"How Ambitious Are You?" | Tyler Cowen & Richard Hanania

Hi everyone, welcome to the podcast. I'm here today with Tyler Cowen, a guest who needs no introduction. Tyler, how are you doing today?

I am fine, how are you?

I'm doing excellent. So we're here to talk about your book Talent along with Daniel Gross. First thing, you know, first thing I wanted to ask you about was I saw in the book that one of the things that you said was sort of an indicator of talent was how quickly people answer emails. Now this is something that I noticed too. I've noticed that when I reach out to people, the people who tended, I think, to generally more successful people or people that I found to be competent later on to answer their emails quickly. And the way I always thought about it, and your book made me reflect on it a little bit more, is that an email is sort of like a pop quiz in today's world. It's how much are you thinking about and how much do you care about the thing you're working on in life, right? You can ask people, how much do you care about your job? How passionate you are? But are you really checking your phone all the time? If somebody comes at you with comes to you with an idea or some kind of opportunity. Do you jump on it or do you sit on it for 24, 48 hours? Is that how you see a sort of a pop quiz going through life or do you think there's something else going on with the email thing?

I think there are several factors. One is that it's an indicator of the other person's assessment of goodness of match. So, they might think they're totally above you or maybe you're totally above them or just you're not going to get along and they answer your email 2 days later. They might be fine as a talent, but they're still signaling, well, you probably shouldn't work with them. People who are online a lot, people in journalism, public intellectuals, a lot of academics, I think it's an excellent measure of talent. But I would stress the point, there are some sectors where talent and speed of email response might be negatively correlated. So, say someone is a brain surgeon and they spend 7 hours doing their most important operations. It could well be if they're always answering emails very promptly, it just means, well, there's never demand for them as brain surgeons and you ought to be a little wary. So I don't think it's a universal regularity, but it's a pressing question to think about. It's a person's speed of response.

Well, in our world though, I mean, a brain surgeon, yes, I think you don't want your brain surgeon checking his email in the middle of work or always being on the phone. But in our world where we're sort of always in front of screens, I think it's it's probably a much better, uh, I agree.

But I think there's a lot of jobs like brain surgeon in some way where the boss may not even let the person be online. Or say someone is a chemist and in the lab all the time. Now, I don't know enough about chemists to judge this, but it wouldn't shock me if the correlation was negative between quality of chemist and speed of email response, that maybe what they should be doing is giving, you know, directions in the laboratory. Rather than reading something online.

Yeah, so I mean, it's— I guess there's, there's a distinction between people who are— whose work involves, you know, manipulating symbols on, on computers and writing things, and then people who are sort of, you know, it's sort of like a hands-on versus, you know, working with your brain sort of dichotomy of where, you know, the importance of— you would emphasize the email issue, right?

Yes.

Yeah. And so the other— I mean, the other thing, um, another thing in your book that I thought interesting was your discussion of intelligence. Now, you seem to think it's, um, you know, I, I think a bit overrated. I mean, maybe like you think it's— I think it's underrated compared to, say, you know, I don't know, like the politically correct way of talking about it. But I think you think it's overrated compared to most people who actually focus on IQ and intelligence. Is that an accurate assessment of your view?

I would say that I think it's overrated by people who end up reading the book and overrated by other smart people. I would say rather obviously it's underrated by society in general, right?

Yeah, it's underrated. I mean, yeah, the fact that IQ is not considered, you know, something you could talk about in polite company, you know, would indicate that if it matters at all, and it does clearly matter, um, then it's probably underrated. Um, what about the, the, the way I look at sort of the intel, uh, intelligence question is I, I've always thought about it as something that if you have it, it can help sort of solve all other all other problems. Um, like, you know, I, I was pretty bad with social skills most of my life. I, I, because I was intelligent, I could reflect, I could read books, I could understand, you know, sort of where my problems came from, and then I could sort of work on them. So I've always thought intelligence will sort of work like that. Anything, you know, it helps with every other potential problem. So it's, it's potentially, it's not just that you could figure out, you know, how to do something in a moment. It just, it just incre— if you find someone, you know, two workers equal, one has a higher IQ, I would suspect the one with the higher IQ has sort of a higher ceiling on what they can accomplish. Do you think that's right?

Maybe higher, but not as higher as people think. So here's what I do observe. If you take a class of people smart enough to say, get a PhD or be an economist or be a reasonably competent programmer, above that level of smarts, smarts and achievement do not seem closely correlated to me. Much at all. Not negatively. I still think it would be vaguely positive, but just not very much. Now, you have to be smart enough, say, to get a degree in math or do whatever it is you're doing. But past that point, I would look at other features of the person's talent.

Yeah, I think that's right. But would you— I mean, would you say that— do you think it's— I guess it depends on what you're doing, right? Because there is a bare minimum here, but there's also a sense of you know, there's also a, uh, yeah, I don't know, like, so do you think, so the CEO study from Sweden is very interesting, right? They had like, didn't they have like a standard deviation higher IQ than the average?

You know, 83rd percentile at the median, which is smart, but not really that impressive, right?

And what, what year was the study from? Do you remember?

I don't remember, but it's recent. Now, before I did all the work for this book, I would've thought, well, a Swedish CEO, they'll be at the 96th percentile of intelligence. I think that's what I would've guessed as being the case. So not 83rd. So that to me is a revision. It's why I think a lot of smart people overrate IQ because I used to overrate IQ. And there are many smart people I've had to talk them down out of rating IQ, but there's never one that I've had to talk into it. I would say.

Do you think that, um, so is it— could it be that, you know, I, I think that this result would not replicate in the United States. And why I think it would not replicate in the United States is because pedigree is important. We care where people went to college, and the colleges themselves are selecting based on standardized tests, right? So I think if you just took the average SAT of, say, Fortune 500 CEOs, I would bet you would estimate, you can estimate an IQ of, I think it would be over the 83rd percentile or whatever. I don't know what the Swedish system is like. I don't know if they care as much about degrees. I don't know if their degrees themselves are based as much on standardized tests, but do you feel that we've artificially created a world where maybe IQ matters or maybe it's a good filtering mechanism? Maybe we should have that system, but do you think you have a feeling that I do that wouldn't probably replicate in the US?

I'm not sure the United States would be so different. And not everyone who goes to our top schools is so brilliant either, right?

Yeah, that's true. But if you look at the average SAT for Harvard or something, it would indicate well into the 90th percentile, right? And most Ivy League schools would indicate that. If you take SAT as a proxy for IQ, you would get— and I don't know if this is the— I don't know, maybe I just don't know enough about that.

There's a lot of CEOs who didn't go to Ivy League schools. They're from the Midwest. They went to a good but not great undergraduate institution and they're worth $350 million. Never went to Harvard Yard. So I'm not sure. I'd love to see the study.

Yeah, yeah. I think I'm assuming from— I've looked at politicians, for example. I've looked at senators and even them, you might get a standard deviation over the mean. A lot of them went to law school, but I'll admit, I don't know. As much about the backgrounds of CEOs. So maybe it would.

I think senators are quite smart, but in the House of Representatives, I don't think it would be very impressive. I've met plenty of them.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it's part of it. Do you ever think about the— our system, because it's sort of— so you have these House races, right? And you have these Senate— you know, you have these, uh, you have the Senate and you get 2 from each state, right? And you get one there's, there's a, there's a brain drain from these areas, right? Do you think it's something having to do with our system? Because I've been thinking a lot about, um, just, yeah, exactly, exactly that issue. That a lot of— I don't know that probably as personally as you, but I found a lot of politicians to be unimpressive. I know there are some systems where the party puts a list and then people pick from lists. Well, ours is sort of more regionally distributed, so not all our politicians are going to be from, you know, the, uh, high-power brain areas of the country. Do you think that's something unique to America, or you think politicians in general are maybe not that impressive.

I really think it depends on the country. I mean, Singapore, they're quite impressive, right? The Nordic countries, I think they're generally pretty smart. But I would make this point about senators. It's just a really fun job. Yeah. In a sense, not that much responsibility. So people who are very talented and could do a lot of different things, they might be attracted to being senators just because the reward is so high. And that may be one reason why they're relatively smart.

Yeah, you're right. And so that might— it might not— it's, uh, and you do get a lot of carpetbagging too. I guess that goes against what I was saying. A lot of people go to Harvard, you know, they move to a certain place and then they, uh, they become elected. The, uh, the Singapore— you bring up Singapore. I, you know, I have a theory and I wanted to maybe write this out, but I guess I'll run it by you first about the state capacity libertarian idea. It was something that I think when you, when you first wrote about it, I think in early 2020 or 2021, was it, um, I was sort of— I was a bit enamored with it, you know. I almost thought there were some clear benefits to something like the Singapore model, um, but then I saw the Western response to COVID, and, you know, and some of the things that— the fact that our state was so incompetent, I think, made these— some of these restrictions that I, I think less, uh, less arduous than they would have been. So for example, Some people would say, oh, you're requiring masks, you're accepting cloth masks, at least make it N95. And I'm like, no, the N95 is, is a terrible device. I like the fact that I can have, you know, a fake mask and at least comply with it. So in that case, I was sort of happy that— I was sort of happy that the gate state wasn't that good. And I guess one way, you know, one thing I think I thought about this state capacity libertarianism is I think when you combine two things in a movement, um, and one is politically popular and is the path of least resistance, and one is sort of unpopular, you get the thing that's easier to get the thing that's easier to sort of enact, and you don't get the other things. I think with state capacity libertarianism, I think you would probably get— not if not state capacity, at least something that looks like state capacity. Like, let's say there was a movement that just said, you know, we're going to be the state capacity libertarian caucus in, in Congress.

I think they—

what they would do is they would find allies to do all the stuff that expands state power, um, find few allies, um, who would want to do libertarian or, uh, or, um, things that reduce the power of government and regulations, and you'd end up just getting, a more and more intrusive government. Do you think about sort of the public choice of that and how it would work out?

Well, I don't feel responsible for the defects of those imaginary people.

Yeah.

I would say I think U.S. state capacity is higher than people now think. I'm very glad we had Operation Warp Speed. That was one of the highlights of our state capacity, and the gains to that were much higher than whatever losses we might have suffered from say different mask regulations having been too strict or would have been far too strict had state capacity been higher or however you want to create that counterfactual. It's just incredible that we had vaccines so quickly in Operation Warp Speed, and that's the main lesson. And you give our state capacity there like A to A+. It could have even been quicker, of course. And the whole world has benefited. It saved millions of lives. So to me, that's the main lesson.. And I agree, we might sort of piss some of those gains away on other margins. I don't doubt that, but I want state capacity and libertarian in there. So if you only apply one, of course I'm unhappy.

Was Opera— I've seen people bring up Operation Warp Speed as a success of, um, you know, our state capacity. But, but, you know, I, I think of sort of the alternative. Wasn't, you know, Operation Warp Speed couldn't have been just seen as government does all these horrible things, like it puts up too many barriers to drug production, and it just— if it's just basically Operation Warp Speed, besides putting in the orders, you know, it was just basically getting out of the way. It was cutting its own red tape, right?

Um, so paying up front had a big effect on incentives. And, you know, my colleague Alex worked literally for Operation Warp Speed. You could speak to him, he could address it in more detail. But the people who've been involved, who are not in general like just a big bunch of government lovers, typically think it was quite effective.

Yeah, yeah. But the— so you have the— another thing the government— because if you think, if you just— if you don't have the state capacity libertarian, let's just say you have a state capacity libertarian solution versus just a libertarian solution. So the libertarian solution would've said, for example, no FDA, no FDA, at all, no FDA doing anything, sell whatever you want and make whatever profit you want. I think the order, the fact that the government, it was a second best option, the fact the government said, we'll commit to all these pre-orders, I think if you let people just pay for whatever they wanted, because government I think also negotiated to make sure that they wouldn't profit too much off of the vaccines. So I think if you could have said, make anything you want, charge whatever you want, could potentially have been better. I guess the question is, even in this case where state capacity libertarian looks good, Is— would perhaps just plain old libertarianism, you know, still have been the better solution? And what's good about the, uh, what's good about the Operation Warp Speed is libertarian stuff, and then the state capacity stuff is sort of second-best stuff that a non-libertarian government wouldn't allow, uh, wouldn't allow to happen.

I have more sympathies for the libertarian solution than most people would, but I think in this case it's not time consistent. So one issue is simply, how do you deal with legal liability? Now, the FDA process for all of its flaws, does give manufacturers the ability to bring the thing to market in a way consistent with corporate law and their other fiduciary responsibilities. So no FDA means everything is fair game in the court system, and that is much worse even than the FDA. It's a bigger constraint. But also, uh, government won't let them keep the prices high. Governments confiscate resources ex post, and we know that, so you need to reward them up front, even if in principle you think the higher price would be a better incentive. But I would also point out when there's an externality through contagion, you don't want the price of a vaccine to be very high. By the way, forgive my throat clearing. It's having come back from India and still suffering from air pollution there, speaking of externalities, but I'm fine.

Well, yeah, we're glad. Do they have you quarantine or take tests or anything at this point?

No, nothing. And I didn't get COVID there. I had great fun. I was there over 2 weeks, went to an Emergent Ventures India meetup event, went all around, saw the Sikh Golden Temple. Now I'm back home. No problems other than the air pollution.

Yeah. When I went to the Emergent Ventures conference, I met some people with India. I saw recently you wrote that it has probably the highest numbers of people who are untapped potential. In the world. And I've noticed a lot of people read my things are from Indian descent, or there are a few from India on Twitter. I've met people, like I said, at the Emergent Venture Conference. And India is one of the giants of the world. The other is China. And how do you think about the differences between India and China here? Because I don't think I met anyone from China at the Emergent Ventures. I've never met anyone from China who reads my articles. I've met a lot of people from India. Is it just a language thing? Is it language plus the system? Are there cultural population differences and sort of openness to outsiders? Why does India seem to have a presence in sort of our world while China really doesn't?

I think it's language plus culture. So if you ask, like, who are the two most influential economists of the last 20 years? Now, you could debate that, but if someone said it's Raj Chetty and then Abhijit Banerjee for RCTs. That's a totally plausible answer, right? They're both ethnically Indian. If someone asks you, well, who's going to run for president in the next election? Like, I wouldn't bet that it's Harris versus Nikki Haley, but it's a totally plausible thing that could happen. And they're both, you know, Indian origin. In Harris's case, only half, but still, China has nothing like that. The list of Indian CEOs And America is a country that home breeds a lot of great CEOs, right? We're not like some lame-ass country that doesn't have a CEO and we've got to import them all. And Indians have done remarkably well. So there's something more synthetic, I think, about India culturally that allows them to slot into a bunch of roles. If you look, say, at biomedicine, I think you will find Chinese are often doing as well as Indians. It's more of a— maybe narrow isn't the word, but more of a directly applied, internally consistent, doesn't connect to the outside world very much sort of endeavor. Like the drug works or it doesn't. But the more synthetic the task, politics, CEO, economist, I think for cultural reasons, you'll find Indians are more prominent. Yeah.

And then Nikki Haley, uh, uh, and then Nikki Haley, um, Kamala Harris example is interesting because these are both, um, American. I think— I'm pretty sure Nikki Haley was American-born. I know Kamala Harris was. Um, and you have a lot of native-born Chinese, and you just see massive underrepresentation of politics. So you both have these, uh, people from China, you know, not being sort of represented in the world. You also have people from Chinese and East Asian descent generally unrepresented in our, um, at the highest levels of our politics, especially for their, you know, socioeconomic status. So there's, uh there's something very, very interesting there. Have you thought of— do you think—

Chinese are doing well. If you look at the teams, US sends to the Math Olympiads. Oh, yes. I'm not sure they're all Chinese, but just visually, you have the sense there's a high proportion of Chinese on those teams.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yes.

From looking at them, you can't tell the US and the Chinese team apart on these Math Olympiads. Yeah, they look the same. I think they're pretty much all Chinese. Maybe there might be a Korean or two in there. So they can do math. I mean, I don't think anyone is— I don't think anyone is doubting that Chinese can do math and engineering. But there, you know, there's something about, um, you know, creativity, you know, leadership, CEO, just being sort of entrepreneurial with ideas. That is, uh, uh, yeah, maybe, maybe the word cell versus, uh, uh, shape rotators here is the, uh, uh, you know, is the apt sort of description.

I'm not sure that though. I mean, I'm never happy with that distinction. It seems to me sort of raw startup entrepreneurship is not exactly India's cultural strength. But again, this idea of synthetic forms of knowledge where you need many different skills and the ability to combine them, CEOs and politics seems to be where they excel. And if you think of Banerjee or Chetty in economics, they're both very synthetic thinkers. They bring together a lot of different kinds of insights. They've mastered different sorts of techniques or ways of doing economics. I don't know if any of it comes from Hinduism. I fully recognize by no means are all Indians Hindu, but it's a strong background cultural influence in all of India. And it is a very synthetic way theologically of thinking about the world.

Yeah, synthetic. I mean, that's an interesting word.

I mean, is it— is that—

how do you differentiate that between, say, creativity? Say some people are more— because creativity involves what, taking a bunch of sources and making— not going down some kind of, you know, clear path, but taking a bunch of sources and trying to make something new.

Creativity obviously can be synthetic, but there's a lot of forms of creativity that are relatively small number of dimensions. You just have like some brilliant insight about, oh, this is the new thing to do in a heavy metal tune, and you do it. Yeah. The—

okay.

India seems to have this historical record of being very good at incorporating other cultures without losing being Indian. And that seems, in a globalized world, that's a much more important strength than it would have been 30 or 40 years ago. And I think it seems to me it's helped India and Indians a great deal. Indians do well in Canada. At least the cities have become highly synthetic environments, right? A lot of other cultures coming together. You're dealing with different influences, problems coming at you all the time if you say live in Toronto. And again, that's not what Toronto was like 40 years ago.

Yeah, right. Yeah, that's interesting. And I listened to you. I think you were talking to Russ Roberts. Um, where you talked about Germany and Germany sort of punching, you know, uh, under, under its, under its weight. Um, do you think that these, um, do you see Europe as the sort of, um, do you see Europe on the decline? I mean, because my, my impression is you're optimistic about the US, optimistic about, uh, India. I think you're, you're— I don't know how you feel about China's, you know, I think you're pessimistic about their sort of role in the world, but I don't know if you're sort of bullish or bearish on their, uh, you know, potential to keep growing. Um, and I get that sense that you're, you're more pessimistic on Europe. Is that right?

Well, I would disaggregate Europe. So England to me, South England is its own thing, but I'm very optimistic there. I'm very optimistic about Ireland, which now is more likely to be called Europe because it's in the EU, but I don't actually think of it as like the continent, but they have the English language, a great time zone. I think wonderful things will happen there. Paris and Rome and Switzerland, I'm very optimistic about. I think they will be amongst the world's best places more or less indefinitely, attract the relevant talent from their home countries. Tourists will love those places for totally justifiable reasons. They won't just be museum pieces either. Uh, but that said, Europe as a whole, I think will grow like percentage point or percentage point and a quarter a year. That's okay. They'll still have remarkable human capital and cultural heritage. But I'm not excited about how most of the continent will do. Yeah, I don't know if that makes me pessimistic though. That's kind of what we've all expected, right?

Yeah, well, Europe— I mean, Europe will be great.

How good the best places on the continent already are and are going to be.

Yeah, the— yeah, so yeah, I mean, I, I think that's sort of, uh, for somebody who they sort of, uh, uh, you know, you want to see sort of dynamism and progress, to say these, you know, Paris and Rome will be great tourist attractions and the people there will maintain their standards of living, it's, it's optimistic from point of view. You know, it'll be, it'll be, won't be the worst thing in the world to be born in Paris or Rome.

Um, at the same time, like, when I go to Paris, I have great conversations every day insofar as I want to. So it's not just, oh, look at the Eiffel Tower, you know, Monet was a great painter way back when. They're dynamic places and they're intellectually alive. I mean, Ulbeck, where is he from? I don't know where he was born, but he's really coming out of Paris as a milieu.

Yeah, and there was the—

there have incredible levels of personal taste, right?

Yeah. And the— and for the— and for the US, you know, the—

the—

I think the mood— I mean, I think the mode— and maybe this is just being on, on Twitter— it seems, you know, very pessimistic. I mean, I think you've brought up some good, you know, points that, you know, this would be reflected. It's sort of the market, um, people would be shorting, you know, all kinds of things if the US, uh, really was, um, uh, you know over the long run was going to be, was going to be in bad shape. You know, people say things like, oh, civil war, we're going to have, you know, violence. You know, I never, I never bought into any of that. Um, what do you think is sort of the difference here? But I think what people think, I think what people think, they don't look at like demographic things. They don't say, oh, Americans' birth rate is that low, or, you know, they don't look anything like that. I think there's just a sort of a vibe from our politics.

Yeah, they dislike each other. I think we live in a kind of age derangement. But that can be positively correlated with creativity. I'm increasingly reminded of the English 17th century where people got quite deranged about each other and it even got violent, right? That was bad. But it's the beginnings of modern economic growth, like the 1640s and ultimately the Industrial Revolution.

So with January 6th, with these sort of political cleavages. Um, the, you know, people, you know, the idea is that this can pot— this could potentially, um, you know, translate into something that hurts our standard of living, um, you know, that hurts our economic, uh, growth. Um, and you say, you, you say you are worried about that, uh, to a certain extent. Um, you know, I, I think, you know, I bring this up not because I'm, you know, I have these worries. I'm not pushing it for that reason. Actually, I think these worries are, uh, generally overrated. But like, what would you, Hedy? Okay, let's say, let's put this, let's talk in probabilities. So the US has some kind of, you know, a big constitutional breakdown, say in the next 10, 20 years. What would you put that at?

Rather than the word breakdown, I would use the word crisis. The chance of a major constitutional crisis to me seems a bit over 10%. And that's comfortably high. And it was not nearly that high 5 years ago, 10 years ago. So a breakdown, I would think, is a much, much lower chance.

Yeah.

Crisis, you can see it possibly coming, and I think we all should be worried.

So yeah, so like a breakdown would be like, you know, the Republicans and Democrats have militias in the streets that are fighting each other. And like the crisis would be the Supreme Court rules X, um, and the president says, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do Y. —like not some kind of weasely— well, they always do this. There's always a weasely legal thing, like, oh, I'm actually complying, but they're really not complying. It would be more. It would have to be sort of more substantive than that, right?

At least one branch of the government not following the Constitution. That seems to me to have popped up on the radar screen as way too high a probability. Yeah. Or you could imagine—

or not just within the branches of the government, you could imagine the states versus the federal government. But yeah, I mean, yeah, my My reading of sort of American history, at least especially the last, like, you know, since the Warren Court, since the last, you know, uh, 60 years or so, is that, you know, they're really not following the law all the time. And they never, they never say we're not following the law. They just say, you know, I have the true interpretation of the law, and someone says something else. And it's hard to see how we, uh, go from that to some— like, somebody would have to have the political, uh, incentive to say I'm ignoring the Supreme Court, or I'm not following the law, or we're not going to listen to the president, which is not impossible to imagine. You can imagine a Republican state not wanting to, uh, do what Biden says or, or something, something like that. Yeah, but the most likely scenario, I think, is— I, I think, I think you're right. And even if that happens, even if that 10% chance happens, that wouldn't necessarily, you know, hurt our economic growth or hurt our living standards, right? It could be just something people worry about and then sort of, you know, we settle it and, and we move on. So I, I think, I think you're right. Do you, do you worry about the American sort of So there's a question of whether these things will lead to some kind of real societal breakdown or cleavage or something that could be measured in, say, GDP or rates of violence or whatever. But there's also— this stuff also has sort of a psychic cost. Do you worry about sort of the mental health of Americans and sort of spiritually and creative-wise what it can do to our culture? Because there has to be a distortive effect. Could be better. Like you said, you can have these tensions and you can have these different states and different regions and different subcultures and something could flourish out of that, but it also could become— it just could lead to a sort of environment of sort of pessimism and negativity. And that's the sort of the flip side, the danger of that, don't you think?

I think there's a lot of evidence for a mental health crisis already. Now, the parts of it you sort of read about in the New York Times are the mental health crises of intellectuals and media types, which are somewhat their own fault. And overblown, but the actual mental health crisis relating from opioids and COVID issues and lockdowns and schools being shut down and people driving 100 miles an hour and so on, those are very real. And a lot of those numbers even predate COVID. COVID accelerated and exposed much of what's happened, but that could be the number one issue of our time in America. Is the mental health crisis. Just look at the percentage of young people taking antidepressants or people who go to therapy, which I'm not at all opposed. But the percentage of super successful, like 32-year-olds I meet who proudly announce they've been in therapy 10 years and don't even think that's weird. Like any one of them, it might be the correct thing to do. But the percentage I see of that seems to me like crazy wrong and too high. For what you would expect. And I think that's a mental health crisis. I don't know where it came from. I worry about it.

As an economist, do you think about sort of the incentives of insurance and the sort of the trend towards treating mental health as sort of a physical health? So somebody's, third party is paying for it. It's the same problem with overconsumption of medical services more generally. But here there's a sort of a bigger problem, right? Because how much you need is sort of, it's by definition in your head. So it's not, you know, being always at a psychiatrist is sort of different than, you know, getting an extra, you know, heart exam or something like that.

I don't know if there's overconsumption of the service, and I'm also not sure how much therapy helps people. I'm not sure how much antidepressants help people, and I have read in all these areas. I'm just not sure what the answers are, but I'm pretty sure there's just too much of the malady of mental health problems. Yeah, I guess when I'm— I see a version of it in our intellectuals who have just become so negative about each other. I'm sure you see it on Twitter every day. Yeah. Again, to me, that's the least worrisome part of it. But a lot of people I've known have just flipped out about politics. And again, I might even agree with most or maybe even all of what they say, but it seems to me perspectively, They're so off. I consider them, I wouldn't say like ideological opponents, but I feel like very distant from them. Even when I might agree, like, well, January 6th, that was terrible. The people committed treason, the this, the that, you know, the FBI was fine to come in and take the materials. But at the end of the day, I don't feel I'm living in the same universe as a lot of those people.

Yeah. Well, I mean, some of the political stuff is very weird. So if you propose some kind of regulation that on trans issues, for example, goes back to what we had in 2010, I mean, the reaction will be fascism, you know, this is going to lead to people dying. I mean, it is so disproportionate to sort of objectively what's going on. I wonder, and I wonder what, you know, I tend to think that, you know, it's such a previewing another something else I think I might want to write about. So if you look at, for example, the 1990s and you you have the Oklahoma City bombing, um, you have the bombings of abortion clinics, um, you have Ruby Ridge, you have Waco. I mean, a serious body count. I lived through all this. And you can imagine, um, imagine if this stuff was happening today. People would say, we, you know, it just like— we just saw it on the news. I, you know, I'm just old enough to remember this. And, you know, we saw it, we sort of, we sort of moved on. And it's the level of violence, you know, political violence at the time was, you know, much higher than it is today. There aren't a lot of these incidents today. And yet the sort of the pessimism and to worry about our politics is just off the charts. I just have to think it's social media and the internet. It's just created— you know, the news always had a negativity bias, but I think the negativity bias has just been so extreme that it's like no matter how good things get, we're going to be extremely pessimistic about America for the rest of our lives. That itself is sort of depressing.

Some of it may well be social media as an amplifier, but I saw comparable trends on cable TV. Before social media was much of a thing. So I wonder if the greater interest in social media is not itself an endogenous part of the process. There's plenty of earlier periods of historical time, maybe on average half of them, where just the social mood is getting worse. And there are particular reasons, but maybe the most general theory is that half the time in history you're approaching a period of greater derangement. And that might be a more important point than the particular culprits. Like, there are social contagion effects with all communications media, but maybe they're not actually as causal as they seem. They're just right in front of our eyes all the time. The 17th century in England, that being so deranged, was that social media? Well, they had all these, like, pamphlets at the pubs and the alehouses. Like, maybe it was. But it still, that seems to miss the point a bit as well.

Yeah, so you're, you're, you're, you're, I think, saying that there's a sort of dynamic and it moves in one direction or not. And it might be the technology might push us in one reason, one direction or other. But, you know, you could imagine a sort of an alternative history where social media was never invented or never took off, and we still might be just going in that direction for, for whatever reason. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, so it's like email can carry certain kinds of messages. You can blame the email, but at the end of the day, you know, maybe the messages get carried anyway. It just seems to me it's prematurely judged far too often. It's a kind of people see it right in front of their faces bias, like, oh, I hate that bastard on Twitter. Like it's pissing me off. It must be social media. It's a very crude form of inference, not befitting of real academics, I would say. They need to be more detached. And certainly there could be something to what they're saying. I don't dismiss it, but people leap at that explanation so quickly. And I think that is itself part of the derangement.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that's just the way social media has you, though, you know, has you expect—

You see this the most in Jonathan Haidt, right?

Uh, what do you mean?

Well, his take on social media. It's far too negative and it's way more negative than the evidence itself justifies, in my opinion. Yeah. And he's this weird mix of someone who's such a huge defender of free speech, but when free speech comes on social media, all of a sudden it's ruining the world. Yeah. And I don't really get how he squares all those views. Yeah. It's not logically impossible, but it's not an easy or comfortable fit either.

So, I mean, my experience, again, I don't know, I sort of, my experience leads me to think of them—

Seems to me social media are probably bad for 12 to 14 year old girls and probably good for most of the rest of us. That would be like my most intuitive answer, but very subject to revision. So I think it's good.

I mean, I think it's good for me.

But they're bad for a lot of academics.

I guess they get classified in. Yeah, they might be, they might be at the—

They get lumped in with the 12 to 14 year old girls.

There might be a similarity there. Yeah, there might be something in common. I think that's right. But the thing about the difference is that the academics and the journalists, I would put them in the same category, sort of are the lens through which we see, you know, everything else. So yeah, yeah, of course. And so this is, uh, yeah, this could, this could potentially be a problem. I don't think that the average person, you know, working, you know, as a manager at Walmart is, is necessarily driven crazy by social media, although, although some might. It's just that everything they consume is produced by the kinds of people, um, who do tend to be, uh, who do tend to be driven crazy by social media. And, and that might, that might be a problem. I mean, we'll, I guess we'll, we'll see. This is a testable hypothesis, right? Either the, the pessimism will stay with us for over the next decades, or, you know, we'll, we'll see if it's possible to have a world where everyone is on Twitter and everyone is holding hands and, and loving each other. If we can get back to like the 1990s level of cultural optimism, um, with Twitter still, still having the role— and maybe it's endogenous too, like maybe people stop using Twitter. Just even if people stop using Twitter, I would say that, that, that, that still, that still works with your sort of, uh, cyclical theory of these things because we're not slaves of the technology. I think that's the argument that people make, that sort of is a deterministic thing. And whether the technology is compatible with a, um, with a more optimistic sort of cultural worldview, or we can choose to get rid of it— maybe we choose for whatever is a memetic, uh, uh, social contagion reasons, we start, we stop using it, um, that would be indicate, you know, we're sort of more free, we have, we have options here, right?

In my view, the chance of returning to optimism is pretty low. I call it greater weirdness. I just think we're going to see greater weirdness. And that, I suppose, I think would happen with or without social media. If you just look at it, what, a 25-year period? No, I don't think they're the same. So the weirdness is all kinds of bubbles of funny kinds of optimism. So just like more people believing in UFOs. It's not pessimism per se. Like it might be, oh, they're all going to kill us. But it's mainly weirdness. And if you have a 25-year period where you have 9/11, the financial crisis, COVID, a bunch of other bad events, war in Ukraine, you're going to have more weirdness.

Yeah, I guess that's right. That 9/11, I think, was an important factor, unquestionably, in breaking that 1990s level optimism. I think We were— I think society was pretty, pretty self-aware about that. Let me go back to the book. I, you know, it was interesting reading about the Emergent Ventures procedure because I'm, you know, myself, CSPI is an Emergent Venture grant winner. So it was interesting sort of reading your philosophy and the thought process behind that. And then you mentioned the book, and this is a question that threw me off when I got it. You ask, How ambitious are you? Can you talk about sort of the benefits of that question? Because I think it's very interesting. It's not something I'd heard before, so it took me by surprise. So, can you sort of explain why you ask that?

That's a question I like to ask leaders and potential leaders. It's not actually a good question for most people. I mean, in the extreme, if you're interviewing a Starbucks cashier, How ambitious are you? Right? That's crazy. If anything, you want them not to be too ambitious so they don't get bored. Uh, but people who are not very ambitious, I've just found empirically cannot fake a good answer to that question. And you're not even assessing if they just say yes. Some ambitious people will kind of say no, but they'll lay out their plans with such detail and enthusiasm. You get the sense they're quite ambitious indeed. So, don't take them too literally, but gauge how well they seem to have thought through and felt through what they want to do. And I think it's one of the best questions for prospective leaders of institutions.

Yeah. Do you remember—

I've asked this. I don't know if you've seen the book. I was interviewing an academic not too long ago and I said, "How ambitious are you?" And the answer was, "I want to publish a bunch of papers and get tenure." Totally honest. I admired the person, but it's like, come on. Like, at that point, for me, the interview is over. Yeah. Do you remember? That is what they're supposed to do.

Yeah. Do you remember how I answered that question?

No, I do not.

What did you say? I don't remember exactly. I remember how I felt and how I tried to sort of gauge the answer. I don't remember the exact thing I said, but I remember thinking to myself,— if I give an honest answer, I'm going to look maybe crazy, maybe a little bit too ambitious. I mean, I think if I answered it completely honestly, I would have said, I want to be in 100 years, I want people to say Richard Hanania was the greatest thinker of the early 21st century, and society was going this one way, and then he came along, and now we're still reading him and studying him because he's so smart and interesting. What if I would have said that? Would that have been a good answer? Would you have said, this is too much, this is a little bit crazy? No, that would have been fine.

And probably I mean, my guess is whatever you said, I read as you saying that. So in a sense, you did say that.

I tried not to. That's all I remember, that I was trying not to say that.

I was trying not to say it is in a way how you say it, right? So that's part of the point of the question. It's very hard to not tell the truth no matter what the literal words might be expressing. And the people who have no ambition, they can't even like fake. Holding in their true ambition. They don't even know how to do that. It's like, oh, I want to publish a bunch of papers and get tenure. Eject. Yeah. Yeah.

The, yeah. Yeah. And academia sort of, do you think this is, this is, you talked about the feminization of social life, feminization of, of academia. Uh, you know, I remember, yeah, I remember like writing papers or having ideas and feedback I'd often get would be, you know, it's, it's too ambitious. It's trying to explain too much. It's trying to do too much. And I've always thought that there, it's just the sort of, there was such a cultural bias against that. And, you know, it's fine to, you know, be on the lookout for research that's too ambitious and, you know, doesn't have good methodology for, for answering the question that it wants to, uh, answer. But if, if that concern leads you to not ask important questions at all, and I think that's sort of where academia is, then, you know, what's the whole point of the enterprise? Do you see academia sort of, you know, I think you probably do, overly risk-averse, but is that, is that something, is that how you would think about it?

I would like to see people be more intellectually ambitious. They are in some ways more ambitious than ever before, like how much money they earn or how good a school they get tenure at. There's a whole bunch of dimensions where ambition is way higher than 20 or 30 years ago. And I was definitely around in those days. I remember it quite well. But intellectual ambition, ambition of curiosity, ambition of influence, uh, seems to me they're all down. A lot. Yeah.

And do you think there's— I think this sort of— I was a little bit surprised by your chapter on the— it was about talented women and minorities, because you've talked about the sort of the feminization of academia. I know you don't think it's all bad. I don't think anyone could say it's all bad. It's obviously changed things a lot. But there's sort of a— it is an open empirical question whether we've gone gone too far in accommodating, making women comfortable in academia and other professional settings, or we haven't gone far enough. And I think the tone of the chapter was we haven't gone far enough. And is that how you see it? And can you defend that?

Well, if it's academia, one thing we could do is change the current system of tenure clocks. I don't think women are the main reason to do that. I think Plenty of other reasons to reform tenure, but the way the tenure clock falls now, it's exactly running against when most women tend to want to have children, and that's another reason to do it. So, I mean, look at Katalin Karikó with mRNA vaccines. That's incredible. That's feminization. I'm a big advocate of it. It mobilizes much, much more talent. But that said, we're in this funny in-between world where things are feminized and they're not, and the rules are unclear, and it's not all working that well, but there's no reversing the feminization, right? It's like figuring out how to make it work better. Yes, I think we should do that.

Yeah, the tenure clock, I mean, I think there's all kinds of good reasons to sort of, um, you know, I think that, I think the time period is sort of just the, just the way we think about time in academia. I think we, we think that people live to be 200. I mean, for a for a man to get a PhD, postdoc, not start his career until his mid-30s, I think is also sort of, it's not good with male biology, the male biological clock either. Men at some point have to become adults and self-supporting and have children too. So maybe it's worse for women, but I think, you know, this to me is in the category of things that's just, you know, there's, it's the reason to do it's a sort of overdetermined, you know, there's a lot of reasons to make everything sort of shorter and compress it. Um, but then, but then you think about sort of just like, you know, the way we talk. I'll, you know, I'll go back to my own experience of academia again. It's very— it's considered sort of, um, rude or sort of, gosh, if I was in a seminar— and economics is famous for being not, not as much like this as, say, political science— but in political science, if somebody just has an idea and you say, I think that's wrong, it's wrong because of, you know, X, Y, and Z, that's a bad variable, that's a bad data set, um, you're— that, that I think people, people would consider you sort of, sort of mean. Tyler Cowen. That was my impression. You couldn't directly challenge people. I do see that as sort of feminization. I see sort of when I hear complaints about economics and coming out of political science, I'm like, "Oh, wow. That economics sounds more like what I wish political science was." I attended some workshops, law and economics, at the University of Chicago, so I got a little bit of a sense of this. I think that in particular, too much agreeableness, I think, is just poison for the search of for the search for truth. And if you want to categorize that as feminization versus not feminization, many men are going to be, you know, uncomfortable with that. I just think that's something we need to get. We just have to normalize saying A is correct, B is wrong. This methodology is good. This methodology is bad. These people are right. These people are wrong. And I just don't think we do enough of that.

I think I agree with that, but I would stress the point, we're going to need a feminized version of acceptably publicly voiced disagreement. We can't go back to how things were. And there are many feminizations. Women disagree with each other publicly all the time. I don't think you can say there's no way to have feminized open disagreement. The new thing we should evolve toward to understand how to make it good and sustainable, we need to understand it will be some kind of partially feminized version of disagreement.

Yeah. Although, I mean, how much, you know, how it's sort of, you know, it's how much feminization we want depends on depends on, you know, the rules that we set, how welcoming they're going to be. So it's not like there's a set number of women who are going to be in academia or are going to be in, uh, you know, political leadership roles. So, so, you know, the choices we can make about these things, um, also sort of influence how much we have to, uh, accommodate. It's just, it's just, it's very hard. I mean, it is very difficult to, you know, it's very difficult to— like, I'm trying to imagine what would this feminized version of, um, disagreement, um, you know, would look like in sort of an academic setting. And I think the point is, I mean, I think the point is sort of this, these feminized sort of ways of communicating are, you know, by their nature designed to take into account feelings more than objective. Right. It's just to have like a crude, you know, just a crude sort of, you know, stereotype of men are like this, women are like this. You know, men sit there, you know, they go, they fix a car, you know, they, they're, they're focused on the thing. They don't stop in the middle of it and say, how are you feeling? You know, they're trying to find the right answer. And if you imagine a feminized way of doing this, a feminized way of going about solving a problem, it seems like femininity itself, as a way of communication style, is by definition geared towards taking into account feelings, putting less emphasis on truth. And maybe— That contrast I don't agree with.

Men have their own ways as they go along of asking, well, is this okay? What are your feelings? They just don't recognize them as such. And women have their own ways of caring about truth more than men do. Men don't always see it as such. And in my view, feminization cannot be reversed, should not be reversed. We need more female talent in most, maybe all of the sciences. And we probably will figure out a better way of making things work than what we have now. But I don't think that's the main difference between men and women. I don't think women care, say less about scientific truth than men do. Hmm. And are like the grand system builders on average who make up all the bullshit, right? Yeah. Like how much of that stuff is true?

Yeah.

Well, women are doing, like if you're going to generalize, women are doing healthcare, economics, and most of it's correct. Hmm. So who cares about truth more?

Well, you picked one field. You picked, uh, I know, I'm just saying there's a lot of different ways I could find examples.

Yeah, slice the bread here, right?

Is it, is it hard to sort of— is it difficult to hear, like, you can have this, you know, women's division of, and you can have this men's division. Is it hard to bring them— is it hard to bring them together in one? Is that, is that part of the, the challenge here? Um, and that, like, you know, it's like, it's sort of like bringing two cultures together, right? But they're, but they're more separate. Men and women are more different than, you know, uh, most, you know, various cultures. I mean, you bring people from, uh, you know, different countries here to the US. You bring people from China, India, um, you know, Africa. It doesn't seem like, you know, there's a big, you know, difference in how, say, men of Amer— of American background versus these foreign men. It doesn't seem to be causing serious, you know, disputes on college campuses. Is it, is it just sort of— isn't it just seen as like— can we just see it maybe as an extreme culture clash? And maybe the answer here is, um, some kind of, you know, educational or labor market segregation where you can have these men things and you can have these women things, and then you avoid the difficulties of like some things making some people uncomfortable and not others?

I think the gains to integration are very, very high and we will become much better at it. But if you look at, say, scientific research teams, vaccine teams, like who succeeded with the vaccines? Bunch of teams full of women. Novavax was like some incredible ratio of women to men. I forget the numbers, So, you know, we're going to make it work. We're already making it work. We do have to get a lot better at it.

Yeah, but that, that sounds like labor market, kind of labor market segregation. So the, you know, you have these— the biology— women organically chose biology more than physics or STEM. And if, you know, if the, if the teams end up being 70 or 80% women, you know, great. I, I, you know, I don't, I don't mind that. But, you know, and then you look at these, you know, software startup builders, and, you know, they're, they're all men, and maybe We need a level of comfort with this idea that these spaces will be all women, these spaces will be all men. Some of them will be integrated perfectly 50/50. I don't know how many market, uh, I don't know how many market, I don't know how many markets end up like that just because it seems to me that institutions and, you know, uh, uh, uh, sort of fields of study, they, they tend to draw one or the other and then you, you sort of have this, um, cycle where they build one kind of culture and not another. Um, so I'm not, you know, I'm not asking for, I'm not arguing for, uh,, uh, you know, the state-enforced, you know, gender segregation of the labor market. I think you get it sort of organically, um, and maybe, you know, we should just, we should just be okay with that, I guess, is what I'm asking.

If the top chess tournaments are all men, which as you know is the case, doesn't bother me at all. But just predictively, I expect the big advances to be made by closely integrated teams, integrated in multiple ways, but here I'm meaning gender. Yeah. So the mRNA teams, I don't know the exact numerical, but it's a lot of men and a lot of women. It's not like 80/20. Novavax was unusual that it was so many women, you know, in the Maryland facility. Um, man, that's great.

Yeah. And what about, and what about the, uh, the, you know, the, the other part of that, um, chapter on, on women and minorities? Do you think that, are you under the impression that you know, these, you know, because my impression is that, yeah, I mean, it could be, it could be true that, you know, some, uh, you know, somebody of Black or Hispanic descent, you know, they might, you know, they might have different cultural norms than people of white descent. I think there's major differences between whites of different, you know, socioeconomic classes and regions, um, and ethnicities. Um, is this something that, you know, is this something that is, um I guess I'm seeing it in the context of like, we worry about it, we make it such a big deal in our, in our culture. Is it, is it a good, is it a good idea when, when we're rating something as a problem, it's like a 9 and it's really a 4? I mean, don't— isn't, isn't the, isn't the, um, you know, is it reasonable to think that maybe we should be sort of just saying, you know, things, things are working out fine and we're not really— this is not really as big of a problem as most people think?

I'm not sure how much of a problem most people think it is. Maybe one big subset of media overrates it as a problem, but I don't think the country as a whole does. I think the country as a whole probably underrates it as a problem. I mean, I'm just struck by data on, say, African Americans who seem to experience much higher levels of stress than would, like, what you might call normal white guys. And that to me is a serious problem. I suspect the country as a whole underrates it. It. But if you want to tell me, well, the New York Times overrates it, I'd want to see what they said. But like, that could certainly be true. It wouldn't shock me if that were true.

Yeah, but I, I think that the sort of the way people feel is sort of shaped by the New York Times and how we talk about it. So I don't know if you've seen data that's been sort of floating around that if you ask Black people how big of a race— how big— how much racism do you experience, um, if you compare them late 1990s, early 2000s to today, they, you know, today they say there's much, much more racism. Objectively, I don't know how you find that. I don't know what metric you would use other than people's feelings, but one theory is that our education establishment and the media just told people that racism is everywhere, it's a big deal, you should be stressed about it, and it's oppressing you all the time, and then people came to believe it, right? It would be a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy if that's what happened.

Well, I would just say that whole communications campaign, in my view, has been a miserable failure. Either on its own terms or different ways in which you or I might disagree with it. I just think it's a failure.

So let me ask you about the one more thing. One thing you said that was interesting was one of your articles is about the question of wokeness. And you're a critic of the woke in some way, but you have an interesting angle on it. And so you say things, you said something like in your article that that, you know, these middle, you know, these Gulf Arab monarchies, um, are becoming more woke. Um, and the idea is sort of there's a spectrum here from like Saudi Arabia to like, uh, you know, the Berkeley, the campus of UC Berkeley or something like that, or, or, you know, the streets of Portland or whatever. Um, is that, is that how you sort of see the wokeness issue? Because I don't see it as exactly, you know, like that. I, I see, I see wokeness as more— and maybe this is just a way for me to oppose wokeness without having to support Saudi social customs or whatever. I think that the better view is there is an obsession with inequality of— there's obsession of creating equality of results, a blank slate commitment to explaining differences between groups. I don't see that as on the same spectrum as say Saudi Arabian gender segregation. Can you defend thinking about wokeness and this very, very broad spectral terms?

Well, I would say look at wokeness as a whole. It has many bad effects, like encouraging people to think about equality of outcomes far too much, and it has a bunch of good effects, like raising people's awareness of, say, gay rights. So in Singapore, they just reaffirmed, uh, gay marriage is illegal, and they also made it very hard to reform that. Uh, people who are woke Whether you want to include that in the definition of woke or just empirically observe, the woke, like almost always, are quite against that. And the woke there are correct. Most of the world should be more woke. So how can you be totally against the woke? Now, do I think wokeness has been bad for American campuses? Absolutely. For US politics? I would say complicated. But the good thing about the woke is just they help their opponents more than they help themselves. Kind of if you just take them straight up, it's been bad. It might be good in this roundabout indirect way. But look, the world as a whole, I've been to over 100 countries. Most of them should be more woke. I was just back from India, been to Pakistan. I just don't doubt that. It's hard for me to see why that isn't self-evident.

Have you had experience?

The bad parts of the package deal. Yes, I would prefer to unbundle the package., but it would still be better if they got more of the package. Hmm.

Do you think— do you— I don't know how much experience you had with sort of, uh, lower-class, uh, Americans, lower-middle-class Americans. Would you, would you apply that, um, uh, would you apply that analysis to, to them too? Do you think they should be more quote-unquote, uh, woke?

Uh, many, you know, my family started off as lower-middle-class. You could even say lower-class. They didn't end up that way by the time I was, say, 18 or 20. But that is my background. And if I think of, say, my sister, who is gay and was gay, it was very hard for her to come out. If I think of my high school in the 1970s, the rate of gay people in that high school is probably about the same as what the rate would be now. But not one person felt they could come out. That just seems to me extremely wrong. It has on average been worse in lower middle class culture in this country. And yeah, those people should be more woke. Do you think—

well, do you think that— I mean, the— you know, just sort of flag, you said the number of gay people are probably the same then as now, you know, according to surveys, you know, not that there was a report from CSPI that you probably probably saw that, you know, the number of young people identifying as gay is, you know, like 5 times or something. A lot of that's just posturing.

People who actually want to live, you know, a life where they are primarily gay or bisexual, I'm not saying it's exactly the same. I don't know. But there were plenty of people back then who were gay. This I know. And since then, most of them have come out and for the better. But at that time, it was not possible to do so. And their lives were made miserable often for decades, and that was a failing of this country not being woke enough.

So I, you know, I am— I tend to take sort of, you know, the rationalist view on these things. I'm not a person who says, you know, people— if people are grossed out by something, it should be banned in most cases. You know, there's just bad cultural practices that, you know, we should get beyond. On this question in particular, I wonder if there was a kind of Chesterton's Fence kind of thing, because, you know, when people were arguing against gay marriage, 20 years ago, they said it would break down a society, it would break down gender roles, it would create confusion. And then if you sort of look at what's happened just very soon after gay marriage, it's like all of human history until 2010 or so, '11, we don't have any gay marriage. And then we have acceptance of gay marriage. And within a decade, we have skyrocketing rates of depression. We have concentrated in people who are liberal, people who identify as LGBT. They're not liberal, they're illiberal.

Please continue. Well, they could—

well, they would— they're left-wing, right? Self-identification, self-identify as, as left-wing. And so, you know, maybe there was— maybe society had some, had some wisdom here in suppressing something that could easily get out of control and, and make every— I understand there's some— there's a minority of gay people who want to live their lives as, as they see fit, but, you know, maybe there— maybe that was sort of, you know, sort of suppressing that was the price to pay for sort of this sense of, you know, normalcy and for encouraging what works for most people most of the time. Is that a view you'd be sympathetic to?

I don't think that would pass a causal identification test. So legalizing gay marriage causally, it seems to me, made marriage somewhat stronger, reaffirmed traditional values, and took away some interesting but probably better left taken away parts of promiscuous male gay culture. Those seem to me the causal effects. Now, I do think what happened is we got a whole bunch of social trends together, like the good side awoke, the bad side awoke. The good side awoke, legalized gay marriage. The bad side awoke, did a bunch of other bad things. But it wasn't legalizing gay marriage that led to the bad things. That seems to me really extremely unlikely.

Yeah. Yeah, I would, I would not single out the legalizing gay marriage. I think the, the sort of the, um, uh, yeah, I think, I think the civil rights law has a huge role to play here. And I always thought that creating new identity groups, I think, is just, is just a bad thing. It leads to things like, you know, government coming in telling school you can, you know, I think that just leads to issues with freedom of association, freedom of speech. Once you go down that path, I think you get a lot of the problems we see today. Yeah, but I wouldn't put it all on gay marriage. I would have taken gay marriage as a sort of a, you know, as a compromise not to have, uh, you know, the not to have the anti-discrimination laws, which I think are, I think are much more, um, problematic. But yeah, I get your point. I would, I wouldn't put all, put it all on gay marriage. Um, okay, but I wouldn't any of it on gay marriage is what I'm saying. Yeah, well, it's hard, it's hard. I, I sort of think you have to, you had to take it as a bundle. If you, if you put me back 15 years ago and you said, um, are you pro or anti-gay marriage, I would have said, you know, I would have maybe this compromise I would be happy with. But I think there's a bundle coming, and I think it's gonna be more bad than good. So, you know, but it's sort of, it's part of that bundle. It's just the most, it's just sort of the most visible of the issues that, you know, were included in that bundle.

I like to work to unpack the bundle. Part of the unpacking is to defend the good parts. Yeah, besides the bad, and gay marriage is one of the good parts.

Yeah, I got it. So, uh, you know, Tyler, I'm, I'm conscious of your time. I just want, I just wanted to, um, I ask you before, uh, I let you go, sir, what is the, you know, what are you, um, you know, you ask how ambitious are you to people, you know, what's, what's your what's the sort of goal? Uh, what do you see your sort of role in the intellectual, you know, ecosystem and American, you know, intellectual culture more generally? Um, is it, is it just you're looking for interesting people? Are you trying to sort of push, you know, the, the culture in a way? Are you trying to, you know, be an evangelist for, for human progress and trying to facilitate it? How do you sort of see what you're doing? Because, you know, there's, there's nobody like you, so I'm just interested in how you sort of conceive your role.

Well, maybe a lot of those things. I did write an essay for Mercatus once called something like My Personal Moonshot that you can Google to rather easily, where I lay it all out, I think, pretty clearly. But at one point, one angle of it I would stress is I like learning things and I like having fun and I'm pretty selfish and I want to be learning things every day. And the way my life is structured now, I can do that. So getting back to the senator idea, I'm kind of like an intellectual senator, but I have a very good arrangement, a lot of diversity in the kinds of things I can build or create, a time to read, freedom to write, a number of different outlets, a high degree of freedom of speech, high degree of autonomy, a high ability, I think, to help other people. And I'm pretty happy with that. So just like the narrowly selfish interpretation of this is good for me to do, so I'm doing it, I think goes a long way. It doesn't contradict a bunch of the other things you cited, but yeah, why shouldn't I do it?

Why do you think more people don't do it? Because when you're a tenured professor, you have so much freedom, and it seems to me that most people just do what they did before they had tenure.

Why do you think you're actually unique here? I've never fully grasped this. I do think a lot of people lack courage. And Daniel and I talk about this in the book. Courage is an important feature of talent. I think it's grossly underrated. Again, you don't need it for plenty of jobs, but for plenty of jobs you do. And certainly in academia you do. So, like, am I allowed to curse on your podcast?

Sure, go ahead. Most people don't ask. That's, yeah, go ahead.

Like, I don't think the right way to explain it is I don't give a fuck. Because I sort of do give a fuck. But at the same time, I have some perspective that I want to do the thing I want to do. And like, I actually kind of can succeed in doing it. And I'm just not that fearful about like what they might do back to me is a big part of it. But I think I have a few unique abilities that make it easier for me to do. And in that sense, like, oh, I don't, I'm not looking down on all the others. Oh, you you bastardly cowards. It's just hard for them to do it. And I got lucky in the genetic lottery, and it's easier for me to do it. And that's another big part of it.

Yeah, the courage thing is so interesting because I'm amazed by sort of the lack of courage among intellectuals. But then you look at men generally, and so something happens like Russia invades Ukraine. It seems like when there's a war or something, it seems like you can have a sort of constant stream of men going out being willing to risk themselves, engage in, you know, physically very brave activities. You know, countries all over the world, they have drafts, they, they go die by the millions. You know, there's courage. It's not— it's too simple to say, you know, men are, men are cowardly. Uh, but then you're looking for people to say politically incorrect things and, and they're scared. Why? That, that always drove me crazy. Like, why are people— why, why do men seem more likely to be willing to die? Uh, you know, people in general, I'm just focusing on men here, um, than they are to, uh, you say, you know, say politically incorrect things about race or gender or whatever issue. I don't get it. It's a very odd aspect of humanity, don't you think?

It may be which way the social pressure cuts. So there can be a lot of pressure to enlist in particular wars. And then, you know, the courageous thing to do is to not enlist, even though fighting may be a higher chance of dying. But courage in this sense is subjective. It also amazes me the number of wealthy people who are just afraid. And they could really say, "Fuck you," to the world and just go off and live off their money and be more than fine. And people respond to this differently, but it's not always the marginal incentives you might expect. A lot of people get more caught up in the trap the more they have, not less. It's like they earn to be independent, but the more they earn, the less independent they are. And that fascinates me as well. Yeah, likewise.

I mean, the idea that it's all just social pressure, that would be a parsimonious explanation of what's going on. If people say having the right attitudes on a college campus and fighting a war, they look very different. One looks like sort of being meek and submissive to the collective, and the other one looks like sort of brave and masculine, but they're the same thing. They're just responding to social pressure. And so if you just assume human beings are social creatures and highly influenced by what other people are doing, I guess that would explain it all, right? It's all just—

it's all just— But it's not. Here's another factor, and this worries me. It's very hard in contemporary society to help other people a great deal unless you are yourself politically acceptable. And I think there's a lot of people, they're not cowards, They really want to help others, but for them to continue helping others, they've got to stay on one side of the line. And that's one of the more screwed up things we're doing. If you could be considered like socially out there and unacceptable, but we still would let you help other people, I think we'd have a better discourse, a better society. I know that's hard to pull off, but it seems to me it should entirely be possible. And that's one of those things we need to learn. Because it's not all just people being cowards.

Yeah, sometimes it's self-sacrificial. You're right. So if you have— you're a professor, for example, and you need to write letters of recommendation and help place your, your students, you're in a position where your actions don't only harm yourself, they harm others, right? So that—

yeah, or like you're Bill Gates, and now people say all these things about you. I don't follow those debates, but his ability to help other people is way lower than it had been Yeah.

Do you think that with greater, you know, sort of cultural and political polarization, there's, um, that takes care of it? Because like, you know, for example, you look at somebody like, uh, you know, Peter, Peter Thiel, um, who's, you know, he could have been, he could have just stayed more sort of as a more neutral cultural figure. He could have decided that would probably have less influence on politics today than if he did it. He sort of put his chips in with, you know, being more influential on the, uh, on the political right. And, you know, Maybe overall that gives him more sort of, gives him more power. So it is maybe sort of, is maybe sort of greater sort of polarization and political sort of discord a way to create these bubbles in the sense of like, okay, this side hates you. This is not going to work in academia where it's a monoculture, but in everything else, like this side hates you, these other people like you. And that sort of creates good incentives for people to maybe go a little bit out there.

There's a lot packed into there. But I would first challenge the view that we're so polarized. I don't think we are. We are in the sense that we hate each other a lot. In terms of people agreeing how the federal budget should be spent, I'm not sure I've ever seen more agreement in my lifetime, for better or worse. So there's one— we've packed all the polarization into a smaller number of dimensions is how I would describe it. Yeah. We might be less polarized. I'm not sure Peter Thiel is politically influential. I mean, I guess we'll see after these Senate races, but I wouldn't take that for granted. I think Peter's doing what he thinks is right. I don't know if it's influential. Well, I mean, I mean, boomerang effects in politics, just like the woke, you know, maybe they're just helping elect Republicans. Yeah. Some of that's been undone by, you know, Dobbs and the abortion stuff, but if somehow that were on a different trajectory, clearly the impact of the woke would've been to elect more Republicans.

Now it's more up for grabs. Yeah. So maybe we're not, you're right, maybe we're not polarized. Yeah, it's funny how little debate there are in these budgetary matters compared to the Tea Party 12 years ago where there seemed to be some actual intellectual difference there. But the effective polarization, so, but political scientists, they talk about effective polarization, just how much people you hate other people.

And that's clearly obvious.

And but that, but that can have the effect that I'm, I'm talking about, right? Because if, you know, if I'm canceled by Group X, then Group Y, you know, might, might be more favorably inclined to me, and therefore I have more, you know, sort of room to influence Group Y. At least I'm not a non-person, right? It's hard to— I think it's getting harder to have a complete, outside of academia, a complete societal cancellation. Like, there's people on the far right and the far left, um, who I think are more, you know, influential than they could be, the most sort of outer edges, uh, just because there's so much polarization. Like, okay, if the New York Times writes a hit piece on 'Mr. X,' even if Mr. X is pretty bad, we don't want to do what the New York Times says. So we accept that person. I feel like that gives people sort of more room to— maybe it brings in some odious figures to the public debate, but also gives other people just sort of more room to say what they think.

But even that phrase, odious figures, I'm made uncomfortable by. Like, okay, you can cite Hitler. Hitler's odious. I think we make ourselves stupider Like I like to ask this question, does this person favor price controls on prescription drugs? Well, they might, they might not. To me, that's like a terrible view that will kill many thousands of people, maybe more. But I don't think of those people as odious. I think they're wrong about something. And if someone's called odious, I'll just ask myself, well, are their views worse than the views of someone who wants price controls on prescription drugs? Yeah. Like who's odious? I know there's the Hitler thing and Godwin's Law, but we gotta like mostly move past that and just focus on like the ideas and being more analytical, I think.

Yeah, I think that's right. I was just sort of using the term just sort of—

Oh, I know, I'm not blaming you. If anything, you react against this.

I get your role in this debate. Yeah, exactly. What do you think, just I guess I'll ask one last question. What do you think of that context about social media censorship? Do you, do you see it as a big problem? Because it seems that seems to be sort of the way that some of these people get excluded from society.

No, I don't. Uh, keep in mind, I grew up in a world where there were 3 network television channels and then PBS, and there was radio. A transistor radio was a new thing that was kind of like the internet. So do I think some people have been been kicked off who shouldn't have been kicked off. I do think that, but relative to the gains, it's such a small amount that's been coughed back up.

Uh, no, I agree. I'm not— I'm not asking about how much free speech, you know, how much, uh, you know, diversity of opinions we see compared to the 1970s or '80s. I just saying, you know, as a sort of— as a, as a, uh, compared to what it could be, is how big of an issue do you see sort of social media, uh, censorship and sort of shaping, you know, our political environment and contributing to this stuff? And, you or just making sort of some ideas off limits?

You know, I'm still a libertarian on this issue. I run a blog. If someone put up a comment that was like anti-vax in like a stupid way, I would just delete it. If Twitter, Facebook, Meta now, wanna do that, you know, I say great. Though I agree they've made some mistakes, but I think it's within their right. I think often it's a good thing they do it. Wonderful. Their property. You don't like it, go somewhere else.

Yeah, I have a blog too, and I also censor comments, so I guess I'm in no place to speak. I guess that's the case for libertarianism. It's always like my freedom to do X is almost more important than taking away someone else's freedom. If you told me a trade where Twitter would not be allowed to censor and I wouldn't be allowed to— actually, I would take it. I would let my blogs go bad. But I get the point that we are all sort of curate when we have the opportunity to do so. So Tyler, is there anything— do you have any projects coming up now? You just finished this book. Is there another book in the pipeline or anything else you want to talk about?

Well, expanding Emergent Ventures is taking a lot of my time. I'm working with Shruti Rajagopalan to build out Emergent Ventures India. That's really her project. But I can be of help in some ways. I have a long-term project to be writing a book on my views on the history of economic thought. But I also would like to write a sequel book to the one I just published with Daniel. So all this goes on at once. And sooner or later, it's all gonna happen.

What's the sequel gonna be? What's the difference gonna be between that and the original?

You know, I think we need more good ideas first. And the sequel comes out of the ideas rather than being planned top-down. But the natural sequel would be to extend the last chapter on how to motivate talent, how to retain it, how to develop it, and not just how to find it. So, that's the most likely sequel. But again, if the ideas evolve in some other direction, so be it.

Gotcha. Well, Tyler, it's been a pleasure. And yeah, thank you for joining us.