Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Is Silicon Valley "Over?" With Bloomberg's @noahpinion

Episode Date: February 13, 2021

If you want the single best person in economics twitter to follow, it’s Noah Smith, Bloomberg’s Economics Opinion Columnist. If you want to him, its @noahpinion, by the way. If you want a great substack to sign up to, try noahpinion.substack.com… the free article this week is called Triumph of the HODler’s… I hope I remember to link to it in the show notes. It’s the best summation I’ve read of what’s going on with Bitcoin at the moment. But also, as you’ll hear, he has a great new podcast with another economist I respect, Brad Delong. Noah is just a smart, smart guy. If you want a smart economics angle to anything happening in the world right now, he’s just the best. Noah and I have been friendly on Twitter over the years, occasionally exchanging DMs about obscure details about the Holy Roman Empire, but this is the first time I “met” him if you will. It’s been a while since I was sort of starstruck to interview someone, but here you go. The great Noah Smith… Sponsors: AirMedCareNetwork.com/tech offer code TECH Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough. If you're anything like me, then you probably have several different Twitters that you follow, like, you know, tech Twitter, obviously. Also for me, English football Twitter, comedy and improv Twitter,

Wall Street Twitter, as I mentioned. And also for me, Econ Twitter. If you want the single best person in economics Twitter to follow, it's Noah Smith, Bloomberg's economics appeal. Pynion columnist. If you want to follow him, it's at Noah Pynion, by the way. If you want a great substack to sign up for, try noopinion.substack.com. The free article he shared this week is called Triumph of the Hodlers. I hope I remember to link to it in the show notes because it's the best summation I've read of what's going on with Bitcoin at the moment. And also, as you'll hear, he has a great new podcast with another economist I respect, Brad DeLong. Link to that, hopefully also in the show notes.

Noah is just a smart, smart guy. If he want a smart economics angle to anything happening in the world right now, he's just the best. I sat down with him to hash out some of the sort of tongue-in-cheek questions we've been asking obliquely lately. Like, is, you know, remote work for real? Is it the future? And is Silicon Valley, quote, over. Noah and I have been friendly on Twitter over the years, occasionally doing dorky DMs about obscure details about the Holy Roman Empire. but this is the first time I met him, if you will.

It's been a while since I was sort of starstruck to interview someone, but here you go. The great Noah Smith. So let me bring up my notes here, start my timer. Let's... First, do you want to see rabbits, though? Sure. Yeah, consider ourselves recording. Show me the rabbits.

How many do you have now? Two. Because I've seen you, like at first I kind of think. thought I didn't follow the thread exactly. I thought you were joke tweeting about rabbits. So how long have you been a rabbit parent now? A rabbit parent. I got this rabbit in 2017. And then I got my second rabbit in late 2018 because she was getting bored and she needed a companion. So I got her a companion.

And do you let them loose in the house or they stay in that sort of crate? thing or what? Oh, no, no. They're loose in the house. They have a little fence, which both prevents them from strewing hay all over the apartment and gives them a feeling of like their little territory, but they don't really need it. They usually just sleep under my bed, to be honest. Do you ever mind them? Sleep in the bed? They don't want to. At least my rabbits will never, they won't go up on a bed. Like they'll sometimes jump on the bed briefly, but they'll be like, what is this soft thing and then just hop down? Well, don't tell my daughter because even though we got her a puppy,

she always wants a cat now and then a horse. And so rabbit would obviously be next on the chain. All right. So let's start off with this because listeners know that I keep going back and forth with this idea of remote work. And is it the new normal in post-pandemic times? I just did a story yesterday about Salesforce saying they're going to go to mostly remote work, which is ironic considering they built that giant skyscraper.

I wonder if they regret that now. So how are you thinking about this stuff? Do you think that we're going to see a meaningful change in where people are working, or is this sort of fattish? I think we're going to see a shift toward remote work, But it's tempered by a couple things. Number one, if people work remotely three days out of the week and then go into the office, too, they still have to live near the office. And so the residential patterns don't change.

Maybe you could have more flexible office arrangements or downsize your office because you have fewer people in there at any time. And so commercial real estate developers could still get hit. But in terms of hollowing out cities, it's probably not going to happen. People have to be completely remote. and they're not just going to have to be completely remote. They're going to also have to do things like job search and networking, completely remote. So there's this whole bundle of things that you can do with physical proximity, and we're going to have to, in order to unbundle the city, as it were,

we're going to have to be able to do all those things remote. And I think that's a taller order than people realize, which doesn't mean it's impossible. The other factor is the fact that cities are fun to live in. And if people work at a company that's based in New York and they move from New York to Taipei, and now they're in Taipei instead of New York, and then people from Taipei move to New York, you've still got the same number of workers in these superstar cities. They just live in different ones. So for this to really have an effect on sort of eveninging out this sort of very lopsided distribution of, you know,

employment in cities, you know, if we're going to get tech workers to be to be less concentrated in like San Francisco, for example, it's going to require that they move to sort of what we call second-tier cities, kind of a, not the nicest expression, but we're going to have to get tech workers living in Cleveland, and we're going to have to get tech workers living in, you know, Youngstown or places like that to really to have their local spending revitalize those places. I think we're going to see a movement towards cities like Dallas, Houston, Austin, Atlanta is going to be a big one. Those aren't what I'd call second-tier cities, but they're sort of sub-superstars. I think we're going to see towns like National become popular. Well, you wrote that you thought like the whole sunbelt is pretty much a decent candidate. The sunbelt is a decent candidate. And that's always been true because the sunbelt really sprawls. And once people are past, they're sort of meeting people years and ready to raise kids.

I think that people, including millennials, have a strong desire to move to the suburbs. You see that in all the data. The suburban dream is not dead. I think people want more walkability to their suburbs. I think people want some more transit in their suburbs. I think people want more density, more restaurant choice and things like that. They want suburbs to be a little more like cities, but I don't think that we're going to see a lot of people raising kids in highly densified downtowns of places like Dallas, Texas.

That's not going to happen. And so I think we'll see some movement. I think the movement is going to be pretty marginal and pretty healthy, actually. I think that it's good to move some of the high-value workforce out of the very top cities like San Francisco. Francisco, New York, Seattle, L.A., and Boston, and D.C. And so take that really super top rank of cities and move people out to some other places. I think that's going to be ultimately healthy for the country. The question specifically of Silicon Valley itself, is it sort of settled science for economists

like why certain cities become hubs for certain intellectual pursuits or capital pursuits or things like that? Is that well known and well understood? No. So we have a lot of theories about why this happens. One idea is the idea of tacit knowledge exchange. So when engineers sort of hang out with each other, they tell each other how to do stuff. It's not clear how powerful that is anymore. I mean, it's important for researchers to be able to exchange ideas very intensive. at things like universities, but engineers going out to the bar and saying, oh, I implemented this with that sort of thing,

it's probably not nearly as big a deal and can now just be done on like Stack Exchange and whatever, GitHub. So that sort of tacit knowledge exchange is hard to establish. It's hard to measure because you can't really observe these ideas going around. You can look at patents. That's all you can really look at, but there's lots of problems with that data. Another idea, so another big reason for cities, for these concentrations of knowledge industries, is called thick markets. So if you want to hire an engineer, there's a lot of engineers in San Francisco, right?

And if you want to work for a tech company, there's lots of tech companies in San Francisco. So there's just so much more choice within these superstar cities. With all this choice, you can lose your job and find another similar job really quickly. Or you can lose your employee and find another employee really quickly, whereas if you're out in, you know, like, Butte, you can't necessarily do that, unless we move it all to remote. So if we figure out how to do hiring and firing and job search and blah, blah, as well remotely as we do in person, whole new ballgame, because you've just sort of canceled out that thick market effect.

And notice we also have to do that for VCs. So VCs famously want to live like a 15-minute bike ride from the companies they invest in, And that mindset has got to change. That culture's got to change to really unbundle the startup cities. Well, and I mean, you know, this is the example of the moment and one example. But, you know, what's the hottest startup in Silicon? But in the world right now, it's Clubhouse. Clubhouse is in San Francisco.

Clubhouse is Andreessen Horowitz is basically one of the greatest sort of thick influence, if that's using the term right that I've seen in a long time, in terms of Andries and Horowitz really helping juice the success of that startup. So, yeah, Clubhouse isn't in Cleveland. Right. Yes. And so that's, but then again, Kim Mike. But it could be, but it could be because there is only what, like 18 people behind Clubhouse right now.

So, right, go ahead. Right. So, I mean, that depends on, you know, Andreessen Horowitz, being willing to invent. in distributed companies. And I think that they are, I know those guys pretty well, I think that they are open to the possibility, and I think that there is a slow,

there'll be a gradual change. I think they're realizing that, they're realizing that costs in San Francisco are just really high. Kim, Mike Cutler of initialized capital just posted some data from her own fund the other day, showing that their investment in distributed companies is increasing, and the percentage of founders who say that they would want to do distributing companies has just shot up enormously.

So maybe this cultural change is coming. I think there will always be some local bias, but I think that maybe it could be reduced. I certainly know VCs at Bloomberg who are working to reduce that. Because really, I feel like the due diligence and human touch that you need to keep track of a portfolio company, the necessity for that to be physical and on-site has just decreased so much.

And I think that the pandemic is maybe making VCs realize that, I hope. I think there'll always be a slight advantage to being nearby, but I think that can be outweighed by the cost disadvantage. You know, it's funny. Just last weekend, speaking of initialized, I had Gary Tan on. And one of the things that he made a point to make a point of was he was like, I'm not leaving San Francisco. And he also made the point that several other people have made is like,

sure, it's almost confirmation bias. Where if you're settled and you've sort of made it either as a company or as an investor or even as a rock star engineer, you've got kids, those are the people that are moving. But those people also wouldn't know about the 24-year-old, 25-year-old developers that are now coming to San Francisco because rent is down 30% in a year or something like that. Right. Let me ask you this. because the converses is you've got VCs heading to Miami and, well, shut up on Twitter about how great Miami is and how Silicon Valley is. Wait, are there any besides Keith?

There are a couple. I think they're all Keith's friends, but. Okay. The only one I know is Keith. They're very enthusiastic. They almost, their sort of stance, whether it's a rhetorical stance or not, is that Silicon Valley and California is almost like a failed state and that it's over, it's done,

only the smart companies are all already not even considering San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Is there any precedent for that for a city absolutely losing its hubstaff? I mean, you know, there's still a lot of car activity in Detroit. And I mean, you could point to like, I guess, port cities like, you know, Venice had to trade as its industry for vice.

But in modern times, like most of the, of the examples are just about factories going overseas. Is there, is there, can you think of a historical example of like intellectual capital and capital resources? I can think of industry-specific clusters that have sort of lost their mojo. So, for example, Boston, Route 128 is the canonical example here. Like, you know, people used to think that the future of the computer industry was in, of the IT industry, was Boston. And then it really lost out in the 70s and 80s. It really lost out to the Bay.

In that case, it was a case of, it wasn't a case of a knowledge cluster sort of dispersing out to many smaller ones. It was a case of one knowledge cluster sort of winning over another. You can certainly lose. The question is, what does it look like? to lose. And so in terms of knowledge clusters, really going away,

you've had like shifts in financial centers a lot. You've had yeah, you've had cities that like Tokyo used to be a huge financial center and then really lost out to other Asian country. Potentially London is maybe about to lose out

because of Brexit. That's right. Right. And so when we've had this big, long wave of globalization and wave of increasing knowledge industries since World War II, it's difficult to point to recent examples where clustering effects, where cities lost their cluster, simply because clustering effects are just getting more and more important across the board. There was this macro trend. But you can see some cases of places that lost out. Detroit is an interesting one because, yeah, Detroit is still a cluster. of auto manufacturing stuff. You said you talked about shipping stuff overseas, but when you have a globally integrated market and Toyota is doing innovation in auto technology

and GM is not, then that is an important shift in the locus of innovation. It is notable that Tesla did not come from Detroit. And so that, yes, there are plenty of car jobs still left, you know, in that area, but. Well, the counter example, The counter example, I would say, the name's going to escape me now, but it's the self-driving startup coming out of Ford. I interviewed the CEO, and he specifically talked about he went the other way.

They started out in California and went back to Detroit. So, yeah. So these industrial clusters are powerful. There's a network of parts suppliers. Maybe you don't need the engine stuff, but you need the axles and doors. and windows and all that stuff. And you need to be able to have close communication. And that's all physical stuff.

It can't be produced remotely. It has to be produced on site. So what's interesting is that the shift remote work could affect the clustering of industries where the production is all done on computers. And so, I mean, you have to have factories ultimately for building cars. You've got to take this windshield and move it to where the frame is physically.

But then if you're just writing code, or if you're just doing business consulting services, or if you're just managing people, whatever, a lot of these things are just on a computer. I have a really good friend that works at a biotech. Literally a scientist that is working on, like cancer research and things like that. And he's been remote this entire year. And like I've even asked him, like, how can you do your actual, don't you have to be in a lab

and things like that? He's like, there's a lot of stuff that we can do on computers now for there, too. Let me ask you this. And this is not about Silicon Valley. This is more about the larger question of remote work. Because one of the reasons I'm, I go back and forth, like I said, but I'm skeptical because I worked from home for a decade, and my life got better when I finally got an office. And so I feel like people might not know to what degree having a separation in your lives is important. You've talked about how you're a great remote worker. You could be working in a coffee shop in Tokyo right now or whatever. But just give me just a random stab in the dark.

Let's talk about these knowledge workers, if you want to call it that. Would you expect at the end of the decade it would be now 25% remote, 30%, 50%, what do you think? When you're talking about percent of remote, do you mean percent of hours or do you mean percent of people? Right, okay, that's a good question. How about my definition would be you're not going into the office five days a week? Not going into the office five days a week, I predict it will be 85 percent of people. That'll be almost everybody. Flexible work schedules are just make people more productive.

That is settled science. We know that people don't need to be in an office all those days a week. And I don't know anyone who does that anymore. I don't know anyone who goes into the office every day of the week anymore in the tech industry. It's like zero. They all have flexible work schedules. And of course, one of the biggest reasons is going to be, you know, is because of kids, child care.

I think that people understood that flexibility is very important for child care, for two-income families, for women to have equality in the workplace. So I think that that pressure is essentially irresistible. The question of how many people are going to be 100% remote, I would say 10%. Maybe. Well, you know, again, one of the things that boomerangs me back on this is it was in the Atlantic. I think it was Derek Thompson did a piece last week about, how it was sort of the lesson of network effects where it was like even a year ago,

not everybody knew how to do remote. So you couldn't assume that, hey, you know, I just assume, Noah, I want to talk to you, get on a Zoom today, right? We all went through like sort of the onboarding of how to do this live remotely at the same time. And so it like the network gets valuable exponentially with the amount of people on the network. But then also he pointed out that like, and I hadn't thought this through, like, again, a year ago, there was still sort of like, could you really go to your boss and be like, you know what, I demand to only come into the office two days a week.

There was still sort of, that would be a risky sort of cultural thing, reputational thing. But now everybody has seen that it can work. And so that's completely gone away. The taboo is gone. Right. I think, you know, Derek is a little too optimistic about the, or not optimistic. Derek is too bullish on the idea of remote work unbundling cities because I think he hasn't thought he hasn't thought enough about the non-work things that would have to be unbundled.

He's thought mostly about the work things, but about things like networking, tacit idea, exchange, and most of all lifestyle. I think that lifestyle is actually the biggie. I want to live in or near a cool city with lots of interesting and fun things to do and interesting and fun people. I grew up in a smallish city. It had a university. It was not a bad place to live. It was a decent place to grow up, for sure.

I don't want to go back to a place like that. And I think that people who have that choice don't want to go back to a place like that. Now, I work remote already. My company's headquartered in New York. When there's no pandemic, I go into the office two days a week, but that's not an office full of people doing any jobs related to me. It's the Bloomberg VC office that I go into. I was going to say, because Bloomberg headquarters is one of my favorite all-time to go into in New York City. I just love that building.

I'd love to work there, yeah. Yeah, no, it's great. I used to work there. I don't work there anymore. And I work in San Francisco, and I'm probably going to move to Japan where I used to live. And then I'll be in another crowded superstar city working for people in another crowded superstar city. And so that's where I'm going to be. And I think that Derek hasn't really considered that. So the number of people who leave their own company's superstar city doesn't necessarily equal the number of people who leave superstar cities as a group.

I guess the bottom line also is that if I'm quibbling about like, is it 10%, is it 35%. It doesn't matter because any meaningful number, even if it was 5% of whatever percentage of the population is knowledge workers, if they go in less, if they only go in two days a week or whatever, like, that has such huge knock on effects for, you know, like infrastructure, investment, traffic and real estate and office space and all that stuff, right? So even if we're quibbling or arguing about, like, how impact, it's still going to have probably a meaningful impact that will notice this decade. I think it will have a meaningful impact that will notice this decade, but it will not, it will be an evolution, not a revolution. I think it will be a modest shift, and I think that the biggest beneficiaries will be other, will be cities that can offer similar amenities with lower costs for certain classes of people, for whom the difference between living in San Francisco and the difference and living in Dallas is not large. I think that there are a lot of such people. I'm not one of them, but there's a lot of people like that who just want, just want to have some pretty good restaurants around,

just want to be somewhere where the, the musical theater will like come to. Things like that. Who don't demand that they be in the place with the most interesting quirky characters and like coolest artists and whatnot, which I kind of do. For me, the superstarseness of a city is more important, I think, than for most people I've ever known. I want to be where cutting-edge thoughts are being thought. And if 80% of those thoughts are being thought on Zoom and Clubhouse and whatnot, I still want to be in the place where the other 20% is concentrated.

But I think I'm probably more abnormal. in that sense. Because I think a lot of people, they just want to be in a place with some good restaurants, some nice, you know, some fun places to go with the kids. A lot of people have kids. You know, I just have rabbits. And I think that when we think about where these people want to go and want to be, we think about, you know, young, single engineer and manager or types. Like basically young, single, high-valued knowledge workers. Because they're very mobile. You know, they're very, they're very mobile, but their very mobility means that they can go and hang out for their 20s in a cool city and, you know, meet their partner and whatever and have their fun and get drunk a bunch or whatever. Do some DMT. I don't know, whatever.

And then they do the, you know, they do all those things and then they get married or whatever we're calling. it these days and then they move out to the berms to raise their kids, I think that that progression is not going to really end. It's going to change a little bit, it's going to evolve, but I think it's not going to end. Yeah, we did that. It's just we moved from Manhattan to Park Slope, but you move from Manhattan to Park Slope. Same deal, yeah. Before I let you go, can I get your take on a couple of other things? You're on Substack, which let me not forget to plug that, because first of all, you're the, you're, my one of my favorite Twitter follows of all time.

Your substack now is a couple months old, and it's fantastic. You have a huge following on Twitter. You're well-known. Your write-up substacks alley. No doubt Hamish has reached out to you to try to get you to burn the boats at Bloomberg and go all in on substack. Just whatever you want to tell me about either your experience so far or what you think about the company and the opportunity it provides to writers and things

like that. Substack is good. It's still in its early stages and it needs to solve the bundling problem because currently you subscribe to like a few substacks and that's all you can spend on media per month. Whereas if you subscribe to an equal number, if you take the same number of dollars and subscribe to like online publications, like online publications, you just get so many more writers, you get so much more of a diversity. So for people who want to follow like they're one or two favorite writers, it's perfect. For people who want to, for people who want to, for people who want to follow like 30 writers, it's not, the economies of scale don't work yet. And so they need to implement a bundling solution. I know they're working on that.

But in general, great, you know, it's, it's something that needed to exist for a long time, and it's brought blogging back. And there, you know, there's just like, I'm always, I'm always, like, annoying Hamish on email with, like, suggestions and, and things for little tweaks. But I don't want to focus on those little tweaks, because subtexts really, you know, it's, it's a good product. It's, and it's, I think the most important thing

it's doing is it's making discussion more reasonable again, because Twitter is really optimized. The way you get attention on Twitter is by dunking on people and by fighting, by saying, look at this idiot. Like, dunking is Twitter.

And it's terrible for our national discourse and just for our ability to think about things. And so Clubhouse and Substack, I think, are both made with the inherent shittiness of Twitter in mind. Twitter is incredibly convenient. It's super viral. It's great for getting news.

It's great for just randomly talking to anybody you want. Twitter has such advantages and then such disadvantages. It's a machine for hate and contentiousness and bridge burning and misunderstanding. And I recognize the importance and enduring power of Twitter at the same time that I think it's a complete dumpster fire and I hate it. And Substack is helping to bring back blogging, which was always better. Like, yes, people say mean things about each other on their blogs. Yes, you can get attention for fighting, but you have to be more reasonable. It's long-form stuff. You can't just take like a little snippet out of context and then like make that the basis of your of your denunciation attack.

And so it's it's just much, it's training our discussion toward reasonability. And Clubhouse is doing the same thing. I mean, Clubhouse, you have you have discussions. between people who would just absolutely be, you know, dunking on each other and tearing out each other's throats on Twitter, who are having a reasonable voice discussion on Clubhouse, because voice, we human beings are programmed, if you want to call it that, to be reasonable when we're talking to each other by voice, even more so on video, I think.

But just voice creates this human element and this back and forth. Of course, clubhouses is real names. And of course, podcasts are doing this too. Podcasts are making, our discourse is becoming more real. reasonable. But because Twitter is the only one of these where you can get breaking news, everyone's still trapped on Twitter. Last thing, hold on, I'm going to change my background if I can do it. Because the funny thing is, the funny thing is, I had planned for my last question all

along was to have you give me some sci-fi recommendations. And funny enough, in my inbox this morning, you went ahead and gave your master list of Because here's the deal. Like, I've been a sci-fi reader all my life, but I missed out on all like the 70s cool stuff. Like, I just got, I read Earthsea for the first time this year, Ring World recently, Forever World recently. So, forever war, sorry, recently.

So, like, there's so much I need to catch up on it. And that doesn't even count all the European stuff. Like, the only reason I know Bujold is because of you. So, number one, I'm having a hard time with Bujol, because I, maybe I, picked the wrong one to start out with. Actually, which one did I try? I started out with Bariar. B-A-R-R-A-Y-A-R. That is exactly the one you should start with. Okay. Because it keeps referencing, maybe a third of the way through, it keeps referencing

the previous battle she was in. I hadn't even got to her giving birth or I think there's some twist coming up right now. But like, so I kept feeling like, well, I'm missing all of the references and all of the sly winks and things that I should know about. No, to be honest, a lot of those aren't anywhere. So there is a book Shards of Honor, which came before Barrier. It is not as well written. It's worth reading just for completion, but it's more sort of like a Star Trek episode with BDSM. And Bariar is really where the series starts getting amazing.

And it's the second book. And, oh, be sure to catch Falling Free, which is another sort of side book. And then the series stays amazing for like 10 books or something. And then it starts to, you know, trail off a bit. But it's one of the most consistent series. So, I mean, I've read Stevenson, of course, Margaret Atwood. I'm trying to think of... Verna Vinge?

See, I haven't. Okay. I should start with that one. That's the very first one on your list. Oh, yeah, you're great. Charlie Jane Anders. Okay. What's that series?

All the Birds in the Sky is her first novel, and it is just one of the best ever written. She just came out with a new one, or he's coming out with soon. But yeah, and she has a couple novels, and then a whole bunch of short stories. that I really love, but she's so good. And then, there's a number of other good ones. I mean, Bruce Sterling, of course, Gibson, a lot of the

cyberpunk classics. What's the Uplift saga by David Brin? Oh yeah, that's a saga. If you really like animals, then that series is for you because it's about sentient dolphins and chimpanzees. So humans sort of use technology to make dolphins and chimpanzees human-level sentient. And then they find themselves very rapidly having to participate in an interstellar war. And so it's just about these dolphins and chimps thinking, like, what the hell are we doing here?

What is our purpose? They don't have history. They don't have like this deep memory of that humans have of like this long history thing. They're just like, we just arrived. And before that, we were just like, animals. What do we do now? And so it's really interesting about the search for collective purpose for your species. Did I see you say on Twitter, maybe even just today, that you don't like? Who is it that you say you don't like? Because I had read him. The post-scarcity books, yeah.

Yeah, the culture, Ian M. Banks. Yeah. That is an author that almost everyone does like. Yeah. And I do not. Like, I'm very, very against the mainstream on that. But it's just personal preference. I have no, there's no, I'm not going to point.

to those books and say, this is why this is bad, because I don't think it's bad. I just, it doesn't tickle my pickle. You know what I mean? You have the Dispossessed, which, again, I only did the Earth's Seas cycle. Oh, yeah. So, all right, give me one more, just one more that you would make an argument for that maybe the listeners wouldn't know about either a writer or a series or a book or anything from this list. Oh, I mean, I have to think about, well, the one that people aren't going to know is Tony Daniels series. from the early 2000s, starting with Metaplanetary.

Nobody knows those books. They just completely bombed. No one bought them or read them. They're so good. There are only two of them. Metaplanetary and superluminal. I mean, that's a real hidden gem. I feel like not enough people have read Orcs and Crake.

It's one of the best. Yeah, I love that one. People didn't, like, the sci-fi community barely recognized that they just ignored orcs and Craig. And that was terrible because that's like one of the, that should have won the hugo award that year easily um and just people ignored it uh oh yeah there's there's a there's a bunch of oh the um the uh unha lee books if uh if people like to read absolutely just far out wacky psychedelic sci-fi just like um you know like now i've invented a gun

that turns you into cheese and like it's like roger zelazni stuff that you say it's like it's like It's a Lasnian level of weirdness. Or like Samuel Delaney kind of level of like, you know, what the hell is going on now? You're recommending it's called the Machineries of Empire series. Right. And unfortunately, that's part of the trend toward having series with names that nobody realized that that's the name of the series they're reading. Like no one reads Three Body and things, ah, I'm reading the first of Remembrance of Earth's Past. Right, right, right.

It's called Three Body. So the first, the first Unha Lee book is called Nine Fox Gambit. And so that's the one people should pick up. Nine Fox Gambit. It's really weird and far out, and I like it a lot. All right. I want to end with a recommendation, which is a podcast, because I tweeted the other day when I discovered about this, that this is a holy shit. I instantly subscribed.

Couldn't subscribe because you guys weren't on the iTunes thing yet. But you just started a podcast called Hexapadia. Hexapodia. Hexipodia. See, this is like a strepatechery thing. You're going to, okay, all right. It's podcasting, so my tendency is to say hexapadia.

But there you go. All right. Hexapadia. In fact, we probably should call it hexapadia. Yeah. We probably should pronounce it that way. That's a good idea. You and Brad DeLong, who is also one of my

longtime favorite follows for anything economic stuff. So tell me what you guys want to do with this. We're going to just talk about economics and nerdy stuff. So essentially we're going to take one econ-related topic per week and just chew over it for about half an hour. And then we'll pepper that with a bunch of sci-fi references and sort of nerdy, esoteric history references that nobody knows and math jokes and just whatever dumb nerdy things come to our minds and we'll alienate all our listeners who are like, oh my God, this is too nerdy. I can't listen to this. No, it'll be great. Everyone will listen to our podcast. We're so great.

No, 100%. And we're going to talk about this as soon as we're done here. But you guys have chemistry, and that's something that you can't buy or train. But also, I just, you know, you're right. I'm thinking, you know, I love it every time I see Ben Thompson go on some new venue, and he has to go through for the nth time, the pronunciation of Stratecre. So, yeah, you know what? Maybe that's a sign of a good show is if you're always going to have to explain to people.

No, it's a subpoena. Listen. People don't even know that Stratere is a joke from the Bush Gore election at this point. Right, at this point. No one knows that history. Yeah. Like I got it immediately. I'm the right generation for that.

Noah, thanks for coming on, and I hope you'll come on and talk to us again. Thank you, man. It was great.