Podcasts about case against education

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel' can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.' Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free' parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping). This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education. Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel' can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.' Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free' parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping). This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education. Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel' can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.' Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free' parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping). This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education. Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/political-science

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel' can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.' Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free' parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping). This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education. Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/public-policy

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel' can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.' Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free' parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping). This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education. Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel' can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.' Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free' parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping). This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education. Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/politics-and-polemics

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel' can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.' Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free' parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping). This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education. Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Economist Bryan Caplan has written—and artist Ady Branzei has illustrated—this new graphic novel about housing regulation (if ‘novel' can be applied to an imaginative essay on a nonfiction topic), Build Baby Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation (Cato Institute, 2024). The thesis of the work is that regulation has driven up the cost of housing and ‘manufactured scarcity.' Regulation is always well intentioned but often ill considered, as Caplan shows, and every benefit—‘free' parking, zoning restrictions, environmental considerations—is provided by a hidden cost to the consumer and the tax-payer, disproportionately born by the poor (ironically the people they are supposed to be helping). This conversation touched on other areas where free-market principles conflict with government interventions: bike lanes, environmental policy, immigration, and public education, especially at the taxpayer-supported university, a topic that Bryan Caplan discussed last time he was on the New Books Network, in his 2018 interview with Editor-in-Chief Marshall Poe when they discussed his earlier book, The Case Against Education. Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute; his blog on Substack is called Bet on It. Krzysztof Odyniec is a historian of Medieval and Early Modern Europe; his dissertation is a forthcoming book, published by Brepols: Dantiscus: Diplomat and Traveller in Sixteenth-Century Europe. He is a regular host on the New Books Network also the host of the 'Almost Good Catholics' podcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

In PX123 our guest is Bryan Caplan. Bryan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. We interview him about his ground breaking graphic novel ‘Build, Baby, Build - The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation'. The book is so described: 'In Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, economist Bryan Caplan makes the economic and philosophical case for radical deregulation of this massive market―freeing property owners to build as tall and dense as they wish. Not only would the average price of housing be cut in half, but the building boom unleashed by deregulation would simultaneously reduce inequality, increase social mobility, promote economic growth, reduce homelessness, increase birth rates, help the environment, cut crime, and more. Combining stunning homage to classic animation with careful interdisciplinary research, Build, Baby, Build takes readers on a grand tour of a bona fide “panacea policy.” We can start realizing these missed opportunities as soon as we abandon the widespread misconception that housing regulation solves more problems than it causes.' The book is a must read for planning undergraduates and all policy makers involved in the housing sector. Other books he has written include The Myth of the Rational Voter, named "the best political book of the year" by the New York Times, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders (co-authored with SMBC's Zach Weinersmith), Labor Econ Versus the World, How Evil Are Politicians?, Don't Be a Feminist, Voters As Mad Scientists, You Will Not Stampede Me, and Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine. He is now writing Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets.  In Podcast Extra / Culture Corner Bryan recommends ‘The problem with political authority' by Michael Huemer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Authority). He also recommends the Youtube series 'Ride with Gabi'  https://www.youtube.com/@ridewithgabi  Jess has gone back to duolingo, learning Italian (https://www.duolingo.com). Pete recommends the Netflix K Rom - com ‘Business Proposal'. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Proposal) Audio produced by Jack Bavage. Podcast released 12 November 2024.

In PX123 our guest is Bryan Caplan. Bryan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. We interview him about his ground breaking graphic novel ‘Build, Baby, Build - The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation'. The book is described: 'In Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, economist Bryan Caplan makes the economic and philosophical case for radical deregulation of this massive market―freeing property owners to build as tall and dense as they wish. Not only would the average price of housing be cut in half, but the building boom unleashed by deregulation would simultaneously reduce inequality, increase social mobility, promote economic growth, reduce homelessness, increase birth rates, help the environment, cut crime, and more. Combining stunning homage to classic animation with careful interdisciplinary research, Build, Baby, Build takes readers on a grand tour of a bona fide “panacea policy.” We can start realizing these missed opportunities as soon as we abandon the widespread misconception that housing regulation solves more problems than it causes.' The book should be a must read for planning undergraduates and all policy makers involved in the housing sector. Other books he has written include The Myth of the Rational Voter, named "the best political book of the year" by the New York Times, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders (co-authored with SMBC's Zach Weinersmith), Labor Econ Versus the World, How Evil Are Politicians?, Don't Be a Feminist, Voters As Mad Scientists, You Will Not Stampede Me, and Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine. He is now writing Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets. In Podcast Extra / Culture Corner Bryan recommends 

‘The problem with political authority' by Michael Huemer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Authority). He also recommends the Youtube series 'Ride with Gabi' https://www.youtube.com/@ridewithgabi Jess has gone back to duolingo, learning Italian (https://www.duolingo.com). Pete recommends Netflix K drama ‘Business Proposal'. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Proposal) Audio produced by Jack Bavage. Podcast released 12 November 2024.
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In PX123 our guest is Bryan Caplan. Bryan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. We interview him about his ground breaking graphic novel ‘Build, Baby, Build - The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation'. The book is described: 'In Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, economist Bryan Caplan makes the economic and philosophical case for radical deregulation of this massive market―freeing property owners to build as tall and dense as they wish. Not only would the average price of housing be cut in half, but the building boom unleashed by deregulation would simultaneously reduce inequality, increase social mobility, promote economic growth, reduce homelessness, increase birth rates, help the environment, cut crime, and more. Combining stunning homage to classic animation with careful interdisciplinary research, Build, Baby, Build takes readers on a grand tour of a bona fide “panacea policy.” We can start realizing these missed opportunities as soon as we abandon the widespread misconception that housing regulation solves more problems than it causes.' The book is a must read for planning undergraduates and all policy makers involved in the housing sector. Other books he has written include The Myth of the Rational Voter, named "the best political book of the year" by the New York Times, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders (co-authored with SMBC's Zach Weinersmith), Labor Econ Versus the World, How Evil Are Politicians?, Don't Be a Feminist, Voters As Mad Scientists, You Will Not Stampede Me, and Self-Help Is Like a Vaccine. He is now writing Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets. In Podcast Extra / Culture Corner Bryan recommends 

‘The problem with political authority' by Michael Huemer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Authority). He also recommends the Youtube series 'Ride with Gabi' https://www.youtube.com/@ridewithgabi Jess has gone back to duolingo, learning Italian (https://www.duolingo.com). Pete recommends the Netflix K Rom Com ‘Business Proposal'. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Proposal) Audio produced by Jack Bavage. Podcast released 12 November 2024.

Bryan is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He's also the author of a number of bestselling books, including The Case Against Education, The Myth of the Rational Voter, and recently Build Baby Build.    In this episode of World of DaaS, Bryan and Auren discuss: Education signaling and ROIThe myth of involved parentingImmigration & diaspora theorySocial science data accessLooking for more tech, data and venture capital intel? Head to worldofdaas.com for our podcast, newsletter and events, and follow us on X @worldofdaas.  You can find Auren Hoffman on X at @auren and Bryan Caplan on X at @bryan_caplan.Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com)

Professor Bryan Caplan, a bestselling author and economist at George Mason University, discusses some of his most controversial books, Don't Be a Feminist, The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and Build, Baby, Build.  

Professor Bryan Caplan, a bestselling author and economist at George Mason University, discusses some of his most controversial books, Don't Be a Femnist, The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and Build, Baby, Build.

There's been renewed debate around Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education recently, so I want to discuss one way I think about this question. Education isn't just about facts. But it's partly about facts. Facts are easy to measure, and they're a useful signpost for deeper understanding. If someone has never heard of Chaucer, Dickens, Melville, Twain, or Joyce, they probably haven't learned to appreciate great literature. If someone can't identify Washington, Lincoln, or either Roosevelt, they probably don't understand the ebb and flow of American history. So what facts does the average American know? https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/a-theoretical-case-against-education 

Esse vídeo é uma reflexão sobre Libertarianismo e Educação e eu vou ser cancelado. O Brasil é um dos países que mais gastam dinheiro com a educação, mas por que temos resultados tão ruins? O problema não é o investimento e sim o sistema educacional atual. Pouco adianta investir dinheiro quando políticos decidem 90% da grade curricular e a autonomia da comunidade escolar é baixa. Precisamos discutir uma reforma completa no sistema, e não só mais dinheiro para políticos decidirem o que o seu filho deve ou não estudar. The Case Against Education: de Bryan Caplan https://amzn.to/4at2EFF Quer relatórios sobre quando comprar ou vender Bitcoin e uma plataforma de educação junto com isso? https://bit.ly/RelatoriosRadicais Cansou de estar sozinho como Libertário? https://www.catarse.me/apoiadoresradicais Quer fugir do Brasil? Nos contate: https://www.settee.io/ https://youtube.com/c/Setteeio Nos acompanhe no Telegram: https://t.me/ideiasradicais

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the New York Times Bestselling author of *The Myth of the Rational Voter*, *Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids*, *The Case Against Education*, *Open Borders*, and *Build, Baby, Build*.Show is Sponsored by The Ayn Rand Institute https://www.aynrand.org/starthereEnergy Talking Points, featuring AlexAI, by Alex Epstein alexepstein.substack.comExpress VPN https://www.expressvpn.com/yaronJoin this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/@YaronBrook/joinLike what you hear? Like, share, and subscribe to stay updated on new videos and help promote the Yaron Brook Show: https://bit.ly/3ztPxTxSupport the Show and become a sponsor: / yaronbrookshow or https://yaronbrookshow.com/membershipOr make a one-time donation: https://bit.ly/2RZOyJJContinue the discussion by following Yaron on Twitter (https://bit.ly/3iMGl6z) and Facebook (https://bit.ly/3vvWDDC )Want to learn more about Ayn Rand and Objectivism? Visit the Ayn Rand Institute: https://bit.ly/35qoEC3#housing #supplyanddemand #immigration #ethics #selfishness #egoism #capitalism #philosophy #Morality ​ ​#Objectivism​ #AynRand #politicsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/yaron-brook-show--3276901/support.

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. A bestselling author, his books include The Case Against Education, Open Borders, and Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Deregulation. Full transcript available at: josephnoelwalker.com/bryan-caplan-155See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We've done several shows on the housing crisis in America, mostly from a progressive perspective in which the solution to the shortage of homes is presented in terms of government investment. The libertarian economist, Bryan Caplan, however, comes at the problem from a more conservative angle. The co-author of the new graphic novel, BUILD, BABY, BUILD, Caplan argues that the housing industry needs to be radically deregularized. This right-wing libertarian approach to the science and ethics of housing in America certainly makes sense in cities like San Francisco, with its massively inflated real-estate values, absence of affordable new homes, and huge homelessness problem. Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. He has written The Myth of the Rational Voter, named "the best political book of the year" by the New York Times, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders (co-authored with SMBC's Zach Weinersmith), Labor Econ Versus the World, How Evil Are Politicians?, Don't Be a Feminist, Voters As Mad Scientists, and You Will Not Stampede Me. His latest book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing, is published by the Cato Institute. He is the editor and chief writer for Bet On It, the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas. He has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Newsweek, Atlantic, American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, and Intelligence, blogged for EconLog from 2005-2022, and appeared on ABC, BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN. An openly nerdy man who loves role-playing games and graphic novels, Caplan live in Oakton, Virginia, with his wife and four kids.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. He's written The Myth of the Rational Voter, named "the best political book of the year" by the New York Times, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders, Labor Econ Versus the World, How Evil Are Politicians?, Don't Be a Feminist; A Letter to My Daughter, Voters As Mad Scientists, and You Will Not Stampede Me. Bryan is a deep-thinker, researcher, status-quo challenger, educator, self-confessed nerd and this conversation was anything but boring. Enjoy.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our guest today is Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation. Steve is an entrepreneur and has started successful ventures in embryo selection, forensic genetics and artificial intelligence. Steve Hsu- Steve is a polymath- you can see just how wide his interests are on his blog infoproc. Despite his mathematical chops Steve is great at having conversations- I recommend Aporia listeners check out his podcast Manifold. During the 2020 racial reckoning, after some controversy, Steve stepped down as Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at Michigan State University. You can see his response to the allegations against him here and his resignation here. Steve published the first paper showing that polygenic scores can predict phenotype with accuracy- see his paper on height here. Steve and his team also have shown that Genomic Prediction's aneuploidy testing improves pregnancy outcomes. We also talked about my article for Aporia on ethical objections to polygenic screening. In China, Yousheng, loosely translated as "eugenics" doesn't have a bad connotation- as Steve points out here. Steve is skeptical about the deleterious effects of polygenic screening or gene editing due to pleiotropy. Simone Collins, former Aporia guest, was also interviewed on Manifold. She used Genomic Prediction's health index. We talked about Bryan Caplan's books, The Case Against Education and "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids"

Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. He's the author of 8 books, including The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, and Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. His next book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing, will be published by the Cato Institute in 2024. He's the editor and chief writer for Bet On It, the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas. He's published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Newsweek, Atlantic, American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, and Intelligence, blogged for EconLog from 2005-2022, and appeared on ABC, BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN. 0:00 - Intro 2:23 - The Most Irrational Beliefs in Society 3:43 - Why Do People Vote? 5:57 - The Most Net Positive Delusions in Society 7:30 - Bottlenecks in Democracy 9:13 - Idea Traps 13:13 - The Ideological Turing Test 15:16 - Caricatures of Political Parties 17:49 - The Case for Open Borders 21:48 - Tribalism and Social Cohesion 25:33 - Privatization and The Confluence of Cultures 26:56 - What's the Point of Countries? 28:26 - What Values Are (Mostly) Non-negotiable? 30:27 - The Net Present Value of Immigration 33:43 - The Competition of Cultures 38:15 - Is Globalism Inevitable? 39:30 - Resources and Culture 42:49 - How to Fix Immigration 45:07 - The Case Against Education 48:48 - What is a Degree Actually Worth? 52:05 - Why is Bryan a Professor? 53:13 - The Value of Conformity in Society 55:25 - Is Learning How to Learn Real? 57:51 - Is There Value in the Liberal Arts? 29:27 - Bryan's Approach to Learning 1:01:49 - Who Does Education Well? 1:02:49 - The Biggest Problems in Academia 1:05:47 - Should we Abolish Tenure? 1:09:32 - Why Parenting is Overrated 1:11:51 - What Kind of Parenting Has an Effect? 1:14:23 - Positive Effects of Having Kids 1:16:03 - The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation 1:18:50 - Intangible Costs of Deregulation 1:21:39 - How does Ideology Propagate Itself? 1:24:09 - If Everything's Mimetic are Free Markets Overrated? 1:25:54 - How to Get Ideas Into the Mainstream 1:28:19 - Are Politicians Evil? 1:31:35 - The Future of Labor Markets Under Remote Work 1:34:21 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Making Bad Decisions On Purpose, published by Screwtape on November 10, 2023 on LessWrong. Allowing myself to make bad decisions on purpose sometimes seems to be a load bearing part of epistemic rationality for me. Human minds are so screwed up. I. Start from the premise that humans want to do the right thing. For example, perhaps you are trying to decide whether to do your homework tonight. If you do your homework, you will get a better grade in class. Also, you may learn something. However, if you don't do your homework tonight you could instead hang out with your roommate and play some fun games. Obviously, you want to do the right thing. When contemplating between these two options, you may observe your brain coming up with arguments for and against both sides. University is about networking as well as pure learning, so making a lasting friendship with your roommate is important. To make the most of your time you should do your homework when you're alert and rested, which isn't right now. Also, aren't there some studies that show learning outcomes improved when people were relaxed and took appropriate breaks? That's if doing homework even helps you learn, which you think is maybe uncertain. Hrm, did I say your brain might come up with arguments for both sides? We seem to have a defective brain here, it seems to have already written its bottom line. There are a variety of approaches to curbing your brain's inclination to favour one side over the other here. Some are harder than others, some easier. Sometimes just knowing your brain does this and metaphorically glaring at it is enough to help, though if you're like me eventually your brain just gets sneakier and more subtle about the biased arguments. This article is about the most effective trick I know, though it does come with one heck of a downside. Sometimes I cut a deal, and in exchange for the truth I offer to make the wrong decision anyway. II. Imagine sitting down at the negotiating table with your brain. You: "Listen, I'd really like to know if doing homework will help me learn here." Your Brain: "Man, I don't know, do you remember The Case Against Education?" You: "No, I don't, because we never actually read that book. It's just been sitting on the shelf for years." Brain: "Yeah, but you remember the title. It looked like a good book! It probably says lots of things about how homework doesn't help you learn." You: "I feel like you're not taking your role as computational substrate very seriously." Brain: "You want me to take this seriously? Okay, fine. I'm not actually optimized to be an ideal discerner of truth. I optimized for something different than that, and the fact that I can notice true things is really kind of a happy coincidence as far as you're concerned. My problem is that if I tell you yes, you should do your homework, you'll feel bad about not getting to build social bonds, and frankly I like social bonds a lot more than I like your Biology classwork. The Litany of Tarski is all well and good but what I say is true changes what you do, so I want to say the thing that gets me more of those short term chemical rewards I want. You: ". . . Fair point. How about this bargain: How about you agree to tell me me whether I would actually do better in class if I did my homework, and I'll plan to hang out with my roommate tonight regardless of which answer you give." Brain: "Seriously?" You: "Yep." Brain: ". . . This feels like a trap. You know I'm the thing you use to remember traps like this, right? I'm the thing you use to come up with traps like this. In fact, I'm not actually sure what you're running on right now in order to have this conversation-" You: "Don't worry about it. Anyway, I'm serious. Actually try to figure out the truth, and I won't use it against you tonight." Brain: "Fine, deal. I...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Making Bad Decisions On Purpose, published by Screwtape on November 10, 2023 on LessWrong. Allowing myself to make bad decisions on purpose sometimes seems to be a load bearing part of epistemic rationality for me. Human minds are so screwed up. I. Start from the premise that humans want to do the right thing. For example, perhaps you are trying to decide whether to do your homework tonight. If you do your homework, you will get a better grade in class. Also, you may learn something. However, if you don't do your homework tonight you could instead hang out with your roommate and play some fun games. Obviously, you want to do the right thing. When contemplating between these two options, you may observe your brain coming up with arguments for and against both sides. University is about networking as well as pure learning, so making a lasting friendship with your roommate is important. To make the most of your time you should do your homework when you're alert and rested, which isn't right now. Also, aren't there some studies that show learning outcomes improved when people were relaxed and took appropriate breaks? That's if doing homework even helps you learn, which you think is maybe uncertain. Hrm, did I say your brain might come up with arguments for both sides? We seem to have a defective brain here, it seems to have already written its bottom line. There are a variety of approaches to curbing your brain's inclination to favour one side over the other here. Some are harder than others, some easier. Sometimes just knowing your brain does this and metaphorically glaring at it is enough to help, though if you're like me eventually your brain just gets sneakier and more subtle about the biased arguments. This article is about the most effective trick I know, though it does come with one heck of a downside. Sometimes I cut a deal, and in exchange for the truth I offer to make the wrong decision anyway. II. Imagine sitting down at the negotiating table with your brain. You: "Listen, I'd really like to know if doing homework will help me learn here." Your Brain: "Man, I don't know, do you remember The Case Against Education?" You: "No, I don't, because we never actually read that book. It's just been sitting on the shelf for years." Brain: "Yeah, but you remember the title. It looked like a good book! It probably says lots of things about how homework doesn't help you learn." You: "I feel like you're not taking your role as computational substrate very seriously." Brain: "You want me to take this seriously? Okay, fine. I'm not actually optimized to be an ideal discerner of truth. I optimized for something different than that, and the fact that I can notice true things is really kind of a happy coincidence as far as you're concerned. My problem is that if I tell you yes, you should do your homework, you'll feel bad about not getting to build social bonds, and frankly I like social bonds a lot more than I like your Biology classwork. The Litany of Tarski is all well and good but what I say is true changes what you do, so I want to say the thing that gets me more of those short term chemical rewards I want. You: ". . . Fair point. How about this bargain: How about you agree to tell me me whether I would actually do better in class if I did my homework, and I'll plan to hang out with my roommate tonight regardless of which answer you give." Brain: "Seriously?" You: "Yep." Brain: ". . . This feels like a trap. You know I'm the thing you use to remember traps like this, right? I'm the thing you use to come up with traps like this. In fact, I'm not actually sure what you're running on right now in order to have this conversation-" You: "Don't worry about it. Anyway, I'm serious. Actually try to figure out the truth, and I won't use it against you tonight." Brain: "Fine, deal. I...

Quem tem mais de 10 anos de estudo no Brasil foi quem mais perdeu renda nos últimos 10 anos. Quem tem 15 ou mais anos de estudo perdeu 16% de sua renda, enquanto os mais pobres viram uma alta forte devido a bolsas e auxílios. É um reflexo de um país que combate investimentos, que caça empreendedores e que permite quase nenhuma inovação em educação. Agora é fazer o L enquanto dirige uber com seu diploma de engenharia civil. Sugestão de leitura: The Case Against Education, do Bryan Caplan Quer fugir do Brasil? Nos contate: https://www.settee.io/ https://youtube.com/c/Setteeio Nos acompanhe no Telegram: https://t.me/ideiasradicais Quer comprar Bitcoin no melhor preço do mercado? Bitpreço! http://bit.ly/BitprecoRadical Apoie o Ideias Radicais: https://www.catarse.me/projects/152640/

Is college (still) worth it? We discuss whether you should save $1,000 every month for 18 years so your kid can go to college, the difference between Ivy League and the 50th best school and whether AI might make all of this redundant. My guest today is Sean Johnson, a startup investor, business coach and professor who helps professionals build intentional businesses. Learn more about Sean: Connect with Sean on ⁠Twitter⁠ Connect with Sean on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ References from the show: The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan Why I fully funded a 529 plan as a single 23 year old by Khe Hy Check out Brent Beshore Join an upcoming group coaching cohort: Are you looking to ask deep, introspective and provocative questions about your own life (with Khe and likeminded peers) ⁠⁠⁠⁠Apply today⁠⁠⁠⁠ THE MOST UNIQUE PRODUCTIVITY COURSE ON THE INTERNET Supercharge your Productivity is the only course that connects the pursuit of productivity to life's larger questions so you can design a system that works for you. ⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll Now⁠⁠⁠⁠ BECOME A RADREADER:

Bryan Caplan is a writer and professor of economics at George Mason University, as well as the author of four books, including The myth of the Rational Voter, and The Case Against Education. His upcoming book is on Feminism. In this conversation, we talked about Bryan's views on sex and relationships, innovative approaches to boost birth rates, homeschooling, and his theories on what actually divides the left and the right. If you're looking for an ERP platform, check out our sponsor, NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/UPSTREAM -- We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com. RECOMMENDED PODCAST:  Every week investor and writer of the popular newsletter The Diff, Byrne Hobart, and co-host Erik Torenberg discuss today's major inflection points in technology, business, and markets – and help listeners build a diversified portfolio of trends and ideas for the future. Subscribe to “The Riff” with Byrne Hobart and Erik Torenberg: https://link.chtbl.com/theriff TIMESTAMPS (00:00) Episode Preview (03:00) Identifying trends that are technically correct but not politically correct (05:20) Why are humans having less kids (13:37) The best ways to not conform (15:28) Sponsor: NetSuite (16:59) Feminism (21:12) Homeschooling (23:25) Dating markets, hook ups, and standard-lowering (32:51) Bryan's dating advice (41:51) Agency and mental illness (46:58) El Salvador's approach to crime (56:27) Immigration (01:02:05) Ukraine (01:03:33) What really divides the left and the right? LINKS: Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652 Bryan Caplan, Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/0465028616/ref=sr_1_2?qid=1691043786&refinements=p_27%3ABryan+Caplan&s=books&sr=1-2&text=Bryan+Caplan Bryan Caplan, Open Borders https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1691043816&refinements=p_27%3ABryan+Caplan&s=books&sr=1-1&text=Bryan+Caplan Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691138732/the-myth-of-the-rational-voter X: Bryan's Twitter: @Bryan_Caplan Erik's Twitter: @eriktorenberg Upstream : @upstream__pod Please support our sponsors: Shopify Shopify: https://shopify.com/torenberg for a $1/month trial period Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business. Shopify powers 10% of all ecommerce in the US. And Shopify's the global force behind Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklinen, and 1,000,000s of other entrepreneurs across 175 countries. From their all-in-one ecommerce platform, to their in-person POS system – wherever and whatever you're selling, Shopify's got you covered. Sign up for $1/month trial period: https://shopify.com/torenberg.

Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University and the author of several books, including Open Borders - The Science and Ethics of Immigration, The Case Against Education and the Myth of the Rational Voter.Bryan is one of the most iconoclastic contemporary thinkers, and had a major influence on the themes of this podcast. His books explain much of the emergent incentives created by the political process that stymie economic growth.In this episode, we talk about his new book "Voters as Mad Scientists - Essays on Political Rationality" and use it as a starter to talk about a variety of topics:Bryan on how the alignment of "Chaotic Good" in the world of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fits his non-conformist style of thinking and practice of breaking bad or unethical laws, as long as you can get away with itWhy voters love to hate business and how the Stockholm Syndrome can help explain it: people like to ally with the powerful, even if they're rich, against rich people or business with less or no political power to hurt themThe politics of what sounds good vs. what is good - explained by social desirability bias, exposed by revealed preferences ("actions speak louder than words") and cemented into practice by status quo biasBryan admits that he's been wrong about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin: F. A. Hayek's idea of de-nationalizing banking has won the day against all oddsIf you're a regular listener to this podcast, you'll chuckle when Bryan compares how someone telling him about Bitcoin for the first time with someone telling him about starting a new country on an island (Prospera is not literally a country though).If starting a new jurisdiction with better laws sounds like a crazy but great idea to you, and your D&D alignment is Lawful-Neutral, Neutral-Good or Chaotic-Good, then come check it out and help us build it - the schedule for coming events is here.

Aporia Magazine: https://www.aporiamagazine.com/ Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and the New York Times Bestselling author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders, and Labor Econ Versus the World. In this podcast, Diana speaks with Bryan about many topics (timestamps below), but centres the conversation around his book Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice. You should subscribe to Bryan's superb Substack: https://betonit.substack.com/

Thanks to the over 42,000 latent space explorers who checked out our Replit episode! We are hosting/attending a couple more events in SF and NYC this month. See you if in town!Lexica.art was introduced to the world 24 hours after the release of Stable Diffusion as a search engine for prompts, gaining instant product-market fit as a world discovering generative AI also found they needed to learn prompting by example.Lexica is now 8 months old, serving 5B image searches/day, and just shipped V3 of Lexica Aperture, their own text-to-image model! Sharif Shameem breaks his podcast hiatus with us for an exclusive interview covering his journey building everything with AI!The conversation is nominally about Sharif's journey through his three startups VectorDash, Debuild, and now Lexica, but really a deeper introspection into what it takes to be a top founder in the fastest moving tech startup scene (possibly ever) of AI. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did!Full transcript is below the fold. We would really appreciate if you shared our pod with friends on Twitter, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Bluesky, or your social media poison of choice!Timestamps* [00:00] Introducing Sharif* [02:00] VectorDash* [05:00] The GPT3 Moment and Building Debuild* [09:00] Stable Diffusion and Lexica* [11:00] Lexica's Launch & How it Works* [15:00] Being Chronically Early* [16:00] From Search to Custom Models* [17:00] AI Grant Learnings* [19:30] The Text to Image Illuminati?* [20:30] How to Learn to Train Models* [24:00] The future of Agents and Human Intervention* [29:30] GPT4 and Multimodality* [33:30] Sharif's Startup Manual* [38:30] Lexica Aperture V1/2/3* [40:00] Request for AI Startup - LLM Tools* [41:00] Sequencing your Genome* [42:00] Believe in Doing Great Things* [44:30] Lightning RoundShow Notes* Sharif's website, Twitter, LinkedIn* VectorDash (5x cheaper than AWS)* Debuild Insider, Fast company, MIT review, tweet, tweet* Lexica* Introducing Lexica* Lexica Stats* Aug: “God mode” search* Sep: Lexica API * Sept: Search engine with CLIP * Sept: Reverse image search* Nov: teasing Aperture* Dec: Aperture v1* Dec - Aperture v2* Jan 2023 - Outpainting* Apr 2023 - Aperture v3* Same.energy* AI Grant* Sharif on Agents: prescient Airpods tweet, Reflection* MiniGPT4 - Sharif on Multimodality* Sharif Startup Manual* Sharif Future* 23andMe Genome Sequencing Tool: Promethease* Lightning Round* Fave AI Product: Cursor.so. Swyx ChatGPT Menubar App.* Acceleration: Multimodality of GPT4. Animated Drawings* Request for Startup: Tools for LLMs, Brex for GPT Agents* Message: Build Weird Ideas!TranscriptAlessio: Hey everyone, welcome to the Latent Space podcast. This is Alessio, partner and CTO on Residence at Decibel Partners. I'm joined by my co-host Wix, writer and editor of Latent Space. And today we have Sharish Amin. Welcome to the studio. Sharif: Awesome. Thanks for the invite.Swyx: Really glad to have you. [00:00] Introducing SharifSwyx: You've been a dream guest, actually, since we started drafting guest lists for this pod. So glad we could finally make this happen. So what I like to do is usually introduce people, offer their LinkedIn, and then prompt you for what's not on your LinkedIn. And to get a little bit of the person behind the awesome projects. So you graduated University of Maryland in CS. Sharif: So I actually didn't graduate, but I did study. Swyx: You did not graduate. You dropped out. Sharif: I did drop out. Swyx: What was the decision behind dropping out? Sharif: So first of all, I wasn't doing too well in any of my classes. I was working on a side project that took up most of my time. Then I spoke to this guy who ended up being one of our investors. And he was like, actually, I ended up dropping out. I did YC. And my company didn't end up working out. And I returned to school and graduated along with my friends. I was like, oh, it's actually a reversible decision. And that was like that. And then I read this book called The Case Against Education by Brian Kaplan. So those two things kind of sealed the deal for me on dropping out. Swyx: Are you still on hiatus? Could you still theoretically go back? Sharif: Theoretically, probably. Yeah. Still on indefinite leave. Swyx: Then you did some work at Mitra? Sharif: Mitra, yeah. So they're lesser known. So they're technically like an FFRDC, a federally funded research and development center. So they're kind of like a large government contractor, but nonprofit. Yeah, I did some computer vision work there as well. [02:00] VectorDashSwyx: But it seems like you always have an independent founder bone in you. Because then you started working on VectorDash, which is distributed GPUs. Sharif: Yes. Yeah. So VectorDash was a really fun project that we ended up working on for a while. So while I was at Mitra, I had a friend who was mining Ethereum. This was, I think, 2016 or 2017. Oh my God. Yeah. And he was mining on his NVIDIA 1080Ti, making around like five or six dollars a day. And I was trying to train a character recurrent neural network, like a character RNN on my iMessage text messages to make it like a chatbot. Because I was just curious if I could do it. Because iMessage stores all your past messages from years ago in a SQL database, which is pretty nifty. But I wanted to train it. And I needed a GPU. And it was, I think, $60 to $80 for a T4 on AWS, which is really slow compared to a 1080Ti. If you normalize the cost and performance versus the 1080Ti when someone's mining Ethereum, it's like a 20x difference. So I was like, hey, his name was Alex. Alex, I'll give you like 10 bucks if you let me borrow your 1080Ti for a week. I'll give you 10 bucks per day. And it was like 70 bucks. And I used it to train my model. And it worked great. The model was really bad, but the whole trade worked really great. I got a really high performance GPU to train my model on. He got much more than he was making by mining Ethereum. So we had this idea. I was like, hey, what if we built this marketplace where people could rent their GPUs where they're mining cryptocurrency and machine learning researchers could just rent them out and pay a lot cheaper than they would pay AWS. And it worked pretty well. We launched in a few months. We had over 120,000 NVIDIA GPUs on the platform. And then we were the cheapest GPU cloud provider for like a solid year or so. You could rent a pretty solid GPU for like 20 cents an hour. And cryptocurrency miners were making more than they would make mining crypto because this was after the Ethereum crash. And yeah, it was pretty cool. It just turns out that a lot of our customers were college students and researchers who didn't have much money. And they weren't necessarily the best customers to have as a business. Startups had a ton of credits and larger companies were like, actually, we don't really trust you with our data, which makes sense. Yeah, we ended up pivoting that to becoming a cloud GPU provider for video games. So we would stream games from our GPUs. Oftentimes, like many were located just a few blocks away from you because we had the lowest latency of any cloud GPU provider, even lower than like AWS and sometimes Cloudflare. And we decided to build a cloud gaming platform where you could pretty much play your own games on the GPU and then stream it back to your Mac or PC. Swyx: So Stadia before Stadia. Sharif: Yeah, Stadia before Stadia. It's like a year or so before Stadia. Swtx: Wow. Weren't you jealous of, I mean, I don't know, it sounds like Stadia could have bought you or Google could have bought you for Stadia and that never happened? Sharif: It never happened. Yeah, it didn't end up working out for a few reasons. The biggest thing was internet bandwidth. So a lot of the hosts, the GPU hosts had lots of GPUs, but average upload bandwidth in the United States is only 35 megabits per second, I think. And like a 4K stream needs like a minimum of 15 to 20 megabits per second. So you could really only utilize one of those GPUs, even if they had like 60 or 100. [05:00] The GPT3 Moment and Building DebuildSwyx: And then you went to debuild July 2020, is the date that I have. I'm actually kind of just curious, like what was your GPT-3 aha moment? When were you like GPT-3-pilled? Sharif: Okay, so I first heard about it because I was also working on another chatbot. So this was like after, like everything ties back to this chatbot I'm trying to make. This was after working on VectorDash. I was just like hacking on random projects. I wanted to make the chatbot using not really GPT-2, but rather just like it would be pre-programmed. It was pretty much you would give it a goal and then it would ask you throughout the week how much progress you're making to that goal. So take your unstructured response, usually a reply to a text message, and then it would like, plot it for you in like a table and you could see your progress over time. It could be for running or tracking calories. But I wanted to use GPT-3 to make it seem more natural because I remember someone on Bookface, which is still YC's internal forum. They posted and they were like, OpenAI just released AGI and it's GPT-3. I asked it like a bunch of logic puzzles and it solved them all perfectly. And I was like, what? How's no one else talking about this? Like this is either like the greatest thing ever that everyone is missing or like it's not that good. So like I tweeted out if anyone could get me access to it. A few hours later, Greg Brockman responded. Swyx: He is everywhere. Sharif: He's great. Yeah, he's on top of things. And yeah, by that afternoon, I was like messing around with the API and I was like, wow, this is incredible. You could chat with fake people or people that have passed away. You could like, I remember the first conversation I did was this is a chat with Steve Jobs and it was like, interviewer, hi. What are you up to today on Steve? And then like you could talk to Steve Jobs and it was somewhat plausible. Oh, the thing that really blew my mind was I tried to generate code with it. So I'd write the function for a JavaScript header or the header for a JavaScript function. And it would complete the rest of the function. I was like, whoa, does this code actually work? Like I copied it and ran it and it worked. And I tried it again. I gave more complex things and like I kind of understood where it would break, which was like if it was like something, like if it was something you couldn't easily describe in a sentence and like contain all the logic for in a single sentence. So I wanted to build a way where I could visually test whether these functions were actually working. And what I was doing was like I was generating the code in the playground, copying it into my VS code editor, running it and then reloading the react development page. And I was like, okay, cool. That works. So I was like, wait, let me just put this all in like the same page so I can just compile in the browser, run it in the browser and then submit it to the API in the browser as well. So I did that. And it was really just like a simple loop where you just type in the prompt. It would generate the code and then compile it directly in the browser. And it showed you the response. And I did this for like very basic JSX react components. I mean, it worked. It was pretty mind blowing. I remember staying up all night, like working on it. And it was like the coolest thing I'd ever worked on at the time so far. Yeah. And then I was like so mind blowing that no one was talking about this whole GPT three thing. I was like, why is this not on everyone's minds? So I recorded a quick 30 second demo and I posted on Twitter and like I go to bed after staying awake for like 20 hours straight. When I wake up the next morning and I had like 20,000 likes and like 100,000 people had viewed it. I was like, oh, this is so cool. And then I just kept putting demos out for like the next week. And yeah, that was like my GPT three spark moment. Swyx: And you got featured in like Fast Company, MIT Tech Review, you know, a bunch of stuff, right? Sharif: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of it was just like the API had been there for like a month prior already. Swyx: Not everyone had access. Sharif: That's true. Not everyone had access. Swyx: So you just had the gumption to tweet it out. And obviously, Greg, you know, on top of things as always. Sharif: Yeah. Yeah. I think it also makes a lot of sense when you kind of share things in a way that's easily consumable for people to understand. Whereas if you had shown a terminal screenshot of a generating code, that'd be pretty compelling. But whereas seeing it get rendered and compiled directly in front of you, there's a lot more interesting. There's also that human aspect to it where you want to relate things to the end user, not just like no one really cares about evals. When you can create a much more compelling demo explaining how it does on certain tasks. [09:00] Stable Diffusion and LexicaSwyx: Okay. We'll round it out soon. But in 2022, you moved from Debuild to Lexica, which was the search engine. I assume this was inspired by stable diffusion, but I can get the history there a little bit. Sharif: Yeah. So I was still working on Debuild. We were growing at like a modest pace and I was in the stable... Swyx: I was on the signup list. I never got off. Sharif: Oh yeah. Well, we'll get you off. It's not getting many updates anymore, but yeah, I was in the stable diffusion discord and I was in it for like many hours a day. It was just like the most exciting thing I'd ever done in a discord. It was so cool. Like people were generating so many images, but I didn't really know how to write prompts and people were like writing really complicated things. They would be like, like a modern home training on our station by Greg Rutkowski, like a 4k Unreal Engine. It's like that there's no way that actually makes the images look better. But everyone was just kind of copying everyone else's prompts and like changing like the first few words. Swyx: Yeah. Yeah. Sharif: So I was like using the discord search bar and it was really bad because it showed like five images at a time. And I was like, you know what? I could build a much better interface for this. So I ended up scraping the entire discord. It was like 10 million images. I put them in a database and I just pretty much built a very basic search engine where you could just type for type a word and then it returned all the prompts that had that word. And I built the entire website for it in like 20, in like about two days. And we shipped it the day I shipped it the day after the stable diffusion weights were open sourced. So about 24 hours later and it kind of took off in a way that I never would have expected. Like I thought it'd be this cool utility that like hardcore stable diffusion users would find useful. But it turns out that almost anyone who mentioned stable diffusion would also kind of mention Lexica in conjunction with it. I think it's because it was like it captured the zeitgeist in an easy to share way where it's like this URL and there's this gallery and you can search. Whereas running the model locally was a lot harder. You'd have to like to deploy it on your own GPU and like set up your own environment and like do all that stuff. Swyx: Oh, my takeaway. I have two more to add to the reasons why Lexica works at the time. One is lower latency is all you need. So in other words, instead of waiting a minute for your image, you could just search and find stuff that other people have done. That's good. And then two is everyone knew how to search already, but people didn't know how to prompt. So you were the bridge. Sharif: That's true. Yeah. You would get a lot better looking images by typing a one word prompt versus prompting for that one word. Yeah. Swyx: Yeah. That is interesting. [11:00] Lexica's Explosion at LaunchAlessio: The numbers kind of speak for themselves, right? Like 24 hours post launch, 51,000 queries, like 2.2 terabytes in bandwidth. Going back to the bandwidth problem that you have before, like you would have definitely run into that. Day two, you doubled that. It's like 111,000 queries, four and a half terabytes in bandwidth, 22 million images served. So it's pretty crazy. Sharif: Yeah. I think we're, we're doing like over 5 billion images served per month now. It's like, yeah, that's, it's pretty crazy how much things have changed since then. Swyx: Yeah. I'm still showing people like today, even today, you know, it's been a few months now. This is where you start to learn image prompting because they don't know. Sharif: Yeah, it is interesting. And I, it's weird because I didn't really think it would be a company. I thought it would just be like a cool utility or like a cool tool that I would use for myself. And I really was just building it for myself just because I didn't want to use the Discord search bar. But yeah, it was interesting that a lot of other people found it pretty useful as well. [11:00] How Lexica WorksSwyx: So there's a lot of things that you release in a short amount of time. The God mode search was kind of like, obviously the first thing, I guess, like maybe to talk about some of the underlying technology you're using clip to kind of find, you know, go from image to like description and then let people search it. Maybe talk a little bit about what it takes to actually make the search magic happen. Sharif: Yeah. So the original search was just using Postgres' full text search and it would only search the text contents of the prompt. But I was inspired by another website called Same Energy, where like a visual search engine. It's really cool. Do you know what happened to that guy? I don't. Swyx: He released it and then he disappeared from the internet. Sharif: I don't know what happened to him, but I'm sure he's working on something really cool. He also worked on like Tabnine, which was like the very first version of Copilot or like even before Copilot was Copilot. But yeah, inspired by that, I thought like being able to search images by their semantics. The contents of the image was really interesting. So I pretty much decided to create a search index on the clip embeddings, the clip image embeddings of all the images. And when you would search it, we would just do KNN search on pretty much the image embedding index. I mean, we had way too many embeddings to store on like a regular database. So we had to end up using FAISS, which is a Facebook library for really fast KNN search and embedding search. That was pretty fun to set up. It actually runs only on CPUs, which is really cool. It's super efficient. You compute the embeddings on GPUs, but like you can serve it all on like an eight core server and it's really, really fast. Once we released the semantic search on the clip embeddings, people were using the search way more. And you could do other cool things. You could do like similar image search where if you found like a specific image you liked, you could upload it and it would show you relevant images as well. Swyx: And then right after that, you raised your seed money from AI grant, NetFreedman, then Gross. Sharif: Yeah, we raised about $5 million from Daniel Gross. And then we also participated in AI grant. That was pretty cool. That was kind of the inflection point. Not much before that point, Lexic was kind of still a side project. And I told myself that I would focus on it full time or I'd consider focusing on it full time if we had broke like a million users. I was like, oh, that's gonna be like years away for sure. And then we ended up doing that in like the first week and a half. I was like, okay, there's something here. And it was kind of that like deal was like growing like pretty slowly and like pretty linearly. And then Lexica was just like this thing that just kept going up and up and up. And I was so confused. I was like, man, people really like looking at pictures. This is crazy. Yeah. And then we decided to pivot the entire company and just focus on Lexica full time at that point. And then we raised our seed round. [15:00] Being Chronically EarlySwyx: Yeah. So one thing that you casually dropped out, the one that slip, you said you were working on Lexica before the launch of Stable Diffusion such that you were able to launch Lexica one day after Stable Diffusion. Sharif: Yeah.Swyx: How did you get so early into Stable Diffusion? Cause I didn't hear about it. Sharif: Oh, that's a good question. I, where did I first hear about Stable Diffusion? I'm not entirely sure. It must've been like somewhere on Twitter or something. That changed your life. Yeah, it was great. And I got into the discord cause I'd used Dolly too before, but, um, there were a lot of restrictions in place where you can generate human faces at the time. You can do that now. But when I first got access to it, like you couldn't do any faces. It was like, there were like a, the list of adjectives you couldn't use was quite long. Like I had a friend from Pakistan and it can generate anything with the word Pakistan in it for some reason. But Stable Diffusion was like kind of the exact opposite where there were like very, very few rules. So that was really, really fun and interesting, especially seeing the chaos of like a bunch of other people also using it right in front of you. That was just so much fun. And I just wanted to do something with it. I thought it was honestly really fun. Swyx: Oh, well, I was just trying to get tips on how to be early on things. Cause you're pretty consistently early to things, right? You were Stadia before Stadia. Um, and then obviously you were on. Sharif: Well, Stadia is kind of shut down now. So I don't know if being early to that was a good one. Swyx: Um, I think like, you know, just being consistently early to things that, uh, you know, have a lot of potential, like one of them is going to work out and you know, then that's how you got Lexica. [16:00] From Search to Custom ModelsAlessio: How did you decide to go from search to running your own models for a generation? Sharif: That's a good question. So we kind of realized that the way people were using Lexica was they would have Lexica open in one tab and then in another tab, they'd have a Stable Diffusion interface. It would be like either a discord or like a local run interface, like the automatic radio UI, um, or something else. I just, I would watch people use it and they would like all tabs back and forth between Lexica and their other UI. And they would like to scroll through Lexica, click on the prompt, click on an image, copy the prompt, and then paste it and maybe change a word or two. And I was like, this should really kind of just be all within Lexica. Like, it'd be so cool if you could just click a button in Lexica and get an editor and generate your images. And I found myself also doing the all tab thing, or it was really frustrating. I was like, man, this is kind of tedious. Like I really wish it was much simpler. So we just built generations directly within Lexica. Um, so we do, we deployed it on, I don't remember when we first launched, I think it was November, December. And yeah, people love generating directly within it. [17:00] AI Grant LearningsSwyx: I was also thinking that this was coming out of AI grants where, you know, I think, um, yeah, I was like a very special program. I was just wondering if you learned anything from, you know, that special week where everyone was in town. Sharif: Yeah, that was a great week. I loved it. Swyx: Yeah. Bring us, bring us in a little bit. Cause it was awesome. There. Sharif: Oh, sure. Yeah. It's really, really cool. Like all the founders in AI grants are like fantastic people. And so I think the main takeaway from the AI grant was like, you have this massive overhang in compute or in capabilities in terms of like these latest AI models, but to the average person, there's really not that many products that are that cool or useful to them. Like the latest one that has hit the zeitgeist was chat GPT, which used arguably the same GPT three model, but like RLHF, but you could have arguably built like a decent chat GPT product just using the original GPT three model. But no one really did it. Now there were some restrictions in place and opening. I like to slowly release them over the few months or years after they release the original API. But the core premise behind AI grants is that there are way more capabilities than there are products. So focus on building really compelling products and get people to use them. And like to focus less on things like hitting state of the art on evals and more on getting users to use something. Swyx: Make something people want.Sharif: Exactly. Host: Yeah, we did an episode on LLM benchmarks and we kind of talked about how the benchmarks kind of constrain what people work on, because if your model is not going to do well, unlike the well-known benchmarks, it's not going to get as much interest and like funding. So going at it from a product lens is cool. [19:30] The Text to Image Illuminati?Swyx: My hypothesis when I was seeing the sequence of events for AI grants and then for Lexica Aperture was that you had some kind of magical dinner with Emad and David Holtz. And then they taught you the secrets of training your own model. Is that how it happens? Sharif: No, there's no secret dinner. The Illuminati of text to image. We did not have a meeting. I mean, even if we did, I wouldn't tell you. But it really boils down to just having good data. If you think about diffusion models, really the only thing they do is learn a distribution of data. So if you have high quality data, learn that high quality distribution. Or if you have low quality data, it will learn to generate images that look like they're from that distribution. So really it boils down to the data and the amount of data you have and that quality of that data, which means a lot of the work in training high quality models, at least diffusion models, is not really in the model architecture, but rather just filtering the data in a way that makes sense. So for Lexica, we do a lot of aesthetic scoring on images and we use the rankings we get from our website because we get tens of millions of people visiting it every month. So we can capture a lot of rankings. Oh, this person liked this image when they saw this one right next to it. Therefore, they probably preferred this one over that. You can do pairwise ranking to rank images and then compute like ELO scores. You can also just train aesthetic models to learn to classify a model, whether or not someone will like it or whether or not it's like, rank it on a scale of like one to ten, for example. So we mostly use a lot of the traffic we get from Lexica and use that to kind of filter our data sets and use that to train better aesthetic models. [20:30] How to Learn to Train ModelsSwyx: You had been a machine learning engineer before. You've been more of an infrastructure guy. To build, you were more of a prompt engineer with a bit of web design. This was the first time that you were basically training your own model. What was the wrap up like? You know, not to give away any secret sauce, but I think a lot of people who are traditional software engineers are feeling a lot of, I don't know, fear when encountering these kinds of domains. Sharif: Yeah, I think it makes a lot of sense. And to be fair, I didn't have much experience training massive models at this scale before I did it. A lot of times it's really just like, in the same way when you're first learning to program, you would just take the problem you're having, Google it, and go through the stack overflow post. And then you figure it out, but ultimately you will get to the answer. It might take you a lot longer than someone who's experienced, but I think there are enough resources out there where it's possible to learn how to do these things. Either just reading through GitHub issues for relevant models. Swyx: Oh God. Sharif: Yeah. It's really just like, you might be slower, but it's definitely still possible. And there are really great courses out there. The Fast AI course is fantastic. There's the deep learning book, which is great for fundamentals. And then Andrej Karpathy's online courses are also excellent, especially for language modeling. You might be a bit slower for the first few months, but ultimately I think if you have the programming skills, you'll catch up pretty quickly. It's not like this magical dark science that only three people in the world know how to do well. Probably was like 10 years ago, but now it's becoming much more open. You have open source collectives like Eleuther and LAION, where they like to share the details of their large scale training runs. So you can learn from a lot of those people. Swyx: Yeah. I think what is different for programmers is having to estimate significant costs upfront before they hit run. Because it's not a thing that you normally consider when you're coding, but yeah, like burning through your credits is a fear that people have. Sharif: Yeah, that does make sense. In that case, like fine tuning larger models gets you really, really far. Even using things like low rank adaptation to fine tune, where you can like fine tune much more efficiently on a single GPU. Yeah, I think people are underestimating how far you can really get just using open source models. I mean, before Lexica, I was working on Debuild and we were using the GP3 API, but I was also like really impressed at how well you could get open source models to run by just like using the API, collecting enough samples from like real world user feedback or real world user data using your product. And then just fine tuning the smaller open source models on those examples. And now you have a model that's pretty much state of the art for your specific domain. Whereas the runtime cost is like 10 times or even 100 times cheaper than using an API. Swyx: And was that like GPT-J or are you talking BERT? Sharif: I remember we tried GPT-J, but I think FLAN-T5 was like the best model we were able to use for that use case. FLAN-T5 is awesome. If you can, like if your prompt is small enough, it's pretty great. And I'm sure there are much better open source models now. Like Vicuna, which is like the GPT-4 variant of like Lama fine tuned on like GPT-4 outputs. Yeah, they're just going to get better and they're going to get better much, much faster. Swyx: Yeah. We're just talking in a previous episode to the creator of Dolly, Mike Conover, which is actually commercially usable instead of Vicuna, which is a research project. Sharif: Oh, wow. Yeah, that's pretty cool. [24:00] Why No Agents?Alessio: I know you mentioned being early. Obviously, agents are one of the hot things here. In 2021, you had this, please buy me AirPods, like a demo that you tweeted with the GPT-3 API. Obviously, one of the things about being early in this space, you can only do one thing at a time, right? And you had one tweet recently where you said you hoped that that demo would open Pandora's box for a bunch of weird GPT agents. But all we got were docs powered by GPT. Can you maybe talk a little bit about, you know, things that you wish you would see or, you know, in the last few, last few weeks, we've had, you know, Hugging GPT, Baby AGI, Auto GPT, all these different kind of like agent projects that maybe now are getting closer to the, what did you say, 50% of internet traffic being skips of GPT agents. What are you most excited about, about these projects and what's coming? Sharif: Yeah, so we wanted a way for users to be able to paste in a link for the documentation page for a specific API, and then describe how to call that API. And then the way we would need to pretty much do that for Debuild was we wondered if we could get an agent to browse the docs page, read through it, summarize it, and then maybe even do things like create an API key and register it for that user. To do that, we needed a way for the agent to read the web page and interact with it. So I spent about a day working on that demo where we just took the web page, serialized it into a more compact form that fit within the 2048 token limit of like GPT-3 at the time. And then just decide what action to do. And then it would, if the page was too long, it would break it down into chunks. And then you would have like a sub prompt, decide on which chunk had the best action. And then at the top node, you would just pretty much take that action and then run it in a loop. It was really, really expensive. I think that one 60 second demo cost like a hundred bucks or something, but it was wildly impractical. But you could clearly see that agents were going to be a thing, especially ones that could read and write and take actions on the internet. It was just prohibitively expensive at the time. And the context limit was way too small. But yeah, I think it seems like a lot of people are taking it more seriously now, mostly because GPT-4 is way more capable. The context limit's like four times larger at 8,000 tokens, soon 32,000. And I think the only problem that's left to solve is finding a really good representation for a webpage that allows it to be consumed by a text only model. So some examples are like, you could just take all the text and pass it in, but that's probably too long. You could take all the interactive only elements like buttons and inputs, but then you miss a lot of the relevant context. There are some interesting examples, which I really like is you could run the webpage or you could run the browser in a terminal based browser. So there are some browsers that run in your terminal, which serialize everything into text. And what you can do is just take that frame from that terminal based browser and pass that directly to the model. And it's like a really, really good representation of the webpage because they do things where for graphical elements, they kind of render it using ASCII blocks. But for text, they render it as actual text. So you could just remove all the weird graphical elements, just keep all the text. And that works surprisingly well. And then there are other problems to solve, which is how do you get the model to take an action? So for example, if you have a booking page and there's like a calendar and there are 30 days on the calendar, how do you get it to specify which button to press? It could say 30, and you can match string based and like find the 30. But for example, what if it's like a list of friends in Facebook and trying to delete a friend? There might be like 30 delete buttons. How do you specify which one to click on? The model might say like, oh, click on the one for like Mark. But then you'd have to figure out the delete button in relation to Mark. And there are some ways to solve this. One is there's a cool Chrome extension called Vimium, which lets you use Vim in your Chrome browser. And what you do is you can press F and over every interactive element, it gives you like a character or two characters. Or if you type those two characters, it presses that button or it opens or focuses on that input. So you could combine a lot of these ideas and then get a really good representation of the web browser in text, and then also give the model a really, really good way to control the browser as well. And I think those two are the core part of the problem. The reasoning ability is definitely there. If a model can score in the top 10% on the bar exam, it can definitely browse a web page. It's really just how do you represent text to the model and how do you get the model to perform actions back on the web page? Really, it's just an engineering problem. Swyx: I have one doubt, which I'd love your thoughts on. How do you get the model to pause when it doesn't have enough information and ask you for additional information because you under specified your original request? Sharif: This is interesting. I think the only way to do this is to have a corpus where your training data is like these sessions of agents browsing the web. And you have to pretty much figure out where the ones that went wrong or the agents that went wrong, or did they go wrong and just replace it with, hey, I need some help. And then if you were to fine tune a larger model on that data set, you would pretty much get them to say, hey, I need help on the instances where they didn't know what to do next. Or if you're using a closed source model like GPT-4, you could probably tell it if you're uncertain about what to do next, ask the user for help. And it probably would be pretty good at that. I've had to write a lot of integration tests in my engineering days and like the dome. Alessio: They might be over. Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. I don't want to, I don't want to deal with that anymore. I, yeah, I don't want to write them the old way. Yeah. But I'm just thinking like, you know, we had the robots, the TXT for like crawlers. Like I can definitely see the DOM being reshaped a little bit in terms of accessibility. Like sometimes you have to write expats that are like so long just to get to a button. Like there should be a better way to do it. And maybe this will drive the change, you know, making it easier for these models to interact with your website. Sharif: There is the Chrome accessibility tree, which is used by screen readers, but a lot of times it's missing a lot of, a lot of useful information. But like in a perfect world, everything would be perfectly annotated for screen readers and we could just use that. That's not the case. [29:30] GPT4 and MultimodalitySwyx: GPT-4 multimodal, has your buddy, Greg, and do you think that that would solve essentially browser agents or desktop agents? Sharif: Greg has not come through yet, unfortunately. But it would make things a lot easier, especially for graphically heavy web pages. So for example, you were using Yelp and like using the map view, it would make a lot of sense to use something like that versus a text based input. Where, how do you serialize a map into text? It's kind of hard to do that. So for more complex web pages, that would make it a lot easier. You get a lot more context to the model. I mean, it seems like that multimodal input is very dense in the sense that it can read text and it can read it really, really well. So you could probably give it like a PDF and it would be able to extract all the text and summarize it. So if it can do that, it could probably do anything on any webpage. Swyx: Yeah. And given that you have some experience integrating Clip with language models, how would you describe how different GPT-4 is compared to that stuff? Sharif: Yeah. Clip is entirely different in the sense that it's really just good at putting images and text into the same latent space. And really the only thing that's useful for is similarity and clustering. Swyx: Like literally the same energy, right? Sharif: Yeah. Swyx: Yeah. And then there's Blip and Blip2. I don't know if you like those. Sharif: Yeah. Blip2 is a lot better. There's actually a new project called, I think, Mini GPT-4. Swyx: Yes. It was just out today. Sharif: Oh, nice. Yeah. It's really cool. It's actually really good. I think that one is based on the Lama model, but yeah, that's, that's like another. Host: It's Blip plus Lama, right? So they, they're like running through Blip and then have Lama ask your, interpret your questions so that you do visual QA. Sharif: Oh, that's cool. That's really clever. Yeah. Ensemble models are really useful. Host: Well, so I was trying to articulate, cause that was, that's, there's two things people are talking about today. You have to like, you know, the moment you wake up, you open Hacker News and go like, all right, what's, what's the new thing today? One is Red Pajama. And then the other one is Mini GPT-4. So I was trying to articulate like, why is this not GPT-4? Like what is missing? And my only conclusion was it just doesn't do OCR yet. But I wonder if there's anything core to this concept of multimodality that you have to train these things together. Like what does one model doing all these things do that is separate from an ensemble of models that you just kind of duct tape together? Sharif: It's a good question. This is pretty related to interoperability. Like how do we understand that? Or how, how do we, why do models trained on different modalities within the same model perform better than two models perform or train separately? I can kind of see why that is the case. Like, it's kind of hard to articulate, but when you have two different models, you get the reasoning abilities of a language model, but also like the text or the vision understanding of something like Clip. Whereas Clip clearly lacks the reasoning abilities, but if you could somehow just put them both in the same model, you get the best of both worlds. There were even cases where I think the vision version of GPT-4 scored higher on some tests than the text only version. So like there might even be some additional learning from images as well. Swyx: Oh yeah. Well, uh, the easy answer for that was there was some chart in the test. That wasn't translated. Oh, when I read that, I was like, Oh yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Sharif: That makes sense. I thought it'd just be like, it sees more of the world. Therefore it has more tokens. Swyx: So my equivalent of this is I think it's a well-known fact that adding code to a language model training corpus increases its ability to do language, not just with code. So, the diversity of datasets that represent some kind of internal logic and code is obviously very internally logically consistent, helps the language model learn some internal structure. Which I think, so, you know, my ultimate test for GPT-4 is to show the image of like, you know, is this a pipe and ask it if it's a pipe or not and see what it does. Sharif: Interesting. That is pretty cool. Yeah. Or just give it a screenshot of your like VS code editor and ask it to fix the bug. Yeah. That'd be pretty wild if it could do that. Swyx: That would be adult AGI. That would be, that would be the grownup form of AGI. [33:30] Sharif's Startup ManualSwyx: On your website, you have this, um, startup manual where you give a bunch of advice. This is fun. One of them was that you should be shipping to production like every two days, every other day. This seems like a great time to do it because things change every other day. But maybe, yeah, tell some of our listeners a little bit more about how you got to some of these heuristics and you obviously build different projects and you iterate it on a lot of things. Yeah. Do you want to reference this? Sharif: Um, sure. Yeah, I'll take a look at it. Swyx: And we'll put this in the show notes, but I just wanted you to have the opportunity to riff on this, this list, because I think it's a very good list. And what, which one of them helped you for Lexica, if there's anything, anything interesting. Sharif: So this list is, it's pretty funny. It's mostly just like me yelling at myself based on all the mistakes I've made in the past and me trying to not make them again. Yeah. Yeah. So I, the first one is like, I think the most important one is like, try when you're building a product, try to build the smallest possible version. And I mean, for Lexica, it was literally a, literally one screen in the react app where a post-process database, and it just showed you like images. And I don't even know if the first version had search. Like I think it did, but I'm not sure. Like, I think it was really just like a grid of images that were randomized, but yeah, don't build the absolute smallest thing that can be considered a useful application and ship it for Lexica. That was, it helps me write better prompts. That's pretty useful. It's not that useful, but it's good enough. Don't fall into the trap of intellectual indulgence with over-engineering. I think that's a pretty important one for myself. And also anyone working on new things, there's often times you fall into the trap of like thinking you need to add more and more things when in reality, like the moment it's useful, you should probably get in the hands of your users and they'll kind of set the roadmap for you. I know this has been said millions of times prior, but just, I think it's really, really important. And I think if I'd spent like two months working on Lexica, adding a bunch of features, it wouldn't have been anywhere as popular as it was if I had just released the really, really boiled down version alongside the stable diffusion release. Yeah. And then there are a few more like product development doesn't start until you launch. Think of your initial product as a means to get your users to talk to you. It's also related to the first point where you really just want people using something as quickly as you can get that to happen. And then a few more are pretty interesting. Create a product people love before you focus on growth. If your users are spontaneously telling other people to use your product, then you've built something people love. Swyx: So this is pretty, it sounds like you've internalized Paul Graham's stuff a lot. Yeah. Because I think he said stuff like that. Sharif: A lot of these are just probably me taking notes from books I found really interesting or like PG essays that were really relevant at the time. And then just trying to not forget them. I should probably read this list again. There's some pretty personalized advice for me here. Oh yeah. One of my favorite ones is, um, don't worry if what you're building doesn't sound like a business. Nobody thought Facebook would be a $500 billion company. It's easy to come up with a business model. Once you've made something people want, you can even make pretty web forms and turn that into a 200 person company. And then if you click the link, it's to LinkedIn for type form, which is now, uh, I think they're like an 800 person company or something like that. So they've grown quite a bit. There you go. Yeah. Pretty web forms are pretty good business, even though it doesn't sound like it. Yeah. It's worth a billion dollars. [38:30] Lexica Aperture V1/2/3Swyx: One way I would like to tie that to the history of Lexica, which we didn't go over, which was just walk us through like Aperture V1, V2, V3, uh, which you just released last week. And how maybe some of those principles helped you in that journey.Sharif: Yeah. So, um, V1 was us trying to create a very photorealistic version of our model of Sable to Fusion. Uh, V1 actually didn't turn out to be that popular. It turns out people loved not generating. Your marketing tweets were popular. They were quite popular. So I think at the time you couldn't get Sable to Fusion to generate like photorealistic images that were consistent with your prompt that well. It was more so like you were sampling from this distribution of images and you could slightly pick where you sampled from using your prompt. This was mostly just because the clip text encoder is not the best text encoder. If you use a real language model, like T5, you get much better results. Like the T5 XXL model is like a hundred times larger than the clip text encoder for Sable to Fusion 1.5. So you could kind of steer it into like the general direction, but for more complex prompts, it just didn't work. So a lot of our users actually complained that they preferred the 1.5, Sable to Fusion 1.5 model over the Aperture model. And it was just because a lot of people were using it to create like parts and like really weird abstract looking pictures that didn't really work well with the photorealistic model trained solely on images. And then for V2, we kind of took that into consideration and then just trained it more on a lot of the art images on Lexica. So we took a lot of images that were on Lexica that were art, used that to train aesthetic models that ranked art really well, and then filtered larger sets to train V2. And then V3 is kind of just like an improved version of that with much more data. I'm really glad we didn't spend too much time on V1. I think we spent about one month working on it, which is a lot of time, but a lot of the things we learned were useful for training future versions. Swyx: How do you version them? Like where do you decide, okay, this is V2, this is V3? Sharif: The versions are kind of weird where you can't really use semantic versions because like if you have a small update, you usually just make that like V2. Versions are kind of used for different base models, I'd say. So if you have each of the versions were a different base model, but we've done like fine tunes of the same version and then just release an update without incrementing the version. But I think when there's like a clear change between running the same prompt on a model and you get a different image, that should probably be a different version. [40:00] Request for AI Startup - LLM ToolsAlessio: So the startup manual was the more you can actually do these things today to make it better. And then you have a whole future page that has tips from, you know, what the series successor is going to be like to like why everyone's genome should be sequenced. There's a lot of cool stuff in there. Why do we need to develop stimulants with shorter half-lives so that we can sleep better. Maybe talk a bit about, you know, when you're a founder, you need to be focused, right? So sometimes there's a lot of things you cannot build. And I feel like this page is a bit of a collection of these. Like, yeah. Are there any of these things that you're like, if I were not building Lexica today, this is like a very interesting thing. Sharif: Oh man. Yeah. There's a ton of things that I want to build. I mean, off the top of my head, the most exciting one would be better tools for language models. And I mean, not tools that help us use language models, but rather tools for the language models themselves. So things like giving them access to browsers, giving them access to things like payments and credit cards, giving them access to like credit cards, giving them things like access to like real world robots. So like, it'd be cool if you could have a Boston dynamic spot powered by a language model reasoning module and you would like to do things for you, like go and pick up your order, stuff like that. Entirely autonomously given like high level commands. That'd be like number one thing if I wasn't working on Lexica. [40:00] Sequencing your GenomeAnd then there's some other interesting things like genomics I find really cool. Like there's some pretty cool things you can do with consumer genomics. So you can export your genome from 23andMe as a text file, like literally a text file of your entire genome. And there is another tool called Prometheus, I think, where you upload your 23andMe text file genome and then they kind of map specific SNPs that you have in your genome to studies that have been done on those SNPs. And it tells you really, really useful things about yourself. Like, for example, I have the SNP for this thing called delayed sleep phase disorder, which makes me go to sleep about three hours later than the general population. So like I used to always be a night owl and I never knew why. But after using Prometheus it pretty much tells you, oh, you have the specific genome for specific SNP for DSPS. It's like a really tiny percentage of the population. And it's like something you should probably know about. And there's a bunch of other things. It tells you your likelihood for getting certain diseases, for certain cancers, oftentimes, like even weird personality traits. There's one for like, I have one of the SNPs for increased risk taking and optimism, which is pretty weird. That's an actual thing. Like, I don't know how. This is the founder gene. You should sequence everybody. It's pretty cool. And it's like, it's like $10 for Prometheus and like 70 bucks for 23andMe. And it explains to you how your body works and like the things that are different from you or different from the general population. Wow. Highly recommend everyone do it. Like if you're, if you're concerned about privacy, just purchase a 23andMe kit with a fake name. You don't have to use your real name. I didn't use my real name. Swyx: It's just my genes. Worst you can do is clone me. It ties in with what you were talking about with, you know, we want the future to be like this. And like people are building uninspired B2B SaaS apps and you and I had an exchange about this. [42:00] Believe in Doing Great ThingsHow can we get more people to believe they can do great things? Sharif: That's a good question. And I like a lot of the things I've been working on with GP3. It has been like trying to solve this by getting people to think about more interesting ideas. I don't really know. I think one is just like the low effort version of this is just putting out really compelling demos and getting people inspired. And then the higher effort version is like actually building the products yourself and getting people to like realize this is even possible in the first place. Like I think the baby AGI project and like the GPT Asian projects on GitHub are like in practice today, they're not super useful, but I think they're doing an excellent job of getting people incredibly inspired for what can be possible with language models as agents. And also the Stanford paper where they had like the mini version of Sims. Yeah. That one was incredible. That was awesome. Swyx: It was adorable. Did you see the part where they invented day drinking? Sharif: Oh, they did? Swyx: Yeah. You're not supposed to go to these bars in the afternoon, but they were like, we're going to go anyway. Nice. Sharif: That's awesome. Yeah. I think we need more stuff like that. That one paper is probably going to inspire a whole bunch of teams to work on stuff similar to that. Swyx: And that's great. I can't wait for NPCs to actually be something that you talk to in a game and, you know, have their own lives and you can check in and, you know, they would have their own personalities as well. Sharif: Yeah. I was so kind of off topic. But I was playing the last of us part two and the NPCs in that game are really, really good. Where if you like, point a gun at them and they'll beg for their life and like, please, I have a family. And like when you kill people in the game, they're like, oh my God, you shot Alice. Like they're just NPCs, but they refer to each other by their names and like they plead for their lives. And this is just using regular conditional rules on NPC behavior. Imagine how much better it'd be if it was like a small GPT-4 agent running in every NPC and they had the agency to make decisions and plead for their lives. And I don't know, you feel way more guilty playing that game. Alessio: I'm scared it's going to be too good. I played a lot of hours of Fallout. So I feel like if the NPCs were a lot better, you would spend a lot more time playing the game. Yeah. [44:30] Lightning RoundLet's jump into lightning round. First question is your favorite AI product. Sharif: Favorite AI product. The one I use the most is probably ChatGPT. The one I'm most excited about is, it's actually a company in AI grants. They're working on a version of VS code. That's like an entirely AI powered cursor, yeah. Cursor where you would like to give it a prompt and like to iterate on your code, not by writing code, but rather by just describing the changes you want to make. And it's tightly integrated into the editor itself. So it's not just another plugin. Swyx: Would you, as a founder of a low code prompting-to-code company that pivoted, would you advise them to explore some things or stay away from some things? Like what's your learning there that you would give to them?Sharif: I would focus on one specific type of code. So if I'm building a local tool, I would try to not focus too much on appealing developers. Whereas if I was building an alternative to VS code, I would focus solely on developers. So in that, I think they're doing a pretty good job focusing on developers. Swyx: Are you using Cursor right now? Sharif: I've used it a bit. I haven't converted fully, but I really want to. Okay. It's getting better really, really fast. Yeah. Um, I can see myself switching over sometime this year if they continue improving it. Swyx: Hot tip for, for ChatGPT, people always say, you know, they love ChatGPT. Biggest upgrade to my life right now is the, I forked a menu bar app I found on GitHub and now I just have it running in a menu bar app and I just do command shift G and it pops it up as a single use thing. And there's no latency because it just always is live. And I just type, type in the thing I want and then it just goes away after I'm done. Sharif: Wow. That's cool. Big upgrade. I'm going to install that. That's cool. Alessio: Second question. What is something you thought would take much longer, but it's already here? Like what, what's your acceleration update? Sharif: Ooh, um, it would take much longer, but it's already here. This is your question. Yeah, I know. I wasn't prepared. Um, so I think it would probably be kind of, I would say text to video. Swyx: Yeah. What's going on with that? Sharif: I think within this year, uh, by the end of this year, we'll have like the jump between like the original DALL-E one to like something like mid journey. Like we're going to see that leap in text to video within the span of this year. Um, it's not already here yet. So I guess the thing that surprised me the most was probably the multi-modality of GPT four in the fact that it can technically see things, which is pretty insane. Swyx: Yeah. Is text to video something that Aperture would be interested in? Sharif: Uh, it's something we're thinking about, but it's still pretty early. Swyx: There was one project with a hand, um, animation with human poses. It was also coming out of Facebook. I thought that was a very nice way to accomplish text to video while having a high degree of control. I forget the name of that project. It was like, I think it was like drawing anything. Swyx: Yeah. It sounds familiar. Well, you already answered a year from now. What will people be most surprised by? Um, and maybe the, uh, the usual requests for startup, you know, what's one thing you will pay for if someone built it? Sharif: One thing I would pay for if someone built it. Um, so many things, honestly, I would probably really like, um, like I really want people to build more, uh, tools for language models, like useful tools, give them access to Chrome. And I want to be able to give it a task. And then just, it goes off and spins up a hundred agents that perform that task. And like, sure. Like 80 of them might fail, but like 20 of them might kind of succeed. That's all you really need. And they're agents. You can spin up thousands of them. It doesn't really matter. Like a lot of large numbers are on your side. So that'd be, I would pay a lot of money for that. Even if it was capable of only doing really basic tasks, like signing up for a SAS tool and booking a call or something. If you could do even more things where it could have handled the email, uh, thread and like get the person on the other end to like do something where like, I don't even have to like book the demo. They just give me access to it. That'd be great. Yeah. More, more. Like really weird language model tools would be really fun.Swyx: Like our chat, GPT plugins, a step in the right direction, or are you envisioning something else? Sharif: I think GPT, chat GPT plugins are great, but they seem to only have right-only access right now. I also want them to have, I want these like theoretical agents to have right access to the world too. So they should be able to perform actions on web browsers, have their own email inbox, and have their own credit card with their own balance. Like take it, send emails to people that might be useful in achieving their goal. Ask them for help. Be able to like sign up and register for accounts on tools and services and be able to like to use graphical user interfaces really, really well. And also like to phone home if they need help. Swyx: You just had virtual employees. You want to give them a Brex card, right? Sharif: I wouldn't be surprised if, a year from now there was Brex GPT or it's like Brex cards for your GPT agents. Swyx: I mean, okay. I'm excited by this. Yeah. Kind of want to build it. Sharif: You should. Yeah. Alessio: Well, just to wrap up, we always have like one big takeaway for people, like, you know, to display on a signboard for everyone to see what is the big message to everybody. Sharif: Yeah. I think the big message to everybody is you might think that a lot of the time the ideas you have have already been done by someone. And that may be the case, but a lot of the time the ideas you have are actually pretty unique and no one's ever tried them before. So if you have weird and interesting ideas, you should actually go out and just do them and make the thing and then share that with the world. Cause I feel like we need more people building weird ideas and less people building like better GPT search for your documentation. Host: There are like 10 of those in the recent OST patch. Well, thank you so much. You've been hugely inspiring and excited to see where Lexica goes next. Sharif: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Get full access to Latent Space at www.latent.space/subscribe

Jason Brennan argues for less democracy and less politics.Today's Book: Debating Democracy: Do We Need More or Less?Follow @IdeasHavingSexx on Twitter.Other books by JasonJason's upcoming book: Democracy: A Guided TourOther discussed works: Uncivil Agreement; Democracy for Realists; Neither Liberal nor Conservative; The Case Against Education; I, Pencil

Podcast: The Lunar Society (LS 37 · TOP 2.5% )Episode: Bryan Caplan - Feminists, Billionaires, and DemagoguesRelease date: 2022-10-20It was a fantastic pleasure to welcome Bryan Caplan back for a third time on the podcast! His most recent book is Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice.He explains why he thinks:* Feminists are mostly wrong,* We shouldn't overtax our centi-billionaires,* Decolonization should have emphasized human rights over democracy,* Eastern Europe shows that we could accept millions of refugees.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.More really cool guests coming up; subscribe to find out about future episodes!You may also enjoy my interviews with Tyler Cowen (about talent, collapse, & pessimism of sex), Charles Mann (about the Americas before Columbus & scientific wizardry), and Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you share it, post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.Timestamps(00:12) - Don't Be a Feminist (16:53) - Western Feminism Ignores Infanticide(19:59) - Why The Universe Hates Women(32:02) - Women's Tears Have Too Much Power(46:37) - Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!(51:09) - Affirmative Action is Philanthropic Propaganda(54:12) - Peer-effects as the Only Real Education(58:46) - The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness(1:08:49) - Why Society is Becoming Mentally Ill(1:11:49) - Open Borders & the Ultra-long Term(1:15:37) - Why Cowen's Talent Scouting Strategy is Ludicrous(1:22:11) - Surprising Immigration Victories(1:37:26) - The Most Successful Revolutions(1:55:34) - Anarcho-Capitalism is the Ultimate Government(1:57:00) - Billionaires Deserve their WealthTranscriptDwarkesh PatelToday, I have the great honor of interviewing Bryan Caplan again for the third time. Bryan, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Bryan CaplanI've got the great honor of being interviewed by you, Dwarkesh. You're one of my favorite people in the world!Don't Be a FeministDwarkesh PatelIt's a greater pleasure every time (for me at least). So let's talk about your book, Don't Be a Feminist. Is there any margin of representation of women in leadership roles at which you think there should be introduced bias to make sure more women get in, even if the original ratio is not because of bias?Bryan CaplanNo, I believe in meritocracy. I think it is a good system. It is one that almost everyone sees the intuitive appeal of, and it works. Just looking at a group and saying, “We need to get more members of Group X,” is the wrong way to approach it. Rather, you need to be focusing on, “Let's try to figure out the best way of getting the top quality people here.”Dwarkesh PatelIf there's an astounding ratio of men in certain positions, could that potentially have an impact on the company's ability to do business well? Perhaps the company could just care about increasing the ratio for that reason alone. Bryan CaplanRight. I mean, one can imagine that! I think in our culture, it really goes the other way. People are more likely to be trying to get rid of men, despite the fact that the men are delivering value. If you really pushed me into starting to think, “Suppose you're running a bar, would you have ladies' night?” well yeah, I would have ladies' night in a bar because that actually works, and it's good business! However, if what you're doing is trying to actually get correct answers to things, if you're trying to go and make something run effectively, and if you're just trying to make progress and you're trying to learn new things, the thing to focus on is what actually leads to knowledge and not focusing on just trying to get demographic representation. I think what we've seen is once you go down that route, it is a slippery slope. So besides defending meritocracy on its merits, I would actually also say that the slippery slope argument is not one that should be dismissed lightly. There's a lot of evidence that it does actually fit the facts. When you make an exception of that kind, it really does lead you to bad places. Dwarkesh PatelOkay. But changing topics a bit, I wonder if this gives you greater sympathy for immigration restrictionists because their argument is similar, that there's no natural shelling point for your keyhole solutions where you let tens of millions of people in, but you don't give them welfare or voting rights. There's a slippery slope when you let them in because, eventually, the civil rights argument is going to extend to them. There'll be adverse consequences that these keyhole solutions can't solve for.Bryan CaplanFirst of all, I would say maybe. That is one of the best arguments against keyhole solutions. I'm also guessing that a lot of your listeners have no idea what keyhole solutions are, Dwarkesh, so maybe we want to back up and explain that. Dwarkesh PatelGo for it. Sure.Bryan CaplanSo I have a totally unrelated book called Open Borders, the Science and Ethics of Immigration. One of the chapters goes over ways of dealing with complaints about immigration that fall short of stopping people from actually excluding or kicking out people that are already there. So just to back up a little bit further, most of the book talks about complaints about immigration–– saying that they're either totally wrong or overstated. But then I have another chapter saying, “Alright, fine, maybe you don't agree with that, but isn't there another way that we could deal with this?” So, for example, if you're worried about immigrants voting poorly, you could say, “Fine, we won't extend voting rights to immigrants or make them wait for a longer time period.” That's one where I would just say that the focal point of citizen versus noncitizen is one of the strongest ones. So I think that it actually is one that has a lot of stability. This line of, “Well, you're not a citizen, therefore…” really does have a lot of intuitive appeal. Although, yes, I do think that keyhole solutions would probably not work multi-generationally, so to go and say this is a keyhole solution where you're not a citizen, your kids are not citizens, and their kids after them are not citizens, that's one that I think would be hard to maintain. However, again, at the same time, the problems people are worried about, if they ever were severe, are also getting diluted over time. So I wouldn't worry about it so much. That is one of the very best objections to keyhole solutions that I know of.Dwarkesh PatelOkay, so going back to feminism. Over time, doesn't feminism naturally become true? One of the things you can say is that the way that society is unfair to men includes how they fight in wars or do difficult and dangerous jobs, but society, over time, becomes more peaceful (or at least has in our timeline), and the difficult jobs get automated. At the same time, the gains for people who are at the very peak of any discipline keep going up fairly, but the implication still is that if men are overrepresented there, even for biological reasons, then the relative gains that they get go up, right? So over time, feminism just becomes more true, not because society necessarily discriminated against women, but just because of the trends in technology. Bryan CaplanOnce again, I feel like we should just back up a little bit. What is feminism anyway, because if we don't know what that is, then it's very hard to talk about whether it's becoming more true over time. In my book, I begin with some popular dictionary definitions that just say feminism is the theory that women should be political, social, economic, and cultural equals of men. I say that this is a terrible definition, which violates normal usage. Why? Well, we actually have public opinion data on, first of all, whether people are or are not feminists, and second of all, what they believe about the political, social, economic, and cultural equality of women. And guess what? An overwhelming majority of people that say they are not feminists still agree with the equality of women in all those mentions, which really makes you realize that really can't be the definition of feminism. That would be like saying feminism is the theory that the sky is blue.Well, feminists do believe the sky is blue, but that isn't what distinguishes feminists from other people. So what distinguishes them? What I say is that the really distinguishing view of feminism is that society treats women less fairly than men. The view is that society treats women less fairly than men or treats men more fairly than women. This definition fits actual usage. It would be very strange for someone to say, “I'm a feminist, but I think that men get terrible treatment in our society, and women are treated like goddesses.” Then you say, “Well, then you're not really a feminist, are you?” That doesn't make sense. On the other hand, for someone to say, “I am not a feminist, but God, we treat women so terribly, we're awful.” That, again, just would not fit. So I'm not saying this is the one true definition, but rather that it is much closer to what people actually mean by feminism than what dictionaries say. So to be fair, every now and then, there'll be a better definition. I think the Wikipedia definition in the second sentence adds that it also has the view that women are treated very unfairly. Dwarkesh PatelIs another way of defining feminism just that we should raise the status of women? That's slightly different from the fairness issue because if you think of a feminist historian, maybe their contention is not that women were treated unfairly in the past. Maybe they just want to raise the status of women in the past who are underrepresented. If you think of somebody today who wants to, let's say, raise the status of Asians in our society, and they want to acknowledge the great things that Asians are doing in our society, then maybe their contention is not even that Asians are treated unfairly. They just want to raise their status. So what would you think of that definition?Bryan CaplanSo first of all, it could be, but I don't think so. Here's what I think. There could be a few people like that, but that's not what the word means in normal use. If someone were to say, “Women are treated absolutely fantastically, way better than men, and I want it to get even higher.” You say, hmm. Well, that's not what I think. Somebody might say, “Well, I can still be a feminist and think that,” okay, but that's not what the word actually means. It's not the typical view of people who call themselves feminists. The typical view is precisely that women are treated very unfairly. They want to raise that and alleviate that in a way that's almost by definition. If you think that someone's being treated unfairly, then to say, “I think they're being really unfair, but I think it's great that it's unfair.” It's almost self-contradictory. Dwarkesh PatelI guess I was making a slightly different point, which is not even that these people don't want to raise the status (the actual living standards of women) in some way. It's just that they want to raise the rhetorical status.Bryan CaplanYes, but again, if someone were to say, “I think that women are treated absolutely fantastically in society, way better than men, who we treat like dogs. But I also want women's status to be even higher than it already is.” That would be something where you could argue that “Well, that person may still be a feminist, but that is not what the word means.” Because hardly anyone who calls themselves a feminist believes that weird thing that you're talking about. Dwarkesh PatelLet me make an analogy. Let's say you or I are libertarians, right? And then we think we should raise the status of billionaires. Now, it's not like we think society mistreats billionaires. They're pretty fine, but we think their status should be even higher.Bryan CaplanYeah, I mean, this just goes to the definition. In order to find out whether a definition is correct, you just have to think, “Well, how is the word commonly used?” Logically speaking, it's possible to have a different view or two things that are compatible. The whole idea of a definition is that, ideally, you're trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions such that everybody who satisfies the conditions falls under the category and that everybody who doesn't satisfy the conditions doesn't. In ordinary language, of course, it's notoriously hard to really do that. Defining a table is actually quite difficult in a necessary and sufficient-condition sense, but we can still say, “Well, a table is not by definition something that people sit on, right?” Someone could say, “Well, I suppose you could sit on a table, but that's not the definition in ordinary use in any language of which I'm aware.”But why don't we actually go back to your real question. Which was..Dwarkesh PatelOverall, the left tail of society is being compressed, and the right tail is being expanded. Does feminism become more true over time?Bryan CaplanThe answer is that we really need to look at all of the main measures to get an idea of this. With some of the ones that you're talking about, it does make more sense. As jobs become less physically dangerous, then at least you might say that things are less unfair to men. Although in the book, what I say is that even that is a bit more superficially complicated, at least on the surface. The immediate reaction is that society's less fair to men because they do the most dangerous jobs. Although I also say, “Yeah, but they get monetary compensation for that.” So, all things considered, you probably shouldn't think of it as unfair. It's something where it's reasonable to say, “Hey, wait a second, how come men are the ones that are enduring 90 percent of the workplace deaths” and say, “Well, because they're getting 90 percent of the combat pay.” Broadly construed it's not mostly actual for combat. So anyway, that's one area where you should be careful. But I can see the possibility there. I do have a section in the book where I go over what's happening over time. What I'll say is, well, one big thing that's happened over time is that people have become very hyper-concerned with the mistreatment of women, which means that feminism is becoming less true as a result because when people are really hyper-concerned that they might be unfair to someone, they are even less likely to be unfair to them. So I think that's one thing where society where feminisms become less true over time. Another area that I talk about and which I think really does tip the scales, although again, you really need to go through the book because I do try to work through a lot of different margins…I think the one that really does settle it against feminism in today's age is precisely the level of false feminist accusations about unfairness. When we go over all the objective measures, then you say, well, it's close to a wash in terms of which gender is treated more or less fairly overall. But then you realize, “Yes, but there's one gender that has to endure a whole lot of grossly exaggerated hyperbolic accusations and unfairness and another gender that gets to make those accusations.” The gender that has to endure the unfair accusations is men, and the gender that gets to make them is women. Obviously, not all women make them, and not all men receive them. But still, if we're talking about the average fairness of the treatment of men and women or society, I say that this climate of false accusation and intimidation is what really tips it. It didn't have to be this way, Dwarkesh! [laughs] We could have just had conditions change without a whole lot of flinging of wildly inaccurate accusations, but that's not the world we're in. Dwarkesh PatelWhen would you say was the flipping point? Was there a particular decade that you thought “unbalanced things are equal now?”Bryan CaplanYeah. So one of the things I say in the book is that there are a bunch of ways where you can say that women were treated less fairly in earlier decades, but there are aspects that are probably more important overall where women are treated worse now. The main one is paternal support for children. In 1940, the odds that you could count on the biological father of your children to help you to raise them was maybe 90%. Now it's probably more like 60%, 70%. So that's one of the main ways that I say that women probably are treated less fairly than men. And the unfairness has gotten worse over time. Again, just understand this is not the kind of book that most people are used to where someone argues like a lawyer and they just say, look, I've got 20 arguments for why I'm right. And everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and doesn't have a leg to stand on. This is the kind of book that I liked to write where I really say, let's just calm down and just go through every issue separately, weigh each one on its merits. There are a bunch of points where someone could say, “Why do you concede that? That makes your argument weaker.” Well, I concede it because it's true! Then in the end, I have my overall judgment. I will just say that there are a number of books that are written in this terrible modern style of lawyerly reasoning, where you basically have a thesis that you just try to defend in every possible way. I don't write books like that. I try to write books that are honest and self-reflective, and where if there's some weakness in what I'm saying, I don't just acknowledge it if someone points it out; I try to be the first person to reveal it so that people feel like they can trust me. It's my own conscience. I don't feel right when I say something not really quite right. I feel like I should've always said the other thing. So I try to just write with candor. Dwarkesh PatelNow, would you say that feminism in the United States is overcorrected but that it's still true in the global sense? In the way that, on average, across the world, women are treated more unfairly than men. Because if that's the case, then if the US is at the center of global feminism, then, of course, they're going to overcorrect here, but overall they're making the world a better place. Bryan CaplanSo that is a much better argument. I would say that if we think about most areas of Europe, then I think that it's very similar to what's going on in the US. In the book, I do go over this especially. I start with Saudi Arabia, where it's really obvious what's going on and how poorly women are treated. But then I go over to India and China and just think about plausible rates of female infanticide. I think it is very likely that overall the treatment of women in India and China is more unfair than that of men. In Saudi Arabia, I'm almost sure that it is. In terms of “Is the US providing a useful corrective for the world while messing up things in the US?” It's possible. I think the problem is that it does discredit a lot of the reasonable points because the US just doesn't focus on the really big issues. The amount of time that American feminists spend on female infanticide in China and India… I don't think it would even be 1% of the rhetoric. It's just not something that they care about.So I would say that there's more harm being done by the sheer distraction of putting so much emphasis upon small, exaggerated, or reverse problems that bother feminists in the first world while ignoring and indirectly causing people to forget or neglect actual serious problems in some other countries. Positively shifting the Overton WindowWestern Feminism Ignores InfanticideDwarkesh PatelBut let me apply the argument you make in Open Borders that you can effect change by shifting the Overton window. So advocating for open borders just shifts immigration policy slightly towards the open end. Can American feminists make the same point that through making the crazy arguments they make in America, they're making Saudi Arabia more liberal for women? Bryan CaplanI would say that when the arguments are crazy, then it's not clear that shifting the Overton window actually happens. That may be where you discredit the other view. In particular, I think what I say in that part of the book is that people generally confuse being radical with being unfriendly. And most of the harm that is done to radical causes is due to the unfriendliness rather than the radicalism. So in that case, I would say that feminism has a definite friendliness problem. It is not a movement that goes out of its way to go and make other people feel like they are respected, where even if you disagree with me, I want to be your friend and listen to what you have to say, and maybe we could go and come to some understanding. I think it is a movement where the main emotional tenure of the elites is, “We are totally right, and anyone who disagrees had better watch out.” So I think that there is a discrediting of it. The other thing is just that I think there's too much cultural separation between the feminist movement as we know it and places like China and India, where I just don't see the attitude of being really angry about exaggerated or false complaints about unfair treatment of women in the United States is going to do anything for infanticide in India. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dwarkesh. Do you see much influence of Western feminism on infanticide in India?Dwarkesh PatelI don't know, but maybe yes. More generally, one of the common arguments that libertarians make about India and its elites is, “Oh, all of India's elites go study in Oxford or something, and they learn about the regulations the West is adopting that make no sense for a country with $2,000 GDP per capita.” I feel like some of the things could be true of feminism where all these Indian elites go to American universities and UK universities where they learn about radical feminism, and they go back, and they adopt some of these things.Bryan CaplanYes, although you might remember what Alex Tabarrok says about these very things. You can go to India and have people pushing paper straws on you, and yet the streets are still totally covered in trash. In fact, the pushing of the paper straws probably actually distracts people from the much more serious problem of the horrible trash, right? Again, I don't know enough about India to speak with any confidence here, but if you go and learn radical feminism in Western universities, come back to India and start complaining about how we need to have more female CEOs in a country where you have millions of female infanticides per year, I think it probably is like the paper straws problem where you are so focused on a trivial problem that maybe is not only a problem, is not even a problem at all. At the same time, that anger really blinds you to an actual, really serious problem that's going on. But you know India better than me, I could be wrong. Why The Universe Hates WomenDwarkesh PatelI believe rape within a marriage is still legal in India and is still not recognized. Maybe it was just recently changed. Let's say this is an interview, and a feminist says, “Oh my gosh, okay Bryan, maybe you're right that society as a whole doesn't mistreat women, but maybe the cosmos mistreats women.” So women are forced to have children. All of these things combined make women's lives worse on average than men's lives. It's not because society mistreats them, but in some sense, there's still unfairness geared toward women. What do you make of this argument?Bryan CaplanSo unfairness, where there's no human being that does it, seems like a very strange idea to me. Just from the get-go, well, so who was unfair to you? “The universe is unfair.” Then I mean, the correct term there is unfortunate, not unfair. So that aside, I would say it's a really interesting question. Who actually has better lives just as a matter of biological endowments, men or women? I mean, in terms of demonstrated preference, I think the overwhelming result is that most people just want to remain in whatever gender they're born in. So this is not actually transgenderism. This is like a genie wish. If you could change your gender just with a wish, costlessly, perfectly, I think a very large majority of people would still want to stay with whatever gender they have because it's part of their identity. It's some kind of endowment effect, status quo bias, or whatever. But then if you say, “Okay, yeah, right, fine. Like you, like you just want to stay whatever you were because that's your identity, but if you could put that aside, what would you want to be?” It's a tough question. You can say, “Well, women have a harder personality to deal with because of higher neuroticism, and they've also got higher agreeableness.” But that gives them some other advantages in terms of getting along with other people. For example, men's disagreeableness makes it hard for men to just bite their tongues and shut up when someone's saying something they don't like. I think that is easier for women to do. You may have noticed that having to shut up and bite your tongue while someone around you says something stupid you don't like is actually a big part of life. That is one thing. Now, in terms of things that I feel that I would get out of being a woman, just being able to have as many kids as I wanted would matter a lot to me. So I only have four kids right now. If it were totally up to me, I would have had more kids. I think, as a woman, it would have been easy to do. [laughs] So again, you know, there is the issue. How are you going to find a guy that wants to have a lot of kids? This is one where I've looked at the data on family size and what determines it. While both men and women seem to have a say on family size, it just looks like women's traits have a much larger effect. Men are more likely to say, “OK, fine, whatever. We'll do what you want to do on family size.” Whereas women seem to have much more pronounced preferences, which they then tend to get. I think that if I were a woman, I could have had more kids, and it would have been easier for me to do it. That would be something that matters to me. It's not something that matters to everybody, but that's something there. Again, there is just the nice fact of people caring about your suffering. In the book, I do talk about the ethos of women and children first, which is very pronounced. It's a modern society where we can simultaneously have something like “women and children first”, but then also have a lot of rhetoric about how people don't care about women. It's like, “Hmm, that's not right.”Dwarkesh PatelWhat do you think of this theory that maybe society cares a lot more about women suffering, but it sympathizes a lot more with men's success? If you think of a default character in a movie or a novel, at least for me, then the default is a man. Then maybe there's some victim that defaults as a woman. But I'd rather be the sympathy of some sort of success than get it for suffering.Bryan CaplanI mean, do you need sympathy for success? Or do you want admiration? I mean, I guess what I would say is that everybody's got suffering, and only a small share of people have any notable success. If all that you knew was you're going to be a man or woman, I would say, “Well, gee, if I'm a woman, then people will sympathize with my suffering, which is almost definitely coming because that's the human condition.” Whereas to have admiration for your success is something where it just affects a much smaller number of people. I know that hanging out in Austin among hyper-successful people may be biasing your sample a bit, but I do think it's believable that men get more unmitigated admiration for their success. Of course, there are also differences in the mating opportunities that you get for being a successful man versus a successful woman. So that is there too, but again, this is something that really is only relevant for a very small share of the population.But then the argument is, “Well, that small share of the population matters so much in terms of the story we tell ourselves about our civilization or just in terms of who controls more resources overall.” So if being a woman billionaire is harder, maybe for biological reasons, maybe for the reasons of our society, you can say, “Well, that only affects a small percentage of women in society.” But on the other hand, billionaires matter a lot.In terms of what life is like for most people, the main way they matter is that billionaires just provide awesome stuff. In terms of the stories that people tell, it's true that if you go and look at most classic movies or novels, the main characters are male. Even in cartoons, actually, the main characters traditionally have been male. But on the other hand, that's just fiction. In terms of daily life. I'd rather have people be really concerned about me in real life but have my perspective underrepresented stories than the other way around. Dwarkesh PatelSo what do you make of the argument that employers hold defects in women's personalities much more against them than they hold defects in men's personalities? I think Tyler cited some of this research in his new book on talent that being too agreeable or being too aggressive harms women more than it harms men. Bryan CaplanI would say that it's complicated in terms of willingness to fire. I think employers are much more willing to fire men. For defects and for insubordination. Another thing on the list is a small one, but I think that it is indicative of a broader trend. For people working at workplaces with dress codes, men are much more likely to be dinged on dress code violations than women because for men, there's a definite thing men are supposed to do. If you're not doing it, you are in violation. For women, on the other hand, it's like, “Well, gee, I mean, it seems kind of like that's not what you should be wearing, but I don't want to be the person that says anything about it. And who knows? Who am I to judge what a woman ought to be wearing on the job?”  But a man, on the other hand, needs to be wearing a suit in 110-degree weather. What was the high this summer over in Austin? [laughter] Dwarkesh PatelWhy do you think that women have gotten less happy since the sixties in America?Bryan CaplanRight. So the main thing I know about this is Stevenson and Wolfer's research on this. The main thing to remember is the magnitude. If I remember correctly, they find that in the sixties, women had about a two percentage point advantage relative to men in terms of their odds of saying they're very happy. 25% of men said they were very happy, then 27% of women in the sixties said that they were very happy. Whereas now, it seems like women have a two percentage point deficit relative to men. So now, if 25% of men say they're very happy, then 23% of women say they're very happy. It's always important in these papers to look at those magnitudes because the media coverage is going to say, “Oh, women are miserable now.” It's not that women are miserable now! We're talking about a two-percentage point difference. It's a data set large enough for this to actually be meaningful, but we do want to keep it in perspective in terms of what's really going on. The paper probably actually goes over a bunch of stories and says the obvious ones are all wrong. That would be what Justin Wolfersustin especially would normally do. I think he's usually right that simple stories about something like this are wrong. In terms of what I would pursue if I read through the paper and reminded myself of what they found and then said, “Okay, well, what will work?” I think I would, on one end, focus on single moms because they'll become much more common, and their lives really are hard. A rise in single motherhood is coming. I would guess that's one important part of it. Then, I would also be wondering how much of it is actual feminism telling women that they should be unhappy because the world is unfair and that causes unhappiness. Again, I'm not saying that these are right. It's plausible to me. The main thing I would say about feminism causing unhappiness in the adherents is that it probably doesn't matter most for most self-identified feminists because most people just are not that intellectual and they don't think about their ideas very often. So it's one thing to say, look, if you believe you're going to hell, you'll be unhappy. It's like, well, if you believe it once a year, does it make you unhappy? If you remember, “Oh yeah, once a year, I think I'm going to hell.” The rest of the time, you don't think it.On the other hand, the person who is always thinking, “I'm going to hell, I'm going to hell,” probably will be unhappy. So I think feminism is very likely to reduce the happiness of people who are feminist elites and take it really seriously, where they're talking about it all the time. That is likely to cause unhappiness. I'd be amazed if it didn't. But on the other hand, for the vast majority of people who say, “Yeah, I am a feminist. Moving on…” I don't think it's too likely to be messing up their lives. Dwarkesh PatelThat raises an interesting possibility. This is not my theory, but let's run with this. So feminism has actually gotten more true over time, but it's precisely because of feminism.  Maybe it's made elite women more unhappy. As you said earlier, the amount of single mothers has gone up. Maybe part of that is the reason, and part of that is because of feminist trends in terms of family formation. Maybe women prefer to be at home caring for children on average more, but then feminism encourages them to have careers, which makes them less happy. So if you add all these things up, plus mentorship, which men are less likely to give because of #metoo. So add all these things up, maybe they're the result of feminism, but they still make feminism more right. Would you agree with that?Bryan CaplanYeah. If we go back to this definition of feminism and this theory that our society treats women less fairly than men, then if the story is that women have made a lot of false accusations against men and then men have responded by changing their behavior, that would seem to be a strange example of saying the society is treating women less fairly than men. It would seem to be a case that society is treating men unfairly, and this is having some negative side effects for women as well. But it's one where if you really were trying to draw the line… Well actually, here's actually one of the weaknesses of the definition that I proposed. So foot binding in China. From my understanding, the main drivers of foot binding in China were women. So women are binding feet, and they're also telling their daughters they have to have their feet bound. Men seemed to care less, actually, it was more of an intra-female abuse. This is one where you could say that in China, women are treated less fairly than men, even though the perpetrators are women. I think that does actually make sense. I would just say that the definition that we use in our society isn't really calibrated to deal with that kind of thing. When it comes to what the right way to describe it would be, it just gets a bit confusing. It's useful just to say, all right, well, if women are mistreating women and that's what's making women's lives hard, how do we count that? I think I would just say that we don't have any really good way of counting it, and might be useful to just come up with a new word to describe this kind of thing. Women's Tears Have Too Much PowerDwarkesh PatelWhat do you make of Hanania's argument that women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas? Bryan CaplanYeah. So we might want to back up a little bit and explain what the argument is. So Richard Hanania on his substack has a very famous essay where he points out that in fiction, when there is a mob of angry college students, it's very demographically diverse. But when you look at actual footage, it seems like women are highly overrepresented. He generalizes this by saying that a lot of what's going on in terms of cancel culture and related problems is that women are the main ones that get angry about these things, and people don't know what to do about it. So he, if I remember correctly, says that a man can, in a way, actually enjoy an argument with another man. Even if you lose or even if it's a physical fight, he says, you can sort of feel invigorated by it. We got through this. We resolved something. Whereas no guy feels this way about an argument with his wife. “What do I need to do in order for this argument to end as soon as possible” would be a more normal reaction. This sort of generalizes to the majority of social arguments, specifically ones that involve someone being offended or angry, or hurt. He says a lot of what's going on is that it is mainly women that are presenting these complaints and that it's hard to deal with it because men don't want to argue with angry women. It just makes them feel bad. It's sort of a no-win situation. So anyway, that is Hanania's argument. Overall, it seemed pretty plausible to me. I haven't thought about it that much more, but it's one that does seem to make a fair bit of sense in terms of just what I'm writing about feminism. You know, one really striking thing is just how one-sided this conversation is. It is a conversation where women have complaints, and men mostly just listen in silence. Ofcourse, men will sometimes complain amongst each other when women aren't around. It's not a real dialogue where women have complaints about men, and then men are very eager to say, “Oh, but I have something I would like to say in rebuttal to that.” A lot of it is what he calls “women's tears.” It's sadness, but mingled with or supported by intimidation: “If you don't give me what I want, if you don't pretend that you agree with me, I will be very angry, and I will be fairly sad.” So you should be afraid. I think a lot of what's probably going on with the rhetorical dominance of feminism, is that people are just afraid to argue against it because, in a way, it does sort of violate the women and children first ethos. If women complain about something, you aren't supposed to go and say, “I disagree. Your complaints are unjustified.” You're supposed to say, “Look, what can I do to make it better?” Dwarkesh PatelBut that seems like a good description of race issues and class issues as well. Bryan CaplanI mean, the main difference there is that there are a lot of people who have a lot more firsthand experience of intergender relations, and they spend a lot more time in intergender relations than they spend in all of the other ones. So I mean, the dynamic is probably pretty similar, but in terms of the really negative firsthand experience that men have, Hanania probably is right about that. Then that generalizes to bigger issues. Dwarkesh PatelYou have an essay about endogenous sexism. Could this just not be the cause of society being unfair to a woman? We start off with men being in power, they get sexist just because they're around other men and they like them more. So then, the starting position matters a lot, even if men aren't trying to be sexist. Bryan CaplanSo let me just back up and explain the argument. The argument says to imagine that in reality, men and women are equally good in absolutely every way, but people are more likely to have close friends with their own gender, (which is totally true). So if I remember the essay, I think that for close male friends, the male-to-female ratio was 6:1, and for women, it was 4:1. So most people's close friends are of the same gender. When you meet these people, and they're your close friends, you know them really well. Furthermore, because you have handpicked them, you're going to think well of them. So then the question is, “What about people of the opposite gender? What will your interaction with them be like?” What I point out is that a lot of the opposite gender you hang out with will be the spouses and partners of your friends. On average, you're going to think worse of them because you didn't pick them. Basically, there are two filters there: I like you because you're my friend, and I put up with your partner because that person is your partner. So this means that the women that men are around are going to be the partners of their friends. They're not going to like them less and think less of them than they think of their friends. On the other hand, the partners of women's friends will be men, and women will get to know them and say, “Wow, they're not that great. They're at least kind of disappointing relative to my same-gender friends.” So anyway, this is an argument about how the illusion of your own gender being superior could arise. Now, as to whether this is actually the right story, I leave that open. This was just more of a thought experiment to understand what could happen here. Could this actually explain the unfair treatment of women in society? Especially if we start off with men being the gatekeepers for most of the business world? It's totally plausible that it could. That's why we really want to go to the data and see what we actually find. In the data I know of, the evidence of women earning less money than men while doing the same job is quite low. So there's very little gender disparity in earnings once you make the obvious statistical adjustments for being in the same occupation. Again, the main area that probably actually has gotten worse for women is mentoring. Mentoring is partly based on friendship. I like this person. I like working with them. So I will go and help them to go and acquire more human capital on the job. This is one that feminism has visibly messed up, and many feminists will, in a strange way, admit that they have done it while not taking responsibility for the harm. I've got an essay on that in the book as well.Looking at the evidence, it is totally standard now for male managers to admit that they are reluctant to mentor female employees because they're so worried. When I go and track down a bunch of feminist reactions to this, they basically just say, “I can't believe how horrible these guys are.” But it's like, look, you're asking them for a favor to get mentorship. They're scared. If someone's scared, do you really want to yell at them more and offer more mostly empty threats? It's really hard to scare someone into doing something this informal, so you really do need to win them over. Dwarkesh PatelTactically, that might be correct, but it seems to just be a matter of “Is their argument justified?” I can see why they'd be frustrated. Obviously, you want to point out when there's a sexual harassment allegation, and that may have the effect of less mentorship. Bryan CaplanWell, is it obvious that you want to point that out? Part of what I'm saying is that there are different perceptions here. There are differences of opinion. If you want to get along with people, a lot of it is saying, “How does it seem from the other person's point of view?” Obviously, do not assume that the most hypersensitive person is correct. So much of the problem with mentorship comes down to hypersensitivity. I've got another piece in the book where I talk about misunderstandings and how we have so much lost sight of this very possibility. When there's a conflict between two people, who's right and who's wrong? Ofcourse, it could be that one person is the conscious malefactor and the other person is an obvious victim that no one could deny. That does happen sometimes. But much more often in the real world, there's a misunderstanding where each person, because of the imperfection of the human mind, has the inability to go and get inside another person's head. To each person, it seems like they're in the right and the other person is in the wrong, and one of the most helpful ways for people to get along with each other is to realize that this is the norm. Most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings, not by deliberate wrongdoing. This is the way the people who keep their friends keep their friends. If any time there's a conflict with a friend, you assume that you're right and your friend is in the wrong, and you demand an immediate abject apology, you're going to be losing friends left and right. It is a foolish person who does that. Friendship is more important than any particular issue. This is not only my personal view, it is the advice that I give to everyone listening. Keep your friends, bend over backward in order to keep your friends, and realize that most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings. It's not the other person is going out of their way to hurt you. They probably don't see it that way. If you just insist, “I'm right, I demand a full apology and admission of your wrongdoing,” you're probably going to be losing friends, and that's a bad idea. The same thing I think is going on in workplaces where there is an ideology saying that we should take the side of the most hypersensitive person. This is not a good approach for human beings to get along with each other.Dwarkesh PatelYeah. That's very wise. What do you make the argument that a lot of these professions that are dominated by men are not intrinsically things that must appeal to men, but the way that they are taught or advertised is very conducive to what males find interesting? So take computer science, for example; there are claims that you could teach that or economics in a way that focuses on the implications on people from those practices rather than just focusing on the abstractions or the “thing-focused stuff.” So the argument is these things shouldn't be inherently interesting to men. It's just in the way they are taught. Bryan CaplanThe word inherently is so overused. It's one where you say, "Well, are you saying that inherently X?” Then someone says, “Well, not inherently X, just you'd have to bend over backward and move heaven and earth for it not to be. So I guess it's not really inherent.” That is a lot of what is worth pointing out. So if you're going to put the standard to that level, then it's going to be hard to find differences. You could say, “There's absolutely no way under the sun to go and teach math in a less male way.” On the other hand, maybe we should ask, “Is it reasonable to expect the whole world to revolve around making every subject equally appealing to men and women?” That's an unreasonable demand. If there's a subject like math that is male-dominated, the reasonable thing is to say, “Well, if you want to get in on that, you're going to need to go and become simpatico with the mindset of the people that are already there and then push the margin.” You can say that it's “so unfair that male ways of doing math are dominant.” Or maybe you could say that it's unfair for someone who's just shown up to demand that an entire discipline change its way of doing things to make you feel better about it. Obviously, there are large areas that are very female-dominated, and there's no pressure on women to go and change the way that flower arranging is done, or cooking in order to make it more welcoming to men.So this is one where if you had a really high bar for how things are fair, then unless the rigorous conditions are met, you're going to see a lot of unfairness in the world. Although even then, as long as you have an equally high bar for both men and women, I don't think it's going to make feminism any more true by my definition. I also just say, I think these really high bars are unreasonable. If a friend had these bars of standards saying, “Look, why is it that when we meet for food, we have to go and meet at standard hours of breakfast, lunch, and dinner? I actually like meeting in the middle of the night. Why can't we have half of the time be my way?” You respond, “Well yeah, but you're only one person, so why should I change?” It depends upon what subfield you're in as well. There are actually groups of people really like hanging out in the middle of the night, so if you ask, “Why is it we always have to meet in the middle of the night? Why can't we do it my way?” You are entering into a subculture that works this way. You could demand that we totally change our way of being to accommodate you, but it just seems like an unreasonable imposition on the people who are already here. Now, when you sort of go through the list of different things that people think of as making something a male or a not-male field, sometimes people will treat things like acting like there's an objectively correct answer as a male trait. If that's a male trait, then we need to keep that trait because that is vital to really any field where there are right and wrong answers. I mean, that's an area where I am very tempted rhetorically to say, “It's just so sexist to say that it's male to think that things are right and wrong. I think that is a trait of both genders”. In a way, I end the essay stating, “Yes, these are not male; not only do they not make a male monopoly, but they are also not uniquely male virtues. They are virtues that can and should be enjoyed by all human beings.” At the same time, you could ask whether virtues are equally represented by both genders and well, that's an empirical question. We have to look at that. Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!Dwarkesh PatelWe're shifting subjects. You recently performed at the Comedy Cellar. How was that experience? Bryan CaplanYeah, that was super fun and a big challenge! I am a professional public speaker. Standup comedy is professional public speaking. I was curious about how much transfer of learning there would be. How many of the things that I know as a regular public speaker can I take with me to do standup comedy? I'm also just a big fan of standup comedy– if you know me personally, I just find life constantly funny. Dwarkesh PatelYes, I can confirm that. You're a very pleasant person to be around. Bryan CaplanLife is funny to me. I like pointing out funny things. I like using my imagination. A lot of comedy is just imagination and saying, look, “Imagine that was the opposite way. What would that be like?” Well, actually, just to back up again: during COVID, I did just create a wiki of comedy ideas just on the idea that maybe one day I'll go and do standup comedy. Comedy Cellar actually has a podcast, kind of like Joe Rogan, where comedians go and talk about serious issues. I was invited to that, and as a result, I was able to talk my way into getting to perform on the actual live stage of the biggest comedy club in New York. The main thing I could say about my performance is that it was me and nine professional comedians, and I don't think I was obviously the worst person. So that felt pretty good.Dwarkesh PatelIt was a pretty good performance.Bryan CaplanI felt good about it! There were some main differences that I realized between the kind of public speaking I was used to doing and what I actually did there. One is the importance of memorizing the script. It just looks a lot worse if you're reading off a note. Normally I have some basic notes, and then I ad-lib. I don't memorize. The only time I have a script is if I have a very time-constrained debate, then I'd normally write an opening statement, but otherwise, I don't. The thing with comedy is it depends so heavily upon exact word choice. You could go and put the same sentence into Google Translate and then back-translate it and get another sentence that is synonymous but isn't funny at all. That was something that I was very mindful of. Then obviously, there are things like timing and being able to read an audience (which I'm more used to). That was what was so hard during COVID–– not being able to look at the faces of a live audience. I can see their eyes, but I can't tell their emotions or reactions to their eyes. I don't know whether I should talk more or less about something. I don't know whether they're angry or annoyed or curious or bored. So these are all things that I would normally be adjusting my talk for in normal public speaking. But with comedy, it's a bit hard to do. What successful comedians actually do is they try it in a bunch of different ways, and then they remember which ways work and which ones don't. Then they just keep tweaking it, so finally, when they do the Netflix special, they have basically done A/B testing on a hundred different audiences, and then it sounds great–– but the first time? Not that funny. Dwarkesh PatelIt didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, but it makes a lot of sense that there are transfers of learning there in both disciplines. There are a lot of hypotheticals, non-extra events, and putting things in strange situations to see what the result is…Bryan CaplanA lot of it is just not having stage fright. So I probably had just a tiny bit of stage fright at the Comedy Cellar, which normally I would have basically zero, but there it was a little bit different because it's like, “Am I going to forget something?” I actually have a joke in the set about how nothing is scarier than staying silent while thousands of people stare at you. So that was a self-referential joke that I worked in there.Dwarkesh PatelI can't remember if it was Robin Hanson who said this, but didn't he have a theory about how the reason we have stage fright is because somehow, you're showing dominance or status, and you don't want to do that if you're not actually the most confident. Bryan CaplanYou're making a bid for status. In the ancestral environment, we're in small groups of 20-40 people. If you go and want to speak, you're saying, “I'm one of the most important people in this band here.” If you're not, or if there are a lot of people voicing that that guy is not important, then who knows? They might shove you off the cliff the next time they get a chance. So yeah, watch out. Affirmative Action is Philanthropic PropagandaDwarkesh PatelI wonder if this explains the cringe emotion. When somebody makes a bid for status, and it's not deserved. Okay, I want to talk about discrimination. So as you know, there's a Supreme court case about Harvard and affirmative action. You might also know that a lot of companies have filed a brief in favor of Harvard, saying that affirmative action is necessary for them to hire diverse work for ourselves, including Apple, Lyft, General Motors. So what is the explanation for corporations wanting to extend affirmative action? Or are they just saying this, but they don't want it? Bryan CaplanIf those individual corporations could press a button that would immunize them from all employment lawsuits, I think they would press it. When you look at their behavior, they don't just give in whenever they get sued. They have a normal team of lawyers that try to minimize the damage to the company and pay as little as possible to make the problem go away. So I think really what's going on is public relations. They are trying to be on that team. As to whether it's public relations vis a vis their consumers or public relations vis a vis other people in the executive boardroom is an interesting question. I think these days, it probably is more of the latter. Although even under Reagan, there were a bunch of major corporations that did make a similar statement saying that they wanted affirmative action to continue. I think that the real story is that they want to get the status of saying, “we are really in favor of this. We love this stuff.” But at the same time, if it just went away, they wouldn't voluntarily adopt a policy where they give you a right to go and sue them for mistreatment.I think there would still be a lot of propaganda. I mean, here's the general thing. You think about this as a species of corporate philanthropy sticking your neck out in favor of a broad social cause. Some people disagree and say that it's self-interest. They say, “Look, the odds that even Apple is going to change the Supreme Court's mind is super low.” So I don't think it's that. Basically, what they're doing is a kind of philanthropy. What's the deal with corporate philanthropy? The deal with corporate philanthropy is you are trying to go and, first of all, make the public like you, but also, you're trying to look good and jockey for influence within your own company. One really striking thing about corporate philanthropy is when you look closer, normally, they spend way more resources marketing the philanthropy and letting everyone know, “Oh, we did all this philanthropy!” Then they actually spend on philanthropy. So I had a friend who was a marketing person in charge of publicizing her company's philanthropy. They gave away about a thousand dollars a year to the Girl Scouts, and she had a hundred thousand dollars salary telling everyone about how great they were for giving this money to the Girl Scouts. So I think that's the real story. Get maximally cynical. I think without denying the fact that there are true believers now in corporate boardrooms who are pushing it past the point of profitability. The cost of philanthropy is just the production budget of the TV commercial. A rounding error. The donations are a rounding error, and then they go, “Hey, everyone, look at us. We're so freaking philanthropic!” Peer effects as the Only Real EducationDwarkesh PatelOkay. So this question is one that Tyler actually suggested I ask you. So in The Myth of the Rational Voter, you say that education makes you more pro-free market. Now, this may have changed in the meantime, but let's just say that's still true. If you're not really learning anything, why is education making you more free market? Bryan CaplanIt's particularly striking that even people who don't seem to take any economics classes are involved. I think that the best story is about peer effects. When you go to college, you're around other peers who though not pro-market, are less anti-market than the general population. The thing about peer effects is that they really are a double-edged sword from a social point of view. Think about this. Right now, if you are one of the 1% of non-Mormons that goes to Brigham Young University, what do you think the odds are that you'll convert to Mormonism? Dwarkesh PatelHigher than normal. Bryan CaplanYeah. I don't know the numbers, but I think it's pretty high. But suppose that Brigham Young let in all the non-Mormons. What would Brigham Young do for conversion to Mormonism? Probably very little. Furthermore, you realize, “Huh, well, what if those Mormons at Brigham Young were dispersed among a bunch of other schools where they were that were a minority?” Seems quite plausible. They'd be making a lot more converts over there. So if you achieve your peer effects by segregation (which is literally what college does, it takes one part of society and segregates it from another part of society physically when you're in school, and then there's social segregation caused by the fact that people want to hang out with other people in their own social circles, your own education levels, etc.), in that case, in terms of whether or not education actually makes society overall pro-free market, I think it's totally unclear because, basically, when people go to college, they make each other more pro-free market. At the same time, they remove the possibility of influencing people of other social classes who don't go to college, who probably then influence each other and make each other less free market. I think that's the most plausible story.Dwarkesh PatelWhat about the argument that the people who go to elite universities are people who are going to control things? If you can engineer a situation in which the peer effects in some particular direction are very strong at Harvard (maybe because the upper class is very liberal or woke), they make the underclass even more woke, and then it's a reinforcing cycle after every generation of people who come into college. Then that still matters a lot, even though presumably somebody becomes more right-wing once they don't go to Harvard because there are no peers there. But it doesn't matter. They're not going to be an elite, or it doesn't matter as much. Bryan CaplanIt could be, although what we've seen is that we now just have very big gaps between elite opinion and mass opinion. Of course, it is a democracy. If you want to run for office, that is a reason to go and say, “Yeah, what is the actual common view here? Not just the view that is common among elites.” However, I will say that this is a topic that deserves a lot more study. Now the other thing to question is, “Wouldn't there be peer effects even without college?” If elites didn't go to college and instead they went and did elite apprenticeships at top corporations instead, I think you'd still wind up getting a very similar elite subculture. I think that this kind of social segregation is very natural in every human society. Of course, you can see it under communism very strongly where it's like, “I don't want my kid going and playing with a kid whose parents aren't in the communist party.” So every society has this kind of thing. Now, if you push the dynamics enough…. let's put it this way. If you were the prophet of the Mormon religion, what would be the very best thing for you to do to maximize the spread of Mormonism? It is not at all clear to me that trying to get all Mormons to go bring them young is a good strategy.Dwarkesh PatelI wonder if there are nonlinear dynamics to this. Bryan CaplanYeah. Well, there's gotta be, right? But as soon as you're talking about nonlinear dynamics, those are truly hard to understand. So I would just say to keep a much more open mind about this, and if anyone is listening and wants to do research on this, that sounds cool, I'll read it. Dwarkesh PatelRight. I remember you saying that one of the things you're trying to do with your books is influence the common view of elite opinion. So in that sense, there are elite subcultures in every society, but they're not the same elite subcultures, and therefore you might care very much about which particular subculture it is. Bryan CaplanNotice that that's one where I'm taking it as a given that we have the current segregation, and I'm going to try to go and take advantage of it. But if it were a question of if I could change the dial of what kind of segregation we have, then it's much less clear. The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness Dwarkesh PatelStudent loan forgiveness. What is your reaction? Bryan CaplanOh, give me a freaking break. This is one subject where I think it's very hard to find almost any economist, no matter how left-wing and progressive, who really wants to stick their necks out and defend this garbage. Look, it's a regressive transfer. Why then? Why is it that someone who is left-wing or progressive would go and favor it? Maybe it's because people who have a lot of education and colleges are on our team, and we just want to go and help our team. Obviously, the forgiveness really means, “We're going to go and transfer the cost of this debt from the elites that actually ran up the bill to the general population.” Which includes, of course, a whole lot of people who did not go to college and did not get whatever premium that you got out of it. So there's that. In terms of efficiency, since the people have already gotten the education, you're not even “increasing the amount of education” if you really think that's good. The only margin that is really increasing education is how it's making people think, “Well, maybe there'll be another round of debt forgiveness later on, so I'll rack up more debt. The actual true price of education is less than it seems to be.” Although even there, you have to say, “Huh, well, but could people knowing this and the great willingness to borrow actually wind up increasing the ban for college and raising tuition further?” There's good evidence for that. Not 100%, but still a substantial degree.Again, just to back up–– that can be my catchphrase [laughter]. So I have a book called The Case Against Education, and my view is much more extreme than that of almost any normal economist who opposes student loan debt forgiveness. I think that the real problem with education is that we have way too much of it. Most of it is very socially wasteful. What we're doing with student loan forgiveness is we're basically going and transferring money to people who wasted a lot of social resources. The story that you are on the slippery slope to free college for all is, in a way, the best argument in favor of it. If you thought that free college for all was a good idea, then this puts us on th

Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and New York Times Bestselling author.In this episode, we dive deep into his newest book, Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice.Get a copy of Don't Be a Feminist here.Bryan has written The Myth of the Rational Voter, named "the best political book of the year" by the New York Times, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders (co-authored with SMBC's Zach Weinersmith), Labor Econ Versus the World, How Evil Are Politicians?, and Don't Be a Feminist. His next book, Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing, will be published by the Cato Institute in 2023.Bryan is the editor and chief writer for Bet On It, the blog hosted by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas. He has published in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, TIME, Newsweek, Atlantic, American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Law and Economics, and Intelligence, blogged for EconLog from 2005-2022, and appeared on ABC, BBC, Fox News, MSNBC, and C-SPAN.Subscribe Now and Join Me as we Explore The Truth Through Conversations With The Most Brilliant Minds. --- Highlights:0:39 Why Write Don't be a Feminist?1:20 What is a good definition of Feminism?2:30 Are women treated less fair than men in our society?5:50 Intimidation & Ideologies9:30 Is Critical Thinking Lacking in today's world?11:50 Moral Over-learning.19:10 What's education for?24:20 Social Justice vs. Genuine Justice.30:30 Closing remarks.

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. He's written "The Myth of the Rational Voter", "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids", "The Case Against Education", and "How Evil Are Politicians?", among others. He's joining us today to talk about his latest book "Don't Be a Feminist". Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was a fantastic pleasure to welcome Bryan Caplan back for a third time on the podcast! His most recent book is Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice.He explains why he thinks:* Feminists are mostly wrong,* We shouldn't overtax our centi-billionaires,* Decolonization should have emphasized human rights over democracy,* Eastern Europe shows that we could accept millions of refugees.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.More really cool guests coming up; subscribe to find out about future episodes!You may also enjoy my interviews with Tyler Cowen (about talent, collapse, & pessimism of sex), Charles Mann (about the Americas before Columbus & scientific wizardry), and Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you share it, post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group chats, and throw it up wherever else people might find it. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.Timestamps(00:12) - Don't Be a Feminist (16:53) - Western Feminism Ignores Infanticide(19:59) - Why The Universe Hates Women(32:02) - Women's Tears Have Too Much Power(46:37) - Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!(51:09) - Affirmative Action is Philanthropic Propaganda(54:12) - Peer-effects as the Only Real Education(58:46) - The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness(1:08:49) - Why Society is Becoming Mentally Ill(1:11:49) - Open Borders & the Ultra-long Term(1:15:37) - Why Cowen's Talent Scouting Strategy is Ludicrous(1:22:11) - Surprising Immigration Victories(1:37:26) - The Most Successful Revolutions(1:55:34) - Anarcho-Capitalism is the Ultimate Government(1:57:00) - Billionaires Deserve their WealthTranscriptDwarkesh PatelToday, I have the great honor of interviewing Bryan Caplan again for the third time. Bryan, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Bryan CaplanI've got the great honor of being interviewed by you, Dwarkesh. You're one of my favorite people in the world!Don't Be a FeministDwarkesh PatelIt's a greater pleasure every time (for me at least). So let's talk about your book, Don't Be a Feminist. Is there any margin of representation of women in leadership roles at which you think there should be introduced bias to make sure more women get in, even if the original ratio is not because of bias?Bryan CaplanNo, I believe in meritocracy. I think it is a good system. It is one that almost everyone sees the intuitive appeal of, and it works. Just looking at a group and saying, “We need to get more members of Group X,” is the wrong way to approach it. Rather, you need to be focusing on, “Let's try to figure out the best way of getting the top quality people here.”Dwarkesh PatelIf there's an astounding ratio of men in certain positions, could that potentially have an impact on the company's ability to do business well? Perhaps the company could just care about increasing the ratio for that reason alone. Bryan CaplanRight. I mean, one can imagine that! I think in our culture, it really goes the other way. People are more likely to be trying to get rid of men, despite the fact that the men are delivering value. If you really pushed me into starting to think, “Suppose you're running a bar, would you have ladies' night?” well yeah, I would have ladies' night in a bar because that actually works, and it's good business! However, if what you're doing is trying to actually get correct answers to things, if you're trying to go and make something run effectively, and if you're just trying to make progress and you're trying to learn new things, the thing to focus on is what actually leads to knowledge and not focusing on just trying to get demographic representation. I think what we've seen is once you go down that route, it is a slippery slope. So besides defending meritocracy on its merits, I would actually also say that the slippery slope argument is not one that should be dismissed lightly. There's a lot of evidence that it does actually fit the facts. When you make an exception of that kind, it really does lead you to bad places. Dwarkesh PatelOkay. But changing topics a bit, I wonder if this gives you greater sympathy for immigration restrictionists because their argument is similar, that there's no natural shelling point for your keyhole solutions where you let tens of millions of people in, but you don't give them welfare or voting rights. There's a slippery slope when you let them in because, eventually, the civil rights argument is going to extend to them. There'll be adverse consequences that these keyhole solutions can't solve for.Bryan CaplanFirst of all, I would say maybe. That is one of the best arguments against keyhole solutions. I'm also guessing that a lot of your listeners have no idea what keyhole solutions are, Dwarkesh, so maybe we want to back up and explain that. Dwarkesh PatelGo for it. Sure.Bryan CaplanSo I have a totally unrelated book called Open Borders, the Science and Ethics of Immigration. One of the chapters goes over ways of dealing with complaints about immigration that fall short of stopping people from actually excluding or kicking out people that are already there. So just to back up a little bit further, most of the book talks about complaints about immigration–– saying that they're either totally wrong or overstated. But then I have another chapter saying, “Alright, fine, maybe you don't agree with that, but isn't there another way that we could deal with this?” So, for example, if you're worried about immigrants voting poorly, you could say, “Fine, we won't extend voting rights to immigrants or make them wait for a longer time period.” That's one where I would just say that the focal point of citizen versus noncitizen is one of the strongest ones. So I think that it actually is one that has a lot of stability. This line of, “Well, you're not a citizen, therefore…” really does have a lot of intuitive appeal. Although, yes, I do think that keyhole solutions would probably not work multi-generationally, so to go and say this is a keyhole solution where you're not a citizen, your kids are not citizens, and their kids after them are not citizens, that's one that I think would be hard to maintain. However, again, at the same time, the problems people are worried about, if they ever were severe, are also getting diluted over time. So I wouldn't worry about it so much. That is one of the very best objections to keyhole solutions that I know of.Dwarkesh PatelOkay, so going back to feminism. Over time, doesn't feminism naturally become true? One of the things you can say is that the way that society is unfair to men includes how they fight in wars or do difficult and dangerous jobs, but society, over time, becomes more peaceful (or at least has in our timeline), and the difficult jobs get automated. At the same time, the gains for people who are at the very peak of any discipline keep going up fairly, but the implication still is that if men are overrepresented there, even for biological reasons, then the relative gains that they get go up, right? So over time, feminism just becomes more true, not because society necessarily discriminated against women, but just because of the trends in technology. Bryan CaplanOnce again, I feel like we should just back up a little bit. What is feminism anyway, because if we don't know what that is, then it's very hard to talk about whether it's becoming more true over time. In my book, I begin with some popular dictionary definitions that just say feminism is the theory that women should be political, social, economic, and cultural equals of men. I say that this is a terrible definition, which violates normal usage. Why? Well, we actually have public opinion data on, first of all, whether people are or are not feminists, and second of all, what they believe about the political, social, economic, and cultural equality of women. And guess what? An overwhelming majority of people that say they are not feminists still agree with the equality of women in all those mentions, which really makes you realize that really can't be the definition of feminism. That would be like saying feminism is the theory that the sky is blue.Well, feminists do believe the sky is blue, but that isn't what distinguishes feminists from other people. So what distinguishes them? What I say is that the really distinguishing view of feminism is that society treats women less fairly than men. The view is that society treats women less fairly than men or treats men more fairly than women. This definition fits actual usage. It would be very strange for someone to say, “I'm a feminist, but I think that men get terrible treatment in our society, and women are treated like goddesses.” Then you say, “Well, then you're not really a feminist, are you?” That doesn't make sense. On the other hand, for someone to say, “I am not a feminist, but God, we treat women so terribly, we're awful.” That, again, just would not fit. So I'm not saying this is the one true definition, but rather that it is much closer to what people actually mean by feminism than what dictionaries say. So to be fair, every now and then, there'll be a better definition. I think the Wikipedia definition in the second sentence adds that it also has the view that women are treated very unfairly. Dwarkesh PatelIs another way of defining feminism just that we should raise the status of women? That's slightly different from the fairness issue because if you think of a feminist historian, maybe their contention is not that women were treated unfairly in the past. Maybe they just want to raise the status of women in the past who are underrepresented. If you think of somebody today who wants to, let's say, raise the status of Asians in our society, and they want to acknowledge the great things that Asians are doing in our society, then maybe their contention is not even that Asians are treated unfairly. They just want to raise their status. So what would you think of that definition?Bryan CaplanSo first of all, it could be, but I don't think so. Here's what I think. There could be a few people like that, but that's not what the word means in normal use. If someone were to say, “Women are treated absolutely fantastically, way better than men, and I want it to get even higher.” You say, hmm. Well, that's not what I think. Somebody might say, “Well, I can still be a feminist and think that,” okay, but that's not what the word actually means. It's not the typical view of people who call themselves feminists. The typical view is precisely that women are treated very unfairly. They want to raise that and alleviate that in a way that's almost by definition. If you think that someone's being treated unfairly, then to say, “I think they're being really unfair, but I think it's great that it's unfair.” It's almost self-contradictory. Dwarkesh PatelI guess I was making a slightly different point, which is not even that these people don't want to raise the status (the actual living standards of women) in some way. It's just that they want to raise the rhetorical status.Bryan CaplanYes, but again, if someone were to say, “I think that women are treated absolutely fantastically in society, way better than men, who we treat like dogs. But I also want women's status to be even higher than it already is.” That would be something where you could argue that “Well, that person may still be a feminist, but that is not what the word means.” Because hardly anyone who calls themselves a feminist believes that weird thing that you're talking about. Dwarkesh PatelLet me make an analogy. Let's say you or I are libertarians, right? And then we think we should raise the status of billionaires. Now, it's not like we think society mistreats billionaires. They're pretty fine, but we think their status should be even higher.Bryan CaplanYeah, I mean, this just goes to the definition. In order to find out whether a definition is correct, you just have to think, “Well, how is the word commonly used?” Logically speaking, it's possible to have a different view or two things that are compatible. The whole idea of a definition is that, ideally, you're trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions such that everybody who satisfies the conditions falls under the category and that everybody who doesn't satisfy the conditions doesn't. In ordinary language, of course, it's notoriously hard to really do that. Defining a table is actually quite difficult in a necessary and sufficient-condition sense, but we can still say, “Well, a table is not by definition something that people sit on, right?” Someone could say, “Well, I suppose you could sit on a table, but that's not the definition in ordinary use in any language of which I'm aware.”But why don't we actually go back to your real question. Which was..Dwarkesh PatelOverall, the left tail of society is being compressed, and the right tail is being expanded. Does feminism become more true over time?Bryan CaplanThe answer is that we really need to look at all of the main measures to get an idea of this. With some of the ones that you're talking about, it does make more sense. As jobs become less physically dangerous, then at least you might say that things are less unfair to men. Although in the book, what I say is that even that is a bit more superficially complicated, at least on the surface. The immediate reaction is that society's less fair to men because they do the most dangerous jobs. Although I also say, “Yeah, but they get monetary compensation for that.” So, all things considered, you probably shouldn't think of it as unfair. It's something where it's reasonable to say, “Hey, wait a second, how come men are the ones that are enduring 90 percent of the workplace deaths” and say, “Well, because they're getting 90 percent of the combat pay.” Broadly construed it's not mostly actual for combat. So anyway, that's one area where you should be careful. But I can see the possibility there. I do have a section in the book where I go over what's happening over time. What I'll say is, well, one big thing that's happened over time is that people have become very hyper-concerned with the mistreatment of women, which means that feminism is becoming less true as a result because when people are really hyper-concerned that they might be unfair to someone, they are even less likely to be unfair to them. So I think that's one thing where society where feminisms become less true over time. Another area that I talk about and which I think really does tip the scales, although again, you really need to go through the book because I do try to work through a lot of different margins…I think the one that really does settle it against feminism in today's age is precisely the level of false feminist accusations about unfairness. When we go over all the objective measures, then you say, well, it's close to a wash in terms of which gender is treated more or less fairly overall. But then you realize, “Yes, but there's one gender that has to endure a whole lot of grossly exaggerated hyperbolic accusations and unfairness and another gender that gets to make those accusations.” The gender that has to endure the unfair accusations is men, and the gender that gets to make them is women. Obviously, not all women make them, and not all men receive them. But still, if we're talking about the average fairness of the treatment of men and women or society, I say that this climate of false accusation and intimidation is what really tips it. It didn't have to be this way, Dwarkesh! [laughs] We could have just had conditions change without a whole lot of flinging of wildly inaccurate accusations, but that's not the world we're in. Dwarkesh PatelWhen would you say was the flipping point? Was there a particular decade that you thought “unbalanced things are equal now?”Bryan CaplanYeah. So one of the things I say in the book is that there are a bunch of ways where you can say that women were treated less fairly in earlier decades, but there are aspects that are probably more important overall where women are treated worse now. The main one is paternal support for children. In 1940, the odds that you could count on the biological father of your children to help you to raise them was maybe 90%. Now it's probably more like 60%, 70%. So that's one of the main ways that I say that women probably are treated less fairly than men. And the unfairness has gotten worse over time. Again, just understand this is not the kind of book that most people are used to where someone argues like a lawyer and they just say, look, I've got 20 arguments for why I'm right. And everyone who disagrees with me is stupid and doesn't have a leg to stand on. This is the kind of book that I liked to write where I really say, let's just calm down and just go through every issue separately, weigh each one on its merits. There are a bunch of points where someone could say, “Why do you concede that? That makes your argument weaker.” Well, I concede it because it's true! Then in the end, I have my overall judgment. I will just say that there are a number of books that are written in this terrible modern style of lawyerly reasoning, where you basically have a thesis that you just try to defend in every possible way. I don't write books like that. I try to write books that are honest and self-reflective, and where if there's some weakness in what I'm saying, I don't just acknowledge it if someone points it out; I try to be the first person to reveal it so that people feel like they can trust me. It's my own conscience. I don't feel right when I say something not really quite right. I feel like I should've always said the other thing. So I try to just write with candor. Dwarkesh PatelNow, would you say that feminism in the United States is overcorrected but that it's still true in the global sense? In the way that, on average, across the world, women are treated more unfairly than men. Because if that's the case, then if the US is at the center of global feminism, then, of course, they're going to overcorrect here, but overall they're making the world a better place. Bryan CaplanSo that is a much better argument. I would say that if we think about most areas of Europe, then I think that it's very similar to what's going on in the US. In the book, I do go over this especially. I start with Saudi Arabia, where it's really obvious what's going on and how poorly women are treated. But then I go over to India and China and just think about plausible rates of female infanticide. I think it is very likely that overall the treatment of women in India and China is more unfair than that of men. In Saudi Arabia, I'm almost sure that it is. In terms of “Is the US providing a useful corrective for the world while messing up things in the US?” It's possible. I think the problem is that it does discredit a lot of the reasonable points because the US just doesn't focus on the really big issues. The amount of time that American feminists spend on female infanticide in China and India… I don't think it would even be 1% of the rhetoric. It's just not something that they care about.So I would say that there's more harm being done by the sheer distraction of putting so much emphasis upon small, exaggerated, or reverse problems that bother feminists in the first world while ignoring and indirectly causing people to forget or neglect actual serious problems in some other countries. Positively shifting the Overton WindowWestern Feminism Ignores InfanticideDwarkesh PatelBut let me apply the argument you make in Open Borders that you can effect change by shifting the Overton window. So advocating for open borders just shifts immigration policy slightly towards the open end. Can American feminists make the same point that through making the crazy arguments they make in America, they're making Saudi Arabia more liberal for women? Bryan CaplanI would say that when the arguments are crazy, then it's not clear that shifting the Overton window actually happens. That may be where you discredit the other view. In particular, I think what I say in that part of the book is that people generally confuse being radical with being unfriendly. And most of the harm that is done to radical causes is due to the unfriendliness rather than the radicalism. So in that case, I would say that feminism has a definite friendliness problem. It is not a movement that goes out of its way to go and make other people feel like they are respected, where even if you disagree with me, I want to be your friend and listen to what you have to say, and maybe we could go and come to some understanding. I think it is a movement where the main emotional tenure of the elites is, “We are totally right, and anyone who disagrees had better watch out.” So I think that there is a discrediting of it. The other thing is just that I think there's too much cultural separation between the feminist movement as we know it and places like China and India, where I just don't see the attitude of being really angry about exaggerated or false complaints about unfair treatment of women in the United States is going to do anything for infanticide in India. Correct me if I'm wrong, Dwarkesh. Do you see much influence of Western feminism on infanticide in India?Dwarkesh PatelI don't know, but maybe yes. More generally, one of the common arguments that libertarians make about India and its elites is, “Oh, all of India's elites go study in Oxford or something, and they learn about the regulations the West is adopting that make no sense for a country with $2,000 GDP per capita.” I feel like some of the things could be true of feminism where all these Indian elites go to American universities and UK universities where they learn about radical feminism, and they go back, and they adopt some of these things.Bryan CaplanYes, although you might remember what Alex Tabarrok says about these very things. You can go to India and have people pushing paper straws on you, and yet the streets are still totally covered in trash. In fact, the pushing of the paper straws probably actually distracts people from the much more serious problem of the horrible trash, right? Again, I don't know enough about India to speak with any confidence here, but if you go and learn radical feminism in Western universities, come back to India and start complaining about how we need to have more female CEOs in a country where you have millions of female infanticides per year, I think it probably is like the paper straws problem where you are so focused on a trivial problem that maybe is not only a problem, is not even a problem at all. At the same time, that anger really blinds you to an actual, really serious problem that's going on. But you know India better than me, I could be wrong. Why The Universe Hates WomenDwarkesh PatelI believe rape within a marriage is still legal in India and is still not recognized. Maybe it was just recently changed. Let's say this is an interview, and a feminist says, “Oh my gosh, okay Bryan, maybe you're right that society as a whole doesn't mistreat women, but maybe the cosmos mistreats women.” So women are forced to have children. All of these things combined make women's lives worse on average than men's lives. It's not because society mistreats them, but in some sense, there's still unfairness geared toward women. What do you make of this argument?Bryan CaplanSo unfairness, where there's no human being that does it, seems like a very strange idea to me. Just from the get-go, well, so who was unfair to you? “The universe is unfair.” Then I mean, the correct term there is unfortunate, not unfair. So that aside, I would say it's a really interesting question. Who actually has better lives just as a matter of biological endowments, men or women? I mean, in terms of demonstrated preference, I think the overwhelming result is that most people just want to remain in whatever gender they're born in. So this is not actually transgenderism. This is like a genie wish. If you could change your gender just with a wish, costlessly, perfectly, I think a very large majority of people would still want to stay with whatever gender they have because it's part of their identity. It's some kind of endowment effect, status quo bias, or whatever. But then if you say, “Okay, yeah, right, fine. Like you, like you just want to stay whatever you were because that's your identity, but if you could put that aside, what would you want to be?” It's a tough question. You can say, “Well, women have a harder personality to deal with because of higher neuroticism, and they've also got higher agreeableness.” But that gives them some other advantages in terms of getting along with other people. For example, men's disagreeableness makes it hard for men to just bite their tongues and shut up when someone's saying something they don't like. I think that is easier for women to do. You may have noticed that having to shut up and bite your tongue while someone around you says something stupid you don't like is actually a big part of life. That is one thing. Now, in terms of things that I feel that I would get out of being a woman, just being able to have as many kids as I wanted would matter a lot to me. So I only have four kids right now. If it were totally up to me, I would have had more kids. I think, as a woman, it would have been easy to do. [laughs] So again, you know, there is the issue. How are you going to find a guy that wants to have a lot of kids? This is one where I've looked at the data on family size and what determines it. While both men and women seem to have a say on family size, it just looks like women's traits have a much larger effect. Men are more likely to say, “OK, fine, whatever. We'll do what you want to do on family size.” Whereas women seem to have much more pronounced preferences, which they then tend to get. I think that if I were a woman, I could have had more kids, and it would have been easier for me to do it. That would be something that matters to me. It's not something that matters to everybody, but that's something there. Again, there is just the nice fact of people caring about your suffering. In the book, I do talk about the ethos of women and children first, which is very pronounced. It's a modern society where we can simultaneously have something like “women and children first”, but then also have a lot of rhetoric about how people don't care about women. It's like, “Hmm, that's not right.”Dwarkesh PatelWhat do you think of this theory that maybe society cares a lot more about women suffering, but it sympathizes a lot more with men's success? If you think of a default character in a movie or a novel, at least for me, then the default is a man. Then maybe there's some victim that defaults as a woman. But I'd rather be the sympathy of some sort of success than get it for suffering.Bryan CaplanI mean, do you need sympathy for success? Or do you want admiration? I mean, I guess what I would say is that everybody's got suffering, and only a small share of people have any notable success. If all that you knew was you're going to be a man or woman, I would say, “Well, gee, if I'm a woman, then people will sympathize with my suffering, which is almost definitely coming because that's the human condition.” Whereas to have admiration for your success is something where it just affects a much smaller number of people. I know that hanging out in Austin among hyper-successful people may be biasing your sample a bit, but I do think it's believable that men get more unmitigated admiration for their success. Of course, there are also differences in the mating opportunities that you get for being a successful man versus a successful woman. So that is there too, but again, this is something that really is only relevant for a very small share of the population.But then the argument is, “Well, that small share of the population matters so much in terms of the story we tell ourselves about our civilization or just in terms of who controls more resources overall.” So if being a woman billionaire is harder, maybe for biological reasons, maybe for the reasons of our society, you can say, “Well, that only affects a small percentage of women in society.” But on the other hand, billionaires matter a lot.In terms of what life is like for most people, the main way they matter is that billionaires just provide awesome stuff. In terms of the stories that people tell, it's true that if you go and look at most classic movies or novels, the main characters are male. Even in cartoons, actually, the main characters traditionally have been male. But on the other hand, that's just fiction. In terms of daily life. I'd rather have people be really concerned about me in real life but have my perspective underrepresented stories than the other way around. Dwarkesh PatelSo what do you make of the argument that employers hold defects in women's personalities much more against them than they hold defects in men's personalities? I think Tyler cited some of this research in his new book on talent that being too agreeable or being too aggressive harms women more than it harms men. Bryan CaplanI would say that it's complicated in terms of willingness to fire. I think employers are much more willing to fire men. For defects and for insubordination. Another thing on the list is a small one, but I think that it is indicative of a broader trend. For people working at workplaces with dress codes, men are much more likely to be dinged on dress code violations than women because for men, there's a definite thing men are supposed to do. If you're not doing it, you are in violation. For women, on the other hand, it's like, “Well, gee, I mean, it seems kind of like that's not what you should be wearing, but I don't want to be the person that says anything about it. And who knows? Who am I to judge what a woman ought to be wearing on the job?”  But a man, on the other hand, needs to be wearing a suit in 110-degree weather. What was the high this summer over in Austin? [laughter] Dwarkesh PatelWhy do you think that women have gotten less happy since the sixties in America?Bryan CaplanRight. So the main thing I know about this is Stevenson and Wolfer's research on this. The main thing to remember is the magnitude. If I remember correctly, they find that in the sixties, women had about a two percentage point advantage relative to men in terms of their odds of saying they're very happy. 25% of men said they were very happy, then 27% of women in the sixties said that they were very happy. Whereas now, it seems like women have a two percentage point deficit relative to men. So now, if 25% of men say they're very happy, then 23% of women say they're very happy. It's always important in these papers to look at those magnitudes because the media coverage is going to say, “Oh, women are miserable now.” It's not that women are miserable now! We're talking about a two-percentage point difference. It's a data set large enough for this to actually be meaningful, but we do want to keep it in perspective in terms of what's really going on. The paper probably actually goes over a bunch of stories and says the obvious ones are all wrong. That would be what Justin Wolfersustin especially would normally do. I think he's usually right that simple stories about something like this are wrong. In terms of what I would pursue if I read through the paper and reminded myself of what they found and then said, “Okay, well, what will work?” I think I would, on one end, focus on single moms because they'll become much more common, and their lives really are hard. A rise in single motherhood is coming. I would guess that's one important part of it. Then, I would also be wondering how much of it is actual feminism telling women that they should be unhappy because the world is unfair and that causes unhappiness. Again, I'm not saying that these are right. It's plausible to me. The main thing I would say about feminism causing unhappiness in the adherents is that it probably doesn't matter most for most self-identified feminists because most people just are not that intellectual and they don't think about their ideas very often. So it's one thing to say, look, if you believe you're going to hell, you'll be unhappy. It's like, well, if you believe it once a year, does it make you unhappy? If you remember, “Oh yeah, once a year, I think I'm going to hell.” The rest of the time, you don't think it.On the other hand, the person who is always thinking, “I'm going to hell, I'm going to hell,” probably will be unhappy. So I think feminism is very likely to reduce the happiness of people who are feminist elites and take it really seriously, where they're talking about it all the time. That is likely to cause unhappiness. I'd be amazed if it didn't. But on the other hand, for the vast majority of people who say, “Yeah, I am a feminist. Moving on…” I don't think it's too likely to be messing up their lives. Dwarkesh PatelThat raises an interesting possibility. This is not my theory, but let's run with this. So feminism has actually gotten more true over time, but it's precisely because of feminism.  Maybe it's made elite women more unhappy. As you said earlier, the amount of single mothers has gone up. Maybe part of that is the reason, and part of that is because of feminist trends in terms of family formation. Maybe women prefer to be at home caring for children on average more, but then feminism encourages them to have careers, which makes them less happy. So if you add all these things up, plus mentorship, which men are less likely to give because of #metoo. So add all these things up, maybe they're the result of feminism, but they still make feminism more right. Would you agree with that?Bryan CaplanYeah. If we go back to this definition of feminism and this theory that our society treats women less fairly than men, then if the story is that women have made a lot of false accusations against men and then men have responded by changing their behavior, that would seem to be a strange example of saying the society is treating women less fairly than men. It would seem to be a case that society is treating men unfairly, and this is having some negative side effects for women as well. But it's one where if you really were trying to draw the line… Well actually, here's actually one of the weaknesses of the definition that I proposed. So foot binding in China. From my understanding, the main drivers of foot binding in China were women. So women are binding feet, and they're also telling their daughters they have to have their feet bound. Men seemed to care less, actually, it was more of an intra-female abuse. This is one where you could say that in China, women are treated less fairly than men, even though the perpetrators are women. I think that does actually make sense. I would just say that the definition that we use in our society isn't really calibrated to deal with that kind of thing. When it comes to what the right way to describe it would be, it just gets a bit confusing. It's useful just to say, all right, well, if women are mistreating women and that's what's making women's lives hard, how do we count that? I think I would just say that we don't have any really good way of counting it, and might be useful to just come up with a new word to describe this kind of thing. Women's Tears Have Too Much PowerDwarkesh PatelWhat do you make of Hanania's argument that women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas? Bryan CaplanYeah. So we might want to back up a little bit and explain what the argument is. So Richard Hanania on his substack has a very famous essay where he points out that in fiction, when there is a mob of angry college students, it's very demographically diverse. But when you look at actual footage, it seems like women are highly overrepresented. He generalizes this by saying that a lot of what's going on in terms of cancel culture and related problems is that women are the main ones that get angry about these things, and people don't know what to do about it. So he, if I remember correctly, says that a man can, in a way, actually enjoy an argument with another man. Even if you lose or even if it's a physical fight, he says, you can sort of feel invigorated by it. We got through this. We resolved something. Whereas no guy feels this way about an argument with his wife. “What do I need to do in order for this argument to end as soon as possible” would be a more normal reaction. This sort of generalizes to the majority of social arguments, specifically ones that involve someone being offended or angry, or hurt. He says a lot of what's going on is that it is mainly women that are presenting these complaints and that it's hard to deal with it because men don't want to argue with angry women. It just makes them feel bad. It's sort of a no-win situation. So anyway, that is Hanania's argument. Overall, it seemed pretty plausible to me. I haven't thought about it that much more, but it's one that does seem to make a fair bit of sense in terms of just what I'm writing about feminism. You know, one really striking thing is just how one-sided this conversation is. It is a conversation where women have complaints, and men mostly just listen in silence. Ofcourse, men will sometimes complain amongst each other when women aren't around. It's not a real dialogue where women have complaints about men, and then men are very eager to say, “Oh, but I have something I would like to say in rebuttal to that.” A lot of it is what he calls “women's tears.” It's sadness, but mingled with or supported by intimidation: “If you don't give me what I want, if you don't pretend that you agree with me, I will be very angry, and I will be fairly sad.” So you should be afraid. I think a lot of what's probably going on with the rhetorical dominance of feminism, is that people are just afraid to argue against it because, in a way, it does sort of violate the women and children first ethos. If women complain about something, you aren't supposed to go and say, “I disagree. Your complaints are unjustified.” You're supposed to say, “Look, what can I do to make it better?” Dwarkesh PatelBut that seems like a good description of race issues and class issues as well. Bryan CaplanI mean, the main difference there is that there are a lot of people who have a lot more firsthand experience of intergender relations, and they spend a lot more time in intergender relations than they spend in all of the other ones. So I mean, the dynamic is probably pretty similar, but in terms of the really negative firsthand experience that men have, Hanania probably is right about that. Then that generalizes to bigger issues. Dwarkesh PatelYou have an essay about endogenous sexism. Could this just not be the cause of society being unfair to a woman? We start off with men being in power, they get sexist just because they're around other men and they like them more. So then, the starting position matters a lot, even if men aren't trying to be sexist. Bryan CaplanSo let me just back up and explain the argument. The argument says to imagine that in reality, men and women are equally good in absolutely every way, but people are more likely to have close friends with their own gender, (which is totally true). So if I remember the essay, I think that for close male friends, the male-to-female ratio was 6:1, and for women, it was 4:1. So most people's close friends are of the same gender. When you meet these people, and they're your close friends, you know them really well. Furthermore, because you have handpicked them, you're going to think well of them. So then the question is, “What about people of the opposite gender? What will your interaction with them be like?” What I point out is that a lot of the opposite gender you hang out with will be the spouses and partners of your friends. On average, you're going to think worse of them because you didn't pick them. Basically, there are two filters there: I like you because you're my friend, and I put up with your partner because that person is your partner. So this means that the women that men are around are going to be the partners of their friends. They're not going to like them less and think less of them than they think of their friends. On the other hand, the partners of women's friends will be men, and women will get to know them and say, “Wow, they're not that great. They're at least kind of disappointing relative to my same-gender friends.” So anyway, this is an argument about how the illusion of your own gender being superior could arise. Now, as to whether this is actually the right story, I leave that open. This was just more of a thought experiment to understand what could happen here. Could this actually explain the unfair treatment of women in society? Especially if we start off with men being the gatekeepers for most of the business world? It's totally plausible that it could. That's why we really want to go to the data and see what we actually find. In the data I know of, the evidence of women earning less money than men while doing the same job is quite low. So there's very little gender disparity in earnings once you make the obvious statistical adjustments for being in the same occupation. Again, the main area that probably actually has gotten worse for women is mentoring. Mentoring is partly based on friendship. I like this person. I like working with them. So I will go and help them to go and acquire more human capital on the job. This is one that feminism has visibly messed up, and many feminists will, in a strange way, admit that they have done it while not taking responsibility for the harm. I've got an essay on that in the book as well.Looking at the evidence, it is totally standard now for male managers to admit that they are reluctant to mentor female employees because they're so worried. When I go and track down a bunch of feminist reactions to this, they basically just say, “I can't believe how horrible these guys are.” But it's like, look, you're asking them for a favor to get mentorship. They're scared. If someone's scared, do you really want to yell at them more and offer more mostly empty threats? It's really hard to scare someone into doing something this informal, so you really do need to win them over. Dwarkesh PatelTactically, that might be correct, but it seems to just be a matter of “Is their argument justified?” I can see why they'd be frustrated. Obviously, you want to point out when there's a sexual harassment allegation, and that may have the effect of less mentorship. Bryan CaplanWell, is it obvious that you want to point that out? Part of what I'm saying is that there are different perceptions here. There are differences of opinion. If you want to get along with people, a lot of it is saying, “How does it seem from the other person's point of view?” Obviously, do not assume that the most hypersensitive person is correct. So much of the problem with mentorship comes down to hypersensitivity. I've got another piece in the book where I talk about misunderstandings and how we have so much lost sight of this very possibility. When there's a conflict between two people, who's right and who's wrong? Ofcourse, it could be that one person is the conscious malefactor and the other person is an obvious victim that no one could deny. That does happen sometimes. But much more often in the real world, there's a misunderstanding where each person, because of the imperfection of the human mind, has the inability to go and get inside another person's head. To each person, it seems like they're in the right and the other person is in the wrong, and one of the most helpful ways for people to get along with each other is to realize that this is the norm. Most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings, not by deliberate wrongdoing. This is the way the people who keep their friends keep their friends. If any time there's a conflict with a friend, you assume that you're right and your friend is in the wrong, and you demand an immediate abject apology, you're going to be losing friends left and right. It is a foolish person who does that. Friendship is more important than any particular issue. This is not only my personal view, it is the advice that I give to everyone listening. Keep your friends, bend over backward in order to keep your friends, and realize that most conflicts are caused by misunderstandings. It's not the other person is going out of their way to hurt you. They probably don't see it that way. If you just insist, “I'm right, I demand a full apology and admission of your wrongdoing,” you're probably going to be losing friends, and that's a bad idea. The same thing I think is going on in workplaces where there is an ideology saying that we should take the side of the most hypersensitive person. This is not a good approach for human beings to get along with each other.Dwarkesh PatelYeah. That's very wise. What do you make the argument that a lot of these professions that are dominated by men are not intrinsically things that must appeal to men, but the way that they are taught or advertised is very conducive to what males find interesting? So take computer science, for example; there are claims that you could teach that or economics in a way that focuses on the implications on people from those practices rather than just focusing on the abstractions or the “thing-focused stuff.” So the argument is these things shouldn't be inherently interesting to men. It's just in the way they are taught. Bryan CaplanThe word inherently is so overused. It's one where you say, "Well, are you saying that inherently X?” Then someone says, “Well, not inherently X, just you'd have to bend over backward and move heaven and earth for it not to be. So I guess it's not really inherent.” That is a lot of what is worth pointing out. So if you're going to put the standard to that level, then it's going to be hard to find differences. You could say, “There's absolutely no way under the sun to go and teach math in a less male way.” On the other hand, maybe we should ask, “Is it reasonable to expect the whole world to revolve around making every subject equally appealing to men and women?” That's an unreasonable demand. If there's a subject like math that is male-dominated, the reasonable thing is to say, “Well, if you want to get in on that, you're going to need to go and become simpatico with the mindset of the people that are already there and then push the margin.” You can say that it's “so unfair that male ways of doing math are dominant.” Or maybe you could say that it's unfair for someone who's just shown up to demand that an entire discipline change its way of doing things to make you feel better about it. Obviously, there are large areas that are very female-dominated, and there's no pressure on women to go and change the way that flower arranging is done, or cooking in order to make it more welcoming to men.So this is one where if you had a really high bar for how things are fair, then unless the rigorous conditions are met, you're going to see a lot of unfairness in the world. Although even then, as long as you have an equally high bar for both men and women, I don't think it's going to make feminism any more true by my definition. I also just say, I think these really high bars are unreasonable. If a friend had these bars of standards saying, “Look, why is it that when we meet for food, we have to go and meet at standard hours of breakfast, lunch, and dinner? I actually like meeting in the middle of the night. Why can't we have half of the time be my way?” You respond, “Well yeah, but you're only one person, so why should I change?” It depends upon what subfield you're in as well. There are actually groups of people really like hanging out in the middle of the night, so if you ask, “Why is it we always have to meet in the middle of the night? Why can't we do it my way?” You are entering into a subculture that works this way. You could demand that we totally change our way of being to accommodate you, but it just seems like an unreasonable imposition on the people who are already here. Now, when you sort of go through the list of different things that people think of as making something a male or a not-male field, sometimes people will treat things like acting like there's an objectively correct answer as a male trait. If that's a male trait, then we need to keep that trait because that is vital to really any field where there are right and wrong answers. I mean, that's an area where I am very tempted rhetorically to say, “It's just so sexist to say that it's male to think that things are right and wrong. I think that is a trait of both genders”. In a way, I end the essay stating, “Yes, these are not male; not only do they not make a male monopoly, but they are also not uniquely male virtues. They are virtues that can and should be enjoyed by all human beings.” At the same time, you could ask whether virtues are equally represented by both genders and well, that's an empirical question. We have to look at that. Bryan Performs Standup Comedy!Dwarkesh PatelWe're shifting subjects. You recently performed at the Comedy Cellar. How was that experience? Bryan CaplanYeah, that was super fun and a big challenge! I am a professional public speaker. Standup comedy is professional public speaking. I was curious about how much transfer of learning there would be. How many of the things that I know as a regular public speaker can I take with me to do standup comedy? I'm also just a big fan of standup comedy– if you know me personally, I just find life constantly funny. Dwarkesh PatelYes, I can confirm that. You're a very pleasant person to be around. Bryan CaplanLife is funny to me. I like pointing out funny things. I like using my imagination. A lot of comedy is just imagination and saying, look, “Imagine that was the opposite way. What would that be like?” Well, actually, just to back up again: during COVID, I did just create a wiki of comedy ideas just on the idea that maybe one day I'll go and do standup comedy. Comedy Cellar actually has a podcast, kind of like Joe Rogan, where comedians go and talk about serious issues. I was invited to that, and as a result, I was able to talk my way into getting to perform on the actual live stage of the biggest comedy club in New York. The main thing I could say about my performance is that it was me and nine professional comedians, and I don't think I was obviously the worst person. So that felt pretty good.Dwarkesh PatelIt was a pretty good performance.Bryan CaplanI felt good about it! There were some main differences that I realized between the kind of public speaking I was used to doing and what I actually did there. One is the importance of memorizing the script. It just looks a lot worse if you're reading off a note. Normally I have some basic notes, and then I ad-lib. I don't memorize. The only time I have a script is if I have a very time-constrained debate, then I'd normally write an opening statement, but otherwise, I don't. The thing with comedy is it depends so heavily upon exact word choice. You could go and put the same sentence into Google Translate and then back-translate it and get another sentence that is synonymous but isn't funny at all. That was something that I was very mindful of. Then obviously, there are things like timing and being able to read an audience (which I'm more used to). That was what was so hard during COVID–– not being able to look at the faces of a live audience. I can see their eyes, but I can't tell their emotions or reactions to their eyes. I don't know whether I should talk more or less about something. I don't know whether they're angry or annoyed or curious or bored. So these are all things that I would normally be adjusting my talk for in normal public speaking. But with comedy, it's a bit hard to do. What successful comedians actually do is they try it in a bunch of different ways, and then they remember which ways work and which ones don't. Then they just keep tweaking it, so finally, when they do the Netflix special, they have basically done A/B testing on a hundred different audiences, and then it sounds great–– but the first time? Not that funny. Dwarkesh PatelIt didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, but it makes a lot of sense that there are transfers of learning there in both disciplines. There are a lot of hypotheticals, non-extra events, and putting things in strange situations to see what the result is…Bryan CaplanA lot of it is just not having stage fright. So I probably had just a tiny bit of stage fright at the Comedy Cellar, which normally I would have basically zero, but there it was a little bit different because it's like, “Am I going to forget something?” I actually have a joke in the set about how nothing is scarier than staying silent while thousands of people stare at you. So that was a self-referential joke that I worked in there.Dwarkesh PatelI can't remember if it was Robin Hanson who said this, but didn't he have a theory about how the reason we have stage fright is because somehow, you're showing dominance or status, and you don't want to do that if you're not actually the most confident. Bryan CaplanYou're making a bid for status. In the ancestral environment, we're in small groups of 20-40 people. If you go and want to speak, you're saying, “I'm one of the most important people in this band here.” If you're not, or if there are a lot of people voicing that that guy is not important, then who knows? They might shove you off the cliff the next time they get a chance. So yeah, watch out. Affirmative Action is Philanthropic PropagandaDwarkesh PatelI wonder if this explains the cringe emotion. When somebody makes a bid for status, and it's not deserved. Okay, I want to talk about discrimination. So as you know, there's a Supreme court case about Harvard and affirmative action. You might also know that a lot of companies have filed a brief in favor of Harvard, saying that affirmative action is necessary for them to hire diverse work for ourselves, including Apple, Lyft, General Motors. So what is the explanation for corporations wanting to extend affirmative action? Or are they just saying this, but they don't want it? Bryan CaplanIf those individual corporations could press a button that would immunize them from all employment lawsuits, I think they would press it. When you look at their behavior, they don't just give in whenever they get sued. They have a normal team of lawyers that try to minimize the damage to the company and pay as little as possible to make the problem go away. So I think really what's going on is public relations. They are trying to be on that team. As to whether it's public relations vis a vis their consumers or public relations vis a vis other people in the executive boardroom is an interesting question. I think these days, it probably is more of the latter. Although even under Reagan, there were a bunch of major corporations that did make a similar statement saying that they wanted affirmative action to continue. I think that the real story is that they want to get the status of saying, “we are really in favor of this. We love this stuff.” But at the same time, if it just went away, they wouldn't voluntarily adopt a policy where they give you a right to go and sue them for mistreatment.I think there would still be a lot of propaganda. I mean, here's the general thing. You think about this as a species of corporate philanthropy sticking your neck out in favor of a broad social cause. Some people disagree and say that it's self-interest. They say, “Look, the odds that even Apple is going to change the Supreme Court's mind is super low.” So I don't think it's that. Basically, what they're doing is a kind of philanthropy. What's the deal with corporate philanthropy? The deal with corporate philanthropy is you are trying to go and, first of all, make the public like you, but also, you're trying to look good and jockey for influence within your own company. One really striking thing about corporate philanthropy is when you look closer, normally, they spend way more resources marketing the philanthropy and letting everyone know, “Oh, we did all this philanthropy!” Then they actually spend on philanthropy. So I had a friend who was a marketing person in charge of publicizing her company's philanthropy. They gave away about a thousand dollars a year to the Girl Scouts, and she had a hundred thousand dollars salary telling everyone about how great they were for giving this money to the Girl Scouts. So I think that's the real story. Get maximally cynical. I think without denying the fact that there are true believers now in corporate boardrooms who are pushing it past the point of profitability. The cost of philanthropy is just the production budget of the TV commercial. A rounding error. The donations are a rounding error, and then they go, “Hey, everyone, look at us. We're so freaking philanthropic!” Peer effects as the Only Real EducationDwarkesh PatelOkay. So this question is one that Tyler actually suggested I ask you. So in The Myth of the Rational Voter, you say that education makes you more pro-free market. Now, this may have changed in the meantime, but let's just say that's still true. If you're not really learning anything, why is education making you more free market? Bryan CaplanIt's particularly striking that even people who don't seem to take any economics classes are involved. I think that the best story is about peer effects. When you go to college, you're around other peers who though not pro-market, are less anti-market than the general population. The thing about peer effects is that they really are a double-edged sword from a social point of view. Think about this. Right now, if you are one of the 1% of non-Mormons that goes to Brigham Young University, what do you think the odds are that you'll convert to Mormonism? Dwarkesh PatelHigher than normal. Bryan CaplanYeah. I don't know the numbers, but I think it's pretty high. But suppose that Brigham Young let in all the non-Mormons. What would Brigham Young do for conversion to Mormonism? Probably very little. Furthermore, you realize, “Huh, well, what if those Mormons at Brigham Young were dispersed among a bunch of other schools where they were that were a minority?” Seems quite plausible. They'd be making a lot more converts over there. So if you achieve your peer effects by segregation (which is literally what college does, it takes one part of society and segregates it from another part of society physically when you're in school, and then there's social segregation caused by the fact that people want to hang out with other people in their own social circles, your own education levels, etc.), in that case, in terms of whether or not education actually makes society overall pro-free market, I think it's totally unclear because, basically, when people go to college, they make each other more pro-free market. At the same time, they remove the possibility of influencing people of other social classes who don't go to college, who probably then influence each other and make each other less free market. I think that's the most plausible story.Dwarkesh PatelWhat about the argument that the people who go to elite universities are people who are going to control things? If you can engineer a situation in which the peer effects in some particular direction are very strong at Harvard (maybe because the upper class is very liberal or woke), they make the underclass even more woke, and then it's a reinforcing cycle after every generation of people who come into college. Then that still matters a lot, even though presumably somebody becomes more right-wing once they don't go to Harvard because there are no peers there. But it doesn't matter. They're not going to be an elite, or it doesn't matter as much. Bryan CaplanIt could be, although what we've seen is that we now just have very big gaps between elite opinion and mass opinion. Of course, it is a democracy. If you want to run for office, that is a reason to go and say, “Yeah, what is the actual common view here? Not just the view that is common among elites.” However, I will say that this is a topic that deserves a lot more study. Now the other thing to question is, “Wouldn't there be peer effects even without college?” If elites didn't go to college and instead they went and did elite apprenticeships at top corporations instead, I think you'd still wind up getting a very similar elite subculture. I think that this kind of social segregation is very natural in every human society. Of course, you can see it under communism very strongly where it's like, “I don't want my kid going and playing with a kid whose parents aren't in the communist party.” So every society has this kind of thing. Now, if you push the dynamics enough…. let's put it this way. If you were the prophet of the Mormon religion, what would be the very best thing for you to do to maximize the spread of Mormonism? It is not at all clear to me that trying to get all Mormons to go bring them young is a good strategy.Dwarkesh PatelI wonder if there are nonlinear dynamics to this. Bryan CaplanYeah. Well, there's gotta be, right? But as soon as you're talking about nonlinear dynamics, those are truly hard to understand. So I would just say to keep a much more open mind about this, and if anyone is listening and wants to do research on this, that sounds cool, I'll read it. Dwarkesh PatelRight. I remember you saying that one of the things you're trying to do with your books is influence the common view of elite opinion. So in that sense, there are elite subcultures in every society, but they're not the same elite subcultures, and therefore you might care very much about which particular subculture it is. Bryan CaplanNotice that that's one where I'm taking it as a given that we have the current segregation, and I'm going to try to go and take advantage of it. But if it were a question of if I could change the dial of what kind of segregation we have, then it's much less clear. The Idiocy of Student Loan Forgiveness Dwarkesh PatelStudent loan forgiveness. What is your reaction? Bryan CaplanOh, give me a freaking break. This is one subject where I think it's very hard to find almost any economist, no matter how left-wing and progressive, who really wants to stick their necks out and defend this garbage. Look, it's a regressive transfer. Why then? Why is it that someone who is left-wing or progressive would go and favor it? Maybe it's because people who have a lot of education and colleges are on our team, and we just want to go and help our team. Obviously, the forgiveness really means, “We're going to go and transfer the cost of this debt from the elites that actually ran up the bill to the general population.” Which includes, of course, a whole lot of people who did not go to college and did not get whatever premium that you got out of it. So there's that. In terms of efficiency, since the people have already gotten the education, you're not even “increasing the amount of education” if you really think that's good. The only margin that is really increasing education is how it's making people think, “Well, maybe there'll be another round of debt forgiveness later on, so I'll rack up more debt. The actual true price of education is less than it seems to be.” Although even there, you have to say, “Huh, well, but could people knowing this and the great willingness to borrow actually wind up increasing the ban for college and raising tuition further?” There's good evidence for that. Not 100%, but still a substantial degree.Again, just to back up–– that can be my catchphrase [laughter]. So I have a book called The Case Against Education, and my view is much more extreme than that of almost any normal economist who opposes student loan debt forgiveness. I think that the real problem with education is that we have way too much of it. Most of it is very socially wasteful. What we're doing with student loan forgiveness is we're basically going and transferring money to people who wasted a lot of social resources. The story that you are on the slippery slope to free college for all is, in a way, the best argument in favor of it. If you thought that free college for all was a good idea, then this puts us on that slippery slope. It's terrible because the real problem with education is that we just spend way too many years in school. It is generally

Today, we speak with Bryan Caplan. Bryan is an American economist at George Mason University, and the New York Times best selling author of many books, including The Myth of The Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, and most recently, Don't Be A Feminist. He's also the editor in chief writer for the blog Bet On It and has published in the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and many more publications. In this episode, we discuss anarcho capitalism, and how we will work in our society. Bryan's book, Don't Be A Feminist, the advantages and disadvantages of being a man versus being a woman, Bryan's argument for open borders, the burden of immigration on the welfare state, and much more. 

Bryan Caplan is an economist and professor at George Mason University, the writer of the betonit substack and the author of many books: The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, the Case Against Education, Open Borders: the Science and Ethics of Immigration, and the newly released Don't Be A Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice. Bryan's Susbtack:Timestamps:0:00 Feminism30:40 Wokeness and Anti-wokeness39:40 Social Desirability Bias1:00:45 Private Companies1:05:20 Rebranding Libertarianism1:15:15 Life as a Public Intellectual This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cactus.substack.com

It was my great pleasure to speak once again to Tyler Cowen. His most recent book is Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World.We discuss:how sex is more pessimistic than he is,why he expects society to collapse permanently,why humility, stimulants, intelligence, & stimulants are overrated,how he identifies talent, deceit, & ambition,& much much much more!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.More really cool guests coming up, subscribe to find out about future episodes!You may also enjoy my interviews of Bryan Caplan (about mental illness, discrimination, and poverty), David Deutsch (about AI and the problems with America's constitution), and Steve Hsu (about intelligence and embryo selection).If you end up enjoying this episode, I would be super grateful if you shared it. Post it on Twitter, send it to your friends & group-chats, and throw it up on any relevant subreddits & forums you follow. Can't exaggerate how much it helps a small podcast like mine.A huge thanks to Graham Bessellieu for editing this podcast and Mia Aiyana for producing its transcript.Timestamps(0:00) -Did Caplan Change On Education?(1:17) - Travel vs. History(3:10) - Do Institutions Become Left Wing Over Time?(6:02) - What Does Talent Correlate With?(13:00) - Humility, Mental Illness, Caffeine, and Suits(19:20) - How does Education affect Talent?(24:34) - Scouting Talent(33:39) - Money, Deceit, and Emergent Ventures(37:16) - Building Writing Stamina(39:41) - When Does Intelligence Start to Matter?(43:51) - Spotting Talent (Counter)signals(53:57) - Will Reading Cowen's Book Help You Win Emergent Ventures?(1:04:18) - Existential risks and the Longterm(1:12:45) - Cultivating Young Talent(1:16:05) - The Lifespans of Public Intellectuals(1:19:42) - Risk Aversion in Academia(1:26:20) - Is Stagnation Inevitable?(1:31:33) - What are Podcasts for?TranscriptDid Caplan Change On Education?Tyler Cowen   Ask Bryan about early and late Caplan. In which ways are they not consistent? That's a kind of friendly jab.Dwarkesh Patel   Okay, interesting. Tyler Cowen   Garrett Jones has tweeted about this in the past. In The Myth of the Rational Voter, education is so wonderful. It no longer seems to be true, but it was true from the data Bryan took from. Bryan doesn't think education really teaches you much. Dwarkesh Patel So then why is it making you want a free market?Tyler Cowen  It once did, even though it doesn't now, and if it doesn't now, it may teach them bad things. But it's teaching them something.Dwarkesh Patel   I have asked him this. He thinks that education doesn't teach them anything; therefore, that woke-ism can't be a result of colleges. I asked him, “okay, at some point, these were ideas in colleges, but now they're in the broader world. What do you think happened? Why did it transition together?” I don't think he had a good answer to that.Tyler Cowen   Yeah, you can put this in the podcast if you want. I like the free podcast talk often better than the podcast. [laughs]Dwarkesh Patel   Okay. Well yeah, we can just start rolling. Today, it is my great pleasure to speak to Tyler Cowen about his new book, “Talent, How to Find Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Across the World.” Tyler, welcome (once again) to The Lunar Society. Tyler Cowen   Happy to be here, thank you!Travel vs. HistoryDwarkesh Patel 1:51  Okay, excellent. I'll get into talent in just a second, but I've got a few questions for you first. So in terms of novelty and wonder, do you think travelling to the past would be a fundamentally different experience from travelling to different countries today? Or is it kind of in the same category?Tyler Cowen   You need to be protected against disease and have some access to the languages, and obviously, your smartphone is not going to work, right? So if you adjust for those differences, I think it would be a lot like travelling today except there'd be bigger surprises because no one else has gone to the past. Older people were there in a sense, but if you go back to ancient Athens, or the peak of the Roman Empire, you'd be the first traveller. Dwarkesh Patel   So do you think the experience of reading a history book is somewhat substitutable for actually travelling to a place? Tyler Cowen   Not at all! I think we understand the past very very poorly. If you've travelled appropriately in contemporary times, it should make you more skeptical about history because you'll realize how little you can learn about the current places just by reading about them. So it's like Travel versus History, and the historians lose.Dwarkesh Patel   Oh, interesting. So I'm curious, how does travelling a lot change your perspective when you read a work of history? In what ways does it do so? Are you skeptical of it to an extent that you weren't before, and what do you think historians are probably getting wrong? Tyler Cowen   It may not be a concrete way, but first you ask: was the person there? If it's a biography, did the author personally know the subject of the biography? That becomes an extremely important question. I was just in India for the sixth time, I hardly pretend to understand India, whatever that possibly might mean, but before I went at all, I'd read a few hundred books about India, and it's not like I got nothing out of them, but in some sense, I knew nothing about India. Now that I've visited, the other things I read make more sense, including the history.Do Institutions Become Left Wing Over Time?Dwarkesh Patel   Okay, interesting. So you've asked this question to many of your guests, and I don't think any of them have had a good answer. So let me just ask you: what do you think is the explanation behind Conquest's Second Law? Why does any institution that is not explicitly right-wing become left-wing over time?Tyler Cowen   Well, first of all, I'm not sure that Conquest's Second Law is true. So you have something like the World Bank which was sort of centrist state-ist in the 1960s, and by the 1990s became fairly neoliberal. Now, about what's left-wing/right-wing, it's global, it's complicated, but it's not a simple case of Conquest's Second Law holding. I do think that for a big part of the latter post-war era, some version of Conquest's Law does mostly hold for the United States. But once you see that it's not universal, you're just asking: well, why have parts? Why has the American intelligentsia shifted to the left? So that there's political science literature on educational polarization? [laughs] I wouldn't say it's a settled question, but it's not a huge mystery like “how Republicans act wackier than Democrats are” for example. The issues realign in particular ways. I believe that's why Conquest's Law locally is mostly holding.Dwarkesh Patel   Oh, interesting. So you don't think there's anything special about the intellectual life that tends to make people left-wing, and this issue is particular to our current moment?Tyler Cowen    I think by choosing the words “left-wing” you're begging the question. There's a lot of historical areas where what is left-wing is not even well defined, so in that sense, Conquests Law can't even hold there. I once had a debate with Marc Andreessen about this–– I think Mark tends to see things that are left-wing/right-wing as somewhat universal historical categories, and I very much do not. In medieval times, what's left wing and what's right wing? Even in 17th century England, there were particular groups who on particular issues were very left-wing or right-wing. It seems to me to be very unsatisfying, and there's a lot of fluidity in how these axes play out over real issues.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. So maybe then it's what is considered “left” at the time that tends to be the thing that ends up winning. At least, that's how it looks like looking back on it. That's how we categorize things. Something insightful I heard is that “if the left keeps winning, then just redefine what the left is.” So if you think of prohibition at the time, it was a left-wing cause, but now, the opposite of prohibition is left-wing because we just changed what the left is.Tyler Cowen    Exactly. Take the French Revolution: they're the historical equivalent of nonprofits versus 1830s restoration. Was everything moving to the left, between Robespierre and 1830? I don't pretend to know, but it just sure doesn't seem that way. So again, there seem to be a lot of cases where Conquest's Law is not so economical.Dwarkesh Patel   Napoleon is a great example of this where we're not sure whether he's the most left-wing figure in history or the most right-wing figure in history.Tyler Cowen 6:00Maybe he's both somehow.What Does Talent Correlate With?Dwarkesh Patel How much of talent or the lack thereof is a moral judgment for you? Just to give some context, when I think that somebody is not that intelligent, for me, that doesn't seem like a moral judgment. That just seems like a lottery. When I say that somebody's not hard working, that seems like more of a moral judgment. So on that spectrum, where would you say talent lies?Tyler Cowen   I don't know. My default is that most people aren't that ambitious. I'm fine with that. It actually creates some opportunities for the ambitious–– there might be an optimal degree of ambition. Well, short of everyone being sort of maximally ambitious. So I don't go around pissed off at unambitious people, judging them in some moralizing way. I think a lot of me is on autopilot when it comes to morally judging people from a distance. I don't wake up in the morning and get pissed off at someone in the Middle East doing whatever, even though I might think it was wrong.Dwarkesh Patel   So when you read the biographies of great people, often you see there's a bit of an emotional neglect and abuse when they're kids. Why do you think this is such a common trope?Tyler Cowen   I would love to see the data, but I'm not convinced that it's more common than with other people. Famous people, especially those who have biographies, on average are from earlier times, and in earlier times, children were treated worse. So it could be correlated without being causal. Now, maybe there's this notion that you need to have something to prove. Maybe you only feel you need to prove something if you're Napoleon and you're short, and you weren't always treated well. That's possible and I don't rule it out. But you look at Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg without pretending to know what their childhoods were like.  It sure sounds like they were upper middle class kids treated very well, at least from a distance. For example, the Collison's had great parents and they did well.Dwarkesh Patel   It could just be that the examples involving emotional neglect stuck out in my mind in particular.  Tyler Cowen   Yeah. So I'd really like to see the data. I think it's an important and very good question. It seems to me, maybe one could investigate it, but I've never seen an actual result.Dwarkesh Patel   Is there something you've learned about talent spotting through writing the book that you wish wasn't so? Maybe you found it disturbing, or you found it disappointing in some way. Is there something that is a correlate for talent that you wish wasn't? Tyler Cowen   I don't know. Again, I think I'm relatively accepting of a lot of these realities, but the thing that disappoints me a bit is how geographically clustered talent is. I don't mean where it was born, and I don't mean ethnically. I just mean where it ends up. So if you get an application, say from rural Italy where maybe living standards are perfectly fine–– there's good weather, there's olive oil, there's pasta. But the application just probably not that good. Certainly, Italians have had enough amazing achievements over the millennia, but right now, the people there who are actually up to something are going to move to London or New York or somewhere. So I find that a bit depressing. It's not really about the people. Dwarkesh Patel   When you do find a cluster of talent, to what extent can that be explained by a cyclical view of what's happening in the region? In the sense of the “hard times create strong men” theory? I mean at some point, Italy had a Renaissance, so maybe things got complacent over time.Tyler Cowen   Again, maybe that's true for Italy, but most of the talent clusters have been such for a long time, like London and New York. It's not cyclical. They've just had a ton of talent for a very long time. They still do, and later on, they still will. Maybe not literally forever, but it seems like an enduring effect.Dwarkesh Patel   But what if they leave? For example, the Central European Jews couldn't stay where they were anymore and had to leave.Tyler Cowen   Obviously, I think war can destroy almost anything. So German scientific talent took a big whack, German cultural talent too. I mean, Hungarian Jews and mathematics-–I don't know big of a trend it still is, but it's certainly nothing close to what it once was.Dwarkesh Patel   Okay. I was worried that if you realize that some particular region has a lot of talent right now, then that might be a one-time gain. You realize that India, Toronto or Nigeria or something have a lot of talent, but the culture doesn't persist in some sort of extended way. Tyler Cowen   That might be true for where talent comes from, but where it goes just seems to show more persistence. People will almost certainly be going to London for centuries. Is London producing a lot of talent? That's less clear. That may be much more cyclical. In the 17th century, London was amazing, right? London today? I would say I don't know. But it's not obvious that it's coming close to its previous glories. So the current status of India I think, will be temporary, but temporary for a long time. It's just a very big place. It has a lot of centres and there are things it has going for it like not taking prosperity for granted. But it will have all of these for quite a while–– India's still pretty poor.Dwarkesh Patel   What do you think is the difference between actual places where clusters of talent congregate and places where that are just a source of that talent? What makes a place a sink rather than a source of talent?Tyler Cowen   I think finding a place where people end up going is more or less obvious. You need money, you need a big city, you need some kind of common trade or linguistic connection. So New York and London are what they are for obvious reasons, right? Path dependence history, the story of making it in the Big Apple and so on. But origins and where people come from are areas that I think theory is very bad at understanding. Why did the Renaissance blossom in Florence and Venice, and not in Milan? If you're going back earlier, it wasn't obvious that it would be those places. I've done a lot of reading to try to figure this out, but I find that I've gotten remarkably not far on the question.Dwarkesh Patel   The particular examples you mentioned today–– like New York, San Francisco, London, these places today are kind of high stakes, because if you want to move there, it's expensive. Do you think that this is because they've been so talented despite this fact, or because you need some sort of exclusion in order to be a haven of talent?Tyler Cowen   Well, I think this is a problem for San Francisco. It may be a more temporary cluster than it ought to have been. Since it's a pretty recent cluster, it can't count on the same kind of historical path dependence that New York and Manhattan have. But a lot of New York still is not that expensive. Look at the people who work and live there! They're not all rich, to say the least. And that is an important part of why New York is still New York. With London, it's much harder, but it seems to me that London is a sink for somewhat established talent––which is fine, right? However, in that regard, it's much inferior to New York.Humility, Mental Illness, Caffeine, and Suits Dwarkesh Patel   Okay, I want to play a game of overrated and underrated with you, but we're going to do it with certain traits or certain kinds of personalities that might come in when you're interviewing people.Tyler Cowen   Okay, it's probably all going to be indeterminate, but go on.Dwarkesh Patel   Right. So somebody comes in, and they're very humble.Tyler Cowen   Immediately I'm suspicious. I figure most people who are going to make something of themselves are arrogant. If they're willing to show it, there's a certain bravery or openness in that. I don't rule out the humble person doing great. A lot of people who do great are humble, but I just get a wee bit like, “what's up with you? You're not really humble, are you?”Dwarkesh Patel   Maybe humility is a way of avoiding confrontation–– if you don't have the competence to actually show that you can be great. Tyler Cowen   It might be efficient for them to avoid confrontation, but I just start thinking that I don't know the real story. When I see a bit of arrogance, I'm less likely to think that it may, in a way, be feigned. But the feigning of arrogance in itself is a kind of arrogance. So in that sense, I'm still getting the genuine thing. Dwarkesh Patel   So what is the difference? Let's say a 15-year-old who is kind of arrogant versus a 50-year-old who is kind of arrogant, and the latter has accomplishments already while the first one doesn't. Is there a difference in how you perceive humility or the lack thereof?Tyler Cowen   Oh, sure. With the 50-year-old, you want to see what they have done, and you're much more likely to think the 50 year old should feign humility than the 15-year-old. Because that's the high-status thing to do–– it's to feign humility. If they can't do that, you figure, “Here's one thing they're bad at. What else are they bad at?” Whereas with the 15-year-old, maybe they have a chip on their shoulder and they can't quite hold it all in. Oh, that's great and fine. Let's see what you're gonna do.Dwarkesh Patel   How arrogant can you be? There are many 15 year olds who are really good at math, and they have ambitions like “I want to solve P ≠ NP” or “I want to build an AGI” or something. Is there some level where you just clearly don't understand what's going on since you think you can do something like that? Or is arrogance always a plus?Tyler Cowen   I haven't seen that level of arrogance yet. If a 15-year-old said to me, “in three years, I'm going to invent a perpetual motion machine,”  I would think “No, now you're just crazy.” But no one's ever said that to me. There's this famous Mark Zuckerberg story where he went into the VC meeting at Sequoia wearing his pajamas and he told Sequoia not to give him money. He was 18 at a minimum, that's pretty arrogant behavior and we should be fine with that. We know how the story ends. So it's really hard to be too arrogant. But once you say this, because of the second order effect, you start thinking: “Well, are they just being arrogant as an act?” And then in the “act sense”, yes, they can be too arrogant.Dwarkesh Patel   Isn't the backstory there that Mark was friends with Sean Parker and then Sean Parker had beef with Sequoia…Tyler Cowen   There's something like that. I wouldn't want to say off the top of my head exactly what, but there is a backstory.Dwarkesh Patel   Okay. Somebody comes in professionally dressed when they don't need to. They've got a crisp clean shirt. They've got a nice wash. Tyler Cowen How old are they?Dwarkesh Patel 20.Tyler Cowen They're too conformist. Again, with some jobs, conformity is great, but I get a little suspicious, at least for what I'm looking for. Though I wouldn't rule them out for a lot of things–– it's a plus, right?Dwarkesh Patel   Is there a point though, where you're in some way being conformist by dressing up in a polo shirt? Like if you're in San Francisco right now, it seems like the conformist thing is not to wear a suit to an interview if you're trying to be a software engineer.Tyler Cowen   Yeah, there might be situations where it's so weird, so over the top, so conformist, that it's actually totally non-conformist. Like “I don't know anyone who's a conformist like you are!” Maybe it's not being a conformist, or just being some kind of nut, that makes you interested again.Dwarkesh Patel   An overall sense that you get from the person that they're really content, almost like Buddha came in for an interview. A sense of wellbeing.Tyler Cowen   It's gonna depend on context, I don't think I'd hold it against someone, but I wouldn't take it at face value. You figure they're antsy in some way, you hope. You'll see it with more time, I would just think.Dwarkesh Patel   Somebody who uses a lot of nootropics. They're constantly using caffeine, but maybe on the side (multiple times a week), they're also using Adderall, Modafinil, and other kinds of nootropics.Tyler Cowen   I don't personally like it, but I've never seen evidence that it's negatively correlated with success, so I would try to put it out of my mind. I sort of personally get a queasy feeling like “Do you really know what you're doing. Is all this stuff good for you? Why do you need this?” That's my actual reaction, but again, at the intellectual level, it does seem to work for some people, or at least not screw them up too much.Dwarkesh Patel   You don't drink caffeine, correct? Tyler Cowen  Zero.Dwarkesh Patel Why?Tyler Cowen I don't like it. It might be bad for you. Dwarkesh Patel Oh really, you think so? Tyler Cowen People get addicted to it.Dwarkesh Patel    You're not worried it might make you less productive over the long term? It's more about you just don't want to be addicted to something?Tyler Cowen   Well, since I don't know it well, I'm not sure what my worries are. But the status quo regime seems to work. I observe a lot of people who end up addicted to coffee, coke, soda, stuff we know is bad for you. So I think: “What's the problem I need to solve? Why do it?”Dwarkesh Patel   What if they have a history of mental illness like depression or anxiety? Not that mental illnesses are good, but at the current margins, do you think that maybe they're punished too heavily? Or maybe that people don't take them seriously enough that they actually have a bigger signal than the people are considering?Tyler Cowen   I don't know. I mean, both could be true, right? So there's definitely positive correlations between that stuff and artistic creativity. Whether or not it's causal is harder to say, but it correlates. So you certainly should take the person seriously. But would they be the best Starbucks cashier? I don't know.How does Education Affect Talent?Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. In another podcast, you've pointed out that some of the most talented people you see who are neglected are 15 to 17 year olds. How does this impact how you think? Let's say you were in charge of a high school, you're the principal of a high school, and you know that there's 2000 students there. A few of them have to be geniuses, right? How is the high school run by Tyler Cowen? Especially for the very smartest people there? Tyler Cowen   Less homework! I would work harder to hire better teachers, pay them more, and fire the bad ones if I'm allowed to do that. Those are no-brainers, but mainly less homework and I'd have more people come in who are potential role models. Someone like me! I was invited once to Flint Hill High School in Oakton, it's right nearby. I went in, I wasn't paid. I just figured “I'll do this.” It seems to me a lot of high schools don't even try. They could get a bunch of people to come in for free to just say “I'm an economist, here's what being an economist is like” for 45 minutes. Is that so much worse than the BS the teacher has to spew? Of course not. So I would just do more things like that.Dwarkesh Patel   I want to understand the difference between these three options. The first is: somebody like you actually gives an in-person lecture saying “this is what life is like”. The second is zoom, you could use zoom to do that. The third is that it's not live in any way whatsoever. You're just kind of like maybe showing a video of the person. Tyler Cowen   I'm a big believer in vividness. So Zoom is better than nothing. A lot of people are at a distance, but I think you'll get more and better responses by inviting local people to do it live. And there's plenty of local people, where most of the good schools are.Dwarkesh Patel   Are you tempted to just give these really smart 15-year-olds a hall pass to the library all day and some WiFi access, and then just leave them alone? Or do you think that they need some sort of structure?Tyler Cowen   I think they need some structure, but you have to let them rebel against it and do their own thing. Zero structure strikes me as great for a few of them, but even for the super talented ones, it's not perfect. They need exposure to things, and they need some teachers as role models. So you want them to have some structure.Dwarkesh Patel   If you read old books about education, there's a strong emphasis on moral instruction. Do you think that needs to be an important part of education? Tyler Cowen   I'd like to see more data. But I suspect the best moral instruction is the teachers actually being good people. I think that works. But again, I'd like to see the data. But somehow getting up and lecturing them about the seven virtues or something. That seems to me to be a waste of time, and maybe even counterproductive.Dwarkesh Patel   Now, the way I read your book about talent, it also seems like a critique of Bryan's book, The Case Against Education.Tyler Cowen   Ofcourse it is. Bryan describes me as the guy who's always torturing him, and in a sense, he's right.Dwarkesh Patel   Well, I guess more specifically, it seems that Bryan's book relies on the argument that you need a costly signal to show that you have talent, or you have intelligence, conscientiousness, and other traits. But if you can just learn that from a 1500 word essay and a zoom call, then maybe college is not about the signal.Tyler Cowen   In that sense, I'm not sure it's a good critique of Bryan. So for most people in the middle of the distribution, I don't think you can learn what I learned from Top 5 Emergent Ventures winners through an application and a half-hour zoom call. But that said, I think the talent book shows you my old saying: context is that which is scarce. And you're always testing people for their understanding of context. Most people need a fair amount of higher education to acquire that context, even if they don't remember the detailed content of their classes. So I think Bryan overlooks how much people actually learn when they go to school.Dwarkesh Patel   How would you go about measuring the amount of context of somebody who went to college? Is there something you can point to that says, “Oh, clearly they're getting some context, otherwise, they wouldn't be able to do this”?Tyler Cowen   I think if you meet enough people who didn't go to college, you'll see the difference, on average. Stressing the word average. Now there are papers measuring positive returns to higher education. I don't think they all show it's due to context, but I am persuaded by most of Brian's arguments that you don't remember the details of what you learned in class. Oh, you learn this about astronomy and Kepler's laws and opportunity costs, etc. but people can't reproduce that two or three years later. It seems pretty clear we know that. However, they do learn a lot of context and how to deal with different personality types.Dwarkesh Patel   Would you falsify this claim, though, that you are getting a lot of context? Is it just something that you had to qualitatively evaluate? What would have to be true in the world for you to conclude that the opposite is true? Tyler Cowen   Well, if you could show people remembered a lot of the facts they learned, and those facts were important for their jobs, neither of which I think is true. But in principle, they're demonstrable, then you would be much more skeptical about the context being the thing that mattered. But as it stands now, that's the residual. And it's probably what matters.Dwarkesh Patel   Right. So I thought that Bryan shared in the book that actually people don't even remember many of the basic facts that they learned in school.Tyler Cowen   Ofcourse they don't. But that's not the main thing they learn. They learn some vision of how the world works, how they fit into it, that they ought to have higher aspirations, that they can join the upper middle class, that they're supposed to have a particular kind of job. Here are the kinds of jerks you're going to meet along the way! Here's some sense of how dating markets work! Maybe you're in a fraternity, maybe you do a sport and so on. That's what you learned. Dwarkesh Patel   How did you spot Bryan?Tyler Cowen   He was in high school when I met him, and it was some kind of HS event. I think he made a point of seeking me out. And I immediately thought, “Well this guy is going to be something like, gotta keep track of this guy. Right away.”Dwarkesh Patel   Can you say more - what happened?Tyler Cowen   His level of enthusiasm, his ability to speak with respect to detail. He was just kind of bursting with everything. It was immediately evident, as it still is. Bryan has changed less than almost anyone else I know over what is now.. he could tell you how many years but it's been a whole bunch of decades.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. So if that's the case, then it would have been interesting to meet somebody who is like Bryan, but a 19 year old.Tyler Cowen   Yeah, and I did. I was right. Talent ScoutingDwarkesh Patel   To what extent do the best talent scouts inevitably suffer from Goodhart's Law? Has something like this happened to you where your approval gets turned into a credential? So a whole bunch of non-earnest people start applying, you get a whole bunch of adverse selection, and then it becomes hard for you to run your program.Tyler Cowen   It is not yet hard to run the program. If I needed to, I would just shut down applications. I've seen a modest uptick in bad applications, but it takes so little time to decide they're no good, or just not a good fit for us that it's not a problem. So the endorsement does get credentialized. Mostly, that's a good thing, right? Like you help the people you pick. And then you see what happens next and you keep on innovating as you need to.Dwarkesh Patel   You say in the book that the super talented are best at spotting other super talented individuals. And there aren't many of the super talented talent spotters to go around. So this sounds like you're saying that if you're not super talented, much of the book will maybe not do you a bunch of good. Results be weary should be maybe on the title. How much of talent spotting can be done by people who aren't themselves super talented?Tyler Cowen   Well, I'd want to see the context of what I wrote. But I'm well aware of the fact that in basketball, most of the greatest general managers were not great players. Someone like Jerry West, right? I'd say Pat Riley was not. So again, that's something you could study. But I don't generally think that the best talent scouts are themselves super talented.Dwarkesh Patel   Then what is the skill in particular that they have that if it's not the particular thing that they're working on?Tyler Cowen   Some intangible kind of intuition, where they feel the right thing in the people they meet. We try to teach people that intuition, the same way you might teach art or music appreciation. But it's not a science. It's not paint-by-numbers.Dwarkesh Patel   Even with all the advice in the book, and even with the stuff that isn't in the book that is just your inarticulable knowledge about how to spot talent, all your intuitions… How much of the variance in somebody's “True Potential” is just fundamentally unpredictable? If it's just like too chaotic of a thing to actually get your grips on. To what extent are we going to truly be able to spot talent?Tyler Cowen   I think it will always be an art. If you look at the success rates of VCs, it depends on what you count as the pool they're drawing from, but their overall rate of picking winners is not that impressive. And they're super high stakes. They're super smart. So I think it will mostly remain an art and not a science. People say, “Oh, genomics this, genomics that”. We'll see, but somehow I don't think that will change this.Dwarkesh Patel   You don't think getting a polygenic risk score of drive, for example, is going to be a thing that happens?Tyler Cowen   Maybe future genomics will be incredibly different from what we have now. Maybe. But it's not around the corner.Dwarkesh Patel   Yeah. Maybe the sample size is just so low and somebody is like “How are you even gonna collect that data? How are you gonna get the correlates of who the super talented people are?”Tyler Cowen   That, plus how genomic data interact with each other. You can apply machine learning and so on, but it just seems quite murky.Dwarkesh Patel   If the best people get spotted earlier, and you can tell who is a 10x engineer in a company and who is only a 1x engineer, or a 0.5x engineer, doesn't that mean that, in a way that inequality will get worse? Because now the 10x engineer knows that they're 10x, and everybody else knows that they're 10x, they're not going to be willing to cross subsidize and your other employees are going to be wanting to get paid proportionate to their skill.Tyler Cowen   Well, they might be paid more, but they'll also innovate more, right? So they'll create more benefits for people who are doing nothing. My intuition is that overall, inequality of wellbeing will go down. But you can't say that's true apriori. Inequality of income might also go up.Dwarkesh Patel   And then will the slack in the system go away for people who are not top performers? Like you can tell now, if we're getting better.Tyler Cowen   This has happened already in contemporary America. As I wrote, “Average is over.” Not due to super sophisticated talent spotting. Sometimes, it's simply the fact that in a lot of service sectors, you can measure output reasonably directly––like did you finish the computer program? Did it work? That has made it harder for people to get paid things they don't deserve.Dwarkesh Patel   I wonder if this leads to adverse selection in the areas where you can't measure how well somebody is doing. So the people who are kind of lazy and bums, they'll just go into places where output can't be measured. So these industries will just be overflowing with the people who don't want to work.Tyler Cowen   Absolutely. And then the people who are talented in the sectors, maybe they'll leave and start their own companies and earn through equity, and no one is really ever measuring their labor power. Still, what they're doing is working and they're making more from it.Dwarkesh Patel   If talent is partly heritable, then the better you get at spotting talent, over time, will the social mobility in society go down?Tyler Cowen   Depends how you measure social mobility. Is it relative to the previous generation? Most talent spotters don't know a lot about parents, like I don't know anything about your parents at all! The other aspect of spotting talent is hoping the talent you mobilize does great things for people not doing anything at all. That's the kind of automatic social mobility they get. But if you're measuring quintiles across generations, the intuition could go either way.Dwarkesh Patel   But this goes back to wondering whether this is a one time gain or not. Maybe initially they can help the people who are around them. Somebody in Brazil, they help people around them. But once you've found them, they're gonna go to those clusters you talked about, and they're gonna be helping the people with San Francisco who don't need help. So is this a one time game then?Tyler Cowen   Many people from India seem to give back to India in a very consistent way. People from Russia don't seem to do that. That may relate to the fact that Russia is in terrible shape, and India has a brighter future. So it will depend. But I certainly think there are ways of arranging things where people give back a lot.Dwarkesh Patel   Let's talk about Emergent Ventures. Sure. So I wonder: if the goal of Emergent Ventures is to raise aspirations, does that still work given the fact that you have to accept some people but reject other people? In Bayesian terms, the updates up have to equal the updates down? In some sense, you're almost transferring a vision edge from the excellent to the truly great. You see what I'm saying?Tyler Cowen   Well, you might discourage the people you turn away. But if they're really going to do something, they should take that as a challenge. And many do! Like “Oh, I was rejected by Harvard, I had to go to UChicago, but I decided, I'm going to show those b******s.” I think we talked about that a few minutes ago. So if I just crushed the spirits of those who are rejected, I don't feel too bad about that. They should probably be in some role anyway where they're just working for someone.Dwarkesh Patel   But let me ask you the converse of that which is, if you do accept somebody, are you worried that if one of the things that drives people is getting rejected, and then wanting to prove that you will reject them wrong, are you worried that by accepting somebody when they're 15, you're killing that thing? The part of them that wants to get some kind of approval?Tyler Cowen   Plenty of other people will still reject them right? Not everyone accepts them every step of the way. Maybe they're just awesome. LeBron James is basketball history and past a certain point, it just seems everyone wanted him for a bunch of decades now. I think deliberately with a lot of candidates, you shouldn't encourage them too much. I make a point of chewing out a lot of people just to light a fire under them, like “what you're doing. It's not gonna work.” So I'm all for that selectively.Dwarkesh Patel   Why do you think that so many of the people who have led Emergent Ventures are interested in Effective Altruism?Tyler Cowen   There is a moment right now for Effective Altruism, where it is the thing. Some of it is political polarization, the main parties are so stupid and offensive, those energies will go somewhere. Some of that in 1970 maybe went to libertarianism. Libertarianism has been out there for too long. It doesn't seem to address a lot of current problems, like climate change or pandemics very well. So where should the energy go? The Rationality community gets some of it and that's related to EA, as I'm sure you know. The tech startup community gets some of it. That's great! It seems to be working pretty well to me. Like I'm not an EA person. But maybe they deserve a lot of it.Dwarkesh Patel   But you don't think it's persistent. You think it comes and goes?Tyler Cowen   I think it will come and go. But I think EA will not vanish. Like libertarianism, it will continue for quite a long time.Dwarkesh Patel   Is there any movement that has attracted young people? That has been persistent over time? Or did they all fade? Tyler Cowen   Christianity. Judaism. Islam. They're pretty persistent. [laughs]Dwarkesh Patel   So to the extent that being more religious makes you more persistent, can we view the criticism of EA saying that it's kind of like a religion as a plus?Tyler Cowen   Ofcourse, yeah! I think it's somewhat like a religion. To me, that's a plus, we need more religions. I wish more of the religions we needed were just flat-out religions. But in the meantime, EA will do,Money, Deceit, and Emergent VenturesDwarkesh Patel   Are there times when somebody asks you for a grant and you view that as a negative signal? Let's say they're especially when well off: they're a former Google engineer, they wanna start a new project, and they're asking you for a grant. Do you worry that maybe they're too risk averse? Do you want them to put their own capital into it? Or do you think that maybe they were too conformist because they needed your approval before they went ahead?Tyler Cowen   Things like this have happened. And I asked people flat out, “Why do you want this grant from me?” And it is a forcing question in the sense that if their answer isn't good, I won't give it to them. Even though they might have a good level of talent, good ideas, whatever, they have to be able to answer that question in a credible way. Some can, some can't.Dwarkesh Patel   I remember that the President of the University of Chicago many years back said that if you rejected the entire class of freshmen that are coming in and accepted the next 1500 that they had to reject that year, then there'll be no difference in the quality of the admits.Tyler Cowen   I would think UChicago is the one school where that's not true. I agree that it's true for most schools.Dwarkesh Patel   Do you think that's also true of Emergent Ventures?Tyler Cowen   No. Not at all.Dwarkesh Patel   How good is a marginal reject?Tyler Cowen   Not good. It's a remarkably bimodal distribution as I perceive it, and maybe I'm wrong. But there aren't that many cases where I'm agonizing and if I'm agonizing I figure it probably should be a no.Dwarkesh Patel   I guess that makes it even tougher if you do get rejected. Because it wasn't like, “oh, you weren't a right fit for the job,” or “you almost made the cut.” It's like, “No, we're actually just assessing your potential and not some sort of fit for the job.” Not only were you just not on the edge of potential, but you were also way on the other edge of the curve.Tyler Cowen   But a lot of these rejected people and projects, I don't think they're spilling tears over it. Like you get an application. Someone's in Akron, Ohio, and they want to start a nonprofit dog shelter. They saw EV on the list of things you can apply to. They apply to a lot of things and maybe never get funding. It's like people who enter contests or something, they apply to EV. Nothing against non-profit dog shelters, but that's kind of a no, right? I genuinely don't know their response, but I don't think they walk away from the experience with some deeper model of what they should infer from the EV decision.Dwarkesh Patel   How much does the money part of Emergent Ventures matter? If you just didn't give them the money?Tyler Cowen   There's a whole bunch of proposals that really need the money for capital costs, and then it matters a lot. For a lot of them, the money per se doesn't matter.Dwarkesh Patel   Right, then. So what is the function of return for that? Do you like 10x the money, or do you add .1x the money for some of these things? Do you think they add up to seemingly different results? Tyler Cowen   I think a lot of foundations give out too many large grants and not enough small grants. I hope I'm at an optimum. But again, I don't have data to tell you. I do think about this a lot, and I think small grants are underrated.Dwarkesh Patel   Why are women often better at detecting deceit?Tyler Cowen   I would assume for biological and evolutionary reasons that there are all these men trying to deceive them, right? The cost of a pregnancy is higher for a woman than for a man on average, by quite a bit. So women will develop defense mechanisms that men maybe don't have as much.Dwarkesh Patel   One thing I heard from somebody I was brainstorming these questions with–– she just said that maybe it's because women just discuss personal matters more. And so therefore, they have a greater library.Tyler Cowen   Well, that's certainly true. But that's subordinate to my explanation, I'd say. There are definitely a lot of intermediate steps. Things women do more of that help them be insightful.Building Writing StaminaDwarkesh Patel   Why is writing skill so important to you?Tyler Cowen   Well, one thing is that I'm good at judging it. Across scales, I'm very bad at judging, so there's nothing on the EV application testing for your lacrosse skill. But look, writing is a form of thinking. And public intellectuals are one of the things I want to support. Some of the companies I admire are ones with writing cultures like Amazon or Stripe. So writing it is! I'm a good reader. So you're going to be asked to write.Dwarkesh Patel   Do you think it's a general fact that writing correlates with just general competence? Tyler Cowen   I do, but especially the areas that I'm funding. It's strongly related. Whether it's true for everything is harder to say.Dwarkesh Patel   Can stamina be increased?Tyler Cowen   Of course. It's one of the easier things to increase. I don't think you can become superhuman in your energy and stamina if you're not born that way. But I think almost everyone could increase by 30% to 50%, some notable amount. Dwarkesh Patel   Okay, that's interesting.Tyler Cowen   Put aside maybe people with disabilities or something but definitely when it comes to people in regular circumstances.Dwarkesh Patel   Okay. I think it's interesting because in the blog post from Robin Hanson about stamina, I think his point of view was that this is just something that's inherent to people.Tyler Cowen   Well, I don't think that's totally false. The people who have superhuman stamina are born that way. But there are plenty of origins. I mean, take physical stamina. You don't think people can train more and run for longer? Of course they can. It's totally proven. So it would be weird if this rule held for all these organs but not your brain. That seems quite implausible. Especially for someone like Robin, where your brain is just this other organ that you're gonna download or upload or goodness knows what with it. He's a physicalist if there ever was one.Dwarkesh Patel   Have you read Haruki Murakami's book on running?Tyler Cowen   No, I've been meaning to. I'm not sure how interesting I'll find it. I will someday. I like his stuff a lot.Dwarkesh Patel   But what I found really interesting about it was just how linked building physical stamina is for him to building up the stamina to write a lot.Tyler Cowen   Magnus Carlsen would say the same with chess. Being in reasonable physical shape is important for your mental stamina, which is another kind of simple proof that you can boost your mental stamina.When Does Intelligence Start to Matter?Dwarkesh Patel   After reading the book, I was inclined to think that intelligence matters more than I previously thought. Not less. You say in the book that intelligence has convex returns and that it matters especially for areas like inventors. Then you also say that if you look at some of the most important things in society, something like what Larry and Sergey did, they're basically inventors, right? So in many of the most important things in society, intelligence matters more because of the increasing returns. It seems like with Emergent Ventures, you're trying to pick the people who are at the tail. You're not looking for a barista at Starbucks. So it seems like you should care about intelligence more, given the evidence there. Tyler Cowen   More than who does? I feel what the book presents is, in fact, my view. So kind of by definition, I agree with that view. But yes, there's a way of reading it where intelligence really matters a lot. But it's only for a relatively small number of jobs.Dwarkesh Patel   Maybe you just started off with a really high priori on intelligence, and that's why you downgraded?Tyler Cowen   There are a lot of jobs that I actually hire for in actual life, where smarts are not the main thing I look for.Dwarkesh Patel   Does the convexity of returns on intelligence suggest that maybe the multiplicative model is wrong? Because if the multiplicative model is right, you would expect to see decreasing returns and putting your stats on one skill. You'd want to diversify more, right?Tyler Cowen   I think the convexity of returns to intelligence is embedded in a multiplicative model, where the IQ returns only cash out for people good at all these other things. For a lot of geniuses, they just can't get out of bed in the morning, and you're stuck, and you should write them off.Dwarkesh Patel   So you cite the data that Sweden collects from everybody that enters the military there. The CEOs are apparently not especially smart. But one thing I found interesting in that same data was that Swedish soccer players are pretty smart. The better a soccer player is, the smarter they are. You've interviewed professional basketball players turned public intellectuals on your podcast. They sound extremely smart to me. What is going on there? Why, anecdotally, and with some limited amounts of evidence, does it seem that professional athletes are smarter than you would expect?Tyler Cowen   I'm a big fan of the view that top-level athletic performance is super cognitively intense and that most top athletes are really extraordinarily smart. I don't just mean smart on the court (though, obviously that), but smart more broadly. This is underrated. I think Michelle Dawson was the one who talked me into this, but absolutely, I'm with you all the way.Dwarkesh Patel   Do you think this is just mutational load or––Tyler Cowen   You actually have to be really smart to figure out things like how to lead a team, how to improve yourself, how to practice, how to outsmart the opposition, all these other things. Maybe it's not the only way to get there, but it is very G loaded. You certainly see some super talented athletes who just go bust. Or they may destroy themselves with drugs: there are plenty of tales like that, and you don't have to look hard. Dwarkesh Patel   Are there other areas where you wouldn't expect it to be G loaded but it actually is?Tyler Cowen   Probably, but there's so many! I just don't know, but sports is something in my life I followed. So I definitely have opinions about it. They seem incredibly smart to me when they're interviewed. They're not always articulate, and they're sort of talking themselves into biased exposure. But I heard Michael Jordan in the 90s, and I thought, “That guy's really smart.” So I think he is! Look at Charles Barkley. He's amazing, right? There's hardly anyone I'd rather listen to, even about talent, than Charles Barkley. It's really interesting. He's not that tall, you can't say, “oh, he succeeded. Because he's seven foot two,” he was maybe six foot four tops. And they called him the Round Mound of Rebound. And how did he do that? He was smart. He figured out where the ball was going. The weaknesses of his opponents, he had to nudge them the right way, and so on. Brilliant guy.Dwarkesh Patel   What I find really remarkable is that (not just with athletes, but in many other professions), if you interview somebody who is at the top of that field, they come off really really smart! For example, YouTubers and even sex workers.Tyler Cowen   So whoever is like the top gardener, I expect I would be super impressed by them.Spotting Talent (Counter)signalsDwarkesh Patel   Right. Now all your books are in some way about talent, right? Let me read you the following passage from An Economist Gets Lunch, and I want you to tell me how we can apply this insight to talent. “At a fancy fancy restaurant, the menu is well thought out. The time and attention of the kitchen are scarce. An item won't be on the menu unless there's a good reason for its presence. If it sounds bad, it probably tastes especially good?”Tyler Cowen   That's counter-signaling, right? So anything that is very weird, they will keep on the menu because it has a devoted set of people who keep on ordering it and appreciate it. That's part of the talent of being a chef, you can come up with such things. Dwarkesh Patel   How do we apply this to talent? Tyler Cowen   Well, with restaurants, you have selection pressure where you're only going to ones that have cleared certain hurdles. So this is true for talent only for talents who are established. If you see a persistent NBA player who's a very poor free throw shooter like Shaquille O'Neal was, you can more or less assume they're really good at something else. But for people who are not established, there's not the same selection pressure so there's not an analogous inference you can draw.Dwarkesh Patel   So if I show up to an Emergent Ventures conference, and I meet somebody, and they don't seem especially impressive with the first impression, then I should believe their work is especially impressive. Tyler Cowen Yes, absolutely, yes. Dwarkesh Patel   Okay, so my understanding of your book Creative Destruction is that maybe on average, cultural diversity will go down. But in special niches, the diversity and ingenuity will go up. Can I apply the same insight to talent? Maybe two random college grads will have similar skill sets over time, but if you look at people on the tails, will their skills and knowledge become even more specialized and even more diverse?Tyler Cowen   There are a lot of different presuppositions in your question. So first, is cultural diversity going up or down? That I think is multi-dimensional. Say different cities in different countries will be more like each other over time.. that said, the genres they produce don't have to become more similar. They're more similar in the sense that you can get sushi in each one. But novel cuisine in Dhaka and Senegal might be taking a very different path from novel cuisine in Tokyo, Japan. So what happens with cultural diversity.. I think the most reliable generalization is that it tends to come out of larger units. Small groups and tribes and linguistic groups get absorbed. Those people don't stop being creative and other venues, but there are fewer unique isolated cultures, and much more thickly diverse urban creativity. That would be the main generalization I would put forward. So if you wanted to apply that generalization to talent, I think in a funny way, we come back to my earlier point: talent just tends to be geographically extremely well clustered. That's not the question you asked, but it's how I would reconfigure the pieces of it.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. What do you suggest about finding talent in a globalized world? In particular, if it's cheaper to find talent because of the internet, does that mean that you should be selecting more mediocre candidates?Tyler Cowen   I think it means you should be more bullish on immigrants from Africa. It's relatively hard to get out of Africa to the United States in most cases. That's a sign the person put in a lot of effort and ability. Maybe an easy country to come here from would be Canada, all other things equal. Again, I'd want this to be measured. The people who come from countries that are hard to come from like India, actually, the numbers are fairly high, but the roots are mostly pretty gated.Dwarkesh Patel   Is part of the reason that talent is hard to spot and find today that we have an aging population?  So then we would have more capital, more jobs, more mentorship available for young people coming up, than there are young people.Tyler Cowen   I don't think we're really into demographic decline yet. Not in the United States. Maybe in Japan, that would be true. But it seems to me, especially with the internet, there's more 15-year-old talent today than ever before, by a lot, not just by little. You see this in chess, right? Where we can measure performance very well. There's a lot more young talent from many different places, including the US. So, aging hasn't mattered yet. Maybe for a few places, but not here.Dwarkesh Patel   What do you think will change in talent spotting as society becomes older?Tyler Cowen   It depends on what you mean by society. I think the US, unless it totally screws up on immigration, will always have a very seriously good flow of young people that we don't ever have to enter the aging equilibrium the way Japan probably already has. So I don't know what will change. Then there's work from a distance, there's hiring from a distance, funding from a distance. As you know, there's EV India, and we do that at a distance. So I don't think we're ever going to enter that world..Dwarkesh Patel   But then what does it look like for Japan? Is part of the reason that Japanese cultures and companies are arranged the way they are and do the recruitment the way they do linked to their demographics? Tyler Cowen   That strikes me as a plausible reason. I don't think I know enough to say, but it wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be the case.Dwarkesh Patel   To what extent do you need a sort of “great man ethos” in your culture in order to empower the top talent? Like if you have too much political and moral egalitarianism, you're not going to give great people the real incentive and drive to strive to be great.Tyler Cowen   You've got to say “great man or great woman ethos”, or some other all-purpose word we wish to use. I worry much less about woke ideology than a lot of people I know. It's not my thing, but it's something young people can rebel against. If that keeps you down, I'm not so impressed by you. I think it's fine. Let the woke reign, people can work around them.Dwarkesh Patel   But overall, if you have a culture or like Europe, do you think that has any impact on––Tyler Cowen   Europe has not woken up in a lot of ways, right? Europe is very chauvinist and conservative in the literal sense, and often quite old fashioned depending on what you're talking about. But Europe, I would say, is much less woke than the United States. I wouldn't say that's their main problem, but you can't say, “oh, they don't innovate because they're too woke”, like hang out with some 63 year old Danish guys and see how woke you think they are once everyone's had a few drinks.Dwarkesh Patel   My question wasn't about wokeism. I just meant in general, if you have an egalitarian society.Tyler Cowen   I think of Europe as less egalitarian. I think they have bad cultural norms for innovation. They're culturally so non-egalitarian. Again, it depends where but Paris would be the extreme. There, everyone is classified right? By status, and how you need to wear your sweater the right way, and this and that. Now, how innovative is Paris? Actually, maybe more than people think. But I still think they have too few dimensions of status competition. That's a general problem in most of Europe–– too few dimensions of status competition, not enough room for the proverbial village idiot.Dwarkesh Patel   Interesting. You say in the book, that questions tend to degrade over time if you don't replace them. I find it interesting that Y Combinator has kept the same questions since they were started in 2005. And of course, your co-author was a partner at Y Combinator. Do you think that works for Y Combinator or do you think they're probably making a mistake?Tyler Cowen   I genuinely don't know. There are people who will tell you that Y Combinator, while still successful, has become more like a scalable business school and less like attracting all the top weirdos who do amazing things. Again, I'd want to see data before asserting that myself, but you certainly hear it a lot. So it could be that Y Combinator is a bit stale. But still in a good sense. Like Harvard is stale, right? It dates from the 17th century. But it's still amazing. MIT is stale. Maybe Y Combinator has become more like those groups.Dwarkesh Patel   Do you think that will happen to Emergent Ventures eventually?Tyler Cowen   I don't think so because it has a number of unique features built in from the front. So a very small number of evaluators too. It might grow a little bit, but it's not going to grow that much. I'm not paid to do it, so that really limits how much it's going to scale. There's not a staff that has to be carried where you're captured by the staff, there is no staff. There's a bit of free riding on staff who do other things, but there's no sense of if the program goes away, all my buddies on staff get laid off. No. So it's kind of pop up, and low cost of exit. Whenever that time comes.Dwarkesh Patel   Do you personally have questions that you haven't put in the book or elsewhere because you want them to be fresh? For asking somebody who's applying to her for the grant? Tyler Cowen   Well, I didn't when we wrote the book. So we put everything in there that we were thinking of, but over time, we've developed more. I don't generally give them out during interviews, because you have to keep some stock. So yeah, there's been more since then, but we weren't holding back at the time.Dwarkesh Patel It's like a comedy routine. You gotta write a new one each year.Tyler Cowen That's right. But when your shows are on the air, you do give your best jokes, right?Will Reading Cowen's Book Help You Win Emergent Ventures?Dwarkesh Patel Let's say someone applying to emergent ventures reads your book. Are they any better off? Or are they perhaps worse off because maybe they become misleading or have a partial view into what's required of them?Tyler Cowen   I hope they're not better off in a way, but probably they are. I hope they use it to understand their own talent better and present it in a better way. Not just to try to manipulate the system. But most people aren't actually that good at manipulating that kind of system so I'm not too worried.Dwarkesh Patel   In a sense, if they can manipulate the system, that's a positive signal of some kind.Tyler Cowen   Like, if you could fool me –– hey, what else have you got to say, you know? [laughs]Dwarkesh Patel   Are you worried that when young people will encounter you now, they're going to think of you as sort of a talent judge and a good one at that so they're maybe going to be more self aware than whether––Tyler Cowen   Yes. I worry about the effect of this on me. Maybe a lot of my interactions become less genuine, or people are too self conscious, or too stilted or something.Dwarkesh Patel   Is there something you can do about that? Or is that just baked in the gig?Tyler Cowen   I don't know, if you do your best to try to act genuine, whatever that means, maybe you can avoid it a bit or delay it at least a bit. But a lot of it I don't think you can avoid. In part, you're just cashing in. I'm 60 and I don't think I'll still be doing this when I'm 80. So if I have like 18 years of cashing in, maybe it's what I should be doing.Identifying talent earlyDwarkesh Patel   To what extent are the principles of finding talent timeless? If you're looking for let's say, a general for the French Revolution, how much of this does the advice change? Are the basic principles the same over time?Tyler Cowen   Well, one of the key principles is context. You need to focus on how the sector is different. But if you're doing that, then I think at the meta level the principles broadly stay the same.Dwarkesh Patel   You have a really interesting book about autism and systematizers. You think Napoleon was autistic?Tyler Cowen   I've read several biographies of him and haven't come away with that impression, but you can't rule it out. Who are the biographers? Now it gets back to our question of: How valuable is history? Did the biographers ever meet Napoleon? Well, some of them did, but those people had such weak.. other intellectual categories. The modern biography is written by Andrew Roberts, or whoever you think is good, I don't know. So how can I know?Dwarkesh Patel   Right? Again, the issue is that the details that stick in my mind from reading the biography are the ones that make him seem autistic, right?Tyler Cowen   Yes. There's a tendency in biographies to storify things, and that's dangerous too. Dwarkesh Patel   How general across a pool is talent or just competence of any kind? If you look at somebody like Peter Thiel–– investor, great executive, great thinker even, certainly Napoleon, and I think it was some mathematician either Lagrangian or Laplace, who said that he (Napoleon) could have been a mathematician if he wanted to. I don't know if that's true, but it does seem that the top achievers in one field seem to be able to move across fields and be top achievers in other fields. I

We finally see if education is worth it on today's episode. The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan (2018).

Is university a waste of time and money? On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, Bryan Caplan, author of The Case Against Education, debates Professor Nicholas Dirks, the former Chancellor of UC Berkeley, on the motion Be it resolved, cut public spending for universities. It's a waste of time and money. SOURCES: CNN, Newsweek, EWTN, Global News.

Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University, a visiting senior scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of several books, including The Myth of the Rational Voter and The Case Against Education. He returns to the podcast to talk about his two new collections of essays released as books, Labor Econ Versus the World: Essays on the World's Greatest Market and How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery. The conversation centers around how much Richard and Bryan have in common when it comes to how they think through social and political issues, with a focus on Social Desirability Bias as a major hindrance to engaging in moral reasoning and discovering truth. Topics include: How little effort most people put towards developing their most cherished political views Why most politicians should be considered bad people Why the first world poor can be considered morally blameworthy, particularly compared to those who live in developing countries The demagoguery of feel-good policy ideas like raising the minimum wage Bryan gives a teaser of his next collection of essays that will be released under the title Don't Be a Feminist: Essays on Genuine Justice, discussing why, as the title suggests, he hopes his daughter does not become a feminist and turn against him. The conversation concludes with reflections on how podcasting and Substack have disrupted legacy media, and why that's good for independent writers and journalists.  Bryan Caplan, “The Ideologues of GMU.” Bryan Caplan, “Labor Econ Versus the World: Essays on the World's Greatest Market.” Bryan Caplan, “How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery.”  Bryan Caplan's Substack Sign up for CSPI's Substack newsletter: https://cspi.substack.com. Follow CSPI on Twitter: https://twitter.com/CSPICenterOrg. Subscribe to our YouTube for video podcasts: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvs4ugq0xSvbvwArpFJG6gA. Learn more about CSPI: https://cspicenter.org.

https://youtu.be/FrAG6MpikUg Free markets are awesome because they give business incentives to do good stuff that sounds bad. Governments are awful because they give politicians incentives to do bad stuff that sounds good. Since the correlation between what IS good and what SOUNDS good is quite low, this is a huge deal. - Bryan Caplan, Ph.D. (December 27th, 2021) Dr. Bryan Caplan is the New York Times Bestselling author of Open Borders, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and The Case Against Education, has been blogging for EconLog since 2005. Labor Econ Versus the World collects the very best of his EconLog essays on the science and ethics of work. Odysee BitChute Flote Archive Spotify Apple Podcasts

Labor Econ Versus the World: Essays on the World's Greatest Market by Bryan Caplan. Ph.D.: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QF44HHG/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_BJV0YJ2ZBJXKM9ACGTHX?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1 Bryan Caplan, New York Times Bestselling author of Open Borders, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, and The Case Against Education, has been blogging for EconLog since 2005. Labor Econ Versus the World collects the very best of his EconLog essays on the science and ethics of work. ----------------------------------------- If you find value in the content, please consider donating to my PayPal KeithKnight590@gmail.com or Venmo: @Keith-Knight-34 LBRY: https://lbry.tv/@KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone:b BitChute: KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone https://www.bitchute.com/channel/keithknightdonttreadonanyone/ Minds: https://www.minds.com/KeithKnightDontTreadOnAnyone/ MeWe: mewe.com/i/keithknight25 Flote: https://flote.app/VoluntaryistKeith Gab: https://gab.com/Voluntarykeith Twitter: @an_capitalist The Libertarian Institute: https://libertarianinstitute.org/dont-tread-on-anyone/ One Great Work Network: https://www.onegreatworknetwork.com/keith-knight

Everybody knows that good parenting has a big impact on how kids turn out. Except that maybe they don't, because it doesn't. Incredible though it might seem, according to today's guest - economist Bryan Caplan, the author of Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, The Myth of the Rational Voter, and The Case Against Education - the best evidence we have on the question suggests that, within reason, what parents do has little impact on how their children's lives play out once they're adults. Links to learn more, summary and full transcript. Of course, kids do resemble their parents. But just as we probably can't say it was attentive parenting that gave me my mother's nose, perhaps we can't say it was attentive parenting that made me succeed at school. Both the social environment we grow up in and the genes we receive from our parents influence the person we become, and looking at a typical family we can't really distinguish the impact of one from the other. But nature does offer us up a random experiment that can let us tell the difference: identical twins share all their genes, while fraternal twins only share half their genes. If you look at how much more similar outcomes are for identical twins than fraternal twins, you see the effect of sharing 100% of your genetic material, rather than the usual 50%. Double that amount, and you've got the full effect of genetic inheritance. Whatever unexplained variation remains is still up for grabs - and might be down to different experiences in the home, outside the home, or just random noise. The crazy thing about this research is that it says for a range of adult outcomes (e.g. years of education, income, health, personality, and happiness), it's differences in the genes children inherit rather than differences in parental behaviour that are doing most of the work. Other research suggests that differences in ?out-of-home environment? take second place. Parenting style does matter for something, but it comes in a clear third. Bryan is quick to point out that there are several factors that help reconcile these findings with conventional wisdom about the importance of parenting. First, for some adult outcomes, parenting was a big deal (i.e. the quality of the parent/child relationship) or at least a moderate deal (i.e. drug use, criminality, and religious/political identity). Second, parents can and do influence you quite a lot - so long as you're young and still living with them. But as soon as you move out, the influence of their behaviour begins to wane and eventually becomes hard to spot. Third, this research only studies variation in parenting behaviour that was common among the families studied. And fourth, research on international adoptions shows they can cause massive improvements in health, income and other outcomes. But the findings are still remarkable, and imply many hyper-diligent parents could live much less stressful lives without doing their kids any harm at all. In this extensive interview Rob interrogates whether Bryan can really be right, or whether the research he's drawing on has taken a wrong turn somewhere. And that's just one topic we cover, some of the others being: * People's biggest misconceptions about the labour market * Arguments against open borders * Whether most people actually vote based on self-interest * Whether philosophy should stick to common sense or depart from it radically * Pers

The most renowned living public choice theorist, GMU economics professor and author of the books The Myth of Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids or Open Borders visited us #navrsku! Why are open borders the best recipe for massive wealth growth in the world. His book Open Borders is now available also in Czech language version! Najvýznamnejší žijúci bádateľ public choice teórie, profesor ekonómie na GMU a autor kníh Mýtus racionálneho voliča, The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids či Open Borders nás navštívil #navrsku. Bavili sme sa, prečo otvorené hranice sú najlepší recept na masívny rast bohatstva vo svete. Jeho kniha Otevřené hranice je dostupná u nás po novom aj v češtine!

Marc Sims asks professor Bryan Caplan about his case against education. Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University. http://www.bcaplan.com

Najvýznamnejší žijúci bádateľ public choice teórie, profesor ekonómie na GMU a autor kníh Mýtus racionálneho voliča, The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, či Open Borders nás navštívil #navrsku. V jubilejnej 100. časti sa bavíme o vzdelaní, školách a diplomoch. The most renowned living public choice theorist, GMU economics professor and author of the books The Myth of Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids or Open Borders visited us #navrsku! We are discussing education, schools and diplomas in our anniversary 100th part.

@IdeasHavingSexx on TwitterToday's Episode: Labor Econ Versus the WorldOther Books: Open Borders, The Case Against Education, The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More KidsBlogs: EconLog, Bet On It

Episode 19: Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the author of several books including Open Borders: The Science and Education of Immigration and The Case Against Education.  In this episode, Bryan has a myriad of questions thrown at him. Alongside explanations on how life extension will change education, industry, birth rate, immigration, and insurance, Bryan also describes the motivation behind work and why a biologically immortal generation won't exactly create the scenario of a dystopian gerontocracy.

This week, Byran Caplan, author of The Case Against Education and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, joins us to discuss the causes of bloat in education, and why we might be better off with less of it. You can find Bryan on Twitter (@bryan_caplan) or check out his website at http://www.bcaplan.com/.

In this episode, Bryan and I discuss why voters are largely uninformed and irrational, the signaling theory of higher education, the case for open borders, and the role and value of failure in life.Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and bestselling author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, and Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit jimmyalfonsolicon.substack.com

Episode Notes Bryan Caplan wrote a much-needed and extremely controversial book about how we view education. Bryan is a professor and economist who argues that for the most part, education is just about social signaling and doesn't provide much value or great outcomes. In this episode, we chat with him about his views on education and what we can do to fix the system for everyone. Follow Bryan on Twitter @bryan_caplan Get a copy of The Case Against Education Get your free books by Chris here: https://bit.ly/3vkRsb6 Follow @TheRewiredSoul on Twitter and Instagram Subscribe to The Rewired Soul Substack Support The Rewired Soul: Get books by Chris Support on Patreon Try BetterHelp Online Therapy (affiliate) Donate

Greetings Glocal Citizens! Around this time last year, the world--Africa particular witnessed the rise of a new and notable class of activists in the #EndSARS protests which was punctuated by a brutal conflict between police forces and activists in the Lekki Toll Gate Shooting on 20th October 2020. In this week's episode, I had to opportunity discuss the changing face of activism as well as the necessary changes in the ways that policy is taught, designed, communicated about and implemented with a consummate policy professional, Kehinde Togun. As former colleagues at www.ndi.org, he was introduced to me by my guest in Episode 93 [https://glocalcitizens.fireside.fm/93], Sefakor Ashiagbor and I am grateful, as always, for the introduction. Kehinde is currently the Senior Director for Policy and Government Relations at Humanity United where he leads the team responsible for engaging governments, multilateral institutions, and civil society in pursuit of policy change and regulatory action that cultivate the conditions for enduring peace and freedom. He has led global democracy and governance programs for 15 years which has included complex research advising on overseas investments; leading diverse development initiatives, including training senior staff of the Tanzanian government to improve service delivery to citizens; supporting members of the Iraqi and Kurdistan Parliaments to increase outreach to constituents; working with citizens in Nigeria and Kenya to improve electoral integrity; and enhancing the ability of NGOs in Iraq, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Turkey to demand greater accountability from their governments. He also serves on multiple boards including the Center for Racial Justice in Education [https://centerracialjustice.org/], an organization that trains and empowers educators to dismantle racism in the US education system. Born and partially raised in Nigeria, Kehinde started his glocal citizenship journey at the age of 11 when his family migrated to the US in search of healthcare solutions. Listen in, there's so much more to this talented diasporan. Where to find Kehinde? On LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/kehindetogun/) On Twitter (https://twitter.com/KehindeTogun?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) What's Kehinde listening to? Up First on NPR (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510318/up-first) The Daily Punch (https://www.audacy.com/podcasts/the-daily-punch-47458) Hacks on Tap (https://www.hacksontap.com/about) Code Switch on NPR (https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch) Snap Judgement (https://snapjudgment.org/) Other topics of interest: About Teach for America (https://www.teachforamerica.org/) The Case Against Education (https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B07T3QRNLC&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=cm_sw_r_kb_dp_Z1YF5PBHA52SW8TY393M&tag=glocalcitiz0e-20) by Bryan Caplan Truman National Security Project (https://www.trumanproject.org/) Council on Foreign Relations (https://www.cfr.org/) *When you click and purchase books using the link(s) above, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you for your support! Special Guest: Kehinde Togun.

Bryan Caplan is Professor of Economics at George Mason University and the author of Open Borders, The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, and Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. In our interview, we discuss: Causes of poverty Charter cities The case for open borders Democracy — is it overrated? Why do voters keep choosing bad policies? Do democracies last longer, grow faster, and go to war less? Stable global totalitarianism Should longtermists care more about having more children? Is the cost of subsidising a new life competitive with the cost of saving a life? What the philosopher Michael Huemer gets right How many kids is Bryan counterfactually responsible for? Life lessons from Hairspray and The Room You can read more about the topics we cover this episode's write-up: hearthisidea.com/episodes/bryan. If you have any feedback or suggestions for future guests, feel free to get in touch through our website. Consider leaving us a review wherever you're listening to this — it's the best free way to support the show. If you want to support the show more directly, consider leaving a tip. Thanks for listening!

Bryan Caplan is a professor of economics at George Mason University. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, and Open Borders. He and Richard discuss their experiences in academia and why people get too much education and don't have enough kids. They also go into why parenting might not matter on average but having Bryan Caplan as a parent might, in addition to the ethics and politics of open borders, and how the conversation around the topic has changed.

Pga. corona-nedlukningerne har elever og studerende ifølge elever og politikere fået dårligere undervisning. Derfor stilles de dårligere til eksamenerne, hvis de skal igennem en normal eksamen.  Regeringen og et flertal i Folketinget har derfor besluttet at aflyse en række eksamener. Men løser det problemet? Links ·       Karstens analyse: https://cepos.dk/artikler/forskelsbehandling-af-eleverne-ved-karaktergivning-i-gymnasiet/ (https://cepos.dk/artikler/forskelsbehandling-af-eleverne-ved-karaktergivning-i-gymnasiet/) ·       Bryan Caplans super interessante bog, ”The Case Against Education”: https://www.saxo.com/dk/the-case-against-education_bryan-caplan_paperback_9780691196459 (https://www.saxo.com/dk/the-case-against-education_bryan-caplan_paperback_9780691196459) Optagelsen er lavet 2. marts 2021.

Episode Notes Bliver vi rige af uddannelse? I dette afsnit diskuterer Lars, ud fra bogen "The Case Against Education" af Bryan Caplan om det er rigtigt at vi altid vil blive rigere af uddannelse. Afsnittet er første del af en serie om uddannelses systemet.

To hear the full interview consider becoming a member at https://colemanhughes.org/Coleman invites Bryan Caplan to join him on his latest bonus episode. Bryan is an economist at George Mason University, a research fellow at the Mercatus Centre, and a New York Times best selling author. His books include The Myth of the Rational Voter (which was voted best political book of the year by the New York Times), Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, and Open Borders. Bryan also blogs for EconLog, and has been published in the New York Times, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine.During this episode, they talk about Bryan's argument for open borders, the case against higher education, and more.

Dr. Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University; and New York Times bestselling author, joins Corey DeAngelis and Matthew Nielsen to discuss the opportunities that the pandemic presents for families looking for solutions to the education slowdown. Find EFI online at EFInstitute.org, @EF_Institute on twitter, and Educational Freedom Institute on Facebook and other social platforms.

For the inaugural episode of the podcast, Bryan Caplan talks with me about open borders, the idea trap, UBI, appeasement, China, the education system, and his next two books on poverty and housing regulation. Bryan Caplan is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a New York Times Bestselling author. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education, and Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration.

Dr. Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University, and New York Times bestselling author, joins Dr. Corey DeAngelis and Matthew Nielsen to discuss his 2018 book, The Case Against Education.

Is university a waste of time and money? On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, Bryan Caplan, author of The Case Against Education, debates Professor Nicholas Dirks, the former Chancellor of UC Berkeley, on the motion Be it resolved, cut public spending for universities. It's a waste of time and money. SOURCES: CNN, Newsweek, EWTN, Global News.

This week Douglas Wilson talks about the ethics of a border wall. He then goes on to talk about “The Case Against Education ” by Bryan Caplan. Wrapping it up with a look at the New Testament word “Anoetos.” Happy plodding!   Google Play: https://play.google.com/music/m/Ihoo62cf5kspbbj5e52wyaes2p4?t=Plodcast iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/plodcast/id1257949421?mt=2 Stitcher: http://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=148592&refid=stpr RSS Feed: http://canonpress.libsyn.com/rss Get the weekly episodes in your inbox: http://canonpress.us2.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=7c049fc7f2904e30e1ac37ebf&id=db9614c891   Show notes:   Ethics of a Border Wall From the OT we can see that a wall is not inherently unethical Because it is built by men it can be misused The difference is in the payout A wall that is capable of keeping everyone out can also keep everyone in   The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan He shows that going to college and completing a degree has a strong economic payoff Caplan argues that a degree is a signal that you can get things done Caplan deals only with tax-funded education and not private education It would be better if he said “A Case Against Government Funded Education” Harmartiology “Anoetos” means foolish Gal. 3:1,3, 1 Tim. 6:9, Tit. 3:3, Luke 24:25

Pretty much everyone knows that the American healthcare system is, well, very inefficient. We don't, so critics say, get as much healthcare bang for our buck as we should. According to Bryan Caplan, however, the American educational system–higher education in particular–is much, much worse. In The Case against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton University Press, 2018), Caplan argues that we are quite literally paying a fortune and getting almost nothing of any collective value. Pretty much all the news in this book is bad. Students spend a ton on secondary ed, but they don't learn many marketable skills. In fact, the don't learn much at all: they forget almost everything they learn in college quite quickly. Taxpayers heavily subsidize this “learning” experience, but the social payoff is dramatically less than the investment. College is a good deal for good students, but it's a very bad deal for the many poor students who don't finish and have thus wasted their savings and several years of their lives–years they could have been working and accumulating money instead of throwing it away. College doesn't make us culturally or ethically better people by almost any definition of “better.” Interestingly, despite what conservative pundits say, it doesn't even change our political views: even though the vast majority of professors are liberal, and their courses perhaps have a liberal slant, students come out of college with the same political attitudes they brought to it. What does college do for students? According to Caplan's compelling argument, it signals to employers that they are conscientious and hard working enough to (you guessed it) finish college and, by inference, work an ordinary job. That, he says, is a very costly signal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's long seemed obvious that if we want to truly fix education, actually make it work for the 21st century, we need to kill a stockyard full of our sacred cows. And we had just the man for the job on The Bill Walton Show this week. Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University and author of “The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is Waste of Time and Money,” described the findings in his book and provided some stark recommendations based on them. First, he said, we need to understand what we're doing in school. There is the romantic version, he said – you go, learn skills employers are interested in, then get jobs with those employers performing those skills. More likely is what he calls the “signaling school of education.” You mostly go to school to get certification, “a bunch of seals of approval saying, ‘Grade A worker' or ‘Grade B worker.'” But, regardless of the grade, you need a seal. The certification, Caplan argues, has become so accessible it has lost its value. Decades ago, a high school diploma was enough for most jobs. Now, thanks to what he labels “credential inflation,” a bachelor's degree is often not enough. That's why he devotes a chapter in the book to the premise that we need a lot less education. And, failing that, we need to spend a lot less money for what we're getting now. To the first point, he divides students into four categories – excellent, good, fair and poor. Parents, he said, need to honestly assess, or have others do so, which category their children fall into. If the answer is “poor,” trying to get into college and major in math or science or management may not be wise, but pursuing skilled trades may be. Wherever you fall, the emphasis should be on maximizing the investment. To the second, he says the main feedback he gets from education leaders is that few say the system works well, but many say, “Give us more money and then we can do the job.” Caplan says we need to turn that logic on its head and cut funding for public schools by 30 percent. Education officials will demand “an exact blueprint” for where to cut. “And I say, ‘You know, there's a strange double standard here. When people say we need more money for schools, people don't usually say, ‘No way until you give us an exact blueprint of how you plan to spend the money.” But “when you say ‘less money,' that's where people say, “I can't even consider your idea until you write an encyclopedia about where every dime of budget cuts are going to come from.” And where would Caplan cut? For starters, he would limit or eliminate foreign language classes. “Almost no American adult uses a foreign language,” Caplan said. “It's just a fact. Second, whether or not you agree with that, virtually no American adult even claims to have learned to speak a foreign language very well in school, despite the fact that it's standard to do two or three years. So, essentially, you're teaching people something that they almost never use and where almost no one even claims to have learned it, despite the fact that you're putting a lot of years and classroom material on it. To me, that's crazy.” Go after the shibboleths as well, Caplan urges, and be thorough. Some kids are not as bright as others, and schools and parents need to rethink expecting the same things from those kids. To claims that there's nothing more important than education, he says, “How about food? Of course food is more important than our children's education.” One thing does bother Caplan. Economists who don't specialize in this area hear his ideas and want to learn more. Those fresh out of the education experience find his message spot on. But education experts are another story. “It's sort of a weird case where the people who know the most disagree with me the most, and the people on the other hand who have sort of an intermediate level of knowledge are often very much in agreement with me. “So I'm like, ‘Gee, the people who know the most think I'm wrong, so maybe they know something I don't know.” Or maybe they have not let go of those shibboleths.

I've had some interesting listener feedback from the recent episodes about questioning education. In this episode I respond to some of the points raised by listeners. Show Notes: 339 Questioning Education 340 Review of The Case Against Education  

Most of what you learn in school and college is practically useless, yet education is (often) a very good investment. How can this be? This episode is a review of Bryan Caplan's book, The Case Against Education. Show Notes: Become a Patron of TVL to get bonus episodes and rewards! The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan 339 Questioning Education 261 Thinking Rationally Part 7: The Irrationality Of Politics  

This episode is the first in a series questioning key life choices around the topic of education. How valuable is education? How much education does it make a sense to get? Does education lead to greater freedom and fulfillment in life? I introduce different views on education that I will be exploring: the traditional view, the rebel view, and the realist view. I talk about why I think it is valuable to question education, even though getting a good education worked very well for me. Show Notes: Become a Patron of TVL to get bonus episodes and rewards! The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan 40 Alternatives to College by James Altucher

We discuss schooling and education with Audrey. Robin Hanson argues that schooling is to domesticate humans. The Zvi is much more emotionally compelling in his Case Against Education and it’s follow-up (with more coming) Scott Alexander examines why DC’s graduation … Continue reading →

If you haven't listened to the full interview yet, check it out first. After interviewing Bryan Caplan about his book, The Case Against Education, I had so many thoughts rolling around that I wanted to record a separate follow up episode.  In this episode, I cover where I think Bryan is right and where I don't think he goes far enough.  Topics Covered: - Economic thinking and rational choice theory to explain the choice to go to college. - The role of parents in their kid's choices to go to college. - Do you need to be a super genius to succeed without college? - People choose college out of fear for bucking the dominant belief system. - Getting cheap easy praise from college and how that creates entitlement. - College grads are free to blame the economy when they are unemployed. - College degrees as a social signal, not an economic signal. Full show notes for every episode are available at isaacmorehouse.com

Bryan Caplan's new book The Case Against Education, argues against the common arguments the value of school and college. Most people would consider his view pretty radical. He recommends massive cuts to education spending and that many people should not go to college. In this episode, I argue that he doesn't go far enough. If you miss the regular episodes, make sure to check out Forward Tilt and Office Hours: - http://discoverpraxis.com/forwardtilt-2/ - https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/office-hours/id1293715707?mt=2 Topics Discussed: - How Bryan got started thinking and writing about education - Degrees as a signal - Credential inflation - Arguments about the quality of education - Parents the motivation for college - Do employers really want conformity? - Working for free as a signal - Even though it's just a signal, should you still go to college? - Bryan's upcoming graphic novel on immigration Full show notes are at isaacmorehouse.com

Today we debate the virtues of weighted blankets, we find out how much Dolly Parton's boobs are insured for. We hear about the astronaut twins who now have different DNA because of their work. Hear what the most popular perfume of all time is. We learn about a mystery woman at a Smithsonian conference, and why people are trying to find her now. We talk about librarians, and we hear the case against against education. Plus, we talk to Christian leader, Rob Bell about what's really in the Bible, and why it might not be what you were taught. 

This show's guest is Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason Unviersity and his latest book is *The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money*. In this book Bryan makes the point that if we evaluated school based on what we are saying it does, teach us useful skills, it fails. So, argues the book, education spending should be cut dramatically. To paraphrase something Tyler Cowen once said: Bryan does a much better job defending his 'crazy' ideas than you think he will. We cover much more, including Bryan's very interesting idea of the Ideological Turing Test, that just because educaiton is signalling doesn't mean it doesn't work and the impact of educational signalling on the civil rights movement! Subscribe in iTunes, stitcher, or by rss feed. Sign up for the mailing list at notunreasonable.com/signup. See older show notes at notunreasonable.com/podcast.

The American education system is a waste of both time and money — at least according to Bryan Caplan, author of the new book, The Case Against Education. Rather than actually impart useful skills, education's benefits stem mainly from “signaling,” implying that as a nation we could drastically reduce years of schooling and be no […] The post https://www.aei.org/multimedia/ep-93-the-case-against-education/ (Ep. 93: The case against education— Political Economy with James Pethokoukis) appeared first on https://www.aei.org (American Enterprise Institute - AEI).

In this episode, Caleb and Todd talk with Bryan Kaplan as he makes his case against education. ------------- *Guest Links* ------------- Bryan's website ( http://www.bcaplan.com ) Bryan on Twitter ( https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan ) The Case Against Education by Bryan Caplan ( https://www.amazon.com/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691174652/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&keywords=the+case+against+education+by+bryan+caplan&qid=1516917825&sr=8-1 ) --------------------------------------- *Learner's Corner Recommended Resource* --------------------------------------- Free To Lead: With Troy Maxwell & Stephen Brewster ( https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/free-to-lead-with-troy-maxwell-stephen-brewster/id1303935096 ) ----------------- *What We Learned* ----------------- *Valued Education* * Reading * Writing * Math *Education Signals:* * Intelligence * Work ethic * Conformity *Not Pursuing Education Can Be Viewed As Deviate* *Vocational Education Has A Stigma, But Is Useful* *College Is Not A Good Place To Experiment* * Experiment before college * College exposes you to a long list of unrealistic options *Advice for Employers* * Offer internships and other opportunities for potential employees *How Do You Learn?* * Practical Activities: learn by doing * Acquiring Information: uses Google Scholar to search for relevant terms, looks for relevant materials , read those materials, right before I write I read so that the information is fresh ----------------- *Quotes to Tweet* ----------------- "Employers might not reward you for the skills you learn in school, but for the traits you reveal in school." - @Bryan_Caplan @LearnersPodcast Click to Tweet ( https://ctt.ec/OUt6q ) "If the education is neither useful in your future or enjoyable at the time, then it's wasteful." - @Bryan_Caplan @LearnersPodcast Click to Tweet ( https://ctt.ec/ctvB2 ) "To not pursue education is viewed as deviate." - @Bryan_Caplan @LearnersPodcast Click to Tweet ( https://ctt.ec/MejQp ) "There are alternate routes to learning than the education system." - @CalebMason @LearnersPodcast Click to Tweet ( https://ctt.ec/_47Pt ) --------------------------- *New Episode Every Tuesday* --------------------------- ----------------------- *Join Us Every Tuesday* ----------------------- Thank you for listening to the Learner's Corner Podcast. We hope you'll join us for next week's episode. Until next time, keep learning and keep growing.

An Afrikaans school in Vereeniging has won its case in the Pretoria High Court against the Gauteng education department. Hoërskool Overvaal approached the courts to overturn the Gauteng Department of Education's decision to admit 55 English speaking learners to the Afrikaans-medium school. Tsepiso Makwetla spoke to Gauteng MEC for Education Panyaza Lesufi

Mike talks with Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a prolific and always interesting blogger for Econlog. He's the author of multiple books, three of which Bryan and Mike have discussed on previous episodes: The Myth of the Rational Voter (interview), The Case Against Education (interview), and Open Borders (interview). Today they discuss Bryan's latest book Labor Econ vs The World: Essays on the World's Greatest Market.  Topics Mike & Bryan discuss include:what labor economics is and why it stands against the worldif politicians are irrational and wrong or rational and deceptivethe problem with almost all government regulationshow the minimum wage hurts workers (and everyone else)the largely illusory gender and race pay gapsthe questionable value of higher education (for most people)why open borders would be a good thing for America (and the world)CBO Interactive Minimum Wage Modeling ToolThe Politics Guys on Facebook | TwitterListener support helps make The Politics Guys possible. If you're interested in supporting the podcast, go to patreon.com/politicsguys or politicsguys.com/support. On Venmo, we're @PoliticsGuys.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-politics-guys/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Mike talks with Bryan Caplan, Professor of Economics at George Mason University and blogger at Bet on It. He's the author of multiple books, including four that we've previously discussed on the show: The Myth of the Rational Voter, The Case Against Education, Open Borders, and Labor Econ vs The World: Essays on the World's Greatest Market. On this episode, Mike and Bryan talk about his most recent book, How Evil Are Politicians?: Essays on Demagoguery. Topics Mike & Brian Discuss Include:The meaning of evil – is it more than just self-interest?Bryan's contention that the vast majority of politicians are, in fact, evilWhy we should hold politicians to a higher standardThe almost utter lack of “moral due diligence” on the part of politiciansIf people don't know or just don't care about evil politiciansDemagoguery as the politics of social desirabilityLiberal vs Conservative forms of evilThe extent to which evil politicians are a result of a bad systemThe pragmatic case for pacifismIf any US hostilities since WWII were justifiedWhat, if anything, we can do about evil politicians Bryan Caplan on Twitter The Politics Guys on Facebook | TwitterListener support helps make The Politics Guys possible. You can support us or change your level of support at patreon.com/politicsguys or politicsguys.com/support. On Venmo, we're @PoliticsGuys.Interested in starting your own podcast? Check out RedCircle, home of The Politics Guys.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-politics-guys/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Mike welcomes George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan back to the show to talk about his latest book, '[The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money](http://amzn.to/2FTfqzI)'.  In this episode, Mike and Dr. Caplan discuss the myths that people believe about the value of a college education, if college teaches people job-relevant skills (mostly no), if it teaches them 'how to think' (not as far as we can measure), if it's an economically smart move for the student (not in as many cases as you might think), and if having a lot of well-educated people benefits society in any measurable way (I bet you can guess the answer at this point). In spite of the depressing (at least to Mike) and impressive amount of data and analysis Dr. Caplan brings to bear, Mike makes a game attempt to salvage some meaning and value for his life's work. **Follow Bryan Caplan [on Twitter](http://politicsguys.com/bryan-caplan-interview/)** **[Bryan Caplan's previous Politics Guys appearance](http://politicsguys.com/bryan-caplan-interview/)** (where he and Mike discussed '[The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies](http://amzn.to/2HFEGKr)') **Listener support helps make The Politics Guys possible.** If you're interested in supporting the show, go to [politicsguys.com/support](http://www.politicsguys.com/support). Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-politics-guys/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Mike talks with Bryan Caplan, a Professor of Economics at George Mason University and a blogger for EconLog ( https://www.econlib.org/econlog/ ). Professor Caplan is the author of multiple books, including two he and I have previously discussed on the show - The Myth of the Rational Voter ( http://pdcn.co/e/traffic.libsyn.com/politicsguys/Bryan_Caplan_2016-11-30_.mp3?dest-id=721884 ) , and The Case Against Education ( https://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/8/6/3/863ff386e9ef2cfa/bryan-caplan-on-the-case-against-education.mp3?c_id=21100238&cs_id=21100238&expiration=1579551784&hwt=17a2b332240ea11b65ebe44a197f0aee ). On this episode, they discussing Bryan's latest book, Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration ( https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics-Immigration/dp/1250316960/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=open+borders+caplan&link_code=qs&qid=1579546928&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-1 ). *Topics Mike & Bryan discuss include:* * ‘a world of global apartheid' * immigration and economic inequality * the moral presumption in favor of immigration * why Nobel Laureate Milton Freedom was wrong about immigration * how open borders could easily double world GDP * the cultural effects of open borders * immigration, crime, and terrorism * the partisan political calculus of immigration policy * open borders and global brain drain * a Burkean approach to immigration * and lots more! *Bryan Caplan on Twitter* ( https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan ) *Today's show is sponsored by SaneBox -* email management for any inbox. For a free two-week trial and $25 credit, go to sanebox.com/politicsguys ( https://www.sanebox.com/politicsguys ). *Be part of the discussion* on the Politics Guys ‘ BipartisanPolitics ( https://www.reddit.com/r/BipartisanPolitics/ ) ' community on Reddit. *Listener support helps make The Politics Guys possible*. If you're interested in supporting the show, go to patreon.com/politicsguys ( https://www.patreon.com/politicsguys ) or politicsguys.com/support ( http://www.politicsguys.com/support ). The Politics Guys theme is ‘Rollin at 5' by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ ) Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-politics-guys/donations Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy