Podcast appearances and mentions of Tyler Cowen

Rula patients typically pay $15 per session when using insurance. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at https://www.rula.com/TOE #rulapod Try Huel with 15% OFF + Free Gift for New Customers today using my code theoriesofeverything at https://huel.com/theoriesofeverything . Fuel your best performance with Huel today! Is Earth being monitored by an advanced civilization one million years ahead of us? And does this alien civilization actually share an ancient past with humanity? Economist Robin Hanson explores a provocative theory suggesting that highly evolved extraterrestrials may be subtly observing us—either as caretakers or as part of a long-running experiment. From there, the conversation delves into the intricacies of academic funding and the peer review process. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Links Mentioned: - Robin's blog: https://www.overcomingbias.com/ - Robin's profile: https://economics.gmu.edu/people/rhanson - Robin's book: https://www.amazon.com/Age-Em-Work-Robots-Earth/dp/0198754620 - Tyler Cowen on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwieLd7Lyc8&ab_channel=CurtJaimungal - Gregory Chaitin on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoEuav8G6sY - Matthew Segal on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeTm4fSXpbM - Daniel Van Zant's article on incentive markets: https://www.danielvanzant.com/p/breakthrough-incentive-markets - Michael Levin on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s - Lue Elizondo on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAmFlLfsZKM - Ross Coulthart on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQnGcX7oxms Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:36 - The Great Filter 05:38 - Where Are The Aliens? 09:13 - UFOs 16:50 - Panspermia 23:05 - Alien Hierarchies 27:30 - Alien Culture & Motivations 33:18 - Probability of Aliens 39:18 - Truth 49:41 - Fall of Academia 01:11:27 - Peer Review 01:20:22 - Ranking Ideas 01:23:09 - The System is “Broken” Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science #aliens Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Shakespeare Book Club meets tonight to talk about A Midsummer Night's Dream. Zoom link here for paid subscribers. Paid subscribers can also join this chat thread and ask me (or other subscribers) whatever they want. Tell us what you are reading, what you disagreed with me about this month. Ask niche questions someone here might be able to answer. Ask me anything you like (I might not answer!) This is an experiment... let's see where it goes... Join the chat.Katherine Dee InterviewWhen we have strong feelings about literary characters, isn't that somewhat the same as ficto-romantics—people who fall in love with fictional people and create part of the identity around that relationship? This is the sort of question you can talk about with Katherine Dee. I am a long-time fan so I was delighted to be able to ask her about the way AI is changing writing, fandom in culture, role play writing, fan fiction, ficto-romance, internet culture, and the way technology is changing what we read, how AI is changing Katherine's writing, and how she uses ChatGPT to discuss her emotional life (she says it is pretty good!). Katherine is one of the most interesting Substackers, writing at default.blog, as well as writing for other publications. You might remember her piece called “No. Culture isn't stuck”. I find her case-studies especially interesting (this is the one we talked about in the interview). Katherine is not judgemental: she simply tires to understand. Here is her Twitter. Here's what Katherine told me about fandom in modern culture.Henry: Why is there so much fandom in modern culture? We've got LARPing, people having AI boyfriends and girlfriends, fictoromance. You're writing about all these things all the time. Why is this such a big part of culture?Katherine: That's a great question. I think that the foundational reason is our culture is oriented around consuming media. And this is, you know, like, the subculture of media consumption is always going to be a fandom. But also, like, other things have eroded, right? Like, you know, it almost feels cliche to bring up, but everything from, like, third places to organized religion, you know, to national identity, you know, all of these things, right? What remains in its status is fandom. And so, you know, the marriage of the erosion of these other sort of cultural cornerstones, plus the importance of consuming media and the way we communicate, it creates this perfect storm. And I've even argued that, like, fandom is, in a way, like, you know, the main way that we know how to organize at this point. It's the chief way we express ourselves. You know, politics tend to, like, devolve into fandom. But the question is, like, well, what else do we have, really?And here's part of our discussion about ficto-romance.Henry: Now, about ficto romance. I find this, like, really fascinating and I've been reading your case studies avidly. But I also am confused, like, people have always had strong feelings for characters in novels, right? So I read an essay, a 19th century essay about Pride and Prejudice recently. And I mean, this made me laugh. Some people don't like it. But the critic was like, these are the five most attractive heroines in 19th century English fiction and had, like, robust views about what made these fictional women attractive. What is different or what feels different about ficto romance today?Katherine: You know, I don't think it is that different is the thing. I think a lot of stuff maybe feels different because it's somehow like more lowbrow or we don't respect the expression as much. I also think the role of art has changed. Like, we don't see, you know, like I talk to a lot of I actually posted an interview today with a guy who identifies as fictoromantic and his fictive other, which is the term they use instead of like significant other, is from Homestuck, which is a web comic that was really popular on Tumblr and is still very popular on Tumblr. And I think, like, ordinary people don't consider that art. Right. And so, like, it's difficult. Like, you see someone who maybe has this, like, devotion to, you know, someone in a great novel or maybe to, like, you know, Aphrodite or Venus or something like that. And they're producing what we're already primed to think of as great art in service of this love. And because the media properties that many of these people are emotionally attached to feel lowbrow, we take it less seriously and we think they're crazy. But if you actually talk to them, they're not crazy at all. I mean, it's a spectrum of expression. But I've never spoken to someone who feels like they're in active psychosis or something. It feels very familiar. Like I brought up in this interview that I posted today, you know, the way this young man was talking about this Homestuck character. And this is going to sound, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, maybe, but it reminded me of Mirabai, who I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, but she is this Hindu poet who had this great devotion for Krishna. And it was it felt very similar to me. It's just that it's reskinned in this way that is there's some dissonance.There's a complete transcript of the interview below. Transcript (AI generated so there may be errors)[00:00:00] Henry Today, I'm talking with Katherine Dee, the internet culture writer and the author of the default friend, Substack. Katherine, welcome.[00:00:11] Katherine: Hey, thanks for having me.[00:00:15] Henry: So how is AI changing writing right now and how is it going to change it in the next, say, couple of years?[00:00:22] Katherine: In the next couple of years, I'm not sure. But right now, I've noticed a lot of people who write news are using AI. AI is interesting because it's like, you know, if you read a lot of fan fiction, for example, there's like a fan fiction register. And so if you then go and read like a mass market paperback, you know, a lot of these people start off in fan fiction, you can kind of tell like who's who, right, because there's certain phrases that are common, certain slang. And the same is similar with AI, right? And so I can, I've, I use AI so much as like a chat companion, that there's like certain phrases that I know, are very specific to AI. So I've picked up from like, talking to it and, you know, it being sort of like a friend of mine, for lack of a better word, that people who write news and write digests, use AI a lot. And I've also noticed that people do like, polish on their writing, like they will fix the grammar, or what have you, which I think is less, less scandalous. But I do think that there's also a backlash, right? There is this, people want to sound human. And it's, it's opening up like, more space somehow, right, somehow, more, even more space for like, messy confessional writing. And maybe just, you know, validating that our, our, our long love for it, is never, is never going away.[00:02:03] Henry: Yeah, just when you thought there couldn't be any more personal essays, right, here they come.[00:02:07] Katherine: There's even, Substack really like, created an explosion of them. I thought, I thought it was over, but it absolutely is not.[00:02:17] Henry: I was amazed the other day, because I've been writing like, I would say quite a balanced view of AI, but people take it to be highly positive. And someone who was writing against it, actually said in their piece, oh, that last sentence was written by AI, by the way. And I was like, it's insane to me that that would happen. If you're so against it, but also that people don't realize that if he hadn't mentioned that, you wouldn't have said, oh, that was an AI sentence.[00:02:46] Katherine: Well, you don't know that it, I do think, and I went, I can't quite figure out what, what is the tell for AI writing when there's certain words that I could list, but there is a register, right? So if you're using it a lot, like, I use, I use like deep research all the time to find like, contact information for people. If I have a problem in my life, it's like, I asked chat GPT first, right? So there's like words like, you know, people have pointed out that it uses an em dash a lot. It uses the word crucial a lot. The word realm, weirdly, I've noticed, right? So you kind of internalize it, right? But there's also a register that is very like, AI specific. And I think, all this to say, I think people can tell.[00:03:38] Henry: You said you're talking to it a lot, like every day. What are you talking to it about?[00:03:45] Katherine: Like, you know, if I get anxiety about something that feels silly, or like, if I get upset about something, sometimes, like, I can't, because I'm online so much, like, very susceptible to getting this sort of, like, internet tunnel vision, where I don't know if I'm like, if my reaction is really to scale, I try not to get into, like, fights on the timeline or anything. But it doesn't mean I don't have the reaction, right? So I'll ask AI, like, I had, you know, this back and forth with someone on Twitter, and I feel like, pretty upset about it, am I overreacting? And it's not always actually, like, a good tool for that. But even just the process of me, like slowing down to ask, has made me, I think, a little bit more rational.[00:04:35] Henry: Do you think you're better at seeing when something's written with AI, because you've got this background in fan fiction and online writing, so you're, like, in a way, very highly trained on different internet registers? Whereas to some of us, it's like, people are just doing internet speak, and we don't have that kind of discrimination between the types?[00:04:55] Katherine: No, I think that if you read a lot of anything, you sort of, you pick up, you become fluent in the tone. People who, you know, there's an academic register, right? Like people who are in STEM speak in a particular way and write in a particular way. And it's not necessarily that the topics that they're talking about, it's certain phrases. People who are the humanities, there's similar things. And I think we're not conscious of being able to detect these different tones or registers, but everyone is capable of doing this.[00:05:34] Henry: How many people, how many, like, prominent people or people who are known for their voice do you think are using AI without telling us?[00:05:43] Katherine: I can only think of one who I would bet money that they're doing it. They mostly send out, like, a news digest. So it might be, you know, I haven't noticed it in their, like, opinion pieces. But in, like, their news digests, definitely, right? There's all sorts of tells. But there's, I mean, there has to be more, right? Because there's so many people who have interesting ideas, but aren't necessarily articulate. And there's probably a lot of people who collaborate with AI, right? So it's, they will have the, you know, Chachapiti or Claude or whatever, structure their piece. And then they will go in and edit it and put it in their voice. Or even the reverse, like, they'll structure it, and then they'll have it be polished or fix the grammar or put it in the tone that they want, and then they'll do minor tweaks. I think that is probably super common. But, like, wholesale, yeah, I've only picked up on this one person.[00:06:48] Henry: How close are we to a time when writers are going to feel obliged to put a little disclaimer saying this is what I do and don't use AI for in my writing? Or will that not come?[00:06:59] Katherine: Some people already do that. I don't want to skip ahead to mention our conversation, but I know we're going to be talking a little bit about fan fiction. And on fan fiction sites, there is, like, an AI-generated tag. And then in some digital magazines, they'll be like, this piece was generated with AI or, you know, was edited with AI or something like that. But I think there's probably a lot of shame around it. And people don't want to feel like they're not a real writer. We don't really know where to place or how to conceive of these tools. And it's complicated, right? And you see these conversations playing out in fandom quite a bit. And you see just how complex it is. I don't think there are easy answers.[00:07:53] Henry: Why is there so much fandom in modern culture? We've got LARPing, people having AI boyfriends and girlfriends, fictoromance. You're writing about all these things all the time. Why is this such a big part of culture?[00:08:06] Katherine: That's a great question. I think that the foundational reason is our culture is oriented around consuming media. And this is, you know, like, the subculture of media consumption is always going to be a fandom. But also, like, other things have eroded, right? Like, you know, it almost feels cliche to bring up, but everything from, like, third places to organized religion, you know, to national identity, you know, all of these things, right? What remains in its status is fandom. And so, you know, the marriage of the erosion of these other sort of cultural cornerstones, plus the importance of consuming media and the way we communicate, it creates this perfect storm. And I've even argued that, like, fandom is, in a way, like, you know, the main way that we know how to organize at this point. It's the chief way we express ourselves. You know, politics tend to, like, devolve into fandom. But the question is, like, well, what else do we have, really?[00:09:22] Henry: Right. Fandom, but also anti-fandom, right? I think that's a big part of culture.[00:09:25] Speaker 3: It's like. Yeah, absolutely.[00:09:28] Henry: Now, about ficto romance. I find this, like, really fascinating and I've been reading your case studies avidly. But I also am confused, like, people have always had strong feelings for characters in novels, right? So I read an essay, a 19th century essay about Pride and Prejudice recently. And I mean, this made me laugh. Some people don't like it. But the critic was like, these are the five most attractive heroines in 19th century English fiction and had, like, robust views about what made these fictional women attractive. What is different or what feels different about ficto romance today?[00:10:14] Katherine: You know, I don't think it is that different is the thing. I think a lot of stuff maybe feels different because it's somehow like more lowbrow or we don't respect the expression as much. I also think the role of art has changed. Like, we don't see, you know, like I talk to a lot of I actually posted an interview today with a guy who identifies as fictoromantic and his fictive other, which is the term they use instead of like significant other, is from Homestuck, which is a web comic that was really popular on Tumblr and is still very popular on Tumblr. And I think, like, ordinary people don't consider that art. Right. And so, like, it's difficult. Like, you see someone who maybe has this, like, devotion to, you know, someone in a great novel or maybe to, like, you know, Aphrodite or Venus or something like that. And they're producing what we're already primed to think of as great art in service of this love. And because the media properties that many of these people are emotionally attached to feel lowbrow, we take it less seriously and we think they're crazy. But if you actually talk to them, they're not crazy at all. I mean, it's a spectrum of expression. But I've never spoken to someone who feels like they're in active psychosis or something. It feels very familiar. Like I brought up in this interview that I posted today, you know, the way this young man was talking about this Homestuck character. And this is going to sound, I mean, this is going to sound crazy, maybe, but it reminded me of Mirabai, who I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name correctly, but she is this Hindu poet who had this great devotion for Krishna. And it was it felt very similar to me. It's just that it's reskinned in this way that is there's some dissonance.[00:12:35] Henry: So you don't think, because I read that interview and I thought it was great. Do you don't think like the behavior that the person you interviewed, like it's actively living with this fictoromantic partner and there's lots of like daily behavior involved. Right. And it's part of the structure of this person's life. Whereas, you know, in the past, like Diana Wynne-Jones used to say that she got a lot of letters about Hal's moving castle from, I think, basically teenage girls who fell in love with Hal. But that would be like. Almost entirely in their imagination, maybe if they wouldn't structure their life around it, is there some kind of difference there?[00:13:18] Katherine: What is different is I feel like because everything's commercialized, there's maybe more of an opportunity to buy products associated with the character that they're attached to. But if you look at the way people, most people, not all of them are expressing these relationships, like I ask these people, what does your relationship look like? It looks like creating art. And, you know, in another time, maybe they wouldn't have become a famous artist or whatever. But like I think it would have been more socially acceptable somehow. The student we used was Puppet, which is sort of maybe a little silly. But Puppet, who's the young man I interviewed, when I asked him, what does your relationship with Ro Strider look like? He said that he writes, he draws, he fantasizes. There is also, you know, there was also like a commercial component, like buying the body pillow. And that's maybe a little different. But to me, it reminds me of just any sort of creative expression. It's just phrased in a slightly different way.[00:14:36] Henry: Right, right. And one thing I liked about that interview was that I don't do the creative activities that this person does, but I was like, well, I speak pretty intensely about fictional characters. It made me sort of I was sort of forced to think, like, how different am I from this guy? Like I'm I have very strong feelings about people in books.[00:14:59] Katherine: I think a lot of us do.[00:15:02] Henry: Or movies, right? For a lot of people, it's movie characters, right?[00:15:04] Katherine: Yeah. I mean, that's that's the beauty of like dramatic structure, right? Like it you it allows us to suspend our disbelief and we feel like we're within the world of the narrative. And if you really like it, you want to take that feeling with you after the show has ended or the book has ended.[00:15:23] Henry: So I guess you're saying that this what it looks very weird to a lot of people, but it's not really so different from the way people grieve about like when Matthew Perry died and people were just completely distraught. It's kind of a similar thing because they had this strong identification with his character.[00:15:42] Katherine: Yeah, I mean, it's more intense, but like there were probably people who felt a really strong connection to Matthew Perry or to any celebrity. And again, it applies also to fictional characters, of course.[00:16:03] Henry: So what are people getting from fan fiction that they're not getting from other sorts of art? Like why is fan fiction so big now?[00:16:13] Katherine: It's playing in the space of a media property and an established world that you already have an attachment to. You know, people bring up a lot like there's, you know, there's certain stories that are like retold over and over and over again. Right. There's certain characters that reappear throughout novels through centuries. Right. And it's a similar idea. Right. It's like you enjoy the world of the story and you want to make it your own. Fan fiction is incredibly diverse. Right. There's some fan fiction that is that moves away from the canon so much you almost wonder, like, why, you know, why aren't you just creating an original work? But there's something that lies in there. And I also think part of it is the types of media that people are consuming are they already have these fandoms set up. Right. So it's it's it's it almost invites that form of expression.[00:17:21] Henry: Do you mean like you read Harry Potter and then you realize that there's already a massive Harry Potter fan fiction ecosystem so you can… it is to us what a theme park was to the 80s or whatever.[00:17:35] Katherine: Yeah, there's there's already this there's already somewhere to go and to meet people.[00:17:41] Henry: I was researching it earlier because I like I know nothing about it. And obviously I was asking deep research. And as I was reading all the stuff it gave me, I was like, people are trying to create almost like folktales based on this, you know, whatever the the original sources in this collectivizing impulse, whereas you say like it diverges, it has these repetitive tropes that they almost want to turn it into these kind of fairy tales or a collection of stories like that. So it seemed it seemed quite interesting to me. Now, you personally, you wrote on your sub stack, you said my lineage isn't literature, it's text based online role playing. Yes. Tell me what that what is that?[00:18:28] Katherine: So I so I always wanted to be a writer, but I wanted to be a writer because I would role play and role play, role playing the way I did it is is like playing, you know, it's like imaginative play that children do, like with Barbies or, you know, even just themselves. But it's it's translated to text because it's it's mediated. And so I would do, you know, I would role play all the time. And it wasn't like I was a voracious reader. I never was. And I don't think I am now. And I think it's it's actually reflected in my writing, actually, but it was because I was like role playing all the time. And I think a lot of people are like this, right? Like I didn't even really write fan fiction. I preferred role playing, which is a little bit more dramatic than than just than just writing. But I but at the time I thought, oh, because I'm I am literally writing something down that I am a writer. But really, it's more like theater, if anything.[00:19:28] Henry: So tell me what's happening, like you would be logging on to some kind of forum and you would be writing as if you were a particular person or character in this in the scenario and other people would be responding.[00:19:43] Katherine: Yeah, it's it's like acting, but through text, so you could do when I started, you could either do it in a chat room, there is text based role playing games, which I didn't actually participate in, like mod some multi user dungeons. I didn't I didn't even know those existed at the time. And then there was forums where and so there would be a theme and the theme could either be from a fandom like Harry Potter, for example, or it could just be a setting. So like high school or the beach or, you know, like an apartment complex and you would design a character and then you would it was it sort of looked like a collaborative story. But really, it was like you were you were just you could only control your own character. So you would just write a description of like, you know, someone says the setting is the beach and then character one comes in and describes what character one is doing and then character two comes in. And, you know, sometimes you would be ignored. Sometimes people would start a fight with you. All sorts of things could happen. And I it's I spent most of my time doing this for like over a decade.[00:20:53] Henry: So are there certain areas where this doesn't does not happen? Like, is there Jane Austen role playing or is it is that not the sort of premise?[00:21:02] Katherine: No, there's role playing for everything. There's like historical role plays. There's, you know, any novel under the sun. You could probably find someone, you know, more like Jane Austen. There's like a there's a rich role playing tradition. People love Jane Austen novels. Something I would do very often is if I was learning about a particular historical period in school, I would get like I would have I would develop these sort of like parasocial attachments with certain historical figures or even settings very similar to the way people feel about fandom. And then I would go home and role play the historical setting and I would read a lot about, you know, whatever it was, ancient Rome or whatever. And it would help me in school because I would be like acting it out online.[00:21:49] Henry: Yeah. You're working on fan fiction and A.I. at the moment. And I'm interested in this because I have this feeling everyone's like A.I. is only going to produce slop. It's not going to do anything new. But I've seen people. I've saw an interesting essay on Substack about someone writing their own fan fiction with A.I. And I sort of I wonder if the confluence of these two things is going to start leading to lots of very new types of fiction and potentially even I don't I mean, this is like a long term speculation, but even some kind of new type of literature. Tell us what you're working on with that.[00:22:32] Katherine: So I was curious the way I was curious, like how people were using A.I. in fandom spaces. And right now it looks it looks like there's this prohibition against using A.I. like people do you do create A.I. generated fan fics, but there's something about like the process and the love that you put into writing your fan fiction that people are very precious about. And they feel that A.I. infringes on this. And part of it is they're very concerned about like, where is the data coming from? Right. Is it somehow unethical because of the data that these LLMs are trained on? But where you see a real difference is people who use A.I. to role play. And that's where it's it seems like people are more open to it. It the feeling the feelings and reactions are a bit more mixed, but there does seem to be like a debate in different fandom spaces. Like some people argue like A.I. is an accessibility issue, like some people aren't good at writing. Maybe English isn't their first language. And this opens up a lot of space for them. And they feel like they're they're collaborating with this tool. Other people say that it's it's unethical and that since they're taking away the process, it is it's harming the work.[00:24:04] Henry: If they could be convinced or, you know, to their own satisfaction that it's not unethical, the data, the data sets and everything like it would be fine. Would they still just not want to do it? It would be fine. Would they still just not want to do it? Because this is the wrong phrase, but like it ruins the game. It's not the point.[00:24:25] Katherine: I think for some people. Yeah, I think the the ethical dimension is is extremely significant for a lot of people. But but for some, it's like, you know, they're not doing it to produce work for its own sake. Right. To go back to the example I gave about the writer who I suspect is using AI to create these news digests, like that person has committed to producing these digests, you know, X number of times a month as part of their livelihood. And so you can sort of see like, well, them using AI is a little bit more sympathetic. But if it's something you're doing for free, for fun, as an expression of love, I can I can see where people are like, well, you're farming it out. But I also am very sympathetic to the other side of that, where it's like maybe, you know, your writing skills aren't as strong and it does open doors and they are your ideas. And it's helping you speak more clearly in a situation where you couldn't otherwise.[00:25:32] Henry: Is it because the way people do this online together, it's a form of communicating, like it's all very oblique and indirect, but it's really just a form of people socializing and they feel like if the AI is there, then they're not getting what they need from it in that sense.[00:25:49] Katherine: Um, it is a form of communication. But I also think there is really a value placed on the like the personal dimension of it. Like, um, like bad fan art, right? Like if you know someone, someone's really trying their best, they really are committed to a fandom. They really love it. But their drawing isn't great and they share it. Of course, there will be people who are mean and who shame them. And there's all sorts of weird, like, you know, labyrinthine dramas that occur in these spaces. But there will also be people who are like, this is beautiful because you tried, because it was coming from a real place of love. And that that that devotion is a very important piece of the puzzle. Again, there there are gatekeepers, there is shaming that occurs. And you know, there's a lot of people who feel like they're not good enough. Like you constantly see this in forums on Reddit, on Wattpad, on AO3, like on all these spaces, people who are like self deprecating, they feel like their work isn't good enough. But there's again, like this, this sense of like, I did it because I love the property. I love the character. Which I guess sort of ties back to the thing about ficto romance, where it's just this extreme expression of, you know, a pulse that's already moving through the space.[00:27:12] Henry: The piece I read on Substack, it wasn't written by the person writing the book. It was written by her roommate. And she was saying, you know, to begin with, like, oh my God, I thought this was dreadful. But actually, the more I saw what was going on, she was like, I can see my roommate has written like 20,000 words in a week. And she's working really hard at it. And she's, you know, prompting and reprompting. And she knows what she likes. She really knows what she's doing and what she wants and how to get it to change its output. And she kind of, she didn't come around to saying, oh, this is a good thing. But I think she mellowed on the idea. And she could see that there was a certain amount of, there's something new happening, right? Some new kind of fiction is coming out of it.[00:27:55] Katherine: I totally agree too, that like, prompting and reprompting is in itself a creative expression. And this is something I tried to argue about AI art, where there is like, you know, not everyone is going to be able to produce the same thing. Like the writing the prompt is in it of itself a skill. And also there's your own taste, which informs the prompt and informs what you include. Like, I'm very proud of the images that I've produced with Mid Journey. Not, you know, not the same way I would be if I had, you know, painted it myself. But like, I do feel like it's informed by my unique experience and taste. And this particular combination of things is unique to me. And that's a type of art, even if it's involves different things than, you know, again, if I were myself painting it. And I think that applies to fan fiction as well. What I have been worried about, I mean, this is a tangent, is like, what happens to the generation that is like, all they know is prompting and AI, and they don't have that space to develop their own taste and their own perception. Like, I think that like, if you start out too fresh, if you started too green, and you haven't had time to develop taste, and that's where I see these platforms being a little bit more dangerous.[00:29:23] Henry: But couldn't we say that about you in the role-playing forums? Like, when they develop taste through like, deep immersive experiences with the AI?[00:29:36] Katherine: Well, no, because with the role-playing, it has to come from myself and from other people, right? And there's nothing like limiting it, right? Like, it's purely through my eyes. Like, maybe there's an issue here where like, the actual writing product would have been better if I was, you know, if I read more, right? Or if I watched different films, but it's only filtered through myself and through other people. Whereas, you don't know how you're gonna get walled in with the AI, especially if you go in too fresh, and you don't know how to prompt it.[00:30:17] Henry: Weren't those people more likely to be, aren't they more likely to get bored?[00:30:24] Katherine: I don't know. I don't know if they're more likely to get bored. I think they might get stuck. I mean, the flip side is maybe they'll innovate more because they're coming from a completely different perspective.[00:30:37] Henry: Right, that's true. I had this interesting experience recently where I saw a whole load of young people that I'm related to. They range from like eight to 16 or something. And some of them just could, they could not not be holding their phone. And some of them, they're like, they don't like the phone. They're reading Jane Austen. So there's a diversity in that sense. But they were all just against AI. Like it's a bad thing. People use it to cheat, all the usual stuff. And I was fascinated. I was like, guys, you should all be using AI. Let me tell you what the good models are. So I wonder if we'll see this bigger diversity within that generation where some of them, a bit like in our generation, right? Some people were online a lot. Some people weren't. And some people are still.[00:31:24] Katherine: I've noticed that there's a very strong anti-tech sentiment among younger generation. And it seems like bifurcated. In the same way you described, people who are so online that they're just like these internet creatures, right? Like if the internet is a forest, like they're like natives of it. And then the other side of it is people who feel like it stole a lot from them. It took a lot from their childhoods. And they're moving away from it. And as a statement, they're either getting like dumb phones or they don't have social media. Or if they do have social media, it's like very sparse. And they tend to have like two very different outlooks. The ones who are more online seem to be more chaotic, a little more nihilistic. And the ones who are more offline, like they seem to be like looking for something more. Like they're more obviously searching for meaning.[00:32:24] Henry: Are we gonna see more like book reading among the offline people?[00:32:30] Katherine: I mean, I would hope so. Who knows, right? Like who knows how much of it is a performance and how much of it is really happening. But I mean, I would imagine so. It does seem also that like a lot of digital outlets feel like something is changing. And I've noticed a lot more like physical media seems to be coming back. I'm interested in seeing how this develops in fan spaces. Early in fandom, like in the... And I guess like early is like right when it was like really starting to grow. So not at the origins, but it's sort of this like... Fandom exponentially grew in the late 70s. And the way people communicated with each other and like a very important mode of expression was a physical fanzine. And this was because first there was no internet and then the internet was confined to certain populations and not everyone had it. And I wonder if fanzines will come back or like handwritten letters. Even I have a couple of books that are collections of letters that these sisters wrote to a particular fandom. And it was just like, it was just a huge part of that particular world. And I thought that was really interesting as a way to keep in touch with people and to keep the community together.[00:34:01] Henry: Yeah, that sounds like a fascinating book.[00:34:05] Katherine: Yeah, it's a collection of... It's called like elf magic letters or something. It's really interesting. And it's also interesting because it's like not something that you can easily read because it's so specific to the time and the place. Like it really was for the people it was for, right? It's not, it doesn't stand the test of time in the same way.[00:34:28] Henry: So is there not much sense of tradition in fandom? Like are people going back to read the fanzines and stuff?[00:34:37] Katherine: There is a sense of tradition for sure. Some of these fanzines are hard to find. It depends on which fandom you're in. Fans love whatever property it is they're fans of. So there's always archivists and people who are curating these things and making these things available. I just wonder if it'll become more popular to return to physical media. And it probably is in certain spaces. I'm just not personally aware of them. Okay.[00:35:09] Henry: Do you think, like, how do you think fan fiction is going to change significantly with AI? Beyond questions of like register and stuff that you were talking about before. Are we going to see, is this going to be like a significant step change in the evolution of the form? Or is it just going to be what people are saying? Like lots of slots in the form of slot content, nothing new as it were.[00:35:33] Katherine: I'm not sure. There's a lot of fan art that's generated with AI that I feel like at first people were really skeptical of. And now they really like it. And it's sort of proven itself. I mean, there's still people who are fiercely against it. But with writing, it's a little bit trickier. And again, the reactions are like very mixed, mostly negative. Again, where I think you will see the most change is with role-playing. You know, AI is always on. You can say whatever you like without feeling embarrassed. Something that I've noticed in reading transcripts of people who, like, on some of these sites where people role-play with bots, you could publish the role-play. You could publish the transcript. And there's just completely disinhibited. Like, they're just really just saying whatever, right? Not in a way that they're trolling or trying to break the bot. But it's like, you know, there's a certain etiquette when you role-play. And they're really just going for it. And I'll just be honest. This is particularly obvious with sexual role-plays, right? They'll just get straight to it. If the person is there to role-play sex, they'll just jump straight to the point. And you don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about being embarrassed. If it doesn't work out or, you know, you don't get the response you want, you start it over, you reprompt it, or you go to another bot. So I think it might take away from that social aspect. Not everybody likes role-playing with bots, but I think a lot of people do.[00:37:21] Henry: To me, this is like prime material for people to write novels about. But I don't see, I don't yet see a lot of people taking that up. Do you think, like, how likely is it, do you think, that some people from within this space will end up, in whatever way this looks like in the future, writing and publishing something like, you know, a straightforward literary, whatever the word is, novel, about this subculture and about these ways of existing? Do you think some people will, like, prompt themselves into being novelists, as it were?[00:38:00] Katherine: I mean, I definitely think that people will write about AI companions and chat bots. I think we're already seeing that to some degree. I think, you know, it seems that everyone is fascinated by emotional attachment to chat bots. And there's, like, just explosions of big pieces about this, because it's so new. And what's surprising to me is, like, there's very little judgment. You know, there's very few people who are like, this is dystopian, right? You see some of that, but most of it is like, well, it is real love, you know? That's been very surprising to me. Something that I could foresee is, and I think would be very ethically tricky and might cause some controversies, people trying to publish their role-playing transcripts. Which, you know, some fan fiction is, like, downstream of role-playing transcripts, and it'll be, like, a collaborative work, right? But it would be, like, very controversial if, you know, like, you and I had a Pride and Prejudice roleplay. And, you know, so we were sending emails back and forth or something, and then I collated all of that and published it as my own story, like, you know, with some edits or whatever. Like, that would be stealing your work. What I could see happening is someone having, like, a really good roleplay and wanting to save the transcript and then, you know, cleaning it up, maybe running it through AI, and the prompt is, you know, turn this into a story and, like, remove redundancies or, you know, whatever. And then it'd be, like, is that their work, right? Like, how much of that belongs to them?[00:39:38] Henry: But I can see something happening where it's, like, you know, in the 19th century, things that were supposed to be cheap and lowbrow, like crime stories and things like that, became a whole new genre of literature, right? And by the end of the 19th century, you've got detective fiction, science fiction, fantasy fiction. They're all flourishing. They've all had decades of really interesting work, and it becomes, like, maybe even the dominant form of fiction in the 20th century. Do you think there's scope for, like, you know, a weird novelist like Muriel Spark, a new one of her to come along and, like, turn this, whatever this is happening with these role plays and everything, turn that into some kind of new kind of fiction, whether it's created with the AI or not with the AI, like, you'll get both, right? Is this, like, everyone thinks the literary novel is exhausted, is this the way out? I don't know.[00:40:37] Katherine: I think that they, like, maybe, maybe, like, a new type of, like, pulp novel or something, you know, something that's, like, considered, like, something that's considered lowbrow, right, and maybe isn't always treated that way. But I'm curious, like, how, like, I'm imagining, you know, people printing, like, paper books or creating EPUBs, but do you mean, like, an interactive form of a novel, maybe, or, like, are you talking about people, like, I mean, what are you imagining, I guess, is my question? I think, so I think it could be, I think in terms of format, it could be all of those.[00:41:25] Henry: What I really want to see is how this interacts with audiobooks, because I think audiobooks have become, like, quietly very dominant in the reading habits of people who are typically reading, like, highbrow nonfiction, literary fiction, whatever. And I can sort of imagine a scenario where, I don't know how long this takes, but, like, a new kind of pulp fiction has been created, it's drawing on fandom, roleplay, AI, so we've got this new kind of sub-genre, and then that gets morphed, a bit like genre fiction in the 19th century, into something much more, quote-unquote, literary, and that could be, like, a boring, typical old book, or it could be some kind of audio thing where, like, you're interacting with it, and you're picking the route and whatever, or you could interact with it through your LLM. You see what I mean?There's all these different ways, right?[00:42:26] Katherine: So I think this stuff already exists. Oh, okay. Oh, so that, I think that maybe what I was confusing was, you know, like, imagining, like, a new style, or, you know?[00:42:37] Katherine: But all of these, so all of these things, so I don't know if they're books, I mean, that's actually a good question, like, is it a form of literature? Like, are these bots that people are roleplaying with, is that literature, right? Because there's set parameters, and when you create these characters, you can, you have a lot of control over designing them, what their world is, what the person talking to them will receive back, right? And there's audio versions of that. So it is, like, stepping into a pre-created world where there's, like, some kind of collaboration. And then on the other hand, there's been lots of novels that started off as fan fiction, and this is actually pretty common, a lot of these, you know, like, teen romances or whatever that get popular on TikTok, a lot of those come from people who had been writing fan fiction smut, right? And turned it into original work. And you can see the traces of whatever fandom they were operating in, in the work, whether it's, like, an allusion to a pre-existing character in another property, or it's just the style of writing, or, like, the way they express romantic intimacy. So both things exist in different forms. I wish I had asked a clarified question earlier, because I feel like we were talking in circles a little bit, so I wasn't quite sure what you were envisioning. But yeah, there's a lot of, I wondered also, like, how will reading change as these bots become more sophisticated? Right now, it's a lot of, like, it's a lot of, like, just, you know, like, teenagers messing around in their fandoms, or people doing erotic role-playing, right? But what is the literary version of that? And that's a very exciting question, and, like, interesting realm of inquiry.[00:44:38] Henry: It's a good, it's currently a very good, like, footnotes-on-demand service, right?[00:44:44] Katherine: Yeah.[00:44:45] Henry: Yeah, like, what the hell is this kind of carriage that they're talking about, or whatever? Do you think it'll, you think it's going to develop beyond that kind of thing?[00:44:53] Katherine: Um, yeah, I do. I mean, something really interesting, I don't know if you've heard about this, it's not literature, but the website Every, so they have, like, several different tech newsletters, and they have a service where they'll take all the research for a given article, and you can talk to an LLM about the stuff they didn't include in the piece. But, so, here's even another idea, like, let's say, you know, you take, like, Harry Potter or something, and then there's, like, a Harry Potter LLM, and you can ask questions about the book, or, like, you know, what's in the store that didn't, you know, that we didn't open, right? Metaphorically, you know, what's behind the scenes and all this stuff we don't see in the actual text? And ordinarily, that's where fandom steps in, and fans will fill in that white space for themselves with their headcanon, so the decisions they make about the whatever narrative universe they're choosing to step into. But maybe in AI, you know, the author can say, all right, these are all my notes, and this is all the, this is the whole world that I couldn't fit into the actual story.[00:46:07] Henry: How is AI changing the way you write?[00:46:12] Katherine: All right, so I correct my grammar a lot. My grammar is, like, atrocious, or at least it is in my own opinion. Maybe it's actually not, but so I'll check for grammatical errors, and then I use it all the time as, like, a search engine. So I love, like, the deep research function on chat GPT. It's, like, I never use Google anymore. So if I have, like, questions about something, or if I'm not sure that an argument makes sense, either I'll, like, run it by, you're like, all right, I'm arguing, you know, like, this, this, and this. Like, does this make sense in my own head, or does this actually make sense? So that's a common DF question to chat GPT.[00:47:05] Henry: But, like, are you thinking about, you know, are you going to be a different sort of writer? Are you going to write more or less of certain things? Are you thinking about how people will be reading less? You know, you're competing with the AIs, you've got to write for the AIs. Is it affecting you like that, or do you feel like what you do is reasonably immune?[00:47:26] Katherine: Um, no, you know, I don't feel like I'm competing with AI. I feel like I'm competing with other people, but I'm not competing with AI. And I'm not, I'm not writing for it. I, you know, I remember that, that Tyler Cowen quote, and I wasn't totally sure what he meant by that. I mean, like, I don't know. I'm definitely not writing, writing for it. I mean, does he mean, like, as the AI, like, learns about each person and learns that, you know, each, each writer is contributing to the conversation, you want to make sure it's easily parsable. So you could, you could be included in history or something as AI starts to write our history. Actually, I guess that's a good point, if that doesn't end up happening. But no, I don't, I don't consider either of those things.[00:48:17] Henry: Um, you wrote about, you wrote a short response to the Machine in the Garden essay that was famous on Substack a few months ago. You said, if you don't have copycats, then you're doing something wrong. Just make sure people don't forget you're the original article. How, how do you do that? How do you, how does that affect the way you organize your writing?[00:48:43] Katherine: Oh, man, I publish a lot. If I feel like something is my unique idea, I repeat it over and over and over again. Yeah, I mean, that's, I guess it also, I mean, a question I don't have the answer to is like, you know, people worry about being plagiarized from or copycats, but what happens, you know, what happens with AI, right? Like, how does AI change that equation? I don't know. But, you know, you just hope for the best, you know, that humanity, you know, just the fact of being human is enough.[00:49:26] Henry: Do you think that the internet and social media are making things worse in the culture generally, the way that people like Ted Gioia argue, or are you more optimistic?[00:49:39] Katherine: Um, I'm slightly more optimistic. I think Ted Gioia is as much too dismissive of technology to the extent that I feel like I've, I've almost like taken a contrarian position, you know, and I, I've been a little bit I've been a little bit more techno-optimist than I would have been normally, because I just like, can't all be bad, right? There's a lot of really good things about the internet and about social media. I think that we really undervalue the friendships people make. And then people will say, well, like, well, look at, you know, how so-and-so got screwed over, you know, whatever famous drama. It's like, those people will f**k you over in real life, you know, in the physical world, right? That's a human problem. That's not a technology problem. I think we also, I, particularly people like Ted Gioia and John Height and Freya India, I mean, and I like all these people. I'm not, you know, but I think they also are, like, I don't know where Ted Gioia lives, but John Height's in New York and Freya is in London, as far as I know. When they talk about going like phone-free or like using the internet less or screen-based childhoods, you know, I, like, I agree. Like, look, like, I don't want my son attached to a phone or something. But I also live in Chicago. There's like a ton of stuff going on. And every single day, no matter what the weather is, he can go, one, see other children and two, go do something really fun. And so can I, right? And that's because I live in Chicago. But if I lived in a small town in Texas, like I did, you know, 10 years ago, like I need the, I, like the internet was my lifeline. Then it's how I made friends. It's how I entertain myself. And it sucks that it was like that. But like, not everyone has the privilege of a rich culture in their immediate environment. You don't have, you know, like, it doesn't mean you have to be online 24 seven, but for social media is like very important for people in those situations. And it's, I think there's this weird binary in the discourse where it's like, you're either online all the time, you know, rotting your brain with just like, you know, nonstop live leak videos, right? Or you have no phone at all, right? But I think there's even like high volume usage that isn't, you know, what I just described, that it's beneficial for certain people in certain situations.[00:52:12] Henry: What is it that you like about Mirabi's poetry? You mentioned this earlier, but I wanted to ask you specifically.[00:52:18] Katherine: Yeah, so I discovered her in my senior year of college. And I didn't know what ecstatic love was. Like I had never, I was completely unfamiliar with that concept. So even on the conceptual level, I was like, so struck by this ability to feel love for a deity, feel love for something non-physical.[00:52:54] Henry: Do you admire other poets in that tradition like Rumi?[00:52:59] Katherine: I'm not as familiar with other poets in that tradition.[00:53:02] Henry: Okay. After fan fiction and AI, what will you do next?[00:53:08] Katherine: I'm working on a whole bunch of stuff. Another piece I'm working on is about techno-animism. So this idea of like, I don't believe that technology is literally insoled, but I think that it's maybe not a bad thing to treat it as if it was. And if we're going to be in such like a technologically rich environment, like maybe if we did see a little bit of life in it, it would be better for us psychologically, which is like kind of a hard thing to argue because I think it turns people off like immediately. And I think there's like a lot of fear around it, but it's a very sad and sterile world, right? If we think that we're around all this lifelessness. And I think that's why I'm so attracted to writing about ficto-sexuals and ficto-romance because I love this idea of being able to see life in something where other people don't see it.[00:54:15] Henry: Katherine Dee, thank you very much.[00:54:18] Katherine: Thank you for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

Tyler Cowen, an economist and writer, talks with me about how AI is changing writing and research. He explains a practical approach to using AI tools while maintaining your own voice. He explains the ways he incorporates LLMs into his daily work. We talk about how people will be writing fewer books in the future and how he believes truly human writing will stand out among AI-generated content. Enjoy! Redeem your free week of Lex at https://lex.page/perell 0:00 Intro 1:00 How Tyler Cowen uses AI everyday 6:06 Hallucinations are rapidly declining now 9:28 Writing authentically with AI 11:34 AI for critiquing your work 17:29 Future of decentralized AI networks 20:34 How and why DeepSeek 22:21 How AI changes writing 24:04 Why there will be less books in an AI era 26:34 Video content will rise 28:17 Start Writing with AI [LEX AD] 29:18 AI Writing a personal biography 30:46 How you can tactically learning about AI 37:12 How AI can help you visualize information 38:31 Creating the perfect AI prompt 42:10 AI's impact in the classroom 46:56 Studying The Bible with AI 49:11 Secrets 50:10 Why social networks are more important now 51:48 Mastering AI prompting 53:58 Mentoring young people 54:49 Would you invest 4 years in a PhD 59:59 Perplexity replaces Google 01:01:09 The different AI tools, explained 01:05:43 The potential of large context windows 01:08:11 AI usage inside companies I also made a website that helps you learn from the best writing of all-time: https://writingexamples.com/ Hey! I'm David Perell and I'm a writer, teacher, and podcaster. I believe writing online is one of the biggest opportunities in the world today. For the first time in human history, everybody can freely share their ideas with a global audience. I seek to help as many people publish their writing online as possible. Follow me  Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-write/id1700171470  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2DjMSboniFAeGA8v9NpoPv  X: https://x.com/david_perell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In today's episode of Theories of Everything, Tyler Cowen proposes that tariffs erode economic efficiency, ultimately passing much of the burden onto smaller countries such as Canada. Moreover, he suggests that the rise of AI and evolving institutional structures demand both intellectual humility and stronger mentorship for a more resilient academic landscape. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Links Mentioned: - Tyler's website: https://tylercowen.com/ - Tyler's blog: https://marginalrevolution.com/ - Tyler's podcast: https://conversationswithtyler.com/ - Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World (book): https://www.amazon.com/Talent-Identify-Energizers-Creatives-Winners/dp/1250275814 ---------------------- Timestamps: 00:00 - Tariffs and Trade Policies 01:21 Economic Consequences of Tariffs 03:07 Canada as a 51st State? 04:00 Canada's Defense Spending Debate 05:41 Positive Aspects of Hostility 06:35 Transitioning to Theoretical Economics 08:07 The Role of Tenure 11:43 The Academy's Strengths 13:04 Problems in Academia 14:08 Understanding the Grant System 15:10 The Need for Grants 16:33 Is the Academic System Broken? 17:18 Improving the Academic System 17:47 The Role of AI in Academia 22:39 Exploring Deep Research 29:32 Writing as Thinking 31:53 Truth in Worldviews 33:22 Patchwork Theory of Reality 34:11 Economics and Theories of Everything 35:07 Disagreements Among Intelligent People 37:48 The Concept of Metarationality 45:10 Cultivating Metarationality 46:55 Distinction Between Stamina and Grit 49:03 Risk-Taking in Academia 51:28 Interviewing Style 56:28 The Value of Preparation 1:13:33 Critiquing Nassim Taleb 1:18:23 Public Debates vs. Private Discussions 1:20:46 Focus on Money 1:22:45 Healthy vs. Unhealthy Ambition 1:23:49 Complexity in Theories of Everything 1:24:39 The Importance of Mentoring 1:26:08 Current Projects and Interests 1:31:15 Advice for Students 1:32:39 The Future of Networking 1:32:53 Closing Thoughts and Reflections -------------------- Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #economy #science #technology #news #tariffs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit wisdomofcrowds.live“I am done saying, ‘impossible',” announces Damir Marusic. At least, with regard to what Trump might do or could do in the near future. We are still in the midst of a major shakeup in the administrative state. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is combing through Treasury data and cutting government personnel. Trump is delaying the distribution of federal funds. Trump's policies have full support of the GOP-majority Congress. Meanwhile, the White House foreign policy agenda has upended three years of support for the Ukrainian war cause and, apart from that, is strikingly imperialistic — annexing Greenland and “owning” Gaza are stated objectives. Will Trump become a dictator?Shadi Hamid believes that Trump won't become a dictator — America is too big for a dictator — but he very will might signal the end of the “liberal” part of our liberal democracy. Damir fears that, by the end of Trump's second term, Congress will become a vestigial representative body with littler power, like the Senate in the Roman Empire. Both worry that the demise of democracy could come in a subtle, slow way — a “boiling frog” scenario.Shadi and Damir move on ask whether what's happening is what Trump's voters asked for. Why is Trump popular right now? Why do people want to break the state? Shadi says, “[Trump voters] believe that the system is fundamentally broken. Certainly, for a majority of Americans, the system is broken.” Damir partially agrees, but adds: “It's a lot more resentment-based … Not really an idea that ‘the system is broken' for me, but that it's populated by those people over there, and it's time to hurt them.” But why so much resentment? In our bonus section for paid subscribers, Shadi talks about the Democratic Party's potential to resist Trump and why the working class likes Trump (hint: it doesn't have to do with economics). Damir brings up the famous book, What's the Matter With Kansas by Thomas Frank, and explains why he thinks it misses the mark.Required Reading:* Shadi Hamid, “How to Break Up with the News” (Contentions).* CrowdSource about the possible constitutional crisis (WoC).* Democratic Party favorability ratings among young people (YouGov).* “How Biden is continuing to cancel student loan debt despite Supreme Court ruling” (CNN).* Tyler Cowen, “Trumpian policy as cultural policy” (Marginal Revolution).* Christine Emba's piece engaging with Cowen's article (WoC).* Shadi's post about the “The System is collapsing” meme (X).* David Polansky's reply to Shadi's post (X).* Lee Hockstader, “In Germany's elections, a last, best chance to hold off extremists” (Washington Post).* Thomas Frank, What's the Matter with Kansas (Amazon).Wisdom of Crowds is a platform challenging premises and understanding first principles on politics and culture. Join us!

Two weeks ago, America thought it was leading the AI race. Then out of nowhere, an unknown Chinese start-up turned the American stock market—and that assumption—on its head. DeepSeek, a Chinese company founded less than two years ago, released a free AI chatbot that rivals the most advanced available open AI products. And they did it despite America's prohibition on shipping our most advanced microchips to China.  America was caught flat-footed, asking how did this happen? And could we actually lose this tech war?  Now, if your understanding of computers stops at the term hard drive, don't worry. Today on Honestly, Bari has two incredible guests, experts on both AI and China, who are going to break it all down for you. Tyler Cowen is an economics professor, AI expert, and a must-read writer at his blog, Marginal Revolution. He is joined today by Geoffrey Cane, an expert on China and the author of The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.  Today, how this happened and what it means. And can America win the AI war with China? Header 6: The Free Press earns a commission from any purchases made through all book links in this article. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

OpenAI's new Deep Research, running on their new o3 model, pushes back against DeepSeek. Is this AGI? NOT YET. But close? Meanwhile, OmniHuman-1 is near perfect AI lip-sync and NVIDIA's robots are coming for us all! Plus, Replit's new iPhone app brings no code AI coding to the masses, ChatGPT does the same thing with o3-mini, Kai Cenat's Unitree Robot experience normalizes humanoid robots and SPECIAL GUEST HOST (YT HANDLE) Theoretically Media joins for the whole show and talks about new free AI music model Riffusion. Kevin is on vacay with his amazing family but will be back next week y'all! Join the discord: https://discord.gg/muD2TYgC8f Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AIForHumansShow AI For Humans Newsletter: https://aiforhumans.beehiiv.com/ Follow us for more on X @AIForHumansShow Join our TikTok @aiforhumansshow To book us for speaking, please visit our website: https://www.aiforhumans.show   // Show Links // ChatGPT Deep Research https://youtu.be/YkCDVn3_wiw?si=VZMn9I3I42kss-yk Deep Research Blog Post From by Casey Newton from Platformer https://www.platformer.news/chatgpt-deep-research-hands-on/ Tyler Cowen on Deep Research https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/deep-research.html#comments OpenAI has a new font https://youtu.be/k3d_xeVxEOE?si=zouxcSyK25lbNZ2w Sam Altman on how Deep Research changes labor https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1886297223417458714 Humanity's Last Exam Creator Tweet About Deep Research https://x.com/DanHendrycks/status/1886213523900109011 New Joint Venture With Softbank & OpenAI https://apnews.com/article/ai-softbank-openai-technology-7abf34541acc2d48bd58dff2a73d9e6f Softbank's Masa talks about AI not wanting to eat us https://x.com/tsarnick/status/1886310933191852096 o3-mini is out and free to use https://openai.com/index/openai-o3-mini/ New Replit iPhone App https://x.com/amasad/status/1886859253648122181 OmniHuman-1 https://omnihuman-lab.github.io/ MatAnyone https://x.com/_akhaliq/status/1886479919443579037  Meta's Video Jam  https://x.com/hila_chefer/status/1886791105380851917 Tim Urban Tweet about Robots https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1886548288775549406 Ronaldo / Kobe / Lebron Robot https://x.com/TheHumanoidHub/status/1886679733460721875 https://x.com/DrJimFan/status/1886824152272920642 Kai Cenat Hangs With His Robot https://x.com/CyberRobooo/status/1886297302882468182 Lord of the Rings: Kings of the Cage https://www.reddit.com/r/aivideo/comments/1iedy29/the_lord_of_the_ring_and_the_king_of_the_cage ASCII Art Generator Made with o3-mini https://x.com/bbssppllvv/status/1886566254565061016 NeuralViz's Glauorn Dating Show https://x.com/NeuralViz/status/1886233002318966916 Tim's Video on Riffusion https://youtu.be/Vv7tYlljiuU?si=jU6QC1ZcAJO9EJFw  

Tyler Cowen discusses his book on the greatest economists of all time, evaluates the contributions of macroeconomics, and touches on topics such as stagnation, AI, fertility, and the future of academia and societal trends. —

Get more notes at https://podcastnotes.org Time Saved This Week: 8 Hours, 53 Minutes​NEW Premium Notes​​David Deutsch: Chemical Scum that Dream of Distant Quasars | TED ​​In this TEDTalk from 2005, David Deutsch (​@DavidDeutschOxf​) was tasked with going out on a limb and saying something surprising. The result? A profound exploration titled Chemical Scum That Dream of Distant Quasars where he redefines humanity's place in the universe and celebrates the limitless potential of human knowledge. Though the title might sound nerdy or even a bit intimidating, these Premium Podcast Notes break down every element of this groundbreaking TED Talk, revealing powerful principles of problem-solving that could transform how you see your role in fostering the endless growth of knowledge and shaping a better future.Scott Galloway on How Stoicism Can Benefit Young Men | Daily Stoic with Ryan HolidayScott Galloway on "Intergenerational Theft" and why Stoicism can help young men who are struggling now more than ever. Go Premium to learn why young men are struggling, how to protect the middle class, the value of being a Nation, how to be successful, truths about money and more.​Mike Cernovich – Escaping Sam Altman's Techno-Slavery | Zero Hour with James Poulos​Mike Cernovich discusses Sam Altman's Techno-Gnostic archetype, secular fatalism, Greco-Roman principles, consciousness, and more. This is not your average podcast and not to be missed.​Upgrade to ​Premium ​to Get 3 Premium Notes Every Week, the Full Newsletter, Playable Timestamps, AI Powered Answers, Unlock 500+ Premium Posts, No Ads and MORE​Go PREMIUMTop Premium Takeaways Of The Week​David Deutsch: Chemical Scum that Dream of Distant Quasars | TED ​​​Is Earth Special? Two Possible Theories…​* Theory #1: Earth is very untypical and uniquely suited...* “Spaceship Earth” = ...* If we destroy the ...* Theory #2: Earth is typical and human beings are not ...* “The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of ...” – Stephen Hawking* Key Takeaway: “So, especially if you regard them as deep truths to form cornerstones of your world view and inform your life-decisions, they appear somewhat in ...” – David Deutsch​Earth is Very Not Typical: ​“Deep, intergalactic space is completely dark. It is so dark that if you were to look at the nearest star to you, and that star were to explode as a supernova, and you were staring directly at it at the moment when its light reached you, then ...”– David Deutsch​Humans are Very Special Chemical Scum: ​“Therefore we are chemical scum that's different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing ...” – David Deutsch* “The fact that the laws of physics permit – and even mandate – ...” – David Deutsch​3 pre-requisite resources for the open-ended creation of knowledge:​* Matter: the growth of knowledge is a ...* Energy: the inputs required to ...* Evidence: the laws of physics saturate the ...​Resources are abundant, knowledge is scarce:​ If something isn't forbidden by the ...​Our Sacred Responsibility as Humans: ​“Species go extinct. All the time. Civilizations end. The vast majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed are now history. If we want to be exceptions ...” – David Deutsch​Scott Galloway on How Stoicism Can Benefit Young Men | Daily Stoic with Ryan Holiday​​The Epicenter of Today's Problem:​ For the first time in the nation's three-century history, a thirty-year-old person today is doing worse than ...* “When the majority of kids aren't doing as ...” – Scott Galloway​The nation is a feature, not a bug:​ The most successful people in tech should have more ...​Understanding Power Laws and the Pareto Principle:​ A very small percentage of people will ...​Advice for young people on how to be successful​: Put yourself in rooms of ...​The trope “money can't buy happiness” is a myth:​ Studies show that middle-income people are ...​Young Men Are In Trouble: ​Young men in America are ...* 4x more likely to kill themselves* Four out of five suicides involve men* There is a certain amount of resentment and ...​Understanding Stoicism: ​Stoicism is a philosophy that teaches ...​Why Billionaires Become Billionaires (narrative violation): ​Generally, billionaires are good high-character people; one of ...​Emotional advice from Scott: ​* If something moves you, lean into that emotion and learn how to cry* Figure out a way to ...* Lean into feeling your ...* To not lean into ...* You will get to know ...​Mike Cernovich – Escaping Sam Altman's Techno-Slavery | Zero Hour with James Poulos​​The Fallacy of Pendulum Theory:​ There is no law of the universe that says things have to swing back and forth between ...* The political right tends to have a certain ...​America has submitted to its base-lower impulses ​* Book recommendation:​ Nicomachean Ethics​ by Aristotle* Many Americans have lost touch with what ...* It would be one thing if people turned away from God but...​The Source of Society's Problems:​ Alienation from the divine is...* Understand that there are ...​Techno-Gnostics​ refers to a perspective or philosophy combining elements of technology with ...* We can't just take our consciousness, ...​The Harsh Truth About Sam Altman: ​“Sam Altman is a gnostic, but he doesn't realize that he's 2,000 years too late. Hating your body and thinking that your body is gross is not some sort of new thing.” – Mike Cernovich* “Sam Altman hates being a human and wishes he didn't live in a body and wants to upload himself into a Warhammer machine. People like that – I think we should dismiss ...” – Mike Cernovich* Like Altman, the materialistic Soviets also hated the body and ...​​Upgrade to Premium to Read the Full Newsletter, Playable Timestamps, AI Powered Answers, Unlock 300+ Premium Posts, No Ads and MORE​​Go PREMIUM​Jensen Huang – Founder of Nvidia | Founders Podcast with David Senra ​What "Strategy" Actually Means: Strategy is not words; strategy is actionWhat "Mission" Actually Means: The Mission is the Boss. Nvidia exists to serve a mission and not for the sake of perpetuating its existenceShip the Whole Cow: Nvidia found ways to package and sell hardware that it previously would have discarded; this helped it mitigate low-end market competition and insulate itself from the innovator's dilemmaComplacency kills: The enemy is not the competition, but the company falling victim to complacency – both real and imaginedJensen's keys to success:(1) He puts in more effort than his peers and (2) He has a willingness to tolerate more suffering than those around him* Greatness does not come from intelligence; it comes from character, which can only be earned from overcoming adversities and developing perseveranceHistory's greatest founders spend a lot of time teaching within their organization* Founders Thread: “If you're not spending 90% of your time teaching, then you're not doing your job.” – James Sinegal of Costco* Founders Thread – Apple is Steve Jobs with 10,000 lives* The best founders are evangelists for their companies; examples include Steve Jobs,​ Palmer Luckey​, and Sir James DysonThe Whiteboard Method: Using a whiteboard is the primary form of communication in Nvidia meetings; everyone must demonstrate their thought process in real-time, and be willing to eventually erase an idea – no matter how good it isGo Fast or Die: “You can drive great people away by making the speed of decision-making really slow. Why would great people stay in an organization where they can't get things done? They look around and say, ‘Hey, I love the mission, but I can't get my job done because the speed of decision-making is too slow.”Value of A flat organizational structure(1) Enables employees to act with more independence and (2) Filters out low-performing employees who are unaccustomed to thinking for themselvesF Your Feelings: Jensen tortures people into greatness: The quality of the work is the most important thing, not people's feelings* “I wake up every morning, look at myself in the mirror, and say: ‘You suck.'” – Jensen Huang* “I don't like giving up on people. I'd rather torture them into greatness.” – Jensen HuangThe Speed of Light in Practice:* Break down each component task of a project and assign a target time to completion for it* Assume no delays, no queues, and no downtime so that you can set the theoretical maximum, i.e. the Speed of Light* Instead of judging performance relative to your past performance or against the competition, judge yourself against the speed of light and the law of physicsTop Five Things (T5T) email* Every employee, at all levels, sends an email with the top five things that they are working on, or the top five things they are observing in the market (customer pain points, a competitor's strategy, new developments in technology, or project delays)* Each email contains five bullet points, and the first word in each bullet is an action word, such as finalize, build, or secure* Each department labels each email in the email's subject lineWinston Churchill Would have Loved Twitter/X– He limited the size of memos that his staff could send him and told them that it was “slothful” not to compress your thoughtsHenry Singleton, cofounder of Teledyne, on planning:* 1. Flexibility over rigid plans* 2. Daily steering over long-term planning* 3. Excessive planning constraints freedom of action* 4. Recognize that the world is complex and avoid counterproductive planning* 5. Be skeptical of the herdEducating the Marketplace: If you are doing something brand-new, you must spend a lot of time and resources on educating the market about your new idea or invention​ Dr. Brian Keating: Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Huberman Lab ​Fun fact #1: We didn't have accurate clocks until the 1700s. Before that, keeping time on a ship or in different time zones was nearly impossibleFun fact #2: The Gutenberg Bible was used as a standard for vision quality in the past. They would test eyesight by making people read it from a certain distance since it had a fixed font size. This was way before modern eye chartsPineal Gland (get rid of that flouride): Most animals have a pineal gland that secretes melatonin based on light. “This is the intrinsic clock-keeping mechanism of all mammalian species and reptiles.” – Huberman* Birds have thin skulls, so light can pass right through to the pineal gland* Humans are different: Our pineal gland is buried deep in the brain, so light doesn't reach it directly. Instead, light info gets passed from the eyes through a pathway to the pineal gland.Gender Symmetry: Women are more symmetrical than menEyes Are Outside Brains: Retinas, which line the back of the eyes, are part of the central nervous system and were squeezed out of the brain during early development* Eyes are the only portion of your brain that reside outside the cranial vaultHubble made two major discoveries: that the Milky Way isn't the entire universe, and that the universe is expanding“The Big Bang is not the origin of time and space, it's the origin of the first elements in the periodic table.” – BrianThe best places in the Northern Hemisphere to see spectacular nighttime views:* Yosemite High Country in August for meteor showers would be a great option* Anywhere 20-40 miles from a large city should be fine. Even in San Diego, there are two dark sky communities: Julian and Anza-Borrego DesertPanspermia—the idea that life might've come from elsewhere in the universe. Basically, genetic material could've traveled from one astronomical object to another. This is not something scientists can prove right now, especially with the lack of life evidence elsewhere​Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety | Huberman Lab Essentials ​How breathing affects heart rate:* Inhale:* When you inhale (through the nose or mouth), the diaphragm moves down, and the lungs expand* The heart gets slightly bigger in that expanded space* This increased space causes blood to move more slowly through the heart* A group of neurons called the sinoatrial node in the heart detects the slower blood flow and sends a signal to the brain* The brain then signals the heart to speed up* A longer or more vigorous inhale will make your heart beat faster* Exhaling:* When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, and the heart becomes smaller and more compact* Blood flows faster through the smaller heart space* The sinoatrial node detects the faster blood flow and signals the brain* The parasympathetic nervous system sends a signal back to the heart to slow down* A longer or more vigorous exhale will make your heart rate slow downThe physiological sigh: two deep inhales through the nose (no exhale in between), followed by a full exhale to the lungs empty (through the mouth) is the fastest way to calm downWhy short-term stress is good:* Pupil dilation and optical changes help enhance vision* Heart rate quickens, improving blood flow and readiness* Cognition sharpens, bringing certain brain areas online to focus better* Narrowed focus supports duration-path-outcome analysis. It allows you to evaluate your environment and decide what to do* It primes the immune system to combat bacterial or viral infectionsTool: eye dilation* Without moving your head or eyes, shift from tunnel vision to panoramic vision (see more of your surroundings)* This activates circuits in the brainstem associated with calming and reduces alertness/stress* For example: While running or cycling at max capacity or 80–90% of your maximum effort, practice dilating your gazeBest tools to modulate long-term stress:* Regular exercise (who would've thought!)* Prioritizing good sleep* Using real-time tools to manage stress response (e.g., breathing exercises)* Social connection (one of the most effective ways to combat long-term stress)​Theanine​ (L-theanine):* Recommended dose: 100–200 mg, 30–60 minutes before sleep* Benefits:* Enhances the transition into sleep and improves sleep depth.* Increases GABA, an inhibitory neurotransmitter* Reduces activity in the forebrain, calming thinking and ruminative systems* Stress and anxiety:* Proven to significantly increase relaxation* Shown to have a minor yet notable effect on anxiety​Tyler Cowen – Humans Are The Bottleneck to AI Progress | Dwarkesh Patel ​Cost disease and AI: Cost disease happens when wages rise across the board due to productivity gains in some industries, but sectors like healthcare or education, where productivity is harder to improve, still need to pay higher wages—making their costs go upTech diffusion is universally pretty slow: While people in the Bay Area are the smartest, most dynamic, and most ambitious, they tend to overvalue intelligenceSome kind of demoralization may materialize in the AI future: Full employment is likely to remain, but it is not clear what humans will be doing or how happy it will make us.The Risks of Progress: War should always be the main concern during a period of rapid technological progress; throughout history, when new technologies emerge, they are turned into instruments of war, and terrible things can happenPREMIUM:* ​David Deutsch: Chemical Scum that Dream of Distant Quasars | TED 2005​* ​Scott Galloway on How Stoicism Can Benefit Young Men | Daily Stoic with Ryan Holiday​* ​Mike Cernovich – Escaping Sam Altman's Techno-Slavery | Zero Hour with James Poulos​FREE:* ​Jensen Huang – Founder of Nvidia | Founders Podcast with David Senra​* ​Dr. Brian Keating: Charting the Architecture of the Universe & Human Life | Huberman Lab​* ​Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety | Huberman Lab Essentials​* ​Tyler Cowen – Humans Are The Bottleneck to AI Progress | Dwarkesh Patel​ Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

The Lunar Society: Read the notes at at podcastnotes.org. Don't forget to subscribe for free to our newsletter, the top 10 ideas of the week, every Monday --------- I interviewed Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference 2024. As always, I had a blast. This is my fourth interview with him – and yet I'm always hearing new stuff.We talked about why he thinks AI won't drive explosive economic growth, the real bottlenecks on world progress, him now writing for AIs instead of humans, and the difficult relationship between being cultured and fostering growth – among many other things in the full episode.Thanks to the Roots of Progress Institute (with special thanks to Jason Crawford and Heike Larson) for such a wonderful conference, and to FreeThink for the videography.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.SponsorsI'm grateful to Tyler for volunteering to say a few words about Jane Street. It's the first time that a guest has participated in the sponsorship. I hope you can see why Tyler and I think so highly of Jane Street. To learn more about their open rules, go to janestreet.com/dwarkersh.Timestamps(00:00:00) Economic Growth and AI(00:14:57) Founder Mode and increasing variance(00:29:31) Effective Altruism and Progress Studies(00:33:05) What AI changes for Tyler(00:44:57) The slow diffusion of innovation(00:49:53) Stalin's library(00:52:19) DC vs SF vs EU Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

The Lunar Society Key Takeaways  While the AIs will be smart and conscientious, they will still face human bottlenecks, such as bureaucracies and committees at universitiesWe may not notice AI productivity gains on shorter timeframes: Even if they only boost economic growth by 0.5% per year, that is a massive productivity gain over 30-40 years! “There are going to be bottlenecks all along the way. It's going to be a tough slug – like the printing press, like electricity. The people who study diffusion of new technologies never think there will be rapid takeoff.” – Tyler CowenOpposition to AI will only increase as the technology starts to change what the world looks like There is increasing variance in the human distribution: Young people at the top are doing much better and are more impressive than they were in earlier times. The very bottom of the distribution is also getting better. But the “thick middle” is getting worse.Since humans are an input “other than the AI”, then humans will rise in marginal value, even if we will have to learn to do different thingsOn Popularity and Progress: There is a danger that as a thing becomes more popular, at the margin it becomes much worseThe Tyler Cowen Investment Philosophy: Buy and hold, diversify, hold on tight, make sure you have some cheap hobbies and can cook Tech diffusion is universally pretty slow: While people in the Bay Area are the smartest, most dynamic, and most ambitious, they tend to overvalue intelligence On progress: War should always be the main concern during a period of rapid technological progress; throughout history, when new technologies emerge, they are turned into instruments of war – and terrible things can happen  Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgI interviewed Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference 2024. As always, I had a blast. This is my fourth interview with him – and yet I'm always hearing new stuff.We talked about why he thinks AI won't drive explosive economic growth, the real bottlenecks on world progress, him now writing for AIs instead of humans, and the difficult relationship between being cultured and fostering growth – among many other things in the full episode.Thanks to the Roots of Progress Institute (with special thanks to Jason Crawford and Heike Larson) for such a wonderful conference, and to FreeThink for the videography.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.SponsorsI'm grateful to Tyler for volunteering to say a few words about Jane Street. It's the first time that a guest has participated in the sponsorship. I hope you can see why Tyler and I think so highly of Jane Street. To learn more about their open rules, go to janestreet.com/dwarkersh.Timestamps(00:00:00) Economic Growth and AI(00:14:57) Founder Mode and increasing variance(00:29:31) Effective Altruism and Progress Studies(00:33:05) What AI changes for Tyler(00:44:57) The slow diffusion of innovation(00:49:53) Stalin's library(00:52:19) DC vs SF vs EU Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

The Lunar Society Key Takeaways  While the AIs will be smart and conscientious, they will still face human bottlenecks, such as bureaucracies and committees at universitiesWe may not notice AI productivity gains on shorter timeframes: Even if they only boost economic growth by 0.5% per year, that is a massive productivity gain over 30-40 years! “There are going to be bottlenecks all along the way. It's going to be a tough slug – like the printing press, like electricity. The people who study diffusion of new technologies never think there will be rapid takeoff.” – Tyler CowenOpposition to AI will only increase as the technology starts to change what the world looks like There is increasing variance in the human distribution: Young people at the top are doing much better and are more impressive than they were in earlier times. The very bottom of the distribution is also getting better. But the “thick middle” is getting worse.Since humans are an input “other than the AI”, then humans will rise in marginal value, even if we will have to learn to do different thingsOn Popularity and Progress: There is a danger that as a thing becomes more popular, at the margin it becomes much worseThe Tyler Cowen Investment Philosophy: Buy and hold, diversify, hold on tight, make sure you have some cheap hobbies and can cook Tech diffusion is universally pretty slow: While people in the Bay Area are the smartest, most dynamic, and most ambitious, they tend to overvalue intelligence On progress: War should always be the main concern during a period of rapid technological progress; throughout history, when new technologies emerge, they are turned into instruments of war – and terrible things can happen  Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgI interviewed Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference 2024. As always, I had a blast. This is my fourth interview with him – and yet I'm always hearing new stuff.We talked about why he thinks AI won't drive explosive economic growth, the real bottlenecks on world progress, him now writing for AIs instead of humans, and the difficult relationship between being cultured and fostering growth – among many other things in the full episode.Thanks to the Roots of Progress Institute (with special thanks to Jason Crawford and Heike Larson) for such a wonderful conference, and to FreeThink for the videography.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.SponsorsI'm grateful to Tyler for volunteering to say a few words about Jane Street. It's the first time that a guest has participated in the sponsorship. I hope you can see why Tyler and I think so highly of Jane Street. To learn more about their open rules, go to janestreet.com/dwarkersh.Timestamps(00:00:00) Economic Growth and AI(00:14:57) Founder Mode and increasing variance(00:29:31) Effective Altruism and Progress Studies(00:33:05) What AI changes for Tyler(00:44:57) The slow diffusion of innovation(00:49:53) Stalin's library(00:52:19) DC vs SF vs EU Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

Economist Tyler Cowen on historical lessons, populism today, and the philosophical debates within libertarianism.

I interviewed Tyler Cowen at the Progress Conference 2024. As always, I had a blast. This is my fourth interview with him – and yet I'm always hearing new stuff.We talked about why he thinks AI won't drive explosive economic growth, the real bottlenecks on world progress, him now writing for AIs instead of humans, and the difficult relationship between being cultured and fostering growth – among many other things in the full episode.Thanks to the Roots of Progress Institute (with special thanks to Jason Crawford and Heike Larson) for such a wonderful conference, and to FreeThink for the videography.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.SponsorsI'm grateful to Tyler for volunteering to say a few words about Jane Street. It's the first time that a guest has participated in the sponsorship. I hope you can see why Tyler and I think so highly of Jane Street. To learn more about their open rules, go to janestreet.com/dwarkersh.Timestamps(00:00:00) Economic Growth and AI(00:14:57) Founder Mode and increasing variance(00:29:31) Effective Altruism and Progress Studies(00:33:05) What AI changes for Tyler(00:44:57) The slow diffusion of innovation(00:49:53) Stalin's library(00:52:19) DC vs SF vs EU Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkeshpatel.com/subscribe

Yascha Mounk and Tyler Cowen also discuss AI and the state of the world economy. Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist, and blogger. Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University, and is the co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the blog Marginal Revolution. In this week's conversation, Yascha Mounk and Tyler Cowen discuss the likely economic futures of Europe, Asia, and Africa; how the United States should approach competition with China; and what role young people should ascribe to personal financial advancement in their career choices. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: podcast@persuasion.community  Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by Jack Shields, and Brendan Ruberry Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tyler and I spoke about view quakes from fiction, Proust, Bleak House, the uses of fiction for economists, the problems with historical fiction, about about drama in interviews, which classics are less read, why Jane Austen is so interesting today, Patrick Collison, Lord of the Rings… but mostly we talked about Shakespeare. We talked about Shakespeare as a thinker, how Romeo doesn't love Juliet, Girard, the development of individualism, the importance and interest of the seventeenth century, Trump and Shakespeare's fools, why Julius Cesar is over rated, the most under rated Shakespeare play, prejudice in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare as an economic thinker. We covered a lot of ground and it was interesting for me throughout. Here are some excerpts. Full transcript below.Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they're trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.Henry The other thing I'd take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.And.Henry Let's say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?Tyler It'll be terrible. It'll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.Transcript (prepared by AI)Henry Today, I am talking to Tyler Cowen, the economist, blogger, columnist, and author. Tyler works at George Mason University. He writes Marginal Revolution. He is a columnist at Bloomberg, and he has written books like In Praise of Commercial Culture and The Age of the Infovore. We are going to talk about literature and Shakespeare. Tyler, welcome.Tyler Good to chat with you, Henry.Henry So have you ever had a view quake from reading fiction?Tyler Reading fiction has an impact on you that accumulates over time. It's not the same as reading economics or philosophy, where there's a single, discrete idea that changes how you view the world. So I think reading the great classics in its entirety has been a view quake for me. But it's not that you wake up one morning and say, oh, I turned to page 74 in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, and now I realize that, dot, dot, dot. That's a yes and a no for an answer.Henry So you've never read Bleak House and thought, actually, I do see things slightly differently about Victorian London or the history of the –?Tyler Well, that's not a view quake. Certainly, that happens all the time, right? Slightly differently how you see Victorian London. But your overall vision of the world, maybe fiction is one of the three or four most important inputs. And again, I think it's more about the entirety of it and the diversity of perspectives. I think reading Proust maybe had the single biggest impact on me of any single work of fiction if I had to select one. And then when I was younger, science fiction had a quite significant impact on me. But I don't think it was the fictional side of science fiction that mattered, if that makes sense to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was the models embodied in the stories, like, oh, the three laws of robotics. Well, I thought, well, what should those laws be like? I thought about that a good deal. So that would be another part of the qualified answer.Henry And what was it with Proust? The idea that people only care about what other people think or sexuality or consciousness?Tyler The richness of the internal life, the importance of both expectation and memory, the evanescence of actual events, a sense of humor.Henry It showed you just how significant these things are.Tyler And how deeply they can be felt and expressed. That's right. And there were specific pages early on in Swan's Way where it just hit me. So that's what I would say. Bleak House, I don't think, changed my views at all. It's one of my three or four favorite novels. I think it's one of the great, great, greats, as you have written yourself. But the notion that, well, the law is highly complex and reality is murky and there are all these deep mysteries, that all felt very familiar to me. And I had already read some number of newer sort of pseudo-Victorian novels that maybe do those themes in a more superficial way, but they introduce those themes to you. So you read Bleak House and you just say, well, I've imbibed this already, but here's the much better version of it.Henry One of the things I got from Bleak House, which it took me a couple of reads to get to, was how comfortable Dickens was with being quite a rational critic of the legal system and quite a credulous believer in spontaneous combustion and other things.Tyler Did Dickens actually believe in spontaneous combustion or is that a plot device? Like Gene Roddenberry doesn't actually believe in the transporter or didn't, as far as weHenry know. No, I think he believed. Yeah. Yeah. He defends it in the preface. Yeah.Tyler So it's not so confusing that there's not going to be a single behavioral model that captures deviations from rationality. So you end up thinking you ought to travel more, you ought to take in a lot of diverse different sources about our human beings behave, including from sociology, from anthropology. That makes it harder to be an economist, I would say it scatters your attention. You probably end up with a richer understanding of reality, but I'm not sure it's good for your research. It's probably bad for it.Henry It's not a good career move.Tyler It's not good for focus, but focus maybe can be a bit overrated.Henry Why are you more interested in fiction than other sort of people of a broadly rational disposition?Tyler Well, I might challenge the view that I'm of a broadly rational disposition. It's possible that all humans are roughly equally irrational, madmen aside, but if you mean the rationality community as one finds it in San Francisco, I think they're very mono in their approach to reasoning and that tends to limit the interests of many of them, not all, in fiction and travel. People are regional thinkers and in that region, San Francisco, there is incredible talent. It's maybe the most talented place in the world, but there's not the same kind of diversity of talents that you would find in London or New York and that somehow spreads to the broader ethos and it doesn't get people interested in fiction or for that matter, the visual arts very much.Henry But even in London, if I meet someone who's an economist or has an economics degree or whatever, the odds that they've read Bleak House or something are just so small.Tyler Bleak House is not that well read anymore, but I think an economist in London is likely to be much more well read than an economist in the Bay Area. That would be my prediction. You would know better than I would.Henry How important has imaginative literature been to you relative to other significant writers like philosophers or theoretical economists or something?Tyler Well, I'm not sure what you mean by imaginative literature. I think when I was 17, I read Olaf Stapleton, a great British author and Hegelian philosopher, and he was the first and first man and star maker, and that had a significant impact on me. Just how many visions you could put into a single book and have at least most of them cohere and make sense and inspire. That's one of the most imaginative works I've ever read, but people mean different things by that term.Henry How objectively can we talk about art?Tyler I think that becomes a discussion about words rather than about art. I would say I believe in the objective when it comes to aesthetics, but simply because we have no real choice not to. People actually, to some extent, trust their aesthetic judgments, so why not admit that you do and then fight about them? Trying to interject some form of extreme relativism, I think it's just playing a game. It's not really useful. Now, is art truly objective in the final metaphysical sense, in the final theory of the universe? I'm not sure that question has an answer or is even well-formulated, but I would just say let's just be objectivists when it comes to art. Why not?Henry What is wrong with historical fiction?Tyler Most of it bores me. For instance, I don't love Hilary Mantel and many very intelligent people think it's wonderful. I would just rather read the history. It feels like an in-between thing to me. It's not quite history. It's not quite fiction. I don't like biopics either when I go to the cinema. Yeah, I think you can build your own combination of extremes from history and fiction and get something better.Henry You don't have any historical fiction that you like, Penelope Fitzgerald, Tolstoy?Tyler Any is a strong word. I don't consider Tolstoy historical fiction. There's a historical element in it, as there is with say Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate or actually Dickens for that matter, but it's not driven by the history. I think it's driven by the characters and the story. Grossman comes somewhat closer to being historical fiction, but even there, I wouldn't say that it is.Henry It was written so close to the events though, right?Tyler Sure. It's about how people deal with things and what humanity means in extreme circumstances and the situations. I mean, while they're more than just a trapping, I never feel one is plodding through what happened in the Battle of Stalingrad when I read Grossman, say.Henry Yeah. Are there diminishing returns to reading fiction or what are the diminishing returns?Tyler It depends what you're doing in life. There's diminishing returns to most things in the sense that what you imbibe from your teen years through, say, your 30s will have a bigger impact on you than most of what you do later. I think that's very, very hard to avoid, unless you're an extreme late bloomer, to borrow a concept from you. As you get older, rereading gets better, I would say much better. You learn there are more things you want to read and you fill in the nooks and crannies of your understanding. That's highly rewarding in a way where what you read when you were 23 could not have been. I'm okay with that bargain. I wouldn't say it's diminishing returns. I would say it's altering returns. I think also when you're in very strange historical periods, reading fiction is more valuable. During the Obama years, it felt to me that reading fiction was somewhat less interesting. During what you might call the Trump years, and many other strange things are going on with AI, people trying to strive for immortality, reading fiction is much more valuable because it's more limited what nonfiction can tell you or teach you. I think right now we're in a time where the returns to reading more fiction are rapidly rising in a good way. I'm not saying it's good for the world, but it's good for reading fiction.Henry Do you cluster read your fiction?Tyler Sometimes, but not in general. If I'm cluster reading my fiction, it might be because I'm cluster reading my nonfiction and the fiction is an accompaniment to that. Say, Soviet Russia, I did some reading when I was prepping for Stephen Kotkin and for Russ Roberts and Vasili Grossman, but I don't, when it comes to fiction per se, cluster read it. No, I don't think you need to.Henry You're not going to do like, I'm reading Bleak House, so I'll do three other 1852 novels or three other Dickens novels or something like that.Tyler I don't do it, but I suspect it's counterproductive. The other Dickens novels will bore you more and they'll seem worse, is my intuition. I think the question is how you sequence works of very, very high quality. Say you just finished Bleak House, what do you pick up next? It should be a work of nonfiction, but I think you've got to wait a while or maybe something quite different, sort of in a way not different, like a detective story or something that won't challenge what has been cemented into your mind from Bleak House.Henry Has there been a decline of reading the classics?Tyler What I observe is a big superstar effect. I think a few authors, such as Jane Austen and Shakespeare, are more popular. I'm not completely sure they're more read, but they're more focal and more vivid. There are more adaptations of them. Maybe people ask GPT about them more. Really quite a few other works are much less read than would have been the case, say as recently as the 1970s or 1980s. My guess is, on the whole, the great works of fiction are much less read, but a few of them achieve this oversized reputation.Henry Why do you think that is?Tyler Attention is more scarce, perhaps, and social clustering effects are stronger through the internet. That would just be a guess.Henry It's not that we're all much more Jane Austen than we used to be?Tyler No, if anything, the contrary. Maybe because we're less Jane Austen, it's more interesting, because in, say, a Jane Austen novel, there will be sources of romantic tension not available to us through contemporary TV shows. The question, why don't they just sleep together, well, there's a potential answer in a Jane Austen story. In the Israeli TV show, Srugim, which is about modern Orthodox Jews, there's also an answer, but in most Hollywood TV, there's no answer. They're just going to sleep together, and it can become very boring quite rapidly.Henry Here's a reader question. Why is the market for classics so good, but nobody reads them? I think what they're saying is a lot of people aren't actually reading Shakespeare, but they still agree he's the best, so how can that be?Tyler A lot of that is just social conformity bias, but I see more and more people, and I mean intellectuals here, challenging the quality of Shakespeare. On the internet, every possible opinion will be expressed, is one way to put it. I think the market for classics is highly efficient in the following sense, that if you asked, say, GPT or Claude, which are the most important classics to read, that literally everything listed would be a great book. You could have it select 500 works, and every one of them would really be very good and interesting. If you look at Harold Bloom's list at the back of the Western canon, I think really just about every one of those is quite worthwhile, and that we got to that point is, to me, one of the great achievements of the contemporary world, and it's somewhat under-praised, because you go back in earlier points of time, and I think it's much less efficient, the market for criticism, if you would call it that.Henry Someone was WhatsAppping me the other day that GPT's list of 50 best English poets was just awful, and I said, well, you're using GPT4, o1 gives you the right list.Tyler Yeah, and o1 Pro may give you a slightly better list yet, or maybe the prompt has to be better, but it's interesting to me how many people, they love to attack literary criticism as the greatest of all villains, oh, they're all frustrated writers, they're all post-modernists, they're all extreme left-wingers. All those things might even be true to some extent, but the system as a whole, I would say completely has delivered, and especially people on the political and intellectual right, they often don't realize that. Just any work you want to read, if you put in a wee bit of time and go to a shelf of a good academic library, you can read fantastic criticism of it that will make your understanding of the work much better.Henry I used to believe, when I was young, I did sort of believe that the whole thing, oh, the Western canon's dying and everyone's given up on it, and I'm just so amazed now that the opposite has happened. It's very, very strong.Tyler I'm not sure how strong it is. I agree its force in discourse is strong, so something like, well, how often is it mentioned in my group chats? That's strongly rising, and that delights me, but that's a little different from it being strong, and I'm not sure how strong it is.Henry In an interview about your book Talent, you said this, “just get people talking about drama. I feel you learn a lot. It's not something they can prepare for. They can't really fake it. If they don't understand the topic, you can just switch to something else.”Tyler Yeah, that's great advice. You see how they think about how people relate to each other. It doesn't have to be fiction. I ask people a lot about Star Wars, Star Trek, whatever it is they might know that I have some familiarity with. Who makes the best decisions in Star Wars? Who gives the best advice? Yoda, Obi-Wan, Luke, Darth Vader, the Emperor?Henry It's a tough question.Tyler Yeah, yeah.Henry I don't know Star Wars, so I couldn't even answer that.Tyler You understand that you can't fake it. You can't prepare for it. It does show how the person thinks about advice and also drama.Henry Right. Now, you're a Shakespeare fan.Tyler Well, fan is maybe an understatement. He's better. He deserves better than fans.Henry How much of time, how much of your life have you spent reading and watching this work?Tyler I would say most of the plays from, say, like 1598 or 99 and after, I've read four to five times on average, some a bit more, some like maybe only three times. There's quite a few I've only read once and didn't like. Those typically are the earlier ones. When it comes to watching Shakespeare, I have to confess, I don't and can't understand it, so I'm really not able to watch it either on the stage or in a movie and profit from it. I think I partially have an auditory processing disorder that if I hear Shakespeare, you know, say at Folger in DC, I just literally cannot understand the words. It's like listening to Estonian, so I've gone some number of times. I cannot enjoy what you would call classic Shakespeare movies like Kenneth Branagh, Henry V, which gets great reviews, intelligent people love it. It doesn't click for me at all. I can't understand what's going on. The amount of time I've put into listening to it, watching it is very low and it will stay low. The only Shakespeare movies I like are the weird ones like Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight or Baz Luhrmann's Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. I think they're fantastic, but they're not obsessed with reciting the text.Henry So, you're reading with notes and you're piecing it together as you go.Tyler I feel the versions in my head are better than anything I see on the screen also, so that's another reason. I just think they're to be read. I fully understand that's not how Shakespeare seemed to view them, but that's a way in which we readers, in a funny way, can improve on Shakespeare's time.Henry No, I agree with you. The thing I get the most pushback about with Shakespeare is when I say that he was a great thinker.Tyler He's maybe the best thinker.Henry Right. But tell us what you mean by that.Tyler I don't feel I can articulate it. It's a bit like when o3 Pro gives you an answer so good you don't quite appreciate it yourself. Shakespeare is like o7 Pro or something. But the best of the plays seem to communicate the entirety of human existence in a way that I feel I can barely comprehend and I find in very, very little else. Even looking at other very great works such as Bleak House, I don't find it. Not all of the plays. There's very, very good plays that don't do that. Just say Macbeth and Othello. I don't feel do that at all. Not a complaint, but something like Hamlet or King Lear or Tempest or some of the comedies. It's just somehow all laid out there and all inside it at the same time. I don't know any other way of putting it.Henry A lot of people think that Shakespeare is overrated. We only read him because it's a status game. We've internalized these snobbish values. We see this stated a lot. What's your response to these people?Tyler Well, I feel sorry for them. But look, there's plenty of things I can't understand. I just told you if I go to see the plays, I'm completely lost. I know the fault is mine, so to speak. I don't blame Shakespeare or the production, at least not necessarily. Those are people who are in a similar position, but somehow don't have enough metarationality to realize the fault is on them. I think that's sad. But there's other great stuff they can do and probably they're doing it. That's fine.Henry Should everyone read Shakespeare at school?Tyler If you say everyone, I resist. But it certainly should be in the curriculum. But the real question is who can teach it? But yeah, it's better than not doing it. When I was in high school, we did Taming of the Shrew, which I actually don't like very much, and it put me off a bit. We did Macbeth, which is a much better play. But in a way, it's easy to teach. Macbeth, to me, is like a perfect two-minute punk rock song. It does something. It delivers. But it's not the Shakespeare that puts everything on the table, and the plot is easy to follow. You can imagine even a mediocre teacher leading students through it. It's to me still a little underwhelming if that's what we teach them. Then finally, my last year, we did Hamlet, and I'm like, whoa, okay, now I get it. Probably we do it wrong in a lot of cases, would be my guess. What's wrong with the Taming of the Shrew? It's a lot of yelling and screaming and ordinary. To me, it's not that witty. There's different views, like is it offensive to women, offensive to men? That's not my main worry. But those questions, I feel, also don't help the play, and I just don't think Shakespeare was fully mature when he wrote it. What was the year on that? Do you know offhand?Henry It's very early.Tyler It's very early. Very early, yeah. So if you look at the other plays that surround it, they're also not as top works. So why should we expect that one to be?Henry What can arts funding learn from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres?Tyler Current arts funding? I don't think that much. I think the situation right now is so different, and what we should do so depends on the country, the state, the province, the region. Elizabethan times do show that market support at art can be truly wonderful. We have plenty of that today. But if you're just, say, appointed to be chair of the NEA and you've got to make decisions, I'm not sure how knowing about Elizabethan theatre would help you in any direct way.Henry What do you think of the idea that the long history of arts funding is a move away from a small group, an individual patronage where taste was very important, towards a kind of institutional patronage, which became much more bureaucratic? And so one reason why we keep arguing about arts funding now is that a lot of it exhibits bad taste because the committee has to sort of agree on various things. And if we could reallocate somewhat towards individual patronage, we'd do better.Tyler I would agree with the latter two-thirds of that. How you describe earlier arts funding I think is more complicated than what you said. A lot of it is just people doing things voluntarily at zero pecuniary cost, like singing songs, songs around the campfire, or hymns in church, rather than it being part of a patronage model. But I think it's way overly bureaucratized. The early National Endowment for the Arts in the 1960s just let smart people make decisions with a minimum of fuss. And of course we should go back to that. Of course we won't. We send half the money to the state's arts agencies, which can be mediocre or just interested in economic development and a new arts center, as opposed to actually stimulating creativity per se. More over time is spent on staff. There are all these pressures from Congress, things you can't fund. It's just become far less effective, even though it spends somewhat more money. So that's a problem in many, many countries.Henry What Shakespeare critics do you like reading?Tyler For all his flaws, I still think Harold Bloom is worthwhile. I know he's gotten worse and worse as a critic and as a Shakespeare critic. Especially if you're younger, you need to put aside the Harold Bloom you might think you know and just go to some earlier Bloom. Those short little books he edited, where for a given Shakespeare play he'll collect maybe a dozen essays and write eight or ten pages at the front, those are wonderful. But Bradley, William Hazlitt, the two Goddard volumes, older works, I think are excellent. But again, if you just go, if you can, to a university library, go to the part on the shelf where there's criticism on a particular play and just pull down five to ten titles and don't even select for them and just bring those home. I think you'll learn a lot.Henry So you don't like The Invention of the Human by Bloom?Tyler Its peaks are very good, but there's a lot in it that's embarrassing. I definitely recommend it, but you need to recommend it with the caveat that a lot of it is over the top or bad. It doesn't bother me. But if someone professional or academic tells me they're totally put off by the book, I don't try to talk them out of that impression. I just figure they're a bit hopelessly stuck on judging works by their worst qualities.Henry In 2018, you wrote this, “Shakespeare, by the way, is Girard's most important precursor. Also throw in the New Testament, Hobbes, Tocqueville, and maybe Montaigne.” Tell us what you mean by that.Tyler That was pretty good for me to have written that. Well, in Shakespeare, you have rivalrous behavior. You have mimetic desire. You have the importance of twinning. There's ritual sacrifice in so many of the plays, including the political ones. Girard's title, Violence and the Sacred, also comes from Shakespeare. As you well know, the best Gerard book, Theater of Envy, is fully about Shakespeare. All of Girard is drenched with Shakespeare.Henry I actually only find Girard persuasive on Shakespeare. The further I get away from that, the more I'm like, this is super overstated. I just don't think this is how humans ... I think this is too mono-explanation of humans. When I read the Shakespeare book, I think, wow, I never understood Midsummer Night's Dream until I read Girard.Tyler I think it's a bit like Harold Bloom. There's plenty in Girard you can point to as over the top. I think also for understanding Christianity, he has something quite unique and special and mostly correct. Then on other topics, it's anthropologically very questionable, but still quite stimulating. I would defend it on that basis, as I would Harold Girard.Henry No, I like Gerard, but I feel like the Shakespeare book gets less attention than the others.Tyler That's right. It's the best one and it's also the soundest one. It's the truly essential one.Henry How important was Shakespeare in the development of individualism?Tyler Probably not at all, is my sense. Others know more about the history than I do, but if I think of 17th century England, where some strands of individualist thought come from, well, part of it is coming from the French Huguenots and not from Shakespeare. A lot of it is coming from the Bible and not from Shakespeare. The levelers, John Locke, some of that is coming from English common law and not from Shakespeare. Then there's the ancient world. I don't quite see a strong connection to Shakespeare, but I'd love it if you could talk me into one.Henry My feeling is that the 1570s are the time when diaries begin to become personal records rather than professional records. What you get is a kind of Puritan self-examination. They'll write down, I said this, I did this, and then in the margin they'll put, come back and look at this and make sure you don't do this again. This new process of overhearing yourself is a central part of what Shakespeare's doing in his drawing. I think this is the thing that Bloom gets right, is that as you go through the plays in order, you see the very strong development of the idea that a stock character or someone who's drawing on a tradition of stock characters will suddenly say, oh, I just heard myself say that I'm a villain. Am I a villain? I'm sort of a villain. Maybe I'm not a villain. He develops this great art of self-referential self-development. I think that's one of the reasons why Shakespeare became so important to being a well-educated English person, is that you couldn't really get that in imaginative literature.Tyler I agree with all that, but I'm not sure the 17th century would have been all that different without Shakespeare, in literary terms, yes, but it seemed to me the currents of individualism were well underway. Other forces sweeping down from Europe, from the further north, competition across nations requiring individualism as a way of getting more wealth, the beginnings of economic thought which became individualistic and gave people a different kind of individualistic way of viewing the world. It seems so over-determined. Causally, I wouldn't ascribe much of a role to Shakespeare, but I agree with every sentence you said and what you said.Henry Sure, but you don't think the role of imaginative literature is somehow a fundamental transmission mechanism for all of this?Tyler Well, the Bible, I think, was quite fundamental as literature, not just as theology. So I would claim that, but keep in mind the publication and folio history of Shakespeare, which you probably know better than I do, it's not always well-known at every point in time by everyone.Henry I think it's always well-known by the English.Tyler I don't know, but I don't think it's dominant in the way that, say, Pilgrim's Progress was dominant for a long time.Henry Sure, sure, sure. And you wouldn't then, what would you say about later on, that modern European liberalism is basically the culture of novel reading and that we live in a society that's shaped by that? Do you have the same thing, like it's not causal?Tyler I don't know. That's a tricky question. The true 19th century novel I think of as somewhat historicist, often nationalist, slightly collectivist, certainly not Marxist, but in some ways illiberal. And so many of the truly great novel writers were not so liberal. And the real liberal novels, like Mancini's The Betrothed, which I quite enjoy, but it's somewhat of a slight work, right? And it might be a slight work because it is happy and liberal and open-minded. There's something about the greatest of creators, they tend to be pessimistic or a bit nasty or there's some John Lennon in them, there's Jonathan Swift, Swift, it's complicated. In some ways he's illiberal, but he's considered a Tory and in many ways he's quite an extreme reactionary. And the great age of the novel I don't think of is so closely tied to liberalism.Henry One of the arguments that gets made is like, you only end up with modern European liberalism through a culture where people are just spending a lot of time reading novels and imagining what it is like to be someone else, seeing from multiple different perspectives. And therefore it's less about what is the quote unquote message of the story and more about the habitual practice of thinking pluralistically.Tyler I think I would be much more inclined to ascribe that to reading newspapers and pamphlets than novels. I think of novels as modestly reactionary in their net impact, at least in the 19th century. I think another case in point, not just Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, one of the great novelists, had bad politics, right, was through Germany in the first world war. So if you look at the very greatest novels, there's something a bit problematic about many of their creators. They're not Nazis, they're not Stalinists, but they're not where I'm at either.Henry Now in 2017, a lot of people were complaining about Donald Trump as Julius Caesar and there was some farce about a production, I think it was put on in New York or DC maybe. And you said, no, no, no, he's not Caesar. He's more like a Shakespearean fool because he's the truth teller. What do you think of that view now?Tyler That was a Bloomberg column I wrote, I think in 2017. And I think that's held up quite well. So there's many criticisms of Trump that he's some kind of fascist. I don't think those have held up very well. He is a remarkable orator, coiner of phrase, coiner of insults, teller of truths, combined with a lot of nonsense and just nonsense talk, like the Covfefe tweet or whatever it was. And there's something tragic about Trump that he may well fail even by his own standards. He has a phenomenal sense of humor. I think people have realized that more and more. The fact that his popularity has persisted has forced a lot of people to reexamine just Trump as an individual and to see what a truly unique talent he is, whether you like him as your president or not. And that, I think, is all Shakespearean.Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they're trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.Henry The other thing I'd take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.Henry Yeah. Here's another quote from the Bloomberg column, “given Shakespeare's brilliance in dramatizing the irrational, one of my biggest fears is that Shakespeare is indeed still a thinker for our times.” Has that come more true in recent years?Tyler I think more true. So from my point of view, the world is getting weirder in some very good ways and in some very bad ways. The arbitrary exercise of power has become more thinkable. You see this from Putin. We may see it from China. In the Middle East, it's happened as well. So the notion also that rulers can be their own worst enemies or human beings can be their own worst enemies. I think we see more when the world is volatile than when the world is stable, almost definitionally.Henry You once said Julius Caesar was an overrated play. Tell us why.Tyler You know, I read it again after I wrote that and it went up in my eyes. But I suppose I still think it's a bit overrated by people who love it. It's one of these mono plays like Macbeth or Othello. It does one thing very, very well. I think the mystical elements in it I had underappreciated on earlier readings and the complexity of the characters I had underappreciated. So I feel I was a little harsh on it. But I just wouldn't put it in the underrated category. Julius Caesar is such a well-known historical figure. It's so easy for that play to become focal. And Brutus and, you know, the stabbing, the betrayal, it's a little too easy for it to become famous. And I guess that's why I think within the world of Shakespeare fans, it still might be a little overrated.Henry It's written at a similar time to Hamlet and Twelfth Night, and I think it gets caught up in the idea that this was a great pivotal moment for Shakespeare. But actually I agree, over the years I've come to think it's really just not the equal of the other plays it's surrounded by.Tyler Yeah, that's still my view. Absolutely. Not the equal of those two, certainly.Henry What is the most underrated play?Tyler I'm not sure how they're all rated. So I used to think Winter's Tale, clearly. But I've heard so many people say it's the most underrated, including you, I think. I don't know if I can believe that anymore. So I think I have to go with The Henriad, because to me that's the greatest thing Shakespeare ever did. And I don't think it's commonly recognized as such. I mean, Hamlet or King Lear would typically be nominated. And those are top, top, top, top. But I'll still go with The Henriad.Henry You are saying Henriad above Hamlet, above Lear, above Twelfth Night.Tyler Maybe it's not fair because you have multiple plays, right? What if, you know, there were three Hamlets? Maybe that would be better. But still, if I have to pick, no one of The Henriad comes close to Hamlet. But if you can consider it as a whole in the evolution of the story, for me it's a clear winner. And it's what I've learned the most from. And a problem with Hamlet, not Shakespeare's fault, but Hamlet became so popular you hear lesser versions of themes and ideas from Hamlet your whole life. It's a bit like seeing Mondrian on the shopping bag. That does not happen, really, with The Henriad. So that has hurt Hamlet, but without meaning it's, you know, a lesser play. King Lear, you have less of that. It's so bleak and tragic. It's harder to put on the shopping bag, so to speak. In that sense, King Lear has held up a bit better than Hamlet has.Henry Why do you admire The Winter's Tale so much? What do you like about it?Tyler There's some mysterious sense of beauty in it that even in other Shakespearean plays I don't feel. And a sense of miracle and wonder, also betrayal and how that is mixed in with the miracle and wonder. Somehow he makes it work. It's quite an unlikely play. And the jealousy and the charge of infidelity I take much more seriously than other readers of the play do. I don't think you can say there's a Straussian reading where she clearly fooled around on the king. But he's not just crazy, either. And there are plenty of hints that something might have happened. It's still probably better to infer it didn't happen. But it's a more ambiguous play than it is typically read as.Henry Yes, someone said to me, ask if he thinks Hermione has an affair. And you're saying maybe.Tyler Again, in a prediction market, I'll bet no, but we're supposed to wonder. We're not supposed to just think the king is crazy.Henry I know you don't like to see it, but my view is that because we believe in this sudden jealousy theory, it's often not staged very well. And that's one reason why it's less popular than it ought to be.Tyler I've only seen it once. I suspect that was true. I saw it, in fact, last year. And the second half of the play was just awful. The first half, you could question. But it was a painful experience. It was just offensively stupid. One of the great regrets of my life is I did not drive up to New York City to see Bergman present his version of Winter's Tale in Swedish. And I'm quite sure that would have been magnificent and that he would have understood it very deeply and very well. That was just stupid of me. This was, I think, in the early 90s. I forget exactly when.Henry I think that's right. And there's a theater library where if you want to go and sit in the archive, you can see it.Tyler I will do that at some point. Part of my worry is I don't believe their promise. I know you can read that promise on the internet, but when you actually try to find the person who can track it down for you and give you access, I have my doubts. If I knew I could do it, I would have done it by now.Henry I'll give you the email because I think I actually found that person. Does Romeo actually love Juliet?Tyler Of course not. It's a play about perversion and obsession and family obligation and rebellion. And there's no love between the two at all. And if you read it with that in mind, once you see that, you can't unsee it. So that's an underrated play. People think, oh, star-crossed teen romance, tragic ending, boo-hoo. That's a terrible reading. It's just a superficial work of art if that's what you think it is.Henry I agree with you, but there are eminent Shakespeare professors who take that opinion.Tyler Well maybe we're smarter than they are. Maybe we know more about other things. You shouldn't let yourself be intimidated by critics. They're highly useful. We shouldn't trash them. We shouldn't think they're all crummy left-wing post-modernists. But at the end of the day, I don't think you should defer to them that much either.Henry Sure. So you're saying Juliet doesn't love Romeo?Tyler Neither loves the other.Henry Okay. Because my reading is that Romeo has a very strong death drive or dark side or whatever.Tyler That's the strong motive in the play is the death drive, yeah.Henry And what that means is that it's not his tragedy, it's her tragedy. She actually is an innocent young girl. Okay, maybe she doesn't love him, it's a crush or it's whatever, but she actually is swept up in the idea of this handsome stranger. She can get out of her family. She's super rebellious. There's that wonderful scene where she plays all sweetness and light to her nurse and then she says, I'm just lying to you all and I'm going to get out of here. Whereas he actually is, he doesn't have any romantic feeling for her. He's really quite a sinister guy.Tyler Those are good points. I fully agree. I still would interpret that as she not loving him, but I think those are all good insights.Henry You've never seen it staged in this way? You've never seen any one?Tyler The best staging is that Baz Luhrmann movie I mentioned, which has an intense set of references to Haitian voodoo in Romeo and Juliet when you watch the movie. The death drive is quite clear. That's the best staging I know of, but I've never seen it on the stage ever. I've seen the Zeffirelli movie, I think another film instance of it, but no, it's the Haitian voodoo version that I like.Henry He makes it seem like they love each other, right?Tyler In a teenage way. I don't feel that he gets it right, but I feel he creates a convincing universe through which the play usefully can be viewed.Henry The Mercutio death, I think, is never going to be better than in that film. What do you like about Antonin Cleopatra?Tyler It's been a long time since I've read that. What a strong character she is. The sway people can exercise over each other. The lines are very good. It's not a top Shakespeare favorite of mine, but again, if anyone else had done it, you would just say this is one of the greatest plays ever, and it is.Henry I think it's going to be much more of a play for our times because many people in the Trump administration are going to have that. They're torn between Rome and Egypt, as it were, and the personal conflicts are going to start getting serious for them, if you like.Tyler There's no better writer or thinker on personal conflict than Shakespeare, right?Henry Yes. Now, you do like Measure for Measure, but you're less keen on All's Well That Ends Well. Is that right?Tyler I love Measure for Measure. To me, it's still somewhat underrated. I think it's risen in status. All's Well That Ends Well, I suspect you need to be good at listening to Shakespeare, which as I've already said, I'm not. It's probably much better than I realize it is for that reason. I'm not sure on the printed page it works all that well.Henry Yeah. That's right. I think it's one of the most important plays. Why? Because I think there are two or three basic factors about Shakespeare's drama, which is like the story could often branch off in different directions. You often get the sense that he could swerve into a different genre. The point Samuel Johnson made about whenever someone's running off to the tavern, someone else is being buried, right? And a lot of the time he comes again and again to the same types of situations, the same types of characters, the same types of family set up. And he ends the plays in different ways and he makes it fall out differently. And I think Helena is very representative of a lot of these facets. Everyone thinks she's dead, but she's not dead. Sometimes it looks like it's going badly for her when actually it's going well. No one in the play ever really has an honest insight into her motives. And there comes a point, I think, when just the overall message of Shakespeare's work collectively is things go very wrong very quickly. And if you can get to some sort of happy ending, you should take it. You should be pragmatic and say, OK, this isn't the perfect marriage. This isn't the perfect king. But you know what? We could be in a civil war. Everyone could be dead. All's well that ends well. That's good advice. Let's take it.Tyler I should reread it. Number one in my reread pile right now is Richard II, which I haven't read in a long time. And there's a new biography out about Richard II. And I'm going to read the play and the biography more or less in conjunction. And there's a filming of Richard II that I probably won't enjoy, but I'll try. And I'm just going to do that all together, probably sometime over this break. But I'll have all's well that ends well is next on my reread list. You should always have a Shakespeare to reread list, right?Henry Always. Oh, of course. Is Shakespeare a good economic thinker?Tyler Well, he's a great thinker. I would say he's better than a good economic thinker. He understands the motive of money, but it's never just the motive of money. And Shakespeare lowers the status of economic thinking, I would say, overall, in a good way. He's better than us.Henry What are your thoughts on The Merchant of Venice?Tyler Quite underrated. People have trouble with it because it is very plausibly anti-Semitic. And everyone has to preface any praise they give it with some kind of disavowal or whatever. The way I read the play, which could be wrong, but it's actually more anti-anti-Semitic than it is anti-Semitic. So the real cruel mean people are those who torment the Jew. I'm not saying Shakespeare was not in some ways prejudiced against Jews and maybe other groups, but actually reading it properly should make people more tolerant, not because they're reacting against Shakespeare's anti-Semitism, but because the proper message of the play understood at a deeper level is toleration.Henry You teach a law and literature class, I think.Tyler Well, I did for 20 years, but I don't anymore.Henry Did you teach Merchant of Venice?Tyler I taught it two or three times, yes.Henry How did your students react to it?Tyler Whenever I taught them Shakespeare, which was actually not that much, they always liked it, but they didn't love it. And there's some version of Shakespeare you see on the screen when it's a decent but not great filmed adaptation where there's the mechanics of the plot and you're held in suspense and then there's an ending. And I found many of them read Shakespeare in those terms and they quite enjoyed it, but somehow they didn't get it. And I think that was true for Merchant of Venice as well. I didn't feel people got hung up on the anti-Semitism point. They could put that aside and just treat it as a play, but still I didn't feel that people got it.Henry Should we read Shakespeare in translation?Tyler Well, many people have to. I've read some of the Schlegel translations. I think they're amazing. My wife, Natasha, who grew up in the Soviet Union, tells me there are very good Russian language translations, which I certainly believe her. The Schlegels are different works. They're more German romantic, as you might expect, but that's fine, especially if you know the original. My guess is there are some other very good translations. So in that qualified way, the translations, a few of them can be quite valuable. I worry that at some point we'll all need to read it in some sort of translation, as Chaucer is mostly already true for Chaucer. You probably don't have to read Chaucer in translation, but I do.Henry I feel like I shouldn't read it in translation, I think.Tyler But you do, right? Or you don't?Henry No, I read the original. I make myself do the original.Tyler I just can't understand the original well enough.Henry But I put the time in when I was young, and I think you retain a sense of it. Do you think, though, if we read, let's say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?Tyler It'll be terrible. It'll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.Henry I'd like to read some of that. That would be quite an exciting project.Tyler Maybe it's been done. I don't know. But just an Americanized Hollywood version, like, no, that's just a negative. It's destructive.Henry Now, you're very interested in the 17th century, which I think is when we first get steady economic growth, East India Company, England is settling in America.Tyler Political parties. Some notion of the rule of law. A certain theory of property rights. Very explicit individualism. Social contract theories. You get Hobbes, Isaac Newton, calculus. We could go on. Some people would say, well, Westphalia, you get the modern nation state. That to me is a vaguer date to pin that on. But again, it's a claim you can make of a phenomenal century. People aren't that interested in it anymore, I think.Henry How does Shakespeare fit into this picture?Tyler Well, if you think of the years, if you think of the best ones, they start, like what, 1598, 1599. And then by 1600, they're almost all just wonderful. He's a herald. I don't think he's that causal. But he's a sign, the first totally clear sign that all the pieces have fallen into place. And we know the 17th century gave us our greatest thinker. And in terms of birth, not composition, it gave us our greatest composer, Bach.Henry So we can't have Shakespeare without all of this economic and philosophic and political activity. He's sort of, those things are necessary conditions for what he's doing.Tyler He needed the 16th century, and there's some very good recent books on how important the 16th century was for the 17th century. So I think more and more, as I read more, I'll come to see the roots of the 17th and the 16th century. And Shakespeare is reflecting that by bridging the two.Henry What are the recent books that you recommend about the 16th century?Tyler Oh, I forget the title, but there's this book about Elizabethan England, came out maybe three or four years ago, written by a woman. And it just talks about markets and commerce and creativity, surging during that time. In a way, obvious points, but she put them together better than anyone else had. And there's this other new German book about the 16th century. It's in my best of the year list that I put up on Marginal Revolution, and I forget the exact title, but I've been reading that slowly. And that's very good. So I expect to make further intellectual moves in that direction.Henry Was Shakespeare anti-woke?Tyler I don't know what that means in his context. He certainly understands the real truths are deeper, but to pin the word anti on him is to make him smaller. And like Harold Bloom, I will refuse to do that.Henry You don't see some sense in which ... A lot of people have compared wokeness to the Reformation, right? I mean, it's a kind of weak comparison.Tyler Yes, but only some strands of it. You wouldn't say Luther was woke, right?Henry But you don't see some way in which Shakespeare is, not in an anti way, in a complicated way, but like a reaction against some of these forces in the way that Swift would be a reaction against certain forces in his time.Tyler Well I'm not even sure what Shakespeare's religion was. Some people claim he was Catholic. To me that's plausible, but I don't know of any clear evidence. He does not strike me as very religious. He might be a lapsed Catholic if I had to say. I think he simply was always concerned with trying to view and present things in a deeper manner and there were so many forces he could have been reacting against with that one. I don't know exactly what it was in the England of his time that specifically he was reacting against. If someone says, oh, it was the strand of Protestant thought, I would say fine, it might have been that. A la Peter Thiel, couldn't you say it's over determined and name 47 other different things as well?Henry Now, if you were talking to rationalists, effective altruists, people from Silicon Valley, all these kinds of groups, would you say to them, you should read Shakespeare, you should read fiction, or would you just say, you're doing great, don't worry that you're missing out on this?Tyler Well, I'm a little reluctant to just tell people you should do X. I think what I've tried to do is to be an example of doing X and hope that example is somewhat contagious. Other people are contagious on me, as for instance, you have been. That's what I like to do. Now, it's a question, if someone needs a particular contagion, does that mean it's high marginal value or does it mean, in some sense, they're immue from the bug and you can't actually get them interested? It can go either way. Am I glad that Peter Singer has specialized in being Peter Singer, even though I disagree with much of it? I would say yes. Peter had his own homecoming. As far as I know, it was not Shakespearean, but when he wrote that book about the history of Vienna and his own family background, that was in a sense Peter doing his version of turning Shakespearean. It was a good book and it deepened his thought, but at the end of the day, I also see he's still Peter Singer, so I don't know. I think the Shakespearean perspective itself militates a bit against telling people they should read Shakespeare.Henry Sure. Patrick Collison today has tweeted about, I think, 10 of the great novels that he read this year. It's a big, long tweet with all of his novels.Tyler Yeah, it's wonderful.Henry Yeah, it's great. At the end, he basically says the reason to read them is just that they're great. Appreciation of excellence is a good thing for its own sake. You're not going to wrench a utilitarian benefit out of this stuff. Is that basically your view?Tyler I fully agree with that, but he might slightly be underrating the utilitarian benefits. If you read a particular thing, whatever it is, it's a good way of matching with other people who will deepen you. If it's Shakespeare, or if it's science fiction, or if it's economics, I think there's this big practical benefit from the better matching. I think, actually, Patrick himself, over time in his life, he will have a different set of friends, somewhat, because he wrote that post, and that will be good.Henry There's a utilitarian benefit that we both love Bleak House, therefore we can talk about it. This just opens up a lot of conversation and things for us that we wouldn't otherwise get.Tyler We're better friends, and we're more inclined to chat with each other, do this podcast, because we share that. That's clearly true in our case. I could name hundreds of similar cases, myself, people I know. That's important. So much of life is a matching problem, which includes matching to books, but also, most importantly, matching to people.Henry You're what? You're going to get better matching with better books, because Bleak House is such a great book. You're going to get better opportunities for matching.Tyler Of course, you'll understand other books better. There's something circular in that. I get it. A lot of value is circular, and the circle is how you cash in, not leaving the circle, so that's fine.Henry You don't think there's a ... I mean, some of the utilitarian benefits that are claimed like it gives you empathy, it improves your EQ or whatever, I think this is all complete rubbish.Tyler I'd love to see the RCTs, but in the prediction markets, I'll bet no. But again, I have an open mind. If someone had evidence, they could sway me, but I doubt it. I don't see it.Henry But I do think literature is underrated as a way of thinking.Tyler Yes, absolutely, especially by people we are likely to know.Henry Right. And that is quite a utilitarian benefit, right? If you can get yourself into that mindset, that is directly useful.Tyler I agree. The kind of career I've had, which is too complicated to describe for those of you who don't know it, but I feel I could not have had it without having read a lot of fiction.Henry Right. And I think that would be true for a lot of people, even if they don't recognize it directly in their own lives, right?Tyler Yes. In Silicon Valley, you see this huge influence of Lord of the Rings. Yes. And that's real, I think. It's not feigned, and that's also a great book.Henry One of the best of the 20th century, no doubt.Tyler Absolutely. And the impact it has had on people still has. It's an example of some classics get extremely elevated, like Shakespeare, Austen, and also Tolkien. It's one of them that just keeps on rising.Henry Ayn Rand is quite influential.Tyler Increasingly so. And that has held up better than I ever would have thought. Depends on the book. It's complicated, but yes, you have to say, held up better than one ever would have thought.Henry Are you going to go and do a reread?Tyler I don't think I can. I feel the newspaper is my reread of Atlas Shrugged, that suffices.Henry Is GPT good at Shakespeare, or LLMs generally?Tyler They're very useful for fiction, I've found. It was fantastic for reading Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. I have never used them for Shakespeare, not once. That's an interesting challenge, because it's an earlier English. There's a depth in Shakespeare that might exceed current models. I'd love to see a project at some point in time to train AI for Shakespeare the way some people are doing it for Math Olympiads. But finding the human graders would be tough, though not impossible. You should be one of them. I would love that. I hope some philanthropist makes that happen.Henry Agreed. We're here, and we're ready.Tyler Yes, very ready.Henry What do you think about Shakespeare's women?Tyler The best women in all of fiction. They're marvelous, and they're attractive, and they're petulant, and they're romantic, and they're difficult, and they're stubborn, or whatever you want, it's in there. Just phenomenal. It's a way in which Shakespeare, again, I don't want to say anti-woke, but he just gives you a much deeper, better vision than the wokes would give you. Each one is such a distinctive voice. Yeah, fantastic. In a funny way, he embodies a lot of woke insights. The ways in which gender becomes malleable in different parts of stories is very advanced for his time.Henry It's believable also. The thing that puzzles me, so believable. What puzzles me is he's so polyphonic, and he represents that way of thinking so well, but I get the sense that John Stuart Mill, who wrote the Bentham essay and everything, just wasn't that interested in Shakespeare relative to the other things he was reading.Tyler He did write a little bit on Shakespeare, didn't he? But not much. But it wasn't wonderful. It was fine, but not like the Bentham Coleridge.Henry I think I've seen it in letters where he's like, oh, Shakespeare, pretty good. This, to me, is a really weird gap in the history of literature.Tyler But this does get to my point, where I don't think Shakespeare was that important for liberalism or individualism. The people who were obsessed with Shakespeare, as you know, were the German romantics, with variants, but were mostly illiberal or non-liberal. That also, to me, makes sense.Henry That's a good point. That's a good challenge. My last question is, you do a lot of talent spotting and talent assessing. How do you think about Shakespeare's career?Tyler I feel he is someone I would not have spotted very well. I feel bad about that. We don't know that much about him. As you well know, people still question if Shakespeare was Shakespeare. That's not my view. I'm pretty orthodox on the matter. But what the signs would have been in those early plays that he would have, say, by so far have exceeded Marlowe or even equaled Marlowe, I definitely feel I would have had a Zoom call with him and said, well, send me a draft, and read the early work, and concluded he would be like second-tier Marlowe, and maybe given him a grant for networking reasons, totally missed the boat. That's how I assess, how I would have assessed Shakespeare at the time, and that's humbling.Henry Would you have been good at assessing other writers of any period? Do you think there are other times when you would have?Tyler If I had met young Thomas Mann, I think there's a much greater chance I would have been thrilled. If I had met young Johann Sebastian Bach, I think there's a strong chance I would have been thrilled. Now, music is different. It's like chess. You can excel at quite a young age. But there's something about the development of Shakespeare where I think it is hard to see where it's headed early on. And it's the other question, how would I have perceived Shakespeare's work ethic? There's different ways you could interpret the biography here. But the biography of Bach, or like McCartney, clearly just obsessed with work ethic. You could not have missed it if you met young Bach, I strongly suspect. But Shakespeare, it's not clear to me you would see the work ethic early on or even later on.Henry No, no. I agree with that, actually.Tyler Same with Goethe. If I met early Goethe, my guess is I would have felt, well, here's the next Klopstock, which is fine, worthy of a grand. But Goethe was far more than that. And he always had these unfinished works. And you would, oh, come on, you're going to finish this one. Like you'd see Werther. OK, you made a big splash. But is your second novel just going to bomb? I think those would have been my hesitations. But I definitely would have funded Goethe as the next Klopstock, but been totally wrong and off base.Henry Right. And I think the thing I took away from the A.N. Wilson biography, which you also enjoyed recently, was I was amazed just how much time Goethe didn't spend working. Like I knew he wasn't always working, but there was so much wasted time in his life.Tyler Yes, but I do wonder with that or any biography, and I don't mean this as a criticism of Wilson, I think we know much less than we think we do about earlier times in general. So he could have been doing things that don't turn up in any paperwork. Sure, sure, sure. So I'm not sure how lazy he was, but I would just say, unlike Bach or say Paul McCartney, it's not evident that he was the world's hardest worker.Henry And Mozart, would you have? How do you feel about Mozart's early career?Tyler Well, Mozart is so exceptional, so young, it's just very easy to spot. I don't I don't even think there's a puzzle there unless you're blind. Now, I don't love Mozart before, I don't know, like the K-330s maybe, but still as a player, even just as a lower quality composer, I think you would bet the house on Mozart at any age where you could have met him and talked to him.Henry So you think K-100s, you can see the beginnings of the great symphonies, the great concertos?Tyler Well, I would just apply the Cowen test at how young in age was this person trying at all? And that would just dominate and I wouldn't worry too much about how good it was. And if I heard Piano Concerto No. 9, which is before K-330, I'm pretty sure that's phenomenal. But even if I hadn't heard that, it's like this guy's trying. He's going to be on this amazing curve. Bet the house on Mozart. It's a no-brainer. If you don't do that, you just shouldn't be doing talent at all. He's an easy case. He's one of the easiest cases you can think of.Henry Tyler Cowen, this was great. Thank you very much.Tyler Thank you very much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

George Mason University economist and leading public intellectual Tyler Cowen discusses his thoughtful new book, GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time, and Why Does it Matter? This episode originally aired on April 10th, 2024.  The Hub Dialogues features The Hub's editor-at-large, Sean Speer, in conversation with leading entrepreneurs, policymakers, scholars, and thinkers on the issues and challenges that will shape Canada's future at home and abroad. If you like what you are hearing on Hub Dialogues consider subscribing to The Hub's free weekly email newsletter featuring our insights and analysis on key public policy issues. Sign up here: https://thehub.ca/join/.

Today, we're revisiting this special Christmas episode of The Curious Task from 2019. ---  Alex Aragona chats with Alex Tabarrok on this very special Christmas episode of The Curious Task as he explores whether gift giving is inefficient, and if there are better ways to give to others. References from Episode 21 with Alex Tabbarok You can watch a video of Alex Tabbarok and Tyler Cowen discuss gift giving here Giving to my Wild Self article can be found here

Get more notes at https://podcastnotes.org Business* Active Listening by Carl R. Rogers* Key reading for getting better at negotiations* Source: Chris Voss's recommendation to Jordan B. Peterson (PN)* When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert* One of the best books about philanthropy* Source: Brent Beshore's recommendation to Shane Parrish (PN)* Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan* A simple guide to creating great advertisements* Source: Chris Beresford-Hill and Tim Ferriss in discussion (PN)* Words That Work by Frank Luntz* Mastering the art of words* Source: Chris Beresford-Hill and Tim Ferriss in discussion (PN)Economics* The Creature From Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin* Analysis of bank bailouts* Source: Michael Saylor and Peter McCormack in discussion (PN)* Broken Money by Lyn Alden* “Money” is the biggest total addressable market in the world, and the money now is currently broken* Source: Dylan LeClair recommendation (PN)* The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David Hacket Fischer* Explores the recurring cycles of price inflation throughout history, connecting economic trends to broader social and cultural changes* Source: Rudyard Lynch's recommendation to Tom Bilyeu (PN)* Fiat Food: How Government, Industry, and Science Manufacture the Foods We Eat by Matthew Lysiak* Why inflation has destroyed our health and how Bitcoin may fix it* Source: Matthew Lysiak's appearance on We Study Billionaires (PN)Entrepreneurship* Zero to One by Peter Thiel* One of the most commonly recommended books for entrepreneurs* Source: Multiple* Only The Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove* Must read for all entrepreneurs* Source: Morgan Housel and Chris Williamson in discussion (PN)* Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours by Noah Kagan* The idea of starting a business is often so overly romanticized that people never make the jump into entrepreneurship* Source: Noah Kagen's appearance on Deep Questions with Cal Newport (PN)* Mastery by Robert Greene* The value of mastering a skill set* Source: Sam Parr's recommendation to Andrew Wilkinson (PN)* Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott* How to overcome creative roadblocks* Source: Chris Beresford-Hill and Tim Ferriss in discussion (PN)* Chase, Chance, and Creativity by James Austin* Talks about how certain people attract luck and how luck can be created* Source: Mike Maples, Jr. recommendation to Lenny Rachitsky (PN)* Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb* The impact of randomness and luck on success* Source: Cyrus Yari and Iman Olya book review (PN)* Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb* “You cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground.” – Nassim Taleb* Source: Cyrus Yari and Iman Olya book review (PN)* Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw* “I got married at Carnegie Hall because of my love for Andrew Carnegie… He did a lot of bad things, but he was mostly amazing” – Sam Parr* Source: Sam Parr's recommendation to Andrew Wilkinson (PN)* Tycoon's War by Stephen Dando-Collins* Cornelius Vanderbilt: How his mind worked and why you wouldn't want to compete against him* Source: David Senra book review (PN)* Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow* Most successful entrepreneurs can be honest family men, too* Source: Sam Parr's recommendation to Andrew Wilkinson (PN)* The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How To Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo* Nobody had more compelling presentations than Steve Jobs* Source: David Senra book review (PN)* How To Be Rich by J. Paul Getty* “I would like to convince young businessmen that there are no surefire, quick, and easy formulas for success in business” – J. Paul Getty* Source: David Senra book review (PN)* Sam Walton: The Inside Story of America's Richest Man by Vance H. Trimble* Discover the rags-to-riches tale of billionaire Sam Walton, founder of the discount chain Wal-Mart and America's richest man, in this study of old-fashioned values like honesty and hard work* Source: David Senra book review (PN)Investing* What I Learned About Investing From Darwin by Pulak Prasad* How to beat the market, the biggest mistakes investors make, why history is more important than projections, and how natural selection applies to investing* Source: Kyle Grieve book review (PN)* The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham* Understanding the difference between price and value* Source: Bill Ackman's recommendation to Lex Fridman (PN)* The Algebra of Wealth by Scott Galloway* “America is a loving, generous place if you have money. It is a rapacious, violent place if you don't.” – Scott Galloway* Source: Scott Galloway's appearance on The Rich Roll Podcast (PN)* A Mathematician Plays The Stock Market by John Paulos* Source: John Paulos appearance on Infinite Loops with Jim O'Shaughnessy (PN)* Poor Charlie's Almanack by Charlie Munger* Charlie Munger understood incentives and human psychology, but never used that knowledge to manipulate others* Source: Warren Buffett's recommendation to shareholders (PN)* Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition by Michael J. Mauboussin* Making decisions is part of life, this is how you make better ones* Source: John Paulos and Jim O'Shaughnessy in discussion (PN)* Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson & Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean by Karen Berman and Joe Knight* Books that Ateet Ahluwalia gives people who join his firm* Source: Ateet Ahluwalia recommendations to Jim O'Shaughnessy (PN)* eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work by Randall Stross* An intriguing insider's look at the rise of Silicon Valley through the lens of the pioneering venture capital firm Benchmark Capital* Source: Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan in discussion (PN)* Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis* How the insiders got exposed* Source: Joseph Stiglitz and Tyler Cowen in discussion (PN)Productivity* Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness, and Productivity by Gloria Mark* Illustrates four myths about attention span* Source: Cal Newport book review (PN)* The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting The Right Things Done by Peter Drucker, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, and Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen* Three books that embody the evolution of productivity* Source: Cal Newport recommendation to Chris Williamson (PN)* Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman* How to embrace the fact that you can't do everything* Source: Cal Newport recommendation to Chris Williamson (PN)Leadership* The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz* Great lessons about running a business and being a leader* Source: Marc Andreessen's recommendation to Rick Rubin (PN)* Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman* Frequently recommended over and over again this year* Source: Bill Gurley, Michael Mauboussin, and Patrick O'Shaughnessy in discussion (PN)* Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card* Sci-fi novel but also a great way to study leadership* Source: Tim Ferriss recommendation to Chris Williamson (PN)* Art of War by Sun Tzu* Do not assume that your enemy thinks in a similar way that you do* Source: Source: Jocko Willink recommendation (PN)* Adventures of a Bystander by Peter Drucker* A captivating journey through his encounters with remarkable individuals who influenced his thinking and shaped the world of management* Source: Jim O'Shaughnessy's recommendation to Ateet Ahluwalia (PN)Motivation* The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho & Ask and It Is Given by Esther and Jerry Hicks* Helped Mike Posner on his spiritual journey* Source: Big Sean recommendations to Mike Poser (PN)* Driven From Within by Michael Jordan* Written during his career peak* Source: David Senra book review (PN)* Michael Jordan: The Life by Roland Lazenby* The key insights into Michael Jordan's competitive spirit and how it made him the greatest basketball player of all time* Source: Ben Wilson book review (PN)Deep Thinking* The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch* Naval Ravikant praises David's work, considering him the smartest human alive* Source: Naval Ravikant and Niklas Anzinger in discussion (PN)* The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger* “Life is not a mystery anymore” – Thomas Metzinger* Source: Thomas Metzinger's appearance on Making Sense with Sam Harris (PN)* Gold by Haleh Liza Gafori (a new translation of Rumi's poems)* Remedy for overthinking before bed* Source: Tim Ferriss recommendation to Chris Williamson (PN)Get the FULL List at Podcast Notes Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode.

There is a counter intuitive school of thought - represented by Tyler Cowen, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen - which suggests that America, for all its technological innovation, remains trapped by long term economic stagnation. So it's no coincidence that the Austin based investor, consultant, and writer, Byrne Hobart's co-authored new book, Boom, comes with enthusiastic blurbs from Cowen, Thiel and Andreessen. If we are to escape our current stagnation, Hobart explained to me when we met in Austin, then we might welcome economic bubbles such as our current AI craze. To get to a boom, he even seems to suggest, borrowing from the ideas of the great economic historian Carlotta Perez, we may even need to celebrate bubbles.Byrne Hobart is an investor, consultant, and writer. He is the author of The Diff, a daily newsletter covering inflection points in finance and technology. He is also a founding partner at Anomaly, a frontier tech investment firm.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

Life and Fate might be the greatest novel of the 20th century or maybe ever. Tyler Cowen talks about this sprawling masterpiece and its author, Vasily Grossman, with EconTalk's Russ Roberts.

I'm re-upping this 2022 conversation with Tyler Cowen about how to identify talent. Professor Cowen holds the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. 

Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which would figure out what progress was and how to increase it. Later that year, tech entrepreneur Jason Crawford stepped up to spearhead the effort. The immediate reaction was mostly negative. There were the usual gripes that “progress” was problematic because it could imply that some cultures/times/places/ideas were better than others. But there were also more specific objections: weren't historians already studying progress? Wasn't business academia already studying innovation? Are you really allowed to just invent a new field every time you think of something it would be cool to study? It seems like you are. Five years later, Progress Studies has grown enough to hold its first conference. I got to attend, and it was great. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/notes-from-the-progress-studies-conference 

Some helpful linksMeter - https://www.meter.com/Meter command - https://command.meter.com/Link to Tyler's book on culture - https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Commercial-Culture-Tyler-Cowen/dp/0674001885Sam Hinkie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Hinkie0:00 - Intro3:48 - Anil's early years and background5:23 - Unconventional parenting9:35 - Anil's journey to entrepreneurship12:30 - Sleeping in factories in China15:22 - China VS U.S.18:30 - Why Networks are so important21:35 - Why networking is still an unsolved problem24:10 - Is hardware too hard?26:11 - What does Meter do?37:17 - How does Meter work?41:08 - Future of enterprise software44:00 - Human interaction with AI models46:30 - Why Meter is building AI models50:50 - Spotting young talent54:00 - Anil's framework to find good talent57:30 - How Anil helped Dwarkesh Patel start his podcast1:02:00 - The “X factor” in Anil's investments1:02:00 - Raising the ambition bar1:06:55 - Escaping the competitive Indian dynamics1:08:38 - How cinema influences entrepreneurship1:17:25 - Why don't we know how planes fly1:19:20 - Lessons from Sam Hinkie1:21:04 - Kindness as an operating principle1:22:10 - Why hasn't Anil had a more public brand?1:24:03 - US Immigration1:28:00 - Aarthi, Sriram and Anil show?1:30:44 - Best Indian restaurant in London1:32:50 - Has sneaker culture peaked?1:34:25 - Why don't wealthy people build monuments anymore?1:38:04 - London's rich history1:40:30 - Why does Sriram have sriramk.eth?1:42:00 - Should all startups go direct on comms?1:47:07 - Are Aarthi and Sriram “too online”?1:49:10 - Sriram's Silicon Valley groupchats1:49:46 - Will Aarthi and Sriram move back to India?1:48:12 - Aarthi and Sriram's failures in tech1:53:55 - Netflix's 3D and streaming software1:58:18 - Popfly1:59:55 - Microsoft success under Satya2:02:00 - On tech execs2:03:10 - Nonfiction book that Aarthi and Sriram would write2:06:27 - Aarthi and Sriram's favorite Indian movie before 20002:09:48 - The End Follow Sriram:https://www.instagram.com/sriramk/https://twitter.com/sriramkFollow Aarthi:https://www.instagram.com/aarthir/https://twitter.com/aarthirFollow the podcast:https://www.instagram.com/aarthiandsriramshow/https://twitter.com/aarthisrirampod

Tyler Cowen has long nurtured an obsession with music. It's one of the few addictions Tyler believes is actually conducive to a fulfilling intellectual life. In this bonus episode, a year after Tyler walked us through the world of the Avant-Garde, and his favorite pop music, Tyler guides us through some of the major pillars of Russian classical music—from Rimsky-Korsakov to Stravinsky. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

On the left-wing case for freedom. Regular contributor Alex Gourevitch is back on to talk about how the Democrats are approaching the US presidential election. Alex talks us through an influential and widely-read article that he wrote in 2020 with Corey Robin on how the left needed to reclaim freedom as its own. We discuss: Why is the left suddenly talking about freedom? When did it abandon freedom in favour of human rights, welfare, or identity? What are the consequences of leaving "freedom" to the libertarians and oligarchs? How would one critique what the Democrats are doing today from this perspective? Plus: we hear about Alex's debate with Tyler Cowen on whether capitalism is defensible. Links: Gaining freedom by escaping the unfreedom of the workplace - PNHP Freedom Now, Alex Gourevitch & Corey Robin, Polity: Vol 52, No 3 The US presidential race will be fought over competing definitions of ‘freedom', Eric Foner, The Guardian The Story of American Freedom, Eric Foner /298/ Working For Freedom ft. Alex Gourevitch

Tyler Cowen is a world-renowned economist, professor, columnist, and co-author of the influential economics blog Marginal Revolution. Graduating from George Mason University with a Bachelor of Science in Economics, and later receiving his PhD in economics from Harvard University, he has developed a vested interest in the economics of culture, as he delves into topics including fame, art, and cultural trade in his 19 books. Alongside economist Alex Tabbarock, Cowen is passionate about making world-class economics education accessible through his online platform, Marginal Revolution University. However, he may be best known for his popular podcast, Conversations with Tyler, where he publishes new conversations with the greatest thinkers of today every Wednesday.  ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Vivo Barefoot http://vivobarefoot.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

In this episode, I sit down with Mark Manson, bestselling author (The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck) and seasoned creator.With his deep understanding of the creator economy, Mark shares the most common pitfalls to avoid, his strategy for growing to millions of YouTube subscribers in 18 months, and how to balance success with happiness.Whether you're a pro or just starting out, Mark's insights on building a sustainable creator business are invaluable.Timestamps:00:00 Introduction01:09 What is the Ideal Size for a Creator Business?05:56 How to Maintain Long-Term Success After Trends Fade08:39 Strategies for Building Strong, Lasting Audience Relationships11:34 The #1 Mistake Creators Make (And How to Avoid It)13:57 Best Social Media Platforms for Growing Your Creator Business18:28 How to Go Viral on YouTube in 202426:19 The Secret to Consistent Online Growth and Engagement33:56 Tips for Sustained Online Success in the Creator Economy36:55 Why Diversification is Crucial for Online Success38:47 Mark Manson's Newsletter Optimization Strategy42:11 How to Adapt to Rising Competition46:26 Closing ThoughtsIf you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe, share it with your friends, and leave us a review. We read every single one.Know more about Billion Dollar Creator: https://www.billiondollarcreator.com/Follow Nathan:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nathanbarry/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanbarry/Twitter: https://twitter.com/nathanbarryWebsite: https://nathanbarry.com/Follow Mark:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/markmanson/X: https://twitter.com/iammarkmansonYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson/Website: https://markmanson.net/Featured in this episode:Ali Abdaal - https://aliabdaal.com/Casey Neistat - https://www.youtube.com/user/caseyneistatBotez sisters - https://www.youtube.com/c/BotezLiveJames Clear - https://jamesclear.com/Ramit Sethi - https://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/Matt D'Avella - https://www.mattdavella.com/Dan Go - https://www.dango.co/Tyler Cowen - https://marginalrevolution.com/Anthony Bourdain - https://explorepartsunknown.com/Mr. Beast - https://www.youtube.com/user/MrBeast6000Kit - https://kit.com/Highlights:11:33 Knowing Your Production Function30:34 What It Takes to Endure in the Creator Economy44:27 Looking Back at Your Digital Footprint

Few people have thought as much about finding and cultivating talent than Tyler Cowen. The economist, prolific author, and Co-founder of Emergent Ventures (still one person) joined us to share how he thinks about identifying talented individuals at the earliest stages (like, say, -1) and channeling those people toward impactful work.

Tyler Cowen, one of the world's most respected economists, shares how to spot, assess, woo, and retain highly talented people.

The economy has hit a hinge moment. For the past few years, inflation has been the big economic story — the fixation of economic policymakers, journalists and almost everyone who goes to the grocery store. But economists now largely see inflation as tamed. It's still a major political issue; the country continues to reel from years of rising prices, and there is a real affordability crisis. But that isn't all the next administration will have to deal with. So what does it mean to fight the next economic war rather than the last one?Jason Furman is an economics professor at Harvard and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Barack Obama. Furman has closely tracked the inflation crisis over the past few years, and he's deeply knowledgeable about how economic policy is made.In this conversation, we discuss why the inflation crisis upended the expectations of so many economists and what we've learned for the next time inflation strikes, what he expects to see with mortgage rates and the housing market, the upcoming fight over Donald Trump's expiring tax cuts, the good and the bad in Kamala Harris's housing policy and why there seems to be so little concern from either party about the ever-growing U.S. debt.Mentioned:“The Economic Theory Behind JD Vance's Populism” with Oren Cass on The Ezra Klein Show“Trump's Most Misunderstood Policy Proposal” by Oren Cass“In Defense of the Dismal Science” by Jason FurmanBook Recommendations:How the World Became Rich by Mark Koyama and Jared RubinThe Goodness Paradox by Richard WranghamThe Ladies' Paradise by Émile ZolaThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones, Efim Shapiro and Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Tyler Cowen, Veronique de Rugy, Desmond Lachman, Lindsay Owens, Nathan Tankus, Isabella Weber and Sonia Herrero. Soon, you'll need a subscription to maintain access to this show's back catalog, and the back catalogs of other New York Times podcasts, on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Don't miss out on exploring all of our shows, featuring everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts.

Freddie deBoer has a post on what he calls “the temporal Copernican principle.” He argues we shouldn't expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes: What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let's hope that it keeps going for awhile - we'll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of human life. So let's just throw out 300,000 years as the span of human existence, even though it could easily be 500,000 or a million or more. Harari's lifespan, if he's lucky, will probably top out at about 100 years. So: what are the odds that Harari's lifespan overlaps with the most important period in human history, as he believes, given those numbers? That it overlaps with a particularly important period of human history at all? Even if we take the conservative estimate for the length of human existence of 300,000 years, that means Harari's likely lifespan is only about .33% of the entirety of human existence. Isn't assuming that this .33% is somehow particularly special a very bad assumption, just from the basis of probability? And shouldn't we be even more skeptical given that our basic psychology gives us every reason to overestimate the importance of our own time? (I think there might be a math error here - 100 years out of 300,000 is 0.033%, not 0.33% - but this isn't my main objection.) He then condemns a wide range of people, including me, for failing to understand this: Some people who routinely violate the Temporal Copernican Principle include Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk, Clay Shirky, Tyler Cowen, Matt Yglesias, Tom Friedman, Scott Alexander, every tech company CEO, Ray Kurzweil, Robin Hanson, and many many more. I think they should ask themselves how much of their understanding of the future ultimately stems from a deep-seated need to believe that their times are important because they think they themselves are important, or want to be. I deny misunderstanding this. Freddie is wrong. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism 

[Interview republished in the main section so that it appears on the regular podcast feed]Find Tyler:https://marginalrevolution.com/https://x.com/tylercowenFind me:AI Meetup / SB 1047 is Over Party:https://lu.ma/sa5q2tkoAlliance for the Future: https://www.affuture.org/donate/ https://x.com/psychosortMentioned in the episode:Chuck Schumer reporthttps://www.schumer.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Roadmap_Electronic1.32pm.pdfAI Safety is dead:https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-05-21/ai-safety-is-dead-and-chuck-schumer-faces-risksPelosi on SB 1047:https://pelosi.house.gov/news/press-releases/pelosi-statement-opposition-california-senate-bill-1047SB 1047 Timeline:https://reason.com/2024/08/16/california-lawmakers-face-backlash-over-doomsday-driven-ai-billGOAT bookhttps://goatgreatesteconomistofalltime.ai/enCSIS Report on Open Source and Defense:https://www.csis.org/analysis/defense-priorities-open-source-ai-debateChange in vibes post:https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/07/the-changes-in-vibes-why-did-they-happen.htmlElites:https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/09/a-simple-theory-of-which-thinkers-support-the-elites-or-not.htmlNoah US State Capacity:The Art of Power:https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Art-of-Power/Nancy-Pelosi/9781668048047 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fromthenew.world/subscribe

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: Monthly Roundup #22: September 2024, published by Zvi on September 18, 2024 on LessWrong. It's that time again for all the sufficiently interesting news that isn't otherwise fit to print, also known as the Monthly Roundup. Bad News Beware the failure mode in strategy and decisions that implicitly assumes competence, or wishes away difficulties, and remember to reverse all advice you hear. Stefan Schubert (quoting Tyler Cowen on raising people's ambitions often being very high value): I think lowering others' aspirations can also be high-return. I know of people who would have had a better life by now if someone could have persuaded them to pursue more realistic plans. Rob Miles: There's a specific failure mode which I don't have a name for, which is similar to "be too ambitious" but is closer to "have an unrealistic plan". The illustrative example I use is: Suppose by some strange circumstance you have to represent your country at olympic gymnastics next week. One approach is to look at last year's gold, and try to do that routine. This will fail. You'll do better by finding one or two things you can actually do, and doing them well There's a common failure of rationality which looks like "Figure out what strategy an ideal reasoner would use, then employ that strategy". It's often valuable to think about the optimal policy, but you must understand the difference between knowing the path, and walking the path I do think that more often 'raise people's ambitions' is the right move, but you need to carry both cards around with you for different people in different situations. Theory that Starlink, by giving people good internet access, ruined Burning Man. Seems highly plausible. One person reported that they managed to leave the internet behind anyway, so they still got the Burning Man experience. Tyler Cowen essentially despairs of reducing regulations or the number of bureaucrats, because it's all embedded in a complex web of regulations and institutions and our businesses rely upon all that to be able to function. Otherwise business would be paralyzed. There are some exceptions, you can perhaps wholesale axe entire departments like education. He suggests we focus on limiting regulations on new economic areas. He doesn't mention AI, but presumably that's a lot of what's motivating his views there. I agree that 'one does not simply' cut existing regulations in many cases, and that 'fire everyone and then it will all work out' is not a strategy (unless AI replaces them?), but also I think this is the kind of thing can be the danger of having too much detailed knowledge of all the things that could go wrong. One should generalize the idea of eliminating entire departments. So yes, right now you need the FDA to approve your drug (one of Tyler's examples) but… what if you didn't? I would still expect, if a new President were indeed to do massive firings on rhetoric and hope, that the result would be a giant cluster****. La Guardia switches to listing flights by departure time rather than order of destination, which in my mind makes no sense in the context of flights, that frequently get delayed, where you might want to look for an earlier flight or know what backups are if yours is cancelled or delayed or you miss it, and so on. It also gives you a sense of where one can and can't actually go to when from where you are. For trains it makes more sense to sort by time, since you are so often not going to and might not even know the train's final destination. I got a surprising amount of pushback about all that on Twitter, some people felt very strongly the other way, as if to list by name was violating some sacred value of accessibility or something. Anti-Social Media Elon Musk provides good data on his followers to help with things like poll calibration, reports 73%-27% lea...

The American dream is the most important of our national myths. It's the idea that, with hard work and determination, anyone in this country can achieve middle-class security, own a home, start a family, and provide the children they raise with a better life than they had. Is that still true? On the one hand, our economy is the envy of the world. We are the richest country, leading the pack when it comes to innovation. And more people choose to move here for economic opportunity than to any other nation. And yet, everywhere you look in this country, there is a growing sense of pessimism. A sense that you can work hard, play by the rules, even go to college, and still end up saddled with debt and unable to afford the basics, like a home. Americans were told that higher education would be their ticket to the good life. Now, there's more than $1.7 trillion dollars in student loan debt hanging over a generation. Americans were told that free trade would make everyone prosper. But try telling that to the 4.5 million people who lost their manufacturing jobs in the last 30 years. Perhaps all of this is why a July Wall Street Journal poll found that only 9 percent of Americans say they believe that financial security is a realistic goal. And only 8 percent believe that a comfortable retirement is possible for them. Now, do those numbers reflect reality? Or just negative vibes? Last week, we convened four expert debaters in Washington, D.C., to hash out the question: Is the American dream alive and well? Arguing that yes, the American dream is alive and well, is economist Tyler Cowen. Tyler is a professor of economics at George Mason University and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. He also writes the essential blog Marginal Revolution. Joining Tyler is Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor in chief of the libertarian Reason magazine and co-host of The Reason Roundtable podcast. Arguing that no, the American dream is not flourishing, is David Leonhardt, senior writer at The New York Times and the author of Ours Was the Shining Future: The Story of the American Dream. David has won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Joining David is Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of The Nation magazine and the founding editor of Jacobin. He is the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality. Before the debate, 71 percent of our audience said that yes, the American Dream is alive and well, and 29 percent voted no. At the end of the night, we polled them again—and you'll see for yourself which side won. This debate was made possible by the generosity of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. If you care about free speech, FIRE is an organization that should be on your radar. If you liked what you heard from Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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: Thiel on AI & Racing with China, published by Ben Pace on August 20, 2024 on LessWrong. This post is a transcript of part of a podcast with Peter Thiel, touching on topics of AI, China, extinction, Effective Altruists, and apocalyptic narratives, published on August 16th 2024. If you're interested in reading the quotes, just skip straight to them, the introduction is not required reading. Introduction Peter Thiel is probably known by most readers, but briefly: he is an venture capitalist, the first outside investor in Facebook, cofounder of Paypal and Palantir, and wrote Zero to One (a book I have found very helpful for thinking about building great companies). He has also been one of the primary proponents of the Great Stagnation hypothesis (along with Tyler Cowen). More local to the LessWrong scene, Thiel was an early funder of MIRI and a speaker at the first Effective Altruism summit in 2013. He funded Leverage Research for many years, and also a lot of anti-aging research, and the seasteading initiative, and his Thiel Fellowship included a number of people who are around the LessWrong scene. I do not believe he has been active around this scene much in the last ~decade. He appears rarely to express a lot of positions about society, and I am curious to hear them when he does. In 2019 I published the transcript of another longform interview of his here with Eric Weinstein. Last week another longform interview with him came out, and I got the sense again, that even though we disagree on many things, conversation with him would be worthwhile and interesting. Then about 3 hours in he started talking more directly about subjects that I think actively about and some conflicts around AI, so I've quoted the relevant parts below. His interviewer, Joe Rogan is a very successful comedian and podcaster. He's not someone who I would go to for insights about AI. I think of him as standing in for a well-intentioned average person, for better or for worse, although he is a little more knowledgeable and a little more intelligent and a lot more curious than the average person. The average Joe. I believe he is talking in good faith to the person before him, with curiosity, and making points that seem natural to many. Artificial Intelligence Discussion focused on the AI race and China, atarting at 2:56:40. The opening monologue by Rogan is skippable. Rogan If you look at this mad rush for artificial intelligence - like, they're literally building nuclear reactors to power AI. Thiel Well, they're talking about it. Rogan Okay. That's because they know they're gonna need enormous amounts of power to do it. Once it's online, and it keeps getting better and better, where does that go? That goes to a sort of artificial life-form. I think either we become that thing, or we integrate with that thing and become cyborgs, or that thing takes over. And that thing becomes the primary life force of the universe. And I think that biological life, we look at like life, because we know what life is, but I think it's very possible that digital life or created life might be a superior life form. Far superior. [...] I love people, I think people are awesome. I am a fan of people. But if I had to look logically, I would assume that we are on the way out. And that the only way forward, really, to make an enormous leap in terms of the integration of society and technology and understanding our place in the universe, is for us to transcend our physical limitations that are essentially based on primate biology, and these primate desires for status (like being the captain), or for control of resources, all of these things - we assume these things are standard, and that they have to exist in intelligent species. I think they only have to exist in intelligent species that have biological limitations. I think in...

Why is our political discourse so polarised? Why do we shout past each other instead of talking to each other? Arnold Kling joins Amit Varma in episode 394 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss his life, the state of the world and how a fourth language has joined the three he mentioned in his seminal book on political discourse. (FOR FULL LINKED SHOW NOTES, GO TO SEENUNSEEN.IN.) Also check out: 1. Arnold Kling on Wikipedia, Twitter, Amazon and his own website. 2. In My Tribe -- Arnold Kling on Substack. 3. The Three Languages of Politics -- Arnold Kling. 4. Specialization and Trade: A Re-introduction to Economics -- Arnold Kling. 5. Invisible Wealth: The Hidden Story of How Markets Work -- Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz. 6. Not What They Had in Mind: A History of Policies that Produced the Financial Crisis of 2008 -- Arnold Kling. 7. Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care -- Arnold Kling. 8. What is Libertarianism? — Episode 117 of The Seen and the Unseen (w David Boaz). 9. David Boaz and the state of libertarianism -- Arnold Kling. 10. Splinter Groups -- Arnold Kling. 11. Seeing Like a State -- James C Scott. 12. A Million Mutinies Now -- VS Naipaul. 13. The Median Voter Theorem. 14. India Needs Decentralization -- Episode 47 of Everything is Everything. 15. Understanding India Through Its Languages — Episode 232 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Peggy Mohan). 16. The Refreshing Audacity of Vinay Singhal — Episode 291 of The Seen and the Unseen. 17. Stage.in. 18. The Indianness of Indian Food — Episode 95 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Vikram Doctor). 19. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution -- CP Snow. 20. Fixing the Knowledge Society -- Episode 24 of Everything is Everything. 21. Arnold Kling's extended biographical note on himself. 22. The Best and the Brightest -- David Halberstam. 23. The Wind in the Willows -- Kenneth Grahame. 24. The State of AI with Marc & Ben -- The A16Z Podcast. 25. The Cash Nexus -- Niall Ferguson. 26. Marginal Revolution -- Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's blog. 27. Episodes of The Seen and the Unseen w Alex Tabarrok: 1, 2, 3, 4. 28. Stubborn Attachments -- Episode 106 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Tyler Cowen). 29. Conversation and Society — Episode 182 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Russ Roberts). 30. This Be The Verse — Philip Larkin. 31. Free to Choose -- The documentary series by Milton Friedman. 32. The Anxious Generation -- Jonathan Haidt. 33. The Life and Times of the Indian Economy — Episode 387 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Rajeswari Sengupta). 34. Fixing Indian Education — Episode 185 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Karthik Muralidharan). 35. Arnold Kling's July 19 post on JD Vance. 36. The Intellectual Foundations of Hindutva — Episode 115 of The Seen and the Unseen (w Aakar Patel). 37. Eric Weinstein Won't Toe the Line — Episode 330 of The Seen and the Unseen. 38. Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web -- Bari Weiss. 39. Every Act of Government Is an Act of Violence — Amit Varma. 40. The Experience Machine. 41. What is Populism? — Jan-Werner Müller. 42. The Populist Playbook — Episode 42 of Everything is Everything. 43. The Rooted Cosmopolitanism of Sugata Srinivasaraju — Episode 277 of The Seen and the Unseen. 44. Matt Y's Declaration of Independence -- Arnold Kling. 45. Lies, Damned Lies, and Productivity Data -- Arnold Kling. 46. Everything Is Amazing & Nobody Is Happy -- Louis CK. Amit's newsletter is active again. Subscribe right away to The India Uncut Newsletter! It's free! Amit Varma and Ajay Shah have launched a new video podcast. Check out Everything is Everything on YouTube. Check out Amit's online course, The Art of Clear Writing. Episode art: ‘Don't Fight' by Simahina.

Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist, and blogger, He was ranked at number 72 among the "Top 100 Global Thinkers" and he is here with Peter & Kasia to discuss wide ranging diverse topics!This episode delves into the speculation around the existence and visitation of aliens to Earth, and exploring the implications of such visits on human behaviour and society. AI's impact on future technology and economics, as well as climate change, deregulation, and animal welfare. Cowen shares his daily routine, emphasising the importance of output and productivity, his philosophy of life, including his views on utilitarianism, religion, and the importance of constantly seeking knowledge and making incremental improvements for a better world.Learn more about Tyler at Marginal Revolution Keep up to date with Peter!Website: www.petersinger.infoSubstack: https://boldreasoningwithpetersinger.substack.com/YouTube: www.youtube.com/@peter_singerKeep up to date with Kasia!https://www.facebook.com/katarzyna.delazariradek Executive Producer: Rachel BarrettSpecial Thanks to Suzi Jamil! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week on Upstream, we're releasing a fascinating discussion with economist, professor, and bestselling author Tyler Cowen about how to find talented people. This was recorded in 2022 around the launch of his book 'Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World' co-authored with Daniel Gross. Tyler and Erik discuss strategies for assessing raw talent, recognizing late bloomers, and fostering an environment conducive to high achievers. They also cover the importance of understanding founder compatibility, building strong peer groups, and the role of mentorship in talent development.

Economist and author Tyler Cowen, the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and chairman and general director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, joins Julia La Roche on episode 182.  Links:  Marginal Revolution: https://marginalrevolution.com/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/tylercowen 00:00 Introduction and welcome Tyler Cowen 01:11 Big picture — the scary and the wonderful   03:37 Optimist 04:40 The Great Stagnation and AI  06:18 The impact of AI on investing 08:14 Human connections will matter more  10:45 Our debt will probably prove manageable because of AI 11:22 How AI will change how we live 13:50 Education  16:39 AI and jobs 18:17 Debt  21:17 U.S. psychology  23:37 Conflicting narratives of the economy 24:40 Immigration 26:25 Talent  29:13 Food and capitalism  32:20 Approach to life  33:20 Great Financial Crisis — why real estate wasn't a bubble  36:20 Investing: Be long 38:36 Travel and humanity  42:00 Views 43:40 Election year  45:50 Parting thoughts 

Warp: Don't let payroll and compliance hold your startup back: visit https://joinwarp.com/peel to get started and receive a $1,000 gift card when you first run payroll. Get first-party targeting with Brave's private ad platform: cookieless and future proof ad formats for all your business needs. Performance meets privacy. Head to https://brave.com/ads/ and mention “Turpentine” when signing up for a 25% discount on your first campaign. Lisa Wehden is the Founder and CEO of Plymoth, making fast and simple immigration for technologists. We go deep on the broken US immigration system, how its holding back US innovation, and the secret 0-1A Visa you can get in as fast as four weeks. Lisa lived in a sawmill while building her first climate tech startup, and we go inside that journey, giving the VC money she raised back to start Plymouth, raising grants to fund it, and how she broke into Silicon Valley as an outsider. Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (04:51) The state of US immigration (09:26) Why immigrants are good founders (11:43) The secret O-1A Visa (12:18) Why the O-1A is easier to get (16:54) Founders that have gotten their O-1A (20:00) Getting a Visa in four weeks with Plymouth (22:01) The 500-page, physical paper Visa application (25:57) Lisa's US immigration COVID hobby (27:58) Living in a Sawmill building a climate tech startup (30:59) Giving VCs their money back (32:19) Joining Interact in SF (33:51) Raising grant money instead of VC (34:40) Becoming a paralegal to learn the industry (37:24) The Plymouth 100 community (39:20) How Lisa raised grant funding from Eric Schmidt and Tyler Cowen (43:55) Talent is the bottleneck to AI development (46:04) How to break into Silicon Valley as an outsider (52:43) Hiring on hopes and fears (55:31) "Write it down, make it happen" (56:45) Benefits of doing a calendar audit (1:01:54) Anyone can be an entrepreneur (1:04:53) Why Lisa doesn't work from her phone (1:06:38) How to fix the US immigration system More on Plymouth Street: https://www.plymouthstreet.com/ Referenced: Interact: https://joininteract.com Lisa's 0-1 Visa Guide: https://lisa-wehden.medium.com/a-guide-to-applying-for-the-o-1-visa-for-extraordinary-individuals-8ca5f22ff86b Writing a forwardable email intro: https://also.roybahat.com/introductions-and-the-forward-intro-email-14e2827716a1 Where to find Lisa: Twitter: https://twitter.com/lisawehden LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-wehden-aa111385/ Where to find Turner: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak/ Newsletter: https://www.thespl.it/

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: Progress Conference 2024: Toward Abundant Futures, published by jasoncrawford on June 26, 2024 on LessWrong. The progress movement has grown a lot in the last few years. We now have progress journals, think tanks, and fellowships. The progress idea has spread and evolved into the "abundance agenda", "techno-optimism", "supply-side progressivism", "American dynamism". All of us want to see more scientific, technological, and economic progress for the good of humanity, and envision a bold, ambitious, flourishing future. What we haven't had so far is a regular gathering of the community. Announcing Progress Conference 2024, a two-day event to connect people in the progress movement. Meet great people, share ideas in deep conversations, catalyze new projects, get energized and inspired. Hosted by: the Roots of Progress Institute, together with the Foresight Institute, HumanProgress.org, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Institute for Progress, and Works in Progress magazine When: October 18-19, 2024 Where: Berkeley, CA - at the Lighthaven campus, an inviting space perfect for mingling Speakers: Keynotes include Patrick Collison, Tyler Cowen, Jason Crawford, and Steven Pinker. Around 20 additional speakers will share ideas on four tracks: the big idea of human progress, policy for progress, tech for progress, and storytelling/media for progress. Full speaker list Attendees: We expect 200+ intellectuals, builders, policy makers, storytellers, and students. This is an invitation-only event, but anyone can apply for an invitation. Complete the open application by July 15th. Program: Two days of intellectual exploration, inspiration and interaction that will help shape the progress movement into a cultural force. Attend talks on topics from tech to policy to culture, build relationships with new people as you hang out on cozy sofas or enjoy the sun in the garden, sign up to run an unconference session and find others who share your interests and passions, or pitch your ideas to those who could help make your dreams a reality. Special thanks to our early sponsors: Cato Institute, Astera Institute, and Freethink Media! We have more sponsorships open, view sponsorship opportunities here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Want to work for Jimmy's Jobs? Apply here Unlocking Talent & Success: An Exclusive Interview with Tyler Cowen | Jimmy's Jobs of the Future In this episode of Jimmy's Jobs of the Future, Jimmy interviews Tyler Cowen, one of the world's most influential economists, known for his expertise in talent. They discuss Cowen's insights on finding and nurturing talent, the changing job landscape, and the future of AI. Cowen shares his personal experiences, from his early days as a chess teacher to his thoughts on modern-day interviewing techniques. The episode also delves into the impact of geography on startup success, the significance of prudence in research, and the enduring importance of stamina and resilience for career growth. 00:00 Introduction to Tyler Cowen and His Influence 01:40 Job Opportunities at Jimmy's Jobs 02:20 Tyler Cowen's Early Career and Lessons from Chess 05:10 Evaluating Talent and Job Interviews 09:04 Building a Social Profile and Networking 14:04 The Importance of Stamina and Daily Routines 16:19 Changing Status of Jobs and Future Predictions 19:07 Climbing Social Hierarchies and Talent Indicators 29:15 The Role of Parents in Modern Success 30:22 Impact of Parental Loss on Ambition 31:05 Balancing Scale and Quality in Ventures 32:02 Geographical Expansion and Talent 34:01 The UK's Unique Position and Challenges 38:14 Brexit and Immigration 44:33 Global Talent and Emerging Markets 46:32 AI's Impact on Future Talent 52:21 Personal Reflections and Influences 55:38 Concluding Thoughts and Recommendations ********** Follow us on socials! Instagram: instagram.com/jimmysjobs Tiktok: tiktok.com/@jimmysjobsofthefuture Twitter / X: twitter.com/JimmyM Linkedin: linkedin.com/in/jimmy-mcloughlin-obe/ Want to come on the show? hello@jobsofthefuture.co Sponsor the show or Partner with us: sunny@jobsofthefuture.co Credits: Host / Exec Producer: Jimmy McLoughlin OBE Producer: Sunny Winter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We revisit an episode from the podcast archives – Melody Hildebrandt (CTO @ Fox) shares her experience representing the tech org during the biggest deal in entertainment history! We cover Melody's most important lessons negotiating on behalf of the tech org plus how they leveraged the M&A event to accelerate innovation and productivity.Melody will be joining us as one of our featured speakers @ ELC Annual 2024 (our two-day conference on 8/27-8/28! Check out our incredible line up of speakers, other conference experiences & tickets at sfelc.com/annual2024 Use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discount.ABOUT MELODY HILDEBRANDTMelody Hildebrandt (@mhil) is Chief Technology Officer for Fox Corporation, where sets set the comprehensive technology strategy for the Company. She previous served as the company's Chief Information Security Officer and as the President of its research and development subsidiary, Blockchain Creative Labs.In her current role, Hildebrandt leads the development, design and implementation of emerging technologies across the FOX enterprise, spanning FOX Sports, FOX News, FOX Entertainment, FOX Television Stations, and Tubi Media Group. Her current focus is on future planning, including developments in artificial intelligence and authenticating and monetizing premium content via blockchain technology. She also continues to oversee the cyber-security posture of the business and leads technology M&A efforts, identifying areas for investment and growth.Prior to FOX, Hildebrandt held the role of Global Chief Information Security Officer at 21st Century Fox, where she was responsible for the cyber security posture of 21CF businesses, including 20th Century Fox, FOX Networks Group, National Geographic Partners, FOX News, Star India and others.Before 21CF, she was Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir Technologies, where she helped start its commercial work and led Palantir's business in cyber security, anti-money laundering and rogue trading detection. Prior to that, she consulted US and international governments with Booz Allen Hamilton, where she designed military and strategy wargames.Hildebrandt is the Executive Sponsor of Women in Technology at FOX."One thing that we intervened on very quickly because we were AT the table for (the conversation), "How should we structure the deal?" Was to do something that was quite counter-intuitive I think, and very controversial... Which was to say ‘Let's essentially value all of our current technology assets at near-zero... And make them part of the deal.'"- Melody Hildebrandt   Join us at ELC Annual 2024!ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discountSHOW NOTES:Background on the Fox Disney “mega-deal” (03:39)How to structure an M&A to accelerate your tech roadmap (06:01)Motivating engineering teams with forcing functions (10:14)What it was like representing a tech org in deal structuring (13:13)How to develop an engineering org's merger strategy (17:36)M&A negotiation tips for engineering leaders (20:07)A critical skill for eng leaders: converting tech pains into business goals (22:59)How to get executive buy-in on engineering initiatives (27:58)“Crashing” your way to a seat at the table (31:05)Melody's process for setting the strategic direction of an engineering org (32:19)Managing engineering teams from high and low — the middle is death (34:35)Why this M&A event continues to accelerate innovation (37:37)Rapid-Fire Questions (42:26)LINKS AND RESOURCES(article) A super-powered approach to tech transformation - Melody Hildebrandt& Paul Cheesborough's article on the untold story of the 21st Century Fox & Disney transaction(podcast) Conversations with Tyler esteemed economist Tyler Cowen engages with today's most underrated thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between.(book) Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir(reference) The Masked Singer NFT project - www.maskverse.com

Stanford's State of AI, Peter Thiel vs. Tyler Cowen, China Taiwan Hacking Prep, GenZ Outperforming, and more… Subscribe to the newsletter at: https://danielmiessler.com/subscribe Join the UL community at:https://danielmiessler.com/upgrade Follow on X:https://twitter.com/danielmiessler Follow on LinkedN:https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielmiessler See you in the next one!  Become a Member: https://danielmiessler.com/upgradeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Our new book, The Score That Matters, is out TODAY (March 26, 2024). Here's the link: https://amzn.to/4citmTL Thank you for your support! Full show notes at www.LearningLeader.com The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk Ryan Hawk is the creator and host of The Learning Leader Show, a top-rated business podcast that focuses on learning from the most effective leaders in the world. He speaks regularly to Fortune 500 companies; works with teams and players in the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NCAA; and facilitates Leadership Circles to offer structured guidance and collaborative feedback to new and experienced leaders. Ryan has also built an online leadership school called The Learning Leader Academy. He is the author of Welcome to Management and The Pursuit of Excellence, lauded by Forbes magazine as “the best leadership book of 2020” and “the most dynamic leadership book of 2022,” respectively. Brook Cupps has been a high school basketball coach for more than 20 years, earning several Coach of the Year awards. His teams have won numerous conference, district, and regional championships, as well as Centerville High School's first-ever basketball state championship in 2021. In addition, he has spent the last eight years coaching grassroots basketball on the AAU circuits and helped guide the North Coast (Ohio) Blue Chips to national championships in 2014 and 2019. He publishes weekly essays on leadership and coaching on his site, Blue Collar Grit, and is the author of Surrender the Outcome. People love to keep score. Managers keep score of a range of business metrics: market share, revenue, profit margin, and growth rate. In our personal lives, social media has us keeping score by likes and followers. These external scores are outcome-driven and serve as proof of our success—money, fame, material possessions, wins—but this constant chase for more validation often leaves us feeling exhausted and empty. Offering both descriptive and prescriptive advice and anecdotes, The Score That Matters will help you unlock true fulfillment and happiness by discovering your purpose, identifying your values, creating critical behaviors, and living them faithfully every day in all aspects of your life. Warren Buffett once said, “The big question about how people behave is whether they've got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard.”  And that's what The Score That Matters Is All About… The inner scoreboard is about eliminating comparison with others and living in alignment with what's most important to you: your values and the behaviors to match those values.  If you want to stop comparing yourself to others, establish YOUR core values, and live in alignment with them (and I believe you should), then I think our book, The Score That Matters, will be useful for you. In addition to that, our book, The Score That Matters, will help you Build trust with the important people in your lives (your family and the team you're leading at work) It will help you focus on your eulogy virtues instead of your resume virtues And we write about how you can build transformational relationships that will ultimately change your life for the better. When I interviewed economics professor and best-selling author Tyler Cowen, I asked him why he chose to write his most recent book with someone else (after he previously had written his books by himself). He said, “If you have an opportunity to work with someone who is awesome and brilliant and who will cooperate with you, you should always do that. Drop everything and do that.” Before this, I never thought I would write with someone else. It's too personal. However, I took Tyler Cowen's advice and I am so glad I did. Working on a book with one of your mentors is the ultimate tool for learning. I got to have long-form conversations (both in writing and in person) from someone who has figured out some of life's most challenging issues. When you meet Brook Cupps, you'll notice that he's incredibly comfortable in his own skin. He has ZERO need to get approval from anyone outside of his closest friends. He has his values, lives his values, and that's it. I think we would all be better off if we did that. In this book, you'll get the unique perspective of a teacher and a student. Brook plays the role of the teacher, and me the student. We wrote almost all of the book together and mixed in some parts labeled BC and RH when it was from each of our unique perspectives. After a lifetime of figuring these things out and 3 years working together to get the ideas out of our heads onto the page, our book, The Score That Matters is now available for you to read. If you've gotten any value from The Learning Leader Show over the past 9 years, I hope you decide to buy this book. I think it could change your life. Go to Amazon now and buy it. If you've already bought yourself a copy, go back to Amazon and buy another one or two for the people in your life you care about most. Start a book club, tell your friends, read this with your colleagues at work. Not only do I think it could change your life, but all of your friends too. Thank you for your support!  

In this episode of "American Potential," host Jeff Crank welcomes Tyler Cowen, a prominent economist, author, and podcaster, to delve into a fascinating discussion on the intersection of economics, talent identification, and the groundbreaking use of AI in literature. Cowen shares insights from his co-authored book "Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World," emphasizing the importance of attracting talent rather than merely searching for it. This concept of sending out the right "bat signals" to draw in exceptional individuals resonates with the core philosophy of "American Potential," advocating for harnessing innate virtues over trainable skills.   Cowen's latest work, "GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter?" serves as a central point of conversation. This generative book invites readers to engage with AI chatbots, creating a dynamic reading experience that allows for personalized interaction with the content. Cowen's approach to this book, encouraging readers to use AI to explore economics deeply, reflects his pioneering spirit and dedication to pushing the boundaries of traditional economic discourse.   The episode also explores Cowen's initiatives like Emergent Ventures and Fast Grants, which aim to support innovative ideas and rapid responses to global challenges like the COVID-19 pandemic. These ventures underline the potential of swift, targeted support to foster significant advancements in various fields, including healthcare and technology. As Cowen and Crank discuss the future of AI in publishing and the broader implications for talent identification and economic understanding, listeners are left with a rich perspective on the evolving landscape of knowledge dissemination and the critical role of initiative in shaping the future.   Check out the new AFP website here: https://www.bidenomics.com     Check out American Potential here: https://americanpotential.com   Check out our Spanish episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8wSZydeKZ6uOuFlT_1QQ53L7l6AmC83c   Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanPotentialPodcast     Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/americanpotentialpodcast/   X: https://twitter.com/AMPotentialPod

Logan Kilpatrick leads developer relations at OpenAI, supporting developers building with the OpenAI API and ChatGPT. He is also on the board of directors at NumFOCUS, the nonprofit organization that supports open source projects like Jupyter, Pandas, NumPy, and more. Before OpenAI, Logan was a machine-learning engineer at Apple and advised NASA on open source policy. In our conversation, we discuss:• OpenAI's fast-paced and innovative work environment• The value of high agency and high urgency in your employees• Tips for writing better ChatGPT prompts• How the GPT Store is doing• OpenAI's planning process and decision-making criteria• Where OpenAI is heading in the next few years• Insight into OpenAI's B2B offerings• Why Logan “measures in hundreds”—Brought to you by:• Hex—Helping teams ask and answer data questions by working together• Whimsical—The iterative product workspace• Arcade Software—Create effortlessly beautiful demos in minutes—Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/episodes/. Today's transcript will be live by 8 a.m. PT.—Where to find Logan Kilpatrick:• X: https://twitter.com/OfficialLoganK• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/logankilpatrick/• Website: https://logank.ai/—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Logan's background(03:49) The impact of recent events on OpenAI's team and culture(08:20) Exciting developments in AI interfaces(09:52) Using OpenAI tools to make companies more efficient(13:04) Examples of using AI effectively(18:35) Prompt engineering(22:12) How to write better prompts(26:05) The launch of GPTs and the OpenAI Store(32:10) The importance of high agency and urgency(34:35) OpenAI's ability to move fast and ship high-quality products(35:56) OpenAI's planning process and decision-making criteria(40:22) The importance of real-time communication(42:33) OpenAI's team and growth(44:47) Future developments at OpenAI(47:42) GPT-5 and building toward the future(50:38) OpenAI's enterprise offering and the value of sharing custom applications(52:30) New updates and features from OpenAI(55:09) How to leverage OpenAI's technology in products(58:26) Encouragement for building with AI(59:30) Lightning round—Referenced:• OpenAI: https://openai.com/• Sam Altman on X: https://twitter.com/sama• Greg Brockman on X: https://twitter.com/gdb• tldraw: https://www.tldraw.com/• Harvey: https://www.harvey.ai/• Boost Your Productivity with Generative AI: https://hbr.org/2023/06/boost-your-productivity-with-generative-ai• Research: quantifying GitHub Copilot's impact on developer productivity and happiness: https://github.blog/2022-09-07-research-quantifying-github-copilots-impact-on-developer-productivity-and-happiness/• Lesson learnt from the DPD AI Chatbot swearing blunder: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lesson-learnt-from-dpd-ai-chatbot-swearing-blunder-kitty-sz57e/• Dennis Yang on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennisyang/• Tim Ferriss's blog: https://tim.blog/• Tyler Cowen on X: https://twitter.com/tylercowen• Tom Cruise on X: https://twitter.com/TomCruise• Canva: https://www.canva.com/• Zapier: https://zapier.com/• Siqi Chen on X: https://twitter.com/blader• Runway: https://runway.com/• Universal Primer: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-GbLbctpPz-universal-primer• “I didn't expect ChatGPT to get so good” | Unconfuse Me with Bill Gates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-Ymdc6EdKw• Microsoft Azure: https://azure.microsoft.com/• Lennybot: https://www.lennybot.com/• Visual Electric: https://visualelectric.com/• DALL-E: https://openai.com/research/dall-e• The One World Schoolhouse: https://www.amazon.com/One-World-Schoolhouse-Education-Reimagined/dp/1455508373/ref=sr_1_1• Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams: https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501144324• Gran Turismo: https://www.netflix.com/title/81672085• Gran Turismo video game: https://www.playstation.com/en-us/gran-turismo/• Manta sleep mask: https://mantasleep.com/products/manta-sleep-mask• WAOAW sleep mask: https://www.amazon.com/WAOAW-Sleep-Sleeping-Blocking-Blindfold/dp/B09712FSLY—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Last year was certainly eventful. 2023 brought spy balloons, Donald Trump's indictments, the coronation of a king, the fall of a crypto prince, and no shortage of chaos in Washington, from the ousting of Kevin McCarthy to the farcical George Santos scandal. Oh and then there's the small matter of two major wars, one in Gaza and one in Ukraine. Plus, ongoing tension between the U.S. and China. On a cheerier note, 2023 was also the year of Barbenheimer, the year when it felt like AI really arrived, and the year when the 90s were finally cool again.   But, as crazy as last year was, will the next twelve months prove that it was actually just the calm before the storm?  For many of us, 2024 begins with a distinct feeling of dread.  The Middle East grows increasingly unstable, the war in Ukraine is not going Kyiv's way, and Xi Jinping's rhetoric gets more bellicose by the day. Here at home, there's the small matter of the election from hell, in which American voters face the unappetizing prospect of once again having to choose between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  To try and figure out whether things will really be as terrible as we fear, today on Honestly Bari Weiss and FP editor Olly Wiseman are calling up some of our favorite experts to get a better sense of what's coming down the pike.  The great Tyler Cowen looks into the economic crystal ball. Leandra Medine clues us in on fashion trends in 2024. Our very own Suzy Weiss talks through the cultural year ahead. Linguist John McWhorter looks at language. Doctor and longevity expert Peter Attia tells how to start the year healthy. Eagle-eyed political observers Nate Silver and Frank Luntz try to forecast the election. And the historian Niall Ferguson tells us whether we're right to be having nightmares about World War III.  Some guests cheered us up, others freaked us out. All of them were a pleasure to talk to. Welcome to 2024! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the words that's become utterly void of meaning in the last few years because of its overuse and misuse is privilege. White privilege, male privilege, able-bodied privilege, gender privilege, heterosexual privilege, even hot privilege. In these contexts, privilege is a stain, a kind of original sin meant to guilt the offending party into repenting for it at every twist and turn in their life. “Check your privilege” became a common refrain of the past decade. What all of this has done is confuse and undermine the idea of real privilege—real advantage that some situations produce over others—which, of course, really exists in this country.  But the ultimate privilege in America is not being born white or straight or male. The ultimate privilege, as Melissa Kearny argues, is being born into a household with two parents. Melissa Kearney is an economist at the University of Maryland and her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind, argues that declining marriage rates in America—and the corresponding rise in children being raised in single parent households—are driving many of the country's biggest economic problems. In the 1950s, fewer than 5 percent of babies in this country were born to unmarried mothers. Today, nearly half of all babies in America are born to unmarried mothers. Most surprising—and worrisome—is how this trend is divided along class lines, with children whose mothers don't have a college degree being more than twice as likely—as compared to children of college-educated mothers—to live in a single parent home. Kearny asserts this is widening the economic gap in opportunities and outcomes and rendering already vulnerable populations even more vulnerable.  Many of the arguments that Kearney makes in her book are what you might call commonsensical. And yet the book has received criticism, including from those in our culture who don't dare make judgments on issues of home and family life, perhaps because that's long been considered to be the domain of social conservatives. But as celebrated economist and our friend Tyler Cowen said of Melissa's book, “this could be the most important economics and policy book of the year… it's remarkable that such a book is so needed, but it is.” The word privilege, as Melissa Kearney uses it, is not a dirty word. It is not a judgment that some people are intrinsically better or worse than others. It's not a word meant to guilt or shame a group of people. Quite the opposite. It's an aspirational word. It's meant to inspire policies, programs, and changes in our social norms to even the playing field so that we can do better for all of our children. So that every child in America has the best possible chance for flourishing. That is what every child in this country deserves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices