50: Tyler Cowen & Nabeel Qureshi - An Appetite For More

27:49And like, I know a lot of people in whom it evokes that response. There's something very kind of, you tense up when you're reading it and you're like, I don't want to read this anymore. And then it's also like just funny because they can, you know, they can code better than most engineers I know. They can do better math than many mathematicians now, right? So there's some ways in which they're extremely intelligent and yet they can't produce an essay as good as, let's say, a Joan Didion essay or something like that. So it was like kind of why. And so to me, if you just say, well, the paragraphs it produces are not beautiful enough, that's not really an answer because you're like, okay, well, why?

28:27And so I wanted to try and, I don't think I fully succeeded by any means, but I wanted to try and give more of like almost like an engineering answer to what some pieces of beauty might be. And so that's why it's very like a mechanistic kind of essay, right? It's like if these words kind of are knitted together in this way, then you get this beauty thing as an emergent property. But I think beauty itself is like a very high level feature and you need to explain what it is. Isn't beauty a little boring though? Like if I asked you to name beautiful piece of music, beautiful work of art, don't you just seize up a bit and all of a sudden you're not sure what's actually beauty or maybe you like parts of it because it's ugly?

29:06Or Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, parts of it are scary or angry or sad and that's why it works. it's actually not that beautiful, though it at first lures you in with some promise of beauty, the opening measures. Right, like when you say beauty, I think of Mozart or something like that, but it's harder to apply it. It's so much of Mozart, the best Mozart is tragic, I think, or comic. Yeah, but like something like you and I saw a concert recently by this band Sun O, and it's harder to describe that as beautiful straightforwardly, right? Even though it's aesthetically very cool. Yes. Yeah. is there art that you love that is complete like completely lacks beauty it's in the eye of the beholder but i like a lot of brutalist architecture especially in eastern europe now i might try to defend its beauty in some funny weird way but by ordinary standards yeah it lacks beauty this is what i'm because part of the i don't know i've listened to or read and talked to extensively about art you have some amazing conversations particularly with rick rubin about music and about art and one of the consistent themes you highlight is this like almost all truly great art at least at some point contextually was so deeply strange and weird and i'm interested in this relationship between strangeness or even grotesqueness or other words you might use and beauty one of my favorite bits about the rick conversation you're you're talking about Venice Bitch by Lana Del Rey.

30:31And you make the point that you kind of say the best part of the song is like the first two, three minutes, which is just angelic. And then the rest of the song, you're just kind of like, I wish I could go back to the first part. But that's why it works. You wish and then it never delivers. If it delivered, it would be a much worse creation. So maybe that's, it's like, we can't have it all. You can't just have ice cream all the time or something like that? You can't have ice cream all the time. Like if you think what is quote unquote beautiful art, Maybe I'd say something from the 18th century, like Tipolo in Würzburg, or some parts of 18th century music, which are mostly beauty, but they feel a bit limited.

31:10And I still like them a lot and enjoy them, but I want something else. A colloquial way of putting it might be that the really good stuff actually keeps you on your toes. So if you listen to, we were just discussing the song Happiness is a Warm Gun by the Beatles. and that song really keeps you on your toes like the time signature keeps changing and the guitar goes from soothing to suddenly he's kind of stabbing it and the vocals go from like a lullaby to a yelp and it's it's constantly changing and this is kind of the point i was trying to make with the um shakespeare sonnets in in that essay is like they keep destabilizing you just as you think you know what's going on he says something completely off the wall and you have to kind of reinterpret everything yeah and so maybe i think tyler's taking beauty to mean something that's kind of like a nice vase or something right but it's corregio right yeah yeah that's beautiful right and it is but you're in a house with plenty of voodoo art right is that beautiful it depends is all the art in this home beautiful to you again i'm not sure what you mean but it's not chosen on that basis.

32:19I want something that's more challenging. Yeah. It attracts me, obviously, almost by definition. Hmm. There is a thread in something you had written that led me to this piece that Christopher Alexander wrote in 2016, Making the Garden. A couple of quick excerpts. This has all come to light because of my intense interest and focus on architecture. In conventional philosophy, there is nothing that allows one to test the reality of God or a vision inspired by God. But we ask people to compare two buildings or two doorways and to decide which one is closer to God. Different people will answer this question the same way and with a remarkably high reliability.

32:59And I think it's worth noting, Alexander is typically talking about architecture, which has a functional role too. But when he talks about the quality without a name, when he talks about a certain kind of beauty that has God in it, there's a element of it that maybe is pointing at something like wholeness or cohesion that's another part of this that i'm curious about like certain art can be really surprising but have that element of wholeness or cohesion and other art can be strange and surprising and even beautiful but but doesn't have it's almost to steal language from alexander it's almost like it doesn't have god inside it i'm curious for both of your thoughts but i especially you nabil i'm curious how you relate to that idea and whether at least you personally are seeking for that again i'm struggling for a word the wholeness yeah i think it's a really interesting point i think he's right but i think the prompt matters if that makes sense right so his prompt is like can you find god inside it i think when you view when you give people that prompt they probably will answer in similar ways but is that the prompt that matters for everybody i don't know um i i think part of having or developing your own taste is that at least for me it's pretty instant if something is interesting or not even if it's immediately ugly to me right so like the first time i ever listened to i think it was my bloody valentine absolutely amazing i think loveless might be one of my favorite albums um yeah it's incredible but it made no sense to It makes no sense.

34:34But I knew I was going to explore it. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's like sort of ugly, sort of strange. Now if you ask me, like, do I see, do I feel God in it? Like, I would say yes. Yeah. Right. But like, I don't know if I'd have said that initially. Yeah. We talked about Yuzis last time we talked about Yuzis. It's a similar element with Kanye. Like, I hated it so much at first. That I loved right away. You're ahead of us all, Tyler. No longer lists him as one of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. so he's been canceled yeah it's interesting there right i mean i i actually also i had the same response as jackson where i hated it straight away and then it became my favorite album of his but then you can't really reason much from that because his latest stuff i hated it right away and then i've not really changed my mind and liked it for the most part i think the most recent one is decent but the few albums in between the um the gospel one and where we are now i would say are not good I agree.

35:28Music is a area where sort of the more you listen, you even said something like this, Tyler, I think something along the lines of like, the more you listen, the more your appetite grows for it. And I would also say the more you listen to one in particular thing, the more you're likely to like it. Maybe that's true for all art, but I think it's especially true in music. I'm curious as someone who has such wide taste and has had a lot of time, how do you know when to go back to something that you, that you didn't connect with if it's just running through your mind you go back to it you put it on again uh i think it's a mistake to be too systematic about that and whatever listening plans you might have you should always disrupt them just suddenly do something else go off on a different tangent there's always youtube right that'll give you some ideas there are some areas of music you just don't really resonate with that much right or you wouldn't say so there's not Not that much in metal I love.

36:28I don't object to it. Country, I like early country and Western quite a bit. A lot of modern and country and Western. I say, I like this in principle, but I would like to like it a bit more than I actually do. Those would be the two main areas. Electronic music? I love complex techno and Aphex Twin, Richard T. James, and a lot in that direction. But just plain EDM to me is a little boring. It's just dance music. but I can get sick of musics forever. So this ethnic musics, you listen to them for a while. You're very glad you listen to them, but you don't go back to them that much. And I think that's fine.

37:07Is there, could you try to pick out a quality that most has you going back to the stuff you really love, whether it's classical or otherwise? Well, hearing different things in it all the time. But another thing that happens with some genres, you decide I'm only going to do the live in concert version of this. So I'm at that point with a lot of jazz. I like it more than ever before, but it's so good in concert. You just say, I'm not going to put it on the stereo really ever again, but I'll work hard to see some good concerts and otherwise I'm done with it. And that feels kind of optimal to me. You're almost like not spoiling the live performance.

37:44That's right. And not settling for the lesser. And ethnic musics tend to be like that. They're created for live performance out of cultures that didn't have recording. So like Haitian Ra-Ra music, the first time you hear it on disc, it's amazing. But then you see some in Haiti and you feel, I'm not going to listen to this on disc anymore. And okay, you can't go back to Haiti right now or maybe never, but you're still not going to put on the disc. Yeah, something I feel like maybe we have in common is like the stuff we are drawn to is almost, it's very puzzling. There's some puzzle in it that you have to, that keeps drawing you back.

38:18So like the EDM comment, I don't like EDM either. I just think the patterns are so obvious and simple. and like once you figure out what those patterns are it's like not that rewarding to listen to for me um whereas like something like apex twin it's so odd and jagged somehow that you keep wanting to go back and figure out what's making it happen early orb would be another example square early square pusher i don't know either of those nicholas yar incredible i got some homework i was thinking about context is that which is scarce particularly in the con i mean i think it applies to a lot of thinking about you, Tyler, but particularly in the context of art, and it almost seems as though

39:02maybe it's just, I'm substituting a word for complexity, but it seems like the things that are most compelling to you across all domains and especially art are the things that just have more context to gain on them. Almost. I have to wonder about, like, if you were able to have a new dimension of context on country music via some person in your life or otherwise like is that am i approximating it the right way or is that too orthogonal idea i may be just locked out of it so garth brooks maybe will always be a bit boring to me but i put on you know the casey musgraves album the really good one like from six years ago whenever and that's excellent but to me it's just great songwriting i don't really imbibe the country element that much so hank williams i think i can enjoy a great amount johnny cash uh leuven brothers but somehow the sheer fact of the country and western or countryness of it doesn't register with me that well maybe it's just where i grew up which was new jersey why do you think the beatles register so much is it the same thread They're the best.

40:12So why? What does that mean? You had the world's two greatest songwriters and two greatest vocalists together in the same band, active in a significant way for seven years together. And you never had that before. You may never have it again. I love the Beatles. And they're certainly, like, I go listen to Strawberry Fields. You could listen to it a million times. Could be their best song, yeah. But a lot of the Beatles aren't that complex. I love In My Life, as an example. That's very complex. really oh of course you that's a bad example why just everything about it i'm just totally wrong the way the melody meanders the backwards piano part played by george martin the modulations the way the vocals are interwoven i think that's a phenomenally complex song and again one of their best a lot of the times they do sound simple and then yeah you talk to a musician about it and they're like wow i would never would have thought to go from this chord to this chord even an early apparently very simple song like from me to you yeah very complex and when the beatles first did it i think it was paul who said after this one like i knew we could just do it and it's an amazing song uh melodically harmonically and this no one else could have done it then but it sounds very simple they do have some songs that are just flat out simple but surprisingly few you listen to even things like what goes on which for a long time i didn't even like but it's both a wonderful song and highly complex and i talked to rick rubin about this he completely agreed he goes oh yes that's amazing i love it and he's right one of my favorites is um your blues of course the two different guitar parts going in different rhythms unbelievable that one is just satisfying to hear i think it's paul and he's just yelling no that's john that's john that's john yeah okay yeah it's yelling it's very it's very satisfying and the drum and bass interplay.

42:04Yeah. I had this, I took a Beatles class in college and my professor was obsessed with this idea that ever since John did Twist and Shout, Paul was just obsessed with trying to match him in the yelling for like the next decade almost. I always think of that when I think of Paul's attempts. I think it's true, by the way. Paul wanted to best John in many other things as well. Yes. But first is Long Tall Sally, right? And then many, Jet later on, many, many attempts, which succeed. What do you think the best Beatles song is? I don't know that there is one. Strawberry Fields is a good nomination. The classic pick, Day in the Life, I would not choose.

42:43It's a little overblown. The one I enjoy hearing the most is You Won't See Me, 1965 Rubber Soul. And it's so complex in the background. The harmonies, the piano parts, the bass, everything, unbelievable. Listen to it with headphones. That's my favorite at the moment, but it's always changing too. I was going to say, so it would have been different a year ago? No, but maybe three years ago. Yeah. How about you? It changes depending on the day, but right now I'm feeling You Never Give Me Your Money. I love that song. Oh, in my top five. I love that song. That might have been my favorite three years ago.

43:21Yeah, that one's amazing. Did Geese do a cover of that? Golden Slumber is amazing. They might have covered that. Maybe that was why it was in my head. Yeah, I've been... Sorry, go ahead. I was going to ask, did you get it all into Cameron Winter last year, Tyler? No. Have you heard him? I tried to get him into it. I don't think it landed. Geese. Oh, that. Yeah, I like that a lot. Yeah. So that person is named Cameron Winter. The lead singer. Okay. I didn't know that. He did a solo album, which you have to listen to. Yeah. It's on the CD rack right now. It's there. Yeah. Yeah. He's also, I feel, I don't know if he is explicitly Christian, but he does all his performance in churches.

43:56And I feel like he's very, there's a certain born again-ness to his lyrics. Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In a subversive way. Yes. I saw him at Carnegie Hall solo, um, in December. It was, it was very special. One question, maybe rehashing a little bit, but I'm curious to the extent you think that appreciating art, um, is a skill that can be practiced beyond just consuming more. when you read about art its history i think you learn a lot of relevant material you get context what duchamp was doing makes sense when you look at what followed him what came before so there's plenty you can do and i think it all works a certain amount of openness is required but not too much else education can hold you back as much as help you in the formal sense of education, getting back to the museum guards point.

44:52And if you go to, say, rural Mexico, where I spent a lot of time, I wrote a book about it, and a lot of the artwork in this house is from rural Mexico, people there love the art that they create. They'll talk about it for hours, analyze it. They're very astute observers. And maybe they wouldn't understand Picasso, but they have a lot in their aesthetic lives that's visual. And they would talk about it, say, better than we would, and were quote-unquote educated, and they never even went to high school. The word openness. Have you always been this open, maybe to everything, but especially to art?

45:28No, when I was younger, I was much more closed. Like, I would not eat a lot of foods, and by my early 20s, I was over that. But I just thought, well, only a certain number of foods are good, and I would stick with those. But I learned out of that pretty quickly. It wasn't a hard struggle. I just had to try some. On the appreciation point, I'm a big advocate of critics. You have to find the right ones. I would say, like, very few of them are actually good. But, like, I've learned a ton from just reading Tyler's posts on various movies or books, right? And then, you know, in the movies, you know, you read someone like Pauline Kyle, who I think you like as well.

46:06Yeah, selectively, but absolutely. Yeah, but, like, I think it's amazing to watch the same movie as somebody else, and they get way more out of it than you do. and I think when you read that and then you go back to the work and then you kind of do this process again and again you learn to get more out of the same thing too and same with literary criticism I think the best literary critics have taught me a lot and we became friends basically because of movies so I visited Nabil's homepage and there's a list of his favorite movies and there's only two people I've ever met in my life that I think have perfect taste in movies and that's Nabil and Scott Sumner maybe I don't agree with them 100 % but even where I disagree, I feel the judgment here is as good as any that could be brought to bear on the movie in question.

46:50And they're the only two I've ever met, including professional movie critics. When I read, I think, no, they're off, they're off. Nabil and Scott, I never think they're off, even if my opinion is not exactly the same. So yeah, during the pandemic, we used to, well, Tyler would book a movie theater because they were closed because of lockdown and such. And so it was very cheap to actually just book out a movie theater and you could bring your own disc or Blu-ray and Tyler has a vast collection of CDs. So every week, you know, me and him and whoever was around would kind of go and see some crazy movie and it was a great...

47:24The Hong Kong classics. Yeah. And it'd be a hundred bucks. Say you have six people, a hundred bucks. It's more or less the price you pay now for a normal viewing. So we had a great time. Yeah, can't do it. Probably, well, maybe you could do it today. I don't know. Most of those theaters... The price would be higher, right? Supply and demand. There's an opportunity cost. you mentioned that for a while your wife referred to tyler as the movie guy i didn't know this no one else calls me that she says oh yeah the movie guy because she used to come sometimes too yeah no and then you know she didn't know about you sort of through your blog the way i did so she's like oh yeah the guy we used to see the movies with you said use the words judgment to describe nabil and scott's movie taste when it is particularly when it isn't overlapping exactly with your opinions you guys as far as i understand have quite similar taste what what is inside of that what do you mean by why is his judgment good like take cassavetes movies which are favorites of nabil's i recognize they're very very good and i wish i could like them more than i do and when i watch them i feel how good they are but i don't relate to it or enjoy it the same way i would like a bergman film or a lot of classic european cinema but i don't at all feel my views better than his if anything i think his view is probably better than mine but i'm just not there either i'm lacking the context those are those are extremely messy so maybe i i prefer the mess mess than you do even um yeah i don't know i mean this maybe goes back to your earlier line of questioning a little bit, right?

49:02Because I think Cassavetes is very, just puts you in these very difficult experiences and kind of, it's almost like torture watching his movies in some weird way where people are acting all crazy and weird and you sort of just have to sit there and tolerate it a little bit. And I think you grow through the process of doing this, but maybe you could say that Tyler values this type of experience in art less than I do. I don't know, maybe that's a reach, but. And Mike Lee movies, he likes more than I do. So again, I don't disagree with him. I just saw them all without subtitles. And at best understood half.

49:37And I don't like them as much. So that one's me being a regional thinker. I mean, Mike Lee is a British director. I grew up in Northern England. He often makes movies set in very, you know, deprived parts of England. And there's definitely a piece of that where I just recognize my own, you know, nighttime strolls through Manchester or London. And a lot of the characters are sort of derelict. So people on the margins of society, shall we say. But I probably have better taste in The Sopranos than Nabil would, though I don't think he would dispute my claims necessarily. I'm planning to watch that this year, actually, for the first time all the way through.

50:12I recognize about 80 % of the locales. Wow. Even the quite obscure ones, not just the famous ones, like the drive over the bridge. Like, oh, that's Sporting Goods store, that's on Route 17. I remember that. Is The Sopranos the ultimate New Jersey work of art? Well, that and Bruce Springsteen, early Springsteen, yeah. My favorite Springsteen song is Thunder Road, by the way. You know, I just did an episode with Bob Spitz, who worked with Springsteen in his early years and who's written biographies of Bob Dylan, Beatles, Rolling Stones, they're great books. And he thinks Thunder Road is Bruce's greatest achievement.

50:44And he's probably right. The alternative would be the song Born to Run. Yes. Or I would say the sequencing of songs on the Born to Run album. Maybe you'd put above it all, because it also contains those two. But something about the sequencing. It's perfect. Jungle Land and what comes at the beginning, the end, unbelievably good. Yeah, I'm a little sad about it. I don't know what you think about this, Jackson, because you listen to a lot of music, but the kind of, the album as an art form feels like it's less and less important in relative terms. It's still, you still get it, right? I mean, Giza doing this quite well, I think.

51:18In Rainbows maybe was the last, like, album, choir album that I can think of that was really, really great, but. but I was thinking of totally different from your guys opinion, but I was thinking of Nebraska and like, I don't know if I can name a song on Nebraska. I think of the album, you make a point somewhere, Tyler, that like when I'm 64 on Sergeant pepper versus as a random song on Spotify, it's like very silly. Yeah. It's, I don't know. These, these types of questions are always so hard to not just be like, Oh, I'm not in my twenties anymore. I'm mad about how the kids are, what do you think Tyler?

51:55it's very important to keep on listening to new music about albums specifically oh yeah they're mostly dead I think music today there's a large number of quite wonderful and entertaining songs in that sense there's no decline but for real breakthroughs maybe I'm too much an old fogey but I don't really see there's been so much since the 90s and we're a bit stuck and cycling through things and the mere notion that you feel you're creating a new genre by mixing together some genres that were already there that's become boring maybe that's the last thing like we did rap i think is largely dead electronica for now at least been exhausted i'm waiting for ai music to become really good it isn't yet but i am hopeful you think rap is largely dead yeah you agree it's boring now yeah when was the last really great rap album i think not for many years even kendrick lamar it's overrated it's become like establishment art in a way jesper jones had been but it's black and it's rap and people treat it a different way but it's it's not that fresh have you always felt that way about kendrick are you just saying now i think i've always felt that way huh i loved a lot of early rap from the 80s felt very fresh de la salle felt very fresh some of outcast i'm not anti-rap the way some people just hate the art form but at the same time i don't put it on anymore unless you count kanye as rap but i wouldn't that's what you wouldn't count him why it's if you had to say it's more rhythm and blues and just eclectic some of the early you could call rap but he's not fundamentally a rapper at heart there was also just much more interesting experimentation back then i think so like mad villain black star most stuff people like that were doing really interesting kind of app.

53:44Too much tech may have hurt rap. Yes, I think so. You can just, you know, twiddle with the knobs and feel you have something new, but you haven't really been challenged. It's like Beatles, Sgt. Pepper, totally analog. Incredible sounds on that are on the Beach Boys Pet sounds because their resources are so limited. And now it's so easy and you throw everything, you know, the whole kitchen sink at the problem. And it's just, it's boring. This is one reason Cameron's so exciting, right? Is it's like often it's just him and a piano. Geese have this very lo-fi quasi shoebox kind of thing going on even the solo i mean one back we talked about this a little bit earlier i didn't like it at first but i just had to go back yes on on the note of not liking things uh or i shouldn't say not liking um i wanted to watch one film uh before this and it may be relevant for both of you i know you both like it but one nabeel has said that movies are like waking dreams and i know it's one of your favorite movies so i watched uncle boon me's past lives oh wow who can remember his past lives.

54:42And I think it's an interesting case study in like a bunch of the stuff we were just talking about, which is, I think I'm someone who, I don't know, I'm a coastal elite. I have a podcast. I like care a lot about art and I'm always trying to like aspire to raise my bar. I found this movie to be difficult and very strange. And so it's maybe an interesting example of something where, and I suspect if most people watched it, they would agree, they would be like this is one i think tyler i don't want to misquote you but i believe you called it one of the best films of all time i think i said i thought it was the best movie of the last 25 years so that's pretty high praise first of all um did you all did you feel that way instantly uh within the first 15 minutes yes wow the scene where like the ghost if that's the right word comes and sits down at the table one of the greatest movie scenes of all time blew me away i I could just keep on rewatching it.

55:39Did you feel the same? So I had a prior because I found out about it through him. But I will say like as soon as in the opening shots where you're in this kind of field and then suddenly the red-eyed creature appears. Yes. I think what he does that's so good. So one is like, I think it will stick with you, Jackson, right? To be fair, I did not hate it. And I really liked parts of it, but I did find it to be slow. It's slow. It's challenging to get there. But this is what I was going to say. is like all of his movies induce in me a very trance-like meditative state and i think he cultivates and creates that he's deeply buddhist this guy right but like um i think if you view his movies as a way of accessing this state of being that's not you're not normally accessing then i think you get a lot out of it yeah first time i saw it i loved the first third and felt the last two thirds were just falling off the tracker i wasn't sure But then as I saw it more and also learned more about Buddhism, it fits together very well.

56:37And the strange moves he makes by morphing the whole movie into something else that seems quite different. It really isn't. And what is sacred? What is beautiful in the modern world? How do we still see the hand of God in, say, ugly urban centers? It's all of the piece. Unbelievable film. This goes back a little to context. Do you think 20-year-old Tyler would have loved that film? not loved it, but he would have been intrigued. He might have stuck at only loving the first third, would be my guess. Because I think that's what I find myself being drawn to, even when I've seen things that I really disliked.

57:14There's some element of like, I kind of want to become the person who likes this kind of thing. But I'm also dubious of wanting to like it because I'm supposed to. Because as someone who likes film, I need to like these obscure, cool art house movies that Nabil and Tyler like. Maybe that's not a terrible motive. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Like if we believe in social norms as overall a good thing, uh, to feel pressure to like something cause you're supposed to probably on that it's a plus and people who don't have that in them are just worse off. I do think, yeah, I do think that the, one of the ways that one acquires taste is through mentors and through models.

57:51Right. And so like I did, um, learn a lot from reading Tyler's blogs and all this like modeling his taste a little bit, even when sometimes I didn't really get it. I think almost everyone who develops good taste does this with somebody. Maybe you had someone who took you along to concerts when you were young or something like that. And so there is this aspect of faith in developing taste, I think, where, to your point, it's like you think there is a there there. And so there's some things where I still haven't gone into, sort of waded in because I'm not convinced there is a there there. So, like, for example, there's a French thinker called Jack Derrida, and I probably should go and read him at some point, but I'm not entirely convinced there is a there there.

58:31And I don't know anyone who swears by it. Like if Tyler told me, Nabil, you are missing a big piece of your life by not reading him. I would go read him tomorrow, but I don't have any of those people. Lacan is my marginal case of no there there. So Derrida, I put in a fair amount of effort, did conclude rightly or wrongly that there's no there there. So you can, in my opinion, write him off. Lacan, I keep on wondering, smart people still will say, this is amazing. I've tried a bunch of times, but I haven't given up. and there's a new Lacan book coming out later this summer and I'll try it again.

59:03We'll see. That's my marginal is there a there there figure. Yeah, I think French thinkers, modern French thinkers, they put too much of a premium on sort of sounding cool or like post-modern philosophy generally and so I think it repays some effort to kind of grasp the core ideas but it doesn't repay like making it your life's reading or something. Baudrillard is quite good and Foucault is extremely interesting so I'm not against like the French in this period. But if they keep on not making sense, I feel I'm educated well enough that at some point I can strike the ledger. I do nowadays, I just put Foucault through GPT and I just have GPT explain it to me and that's going to be good enough for now.

59:47The problem with Foucault, I think, is so much of the history is wrong in a quite mundane way. So there's something very problematic about it. But the stuff, I think it's in a way quite simple, almost too simple. And the fact that the current right has so latched onto Foucault, it's a sign that it's simple. I don't mean necessarily bad, but well, there are these structures and they're trying to tell you what to do. And there's something anonymous about that as well. It's not just the individuals who form the conspiracy. It's how a lot of the world thinks today. what's the least complex or most simple or most low brow thing that you really love

1:00:34Well, what's lowbrow? We're going to be led to ask ourselves. Tyler has very wide tastes. I mean, he goes to see a lot of movies that I will not go to see. He sees things all the time. I mean, he's a huge, I don't know what you mean by lowbrow, but like he loves all kinds of sports, right? Whereas I'm kind of like, oh, I don't have time for that. I just don't really think it's lowbrow though. That's why I'm stuck on the question. least complex yeah that's tough that's tough too you know the simple mozart piano sonatas are they very simple are they highly complex mondrian painting is it simple or complex something like michael jackson to me it's not lowbrow at all it's super complex no one else could do it it's amazing it's held up very well held up better say than prince i get that he was a bad guy and did these terrible things but man i put it on i think this is really something is that lowbrow i don't know right ellers swift to me is boring i don't think it's bad i think it's pretty good pop but i don't get anything out of hearing it again what do you make of the fact that she's arguably the most famous musician ever she's very skilled at her brand of pop and the personality it's a mix of super appealing but also not too threatening uh and her show live shows are supposed to be amazing it makes sense you know i think it's meritocracy that she's doing so well not some kind of weird fraud but is it for me no do you think there's a chance going to one of her concerts would change your opinion i don't think so i might come away saying this is one of the most amazing live shows yeah but at the end of the day when i come home three days later and put on red or something i don't think so i don't know the album name i'm not a critic of it i'm not trying to pull the alan blues thing here on taylor swift i think it's great that people like it you and Patrick Collison put out a call for new aesthetics.

1:02:29I think much of the conversation we just had is perhaps an interesting backdrop for this. And one question I suppose I have is

1:02:39assuming that the most compelling things are going to be strange and perhaps that so much of modern creation is inherently digital or at least reflective of something digital i saw this photo on twitter this week you guys probably saw the guy playing chess on his laptop that was great was that a real photo or someone made it do we even care right do we even care um i'm curious and maybe as one final backdrop in in that rented virtue piece will and nabeel make a point that like the call for i'm quoting the call for a new aesthetic is necessarily a call for new transcendent morality. You cannot build beautiful things without beautiful and transcendent reasons for making them.

1:03:25In some sense, I don't know that there's anyone maybe more equipped to evaluate or prompt new aesthetics. I also know lots of people who probably know less about you and who see it as like two kind of tech capitalist guys being like, we need to invent new aesthetics from first principles but i'm curious what what that experience has been like so far six months in to the extent you have a thought on the on the the moral kind of underpinning part there needs to be god in the art how the digital part plays into it and that's a bunch of questions rolled into one but i would love maybe just an update we've made many awards some of them are digital uh i was pretty happy with the applications but of course there's a lot of bad ones it's true in any open application process i don't think Like we or anyone has found what the new aesthetic or new aesthetics are.

1:04:16I'm fine with that. I think my views and Patrick's views are actually pretty different. So when people say these like two tech guys, like I'm not even that. I have trouble working the cable TV. But I'm in a position, like I grew up in the northeast of the United States in the 1970s. And to see the current state of aesthetics as inevitably in a world that is somehow ideologically fractured comes very natural to me, and that makes me not nostalgic artistically. I'm not sure I can describe Patrick's view well, but he would not describe it the way I just described my own. So as we were putting up nominations, we had pretty different opinions.

1:04:58Yeah, and part of the point I think we were making there was not necessarily that a new aesthetic has to be religious in nature. It's not a religious apologetic. I think it's more like, if you take the house we're in as an example, right, were in Tyler's house. I think it's very beautiful. It's directly connected to how he lives his life though, right? And Tyler's not religious as we've already heard, but it's very much like a monument to his love of art and books and everything that he consumes and kind of takes in. And I think for that reason, it's beautiful. And so I think the point there is like, you cannot just make something that looks pretty and expect that to become the next wave of aesthetics.

1:05:40I think the next wave of aesthetics does express a certain way of living as well. And these things are very tied up. And so, in a sense, the thing that's going to do it is also going to be philosophically very interesting, whatever it is. And the shared context is no longer clear. I don't know how much it ever was, but there was at least a pretense in the 18th century or medieval times that it was clear. I suspect it wasn't, in fact, clear back then, but the pretense itself means something. And now those pretenses have all been knocked down. We've all seen Duchamp or heard Schoenberg or whatever you think the different markers were.

1:06:18And what does it mean to rebuild that? Does that make sense? Do we just have to go forward and do weird things that don't cohere, and that's the new coherence? Maybe that's my view. Yeah, I mean, so one of my favorite buildings in New York is the Chrysler Building, right? Or if you go look at kind of these Art Deco masterpieces around New York, and I think they are coming directly out of this kind of Gilded Age optimism about America and capitalism and building tall buildings. And it's all kind of cool, right? And I think now people are sort of trying to revive that aesthetic of this kind of Ayn Rand Art Deco situation, right?

1:06:51There was that recent movie, Megalopolis, by Coppola, for example, which is all about this. But I think that doesn't quite work because we are way more pessimistic than those people were. And so I feel like the core problem here actually is like demoralization and pessimism and less like aesthetics, if that makes sense. Or the Trumpian move toward all this classicism in public architecture. It becomes kitsch or schlock or just bad. Redoing art deco, I also suspect is not possible. So you're left with these tough dilemmas and you want art that somehow recognizes that yet without being too self-conscious at the same time.

1:07:29You made a point somewhere that to do, to innovate it in any way, you need to sort of believe you're doing something important. And you were referencing the rock and roll in the sixties. That's not mutually exclusive with pessimism, but it maybe is mutually exclusive with not some strong degree of belief in something. I mean, I mean, are you even curious based on the stuff you've seen so far to the extent like, can really strange beautiful compelling etc new aesthetics show up without some really strong point of view in some dimension needs a strong point of view yeah and religion is one of those but not the only nihilism can be another can apathy be it's feigned apathy but i'll go i'll go for the feigned like you said these earlier times were less depressive than today i'm not sure that's true i would stress they feigned greater optimism and that may be enough to be what counts but there's a lot of glorious art from the 1930s and it's not obvious that during the great depression everyone was so optimistic yet they still did big band and swing in a style that sounds very vivacious and with it right you have the lindy hop you have all these very like cheery dances i mean you have a phrase uh maybe i can ask you about you have a phrase you like to use uh negative emotional contagion i do feel like we have a lot of this going on now like if you go and talk to the average person in new york i just feel you hear very negative views on life i agree but i think that's pretty recent the dilemmas of what you would call modern art or contemporary art way predate that i think that's the last 10 to 15 years yeah i guess my claim would be that you or whoever does this has to somehow fix that in order to really break through here maybe i hope we fix it rather than it just getting worse but there do seem to be these snapping and reversion points i think there's a chance we fixed it already and we just don't quite see it yet that two three years after pandemic was peak pessimism and weirdness and maybe now nature is healing as they like to say on twitter where is the most optimistic country in the world right now just by in in terms of purely your experience of talking to people well one would be poland right and again i would admit or indeed stress there's something superficial about that judgment but that can be fine as well oh i think a lot of parts of the world are pretty pessimistic in fact at the moment india india pretty optimistic yeah that's a good pick what would be one of my top choices.

1:10:08Oman? It was too hard for me to tell. It didn't feel bad. And now with the war, it may be quite different. But they're at least in the running for optimism. Same with UAE. It's quite inscrutable. 90 % of the people are migrants, right? Very hard to classify. But you could at least say they're in the running for something. China? I haven't been in six years. Dan Wong tells me it's much more pessimistic than it had been. He would be the source I would defer to, but I don't myself know. I think about this a lot because I grew up in the UK. Of course. The UK is so pessimistic now, right? And I go there and I want to shake them.

1:10:49It's like, yeah, I get your fiscal problems, no wage growth, but you people have a great country. Like there's so much to enjoy. A lot of it's free. You can always just speak the English language. Wordsworth is out of copyright like come on it's great yeah there's been public spaces can be so amazing right and this is very like eorish attitude to paul everything right practically and i sort of wish they'd get out of that and there's all this status in germany too you get status from carping at things it's a problem bad place to be yeah what about the internet is this place like if you if If you're 17 and in a place that is pessimistic in the UK or whatever, or in a place that's just bleak, in theory, the internet should be this amazing new sense of place.

1:11:37It is. You think it remains. I'm not saying that's true for the median, but for the people who are most creative, most ambitious, it's 110 % true. And where do you think that's mostly happening? Anywhere where people have good connections and can read English. So that's a lot of the world. really a lot of the world but you know most maybe india oh i meant where on the internet oh where on the internet no i think the whole point of the internet is the internet it's like a grand organ that you play to learn things and no one part of it is very interesting at all like a single tweet this gets back to the context is that which is scarce issue a single tweet is not interesting i don't care how well written it is but twitter as this grand organ that you play to learn things and see jokes.

1:12:27It's phenomenal. It's actually one of mankind's greatest creations. Marc Andreessen will say this. Very few people say it. There's so much hating on it, but I think it's important to make it clear. It is one of our greatest intellectual, humorous, learning, inspirational, also depressing creations of all time. Twitter. Twitter. I guess we're supposed to call it X, but it's still always Twitter to me. Twitter. I mean, I cannot imagine my life without the internet, right? When I was younger, I was on these forums for video games and chat rooms and then, you know, AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger.

1:13:03And now it's like WhatsApp group chats and Signal. And I think for those who enjoy using the Internet, like everyone does get a non-zero amount of joy out of it, even if they won't admit it necessarily. But like even just the banal everyday, like sending the group chat like a funny tweet, you know, you do get a little bit of a kick out of it, I think. What makes a great group chat? not too many people and the the more frequently they congratulate each other the worse the group chat yes what's not too many mean preferably zero two or three times a year is fine no no people people no i would say four to seven four to seven yeah how many uh you you said you keep in touch with i think 100 to 150 people roughly at a time or semi-regular every day but right i'm in a whole bunch of group chats yeah roughly how many group chats that are active at any point in time a few dozen but they pop in and out of being active and what do you think aside from the number and the congratulations makes them you're in some with nabil what makes them what keeps you coming back some common interest curiosity willingness to share not taking it too seriously uh but actually thinking it's also really important that odd kegelian mix of it is important it's not important holding that in your head at the same time.

1:14:23As soon as anything's performative, I think it's death to the group chat. Yeah. You see some where it's like there's a professional purpose of some kind and people make these very performative comments or remarks and that's when it's like a bad group chat. I think a good one, you can trust everyone to be sincere. There's some common interests. Ideally, you've met IRL at least once and then I think you get something good. The congratulations is the ultimate in performative. right what are you guys um adding and removing people often more ads than removes this is a problem for the system as a whole it's hard to kick people out though it's good when you do it i think trimming is very important you have to trim especially like if people are not adding to it at all not participating i think it's important to to sort of cut out the dead weight would you is that filling a space for you, Tyler, that previously would have had more socializing, or is it just a pure positive sum additional thing?

1:15:27What do you mean by socializing? Being, like, doing, in some sense, and maybe this is incorrect, but at least for me, the group text is a sort of permutation of going and getting beers with your friends or coffees or whatever. Oh, sure, yeah, social. I'm good at socializing. But is it replacing, or is it a... I hope so. You hope so. I hope so, yeah. Somewhat. Not at all margins. But you can spend more time with the people you really want to spend time with and be in touch with a whole bunch of others and have it be fairly fluid. I think it's a great innovation for that. I feel like you also use it as sort of a generative medium, right?

1:16:05Like sometimes I see posts on your blog and I'm kind of like, oh, I feel like I can trace that. That's right. And almost always you're correct. It's taking a little bit of credit every once in a while. There's got to be a source. somewhere along the lines yes do you think you would be more likely more likely to live in a city if it weren't for the internet i would live very close to new york city and indeed i did growing up but i've never lived in a major city it feels claustrophobic to me and i hope i never have to what do you um how do you think you guys most disagree on new york city well i love it i I think Tyler...

1:16:43I don't think we disagree. Yeah. You just don't find it as claustrophobic as I do. Yeah, I mean, I live in it. You, in theory, love it, but you hate the claustrophobia. That's right. I love visiting it. It's one of the greatest places mankind has ever created. I'm very positive on it. I don't freak out about the supposed crime, which is actually pretty low. If the garbage isn't always picked up, I'm not bent out of shape. But at the same time, if I had to live there always, you know, we're in this house. The house is big. I feel I live better than some billionaires I know in New York City and there's a big yard in the back and the dog and in the morning we have like deer and fox and I'm 35 minutes from Washington DC and this cost of pittance I don't want to give that up that's but there's no disagreement what do you think he's missing no I think it's rational I mean I think it's a phases of life thing right I actually often joke about moving to northern Virginia once you know I have children or whatever, because, yeah, I think when you're raising children in New York or you have a family, it does feel a lot more claustrophobic, and I'm seeing friends kind of struggle with that now.

1:17:50And say I'm in New York once every six weeks and half the time on the road. The things about where I live that are awful, which are real, don't really matter. Like here, it's totally boring. People who say that, they're not wrong. But you're on the road half the time, like you're not bored. In any exhibit in New York, you'll see. You won't see every concert you want to, but you catch plenty. Yeah. This is true. He's actually traveling half of the year. I was going to say, you said before we sat down about half. So that seems almost completely at odds with the cities are crazy lifestyle. Perhaps that you're doing a barbell.

1:18:25Barbell. Do you mostly travel in cities? My next trip starts tomorrow. It's to Miami. Of course, it's a city, but it doesn't feel like being in a city. It's not claustrophobic. Then Detroit. I haven't been there in a while. For a while, it was hollowed out. the opposite of claustrophobic you would long for some claustrophobia and then new york briefly uh for some talks it'll be great i'll get my barbells i often do say to people who are moving to new york like the ideal way to do it is you you live at least a year in manhattan first yeah just get the maximum experience and then you kind of figure out where you want to go from there so for me it was a little bit too much like too many sirens too many you know just too many stimuli in general so i now live in kind of south brooklyn and that's i often joke like i treat new york like the suburbs a little bit right it's like here's what i don't get maybe you can explain this to me so some young people they go there to do some mix of dating and marrying in that order and that i fully understand and then so many people seem to live there and they hardly take advantage of it and they're paying the prices they don't go to exhibits or many concerts or this or that They just love sort of living in New York or their self-image.

1:19:38That seems insane. And that's more than half of Manhattan. There's a lot of that. Okay, but I think you're underwriting hedonism here, right? Like I think they like restaurants and bars, typically those people. But there's very good restaurants here and you can drink at home. I'll tell you how I feel. I don't go to that many galleries or theater, things like this. I love being able to opt into like the best physical social network in the world um I lived in Los Angeles for many years and I always joke LA is a place where it takes energy for anything to happen right and New York is a place where it takes energy for things not to happen right and there's intentionality trade-offs I still like LA there's positives but being able to no matter how busy I am or no matter how bad at planning I may have been being able to opt in and see one of 25 people that I really like almost anytime I want is, I'm rating that above almost anything.

1:20:34So I think it's, and yeah, it's really fun when I go to the Met Cloisters with a friend, but it could also just be a walk or something like that. Yeah, the other thing I think you're underrating there, right, is like some people, so the subway is excellent. You can get from point A to point B very quickly. You don't have to drive. It's a very dense city in a way that it's very hard to find elsewhere in America. And maybe people value that a lot. like that's part of it for me coming from you know london is like this is the most london-like city i could find here but london seems better to me i guess is that you have all the upside and it's not that claustrophobic it's just way nicer yeah but they're pessimists over there yeah i know it's it's a problem uh but european cities in general yeah given my career and other interests i wouldn't choose them over new york but as cities in some ways they feel superior I agree.

1:21:23I also think there's one New York, there's one New York like city in the U S and there's a bunch in Europe. I lived in Berlin, I guess eight weeks, one summer. And that was just incredible. Yeah, that was perfect. I want to talk briefly about mentors. I know, or at least I understand you're working on a book on mentors. Maybe a first question would be, how has Nabil been a mentor to you? Well, movies is the most obvious, but tech and AI came later. Movies came first. uh, music. So, uh, the Cameron guy you're talking about, I learned his name from the two of you moments ago, but to buy the CD at all, that happened because of Nabil.

1:22:02So those would be some simple examples, but there's something intangible about mentorship that transcends all that. And it's hard to put your finger on, but there's that too. I was going to say, when I think of mentors, I don't necessarily think of people who show me cool things, although So hopefully that's a big part of it. What makes, just to choose one example, what about Nabil or his approach to it makes you like learning about AI from him? He shows, he's the kind of guy who can show me cool things. And that is value above and beyond. But lots of people, theoretically, lots of people could show you cool things.

1:22:39I have lots of mentors. There's a chapter in my pending book, My Mentors, and it's the longest chapter in the book. Ah, what do you think will be most surprising to readers in the book to the extent you're willing to share? How many of those mentors are not strong in formal education and they tend to be weird and kind of cranky and they'll just burst out and say things that are pretty dogmatic. And those are often the best mentors because they make you think they're not that reasonable a set of people overall. I don't know how much that's a surprise, but when I wrote the chapter and worked through the cases, it was a bit of a surprise to me.

1:23:15Why write a book about mentorship? There's not a serious book on mentorship. We should all do it more. We should all do menteeship more. You become older, successful, established. You think a bit, oh, I don't need mentors. It's totally wrong. You need more mentors than ever before. And more and more of them should be younger, especially with AI, but even AI aside. And just to push that simple idea in people's face, even if there's nothing else in the book of any value, I think that's super important. I think just the idea that you should actually learn from younger people than you is a very distinctive contribution to this discourse, right?

1:23:51This idea of reverse mentorship. I've already kind of taken this on a little bit because I'm in my 30s now and like, you know, people in their early 20s that I meet in some ways are much smarter than me at certain things. And so I think you do have to make this conscious shift a little bit because it's very rare to find in older people that they have that degree of kind of low ego and they're willing to frame it like that. How has Tyler mentored you? I mean, so many ways. You know, I think we talked about the taste thing already. That's one of them. I think how he lives his life, right? Like he lives this very like, it's almost, I want to call it self-indulgent in some ways.

1:24:30It's totally self-indulgent. He follows his curiosities. He collects the art. He goes and watches every movie. There's an element of like more, more, more in him that I find very... Mr. Hedonism. Very admirable. It is in a sense, right? Like I'm always like, I think my, one of the things I dislike most in myself is like, I feel like I always have this slight status quo bias of like, like he's always pinging me like, hey, do you want to go to El Salvador or something? And I'm always like, oh, I can't go there. But then I'm like, wait, I could go there. And so I think just trying Trying, constantly trying new things, constantly trying to get into new things is another one.

1:25:07Yeah, and then I think, you know, there's a certain, it's hard to describe comprehensively, but like there's a certain kindness but directness in the way that he gives advice that I think is very important. Like he's not shy about taking an opinion, but you know he always kind of has the best intentions for you. What do you think? Sound right? S-G-P-T.

1:25:35Why do you write books? Why books specifically? I think Mentors and Mentees, which is the title of the next book, might be my last book. He mentioned this. The world is changing very rapidly, and a book takes two and a half years or more. So you can write books about the past, but you can't write books about the important things happening now. And I can write every day on my blog, for free press, other outlets on Twitter. And I think I'll do more of that. I'm not at all soured on writing, but to write things with a two to three year cycle at the moment does not make sense. I just want to cut in and say this is my least favorite Tyler take.

1:26:16I said to him, like, if you just wrote a book that was like, here are my hundred favorite Beatles songs and I'm going to write three paragraphs on each of them, I would absolutely buy that book. Why can that be a blog post every day? It could be. And I totally, I would read that. I do read his blog, right? But like - You just want more Tyler. I just disagree with this idea that at some point I can go to GPT and get that instead. I just don't think GPT is going to give me as good of an answer as he is, right? And like, fundamentally, if you view this as like in terms of tokens in the machine learning sense, like books are the tokens that the AI was trained on in the first place.

1:26:50And I do think for better or for worse, humans can still generate these things that we call books that are so precious to us. And I don't know that that changes as sharply as maybe this view is implying. I would just rather put my favorite Beatles songs on the blog. So more people will consume it. It's not so profitable in book form that I feel I need the money. Why wasn't this true five years ago or 10 years ago then? Well, I started blogging 23 years ago. Of course. I mean, but you've written how many books since then? Or since 2015? But the world then was changing quite slowly. So I wrote Great Stagnation in the midst of the Great Stagnation, which remained stagnated.

1:27:28I wrote Averages Over about the pending AI revolution, which came basically 10 years later. But I knew in the meantime, when I was writing the book, when it would come out, that it wasn't going to happen in that time window. And so I could write the book. So I would feel very secure writing books about the past. I put out this weird, I called it generative book, like Within Claude, about the marginal revolution from the 1870s and that's fine but the world is interesting enough i want to write about the world now and again that two to three year time delay just kills me i feel there's an extra level of effort that's put into a book that there is yeah but it's not always a positive result from that effort people overthink things uh you have to appeal to all these audiences and editors and filters.

1:28:19So it cuts both ways. Do you think there's any kind of spectrum between a blog post and a book that could be explored? Well, there's different kinds of essays, substack, medium, and all that. But here's another way of putting it. I think I've written, I'm guessing, 17 books. There's plenty of people in history who've written 40 books. I look at their careers, and I have never thought they should have written 40 books. Now, I don't know what number is the cutoff, and maybe I'm not quite at it, but 17's a lot. And if it's only 17, I guess 18, I think that's fine. And again, there's plenty of other things I can do.

1:29:00I think my value as a mentor has gone up. In a lot of other ways, my value has gone up. We'll see. If this book is a big hit, I'll definitely write a sequel to it. I can promise you that. A sequel to the mentor book. That's right. the market would demand one. So if any book does well enough, it should have a sequel? Of course. Great Stagnation had a sequel. It was Average is Over, which is how we're going to get out of the Great Stagnation. So you should never turn down serious market demand if you can satisfy it. Do you make art? No, nothing. Never? Never. You write poetry as an example. You don't do anything you would...

1:29:42Do you think you do things that you're saying aren't art, but that we would consider our art? When I was a teenager, I played guitar. I learned a great deal from doing it, but I was never good, and I never thought it was artistic. Do you think artists should follow the advice you just gave about when the market demands something to maybe go back to commercial culture? Only some. You know, Mozart and Beethoven did, and we're very glad they did. Haydn did. Should John Cage have? I don't know. Maybe not. Do you think there's... Prince Stewart too much, probably. he's someone who wrote too many books you could say yeah right there's too much prints out there well the big counter example i would say for this is like paul mccartney right like more is always better yeah and in the case of paul it's true but he's the greatest songwriter ever right and if i were the greatest book writer ever yes then i should write more books but i'm not what are you the greatest at nothing i don't believe you i think i'm in the top tier of people for absorbing information and then organizing it in their minds and being able to spit it back in some form.

1:30:44I think I'm truly in the top tier of that, and I've built my career around it. I genuinely don't think I'm the best person in the world at it, but I think I'm often the best person a given individual has met at doing that. You're the best available. So I'll sort of seem like the best person in the world to them, but it's unlikely I'm at the very top there. Nabil, what makes Tyler good at giving feedback on writing or otherwise? I mean, there's a few things, right? One is he's very quick. He will usually do it the same day and in kind of a rough form. But you meet these people who sometimes they feel like they have to give you the perfect feedback and then it takes them two months, by which time it's not useful anymore.

1:31:26So I would say that's just one thing is he's very quick to respond. I think two is like, you know, it's the flip side of having great taste. so he's very good at reading something and kind of spotting the fundamental thing that's wrong with it and he won't bother you with so much extraneous stuff around it i think that's just very scarce right like he has years of lecturing writing books reading books reading things people send him and so he's probably one of the best in the world that's it um yeah and then i think three is like he's honest, he's not afraid to offend you, but he's not fully honest, I will say.

1:32:06I think sometimes at the margin, he'll bias towards being more positive than he ought to be. I mean, I think the first interaction I had with him actually had written a piece of a novel, which I never put out because I didn't like it in the end. But I sent it to him and he was like, this is great, keep going. And later I read it and I was like, this is not great. What was he talking about but he probably said the right thing at the right time to keep me to completing the project which was helpful do you have any recollection of that or what stood out about well what if it was great i don't remember i'd have to reread it but uh please don't it probably was sincere was that the reason you became friends or was it no the movie thing yeah but who prompted the movie thing well i read it on his home page oh right i forget how that was prompted i recall having to search through the multiple nabeel koresh is out there yeah at the time and oh this is the real nabeel yes but that succeeded yeah we need to get the other one off but how did we even get to that point at all do you remember the like the prehistory may have been it may have been through through twitter i occasionally wrote online yeah maybe you saw one of those and then clicked around Yeah, but I don't remember.

1:33:18Yeah, yeah. Tyler, do you have best friends? I have a lot of very good friends. I'm not sure I have best friends or friend. And then there's people you knew early in life. Like I'm still in close touch with someone I went to high school with. He's a candidate for best friend, but it's not best friend across all dimensions. So no, I don't have a best friend. And on the note of maybe the earlier point about keeping in touch with over 100 people in some level, do you think that there's a cap on how many people you can have? However we're defining close friends. I think I'm pretty close to the cap.

1:33:53Not quite at it. You should never be at it. It'd be tragic. How many roughly? I would guess 200. You have 200 good friends? No, that would be the cap. I don't have 200 good friends. Okay, okay. I mean, he has a lot more friends than people I know, I would say. I mean, he has a lot of friends. I'm just older too. Yeah. And traveling, you encounter people. I would assume most people decrease the amount of good friends they have over time. Right. I think they do, but that's bad. Yeah. It's very bad. Just a big mistake, yeah. Do you believe anything noteworthy about friendship? That's original? I doubt it.

1:34:30It doesn't have to be original. When you hear people talk about it, it just mostly sounds phony. So, talking about friendship makes... Don't tell our friend Ava. She'll be offended. Yeah, makes it sound worse to me. So you know Ava. I do. Great. She was episode four of this very podcast. Oh, I'll have to listen to it. Yeah. I don't know if I was any good back then, but she was great. Speaking of podcasts, I think in 2018 with David Perel, you were talking about conversations with Tyler and you described the podcast, the interviewing. For me, doing these interviews is the most strenuous thing I do in life.

1:35:07You talked about it being exhausting like chess. You lose 90 % of the information after you're holding all this information in your head. first of all is that do you still feel that way i've gotten a lot better at it and i thought you know aging i would get worse now i can easily do three in a day two in a day four i would feel deterioration but like we're doing two hours maybe not for me to judge uh but my mental stamina feels to me considerably stronger than it did in 2018 mostly through practice and i get that can't go on that way forever, but I'm very pleased by that. It's one of the best things that's happened to me.

1:35:45What about when you're interviewing? Because to me, at least my experience would be that being interviewed is dramatically less strenuous and dramatically different than interviewing. Interviewing is much harder. That's right. And you are, you are certainly one of the great interviewers in the world. You do it in a way that is pretty much singular. In what ways does it become easier or have you gotten better? You have to keep a lot in your head, but I've gotten and better at doing that. Better at learning it to begin with, and better at keeping it in my head. And better at having a sense of the pace of an episode and how to alter that, both when I should and then how to do it when I want to do it.

1:36:20So that's been good. How much are you trying to push a guest off balance a little bit? In the middle of the interview. I know at the beginning you always do, but like... It's not necessarily off balance. I want every episode to be the dramatic unfolding of something. now often that might be how do they respond when they're pushed off balance yeah but i'm not obsessed with making them feel off balance per se it can just be dramatic unfolding of my friendship with the person or their sense of life how they will approach their death whatever so off balance is only one scenario are there any interviewers that you really admire well i don't listen to that many i listen to other people's podcasts when i'm prepping with a common guest uh but mostly i think podcasts are bad and i prefer to read and i can read way more quickly than i can listen even 2x whatever so i don't like podcasts are they ever are they ever great yeah sure other than yours of course i i wouldn't say that uh what makes them to the extent you can think about a specific one or a host or one you've listened to, again, I'm probably risking myself looking very foolish here as I try to record a podcast with you, but what makes, what has made them uniquely great for that medium?

1:37:44Well, I would say one of the best, what you might call classic interviewers is Ezra Klein. Yes. Who's very mainstream and classic and does like an AA plus job. But something I think is truly great is what Dworkesh has done with the AI revolution as a chronicler of that in a way where the whole far exceeds the sum of the parts. So the parts are wonderful also. And that's really impressive. And I would say that is a great achievement. And it's wonderful that it's in a book, but it's still actually considerably underappreciated, even though he earns a lot of money and has mega number of listeners, whatever else, as an achievement, it's underappreciated.

1:38:22On that note, slightly, you are quite good, not only at identifying talent, which you've written extensively about but maybe to steal a line from nubil putting out the bat signal for very special people dorkash being one of them right um nubil is someone who is building a company trying to attract great people i'm thinking about people i want to speak to i think relevant for any of us how do you how do you put out the bat bat signal well i've never tried to do it too self-consciously so just been myself and one day i realized like hey i have a bat signal and my bat signal wouldn't work say for building a company but it works great for attracting interesting people to me so i don't feel i have general advice but the notion that the best bat signals evolve like peter teal's bat signal those youtube talks you're getting real peter like i've talked to Peter plenty privately and whatever you agree, disagree with the public Peter you get, like, it's never exactly the same, but you're getting real Peter and it's worked for him.

1:39:26I think you are quite strategic about the bat signal though. So like if you take emergent ventures as a specific example, you know, I think the, the way you framed it, you sort of don't want it to go too mainstream. Like you're quite thoughtful about that. Yeah. That, and never doing publicity for it. That's a deliberate, very calculated act of non-doing and that's been a good decision and the questions you ask yeah sure that's all pretty maybe calculated isn't the word but very carefully thought through and iterated can you reveal a bit about how you uh interview ev applicants i deliberately change it over time but most of all i am obsessed with getting them off script i never want to see a demo i never want to hear like their plans for what they're going to do, that's just poison and stilted.

1:40:15And to have them talking about anything where I can relate to it, then I'm pretty happy. I remember when I interviewed at Palantir, my final interview was with the CEO, Alex Karp. And I went in expecting, you know, the sorts of questions you normally get. And he asked me only two questions, which were, where did you grow up? and what did your parents do? Yeah, those are good questions. I came out almost offended. I was like, how can you tell anything about me from that? But he clearly had some theory about it. But it's weird to me, he couldn't tell where you grew up. Even I know you're from Northern England.

1:40:55Yeah, I mean, it's very specific and there's a few things going on there. But I like very much to get people talking about where they came from or what trips they've done or want to do. All of that is fine. And then I do have some specific questions I like to ask. One would be, what's your plan for follow-up funding? And many, especially younger people, do very poorly on that, and that's a big discriminator for me. And I don't even mind if they're gaming that. If they're gaming it by actually making the plan, even if the plan is BS, it's a huge advance over no plan at all. And that has been very useful for me, that query.

1:41:36It's not something you'd use hiring someone at Palantir, but if you're doing philanthropy with limited resources, it's critical. Do you feel like you sometimes mistake weirdness for talent? Oh, sure. I mean, most awards are, I wouldn't say failures, but they're not people who will shake up the world. And it's important not to be intimidated by that. That's another way in which you should deliberately calculate not to think too hard about your failures or even what you're doing. Just like plow ahead, keep on taking chances. Don't think like, oh, my hit rate's whatever percent. You're just going to discourage yourself.

1:42:12Do you think motivation or agency, whatever that clump of words, is a fundamental necessity for great talent? or do you think that great talent can not have that at some point and get ignited basically at some point uh it may be a matter of age so the young people it can appear quite dormant yes i'm pretty sure genetically it is there in some manner i don't think you can teach it to people per se if they don't already have it uh but i don't over index on looking for it and the whole silicon Valley, that question, how agentic are you? Yes. Seems to me counterproductive. And to think of yourself as agentic is counterproductive.

1:43:01It seems to me just a bad discourse. And people might do better forgetting about it a bit. And just look for some people who are inarticulate and a bit illegible and see if you can appreciate their virtues. And can you then from that imagine some kind of path where they're worth supporting? I'd rather do that than obsessing over agenticness. Yes. But I'm not denying how much it matters. Like, I'm not an idiot. But maybe they haven't found the entry point. Or maybe I can't see it in a half-hour interview. And the whole world's chasing after eugenicness. So I'm like, kind of, give it a break. And some of the winners, like, I'm just very happy if they're great peers for some of the other winners.

1:43:44And maybe they're not very eugenic. I think the environment matters so much. Like I'm a very big context matters kind of person. So like, I do think even though it's very banal advice is like to a first approximation, moving to San Francisco is going to make the average person a lot more motivated than they might have been in some other place. And so that's why it still is a good idea to move there. I think you do have to combine that with some independent thinking streak. Otherwise you'll just get sucked into the mimetic vortex of San Francisco. Right. But I'm a Girardian too, right? Yeah, absolutely.

1:44:16Yeah, exactly. The other thing I'd say is, I think, you know, you go long enough and you see people in different settings, and it's very interesting. So, I think Palantir produced a lot of entrepreneurs who have raised a lot of money, have very good businesses. It's not necessarily the case that the top performers at Palantir were the ones who were the best entrepreneurs, actually. In some cases, I have seen people be very successful who, at that company, I would have put them somewhere in the middle. And so it might just be like that in some sense, like being too good in a, let's say, an environment with a clear status hierarchy might be an anti-signal or something like that.

1:44:55I'm not saying that's what that was, but you can never totally write someone off. I think it's sometimes just about putting them in the right environment. And I think Tyler's a testament to this with his granting is like a lot of the grants he makes are literally just somebody is out there in Austria and he's like, I'll give you a grant just to go to San Francisco and spend two weeks there. and that will actually change their lives. Did you have an inflection point yourself? You seem deeply, deeply intrinsically motivated and also incredibly effective and high output and all these things. You're the person who's seemingly always been this way, and maybe you have.

1:45:28Yeah, I mean, I think it has varied in my life, and I also have been very intentional about putting myself in the right environment in the first place, right? So straight out of graduating, I worked at one of the big consulting companies, And I only did six months there. And then I had to leave because I could not stand that environment. And I joined a company that was one of the first two companies to go through Y Combinator from the UK. So YC was back then mostly a San Francisco phenomenon, but they let in two companies from the UK. I joined that company specifically because I admired the founders a lot.

1:46:02I thought they were extremely determined people that I would learn from. And so I think the only thing I had was maybe an understanding of this insight very early on that you have to put yourself around. people who are much better than you and you will rise to that occasion and i just was very intentional about doing that like that is also the reason or a reason i joined palantir's i was so impressed with the people i interviewed with and i thought they you know there's a specific feeling where you're like scared that someone's better than you in every way and i think that's what i look for is like okay i want to be in this room because i will rise to that level yeah um and so i feel like i just keep trying to find like the level above mine and then trying to operate on that level just a couple more things who would win in a game of chess between the two of you easily tyler easily tyler we played a few times we played and he's he's won it's not even he was he was new jersey haven't you not played since you were 13 15 i played with nabeel i played a few games with john collison i played a bunch of games with woody harrelson really that's the entirety of my chess i played with some drunk russian when i first met my wife at a party in richmond didn't you play the chess hustlers sometime recently yeah like twice i played the hustlers once i think i played coleman hughes but that's like it but you didn't lose any of those games correct only famous people like should you play with and that will ration it pretty automatically how might you guys collaborate in the future good question i mean i would love to travel together.

1:47:39It sounds like Tyler's book writing Days of the River, so we'll see. But writing a book together would be really thrilling. I've said many times before in the past that I'm done writing books, and it's always been wrong. But to write something together, whether it's a book or not, would be the obvious. But a trip together, which can be as important as a book, I've already been working on. So that will happen, I think it's likely. this podcast yeah hopefully a little momentum in the right direction um nabeel has this great tweet and probably written about it elsewhere um citing christopher alexander and the idea of aiming for chartre uh you you must aim for the most ambitious thing tyler it seems to me that you treat your career more like a stream a river of just all of these amazing projects and the person you're trying to become we've got a buddy joining joining us for those of you on audio this is spinoza hey spinoza spinoza decided to crash we have a fourth member um with his cameo hopefully the audio is still connected um you are so prolific and you've done so many amazing things that said i'm curious is there anything, is there any grand project that you've wondered about or that might still be in store?

1:48:59Or do you just totally not think about things that way? I like my current projects. I'm going to do a lot more podcasts, write more, whether it's books or not, travel more, emerging ventures. I don't really see how I could improve on that. That may be my limited imagination. I feel I'm open to new ideas, but the ones I have, I'm very happy with how they're going okay how are you guys most excited about the future or what are you most excited for i truly am excited to see ai develop i mean i feel a little bad saying it because people like to talk about the negative aspects of ai a lot but for me just like i don't know every month has been a treat since gpt3 more or less is when i started to get really excited about it but um twitter notifications for Nabil, everybody, by the way.

1:49:50It's a great way to stay up to date on this. It's just enthusiasm. People sometimes ask me, why do you tweet about AI so much? It's because I like it. There's no kind of grand thing I'm trying to achieve or I'm not trying to become an influencer. It's really just because I enjoy it. And I think the fact that we've created artificial minds is incredible. I love chatting to them. I think every time it gets better, it's just like a new Christmas present for me. So I'm excited to see where it goes. I'm sure there'll be lots of dislocations and disruptions along the way, but to me, it's very fun so far.

1:50:21And biomedicine. We're going to see amazing advances, I think. I hope I'm around to enjoy some of them, but someone will get them. Dyson spheres. We're going to see Dyson spheres. I'm less sure about that. Give it 10, 20 years. I worry that a world with Dyson spheres has too much destructive potential.

1:50:44Nabil's Twitter profile is make yourself proud and so I would turn that question around on both of you how have you made yourself proud? I just think it's a good heuristic I think it's worth asking yourself I agree but how have you made yourself proud?

1:51:12You know, I think I'm a decently fine person, and I'm nice to the people around me. I guess the collections of friends I have around me, like my spouse, the people I know that I get to talk to every day, I'm probably proudest of that. And I think that is the vast majority of the value in my life. i know many people my own age as you would expect and i feel i'm at it going more than almost any of them so uh that i'm proud of are there any ways you're proud of each other what he said i mean he's uh he's so himself and he's he feels like more himself every year and uh he i feel like he never gets stuck in his ways you know that's so so admirable and with him i don't get how he has such good taste and this i mean as a compliment so there's a lot of people they grow up in ways where you see where the good taste comes from uh but it's much more sui generis and i think that's quite striking and something nabil should be very proud of anything else you guys want to talk about there's always more but that's why we need to go to el salvador yes yes or somewhere similar i was actually curious about earlier you read the quote about him preparing for interviews and it being very exhausting did that resonate with you do you feel that way certainly resonated i think especially so in a case like this um and there's a question i'm curious how you feel tyler maybe there's one of my favorite moments in the Rick Rubin conversations.

1:52:57Rick observes, as many have, that conversations with Tyler are not very much conversations at all. And Rick says, well, we're conversational people though. And you laugh and then go, well, I don't know about myself. But the thing I always struggle with is on one hand, I want to prep as much as possible and really do as much I can to control. And what I'm trying to do, which is pull the humanity out of the people I get to speak to. But on the other hand, I want to be here for it. and not squeeze it too hard and let it happen. And that's a challenge. It's like the Zen master who's so prepared and yet can be loose.

1:53:32It's hard, yeah. That's all I got. Thank you both. I really appreciate your generosity. Thank you for having us, Tyler. Thank you for listening to Dialectic with Tyler Cowen and Nabeel Qureshi. And thank you for supporting the show. Whether this is the first time you've listened or watched or you've been around since episode one, back with Jason Liu, it means a whole lot. You can get the full transcript and all the links for the show at dialectic.fm slash Tyler-Nabeel. And if you enjoyed the show, the most important thing you could do would be to share it with a friend. You can also rate it, give it five stars on Spotify, give it a thumbs up on YouTube, subscribe or follow wherever you're watching or listening.

1:54:08And before I leave you, I'd like to thank Notion one more time for presenting Dialectic. They're a huge part of why I was able to get to episode 50 and go full-time with the show back in December. And Notion has totally transformed itself in the last year and a half or so for the AI era. One of the rare companies that has been able to do that from the ground up and turn an amazing collaborative workspace tool into a canvas for you and your team to do all of the most important work and get a ton of leverage from where you want to get AI and agents to help you automate things, find edge cases, get an extra set of eyes and more.

1:54:44As Notion has transformed itself, it has grown the team and built a remarkably special group of people. some of which I get to work with on a regular basis. And recently they even brought on somebody I deeply admire. And it's been really fun to get to watch him be blown away by the level of ambition, especially in a mature company. If you're interested in joining the team at Notion, you can reach out to them directly or email me at work at jacksondoll.com. And if it is a fit, I will send you to the right person. Again, I think it's pretty special to be able to have a team and a leader like Ivan, who is willing to take the gambit to, in many ways, kind of rebuild his company to meet where the future is going.

1:55:23You can learn more at notion.com slash dialectic. And thank you again for listening to episode 50 to episode 100 and beyond. I'll see you next time.