Tyler Cowen on Successful Indians, Mentorship, Cracking Cultural Codes and Living Your Best Life

What is the secret to cracking the cultural code of people in tech?

I like to confuse guests. I could see his eyes light up.

I love shows like that which have authentic banter.

I want to talk about your podcast.

So I think one reason Indians have done so well in Silicon Valley is they grow up being masters of cracking cultural codes. If the best thoughts of the smartest humans were all just easy, that'd be a little pathetic, right?

Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of The Good Time Show. Uh, today we have the one, the only Tyler Cowen. Uh, Tyler, apart from being a longtime friend of ours, is a professor at George Mason University and writer of the long-running Marginal Revolution. And I would say, uh, if I ever had an intellectual crush on somebody, it would be Tyler. Uh, you know, his range of intellectual input And his range of output from his books and his blog and his writing and just the sheer amount of stuff he knows is just great.

And just his joy for living, of life, is just spectacular. It's just very inspiring for us. We talked about everything from travel. I think he knows more about Chennai than we do. He actually talked about Carnatic music and a bunch of other things also. He's been writing this blog every day for about 19 years now. So we obviously talked to him about his productivity, production function, cracking cultural codes, how he travels, things like that. So just such a great episode for just a variety of topics.

Yeah. And stay for the moment when he turns the table on us and asks us about our own life story and we try and get out of it. But Tyler Cowen, enjoy. Tyler, thank you so much for coming on the show. And while we were preparing for this, I found a blog post of yours which said that what makes for a good podcast is the dramatic tension between the guest and the host. So I am curious if— what methods have you used to create said tension?

Oh, I like to confuse guests just by asking them a lot of non-hostile but very difficult questions quickly in a row and just see how they deal with that, because typically they're very well-known or famous people. But they're not quite used to actually having to engage with an interlocutor. And the dramatic tension is how will that process be resolved?

My favorite version of that might be the one you asked Carl Knausgaard, where if I remember, you asked him about who does he copy or who does he try to mimic.

The Knausgaard podcast was a very interesting one for me. I did it in person with him. Flew to London. He's a very, very smart man, of course, but as I was asking the first question, I could see his eyes light up and he understood immediately what the actual experience would be like. And that doesn't come through, you know, in the audio, uh, but that, that's a moment I'll never forget.

That's awesome. That's great. Yeah, we try and like capture moments like that on our show as well.

Um, so, um, a large part of What you talk about is, uh, well, you talk about cracking cultural codes, uh, especially of sets of people that you may not usually encounter. Now, over the years, you've gotten, uh, friendly with a lot of people in the technology world. You have a lot of them on your show. You work with some of them. What is the secret to cracking the cultural code of people like us, people in tech?

I think it's a kind of competitive performance contest. So, you know that movie Free Solo, where the guy is climbing all the mountains and you're wondering, well, he's super impressive, right? And I think Silicon Valley types would be quite willing to spend time with him, whether or not they care about mountain climbing, simply that he had done something, won some contest, so to speak, just through sheer dedication and skill. So my sense is if you can exhibit that in almost any area in a Magnus Carlsen-like fashion, you can get some attention from the tech community. Maybe that's not the only way, but that's how I model the process. So I think my ability to retain, organize, process, and spit back information is like my free solo skill. And I'm better at it than most people. And good enough to have gotten some attention through these implicit contests.

And also, I think in your book, in the latest book that you and Daniel Gross have published together, Talent, you also talk about the importance of cracking the cultural code in the interview process. Why is that so important?

Well, everyone you interview comes from a different culture than you do, right? Pretty much, unless they're from your high school, even then. But more and more people come from other countries. Men are interviewing women, women are interviewing men, more different possibilities. So the returns to being able to figure out quickly just what is going on here, I think they're much higher than they were, say, 30, 40 years ago. And it's very difficult to do, but I even just recommend some basic travel for a lot of people if they haven't done it and go to the countries or regions where you're talking to people, you know, where they come from. Super simple. But it's amazing to me how many people don't do it.

This is actually going to be the next thing which I get to, which is give us Tyler's tips to traveling the world.

Well, I can give you tips to traveling any particular region. In terms of traveling the world, the main tip is simply go. There are many more places you can go than you think. You shouldn't go to North Korea right now. Many people shouldn't go to Russia or China because of zero COVID policies. But places at the margin, usually you can go. I went to Lagos, Nigeria 7 years ago. I walked around alone at night. It was fine, actually. I'm not saying every neighborhood is fine at night, but, uh, what you can do and how cheaply you can do it, if that's a factor, you have many more options than you realize. So I guess if you name a place, I'll try to give you some specific tips.

I think, you know, for, for folks like, you know, for me and Shriram, we moved from India, from Chennai in 2007 to Seattle. And that's, that was our first ever international trip. We basically moved here as a trip and settled down in Seattle for 5 years and then moved to the Bay Area. But, you know, we'd never traveled outside of India before then. Um, and, uh, once we came here, the process of just traveling around over here opened up doors for us where I think our first ever non-US country was Sweden. And we basically never stopped traveling since, like, we almost like budget out time through the year where we force ourselves to just go to a new country, go to new, new cities and countries we've been to. But it's not easy and obvious for everybody else. Especially when you look at considerations in like family commitments, kids, uh, economic status, where you are. Why should someone take travel so seriously if they have small kids?

Maybe they can't do it. That's more than understandable. But if you think about cracking cultural codes, well, you two are from India, as you mentioned, Chennai. There are so many nations within India. There's the caste, there's the tribes. There's all the different religions. There's all the different states. So I think one reason Indians have done so well in Silicon Valley is they grow up being masters of cracking cultural codes, whether they want to or not, in a way that, say, people from Iowa don't have to deal with at a comparable level. So travel is a way of replicating living in India, is one way to put it. But it will broaden your horizons and just make you realize how culturally specific your own practices are and help you understand other people better. Both you'll have more empathy, but just greater analytic ability to unpack their words and figure out what's going on in their head. And maybe that's not useful for all jobs, but why not do it? And it can really be cheap.

So when you— so what is a Tyler Cowen algorithm when you land in a country, maybe for the first time, or maybe for the nth time? Time? Are you, you know, how are you breadth-first, depth-first searching out places to eat? Um, let's pick anything in Western Europe, you know, let's say France or Spain, like one of the, you know, the sort of the classic tourist spots, you know. What are you doing there?

I just like to walk, to walk around the sections with the older buildings, which most of Western Europe will have. You know, it will be reasonably safe. I'm quite keen to take in, you know, an early lunch. Figure you've landed like at 6:50 or 7:20. The breakfast on the plane you can skip, even business class. So you're going to be hungry. You want to see something very good to forget your hunger. Just walk a lot. You can't check into your hotel room yet and get an orientation. And then if there's some kind of vertical lookout point where you can see how things fit together, I like to do that early on. First day, I'm really not focused on trying to speak to people much, just because I'm bleary-eyed and a bit tired and, like I said before, hungry. And then to be eating by 11:30, and then you go back to your hotel and you rest, maybe you take a brief nap, but you've already done some things that are just really, truly important— seeing those churches and historic buildings and having had your first meal. So you feel good about that day no matter what. And then you see how much more you're good for.

And how long do these trips last? Like a typical new city you're going in for the first time, how many days do you recommend?

If you name a city, I'll give you an answer. But Barcelona, people should, should take many more short trips than they do. Like Natasha and I, my wife, we were just in Colombia. You think, oh, Colombia, that sounds so far away, but it's slightly closer than San Francisco. Maybe by only about 10 minutes, but you can just go there for a day and come back. Now, we had more time than that, but it's worth it. It's not that expensive. The country itself, it's probably cheaper to be a tourist there than it is to live in your own home in the US. The dollar is strong right now. But what was the city you mentioned? For how many days?

I said Barcelona since Shuram said Spain.

I think Barcelona, you need, I don't know, 5 to 6 days. It's a good walking city, has a lot of different parts, plenty of places where you ought to eat. You can do good day trips, uh, to the Catalan countryside. I don't quite think you need a week, but 2 days isn't enough.

True. Were you always a traveler? When did this start for you?

I was not always a traveler. When I went to live in Germany in my early 20s for a year, I got the bug. Before that, I traveled a fair amount in the US. I had some summer jobs where I gave talks around the country. I got to see a lot of the Midwest, a lot of Texas, like when I was 18, 19. That was fascinating. But then I just didn't realize right away everywhere would be that interesting.

And I am curious, right, like how much do you think the travel, exposing yourself to different mental models, different cultural codes actually feeds into your work? In the blog and everything else you do?

That's hard for me to judge, and people are not usually good judges of themselves. But I would say at age 60, I feel I have more energy and more drive than virtually all of my peers. And intuitively, I suspect that's because of travel. It's just a motivation that keeps me going and always refreshes me and forces me to see things anew. But I can't prove that. It could be some massive self-deception on my part, and I just want to go these places and I make up this silly story.

So on the theme of travel, you know, we are recording this just before a trip for you to India, and, uh, and I'm curious, so give us your, I would say, the current state of the union on India, right? What do you, what do you think of India? Why is it exciting to you? And let's start there.

You've been there before. You've been there multiple times before.

I've been 5 times before. But obviously, there are many parts of the country I still haven't seen. India, to me, at the margin, seems the most important center of talent for new talent by some order of magnitude. Whether that occurs within India or outside, I'm not sure. But people coming from India— so that's a major reason why everyone should go to India. If you were in Great Britain in 1900 and you wanted to figure out how things were going to change, whatever theorizing you might do, you should just tell someone, "Well, go to America," right? So that's how I feel about India. I'm not a massive optimist about like Indian national economic growth. My sense is there'll be 5 or 6 states that will do very well and build or finish building real infrastructure. And become like high, you know, upper-middle-income countries, kind of like Malaysia would be, or the better parts of Mexico. And a lot of India will really stay quite poor. Governance will remain chaotic. More functions will shift to the states. No one will ever agree on anything, but they'll muddle through, and some of it will be pretty splendid and spectacular. That would be my, like, offhand guess.

And what about the Indian —diaspora, I guess in some ways people like us, where people from India but making it in Silicon Valley and outside, do you see that continuing? Super bullish on that.

And when I run Emergent Ventures, which is my philanthropic program, like if I see an application from an Indian child of an immigrant in Ontario, Canada, that's the most positive signal I have seen so far in like 4,000 or 5,000 applications. Those people are gold, at least conditional on them applying. And those are teenagers, sometimes young teenagers. So I don't think that process is anywhere near an end. It's just getting started. And it will be like the rise of America. We're like, oh, there's some, you know, relevant Americans. There's Henry James, great. But people then still had no idea what would be coming in the '40s, '50s, '60s. And I think that's where we're at with India.

We're obviously generalizing a nation of like 1.3+ billion people, but what do you think about India as a culture? Do you think makes Indian immigrants, uh, you know, successful, at least in technology, if not technology, you know, other parts of the, uh, the West?

Just to be clear on the generalizations issue, like I'm not that bullish on the median Indian human being per capita income 30 years from now. I'd say I'm agnostic. But not thrilled by the prospect. So I think partly my view is there's not a clear generalization, but the upper tail is sufficiently numerous and diverse and motivated and aspirational. But I think, as I mentioned before, so growing up in India, you're required to crack all these cultural codes. People growing up in India don't take prosperity for granted. There's often strong family structure. There's this aspirational sense to things and the difference in living standards between richer and poorer, unlike say in Western Europe, it's really an enormous difference. So the motivation to do well is super strong. English language, internet access is like good enough, however imperfect it may be, but enough people have it. And then it's just like let her rip and there's some kind of path dependence as you get some role models. The process feeds on itself.

In your post on this, the one I found really interesting was the Indian diaspora living outside India having really strong ties to the homeland. Yes. And so there is this sense of like upward mobility, but also paying it forward to people back in India and being able to like uplevel everybody else up. And not many cultures, like you pointed out, that not many cultures have that explicitly. And that could be one of the reasons Russia does not have that much at all.

It's a notable contrast, right? Plenty of Russians do really well. They leave and poof. I don't blame them, but it's a big difference.

You know, I think it's interesting. I never heard the cultural code aspect of India, but a lot of everything else you said strikes true. You know, I mean, we come from a certain part of India with a certain background, which is definitely not representative because India is so different. I mean, a lot of people in the US don't recognize how different, different parts of, different parts of India are culturally. But I would say when you grow up, number one, you know, intense competition because the numbers, right? You have a country of over a billion people packed in a landmass, which is, I think, like the 1/8th the size of the United States. So just, you realize like nothing is given to you, you know, you kind of have to—

And there's everything from high school admissions, college admissions, like you fight for you know, 20, 30 seats, but there are like, you know, 20,000 people fighting for that spot. And so it just makes you intensely competitive in a way where you have to, in your words, crack cultural codes like way faster and get to it really quickly and be able to figure out, okay, if this is not the path, what's the path that I can take, which will give me economic success in the short term.

An unabashedly elitist system of education in some of its parts. I'm not even sure it's good for India as a whole, but it is good for the stars and the people we're talking about, getting us back to the difference between the median and the people who are becoming recognized. The US in a funny way also has a system not ideal for the median, but wonderful for the stars.

Right. What do you think about the impact of Indian culture? Because, you know, now we are seeing more Indian movie stars. You know, I don't think we have seen a lot of Bollywood or Indian movie industry exports to the US. Do you think we'll start seeing cultural exports the way we are starting to see from South Korea, for example?

I don't know. There's really a big gap between Indian movie, Bollywood movies, and what people in the United States watch, even with a lot of migrants. I'm not sure the impact will go much beyond what we have right now. So, I mean, Parasite, South Korean movie, won Best Picture. I could imagine an Indian movie doing that, but maybe not a Bollywood movie. They're so reliant on music, and the musical language is so foreign to we Americans who don't do so well cracking that one particular cultural code.

I want to ask you, when did you start getting into Indian classical music. What do you listen to?

When I first started listening, I guess I was 15 or 16, the way a lot of people started, there was the George Harrison record Concert for Bangladesh. And at least one whole side of that, I think more, was given over to Ravi Shankar, who now I don't even really like that much as an Indian classical musician. But if you start with that, it's fine, right? Yeah. So I just realized like, hey, there's something here.. And it took me a long time to understand it better, but I was always intrigued by it.

And, you know, and when you say Indian classical music, you specifically mean Carnatic music, or what kind?

Yeah, Hindustani also. I guess maybe I would prefer Carnatic if I had to choose. Okay. But I don't view it as either or, and they're both phenomenal.

You know, the best time to go to Chennai if you're into Carnatic music is December.

I have done this. I took my daughter one December. This is why Chennai is my favorite part of India. We went to the classical music festival. We saw Srini Vasan among many others, and we ate the best Indian food in the world.

So my 3-and-a-half-year-old, our 3-and-a-half-year-old daughter, we asked her, what's the one question you have for Tyler? And she said, what's his favorite food?

The vegetables in Chennai to me are the best and most unique food in India, and I'm not a vegetarian, to be clear. But growing up as an American, the one thing you hardly ever get here are good vegetables, right? With some exceptions. Yeah. So if I go to North India and eat these fantastic meats, yes, well, that's delicious, but it's not that different for me. But the things like the bitter gourd or the spice dishes you get in Tamil Nadu. That's just mind-blowing.

Oh my God, my parents are going to be so excited.

I mean, her parents watch our show and they're going to be so thrilled with all of this, and they're going to feed you. Like, even next time you go there, you're going to get a lot of food.

Uh, they grow their own garden, they have their own garden, they grow their own vegetables and the vegetables and fruits. And bitter gourd is both my dad and my favorite vegetable, so this is We love it. It's a delicacy.

I would say it's very impressive that you love it because I think when we have tried to introduce folks from the US to South Indian food, which by the way, you know, for folks listening, it's not the, the naan, tikka that you would probably expect, but usually it's more North India. They find it hard because there are so many things going on. There's a central rice dish and all these other things. So it's very impressive that you managed to get, actually get familiar with it and Love it.

Well, I think the more interesting question is, where's the worst food in India? And I have a nomination for that too.

Okay, you tell us.

Yeah, let's piss off a bunch of Indians right now. Go for it.

Well, I haven't been to every part of India, so this is a tentative selection, but I would say Bangalore, okay, where the average food is quite good. It's always pretty good, but there's not quite anything special there. When I eat it, I say, Well, this is the best X I've ever had.

Next time, if you're going to Bangalore this trip, we have some places to send you to. Okay. There are some really good spots, which I agree.

Worst in India is no shame. But what do you think is the worst food in India?

Oh man, we cannot answer that question. Yeah, we will get into deep, deep.

Yeah, we won't be able to land in the country.

I also think it's like India's, you know, made of many countries. So Worst food is very relative. It's mostly because our taste buds and our palates have been trained to like one particular kind of food and not another, and that's really it.

Yeah, I think in some ways we can't be as intellectual and rational about Indian food because South Indian food is very much home, um, you know, like, you know, yogurt and rice, thair sadham, is like memories of home, and it's like mac and cheese or what your mom would make. So it's very hard to be rational about it, um, and then since we are mostly vegetarian, the there's large parts of, like, for example, the seafood in Kerala that we can't access. So that's also off limits for us. You mentioned Bangalore, which is interesting because I think in one of your India travel tips post, you spoke about how Bangalore might be overrated and other cities might be underrated. I think Chennai is an underrated place. So if people watching this want to go to India, what are the cities they should hit up or maybe also avoid?

I love Mumbai and I do not love Delhi. I would say that. Why? Mumbai to me is sort of both a bit North India and South India. It has a great deal of religious diversity. I very much like seafood. It has architecture of different kinds, Victorian architecture. I love how the, you know, the boot of it hangs out by the sea. And it's just drama every moment. Delhi for me has too much air pollution. Different kind of locale for the city. Cuisine is too meat-heavy to be my ideal, though it's very, very good. Uh, traffic— I wouldn't say traffic is better in Mumbai, but there's more in Mumbai you can walk to if traffic is equally terrible. So I, I far prefer Mumbai to Delhi. And then I would say Kolkata and Chennai and Rajasthan would be the natural other picks, but I've never been to Kerala, and most people put that near the top, so maybe that too. Really good.

And obviously we are biased about Chennai.

Yeah, I love it. Okay. Wild change of topic. You and Daniel Gross, who's also a good friend of ours, have this amazing book out on talent. Highly recommended. Please go buy it on Amazon for everybody watching it right now. One meta question I'm curious about is, after writing the book, do you find people who interview with you changing their behavior somehow? Do you expect them to?

I have noticed this starting, so people come prepared for some of the pet questions. And I've always known, even without the book, those have a half-life of, you know, maybe 6 months or a year. So you should always be changing your questions and your approach somewhat. But yeah, like, what are your open browser tabs? What do you do every day to practice that's akin to a pianist practicing scales? A lot of people are ready for those.

How much of the book was mostly you and Daniel trying to put out a bat signal to establish that, hey, this is the kind of people we want to attract for ourselves, as opposed to this being a guide for other people?

Oh, I think it's both. And it's also a guide for understanding yourself. But like many books, we wrote this one to fit, to figure out in our own minds what we think about And I would say that's the number one motive and should be the number one motive.

You know, one of the things I think you taught me is that probably one of the most important things that you can do to a young person is try and tell them that they are capable of maybe more than they think they're capable of. Could you talk about that? Because I think it's something you've spoken about quite a bit in the past too.

A lot of young people grow up with expectations that are what I call too local. They're too based on what their father did, what their cousins have done, their high school class, the town they were in. Now, if they're born in Manhattan or Mumbai, you know, it may not be a problem. But a lot of people, they hit age 17, they haven't seen true excellence or true excellence in the field they want to work in. And they don't really get how anything works. And just to show them what is possible, like give them a trip to Manhattan, the Bay Area, maybe Harvard, whatever it's going to be, so they can interact with top people, even if very— only very briefly. And then give them credible signals. I mean, when deserved, it could be a grant, it could be, you know, venture capital allotment, like, you can do this. And the signal can be as important as the money itself. And then you create a peer group that reinforces the signal. And they hang out with these super smart, energetic, ambitious peers. And they realize like, I'm up to the standard. That's immensely valuable. And it's way undersupplied.

Did you have somebody do that for you growing up?

Somewhat. So I was very fortunate. I grew up near New York City on the bus line. So when I was a teenager, I would take the bus into New York and hear very smart people give talks, academic talks, public intellectual talks. I went to NYU graduate economics seminar as a pretty young teenager. So I was exposed to a lot. If I'd been in North Dakota, I shudder to think how it all would have turned out.

But, you know, now we have with YouTube, with the internet, with your own, you know, podcast interviews, The problem is somewhat solved. Like, you could be in a village somewhere, as long as you have reasonable internet access, you would still be able to get access to people, intellectuals, people having like really deep conversations, discussions. If you're looking for inspiration, it can come from a lot of places on the internet. So why is— why do you still think, you know, go see, go outside of your local maxima from like a physical standpoint is important?

Well, I think the internet is reason to be optimistic for the reasons you cite, but I still think it's only halfway there to actually meeting someone in the flesh and absorbing them as a vivid presence that somehow we're biologically programmed to respond to the vivid presence. And only listening to YouTube lectures isn't enough, and a lot of people don't listen to the smartest YouTube stuff, even if they are smart. They'll listen to some good enough content because they like the topic. And the notion that the perfect thinker for them, typically they don't discover right away.

You know, I'm really fascinated with young Tyler because young Tyler becomes a travel buff, you know, gets into, you know, Ravi Shankar and classical Indian music. Uh, you know, it's definitely way more intellectual than I'm guessing the median one of your peers. Did, did you build almost like a mimetic resistance where you didn't have to fit in with— I'm guessing the other kids in your high school or college were not listening to, uh, esoteric Indian music.

Some mimetic resistance, but I also had my small group of high school best friends, two of whom became economists, and I'm in touch with at least once a week. And I had other friends who were into Indian classical music or microtonal music, or you name it, are reading literary classics, talking about economics. My friend Randall Kroszner and I went to high school together. I'd bicycle over his house. We'd both, like, read an essay by Hayek and talk about it for 2, 3 hours. So I had the best of both worlds, the small group but somewhat insulated from massive conformism.

That's okay, I think, because one of the ways Aarti and I actually found each other 20 years ago was we were one of the few people who were into all the nerdy stuff we were into, right? Like whether we had to talk metrics or, you know, writing code. And I don't want to claim we were not conformist in other ways, but we definitely were trying to seek out in sort of this proto-internet era, like people who were into the same thing.

We just happened to be really lucky because we had zero social skills. We didn't really hang out with like, you know, we didn't do the things that other kids of our age did. We had the internet, we were obsessed with it. And we just, we had a few areas that were like really exciting and interesting. And we just happened to find this cohort of friends entirely online. And I think in India, at least ours was like the first generation that did that. And so we just happened to be incredibly lucky finding the internet, finding this cohort of people who were just as weird and wonky as us.

What was the first thing you noticed about each other?

Love for computers?

Uh, oh my goodness. So recently we had our 10th wedding anniversary, and, uh, congratulations, thank you. And we've been together for over 20 years now, and I went and dug up like every old digital artifact, and we actually found out like some of the first ever emails we had written to each other in 2003. I think the very first email we had sent each other was her disagreeing with me on some weird database structuring issue, and I was thinking, well, Well, you know, at the time I had no idea. I was right. Yeah, she was right. Uh, I still learned my lesson there. Uh, but we had, by the way, to be clear, we had no idea of each other's ages, uh, you know, or how we look like. We are almost unknown as the modern thing goes. But we were, you know, at least for me at the time, I was going through a tough time in college and I didn't really have a crowd or group I really fit into. And it felt like all of a sudden there's this other person who's into computers and who's into writing code And the internet wasn't really like a big thing in my life then. So, I think we kind of hung on to that.

Yeah. We pulled together to build a website, which, you know, didn't end up going anywhere eventually. But that was like the first thing we noticed about each other, just love for writing code, computer science. And then the movie Matrix came out and we were obsessed with it for a fair amount of time.

Yeah. The other thing I think we could be with each other is we had these big— ambitions of getting to Silicon Valley. Like, our first movie we watched together was Pirates of Silicon Valley, um, the Noah Wiley movie from the '90s, uh, uh, much better than the Aaron Sorkin ones from recent times. And we watched a BitTorrent copy of it, uh, because that's what you could do back at time in India. And I still can quote the opening lines of 'Make a dent in the universe.' But we were like, we want to do that. Like, we want to go there to Palo Alto. We want to be in that scene.

Crazy thing is we had no shot at it. Like, there was no, like, career path. It was that was obvious to us at that point. You know, if we had just done the usual thing, like the odds were that we would have gotten a really safe job, stayed in Chennai, and just settled down there for the rest of our lives, which is what everybody does and do. And so, for us to like start thinking about like coming to Silicon Valley was like almost, you know, childishly ambitious.

Yeah. And we are the only people who would make fun of each other when we said that.

Yeah. Let's get back to the romance though. How long did it take before you figured there was a very good chance you'd be marrying each other?

Oh my goodness. Uh, uh, let's see. So, uh, I, I don't think I've ever said this story in public. Um, so I had this incredibly non-romantic proposal I made to her in 2004, uh, 2005, where I said something and we were kind of in the stage where we were not dating, but a lot of her friends would kind of tease us that we were dating and it's kind of in that space in between. And I said, I think I called her and there's something like, hey, you know what, if we actually start dating like tomorrow and we are officially in a relationship, you know, the amount of time and a lot of the ways we interact probably wouldn't change as much. So maybe we should just start, right? So this was incredibly, yeah, not exactly, not very, not exactly the meet cute romantic scene that you would expect, but it worked.

Well, I think my answer was, well, if nothing's really going to change, then why do we change anything? Yeah, and I was like, that's a really good point. I'd never thought—

yeah, I hadn't thought through this very well. Um, anyway, but you talk about the importance of mentorship. How, how does one go about finding a mentor?

Well, being mentor-worthy maybe is a little question begging, but it's not a bad start. But be very open-minded about who your mentors can be. You should have multiple mentors. Some should be older and more senior than you, others should be younger. Because people younger than you are going to know all kinds of things that you don't, no matter what their station in life. So don't approach mentorship too cynically, like, oh, who's the well-established person who can make me rich, or, you know, get me whatever. Think of it in terms of a relationship where you, like, ought to be worthy of it, and that it's a friendship and some kind of bond over substance.

Who should choose to be a mentor? Or why would like one raise their hands to be like, I could be a good mentor, this is what I have to offer?

Well, I think you have to set up filters. So if, for instance, an American writes me an email with a very good 4-paragraph understanding of Indian classical music, I'm curious. Like, I want to know. And this kind of thing has happened to me. I was corresponding with someone who showed a remarkably deep knowledge of Renaissance music. And I bought some recommended CDs, was very impressed, and, uh, we'll still be in contact with this person. Now it's up to them too, of course, but of course you've got to be selective. But that gets, gets us back to cracking cultural codes, right? True.

Um, okay, so at the meta level of cracking cultural codes, then, you know, um, outside of travel, you know, how does one, you know, when you look at a new community or a new group of people How does one go about doing it? Like if somebody told you tomorrow, hey Tyler, if you had to go crack the code of, I don't know, TikTokers in 2022, right? How would you go about it?

Well, they're a very large group, but I would say I start with things I know. One of those would be food. Another would be cinema. Another would be classic books, music, and just see what points of commonality are. And if the individual has some depth and substance in areas that I can judge. Now, there's plenty of areas I can't judge. Say gaming would be one of them. That's my defect. But, uh, at least you can bring something to the table and, and see what's there.

The, the part about— I think you said about people reaching out cold with thoughtful work is so underappreciated. Like, so many of my really strong relationships have started from email. Either I've emailed somebody and they've responded, and some, some really interesting successful people, or somebody's reached out to me. So I think it's underappreciated how often you can just email some of the most interesting people in the world and they will respond to you if you have something interesting to say.

Yes, or it can be on Twitter, right? You see it on Twitter and say you get the same response. Uh, maybe it's more powerful if they do it on email only for you. It's like a stronger signal that it might be a good match. Uh, but either one can work. Okay.

So I want to ask about Twitter and your information diet, but maybe one way to enter the theme of Twitter is, uh, we are obviously in an interesting time in Twitter's corporate history. If due to some weird set of events, you find yourself running Twitter, what would you do?

I like current Twitter more than most people do. So I'm not actually wishing for it to change a whole lot. I think it's always going to feel a bit stupid and clumsy. And I hope they're never great at A/B testing and better at selling ads. So, I get it's not what most people want, but it's kind of, it's a playground for me, or I would say people like us. And what I would do is the targeted ads I get, they don't bother me, but they're not very good. Like, I wish they would try to manipulate me more successfully. Like, can't they send me a targeted ad for Indian classical music at least once? Or how about an economics book? Like, that would be easy given whom I follow. But they can't even do that. It's like Top Gun. Like, my eyes roll. I know Top Gun is out. So I would make that a little better, not try to earn too much money with it, and actually kind of stay the course. But I would have more free speech on a number of margins where they have booted people off. I don't agree with a lot of those decisions.

Which leads me to ask, how do you make Twitter work for you today?

Well, I don't follow politics at all. It sometimes pops up. I don't have the energy to mute particular terms. I probably should. It's good advice. I don't follow too many people. I don't get into back and forth debates very much, if at all. It's super easy. You follow specific things. Like China, like India, like music, whatever. You just avoid a lot of the garbage. I don't think it's that hard. The people who complain the most, I tend to think a bit, well, you chose that feed. That's a reflection of you. This is your not so subtle way of complaining about yourself.

So do you create lists of people based on topics that you like? I don't.

I should. I think it's a good idea. I wouldn't say I'm too lazy. I'm too focused on other things. Right. But the way it is now, it works for me. And then really very often I'll just go to Twitter search and type in something like I'll type in Zakir Hussain sometimes. Right. To see if there's a short clip. That's great. Like my favorite NBA players, see if there's, you know, a short clip of something. I do that all the time. It's a great way to use Twitter.

Do you ever look at Twitter trends? No. Okay. All right.

Maybe ever is not the right word, but I don't really do it. No.

How does it— I remember during COVID you particularly start talked about using Twitter as a way to, you know, just absorb all this analysis and research from a lot of people and maybe tying it back to if somebody's trying to learn a new space or area, how does somebody go about constructing the ideal Twitter graph? Twitter diet?

I don't think it takes you very long, but you do it a bit piece by piece. You just start with a few recommendations. You see who it is that they retweet. You just keep on building. So I built for a while a very, very good COVID feed. I've more or less dismantled it for obvious reasons, and that was a fantastic experience. I learned so much about the back and forth of science. I learned different to have detailed arguments, ideas in the biomedical sphere. Nothing other than Twitter could have given me that.

Now, which is actually what I wanted to segue into COVID. And, you know, I loved your blog post during COVID time. Lots of interesting directions on epidemiology and, you know, politics. What is the experience of COVID Let's just assume COVID is done and over and it may not be for everybody. What has the last years of COVID left you with?

What are your takeaways? A stunning feeling that we've learned almost nothing. If you look at the handling of monkeypox, not nearly as serious, but for a lot of people it's still a big deal, right? We have done nothing right with vaccines or testing or data. Uh, it's been another train wreck. So maybe that's the most important thing I learned, is that we don't necessarily learn from experience.

One post I think we spoke a lot about previously is yours on epidemiology and epidemiologists and their role in policy. Do you think that has changed, has, in, in terms of incorporating them into policymaking in some positive way?

I think they've been beaten down and somewhat defeated, and a lot of policymakers realize they need to listen more to sources who think in terms of maximizing expected value. And that's been a triumph for the world, but a defeat for the epidemiologists is how I would put it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

OK, so switching gears a little bit, something I actually tried to do based on your advice is try and read hard books, especially fiction— Classics. Classics. And my question for you is, why should somebody in their 30s, 40s, try and read Western canon, the classics, and things which are actually hard to read.

And how those are the best thoughts of the smartest humans, right? Once it's described that way, how can you not be curious? And of course they're hard. If the best thoughts of the smartest humans were all just easy, that'd be a little pathetic, right? Roses are pretty, I enjoy the sky, the end. That's it. You go away very disillusioned.

And in a similar vein, you know, you're big into art as well. I have a couple of questions there. Why? Two, how does one who has no background on art, knows nothing about it, how do you get started?

In reverse order, the best way to get started is just to go around and look at it wherever you can. Depends where you are. And if you're in a position to do so, start buying some. You can get very, very nice things really very cheaply. Depends on your interests. But to buy, say, an excellent watercolor by a very good artist who has books and biographies written about him or her, that can cost $2,000 or $3,000. I don't mean that you can do that for Rembrandt, but there's so much you can do. On a limited income and just live with some things and see what you think. So art, it's like the great books— they're ideas, but they're not ideas put into words. And it's also some of the, the greatest skill that humans ever have shown.

The challenging thing with art for a lot of people is it seems inaccessible, um, and there is maybe a level of you know, maybe I'm just dumb, I don't get it. How do I actually put in the work to understand and appreciate it? And how does one get over that curve?

All of these wonderful artworks have been loved by many, many people who never had a college degree or maybe never went to high school. It doesn't mean each and every style is for you, uh, but you don't need any particular background other than to look a lot and find what you love. I was just reading a biography of John Quinn, an Irish-American in the early 20th century. Never went to college. He became wealthy, lived in New York, bought lots of works from Irish artists, from Picasso, from Henri Rousseau, supported James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot. He was just some guy. Obviously, he was smart. But you have to find what's for you. It is there for sure. And great art was never intended for people who studied art history or even went to college, because back then none of that stuff even existed.

That's so interesting. I think one of the— like Shriram said, one of the pushback we get for both art and fashion is the barrier seems so high. Like, the barrier to entry is just like ridiculous that it doesn't make it easy for a normal person who has no background in this to just get in. And so, you know, often the advice of like, go check out galleries, like, okay, great. But, you know, it just seems impossible to like figure out what is good art because what you think is good art might not be the one that the critics think is like good art or same with like fashion, what the current trends are or what the right, like, are you following the right Pantone colors? Like, you know, all of that is like, it's very subjective and it's very relative that, you know, if you're not following the trend, the mimetic culture, you'd seem like so out of the system that you're like not considered cool enough or adept enough at catching up. You need to forget about all that.

Treat it as more like food. You go to eat, you order stuff that you enjoy or that you don't enjoy. You order stuff you enjoy. Like, don't you love Indian textiles? Yes. Yes. Okay. Don't you love, you know, Hindustani Indian miniatures, 17th century? Yes. Yes. I think so. You're there.

Like, forget, eat those dishes. That's great advice. You know, it's just, it's, it's intimidating for somebody who's like never broken into the scene.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Yeah. You know, 25 years ago I was in an antique store and I saw an 18th century Indian miniature, not like a top one, but it's pretty nice. It was $350. I'm just like, I have to buy this. I still have it. I love it. It's my office. It's just a great thing to have. This was Virginia suburbs. Like, no, before we even had many Indians living here, probably no one else would have bought it. I have it.

You can just do that. I love it.

Okay. One of the things, the loveliest thing about Tyler is like he takes these incredibly complex things and be like, but you can do that. Like you just like walk into the store and get this 18th century miniature figurine and you can do this. And you're right. Like people can do these incredible things and learn faster and do more and travel and enjoy life and eat really different, interesting food. But on the other side, you— we also live in this world of incredible memetic culture, right? Like, people like to follow trends, follow each other. It's almost gotten to the point where, you know, like, social media makes this, like, impossible not to back away from. Like, you see TikTok and Instagram and everything is just, like, trend-based. In a world full of Mimetic culture. How do you teach people, especially young people, to think on their own, to reason for themselves?

Travel, right? So you go to India, you see beautiful textiles, or you go to London, you go to Victoria and Albert Museum, which is some of the best Persian, Mughal, Indian works, and you see, hey, this can be different. Like maybe this is the Ravi Shankar thing for me. And, you know, people have different levels of net wealth, but if you're talking Indian miniatures, you can buy a world-class piece for $10,000 to $20,000. There's some pieces that cost more, like $60,000, $80,000, like top, top, top pieces. But you can get something really very good that anyone would be proud to own. I'm not saying that's cheap for everyone, but when you think about it, it's amazing.

I think at the end of this, you know, we should try and get some referral links and make some money off, you know, trying to drive some Indian miniature art sale Programs.

Yeah, but it's true.

All of this is true. So I think a lot of people have tried to get from you what you try and get from others, which is a Tyler Cowen production function. And so I am curious though, so in your— you have a moonshot which you talk about, which is trying to be the economist who has most successfully used the internet to drive enlightenment. I am curious about your system of information diet, writing, and then the blog. How does it work?

Let me just outline a few of my projects. So I write a daily blog every day for 19 years. I have my podcast Conversations with Tyler Cowen every 2 weeks. I might be expanding that in some manner. I have an online education site called Marginal Revolution University. It's the number one online economics education site in the world, totally free and also no ads. I'm on Twitter, not my main thing, but I'm there. I write 2 columns a week for Bloomberg Opinion. I have 16 or 17 books, and I'm just going to keep on trying. I don't have some deep strategy about like how much energy to put where. They're all fun for me, and until I have to stop, I won't. But what— maybe that's oversimplifying it, but it's kind of like the food or like the Indian textile or miniature, like, just do it.

And what's your process for writing, right? Like, because you write a lot every single day. How do you actually write? I write every morning.

Wednesday morning I won't write because my India flight is 11 AM. That will bug me, but I'll get over it. Sunday, Christmas, birthday, right? Every day. There's always something to write. If you blog every day for 19 years and write 2 columns a week, and a lot of books. Like, you're never short of things you need to write. Then just do it. Of course it's rotten, but it'll get better, right? Like, that's your practice. Of course it's rotten. Don't let it stop you. Don't listen to this, that. Just like keep on doing it. If that's not your thing, then do something else.

I really— well, just do it. This is a very Nike conversation. Uh, I, I've been really getting into Andrew Andrew Huberman's work and podcast, and he talks a lot about trying to have a particular daily routine and trying to do some of the hardest intellectual work earlier in the morning. What does your daily routine look like?

The most important stuff I do right away in the morning. I do check my email, WhatsApp, and Twitter before writing. Everyone says not to, but somehow I'm too curious. And I don't feel it's really held me back. And my Twitter feed is not so enormous that it takes hours. So I like to check everything first, just as kind of a nosy, gossipy busybody, like, what are they saying? And then my mind is clear and I can start something.

And what about the reading? How are you fitting that in?

All my extra time that is not writing or teaching or meetings I have to go to, then I'm reading. I'm reading all the time. I learned how to read when I was 2, which is a huge advantage, and I read quickly. So just bring it on, more, more, more. Every day, 5 to 10 books come to the house, at least every weekday. Review copies, Amazon, my research assistant, whatever. It's like a flood. I have a literal book disposal problem.

We, yeah, we have—

I think I empathize with that. Sriram is a speed reader too. He reads really, really quickly. We would board a really short flight and he'd be done with a book and a half by the time we land. And we have the same, you know, it's one of the few quote-unquote vices that we have. We both love to read and we have a lot of books. And we basically, every house we move into, we have to custom build these bookshelves because we just run out of space really quickly. And it's a good problem to have.

I think books are this interesting thing where they are at a price point where you can really buy a lot and not feel too bad about it. Um, and, uh, which is not a lot of things that I have. Some other vices, uh, example, sneakers, which are not as cheap, but books, you know, they're going to cost $10, $15, $20. And even if you go really overboard, it's not so bad for most people.

And you can buy them used almost always if you really need to save on money. And you wouldn't buy used sneakers, right?

Sometimes it depends on the whole— we should talk about the—

Yeah, that's like a collecting thing, but you don't buy used sneakers because you're too poor to play tennis with new sneakers.

Yeah, probably not. No, one thing you do really well is, for example, when you go prepared with Emily, you went deep into Odyssey. How do you read really hard books, extremely literary, or, you know, old books, or how do you actually— what is your method for tackling them?

Uh, simple repetition, but I don't read the book and then reread the whole book. So I'll read, you know, part 1, chapter 1, and then reread part 1 or chapter 1. I might read the book once straight through just to see where things are going, but then I repeat the read in parts rather than repeating the read of the whole book.. And then I assemble piles of secondary literature and I hope I have some people to talk to about the book. There's no guarantee there, but when possible, that's great. Certainly with Homer's Odyssey, it's possible.

That is true. That's a fantastic episode, which by the way, I want to ask you, you mentioned email. You mentioned this in your book. Why do you think successful people tend to respond to email very quickly?

I think successful people only in some areas. In venture capital, in startups, and public intellectuals, speed of response is strongly positively correlated with quality of success of the person. But I think someone who's, say, doing lab work all day long, it might be negatively correlated. So you do need to adjust for context. But this person is alert. It's a signal they view themselves as a good match with you. You've got them thinking and they want to respond. They want to hear what you have to say. So yes, I love speed of response with the caveat that only in some areas. That's true.

Okay, I want to talk about your podcast. What makes for a good guest? And maybe more interesting, what makes for a terrible guest?

A terrible guest is hesitant, a bit too nervous, a bit too prepared, unwilling to go off script. And they're either super experienced or super inexperienced. And it's just boring. You want people who will take chances and think out loud and work through issues with you and maybe willing to be a little outrageous. But you don't actually want offensive people. I don't find that appealing. I don't want people insulting others or saying things that will get them in trouble. It's not really what I get. But just people with some intellectual daring where they live it, breathe it, feel it, and it comes through, through the mic, in the transcript, whatever. It happens a lot.

And, uh, in the last year or so, uh, who's been your favorite guest?

Roy Foster, the Irish historian who is so charming and Irish and who knows so, so much and is such a wonderful storyteller and raconteur but has this amazing command of fact and detail. That was my favorite recent episode.

What guest of yours has surprised you the most?

It's hard to say. I mean, Peter Thiel surprised me a lot just by agreeing to do it. He was the first episode ever. But I think Richard Prum, the Yale ornithologist, that's one of my favorite episodes. Just how much he radiated ornithology, you might say, and how much he loves it. I wasn't expecting him to be bad, hardly. I wouldn't have invited him, but just how good he was to me was a big surprise.

Mostly because of his passion for ornithology.

Yes, and including the parts that are really weird and obscure, he seems to like the most. And this devilish sense of humor he brought to the whole thing.

One of the things when we started doing the show is I tried to study the styles of all the podcasts I love, and we definitely can't claim we're anywhere close to them, but it's interesting to see your style versus, say, Rogan or versus Howard Stern? Like, where would you put your style of conversation versus with some of these others?

I don't think I'm much influenced by other podcasters, podcasting having come along very late in my life. Uh, but stand-up comedy, Seinfeld, Charles Barkley on Inside NBA on TNT, like Abbott and Costello, Those are some of what influenced how I think about timing and ensembles and group dynamics, not other podcasts. Interesting.

What can we learn as a podcast host from, you know, the NBA halftime show with Barkley and everyone else?

Well, first, have you ever watched it? Yeah. Yeah. The way the group argues all the time, but they really seem to love each other. And they are trying to get at the truth of the game. And you know, at the end of it all, like, someone was wrong and someone was right. And then how ruthlessly analytical Charles Barkley can be while also understanding the viewpoints of the players and the dynamics between Kenny, Charles, sometimes Shaq, and whoever else might be there. I just think that's a genius show. So I've learned a lot from it. I wish I could do it better, but they've really nailed it.

Similar to Insight. I love that. I think similar to Insight NB, I love shows like that which have authentic banter. Yes. Healthy sense of disagreement with mutual respect. They all love each other. Like you said, one of, I think, my recent discoveries, and they've been around for a couple of years, this podcast called Smartless. And It's very similar. You know, I love comedy and, uh, and, you know, I don't want to give too much away, but these 3 comedic guests who just do a really good job and they have a good sense of respect because they've known each other for, you know, 20 years or so. And just it coming together, I find it like, it's hilarious. It's, um, makes you think, but they just seem to be having a blast more than anything else. Them having fun really comes across.

So there's some kind of Lindy effect for me where the very old stuff that has lasted, I just know it better because I'm older and I'm very busy now, so I just don't catch up on a lot of podcasts, right? But stuff I saw earlier in life has stuck with me. And it's not that I think I'm funny, but some sense of concern with timing and substituting in intellectual discourse, you know, for making jokes. Is what I've tried to do.

How do you think comedy has shifted in, in, you know, in the sort of the current wokeness slash cancel culture slash Netflix age, or has it shifted at all?

3 or 4 times a year I go to Comedy Cellar in New York City, uh, and I enjoy that very much. I've even heard Louis C.K. there, and I've learned a lot from it as a thing. I don't watch Netflix much. I don't watch comedy specials on Netflix. I've seen one or two. They just seem worse to me than actually going to the club and the surprise and it being live and vivid. So just because I'm busy, that's how I sample comedy, and it works great for me. And I love Larry David also, and then, you know, various early comedians, mostly just classic stuff, nothing surprising.

Have you checked out Andrew Schultz? One of the things we've gotten a lot of is, you know, his recent special. There's a set of comedians who I think have used the internet to really break out and build loyal audiences. They're definitely worth checking out.

Probably, whatever, you know, I don't know it. Please message it to me later.

I will try it. It's controversial. In a good way. I think there's an efficient frontier of controversy and I think comedy needs to be on the right you know, part of it.

5 years ago, it's not going to offend me. So it's not an issue. Right.

5 years ago, it would not be controversial, but now it is. Yeah.

You know, I think in one of your interviews, you described yourself as very even-keeled and even-temperamented. Where did that— where does that come from?

I assume I was born with that. My mother has related to me that I've always been that way. So simple genetics is the best guess. And so many things are 40 to 60% genetic anyway, so why not that? Every day I'm happy. I think my peaks actually are fairly low compared to most people. Like, I'm never thrilled, I'm never ecstatic. I read or hear accounts of other people being ecstatic, it doesn't really register with me. But like a depressed day, "Oh, I didn't get work done today, I was sad." Totally foreign to me. Like every day, do. I think there's a kind of almost thinness to my character that stems from not being sad very much, not being ever depressed.

I sometimes wonder whether that lends itself to you being so meta-rational, where you can almost be so intellectual and abstract and observant, as opposed to somebody who runs hot and cold and who may not be able to maybe separate and analyze, you know, everything.

It's possible, and it makes it easier for me to be upbeat about, say, America or the West. I'm not offended by the bad stuff, even though I would admit it's offensive, but I'm just not on the spot personally, emotionally offended. I'm like, okay, let's go do something good, you know. And that— it's just much easier then to keep a positive attitude about things. You see all the good going on in the world and in the arts and in music and in comedy and in podcasting, whatever. And that's just like the immediate focus all the time. I like having that.

Um, which may be a good next question, which is, why are you positive about America?

Uh, please repeat that, I didn't quite hear it.

Um, why are you positive about America?

This country has more talent than any other country. I think we have one of the very best constitutions our natural enemies are quite far away. We have a very strong military. We still attract a lot of the world's best people. The country has a reasonable degree of energy. I very firmly believe in both democracy and capitalism. We're not perfect on either, but we do have both. Uh, plenty of things wrong with it, but at the end of the day, I'd rather have our problems than those of any other country.

And from the time you wrote, uh, The Complacent Class, and I would say it's kind of a body of your work which tackled this general sense of stagnation, do you think times have changed? Have your views changed on that?

Uh, times have changed. My view is the same in the sense that I think I was right about the time period I wrote about, but I think some mix of pandemic and Trump has shaken everything up. Not always in good ways, to be clear, but we have mRNA vaccines. You can't say there's been no major breakthrough lately. And I am hopeful that we are emerging from the Great Stagnation. And as a thrice vaccinated, once infected person who seems quite healthy ongoing, there's kind of some living proof of that. I'm here. So are you.

Well, Tyler, maybe, you know, one last thing.

I wanted to ask you about— this is like a We've been following this TV show for a few years. Yes. Oh, yes. I wanted to ask you about Borgen and the most recent season. You know, I think it's back after, what, 7 years, 8 years, something like that. 7 years.

Yes.

You wrote a post about it. You seem to like it. The most recent episode, same season. Thoughts on Borgen?

Well, I really love the first 3 seasons. But they're a little namby-pamby and goody-two-shoes and social democracy, it's so good, and the woman leader will rise to the occasion. Like, that's fine. I watched it and I hardly watch TV. So very positive on that. But then they wait 7 years, they turn around, club you on the side of the head with season 4, which is kind of misogynistic and chauvinistic, but in a deep way, and deeply brutal about power politics and the role of the indigenous and green politics. And man, do they whack you. And I think they did it very well, and the performances are excellent, and I recommend it to everyone. Borgen: Power and Glory, season 4.

But it's going to offend some people. I know, we, we watched, I think, the first episode, and, uh, what was it called? I think even the title was like—

I would say it is very different shift in tone from the previous 3 seasons. And by the way, we also watched it because we made a trip to Copenhagen recently and we're like, oh, we should watch this before we go there. Yeah.

This is before like the land of Morgan. We got to watch it. But this was harsh.

And there was, I would say, you know, you say whack on the head. There was a lot of pontificating, right? It's really upfront about its politics. Uh, feminism.

Yes. Women's career stuff, but also Greenland.

Um, and it gets harsher as it goes on and it gets better. So first episode, I was somewhat unsure. I was like, is this gonna work? By third episode, I'm like, Bring it on.

Okay. What is a recent movie that you watched that you loved?

The last movie I saw was Nope. It disappointed me.

Why? Oh my God. I've heard such— the lead-up to it has been so strong.

I love the first two Jordan Peele movies, but this I just thought was okay. Super well done technically, but doesn't amount to anything conceptually. Before that, I saw Top Gun, uh, whatever it's called.

What? Wait, hold on, hold on. Did you not love Top Gun Maverick?

No, I did not love it. I thought it was interesting sociologically as a sign of America's complacency and collapse that we're just recycling the same story. It was fine to watch. I didn't think it was a meaningfully important movie. Wow. So it's been A weak year for movies. Uh, I'm not sure what I would cite as my favorite movie.

Uh, what, what do you think? What are your thoughts on the broad Marvel Cinematic Universe?

I went to see Thor about a week ago and I walked out in 15 minutes, and some people said that was the best Marvel movie.

No, no, no, I wouldn't think it's the best Marvel movie by far. Like, no, that is not a thing.

Nothing beats Ragnarok, in my opinion.

The previous Thor movie I think, you know, foreign movies, it's such a broad category, but better right now than Hollywood movies. Hollywood movies are at the lowest low they've been in my lifetime.

Is there a movie that you wish gets a sequel made?

It's very hard to do sequels, and I'm shocked they pulled it off with Borgon. Uh, you need people to put on a new vision. So I actually think that the prequels of Star Wars 1, 2, and 3, while highly flawed, are underrated. And the Disney sequels are just awful and unwatchable because they're just trying to reboot and copy and exploit. Uh, so I'm always up for a sequel when the original creator is willing to take chances again.

So I think the prequels are highly underrated in an interesting way. I was watching, um, Ewan McGregor. He was doing a big PR tour for, uh, the Obi-Wan Kenobi series. And he said something interesting. So for him, when they did the prequels, you know, at the time, first there was a huge hype because it was Lucas doing it after a long time. And then there was huge disappointment because nobody loved it. The critics hated it, or so they thought. Um, but it turns out that for an entire generation of people, it was their Star Wars. It was what they saw when they were 9 years old, 10 years old. And Evan, in this interview, talks about how over the years he'd always see people be like, hey, you are in my Star Wars. And I suspect that even though all the J.J. Abrams Star Wars and Rian Johnson Star Wars gets a bad rap. People are going to identify with Daisy Ridley and they were like, I grew up with Rey. And for them it would be their Star Wars. So I think the prequels are underrated.

By the way, I pulled up the list of the 7 movies I liked this year. Do you want to hear them? Well, go for it. Uh, The Lost Daughter, that Ferranti special, kind of for TV, but like a movie. Uh, Belle, the Japanese anime. Gorgeous. Licorice Pizza, the only normal movie on the list. Compartment Number 6, Russian movie, all the more interesting in retrospect. Memoria, Thai director filmed in Medellín, Colombia. Petite Maman, 73 minutes, French movie about a woman who goes back in time and spends time with herself as a little kid. And finally, The Quiet Girl, Irish movie. I saw it in Cork, filmed in Irish as a language with subtitles. Not a very Hollywood list, right? No, no, really. I mean, that's pretty diverse. Oh my goodness.

Um, what about Bollywood? Have you seen RRR yet on Netflix?

No, I wanted to see it. It's on my list. I did not too long ago watch Court, an Indian movie, which I thought was excellent, and I even taught it to my law class. Not Bollywood, but of course Indian. Have you seen it?

No, not yet. Oh, we like it.

You know what it is? It uses 3, at least 3 languages brilliantly. Kind of how language and class intersect in this ongoing dance. Everyone wants to speak a different language, you know, depending on their status. And it's just a very well choreographed movie pretending to be super slow, but actually a lot happens very quickly.

Wow. It's a legal drama from 2014. Um, wow.

Okay, no, it's newer than that, isn't it?

I thought it's like 2020. Really? Uh, it's between 2014, 2015. At least the one I see says 2014. But yeah, it's on Amazon Prime. We should watch it.

Yeah. What do you think on Indian film music? So we recently, uh, you know, we're gonna have this episode out. We had, uh, A.R. Rahman on the show, who's obviously a legend. What is your take on Indian movie music, film music?

I've never really loved it. That's probably my defect, but I always want the sterner stuff from the classical side.

Oh wow, okay, well, you definitely, you're definitely up for a challenge, Tyler, I have to say. In each one of these, right, you're definitely up for the hard stuff for sure.

Um, um, this is, yeah, this is really fun. I, you know, I think, uh, for me, I think the best part of the whole, the, the theme of the interview is just how optimistic and high energy you are on like, go chase your dreams, go find stuff, go learn things, go explore, go tinker, go— you know, I feel like you're just unbounded as an individual, which for me is very inspiring to see because oftentimes when we talk to guests, they have a fairly constrained view of their, you know, universe, what helped them be successful, what their worldviews are. And you just seem completely unbounded, both in the kind of things, the breadth, but also the depth in each one of them, which is amazing because I think we all want to grow up and be like you.

Yep. Buy some Indian art and someday we'll do the wedding podcast. How's that?

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's— I may need to warn Arti's parents.

We do have one big— in our living room, we have an MF Hussain. And, uh, you know, we love it. We, it's one, one of our pieces of art that we really like.

We should do the wedding thing, or you should definitely at an Indian wedding. If you know of one, you know, we'll try and get you invited. It'd be fun. You'll have fun time. There'll be a lot of great food. On that note, right, Tyler, this has been amazing. Thank you so, so much for doing this.

Very nice to meet you, Arthur, and catch you both next time.

All right. Safe travels to India.

Take care. Wish me luck. Bye.