Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / SZEPS LIVE TOUR - TYLER COWEN on Inequality, Abundance, & Using A.I. to Achieve 'Intellectual Immortality'

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SZEPS LIVE TOUR - TYLER COWEN on Inequality, Abundance, & Using A.I. to Achieve 'Intellectual Immortality' · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  G'day, humans. Welcome to Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. This episode of Uncomfortable Conversations
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  is the audio of a video live stream from the ZEPPS live around the world tour substacks
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  first ever live streamed global podcast marathon where I'm crossing two dozen time zones
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  in a dozen days and a circumnavigating the globe to sit down with some of the world's
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  most interesting people in some new global capital nearly every single day sometimes multiple
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  it already on substack if you want to get ahead of the next one. If you're new to Uncomfortable
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  for sane independent media in the meantime. Enjoy this conversation and thank you whether you're paid
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  or unpaid for helping us to make debate healthy again.
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  Thank you for being here. You're one of the most intellectually heterodox people.
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  I know. I'm not sure if that's true. But it's polymathic, as we say.
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  The main thing that people talk about when they ask me about economists who I speak to is
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  inequality at the moment. We've just seen the New York Meryl race focus a lot on inequality.
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  What causes inequality? Is it a policy problem? Is it a technological one, a cultural one?
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  It depends what causes the inequality. So some inequalities are caused by what I would call
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  renseeking. People go to the government and they get special privileges. Another people can't
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  compete with them. But most inequality is just caused by naturally different outcomes. Some people
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  have more talent. Some people have more luck. Typically it's a combination of the two. So in any
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  process where there are decentralized generation of who ends up doing what? You're going to have
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  a fair amount of inequality. So I don't think inequality per se is a problem. I do think in New
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  York City the cost of living is a problem. And I think people voted from Amdani more because of
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  the cost of living than because of inequality. Right. The more upset they rent in the price of
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  food, then they are mad at Michael Bloomberg. Yes. Isn't there a sense that if there were more
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  equitable distribution of wealth, then they would be able to afford things better.
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  You could tax the rich all you want. But even in the medium term, it doesn't make up for the
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  differences. So New York City, for instance, spends I think 3x per student on its public schools
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  in a place like Florida. So New York City spends an enormous amount on its public schools,
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  on its other public services. Mostly they're still not good. So it's not a question of resources.
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  It's badly managed. And I don't think trying to take more from Michael Bloomberg is the answer.
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  What is better governance? How do we get that? Voters should elect different people.
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  Not like Amdani? I don't know what he said about the school systems. So that to me is a very
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  important issue. I'd like to look at that. I'm highly skeptical of him in general. But if you had
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  someone come in and really be determined to set the school system straight, once those children
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  would grow up, you'd have much higher living standards in New York City. Right. And 16, the
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  infrastructure. So building a subway line, like on the east side, that line, they started
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  planning it in the 1970s. And it opened not that long ago. You can't run a major city that way.
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  Okay. So the answer for people who focus on inequality a lot like Amdani is hold rents in place,
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  say, community grocery stores. So whatever this is. Do we want to just go through and just explain
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  to us why those are misguided? We've tried rent control in many American cities, including New
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  York City in the past. You end up with a shortage of apartments, quality deteriorates. Landlords might
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  hold properties off the market or they try to drive out tenants knowing if a new tenant comes in,
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  they can raise the rent. Economists, whether they're Republicans, Democrats, Progressives,
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  Libertarian, whatever, just do not support rent control. It's a bad idea. There's plenty of evidence
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  to that effect. Now government or in grocery stores, we actually have a few of them in the military.
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  They cost a lot of money. They lose money. Therefore, American service people, typically abroad.
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  Government has no advantage at running them. What you need is competition to get down the price
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  of groceries. It's a problem in New York City that the rents for just about everything are way too
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  high. So that's one reason why food is so expensive there. That can be alleviated somewhat in the
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  longer term. I don't think it will ever really be fixed. It costs a lot to live in New York City,
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  because New York City is great. You don't want to change that, right? So maybe arson would get down
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  the rents, but it's an eternal fact of life. You live in Sydney. I believe the rents and home prices
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  are pretty high there. And it brought a rent. Some of it is legal restrictions. Those we should ease,
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  but just living in Sydney is great. And there's only so much of it. Yeah. Well, in a city like Sydney,
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  where there is no dearth of land, I think there you can blame planners a lot more. There really is.
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  Yeah. And there's truly opposed problem. There's no reason why we shouldn't have much,
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  much higher density populations in Sydney than we do. And there's a lot of restrictions and
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  zoning and height restrictions and all that, which presumably can't be said of New York. I mean,
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  Manhattan is a fixed size. You can't add an extra suburb to Manhattan. But if you look at
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  Seoul South Korea, where there had been a lot of land around it, they built, they built, they kept
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  on building. It's still expensive there. Yeah. It's cheaper having bills a lot than not.
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  I don't think major cities are ever going to be that cheap. Paris, London, there's plenty of
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  examples. But doesn't that sort of undercut the point that you were making earlier, which is that
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  inequality is not what people are really responding to. It's the price of things. If the price of
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  things is always expensive in a place like New York, you can make the price of things in New York
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  cheaper by making it a place where wealthy people didn't want to live, didn't want to go see the
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  opera where young people didn't want to meet up to do whatever young people do when they meet up.
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  All those things, but you're basically just making the city bad. So any urban area that generates
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  a lot of good outcomes, well, A, have a lot of inequality, and B, have pretty high rents.
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  We can do some things to get those rents down like build more. Yeah, right. I mean, I think
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  this has been a change of opinion. I don't know if it's a change of fact or just a change of
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  perception, which is that when I first went to New York in my teens, it landed for me as a place
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  that was inspiringly vibrant and full of creative people, and this might just be because I was a
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  teenager, and that the prosperity there was a result of innovative people doing innovative things.
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  And now when I go to New York, I have a narrative running in the back of my head,
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  which sees the penthouse apartments and thinks Russian oligarchs, Arab oil shakes,
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  trust fund babies, people who are probably seeking rents in some way and probably didn't deserve
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  what they've got. Has New York changed or have I changed? That sounds more like London than
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  New York, but definitely New York has changed. So I started going there in the 1970s. I lived right
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  nearby as a teenager, and even chest layers could afford to live in Manhattan, some of them,
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  which is incredible, unthinkable today, that you would walk into Times Square and there would be
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  junkies shooting up and there would be prostitutes and it would be dangerous. Even on the upper
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  side, you were not totally safe. The city was a mess. It went in and out of bankruptcy.
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  Crime, I think the murder rate was at its peak six times higher than it is today. So again,
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  when you make the city better, it's not better for the chest players who wanted to live there,
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  but it's far preferable overall. It supports more economic activity, more good things. But of
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  course, there is some cost, writers, painters, chest players, whatever, often have moved elsewhere
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  because it's cheaper. But for America as a whole, I think that's fine. I actually think it was
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  quite unhealthy, say in the 70s, to have so much talent concentrated in New York City. They're
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  wonderful, of course, if you live there. And there's no alternative in between the series,
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  and we're such that you're able to live in work in New York City if you're working class,
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  and it's also not a dump. There's a bunch of things we could do to make it much better.
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  Another thing that would be a partial solution is to have more ways of getting from New Jersey
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  into Manhattan. You could do that with more fairies, another tunnel, another bridge,
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  you can debate what is best. But more people would live seeing your Hoboken in Jersey City,
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  and they would commute in. It's really a very quick commute when done properly.
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  And I'm not saying that will make the city cheap, but there are dozens of things we could do,
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  improving the subways, congestion pricing on different ways in and out of the city,
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  that would make it much better, much easier for people to live somewhat outside and still work
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  there and have an acceptable commute. We're mostly not doing those things. We did a somewhat
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  misguided version of congestion pricing for one area, but there's a sense of complacency because
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  New York is still New York, and it can get away with making a lot of bad decisions.
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  Tyler Cowan is with us legendary economist professor of economics at George Mason University.
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  America's hottest economist by Bloomberg Business Week, did you know that Tyler?
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  That was, I think, 2013. This was 2025. That's right. They need to run that poll again.
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  Foreign Policy Magazine called you one of the top 100 global thinkers,
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  marginal revolution, your blog was named the best economics blog by the Wall Street Journal.
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  He's written for New York Times, the Wall Street Journal of Washington Post, and everywhere else
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  and is now contributor at the free press and thanks to the free press for collaborating on this
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  episode of Uncomfortable Conversations. We're traveling around America, Europe, the world, and
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  pretty much every day we're talking to some other fascinating person like Tyler next week,
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  we'll be in LA talking to Sam Harris and a bunch of other people. So subscribe to Uncomfortable
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  Conversations to get notified whenever we have these chats and subscribe to the free press,
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  which I hope you already do, which Tyler is a contributor to. On this sense that I have the
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  Tyler of there being a sort of injustice in the people who own the prosperity in a place like
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  New York, and we're not talking just about New York, we're talking about a sense of populism
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  that exists all over the United States and is researching around the world.
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  Is there any validity to my intuition that there is less, that more of the wealth is earned
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  in essentially arbitrary money-fudging commoditized ways than it was 20 years ago?
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  Income inequality has been falling in recent times, not rising, that's not very well known.
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  If you go around America, I was just in Grand Rapids, Michigan, which you might think is this
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  decaying rust belt city. It's beautiful again. It has a resurgence. If you go to Nashville,
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  that's booming. There are just so many second-third tier places in America that are doing much
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  better than before, giving people middle-class or upper-middle-class lifestyles. So to think the
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  whole system is broke, I think New York City has been badly governed for my entire life.
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  You can't look at New York City and infer very much about the problems of the United States.
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  One great thing about this country is you don't have to live in New York City and, indeed,
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  I don't live there. I live in Northern Virginia. There's so much choices to where you can live
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  and still have access to many things, including the city itself. So there's competition across
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  different jurisdictions. New York City is an option that some, to me, slightly insane people,
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  decide to choose, and it's there for them. That's great. Do you agree, though, that there's a rise
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  in the perception in Middle America that wealth is unjustified, inherited, not earned fairly?
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  I'm not sure what the perception is, but so many of the very wealthiest people today produce
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  their wealth. The tech wealth is all produced. It's not earned or, you know, sought-unearned or
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  inherited. Yeah. Well, from Nvidia is new wealth. So there's some exceptions, you could say,
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  well, the wall and air, but that's quite recent, in fact. So more wealth is being generated now
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  than ever before. It's not mostly a story of inherited wealth. Now, if you pulled people,
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  I'm not sure what they would say, but I can tell you what the reality is.
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  To what do you attribute the anti-alletist backlash? The elites have screwed up a number of things.
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  So you could say the Iraq war or you could say 9-11. You could say the COVID response. You could say
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  the great financial crisis. People disagree maybe what exactly the screw up was, but hardly anyone is
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  completely happy with how those things went. And I think that's most of it. Like reality matters.
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  And this is part of the problem, is that everyone has different things that they hate about the elites,
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  right? I mean, the census about exactly what we got wrong in any of those circumstances that
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  you just cited. So there's no obvious solution for everybody to cohere around. But when very big
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  things go wrong, sentiment becomes more negative and the elites bear the brunt of that. I think
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  is the simplest and most correct explanation. But what about technology? Social media algorithms.
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  I think social media contributes to the depression of SEG like 12 to 16-year-old girls,
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  which is a bad thing. But for the most part, it is amplifying social trends we already have.
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  So for me, it's not a primary explanation of why people are upset.
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  And the fragmentation of the media and the fact that we all get out news from
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  Taliban-made sources rather than listening to Walter Cronkite.
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  We are the fragmentation of the media right here right back here. I love it.
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  I'm not just saying that, this is my gig.
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  And you used to be in mainstream media, right? As was Barry.
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  Yeah.
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  And for the better, the two of you left and I used to write for New York Times and now I'm with
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  Free Press and why not? Absolutely. I mean, this comes back to your point that the elites have
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  made some blunders and clearly institutions like big media organizations created climates in which
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  people like Barry Weiss and I felt unwelcome. And whether it's universities or media organizations,
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  I think there's a reckoning at the moment in which they're thinking, well, maybe we do need a
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  greater diversity of opinion.
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  And even apart from mistakes, so if I want to watch online chess, even cable TVs
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  not going to make me happy, but YouTube definitely will.
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  Right. So there's just a high demand for diversity and things like YouTube keep
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  on growing podcasts, your venture.
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  But is the cost of the diversity that people are less exposed to points of view that they would
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  otherwise have heard? I don't know. I think people online sample a lot of different opinions.
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  Is my sense? I think some people are driven crazy by what they've asked for just because you do.
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  Now, there's data. There's a number of research papers that show people's online political
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  consumption is actually more diverse than their selection of face-to-face friends or what you
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  would get from earlier network TV, which was mostly one very bland, centrist point of view.
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  I sometimes like to say the Vietnam War would not have lasted two weeks on Twitter.
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  Maybe it wouldn't have. So there's definitely minuses, but there's a lot of pluses.
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  I think we need still a lot more adjustment to learn how to live in this new world.
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  Like when the printing press trust came, it disoriented a lot of people, I believe,
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  and all kinds of new tales of conspiracies and rumors and who's actually the antichrist that's
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  spread over time. We learned how to deal with it and never completely.
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  And there's now a new wave of media that we have to learn how to deal with.
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  So it's not a seamless process, but medium term, it's definitely a good thing.
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  Short term, I think it's mostly a good thing. And we're dealing with it.
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  One of the things that you are important to emphasize that we need to be
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  quick to future generations is institutions, good institutions.
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  That's right. The threat of this sort of fragmented ecosystem is that we undermine our institutions
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  through those or Trump or the far right in Europe or whatever it might be that we clutch at
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  as solutions to what we fear, what we fear. What do you worry about that?
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  There's a lot packed into what you said. I'm not a Trump supporter. I'm not rooting for
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  the populist right in Europe, but they would very much insist on telling you they're the ones
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  defending our institutions. They think very high levels of immigration are undermining them.
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  One can debate that. I'm much more pro-integration than they are. But from their point of view,
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  they're playing defense, and we slug out that debate on social media.
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  I'm not sure that's true that they think that they're defending institutions. I think they
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  think they're defending good principles, but I would think that they would argue that some of
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  the institutions were captured by an ideology that would betraying America. Of course.
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  And they're defending the institutions by pushing out that other ideology.
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  Yeah, or maybe not even defending the institutions. I mean,
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  does J.E. Vance think he's defending his institutions, or does he think that he's defending
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  principles and communities in both institutions? Yeah. Again, I think the influence of immigrants
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  in this country is far more positive. But if you're in, say, the Netherlands, or Frankfurt,
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  Germany, and you observe the changes in your country, it's quite understandable to me why those
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  people would support the populist right? Yeah, definitely, but that's because of a failure of
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  institutions. Well, labor markets are not free enough, and I think they're taking in a critical
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  mass of people who are Muslim, rather than say Latinos who tend to be Catholic or Christian,
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  and that's much harder to digest. And over the last 20 years, I think it's over 60 million immigrants,
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  the European Union has absorbed, and many want to go to the same places as the other ones.
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  It's just a lot to ask of relatively static economies that maybe only grow 1% a year.
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  Certainly, from the perspective of someone who comes from an island nation that is extremely
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  aggressive about policing its oceans and ruthless in the Faustian pact that Australia has made
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  where it has said for decades now that if anyone comes on a boat, they're going to get shipped
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  off to a concentration camp on a desert island and will never set foot in Australia. It looks like
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  America's problems, just to keep the conversation localised to the United States,
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  is a failure of the institutions to secure the southern border to require employment
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  verification, which is another thing that other countries like Australia have where it's
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  incumbent on the employer to make sure that their employee is a legal citizen. So,
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  there's a network of law enforcement and immigration agencies that should be functioning,
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  which for decades in this country have not been functioning effectively, such that we now find
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  ourselves in a situation where there's a backlash. It's very hard to get those functioning,
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  well, I think immigration in the US, even at its recent relatively high levels, has in fact
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  gone fine. We need more people. Our own birth rate is declining. There's a lot of evidence for
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  Latina with simulation. Mexicans and Chinese are the two most numerous groups that come over.
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  I think both of those have been success stories. Media and household income for a family from India
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  is $150,000. Family from Pakistan, which of course is going to be Muslim. That's over $100,000.
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  So, Pakistani Americans, who are almost entirely recent arrivals, would be one of the richest
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  countries in the world. So, I'm all for it. Again, I disagree with the Trump people.
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  Yeah, but sorry, let me just split apart. You're talking about legal immigration. When I was
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  talking about the dysfunction of immigration as an institution in the United States, I was talking
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  about illegal immigration, which I think is what's giving rise to the antipathy, because Australia has
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  very high rates of legal immigration, one of the highest rates of refugee resettlement in the
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  world. The pact that Australian governments have successively made is to say people will
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  tolerate very, very high rates of demographic change in immigration as long as they feel like
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  they're in control of who's coming into the country. So, yeah, I'm the big booster of
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  high immigration. I was a migrant to this country. I lived in New York City. I think I'm
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  much prefer living in places with lots of migrants, but isn't that the case that in the United States,
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  the framework in which sustainable high rates of legal migration can take place has been
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  undermined by the institutional failure towards to deal with illegal immigration.
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  I think a lot of voters, they just see many more foreigners. There's disagreements. What are
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  the numbers on illegal migrants? One estimate I saw was 10 to 12 million. I'm not sure that's
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  correct, but if you take that as an estimate for a country verging on 350 million people,
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  I think it's more than manageable. It's a low wage labor. Many of them become legal over time. A lot
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  of it's from Central America. There is a problem that you're sometimes getting central Americans
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  who have not yet assimilated into their own countries, and then they arrive here.
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  But I don't think it's a major problem facing America right now. It isn't particular border towns,
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  but we need more people. We need cheap labor. We have a large border. It's unrealistic to expect
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  that we can get that number down so much, much more. I know Trump, you know, the immediate
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  flow is much lower, but I predict that will resume at some point. There's just a lot of
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  inter-temporal substitution going on. Well, we're going to wait to go, and it gets a bit easier.
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  Periodically, it gets a bit easier. It's hard to staff the whole border. For legal reasons,
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  it's not possible to build a wall. I think America will get through this just fine.
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  When you say that it's not a problem, it may not be a problem. It's not a major problem.
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  It may not be. It's not a big problem. It could be a problem if it gives rise to self-inflicted
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  harms because people feel like the situation is out of control. In the same way that
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  you may not have gotten Brexit had it not been for huge billboards that showed Syrian refugees
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  pouring across a border and scared the pants off everybody. Right. I mean,
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  sure, but I think a lot of the public sentiment is just seeing a lot of foreigners,
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  most of whom are quite legal, and feeling something about America is different. I would say
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  most of those differences are good, not all of them. Simply choking off the illegals is a kind of
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  easy target, but I don't think it's getting at the real phenomenon, which is America truly has
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  been changing, like Australia, all the more so. My suspicion is that you need both. There's
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  probably a core of the population who are unreconstructed racists who just don't like the
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  demographic change at all, but then there's a winnable portion of the population who are frustrated
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  with seeming incompetence and the out of controlness and don't understand why this problem can be
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  so hard to fix. If you want low-paid, low-skilled, low-paid wages, then create a visa class for that,
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  and you can bring in people who've been properly vetted from wherever you want to in the world,
• 23:33
  and you can bring in a lot of Bangladeshies. Why does it have to be that people just wonder
• 23:37
  anyone who can wander across the border is the person who gets the job as a fruit picker or a
• 23:42
  nanny? Don't you think that there's a sense of anxiety about the uncertainty of that
• 23:47
  that gets capitalized on? There's a sense of anxiety, and it's very strong in border towns,
• 23:52
  which I do understand. But keep in mind, we're in a world where you can walk across Europe or the
• 23:57
  Americas using a Facebook account and GPS, and the wage difference between, say, the US and
• 24:04
  Central America is quite significant, and any legalized worker program is going to ration how
• 24:10
  many people it takes in. There's always a large number of people who are not being taken in,
• 24:15
  and then you look at our immigration authorities, they're underpaid, understaffed, a significant
• 24:20
  percentage of them do not work. What they're able to do with the border is extremely feeble,
• 24:26
  and then you have environmental groups, you have tribal groups, they won't let Trump build his wall,
• 24:30
  there's lawsuits that would take forever if it were possible at all. So I think we need to learn
• 24:34
  how to live with the problem. I don't think there's really a way to choke it off that Americans would
• 24:39
  be comfortable with, rather than literal mass violence against people who would come. Right.
• 24:45
  You could build a giant wall. Well, the law won't allow us. What? Tribal groups bring lawsuits,
• 24:54
  they say it in a split up the tribal property, those lawsuits freeze the wall. The wall needs so many
• 24:59
  layers of environmental review that alone would take decades. You need the money for the wall.
• 25:05
  It sounds like a libertarian economist, like you would say that hell with the all of this red
• 25:11
  type. I would gladly get rid of the red tape, but the red tape is there, and I don't think we
• 25:15
  will get rid of it, and we need to deal with it. So I don't think going on the war path against
• 25:20
  illegal immigrants is going to yield a very high return. We want to make it work better, have more
• 25:26
  positive selection by tightening, say welfare payments to illegals, healthcare benefits to illegals,
• 25:32
  then you get the more responsible people coming. You don't get people distrushing across the border
• 25:36
  to run into a hospital. But that'll say it. I think we're lucky to have the neighbors we have.
• 25:44
  Yeah, you could do a lot worse. We could do a lot worse. And then New Zealanders.
• 25:49
  They're far from you. A lot of them go to you also. That's true. We have a lot of New Zealanders
• 25:55
  in Australia. This is uncomfortable conversations. We're on a zeps live world tour stopping in at
• 26:01
  least a half dozen different cities in a dozen days in 24 different time zones all over the world.
• 26:07
  Subscribe to our comfortable conversations to get notified whenever we sit down with fascinating
• 26:11
  people and have a conversation about things that would make people slightly uncomfortable with
• 26:15
  some of the way to express a stride and tipping in about the Atacotale Party. Tyler Cowan is with us
• 26:19
  contributed the free press and thanks to the free press for making this this conversation possible.
• 26:24
  The big, big, beautiful bill does does American need a balanced budget?
• 26:30
  We don't need a balanced budget, but we need to be closer to balance than what we have now.
• 26:36
  So right now, if you imagine the budget deficit at about what's 7% of GDP and rising and where an aging
• 26:42
  society, we don't know how sustainable that is. It may depend on how high interest rates go up.
• 26:48
  If interest rates would have fallen, it might be okay. But even then, you're running a risk.
• 26:53
  What's the risk exactly? That so much of the government budget is eaten up by interest payments
• 26:58
  that you can't spend more on defense when you need to. And you have to increase taxes to fund
• 27:04
  people's retirement, social security, Medicare, also Medicaid. At the higher level of taxes,
• 27:09
  you become like a European economy growth slows down rather than growing it two to two and a half
• 27:14
  percent. All of a sudden you're growing at one and a half percent. That makes your budget
• 27:18
  problems worse yet over the longer haul and you just get into a negative spiral.
• 27:23
  It doesn't mean your country blows up or goes bankrupt, but maybe you never get out of it and
• 27:27
  that's a much worse world. Is there a risk that bond markets no longer trust that America's
• 27:32
  going to repay its debt or is that a long while? There's always a risk and I don't think we know
• 27:37
  how large the risk is. An advantage America has is there's nowhere else really good to put your money.
• 27:43
  So if you look at other government bond markets, well, the Japanese bond market is large,
• 27:48
  relatively speaking. They're in much worse economic shape than we are. They grow at lower rates,
• 27:53
  have an older population, have a significantly lower birth rate. They're not obviously
• 27:59
  better governed, I would say. So there's the Italian market, which you know, it's not really,
• 28:05
  it's not even that large for one thing. You're not going to have more faith in the Italian
• 28:09
  political system than the American political system. That's right. So UK, but again, the United
• 28:15
  States is in this weird, unique position, which we abuse to be clear, but it also means we've been
• 28:20
  getting away with it. And it could be we just can keep on getting away with that, more or less
• 28:25
  forever, but I don't like taking that chance. It's like we're playing economic Russian roulette.
• 28:30
  It reminds me a little bit of what's the magical monetary policy theory that people are coming
• 28:34
  out with a few years ago, which basically said that you can just spend money on everything and
• 28:37
  you just make up the money. Just print it. Just print it and no one will ever catch you.
• 28:42
  That's what we'll probably do, but it's of course quite bad. So you print money, there's inflation,
• 28:47
  like right after COVID, we had 9% inflation. So real wages go down, people are worse off, people
• 28:52
  hate it. They also vote for the wrong candidates, I think on average, they go for extremes on each side.
• 28:59
  And we had one year of that, imagine having five to 10 years of it, but that's possibly what we're
• 29:03
  in for now, not 20 25, but over the next 15 to 20 years, possibly as a result of the budget,
• 29:10
  that we could print money to finance the deficits and you never tire some of the debt
• 29:15
  and have much higher inflation. And we could we're not going to solve the entire problem that way,
• 29:20
  but we could get rid of a lot of the debt at the cost of high inflation. And it would be very bad,
• 29:26
  but our hand might be forced. So say you go to the American people implicitly and say, well,
• 29:30
  we can put on a heavy that and all your money will be worth less. The sales tax and national
• 29:35
  sales tax or are we can inflate and all your money will be worth a lot less. I'm not sure which
• 29:41
  people would prefer, but in both cases, what you've got is worth a lot less and people hate it.
• 29:45
  Should America have a value added tax? No, I'm against it. I'm not sure if I prefer to add
• 29:51
  or the inflation, what I do prefer is a greater degree of budgetary balance. And I am hoping
• 29:57
  that technological improvements raise our growth rate a bit and give us some kind of smooth
• 30:02
  glide. Again, I don't want to bet on that. We need more fiscal restraint. But there's a chance
• 30:08
  if we're innovative enough again, we'll get away with it. If you need to raise revenue from somewhere,
• 30:13
  even if you don't like taxes and your options are taxing income or taxing employment in a payroll
• 30:20
  tax or whatever else it might be, what's wrong with having a value added tax as part of the mix?
• 30:24
  Once you get it, it's permanent. It's highly invisible. People get used to it. They blame the
• 30:29
  high prices on the merchants and you just end up with a much larger government and a lower growth
• 30:33
  rate. So I absolutely don't want it. It's the last thing I want. Isn't that the nice thing about
• 30:38
  inflation? Nice thing is a funny way to put it. But the nice thing about it is that people hate it.
• 30:42
  People see it. They get pissed off every day. And historically, higher rates of American inflation,
• 30:48
  we do in fact get rid of them. So Volker did it. You know, Jay Powell did it after the pandemic.
• 30:54
  So maybe part of me actually thinks the inflation would be better than the vet.
• 30:59
  Right. What if you were a betting man? How does America end up getting rid of its deficit? If
• 31:04
  you're adding three to four and a half trillion dollars or whatever, just to the deficit in this bill,
• 31:10
  how do you think that ends up getting wiped out if at all? Well, again, I don't think we need to get
• 31:13
  rid of it. Since where the global reserve currency, a very powerful nation, quite wealthy,
• 31:19
  we just have to lower the trajectory a bit. So we can do it by a mix of changing the trajectories
• 31:25
  of social security, Medicare, Medicaid, which we should do. And we can do it by some degree of
• 31:32
  inflation in tax hikes, which we're going to do whether one likes it or not. And I hope most of it
• 31:37
  we do by productivity improvements, but that's highly speculative. There's a lot of talk about the
• 31:42
  abundance agenda on the left at the moment. And it's a client. I'm all for it. Yeah. Yimbiism and so on.
• 31:48
  As is great. Why is this hard to scale politically? Or is it? We've seen Yimbi-related reforms,
• 31:55
  I think in about 20 American states and cities. So it's not obviously hard to scale. It's hard
• 32:01
  to do as much of it as you should. So for instance, I think they should take Oakland,
• 32:05
  back to San Francisco and just open it up, fair game. Like anyone can do whatever, build whatever
• 32:11
  they want in Oakland. No restriction. I don't think we should do that with central San Francisco,
• 32:17
  which has some kind of delegate balance, historic homes, to look a certain way. But Oakland,
• 32:23
  it doesn't attract any tourists. So Oakland should look like Dubai. They're flying into Oakland
• 32:28
  airport because it's cheaper than SFO. But they're not going to stay in Oakland to see Oakland.
• 32:32
  You're not ruining anything. So Oakland should look like Dubai. That's the core view I hold.
• 32:36
  We're not doing it. We've done some very good Yimbi in California. We'll probably do more,
• 32:41
  but we need to make Oakland look like Dubai. And that in turn will help a lot with the budget,
• 32:45
  because it's a higher rate of growth. So that's something I want to do. I've been amazed and
• 32:49
  pleased how much progress we've made already. The example of something like high speed rail,
• 32:55
  for example, in California, is often cited by Americans and baffled non-Americans about the
• 32:59
  inability of the political system to get any big projects done here. Doge was presumably an
• 33:06
  attempt to address or regress that phenomenon. Was it a good idea at the time? Well, high speed
• 33:14
  rail for California is a bad idea. So one reason we never got it done. First, there is too much
• 33:19
  bureaucracy. But also the demand for it is just not high enough for politicians to get their
• 33:24
  act together. You can fly. You can drive. Driving will soon be greener. Flying at some point may be
• 33:30
  greener. The only part of the annoying though between Los Angeles and San Francisco isn't that
• 33:35
  exactly the kind of city pair that if you were in Europe, you would like to just hop on a train
• 33:40
  for 90 minutes and knock out. When you think about where you would put the terminal in LA or
• 33:45
  San Francisco and how long would take to drive there? What you would do with parking and you add up
• 33:49
  all the costs. I don't think you really gain anything. The actual costs are internal to each city
• 33:55
  for the most part, not getting from one to the other. So you're hardly making people better off.
• 34:01
  There were already a bunch of airports say in the LA area. So you don't just have the option of
• 34:05
  going to LAX. But it's spending a lot of money for no real gain. You can argue DC to Boston should
• 34:12
  have high speed rail. Probably I would agree. But there's too many laws in the way I don't think
• 34:17
  we'll ever do it. That would make some sense. You know, there's people all along the corridor
• 34:22
  where it's between LA and San Francisco. There's Santa Barbara. No, just fly.
• 34:28
  That's very tempting. Or there's some planned route for somewhere in Florida. It's like with it
• 34:35
  from Tampa to no one even cares. It makes no sense. No one wants to go from one place to the other.
• 34:43
  The first you said high speed rail and then you mentioned something else. That's right. I was just
• 34:47
  saying whether or not that whether on Doge was a good idea. We don't know yet. Doge made some big
• 34:52
  mistakes. Did a bunch of good things. There's more Doge to come. So there was an article in today's
• 34:58
  Washington Post claiming I'm not sure this is true. But claiming Doge will use AI to get rid of
• 35:03
  half of the government's regulations claiming they're literally not needed by law. Again, I'm not
• 35:09
  sure that's true. But Doge has the potential to do some deregulation. And just the notion that
• 35:16
  the Department of Agriculture does not actually need 100,000 employees or the Department of Education
• 35:22
  could be half its earlier size with no loss and value. No American student will end up less well
• 35:28
  educated by cutting the Department of Education personnel in half. Those are parts of Doge. I totally
• 35:34
  agree with them. I was against getting rid of PEPFAR though fortunately that's coming back.
• 35:39
  There's a bunch of other things they cut staffing at the FDA. That was probably a mistake. Staff at
• 35:44
  the IRS. Probably a mistake. But in a lot of cases you need in government a culture where people
• 35:51
  treat their jobs as something other than a matter of entitlement. And by firing some people,
• 35:55
  even if sometimes they're the wrong people, it's a cultural wake-up call and it's not crazy to
• 36:01
  think that's what our government needs. Is it the cultural wake-up call to the government
• 36:05
  of nature? Is it the halving of employees when there are twice as many as employees as you need?
• 36:11
  Do you need both? And the more employees you have, the more layers everything acquires, the more
• 36:16
  it becomes a cledgeocracy, the more levels of review you get. So you very often get better decisions
• 36:22
  with smaller numbers of decision makers. If you look at say National Endowment for the Arts started
• 36:27
  in 1965. In its early days there were just these very small groups of people that made decisions
• 36:32
  and handed out money and it was based on their taste and it actually went pretty well.
• 36:37
  The bureaucracy gets bigger and bigger. Everything's a staff decision. There are now these large
• 36:41
  committees that make committee-like decisions. Least common denominator wins out. You need consensus
• 36:46
  candidates to get the money. Congress is involved. 40% of it is sent to the states, staffing costs
• 36:52
  grow. And it was better in the 1960s than today. Even with less money it was better.
• 36:58
  You could imagine though Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney and George H.W. Bush creating a plan that would
• 37:04
  be signed on to by Ezra Klein and Barack Obama and Gavin Newsom to degrow certain departments.
• 37:13
  That's my hope. 30% or 40% or 50% without doing the sudden damage that a lot of people
• 37:19
  regard as being reckless that both did. Wouldn't you be better off if you had the institutional
• 37:24
  capacity to say, all right, these departments are too big where we've got a 10-year plan in which
• 37:29
  we're going to scale them down. People who are ready for a time and age are not going to be replaced.
• 37:33
  People who want to apply for furlough can do so. This is how we're going to reduce it,
• 37:37
  but we're not just going to haphazardly bullen a china shop, smash things up and then have to
• 37:42
  rebuild them potentially. You might be, but there's people you mentioned, Romney, Bush, Obama,
• 37:46
  Ezra. I mean, they're not president. President is you know who, who has a short attention span.
• 37:52
  And Doge was sort of run by Elon and a lot of people wisely figured, Elon will be in Trump's
• 37:58
  good graces for not very long. So everything isn't a true hurry because it was felt you didn't have
• 38:03
  that long. Now it's fine to say that suboptimal. I agree. But if it's either that or do nothing,
• 38:10
  I don't know. Maybe it's better to get the thing underway and there'll be some broken china,
• 38:15
  but X-Post pick up the pieces. We'll see how it goes. I would just stress it's not over. Doge has
• 38:20
  a very bad reputation. There are some big serious mistakes, but a lot of it absolutely is in the
• 38:25
  right spirit. Are people to averse to change and risk? Of course they are. I've lived in this
• 38:32
  house for 22 years, I might add, but it's a very nice home. It's a great home. It's a beautiful
• 38:37
  environment. Why would you move? The dog is new. The dog's great too. The dog is what breed and
• 38:43
  Australia? Australian miniature shepherd comes from her daughter when she had her two kids. She's like,
• 38:50
  will you take the dog? The dog is here. I know that you say that people are averse to risk,
• 38:55
  but it strikes me that when we actually go to the ballot box, we lightly have been people,
• 39:01
  have been electing people who are not averse to risk. It's not clear people want real change
• 39:07
  from them. Let's assume I'm Donnie Wins, which seems likely at this point. I don't think voters
• 39:13
  are actually longing for the government to run grocery store. They're just upset. They want to send
• 39:17
  a message. They're screaming out. They want something. They may even know. They don't know what they
• 39:22
  want. Then Trump, when he's tried to change things, whether you agree or not, it has not always
• 39:27
  been easy. People want change and they don't want change at the same time. They want to scream out,
• 39:33
  I think, more than they want real change. That's interesting because sometimes they scream out
• 39:39
  and make real changes like Brexit, for example, which is pasting consequences. Yes.
• 39:48
  They're not the kind of change that they thought they were voting for when they yelled.
• 39:52
  That's right. What Trump has done, I'm not sure how much of it, if any, will be lasting.
• 39:57
  So if you take cutting the corporate tax rate and changing the trajectory of Medicaid expenditures,
• 40:03
  I could easily imagine each of those being reversed, but they could be lasting. I don't know.
• 40:08
  But say when we had Volker and Reagan in 79, 80, through 80, four and then later,
• 40:15
  those changes were mostly lasting. The taxes went back up again, but still, it was a real change,
• 40:21
  and people mostly wanted lower inflation, and they were willing to put up with the recession.
• 40:26
  You're watching uncomfortable conversations in collaboration with the Free Press. This is part
• 40:30
  of these apps live. World tour, we're literally traveling around the world, and pretty much every
• 40:35
  single day for the next two weeks, we're sitting down with someone fascinating, sometimes multiple
• 40:39
  people a day and having conversations about things that would make regular people uncomfortable,
• 40:44
  if they expressed a stride and opinion about them at a cocktail party. Thanks to the Free Press
• 40:49
  for facilitating Tyler Cowan, one of the world's greatest economists for this conversation.
• 40:53
  Have I made anyone uncomfortable yet? Should I try harder?
• 40:56
  The point is not to make people uncomfortable. It's just, you know, if people, if you were at like,
• 41:01
  if you're at the pub or the bar, and somebody started expressing very stride and opinions about
• 41:07
  Doge, then they would get uncomfortable. I'm trying to model ways of making you not uncomfortable.
• 41:12
  And a lot of bars, I would be the moderate. Yeah, yeah, that's true compared to left and right.
• 41:17
  And certainly depends what part of the country you're in. I don't believe in conspiracy theories
• 41:21
  for the most part. Is there one you believe in? Maybe a few in sports. I think JFK was probably a
• 41:30
  single assassin. It's Dean probably committed suicide. I can't think offhand of a big one I believe
• 41:38
  in. I used to think JFK might have been multiple people or cover up, but I don't, you know,
• 41:43
  they release the files. I don't see the evidence for that. And you need the evidence?
• 41:48
  I don't need the evidence, but I'll be agnostic, you know, slanted toward not believing in the meantime.
• 41:54
  Yeah. Because there's a lot of people involved in conspiracy. There's deathbed confessions.
• 41:58
  There's documents. People write things down these days. They send emails, whatever.
• 42:03
  And if just nothing turns up. Now, Epstein has some chance of being a conspiracy.
• 42:10
  There's some kind of conspiracy not to release the list of names. But in fact, we know a lot about
• 42:15
  who's on it. And that sense, the list has come out. We don't know what they did, but we know who
• 42:20
  is in the plane to a substantial degree. Yeah. So that evidence conspiracies more or less come out.
• 42:26
  That's right. And we also know who's not releasing the list. That's right. There's no conspiracy
• 42:30
  about who that is. That's right. We can write those names down too. Yeah.
• 42:34
  A university is as hostile to free speech as conservatives think that.
• 42:38
  It depends on the university. If you work in a state university, as I do, I feel I have
• 42:43
  quite a bit of free speech. I'm not sure any free speech is absolute given there are social
• 42:47
  pressures. But I feel I have one of the best free speech environments of anyone in the world.
• 42:52
  If you work at Brown University or Harvard, I mean, right now it's in flux with what Trump is
• 42:57
  doing, but at least before Trump's selection, I don't think you had that much free speech.
• 43:02
  So many pressures could be brought to bear on you if you said the wrong thing.
• 43:06
  So it depends. I'm delighted with my own situation, though. How do you think that developed?
• 43:12
  The courts ruled that if you work in a state university, you get free speech protections as a
• 43:17
  matter of law, whereas if you work in a private university, it's like working for a company.
• 43:21
  And you don't have free speech in the sense that you can tell your boss to go
• 43:25
  exploitive deleted, right? I didn't mean why the public universities conducive to free speech,
• 43:33
  which I think should be a given, but why are private universities which, I mean, there should be an
• 43:38
  ethos. There are two industries in which there should be a free speech ethos. That should be
• 43:43
  that's the academy and journalism, I can say. Like those would be the two where it's not
• 43:48
  incidental. It's not dealing. You're not working for Nike that can have a corporate policy on
• 43:52
  something that they want to enforce. If it's journalism or a universal academia, then the
• 43:58
  load star ought to be a plurality and diversity of ideas and a rambunctious town square in which
• 44:03
  anyone can say anything. And lately over the past decade or so, we've seen a winnowing of that
• 44:08
  in both of those. Who many left-wingers in the universities that don't believe in free speech,
• 44:13
  it leads to homogeneity of thought, educated people these days, especially your more left-wing.
• 44:19
  So you have all these sociological selection mechanisms making colleges and universities left
• 44:24
  wing. Much as a police department's often become right-wing, there's some explicit discrimination
• 44:29
  in each case, but I don't think that's the main driver. Right-wingers don't feel that welcome
• 44:34
  in universities. It's not the rules of the game they want to play under. They might rather run a
• 44:38
  small business, a group of people that tends to be relatively Republican, say. And you get more
• 44:46
  and more polarization. It's very bad. I'd love to have, as Matt Eglace says, more left-leaning
• 44:51
  cops and more right-leaning professors. How do you get it? No one knows. The Trump people are trying.
• 44:59
  You know, it's very much a hammer approach rather than a scalpel. It's wreaking havoc.
• 45:05
  Universities hate it. They feel quite persecuted. I don't know how it's going to turn out.
• 45:11
  The narrative from the universities and from the anti-Trump folks is this is always the authoritarian
• 45:16
  playbook. People who are hungry for power and want to subvert democracy will always go after
• 45:21
  the independent centers of thought. The university is the judiciary, the media, and so on. Do you
• 45:28
  give that credence? Their own record in that regard is so bad that I think they're entirely hypocrites.
• 45:33
  That said, the charge may be true to some extent, but media and universities have been so left-leaning
• 45:40
  for a while that for them to be complaining is a bit rich. They're the ones who've been
• 45:45
  cancelling other people for some while now. I'm like, yeah, you can say that partly you're right,
• 45:51
  but you're saying that? Get your own house in order. Why is it the educated people who are
• 45:58
  drawn to professions like journalism and academia tend to be left-wing? Robert Nuzek's hypothesis
• 46:05
  was that they're quite smart, and they see that their social standing due to lower wealth is not
• 46:09
  this eye as they think it should be. I would guess that's 10 or 15 percent of it. Another hypothesis
• 46:16
  is that by living in the university, there's very little accountability once you get tenure,
• 46:21
  so you tend to think the world works that way. I would guess that's another 10 to 15 percent.
• 46:26
  I think if you work in media, there's a bias toward bad news and negative reporting,
• 46:31
  which for the most part will tend to make you left-wing, rather than having a headline.
• 46:35
  Today, everything went fine. The economy is growing at 2.3 percent. That probably accounts for
• 46:39
  maybe 20 percent of it, and a lot of the rest of it we can't explain. I think there's also a man
• 46:45
  maybe this is kind of implied by what you just said, a sense that you want to be the defender of
• 46:50
  the little person that you want to be on the right side of the industry, right? You don't go to
• 46:54
  areas. Yeah, exactly. You want to make sure that you're
• 46:59
  being careful about defending the downtrodden. You've never yourself had to manage a large or even
• 47:05
  mid-size organization. You have very little idea what is required to do that well in terms of
• 47:12
  legal freedom, regulatory freedom, tax burden, meeting payroll. Like when George McGovern,
• 47:18
  he ran for president as a left-winger in 1972, and later he became a small businessman.
• 47:23
  He just said publicly, like, oh, now I see what these people mean. Right.
• 47:26
  And he moved quite a bit to the right and became a centrist. So that's part of it as well.
• 47:31
  So part of what we're talking about when we talk about this, the diversity of opinion and
• 47:35
  cancel culture, and trying to open things up to great points of view, is having a kind of
• 47:41
  epistemic humility is such that you don't think that you're either side is wrong, but you think
• 47:45
  that they just have a different set of opinions, right? Because if you spoke to a lot of the most
• 47:49
  ideologically blinded and dogmatic people in these professions, they would not regard themselves
• 47:55
  as being exclusionary or bigoted towards conservatives. They would just think that they're the ones
• 47:59
  who are right. They love the word inclusion, right? Yeah, they want to, yeah, exactly.
• 48:03
  They want to be inclusive, and they would say that they're just being non-inclusive to uninclusive
• 48:07
  people, and they're being intolerant of intolerant people, but fundamentally. So how do you
• 48:14
  tile a cow and know when it's time to be intellectually open because you're so intellectually
• 48:19
  curious and you're so kind of intellectually open? How do you know when it's time to not be
• 48:25
  open anymore and to draw a line in the sand and man the barricades on something?
• 48:31
  Well, I don't know if you should ever be at the barricades. I think you should always be open
• 48:35
  to the other side. So if you talk about university hiring, I think the people on the left are
• 48:40
  really quite correct that there are unjust barriers that lead to smaller numbers of African
• 48:45
  Americans becoming tenured professors or smaller numbers of women, then would be either
• 48:51
  socially just or meritacratically justified. But that said, the idea that you fix that problem
• 48:57
  by bureaucratizing hiring processes and putting more paperwork on top of what we already have,
• 49:03
  I'm pretty sure that's wrong, but their basic intuition is correct, and I think people on
• 49:08
  the right are often wrong in denying it or just refusing to pay it a lot of attention. So we
• 49:14
  need to look for other solutions. I certainly don't think I have all those other solutions,
• 49:19
  but the solutions people have done at the university level. There's even studies showing
• 49:23
  like schools that spend more on DEI and so on, they don't hire a higher proportion of minority
• 49:28
  candidates. So it's clearly not been working. But the criticism that people who are open-minded and
• 49:34
  who seek to build bridges get, people like me on uncomfortable conversation, very wise at the
• 49:40
  free press, and I'm sure you get it sometimes as well, is that by being overly interested in
• 49:45
  understanding everyone's points of view, you end up being a wishy-washy nobody who has no
• 49:49
  principles. And like, what would be be doing in 1938 tile? I would be sitting down with the
• 49:55
  Nazis and trying to understand where they're coming from and having a nice cup of tea and a
• 49:59
  spoon with garing or something. Well, we don't have the Nazis. I do hate Putin, and I'm very
• 50:05
  concerned about China. Those I'm pretty sure are correct intuitions. But if you start thinking of
• 50:12
  the people domestically you disagree with as Nazis, you've made a very bad mistake. There are some
• 50:16
  Nazis in America to be sure, and I'm willing to think of them as Nazis, but that's not the main
• 50:21
  issue. I'm worried the numbers growing though. Right. It's more visible online. I'm not sure
• 50:28
  how the real numbers behaving, but simply being more visible is itself a matter of concern.
• 50:33
  But the left would say, if you're locking up children in cages at the border and you're
• 50:38
  grabbing people off the street and with masked ICE agents and sending them to Goulags and El Salvador,
• 50:45
  only bringing them back under the most extreme duress, then anyone who is not manning the barricades
• 50:51
  against that administration is complicit with fascism. Well, they're not manning the barricades.
• 50:56
  First of all, a second, I am against those policies, and I try to speak against them in a
• 51:01
  responsible way that will have influence and clout on the right wing, which is now governing our
• 51:07
  country. So maybe that's better than manning the barricades. Manning the barricades is often
• 51:11
  something you do to feel better about yourself. It's not necessarily effective, but I would add
• 51:16
  the additional point that in most countries, immigration law has never been just, has never
• 51:22
  involved a lot of due process. It involves arbitrary decisions at the border where you send
• 51:28
  people to very bad fates for reasons that are or more really hard to justify. I don't think you
• 51:34
  can have open borders, so you will always have some different way of making some highly unjust
• 51:40
  decisions in your immigration process. And at some level, you need to digest part of that.
• 51:44
  Yes, we should have less of it than we have now. We should not have increased it,
• 51:49
  but people need to realistically think about what immigration law is and does, and incorporate
• 51:54
  that into their worldview. Hi, everyone is with us. If you are just joining Professor of
• 51:59
  Economics, one of the world's leading economists, his blog is marginal revolution,
• 52:03
  and he's a contributor to the free press. You should subscribe to uncomfortable conversations
• 52:07
  for more conversations like this. We're on a Zeppes live world tour talking to people in
• 52:12
  pretty much every major time zone over the next two weeks and subscribe to the free press.
• 52:19
  There are more male Nobel Prize winners and male software engineers and male murderers and
• 52:26
  male jail inmates than females, but how much of that is biology and how much is culture?
• 52:33
  Are they going to differ? Some more men in jail for violent crimes. I'm pretty sure that's
• 52:38
  biological. In terms of Nobel laureates, I think this whole number of fields, broadly you could
• 52:46
  call them biology and some of the sciences, where the number of female winners is going to rise
• 52:50
  fairly steeply due to greater opportunity. But if you win a Nobel Prize, say, between the ages
• 52:55
  of 60 and 70, it's going to take a long time for that to show up in the aggregate numbers.
• 53:00
  So that would be more matter of what you might call culture or spiteful opportunities.
• 53:04
  So it depends which party or list you mean. But some of it I'm pretty sure is biological and
• 53:09
  innate, especially the violence part. I suspect men are just more obsessive than women.
• 53:15
  So the top 100 chess players in the world are male. There's plenty of female chess players and
• 53:21
  they're quite good, but they're not in the top 100. And I suspect that too is somehow an
• 53:26
  genetic biological. But not intelligence. I think intelligence is roughly equal, but men are more
• 53:32
  obsessive. And there's some kind of higher variance in the genes. There's a lot of mutations.
• 53:37
  And this can be measured. Autism would be one example. There's just more men with
• 53:41
  the mutation than women. So many are in some ways higher variance.
• 53:46
  What have you made of the combat of the sort of taboos around talking about
• 53:49
  sex differences between men and women, especially behavioral ones?
• 53:52
  Well, they fall in a way quite a bit in the last few years. That's great. But at the same time,
• 53:57
  it's a little dangerous to obsess over the question too much. Because I think when people
• 54:03
  believe everything's determined rigidly, the world becomes worse, people try less hard,
• 54:09
  better when we have this cultural milieu where everything feels agentic. And then in fact,
• 54:15
  it becomes more agentic as a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the people who obsess these online
• 54:20
  debates, I'm going to show this. I'm going to show that. I'm going to show them.
• 54:24
  I don't think that's so positive either. I think having a good attitude and trying to mentor
• 54:29
  people and help them is usually a better place to put your energies. Where do you get that political
• 54:35
  philosophy from? Maybe I was born with it genetically. So reasonable degree of temperament's genetic.
• 54:42
  When I was a young kid, I was like, always in a good mood. Always in a good mood now. I think I
• 54:48
  have lower peaks than most people, but very high average. And I suspect I was born with that.
• 54:53
  But I think politically it will make you positive, forward-looking. What is it we're going to build?
• 54:58
  How can we work with other people? But I do think that's better. Even if I was determined
• 55:03
  to be that way, I feel it's the better way. Which do you think has been more impactful on your
• 55:09
  life? That elevated mood or your high IQ? I don't think my IQ is that high. I think I'm very
• 55:16
  persistent at working at things to improve. That's more important than IQ for me. I don't think
• 55:23
  my IQ is low, but I suspect if I ever took a test, people would be quite disappointed.
• 55:31
  Let's not call it IQ then. You're obviously highly intellectually nimble.
• 55:38
  Is that more important or is your emotional violence? I think it's a multiplicative model
• 55:44
  where to get anywhere you need a fair degree of the two together and they multiply each other.
• 55:49
  If you could take one away, which one would you lose? Well, my mood just makes me happy, so
• 55:55
  if you could be dumb and happy. The other one makes me more financially secure. Can I have both?
• 55:59
  No, you have both. If you had to be dumb and this is the binary, I'm the genie coming out of the
• 56:07
  bottle, the bad genie, because I'm taking away one of your assets. It's like dumb and happy
• 56:13
  or saddened brilliant. I don't think brilliance the right word. I'd rather know a lot of things and
• 56:19
  be somewhat sadder if I had to choose. Really? Yeah. Maybe sadness isn't that bad. Now if you
• 56:28
  if I'm saddened by definition, sadness is, sadness is what we, I mean, unless you're talking about
• 56:36
  a healthy amount of grief over something that has approximate cause, but I mean, depression is
• 56:42
  exactly what everyone wants to avoid. But here's the way I answer the question. So say if I visit
• 56:47
  Australia or anywhere, this is fascinating to me, but I don't feel I'm happier when I'm in Sydney
• 56:54
  than when I'm here or in New York. Somehow I feel I've learned something of value. That's a better
• 57:00
  state of the world, makes me a better person, but it costs money, takes effort, jet lag,
• 57:06
  and I'm not getting happiness, but I am getting learning and I do it all the time. So my demonstrated
• 57:11
  preference by traveling a lot seems to show at the margin, it's not happiness. I'm looking for more
• 57:17
  off. It's learning. I think where I think there's a definition or misunderstanding about the word
• 57:21
  happiness might be because I don't think you're just getting learning from those experiences.
• 57:25
  I think you're getting enrichment and fulfillment, which provide a core sense of what I would
• 57:31
  call happiness. I'm very happy here. These chairs are great. The dog is nice. The dog is highly
• 57:38
  intelligent. The dog is almost around average. Yeah, obviously an Australian dog is going to be a
• 57:44
  superior breed. Well, there's a study in his breed ranked number two of all dog breeds for smarts.
• 57:50
  I rest my case. Yes, he's in general, but in Australia, Australia is the number two smartest
• 57:54
  country in the world. Quite a lot of them. I was talking to Stephen Frye on uncomfortable
• 58:00
  conversations and people should go back and watch that episode because it's really brilliant. The
• 58:04
  English comedian and writer and he's a brilliant guy and he wrote this letter to himself when he
• 58:09
  was 15. That is excerpting his biography, which is a great book, where he's it's a letter to his
• 58:16
  future self, where he's basically saying, you've sold out, you've become a contented mainstream
• 58:25
  hypocrite. What I'm feeling right now as a teenager, as an adolescent, the true aliveness that
• 58:30
  I'm feeling is the the truest and most real thing that you'll ever feel. I'm sure you'll read
• 58:36
  this and you'll scoff and roll your eyes at the naivety of youth, but you know deep down in a
• 58:43
  place that you don't want to talk about it, parties that I am the real thing and that you are a sellout.
• 58:48
  I asked Stephen about this, how he thinks about this now, but he's
• 58:52
  of a certain age and he sort of said that he does miss that vitality, but what he has now is
• 59:01
  contentment. And I think you're overvaluing the contentment component of happiness and undervaluing
• 59:10
  the vitality component of happiness. When you travel, you get something more than just information.
• 59:16
  It's not like you're plugging data into your brain. But that's a lot of you, but I would say this,
• 59:21
  and for my own case, I work both harder and more effectively and more vitally than when I was
• 59:28
  much younger. So at age 63, I have not yet slid into that abyss. Obviously at some point,
• 59:36
  I will, if only when my demise comes. I don't dismiss the earlier perspective at all. I think you
• 59:42
  need to ask, can you make sense of the whole course of your life from the varying perspectives you've
• 59:48
  had along the way? I'm not saying there's ever going to be like unanimous ranking that everything
• 59:53
  you did was perfect. But if your teenage self would hate your current self, you need to take that
• 1:00:00
  seriously and vice versa. When your teenager is like, well, when I'm 60, well, I think of the fact
• 1:00:07
  that I'm holding up this gas station right now, that's a damn good question. And I think I know
• 1:00:11
  the answer. But what do you think your teenage self would make of you? You would think that I'm too
• 1:00:16
  moderate and too establishment, but still see, I think that I'm doing good in terms of the value
• 1:00:22
  that that teenage self held, which would be a much more radical form of libertarianism. Right.
• 1:00:28
  So it'd be like, oh, Tyler, you could have done much more for the radical side, but I still see,
• 1:00:33
  you know, you've had different kinds of impact in a pro-liberty direction. And I think that would
• 1:00:37
  be true. And I think other people would affirm some version of that narrative.
• 1:00:42
  If your teenage self could see you now and have the option of either accepting that future,
• 1:00:48
  or rolling the disand, trying to do that, or lead a different life, which one do you think he'd
• 1:00:54
  take? Well, I've had no health problems, or anything like that, no big car crash, whatever.
• 1:01:00
  So I think like the life I've had, you're not going to want to redo it.
• 1:01:05
  You said that the books that you're writing now are mostly written for artificial intelligence,
• 1:01:08
  not for people. Is that a gag? Or is there a kind of truth in that? Well, gag, kernel of truth,
• 1:01:15
  you know, a book should be both, right? Well, I don't know. I've never thought about it being
• 1:01:19
  for AI. I mean, I just thought that that's an incidental, that the fact that artificial systems
• 1:01:25
  will consume it is tangential or, you know, most questions will go through AI. I think even three
• 1:01:32
  years from now, not quite a year from now, already like chat GPT is a mode of search. It's gaining a
• 1:01:37
  lot on Google. And Google search is more and more just AI. It's not old Google search. It's really
• 1:01:42
  you get a version of Gemini. Yeah. When you look at the answer at the top. I don't work well anymore.
• 1:01:47
  So if you want to have influence, you should teach to the AI's because they're like the new
• 1:01:53
  Google, but super powered Google. So I was fully serious when I meant that, but I haven't stopped
• 1:01:59
  writing for humans like the people asking the AI. They're still humans, so those other AI's too.
• 1:02:08
  The importance here. The impact that you have on me when I read one of your books is
• 1:02:13
  large and focused. The impact that you have on any artificial learning system, which is just
• 1:02:19
  hovering up everything that exists that is ever written, is highly diffused. And now I have both.
• 1:02:26
  I don't feel I'm just tossing cans of orange juice into the ocean with the AI. I do think
• 1:02:32
  AI's are better because responsible people do take care to put a lot of what they do to open access
• 1:02:38
  where the AI can read it or listen to it. And I do that a lot. I do a lot of extra recordings,
• 1:02:44
  I mean, including this one, so the AI can hear. So it knows what I think. I'm one of the most
• 1:02:49
  intellectually immortal people in the entire world right now because I've written and spoken so much
• 1:02:54
  online, more or less ungated to varying degrees, but mostly ungated. And the AI knows me very well.
• 1:03:01
  I can go to the AI like I'm in Spain and ask it all, where does Tyler Cowan want to eat in this
• 1:03:06
  neighborhood? And it knows because I've written a lot on food. I can ask it whatever about Tyler
• 1:03:13
  Cowan. It knows right or so much. Oh, what would Tyler Cowan think is, you know, that reforms to
• 1:03:18
  the Medicaid policies. Sometimes it has a better answer than I do. Like I haven't thought it through
• 1:03:24
  yet. And I re so yeah, that is what Tyler Cowan would think and I'm nodding my head. So that's
• 1:03:29
  where I am now. And I think that's an extreme privilege. And people in the future, I'm not convinced
• 1:03:35
  such a large number will want to ask what is Tyler Cowan think, but I will be I will be one of the
• 1:03:40
  people where you can do that. Yeah. And that will persist. So I'm intellectually immortal.
• 1:03:47
  And that makes me happy. It's great content. Whatever you want to call it. Yeah. And I don't have to
• 1:03:52
  try to do it. And probably fulfilled. Yeah. Well, speaking of gated conversations and
• 1:03:56
  ungated conversations, this is an ungated conversation. Thanks to the free press. Hi, hi,
• 1:04:01
  conversations. Hope you're listening. Don't forget everything we're saying. All of the
• 1:04:05
  artificial intelligence is out there. Should go and subscribe to the free press and two uncomfortable
• 1:04:10
  conversations. You joke, but they will. They will. Yeah. Yeah. But I told them they have media
• 1:04:15
  deals with Washington Post and Atlantic. Yeah. And there's a good chance the one will be cut with
• 1:04:20
  the New York Times because of that lawsuit. Yeah. And over time, most media outlets will have some kind
• 1:04:25
  of deal. So people should be all seriousness subscribe because we're traveling. Well,
• 1:04:31
  this is a Zeppes Live tool. We're basically traveling literally around the world,
• 1:04:35
  circumnavigating the world in 12 days and sitting down with the likes of Tyler Cowan,
• 1:04:39
  one of the world's most renowned economists. And every day you'll get a new notification.
• 1:04:43
  If you subscribe to uncomfortable conversations, plus the whole back catalog of all kinds of
• 1:04:47
  interesting conversations that we've had. So thanks to the free press for facilitating this
• 1:04:51
  conversation. If it is true that you're sort of constructing this world view of Tyler Cowan
• 1:04:57
  for the AIs, do you feel a greater moral responsibility or do you need to make your writing more
• 1:05:04
  overtly? Have a greater moral clarity? You can make it less clear because the AI understands
• 1:05:10
  all your references. You don't have to link to things. You don't have to explain that maybe
• 1:05:15
  it needs more moral clarity. But I think the thing that's hard to do, but I do try to do it.
• 1:05:20
  A lot of people, they have writings for the AI, whatever they intended. And the AI
• 1:05:25
  overweight their earlier opinion a bit. So I asked AI like writing newspaper column in the
• 1:05:30
  style of David Brooks. And it was a pretty good impression of David Brooks 15 years ago.
• 1:05:36
  But I sort of wanted David Brooks today. And you want the AI to know that you contain
• 1:05:42
  multitudes. And that takes a bit of work. And AIs will get better at that for one thing.
• 1:05:48
  Why is there that bias toward the early? Well, they've in the case of David say and myself,
• 1:05:54
  they've read the early. And they may not understand the sequencing. So you try to write some posts
• 1:06:01
  or podcasts, explain that your ideas are developing sequencing, changing over time. And the
• 1:06:07
  AIs will get that. But if you don't tell them, you might just get a bit of a stacked weighted
• 1:06:11
  average in some cases. Yeah, I see. So I think you can fix that with some work and with better AIs.
• 1:06:17
  But that's the one thing that strikes me where you have to be a bit careful. So if you were talking
• 1:06:22
  to the head of an average one television company, would you say there should be something embedded
• 1:06:26
  in the algorithm that understands that human beings grow and age in a and grow wiser over time.
• 1:06:34
  And that therefore it ought to wait more recently. I'm not sure we grow wiser. This gets back to
• 1:06:38
  the teenage perspective. But simply that people change. I don't think you can embed it in the
• 1:06:42
  algorithm. I think you have to be the teacher, but you can't control these AI systems that easily.
• 1:06:49
  Well, the AI systems might be able to, they might be able to say give, you know, give two X
• 1:06:55
  waiting to anything that time is very surprised if that were possible. But simply by explaining
• 1:07:01
  to the AIs what we're talking about now, indeed, I am explaining it to the AIs now as I've done
• 1:07:05
  before. We need a bunch of other people explaining it. That will solve the problem. Like it's a very
• 1:07:10
  fixable problem. Yeah. You're making me feel increasingly redundant. You're just explaining
• 1:07:15
  it to the AIs. Are you happy with your early podcasts? Do you need to tell it you reputed
• 1:07:19
  the first year? That was your chance. I mean, I have to go back and listen to the early stuff. Yeah.
• 1:07:24
  No, I think I'm, I think I'm firing on all cylinders now. So I'm just going to have to explain
• 1:07:27
  to the AI. I just don't want to list them on saying now, bro. That one with Mr. Keating. Please,
• 1:07:32
  I didn't mean have of what I said. That's right. So let me just ask some rapid five questions so I
• 1:07:38
  can let you go here because I don't want to keep you forever. Your answers don't have to be rapid
• 1:07:41
  fire. But if the questions seem like they come from nowhere, that's why. What's the best sport?
• 1:07:46
  My favorite sport is NBA basketball. What? But I wouldn't say it's the best. I think as a
• 1:07:51
  best sport tennis is a serious competitor. There's something very compelling about a one versus one
• 1:07:56
  matchup, but you can also do two against two. And the personality element emerges strongly in tennis.
• 1:08:03
  But NBA, it's five players on the court. It's global. It's highly athletic. You can watch it
• 1:08:09
  in short segments. That to me is very important. So soccer and baseball, I find our worst in that
• 1:08:14
  regard. A small segment of the game is not that meaningful. Soccer is a kind of dramatic unfolding.
• 1:08:20
  Yeah. Of plays back and forth. Baseball is just slow and too much of the time. Nothing happens.
• 1:08:25
  Oh, I'm trying cricket. Yeah, cricket. Exactly. But for five days, an end up in a draw.
• 1:08:30
  If someone says, oh, the NBA game, you're busy, but just turn on the fourth quarter.
• 1:08:35
  It's not as good, but it's perfectly coherent thing to do. Yeah. So I like that. It uses numbers
• 1:08:41
  well. Statistical knowledge is highly useful. But it's not so wonky that you need a PhD in statistics.
• 1:08:47
  So I'm going to say NBA basketball and tennis are the two best. Should we colonize space?
• 1:08:53
  We, I don't think there's much economic potential in Mars. And I don't understand from what I've
• 1:08:57
  read. Had the human body. In fact, can handle it. So I would say I'm much more skeptical of that
• 1:09:03
  idea than our many people I know. But to blanket say we shouldn't, I'm delighted if people try.
• 1:09:09
  But I'm not betting on them. Let's put it that way. What's the most underrated country to visit?
• 1:09:15
  For me, it's Mexico. I've been there 32 times. A lot of people never go or only go to Mexico City,
• 1:09:21
  or they think it's too dangerous. It's a top five country, globally, for food. It's very diverse,
• 1:09:28
  all kinds of wonderful landscapes and climates. It's an odd mix of medieval European, North American,
• 1:09:35
  Eastern European, Indigenous, you know, Nahuatl, Aztec, Mayan civilizations, Otomi, many others.
• 1:09:43
  Unending riches. It changes over time. And for me, it's super close and no jet lag. And I speak
• 1:09:49
  Spanish. So what's not to like? I'm sold. Yeah. The AI is sold. Yeah, I have been well. When I
• 1:09:57
  lived in New York City, it was an easy thing to go down the toloom for a weekend or whatever.
• 1:10:01
  But in terms of actually going and I've been to Mexico City for a weekend and I've been over
• 1:10:06
  and then I'd road trip down Chicago from the north of the peninsula. But I'm enough of a
• 1:10:13
  traveler to say that I don't feel like Ben Ben. Yeah, if you know what I mean. I haven't done
• 1:10:18
  the free week. Yeah, no trips that I want to do. But I would say almost all countries are underrated.
• 1:10:23
  Yeah. Well, you said that. Yes. I'm not sure about North Korea. Oh, that it is. I mean, I'll
• 1:10:28
  bet if you could escape from. Yeah, I agree. You could escape. I know people have been. Yeah.
• 1:10:36
  What's the worst thing about being an economics professor?
• 1:10:41
  It depends what age you entered it at. So I entered my first job as like 1988 and that was a great
• 1:10:48
  time to enter. There are a lot of jobs. You have relative freedom. There's not too much political
• 1:10:53
  correctness. You're not forced to overspecialize so much. Then there was hardly any downside. Now,
• 1:10:59
  your wage was never so high in academia, but okay, you know that going in. Right now, I think
• 1:11:07
  so much of what you do is you become a programmer. Nothing wrong with being a programmer.
• 1:11:11
  It's a great profession in and of itself, but the notion that you set out to be an economist
• 1:11:16
  and you end up as a programmer and a data gatherer. That to me is sad. So I want there to be a revival
• 1:11:22
  of some notion of an economist who doesn't have to do those things. Best hope, of course, is the AI
• 1:11:28
  will do a lot of that for you. That may happen. If you could snap your fingers and the British Empire
• 1:11:34
  had never existed. Britain had remained just an island without empire ambitions. Do you do it?
• 1:11:43
  It depends what the counterfactual looks like. So I think Singapore and Hong Kong are two places
• 1:11:48
  that are clearly better off because there was a British Empire. I think India has been worse off,
• 1:11:54
  Pakistan worse off. Those, of course, have a lot of people. Africa, it's going to depend on the
• 1:12:00
  country, a mixed story, but given that slavery was part of it all, you say they're worse off.
• 1:12:08
  So overall, I would say the world has been worse off, but some places clearly much better off.
• 1:12:14
  But again, you want to know what is it they do instead? If they're just trading nice and friendly
• 1:12:18
  with everyone, of course, that's better. But if the alternative is that the Spanish end up there
• 1:12:23
  instead, then that's right. Then it's probably better that the British had something like
• 1:12:27
  all they did. Of course, it could have been much, much, much better. You said that Mexico has one
• 1:12:31
  of the top five cuisines, what's the number one cuisine? Well, China and India, if you count them
• 1:12:35
  as unitary or clearly the two winners, by far, probably France and Italy are number two,
• 1:12:42
  if you want to squeeze Belgium in with France for the Belgian allies out there. I know they're
• 1:12:49
  pleased now, but I would actually take Mexico over France subjectively, but not objectively.
• 1:12:54
  And Mexico, I think, is fifth. So there's a top few that are at least Asian in there.
• 1:13:00
  No Thai, no Vietnamese. I'm a lady. There are a little North Korean luxus. But look,
• 1:13:06
  when I say India and China, I'm somewhat covering parts of Southeast Asian with those.
• 1:13:11
  That's a bit too generic, but I'll grant it. I might put Thailand and Vietnam at six and seven.
• 1:13:17
  I've been to both. But again, there are a bit mono for me, not for me, but they're incredible.
• 1:13:24
  Southeast Asia is the best world region for food, without a doubt. I think it's the best world
• 1:13:28
  region for visiting for food. I mean, I might be biased because it's our Mexico in terms of what
• 1:13:34
  you were saying about not having jet lag and being able to get there easily from Australia.
• 1:13:38
  It's too crowded for me. So environmentally, it feels polluted, congested because it is.
• 1:13:45
  Latin America is sufficiently exotic, but just much more open and friendly.
• 1:13:51
  That would only be the main factor that's friendly, but it's probably easier to get
• 1:13:55
  to find remote places in Mexico than it is in. I'm not sure about that. There's plenty in Indonesia
• 1:14:02
  where you're just out there on your own. The best president who's not Lincoln.
• 1:14:08
  Well, George Washington was the first and the fact that we had a second implies he might be the
• 1:14:13
  best with Lincoln. So you don't have a Lincoln without a George Washington. So I'm inclined to
• 1:14:18
  think George Washington was the best president side out. I'll wrap you up with just one word
• 1:14:23
  answer. There's like a rule shot test, okay? First thing that comes in your head. I'll just say a word
• 1:14:28
  tiktok. Fun, but I get bored quickly. Capitalism. Great. Popularism. I don't know what it means.
• 1:14:37
  Everyone who wins an election is in a sense popular, right? When I hear the word, I feel the
• 1:14:44
  sentence is making me stupider. Let's put it that way. What do you think they, what do you think people
• 1:14:49
  use it? Think it means? There's all these new political movements that we haven't quite figured
• 1:14:55
  out yet. And there's plenty about them that's objectionable. And people are trying to win the argument
• 1:15:00
  just by deploying the word. And that makes me somewhat nervous. That may be true. And it may also
• 1:15:05
  be true that the word has a meaning, which is something along the lines of people who, you know,
• 1:15:11
  a movement that is grasping for easy answers to popular grafers. It's all movements. I mean,
• 1:15:17
  if you look at mainstream democratic and republican establishment of the 50s, 60s, 70s,
• 1:15:23
  they were grasping for easy answers. Some of them were easy. Like, just don't be crazy. You have
• 1:15:27
  a great country. Don't wreck it. I don't know. I guess populism implies that there's something gimmicky
• 1:15:34
  about the solution on offer, right? If you think about what is like, what makes a Silvio-Berlusconi
• 1:15:38
  a populist? It's that it's like, it doesn't have great answers, but he's got easy, popular ones.
• 1:15:44
  I think that's the, but I've heard that my whole life. It's maybe something about the way in which
• 1:15:48
  elites are not trusted, that you get from Berlusconi, you get from Trump. But I think we're going to
• 1:15:53
  see what's called populism evolve, like the Fox Party in Spain, which might be called populist.
• 1:15:59
  Still, I think a bad word. I think they'll attract their share of intellectuals. And I think
• 1:16:04
  that's already starting. So it doesn't mean you have to agree with them. But all this is in flux.
• 1:16:09
  You look at JD Vance, vice president. Whatever you think of him, he's much smarter and more
• 1:16:15
  intellectual than Tim Walsh was. Trump, this is more complicated. I think he has a higher IQ
• 1:16:23
  than Harris. I don't want to say he's smarter, because it's so skewed and bizarre and narcissistic.
• 1:16:30
  The elites in Republican government are smarter than a lot of the Biden people. Again,
• 1:16:35
  not sure how much that matters, but all these things are in flux. Well, I don't want to use the
• 1:16:39
  definitions to be getting one. But that's why I didn't define populism as being
• 1:16:45
  unintelligent or uneducated people.
• 1:16:49
  We need disaggregated words, I would say. Yeah, right. Yeah, fair enough. And don't let them
• 1:16:53
  claim their popular. Also, like when people say popular music, they mean like all kinds of
• 1:16:58
  things teenagers listen to that like sell 4,000 copies or that would be downloads, but they're not
• 1:17:04
  really popular. Right, right. Brexit. Inevitable, I was against it. But with time, I recognize it was
• 1:17:12
  not going to work out. Read the history of the Reformation and they did it again. Like,
• 1:17:17
  let's put it behind us and rebuild. But I was not for it. Winston Churchill.
• 1:17:24
  Great man, drunkard, indec, incredible writer, bundle of contradictions, highly admirable,
• 1:17:31
  but should open your mind as to who can do really great things. That's more than a word. I like it.
• 1:17:37
  Margaret Thatcher. Amazing to me how much they still hate her. I'm just like some guy and
• 1:17:42
  outsider. And I hear the phrase Maggie, the milk snatcher like once a year. And I never bring her up.
• 1:17:48
  Most of what she did was good for Britain. Should this be hated more and more? You still have
• 1:17:52
  like F.T. columnists. Oh, Maggie didn't fix Britain. Look, you can't as a person fix a whole
• 1:17:58
  country. But the 90s were great years for much of Britain. And she's responsible for a lot of that.
• 1:18:05
  And yet, it's true. A lot of things have gone wrong since then, but she's become way underrated.
• 1:18:10
  And the 70s sucked. The 70s sucked. I was in Britain in the 70s. The phone booth wouldn't work.
• 1:18:16
  This was the 79s. That was the problem. That's right. In the 70s.
• 1:18:20
  Double digit inflation. Of course. You know, marginal tax rates of 70% and higher,
• 1:18:26
  you know, incredibly strong trade unions crippling the country, rolling strikes,
• 1:18:30
  blackouts, and you'll complain about the phone booth, Tyler. She did set it right. But it's fair
• 1:18:35
  to say it gave rise to a kind of zombie thaturism where a lot of the British right kept on repeating
• 1:18:42
  the same thing rather than taking in new lessons and coming up with new improvements for the country.
• 1:18:47
  And that's a big reason why you had the Tories in power. What was it? Fourteen years? Something
• 1:18:51
  like that. And they totally screw it up. Or at the very least, they don't fix matters.
• 1:18:56
  Because you have either complacent status quo types or zombie thaturite types and not that much
• 1:19:02
  else. You needed some more Ezra Klein in the Tory party. Does that phenomenon exist here regarding
• 1:19:07
  Reagan? He did until recently. I think now the Reagan zombie thing is pretty dead.
• 1:19:13
  But a big reason why Trump rose is the Republicans did not have new fresh ideas. Yes, in part,
• 1:19:18
  because of Reagan's own. Plato. Incredible. Much better than Socrates,
• 1:19:24
  better than Aristotle, clearly the greatest philosopher ever. Elon Musk. I've never met him. I
• 1:19:30
  greatly admire what he's done. From a distance, it seems his understanding of politics is abysmal
• 1:19:36
  and he's taken a huge whack for it. He's lost what? Forty billion through Tesla share price declines.
• 1:19:43
  I don't know what he's going to do next. Wishing him the best. A mixed record. But to me, the
• 1:19:49
  positives way, way, way outweigh the negatives. Silicon Valley. It's a boring place to be.
• 1:19:56
  Great Indian food. Don't tell me I honest that. Well, they're not there. They're in the data center
• 1:20:04
  as a wonderful northern Virginia. Sometimes. Mostly, I'm a fan of big tech. If that's what you're asking.
• 1:20:13
  But the valley itself. Yeah, I think I meant the metaphor. It's for Indian food. Very good Indian food.
• 1:20:21
  Wokeness. Well, in a funny way, it's become underrated. Like most of the world should be more woke.
• 1:20:28
  You go to Pakistan, where if you're gay, I can only imagine how hard it is. I don't even know
• 1:20:33
  the details. Like Pakistan should be more woke. Yeah. And you add up the numbers. More billions
• 1:20:39
  should be more woke than should be less woke. That said, if you look at US academia, media,
• 1:20:45
  all that has been way too well. So we just take a little from Berkeley and smear it across the
• 1:20:51
  Pakistan continent of Asia. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. That would never would equal itself out.
• 1:20:57
  Australia. Great country. I've only been twice. I loved Melbourne and Sydney. I've never been to Canberra.
• 1:21:04
  Yeah, I'd love to go to Canberra. No, no, I do need to go to Canberra. It has some architectural
• 1:21:08
  brutalism. I hear it has great food. A national capital is always interesting. If only because you
• 1:21:13
  see the ways in which it's boring. Like, born West Germany was very interesting, even though it
• 1:21:17
  was totally boring. Fair enough. To see wildflowers near Perth is one of my dreams. Great barrier reef
• 1:21:24
  probably isn't my thing, but I do hope to do it. There are better reefs. Good send me an email
• 1:21:29
  when you're coming to Australia. I'll talk about the better place. Okay. And then these places
• 1:21:32
  like Adelaide. I don't know how good they are to see. I'll give you the itinerary. There was
• 1:21:37
  a place in South Australia that are not Adelaide, which are really beautiful. And Tasmania as well
• 1:21:41
  as a great place to go. People say it looks a lot like New Zealand where I used to live. So Tasmania
• 1:21:45
  is maybe last on my list. No slight to the Tasmanian centented. Very good. The ethos of move fast
• 1:21:51
  and break things. It's all context dependent. So America at the margin needed more of that,
• 1:21:59
  but clearly some parts of America at the margin got too much of it. It's still the case
• 1:22:04
  that most people are too complacent, but you have to be very careful with these slogans.
• 1:22:07
  Right. The truth of falsity will be context dependent. Speaking of slogans,
• 1:22:11
  next thing is companies that require staff to put their gender pronouns in their email signatures.
• 1:22:17
  Well, that's going away and that's a good thing that it's going away. What? It's just a kind of
• 1:22:22
  political litmus test and a lot of people feel uncomfortable and companies shouldn't do it. But if
• 1:22:27
  you want to put them there, companies shouldn't ban it. But there shouldn't be a social pressure
• 1:22:31
  within the company one way or the other. Northern Virginia. Awesome. Great place to live.
• 1:22:37
  Immigrants have been assimilated wonderfully here, including most of the illegal ones.
• 1:22:41
  Excellent food. Three airports nearby. Very good concerts in the nation's capital.
• 1:22:48
  War much of the year. One of the best places in the world. But quite boring if you're visiting.
• 1:22:52
  Follow uncomfortable conversations on substack to be notified whenever we have conversations like
• 1:22:57
  this. My thanks to the free press for making this conversation possible. And my huge thanks to
• 1:23:03
  you, Tyler Fiatorn. Thank you. My pleasure. Thank you all.