back to indexTyler Cowen: Economic Growth & the Fight Against Conformity & Mediocrity | Lex Fridman Podcast #174
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The following is a conversation with Tyler Cohen,
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an economist at George Mason University
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and co creator of an amazing economics blog
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called Marginal Revolution, author of many books,
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including The Great Stagnation, Average Is Over
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and his most recent Big Business,
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A Love Letter to an American Antihero.
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He's truly a polymath in his work,
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including his love for food,
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which makes this amazing podcast
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called Conversations with Tyler really fun to listen to.
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Quick mention of our sponsors,
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Linode, ExpressVPN, Simplisafe and Public Goods.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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As a side note, given Tyler's culinary explorations,
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let me say that one of the things that makes me sad
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about my love hate relationship with food
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is that while I've found a simple diet,
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plain meat, veggies, that makes me happy in day to day life,
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I sometimes wish I had the mental ability
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to moderate consumption of food
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so that I could truly enjoy meals
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that go way outside of that diet.
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I've seen my mom, for example,
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enjoy a single piece of chocolate
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and yet if I were to eat one piece of chocolate,
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the odds are high that I would end up eating the whole box.
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This is definitely something I would like to fix
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because some of the amazing artistry in this world
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happens in the kitchen and some of the richest
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human experiences happen over a unique meal.
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I recently was eating cheeseburgers
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with Joe Rogan and John Donahue late at night in Austin,
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talking about jiu jitsu and life
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and I was distinctly aware of the magic of that experience.
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Magic made possible by the incredibly
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delicious cheeseburgers.
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This is the Lex Friedman podcast
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and here is my conversation with Tyler Cohen.
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Would you say economics is more art or science
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or philosophy or even magic?
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Economics is interesting because it's all of the above.
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To start with magic, the notion that you can
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make some change and simply everyone's better off,
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that is a kind of modern magic
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that has replaced old style magic.
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It's an art in the sense that the models are not very exact.
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It's a science in the sense that occasionally
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propositions are falsified.
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Are a few basic things we know
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and however trivial they may sound,
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if you don't know them, you're out of luck.
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So all of the above.
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But from my outsider's perspective,
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economics is sometimes able to formulate very simple,
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almost like E equals MC squared,
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general models of how our human society will function
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when you do a certain thing.
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But it seems impossible or almost way too optimistic
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to think that a single formula
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or just a set of simple principles
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can describe behavior of billions of human beings
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with all the complexity that we have involved.
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So do you have a sense there's a hope for economics
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to have those kinds of physics level descriptions
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and models of the world?
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Or is it just our desperate attempts as humans
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to make sense of it even though it's more desperate
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than rigorous and serious and actually predictable
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like a physics type science?
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I don't think economics will ever be very predictive.
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It's most useful for helping you ask better questions.
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You look at something like game theory.
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Well, game theory never predicted USA and USSR
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would have a war, would not have a war.
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But trying to think through the logic of strategic conflict,
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if you know game theory,
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it's just a much more interesting discussion.
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Are you surprised that we,
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speaking of the Soviet Union and the United States
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and speaking of game theory,
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are you surprised that we haven't destroyed ourselves
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with nuclear weapons yet?
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Like that simple formulation
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of mutually assured destruction,
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that's a good example of an explanation
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that perhaps allows us to ask better questions.
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But it seems to have actually described the reality
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of why we haven't destroyed ourselves
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with these ultra powerful weapons.
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Are you surprised, do you think
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the game theoretic explanation is at all accurate there?
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I think we will destroy each other with those weapons.
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Look, it's a very low probability event.
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So I'm not surprised it hasn't happened yet.
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I'm a little surprised it came as close as it did.
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You know, you're general thinking,
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realizing it might've just been a flock of birds
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or it wasn't a first strike attack from the USA.
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We got very lucky on that one.
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But if you just keep on running the clock
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on a low probability event, it will happen.
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And it may not be USA and China,
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USA and Russia, whatever.
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You know, it could be the Saudis and Turkey.
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And it might not be nuclear weapons,
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it might be some other destruction.
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But it simply will happen is my view.
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And I've argued at best we have 700 or 800 years
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and that's being generous.
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Well, maybe it's like a post on arrival process, right?
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So tiny probability could come any time.
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Probably not in your lifetime.
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But the chance presumably increases
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the cheaper weapons of mass destruction are.
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So the Poisson process description doesn't take
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in consideration the game theoretic aspect.
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So another way to consider is repeated games,
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So is there something about our human nature
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that allows us to fight against probability?
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Reduce, like the closer we get to trouble,
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the more we're able to figure out how to avoid trouble.
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The same thing is for when you take exams
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or you go and take classes,
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the closer or paper deadlines,
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the closer you get to a deadline,
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the better you start to perform
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and get your shit together and actually get stuff done.
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I'm really not so negative on human nature.
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And as an economist,
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I very much see the gains from cooperation.
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But if you just ask, are there outliers in history?
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Like was there a Hitler, for instance?
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And again, you let the clock tick,
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another Hitler with nuclear weapons,
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doesn't per se care about his own destruction,
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So your sense is fundamentally people are good,
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but outliers happen.
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A trembling hand equilibrium is what we would call it.
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Trembling hand equilibrium?
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That the basic logic is for cooperation,
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which is mostly what we've seen, even between enemies.
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But every now and then someone does something crazy
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and you don't know how to react to it.
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And you can't always beat Hitler.
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Sometimes Hitler drags you down.
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To push back, is it possible
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that the crazier the person, the less likely they are,
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and in a way where we're safe,
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meaning like, this is the kind of proposition,
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I had the discussion with my dad as a physicist about this,
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where he thinks that like if you have a graph,
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like evil people can't also be geniuses.
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So this is his defense why evil people
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will not get control of nuclear weapons,
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because to be truly evil.
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But evil meaning sort of, you can argue that,
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not even the evil of Hitler we're talking about,
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because Hitler had a kind of view of Germany
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and all those kinds of, there's like,
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he probably deluded himself and the people around him
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to think that he's actually doing good for the world,
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similar with Stalin and so on.
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By evil, I mean more like almost like terrorists
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to where they wanna destroy themselves and the world.
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Like those people will never be able to be
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actually skilled enough to do,
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to deliver that kind of mass scale destruction.
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So the hope is that it's very unlikely
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that the kind of evil that would lead to extinctions
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of humans or mass destruction is so unlikely
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that we're able to last way longer than some 100, 800 years.
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It's very unlikely.
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In that sense, I accept the argument,
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but that's why you need to let the clock tick.
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It's also the best argument for bureaucracy.
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To negotiate a bureaucracy,
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it actually selects against pure evil
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because you need to build alliances.
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So bureaucracy in that regard is great, right?
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It keeps out the worst apples.
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But look, put it this way,
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could you imagine 35 years from now,
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the Osama bin Laden of the future
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has nukes or very bad bio weapons?
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It seems to me you can.
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And Osama was pretty evil.
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And actually even he failed, right?
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But nonetheless, that's what the 700 or 800 years
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And there might be destructive technologies
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that don't have such a high cost of production
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or such a high learning curve.
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Like cyber attacks or artificial intelligence,
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all those kinds of things.
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I mean, let me ask you a question.
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Let's say you could as an act of will,
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by spending a million dollars,
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obliterate any city on earth and everyone in it dies.
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And you'll get caught and you'll be sentenced to death,
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but you can make it happen just by willing it.
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How many months does it take before that happens?
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So the obvious answer is like very soon.
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There's probably a good answer for that
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because you can consider how many millionaires there are,
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how many you could look at that, right?
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I have a sense that there's just people
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that have a million dollars.
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I mean, there's a certain amount,
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but have a million dollars,
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have other interests that will outweigh
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the interest of destroying an entire city.
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Like there's a particular,
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like, I mean, maybe that's a hope.
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It's why we should be nice to the wealthy too, right?
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Yeah, all that trash talking as Bill Gates,
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we should stop that
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because that doesn't inspire the other future Bill Gates
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is to be nice to the world.
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But your sense is the cheaper it gets to destroy the world,
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the more likely it becomes.
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Now, when I say destroy the world,
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there's a trick in there.
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I don't think literally every human will die,
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but it would set back civilization
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by an extraordinary degree.
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It's then just hard to predict what comes next.
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But a catastrophe where everyone dies,
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that probably has to be something more like an asteroid
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And those are purely exogenous for the time being, at least.
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So I immigrated to this country.
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I was born in the Soviet Union in Russia and...
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I guess it's an important question.
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You were born in the Soviet Union, right?
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Yes, I was born in the Soviet Union.
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The rest is details, but I grew up in Moscow, Russia.
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But I came to this country,
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and this country even back there,
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but it's always symbolized to me a place of opportunity
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where everybody could build the most incredible things,
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especially in the engineering side of things.
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Just invent and build and scale
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and have a huge impact on the world.
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And that's been, to me, the...
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That's my version of the American ideal, the American dream.
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Do you think the American dream is still there?
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What do you think of that notion in itself,
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like from an economics perspective,
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from a human perspective, is it still alive?
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And how do you think about it?
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The American dream.
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The American dream is mostly still there.
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If you look at which groups are the highest earners,
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it is individuals from India and individuals from Iran,
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which is a fairly new development.
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Great for them, not necessarily easy.
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Both you could call persons of color,
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may have faced discrimination,
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also on the grounds of religion, yet they've done it.
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It says great things about America.
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Now, if you look at native born Americans,
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the story's trickier.
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People think intergenerational mobility
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has declined a lot recently,
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but it has not for native born Americans.
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For about, I think, 40 years, it's been fairly constant,
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which is sort of good,
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but compared to much earlier times,
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it was much higher in the past.
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I'm not sure we can replicate that,
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because look, go to the beginning of the 20th century,
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very few Americans finish high school,
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or even have much wealth.
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There's not much credentialism.
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There aren't that many credentials.
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So there's more upward mobility
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across the generations than today.
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And it's a good thing that we had it.
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I'm not sure we should blame the modern world
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for not being able to reproduce that.
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But look, the general issue of
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who gets into Harvard or Cornell?
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Is there an injustice?
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Should we fix that?
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Is there too little opportunity for the bottom,
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say, half of Americans?
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It's a disgrace how this country has evolved in that way.
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And in that sense, the American dream is clearly ailing.
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But it has had problems from the beginning,
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for blacks, for women, for many other groups.
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I mean, isn't that the whole challenge of opportunity
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and freedom is that it's hard,
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and the difficulty of how hard it is to move up in society
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is unequal often, and that's the injustice of society.
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But the whole point of that freedom
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is that over time, it becomes better and better.
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You start to fix the leaks, the issues,
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and it keeps progressing in that kind of way.
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But ultimately, there's always the opportunity,
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even if it's harder, there's the opportunity
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to create something truly special,
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to move up, to be president, to be a leader
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in whatever the industry that you're passionate about.
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We each have podcasts, right, in English.
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The value of joining that American English language network
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is much higher today than it was 30 years ago,
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mostly because of the internet.
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So that makes immigration returns themselves skewed.
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So going to the US, Canada, or the UK,
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I think has become much more valuable in relative terms
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than, say, going to France,
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which is still a pretty well off, very nice country.
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If you had gone to France,
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your chance of having a globally known podcast
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would be much smaller.
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Yeah, this is the interesting thing
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about how much intellectual influence
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the United States has.
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I don't know if it's connected to what we're discussing here,
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the freedom and opportunity of the American dream,
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or does it make any sense to you
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that we have so much impact on the rest of the world
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in terms of ideas?
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Is it just simply because English
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is the primary language of the world,
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or is there something fundamental to the United States
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that drives the development of ideas?
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It's almost like what's cool, what's entertaining,
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what's like meme culture, the internet culture,
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the philosophers, the intellectuals, the podcasts,
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the movies, music, all that stuff, driving culture.
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There's something above and beyond language
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in the United States.
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It's a sense of entertainment really mattering,
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how to connect with your audience,
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being direct and getting to the point,
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how humor is integrated even with science
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that is pretty strongly represented here,
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much more so than on the European continent.
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Britain has its own version of this,
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which it does very well,
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and not surprisingly, they're hugely influential
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in music, comedy, most of the other areas you mentioned.
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Canada, yes, but their best talent tends to come here,
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but you could say it's like a broader North American thing
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and give them their fair share of credit.
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What about science?
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There's a sense higher education is really strong,
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research is really strong in the United States,
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but it just feels like, culturally speaking,
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when we zoom out, scientists aren't very cool here.
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Most people wouldn't be able to name
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basically a single scientist.
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Maybe they would say like, they would say what,
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like Einstein and Neil deGrasse Tyson maybe,
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and Neil deGrasse Tyson isn't exactly a scientist,
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he's a science communicator.
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So there's not the same kind of admiration
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of science and innovators as there is of like,
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athletes or actors, actresses, musicians.
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Well, you can become a celebrity scientist if you want to.
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It may or may not be best for science.
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And we have Spock from Star Trek, who is still a big deal,
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but look at it this way.
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Which country is most comfortable
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with inegalitarian rewards for scientists,
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whether it's fame or money?
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And I still think it's here.
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Some of that's just the tax rate.
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Some of it is a lot of America is set up
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for rich people to live really well.
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And again, that's going to attract a lot of top talent.
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And you ask like, the two best vaccines.
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I know the Pfizer vaccine is sort of from Germany,
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sort of from Turkey, but it's nonetheless
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being distributed through the United States.
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Moderna, an ethnic Armenian immigrant through Lebanon,
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first to Canada, then down here to Boston, Cambridge area.
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Those are incredible vaccines.
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Yeah, well, that's more almost like the,
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I don't know what you would call it,
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engineering, the sort of scaling.
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That's what US is really good at,
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not just inventing of ideas,
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but taking an idea and actually building the thing
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and scaling it and being able to distribute it at scale.
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I think some people would attribute that
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to the general word of capitalism.
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I don't know if you would.
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What in your views are the pros and cons of capitalism
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as it's implemented in America?
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I don't know if you would say
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capitalism really exists in America,
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but to the extent that it does.
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People use the word capitalism in so many different ways.
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What is capitalism?
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The literal meaning is private ownership of capital goods,
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which I favor in most areas.
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But no, I don't think the private sector
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should own our F16s or military assets.
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Government owned water utilities seem to work
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as well as privately owned water utilities.
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But with all those qualifications put to the side,
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business, for the most part,
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innovates better than government.
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It is oriented toward consumer services.
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The biggest businesses tend to pay the highest wages.
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Business is great at getting things done.
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USA is fundamentally a nation of business
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and that makes us a nation of opportunity.
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So I am indeed mostly a fan.
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Subject to numerous caveats.
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What are some negative downsides of capitalism
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in your view or some things that we should be concerned
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about maybe for longterm impacts of capitalism?
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Again, capitalism takes a different form in each country.
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I would say in the United States,
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our weird blend of whatever you want to call it
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has had an enduring racial problem from the beginning,
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has been a force of taking away land
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from Native Americans and oppressing them
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pretty much from the beginning.
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It has done very well by immigrants for the most part.
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We revel in championitarian creative destruction more.
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So we don't just prop up national champions forever.
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And there's a precariousness to life for some people here
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that is less so say in Germany or the Netherlands.
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We have weaker communities in some regards
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than say Northwestern Europe often would.
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That has pluses and minuses.
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I think it makes us more creative.
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It's a better country in which to be a weirdo
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than say Germany or Denmark.
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But there is truly, whether from the government
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or from your private community,
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there is less social security in some fundamental sense.
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On the point of weirdo,
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what, that's kind of a beautiful little statement.
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I mean, that seems to be, you know,
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you could think of a guy like Elon Musk
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and say that he's a weirdo.
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Is that the sense in which you're using weirdo
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like outside of the norm, like breaking conventions?
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And here that is either acceptable or even admired
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And since so many people are outsiders
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and that we're all immigrants is selecting for people
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who left something behind,
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we're willing to leave behind their families,
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we're willing to undergo a certain brutality
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of switch in their lives,
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makes us a nation of weirdos and weirdos are creative.
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And Denmark is not a nation of weirdos.
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It's a wonderful place, you know, great for them.
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Ideally you want part of the world
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to be full of weirdos and innovating.
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And the other part of the world to be a little
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kind of chicken shit, risk averse
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and enjoy the benefit to the innovation
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and to give people these smooth lives
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and six weeks off and free ride.
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And everyone's like, oh, American way versus European way,
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but basically they're compliments.
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Yeah, that's fascinating.
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I used to have this conversation with my like parents
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when I was growing up and just others
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from the immigrant kind of flow.
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And they use this term, especially in Russian is,
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you know, to criticize something I was doing,
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that was suggest, you know, normal people don't do this.
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And I used to be really offended by that,
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but, you know, as I got older,
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I realized that that's a kind of compliment
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because in the same kind of, I would say,
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way that you're saying that is the American ideal,
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because if you want to do anything special or interesting,
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you don't want to be doing in one particular avenue
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what normal people do, because that won't be interesting.
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Russians, I think fit in very well here
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because the ones who come are weirdos.
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And there's a very different Russian weirdo tradition
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like Alyosha, right?
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And by this card, I miss off.
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Or Perelman, the mathematician, they're weirdos.
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And they have their own different kind of status
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in Soviet Union, Russia, wherever.
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And when Russians come to America,
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they stay pretty Russian, but it seems to me a week later,
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they've somehow adjusted.
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And the ways in which they might want to be like grumpier
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than Americans, not smile,
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think that people who smile are idiots,
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like they can do that.
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No one takes that away from them.
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What are you, on a tiny tangent,
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I'd love to hear if you have thoughts
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about Grisha Perelman turning down the Fields Medal.
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Is that something you admire?
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Does that make sense to you that somebody,
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you know, with the structure of Nobel Prizes,
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of these huge awards, of the reputations,
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the hierarchy of everyone saying, applauding,
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how special you are, and here's a person
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who was doing one of the greatest accomplishments
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in the history of mathematics.
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It doesn't want the stupid prize
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and doesn't want recognition,
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doesn't want to do interviews,
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it doesn't want to be famous.
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What do you make of that?
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Look, prizes are corrupting.
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After scientists win Nobel Prizes,
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they tend to become less productive.
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Now, statistically, it's hard to sort out
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the different effects.
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There's aggression toward the mean.
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Does the prize make you too busy?
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It's a little tricky, but.
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There's not enough Nobel Prizes either
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to gather enough data.
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Right, but I've known a lot of Nobel Prize winners,
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and it is my sense they become less productive.
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They repeat more of their older messages,
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which may be highly socially valuable,
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but if someone wants to turn their back on that
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and keep on working, which I assume is what he's doing,
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I mean, we should respect that.
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It's like he wins a bigger prize, right?
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Our extreme respect.
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Grisha, if you're listening, I need to talk to you soon.
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I've been trying to get ahold of him.
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Back to capitalism.
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I gotta ask you, just competition in general,
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in this world of weirdos,
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is competition good for the world?
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This kind of seems to be one of the fundamental engines
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of capitalism, right?
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Do you see it as ultimately constructive
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or destructive for the world?
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What really matters is how good your legal framework is.
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So competition within nature for food
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leads to bloody conflict all the time.
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The animal world is quite unpleasant, to say the least.
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If you have something like the rule of law
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and clearly defined property rights,
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which are within reason justly allocated,
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competition probably is gonna work very well.
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But it's not an unalloyed good thing at all.
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It can be highly destructive.
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Military competition, right?
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Which actually is itself sometimes good,
link |
but it's not good per se.
link |
What aspects of life do you think
link |
we should protect from competition?
link |
Is there some, you said like the rule of law,
link |
is there some things we should keep away from competition?
link |
Well, the fight for territory, most of all, right?
link |
So violence, anything that involves
link |
like actual physical violence.
link |
Right, and it's not that I think
link |
the current borders are just.
link |
I mean, go talk to Hungarians, Romanians,
link |
Serbians, Bosnians, they'll talk your ear off.
link |
And some of them are probably right.
link |
But at the end of the day,
link |
we have some kind of international order.
link |
And I would rather we more or less stick with it.
link |
If Catalonians wanna leave, they keep up with it,
link |
What about a space of like healthcare?
link |
This is where you get into a tension of like
link |
between capitalism and kind of more,
link |
I don't wanna use socialism,
link |
but those kinds of policies that are less free market.
link |
I think in this country,
link |
healthcare should be much more competitive.
link |
So you go to hospitals, doctors,
link |
they don't treat you like a customer.
link |
They treat you like an idiot or like a child
link |
or someone with third party payment.
link |
And it's a pretty humiliating experience often.
link |
Do you think a free market in general is possible?
link |
Like a pure free market?
link |
And is that a good goal to strive for?
link |
I don't think the term pure free market's well defined
link |
because you need a legal order.
link |
Legal order has to make decisions
link |
on like what is intellectual property
link |
more important than ever.
link |
There's no benchmark that like represents
link |
the pure free market way of doing things.
link |
What will penalties be?
link |
How much do we put into law enforcement?
link |
No simple answers, but just saying free market
link |
doesn't pin down what you're gonna do
link |
on those all important questions.
link |
So free market is an economics, I guess, idea.
link |
So it's not possible for free market to generate the rules
link |
that are like emergent, like self governing?
link |
It generates a lot of them, right?
link |
Through private norms, through trade associations.
link |
International trade is mostly done privately and by norms.
link |
So it's certainly possible, but at the end of the day,
link |
I think you need governments to draw very clear lines
link |
to prevent it from turning into mafia run systems.
link |
You know, I've been hanging out with other group of weirdos,
link |
lately Michael Malice, who espouses to be an anarchist,
link |
anarchism, which is like, I think intellectually
link |
just a fascinating set of ideas, where taking free market
link |
to the full extreme of basically saying
link |
there should be no government, what is it?
link |
Oversight, I guess, and then everything should be fully,
link |
like all the agreements, all the collectives you form
link |
should be voluntary, not based on the geographic land
link |
you were born on and so on.
link |
Do you think that's just a giant mess?
link |
Like, do you think it's possible for an anarchist society
link |
to work where it's, you know, in a fully distributed way,
link |
people agree with each other,
link |
not just on financial transactions,
link |
but you know, on their personal security,
link |
on sort of military type of stuff, on healthcare,
link |
on education, all those kinds of things.
link |
And where does it break down?
link |
Well, I wouldn't press a button to say get rid
link |
of our current constitution, which I view is pretty good
link |
and quite wise, but I think the deeper point
link |
is that all societies are in some regards anarchistic
link |
and we should take the anarchists seriously.
link |
So globally, there's a kind of anarchy across borders,
link |
even within federalistic systems, they're typically complex.
link |
There's not a clear transitivity necessarily
link |
of who has the final say over what,
link |
just the state vis a vis its people.
link |
There's not per se a final arbitrator in that regard.
link |
So you want a good anarchy rather than a bad anarchy.
link |
You wanna squish your anarchy into the right corners.
link |
And I don't think there's a theoretical answer
link |
how to do it, but you start with a country,
link |
like is it working well enough now?
link |
This country, you'd say mostly,
link |
you'd certainly wanna make a lot of improvements.
link |
And that's why I don't wanna press that
link |
get rid of the constitution button,
link |
but to just dump on the anarchists is to miss the point.
link |
Always try to learn from any opinion.
link |
What in it is true?
link |
I'm just like marveling at the poetry
link |
of saying that we should squish our anarchy
link |
into the right corners of it.
link |
Okay, I gotta ask, I've been talking with,
link |
since we're doing a whirlwind introduction
link |
to all of economics,
link |
I've been talking to a few objectivists recently
link |
and just, Ayn Rand comes up as a person,
link |
as a philosopher throughout many conversations.
link |
A lot of people really despise her.
link |
A lot of people really love her.
link |
It's always weird to me when somebody arouses a philosophy
link |
or a human being arouses that much emotion
link |
in either direction, does she make,
link |
do you understand, first of all, that level of emotion
link |
and what are your thoughts about Ayn Rand
link |
and her philosophy of objectivism?
link |
Is it useful at all to think about this kind of formulation
link |
of a rational self interest,
link |
if I could put it in those words,
link |
or I guess more negatively the selfishness
link |
or she would put, I guess, the virtue of selfishness.
link |
Ayn Rand was a big influence on me growing up.
link |
The book that really mattered for me was
link |
Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal.
link |
The notion that wealth creates opportunity
link |
and good lives and wealth is something we ought to valorize
link |
and give very high status.
link |
It's one of her key ideas.
link |
I think it's completely correct.
link |
I think she has the most profound
link |
and articulate statement of that idea.
link |
That said, as a philosopher,
link |
I disagree with her on most things.
link |
And I did, even like as a boy, when I was reading her,
link |
I read Plato before Ayn Rand.
link |
And in a Socratic dialogue,
link |
there's all these different points of view
link |
being thrown around.
link |
And whomever it is you agree with,
link |
you understand the wisdom is in the coming together
link |
of the different points of view.
link |
And she doesn't have that.
link |
So altruism can be wonderful in my view.
link |
Humans are not actually that rational.
link |
Self interest is often poorly defined.
link |
To pound the table and say existence exists.
link |
I wouldn't say I disagree,
link |
but I'm not sure that it's a very meaningful statement.
link |
I think the secret to Ayn Rand is that she was Russian.
link |
I'd love to have her on my podcast if she was still alive.
link |
I'd only ask her about Russia,
link |
which she mostly never talked about
link |
after writing We the Living.
link |
And she is much more Russian than she seems at first,
link |
even like purging people from the objectivist circles.
link |
It's like how Russians, especially female Russians,
link |
so often purge their friends.
link |
It's weird, all the parallels.
link |
So you're saying, so yes,
link |
so assuming she's still not around,
link |
but if she is and she comes onto your podcast,
link |
can you dig into that a little bit?
link |
Do you mean like her personal demons
link |
around the social and economic Russia of the time,
link |
The traumas she suffered there,
link |
what she really likes in the music and literature and why.
link |
Music and literature, huh?
link |
And getting deeply into that,
link |
her view of relations between the sexes and Russia,
link |
how it differs from America,
link |
why she still carries through the old Russian vision
link |
in her fiction, this extreme sexual dimorphism,
link |
but with also very strong women,
link |
to me is a uniquely, at least Eastern European vision,
link |
mostly Russian, I would say.
link |
And that's in her, that's her actual real philosophy,
link |
not this table bounding existence exists.
link |
And that's not talked about enough.
link |
She's a Russian philosopher.
link |
Or Soviet, whatever you wanna call it.
link |
And if she wasn't so certain,
link |
she could have been a Dostoevsky where it's not,
link |
that certainty is almost the thing
link |
that brings out the adoration of millions,
link |
but also the hatred of millions.
link |
She became a cult figure in a somewhat Russian like manner.
link |
But I love the idea that, again,
link |
you're just dropping bombs that are poetic,
link |
that the wisdom is in the coming together of ideas.
link |
It's kind of interesting to think
link |
that no one human possesses wisdom.
link |
No one idea is the wisdom.
link |
That the coming together is the wisdom.
link |
Like in my view, Boswell's Life of Johnson,
link |
18th century British biography.
link |
It's in essence a coauthored work, Boswell and Johnson.
link |
It's one of the greatest philosophy books ever,
link |
though it is commonly regarded as a biography.
link |
John Stuart Mill, who in a sense
link |
was coauthoring with Harriet Taylor,
link |
better philosopher than is realized,
link |
though he's rated very, very highly.
link |
Plato slash Socrates, a lot of the greatest works
link |
are in a kind of dialogue form.
link |
Curtis Faust would be another example.
link |
It's very much a dialogue.
link |
And yes, it's drama, but it's also a philosophy.
link |
Shakespeare, maybe the wisest thinker of them all.
link |
In your book, Big Business, speaking of Ayn Rand,
link |
Big Business, A Love Letter to an American Antihero,
link |
you make the case for the benefit
link |
that large businesses bring to society.
link |
If you look at, say, the pandemic,
link |
which has been a catastrophic event, right,
link |
for many reasons, but who is it that saved us?
link |
So Amazon has done remarkably well.
link |
They upped their delivery game more or less overnight
link |
with very few hitches.
link |
I've ordered hundreds of Amazon packages,
link |
direct delivery food, whether it's DoorDash or Uber Eats,
link |
or using Whole Foods through Amazon shipping.
link |
Again, it's gone remarkably well.
link |
Switching over our entire higher educational system,
link |
basically within two weeks, to Zoom.
link |
I mean, I've had a Zoom outage,
link |
but their performance rate has been remarkably high.
link |
So if you just look at resources, competence, incentives,
link |
who's been the star performers, the NBA even,
link |
just canceling the season as early as they did,
link |
sending a message like, hey, people, this is real,
link |
and then pulling off the bubble
link |
with not a single found case of COVID
link |
and having all the testing set up in advance.
link |
Big business has done very well lately,
link |
and throughout the broader course of American history,
link |
in my view, has mostly been a hero.
link |
Can we engage in a kind of therapy session?
link |
I'm often troubled by the negativity towards big business,
link |
and I wonder if you could help figure out
link |
how we remove that or maybe first psychoanalyze it
link |
and then how we remove it.
link |
It feels like once we've gotten wifi on flights,
link |
on airplane flights, people started complaining
link |
about how shady the connection is, right?
link |
They take it for granted immediately
link |
and then start complaining about little details.
link |
Another example that's closer to,
link |
especially as an aspiring entrepreneur,
link |
is closer to the things I'm thinking about
link |
is Jack Dorsey with Twitter.
link |
To me, Twitter has enabled
link |
an incredible platform of communication,
link |
and yet the biggest thing that people talk about
link |
is not how incredible this platform is.
link |
They essentially use the platform
link |
to complain about the censorship of a few individuals
link |
as opposed to how amazing it is.
link |
Now, you should talk about how shady the wifi is
link |
and how censorship or the removal of Donald Trump
link |
from the platform is a bad thing,
link |
but it feels like we don't talk about the positive impacts
link |
at scale of these technologies.
link |
Can you explain why and is there a way to fix it?
link |
I don't know if we can fix it.
link |
I think we are beings of high neuroticism for the most part
link |
as a personality trait.
link |
Not everyone, but most people.
link |
And as a compliment to that,
link |
if someone says 10 nice things about you and one insult,
link |
you're more bothered by the insult
link |
than you're pleased by the nice things,
link |
especially if the insult is somewhat true.
link |
So you have these media, these vehicles,
link |
Twitter is one you mentioned,
link |
where there's all kinds of messages going back and forth,
link |
and you're really bugged by the messages you don't like.
link |
Most people are neurotic to begin with.
link |
It's not only taken out on big business, to be clear.
link |
So Congress catches a lot of grief
link |
and some of it they deserve, yes.
link |
Religion is not attacked the same way,
link |
but religiosity is declining.
link |
If you poll people, the military still polls quite well,
link |
but people are very disillusioned with many things.
link |
And the Martin Gury thesis that because of the internet,
link |
you just see more of things.
link |
And the more you see of something,
link |
whether it's good, bad, or in between,
link |
the more you will find to complain about,
link |
I suspect is the fundamental mechanism here.
link |
I mean, look at Clubhouse, right?
link |
To me, it's a great service, may or may not be like my thing,
link |
but gives people this opportunity.
link |
No one makes you go on it.
link |
And all these media articles like,
link |
oh, is Clubhouse gonna wreck things?
link |
Are they gonna break things?
link |
New York Times is complaining.
link |
Of course, it's their competitor as well.
link |
I'm like, give these people a chance, talk it up.
link |
You may or may not like it.
link |
Let's praise the people who are getting something done.
link |
Very Ayn Randian point.
link |
As an economic thinker, as a writer, as a podcaster,
link |
what do you think about Clubhouse?
link |
What do you think about...
link |
Okay, let me just throw my feeling about it.
link |
I used to use Discord, which is another service
link |
where people use voice.
link |
So the only thing you do is just hear each other.
link |
There's no face, you just see a little icon.
link |
That's the essential element of Clubhouse.
link |
And there's an intimacy to voice only communication.
link |
That didn't make sense to me, but it was just what it is,
link |
which feels like something that won't last
link |
for some reason, maybe it's the cynical view.
link |
But what's your sense about the intimacy
link |
of what's happening right now with Clubhouse?
link |
I've greatly enjoyed what I've done,
link |
but I'm not sure it's for me in the long run
link |
First, if you compare it to doing a podcast,
link |
podcasting has greater reach than Clubhouse.
link |
So I would rather put time into my podcast.
link |
But then also my core asset, so to speak,
link |
is I'm a very fast reader.
link |
So audio per se is not necessarily to my advantage.
link |
I don't speak or listen faster than other people.
link |
In fact, I'm a slower listener because I like 1.0,
link |
So I should spend less time on audio
link |
and more time reading and writing.
link |
Yeah, it's interesting because you mentioned podcasts
link |
and audio books, the podcasts are recorded
link |
and so I can skip things, like I can skip commercials,
link |
or I can skip parts where it's like,
link |
ugh, this part is boring.
link |
With live conversations, especially when,
link |
there's a magic to the fact when you have a lot of people
link |
participating in that conversation,
link |
but some people are like, ugh, this topic,
link |
they're going into this thing and you can't skip it
link |
or you can't fast forward, you can go 1.5X or 2X,
link |
you can't speed it up.
link |
Nevertheless, there's a tension between that,
link |
so that's the productivity aspect,
link |
with the actual magic of live communication,
link |
where anything can happen, where Elon Musk
link |
can ask the CEO of Robinhood, Vlad, about like,
link |
hey, somebody holding a gun to your head,
link |
there's something shady going on, the magic of that.
link |
That's also my criticism of like,
link |
there's been a recent conversation with Bill Gates
link |
that he won a platform and had a regular interview
link |
on the platform without allowing the possibility
link |
of the magic of the chaos.
link |
So I'm not exactly sure, it's probably not the right
link |
platform for you and for many other people
link |
who are exceptionally productive in other places,
link |
but there's still nevertheless a magic to the chaos
link |
that can be created with live conversation
link |
that gives me pause.
link |
Maybe what it's perfect for is the tribute.
link |
So they had an episode recently that I didn't hear,
link |
but I heard it was wonderful.
link |
It was anecdotes about Steve Jobs.
link |
That you can't do one to one, right?
link |
And you don't want control.
link |
You want different people appearing and stepping up
link |
and saying their bit.
link |
And Clubhouse is 110% perfect for that.
link |
I love that, the tribute.
link |
But there's also the possibility,
link |
I think there was a time when somebody arranged
link |
a conversation with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage.
link |
I remember that happened a long time ago.
link |
And it was very formal.
link |
It could have probably gone better,
link |
but it was still magical to have these people
link |
that obviously had a bunch of tension
link |
throughout their history.
link |
It's so frictionless to have two major figures
link |
in world history just jump on a Clubhouse stage.
link |
Putin and Elon Musk.
link |
Putin and Elon Musk.
link |
And that's exactly it.
link |
So there's a language barrier there.
link |
There's also the problem that in particular,
link |
it's like Biden would have a similar problem.
link |
It's like they're just not into a new technology.
link |
So it's very hard to catch the Kremlin up to,
link |
first of all, Twitter,
link |
but to catch them up to Clubhouse,
link |
you have to have the,
link |
Elon Musk has a sense of the internet,
link |
the humor, the memes, and all that kind of stuff
link |
that you have to have in order to use a new app
link |
and figure out the timing, the beat,
link |
what is this thing about?
link |
So that's the challenge there.
link |
But that's exactly it.
link |
That magic of have two big personalities just show up.
link |
And I wonder if it's just the temporary thing
link |
that we're going through with the pandemic
link |
where people are just lonely
link |
and they're seeking for that human connection
link |
that we usually get elsewhere through our work.
link |
But they'll stay lonely, in my opinion.
link |
You think so? I do.
link |
So it is a pandemic thing, but I think it will persist.
link |
And the idea of wanting to be connected
link |
to more of the world, Clubhouse will still offer that.
link |
And all the mental health issues out there,
link |
a lot of people have broken ties
link |
and they will still be lonely post vaccines.
link |
Yeah, I, from an artificial intelligence perspective,
link |
have a sense that there is like a deep loneliness
link |
in the world, that all of us are really lonely.
link |
Like we don't even acknowledge it.
link |
Even people in happy relationships,
link |
it feels like there's like an iceberg of loneliness
link |
in all of us, like seeking to be understood,
link |
like deeply understood, understanding us,
link |
like having somebody with whom you can have
link |
a deep interaction enough to where you can,
link |
they can help you to understand yourself
link |
and they also understand you.
link |
Like I have a sense that artificial intelligence systems
link |
can provide that as well, but humans,
link |
I think crave that from other humans
link |
in ways that we perhaps don't acknowledge.
link |
And I have a hope that technology will enable that
link |
more and more, like Clubhouse is an example
link |
Are touring bots gonna out compete Clubhouse?
link |
Like why not sort of program your own session?
link |
You'll just talk into your device
link |
and say here's the kind of conversation I want
link |
and it will create the characters for you.
link |
And it may not be as good as Elon and Vladimir Putin,
link |
but it will be better than ordinary Clubhouse.
link |
Yeah, and one of the things that's missing,
link |
it's not just conversation, it's memory.
link |
So longterm memories, what current AI systems don't have
link |
is sharing experience together.
link |
Forget the words, it's like sharing the highs
link |
and the lows of life together
link |
and the systems around us remembering that.
link |
Remembering we've been through that.
link |
Like that's the thing that creates
link |
really close relationships, is going through some shit.
link |
If you survive together, there's something really difficult
link |
that bonds you with other humans.
link |
And this is related to immigration and the American dream.
link |
The people who have come to this country,
link |
however weird and different they may be,
link |
they or their ancestors at some point
link |
probably have shared this thing.
link |
Right, US is not gonna split up.
link |
It may get more screwed up as a country,
link |
but Texas and California are not gonna break off.
link |
I mean, they're big enough where they could do it,
link |
but it's just never gonna happen.
link |
We've been through too much together.
link |
Yeah, that's a hopeful message.
link |
Do you think, some people have talked to Eric Weinstein,
link |
you've talked to Eric Weinstein.
link |
He has a sense that growth,
link |
like the entirety of the American system
link |
is based on the assumption that we're gonna grow forever,
link |
that the economy's gonna grow forever.
link |
Do you think economic growth will continue indefinitely?
link |
Or will we stagnate?
link |
I've long been in agreement with Eric, Peter Thiel,
link |
Robert Gordon and others, that growth has slowed down.
link |
I argued that in my book,
link |
The Great Stagnation, appropriately titled.
link |
But the last two years, I've become much more optimistic.
link |
I've seen a lot of breakthroughs
link |
in green energy and battery technology.
link |
mRNA vaccines and medicine is a big deal already.
link |
It will repair our GDP
link |
and save millions of lives around the world.
link |
There's an anti malaria vaccine
link |
that's now in stage three trial, it probably works.
link |
CRISPR to defeat sickle cell anemia.
link |
Just space, area after area after area,
link |
there's suddenly the surge of breakthroughs.
link |
I would say many of them rooted in superior computation
link |
and ultimately Moore's law
link |
and access to those computational abilities.
link |
So I'm much more optimistic than say,
link |
the last time I spoke to Eric.
link |
I don't know, he moves all the time in his views.
link |
I don't know where he's going.
link |
His views, I don't know where he's at now.
link |
He's not at, he hasn't gained, that's really interesting.
link |
So your little drop of optimism comes from like,
link |
there might be a fundamental shift
link |
in the kind of things that computation has unlocked for us
link |
in terms of like, it could be a wellspring of innovation
link |
that enables growth for a long time to come.
link |
Like Eric has not quite connected
link |
to the computation aspect yet
link |
to where it could be a wellspring of innovation.
link |
But you're very close to it in your own work.
link |
I don't have to tell you that.
link |
The work you're doing would not have been possible
link |
not very long ago.
link |
But the question is,
link |
how much does that work enable continued growth
link |
for decades to come?
link |
For all their problems,
link |
some version of driverless vehicles will be a thing.
link |
I'm not sure when, you know much better than I do.
link |
Maybe only partially, but that too will be a big deal.
link |
Well, one of the open questions
link |
that sort of the Peter Thiel School area of ideas
link |
is how much can be converted to technology?
link |
How much, how many parts of our lives
link |
can technology integrate and then innovate?
link |
Like can it replace healthcare?
link |
Can it replace the legal system?
link |
Can it replace government?
link |
Not replace, but like, you know, make it digital
link |
and thereby enable computation to improve it, right?
link |
That's the open question,
link |
because many aspects of our lives
link |
are still not really that digitized.
link |
There was a New York Times symposium in April,
link |
which is not long ago.
link |
And they asked the so called experts,
link |
when are we gonna get vaccines?
link |
And the most optimistic answer was in four years.
link |
And obviously we beat that by a long mile.
link |
So I think people still haven't woken up.
link |
You mentioned my tiny drop of optimism,
link |
but it's a big drop of optimism.
link |
Is it a waterfall yet?
link |
I mean, is it just?
link |
Well, here's my pessimism.
link |
Whenever there are major new technologies,
link |
they also tend to be used for violence
link |
directly or indirectly, radio, Hitler.
link |
Not that he hit people over the head with radios,
link |
but it enabled the rise of various dictators.
link |
So the new technologies now, whatever exactly they may be,
link |
they're gonna cause a lot of trouble.
link |
And that's my pessimism.
link |
Not that I think they're all gonna slow to a trickle.
link |
When was the stagnation book?
link |
It was the first of the stagnation books, in fact.
link |
It's very interesting.
link |
But even then I said, this is temporary.
link |
And I was predicting it would be gone
link |
in about 20 years time.
link |
I'm not sure that's exactly the right prediction,
link |
like 2030, but I think we're actually gonna beat that.
link |
So you think United States might still be
link |
on top of the world for the rest of the century
link |
in terms of its economic growth,
link |
impact on the world, scientific innovation,
link |
all those kinds of things?
link |
That's too long to predict,
link |
but I'm bullish on America in general.
link |
Speaking of being bullish on America,
link |
the opposite of that is,
link |
we talked about capitalism,
link |
we talked about Iran and her Russian roots.
link |
What do you think about communism?
link |
Why doesn't it work?
link |
Is it the implementation?
link |
Is there anything about its ideas that you find compelling?
link |
Or is it just a fundamentally flawed system?
link |
Well, communism is like capitalism.
link |
The words mean many things to different people.
link |
You could argue my life as a tenured professor
link |
comes closer to communism than anything
link |
the human race has seen.
link |
And I would argue it works pretty well.
link |
But look, if you mean the Soviet Union,
link |
it devolved pretty quickly
link |
to a kind of decentralized set of incentives
link |
that were destructive rather than value maximizing.
link |
It wasn't even central planning, much less communism.
link |
So Paul Craig Roberts and Polanyi were correct
link |
in their descriptions of the Soviet system.
link |
Think of it as weird mixes of barter
link |
and malfunctioning incentives
link |
and being very good at a whole bunch of things,
link |
but in terms of progress, innovation,
link |
and consumer goods, it really being quite a failure.
link |
And now I wouldn't call that communism,
link |
but that's what I think of the system the Soviets had.
link |
And it required an ever increasing pile of lies
link |
that both alienated people, but created an elite
link |
that by the end of the thing
link |
no longer believed in the system itself,
link |
or even thought they were doing better by being crooks
link |
than by just say moving to Switzerland
link |
and being an upper middle class individual,
link |
like you would have a higher standard of living
link |
by Gorbachev's time, not Gorbachev,
link |
but if you're a number 30 in the hierarchy,
link |
you're better off as a middle class person in Switzerland.
link |
And that, of course, did not prove sustainable.
link |
And so it's, what is it, a momentum of bureaucracy
link |
or something like that, it just builds up
link |
where you lose control of the original vision,
link |
and that naturally happens, it's just people.
link |
And you can't use normal profit and loss
link |
and price incentives, so you get all prices
link |
or most prices set too low, right?
link |
Shortages everywhere, people trade favors,
link |
you have this culture of bartered bribes,
link |
sexual favors or family friends,
link |
and you get more and more of that,
link |
and you over time lose more and more of the information
link |
and the prices and quantities and practices
link |
and norms you had, and that sort of slowly decays,
link |
and then by the end no one is believing in it.
link |
That would be my take, but again, you're the expert here.
link |
The Russian scholar, well, I'm perhaps no more
link |
an expert than Ayn Rand, it's more personal
link |
than it is scholarly or historic.
link |
So Stalin held power for 30 years,
link |
Vladimir Putin has held power for 21 years,
link |
where you could argue he took a little break.
link |
But not much, he was still holding power, I think.
link |
And it's still possible now with the new constitution
link |
that he could hold power from longer than Stalin,
link |
longer than 30 years.
link |
What do you think about the man,
link |
the state of affairs in Russia,
link |
in general, the system they have there?
link |
Is there something interesting to you
link |
as an economist, as a human being, about Russia?
link |
Everything is interesting.
link |
I mean, here would be part of my take.
link |
As you know, the Russian economy starting, what, 1999, 2000,
link |
has really quite a few years of super excellent growth.
link |
And Putin is still riding on that.
link |
It more or less coincides with his rise
link |
as the truly focal figure on the scene.
link |
Since then, pretty recently, they've had a bunch of years
link |
of negative four to 5% growth in a row, which is terrible.
link |
The economy is way too dependent on fossil fuels,
link |
but the structural problem is this.
link |
You need a concordance across economic power,
link |
social power, political power.
link |
They don't have to be allocated identically,
link |
but they have to be allocated consistently.
link |
And the Russian system under Putin,
link |
from almost the beginning, has never been able to have that,
link |
that ultimately his incentives are to steer the system
link |
where the economic power is in a small number of hands
link |
in a non diversified way.
link |
The system won't deliver sustainable gains
link |
in living standards anymore ever the way it's set up now.
link |
Though if fossil fuel prices go up,
link |
they'll have some good years for sure.
link |
And that is really quite structural, what has gone wrong.
link |
And then on top of that, you can have an opinion of Putin,
link |
but you've got to start with those structural problems.
link |
And that's why it's just not going to work.
link |
But he had all those good years in the beginning.
link |
So the number of Russians, say, who live here
link |
or in Russia, who love Putin and it's sincere,
link |
they're not just afraid of being dragged away,
link |
like that's a real phenomenon.
link |
Yeah, I'm really torn on Putin's approval rating,
link |
real approval rating seems to be very high.
link |
And I'm torn in whether that has to do with the fact
link |
that there is control of the press,
link |
or if it's, which is the people I talked to
link |
who are in Russia, family and so on, a genuine love
link |
of Putin, appreciation of what Putin has done
link |
and is going to do with Russia.
link |
And a lot of that would go away
link |
if the press were freer, I think.
link |
Yes, well, Singapore realizes this,
link |
anyone discussed by the press, no matter who they are,
link |
people in Singapore have done a great job.
link |
But if you're discussed by the press, you don't look good.
link |
Tech company executives are learning this, right?
link |
It's just like a rule.
link |
So in that sense, I think the rating is artificially high,
link |
but I don't by any means think it's all insincere,
link |
but that high popularity I view as bearish for Russia.
link |
I would feel better about the country
link |
if people were more pissed off at him.
link |
Yeah, that's right.
link |
It's nice to see free speech, even if it's full of hate.
link |
I am also troubled on the scientific side
link |
and entrepreneurial side, it seems difficult
link |
to be an entrepreneur in Russia.
link |
Like it's not even in terms of rules,
link |
it's just culturally, the people I speak to,
link |
it's not easy to build a business, no.
link |
It's not easy to even dream of building a business in Russia.
link |
That's just not part of the culture,
link |
part of the conversation.
link |
It's almost like the conversation is,
link |
if you wanna be the next Bill Gates or Elon Musk,
link |
or Steve Jobs or whatever, you come to America.
link |
That's the sense they have.
link |
Yeah, history matters.
link |
Is it history, is it structural problems of today?
link |
It's all the same thing.
link |
So a history of hostility to commerce,
link |
which of course the old USSR is gone,
link |
but a lot of the attitudes remain,
link |
a lot of the corruption remains.
link |
You have this legacy distribution of wealth
link |
from the auctioning off of the assets,
link |
which is not conducive to some kind of broadly egalitarian
link |
democracy, and so you have these small number
link |
of power points that try to control information and wealth
link |
and not really so keen to encourage the others
link |
who ultimately would pull the balance of political power
link |
away from the very wealthy and from Putin,
link |
and they support that culture,
link |
and the return of interest in Orthodox Church and all that,
link |
it's all part of the same piece, I think,
link |
because the old Orthodox Church is not that pro commerce,
link |
you'd have to say, but it's traditionalist,
link |
it's pro family, those are safer ideas,
link |
and then there's such a great safety valve,
link |
the most ambitious, smartest people,
link |
like they probably will learn English,
link |
they sort of can look like they belong
link |
in all sorts of other countries,
link |
they can show up and blend in, super talented,
link |
they've probably had an excellent education,
link |
especially if they're from one of the two major cities,
link |
but even if not so, even from Siberia,
link |
and they go off, they leave,
link |
they're not a source of opposition,
link |
and that keeps the whole thing up and running
link |
for another generation.
link |
Yeah, what do you make of the other big player, China?
link |
They seem to have a very different messed up,
link |
but also functioning system.
link |
They seem to be much better at encouraging entrepreneurs.
link |
They're choosing winners,
link |
but what do you make of the entire Chinese system?
link |
Why does it work as well as it does currently?
link |
What are your concerns about it,
link |
and what are its threats to the United States,
link |
or possible, what is it you said,
link |
wisdom isn't when two ideas come together,
link |
is there some possible benefits
link |
of these kinds of ideas coming together?
link |
It's amazing what China has done,
link |
but I would say to put it in perspective,
link |
if you compare them to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan,
link |
Hong Kong, and Singapore,
link |
they've still done much worse, not even close.
link |
And that's both living standards,
link |
or I hesitate to cite democracy
link |
as an unalloyed good in and of itself,
link |
but there's more freedom in all those other places by a lot.
link |
So China has all these problems of history,
link |
but they've managed, as actually the Soviets did
link |
in the middle of the 20th century,
link |
one of the two great mass migrations
link |
from the countryside to cities,
link |
which boosts productivity enormously
link |
and will sustain totalitarian systems,
link |
but they moved from a totalitarian system to an oligarchy
link |
where the CCP is actually, at least for a while,
link |
hey, have been really good at governing,
link |
have made a lot of very good decisions.
link |
You have to admit that.
link |
I don't know how long that streak will continue
link |
with one person so much now holding authority
link |
in a more extreme manner.
link |
The selection pressures for the next generation
link |
of high level CCP members probably become much worse.
link |
You have this general problem of the state owned enterprise
link |
is losing relative productivity
link |
compared to the private sector.
link |
Well, we're gonna kind of hold Jack Ma on this island
link |
and he can only issue like weird hello statements.
link |
It kind of smells bad to me.
link |
I don't feel that it's about to crash,
link |
but I don't see them supplanting America
link |
as like the world's number one country.
link |
I think they will muddle through
link |
and have very serious problems,
link |
but there's enough talent there they will muddle through.
link |
Is there ideas from China or from anywhere in general
link |
of large scale role of government
link |
that you find might be useful?
link |
Like Andrew Yang recently ran on a platform,
link |
UBI, right, Universal Basic Income.
link |
Is there some interesting ideas of large scale
link |
government sort of welfare programs at scale
link |
that you find interesting?
link |
Well, keep in mind the current version
link |
of the Chinese Communist Party post now dismantled
link |
what was called the iron rice ball.
link |
So it took apart the healthcare protections,
link |
a lot of the welfare system, a lot of the guaranteed jobs.
link |
So the economic rise of China coincided
link |
with the weakening of welfare.
link |
I'm not saying that's causal per se,
link |
but people think of China as having a government
link |
that takes care of everyone, it's very far from the truth.
link |
And by a lot of metrics,
link |
I don't mean control over people's lives,
link |
I don't mean speech, but by a lot of metrics,
link |
economically we have a lot more government than they do.
link |
So what one means here by like government, private control,
link |
I don't think you can just add up the numbers
link |
and get a simple answer.
link |
They've been fantastic at building infrastructure in cities
link |
in ways that will attract people from the countryside.
link |
And furthermore, they more or less enforce a meritocracy
link |
Like if you're a kid of a rich guy,
link |
you'll get unfair privilege.
link |
That's unfair, but systems can afford that.
link |
If you are smart and from the countryside
link |
and your parents have nothing,
link |
you will be elevated and sent to a very good school,
link |
graduate school because of the exam system.
link |
And they do that and they mean that very consistently.
link |
It's like the Soviets had a version of that
link |
like for chess and romantic piano.
link |
Not for everything, but where they had it,
link |
like again, they were tremendous, right?
link |
And Chinese have it in so many areas,
link |
a genuine meritocracy in this one way.
link |
That moves people from the rural to the big city
link |
and that's a big boost of productivity
link |
for some amount of time.
link |
And when they get there, they're taken seriously.
link |
Jack Ma was riding a bicycle,
link |
teaching English in his late 20s.
link |
He was a poor guy.
link |
Not a society of credentialism.
link |
Or in America, it's way too much a credentialist society.
link |
As we're talking about even with the Nobel Prize.
link |
But what do you think about these large government programs
link |
The one version of UBI that makes the most sense to me
link |
is the Mitt Romney version, UBI for kids.
link |
Like kids are vulnerable.
link |
If their parents screw up, you shouldn't blame the kid
link |
or make the kids suffer.
link |
I believe in something like UBI for kids.
link |
But if you don't have kids, even with AI,
link |
my sense is at least in the world we know,
link |
you should be able to find a way to adjust.
link |
You might have to move to North Dakota to work,
link |
next to fracking, say.
link |
But look, before the pandemic,
link |
the two most robot intensive societies,
link |
Japan and the US, US at least for manufacturing,
link |
were at full employment.
link |
So maybe there's some far off day
link |
where there's literally no work, John Lennon,
link |
and imagine it's piped everywhere.
link |
And then we might revisit the question.
link |
But for now, we had rising wages in the Trump years
link |
and full employment.
link |
So I don't see the point.
link |
You don't see automation as a threat
link |
that fundamentally shakes our society.
link |
It's a threat in the following sense.
link |
The new technologies are harder to work with
link |
for many people, and that's a social problem.
link |
But I'm not sure a universal basic income
link |
is the right answer to that very real problem.
link |
Well, that's also, I like the UBI for kids.
link |
It's also your definition or the line,
link |
the threshold for what is vulnerable
link |
and what is basic human nature.
link |
Going back to Russia, life is suffering.
link |
That struggle is a part of life.
link |
And perhaps sort of changing,
link |
maybe what defines the 21st century
link |
is having multiple careers
link |
and adjusting and learning and evolving.
link |
And some of the technology in terms of,
link |
some of the technology we see like the internet
link |
allows us to make those pivots easier,
link |
allows later life education possible.
link |
It makes it possible.
link |
And your earlier point about loneliness
link |
being this fundamental human problem,
link |
which I would agree with strongly,
link |
UBI, if it's at a high level, will make that worse.
link |
I mean, say UBI were higher enough,
link |
you could just sit at home.
link |
People are not gonna be happy.
link |
They don't actually want that.
link |
And we've relearned that in the pandemic.
link |
Yeah, the flip side, the hope with UBI
link |
is you have a little bit more freedom
link |
to find the thing that alleviates your loneliness.
link |
So it's kind of an open question.
link |
If I give you a million dollars or a billion dollars,
link |
will you pursue the thing you love?
link |
Will you be more motivated to find the thing you love,
link |
to do the thing you love,
link |
or will you be lazy and lose yourself
link |
in the sort of daily activities
link |
that don't actually bring you joy,
link |
but pacify you in some kind of way
link |
where you just let the days slip by?
link |
That's the open question.
link |
A lot of the great creators did not have huge cushions,
link |
whether it was Mozart or James Brown
link |
or the great painters in history,
link |
they had to work pretty hard.
link |
And if you look at heirs to great fortunes,
link |
maybe I'm forgetting someone,
link |
but it's hard to think of any
link |
who have creatively been important as novelists,
link |
or they might have continued to run the family business.
link |
But Van Gogh was not heir to a great family fortune.
link |
It's sad that cushions get in the way of progress.
link |
It's the same point about prizes, right?
link |
Inheriting too much money is like winning a prize.
link |
We mentioned Eric, Eric Weinstein.
link |
I know you agree on a bunch of things.
link |
Is there some beautiful, fascinating,
link |
insightful disagreement that you have
link |
that has yet to be resolved with him?
link |
Is there some ideas that you guys battle it out on?
link |
Is it the stagnation question that you mentioned?
link |
That's one of them, but here's at least two others.
link |
But I would stress Eric is always evolving.
link |
So I'm just talking about a time slice Eric, right?
link |
I don't know where he's at right now.
link |
Like I heard him on Clubhouse three nights ago,
link |
but that was three nights ago.
link |
But I think he's far too pessimistic
link |
about the impact of immigration on U.S. science.
link |
He thinks it has displaced U.S. scientists,
link |
which I think that is partly true.
link |
I just think we've gotten better talent.
link |
I'm like, bring it on, double down.
link |
And look at Kiriko, who basically came up
link |
with mRNA vaccines, she was from Hungary.
link |
And was ridiculed and mocked,
link |
she couldn't get her papers published.
link |
An American might not have been so stubborn
link |
because we have these cushions.
link |
So Eric is all worried, like mathematicians coming in,
link |
they're discouraging native U.S. citizens from doing math.
link |
I'm like, bring in the best people.
link |
If we all end up in other avocations,
link |
absolutely fine by me.
link |
Does it trouble you that we kick them out
link |
after they get a degree often?
link |
I would give anyone with a plausible graduate degree
link |
a green card, universally.
link |
Yeah, I agree with that, it makes no sense.
link |
It makes so strange that the best people that come here
link |
suffer here, create awesome stuff here,
link |
then when we kick them out, it doesn't make any sense.
link |
Here's another view I have.
link |
I call it open borders for Belarus.
link |
Now Russia's a big country.
link |
I would gladly increase the Russian quota
link |
by three X, four X, five X, not 20%, but a big boost.
link |
But Belarus, a small country, and they're poor,
link |
and they have decent education, and a lot of talent there.
link |
Why can't we just open the door
link |
and convert a Belarus passport to a green card?
link |
Open borders for Belarus, it's my new campaign slogan.
link |
Are you running for president in 2024?
link |
Well, write ins are welcome, but.
link |
Okay, what's the second thing you disagree with, Eric?
link |
Trade, again, I'm not sure where he's at now,
link |
but he is suspicious of trade in a way that I am not.
link |
I do understand what's called the China shock
link |
has been a big problem for the US middle class.
link |
I fully accept that.
link |
I think most of that is behind us.
link |
National security issues aside,
link |
I think free trade is very much a good thing.
link |
Eric, I'm not sure he'll say it's not a good thing,
link |
but he won't say it is a good thing.
link |
And I know he's kind of, it's like, Eric, free trade.
link |
But look, on things like vaccines,
link |
I don't believe in free trade.
link |
You want vaccine production in your own country,
link |
They have enough money, no one will send them vaccines.
link |
What's different about vaccines?
link |
Is it, there's some things you want to prioritize
link |
You could argue it would be cheaper
link |
to produce all US manufactured vaccines in India.
link |
They have the technologies, obviously lower wages,
link |
but look, there's talk in India right now
link |
of cutting off the export of vaccines.
link |
If you outsource your vaccine production,
link |
you're not sure the other country
link |
will respect the norm of free trade.
link |
So you need to keep some vaccine production in your country.
link |
It's an exception to free trade, not to the logic,
link |
a bunch of things the Navy uses.
link |
You can't buy those components from China.
link |
But look, it would be cheaper to do so, right?
link |
Let me completely shift topics
link |
on something that's fascinating.
link |
It's all the same topic, but great.
link |
Everything is interesting.
link |
What do you think about what the hell is money?
link |
And the recent excitement around cryptocurrency
link |
that brings to the forefront
link |
the philosophical discussion of the nature of money.
link |
Are you bullish on cryptocurrency?
link |
Are you excited about it?
link |
What does it make you think about
link |
how the nature of money is changing?
link |
No one knows what money is.
link |
Probably no one ever knew.
link |
Go back to medieval times, bills of exchange.
link |
Maybe it's just a semantic debate.
link |
Gold, silver, what about copper coins?
link |
What about metals that were considered legal tender
link |
but not always circulating?
link |
What about credit?
link |
So being confused about moneyness
link |
is the natural state of affairs for human beings.
link |
And if there's more of that,
link |
I'd say that's probably a good thing.
link |
Now, crypto per se, I think Bitcoin has taken over
link |
a lot of the space held by gold.
link |
That to me seems sustainable.
link |
I'm not short Bitcoin.
link |
I don't have some view that the price
link |
has to be different than the current price,
link |
but I know it changes every moment.
link |
I am deeply uncertain about the less of crypto,
link |
which seems connected to ultimate visions
link |
of using it for transactions in ways where I'm not sure
link |
whether it be prediction markets or DeFi.
link |
I'm not sure the retail demand really is there
link |
once it is regulated like everything else is.
link |
I would say I'm 40, 60 optimistic on those forms of crypto.
link |
That is, I think it's somewhat more likely
link |
they fail than succeed, but I take them very seriously.
link |
So we're talking about it becoming
link |
one of the main currencies in the world.
link |
That's what we're discussing.
link |
That I don't think will happen.
link |
So, but the reality is that Bitcoin used to be
link |
in the single digits of a dollar and now has crossed $50,000
link |
for a single Bitcoin.
link |
Do you think it's possible it reaches
link |
something like a million dollars?
link |
I don't think we have a good theory of the value of Bitcoin.
link |
If people decide it's worth a million dollars,
link |
it's worth a million dollars.
link |
But isn't that money?
link |
Like you said, isn't the ultimate state of money confusion,
link |
however beautifully you put it?
link |
It's like valuing an Andy Warhol painting.
link |
So when Warhol started off,
link |
probably those things had no value.
link |
They were sketches, early sketches of shoes.
link |
Now a good Warhol could be worth over 50 million.
link |
That's an incredible rate of price appreciation.
link |
Bitcoin is seeing a similar trajectory.
link |
I don't pretend to know where it will stop,
link |
but it's about trying to figure out
link |
what do people think of Andy Warhol?
link |
He could be out of fashion in a century.
link |
Maybe yes, maybe no.
link |
But you don't think about Warhols as money.
link |
They perform some money like functions.
link |
You can even use them as collateral
link |
for like deals between gangs.
link |
But they're not basically money, nor is Bitcoin.
link |
And the transactions velocity of Bitcoin,
link |
I would think is likely to fall, if anything.
link |
So you don't think there'll be some kind of phase shift
link |
where it become adopted and become mainstream
link |
for one of the main mechanisms of transactions?
link |
Now, you know, ether has some chance at that.
link |
I would bet against it,
link |
but I wouldn't give you a definitive no.
link |
And you wouldn't put us here.
link |
Bitcoin is too costly.
link |
It may be fine to hold it like gold,
link |
but gold is also costly.
link |
You have smart people trying to make, say, ether,
link |
much more effective as a currency than Bitcoin.
link |
And there's certainly a decent chance they will succeed.
link |
Yeah, there's a lot of innovation.
link |
I mean, with smart contracts, with NFTs as well,
link |
there's a lot of interesting innovations
link |
that are plugging into the human psyche somehow,
link |
just like money does.
link |
You know, money seems to be this viral thing,
link |
our ideas of money, right?
link |
And if the idea is strong enough,
link |
it seems to be able to take hold.
link |
Like there's network effects that just take over.
link |
And like, I particularly see that with,
link |
I'd love to get your comment on Dogecoin,
link |
which is basically by a single human being,
link |
Elon Musk has been created.
link |
You know, it's like these celebrities
link |
can have a huge ripple effect on the impact of money.
link |
Is it possible that in the 21st century,
link |
people like Elon Musk and celebrities,
link |
I don't know, Donald Trump, The Rock,
link |
whoever else, can actually define,
link |
you know, the currencies that we use?
link |
Maybe can Dogecoin become the primary currency of the world?
link |
I think of it as like baseball cards.
link |
So right now, every baseball player has a baseball card.
link |
And the players who are stars,
link |
their cards can end up worth a fair amount of money.
link |
And that's stable, we've had it for many decades.
link |
Sort of the player defines the card,
link |
they sign a contract with Topps or whatever company.
link |
Now, could you imagine celebrities, baseball players,
link |
LeBron James, having their own currencies instead of cards?
link |
Absolutely, and you're somewhat seeing that right now,
link |
as you mentioned, artists with these unique works
link |
on the blockchain.
link |
But I'm not sure those are macroeconomically important.
link |
If it's just a new class of collectibles
link |
that people have fun with, again, I say, bring it on.
link |
But whether there are use cases beyond that,
link |
that challenge fiat monies, which actually work very well.
link |
Yesterday, I sent money to a family in Ethiopia
link |
that I helped support.
link |
In less than 24 hours, they got that money.
link |
No, not digitally, through my bank.
link |
My primitive dinosaur bank, BB&T, Mid Atlantic Bank,
link |
headquartered in North Carolina,
link |
charted by the Fed, regulated by the FDAC and the OCC.
link |
Now, you could say, well, the exchange rate was not so great.
link |
I don't see crypto as close to beating that
link |
once you take into account all of the last mile problems.
link |
Fiat currency works really well.
link |
People are not sitting around bitching about it.
link |
And when you talk to crypto people,
link |
they're crypto people, the number who have to postulate
link |
some out of the blue hyperinflation,
link |
where there's no evidence for that whatsoever,
link |
that to me is a sign they're not thinking clearly
link |
about how hard they have to work
link |
to outcompete fiat currency.
link |
There's a bunch of different technologies
link |
that are really exciting that don't want to address
link |
how difficult it is to outcompete
link |
the current accepted alternative.
link |
So for example, autonomous vehicles.
link |
A lot of people are really excited.
link |
But it's not trivial to outcompete Uber
link |
on the cost and the effectiveness and the user experience
link |
and all those kinds of, sorry, Uber driven by humans.
link |
And it's not, you know, that's taken for granted,
link |
I think, that look, wouldn't it be amazing,
link |
how amazing would the world look
link |
when the cars are driving themselves fully,
link |
you know, it's gonna drive the cost down,
link |
you can remove the cost of drivers,
link |
all those kinds of things.
link |
But it's when you actually get down to it
link |
and have to build a business around it,
link |
it's actually very difficult to do.
link |
And I guess you're saying your sense
link |
is similar competition is facing cryptocurrency.
link |
Like you have to actually present a killer app reason
link |
to switch from fiat currency to Ethereum or to whatever.
link |
And the Biden people are gonna regulate crypto
link |
and they're gonna do it soon.
link |
So something like DeFi, I fully get why that is cheaper
link |
or for some can be cheaper than other ways
link |
of conducting financial intermediation.
link |
But some of that is regulatory arbitrage.
link |
It will not be allowed to go on forever
link |
for better or worse.
link |
I would rather see it given greater tolerance.
link |
But the point is banking lobby is strong.
link |
The government will only let it run so far.
link |
There'll be capital requirements,
link |
reporting requirements imposed,
link |
and it will lose a lot of those advantages.
link |
What do you make of Wall Street bets?
link |
Another thing that recently happened
link |
that shook the world and at least me
link |
from the outside of perspective,
link |
make me question what I do
link |
and don't understand about our economics.
link |
Which is a bunch of different,
link |
a large number of individuals
link |
getting together on the internet
link |
and having a large scale impact on the markets.
link |
If you tell a group of people
link |
and coordinate them through the internet,
link |
we're gonna play a fun game, it might cost you money,
link |
but you're gonna make the headlines
link |
and there's a chance you'll screw over
link |
some billionaires and hedge funds.
link |
Enough people will play that game.
link |
So that game might continue,
link |
but I don't think it's of macroeconomic importance.
link |
And the price of those stocks in the medium term
link |
will end up wherever it ought to be.
link |
So these are little outliers
link |
from a macroeconomics perspective.
link |
They're not going to,
link |
these are not signals of shifting power,
link |
like from centralized power to distributed power.
link |
These aren't some fundamental changes in the way
link |
our economy works.
link |
I think of it as a new brand of eSports,
link |
maybe more fun than the old brand.
link |
Which is fine, right?
link |
It's like push the anarchy into the corners
link |
where you want it.
link |
It doesn't bother me,
link |
but I think people are seeing it
link |
as more fun than it is.
link |
It's a new eSport, more fun for many,
link |
but more expensive than the old eSports.
link |
Like chess is a new eSport, super cheap,
link |
not as fun as like sending hedge funds to their doom,
link |
but like, what would you expect?
link |
The poetry, I love it, okay.
link |
But macroeconomically, it's not fundamental.
link |
Okay, I was going to say, I hope you're right,
link |
because I'm uncomfortable with the chaos
link |
of the masses that's creates.
link |
But I also think that chaos is somewhat real to be clear,
link |
but it will matter through other channels,
link |
not through manipulating GameStop or AMC.
link |
So you're seeing the real macro phenomenon.
link |
When people see a real macro phenomenon,
link |
they tend to make every micro story fit the narrative.
link |
And this micro story, like it fits the narrative,
link |
but it doesn't mean its importance fits the narrative.
link |
That's how I would kind of dissect the mistake
link |
I think people are making.
link |
The macro phenomenon that are there, do you mean?
link |
Everyone's weird now, the internet.
link |
Either allows us to be weirder or makes us weirder.
link |
I'm not sure what's the right way to put it.
link |
Maybe a mix of both.
link |
You're probably right that it allows us to be weirder
link |
because, well, this is the other, okay.
link |
So this connects our previous conversation.
link |
Does America allow us to be weirder
link |
or does it make us weirder?
link |
Like say we're weird and somewhat neurotic to begin with,
link |
but the only messages we get are Dwight D. Eisenhower
link |
and I Love Lucy and network TV.
link |
Like that's going to keep us within certain bounds.
link |
In good and bad ways.
link |
That's obviously totally gone.
link |
And the internet, you can connect to not just QAnon,
link |
but all sorts of things.
link |
Many of them just fantastic, right?
link |
But in good and bad ways, it makes us weirder.
link |
So that maybe is troubling, right?
link |
Like if someone's worried about that,
link |
I would at least say they should
link |
give it deep serious thought.
link |
And then it has a whole lot of ebbs and flows,
link |
micro realizations of the weirdness
link |
that don't actually matter.
link |
So like chess players today,
link |
they play a lot more weird openings
link |
than they did 20 years ago.
link |
Like it reflects the same thing
link |
because you can research any weird opening on the internet,
link |
but like, does that matter?
link |
So a lot of the things we see
link |
are just like the weird chess openings.
link |
And to figure out which are like the weird chess openings
link |
and which are fundamental to the new and growing weirdness,
link |
like that's what a hedge fund investor type
link |
should be trying to do.
link |
I just think no one knows yet.
link |
It's like this itself, this fun weird guessing game,
link |
which we're partly engaging in right now.
link |
And I mean, as Eric talks about
link |
on the science side of things,
link |
I mean, I said like at MIT,
link |
especially in the machine learning field,
link |
there's a natural institutional resistance to the weird.
link |
It's very, as they talk about,
link |
it's difficult to hire weird faculty, for example.
link |
You want to hire and give tenure to people that are safe
link |
And that's one of the concerns is like,
link |
it seems like the weird people
link |
are the ones that push the science forward usually.
link |
And so like, how do you balance the two?
link |
Because it's another area where Eric and I disagree.
link |
As I interpret him,
link |
he thinks academia is totally bankrupt.
link |
And I think it's only partially bankrupt.
link |
Because I'm with you, I'm bullish on academia.
link |
You need up and coming schools
link |
that end up better than where they started off.
link |
And MIT was once one of them.
link |
Now they're not in every area.
link |
In some areas, they have become the problem.
link |
UChicago, you wouldn't call it up and coming,
link |
but it's still different.
link |
Let's hope they manage to keep it that way.
link |
The biggest problem to me is the rank absurd conformism.
link |
I kind of second tier schools,
link |
maybe in the top 40, but not in the top dozen,
link |
that are just trying to be like a junior MIT,
link |
but it's mediocre and copycat.
link |
And they're the most dogmatic enforcers of weirdness
link |
that like Harvard is more open
link |
than those second tier schools.
link |
And those second tier schools
link |
are pretty good typically, right?
link |
But the mediocrity is enforced there.
link |
And the homogenization pressures.
link |
Climb the rankings by another three places
link |
and be a little closer to MIT,
link |
though you'll never touch them.
link |
That to me is very harmful.
link |
And you'd rather they be more like Chicago,
link |
more like Caltech, or the older Caltech all the more,
link |
like pick some model, be weird in it.
link |
That's socially better.
link |
Yeah, but so the problem with MIT, for example,
link |
is the mediocrity is really enforced on the junior faculty.
link |
So like the people that are allowed to be weird,
link |
or actually they just don't even ask for permissions anymore
link |
are more senior faculty.
link |
And that's good, of course,
link |
but you want the weird young people.
link |
I find too, this podcast, I like talking to tech people,
link |
and I find the young faculty to be really boring.
link |
They're the most boring of faculty.
link |
Their work is interesting technically,
link |
technically, but just the passion.
link |
And some of them sneak by.
link |
Like you have like the Max Tegmark,
link |
young version of Max Tegmark,
link |
who knows how to play the role of boring and fitting in.
link |
And then on the side, he does the weird shit.
link |
But they're far and few in between,
link |
which I'd love to figure out a way to shake up that system
link |
because as you look at MIT's Broad Institute, right,
link |
in biomedical, it's been a huge hit.
link |
I'm not privy to their internal doings,
link |
but I suspect they support weird
link |
more than the formal departments do at the junior level.
link |
Yes, that's probably true.
link |
Yeah, I don't know what, whatever they're doing,
link |
it's working, but we needed to figure it out
link |
because I think the best ideas still do come from the,
link |
so forget, my apologies,
link |
but for the humanities side of things,
link |
I don't know anything about,
link |
but the engineering and the science side,
link |
I think there's so many amazing ideas
link |
that are still coming from universities.
link |
It's not true that you don't know anything
link |
about the humanities.
link |
You're doing the humanities right now.
link |
Talking about people,
link |
there are no numbers put on a blackboard, right?
link |
There's no hypothesis testing per se.
link |
You have however many subscribers to your podcast,
link |
all listening to you on the humanities.
link |
Every, whatever your frequency is.
link |
But I'm not in the department of the humanities.
link |
That's why it's innovative.
link |
They have very different conversations.
link |
There's the number of emails I get about,
link |
listen, I really deeply respect diversity
link |
and the full scope of what diversity means
link |
and also the more narrow scope of different races
link |
and genders and so on.
link |
It's a really important topic,
link |
but there's a disproportionate number of emails
link |
I'm getting about meetings and discussions
link |
and that just kind of is overwhelming.
link |
I don't get enough emails from people,
link |
like a meeting about why are all your ideas bad?
link |
Let's, for example, let me call out MIT.
link |
Why don't we do more?
link |
Why don't we kick Stanford's ass or Google's ass,
link |
more importantly, in deep learning and machine learning
link |
What CSAIL, for example, used to be a laboratory
link |
is a laboratory for artificial intelligence research.
link |
And why is that not the beacon of greatness
link |
in artificial intelligence?
link |
Let's have those meetings as well.
link |
Diversity talk has oddly become this new mechanism
link |
for enforcing conformity.
link |
And right, so it's almost like this conformity mechanism
link |
finds the hot new topic to use
link |
to enforce further conformity.
link |
Oh boy, I still, I remain optimistic.
link |
The humanities have innovated through podcasts,
link |
including yours and mine, and they're alive and well.
link |
All the bad talk you hear about the humanities
link |
in universities, there's been this huge end run
link |
of innovation on the internet and it's amazing.
link |
I never thought of, I mean, this is humanities.
link |
This podcast is right.
link |
It's like you've been speaking prose all one's life
link |
and didn't know it, right?
link |
Yeah, I am actually part of the humanities department
link |
I did not realize this and I will fully embrace it
link |
from this moment on.
link |
Look, you have this thing, the Media Lab.
link |
I'm sure you know about it.
link |
Done some excellent things, done a lot of very bogus things,
link |
but you're out competing them.
link |
You're blowing them out of the water.
link |
Like you are them.
link |
Yeah, I mean, and I'm talking to those folks
link |
and they're just trying to, well,
link |
they're just trying to figure it out.
link |
I mean, they had their issues with Jeff Epstein and so on,
link |
but outside of that, there's a,
link |
I've actually gone through a shift
link |
with this particular podcast, for example,
link |
where at first it was seen as a,
link |
one, at the very first it was seen as a distraction.
link |
Second, it was a source of like,
link |
almost like a kind of jealousy,
link |
like the same kind of jealousy you feel
link |
when junior faculty outshines the senior faculty.
link |
And now it's more like, oh, okay, this is a thing.
link |
Like we should do more of that.
link |
We should embrace this guy.
link |
We should embrace this thing.
link |
So there's a sense that podcasting and whatever this is,
link |
it doesn't have to be podcasting,
link |
will drive some innovation within MIT,
link |
within different universities.
link |
There's a sense that things are changing.
link |
It's just that universities lag behind.
link |
And my hope is that they catch up quickly.
link |
They innovate in some way that goes along
link |
with the innovations of the internet.
link |
I think the internet will outrace them
link |
for a long time, maybe forever.
link |
Well, I mean, but it's okay if they're,
link |
as long as they're keeping.
link |
Yeah, and we're both in universities.
link |
So we have multiple hats on here as we're speaking.
link |
So we can complain about the universities,
link |
but that's like complaining about the podcast, right?
link |
But speaking on the weird,
link |
you've in the best sense of the word weird,
link |
you've written about and made the case
link |
that we should take UFO sightings more seriously.
link |
So that's one of the things that I've been inundated with,
link |
sort of the excitement and the passion that people have
link |
for the possibility of extraterrestrial life,
link |
of life out there in the universe.
link |
I've always felt this excitement.
link |
I was just looking up at the stars
link |
and wondering what the hell's out there.
link |
But there's people that have more like,
link |
more grounded excitement and passion
link |
of actually interacting with aliens
link |
on this here, our planet.
link |
What's the case from your perspective
link |
for taking these sightings more seriously?
link |
The data from the Navy, to me, seem quite serious.
link |
I don't pretend that I have the technical abilities
link |
to judge it as data,
link |
but there are numerous senators
link |
at the very highest of levels,
link |
former heads of CIA, Brennan.
link |
I talked to him, did an interview with him.
link |
I asked him, what's up with these?
link |
What do you think it is?
link |
He basically said that was the single most likely explanation
link |
was of alien origin.
link |
Now you don't have to agree with him.
link |
But look, if you know how government works, these senators,
link |
or Hillary Clinton, for that matter, or Brennan,
link |
they sat down, they were briefed by their smartest people,
link |
and they said, hey, what's going on here?
link |
And everyone around the table, I believe,
link |
is telling them, we don't know.
link |
And that is sociological data I take very seriously.
link |
I have not seen a debunking of the technical data,
link |
which is eyewitness reports and images and radar.
link |
Again, I don't pretend that I have the technical abilities
link |
or again, at a technical level,
link |
I feel quite uncertain on that turf.
link |
But evaluating through the testimony of witnesses,
link |
it seems to me it's now at a threshold
link |
where one ought to take it seriously.
link |
Yeah, one of the problems with UFO sightings
link |
is that because of people with good equipment
link |
don't take it seriously, it's such a taboo topic,
link |
that you have just like really shitty equipment
link |
And so you have the blurry Bigfoot kind of situation
link |
where you have just bad video and all those kinds of things.
link |
As opposed to, I mean, there's a bunch of people,
link |
Avi Lo from Harvard talking about Oumuamua.
link |
It's just like people with the equipment
link |
to do the data collection don't want to help out.
link |
And that creates a kind of divide
link |
where the scientists ignore that this is happening
link |
and there's the masses of people who are curious about it.
link |
And then there's the government that's full of secrets
link |
that's leaking some confusion
link |
and it creates distrust in the government,
link |
it creates distrust in science
link |
and it prevents the scientists
link |
from being able to explore some cool topics,
link |
some exciting possibilities that they should be,
link |
be curious kids like Avi talks about.
link |
Even if it has nothing to do with aliens,
link |
whatever the answer is, it has to be something fascinating.
link |
We already know everything's interesting,
link |
but this is fascinating.
link |
But look, that all said,
link |
I suspect they're not of alien origin.
link |
And let me tell you my reason.
link |
The people who are all gung ho,
link |
they do a kind of reasoning in reverse
link |
or argument from elimination.
link |
They figure out a bunch of things that can't be,
link |
like is it a Russian advanced vehicle?
link |
No, probably pretty good arguments there.
link |
Is it a Chinese advanced vehicle?
link |
Is it people like from the earth's future
link |
coming back in time?
link |
And they go through a few others.
link |
They have some really good no arguments.
link |
Then they're like, well, what we've got left is aliens.
link |
This argument from elimination,
link |
I don't actually find that persuasive.
link |
You can talk yourself into a lot of mistaken ideas that way.
link |
The positive evidence that it's aliens is still quite weak.
link |
The positive evidence that it's a puzzle is quite huge.
link |
And whatever the solution to the puzzle is,
link |
it might be fascinating.
link |
And it's gonna be so weird or fascinating
link |
or maybe even trivial, but that's weird in its own way,
link |
that we can't set up by elimination
link |
all the things that might be able to be.
link |
Yeah, and just like you said,
link |
the debunking that I've seen of these kinds of things
link |
are less explorations and solutions to the puzzle
link |
and more a kind of halfhearted dismissal.
link |
And Avi, as you mentioned to him on your podcast with him,
link |
he's been attacked an awful lot.
link |
And when I hear the idea carrier attacked,
link |
I get very suspicious of the critics.
link |
If he's wrong, like just tell me why.
link |
Like my ears are open.
link |
I don't have a set view on Oumuamua, you know.
link |
I know I can't judge Avi's arguments.
link |
He can't convince me in that sense.
link |
I'm too stupid to understand
link |
how good his argument may or may not be.
link |
And like you said, ultimately,
link |
in the argument, in the meeting of that debate
link |
is where we find the wisdom.
link |
Like dismissing it, there's one other thing
link |
There's a bunch of people,
link |
like Nietzsche sometimes dismiss this way.
link |
Ayn Rand is sometimes dismissed this way.
link |
Like there's a, as opposed to arguing against her ideas,
link |
dismissing it outright.
link |
And that's not productive at all.
link |
She may be wrong on a lot of things,
link |
but like laying out some arguments,
link |
even if they're basic human arguments,
link |
that's where we arrive at the wisdom.
link |
Is there something deeper to be said
link |
about our trust in institutions and governments and so on
link |
that has to do with UFOs?
link |
That there's a kind of suspicion
link |
that the US government and governments in general
link |
are hiding stuff from us when you talk about UFOs.
link |
This is my view on that.
link |
If we declassified everything,
link |
I think we would find a lot more evidence
link |
all pointing toward the same puzzle.
link |
There aren't some alien men being held underground.
link |
There's not some secret file that lays out
link |
whatever is happening.
link |
I think the real lesson about government
link |
is government cannot bring itself to any new belief
link |
on this matter of any kind.
link |
And it's a kind of funny inertia.
link |
Like government is deeply puzzled.
link |
They're more puzzled than they want to admit to us,
link |
which I'm okay with that, actually.
link |
They shouldn't just be out panicking people in the streets.
link |
But at the end of the day,
link |
it's a bit like approving the AstraZeneca vaccine,
link |
which does work and they haven't approved it.
link |
When are they gonna do it?
link |
When is our government actually, if only internally,
link |
gonna take this more than just seriously,
link |
but take it truly seriously?
link |
And I just don't know if we have that capability,
link |
kind of mentally, to sound like Eric Weinstein
link |
for another moment.
link |
And to stay on the same topic,
link |
although on the surface shifting completely,
link |
because it is all the same topic.
link |
You have written and studied art.
link |
Why do you think we humans long to create art,
link |
human society in general and just the human mind?
link |
Well, most of us don't really long to create art, right?
link |
I would start with that point.
link |
You think that's a unique weirdness
link |
of some particular humans?
link |
I think, I don't know, 10% of humans roughly,
link |
which is a lot, but it is somewhat weird.
link |
I don't aspire to create art.
link |
You could say, like writing nonfiction,
link |
there's something art like about it,
link |
but it's a different urge, I would say.
link |
So why do some people have it?
link |
I think human brains are very different.
link |
It's a different notion of working through a problem.
link |
Like you and I enjoy working through analytic problems.
link |
For me, economics, for you, AI and other areas,
link |
or your humanities podcast, but that's fun.
link |
For that problem to be visual
link |
and linked to physical materials
link |
and putting those like on a canvas,
link |
to me, it's not a huge leap,
link |
but I really don't wanna do it.
link |
Like it would be pain.
link |
If you paid me like 500 bucks to spend an hour painting,
link |
I don't know, is that worth it?
link |
Maybe, but like, I'm happy when that hour's over.
link |
And would not be proud or happy with the result.
link |
I don't think I would do it actually.
link |
Do you think you're suppressing some deep, I mean?
link |
Now, when I was young, I played the guitar
link |
as you played the guitar and that I greatly enjoyed,
link |
although I was never good,
link |
but it helped me appreciate music much, much more.
link |
Well, this is the question.
link |
Okay, so from the perspective of the observer
link |
and appreciator of art, you said good.
link |
Is there such a concept as good in art?
link |
There's clearly a concept of bad.
link |
My guitar playing fit that concept.
link |
But I wasn't trying to be good.
link |
I wanted to learn like how do chords work?
link |
How does a jazz improvisation work?
link |
How is blues different?
link |
Classical guitar, sort of physically,
link |
how do you make those sounds?
link |
And I did learn those things.
link |
And you can't learn everything about them,
link |
but you can learn a lot about them without ever being good
link |
or even trying to be that good.
link |
But I could play all the notes.
link |
So from the observer perspective,
link |
what do you, I apologize for the absurd question,
link |
but what do you use the most beautiful
link |
and maybe moving piece of art you've encountered
link |
It's not an absurd question at all.
link |
And I think about this quite a bit.
link |
I would say the two winners by a clear margin
link |
are both by Michelangelo.
link |
It's the Pieta in the Vatican
link |
and the David statue in Florence.
link |
Historical context or just purity, the creation itself?
link |
I don't think you can view it apart from historical context
link |
and being in Florence or in the Vatican,
link |
you're already primed for a lot, right?
link |
You can't pull that out.
link |
But just technically how they express
link |
the emotion of human form,
link |
I do honestly intellectually think
link |
they're the two greatest artworks for doing that.
link |
That's not all that art does.
link |
Not all art is about the human form,
link |
but they are phenomenal.
link |
And I think critical opinion, not that everyone agrees,
link |
but my view is not considered a crazy one
link |
within the broader court of critical opinion.
link |
Now in painting, I think the most I was ever blown away
link |
was to see Vermeer's artwork.
link |
It's called The Art of Painting and it's in Vienna
link |
in the Kunsthistorisches Museum.
link |
And I saw that, I think I was 23.
link |
It just stunned me because I'd seen reproductions,
link |
but live in front of you in huge,
link |
a completely different artwork.
link |
And again, Vienna, primed.
link |
Yes, and I was living abroad for the first time
link |
and Vienna itself, the city and so on.
link |
Now, unlike the Michelangelo's,
link |
that is not my current favorite painting,
link |
but that would be like historically the one I would pick.
link |
What do you make in the context of those choices?
link |
What do you make of modern art?
link |
And I apologize if I'm not using the correct terminology,
link |
but art that maybe goes another level of weird
link |
outside of the art that you've kind of mentioned
link |
and breaks all the conventions and rules and so on
link |
and becomes something else entirely
link |
that doesn't make sense in the same way
link |
I think a lot of it is phenomenal.
link |
And I would say the single biggest mistake
link |
that really smart people make is to think contemporary art
link |
or music for that matter is just a load of junk or rubbish.
link |
It's just like a kind of mathematics
link |
they haven't learned yet.
link |
It's really hard to learn.
link |
Maybe some people can never learn it,
link |
but there's a very large community of super smart,
link |
well educated people who spend their lives with it,
link |
Those are genuine pleasures.
link |
They understand it.
link |
They talk about it with the common language.
link |
And to think that somehow they're all frauds,
link |
it just isn't true.
link |
Like one doesn't have to like it oneself,
link |
just like Love House may or may not be your thing,
link |
but it is amazing and for me personally, highly rewarding.
link |
And if someone doesn't get it,
link |
I do kind of have the conceited response of thinking
link |
like in that area, I'm just smarter than you are.
link |
Yeah, so the interesting thing is as with most...
link |
We get back to Eric Weinstein again.
link |
He's in general smarter than I am, this I get.
link |
But when it comes to contemporary artistic creations,
link |
I'm smarter than he is.
link |
So he's not a fan of contemporary art?
link |
I don't want to speak for him.
link |
I've heard him say derogatory...
link |
He's evolving always.
link |
He's evolving always.
link |
I've heard him say derogatory things about some of it.
link |
Doesn't mean he doesn't love some other parts of it.
link |
So I wonder if there's just a higher learning curve,
link |
a steeper learning curve for contemporary art,
link |
meaning like it takes more work to appreciate the stories,
link |
the context from which they're like thinking about this work.
link |
It feels like in order to appreciate the art contemporary,
link |
certain pieces of contemporary art,
link |
you have to know the story better behind the art.
link |
I think that's true for many people,
link |
but I think it's a funny shape distribution
link |
because there's a whole other set of people.
link |
Sometimes they're small children
link |
and they get abstract art more easily.
link |
You show them Vermeer or Rembrandt, they don't get it.
link |
But just like a wall of color, they're in love with it.
link |
So I don't think I know the full story.
link |
Again, some strange kind of distribution.
link |
The entry barriers are super high or super low,
link |
but not that often in between.
link |
But you would challenge saying
link |
that there's a lot to be explored in contemporary art.
link |
It's just you need to learn.
link |
Yeah, it's one of the most profound bodies
link |
of human thought out there.
link |
And it's part of the humanities.
link |
And yes, there are people who also don't like podcasts,
link |
You've also been a scholar of food.
link |
We're just going through the entirety
link |
of the human experience today on this humanities podcast.
link |
Another absurd question, say this conversation
link |
is the last thing you ever do in your life.
link |
I, wearing the suit, would murder you
link |
at the end of the conversation.
link |
So this is your last day on earth,
link |
but I would offer you a last meal.
link |
What would that meal contain?
link |
We can also travel to other parts of the world.
link |
Well, we have to travel
link |
because my preferred last meal here,
link |
I probably had like two nights ago.
link |
Can you describe or no?
link |
The best restaurant around here is called Mama Chang's
link |
and it's in Fairfax and it's food from Wuhan actually.
link |
And they take pandemic safety seriously
link |
in addition to the food being very good.
link |
But this is what I would do.
link |
I would fly to Hermosillo in Northern Mexico,
link |
which has some of the best food in Mexico,
link |
but I sadly only had two days there.
link |
So somewhere like Oaxaca, Puebla,
link |
I think they have food just as good
link |
or some people would say better,
link |
but I've spent a lot of time in those places.
link |
So the scarce, wait, is it possible the scarcity of time
link |
contributed to the richness of the experience?
link |
Of course, but the point is that scarcity still holds.
link |
So I want one more dose of the food from Hermosillo.
link |
Can you describe what the food is?
link |
It's the one kind of Mexican food that at least nominally
link |
is just like the Mexican food you get in the US.
link |
So there are burritos, there's fajitas.
link |
It doesn't taste at all like our stuff.
link |
But again, nominally, it's the part of Mexican food
link |
that made it into the US was then transformed.
link |
But it's in a way the most familiar.
link |
But for that reason, it's the most radical
link |
because you have to rethink all these things you know
link |
and they're way better in Hermosillo.
link |
Hardly any tourists go there.
link |
Like there's nothing to see in Hermosillo.
link |
Nothing you do other than eat.
link |
It's not ruined by any outsiders.
link |
It's this longstanding tradition, dirt cheap.
link |
And the thing to do there is just sweet talk a taxi driver
link |
into first taking you seriously
link |
and then trusting you enough to know that you trust him
link |
to bring you to the very best like food stands.
link |
So where's the magic of that nominally similar
link |
entity of the burrito?
link |
Where's the magic come from?
link |
Is it the taxi ride?
link |
Is it the whole experience
link |
or is there something actually in the food?
link |
So well, you can break the food down part by part.
link |
So if you think of the beef,
link |
the beef there will be dry aged just out in the air
link |
in a way the FDA here would never permit.
link |
Like they dry age it till it turns green,
link |
but it is phenomenal.
link |
The quality of the chilies.
link |
So here there's only a small number
link |
of kinds of chilies you can get.
link |
In most parts of Mexico,
link |
there's quite a large number of chilies you can get.
link |
They're different, they're fresher,
link |
but it's just like a different thing.
link |
The chilies, the wheat used.
link |
So this is wheat territory, not corn territory,
link |
which is a self interesting.
link |
The wheat is more diverse and more complex.
link |
Here it's more homogenized, obviously cheaper,
link |
more efficient, but there it is better.
link |
Non pasteurized cheeses are legal in all parts of Mexico
link |
and they can be white and gooey and amazing
link |
in a way that here again, it's just against the law.
link |
You could legalize them.
link |
The demand wouldn't be that great.
link |
There's a black market in these cheeses
link |
that Latino groceries around here,
link |
but you just can't get that much of it.
link |
So the cheese, the meat, the wheat,
link |
all different in significant ways.
link |
The chilies, I don't think the onions really matter much.
link |
Garlic, I don't know.
link |
I wouldn't put much stock in that,
link |
but that's a lot of the core food
link |
and then it's cooked much better
link |
and everything's super fresh.
link |
The food chain is not relying on refrigeration.
link |
And this is one thing Russia and US have in common.
link |
We were early pioneers in food refrigeration
link |
and that made a lot of our foods worse quite early.
link |
And it took us a long time to dig out of that
link |
because big countries, right?
link |
You've had an extensive rail system in Russia,
link |
USSR a long time, which makes it easier to freeze
link |
What about the actual cooking, the chef?
link |
Is there an artistry to the simple?
link |
I hesitate to call the burrito simple, but.
link |
And there's no brain drain out of cooking.
link |
So if you're in the United States and you're very talented,
link |
I'm not saying there aren't talented chefs.
link |
Of course there are,
link |
but there's so many other things to pull people away.
link |
But in Mexico, there's so much talent going into food
link |
as there is in China,
link |
which would be another candidate for last meal questions.
link |
Or, oh, India, let's not even get started on India.
link |
You've also, I mean, there's a million things
link |
we could talk about here,
link |
but you've written about your own dreams of sushi.
link |
It's just a really clean, good example
link |
that people are aware of of mastery
link |
in the art of the simple in food.
link |
What do you make of that kind of obsessive pursuit
link |
of perfection in creating simple food?
link |
Sushi is about perfection,
link |
but it's a bit like the Beatles White album,
link |
which people think is simple and not overproduced.
link |
It's in a funny way their most overproduced album,
link |
but it's produced just perfectly.
link |
It's really hard to produce music to the point
link |
where it's gonna sound so simple and not sound like sludge.
link |
Like Let It Be album, it has some great songs,
link |
but a lot of it sounds like sludge.
link |
One After 909, that's sludge.
link |
I Dig A Pony, it's sludge.
link |
Like it's a bit interesting.
link |
It's not that good.
link |
It doesn't sound that good.
link |
White album, like the best half, like Dear Prudence,
link |
sounds perfect, sounds simple.
link |
Cry Baby Cry, it's not simple.
link |
Back in the USSR, super complex.
link |
So sushi is like that.
link |
It's because it's so incredibly not simple
link |
starting with the rice.
link |
You try to refine it to make it appear super simple,
link |
and that's the most complex thing of all.
link |
I mean, we're not talking about days, weeks, months.
link |
We're talking about years, generations
link |
of doing the same thing over and over and over again.
link |
Do you admire that kind of sticking to the,
link |
we talked about our admiration of the weird.
link |
That doesn't feel weird.
link |
That seems like discipline and dedication
link |
to like a stoic minimalism or something like that.
link |
I'm happy they do it, but I actually feel bad about it.
link |
I feel they're sacrificial victims to me,
link |
which I benefit from.
link |
But don't you ever think like,
link |
gee, you're a great master sushi chef.
link |
Wouldn't you be happier if you did something else?
link |
Doesn't seem to happen.
link |
That might be something that a weird mind would think.
link |
Maybe it is weird people,
link |
and maybe they're really enjoying it,
link |
but like to learn how to pack rice for 10 years
link |
before they let you do anything else.
link |
It's like these Indian, you know, sarod players.
link |
They just spent five years tapping out rhythms
link |
before they're allowed to touch their instruments.
link |
Well, actually to defend that.
link |
It's kind of like graduate school, right?
link |
Well, I think graduate school, perhaps.
link |
Graduate school is full of,
link |
like every single day is full of surprises, I would say.
link |
I did martial arts for a long time.
link |
I do martial arts, and I've always loved,
link |
it's kind of the Russian way of drilling,
link |
is doing the same technique.
link |
I don't know if this applies
link |
into intellectual or academic disciplines,
link |
where you can do the same thing over and over and over again,
link |
thousands and thousands and thousands of times.
link |
What I've discovered through that process
link |
is you get to start to appreciate the tiniest of details
link |
and find the beauty in them.
link |
People who go to like monasteries to meditate
link |
talk about this, is when you just sit in silence
link |
and don't do anything,
link |
you start to appreciate how much complexity and beauty
link |
there is in just the movement of a finger.
link |
Like you can spend the whole day joyously thinking about
link |
how fun it is to move a finger.
link |
And then you can almost become your full weird self
link |
about the tiniest details of life.
link |
As a thing, you've got to wonder,
link |
like, is there a free lunch in there?
link |
Are the rest of us moving around too much?
link |
They sure feel like they found a free lunch.
link |
The people meditate, they're onto something.
link |
I tend to think it's like artists,
link |
that some percent of people are like that,
link |
And for most of us, there's no free lunch.
link |
Like my free lunch is to move around a lot.
link |
In search of lunch, in fact.
link |
Well, with all the food talk, you made me hungry.
link |
What books, three or so books,
link |
if any come to mind, technical fiction, philosophical,
link |
would you recommend, had a big impact on you,
link |
or you just drew some insights from throughout your life?
link |
Well, two of them we've already discussed.
link |
One is Plato's Dialogues,
link |
which I started reading when I was like 13.
link |
Another is Ayn Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal.
link |
But I would say the Friedrich Hayek essay,
link |
The Use of Knowledge in Society,
link |
which is about how decentralized mechanisms can work,
link |
also why they might go wrong.
link |
And that's where you start to understand
link |
the price system, capitalism.
link |
And that was in a book called
link |
Individualism and Economic Order,
link |
but it was just a few essays in that book.
link |
Those are maybe the three I would cite.
link |
Can you elaborate a little bit on the...
link |
Say the price of copper goes up, right?
link |
Because there's a problem with the copper mine
link |
in Chile or Bolivia.
link |
So the price of copper goes up.
link |
All around the world, people are led to economize copper,
link |
to look for substitutes for copper,
link |
to change their production processes,
link |
to change the goods and services they buy,
link |
to build homes a different way.
link |
And this one event creates
link |
this one tiny change in information.
link |
This gets into your AI work very directly.
link |
And how much complexity that one change engenders
link |
in a meaningful, coherent way,
link |
how the different pieces of the price system fit together.
link |
Hayek really laid out very clearly.
link |
And it's like an AI problem.
link |
And how well, not for everything,
link |
but for many things, we solve that AI problem.
link |
I learned, I was, I think 13, maybe 14 when I read Hayek.
link |
Yeah, the distributed nature of things there.
link |
And it's like your work on human attention,
link |
like how much can we take in?
link |
Very often not that much.
link |
And how many of the advances of modern civilization
link |
you need to understand as a response to that constraint.
link |
I got that also from Hayek.
link |
And what's the title of the book again?
link |
It's reprinted in a lot of books at this point.
link |
But back then the book was called
link |
Individualism and Economic Order.
link |
But the essay is online.
link |
Hayek, Use of Knowledge in Society.
link |
There are open access versions of it through Google.
link |
And you don't need the whole book.
link |
So it's a very good book.
link |
Again, one of those profound looking over the ocean,
link |
maybe sitting on a porch,
link |
maybe with a drink of some kind.
link |
And a young kid comes by and asks you for advice.
link |
What advice would you give to?
link |
So, okay, after that,
link |
what advice would you give to a young person today
link |
as they take on life?
link |
Whether a career in academia in general or just a life,
link |
which is probably more important than career.
link |
Most good advice is context specific.
link |
But here are my two generic pieces of advice.
link |
First, get a mentor.
link |
Both career, but anything you wanna learn.
link |
Like say you wanna learn about contemporary art.
link |
People write me this.
link |
Oh, what book should I read?
link |
It's probably not gonna work that way.
link |
You need a mentor.
link |
Yes, you should read some books on it.
link |
But you want a mentor to help you frame them,
link |
take you around to some art, talk about it with you.
link |
So get as many mentors as you can
link |
in the things you wanna learn.
link |
Can I ask you a quick tangent on that?
link |
Presumably a good mentor.
link |
I'm begging the question in there.
link |
It's complicated, right?
link |
Well, it is complicated.
link |
Is there a lot of damage to be done from a bad mentor?
link |
I don't think that much
link |
because it's very easy to drop mentors.
link |
And in fact, it's quite hard to maintain them.
link |
Good mentors tend to be busy.
link |
Bad mentors tend to be busy.
link |
And you can try on mentors
link |
and maybe they're not good for you,
link |
but there's a good chance you'll learn something.
link |
Like I had a mentor, I was an undergrad.
link |
He was a Stalinist.
link |
He edited the book called The Essential Stalin.
link |
I learned a tremendous amount from him.
link |
Was he like as a Stalinist a good mentor for me?
link |
But for a year it was tremendous.
link |
He introduced me like to Soviet
link |
and Eastern European science fiction
link |
because he was a Marxist.
link |
Like that's what I took from him among other things.
link |
Any advice on finding a good mentor?
link |
Daniel Kahneman has...
link |
Somebody just popped this to mind
link |
as somebody who was able to find
link |
exceptionally good collaborators throughout his life.
link |
There's not many bright minds that find collaborators.
link |
They often, which I ultimately see what a mentor is.
link |
Be interesting, be direct and try.
link |
It's not like a perfect formula,
link |
but it's amazing how many people
link |
don't even do those things.
link |
Be interesting, be direct and try.
link |
Like what you want from a better known person,
link |
I would just say be very direct with them.
link |
What's the second piece of advice?
link |
Build small groups of peers.
link |
They don't have to be your age,
link |
but very often they'll be your age,
link |
especially if you're younger
link |
with broadly similar interests,
link |
but there can be different points of view.
link |
People you hang out with,
link |
which can include in a WhatsApp group online
link |
and like every day or almost every day,
link |
they're talking about the thing you care about,
link |
trying to solve problems in that thing.
link |
And that's your small group and you really like them
link |
and they like you and you care
link |
what you think about each other
link |
and you have this common interest.
link |
That's for human connection
link |
or that's for development of ideas?
link |
It's both, they're not that different.
link |
Like Beatles, classic small group, right?
link |
But there's so much drama.
link |
The Florentine artists, of course there's drama
link |
and small groups tend to split up, which is fine,
link |
just like entering relationships off an end.
link |
But it's remarkable how little has been done
link |
that was not done in small groups in some way.
link |
So speaking of loss of beautiful relationships,
link |
where do you make this whole love thing?
link |
Why do humans fall in love?
link |
What's the role of love, friendship, family in life?
link |
In a successful life or just life in general?
link |
Why the hell are we so into this thing?
link |
There are multiple layers of understanding that question.
link |
So kind of the lowest layer is the Darwinian answer, right?
link |
If we weren't this way,
link |
we wouldn't have been successful
link |
in reproducing and building alliances.
link |
It's important to realize that's far from complete.
link |
Sort of the highest understanding would be poetic,
link |
like read John Keats or many other love poets.
link |
So who do I go to to find out,
link |
to learn about love in terms of poets or?
link |
I would say start with John Keats.
link |
But given that you're fluent in Russian.
link |
Yeah, let's go Russian literature for a second.
link |
Like you keep mentioning Russia.
link |
What's your connection?
link |
What's your love in Russia?
link |
Well, first it's all interesting,
link |
but more concretely, my wife was born in Moscow.
link |
So Kolniki was her neighborhood.
link |
And she grew up there.
link |
I married her here.
link |
My daughter, I adopted her.
link |
I'm not her biological father, but I genuinely raised her.
link |
She was born in Russia,
link |
though she came here when she was one.
link |
So you're basically Russian.
link |
I'm a New Jersey boy.
link |
That's the same thing.
link |
I'm very sorry to report.
link |
My father in law passed away a week ago.
link |
He lived with us for six years.
link |
He lived in Russia till he was, oh, 70.
link |
Saw Stalinist error.
link |
His father was brought to a camp,
link |
lived through World War II.
link |
Had an incredible life.
link |
Never really learned how to speak English.
link |
So I absorbed something Russian from him as well.
link |
He was part Armenian.
link |
So that's my connection to Russia.
link |
A bit of the Russian soul, too.
link |
I don't think I have it.
link |
I think I appreciate it.
link |
But there's division of labor, right?
link |
Others in the family.
link |
Take care of that.
link |
I'm more superficial.
link |
You mentioned Keats and that higher version,
link |
that non Darwinian love.
link |
What's that about?
link |
That it's the highest form of human connection
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and it's intoxicating and it's part of building a life.
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And most of us are very, very strongly drawn to it.
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And it's part of the highest realization
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of you being what you can be.
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He mentioned you lost.
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But ask a Russian.
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I mean, this is a superficial New Jersey boy
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who grew up listening to Bruce Springsteen
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and that was his romanticism.
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What's your favorite Bruce Springsteen song?
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I think the album Born to Run has actually held up the best.
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Though it's very fashionable to think
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the earlier or later works are actually better.
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And that's the overproduced super pop album.
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But the quality of the songs,
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to me Born to Run is just far and away the best.
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Then Darkness on the Edge of Town.
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And those are still my favorites.
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Born to Run is an incredible song.
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And perfectly produced in a Phil Spector kind of way.
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Every detail is right.
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What else is on the album?
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Thunder Road, Jungle Land, Tenth Avenue, Freeze Out.
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She's the one, unbelievable.
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Yeah, Bruce is amazing.
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Leading across the river.
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I really like when he goes into love personally.
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That's a very good song, Dancing in the Dark.
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A lot of the later work,
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I find the percussion becomes too simple
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and kind of too white somehow.
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And a little clunky.
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And it's still good work.
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He's super talented, but it doesn't speak to me.
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But when it all bursts open into the open road,
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like it does on Born to Run, that's magic.
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Have you ever seen him live?
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I wonder what he's like live when he was young, right?
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I saw him live when he was young.
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I was a little disappointed actually.
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I think what I like best from him is quite studio.
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He certainly played well.
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I don't fault his performance.
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But it's like when I saw Plant and Page of Led Zeppelin.
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Tremendous creators.
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And they showed up.
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They were not drunk.
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Like they were paying attention.
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But I was underwhelmed.
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Because Led Zeppelin, like the Beatles White album,
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is much more of a studio band than you think at first.
link |
And in the case of Bruce Springsteen,
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I don't know about you, but for me,
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he's somebody that I connect with the most
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when I'm alone and there's like a melancholy feeling.
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And actually, my folks live in Philly.
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I went to school in Philly.
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And so, you know, I've, I think I've.
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You're almost worthy of New Jersey then.
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Yeah, well you're, you're almost worthy of Russia.
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So we're, we can connect.
link |
And then ask, but I mean, I love Jersey.
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This is something I feel like, I feel like, I don't know.
link |
It's always, there's this beautiful,
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like there's a diner, Olga's Diner that closed down.
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I used to go there.
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There's, there's a melancholy feeling to me.
link |
I mean, of course.
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A thickness to culture in that part of the world.
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Which is oddly similar to some elements
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of the thickness of Russian culture.
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And when you see like Russian characters on the Sopranos,
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it totally makes sense,
link |
even though there are these complete outliers.
link |
Exactly, it totally makes sense.
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You've, you mentioned you lost your father in law last week.
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Do you think about mortality?
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Do you think about your own mortality?
link |
Are you afraid of death?
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I don't think about my own mortality that much,
link |
which is probably a good thing.
link |
I think death will be bad.
link |
I wouldn't say I'm afraid of it.
link |
For me, the worst thing about death
link |
is not knowing how the human story turns out.
link |
The full human story.
link |
The full human story.
link |
So if I could, right before I die,
link |
read like a Wikipedia page called The Rest of Human History
link |
and have enough time, just like a few days,
link |
to absorb it, think about it,
link |
and know like, oh, well 643 years from now,
link |
that's when all the atomic weapons went off
link |
and here's what happened between now and then,
link |
I would feel much better dying.
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But that's not how it's gonna be, right?
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It's almost like the Hitchhiker's Guide,
link |
they kind of have, what is it?
link |
They have a one or two sentence description of the human,
link |
of what goes on on Earth.
link |
It's kind of interesting to think
link |
if there's a lot of intelligent civilizations out there
link |
that in the big encyclopedia that describes the universe,
link |
humans will only have one sentence, maybe two.
link |
But it's the only one I can read and understand, right?
link |
And it may be hard to understand the human one
link |
past a number of centuries.
link |
Yeah, with AI, yes.
link |
Like how many years from now will reading Wikipedia
link |
be like trying to read Chaucer,
link |
which I almost can do, but I actually can't.
link |
I need a translation.
link |
Probably you can't do it at all.
link |
I mean, maybe reading will be outdated.
link |
It might be a very silly notion.
link |
Maybe we're fundamentally,
link |
like we think language is fundamental to cognition,
link |
but it could be something visual
link |
or something totally different that we'll plug in.
link |
Neuralink or, yeah.
link |
But in that story, that Wikipedia article,
link |
do you think there'll be a section on the meaning of it?
link |
I hope not, because that section we could write now,
link |
and it's just not going to be very good, right?
link |
What would you put in the section
link |
on the meaning of human existence?
link |
I don't know, links to a lot of other sections?
link |
I don't think there are general statements
link |
about the meaning of life that have that much meaning.
link |
I think if you study different cultures,
link |
the arts, travel, mathematics,
link |
like whatever your thing is,
link |
you'll get a lot about the meaning of life.
link |
So like it's there in Wikipedia in some bigger sense.
link |
But I don't want to read the page on the meaning.
link |
I bet they have such a page, in fact.
link |
The fact that I've never visited it,
link |
none of my friends, oh, here, Tyler,
link |
here's the page on the meaning of life.
link |
I know you've been wondering about this.
link |
You got to read this one.
link |
No one's ever done that to you, have they?
link |
It probably has, well, I've actually gone to that page.
link |
It does, in fact, have a lot of links to other pages.
link |
The meaning of life is just a bunch of self referential
link |
or citation needed type of statements.
link |
I think there's no better way to end it.
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Tyler, it's a huge honor.
link |
Thank you so much for wasting all of this time with me.
link |
It was one of the greatest conversations I've ever had.
link |
Thank you so much.
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My pleasure and delighted to finally have met you
link |
and that we can do this.
link |
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Tyler Cowen
link |
and thank you to Linode, ExpressVPN,
link |
SimpliSafe and Public Goods.
link |
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
link |
And now let me leave you with some words from Adam Smith.
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Little else is requisite to carry a state
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to the highest degree of opulence
link |
from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes
link |
and a tolerable administration of justice.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.