Conversations with Tyler 2023 Retrospective

Hi everyone, this is Tyler Cowen. This podcast is my favorite thing to do. I look forward to learning from each guest and having the opportunity to ask them questions, the questions that I'm most curious about. I look forward to sharing these conversations with you. One way you can help us keep these conversations going is by sponsoring an upcoming transcript. You can make a one-time donation of $500 or more before January 1st. Your generous contribution will cover the production cost of one of next year's transcripts, with your name featured prominently at the top. There are only a few spots left, so please don't wait. For those of you who can make a one-time donation of $1,000 or more, you will be invited to an exclusive virtual "Ask Me Anything" session with me. Our dedicated production team, and the wider CWT community. It's your contributions that help us continue to offer this podcast for free, to host future listener meetups, to hold live events, and to continue to record episodes with the world's top thinkers and doers today. So please consider making a donation of any amount to Conversations with Tyler. To donate, visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. And thank you once again for your support. Now, onto the show. Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

Hello everyone and welcome to this special episode of Conversations with Tyler. This is the 2023 retrospective where we take a look back at the previous year in conversations, look back at Tyler's pop culture picks from 2013 and other topics besides. My name is Jeff Holmes. I produce Conversations with Tyler and Tyler, welcome to the show.

It's always such a pleasure to do Conversations with Tyler with you, Jeff.

And this is an extra, extra special episode because this is the 200th episode of Conversations with Tyler.

200th, that's a lot, yeah.

Yeah, we released 33 original episodes this year. That's the most we've ever done by far.

When we started the first, I had no idea it was a podcast. It was with Peter Thiel. I just thought it was a one-off event.

Yeah, I was reflecting, obviously when you go and look at these review of the year in Conversations with Tyler, you start thinking about the origin story and it started as an event series. I don't know if we've talked about that on the podcast podcast. I've definitely talked about it with listeners, but this got a slow start where it started as an event series. It was kind of sporadic, a little slapdash, and eventually it came in clusters where we kind of do a few and then there'd be a break. Then it became a once-a-month thing, and now it's once every 2 weeks. But this year, with all the in-between episodes that we released, it became almost a 3-per-month, a year of conversations with Tyler. Did you feel it?

Yes, you know, ideally a podcast I think should be once every day. That's not possible for a number of reasons, but there is something socially optimal about that, that you wake up in the morning and you know there's a podcast for you, and you only listen, say, to the 11 a year you care about the most, but that will be a different 11 for every person. Are you ready?

You talked to me about another podcast idea before this. That's not the first time you've brought up the daily podcast. Maybe soon that will be— everyone will have their AI assistant and everyone will have their personal podcast and it'll be up to the listener to decide who they want to spend time with.

No, it'll be up to the AI. You'll ask your AI, which are the new podcasts that I want to hear?

Yeah, exactly. So you're looking at the list of conversations in front of you. 33 original episodes. Let's do some numbers. Most popular episode of the year. Which ones do you think were the most listened to episodes of the year?

I never have a good sense of this. I suspect the one with Jonathan GPT Swift was either the most or the least listened to, but I don't know which. And maybe Rick Rubin was pretty popular.

Tyler, you could do better than that. Look at this list again and say who was the one who CWT listeners would absolutely turn out and listen to in droves.

I don't know, Paul Graham?

Paul Graham, yeah, by far.

Okay.

By far. Okay, GPT Swift. I think was just kind of middling. So it was neither like an underperformer, but it certainly didn't overperform. But Paul Graham was absolutely the top this year and just broke, you know, first day listens, first week listens, overall downloads, like a clear, clear favorite.

That tells us something about our audience, right?

Yes, it does. And also the paucity of Paul Graham interviews.

That's right. There's only a few. Yeah. So he was easy to prepare for. There's not much you can do. You read all his essays, or reread them rather, and you're done. And then you study 18th century British art.

Yeah.

And hope that leads to something.

So he was maybe the easiest prep. Who was the most difficult prep this year?

Well, Jonathan G.P.T. Swift is difficult because you have to read most of Swift. Who else here? Anna Kay was very difficult because 17th century England has an enormously large literature. Gnome Dwarven was difficult because learning the history of comedy cannot really be done by reading. Lazarus Lake, I mostly prepared for that using GPT because he hasn't written much. There's not that much written on ultramarathons. So you keep on asking GPT for background context and then you get somewhere. And then the Kenyan trilogy, the three from the Nairobi area, especially the two Kenyans. I'd never met them. I didn't really know who they were. So it's completely improvised. That's like both the easiest and the hardest prep.

Other than Paul Graham, most popular episodes this year coming in second was Reid Hoffman, his second appearance talking about AI. I took a skim through that one and, you know, AI's fraught because things are changing every day. Developments are rapid, but that one was more conceptual, I think, has held up really well. Did you have any reflections on that now? I don't know what, 7 months after it was recorded?

Well, I promised Reid to do another one with him a year or two from now because everything will be so different. So the fact that we could keep on doing this podcast every month and it would be interesting every month is what's important there.

Yeah, and then third in popularity this year was Noam Chomsky. So people turned out for Chomsky. Some people, you know, if you look at like the MR comments, people complain, you know, they're like, oh, Chomsky's terrible on some of these subjects, why didn't Tyler challenge him more? What were your thoughts? What were you trying to get out of Chomsky? He's doing a lot of interviews now. He's 94. His birthday is actually tomorrow. We're recording this on December 6th, according to Wikipedia. Maybe it's hallucinating. But what were you trying to get out of it?

Well, that's a kind of unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don't even want to do it, but you feel if I don't do it, I'll regret. Not having done it. Just like we didn't get to chat with Charlie Munger in time, though he's far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is. I thought half of Chomsky was quite good and the other half was beyond terrible, but that's okay. And people, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner and just, well, they had this picture, what's it like, Tyler talking with Chomsky? And then they get to see it and maybe recoil, but that's what they came for, like a horror movie.

Yeah, the engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying, "I turned it off. I couldn't listen to it." But actually, most people listened to it. It did actually probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode on average people listened to.

How can you turn it off? What does that say about you? Like, were you surprised? You thought that Chomsky had become George Stigler or something? No.

You never know. You know, once you get into your 90s, who knows what might happen there? Speaking of which, so you mentioned Charlie Munger. We had an interview scheduled with Charlie Munger in January of 2024. His birthday, I believe, is in December. He was going to be 100 years old when we would have interviewed him. Recently, Henry Kissinger died.

We didn't want to do him, by the way. I felt there was no good way I could handle it. Yeah. So, some of what he did was very good, but a lot was very bad. And I just figured, stay away. I think he might have done one with us 2 or 3 years earlier. Yeah. But it didn't interest me.

And then this morning, actually, it was announced that Norman Lear died, the television pioneer.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, he was 101 years old and pretty active until at least a year or 2 ago. Do you have any thoughts on centenarians, and I mean, it seems, it's a weird coincidence that in the past few weeks we've had people who have been very active, Kissinger, Munger, Norman Lear, making it to 100 or at least near 100.

We need to get one on the show. I mean, who's the best candidate at this point, Vernon Smith?

Probably, yes.

Let's see, 96, 97? Yeah. So if he shows his worth as an economist over the next few years, maybe we'll give him an invite.

Warren Buffett's not that far behind. Munger, I think he's in his early 90s.

He's harder to get, I think.

Yeah. So I also did something this year that I haven't looked at it before. And I looked, I mentioned the engagement for the Chomsky episode was good. I looked and just saw like who was actually the highest engagement. So who actually on average most people listened to the most and got through most of the episode.

You mean relative to total numbers or absolute?

Sort of ask the question of like on average, how much of an episode people listen to.

Okay, so conditional on starting. Is that Katherine Rundell?

It's not. The two winners— it's a very tight field. It's not like there's some runaway winner. These are all very, very similar. But if you look at the top for retention, as it's called, Brad DeLong, number one.

Okay.

And Seth Godin. So as a measure of engagement, like the ones that people really tended to stick to to the end, those were the two at the top of the pack.

I would think Vishy Anand might have won that also because There's plenty of reasons why you might not care, but you know up front it's a bit like Chomsky. Like, he's a chess player. You're going to get chess.

Yeah.

If you don't want chess, don't even start.

Yeah. I'm going to move on to underrated and I'll tip my cap a little bit here and say that Vishy was actually one of my picks for underrated episodes this year. He kind of— he did fine, but actually I think his engagement was lower. His download numbers were lower. And I think it was, as you said, that a lot of people looked and said, "I don't know anything about chess." So they either didn't listen to it at all, or they gave up on it at some point in the interview. And that's one of my picks for underrated episodes this year because I'm not a big chess guy, but there was some really good stuff that Vishy had in there about competition, being hard on yourself. In particular, I think his anecdote about you know, being a bad loser and saying like he takes defeat probably the hardest of anyone he knows. He has just enough composure to get through the post-match press conference, but then he goes to his hotel room and he's just, just self-flagellating in there.

Maybe our very best episode on human psychology of the whole 200. Yeah.

And he was also just so delighted to talk about chess and I think really—

And not have to dumb it down. Yeah.

So that was one of my picks.

I agree.

What would your picks be for underrated? We went, we went through the most popular ones, but what do you think underrated?

Well, I don't know how these are rated, but I thought Lazarus Lake was one of the best episodes.

Absolutely.

It just captured something about him. Maybe— I don't know how many listeners that had. Katherine Rundell is one of my all-time favorites. Rick Rubin was a great deal of fun for me and a real honor. Noam Dorman, I thought we had very good rapport and back and forth. But they're all underrated, I have to say, right?

Lazarus Lake That was one of those episodes. Every once in a while, there's an episode where as soon as you listen to it, you think, this is really special. I would say like Richard Perham was one of those episodes. And I had the experience listening to the Lazarus Lake episode similar to that, where I was like, this is, this is an old timer for me. It was just, there was something about it where the way that he was, the topics he was talking about, it was actually kind of heartwarming and affirming. But there was also some good stuff in there about competition and self-improvement. And I had a number of other people reach out to me or, you know, they said it on Twitter. They've told me in person that Lazarus Lake was like their favorite by far. So I think clear number one pick Lazarus Lake. If you haven't listened to that one, check it out. It's really good. The ones you mentioned are great. The other one that I would throw out there is Glen Lowery. Traffic-wise, it did fine, but If you haven't listened to that one, it has one of the most unexpected kind of affecting endings of any Conversation with Tyler episode where you ask him about death and he gives a very genuine, from the heart answer. And it's really compelling. And I wonder why, why it's not a typical Tyler question. I don't think this is one of your talent questions, but why were you compelled to ask him about death?

It's one of our most moving episodes, but I think it is a Tyler question.

Okay.

How is it you feel you're going to face death? And I want to ask more people that one.

Yeah.

It's hard to BS in response to that question without sounding like an idiot. So that makes it a Tyler question. And you get a sense of how thoughtful a person is and how they respond on the fly, because I don't think too many people have a ready answer. They're not used to hearing that in an interview. Oh, and by the way, you know, President Carter, how do you feel you're gonna face your own death, right? It doesn't come up that much.

I'll go ahead and ask it. How do you feel you're going to face death?

I think it will come suddenly, and I won't be faced with that much of an issue, but that could be a delusion.

That's my hope. I feel like the hope is that it will come suddenly and you won't be aware of it. I think I have a fear like a lot of people, that if I know death is coming, that there will be moments I will be very at peace with it and moments where I'll completely lose composure. And my hope is that I can actually have my final moments be one where I have composure and not be in a panic. But I don't feel like I have a way of ensuring that in any way.

Robin Hanson has looked into this a bit, and he tells me in people's final moments, they're typically very, very weak. And just have way less of reactions, period, than they think they're going to. And it's not that much of a question. That was his empirical finding.

Okay, some solid empirics on that too. That's way my panic about it.

Solid empirics remain underrated, I would say.

So those were our picks for underrated. I definitely encourage all of you, we had a listener meetup earlier this year, and I was surprised to find that, and I've heard this since, that many listeners use this episode as a way to, as an episode guide of sorts, to go back and check out episodes they miss them. Some people actually kind of hold them in reserve and use this as a guide. So definitely check out the episodes that, that we've mentioned. But I would be curious to hear what other people's picks were as well. So let us know. I'm curious to know. There's definitely a lot on this list. I think that we also got feedback that especially in the second half of the year, people really felt like the show was on a roll, that it was just like really good interviews, really interesting people. Episode after episode after episode.

We didn't have many bad episodes. But I won't say how many we had.

Jonathan G.B.D. Swift, that guy was just hard to deal with.

Well, he had a commanding knowledge of history. You can say that for him.

Absolutely. Last year on the retrospective, I asked you, I think it was in the context of asking what you'll be working on next, Tyler Cowen: And you mentioned that you had a book that you were working on about top economists, who's the best economist, and you indicated that it wouldn't— it was kind of dependent on publishing things like maybe the paperback of Talent would be coming out, so you're not sure, but it was basically ready, and now here we are a year later and that book has arrived. Mercatus ended up publishing it in a non-traditional fashion. It's called GOAT: Who's the Greatest Economist of All Time and Why Does It Matter? So you haven't done a ton of like interviews or press about it. There's the EconTalk with Russ Roberts that released in late November, I think. Tell us that story. Why were you compelled? You had this manuscript. Why were you compelled to release it in the way that you did?

The site is econgoat.ai, and most of the book I wrote during the depths of the pandemic, the very worst parts where you couldn't get to libraries. Or do many things or travel much. So I just thought, what's a project I can do that where I won't be driven crazy? So classic texts you can work with either online or I already owned copies, had read them, just needed to reread them a few times. I didn't know when a book could come out in any form, how the pandemic would evolve, but I thought, well, this is timeless. If it doesn't come out for a number of years, that's not a problem. So by the time things were reopening, most of the book was written. And I just thought, well, I'm going to sit on this for a while, improve it slowly, and there'll be a chance at some point to do something really interesting with it. And then GPT-4 came along and I started thinking, well, this should be the first book published in GPT-4. It's 100,000 words. You can access it through GPT-4 or just read it like a regular book or interrogate a GPT-4-based app that you helped build and oversaw the construction of, and ask it to summarize chapters, ask it for more background, ask it what mistakes it thinks I made. That's the future of a lot of learning. So I thought, let's be in advance of this.

And you're planning on using it, I believe, in a class that you're teaching next semester?

History of Economic Thought. It's a graduate class I'm teaching, already fully subscribed.. And of course the book to the students, as for everyone else, it will be completely free and they can just ask away.

And a professor at Purdue, I believe, reached out to us and was planning on doing the same. So does that seem like a— I wasn't necessarily thinking of that as a use case, but it makes complete sense that it's hard to pinpoint. I think in this case the professor was mentioning that it's hard to pinpoint sometimes a specific book Do you do a bunch of readings? Well, maybe you can do a reading or two, but also just use a tailored AI assistant to help give you that context that you would get from multiple readings.

That's right. And it's a kind of meta-book. So you can ask it, what did Joseph Schumpeter say about Walras? And it will give you a reasonable answer. Right. So there aren't that many history of economic thought classes, period, anymore. But I think the topic is making a comeback online. With non-professional economists who just want to read great books, smart books. So I hope this is speeding along that comeback because Adam Smith, Keynes, John Stuart Mill, they're some of the greatest thinkers of all time. And as I reread them, it just amazed me how much even smarter they were than I had thought. That's the main thing I learned from doing that book.

Who got the biggest upgrade and who got the biggest downgrade in the writing of the book?

John Stuart Mill got the biggest upgrade. Just how much Mill there is. It's either 32 or 33 volumes, and if you just open up to pages randomly, it's interesting almost all the time. And he wrote about, you know, the ancient world, wrote about Plato and Socrates, wrote about the French historians, in addition to the well-known works, reviewed Tocqueville. So that to me was the biggest upgrade. I don't think that anyone got a downgrade. Maybe Hayek didn't get much of an upgrade, but that's because I liked his best pieces so much already.

You'll be happy to know I read this in a Tyler Cowen fashion where because I was working on the AI assistant for the book, I will say I looked at every page of the book as you have said from time to time. So in that sense, have I read it? Maybe, but I've worked a lot with the AI assistant. I read some of it traditionally. And I've looked at every page, so.

I think this is encouraging people to rethink how they read. So with the app, you can just ask it, well, the chapter on Keynes, give me 3 anecdotes for a cocktail party. I don't wanna read the chapter. It will do that quite well. Now if that's how most people read anyway, and there's a lot of evidence from, say, Kindle, that that is how most people read, why shouldn't we cater to that demand? Now underneath the surface, there's a slight Straussian mocking of the reader, like, "This is what you want, we'll give it to you, heh heh." But at the same time, I honestly think we should accommodate that and give people the option, but also just let them read the book straight through if they want.

That's maybe a cynical view of what people read books for. There's also—

Mostly they just don't read them, right?

Mostly they don't read them.

They kind of, they sit dormant.

Podcasts have substituted for books. And so on some level, there's a cynicism where it's a signaling thing. You're just trying to show a certain intellectual level of sophistication. But there's also a level of thinking on the margin with some of this stuff. Like, if I can listen to a podcast interview with the author and get 80 or 90% of the insight, why would I read the book? Similarly, if I can sit down with the tutor for an hour or two, can I get a level of insight that's sufficient? It's not just cocktail party fodder, it's I get the learning I need to.

I'm fine with that competition. Most authors are running away from it. I think we should run toward it and embrace it, and then if you have to figure out, well, this is actually my comparative advantage, it's fantastic to know that, right? Most authors never know that.

When you read nonfiction books, one of the ways that you can read very fast, but you also read really efficiently, you can skip parts of the book that you're like, I know this.

Which is often the case, yes.

When would an LLM get good enough that you feel like it could kind of help you do that? So it's almost like it can just excise the stuff that you don't even need to see.

I think in less than 2 years. Now whether that's a product on the market that I can subscribe to, I'm less sure of. But technologically speaking, it's probably possible right now. It's a question of at what cost. So what's the token cost? If it's $2 per query to do that, well, I'm not going to do that even if I could afford it. But again, it'll be affordable in a few years' time. You'll train it on Tyler Cowen and then say, just take out the parts that Tyler already knows.

What would give you the certainty that it's doing the job? Were you— and would you actually—

I don't have the certainty now that I'm doing the job. I'd be fine with that. I think it'd be sort of 87% accurate. And I'd get to read much more, and then I'd apply my own rules to what's left in there. If it leaves in too much, I would have been faced with that anyway. So you can always set Type 1 versus Type 2 error. Like, it almost certainly has to be a help. I don't see the scenario where it's not a help.

It puts you, though, in a digital reading context. You can't, I mean, unless you're having it print on demand for you somehow.

Give that another year or two.

Okay.

So if there's something like a Kindle but more sophisticated, Now that's a kind of digital reading, but it would be like enough like reading a book with some kind of screen. Or it's an audiobook and it just tells me the parts I didn't know.

Speaking of audiobooks, after this recording we're going to sit down and record a sample of you reading the book to generate a synthetic Tyler voice. I don't think we even told you about this, but we're going to take 5 minutes and have you record a sample to generate—

So there's not enough of my voice already with 200 episodes?

There is.

It has to be my book voice. The Tyler Cowen talking about Adam Smith book voice is a special thing, I suppose.

There is enough that we can do it, but we have been told by those in authority that we'll get even better results if it's you actually reading the book. So now a 5-minute sample will improve things.

Give me advice on how my book voice should be different than my podcast voice. Should it be more pompous? It shouldn't be more giggly, right?

That's a question. I'm not a big consumer of audiobooks. I know you talked about on the Bryan Koppelman episode And what came out of that is, A, I think it is true that a lot of people do, at least with nonfiction, they want to hear the actual author speak the words and they imagine it. I think most people tend to imagine it in their voice if they have any conception of the author's voice. So one is it should be you. But I don't think— I just don't think you have that many registers, Tyler Cowen.

That's good. Makes it easy then.

I don't think you really need to worry too much about it. I think actually it would be totally fine. As we were originally doing where we just took an episode of Conversation with Tyler and said, "Here you go." But we'll give this a try and see what happens.

It needs to learn how I pronounce Smith, right? Yes.

And so all that to— and yeah, maybe it will take with you some of your more idiosyncratic pronunciations as well, which is important to preserve. So I don't know if I even connected the dots there, but we're doing that to generate an AI audiobook.

Great. When do we think that audiobook will be ready? Do you know?

Right now it's a function, I think, mainly of when they give the synthetic voice back to us and how long it might take us to— it's a fairly long book, so how long it'll take us just to edit it. But it's something that it's a matter of assuming we get the voice back relatively promptly, it's, you know, days or weeks. It's not a long process. It's just how long does it take a human to actually package that audio file in a way that is presentable? There's also a version in which we release it and say, we haven't even listened to this really, so here it is. Let us know what goes wrong.

I would think within a year an AI should be able to edit it. But again, I don't think that's a service currently available, but technologically it should be possible right now. You feed it the text, you let it listen, you ask it about the discrepancies, it sends you a list.

Mm-hmm. The nature of this is that you can't imagine there being a lot of outright errors. It's more about maybe having to divvy it up into chapters or things like just packaging as an audiobook, but it's really not as labor-intensive. What it gets you though is you don't actually have to worry about was there a flub that we didn't catch because it's just a synthetic voice reading the text. There might be weird mispronunciations or there might be weird inflections. But that's it. There's not going to be an outright mistake, or perhaps it reads a footnote or something and it's not supposed to, or does chapter headings. But those are—

Say when I write about Keynes being into eugenics, I'm not sure myself what's the right tone for that discussion. But I wonder if the AI— I mean, I'm pretty sure they don't change the tone at all.

Yeah. Well, what's great—

It should sound more grave or something.

That's a great question. I don't know to what extent there's an ability for it to have that contextual awareness of this is a more serious, grave matter. I'm sure there is.

I don't think there is now in the current products. Again, I don't think it's at all difficult, but—

Yeah, maybe you just have to kind of pick up, you just select a mood and say, go for it, possibly so. There might be a weird mood for some of these where it's a very light and lilting exposition on eugenics or whatever.

Or when Adam Smith is kidnapped by the gypsies, it's all joyous.

Yes. Yeah, of course. That sounds fun. So that is coming up as well. Let's see. Incidentally, on the GOAT thing, you and Russ Roberts at the end of your EconTalk conversation, you had a bit of a discussion about GOATs in various fields. I think this book has inspired people to think about— you were inspired by Bill Simmons writing about the greatest of all time in basketball. You did it for economics. What are you looking at? Next is, what do you want to see someone make a good case for as a field for who's the GOAT?

Almost anything, it can work. So it's been done plenty for basketball. There's my take on economics. I think the fundamental innovation is not GOAT per se, but writing from the perspective of a fan. It's what a lot of people actually want. If you read, say, TheRinger.com, it's written from the perspective of a fan, which is great. So to have many more things written from the perspectives of fans to me is more important than whether or not they do GOAT. GOAT may not apply to a lot of fields. Political science, it's much more heterogeneous and varied than say economics, so maybe there is no GOAT of political science even possibly. That's fine, but you could write a book about your favorite political scientists, again with this perspective of enthusiasm and why they got me excited about things, and that's what I want. And academic incentives are precisely to do the opposite of that. Like, here's why it's not really very exciting at all. That's not how it's described, but that's the way it turns out.

Yeah, that's very much the Bill Simmons brand, and I think the success of The Ringer has shown that that kind of thing is really enticing when you hear people come to it from deep appreciation and enthusiasm.

And the goal is to teach people how to appreciate. So how can you do that if they can't even see you appreciating? It's insane. Like, the key thing is plenty of information, but how do you motivate people to want to study? Teaching them the art of appreciation is what CWT has been about from the beginning. Like, here's how I've learned to appreciate these people, and you hope your listeners either appreciate them, or just learn the general art of learning how to appreciate. That's like the whole mission.

Yeah. What's strange is Bill Simmons has even said that he noticed that that wasn't the case always in sports writing, that he would read columns and think, this person doesn't even care about what they're writing about.

Or they dislike it.

Or they actively disliked it. How do you model that? I don't understand. I mean, I do, but if you can find people whose profession is to commentate on sports or these other things that seem like dream jobs and they still don't seem to actually like it. What's the model for that and how do we have hope that that can be brought to bear on things like, you know, who's the GOAT of political science?

Well, you used to have these comprehensive media outlets that did sports pages, was never their specialty, and probably didn't have much influence over marginal subscribers or not subscribers. So the Washington Post, New York Times, they would sometimes have very good sports reporting, but a lot of the ordinary stuff was just not that interesting. It didn't use analytics. It wasn't from the perspective of a fan. So New York Times has now mostly switched to The Athletic, which is much better. And places like ESPN or The Ringer just way outcompete, like, the sports section of, say, the Post or ordinary newspapers that don't really do sports. And that will disappear, them doing sports, right? One way or the other. And that's for the better. Washington Post should cover politics and The Ringer, ESPN, and Substack should cover sports. And that's what we're getting. What's not to like? And podcasts cover sports like Bill Simmons.

By the way, we definitely need to, I hope we have Washington in the reading sample because we've gotta capture your Washington. That's a Tyler.

But I don't know if it's in the goat book because none of the goats are in Washington.

We've got it either way. Let's move on to some Twitter questions. We've got a few from either past or actually upcoming conversations with Tyler Cowen. So let's start with those. First from Hollis Robbins, if the humanities are dying, she says it's speculative, what are the opportunities for revival with AI?

I don't think the humanities are dying and podcasts show that. So I don't have data, but I suspect more people are reading Shakespeare than ever before. Certainly if you're counting India and China, that's quite likely. The presence of classical music on YouTube is very high. Poetry, I wouldn't quite say it's popular, but it's a thing. And I think it's robust. So they're being removed from the academy. That's probably good for them at current margins. So I'm bullish on the humanities. I think they're showing time and again that people who have studied them have special and unique talents. Peter Thiel would be a simple example, that he's such an incredible judge of who will be a good CEO comes in part from Peter having studied the humanities, and others are seeing that. So you go on Twitter and someone like, you know, Tommy Collison is saying, what have you read this weekend? And everyone just knows he means great books. He doesn't mean the latest Robert Harris novel, although some of them are like not terrible. And there's this Catherine Project with Zena Hitz and many other groups. I think there's a huge revival of the humanities right now. Harold Bloom has become a popular thing. People ask me about Harold Bloom all the time. And like, why is that? I didn't even know Harold Bloom. He's a guest we should have had, by the way, but he was ill for too long. Yeah, I'm very optimistic there.

Upcoming Conversations with Tyler Cowen guests, Patrick McKenzie asks, What has changed the most in your production function since LLMs became widely available, and what will change the most over the next 5 years, assuming continued improvements?

What I do when I prepare for a guest who hasn't written a lot, I keep on interrogating the LLM about background and context, and that works very well. I mentioned that already with Lazarus Lake. In general, when I'm reading books, unless I know the area quite well, There's all sorts of references where I just don't know really what they're talking about. And I just type a query into my GPT-4, usually I'll experiment with the other services too. It will tell me a lot. And I find that is more useful than trying to read more books. It's taking one book and the things I don't know, asking questions. So that would be the main difference. Over time, it's hard to predict. What I've already started doing is I do more personal appearances and give more talks. Because I think simply writing isn't good enough anymore. You don't have to believe the next GPT will write a better book than person X, but I do think many more people will be playing around with LLMs rather than reading books. Yeah. So we need to diversify more out of only doing books.

Has ChatGPT condensed the number of tabs you typically have open, or has it expanded, or is it just substituted maybe one for one with like what you might Google for?

Well, I have several LLM tabs always open, like Anthropic as well, which is a great service, more to come. And so it's going to increase the number of open tabs by 4 or 5 in equilibrium. I don't have access to X yet, their AI service. Open Source I've played around with, but I'm not using it yet on a regular basis, but I will be once there's open service fine-tuned on what I want it to have read. That's not very far away. So it's 5 more open tabs perpetually.

Do you see it collapsing? If you continue to make the analogy with Google, do you see it collapsing into one thing that you're using? I mean, you're mainly using ChatGPT, but you're experimenting with others. Do you see that eventually there's a leader and you're just going to whatever that service is, or do you think that it'll persist where you're going to have—

Well, there's a leader now, but I strongly believe diversity will persist. For one thing, there'll be differences in prices, which is not the case at Google. It's all P 0. So if you're in Kenya, you'll probably want cheaper, free open source, and it may not be as good as what I'm using, but it will make sense for them. And open source will just allow a lot of diversity of product. And the different companies, well, they'll be less gated. Elon Musk's will have less reinforcement learning. It'll be ruder. In some ways more interesting. Character AI will play out different historical characters or some offshoot service. So I would be shocked if there were just a single dominant provider.

John Stark asks what does he think about Aaron Wren's reasons for why you don't come across more Protestant intellectuals. So you made a comment in A Marginal Revolution that you don't sort of perceive there being these leading Protestant intellectuals like there are Catholicism, and then Aaron Wrenn wrote a response. What do you make of it?

Well, I don't hang out in Protestant intellectual circles. That's the main reason why I don't meet more of them. I do hang out in Jewish intellectual circles. Like, part of it's just called academia. Catholic is trickier, but I think there's something systematizing about Catholic philosophy where I'm more likely to end up interacting with those people. Than I would be for the Protestants. There's a lot of Protestant theology when I read it, mainly I'm bored. That's probably my defect. But I'm more likely to read like, you know, something in Thomist philosophy because it's closer to other things I know in terms of the way it thinks.

What have your favorite things Sri Lanka changed after your last visits? Joshua Perick asked this question. You had an old post on Marginal Revolution, I think actually maybe from 2013, 10 years ago.

That's when I went. Time, yes.

Or you say you'll— you list some, some of your favorite things Sri Lanka, but you say you're kind of not happy with your picks, and you say I'll try better next time.

The architecture of Geoffrey Bawa, especially the hotels, is one of the great glories of the world, and most people haven't heard of it, and you can see so much of it in Sri Lanka. So I would elevate that over all else. I understand the food much better, so there's very good Western food in Sri Lanka, which I hadn't understood on my first visit. Baked goods in particular can just be first-rate. And if you get tired of hoppers and string hoppers, which everyone does at some point, I don't care what you say, you get tired of it. What do you have next? There's like their weird mediocre Chinese food, or you can get Western baked goods. On the second trip, my view of Sri Lanka changed a good deal, and I recommend it highly as a vacation spot. And one of my best friends just did 2 weeks there and he loved it. And he was blown away by the quality of the architecture and the food. And it's quite safe and very affordable.

Do you want to do more DJing of your favorite songs like you did with Rick Rubin? asks Roommate Dave.

After my CWT with Rick Rubin, he recorded a podcast with me at his place in Italy, and that was quite a fun experience. So I went to visit him. And he just asked me to DJ for him. So I had no prep for this. This is intimidating. Oh, I've got to DJ for Rick Rubin. We did that, I guess, total for 7 or 8 hours, and he turned about 2 hours of it into one of his podcasts. Now, since then, he's asked me to make a number of playlists for him that will be on a new website he's building. And I've sent him 2 already. One is on avant-garde music. This is a Spotify playlist. And the others like African/world music/jazz, which is world music too. And those are done and ready. They're not out yet, but they exist. And I'm going to do at least two more in classical music. One will be like the best performances of some of the best pieces, but restricted to shorter pieces. And then the other would be what are obscure pieces by the best-known composers that are wonderful nonetheless. And those I'm working on right now.

Wow, that's amazing. Are you— you say it's a 7 or 8 hour DJ session. Are you literally just sitting in the room playing songs and talking about them for 8 hours straight?

Well, this is over the course of 3 days.

Okay.

So it's actually maybe, I don't know, 10 hours. And he'll play for me too. There are breaks and he has work breaks. I have work breaks. There's meal breaks. But it's a very intense experience. It is taken very seriously in exactly the right way.

Do you think there's an analogy there to developing taste appreciation for other fields? Like, what would be the equivalent of that in even something like economics? Is that just a seminar?

Well, you could have a group of 3 to 5 people read the same piece and talk about it. And we do that at George Mason pretty often, like with Alex Tabarrok. Robin Hanson, Brian Kaplan, Garrett Jones. I recommend that. Uh, academics don't do it enough. There's somehow no space for it. You learn more that way than from most seminars. You can even have a guest or visitor come if you want. But if you do music appreciation with Rick, you learn a great deal about talent. He's one of the greatest talent judges of all time, and you learn a lot about appreciation. So I think one of the things he and I have in common is we're both quite keen to get other people more excited about appreciation.

Eric Silver asks, will there be more clustered shows as with the 3 Tattoo City episodes? And I'll broaden that to say, do you think you'll experiment more with format or guest ideas? Or we also have the Jerusalem-Demsos book club.

Where we just read books and talked about those 3 books. So we had what, 3 big experiments this year. One is the GPT episode. The other is the Kenyan trilogy and two, you know, the two Kenyans I had never met before, nothing to read by them. And then with Jerusalem Dempsetz doing the books. So I want to experiment more and I'm looking for ideas. So ideas are welcome.

Tom Wong asks, given his interest in cultural dynamics, it could be intriguing to discuss how he sees cultural shifts affecting global economics and politics, particularly in relation to the rise of virtual communities and remote work. He's thinking about digital nomad groups, educational communities centered around, say, YouTube channels. You could think of Vitalik's Zuzulu kind of 3-month conference in Montenegro as an example of this. What do you think?

I think there'll be much more of that. I'm going to visit one of those groups in January in Honduras, Prospera. So they're running a 2-month experiment. It's called Vitalia. And one of the integrating themes is people going there are interested in life extension. I don't know very much about it at the moment. I would be going there anyway, but I'm very curious to see it and interact with it and try to learn something. So I think this is appealing from the, the user point of view to do this. You meet other very interesting people. You're in an interesting location for a while. The cost shouldn't be that high. So if it can be done, I think it's gonna happen much more.

Whammo asks, what guest appearances on other podcasts have been your favorite this year?

When I was on Rick Rubin's, that would by far be my favorite, yeah.

Yeah, I would encourage everyone to check that out. So there's two, there's an interview with you, and actually it ends up being one where you talk a lot about yourself, more of your personal bio, But then the DJ session is great as well and turned me on to some new tracks and artists that I had never heard of that was great. So if you haven't listened to those, jump on that.

I did many other podcasts this year. They tend to blur together in my mind. So I don't even know anymore which were the favorites. And I don't listen to them afterwards. Unlike with CWT, I don't read through a transcript afterwards. So some of them were good. Is what I'll say.

Heipe Johansen says, I'm going to summarize this one, but he's pointing out that when you look at the GOATs in different fields, you know, you point to the Beatles, Bach, Homer, Shakespeare, and is there a bias there in that it feels like we look more to older figures as GOATs, especially like, is Shakespeare really the best writer or the best playwright?

Yeah, he's the best, but it's going to be older by its nature. It doesn't mean modernity is collapsing, but if someone did something amazing 2 years ago, say in gaming, it just won't be called GOAT yet. You'll even wonder, well, maybe it'll be surpassed next year, just like, say, the Beatles surpassed the Rolling Stones. So things that qualify for GOAT, they're not going to be that new, but we're generating GOAT-like outputs all the time. We just don't know yet which are the most wonderful in their areas.

All right, well, let's switch gears and go to a version of GOAT. These are your picks, pop culture picks from 2013. So these are— you do a year-end list on Marginal Revolution. I've gone back to 2013, and here are your picks. Favorite music. You say these are favorites from a radically incomplete sampling, not a best-of list, which I don't know that you usually put that qualification on there, but you did this time. So let's run through them. Kanye West, Yeezus, his best album by quite a bit.

It's a very, very good album. I'm no longer sure it's his best, but it's held up very well. Kanye himself is a more problematic matter, but people still listen to it and they should.

MBV by My Bloody Valentine, you say, if you had to ask who did better after a 20-year hiatus, Kevin Shields or Bobby Fischer, this is decisive evidence in favor of Shields, a totally unexpected renaissance.

Strong agree. It's still a very good album.

Acid Rap by Chance the Rapper.

I don't listen to rap much anymore. I'm not sure why not. It's very innovative and there's a lot of high-quality work, but somehow it strikes me as being in a rut and a lot of it doesn't stick with me. Chance is very good, but I don't listen to it these days. I don't regret picking it, but yeah.

WED21 by Juana Molina. You say, why isn't she better known?

She's from Argentina. She does a mix of pop and avant-garde. She's coming to Barnes at Wolf Trap on my teaching night. I'm sad to miss her. I still think about her and her music. So yeah, strong agree. Held up well.

Matangi by M.I.A. You say her first album had enough posturing that I figured that was it, but by now she has compiled an impressive streak.

The streak ended. She stopped. She was an incredible talent. It may have been family obligations. I'm not sure. But she is not a part of my musical life in terms of new output. But again, quality on the older work has held up.

And lastly, you say, I'm also starting to like Church's Bones of What You Believe. My favorite jazz album of the year has been Charles Lloyd and Jason Moran, Hagar's Song. And I have more on order.

Charles Lloyd had an incredible renaissance. I mean, not that he really ever stopped at quite an old age. You would think playing the saxophone is hard to do when you're very old, but his last few albums were some of his best, some of the best jazz, period. So I like my picks for that year much better than my picks from the year before. It's like I learned something between 2012 and 2013.

Favorite movies. So at the end of the year, in a resonance maybe with 2023, the movie Her came out and you were a big fan of it. So it came out after you released your best of, but that movie I think has held up really well and people are returning to it now because it feels like it got some things right. One is just the natural feel of how it's already possible now to chat with an AI and for it to feel very seamless. There's now Humane, which has made an AI pin that the primary interface with it is voice. And the other thing it got right, by the way, is it, if you look at the costume design in the movie Her, it very much imagines that the future will look like an updated version of like the '50s and '60s. So the trousers will be higher waisted, the cuts will be looser, things like that. And that is totally coming to pass. So great job, whoever did the costume design on Her. I think you got that one right.

It'll go down as one of the great movies of its time, like Frankenstein or City Lights or Gone with the Wind. Total clear winner.

Relatedly, you did a review of Google Glass in 2013. So thinking about Google Glass, that you were not a fan of it, I think you found it just hard to use. Now in 2023, we have this product that I guess will launch next year. That's an AI pin that you primarily talk to. It's supposed to be in some sense a substitute for your phone so you're not on your screen all the time. What do you make of that? Will you try it out?

I will try out the pin. The thing I'm most bullish about is the Meta glasses. They're not out yet. I believe they'll be priced below $200. And they'll be what Google Glass was trying to be except now we have all the tech. So I was very sympathetic to the idea of Google Glass. I give Google a lot of credit. I don't think it worked. The market agreed with me. But that was step one. And with LLMs being so much better, we're ready for a step that people are going to want to use. Now, the privacy issues will be tricky, but it's going to happen in some form no matter what. And the notion that you can wear glasses and talk to your glasses and they'll tell you whatever you want to know, that's going to be here to stay.

All right, let's go through the favorite movies. You have a lot of favorite movies. You say it's been an excellent year for movies. I can't remember a period so good. This is after 2012 when you were like, it's good, but A lot of Temple Studio stuff. So let's run through these. Not all of these released in 2013, this is all—

But it's when I saw them.

All is always when you saw them. Amour by Michael Haneke.

Very dramatic, very European. I don't like a lot of his movies, they're too negative, but that's a good one.

The Chilean movie No, which is an account of how even in the strangest of circumstances democracies filter policy outcome, as indeed autocracies do too in different ways.

One of the best movies about elections, politics, and public choice. Strong plus.

Spring Breakers.

That was just fun. That movie has really stuck. It's an easy movie to hate or make fun of, but it's full of energy. It's cinematic in every shot. I thought it was great and still do.

The Gatekeepers. You taught it in a law and literature class. It's about 6 former heads of Israel's secret service agency discussing their successes and failures in the Six-Day War in 1967.

We all should watch that one again, right? Excellent film.

Another resonance with 2013 is you were actually in Israel in December. You were writing a lot of posts about Israel. And so that was another resonance with me when I was reviewing it. So I think you were also doing a dive more into Israel at the time, as you are wont to do. Room 237, a documentary, an excellent mock on Straussians through the medium of fandom cult for Kubrick's The Shining.

It's about these people who think there are all these secret hidden meanings in The Shining. It's a hilarious film. More people should watch it. I'm surprised it hasn't become better known because Strauss has become much better known and more widely discussed. I would recommend that. Room 237, that's the title, right? Yep.

Oblivion, Tom Cruise movie directed by Joseph Kosinski, who went on to direct Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, which just was the biggest movie of last year.

Maybe it's a bad sign that I don't remember, but which one is Oblivion?

I've never seen it, but a lot of people remark on Oblivion as being a visually spectacular movie. You say— that's actually what you say, so I'm quoting you. It's one of the most visually spectacular movies I've seen. The first half is a very good movie in its own right. The second half is mostly narcissistic trash, only periodically compelling, in which Cruise also rewrites the story of his breakup with Nicole Kidman.

Well, there you go. I must have been right.

It's been one that I have meant to check out for its visual style, but—

You might need big screen though. Yeah.

Next on the list, Stories We Tell by Sarah Polley.

She's an incredible filmmaker. The very recent one about women talking, I couldn't stick with.

I was a big fan of it.

I like the idea of it. And Away from Her also is another amazing Polley movie. So I'm glad to see she's gotten the recognition she deserves.

Stories We Tell is a very unique documentary. It's about the stories we tell, and it relates to her life and upbringing, and it's a very well done and crafted documentary. I highly recommend it as well.

She will still do great things, I think.

Before Midnight completes the trilogy realistically with charm and bite.

People love that trilogy. Again, it will go down as a classic achievement of the age. Maybe it's too poppy or too popular or too clichéd, but it does cliché in just the right way. And it's a bit self-mocking. I think those are great.

I think they'll age well. I am a fan of the trilogy. I think they will age well. Next one, In a World. This is probably your most kind of out there pick. It's a— do you remember it? In a World?

Tell me something.

It's a comedy about voiceover artists. So the— Oh, that was very good. In a World.

Yes, I like movies about how things are done, how things are made. There's something very CWT about it, and more people should watch it, yeah.

By the way, random question for me: what is an intellectual romance or gossip book? What does that mean to you?

There's a number of recent books about early 20th century intellectuals and their love lives. And I reviewed them on MR. And those were just fun, and you don't have to read all of it. You can just pick out figures you're interested in. So there's one of them, it's about like what different top Central European thinkers were doing, often with their love lives, right before World War I broke out. There should be more books like that. It brings things to life, it helps you appreciate, it makes it vivid. You get some sense of what might have actually motivated them, or it's like if you read the letters Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, a very strange romance. He's this Nazi, really. She's Jewish. It's a fraught romance, but there was like a really deep, electrifying connection between the two as well. And of course you should read that stuff.

This is a very Tyler Cowen book. I don't know if you've invented a new genre there, but the reason this came up is you spoke positively of a book called The Lives of Wives: Five Literary Marriages.

Oh yeah, that's a good example.

Yes. That's from this year. All right, moving back to movie picks. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceaușescu.

I don't remember it well. I know I liked it. Must have been good. I feel with a lot of history of communism, I feel a bit too much I know the story, and a lot of things haven't stuck with me. Maybe that's me oversimplifying, but I'm not going back to that topic very much.

Pieta, a beautiful Korean tale involving moneylenders and non-price compensation schemes.

Korean movies for almost a 20-year period are just some of the best in the world, and the ones that are known at all are quite good at a success rate of about 90%.

In Another Country is another pick, Korean and French juxtaposed. World War Z, You say, "Was surprised how serious a movie it is, deeply politically incorrect it is, including on third rail issues such as immigration, ethnic conflict, songs of peace, the Middle East." You also mentioned The Attack, Lebanese and Israeli in its sources.

That's an incredible film, The Attack. You know, the Z1, I don't know if watching it would hold up well, but part of it is this story about, like, killers scaling a fence. And we should rewatch it and see. The film was willing to take chances. I suspect a lot of it doesn't hold up, but, you know, fundamentally creative, and I'm for that kind of effort.

The Act of Killing, documentary with interviews with Indonesian gangsters and murderers from the '65 pogroms.

Saturday night, I was talking to the cellist in the Jack Quartet about this movie, The Act of Killing, and he and I both agree it's just phenomenal, one of the best movies just flat out, you know, of its time.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga depicts the life of the people in the isolated village of Bokta in the eastern Siberian taiga.

Hasn't stuck with me.

You end the list with 3 Hollywood picks: Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, Captain Phillips, and 12 Years a Slave.

We should try to get Cuarón on the show. Just remember that. 12 Years a Slave. It was good. Too Hollywood. I think I would like it less now. And what was the middle one again?

Captain Phillips. Tom Hanks, Somali pirate, based on a true story.

It would bore me now. I mean, it's a well-done Hollywood movie. I'm fine with that.

The reason that movie has stuck, I think it's kind of lived on in YouTube fame for the clip where Tom Hanks depicts going in shock after— it's in the final minutes of the movie, and he very realistically portrays what it's like to go through shock as he's being treated. And it's just this really surprising punch right at the end of the movie where he's just breaking down as he's being treated. And for a lot of people, I think that's why Tom Hanks is still, still a top contender for GOAT in terms of, of actors today is because just the skill of being able to go through these range of emotions and portray it so realistically, he gets all these little nuances of it exactly right. I watch it on YouTube all the time. I don't know why, but it comes up for me all the time. Like, I'm gonna watch Tom Hanks go through shock again.

Who is the GOAT of actors? Cary Grant? Jimmy Stewart? Harrison Ford? Clint Eastwood?

I'm very biased towards— for me, I don't watch enough old movies that I could give you a pick for older. And I think the style has changed so much. It's such But I think if you were looking for criteria, they would have to have critical success, commercial success, longevity.

How about Tom Cruise? The Kubrick Eyes Wide Shut. He's amazing in that.

Tom Cruise is absolutely a contender.

Yeah, I'll say Tom Cruise off the top.

He's worked with, he's worked with top directors. He has been in critically adored films. Now he's in a phase where he's doing just shooting-for-the-moon blockbusters with physical stunt work, and that could be another dimension of it is the physical demands of the role. He's absolutely a contender for GOAT. Alright, so those were movie picks. Let's move on to fiction. And we'll have to run through these quickly because we're running short on time. Carl Knausgaard, My Struggle Book Two: A Man in Love.

You know, I called Knausgaard early, even the earlier book about the angels. I basically said, this guy is going to be great. So I feel very good about that one. And he, of course, has been a guest in one of my most favorite episodes.

Yeah, that's an underrated pick from years past. Claire Massoud, The Woman Upstairs.

She's done good things since then. A good pick on my part.

Amy Sackville, Orkney.

Well, I love the Orkney Islands, so that made that one work for me. I'm not sure everyone should read it.

Mohsin Hamid, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.

That's one of these fun books you read on a plane. It's good for that. I don't think you need to read it now.

Katherine Davis, Duplex: A Novel.

Her work is very deep. It seems to have slipped a bit out of people's attention, but people who like very serious fiction should take a look at her.

All right. Favorite nonfiction. Quite a lot here. Why don't I just run through them and you stop me if you want to say anything. Jeremy Adelman, Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman.

Obviously a great book. Self-recommending, as they say.

As they say. Daniel Brook, A History of Future Cities. Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. That's a very of-its-moment pick. I liked Neil Powell, Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music, and—

Self-recommending.

A couple books on Benjamin Britten. Emmy Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath. Rana Mitter, China's War with Japan, 1937-1945. It's called in the US, Forgotten Ally.

Confessions of a Sociopath, people should still read. Sociopaths are underrated, I think is the key point of that one. I'm serious.

Please elaborate.

They can be problematic, but the notion that they can be super smart, high-achieving people— people are beginning to learn this, and her book is one of the best statements of how you could think more deeply about sociopaths.

Are you willing to bite the bullet on—

They're not psychopaths, to be clear, right?

Right. So are you willing to bite the bullet on this idea that a lot of things that might be considered like mental disorders of one form or another are more about just cognitive diversity? And if there are specific problems or behaviors, that's one thing, but in general, maybe we should be more open to—

You toss me that bullet, I'll bite it, I'll swallow it.

Yes. Okay.

All right.

Moving on, Emil Simpson, War from the Ground Up: 21st Century Combat as Politics.

Hasn't stuck with me.

William Haseltine, Affordable Excellence: The Singapore Health System.

Self-recommending.

Claire Jacobson, New Museums in China. It's mostly a picture book.

A lot of them are still empty, but the construction boom there and how the Chinese state tried to use aesthetics That book has very important lessons, and we should all think about that more.

Mark Lawrence Schröd, Vodka Politics: Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State.

The roles of alcohol and drugs in war, people are starting to pay attention to. That book was an early move in that direction, way ahead of its time. I would say a very good pick by me.

Yeah, I feel like you were tweeting someone else or linking to a piece that was making that point just recently about people don't appreciate the— If you don't engage with the role of alcohol and particularly with Russia, you're missing a fundamental component of the dynamics there.

And how many of the Nazis were on speed or some version thereof? Mm-hmm.

Paul Sabin, The Bet, Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and the Gamble Over Earth's Future.

You know, in any given year it changes who is looking better in that bet. The funny thing I've realized is that Ehrlich's in a funny way is the more optimistic prognosis. That rising resource prices is a sign that AI is working. So I think the price of energy is going to go up a lot because people will need compute and they'll be building all these new projects. And that's a good thing. So in a funny way, the Simon side is pessimistic.

Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher biography.

That's an incredibly detailed and thoughtful piece of work. There's several volumes. Just amazing. More detail than most people need to know. I don't think I'll read them all, but you gotta give that one an A+.

From books you say close at hand, you very much like The Power of Glamour by John List, Uri Ganesi, and Virginia Postrel, Lant Pritchett, The Rebirth of Education, and Tim Harford's The Undercover Economist Strikes Back was the book in 2013.

I know all those people. They're great. They're just obvious picks. Everything they do is quality and interesting.

You said if I have to—

And Tim's been on the show.

Another past CWT guest. If I had to offer my very top picks for the year, you say, It would be Joe Studwell, How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World's Most Dynamic Region. Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. Mark Lewison, Tune In: The Beatles All These Years, Volume 1. Peter Baker, Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.

The Studwell book has become seminal, and I'm happy I had a role in its spread. So it's the book a lot of people go to to understand Asia. And I feel I was early to that. The Alan Taylor book Jon Elster recommended to me, one of the best history books I think of its generation. I don't think it's really stuck with say the smart people on Twitter who read great books. I'm not sure why, but more people should know about it. Beatles book, Beatles have made a huge comeback in the public eye. Mark Lewisohn's one of the best books about them. What was the other one you mentioned?

There was Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House and Taylor: The Internal Enemies, Slavery and War in Virginia.

Oh, the Tyler— yes, the Days of Fire— I'm tired of all that stuff. So people don't talk about that time so much anymore, which is interesting. But overall, I think my 2013 recommendations might have been like my best year ever of recommendations because so many of them turned out so well.

That is all of your pop culture picks that I could find anyway from 2013. So I'm glad to hear your assessment is positive.

I think it means I've gotten worse, right? We'll see.

We're catching up to the era in which I actually knew you and we've been working together. This year was a year in which I feel like, especially in movies, I watched a lot of the movies either coincidentally or on your recommendation. So I felt a little more up to date in some ways with your recommendations this year compared to previous years. But quite, quite a few as well. I think uncommonly large amount of recommendations from this year. So those are the pop culture picks. Last question from me before we close. Returning to our number one underrated episode with Lazarus Lake, what did he teach you about Emergent Ventures and specifically with the application process? Did you learn anything from Lazarus Lake there that you want to apply?

He strengthened something I've been feeling for a while, which is that it's very difficult to get true geographic diversity. In your winners. Maybe where they're from you can do, but where they live now— so he is in central Tennessee, as he takes pains to emphasize. I don't think I've ever gotten an application, much less a winner, from central Tennessee. And I know that's a kind of failure on my part, but it's a hard problem to overcome, and his success just drove that home to me all the more.

Before we close, let me give a shout out to everyone who helped out on the show this year. That's Dallas Flohr, Sam Alberger, Jen Whistler, Morgan Hamilton, Karen Plant, Christina Behe, Haley Larson, Anna McVey, Ashley Schiller, and there's many others who have contributed as well in small ways. Thank you all very much. And we look forward to another year in conversations. In 2024.

Years, right? Thank you, Jeff.

Thank you.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm @TylerCowen, and the show is @cowandconvos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.