Tyler Cowen: talent, effective altruism and religion

Okay, Tyler, thank you for doing this.

Very happy to be here.

Okay, first question. Do you think like the rate of meta-innovation, how we find talent, has been accelerating faster than technological innovation itself?

I think the rate at which we are finding talent has accelerated a great deal in the last 10 years. So the internet truly becoming the thing, even though we've had the internet for a while, I think that's fairly recent. Younger people truly mastering the internet also is fairly recent. I would say last 10 to 15 years. So those two developments together I think have meant teenage talent we're discovering a lot more quickly than we used to. You're an example of that. You're age 17, right?

Yeah.

And here we are doing this podcast. Could this have happened without the internet?

Oh, not at all.

No. But I even think like the internet of 20 years ago, it could not have happened. So I think it's going to keep on going. You see it in chess, all these great young chess players. Gukesh is world champion at age 18. So, uh, I'm very bullish on that development. Hmm.

And how have you discovered talent on Twitter? Because according to you, all you need to spot a highly talented person is an essay of 1,500 words and a Zoom call. So I guess like if you have access to just thousands of tweets of someone, you can kind of have a sense whether or not they would be talented.

When it's on Twitter, I think my formula is to have them discover me rather than me discover them. So I'm not very famous, but I'm somewhat well-known. And people I might be interested in, I think they'll come across me. And then it's up to them to come forward. And I will meet them, discover them, you know, chat with them, read something they did. But usually the initiative comes from them. They'll send me a link, something they wrote or whatever. And that works pretty well.

Okay, and do you think overall staying anonymous on Twitter, is it like, do your favorite accounts are anonymous or do they come with more benefits?

I don't like anonymous accounts, so I like the context of knowing who it is. Also, the people who stay anonymous, there's some reason for that, right? So a lot of them will self-destruct intellectually because they feel they're not accountable for their views and they become crazier and crazier. Others are people who have a real job, but they're afraid to let on who they are. It just feels like an unstable mental equilibrium to me. So I don't know, the accounts I really like, I know who they are, and I mean, the world knows too. It might be a pretext of anonymity. So like Roon, R-O-O-N, on Twitter, he's anonymous, but everyone— not everyone, but people know who he is.

I'm not gonna say, like, where— yeah.

But people, yeah, he's open about working at OpenAI. And if you want to find out, there he is.

Have you met like any anonymous accounts that like his tweets like were super good, but in real life they were just very dumb or it didn't seem to match?

No, I think if you can be smart on Twitter, you're just flat out smart and you will seem smart. I've never met such a person where they seemed dumb. OK. Can't think of that, no.

OK. Why do you think the labor market is so bad at spotting talent?

Well, when you say the market's bad at it, you have to ask compared to what. But part of the problem is this. If you spot talent, you have to invest resources. And the talent probably won't work for you. So the profit incentive to spot that talent can be fairly weak, especially younger talent. You spot a brilliant 16-year-old and say you're a company. That person's unlikely to work for you. Maybe in a few areas like AI, there's only a few major companies. You develop a relationship with them or some of the VC companies. But for the most part, you're relying on what you might call volunteers. And it takes time, energy, effort, and attention. And a lot of it doesn't happen. I think that's the market failure, the difficulty of internalizing the gains.

But do you think even the market cares about spotting talent? Because it seems like at one point, it's just you're you're hiring like a worker and you don't really care if they have that much insights or if they have original work of their own. You just want them to do the work you're assigning them.

I think the market cares a lot. Now, it depends on the type of job. So if it's a cashier in a supermarket, you want someone, first of all, who shows up, which you cannot take for granted, someone who won't steal from the till, which you cannot take for granted, and third, you want someone who can actually do the job. But if you go to say Whole Foods, which is a high-quality, pretty successful supermarket chain, their cashiers are pretty uniformly good. So they put a lot of effort into that and whatever formulas they use seem to work. And when I go to Whole Foods, I really pretty much know I'll have a good experience at the cashier. A lot of their people are immigrants from poorer countries. They seem really quite smart to me. And I talk to them a little and I think like, You're undervalued. Like, why don't you work for me? But they don't quite exactly have the training where they could do something useful for me, and it doesn't happen.

Ah, interesting. Okay.

But they are very good cashiers. They're very smart people, I think, as a class.

Okay. Would you say like places like San Francisco with a lot of talent and ambition become like less relevant with time because you can just go on the internet, on Twitter, and connect with super talented people no matter where they are?

This is maybe counterintuitive, but it seems to me the returns to location have only been going up. The returns to being in San Francisco are high and rising. And maybe AI, it encapsulates and can express general knowledge.

Yeah.

But it does not contain secret knowledge or knowledge of very particular matters of time and place that are not in print anywhere or on video. So just being there is worth way more. You see this in real estate prices, and I expect this trend to continue. San Francisco in particular. Like, what's new in AI? If you've never been there, it's very hard to know. If you go there some number of times a year, you can keep somewhat current, and that's, for me, worth a lot.

So I think you say in the Complacent Class that San Francisco is the best place in the world if you have a vision and want to work work hard to achieve it. So that was like 8 years ago. Do you still think that?

Absolutely. All the more so, you know, Bay Area a bit more than just the city, but that general area. And with the rise of AI, which had not really happened when I wrote Complacent Class, that's become a lot stronger. And a lot more of it is in the city itself than when I wrote those words. It used to be a bit more like Sand Hill Road, or, you know, we then called it Facebook. Apple were outside the city, but the city itself is really rising now.

Okay, interesting.

And when we have all these liquidity events, the home prices will go crazy. They're already crazy, right?

What about Austin? Like, it seems there are so many prospects around Austin. Is like Austin the new San Francisco in some way?

I don't think so. I think it's a distant— I wouldn't even say it's second. It's a great place. I love going there. I like the people. But now it's not close and it's not gaining on the Bay Area either. Some people moved there during pandemic. A lot of them moved back. Same with Miami. Those cities are doing fine. They're great places of their own, but they're not becoming second-tier San Franciscos. Maybe Austin a little.

Do you think that could ever happen, like a city surpassing San Francisco?

Well, if California does this billionaire's wealth tax of 5%, oh, that would give some other places a shot. Even then, I don't think it would happen. But California would have to blow its lead. I don't think it will simply evolve into something else. Now eventually every place does that. Like what's Florence today? It's a lovely city, but it's not an important place.

Right.

Or Rome for that matter. So eventually it's lost, but it does not feel close to me, that event.

Interesting, okay. So I'm always like struck by soccer teams that are like in the top of the charts during decades and decades. And I wonder if you think it's more like about the team being very rich and being able to hire super talented people, super talented players from other clubs, or if they actually need to be good at growing talent and have a good academy. Otherwise, it would be unsustainable.

I know very little about soccer, but I know more about basketball. And for basketball, I think the quality of the general manager and possibly owner and coach matter a great deal. And they have to really care about winning. A lot of teams, in fact, just have a share of the TV contract. They get money automatically. They want to keep their costs down, and no one really cares to do better than that. And those teams don't do better than that. Like the Washington basketball team, the Wizards, they've been bad for decades, pretty much. And it's not about to change. There is such a thing as a winning organization like Houston and Dallas, pretty consistently put together good teams. Obviously, those players retire, get injured, but 3 to 5 years later, they're back again with another good team. Miami Heat. Those are winning organizations and you can feel it and sense it in them.

So is it about growing, having a good structure to grow talent?

And it helps to have a larger market. So if you're the Memphis Grizzlies, Memphis is quite a small city. They haven't done very well much. They have a little bit. They have less revenue. Ticket sales matter less. Their local TV contract is worth more. It's not the end of the story, but they're at a noticeable disadvantage. Players don't want to go there because if you're in New York or LA, like, your shoe contract is worth more. You're exposed to major media more. So small city also hurts even when you have good management.

Interesting. OK. How crucial do you think it is for one to develop its talent to be in the US? So I remember when we had the Zoom call for the EV Immersion Ventures grant. You said, like, I asked you for advice and you said, uh, that I should try to, uh, keep living in the US. Like, how crucial do you think it is for, for example, for me to stay in the US?

It depends what you want to do, but I would say in, in over half of all areas of endeavor, it's very important to be in the United States to hit a top level of achievement. Now, there are plenty of things where you can excel in Europe, Even then, I don't think Portugal is a big enough country to be the place to be. But the UK, Germany, Switzerland, France, in many areas you can do very, very well there. You know, in your case, unless you're natively fluent in something like French or German, it's really US or UK if you want to be highly successful.

If I don't go to either of those countries, do you think I might risk, like, lose my ambition or just, you know, lost, like became more conformist or—

That's what usually happens. Now again, some areas are exceptions. So say you want to be a politician. That more or less restricts you to Portugal. There are in fact plenty of people in every country, including Portugal, who have the ambition to be prime minister in the legislature. And if you compete in that arena, you won't lose your ambition because your peers will have the same ambition. But there are not that many people in Portugal who stay in Portugal who aspire to be like the greatest economist of all time. You just can't do it there. You'll leave. But if you're in an area like politics, you can stay in Portugal and you absolutely will not lose your ambition. But most sectors you would.

Okay. Okay. Do you think the startup benefits more from being good at identifying talent than a big company? Because like, presumably, if you are— if you go work to a startup, like, every employee is very fundamental in the shape the company will take, or if it will take shape. But at the big company, at the same time, like, you, you already have the resources to do what you want.

But talent is very important for, for each, but in very different ways. If you have a big company, you know, say it's Coca-Cola, you need people who fit the culture of that company. So Coca-Cola has been around a long time. There's plenty of competition in their markets. People have actually started drinking much less literal Coca-Cola, and they like all these weird sweet and fruity drinks. And Coca-Cola adjusted, and they're still a big deal and very profitable because they had talent. People who fit your culture and who will keep you on track, it's not less important, but it's very different than you need miracle workers who are, you know, employee number 4 and bring your company from nothing to something that exists. Very different set of tasks.

Would you say that most super talented young people would choose to spend their time in a startup and not transform into something big, or just go to a straight big company?

Most people prefer to work in the big company. Most people are happier working in the big company. It's a form of, less ambition, but still in a big company you can do quite well and rise up through the ranks. And if after 17 years you end up as some kind of top manager at Coca-Cola, you live in Atlanta, it's a great life. So nothing against it at all.

Okay.

But it's a different sort of ambition, right? You're a cog in a machine. You're changing the world collectively, but not directly and individually so much.

Interesting. So would you choose, like, if every super talented young people, you choose for them to go to a startup or a big company? What do you think brings them more life experience in the long term?

I think it's in the midst of changing. So 7 years ago, I would have said startup, but I think we're seeing a shift toward big companies. And you look at AI, well, where is good AI work being done? Well, a lot of it's being done at Google. Which is a very large company. There's a lot going on at Meta, which is a very large company. OpenAI is becoming a large company. Anthropic, I predict, is becoming a very large company. And the way to have impact in the most impactful area is probably to work in those places and not do a startup. There's something about the compute you need, the testing and evaluation you need. That is harder to do at small scale. Companies such as Merck Corp have succeeded at it. But I'd give, at the moment, an edge to the larger companies. That can change, too. But for now, yes.

OK. In what ways does a company benefit from having conformist workers?

You need a common culture. Once your company's around for a while, that's your moat. Because however innovative your product was, eventually people copy it. Is Pepsi better than Coke? Is Coke better than Pepsi? You debate it. Blind taste tests, Pepsi often wins. Coca-Cola is still a bigger deal. And there's something about how well do your people work together that is very difficult to maintain over time. People want to carve out turf and fight wars against each other. They lose track of the mission. It just takes so much work and diligence and inspiration to keep people on that same common track. It's an issue, you know, in nonprofits. We're here at Mercatus, 130 employees. It's not a very large number, but to keep people in Mercatus cooperative, which I think we've done pretty well, but it's a never-ending thing you need to work on.

Interesting. Okay.

Never-ending. In a way, it just gets harder.

Would you say that a startup benefits more from having less conformist people than workers than a big company?

It depends on the sector. When you say startup, most people think tech, new product, software.

Right.

And in those areas, you very often need nonconformists. But most quote unquote startups are quite ordinary things. It could be a restaurant. It could be a shoe store. And in those cases, you probably want more or less the conformists. Maybe you need one new idea, but after that you just want execution. And then again, you're looking to the conformists.

Why do you want less conformist people in the tech sector?

It used to be the case, still largely the case, that you need to work insanely hard, and a conformist person won't do that. And you need people who can imagine the future being quite different than it is in their sector, and you need nonconformists for that. But again, if the startup is a shoe store, You don't need people to imagine the future being totally different. You just need people who can imagine that they can sell shoes pretty well. And that's more or less going to be the conformists. Then like Mercatus, I'd say we need a balance of conformists and nonconformists. And I think we're pretty good at that. But the idea people are largely nonconformist. But a lot of the execution people, like your event staff, you don't necessarily want crazy people on your event staff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it depends on the job you are trying to assign them.

And a lot of companies have this mix of both. Like, the ideas people will be more nonconformist. And the executors— again, this can vary— but they're more likely to— where you want conformity.

OK, I see. Where do you and Malcolm Gladwell differ when it comes to talent?

Where do we disagree?

Yeah.

I'm not sure I know all his views. In his book, On Talent. He stresses practice a great deal.

Yeah.

I don't disagree with what he wrote, but I think he undersells genetics a bit, at least implicitly. So it's not quite a disagreement, but it's a difference of emphasis. But Malcolm is himself an amazing talent, a very underrated talent, one of the smartest people I've met, and he's done a great job throughout his life. Picking great talents to work with, just like publishers, agents, production companies. So he's a great judge of talent too.

When you look at the academia, why does it seem that professors in America are way more likely to produce original work and have ideas on their own and write books or blogs than when compared to professors in Europe?

Well, we pay people much more, and your ability to move if you do well is much higher. So if you're in Europe, even now it's hard to cross national borders. The countries are smaller. In Germany, you're technically a civil servant and you're on a bureaucratic pay scale. And that's poison for ambition. And there's just a lot of paperwork associated with many of those jobs. US is getting worse in this regard. And in terms of immigration, in the academic market, a talented academic can just get a visa to come here. It's not hard at all. It's like we have open borders for academic scientists. So we attract the best, we pay the most, we have the single biggest market. China is now a rival, but they're not a rival for attracting people. Like if you're a great researcher from Switzerland, you probably still don't want to go to China. It's just a worse life than coming to the US.

I wonder if you think it's more important to give money to poor people or to talented people like you do through Emergent Ventures because if you give money to Talent people that might just completely outweigh giving money to the poor people because, you know, the person you invested in might even become a billionaire and give tons to the poor. But at the same time, it doesn't seem like the average person can really invest in people like that.

Uh, I believe in what I call a barbell strategy. You want to do both. It's people in the middle you shouldn't give much to. They're not poor enough to really need it, and they're maybe not talented enough to do something astonishing and wonderful. So You're never going to be sure the money you give to talented people, what will be done with it. The person might be awesome, but then you ask, well, they might have succeeded anyway, right? You'll never really know if you made a difference. Poor people, even then it's hard to know you made a difference. I'd say when you give money to poor people, mostly you're buying them what I call consumption insurance. So if something very bad happens, they have something to fall back upon. But you're not elevating them out of poverty., and you need to approach it somewhat realistically. There's a lot of evidence on this. But my own efforts personally, I help out some very poor people in Mexico and Ethiopia, and then I put a lot of time into trying to help out very talented people. And say like the lower middle class, I'm not much interested in helping them at all.

Okay. Do you take the EA 10% pledge?

No. My wife and I, we send a lot of our money to poor countries, and my work for Emergent Ventures is volunteer labor. So in opportunity cost terms, it would be more than 10%. But no, I don't give 10% of my money away in that manner.

Okay. It seems Emergent Ventures attracts a lot of effective altruists. Do you think effective altruists as a whole are very talented?

In the past, effective altruism has been a great place to find super talented young people. It was a set of ideas. It brought them together. It was attractive. It was a broadly optimistic view of the world that you can actually improve things. I think that's important. So I've been a fan of it for those reasons, even though I don't agree with every single one of the doctrines. I agree with a lot of it. Their attitude toward talent, it was different than mine. I think maybe they're changing a bit. A lot of effective altruism has been focused on projects rather than people. So they'll say, oh, we know, like mosquito bed nets save a lot of lives, so we're gonna spend a lot of money on mosquito bed nets. I think that's made good sense from a group such as, they used to be called Open Philanthropy, now they're renamed as Coefficient Giving, because they had a lot of money and could do that at some decent scale. I don't have resources anything close to what they have. Okay. So my hope for leverage is to get really talented people, find them at hinge moments in their lives, often when they're young, and have them turn into people who will have major impact.

Okay. So you don't think EA is still at fault for smart people?

I think less. EA is less of a coherent movement. Unfortunately, when everything happened with Sam Bankman-Fried, EA took a reputational knock, which I consider to be unfair, and EA events are not the attraction they once were. But when you meet all these people who are, they now use the phrase, I'm EA adjacent. They're still great people, but they're just a lot more diffuse. They self-identify less clearly. That was probably inevitable, but it's been a noticeable change.

Do you think the movement will ever die?

Well, look, effective altruism we had in the early 19th century with Jeremy Bentham and arguably in the 18th century with Beccaria. It sort of went away. It'll always come back, maybe with different names. So no, I don't think it will ever really go away. It makes some basic sense. Again, you don't have to agree with all of it, but the idea that you should not give money away mindlessly, but you should try to calculate maximum impact, that idea will always have appeal.

Do you think humanity benefits more from having smart people or good-hearted people in the long term?

I think it's a multiplicative model. You need first and foremost people who are determined and who stay the course, and then they need to be smart, and some of them need to be good-hearted. A lot of them can be bastards in reality, but some have to be good-hearted, and you need all those things to come together to get anywhere. So it's not really an either-or, you need both.

If rich people give money to the poor, does that make society overall more rich or more poor?

Oh, it's a good thing for the poor, and I don't think it much harms the rich. But I would just say it's very difficult to give money away effectively. In many ways, it's easier to earn money than to give it away effectively.

What do you mean?

If you simply give money to anyone, whether the poor or not, whether it's academics. A lot of them just don't use it very well, or they don't invest in it properly, or they give it away to their friends, or they squander it. The money, you know, say my wife and I send to Mexico and Ethiopia, they're actually families we know a bit and who behave responsibly. Mm-hmm. But not everyone is in a position where they know some poor families in rural Mexico and Ethiopia.

So you don't trust like the effective charities?

Well, I'm sure there are good ones, but it's hard to know from a distance. And I would trust my own judgment over other people's judgment.

Okay. What's the best explanation of why Europe's rich don't give as much away when compared to America's rich?

In the United States, it's a tradition. We have a very particular —radical worldview that is in part derived from Protestantism, that you have a life mission and you ought to incur real sacrifice, including working harder to fulfill that mission. Here, there's also a bigger tax break. And the way peer groups are formed, if you give a lot of money to something, you get on the board, you're invited to events. You use that as a way of building out your peer group and your network. In a way, where in Europe it's maybe more what high school you went to or people you've known all your life. And the selfish value of being philanthropic is much higher in this large, diverse country.

So often you say that if you really care about the long-term future, the best thing you can do is to promote economic growth. I wonder if you think the promotion of economic growth, like the creation of innovations, is more altruistic long-term. When compared to some EA-related approaches like donating to charity in order to reduce global poverty or trying to reduce existential risk?

In general, I'm a bigger fan of innovation, but I would stress a lot of EA types recognize this, and they've tried to fund innovations, sometimes successfully. Sometimes they fund the innovations they didn't intend to. So the people in the EA movement who are the AI doomers, they've actually done more to encourage AI advances than anyone else. I find that interesting. Why? You talk about how powerful something is and the rest of the world gets excited. They don't always buy your story about doom, but they'll buy into part of your story about its power and they'll want to invest a lot more money in it. And that's exactly what happened. And then over time, the institutions that start off focused on safety, they get shaped by the imperatives of being an institution and having to raise money and maximize profit. And over time, they just become very effective companies at building and marketing AI systems, which I think is a good thing. But they're very different from how they were when they started off. And again, the doomers have spurred this on rather than slowing it down. Mm-hmm. But I think effective altruism has plenty of room for innovation. You know, innovation is an ongoing game. It tends to spread to most of the world. Giving stuff away is one time., and a lot of it gets wasted. So if you can pull off an innovation, that's definitely my priority. Okay. But it's harder to pull off. Like, you can always give more money to anti-malaria bed nets, and you know you'll do some good. Like, the bed nets work. It's not that hard a thing. And most innovations fail. So it's a tricky balance. You know, you want to do some of each, I would say.

Okay. You wrote, the true disagreements over long-termism, as with most political concerns, remain foundationally rooted in our emotions and our personal temperaments. Do you mean that no amounts of data or analysis can fully resolve them because we differ on what feels morally urgent?

Yeah, I think people's views are largely guided by their temperaments. I have pretty optimistic worldviews. I do think they're correct. They're fully sincere. But I also recognize I was born with a pretty positive temperament, which my mother tells me I exhibited early on. I was like a well-behaved child and had a lot of fun just doing different things. So, okay, it's easy for me to be an optimist, and I think that really matters for where you end up. And it's hard to talk your way out of it, even when you ought to. So if the world were somehow ending, I probably would be trying too hard to see a bright side in that. Fortunately, it's not ending, but if it were—

Oh, you don't think it's— in a conversation with Varkesh, I think you were— you gave like the that we have like 700 years left. Do you think that?

Well, my view is this. There's always a risk of either nuclear war or something like nuclear war with maybe different kind of weapons, but equally or more destructive. And in any given year, I think the chance of that is quite small. In that sense, I'm an optimist. I think the chance of that in a given year is smaller than most people think. But I do recognize there's such a thing as a probability density function. And if you let enough years run, at some point it's going to happen. Now when I said 800 years, that was a bit tongue-in-cheek. It's just a number I made up. It's probably not going to happen soon. Yeah. But I don't think you need a million years for it to happen. I also don't think it would end all of civilization. Some people will survive, but it would set things back very severely. And maybe permanently.

Don't you think like we should be more focused on trying to expand humanity to other planets because, you know, a lot of existential risks matter because we only are in one planet, so if we destroy this planet, it's the— all humanity dies?

As a youthful science fiction fan, I would like very much if we could do that, but it seems to me very, very difficult, and even Mars, which is relatively close, I think would basically kill or disable all the people who go to live there. And to survive on another planet, you need exactly the right planet. Maybe you have to live underground. There's issues of radiation. I just don't see it working. So there's the upper atmosphere and under the ocean or on the ocean. Those seem more promising to me. Oh, interesting. I don't even know that we need them. Like, you ever go to Nevada? Like, where are you living right now?

I'm going to be in Omaha.

Omaha, okay, drive 10 minutes and it's empty, right? Yeah. So you're like, we need Mars? I don't know, Nebraska, there's a lot of land there.

So do you think Elon will ever launch a rocket to Mars?

Absolutely, but I don't think it will matter that much. He'll launch a rocket, there might be people on it on a suicide mission. They'll land on Mars, it'll be a big deal. But just like we went to the moon in 1969 and that was the end of that, I think it will be a bit similar. What's really valuable is space, the satellite belt, property rights up in space. We're going to put data centers in space. We may get solar-powered energy from up there in space. That's super valuable. A lot of that might happen, but that's where the action will be, not Mars. What's on Mars that's not in Nebraska? Mars doesn't even have cows. You have great beef in Nebraska, and I should go to Mars?

Interesting, okay. If long-term impact is about what endures for centuries, do you think EA people underweight the role of religion in shaping institutions?

Underrate the role of what? Religion. I've noticed sociologically a lot of the EA people do not think enough about culture and religion at all. Very distant from that. But I have seen in the last 2, 3 years some noticeable shifts where they're starting to do it more. I hope that continues. So I think they're willing to learn on those topics, but they're also just harder to wrap your arms around. Like, we all know what it means to invest in mosquito bed nets. If you say, well, I want to invest in giving America a better culture, okay, but what do you do the next day? Much tougher issue. And a lot of the EA groups, they want to be transparent and they want to have a kind of defensibility and legibility to what they do. And that pushes them more in the direction of bed nets and less in the direction of these less tangible things. But the less tangible things are super important and they're right now underinvested in.

So do you think like if EA people start to look more at religion, they would change some of their practices or?

I don't know. Again, if you look at the talent in the EA movement, I would say a lot of it is highly analytical. And as talents, they're not that strong in the humanities. It's just an observational fact. So maybe they're better off just sticking with the analytic stuff. And someone else will have to do the cultural and religious issues. But still, you'd like if there could be more crossover, right, in both directions. But maybe they're just not good at it. Like some of the EA people, you talk to them, they just seem like they're in quite a fog. They grew up in the rationality community. They're very good at a certain, like very narrow set of ways of thinking. They can be very effective applying those ways of thinking. Maybe that's just their comparative advantage. Okay, interesting.

So you've said before that the most important thinkers of the future would be religious. You could even say the present.

I said that a while ago, but yeah. Oh, interesting. Religious thinkers, absolutely.

Oh, but like wouldn't you expect that religion generates some pressure towards conformity and like Just the single fact that most religious people came from religious families says a lot about it. And the way, like, we get interesting stuff being done and creations being made is by having more risk-taking people, therefore less conformists, therefore less religious.

I think historically what you're saying has been true, and it's probably still true in Europe today. But I think in America today there's been a bit of a flip. The religious people are often the non-conformists. The formal religious structures themselves no longer exert much conformity power. Like the Catholic Church, the Pope tells you what to do, everyone ignores it for the most part. The Episcopalian Church barely exists. People who are LDS, you know, Mormons, that's become a much more diffuse thing. Who's a Mormon, who isn't, is much looser than it used to be. So I think religious conformity as a pressure is far weaker. Secular conformity with the rise of the woke became much stronger, and the ability of Americans to use religion to find new and different ideas and justify them, I think, has been pretty phenomenally positive in the last decade. Like, look at Peter Thiel. Whether you agree or not, well, his theory of the Antichrist— there were like some bishops who condemned Peter for talking about the Antichrist, but no one cares. They listen to Peter. They don't listen to the bishops. Interesting ideas will come of it. That's just a simple example.

But why do you think Europe is behind the US?

You have state churches. Those state churches still have a strong small-c conservative role in your societies. They're supported by tax money. You have fewer sects in the way that America has them. You also— this is changing— but you have fewer religions. It's less and less true as non-Westerners are migrating more to Europe. But I think the forms of Islam you have are much more conformist than what's here in the US. They're more harmful. They're working less well in terms of assimilation. US has more forms of Judaism that are more active here. That's another plus. Again, some parts of Europe have that, but overall much less than would be the case here. Hinduism, much more successful in the United States.

So is it good that there are more religions in the US than in Europe?

I wouldn't say it's unconditionally good. I would say the way it's evolved is good. US has a better functioning labor market. We have better mechanisms for selecting the higher talented immigrants and religious immigrants. We have strict guarantees of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and you put all that together, our recipe has worked much better.

Interesting, okay. So are Catholics more conformist than Protestants?

Once that would have been true. I'm no longer sure it's true now. I don't know, it's a good question. I would say the US has a quite Protestant set of Catholics compared to say, Western and Central Europe.

When you look at the George Mason Econ Department, a lot of you seem to have came from interesting religious backgrounds. So Garrett Jones from Mormon family, Robin Hanson, whose dad was a pastor.

That's right.

John Nye, Catholic. Right. Brian Kaplan, Catholic. Right. You have Mormon relatives?

No, nothing. Irish Catholic family. My parents were both anti-clerical. Okay. Non-believers.

Okay. Is there any believer within you? Or are all of you secular? In me, no.

No, I'm very, very far from that.

What about the GMU econ professors? Are there any believers?

I don't think there are many. And I'm never quite sure. There might be some, but you'd be looking to find them, is how I would put it.

So do you think like it's just random that some of you came from interesting religious backgrounds, or is there like an explanation of people that born in religious families and then became secular, or I don't know, more, I don't know, interesting?

It makes you less conformist, and some of us, Robin Hanson in particular, still have very religious ideas. So Robin's whole upload thing, it's really about the resurrection, which is a secular version of an idea where he used to believe in the religious version. So I tease Robin about this all the time. Bryan Caplan, in some ways, he's still a Catholic moral theologian. Like Aristotle, Aquinas, Rand. There's commonalities between that and certain Catholic views, Aquinas in particular. So these things leave traces. Would you like to believe in a religion?

Only if it's true.

Oh, interesting. Okay. The sense of security it gives people, I feel I have anyway, just through life circumstances. I'm not looking to believe, for instance. I think people on average, they're better off if they believe. They feel better. They feel less fear. They have a sense of community. They belong to something, higher purpose. I don't feel I need religion for any of those things. But I'm not anti-clerical the way my parents were. I think on that, at the margin, religion tends to be good for people, not bad for people.

And you think most people truly believe their religion, or they just like going to church and having the community and don't think too much about whether the book is true or not?

It's something in between. They don't not believe it. Yeah. But they don't very actively believe the details of it either. They have a general sense there's a God. If it's Christianity, they feel Christianity's a good thing. If it's Judaism, Judaic history, culture, society, community is a good thing. And then they start from there and they don't necessarily think too long and hard about what's the nature of the Trinity or when is the Pope speaking ex cathedra or whatever. They let a lot of that slide and they're willing to admit it might be wrong, but they still think on net it's a positive good thing.

Do you agree with them? Well, on which part? That it's a positive thing.

At the margin, yeah. I think the US and much of the world would be better off with more religion. I'm not sure in Nigeria, West Africa, would be better off with more religion, but the wealthy countries in the world would be.

Have you ever been to Life.Church?

Life.Church? You mean church?

No, there's a church named Life.Church.

Oh no, I've never heard of it. What is it?

I went like 2 weeks ago, a friend took me there, and it was just— I mean, I'm not a believer, but it was amazing, just a community. And it's like a kind of a rock concert where people—

I've been to things like this. Yeah, and the music is bad. That's my objection.

It is bad. And, um, I don't know, like, I think I'm gonna start going there every Sunday, but it's not because like I believe that it is true, but I just think it's good and it makes me like feel good about myself and I have like the community, all people are super nice.

You will learn things and you will meet people. There is no reason not to go if you can get there.

And one of the things when a pastor asked me why I am not religious, I asked them like what is the difference between like believing in God or believing in UFOs or in a conspiracy theory or there is life in Jupiter? Like how do they distinguish that? Do you have any answer?

Well, it is going to depend on the religion. But in many religions, faith plays this very important role in distinguishing between things you should and should not believe in. And a lot of the things you shouldn't believe in, say by a Christian Protestant sect, might be considered a form of demon. Like if you believe in UFOs, it's like saying you believe in demons. Now some of them welcome this and say, oh, the demons are here. You know, this is a reflection of our religious belief. But a lot of them would just say, no, you're believing in something dangerous. Don't go there. You know, keep your belief firm in Christ and the Trinity and Christ as the Son of God and our Savior. And they want to discourage this kind of multiplication of semi-sacred entities. It's one thing to me that's always been interesting about Ross Douthat. Ross is nominally Catholic, grew up in some kind of strange Protestant sect due to his mother, and his current beliefs are a weird mix of things. And he's quite willing to ponder, like fairies, demons, all these intermediate beings. Yeah. They're pretty welcome in his cosmology. He might be agnostic about them, but he's certainly not dismissive. Oh, okay.

Have you ever been persuasive by any of his arguments?

He and I had a 2-hour podcast. We did it in this room. Yeah. So you can listen to the podcast and see if you think I was persuaded. But no, I still don't believe. So I had a good time talking about the ideas. I did learn many things. But I still don't, I'm not closer to belief.

Okay. Would you agree that like one of the advantages of being a non-believer or like secular is that like you're more like naturally skeptic? Yeah, like you're more skeptic of believing in ideologies and more suspicious of like dogmas.

I don't think it's an advantage. I know so many secular people, like socialism becomes the dogma, woke becomes the dogma, or it could be libertarianism for that matter. But they cling to their other dogmas more fiercely. One of the arguments for religion is just there's a place you can stuff your dogmatism into beliefs about the Trinity, and then the rest of you is free to be open-minded because you've taken care of your dogmatism. You've sent it somewhere where it doesn't really matter that much for a lot of decisions. Okay. Okay.

So you've described yourself in the past as a philosopher who happens to study economics. Yeah. Can you explain?

Isn't it like inverse? Well, maybe it's both, but I read a lot of philosophy early on. I almost decided to become a philosopher. A lot of my economics is philosophically oriented. Just as a marker, I think I have at least as many pieces in top-tier philosophy journals as in economics journals. Now that's unusual, but it's a kind of evidence, right? Yeah. Maybe just the categories aren't that useful would be another way to put it. I was speaking a bit tongue-in-cheek when I said that, but I also meant it. I tend to think pretty philosophically, and when I'm in the role of podcast host, if I were mainly an economist, I actually couldn't do it at all.

Right, yeah, yeah. Who's your favorite philosopher?

Well, if you, it's like Plato if you count everyone. I love Derek Parfit and his work, more recently Robert Nozick and his work. Those would be recent favorites, Quine. Just to name a few. Okay.

You write in your book Big Business that the CEOs are the modern equivalent of successful philosophers and that in reality there is no job that is as philosophical. Can you expand on that?

If you're a CEO, you need to deal with the question, what do people really want from your product? Yeah. It's a pretty deep question, in fact. It's hard to get it right. What motivates people at work? How do I motivate them? It's really not just about money at all. That's a very deep question. It's hard to get it right. Just those two questions alone make you a philosopher. Then there's questions, well, how much should we invest in like following every law? Which no company does with full strictness, right? Mm-hmm, yeah. And it's not even possible. That's also a philosophical question. So you're faced with large-scale significant philosophical questions every day, all day long. That to me makes you a philosopher, no matter what the product.

Is that why you say Patrick Colson is one of the best philosophers alive?

Yeah, absolutely. And Stripe has been successful. Interesting. Now Patrick also thinks about philosophy in the narrower, more explicit sense, but the other counts too.

So do you think like the persona of a CEO has shifted from the one of a specialist to the one of a generalist, or it was always like a generalist persona?

It's changed a lot with time. So CEOs have more and more become generalists who coordinate their companies and spend a lot of time interfacing with the public, with government, setting the image of the company. 30, 40 years ago, it was much more likely the CEO was quote unquote the person who ran the company. That is today less likely to be true. Much less likely.

What happened? Why you say less?

Companies are bigger, more complex. No one knows enough to run the company. The demands on your time and attention for government, public relations, communicating the vision, forming the vision, the mission, those are all much more pressing. And the CEO has to do those. And whether the title is COO or not, but something like that, someone else literally running the company. Is a bigger and bigger thing. And that's just division of labor. Okay, interesting.

So like thinking about history, like we have the Enlightenment and the Renaissance where people are generalists. Then with the Industrial Revolution, we became specialists. And now it seems like we're becoming generalists again.

The CEOs are. You as an individual may or may not be.

Oh, so you don't agree that society overall is becoming more generalist?

There's more room for generalists. That's true. But the people who specialize specialize more and more. So it's again this barbell thing that you get both trends at once. And it's people stuck in the middle who are doing less well. You either need to be a really good specialist who does one thing better than other people or an excellent generalist.

If civilization still exists 1,000 years from now, who do you think might be remembered from today? Or do you think someone will be remembered from today? It's a good question.

Probably no one. So if I think who's remembered from 1,000 years ago, I would say it's no one. Now that's an odd pick, like exactly 1,000 years, you're hitting on a time period where things were not going that well, but very, very few people, I think, very few. Do you have any bet? Well, if Mars becomes a thing, it will be Elon Musk, but for reasons we already discussed, I would bet against that, but at least it's possible, right? Like Elon has a chance. You think he still believes it?

I don't know Elon.

I've never talked to him. I suppose I think he believes it, but that's not based on much that's firm. Okay. Okay.

What about a book from like today or from the past that might be remembered 1,000 years from now? Nothing from today.

Obviously there's books from the past. You can go see what we remember. It's less than 1,000 years ago, but I would say Canterbury Tales and Dante's Inferno. We still remember. Those are what you would call the post-antiquity books. You could name some others, but they'd be two obvious picks. What about the Bible? Well, that's not post-antiquity. Oh, okay. There's plenty from early on. Plato, Aristotle, from the Romans, Cicero, the Bible, other sacred texts that are plenty remembered, the Ramayana, go on and on and on. But then you have this breakpoint. Yeah. And those things won't be forgotten, but after antiquity ends, it takes a long time before you get to things that are remembered again. I guess Beowulf counts as post-antiquity. I'm not sure how well remembered that is, but I'll say like Chaucer, Dante are clearly somewhat remembered. Interesting.

So do you think the Bible will also be remembered 1,000 years from now?

Absolutely. And it's such a wonderful book. And there's still going to be Jews, Christians. Yeah, it's not going away.

If there were two versions of you, one that has never traveled and one that has never read a book, which one of them would end up closer to who you are today?

I guess the one who's never traveled, but again, it's the multiplicative model thing that doing both multiplies the value of each. So I know a lot, not a lot, but I know a reasonable number of people who read a fair amount and I don't think they've traveled much or if they traveled they didn't really travel and explore. Business trip or their parents dragged them when they were 10, whatever. You can see what those people are like. And they're still pretty smart but they're limited in some fundamental ways.

What's the difference between what you learn and like your overall insights when you go to a place say for a week to travel versus when you go to a place for a year to live?

Well, when you go for a year or two, you realize how little you understand. When you go for a week, you think you understand a bunch of things. But the value of going only for just one day is immense. The place becomes real to you. Maybe you understand nothing, but when you then later read about it, you have mental and emotional touchstones, and things fall into place much better. Like, I was recently in Tbilisi, Georgia, just for a day. And I couldn't tell you I understand any single thing, but my goodness, my sense of it is so advanced compared to not long ago when I'd never been there at all. Interesting.

In what sense do you learn by eating different foods? Like, does it help you crack cultural codes when you eat like a food, a typical food of a country?

If you only eat the food, I don't know how much you learn, but when you read about the food and its history. You learn about their supply chains. You learn about their economic geography. You learn about their history of agriculture, trade, colonization when that was the case. When you talk to the people who make the food, typically you're talking to non-elites, which is a useful corrective to what a lot of us end up doing on these trips, which is talking to other elites. You're often talking more to women or grandmothers or cooks That's another useful corrective. And it gives you a destination in many places, like gives it more of a quest-like feeling. We're going there for this meal, or we're going to go to Oaxaca and eat in these certain food stalls. And that gives a structure to your trip that makes the non-food parts of the trip better and more instructive. That's what I would say. Oh, okay. Interesting. Like you need a quest for a trip. Like, why are you going? And the quest can be a little bit made up or imagined, but it will make your whole trip better. Like you want to see some person, you want to eat some meal, you want to see some church, whatever. I think it's important for the whole trip, not just for the thing you see.

Did you ever went to places because of the food? Only because of food?

Or yeah, I think Malaysia is a great country to visit only for the food. It's pleasant, it's safe, people speak English. I like it. But there's not that much to see and do there that's special. Yeah. It could be the world's best food or it's in the top, top tier. I want to go back there, but I wouldn't say it's top of my list because for me it is mainly the food. Okay. People are very friendly there.

Oh, okay. Is it necessarily bad that with time a lot of businesses end up less innovative because the best workers get pulled into a small number of companies? Like, should we expect that we have less innovations from having a lot of small, big businesses than from having a lot of average, medium businesses?

Well, these things are clustered, and I think you want to build up the cluster. And if you look at, say, the Italian Renaissance, the early Renaissance, it was incredible in painting and not nearly as exceptional in music. So maybe we pulled some talent into painting and sculpture and away from music. You've just got to do it. Like, when you find something that's working, double down, triple down. Keep on doing it, you're not going to have a fully diverse set of achievements anyway. Maybe there's a few places like 19th century Paris, late 19th century, early 20th century Vienna where it's quite broad-based, but that's really the exception.

This technology drives the growth of government because like presumably every major innovation from now on, and AI included, has not only the prospects of significantly increase, benefit humanity and the human experience, but also of destroying civilization. Therefore, like, we need more regulation to make sure it doesn't go through a wrong, dangerous path.

I don't know if it means more government or less government. So AI will provide a lot of services cheaply. Yeah. Legal advice, medical advice. I don't know if the regulations in those areas will go away, but they might be made irrelevant. It's also possible that we need certain types of laws to set liability for AI, property rights. Can AIs have a bank account? To limit dangers, internalize externalities. I don't know yet if it will mean more government or less government. Maybe there's just fewer government workers because things are done by AI. A lot of government work is quite routine. If a government workforce shrank like by 4x, Yeah. It's not the same as less government because there's more work being done. I don't know. I think about this a lot, but I don't think I have good answers. Okay.

Do you think like major innovations from now on will also have like this safety component like we see with AI where we have like just people working on the safety side, making sure it doesn't go through a wrong, dangerous path?

Yeah, biological innovations. We have that already. We'll need more of it. The more we do with genomics, there's different safeguards you need to think about, and I think more interdependence lies in our future with AI and biology in particular. Quantum computing, I don't know if that will really work and be a practical matter, but that could change cryptography quite a bit, internet commerce, but like the regulations will come late. We'll be faced with the crises before the regulations in that area in particular. A lot of this stuff will come so quickly, we'll be scrambling to catch up with it. Like, we won't be ready. Our governments are pretty clueless about most of these areas. And voters are not demanding much action either. They're vaguely suspicious of AI, but they're not demanding any particular set of laws.

Should we worry that our governments are clueless?

They're always clueless, but when there are big new changes, it matters more than other times. So we should worry, but in some ways maybe it's good that they're clueless because they have no choice but to let it happen. I guess that's my view. But I don't want them clueless forever. I'm glad they're clueless for now, but the clock is ticking and the time is coming where they shouldn't be clueless anymore.

Why do you think blogging rewards so much like this big body of language, of knowledge from knowing a lot about different fields in the sense like bloggers are more likely to just go and search and get a thoughtful picture from a lot of fields in order to write about the problem they are trying to solve.

Well, I'm not sure blogging rewards that in particular. I would say if you want to blog for 23 years running, that's what you need to stay fresh or interesting. But most bloggers, they blog what they know. Maybe they blog for 6 months. It's some value to them and then they stop. And they don't need that at all. So most blogging is not like what I've been doing. Okay. I'm very much the outlier.

Oh. In your conversation with Patrick Olson a couple years ago, you said that you would like to see more blogs focus on a single issue, on a single problem. Yeah. Why do you think that's so important? Do you think people would read them as well?

There's just a lot that's underdiscussed. So Brian Potter has done this very effectively with Construction Physics. A lot of that is about the cost of construction, which is a major problem. It's not neglected anymore, in large part because of Brian. That's been great. Roxandra from Romania, she's blogging clinical trials, a major problem. It's not her only topic, but it's her main topic. She's, I think, having a real impact. So I'm delighted to see both of those things happening. I'd love for there to be a lot more. Interesting.

Have you ever been tempted to just stop writing for the Free Press and magazines and just write on Marginal Revolution or on your personal Substack like Paul Krugman did?

No, I mean, I write the blog anyway. Keep in mind those other people pay me. No one pays me to write on my blog. But I also like working with editors. New York Times, Bloomberg, Free Press, I've always had great editors. That's important. And you reach very different audiences writing for these other outlets. And I like that I've written for different outlets. And now it's the Free Press where I've been very happy and I've had great editing and they have great reach. So no, I don't think I'm going to change that. Okay. Okay.

I'm going to name like some bloggers and famous Twitter personalities, and I'd like to hear like your take on them. Yeah. Okay. So first, Hila. She's very smart.

A fantastic writer, quite an important figure. Some people hate her. I think you have to distinguish between approving, you know, different things she does and what you think of her as a thinker. And she's a great and important thinker. I've met her a bunch of times. I don't know her, but I like her as a person from the interactions I've had. Mm-hmm. What about Skolnick, Senator? Scott has written an incredible series of essays and blog posts over what is now quite a few years. He's been remarkably influential in the Bay Area, has built up the rationality community, has this one huge blind spot on AI risk, which he just won't treat scientifically. Other than that, he's done great stuff.

Noah Smith.

Noah Smith, when he started, I disagreed with him a lot. He just has worked so hard and he's just gotten better and better and better. I love reading him. I think he's very often right. He has great influence and he's really mastered like what he should be doing in a way based on this like continual ongoing ruthless self-improvement. Matthew Iglesias. Matt, I've always liked a lot in his various incarnations. Now that politically he's more centrist or even on the right in some issues makes me happy. But I loved Matt even in his strict blogger days when he'd like blog about the Wizards or movies or— he's just a very, very smart person as his father is and he's always interesting and he's like this American treasure.

Roen, R-O-E-N.

Oh, R-O-E-N. Yeah. I love Roen. I only met him once. He seemed very nice. He's one of my favorite people on Twitter. He works for OpenAI, so that to me is already a big plus right there. Yeah, I'd like to get to know Roon better. Only positives from what I've seen. Cool, okay. Razib Khan. I met Razib I think once, maybe twice briefly. I wouldn't say I know him. I believe he's blogging very high-quality material on genetics. I'm not sure I'm able to judge it. It has the sniff test of being high quality, and he covers a lot of things other people don't cover. It seems to me quite valuable. Okay. Richard Anania. Richard is a long and complicated story. I like where Richard has ended up, and he's one of the most influential classical liberals. He's super smart. He's very willing to be disagreeable. Which is usually but not always a strength for him. I hope now he doesn't get caught in the trap of just repeating his current point, which to be clear I agree with, but he's like against the right-wing populists, but I'm a little bored with that, and I'm waiting for his next thing. Okay, Samo Burja. I know Samo, I had lunch with him some number of years ago and seen him a bunch of times since. I think his Substack newsletter is very good. It's super well-informed. There's a few calls he got wrong, but he is willing to think outside the box, and he's one of the people you can and should read to actually get different perspectives that are nonetheless backed up by a lot of information.

Okay. Uh, Scott Aaronson.

I've met Scott a bunch of times. He's one of the best bloggers. I cannot judge his contributions on the technical side, but I believe they're thought of very highly. Just one of the smartest people and seems to have good judgment, and it's a great thing for the world that Scott is out there. Zvi? I know Zvi. He's very, very smart. I think he is caught up in this one mood of the world is going to end. Which I think is quite wrong and it skews a lot of what he does. But he writes the best surveys on AI and maybe you need to be a bit caught up to be motivated for the surveys to be that good and that useful. So I get his stuff and in fact I usually read it, which is the highest praise, right? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I try to talk him out of his mood, but I've totally failed.

Okay, I'm curious to know what you think about Portugal.

I've been to Portugal 3 times. No, 4 times. Twice to Lisbon, once to Porto, and once to Tavera. We call it Lagos. You have a different pronunciation, right? Oh, Lagos. Yeah, but we call it Lagos. It's like you say Paris, not Paris. But Paris is correct. All of those are incredible places. It's a very underrated country to visit. I think the food is superb. And original, and you can't really get good versions of it easily elsewhere. Architecture, phenomenal. In Lisbon, I love the main art museum and also the Gulbenkian. I like just wandering through smaller Portuguese towns. Tavira and the tiles is incredible. I worry a lot of the country is dying and depopulating and too old, and like half of it won't be Portuguese people within my lifetime. It'll be like British retirees and migrants. Oh yeah. And it will be kind of dead. So I'm not sure the country has a future at all, but I think it's a fantastic place and I love going. And I'll go back again, I guess, to Braga and Coimbra. Forgive my pronunciation, but that's how we say them. People are so nice. I like the sound of the language. I can even sort of read the language through Spanish, so I don't feel helpless there.

Okay. Do you have a lot of Immersion Ventures grantees who came from Portugal?

No. Vasco.

Vasco, yeah, he's my cousin.

Yes. Yeah. You, uh, there might be someone else, but that's all that comes to mind. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So everyone go to Portugal. There's at least 3 great parts of the country, probably more. And it's easy to get around. It's safe enough. Like, there's no downside to going. It's pretty affordable. Cheaper than most of the rest of Europe. Do you think people are—

do you think it's a good place to live in?

If you're retired or young, very young, or young, if you're a kid or retiree, it's the best place in the world. In between, like, what's your job? I don't know. I'm then, you know, less bullish on it. But like, the quality of the place is incredibly high. I just don't know what you can do there with all this shrinkage. Okay. And aging.

How would you fix it?

I don't think you can fix it. Oh. Now, if current Portuguese couples all decided to have 3 kids, it would be fixed automatically. I just don't see that happening. Oh, okay. But the fix is easy. We know the technology, right?

What's the technology?

To have kids. We know how to do it.

Oh, okay. Okay. So you don't vote. I'm wondering if, quote unquote, civic responsibility takes a different shape when it comes to you, because like for the average person, like voting is the only thing they can do in order to influence politics. But like you have your blog is read by millions. And I mean, I don't know, you probably don't impact policies, but I'm sure you impact a lot of opinions.

I have impacted a number of policies, often through indirect means that I would not necessarily speak about. But I've played a role as an advisor in a whole bunch of things. So I'm doing my civic duty, and I feel voting would diminish my civic duty. It would make me stupider. Why? I would start taking sides. And often I genuinely don't know which side to vote for in many elections. Some elections I feel I know, but a lot of times I don't know. And if I'm not sure and it's going to make me stupider and I have other things I can do, including with that time, There you go.

Okay, uh, okay, so, uh, 2 days ago you launched this aesthetics program with Patrick Collison. Yeah. Uh, what's the larger vision behind it? What's the motivation?

To make the world more interested in beauty again, in inspiration. And if you go, say, to Portugal, the older buildings in most parts are just incredible, and we'll still go to see them. I'll travel from the US to go see them. The newer buildings, not only Portugal, but they're quite unexceptional. You might even say they're ugly. So why is that? I want people to do more to answer that question, address it, and change it. It strikes me as, in a wealthy, diverse world, an entirely reasonable set of expectations, but someone needs to act on it. And that's what we're doing with this project.

Is it like serving the big same goal as progress studies, or it's just fundamentally different?

No, aesthetics is a hugely important part of progress, and a purely mechanical, material vision of progress studies, I'm convinced, will fail. That the Enlightenment comes from the Renaissance, which had a strong interest in beauty and drew beauty from the ancient world and the best of medieval times, was critical to everything that followed. And I would say the Industrial Revolution came first to aesthetics And only later to industry.

So you agree, like, with the view that, like, people are happier when they are in beautiful places, wherever they might be?

I mean, they're probably happier, but that's not what motivates me. Just the beauty itself motivates me. It's probably good for happiness, but that is not even my sales pitch. We should care about beauty for its own sake. Thank you, Tyler. It has been great chatting. Okay, thank you. I appreciate it. Let's do this again sometime. I'd love to. And thank you for coming out. Oh, thank you. And also hope to see you in Portugal someday.

Oh, that would be amazing.

Yeah, I want to go back and see the rest of the country. OK.