Podcast appearances and mentions of Tyler Cowen

Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution continues to disagree with my Contra MR On Charity Regrants. Going through his response piece by piece, slightly out of order: Scott takes me to be endorsing Rubio's claim that the third-party NGOs simply pocket the money. In reality my fact check with o3 found (correctly) that the money was “channelled through” the NGOs, not pocketed. Scott lumps my claim together with Rubio's as if we were saying the same thing. My very next words (“I do understand that not all third party allocations are wasteful…”) show a clear understanding that the money is channeled, not pocketed, and my earlier and longer post on US AID makes that clearer yet at greater length. Scott is simply misrepresenting me here. The full post is in the image below: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sorry-i-still-think-mr-is-wrong-about

The race to develop ever-more-powerful AI is creating an unstable dynamic. It could lead us toward either dystopian centralized control or uncontrollable chaos. But there's a third option: a narrow path where technological power is matched with responsibility at every step.Sam Hammond is the chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation. He brings a different perspective to this challenge than we do at CHT. Though he approaches AI from an innovation-first standpoint, we share a common mission on the biggest challenge facing humanity: finding and navigating this narrow path.This episode dives deep into the challenges ahead: How will AI reshape our institutions? Is complete surveillance inevitable, or can we build guardrails around it? Can our 19th-century government structures adapt fast enough, or will they be replaced by a faster moving private sector? And perhaps most importantly: how do we solve the coordination problems that could determine whether we build AI as a tool to empower humanity or as a superintelligence that we can't control?We're in the final window of choice before AI becomes fully entangled with our economy and society. This conversation explores how we might still get this right.Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on X: @HumaneTech_. You can find a full transcript, key takeaways, and much more on our Substack.RECOMMENDED MEDIA Tristan's TED talk on the Narrow PathSam's 95 Theses on AISam's proposal for a Manhattan Project for AI SafetySam's series on AI and LeviathanThe Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty by Daron Acemoglu and James RobinsonDario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace essay.Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World by Deirdre McCloskeyThe Paradox of Libertarianism by Tyler CowenDwarkesh Patel's interview with Kevin Roberts at the FAI's annual conferenceFurther reading on surveillance with 6GRECOMMENDED YUA EPISODESAGI Beyond the Buzz: What Is It, and Are We Ready?The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive The Tech-God Complex: Why We Need to be Skeptics Decoding Our DNA: How AI Supercharges Medical Breakthroughs and Biological Threats with Kevin EsveltCORRECTIONSSam referenced a blog post titled “The Libertarian Paradox” by Tyler Cowen. The actual title is the “Paradox of Libertarianism.” Sam also referenced a blog post titled “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Eli Dourado. The actual title is “A beginner's guide to sociopolitical collapse.”

Economist and polymath Tyler Cowen challenges Silicon Valley's optimistic projections about AI-driven economic growth. We explore what could slow AI's economic impact, despite its remarkable capabilities – and where humans find the new normal amidst major shifts.Timestamps: (00:00) Episode trailer (01:47)  The problem with Silicon Valley's AI-driven growth projections (06:02) The institutional bottleneck to AI progress (10:49) Markets aren't pricing in a radical AI future (12:53) Are we heading for a great job displacement? (17:02) Is GDP still worth talking about? (19:11) Who does AI benefit most? (21:11) Will AI cause a human identity crisis? (27:11) The education system's failure to adapt (35:34) How the Gulf could become a geopolitical powerhouse (39:10)  Could AI change religion? (46:46)  Closing thoughts Tyler's links: Marginal Revolution Blog: https://marginalrevolution.com/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/tylercowen Azeem's links: Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/ Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeemOur new showThis was originally recorded for "Friday with Azeem Azhar", a new show that takes place every Friday at 9am PT and 12pm ET. You can tune in through Exponential View on Substack.Produced by supermix.io and EPIIPLUS1 LTD

Jason, Rob, and Asher are taking out a huge, unaffordable mortgage on the housing crisis. What's behind the shortage in housing? Why is it that no one, except canine Tik Tok influencers with billion-dollar bank accounts, can afford to own a home? While mainstream pundits press for an energy-blind buildout of desert sprawl and gleaming towers of glass and steel, we propose a surprising change of course inspired by little people with hairy feet. Originally recorded on 5/21/25.Warning: This podcast occasionally uses spicy language.Sources/Links/Notes:The story of Gunther, the world's most moneyed canine.You can't make this stuff up: Gunther offers to buy Nicholas Cage's island.David Wessel, "Where do the estimates of a 'housing shortage' come from?," Brookings Institute, October 21, 2024.Alex Fitzpatrick and Alice Feng, "Americans' average daily travel distance, mapped," Axios, March 24, 2024.Jon Gertner, "America Is on Fire, Says One Climate Writer. Should You Flee?," New York Times, March 22, 2024.U.S. News and World Report, "Fastest-Growing Places in the U.S. in 2025-2026."Good Ideas for Addressing the Housing Crisis:Jason Bradford, "Growing the Shire, Not the 'Burb: Facing the Housing Crisis with Ecological Sanity," Resilience, May 27, 2025.Global Ecovillage NetworkNate Hagens, "Alexis Zeigler —  Living Without Fossil Fuels: How Living Energy Farm Created a Comfortable Off-Grid Lifestyle," The Great Simplification, April 9, 2025.Energy-Blind Non-Solutions for the Housing Crisis:Conor Dougherty, "Why America Should Sprawl," New York Times, April 10, 2025.Binyamin Applebaum, "Build Homes on Federal Land," New York Times, April 15, 2025.Ezra Klein, "Abundance and the Left," The Ezra Klein Show, April 29, 2025.Samuel Moyn, "Can Democrats Learn to Dream Big Again?," New York Times, March 18, 2025.Tyler Cowen, "Ezra Klein on the Abundance Agenda (Ep. 236)" Conversations with Tyler, March 7, 2025.Related Episode(s) of Crazy Town:Episode 37. Discounting the Future and Climate Chaos, or… the Story of the Dueling EconomistsSupport the show

This week, Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg explore persistent economic myths and recent developments—from cost disease in services like healthcare and education to stagnating manufacturing productivity, rising higher education costs, drug pricing policies, and student loan debates—while also reflecting on broader intellectual shifts driven by culture wars and foreign aid discussions. – SPONSORS: NetSuite More than 41,000 businesses have already upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle, the #1 cloud financial system bringing accounting, financial management, inventory, HR, into ONE proven platform. Download the CFO's Guide to AI and Machine learning: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://netsuite.com/102⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ AdQuick The easiest way to book out-of-home ads (like billboards, vehicle wraps, and airport displays) the same way you would order an Uber. Ready to get your brand the attention it deserves? Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://adquick.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ today to start reaching your customers in the real world. – SEND US YOUR Q's FOR NOAH TO ANSWER ON AIR: Econ102@Turpentine.co – FOLLOW ON X: @noahpinion @eriktorenberg @turpentinemedia – RECOMMENDED IN THIS EPISODE: Noahpinion: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.noahpinion.blog/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  – TAKEAWAYS: Healthcare & Education Cost Trends Reversing: Healthcare price growth has slowed significantly since 2009 and is now growing slower than average costs. Technology's Role in Services: AI potentially solving education through personalized one-on-one tutoring (referencing "The Diamond Age"). Student Loans & Market Dynamics: Marginal students are dropping out of college, reducing demand. Pharmaceutical Pricing: Americans actually pay less on average for pharmaceuticals due to cheaper generics. Cultural Commentary: Discussing intellectual debates between prominent thinkers (Tyler Cowen vs. Scott Alexander on foreign aid, Scott Alexander vs. Curtis Yarvin on governance), emphasizing the importance of not getting trapped in the cultural moment of 2020-2021.

Tyler Cowen joins Marian Tupy to discuss the New Right, the relationship between freedom and progress, and whether classical liberalism is equipped to meet today's political challenges.

Mississippi is richer than France. No, really. The poorest U.S. state now has a higher GDP per person than France, the U.K., Italy, and Spain. How did that happen? Don't miss this eye-opening episode with George Mason University's Tyler Cowen. 

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Discover more content http://www.newmedia.ufm.edu Organized by: Universidad Fransisco Marroquín https://www.ufm.edu/ A production by UFM Studios http://newmedia.ufm.edu Follow us on social media Facebook @ufmvideos Twitter @newmediaufm Facebook @UFMedu Twitter @UFMedu

Nabeel Qureshi is an entrepreneur, writer, researcher, and visiting scholar of AI policy at the Mercatus Center (alongside Tyler Cowen). Previously, he spent nearly eight years at Palantir, working as a forward-deployed engineer. His work at Palantir ranged from accelerating the Covid-19 response to applying AI to drug discovery to optimizing aircraft manufacturing at Airbus. Nabeel was also a founding employee and VP of business development at GoCardless, a leading European fintech unicorn.What you'll learn:• Why almost a third of all Palantir's PMs go on to start companies• How the “forward-deployed engineer” model works and why it creates exceptional product leaders• How Palantir transformed from a “sparkling Accenture” into a $200 billion data/software platform company with more than 80% margins• The unconventional hiring approach that screens for independent-minded, intellectually curious, and highly competitive people• Why the company intentionally avoids traditional titles and career ladders—and what they do instead• Why they built an ontology-first data platform that LLMs love• How Palantir's controversial “bat signal” recruiting strategy filtered for specific talent types• The moral case for working at a company like Palantir—Brought to you by:• WorkOS—Modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, free up to 1 million MAUs• Attio—The powerful, flexible CRM for fast-growing startups• OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster—Where to find Nabeel S. Qureshi:• X: https://x.com/nabeelqu• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nabeelqu/• Website: https://nabeelqu.co/—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) Introduction to Nabeel S. Qureshi(05:10) Palantir's unique culture and hiring(13:29) What Palantir looks for in people(16:14) Why they don't have titles(19:11) Forward-deployed engineers at Palantir(25:23) Key principles of Palantir's success(30:00) Gotham and Foundry(36:58) The ontology concept(38:02) Life as a forward-deployed engineer(41:36) Balancing custom solutions and product vision(46:36) Advice on how to implement forward-deployed engineers(50:41) The current state of forward-deployed engineers at Palantir(53:15) The power of ingesting, cleaning and analyzing data(59:25) Hiring for mission-driven startups(01:05:30) What makes Palantir PMs different(01:10:00) The moral question of Palantir(01:16:03) Advice for new startups(01:21:12) AI corner(01:24:00) Contrarian corner(01:25:42) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Reflections on Palantir: https://nabeelqu.co/reflections-on-palantir• Palantir: https://www.palantir.com/• Intercom: https://www.intercom.com/• Which companies produce the best product managers: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/which-companies-produce-the-best• Gotham: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/gotham/• Foundry: https://www.palantir.com/platforms/foundry/• Peter Thiel on X: https://x.com/peterthiel• Alex Karp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Karp• Stephen Cohen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cohen_(entrepreneur)• Joe Lonsdale on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jtlonsdale/• Tyler Cowen's website: https://tylercowen.com/• This Scandinavian City Just Won the Internet With Its Hilarious New Tourism Ad: https://www.afar.com/magazine/oslos-new-tourism-ad-becomes-viral-hit• Safe Superintelligence: https://ssi.inc/• Mira Murati on X: https://x.com/miramurati• Stripe: https://stripe.com/• Building product at Stripe: craft, metrics, and customer obsession | Jeff Weinstein (Product lead): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-product-at-stripe-jeff-weinstein• Airbus: https://www.airbus.com/en• NIH: https://www.nih.gov/• Jupyter Notebooks: https://jupyter.org/• Shyam Sankar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shyamsankar/• Palantir Gotham for Defense Decision Making: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8• Foundry 2022 Operating System Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uF-GSj-Exms• SQL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL• Airbus A350: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A350• SAP: https://www.sap.com/index.html• Barry McCardel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/barrymccardel/• Understanding ‘Forward Deployed Engineering' and Why Your Company Probably Shouldn't Do It: https://www.barry.ooo/posts/fde-culture• David Hsu on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dvdhsu/• Retool's Path to Product-Market Fit—Lessons for Getting to 100 Happy Customers, Faster: https://review.firstround.com/retools-path-to-product-market-fit-lessons-for-getting-to-100-happy-customers-faster/• How to foster innovation and big thinking | Eeke de Milliano (Retool, Stripe): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-foster-innovation-and-big• Looker: https://cloud.google.com/looker• Sorry, that isn't an FDE: https://tedmabrey.substack.com/p/sorry-that-isnt-an-fde• Glean: https://www.glean.com/• Limited Engagement: Is Tech Becoming More Diverse?: https://www.bkmag.com/2017/01/31/limited-engagement-creating-diversity-in-the-tech-industry/• Operation Warp Speed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Warp_Speed• Mark Zuckerberg testifies: https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-testifies-congress-libra-cryptocurrency-2019-10• Anduril: https://www.anduril.com/• SpaceX: https://www.spacex.com/• Principles: https://nabeelqu.co/principles• Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.ai/• Claude code: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/agents-and-tools/claude-code/overview• Gemini Pro 2.5: https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini/pro/• DeepMind: https://deepmind.google/• Latent Space newsletter: https://www.latent.space/• Swyx on x: https://x.com/swyx• Neural networks in chess programs: https://www.chessprogramming.org/Neural_Networks• AlphaZero: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero• The top chess players in the world: https://www.chess.com/players• Decision to Leave: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12477480/• Oldboy: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364569/• Christopher Alexander: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander—Recommended books:• The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West: https://www.amazon.com/Technological-Republic-Power-Belief-Future/dp/0593798694• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296• Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre: https://www.amazon.com/Impro-Improvisation-Theatre-Keith-Johnstone/dp/0878301178/• William Shakespeare: Histories: https://www.amazon.com/Histories-Everymans-Library-William-Shakespeare/dp/0679433120/• High Output Management: https://www.amazon.com/High-Output-Management-Andrew-Grove/dp/0679762884• Anna Karenina: https://www.amazon.com/Anna-Karenina-Leo-Tolstoy/dp/0143035002—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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe

Audio file, also on Apple and SpotifyTyler Cowen, Ph.D, is the Holbert L. Harris Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He is the author of 17 books, most recently Talent.: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. Tyler has been recognized as one of the most influential economists of the past decade. He initiated and directs the philanthropic project Emergent Ventures, writes a blog Marginal Revolution, and a podcast Conversations With Tyler, and also writes columns for The Free Press." He is writing a new book (and perhaps his last) on Mentors. “Maybe AGI [Artificial General Intelligence] is like porn — I know it when I see it. And I've seen it.”—Tyler CowenOur conversation on acquiring information, A.I., A.G.I., the NIH, the assault on science, the role of doctors in the A.I. era,, the meaning of life, books of the future, and much more.Transcript with linksEric Topol (00:06):Well, hello. This is Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I am really thrilled today to have the chance to have a conversation with Tyler Cowen, who is, when you look up polymath in the dictionary, you might see a picture of him. He is into everything. And recently in the Economist magazine 1843, John Phipps wrote a great piece profile, the man who wants to know everything. And actually, I think there's a lot to that.Tyler Cowen (00:36):That's why we need longevity work, right?Eric Topol (00:39):Right. So he's written a number of books. How many books now, Tyler?Tyler Cowen:17, I'm not sure.Eric Topol:Only 17? And he also has a blog that's been going on for over 20 years, Marginal Revolution that he does with Alex Tabarrok.Tyler Cowen (00:57):Correct.Eric Topol (00:57):And yeah, and then Conversations with Tyler, a podcast, which I think an awful lot of people are tuned into that. So with that, I'm just thrilled to get a chance to talk with you because I used to think I read a lot, but then I learned about you.“Cowen calls himself “hyperlexic”. On a good day, he claims to read four or fivebooks. Secretly, I timed him at 30 seconds per page reading a dense tract byMartin Luther. “—John Phipps, The Economist's 1843I've been reading more from the AIs lately and less from books. So I'll get one good book and ask the AI a lot of questions.Eric Topol (01:24):Yeah. Well, do you use NotebookLM for that?Tyler Cowen (01:28):No, just o3 from OpenAI at the moment, but a lot of the models are very good. Claude, there's others.Eric Topol (01:35):Yeah, yeah. No, I see how that's a whole different way to interrogate a book and it's great. And in fact, that gets me to a topic I was going to get to later, but I'll do it now. You're soon or you have already started writing for the Free Press with Barri Weiss.Tyler Cowen (01:54):That's right, yes. I have a piece coming out later today. It's been about two weeks. It's been great so far.“Tyler Cowen has a mind unlike any I've ever encountered. In a single conversation, it's not at all unusual for him to toggle between DeepSeek, GLP-1s, Haitian art, sacred Tibetan music, his favorite Thai spot in L.A., and LeBron James”—Bari WeissYeah, so that's interesting. I hadn't heard of it until I saw the announcement from Barri and I thought what was great about it is she introduced it. She said, “Tyler Cowen has a mind unlike any I've ever encountered. In a single conversation, it's not at all unusual for him to toggle between DeepSeek, GLP-1s, Haitian art, sacred Tibetan music, his favorite Thai spot in L.A., and LeBron James. Now who could do that, right. So I thought, well, you know what? I need independent confirmation of that, that is as being a polymath. And then I saw Patrick Collison, who I know at Stripe and Arc Institute, “you can have a specific and detailed discussion with him about 17th-century Irish economic thinkers, or trends in African music or the history of nominal GDP targeting. I don't know anyone who can engage in so many domains at the depth he does.” So you're an information acquirer and one of the books you wrote, I love the title Infovore.Tyler Cowen (03:09):The Age of the Infovore, that's right.Eric Topol (03:11):I mean, have people been using that term because you are emblematic of it?“You can have a specific and detailed discussion with him about 17th-century Irish economic thinkers, or trends in African music or the history of nominal GDP targeting. I don't know anyone who can engage in so many domains at the depth he does.”—Patrick CollisonIt was used on the internet at some obscure site, and I saw it and I fell in love with that word, and I thought I should try to popularize it, but it doesn't come from me, but I think I am the popularizer of it.Yeah, well, if anybody was ingesting more information and being able to work with it. That's what I didn't realize about you, Tyler, is restaurants and basketball and all these other fine arts, very impressive. Now, one of the topics I wanted to get into you is I guess related to a topic you've written about fair amount, which is the great stagnation, and right now we're seeing issues like an attack on science. And in the past, you've written about how you want to raise the social status of scientists. So how do you see this current, I would even characterize as a frontal assault on science?Tyler Cowen (04:16):Well, I'm very worried about current Trump administration policies. They change so frequently and so unpredictably, it's a little hard to even describe what they always are. So in that sense, it's a little hard to criticize them, but I think they're scaring away talent. They might scare away funding and especially the biomedical sciences, the fixed costs behind a lot of lab work, clinical trials, they're so high that if you scare money away, it does not come back very readily or very quickly. So I think the problem is biggest perhaps for a lot of the biomedical sciences. I do think a lot of reform there has been needed, and I hope somehow the Trump policies evolve to that sort of reform. So I think the NIH has become too high bound and far too conservative, and they take too long to give grants, and I don't like how the overhead system has been done. So there's plenty of room for improvement, but I don't see so far at least that the efforts have been constructive. They've been mostly destructive.Eric Topol (05:18):Yeah, I totally agree. Rather than creative destruction it's just destruction and it's unfortunate because it seems to be haphazard and reckless to me at least. We of course, like so many institutions rely on NIH funding for the work, but I agree that reform is fine as long as it's done in a very thought out, careful way, so we can eke out the most productivity for the best investment. Now along with that, you started Emergent Ventures where you're funding young talent.Tyler Cowen (05:57):That's right. That's a philanthropic fund. And we now have slightly over 1000 winners. They're not all young, I'd say they're mostly young and a great number of them want to go into the biomedical sciences or have done so. And this is part of what made me realize what an incredible influx of talent we're seeing into those areas. I'm not sure this is widely appreciated by the world. I'm sure you see it. I also see how much of that talent actually is coming from Canada, from Ontario in particular, and I've just become far more optimistic about computational biology and progress in biology and medical cures, fixes, whatever you want to call it, extending lives. 10 years ago, I was like, yeah, who knows? A lot of things looked pretty stuck. Then we had a number of years where life expectancy was falling, and now I think we're on the verge of a true golden age.Eric Topol (06:52):I couldn't agree with you more on that. And I know some of the people that you funded like Anne Wylie who developed a saliva test for Covid out of Yale. But as you say, there's so many great young and maybe not so young scientists all over, Canada being one great reservoir. And now of course I'm worried that we're seeing emigration rather than more immigration of this talent. Any thoughts about that?Tyler Cowen (07:21):Well, the good news is this, I'm in contact with young people almost every day, often from other countries. They still want to come to the United States. I would say I sign an O-1 letter for someone about once a week, and at least not yet has the magic been dissipated. So I'm less pessimistic than some people are, but I absolutely do see the dangers. We're just the biggest market, the freest place we have by far the most ambitious people. I think that's actually the most significant factor. And young people sense that, and they just want to come here and there's not really another place they can go that will fit them.Eric Topol (08:04):Yeah, I mean one of the things as you've probably noted is there's these new forces that are taking on big shouldering. In fact, Patrick Collison with Arc Institute and Chan Zuckerberg for their institute and others like that, where the work you're doing with Emergent Ventures, you're supporting important projects, talents, and if this whole freefall in NIH funding and other agency funding continues, it looks like we may have to rely more on that, especially if we're going to attract some talent from outside. I don't know how else we're going to make. You're absolutely right about how we are such a great destination and great collaborations and mentors and all that history, but I'm worried that it could be in kind of a threatened mode, if you will.Tyler Cowen (08:59):I hope AI lowers costs. As you probably know at Arc, they had Greg Brockman come in for some number of months and he's one of the people, well, he helped build up Stripe, but he also was highly significant in OpenAI behind the GPT-4 model. And to have Greg Brockman at your institute doing AI for what, six months, that's a massive acceleration that actually no university had the wisdom to do, and Arc did. So I think we're seeing just more entrepreneurial thinking in the area. There's still this problem of bottlenecks. So let's say AI is great for drug discovery as it may be. Well, clinical trials then become a bigger bottleneck. The FDA becomes a bigger bottleneck. So rapid improvement in only one area while great is actually not good enough.Eric Topol (09:46):Yeah, I'm glad you brought up that effect in Arc Institute because we both know Patrick Hsu, who's a brilliant young guy who works there and has published some incredible large language models applied to life science in recent months, and it is impressive how they used AI in almost a singular way as compared to as you said, many other leading institutions. So that is I think, a really important thing to emphasize.Tyler Cowen (10:18):Arc can move very quickly. I think that's not really appreciated. So if Patrick Hsu decides Silvana Konermann, Patrick Collison, if they decide something ought to be bought or purchased or set in motion, it can happen in less than a day. And it does happen basically immediately. And it's not only that it's quicker, I think when you have quicker decisions, they're better and it's infectious to the people you're working with. And there's an understanding that the core environment is not a bureaucratic one. So it has a kind of multiplier effect through the institution.Eric Topol (10:54):Yeah, I totally agree with you. It's always been a philosophy in your mind to get stuff done, get s**t done, whatever you want to call it. They're getting it done. And that's what's so impressive. And not just that they've got some new funds available, but rather they're executing in a way that's parallel to the way the world's evolving in the AI front, which is I think faster than most people would ever have expected, anticipated. Now that gets me to a post you had on Marginal Revolution just last week, which one of the things I love about Marginal Revolution is you don't have to read a whole lot of stuff. You just give the bullets, the juice, if you will. Here you wrote o3 and AGI, is April 16th AGI day? And everybody's talking about artificial general intelligence is here. It's going to be here five years, it's going to be seven years.Eric Topol (11:50):It certainly seems to be getting closer. And in this you wrote, “I think it is AGI, seriously. Try asking it lots of questions, and then ask yourself: just how much smarter was I expecting AGI to be? As I've argued in the past, AGI, however you define it, is not much of a social event per se. It still will take us a long time to use it properly. Benchmarks, benchmarks, blah blah blah. Maybe AGI is like porn — I know it when I see it. And I've seen it.” I thought that was really well done, Tyler. Anything you want to amplify on that?Tyler Cowen (12:29):Look, if I ask at economics questions and I'm trained as an economist, it beats me. So I don't care if other people don't call it AGI, but one of the original definitions of AGI was that it would beat most experts most of the time on most matters, say 90% or above, and we're there. So people keep on shifting the goalposts. They'll say, well, sometimes it hallucinates or it's not very good at playing tic-tac toe, or there's always another complaint. Those are not irrelevant, but I'll just say, sit down, have someone write at a test of 20 questions, you're a PhD, you take the test, let o3 take the test, then have someone grade, see how you've done, then form your opinion. That's my suggestion.Eric Topol (13:16):I think it's pretty practical. I mean, enough with the Turing test, I mean, we've had that Turing test for decades, and I think the way you described it is a little more practical and meaningful these days. But its capabilities to me at least, are still beyond belief eke out of current, not just the large language models, but large reasoning models. And so, it's just gotten to a point where and it's accelerating, every week there's so many other, the competition is good for taking it to the next level.Tyler Cowen (13:50):It can do tasks and it self improves. So o3-pro will be out in a few weeks. It may be out by the time you're hearing this. I think that's obviously going to be better than just pure o3. And then GPT-5 people have said it will be this summer. So every few months there are major advances and there's no sign of those stopping.Eric Topol (14:12):Absolutely. Now, of course, you've been likened to “Treat Tyler like a really good GPT” that is because you're this information meister. What do you ask the man who you can ask anything? That's kind of what we have when we can go to any one of these sites and start our prompts, whatever. So it's kind of funny in some ways you might've annotated this with your quest for knowledge.Tyler Cowen (14:44):Well, I feel I understand the thing better than most people do for that reason, but it's not entirely encouraging to me personally, selfishly to be described that way, whether or not it's accurate. It just means I have a lot more new competition.Eric Topol (14:59):Well, I love this one. “I'm not very interested in the meaning of life, but I'm very interested in collecting information on what other people think is the meaning of life. And it's not entirely a joke” and that's also what you wrote about in the Free Press thing, that most of the things that are going to be written are going to be better AI in the media and that we should be writing books for the AI that's going to ingest them. How do you see this human AI interface growing or moving?Tyler Cowen (15:30):The AI is your smartest reader. It's your most sympathetic reader. It will remember what you tell it. So I think humans should sit down and ask, what does the AI need to know? And also, what is it that I know that's not on the historical record anywhere? That's not just repetition if I put it down, say on the internet. So there's no point in writing repetitions anymore because the AI already knows those things. So the value of what you'd call broadly, memoir, biography, anecdote, you could say secrets. It's now much higher. And the value of repeating basic truths, which by the way, I love as an economist, to be clear, like free trade, tariffs are usually bad, those are basic truths. But just repeating that people will be going to the AI and saying it again won't make the AI any better. So everything you write or podcast, you should have this point in mind.Eric Topol (16:26):So you obviously have all throughout your life in reading lots of books. Will your practice still be to do the primary reading of the book, or will you then go to o3 or whatever or the other way around?Tyler Cowen (16:42):I've become fussier about my reading. So I'll pick up a book and start and then start asking o3 or other models questions about the book. So it's like I get a customized version of the book I want, but I'm also reading somewhat more fiction. Now, AI might in time become very good at fiction, but we're not there now. So fiction is more special. It's becoming more human, and I should read more of it, and I'm doing that.Eric Topol (17:10):Yeah, no, that's great. Now, over the weekend, there was a lot of hubbub about Bill Gates saying that we won't need doctors in the next 10 years because of AI. What are your thoughts about that?Tyler Cowen (17:22):Well, that's wrong as stated, but he may have put it in a more complex way. He's a very smart guy of course. AI already does better diagnosis on humans than medical doctors. Not by a lot, but by somewhat. And that's free and that's great, but if you need brain surgery for some while, you still need the human doctor. So human doctors will need to adjust. And if someone imagines that at some point robots do the brain surgery better, well fine. But I'm not convinced that's within the next 10 years. That would surprise me.Eric Topol (17:55):So to that point, recently, a colleague of mine wrote an op-ed in the New York Times about six studies comparing AI alone versus doctors with AI. And in all six studies, the AI did better than the doctors who had access to AI. Now, you could interpret that as, well they don't know how to use AI. They have automation bias or that is true. What do you think?Tyler Cowen (18:27):It's probably true, but I would add as an interpretation, the value of meta rationality has gone up. So to date, we have not selected doctors for their ability to work with AI, obviously, but some doctors have the personal quality, it's quite distinct from intelligence, but if just knowing when they should defer to someone or something else, and those doctors and researchers will become much more valuable. They're sufficiently modest to defer to the AI and have some judgment as to when they should do that. That's now a super important quality. Over time, I hope our doctors have much more of that. They are selected on that basis, and then that result won't be true anymore.Eric Topol (19:07):So obviously you would qualify. There's a spectrum here. The AI enthusiasts, you and I are both in that group, and then there's the doomsayers and there's somewhere middle ground, of course, where people are trying to see the right balance. Are there concerns about AI, I mean anything about that, how it's moving forward that you're worried about?Tyler Cowen (19:39):Well, any change that big one should have very real concerns. Maybe our biggest concern is that we're not sure what our biggest concern should be. One simple effect that I see coming soon is it will devalue the status of a lot of our intellectuals and what's called our chattering class. A lot of its people like us, we won't seem so impressive anymore. Now, that's not the end of the world for everyone as a whole, but if you ask, what does it mean for society to have the status of its elites so punctured? At a time when we have some, I would say very negative forces attacking those elites in other ways, that to me is very concerning.Eric Topol (20:25):Do you think that although we've seen what's happening with the current administration with respect to the tariffs, and we've already talked about the effects on science funding, do you see this as a short-term hit that will eventually prevail? Do you see them selectively supporting AI efforts and finding the right balance with the tech companies to support them and the competition that exists globally with China and whatnot? How are we going to get forward and what some people consider pretty dark times, which is of course, so seemingly at odds with the most extraordinary times of human support with AI?Tyler Cowen (21:16):Well, the Trump people are very pro AI. I think that's one of the good things about the administration, much pro AI and more interested than were the Biden people. The Biden people, you could say they were interested, but they feared it would destroy the whole world, and they wanted to choke and throttle it in a variety of ways. So I think there's a great number of issues where the Trump people have gone very badly wrong, but at least so far AI's not one of them. I'd give them there like an A or A+ so far. We'll see, right?Eric Topol (21:44):Yeah. As you've seen, we still have some of these companies in some kind of a hot seat like Meta and Google regarding their monopolies, and we saw how some of the tech leaders, not all of them, became very supportive, potentially you could interpret that for their own interests. They wanted to give money to the inauguration and also get favor curry some political favor. But I haven't yet seen the commitment to support AI, talk about a golden age for the United States because so much of this is really centered here and some of the great minds that are helping to drive the AI and these models. But I wonder if there's more that can be done so that we continue to lead in this space.Tyler Cowen (22:45):There's a number of issues here. The first is Trump administration policy toward the FTC, I think has not been wonderful. They appointed someone who seems like would be more appropriate for a democratic or more left-leaning administration. But if you look at the people in the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House, they're excellent, and there's always different forces in any administration. But again, so far so good. I don't think they should continue the antitrust suit against Google that is looking like it's going against Google, but that's not really the Trump administration, that's the judiciary, and that's been underway for quite some while. So with Trump, it's always very hard to predict. The lack of predictability, I would say, is itself a big problem. But again, if you're looking for one area where it's good, that would be my pick.Eric Topol (23:35):Yeah, well, I would agree with that for sure. I just want to see more evidence that we capitalize on the opportunities here and don't let down. I mean, do you think outlawing selling the Nvidia chips to China is the way to do this? It seems like that hurts Nvidia and isn't China going to get whatever they want anyway?Tyler Cowen (24:02):That restriction, I favored when it was put in. I'm now of the view that it has not proved useful. And if you look at how many of those chips get sold, say to Malaysia, which is not a top AI performer, one strongly suspects, they end up going to China. China is incentivized to develop its own high-quality chips and be fully independent of Western supply lines. So I think it's not worked out well.Eric Topol (24:29):Yeah, no, I see that since you've written so much about this, it's good to get your views because I share those views and you know a lot more about this than I would, but it seems like whether it's Malaysia or other channels, they're going to get the Blackwell chips that they want. And it seems like this is almost like during Covid, how you would close down foreign travel. It's like it doesn't really work that well. There's a big world out there, right?Tyler Cowen (25:01):It's an interesting question. What kind of timing do you want for when both America and China get super powerful AI? And I don't think you actually want only America to have it. It's a bit like nuclear weapons, but you don't want China to have it first. So you want some kind of staggered sequence where we're always a bit ahead of them, but they also maybe are constraining us a bit. I hope we're on track to get that, but I really, really don't want China to have it first.Eric Topol (25:31):Yeah, I mean I think there's, as you're pointing out aptly is a healthy managed competition and that if we can keep that lead there, it is good for both and it's good for the world ideally. But getting back, is there anything you're worried about in AI? I mean because I know you're upbeat about its net effective, and we've already talked about amazing potential for efficiency, productivity. It basically upends a lot of economic models of the past, right?Tyler Cowen (26:04):Yes. I think it changes or will change so many parts of life. Again, it's a bit difficult to specify worries, but how we think of ourselves as humans, how we think of our gods, our religions, I feel all that will be different. If you imagine trying to predict the effects of the printing press after Gutenberg, that would've been nearly impossible to do. I think we're all very glad we got the printing press, but you would not say all of it went well. It's not that you would blame the printing press for those subsequent wars, but it was disruptive to the earlier political equilibrium. I think we need to take great care to do it better this time. AI in different forms will be weaponized. There's great potential for destruction there and evil people will use it. So of course, we need to be very much concerned.Eric Topol (26:54):And there's obviously many of these companies have ways to try to have efforts to anticipate that. That is alignments and various safety type parallel efforts like Ilya did when he moved out of OpenAI and others. Is that an important part of each of these big efforts, whether it's OpenAI, Google, or the rest of them anthropic that they put in resources to keep things from going off the tracks?Tyler Cowen (27:34):That's good and it's important, but I think it's also of limited value because the more we learn how to control AI systems directly, the bad guys will have similar lessons, and they will use alignment possibly to make their AIs bad and worse and that it obeys them. So yeah, I'd rather the good guys make progress on what they're trying to do, but don't think it's going to solve the problem. It creates new problems as well.Eric Topol (28:04):So because of AI, do you think you'll write any more books in the future?Tyler Cowen (28:11):I'm writing a book right now. I suspect it will be my last. That book, its title is Mentors. It's about how to mentor individuals and what do the social sciences know about mentoring. My view is that even if the AI could write the book better than I can, that people actually want to read a book like that from a human. I could be wrong, but I think we should in the future, restrict ourselves to books that are better by a human. I will write every day for the rest of my life, but I'm not sure that books make sense at the current moment.Eric Topol (28:41):Yeah, that's a really important point, and I understand that completely. Now, when you write for the Free Press, which will be besides the Conversations with Tyler podcast and the Marginal Revolution, what kind of things will you be writing about in the Free Press?Tyler Cowen (28:56):Well, I just submitted a piece. It's a defense of elitism. So the problem with our elites is that they have not been elitist enough and have not adhered strictly enough to the scientific method. So it's a very simple point. I think to you it would be pretty obvious, but it needs to be said. It's not out there enough in the debate that yes, sometimes the elites have truly and badly let us down, but the answer is not to reject elitism per se, but to impose higher elitist standards on our sometimes supposed elites. So that's the piece I just sent in. It's coming out soon and should be out by the time anyone hears this.Eric Topol (29:33):Well, I look forward to reading that. So besides a polymath, you might be my favorite polymath, Tyler you didn't know that. Also, you're a futurist because when you have that much information ingested, and now of course with a super performance of AI to help, it really does help to try to predict where we're headed. Have I missed anything in this short conversation that you think we should touch on?Tyler Cowen (30:07):Well, I'll touch on a great interest of yours. I like your new book very much. I think over the course of the next 40 years working with AI, we will beat back essentially every malady that kills people. It doesn't mean you live forever. Many, many more people will simply die of what we now call old age. There's different theories as to what that means. I don't have a lot of expertise in that, but the actual things people are dying from will be greatly postponed. And if you have a kid today to think that kid might expect to live to be 97 or even older, that to me is extremely plausible.Tyler Cowen (30:45):I won't be around to see it, but that's a phenomenal development for human beings.Eric Topol (30:50):I share that with you. I'm sad that I won't be around to see it, but exactly as you've outlined, the fact that we're going to be able to have a huge impact on particularly the age-related diseases, but also as you touched on the genetic diseases with genome editing and many other, I think, abilities that we have now controlling the immune system, I mean a central part of how we get into trouble with diseases. So I couldn't agree with you more, and that's a really good note to finish on because so many of the things that we have discussed today, we share similar views and we come at it from totally different worlds. The economist that has a very wide-angle lens, and I guess you'd say the physician who has a more narrow lens aperture. But thank you so much, Tyler for joining me today.Tyler Cowen (31:48):My pleasure. Let me close by telling you some good news. I have AI friends who think you and I, I'm 63 will be around to see that, I don't agree with them they don't convince me, but there are smart people who think the benefits from this will come quite soon.Eric Topol (32:03):I sure hope they're right.Tyler Cowen (32:05):Yes.*******************************************SUPER AGERS, my new book, was released on May 6th. It's about extending our healthspan, and I introduce 2 of my patients (one below, Mrs. L.R.) as exemplars to learn from. This potential to prevent the 3 major age-related diseases would not be possible without the jumps in the science of aging and multimodal A.I. My op-ed preview of the book was published in The NY Times last week. Here's a gift link. I did a podcast with Mel Robbins on the book here. Here's my publisher ‘s (Simon and Schuster) site for the book. If you're interested in the audio book, I am the reader (first time I have done this, quite an experience!)The book was reviewed in WSJ. Here's a gift linkThere have been many pieces written about it. Here's a gift link to the one in the Wall Street Journal and here for the one in the New York Times .**********************Thanks for reading and subscribing to Ground Truths.If you found this interesting please share it!That makes the work involved in putting these together especially worthwhile.All content on Ground Truths— newsletters, analyses, and podcasts—is free, open-access.Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Please don't hesitate to post comments and give me feedback. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

Tyler Cowen recently wrote an article arguing that spending lots of time online is in fact a good thing. In this episode, Cal looks deeper at Cowen's argument and finds some surprising common ground. The internet can be a major source of good in your life, he argues, but only if you use it in the right way. He then answers listener questions and reviews the books he read in April.Find out more about Done Daily at DoneDaily.com!Below are the questions covered in today's episode (with their timestamps). Get your questions answered by Cal! Here's the link: bit.ly/3U3sTvoVideo from today's episode: youtube.com/calnewportmediaDeep Dive: Making the Internet Good Again [5:06]What are good activities for “deep breaks”? [28:38]How can I approach parenting without resenting the sacrifices to deep work? [31:36]How does the deep life compare to David Epstein's book, “Range”? [38:06]What is the difference between a “winner-take-all” field of work and “auction” field of work? [41:12]Does “following your passion” have any connection to “lifestyle centric planning”? [47:39]CASE STUDY: Implementing the concept of “Eat The Frog” [52:48]CALL: Introducing seasonality and the meetings being the work [55:07]APRIL BOOKS: The 5 books Cal read in April, 2025 [1:06:08]I, Robot (Isaac Asimov)After Disney (Neil O'brien)The Baseball Book of Why (John McCollister)The Technology Republic (Alexander Karp and Nicholas Zamiska)Everything is Tuberculosis (John Green)Links:Buy Cal's latest book, “Slow Productivity” at calnewport.com/slowGet a signed copy of Cal's “Slow Productivity” at peoplesbooktakoma.com/event/cal-newportCal's monthly book directory: bramses.notion.site/059db2641def4a88988b4d2cee4657ba?thefp.com/p/the-case-for-living-onlineThanks to our Sponsors:shopify.com/deepauraframes.com [Use promo code “DEEPQUESTIONS”]indeed.com/deepharrys.com/deepThanks to Jesse Miller for production, Jay Kerstens for the intro music, Kieron Rees for the slow productivity music, and Mark Miles for mastering.

Noch sind die besten generativen KI-Modelle für alle zugänglich - und vielleicht nutzt sogar die Trump-Regierung die gleichen Systeme wie jeder andere Nutzer. Aber was, wenn das nicht immer so bleibt? Das neue Modell "o3" zeigt, dass KIs weiter besser werden, dabei aber auch immer eklatantere Fehler machen. Was bedeutet das für die Jagd nach einer "allgemeinen” Künstlichen Intelligenz? Und was kann der spekulative Bericht "AI 2027” uns über die Zukunft für "starke” KI verraten? Über die Hosts: Gregor Schmalzried ist freier Tech-Journalist, Speaker und Berater, u.a. beim Bayerischen Rundfunk. Marie Kilg ist Chief AI Officer bei der Deutschen Welle. Zuvor war sie Produkt-Managerin bei Amazon Alexa. In dieser Folge: 0:00 "Ich liebe ihn!” 3:50 KI-Zölle 10:50 o3 25:40 AI 2027 32:45 Was haben wir mit KI gemacht? Links und Quellen: VOLLBILD Perfekte Liebe? - Wie gefährlich sind KI-Beziehungen? https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/vollbild-recherchen-die-mehr-zeigen/perfekte-liebe-wie-gefaehrlich-sind-ki-beziehungen/swr/Y3JpZDovL3N3ci5kZS9hZXgvbzIyMzAyODE AI 2027 https://ai-2027.com/ Hat die US-Regierung Zölle auf Pinguine mit ChatGPT errechnet? https://www.br.de/nachrichten/netzwelt/hat-die-us-regierung-zoelle-auf-pinguine-mit-chatgpt-errechnet,UhO69RU "roon” auf X https://x.com/tszzl/status/1915621182809813391 Tyler Cowen über o3 https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/o3-and-agi-is-april-16th-agi-day.html OpenAI stellt o3 und o4-mini vor: KI-Modelle sollen mit Werkzeugen und Bildern denken https://the-decoder.de/openai-stellt-o3-und-o4-mini-vor-ki-modelle-sollen-mit-werkzeugen-und-bildern-denken/ Redaktion und Mitarbeit: David Beck, Cristina Cletiu, Chris Eckardt, Fritz Espenlaub, Elisa Harlan, Franziska Hübl, Marie Kilg, Mark Kleber, Gudrun Riedl, Christian Schiffer, Gregor Schmalzried Kontakt: Wir freuen uns über Fragen und Kommentare an kipodcast@br.de. Unterstützt uns: Wenn euch dieser Podcast gefällt, freuen wir uns über eine Bewertung auf eurer liebsten Podcast-Plattform. Abonniert den KI-Podcast in der ARD Audiothek oder wo immer ihr eure Podcasts hört, um keine Episode zu verpassen. Und empfehlt uns gerne weiter!

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

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

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

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.

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

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