Tyler Cowen on Never Crying at Art, Why Rap is Dead, and Quitting Writing Books (w/ Nabeel Qureshi)

There's this funny race, approximately it's between obviously Anthropic and OpenAI, but it's a race that never ends. But when you ask the question, when is this settled? Maybe the answer is just never.

People say, you know, I'm tired and it's like, well, pace yourself.

We're in the first inning, sir. And when Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. So all these debates, is Claude conscious? I would way sooner ask like, is Tyler Cowen conscious? But at the same time, I like to say I'm only conscious enough to avoid philosophical self-refutation. I don't think I feel that much. I've never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts, oh, I saw the Madonna and I started weeping, it makes no sense to me. It's like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There's positive-sum gambles for you. Here's a few. Here's the S&P 500.

A work of art has never made you cry?

Never.

I would say the last one, I think we saw this maybe together, was Memoria. And the scene at the end where they're both lying by the river and there's some kind of weird transmission that takes place moved me to tears.

That's too good a work of art for me to cry over.

Why do you write books?

I think Mentors and Mentees, which is the title of the next book, might be my last book. The world is changing very rapidly and a book takes 2 and a half years or more.

I just want to cut in and say this is my least favorite Tyler take.

Welcome to Dialectic, episode 50 with Tyler Cowen and Nabil Qureshi.

I wanted to do something special for episode 50, and Tyler Cowen is somebody who, frankly, I was a little intimidated to interview. My friend Nabil Qureshi, who had been on the show episode 13, one of my favorites, who's become somebody I've learned a tremendous amount from, had suggested Tyler a few times. And I frankly, I think Tyler's a little bit incompressible. So I wasn't sure about my normal dialectic style. And so I decided to use Nabil as an entry point to talk to Tyler. And I interviewed the two of them. If you're not familiar with Tyler, he is a PhD economist at George Mason University and leads the Mercatus Center. But he is also so many other things. He's blogged almost every day for over 20 years at Marginal Revolution. He has interviewed hundreds of people on his podcast. Conversations with Tyler. He's one of the best interviewers in the world. He's written nearly 20 books. Tyler and Nabil both are prolific, brilliant generalists. So I decided to focus most of the conversation on an area that I know is common ground for them, which is art and aesthetics and, for lack of a better word, taste. In the conversation, you'll hear it. Tyler says Nabil has some of the best taste of anyone he knows, particularly in movies, which is actually how they got to know each other. And I wanted to talk to these two about great art and why they respond to it. We also talk about AI and acceleration, commitments, what is sacred, mentorship, friendship, and much more. I think you could probably talk to Tyler Cowen and Nabil Qureshi about almost anything, and the moderator certainly isn't doing much heavy lifting, so I was just glad to be in the room. I hope you enjoy the conversation, and thank you for coming along for the ride for 50 episodes so far of Dialectic. I hope to see you for 50 more and beyond. You can get a full transcript for the show and all the linked references in the description below. And before we get into the things, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectics' presenting partner. Speaking of 50 episodes, Notion came on board towards the end of last year, and it's been an amazing journey to have them support the show and make so much more possible. Notion is collaborative workspace for your life's work that has reinvented itself for the AI era. Some of you may know Notion from using it in the past and see it as a great collaborative workspace, a great, uh, note-taking tool, a great database tool, whatever. But I think Notion is incredibly well-suited to the AI era because of how important context is for using these tools, whether it be individual models, plugging into tools like Codex and Claude Code, being able to have a shared substrate for you and everyone you collaborate with that updates in real time, that treats models and agents as first-class citizens. And is up to date with every single model as soon as it's released is remarkably powerful. Notion is the harness. It's the context layer. It's the canvas that holds all of that for me, for Dialectic, for research I'm doing, for understanding guests, for thinking about who might be able to come on the show in the future, and for preparing things for all of you. I also appreciate that Notion is deeply principled about the work that we automate and the ultimate mission of what Notion founder Ivan Zhao calls thinking together. The goal for us and our collaborators and increasingly these new intelligences is to think together and do great work. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic, and I think you'll be pretty blown away, especially if you haven't checked things out in a while. With that, here is my conversation with Tyler Cowen and Nabil Qureshi.

Gentlemen, thank you for being with me.

Thank you for coming over.

Thank you.

Or I should say, thank you for having us, Tyler. As I was just telling you guys, I'm excited to use Nabil as a little bit of an entry point to the incompressible Tyler Cowen. It's an honor to be with you. I want to start with this piece that Nabil and Will Manidis wrote fairly recently on rented virtue. And it's an essay about a few different things. I think it's an essay about work and secular institutions and religion and God. But I think maybe more than anything else, it's an essay about commitments, uh, or at least a big part of what it's about is about commitments. And so I guess my first question is for Tyler, but I, maybe we can open it up to both of you, which is, can a society sustain itself without some level of sacred commitments?

I think about this all the time. If I ponder Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, They seem on the surface quite secular societies, but you could say they're all built upon earlier matrices. Christianity in the case of Sweden and the United Kingdom, something more complex in the case of Japan. So empirically, you know, how distant do you have to be from your origins before you say the society is not built upon that anymore? I think there's a lot of momentum in this. That a lot of people in Japan are genuinely afloat in some sense. Maybe that's why they're not as happy as they might be. But it is a society. It's one of the most wonderful places on Earth, even though I feel they're missing something fundamental. So I do think it's possible. I'm not sure it's desirable.

I think of the saying— I think it's like, everything is about sex except sex, which is about power. And I feel like the modern equivalent of that is like everything is about AI except AI, which is about power. And so actually, I feel like in the shadows of that piece, it's really about acceleration, right? So if you read, I think one of the philosophers that's very important for the current moment is Nick Land. And I think it's because there's almost like a, there's a very powerful thing he puts his finger on in this concept of just pure acceleration, right? Acceleration with no human end or purpose in mind. And it does increasingly feel like that is where we are going eventually, right? If you believe that AGI is coming and AI is accelerating, then you kind of just get hyper hyper capitalism. And like, so the piece kind of traces this arc of like commerce from initially a thing that's very much tangled with how we view goodness and morality and virtue and religion. So you got the Quakers, you got Adam Smith. And the implicit thing is like, okay, we're here now where they're kind of coming apart. But unless we— I'm not saying we have to do something, but there is some sense in which they're going to come apart very aggressively in the next 50 years. And do we actually want that or not? And I think that was the animating question for me in writing that piece.

I don't think you need the word eventually to describe this accelerationism. It's happening now. There's this funny race, approximately it's between obviously Anthropic and OpenAI, but it's a race that never ends. Well, there's a separate race between the United States and China. But when you ask the question, when is this settled? When can we slow down? When can you just retire and write this off as the way we did with the Cold War? Maybe the answer is just never. And that to me is such a strange future.

Yeah.

Because it keeps on cycling itself, producing a better version of itself. Yes, maybe at faster rates.

People say, I'm tired, and it's like, well, pace yourself.

We're in the first inning, sir.

Yeah, exactly right. And then there's this debate right now over, are we seeing the beginnings of self-improvement or not? And clearly, in some sense, it's beginning, but there's a question of how fast it will go up. Right. But things will get faster is the way to put it, I think.

And the notion we all, I think, agree, like right now you should be working very hard. You are working very hard. Because the world's changing a lot, you need to be ready. And when you ask yourself the question, well, when can I stop working really hard and enjoy Keynes's 15 hours a week of work and lots of leisure? If it keeps on accelerating and change doesn't let up, again, you're asking, when does that day come?

You don't think we have more leisure time now as a society?

We had it until very recently. Now when a new model comes out, half of me is excited. The other half of me looks at my calendar and says, oh no, Could you please wait a week? I don't have time to play around with it just now. And there may be a point where you can just stop worrying about such things and ignore it, but I don't see that being next year.

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, the number of weekend days I've burned just playing with Claude Code or Codex or these new things, but also like, you know, there's, the point is, as these things get better, I think the returns to doing very human things also go up, right? So like, the returns to certain deal making, for example, are much higher now because if you make the right deal, then the amount of value you can unlock with the AI is much higher. And so I'm also flying around everywhere making deals at the same time.

But you've got to learn the AI to make the right deal, right?

Yeah.

And it's like the bottle of wine that keeps on getting better as it ages. Like, well, I'll make an even better deal tomorrow once I learn more about the AI.

Yes.

Yeah.

And so maybe, I mean, Jackson kind of gestured at this, but do you think there's something to that? Young people are going to going to mass more and there's kind of this Catholic revival online. Do you feel like we'll get this religious revival coming back a little bit?

I see it within the elites. I don't see it at the mass level. And I know there's New York Times stories, young men in the Orthodox Church, but in the aggregate, it's hard to see in the numbers. But the people I know, it's massive.

Do you think that markets can form virtue in us, or does the virtue have to come from something outside of it.

It's two ways and endogenous. So markets can boost virtue. I don't think they can form it. A lot of it is just in you genetically. And then you hope to have some beneficial interaction with the environment where the virtue supports the environment, the environment further supports the virtue, and so on. The West, for a lot of its history, has had that. For how long that keeps on going, I guess we're going to test that proposition. There's no reason why it has to go on forever. It might be self-undercutting. That's Albert Hirschman's famous claim that the real problem with capitalism is it works so well, it becomes self-undercutting at some margin.

Are we forming— you could take a view that we're basically forming the intelligences of the future primarily with markets. We are instilling them with the values of markets. Maybe you guys disagree, but if that's true and there isn't some other place virtue is coming from and we are in full speed ahead, like, where do you think that leaves us?

I think we are doing that, but we are also— there are only so many frontier AIs, right? And so somebody like, you know, an Amanda at Anthropic or somebody like that who's writing the Soul of Claude, etc., actually potentially has a lot of influence, you could argue. Now, the other side of that would be, well, eventually Claude will be in the shape that market demand wants it to be, right? So, like, you could kind of make the argument two ways. Same with Grok. I mean, if you look at it, like, clearly the way it behaves is in part the way that Elon wants it to behave. Um, but, like, I always joke that, you know, if I were, let's say, a Mormon missionary or a particularly religious person, I would be going and camping outside the offices of the AI companies, and I would try to send my brightest young people to get jobs there and essentially, like, influence the AIs to adhere to your particular religion? Because I think— I actually do think religious values could be a really interesting attractor for the AIs to behave in the ways we want them to be, just as they are for human beings.

So far, the AIs seem to be evolving in a manner similar to pets, coexistence and mutuality with humans. That's the better case scenario. I don't see that changing soon, but it may not be that way forever. I once joked the AIs you really need to worry about are the Wall Street AIs, because they're not really taught to cooperate with humans. And the normal AIs that everyone talks about, they're just going to be like puppy dogs more or less forever.

Do you think current competition is making OpenAI and Anthropic AIs more likely to trend towards being what you mean by Wall Street AIs though?

No, it's making them more like pets.

Really?

Like Spinoza the dog, he's hanging around the house. He's so nice. He's so sweet. He'll come over. He wants to be petted. He'll wag his tail at you or whatever. And Yeah, I think that's what we're seeing.

Yeah. So for business, for example, you need it to be reliable, right? And so like an AI that tells you it's written the code and then you check and it hasn't actually written the code, which they do in some cases right now, that's considered a bad behavior and it will get stamped out over time. So you'll get kind of the maximally helpful AI eventually.

So a certain degree of centralization and high fixed cost might be good because you only get pet-like AIs. But as AI becomes really cheap, fixed costs fall. Again, like the Wall Street AIs, you might have very, very good AIs not bound by those same selection pressures, and then you should start worrying. And you see this in when people think about AI and war, even if it's the good guys running the AIs, over time you might be evolving AIs that are in fact trained to kill. And in many instances, of course, that's what you want. But the longer-term repercussions of that, you know, should make us nervous.

Yeah, I can't help but— the comparison to pets, while it makes a ton of sense, I think of— I mean, you wrote a piece for Wired years ago about maybe the argument that— and in referencing Ilya Sutskever talking about AIs becoming something like a loving parent to humanity. But a parent and a pet are very, very different form factors. I can't help but feel that a pet is maybe, maybe where we are today, but certainly not where we are a year or two from now in terms of its stature.

Yeah, my point in that piece, which I think it was behind a paywall, so I didn't think it was read very widely, but I was quite proud of it because my argument was basically like, you are not going to get anywhere by trying to control how the AI responds in all these restrictive ways, right? So you hear this concept of, oh, we have to make sure that given the same input, the AI produces the same output, or things like that. We need to make it more reliable. And to me, you're not taking AI seriously enough, right? At the limit, AIs become like other agents. They become other people, practically speaking. And so how do you— you know, when you have a child, how do you educate the child? You teach it morals, or you teach it religion, or whatever. You imbue it with the right values. It kind of figures out what you mean by them in some mysterious way, and then it ends up behaving in roughly the ways you want it to. And my point there was like, I think we're gonna have to teach the AIs to adhere to some of those same values, whether it's through teaching them religion. And the kind of facetious way of putting it is like, love is all you need, right? You need to teach them how to love, which is like, it's a little bit of a provocative framing. But yeah, I do think like, you need to figure out how to put the right values in them. And like, that is going to become more important as they exceed human intelligence.

But if you want to hunt for worries, at some point there'll be an open source, call it an S&M AI, right? And it won't be very important.. It won't even be the best or strongest AI, but over time it might evolve in strange ways. And if the world is going to end, maybe we can blame all the people who practiced S&M and then trained their AIs to help them. And the normal AIs, again, that everyone worries about, they're just going to be like docile pets.

Right. Well, I think this is the case for— I think Vitalik came up with this term defensive acceleration.

Right.

And so the idea is simply that the good guys get the AIs first, and then you kind of patch up the world such that it's very robust. And then by the time something like what Tyler Cowen said happens, you've kind of hardened the defense chances enough that the defenders will always win. But—

And that's why we should be accelerationists for the most part.

Yes. Yeah.

To maybe go back to the beginning of the first part of that conversation, I'm curious for you, Tyler, is anything sacred for you?

I'm not a religious person. So when you ask what is sacred, I could take that in a number of ways.

Yeah.

I think I lead in some ways a fairly religious life in the Protestant sense of being oriented toward projects. And feeling that I need to fulfill a certain personal role in those projects. And if you want to call that sacred by any other name, I wouldn't object, but I don't deploy the word myself.

You've talked a lot about increasing productivity. Is there anything more ideologically that you're particularly committed to?

Ästhetics in my personal life, obviously particular personal connections. Curiosity, travel. I'm very strongly committed to all those.

I think there's a, maybe, this is maybe not the right word, but there's a sort of liberal view that says we should choose individualated commitments, basically. Kind of along the way you just described, I think I would relate to that. I think Nabil would relate to that. Part of maybe the idea, at least rooted in the Quaker stuff that you guys were exploring, is like, a commitment that is not only outside of yourself, which I would describe the things you just said as being that, but also like part of a larger whole or something like that? Do you relate to anything in that way or not really?

I think I'm very mundane in many ways. And when Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective. Yeah. I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work, I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven't seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but actually to me, those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I'm fine with that.

What about your influence?

I don't know. I think influence is quite temporary and my influence will not survive my passing.

But I think you're deeply influential now.

Maybe. You know, there's so many nonlinear effects. Who's really influencing what? It's very hard to say. I would say don't worry about it too much. If you are going to be influential, you'll be less influential if that's what you're trying to maximize. Ah.

I feel like one way of putting this maybe is like you, um, you ex— you are a very exterior person. Everything is exterior. Like you want to write something and push it out. You want to travel the world and interact with it. It's like you, you don't value your inner states necessarily so much. You're like in the world, right?

Well, I think I'm not that conscious, to get a little more radical here. So all these debates, is Claude conscious? I would way sooner ask, like, is Tyler Cowen conscious? And I'm sure I am a bit. If I were not at all, there'd be an obvious self-contradiction, right? The transcendental argument here does apply. But at the same time, I like to say I'm only conscious enough to avoid philosophical self-refutation. And I think the real me is mostly underneath, as it is with all people. And there's this thin veneer of feeling in charge that somehow nature chose to give us. And I'm fine with that. Maybe I don't want to be more conscious. Like, I'm used to how it is. It's gone well for me.

How about you? We're surrounded by a lot of sacred art. Do you feel like if you were more religious, there would be you would see it differently or something like that?

If I were more religious, it would be harder for me to have all this art around. Some of it is a kind of pagan Catholicism. Some of it is Haitian voodoo religion. Some of it is Soviet art. And I'd have all these inner conflicts like, what am I doing with this? What am I doing with that? And being what I call a non-believer, maybe agnostic, maybe atheist, but a non-believer, I can enjoy it all, learn from it, be in this intense environment where it's around me every day and just take it in and still relax. It's like not a statement in the way that it might be for a religious person. I've had religious people come over here and they're terrified by the voodoo art. And they're like, Tyler, why do you have that here? It's like, it's not going to come and get you. But they don't quite believe that either. And these would be Christians, you know, not practitioners of voodoo. There was once a Nigerian woman over here who did have ties to native Nigerian religions, and I think she was terrified.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I mean, I don't have that burden.

I feel like I'm sort of an art as experience guy, right? So I do feel like the experience of encountering a work of art is the thing that we value in it and what happens inside you, if you will. So I don't know if we disagree on that, but it feels like you emphasize it less in some ways.

Yeah, maybe. I'm sure you've read those articles. Well, the people who understand art the best are the museum guards. I don't think that's a crazy opinion. It's not quite correct, but it's closer to correct than many people would like to think.

I love going to a gallery and you see the guards and they're all scrolling their phone and it's like Van Goghs everywhere.

But they look at it plenty.

Yeah.

And most of them who typically are not that well educated, they do grow to love abstract art. Or works that might be strange, rejected often by many more educated people because they just spend so much time with it and it starts making sense to them. And I give that kind of response a fair amount of priority.

Did you ever have a moody sort of German romantic phase, like maybe when you were a teenager or something?

Well, when I lived in Germany, it was a big thing. It's partly why I went to Germany, but it wasn't that moody. I would say it was distanced romantic phase, which is this contradiction in terms,, but I wanted to read Goethe. I wanted to live in South Germany. I wanted to imbibe all of that, which today, by the way, is mostly gone. But this was early to mid-1980s, and then you still felt it. So I was in Freiburg, which is where, you know, Hayek actually was living. Heidegger had connections there. Uh, it was fantastic.

We have a mutual friend who I won't name, but their take is that you're actually a deeply emotional person, but you sort of like push it to one corner of your mind and don't interact with it too much. What do you think of that?

I think I have a fair degree of equanimity, and every morning I wake up happy.

Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?

I don't even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don't think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it's pleasure, and I feel I learn a lot from it. And then when I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more that people may not who don't live with art. I don't think I feel that much. I've never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts, oh, I saw the Madonna and I started weeping, it makes no sense to me. It's like people who do sports gambling. It's like, why do you do that? There's positive-sum gambles for you. Here's a few.

Hang on.

Here's the S&P 500.

A work of art has never made you cry.

Never.

No film, no novel, nothing.

If there's a really schlocky film and like the hero is rescued at the end, there's like a few tears, typically in lesser movies rather than great works of art. But I go to museums of the world. No, nothing brings me at all close to crying or laughing for that matter.

What's interesting to me though is that there are people, there are a lot of people in the world who are probably closer in the Venn diagram to you, especially on the surface, than the highly emotional art lover or the traditional person when you think about an artist. And yet you seem to— Nabil and I were talking about this— you seem to love art more than almost anyone I've ever met. And that's peculiar, peculiar, I should say.

I think that entire description is true.

To go back a little—

where were you on the spectrum, so to speak?

Yeah, I mean, I think I do have strong emotional responses to work. I guess I would probably cry maybe once every 3 years in response to something. It's not a super high rate, but something really good will come along and evoke that response.

And what makes you cry?

I think when just, you know, it's almost like, it's like you said, when you're looking at it, right? And then it's like your whole body is responding to it or something, that it's almost like something overflows. Like, I would say the last one, I think we saw this maybe together, was Memoria. And the scene at the end where they're both lying by the river and there's some kind of weird transmission that takes place moved me to tears. Yeah.

So that's too good a work of art for me to cry over.

Yeah.

So something like the final scene of Top Gun, I might shed 2 or 3 tears.

Oh my God.

Like out of embarrassment. I don't defend this. But it does motivate me to do that. It makes me suspicious of crying. In fact, I don't feel like, oh, I should be crying at, uh, you know, the Rembrandt painting. I feel, oh, I should be suspicious of crying.

Yeah, I don't necessarily think it's what I would call an intelligent response. It's sort of just a fact about the world, I think. But, um, I do think that, uh, the experience of being emotionally moved by an artwork is part of the value we get out of it in some way. Like, I think if you don't experience any emotions when you're seeing it, but you still consider it very valuable, that's like harder for me to parse, if that makes sense.

Like, what's emotions? What's cognition?

Right.

That's quite blurry for me.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the tears you do not see, that I can report.

I will say I don't cry a lot, but the causality is quite random. Like, I cried during NBA highlights sometimes, like watching LeBron in 2016. I, that moves me, I guess.

That makes some sense. Yeah.

Do you, do you cry at all in your life?

No, not in decades.

In decades.

Yeah, that I can, no, I can't think of anything.

Hmm. Hmm.

Nabil also wrote a piece recently about what makes great art, and he has this kind of set of criteria in it where he's talking about surprise and echoes and depth. And something that was absent from it that I was curious for your guys' perspective on is beauty. Obviously beauty could be heavily wrapped up in all three of those things, but is beauty, uh, a necessary factor in great art?

Yeah, I was trying to go one level below that, I guess I should say. Like, to me, those things add up to what we call beauty. Um, but the, the thing I was really just very puzzled by, right, is like Firstly, when you read AI writing, at least for me, I find it very irritating. And I know a lot of people in whom that evokes that response. There's something very kind of— you tense up when you're reading it and you're like, I don't want to read this anymore. And then it's also just funny because they can code better than most engineers I know. They can do better math than many mathematicians now. Right. So there's some ways in which they're extremely intelligent, and yet they can't produce an essay as good as, let's say, a Joan Didion essay or something like that. So it was like, kind of, why? And so to me, if you just say, well, the paragraphs it produces are not beautiful enough, that's not really an answer because you're like, okay, well, why? And so I wanted to try and— I don't think I fully succeeded by any means, but I wanted to try and give more of almost like an engineering answer to what some pieces of beauty might be. And so that's why it's very like a mechanistic kind of essay, right? It's like, if these words kind of are knitted together in this way, then you get this beauty thing as an emergent property. But I think beauty itself is like a very high-level feature, and you need to explain what it is.

Isn't beauty a little boring though? Like, if I asked you to name beautiful piece of music, beautiful work of art, don't you just seize up a bit and all of a sudden you're not sure?

Yes.

What's actually beauty? Or maybe you like parts of it because it's ugly. Or Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, parts of it are scary or angry or sad, and that's why it works. It's actually not that beautiful. Though it at first lures you in with some promise of beauty, the opening measures.

Right. Like when you say beauty, I think of Mozart or something like that, but it's harder to—

It's so much of Mozart, the best Mozart is tragic, I think, or comic.

Yeah. But like something like you and I saw a concert recently by this band Sun O, and it's harder to describe that as beautiful straightforwardly, right? Even though it's aesthetically very cool.

Yes.

Yeah.

Is there art that you love that is complete, like completely lacks beauty?

It's in the eye of the beholder, but I like a lot of brutalist architecture, especially in Eastern Europe. Now I might try to defend its beauty in some funny, weird way, but by ordinary standards, yeah, it lacks beauty.

This is what I'm, because part of the, I don't know, I've listened to, or read and talked to you extensively about art. You have some amazing conversations, particularly with Rick Rubin, about music and about art. And one of the consistent themes you highlight is this, like, almost all truly great art, at least at some point contextually, was so deeply strange and weird. And I'm interested in this relationship between strangeness, or even grotesqueness, or other words you might use, and beauty. One of my favorite bits about the Rick conversation, you're talking about Venice Beach by Lana Del Rey, and you make the point that You kind of say the best part of the song is like the first 2, 3 minutes, which is just angelic, and then the rest of the song you're just kind of like, "I wish I could go back to the first part." But that's why it works, because you wish and then it never delivers.

If it delivered, it would be a much worse creation.

Hmm. So maybe that's— it's like we can't have it all. You can't just have ice cream all the time or something like that?

You can't have ice cream all the time. Like if you think what is quote unquote beautiful art, maybe I'd say something from the 18th century, like Tiepolo in Würzburg, or some parts of 18th century music, which are mostly beauty, but they feel a bit limited. And I still like them a lot and enjoy them, but I want something else.

A colloquial way of putting it might be that, like, good, the really good stuff actually keeps you on your toes. Right? So, like, if you listen to, we were just discussing, um, the song Happiness is a Warm Gun by the Beatles. And that song really keeps you on your toes. Like the time signature keeps changing and the guitar goes from soothing to suddenly he's kind of stabbing it. And the vocals go from like a lullaby to a yelp. And it's constantly changing. And this is kind of the point I was trying to make with the Shakespeare sonnets in that essay is like, they keep destabilizing you just as you think, you know what's going on. He says something completely off the wall and you have to kind of reinterpret everything.

Yeah.

And so maybe I think Tyler's taking beauty to mean something that's kind of like a nice vase or something, right? But it's not like—

Or a Gio, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's beautiful.

Right, right.

And it is. But you're in a house with plenty of voodoo art, right? Is that beautiful? It depends.

Is all the art in this home beautiful to you?

Again, I'm not sure what you mean, but it's not chosen on that basis. I want something that's more challenging. Yeah, it attracts me, obviously, almost by definition. Hmm.

There is a thread in something you had written that led me to this piece that Christopher Alexander wrote in 2016, Making the Garden. A couple of quick excerpts. This has all come to light because of my intense interest and focus on architecture. In conventional philosophy, there is nothing that allows one to test the reality of God or a vision inspired by God, but we ask people to compare two buildings or two doorways and to decide which one is closer to God. Different people will answer this question the same way and with a remarkably high reliability. And I think it's worth noting Alexander is almost— or is typically talking about architecture, which has a functional role too. But when he talks about the quality without a name, when he talks about a certain kind of beauty that has God in it, there's an element of it that maybe is pointing at something like wholeness or cohesion. That's another part of this that I'm curious about. Like, certain art can be really surprising but have that element of wholeness or cohesion, and other art can be strange and surprising and even beautiful but doesn't have— it's almost, to steal language from Alexander, it's almost like it doesn't have God inside it. I'm curious for both of your thoughts, but especially you, Nabil, I'm curious how you relate to that idea and whether at least you personally are seeking for that again, I'm struggling for a word, the wholeness.

Yeah, I think it's a really interesting point. I think he's right, but I think the prompt matters, if that makes sense, right? So his prompt is like, can you find God inside it? I think when you view— when you give people that prompt, they probably will answer in similar ways. But is that the prompt that matters for everybody? I don't know. Um, I, I think part of having or developing your own taste is that, at least for me, it's pretty instant if something is interesting or not, even if it's immediately ugly to me, right? So like the first time I ever listened to, I think it was My Bloody Valentine. Absolutely amazing. I think Loveless might be one of my favorite albums.

Same here.

Yeah, it's incredible.

But it made no sense to me.

It makes no sense.

But I knew I was going to explore it. Yes.

Yeah, it's like sort of ugly, sort of strange. Now if you ask me, like, do I see Do I feel God in it? Like, I would say yes.

Yeah.

Right. But like, I don't know if I'd have said that initially.

Yeah. We talked about Yeezus last time we talked about a similar element with Kanye. Like, I hated it so much at first.

That I loved right away.

Did you? You're ahead of us all the time.

The New York Times no longer lists him as one of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. So he's been canceled.

Yeah.

It's interesting though, right? I mean, I actually also had the same response as Jackson where I hated it straight away and then it became my favorite album of his. But then you can't really reason much from that because his latest stuff, I hated it right away, and then I've not really changed my mind and liked it for the most part. I think the most recent one is decent, but the few albums in between the, um, the gospel one and where we are now, I would say, are not good.

Music is an area where sort of the more you listen— you, you even said something like this, Tyler, I think something along the lines of like the more the more you listen, the more your appetite grows for it. And I would also say the more you listen to one in particular thing, the more you're likely to like it. Maybe that's true for all art, but I think it's especially true in music. I'm curious, as someone who has such wide taste and has had a lot of time, how do you know when to go back to something that you didn't connect with?

If it's just running through your mind, you go back to it, you put it on again. Uh, I think it's a mistake to be too systematic about that. And whatever listening plans you might have, you should always disrupt them. Just suddenly do something else. Go off on a different tangent. There's always YouTube, right? That'll give you some ideas.

There are some areas of music you just don't really resonate with that much, right? Or you wouldn't say so.

There's not that much in metal I love. I don't object to it. Country, I like early country and western quite a bit. A lot of modern and country and western, I say, I like this in principle, but I would like to like it a bit more than I actually do. Those would be the two main areas.

Electronic music?

I love complex techno and Aphex Twin, Richard T. James, and a lot in that direction, but just plain EDM to me is a little boring. It's just dance music. But I can get sick of music forever. So this ethnic music, you listen to them for a while, you're very glad you listened to them, but you don't go back to them that much. And I think that's fine.

Is there, could you try to pick out a quality that most has you going back to the things, the stuff you really love, whether it's classical or otherwise?

Well, hearing different things in it all the time. But another thing that happens with some genres You decide, I'm only going to do the live in concert version of this. So I'm at that point with a lot of jazz. I like it more than ever before, but it's so good in concert. You just say, I'm not going to put it on the stereo really ever again, but I'll work hard to see some good concerts. And otherwise I'm done with it. And that feels kind of optimal to me.

You're almost like not spoiling the live performance.

That's right. And not settling for the lesser. And ethnic musics tend to be like that. They're created for live performance out of cultures that didn't have recording. So like Haitian Rara music, the first time you hear it on disc, it's amazing. But then you see some in Haiti and you feel, oh, I'm not going to listen to this on disc anymore. And okay, you can't go back to Haiti right now, or maybe never, but you're still not going to put on the disc.

Yeah. Something I feel like maybe we have in common is like the stuff we are drawn to is almost, it's very puzzling. There's some puzzle in it that you have to that keeps drawing you back. So like the EDM comment, I don't like EDM either. I just think the patterns are so obvious and simple. And like, once you figure out what those patterns are, it's like not that rewarding to listen to for me. Um, whereas like something like Aphex Twin, it's so odd and jagged somehow that you keep wanting to go back and figure out what's making it happen.

Early Orb would be another example. Early Squarepusher.

I don't know either of those.

Nicholas Yahr. Incredible.

I got some homework. I was thinking about context is that which is scarce, particularly in the con— I mean, I think it applies to a lot of, uh, thinking about you, Tyler, but particularly in the context of art. And it almost seems as though maybe it's just I'm substituting a word for complexity, but it seems like the things that are most compelling to you across all domains, and especially art, are the things that just have more context to gain on them almost. I have to wonder about, like, if you were able to have a new dimension of context on country music via some person in your life or otherwise, like, is that— am I approximating it the right way or is that too orthogonal idea?

I may be just locked out of it. So Garth Brooks maybe will always be a bit boring to me. But I put on, you know, the Kacey Musgraves album, the really good one, like from 6 years ago, whenever. And that's excellent. But to me, it's just great songwriting. I don't really imbibe the country element that much. So Hank Williams, I think I can enjoy a great amount. Johnny Cash, uh, Louvin Brothers. But somehow the sheer fact of the country and Western or countryness of it doesn't register with me that well. Maybe it's just where I grew up, which was New Jersey.

Why do you think the Beatles register so much? Is it the same thread?

Because they're the best.

So why?

What does that mean?

You had the world's two greatest songwriters and two greatest vocalists together in the same band, active in a significant way for 7 years together. And you never had that before. You may never have it again.

I love the Beatles, and they're certainly— like, I go listen to Strawberry Fields. You could listen to it —could be their best song, yeah. But a lot of the Beatles aren't that complex. I love "In My Life," as an example. That's very complex.

Really? Oh, of course. That's a bad example.

Why? Just everything about it? I'm just totally wrong.

The way the melody meanders, the backwards piano part played by George Martin, the modulations, the way the vocals are interwoven, I think that's a phenomenally complex song. And again, one of their best.

A lot of the times they do sound simple, and then you talk to a musician about it, and they're like, wow, Wow, I would never would have thought to go from this chord to this chord.

Even an early, apparently very simple song like "From Me to You." Yeah. Very complex. And when the Beatles first did it, I think it was Paul who said, "After this one, like, I knew we could just do it." And it's an amazing song, melodically, harmonically. And no one else could have done it then. But it sounds very simple. They do have some songs that are just flat out simple, but surprisingly few. You listen to even things like What Goes On, which for a long time I didn't even like, but it's both a wonderful song and highly complex. And I talked to Rick Rubin about this. He completely agreed. He goes, oh yes, that's amazing. I love it. And he's right.

One of my favorites is Year Blues.

Of course, the two different guitar parts going in different rhythms.

Unbelievable. That one is just satisfying to hear. I think it's Paul and he's just yelling.

No, that's John. That's John. That's John?

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. It's his yelling. It's very, it's very satisfying.

And the drum and bass interplay.

Yeah, I had this—

I took a Beatles class in college, and my professor was obsessed with this idea that ever since John did Twist and Shout, Paul was just obsessed with trying to match him in the yelling for like the next decade almost. I always think of that when I think of Paul's attempts.

I think it's true, by the way. Paul wanted to best John in many other things as well. Yes. But first is Long Tall Sally, right? And then many— jet— later on, many, many attempts which succeed.

What do you think the best Beatles song is?

I don't know that there is one. Strawberry Fields is a good nomination. The classic pick, Day in the Life, I would not choose. It's a little overblown. The one I enjoy hearing the most is You Won't See Me, 1965, Rubber Soul. And it's so complex in the background. The harmonies, the piano parts, the bass, everything. Unbelievable. Listen to it with headphones. That's my favorite at the moment, but it's always changing too.

I was going to say, is it? So it would have, it would have been different a year ago?

No, but maybe 3 years ago.

Yeah. How about you?

It changes like depending on the day, but right now I'm feeling, um, You Never Give Me Your Money.

Oh, in my top 5. I love that song. Absolutely. That might have been my favorite 3 years ago.

Yeah, that one's amazing.

Did Geese do a cover of that? Golden Slumbers is amazing. I think might have covered that. I think that maybe that was why it was in my head.

Yeah. I've been— sorry, go ahead.

I was going to ask, did you get it all into Cameron Winter last year, Tyler? Nope.

I tried to get him into it. I don't think it landed. Geese, I sent you. Oh, that. Yeah.

I like that a lot.

Yeah.

So that person is named Cameron Winter. Okay. I didn't know that.

He did a solo album, which you have to listen to. Yeah.

It's on the CD rack right now.

It's there. Yeah. Yeah. He's also, I feel, I don't know if he is. Explicitly Christian, but he does all his performance in churches. And I feel like he's very— there's a certain born-again-ness to his lyrics. Oh, good. Yeah.

Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. In a subversive way. Yes. Yeah. I saw him at Carnegie Hall solo in December. It was very special. One question, maybe rehashing a little bit, but I'm curious to the extent you think that appreciating art Is a skill that can be practiced beyond just consuming more?

When you read about art, its history, I think you learn a lot of relevant material. You get context. What Duchamp was doing makes sense when you look at what followed him, what came before. So there's plenty you can do, and I think it all works. A certain amount of openness is required, but not too much else. Education can hold you back as much as help you in the formal sense of education. Getting back to the museum guard's point. And if you go to say rural Mexico, where I spent a lot of time, I wrote a book about it. And a lot of the artwork in this house is from rural Mexico. People there love the art that they create. They'll talk about it for hours, analyze it. They're very astute observers. And maybe they wouldn't understand Picasso, but they have a lot in their aesthetic lives that's visual. And they would talk about it, say, better than we would. And we're quote unquote educated and they never even went to high school.

The word openness. Have you always been this open, maybe to everything, but especially to art?

No, when I was younger, I was much more closed. Like I would not eat a lot of foods. And by my early 20s, I was over that., but I just thought, well, only a certain number of foods are good and I would stick with those. But I learned out of that pretty quickly. It wasn't a hard struggle. I just had to try some.

On the appreciation point, I'm a big advocate of critics. Um, you have to find the right ones. I would say like very few of them are actually good, but like I, I've learned a ton from just reading Tyler's posts on various movies or books. Right. And then, you know, in the movies, you know, you read someone like Pauline, Pauline Kael and, um, Who I think you like as well. And—

Yeah, selectively, but absolutely. Selectively, yeah.

But like, I think it's amazing to watch the same movie as somebody else and they get way more out of it than you do. And I think when you read that and then you go back to the work and then you kind of do this process again and again, you learn to get more out of the same thing too. And same with literary criticism. I think the best literary critics have taught me a lot.

And we became friends basically because of movies. So I visited Nabil's homepage and there's a list of his favorite movies. And there's only two people I've ever met in my life that I think have perfect taste in movies, and that's Nabil and Scott Sumner. Maybe I don't agree with them 100%, but even where I disagree, I feel the judgment here is as good as any that could be brought to bear on the movie in question. And they're the only two I've ever met, including professional movie critics. When I read, I think, no, they're off, they're off. Nabil and Scott, I never think they're off, even if my opinion is not exactly the same.

So yeah, during the pandemic, we used to— well, Tyler would book a movie theater because they were closed because of lockdown and such. And so it was very cheap to actually just book out a movie theater and you could bring your own disc or Blu-ray. And Tyler has a vast collection of CDs. So every week, me and him and whoever was around would kind of go and see some crazy movie. And it was—

it was Hong Kong classics. Yeah. And it'd be $100. So you have 6 people, $100. It's more or less the price you pay now for a normal viewing. So we had a great time.

Yeah, can't do it probably. Well, maybe you could do it today. I don't know. There's most of those theaters.

Price is higher, right? Supply and demand. There's an opportunity cost.

You mentioned that for a while your wife referred to Tyler as the movie guy.

I didn't know this. No one else calls me that.

She says, oh yeah, the movie guy, because she used to come sometimes too. Yeah, no. And then You know, she didn't know about you through your blog the way I did. So she's like, oh yeah, the guy we used to see the movies with.

You said—

you used the word judgment to describe Nabil and Scott's movie taste. When it is particularly when it isn't overlapping exactly with your opinions, you guys, as far as I understand, have quite similar taste. What, what is inside of that? What do you mean by why is his judgment good?

Like, take Cassavetes movies, which are favorites of Nabil's. I recognize they're very, very good, and I wish I could like them more than I do. And when I watch them, I feel how good they are, but I don't relate to it or enjoy it the same way I would like a Bergman film or a lot of classic European cinema. But I don't at all feel my view is better than his. If anything, I think his view is probably better than mine. But I'm just not there either. I'm lacking the context.

Those are extremely messy. So maybe I prefer the mess than you do even. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, this maybe goes back to your earlier line of questioning a little bit, right? Because I think Cassavetes is very, just puts you in these very difficult experiences and kind of, it's almost like torture watching his movies in some weird way where people are acting all crazy and weird and you sort of just have to sit there and tolerate it a little bit. And I think you grow through the process of doing this. But maybe you could say that Tyler values this type of experience in art less than I do. I don't know, maybe that's a reach.

And Mike Leigh movies he likes more than I do. Yes. Again, I don't disagree with him. I just saw them all without subtitles and at best understood half. And I don't like them as much.

So that one's me being a regional thinker. I mean, Mike Leigh is a British director. I grew up in Northern England. He often makes movies set in very deprived parts of England. And there's definitely a piece of that where I just recognize my own nighttime strolls through Manchester or London. And a lot of the characters are sort of derelicts or people on the margins of society, shall we say.

But I probably have better taste in The Sopranos than Nabil would, though I don't think he would dispute my claims necessarily.

I'm planning to watch that this year, actually, for the first time all the way through.

I recognize about 80% of the locales. Wow. Even the quite obscure ones, not just the famous ones like the drive over the bridge, like, oh, that's Boarding Goods Store. That's on Route 17.

I remember that. Is The Sopranos the ultimate New Jersey work of art?

Well, that and Bruce Springsteen, early Springsteen. Yeah.

My favorite Springsteen song is Thunder Road, by the way.

You know, I just did an episode with Bob Spitz, who worked with Springsteen in his early years and who's written biographies of Bob Dylan, Beatles, Rolling Stones. They're great books. And he thinks Thunder Road is Bruce's greatest achievement. And he's probably right. The alternative would be the song Born to Run. Yes. Or I would say the sequencing of songs on the Born to Run album, maybe you'd put above it all because it also contains those two. But something about the sequencing. It's perfect. Jungleland and what comes at the beginning, the end. Unbelievably good.

Yeah. I'm a little sad about— I don't know what you think about this, Jackson, because you listen to a lot of music, but the kind of album as an art form feels like it's less and less important in relative terms. It's still, you still get it, right? I mean, Geese are doing this quite well, I think. In Rainbows maybe was the last like album, quiet album that I can think of that was really, really great.

But yeah, I was thinking of totally different from your guys' opinion, but I was thinking of Nebraska. And like, I don't even know if I can name a song on Nebraska. I think of the album, you make this point somewhere, Tyler, that like when I'm 64 on Sgt. Pepper versus as a random song on Spotify. It's like very silly. Yeah, it's— I don't know, these, these types of questions are always so hard to not just be like, oh, I'm not in my 20s anymore, I'm mad about how the kids are. What do you think, Tyler?

It's very important to keep on listening to new music. Yes, about albums specifically. Oh yeah, they're mostly dead. I think music today, there's a large number of quite wonderful and entertaining songs. In that sense, there's no decline. But for real breakthroughs, maybe I'm too much an old fogey, but I don't really see— there's been so much since the '90s, and we're a bit stuck and cycling through things. And the mere notion that you feel you're creating a new genre by mixing together some genres that were already there, that's become boring. Maybe that's the last thing like we did. Rap, I think, is largely dead. Electronica, for now at least, been exhausted. I'm waiting for AI music to become really good. It isn't yet, but I am hopeful.

You think rap is largely dead? Yeah. You agree?

It's boring now.

Yeah, when was the last really great rap album? I think not for many years. Even Kendrick Lamar, it's overrated.

It's become like establishment art in a way Jesper Jones had been. But it's Black and it's rap and people treat it a different way, but it's not that fresh.

Have you always felt that way about Kendrick or are you just saying now?

I think I've always felt that way. Huh. I loved a lot of early rap from the '80s. Felt very fresh. De La Soul felt very fresh. Some of OutKast. I'm not anti-rap the way some people just hate the art form, but at the same time, I don't put it on anymore. Unless you count Kanye as rap, but I wouldn't. You wouldn't count him? Why? It's, if you had to say, it's more rhythm and blues and just eclectic. Some of the early you could call rap, but he's not fundamentally a rapper at heart.

There was also just much more interesting experimentation back then, I think. So like Madvillain, Blackstar, Mos Def, people like that were doing really interesting kind of avant-garde.

Much tech may have heard rap. Yes, I think so. You can just twiddle with the knobs and feel you have something new, but you haven't really been challenged. It's like Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, totally analog. Incredible sounds on that or on the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds because their resources are so limited. And now it's so easy and you throw everything, you know, the whole kitchen sink at the problem. And it's just, it's boring.

This is one reason Cameron's so exciting, right? Is it's like often it's just him and a piano. Geese have this very lo-fi, quasi-shoebox kind of thing going on.

Even the solo, I mean, one back, we talked about this a little bit earlier. I didn't like it at first, but I just had to go back. Yes. On the note of not liking things, or I shouldn't say not liking, I wanted to watch one film before this, and it may be relevant for both of you. I know you both like it, but one, Nabil has said that movies are like waking dreams, and I know it's one of your favorite movies, so I watched Uncle Boonmee's Past Lives. Oh, wow. Who can remember his past lives? And I think it's an interesting case study in, like, a bunch of the stuff we were just talking about, which is I think I'm someone who— I don't know, I'm a coastal elite, I have a podcast, I, like, care a lot about art, and I'm always trying to, like, aspire to raise my bar. Um, I found this movie to be difficult, uh, and great and very strange. And so it's maybe an interesting example of something where— and I suspect if most people watched it, they would agree, they would be like, this is one— I think, Tyler, I don't want to misquote you, but I believe you called it one of the best films of all time.

I think I said I thought it was the best movie of the last 25 years. So that's pretty high praise.

First of all, did you feel that way instantly?

Within the first 15 minutes, yes. Wow. The scene where like the ghost, if that's the right word, comes and sits down at the table. One of the greatest movie scenes of all time. Blew me away. I could just keep on rewatching it. Did you feel the same?

So I had a prior because I found out about it through him. Um, but I will say, like, as soon as— in the opening shots where you, you're in this kind of field and then suddenly the red-eye creature appears. Yes. I think, I think what he does that's so good— so one, one is like, I think it will stick with you, Jackson, right?

Like, a year later, I did not hate it and I really liked parts of it, but I did find it to be slow. It's slow. It's challenging.

But this is what I was going to say, is like, all of his movies induce in me a very trance-like meditative state, and I think he cultivates and creates that. He's deeply Buddhist, this guy, right? But like I think if you view his movies as a way of accessing this state of being that you're not normally accessing, then I think you get a lot out of it. Yeah.

First time I saw it, I loved the first third and felt the last two-thirds were just falling off the track, or I wasn't sure. But then as I saw it more and also learned more about Buddhism, it fits together very well. And the strange moves he makes. Yes. By morphing the whole movie into something else that seems quite different. It really isn't. And what is sacred? What is beautiful in the modern world? How do we still see the hand of God in, say, ugly urban centers? It's all of the piece.

Unbelievable film. This goes back a little to context. Do you think 20-year-old Tyler would have loved that film?

Not loved it, but he would have been intrigued. Yeah. He might have stuck at only loving the first third. Yeah. Would be my guess.

Because I think that's what I find myself being drawn to, even when I've seen things that I really disliked. There's some element of like, I kind of want to become the person who likes this kind of thing. But I'm also dubious of wanting to like it because I'm supposed to. Because as someone who likes film, I need to like these obscure, cool arthouse movies that Nabil and Tyler like.

Maybe that's not a terrible motive. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like, if we believe in social norms as overall a good thing, To feel pressure to like something because you're supposed to, probably on net it's a plus. And people who don't have that in them are just worse off.

I do think, yeah, I do think that one of the ways that one acquires taste is through mentors and through models, right? And so I did learn a lot from reading Tyler's blogs and almost modeling his taste a little bit, even when sometimes I didn't really get it. I think almost everyone who develops good taste does this with somebody. Maybe you had someone who took you along to concerts when you were young or something like that. And so there is this aspect of faith in developing taste, I think, where to your point, it's like you think there is a there there. And so there's some things where I still haven't gone into, sort of waded in because I'm not convinced there is a there there. So for example, there's a French thinker called Jacques Derrida, and I probably should go and read him at some point, but I'm not entirely convinced there is a there there. And I don't know anyone who swears by it. Like if Tyler told me, you are missing a big piece of your life by not reading him, I would go read him tomorrow, but I don't have of those people.

Lacan is my marginal case of no there there. So Derrida, I put in a fair amount of effort, did conclude rightly or wrongly that there's no there there. So you can, in my opinion, write him off. Lacan, I keep on wondering. Smart people still will say this is amazing. I've tried a bunch of times, but I haven't given up. And there's a new Lacan book coming out later this summer, and I'll try it again. We'll see. That's my marginal, is there a there-there figure?

Yeah, I think French thinkers, modern French thinkers, they put too much of a premium on sounding cool or postmodern philosophy generally. And so I think it repays some effort to grasp the core ideas, but it doesn't repay making it your life's reading or something.

Baudrillard is quite good and Foucault is extremely interesting. So I'm not against the French in this period. But if they keep on not making sense, I feel I'm educated well enough. You have a lot of confidence that at some point I can strike the ledger. Yeah. Yeah. I do.

I do nowadays. I just put Foucault through, through GPT and I just have GPT explain it to me and that's, that's going to be good enough for now.

The problem with Foucault, I think, is so much of the history is wrong in a quite mundane way. So there's something very problematic about it. But the stuff, I think it's in a way quite simple, almost too simple. And the fact that the current right has so latched onto Foucault is a sign that it's simple. I don't mean necessarily bad, but well, there are these structures and they're trying to tell you what to do. And there's something anonymous about that as well. It's not just the individuals who form the conspiracy. It's how a lot of the world thinks today.

Yeah. What's the least complex or most simple or most lowbrow thing that you really love?

Well, what, what's lowbrow? We're going to be led to ask ourselves.

Tyler has very wide tastes. I mean, he goes to see a lot of movies that I, I will not go to see. He sees things all the time. I mean, he's a huge I don't know if, I don't know what you mean by lowbrow, but like he loves all kinds of sports, right? Whereas I'm kind of like, oh, I don't have time for that.

So I just don't really think it's lowbrow though.

That's why I'm, yeah, maybe least complex.

Yeah. That's tough. That's tough too. You know, the simple Mozart piano sonatas, are they very simple? Are they highly complex? Mondrian painting, is it simple or complex? Uh, something like Michael Jackson. To me, it's not lowbrow at all. It's super complex. No one else could do it. It's amazing. It's held up very well, held up better, say, than Prince. I get that he was a bad guy and did these terrible things, but man, I put it on, I think this is really something. Is that lowbrow? I don't know. Right. Taylor Swift to me is boring. I don't think it's bad. I think it's pretty good pop, but I don't get anything out of hearing it again.

What do you make of the fact that she's arguably the most famous musician ever?

She's very skilled at her brand of pop and the personality. It's a mix of super appealing but also not too threatening. Uh, and her show— live shows are supposed to be amazing. It makes sense, you know. I think it's meritocracy that she's doing so well, not some kind of weird fraud. But is it for me? No.

Do you think there's a chance going to one of her concerts would change your opinion?

I don't think so.

I might come away saying this is one of the most amazing live shows. Yeah. But at the end of the day, would I come home 3 days later and put on Red or something? I don't think so.

I don't think you know the album name.

I'm not a critic of it. I'm not trying to pull the Alan Bloom thing here on Taylor Swift. I think it's great that people like it.

You and Patrick Collison put out a call for new aesthetics. I think much of the conversation we just had is is perhaps an interesting backdrop for this. And one question I suppose I have is assuming that the most compelling things are going to be strange and perhaps that so much of modern creation is inherently digital, or at least reflective of something digital. I saw this photo on Twitter this week. You guys probably saw the guy playing chess on his laptop. That was great.

Was that a real photo or someone made it?

Do we even care? Do we even care?

I'm curious, and maybe as one final backdrop, in that Rented Virtue piece, Will and Nabil make a point that like the call for— I'm quoting— the call for a new aesthetic is necessarily a call for new transcendent morality. You cannot build beautiful things without beautiful and transcendent reasons for making them. In some sense, I don't know that there's anyone maybe more equipped to evaluate or prompt new aesthetics. I also know lots of people who probably know less about you and who see it as like two kind of tech capitalist guys being like, we need to invent new aesthetics from first principles. But I'm curious what, what that experience has been like so far, 6 months in, to the extent you have a thought on the, on the, the moral kind of underpinning part. There needs to be God in the art. How the digital part plays into it. And that's a bunch of questions rolled into one, but I would love maybe just an update. We've made many awards.

Some of them are digital. Uh, I was pretty happy with the applications, but of course there's a lot of bad ones. It's true in any open application process. I don't think we or anyone has found what the new aesthetic or new aesthetics are. I'm fine with that. I think my views and Patrick's views are actually pretty different. So when people say these like two tech guys, like I'm not even that. I have trouble working the cable TV. But, uh, I'm in a position, like I grew up in the Northeast of the United States in the 1970s. And to see the current state of aesthetics as inevitably in a world that is somehow ideologically fractured comes very natural to me. And that makes me not nostalgic artistically. I'm not sure I can describe Patrick's view well, but he would not describe it the way I just described my own. So, as we were like putting up nominations, we had pretty different opinions.

Yeah. And part of the point I think we were making there was not necessarily that a new aesthetic has to be religious in nature. It's not a religious apologetic. I think it's more like, if you take The House We're In as an example, right? We're in Tyler's house. I think it's very beautiful. It's directly connected to how he lives his life though, right? And Tyler's not religious, as we've already heard, but it's very much like a monument to his love of art and books and everything that he consumes and kind of takes in. And, um, I think for that reason it's beautiful. And so I think the point there is like, you cannot just make something that looks pretty and, um, expect that to become the next wave of aesthetics. I think the next wave of aesthetics does express a certain way of living as well. And these things are very tied up. And so in a sense, like the thing that's gonna do it is also gonna be philosophically very interesting, whatever it is.

And the shared context is no longer clear. I don't know how much it ever was, but there was at least a pretense in the 18th century or medieval times that it was clear. I suspect it wasn't in fact clear back then, but the pretense itself means something. And now we're— those pretenses have all been knocked down. We've all seen Duchamp or heard Schoenberg or whatever you think the different markers were. And what does it mean to rebuild that? Does that make sense? Do we just have to go forward and do weird things that don't cohere and that's the new coherence? Maybe that's my view. Yeah.

I mean, so one of my favorite buildings in New York is the Chrysler Building, right? Or if you go look at kind of these Art Deco masterpieces around New York, and I think they are coming directly out of this kind of Gilded Age optimism about America and capitalism and building tall buildings. And it's all kind of cool, right? And I think now people are sort of trying to revive that aesthetic of this kind of Ayn Rand Art Deco situation, right? There was that recent movie Megalopolis by Coppola, for example, which is all about this. But I think that doesn't quite work because we are way more pessimistic than those people were. And so I feel like the core problem here actually is like demoralization and pessimism and less like aesthetics, if that makes sense.

Or the Trumpian move toward all this classicism in public architecture. It becomes kitsch or schlock or just bad. Redoing Art Deco, I also suspect, is not possible. So you're left with these tough dilemmas and you want art that somehow recognizes that yet without being too self-conscious at the same time.

You made a point somewhere that to do, to innovate in any way, you need to sort of believe you're doing something important. Yeah, I think you were referencing, um, the rock and roll in the '60s. That's not mutually exclusive with pessimism, but it maybe is mutually exclusive with not some strong degree of belief in something. I mean, I'm even curious based on the stuff you've seen so far to the extent like Can really strange, beautiful, compelling, et cetera, new aesthetics show up without some really strong point of view in some dimension?

Needs a strong point of view. Yeah. And religion is one of those, but not the only. Ah. Nihilism can be another. Ah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Can apathy be?

It's feigned apathy, but I'll go, I'll go for the feigned. Like you said, these earlier times were less depressive than today. I'm not sure that's true. I would stress they feigned greater optimism, and that may be enough to be what counts. But there's a lot of glorious art from the 1930s, and it's not obvious that during the Great Depression everyone was so optimistic. Yet they still did big band and swing in a style that sounds very vivacious and with it.

Right. You have the Lindy Hop. You have all these very, like, cheery dances. I mean, you have a phrase, maybe I can ask you about, You have a phrase you like to use, uh, negative emotional contagion. And I do feel like we have a lot of this going on now. Like if you go and talk to the average person in New York, I just feel you hear very negative views on life.

I agree, but I think that's pretty recent. Mm-hmm. The dilemmas of what you would call modern art or contemporary art way predate that. Mm-hmm. I think that's the last 10 to 15 years. Yeah.

I guess my claim would be that you, Or whoever does this has to somehow fix that in order to really break through here.

Maybe. I hope we fix it rather than it just getting worse. But there do seem to be these snapping and reversion points. I think there's a chance we fixed it already and we just don't quite see it yet. That 2, 3 years after pandemic was peak pessimism and weirdness. And maybe now nature is healing, as they like to say on Twitter.

Where is the most optimistic country in the world right now, just by, in terms of purely your experience of talking to people?

People? Well, one would be Poland, right? And again, I would admit, or indeed stress, there's something superficial about that judgment, but that can be fine as well. Um, I think a lot of parts of the world are pretty pessimistic, in fact, at the moment. India? India, pretty optimistic. Yeah, that's a good pick. Would be one of my top choices. Oman? It was too hard for me to tell. It didn't feel bad, And now with the war, it may be quite different, but they're at least in the running for optimism. Same with UAE. It's quite inscrutable. 90% of the people are migrants, right? Very hard to classify, but you could at least say they're in the running for something. China? I haven't been in 6 years. Dan Wang tells me it's much more pessimistic than it had been. He would be the source I would defer to, but I don't myself know.

I think about this a lot because I grew up in the UK. Of course. The UK is so pessimistic now, right?

And I go there and I want to shake them. It's like, yeah, I get your fiscal problems and the wage growth, but you people have a great country. Like, there's so much to enjoy. A lot of it's free. You can always just speak the English language. Wordsworth is out of copyright. Like, come on, it's great.

Yeah, there's been this—

Public spaces can be so amazing.

Right. And this is very like Eeyore-ish attitude to everything, right? Practically. And I sort of wish they'd get out of that.

And there's all this status in Germany too. You get status from carping at things. Yes. It's a problem. Bad place to be.

Yeah.

What about the internet as a place? Like if you, if you're 17 and in a place that is pessimistic in the UK or whatever, or in a place that's just bleak, in theory, the internet should be this amazing new sense of place. It is. You think it remains?

I'm not saying that's true for the median, but for the people who are most creative, most ambitious, it's 110% true.

And where do you think that's mostly happening?

Anywhere where people have good connections and can read English. So that's a lot of the world. Really a lot of the world. But, you know, most, maybe India.

Oh, I meant where on the internet.

Oh, where on the internet. No, I think the whole point of the internet is the internet. It's like a grand organ that you play to learn things. And no one part of it is very interesting at all. Like a single tweet. This gets back to the context is that which is scarce issue. A single tweet is not interesting. I don't care how well written it is, but Twitter as this grand organ that you play to learn things and see jokes is phenomenal. It's actually one of mankind's greatest creations. Marc Andreessen will say this. Very few people say it. There's so much hating on it, but I think it's important to make it clear. It is one of our greatest intellectual, humorous, learning, inspirational, also depressing creations of all time. Twitter. Twitter. I guess we're supposed to call it X, but it's still always Twitter to me.

Twitter. And I mean, I cannot imagine my life without the internet, right? When I was younger, I was on these forums. For video games and, and, uh, chat rooms. And, and then, you know, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger, and now it's like WhatsApp group chats and Signal. And I, I think for those who enjoy using the internet, like, everyone does get a non-zero amount of joy out of it, even if they won't admit it necessarily. But like, even just the banal everyday, like, sending the group chat like a funny tweet, you know, you do get a little bit of a kick out of it, I think.

What makes a great group chat?

Not too many people. And the more frequently they congratulate each other, the worse the group chat. Yes.

What's not too many mean? Preferably zero.

Two or three times a year is fine. No, no, no. People, people.

I mean, Tyler Cowen.

No, I would say 4 to 7. 4 to 7.

Yeah. How many, uh, you, you said you keep in touch with, I think, 100 to 150 people roughly at a time. Or semi-regularly?

Not every day, but I'm in a whole bunch of group chats, yeah.

Roughly how many group chats?

That are active at any point in time? A few dozen, but they pop in and out of being active.

And what do you think, aside from the number and the congratulations, makes them— you're in some with Nabil— what makes them, what keeps you coming back?

Some common interest, curiosity, willingness to share, not taking it too seriously. But actually thinking it's also really important, that odd Hegelian mix of it is important, it's not important, holding that in your head at the same time.

As soon as anything's performative, I think it's death to the group chat. Yeah. You see some where it's like there's a professional purpose of some kind and people make these very performative comments or remarks, and that's when it's like a bad group chat. I think a good one, you can trust everyone to be sincere. There's some common interest. Um, ideally you've met IRL at least once. Um, and, and then I think you get something good.

The congratulations is the ultimate in performative, right?

What— are you guys, um, adding and removing people often?

More adds than removes. This is a problem for the system as a whole. It's hard to kick people out, though it's good when you do it.

I think trimming is very important. You have to trim, especially like if people are not adding to it at all or not participating, I think it's important to sort of cut out the dead weight.

Would you, is that filling a space for you, Tyler, that previously would have had more socializing or is it a just pure positive sum additional thing?

What do you mean by socializing?

Um, being like doing in some sense, and maybe this is incorrect, but at least for me, The group text is a sort of permutation of going and getting beers with your friends or coffees or whatever.

Oh sure, yeah, social. I'm good at socializing.

But is it replacing or is it a different—

I hope so. You hope so? I hope so, yeah, somewhat. Not at all margins, but you can spend more time with the people you really want to spend time with and be in touch with a whole bunch of others and have it be fairly fluid. I think it's a great innovation for that.

I feel like you also use it as sort of a generative medium, right? Like sometimes I see posts on your blog and I'm kind of like, oh, I feel like I can trace that.

That's right. And almost always you're correct.

It's taking a little bit of credit every once in a while. There's got to be a source somewhere along the lines. Yes. Do you think you would be more likely to live in a city if it weren't for the internet?

I would live very close to New York City. And indeed I did growing up. But I've never lived in a major city. It feels claustrophobic to me, and I hope I never have to.

What do you, um, how do you think you guys most disagree on New York City? Well, I love it.

I think Tyler— I don't think we disagree. Yeah, you just don't find it as claustrophobic as I do.

Yeah, I mean, I, I live in it.

You, in theory, love it, but you hate the claustrophobia.

That's right. I love visiting it. It's one of the greatest places mankind has ever created. I'm very positive on it. I don't freak out about the supposed crime, which is actually pretty low. If the garbage isn't always picked up, I'm not bent out of shape. But at the same time, if I had to live there always, you know, we're in this house, the house is big. Uh, I feel I live better than some billionaires I know in New York City. And there's a big yard in the back and the dog. And in the morning we have like deer and fox. And I'm 35 minutes from Washington, D.C., and this costs a pittance. I don't want to give that up. But there's no disagreement about it.

What do you think he's missing, if anything?

No, I think it's rational. I mean, I think it's a phases of life thing, right? I actually often joke about moving to Northern Virginia once I have children or whatever, because yeah, I think when you're raising children in New York or you have a family, it does feel a lot more claustrophobic. And I'm seeing friends kind of struggle with that now.

And say I'm in New York once every 6 weeks and half the time on the road. The things about where I live that are awful, which are real, don't really matter. Like here, it's totally boring. People who say that, they're not wrong. But you're on the road half the time. Like, you're not bored. In any exhibit in New York, you'll see— you won't see every concert you want to, but you catch plenty.

Yeah. This is true.

He's actually traveling half of the year. I was going to say, you said before we sat down about about half. So that seems almost completely at odds with the cities are crazy lifestyle. Perhaps that's that you're doing a barbell. Barbell. So do you mostly travel in cities?

My next trip starts tomorrow. It's to Miami. Of course it's a city, but it doesn't feel like being in a city. It's not claustrophobic. Then Detroit. I haven't been there in a while. For a while it was hollowed out. The opposite of claustrophobic. You would long for some claustrophobia. And then New York briefly for some talks. It'll be great. I'll get my barbells.

I often do say to people who are moving to New York, like, the ideal way to do it is you, you live at least a year in Manhattan first. Yeah, just get the maximum experience, and then you kind of figure out where you want to go from there. So for me, it was a little bit too much, like too many sirens, too many, you know, just too many stimuli in general. So I now live in kind of South Brooklyn, and that's— I often joke, like, I treat New York like the suburbs a little bit, right? It's like— but here's what I don't get.

Maybe you can explain this to me. Yes. So some young people, they go there to do some mix of dating and marrying, in that order, and that I fully understand. And then so many people seem to live there and they hardly take advantage of it, and they're paying the prices. They don't go to exhibits or many concerts or this or that. They just love of sort of living in New York or their self-image. That seems insane. And that's more than half of Manhattan.

There's a lot of that. Okay. But I think you're underrating hedonism here, right? Like, I think they like restaurants and bars, typically those people.

And there's very good restaurants here and you can drink at home.

I'll tell you how I feel. Yeah. I don't go to that many galleries or theater, things like this. I love being able to opt into like the best physical social network in the world. Um, I lived in Los Angeles for many years, and I always joke, LA is a place where it takes energy for anything to happen, right? And New York is a place where it takes energy for things not to happen, right? And there's intentionality trade-offs. I still like LA.

There's positives.

But being able to, no matter how busy I am or no matter how bad at planning I may have been, being able to opt in and see one of 25 people that I really like almost any time I want is I'm rating that above almost anything. So I think it's— and yeah, it's really fun when I go to some— the Met Cloisters with a friend, but it could also just be a walk or something like that. Yeah.

The other thing I think you're underrating there, right, is like some people— it's so, so, you know, the subway is excellent. You can get from point A to point B very quickly. You don't have to drive. Like, it's a very dense city in a way that it's very hard to find elsewhere in America. Yeah, sure. Maybe people value that a lot. Like, that's part of it for me coming from, you know, London is like, this is the most London-like city I could find here.

But London seems better to me, I guess. You have all the upside and it's not that claustrophobic. It's just way nicer. Yeah, but they're pessimists over there.

Yeah, I know, it's a problem.

But European cities in general, given my career and other interests, I wouldn't choose them over New York. But as cities, in some ways they feel superior.

I agree. I also think there's one New York There's one New York-like city in the US and there's a bunch in Europe.

That's kind of the challenge. I lived in Berlin, I guess, 8 weeks one summer, and that was just incredible. Yeah. That was perfect.

I want to talk briefly about mentors. I know, or at least I understand you're working on a book on mentors. Maybe a first question would be, how has Nabil been a mentor to you?

Well, movies is the most obvious, but tech and AI came later. Movies came first. Music. So the Cameron guy you're talking about, I learned his name from the two of you moments ago, but to buy the CD at all, that happened because of Nabil. So those would be some simple examples. But there's something intangible about mentorship that transcends all that, and it's hard to put your finger on, but there's that too.

I was going to say, when I think of mentors, I don't necessarily think of people who show me cool things, although Hopefully that's a big part of it. What makes, just to use one example, what about Nabil or his approach to it makes you like learning about AI from him?

He shows, he's the kind of guy who can show me cool things. And that is value above and beyond showing me the cool things.

Theoretically, lots of people could show you cool things.

I have lots of mentors. There's a chapter in my pending book, My Mentors. And it's the longest chapter in the book.

Ah, what do you think will be most surprising to readers in the book, to the extent you're willing to share?

Uh, how many of those mentors are not strong in formal education. Ah, and they tend to be weird and kind of cranky, and they'll just burst out and say things that are pretty dogmatic. And those are often the best mentors because they make you think. They're not that reasonable a set of people overall. I don't know how much that's a surprise. But when I wrote the chapter and worked through the cases, it was a bit of a surprise to me.

Why write a book about mentorship?

It's not a serious book on mentorship. We should all do it more. We should all do menteeship more. You become older, successful, established, you think a bit, oh, I don't need mentors. It's totally wrong. You need more mentors than ever before, and more and more of them should be younger, especially with AI, but even AI aside. And just to push that simple idea in people's face, even if there's nothing else in the book of any value, I think that's super important.

I think just the idea that you should actually learn from younger people than you is a very distinctive contribution to this discourse, right? This idea of reverse mentorship. I've already kind of taken this on a little bit because I'm in my 30s now and people in their early 20s that I meet in some ways are much smarter than me at certain things. And so I think you do have to make this conscious shift a little bit because it's very rare to find in older people that they have that degree of kind of low ego and they're willing to frame it like that.

How has Tyler mentored you?

I mean, so many, so many ways. Um, I, you know, I think we talked about the taste thing already. That's one of them. I think how he lives his life, right? Like, he lives, uh, this, this very— like, it's almost— I want to call it self-indulgent in some ways. Totally self-indulgent. He follows his curiosities, he collects the art, he goes and watches every movie. There's an element of like more, more, more in him that I find very— Mr. Hedonism. Very admirable. It is in a sense, right? Like, I'm always like— I think my— one of the things I dislike most in myself is like, I feel like I always have this slight, um, status quo bias of like— like, he's always pinging me like, hey, do you want to go to El Salvador or something? And I'm always like, oh, I can't go there. But then I'm like, wait, I could go there. And so I think just, um, trying Constantly trying new things, constantly trying to get into new things is another one. Um, yeah, and then I think, you know, there's, there's a certain— it's hard to describe comprehensively, but like there's a certain, uh, kindness but directness in the way that he gives advice that I think is very important. Like, he's not shy about taking an opinion, but you know he always kind of has the best intentions for you.

What do you think? Sound right?

Ask GPT.

Why do you write books? Why books specifically?

I think Mentors and Mentees, which is the title of the next book, might be my last book. He mentioned this. The world is changing very rapidly and a book takes 2.5 years or more. So you can write books about the past. But you can't write books about the important things happening now. And I can write every day on my blog, for Free Press, other outlets, on Twitter. And I think I'll do more of that. I'm not at all soured on writing, but to write things with a 2 to 3 year cycle at the moment does not make sense. Why did—

I just want to cut in and say, this is my least favorite Tyler take. I said to him, like, if you just wrote a book that was like here are my 100 favorite Beatles songs, and I'm going to write 3 paragraphs on each of them. I would absolutely buy that.

Why can't that be a blog post every day? It could be.

And I totally, I would read that. I do read his blog, right? But you just want more Tyler. I just disagree with this idea that at some point I can go to GPT and get that instead. I just don't think GPT is going to give me as good of an answer as he is, right? And fundamentally, if you view this as in terms of tokens in the machine learning sense, books are the tokens that the AI was trained on in the first place. And I do think, for better or for worse, humans can still generate these things that we call books that are so precious to us. And I don't know that that changes as sharply as maybe this view is implying.

I would just rather put my favorite Beatles songs on the blog where more people will consume it. It's not so profitable in book form that I feel I need the money.

Why wasn't this true 5 years ago or 10 years ago then?

Well, I started blogging 23 years ago. Of course.

I mean, you've— but you've written how many books since then? Or since 2015?

Quite a few. But the world then was changing quite slowly. So I wrote Great Stagnation in the midst of the Great Stagnation, which remained stagnated. I wrote Average Is Over about the pending AI revolution, which came basically 10 years later. But I knew in the meantime when I was writing the book, when it would come out, that it wasn't going to happen in that time window.. And so I could write the book. So I would feel very secure writing books about the past. I put out this weird, I call it a generative book, like Within Claude, about the marginal revolution from the 1870s. And that's fine, but the world is interesting enough. I want to write about the world now. And again, that 2 to 3 year time delay just kills me.

I feel there's an extra level of effort that's put into a book that is valuable. There is. Yeah.

But it's not always a positive result from that effort. People overthink things. Uh, you have to appeal to all these audiences and editors and filters. So it cuts both ways.

Do you think there's any kind of spectrum between a blog post and a book that could be explored?

Well, there's different kinds of essays, Substack, Medium, and all that. Uh, but here's another way of putting it. I think I've written, I'm guessing, 17 books. There's plenty of people in history who've written 40 books. I look at their careers and I have never thought they should have written 40 books. Now, I don't know what number is the cutoff, and maybe I'm not quite at it, but 17 is a lot. And if it's only 17, I guess 18, I think that's fine. And again, there's plenty of other things I can do. I think my value as a mentor has gone up. In a lot of other ways, my value has gone up. We'll see. If this book is a big hit, I'll definitely write a sequel to it. I can promise you that.

A sequel to the mentor book?

That's right. What would that be? The market would demand one.

So if any book does well enough, it should have a sequel?

Of course. Great Stagnation had a sequel that was Average Is Over, which is how we're going to get out of the Great Stagnation. So you should never Turn down serious market demand if you can satisfy it.

Uh, do you make art? No, I'm nothing. Never, never. You like, you write poetry as an example. You don't do anything you would, or do you think you do things that you're saying aren't art, but that we would consider our art?

When I was a teenager, I played guitar. I learned a great deal from doing it, but I was never good and I never thought it was artistic.

Do you think artists should follow your, the advice you just gave about when the market demands something to maybe go back to commercial culture?

Uh, only some, you know, Mozart and Beethoven did, and we're very glad they did. Haydn did. Should John Cage have? I don't know. Maybe not. Do you think there's Prince do it too much? Probably. He's someone who wrote too many books, you could say. Yeah. Right. There's too much Prince out there.

Well, the big counterexample I would say for this is like Paul McCartney, right? Like, More is always better. Yeah.

And in the case of Paul, it's true, but he's the greatest songwriter ever. Right. And if I were the greatest book writer ever, yes, then I should write more books, but I'm not.

What are you the greatest at? Nothing. I don't believe you.

Uh, I think I'm in the top tier of people for absorbing information and then organizing it in their minds and being able to spit it back in some form. I think I'm truly in the top tier of that and I've built my career around it. I genuinely don't think I'm the best person in the world at it, but I think I'm often the best person a given individual has met at doing that. The best available. So I'll sort of seem like the best person in the world to them, but it's unlikely I'm at the very top there.

Nabil, what makes Tyler good at giving feedback on writing or otherwise?

I mean, there's a few things, right? One is he's very quick. Like he will, he will usually do it the same day, uh, and, and in, in kind of a rough form. But you meet these people who sometimes they feel like they have to give you the perfect feedback, and then it takes them 2 months, by which time it's not useful anymore. So I would say that's just one thing, is he's very, uh, quick to respond. I think two is like, you know, it's, it's the flip side of having, um, great taste. So he's very good at reading something and kind of spotting the fundamental thing that's wrong with it, and he won't bother you with so much extraneous stuff around it. I think that's just very scarce, right? Like, he has years of lecturing, writing books, reading books, reading things people send him, and so he's probably one of the best in the world at it. Um, yeah. And then I think 3 is like, he's, he's honest. He's not afraid to offend you, but, um, he's not fully honest, I will say. Like, I think sometimes at the margin he'll bias towards being more positive than he he ought to be. I mean, I think the first interaction I had with him, actually, I'd written a piece of a novel, which I never put out because I didn't like it in the end. But I sent it to him and he was like, "This is great. Keep going." And later I read it and I was like, "This is not great. What was he talking about?" But he probably said the right thing at the right time to keep me to completing the project, which was helpful.

Do you have any recollection of that or what stood out about Nabil?

Well, what if it was great? I don't remember. I'd have to reread it.

But Please don't.

It probably was sincere.

Was that the reason you became friends?

Or was it— No, the movie thing.

Oh, the movie thing. Yeah.

But who prompted the movie thing? Well, I read it on his homepage. Oh, right. I forget how that was prompted. I recall having to search through the multiple Nabil Qureshis out there at the time. And, oh, this is the real Nabil Qureshi. Ah, yes. But that succeeded.

Yeah, we need to get the other one off the—

But how did we even get to that point at all? Do you remember the prehistory?

It may have been through through Twitter. I occasionally wrote online. And so maybe you saw one of those and then clicked around. Yeah, but I don't remember. Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler, do you have best friends?

I have a lot of very good friends. I'm not sure I have best friends or friend. And then there's people you knew early in life. Like I'm still in close touch with someone I went to high school with. He's a candidate for best friend, but it's not best friend across all dimensions. So No, I don't have a best friend.

And on the note of maybe the earlier point about keeping in touch with over 100 people at some level, do you think that there's a cap on how many people you can have, however we're defining close friends?

I think I'm pretty close to the cap. Not quite at it. You should never be at it. It'd be tragic. How many, how many roughly? I would guess 200.

You have 200 good friends?

No, I, that would be the cap. I don't have 200 good friends. Okay. Okay.

I mean, he has a lot more friends than, uh, people I, I know, I would say.

Yeah, I mean, he has a lot. I'm just older too. Yeah, and traveling, you encounter people.

I would assume most people decrease the amount of good friends they have over time, right?

I think they do, but that's bad. Yeah, it's very bad. Just a big mistake.

Yeah. Do you believe anything noteworthy about friendship that's original?

I doubt it.

It doesn't have to be original.

When you hear people talk about it, it just mostly sounds phony. So talking about friendship—

Don't tell our friend Ava, she'll be offended.

Yeah, makes it sound worse to me. So you know Ava? I do. Great.

Yeah, she was episode 4 of this very podcast. Oh, I'll have to listen to it.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't know if I was any good back then, but she was great. Um, speaking of podcasts, uh, I think in 2018 with David Perel, you were talking about conversations with Tyler, and you described the podcast, the interviewing. For me, doing these interviews is the most strenuous thing I do in life. You talked about it being exhausting, like chess. You lose 90% of the information after you're holding all this information in your head. First of all, is that still— do you still feel that way?

I've gotten a lot better at it, and I thought, you know, aging, I would get worse. Now I can easily do 3 in a day, 2 in a day. 4, I would feel deterioration. But like, we're doing 2 hours, maybe not for me to judge, but my mental stamina feels to me considerably stronger than it did in 2018, mostly through practice. And I get that can't go on that way forever, but I'm very pleased by that. It's one of the best things that's happened to me.

What about when you're interviewing? Because to me, at least my experience would be that being interviewed is dramatically less strenuous and dramatically different than interviewing.

Interviewing is much harder.

That's right. And you are, you are certainly one of the great interviewers in the world. You do it in a way that is pretty much singular. In what ways has it become easier, or have you gotten better?

You have to keep a lot in your head, but I've gotten better at doing that. Better at learning it to begin with, and better at keeping it in my head. And better at having a sense of the pace of an episode and how to alter that. Both when I should and then how to do it when I want to do it. So that's been good.

How much are you trying to push a guest off balance a little bit? In the middle of the interview. I know at the beginning you always do, but like—

It's not necessarily off balance. I want every episode to be the dramatic unfolding of something. Now, often that might be, how do they respond when they're pushed off balance? But I'm not obsessed with making them feel off balance per se. It can just be dramatic unfolding of my friendship with the person, or their sense of life, how they will approach their death, whatever. So off balance is only one scenario.

Are there any interviewers that you really admire?

Well, I don't listen to that many. I listen to other people's podcasts when I'm prepping with a common guest. But mostly I think podcasts are bad and I prefer to read. And I can read way more quickly than I can listen, even 2x, whatever. So I don't like podcasts.

Are they ever, are they ever great?

Yeah, sure. Other than yours, of course. I wouldn't say that.

Uh, what makes them, to the extent you can think about a specific one or a host or one you've listened to, again, I'm probably risking myself looking very foolish here as I try to record a podcast with you, but what makes, what has made them uniquely great for that medium?

Well, I would say one of the best, what you might call classic interviewers, is Ezra Klein. Yes. Who's very mainstream and classic and does like an A-plus job. But something I think is truly great is what Dwarkesh has done with the AI revolution as a chronicler of that in a way where the whole far exceeds the sum of the parts. So the parts are wonderful also, and that's really impressive. And I would say that is a great achievement. And it's wonderful that it's in a book, but it's still actually considerably underappreciated, even though he earns a lot of money and has mega number of listeners, whatever else. As an achievement, it's underappreciated.

On that note, slightly, you are quite good not only at identifying talent, which you've written extensively about, but maybe to steal a line from Nabil, putting out the bat signal for very special people, Dwarkesh being one of them. Right. Nabil is someone who is building a company, trying to attract great people. I'm thinking about people I want to speak to. I think relevant for any of us. How do you How do you put out the bat signal well?

I've never tried to do it too self-consciously. Yeah. So just being myself. And one day I realized like, hey, I have a bat signal and my bat signal wouldn't work, say, for building a company, but it works great for attracting interesting people to me. So I don't feel I have general advice, but the notion that the best bat signals evolve like Peter Thiel's Bat Signal, those YouTube talks, you're getting real Peter. Like I've talked to Peter plenty privately and whatever you agree, disagree with the public Peter you get, like it's never exactly the same, but you're getting real Peter and it's worked for him.

I think you are quite strategic about the Bat Signal though. So like if you take Emergent Ventures as a specific example, you know, I think the, the way you framed it, you sort of don't want it to go too mainstream. Like you're quite thoughtful about that.

Yeah, that and never doing publicity for it. That's a deliberate, very calculated act of non-doing. And that's been a good decision.

And the questions you ask.

Yeah, sure. That's all pretty— maybe calculated isn't the word, but very carefully thought through and iterated.

Can you reveal a bit about how you interview EV applicants?

I deliberately change it over time, but most of all, I am obsessed with getting them off script. I never want to see a demo. I never want to hear like their plans for what they're going to do. That's just poison and stilted. And to have them talking about anything where I can relate to it, then I'm pretty happy.

I remember when I interviewed at Palantir, my final interview was with the CEO, Alex Karp, and I went in expecting, you know, the sorts of questions you normally get and he asked me only two questions, which were, "Where did you grow up?" and "What did your parents do?" Yeah, those are good questions. I came out almost offended. I was like, "How can you tell anything about me from that?" But he clearly had some theory about it.

But it's weird to me he couldn't tell where you grew up. Even I know you're from Northern England.

Yeah, I mean, it's very specific and, you know, there's a few things going on there.

But I like very much to get people talking about where they came from. Or what trips they've done or want to do. All of that is fine. Um, and then I do have some specific questions I like to ask. One would be, what's your plan for follow-up funding? And many, especially younger people, do very poorly on that. And that's a big discriminator for me. And I don't even mind if they're gaming that, if they're gaming it by actually making the plan. Even if the plan is BS, it's a huge advance over no plan at all. And that has been very useful for me, that query. It's not something you'd use hiring someone at Palantir, but if you're doing philanthropy with limited resources, it's critical.

Do you feel like you sometimes mistake weirdness for talent? Oh, sure.

I mean, most awards are— I wouldn't say failures, but they're not people who will shake up the world. And it's important not to be intimidated by that. That's another way in which you should deliberately calculate not to think too hard about your failures or even what you're doing. Just like plow ahead, keep on taking chances. Don't think like, oh, my hit rate's whatever percent. You're just going to discourage yourself.

Do you think motivation or agency, whatever that clump of words, um, is a fundamental necessity for great talent, or do you think that great talent can not have that at some point and get ignited basically at some point?

Uh, it may be a matter of age. Yeah. So the young people, it can appear quite dormant. Yes. I'm pretty sure genetically it is there in some manner. I don't think you can teach it to people per se if they don't already have it. But I don't over-index on looking for it. And the whole Silicon Valley, like, question, well, how agentic are you? Yes. Seems to me counterproductive. And to think of yourself as agentic is counterproductive. It seems to me just a bad discourse. And people might do better forgetting about it a bit and just look for some people who are inarticulate and a bit illegible and see if you can appreciate their virtues. And can you then from that imagine some kind of path where they're worth supporting? I'd rather do that than obsessing over agenticness. Yes. But I'm not denying how much it matters. Like, I'm not an idiot, so.

But maybe they haven't found the entry point.

Or maybe I can't see it in a half-hour interview. So, and the whole, the whole world's chasing after agenticness. So I'm like, kind of give it a break. Uh, And some of the winners, like, I'm just very happy if they're great peers for some of the other winners, and maybe they're not very eugenic.

So— I think the environment matters so much. Like, I'm a very big context matters kind of person. So like, I do think even though it's very banal advice is like, to a first approximation, moving to San Francisco is going to make the average person a lot more motivated than they might have been in some other place. And so that's why it still is a good idea to move there. I think you do have to combine that with some independent thinking streak, otherwise you'll just get sucked into the memetic vortex of San Francisco. Right.

But I'm a Girardian too, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, exactly.

The other thing I'd say is like, I think, you know, you go long enough and you see people in different settings and it's very interesting. So like, I think Palantir produced a lot of entrepreneurs who have, you know, raised a lot of money, have very good businesses. It's not necessarily the case that the top performers at Palantir were the ones who were the best entrepreneurs. Actually, in some cases I have seen people be very successful who at that company were— I would say I would have put them somewhere in the middle. Um, and so it might just be like that in some sense, like being too good in a, let's say, an environment with a clear status hierarchy might be an anti-signal or something like that. I'm not saying that's what that was, but you can never totally write someone off. I think it's some— it's sometimes just about putting them in the right environment. And I think Tyler's a testament to this with his granting is like a lot of the grants he makes are literally just somebody's out there in Austria and he's like, I'll give you a grant just to go to San Francisco and spend 2 weeks there and that will actually change their lives.

Did you have an inflection point yourself? You seem deeply, deeply intrinsically motivated and like also incredibly effective and high output and all these things. Like you're the, you're the person who's seemingly like always been this way and maybe you have.

Yeah, I mean, I think, um, I think it has varied in my life, and I also have been very intentional about putting myself in the right environment in the first place, right? So like, I straight out of graduating, I worked at one of the big consulting companies, and I only did 6 months there, and then I had to leave because I could not stand that environment. And I joined a company that was one of the first 2 companies to go through Y Combinator from the UK. So YC was back then mostly a San Francisco phenomenon, but they let in 2 companies from the UK. I joined that company specifically because I admired the founders a lot. I thought they were extremely determined people that I would learn from. And so I think the only thing I had was maybe an understanding of this insight very early on, that you have to put yourself around people who are much better than you, and you will rise to that occasion. And I just was very intentional about doing that. Like, that is also the reason, or a reason, I joined Palantir, is I was so impressed with the people I interviewed with. And I thought they— you know, there's a specific feeling where you're like scared that someone's better than you in every way. And I think that's what I look for is like, okay, I want to be in this room because I will rise to that level. Yeah. And so I feel like I just keep trying to find like the level above mine and then trying to operate on that level.

Just a couple more things. Who would win in a game of chess between the two of you?

Easily Tyler. Easily Tyler.

We played a few times.

We played and he's won every game. He was New Jersey chess champ.

Haven't you not played played since you were 13, 15? I played with Nabil.

I played a few games with John Collison. I played a bunch of games with Woody Harrelson. Really? That's the entirety of my chess. I played with some drunk Russian when I first met my wife at a party in Richmond.

Didn't you play the Chess Hustlers sometime recently?

Yeah, like twice I played the Hustlers.

New York, yeah.

Once I think I played Coleman Hughes, but that's like it.

But you didn't lose any of those games?

Correct.

Only famous people, like, should you play with. That will ration it pretty automatically.

How might you guys collaborate in the future?

Good question. I mean, I would love to travel together. Um, it sounds like Tyler's book writing days are over, so, uh, we'll, we'll see. But like writing a book together would be really thrilling.

I've said many times before in the past that I'm done writing books. Yeah. And it's always been wrong. But to write something together, whether it's a book or not, would be the obvious. But a trip together, which can be as important as a book, uh, I've already been working on. So that will happen. I think it's likely. This podcast. Yeah.

Hopefully a little momentum in the right direction. Um, Nabil has this great tweet and probably written about it elsewhere, um, citing Christopher Alexander and the idea of aiming for Chartres. You must aim for the most ambitious thing. Tyler, it seems to me that you treat your career more like a stream, a river of just all of these amazing projects and the person you're trying to become. We've got a buddy joining, joining us. For those of you on audio, this is Spinoza. Hey, Spinoza. Spinoza decided to crash. We have a fourth member with his cameo.

Hopefully the audio is still connected.

Um, you are so prolific and you've done so many amazing things. Uh, that said, I, I'm curious, is there anything, is there any grand project that you've wondered about or that might still be in store? Or do you just totally not think about things that way?

I like my current projects. I'm gonna do a lot more podcasts, write more, whether it's books or not, travel more. Emergent Ventures. I don't really see how I could improve on that. That may be my limited imagination. I feel I'm open to new ideas, but the ones I have, I'm very happy with how they're going.

Okay. How are you guys most excited about the future? Or what are you most excited for?

I truly am excited to see AI develop. I mean, I feel a little bad saying it because I guess people like to talk about the negative aspects of AI a lot, but for me, just like, I don't know, every month has been a treat since GPT-3, more or less, is when I started to get really excited about it.

But, um, Twitter notifications for Nabil, everybody, by the way. It's a great way to stay up to date on this.

It's just enthusiasm. Like, people sometimes ask me, why do you tweet about AI so much? It's because I like it. There's no kind of grand, um, thing I'm trying to achieve, or I'm not trying to become an influencer. It's really just because I enjoy it, and I think I think the fact that we've created artificial minds is incredible. I love chatting to them. I think every time it gets better, it's just like a new Christmas present for me. So I'm excited to see where it goes. I'm sure there'll be lots of dislocations and disruptions along the way, but to me it's very fun so far.

And biomedicine, we're going to see amazing advances, I think. I hope I'm around to enjoy some of them, but someone will get them.

Dyson spheres. We're gonna see Dyson spheres. I'm less sure about that. Give it 10, 20 years.

Aliens worry that a world with Dyson spheres has too much destructive potential. Wow.

Nabil's Twitter profile is Make Yourself Proud, and so I would turn that question around on both of you. How have you made yourself proud?

I just think it's a good heuristic. Like, I think, um, you— it's worth asking yourself every—

I agree, but how have you made yourself proud?

Um, you know, I think I'm, I'm a, I, I'm a decently fine person, and I'm nice to the people around me, and, uh, um I, I guess, I guess the collections of friends I have around me, like my, my spouse, um, the people I know that I get to talk to every day. I'm probably proudest of that, and I think that is the vast majority of the value in my life.

I know many people my own age, as you would expect, and I feel I'm at it, going more than almost any of them, so That I'm proud of.

Are there any ways you're proud of each other?

What he said. I mean, he's so himself and he feels like more himself every year. And I feel like he never gets stuck in his ways. I think that's so admirable.

And with him, I don't get how he has such good taste. And this I mean as a compliment. So there's a lot of people they grow up in ways where you see where the good taste comes from. But it's much more sui generis. And I think that's quite striking and something Nabil should be very proud of.

Anything else you guys want to talk about?

There's always more, but that's why we need to go to El Salvador. Yes. Yes. Or somewhere similar.

I was actually curious about earlier you read the quote about him preparing for interviews and it being very exhausting. Did that resonate with you?

Do you feel that way? Certainly resonated. I think especially so in a case like this. And there's a question I'm curious how you feel, Tyler. Maybe you— there's one of my favorite moments in the Rick Rubin conversations. Rick observes, as many have, that conversations with Tyler are not very much conversations at all. And Rick says, well, we're conversational people, though. And you laugh and then go, well, I don't know about myself. But the thing I always struggle with is on one hand, I want to prep as much as possible and really do as much I can to control and what I'm trying to do, which is pull the humanity out of the people I get to speak to. But on the other hand, I want to be here for it and like, and not squeeze it too hard and let it happen. And that's a, that's a challenge. It's like the Zen master who's so prepared and yet can be loose. It's hard. Yeah. That's all I got. Thank you both. I really appreciate your generosity. Thank you for having us, Tyler.

Thank you for listening to Dialectic with Tyler Cowen and Nabil Qureshi. And thank you for supporting the show. Whether this is the first time you've listened or watched or you've been around since episode 1 back with Jason Liu, it means a whole lot. You can get the full transcript and all the links for the show at dialectic.fm/tyler-nabil. And if you enjoyed the show, uh, the most important thing you could do would be to share it with a friend. You can also rate it, give it 5 stars on Spotify, give it a thumbs up on YouTube. Subscribe or follow wherever you're watching or listening. And before I leave you, I'd like to thank Notion one more time for presenting Dialactic. They're a huge part of why I was able to get to episode 50 and go full-time with the show back in December. And Notion has totally transformed itself in the last year and a half or so for the AI era. Uh, one of the rare companies that has been able to do that from the ground up and turn an amazing collaborative workspace tool into a canvas for you and your team to do all of the most important work and get a ton of leverage from where you want to get AI and agents to help you automate things, find edge cases, get an extra set of eyes, and more. As Notion has transformed itself, it has grown the team and built a remarkably special group of people, some of which I get to work with on a regular basis. And recently they even brought on somebody I deeply admire, and it's been really fun to get to watch him be blown away by the level of level of ambition, especially in a mature company. If you're interested in joining the team at Notion, you can reach out to them directly or email me at work@jacksondahl.com. And if it is a fit, I will send you to the right person. Again, I think it's pretty special to be able to have a team and a leader like Ivan who is willing to take the gambit to in many ways kind of rebuild his company to meet where the future is going. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic. And thank you again for listening to episode 50, to episode 100, and beyond. I'll see you next time.