Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - Tyler Cowen

Episode Date: October 18, 2023

Tyler Cowen is one of the top thinkers in the world: the thinkers’ thinker. A professor of economics at George Mason University, he has one of the most popular economics sites on the internet, Marginal Revolution, where he’s blogged every day for over 20 years. It also runs the online educational platform Marginal Revolution University. However, he may be best known for his popular podcast, Conversations with Tyler. Tyler is a New York Times bestselling author, having written 19 books, including Average is Over, The Great Stagnation, Discover Your Inner Economist, and Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. ------- Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra ------- Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra ------- Manna Vitality https://mannavitality.com/ ------- LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra 

Tetragrammitson I think there are two core lessons to start with in economics. The first is incentives matter. So when you think about a social situation or an economy, just try to figure out what all the incentives are. It doesn't have to be money. It could be fame or recognition or just actually not wanting to have to work. The second lesson of economics, as I see it, is there is no free lunch.

So if you want to do something, there's a trade-off, there's an opportunity cost. Don't think that you can just get something for free. So again, if you're analyzing a choice in a business with respect to policy, if you don't understand what is the opportunity cost, you probably don't know what you're doing. So I would say those are the two key lessons of economics. Most good economics is fairly simple. If economics is super complicated, maybe I wouldn't entirely trust it. And just take those as some key concepts out there to explore life. How different is the theoretical versus the practical when it comes to economic matters. When the theoretical is simple, it usually makes sense.

So if you can explain an economic idea to someone who is not an economist, that's a good sign. There's so much academic economics out there. And some of it is very accurate, but often it's not that relevant. It's just designed to address one specific context, one place at one point in time, and people do that for research, but hardly anyone else needs to know that.

So I would just say be careful, and always try to translate it back to your common sense. Is there a one-size-fits-all, or is it always case-sensitive? It's usually case-sensitive. So if you're trying to think about why have different countries or economies done well, I think there are some very basic principles. Incentives matter, property rights matter. You don't want the government to screw things up too much. But in fact, you see different countries like South Korea or say Ireland. They've taken very different paths, done different things.

In both cases, it's turned out pretty well. So I don't think there's a simple recipe like formula for how to grow your economy. Tell me a little bit about those two particular, what works in Ireland, what works in South Korea. In 1960, South Korea was actually a poorer nation than most of sub-Saharan Africa. Now it has a per capita income, actually richer than Italy, about equal to France. I think recently they've kind of come into a tie or surpassed Japan and England. They did it by building very large corporations, like Samsung or Hyundai that all of us wouldn't know, by having King Glamour itites, by having high savings rates and not

relying too much on foreign investment. At first their government was quite corrupt, it's still actually fairly corrupt, but basically they've done it. Now, if you look at Ireland in the 1970s, Ireland was in essence considered a third-world country. There was conflict going on between Catholic Protestants, the situation with an Northern Ireland. They opened up to foreign investment, they cut their tax rates. A lot of them just decided enough of this nonsense. All of a sudden people started calling it the Celtic Tiger. And circa 2023, you would have to say they're doing better, say the England, which is a complete historic reversal, very high dependence on foreign multinationals and foreign direct investment.

Good for them, but it's very different from the Korean homegrown conglomerate approach. Is there any downside to the foreign investment? There always is, so if you have a lot of foreign investment to some extent you're at the mercy of, will other larger countries, in fact, continue to produce the big corporations who will invest in Ireland. Another problem Ireland continually has is the European Union wants to, from the outside, regulate Ireland more, and Ireland being a small country has to push back very hard. So their prosperity is never quite guaranteed, but they've, you know, stuck with it and made it. What are the other countries around the world that you see as winning stories? Well, Singapore, putting aside oil, rich monarchies, and the like, Singapore is one of the

very wealthiest nations. It's richer than the United States. They achieved their independence in the 1960s. They were kicked out of Malaysia. They were very upset about this They weren't sure they could make it on their own But they had some really fantastic leaders like Lee Kuan Yew They had a high savings rate. They decided they were going to develop the highest quality civil service in the world and

Basically did it so most countries the smartest people work in the private sector very often in Singapore The best and smartest people work in the private sector, very often in Singapore, the best and smartest people work in government, which is not a formula that I as an American am especially used to. But for them, it's work. You can think of Singapore in a way, as in some ways, more like a company than a country. But they have sovereign, well-fun, that have invested successfully in China, India, many places, made the nation even much richer than its per capita income would indicate. And they turned being a British colony to their advantage, which

not everyone has done. Being a British colony was not good for many countries, but it's been very good for Singapore. You say that the function more like a company than a country would every country benefit from running more like a company? I think there's only a small number of fairly small countries with some degree of ethnic homogeneity, Singapore being about 80% Chinese. That can pull that off. Why is that? You need a sense of unity, a sense of a common mission.

So the United States with 330 million people, our strength is in our diversity, our innovation, our discord in a sense. And it can be good off in that we're polarized. Let's have a debate, let's slug it out. You don't always like who wins. But at the end of the day, we move forward with a lot of new ideas.

Singapore is not that innovative. It's just incredibly well-run. Everything works. Everything is how you want it to be. It's wonderful if you visit as a foreigner. You know, Singapore is about the size of Fairfax County. I think population is about 5 to 6 million people. I don't think it could be so much bigger than it is, and still do that. Beyond Singapore, other countries worthy of note? Well, I think Canada and Australia are two amazingly well-run countries. I would say they're both a bit more to the socialistic side than I would prefer, but they've

made immigration work for themselves. Canada has been willing to slot itself economically speaking next to the United States and take advantage of that relationship. And life in Canada now is much better than life in Western Europe. That really wasn't true, say, 30 years ago. Western Europe has been stagnating. You have North America taking advantage of tech, now artificial intelligence, fracking, just general entrepreneurship, where as Western Europe is state, as it is wonderful standard of life, especially if you come here with an outside income, but really quite stagnant.

Could that change? Oh, could. I think one place that has changed is Poland, which obviously is Eastern Europe. So Poland now, since 1990, has been growing at an average rate of about 4%. It's on track, you know, in 10 to 12 years, to equal or surpass, say, the United Kingdom. And in 1990, they basically had nothing. They have a kind of unity stemming from their background with the Catholic Church, dislike of the USSR or Russia, viewing success as an existential issue. Like if we don't make

this will be swallowed up or attacked as Ukraine has been. So having incentives to succeed embracing capitalism, I think through some problems and how they run their government, but it's hard to call it anything other than a success. Is pressure always a good thing? I wouldn't say always, but I think on average, so you look at Israel, which again, the country started with virtually nothing, but everyone knew if we don't get richer quickly, you know, we're outnumbered by enemies who oppose us or wish us harm. So many more Egyptians say than Israelis, and that's not to even bring in all the other countries. And Israel developed some notion of

capitalism, a startup scene, a tech center, in cybersecurity, their masters, water policy. There's so many things they've gotten right because they had to. And you would have to call that another example of existential crisis leading to success. In South Korea, the examples were hardware. Right. Can hardware grow in a way that it's in peak with software in terms of growth? I think today, hardware and software are becoming much more the same thing, so most of your car and I was software, so both the hardware and the software have to be good. So if you're thinking about future countries that will do well, look for ones that will

master both hardware and software, you think about drones, which are now quite important, not only for the military. Again, you need both the hardware and software to be on track, self-driving vehicles, which I think will become a much bigger thing. So that's the new mode, is to be good at both. And that's going to be very hard for a lot of countries. I think it will be very beneficial for North America, probably for Israel. But a lot of places, the European Union in particular, they're not so good at software.

Germany has always been excellent at hardware, and that is carried them a long way, but they're about to enter this new era, and it seems like they're deindustrializing, and that will be a grave problem for them. What do you believe now that you didn't believe when you were younger? Well, it depends on the year of younger. So when I was 10 years old, I guess my favorite song was Jackson Five. I want you back, which was not so bad a pick. I thought Tommy Rowe was really good.

Now I only like two of his songs and I was tired of hearing Hey Jude on the radio. And now I just keep on wanting to hear it. So that would be a simple place to start. But if you're looking at 10 years ago, 10 years ago, I thought 2008, 2009 was the collapse of a housing bubble. Now I see home prices, they've come back. I don't think it was a bubble at all.

I think we panicked when we didn't need to panic. But you can pick a year. And I'll tell you what I've changed my mind about. Anything culturally that you've changed your mind about? Five years ago, certainly ten years ago, I thought marijuana legalization and decriminalization would work fine. I'm still in favor of them. I think it's ethically wrong to put a person in jail for something the person does as his or her own choice. But I don't feel it's working well, and I would prefer that at the social level we rethink having a world where so many parents bring their kids to school, say in New York City,

and smell marijuana smoke along the way. I'm worried this is not a stable political equilibrium, and I would just say it's gone less well than I would have wanted it to, and I hope we rethink it to make it work better because I don't want us to go back to how things were. Any ideas of what would work better? I think just having personal norms that are maybe a bit more like those of Singapore. I don't favor Singaporean drug policy, which is super strict and pretty well enforced because it's so hard to get in and out of the country, but just the notion that there's a sense of

shame to certain ways of behaving in public. America had more of this in earlier decades, and I think we need to bring some of it back. How often does your worldview change? Every day, every moment, like the mere fact that nothing happens, you should update your worldview. So there's a big debate now. They're called UAPs. We used to call them UFOs. What are they? It's a big debate now. They're called UAPs. We used to call them UFOs. What are they?

It's a big mystery. So one hypothesis is there actually some kind of craft from aliens. I don't know if that's true, but years have passed. I don't hear other good explanations. So if a moment passes and I don't hear anything, you know, my probability that they might actually be say alien drone probes.

It just takes up by the tiniest amount. And all I'm doing is sitting in this chair hearing nothing. When you have a strong feeling about something and then you get new information that refutes that, are you easy to reset your software? Everyone will say yes to that, but the people who say yes, I don't trust.

So maybe I'm better off thinking that I'm actually pretty stubborn, and it takes a fair amount. We're all too vulnerable to the following mechanism. If someone you trust tells you you're wrong, you take it on more readily than if someone you don't trust tells you you're wrong. But that's a very asymmetric way to do intellectual business. And we all ought to try to reform ourselves.

When does science get it wrong? It depends what you mean by science. I would say very often scientists get it wrong. So if you look at the pandemic, our unwillingness to reopen schools in a timely manner was a huge instance of scientists getting it wrong and you could just blame the public school system as well. And the media did science and the abstract sense get it wrong and you could just blame the public school system as well. And the media did science and the abstract sense get it wrong? That's a more metaphysical question.

We see paradigms change in science. Like, science seems to always be changing. Whatever today's standard of science is, 10 years from now we'll look back and it's like there'll be a new discovery that changes, you know, a third of the things that we believe today. Sure, mostly it gets better, but sometimes it seems to me it gets worse, because scientists take on their political beliefs and confuse them with the science. Now, I think that's what happened during the pandemic.

We, the United States, have just become in some ways too cautious, too bureaucratized. We were too slow to respond in a number of ways. And then we made the additional mistake of just dragging out all of the adjustments and lockdowns. So I think we should have had so lockdowns early on just to see what was going on, but then we should have gotten rid of them really pretty quickly. Some places did, Florida, I think that went quite well, but a lot of places didn't, a lot of countries didn't.

What are healthy levels of bureaucracy? In every country I've ever visited, there should be less bureaucracy. I'm not sure if there are any exceptions, but I would say the nice thing about Singapore is it's the highest quality bureaucrats I've ever met encountered or dealt with, and I've given talks to them numerous times met with them. And they're just uniformly impressive. Tell me about intuition versus education. I think you need both. It's a bit like to have your economy succeed. You need hardware and software. So there are many people that are very highly educated, but they're intuitions or poor. I think all other things equal. I would prefer

the people who are less educated and have better intuition. Most of all, I want people to have both. And the great thing about education these days, it's not so closely tied to schooling. It may or may not be, but you can learn from the internet. It's just easier to meet the people you can learn from when you're learning from others face to face, like we wouldn't have met if not for the internet, right? So formal schooling, mattering less to me is a big advance. If you're in high school today and you're really excited about either a career or starting a business, would you go to college before pursuing that dream?

It's a difficult counterfactual. I think I would, but I don't think I would take the course I've taken. So I became an academic and a professor. That path is now to bureaucratized. Given that I'm 61, I went through the obstacles at a time when they were easier and better. So it's worked out great for me. But when people, you know, who are 20 years old tell me, like Tyler, should I try to do this?

Some of them should, but far more often than before, I would say, no, you don't actually end up with the freedoms you think you're looking for. And to look at something like the world of tech or startups, or just doing your own thing, like someone like Mr. Beast, or yourself for that matter, it's very hard to just categorize your profession. There's ways you could describe Mr. Beast, well while YouTuber, of course, or you produce music, but it's

something also bigger, different, and more diverse than that, and I would look for some kind of job in that matter that would be hard to describe in advance. In the past, there was talk of the population boom and there being too many people on the planet. The planet can't sustain the people. And now the discussion is there not enough people or there won't be enough people. Where are you on that? Well, I agree with Elon Musk. As of 2023, we face a future where there will not be enough people. The big flaw of South Korea, by the way, is they have a total fertility rate of 0.8. Can you imagine so low? Like a family is not even averaging one kid. Italy had been at 1.3.

I think it's now a bit even lower than that. So these societies are not reproducing themselves and to just have someone, you know, to have people raise their hands and say, there's something about this that is totally dysfunctional and it will at some point be an emergency. Very few people are willing to do that. And any given day, it's a problem you could ignore, because in terms of the stock of people,

there's enough people around in most places. But the future flows, a lot of countries are in big trouble. And you have places like Iran, which will depopulate before they become wealthy, and they're not so attractive for immigrants to go there. Is the need for population only based on the economy? Well, the economy is so intertwined with other factors. I'm not sure you can separate them, but just to pay for everyone's retirement,

you need an incoming flow of young people, but I think also for individuals to feel connected, to have families, to have ties, to feel whole in their lives, to have some sense of attaining a spiritual understanding of all that is around them. More people are an enormous help, maybe the number one help, they don't. Have to be your biological family,

but that's one pretty easy way to get there, which typically does have pretty strong bonds, so it's not only economic. And describe to me the world that tomorrow if there were half as many people on it. Well, again, there's an issue between the stock and the flow. If you had half as many people, but each family had three kids, it wouldn't be a problem over time. You would repopulate the earth.

If you have half as many people, and the total fertility rate is 0.8. You're headed, if not quite toward extinction, to not having enough people to keep things up and running, you'd have less division of labor. All economies would have negative economic growth. Future generations would be poorer. You'd probably have a lot of political conflict. So you would solve some environmental problems, which is nice, but it's not close to being worth the price. I heard a quote from a current politician talking about the need for depopulation, and I was surprised. If you think, are there overpopulated countries,

there's maybe a handful that are overpopulated in the sense that they're not wealthy enough, so does Bangladesh have too many people? Maybe. But most of the world, including Africa, is quite underpopulated. They don't have the economies of scale to build infrastructure and transportation networks that will get people, food, medicines, other benefits of urban life. So, very few parts of the world are overpopulated in my view. Tell me the effects of Brexit.

Brexit is a complex issue. So when Brexit happened, I was opposed to Brexit, because I thought the economic future of the United Kingdom was with the European Union, and I thought they would lose about 3% of their GDP by leaving. They left. It has hurt the economy. I think that was a correct forecast, but increasingly I've come to see Brexit as necessary, just as the reformation was necessary. So the British way of life, European Union way of life, they're just very different. I don't think they're ever going to converge enough for the UK and the European Union to be stable. So I think they had to go their own way and I'm hoping they

can turn it into a good Brexit. If the United Kingdom would deregulate, toss out all of the European Union laws and regulations they inherited, which they have not done, by the way, that's odd. It's very odd, but they've lost their courage. And in some ways their regulations are worse than the EU. So what's the point of leaving if you're not going to make a good go of it? So they're at this kind of turning or switch point where they need to decide, are we going to use Brexit for the better, or are we just going to take this loss and not actually do anything to compensate? Then we'll see. If Brexit could have been good for the UK, why would that not be the case for other countries? If you're looking at a country like Estonia, which has a military issue with Russia, they're

very small. They need trade with the European Union. They can't go it on their own. So they should be in the European Union, even though... This trade not happened without the European Union. The European Union is kind of nasty. They say if you don't belong to us and you're nearby, we're going to put significant tariffs on your goods. Now, I object to that, but it's a fact, and given that fact, a small country such as Estonia has to be in the EU, plus they need the protection against Russia. So a bunch of countries should be in the EU, but United Kingdom, it has nuclear weapons.

It's on the other side of Europe. It has the English language. It has very strong ties to the US, so I would like to see them over time, enter NAFTA in some form, and truly build out the transatlantic partnership. That would be one way that could turn this thing to their advantage. And they might do that, right? They might, we'll see. Yeah. How do the different countries maintain the specialness of why we like to visit them as the world becomes more of a global system?

There was a big prediction in the 1990s that the whole world would culturally become the same. And I think in some ways that has happened, but mostly it hasn't. So if you go to China, go to India, they still feel quite special, not always in good ways, but they're still strongly Chinese Indian or regionally different. If you're in Italy, Italian social ways, or still here and quite intact, that said, there's something about cities

that I find a little depressing. They all have the same kind of we work spaces, the same kind of cafes. There's Starbucks everywhere. I love sushi, but the fact that you get the same kind of sushi in all the world's great cities. I don't know. There's some dimensions along which cities have the super common kind of yapified upper-middle class appeal to the educated, but it doesn't at all appeal to me, and I find it quite boring. And that to me is depressing. And it depends on the city. I think if you go to Tokyo, it's remarkably vital, still quite Japanese. Los Angeles,

plenty of places that are fine up and running. London to me culturally feels much more boring than it was the first time I went in 1970. There's way more culturally to do. Oh, here's an exhibit. Here's a concert. But what about that is London feels fairly emptied out. So... There's a homogenization. Yes. But again, many, many countries in the world still feel like what you want them to be. So I'm not pessimistic. What is your experience of the situations around the world versus what we are told about the situations around the world? I don't trust global news at all about most places.

There's a tendency for media to report the negative about what happens in the world. Reporters, they might have formal education in the sense they were undergraduates at Harvard. They're typically very poorly educated, if you ask, do they know a diverse set of people in terms of class? If they know a diverse set of people, ethnically it's the same kind of wealthier people whose kids went to Harvard sort of thing. Often they haven't traveled in a serious way much

or ever tried to actually live in a very poor place or learn other languages. So they think their way undereducated. Sometimes they even might have base motives, but I don't think that's the main problem. I think in life most people mean well. I just think they're not up to the job of reporting on other countries.

What do you think of remote viewing? When you say remote viewing, what do you mean? Remote viewing is when you close your eyes, travel to another place, can visualize the place, draw it, and be accurate. It's fantastic if you can do it. I have a zero skill at that, like I have to go to the other place. But it's a great human ability and just ability to imagine other places. But I'm very poor at that.

I feel I need to see things literally, smell them, taste them. And then I start to have like some partial understanding of a place by being there. Welcome to the House of Macadamias. standing of a place by being there. source of Omega-7 linked to collagen regeneration, enhanced weight management, and better fat metabolism. Macadamia's art healthy and bring boosting fats. Macadamia's paleo-friendly, chitol and plant-based macadamies. No wheat, no dairy, no gluten, no ghee M.O.'s, no preservatives, no palm oil, no added sugar, house of macadamias. Thy roasted with Namibian sea salt, cracked black pepper, and chocolate dips. Snack bars come in chocolate.

Coconut white chocolate and blueberry white chocolate. Visit houseofmacademias.com slash tetra. When you ask a question, are you looking for the answer to your question, are you interested in seeing where it goes? I'm looking for a better question. I'm not sure how many questions have answers. I mean, a bunch do. One is two plus two, that's four, but we know those answers, right? So I think we ought to be looking for better questions and always trying to revise and not get too caught up in,

quote unquote, the answer. With people who are leaving countries, fleeing countries, are they fleeing to escape or to look for a better life? My wife was a refugee from the Soviet Union. She left right before the Soviet Union collapsed. For her it was both of those. So a lot of human decisions that are over determined. You have a bunch of reasons for leaving.

Ultimately what pushed her to leave is that her mother, who was very wise and she trusted greatly, insisted to her that she had to leave and had to leave now, that they didn't know if they'd be able to leave in the future. So it was just like, let's go. Are they all expected the family great things from the United States? They did not in every way have those expectations met. My wife's father, who's the one who expected the least and didn't really want to go. He's the one who ended up the happiest with the country.

He just thinks it's great. Or is my wife's mother who visualized it all as like a country of jazz and poetry and Henry James and Herman Melville, she ended up remarkably disillusioned. That a lot of it was not a cyber-ad was what she was wanting. Did they all leave the whole family? The two parents, my wife and her daughter, who then was between ages one and two, and later I adopted her, They all left. Nichea, other relatives who did not leave. Many of the others left and went to Israel and

are still there. That was a very different choice. They didn't have the option of the United States. My wife did. That was unusual. And she grabbed it. Did they stay in contact with any people who stayed? Oh, of course. And my wife is still in contact with many people in Moscow. Absolutely, all the time. How did their life change with the fall? Well, at first it was extremely traumatic, so life expectancy for men dropped a great deal. Things were chaos.

No one knew what the future held. There was then a period of time. I would date it is roughly something like 2000 and 2006, give or take, where the Russian economy grew and just boomed and it was a phenomenal period. Things were happening. They built out a whole economy and away from scratch. They overcame deindustrialization. Putin, who was leader then, was relatively popular. That was his better period, even though he still still doing bad things. And people then had a sensible rush, really, on the march forward.

This is going to be wonderful. But then a lot started going wrong. The country didn't turn out as competitive or prosperous as people like. There were these foreign adventures, which got the country in trouble, eventually culminating in the Ukraine war. And now people are back to really not knowing what the future is. And there's been a mass exodus to Armenia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, many other places. We'll see.

Only since the war. No, it was ongoing before the war, but it greatly accelerated because of the war. Some of it simply being young man who don't want to be drafted, right? But just people who didn't want to face a future where in essence they wouldn't be allowed into the European Union, say without having assets confiscated. And I've been looking for places to go. And the Russian economy sold up pretty well,

better than people thought. I would say the sanctions did not work out as planned. But still there's other reasons to want to leave. You're not really part of the global community anymore. And you had this, whether you call it a coup or a minikoo or a fake coup or a staged coup, whatever happened with pregusion, and I don't understand it. You just feel a bit, well, here's a guy with 25 soldiers may be marching on my capital. Like who needs that, right?

Tell me about the house you grew up in. It was in Northern New Jersey. So I was born in Cardi, New Jersey, to a family that at the time was quite poor. When my father was 30, his pet shop had just gone bankrupt and he had zero net wealth. I was a tiny tot then. Cardi was very much a working class city, very Irish American. That was our background. My father worked in Chambers of Commerce. He had a few other chances to move.

He in fact was extremely talented that we never went to college. Back then it was still possible to work your way up. We ended up in Bergen County, which became quite well to do. And by the time I was 18, we were very upper middle class. My parents divorced, they started splitting like in my age range, age range 10 to 12. I had a sister. Later, brother was born from my father's second marriage. I went into New York City all the time. I was a chess prodigy early on like ages 10 to 15. chess was totally my thing. Always took the bus into New York, learned New York early on.

That was my childhood. I was like a nerdy kid playing chess, reading books. I love music. Was there a piano in the house? There was a piano in the house. It was a terrible piano. And there was a kind of plastic organ and guitars. And I played around with those just all the time.

It's totally fascinated. I ended up with sheet music from the Beatles, Classic Rock, just would try to learn the notes and chords to everything. Was music playing your house often? Well played by me. My parents had been in barbershop choirs and sang harmony, but they didn't play record much. Some music was self-generated. My sister, who was two years older,

from her I learned a lot about music, like Great Full Dead, Bruce Springsteen. She would get to know it before I would, and I figured out pretty quickly, well, she had good taste in music. Let's just see what she's listening to. And that worked fantastic. Did you ever get into looking for records yourself?

Oh, of course. I mean, I would, as soon as I had money, records would be what I would buy. And buying the next beetle record, things that were already out was just the thing. So first I got like the blue and the red records, which kind of everyone started with then. And then, well, which do I buy next? So it was such an agony. I think it was something new I bought, which is the American version. A lot of it's like hard days night. I heard, I'll cry instead, you know, by John, just blew my mind first time I heard it. I'm like, what is this? This was better than what I was hearing on transistor radio, which was like Zager and Evans year 25, which is

fun. I like it, but it's like John singing hard days night stuff. And then I just worked hard to get more money and bought all this stuff and then tried to go to concerts. I saw Paul McCartney and Wings at Madison Square Garden. That was probably 1976. Crosby Nash, I saw on 75 in New Jersey, my mother drove my sister and myself. What was the venue in New Jersey? It was called a home-dale.

It's an unknown town, but a very nice concert stage. The first real concert I ever saw, they were still close to their vocal peaks. They were also out to show like they were better, you know, stills and young, didn't need those other guys. Very competitive relationship, it seemed, and played all the great songs they would have had in 75. And I just realized, here's this whole world, I have to learn everything about music for the rest of my life. Yeah, I love the enthusiasm. Same, my, same.

You hear like our house, which I knew from record, but to actually have Graham Nash in front of you playing our house and singing it. It's totally different experience. Our Wings Back then was much better as a live band, like that Holviness and Orr's album, which to me feels like I overproduced too many horns, but when you heard those songs live, like Letting Go, they were A-Double Plus and they all made sense, all of a sudden, or call

me back again. On the album it's okay, live, it was just fantastic. The live version of Maybe I'm Amazed was better than the studio. Maybe I'm Amazed on the McCartney album, though I love that one too. Did you watch much television growing up? Oh, absolutely. So I had clear favorites. I didn't watch that many shows, most shows I hated. First I loved Gilligan's Island, like the Professor, and then of course it was Classic Star Trek with Spock. And I watched those again and again and again. And then of course it was classic Star Trek with Spock. And I watched those again and again and again. And then like horror movies, like Frankenstein, Wolfman,

Dracula from the 30s, comedies. Comedy's back then were not funny. I mean, they might be in the movies. I haven't been castelo. My father watched Abbot and Castello. I saw it multiple times. I have to say, I never thought they were funny. But when I now see Larry David Seinfeld,

you see how much Abbott and Castello is in them, and you realize there was something funny about it after all, even though it was an 11-year-old, you're not going, ha-ha-ha. So they've gotten up in my view. Yeah, and I suppose Guggen's own, essentially, is a comedy. Absolutely. And it's a statement about society. What the America then valued, like how we stereotype the millionaire, the professor, the skipper, the movie starlet.

It's actually very interesting, substantively. Do you have any rituals? Do I have anything that's not a ritual? Listen, I would reword the question. I go to bed every night in a timely manner, like by 1130. I wake up every morning in a timely manner. I work every day, I listen to music every day. Every day I'm totally focused on learning, can be talking, it can be on WhatsApp, it can

be reading Twitter, it can be my own writing. It's like, what I do, and I'd say my whole life is original. Is Twitter the only social media you spend time with? I don't spend time on Facebook or Instagram. I've written a blog every day for 20 years. I don't know if you'd call that social media, but it's how I meet a lot of people. And then I'm super active on what's happened texting, really a lot of time each day. Tell me about the process of writing a blog every day.

It forces you to learn things like you're making something. It's like teaching. You only learn economics when you have to teach it. It doesn't matter what school you went to. So you write to figure out what you think and to come up with better questions. And directly it's a source of income for me, but most of all I do it. To keep going and I want to stay fresh, and always have questions to ask. What's the amount of time that it takes to do a post? Well, I'm 61 years

old, so I would say 61 years. But, you know, in the moment, really not very long. Yeah. But it's the fixed cost that matters. Do you do any research for the post? It's always about what I've been reading lately or talking to people about. If you would call that research, yes, all the time. But you'd be doing the same research regardless of whether you were writing the post or you don't know it. Exactly. It's more or less the same.

So the marginal cost of the writing is actually much lower than people think. And I've written enough, I write pretty quickly, just like some people write songs pretty quickly. How do you say you manage your time? I guess I have to say, well, so I direct a non-profit, which is now reasonably large. I run what is arguably the number one YouTube channel for economics. I write two columns a week for Bloomberg. I teach at my university.

I write blog every day, and I'm in touch with, I don't know, 100 to 150 people on a pretty regular basis, have a wife, have a daughter, have two grandkids, we now take care of a dog. So, like, well, it's a normative thing, but people look at me and think I got a lot done. That's how I would put it, immodestly. All of those things the same. They feel a bit the same to me. So I sometimes say like my program or project is to become an information trillionaire. So I know people who are billionaires, so I try now to be an information billionaire. It's never enough, right?

Like you only keep your current knowledge fresh by always wanting more. So that's the general quest and obviously one never gets there, but for me it makes life very exciting. I've always been in good health, I feel in very high energy and just keep on going. How much of what you land to retain? I'm never sure what retain means. So I'm very well known for reading a lot of books and for reading at a very rapid speed. And a lot of people like used to doubt how much I retained. But then I started doing a podcast called Conversations with Tyler into 200 episodes or so, and you're one of them. And people when they listen to the podcast, they tend to realize I

retain a lot of what I read in a way where they didn't believe me before. So I think I retain a fair amount, but like, is it for me to say? The questioning on your podcast is different than any I've ever experienced. How would you describe that difference? I would say it's like speed dating. I've never done speed dating, but what I believe speed dating works. It's not at all conversational. That's right.

That it's called conversations with Tyler's kind of an inside joke pun. Yeah. It's not a conversation. How did you develop the style? It's just, here's what I want to know from the person. I'm not paid to do it. We don't sell ads. There's zero revenue.

So there's no reason for me to do anything other than what I want. And I'm just informationally greedy and want to keep on pulling grabbing. It puts some people off like, oh, what is this? It's not hostile at all. Like there's no, oh you dummy. Why did you do that kind of question? Yeah, but it's like tell me tell me tell me like this impatient little kid pulling on someone's sleeve. It's a very strange experience. I think that we're conversational beings. So up. Yes.

So it's odd. But I'm not so much. Yeah, I see. Yeah. What do you view as success? Learning more, staying in good health, being around people I care about, and I take care of them.

They take care of me. You know, all of those things. I think one needs all of them. Tell me about the extremes of the different cultural norms you've seen in your travels. Well, I've been to over a hundred countries, so there's incredible variation. I think overall I've ended up seeing different humans as more alike than when I started. But for instance, recently I was in rural Kenya with my wife. We were in a massage village. And there a typical man would have like three wives and 12 kids.

There's female circumcision quite often. People cannot read her right. They do have smartphones. They have to walk two kilometers to get their water. It is a very different outlook, but when you stand across from them, like first thing you want is to talk about music and they will perform music for you and that's phenomenal. And then they want to ask, they asked my wife and myself, oh, were you too married? How long have you been married? When did you meet? It's much more honest than a lot of Western conversation.

They're like, here's what we really want to know. We're just going to ask you, we're not shy. So I think the universals are more important. So much of today's life happens on the web. Square space is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus, so your

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Well, I would do it country by country or even region by region, but I think the United States is an overall a bad nation for limiting mental illness and the costs of mental illness. We don't have social networks well designed for that. Italy is one of many countries that does a much better job of limiting the costs of mental illness. American families may be are underrated. American politics may be is underrated. You know, we've grown a lot more rapidly than Europe has. But I think keeping people in the bottom, is it like bottom third, bottom quarter, however

you want to slice the distribution, keeping them out of trouble we're not good at. And I think a lot of it comes down to social networks. We're super good at innovation. So you can just be on your own as a weirdo and innovate, but you can also be on your own as a weirdo and just get into trouble and not get out of it. What's the recipe for places that have revolutionary changes for the Renaissance, Silicon Valley, Paris to the 20s?

What are the seeds? A certain degree of competition, cluster of talented people who are rivals, but who also help each other, effective social networks, typically there are new technologies coming along. So if you take the Florentine Renaissance, well at first it's gold smithing, but then it's the ability to have temper-repaint, and then you have enough wealth through finance and the well-gilds and other other producers that there are business people who want to commission paintings one way or another.

And then you have oil painting coming from the north. So there's a whole new medium that people like Leonardo can experiment with. Just like the electric guitar, a lot of the earliest people did the most with it. Because over time these things become repetitive. So having this magic collection of different facts about the world come together, the small groups, the networking, the growth in wealth, the new technologies, and most importantly, the sense of believing you're doing something really important, which you see say in 1960s music. It might be in summer app today, but for the most part I don't see it in very contemporary

music, but it's so strong earlier on in popular music. This stuff really mattered. The Beatles sing, all you need is love, and the world is shaken. Is it always related to a new technology? Are there any examples where it's not tech-based? I would hesitate to use the word always, but if you think about, say, French impressionism, while actually there, the railroad was important, you needed to take a train to get out into the countryside to see what, you know, painting the landscape. And just like brushes and oil paints became much cheaper, so it opened it up to a large number of people.

So I think in an overwhelming majority of cases, there's technology, electronic, obviously required technology, sculptural materials, do you have access to the quarry, can you get what you need? It's not enough. There's plenty of technological breakthroughs that lead to nothing, but in so many cases you see it as part of the mix. What is public choice theory? Public choice theory is a branch of economics that analyzes politics and starts with the largely correct assumption that most politicians are self-interested, they're not angels, and if you're going to understand politics, you have to realize they have their own purposes

and will pursue their own ends. It doesn't have to work out badly, but if incentives are not aligned, the government can just screw you, or maybe the government does what voters tell them, and voters want bad or misinformed things, that's another way things can go wrong. And I view public choice economics as essential to understanding why the modern world is partly screwed up. Can the incentives align?

What would a world-were incentives align look like? Well, one thing we did very well in the United States, I think, was Operation Warp Speed, where the government created incentives for vaccine manufacturers to get something out there quickly. It didn't go perfectly, but government actually moved rapidly rather than slowly. Outside of Philadelphia, the I-95 bridge collapsed, and there was the prospect of it wouldn't be easy to drive to Philadelphia for months, three even years. It can take the government decades to build a road, in fact, even to rename

a road. It can take them 10 or 20 years. What actually happened is that people in the local and state government worked together together and they refitted the road and it was up and running again in a few weeks. Now, that's the exception, but it definitely can be done. And that's a case where it was done. This just happened. So America hasn't lost its greatness. It's lost it selectively.

I worry that the fraying may increase and increase. But there's still plenty of cases where we get things right. As we're speaking, the latest inflation report came in at 3%, it had been at 8.9%. We're still awaiting further data, but to get it like from 8.9 to 3 in a pretty painless way, we did something right. The European Union, most of it, has not managed the same. United Kingdom has not managed the same. So it's very wrong to think American greatness has vanished. It's just like how selectively are we going to decide to make it appear? In the bridging sample you just gave, what were the conditions that allowed that to come

together? Why is that the exception versus the rule? I think in some ways, believe it or not, American media is better than it was, say, three years ago, that you actually have media outlets, than it was say three years ago, that you actually have media outlets, you know, including like from the left that look at this episode and just ask, why can't we actually get this done? And then there was some political onto entrepreneurship and a number of people seeing they would be popular if they did get it done. And the governor was willing to wave a whole bunch of regulations and just

say we're going to build this thing. And you compare that to say New York City subway where the second avenue line was first planned in the 1970s, costs billions of dollars and opens only 50 years later. I just think there's more tension being brought to bear on that contrast. Or people, you know, they want more green energy in the United States. Well, that's great, but if it's so over-regulated, you can't build anything, environmental impact reviews, take 20 years, we're never going to get there. So you need to have in some key ways government getting out of the way

and saying, we're going to let builders make these things happen. What's your view on nuclear energy? I think we should have much more of it. I think it's also possible nuclear fusion. May work. A number of very smart people I know strongly believe nuclear fusion is the future. It also allows you to have more solar and wind energy because those are intermittent. The sun and wind can go away. You need something to fall back on.

So it's a compliment to other green energy sources. And the countries that have done more nuclear, Sweden and France are two main examples. It's worked fine for them. You know, the country is having a blown up. People are not dying from radiation. So we can do the same. We can do better. How do you decide a subject is worthy of writing a book?

It's not rational. If you feel something is bugging you until you get the book written, of writing a book. It's not rational. If you feel something is bugging you until you get the book written, I write the book. I don't even know if that's wise. I just don't know any other way to do things. So my next book, which is not out yet, is about all the greatest economists of all time. Friedman and Hayek and Keynes and Adam Smith and Malthus. And I just have had ideas about them my whole life. This was during lockdown time. I was sort of cooped up.

Couldn't write a book about any place I might go, really. That was a book I could write at home. And I just felt I had to do it. So I wrote it. I remember hearing that you decided to become an economist very young in life, is that true? I was like ages 13 to 14. It's a funny choice for a 13 or 14 year old. Tell me about what turned you on to that idea.

Well, I'm a funny person, right? So as I mentioned, like my first thing was chess, but you realize when you're playing chess, unless you're the very best person in the world, it's a terrible life, income, no health insurance, whatever, meeting women, it's just awful. It's actually better now, but then it was unbearably bad. So it's like, well, what else can I do? And I realized like I wanted to learn as much as I could. So I thought I would either be a philosopher or an economist. And I looked a little into

being a philosopher harder to get a job, less outside income. In a way, it's more limiting. You can still philosophize from other perspectives. And I just thought, well, let's do economics and kept on going. But I've always had these very broad interests in the arts and travel and food and music, whatever I can learn, history, different places. So am I even an economist? I don't know. I don't worry about it. Describe your love of chess. whatever I can learn, history, different places. So am I even an economist?

I don't know, I don't worry about it. Describe your love of chess. I don't play anymore. I really have not played since I was 15, 16, I don't know that I've played 20 games because it's one of these addictive things. You do it a lot or you've got to stop. But I watch online, I love Magnus Carlson.

It's a way you can learn about talent. It's a great way to learn about how artificial intelligence works I found, because it was prominent early in that area. You learn about competition, you learn about globalization. It's just a very good entry point into many different parts of the modern world. It's no surprise to me. It's actually booming, rather than dying out. And it's fun to watch, especially when they play the faster games. Would you say you had fun playing it or was it something else? It's something else. So it's a zero-sum game, in the sense for any winner, there's a loser.

Now, when I was at a little pike, I was winning a lot more than losing. But that does not for anyone go on forever. You reach higher levels, and it asymptotes into something like, if you're lucky, you know, 55, 45, but there's a compulsion to it and it's a way of ordering the world. But again, I definitely found it unsatisfying. It was too mono and 64 squares, a bunch of pieces, all the same people, it's like, yeah, not for me. As you're progressing, as things were going good, as you're rising in whatever ranks they were, do you remember a big loss?

Well, what I remember most is I learned pretty early on. This was very important for me. Like first I learned I could win. Beat like grown adults. But more importantly, I learned that I could lose. That there were people out there who were just better than I was. And even if sometimes I'd hold even because I had good work habits, or I didn't take drugs or drink, like they were just better. And a lot of smart young people don't learn that till much later. And they're not sort

of built to adjust for it. And I feel I was built to adjust for that very early on. So I always knew there'd be smarter people than me out there. And to do well, I would have to kind of have rituals or routines where I would have a lot of compound learning and just keep on doing those for many decades. And that I figured out when I was like 12, 13 because of chess. And that was just invaluable for me.

I don't know if you can answer this question. But do you think the people who are the best have any question about it? There's one clear best in chess. We could talk about other areas. Magnus Carlson knows he's the best. He's justifiably arrogant. Keeps him going.

And that's great. No one else thinks they're the best in chess because they're not. But the area like music, you know, it's not a clear competition with a winner loser. So who's the best? I think people feel deeply insecure about it, but you would know better than I do. Tell me about hiring. Most organizations are bad at hiring.

They're too bureaucratic. They want people who are just like they are. They want conformity, probably from any jobs that's fine, a lot of organizations conformity is what you need. But when you're looking for creative, dynamic people, and I think in a globalizing high-tech economy, they are more valuable than ever before, you have to be better at looking for weirdos. So I co-authored a book with venture capitalist Daniel Gross, called Just Palant.

And that's a book in part about how to find and hire weirdos. And maybe he and I are weirdos, and that's why we should have written the book. He and I had years of conversations and getting back to your earlier question, like when do you have to write a book? We just had to get it out of our system. Like we're not gonna move on until we write this book.

So we did. From the beginning, was there always the thought for it to be a book? No, it was just conversation. And it was the first thing Daniel and I ever talked about. I didn't even know him or really who he was. He was just this guy. And he didn't ever go to college, was from Israel, had his first start up. I think he was 18. He sold it to Apple. He was head of machine learning at Apple. I think he was 23. He was the youngest ever partner at Y Combinator, the leading venture capital firm at the time. And at incredibly young ages, he was becoming this master of talent. And he still is. So he was a practitioner. I hire people also.

But I was the one who typed out the words of the book, though I would say more than half the good ideas in it are his. And that was our collaboration. Good experience. Wonderful experience. And he and I became great friends, are in touch all the time.

He's investing now in artificial intelligence and lives in California, Bay Area. Through the process of writing the book, did you learn about how entered did you just put together what you already know? Both of those. So so much of what Daniel knew I didn't know and the hiring I've done has been very different than the hiring he's done. I've hired public intellectuals, academics, ideas, people, you know, podcasters, and he hires people doing companies for the most part or who want to do companies. So so much I learned from him and other people he put me in touch with.

But I also figured out what I really think and how much I like people who get to the point. I like people who get to the point, I like people who are curious. And again, it may not be appropriate for every kind of job, but there's plenty of manuals on how to hire for conformity, and not enough approaches on how to hire weirdos. Are weirdos the key to everything? No, but I think they're the key to a lot in music. I think they're a key to a lot in the world of ideas. They're a key to a lot in music. I think they're a key to a lot in the world of ideas. They're a key to a lot in the worlds of religion,

great religious leaders, whether they're actually weird, but they certainly come across as weirdos in a big way. And increasingly, top businesses in the United States are led by weirdos rather than conformists. And that was not the case decades ago. And in many countries, you know, saying Denmark, like their four biggest companies, date from the 1920s or earlier, they're fine companies. But are they truly all going to be led by weirdos?

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creators, people who are starting companies. They start as hackers or programmers, but then they realize the idea they have is so good. It can be a company. And then at some point they realize it can be a world shattering company, like Facebook or Stripe or the other tech companies that, who whose names we all know, and it just takes off. But they were tinkerers in the sense that a lot of the early great musicians were tinkerers, people in the industrial revolution were tinkerers. Religious leaders may have been a kind of tinkerers with ideas, and then they realized they're

on to some larger enlightenment, but they start by playing with ideas. I think that might have been the case in the past as it related to tech, because usually it would be an engineer who was interested in making something that would run those businesses at least at first, no? And I think it's some of its changing. You have now these long established tech companies, which are not so weird. They still might be successful. So how much the future is a future for weirdos? I would say we don't know yet. But I still think it will be certainly in the creative arts. What are your thoughts on UBI? It's an idea I used to

favor you asked about changing my mind. I now don't think it will work anymore. So people want to work. We do need to make jobs more rewarding. In different ways we paid people to stay at home during the pandemic. It was bad for most of them. Mental illness or frustration. So I don't favor UBI anymore. I think we do need to work harder at creating more good jobs though. Did your experience change with the lockdown? Yes, I saw other people not doing well during the lockdown.

Though financially they were fine for the most part. And they were much less happy. And it just made me update views on a whole bunch of things. Also our mental fragility, I now see as much higher than I used to see. Because again, like if you don't have to go to work, you might think it's this extreme form of comfort. Everyone will just have a great time. It wasn't that way.

Like what was your purpose, people would ask, or what am I doing, or how can I return to my project, or my kids with school, all sorts of issues, just kept on growing in their minds and praying on their happiness? It's interesting, though. When I think about you, I don't think that the things that you do, you do because of the financial outcome. No, generally not.

A lot of what I do, I give away for free. My podcast, I'm not paid. It's free by YouTube channel No ads. No nothing. It's free. I blog no ads. No nothing. It's free So in some ways you be I allows everybody to be you I Don't think everyone ends up being me. I'm this weird outlier If the whole world were me you be I would probably work fine Yeah, yeah, and maybe earlier on I too much assumed other people were like me. So, oh, UBI, we can do that.

Yeah. Is that a common confusion is thinking that other people are like us? I think everyone makes that confusion. And even once you're like 47 years old, and you feel, oh, I don't make this confusion anymore. You still do. It's remarkable how hard it is to root that confusion

out of your world view. What do you think some remote work? That's another thing I've changed by mind on. So there was a new piece of research that just came out. But the number of people playing golf on Wednesday afternoon, now compared to 2019, has gone up dramatically. And it's remote work. It's not that people love golf more. So in the very short run, it works great.

It's great for senior people. They already have their networks. But I see people working less and less. And the young people who are starting are not getting mentored the way they need to be. Apprenticeships don't work that well. Finding and selecting for talent is breaking down. So it's hard to get out of from at work once you have it,

but I've changed my mind on it in a big way. And again, it's just seeing the data. How much you rely on data. It influences me, but I want intuition and data to work together. If it's only a number, I'll question what I think, but I also want a new story. And the new story with work from home is actually a pretty simple one, like, hey, a lot of people stopped working. They're out there playing golf or walking the dog too much, walking the dog's great, but you can't do it all day. When the data and your intuition don't align, do you dig deeper?

Talk to more people. Look for more data. Question your intuition. Just keep on going. Yeah. Can the same data be used to argue both sides of an issue? I very often I mean maybe some things are quite unambiguous But the data do not always speak

You interpret them through some kind of framework or lens So that it don't settle a lot of issues a lot of people they'll they'll look at the same economy, some say it's going great, some say it's going terribly. Maybe they each have a point, there's not a simple, right or wrong always. Are there characteristics that you see in many of the, I'll use talent the way you use talent in the book? Are there similar characteristics

between talented people? It depends on the area, an area's change. So it seems to me America's in an era where a politician being weird is not so unpopular as it used to be. In the 1950s, it just was a non-starter. It's like, I like Ike, whatever. Now weird is more acceptable, though it may not always succeed. So there's different types of talent across sectors, and it changes, maybe musical talent now, in some ways, is less weird than it had been and more about execution.

Because you have to manage more parts of the business that is you. And you need like teams to do different things and agents, and maybe it's just different sort of management problem than stepping out there with the guitar. But you look at like YouTube channels, it's not solo production, the top people do have teams, but they're small teams. It seems to me a lot of them are weird. So this concept of weird talent overall is applying in more areas, but not all. And there is

something similar across a bunch of different sectors of the economy. Yeah. Is there usually some sort of a, I'll start with the word obsession, but then we might even go to say unhealthy obsession with people who succeed. It's definitely an obsession. I don't know if it's unhealthy. If you think happiness is the standard for everything, it's probably unhealthy,. I don't know if it's unhealthy. If you think happiness is the standard for everything, it's probably unhealthy, but I don't think happiness is the standard. I think simply having done something worthwhile

or great is a standard of its own. It's not the only standard either, but then these unhealthy obsessives look a lot better because many of them do manage that. And to ask how happy these people all are, to me, that's a little degenerate, if that's all you're focused on, I think it's fine if they're not entirely happy.

It's Magnus Carlson happy, like, I don't know, I've never met him. But if I learned he wasn't, I'd still think he was great and it was worthwhile what he's doing. Did you have any mentors? Oh, many mentors, and I still have mentors, and it's important to always have mentors,

have mentors who are younger than you are. But when I was in my early teens, I met a bunch of older people who just had read a lot of books. And what I learned from them, this will sound stupid, just that it's possible to have a life where you've read a lot of books. And that was sort of somehow physically possible. You don't know that when you're 10.

Like you read books, but you don't really know how the bigger piece is fit together. And that was a huge impact on me. Maybe bigger impact than any other people have had. How did you meet those people? One of them I met through my father. His name was Walter Grinder. Walter was not all that successful in life. He was super smart. His goal was to read everything, which you cannot literally do, but it was remarkable how many fields there were, humanities, social sciences, or he would have read like any book I could have named. So he really knew a lot, and I think he understood it quite well. In retrospect, I now

think Walter was highly successful, but he wasn't known or didn't have a high income or, you know, he's struggled a bit throughout his life, but he inspired many people, not just myself. Any others? Different in different areas? I think in terms of getting things done, managing, there was an early professor I had named Richard Fink, who was full of energy, he had so much energy, he left academia, and became highly successful, which was the right thing for him. But the notion that you just always want to keep on pushing, like, should never be satisfied, self-satisfied, it's never good enough, you're always not being aggressive enough along some dimension.

I learned that from him pretty early on. I learned some of that from Chast too, like you have a good position. You can't let up, you've got to keep on going. But then to see it instantiated and actual people was great for me. How different of a person would you be today had you not played Chast when you played it? It depends on the counterfactual, but I think it made a big, big difference.

And really was the key to so much of what happened later on. Both that I did well and that at some point realized I was not going to do that well, like I'd never be in the world, top 10. Are there any other pursuits over your life that informed you in the way that just when I say in the way as much as just did, let's say? Well, music in sports, so music, I tried to play a bunch of instruments when I was young. I was terrible at everything musically. But I learned chords and theory and jazz improvisation,

not that I could ever do it well, but I had a very solid foundation for going out there and exploring music. And I just still remember a lot of it. Like if I hear the song something, I think of like, oh, is that C to C major, to C7? And maybe I learned that when I was 11, but I still know it and that helped me a lot. But having something like that I was terrible, that was useful, but really cared about. And then sports, maybe I was at best average in sports,

like never could have done anything, but you learn a lot of quantitative realities from sports. Like I was very young, I figured out percentages, expected value from baseball cards, learned how to think mathematically. You start thinking about talent, like which players are underrated, overrated. You can become very analytical.

I was a baseball fan, basketball fan. Also had a big impact on me. My later interest in talent, I think, came through sports and also music. Matters intellectual. So you see, all these people who really were mostly not educated at all become so successful in music and just so smart. And you start asking, like, where did that come from?

And there's no simple answer. But it gets you thinking in ways that are very non-academic, that I feel I've always tried to embrace, that like one of the things you care about most, pretty much all the successful people are not educated, is a very healthy, early impression to have. What's taught in economics class that's different from your real world experience or life. I think economics classes don't teach you anything about culture and culture is a vague term, but maybe I would define culture as what people think is important and how they receive their validations and how they interact with each other. I'm not sure economics classes can take on

every task of the world. Maybe they can't teach culture, but you need to learn it. People need to live in different places, visit different places. Like if all you know is economics, you don't know anything, I would say. It may even be positively harmful.

And just to have, like your analysis tempered against some experience of the diversity of humankind is kind of a starting point for doing anything with economics. It's too small of a lens to look through. It's like chess, right? It's bigger than chess, but it's not as much bigger as it likes to pretend. It's how I view it. The theoretical versus the practical.

Talk to me about those. I do a lot of things in life that are quite practical, like partly running my YouTube channel, managing a non-profit. I have an economic textbook, which is an essence of commercial project with a textbook publisher. So I'm always dealing with the real economy in some way.

And that's greatly deepened by understanding of economics. I have to solve some problem every day with some other person, typically, or motivate someone to do something or choose the right person to do something. So when I do that, all the time I'm confronted with, if something goes well, how much won't we out because I understood economics, or how much won't we out because I understood culture? And the economics contribution contribution like it's pretty good It's maybe 20 to 30% like that's not nothing But it's only 20 to 30% and the rest is like culture psychology human experience and again

It's very sobering when you actually have to try to stop something from failing and you must face this all the time You're working on a record. A lot of it is just the music, right? But there's motivating the people you're working with. There's choosing with whom to work, dealing with the corporate angle of things. There's dozens of dimensions that you have to deal with. And simply knowing music doesn't really get the job done

on any of those, though it might help you. How did the podcast start? It was, I think, seven years ago, and I thought I would invite my friend Peter Teal to George Mason where I teach, just to come talk to everyone. I was like, oh, this would be great for everyone to hear Peter, and Peter at the time was not as well-known as he is now. He also wasn't vilified the way he is now. It was not a controversial thing to invite Peter

Teal. But I thought like, oh Peter, he's not going to come. He's like so busy, whatever. So I asked Peter, Peter's like, oh, that'd be great. I'll come. And it's like, oh Peter, can we tape this? And we taped it. It was a live event. And we put it online. It was like massively popular. And then I just thought, well, let's try someone else. And let's try someone else. And all of a sudden, it was a podcast. And now there's a few hundred episodes. We've had on like Mark Zuckerberg, Eric Schmidt, Margaret Atwood, Karim Abdul-Jabbar, yourself, the classical composer, John Adams. Oh, John Adams. That's a great guest.

That's a great one. Vishi Anand, the chess player. I'm going to interview him in Chennai after being here. And I learned so much from doing them, and I learned so much from the prep. It makes my reading much better. That's a big reason why I do it. Like, if I read about you, and I'm not going to interview or meet you,

I lose much more of it. If I read about you, and we're going to have one of these non-conversations, you could call them, I retain so much more of it. And I have to actually try to understand it, it's like solving the real world problem again and if your knowledge is not connected to solving a real world problem it sort of goes poof or it was not even knowledge to begin with. The first one was live in front of an audience? Yes.

And then when did that change right away or after several? It changed pretty quickly, the second one was with an audience and then a lot of people just And then when did that change right away or after several? It changed pretty quickly. The second one was with an audience. And then a lot of people just couldn't come, but we still wanted to do them. Like I would fly to them, which was fun also. Obviously, COVID came. Totally stopped everything. So they were all on Zoom.

And at first I thought, like, oh, these are on Zoom, they're going to be terrible. It's another thing I learned. But they were on Zoom and I don't think they were terrible. Or like the viewers didn't think they were terrible. Yeah, they're just different. They're different. I personally preferred to meet the person. For other reasons.

But some are on zoom, a lot of them I meet the person, whatever it takes. L-M-N-T. Element Electrolikes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? You want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add element electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper. Improve your cognitive function. Experience an increase in steady energy with fewer headaches and fewer muscle cramps. Element electrolytes. Drink it in the sauna. Refreshing flavors include grapefruit, citrus, watermelon, and chocolate salt. Formulated with the perfect balance of sodium, potassium, and magnesium to keep you hydrated and energized throughout the day.

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Do you work better under pressure or in a more relaxed situation? I feel I don't recognize that distinction. So I'm very obsessed with the process, so I don't feel pressure, but I'm not sure I would describe it as relaxed. I would say I'm just wrapped up, and that's the only mode I have of working. I don't get very nervous if there's some big talk or event or whatever. I really don't notice that. I'm oblivious in a very particular way, but not relaxed. I'm not tense, just like very focused. Where does your drive come from?

I think I was born with it. According to my mother, I've always been the same. You know, moms will tell you different tales about yourself, but I trust her on that one. And yet now that I have two grandkids, you'd see how early the personality is evident. So that's my basic theory of human beings that 60 to 70% of stuff people are born with. When did your musical taste broaden from the current

rock music to what you like now? My biggest interest at the margin would be what's misleadingly called world music and then classical music. And really a lot of that came from the Beatles. So I would go to the public library, bring home records, and of course I saw George's concert for Bangladesh, and I heard Indian classical music. And it made no sense to me, but I didn't give up on it. I thought, well, the Beatles like this, like they knew what the heck they were doing.

So it really took me, I think, 25 years to really figure out Indian classical music. And I just kept on trying, never gave up. Finally, it all clicked. I now think it's one of the highest achievements of humanity of all time, Indian classical music. And I don't even like Robbie Shanker anymore. I think it's like not actually very high quality

of the form. And then classical music, you know, the flip side of the yellow submarine LP, which George Martin, it's not that good, but I heard it just swell. I oughta get to know this better. And then in the house we had two records that I think my mother brought home from the supermarket.

It was Jekowski, Pathetic, Beethoven, Pastoral, Symphony, and then I heard Bach Brandenburg can share it on number two. I used to watch William Buckley's firing line, and I liked all that. So it's like, I guess I was 15 then. Well, I ought to just keep on going. And those are great introductions. The Buckley had a real impact on me, and partly I enjoyed it, but I also saw how much he appreciated it. Like he'd have on Rosalind Touarek, they'd talk about Bach. Most of it I didn't understand, but I understood enough to know they were smart people appreciating something. So it's like, oh, you've got to keep on going. But whereas Indian classical music took me 25 years,

that took me, I don't know, a month. Is that the case with everything in your life if someone that you're interested in references something will you always go back to the source? Yeah, I'll try and try again. I don't like it when people dismiss things. It's fine to disagree or there's things in music that maybe I don't listen to as much or don't understand. Like there's still a lot in country in Western, I feel I don't understand. Maybe I don't have the cultural codes or don't understand, like there's still a lot in country in Western, I feel I don't understand, maybe I don't have the cultural codes, or don't know enough, but I don't dismiss it. Even though if I listened more, maybe I never would love it like I love some other things.

Did jazz ever take a hold for you? Oh, absolutely. And you know, my grandfather whom I never knew, but he was a professional jazz drummer. And there was a jazz radio station from New York. I listened to it. I tried to learn jazz guitar. I studied like theory of jazz improvisation more than any other kind of music.

Loved all the jazz guitarists like Joe Pass, Barney Kessel, Herbalis, early on, went to see them play in New York, went to great lengths to see them play. Had a huge impact on me. And I still enjoy it a great deal. And especially jazz guitar, piano. I've just tried to see everyone I possibly can. I'll go to village Vanguard. It's the one concert venue in the world. I'll show up.

And I don't even have to look at who is listed. I'll just buy a ticket and I've never been disappointed. Typically, how much time per day do you spend on Twitter? appointed. Typically how much time per day do you spend on Twitter? It's probably too much. I don't know, two hours an hour and a half, but if I see something on Twitter and then I read the article which is not on Twitter, is that time on Twitter? Like on Twitter, it's not that long, but the stuff it leads me to an hour and a half to two hours. What are the different schools of economics? Economists pretend that schools of economics? Economists pretend that schools of thought have vanished. I think they're fooling themselves.

So typically there would be like Keynesian approach, which is often advocating a lot of government spending, monitorist approach, Milton Friedman, which is often advocating government predictability within certain rules, Austrian approach, which typically stresses the dynamic unpredictability and creativity of the market. I think you have to know all of them. You shouldn't dismiss any of them. You ask me about public choice approach of studies government, but Austrian approach has been the biggest influence on me.

How has the field changed throughout history? Early economics was a lot like philosophy. Adam Smith, he was a professor who taught literature. He gave lectures on literature, lectures on astronomy. He wrote a book, some blend of psychology and philosophy. No one thought that was weird. It was called Theory of Moral Sentiments. Economists have become more and more specialized,

more and more technical, doing a smaller number of things, doing them with greater technical expertise, but arguably losing sight of these larger pictures. In general, is that an issue across the board? In every science or humanities effort I know, I've seen the same trends, way more specialization, people do become adept at dealing with real world in some ways, but it's even then specialized ways like manipulating grant procedures to get money, not always like healthy ways, and just so tied up in their work, the hour requirements, forgetting like that 90-page intensive study done, or so extreme, people get cut off from other things. But like the quality of that 90-page paper, which was once a 20-page paper, say, 30 years ago, like the quality is higher, but we're making the person worse.

That doesn't seem right to me. How much corruption do you see in the system? In academia, it's more than most people think, but a lot more of it has been coming out lately. So there's one researcher, Dan Ariely. He's been accused of just fabricating research results. People have asked him where that data come from. He can't say where it's from. I haven't followed this closely, but if someone's accused, they can't say where it's from. Their co-authors can't say where it's from. I'll just say people have

crone increasingly suspicious, and I think there's a lot more of that than people realize. Or just people, they're not outright frauds, but they just push on the research methods enough to be right up to the point of not being dishonest, but right up to that point, and in a way, maybe that's worse. There's a lot of that. What are the ramifications of that? I mean, the sad thing is it may not matter that much because a lot of the outputs aren't consumed. The ramifications for me personally, as I started this blog 20 years ago called Marginal Revolution, where I try to showcase research that I think is good and explain why

or criticize why something is bad. And that's the most widely read, like social media or a blog source on economics. It has a big readership. And it's one of the things that keeps me going. And I try to shunt credit toward the people doing good things. That would, you know, that's been my response. But I try to mostly be positive. Help out the people who are good

and not spend too much time damning the people who are bad. Understood. Which modern convenience is do you use in which do you avoid? Car is very important to me. More so than for most people. I love satellite radio, the Beatles station, Internet of course. I'm starting to use chat GPT and enormous amount. And Claude too, I find this both extremely useful for learning about everything. Music included. But a lot of stuff I don't use.

Like I have a microwave, I don't use it. Most devices, I don't know how to operate them. You may have noticed time we spent together. I'll get confused by different things pretty easily. So again, it's like this focus in certain ways. Would have no idea if I'd had fixed my own car or something. I'd have changed a flat tire. But I find the internet extremely useful in WhatsApp.

What are labels that have been put on you that you don't see as accurate? Well, I think any label you ought to realize it might be partly accurate. And if you rebel against it, like you still ought not to dismiss the person labeling you. So people will call me libertarian. I think it's pretty accurate. Even though like no libertarian will call me a libertarian. Like they would call me a sell out. People will call me like eccentric or like selfish. I mean, I think you have to accept that all of it's partly accurate. Anything else you want to talk about?

Well, there's everything. I mean, Paul McCartney's solo career. I want more people to know that his second recording of Seamoon done on a CD single, which starts with all my trials, one of his best by gospel-inspired cuts, and then he redid Seamoon with much more rigor, and no one ever talks about this redone song, and more people ought to know, and your audience is probably the audience I want to tell about this.

So that's what I'll say. Great, so then maybe tomorrow we'll do a music focused where you'll DJ and we'll talk about a different music that you'll turn us on to stuff. That would be my pleasure. you