16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized

The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized
Information
Guest	Tyler Cowen
Length	01:45:58
Release Date	16 December 2019
YouTube Date	6 February 2020
Apple Podcasts	Listen
Links
YouTube	Watch
Portal Blog	Read
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In this episode, Eric sits down with Tyler Cowen to discuss how/why a Harvard educated chess prodigy would choose a commuter school to launch a stealth attack on the self-satisfied economic establishment, various forms of existential risk, tech/social stagnation and more. On first glance, Tyler Cowen is an unlikely candidate for America's most influential economist. Since 2003, Cowen has grown his widely read and revered economics blog Marginal Revolution with lively thought, insight and prose resulting in a successful war of attrition against traditional thinking. In fact, his well of heterodox thinking is so deep that there is an argument to be made that Tyler may be the living person with the most diverse set of original rigorous opinions to be found in any conversation. The conversation takes many turns and is thus hard to categorize. We hope you enjoy it.

Eric Weinstein (right) talking with Tyler Cowen (left) on episode 16 of The Portal Podcast

Transcript

00:00:00
Eric Weinstein: [intro music] Hello. You found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and today I get to sit down with one of my favorite conversationalists, Tyler Cowen, uh, who's here from George Mason University, where he's a professor of economics. Tyler, welcome to The Portal.

00:00:20
Tyler Cowen: Thank you, Eric.

00:00:21
Eric Weinstein: Now, uh, when we were talking about what topics we could begin with, I didn't wanna begin with economics, and you suggested the apocalypse as a great place to start. Now, the great benefit o- of this is that if we get past it, the rest of the conversation will be post-apocalyptic.

00:00:37
Tyler Cowen: The apocalypse itself is economics, of course, but I was just thinking that virtually any good theory of politics needs some notion of the apocalypse. Let's say you thought the time horizon for the universe or human civilization were potentially infinite. You would then be so concerned with minimizing existential risk that nothing would get done. Whereas if you think, well, you know, mankind has another 800 years left on Earth on average, and by that time probably will have blown ourselves up or an asteroid will come, uh, then you think what glorious things can we do with those 800 years? And it's quite a difference in perspective. So an infinite time horizon might actually choke off rational thought about political decision-making.

00:01:16
Eric Weinstein: So is, is there any possibility for keeping the apocalypse [chuckles] exactly 800 years away, like a donkey with a carrot, uh, dangled in front of it at a fixed distance?

00:01:26
Tyler Cowen: That would be the Straussian view, right? That you always think it's 800 years away. But think of it as like a problem from, from finance. So you write a naked put on a security. Well, it's gonna bankrupt you at some point, but any given month, any given day, the chance of that happening is probably quite small. So the apocalypse may be like the proverbial naked put. It's out there. The chance is very small. The optimists always sound like they're right. In a sense, they are right, as Steven Pinker would claim. Uh, but at the end of the day, if the clock ticks for long enough, it's boom and bye. But in the meantime, let's do something grand and glorious.

00:02:00
Eric Weinstein: Now, Tyler, you have a, um, sort of a portfolio of different ways of communicating with the world. Have you ever dragged Steven Pinker onto a podcast, which you do under, uh, Conversations with Tyler, or have you discussed, uh, his bizarre notion of optimism on your, uh, famous economics blog, Marginal Revolutions, which you do with your colleague, Alex?

00:02:25
Tyler Cowen: My podcast, Conversations with Tyler, has an episode with Steven Pinker, and I sat him down in a chair the way you did with me, and I said, "Steven, the cost of destroying the world by pressing a button is falling all of the time, every year. At some point, it will only cost, say, $20,000 to take out a major city. Uh, how long do you think the world is actually gonna last, given that demand curves slope downwards, when prices fall, people do more things, destructive weaponry is becoming cheaper? How can you be optimistic?" I asked him. No good answer. I would say evasion. He said, "Well, my theory's not predictive. It's just a way of thinking about da, da, da." So-

00:03:01
Eric Weinstein: So it instantly falls apart.

00:03:03
Tyler Cowen: It, it falls apart. I don't know if it falls apart instantly because weaponry has spread more slowly than we might have thought. So you read nuclear theorists in the '50s and thir- '60s, they think a third World War might be coming quite soon. They were wrong. You read worries about proliferation from the '80s and '90s. They sound horrible. I wouldn't say it's been great. North Korea, no one's happy about that. But at the same time, the weapons have not been used. So there's something fundamental about the models we don't understand. You can ask the question, why didn't Al-Qaeda hire a bunch of stooges to go into a Tysons Corner shopping mall with submachine guns and just cause some terror? That didn't happen. So the logic of choice of wielding destructive power is one of the issues in social science we understand least well, I would say, and there is perhaps some hope of salvation. So I'm not sure Pinker falls apart instantly, but I didn't feel Pinker defended Pinker very well. And on my blog, Marginal Revolution, I did review his book, and my worry is that there's an observational equivalence with how you look at the data. So you could say, well, deaths in wars have been going down, will continue to fall. That's possibly true. But another model is the more destructive the weapons are, the less frequent the wars, things will seem great for quite a while, but the next war when it comes will be quite a doozy.

00:04:18
Eric Weinstein: So in some sense, uh, this is the Great Moderation, which last time was about market volatility, and here it's about the volatility of human violence.

00:04:26
Tyler Cowen: And Great Moderations maybe contain the seeds of their own destruction.

00:04:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's-

00:04:30
Tyler Cowen: But again, I would wanna be cautious there because we don't understand destructive decisions very well. Like, why did Hitler invade Russia? We know a lot about it in the documented sense, but I don't feel it's understood very well.

00:04:43
Eric Weinstein: Uh, agreed, and I agree that we don't know why so few reservoirs have been poisoned, um-

00:04:49
Tyler Cowen: Yes

00:04:49
Eric Weinstein: ... with relatively low-tech, uh, options. And it, uh, the Las Vegas shooting, for example, showed what a small level of innovation in mass killing can do to really amp the body count if that's what somebody is trying to optimize. Uh, so I, I think that there is a huge mystery, but I don't think that Pinker, from what I understand of his basis for optimism, uh, is really getting at that. Uh, people who've listened to this podcast, uh, and have heard me elsewhere have heard me complain that it's as if he's neglecting a potential energy term, but for violence. And so the realized violence, as you were pointing out, has gone down, but the potential for violence is enormous, and as the cost falls, the access to violence, uh, of this particular nature seems, uh, to put it into far too many, uh, within reach of far too many hands.

00:05:45
Tyler Cowen: One of our saving graces could be that the contagion effects for methods of violence seem pretty strong. So we're in a time where in the US, shooting up schools is the thing to do. It happens more often by some metrics than it used to. In the 1970s, being a serial killer was somehow, like, the thing to do. So if you're inspired by what people have done just before you and you're not very innovative, it could be that violence and lack of innovation are somehow correlated, and contagion effects mean you'll kill, you know, a terrible number of innocent people, but it still will quite limit how much damage you do to the world as a whole.

00:06:20
Eric Weinstein: Well, I mean, in terms of R&D, um, thinking about terror innovation is quite interesting. It, it seems to me that it's hard to remember that there is no known linkage between suicide bombing and Islam, uh, before the, the Beirut barracks bombing, if, if I'm not mistaken.

00:06:43
Tyler Cowen: It came from Sri Lanka i-in the proximate sense, the idea, from the Tamil Tigers.

00:06:48
Eric Weinstein: Well, the Tamils-

00:06:48
Tyler Cowen: They're not the only ones who've done it, but-

00:06:49
Eric Weinstein: No, I think that they... Didn't they really perfect it after the Beirut barracks bombing, and then it sort of came back to the Middle East? Do I have that wrong?

00:06:57
Tyler Cowen: I'm not sure on the timing. Uh.

00:06:59
Eric Weinstein: But there are very few groups that have been using suicide bombing in the modern era.

00:07:03
Tyler Cowen: Yes.

00:07:04
Eric Weinstein: The, the, maybe the Kurds, the, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, and, uh, various, uh, Muslim violent movements, jihadi movements. Um.

00:07:14
Tyler Cowen: The striking thing about 9/11 is how innovative it was.

00:07:17
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:07:17
Tyler Cowen: So that's what really ought to scare us, but it does seem also such innovations are pretty scarce.

00:07:24
Eric Weinstein: Well, in that, that in some sense Af-Afghanistan was like a-an R&D lab for Al-Qaeda, and one of the things I believe I remember was that there was a taped conversation within Al-Qaeda that had leaked, uh, in which various groups were deciding, were trying to decide whether this was the greatest thing they'd ever done or whether it was a terrible move because it was gonna cause them the loss of their R&D lab.

00:07:51
Tyler Cowen: You know, Karlheinz Stockhausen, the German composer, he said, well, it was such a wonderful work of art, and obviously he got pilloried for that comment. I'm not sure what he meant by it. It's a terrible thing to say. I wouldn't say it, but it's still getting at some aspect of 9/11 that was quite different, that it was an attempt to innovate.

00:08:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, I mean, could we, could we go there? I've talked on this program about message violence, which is violence that is made, uh, particularly theatrical for the purpose of underscoring a message. For example, uh, affecting a position of kindness, uh, which clearly, uh, ends up, uh, you know, torturing somebody, like, you know, drowning them in a tub of their favorite wine or something like this. That there's something very perverse about certain kinds of violence whose... where the intention is to amplify the underlying harm in a way that animates the imagination. In some sense, um, you know, the Jordanian pilot video, which was cinematically, uh, gorgeous and as sick as could possibly be imagined, that was released by ISIS, would be in this realm. And it, is there a sense in which we can look at 9/11 as deliberately theatrical and artistic?

00:09:05
Tyler Cowen: Most likely it was, as I understand it. Uh, and if you look at the targets chosen, the World Trade Center was not actually that economically important. Uh, it certainly was not politically important, but they were the tallest structures. There was a theory they would collapse in a certain way, and it, it seems they did. They did. Uh, so it does seem artistically motivated in some sense. And there is this odd obsession of many dictators with the arts, which I think is also poorly understood, but it also gets at the notion that the totalitarian and violent impulses in us, uh, can be severed from innovation, but don't necessarily have to be.

00:09:46
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, so, you know, the passion inside of the passion play, uh, anything that can truly excite the spirit can easily be weaponized. Um, so there's a way in which I guess I would expect the dictators would be very animated by, by the theater in particular.

00:10:03
Tyler Cowen: But I think mass opinion in general tends to neuter some of that desire for artistic creativity. So if you look at passion plays around the world, if you go see one, say, during Easter in Mexico, uh, they become something quite celebratory. Uh, it's for family and for friends, and people get together, people drink, people cook special dishes. So it's drained of so much of the actual passion story, and it becomes, among other things, less passionate. So it's hard to sustain the emotional violence behind the innovation of violence, and that may be another one of our saving graces. And you see this with suicide bombers. When they're removed from their environments where they've been indoctrinated, it can be quite hard to get them to go through with what they've been told to do, and sometimes you get them to go through with it by not even telling them they're gonna die.

00:10:54
Eric Weinstein: Hmm.

00:10:55
Tyler Cowen: I've read some accounts, I'm not sure how validated this is, that a lot of the 9/11, uh, terrorists, they didn't know they were gonna die.

00:11:04
Eric Weinstein: And maybe that ambiguity, I mean, presumably, uh, everybody signs up with an idea that martyrdom is part of the package potentially, but it, they don't know that it, the play is going to be called for any particular Tuesday.

00:11:17
Tyler Cowen: And the same was true for RAF fighters in World War II or any other very high-risk activity, where you're pretty sure you're one of the good guys, but you don't wanna die. So the fact that it's a lottery ticket of sorts, in some ways it piques your interest, it motivates you, it gets your adrenaline up, it probably improves your performance, uh, but at the same time, it's absolutely terrifying. And, you know, how much does that operate symmetrically on the good and bad moral sides of this equation? It's probably more similar than we would feel comfortable admitting.

00:11:48
Eric Weinstein: Now, Tyler, I ran into an idea that I hadn't heard codified with, a-a-and labeled with a phrase before, um, called strategic silence, and I r- I read about this in writings or speeches of danah boyd, uh, who works with, uh, Data & Society Institute. The idea behind it is that if you have predictable, reliable news coverage, it allows somebody who, let's say, wishes to undertake a terrorist action to know that they w- can count on you to amplify their message, because they have the ability to create news. They are n-not just news takers, but news makers. In that realm, the news media has been experimenting with the idea that they will not do the bidding of the attacker by broadcasting things about motive, about name. Uh, or about certain circumstances of the crime so, uh, at least ostensibly as not to amplify the leverage of the attacker. Is that kind of a, a death knell for confidence in reporting that if we report the facts straight, we give people too much leverage over our news, and if we don't report the facts, then we quickly erode confidence in our system?

00:13:08
Tyler Cowen: I favor the experiment of not reporting the names of, say, mass shooters. I'm not sure we're really withholding facts. So the name of the person didn't mean anything to the audience in advance. Whether the person's name is John Smith or John Brown, it's, it's a fact in some way, but in another way it's not a fact at all. Whereas if it's a person who is already known, say back, back then, Osama bin Laden, then you are withholding a fact if you don't say Osama bin Laden had a role in 9/11. Uh, my worry with the policy of strategic silence is that destroyers will innovate in ways to recapture the attention. So if they don't report your name, maybe you kill more people, or maybe you innovate with a new method of killing people. So you might be inducing innovation over the medium term, and I don't think we know yet. As an experiment, it does seem to me worth trying, but I wouldn't be all too optimistic about it because as I say on my blog, like solve for the equilibrium, and what's the equilibrium here? We don't quite know.

00:14:11
Eric Weinstein: Although with somebody like the Unabomber, uh, who left us a manifesto, or let's say the Christchurch, uh, shooter in the mosque, we have, uh, a fairly detailed account of what was going through the person's mind while they were committing their crimes.

00:14:27
Tyler Cowen: I don't know if that is what was going through their mind. It was what was going through their mind at some point in time, but was it their actual set of motivations? Uh-

00:14:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, do you-

00:14:37
Tyler Cowen: ... I don't feel qualified to judge, but I wouldn't just take that for granted or take it quite literally.

00:14:41
Eric Weinstein: But would you feel, uh, comfortable in suppressing the dissemination of such a document?

00:14:46
Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's possible to suppress that at, uh, the way the internet and other institutions have evolved. I wouldn't do it either, uh, but in any case, it will get out there. So if we decide, oh, it's not gonna be on Facebook, uh, uh, as you well know, there are other parts of the internet where it just can't be taken down.

00:15:03
Eric Weinstein: That's an interesting place where I think I disagree with you. I don't disagree with you that we can't stop, uh, the document from being on the internet and a very determined person in their ability to find it. I do believe that there is a frictional coefficient that the search engines and the major platforms can control if they, uh, so choose to slow down the flow of information, and whether it gets reified and discussed inside of what I've termed the gated institutional narrative is a big deal because those news organizations react chiefly to each other and special trusted institutions. And so many of us still have the idea when we're listening to that conversation that it's an open conversation when, if you're in a position like you or I may be, we're astounded by the number of things that simply can't be discussed in, in, in that echo chamber and in, and in those corridors.

00:15:58
Tyler Cowen: But I think the short term and the medium term are quite different here. So if Facebook and YouTube and Google all of a sudden decide they won't cover some awful video, uh, that will have real impact. But I think, say, four or five years later, there'll be some new set of tools. Maybe they're only used to find the really bad stuff, uh, but people will know there are sites or methods where you can go see, hear, experience all the really bad things, and then it still gets out. So, uh, I'm not at all opposed to people, say, who run Facebook deciding not to post something. I think it's fine. It's their website. Uh, more power to them. Uh, but at the same time, we should not infer too much from the short-run reaction because, again, solve for the equilibrium. Institutions and searchers will adjust.

00:16:42
Eric Weinstein: So you and I have a slightly different orientation about that. Might be fun to play with it for a second. I think I've inc- I used to hold a position that these companies had the right to do what they wanted.

00:16:53
Tyler Cowen: Yes.

00:16:53
Eric Weinstein: And I, I've started to change my opinion on that based on the idea that if I define the public space, uh, relative to private space, I can find only private space on the internet. I, I need to hire a company to allow me to get an on-ramp in the form of an ISP, and that in general, uh, unlike a city, uh, with parks and, um, institutions of government, I really can't find any public space on the internet. And so if the whole thing is private, I feel like it's absolutely essential that we place much more restrictive, um, rules about what can and cannot be prohibited on the internet because there is no public space from the get-go. Am I way, am I way off?

00:17:46
Tyler Cowen: The analogies of public and private space to the internet, I think, are quite complex. I would just start with a very simple question. Who is it you would trust in politics to make those decisions better than what our current internet is giving us? And for me, the answer is no one, no party, no institution. So I would like to keep things more or less the way they are now and have no liability for the internet companies, let them decide. And, uh, the notion that Congress... Did you see the recent- recent, uh, testimony of Mark Zuckerberg before Congress?

00:18:21
Eric Weinstein: Caught a little bit of it. Not much.

00:18:22
Tyler Cowen: It's remarkable how m- how little people in Washington understand about tech at any level, so...

00:18:28
Eric Weinstein: Well, so what explains this? You and I spend a fair amount of time in Silicon Valley, and it's not like the government couldn't get help from the world's smartest tech people.

00:18:38
Tyler Cowen: And they can, and they do, but the actual decisions are made by Congress and by a president.

00:18:43
Eric Weinstein: But what explains the lousy level of questioning of tech people and, you know, both scientific quality-

00:18:48
Tyler Cowen: The quality of voters, right So people get the leaders they deserve, voters are poorly informed, representatives want to parade a certain display of toughness or strength in front of those voters, so they're deliberately rude to Mark Zuckerberg. They ask stupid questions, which voters will let them get away with. In my Twitter feed, some of the very stupidest questions were being applauded, say, by PhD economists, like, "Oh," you know, "Get tough," you know, "Show Mark Zuckerberg." So even at that level, there's an expressive response that encourages this behavior, and that's why we get it. But when you then think, "Gee, this system is gonna regulate speech on the internet," I say, "No way," you know? Zenger was right. Oh well.

00:19:26
Eric Weinstein: I think that's different. You, you ever watch giraffes fighting, or bunnies?

00:19:32
Tyler Cowen: Uh, I've seen bunnies fighting on the internet. I'm not sure I've seen-

00:19:34
Eric Weinstein: I mean, bunnies fighting is amazing, right? And it's like, I, I think I got this from Joe Rogan. Bunny UFC is just, it, they fight in such an intense fashion. I, I think people are cheering, um, some of these hearings in the same way that they would cheer for, like, one rabbit over another. They don't-

00:19:52
Tyler Cowen: Of course, it's like a cockfight

00:19:53
Eric Weinstein: ... it's just, it's just interesting watching people beat up on each other, particularly if you like one more than the other. I don't think that people are anywhere near as stupid as... I don't think we're, we're getting the government we deserve. And, and let me give you an analogy which is plaguing me, uh, for many things. We used to think that TV was the idiot box, and we clearly just didn't understand long-form television of the form that has been discovered with Game of Thrones, uh, or The Sopranos. I think that there's a long-form politics that we want, and we're smart enough to know the difference between what we have and that, and we can't get it because it's really not in the interests of people who have more leverage than the rest of us.

00:20:40
Tyler Cowen: I don't think it's the elites who are keeping this long-form politics from us. I think it's the voters. There are plenty of candidates on the Democratic side. Uh, some of them are quite smart. Uh, you may or may not agree with them. But what-

00:20:52
Eric Weinstein: Who do you find qui- quite smart on the Democratic side? We won't talk about dumb

00:20:56
Tyler Cowen: ... uh, Mayor Pete and Andrew Yang, for instance, are, seem quite smart. I'm not familiar with all the candidates, so if I haven't mentioned your favorite-

00:21:03
Eric Weinstein: That's fine

00:21:03
Tyler Cowen: ... I intend no slight. Uh, but they're obviously both quite smart. Their chance of winning is pretty small. They have gotten media exposure. Uh, I know Andrew Yang is sometimes kept out of the CNN graphics and so-

00:21:16
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:21:16
Tyler Cowen: ... and so on. But, uh, Bernie Sanders-

00:21:19
Eric Weinstein: Which is in, in and of itself hysterically funny, as if it's, you know, we're back in 1994, and no one will be able to discuss this because we don't have a, a lively internet.

00:21:28
Tyler Cowen: But the people who manipulate emotions-

00:21:31
Eric Weinstein: Right

00:21:31
Tyler Cowen: ... are m- more likely to be the Democratic candidates than those two individuals.

00:21:36
Eric Weinstein: Huh.

00:21:37
Tyler Cowen: And that I don't blame on the elites. I'm not saying the elites are blameless, but it's mostly the voters.

00:21:42
Eric Weinstein: Do you know Frank Luntz well?

00:21:44
Tyler Cowen: Uh, I've met him and I've heard him talk. I wouldn't say I know him well. I think he's very smart.

00:21:48
Eric Weinstein: I think he's very smart, too. I went to college with him. And for those who don't know, he's a Republican pollster who pioneered the use of particular phraseology for a common concept, and he more or less discovered that we don't actually have opinions about underlying law or facts or theory, but we have hugely divergent opinions o- based on how the same underlying stuff is presented to us, that death taxes, uh, and estate taxes may be the same thing, but we oppose the death tax and we're for the estate tax. Do you believe that this level of emotional manipulation, um, would go away if we started getting tools with which to discuss it?

00:22:37
Tyler Cowen: Clearly, that kind of emotional manipulation is higher in some countries than in others, so it's impossible to li- to believe it's some fixed, eternal constant. But the United States have a, has a long history of emotional and sometimes populist politics. In the '80s and '90s, I view as an outlier kind of era where things were relatively calm and reasonable, even though at the time it didn't always feel that way.

00:22:58
Eric Weinstein: It didn't feel that way to me at all.

00:22:59
Tyler Cowen: But compared to the mid to late 19th century, my goodness, right?

00:23:02
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00:23:02
Tyler Cowen: Then you had people in Congress attacking each other. It, uh, a lot of partisan media, a lot of outright lying. So I don't see America becoming like Switzerland anytime soon, but clearly it's not impossible.

00:23:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think one of the things that really strikes me about that is that the Lee Atwaters and the Frank Luntzes who, um, put a sort of a deliberate spin on this kind of mean-spirited emotional manipulation, were surprised that it didn't behave, let's say, like rugby, where you have a bunch of gentlemen take the field, play absolutely brutally with each other, and then going back, going back to being gentlemen, uh, when the game is over. Frank Luntz has told me that he just ha- hates the current sta- state, um, of our politics, that it's far too mean-spirited and destructive, and he can't locate anything that he's done to kick this, this, uh, this into high gear. It's a, it's a very strange thing. There's a disconnection between working on these campaigns in a somewhat scientific fashion to use people's passions, um, to sort of take over their decision-making, and then there's this inability to understand, well, how did we all become so, uh, uncivil?

00:24:21
Tyler Cowen: I wonder if one of the problems in America is our temporal distance from war. So there was World War II, terrible event, but it did make us more instrumentally rational. And if you look at something like the Manhattan Project, phenomenal achievement, as you know, done really quite quickly, would not have been possible outside of wartime, even in an earlier America. Then there's the Cold War. Now, the Cold War, let's say it ended 1989, 1992. That's a number of decades. Young people today don't know about it. So without a common enemy, maybe the enemy becomes each other in some way, and we're more mean-spirited because there's a lack of a common enemy. That's, to me, the most likely single hypothesis for what's happened.

00:25:01
Eric Weinstein: And, and it's evolutionarily rational that when there isn't a common enemy, you would attempt, potentially, to make your slice larger at the expense, uh, of- Of someone else's slice who might, might be on your team, whereas during wartime, that would be seen as a sort of an unforgivable offense because you have something much bigger to, to organize around.

00:25:23
Tyler Cowen: And I think it's interesting, the one issue where there is at least potentially a common enemy, maybe not quite vivid yet, but that would be China.

00:25:29
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

00:25:29
Tyler Cowen: Opinion on China, it's not polarized Republican versus Democrat. I've spoken to people in Congress on both sides about China. There's a mix of opinions, diverse opinions within each party. It's not that all the Republicans line up on one side and all the progressives on another. So there you see polarization actually not being so strong.

00:25:50
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think China's done a wonderful job of manipulating us by making sure that most of their activity is below a threshold, um, so that it appears that they don't really have any global designs. And of course, there's a narrative that says China really cares only about China, and it's not focused on the outside world.

00:26:09
Tyler Cowen: My view is China has very strong Asian designs. I'm not sure they have truly global designs, uh, but I view them as a threat to liberty in Asia.

00:26:19
Eric Weinstein: Sure. Now, I guess I have a question. Um, do you think we're living through a very unusual time in the last, this, the last decade and really probably the last five to seven years?

00:26:35
Tyler Cowen: I'm not sure I would slice up the years that way. So I now see the 1980s and '90s as the unusual time of calm and feeling of triumph and that neoliberalism can do no wrong, and that's the outlier. The turning point for me is 9/11 and the financial crisis, and now you have Trumpism, a series of very strange events that are causing people to revise many things they had believed and were responding by being nastier to each other. So I see the cutoff point as 2001.

00:27:06
Eric Weinstein: Do you see anything, for example, that's, to me, um, I, I view the, uh, apparent death of Jeffrey Epstein, uh, as one of the most bizarre news stories I've ever seen. It, it seemingly happened with every bizarre coincidence that would be necessary for somebody in protective custody, uh, to meet his end, uh, under a situation in which everybody wants to know exactly who he was, how he was connected to the intelligence communities, where are his, uh, suppo- probable co-conspirators. They seem to still be alive. Nobody seems to be tracking this down. The news media seems preternaturally uninterested in it. And if you look at, like, top podcasts, there are lots of podcasts that are [chuckles] dedicated to the Jeffrey Epstein question. Anybody could make money even debunking conspiracy theories about murders of Jeffrey Epstein by the intelligence community. What the hell's going on that we're not even talking about?

00:28:05
Tyler Cowen: I haven't followed the details of the Epstein death very closely, but in general, it's very hard to get me to believe in conspiracy theories. Just looking at base rates, how many people kill themselves in prison versus how many people are killed by outside conspiracies in prison, other than the case of someone who snitches on, you know, the drug gang and they're shivved in the shower, that kind of thing, which is pretty common. Uh, so I'm not close to thinking that was a conspiracy. I would say I have an open mind since I haven't studied it. But I don't look at it and recoil and think, "My goodness, this is so strange."

00:28:37
Eric Weinstein: No, I don't necessarily... You don't have to believe it's a conspiracy. You can believe that there are two camera failures and that there's some guards that were asleep on the job and that a freakishly long period with nobody killing themselves in that facility happened to be ended because there's an arrival of an unpredictable event. What I'm trying to s-

00:28:52
Tyler Cowen: Yes, that is what I believe.

00:28:54
Eric Weinstein: Okay, that's great.

00:28:54
Tyler Cowen: You said it well.

00:28:55
Eric Weinstein: Right. But my point to you would be, uh, if that's what I believed, and that is a part of what I believe, but I have a probability distribution that puts far more weight on other things than, than I think your probability distribution does, um, I would be interested to discuss that and to show people just how, uh, the conspir- uh, the conspiracy theorizing mind is led astray. It would be a wonderful opportunity for a rationalist to take this on, uh, and to sell a bunch of papers by showing what nonsense this is, and even Michael Shermer at some point, um-

00:29:32
Tyler Cowen: But is the market for that so large? Uh-

00:29:35
Eric Weinstein: People wanted to talk about-

00:29:35
Tyler Cowen: It's hard to prove he wasn't murdered, right?

00:29:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, but my point is people wanted to talk about this much more than papers wanted... Like, why not do a, a, a special on what is known about Jeffrey Epstein's connections to the intelligence community? Just, just that.

00:29:54
Tyler Cowen: Sure.

00:29:54
Eric Weinstein: What is known? I'm not saying that the, he has huge connections to the intelligence, but what do we know?

00:30:01
Tyler Cowen: I read about it in my blog comments all the time. I'm not sure how much of it to trust. Uh, but if I look back on history, to me, it's remarkable how few successful conspiracies there are, and there can be a lot of circumstantial evidence that something was a conspiracy, talk of Pearl Harbor, JFK assassination, many other cases.

00:30:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, like the M-

00:30:19
Tyler Cowen: But they don't quite materialize as actual conspiracies.

00:30:20
Eric Weinstein: How does the McCollum Memo on Pearl Harbor affect you?

00:30:24
Tyler Cowen: Most historians think it was a series of massive screw-ups, and there were clearly pieces of information put on tables and left around, but there was no committee or individual such as FDR saying, "I'm gonna let this happen."

00:30:37
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, I'm not saying that... I don't think anybody wanted Japan to attack us-

00:30:41
Tyler Cowen: Yeah

00:30:41
Eric Weinstein: ... with that ferocity in Pearl Harbor. But the question of did we want casus belli for World War II and was-

00:30:49
Tyler Cowen: Probably.

00:30:50
Eric Weinstein: And were we interested in potentially getting torpedoed, uh, in British shipping lanes or choking, uh, Japan, which is resource poor for natural resources, uh, so as to induce them into some act of belligerence, hopefully much smaller than Pearl Harbor?

00:31:06
Tyler Cowen: Sure, but that's not a conspiracy, right? That's, that's a plan that went wrong.

00:31:10
Eric Weinstein: Well, it would be, it would be a bit of a conspiracy to attempt to get- ... uh, someone to attack you so that you could enter the war claiming to have been attacked.

00:31:18
Tyler Cowen: I don't know. It-

00:31:19
Eric Weinstein: Well, maybe you don't think that is-

00:31:20
Tyler Cowen: I mean, that's pretty standard military strategy

00:31:22
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, if that's standard military strategy, maybe this is the reason why you don't see as many conspiracies [laughs]

00:31:27
Tyler Cowen: [laughs]

00:31:27
Eric Weinstein: Because that's just normal operating procedure. Um, I, I, I guess I'm always shocked by how many relatively large and complicated conspiracies have been proven to have existed, have not fallen apart. You know, all these standard things that you can't get a large number of people to do something without somebody squealing, that people have an urge to purge, so nobody keeps a secret. This has been, to my mind, clearly disproven just by proven conspiracies.

00:31:52
Tyler Cowen: So what's, what is to you the most dramatic large-scale conspiracy?

00:31:55
Eric Weinstein: Well, COINTELPRO has to be the best of them.

00:31:58
Tyler Cowen: And what happened there?

00:32:00
Eric Weinstein: That the FBI had a dirty tricks department that, uh, actually fed misinformation, uh, to create fake news into the mainstream media with the intention of killing law-abiding, uh, Americans because the FBI didn't like their politics. That's pretty bad.

00:32:18
Tyler Cowen: Look, it's bad-

00:32:18
Eric Weinstein: That's a large number of people, too

00:32:20
Tyler Cowen: It's not what I see as a conspiracy. So we know, for instance, as a fact that the CIA supported abstract expressionism within the field of painting-

00:32:29
Eric Weinstein: Yes

00:32:29
Tyler Cowen: ... 'cause they thought it would neutralize propagandistic art and make America's less communistic. I don't think that's seriously disputed.

00:32:37
Eric Weinstein: Well, I got into a much more interesting discussion with an economist not too long ago who was looking at my work in economics and said, "Eric..." The person said to me, "Eric, I can't stand to see you fighting the Chicago School of Economics. Do you, are you aware that this was really just a bulwark against totalitarian communism rather than a theory that was intended to be operational and descriptive with predictive power, and that now that the Cold War is over, uh, the problem is we didn't tell the children that it was really, uh, a political project rather than an analytic one?"

00:33:15
Tyler Cowen: But, I mean, I know or knew most of those people. They were economists. What they said they believed was true. They had careerist concerns. Uh, they wanted to make the world a better place. That's actually the best theory of the Chicago School of Economics.

00:33:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, I don't know. I mean, you know, the, there's this very funny paradigm which I call earns as an X, spends as a Y. And, you know, for example, in physics, I would say that Edward Witten, uh, has earned as a geometer, but he's spent as a string theorist.

00:33:46
Tyler Cowen: Okay.

00:33:47
Eric Weinstein: In economics, I would say Milton Friedman earned as an economist. He was a very fine economist.

00:33:52
Tyler Cowen: Sure.

00:33:52
Eric Weinstein: And he spent as a, uh, political theorist, and that in part, this game of earning in one place and spending somewhere else is, depending upon h- how you view the history of a subject, it can be far more important to the participants how they spend rather than how they earn their credibility.

00:34:13
Tyler Cowen: Sure. Look, Friedman made some mistakes. So he thought that educational vouchers would work easily and simply and be quite popular. That hasn't turned out to be the case. He was more optimistic about shock therapy than he should have been. Though I would say on the whole, shock therapy has done well on average. Look at Poland, right? Poland is, uh, a successful, fairly free economy. But what explains that, I think, is just simply that Milton didn't see the future course of world history, and he was imperfect and maybe too optimistic about some of his own ideas. And you'll hear all kinds of accounts about the Chicago, the Chicago boys and conspiracy or the Habsburg monarchy. You hear this from Lyndon LaRouche-

00:34:56
Eric Weinstein: Okay

00:34:56
Tyler Cowen: ... or the CIA funded them in Chile or whatever. Uh, I don't feel those are the correct deep historical understandings. The more or less superficial account, they had ideas. They believed in the ideas. Some of the ideas were wrong. A lot of them turned out to be really quite correct. Their overall record is pretty good. That superficial account, I think, is fundamentally true.

00:35:17
Eric Weinstein: So now that we're, we've somehow found a way [laughs] into economics after burning through some other stuff, uh, at an earlier-

00:35:23
Tyler Cowen: We were never out of economics.

00:35:24
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:35:25
Tyler Cowen: But please continue.

00:35:25
Eric Weinstein: All right. Well, that's the problem is, is that you can never... It's like you can't leave evolutionary theory. Um, can we talk... And again, let's, uh, feel free to turn any question around on me-

00:35:37
Tyler Cowen: Sure

00:35:37
Eric Weinstein: ... although I'm not an economist. Um, what I find astounding about the field of economics is that on the one hand, I can't get enough of it. I need to use its concepts, its terminology, some of its models. And on the other hand, I think it's an absolute abomination that has been not... It's not that the field is broken so much as that the field is fixed in the same sense that the World Series can be fixed. And I find that whenever I go into economics, um, there's this sort of Mott and Bailey type approach where there's this very defensible core of economic thinking.

00:36:16
Tyler Cowen: Right.

00:36:16
Eric Weinstein: And then there's this absolutely tortured, uh, just so story that we tell that almost always seems to flatter institutions and power and, uh, and the structures that would be upended if we actually just let the field run and rel- uh, reach the conclusions that would, would emerge from the models.

00:36:38
Tyler Cowen: It may depend on what exactly you're being upset by. But keep in mind, at least in the West, what you're calling institutions and power are the most successful institutions the world has seen ever. So there's something to be said on their behalf, right?

00:36:52
Eric Weinstein: Sure. No, I'm not-

00:36:52
Tyler Cowen: And if economics, if our just so stories are fairly positive toward those institutions, we shouldn't be repulsed by that. There may be margins where they're getting things wrong. So I would say no economist that I know of is really willing to write a critique of the National Science Foundation. Why is that? Hard to prove, but I think the logical reasons are the obvious ones. They don't want to alienate a potential funder.

00:37:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, the-

00:37:17
Tyler Cowen: The only major critique written was written by myself, uh, with Alex Tabarrok. Other than that, it's a virtually empty literature

00:37:23
Eric Weinstein: Oh, look, I, I, I've, I've accused the National Science Foundation of specifically destroying the pipeline, uh, for STEM labor, uh, for the purpose of making la- STEM labor cheap for employers to the detriment of American aspirants.

00:37:42
Tyler Cowen: Sure, I've read that, but within economics it's very hard to find criticisms of the NSF. Virtually impossible.

00:37:49
Eric Weinstein: Okay. So here's an interesting question to me. E- economists have been very comfortable turning the lens of economic theorizing on absolutely any group save one.

00:38:01
Tyler Cowen: Themselves.

00:38:01
Eric Weinstein: They'll do it to priests, they'll do it to, to scientists, to politicians. They cannot imagine, I mean, that this is going to escape notice forever. My wife has talked about economics squared. What is the political economy of economists themselves, and where are these papers? Now, you don't find it interesting particularly that this field doesn't exist.

00:38:27
Tyler Cowen: I think they do it now on Twitter, so they accuse each other of having bad motives or being captive of their funders. Uh, so with social media you're seeing a blossoming of this kind of attack. Uh, there are still criticisms they don't like being made, so there's the partisan criticism of people who disagree with you. But to, say, criticize Chinese graduate students because they can't speak their mind about issues related to China because they fear for their own careers or for their family members back in China, that's somehow not acceptable to raise even as an issue. So I do think there are big blind spots, but just like attacking the other person is now pretty common, typically done in a not very clever, sophisticated way.

00:39:07
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but we c- let's [laughs] talk about making it cleverer and more sophisticated. If you were going to turn the lens of economics, in particular the analysis of political economy, on the profession of economics, what would be the, assuming that there's sort of a Pareto curve here-

00:39:25
Tyler Cowen: Sure

00:39:26
Eric Weinstein: ... for the first 10% of my effort I should get something like 70% of, of, of the, uh, of the bang. W- what would be the first thing to do in economic theory using economic theory against economists themselves?

00:39:40
Tyler Cowen: Well, you use the subjunctive, but I have in fact written this. The biggest problem is people overspecialize and write narrow defensible papers to be published that are invulnerable to peer criticism but don't amount to very much, and there's a massive waste of human labor, and people do not direct their energy, energies toward actually solving problems and answering questions. That to me is criticism number one. I think it's absolutely correct. Uh, it concerns me greatly. Uh, a small number of people have voiced this.

00:40:10
Eric Weinstein: That's sort of a, if I understood it correctly, and perhaps I didn't, that's a little bit of an opportunity cost, that we could have done a lot more and instead we settled for something that wasn't-

00:40:19
Tyler Cowen: Or maybe those people should just not be doing economics. They're talented people, they could just, you know, build bricks, whatever.

00:40:26
Eric Weinstein: True, but if, if I think about what really moved the needle in medicine, let's say, um, the, the whole concept of iatrogenic harm, um, which is, you know, harm done by healers, really focused us on the idea that certain hospitals kill more people than others. Uh, what about econogenic harm?

00:40:48
Tyler Cowen: It depends at whom you point the finger, but if you look at what is sometimes called the Washington Consensus, which is not a view I completely agree with by any means, but it's called the Washington Consensus for a reason. There's a recent paper by Bill Easterly that goes through and argues, correctly I think, that on average the Washington Consensus has done more good than harm. So the idea that economics is some great scandal, that we've gone around wrecking things, Benjamin Appelbaum argues this in his recent book. I like that book, I think it's smart, but I think it is more wrong than right, and it's overlooking the many cases where economic advice has done well. I mentioned Poland before, but Czech Republic, Slovakia. You look at Chile, which has been democratic since 1990. Economic inequality in Chile has been falling for some period of time. The country is-

00:41:39
Eric Weinstein: It started from sky-high rates and it has fallen somewhat

00:41:43
Tyler Cowen: It's in the middle of the Latin American distribution, but it's fallen, and the country has the highest real wages in Latin America by some amount. It's not a miracle, it's not perfect. Economists gave some bad advice there-

00:41:55
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

00:41:56
Tyler Cowen: ... but overall they did much more good than harm.

00:41:59
Eric Weinstein: See, this is the thing that I, I'm very confused by. I understand... L- let, let me just say that I see that even though economists may do a lot of harm, uh, prettified, uh, as doing pure good, that that's not the criticism that I would r- really level first at the profession. It's really something closer to academic malpractice, where the economists know the truth, the right way to set up the problem, and choose not only not to do that in public, but to, uh, demonize, to exclude, to blackball anyone who would make the correct critique. In other words-

00:42:44
Tyler Cowen: They don't know the right way to set up the problem. We don't. We're too stupid.

00:42:49
Eric Weinstein: I totally disagree with this.

00:42:51
Tyler Cowen: We're not that advanced. W- what's the problem we should be setting up the right way?

00:42:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, let me, let me give the, the, the, the example that I perhaps know w- I, I know a small number of-

00:42:59
Tyler Cowen: Are we gonna get to gauge theory now?

00:43:00
Eric Weinstein: You want to?

00:43:01
Tyler Cowen: Well, first make your point, but at some point we need to get to gauge theory, 'cause I need you to present-

00:43:05
Eric Weinstein: All right. Let, let me... I'll change one. I'll, I'll, l- I'll do the gauge, I'll do a gauge theory example.

00:43:09
Tyler Cowen: But that's complicated. Do your other simpler point, then we'll do gauge theory.

00:43:13
Eric Weinstein: Well, I could do the great moderation. I could do- STEM labor, and I could do CPI. These are the things I've, I've engaged with. If I did the CPI one, that's very clear. You have a small number of economists who in the mid-'90s, uh, became directed by Bob Packwood and Daniel Moynihan to find an overstatement of the CPI-

00:43:44
Tyler Cowen: Mm-hmm

00:43:44
Eric Weinstein: ... because tax brackets were indexed-

00:43:47
Tyler Cowen: Right

00:43:47
Eric Weinstein: ... and entitlement benefits, uh, Social Security, Medicare were indexed. And so what they found is if you could knock down the measurement of the CPI, you could raise taxes and slash benefits. And they backed out that 1.1% overstatement, if corrected, would lead to a trillion-dollar savings over 10 years, and they actually broke into two groups to come up with two separate numbers that would add together to 1.1, which to me is academic malpractice. That is, they started with the target, and this is according to one of their own members of this Boskin Commission, uh, Professor Gordon, who talked about the fact that somehow the two groups came up with the two numbers which when added together gave Dale Jorgenson, a Harvard professor of economics, his 1.1% overstatement. Um, and that's what they went with. Now, to me, that's like saying we need to find an error in all the temperature gauges so that we can come up with different targets because global warming is a problem. You're not allowed to touch the temperature gauges, for God sakes.

00:44:57
Tyler Cowen: For sure, as in so many numbers, there's an error of exaggerated exactness. But if you look, say, at Google's price index, it's not so different from how we calculate the CPI. If you look at how central banks or other economic authorities around the world calculate their CPIs, it's not that different than what we have done. And you could say it's all one big overly correlated system-

00:45:18
Eric Weinstein: No, no, it's not one-

00:45:19
Tyler Cowen: ... or a conspiracy, but I don't see that the current way of calculating the CPI is off by very much. And if it's off, it still may be overstating inflation a wee bit because there are perhaps more free goods today through the internet than we had in times past.

00:45:33
Eric Weinstein: That's not a, that's not a legitimate counterargument. What I'm trying to say is, is that assume that in fact there is a best CPI, and assume that it was 1.1% overstated. It's still not legitimate to go into a quiet room in a closed commission and say, "Here's the target, boys. We have to find this number. Let's break into groups and put together that number so that our finding will raise taxes and slash benefits." You're not allowed to break the gauge to get the policy. The gauge is the gauge.

00:46:05
Tyler Cowen: Politics is an ugly system, but it does seem they gave us a measure of the CPI somewhat better than what we had had. If you think that inflation has actually been much higher, you must think real rates of return today are astonishingly low. I mean, that will truly make you a mega pessimist, which perhaps you are.

00:46:23
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

00:46:23
Tyler Cowen: But keep in mind, people compare our measurements of rates of inflation to other economic variables and see if the whole picture makes sense. And if you think the true rate is very different from what we have, that implies some very radical conclusions, which I don't wanna dismiss out of hand, but I'll just say there are multiple checks on this process. Do they fit in with our other judgments?

00:46:41
Eric Weinstein: I, I think we're in two different layers of the discussion, which is fascinating to me. One layer of the discussion is did they point out some good things about w- the ways in which the CPI could be done better? They did. And did they do some work? They absolutely did. Did they commit academic malpractice? Absolutely motherfucking yes, they committed academic malpractice. It's not in the same layer of the stack, Tyler, to me.

00:47:08
Tyler Cowen: But is your objection just the process? So I don't doubt-

00:47:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

00:47:11
Tyler Cowen: ... bad things went on in those rooms. I don't know. I wasn't there. Uh-

00:47:16
Eric Weinstein: Well, they destroyed my wife's career over it, is my opinion. They went into something called the Harvard Jobs Market Meeting, which is a closed-door session, during the time that the Boskin Commission was active. And she was talking about, uh, two of the things that you can do to try to adjust the CPI to make it more accurate. One is to replace what's called a mechanical index. That is something that prices, let's say, a basket of goods, uh, in two different time periods, famous examples being the Paasche and Laspeyres index, um, that you can either replace that with a human standard, which is, like, cost of living, what does the cost make you equally happy between two points in time?

00:48:00
Tyler Cowen: Right.

00:48:01
Eric Weinstein: Or you can do something called chaining. And chaining, given that your blog-

00:48:05
Tyler Cowen: Sure

00:48:05
Eric Weinstein: ... is called Marginal Revolution, marginal revolution was originally the introduction of the differential calculus into economic theory, and this is, uh, in the limit, a, an application of differential calculus. And the fact is that these two things have never played well together because you can't chain tastes, uh, in economic theory. You have this doctrine that says that tastes have to be treated as if they were unchanging. And what we did, um, in collaborative work was to bring in gauge theory, as you were s- stating, to make sure for the first time you had dynamic agents who were allowed to change their tastes as humans do and still stay within the folds of what's known as ordinal utility theory.

00:48:48
Tyler Cowen: So I would say this. Most people would admit and indeed emphasize that over a time period of multiple decades, the comparisons just don't work and cannot work. There are various impossibility theorems for aggregating price indices over time. So if you ask, well, would you rather have-

00:49:05
Eric Weinstein: You mean like the Rogner frishes.

00:49:07
Tyler Cowen: Right. Would you rather have $50,000 to spend in the Sears Roebuck catalog of today or 1900? Uh, most people would rather spend it in the catalog of today. But that suggests there's actually been radical deflation. But I don't think that's exactly the correct conclusion. I think the correct conclusion is over very long periods of time, the comparability goes away, intransitivity enters into the calculation, and you just need to be very careful and modest as to what you know and don't know.

00:49:34
Eric Weinstein: Actually, there's an entirely different possibility. So what, what we're discussing, for those of you at home who wanna play along, one of the things that's weird about this podcast is that I'm very willing to throw out pointers rather than to dumb things down to the point that nothing ever happens on the podcast. So there was a guy named Irving Fisher, who you can look up, who came up with lots of axioms to find the perfect price index. And then, um, Ragnar Frisch came up with an impossibility theorem that said if you took on, uh, Fisher's axioms, there was provably no measure that could satisfy all of the axioms-

00:50:08
Tyler Cowen: Correct

00:50:08
Eric Weinstein: ... it was impossible.

00:50:09
Tyler Cowen: Correct.

00:50:10
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:50:10
Tyler Cowen: Now let me ask you about gauge theory. F- before you tell us what it is, give us the bottom line, you know, money shot. Let's say gauge theory is correct. Is the actual rate of inflation higher or lower than what we're measuring?

00:50:23
Eric Weinstein: You know, it, it's that you're measuring the wrong object. There's something that you would create which you might... So if we previously used these mechanical Paasche and, uh, Laspeyres inde- indices-

00:50:37
Tyler Cowen: Right

00:50:37
Eric Weinstein: ... those are replaced by something called a Conus index. Now, Conus comes in two flavors, but it's a cost of living, uh, which prices utility, the pleasure I get from i-i-items, uh, rather than the cost of the item. So if, if, if, uh, wine and beer, uh, are the same price per liter-

00:50:55
Tyler Cowen: Right

00:50:55
Eric Weinstein: ... and I'm indifferent between them-

00:50:57
Tyler Cowen: Right

00:50:57
Eric Weinstein: ... and there's a frost that kills off a bunch of grapes, if you pay me the money to rebuy my original basket, I'm gonna take the money, I'm gonna buy a mess of beer because wine has become too expensive, and I'm gonna spend the extra money on something else.

00:51:09
Tyler Cowen: Right.

00:51:09
Eric Weinstein: So if you wanna get rid of that effect, you move to this thing called the Conus index.

00:51:13
Tyler Cowen: And you adjust for quality better, but that's hard to do. There's a lot of people-

00:51:17
Eric Weinstein: Well, there's a lot of different techniques

00:51:17
Tyler Cowen: ... at the Bureau of Labor Statistics who try to do this.

00:51:20
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:51:20
Tyler Cowen: It's a highly imperfect endeavor.

00:51:21
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00:51:22
Tyler Cowen: The internet makes it harder.

00:51:23
Eric Weinstein: But that's not, that's not where gauge theory really comes in. What... Th-the really exciting thing about gauge theory in economics, and there's nobody I'd rather discuss it with than, than Tyler, um, is that economics should be the most interesting of subjects analytically and intellectually because it is the only place that I'm familiar with man's two greatest ideas coming into direct contact. The theory of selection, both sexual and natural, that governs us as apes-

00:51:51
Tyler Cowen: Which we don't use very much, but continue.

00:51:53
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I think-

00:51:53
Tyler Cowen: I agree it's a great idea.

00:51:55
Eric Weinstein: I think if you, uh, allow a reinterpretation in which, um, let's say utility maps to fitness and, uh, indifference, uh, maps to drift, I think you'll find that you're using it everywhere. In fact, what economics does is to give you a second layer, um, using the fact that money uniformizes a lot of things to allow an as if physics to arise, as in the work of Paul Samuelson. And so the weird thing is, is that you've got apes engaging in markets, which is really just selection by other, by other means, um, using an as if physics as the language of interaction.

00:52:36
Tyler Cowen: See, I would say the best idea of economics is that demand curves slope downwards. Price goes up, people do less of something. Uh, selection is an incredibly important idea. We've done a bad job of incorporating it. Uh, no slight meant to the idea. There's a lot of pieces on selection in economics, but they tend to be big sprawling messes rather than useful, and most of the best economics pieces are based on pretty simple applications of the law of demand or income effects. But to get back to gauge theory, let's say everything you're saying is true. Is the actual real rate of return higher or lower than I used to think it is? That's what I wanna know. Should I be more optimistic or more pessimistic?

00:53:15
Eric Weinstein: Well, my guess is you probably end up more pessimistic, but the, the number of different things that would change. You see, there's a concept, let's say, in computer programming about how something is cast. If I have the number three, I can either treat three as a symbol, in which case it's a string, I can treat it as an integer, in which case I'd call it an, you know, INT, or I could treat it as a float, 3.000, however much accuracy that the computer's willing to maintain. The question of what is, let's say, a representative consumer is not properly understood, in my opinion.

00:53:51
Tyler Cowen: I agree.

00:53:52
Eric Weinstein: That the, the problem is the representative consumer should be a field, something like a temperature field or a field of, uh, wind measurements on the space of all possible consumers. Now, you and I sh- will explore hopefully on this podcast something about our difference in taste in music. I don't even know what it is, but I'm-

00:54:10
Tyler Cowen: We're gonna find out

00:54:10
Eric Weinstein: ... I'm sure we're gonna find out. It, it is the case that if you were doing inflation properly, you would be using gauge theory and you would be using field theoretic concepts for representative agents. You wouldn't be making these point... Like, it, you would never say, "What's the temperature today in America?" Because it's, it's, it's you've cast temperature, which should be a field displayed on a map, as if it was a single number, like a float.

00:54:38
Tyler Cowen: Okay, but again, let's say you're right. What's the actionable trade based on this information? I mean, you probably are already rich, but you should be truly, truly rich, right? Because there'll be an actionable trade if we're miscalculating real rates of return.

00:54:54
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think that there's a-

00:54:54
Tyler Cowen: Even if the variance of the proper estimate is higher than we realize, there'll be some kind of options play on that, and over time it will systematically make money.

00:55:03
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I think that my, my reluctance is, is that it's not really a sharp question. You have all sorts of questions like hedonic adjustments, which is, you know, the car that I call a Mustang today isn't Like the car that I call a Mustang from 30 years ago, so I may have to look at how much luxury trunk space, fuel efficiency that series of different objects had and as, as it's qu- as it changed qualitatively. Um, there's a question about why does economics focus so much on Pareto improvement as a gold standard where if you all get rich by a, a, an additional billion dollars and I get rich by 35 cents, I'm supposed to say that I'm improved? Any sensible human being looking at things like mate selection or, uh, you know, scarce vacation property will know that I'm much worse off-

00:55:54
Tyler Cowen: I wouldn't agree with that, but that's a separate question

00:55:56
Eric Weinstein: Well, but that, but there's so many of those things, I don't know how to answer your question. In other words, the field-

00:56:01
Tyler Cowen: But you should be short intangible capital. If you think r- true real rates of return are lower than other people realize, there may be tangible capital you can measure exactly how valuable the factory is. But intangible capital, which is hard to value, you should be more pessimistic about. So there's a bunch of firms with a lot of intangible capital. You could short those. If you want to be hedged the market as a whole, you could be long or otherwise protect yourself against other developments by having some other long positions.

00:56:27
Eric Weinstein: Well, except it's also the case that some of us who have attempted to form these kind of broad theses, um, I can tell you that I didn't, um, really appreciate what was going to happen, uh, between, uh, the collapse of Bear Stearns and, um, I don't know, several months after AIG was about to fail.

00:56:48
Tyler Cowen: Sure, hardly... Basically, no one did. Even people who saw some parts of the crash early on did not have good day-by-day predictions of how it would all unfold.

00:56:57
Eric Weinstein: Well, and the issue of the in- uh, interceding in the markets, you know, with a very visible hand, um, to engage in pure acts of political economy, um, to, you know, both stabilize th-the economic system, but also to defend, uh, very vulnerable institutional players. I no longer know how to make those kinds of trades because I don't believe that I know what we can do artificially in the face of a crisis.

00:57:27
Tyler Cowen: But if real rates of return are truly lower than is believed, the system cannot deny that either forever or even for that long, right?

00:57:35
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's why I'm claiming that we're-

00:57:37
Tyler Cowen: Just keep on buying puts on the appropriate stocks. Don't do it with leverage. Just toss money into those trades, forget about them, do it for 30 years. You're a young man. Maybe you're doing it, right? I'm not expecting you to tell the audience your financial position. I'm just saying there's a way of testing this view. It's not that hard. Uh, most people in the hedge fund world are not doing this.

00:57:58
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00:57:59
Tyler Cowen: And they think very closely about-

00:58:00
Eric Weinstein: Well, I do believe that we're-

00:58:01
Tyler Cowen: ... rates of inflation, rates of return

00:58:02
Eric Weinstein: I believe there's about a 50-year bubble. I mean, so one of the things that, that, that unites us is I was thrilled that you were also focused on the early 1970s as a real and mysterious discontinuity, um, with respect to growth and, and its, and the-

00:58:20
Tyler Cowen: It's one of the biggest puzzles

00:58:22
Eric Weinstein: ... and distributes.

00:58:22
Tyler Cowen: So 1973 comes, a lot of indicators crash. You can say, fine, the higher price of oil. That's great, but the higher price of oil goes away, and those indicators do not come back very well.

00:58:33
Eric Weinstein: What do you think-- Okay. First of all, let's just do this slowly.

00:58:38
Tyler Cowen: Sure.

00:58:38
Eric Weinstein: Is it mysterious that more people aren't focused on what happens around 1972 to '74?

00:58:45
Tyler Cowen: Of course. Ten percent of the profession should be working on that. Instead, people are doing these little narrow things to publish, but it's hard to get a clear answer to the question we're discussing, so no one can publish on it. The referees will shoot down whatever you turn in. I would rather see people just write and speculate on the more important questions. But if you ask, what do I think happened? Clearly, oil was a major factor.

00:59:06
Eric Weinstein: Well, let, let me give you just a little bit of, of, of your due, which you can't do, but I can.

00:59:10
Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

00:59:11
Eric Weinstein: I think my favorite version of the graph that shows [chuckles] how violent this change was, uh, is something that you focused us on. It's not perfect, but it's, um, measured GDP, whatever the failures we have of that measure-

00:59:27
Tyler Cowen: Right

00:59:27
Eric Weinstein: ... together with measured male median income.

00:59:30
Tyler Cowen: Yes.

00:59:31
Eric Weinstein: And those two things are going up in lockstep before 1973 or so, and then one of them flatlines and the other keeps going up. Is that graph something that you developed?

00:59:45
Tyler Cowen: Uh, I presented it. Uh, obviously, the numbers come from other people. I've done a lot to draw attention to it, but I don't pretend it's original with me.

00:59:53
Eric Weinstein: Well, I think it's-- I think it was a great observation that that graph was so clean that, um, it caused people to stop denying that something happened.

01:00:03
Tyler Cowen: Sure.

01:00:03
Eric Weinstein: And then they almost immediately, in my experience, and correct me if, if yours is different, they go from not believing that something [chuckles] really big happened to immediately telling you exactly what it was that happened that explains it.

01:00:15
Tyler Cowen: And the rich people stole it all or something.

01:00:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, or, or, or it's all about Bretton Woods or it's all just about the oil shock.

01:00:22
Tyler Cowen: Right. But I think the missing variable, once you get through oil prices, over-regulation, uh, a number of factors that people have already discussed, but I think the increasing feminization of society is a missing factor in this whole equation, that norms have changed. Women as a whole are more risk-averse, uh, we're much less likely to fight a war in a more feminized society. So in my opinion, this is very likely good on net. Uh, but change is harder to accomplish in some ways and, uh, people are more comfortable with higher levels of regulation, and that's how things are. There's pluses and minuses, but it will slow down measured economic growth.

01:01:03
Eric Weinstein: Now, can we talk about, uh, to use your term, a feminized economy, uh, without-- in a public, in a public sphere, without having to celebrate- Everything that is feminized [laughs] and demonized everything that was lost

01:01:21
Tyler Cowen: Well, it depends who the we is.

01:01:23
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:01:24
Tyler Cowen: Uh, I do think one should consider costs and benefits and to a large extent, men have accepted a more feminized society because it has very strong positives. So I'm completely sincere when I say on net, I think it's a good thing.

01:01:38
Eric Weinstein: So give me the, the-

01:01:39
Tyler Cowen: But both experimental evidence and portfolio evidence, women are more risk-averse. Uh, and as a norm, my guess is, not proven, but my speculation is that really matters. And it is in addition to other factors about productivity and regulation and spending more on fighting pollution and oil prices and so on, which are, at this point, more or less well-known. And that's why I think the slowdown has mostly persisted. And I do think you will have extraordinary periods like 1995 to 1998 when information technology does so many good things, it overwhelms the negatives. I think we'll have more of those.

01:02:16
Eric Weinstein: So let's assume for the moment that both feminization of some kind has occurred-

01:02:21
Tyler Cowen: Right

01:02:21
Eric Weinstein: ... and let's also, uh, just stipulate for this purpose that it's also net positive-

01:02:25
Tyler Cowen: Right

01:02:26
Eric Weinstein: ... up until the present. Let's imagine that going forward, far fewer women choose or are able to form families and become mothers.

01:02:36
Tyler Cowen: Sure.

01:02:36
Eric Weinstein: How does that change the equation potentially? Could that tip this increased level of feminization negative?

01:02:42
Tyler Cowen: Well, could. It, even now, forgetting about the speculation, it's a significant gain for elite men and quite possibly a negative for non-elite men, and you see that in the data very clearly.

01:02:54
Eric Weinstein: Due to marriage.

01:02:55
Tyler Cowen: Correct. So marriage as an incentive is much weaker for some subclass of men who seem to be fairly numerous. Religiosity seems to be down. Uh, total fertility is down. It's now, I believe, at about 1.8. It used to be at 2.2. And, uh, if you look at social indicators for a lot of men in the lower middle class income or educational category, you see massive problems, and that's part of the story.

01:03:24
Eric Weinstein: What sorts of economic behavior do you see, um, change with, um, let's say, lower status males, um, really taking the brunt of some of the shocks to, to our modern economy?

01:03:43
Tyler Cowen: Well, marriage is good for men on net. Uh, it feminizes them, for one thing. Uh, suicide-

01:03:49
Eric Weinstein: So greater health, lower depression.

01:03:51
Tyler Cowen: Correct. Less drug abuse, uh, suicide rates lower, and so on. And we're seeing those variables for significant numbers of men move in the wrong directions. Median income, as you noted, as I presented, that has been stagnant for the median male earner. I think those numbers are ch- are, across a long enough period of time, they're unreliable in some ways. But that there is a problem is completely indisputable. To say, "Oh, it's gone up exactly so much between 1970 and today," that is an illusion. But that it is a problem and indeed a crisis, uh, that is very much a reality. And you see it, again, in many other indicators, not just the income numbers. That's how we know it's real.

01:04:31
Eric Weinstein: What have women potentially lost from increased feminization, even if it's net positive for them as well?

01:04:38
Tyler Cowen: Uh, again, women is quite a large category, um-

01:04:41
Eric Weinstein: So is men.

01:04:43
Tyler Cowen: Um...

01:04:45
Eric Weinstein: Well, do you want to break it up into low status and high status females, looking at some of the issues about how high status females use low status females, uh, to perform kin work that would otherwise have to be done? Um, I mean, there, there-

01:04:59
Tyler Cowen: I would say this. There's evidence that stress levels for a fair number of women are higher. If you think women now have the chance to have better careers, which is great for the economy and, uh, very good for the person working if you're in a career you enjoy, but at the same time, it may be hard to convince the men they should take on a greater share of child-rearing responsibilities, so the woman ends up having to do both. And the income level is higher, but the stress level is much higher, and I think there's both scientific evidence and anecdotal evidence that is true. I couldn't tell you offhand how large a class of women that is, but I do know it's been studied pretty extensively.

01:05:38
Eric Weinstein: Why do you think it's so difficult to discuss, uh, costs and benefits, uh, and even the facts of gender within economic theory without it becoming so contentious, uh, as to effectively make the enterprise [laughs] somewhat unprofitable?

01:05:58
Tyler Cowen: Well, it's hard to discuss in many settings, not just in economics. I think actually economics is one of the better settings to be able to have such discussions. Uh, there are two areas in academia where you can still say things that are either counterintuitive or possibly politically incorrect, and that's economics and philosophy, and both are healthier for it. So to me, the que-

01:06:20
Eric Weinstein: Not evolutionary theory.

01:06:22
Tyler Cowen: I know that area less well. Uh, may well be true there.

01:06:24
Eric Weinstein: I would say that that's probably my... I mean, it, it's under a ton of pressure. No, don't get me wrong. But I do think that if you allow political correctness into evolutionary theory, there is no subject.

01:06:39
Tyler Cowen: Probably true. Again, I couldn't say. Uh, economics is under some pressure now, uh, but it's so data-driven that, uh, results get out, right? They may be reframed in particular ways or certain angles of it talked down or put in a different way.

01:06:55
Eric Weinstein: Do you have any thoughts about the wage gap?

01:06:58
Tyler Cowen: Well, which one? Between men and women?

01:07:00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, let's take that one.

01:07:00
Tyler Cowen: If you adjust for demographics, it mostly goes away. I do think there is also discrimination against women in labor markets, but I don't think-

01:07:08
Eric Weinstein: Oh, huge

01:07:08
Tyler Cowen: ... it's measured by the wage gap.

01:07:09
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's, that's one of my problems. Like, I've, I've gone so far as to claim that academic tenure is increasingly withheld because a large number of females find child-rearing so fulfilling that it competes, even if they're at the very top of their profession, uh, as researchers. And so by Forcing people, both men and women, to wait longer and longer for a permanent job offer, um, what you do is you start selecting out against, uh, a very talented, uh, usually female p- uh, assistant professor who may discover the joys of raising three kids and will have a 15-year period of decreased productivity.

01:07:52
Tyler Cowen: I've argued we should abolish tenure to be more fair to women. There are other reasons, but that alone is sufficient.

01:07:57
Eric Weinstein: But you think that that's somewhat len- I mean-

01:07:59
Tyler Cowen: Absolutely

01:08:00
Eric Weinstein: ... the frustration being that those of us w- who think of [laughs] ourselves as concerned with actual discrimination against women in the labor force may not wanna sign on to the, you know, women get paid 75 cents for every dollar that a man gets paid, because that's not a good argument.

01:08:15
Tyler Cowen: And the elite men who benefit from tenure, they'll just call it meritocracy-

01:08:19
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:08:19
Tyler Cowen: ... and somehow compartmentalize and not see how it's an unfair system. But another thing I would say, that I would really wanna stress, there's a lot of kind of tough talk on like the right wing about, oh, the claims of women about discrimination are overblown or incorrect and so on, and I get where they're coming from, but the discrimination against women in markets, it's very real, it's very significant, and our main self-image of ourselves should be as problem-solvers who will reduce that discrimination and take on some kind of emancipatory perspective. To do that, I think you have to be objective about the evidence, but the goal is not at the end of it all to dismiss it or the Democrats are wrong or the left wing is terrible. It's really the wrong approach. Like focus on the individuals. There's a big problem-

01:09:04
Eric Weinstein: I tell people to come at it from a different perspective. I say c- come at it from greed. If you imagine the number of insights that are held between female ears, and putting up extra barriers within the workplace means that we have less, we have fewer minds that we can query, um, it definitely seems to me the case that given differential success rates, if you believe in anything like intellectual equality, there should be a bonanza to be unlocked, um, from having women highly productive in the workplace. To m- I mean, to me, greed rather than obligation seems to me to be the right strategy, and not everybody loves that approach.

01:09:44
Tyler Cowen: Uh, yes, but there is a collective action problem. So even if you as an individual, say an employer, are greedy, there may be social norms that make it hard for you to benefit from your insights-

01:09:54
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:09:55
Tyler Cowen: ... because the other people in your workplace, customers, may have screwed-up expectations and norms, and you can't just wave a magic wand and kind of see through all the myths of gender and hire the right people and automatically succeed. There's some educational issue, a collective action problem, where large numbers of us need to understand what's going on better and see which are the actual discriminations, which I think are often matters of expectations and role models and implicit biases which can be very strong.

01:10:23
Eric Weinstein: Well, you asked about gauge theory earlier. Um, when we ran into trouble trying to introduce gauge theory into the core of economics, it was gonna have a very unpredictable effect because it was going to be a backwards-incompatible ... It was, sorry, a backwards-compatible upgrade of the entire theory, um, w- with m- making it compatible also with the world's most beautiful mathematics found in particle theory, general relativity, and differential topology. Uh, what I found was that their economics was set up for it to be a battle, and that my wife and collaborator did not want the fight. And I was, I mean, I was just ready to, you know, to duke it out with these guys for the pure ple- pleasure of shoving it down their throats, an extremely sort of male aggressive-

01:11:14
Tyler Cowen: [laughs]

01:11:15
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, perspective on an innovation. And because it was under her name, um, given that it was her thesis, uh, and we would collaborated on part of it, there was no ability to ha- actually have that fight. So the, the, the norms of the profession favored conflict as a means of exploring something, and that because women may have different feelings about how conflict should be handled, uh, I worry that, like in this instance where, you know, you had somebody from, from the developing world, um, who's female, uh, presenting a new idea, that such ideas can get lost very easily if we don't have a more balanced workplace.

01:12:03
Tyler Cowen: There's a lot of self-examination going on in economics right now about conflictual norms and how seminars are held, but I worry a bit we'll address the superficial aspects and be superficially polite-

01:12:14
Eric Weinstein: That is my concern

01:12:14
Tyler Cowen: ... and not change actually being rivalrous in the way that is screwed up. We'll see how it evolves. This is a new movement, uh, but so far I'm, I'm not yet optimistic that we'll get at the actual problem.

01:12:27
Eric Weinstein: You aren't?

01:12:28
Tyler Cowen: Well, we'll see. In all fairness, uh, the people who raise it are completely correct to raise it. I'm on their side.

01:12:34
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:12:34
Tyler Cowen: Uh, but at the same time, we can't be naive. You've got to realize problems are deeply rooted, and to just focus on the superficial symbols of the problem, you can end up, uh, not fixing things.

01:12:48
Eric Weinstein: So we, we've referred to this podcast as audio and video samizdat, that effectively this is pirate radio for, uh, a new generation. You were famous within economics for a couple of moves that seem really nutty to me, and I think, uh, the first one is, is that you turned down, uh, Harvard to go to George Mason as an undergraduate because you thought you could spend more time reading the great, [laughs] the great works of economics. Is this ... Do I have my facts more or less right?

01:13:20
Tyler Cowen: Uh, I didn't apply to Harvard. I had a very strong academic record.

01:13:24
Eric Weinstein: Oh.

01:13:24
Tyler Cowen: And this was back in the late 1970s. I'm believe I could have gotten into many top schools.

01:13:31
Eric Weinstein: But-

01:13:31
Tyler Cowen: Uh, but I only applied to George Mason, in fact.

01:13:33
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:13:34
Tyler Cowen: So- Um, my high school guidance counselor thought I was crazy. I had SATs, you know-

01:13:40
Eric Weinstein: Top

01:13:40
Tyler Cowen: ... top percentiles-

01:13:40
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:13:40
Tyler Cowen: ... and so on. Uh, good grades. But for me, this was a version of homeschooling. I was choosing homeschooling, and most of all, I hated the idea of living in a dorm. I considered that so barbaric-

01:13:51
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:13:51
Tyler Cowen: ... that as a 17-year-old I thought, "I want a life, I want a car, I want an apartment." George Mason was a commuter school. It had an in- interesting economics department, but most of all, I wanted my personal space and ability for classes not to be too hard or have too much homework, and I would just work on my own, like, every day, all day long, morning through night, and I did it.

01:14:12
Eric Weinstein: Was it a great decision?

01:14:13
Tyler Cowen: Well, it's not for me to say. I, I don't regret it at all. I'm very happy I did it.

01:14:18
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:14:18
Tyler Cowen: But, you know, great by what standard? It could be a lot of decisions you make ex post you're glad-

01:14:22
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, sure

01:14:23
Tyler Cowen: ... it turned out to be you, and you'll endorse them, but that's not quite as informative as actually seeing the ex ante trade-off.

01:14:30
Eric Weinstein: Okay, but then you, you went to Harvard for grad school.

01:14:32
Tyler Cowen: Correct.

01:14:33
Eric Weinstein: And-

01:14:33
Tyler Cowen: Which was necessary for me to get a job.

01:14:36
Eric Weinstein: Right. And then-

01:14:37
Tyler Cowen: A tenured research job

01:14:38
Eric Weinstein: ... and then you came back to George Mason.

01:14:40
Tyler Cowen: After a stint at UC Irvine.

01:14:41
Eric Weinstein: That-

01:14:41
Tyler Cowen: That's correct.

01:14:42
Eric Weinstein: Okay. And you start choosing to blog.

01:14:47
Tyler Cowen: Yes, that's correct. That was, I think, 2003, though my memory could be off by a year.

01:14:52
Eric Weinstein: Okay, now this puts you in, in a group with people like Peter Woit in physics, who are starting to really upset standard academicians, if I recall correctly, because the power of this blog to upend what had been thought to be the meritocracy, if you have somebody who can think and write very clearly in, in an, in a lively fashion, suddenly they're able to have a different kind of influence than you might have through a journal like Econometrica or something like that.

01:15:24
Tyler Cowen: But I'm not sure I upset people. At first, it was not taken at all seriously, so no one was upset. And then it was very quick all of a sudden that it was taken very seriously, and then people decided they needed to suck up to me or to the blog, and there was not much of an intermediate period where I fought some kind of war against opposition.

01:15:40
Eric Weinstein: Oh, was... I didn't understand that. So in general, the power of this blog, once it was realized, caused people to, um, w- want to get along with you.

01:15:51
Tyler Cowen: People are very nice to me, as I think they should be. Uh, but they're not always nice to each other. They're nicer to me than they are to each other.

01:15:57
Eric Weinstein: Huh.

01:15:57
Tyler Cowen: And that came suddenly, and before that happened, they just ignored me. There was n- never much hostility that I'm aware of.

01:16:03
Eric Weinstein: Well, I tried fighting you on a couple of points-

01:16:05
Tyler Cowen: [laughs]

01:16:05
Eric Weinstein: ... but I was very ineffectual, [laughs] so I can see that you're, uh, you're disturbing-

01:16:10
Tyler Cowen: I don't feel, I don't feel I'm-

01:16:10
Eric Weinstein: ... you're disturbingly likable

01:16:11
Tyler Cowen: ... I don't feel I'm one of these people who's had to fight off this incredible opposition and, you know, I persevered, and they told me this, and I stuck with it. That doesn't ring so true to me.

01:16:20
Eric Weinstein: Got it.

01:16:20
Tyler Cowen: It was like I did my own thing. World, like, who knows? They weren't paying attention, and then somehow, magically, it worked out.

01:16:27
Eric Weinstein: And what do you think the current status of economics blogging... I mean, I just, I, I'm-

01:16:33
Tyler Cowen: Well, most of the blogs have faded and have died.

01:16:36
Eric Weinstein: Who's still in it that, that's worth reading?

01:16:39
Tyler Cowen: It depends what you count as a blog, but EconLog with Bryan Caplan, Scott Sumner, and other people is great. Uh, Scott Sumner's own blog is very good. Arnold Kling, Ask Blog it's called. Paul Krugman is not really blogging anymore. Uh, the debates happen on Twitter, which I think is a less effective medium, but obviously it's quicker and in that sense, quote-unquote, "cheaper." And, uh, obviously Facebook, Twitter, and other social media have beaten out blogging. It's been great for my efforts. We've played a kind of last man standing strategy and done very well with it, so I'm not worried about the death of blogging. My view is, like, bring it on.

01:17:16
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:17:17
Tyler Cowen: You know? [laughs] Just the death of Tyler Cowen, that worries me.

01:17:20
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

01:17:20
Tyler Cowen: But until then, you know, blog will continue. Just ask the question, how many websites can you go to every day where there's reliably interesting content? So there's New York Times, there's Financial Times, there's a bunch of others.

01:17:33
Eric Weinstein: Well, do you think that the comments section of Marginal Revolutions, your blog, uh, is a large draw?

01:17:39
Tyler Cowen: I don't know. I think it's pretty terrible. I hope it's not a large draw, but since it has a lot of comments, it must draw someone.

01:17:45
Eric Weinstein: It does seem to draw a lot of interest where people really wanna mix it up there. I don't know whether-

01:17:49
Tyler Cowen: Yeah, people provide context for the post. So I shut down the comments section for, like, 10 days just as an experiment.

01:17:55
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:17:55
Tyler Cowen: And all these people wrote me. They're like, "We know the comments were terrible, but they gave us context on your post, 'cause you would just say things we wouldn't understand, and we'd read the comments, and now we know what's at stake." So now I think those people are doing something pretty valuable, even though, like, the actual quality of what is said is highly variable, to be generous.

01:18:15
Eric Weinstein: Do you have the sense that we're part of a weird movement, um, of... I don't know how to call it. Like, thinkers who aren't much recognized by the standard structures. Um, like for example-

01:18:30
Tyler Cowen: I am the standard structures, Tyler.

01:18:31
Eric Weinstein: Oh, stop it. You are not.

01:18:33
Tyler Cowen: [laughs]

01:18:33
Eric Weinstein: Like, you're, you're... Like Patrick Collison, for example, is somebody who a lot of our world that I share with you holds in very high... We hold him in very high esteem. I don't know how many people in the country think of Patrick as a mind rather than as a very rich CEO.

01:18:53
Tyler Cowen: Patrick is one of the smartest people ever, uh, but I think a whole bunch of people know that now.

01:18:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah?

01:18:59
Tyler Cowen: And, uh, but I-

01:19:00
Eric Weinstein: Do you think that he's being tasked by our government to really think through difficult problems in technology? I would ta- I would task him in a heartbeat.

01:19:09
Tyler Cowen: Well, I don't know, uh, what our government has in mind, but I, I wanna get back to this idea of, like, who are the structures. So Marginal Revolution, it's a blog, but I don't view it as just about me. I view myself as editing a daily magazine for economists and other smart people.

01:19:25
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:19:26
Tyler Cowen: And, like, it's the daily magazine for economists and related kinds of thinkers. So I don't view it as, like, an outside thing anymore. I know it has this funny, weird early years of blogging look, like a 1990s website that's like a retro inside joke and all that.

01:19:41
Eric Weinstein: That's so cool.

01:19:42
Tyler Cowen: I like it.

01:19:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, yeah.

01:19:44
Tyler Cowen: And I don't even know how to make it better without it looking kinda stupid and gross. But, uh- Like I'm the establishment. Not the only part of it.

01:19:52
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so you're gonna pretend to be the establishment. This is awesome.

01:19:54
Tyler Cowen: I'm gonna pretend to be the establishment.

01:19:56
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:19:56
Tyler Cowen: You can attack me now.

01:19:57
Eric Weinstein: All right, well who are the best heterodox thinkers that live sort of on the periphery of the consciousness of the establishment?

01:20:04
Tyler Cowen: You.

01:20:04
Eric Weinstein: Oh, stop it. No.

01:20:04
Tyler Cowen: I don't know what to make of the term. I'm serious. You. Absolutely.

01:20:08
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:20:08
Tyler Cowen: I wrote a blog post about you.

01:20:10
Eric Weinstein: Ugh.

01:20:10
Tyler Cowen: And I said it-

01:20:11
Eric Weinstein: You, you defended me

01:20:11
Tyler Cowen: ... before this podcast. I didn't just defend, uh, defend you. I said, "Eric Weinstein is one of the most interesting people to sit down and have an extended intensive conversation with."

01:20:21
Eric Weinstein: This is why it's so hard to fight with you.

01:20:24
Tyler Cowen: [laughs]

01:20:25
Eric Weinstein: It, it, you, you couldn't be kinder, but I, I'm, I, I'm trying to think about whose signal we can boost at the moment. Like I think you, you remember when we went to that meeting on how to, uh, think about, uh, measuring and ref- and reforming science for higher productivity? Laura Deming, for example, blew me away. I thought she had some of the-

01:20:43
Tyler Cowen: Laura's great

01:20:43
Eric Weinstein: ... she had some of the best insights. I, I don't know how to boost her signal enough. She's, she's somebody like Patrick, um, that I want more people thinking about. We have a mutual friend, uh, who is incredibly generative and very dangerous, Michael Vassar, intellectually.

01:21:01
Tyler Cowen: I'm never sure what's up with Michael. I've spent time with him and been very impressed, but I just don't know what he's doing.

01:21:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:21:08
Tyler Cowen: Can you enlighten me?

01:21:09
Eric Weinstein: No. I, I-

01:21:10
Tyler Cowen: But that's a bad sign, right? Or you know what-

01:21:12
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. I, I can tell you that he's theorizing about woke as a concept. He's much more for it without buying it in its own terms.

01:21:23
Tyler Cowen: That sounds like me, but what are his intermediate products?

01:21:26
Eric Weinstein: Uh, don't know. I mean, Mi- it's just there are these people who many of us talk to over the years and-

01:21:34
Tyler Cowen: Or Gwern. You must know who Gwern is.

01:21:35
Eric Weinstein: No.

01:21:36
Tyler Cowen: You don't know Gwern? Just G-W-E-R-N. Just Google to Gwern. He is a man-

01:21:41
Eric Weinstein: Is he like the Daniel Schmachtenberger of our time?

01:21:44
Tyler Cowen: Uh, wonderful.

01:21:44
Eric Weinstein: Do you know Daniel Schmachtenberger?

01:21:45
Tyler Cowen: I don't, but I th-

01:21:46
Eric Weinstein: You will

01:21:47
Tyler Cowen: ... just the way, the way you put the question.

01:21:48
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:21:49
Tyler Cowen: So Gwern lives in southern Maryland.

01:21:51
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:21:51
Tyler Cowen: And just like lives, and he writes these essays on the internet, and he collects information. He's a phenomenal guy. Uh, very friendly if you meet him. Seems super nice. I don't know him well, but I have only positive things to say about my interaction with him. And, uh, his essays will blow your mind.

01:22:08
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:22:08
Tyler Cowen: Scott Alexander. But this idea-

01:22:10
Eric Weinstein: So Scott Al- okay, so Slate Star C- Codex is-

01:22:13
Tyler Cowen: But there's no longer heterodox or orthodox anymore. Ideas come from the internet-

01:22:19
Eric Weinstein: And for-

01:22:19
Tyler Cowen: ... whether everyone likes that or not-

01:22:21
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:22:21
Tyler Cowen: ... for the last 10, 15 years, and the people we're all discussing are in various ways significant players on the internet. And of course it's diverse, but they're not like quite the outsiders anymore, and neither are you.

01:22:33
Eric Weinstein: Oh, really.

01:22:34
Tyler Cowen: Really.

01:22:35
Eric Weinstein: I, I don't know that I can get my ideas inside of the institution. My claim is, is that when the heterodox thinkers are finally invited back in... Like I, I think of it as-

01:22:45
Tyler Cowen: Where is it you want to be invited? The Council on Foreign Relations? They would bore the, the hell out of you.

01:22:50
Eric Weinstein: Not the way I'd do it. [laughs]

01:22:52
Tyler Cowen: I don't know. I mean, I'm sure they're fine. They have a lot of smart people. I know a lot of people there. I like them very much.

01:22:57
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:22:57
Tyler Cowen: I enjoy talking with them. I've never visited the place.

01:22:59
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:23:00
Tyler Cowen: But as an institution-

01:23:01
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:23:01
Tyler Cowen: ... I don't think of them as changing anyone's mind on anything.

01:23:04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:23:05
Tyler Cowen: And I don't mind.

01:23:06
Eric Weinstein: No, but that's part of what I think about like the National Academy of Sciences. I went for a meeting at the National Academy, and it's very clear that they weren't used to really heterodox ideas of a, of a certain level, uh, in anything like the volume that we had them. And th- the problem that I... Uh, so I have this thing I call the DISC, the distributed idea suppression complex.

01:23:29
Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

01:23:29
Eric Weinstein: And it has to do, and this has to do with our mutual friend Peter Thiel, um, who has a related bizarre v- version of a, of a common idea w- that, that we've talked a lot about. His version is that the stagnation that he and I and you, I think, have all discussed is actually functional, that it's really important to retard the spread of great ideas because in some sense they may be so destabilizing to a fragile world.

01:23:58
Tyler Cowen: A fascinating idea, yes.

01:23:59
Eric Weinstein: It's a fascinating idea. Uh, Peter, I would say, would be one of the smartest people of our age.

01:24:03
Tyler Cowen: Absolutely.

01:24:04
Eric Weinstein: And again, too often he's referred to [laughs] as something like shadowy figured-

01:24:09
Tyler Cowen: Maybe the smartest.

01:24:09
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, he's really-

01:24:10
Tyler Cowen: Yeah

01:24:10
Eric Weinstein: ... he's really quite good.

01:24:11
Tyler Cowen: As an original creative generative thinker and as a judge of talent, which are two related but separate things.

01:24:18
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's-

01:24:18
Tyler Cowen: Like Peter could be th- the smartest person that I know.

01:24:21
Eric Weinstein: Well, in part, i- i- to make that argument what I would say is, is that Peter does a better job figuring out who the generative heterodox thinkers are, your objection, uh, notwithstanding to the term heterodox. And then what he realizes very often is, is that they don't know the, the best way of putting forward their ideas. And he's also got another, uh, idea that academicians don't understand, which I call, um, maximally compressed, minimally distorted, where he takes some idea and he's willing to give up a tiny amount of accuracy to make it extremely compact so that when unpacked it tells you a ton. And because academicians over-focus on special cases, uh, he very often runs the table where somebody will object to the idea that his principle isn't exactly accurate, but it's thematically so accurate that the heuristic is just of o- overwhelming power. And of course, he's used that to enrich himself quite considerably.

01:25:25
Tyler Cowen: Patrick Collison may be the quickest learner. But I would say this, Eric, enjoy your triumph. So we live in this funny in-between world where the old structures are all still there, and we both have had the first half or so of our lives in only the old structures.

01:25:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:25:39
Tyler Cowen: Second half of our lives in the world of the internet. We're the only generation that will be able to say that like ever.

01:25:44
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I think it's a beautiful point.

01:25:46
Tyler Cowen: It's beautiful, but when the old structures fade away and you have more and more people who just grew up with the internet Like you are the mainstream and the Council on Foreign Relations-

01:25:55
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:25:55
Tyler Cowen: ... is like the heterodox thinkers who don't have much influence. And I'm half teasing you.

01:25:59
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:26:00
Tyler Cowen: But in fact, I'm mostly correct.

01:26:01
Eric Weinstein: I-

01:26:01
Tyler Cowen: And you just don't see it yet because this kinda status hangover is still there.

01:26:07
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, I mean, I have-

01:26:07
Tyler Cowen: And they have, like, the thick oak desks, whatever, in their offices.

01:26:10
Eric Weinstein: It's not that we want that. It's not that at all. It has to do with the fact that I've been in both worlds, you know? I've been in, I've been at Harvard and MIT and Oxford, and I've also been shit out of luck. And the oscillation between being in the good graces and outside of the good graces, uh, has impressed me a great deal, I think more than, than it has with you because you've just charted a heterodox path.

01:26:34
Tyler Cowen: I've never been out of the good graces.

01:26:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:26:36
Tyler Cowen: I've just been ignored at times.

01:26:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:26:38
Tyler Cowen: I've never felt, like, the stress or the failure.

01:26:41
Eric Weinstein: Well, okay, I guess in terms of opportunity costs, uh, a lot of us view you as one of the most insightful, uh, and encyclopedic minds out there. You do an unbelievable job of sifting for us, and you're an unbelievable expositor, and we would, we would naturally see you as at the very highest echelons, and I think that that view is now, um, much m- much more widespread than it was 15 years ago, right? I mean, you've become... Ti- time has treated you pretty well.

01:27:18
Tyler Cowen: It's gone well for me.

01:27:19
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:27:20
Tyler Cowen: Like, if I'm just out in the world, and I don't, like, go out to places much-

01:27:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:27:24
Tyler Cowen: ... like at least once a week, someone will recognize me, or like more than once a day, someone will write me and like express great thanks and-

01:27:30
Eric Weinstein: Dude, let's go f- clubbing on the Sunset Strip. People are gonna recognize you all up and down.

01:27:34
Tyler Cowen: I'm not sure that's the place.

01:27:35
Eric Weinstein: Trust me.

01:27:35
Tyler Cowen: But, uh, I've had a lot of good fortune, I would say.

01:27:40
Eric Weinstein: So let's talk about something. You were talking about being 17, uh, at a, choosing to go to a commuter school. You were playing guitar back then.

01:27:48
Tyler Cowen: I think I started when I was 11 or 12.

01:27:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:27:51
Tyler Cowen: And I quit, like, around the time I was 17-

01:27:54
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:27:54
Tyler Cowen: ... because I went to college.

01:27:56
Eric Weinstein: And your musicianship, uh, informed you in terms of what the structure of music really is at its deepest level. You have strong opinions about, uh, music and culture.

01:28:11
Tyler Cowen: I was always terrible on guitar. I wanted to learn different fields of music, and I thought to do that you needed to play something-

01:28:17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:28:17
Tyler Cowen: ... to understand basics of music, music theory, chords, whatever. So I did a bit, like classical, jazz, blues, every different kind of guitar just a bit to have an entry point into the world of music. It was never to play or impress people.

01:28:31
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:28:31
Tyler Cowen: I never played for people and was never good. But I could play the notes of a song to see how it fit together.

01:28:37
Eric Weinstein: Okay. There is a kind of relativism that has descended over musical taste, where every time I say something is better than something else, I run into somebody i- instantaneously telling me I've committed, like I, I get a traffic citation that you can't say, uh, you know, that, that Bach is much more important or better than Scarlatti. And I just don't understand this complete abdication, um, of, of any role in which d- you know, informed judgment, uh, plays a role, that we have to have issues of taste that, that say this is better than that, and then y- you're allowed to take a, a, you're allowed to take a heterodox position on that. But we should be passing along our tastes and our prejudice and exposing it to discussion with other people rather than just finding relativist mush. Am I wrong?

01:29:34
Tyler Cowen: I agree, and I think the relativists often don't mean it. What they're really saying is, "On objective grounds, I challenge the status of the person making this proclamation."

01:29:44
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:29:44
Tyler Cowen: "And I will challenge the status by not accepting the judgment." But they're not actually claiming that all matters-

01:29:51
Eric Weinstein: I think they are more than they used to-

01:29:52
Tyler Cowen: ... are relativistic. I don't think of postmodern or relativism or these boogeymen-

01:29:56
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:29:57
Tyler Cowen: ... the way Jordan Peterson says. I've never bought that argument. In Peterson's exchange with Zizek in their debate, I thought Peterson lost that part of the debate. Uh, most people are objectivists, whether they admit it or not. Let's just say what we think is correct and debate it. And David Hume in the mid-18th century wrote some wonderful essays on standards of taste and the test of time. I think he was essentially correct that matters of, of aesthetics are not objective in the same way that matters of fact are, that you can measure and confirm them. But nonetheless, there is something about the judgments that informed people make that expresses an intersubjective validity, and it can be debated and judged, and it's one of the things we're here on Earth to do.

01:30:40
Eric Weinstein: It's a ti-

01:30:40
Tyler Cowen: It's to take in wonderful music.

01:30:42
Eric Weinstein: What move, what moves your soul in music?

01:30:46
Tyler Cowen: Well, let's start with classical music.

01:30:47
Eric Weinstein: Please.

01:30:48
Tyler Cowen: My tastes are completely orthodox, so Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms. Uh, I'm quite fond of contemporary classical music or mid-20th century classical music.

01:30:58
Eric Weinstein: Do you have anybody who isn't in the, uh, acknowledged highest, highest echelon?

01:31:04
Tyler Cowen: I don't think so. I think my tastes are so remarkably close to what you would call the canon in these particular areas that they're, they're boring. Um-

01:31:14
Eric Weinstein: Do you think that was because-

01:31:14
Tyler Cowen: I find a lot of music before Bach maybe somewhat overrated. So Palestrina is an important composer. When I listen to it, I just don't enjoy it as much as I'm supposed to.

01:31:25
Eric Weinstein: How about Guillaume-

01:31:25
Tyler Cowen: Maybe my defect

01:31:26
Eric Weinstein: ... Guillaume de Machaut?

01:31:28
Tyler Cowen: It's fine. I don't know.

01:31:30
Eric Weinstein: Josquin des Prez?

01:31:32
Tyler Cowen: I like it. I don't love it. Anything from that period-

01:31:34
Eric Weinstein: Okay

01:31:35
Tyler Cowen: ... is fine in a slightly eh, under-impressed manner.

01:31:40
Eric Weinstein: Do you think you-

01:31:40
Tyler Cowen: And I think with Monteverdi and then Bach, things explode and become marvelous and amazing for quite some time.

01:31:45
Eric Weinstein: Do you think even temperament is really the, uh- The central, uh, is, is that ground zero for, for the specific beauty of Western music?

01:31:56
Tyler Cowen: I think it's a development of instruments through capitalism and markets, and growth of a middle class, and having more people experiment at playing and composing. Pianos become much better, string instruments become much better. You have the modern orchestra. You have actual audiences. And the interplay of those forces, as opposed to music being more in the church, maybe closer to pure vocal music, I just think it's much better, and almost everyone in their heart knows that.

01:32:23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:32:24
Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

01:32:25
Eric Weinstein: No, no-

01:32:25
Tyler Cowen: What's the but? Tell me the but.

01:32:27
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no. I'm, I'm, I'm actually, uh, I'm processing in real time.

01:32:29
Tyler Cowen: What excites you in classical music? I think Haydn's under- somewhat underrated.

01:32:33
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:32:33
Tyler Cowen: Closer to Mozart than people want to admit.

01:32:36
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:32:36
Tyler Cowen: He's quite durable.

01:32:38
Eric Weinstein: Um, gosh. I mean, I guess I-

01:32:42
Tyler Cowen: Mozart has amazing peaks, but a significant portion of what Mozart wrote is boring. The younger works are mostly boring.

01:32:49
Eric Weinstein: I, I often feel that I have, must have a hole in my soul because of the amount of Mozart that doesn't land, that I hear all of these people describing Mozart as this, you know, exact, exactly perfect balance, and there's something about the language that I find, um, somewhat repellent, so that I'm less likely to get along with people who are bananas over, over Mozart. If, if, if somebody's very clear about Bach, like Bach is like heroin. It's an addiction. You can't, you just can't get enough of the stuff. I relate to that much more. I often say that there are mathematicians who will claim that Bach isn't their favorite composer, and I, I never believe them.

01:33:29
Tyler Cowen: But, you know, take Mozart symphonies, which are obviously chronological. Uh, 29 is quite good, and then not until, uh, you know, maybe 36. You could say 33, 34. But before 29, they're just boring. If they were somehow all gone, I don't think there'd be any great loss. So most of Mozart isn't that good. I don't think it detracts from him. But even with Bach, there's extreme selection which Bach you hear. You don't hear most of the cantatas very much. Most of them are boring.

01:33:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:33:58
Tyler Cowen: That was the main thing he created. So there's some of that in Johann Sebastian as well.

01:34:03
Eric Weinstein: Yes.

01:34:03
Tyler Cowen: Don't exonerate him from the boredom charge altogether.

01:34:06
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:34:06
Tyler Cowen: Christmas Oratorio, it's pretty good. It's not an incredible work. So even St. John's Passion, it's quite good. Not as good as B Minor Mass or St. Matthew's Passion.

01:34:16
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:34:17
Tyler Cowen: So there's extreme selection in the Bach you're hearing and thinking about.

01:34:22
Eric Weinstein: I mean, you know, the, the funny thing for me is that, uh, I had to swim upstream from, uh, Segovia's translation of Spanish piano music onto guitar. I didn't realize that there was an entire world of Spanish piano music, um, where the guitar wasn't originally thought of m- necessarily as a, as a concert or art music instrument. It was more of a folk instrument. And so that's been, um, a huge well of, uh, of interest for me, like listening to Albéniz on, on piano is-

01:34:56
Tyler Cowen: Mm-hmm

01:34:56
Eric Weinstein: ... amazing.

01:34:57
Tyler Cowen: Alicia de Larrocha, right? She's a wonderful performer of that. But the guitar music, I find it very interesting to take some more modern, like ambient music, like Brian Eno or the whole movement from the 1970s, and listen and think through what was going on there.

01:35:13
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:35:13
Tyler Cowen: And then go back to earlier guitar music, uh, baroque, but also the Spaniards, and listen to it through that lens. And it just comes alive in a completely new way.

01:35:22
Eric Weinstein: It's funny, I had that with Robert Fripp-

01:35:24
Tyler Cowen: Yes

01:35:24
Eric Weinstein: ... that somehow Fripp was evocative of, uh, earlier-

01:35:27
Tyler Cowen: Exactly

01:35:27
Eric Weinstein: ... earlier, like vihuela music or something like that.

01:35:29
Tyler Cowen: Yes.

01:35:29
Eric Weinstein: And I've never traced down why I felt that. Um, are you... So s-

01:35:35
Tyler Cowen: So we're... I'm a big fan of what is misleadingly called world music, just listening to as many different musics as you can, kind of figuring out their logics, and then going back and applying it to what you already knew from rock and roll or classical music or jazz and seeing it all, you know, quite anew.

01:35:51
Eric Weinstein: Are you-

01:35:52
Tyler Cowen: To me, that's a very high productivity activity.

01:35:53
Eric Weinstein: Are you interested in, uh, in oud music?

01:35:56
Tyler Cowen: Sure. Of course.

01:35:57
Eric Weinstein: So like when I found Munir Bashir, uh, in Iraq, I just, my, my jaw dropped. I thought this was such gorgeous stuff. And then, and I sort of made my way to Munir Bashir through, uh, Fairuz, who I think is unbelievable. And eventually, I was listening in this Middle Eastern idiom, and I hear him start to play with blues and rock and roll on the oud. And it was fascinating watching somebody from Iraq, uh, who'd studied in Europe, of course, [laughs] watching you. There's a, for example, in, um, at Stanford University, there's this, uh, garden which I think has, uh, master carvings from Polynesia or Indonesia, and there's versions of Rodin's Gates of Hell and The Thinker in this, um, Polynesian or, or, or, uh, Indonesian idiom, and it's just fascinating to see oneself regarded by the other.

01:37:01
Tyler Cowen: Sometimes I think the more interesting question is which musics don't you like, and to think through those. So I'm going to ask you, Eric, what in music do you really not like or cotton to?

01:37:11
Eric Weinstein: Uh-

01:37:11
Tyler Cowen: And you think is just bad or wrong somehow?

01:37:14
Eric Weinstein: Uh, I have trouble with music that doesn't allow us to impart more emotion because it's too highly produced, and I'm pretty sure that has to do with the emotion because I find Jimi Hendrix, uh, very emotional. I found that Cher's Believe, where she uses the Auto-Tune function as an instrument rather than as a correcting of the human voice, to be very emotional. Um, but when I hear very, like, computer-oriented or, you know-

01:37:47
Tyler Cowen: Can you name a name? What do you reject? Point the finger.

01:37:51
Eric Weinstein: Oh, geez, do I have to?

01:37:52
Tyler Cowen: You have to. It's your podcast.

01:37:55
Eric Weinstein: Um-

01:37:56
Tyler Cowen: And let's hope the person isn't listening

01:37:59
Eric Weinstein: Well, I guess there was a time when I didn't like Amy Stewart's version of Knock on Wood, um, which was a great piano R&B song, um, because I found that it was so highly overproduced that I just couldn't cotton to it. Um, that, that had to do with the disco influence. I'm, I'm, I'm choosing things now that I really dislike, but I've sort of maybe come around.

01:38:27
Tyler Cowen: [laughs]

01:38:27
Eric Weinstein: Because I find... No, look, you find something in just about everything that you listen to. It's very hard to create music that's completely devoid of interest. And so if I spend more time with something, even if it's really bad, I'll, I'll usually be able to find something in it that, well, that's why it became famous, and that's why, that's why it's being listened to. I, I've been down on EDM, to be blunt. I don't think that I've... At some point we had a car ride with a friend, and I said, "Let's put on songs we can sing along with." [laughs] Person puts on some EDM. There was nothing close to a campfire song inside of it, and I, I found that kind of sad.

01:39:08
Tyler Cowen: Do you buy into electronic dance music? No, sorry. Heavy metal, I meant to say.

01:39:12
Eric Weinstein: Heavy metal. Such as? I mean, there's a lot of artistry in it.

01:39:17
Tyler Cowen: Many of it. So I asked Ted Gioia this when I did my Conversations with Tyler podcast with him. He's one of my favorite music critics, a brilliant guy. You should have him on. But I asked him about heavy metal. I said, "Underrated or overrated?" And he said, "Well, it's underrated." But I couldn't get him to admit that he actually listened to it and enjoyed it.

01:39:32
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so you wanna go there. Uh, I think it's underrated from technical musicianship, and I think it's often, uh, overrated in terms of what it does to heart. Paul Gilbert-

01:39:42
Tyler Cowen: That's exactly what he said, in other words

01:39:44
Eric Weinstein: ... Okay. So Paul Gilbert has a beautiful riff on this. He's a, you know, obviously a fantastic guitarist, but he says you can take a great blues guitar- guitarist, teach them, uh, a lot of scales, and turn them into a shredder, uh, devoid of interest, but with fantastic technical chops. I think that that's really sad. Um, I think that one, one of the things I'm very concerned about is the falloff in interest in musicianship. Like in guitar at the moment, we have these fantastic guitar virtuosos who live on YouTube and Instagram, and the guitar universe is paying attention to them, but the outside universe is not. There's this guy, Guthrie Govan, uh, who lots of people I know have never heard of this guy, and he's an unbelievable gift to the guitar. Where is he? What, what, what group is he part of? What are his main songs? You know, he, he can, he can be anyone, and then he can be his own thing.

01:40:46
Tyler Cowen: He's like the Guaran of guitar. [laughs]

01:40:47
Eric Weinstein: I guess. Yeah, but it's very odd to me that, um... Or for example, percussive guitar. Um, there was a guy named Justin King who did a song, oddly enough, called Knock on Wood, which just showcases how many ways you can now interact with your instrument through harmonics and various, um, you know, patterns of drumming on the wood, the way the flamenco guitarists used to, brought to a high level. I can't get a lot of people interested in all of the weird innovations that are taking place. A little bit like Rodney Mullen and skateboarding, where originally you're skateboarding on four wheels, and then his point is like, "Well, okay, well, what else can we do?" And you're thinking, "Well, what do you mean?" "Well, maybe we could skateboard on the bottom side or on the sides [laughs] of the skateboard." And you're thinking, "Does that even make sense?" And he says, "Well, here, I'll show you." Well, that's what percussive guitar has been for me. It told me that I didn't understand the instrument more or less at all. Something else I'm really enthusiastic about is Sugar Blue on harmonica. Do you know this guy?

01:41:46
Tyler Cowen: Not known to me at all.

01:41:47
Eric Weinstein: Do you know the song-

01:41:48
Tyler Cowen: Is it on YouTube?

01:41:48
Eric Weinstein: Do you know the song Miss You by The Rolling Stones?

01:41:51
Tyler Cowen: Sure.

01:41:51
Eric Weinstein: Right. Well, that, that, uh, that harmonica is Sugar Blue.

01:41:55
Tyler Cowen: Okay.

01:41:55
Eric Weinstein: And this is a guy who can thread the... If you break the harmonica into three registers, he can thread the top register like nobody's business, and he and John Popper of Blues Traveler are sort of locked in some artistic conversation the rest of us can barely understand. Like, that excites the hell out of me, because you're taking an instrument that's so limited and you're saying, "Well, it's only limited to you because you haven't figured out what you [laughs] can do with it."

01:42:19
Tyler Cowen: Other than Bach, maybe South Indian classical music is the closest we have in music to mathematics. And at times I think-

01:42:25
Eric Weinstein: Why do you say South?

01:42:25
Tyler Cowen: ... we should only listen to that.

01:42:28
Eric Weinstein: 'Cause I, I would've said North.

01:42:29
Tyler Cowen: It's purer somehow.

01:42:31
Eric Weinstein: The North Indian?

01:42:32
Tyler Cowen: No, the South, the Carnatic.

01:42:33
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. I think that the North Indian... I mean, look, th- th- this is just a world that I knew nothing about, and I chanced upon this, uh, book of a musicologist named Neil Sorrell called something like Indian Music and Performance. You can find it on the internet with lots of little sound files that he made-

01:42:52
Tyler Cowen: Mm-hmm

01:42:52
Eric Weinstein: ... for a, a cassette way back in the day. And he took it, an entire performance of Ram Narayan, the great sarangi player-

01:42:59
Tyler Cowen: Sure

01:42:59
Eric Weinstein: ... the Indian violinist. Man, this, this just... How did I not know there was an entire universe, uh, of Indian classical music? You may be partial to the South. I'm very partial to the North.

01:43:12
Tyler Cowen: But South, North, along with Bach and maybe The Beatles, it has the only other serious claim to being the best music, period.

01:43:19
Eric Weinstein: All right, The Beatles, defend yourself, sir. What's your take on three Beatles songs that, uh, are at least current in your thinking and that really show off how deep that canon is?

01:43:31
Tyler Cowen: Was it 1966, You Won't See Me. It's basically a Paul song. But the melancholy, how the background vocals operate, what's done with the piano, the bassline. It operates on so many different levels at once. Just sounds like a simple ballad, but every time you listen to it, there's something new in there. Complex emotionally. Uh, and then it's just over. You Never Give Me Your Money. The last 10, 15 seconds are just phenomenal. Paul had been listening to John Cage and Stockhausen and just sound, and what's the dividing line between sound and music. And he just sticks that in at the end of a Beatles song with a lovely melody, and the whole thing just dissolves, and then you get back, uh, to marching through the Abbey Road Side Two medley. Uh, Hey Jude. This is so many- ... uh, Beatles songs that I think are just phenomenally better than what other people were doing, and they synthesize more different parts of music than anything Bach did. That's their claim to greatness in terms of-

01:44:26
Eric Weinstein: Wait, slow, slow, slow it down

01:44:26
Tyler Cowen: ... lyrics, vocals.

01:44:27
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01:44:28
Tyler Cowen: So the Beatles, mostly Lennon and McCartney, they're composing these songs, and they're playing them, and they're singing them, and they're producing them, and they're A+ excellent in all of those dimensions-

01:44:38
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:44:38
Tyler Cowen: ... on their best material, and Bach was a composer, probably an excellent player. We don't-

01:44:43
Eric Weinstein: Right

01:44:43
Tyler Cowen: ... really know, but he was reputed to be very good, easy enough to believe. The Beatles take on an added three or four dimensions that are not in classical music and master them, and then every album they change their style. Every song they change their style. They hardly repeat themselves. Yes, they have a lot of clunkers. They had the two best voices in rock and roll, John and Paul-

01:45:05
Eric Weinstein: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa

01:45:05
Tyler Cowen: ... two best composers in rock and roll.

01:45:07
Eric Weinstein: Slow it down. All right. The two best voices-

01:45:08
Tyler Cowen: So they were pretty impressive.

01:45:09
Eric Weinstein: All right, let's have a small fight, and we'll get back to the Beatles.

01:45:10
Tyler Cowen: Aretha Franklin won the Rolling Stones poll. She's wonderful. Uh-

01:45:14
Eric Weinstein: What would you have said?

01:45:15
Tyler Cowen: But she's less versatile than the Lennon voices.

01:45:16
Eric Weinstein: Okay, I would've gone with Freddie Mercury and Roy Orbison. Where am I wrong?

01:45:21
Tyler Cowen: Roy Orbison has eight or nine amazing songs, which are incredible, and the Beatles themselves loved, right? But that's kind of it, then it's over.

01:45:28
Eric Weinstein: And Freddie Mercury, sir?

01:45:30
Tyler Cowen: Freddie Mercury has one album, two albums you can listen to straight through. His vocal affect is most of the time broadly the same. Uh, he's one of the top vocalists, absolutely, and I know you're partial, uh, maybe to Parsi culture and where he comes from.

01:45:49
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] You're gonna drag that in?

01:45:52
Tyler Cowen: Uh, but in terms of versatility, I don't think he's close to the Beatles.

01:45:56
Eric Weinstein: And can we-

01:45:56
Tyler Cowen: And I love Queen, and I went to see them play, not with Freddie Mercury, but with Adam Lambert, who did a fantastic job I thought. Uh, I still listen to Queen. I'm a big fan, but they're wonderful-

01:46:07
Eric Weinstein: I actually have trouble with their material

01:46:08
Tyler Cowen: ... in a one-dimensional way.

01:46:09
Eric Weinstein: I don't think that's true. I think that they've got-

01:46:12
Tyler Cowen: Maybe two dimensions. There's like the shredder-

01:46:14
Eric Weinstein: Ugh

01:46:14
Tyler Cowen: ... early punk semi-metal stuff-

01:46:16
Eric Weinstein: Wait, what?

01:46:16
Tyler Cowen: ... and then there's the ballads.

01:46:19
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I just think-

01:46:19
Tyler Cowen: Love of My Life, You Hurt Me, 39.

01:46:21
Eric Weinstein: I, I feel like Brian May is so incredibly tasteful.

01:46:25
Tyler Cowen: I agree.

01:46:26
Eric Weinstein: And he doesn't have to play a note more or less than he wants. He's just not needy.

01:46:30
Tyler Cowen: I agree.

01:46:30
Eric Weinstein: And then, you know, Roger Taylor's, uh, I'm in Love with My Car, I think is one of the most comically brilliant songs I've ever heard. So, and I don't even listen to that much Queen. Are you familiar with the voice of Eva Cassidy, given that you were in the Washington area for a long time?

01:46:48
Tyler Cowen: Only marginally, but I've never heard it live, if that's what you're asking.

01:46:52
Eric Weinstein: Just, there's an album called Live at Blues Alley, where she does a version of Stormy Monday that just tears my heart in shreds and barely puts it back together by the end. It's just unbelievable performance on a song I thought I've heard everybody's version of it, and just, just, uh... Well, you haven't heard this one. Apparently she was sick while the recording session was happening, and so some magic happened to her voice because of the illness. It's really interesting.

01:47:16
Tyler Cowen: Cecile McLorin Salvant is my favorite of jazz popular song vocalist, and she's active now. I've seen her three times. I think she's better than Ella Fitzgerald. She's in her prime. She's maybe about 30. Plays a- you know, around in clubs very often, has plenty of CDs.

01:47:32
Eric Weinstein: I love Ella Fitzgerald and never put her on. Why is that?

01:47:35
Tyler Cowen: Uh, it's a little exaggerated and mannered, and she was trying too hard. Her technique is incredible, but it's always excessively aw- conscious of what the audience is thinking, for me.

01:47:49
Eric Weinstein: You know, I used to listen-

01:47:50
Tyler Cowen: I enjoy it when I hear it, but I also never put it on.

01:47:52
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I use it as like the gold standard for lots of things like Cole Porter, and then at some point I heard-

01:47:57
Tyler Cowen: I don't think it is.

01:47:58
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I don't... I, I think that there's something in my tastes that have changed with the time, and I now just never, I never reach for it. But, you know, and like Art Tatum, I always enjoy him when I'm listening to his piano work-

01:48:11
Tyler Cowen: Sure

01:48:11
Eric Weinstein: ... but I never think, "Boy, am I in an Art Tatum mood," because how can you be in an Art Tatum mood? It's so exacting and demanding on the ear that, like, that's not something that happens.

01:48:24
Tyler Cowen: He might've been the, one of the two greatest jazz pianists with Monk, but I, or Cecil Taylor.

01:48:29
Eric Weinstein: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01:48:29
Tyler Cowen: I don't hear new things when I hear Tatum. It's just perfect, right?

01:48:33
Eric Weinstein: It's just, it's just-

01:48:34
Tyler Cowen: And it contains every style of its time and then some, but I don't feel the need to go back to it. I'm okay with that.

01:48:39
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, okay.

01:48:40
Tyler Cowen: It hasn't gone down in my eyes, but I think it's so rarefied level-

01:48:42
Eric Weinstein: Well, I feel like nobody, nobody was ever really able to work with... There's a guy now named Eric Lewis who I think I connect to Tatum, and I start to see, oh, well, maybe if I saw this as being part of a, uh, of a lineage. But it, there's something about the fact that, you know, Hendrix didn't really leave descendants on the guitar, and I feel like Tatum didn't really leave descendants on the piano. Although Monk really surprises me.

01:49:07
Tyler Cowen: In some ways he's a funny descendant of Tatum, more than you would think.

01:49:11
Eric Weinstein: Monk?

01:49:11
Tyler Cowen: Monk. He has very little technique, but the idea of integrating styles and making jokes, he was, in my opinion-

01:49:19
Eric Weinstein: He's-

01:49:19
Tyler Cowen: ... highly influenced by Art Tatum. He just didn't [laughs] play the piano very well, but as a composer, he's phenomenal.

01:49:25
Eric Weinstein: I don't know that he did or didn't.

01:49:27
Tyler Cowen: Put on Solo Monk. It could be the best jazz piano album-

01:49:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:49:29
Tyler Cowen: ... that there is, and I still listen to it.

01:49:31
Eric Weinstein: Do you have a take on, um, the weirdness of Miles Davis' generosity to us all in terms of leaving this beautiful legacy and his being a complete dick?

01:49:47
Tyler Cowen: Well, a lot of wonderful creators have been complete dicks.

01:49:50
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:49:50
Tyler Cowen: There's a long list of those, Picasso, uh, some people have said John Lennon. I don't know the full list, but he's not some unusual data point to be explained. Uh, partly there might be correlations between creativity and having unusual brains, right?

01:50:05
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:50:06
Tyler Cowen: And then once you're succeeding, you can get away with a lot more, and then drugs enter the equation for Davis and Lennon, and, uh, bad things happen. So this is not a huge surprise.

01:50:17
Eric Weinstein: All right, so getting back to the B- Beatles, I, I-

01:50:19
Tyler Cowen: Okay

01:50:19
Eric Weinstein: ... um- When Lennon writes the song, what is it, How Do You Sleep?

01:50:26
Tyler Cowen: Right

01:50:26
Eric Weinstein: ... uh, after The Beatles have broken up, he, he makes a, a reference to y- something about you didn't see Sgt. Pepper's, or Sgt. Pepper's took you by surprise

01:50:35
Tyler Cowen: You'd better see right through that mother's eyes.

01:50:37
Eric Weinstein: Yeah

01:50:37
Tyler Cowen: And he means Paul McCartney. So he admits Sgt. Pepper was Paul's album, which it kind of was. That's quite [laughs] an admission.

01:50:43
Eric Weinstein: Well, is that... Uh-

01:50:46
Tyler Cowen: Paul was the workaholic in The Beatles

01:50:47
Eric Weinstein: ... Yeah

01:50:48
Tyler Cowen: That's the key point here.

01:50:49
Eric Weinstein: So what I hadn't understood, and this is only because I happen to weirdly be friends with, with th- uh, John's son, Sean, is Sean points very clearly to Strawberry Fields Forever as being the discontinuity in Lennon's ability as a composer.

01:51:07
Tyler Cowen: I agree with that.

01:51:09
Eric Weinstein: What... Okay. How did I miss this, and how do you see that?

01:51:13
Tyler Cowen: Well, I don't know that you missed it.

01:51:14
Eric Weinstein: I, I did miss it. I cannot understand that

01:51:15
Tyler Cowen: So early Beatles is John's group. You look at Hard Day's Night album, there's hardly any Paul songs on there. There's Things You Said Today, which is amazing, but it's a John album, and it's pretty close to perfect. Even John's, like, first real song, Please Please Me, one of the best Beatles songs, completely visceral, hits you in the gut, still sounds amazing. But I think after Strawberry Fields, John stopped innovating. He had an amazing voice emotionally, which he still could use. You have songs like I Am The Walrus, which have a kind of even, melodic line and a bit of pulsating. But when you start to hear John songs through the lens of if you applied machine learning to them, there's a similar structure to a lot of the melodies. They don't move around that much the way Paul melodies do. And Paul being the workaholic just gets better and better and better, and Paul learns from George Martin, and Paul learns orchestration. Paul even became a good classical music composer. That's phenomenal. And, uh, by the time of Sgt. Pepper, it's Paul's group, and Paul is calling the shots. Abbey Road, side two is, you know, basically Paul's work, Paul's creation, even with the John songs. A piece like Tomorrow Never Knows, which is John singing, John composed, a very flat, melodic line, but the whole construction of the sound was mostly Paul, and Paul will take credit for that. So, uh, it becomes Paul's group. John feels more pushed out. It's the start of The Beatles breaking up and so on.

01:52:40
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, so there, there are these, uh, dynamics within the group that I'm not qui- I, I, I never actually studied The Beatles enough. But, like, songs like Across the Universe don't really impress themselves upon you as being-

01:52:53
Tyler Cowen: It's that same kind of even, not much varying melodic line-

01:52:56
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

01:52:56
Tyler Cowen: ... carried by John's voice and mood, and the fact that it's The Beatles. I like the song, uh, but Paul is experimenting much more by then.

01:53:05
Eric Weinstein: I see. Very interesting.

01:53:06
Tyler Cowen: But here's the thing about How Do You Sleep? by John. It was... I learned recently it was actually Paul who started that feud.

01:53:11
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:53:12
Tyler Cowen: Paul had a song, uh, Too Many People, you know, "That was your lucky break," and he was really mocking John. Like, "Oh, it was lucky that you, you know, hung out with me." And John was retaliating. People think, uh, John is the aggressor in that, but Paul was, like, super passive aggressive. Right

01:53:28
Eric Weinstein: All right, so then I want to put together a data series, and I wanted-

01:53:30
Tyler Cowen: Yeah

01:53:30
Eric Weinstein: ... to get your reaction to it. So I'm gonna start with Gilbert and Sullivan. I'm gonna have Jagger and Richards-

01:53:36
Tyler Cowen: Yeah

01:53:36
Eric Weinstein: ... Lennon and McCartney, um, uh, Perry and Tyler in Aerosmith.

01:53:44
Tyler Cowen: Mm-hmm.

01:53:46
Eric Weinstein: What the hell's going on with these dyads that are so combustible, both really benefit [laughs] from the antagonized relationship, uh, and we end up with this incredible music, but it's, it's so effing personal?

01:54:03
Tyler Cowen: Well, it's rivalry. It's what really motivates people. Yes, it's the money also, of course, but wanting to do better than the other and having the other as a mental audience. Uh, I think it was Peter Thiel who had this in one of his talks once, that he has these different images of people sitting on his shoulder. What would this person think? What would that person think? Uh, I have an Eric Weinstein and a Peter Thiel sitting on my shoulder-

01:54:26
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:54:26
Tyler Cowen: ... among others, right?

01:54:27
Eric Weinstein: We, we all have Tyler Cowen on ours.

01:54:29
Tyler Cowen: So I call it, you know, like, Phantom Eric Weinstein or Phantom Peter Thiel.

01:54:33
Eric Weinstein: Do you run me in emulation?

01:54:35
Tyler Cowen: What do you mean by that?

01:54:36
Eric Weinstein: I try to run you in emulation sometimes. I think about Tyler... Like, I start to get emotional about something. Tyler is not gonna fall for that. He's gonna be even-keeled. He's gonna think about what's likely to be true. He's not going to think about how to make the biggest splash. Uh, and, like, I have these rules that can't generate you and what I consider to be your brilliance and contribution, but it can, it can generate a kind of s- thumbnail sketch of you without you needing to be present.

01:55:06
Tyler Cowen: Oh, sure, but it's harder to have a Phantom Eric Weinstein, because a Phantom Eric Weinstein is about being generative, and that's harder to model than a Phantom Tyler Cowen. So if you think of part of me as even-keeled, even-keeled might be hard to achieve, but it's not that hard to model. It's just like, calm down, right?

01:55:23
Eric Weinstein: I can't... I have such... I'm so driven by passion.

01:55:26
Tyler Cowen: Hard to achieve, but not hard to model

01:55:28
Eric Weinstein: ... Yeah, yeah.

01:55:29
Tyler Cowen: So you might reject your Phantom Tyler Cowen.

01:55:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's true. One of the things I do is it has a very strong filter which says if the emotional register has been exceeded by this much or that much in e- either direction, Tyler wouldn't do that.

01:55:40
Tyler Cowen: Call up Phantom Tyler Cowen.

01:55:42
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

01:55:42
Tyler Cowen: He's right there. He'll answer the phone. Even the real Tyler Cowen will probably answer the phone. But you're harder to model for that reason.

01:55:49
Eric Weinstein: I'm, I'm incredibly flattered, even if that isn't your intention. Uh, the, yeah, the idea that you would have a hard time doing that, uh, means a lot to me. Peter is an insanely difficult person for most of us to model because, uh, I don't think it's even consistent session to session. Peter is so driven by the search for something new that whatever it is that he's thought last is now incorporated into, well, that's old. Where do we go from here? I mean, it's just, it's a constant series of-

01:56:22
Tyler Cowen: But that's part of the model. So I have my own Peter Thiel model. Now, you know Peter much, much better than I do. But I think of it as you really do need to incorporate everything you know into your current view consistently or you're failing. So your views should be a kind of random walk, because if you can predict their direction, it means you should already be where you're headed, and there's something wrong if you're not. And the other part of my Peter Thiel model is the way in which he is an intensely moral thinker and how the moral element of his thought interacts with the cognition and strengthens it. And again, you know Peter better than I do. If you tell me that's wrong-

01:56:59
Eric Weinstein: No, he's an insanely moral human. He-

01:57:00
Tyler Cowen: I will retreat, but that's how I model Peter.

01:57:03
Eric Weinstein: He's, he's moral, he's religious.

01:57:05
Tyler Cowen: But that, but it's not just that, it's how the moral and the cognitive are integrated. He does so well.

01:57:10
Eric Weinstein: No, no, but I'm, I'm picking up on this weird feature. So I had him as the f- the inaugural episode of, uh, the interview episode of the show, and I would say that one of the, one of the reactions that people had was, "Wow, I've never seen this side of Peter." And of course-

01:57:25
Tyler Cowen: I've never seen any other side of Peter

01:57:26
Eric Weinstein: ... I've never seen any other side of Peter.

01:57:28
Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

01:57:28
Eric Weinstein: So the, the, the delta between the private and the, uh, cartoon c- the private person and the cartoon character that the media portray has gotta be one of the largest deltas I've, I've known for any other human being. [laughs]

01:57:41
Tyler Cowen: Sure.

01:57:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Um, anybody else you think we're getting wildly wrong if we go by their media, um, character?

01:57:49
Tyler Cowen: Well, most people, I think, and plenty of these are people I don't know, but my default assumption is if they're very well known, the media is getting them wrong.

01:57:58
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01:57:58
Tyler Cowen: Not true in all cases, but it's a better default assumption than the opposite.

01:58:02
Eric Weinstein: So I agree that that, that's true, but what I'm looking for is where is the distortion most significant?

01:58:09
Tyler Cowen: Well, Charles Koch would be an example.

01:58:11
Eric Weinstein: Tell me about Charles Koch.

01:58:13
Tyler Cowen: Uh, Char-

01:58:13
Eric Weinstein: I've, I, I... So I have the experience, people perceive me as being somebody who's not going to be friendly to the Koch brothers, certainly the, the image of the Koch brothers. And a lot of people I respect think very highly of the Koch brothers, and I notice in myself that I have a module that says anything Koch related has to be seen as the work of the devil. Like, it doesn't... I don't even have a thought before the word Koch starts to tell me that this is something I can't even entertain, which is fascinating because of my political milieu, um, just noticing metacognitively, wow, I didn't install that module. Where did, how did it get there?

01:58:52
Tyler Cowen: Just to be clear, uh, Koch Foundation is a major donor to my university and programs I'm connected with. Uh, Peter has supported some things I've done, just for our listeners. Uh, Charles, I think in terms of being an executor, an integrator, and synthesizer, is the most impressive human I have met, as far as I can tell.

01:59:11
Eric Weinstein: No kidding.

01:59:12
Tyler Cowen: That the, uh, high returns of Koch Industries over such a long period of time, and it's not in a sector based on a kind of like trick. Well, Google obviously has done very well. I don't want to call Google a trick.

01:59:24
Eric Weinstein: [laughs] No, no, no, but I understand what you-

01:59:25
Tyler Cowen: But look, they figured out search. It's a kind of natural monopoly.

01:59:28
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01:59:29
Tyler Cowen: They've done a wonderful job since then and YouTube and all that, yes. Uh, but Koch Industries has worked in pretty competitive sectors and earned high returns through competence and execution and understanding and developing processes which are replicable on a much larger level than the individual of Charles Koch or anyone else in a way that all the other impressive people we know have not done. So that is his and their most impressive contribution, but he is a man of the utmost integrity. And to make it clear, on issues such as climate change, I don't at all agree with him, but I've known Charles for a long time. He's absolutely a straight shooter and does what he thinks is right and is a great American and, uh, is very much a person to be admired.

02:00:16
Eric Weinstein: Wow. And that, that's reason enough to invite him onto the portal if he, if he'd come.

02:00:22
Tyler Cowen: And there's, you know, plenty of things I disagree with him about, just to make it clear.

02:00:25
Eric Weinstein: Charlie Munger, is he somebody that you, uh, have had interactions with? I had a dinner with-

02:00:29
Tyler Cowen: I've never met Charlie.

02:00:30
Eric Weinstein: I had a dinner with Charlie, and I was very impressed by-

02:00:34
Tyler Cowen: I've heard that from many people

02:00:35
Eric Weinstein: ... he's a very tough, tough-minded individual, but there's a big payoff. Yeah.

02:00:41
Tyler Cowen: It's probably true.

02:00:42
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:00:42
Tyler Cowen: I don't even know what his media reputation is. Is it the opposite of that?

02:00:46
Eric Weinstein: I don't know. My, my sense of it is that he is happy to be overshadowed, uh, in the media by Warren Buffett, but that to those who know, he's a powerful independent mind. I, I noticed that in my own work relationship with, uh, Peter Thiel, people who don't like me will say, they'll, they'll always talk ab- use the word boss. "Well, your boss did this. Your boss said this." Like, they'll really emphasize-

02:01:14
Tyler Cowen: [laughs]

02:01:14
Eric Weinstein: ... the, uh, the hierarchy, which is something that Peter has never done, bizarrely. And it allowed me for a long period of time to move somewhat more quietly while, uh, Peter got more of the attention, and I, I don't know that there isn't a version of that, um, at, at a different level with, uh, with Munger and Buffett, where Munger is known by everybody who should know, um, who he is, and Buffett gets most of the headlines.

02:01:42
Tyler Cowen: Yeah.

02:01:43
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Uh, but any other, like, famous, famous... Uh, are there great arbitrage opportunities, um, with other people whose reputations mask incredible contributions?

02:01:56
Tyler Cowen: Well, I don't know if it's arbitrage, because if the people are famous, they've already been doing things, right? So it's not that you-

02:02:03
Eric Weinstein: No, but for example-

02:02:03
Tyler Cowen: ... can come along and hire them for minimum wage.

02:02:05
Eric Weinstein: All right. But like, uh, you know, Charro, who used to do the Gucci Gucci act-

02:02:09
Tyler Cowen: Right

02:02:09
Eric Weinstein: ... was a student of Segovia and a fabulous classical-

02:02:11
Tyler Cowen: Very talented, yes

02:02:12
Eric Weinstein: ... classical guitarist. Dolly Parton, you know-

02:02:15
Tyler Cowen: Phenomenal talent

02:02:15
Eric Weinstein: ... is some kind of a genius who happens to hide bet- behind, you know, a, a, a, a physique that draws most of the attention, but she's, she's really an, a, just an incredible thinker-

02:02:27
Tyler Cowen: Correct

02:02:27
Eric Weinstein: ... and artist. Who-

02:02:28
Tyler Cowen: On multiple dimensions.

02:02:29
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Who else like this?

02:02:32
Tyler Cowen: Well, this is a controversial name, but Michael Jackson, and I don't at all mean to excuse the things it certainly seems he has done. Uh, but as a musical talent, uh, even before the bad news came out, he's been grossly underappreciated. Getting back to the theme of creative individuals, uh, often having these highly problematic elements.

02:02:54
Eric Weinstein: Right. Well, this is, this is this thing that I don't know how to get at. In mathematics, I think we do an unbelievably good job of not removing the names of despicable people from their own work. So for example, um, I'm very partial to the work of a guy named Pascual Jordan, uh, in the algebra of quantum mechanics and quantum theory, who was a committed Nazi. And there are tons of Nazis [laughs] whose names are discussed, uh, along with their work, even at places like Hebrew University, where I was for a couple of years. So it's a culture that says we don't get to choose who brings the gifts, and we don't get it, to choose h- whether or not we acknowledge them just because they, they did something in the rest of their life that was untoward. Uh-

02:03:47
Tyler Cowen: I think we should stop with the ex post purges, which are, in any case, highly, highly selective. But that said, I'm never sure what is exactly the right policy looking forward.

02:03:56
Eric Weinstein: How do we do that, do you think?

02:03:57
Tyler Cowen: I don't think we figured it out. Uh, when I hear any side in that debate, I think, "Oh, they're wrong."

02:04:03
Eric Weinstein: [laughs]

02:04:04
Tyler Cowen: Uh, but they can't all be wrong, or maybe they are all wrong, but I don't think I have the answers.

02:04:08
Eric Weinstein: Well, you've heard my strategy for this. I'd be curious to get your take on it. I think that we Jews should call for the destruction of the Arch of Titus that commemorates the sacking of Jerusalem and the carrying off of Jewish booty by R- I guess, Roman hands, with the idea being that this is so preposterous that we should tear down this ancient arch, even though, you know, Jews have always hated this arch-

02:04:32
Tyler Cowen: Sure

02:04:33
Eric Weinstein: ... um, that it will evidence to people just how insane it is to attempt to pr- you know, do this excision or exorcism, I don't know what you wanna call it, retroactively when we obviously have a society built on structures of oppression.

02:04:51
Tyler Cowen: I don't think it would show people that. I don't think it would be digested or interpreted properly. And here's my worry. So you can say, "Well, we're gonna have a moratorium on canceling people in the past."

02:05:01
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02:05:02
Tyler Cowen: But the past and the present are not so neatly separated, and there are people who are a part of the past but also part of the present. A number of people in comedy, but many others who are either active, or they would be active if they would be allowed to be active. Uh, and in those cases, I'm not sure what we should do.

02:05:21
Eric Weinstein: Do you have a strong feeling on Louis CK?

02:05:25
Tyler Cowen: Um-

02:05:25
Eric Weinstein: He seems to be the case that a very large number of people wanna see him return, and a very large number of people wanna make sure that that does not happen.

02:05:35
Tyler Cowen: I don't know all of the details. It may be he's done things I would find worse than I thought. But the marginal cases, I tend to believe we should allow for rehabilitation. In general, I believe in second, third, and additional chances, and it's striking to me how many people in the political debate will be, "Oh, ex-convicts, you know, we need to allow them to have jobs-

02:05:57
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:05:57
Tyler Cowen: ... and rehabilitate them and welcome them back into society." But these o- other offenders, often they're white men-

02:06:03
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:06:03
Tyler Cowen: ... by the way, uh, they cannot in any way be allowed back on the concert stage or wherever. Now, maybe you think they, you know, ought to be working in a cafeteria somewhere. I don't know. But I'm pretty sure those emotions and intuitions are not consistent.

02:06:16
Eric Weinstein: Are you conflicted yourself?

02:06:18
Tyler Cowen: I'm conflicted myself. My gut, which I'm not saying is correct-

02:06:22
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:06:22
Tyler Cowen: ... clear, is for second and third chances. But I understand incentives matter, as an economist, and if everyone gets, you know, an N number of chances, then penalties, uh, don't matter so much, so that's why I'm conflicted.

02:06:38
Eric Weinstein: I was thinking about having, uh, eh, I keep threatening to do this. Somewhere I have a list of, like, 20 paradoxes, which I've called the H- Hilbert Problems of So- Social Justice, named after the famous mathematical problems, and that there are certain intractable problems that have to do with contradictory impulses, where you can show people that there's no way of solving these puzzles. But they still insist on trying to apply these axioms and heuristics as if they lead to a compatible social ordering. Um, is there any way in which people can be dissuaded from trying to purge themselves of the fruits of all oppression by showing them what that would actually mean, do you think?

02:07:20
Tyler Cowen: Uh, I don't know, but again, the, the view that we purge nothing may be problematic as well. My own podcast series, Conversations with Tyler, I'm doing one in two days with a fellow, Shaka Senghor, who's a convicted murderer.

02:07:32
Eric Weinstein: Oh, I love Shaka.

02:07:33
Tyler Cowen: Uh, I haven't met him yet. Spent 19 years in prison, seven years in solitary, uh, 36 times was written up for in some way treating guards badly, uh, has, you know, confessed to w- you know, these charges. And I had to think long and hard, like, "Should I do a podcast with Shaka?"

02:07:50
Eric Weinstein: Oh, no, you're making, you're making a great decision, in my opinion.

02:07:53
Tyler Cowen: And that was the conclusion I arrived at, but it's still a question, right?

02:07:57
Eric Weinstein: No, you c- I, I found Shaka to be... I mean, th- I've only... It's very weird. I, all, there are all these people in my personal and private life who are, are now coming up potentially in the context of should, should I have a podcast with them? I think Shaka, uh, you can ask almost any question about his time in prison, about what the transformation, uh, has been, and I think you'll get a very credible answer. I, I thought, I found him incredibly thoughtful as a theorist about the entire system.

02:08:29
Tyler Cowen: That's also my sense, but the, the question of does the fact that we can learn from someone in any way exonerate them, I would still say I don't have a clear answer to that.

02:08:40
Eric Weinstein: That's true, but I guess-

02:08:42
Tyler Cowen: It matters for me at the margin. For selfish reasons, it matters. I'm really looking forward to talking with Tshaka, but if you try to generalize, I don't know where we're left.

02:08:51
Eric Weinstein: So let me give a really clean example because the person is no longer with us, and I think that the artistic contribution is more fascinating than we care to admit. Have you ever heard the song, um, by Charles Manson called Look At Your Game, Girl?

02:09:07
Tyler Cowen: I've heard that there are songs by Charles Manson, but I've never heard it. I don't think so.

02:09:12
Eric Weinstein: I struggle with this because it's an incredibly beautiful performance to my ear, and the human being who created it, um, is obviously almost synonymous with a level of, uh, madness and depravity that we wish to insulate ourselves from. I don't know how to reconcile that because I, I see the sensitivity and the gift, um, and my feeling about it as a song, if you could just disembody it, I think it'd be a great song. If you actually think about what it is that you're choosing to promote, this is not a very famous song, um, because of its association. Um, I think it would be a huge disservice if its popularity came to, uh, have us reevaluate its author.

02:10:04
Tyler Cowen: When the John Lennon song Run for Your Life comes on the radio, which is a song about wife beating, it seems, uh, I do actually change the channel. I'm not sure I'm consistent-

02:10:14
Eric Weinstein: Mm-hmm

02:10:14
Tyler Cowen: ... but it bothers me, and that's John Lennon, and I don't want to listen.

02:10:19
Eric Weinstein: Uh, are we not entitled to some hypocrisy? I mean, like, my-

02:10:23
Tyler Cowen: We are, but we need optimal hypocrisy.

02:10:25
Eric Weinstein: Well, is it-

02:10:25
Tyler Cowen: So you need a kind of consistently-

02:10:26
Eric Weinstein: Right

02:10:27
Tyler Cowen: ... inconsistent optimal hypocrisy, and no one's found that yet.

02:10:29
Eric Weinstein: Well, I really like that because I- I- I- I feel [laughs] that I can't get through a day without my hypocrisy, and people are always trying to take it away from me, and all I really want to do is to minimize it and to make sure that it's functional rather than just a complete dodge.

02:10:46
Tyler Cowen: But we also need some hypocritical sanctions against hypocrisy, so there are multiple layers here, right?

02:10:51
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02:10:51
Tyler Cowen: So you can't just sit content in your hypocrisy even if it's optimal.

02:10:56
Eric Weinstein: Tyler, I could have you here, uh, for the rest of time. Can I instead say that you are welcome to come back anytime? I would, in fact, love to talk to you about gauge theory a- and other matters of how do we push the economics profession forward, but, you know, there are a million topics I could talk to you about, have absolutely nothing to do with, uh, our area of professional overlap. Will you consider coming back?

02:11:22
Tyler Cowen: I would love to come back, and I'm still planning on having you on my podcast, which we absolutely will do, and might have even happened now if you hadn't invited me onto yours.

02:11:30
Eric Weinstein: Well, uh, I, I would be completely honored. It would be a, a fantastic adventure, so thanks very much for that, and let's make that happen.

02:11:38
Tyler Cowen: Eric, it's been a great pleasure.

02:11:39
Eric Weinstein: Okay. You've been through the portal with our guest, uh, Professor Tyler Cowen. Make sure that you subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Stitcher, uh, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and go over to YouTube and try to find our channel, um, and make sure that you sub- both subscribe and click the bell to be notified when our next episode drops. Thanks very much. Be well. [outro music]