Tyler Cowen and I discuss innovation, art, music, touch, directionality in history, and Star Trek

Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics and director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. He is also the host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler and author of a regular column on Bloomberg, along with engaging in a million other activities in writing, speaking, and investing. I've discovered many things through his books and podcast, from how to find good, inexpensive ethnic food to why I should perhaps feel less guilty about my consumption of commercial culture. Back when it was safe to travel, I used to download several episodes of his podcast before long flights to academic conferences and often remembered learning more from Tyler and his guests than I did from the actual conference. I invited him here today to see what an audience of natural scientists and engineers might learn from an economist. More so, I just think he has interesting thoughts on many of the topics that interest me and the people who are probably listening. Tyler, thanks for doing this and welcome.

My pleasure. And I'm allowed to ask you a few questions back, yes?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay, let's go.

Why would William Shatner be a good guest for your podcast? What would you ask him that isn't in any of his biographies?

He's willing to say what he thinks. He follows Twitter. He understands what you might call the contemporary post-Trumpian rules of engagement. Uh, and he was, I think, quite a good Shakespearean actor in his youth. So, I would start by asking him how he thinks about different plays by Shakespeare, and some of the roles he played, and how he would today, looking back, interpret them.

How do you think he would look at the original Star Trek and its cheesiness to modern eyes, and perhaps archaic portrayal of women, and do you worry about Star Trek and its future, the original series?

You know, it's funny you bring this up. Just a few days ago, I ordered the DVD box of all the original Star Treks because I want to rewatch maybe the best dozen of them. So I might have a better answer for you soon. I think Shatner, from his public comments, seems to quite understand the cheesy nature of the original show, uh, the obsessive weirdness of many of the fans, why it's something he himself has mixed feelings about. But at the end of the day, I think, you know, I mean, ego drives him, and that's what made him big. And he was literally perfect for the role of Captain Kirk in this hysterical, overacted way. And I think he has to love it, basically. And his criticisms of it are defusing his own sense of vulnerability from having been involved in something that is itself so easy to criticize.

For the record, I enjoy the cheesy aspects much that I too own the box set, even though they're all available on Netflix. Because on Netflix they've replaced all the original rotoscope composited images of, of the planets with CGI effects that really don't look that great.

Really? That's terrible. I didn't know that. Yeah, I think it's great also how Scotty and Dr. McCoy overact. I mean, if you compare it to the successor Star Trek series Everyone is wooden and unmemorable. Like, Spock is clearly better than Data, and the other characters, there's nothing close to Scotty or Dr. McCoy, right? They just stand out through their absurdity.

Agreed. Do you think that if Shatner were to do your show, you would be too— you would be more starstruck than usual, or do you think you'd you would be able to give a good interview?

Well, having done Kasparov, I'm not sure I would be more starstruck than that. Keep in mind, we have invited Shatner, and the answer was not a— this is pre-COVID— the answer was not a no, the answer was a not right now, and we thought of organizing a public event around it, and we might yet do this, but I'm not sure what planning will be like, and I think he is over 80 now, So I'm not counting on it, but these are active possibilities and you're asking me in hypotheticals. I would love to bring it to life for you and, you know, invite you as my guest.

The closest I ever got to Star Trek stardom was about a 20-minute conversation I had with J.G. Hertzler, who played General Martok on Deep Space Nine, at San Diego Comic-Con a couple of years ago.

I don't know any of the later installments. I've seen maybe 8 episodes of the second one, uh, and I know all of them of the classic first, and that's it. Maybe I've seen 2 or 3 total episodes of later incarnations. I couldn't even match names to what they are.

Is there one originally—

like the Star Wars syndrome where I'm looking for a way to cut that one off?

Are you— is there one particular original episode that you've watched more than others?

Well, I haven't watched any of them recently at all. So as a kid, what I watched depended on what they showed the most, and they definitely undershowed the early part of season 1 and overshowed many of the bad episodes of season 3. Season 2, of course, as you know, being by far the best. I tend to think in retrospect the D.C. Fontana scripts are clearly better. Than the other episodes. And one I watched with my daughter maybe 4 or 5 years ago was a Fontana script. Kirk goes back in time and encounters the Air Force captain at the Air Force base in current America, and it's really all about the Great Stagnation. And it just stunned me how good I thought that episode was. In a way, it violated my memory how good it was, and I can't believe they're all that good. The other one I rewatched a few years ago was when Sarek comes and all the ambassadors meet on Enterprise. And that too was pretty good. So next I'm going to try "Mirror, Mirror." But no, I think I'm just getting lucky in the picks. Like most of them kind of have to be pretty bad, right?

Correct me if I'm wrong. My favorite episode is also a D.C. Fontana script. You know, she went "This Side of Paradise" with the spores on the planet that turn everybody into sort of a glazed-over happy person. Even Spock. Spock resists it. Perhaps the most famous scene was the fight in the transporter room when Kirk realizes that in order to break Spock of this spell from the spores, he has to get him really, really mad. So he calls him a computer who should be squatting on a mushroom and that he belongs in a circus, not a starship. Right next to the dog-faced boy, and the dog-faced boy comment really sets him off.

Yes, that's a very good episode. What's your take on the movies?

I'm glad that the movies brought Star Trek back into the limelight, that it introduced Star Trek to a younger audience. I have a poster of the original cast above my computer monitor here, and one of my undergraduate researchers came in looked at it, saw these unfamiliar characters, and he said, "Star Trek was a TV show in the '60s? I had no idea." So, I feel that I improved his life by way of that interaction.

I quite like, you know, the Khan one and the whales one. What's that, 2 and 4? The others have faded, but I don't dislike them. Even one which was panned, like, it was a full world of Star Trek for 2 hours. Didn't seem that bad to me.

Just the CGs, or the, um, the outdoor, uh, the outer space shots were too long. But you know, it was, it was interesting.

Yeah.

Has COVID taught you anything about travel, or perhaps positive aspects of staying home now that travel is so severely restricted?

It's taught me you can still travel when COVID is circulating. You just have to track data. I was, uh, 2 weeks in England and 9 days in New York. Did a trip to the Chesapeake in Maryland, West Virginia, Southern Ohio. I would have done more, but actually I've just been very busy with Fast Grants and other matters. But it's taught me it's very hard to stop a person from traveling who wants to travel. And I don't feel that any of what I did was dangerous either. Probably safer than staying at home if you go to safe places.

May I ask what led you to West Virginia and southern Ohio?

Well, most of all, I had never been to those particular parts, so I went to Wheeling and Parkersburg with my daughter, and I'd never seen those two cities, and they're only, what, 5 hours away? Like, that's absurd. Uh, Wheeling is an incredible mess but has a lot of old American history. Parkersburg has some hope of revival. And Southern Ohio was remarkably intact, and there's a new manufacturing belt arising there. I learned a lot about America and reshoring. And at the time I went— not now, of course— but at the time I went, hospitalizations, cases, deaths were very close to zero. It wasn't even a big story, so it didn't seem more dangerous than staying at home. And I I don't think it was. So, uh, there was nice scenery, good weather, mediocre food, still a wonderful trip to see something new.

A couple of years ago, I went to Kentucky to do the bourbon tour with a friend from grad school, and I had never been to that part of the country before, and I wanted to see how, you know, I, I, I'm not like a big drinker, but they make this artisan product in a part of the country that I think is misunderstood, and I wanted to see it in action. So, um, I— that was a positive experience traveling to that part of the country.

Have you been anywhere in COVID times?

We took a couple of days to go to Las Vegas to visit my sister, but we stayed at an Airbnb on the outskirts. In general, the biggest hole in our bubble is the fact that our 18-month-old daughter is in daycare at a home daycare down the street. So we're trying to minimize our exposure in other ways. I'm also part of the— I'm a participant in the AstraZeneca Phase 3 trial. So hopefully I have either 62% or 90% immunity. We'll see how that how that plays out once the U.S. data are analyzed.

As a chemist, what perspective do you have on those trials that the public health people would not?

I think I'm most interested in the formulation, the use of lipid structures and self-assembling nanoparticles to afford stability or lack thereof to particles that are based on well, basically naked mRNAs that are encapsulated in lipids, and on the adenovirus side, like AstraZeneca and Janssen, formulating a viral vector in such a way that it's going to survive in the bloodstream, escape immunity for long enough, but not too long. And I would say the aspects that are not the genetic aspects, but the formulation aspects. I don't know if that's what a public health person would misunderstand about it, but I think to me, that's scientifically, those are the most intriguing aspects. And it's not that the genetic part is uninteresting, it's that other people are doing it and are very good at doing it.

So given your perspective, do you think we're underrating or overrating those vaccines?

I think we are underrating the transformative potential of genetic vaccines that have a genetic basis. So normally there would be a live attenuated virus or something like that. You would find the SARS coronavirus 2 virion and it would be disabled somehow. You would inject it. But that takes 8 to 10 years. Now we have these genetic approaches. You have the RNA approach or you have the DNA approach, which is, you know, takes it a step upstream to put it in the adenovirus vector. And you can turn over your experiments a lot more quickly with a genetic approach. It's really a triumph of molecular biology that we can do this and have a vaccine for a virus that has only been sequenced for 11 or 12 months or whatever it is. It really means to me that infectious disease, that viral disease, is not going to be as significant a problem henceforth in human existence.

And what do you think of the nanobot approaches that try to stop COVID from attaching to the cell, to the receptors?

So I'm not too familiar with those approaches. I have a hard time in general with the idea of nanobots and assemblers, just because van der Waals forces are so incredibly strong that I don't see what makes a nanobot different from a protein or an enzyme that does this work. And we, you know, it does far more sophisticated work and we just don't call it a nanobot.

So you're skeptical on those. Now, Let's both try this question. In Star Trek, I mean, what's the big technological absurdity? What makes sense and what doesn't?

I'm not a physicist. Warp speed strikes me as quite difficult to achieve. I think something like the transporter is more doable than we ever thought it would be. But then you're left with the copy of the person that's left over on the transporter pad and what to do with them.

Yeah, I think the transporter kills people. I wouldn't do it myself, not even for, say, a billion dollars. Warp speed is totally absurd. The way that phasers work, sort of how they know what to zap and where to stop destroying, seems a little weak on the edges. Obviously, sound in space is just always ridiculous, but that's TV.

Fire in Space as well.

Yeah, I mean, the Universal Translator, the idea is ahead of its time, but it doesn't actually translate. Everyone speaks perfect English, but with an accent. So I think today they actually, you know, would have done that as a universal translator.

In your international travel, have you found Google Translate on your phone to be useful?

I use it the most in China, and in fact, like, Chinese cab drivers have it already open And you type messages back and forth and it just works. And they all know how to use it and they're quicker to have it out than I am. So that's been the biggest way it's come in handy. But I think true speech-to-speech translation shouldn't be that far away, right? Less than 10 years?

It does seem very close. Even a few years ago, I was in a cab in Jeju Island in South Korea and I had to have a type of sophisticated conversation with the driver that would have been impossible with his command of English or my non-existent Korean.

The degree of compatibility in Star Trek systems, it also seems weird to me. Like, you can hail any alien and the interface is compatible and there's not even a glitch to it.

That is, to me, the biggest hurdle with the Internet of Things and the trillion sensors idea is half the time my Bluetooth speakers won't connect to my computer. Not half, but some, some intolerable number, you know, fraction of the time. And then we have, you know, we're expecting a trillion sensors to somehow communicate seamlessly with a hub. It doesn't seem that that's it seems that the eradication of viral infection is probably closer to the horizon than the Internet of Things at this point.

And it also seems in their battles and wars, they shouldn't be as uncertain as they are. That is, it ought to be quite decisive for one side or the other. You could debate which one, but it should be over before it starts. Once the force involved is that extreme, I don't really see where the fight is.

Why? Yeah, why should a photon torpedo only be strong enough to blow off a wing or—

Yeah, it's like, oh, good, 'cause it's gonna shake me in my seat. My goodness.

It's a little bit like the idea of an extraterrestrial being so beyond us intellectually that we wouldn't have noticed them because they would've just observed us from a distance or existed among us while being too smart to reveal their presence to us. That we're probably in cosmic scale talking about log differences between capabilities of species. And you're right that the Klingons and the Romulans shouldn't be that close. The only place technologically, the only species that seem to to have a log difference was the Borg. But then I have to go into the, you know, 1980s and '90s, and that might— I mean, you know of the Borg, but you haven't seen too many.

But even within a species, you know, within humans, you would expect battles to be over before they start. And I think this is actually a pessimistic point about the future of humanity. It seems that some force level Destructive power overwhelms all defenses, and it may be a long time before anyone has the destructive impulse, but sooner or later it comes. And I don't see what stops that. I see what stops it in the world of sticks and stones, in the world of tanks, even nuclear weapons. You know, it seems absolute destruction is close, very close to being possible, and just up the power there. I don't know, I have a bad feeling about that.

There's almost an aspect of entropy to it. You know, it's easier to arrange our atoms in, in a, in a huge number of other arrangements than being this body. So just over time, you would expect disintegration and destruction. The— however, What do you think? I know you've had Steven Pinker on your show. Do you think that, that, that this is an anti-entropic argument that he makes, that, that, that there shouldn't be a— or rather that, that our brains can counteract this destructive impulse?

I read him as saying that brains are anti-entropic. Yes. And I'm sure you know the whole tradition of complexity theory in physics and associated sciences, including of course chemistry, Prigogine and the like. But it still seems to me that's only going to be true locally, that the more complexity and reason you build up, at some point you get corner points in those systems that are destructive, and they will destroy the other, you know, beings of reason. Sooner or later. And again, you can think it's a low probability, but just the ticking of the clock, it seems destruction wins out. Or do you see it differently?

Maybe it's a religious faith. I'm not a religious person, but maybe it's a, it's a, it's a faith in humanity and civilizing processes. And, uh, these, these gifts, perhaps they're emergent properties of evolution, like the ability to appreciate art and literature and to empathize with others and to communicate complex thoughts with others that do seem to be a counter-current to violence.

But why do you think civilization is so recent? So Sumeria is only 6,000 years ago, right? I'm not sure what we should count as the total length of history of mankind, but it's way longer than 6,000 years by under any account. And if most of that is not very civilized, That to me is also an argument for a kind of maybe Neo-Malthusian pessimism.

There may be a ratchet-type mechanism where the grips on the interior of the ratchet are things that can't be unlearned, that tend to— there could be a lot of motion in the system, but once there is some motion in the direction that the ratchet is inclined to hold the position that we are very unlikely to go in the opposite direction. I think US politics recently has made me question some of, some of this, but there does seem to be a directionality that may not be the result of a positive force, but rather a force that resists going backwards.

I know it's easier to say that post-1945, but there are other historical periods where it appears the opposite. And again, it's sort of like fighting a war as Israel or Singapore. You only have to lose badly once. So there could be a lot of probabilistic arguments that the weight of the forces is on the side you're saying, and I definitely would agree with those, but I'm still back to worrying about the you only have to lose really badly once problem.

Agreed. It is, it is something I think about. I don't worry about it too much. I think, I think I'm probably an optimist, although there is a, there is an aspect of this problem I wanted to ask you about, and that is the, the rate of, of innovation, particularly since World War II. So Robert G. Gordon published a book a couple of years ago, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, saying among other things that because things like penicillin and the washing machine and the telephone and the transistor could only be invented once, that we'll get all the benefit we can in one shot, and then that can't be invented again. And so now we're kind of were kind of stagnating in your, uh, in, in, in your, your words. Um, do you think that that is— what is your take? Do you think that that's true? Do you think that, uh, that— okay, I'll stop there. I'll let you react.

Well, we clearly have been stagnating. You can see that in the productivity numbers. Those numbers are imperfect, but they're actually consistent with the quantity numbers for investment in labor supply. So I think they're basically correct, but I don't see why you need to stagnate forever. So to go back to Star Trek, if we could pull something like that off, it would be a major advance over today's America. Now, warp speed travel might not be possible, but very significant biomedical advances seem entirely plausible. I'm not an expert on those, but I don't see that Gordon has any argument for suggesting they're not possible other than he can't think of what they might be. Well, he's not an entrepreneur, is he, right? Just limiting— maybe curing is too strong a word— but changing the status of what we now call mental health problems would boost the well-being of mankind an enormous, enormous amount. And again, I hardly think we're on the verge of doing that, but it doesn't seem crazy It's not like dilithium crystals. So I'm a long-run optimist. I even think there's a chance that right now we're coming out of the Great Stagnation. Uh, you already mentioned the mRNA vaccines. Just think what the productivity gains will be over the next year from the fact that we're vaccinating everyone. Even hard to measure, I think, because the happiness element will exceed the GDP element, but we'll have a truly amazing year for productivity. Maybe it's a one-off, but that would surprise me. Solar power is looking better, right? I'm not sure what will come of SpaceX, but it's a very positive sign, good sign about our attitudes. Uh, countries that used to be poor have learned how to govern pretty well. That's a major under-discussed advance that ultimately is somewhat of a technological advance, though we don't call it that.

I think that the, even the simple fact of mitigating the worst effects of pandemics, even if they only occur once every 50 or 100 years, is a significant, represents a significant step function in improvement of human wellbeing if we can avoid something like this in the future using viral vector and mRNA vaccines.

And I would think they'll occur more than once every 50 years, right?

Especially if the forces of destruction are arrayed against us.

But the more biomass you have on Earth— this is my crude Darwinian reasoning here— but I would think the greater the quote-unquote incentive— I know it's a mistransference of concept— but the greater the incentive of things to learn how to feed off of us. And something like HIV/AIDS, which I believe killed well over 30 million humans, is still with us. It's a major, major pandemic, and it's recent and present. And there's this weird gap that then you go back to like 1968, 1957. Uh, it may all be some kind of randomness or strange distribution, but I've thought a great deal about the distribution of pandemic arrivals. Like, are we now in a new age of coronavirus pandemics? And something happened with coronaviruses where there was like a general mobilization, and now they're going to be throwing themselves at us, you know, quite a bit for the next few decades. Do you think about these issues much?

I do. It seems to me that we have better tools than, than we ever did. I think in general, research, research on infectious disease is underfunded compared to cancer and cardiovascular disease, given the fact that we have essentially added another cancer on top of our existing portfolio of causes of death in terms of the number of people that die. I'm extremely optimistic about this newfound appreciation for infectious disease by the public and funding agencies. And researchers.

But have our tools outraced our vulnerabilities? So if you go back, say, to 18th century England and you ask where are the places where mortality is highest, it's in some of the lowlands where there's a lot of malaria, and then it's in the cities, which were the technologically advanced parts of the country— just so many people. So today's cities are without parallel. I mean, go to Lagos, go to Kolkata, And of course they have hospitals, but isn't the greater vulnerability from all the megacities, maybe from a pandemic point of view, worse than the advances we've made? I mean, imagine if COVID had been worse than it was, what the casualties could have been.

Yeah, it's hard to say because COVID was such a unique, uh, unique virus in its rate of asymptomatic infection. Um, I think that that was not, uh you know, it wasn't part of the profile of MERS or SARS or H5N1. It's hard to say. I wanted to pick up a thread from Solar for a moment. If I think about my— granted, this is coming from a middle to upper middle class perspective. But if I think about the life that I had in growing up in the '80s and '90s and the life that I have now, I'm driving a car that is— it's a plug-in hybrid. It's charged by the solar panels on my roof. We have home battery storage. We had a truck hit a transformer outside our house the other day, and then all the lights on the whole street went out except ours. And this to me is a— also, this has nothing to do with solar, but has to do with technology and its acceptance. I'm working, I'm teaching a class of 60 students entirely remotely. I'm— and that's accepted now that, you know, it's okay. I'm running a research lab that has a, million-dollar-per-year grant revenue budget, but I'm doing it all from my closet. And I think this, this would have seemed unthinkable. And these are actual, like, physical sciences innovations. I mean, these are like the solar cell, the electrochemical energy storage. These innovations are happening at the level of of the transistor or penicillin. I mean, these are not just sociological innovations like the acceptance of Airbnb or Uber or, you know, take the latest app-enabled device. And it does seem that there's a rebirth of technology, physical sciences-based innovation, uh, that I think is completely absent from, for example, Gordon's book. And maybe it's just transformed my experience, but it does seem like a, like a source of optimism.

I agree, but if I were defending Gordon and some of my own writings, I would say solar power is largely a defensive innovation. So it's great. We should encourage it. But it's simply stopping great destruction from climate change. Like, our power isn't that much better. Maybe it's more robust if there's a storm. Defensive innovations are necessary, but they don't improve your living standard. So we just had a funny temporal distribution of the costs from climate change. We really didn't have many of those costs for a long time. And now we're having to pay the bill for that. So we're just holding steady.

How about the way that COVID has changed the acceptance of remote learning?

I think 10 years from now, a school like yours, UCSD, or mine, George Mason, 20 to 25% of everything will be online and remote, and students will prefer it. They'll still live on campuses, and have professors, but imagine taking out the worst quarter of the professors you had and replacing them with Zoom classes. I mean, who wouldn't do that? Or with watching, you know, movies and Khan Academy-like videos, and it could be much cheaper. Let's say it's a third the price and you can cut out the bottom quarter of your professors. It just seems to me that has to happen, and this will have been the turning point. For that coming about.

Can you tell me—

the forces of reaction will fight it bitterly, right? You know that too. Uh, but still, I think it will win out. There'll be some kind of national market in classes and credits, and schools ultimately will accept credits from these national classes, which will be run for profit.

Who do you think will be recruited to teach those classes?

Well, if you look at something like MasterClass, they're starting with very famous people. And I think the sector will start that way but not end that way. A lot of the actual successes in terms of volume have come from state universities like Arizona State, uh, Georgia Tech. And state universities are better at both being inclusive and figuring out how to actually teach the non-excellent students. So I think in the longer run you'll see an alliance between a bunch of big schools not the Harvards and Princetons, and things like textbook companies and even Hollywood and online producers, and they'll team up and give us these marvelous classes. And, you know, you might take them on something like Netflix. And again, it's a supplement to face-to-face, but they'll make face-to-face better.

I had the advantage going into COVID that 4 years ago I recorded all of my course lectures. It ended up being about 90 hours of material, and it's all on YouTube for free. And I had been using those as the basis of the flipped classroom methodology. So the students would watch the lecture, then they would respond to some questions, and then we would use actual class time for design challenges and team assignments and interaction with me and the TA. When COVID happened, I more or less kept the same format, except it was a lot easier to run the in-person component components, not— and the breakout rooms don't work that well, but the polling function, the screen sharing, these— the fact that, you know, the instantaneous feedback that you could get from students that is kind of impossible if they're just sitting there. Also, the fact that we have these little name placards in the bottom left of our screens, and that has been enormously helpful. So there are some aspects that I definitely want to retain when life gets back to normal, so to speak.

You know, I did my version of the same with Marginal Revolution University. So I'm teaching principles now, but not over Zoom. The whole thing is already in the box, so to speak.

Can you tell me a little bit about the artwork that you collect? I see some over your shoulder. I wonder, when you look at a piece of artwork, in your house, to what extent is the effect that it produces in you related to the artwork itself rather than the story behind it, or is that not a useful distinction?

I think it's a critical distinction, and it depends on the work. But this work behind me is by a Ukrainian artist named David Berlukh, who was early on in the Blue Rider group with Kandinsky and Franz Marc. He was arguably leader of the Ukrainian avant-garde early in the 20th century. He then moved to America. He mostly became much worse, softened his style, and painted flowers and boat scenes for old ladies on Long Island. But he kept his original level of talent, and sometimes he did things that are just astonishingly good, but they're underpriced because he's viewed as this artist who, after his early years, basically sold out. So if you have, or at least think you have, a good eye for the good ones, you can do very well buying Berlux. This, uh, you can't really see the painting that well, but it is an open book in the picture. So I thought, well, if I'm going to do Zoom calls, you know, which image should be behind me? I figure a book can't be that bad. But most of what's in the house is Haitian art or Mexican art from one area of Mexico. Sometimes called outsider art or naive art, different names for it. And we have a very, very large collection. It's been exhibited a few times, and in a few areas it's very strong. And that's been one of the big things I've done with my life is buy and collect art.

More broadly, you're also a music aficionado. What is capable of generating stronger emotions, visual art or music? And you can take music with, uh, with or without lyrics.

Oh, clearly music. And if I had to choose one or the other, I wouldn't hesitate. And, uh, to see an incredible concert is more rewarding than to see a very good art exhibit, I think. And it's also striking that other than people who have amusia all other human beings just love music, but a significant percentage of human beings are mostly somewhat indifferent toward art. They may care about how they dress or how their sofa looks, but they're not actually that interested in art. But music is somewhat close to being universal, and it is perhaps because it is more closely wired, I think, into our biological natures. That we respond to it so strongly.

What is the most atonal or postmodern music that still generates a reaction with you, or is that not a fair question?

Oh, it's a fair question, but it all does. There's no year when I say after that time I don't like it anymore. So, you know, Schoenberg and Webern, to me, it's like listening to Mozart. It feels very familiar, comfortable. I just enjoy it. If something is later and weirder, I'm not saying I like it all any more than I like everything Beethoven wrote, but my attitude is bring it on. It doesn't sound too strange to me per se, it's just a question of training your ear, which can take many years, but musics without traditional notions of timbre or rhythm or other means of organization, it's just something you have to learn, and the John Cage point that the line between music and noise is a difficult one to draw, and you really grasp even like normal— quote-unquote normal music— when you figure out how to transcend the boundaries of music and appreciate noise. I think that's very true. If you're listening to Beethoven, like Hammerklavier Sonata or the Appassionata Sonata, you get it or enjoy it much more if you've been down these other paths with things like techno music, atonal music, Indian classical music, my goodness, who knows what else. There's atonal passages in Bach in the Goldberg Variations, right? That's maybe the best of all the variations. I suspect no one else, or few other people, really love it that much.

Which variation?

It's critical for music to take those steps that most people don't want to take.

Is there any— this could be literally noise, but is there any sound that you would consider music that most people would consider noise?

Well, let me give you a simple example that many of you will know. The Beatles song "You Never Give Me Your Money," which is one of my favorite Beatles songs, beautiful melody, Paul's voice, Abbey Road, Side 2, the whole bit. But just listen to the last like 20 seconds of that song, and it's some weird kind of acoustoelectric music that Paul took from the French, Stockhausen, John Cage, and others, and it's just noise. And it might be the best part of that song. And you work your way through other Beatles songs, the later ones of course, and just try to pinpoint, like, what's the part in this song that's just noise? And have I actually been enjoying it all along for these years? And what can I learn about my own music appreciation abilities from that fact? I think that's a good entry point for a lot of people. Start with Never Give Me Your Money.

It has occurred to me that the last couple of seconds of that is something that sounds like, never could have been any other way. And then I think about the first recorded Paul lyrics, she was just 17, and then you have 11 albums, or however many it was, and then it never could have been any other way. I always thought that that was a poignant way to bookend the most incredible catalog in popular music.

And the Beatles understood this point about noise. I mean, listen to Tomorrow Never Knows, right? That's like one chord, G, and not that many notes. And of course it's a drone, but it works. And it's funny what people will digest almost effortlessly when it's packaged to them in a particular way, and then what they will find repulsive if you tell them it's atonal music and play it for them in a university. Your own school, UCSD, I mean, all the geniuses you've had, Roger Reynolds and all that, Gordon— it was Gordon Mumma was there. Your school has an incredible history in noise. Congratulations.

Do you know, uh, are you familiar with the band Tool? It's— so Tool is a progressive metal band. Uh, yeah, yeah. So there's much of the most recent album that is, uh, that is atmospheric because all the songs are 11 to 16 minutes. And it is Adam Jones having fun with the guitar and some percussive effects, some pedal effects. It's not music. There's no melody. There's no harmony. It's not the whole album, but there are stretches at a time that are pure atmosphere and odd rhythms. It occurred to me one time listening to the to the album Lateralis that Danny Carey didn't hit the snare drum for like the first 4 tracks or something. And this is ostensibly a rock album and there was no snare on 2, but then they don't use square rhythms anyway.

And the people who listen to this material are supposedly the musical illiterates. That's the funny thing. But if you only listen to Haydn, which is wonderful, but I mean, that's become highbrow and it's weird to me. Haydn is like very good pop music, which I love, but that's what it is.

So you— I, I think I have heard you say that you're not a meditator, but your approach to appreciation of music and sound Sounds like open awareness practice. It sounds like you are appreciating texture and resonance of sound in a way that is reminiscent of a mindful awareness of sound.

It's a way of thinking about why I don't meditate. It seems there's always something better to do, like, oh, go listen to some music.

The reason I'm interested in the topic of artwork divorced from story and visual art divorced from objects in the piece is because I've become very interested in touch lately and what we can learn about touch using materials chemistry. It strikes me that in the field of haptics, we have things that shake, things that sort of shock you indiscriminately, and maybe things that heat up or cool down. And none of the effects actually are effective in recapitulating the feeling of objects in the real world. So I always thought, or thought over since getting tenure and kind of had the freedom to explore these ideas, that since our interaction with basically every object in the natural environment is mediated by a thin, thin layer of organic molecules that affect the friction, the adhesion, the thermal conductivity if it's deeper than just one layer, and are really responsible for, for our tactile appreciation of an object, that it should be possible to create a new type of of artwork based on tactile interaction with deliberately designed materials and, and objects. Now, there are touch museums that are really intended to recreate visual objects in consciousness, but they're not really intended to be appreciated for texture, friction, thermal conductivity, softness, tackiness. And I always wondered, I guess it's the hypothesis of this sort of pie-in-the-sky research program in my lab, that it should be possible to appreciate texture in the same way that we appreciate a well-struck note on a piano or a well-bowed sound on a string instrument.

Sure, it's not pie in the sky. Let's call them textiles. I've bought many textiles in my life, and the touch element is often, not always, but often critically important. And you pick them up and you move them and you carry them. It's part of owning them. You're not allowed to touch them in museums, but in a way that's making them less than what they really are, especially the Kuna Panamanian molas in the house. I touch those all the time, and they're just beautiful and lovely, and your fingers melt into them. Amate paintings, which are on bark paper from Mexico, The texture of that paper, its thinness, how it feels, how brittle it is or it isn't, how thick it is, the staining of the ash on the paper. Not all of that is touch, but it's touch blended with sight and texture. So this is a thing now. It's not at all hypothetical. We're just used to going to museums where you're not allowed to touch the paintings, and if you even get within 5 feet, some red siren goes off and they cart you off to like COVID quarantine or something. So I'm fully with you.

So textiles are a great example of an artifact that is a human artifact that is designed to elicit an emotional or thoughtful response. But textiles are not reconfigurable. They're not dynamically reconfigurable in the same way that an image is on a display. Or that the sound, that the timbre of an instrument can change based on the way it's— one interacts with it. Maybe that's not a good example because the downward force and loading velocity of the interaction actually does change the feeling of something. But you can't get something that feels like a progression or a story or dynamism, something that changes in time, unless the material itself can be changed.

I think you can, and often you do it with light. So if you think about Haitian voodoo flags, they're very different items. Where is the light coming from? How dark is it? How much light is there? Are they on the floor? Are they hanging? And the angle you look at them at combined with the light makes them really quite dynamic, and I think much better. And again, you don't get very much of that in a museum where you're supposed to look at it one correct way. So we could do more, but I think you're underrating current textiles somewhat.

Fair, fair point. I would, I would say that the extent to which systematic investigation has been applied to textiles is is less developed than it is in other forms of material science and, and let's say physical organic chemistry, where you make one small change, you measure the effect, you home in on the effect that one is trying to achieve. And I would say that these are static objects, but there is the potential to generate a real I think revolution in haptics technology for things like surgical robotics and medical training, where you put such elements, say, in a glove or using a haptic dummy where these properties are reconfigured in real time.

But don't neglect the earlier historical integration of textiles and chemistry. So something like Persian carpet making, and at its peaks in the 17th or 19th centuries, the extent to which knowledge of dyes and knowledge of materials had to be integrated through repeated experimentation in a market setting, it's a pretty phenomenal story. But I agree, we can and will do much more with this.

Well, stay tuned. The, um, On a completely different topic, how do you approach interviewing in the sense that you have guests, you have an hour with them, you want to cover a range of topics, you've reread all their books and many of their public comments, and you skip between topics? And I think it surprises some of your guests, but actually, I find it refreshing because sometimes there's the potential to get stuck on a particular topic and it can— so do you think that segues are overrated?

I think follow-up questions are overrated. Most people will repeat their initial point, uh, but I think my task as the interviewer is to figure out on which topics is this person verbally most interesting and smartest. And that's not always that easy. There are people like Kenneth Arrow, who is a genius, but verbally he could be fairly dull. So you're playing a sort of hermeneutic game with their life's work, including their YouTube presence. Where are they going to do something that's not just retreating to talking points? And you give it your best shot. And then it's partly like, just what do I want to know? You know, I'm not paid to do it, so Like someone had better have fun and first in line for that, it's going to be me.

And starting every conversation as weird as possible in as weird a way as possible is another of your hallmarks.

And specificity, it signals you mean business. You don't just want their lame crap. They might serve up, oh, tell us what your latest book said. Eugh. Like, don't you just want to go croak when you hear that? You might love the book, you might love them, you might spend real money on the book, but you hate that question, I think.

Do you still respond to every serious email?

Uh, I mean, there's something tautological about putting the word serious in there. I would say I respond to over 90%, serious or not. And where the line is, I don't know. Uh, but I don't respond to 100%.

If you were to ask me, I always thought about what would be the Darren LaPomme production function, and I think that responses to emails in a timely manner has to be part of it, for what it's worth.

You know, Sam Altman, in my chat with him, he thinks that's a kind of signature that a person is always paying attention and always focused on taking in information from the outside world, which is where you get most of your good information. I tend to agree with that. People who let their inboxes lie fallow, like for 2 weeks, I guess I think less of them for that.

Do you think that the topics of your books have gotten more serious since you first started writing popular economics books?

I don't know. I mean, my very first popular economics book, a lot of it was about love, marriage, and family. Now, is that more or less serious than technological stagnation? It's like, which are the serious emails? I'm not quite sure. Uh, I don't really have any plan with the topics.

Uh, what are your thoughts on trivia as a general pastime? Do you watch Jeopardy?

Uh, I don't watch Jeopardy, but I did as a kid. I loved it as a kid. I don't watch that much TV. Uh, don't have time. I guess I feel I would be good at Jeopardy. Um, but again, I don't like the word trivia. I don't think it's trivia at all. I think it's the important stuff. So I'm not sure how to answer your question as worded.

Do you think that recall and memorization are underrated in education?

If you mean with well-educated white kids, yes. Uh, if you mean in the world as a whole, I suspect not. It may well be overrated. Certainly it would be in some parts of Asia. But the idea that people in the 19th century, they just knew a bunch of things because they had to memorize them. I would do that more with kids in the 4th grade because they have no opportunity cost. And I'm not sure what the return is, but as in Switzerland, they teach some languages and you should make them like memorize state capitals and all that. I say bring it on, double down, triple down. Don't make it homework, just make them do this stuff all the time. You know, let them rebel, whatever, why not? It might come in handy.

Memorize the periodic table. Uh, why do social scientists write more popular books than natural scientists?

Well, I'm seeing more natural science popular books, but if we take your field, chemistry, where there are not that many really good, uh, popular science books, I don't think you have models that can be explained intuitively in the way economic models can be. Because people act according to economic models in a way that at least sometimes is present in their consciousness. Oh, he gave me a raise, I'll work harder, right? Obviously your body has chemical reactions, but you don't experience them as such. So it's like cell biology, it's a difficult topic to have good books because the principles of interaction, you have to keep so many things in your mind and scale and speed or all, you know, different from the world you live in, whereas scale and speed for economic principles are literally the world you live in, and that makes for more popular books.

It's ironic because the reason that I'm a chemist and not a physicist or a biologist is because chemistry is the length scale at which I can attribute human-like motivations to atoms, molecules, and functional groups. Like greed and, uh, and, um, uh, and, and, uh, causticness and stability and, uh, reactivity that resonate with me in a way that mathematical models used in physics, uh, don't. Although I've sort of become more of a physicist over time, I'm, I'm nowhere near You know, my first language is still behavior of atoms and molecules. And I really mean that in the sense of psychological behavior. Like, it seems to me that fluorine is greedy. You know, it has the most lone pairs. We call it the capitalist rule of electron pair donation. The more you have, the less you want to share. Share. This level of anthropomorphizing these molecular properties is what resonated with me as a kid.

But that's you. You're not the median, of course. So I think for potential readers, it's very hard. It's interesting, you look at an area like geology, where the actual principles of geology, they're like chemistry in the sense that they're not intuitive, There are a fair number of popular books on geological themes, but they focus on what you can see, you know, mountain ranges, volcanoes, events that humans relate to. So even there, when you get a lot of popular books in terms of scale and speed and the like, they're going the economics route of attaching directly to human lives.

How is your promotion file handled at George Mason, given your output is in book form and, uh, podcast form and less so in, uh, traditional, uh, journal articles?

Well, the first 20 to 25 years of my career, I mostly wrote journal articles, uh, and I wouldn't say they were all normal, but my profile looked somewhat typical. And I think I was a full professor like at age 28, and never had to face any kind of promotion after then, so the question you're asking fortunately hasn't really come up.

In the UC system, we—

I'm popular at my school, I'm not looked upon as a leper or anything. I think people mostly appreciate what I do, or maybe they're just afraid to criticize it, but I don't have any trouble with this at all.

In a parallel universe, I would like to know what it would be like for a professor of of engineering to do this for a living, to communicate, to educate the public without the pressure of having to retain a certain dollar amount in grant revenue per square footage of my lab space and the sorts of things that I'm used to thinking about.

Do you not even have one in your field who would fit that description?

I would say in computer science and engineering, perhaps, but I think to the extent that engineers are popular, public-facing. They are people that have become famous later for other things, whether it's through their entrepreneurial activities or investing or administration or leadership positions.

That's an opportunity for someone, I would think. And again, I think the best way to do it is to be more standard when you're young. If only to learn how a bunch of things work and just to improve your own thinking and critical abilities, if you started off doing that, I think one would be much worse at it.

Would you indulge me in a segment of overrated or underrated?

We've been doing it all along, I'd say.

Which tells me that in the first 3 on my list, actually, we've already covered completely unexpectedly. So I had a Beatles song, "You Won't See See Me, but we won't go there. I have the Goldberg Variations, and I had Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which you haven't seen, so we'll skip to the next one. How about—

If I haven't seen it, I must think it's overrated, right?

Deep Space Nine is perhaps my second favorite TV show of all time after the original Star Trek.

Wow. But do you think I would like it?

Yes, but it requires quite a commitment because it's serialized. And half of the episodes, half of the 170 episodes, um, are, are related. So, um, if you, if you don't watch them in order, it could be quite confusing.

170, got that. But I will make a mental note.

Uh, the GRE and graduate admissions.

Well, it's becoming grossly underrated. Schools are afraid to give the test for what you might call political reasons. So, uh, I'm a big believer in standardized testing. I think mostly it works. It's highly imperfect, but the alternatives are worse and do more to favor, like, the wealthy and the people with pushy parents who pad kids' fetuses. So I'm all for it. Bring it on.

Yeah, if you scroll through Twitter long enough, you can find a reason to discount pretty much every element of the graduate school application.

Yeah.

Aldous Huxley.

I'm not sure how he's rated. I think quite highly of him, and Brave New World for me is more interesting to reread than is George Orwell. And he has so many other books, and I've only looked at some of them, and most I found horribly boring and stupid. Somehow I felt there was something in there, and that if I read all of them, I'd have this very interesting total picture of the man. And since hardly anyone has read all of them, I'm going to say he's definitely underrated.

I have read all of them. He is grossly underrated. In fact, Point Counterpoint is perhaps my favorite novel. The Empire Strikes Back.

I think it has become underrated. It's one of the best movies of all time. But it's a bit like looking at the Mona Lisa, right? Or hearing, "I want to hold your hand." It's such a cliché, you're not even sure how to think about it. So when Darth Vader says, "Luke, I am your father," like, we all grew up in the world of the internet, but when you saw it way back when, you were stunned, like, "Oh my God, it's his father. I never thought that Darth Vader means dark father." So I think it's still pretty amazing, and the Disney stuff has transformed what Star Wars means and made, made that underrated. Alicia de la Roca, uh, she's one of the best pianists for Spanish music. She's now mostly forgotten. Uh, she had a real flair with those works and definitely underrated. My kind of classical piano mentor Roy Childs loved her, got me onto her, gave me some of her records.

They're still great and possibly had the best interpretation of the Mozart sonatas, in my opinion.

Those are very good by her too. I prefer Ushida, but she was more general than I at first made her out to be. That's right.

Gas cooking ranges.

Well, again, compared to what?

Electrical.

I think that having flame is a big advantage for wok cooking, which is what I like to do. I don't have flame. I wish I had flame. Uh, But most people aren't cooking those things, so it's probably correctly rated.

Human longevity research.

You know, for the first time in the last year, year and a half, I've started to believe there is something to it. So I used to think correctly rated by most people, overrated by my quote unquote weird friends in Silicon Valley. And now I think there's something there and it's underrated by most people. But my weird friends might still be overrating it.

Traditional Thanksgiving food?

Well, it depends how traditional you get. So if you go to Yucatán in Mexico and you eat turkey, that is phenomenal. So, you know, in the New World, indigenous foods as they are consumed on the plate today, like fiestas near, you know, Tiempo de la Cosecha in Mexico, Unbelievable, unbelievably underrated. But if you mean like your normal regular American family and stuffing and cranberry this and, oh, that's awful. Like the one good thing about this pandemic is there will be less of that. One of the few good— you know, mRNA vaccines and not so much Thanksgiving food. Those are like the recompense.

Excellent. That sounds like a good place to end. Is there anything you wish we had chatted about in the last minute before I have to let you go?

Well, next time you're out here, look me up. We'll get food somewhere. And maybe someday we'll get to do this again.

Fantastic. Thank you very much, Tyler. It's been a real pleasure.

My pleasure. Thank you.