Lex Fridman Podcast - #174 – Tyler Cowen: Economic Growth and the Fight Against Conformity and Mediocrity

Episode Date: April 11, 2021

Tyler Cowen is an economist, writer, and podcaster. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Linode: https://linode.com/lex to get $100 free credit - ExpressVPN: https://expressvpn.com/lexpod and use code LexPod to get 3 months free - SimpliSafe: https://simplisafe.com/lex and use code LEX to get a free security camera - Public Goods: https://publicgoods.com/lex and use code LEX to get $15 off EPISODE LINKS: Tyler's Twitter: https://twitter.com/tylercowen Tyler's Blog: https://marginalrevolution.com/ Conversations with Tyler (Podcast): https://conversationswithtyler.com/ Big Business (Book): https://amzn.to/2OBPbaK Tyler's Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyler_Cowen PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (07:24) - Economics (09:16) - Nuclear war (16:03) - The American dream (23:16) - Capitalism: pros and cons (29:50) - Is competition good for the world? (31:53) - Free market (32:57) - Anarchy (35:23) - Ayn Rand (40:04) - The case for big business (44:31) - Clubhouse (49:35) - Loneliness (51:47) - Eric Weinstein and economic growth (56:08) - Communism (58:58) - Putin (1:04:29) - China (1:09:21) - UBI (1:13:17) - Disagreement with Eric Weinstein (1:17:09) - Money, Bitcoin, and Ethereum (1:25:20) - WallStreetBets (1:29:16) - MIT (1:36:44) - UFO sightings (1:44:03) - Contemporary art is misunderstood (1:51:06) - Mexican food is the best in the world (1:55:56) - Jiro Dreams of Sushi (1:59:59) - Book recommendations (2:02:15) - Advice for young people (2:05:53) - Love (2:11:35) - Mortality (2:13:25) - Meaning of life

The following is a conversation with Tyler Cohen, an economist at George Mason University and co-creator of an amazing economics blog called Marginal Revolution. Author of many books, including The Great's Dagnation, Average Is Over, and His Most Recent Big Business, a love letter to an American anti-hero. He's truly a polymath in his work, including his love for food, which makes this amazing podcast called Conversations with Tyler really fun to listen to. Quick mention of our sponsors, Linode, ExpressVPN, Simply Safe and Public Goods, check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note given Tyler's culinary explorations, let me say that one of the things that makes me sad about my love hate relationship with food is that while I found a simple diet playing meat veggies that makes me happy in day-to-day life, I sometimes wish I had the mental ability to moderate consumption of food so that I could truly enjoy meals that go way outside of that diet. I've seen my mom for example enjoy a single piece of chocolate, and yet if I were to eat one piece of chocolate, the odds are high that I would end up eating the whole box. This is definitely something I would like to fix because some of the amazing artistry in this world happens in the kitchen, and some of the richest human experiences happen over a unique meal. I recently was eating cheeseburgers with Joe Rogan and John Donahar, late at night in Austin, talking about Jiu-Jitsu and life, and I was distinctly aware of the magic of that experience. Magic made possible by

the incredibly delicious cheeseburgers. As usual, I'll do a few minutes of ads now. I'll try to make them interesting. I do give you time stamps because I value your time and listening to your experience so you can skip, but please still check out the sponsors. I only choose the ones I actually like, so click their links. It really is the best way to support this podcast. This episode is sponsored by Linode, Linux Virtual Machines. It's an awesome computer infrastructure that lets you develop, deploy and scale what applications

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Like who do you want to partner up with in this world, given ideas of censorship, but also just the ideas of cost and scaling and innovation. All those kinds of things, I think, are enabled by computer infrastructure and making the right decision that is really important. I think I really like the way Linode is approaching this problem. So they're definitely in the running for somebody I go with long term. Forget sponsorships and all that. I just mean building stuff on their platform.

As they say, if it runs on Linux, it runs on Linux, visit linno.com slash Lex and click the create free account button to get started with 100 bucks and free credit. That's linno.com slash Lex. This show is sponsored by ExpressVPN. I use it to help keep my data and online interactions private from companies that want to use that data in ways that is not transparent to me. As I mentioned recently, I try to make sure that my private life and my public life don't

have a significant gap in between or any gap is the goal. But I think that's more about sort of big natural language expressed ideas versus like traces of what kind of stuff you bought online or for example, like location, all those kinds of things. I think in fact, that very kind of honesty and realness in public expression is enabled by the respect for privacy in private life because privacy is often violated by people that seek to limit your freedom, that increase your freedom.

Anyway, go to ExpressVPN.com slash legs pod to get an extra three months free. That's ExpressVPN.com slash legs pod. This show is sponsored by Simply Safe, a home security company, and now let me take a sip of an energy drink. That's better. Okay, protect your home with a simple 30-minute setup. You can customize the system for your needs on SimplySafe.com slash Lex. I have it set up on my place, and I love it. In general, I've been thinking quite a bit about how to protect myself in this world as this particular platform grows and maybe as I say some stupid things in this world that make people angry.

I don't want to close myself from this world, but I also, sadly, understand that there's people out there that want to do you harm Kind of breaks my heart that there's people out there that think in this kind of way But I also don't want to be completely naive You want to take basic step in protecting yourself physically and also in your digital life And then after that don't overthink it I think the flip side of being concerned about your own safety is that you're constantly stressed out. And I do think there's something about reducing stress resulting in increased quality of life. So get like the obvious low-hanging fruit like the simple safe system to protect yourself,

but other than that, just try to live life freely. Anyway, go to simplysafe.com slash flex, customize your system and get a free security camera plus a 60 day risk free trial. Again, that's simply safe.com slash Lex. This show is also sponsored by Public Goods. The one-stop shop for affordable, sustainable, healthy household products. I use their hand soap, toothpaste, toothbrush, and a bunch of this stuff, actually.

Their products often have a minimalist black and white design that I find to be just beautiful. In fact, I'm now in the process of giving away most of the things I own. I really value minimalism in my life, in design, in all things, really. And so public goods is another example of a company that takes products that would kind of take for granted and like redesigns them with this minimalist style that I just love having a part of my life. Anyway, go to public goods.com slash Lex or use code Lexa checkout to get $15 off your first order. Plus you'll receive your choice of either a free pack of bamboo straws or reusable food storage wraps. Visit publicgoose.com slash Lex and use code Lex at checkout. They're testing out this podcast this month so this

is a good time to try them out if you're interested. Cool design, good products, I'm happy. Try them out, see what you think. This is the Lex Friedman podcast and here is my conversation with Tyler Cohen. Would you say economics is more art or science or philosophy or even magic? What is it? Economics is interesting because it's all of the above. To start with magic, the notion that you can make some change and simply everyone's better off, that is a kind of modern magic that has replaced old-style magic. It's an art in the sense that the models are not very exact It's a science in the sense that occasionally propositions are falsified

Or a few basic things we know yeah, and however trivial they may sound if you don't know them you're out of luck So all of the above But for my outside of perspective economics is sometimes able to formulate very simple, almost like e.g. I'm C squared, general models of how our human society will function when you do a certain thing. But it seems impossible, or almost way too optimistic, to think that a single formula or just a set of simple principles can describe behavior of billions of human beings with all the complexity that we have involved. Do you have a sense there's a hope for economics to have those kinds of

physics level descriptions and models of the world, or is it just our desperate attempts as humans to make sense of it, even though it's more desperate than rigorous and serious and actually predictable, like a physics type science. I don't think economics will ever be very predictive. It's most useful for helping you ask better questions. You look at something like Game Theory. Well, Game theory never predicted USA and USSR would have a war, would not have a war, but trying to think through the logic

of strategic conflict. If you know game theory, it's just a much more interesting discussion. I used to surprise that we speaking of Soviet Union and United States and speaking of game theory, I used to surprise that we haven't destroyed ourselves with nuclear weapons yet? Like that simple formulation of mutually shared destruction. That's a good example of an explanation that perhaps allows us to Ask better questions, but it seems to have actually described the reality of Why we haven't destroyed ourselves with these ultra powerful weapons. Are you surprised? Do you think the game of the Redic Exclamation is at all accurate there?

I think we will destroy each other with those weapons. Eventually. Eventually. Look, it's a very low probability event. So I'm not surprised it hasn't happened yet. I'm a little surprised it came as close as it did. You know, your general thinking realizing it might have just been a flock of birds or it wasn't a first strike attack from the USA, we got very lucky on that one.

But if you just keep on running the clock on a low probability event, it will happen. And it may not be USA and China, USA and Russia, whatever, you know, it could be the Saudis and Turkey. And it might not be nuclear weapons. It might be some other destruction. Bio weapons, but it simply will happen is my view. And I've argued at best we have seven or 800 years. And that's being generous. A worst. How long we got?

Well, maybe it's like a first on arrival process, right? So tiny probability could come any time, probably not in your life time. So tiny probability could come any time, probably not in your lifetime. But the chance presumably increases the cheaper weapons of mass destruction are. So the Poisson process description doesn't take in consideration the game theoretical aspect. So another way to consider is repeated games, iterative games. repeated games, iterative games. So is there something about our human nature that allows us to fight against probability, reduce like the closer we get to trouble, the more we're able to figure out how to avoid trouble. The same thing is for when you take exams or you go and you know, it takes classes, closer or paper deadlines the closer you get to a deadline The better you start to perform and get your shit together. It actually gets stuff done

I'm really not so negative on human nature and as an economist I very much see the gains from cooperation Yeah, but if you just ask are there outliers in history like was there a Hitler for instance? Obviously and again, you let the clock tick another Hitler with nuclear weapons doesn't per se care about his own destruction. It will happen. So your senses fundamentally people are good, but on-line hand equilibrium is what we would call it. Trumbling hand equilibrium. That the basic logic is for cooperation, which is mostly what we've seen, even between enemies, but every now and then someone does something crazy, and you don't know how to react to it. And you

can't always beat Hitler. Sometimes Hitler drags you down. To push back is it possible that the crazier the person, the less likely they are, and in a way where we're safe, meaning like, this is the kind of proposition I've had the discussion with my dad as a physicist about this, where he thinks that, like, if you have a graph, like evil people can't also be geniuses. So his, this is his defense white evil people will not get control of nuclear weapons because to be truly evil. But evil meaning sort of, you can argue that not even the evil of Hitler

we're talking about because Hitler had a kind of view of Germany and all those kinds of, there's like, he probably deluded himself and the people around him to think that he's actually doing good for the world, similar with Stalin and so on. By evil, I mean more like, almost like terrorists, to where they want to destroy themselves and the world. Like those people will never be able to be actually skilled enough to do to deliver that kind of masculine destruction. So the hope is that it's very unlikely that the kind of evil that would lead to extinctions of humans or mass destruction is so unlikely that we're able

to last for longer than some 180 years. Is that pretty? It's very unlikely. And that's the argument. But that's why you need to let the clock tick. It's also the best argument for bureaucracy. To negotiate a bureaucracy, it actually selects against pure evil, because you need to build alliances. So bureaucracy in that regard is great, right? It keeps out the worst apples. But look, put it this way, could you imagine 35 years from now, the Osama bin Laden of the future has nukes or very bad bio-epins. It seems to me you can. Yeah. And Osama bin Laden of the future has nukes or very bad bio weapons. It seems to me you can. Yeah. And Osama was pretty evil and actually even he failed, right? But nonetheless, that's what the seven or eight hundred years is there for. And there might be destructive

technologies that I don't have such a high cost of production or such a high learning curve, cyber attacks or artificial intelligence, all those kinds of things. So yeah. I mean, let me ask you a question. Let's say you could as an active will by spending a million dollars obliterate any city on earth and everyone in it dies. And you'll get caught and you'll be sentenced to death. But you can make it happen just by willing it. How many months does it take before that happens?

So the obvious answer is like very soon, there's probably a good answer for that because you can consider how many millionaires there are when you can look at that, right? I have a sense that there's just people that have a million dollars. I mean, there's a certain amount, but have a million dollars, I mean, there's a certain amount, but have a million dollars have other interests that will outweigh the interest of destroying in the entire city. Like, there's a particular, you know, like,

maybe that's a hope. It's why we should be nice to the wealthy too, right? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah, yeah, all that trash talking is Bill Gates, we should be nice to the wealthy too, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All that trash talking is Bill Gates, which is stopped at because that doesn't inspire the other future Bill Gates is to be nice to the world. That's true. But your sense is that you per guess to destroy the world the more likely it becomes.

Now, when I say destroy the world, there's a trick in there. I don't think literally every human will die, but it would set back civilization by an extraordinary degree. It's then just hard to predict what comes next. Yeah. But a catastrophe where everyone dies, that probably has to be something more like an asteroid or supernova. And those are purely exogenous for the time being at least. So I immigrated to this country. I was born in the Soviet Union in Russia. And which one? Which is the important question. Well, you were born in the Soviet Union, right? Yes, I was born in the Soviet Union. The rest is details, but I grew up in Moscow, Russia. Yeah. But I came to this country and this country even back there, but it's always symbolized to me a place of opportunity

where everybody could build like build the most incredible things, especially in the engineering side of things, just invent and build and scale and have a huge impact on the world. And that's been to me, that's my version of the American ideal, the American dream. Do you think the American dream is still there? Do you think, what do you think of that notion in itself like from an economics perspective, from a human perspective, is it still alive?

And how do you think about it? The American dream. The American dream is mostly still there. If you look at which groups are the highest earners, it is individuals from India and individuals from Iran, which is a fairly new development, great for them, not necessarily easy. Both you could call persons of color may have faced discrimination, also on the grounds of religion, yet they've done it. That's amazing.

It says great things about America. Now, if you look at native born Americans, the story's trickier. People think intergenerational mobility has declined a lot recently, but it has not for native born Americans. For about, I think, 40 years, it's been fairly constant, which is sort of good, but compared to much earlier times, it was much higher in the past. I'm not sure we can replicate that

because look, go to the beginning of the 20th century, very few Americans finish high school, or even have much wealth. There's not much credentialism, there aren't that many credentials. So there's more upward mobility across the generations than today. And it's a good thing that we had it. I'm not sure we should blame the modern world for not being able to reproduce that. But look, the general issue of who gets into Harvard or Cornell is there in injustice. Should we fix that?

Is there too little opportunity for the bottoms, they half of Americans? Absolutely. It's a disgrace how this country has evolved in that way. And in that sense, the American dream is clearly yelling. But it has had problems from the beginning, for blacks, for women, for many other groups. I mean, isn't that the whole challenge of opportunity

and freedom is that it's hard and the difficulty of how hard it is to move up in society is unequal often, and that's the injustice of society, but the whole point of that freedom is that over time it becomes better and better. You start to fix the leaks, the issues, and it keeps progressing in that kind of way. But ultimately, there's always the opportunity, even if it's harder, there's the opportunity to create something truly special, to move up, to be present, to be a leader in whatever the industry that you're passionate about.

Have it. We each have podcasts, right? In English, the value of joining that American English language network is much higher today than it was 30 years ago, mostly because of the internet. So that makes immigration returns themselves skewed. So going to the US, Canada, or the UK, I think has become much more valuable in relative terms than say, go into France, which is still a pretty well off very nice country. If you had gone to France, your chance of having a globally known podcast would be much smaller.

Yeah, this is the interesting thing about how much intellectual influence the United States has. I don't know if it's connected to what we're discussing here, the freedom and opportunity of the American dream. Or does it make any sense to you that we have so much impact on the rest of the world in terms of ideas? Is it just simply because the English is the primary language of the world, or is there something fundamental to the United States that drives the development of ideas? So it's almost like what's cool, what's entertaining, what's, you know, like meme culture, the internet culture, the philosophers, the intellectuals, the podcasts, the movies, music, all that stuff, driving culture. There's something above and beyond language in the United States.

It's a sense of entertainment really mattering how to connect with your audience, being direct and getting to the point, how humor is integrated even with science. That is pretty strongly represented here, much more say than on the European continent. Britain has its own version of this, which it does very well. And not surprisingly, they're hugely influential in music, comedy, the most of the other areas you mentioned. Canada yes, but they're best talent tends to come here. But you could say it's like a broader North American thing and give them their fair share of credit. What about science? There's a sense higher education is really strong. Research is really strong in the United States, but it just feels like culturally speaking, when we zoom out, scientists

aren't very cool here. Most people wouldn't be able to name basically a single scientist. Maybe they would say what Einstein and Neil deGrasse Tyson maybe. And Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't exactly a scientist. He's a science communicator. There's not the same kind of admiration of science and innovators as there is of athletes or actors, actresses, musicians. Well, you can become a celebrity scientist if you want to. A mayor may not be best for science, and we have Spock from Star Trek, who is still a big deal. But look at it this way, which country is most comfortable with any gallitarian rewards for scientists, whether it's fame or

money. And I still think it's here. Some of that's just the tax rate. Some of it is a lot of America is set up for rich people to live really well. And again, that's going to attract a lot of top talent. And you ask like the two best vaccines, I know the fights are vaccine is sort of from Germany, sort of from Turkey, but it's nonetheless being distributed through the United States, Moderna, and our Armenian ethnic Armenian immigrant through Lebanon,

first to Canada, then down here to Boston, Cambridge, area. Those are incredible vaccines, and US nailed it. Yeah, well, that's more or almost like the, I don't know what you would call it, engineering, the sort of scaling. That's what US is really, I don't know what you would call it, engineering the sort of scaling. That's what US is really good at. Not just inventing ideas, but taking an idea and actually building the thing and scaling it and being able to distribute it at scale. I think some people would attribute that to the general word of capitalism. I don't know if you would. What in your views are the pros and cons of capitalism as it's implemented in America?

I don't know if you would say capitalism has really existed in America, but to the extent that it does. People use the word capitalism in so many different ways. What is capitalism? The literal meaning is private ownership of capital goods, which I favor in most areas. But no, I don't think the private sector should own our F-16s or military assets. Government-owned water utilities seem to work as well as privately

owned water utilities. But with all those qualifications put to the side, business, for the most part, innovates better than government. It is oriented toward consumer services. The biggest businesses tend to pay the highest wages. Business is great at getting things done. USA is fundamentally a nation of business, and that makes us a nation of opportunity. So I am indeed mostly a fan subject to numerous caveats. What's uh, what's the con? What's what is some negative downsides of capitalism in your view?

Or some things that we should be concerned about maybe for long term impacts of capitalism. Again, capitalism takes a different form in each country. I would say in the United States, our weird blend of whatever you want to call it has had an enduring racial problem from the beginning, has been a force of taking away land from Native Americans and oppressing them pretty much from the beginning. It has done very well by immigrants for the most part. We revel in create, chimpotary and creative destruction more. So we don't just prop up national champions forever. And there's a precariousness to life for some people here that is less so say in Germany or the Netherlands. We have weaker communities in some regards than say Northwestern Europe often would.

That has pluses and minuses. I think it makes us more creative. It's a better country in which to be a weirdo than say Germany or Denmark. But there is truly whether from the government or from your private community, there is less social security in some fundamental sense. On the point of weirdo, what? that's kind of a beautiful little statement. What is that? I mean, that seems to be, you know, you could think of a guy like Elon Musk and say that he's a weirdo. Is that the sense in which you're using weirdo? Like outside of the norm, like breaking conventions. Absolutely. And here that is either acceptable or even admired, or to be a loner. And since so many people are outsiders,

and that where all immigrants is selecting for people who left something behind, we're willing to leave behind their families, we're willing to undergo a certain brutality of switch in their lives, makes us a nation of weirdos and weirdos are creative. And Denmark is not a nation of weirdos. It's a wonderful place, you know, great for them. Ideally you want part of the world to be full of

weirdos and innovating and the other part of the world to be a little kind of chicken-chit, risk averse and and enjoy the benefit of the innovation, and to give people these smooth lives in six weeks off and free ride. And everyone's like, oh, American way versus European way, but basically they're compliments. Yeah, that's fascinating. I used to have this conversation with my parents when I was growing up, and just others from the immigrant kind of flow. And he used this term, especially in Russian, is to criticize something I was doing that was suggest, you know, no more people don't do this. And I used to be really offended by that.

But as I got older, I realized that that's a kind of complement because in the same kind of, I would say, way that you're saying that is the American ideal, because if you want to do anything special or interesting, you don't want to be doing in one particular avenue, what normal people do, because then it won't be interesting. So Russians, I think, fit in very well here because the ones who come are weirdos and there's a very different Russian weirdo tradition like alliose, right? And brother's cardamom is off. Yeah. Or parallel man, the mathematician, they're weirdos and they have their own different kind of status in Soviet Union, Russia, wherever. And when Russians come to America, they stay pretty Russian,

but it seems to me a week later, they've somehow adjusted. Yeah. And the ways in which they might want to be like grumpier than Americans, not smile, I think the people who smile already, it's like they can do that. No one takes that away from them. Yeah. What do you, uh, an Italian tangent? Uh, I'd love to hear if you have

thoughts about Gregor Grisha Perlman turning down the field's metal. Is that something you admire? Does that make sense to you that somebody, you know, with the structure of Nobel Prizes of these huge awards of the reputations, a hierarchy of everyone saying, applauding how especially you are, and here's a person who was doing one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of mathematics. It doesn't want to superprise and doesn't want to recognition. It doesn't want to do interviews. It doesn't want to be famous.

What do you make? What do you make of that? It's great. Look, prizes are corrupting. After scientists win Nobel prizes, they tend to become less productive. Now, statistically, it's hard to sort out the different effects. There's a Russian toward the mean. It's just the prize make you too busy.

It's a little tricky, but it's not enough Nobel prizes either to get gathering of data. Right. But I've known a lot of Nobel prize winners, and it is my sense they become less productive. They repeat more of their older messages, which may be highly socially valuable. But if someone wants to turn their back on that and keep on working, which I assume is what he's doing, that's awesome. I mean, we should respect that. It's like he wins a bigger prize, right? Our extreme respect. Yeah. Well, Grisha, if you're listening, you to talk to you soon. Okay. I've been trying to get a hold of them. Okay.

Back to capitals, I got to ask you, just competition in general in this world of weirdos. Is competition good for the world? This kind of seems to be one of the fundamental engines of capitalism, right? Do you see as ultimately constructive or destructive for the world? What really matters is how good your legal framework is. So competition within nature, you know, for food leads to bloody conflict all the time. The animal world is quite unpleasant to say the least. If you have something like the rule of law and clearly defined property rights, which are within reason,

justly allocated, competition probably is going to work very well. But it's not an unalloyed good thing at all. It can be highly destructive, military competition, right? Which actually is itself sometimes good, but it's not good per se. What, what, what aspects of life do you think we should protect from kind of competition? So is there some, you said like the rule of law? Is there some things we should keep away from competition? Well, the fight for territory, most of all, right? So violence, anything that involves like actual physical violence. Right.

And it's not that I think the current borders are just, I mean, go talk to Hungarians, Remanians, you know, Serbian, Bosnians, they'll talk your ear off. And some of them are probably right. But at the end of the day, we have some kind of international order. And I would rather we more or less stick with it. If Catalonia is want to leave, they keep up with it, you know, let them go. But what about space of like healthcare? This is where you get into attention of like between capitalism and kind of a more, I don't want to use socialism, but those kinds of policies, they're less free market. I think in this country, healthcare should be much more competitive.

So you go to hospitals, doctors that don't treat you like a customer, they treat you like an idiot or like a child or someone with third party payment. And it's a pretty humiliating experience often. Yeah. Yeah. Do you think free market in general is possible? Like a pure free market?

And is that a good goal to strive for? I don't think the term pure free market markets well defined because you need a legal order. Legal order has to make decisions on like what is intellectual property, more important than ever. There's no benchmark that like represents the pure free market way of doing things. What will penalties be? How much do we put into law enforcement? No simple answers, but just saying free market doesn't pin down what you're

going to do on those all important questions. So free market is an economics, I guess idea. So there's no, it's not possible for free market to generate the rules. They're like emergent, like self-governing. It generates a lot of them, right, through private norms, through trade associations. International trade is mostly done privately and by norms. So it's certainly possible, but at the end of the day, I think you need governments to draw very clear lines to prevent it from turning into mafia-run systems. You know, I've been hanging out with the other group of weirdos, Lately Michael Malas, who aspires to be an anarchist, anarchism, which is like, I think, intellectually,

just fascinating Santa Videas, where they're taking free market to the full extreme of basically saying there should be no government. What is it? Oversight, I guess, and then everything should be fully like all the agreements, all the collectives you form should be voluntary, not based on the geographical land you are born on and so on. Do you think that's just the giant mess? Like, do you think it's possible for an anarchist

society to work where it's, you know, in a fully distributed way, people agree with each other, not just on financial transactions, but, you know, on, um, on their personal security, on sort of military type of stuff, on health care, on education, all those kinds of things. And where does it break down? Well, I wouldn't press a button to say, get rid of our current constitution, which I view is pretty good and quite wise. But I think the deeper point is that all societies are in some regards anarchistic. Yes.

And we should take the anarchists seriously. So globally, there's a kind of anarchy across borders, even within federalistic systems. They're typically complex. There's not a clear transitivity necessarily of who has the final say over what. Just the state visa vits people. There's not per se a final arbitrator in that regard. So you want a good anarchy rather than a bad anarchy. If you want to squish your anarchy into the right corners, and I don't think there's a theoretical answer how to do it. But you start with a country like is it working well enough now?

This country you'd say mostly, you'd certainly want to make a lot of improvements. And that's why I don't want to press that get rid of the Constitution button. But to just dump on the anarchists is to miss the point. Always try to learn yeah. For many opinion, you know, and what in it is true? I'm just like marvelling at the at the poetry of saying they wish to squish our energy into the right corners. I love it. Okay, I gotta ask I've been talking, since we're doing a world-wind introduction to all of economics, I've been talking to a few objectives recently, and just, you know, Einran comes up as a person, as a philosopher, throughout many conversations. A lot of people really despise her.

A lot of people really love her. It's always weird to me when somebody arouses a philosophy or a human being arouses that much emotion in either direction. Does she make, do you understand, first of all, that level of emotion? And what are your thoughts about Iron Rand and her philosophy ofjectivism? Is it useful at all to think about this kind of formulation of rational self-interest, if I could put it in those words, or I guess more negatively the selfishness, or she would put, I guess, the virtue of selfishness. Iron Rand was the big influence on me growing up. The book that really mattered for me was capitalism, the unknown ideal.

The notion that wealth creates opportunity and good lives and wealth is something we ought to valorize and give very high status. It's one of her key ideas. I think it's completely correct. I think she has the most profound and articulate statement of that idea. That said, as a philosopher, I disagree with her on most things, and I did, even like as a boy, when I was reading her, I read Plato before I ran, and in a socratic dialogue, there's all these different points of view being thrown around. And whomever it is, you agree with, you understand the wisdom is in coming together at the different points of view. Yeah. And she doesn't have that. So altruism can be wonderful in my view. Humans are not actually that rational. Self-interest is often poorly defined to pound the table and say existence exists. I wouldn't say I disagree, but I'm not sure that it's

a very meaningful statement. I think the secret to Iron Rand is that she was Russian. I'd love to have her on my podcast if she was still alive I'd only ask her about Russia, which she mostly never talked about after writing We The Living and she is much more Russian Then she seems at first even like purging people from the objectiveist circles. It's like how Russians Especially female Russians so often purge their friends. It's weird all the parallels So you're saying so yes so I Assuming she's still not around But if she is and she comes into your podcast see can you dig into that a little bit? Do you mean like the first her personal

demons around the social and economic Russia of the time, when she escaped. The traumas she suffered there, what she really likes in the music and literature and why. And getting deeply into that, her view of relations between the sexism, Russia, how it differs from America, why she still carries through the old Russian vision in her fiction, this extreme sexual dimorphism, but with also very strong women. And he is a uniquely, at least Eastern European vision, mostly Russian, I would say.

And that's in her. That's her actual real philosophy, not this table-bounding existence exists. And that's not talked about enough. He's a Russian philosopher. Yeah. Like, or Soviet, whatever you want to call it. And if she wasn't so certain, she could have been a Dostoyevsky, where it's not that certainty is almost the thing

that brings over the adoration of millions, but also the hatred of millions. He became a cult figure in a somewhat Russian-like manner. Yeah. Yeah. It is what it is. But I love the idea that, again, you're just dropping bombs that are poetic, that the wisdom is in the coming together

of ideas is kind of interesting to think that no one human possesses wisdom. No one idea is the wisdom that the coming together is the wisdom. Like coming together is the wisdom. Like in my view Boswell's life of Johnson, 18th century British biography, it's an essence of co-authored work, Boswell and Johnson. It's one of the greatest philosophy books ever, though it is commonly regarded as a biography. John Stuart Mill, who in a sense was co-authoring with Harriet Teller, a better philosopher than his realized,

though he's rated very, very highly, Plato-Slash Socrates, a lot of the greatest works are in a kind of dialogue form, Gertis Faust, would be another example. It's very much a dialogue, and yes, it's drama, but it's also a philosophy, Shakespeare, maybe the wisest thinker of them all. It's also a philosophy, Shakespeare. Maybe the wisest thinker of them all. In your book, Big Business, speaking of our own brand, Big Business, a love letter to an American anti-hero. You make the case for the benefit that large businesses bring to society.

Can you explain? If you look at, say, the pandemic, which has been a catastrophic event, right, for many reasons, but who is it that saved us? So Amazon has done remarkably well. They upped their delivery game more or less overnight with very few hitches. I've ordered hundreds of Amazon packages, direct delivery food, whether it's door dash or Uber Eats or using, you know, Whole Foods through Amazon shipping. Again, it's gone remarkably well. Switching over our entire higher educational system, basically within two weeks to zoom. Zoom did it. I mean, I've had a zoom outage, but their performance rate has been remarkably high. So if you just look at resources, competence, incentives, who's

been the star performers, the NBA even just canceling the season as early as they did sending a message like, Hey, people, this is real. And then pulling off the bubble, if not a single found case of COVID and having all the testing set up in advance. Big business has done very well lately. And throughout the broader course of American history, in my view, has mostly been a hero. Can we engage in a kind of therapy session? And I'm often troubled by the negativity towards big business. And I wonder if you could help figure out how we remove that or maybe first psychoanalysed it and then how we remove it.

It feels like, you know, once we've gotten Wi-Fi on flights, on airplane flights, people started complaining about how shady the connection is, right? Yeah. They take it for granted immediately. Yeah. And then start complaining about little details. Another example that's closer to like, especially as aspiring entrepreneurs closer to the things I'm thinking about is Jack Dorsey with Twitter. You know, to me, Twitter has enabled an incredible

platform of communication. And yet the biggest thing that people talk about is not how incredible this platform is. They essentially use the platform to complain about the censorship of a few individuals as opposed to how amazing is now you should also you should talk about how shady the Wi-Fi is and how censorship or the removal of Donald Trump from the platform is a bad thing, but it feels like we don't talk about the positive impacts at scale of these technologies. Is there, can you explain why and is there a way to fix it? I don't know if we can fix it. I think we are beings of high neuroticism for the most part as a personality trait, not everyone, but most people. And as a compliment to that, if someone says, 10 nice things about you and one insult,

you're more bothered by the insult than you're pleased by the nice things, especially if the insult is somewhat true. So you have these media, these vehicles, Twitter is one you mentioned, where it's all kind of messages going back and forth, and you're really bugged by the messages you don't like. Most people are neurotic to begin with. It's not only taken out on big business to be clear. So Congress catches a lot of grief and some of it they deserve. Yes. Religion is not attacked the same way, but religiosity is declining. If you poll people, the military still polls quite well, but people are very disillusioned with many things. And the Martin Gurry thesis

that because of the internet, you just see more of things. And the more you see of something, whether it's good, bad or in between, the more you will find to complain about, I suspect as the fundamental mechanism here. I mean, look at Clubhouse, right? Yes. To me, it's a great service. May or may not be like my thing, but gives people this opportunity. No one makes you go on it. And all these media articles like, Oh, as Clubhouse can erect things, you know, are they going to break things? New York Times is complaining. Of course, it's their competitor as well. Yeah. I'm like, give these people a chance,

like talk it up. You may or may not like it. Like, let's praise the people who are getting something done, very iron-randy in point. As an economic thinker, as a writer, as a podcaster, what do you think about Clubhouse? What do you think about? Okay, let me just throw my feeling about it. I used to use Discord, which is another service

where people use voice. So the only thing you do is just hear each other. There's no face. You just see a little icon. That's the essential element of Clubhouse. And there's an intimacy to voice only communication. That's hard. They didn't make sense to me, but it was just what it is.

Which feels like something that won't last For some reason, maybe it's the same thing of you, but what's your sense? Is about the smad the intimacy of what's happening right now with Clubhouse? I've greatly enjoyed what I've done, but I'm not sure it's for me in the long run for two reasons. First, if you compare it to doing a podcast, podcasting has greater reach than clubhouse. So I would rather put time into my podcast. But then also, my like core asset, so to speak, is I'm a very fast reader. So audio per se is not necessarily to my advantage. I don't speak or listen faster than other people. In fact, I'm a slower listener because I like 1.0, not 1.5x. So I should spend less time on audio

and more time reading and writing. Yeah. It's interesting because you mentioned podcasts in audiobooks. I, you know, the podcasts are recorded. And so I can skip things, like I can skip commercials, or I can skip parts where it's like, ah, this part is boring. With live conversations, especially when, there's a magic to the fact that when you have a lot of people participating in that conversation, but, you know, some people are like, ah, this topic,

they're going to this thing and you can't skip it or you can't fast forward, you can go 1.5 X or 2 X, you can't speed it up. Nevertheless, there's a tension between that. So that's the productivity aspect with the actual magic of live communication where anything can happen where Elon Musk can ask the CEO of Robinhood Vlad about like, Hey, somebody like holding a gun to your head is something shady going on the magic of that That's also my criticism of like there's been a recent conversation with Bill Gates that he won a platform And had a basically a regular interview on the platform without allowing the possibility of the magic of the chaos. Yeah.

So I'm not exactly sure. It's probably not the right platform for you and for many other people who are exceptionally productive in other places, but there's still nevertheless a magic to the chaos that could be created with a left conversation that gives me pause. Maybe what it's perfect for is the tribute. So they had an episode recently that I didn't hear, but I heard it was wonderful. It was anecdotes about Steve Jobs. That you can't do one-to-one, right? And you don't want control. You want different people appearing and stepping

up and saying they're bit. Yeah. And Clubhouse is 110% perfect for that. The tribute. I love that, the tribute. But there's also the possibility, I think there was a time when somebody arranged a conversation with Steve Jobs and Bulgay's on stage, right? I remember that happened a long time ago. And, you know, it was very formal, you know, it could have probably gone better, but it was still magical to have these people that obviously like had a bunch of attention throughout their history. There's, it's so frictionless to have two major figures in world history. Just jump on a clubhouse stage. Putin and Elon Musk. Putin and Elon Musk.

And that's exactly it. So there's a language barrier there. There's also the problem that in particular, it's like Biden would have a similar problem. It's like, they're just not into a new technology. So it's very hard to catch the Kremlin up to, first of all, Twitter, but to catch them up to Clubhouse, you have to have the Elon Musk has a sense of the internet, the humor, the memes and all that kind of stuff that you have to have in order to, to like, use a new app and figure out like the timing to beat. What does this thing about, you know, so that's the challenge there.

But that's exactly it. That that magic of have two big personalities just show up. And I, I wonder if it's just a temporary thing that we're going through with the pandemic where people are just lonely. And they're seeking for that human connection that we usually get elsewhere through our work. But they'll stay lonely in my opinion. You think so? I do. So it is a pandemic thing, but I think it will persist. And the idea of wanting to be connected to more of the world, clubhouse will still offer that. And all the mental health issues out there, a lot of people have broken

ties, and they will still be lonely post vaccines. Yeah, I, from an artificial intelligence perspective, have a sense that there is like a deep loneliness in the world that all of us are really lonely. Like we don't even acknowledge it. Even people in happy relationships, it feels like there's like an iceberg of loneliness in all of us, like seeking to be understood, like deeply understood, understanding us, like having somebody with whom you can have a deep interaction enough to where you can, they can help you to understand yourself and they also understand you. Like I have a sense that artificial intelligence systems

can provide that as well, but humans, I think crave that from other humans in ways that we perhaps don't acknowledge it. I have a hope that technology will enable that more and more, like Clubhouse is an example that allows that. Or touring bots going to out compete clubhouse? Like why not sort of program your own session? You'll just talk into your device and say, here's the kind of conversation I want. And it will create the characters for you. And it may not be as good as Elon and Vladimir Putin, but it will be better than ordinary

clubhouse. Yeah. And one of the things that's missing, it's not just conversation, it's memories. A long-term memories, what current AI systems don't have is sharing experience together. Forget the words, it's like sharing the highs and the lows of life together. And the systems around us remembering that, remembering we've been through that.

Like that's the thing that creates really close relationships. It's going through some shit. Like go struggle. If you've survived together, there's something really difficult that bonds you with other humans. And this is related to immigration in the American dream in what way the people who have come to this country. However, weird and different they may be, they are their ancestors at some point probably have shared this thing.

Right, US is not going to split up. It may get more screwed up as a country, but Texas and California are not going to break off. I mean, they're big enough where they could do it, but it's just never going to happen. We've been through too much together. Yeah. where they could do it, but it's just never going to happen. We've been through too much together. Yeah. That's a hopeful message. Do you think some people have talked to Eric Weinstein? You've talked to Eric Weinstein. He has a sense that growth, the entirety of the American system is based on the assumption

that we're going to grow forever. The economy is going to grow forever. based on the assumption that we're going to grow forever at the economy is going to go forever. Do you think economic growth will continue indefinitely or will we stagnate? I've long been in agreement with Eric Peter Teal, Robert Gordon and others that growth has slowed down. I argue that in my book, The Great Stagnation appropriately titled, but the last two years I've become much more optimistic. I've seen a lot of breakthroughs in green energy and battery technology. mRNA vaccines in medicine is a big deal already.

It will repair our GDP and save millions of lives around the world. There's an anti-malaria vaccine that's now in stage three trial. It probably works. CRISPR to defeat sickle cell anemia. This space area after area after area, there's suddenly the surge of breakthroughs. I would say many of them rooted in superior computation and ultimately more's law and access to those computational abilities. So I'm much more optimistic than say, the last time I spoke to Eric,

I don't know, he moves all the time in his views. I don't know where he's at now. He's not at, he hasn't gained, that's really interesting. So your little drop of optimism comes from, like there might be a fundamental shift in the kind of things that computation has unlocked for us in terms of, like it could could be a wellspring of innovation that enables growth for a long time to come.

Like, Eric has not quite connected to the computation aspect yet to where it could be a wellspring of innovation. But you're very close to it in your own work. I don't have to tell you that. The work you're doing would not have been possible not very long ago. But the question is, how much you that the work you're doing would not have been possible not very long ago, but the question is how much does that work enable Continue growth for decades to come that all their problems some version of driverless vehicles will be a thing I'm not sure when you know much better than I do may be only partially, but that too will be a big deal

Well one of the open questions that sort of the Peter Teal School of Well, one of the open questions that sort of the Peter Teal School area of ideas is how much can be converted to technology, how many parts of our lives can technology integrate and then innovate? Can it replace healthcare, can it replace the legal system, can it replace government, not replace, but like, you know, make it digital. And thereby enable computation to improve it. Right. That's the open question, because many aspects of our lives are still not really that digitized. There was a New York Times symposium in April, which is not long ago. And they asked the so-called experts, why are we going to get vaccines?

And the most optimistic answer was in four years. And obviously, we beat that by a long mile. So I think people still haven't woken up. You mentioned my tiny drop of optimism, but it's a big drop of optimism. Is it a waterfall yet? I mean, is it just... Well, here's my pessimism. Whenever there are major new technologies, they also tend to be used for violence directly or indirectly,

radio, Hitler, not that he hit people over the head with radios, but it enabled the rise of various dictators. So the new technologies now, whatever exactly they may be, they're going to cause a lot of trouble. Yeah. And that's my pessimism, not that I think they're all gonna slow to a trickle. One was this stagnation book, 2011. 2011. Yes. It was the first of these stagnation books, in fact. It's very interesting.

But even then, I said, this is temporary. And I was predicting it would be gone in about 20 years time. I'm not sure that's exactly the right prediction, like 2030, but I think we're actually going to beat that. So you think United States might still be on top of the world for the rest of the century in terms of its economic growth impact on the world's scientific innovation, all those kinds of things. That's too long to predict, but I'm bullish on America in general.

Got it. Speaking of being bullish on America, the opposite of that is, you know, we talked about capitalism, talked about iron, and the Russian roots. What do you think about communism? Why doesn't it work? What is that the implementation? Is there anything about its ideas that you find compelling? Or is it just a fundamentally flawed system? Well communism is like capitalism. The words mean many things to different people. Yes. You could argue, my life is a tenured professor comes closer to communism. Anything the human race is seen and I would argue it works pretty well.

Yeah. But look, if you mean the Soviet Union, it devolved pretty quickly to a kind of decentralized set of incentives that were destructive rather than value maximizing. It wasn't even central planning, much less communism. So Paul Craig Roberts and Paul Agnye were correct in their descriptions of the Soviet system. Think of it as weird mixes of barter and malfunctioning incentives and being very good at a whole bunch of things, but in terms of progress, innovation and consumer goods, it really being quite a failure. And now I wouldn't call that communism, but that's what I think of the system the Soviets had. And it required an ever increasing pile of lies that both alienated people, but created

an elite that by the end of the thing no longer believed in the system itself, or even thought they were doing better by being crooks, then by just say moving to Switzerland and being an upper middle class individual. Like you would have a higher standard of living by Gorbachev's time, not Gorbachev, but if you're a number 30 in the hierarchy, you're better off as a middle class person in Switzerland. And that, of course, did not prove sustainable. And so what is it? A momentum of bureaucracy system like that? It just builds up where you lose control the original vision. And then naturally happens. It's just people. And you can't use normal profit and loss and price incentives. So you get all prices, our most prices set to low, right?

Shortages everywhere. People trade favors. You have this culture of bartered bribes, sexual favors, or you know family friends and you get more and more of that and you over time lose more and more of the information and the prices and quantities and practices and norms you had and that's sort of slowly decays and then by the end no one is believing in it. That would be my take. But again, you're the expert here. The Russian scholar. Well, I perhaps know more an expert than Iron Rand. It's more personal than it is scholarly or historic. So Stalin held power for 30 years.

Vladimir Putin has held power for 21 years. Vladimir Putin has held power for 21 years, we could argue, he took a little break. But not much. He was still holding power, I think. And it's still possible now with the new constitution that he could hold power from longer than Stalin, long over the 30 years, what do you think about the man, the state of affairs in Russia, in general, the system they have there? Is there something interesting to use and economists as a human being about Russia today? Everything is interesting.

I mean, he really, as far as my take, as you know, the Russian economy, starting what, 1999-2000, has really quite a few years of super excellent growth. And Putin is still riding on that. It more or less coincides with his rise as the truly focal figure on the scene. Since then, pretty recently, they've had a bunch of years of negative 4% to 5% growth in a row, which is terrible. The economy is way too dependent on fossil fuels, but the structural problem is this. You need a concordance across economic

power, social power, political power. They don't have to be allocated identically, but they have to be allocated consistently. And the Russian system under Putin, from almost the beginning, has never been able to have that, that ultimately his incentives are to steer the system, where the economic power is in a small number of hands in a non-diversified way. The system won't deliver sustainable gains and living standards any more ever, the way it's set up now, that with fossil fuel prices go up, they'll have some good years, for sure. And that is really quite structural, what has gone wrong.

And then on top of that, you can have an opinion of Putin, but you've got to start with those structural problems. And that's why it's just not going to work. But he had all those good years in the beginning. So the number of Russians say who live here or in Russia, who love Putin and its sincere, they're not just afraid of being dragged away. That's a real phenomenon. Yeah, I'm really torn on Putin's approval rating, real approval rating, seems to be very high. And I'm torn in whether that's has to do with the fact

that there is control of the press, or if it's a, which is the people I talk to who are Russia family and so on, a genuine love of Putin appreciation of what Putin has done and is going to do with Russia. And a lot of that would go away if the press were freer, I think. Yes. Well, Singapore realizes this. Anyone discussed by the press, matter who they are, people in Singapore have done a great job. Yes.

But if you're discussed by the press, you don't look good. Tech company executives are learning this, right? It's just like a rule. So in that sense, I think the rating is artificially high, but I don't by any means think it's all insincere, but that high popularity, I view as bearish for Russia. I would feel better about the country if people were more pissed off at him. Yeah, that's right. It's nice to see free speech, even if it's full of hate. I am also troubled on the scientific side and entrepreneurial side.

It seems difficult to be an entrepreneur in Russia. It's not even in terms of rules. It's just culturally that people I speak to. It's not easy to build a business. No, it's not easy to build a business to, no, it's not easy to even dream of building a business in Russia. That's just not part of the culture, part of the conversation. It's almost like the conversation is, if you want to be the next Bill Gates, Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or whatever, you come to America, that's the sense they have. And I don't. It's three matters.

It's history. It's a history. It's a structural problems of today. What do you mean? It's all the same thing. So a history of hostility to commerce, which, of course, the old USSR is gone. But a lot of the attitudes remain. A lot of the corruption remains. You have this legacy distribution of wealth from the auctioning off of the assets, which is not conducive to some kind of broadly egalitarian democracy. And so you have the small number of power points away from the very wealthy and from Putin. And they support that culture and the return of interest in like Orthodox church and all that. It's all part of the same piece, I think, because the old Orthodox church is not that pro-commerce, you'd have to say, but it's traditionalist, it's pro-family, those are safer ideas.

And then there's such a great safety valve, the most ambitious smartest people, like they probably will learn English. They sort of can look like they belong in all sorts of other countries that can show up and blend in. Super talented. They've probably had an excellent education, especially if they're from one of the two major cities, but even if not so, even from Siberia. And they go off, they leave. They're not a source of of opposition and that keeps the whole thing up and running for another generation. Yeah. What do you make of the other, the other big player, China, they seem to have a very different messed up, but also functioning system, they seem to be much better at encouraging entrepreneurs. They're choosing winners, but what do you make of the entire attorney system?

Why does it work as well as it does currently? What are your concerns about it? What are its threats to the United States or possible? It's like, what do it? You said like wisdom isn't when two ideas come together. Is there some possible benefits of these kinds of ideas coming together? It's amazing what China has done, but I would say to put it in perspective, if you compare them to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, they've still done much worse, not even close. And that's both living standards or I hesitate to cite democracy as an unalloyed good

in and of itself, but there's more freedom in all those other places. Buy a lot. So China has all these problems of history, but they've managed, as actually the Soviets did in the middle of the 20th century, one of the two great mass migrations from the countryside to cities, which boosts productivity enormously and will sustain totalitarian systems. But they moved, trimototalitarian system to an oligarchy where the CCP is actually, at least for a while, hey, it has been really good at governing, have made a lot of very good decisions.

You have to admit that. I don't know how long that streak will continue with one person so much now holding authority in a more extreme manner. The selection pressures for the next generation of high-level CCP members, probably become much worse. You have this general problem of the state-owned enterprise as losing relative productivity compared to the private sector.

Well, we're going to kind of hold Jack Ma on this island and he can only issue like we are at hello statements. It kind of smells bad to me. I don't feel that it's about to crash. But I don't see them supplanting America as like the world's number one country. I think they will model through and have very serious problems. But there's enough talent there that they will model through. Is there ideas from China, from any one general of large scale role of government that you find might be useful. Like, Andrew Yang recently ran on a platform UBI, right, Universal Basic Income.

Is there some interesting ideas of large scale government, sort of welfare programs at scale that you find interesting? Well, keep in mind, the current version of the Chinese Communist Party, post-Mau, dismantled what was called the Iron Rice Bowl. So it took apart the healthcare protections, a lot of the welfare system, a lot of the guaranteed jobs. So the economic rise of China coincided with the weakening of welfare. I'm not saying that's causal per se, but people think of China as having a government that

takes care of everyone. It's very far from the truth. And by a lot of metrics, I don't mean control over people's lives. I don't mean speech, but by a lot of metrics, economically, we have a lot more government than they do. So what one means here by government, private control, I don't think you can just add up the numbers and get a simple answer. They've been fantastic at building infrastructure in cities,

in ways that will attract people from the countryside. And furthermore, they more or less enforce a meritocracy in this sense. Like if you're a kid of a rich guy, you'll get unfair privilege. That's unfair, but systems can afford that. If you are smart and from the countryside and your parents have nothing, you will be elevated and sent to a very good school graduate school because of the exam system. And they do that and they mean that very consistently. It's like the Soviets had a version of that like the chess and romantic piano, not for everything, but where they had it. Like, yeah, again, they were tremendous, right? Yeah, exactly. It's a, yeah,

Chinese have it in so many areas, a genuine meritocracy in this one way. That moves people from the world to this big city, and that's, that's, that's a big boost of productivity for so amount of time. And when they get there, they're taken seriously. Jack Ma was riding a bicycle teaching English in his late 20s. He was a poor guy. So not a society of credentialism or in America is way too much a credentialist society. As we were talking about even with the Nobel Prize.

Yeah. But what do you think about these large government programs like UBI? The one version of UBI that makes the most sense to me is the Mitt Romney version, UBI for kids. Like kids are vulnerable. If their parents screw up, you shouldn't blame the kid or make the kid suffer. I believe in something like UBI for kids, maybe just cash.

But if you don't have kids, even with AI, my sense is at least in the world we know, you should be able to find a way to adjust. You might have to move, you know, to North Dakota, to work, you know, next to fracking, say, but look before the pandemic, the two most robot intensive societies, Japan and the US, US at least for manufacturing, we're at full employment. So maybe there's some far off day where there's literally no work. John Lennon, imagine it's piped, you know, everywhere. And then we might revisit the question.

But for now, we, you know, we are rising wages in the Trump years and full employment. So I don't see automation as a threat that fundamentally like shakes our society. It's a threat in the following sense. The new technologies are harder to work with from any people. Yeah. And that's a social problem. But I'm not sure a universal basic income is the right answer to that very real problem. Well, that's also, I like the UBI for kids. It's also your definition or the line, the threshold

for what is vulnerable and what is basic human nature. Going back to Russia, life is suffering that struggle is a part of life. and perhaps sort of changing maybe what defines the 21st century is having multiple careers and adjusting and learning and evolving. And some of the technology in terms of some of the technology we see like the internet allows us to Make those pivots easier You know allows later life education possible and it makes it possible. I don't know And your earlier point about loneliness being this fundamental human problem, which I would agree with strongly UBI if it's at a high level will make that worse. I mean say you be I or higher enough you could just sit at home

People are not going to be happy. They don't actually want that. Yeah, and we've relearned that in the pandemic Yeah, the flip side the hope with you be I is you have a little bit more freedom to find the thing that alleviates your loneliness That's the idea So it's it's kind of an open question. If I give you a million dollars or a billion dollars, will you pursue the thing you love? Will you be, will you be more motivated to find the thing you love to do the thing you love? Or will you be lazy and lose yourself in the sort of daily activities that don't actually bring you joy, but, you know, pacify you in some kind of way where you can, he's just let

the day slip by. That's, that's open question. But a lot of the great creators did not have huge cushions, whether it's Mozart or James Brown or the great painters in history, they had to work pretty hard. And if you look at heirs to great fortunes, maybe I'm forgetting someone, but it's hard to think of any who have creatively been important as novelists or they might have continued to run the family business.

But in a van Gogh was not heirs, not heir to a great family fortune. It's sad that cushions get in the way of progress. Which is, yeah, so there's the same point about prizes, right? Yeah. Herring too much money is like winning a prize. We mentioned Eric, Eric Weinstein. I know you agree on a bunch of things.

Is there some beautiful, fascinating, insightful disagreement that you have? There's yet to be resolved with him. We ran a bunch of things. Is there some beautiful, fascinating insights for disagreement that you have? Does he have to be resolved with him? Is there some ideas that you guys battle it out on? Is it the stagnation question that you mentioned? That's one of them, but here's at least two others. But I would stress, Eric is always evolving. So I'm just talking about a time slice, Eric, right?

I don't know where he's at right now. Like I heard him on clubhouse three nights ago, but that was three nights ago. But I think he's far too pessimistic about the impact of immigration on US science. He thinks it has displaced US scientists, which I think that is partly true. I just think we've gotten better talent. I'm like bring it on double down Mm-hmm and look at Currico, you know who basically came up with mRNA vaccines. She was from Hungary and I was ridiculed and mocked. She couldn't cut her papers published. She stuck at it An American might not have been so stubborn because we have these cushions

So Eric is all worried, you know, like mathematicians coming in, they're discouraging native US citizens from doing math. I'm like, bring in the best people. If we all end up in other applications, absolutely fine by me. Does it trouble you that we kick them out after they get the degree often? I would give anyone with a plausible graduate degree agreed card universally. Yeah, that's I agree with that makes no sense. It makes so strange that the best people that come here suffer here create awesome stuff here

then when we kick them out doesn't make any sense. Here's another view I have I call it open borders for Belarus. Now Russia's is a big country. I would gladly like increase the Russian quota by 3x, 4x, 5x. Like I, not 20 percent, but it'd be a big boost. But Belarus, small country, like why can't it end their poor? And they have decent education and a lot of talent there. Why can't we just open the door? Yeah, and convert a Belarus passport to a green card Open borders for Belarus. It's my new campaign slogan. Are you running for president? Twenty-two four? Well, right in sir Welcome, okay What's the second thing you disagree with there?

Trade Again, I'm not sure where he's at now, but he is suspicious of trade in a way that I am not. I do understand what's called the China shock has been a big problem for the U.S. middle class. I fully accept that. I think most of that is behind us. National security issues aside, I think free trade is very much a good thing.

Eric, I'm not sure he'll say it's not a good thing, but he won't say it is a good thing. And I know he's kind of, it's like Eric, free trade. But look, on things like vaccines, I don't believe in free trade. You want vaccine production in your own country. Look at the EU. They have enough money. No one will send them vaccines. What's different about vaccines? There's some things you want to prioritize the citizenry on. You could argue it would be cheaper to produce all US manufactured vaccines in India. They have the technologies, obviously lower wages.

But look, there's talking India right now of cutting off the export of vaccines. If you outsource your vaccine production, you're not sure the other country will respect the norm of free trade. So you need to keep some vaccine production in your country. It's an exception to free trade, not to the logic. A bunch of things the Navy uses. You can't buy those components from China. Like that's insane. But look, it would be cheaper to do so, right? Yeah. Let me completely shift topics on something that's fascinating. So all the same topic, but great.

Everything is interesting. What do you think about what the hell is money? And the recent, the recent excitement around cryptocurrency that brings to the forefront the philosophical discussion of the nature of money. Are you bullish on cryptocurrency? Are you excited about it? What does it make you think about how the nature of money is changing? No one knows what money is. Probably no one ever knew. Go back to medieval times, bills of exchange, were they money? Maybe it's just a semantic debate. Gold, silver,

what about copper coins, what about metals that were considered legal tender, but not always circulating. Yeah. What about credit? So being confused about money is the natural state of affairs for human beings. And if there's more of that, I'd say that's probably a good thing. Now, crypto per se, I think Bitcoin has taken over a lot of the space held by gold. That to me seems sustainable. I'm not short Bitcoin. I don't have some seems sustainable. I'm not short bit coin. I don't have some view that the price has to be different than the current price, but I know it changes every moment. I am deeply uncertain about the less of crypto, which seems connected to ultimate visions of using it for transactions in ways where I'm not sure whether it be, you know, prediction markets or DeFi. I'm not sure whether it be prediction markets or DeFi, I'm not sure the retail

demand really is there once it is regulated like everything else is. I would say I'm 40, 60 optimistic on those forms of crypto. That is, I think, at somewhat more likely they failed and succeed, but I take them very seriously. So we're talking about it becoming one of the main currencies in the world. That's what we're discussing. That I don't think will happen. So, but the reality is that Bitcoin used to be in the single digits of a dollar and now has crossed $50,000 for a single Bitcoin. Do you think it's possible it reaches something like a million dollars? I

Don't think we have a good theory of the value of Bitcoin if people decide it's worth a million dollars It's worth a million dollars, but isn't that money? Like you said isn't the ultimate state of money confusion? Or however beautifully put it it's like valuing an Andy Warhol painting so when Warhol started off Probably those things had no value yeah sketches early sketches of shoes Now a good Warhol could be worth over 50 million. That's an incredible rate of price appreciation. Bitcoin is seeing a similar trajectory. I don't pretend to know where it will stop.

But it's about trying to figure out what do people think of Andy Warhol? He could be out of fashion in a century. Maybe yes, maybe no. But you don't think about war halls as money. They perform some money like functions. You can even use them as collateral for like deals between gangs. But they're not basically money nor is Bitcoin. And the transactions velocity of Bitcoin, I would think is likely to fall if anything. So you don't think there will be some kind of phase shift will it become adopted and become mainstream for the For the main for one of the main mechanisms of transactions Bitcoin. No now

You know, Ether has some chance at that. I would bet against it But I wouldn't give you a definitive no and your wood coin is too costly It may be fine to hold it like gold, but gold is also costly. You have smart people trying to make say, ether, much more effective as a currency than Bitcoin. And there's certainly a decent chance they will succeed. Yeah, there's a lot of innovation and you will smart contracts with NFTs as well. There's a lot of interesting innovations that are plugging into the human psyche somehow,

just like money does. Money seems to be this viral thing, our ideas of money. And if the idea is strong enough, it seems to be able to take hold. There's network effects that just take over. I particularly see that with, I'd love to get your comment on the Dorchcoin, which is basically by a single human being Elon Musk has been created. It's like these celebrities can have a huge ripple effect on the impact of money. Is it possible that in the 21st century, people like Elon Musk and celebrities, I don't know, Donald Trump, the rock, whoever else can have, can actually define, you know,

the currencies that we use, maybe can, can doch go and become the primary currency of the world. I think of it as like baseball cards. So right now every baseball player has a baseball card. And the players who are stars, their cards can end up worth a fair amount of money. And that's stable. We've had it for many decades. It's sort of the player defines the card. They sign a contract with tops or whatever company.

Now could you imagine celebrities, baseball players, LeBron James having their own currencies instead of cards? Absolutely. How could you imagine celebrities, baseball players, LeBron James having their own currencies instead of cards? Absolutely, and you're somewhat seeing that right now, as you mentioned, artists with these unique works on the blockchain. But I'm not sure those are macroeconomically important. If it's just a new class of collectibles that people have fun with, again, I say bring it on.

But whether there are use cases beyond that, the challenge fiat monies, which actually work very well yesterday I sent money to a family in Ethiopia that I help support and less than 24 hours. They got that money digitally Yes, no not digitally through my bank, my primitive dinosaur bank, BB and T, Mid-Atlantic Bank, had quartered in North Carolina, you know, charted by the Fed, regulated by the FDAC and the OCC. Now, you could say, well, the exchange rate was not so great. I don't see crypto as close to beating that once you take into account all of the last mile problems. Fiat currency works really well.

People are not sitting around bitching about it. And when you talk to crypto people, the number who have to postulate some out of the blue hyperinflation, there's no evidence for that whatsoever. That's Denise assigned. They're not thinking clearly about how hard they have to work to outcompete fiat currency. There's a bunch of different technologies that are really exciting that don't want to address how difficult it is to outcompete the current except an alternative.

So for example, autonomous vehicles, a lot of people are really excited. Yeah. But it's not trivial to outcompete Uber on the cost and the effectiveness and the user experience and all those kinds of, sorry, Uber driven by humans. Yes. And it's not, you know, that's taken for granted, I think, that look, wouldn't it be amazing, how amazing would the world look when the cars are driving themselves fully, you know,

it's going to drive the cost down, you can remove the cost of drivers, all those kinds of things. But it's, when you actually get down to it and have to build a business around it, it's actually very difficult to do. And I guess you're saying your sense as a similar competition is facing cryptocurrency. Like you have to actually present a killer app reason to switch from Fiat currency to Ethereum or whatever. And the Biden people are going to regulate crypto and they're going to do it soon. So something like DeFi, I fully get why that is cheaper or for some can be cheaper than

other ways of conducting financial intermediation. But some of that is regulatory arbitrage. It will not be allowed to go on forever for better or worse. I would rather see it given greater tolerance. But the point is banking lobby is strong. The government will only let it run so far. There'll be capital requirements, reporting requirements imposed, and it will lose a lot of those advantages. What do you make of Wall Street bets? Another thing that recently happened that shook the world and At least me from the outside of perspective

Make me question what I do and don't understand about our economics Which is a bunch of different a bunch a large number of individuals getting together on the internet and having a large scale impact on the markets If you tell a group of people and coordinate them through the internet, we're going to play a fun game that might cost you money, but you're going to make the headlines, and there's a chance you'll screw over some billionaires and hedge funds, enough people will play that game. Yes. So that game might continue, but I don't think it's of macroeconomic importance.

And the price of those stocks in the medium term will end up wherever it ought to be. So these are little outliers from a mech-economics perspective. They're not going to, these are not signals of shifting power. Like from centralized power to the distributed power. These aren't some fundamental changes in where our economy works. I think of it as a new brand of esSports, maybe more fun than the old brand, which is fine, right? It's like push the energy into the corners where you want it. It doesn't bother me, but I think people are seeing it as more fun amount than it is. It's a new eSport, more fun for many, but more expensive than the old e sports Like Jess is a new eSport. Yeah super cheap. Not as fun is like, you know, sending hedge funds to their doom

But like what would you expect? The poacher that I love it. Okay, but macroeconomically, it's not there's not fundamental. Okay. I was gonna say I hope you're right Because I'm uncomfortable with the chaos of the masses. That's crazy. But I also think that chaos is somewhat real to be clear. Yes. But it will matter through other channels, not through manipulating, you know, GameStopper. Yeah. AMC. So you're seeing the real macro phenomenon. When people see a real macro phenomenon, they tend to make every micro story fit the narrative.

And this micro story like it fits the narrative, but it doesn't mean it's importance fits the narrative. That's how I would kind of dissect the mistake I think people are making. Do you do within the macro phenomena that are there? Do you mean everyone's weird now? The internet either allows us to be weirder or makes us weirder. I'm not sure what's the right way to put it.

Maybe a mix of both. You're probably right that it allows us to be weirder because well, this is the other, okay. So this connects our to previous conversation. Does America allow us to be weirder? Or does it make us weirder? Like say we're reared in somewhat neurotic to begin with. But the only messages we get are white DIs and Howard,

and I love Lucy and Network TV. Like that's going to keep us within certain bounds. Yeah. In good and bad ways. That's obviously totally gone. And the internet you can connect to, not just Q and on, but all sorts of things. Many of them just fantastic, right?

Yeah. But in good and bad ways, it makes us weirder. So that maybe is troubling, right? Like if someone's worried about that, I would at least say they should give it deep, serious thought. And then it has a whole lot of ebbs and flows,

micro realizations of the weirdness that don't actually matter. So like chess players today, they play a lot more weird openings than they did 20 years ago. Like it reflects the same thing, because you can research any weird opening on the internet, but like does that matter? Probably not. So a lot of the things we see are just like

the weird chess openings. And to figure out which are like the weird chess openings and which are fundamental to the new and growing weirdness. Like that's what a hedge fund investor type should be trying to do. I just think no one knows yet. It's like this itself, this fun weird guessing game, which we're partly engaging in right now. Exactly. And I mean, Eric talks about on the science side of things. I mean, I said, like at MIT, especially in the machine learning field, there's a natural institutional resistance to the weird. It's very, as they talk about, it's

difficult to hire weird faculty, for example. Correct. You want to hire and give tenure to people that are safe, not weird. And that's one of the concerns is it seems like the weird people are the ones that push the science forward usually. Right. And so like, how do you, how do you balance the two? It's not obvious. Because it's another area where Eric and I disagree. As I interpret him, he thinks academia is totally bankrupt.

Yeah. And I think it's only partially bankrupt. How do we fix it? Because I'm with you. I'm bullish on academia. You need up and coming schools that end up better than where they started off. And MIT was once one of them. Yes. Now, they're not in every area. And some areas, they have become the problem. Yep.

You Chicago, you wouldn't call it up and coming, but it's still different. And that's great. Let's hope they manage to keep it that way. The biggest problem to me is the rank absurd conformism at kind of second tier schools, maybe in the top 40, but not in the top dozen that are just trying to be like a junior MIT, but it's mediocre and copycat. And they're the most dogmatic and forestish of weirdness that like Harvard is more open than those second tier schools. And those second tier schools are pretty good, typically, right?

Yeah. But the mediocrity is enforced there. Correct. Very strictly. And the homogenization pressures, try and climb their rankings by another three places and be a little closer to MIT, though you'll never touch them. That to me is very harmful. And you'd rather they be more like Chicago, more like Caltech,

or the older Caltech, all the more, like pick some model, be weird in it. You might fail. That's socially better. Yeah, but so the problem with MIT, for example, is the mediocrity is really enforced on the junior faculty. Yeah. So like the people that are allowed to be weird, or actually they just don't even ask for permissions anymore, are more senior faculty. And that's good, of course, but you want the weird young people. You know, I find to, you know, this podcast, I like talking to tech people,

and I find the young faculty to be really boring. They are. They're the most boring of faculty. Their work is interesting technically, technically. But just the passion. They are dredges. And it was some of them sneak by. Like you have like the Max Tecmar, the young version of Max Tecmar,

who knows how to play the role of boring and fitting in. And then on the side, he does the weird shit. But they're not there far and few in between, which I'd love to figure out a way to shake up that system because, you look at MIT's Broad Institute, right? And biomedical, it's been a huge hit. I'm not privy to their internal doings,

but I suspect they support weird more than the formal departments do at the junior level. Yes, that's probably true. Yeah, I don't know. Whatever they're doing is working, but it needed to figure it out because I think the best ideas still do come from the, so forget my apologies, but for the humanity side of things, I don't know, I don't know anything about, but the engineering and the science side, I think there's so many amazing ideas that are still coming from universities.

It's not true that you don't know anything about the humanities. You're doing the humanities right now. Well, we're talking about people. There are no numbers put on a blackboard, right? There's no hypothesis testing per se. You have however many subscribers to your podcast, all listening to you on the humanities. numbers put on a blackboard, right? There's no hypothesis testing per se. No, yeah, you have however many subscribers to your podcast all listening to you on the humanities. Every, whatever your frequency is, I'm not in the department of the humanities. That's why

they have innovative. They have very different conversations. There's the number of emails I get about, listen, I really deeply respect diversity and the full scope of what diversity means and also the monaril scope of different races and genders and so on. It's a really important topic, but there's a disproportionate number of emails I'm getting about meetings and discussions and that just kind of is overwhelming. I don't get enough emails from people like a meeting about why are all your ideas bad? Let's, for example, let me call out MIT. Why don't we do more, why don't we kick Stanford's ass

or Google's ass more importantly in deep learning and machine learning and AI research? What C-Sale for example used to be a laboratory is a laboratory for artificial AI research. What C-Sail, for example, used to be a laboratory is a laboratory for artificial intelligence research. And why is that not the beacon of what of greatness in artificial intelligence? Let's have those meetings as well. Diversity talk has oddly become this new mechanism

for enforcing conformity. Yes, exactly. And right. So it's almost like this conformity mechanism finds the hot new topic to use to enforce further conformity. Exactly. Oh, boy, I still hope I may not optimistic. The humanities have innovated through podcasts, including yours and minds. Yeah.

And they're alive and well. All the bad talk you hear about the humanities in universities. There's been this huge end-run of innovation on the internet. Yeah, and it's amazing. You're right. I never thought, I mean, this is humanities. This podcast is fine. I've been speaking pros all once in a while. You didn't know it, right?

Yeah, I am actually part of the humanities department on my team. I did not realize this and I will fully embrace it from this moment on. Look, you have this thing, the media lab. I'm sure you know about it. Done some excellent things, done a lot of very bogus things, but you're out competing them. You're blowing them out of the water. Yeah.

Like, you are them. Yeah, and I'm talking to those folks and they, they're trying to, well, they're trying to figure it out. I mean, they had their issues with Jeff Epstein and so on, but how the outside of that, there's a I've actually gone through a shift with this particular podcast, for example, where at first, it was seen as one very first, it was seen as a distraction. Second, it was a source of like almost like a kind of jealousy, like the same kind of jealousy you feel when junior faculty outshines the senior faculty. And now it's more like, oh, okay, this is a thing. Like we should do more of that.

We should embrace this guy. We should embrace this thing. So there's a sense that podcasting and whatever this is, it's a something podcasting Will drive some innovation with an MIT within different universities There's a sense that things are changing. It's just that universities lag behind and my hope is that You know, they catch up quickly They they they they innovate in some way that goes along with the innovations of the internet I'll mind the internet. Well, Irace them for a long time, maybe forever. Well, I mean, but it's okay if they're as long as they keep them. Yeah, and we're both in universities, so we have multiple hats on here as we're speaking.

We can complain about the university, but that's like complaining about the podcast, right? Yeah. We've been them. But speaking on the weird, you've, uh, in the best sense of the word weird, you've written about and made the case that we should take UFO sightings more seriously. So that's one of the things that I've been in on data with, sort of the excitement and the passion that people have for the possibility of extraterrestrial life of life out there in the universe. I've always felt this excitement,

I've just looked in up at the stars and wondering what the hell's out there. But there's people that have more like more grounded excitement and passion of actually interacting with the with aliens on this here are planet. What's the case? They from your perspective for taking these sightings more seriously. The data from the Navy to me seem quite serious.

I don't pretend that I have the technical abilities to judge it as data, but there are numerous senators at the very highest of levels, former heads of CIA, Brennan. I talked to him, didn't interview with him. I asked him, what's up with these? What do you think it is? He basically said that was the single most likely explanation of alien origin. Now you don't have to agree with him. But look, if you know how government works, these senators, or Hillary Clinton for that matter, or Brennan, they sat down, they were briefed by their smartest people and they said, Hey, what's going on here? And everyone around the table,

I believe, is telling them we don't know. And that is sociological data. I take very seriously. I have not seen a debunking of the technical data, which is eyewitness reports and images and radar. Again, at a technical level, I feel quite uncertain on that turf. But evaluating the testimony of witnesses, it seems to me it's now at a threshold where one ought to take it seriously.

Yeah, there's one of the problems with UFO sightings is that because of people with good equipment, don't take it seriously. It's such a taboo topic that you have just like really shitty equipment collecting data. So you have the blurry, bigfoot kind of situation where you have just bad video and all those kinds of things. As opposed to, I mean, there's a bunch of people audio low from Harvard talking about Amoa Moa. It's just like people with the equipment

to do the data collection don't want to how about. And that creates a kind of divide where the scientists ignore that this is happening. And there's the masses of people who are curious about it. And then there's the government that's full of secrets that's leaking some confusion and it creates distrust in the government, it creates distrust in science, and it prevents the scientists from being able to explore some cool topics, some exciting possibilities that they should be, be curious kids like Avi talks about. Even if it has nothing to do with aliens, what everything answer is, it has to be something

fascinating. We already know everything's it has to be something fascinating. We already know everything's interesting, but this is fascinating. That all said, I suspect they're not of alien origin. Let me tell you my reason. The people who are all gung-ho, they do a kind of reasoning in reverse, or argument from elimination. They figure out a bunch of things that can't be like is it a Russian advanced vehicle? No, probably pretty good arguments there. Is it a Chinese advanced vehicle? No.

Is it people like from the earth's future coming back in time? No. And they go through a few others. They have some really good no arguments. Then they're like, well, what we've got left is aliens. This argument from elimination, I don't actually find that persuasive. You can talk yourself into a lot of mistaken ideas that way. The positive evidence that it's aliens is still quite weak. The positive evidence that it's a puzzle is quite huge. And whatever the solutions of the puzzle is, it might be fascinating. And it's going to be so weird or fascinating, or maybe even trivial, but that's weird in its own way, that we can't set up by elimination all the things that might be able to be.

Yeah. And just like you said, the debunking that I've seen of these kinds of things are less explorations and solutions to the puzzle and more, I kind of have hard to dismissal. And Avi, as you mentioned to him on your podcast with him, he's been attacked an awful lot. And when I hear the idea carrier attacked, I get very suspicious of the critics. If he's wrong, like just tell me why,

yeah, like my ears are open. I don't have a set view on oh, Moa, Moa, you know, I know I can't judge hobby's arguments. He can't convince me in that sense. I'm too stupid to understand how good his argument may or may not be. And like you said, ultimately, in the argument is in the in the meeting of that debate is when we were we find the wisdom like dismissing it. That's one of the thing that troubles me. There's a bunch of people like Nietzsche sometimes dismiss this way. I'm Rand is sometimes dismiss this way. Oh, here we go. Like there's a as opposed to arguing against her ideas, dismissing it. All right. And that that does that's not

productive at all. She may be wrong in a lot of things, but like laying out some arguments, even if they're basic human arguments, that's where we arrive at the wisdom. I love that. Is there something deeper to be said about our trust in institutions and governments and so on? That has to do with UFOs. There is a kind of suspicion that the US government and governments in general are hiding stuff from us when you talk about UFOs. This is my view on that. If we declassified everything, I think we would find a lot more evidence all pointing toward the same puzzle.

There aren't some alien men being held underground. Yes. There's not some secret file that lays out whatever is happening. I think the real lesson about government is government cannot bring itself to any new belief on this matter of any kind. And it's a kind of funny inertia. Like government is deeply puzzled. They're more puzzled than they want to admit to us, which like, I'm okay with that actually. They shouldn't just be outpanicking people in the streets. But at the end of the day, it's a bit like approving the AstraZeneca

vaccine. Yeah. Like, which does work? And they haven't approved it. Like, when are they going to do it? Like, when is our government actually, if only internally, going to take this more than just seriously, but like, take it truly seriously. Yeah. And I just don't know if we have that capability kind of mentally To sound like Eric Weinstein for To stay on the same topic although on the surface shifting completely Because it is all the same topic you have written and studied art What do you think we humans long to create

art, human society in general, and just the human mind? Well, most of us don't really long to create art, right? I would start with that point. You think so. You think that's a unique weirdness of some particular humans. I think I don't know, 10% of humans roughly, which is a lot, but it is somewhat weird. Yeah. Uh, I don't aspire to create art. You could say, like writing nonfiction, there's something art like about it, but it's a different urge. I would say. Yeah.

Uh, so why do some people have it? I think human brains are very different. It's a different notion of working through a problem, like you and I enjoy working through analytic problems. For me, economics for UI and other areas, or your humanities podcasts, but that's fun. Yeah. For that problem to be visual and linked to physical materials and putting

those like on a canvas, to me, it's not a huge leap, but I really don't want to do it. Like it would be pain. If you paid me like 500 bucks to spend an hour painting, I don't know. Is that worth it? Maybe. But like, I'm happy when that hour's over. And would not be proud or happy with the results. It would suck. I don't think I would do it, actually. I do you think you're suppressing some deep. I mean, absolutely not. Now, when I was young, I played the guitar as you played the guitar, and that I greatly enjoyed enjoyed although I was never good

But it helped me appreciate music much much more. Well, this is the question. Okay, so from the perspective of the Observer and appreciate our vart, you said good Is there such a concept as good in art? There's clearly a concept of bad My guitar playing fit that concept Okay, but I wasn't trying to be good. I wanted to learn like how do chords work? Okay. And it was a jazz improvisation work. I was blues, different classical guitar, sort of physically.

How do you make those sounds? Yes. And I did learn those things and you can, you can't learn everything about them, but you couldn't learn a lot about them without ever being good or even trying to be that good, but I could play all the notes. So from the observer perspective, what do you apologize to the observer question? What's the most beautiful and maybe moving piece of art even counter in your life? It's not an absurd question at all.

And I think about this quite a bit. I would say the two winners by a clear margin are both by Michael Angelo. It's the Paita in the Vatican and the David statue in Florence. Why? Historical context for just purity of the the the creation itself. I don't think you can view it apart from historical context and being in Florence or in the Vatican is that you're already prime for a lot, right? I can't pull that out, but just technically how they express the emotion of human form, I do honestly intellectually think they're the two greatest artworks for doing that. That's not all that art does, not all art is about the human form, but they are phenomenal.

And I think critical opinion, not that everyone agrees, but my view is not considered a crazy one within the broader part of critical opinion. Now in painting, I think the most I was ever blown away was to see Vermeer's artwork. It's called the Art of Painting, and it's in Vienna in the Quince de Stortisius Museum. And I saw that, I think I was 23. It just stunned me because I've seen reproductions, but live in front of you in huge, a completely different artwork. And again, yeah, primed. Yes. And I was living abroad for the first time in Vienna, itself, the city and so on. Now, unlike the Michelangelo's, that is not my current favorite painting, but that would be like historically the one I would pick.

What do you make in the context of those choices? What do you make a modern art and I apologize if I'm not using the correct terminology, but art that maybe is goes another level of weird outside of the art that you've kind of mentioned and breaks all the conventions and rules and so on and becomes something else entirely that doesn't make sense in the same way that David might. I think a lot of it is phenomenal and I would say the single biggest mistake that really smart people make is to think contemporary art or music for that matter. It's just a load of junk or rubbish. It's just like a kind of mathematics they haven't learned yet. It's really hard to learn. Maybe some people can never learn it.

But there's a very large community of super smart well-educated people who spend their lives with it, who love it. Those are genuine pleasures. They understand it. They talk about it with the common language. And to think that somehow they're all frauds, it just isn't true. Like one doesn't have to like it oneself. Just like, love, have a smayer, may not be your thing. But it is amazing. And for me personally, highly rewarding. And if someone doesn't get it, I do kind of have the conceded response of thinking like in that area, I'm just smarter than you are. Yeah, so the interesting thing is as with most, we get back to Eric Weinstein again. Yes. He's in general smarter than I am. This I get. But when it comes to contemporary

artistic creations, I'm smarter than he is. So he's not a fan of contemporary art. I don't want to speak for him. I've heard him say derogate. He's evolving always. He's evolving always. I've heard him say derogate to our things about some of it. It doesn't mean he doesn't love some other parts of it. So I wonder if there's just a higher learning curve, a steeper learning curve for contemporary art, meaning like it takes more work to appreciate the stories,

the context for which they're like thinking about this work. It feels like in order to appreciate the stories, the context for which they're like thinking about this work. It feels like in order to appreciate the art, uh, contemporary, certain pieces of contemporary art, you have to know the story better behind the art. I think that's true for many people, but I think it's a funny, shaped distribution because there's a whole other set of people. Sometimes just small children and they get abstract art more easily. Yeah. You show them Vermeer or Rembrandt, they don't get it, but just like a wall of color, they're in love with it. So I don't think I know the full story.

Again, some strange kind of distribution, the entry barriers are super high or super low, but not that often in between. But you would challenge saying that there's a lot to be explored in contemporary art is just you need to learn. Yeah, it's one of the most profound bodies of human thought out there and it's part of the humanities. And yes, there are people who also don't like podcasts, right? And that's fine. Yeah. He've also been a scholar of food. We're just going through the entirety of the human experience today on this humanity's podcast. Another absurd question, say this conversation is the last thing you ever do in your life. I, we're in the suit, would murder you at the end of the conversation. So this is your

last Dan earth, but I would offer you a last meal. What would that meal contain? We can also travel to other parts of the world. But we have to travel because my preferred last meal here, I probably had like two nights ago, which is what? Can't know. The best restaurant around here is called Mama Changs, and it's in Fairfax, and it's food from Wuhan, actually. And they take pandemic safety seriously, in addition to the food being very good. But this is what I would do. I would fly to Hiramoseo in northern Mexico,

which is some of the best food in Mexico, but I sadly only had two days there. So somewhere like Wahaka, Puebla, I think they have food just as good or some people would say better, but I've spent a lot of time in those places. So the scarce, wait, is it possible the scarcity of time contributed to the richness of the experience? Of course, but the point is that scarcity still holds. So I want one more dose as a food from Homocio. Can we describe what the point is that scarcity still holds. Yeah, so I want one more dose. Yes. The food from Ham Oceo. Can we describe what the food is? It's the one kind of Mexican food that at least dominally is just like the Mexican food you get in the US.

So there are burritos. There's fajitas. It doesn't taste at all like our stuff. But again, nominally, it's the part of Mexican food that made it into the US was then transformed. Yes, but it's in a way the most familiar, but for that reason, it's the part of Mexican food that made it into the US was then transformed. Yes, but it's in a way the most familiar But for that reason it's the most radical because you have to rethink all these things you know and they're way better in Heardham, Oceano hardly any tourists go there like there's nothing to see in Heardham, Oceano Nothing to do whether the neat It's not ruined by any outsiders. It's a long-standing tradition dirt cheap and the thing to do there is just sweet talk at taxi driver into first taking you seriously and then trusting you enough to know that you trust him to bring you to the very best, like food stands.

So where's the magic of that nominally similar Entity of the burrito. Where's the magic come from? What is it? Is it the taxi ride? Is it the whole experience or is there something actually in the food? So you can break the food down part by part. So if you think of the beef the beef there will be dry aged Just out in the air and away the FDA here would never permit Like they dry age it till it turns green, but it is phenomenal. The quality of the chilies. So here, there's only a small number of kinds of chilies you can get. In most parts of Mexico, there's quite a large number of chilies you can get. They're different, they're fresher, but it's just like a different thing, the chilies.

The wheat used, so this is wheat territory, not corn territory, which is self-interesting. The wheat is more diverse and more complex. Here it's more homogenized, obviously cheaper, more efficient, but there it is better. Non-pasturized cheeses are legal in all parts of Mexico, and they can be white and gooey and amazing, in way that here again it's just against the law you could legalize them the demand wouldn't be that great there's a black market in

these cheeses that Latino groceries around here but you just can't get that much of it so the cheese the meat the wheat all different in significant ways the chilies I don't think the onions really matter much garlic. I don't know. I wouldn't put much stock in that. But that's a lot of the core food. And then it's cooked much better and everything's super fresh. The food chain is not relying on refrigeration.

And this is one thing, Russia and US have in common. We were early pioneers in food refrigeration. And that made a lot of our foods worse quite early. and it took us a long time to dig out of that because big countries, right? You've had an extensive rail system in Russia, US, a star a long time, which makes it easier to freeze and then ship. What about the actual cooking, the the chef, is there an artistry to the simple? It has to be called a burrito simple, but... And there's no brain drain out of cooking. So, if you're in the United States and you're very talented, I'm not saying there aren't

talented chefs, of course there are, but there's so many other things to pull people away. Yeah. But in Mexico, there's so much talent going into food as there is in China, which would be another candidate for last meal, or India. Or India. Or India. I don't even get started. Unbelievable.

You've also, I mean, there's a million things we can talk about here, but you've written about Jero Junsu Sushi. It's just a really clean, good example that people are aware of, of mastery in the art of the simple in food. What do you make of that kind of obsessive pursuit of perfection in creating simple food? Sushi is about perfection, but it's a bit like the Beatles' wide album, which people think is simple and not over-produced. Yeah. It's in a funny way, they're most over-produced album, but it's a bit like the Beatles White Album, which people think is simple and not over-produced. Yeah.

It's in a funny way, they're most over-produced album, but it's produced just perfectly. It sounds simple. It's really hard to produce music to the point where it's going to sound so simple and not sound like sludge. Like let it be album. It has some great songs, but a lot of it sounds like sludge. One after 909, that sludge, I dig a boney, it sludge. Like it's a bit interesting, it's not that good, it doesn't sound that good. White album, like the best half,

like Dear Prudence, sounds perfect, sounds simple, crybaby cry, it's not simple, back in the USSR. Super complex. So sushi is like that, it's because it's so incredibly not simple starting with the rice. You try to refine it to make it appear super simple and that's the most complex thing of all. Do you admire, I mean, we're not talking about days, weeks, months. We're talking about years, generations of doing the same thing over and over and over again. Do you admire that kind of sticking to the, does that, you know, we talked about our admiration of the weird, that doesn't feel weird. That seems like discipline and dedication to like a stoic minimalism or something like that.

I'm happy they do it, but I actually feel bad about it. I feel their sacrificial victims to me, which I benefit from. But don't you ever think like, gee, you're a great master sushi chef. Wouldn't you be happier if you did something else? Doesn't seem to happen. That might be something that a weird mind. Maybe it is weird people. And maybe they're really enjoying it. But like to learn how to pack rice for 10 years before they let you do anything else. It's like these Indian you know, sarod players, they just spent five years tapping at rhythms before they're allowed to touch their instruments. Well, actually to defend that.

It's kind of like graduate school, right? Well, I think graduate school, perhaps, graduate school is full of, like every single day is full surprises, I would say. I did martial arts for a long time, do martial arts, and I've always loved, it's kind of the Russian way of drilling, is doing the same technique. I don't know if this applies into intellectual or academic disciplines

where you can do the same thing over and over and over again, thousands and thousands and thousands of times. What I've discovered through that process is you get to start to appreciate the tiniest of details and find the beauty in them. People who go to like monasteries to meditate, talk about this is when you just sit in silence and don't do anything, you start to appreciate how much complexity and beauty there is in just a movement of a finger. Like you can spend the whole day joyously thinking

about how fun it is to move a finger. Yeah. And so, and then you can almost become your full weird self about the tiniest details of life. As a thing you've got to wonder, like, is there a free lunch in there? Are the rest of us moving around too much? Yeah, exactly. But they sure feel like they found a free lunch.

The people meditate. They're onto something. I tend to think it's like artists that's some percent of people are like that, but most are not. And for most of us, there's no free lunch. Like my free lunch is to move around a lot in search of lunch, in fact. Well, with all the food talk, it made me hungry. What books, three or so books, if you can come, if any, come to mind, technical fiction, philosophical, would you recommend had a big impact on you or you just drew some insights from throughout your life?

Well, two of them we've already discussed. One is Plato's Dialogues, which I started reading when I was like 13. Another is Enraged Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal ideal but I would say the Friedrich Hayek essay the use of knowledge in society Which is about how decentralized mechanisms can work also why they might go wrong and That's where you start to understand the price system capitalism and that was in a book called individualism an economic order But it was just a few essays in that book. Those are maybe the three I would say. Can you elaborate a little bit on the... Say the price of copper goes up, right? Because there's a problem with a copper mine in Chile or Bolivia. So the price of copper goes up all around the world. People are led to economize copper to look for substitutes for copper, to change their production processes, to change the goods and services they buy, to build homes a different way.

And this one event creates this one tiny change in information. This gets into your AI work very directly. And how much complexity that one change engenders in a meaningful coherent way, how the different pieces of the price system fit together. Hiic really laid out very clearly, and it's like an AI problem, and how well, not for everything, but for many things, we solve that AI problem. I learned I was I think 13 maybe 14 when I read Hayek.

You have a distributed nature of things there. And it's like your work on human attention, like how much can we take in? Yes. Very often not that much. there. And it's like your work on human attention, like how much can we take in? Yes. Very often not that much. And how many of the advances of modern civilization you need to understand as a response to that constraint? I got that also from Hayek. Was the title of the book again? It's reprinted in a lot of books at this point, but back then the book was called Individualism and Economic Order. but the essay is online. Hayek, Use of Knowledge in Society, there are open access versions of it through Google,

and you don't need the whole book. That was a very good book. Again, one of those profound looking over the ocean, maybe sitting on a porch, maybe with a drink of some kind, and a young kid comes by and asks you for advice, what advice would you give to... I'll drink. That's my advice. I'm serious. So okay, after that, what advice would you give to a young person today as they take on life, whether a career in academia in general, or just a life which is probably more important than career?

Most good advice is context specific, but here are my two generic pieces of advice. Good. First, get them in tour. It's both career, but anything you want to learn, like say you want to learn about contemporary art. People write me this. What book should I read? It's probably not going to work that way.

You need a mentor. Yes, you should read some books on it, but you want a mentor to help you frame them, take you around to some art, talk about it with you. They'll get as many mentors as you can in the things you want to learn. And then... Cascus, a quick tangent on that. Pres on that presumably good mentor. Of course. Is there begging the question in the eyes? Complicated, right? Well, it is complicated. Is there a lot of damage to be done for a bad mentor? I don't think that much because it's very easy to drop mentors

and in fact, it's quite hard to maintain them. Good mentors tend to be busy. Yeah, Ed mentors tend to be busy. Yeah. And you can try on mentors and maybe they're not good for you, but you still is a good chance you'll learn something. Like I had a mentor, I was an undergrad. He was a Stalinist. He edited the book called The Essential Stalin, Brilliant Guy. I learned a tremendous amount from him. Was he like as a Stalinist? A good mentor for me, fan if I, well, no, but for a year, it was tremendous. Hmm. Yeah. He introduced me like to, you know, Soviet and Eastern European science fiction,

because he was a Marxist. Like, that's what I took from him among other things. And the advice on finding a good mentor, Daniel Coneman has, uh, this is somebody just popped his mind as somebody who was able to find exceptionally good collaborators throughout his life. There's not many bright minds that find collaborators. They often, which I ultimately see of what a mentor is, be interesting, be direct and trust. It's not like a perfect formula, but it's amazing. How many people don't even do those things? Be interesting, be direct and try. Like what you want from a better known person, I would just say be very direct with them. Yeah.

Beautiful. What's the second piece of advice? Build small groups of peers. They don't have to be your age, but very often they'll be your age especially if you're younger with broadly similar interests, but there can be different points of view people you hang out with Which could include in a WhatsApp group online and like every day or almost every day They're talking about the thing you care about trying to solve problems in that thing and that's your small group And you really like them and they like you and you care what you think about each other and you have this common interest. That's for human connection or that's for development of ideas. It's both. They're not that different. Like Beatles, classic small group, right? But there's so much drama. The

Florentine artists, of course, there's drama and small groups tend to split up, which is fine. Just like entering relationships off an end. But it's remarkable how little has been done that was not done in small groups in some way. So speaking of loss of beautiful relationships, what do you make this whole love thing? What are humans falling love? What's the role of love, friendship, family, and life? In a successful life or just life in general? Why the hell are we so into this thing? There are multiple layers of understanding that question. So the kind of the lowest layer is the Darwinian answer.

Right? If we weren't this way, we wouldn't have been successful in reproducing and building alliances. It's important to realize that's far from complete. Sort of the highest understanding would be poetic, like read John Keats or many other love poems. So who do I go to to find out, to learn about love in terms of poets?

Or I would say start with John Keats. But given that you're fluent in Russian, yeah, let's go Russian literature for a second. Like what, what, what, you keep mentioning in Russia, what, what's your connection, what's your love in Russia? Well, first, it's all interesting, but more concretely, my wife was born in Moscow. So call the key.

What's your name? Yeah, Wow. And she grew up there. I married her here. My daughter, I adopted her. I'm not her biological father, but I genuinely raised her. She was born in Russia, though she came here when she was one. My father basically Russian. No, no, no. I'm going to do Jersey boy. That's the same thing. I'm very sorry to report my father-in-law passed away a week ago He lived with us for six years He lived in Russia till he was oh 70 saw You know the Stalinist era his father was brought to a camp lived through World War two much much more

had an incredible life Never really learned how to speak English. So I absorbed something Russian from him as well. He was part Armenian. So that's my connection to Russia. A bit of the Russian soul too. I don't think I have it. I think I appreciate it. But there's division of labor, right? Others in the family. Take care of that. I'm more superficial. You're much in Keatson, that higher version, that non-darwinny in love, what's that about?

That it's the highest form of human connection, and it's intoxicating, and it's part of building a life, and most of us are very, very strongly drawn to it. And it's part of the highest realization of you being what you can be. Yeah. He mentioned you lost. But ask a Russian. I mean, this is a superficial New Jersey boy who grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen. Bruce Springsteen, and that was his romance.

What's your favorite Bruce Springsteen song? I think the album Born to Run has actually held up the best. That was very fashionable to think the earlier or later works are actually better and that's the over-produced, super pop album. But the quality of the songs to me Born to Run is just far and away the best, then darkness on the edge of town. And those are still my favorites. The Born to Run is an incredible song. Yeah. And perfectly

produced in a full-spector kind of way. Every detail is right. Every lyric. What else is on the album? Thunder Row, Jungle Land, 10th Avenue Freeze Out. She's the one unbelievable. Yeah. Yeah. Breastly. Meeting across the river. I I really like I like when he goes into love personally You know like I'm on fire. That's a very good song dancing in the dark Yeah, a lot of the later work. I find the percussion becomes too simple and kind of too white somehow And a little clunky and it's still good work. He's super talented, but it doesn't speak to me But when it all bursts open into the open road like it does on Bourne Turan. That's magic Yeah, I love Rosalita. Have you ever seen him live?

Yes, twice I wonder what he's like Lavon was young right that those years. I saw him live when he was young. I was young. New Jersey. I was a little disappointed, actually. Yeah. I think what I like best from him is quite studio. He certainly played well. I don't fault his performance.

But a psych when I saw a plant in page, you know, a fled Zeppelin, tremendous creators. And they showed up. They were not drunk, like they were paying attention. But I was underwhelmed, because Led Zeppelin, like the Beatles White album, is much more of a studio band than you think it was. And in the case of Bruce Princy, I don't know about you, but for me,

he's somebody that I connect with the most when I got that, when I'm alone, and there's like a melancholy feeling, and actually drive my folks live in Philly, I went to school in Philly. And so, you know, I've I've almost worthy of New Jersey then. Yeah. Well, you're, you're almost worthy of Russia. So we can connect that and then ask by me, I love yours. It's something I feel like, I feel like, I don't know, it's always, there's this beautiful, like there's a dying old-go's-diner that closed down. I used to go there.

There's a melancholy feeling to me. Of course. A thickness to culture in that part of the world, which is oddly similar to some elements of the thickness of Russian culture. And when you see Russian characters on the sopranos, it totally makes sense, even though they're these complete outlines. Exactly, it totally makes sense. You've, you mentioned you lost your father-in-law last week. Do you think about mortality? Do you think about your own mortality? Are you afraid of death? I don't think about my own mortality that much, which is probably a good thing. I think death will be bad. I wouldn't say I'm afraid of it. For me, the worst thing about death is not knowing how the human story turns out. The full human story. The full human story. So if I could right

before I die, read like a Wikipedia page called the rest of human history and have enough time, just like a few days to absorb it, think about it, and know like, oh, well, 643 years from now, that's when all the atomic weapons went off. And here's what happened between now and then. I would feel much better dying. between now and then, I would feel much better dying. Does that's not how it's gonna be, right? Is that unlikely? It's almost like the Hitchhiker's Guide, they kind of have, what is it?

They have a one or two sentence description of the human of what goes on on Earth. It's kind of interesting to think if there's a lot of intelligent civilizations out there that in the big encyclopedia describes the universe humans will only have one sentence probably true. It's the only one I can read and understand, right? And it may be hard to understand the human one past a number of centuries. Yeah, with the eye. Yes.

Like how many years from now, we're reading Wikipedia, be like trying to read Chaucer, which I almost can do, but I actually can't, I I need a translation probably you can't do it at all yeah. I mean maybe reading will be outdated and maybe a very silly notion maybe we're fundamentally like we think language is fundamental to cognition but it could be something visual or something totally different that we'll plug in neural linker. Yeah. Uh, but in that story that Wikipedia article, do you think there'll be a section on the meaning of it? I hope not. If that section we could write now and it's just not going to be very good, right?

He's what what would you put in the section on the meaning of human existence? I don't know, links to a lot of other sections. I don't think there are general statements about the meaning of life that have that much meaning. I think if you study different cultures, the arts, travel, mathematics, like whatever your thing is, you'll get a lot about the meaning of life. So like it's there in Wikipedia in some bigger sense. But I don't want to read the page on the meaning. I bet they have such a page. In fact, the fact that I've never visited it. None of my friends. Oh, here Tyler, he's the page on the meaning of life. I know you've been wondering about this. You got to read this one. No one's ever done that to you. Have

they? It probably has, well, I actually gone to that page. It does in fact have a lot of links to other features. Okay. So that's it. The meaning of life is just about a bunch of self-referential or citation needed type of statements. I think there's no better way to end it. Tyler is a huge honor, I'm a huge fan. Thank you so much for wasting all of this time with me. It was one of the greatest conversations I've ever had. Thank you so much. My pleasure and delighted to finally have met you and that we can do this.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tyler Cohen and thank you to Linode, ExpressVPN, Simply Safe and Public Goods. Check them out in the description to support this podcast. And now let me leave you with some words from Adam Smith. Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. you