Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Why The Doomsayers Are Wrong" with Tyler Cowen

Transcript

"Why The Doomsayers Are Wrong" with Tyler Cowen · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Are you an optimist or a pessimist, or do you think you're just a realist when everyone else is biased, but not you, not me either.
• 0:11
  This week and next week, two completely different characters, both wonderful conversations, I won't go into details about them here.
• 0:18
  Suffice it to say that you have one of the most optimistic people this week, and one of the most pessimistic people next week.
• 0:26
  But neither of them thinks of themselves as such, both of them think they are rational, hard-headed, cool-minded analysts of the data in front of them.
• 0:38
  And it's a fascinating duo. If you enjoy this week, then it's well worth listening to next week's episode and vice versa.
• 0:45
  A reminder that in the not too distant future, you will be able to support the mission of this show.
• 0:50
  You'll be able to empower people to have honest conversations and not feel like they have to subscribe to one team or another by getting a little bit more of me.
• 0:59
  And not just on my ABC radio show, which is probably the easiest way to get a big dose of Josh Seps for three hours every day from 1230 Sydney time, which you can stream on the ABC Listen app, but you will also be able to access at least a new piece of fresh content every week.
• 1:14
  And the existing podcast will remain exactly the same. We can't just use ad revenue to produce all of the amazing stuff that we want to and that you obviously want us to given the success of this show.
• 1:24
  So thank you for that. But you'll get video blogs and recommendations and rants and live streams with special guests and maybe even the occasional real-time Zoom cocktail hour with yourself and yours truly.
• 1:37
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• 1:45
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• 1:52
  My producer, Stefan is somewhat swamped and overwhelmed and also happens to be going on a holiday in North America next week, which sounds absolutely delightful.
• 2:01
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• 2:10
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• 2:15
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• 2:20
  Either way, one thing that we will do on team Convo Squad is give you your own unique feed of this show.
• 2:25
  There'll be no ads. There'll be a special bonus segment called first date questions.
• 2:29
  So sometimes you will hear my first date questions in this pre-period before we launch the subscription model.
• 2:36
  So don't worry, if you hear me saying, oh, now this is just for subscribers, you're getting it with your subscriber or not.
• 2:43
  If you are interested, just shoot us an email with subscribe in the subject line.
• 2:48
  Having conversations with optimists is fun. Having conversations with pessimists is fun.
• 2:53
  And it certainly helps you to rethink where you fall on that spectrum.
• 2:58
  It's the only way to get ahead to sort of make sure that we can all talk to each other on an even keel with a certain amount of balance.
• 3:05
  To include in the conversation, people who have very different outlooks and are willing to have conversations that are challenging, that are provocative, and that are often yes uncomfortable.
• 3:17
  Today on the show, one of my, I suppose, contemporary intellectual heroes, Tyler Cowan.
• 3:32
  He has a column in the New York Times called the economic scene. He's written a bazillion books, which I won't read out the titles of all of them,
• 3:40
  but just in the past decade, the complacent class, the self-defeating quest for the American dream, stubborn attachments, a vision for a society of free, prosperous, and responsible individuals, big business, a love letter to an American anti-hero.
• 3:54
  And most recently, which precipitated this conversation, a book which he co-wrote with Daniel Gross called Talent.
• 4:01
  How do I identify energizers, creatives, and winners around the world?
• 4:07
  He has interesting thoughts about what Talent is, how to spot it, how to spot it in yourself, how to make the most of it, but more than that, I wanted to talk to him not just about his own perspectives on what makes us useful and makes us good, but where we find ourselves, culturally, economically, and politically.
• 4:26
  I hope you enjoy this conversation with the one and only Tyler Cowan.
• 4:38
  My things are off. My phone is off. It's not least blower season. Probably we're okay.
• 4:46
  I somehow knew you'd be diligent. I knew I wasn't going to log in and find you scrambling around eight minutes late with dog barking in the background. You struck me as a diligent person.
• 4:58
  This is true. I have a lot of nice open browser tabs.
• 5:02
  Very good. Excuse my cold. It's not the dreaded, the dreaded Rona, but it is a nasty cold, nonetheless. Have you had the choice of the virus yet?
• 5:17
  I don't think so. I've tested many times. I've never had the symptoms. I don't quite fully believe that I haven't had it, but it seems I haven't had it.
• 5:27
  In the last month and a half, so many people I know have had it. It's like our time, so to speak, but no, I'm still been safe.
• 5:37
  Where are you physically, Tyler? In the year this Virginia, about 30 minutes west of Washington, DC.
• 5:44
  It is averse. Yeah.
• 5:47
  I was there in Omicron at Omicron time in December when everything was going crazy. I was back in New York after when Australia's borders reopened in November.
• 5:57
  It was an interesting time to be wandering around Manhattan as those cases were like doubling every three hours and everyone was going crazy about Omicron.
• 6:05
  I thought if you didn't get it in December, January, then I thought that was the time.
• 6:10
  Yeah, but there's been this other wave. Virginia has been an okay place to be because you have the vaccination habits of a blue state, but the opening practices of a red state.
• 6:22
  And most of America, you only get one or the other, both.
• 6:26
  That's right. Well, Australia had a similar experience, but temporarily instead of geographically where it was the, you know, Australia was Japan or North Korea for almost two years.
• 6:37
  And then all of a sudden it was Florida or Texas. As soon as we hit a vaccination rate and we all got totally fed up with staying indoors as of November, everything reopened.
• 6:47
  And so everyone has has had it, but everyone had it at a time of our choosing with high vaccination rates.
• 6:52
  And the very new strains. Do you, do you have them now?
• 6:56
  I think so. Do you mean you're like Omicron part two or whatever that is called?
• 7:00
  Yeah, maybe it's even not to part three by now, but yeah.
• 7:02
  Yeah, to be more contagious. Yeah. Well, the borders are completely open and everything's open and we're not really masking anymore.
• 7:08
  And nothing is restricted. So it's like, it's like, you know, we've all sort of, we've all had it recently. So I think we all feel like super humans.
• 7:15
  Yeah. For a while.
• 7:17
  Well, I know people who are getting it again. And I'm resigned to getting it two, three times. I can't even get it once though.
• 7:23
  You've got to try harder, Tava.
• 7:25
  I went to Miami Beach at the peak of Omicron wave. I didn't indoor event. I took no precautions, half the people there had it.
• 7:34
  And I didn't get it. I tested a few times when I got back nothing.
• 7:38
  I wonder if you're just one of those people.
• 7:41
  I wonder if there are such people there are, but they're very small in numbers. So it's unlikely I'm one. I think it's more likely I've just been lucky so far.
• 7:50
  I mean, and it may not be a binary either. It may just be that it not may not be that there are such people who are unicorns, but that some people just have a propensity that they need a much higher dose to actually contract it.
• 8:03
  That's great possible.
• 8:05
  You used to start your podcast style. I'm a big fan. It's lovely to talk to you. I listen to your show all the time and I read your blog.
• 8:12
  You used to start it by saying just a reminder. This is a show on which I asked the questions that I want to ask not the questions you want me to ask.
• 8:22
  Why did you say that?
• 8:24
  I said it once and my production team really liked it because a lot of people wrote it back to us as a line or repeated it.
• 8:32
  So I said it once and they put it at the beginning and had me saying it every time they thought it was a successful meme.
• 8:39
  So I can't listen to my own show for a bunch of reasons that being one of them.
• 8:44
  But I just said at a live event once this is the conversation with person X I want to have not the one you want me to have it was someone controversial if I recall.
• 8:53
  And the person was in politics and I knew everyone wanted me to ask about X Y and Z and I just wanted to have a normal conversation. That was the context.
• 9:03
  I think your production team is ingenious within repeating it on every episode because it gives a flavor to your style which is which runs so counter to the pandering that so many people in the media seem to be doing at the moment where everything has to be.
• 9:16
  You know we used to A B test everything and product test everything and do consumer research and now we sort of do it in real time in a de facto way on social by tweaking ourselves to please the mob and to defiantly begin every conversation by saying I don't really give a fuck what you guys want me to do I'm just going to do is refreshing.
• 9:36
  But that the statement itself becomes a form of pandering is of course ironic but I have a great production team and they know they need to offset me to some extent because if it were all up to me I would just make it too strange.
• 9:48
  And there was a lot of pandering.
• 9:51
  Yeah.
• 9:52
  How do you think about your job when you're interviewing someone?
• 9:56
  Well I'm not paid to do it so I mean it is a job but I do it for fun I enjoy it most of all I enjoy the learning and it's people I want to speak to people I want to meet so I just do it for pleasure.
• 10:09
  And it is a bit you know damn the audience like yeah you're getting this for free you don't have to listen so it's incentive compatible because I have other sources of income most of all my job is a professor.
• 10:22
  I mean let's take away the word job then and just say task what do you think your task is.
• 10:27
  My goal is to learn something my aspiration is to be an information billionaire and I find I read and learn much much more effectively when it's structured around a concrete interaction with a specific other human being.
• 10:42
  Do you mean that you'll do more research if you know that you're going to have to face up to the human being?
• 10:47
  Of course but it's not just more though it is more but it's better I retain it better because I know like go in two weeks I'm going to have to draw on this.
• 10:55
  And it's like you know stepping up to the plate in a baseball or cricket game like you know you know you'd better pay attention because the ball is coming out you rather quickly so it's like that.
• 11:06
  It's interesting I do a three hour daily radio show so the ability to do that kind of preparation for every guest when you're talking to a dozen people a day.
• 11:16
  It's obviously impeded and so I rationalize it using a sort of a Larry King kind of Maxim that it's actually in some ways an asset to not know any more than the listener knows and to find your and to explore and for part of the joy to be the groping around in the dark.
• 11:33
  You're very much not like that to such an extent that the only criticisms I've heard of your show have been that it's too difficult to to to pierce I recommended you to a friend and they said.
• 11:44
  He was interviewing some Irish guy about like 15th century Irish theology and about the ways in which like some particular dissident monk had split off from the you know it was like I don't you know there wasn't any explanation to help to help hold me by the hand and bring me into the conversation it was just.
• 12:00
  To incredibly knowledgeable people talking about something that I know nothing about do you try to know I'm happy now I'm happy that was one of my favorite episodes and I jump right in and I at least try that every episode is recorded for specialists in the area which of course it's not the actual audience at all for the most part but maybe some kind of quote unquote normal people just still want to hear what that sounds like.
• 12:25
  Yeah yeah it's interesting what made you want to go into academia.
• 12:34
  The first thing I did in life was I was a chess player I was a chess prodigy and that's fun when you're 12 but by the time you're 13 you realize it can't be a career specially in the days before the internet.
• 12:47
  But I realized I could do well at something so I started reading an economics and philosophy and I decided pretty quickly I wanted to spend the rest of my life reading things talking about it which of course I'm still doing including with podcasts and the job to do that was professor so I was.
• 13:05
  I was you know by 13 14 going to be a professor and that's what I've done ever since now I'm 60.
• 13:12
  If you were 13 or 14 in 2022 would the decision be the same.
• 13:16
  It would be a much more difficult decision for one thing being a professor I think is much worse today it's more bureaucratized there's more pressure from political correctness the academy is in many ways more stagnant it's more ideologically tilted toward the left and you just have more options so to support yourself say.
• 13:34
  Using patreon or YouTube obviously I couldn't have done when I was a kid so I'm really not sure I would do have done the same now highly up for question you might be Joe Rogan.
• 13:46
  Well I'm too unusual to be Joe Rogan I'm too unusual to be Joe Rogan that's true but he speaks to actual people I could be something you know with the podcast YouTube some kind of portfolio that was not academic.
• 14:02
  When you say that political correctness and sort of the left have influenced the academy how does that show up for you.
• 14:09
  Well at my position in my university it's not a problem for me at all I'm treated very well I'm very happy there I have good relations with my colleagues my administrators.
• 14:21
  But if you're starting off I think it's quite a different story so I'm already successful in a number of ways and I think there are ways the system can can even work to your advantage if you're not someone on the left.
• 14:33
  But if you're starting off and everything you run into you know all your peers essentially are on the left or just conformist I think it's much tougher and it's disputing and the level of hyper specialization is so high.
• 14:48
  All that makes it a worse deal than before and it's harder I think to get and keep a good job than it was before.
• 14:55
  What happens to set you back would set me back no to set one back if one is in that position finding it harder to get ahead.
• 15:07
  Well many people leave academia for quite good private sector jobs so you can earn much more as a consultant today or in finance or at a tech company then with the case in earlier decades.
• 15:18
  So the exit opportunities are wonderful or you could leave and do the public intellectual thing or you can just suffer through it but the people who suffer through and then they say well when I get to be senior then I'll finally let loose what I think.
• 15:32
  They rarely end up doing that and they typically sink into a deeper conformism and that's what I observe happening and it's just less exciting more depressing depressing than I think academia was in the 70s 80s or even 1990s.
• 15:47
  How do you see that turning around?
• 15:49
  I don't think it will turn around anytime soon. Now I think for the world as a whole woke probably has peaked we could talk about that but it clearly hasn't peaked in academia because the saner people are older and they're going to retire and the more woke people are younger and they have longer careers ahead of them and the more woke they are probably the fewer outside options they have.
• 16:11
  So the mere ticking of the clock even if you think like stand up comedy youtubers whatever move away from what which I do see happening it will not be the case in academia.
• 16:23
  Why do you say work is peaked.
• 16:26
  At least in the United States there are enough ordinary people who are just fed up with it.
• 16:31
  People on the woke side have overreached on a number of issues and I'm not I'm not saying whether you agree or disagree but like the issue of trans individuals and women sports whatever you think I don't myself have a clear view.
• 16:44
  But I'm quite sure the American public doesn't like the idea as a whole and if you push that as part of woke woke itself will become less popular if woke is you know me too and racism is bad.
• 16:56
  There's a huge constituency for that because there's so much that is correct about those views and important but the further you push it the more people you alienate.
• 17:05
  And I think the self-righteousness the preaching is the hypocrisy have just gotten on people's nerves.
• 17:11
  So not in every country but in numerous countries I think woke is peak but again not in every segment of society.
• 17:18
  The concern of the anti-wokesters would be that it doesn't really matter that most people are fed up with it because when you have dynamics in which a sensorious mob controls rains of cultural power then it can conduct which hunts and stir up a mess that is just too much hassle for reasonable minded people to bother actually confronting.
• 17:38
  So you have CEOs firing people because it's just easier to fire the person than to actually investigate whether or not the incident that went viral on social media was truly evidence of their that individual's racism or not.
• 17:50
  You don't want to find yourself in a position where you're all up against the firing squad so the dynamic faith favors the mob what do you make of that.
• 17:57
  I see more and more people fighting back and getting away with it I see more and more companies moving away from just wanting to hire the woke you look at the recent Grammy Awards Louis CK he won he took home a Grammy now it was secret ballot.
• 18:12
  But there was not a huge outrage on Twitter there was a modest outrage and less than a day it died away and now we move on to the next thing so my suspicion strongly is woke has peaked.
• 18:24
  I'm happy about that yeah.
• 18:27
  I mean you wrote a piece a really interesting piece that I keep coming back to when I'm talking with friends who are super anti woke.
• 18:34
  Which basically argued that that woke may have gone too far in the United States but given that the United States is such a strong exporter of cultural norms to the rest of the world it wouldn't hurt if the rest of the world.
• 18:46
  Had its wokeness dialed up by 10 or 20% and that maybe actually wokeness will be America's great cultural gift.
• 18:54
  I strongly strongly agree that it's true for many countries France could use more me to Pakistan and Afghanistan could use way more tolerance of say gay rights not just 10 or 15% more but dial that way way way up.
• 19:09
  And not all countries but a majority of countries in this world should be more woke and in so far as the wokesters here at home accomplish that I'm all for it.
• 19:19
  But that doesn't mean I agree with everything they do quite to the contrary.
• 19:23
  Yeah I mean it strikes me that one thing that that analysis misses is that there's the content of the woke ideas and then there's the method by which the ideas are implemented.
• 19:32
  So I was being with Peter Singer recently who was talking about academic freedom as well and he was he was just sort of making the point that he has no problem with you know a lot of woke people will say.
• 19:42
  All we're trying to do is enforce consequences for people's bad speech went we're not you know yeah you can complain about cancel culture and about being silenced but.
• 19:51
  You can't complain about the fact that you're being held to account for the racist or sexist or bigoted things that you might be saying and singers point was simply it's fine to push back on those ideas using refutations of those ideas it what's not fine is to try to get the person fired or.
• 20:08
  Uninvited or excluded from polite society or driven off social media without even bothering to articulate why the thing that they did is incorrect simply saying that they're.
• 20:18
  You know big it's prima facie and so that there's a methodological question and then there's a content question and my concern is that.
• 20:26
  The methodological strategies of of wokeness are going to overwhelm anybody's ability to actually try to detect what the the the the noble point of their ideas actually is.
• 20:40
  And so far so often people don't get a fair hearing but I think Peter Singer is an interesting example he wasn't fired from his job he has been in a way de facto canceled but he's never been more influential than he is today he stuck at it he kept on going and now if you look at the movement known as effective altruism singer is the most influential person behind that movement it now
• 21:03
  command the loyalty is billionaires and a large number of really quite brilliant young people and singer gets a lot of credit for that including also his work on animal welfare settle there's canceling but.
• 21:15
  I think the wokesters are losing and I disagree with singer on a lot of issues and in particular the stuff he was canceled on I agree with the critics not singer.
• 21:25
  Now I never wanted to criticize him on that I never wanted to fire him I've had very nice dialogues with him I like him very much but I think he's wrong on that stuff.
• 21:37
  I mean I think he I don't think he was pleading that he was a subjective cancellation person because I think he to some extent can respond with your response about academia which is he's sort of grandfathered in as being.
• 21:50
  You know someone who came in of a different generation and somewhat gets a pass it would be almost impossible he thinks to say the things that he says if he was a young academic now he just he's just built up enough credibility and enough kind of institutional.
• 22:02
  Stability that that he's safe but where do you so just articulate for people who aren't very familiar with all the ins and outs of.
• 22:09
  Of his work where you disagree with him on.
• 22:11
  Well Peter Singer made a number of controversial comments this is now I think over 20 years ago I've disabled individuals and raising the notion of whether it was always worth saving their lives and I'm very reluctant to in a third party way try to describe it.
• 22:28
  Because perhaps his wording was very careful and you might come away with the wrong idea but I know many people found it objectionable and at the time I thought he was not putting it the morally correct way.
• 22:40
  That I think there is something to a notion of individual human rights that is near sacred that goes above and beyond utilitarianism where singers are utilitarian.
• 22:50
  If you see you know say it deformed baby and you think it will be happy then it won't be happy it's better to let it die or don't spend too much saving it.
• 22:59
  That's different than my attitude but I respect his view I think it should be out there I don't think he should be canceled for it but I definitely disagreed with him and it's because he's a utilitarian and I believe in the stronger notion of individual rights.
• 23:14
  I think that's a fair description of his position I mean I would I would simply add to it that I think that he would just argue that we all intrinsically understand the idea of there being a life not worth living.
• 23:25
  A life that is subjectively so terrible so painful and so short that it's not worth living.
• 23:31
  And if we can ascribe that compassion to ourselves we ought to be able to ascribe it to other individuals for example a baby who's born horrendously crippled in complete pain and is going to die before they're nine month birthday that in that case to be blocking someone up for the rest of their lives or giving them the electric chair for killing that child seems like it doesn't make a lot of moral sense.
• 23:53
  I think that might be the fairest way of putting his perspective but if you're not a consequentialist or utilitarian rather where do you ground your ethics.
• 24:02
  I do believe in individual rights I think for actually most practical decisions utilitarianism is fine but here's a way I would put a similar point let's look at the other end of life people as they're approaching death and they're in extreme pain.
• 24:15
  So a fair degree of euthanasia is probably a better thing for it to happen but a society which openly embraces euthanasia such as the Netherlands will find that in all sorts of marginal cases people will feel pressured to make their relatives or children happy to want to do themselves in.
• 24:35
  And that leads to what I consider a very bad outcome which is people feeling moral pressure to commit suicide who are not normally candidates for euthanasia.
• 24:45
  So I would rather have some degree of euthanasia done but a bit under the table not too openly not professed as such it can happen but to really check the social pressure on the number of cases expanding.
• 25:01
  So that regard I'm partly astrosian.
• 25:03
  Right, right. It's funny you pick that example because the state that I live in New South Wales the most populated state in Australia has just become the final state in Australia to legalize voluntary assisted dying but it's within very tight parameters so you have to have you have to be dying of a fatal disease that is causing you immense pain and suffering and you have to have two doctors sign off on it.
• 25:28
  You can't just be because you want to end your life. How do you feel about laws like that?
• 25:31
  That's exactly what makes sense to me but you see in some localities well if you have autism or if you're simply depressed or the criteria get very loose.
• 25:42
  So how tight do you have to make it so that it doesn't keep on getting looser that will depend on the country the culture but in general something like what you describe is exactly what I favor.
• 25:52
  Right. I'd love to get your thoughts about economics. What are people most people misunderstand the most about economics.
• 26:00
  Well, it depends who the people are. We now so frequently evaluate economic issues just by seeing well which party agrees with what position and then we take that stance.
• 26:13
  So we choose a party or a left wing right wing based on a few fundamental values and then all of our decisions on particular questions.
• 26:20
  We just let be matched up to whatever side we've chosen and that's the biggest mistake people make in thinking about economics.
• 26:27
  They pick a side and then they figure out what that side believes and then they believe that it's not even a mistake in economic reasoning.
• 26:34
  It's just a mistake in reasoning.
• 26:36
  Yeah, yeah, I mean that might be the biggest cultural problem. I think that we currently face that were expected to select between two binaries in which all attitudes towards everything from as disparate a subject.
• 26:48
  I think it's somewhat a stronger problem on the left.
• 26:51
  Yeah, because of educational polarization mainstream media, academia, a lot of mainstream intellectualized institutions are now more on the left than on the right.
• 27:02
  So you have more smarter people feeling pressure to conform toward the left.
• 27:07
  The right is more chaotic, often in bad ways, so things like acceptance of a variety of scientific results might in fact be much weaker on the right.
• 27:15
  I would see that as very much a bad thing, but you do avoid some of the conformism.
• 27:20
  Yeah, it is incredible that you can, I mean if you tell me at least in America, if you tell me what your attitude towards abortion and climate change are,
• 27:29
  I can tell you back what your attitude towards corporate taxes.
• 27:33
  Exactly. And that no way should that be the case. Those are all difficult questions.
• 27:37
  And a lot of your views should in fact be surprising or you should be evolving over time or just agnostic.
• 27:43
  Why is this happening?
• 27:46
  It's a very good question. Many people blame social media. I'm less sure about that. I see at least in the US cable news as having been a bigger driver.
• 27:55
  But I also see again, this is an American specific answer, but most of American history is like that.
• 28:01
  So why was it ever different?
• 28:03
  It's perhaps the more relevant question.
• 28:06
  And maybe we just had a few decades with peace and prosperity and a lot of oligopolistic mainstream media.
• 28:12
  And many things weren't questioned and a lot was bipartisan.
• 28:16
  And it was a bubble waiting to be popped and it was popped and now we're back to normal.
• 28:20
  I guess that's my best answer.
• 28:22
  You think that prior to say World War One people were equally conformist in the groups that they in the sort of psychological intellectual groups that they found themselves in?
• 28:31
  They were extremely partisan and unreasonable.
• 28:35
  And media was like left leaning or right leaning or the dimensions might have been different.
• 28:40
  People in a red rags, there would be a main issue such as slavery or race and that would determine what people thought about the tariff.
• 28:48
  And not saying was identical to today, but much more like today than say 1966 was or 1997 for that matter.
• 28:58
  So America mostly has been like that quite ideological, a lot of crazy views, some of which are super innovative and turn out to be correct.
• 29:08
  But in the meantime, you've got to suffer under these crazy views and people think your country's crazy and they're partly right.
• 29:14
  And they know your country's innovative and that's right too, but they don't quite see the connection between those things.
• 29:20
  Does that give you hope that the current state of partisanship can find an equilibrium and not spiral out of control?
• 29:28
  I'm the most optimistic intellectual.
• 29:31
  I think I know on these issues.
• 29:33
  So it absolutely gives me hope.
• 29:36
  I don't know that we'll ever have an equilibrium.
• 29:38
  We may just circle around in weird, displeasing, disorienting ways.
• 29:43
  But I actually think we'll be fine.
• 29:45
  This country has never had more talent.
• 29:47
  The world as a whole has never had more talent.
• 29:49
  I'm super bullish on the whole English sphere, Australia included.
• 29:54
  What is it that makes you so different from so many people who say that we are going to hunker down into our silos,
• 30:03
  and increasingly find our prejudices reinforced and our antagonisms enraged by cable news and social media.
• 30:11
  And we will find no way to talk to each other and to find a common polity.
• 30:15
  I think as a personality type, I'm more emotionally detached.
• 30:19
  So when I see things on Twitter that, you know, maybe I would quote unquote hate if I got more emotional about it.
• 30:25
  I'm not that disturbed.
• 30:27
  Whereas my peers, they see different views on Twitter, whether it's left wing, right wing, whatever.
• 30:32
  They're so offended by it. They're so horrified that they somehow think it at all has to be this horrible for the whole world.
• 30:38
  But it's not like a lot of the world just doesn't care.
• 30:41
  They have too much common sense to give a damn about what's on Twitter.
• 30:45
  And I think that's a large part of what makes America work.
• 30:48
  So you think the average lay person is closer to your temperament than your peers?
• 30:53
  I don't think there is detached, but they're less aware.
• 30:56
  Their views are not partisanly thought through and consistent.
• 31:01
  They think more in terms of life experience or maybe like the views of their family or sometimes their self interest.
• 31:08
  They may not have a coherent positions, but when you aggregate them all, it's sufficiently sensible.
• 31:14
  But I think a lot of nations in this world, not just US, they're just going to get on fine.
• 31:19
  What if the Ireland like what's going to go so wrong in Ireland?
• 31:23
  They just don't see it. I think Ireland's side in Australia.
• 31:26
  It's a great country, high standard of living, nature, you know, in some parts the weather.
• 31:31
  You have to worry about China, but like what's really the downside? I just frankly don't see it.
• 31:37
  Let people say whatever, right? They're going to say John Contritor or social media.
• 31:42
  Let them do it. Ignore it.
• 31:44
  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so the concern just to just close out I think and articulate the fairest version of your opponent's point of view there.
• 31:52
  I think the concern would be people on Twitter who are very online and very exercised by these things.
• 31:58
  Hold positions of undue power in politics and in the media.
• 32:02
  And they are creating their own chatter that is incrementally pulling apart the strands of and the fabric of of the culture.
• 32:09
  So that people who read one newspaper are getting pulled a little bit further away from people who watch another cable news show.
• 32:16
  And the environment, the soup in which we're all swimming is just becoming a little bit more spoiled by Twitter, even if you're not on it.
• 32:27
  And so that makes it harder and harder to have to have common shared values and the common understanding of the world.
• 32:32
  Now whether that ends up reaching a critical mass or a tipping point at which everybody is out and out war who knows, but I think that phenomenon is a thing.
• 32:42
  I'm not saying everything is perfect, but if I look back at the 1960s, the fiat non-war, a deeply polarized America, you have race riots, cities literally burning to the ground, bombs going off almost every day.
• 32:56
  Our problems now don't seem that serious relative to that. So we definitely have problems.
• 33:03
  Some of them clearly are transmitted online. Anything as important as online is going to be connected to a lot of problems.
• 33:09
  Like I do think Instagram is probably not great for 12 to 14 year old girls and so on. I don't don't dismiss those concerns.
• 33:17
  But at the end of the day, we've had worse problems in the past, including with media.
• 33:24
  The second pessimistic case that I sometimes hear people make Tyler is the climate chaos case.
• 33:30
  Tim Flannery, who's an environmentalist, who was the Australian of the year, made it most starkly to me by putting it in economic terms and basically said,
• 33:40
  because I was skeptical that there's going to be such disruption that it will sort of doom Western civilization.
• 33:47
  I'm a bit of a techno optimist. I think that we will muddle through as we generally have.
• 33:52
  His point was look at how easily democratic norms get frayed with the far right in Western Europe during reasonably good times.
• 34:00
  And whatever you make of the recent elections in the United States and whatever Trump was representing.
• 34:06
  And imagine that we all just got a bit poorer every year.
• 34:10
  Imagine that climate chaos just became very expensive and logistically annoying and we were constantly dealing with endless rain as Australia just has been and floods,
• 34:20
  which is just an enormous pain in the arse and very, very expensive.
• 34:23
  And before that massive bushfires, which was an enormous pain in the arse, quite apart from being deadly and very, very expensive.
• 34:29
  If your GDP just goes down by a half a percent or 1 percent every year because you're pouring 304 percent of your GDP into dealing with these recurring weather catastrophes and refugee flows as a result of monsoons being disrupted.
• 34:42
  How much faith do we have that liberal democracy and the free market survive whatever populist pushbacks come after year after year after year of getting a little bit poorer?
• 34:53
  What do you make of that?
• 34:55
  I think it's very hard to predict how people will react to climate change, but I see progress in many areas like solar power, electric cars.
• 35:04
  It's a lot quicker than what we had expected. That has to count as very good news.
• 35:09
  The best estimates I've seen, I'm not even sure how good they are, very hard to evaluate.
• 35:14
  But they suggest climate change will swallow up, not at per year, just total, you know, up to 10 percent of global GDP.
• 35:22
  So that's like two to three years of global growth that vanish.
• 35:27
  So, you know, the living standard we would have attained in, say, 2100, we only get to in 2103 or 2104.
• 35:37
  When you put it in those terms, it doesn't sound like it's going to end civilization.
• 35:42
  And I understand the distribution is highly uneven.
• 35:45
  Some nations will be very big losers. That is itself intrinsically unjust.
• 35:50
  I would take all that seriously, but the people who think it's going to end the worlds of the wealthy, better run countries.
• 35:57
  Again, that strikes me as unlikely, but I agree it's one of our three or four biggest problems.
• 36:02
  You know, we ought to do much more about it.
• 36:05
  What would you do?
• 36:08
  Again, it depends which country you mean, but I would stop coal as rapidly as possible.
• 36:13
  I would institute nuclear wherever that is possible.
• 36:17
  I would continue with solar and wind power. I would stop dinbys from limiting solar and especially wind power.
• 36:24
  I would further subsidize research in nuclear fusion.
• 36:27
  Western Europe should allow fracking.
• 36:29
  That would be the beginnings of a list. I would invest more in geoengineering and carbon sequestration.
• 36:35
  Not sure if those work, but were the further investigation, same with deep earth geothermal.
• 36:41
  There's just a lot we could do and do better than we're doing now.
• 36:45
  That's also reason for optimism.
• 36:47
  Yeah, I mean, all of those things are sort of presuppose that you're the emperor of the universe who's able to weigh the magic one and have them happen.
• 36:54
  But if we don't want to live in a big hunkering massive Stalinist state that's directing all of this, how do you get those things to happen?
• 37:02
  I don't think we need a Stalinist state.
• 37:04
  So government support of solar, some has come through China, some through Spain, some through Germany, some through the US.
• 37:10
  Definitely there was money wasted, but it hasn't like enslaved us.
• 37:14
  It hasn't cost that much and the progress has been incredible.
• 37:17
  A lot of it driven by the market, but the subsidies helped.
• 37:20
  We've seen plenty of cases. Nuclear fusion now.
• 37:24
  Maybe is viable. People don't agree. I don't feel I can judge that.
• 37:29
  But it doesn't feel like the process of getting there involved Stalinism or even like way too much government.
• 37:36
  So I think we'll probably muddle through in some way in most countries.
• 37:41
  And will we need to put attacks on carbon, the price on carbon to do it?
• 37:45
  I favor such attacks, but that to me looks increasingly unlikely voters seem to hate it or they've even repealed it in some locales.
• 37:53
  So I'm all for it. I understand the economic case. I used to argue for it.
• 37:57
  Haven't changed my mind, but it's really not or I put my intellectual energy anymore.
• 38:02
  You written a book about talent?
• 38:05
  What is it?
• 38:07
  Talent is those individuals who have a creative spark, who are 10X, 20X, or even 100X better than just a typical good worker.
• 38:18
  And my book, co-authored with venture capitalist Daniel Gross, is about how to find and identify those individuals.
• 38:26
  Did I come out of the womb like that? Are they raised to be that presumably at some combination?
• 38:33
  The most significant talents typically have good genes for what they want to do and they use their genes to manipulate their environment so that the genes and the environment work together in a multiplicative fashion to make them better.
• 38:48
  We call this the multiplicative model of top achievement.
• 38:51
  How much does the environment have to give them? In other words, how well resource do they have to be to make the most of themselves?
• 38:57
  Well, I think incredibly well-resourced, so look at a classic example like the Renaissance in Florence or classical music in Germany and Vienna.
• 39:06
  You have some very talented individuals born, Mozart, Beethoven, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, but there were incredible talents born in other places other times but never had opportunities to actually meet in a market and sell a product and improve themselves and compete against others who were also very talented.
• 39:26
  So it's super sensitive to environment and you see achievements come in clusters. There's like an era of great Russian novels, an era of great Victorian novels that they come together in these packs because of emulation and rivalry and the ethos in the environment is just right somehow.
• 39:44
  Emulation and rivalry is interesting. I mean, I do sometimes wonder why there's so many great Chinese violinists and why there's so many great Russian novelists and why there's so many great Australian actors but there aren't any great Australian like Chamber Orchestra musicians.
• 40:00
  I'm sure there are no offense but like Australia is not renowned for that whereas it consistently punches above its way to the Academy Awards but not at or in sports for example but not in other pursuits, not in chess.
• 40:10
  Why? I think it's this clustering that you need a small group of like-minded others to learn from to motivate you also to compete against. If you look at say the British rock invasion of the 60s and 70s, you see another very strong cluster.
• 40:26
  You look at, you know, Bollywood creativity in India or Indian classical music. Again, you see achievement bunched together in funny ways.
• 40:36
  And how many different ways could that could those talents have been expressed do you think like if you pick someone who is really successful in one creative field.
• 40:44
  If you transplant that baby to another country where that particular creative field is not as well respected but one that might share some similarities and some differences is how malleable are we at six.
• 40:57
  You know, is the talented person sort of destined to be talented regardless of what specific pursuit they undertake.
• 41:05
  I don't think individuals are so malleable in that way. So you can find individuals who are like top performers, you know, great composers who then write books or great composers who try their hands at painting.
• 41:18
  Some of them have succeeded like Hector Barelyouts, his memoirs are fantastic. As a literary work, they would be like a quality literary work.
• 41:26
  But mostly they're smart people who are pretty good at the other thing, but just not that extraordinary at it. Or when Michael Jordan tried to play baseball, right?
• 41:34
  Well, he was a pitcher for the Chicago White Sox minor league team. He didn't even make it in the minor leagues, even though he was six foot six.
• 41:42
  Incredibly strong, athletic, super fast, amazingly coordinated. As a minor league baseball pitcher, he was mediocre.
• 41:50
  So you really need this very exact matching.
• 41:53
  Well, but there were taking the example of an individual who was already perfected one particular pursuit and trying to force them into another or trying to have that pursuit rejigged into another.
• 42:04
  I guess, you know, we had some open question as to whether or not the result would be the same if you could wind back the clock and make the change when they were two.
• 42:13
  It's hard to say, but you know, when Michael Jordan tried to move into baseball, he wasn't that old and he had played baseball before.
• 42:20
  So I just think achievement is something quite fragile and many different things need to come together.
• 42:27
  And a lot of the most talented people, if they'd been born like the great internet, the great internet on topreneurs, if they'd been born 20 years earlier, I still think they would have succeeded in business, but they probably would not have been multi billionaires.
• 42:42
  Where's Bill Gates without the internet and Microsoft software? Well, he's probably very successful at something, but odds are I would not have heard of him.
• 42:51
  Therefore, a lot of success is chance.
• 42:54
  I don't know if chance is the right word. I would say it's contingent, you know, relative to the circumstance that those people did work very hard.
• 43:02
  They do largely deserve what they've earned, but their success is contingent. A Leonardo da Vinci born into the Stone Age is not a Leonardo, right?
• 43:12
  Yeah, he might make wonderful cave drawings, but that's the end of it.
• 43:18
  Can you spot talent? Well, I run a philanthropic fund called emergent ventures where I work every day on trying to spot talent.
• 43:28
  Maybe it's not for me to judge how good I am, but it's commonly viewed as a successful program.
• 43:36
  I direct a nonprofit. We have almost 200 employees. I've been very active and hiring faculty at my school. So my whole life, I've worked at judging talent.
• 43:45
  You know, everyone likes to think they're better than average, but people can read my book and decide.
• 43:52
  Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. I mean, and in addition to aptitude and like intellect, is there some ineffable pixie dust about talent that you just smell?
• 44:03
  There's something about energy level that once you're looking for it, you can smell.
• 44:07
  There's something about how well does the person work with other people? Are they concerned with making others better?
• 44:13
  That you can learn from conversation. There's something about how well does the person perceive hierarchies within a team or organization?
• 44:22
  And how well can they climb them or figure out how they work? That you can learn pretty quickly.
• 44:27
  The hardest thing to learn about most people, I think, is their durability and persistence.
• 44:32
  Now, if they're much older, you can just look at their track record and you'll just know it, right?
• 44:36
  Yeah.
• 44:37
  But if they're younger, that's the hardest thing. You can talk to them for a long time.
• 44:40
  And I find often I just still don't know how much they're going to stick with this thing that they have going.
• 44:46
  Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, that's one of the things that I think is the most misunderstood by young people.
• 44:53
  At least was the most misunderstood by myself when I was young.
• 44:56
  As I approach middle age, I think the thing that I had that my peers who were better than me didn't have was just perseverance and tenacity, actually.
• 45:06
  The ability to go through the dark patches of my career and not pack it in and do something else.
• 45:13
  I see the so quite frequently in people in media, but it describes my own career as well.
• 45:18
  I was not very well known until I was in my 40s.
• 45:21
  So I had several decades, like I was doing fine, but most people just would have posted into an asymptote of maintaining doing fine.
• 45:30
  And I just kept on trying to do better and work harder and improve myself.
• 45:34
  And I think that's what made the difference.
• 45:36
  How did you find that?
• 45:39
  I think there's a lot of big advantages to being better known late in life.
• 45:44
  If you're too well known, too early in life, you lose control of your time.
• 45:48
  A lot of things come to you too easily. It's too easy to stop learning.
• 45:52
  I had a lot of free time to travel, see the world, go places like Australia.
• 45:56
  So it worked out great for me.
• 45:59
  Yeah.
• 46:00
  And then when it came, were there ever any points where you thought, you know what?
• 46:04
  This is pretty good. I mean, I could sit on this asymptote.
• 46:07
  I don't really need to do anything else.
• 46:10
  No, I never thought that. That always would have bugged me.
• 46:13
  I don't think it ever really occurred to me.
• 46:16
  So that's not an issue of your will. That's an issue of just something that's intrinsic to you.
• 46:22
  I think so. I think I was born with that.
• 46:25
  Don't think it's from my environment.
• 46:28
  Does that lead to a happy life? Or does it lead to a life where you're always clamoring for more?
• 46:34
  My life has been happy. I don't think it always leads to a happy life.
• 46:39
  So if I think of the things I want to do, which is learn more about the world, travel more, you know,
• 46:45
  read books, listen to wonderful music, have great friends, they are all fairly achievable.
• 46:51
  I'm not saying they're all easy, but you really can succeed at those in the modern Western world.
• 46:56
  But there are people who have desires that are more specific or harder to achieve.
• 47:01
  So Elon Musk, he's obsessed with setting up a Mars colony.
• 47:05
  Not for me to judge how feasible that is, but it seems a lot harder than what I want to do.
• 47:10
  And he already seems somewhat unhappy or could end up very unhappy.
• 47:14
  So it really depends on your goals. It can be a curse.
• 47:19
  Yeah, there's, I mean, there certainly seems to be a resurgence in Silicon Valley of a kind of a stoic way of thinking,
• 47:26
  you know, a rise of secular Buddhism, a recognition that the traditional clamoring for more and more stuff
• 47:34
  is never going to lead to anything but the rat race and the hamster wheel.
• 47:38
  And I wonder whether or not what you make of that.
• 47:41
  Is that something that you try to incorporate into your life?
• 47:45
  I'm not very Buddhist or very stoic, but I think for many people it's a wonderful way to go.
• 47:51
  But I suspect most of them should actually leave Silicon Valley, which you know, I'm fine.
• 47:56
  If they want to do that, move to Maine or Oregon and set up a different kind of life.
• 48:02
  But I think from the beginning, I've tried to think through my goals to be achievable.
• 48:07
  And if your main goal is to sort of collect, assemble, process, understand a lot of information through some version of that that's doable.
• 48:15
  It's almost any setting for your career.
• 48:18
  So you can always be pretty happy, even if you're not meeting up with that much earthly success.
• 48:25
  So I would rather people try to be wiser along that dimension than kind of retreat, acceptance, specificity.
• 48:32
  They don't suit my temperament, but you know, for plenty of people they do, that's fine.
• 48:37
  Well, I think for plenty of people the way that you're articulating your life goals, Tyler would seem ultimately fruitless in the sense that when you die, all of that acquisition will be for naught.
• 48:49
  Well, we'll see, right? So I've had a lot of students, a lot of people I've supported and helped in their careers.
• 48:55
  Not always younger people, but predominantly younger people.
• 48:59
  We have a daughter, now a granddaughter, second granddaughter on the way.
• 49:04
  Again, I don't have exact predictions for you, but like there will be traces of me in different ways.
• 49:09
  I'm not pessimistic about those traces while not pretending to know.
• 49:14
  Yeah, it's just interesting to me that those traces weren't the things that you identified as being sort of the purpose of your life.
• 49:20
  Because I think if you were, they're not in the prolific.
• 49:23
  If someone had asked me before speaking to what does Tyler think his life is about, I would have said, probably giving the world, you know, a huge quantity of interesting ideas that help it to rethink, that help people to sort of rethink things or see things from a different angle or dig into things a little bit more deeply or be a little bit more unconventional in their thinking.
• 49:44
  My perception of you is as a very outwardly directed person because you're so prolific, but your perception of you is as someone who is, who is almost a positive in your knowledge.
• 49:55
  Yeah, I think I'm way more selfish than how you described me, which was accurate in terms of how it looks.
• 50:01
  That was like a very good description, but the motive is the selfish joy at learning something every day, which is pretty internal.
• 50:09
  And I think that's why over many decades, I've just kept on going because I'm never asking like, do I need this extra money? Do I need this extra job promotion, whatever?
• 50:20
  I don't need that to motivate me.
• 50:22
  So it's helped me be durable and persistent. This short run selfishness of acquisition.
• 50:29
  What would you advise to some to a young person who thinks they might be talented, but isn't quite sure if they are talented because they only have themselves to compare themselves to be?
• 50:40
  Well, I think that the number of talented people is really quite large. We often don't do a good job spotting them or mobilizing them.
• 50:47
  But I have two pieces of general advice for most humans, and I have very few pieces of general advice, but these two, the first is get a wonderful small group that you can interact with, who are your peers, and who challenge you, and try to make that group better and better over time.
• 51:03
  And the second is, you know, get a mentor, mentors, and if you can, at the same time, mentor or other people.
• 51:11
  How do you get a mentor? I was always jealous of people who had mentors in a way to stop.
• 51:16
  I bet you've had mentors. You want to start by making yourself mentorable.
• 51:22
  So just being truly concerned with improving yourself and what you're doing in this sincere way is the biggest step.
• 51:30
  But then try to meet people, network, write people, call emails, circulate whatever it depends where you are, what you do, put out a podcast, be on YouTube, it's going to vary.
• 51:40
  But especially with the internet, there is so much you can do.
• 51:44
  That's so much you can do. Now I wonder whether it's also an impediment as much as an opportunity.
• 51:50
  And in the sense that some talented people, and I count myself among them, humbly, are pretty good at a lot of things.
• 51:58
  And so it's hard to know exactly what you should be focusing on because you don't want to waste the opportunity by pursuing something that turns out not to have been the ideal thing.
• 52:09
  Maybe Leonardo in the Stone Age because you just didn't pick up the paintbrush.
• 52:15
  And for people who think that they have a reasonable aptitude and interest in a lot of things, how do you think what you deal with that?
• 52:24
  I think indirectly you're a small group, groups, and your mentors, they will tell you, they may not tell you flat out.
• 52:31
  But say when I was a chess player at age 12, 13, I was buddies with these other chess players around the same age.
• 52:38
  They didn't tell me, but I'd hang out with them. I could see like some of them were just intrinsically better than I was.
• 52:44
  And that I was not going to make it to world champion or even national champion.
• 52:48
  So like they told me like Tyler, like maybe you're a smart guy, but do something else.
• 52:53
  So I think you will learn those things if you're interacting enough with like minded others, they will tell you one way or another.
• 53:01
  Tyler, it's great to speak with you for our for our paid subscribers.
• 53:05
  I like to do a little segment called first date questions, which are basically a series of left field sort of rush up rapid fire questions.
• 53:12
  Will you stick around for that for me?
• 53:14
  Absolutely.
• 53:15
  What's your favorite movie Tyler?
• 53:19
  Bergman movies and Hitchcock movies are my favorite. My favorite Bergman movie changes over time. Maybe now it's persona.
• 53:27
  Sometimes it smiles of the summer night. That's more optimistic. Sometimes it seems from a marriage, which is more brutal.
• 53:34
  Hitchcock would be rear window.
• 53:36
  Kubrick movies 2001. Barry Lyndon. Those would be a few picks.
• 53:41
  Do you understand the ending of 2001?
• 53:45
  No, and I have read the book, but I don't think you need to understand it. Now Clark later on offered some remarks about it, but I would dismiss those.
• 53:53
  It's not up to the artist or the writer, correct?
• 53:56
  I think the ending is simply there's some new phase and transition for human beings and we're seeing the beginnings of it and by its nature, of course, it will puzzle us.
• 54:05
  Got it.
• 54:06
  Do you binge watch TV shows?
• 54:09
  No, I typically in a given year, I'll watch two or three TV shows and I like to stretch them out a bit. My wife and I debate this.
• 54:16
  She wants to watch it all in a few nights. My view is let's watch like two episodes a week and enjoy it for a month.
• 54:24
  Yeah, and just because we're busy, usually I win out, not that I win every argument like that.
• 54:29
  So I prefer to stretch them out. I'm anti-binging for myself.
• 54:33
  What's your favorite app on your phone?
• 54:37
  Well, I use Uber and I use WhatsApp as an app, but I don't use many apps. I'm much more internet-rooted just using emails, visiting websites.
• 54:49
  I use very few apps except for the super, super obvious things that are so obvious we barely still think of them as apps.
• 54:56
  If you could travel back or forward in time to any period and you were able to come back to the present day, where would you go?
• 55:03
  I was just thinking about this earlier today. I would want to see the Aztec Empire, Tenochitslán at its peak right before the Spaniards arrived.
• 55:12
  And be able to spend some time there, assuming like, hey, I wouldn't get sick and die, and be I would somehow cope with the language which you have to toss in there. Otherwise you're just dead everywhere, right?
• 55:22
  That's right. I think we can assume that you're vaccinated and yeah, and you're multilingual.
• 55:28
  What's been the best year of your life so far?
• 55:31
  The next one? I don't know. I feel I've had a happy life with a very high average, maybe relatively low peaks.
• 55:40
  The first year I spent living abroad in Germany was certainly one of my best years.
• 55:45
  It had some frustrations because I wasn't used to living abroad, but that's one year that stands out.
• 55:50
  But I will say, you know, the next year I was 23, rent at least a car drove around, would go to Switzerland on the weekend or drive up to Amsterdam or to drive to France from where I lived in Germany was half hour away.
• 56:05
  It was just fantastic time for me. Everything was new every day.
• 56:09
  Yeah. What's the most beautiful place you've been?
• 56:13
  Physically beautiful would be the northern rim of the Grand Canyon, and I assure you I am not a nationalist when it comes to travel.
• 56:20
  I much prefer traveling outside my own country, but the mix of southern Utah and northern rim of the Grand Canyon would be my number one igua su falls in Brazil, Argentina would be number two.
• 56:31
  Wow. Not the Swiss Alps.
• 56:34
  I love them and I saw them early in life that made a huge impression on me, but they're actually not that tall.
• 56:41
  Maybe they're in the top 10, but bottom of the top 10.
• 56:44
  Interesting. If you can live to 100 and you can either keep the body you had at the age of 30 or the mind you had at the age of 30, which would you keep?
• 56:54
  I think the body, but it depends just what else is happening with the mind or the body in these counterfactuals.
• 57:01
  A lot more can go wrong with your body. There are people I've known well into their 90s who are sharp enough, so I'm inclined to think I would keep the better body.
• 57:11
  But again, I would want a little more detail.
• 57:14
  What's your least favorite household chore?
• 57:17
  My least favorite household chore, putting the sheets on the bed that you have to do like cross corner.
• 57:24
  That's in my top tier of least favorite.
• 57:27
  Things like doing the dishes are fine. Anything where I can listen to music is fine.
• 57:33
  Cleaning up, I intrinsically enjoy, though I guess I don't do enough of it.
• 57:37
  Cooking, I love. Things like sort of painting the house. I'm just topless.
• 57:42
  And I just tire someone. So the stuff I really hate, like I've never even done.
• 57:47
  What's your best dish to cook?
• 57:49
  I cook Indian food, Sichuan food in Mexican food, maybe chicken mole, poeblist style with like 17 different spices,
• 57:57
  an unsweetened chocolate and raisins and all that ground in would be my best dish.
• 58:03
  Have you always been a cook?
• 58:06
  Not always, but since I was 20, I didn't grow up cooking, but for a long time.
• 58:13
  Are you an indoors or outdoors person?
• 58:16
  I think more indoors and I prefer seeing cities to seeing nature.
• 58:21
  The notion of just like walking through the woods, I would never do unless like occasionally people want to do it with me.
• 58:27
  But it just seems strange, like you're voluntarily putting yourself somewhere where all prices are infinite.
• 58:33
  And it bores me. So I'm like a city slash indoor slash culture person, absolutely definitely.
• 58:39
  What's the most underrated city?
• 58:42
  Most underrated city, I guess underrated by whom, but I'm inclined to think it's Los Angeles, which is America's most global city, entertainment capital of the world,
• 58:51
  has the best food in the United States. A lot of people hate it because they hate cars or they don't really get what it is you're supposed to see you're supposed to do.
• 58:59
  So I'll say LA, but our Mexico City is deeply underrated by many.
• 59:05
  It's like as good as Paris or Rome and I'm not sure everyone knows that.
• 59:11
  If you could live forever, would you?
• 59:14
  It depends on the terms, but probably I would if I'm not in extreme pain because I'm so curious about how history turns out.
• 59:23
  That even if I were very bored or felt out of place or all my skills were obsolete, I could still learn what was going on in history.
• 59:30
  And that would be enough to make it worthwhile for me.
• 59:33
  And if I'm some like weird vampire and all the people I know die and I'm so sad and I weak, it's like, OK, but yeah, I'm still going to pick living forever.
• 59:43
  Last question, what's getting worse as you get older and what's getting better as you get older?
• 59:48
  You mean in the world?
• 59:50
  No, for you. Well, either how you want to take it?
• 59:53
  I think on average, I am happier. I haven't had any health problems yet at age 60. That's maybe a little unusual, but that can't keep on going forever.
• 1:00:03
  So for me, not much has gotten worse.
• 1:00:08
  I think for the world, people's understanding of economics on average has gotten much worse.
• 1:00:14
  For aspects for global peace have become much worse, Ukraine, possibly Taiwan, a number of other spots in Africa.
• 1:00:22
  That would be the biggest thing that has gotten much worse.
• 1:00:25
  And even though I'm optimistic about many things, it's hard for me to be optimistic about those particular places.
• 1:00:31
  And what's gotten better for you?
• 1:00:34
  I know more people. I know more interesting people. I know smarter people.
• 1:00:40
  Now have a granddaughter. Love the house I live in. Have a better art collection. I understand music than I better use.
• 1:00:46
  Better than I used to. I know more history and I get more fun invitations to do things.
• 1:00:52
  So most things have gotten better.
• 1:00:55
  That comes with status. The invitations come with status.
• 1:00:58
  But some people who are high status, they get terrible invitations.
• 1:01:01
  And they do them. They sort of the kind of.
• 1:01:05
  I don't want to name names, but there are all these events that are actually a crashing bore.
• 1:01:09
  Oh, God. I get good invitations too. Yeah.
• 1:01:12
  That's another thing that young people don't realize.
• 1:01:15
  Just help boring so many of the things that they want to go to actually are when you get invited and you go.
• 1:01:19
  Exactly. Woodson. I mean, you don't trust me. You don't actually want to go to a wood ceremony.
• 1:01:24
  You want to go once. You don't want to go the fifth time.
• 1:01:27
  Uh, tie up to reflect to meet you. Thanks so much for doing this. It's, uh, it's lovely to touch base.
• 1:01:32
  A real pleasure chatting you and maybe someday we'll meet in the meantime. Take care.
• 1:01:36
  Listen, next time I'm in DC, I will hit you up and see if I can buy you a meal.
• 1:01:40
  Sounds great. You cook some amazing Mexican food.
• 1:01:44
  Sounds great. Have a good, uh, I guess morning for you. Take care.
• 1:01:50
  Uncomfortable conversations is produced by Stefan Postuma. Follow me, Josh Zeps on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest.
• 1:01:57
  May your day be fruitful, your mind humble, your enemies generous and your conversations perfectly, sparklingly,
• 1:02:05
  collectively, uncomfortable.