Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
tyler cohen an economist at george mason
university
and co-creator of an amazing economics
blog
called marginal revolution author of
many books
including the great stagnation average
is over
and his most recent big business a love
letter to an american anti-hero
he's truly a polymath in his work
including his love for food
which makes this amazing podcast called
conversations with tyler
really fun to listen to quick mention of
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as a side note given tyler's culinary
explorations
let me say that one of the things that
makes me sad
about my love hate relationship with
food is that
while i've found a simple diet playing
meat veggies
it makes me happy in day to day life i
sometimes wish i had the mental ability
to moderate consumption of food
so that i could truly enjoy meals that
go way outside of that diet
i've seen my mom for example enjoy a
single piece of chocolate
and yet if i were to eat one piece of
chocolate the odds are high
that i would end up eating the whole box
this is definitely something i would
like to fix
because some of the amazing artistry in
this world
happens in the kitchen and some of the
richest human experiences
happen over a unique meal i recently was
eating cheeseburgers with
joe rogan and john donahue late at night
in austin
talking about jiu-jitsu and life and i
was distinctly aware
of the magic of that experience magic
made possible
by the incredibly delicious
cheeseburgers this
is the lex friedman podcast and here is
my conversation with tyler
cohen would you say economics is more
art
or science or philosophy or even magic
what is it economics is interesting
because it's all of the above
to start with magic the notion that you
can make some change and simply
everyone's better off
that is a kind of modern magic that has
replaced old-style magic
it's an art in the sense that the models
are not very exact
it's a science in the sense that
occasionally propositions are falsified
are a few basic things we know yeah and
however trivial they may sound if you
don't know them
you're out of luck so all of the above
but from my outsiders perspective
economics
is sometimes able to formulate very
simple almost like e equals c squared
general models of how our human society
will function
when you do a certain thing but
it seems impossible or almost way too
optimistic to think
that a single formula or just a set of
simple principles can describe
the behavior of billions of human beings
well
with all the complexity that we have
involved so do you have a sense there's
a hope for economics to
to uh to have those kinds of physics
level descriptions and models of the
world or is it just our desperate
attempts as humans to make sense of it
even though it's
more desperate than uh than uh
rigorous and serious and actually
predictable like a like a
physics type science i don't think
economics will ever be very predictive
it's most useful for helping you ask
better questions
you look at something like game theory
well game theory never predicted
usa and ussr would have a war would not
have a war
but trying to think through the logic of
strategic conflict if you know game
theory
it's just a much more interesting
discussion are you surprised
that we speaking of the soviet union and
the united states
and speaking of game theory are you
surprised that we haven't destroyed
ourselves with nuclear weapons yet like
that
simple formulation of mutually assured
destruction
that's a good example of an explanation
that perhaps
allows us to ask better questions but it
seems to have
actually described the reality of why we
haven't destroyed ourselves with these
ultra powerful weapons are you surprised
do you think the game of theoretic
explanation is is at all accurate there
i think we will destroy each other with
those weapons
eventually eventually look it's a very
low probability event
so i'm not surprised it hasn't happened
yet i'm a little surprised it came as
close as it did
you know your general thinking realizing
it might have just been a flock of birds
or it wasn't a first strike attack from
the usa
we got very lucky on that one but if you
just keep on running the clock on a low
probability event
it will happen and it may not be usa and
china usa and russia whatever
you know it could be the saudis and
turkey and it might not be nuclear
weapons it might be some other
destruction bio weapons
but it simply will happen is my view and
i've
argued at best we have seven or eight
hundred years and that's being generous
at worst how how long we got well maybe
it's asking for
arrival process right okay so tiny
probability
could come any time probably not in your
lifetime
but uh the chance presumably increases
the cheaper
weapons of mass destruction are so the
poisson process
description doesn't take in
consideration the game theoretic aspect
so another way to consider is uh
repeated games
iterative games so is there something
about
us our human nature that allows us to
fight against
probability reduce like the closer we
get to trouble
the more we're able to figure out how to
avoid trouble the same thing is
for when you take exams or you go you
know and take classes
the closer or paper deadlines the closer
you get to a deadline
the better you start to perform you get
your together and actually get
stuff done
i'm really not so negative on human
nature and as an economist i very much
see the gains from cooperation
yeah but if you just ask are there
outliers in history like was there a
hitler
for instance obviously and again you let
the clock tick
another hitler with nuclear weapons
doesn't per se care about
his own destruction it will happen so
your sense is fundamentally people are
good
but equilibrium is what we would call it
trembling hand equilibrium that the
basic logic
is for cooperation which is mostly what
we've seen
even between enemies but every now and
then someone does
something crazy and you don't know how
to react to it and you can't always beat
hitler sometimes hitler drags you down
to push back is it possible that the
crazier
the person the less likely they are
and in a way where we're safe
meaning like this is the kind of
proposition
i've had i had the discussion with my
dad as a physicist about this
where he thinks that uh
like if you have a graph like evil
people
can't also be geniuses so his this is
his defense why
evil people will not get control of
nuclear weapons because to be truly evil
but evil meaning sort of you can argue
that
not even the evil of hitler were talking
about because hitler had a kind of view
of germany and all those kinds of
there's like
i he probably deluded himself and the
people around him to think that he's
actually doing good for the world
similar with stalin and so on by evil i
mean more like almost like terrorists
where they
want to destroy themselves and of the
world
like those people will never be able to
be
actually skilled enough to do to deliver
that kind of
mass scale destruction so the hope is
that it's very unlikely
that the kind of evil that would lead to
extinctions of humans or
mass destruction is so unlikely
that we're able to last way longer than
seven hundred and eight hundred years
is that three it's very unlikely in that
sense i accept the argument
but that's why you need to let the clock
dick it's also the best argument for
bureaucracy
to negotiate a bureaucracy it actually
selects against pure evil
because you need to build alliances so
bureaucracy in that regard is great
right it keeps out
the worst apples but look put it this
way could you imagine 35 years from now
the osama bin laden of the future has
nukes or very bad bio weapons
it seems to me you can yeah and osama
was pretty evil
and actually even he failed right but
nonetheless
that's what the seven or eight hundred
years is there for and there might be
destructive technologies that don't have
such a high
cost of production or such a high
learning curve
like cyber attacks or artificial
intelligence all those kinds of things
so yeah i mean let me ask you a question
let's say you could as an act of will
by spending a million dollars obliterate
any city on earth
and everyone in it dies and you'll get
caught
and you'll be sentenced to death but you
can make it happen just by willing it
how many months does it take before that
happens
so the obvious answer is like very soon
this is probably a good answer for that
because you can
consider how many millionaires there are
how many you could look at that right
right
i have a sense that there's just people
that
have a million dollars
i mean there's a certain amount but have
a million dollars
have other interests that will outweigh
the uh the interest of destroying the
entire city
like there's a particular you know like
the
i mean maybe that's a hope it's why we
should be nice to the wealthy too right
yeah all that trash talking is bill
gates we should stop that because uh
that doesn't inspire the other future
bill gates is to be nice to the world
that's true but your sense is the
cheaper it gets to destroy the world
the more likely it becomes now when i
say destroy the world there's a trick in
there i don't think literally every
human will die
but it would set back civilization by an
extraordinary degree it's then just
hard to predict what comes next yeah but
a catastrophe where everyone dies
that probably has to be something more
like an asteroid or a supernova
and those are purely exogenous for the
time being at least
so i immigrated to this country i'm i
was born in the
the soviet union in russia and uh
which one which is an important question
well which you were born in the soviet
union right
yes i was born in the soviet union the
rest is details but i
grew up in moscow russia yeah but i came
to this
country and this country even back there
but
it's always symbolized to me a place of
opportunity
where ev everybody could build like uh
build the most incredible things
especially in the engineering side of
things
just invent and build and scale
and have a huge impact on the world and
that's been to me
the that's my version of the american
ideal the american dream
uh do you think the american dream
is still there uh do you think
what do you think of that notion in
itself like from an economics
perspective from a human perspective
is it still alive and how do you think
about it
the american dream the american dream is
mostly still there
if you look at which groups are the
highest earners
it is individuals from india and
individuals from iran
which is a fairly new development great
for them
not necessarily easy both you could call
persons of color
may have faced discrimination also on
the grounds of religion
uh yet they've done it that's amazing it
says great things about america
now if you look at native born americans
the story's trickier
people think energizer intergenerational
mobility has declined a lot
recently but it has not for native born
americans
for about i think 40 years it's been
fairly constant
which is sort of good but compared to
much earlier times
it was much higher in the past i'm not
sure we can replicate that because look
go to the beginning of the 20th century
very few americans finish high school
or even have much wealth there's not
much credentialism there aren't that
many credentials
so there's more upward mobility across
the generations than today
and it's a good thing that we had it i'm
not sure we should blame the modern
world
for not being able to reproduce that
but look the general issue of who gets
into harvard or cornell
is there an injustice should we fix that
is there too little opportunity
for the bottom say half of americans
absolutely
it's a disgrace how this country has
evolved in that way
and in that sense the american dream is
clearly ailing
but it has had problems from the
beginning for blacks for women for many
other groups
i mean isn't that the whole challenge of
opportunity and freedom
is that it's hard and the difficulty of
how hard it is to move up in society
is unequal often and that's the
injustice of society but
the the whole point of that freedom is
that over time it becomes better and
better
you start to fix like uh fix
the the leaks the issues and it gives
that's he keeps progressing in that kind
of way
but ultimately there's always the
opportunity even if it's harder
there's the opportunity to create
something truly special to move up
to be to be president to be
a leader in whatever the industry that
you're passionate about to have it we
each have podcasts right
in english the value of joining that
american english
language network is much higher today
than it was 30 years ago mostly because
of the internet
so that makes immigration returns
themselves skewed
so going to the u.s canada or the uk
i think has become much more valuable in
relative terms than say going to france
which is still a pretty well-off very
nice country
if you had gone to france your chance of
having a globally known podcast
would be much smaller yeah this this is
the interesting thing uh
about how much intellectual influence
the united states has i don't know if
it's uh connected to what we're
discussing here the the freedom and
opportunity of the american dream
or like does it make any sense to you
that we have so
much impact on the rest of the world in
terms of
uh ideas you know is it just simply
because the
english is the primary language of the
world or is there something fundamental
to the united states that
drives the development of ideas it's
almost like
what's cool what's entertaining
what's uh you know like meme
culture the internet culture uh
the philosophers the intellectuals the
podcasts the
movies music all that stuff driving
culture
there's something above and beyond
language in the united states
it's a sense of entertainment really
mattering how to connect with your
audience
being direct and getting to the point uh
how humor is integrated
even with science yeah that is pretty
strongly represented here much more say
than on the european continent
britain has its own version of this
which it does very well
and not surprisingly they're hugely
influential in music comedy the
most of the other areas you mentioned
canada yes but their best talent tends
to come here but
you could say it's like a broader north
american thing and give them their fair
share of credit
what about science you you know there's
a sense
uh higher education is really strong
research is really strong in the united
states but it just feels like
culturally speaking when we zoom out
you know scientists aren't very cool
here
like uh most people wouldn't be able to
name basically a single scientist
maybe they would say like they would say
what like einstein and neil degrasse
tyson maybe
and neil degrasse tyson isn't exactly a
scientist he's a science communicator
so like there's not uh you know the same
kind of admiration
of uh science and innovators as there is
of like
athletes or actors actresses
musicians well you can become a
celebrity scientist
if you want to may or may not be best
for science and we have spock from star
trek who is still a
big deal but look at it this way which
country is most comfortable with
inegalitarian rewards
yeah for scientists whether it's fame or
money and i still think it's here some
of that's just the tax rate
some of it is a lot of america is set up
for rich people
to live really well and again that's
going to attract a lot of top talent
and you ask like the two best vaccines i
know the fights are vaccine is
sort of from germany sort of from turkey
but it's nonetheless
being distributed through the united
states marderana
an armenian ethnic armenian immigrant
through lebanon first to canada then
down here to boston cambridge area
those are incredible vaccines and u.s
nailed it
yeah well that's that's more almost like
the
i don't know what you would call it
engineering the sort of
scaling that's what us is really good as
not just inventing of ideas but
taking an idea and actually building the
thing and scaling it and
being able to distribute it at scale i
think some people would attributed that
to the
the the general award of capitalism
uh i don't know if you would uh what
what in your views
are the pros and cons of capitalism
as it's implemented in america i don't
know if you would say capitalism is
really exist in america
but to the extent that it does people
use the word capitalism in in so many
different ways
what is capitalism the literal meaning
is private ownership of capital goods
which i favor in most areas but no i
don't think the private sector should
own our f-16s or military assets
government-owned water utilities seem to
work as well as privately owned water
utilities
but with all those qualifications put to
the side
business for the most part innovates
better than government it is oriented
toward consumer services
the biggest businesses tend to pay the
highest wages
business is great at getting things done
usa
is fundamentally a nation of business
and that makes us a nation of
opportunity
so i am indeed mostly a fan subject to
numerous caveats
what's uh what's the con what's what are
some negative
downsides of capitalism in your view
or some things that we should be
concerned about maybe for long-term
impacts of capitalism again capitalism
takes a different form in each country i
would say in the united states
our weird blend of whatever you want to
call it
has had an enduring racial problem from
the beginning
has been a force of taking away land
from native americans and oppressing
them
pretty much from the beginning um
it has done very well by immigrants for
the most part
uh we revel in creationitarian creative
destruction
more so we don't just prop up national
champions forever
and there's a precariousness to life for
some people here that is less so
say in germany or the netherlands we
have weaker communities in some regards
than say northwestern europe
often would that has pluses and minuses
i think it makes us more creative
it's a better country in which to be a
weirdo than say germany or denmark
but there is truly whether from the
government
or from your private community there is
less social security
in some fundamental sense on the point
of weirdo uh
what that's kind of a beautiful little
statement
what uh what is that i mean that that
seems to be
uh you know you could think of a guy
like elon musk and
say that he's a weirdo is is that the
sense in which you're using the weirdo
like outside of the norm
like breaking conventions absolutely
yeah and here that is
either acceptable or even admired or to
be a loner
and since so many people are outsiders
and that we're all immigrants is
selecting for people who left something
behind we're willing to leave behind
their families
we're willing to undergo a certain
brutality of switch
in their lives makes us a nation of
weirdos
and weirdos are creative yeah and
denmark
is not a nation of weirdos it's a
wonderful place you know great for them
ideally you want part of the world to be
fully weirdos and innovating
and the other part of the world to be a
little kind of
chicken risk-averse and enjoy the
benefits of the innovation
and to give people these smooth lives
and six weeks off
and free ride and everyone's like oh
american way versus european way but
basically they're compliments
yeah that's fascinating i i used to have
this conversation with my uh like
parents when i was growing up and just
others from the immigrant
uh kind of flow and they use this term
especially in russian is uh
you know to criticize something i was
doing that would
suggest you know normal people don't do
this
and i used to be really offended by that
uh
but you know as i got older uh
i realized that that's a kind of
compliment
because in in the same kind of uh i
would say
way that you're you're saying that is
the american ideal
because if you want to do anything
special or interesting you don't want to
be doing
in one particular avenue what normal
people
do because uh because that won't be
interesting so the russians i think fit
in very well here
because the ones who come are weirdos
and there's a very different russian
weirdo tradition
like alyosha right in brothers carter or
perilman the mathematician they're
weirdos
and they have their own different kind
of status in soviet union russia
wherever
and when russians come to america they
stay pretty russian but it seems to me a
week later they've
somehow adjusted yeah and the ways in
which they might want to be like
grumpier
than americans not smile think that
people who smile are idiots
yeah like they can do that no one takes
that away from them yeah
yeah what are you uh on a tiny tangent
uh
i'd love to hear if you have thoughts
about grisha pearlman
uh turning down the fields medal is that
something you admire
does that make sense to you that
somebody you know with the structure of
nobel prizes of these huge awards of the
reputations the hierarchy of
everyone saying applauding how special
you are and here's a person
who was doing one of the greatest
accomplishments in the history of
mathematics it doesn't want
stupid prize and doesn't want
recognition doesn't want to do
interviews it doesn't want to be famous
what do you mean
what do you make of that it's great look
prizes are corrupting
after scientists win nobel prizes they
tend to become less productive
now statistically it's hard to sort out
the different effects there's aggression
toward the mean
does the prize make you too busy it's a
little tricky but there's not enough
nobel prizes either
to to get gathering of data right but
it's
i've known a lot of nobel prize winners
and it is my sense they become less
productive
they repeat more of their older messages
which may be highly socially valuable
but if someone wants to turn their back
on that and keep on working which i
assume is what he's doing that's awesome
yeah i mean we should respect that
it's like he wins a bigger prize right
our extreme respect
yeah uh well
uh grecia if you're listening i need to
talk to you soon
okay i've been uh i've been trying and
trying to get a hold of him
okay uh back to capitalism i got to ask
you
just competition in general in this
world of weirdos
is competition good for the world
you know this kind of uh seems to be one
of the fundamental
engines of capitalism right do you see
as ultimately constructive or
destructive for the world
what really matters is how good your
legal framework is so competition within
nature
you know for food leads to bloody
conflict all the time the animal world
is
quite unpleasant to say the least if you
have
something like the rule of law and
clearly defined property rights which
are
within reason justly allocated
competition probably is going to work
very well but it's not an
unalloyed good thing at all it can be
highly destructive military competition
right
which actually is itself sometimes good
but it's not good per se
what what what aspects of life do you
think we should protect from
competition so is there some you said
like the rule of law is there some
things we should uh
keep away from competition well the
fight for territory most of all
right so violence anything that involves
like actual physical violence
right and it's not that i think the
current borders are just i mean go talk
to
hungarians romanians they'll you know
serbians bosnians they'll talk your ear
off
and some of them are probably right but
at the end of the day we have
some kind of international order and i
would rather we more or less stick with
it
if catalonians want to leave they keep
up with it you know let them go
but what about space of like health care
this is where you get into a tension of
like between capitalism and
kind of uh morse i don't want to use
socialism but those kinds of policies
they're less
uh free market i think in this country
healthcare should be much more
competitive
so you go to hospitals doctors they
don't treat you like a customer uh they
treat you like an idiot or like a child
or
someone with third party payment and
it's a pretty humiliating experience
often
yeah do you think a free market in
general
is possible like a pure free market
and is that a good goal to to uh strive
for
i don't think the term pure free
market's well defined because you need a
legal order
the legal order has to make decisions
unlike what is intellectual property
more important than ever there's no
benchmark that like represents the
pure free market way of doing things
what will penalties be
how much do we put into law enforcement
no simple answers but just saying free
market
doesn't pin down what you're going to do
on those all important questions
so free market is a is an economics i
guess idea so
there's no it's it's not possible for
free marketers generate the rules
they're like
emergent like self-governing it
generates a lot of them right through
private norms through trade associations
international trade is mostly done uh
privately and by norms so it's certainly
possible
but at the end of the day i think you
need governments to draw very clear
lines to prevent it from turning into
mafia run systems you know i've been
hanging out
with the co with other group of weirdos
uh lately michael malus
who's uh who espouses to be an anarchist
anarchism which is like i i think
intellectually just a fascinating set of
ideas
uh where the you know taking free market
to the full extreme of
basically saying there should be no no
government what is it
uh oversight i guess and then everything
should be
fully like all the agreements all the
collectives you form should be uh
voluntary not based on the geographic
land you were born on and so on
do you think that's just the giant mess
like do you think it's possible for an
anarchist society to work
where it's um you know this in addition
in a fully distributed way people agree
with each other not just
on financial transactions but you know
on
um on their personal security
on sort of military type of stuff uh on
healthcare
on education all those kinds of things
and where does it break down
well i wouldn't press a button to say
get rid of our current constitution
which i view is pretty good
and quite wise but i think the deeper
point is that
all societies are in some regards
anarchistic
yes and we should take the anarchists
seriously so globally there's a kind of
anarchy
across borders even within federalistic
systems
they're typically complex there's not a
clear transitivity
necessarily of who has the final say
over what
uh just the state visa via its people
there's not
per se a final arbitrator in that regard
so you want a good anarchy rather than a
bad anarchy
you want to squish your anarchy into the
right corners and i don't think there's
a theoretical
answer how to do it but you start with a
country like is it working
well enough now this country you'd say
mostly
you'd certainly want to make a lot of
improvements and that's why i don't want
to press that get rid of the
constitution button
but to just dump on the anarchists is to
miss the point always try to learn
from any opinion you know and what in it
is true
i i'm just like uh marveling at the at
the poetry of
saying that we should squish our anarchy
into the right corners
love it okay uh i gotta ask i've been
uh talking with uh uh since we're doing
a whirlwind
introduction to all of economics uh i've
been talking to a few objectivists
recently
and just you know uh inran comes up as a
as a person as a philosopher throughout
many conversations a lot of people
really despise her
a lot of people really love her it's
always weird to me
when uh somebody arouses a philosophy or
a human being arouses that much emotion
in either direction
does she make do you understand first of
all that level of emotion
and what are your thoughts about ayn
rand and her philosophy objectivism is
it useful
at all to think about this kind of
formulation of
rational self interest if i could put in
those words
or i guess more negatively
the the the selfishness where she would
put i guess the virtue of selfishness
ein rand was a big influence on me
growing up the book that really mattered
for me was capitalism the unknown ideal
the notion that wealth creates
opportunity and good lives
and wealth is something we ought to
valorize and give very high status
it's one of our key ideas i think it's
completely correct
i think she has the most profound and
articulate statement of that idea
that said as a philosopher i disagree
with her
on most things and i did even like as a
boy when i was reading her
i read plato before i ran and in a
socratic dialogue there's all these
different points of view being thrown
around
yeah and who whomever it is you agree
with you understand the wisdom is in
the coming together of the different
points of view yeah and she doesn't have
that so
altruism can be wonderful in my view
humans are not actually that rational
self-interest is often poorly defined to
pound the table and say
existence exists i wouldn't say i
disagree
but i'm not sure that it's a very
meaningful statement
i think the secret to iran is that she
was russian i'd love to have her on my
podcast if she was still alive
i'd only ask her about russia which she
mostly
never talked about after writing we the
living and she
is much more russian than she seems at
first even like purging people
from the objectivist circles it's like
how russians especially
female russians so often purge their
friends it's weird
all the parallels so you're saying so
yes
so i um assuming she's still not around
uh but if she is and she comes into your
podcast see
can you dig into that a little bit do
you mean like the pers her personal
uh demons around the
social and economic russia of the time
when she escaped the promise she
suffered there yeah what she really
likes in the music and literature and
why she's looking literature
and getting deeply into that her view of
relations between the sexes and russia
how it differs from america why she
still
carries through the old russian vision
in her fiction this extreme
sexual dimorphism but with also very
strong women
to me as a uniquely at least eastern
european
uh vision mostly russian i would say
and that's in her that's her actual real
philosophy not this
table bounding existence exists and
that's not talked about enough
he's a russian philosopher yeah like she
or soviet whatever you want to call it
and if she wasn't so certain she could
have been
a dostoevsky where it's not that that
certainty is almost the thing that uh
brings of the adoration of uh millions
but also the hatred of millions
you became a cult figure in a somewhat
russian-like manner
yeah yeah it is it is what it is uh but
i love the idea that
i again you're just dropping bombs that
are poetic
that the wisdom is in the coming
together of ideas
it's kind of interesting to think that
no one human
possesses wisdom no one idea
is the wisdom that the coming together
is the wisdom
like in my view boswell's life of
johnson 18th century british biography
it's in essence a co-authored work
boswell and johnson it's one of the
greatest philosophy books ever
though it is commonly regarded as a
biography john stuart mill
who in a sense was co-authoring with
harriet taylor
a better philosopher than his realized
though he's rated very very highly
plato socrates a lot of the greatest
works
are in a kind of dialogue form curtis
faust
would be another example it's very much
a dialogue
and yes it's drama but it's also
philosophy shakespeare
maybe the wisest thinker of them all
in your book big business speaking of
iran
big business a love letter to an
american anti-hero
you make the case for uh the benefit
that large businesses bring to society
can you explain if you look at say the
pandemic which has been a catastrophic
event right for for many reasons
but who is it that saved us so amazon
has done remarkably well
they upped their delivery game more or
less overnight with very few hitches
i've ordered hundreds of amazon packages
direct delivery
food whether it's doordash or ubereats
or using you know whole foods through
amazon shipping
again it's gone remarkably well
switching over our entire
higher educational system basically
within two weeks to zoom
zoom did it i mean i've had a zoom
outage
but their performance rate has been
remarkably high
so if you just look at resources
competence incentives
who's been the star performers the nba
even just canceling the season as early
as they did
sending a message like hey people this
is real
and then pulling off the bubble with not
a single
found case of covid and having all the
testing set up in advance
big business has done very well lately
and
throughout the broader course of
american history in my view has mostly
been a hero
can we engage in a kind of therapy
session uh in
in i i'm often troubled by the
negativity towards
big business and uh i wonder if you
could help
figure out how we remove that or maybe
first psychoanalyze it and then how we
remove it it
it it feels like you know once we've
gotten
wi-fi on flights
on airplane flights uh
people started complaining about how
shitty the connection is right
yeah they take it for granted
immediately yeah and then start
complaining about little details
uh another example that's more that's
closer to like
especially as a as aspiring
entrepreneurs closer to the things i'm
thinking about
is jack dorsey with twitter you know
to me twitter has enabled an incredible
platform of communication and yet the
biggest thing that people talk about
is not how incredible this platform is
uh they essentially use the platform to
complain about the censorship of a few
individuals
as opposed to how amazing it is now you
should also you should talk about
how shitty the wi-fi is and how
censorship or the removal donald trump
from the platform is a bad thing but
it feels like we don't talk about the
positive impacts at scale
of these technologies is there can you
explain why and is there a way to fix it
i don't know if we can fix it i think we
are beings of high neuroticism
for the most part yeah as a personality
trait not everyone
but most people and as a compliment to
that
if someone says 10 nice things about you
and one insult
you're more bothered by the insult than
you're pleased by the nice things
especially if the insult is somewhat
true yeah so you have these
media these vehicles twitter is one you
mentioned
there's all kind of messages going back
and forth and you're really bugged
by the messages you don't like most
people are neurotic to begin with
it's not only taken out on big business
to be clear so
congress catches a lot of grief and yeah
some of it they deserve yes
religion is not attacked the same way
but religiosity is declining
if you poll people the military still
pulls
quite well but people are very
disillusioned with many things and the
martin guri thesis
that because of the internet you just
see more of things and the more you see
of something whether it's good bad or in
between
the more you will find to complain about
i suspect is the fundamental mechanism
here
i mean look at clubhouse right it's to
me it's a great service may or may not
be like my thing
but gives people this opportunity no one
makes you go on it
and all these media articles like oh is
clubhouse gonna wreck things you know
are they gonna break things new york
times is complaining of course it's
their competitor as well
yeah i'm like give these people a chance
like talk it up
you may or may not like it like let's
praise the people who are
getting something done very ein randy in
point
as an economic thinker as a writer as a
podcaster
what do you think about clubhouse as
what do you think about
okay let let me uh just throw my feeling
about it i
used to use discord which is another
service where people use voice so the
only thing you do is
just hear each other there's no face you
just see a little icon
that's the essential element
of uh clubhouse and there's an intimacy
to voice only communication that's hard
that didn't make sense to me but it was
just what it is
which feels like something that won't
last for some reason maybe it's the
cynical view but what's your sense uh
what is it about this mat the intimacy
of what's happening right now with
clubhouse
i've greatly enjoyed what i've done but
i'm not sure it's for me in the long run
for two reasons
first if you compare it to doing a
podcast
podcasting has greater reach than
clubhouse so i would rather put time
into my podcast
but then also my like core
asset so to speak is i'm a very fast
reader
so audio per se is not necessarily to my
advantage i don't speak or listen
faster than other people in fact i'm a
slower listener because i like 1.0
not 1.5 x so i should spend less time on
audio and more time reading and writing
yeah it's interesting because you like
you mention podcasts and audio books
i you know the the
podcasts are recorded and so i can skip
things
like i can skip commercials uh or i can
skip parts where it's like ugh this part
is boring
with live conversations especially when
there's a magic to the fact when you
have a lot of people participating in
that conversation
but you know some people are like ugh
this topic
they're going into this thing and you
can't skip it or you can't fast forward
you can't go one
1.5 x or 2x you can't speed it up
nevertheless there's a tension between
that so that's the productivity aspect
with the actual magic of live
communication where anything can happen
where
elon musk can ask the ceo of robin hood
vlad
about like hey somebody like holding a
gun to your head there's something shady
going on
the magic of that that's also my
criticism of like
there's been a recent conversation with
bill gates that uh he won a platform
uh and had a basic a regular interview
on the platform
without allowing the possibility of the
magic of the chaos like
uh so i'm not i'm not exactly sure
it's probably not the right platform for
you and for many other people who are
exceptionally productive in other places
but there's still nevertheless a magic
to the chaos that can be created with a
live conversation
that gives me pause maybe what it's
perfect for is the tribute
so they had an episode recently that i
didn't hear but i heard it was wonderful
it was anecdotes about steve jobs that
you can't do one-to-one right and you
don't want control
you want different people appearing and
stepping up and saying they're bit
yeah and clubhouse is 110 perfect for
that
the tribute i love that that should be
but there's also the possibility
i think uh there was a time when
somebody arranged a conversation with
steve jobs and bill gates on stage right
i remember that happened a long time ago
and you know it was very formal
you know it could have probably gone
better but it was still magical
to have these people that obviously like
had a bunch of tension throughout their
history
there's it's so frictionless to have two
major figures in world history just jump
on
a clubhouse stage putin and elon musk
and then that's exactly it so there's a
language barrier there
there's also the problem that in
particular
it's like like biden would have a
similar problem it's like they're just
not
into new technology so it's very hard to
catch the kremlin up to
first of all twitter right uh but to
catch them up to clubhouse you have to
have
the elon musk has a sense of the
internet the humor the memes and all
that kind of stuff
that you have to have in order to to
like use a new app
and figure out like the timing the beat
what is this thing about
you know so that that's the challenge
there but that's exactly it that that
magic of have two big personalities
just show up and i i i wonder if it's
just a temporary thing that we're going
through with the pandemic where people
are just lonely and they're seeking for
that
human connection that we usually guess
get elsewhere through our work
but they'll stay lonely in my opinion
you think so i do
so it is a pandemic thing but i think it
will persist
and the idea of wanting to be connected
to more of the world clubhouse will
still offer that
and all the mental health issues out
there a lot of people have broken ties
and they will still be lonely
post-vaccines
yeah i um from an artificial
intelligence perspective
i have a sense that there is
like a deep loneliness in the world that
all of us are really lonely like we
don't even acknowledge it even people in
happy relationships
it feels like there's like an iceberg of
loneliness in all of us
like seeking to be understood like
deeply understood
understanding us like having somebody
with whom
you can have a deep interaction enough
to where you can
they can help you to understand yourself
and they
also understand you like i have a sense
that artificial intelligence systems can
provide that as well but humans i think
crave that from other humans
in in ways that we perhaps don't
acknowledge and i i have a hope that
technology will enable that more and
more like clubhouse
is an example that allows that are
touring bots going to out-compete
clubhouse
like why not pro sort of program your
own session you'll just talk into your
device and say here's the kind of
conversation i want
and it will create the characters for
you and it may not be as good as elon
and vladimir putin
but it will be better than ordinary club
has yeah and one of the things
that's missing it's not just
conversation it's
it's memory so long-term memory is what
current ai systems don't have
is sharing an experience together forget
the words
it's like sharing the highs and the lows
of life
together and the systems around us
remembering that
remembering we've been through that like
that's the thing that creates really
close relationships
is going through some like go
struggle
if you survive together there's
something really difficult
that bonds you with other humans and
this is related to immigration in the
american dream
in what way people who have come to this
country however
weird and different they may be they are
their ancestors at some point
probably have shared this thing
right us is not going to split up it may
get more screwed up as a country
but texas and california are not going
to break off yeah i mean they're big
enough where they could do it but it's
just never going to happen
we've been through too much together
yeah
ah that's a hopeful message do you think
uh you know some people have talked to
eric weinstein you've talked to eric
weinstein
uh he has a sense that growth
uh you know like the the the entirety of
the american system is based
on the assumption that we're going to
grow forever the economy is going to
grow forever
do you think uh uh economic growth will
continue indefinitely
or will we stagnate i've long been in
agreement with eric peter thiel
robert gordon and others that growth has
slowed down
i argued that in my book the great
stagnation appropriately titled
but the last two years i've become much
more optimistic i've seen a lot of
breakthroughs
in green energy and battery technology
mrna vaccines and medicine
is a big deal already it will repair our
gdp and save
millions of lives around the world uh
there's an
anti-malaria vaccine that's now in stage
3 trial it probably works
crispr to defeat sickle cell anemia
just space area after area after area
there's suddenly the surge of
breakthroughs
i would say many of them rooted in
superior computation
and ultimately moore's law and access to
those computational abilities
so i'm much more optimistic than say the
last time i spoke to eric
i don't know he he moves all the time in
his views i don't know where he's at now
he's not he hasn't gained that's really
interesting
so your little drop of optimism comes
from
like there might be a fundamental shift
in the kind of things that computation
has unlocked for us in terms of like it
could be a well spring of innovation
that can
that enables growth for a long time to
come like eric has not
quite connected to the computation
aspect yet
to where it could be a wellspring of
innovation but you're very close to it
in your own work
i don't have to tell you that the work
you're doing would not have been
possible
not very long ago but the question is
how much does that work enable
continue growth for decades to come for
all their problems
some version of driverless vehicles will
be a thing i'm not sure when you know
much better than i do
maybe only partially but that too will
be a big deal
well one of the open questions that sort
of the peter thiel school
area of ideas is how much can be
converted to technology
how much how many parts of our lives can
technology integrate and then innovate
like can it replace uh healthcare okay
you know can a replace the legal system
can replace government
not replace but like you know uh
make it digital and thereby enable
computation to
improve it right that's the open
question because
many aspects of our lives are still not
really that
digitized there was a new york times
symposium in april which is not long ago
and they asked
the so-called experts when are we going
to get vaccines
and the most optimistic answer was in
four years
yeah and obviously we beat that by a
long mile
so i think people still haven't woken up
you mentioned my tiny drop of optimism
but it's a big drop
of optimism is it a waterfall yet i mean
is it just well here's my pessimism
whenever there are major new
technologies they also tend to be used
for violence directly or indirectly
radio hitler not that he hit people over
the head with radios but
it enabled the rise of various dictators
so the new technologies now whatever
exactly they may be
they're going to cause a lot of trouble
yeah and that's my pessimism not that i
think they're all going to slow to a
trickle
when was the stagnation book 2011
yes it was the first of these stagnation
books in fact
it's very interesting uh but even then i
said this is temporary
and i was predicting it would be gone in
about 20 years time
i'm not sure that's exactly the right
prediction like 2030 but
i think we're actually going to beat
that so you think
the united states might still be on top
of the world for the rest of the century
in terms of its economic economic growth
impact on the world scientific
innovation all those kinds of things
that's too long to predict but i'm
bullish on america in general
got it um speaking of being bullish on
america
the opposite of that is uh
you know we talked about capitalism talk
about iran
and her russian roots what do you think
about communism why doesn't it
what
is it the implementation is there
anything about its ideas that you find
compelling
or is it just a fundamentally flawed
system well communism is like capitalism
the words mean
many things to different people yes you
could argue my life as a tenured
professor comes closer to communism
anything that the human race has seen
and i would argue it works pretty well
yeah but look if you mean the soviet
union
it devolved pretty quickly to a kind of
decentralized set of incentives that
were destructive
rather than value maximizing it wasn't
even central planning
much less communism so paul craig
roberts and paulani
were correct in their descriptions of
the soviet system
think of it as weird mixes of barter and
malfunctioning incentives
and being very good at a whole bunch of
things but in terms of progress
innovation and consumer goods
it really being quite a failure
and now i wouldn't call that communism
but that's what i think of the system
the soviets had and it required an
ever increasing pile of lies that both
alienated people but created an elite
that by the end of the thing
no longer believed in the system itself
or even thought they were doing better
by being crooks
then by just say moving to switzerland
and being an upper middle class
individual like you would have a
higher standard of living by gorbachev's
time not gorbachev but if you're number
30 in the hierarchy
you're better off as a middle-class
person in switzerland and that
of course did not prove sustainable and
so it's uh what is it a momentum a
bureaucracy or something like that it
just builds up or you lose control of
the
the original vision and that naturally
happens it's just people
and you can't use normal profit and loss
and price incentives so you get all
prices
or most prices set too low right
shortages everywhere
people trade favors you have this
culture of bartered bribes
sexual favors or you know family friends
and
you get more and more of that and you
over time lose more and more of the
information
and the prices and quantities and
practices and norms you had
and that sort of slowly decays and then
by the end no one is believing in it
that would be my take but again you're
the expert here
the the russian scholar
well perhaps no more an expert than iron
rand
uh it's more personal than it is
scholarly
uh or historic so stalin held power for
30 years
uh vladimir putin has held power for
21 years where you could argue he took a
little break
uh but not much he was still holding
power i think
and it's still possible now with the new
uh
uh constitution that he could hold power
from longer than stalin 30
longer than 30 years what do you think
about the man
the state of affairs in russia
in general the system they have there
is there something interesting to you as
an economist as a human being
about russia everything is interesting i
mean he would be
part of my take as you know the russian
economy
starting what 1999 2000 has really quite
a few years
of super excellent growth and putin is
still
riding on that it more or less coincides
with his
rise as the truly focal figure on the
scene uh since then pretty recently
they've had a bunch of years of negative
four to five percent growth in a row
which is
terrible the economy is way too
dependent on fossil fuels
but the