00:22:25.100 | And they have their own different kind of status

00:22:27.900 | in Soviet Union, Russia, wherever.

00:22:29.940 | And when Russians come to America,

00:22:32.420 | they stay pretty Russian, but it seems to me,

00:22:34.500 | a week later, they've somehow adjusted.

00:22:38.060 | And the ways in which they might wanna be grumpier

00:22:40.900 | than Americans, not smile,

00:22:42.300 | think that people who smile are idiots.

00:22:44.460 | They can do that.

00:22:45.300 | No one takes that away from them.

00:22:47.020 | - What do you, on a tiny tangent,

00:22:50.740 | I'd love to hear if you have thoughts

00:22:52.260 | about Grisha Perelman turning down the Fields Medal.

00:22:57.060 | Is that something you admire?

00:22:59.180 | Does that make sense to you, that somebody,

00:23:01.380 | with the structure of Nobel Prizes, of these huge awards,

00:23:05.260 | of the reputations, the hierarchy of everyone saying,

00:23:08.580 | applauding how special you are,

00:23:10.620 | and here's a person who was doing

00:23:13.380 | one of the greatest accomplishments

00:23:14.820 | in the history of mathematics.

00:23:16.140 | It doesn't want the stupid prize.

00:23:17.660 | It doesn't want recognition.

00:23:19.380 | Doesn't wanna do interviews.

00:23:20.580 | It doesn't wanna be famous.

00:23:22.020 | What do you make of that?

00:23:24.140 | - It's great.

00:23:24.980 | Look, prizes are corrupting.

00:23:26.900 | After scientists win Nobel Prizes,

00:23:28.940 | they tend to become less productive.

00:23:31.220 | Now, statistically, it's hard to sort out

00:23:32.980 | the different effects.

00:23:33.820 | There's aggression toward the mean.

00:23:35.180 | Does the prize make you too busy?

00:23:36.620 | It's a little tricky, but--

00:23:38.060 | - There's not enough Nobel Prizes either

00:23:39.900 | to gather enough data.

00:23:41.780 | - Right, but I've known a lot of Nobel Prize winners,

00:23:45.260 | and it is my sense they become less productive.

00:23:47.780 | They repeat more of their older messages,

00:23:49.580 | which may be highly socially valuable,

00:23:52.220 | but if someone wants to turn their back on that

00:23:54.940 | and keep on working, which I assume is what he's doing,

00:23:58.300 | that's awesome.

00:23:59.380 | I mean, we should respect that.

00:24:01.300 | It's like he wins a bigger prize, right?

00:24:02.980 | Our extreme respect.

00:24:04.460 | - Yeah.

00:24:05.300 | Wow.

00:24:07.820 | Grisha, if you're listening, I need to talk to you soon.

00:24:10.700 | Okay.

00:24:11.540 | (both laughing)

00:24:12.460 | I've been trying to get ahold of him.

00:24:15.140 | Okay.

00:24:15.980 | Back to capitalism.

00:24:18.460 | I gotta ask you, just competition in general

00:24:20.740 | in this world of weirdos,

00:24:22.580 | is competition good for the world?

00:24:24.820 | This kind of seems to be one of the fundamental engines

00:24:29.940 | of capitalism, right?

00:24:30.900 | Do you see it as ultimately constructive

00:24:32.860 | or destructive for the world?

00:24:34.860 | - What really matters is how good your legal framework is.

00:24:37.660 | So competition within nature,

00:24:40.180 | for food leads to bloody conflict all the time.

00:24:42.500 | The animal world is quite unpleasant to say the least.

00:24:46.300 | If you have something like the rule of law

00:24:49.860 | and clearly defined property rights,

00:24:52.060 | which are within reason justly allocated,

00:24:54.780 | competition probably is gonna work very well,

00:24:58.940 | but it's not an unalloyed good thing at all.

00:25:01.460 | It can be highly destructive.

00:25:02.900 | Military competition, right?

00:25:04.500 | Which actually is itself sometimes good,

00:25:07.740 | but it's not good per se.

00:25:09.380 | - What aspects of life do you think we should protect

00:25:12.100 | from competition?

00:25:13.780 | So is there some, you said like the rule of law,

00:25:16.580 | is there some things we should keep away from competition?

00:25:19.740 | - Well, the fight for territory most of all, right?

00:25:22.140 | - So violence, anything that involves

00:25:24.180 | like actual physical violence.

00:25:25.740 | - Right, and it's not that I think

00:25:26.820 | the current borders are just.

00:25:28.100 | I mean, go talk to Hungarians, Romanians,

00:25:31.820 | Serbians, Bosnians, they'll talk your ear off.

00:25:34.460 | And some of them are probably right.

00:25:36.700 | But at the end of the day,

00:25:37.620 | we have some kind of international order

00:25:40.660 | and I would rather we more or less stick with it.

00:25:43.220 | If Catalonians wanna leave, they keep up with it,

00:25:46.580 | you know, let them go.

00:25:47.500 | But.

00:25:48.420 | - What about a space of like healthcare?

00:25:50.500 | This is where you get into a tension of like

00:25:52.660 | between capitalism and kind of more,

00:25:55.420 | I don't wanna use socialism,

00:25:57.900 | but those kinds of policies that are less free market.

00:26:02.380 | - I think in this country,

00:26:03.420 | healthcare should be much more competitive.

00:26:06.020 | So you go to hospitals, doctors,

00:26:07.580 | they don't treat you like a customer.

00:26:10.020 | They treat you like an idiot or like a child

00:26:11.980 | or someone with third party payment.

00:26:14.540 | And it's a pretty humiliating experience often.

00:26:17.140 | - Yeah, do you think a free market in general is possible,

00:26:22.860 | like a pure free market?

00:26:25.140 | And is that a good goal to strive for?

00:26:28.260 | - I don't think the term pure free market's well defined

00:26:31.300 | because you need a legal order.

00:26:33.020 | The legal order has to make decisions on like

00:26:35.420 | what is intellectual property, more important than ever.

00:26:38.540 | There's no benchmark that like represents

00:26:40.540 | the pure free market way of doing things.

00:26:43.820 | What will penalties be?

00:26:45.460 | How much do we put into law enforcement?

00:26:47.860 | No simple answers, but just saying free market

00:26:50.820 | doesn't pin down what you're gonna do

00:26:52.380 | on those all important questions.

00:26:53.980 | - So free market is an economics, I guess, idea.

00:26:56.980 | So there's no, it's not possible for free market

00:27:00.260 | is generate the rules that are like emergent,

00:27:02.620 | like self-governing.

00:27:03.820 | - It generates a lot of them, right?

00:27:05.340 | Through private norms, through trade associations,

00:27:08.140 | international trade is mostly done privately and by norms.

00:27:13.140 | So it's certainly possible, but at the end of the day,

00:27:16.060 | I think you need governments to draw very clear lines

00:27:20.020 | to prevent it from turning into mafia run systems.

00:27:24.260 | - You know, I've been hanging out

00:27:26.460 | with other group of weirdos lately, Michael Malice,

00:27:30.820 | who espouses to be an anarchist, anarchism,

00:27:36.180 | which is like, I think intellectually,

00:27:39.540 | just a fascinating set of ideas,

00:27:42.620 | where the, you know, taking free market to the full extreme

00:27:47.500 | of basically saying there should be no government,

00:27:51.820 | what is it?

00:27:54.300 | Oversight, I guess, and then everything should be fully,

00:27:57.780 | like all the agreements, all the collectives you form

00:28:00.380 | should be voluntary, not based on the geographic land

00:28:05.700 | you were born on and so on.

00:28:07.460 | Do you think that's just a giant mess?

00:28:10.900 | Like, do you think it's possible

00:28:12.500 | for an anarchist society to work where it's,

00:28:15.180 | you know, in a fully distributed way,

00:28:18.940 | people agree with each other,

00:28:20.500 | not just on financial transactions,

00:28:22.700 | but, you know, on their personal security,

00:28:27.700 | on sort of military type of stuff, on healthcare,

00:28:31.940 | on education, all those kinds of things.

00:28:34.100 | And where does it break down?

00:28:35.700 | - Well, I wouldn't press a button to say,

00:28:37.260 | get rid of our current constitution,

00:28:39.180 | which I view as pretty good and quite wise.

00:28:41.900 | But I think the deeper point is that all societies

00:28:44.940 | are in some regards anarchistic,

00:28:47.220 | and we should take the anarchist seriously.

00:28:49.100 | So globally, there's a kind of anarchy across borders,

00:28:53.580 | even within federalistic systems, they're typically complex.

00:28:57.260 | There's not a clear transitivity necessarily

00:29:00.340 | of who has the final say over what.

00:29:03.140 | Just the state vis-a-vis its people.

00:29:05.300 | There's not per se a final arbitrator in that regard.

00:29:09.060 | So you want a good anarchy rather than a bad anarchy.

00:29:13.060 | You want to squish your anarchy into the right corners.

00:29:15.980 | And I don't think there's a theoretical answer

00:29:18.420 | how to do it.

00:29:19.380 | But you start with a country,

00:29:20.660 | like, is it working well enough now?

00:29:23.540 | This country, you'd say mostly.

00:29:25.740 | You'd certainly want to make a lot of improvements.

00:29:28.220 | And that's why I don't want to press

00:29:29.540 | that get rid of the constitution button.

00:29:31.660 | But to just dump on the anarchist system is the point.

00:29:34.020 | Always try to learn from any opinion.

00:29:36.540 | You know, and what in it is true.

00:29:39.100 | - I'm just like marveling at the poetry

00:29:42.900 | of saying that we should squish our anarchy

00:29:45.580 | into the right corners.

00:29:46.740 | Love it.

00:29:48.500 | Okay, I gotta ask, I've been talking with,

00:29:52.020 | since we're doing a whirlwind introduction

00:29:55.940 | to all of economics, I've been talking

00:29:58.100 | to a few objectivists recently,

00:30:00.100 | and just, you know, Ayn Rand comes up as a person,

00:30:04.340 | as a philosopher, throughout many conversations,

00:30:07.020 | a lot of people really despise her.

00:30:09.180 | A lot of people really love her.

00:30:11.140 | It's always weird to me when somebody arouses a philosophy

00:30:14.940 | or a human being arouses that much emotion

00:30:16.740 | in either direction.

00:30:17.740 | Does she make, do you understand, first of all,

00:30:21.260 | that level of emotion?

00:30:22.780 | And what are your thoughts about Ayn Rand

00:30:25.060 | and her philosophy, objectivism?

00:30:26.700 | Is it useful at all to think about this kind

00:30:30.180 | of formulation of rational self-interest,

00:30:34.860 | if I could put it in those words,

00:30:36.700 | or I guess more negatively, the selfishness,

00:30:41.700 | or she would put, I guess, the virtue of selfishness.

00:30:46.540 | - Ayn Rand was a big influence on me growing up.

00:30:49.300 | The book that really mattered for me

00:30:50.660 | was "Capitalism and the Unknown Ideal."

00:30:53.340 | The notion that wealth creates opportunity

00:30:56.220 | and good lives and wealth is something we ought

00:30:58.900 | to valorize and give very high status.

00:31:01.380 | It's one of her key ideas.

00:31:02.880 | I think it's completely correct.

00:31:04.500 | I think she has the most profound

00:31:06.100 | and articulate statement of that idea.

00:31:08.820 | That said, as a philosopher, I disagree with her

00:31:11.860 | on most things, and I did, even as a boy,

00:31:14.500 | when I was reading her.

00:31:15.700 | I read Plato before Ayn Rand, and in a Socratic dialogue,

00:31:19.140 | there's all these different points of view

00:31:20.420 | being thrown around.

00:31:22.140 | And whomever it is you agree with,

00:31:24.140 | you understand the wisdom is in the coming together

00:31:27.060 | at the different points of view.

00:31:28.740 | And she doesn't have that.

00:31:29.840 | So altruism can be wonderful, in my view.

00:31:33.040 | Humans are not actually that rational.

00:31:35.420 | Self-interest is often poorly defined.

00:31:38.180 | To pound the table and say existence exists,

00:31:41.200 | I wouldn't say I disagree, but I'm not sure

00:31:43.940 | that it's a very meaningful statement.

00:31:46.500 | I think the secret to Ayn Rand is that she was Russian.

00:31:49.260 | I'd love to have her on my podcast if she were still alive.

00:31:52.060 | I'd only ask her about Russia.

00:31:53.860 | Which she mostly never talked about

00:31:56.140 | after writing "We the Living."

00:31:57.920 | And she is much more Russian than she seems at first.

00:32:01.660 | Even purging people from the objectivist circles.

00:32:04.420 | It's like how Russians, especially female Russians,

00:32:07.420 | so often purge their friends.

00:32:09.340 | It's weird, all the parallels.

00:32:11.620 | - So you're saying, so yes,

00:32:13.540 | assuming she's still not around,

00:32:17.780 | but if she is and she comes onto your podcast,

00:32:20.660 | can you dig into that a little bit?

00:32:22.020 | Do you mean her personal demons around

00:32:27.020 | the social and economic Russia of the time,

00:32:31.980 | when she escaped?

00:32:32.900 | - The traumas she suffered there.

00:32:34.860 | What she really likes in the music and literature and why.

00:32:37.500 | - Music and literature, huh?

00:32:38.580 | - And getting deeply into that,

00:32:40.260 | her view of relations between the sexes in Russia,

00:32:42.900 | how it differs from America,

00:32:45.020 | why she still carries through the old Russian vision

00:32:48.300 | in her fiction, this extreme sexual dimorphism,

00:32:51.540 | but with also very strong women.

00:32:53.860 | To me is a uniquely, at least Eastern European vision,

00:32:57.860 | mostly Russian, I would say.

00:32:59.420 | And that's in her, that's her actual real philosophy,

00:33:03.180 | not this table-bounding existence exists.

00:33:06.100 | And that's not talked about enough.

00:33:07.820 | She's a Russian philosopher.

00:33:09.340 | Or Soviet, whatever you wanna call it.

00:33:12.420 | - And if she wasn't so certain,

00:33:14.740 | she could have been a Dostoevsky,

00:33:16.300 | where it's not, that certainty is almost the thing

00:33:19.100 | that brings her the adoration of millions,

00:33:23.420 | but also the hatred of millions.

00:33:25.340 | - You became a cult figure

00:33:26.620 | in a somewhat Russian-like manner.

00:33:29.100 | - Yeah.

00:33:30.060 | - Yeah.

00:33:30.900 | - It is what it is.

00:33:32.260 | But I love the idea that, again,

00:33:34.660 | you're just dropping bombs that are poetic,

00:33:37.180 | that the wisdom is in the coming together of ideas.

00:33:41.020 | It's kind of interesting to think

00:33:42.380 | that no one human possesses wisdom.

00:33:46.860 | No one idea is the wisdom,

00:33:49.460 | that the coming together is the wisdom.

00:33:52.260 | - Like in my view, "Boswell's Life of Johnson,"

00:33:54.700 | 18th century British biography.

00:33:56.980 | It's in essence a co-authored work, "Boswell and Johnson."

00:33:59.980 | It's one of the greatest philosophy books ever,

00:34:02.740 | though it is commonly regarded as a biography.

00:34:05.220 | John Stuart Mill, who in a sense

00:34:07.260 | was co-authoring with Harriet Taller,

00:34:09.220 | a better philosopher than is realized,

00:34:12.180 | though he's rated very, very highly.

00:34:14.260 | Plato/Socrates,

00:34:16.060 | a lot of the greatest works are in a kind of dialogue form.

00:34:19.940 | Goethe's "Faust" would be another example.

00:34:23.140 | It's very much a dialogue.

00:34:25.020 | And yes, it's drama, but it's also philosophy, Shakespeare.

00:34:28.700 | Maybe the wisest thinker of them all.

00:34:30.540 | - In your book, "Big Business," speaking of Ayn Rand,

00:34:35.380 | "Big Business, a Love Letter to an American Antihero,"

00:34:38.940 | you make the case for the benefit

00:34:41.540 | that large businesses bring to society.

00:34:43.580 | Can you explain?

00:34:45.220 | If you look at, say, the pandemic,

00:34:46.940 | which has been a catastrophic event, right,

00:34:49.100 | for many reasons, but who is it that saved us?

00:34:52.660 | So Amazon has done remarkably well.

00:34:56.220 | They upped their delivery game more or less overnight

00:34:59.460 | with very few hitches.

00:35:00.980 | I've ordered hundreds of Amazon packages,

00:35:03.700 | direct delivery food, whether it's DoorDash or Uber Eats

00:35:07.420 | or using Whole Foods through Amazon shipping.

00:35:10.140 | Again, it's gone remarkably well.

00:35:12.260 | Switching over our entire higher educational system,

00:35:15.780 | basically within two weeks, to Zoom.

00:35:18.140 | Zoom did it.

00:35:19.100 | I mean, I've had a Zoom outage,

00:35:21.260 | but their performance rate has been remarkably high.

00:35:24.820 | So if you just look at resources, competence, incentives,

00:35:29.420 | who's been the star performers?

00:35:31.020 | The NBA, even, just canceling the season

00:35:33.260 | as early as they did, sending a message like,

00:35:35.700 | "Hey, people, this is real,"

00:35:37.620 | and then pulling off the bubble.

00:35:39.580 | It's not a single found case of COVID

00:35:41.700 | and having all the testing set up in advance.

00:35:45.060 | Big business has done very well lately,

00:35:47.820 | and throughout the broader course of American history,

00:35:50.700 | in my view, has mostly been a hero.

00:35:52.700 | - Can we engage in a kind of therapy session?

00:35:56.220 | I'm often troubled by the negativity towards big business,

00:36:03.540 | and I wonder if you could help figure out

00:36:07.260 | how we remove that, or maybe first psychoanalyze it,

00:36:11.380 | and then how we remove it.

00:36:12.940 | It feels like, you know, once we've gotten wifi on flights,

00:36:17.940 | on airplane flights, people started complaining

00:36:24.860 | about how shady the connection is, right?

00:36:27.220 | They take it for granted immediately,

00:36:29.540 | and then start complaining about little details.

00:36:31.900 | Another example that's closer to,

00:36:35.620 | especially as aspiring entrepreneurs,

00:36:39.860 | closer to the things I'm thinking about

00:36:41.980 | is Jack Dorsey with Twitter.

00:36:44.020 | You know, to me, Twitter has enabled

00:36:46.940 | an incredible platform of communication,

00:36:50.620 | and yet the biggest thing that people talk about

00:36:53.420 | is not how incredible this platform is.

00:36:57.380 | They essentially use the platform to complain

00:37:01.380 | about the censorship of a few individuals,

00:37:03.800 | as opposed to how amazing it is.

00:37:06.260 | Now, you should also, you should talk about

00:37:08.140 | how shady the wifi is, and how censorship,

00:37:11.040 | or the removal of Donald Trump from the platform

00:37:13.100 | is a bad thing, but it feels like we don't talk about

00:37:16.340 | the positive impacts at scale of these technologies.

00:37:19.660 | Is there, can you explain why, and is there a way to fix it?

00:37:23.940 | - I don't know if we can fix it.

00:37:25.340 | I think we are beings of high neuroticism,

00:37:28.060 | for the most part, as a personality trait.

00:37:30.740 | Not everyone, but most people.

00:37:33.460 | And as a compliment to that,

00:37:34.780 | if someone says 10 nice things about you,

00:37:36.660 | and one insult, you're more bothered by the insult

00:37:39.540 | than you're pleased by the nice things,

00:37:41.180 | especially if the insult is somewhat true.

00:37:43.860 | So you have these media, these vehicles,

00:37:46.620 | Twitter is one you mentioned,

00:37:48.440 | where it's all kind of messages going back and forth,

00:37:50.580 | and you're really bugged by the messages you don't like.

00:37:53.580 | Most people are neurotic to begin with.

00:37:56.200 | It's not only taken out on big business, to be clear.

00:37:58.860 | So Congress catches a lot of grief,

00:38:01.580 | and some of it they deserve, yes.

00:38:05.260 | Religion is not attacked the same way,

00:38:07.380 | but religiosity is declining.

00:38:09.840 | If you poll people, the military still polls quite well,

00:38:14.580 | but people are very disillusioned with many things,

00:38:17.040 | and the Martin Gury thesis, that because of the internet,

00:38:19.740 | you just see more of things,

00:38:21.580 | and the more you see of something,

00:38:22.860 | whether it's good, bad, or in between,

00:38:24.940 | the more you will find to complain about,

00:38:26.780 | I suspect is the fundamental mechanism here.

00:38:28.980 | I mean, look at Clubhouse, right?

00:38:32.660 | To me, it's a great service,

00:38:33.840 | may or may not be my thing,

00:38:35.780 | but gives people this opportunity.

00:38:37.380 | No one makes you go on it.

00:38:39.100 | And all these media articles,

00:38:40.380 | like, oh, is Clubhouse gonna wreck things?

00:38:42.740 | Are they gonna break things?

00:38:44.260 | New York Times is complaining.

00:38:45.740 | Of course, it's their competitor as well.

00:38:48.020 | I'm like, give these people a chance.

00:38:49.780 | Talk it up.

00:38:50.800 | You may or may not like it.

00:38:52.700 | Let's praise the people who are getting something done.

00:38:55.580 | Very Ayn Randian point.

00:38:57.780 | - As an economic thinker, as a writer, as a podcaster,

00:39:01.460 | what do you think about Clubhouse

00:39:03.700 | as what do you think about...

00:39:05.200 | Okay, let me just throw my feeling about it.

00:39:09.780 | I used to use Discord,

00:39:11.260 | which is another service where people use voice.

00:39:13.640 | So the only thing you do is just hear each other.

00:39:16.420 | There's no face.

00:39:17.280 | You just see a little icon.

00:39:19.060 | That's the essential element of Clubhouse.

00:39:23.580 | And there's an intimacy to voice-only communication

00:39:26.540 | that's hard.

00:39:27.660 | That didn't make sense to me,

00:39:29.060 | but it was just what it is,

00:39:30.860 | which feels like something that won't last for some reason.

00:39:33.940 | Maybe it's the cynical view,

00:39:36.220 | but what's your sense about the intimacy

00:39:40.860 | of what's happening right now with Clubhouse?

00:39:43.400 | - I've greatly enjoyed what I've done,

00:39:45.540 | but I'm not sure it's for me in the long run

00:39:47.340 | for two reasons.

00:39:48.700 | First, if you compare it to doing a podcast,

00:39:52.480 | podcasting has greater reach than Clubhouse.

00:39:55.180 | So I would rather put time into my podcast.

00:39:58.320 | But then also my core asset, so to speak,

00:40:02.800 | is I'm a very fast reader.

00:40:04.940 | So audio per se is not necessarily to my advantage.

00:40:08.200 | I don't speak or listen faster than other people.

00:40:10.800 | In fact, I'm a slower listener 'cause I like 1.0,

00:40:13.560 | not 1.5x.

00:40:14.400 | So I should spend less time on audio

00:40:17.240 | and more time reading and writing.

00:40:18.760 | - Yeah, it's interesting because you mentioned podcasts

00:40:21.800 | and audio books.

00:40:25.480 | The podcasts are recorded and so I can skip things.

00:40:30.040 | Like I can skip commercials or I can skip parts

00:40:33.560 | where it's like, "Ugh, this part is boring."

00:40:36.240 | With live conversations, especially when,

00:40:40.120 | there's a magic to the fact when you have a lot of people

00:40:42.560 | participating in that conversation.

00:40:44.800 | But some people are like, "Ugh, this topic.

00:40:47.920 | "They're going into this thing."

00:40:49.240 | And you can't skip it or you can't fast forward.

00:40:51.040 | You can't go 1.5x or 2x.

00:40:54.000 | You can't speed it up.

00:40:55.200 | Nevertheless, there's a tension between that,

00:40:58.520 | so that's the productivity aspect,

00:41:00.560 | with the actual magic of live communication

00:41:04.600 | where anything can happen,

00:41:05.580 | where Elon Musk can ask the CEO of Robinhood, Vlad,

00:41:10.200 | about like, "Hey, somebody holding a gun to your head.

00:41:13.220 | "There's something shady going on."

00:41:15.040 | The magic of that.

00:41:16.080 | That's also my criticism of like,

00:41:18.280 | there's been a recent conversation with Bill Gates

00:41:20.900 | that he went on a platform,

00:41:23.940 | and had basically a regular interview on the platform

00:41:27.900 | without allowing the possibility of the magic of the chaos.

00:41:31.380 | So I'm not exactly sure.

00:41:35.060 | It's probably not the right platform for you

00:41:36.980 | and for many other people who are exceptionally productive

00:41:39.580 | in other places, but there's still nevertheless a magic

00:41:42.660 | to the chaos that can be created with live conversation

00:41:45.540 | that gives me pause.

00:41:47.860 | - Maybe what it's perfect for is the tribute.

00:41:50.140 | So they had an episode recently that I didn't hear,

00:41:52.520 | but I heard it was wonderful.

00:41:54.040 | It was anecdotes about Steve Jobs.

00:41:56.380 | That you can't do one-to-one, right?

00:41:58.040 | And you don't want control.

00:41:59.460 | You want different people appearing and stepping up

00:42:02.020 | and saying their bit.

00:42:03.780 | And Clubhouse is 110% perfect for that, the tribute.

00:42:08.780 | - I love that, the tribute.

00:42:10.500 | But there's also the possibility,

00:42:12.580 | I think there was a time when somebody arranged

00:42:15.740 | a conversation with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage.

00:42:18.900 | I remember that happened a long time ago.

00:42:21.880 | And it was very formal.

00:42:24.580 | It could have probably gone better,

00:42:27.920 | but it was still magical to have these people

00:42:30.080 | that obviously had a bunch of tension

00:42:32.220 | throughout their history.

00:42:33.420 | It's so frictionless to have two major figures

00:42:39.480 | in world history just jump on a Clubhouse stage.

00:42:42.600 | - Putin and Elon Musk.

00:42:43.760 | - Putin and Elon Musk. - See what happens.

00:42:45.680 | - And that's exactly it.

00:42:47.200 | So there's a language barrier there.

00:42:48.800 | But there's also the problem that in particular,

00:42:52.880 | it's like Biden would have a similar problem.

00:42:55.920 | It's like, they're just not into new technology.

00:42:58.360 | So it's very hard to catch the Kremlin up to,

00:43:01.620 | first of all, Twitter.

00:43:02.900 | But to catch them up to Clubhouse, you have to have the,

00:43:07.300 | Elon Musk has a sense of the internet, the humor,

00:43:09.260 | the memes and all that kind of stuff

00:43:10.900 | that you have to have in order to use a new app

00:43:14.920 | and figure out the timing, the beat,

00:43:16.940 | what is this thing about?

00:43:18.760 | So that's the challenge there.

00:43:20.580 | But that's exactly it.

00:43:21.860 | That magic of have two big personalities just show up.

00:43:26.860 | And I wonder if it's just a temporary thing

00:43:30.660 | that we're going through with the pandemic

00:43:32.340 | where people are just lonely

00:43:34.660 | and they're seeking for that human connection

00:43:37.500 | that we usually get elsewhere through our work.

00:43:40.540 | - But they'll stay lonely, in my opinion.

00:43:42.620 | - You think so? - I do.

00:43:44.560 | So it is a pandemic thing, but I think it will persist.

00:43:48.140 | And the idea of wanting to be connected

00:43:49.880 | to more of the world, Clubhouse will still offer that.

00:43:53.480 | And all the mental health issues out there,

00:43:56.120 | a lot of people have broken ties

00:43:58.680 | and they will still be lonely post-vaccines.

00:44:00.880 | - Yeah, from an artificial intelligence perspective,

00:44:05.840 | have a sense that there is a deep loneliness in the world,

00:44:11.460 | that all of us are really lonely.

00:44:13.120 | Like we don't even acknowledge it.

00:44:14.420 | Even people in happy relationships.

00:44:16.640 | It feels like there's like an iceberg of loneliness

00:44:19.100 | in all of us, like seeking to be understood,

00:44:22.660 | like deeply understood.

00:44:24.120 | Understanding us, like having somebody

00:44:26.900 | with whom you can have a deep interaction enough

00:44:29.500 | to where they can help you to understand yourself

00:44:34.060 | and they also understand you.

00:44:36.440 | Like I have a sense that artificial intelligence systems

00:44:38.780 | can provide that as well,

00:44:40.660 | but humans, I think, crave that from other humans

00:44:44.400 | in ways that we perhaps don't acknowledge.

00:44:46.420 | And I have a hope that technology

00:44:48.220 | will enable that more and more.

00:44:49.460 | Like Clubhouse is an example that allows that.

00:44:52.220 | - Are touring bots gonna out-compete Clubhouse?

00:44:54.900 | Like why not sort of program your own session?

00:44:57.540 | You'll just talk into your device

00:44:59.860 | and say, "Here's the kind of conversation I want."

00:45:02.260 | And it will create the characters for you.

00:45:04.540 | And it may not be as good as Elon and Vladimir Putin,

00:45:07.060 | but it'll be better than ordinary Clubhouse.

00:45:09.580 | - Yeah, and one of the things that's missing,

00:45:11.620 | it's not just conversation, it's memory.

00:45:14.900 | So long-term memory is what current AI systems don't have,

00:45:17.860 | is sharing an experience together.

00:45:21.180 | Forget the words, it's like sharing the highs

00:45:23.980 | and the lows of life together

00:45:26.260 | and the systems around us remembering that,

00:45:29.420 | remembering we've been through that.

00:45:31.260 | Like that's the thing that creates

00:45:32.860 | really close relationships, is going through some shit.

00:45:35.420 | Like go struggle.

00:45:37.620 | If you've survived together,

00:45:39.420 | there's something really difficult

00:45:40.980 | that bonds you with other humans.

00:45:42.780 | - And this is related to immigration

00:45:44.340 | and the American dream.

00:45:45.500 | - In what way?

00:45:47.340 | - The people who have come to this country,

00:45:48.940 | however weird and different they may be,

00:45:51.860 | they or their ancestors at some point

00:45:53.780 | probably have shared this thing.

00:45:55.380 | Right, US is not gonna split up.

00:46:00.100 | It may get more screwed up as a country,

00:46:02.380 | but Texas and California are not gonna break off.

00:46:05.500 | I mean, they're big enough where they could do it,

00:46:07.260 | but it's just never gonna happen.

00:46:08.900 | - We've been through too much together.

00:46:10.380 | - Yeah.

00:46:11.220 | (both laughing)

00:46:12.620 | - Ah, that's a hopeful message.

00:46:14.100 | Do you think, some people have talked to Eric Weinstein,

00:46:17.060 | you've talked to Eric Weinstein.

00:46:18.660 | He has a sense that growth,

00:46:21.980 | the entirety of the American system

00:46:26.260 | is based on the assumption that we're gonna grow forever,

00:46:29.260 | the economy's gonna grow forever.

00:46:31.020 | Do you think economic growth will continue indefinitely,

00:46:35.860 | or will we stagnate?

00:46:37.220 | - I've long been in agreement with Eric, Peter Thiel,

00:46:42.020 | Robert Gordon and others that growth has slowed down.

00:46:46.300 | I argue that in my book,

00:46:47.460 | "The Great Stagnation," appropriately titled.

00:46:50.660 | But the last two years, I've become much more optimistic.

00:46:53.140 | I've seen a lot of breakthroughs

00:46:54.900 | in green energy and battery technology.

00:46:57.780 | mRNA vaccines and medicine is a big deal already.

00:47:01.860 | It will repair our GDP

00:47:03.340 | and save millions of lives around the world.

00:47:06.140 | There's an anti-malaria vaccine

00:47:09.060 | that's now in stage three trial, it probably works.

00:47:12.100 | CRISPR to defeat sickle cell anemia.

00:47:14.380 | Just space, area after area after area,

00:47:18.340 | there's suddenly this surge of breakthroughs.

00:47:20.660 | I would say many of them rooted in superior computation

00:47:23.860 | and ultimately, Moore's law

00:47:25.420 | and access to those computational abilities.

00:47:28.380 | So I'm much more optimistic than say,

00:47:30.380 | the last time I spoke to Eric.

00:47:32.060 | (Lex laughs)

00:47:32.900 | He moves all the time in his views.

00:47:34.700 | I don't know where he's at now.

00:47:35.980 | - He's not at, he hasn't gained, that's really interesting.

00:47:38.940 | So your little drop of optimism comes from,

00:47:43.780 | like there might be a fundamental shift

00:47:46.180 | in the kind of things that computation has unlocked for us

00:47:49.620 | in terms of, like it could be a wellspring of innovation

00:47:52.900 | that enables growth for a long time to come.

00:47:55.540 | Like Eric has not quite connected

00:47:59.420 | to the computation aspect yet

00:48:01.620 | to where it could be a wellspring of innovation.

00:48:04.340 | - But you're very close to it in your own work.

00:48:06.180 | I don't have to tell you that.

00:48:07.760 | The work you're doing would not have been possible

00:48:10.020 | not very long ago.

00:48:11.300 | - But the question is, how much does that work enable

00:48:13.860 | continued growth for decades to come?

00:48:16.180 | - For all their problems,

00:48:17.640 | some version of driverless vehicles will be a thing.

00:48:20.700 | I'm not sure when, you know much better than I do.

00:48:23.380 | Maybe only partially, but that too will be a big deal.

00:48:26.700 | - Well, one of the open questions

00:48:28.220 | that sort of the Peter Thiel School area of ideas

00:48:32.940 | is how much can be converted to technology?

00:48:36.180 | How many parts of our lives can technology integrate

00:48:39.800 | and then innovate?

00:48:40.720 | Like, can it replace healthcare?

00:48:43.460 | Can it replace the legal system?

00:48:46.440 | Can it replace government?

00:48:47.740 | Not replace, but like, you know, make it digital

00:48:52.740 | and thereby enable computation to improve it, right?

00:48:57.480 | That's the open question

00:48:58.820 | because many aspects of our lives

00:49:00.740 | are still not really that digitized.

00:49:06.020 | - There was a New York Times symposium in April,

00:49:08.580 | which is not long ago.

00:49:09.740 | And they asked the so-called experts,

00:49:11.940 | when are we gonna get vaccines?

00:49:13.620 | And the most optimistic answer was in four years.

00:49:17.680 | And obviously we beat that by a long mile.

00:49:21.260 | So I think people still haven't woken up.

00:49:23.140 | You mentioned my tiny drop of optimism,

00:49:25.000 | but it's a big drop of optimism.

00:49:27.860 | - Is it a waterfall yet?

00:49:28.900 | I mean, is it just-

00:49:30.700 | - Well, here's my pessimism.

00:49:32.340 | Whenever there are major new technologies,

00:49:34.420 | they also tend to be used for violence,

00:49:36.300 | directly or indirectly.

00:49:37.660 | Radio, Hitler, not that he hit people

00:49:39.940 | over the head with radios,

00:49:41.060 | but it enabled the rise of various dictators.

00:49:44.660 | So the new technologies now, whatever exactly they may be,

00:49:48.580 | they're gonna cause a lot of trouble.

00:49:50.460 | And that's my pessimism,

00:49:51.620 | not that I think they're all gonna slow to a trickle.

00:49:54.700 | - When was the stagnation book?

00:49:56.900 | - 2011.

00:49:57.820 | - 2011.

00:49:58.700 | - Yes.

00:49:59.860 | It was the first of the stagnation books, in fact.

00:50:03.020 | - It's very interesting.

00:50:05.140 | - But even then I said, this is temporary.

00:50:07.660 | And I was predicting it would be gone

00:50:09.580 | in about 20 years time.

00:50:11.220 | I'm not sure that's exactly the right prediction,

00:50:14.500 | like 2030, but I think we're actually gonna beat that.

00:50:17.800 | - So you think United States might still be

00:50:20.980 | on top of the world for the rest of the century,

00:50:22.980 | in terms of its economic growth, impact on the world,

00:50:27.400 | scientific innovation, all those kinds of things.

00:50:29.940 | - That's too long to predict,

00:50:31.460 | but I'm bullish on America in general.

00:50:33.820 | (Lex laughing)

00:50:35.060 | - Got it.

00:50:35.900 | Speaking of being bullish on America,

00:50:38.900 | the opposite of that is,

00:50:40.820 | we talked about capitalism,

00:50:44.460 | we talked about Ayn Rand and her Russian roots.

00:50:47.060 | What do you think about communism?

00:50:51.220 | Why doesn't it work?

00:50:52.760 | What is the implementation?

00:50:58.220 | Is there anything about its ideas that you find compelling,

00:51:01.580 | or is it just a fundamentally flawed system?

00:51:06.260 | - Well, communism is like capitalism.

00:51:08.060 | The words mean many things to different people.

00:51:10.780 | You could argue my life as a tenured professor

00:51:12.880 | comes closer to communism than anything

00:51:15.340 | the human race has seen,

00:51:16.500 | and I would argue it works pretty well.

00:51:19.180 | But look, if you mean the Soviet Union,

00:51:21.700 | it devolved pretty quickly to a kind of

00:51:24.900 | decentralized set of incentives that were destructive

00:51:29.020 | rather than value maximizing.

00:51:30.600 | It wasn't even central planning, much less communism.

00:51:34.260 | So Paul Craig Roberts and Polanyi were correct

00:51:37.100 | in their descriptions of the Soviet system.

00:51:39.640 | Think of it as weird mixes of barter

00:51:41.560 | and malfunctioning incentives,

00:51:44.060 | and being very good at a whole bunch of things,

00:51:47.060 | but in terms of progress, innovation, and consumer goods,

00:51:50.180 | it really being quite a failure.

00:51:54.460 | And now, I wouldn't call that communism,

00:51:56.380 | but that's what I think of the system the Soviets had,

00:52:00.420 | and it required an ever-increasing pile of lies

00:52:04.840 | that both alienated people but created an elite

00:52:07.740 | that by the end of the thing

00:52:08.940 | no longer believed in the system itself,

00:52:12.300 | or even thought they were doing better by being crooks

00:52:15.400 | than by just, say, moving to Switzerland

00:52:16.980 | and being an upper-middle-class individual.

00:52:18.740 | Like, you would have a higher standard of living

00:52:20.740 | by Gorbachev's time.

00:52:22.260 | Not Gorbachev, but if you're number 30

00:52:24.020 | in the hierarchy, you're better off

00:52:25.980 | as a middle-class person in Switzerland.

00:52:27.900 | And that, of course, did not prove sustainable.

00:52:31.180 | - And so it's, what is it, a momentum, a bureaucracy,

00:52:33.580 | or something like that, it just builds up

00:52:34.940 | where you lose control of the original vision,

00:52:37.700 | and that naturally happens.

00:52:39.160 | It's just people--

00:52:40.180 | - And you can't use normal profit and loss

00:52:41.980 | in price incentives, so you get all prices,

00:52:44.420 | or most prices, set too low, right?

00:52:46.760 | Shortages everywhere, people trade favors.

00:52:49.580 | You have this culture of bartered bribes,

00:52:52.080 | sexual favors, or family friends,

00:52:55.380 | and you get more and more of that,

00:52:57.060 | and you, over time, lose more and more

00:52:58.900 | of the information and the prices and quantities

00:53:02.380 | and practices and norms you had,

00:53:04.100 | and that slowly decays, and then by the end,

00:53:06.900 | no one is believing in it.

00:53:08.200 | That would be my take, but again,

00:53:10.620 | you're the expert here.

00:53:12.080 | - The Russian scholar?

00:53:14.400 | Well, I'm perhaps no more an expert than Ayn Rand.

00:53:19.580 | It's more personal than it is scholarly or historic.

00:53:24.580 | So Stalin held power for 30 years.

00:53:27.640 | Vladimir Putin has held power for 21 years,

00:53:34.040 | where you could argue he took a little break.

00:53:36.840 | - But not much.

00:53:38.120 | He was still holding power, I think.

00:53:39.960 | - And it's still possible now with the new constitution

00:53:44.920 | that he could hold power for longer than Stalin,

00:53:47.480 | longer than 30 years.

00:53:48.880 | What do you think about the man,

00:53:51.380 | the state of affairs in Russia,

00:53:53.500 | in general, the system they have there?

00:53:57.900 | Is there something interesting to you

00:53:59.260 | as an economist, as a human being, about Russia?

00:54:02.260 | - Everything is interesting.

00:54:03.400 | I mean, here would be part of my take.

00:54:05.980 | As you know, the Russian economy, starting, what,

00:54:09.160 | 1999, 2000, has really quite a few years

00:54:12.620 | of super excellent growth,

00:54:14.180 | and Putin is still riding on that.

00:54:17.140 | It more or less coincides with his rise

00:54:20.600 | as the truly focal figure on the scene.

00:54:24.240 | Since then, pretty recently, they've had a bunch of years

00:54:26.460 | of negative four to 5% growth in a row, which is terrible.

00:54:31.460 | The economy is way too dependent on fossil fuels,

00:54:35.180 | but the structural problem is this.

00:54:37.660 | You need a concordance across economic power,

00:54:40.860 | social power, political power.

00:54:43.140 | They don't have to be allocated identically,

00:54:45.500 | but they have to be allocated consistently,

00:54:48.560 | and the Russian system under Putin,

00:54:51.140 | from almost the beginning, has never been able to have that,

00:54:55.140 | that ultimately, his incentives are to steer the system

00:54:58.500 | where the economic power is in a small number of hands

00:55:01.700 | in a non-diversified way.

00:55:03.940 | The system won't deliver sustainable gains

00:55:06.580 | in living standards anymore, ever, the way it's set up now,

00:55:11.160 | though if fossil fuel prices go up,

00:55:13.160 | they'll have some good years for sure,

00:55:15.060 | and that is really quite structural, what has gone wrong.

00:55:20.380 | And then on top of that, you can have an opinion of Putin,

00:55:23.420 | but you've gotta start with those structural problems,

00:55:25.700 | and that's why it's just not gonna work,

00:55:28.740 | but he had all those good years in the beginning,

00:55:30.820 | so the number of Russians, say, who live here,

00:55:33.420 | or in Russia, who love Putin and it's sincere,

00:55:36.580 | they're not just afraid of being dragged away,

00:55:39.500 | that's a real phenomenon.

00:55:41.480 | Yeah, I'm really torn on, Putin's approval rating,

00:55:45.260 | real approval rating, seems to be very high,

00:55:49.060 | and I'm torn in whether that has to do with the fact

00:55:54.060 | that there is control of the press,

00:55:57.000 | or if it's, which is the people I talk to

00:56:01.020 | who are in Russia, family and so on,

00:56:03.200 | a genuine love of Putin, appreciation of what Putin has done

00:56:07.860 | and is going to do with Russia.

00:56:09.940 | - But a lot of that would go away

00:56:11.640 | if the press were freer, I think.

00:56:13.180 | - Yes.

00:56:14.440 | - Well, Singapore realizes this,

00:56:15.960 | anyone discussed by the press, no matter who they are,

00:56:18.600 | people in Singapore have done a great job.

00:56:20.680 | - Yes.

00:56:21.520 | - If you're discussed by the press, you don't look good.

00:56:24.720 | Tech company executives are learning this, right?

00:56:27.160 | It's just like a rule.

00:56:28.440 | So in that sense, I think the rating is artificially high,

00:56:32.280 | but I don't, by any means, think it's all insincere,

00:56:36.120 | but that high popularity, I view as bearish for Russia.

00:56:39.520 | I would feel better about the country

00:56:40.960 | if people were more pissed off at him.

00:56:43.160 | - Yeah, that's right.

00:56:44.280 | It's nice to see free speech, even if it's full of hate.

00:56:47.360 | I am also troubled on the scientific side

00:56:52.920 | and entrepreneurial side.

00:56:54.360 | It seems difficult to be an entrepreneur in Russia.

00:56:57.500 | Like, it's not even in terms of rules,

00:57:03.120 | it's just culturally, the people I speak to,

00:57:06.280 | it's not easy to build a business.

00:57:10.080 | No, it's not easy to even dream

00:57:13.960 | of building a business in Russia.

00:57:15.760 | That's just not part of the culture,

00:57:17.160 | part of the conversation.

00:57:19.080 | It's almost like the conversation is,

00:57:21.720 | if you wanna be the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk

00:57:25.240 | or Steve Jobs or whatever, you come to America.

00:57:28.800 | That's the sense they have.

00:57:29.960 | - Yeah, history matters.

00:57:34.120 | Is it history, is it structural problems of today?

00:57:36.920 | - It's all the same thing.

00:57:38.440 | So a history of hostility to commerce,

00:57:40.620 | which of course, the old USSR is gone,

00:57:44.140 | but a lot of the attitudes remain,

00:57:47.240 | a lot of the corruption remains.

00:57:49.120 | You have this legacy distribution of wealth

00:57:51.040 | from the auctioning off of the assets,

00:57:53.240 | which is not conducive to some kind

00:57:54.920 | of broadly egalitarian democracy.

00:57:57.760 | And so you have these small number of PowerPoints

00:58:00.760 | to try to control information and wealth,

00:58:03.120 | and not really so keen to encourage the others

00:58:06.200 | who ultimately would pull the balance of political power

00:58:08.920 | away from the very wealthy and from Putin.

00:58:11.640 | And they support that culture.

00:58:13.400 | And the return of interest in Orthodox Church and all that,

00:58:16.320 | it's all part of the same piece, I think,

00:58:19.300 | 'cause the old Orthodox Church

00:58:20.680 | is not that pro-commerce, you'd have to say,

00:58:23.160 | but it's traditionalist, it's pro-family,

00:58:25.320 | those are safer ideas.

00:58:27.360 | And then there's such a great safety valve,

00:58:29.440 | the most ambitious, smartest people,

00:58:31.440 | like they probably will learn English.

00:58:33.680 | They sort of can look like they belong

00:58:35.880 | in all sorts of other countries,

00:58:37.160 | they can show up and blend in, super talented,

00:58:39.720 | they've probably had an excellent education,

00:58:42.320 | especially if they're from one of the two major cities,

00:58:44.520 | but even if not so, even from Siberia,

00:58:47.320 | and they go off, they leave,

00:58:49.240 | they're not a source of opposition,

00:58:51.280 | and that keeps the whole thing up and running

00:58:52.840 | for another generation.

00:58:54.800 | - Yeah, what do you make of the other big player, China?

00:59:00.800 | They seem to have a very different,

00:59:04.560 | messed up, but also functioning system.

00:59:09.520 | They seem to be much better at encouraging entrepreneurs.

00:59:13.880 | They're choosing winners,

00:59:15.680 | but what do you make of the entire Chinese system?

00:59:18.360 | Why does it work as well as it does currently?

00:59:22.500 | What are your concerns about it?

00:59:24.360 | And what are its threats to the United States

00:59:28.200 | or possible, what is it you said,

00:59:32.320 | like wisdom is when two ideas come together.

00:59:34.920 | Is there some possible benefits

00:59:36.960 | of these kinds of ideas coming together?

00:59:40.440 | - It's amazing what China has done,

00:59:42.960 | but I would say to put it in perspective,

00:59:44.800 | if you compare them to Japan, South Korea,

00:59:47.240 | Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore,

00:59:49.480 | they've still done much worse, not even close.

00:59:53.440 | And that's both living standards,

00:59:55.120 | or I hesitate to cite democracy as an unalloyed good

00:59:59.840 | in and of itself, but there's more freedom

01:00:01.360 | in all those other places by a lot.

01:00:04.000 | So China has all these problems of history,

01:00:07.080 | but they've managed as actually the Soviets did

01:00:09.560 | in the middle of the 20th century,

01:00:11.340 | one of the two great mass migrations

01:00:14.000 | from the countryside to cities,

01:00:15.740 | which boosts productivity enormously

01:00:18.180 | and will sustain totalitarian systems.

01:00:21.000 | But they moved from a totalitarian system to an oligarchy

01:00:24.600 | where the CCP is actually, at least for a while,

01:00:29.120 | hey, has been really good at governing,

01:00:31.120 | have made a lot of very good decisions.

01:00:33.720 | You have to admit that.

01:00:35.560 | I don't know how long that streak will continue

01:00:38.380 | with one person so much now holding authority

01:00:43.380 | in a more extreme manner.

01:00:45.840 | The selection pressures for the next generation

01:00:48.160 | of high-level CCP members probably become much worse.

01:00:52.600 | You have this general problem

01:00:53.940 | of the state-owned enterprise

01:00:55.280 | is losing relative productivity

01:00:57.120 | compared to the private sector.

01:00:58.800 | Well, we're gonna kind of hold Jack Ma on this island

01:01:02.640 | and he can only issue like weird hello statements.

01:01:05.240 | It kind of smells bad to me.

01:01:08.680 | I don't feel that it's about to crash,

01:01:10.900 | but I don't see them supplanting America

01:01:14.760 | as like the world's number one country.

01:01:17.280 | I think they will muddle through

01:01:19.280 | and have very serious problems,

01:01:21.760 | but there's enough talent there.

01:01:22.840 | They will muddle through.

01:01:24.000 | - Is there ideas from China or from anywhere in general

01:01:26.640 | of large-scale role of government

01:01:29.360 | that you find might be useful?

01:01:30.480 | Like Andrew Yang recently ran on a platform,

01:01:33.800 | UBI, Universal Basic Income.

01:01:37.140 | Is there some interesting ideas of large-scale government,

01:01:42.140 | sort of welfare programs at scale

01:01:47.600 | that you find interesting?

01:01:51.700 | - Well, keep in mind the current version

01:01:54.260 | of the Chinese Communist Party, post-Mao,

01:01:56.800 | dismantled what was called the iron rice ball.

01:02:00.040 | So it took apart the healthcare protections,

01:02:02.320 | a lot of the welfare system, a lot of the guaranteed jobs.

01:02:05.880 | So the economic rise of China coincided

01:02:08.120 | with the weakening of welfare.

01:02:10.480 | Not saying that's causal per se,

01:02:12.960 | but people think of China as having a government

01:02:16.840 | that takes care of everyone.

01:02:17.760 | It's very far from the truth.

01:02:19.440 | And by a lot of metrics,

01:02:20.880 | I don't mean control over people's lives.

01:02:23.520 | I don't mean speech, but by a lot of metrics,

01:02:25.800 | economically, we have a lot more government than they do.

01:02:28.880 | So what one means here by government, private control,

01:02:32.720 | I don't think you can just add up the numbers

01:02:35.120 | and get a simple answer.

01:02:36.760 | They've been fantastic at building infrastructure in cities

01:02:40.800 | in ways that will attract people from the countryside.

01:02:44.040 | And furthermore, they more or less enforce a meritocracy

01:02:47.540 | in this sense.

01:02:49.000 | Like if you're a kid of a rich guy,

01:02:51.400 | you'll get unfair privilege.

01:02:53.200 | That's unfair, but systems can afford that.

01:02:56.000 | If you are smart and from the countryside

01:02:57.800 | and your parents have nothing,

01:02:59.800 | you will be elevated and sent to a very good school,

01:03:02.600 | graduate school, because of the exam system.

01:03:05.160 | And they do that and they mean that very consistently.

01:03:08.520 | It's like the Soviets had a version of that

01:03:10.240 | like for jazz and romantic piano.

01:03:12.400 | Not for everything, but where they had it,

01:03:14.960 | like again, they were tremendous, right?

01:03:17.400 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:03:18.240 | - And Chinese have it in so many areas,

01:03:21.040 | a genuine meritocracy in this one way.

01:03:23.560 | - That moves people from the rural to the big city

01:03:26.480 | and that's a big boost of productivity

01:03:29.040 | for so a lot of time.

01:03:30.480 | - And when they get there, they're taken seriously.

01:03:32.280 | Jack Ma was riding a bicycle teaching English

01:03:34.760 | in his late 20s.

01:03:35.720 | He was a poor guy.

01:03:36.780 | - So--

01:03:39.240 | - Not a society of credentialism.

01:03:41.520 | - Right.

01:03:42.360 | - Or in America, it's way too much a credentialist society.

01:03:45.480 | - As we were talking about, even with the Nobel Prize.

01:03:47.760 | - Yeah.

01:03:48.600 | - But what do you think about these large government

01:03:50.840 | programs like UBI?

01:03:53.160 | - The one version of UBI that makes the most sense to me

01:03:55.840 | is the Mitt Romney version, UBI for kids.

01:03:59.280 | Like kids are vulnerable.

01:04:00.680 | If their parents screw up, you shouldn't blame the kid

01:04:03.080 | or make the kid suffer.

01:04:04.980 | I believe in something like UBI for kids, maybe just cash.

01:04:08.720 | But if you don't have kids, even with AI,

01:04:13.520 | my sense is at least in the world we know,

01:04:16.440 | you should be able to find a way to adjust.

01:04:19.000 | You might have to move to North Dakota to work,

01:04:22.840 | next to fracking, say.

01:04:26.000 | But look, before the pandemic,

01:04:30.640 | the two most robot-intensive societies,

01:04:33.080 | Japan and the US, US at least for manufacturing,

01:04:36.520 | were at full employment.

01:04:38.360 | So maybe there's some far-off day

01:04:40.180 | where there's literally no work.

01:04:41.560 | John Lennon, imagine it's piped everywhere.

01:04:46.460 | And then we might revisit the question.

01:04:49.500 | But for now, we had rising wages in the Trump years

01:04:53.500 | and full employment.

01:04:54.940 | So I don't see--

01:04:55.780 | - You don't see automation as a threat

01:04:57.580 | that fundamentally shakes our society.

01:05:00.380 | - It's a threat in the following sense.

01:05:01.980 | The new technologies are harder to work with

01:05:04.260 | for many people, and that's a social problem.

01:05:07.280 | But I'm not sure a universal basic income

01:05:10.460 | is the right answer to that very real problem.

01:05:13.520 | - Well, that's also, I like the UBI for kids.

01:05:16.800 | It's also your definition or the line,

01:05:20.300 | the threshold for what is vulnerable

01:05:21.960 | and what is basic human nature.

01:05:24.760 | Going back to Russia, life is suffering.

01:05:27.000 | Struggle is a part of life.

01:05:31.200 | And perhaps sort of changing,

01:05:33.680 | maybe what defines the 21st century

01:05:36.440 | is having multiple careers

01:05:38.080 | and adjusting and learning and evolving.

01:05:41.120 | And some of the technology in terms of,

01:05:45.420 | some of the technology we see, like the internet,

01:05:50.560 | allows us to make those pivots easier.

01:05:55.560 | Allows later life education possible.

01:05:59.080 | It makes it possible.

01:06:00.680 | I don't know.

01:06:01.520 | - And your earlier point about loneliness

01:06:03.080 | being this fundamental human problem,

01:06:04.680 | which I would agree with strongly,

01:06:07.200 | UBI, if it's at a high level, will make that worse.

01:06:10.240 | I mean, say UBI were high enough,

01:06:11.680 | you could just sit at home.

01:06:13.040 | People are not gonna be happy.

01:06:16.440 | They don't actually want that.

01:06:18.280 | And we've relearned that in the pandemic.

01:06:20.320 | - Yeah, the flip side, the hope with UBI

01:06:24.080 | is you have a little bit more freedom

01:06:26.320 | to find the thing that alleviates your loneliness.

01:06:29.260 | That's the idea.

01:06:30.740 | So it's kind of an open question.

01:06:33.320 | If I give you a million dollars or a billion dollars,

01:06:38.240 | will you pursue the thing you love?

01:06:41.640 | Will you be more motivated to find the thing you love,

01:06:45.800 | to do the thing you love?

01:06:46.680 | Or will you be lazy and lose yourself

01:06:50.180 | in the sort of daily activities

01:06:52.400 | that don't actually bring you joy,

01:06:54.900 | but pacify you in some kind of way

01:06:57.760 | where you just let the day slip by?

01:07:01.040 | That's the open question.

01:07:02.760 | - But a lot of the great creators did not have huge cushions,

01:07:05.640 | whether it's Mozart or James Brown

01:07:07.600 | or the great painters in history.

01:07:10.320 | They had to work pretty hard.

01:07:12.400 | And if you look at heirs to great fortunes,

01:07:15.320 | maybe I'm forgetting someone,

01:07:16.840 | but it's hard to think of any

01:07:18.640 | who have creatively been important as novelists.

01:07:22.000 | They might have continued to run the family business,

01:07:25.980 | but Van Gogh was not heir to a great family fortune.

01:07:30.760 | - It's sad that cushions get in the way of progress.

01:07:34.640 | It's just, yeah.

01:07:36.800 | - So it's the same point about prizes, right?

01:07:38.920 | - Yeah.

01:07:39.760 | - Inheriting too much money is like winning a prize.

01:07:42.360 | - We mentioned Eric, Eric Weinstein.

01:07:45.800 | I know you agree on a bunch of things.

01:07:47.160 | Is there some beautiful, fascinating,

01:07:49.260 | insightful disagreement that you have

01:07:51.680 | that has yet to be resolved with him?

01:07:54.120 | Is there some ideas that you guys battle it out on?

01:07:58.120 | Is it the stagnation question that you mentioned?

01:08:00.560 | - That's one of them, but here's at least two others.

01:08:03.800 | (laughing)

01:08:05.200 | But I would stress Eric is always evolving.

01:08:08.040 | So I'm just talking about a time slice, Eric, right?

01:08:10.720 | I don't know where he's at right now.

01:08:13.000 | Like I heard him on Clubhouse three nights ago,

01:08:15.040 | but that was three nights ago.

01:08:16.620 | But I think he's far too pessimistic

01:08:20.080 | about the impact of immigration on US science.

01:08:23.520 | He thinks it has displaced US scientists,

01:08:26.640 | which I think that is partly true.

01:08:28.720 | I just think we've gotten better talent.

01:08:30.360 | I'm like, bring it on, double down.

01:08:33.200 | And look at Currico, who basically came up

01:08:35.860 | with mRNA vaccines.

01:08:37.040 | She was from Hungary and was ridiculed and mocked.

01:08:41.180 | She couldn't get her papers published.

01:08:42.800 | She stuck at it.

01:08:43.860 | An American might not have been so stubborn

01:08:47.960 | 'cause we have these cushions.

01:08:49.800 | So Eric is all worried, like mathematicians coming in,

01:08:52.880 | they're discouraging native US citizens from doing math.

01:08:57.000 | I'm like, bring in the best people.

01:08:59.520 | If we all end up in other avocations,

01:09:02.760 | absolutely fine by me.

01:09:04.120 | - Does it trouble you that we kick them out

01:09:06.840 | after they get a degree often?

01:09:08.680 | - I would give anyone with a plausible graduate degree

01:09:11.440 | a green card, universally.

01:09:13.440 | - Yeah, I agree with that.

01:09:15.960 | It makes no sense.

01:09:17.120 | It makes so strange that the best people that come here

01:09:19.920 | suffer here, create awesome stuff here,

01:09:22.640 | then when we kick them out, it doesn't make any sense.

01:09:24.440 | - Here's another view I have.

01:09:25.560 | I call it open borders for Belarus.

01:09:27.720 | Now, Russia's a big country.

01:09:30.340 | I would gladly increase the Russian quota

01:09:33.440 | by three X, four X, five X.

01:09:36.480 | Not 20%, but a big boost.

01:09:39.360 | But Belarus, small country, why can't?

01:09:43.120 | And they're poor, and they have decent education,

01:09:46.580 | and a lot of talent there.

01:09:47.800 | Why can't we just open the door

01:09:50.120 | and convert a Belarus passport to a green card?

01:09:53.520 | Open borders for Belarus, it's my new campaign slogan.

01:09:56.640 | - Are you running for president in 2024?

01:09:58.720 | - Well, write-ins are welcome.

01:10:00.400 | - Okay. (laughs)

01:10:02.000 | What's the second thing you disagree with, Eric?

01:10:04.440 | - Trade.

01:10:07.360 | Again, I'm not sure where he's at now,

01:10:10.240 | but he is suspicious of trade in a way that I am not.

01:10:14.840 | I do understand what's called the China shock

01:10:17.320 | has been a big problem for the US middle class.

01:10:19.880 | I fully accept that.

01:10:21.400 | I think most of that is behind us.

01:10:24.040 | National security issues aside,

01:10:25.960 | I think free trade is very much a good thing.

01:10:29.200 | Eric, I'm not sure he'll say it's not a good thing,

01:10:33.060 | but he won't say it is a good thing.

01:10:34.840 | And I know he's kind of, "Eh."

01:10:36.680 | It's like, "Eric, free trade."

01:10:38.280 | But look, on things like vaccines,

01:10:40.920 | I don't believe in free trade.

01:10:42.880 | You want vaccine production in your own country,

01:10:45.540 | look at the EU.

01:10:46.960 | They have enough money, no one will send them vaccines.

01:10:50.160 | - What's different about vaccines?

01:10:52.600 | There's some things you want to prioritize

01:10:54.520 | the citizenry on.

01:10:56.400 | - You could argue it would be cheaper

01:10:58.080 | to produce all US manufactured vaccines in India.

01:11:02.000 | They have the technologies, obviously lower wages.

01:11:05.920 | But look, there's talk in India right now

01:11:07.560 | of cutting off the export of vaccines.

01:11:09.840 | If you outsource your vaccine production,

01:11:11.980 | you're not sure the other country

01:11:13.360 | will respect the norm of free trade.

01:11:15.820 | So you need to keep some vaccine production in your country.

01:11:20.120 | It's an exception to free trade, not to the logic.

01:11:23.620 | A bunch of things the Navy uses,

01:11:26.460 | you can't buy those components from China.

01:11:28.540 | That's insane.

01:11:29.380 | But look, it would be cheaper to do so, right?

01:11:34.140 | - Yeah.

01:11:35.340 | Let me completely shift topics

01:11:37.380 | on something that's fascinating.

01:11:38.700 | - It's all the same topic, but great.

01:11:40.940 | - Everything is interesting.

01:11:42.880 | What do you think about, what the hell is money?

01:11:48.820 | And the recent excitement around cryptocurrency

01:11:53.820 | that brings to the forefront

01:12:01.100 | the philosophical discussion of the nature of money.

01:12:04.860 | Are you bullish on cryptocurrency?

01:12:06.820 | Are you excited about it?

01:12:07.900 | What does it make you think about

01:12:09.580 | how the nature of money is changing?

01:12:11.860 | - No one knows what money is.

01:12:13.740 | Probably no one ever knew.

01:12:15.540 | Go back to medieval times, bills of exchange.

01:12:17.900 | Were they money?

01:12:19.460 | Maybe it's just a semantic debate.

01:12:21.500 | Gold, silver, what about copper coins?

01:12:23.360 | What about metals that were considered legal tender

01:12:26.380 | but not always circulating?

01:12:28.300 | What about credit?

01:12:29.700 | So being confused about moneyness

01:12:32.480 | is the natural state of affairs for human beings.

01:12:35.240 | And if there's more of that,

01:12:36.260 | I'd say that's probably a good thing.

01:12:38.860 | Now crypto per se, I think Bitcoin has taken over

01:12:42.900 | a lot of the space held by gold.

01:12:45.580 | That to me seems sustainable.

01:12:48.180 | I'm not short Bitcoin.

01:12:50.380 | I don't have some view that the price

01:12:53.460 | has to be different than the current price,

01:12:55.100 | but I know it changes every moment.

01:12:56.860 | I am deeply uncertain about the less of crypto,

01:13:01.180 | which seems connected to ultimate visions

01:13:04.500 | of using it for transactions in ways where I'm not sure

01:13:09.340 | whether it be prediction markets or DeFi.

01:13:13.340 | I'm not sure the retail demand really is there

01:13:16.220 | once it is regulated like everything else is.

01:13:18.520 | I would say I'm 40/60 optimistic on those forms of crypto.

01:13:24.340 | That is, I think it's somewhat more likely

01:13:26.020 | they fail than succeed, but I take them very seriously.

01:13:29.140 | - So we're talking about it becoming

01:13:31.140 | one of the main currencies in the world.

01:13:32.940 | That's what we're discussing.

01:13:33.980 | - That I don't think will happen.

01:13:35.580 | - But the reality is that Bitcoin used to be

01:13:40.420 | in the single digits of a dollar

01:13:42.300 | and now has crossed $50,000 for a single Bitcoin.

01:13:46.740 | Do you think it's possible it reaches

01:13:48.620 | something like a million dollars?

01:13:50.260 | - I don't think we have a good theory

01:13:52.780 | of the value of Bitcoin.

01:13:54.260 | If people decide it's worth a million dollars,

01:13:56.140 | it's worth a million dollars.

01:13:57.740 | - But isn't that money?

01:13:58.580 | Like you said, isn't the ultimate state of money confusion,

01:14:01.660 | however beautifully you put it?

01:14:03.180 | - It's like valuing an Andy Warhol painting.

01:14:05.040 | So when Warhol started off,

01:14:06.940 | probably those things had no value,

01:14:08.900 | sketches, early sketches of shoes.

01:14:11.540 | Now a good Warhol could be worth over 50 million.

01:14:14.980 | That's an incredible rate of price appreciation.

01:14:17.620 | Bitcoin is seeing a similar trajectory.

01:14:20.700 | I don't pretend to know where it will stop,

01:14:22.960 | but it's about trying to figure out,

01:14:25.260 | well, what do people think of Andy Warhol?

01:14:26.780 | He could be out of fashion in a century.

01:14:29.780 | Maybe yes, maybe no.

01:14:31.260 | But you don't think about Warhols as money.

01:14:35.320 | They perform some money-like functions.

01:14:38.660 | You can even use them as collateral

01:14:40.580 | for like deals between gangs.

01:14:42.380 | But they're not basically money, nor is Bitcoin.

01:14:46.860 | And the transactions velocity of Bitcoin,

01:14:48.900 | I would think is likely to fall, if anything.

01:14:51.300 | - So you don't think there'll be some kind of phase shift?

01:14:53.260 | Will it become adopted, become mainstream

01:14:55.420 | for one of the main mechanisms of transactions?

01:15:00.180 | - Bitcoin, no.

01:15:01.000 | Now, Ether has some chance at that.

01:15:03.340 | I would bet against it,

01:15:04.780 | but I wouldn't give you a definitive no.

01:15:06.820 | - And you wouldn't put it in Sierra?

01:15:07.660 | - Bitcoin is too costly.

01:15:10.100 | It may be fine to hold it like gold,

01:15:12.340 | but gold is also costly.

01:15:13.840 | You have smart people trying to make, say, Ether

01:15:18.300 | much more effective as a currency than Bitcoin,

01:15:21.540 | and there's certainly a decent chance they will succeed.

01:15:25.540 | - Yeah, there's a lot of innovation.

01:15:26.660 | I mean, with smart contracts, with NFTs as well,

01:15:30.060 | there's a lot of interesting innovations

01:15:33.380 | that are plugging into the human psyche somehow,

01:15:36.060 | just like money does.

01:15:38.260 | Money seems to be this viral thing, our ideas of money,

01:15:43.060 | and if the idea is strong enough,

01:15:45.340 | it seems to be able to take hold.

01:15:47.700 | Like there's network effects that just take over.

01:15:50.860 | And I particularly see that with,

01:15:54.020 | I'd love to get your comment on Dogecoin,

01:15:57.380 | which is basically by a single human being,

01:15:59.740 | Elon Musk has been created.

01:16:01.860 | It's like these celebrities can have a huge ripple effect

01:16:05.620 | on the impact of money.

01:16:07.140 | Is it possible that in the 21st century,

01:16:11.580 | people like Elon Musk and celebrities,

01:16:13.820 | I don't know, Donald Trump, The Rock, whoever else,

01:16:17.580 | can actually define the currencies that we use?

01:16:22.340 | Maybe, can Dogecoin become

01:16:24.460 | the primary currency of the world?

01:16:26.160 | - I think of it as like baseball cards.

01:16:29.260 | So right now, every baseball player has a baseball card.

01:16:32.820 | And the players who are stars,

01:16:34.120 | their cards can end up worth a fair amount of money.

01:16:36.700 | - Yeah.

01:16:37.540 | - And that's stable, we've had it for many decades.

01:16:39.940 | Sort of the player defines the card,

01:16:42.860 | they sign a contract with Topps or whatever company.

01:16:46.180 | Now, could you imagine celebrities, baseball players,

01:16:49.060 | LeBron James, having their own currencies

01:16:51.440 | instead of cards?

01:16:53.000 | Absolutely, and you're somewhat seeing that right now,

01:16:55.960 | as you mentioned, artists with these unique works

01:16:58.320 | on the blockchain.

01:16:59.340 | But I'm not sure those are macroeconomically important.

01:17:03.340 | If it's just a new class of collectibles

01:17:05.180 | that people have fun with, again, I say bring it on.

01:17:08.340 | But whether there are use cases beyond that,

01:17:12.100 | that challenge fiat monies, which actually work very well.

01:17:16.300 | Yesterday, I sent money to a family in Ethiopia

01:17:20.300 | that I helped support.

01:17:22.060 | In less than 24 hours, they got that money.

01:17:24.980 | - Digitally, yes.

01:17:27.300 | - No, not digitally, through my bank,

01:17:29.420 | my primitive dinosaur bank, BB&T, Mid-Atlantic Bank,

01:17:33.220 | headquartered in North Carolina,

01:17:35.380 | charted by the Fed, regulated by the FDAC and the OCC.

01:17:39.260 | Now, you could say, well, the exchange rate

01:17:41.420 | was not so great.

01:17:42.620 | I don't see crypto as close to beating that

01:17:47.420 | once you take into account all of the last mile problems.

01:17:50.380 | Fiat currency works really well.

01:17:53.460 | People are not sitting around bitching about it.

01:17:55.620 | And when you talk to crypto people,

01:17:57.060 | the number who have to postulate

01:17:58.460 | some out of the blue hyperinflation,

01:18:00.700 | where there's no evidence for that whatsoever,

01:18:03.300 | that, to me, is a sign they're not thinking clearly

01:18:06.060 | about how hard they have to work

01:18:07.620 | to out-compete fiat currency.

01:18:09.220 | - There's a bunch of different technologies

01:18:11.860 | that are really exciting that don't want to address

01:18:15.860 | how difficult it is to out-compete

01:18:17.780 | the current accepted alternative.

01:18:19.220 | So, for example, autonomous vehicles.

01:18:21.780 | A lot of people are really excited.

01:18:24.100 | But it's not trivial to out-compete Uber

01:18:28.100 | on the cost and the effectiveness

01:18:30.860 | and the user experience and all those kinds of--

01:18:32.860 | - Correct. - Sorry, Uber driven

01:18:34.260 | by humans. - Yes.

01:18:36.060 | - And it's not, that's taken for granted, I think.

01:18:40.260 | That, look, wouldn't it be amazing,

01:18:41.980 | how amazing would the world look

01:18:43.260 | when the cars are driving themselves fully?

01:18:45.860 | It's going to drive the cost down.

01:18:47.220 | You can remove the cost of drivers,

01:18:48.620 | all those kinds of things.

01:18:50.180 | But when you actually get down to it

01:18:52.180 | and have to build a business around it,

01:18:53.620 | it's actually very difficult to do.

01:18:55.500 | And I guess you're saying your sense

01:18:56.860 | is similar competition is facing cryptocurrency.

01:19:00.340 | Like you have to actually present a killer app reason

01:19:05.340 | to switch from fiat currency to Ethereum or to whatever.

01:19:11.780 | - And the Biden people are going to regulate crypto.

01:19:15.540 | And they're going to do it soon.

01:19:17.020 | So something like DeFi, I fully get why that is cheaper,

01:19:20.740 | or for some, can be cheaper than other ways

01:19:23.340 | of conducting financial intermediation.

01:19:25.660 | But some of that is regulatory arbitrage.

01:19:28.540 | It will not be allowed to go on forever,

01:19:30.780 | for better or worse.

01:19:32.340 | I would rather see it given greater tolerance.

01:19:35.180 | But the point is, banking lobby is strong.

01:19:37.580 | The government will only let it run so far.

01:19:40.020 | There'll be capital requirements,

01:19:41.420 | reporting requirements imposed,

01:19:43.460 | and it will lose a lot of those advantages.

01:19:45.620 | - What do you make of Wall Street bets?

01:19:48.860 | Another thing that recently happened that shook the world,

01:19:53.220 | and at least me from the outsider perspective,

01:19:56.900 | make me question what I do and don't understand

01:19:59.380 | about our economic system,

01:20:01.380 | which is a bunch of different,

01:20:03.540 | a large number of individuals getting together

01:20:05.740 | on the internet and having a large-scale impact

01:20:08.620 | on the markets.

01:20:10.300 | - If you tell a group of people

01:20:11.780 | and coordinate them through the internet,

01:20:13.460 | we're going to play a fun game, it might cost you money,

01:20:16.100 | but you're going to make the headlines,

01:20:17.500 | and there's a chance you'll screw over

01:20:18.860 | some billionaires and hedge funds.

01:20:20.860 | Enough people will play that game.

01:20:22.540 | - Yes.

01:20:23.380 | - So that game might continue,

01:20:24.260 | but I don't think it's of macroeconomic importance.

01:20:26.860 | And the price of those stocks in the medium term

01:20:30.660 | will end up wherever it ought to be.

01:20:32.980 | - So these are little outliers

01:20:34.980 | from a macroeconomics perspective.

01:20:36.780 | They're not going to,

01:20:38.300 | these are not signals of a shifting power,

01:20:43.620 | like from centralized power to distributed power.

01:20:46.300 | These aren't some fundamental changes

01:20:48.700 | in the way our economy works.

01:20:50.260 | - I think of it as a new brand of esports,

01:20:52.500 | maybe more fun than the old brand,

01:20:54.220 | which is fine, right?

01:20:56.340 | It's like, push the anarchy into the corners

01:20:58.540 | where you want it.

01:20:59.660 | It doesn't bother me,

01:21:02.900 | but I think people are seeing it

01:21:04.100 | as more fundamental than it is.

01:21:05.260 | It's a new esport, more fun for many,

01:21:07.620 | but more expensive than the old esports.

01:21:09.940 | Like chess is a new esport, super cheap,

01:21:13.660 | not as fun as like, you know,

01:21:15.500 | sending hedge funds to their doom,

01:21:16.900 | but like, what would you expect?

01:21:19.900 | The poetry of that, I love it.

01:21:21.220 | Okay, but macroeconomically, it's not fundamental.

01:21:24.900 | Okay, I was going to say, I hope you're right,

01:21:27.380 | 'cause I'm uncomfortable with the chaos

01:21:29.820 | of the masses that's creates, but I also--

01:21:33.740 | - I think that chaos is somewhat real, to be clear.

01:21:36.220 | - Yes.

01:21:37.060 | - But it will matter through other channels,

01:21:40.620 | not through manipulating, you know, GameStop or AMC.

01:21:45.620 | So you're seeing the real macro phenomenon.

01:21:48.540 | When people see a real macro phenomenon,

01:21:50.740 | they tend to make every micro story fit the narrative.

01:21:54.020 | And this micro story, like it fits the narrative,

01:21:56.220 | but it doesn't mean its importance fits the narrative.

01:21:58.980 | That's how I would kind of dissect the mistake

01:22:01.780 | I think people are making.

01:22:03.080 | - Do you, within the macro phenomenon,

01:22:06.140 | there are there, do you mean--

01:22:07.820 | - Everyone's weird now.

01:22:09.140 | The internet either allows us to be weirder

01:22:12.100 | or makes us weirder.

01:22:12.980 | I'm not sure what's the right way to put it.

01:22:14.540 | Maybe a mix of both.

01:22:16.420 | - You're probably right that it allows us to be weirder

01:22:18.780 | because, well, this is the other, okay.

01:22:21.340 | So this connects our previous conversation.

01:22:23.980 | Does America allow us to be weirder

01:22:26.660 | or does it make us weirder?

01:22:29.220 | - Like say we're weird and somewhat neurotic to begin with,

01:22:32.300 | but the only messages we get are Dwight D. Eisenhower

01:22:34.940 | and I Love Lucy and Network TV.

01:22:37.580 | Like that's gonna keep us within certain bounds

01:22:40.060 | in good and bad ways.

01:22:41.660 | That's obviously totally gone.

01:22:43.860 | And the internet you can connect to not just QAnon,

01:22:47.020 | but all sorts of things.

01:22:47.980 | Many of them just fantastic, right?

01:22:49.740 | But in good and bad ways, it makes us weirder.

01:22:54.260 | So that maybe is troubling, right?

01:22:56.700 | Like if someone's worried about that,

01:22:58.020 | I would at least say they should give it

01:22:59.860 | deep serious thought.

01:23:01.500 | And then it has a whole lot of ebbs and flows,

01:23:04.620 | micro realizations of the weirdness

01:23:07.580 | that don't actually matter.

01:23:09.580 | So like chess players today,

01:23:10.940 | they play a lot more weird openings

01:23:12.580 | than they did 20 years ago.

01:23:14.580 | Like it reflects the same thing

01:23:16.740 | 'cause you can research any weird opening on the internet,

01:23:19.140 | but like, does that matter?

01:23:21.100 | Probably not.

01:23:22.460 | So a lot of the things we see

01:23:23.780 | are just like the weird chess openings.

01:23:26.020 | And to figure out which are like the weird chess openings

01:23:28.340 | and which are fundamental to the new and growing weirdness.

01:23:31.540 | Like that's what a hedge fund investor type

01:23:33.500 | should be trying to do.

01:23:35.020 | I just think no one knows yet.

01:23:36.900 | It's like this itself, this fun, weird guessing game,

01:23:40.020 | which we're partly engaging in right now.

01:23:41.940 | - Well, exactly.

01:23:43.260 | And I mean, as Eric talks about

01:23:45.220 | on the science side of things,

01:23:47.980 | I mean, I said like at MIT,

01:23:50.100 | especially in the machine learning field,

01:23:52.460 | there's a natural institutional resistance to the weird.

01:23:56.180 | It's very, as they talk about,

01:23:58.220 | it's difficult to hire weird faculty, for example.

01:24:00.980 | - Correct.

01:24:01.820 | - You want to hire and give tenure to people that are safe,

01:24:05.860 | not weird.

01:24:07.660 | And that's one of the concerns is like,

01:24:09.740 | it seems like the weird people

01:24:11.020 | are the ones that push the science forward usually.

01:24:13.100 | - Right.

01:24:14.100 | - And so like, how do you balance the two?

01:24:16.620 | It's not obvious.

01:24:17.860 | - It's another area where Eric and I disagree.

01:24:20.540 | As I interpret him, he thinks academia is totally bankrupt.

01:24:24.460 | And I think it's only partially bankrupt.

01:24:26.500 | - How do we fix it?

01:24:28.740 | 'Cause I'm with you.

01:24:29.740 | I'm bullish on academia.

01:24:32.020 | - You need up and coming schools

01:24:34.220 | that end up better than where they started off.

01:24:36.340 | And MIT was once one of them.

01:24:38.780 | Now they're not in every area.

01:24:40.540 | In some areas, they have become the problem.

01:24:43.180 | UChicago, you wouldn't call it up and coming,

01:24:45.300 | but it's still different.

01:24:46.380 | And that's great.

01:24:47.220 | Let's hope they manage to keep it that way.

01:24:49.900 | The biggest problem to me is the rank, absurd conformism

01:24:55.340 | at kind of second tier schools,

01:24:57.140 | maybe in the top 40, but not in the top dozen,

01:24:59.980 | that are just trying to be like a junior MIT,

01:25:02.700 | but it's mediocre and copycat.

01:25:04.900 | And they're the most dogmatic enforcers of weirdness

01:25:07.420 | that like Harvard is more open

01:25:09.660 | than those second tier schools.

01:25:11.420 | And those second tier schools

01:25:12.660 | are pretty good typically, right?

01:25:14.900 | - But the mediocrity is enforced there.

01:25:17.420 | - Correct, very strictly.

01:25:19.540 | And the homogenization pressures.

01:25:21.300 | Climb the rankings by another three places

01:25:24.540 | and be a little closer to MIT,

01:25:25.940 | though you'll never touch them.

01:25:27.340 | That to me is very harmful.

01:25:28.820 | And you'd rather they be more like Chicago,

01:25:30.980 | more like Caltech, or the older Caltech all the more.

01:25:33.980 | Like pick some model, be weird in it.

01:25:37.420 | You might fail, that's socially better.

01:25:40.640 | - Yeah, but so the problem with MIT, for example,

01:25:43.700 | is the mediocrity is really enforced on the junior faculty.

01:25:48.700 | So like the people that are allowed to be weird,

01:25:52.660 | or actually they just don't even ask for permissions anymore

01:25:54.940 | are more senior faculty.

01:25:56.380 | And that's good, of course,

01:25:57.820 | but you want the weird young people.

01:26:00.360 | I find this podcast, I like talking to tech people,

01:26:06.220 | and I find the young faculty to be really boring.

01:26:08.740 | - They are, they're the most boring of faculty.

01:26:11.140 | - Their work is interesting technically, technically,

01:26:15.020 | but just the passion.

01:26:18.100 | - They are drudges.

01:26:19.100 | - And some of them sneak by.

01:26:23.420 | Like you have like the Max Stegmark,

01:26:24.980 | young version of Max Stegmark,

01:26:26.420 | who knows how to play the role of boring and fitting in.

01:26:31.420 | And then on the side, he does the weird shit.

01:26:35.380 | But they're not, they're far and few in between,

01:26:37.380 | which I'd love to figure out a way to shake up that system

01:26:41.460 | because--

01:26:42.300 | - You look at MIT's Broad Institute, right,

01:26:45.140 | in biomedical, it's been a huge hit.

01:26:47.300 | I'm not privy to their internal doings,

01:26:49.420 | but I suspect they support weird

01:26:52.460 | more than the formal departments do at the junior level.

01:26:55.340 | - Yes, that's probably true.

01:26:56.500 | Yeah, I don't know what,

01:26:57.800 | whatever they're doing is working,

01:26:59.640 | but we need to figure it out,

01:27:03.580 | 'cause I think the best ideas still do come from the,

01:27:06.700 | so forget my apologies,

01:27:10.140 | but for the humanities side of things,

01:27:11.660 | I don't know anything about,

01:27:12.820 | but the engineering and the science side,

01:27:15.660 | I think there's so many amazing ideas

01:27:17.740 | that are still coming from universities.

01:27:19.780 | - It's not true that you don't know anything

01:27:21.220 | about the humanities.

01:27:22.060 | You're doing the humanities right now.

01:27:24.260 | We're talking about people.

01:27:25.720 | There are no numbers put on a blackboard, right?

01:27:28.300 | There's no hypothesis testing per se.

01:27:30.220 | - No, yeah, that's not--

01:27:31.060 | - You have however many subscribers to your podcast

01:27:34.580 | all listening to you on the humanities.

01:27:37.060 | Every, whatever your frequency is--

01:27:38.820 | - But I'm not in the department of the humanities.

01:27:40.940 | - That's why it's innovative.

01:27:42.420 | - They have very different conversations.

01:27:44.900 | There's the number of emails I get about,

01:27:48.180 | listen, I really deeply respect diversity

01:27:51.900 | and the full scope of what diversity means,

01:27:56.260 | and also the more narrow scope

01:27:57.540 | of different races and genders and so on.

01:27:59.420 | It's a really important topic,

01:28:01.060 | but there's a disproportionate number of emails I'm getting

01:28:03.820 | about meetings and discussions,

01:28:06.020 | and that just kind of is overwhelming.

01:28:08.540 | I don't get enough emails from people,

01:28:10.880 | like a meeting about why are all your ideas bad?

01:28:15.880 | Let's, for example, let me call out MIT.

01:28:18.860 | Why don't we do more?

01:28:20.400 | Why don't we kick Stanford's ass or Google's ass,

01:28:24.320 | more importantly, in deep learning and machine learning

01:28:26.660 | and AI research?

01:28:28.280 | What CSAIL, for example, used to be a laboratory

01:28:31.620 | is a laboratory for artificial intelligence research,

01:28:35.140 | and why is that not the beacon

01:28:38.860 | of greatness in artificial intelligence?

01:28:43.800 | Let's have those meetings as well.

01:28:45.780 | - Diversity talk has oddly become this new mechanism

01:28:48.940 | for enforcing conformity.

01:28:50.500 | - Yes, exactly, and right.

01:28:52.340 | So it's almost like this conformity mechanism

01:28:54.340 | finds the hot new topic to use

01:28:56.860 | to enforce further conformity.

01:28:58.220 | - Exactly.

01:28:59.720 | - Oh boy, I still have hope.

01:29:01.800 | I remain optimistic.

01:29:03.280 | - But the humanities have innovated through podcasts,

01:29:05.640 | including yours and mine, and they're alive and well.

01:29:08.700 | All the bad talk you hear about the humanities

01:29:12.560 | in universities, there's been this huge end run

01:29:15.160 | of innovation on the internet, and it's amazing.

01:29:17.680 | - You're right.

01:29:18.520 | I never thought of, I mean, this is humanities.

01:29:20.820 | (both laughing)

01:29:22.560 | This podcast, right?

01:29:23.400 | - It's like you've been speaking prose all one's life

01:29:25.120 | and didn't know it, right?

01:29:28.160 | - Yeah, I am actually part of the humanities department

01:29:31.040 | at MIT now.

01:29:31.880 | I did not realize this, and I will fully embrace it

01:29:35.040 | from this moment on.

01:29:36.120 | - Look, you have this thing, the Media Lab.

01:29:37.600 | I'm sure you know about it.

01:29:39.080 | Done some excellent things, done a lot of very bogus things,

01:29:42.440 | but you're out-competing them.

01:29:43.720 | You're blowing them out of the water.

01:29:45.000 | - Yeah.

01:29:45.840 | - Like you are them.

01:29:46.920 | - Yeah, and I'm talking to those folks,

01:29:48.520 | and they're trying to figure it out.

01:29:51.520 | I mean, they had their issues with Jeffrey Epstein

01:29:53.280 | and so on, but outside of that,

01:29:57.000 | there's a, I've actually gone through a shift

01:30:00.000 | with this particular podcast, for example,

01:30:02.260 | where at first, it was seen as a,

01:30:06.320 | one, at the very first, it was seen as a distraction.

01:30:09.600 | Second, it was a source of almost a kind of jealousy,

01:30:13.740 | like the same kind of jealousy you feel

01:30:15.320 | when junior faculty outshines the senior faculty.

01:30:18.120 | - Of course.

01:30:19.000 | - And now it's more like, oh, okay, this is a thing.

01:30:21.720 | We should do more of that.

01:30:23.840 | We should embrace this guy.

01:30:25.240 | We should embrace this thing.

01:30:26.920 | So there's a sense that podcasting,

01:30:29.560 | and whatever this is, it doesn't have to be podcasting,

01:30:32.800 | will drive some innovation within MIT,

01:30:35.480 | within different universities.

01:30:37.600 | There's a sense that things are changing.

01:30:39.200 | It's just that universities lag behind,

01:30:41.840 | and my hope is that they catch up quickly.

01:30:45.800 | They innovate in some way that goes along

01:30:49.560 | with the innovations of the internet.

01:30:51.880 | - I think the internet will outrace them

01:30:53.460 | for a long time, maybe forever.

01:30:55.760 | - Well, I mean, but it's okay if they're,

01:30:57.680 | as long as they're keeping--

01:30:58.640 | - Yeah, and we're both in universities,

01:31:00.200 | so we have multiple hats on here as we're speaking.

01:31:02.720 | So we can complain about the universities,

01:31:05.800 | but that's like complaining about the podcasters, right?

01:31:08.440 | - Yeah.

01:31:09.280 | - We be them.

01:31:10.100 | - But speaking on the weird, you've,

01:31:12.960 | in the best sense of the word, weird,

01:31:16.400 | you've written about and made the case

01:31:18.520 | that we should take UFO sightings more seriously.

01:31:22.280 | - So that's one of the things that I've been inundated with,

01:31:27.280 | sort of the excitement and the passion

01:31:34.300 | that people have for the possibility

01:31:37.740 | of extraterrestrial life, of life out there in the universe.

01:31:40.740 | I've always felt this excitement.

01:31:42.460 | I was just looking up at the stars

01:31:43.740 | and wondering what the hell's out there.

01:31:46.140 | But there's people that have more like,

01:31:48.820 | more grounded excitement and passion

01:31:52.160 | of actually interacting with aliens on this,

01:31:56.000 | here, our planet.

01:31:57.880 | What's the case, from your perspective,

01:32:01.240 | for taking these sightings more seriously?

01:32:05.020 | - The data from the Navy, to me, seem quite serious.

01:32:11.920 | I don't pretend that I have the technical abilities

01:32:14.460 | to judge it as data,

01:32:16.820 | but there are numerous senators at the very highest of levels

01:32:21.120 | former heads of CIA, Brennan, I talked to him,

01:32:24.080 | did an interview with him.

01:32:25.440 | I asked him, "What's up with these?

01:32:27.480 | "What do you think it is?"

01:32:28.440 | He basically said that was the single most likely explanation

01:32:31.680 | was of alien origin.

01:32:32.880 | Now, you don't have to agree with him,

01:32:35.440 | but look, if you know how government works,

01:32:37.280 | these senators, or Hillary Clinton for that matter,

01:32:39.740 | or Brennan, they sat down,

01:32:41.640 | they were briefed by their smartest people,

01:32:43.480 | and they said, "Hey, what's going on here?

01:32:46.880 | "And everyone around the table, I believe,

01:32:48.600 | "is telling them, 'We don't know.'"

01:32:51.260 | And that is sociological data I take very seriously.

01:32:55.800 | I have not seen a debunking of the technical data,

01:32:59.660 | which is eyewitness reports, and images, and radar.

01:33:02.260 | Again, at a technical level,

01:33:03.880 | I feel quite uncertain on that turf.

01:33:06.680 | But evaluating the testimony of witnesses,

01:33:10.040 | it seems to me it's now at a threshold

01:33:12.660 | where one ought to take it seriously.

01:33:15.140 | - Yeah, there's one of the problems with UFO sightings

01:33:18.520 | is that because of people with good equipment,

01:33:21.100 | don't take it seriously.

01:33:23.200 | It's such a taboo topic that you have

01:33:26.640 | just really shitty equipment collecting data.

01:33:28.940 | And so you have the blurry Bigfoot kind of situation

01:33:32.520 | where you have just bad video,

01:33:33.960 | and all those kinds of things,

01:33:35.720 | as opposed to, I mean, there's a bunch of people,

01:33:40.200 | Avi Loeb from Harvard talking about Amua Amua,

01:33:44.840 | it's just like people with the equipment

01:33:49.640 | to do the data collection don't want to help out.

01:33:54.200 | And that creates a kind of divide

01:33:57.800 | where the scientists ignore that this is happening,

01:34:00.720 | and there's the masses of people who are curious about it.

01:34:04.080 | And then there's the government that's full of secrets

01:34:06.980 | that's leaking some confusion,

01:34:10.720 | and it creates distrust in the government,

01:34:12.800 | it creates distrust in science,

01:34:15.240 | and it prevents the scientists

01:34:16.960 | from being able to explore some cool topics,

01:34:19.800 | some exciting possibilities that they should be,

01:34:22.760 | be curious kids like Avi talks about.

01:34:25.300 | - Even if it has nothing to do with aliens,

01:34:28.520 | whatever the answer is,

01:34:29.560 | it has to be something fascinating.

01:34:31.200 | We already know everything's interesting,

01:34:32.600 | but this is fascinating.

01:34:33.840 | But look, that all said,

01:34:37.000 | I suspect they're not of alien origin,

01:34:39.080 | and let me tell you my reason.

01:34:40.360 | The people who are all gung-ho,

01:34:43.200 | they do a kind of reasoning in reverse,

01:34:45.200 | or argument from elimination.

01:34:46.760 | They figure out a bunch of things that can't be,

01:34:49.900 | like is it a Russian advanced vehicle?

01:34:52.340 | No, probably pretty good arguments there.

01:34:54.560 | Is it a Chinese advanced vehicle?

01:34:56.320 | No.

01:34:57.280 | Is it people from the Earth's future coming back in time?

01:35:01.480 | No.

01:35:02.320 | And they go through a few others,

01:35:03.600 | they have some really good no arguments,

01:35:05.000 | then they're like, well, what we've got left is aliens.

01:35:07.960 | This argument from elimination,

01:35:09.680 | I don't actually find that persuasive.

01:35:12.480 | You can talk yourself into a lot of mistaken ideas that way.

01:35:16.040 | The positive evidence that it's aliens is still quite weak.

01:35:20.480 | The positive evidence that it's a puzzle is quite huge.

01:35:24.080 | - And whatever the solution to the puzzle is,

01:35:27.200 | it might be fascinating.

01:35:28.520 | - And it's gonna be so weird or fascinating,

01:35:30.580 | or maybe even trivial, but that's weird in its own way,

01:35:33.560 | that we can't set up by elimination

01:35:37.080 | all the things that might be able to be.

01:35:38.720 | - Yeah, and just like you said,

01:35:40.000 | the debunking that I've seen of these kinds of things

01:35:43.840 | are less explorations and solutions to the puzzle

01:35:48.840 | and more a kind of half-hearted dismissal.

01:35:52.840 | - And Avi, as you mentioned to him on your podcast with him,

01:35:56.600 | he's been attacked an awful lot.

01:35:58.800 | And when I hear the idea carrier attacked,

01:36:01.280 | I get very suspicious of the critics.

01:36:03.180 | If he's wrong, just tell me why.

01:36:07.440 | My ears are open.

01:36:08.960 | I don't have a set view on Oumuamua.

01:36:11.320 | You know, I know I can't judge Avi's arguments.

01:36:14.480 | He can't convince me in that sense.

01:36:16.040 | I'm too stupid to understand how good his argument

01:36:19.080 | may or may not be.

01:36:20.760 | - And like you said, ultimately, in the argument,

01:36:24.680 | in the meeting of that debate is where we find the wisdom.

01:36:30.600 | Like dismissing it, that's one of the things

01:36:32.240 | that troubles me.

01:36:33.080 | There's a bunch of people,

01:36:33.900 | like Nietzsche sometimes dismissed this way,

01:36:35.520 | Ayn Rand is sometimes dismissed this way.

01:36:38.120 | Oh, here we go.

01:36:38.960 | Like there's a, as opposed to arguing against her ideas,

01:36:43.120 | dismissing it outright.

01:36:44.920 | And that's not productive at all.

01:36:48.340 | She may be wrong in a lot of things,

01:36:49.800 | but like laying out some arguments,

01:36:52.920 | even if they're basic human arguments,

01:36:54.840 | that's where we arrive at the wisdom.

01:36:58.020 | I love that.

01:36:58.860 | Is there something deeper to be said

01:37:03.340 | about our trust in institutions and governments and so on

01:37:06.800 | that has to do with UFOs?

01:37:09.000 | That there's a kind of suspicion that the US government

01:37:12.680 | and governments in general are hiding stuff from us

01:37:15.680 | when you talk about UFOs.

01:37:17.360 | - This is my view on that.

01:37:19.380 | If we declassified everything,

01:37:21.440 | I think we would find a lot more evidence

01:37:23.360 | all pointing toward the same puzzle.

01:37:25.760 | There aren't some alien men being held underground.

01:37:28.660 | There's not some secret file that lays out

01:37:30.600 | whatever is happening.

01:37:32.720 | I think the real lesson about government

01:37:34.940 | is government cannot bring itself to any new belief

01:37:38.980 | on this matter of any kind.

01:37:41.100 | And it's a kind of funny inertia.

01:37:42.820 | Like government is deeply puzzled.

01:37:44.820 | They're more puzzled than they want to admit to us,

01:37:47.060 | which like, I'm okay with that actually.

01:37:50.260 | They shouldn't just be out panicking people in the streets.

01:37:53.660 | But at the end of the day,

01:37:54.700 | it's a bit like approving the AstraZeneca vaccine.

01:37:57.620 | Like which does work and they haven't approved it.

01:37:59.460 | Like when are they gonna do it?

01:38:00.960 | When is our government actually, if only internally,

01:38:05.960 | gonna take this more than just seriously,

01:38:08.720 | but like take it truly seriously?

01:38:10.880 | And I just don't know if we have that capability

01:38:13.560 | kind of mentally to sound like Eric Weinstein

01:38:16.320 | for another moment.

01:38:17.780 | (laughing)

01:38:19.840 | - To stay on the same topic,

01:38:21.640 | although on the surface shifting completely,

01:38:23.840 | because it is all the same topic,

01:38:27.000 | you have written and studied art.

01:38:30.000 | Why do you think we humans long to create art?

01:38:34.800 | Human society in general and just the human mind?

01:38:38.080 | - Well, most of us don't really long to create art, right?

01:38:41.200 | I would start with that point.

01:38:42.960 | - You think so?

01:38:45.140 | You think that's a unique weirdness

01:38:47.760 | of some particular humans?

01:38:49.960 | - I think, I don't know, 10% of humans roughly,

01:38:52.920 | which is a lot, but it is somewhat weird.

01:38:55.880 | I don't aspire to create art.

01:38:58.880 | You could say, like writing nonfiction,

01:39:01.720 | there's something art-like about it,

01:39:03.520 | but it's a different urge, I would say.

01:39:05.720 | So why do some people have it?

01:39:10.800 | I think human brains are very different.

01:39:13.220 | It's a different notion of working through a problem.

01:39:17.100 | Like you and I enjoy working through analytic problems.

01:39:21.000 | For me, economics, for you, AI and other areas,

01:39:23.440 | or your humanities podcast, but that's fun.

01:39:27.720 | For that problem to be visual

01:39:30.000 | and linked to physical materials

01:39:31.960 | and putting those on a canvas,

01:39:33.900 | to me, it's not a huge leap,

01:39:37.040 | but I really don't wanna do it.

01:39:39.280 | If you paid me like 500 bucks to spend an hour painting,

01:39:45.800 | I don't know, is that worth it?

01:39:48.720 | Maybe, but I'm happy when that hour's over.

01:39:51.920 | - And would not be proud or happy with the result.

01:39:56.080 | - It would suck.

01:39:57.680 | I don't think I would do it, actually.

01:40:00.240 | - Do you think you're suppressing some deep, I mean--

01:40:03.480 | - Absolutely not.

01:40:04.400 | Now, when I was young, I played the guitar,

01:40:07.320 | as you played the guitar, and that I greatly enjoyed,

01:40:09.560 | although I was never good.

01:40:11.560 | But it helped me appreciate music much, much more.

01:40:14.880 | - Well, this is the question, okay.

01:40:15.840 | So from the perspective of the observer

01:40:17.520 | and appreciator of art, you said good.

01:40:20.360 | Is there such a concept as good in art?

01:40:24.000 | - There's clearly a concept of bad.

01:40:26.320 | My guitar playing fit that concept.

01:40:28.480 | - Okay.

01:40:30.440 | - But I wasn't trying to be good.

01:40:31.280 | I wanted to learn, like, how do chords work?

01:40:33.600 | - Okay, analytical.

01:40:34.440 | - How does a jazz improvisation work?

01:40:36.120 | How is blues different?

01:40:37.840 | Classical guitar, sort of physically,

01:40:39.440 | how do you make those sounds?

01:40:41.160 | And I did learn those things,

01:40:42.400 | and you can't learn everything about them,

01:40:44.840 | but you can learn a lot about them without ever being good,

01:40:47.120 | or even trying to be that good.

01:40:48.760 | But I could play all the notes.

01:40:51.080 | - So from the observer perspective,

01:40:53.200 | what do you, I apologize for the absurd question,

01:40:57.000 | but what do you use the most beautiful

01:40:58.760 | and maybe moving piece of art you've encountered

01:41:02.160 | in your life?

01:41:03.160 | - It's not an absurd question at all.

01:41:05.800 | And I think about this quite a bit.

01:41:07.560 | I would say the two winners by a clear margin

01:41:13.080 | are both by Michelangelo.

01:41:15.160 | It's the Pieta in the Vatican

01:41:17.640 | and the David statue in Florence.

01:41:20.800 | - Why?

01:41:21.640 | Historical context or just purity, the creation itself?

01:41:25.360 | - I don't think you can view it apart

01:41:26.800 | from historical context.

01:41:28.080 | And being in Florence or in the Vatican,

01:41:30.400 | it's that you're already primed for a lot, right?

01:41:32.800 | You can't pull that out.

01:41:35.520 | But just technically how they express

01:41:37.800 | the emotion of human form,

01:41:40.120 | I do honestly intellectually think

01:41:42.200 | they're the two greatest artworks for doing that.

01:41:45.240 | That's not all that art does.

01:41:46.520 | Not all art is about the human form.

01:41:48.640 | But they are phenomenal.

01:41:51.160 | And I think critical opinion,

01:41:52.880 | not that everyone agrees,

01:41:54.320 | but my view is not considered a crazy one

01:41:56.480 | within the broader court of critical opinion.

01:41:58.960 | Now in painting, I think the most I was ever blown away

01:42:02.880 | was to see Vermeer's artwork.

01:42:05.440 | It's called the Art of Painting.

01:42:07.160 | And it's in Vienna in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

01:42:11.280 | And I saw that, I think I was 23.

01:42:13.320 | It just stunned me because I'd seen reproductions

01:42:17.920 | but live in front of you in huge,

01:42:19.520 | a completely different artwork.

01:42:21.000 | - And again, Vienna, primed.

01:42:23.440 | - Yes.

01:42:24.640 | And I was living abroad for the first time

01:42:26.800 | and Vienna itself, the city and so on.

01:42:28.720 | Now, unlike the Michelangelo's,

01:42:30.240 | that is not my current favorite painting.

01:42:32.320 | But that would be like historically the one I would pick.

01:42:35.480 | - What do you make in the context of those choices?

01:42:38.040 | What do you make of modern art?

01:42:39.680 | And I apologize if I'm not using the correct terminology

01:42:44.680 | but art that maybe goes another level of weird

01:42:50.520 | outside of the art that you've kind of mentioned

01:42:52.920 | and breaks all the conventions and rules and so on

01:42:55.680 | and becomes something else entirely

01:42:59.400 | that doesn't make sense in the same way that David might.

01:43:03.880 | - I think a lot of it is phenomenal.

01:43:05.680 | And I would say the single biggest mistake

01:43:07.760 | that really smart people make

01:43:09.200 | is to think contemporary art or music for that matter

01:43:13.760 | is just a load of junk or rubbish.

01:43:16.040 | It's just like a kind of mathematics

01:43:17.600 | they haven't learned yet.

01:43:18.800 | It's really hard to learn.

01:43:20.640 | Maybe some people can never learn it.

01:43:23.280 | But there's a very large community of super smart,

01:43:26.200 | well-educated people who spend their lives with it,

01:43:28.800 | who love it.

01:43:29.720 | Those are genuine pleasures.

01:43:30.920 | They understand it.

01:43:31.760 | They talk about it with a common language.

01:43:34.240 | And to think that somehow they're all frauds,

01:43:36.120 | it just isn't true.

01:43:37.480 | Like one doesn't have to like it oneself,

01:43:40.080 | just like Love House may or may not be your thing,

01:43:42.320 | but it is amazing.

01:43:43.560 | And for me personally, highly rewarding.

01:43:45.840 | And if someone doesn't get it,

01:43:47.960 | I do kind of have the conceited response of thinking like,

01:43:50.600 | in that area, I'm just smarter than you are.

01:43:54.080 | - Yeah, so the interesting thing is, as with most-

01:43:56.840 | - We get back to Eric Weinstein again.

01:43:58.560 | - Yes.

01:43:59.400 | - Who is in general smarter than I am.

01:44:01.040 | This I get.

01:44:02.240 | But when it comes to contemporary artistic creations,

01:44:05.120 | I'm smarter than he is.

01:44:06.760 | - So he's not a fan of contemporary art?

01:44:08.840 | - I don't want to speak for him.

01:44:10.240 | I've heard him say-

01:44:11.080 | - He's evolving always.

01:44:12.720 | - He's evolving always.

01:44:13.840 | I've heard him say derogatory things about some of it.

01:44:16.200 | Doesn't mean he doesn't love some other parts of it.

01:44:18.760 | - So I wonder if there's just a higher learning curve,

01:44:22.360 | a steeper learning curve for contemporary art.

01:44:24.840 | Meaning like it takes more work to appreciate the stories,

01:44:28.680 | the context from which they're like thinking about this work.

01:44:32.480 | It feels like in order to appreciate the art,

01:44:35.520 | contemporary, certain pieces of contemporary art,

01:44:37.720 | you have to know the story better behind the art.

01:44:41.280 | - I think that's true for many people,

01:44:42.920 | but I think it's a funny shape distribution

01:44:45.480 | because there's a whole other set of people,

01:44:47.800 | sometimes just small children,

01:44:49.520 | and they get abstract art more easily.

01:44:51.760 | You show them Vermeer or Rembrandt, they don't get it.

01:44:56.400 | But just like a wall of color, they're in love with it.

01:45:00.400 | So I don't think I know the full story.

01:45:03.120 | Again, some strange kind of distribution.

01:45:04.760 | The entry barriers are super high or super low,

01:45:07.880 | but not that often in between.

01:45:09.360 | - But you would challenge saying that there's a lot

01:45:13.880 | to be explored in contemporary art.

01:45:15.480 | It's just you need to learn.

01:45:20.480 | - Yeah, it's one of the most profound bodies

01:45:22.400 | of human thought out there, and it's part of the humanities.

01:45:25.600 | And yes, there are people who also don't like podcasts,

01:45:28.560 | right?

01:45:29.400 | And that's fine.

01:45:31.360 | - Yeah.

01:45:32.560 | You've also been a scholar of food.

01:45:35.520 | We're just going through the entirety

01:45:37.040 | of the human experience today on this humanities podcast.

01:45:42.600 | Another absurd question, say this conversation

01:45:45.480 | is the last thing you ever do in your life.

01:45:47.120 | I, wearing the suit, would murder you

01:45:49.480 | at the end of the conversation.

01:45:50.720 | So this is your last day on Earth,

01:45:52.680 | but I would offer you a last meal.

01:45:54.560 | What would that meal contain?

01:45:57.240 | We can also travel to other parts of the world.

01:45:59.360 | - Well, we have to travel because my preferred last meal

01:46:02.920 | here I probably had like two nights ago.

01:46:05.840 | - Which is what?

01:46:06.920 | Can you describe or no?

01:46:08.600 | - The best restaurant around here is called Mama Chang's,

01:46:11.320 | and it's in Fairfax, and it's food from Wuhan, actually.

01:46:16.120 | And they take pandemic safety seriously

01:46:18.440 | in addition to the food being very good.

01:46:20.440 | But this is what I would do.

01:46:23.080 | I would fly to Hermosillo in Northern Mexico,

01:46:27.480 | which has some of the best food in Mexico,

01:46:29.240 | but I sadly only had two days there.

01:46:32.000 | So somewhere like Oaxaca, Puebla,

01:46:33.840 | I think they have food just as good,

01:46:37.520 | or some people would say better,

01:46:38.840 | but I've spent a lot of time in those places.

01:46:41.240 | - So the scarce, wait, is it possible

01:46:43.440 | the scarcity of time contributed

01:46:44.920 | to the richness of the experience?

01:46:46.720 | - Of course, but the point is that scarcity still holds.

01:46:50.040 | So I want one more dose of the food from Hermosillo.

01:46:53.400 | - Can you describe what the food is?

01:46:55.640 | - It's the one kind of Mexican food

01:46:57.240 | that at least nominally is just like the Mexican food

01:46:59.480 | you get in the US.

01:47:00.760 | So there are burritos, there's fajitas.

01:47:02.880 | It doesn't taste at all like our stuff.

01:47:05.440 | But again, nominally, it's the part of Mexican food

01:47:08.200 | that made it into the US, was then transformed.

01:47:11.000 | - Yes.

01:47:11.840 | - But it's in a way the most familiar,

01:47:13.360 | but for that reason, it's the most radical

01:47:16.240 | because you have to rethink all these things you know,

01:47:18.680 | and they're way better in Hermosillo.

01:47:21.080 | Hardly any tourists go there.

01:47:22.560 | Like there's nothing to see in Hermosillo.

01:47:24.800 | Nothing you do other than eat.

01:47:26.800 | It's not ruined by any outsiders.

01:47:29.280 | It's this longstanding tradition, dirt cheap.

01:47:33.000 | And the thing to do there is just sweet talk a taxi driver

01:47:36.280 | into first taking you seriously,

01:47:38.520 | and then trusting you enough

01:47:40.280 | to know that you trust him to bring you

01:47:42.320 | to the very best like food stands.

01:47:44.760 | - So where's the magic of that

01:47:48.920 | nominally similar entity of the burrito?

01:47:53.440 | Where's the magic come from?

01:47:54.840 | What is it?

01:47:55.680 | Is it the taxi ride?

01:47:56.720 | Is it the whole experience?

01:47:57.920 | Or is there something actually in the food?

01:47:59.920 | - So well, you can break the food down part by part.

01:48:02.280 | So if you think of the beef,

01:48:03.960 | the beef there will be dry aged, just out in the air.

01:48:07.480 | In a way the FDA here would never permit.

01:48:10.640 | Like they dry age it till it turns green,

01:48:12.520 | but it is phenomenal.

01:48:14.400 | The quality of the chilies.

01:48:16.320 | So here there's only a small number

01:48:17.760 | of kinds of chilies you can get.

01:48:19.680 | In most parts of Mexico,

01:48:21.640 | there's quite a large number of chilies you can get.

01:48:24.160 | They're different, they're fresher,

01:48:26.080 | but it's just like a different thing, the chilies.

01:48:28.720 | The wheat used, so this is wheat territory,

01:48:33.720 | not corn territory, which is itself interesting.

01:48:37.440 | The wheat is more diverse and more complex.

01:48:39.720 | Here it's more homogenized,

01:48:41.120 | obviously cheaper, more efficient,

01:48:43.280 | but there it is better.

01:48:44.760 | Non-pasteurized cheeses are legal in all parts of Mexico,

01:48:50.240 | and they can be white and gooey and amazing

01:48:52.920 | in a way that here, again, it's just against the law.

01:48:55.680 | You could legalize them.

01:48:56.640 | The demand wouldn't be that great.

01:48:57.800 | There's a black market in these cheeses,

01:48:59.320 | that Latino groceries around here,

01:49:01.640 | but you just can't get that much of it.

01:49:03.440 | So the cheese, the meat, the wheat,

01:49:05.680 | all different in significant ways.

01:49:09.320 | The chilies, I don't think the onions really matter much.

01:49:13.120 | Garlic, I don't know.

01:49:14.120 | I wouldn't put much stock in that,

01:49:15.880 | but that's a lot of the core food,

01:49:18.720 | and then it's cooked much better,

01:49:20.080 | and everything's super fresh.

01:49:22.360 | The food chain is not relying on refrigeration,

01:49:25.320 | and this is one thing Russia and US have in common.

01:49:28.680 | We were early pioneers in food refrigeration,

01:49:31.600 | and that made a lot of our foods worse quite early,

01:49:34.280 | and it took us a long time to dig out of that

01:49:37.280 | 'cause big countries, right?

01:49:38.880 | You've had an extensive rail system in Russia,

01:49:42.480 | USSR, a long time,

01:49:44.320 | which makes it easier to freeze and then ship.

01:49:46.560 | >> What about the actual cooking, the chef?

01:49:50.640 | Is there an artistry to the simple?

01:49:53.840 | I hesitate to call the burrito simple, but--

01:49:57.120 | >> And there's no brain drain out of cooking,

01:49:58.760 | so if you're in the United States,

01:50:02.280 | and you're very talented,

01:50:03.520 | I'm not saying there aren't talented chefs.

01:50:05.280 | Of course there are,

01:50:06.800 | but there's so many other things to pull people away,

01:50:09.640 | but in Mexico, there's so much talent going into food,

01:50:12.320 | as there is in China,

01:50:14.120 | which would be another candidate for last meal questions,

01:50:17.440 | or India.

01:50:18.280 | >> Oh, India, let's not even get started on India.

01:50:21.360 | >> Unbelievable.

01:50:22.200 | >> There's a million things we could talk about here,

01:50:25.440 | but you've written about your dreams of sushi.

01:50:28.700 | This is just a really clean, good example

01:50:30.640 | that people are aware of,

01:50:31.760 | of mastery in the art of the simple in food.

01:50:36.760 | What do you make of that kind of obsessive pursuit

01:50:41.480 | of perfection in creating simple food?

01:50:45.040 | >> Sushi is about perfection,

01:50:46.800 | but it's a bit like the Beatles' "White Album,"

01:50:48.440 | which people think is simple and not overproduced.

01:50:51.520 | It's in a funny way their most overproduced album,

01:50:54.320 | but it's produced just perfectly.

01:50:56.000 | It sounds simple.

01:50:57.280 | It's really hard to produce music to the point

01:50:59.860 | where it's going to sound so simple

01:51:01.580 | and not sound like sludge.

01:51:03.140 | Like "Let It Be" album, has some great songs,

01:51:06.140 | but a lot of it sounds like sludge.

01:51:07.620 | "One After 909," that's sludge.

01:51:09.700 | "I Dig a Pony," it's sludge.

01:51:11.580 | Like it's a bit interesting.

01:51:13.020 | It's not that good, it doesn't sound that good.

01:51:15.660 | "White Album," like the best half, like "Dear Prudence,"

01:51:18.140 | sounds perfect, sounds simple, cry baby cry.

01:51:21.180 | It's not simple, back in the USSR, super complex.

01:51:25.180 | So sushi is like that.

01:51:26.920 | It's because it's so incredibly not simple,

01:51:29.600 | starting with the rice.

01:51:31.520 | You try to refine it to make it appear super simple,

01:51:34.440 | and that's the most complex thing of all.

01:51:37.020 | - So do you admire, I mean,

01:51:40.080 | we're not talking about days, weeks, months.

01:51:43.920 | We're talking about years, generations

01:51:46.540 | of doing the same thing over and over and over again.

01:51:49.240 | Do you admire that kind of sticking to the,

01:51:53.040 | we talked about our admiration of the weird.

01:51:56.080 | That doesn't feel weird.

01:51:57.540 | That seems like discipline and dedication

01:52:01.440 | to like a stoic minimalism or something like that.

01:52:05.320 | - I'm happy they do it, but I actually feel bad about it.

01:52:07.960 | I feel they're sacrificial victims to me,

01:52:10.880 | which I benefit from.

01:52:12.640 | But don't you ever think like,

01:52:13.660 | "Gee, you're a great master sushi chef.

01:52:16.840 | "Wouldn't you be happier if you did something else?"

01:52:21.780 | It doesn't seem to happen.

01:52:23.500 | - That might be something that a weird mind would think.

01:52:25.700 | - Maybe it is weird people,

01:52:27.260 | and maybe they're really enjoying it.

01:52:29.840 | But to learn how to pack rice for 10 years

01:52:32.880 | before they let you do anything else,

01:52:35.220 | it's like these Indian sarod players.

01:52:37.880 | They just spent five years tapping at rhythms

01:52:40.440 | before they're allowed to touch their instruments.

01:52:43.480 | - Well, actually, to defend that--

01:52:46.280 | - It's kind of like graduate school, right?

01:52:48.520 | - Well, I think graduate school,

01:52:50.640 | perhaps, graduate school is full of,

01:52:54.920 | like every single day is full of surprises, I would say.

01:52:58.500 | I did martial arts for a long time, I do martial arts.

01:53:03.320 | And I've always loved kind of the Russian way of drilling

01:53:06.960 | is doing the same technique.

01:53:09.200 | I don't know if this applies

01:53:10.520 | in intellectual or academic disciplines,

01:53:13.280 | where you can do the same thing

01:53:15.040 | over and over and over again,

01:53:16.960 | thousands and thousands and thousands of times.

01:53:19.960 | What I've discovered through that process

01:53:23.640 | is you get to start to appreciate the tiniest of details

01:53:27.280 | and find the beauty in them.

01:53:29.440 | People who go to monasteries to meditate talk about this,

01:53:33.280 | is when you just sit in silence and don't do anything,

01:53:37.420 | you start to appreciate how much complexity and beauty

01:53:41.360 | there is in just the movement of a finger.

01:53:43.080 | Like you can spend the whole day joyously thinking

01:53:46.060 | about how fun it is to move a finger.

01:53:49.520 | - Yeah.

01:53:50.360 | - And so, and then you can almost become

01:53:53.160 | your full weird self about the tiniest details of life.

01:53:56.960 | - The thing you've got to wonder,

01:53:58.000 | like is there a free lunch in there?

01:53:59.800 | Are the rest of us moving around too much?

01:54:01.920 | - Yeah, exactly.

01:54:02.840 | They sure feel like they found a free lunch.

01:54:06.640 | The people meditate, they're onto something.

01:54:09.160 | - I tend to think it's like artists,

01:54:11.240 | that some percent of people are like that, but most are not.

01:54:14.760 | And for most of us, there's no free lunch.

01:54:16.800 | Like my free lunch is to move around a lot

01:54:19.100 | in search of lunch, in fact.

01:54:20.720 | (both laughing)

01:54:22.080 | - Well, with all the food talk, you made me hungry.

01:54:24.480 | What books, three or so books, if any come to mind,

01:54:29.480 | technical fiction, philosophical,

01:54:33.520 | would you recommend had a big impact on you,

01:54:37.360 | or you just drew some insights from throughout your life?

01:54:40.400 | - Well, two of them we've already discussed.

01:54:42.360 | One is Plato's Dialogues,

01:54:44.760 | which I started reading when I was like 13.

01:54:47.600 | Another is Ayn Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal.

01:54:51.100 | But I would say the Friedrich Hayek essay,

01:54:53.880 | The Use of Knowledge in Society,

01:54:56.260 | which is about how decentralized mechanisms can work,

01:54:58.940 | also why they might go wrong.

01:55:01.060 | And that's where you start to understand

01:55:03.300 | the price system, capitalism.

01:55:05.220 | And that was in a book called

01:55:06.260 | Individualism and Economic Order,

01:55:08.020 | but it was just a few essays in that book.

01:55:10.580 | Those are maybe the three I would say.

01:55:12.700 | - Can you elaborate a little bit on the--

01:55:14.580 | - Say the price of copper goes up, right?

01:55:16.380 | Because there's a problem with a copper mine

01:55:18.560 | in Chile or Bolivia.

01:55:20.680 | So the price of copper goes up all around the world.

01:55:22.780 | People are led to economize copper,

01:55:24.900 | to look for substitutes for copper,

01:55:26.780 | to change their production processes,

01:55:28.880 | to change the goods and services they buy,

01:55:31.140 | to build homes a different way.

01:55:32.700 | And this one event creates this one tiny change

01:55:37.160 | in information, it gets into your AI work very directly.

01:55:41.280 | And how much complexity that one change engenders

01:55:44.840 | in a meaningful, coherent way,

01:55:47.200 | how the different pieces of the price system fit together.

01:55:50.840 | Hayek really laid out very clearly.

01:55:54.000 | And it's like an AI problem.

01:55:56.440 | And how well, not for everything,

01:55:58.060 | but for many things, we solve that AI problem.

01:56:00.960 | I learned, I was I think 13, maybe 14 when I read Hayek.

01:56:04.840 | - Yeah, the distributed nature of things there.

01:56:07.400 | - And it's like your work on human attention,

01:56:09.160 | like how much can we take in?

01:56:10.640 | - Yes.

01:56:11.720 | - Very often not that much.

01:56:13.880 | - And how many of the advances of modern civilization

01:56:16.560 | you need to understand as a response to that constraint.

01:56:19.600 | I got that also from Hayek.

01:56:21.360 | - What's the title of the book again?

01:56:23.160 | - It's reprinted in a lot of books at this point.

01:56:26.120 | But back then the book was called

01:56:27.520 | "Individualism and Economic Order."

01:56:30.560 | But the essay's online,

01:56:31.760 | Hayek, Use of Knowledge in Society.

01:56:34.580 | There are open access versions of it through Google.

01:56:37.400 | And you don't need the whole book.

01:56:39.120 | So it's a very good book.

01:56:42.200 | - Again, one of those profound looking over the ocean,

01:56:46.160 | maybe sitting on a porch, maybe with a drink of some kind,

01:56:49.700 | and a young kid comes by and asks you for advice.

01:56:55.040 | What advice would you give to--

01:56:56.640 | - A drink, that's my advice.

01:56:58.600 | I'm serious.

01:56:59.440 | - So, okay, after that,

01:57:03.120 | what advice would you give to a young person today

01:57:09.420 | as they take on life?

01:57:10.880 | Whether career and academia in general,

01:57:14.760 | or just a life, which is probably more important than career.

01:57:19.340 | - Most good advice is context specific,

01:57:22.040 | but here are my two generic pieces of advice.

01:57:24.560 | - Good.

01:57:25.400 | - First, get a mentor.

01:57:27.200 | Both career, but anything you want to learn.

01:57:29.080 | Like say you want to learn about contemporary art.

01:57:31.560 | People write me this.

01:57:33.040 | What book should I read?

01:57:34.360 | It's probably not going to work that way.

01:57:36.400 | You need a mentor.

01:57:37.220 | Yes, you should read some books on it,

01:57:39.120 | but you want a mentor to help you frame them,

01:57:40.800 | take you around to some art, talk about it with you.

01:57:43.880 | So get as many mentors as you can

01:57:45.560 | in the things you want to learn.

01:57:47.640 | And then--

01:57:48.480 | - Can I ask you a quick tangent on that?

01:57:51.140 | Presumably a good mentor.

01:57:54.360 | - Of course.

01:57:55.200 | I'm begging the question in there.

01:57:56.800 | It's complicated, right?

01:57:59.280 | - Well, it is complicated.

01:58:00.280 | Is there a lot of damage to be done from a bad mentor?

01:58:03.360 | - I don't think that much,

01:58:04.280 | because it's very easy to drop mentors,

01:58:06.000 | and in fact, it's quite hard to maintain them.

01:58:07.940 | Good mentors tend to be busy.

01:58:09.600 | Bad mentors tend to be busy.

01:58:11.200 | And you can try on mentors,

01:58:14.200 | and maybe they're not good for you,

01:58:15.440 | but there's a good chance you'll learn something.

01:58:17.940 | Like I had a mentor, I was an undergrad.

01:58:21.040 | He was a Stalinist.

01:58:22.600 | He edited the book called "The Essential Stalin."

01:58:24.680 | Brilliant guy.

01:58:25.720 | I learned a tremendous amount from him.

01:58:28.200 | Was he like as a Stalinist, a good mentor for me,

01:58:30.640 | fan of Hayek?

01:58:31.480 | Well, no, but for a year, it was tremendous.

01:58:34.140 | - Yeah.

01:58:38.240 | - He introduced me to Soviet

01:58:40.200 | and Eastern European science fiction,

01:58:41.800 | 'cause he was a Marxist.

01:58:43.760 | That's what I took from him, among other things.

01:58:45.480 | - Any advice on finding a good mentor?

01:58:47.720 | Daniel Kahneman, as somebody just popped into mind,

01:58:52.720 | as somebody who was able to find

01:58:54.320 | exceptionally good collaborators throughout his life,

01:58:57.120 | there's not many bright minds that find collaborators.

01:59:00.520 | Which I ultimately see what a mentor is.

01:59:06.480 | - Yeah.

01:59:07.300 | - Be interesting, be direct, and try.

01:59:08.920 | (laughs)

01:59:10.200 | It's not like a perfect formula,

01:59:11.640 | but it's amazing how many people

01:59:12.920 | don't even do those things.

01:59:14.240 | - Be interesting, be direct, and try.

01:59:17.540 | - Like what you want from a better known person,

01:59:20.120 | I would just say be very direct with them.

01:59:22.200 | - Yeah.

01:59:23.040 | Beautiful.

01:59:24.760 | What's the second piece of advice?

01:59:26.520 | - Build small groups of peers.

01:59:29.300 | They don't have to be your age,

01:59:30.760 | but very often they'll be your age,

01:59:32.360 | especially if you're younger,

01:59:33.840 | with broadly similar interests,

01:59:35.360 | but there can be different points of view.

01:59:37.280 | People you hang out with,

01:59:39.000 | which can include in a WhatsApp group online,

01:59:41.800 | and like every day or almost every day,

01:59:43.880 | they're talking about the thing you care about,

01:59:46.200 | trying to solve problems in that thing,

01:59:48.800 | and that's your small group,

01:59:49.960 | and you really like them, and they like you,

01:59:51.780 | and you care what you think about each other,

01:59:53.960 | and you have this common interest.

01:59:55.920 | - That's for human connection,

01:59:57.260 | or that's for development of ideas?

01:59:58.880 | - It's both, they're not that different.

02:00:01.420 | Like Beatles, classic small group, right?

02:00:03.880 | - But there's so much drama.

02:00:06.600 | - The Florentine artists, of course there's drama,

02:00:08.560 | and small groups tend to split up, which is fine,

02:00:10.920 | just like entering relationships often end,

02:00:13.340 | but it's remarkable how little has been done

02:00:16.880 | that was not done in small groups in some way.

02:00:19.920 | - So speaking of loss of beautiful relationships,

02:00:24.920 | why do you make this whole love thing?

02:00:28.280 | Why do humans fall in love?

02:00:31.680 | What's the role of love, friendship, family in life?

02:00:37.000 | In a successful life, or just life in general?

02:00:40.120 | Why the hell are we so into this thing?

02:00:42.200 | - There are multiple layers of understanding that question.

02:00:44.920 | So kind of the lowest layer is the Darwinian answer.

02:00:48.720 | If we weren't this way, we wouldn't have been successful

02:00:51.800 | in reproducing and building alliances.

02:00:54.520 | It's important to realize that's far from complete.

02:00:57.680 | Sort of the highest understanding would be poetic,

02:01:00.040 | like read John Keats, or many other love poets.

02:01:03.720 | - So who do I go to to learn about love in terms of poets?

02:01:08.080 | - I would say start with John Keats,

02:01:10.120 | but given that you're fluent in Russian.

02:01:12.600 | - Yeah, let's go Russian literature for a second.

02:01:16.320 | You keep mentioning Russia.

02:01:18.640 | What's your connection, what's your love in Russia?

02:01:23.640 | - Well, first, it's all interesting,

02:01:26.440 | but more concretely, my wife was born in Moscow.

02:01:29.400 | Sokolniki was her neighborhood.

02:01:31.520 | - Oh, wow. - Yeah.

02:01:32.360 | - Oh, okay. - And she grew up there.

02:01:34.200 | I married her here.

02:01:35.560 | My daughter, I adopted her.

02:01:38.360 | I'm not her biological father, but I genuinely raised her.

02:01:41.280 | She was born in Russia,

02:01:42.560 | though she came here when she was one.

02:01:44.440 | - Wow.

02:01:45.520 | - My father-in-law-- - So you're basically Russian.

02:01:47.320 | - No, no, no, I'm a New Jersey boy.

02:01:49.220 | - That's the same thing.

02:01:51.200 | - I'm very sorry to report,

02:01:52.280 | my father-in-law passed away a week ago.

02:01:54.840 | He lived with us for six years.

02:01:57.360 | He lived in Russia till he was, oh, 70?

02:02:01.520 | Saw the Stalinist era.

02:02:04.240 | His father was brought to a camp,

02:02:05.840 | lived through World War II, much, much more,

02:02:09.640 | had an incredible life,

02:02:11.880 | never really learned how to speak English.

02:02:14.540 | So I absorbed something Russian from him as well.

02:02:17.960 | He was part Armenian.

02:02:19.300 | So that's my connection to Russia.

02:02:22.040 | - A bit of the Russian soul, too.

02:02:24.120 | Do you-- - I don't think I have it.

02:02:25.560 | I think I appreciate it.

02:02:27.600 | But there's division of labor, right?

02:02:29.060 | Others in the family.

02:02:30.060 | (laughing)

02:02:31.400 | Take care of that.

02:02:32.240 | I'm more superficial.

02:02:34.200 | - You mentioned Keats and that higher version,

02:02:37.000 | that non-Darwinian love.

02:02:38.480 | What's that about?

02:02:39.760 | - That it's the highest form of human connection,

02:02:42.400 | and it's intoxicating, and it's part of building a life,

02:02:46.920 | and most of us are very, very strongly drawn to it.

02:02:50.400 | And it's part of the highest realization

02:02:52.600 | of you being what you can be.

02:02:54.720 | - Yeah.

02:02:55.560 | You mentioned you lost-- - But ask a Russian.

02:02:58.720 | This is superficial New Jersey boy

02:03:01.520 | who grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen,

02:03:03.880 | and that was his romanticism.

02:03:05.280 | - What's your favorite Bruce Springsteen song?

02:03:09.680 | - I think the album "Born to Run"

02:03:12.320 | has actually held up the best.

02:03:14.160 | Though it's very fashionable to think the earlier

02:03:16.600 | or later works are actually better,

02:03:18.440 | and that's the overproduced super pop album.

02:03:21.160 | But the quality of the songs, to me, "Born to Run"

02:03:23.320 | is just far and away the best.

02:03:25.460 | Then "Darkness on the Edge of Town."

02:03:27.620 | And those are still my favorites.

02:03:29.800 | "Born to Run" is an incredible song.

02:03:32.080 | - Yeah.

02:03:33.120 | - And perfectly produced in a Phil Spector kind of way.

02:03:36.520 | Every detail is right, every lyric.

02:03:38.960 | - What else is on the album?

02:03:40.600 | - "Thunder Road," "Jungle Land," "10th Avenue Freezeout."

02:03:43.560 | She's the one, unbelievable.

02:03:45.360 | - Yeah, Bruce is-- - "Meeting Across the River."

02:03:48.920 | - I really like, I like when he goes into love, personally.

02:03:55.880 | Like, "I'm on fire."

02:03:57.820 | - That's a very good song, "Dancing in the Dark."

02:04:00.380 | A lot of the later work, I find the percussion

02:04:02.460 | becomes too simple and kind of too white, somehow.

02:04:05.940 | And a little clunky.

02:04:08.140 | And it's still good work, he's super talented,

02:04:10.680 | but it doesn't speak to me.

02:04:13.100 | But when it all bursts open into the open road,

02:04:16.060 | like it does on "Born to Run," that's magic.

02:04:18.420 | - Yeah.

02:04:20.540 | - Or Rosalita.

02:04:21.380 | - Have you ever seen him live?

02:04:22.620 | - Is it, yes, twice.

02:04:25.880 | - I wonder what he's like live when he was young, right?

02:04:28.680 | Those years.

02:04:29.520 | - I saw him live when he was young.

02:04:31.280 | I was young.

02:04:32.120 | New Jersey.

02:04:34.500 | I was a little disappointed, actually.

02:04:36.560 | - Yeah?

02:04:37.400 | - I think what I like best from him is quite studio.

02:04:41.240 | He certainly played well, I don't fault his performance.

02:04:44.080 | But it's like when I saw "Plant and Page,"

02:04:46.040 | you know, of Led Zeppelin.

02:04:47.600 | Tremendous creators.

02:04:49.000 | And they showed up, they were not drunk,

02:04:50.440 | like they were paying attention.

02:04:52.160 | But I was underwhelmed, because Led Zeppelin,

02:04:55.220 | like the Beatles' "White Album,"

02:04:56.700 | is much more of a studio band than you think at first.

02:04:59.780 | - And in the case of Bruce Springsteen,

02:05:01.260 | I don't know about you, but for me,

02:05:03.260 | he's somebody that I connect with the most

02:05:05.980 | when I'm alone and there's like a melancholy feeling.

02:05:10.140 | And actually, my folks live in Philly.

02:05:12.420 | I went to school in Philly.

02:05:14.900 | And so, you know, I've...

02:05:16.460 | - You're almost worthy of New Jersey, then.

02:05:20.060 | - Yeah, well, you're almost worthy of Russia.

02:05:24.040 | So we're, we can connect in that aspect.

02:05:27.880 | I mean, I love Jersey.

02:05:28.720 | It's something I feel like,

02:05:31.800 | I feel like, I don't know, it always,

02:05:35.960 | there's this beautiful, like there's a old girls' diner

02:05:38.240 | that closed down.

02:05:39.080 | I used to go there.

02:05:41.560 | There's a melancholy feeling to me.

02:05:43.880 | I mean, of course--

02:05:44.720 | - A thickness to culture in that part of the world.

02:05:47.800 | - Which is oddly similar to some elements

02:05:49.980 | of the thickness of Russian culture.

02:05:51.960 | And when you see like Russian characters on "The Sopranos,"

02:05:55.620 | it totally makes sense,

02:05:56.720 | even though there are these complete outlines.

02:05:59.480 | - Exactly, it totally makes sense.

02:06:01.880 | You've, you mentioned you lost your father-in-law last week.

02:06:06.220 | Do you think about mortality?

02:06:09.660 | Do you think about your own mortality?

02:06:12.520 | Are you afraid of death?

02:06:14.900 | - I don't think about my own mortality that much,

02:06:17.420 | which is probably a good thing.

02:06:19.120 | I think death will be bad.

02:06:22.440 | I wouldn't say I'm afraid of it.

02:06:24.000 | For me, the worst thing about death

02:06:25.520 | is not knowing how the human story turns out.

02:06:28.760 | - The full human story.

02:06:29.880 | - The full human story.

02:06:30.760 | So if I could, right before I die,

02:06:32.880 | read like a Wikipedia page called "The Rest of Human History"

02:06:36.560 | and have enough time, just like a few days,

02:06:38.280 | to absorb it, think about it,

02:06:40.280 | and know like, oh, well, 643 years from now,

02:06:43.300 | that's when all the atomic weapons went off.

02:06:45.120 | And here's what happened between now and then.

02:06:47.980 | I would feel much better dying.

02:06:49.620 | But that's not how it's gonna be, right?

02:06:53.960 | It's unlikely.

02:06:55.080 | - It's almost like the "Hitchhiker's Guide."

02:06:57.080 | They kind of have, what is it?

02:06:58.840 | They have a one or two sentence description of the human,

02:07:02.000 | of what goes on on Earth.

02:07:03.640 | It's kind of interesting to think

02:07:05.080 | if there's a lot of intelligent civilizations out there

02:07:08.080 | that in the big encyclopedia that describes the universe,

02:07:11.040 | humans will only have one sentence, maybe two.

02:07:13.240 | - Probably true.

02:07:14.180 | - Yeah.

02:07:16.000 | - But it's the only one I can read and understand, right?

02:07:18.640 | And it may be hard to understand the human one

02:07:20.800 | past a number of centuries.

02:07:22.880 | - Yeah, with AI, yes.

02:07:24.600 | - Like how many years from now will reading Wikipedia

02:07:29.100 | be like trying to read Chaucer?

02:07:31.160 | Which I almost can do, but I actually can't.

02:07:33.400 | I need a translation.

02:07:34.880 | Probably you can't do it at all.

02:07:36.400 | - Yeah.

02:07:37.600 | I mean, maybe reading will be outdated.

02:07:39.400 | It might be a very silly notion.

02:07:41.680 | Maybe we're fundamentally,

02:07:43.560 | like we think language is fundamental to cognition,

02:07:46.080 | but it could be something visual

02:07:47.400 | or something totally different that we'll plug in.

02:07:50.280 | - Neural anchor, yeah.

02:07:51.700 | - But in that story, that Wikipedia article,

02:07:55.840 | do you think there'll be a section on the meaning of it?

02:08:00.840 | - I hope not.

02:08:01.840 | 'Cause that section we could write now,

02:08:04.820 | and it's just not gonna be very good, right?

02:08:07.280 | - What would you put in the section

02:08:08.640 | on the meaning of human existence?

02:08:11.640 | - I don't know, links to a lot of other sections?

02:08:13.840 | (both laughing)

02:08:15.960 | I don't think there are general statements

02:08:17.440 | about the meaning of life that have that much meaning.

02:08:19.880 | I think if you study different cultures,

02:08:22.040 | the arts, travel, mathematics,

02:08:23.840 | like whatever your thing is,

02:08:25.440 | you'll get a lot about the meaning of life.

02:08:27.240 | So like it's there in Wikipedia in some bigger sense.

02:08:30.680 | But I don't wanna read the page on the meaning.

02:08:32.200 | I bet they have such a page, in fact.

02:08:34.320 | The fact that I've never visited it,

02:08:36.040 | none of my friends, oh, here, Tyler,

02:08:37.740 | here's the page on the meaning of life.

02:08:39.120 | I know you've been wondering about this.

02:08:40.360 | You gotta read this one.

02:08:41.600 | No one's ever done that to you, have they?

02:08:43.320 | - It probably has, well, I actually gone to that page.

02:08:46.040 | It does in fact have a lot of links to other pages.

02:08:48.040 | - Okay. (laughing)

02:08:51.020 | - So that's it.

02:08:52.520 | The meaning of life is just a bunch of self-referential

02:08:57.200 | or citation needed type of statements.

02:09:02.200 | I think there's no better way to end it.

02:09:03.880 | Tyler, this is a huge honor.

02:09:05.120 | I'm a huge fan.

02:09:07.520 | Thank you so much for wasting all of this time with me.

02:09:10.080 | It was one of the greatest conversations I've ever had.

02:09:12.000 | Thank you so much.

02:09:12.840 | - My pleasure and delighted to finally have met you

02:09:15.240 | and that we can do this.

02:09:16.860 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tyler Cohen

02:09:20.280 | and thank you to Linode, ExpressVPN,

02:09:23.560 | SimplySafe and Public Goods.

02:09:25.960 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

02:09:29.600 | And now let me leave you with some words from Adam Smith.

02:09:33.680 | "Little else is requisite to carry a state

02:09:36.520 | "to the highest degree of opulence

02:09:38.520 | "from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes

02:09:42.600 | "and a tolerable administration of justice."

02:09:45.920 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

02:09:48.920 | (upbeat music)

02:09:51.500 | (upbeat music)

02:09:54.080 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Tyler Cowen: Economic Growth & the Fight Against Conformity & Mediocrity | Lex Fridman Podcast #174

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