Tyler Looks Back on 2019 (BONUS)

Hi everyone, this is Jeff, producer of Conversations with Tyler Cowen. It's the end of the year and today we're doing a special retrospective episode. So I sat Tyler down in the studio and we reflected on the past year of the show. We talk about how Tyler's production function has changed in the past year, which guest was the most challenging for him to prep for, most popular episodes, most underrated conversations. I also challenged Tyler to several rounds of a segment I call Name That Production Function. We took your questions from Twitter. I went back to Marginal Revolution in December 2009 and asked Tyler how he thought his picks held up from then for best books and movies. It's a great conversation. I really enjoyed it, and I hope you also enjoy this peek behind the scenes. Before we get to it, the last thing I'll say is that if you'd like to support the show before the end of the year, please go to conversationswithtyler.com/donate. On behalf of me and the rest of the Conversations with Tyler team, we really appreciate it. Thank you and enjoy this special end-of-year retrospective.

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit www.conversationswithtyler.com. I love going to a hotel, often a bad one, when all they have is cereal, and then I can have it again. And I don't have to feel guilty, and I won't have it any other time.

Actually, one of my questions for you, Tyler, was what your favorite sort of packaged grocery store item is. So I know you love chocolate and you have sort of things you eat, but if you were kind of buying a packaged good off the shelf in a grocery store, what's your favorite thing?

Well, the funny thing is I don't really buy any packaged goods, so I hardly buy any canned goods. I love Goya small white beans. I cook them with chili, and I love Goya small red beans. I cook them with Mexican dishes, but I'll buy fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, cheese, and very little processed or packaged. I can't even think offhand. If you count smoked trout wrapped in plastic, that's a kind of package, but it's still basically buying fish.

Yeah, so you follow the typical, the kind of healthy advice where you stay around the perimeter of the grocery store and you're in the fresh fruits and you're in the meats, but you're not in those interior aisles where they typically are stocking the candy bars and potato chips and things like that.

That's right, but I'm not sure it's motivated by health. I just like the other items better.

But you said cereal, so is cereal one of those foods for you that you would— you indulge at hotels, but you won't buy it for yourself now?

I don't buy it ever, and I only indulge at it in bad hotels. Like if I'm staying in Menlo Park where the hotels are bad, unless you're paying a lot, and they'll just have cereal and bad eggs and bacon. I'll just have the cornflakes. But it's so delicious. And to do that 5 times a year makes me very happy.

So this is a story I think is known at Mercatus. It's part of the lore of Tyler is that when you were studying in Germany, you had someone ship you cereal. This is before you had your awakening. Tell us, tell us that story.

I think you can get away more with eating cereal when you're younger. But I had a favorite cereal, which then was Product 19. And it was very hard to get in Germany. The only place you could get it was at American army bases. And then you had to pretend to be part of the American armed services, which involved costs of its own. So one very nice person working at Mercatus sent me a bunch of boxes of Product 19.

This is the first Mercatus export, maybe in a way, was Tyler Cowen and Product 19.

That's correct, to Germany.

So when was that? What year was that?

That must have been 1984. Possibly '85. '85, I think.

When was your awakening in terms of food? So it wasn't—

In Germany, that was the year. So I was starting to experiment. I think I was 23 when I went in graduate school, and then I got to Germany and everything was different. So if you're thrown out of your status quo, you'll experiment with many other things too. I think that's an interesting general principle. People don't experiment enough with their own lives. And you'll find yourself trying things that were not part of the initial experiment. And that's what Germany did to my food life. So I started trying, say, Korean food, which I hadn't had before. I don't even know that it was that good in Germany, but I didn't know. And it's like, I'm not going to eat German food every day. So let's try, you know, bulgogi.

Yeah. I think my first Indian food was when I was living in Germany.

And how was it?

I just remember it in my mind. It was the first time I'd had a curry.

So it was pretty tasty.

Yeah. And it was one of my favorite things. And I thought, this is amazing. And it just happened to be in Germany. So my experience bears it out a little bit too. Some of the things you mentioned about physical space and experimentation are going to come up in this conversation. So we've already gotten started. For those of you who don't know, I'm Jeff Holmes. I produce Conversations with Tyler. I'm joined with our host Tyler Cowen, and we're going to do sort of a year in review and talk about the show, but go beyond. It's the end of a decade, and we've never done this before, so I'm going to go a little further afield. If you like this segment, we'll do it more. So let me know, let Tyler Cowen know, but I thought it was a great time here at the end of the year to look back on the state of the podcast. We're going to do a few things. We're going to look back at past episodes, talk about them. We're going to do a segment I like to call Name That Production Function, which I'm very excited about. And then I've actually looked back at Marginal Revolution from 10 years ago, and I'm very curious to hear your thoughts about the productivity and the changes in Marginal Revolution in in the past decade.

I will fail all of these memory tests.

But first—

I'm very focused on the next podcast, just to be clear, as my producer tells me to be.

Yes, well, that is the prime directive for Conversations with Tyler. We're here at the end of the year. Actually, all of our episodes through the end of the year have been recorded, but we do have always more in the queue, more in the pipeline. Your prep is as intensive as ever.

How many total this year? Do you have a count?

Nearly 30. Wow! This is the second year that we— so starting last year, we started the every other week, and then we usually have a few bonus episodes. So this year that was true to form as well. So we do it minimum now 24, and then usually there is a little bit extra. And so as you look back over those episodes and you have the list in front of you, you know, what strikes you about it? Can you keep up the pace?

I think I can. I felt it was an incredible year, our best guests, Maybe the most diverse group, a very few week episodes. And for me, basically a thrill each time. People I thought I'd never have a chance to do a podcast with, and here they are.

Have you had to adapt your research process to accommodate more guests? And I think we have more guests on that you're not as familiar with, that you can't just rely on a base knowledge. You really do have to kind of get in at a ground level, not just read everything they know, but maybe get more of the contextual work down. Have you adjusted or you just, you go for it and you've just had to shift other priorities?

I've had to shift other priorities. Economists are the easiest to prep for. Like in principle, you could try doing it with no prep. Ed Boyden was one of the hardest because he studies the brain and even Ed will tell you we don't understand the brain. So if Ed doesn't understand the brain, how well do you think I understand the brain? But I still have to ask him some questions. Can I ask, Gard? I had to revisit a lot of Norwegian literature, which I had already read, but that wasn't actually very easy. That was an especially difficult prep. And anytime I have to read fiction, which I just read slower, it's not the fault of the author, but Neil Stevenson was a very difficult prep.

Long books.

Long books. And you can't just breeze through them because like you've absorbed the material in some other capacity. And then Jordan Peterson's a hard prep. Not that he's written that much, but there's so much of him on YouTube and you can only listen to it that quickly and you've got to decide, what am I going to do about this guy? And at some point you just drop it and you put your energy into thinking through how should the conversation actually be. But the hardest prep of all was Emily Wilson, who translated Homer. And in a way that was mainly one book, but it was one book I had to read about 5 times and it's a very hard book. That was the single killer prep for me during the year, and that was very rewarding, but that was tough.

Let me give you a rundown of the stats. Do you have a sense of what was the most popular podcast this year?

No idea whatsoever. Are you allowed to tell me?

Sure. I'm benchmarking this in the first week of release to sort of—

Okay, fair enough.

—to control for life, to control for release age, but the most popular podcast in the first week was Jordan Peterson. Not surprised. No, of course not. Jordan Peterson was by far the most downloaded in the first week.

And that was closer to his popularity peak than today.

Yes, and I thought a very good conversation, 'cause I've reviewed the conversations leading up to this, and I was surprised at how Jordan, as you say, Jordan Peterson, very exposed person, a lot out there, but I found a lot of what he said very good.

And it was actually a conversation, which is not always the case, right?

That's true, and I really did, I thought his comments on fame and having to be careful, I thought he revealed something about himself That was very interesting. I encourage everyone, if you're new, you should definitely check that out. Do you have a sense of what might be the most underrated conversation? If you look here and you think about our typical listenership and one they may have skipped, I have my answers. I'm curious to hear yours. Most underrated.

I suppose I think that's going to be Knausgaard, who was brilliant, but highly literary and very much into things Norwegian. So my guess is that did not get the number of listeners it deserved, but I'll defer to you.

You've got the data. Yeah, I'm not equating it necessarily with listens, but that is true. I think Knausgaard underperformed relative to the quality of the conversation and how well he is known within literary circles. And for me, Knausgaard was also a highlight. It was fun also just to record that. It was in London.

He left his black bread. He left his bread. And we got to eat it, right? That was awesome. It's like, I'm eating Knausgaard's black bread.

Yeah. He came in, he left. It was actually a bag of pastries and we realized too late that he had left them. Apparently this is common for Knausgaard that he forgets things and leaves them behind. I ran—

confiscate the food for all of our guests and producers.

I— we divvied it up amongst you, your wife and myself and another producer who was sick and I don't think got to enjoy it. But I actually— one of those pastries I brought all the way back to the States and my wife even enjoyed one of Knausgaard's pastries. But I also love I love that conversation because he talked about fatherhood and writing in a way that I found very, very affecting as someone with a young child. So even as someone who's never read Knausgaard, which is me, I thought it was a great conversation.

The best part of that was his opening look, which is not on the audio or the transcript. It was clear he's sick and tired of doing media. And he got the first question and his eyes shifted as he realized this was going to be an actual conversation. And that was maybe the CWT highlight of the year for me, was to see Knausgaard's eyes shift and just how quickly and how smartly he realized that he was in for something different. It did not take him long.

Yes. This is— in editing these, we do take out pregnant pauses and people do stop to think. That's something I do wonder. I do know people wonder about is sometimes the conversation seems so fast-paced and usually they are. But sometimes guests do take a moment and they think about something. Do I do that? I don't think— Carter's saying no, I don't edit. I don't edit them anymore. I don't think we're cutting out pauses for you as much. And actually, I think for guests, it's— they don't have the time to regroup because you're so fast. I've definitely heard that from guests that the pace is kind of thrown off for them. But we try to leave in a hint of when there was a pause, but we definitely condense and shorten. Um, so these people aren't always superhumans, but I remember with Knausgaard in particular, as I, as I recall, he did take quite a bit of time after that first question to think, uh, and that wasn't reflected in the final product.

So which is the most underrated according to you?

I would say Knausgaard, and the other one I would say is Emily Wilson. I was going to say that.

So we agree actually. Yeah. And Emily was fantastic. Yeah. But Homer is not the biggest draw with our audience, but she was perfect. She knows everything. There was something just mellifluous about the whole rhythm of the dialogue.

Yeah. And she is someone who has found a way to use Twitter effectively to market and storytell about her work as a translator. Yes. And she's a great Twitter follow. So that's an underrated aspect of Emily Wilson. So yeah, those would be probably my two top picks for underrated conversations. As you look over any other reflections on on the year. Surprises for you, like if you would have thought at the beginning of 2019 that we're going to have some of these people on? Because some of them we know, some of them we don't. They come very quickly.

Well, I didn't think Mark Zuckerberg would ask me. That was a surprise. I said yes. That would be the biggest surprise. The physical setting of the chat with Alain Bertaud, where the World Trade Center had been, that overlook site where all of New York was around with the open windows, and as the chat proceeded, You know, it turned to dark and the lights came out. Again, the listeners have no sense of that, but for me, that was pretty incredible.

Yes, we were on top of One World Trade Center for that conversation, and it was— we did it right at sunset, and it was a special event for that reason, the subject matter, the setting. Kudos to our event producer for that, Caitlin Schmidt. She did a great job.

Margaret Atwood making fun of me and the art collection in Kwame Anthony Appiah's home. Those are two other very memorable moments.

And that will come up. Actually, I'll use that to transition to a segment I'm going to slip in at various points in the conversation. But we're going to do Name That Production Function. And we have music. We're going to keep— no, we don't have music. So I've gone through and obviously a recurring theme is that you ask about their production function sometimes explicitly. Sometimes it just comes up organically where they talk about how they do what they do. So I've grouped them into different themes.

Before you do that, I just want to say it's one of my core views. We should just study successful people more. Like, how'd they do this? Yes. There's a very superficial version of that in the media all the time, but like actually trying to figure out how they did it to me is one of the most interesting topics.

On that question, when people give their production function, how much do you believe they're aware of it? Let's say for a CWT guest, how often do you think this is actually true or this is something they think but is not the true production function?

I don't think it's untrue, but I think on average they're too modest and they're not quite willing to express their sheer ruthlessness at being successful in a way, and the glee they take in that. So it's a biased estimate, I would say. Yeah.

One of my things that I'm always curious to hear people name in a production function is the people that surround them, that they have built a team around. And sometimes it may be more of a leadership team, but sometimes it might just be people who are very good at using producers, say, or people like administrative assistants. And how that plays into people's production function and allows them to focus on the things that really matter. I know this is something that people talk about in academia, some as well, that academics tend to get saddled with a lot of administrative work, but honestly, I think one of the underrated aspects of any person's production function is the extent to which they can plug into an infrastructure and have certain things just not be a focus of worry for them.

Ed Boyden saw that, but a lot of our guests didn't emphasize it. And I feel that's another bias. By being excessively modest, they're in some bizarre way also being too egocentric. They're not talking about like, how am I good at building a team or letting someone else build a team around me?

Yes. Okay. So first theme, name that production function. These are all related to— several guests gave answers related to physical space. So the first one, I have a very big desk from IKEA. I have a huge orange cat. Who's mostly on it. I also have a couple of Greek dictionaries, Greek texts. Sounds like Emily Wilson, but that's a softball. That's a softball. So Emily Wilson really stressed having a big desk with a lot of text around it.

She translates Homer. You need a big desk to do that.

And a big orange cat as well.

And a cat, yes. And the Greek dictionaries.

Okay. Second person who emphasized physical space. I almost always work on the column at the weekend in the living room of our house in another state.

In New Jersey. That's easy.

That's a pia. Yeah. So he said, I work for 6 or 7 hours. And he emphasized that he can't do certain work in certain spaces. Like he has a study, but he doesn't do any work there.

Multiple locations are underrated. I have 2 offices in Arlington and Fairfax. I used to have 3 and I work a lot at home and I work a lot now on the road, including going to these podcasts. So that's 4 different locations.

On that question, particularly physical spaces, working on the road, do you have any tips or tricks?

It's been maybe my biggest productivity boost in the last 2 years. I've learned how to work on the road much better. I think I was always pretty good at it, but now my productivity, uh, is maybe not even lower for most trips. So I'm not sure what I did to get there.

Is it preserving the schedule or is it you've just figured out how to do work in incidental spots as you're traveling?

More the latter and learning greater flexibility. So being able to write, even if I'm not just writing early in the morning. It's been part of it. Right. Some—

I feel like you have to go into two spaces. You either have to try your best to preserve a schedule even when on the road, or you have to get much, much better at just working where you can and not being precious about it.

And I've done the latter without breaking my rigid schedule at home.

All right. So we'll go back to production function, but now we're going to, uh, let's do some listener questions. So I asked, uh, I asked for some questions on Twitter. And I picked some of my favorites. This is still the conversation I want to have, so I did skip some. All right. So we got some questions from Twitter. Here's one. Our former Mercatus scholar, Make America Boom Again advocate Eli Dorado. His question was simply, what is it like being Tyler Cowen? And this felt like an inside joke to me. I don't know if it is, but I have an addendum to it as well. So answer that question. And then my follow-up to it would be, Is there a difference in what it's like to be Tyler from 2009 to now? How has it changed in the past 10 years?

I think I'm very calm, and it's really quite rare that I have an unhappy day. It's hard for me to remember one. So this extreme evenness of temperament is actually a real thing. And I guess that's what it's like being Tyler. It has some downsides, but it's great for getting work done because your emotions are not distracting you from the task in front of you, and it just happens. So that's what it's like, part of what it's like being Tyler.

I've never witnessed a Tyler tirade. I think you never will. Yeah, I was a Tyler fan for many years, started reading Marginal Revolution probably in 2006, probably. And they say don't meet your heroes, that's always a concern, but I would say you are exactly as you appear to be, and meeting you has been great, and working with you has been great. Thank you for the kind words. You are exactly how I think most people perceive you to be. There is no other dark side of Tyler. There is no Tyrone lurking in the shadows.

That's a problem perhaps, but I think it's an interesting question whether you should aspire to be better or worse than your public self, and you can make an argument either way. So there are people who are just incredible when you read their writing, and when you meet them, there's nothing wrong with them, but you don't get anything extra. Out of meeting them. Yeah. And I guess I feel that's a worse way to be, that if the person is better than the product, maybe in some ways the product is worse, right? It's easier to exceed a lesser product. But nonetheless, philosophically, that's what I prefer in people, is for the person to be better than the product.

You have your product as writings and your thoughts that are out in the web, but you still have not I don't think most people would consider you overexposed still, or they feel like they've gotten to the depths of Tyler Cowen. And I think that maybe that time can come. Maybe there is a limit, but I don't think we found it yet.

One thing Jordan Peterson figured out, it's one thing that made him successful, is there's a certain way in which on the internet you can't be overexposed. That if there's just a steady stream of you, it feels like being overexposed compared to the standards of 1987 or whenever, but in fact it's not, and people are picking and choosing, and you end up just dominating a particular space in a particular kind of way. Yeah. And I think most older people have not made that transition mentally to understanding how you should exist intellectually on the internet.

Yeah, I'm sure it does feel like that to, to a Jordan Peterson. I feel like in 2006 2007, I could go on YouTube and watch literally every video that existed of you and now I can't, but I also choose not to watch them. I mean it's amazing now if you had asked me 10, 12 years ago, "Oh, there's new Tyler content out," and I still love it and I read Marginal Revolution every day, but I also do that filtering myself that I'm like, "Well, I still have my canon or the core reading that I do and some of the other—" Like one thing is I almost never read your Bloomberg columns. Yeah, it's fine.

They're for a different audience.

And yeah, something about you, something. Well, how do you think about that difference?

Well, if you think about Bloomberg, the first tier of readers are those people who subscribe to the terminals, right? And a lot of them, most of them are a finance audience. They tend to be highly analytical, high income with a particular set of interests. And I think it's fine, great to write for them. I love them as an audience. But they're not like the blog audience or the CWT audience at all.

So you've got sort of a portfolio now, you feel? Yes. How does the podcast fit into that? Do you feel like you're reaching a new or a bigger niche? How does that sort for you?

I mean, I don't even know who I'm reaching. When people see me in public, they now mention the podcast more than the blog. So that tells me something. But part of the strategy is in a way to ignore the audience and this is the conversation with person X that I want to have. And it's true because that's the only reason to do it in a way. Should— not an income earner.

Should people approach you if they see you or do you— Depends who they are. And if a listener to the podcast sees you in an airport or train station.

In the current equilibrium, I'm happy when they do, but I'm not sure it would be true across all margins.

Do you have rules of etiquette that you want us to communicate here and now that Say hello, but—

Yeah, sure. Yes. No reason not to.

Celebrities have to learn the rules here about you can say hello, but maybe no photos. What's— No, whatever a person wants, so.

Okay, you heard it, whatever you want.

But no, in the current equilibrium, right?

So it's a Lucas critique issue. Well, let us know. If you announce the current equilibrium is fine, it may change. It's already shifted, it's shifted already.

Okay, next question from Twitter. This is from Benjamin Fisher. Does Tyler have any thoughts on the legacy of Robert Crumb? Do you know Robert Crumb?

You mean the guy who did the comic books? Cartoonist. The movie's about. I've never really read them. I saw the preview for that movie many times and somehow it didn't appeal to me. And I haven't read comic books since I was a kid when I read a lot of DC Comics when I was quite young. And my interest with it has died there. I'm not against it, but it just has not been a live thing for me, just like graphic novels are not a live thing for me. Yeah. I love the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman, but most of them just, they don't click with me somehow. Yeah. The fault is mine, I would readily admit.

All right. We're going to move off of listener questions and go back to production function. Here we go. All right. These are on writing habits. First one. I've never written as much as I have after I got the children, after I started to write at home, after I kind of— Knausgaard. Knausgaard. The Norwegian. And as I mentioned, this was a part that really struck home with me. He talked about trying to write and like literally lock himself in, you know, a Nordic lighthouse or whatever it was. But he established a routine in the middle of life. And I liked that so much that I put that as part of the title. It became less religious for him, less sacred. All right, so that was Knausgaard. Second person, I certainly do not write every day. And I don't think that's a bad thing. I think it's sometimes good not to be purposeful in what you're doing. You're distilling thoughts. There's a lot of merit to allowing your thoughts just to meander in your head and make weird connections before you push them on the page.

I'm guessing a bit on this one, but Margaret Atwood?

That's, uh, MacFarlane actually.

MacFarlane, okay.

Yeah. All right, next one. When I first dreamed of being a writer, I thought I needed all these life experiences. I needed to go running with the bulls, be an alcoholic. Now I think just the opposite. There's plenty of stories out there. The things to write about are all around you and you need to discipline yourself, get your health right. I tend to be very careful about what I eat. I exercise, running, yoga, getting my body right. It's not glamorous, but I feel like it benefits my work a lot. Sounds like Neal Stephenson. It's not Neal Stephenson. It's not? Who's your second guess?

It sounds like a fiction author.

Running with the Bulls. It's not fiction either, because—

Who else would need to— Ben Westhoff.

Yeah, it was Ben Westhoff. Okay, journalist. Okay, last one. This was one of my favorite answers of all production function answers. I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. That's why I spend maybe 2 hours a day writing. I'm a writer. Sounds like me. But I spend 3 to 4 hours a day reading and 2 to 3 hours a day listening to music. People think that's creating a problem, but I say, no, this is the reason I'm able to do this because I have constant good quality input. That is the only reason I can maintain the output.

I think only Ted Gioia would mention so many hours of music. Yes. But it is also me. That would completely apply to me.

He articulated something I think is very true of infovores generally, but I've haven't heard it, I think, on CWT yet, is that idea that saving the time for the inputs is what allows you to do the thing.

That's right. And music always having a role in what's going on as well.

Okay. Back to some questions and we'll move on from production function. Uh, Evie Fellow Llama, she, uh, she asked you if you had a restaurant, what cuisine would you serve?

Oh, I think it would be food from Central Mexico and I would cook it. So. That's my favorite food to cook. Like chicken mole is my best dish, I think.

How long does it take you to make a mole?

I've gotten it down to about an hour's worth of labor time, but it has to sit overnight. So it's not ready in an hour. But if I rush and do it perfectly, my part of it is done in an hour. And then the sauce sits overnight. And then the next day, the chicken roasts for about an hour and 5 hours and 10 minutes. So it depends what you count, but it feels like it takes an hour.

And what style is it? Is it like a chocolatey mole or— Chocolatey mole. Okay. Yeah. Another question from a Mercatus scholar, Emily Hamilton, who works on affordable housing, land use. What do you think of fast casual architecture?

Have you heard that term? I don't think I know the term. What does she mean by that?

It's, uh, think of something like the Southwest Wharf in DC, where it's a big sort of master plan. It's kind of this upper middle class development. They bring a lot of higher end retailers. You might have a Whole Foods, you might have some fancy restaurants, and it's all kind of part of this master plan, part of an urban design.

I find so much of America dispiritingly ugly, but I've learned to prefer that, that it keeps our minds open for other things. And the towns that are in a way picture perfect, like Ghent or Bruges or Bergen, Norway, where I just was. Uh, that's stultifying. So I guess I quite like fast casual precisely because I don't like it. That if architecture is what is controlling your mind rather than music, uh, I suspect you'll end up in a worse place. And you don't want your visual physical environment to be too perfect in any one dimension, that that ends up stopping or halting your thinking in some way. So to grow up in Paris, maybe now at this point is limiting. I'm not saying it always was, but Paris is a completely static city at this point, at least central Paris. It's like, my goodness, it somehow can't be good for a public intellectual. Another Twitter question.

This is from Vincenzo Luna. What's the biggest change in the shortest period of time you've ever witnessed something either personally or professionally? And he says, to clarify, I mean anything from a near instantaneous transformation, but, or something that proceeded incrementally, but you saw it from start to finish and you thought, wow, that was amazing.

Well, the growth of China would be one example. I'm not sure I can rank anything as the very most extreme, but I first went to China 30 years ago and I've been there many times since. And each time I go, my jaw drops. And the difference between 30 years ago and today, I even wrote a Bloomberg column about that you didn't read. But the point got made. It's really quite phenomenal.

That is one of my regrets is that I haven't visited China and the idea that you can see things changing almost in real time.

—That's over there now. I mean, it will still change a lot, but not at 10% rates of growth.

—Back to production function questions. This is kind of a grab bag one. My father always told me, when you travel, you don't look enough. Every time he traveled a lot, he would say, I have not looked enough, I've not looked enough. This was ingrained in me all the time.

—Mm, I think I have no idea on that one. But maybe— The first part of his answer— Alain Berthaut?

Alain Berthaut, exactly. Okay, but that was a guess. He emphasized that he would travel with his dad for business, and his dad would more or less give him a map and say, "Here's some places to go," and he would sort of report back, and his dad would almost quiz him on what he had seen, and he always got critiqued for not looking carefully enough or noticing enough. All right, here's another one. I keep a calendar of future plans. Many people do, but then I also keep a calendar of the past, which logs how long it actually took for me to write that grant or to meet with that person or eat dinner or whatever. Over time, I've learned a lot about how long it takes me to do something.

Is that Ed Boyden? It was. Who else writes grants, right? He has a lab. So that's how I figured that one out. Not memory, induction.

Boyden has a lot of great tips in his. I could have selected any number of things, but that was one.

He was one of the best for actually understanding how he succeeded.

Yes, and great, great insights into how you try to solve a problem, how you get a team to work together, like, especially for an academic, but even just in terms of the full roster of CWT guests, I thought he was great on that stuff.

And I suspect the unedited Ed Boyden would be so much better yet on administration, personnel management, working within a university. My goodness, the things he could say.

All right, let's go to another theme in production functions. Interestingly, two of our guests mentioned voice recording. First, this is literally all this person said about it. They didn't elaborate, but "I use voice recognition software," and you were asking about how they produce their work. This was very recent.

Hmm. I don't think I have any idea who uses voice recognition software. Who is it? It's Doron Asimoglu.

And he gave it as an aside, and it wasn't dwelled on or elaborated on, but that's what I keyed in on, is that he said he basically— it sounded like he actually drafts his papers by essentially dictating.

By talking. Gordon Tullock did that, of course, with a tape recorder, not with software, and then he would have someone type it out.

On that note, second person. Something like this person said they write in the morning, and they stop at about 11. As I'm walking around for the next 15 minutes or so, sentences will come into my head. By and large, they're the best sentences, so I've learned to carry a recorder with me. Now it's just the voice recorder app on my phone, because I know that if I jump in the car and start driving somewhere, I'm gonna have a few of those lines and I don't wanna lose them.

Is that Russ Roberts? No, that was Neal Stephenson. Neal Stephenson, okay, yeah.

Which I thought was great that his mind is still working and he leaves the work, but he knows some stuff he's gonna spit out. Do you find yourself having to write notes or—

No, I don't write notes.

Yeah. You just sit down, you write, and when you're done, that's it. It's a discrete kind of thing.

If I need to remind myself of something, I'll send myself an email, which is the worst possible way of managing your production function. But it works to use your inbox as a to-do list. I think it's actually underrated. Okay. Though I've read all the critiques. I don't need to email myself much. It's maybe one thing every 3 days. And the rest I just remember. Yeah.

One of my insights about you, I don't know if you would agree with this, but when I email with you, you're very responsive generally. If you're near a computer, you'll respond nearly instantly. Yes. And then often there will be a flurry of emails as if a real-time conversation was happening. And for me, oftentimes it feels like we're actually texting with each other, but you never text.

I never text. I'm against texting. You're against texting.

It seems grossly inefficient. But here's the thing, Tyler. Email like a texter.

But when you're emailing, you can type. And when you text, you have a little phone, you have big thick fingers. It doesn't make any sense to me.

I actually, because I'm on a Mac, I can text from my laptop, and I actually text a lot from my keyboard.

Well, then it's like emailing.

That's fine. So if I got you hooked up with the technology, maybe you would— maybe you could be texting like a teenager.

I don't see the advantage, though, because with texting, you're in essence telling people they can jump a particular queue. And I'm not sure why you would want to give them that right rather than reserving yourself the ordering privilege for the emails. Right. So I always have my iPad and iPhone with me so I can have as much immediacy as I want. And why let people jump the queue?

Right. Yes. This is the bane of texting, of Slack, something that it does create a presumption that you're kind of at the head of the line.

Now, responding to all your emails right away, as I do, also creates that presumption, but somehow it feels different.

Okay, a few people talked about using social media as a tool, so we're still on production function. So first person, I would say I read widely. I play with a lot of ideas, most of which don't come to fruition. Again, this is one of the advantages of social media.

Henry Farrell.

Henry Farrell, and he talked about doing little microthreads on Twitter as a kind of experimental thing.

And he's very good at that, yes. All right, second one.

Killing me, I'm losing my—

You need to send yourself an email.

That's right. Okay, second one. That's what I mean when I say that spending time on Facebook is really part of my work. I try to have a sense of the temperature of the air, the flavor of the conversation. That's where social networks used strategically, I think, are extremely useful. It's the kind of research tool that I didn't have as a young journalist.

Masha Gessen, of course.

I gave you the clue there at the end.

But even without that, I would have known. I remember that passage quite well.

Yeah. And she talked about, I thought was interesting, that her friend described her as an empty pot, that she absorbs information and then it just leaves her. Do you find that true of yourself? I mean, I think most people would say no, you're a sponge and you keep it all in.

No, I feel I don't retain hardly any of it. That I can somehow summon it back if I cram on something. But at any moment, I feel like I know nothing or close to nothing.

It's deep in there, but you have the tools to— you can't access it offhand, but if you focus on it somehow that you know it's there.

It doesn't feel lost, but it doesn't feel on the tip of my fingers either. Last one.

This is a random one. I played poker, played a lot of poker in college, and I think I learned more about life and business from that than I learned in college. I would not say I'm a great poker player, but I'm pretty good. The thing that makes me, I think, good about that is getting good at quickly evaluating risk.

It's got to be Sam Altman, right?

It is. Sam Altman. Whose production function most clearly mirrors yours, you think, of these guests?

Maybe Ted Gioia. Yeah. But I like Sam's quickness and emphasis on speed, also as a way of thinking about other people. So I felt I had more in common with him than maybe I was expecting to. —And a kind of do-it-right-away obsession with speed and how he evaluates other people by their speed, I very much sympathized with. It was one of my favorite parts of that discussion. Just how quickly do they respond to their email? Yeah. Who are the—

so Alden brought up that as a founder thing. Do you have any sense of a pattern among— you send out a lot of invites to conversation with Tyler and generally email with some of these people. So who are the speed responders? I don't think I remember.

Russ Roberts? Perhaps, Mark Zuckerberg. But I think maybe, yeah, if it's younger people and you don't know how to evaluate them, it obviously takes on greater weight in your impression. And it's kind of an arrogant, like, why shouldn't you respond to me right away? But I think it's true. And it's fine if they want to downgrade me. I don't take that personally, like they're going to do something else. But then I figure I should downgrade them.

That's the equilibrium. Very well. Some more questions from Twitter, and then we'll talk— we'll go back in the decade a little bit and look at Marginal Revolution through the years. Actually, just through one year, 2009. New Recusant on Twitter: What econ-related facts surprised Tyler the most in the last decade? Bitcoin, China? What surprised you?

Bitcoin surprised me multiple times. China, I thought, would have an excess capacity debt crisis. And it didn't. So those would be two big picks. That the rate of unemployment fell to such a low rate definitely surprised me. Those would be the three big ones that come to mind right away. Trump winning, not an economics thing, but it surprised me, sure.

Looking back over the last decade, so I went back and I looked at every post from December 2009, partly to look at your end-of-year list because I think people would— I'm going to bring up some of your recommendations in December 2009.

Okay, let's see how they held up.

Do you remember what you were writing about in December 2009?

Well, not month by month, but I know that time there was plenty on the financial crisis, of course. And I think the blog, like 2005 to 2010 or so, was very different than the blog today. And I do understand, I think, those differences.

So 2009 for you, the book that you had published was Create Your Own Economy, which was renamed in paperback to Age of the Infovore. That's right. Is that your only book that's been sort of rebranded like that?

As far as I know. The original title was bad, so I'm glad they renamed it, but it's a sign of failure in a way.

I bought it with the original title and I was living abroad at the time and I had it shipped to me and I emailed you. Did I respond quickly? You did. I think within 2 hours. I checked it last night. You responded within 2 hours. I'll screenshot it for the transcript. You responded within 2 hours because I sent you a picture because I was living in a place where it wasn't easy to get a book. I couldn't go to a bookstore, let's put it that way.

Oh, this was from Africa.

Yeah, it was from Rwanda.

Oh, so that was you. I remember that email. Yes. But I didn't know it was you.

Yes. Amazing. That was me. Okay. And I was sitting in, yeah, paying taxes in Rwanda and I read a third of the book sitting there.

My opinion of my own memory just went up.

That's good, yes.

My opinion of my own laterality just went down.

When I look over your posts from 2009, what struck me is some of it feels sort of old blogosphere, old internet in the sense that some of the links are broken, some of the blogs don't exist. But I was struck by how many of the themes to me felt very still topical. Obviously there was sort of credit crunch. You and Alex talked about Avatar because it was the biggest movie that came out.

Which is bizarre, completely. Fallen Down a Memory Hole. Although they're going to do like 5 sequels, right? Yes. I don't understand that. I just think I'll see them.

So there is some of that, but what struck me is, yeah, the consistency in— so you're referencing Scott Sumner. I'm sure there's—

Scott's now at Mercatus, of course.

Yeah, and Scott's now at Mercatus. There's probably like a Henry Farrell thing in there somewhere. He's now at CWT, yeah. Getting into some of— actually, what was interesting—

The real lesson is the supply of bloggers is inelastic. And what should we infer from that? I'm not sure, but it's significant.

Well, I'll get to this now. So Alex has a post discussing Paul Romer, who we've had on and won the Nobel Prize— Yeah, the year before. —last year, and talking about how the average age of people who are getting grants is going up, and he wonders if that's the reason why there's a slowdown in productivity or progress, which I thought was very, very funny. There was also a weird coincidence in that December 2009, Paul Samuelson had just died. That's right. So we're— Paul Volcker, as we're recording this, has just passed away. One thing that surprised me is that I was clicking through the posts and I was going from December 31st back, and I clicked to like the second page of posts, and I still wasn't even at Christmas. And the output, I thought, was much higher. And I looked and you had on MR in December 2009, you had like 160 posts. So you were posting like 5 times a day between you and Alex. Right. This month, it looks like you're on pace maybe to do about 130.

So has— I had 4 a day, yeah, and it's come down.

So has your productivity slowed down, and what are your reasons? Is it the age, or do you have other explanations?

No, it's on purpose. I'm doing more other things, including the podcast. But I think in 2009, I was still experimenting in some fresh way with blogging as a new medium and what it meant. And in some ways, the blog was better then for that reason. Whereas now, Marginal Revolution, it's a bit like, well, The Economist magazine plus a dose of me, and that's a set formula. I don't know that there's that much more experimentation I can do or should be doing. Maybe that drains a little bit of energy out of it, but people know what to expect more, and I think that's the biggest difference.

My explanation too would be this was really before Twitter took off, and so I would think that some of those marginal posts are now just tweets. That's right. So you used to have a segment called like the best paragraph I read today. I don't think that you would do a lot of just— you still do to some extent, but I think a lot of that would actually just be a tweet today and not a post.

And if you think about the transcripts behind a CWT and they go on the blog, they're equal to a lot of posts. And so are Bloomberg columns. They're 800 words typically. Right. And that's longer than an average post. So people have to click. But I think if you adjust for that, the amount of material is not really down at all. Okay.

So the rate of progress, the rate of productivity for Marginal Revolution, for Tyler Cowen Alex Tabarrok.

It's presented more economically, but it has not fallen. Okay.

Let's get into some of the recommendations. So you've now— it's become more of an institution for you. Interestingly, you do recommendations, but they're more offhand. They're a little flip, like when you talk about movies, you say these are what come to mind, whereas I know now you actually kind of catalog it and you try to keep a list running through the year. That's right. Do you have any sense—

I don't try to keep a list. I keep a list. It's a big difference.

Yes, you keep a list. I've seen it. I have privilege to the Marginal Revolution drafts post, and I see it in there, and I do peek because I'm always curious. Let's do movies first. Do you have any sense in 2009 what your favorite movies of the year were?

No idea whatsoever, and what movie was exactly which year? Other than Star Wars, I'm not sure there's like a single movie I could tell you, or just a small number.

So the list you gave was Tyson. Which I don't even know what that is. I didn't look it up. Tyson, I Love You, Man, comedy, District 9, okay, Up, the Pixar film, Bruno, Let the Right One In, and The Hurt Locker, and documentary Man on Wire.

District 9, Let the Right One In, and Man on Wire have aged the best on that list, and Bruno probably has aged the worst. It's still a good list, I think. Course, it was what you could see then was a bit different than what you could see now. It was pre-Netflix. So the list would be different now. There would be more movies from the year before on Netflix disc. Yeah. Fiction.

You say my favorite works of fiction this year were the new Pamuk, Orhan Pamuk, who comes up when you interviewed like Danny Rodrick, you put him up with Dereliction.

That was still a good pick.

Yes. The Museum of Innocence was the book.

Right.

Gail Harriven's The Confession of Noah Webber.

You know, I met her this year. She was phenomenal. I loved meeting her. I was very honored. Natasha and I were in Israel and we made a point of contacting her, and I still love that book. A great pick.

And A Happy Marriage by Rafael Iglesias.

Who is an extremely underrated writer. He's the father of Matt, and more people should read him.

Speaking of the old blogosphere, who is obviously still continuing.

At Vox. And Dr. Neruda's Cure for Evil is maybe Rafael's best book. And he has a new one online, which I haven't read yet, and I've been meaning to. I wish he would get more attention.

Yeah. For nonfiction, you said the new Gabriel García Márquez biography, which I don't know what the title of that was. The link was broken and I forgot to look it up. Do you remember offhand?

Not the exact title, but a good book.

Chris Wickham's The Inheritance of Rome. Yes, good pick. Eric Siblin's The Cello Suites: J.S. Bach, Pablo Casal, and the Search for a Baroque Masterpiece.

I feel very good about my alt picks, I have to say.

I bought The Cello Suites on that recommendation. I read it with my now wife. Okay. And we had a great time reading it together. I've bought many books off of Marginal Revolution, as I suspect listeners have. So you feel good about your picks? I do.

Yeah. At least from 2009. The cinema, like one or two of them are off and all the others still seem kind of perfect. Okay. Uh, do you feel, um, it's interesting that cinema picks are more uncertain about how they hold up over time. It makes intuitive sense, but I'd like to have a good theory as to why that is.

Yeah. Well, something like Avatar, which is the biggest movie of the time, has been, as you've, I think it's been noted on the Marginal Revolution, just completely disappeared from the cultural consciousness. It has not made it. We know the sequels are coming. Right. But beyond that.

But I feel if I saw it again, and maybe I will, I wouldn't say, "Gee, how could I have liked that?" It would feel like, "Gee, that was some weird but brilliant dead end." And a lot of wonderful movies should be weird but brilliant dead ends.

What's fascinating is I think it was Alex linked to a post of a, you know, a think piece on Avatar, and it was about white privilege. And, you know, I just thought that that was so funny because it felt like such a present-day take on Avatar. Right. It was actually happening in 2009.

Blue privilege, you might say.

All right, so looking forward, 2029, are you still blogging? Yes. Are you still podcasting?

10 years from now, probably not, but it's possible. I'm not quitting anytime soon. If you said 5 years, I'd say, oh, definitely. 10 years, hard to say. My voice might give out.

We know that the We've often talked about this, you and I, that the power CWT listener is actually a reader, that they read the transcript. You yourself don't listen to podcasts, actually. Do you have any that you ever— you may, maybe you have to for some reason, but—

Sometimes I have to and I don't mind, but I never want to listen to any podcast, including my own. It's just too slow. And I'll listen to podcasts when I'm prepping for a guest and then I quote unquote have to. But that's it. So I have no idea, like, who really has a good podcast.

So given that you don't listen to them, a lot of our sort of most successful listeners don't listen to it. They read the transcript. Most don't offer a transcript.

So what they do with other podcasts, I don't know. Some people have their own transcripts made.

Right. But does that mean that podcasts themselves are overrated in a sense, and that writing and the written word is still underrated? Yeah, the whole genre mystifies me.

I don't see why anyone does it or listens or cares. It's bizarre given that I produce the output, but I never would have predicted it. And it always feels to me like a bubble. I don't think it is at this point. It's less of a bubble than blogs were. I think the big insight was that people were wasting their time a lot more than we thought, and mobile and social media and podcasting all filled that space.

Yes, I think it is a way to fill up some of that idle time with content that actually is better than what you're typically going to consume. If to the extent that we're competing with like mobile games, which I think is one of the things you're going to do with your idle time for an average person.

I feel, you know, our audience listens and reads, but podcasts as a whole, I wonder, is it just like some kind of drone in the background, like Muzak? Muzak with a human voice.

I don't know. I'm sure some people listen to it that way. For me, it's actually replaced music, which may not be a good thing, but I stopped, you know, this is back in iPod days. I've been listening to podcasts for a long time and it just replaced a lot of the music that I might've been listening to.

I feel music is a dynamic influence on ourselves. And when music gets replaced, we should worry. And music can change and you listen to different kinds of music. And there's a propulsiveness to it that the spoken voice doesn't have.

So, uh, you've made me more worried, but at least for the next year, we'll keep it, we'll keep it going. Maybe 5 years. We'll see.

No, I don't mind inflicting the human voice on people. I'm happy to corrupt them and tear them away from beloved music, but just viewed aesthetically. If you think of, say, the 1960s and '70s, music was primary in that era. And there was something very creative about that. And that was a time when we made a lot of big, bold decisions, not all of them good ones, but nonetheless. And maybe the drone of the voice in the background reflects the complacency of our time. And podcasting is a form of complacency, maybe.

On that happy note, let's wrap up.

And look forward to another year and more of working together. That's right.

I have enjoyed this. And for those of you listening, please do let us know if you did too. We'll do it more. Before we close, I'd like to shout out the other people at Mercatus who work behind the scenes on this: Dallas Flohr, Carter Woolley, Sloan Shearman, Ashley Schiller, Krista Chavez, Kate Delannoye, Kate Brown, Caitlin Schmidt, Karen Plant, Christina Behe. For all of us, this is just one of the things we do at Mercatus, and it's a lot of fun.

And just everyone else at Mercatus. And everyone. The people who do infrastructure, the IT people, the finance people, the receptionists, They all do their bit. A guest shows up. How do they get back to the studio, right? Someone does it. It's not always us. It's part of the production function.

That's right. Unheralded. But on behalf of Tyler, this is Jeff Holmes. Thank you. You're all great to work with. Thank you, Tyler.

Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite podcast app. And if you like this podcast, please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review. This helps other people find the show.