 Hello everyone and welcome to a special episode of Conversations with Tyler. My name is Jeff Holmes and I'm here in my capacity as a producer of Conversations with Tyler, but I'm here in another capacity as well as a reader of Marginal Revolution, the economics blog that Alex Tabarak and Tyler Cowan started in August of 2003. We're recording this in August of 2023, which of course marks the 20th anniversary of Marginal Revolution. So today for the podcast we will be talking about the now 20-year history of the blog. But first, welcome to the two co-founders of Marginal Revolution. Alex Tabarak, welcome. Thanks. Great to be here. Tyler, welcome. Thank you for all the great work, Jeff. And in addition to the co-founders and writers of Marginal Revolution, we're joined by two other longtime readers of the blog. First, Ben Casnoka. Ben is an author, writer and investor. He's founded and runs several businesses, blogged, written bestselling books, and is the co-founder and partner of Village Global, which invests in early-stage startups. Ben, welcome. Thanks, Jeff. And Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum and one of the most influential thinkers and writers in crypto. Vitalik, welcome. Thank you. Okay, to start off, we're here in Chennai, India. We're here for a Mercatus Center conference. And 20 years ago, would you have thought that the growth of the blog would lead to the rising prominence and influence of George Mason economics, the rising prominence and influence of the Mercatus Center, which I work for, such that we would now be sitting here in Chennai, India, running a conference, in part because of the success of the blog? What does that say to you? My original vision was, if we were lucky, we would have 5,000 readers. And I thought it would be mostly academics, people like Timur Karan, who wanted something more interesting. I didn't understand we would end up in a world where Timur Karan's wife reads Marginal Revolution. So the reach of not just blogs, but just online writing, now it's maybe Substack or Twitter or whatever. I always knew it was going to happen, but it's gone far past what I ever expected. There was definitely an inflection point. At the very beginning when we started out, blogging was something that other academics sort of looked down upon. Turn their noses down, of all you're just speaking to the public. And then maybe about five years in, beginning with the sort of the empirical revolution, people like theorists and high-ranking people would start sending us their papers, like obviously trying, could you put this on the blog? And so that was a real shift in the vibe as it were. So speaking of that, I think about different eras of Marginal Revolution. But I think the first era of Marginal Revolution is 03-08. It's kind of the rise of new media, podcasting and blogging. And also the rise of popular economics. So a lot of the younger readers, Timur, may not even be aware of like Freakonomics being released in 2005. And there's just this onslaught of like popular economics books. A reader wrote in and talked about that first, would you agree that that's kind of a distinct era in MR? And what are your thoughts on that time period? Yeah, absolutely. I think it is part of the rise of popular economics. So we sort of timed that well. You know, there were sort of the grandfathers like Stephen Landsberg and people like that. But then with the Freakonomics phenomena. I remember seeing Steve Levitt on The Daily Show and John Stewart like, Freakonomics! Oh my God! It was like so, it was very, very strange. But you knew something had changed. And we covered no macroeconomics then. There just wasn't much to say. There weren't that many interesting debates. That too was part of it. Ben, you started reading MR in that era. How did you discover Marginal Revolution? What's the story there? I can't remember how I discovered it, but I remember being struck by the incredible curiosity on display in the blog, but also the relentless optimism that infused all of the posts. And I think what was striking about that era of the blogosphere was how civil and polite it all was. And that's clearly changed a great deal. And I wonder, when you look back on that era, is there a sort of wistfulness for the tone and the camaraderie of the blogosphere. Now it feels like such a toxic social media ecosystem and so much noisier. You've maintained the tone both of you over all these years, which I think is really impressive. But is there something about that era that you feel like was different in terms of the other blogs you were reading, the commenters, the quality of the comments and so on? When I look back to that era, it seems like a golden age. But I suspect if I had to go back and read everyone's posts, I'd be pretty bored. And the people get more to the point now is a good thing. So there is something about Twitter and other social media that encouraged jabs and the kind of nastiness. But I actually prefer the world we're in now. And the fact that you have all these repeated interactions, it made people nicer. But repeated interactions are themselves a little problematic, you know? Like, well, it's not quite collusive. But maybe it's better that it's sharper, even though we remain sunny and optimistic as always. We get to work with each other. That's true. The only thing, it is a little bit sad. But what has been sad actually is that we're almost the last man standing, right? So all of those blogs, you get older, your friends die. So we haven't quite gotten there. But in terms of blogs, you know, the blogs have just sort of disappeared and faded away. And we are sort of the last ones still remaining from that era. And that's a little bit wistful. Vitalik, Ben, do you consider yourself bloggers? I mean, I have a blog, so I guess so. Versus, say, like an essayist or something, maybe a little more pompous. What is the difference? I don't know. Paul Graham would be an essayist. Yeah, Paul Graham would be an essayist. So I would say Vitalik's a blogger somehow. Interesting. To me, an essay is something you write for, I'm in high school in exchange for getting grids. Ben, what about you? Do you self-identify? I do. But I do think there's, you know, when MR started, when I was blogging in 2004, there were RSS readers. You would read every post. You really felt like you had a connection with the person you were reading. It was a smaller community. When Google killed Google Reader, I felt like that was also distinct. And to a chapter in the blogosphere, because suddenly all the distribution went to Twitter and Facebook, and you didn't read every post anymore. And so I think a lot of people, so I used to consider myself a blogger when I felt like there was a dedicated readership that read every post. But now it feels like you're a publisher on Facebook or something as the identity, and you really have to bow down to those algorithms to ensure that your posts get distribution. I used to, I aggregated a lot of my blogs in those days in Google Reader, but I saved Marginal Revolution as a bookmark because I wanted to check Marginal Revolution. So for some reason, I didn't want it to be in that kind of stream. I wanted to check it as a destination. And I still do, actually. It's because of the frequency. I mean, I think it's so rare for a blog to publish multiple times a day, so that if you click refresh in the browser, you'll actually get new content. You don't have to wait for it to syndicate to RSS. We average four to five a day for most of the history of the blog, and when they come up, it's timed somewhat strategically. And I think it's why... You schedule? Post schedule? Oh, absolutely. Ah, okay. The death of the blogosphere, there's just not that many internet sites you can go to that are at all interesting and also not gated. You've just picked up a lot of people. Oh, they've been to New York Times already, or they've been to financial times, and how many other places can they go? And they come to Marginal Revolution. So you optimize postings based on what? Like Western reader time zone? Like, so we're in India today. You're at something this afternoon. It's the middle of the night in California. Are you thinking about the timing of the... I spread mine out. So they come during the Western work day in North America. But the very first post or two, I have come up at 1 a.m., because this way people in Europe can see it for lunch. But the people waking up, say, at 7 in New York City, that it's been stale for six hours. They don't really know this again. Very generous to the Europeans to give them at least something to overlaunch the read. I think that is one... As someone who has access to Marginal Revolution's backend, I don't think people... I think their model is you guys write the post and smash that publish button. And a lot of these posts are scheduled... It's strange when people ask you, were you up at 1 a.m. in the morning posting that? I'm the opposite. I don't schedule. The published time is the time it's published. Very good. I was going to ask all of you while we're on this, what are some independent blogs that you still read? Or what's your favorite independent blog? Not sub-stack, right? Like, not the analogs, but like an actual blog blog. I was going to say sweet store codex, but then I guess it became a sub-stack. Vitalik, obviously, not just being polite. Scott Sumner, I definitely still read. Yeah, I mean, I got Paul, Paul Krugman, sort of a blog, you know. It's not a blog anymore though. It's just periodic columns. Yeah, periodic columns. Yeah, it doesn't sound like a blog anymore. Yeah, and what does that say? I mean, you guys really have been the last hangers on. Correct. And do you have any plans to change the format? Would you move to sub-stack or something like that? We have no plans to change. Yeah, no. I mean, people ask us periodically to do something else, but should we price it, right? Should we do a sub-stack model, subscription model, and so forth? But we've always kept it free, always kept it open. No ads for a long time. Yeah, and we're happy with that. I mean, that's part of the reason why we're here in Chennai, right? I mean, it's about distributing the ideas. It's about reaching as many people as possible, and we're just much more interested in doing that than, you know, monetizing something. But it also, there's a remarkable consistency to the design and layout, and I think I've been giving grief to Tyler for years on, hey, you might think about, you know, redesigning this portion. And I think the best analogy that I have for MR on the internet is Craigslist. Incredibly successful, incredibly well-trafficked, hasn't changed one pixel in 20-plus years. And weirdly, like for as much as people hate on Craigslist's design, the familiarity is so rare on the internet today. Like companies everywhere are higher brand marketers and they can't help themselves to do a brand refresh, you know, every five years. And the fact that MR, the same two people, same design, same format, same style of posts, I mean, it's kind of stunning in a world of constant change. I think people, like, take refuge in the MR approach. And Alex, didn't you pick the shade of green from George Mason University Green? Yeah, correct. Yeah, that's our, like, little Straussian allegiance to our own school. But people don't know that somehow. George Mason itself has rebranded at least once or twice, I think, in that time. And, you know, the subheadings, small steps toward a much better world. Alex and I argued, so I thought it should say small steps toward a better world. And he thought it should say much better world. And he was totally right. But it's an important point, actually. Do you agree, Alex? I'm not sure. I know you like that point. I like asking people, I'm ambitious, are you? Small steps toward a giant leap forward would have been better parallelism with the moon, but it would have helped with another association. Yes. So, that was the first air. We're talking a little bit about the first air in Marshall Revolution. The second one I would say is 2008 to 2016. You have the great recession, the financial crisis of 08, which after the rise of popular economics, suddenly huge crisis that everyone has to talk about right now. It's clearly the biggest economic issue in the world. And then that leads on to great stagnation and how do we bounce back because it was such a long recovery. What are your general, again, do you agree that that's the right way to think about that era and what do you think of that time in MR history? Yeah, 2008, 2010, the financial crisis, I think was the peak of the blogosphere. And to me, like watching in real time, people trying to figure out what is going on and really not having, actually not having a clue, but seeing people like Tyler, Scott Sumner, Paul Krugman, Mark Tomah really a bunch of macroeconomists, top people, the very best people right in the world were literally in real time struggling to understand what was going on and trading ideas with one another and we were invited to, you know, the Treasury to talk with. Right, sir? Yeah, exactly, yeah. I mean, that was incredible, right? So the bloggers were talking with top Treasury officials and it wasn't that made sense because really so few people understood what was going on and everyone was trying to help one another and kind of get a different perspective on it and so that was really a remarkable time. That was the era when the blogosphere or more generally internet as a tool of intellectual calculation became developed. The notion that it's a kind of computer of its own and that if you learn how to play the keys you could figure out the best sense of what was going on, but not from any one blog. So a lot of MR in those areas you need to think of it as part of this larger like organ of intellectual calculation and we were a cog in that machine. It's not true now, it wasn't true in the earlier popular economics years, but that's how I think of that time. Why isn't it true now anymore? Well, there aren't many other blogs and back and forth between us and Twitter. There's a little of it but I think you can use Twitter. Twitter doesn't count. No, it does. Yeah, but it's not... So it's migrated and I think that's, isn't that kind of sad because we've moved the long form format that you all pioneered on MR allowed for substantive exploration. Do you think the, is the quality of the conversation as good on Econ Twitter today? You get better helpful suggestions about how to say run a particular kind of regression but the debate is much worse. And Econ Twitter has tended to lean somewhat left and it's less balanced than the older boggess fear was. The debate is worse but I would say actually as we're speaking right now we're seeing some things are parallel not with blogs but understanding superconductivity, right? And seeing all of these people around the world trying to replicate these Korean results. That feels to me very similar to the blogosphere in 2008 everyone trying to figure out what is this shadow banking system? Where, what is happening to credit? Why is this when the banks are still giving out credit? Why are people saying we can't get any money? What's going on? Like that was like the replication of the superconductivity today. I believe you started reading MR so in the second era 08 to 2016 is that about when you started reading Margin Revolution? Yeah, sometime between 2010 and 2012 not sure exactly when. And how old were you? Somewhere between 16 and 18 not sure exactly how old. And what were you, what were you reading? Do you remember how you came across Margin Revolution? Kind of paint us a picture of what what was your intellectual kind of thing? So this was the time when I was really getting into what was back then the Bitcoin world because back then Bitcoin was basically the only crypto out there and it was very closely connected with Austrian economics libertarianism rationalism effective altruism like that whole bubble of there's most whole bubbles in there right? Those whole bubbles of movements right? And MR was definitely kind of in the mesh like it was something that I would get I would see links to from other places I think I would I probably would have seen links to it from Twitter as well though I think my my Twitter usage was definitely pretty low back then. We were one of the first places to report on Bitcoin at all. Someone sent it to me as a link and I didn't understand it not just I didn't understand it in a deep way I didn't even understand it in a superficial way but I thought well this sounds interesting you know we're like a forum for new ideas this is a new idea but you didn't buy Bitcoin at the time that's why we're all still here But to see people who began reading us at a younger age and then turn into a metallic or something like that that's one of the biggest thrills we could have and I can possibly have I mean it's incredible we've had students at George Mays I've been reading you since I was 12 and now they're getting their PhDs that's sort of mind-blowing Yeah now these things can make an influence I mean outside of economics the other one was I read Aubrey's book on ending aging when I was around 13 and that's definitely stuck with me pretty much forever since then Would you say you were more influenced by blogs and internet thinking versus books? I definitely did all the standard round of books the internet hive mind we still were tearing internet hive mind told you to read back then like you know I went through mine Rand went through my human action well you know went through all of the standard good stuff at the time I think I like I definitely probably moved over to being more blog driven somewhat later I think near the beginning like I was more seeking out like one or a very small number of big ideas that would explain a whole bunch of things and I guess I became somewhat more intellectually pluralist over time I think to Alex's point about the folks who've been influenced by the Catholic and myself I mean I think it's not just the direct influence but it's also the community of readers there's so many people who are now close friends of mine who first discovered me via MR and now in a very offline way we're good friends and so there's this second and third order effect of these communities and I do think that's what's rare about MR and Jeff you've pointed this out as the richness of the comment section and the sort of its own social network the offline communities that get built the genuine friendships have there been any marriages that have come out? There is an MR marriage. Kathleen and Eric who at the time lived in the state of Texas I think they still do it turns out it's legal in Texas that if you pledge marriage through backtrack feature of blogging which goes back that it counts as a legally binding pledge and they literally legally married on marginal revolution and I think they met through also you guys are like almost beating the blockchain here what is the state of the marriage are they trending well do we know I did it in a few years ago they seemed very happy but that's a while back now then open the door to commenters and readers in readership so let's go into that right now if we snapped our fingers and removed the comment section how would MR change how would it have dealt you know historically or how would if you did it now how do you think it would change I tried doing that for two weeks a few years ago just to be arbitrary and a lot of people complained to me that they no longer had context for the posts so my style in particular is to assume the reader knows everything and give them nothing and they all think it's like strategy it's not it's just like you don't know what I'm talking about that's fine but people readers use the comments to norm and hone in on what I'm saying like to see who gets upset by it for instance when the comments were gone they felt rudderless and did see that was more or less the correct reaction so the only thing worse than a comment section is no comment section I mean the comment section could be hit or miss it usually misses on theory people are not good at that but you can sometimes find the one person in the world who knows more facts about the issue that you're writing about and that you can give the blog to kind of bubble that person to the top who has this really specific knowledge about this tiny tiny area of the world and then you can learn from them that I think is very valuable about the comments do you guys read the yeah twitter responses to the mr posts no I don't if I see it on twitter I would read it but yeah if it's at Tyler Cowan I do but if it's at margreb I don't know if it's at my mentions we would look on the blog we look at the comments but we don't get upset by them it's almost become a reddit style repository of knowledge as it relates to travel so one of the things that I've learned to do when searching the internet for stuff is just to add the word reddit to the end of a query to avoid all the SEO crap at the top of the results and just get right to the reddit page on a given topic and for certain travel resources because you know how would Tyler know where to eat and you know middle know where but after 20 years both of you have there's so many these open comment threads about food recommendations hotel recommendations things to do in Singapore things to do and Bolivia wherever it's kind of remarkable and so I found myself years later just going on to mr searching some country or city and using that to guide travel planning I do that too and it might have been my post but the mr search function is the most underrated part of the blog I think and that you call it the mr search function which is what essential Tyler Frey is what you've been using since the beginning so if marginal revolution has been going for 20 years you're posting you know three five times a day for 20 years so now people jumping in just in the past couple of years it's almost like the Simpsons I mean where do you even start you know is it is a 15 year old worst blog post ever is there a greatest hits list anyone no I've deliberately not done that for one thing I might change my mind but I don't want people to feel there's some easy way of skimming the cream they just have to keep on riding along with us I hope it's too easy make it work for the insight exactly so like it's not about them it's about me and Alex this is the it's not the blog they want to read exactly so but you have no plans to somehow kind of get out of that flow model and provide kind of the best of or the stock because at first it was relatively easy to kind of get the stock of them or now it's just a river you've got to jump in and let it carry you away let people play around with the MR search function maybe we'll do a book or something like that but you know I had looked at this at one point and just to get like a PDF of the blog post like sort of read them and see them it broke all of the it was just too big it was just too big so we had to sort of do it year by year and you know I mean you think about that that's like I don't know thousands of posts and the whole thing just to read it all to find the best posts it's going to take some time I wonder if Chad GPT is going to change it like what happens if you type in like what does marginal revolution say about what you do in Singapore does that work at some point it will yeah I think some point soon in the next two years hmm maybe the MR search function is not as important well it may become less important but until now it remains the most underrated feature and it's still easier to use than say GPT 4 it's just right there and it's free and it's pretty quick at some point we'll be able to ask even for a city that Tyler has never been to we could say what restaurant would Tyler Cowan like GPT 4 is pretty good at that I do that actually fairly often where would you tell Tyler Cowan to go eat that's the prompt you need this works better for you than for me I think if I did this it would just answer oh Vitalik Buterin would obviously want to go to a decentralized restaurant or like Eastern European food right it'll take decentralized it'll say yeah I like eating cryptographically verifiable hash it'll tell you to go to a chain restaurant yeah that's that's a good jokes guys just off the dome alright favorite MR commenters I'll throw out one notable one Barkley J. Rosser he passed away in early 2023 when he passed away you called him out as a long time commenter and I went and looked he left nearly 4,000 comments on Marginal Revolution the first in May 2005 and the last in December of 2022 so he that averages to about a comment every other day for 17 and a half years he was a very good polymath super smart but like every 50th comment or so he just called his intellectual opponent the total moron followed by some obscenities and then he'd be back to totally cool and speed it again out of the system every 50 comments that's right what did this guy do did he have a job or professor he was a professor of economics but chaos theory, mathematician Soviet economy Soviet economy yes well here's your chance to kind of lift up the best commenters so who in your mind right now or throughout the history of MR who stands out to you as a good commenter right now sure it's the best commenter I don't know who he or she is probably it's a he given our comment section but just a lot of concrete points especially about the healthcare medical system yeah probably a doctor very knowledgeable sure it was good Dan 1111 or 111 I don't know which one but it definitely changes over the years not everybody has comments long you know so it changes but it's like the intellectual calculation of the comment section there will be lists of comments and maybe every comment is bad but actually in the aggregate you learn a lot from like triangulating against it well here's what these people would say well adding the upvote feature to me was like long overdue but it substantially improved the quality of the comment section okay the reddit style like being able to just see the top comments versus waiting throughout all I think it's been a big improvement there's a lot of manipulation though I think it's an improvement but people coordinating among their friends and family to upload their comment and manipulate the right script I believe wow it's possible to do but it's a sign about seriously a free time writing scripts to hack the comment section of MR wow the most critical people are our biggest fans in my view it's like you're bothering to go after us I feel really flabby the opposite of love is not hate it's indifferent it's very close to you there are people who are you know very invested in the maintenance and operation of the marginal revolution comment system and so much to the chagrin of some people you can put any name you want and people who have probably commented maybe as long as Rosser did want sort of their identity protected and it really bothers some people when they can't do that and anyone can claim to be who they are have you thought about giving people that ability or changing in a way that it's a little less gameable in that sense if people register it can be hacked or they maybe they don't trust us so I don't want to force people to have these identities this is one fellow actually when he was a kid he trademarked the name bill he has IP in the name bill and there's another bill who comes along violates this guy's property rights so the first bill calls the second one fake bill and they slug this out and first bill the guy with all the IP rights to the name he's convinced fake bill is actually equestrian and he writes us and tells us look at the posting of the timing and look at what it was it must be you guys need to get rid of fake bill and there's no grand conspiracy it's just there are many bills let's go back to eras of MR so we did 06 to 2016 and I think the third era of MR is 2016 to 2020 which is popular the rise of populism Trump it's a smaller period because of covid and things that happened around 2020 but what about that specific time both for MR and again the kind of intellectual discourse online it definitely fell and the thing which marked it to me was actually our most commented I believe it's our most commented on post was just Tyler's post and it just said Sarah Palin that was it that was it and that is the most commented was the title of the post McCain had just picked her I didn't heard of her I was very innocent and the comment section just went nuts and everybody has got an opinion and it was a little distressing in the sense that that's precisely the sort of thing that Tyler and I don't want to do but at the same time if you don't give the comment section an opportunity to speak on the so-called issue of the day they will take some other post which is on something entirely different and say but what about Sarah Palin you know so you have to give them that outlet that's right these sound like children I think we're the children we're giggling about them and they may be like disturbed sometimes or just very smart people but I think in this era in this era of the political discourse the level-headedness of MR which sounds both truly reflective of your natures but also an intentional norm that you try to establish was as needed as ever the cool-headedness even in the Trump era I can't recall any post that were over the top in their emotion we had some very good think pieces in that era I thought both of us what is a think piece like longer about politics but not candidates about politics at a conceptual level what is going on here how can this be happening sort of pieces MR's market share of my mind is definitely increased during that period I think definitely other spaces declining in quality and MR didn't see what's great credit which I think was great now kind of a short lived era 2020 obviously pandemic and then somewhat resulting from that though some of this stuff was ceded before we have these big essays on progress state capacity libertarianism but also of course pandemic response so maybe we separate those two but COVID and just becoming similar to the financial crisis similar to the other examples like this where everyone's learning in public everyone's trying to figure out what's going on what was that like for you two we were stuck inside so we put up more links would have 10 rather than 5 or 6 definitely a strange era you know I found myself I was invited to give this talk to the White House domestic policy and I'm using incentives to accelerate vaccine development so I get on the call and turns out that they had invited me and Michael Cramer who's the number one world expert on precisely this question and I was very direct you know you got to do this you got to do this is when the economy was losing like $200 billion $250 billion right and so there was almost nowhere you could go wrong right so where I was promoting an operation warps what turned into operation warps being saying you look you got to spend some money here you know I said look I'm known as a conservative free market economist guy I've never said these words in my entire life before but now is the time to throw money at the problem and Michael Cramer turned out was in complete agreement which was good it gave me a lot of credibility he's sort of more soft spoken but that was a good teamwork and then afterwards they invited us they asked us to write a report and then Michael got you know a bunch of other people like Susan and Chris Snyder a top economist and we wrote this report promoting something like what became operation warps speed I have no idea what influence we had but we certainly put it out there and so then I became because of the blog I sort of became the spokesperson for some of these ideas first doses first first doses first and fractional dosing and you know using incentives operation warps speed all that kind of stuff and then what was peculiar I think strange so I had that role and then Tyler started fast grants so we both had this tremendous kind of involvement in one way or another but in a very different respect yeah and more became a kind of information clearing house with other blogs gone clearly there was twitter for the pandemic but if you wanted one website where you didn't have to scroll or fend off other things we made that the place to go it's amazing to me in retrospect how many people have held that against us a lot of what we did was just covering different facts held what against you that we gave so much attention to the pandemic they think we're like to the fake pandemic oh I see gotcha the fake pandemic yeah the one where the vaccines give the people that's that thing remember it is I hadn't really thought about it in that way that margin revolution enabled both of you to have applied you know real world responses to the pandemic but in separate ways to do your independent thing you're both on the blog obviously covering this stuff getting your ideas out there but then Alex you're much more giving policy makers a very specific idea of something to do and Tyler goes for let's get grants out there as quickly as we can and fast grants raised over 50 million dollars and most of the donors were MR readers and I think in part they felt they trusted me in the operation because they had known of MR for so long and they knew Alex was doing operation work speed and it felt very credible and I wonder if this is a good time to talk about the differences between the two of you and the way that you write and the way that you engage with the world because you're co-authors and obviously share so much but the differences are sometimes amusing to see so I was telling Alex earlier I always know when I'm in my RSS reader looking at MR posts that I have to click on the ones where the capitalization is proper in the title of the post because I know Alex will capitalize the words in a post where as Tyler will do lowercase words in the title then obviously Alex posts infrequently, longer form usually Tyler's relentless daily output say some talk about some of the differences between the two of you in terms of how you think how you write and are these subtle differences that show up at the end are revealing of any deeper difference in your approach to life world view, work style, etc. You wrote a post on this, right? Do you remember what you said? So I said something like if the post has got five different explanations for the same phenomena then it's a Tyler post. If it has one explanation simplifying everything down then it's an Alex post if you don't understand what the post says it's a Tyler post. If you do understand what the post says and you hate it I think that that rules pretty well the way I put it is that the first thing I do when coming to a problem is to rip away as much complexity as I possibly can and get down to what I think is the nut of the problem and try and deal with that while the first thing that Tyler does is think about, let's think about the five or six or seven things which could influence this and then we'll work with those seven different things and try and come up with a solution and so we're very different in that way but then if you sort of force me to add in some complexity and what about this, what about this this period of time and then if you were to force Tyler to take away some complexity which is really hard to do so you have to get Tyler, you have to gang up on him with like Brian Kaplan and Garrett Jones people at lunch, if you gang up on Tyler and make him strip away the complexity and you make me add complexity then actually we come to the same place but from very different thinking styles and how about the cadence of the output I mean Alex are you ever like tempted or inspired to publish more frequently or Tyler have you ever thought about doing twice a week or what's that about the difference No, I have no plan on changing one thing I try to do in many of my posts is to mix moods so I presented this notion of mood affiliation, people are like optimistic or pessimistic or they have their loyalty to the mood and that's usually a cognitive mistake and I found if you mix moods in a post you can say things that are entirely correct and people will just get angry they'll think you're confusing them you're kind of messing with their minds and this is deliberate but I think it's trying to teach people a lesson you know once I wrote the book The Great Stagnation the title Great Stagnation, okay but the whole last chapter of the book is about how we're going to get out of it all these wonderful breakthroughs will be coming because of the internet no one ever mentions that last chapter they only take one mood away from a book so I'm happy with the post if I feel I've sent mixed moods and what I'm saying I think is true and it's going to bug people and confuse them then I'm like yes interesting it reminds me of the post that I wrote last week on Worldcoin where I think what are the things that happened is that the people who are pro-Worldcoin basically said look the haters are crazy, Vitalik explains it really clearly and then the people who are anti basically said look here's the section where he outlines what the four crazy risks are and people it seems like everyone just kind of walked away yeah I hope some people did get interesting information but definitely many walked away just certain that their existing opinion is correct which is unfortunately the default response to most writing anywhere so do you people don't to answer your question Ben it's not about being tempted me being tempted to write more often the production function just doesn't encompass that ability and people they don't believe Tyler reads as much as he does but he honestly does I only cover a small fraction of what I read that's a funny thing I mean it's true Tyler skims but the way I would put it is this is that he very quickly is able to find something in a book which he doesn't know and then he reads that section but what this means is that the more Tyler reads the faster he can read because he just skips the stuff he already knows so I mean he's just a unique ability and that is there's nobody else I think in the world who can produce as much original interesting new content as Tyler so I'm very grateful for that since I feel I don't have to feed the blog quite as much speaking of reading let's move to a segment I'm calling Mysteries of MR so a couple times I think from like 06 to 08 you hosted book clubs there were maybe two or three there was a Keynes book club on the general theory and it just stopped halfway through why did it stop I'm not sure I remember I was happy with it and the comments section on this post was often quite good it stopped at chapter 12 and your last post is basically a long quote of the chapter excerpt of the chapter and then you say a lot of insights in here it's the best chapter of the general theory so maybe I just felt it would be going downhill okay not a satisfactory I feel like I'm the only one in the world who's wondering I was participating at the time and to me it just ended and it was never spoken of again maybe 13 will be coming soon who knows why no more book clubs comment section is worse I think we're also not in an era of that many seminal books so there aren't books I'm tempted to cover I think there's a large number of excellent history books coming out but they don't make sense for book clubs you need some theory in a book for it to fit into a book club so if everyone can say something what do you think is the last book that was even on the level of things like human action or the stuff that animated a lot of people in the last century I feel there was a 15 to 20 year period maybe starting with Jared Diamond Consturms and Steele at least 30 or 40 books and I couldn't remember which was the last but things like The Red Queen and many different free economics and everyone had to read all those books to be intellectually literate I don't think we're in that time anymore I've definitely found for myself having a harder and harder time answering the question what's the most interesting book that you've read I just mainly read history especially if you read them in clusters or clumps I'll read about the history of Ireland for 69 months but there's not any single book like oh you have to read this book and everyone's still trying to write books like the Jared Diamond kind of book I'm not saying they're all bad books but I don't think they're really succeeding in grabbing anyone's attention it feels played out that genre do you think we're just in less of a many small ideas age the big ideas are things people do like large language models Ethereum and so on and those are the big ideas they're fantastic but they're not books in a sense the books were a poor substitute for the actual big ideas that's the way I look at it I'd rather have the big ideas if superconductivity comes through how many books is that worth so for a long time you've made the claim that you've never missed a day of posting on Margin Revolution it's not a claim it's a fact I've often wondered if anyone checked that I've checked too and it's not true what? Alex your first post was on August 21st there was no post on August 22nd so Tyler you hadn't started yet so maybe you can still keep this claim but there is one day that I've only been able to find where there was no MR post have there been any close calls like playing got delayed it's 11.50pm the post hasn't gone up or is it a schedule? it's not actually a thing that we try I've evolved into trying but I just have had a lot to say yeah it's just Tyler's natural pace do you have any memory of so you wrote the first post on August 21st and then Tyler you just started two days later do you have any memory of why Alex started first or there was the two day delay? we were doing all these practice posts thinking no one would read them and we would just get up to speed and then we learned people were writing us like oh I loved your post just like oh someone did that wondering oh what did we say yesterday and you have to also understand Tyler is not that good at technology yes so I set the blog up so then I had to here's your password Tyler here's how you post so it took Tyler a week or two before he really hit stride I still come to Alex with very simple questions how does this work? and yet at the same time you've been a more active user of ChadGPT than probably the great majority of other people I don't think I'm good at the technological side of it the conceptual side maybe there are things I grasp because of my background in the humanities that would be it let's move to probably the last official segment of the conversation but this is the recurring segments and memes of marginal revolution so I'll throw out a few that I've noticed and Vitalik and Ben you jump in with any you know but throughout the history of the blog these recurring things best sentence I read today a very early one claims my Russian wife laughs at you won't let me call her Russian anymore that's one reason that one disappeared sentences to ponder shouted from the rooftops pictures of puffins and Alex I don't know how long you've done this but at the end of the year now you do a stats rundown where you show off the most popular post marginal revolution and to me when I read it I think this is Alex's way of saying like I don't write nearly as many posts as Tyler but I usually have the top raking posts on marginal revolution is that am I correct in that or is it you're just providing that's fair yeah but to be also to be fair to have the top post which I don't always do by any means that's not necessarily a good thing right that goes back to you know if you understand the post and you hate it it's an Alex post so those tend to get a lot of comments I think one of my favorite points of levity in MR is when I think Tyler you once wrote a post after all these assorted links of course which is a standby on the blog one day you just did assorted link and the whole post was just number one with a link like what a clever reversal but I think it'd be remiss if we're talking about memes Jeff I feel like we have to honor the third co-author of the blog here with us in this conversation that's Tyrone and he's given a lot to marginal revolution over the years and just curious Tyler be honest with us where is he what have you done with him he lives in the attic Tyrone there hasn't been that much Tyrone in the last six or seven years and I think the reason for that is the real world itself has become so weird and bizarre that what is a Tyrone post or what is funny in a Tyrone post has changed and it's somehow more tragic and I would like to let Tyrone out of the attic but I also find it's a lot of emotional energy to write a Tyrone post much more than to write a Tyler post because you have to keep it within certain bounds but you have to let the juices flow and that's really hard it has to be plausible enough but people should not think as indeed they shouldn't that Tyrone's view is Tyler's so that's never true and Tyrone's for the uninitiated Tyrone's worldview or essential style is what for those who haven't been part of the blog for a long time they've heard about Tyrone only in the abstract how would you characterize his I'm so close to Tyrone I think we have to let Alex answer that question I mean I will say Tyrone will come to lunch but he never announces himself so the way that Tyrone operates is he will say something outrageous then everyone at the lunch conversation will try and I would argue overcome and they don't give a lot of good arguments for this it's very disturbing because then you go home and oh my god Tyrone is messing with my mind what was wrong it seems totally wrong and yet the argument seems logically correct so Tyrone is a troublemaker he's troubled so that's what I would say and Tyrone uses his gifts to do evil deeds Tyler uses his gifts to benefit the world and to create fast grants and immersion ventures and to stimulate all kinds of people Tyrone uses his gifts to confound people and confuse them and set them on wrong paths so we want to keep Tyrone pretty boxed and we want it to name me Tyrone that's where the name comes from and my mother refused she's like Tyrone that's a terrible name she held firm, I became Tyler but it's some kind of modal reality in the David Lewis sense and every now and then readers should be allowed to peek behind that curtain we should all I suppose reflect in ourselves at this moment of who is our inner Tyrone and how do we get in touch with our shadow that's part of the point of the post is maybe cognitive behavioral therapy to give your negative thoughts a name and say oh that's Tyrone talking that's not Jeff so maybe I'll steal yours I feel like Strosianism is a meme in itself I think a lot of people misread that I feel I've expressed forthright opinions on more topics possibly than any economist ever and it is true that when I write a post I hardly ever explain the references it's super informationally dense partly doing so bores me partly kind of mess with people's minds a bit but if they know all the references it's actually crystal clear and there's plenty of topics here's what Tyler thinks and I say it, I mean hundreds, thousands of topics and people think I'm the Strosian I tell people like how to find the Strosian others alright Alex okay some general questions to close how much time per week right now do each of you spend like directly writing thinking about the blog all of it but look writing it takes way less time than people think way less alright let's say just writing writing like just actually crafting the post getting them ready to go I don't know two hours a day yeah I mean when I write it does take some time because I think especially when you have a lot of readers and you think or I think you know if I can save a reader a few seconds of time and you do the you know expected altruism sort of calculation where we got thousands of readers so if I can you know my a minute for me and save them you know hours yeah Tyler just likes to get it down as your audience has grown is there a sense that did the stakes seem higher to spend more time sort of thinking of reviewing posts perhaps even self-censoring like gosh in the old days I would have published this but now that I've got all these influential readers I can't just you've got to resist that and there's a few recent times where I did resist that and I'm glad I did but for me a key thing is like can you ever sit there and still giggle and if that disappears I feel I'm doing something wrong but I definitely can still sit there and giggle yeah I wouldn't say we self-censor I don't feel I self-censor except in the following sense there's just a bunch of topics that I think the world just does not need to know my opinion right a wouldn't be useful and wouldn't be useful for them wouldn't be useful for me so like you know what why bother so there are things like that so obviously what do you think about this topics yeah floor is yours so the blog has allowed you to gain so much influence notoriety what's kept you at Mason and Mercatus have you had offers what's kept you at this kind of institutional home I've had good offers or potential offers but support for what I'm doing great people to work with Alex most of all but not only everyone at Mercatus and where it is I think it's the best location in the United States to be for a number of reasons at least for me it's been great I go to economics conferences and you know you go hear some talks and they're often boring and then I find myself it's bizarre but I find myself I want to go hear Tyler's talk or Robin Anderson's talk or Brian Kaplan's and like I can speak to these guys every day right why would I possibly do this and yet it often turns out they're the most interesting people you know on the agenda and you know Tyler can talk to Tyler every single day but you'll go present at a conference and he'll say things I've never heard him say before so it's not like you know I say Tyler is like a heraclitian thinker you know you can never enter the same waters twice because every single day it's something different and so what a joy what a pleasure what a honor you know it is for me to be in a department with just an amazing group of thinkers who stimulate and you know you try and just keep up even a little bit and it's incredible we never get sick of it and George Mason's a good school for free speech definitely yes we feel supported there what are the types of blog posts that you think have generated the most impact in the sense of cultural resonance or influence are they like the very prescriptive policy things are they the philosophical treatises what do you think is it one poster is it actually more of the the chorus it's very hard to know but two things I would cite one is my post on state capacity libertarianism which is still a good statement of where I am philosophically I think that's held up well and when I coined the term that's the case where I was sitting there giggling like oh this term is so absurd no one will ever use it so it's just right and people still use it but I wrote a post about emergent ventures we're at the emergent ventures winners meet up and I outlined the philosophy behind emergent ventures I don't think it's our most read post I don't think it's our most cited post but a lot of donors read that post and were persuaded and without that post I don't think we would have emergent ventures as a large thing so given how much talent we now have over 400 winners have come through emergent ventures that's like a super influential post even though at the surface level it may not look that way we try and keep either increase the Overton window or try and stop the Overton window from shutting down I think some of the COVID posts like on first doses first and things like that even though in the United States we didn't do first doses first but Britain and Canada did hopefully I may have had some influence there but what I think is interesting is that when we did monkeypox CDC went along with first doses first for monkeypox so that's what I mean by sort of keeping that Overton window so even though like no one's going to cite Tabrock said this on first doses for COVID it made it possible for people to think that this is an idea we should be thinking about right and so the next time the virus a virus came around you have a bigger pot of ideas from which to pull and this idea which once seemed totally radical now seems hey maybe we can try this so I think that has been on first doses first there was a major decision maker from an actual country who just sent me a message like hey you guys really mean this and I said yes and the next day it happened no I'm not saying it happened because of that only thing but people are really listening to an extent that is scary sometimes I think there are two vectors of influence from MR one was the specific Jeff post specific ideas he put forth in the world that had a real impact but there's another vector of influence which I think is more subtle but it's probably how I would identify being influenced because if you ask me what are the five posts that have most influenced me I probably can tell you the five but there's this general mood a temperament an approach to the world a way of thinking about ideas, a level of headiness that kind of like a fish in water after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of posts just seep into every aspect of the world view and way of thinking about the world and I think that's the really profound legacy of MR to me as a reader hard to put my finger on exactly how or where I think it's ultimately a much deeper level of influence on perhaps a smaller number of people but it's really really incredible and I'm so grateful for that Before I close Vitalik any general questions you had? Other things you're curious about? So how did it happen that the two of you are on the same blog and Brian and Robin are often there on separate playgrounds could things have ended up differently? I can speak to that and this is the origin story of MR correct me if I'm getting anything wrong but Alex came into my office one day and he said we ought to write a textbook and I said something like that's a great idea Alex but first we need to write a blog and become much better known and then we'll write a textbook and without Alex I wouldn't have done it and I love Brian, I love Robin but I wouldn't have done it with them and whether Alex might have done something with them he could speak to and he supported their writing a lot but I don't feel it meshes with mine somehow the thing that Ben just outlined this kind of cumulative vision of a way to be I think Alex's take on that is different than mine but I feel his doesn't interfere with mine and it supports it and compliments it and for Brian and Robin it doesn't and that's why I didn't pick them I think that's great we both have a pluralist ways of thinking in a slightly different way so I agree with that and it's worked well for the blog Tyler is obviously posting every day and I'm giving people a little bit more of the red meat which sort of keeps them coming back as well so I think and we've done the book we've done Martial Revolution University together so we have a long history of projects which have come out pretty good we've worked together now 33 years I believe well before MR we wrote a whole bunch of papers together what would be the reason to end marginal revolution death senility not superconductivity though would senility actually end marginal revolution I guess a sufficient amount of it would well you could take away the keys for me Jeff the responsibility lies in my hands congratulations on entering your third decade of marginal revolution I think I speak for Ben and Vitalik and myself and all the readers that we look forward to continue reading and to hearing your ideas and seeing your influence in the world so thank you Alex thank you Tyler, thank you Ben and Vitalik and thank you all for listening let's see another 20 years thank you