 Hello everyone and welcome to the special episode of Conversations with Tyler. This is the 2023 retrospective where we take a look back at the previous year in conversations. Look back at Tyler's pop culture picks from 2013 and other topics besides. My name is Jeff Holmes. I produce Conversations with Tyler. And Tyler, welcome to the show. It's always such a pleasure to do Conversations with Tyler with you, Jeff. And this is an extra, extra special episode because this is the 200th episode of Conversations with Tyler. 200th, that's a lot, yeah. We released 33 original episodes this year. That's the most we've ever done by far. When we started the first, I had no idea it was a podcast. It was with Peter Thiel. I just thought it was a one-off event. Yeah, I was reflecting. Obviously when you go and look at these, review the year in Conversations with Tyler, you start thinking about the origin story and it started as an event series. I don't know if we've talked about that on the podcast. I've definitely talked about it with listeners, but this got a slow start where it started as an event series. It was kind of sporadic, a little slap-dash. And eventually it came in clusters where we kind of do a few and then there'd be a break. Then it became a once a month thing and now it's once every two weeks. But this year, with all the in-between episodes that we released, it became almost a three per month year of Conversations with Tyler. Did you feel it? Yes, you know, ideally a podcast I think should be once every day. That's not possible for a number of reasons, but there is something socially optimal about that, that you wake up in the morning and you know there's a podcast for you and you only listen, say, to the 11 a year you care about the most, but that will be a different 11 for every person. Are you ready? You talked to me about another podcast idea before this. That's not the first time you've brought up the daily podcast. I, maybe soon that will be, you know, everyone will have their A.I. assistant and everyone will have their personal podcast and it'll be up to the listener to decide who they want to spend time with. No, it'll be up to the A.I. You'll ask your A.I. Which are the new podcasts that I want to hear? Yeah, exactly. So, you're looking at the list of conversations in front of you. 33 original episodes. Let's do some numbers. Most popular episode of the year. Which ones do you think were the most listened to episodes of the year? I never have a good sense of this. I suspect the one with Jonathan GPT Swift was either the most or the least listened to, but I don't know which. And maybe Rick Rubin was pretty popular. Tyler, you could do better than that. Look at this list again and say who was the one who CWT listeners would absolutely turn out and listen to in droves. I don't know, Paul Graham? Paul Graham, yeah, by far. GPT Swift, I think, was just kind of middling. So it was neither like an under performer, but it certainly didn't overperform. But Paul Graham was absolutely the top this year. And just broke first day listens, first week listens, overall downloads, like a clear favorite. That tells us something about our audience, right? Yes, it does. And also the paucity of Paul Graham interviews. That's right, there's only a few. So he was easy to prepare for. There's not much you can do. You read all his essays or reread them, rather. And you're done. And then you study 18th century British art. I hope that leads to something. So he was maybe the easiest prep. Who was the most difficult prep this year? Well, Jonathan GPT Swift is difficult because you have to read most of Swift. Who else here? Anna Kay was very difficult because 17th century England has an enormously large literature. Noam Dwarman was difficult because learning the history of comedy cannot really be done by reading. Lazarus Lake, I mostly prepared for that using GPT because he hasn't written much. There's not that much written on ultramarathons. So you keep on asking GPT for background context and then you get somewhere. And then the Kenyan trilogy, the three from the Nairobi area, especially the two Kenyans. I'd never met them. I didn't really know who they were. So it's completely improvised. That's like both the easiest and the hardest prep. Other than Paul Graham, most popular episodes this year coming in second was Reid Hoffman. His second appearance talking about AI. I took a skim through that one and, you know, AI is fraught because things are changing every day. Developments are rapid, but that one was more conceptual. I think it has held up really well. Did you have any reflections on that now? I don't know what seven months after it was recorded. Well, I promised Reid to do another one with him a year or two from now because everything will be so different. So the fact that we could keep on doing this podcast every month and it would be interesting every month is what's important there. Yeah. And then third in popularity this year was Noam Chomsky. So people turn out for Chomsky. Some people, you know, if you look at like the MR comments, people complain, you know, they're like, oh, Chomsky is terrible on some of these subjects. Why didn't Tyler challenge him more? What were your thoughts? Where were you trying to get out of Chomsky? He's doing a lot of interviews now. He's 94. His birthday is actually tomorrow. We're recording this on December 6th according to Wikipedia. Maybe it's hallucinating. But what were you trying to get out of it? Well, that's a kind of unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don't even want to do it, but you feel if I don't do it, I'll regret not having done it. Just like we didn't get to chat with Charlie Munger in time. Though he's far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is. I thought half of Chomsky was quite good. And the other half was beyond terrible. But that's okay. And people, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner. And just, well, they had this picture. What's it like? Tyler talking with Chomsky. And then they get to see it and maybe recoil. But that's what they came for, like a horror movie. Yeah. The engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying I turned it off. I couldn't listen to it. But actually, most people listened to it did actually probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode on average people listen to. How can you turn it off? What does that say about you? Like, were you surprised? You thought that Chomsky had become George Stigler or something? No. You never know. You know, once you get into your 90s, who knows what might happen there. Speaking of which, so you mentioned Charlie Munger. We had an interview scheduled with Charlie Munger in January of 2024. His birthday, I believe, is in December. He was going to be 100 years old when we would have interviewed him. Recently, Henry Kissinger died. I didn't want to do him, by the way. I felt there was no good way I could handle it. So some of what he did was very good, but a lot was very bad. And I just figured stay away. I think he might have done one with us two or three years earlier. But it didn't interest me. And then this morning, actually, it was announced that Norman Lear died. The television... Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, he was 101 years old and pretty active until at least a year or two ago. Do you have any thoughts on centenarians? And I mean, it seems it's a weird coincidence that in the past few weeks we've had people who have been very active, Kissinger Munger, Norman Lear making it to 100 or at least near 100. We need to get one on the show. I mean, who's the best candidate at this point, Vernon Smith? Probably, yes. Let's see, 96, 97? Yeah. So if he shows his worth as an economist over the next few years, maybe we'll give him an invite. Warren Buffett's not that far behind Munger. I think he's in his early 90s. He's harder to get, I think. Yeah. So I also did something this year that I haven't looked at it before. And I looked, I mentioned the engagement for the Chomsky episode was good. I looked and just saw like who was actually the highest engagement. So who actually, on average, most people listen to the most and got through most of the episode. You mean relative to total numbers or absolute? Sort of asked the question of like, on average, how much of an episode do people listen to? Okay. So conditional and starting. Yeah. Is that Catherine Rundell? It's not. The two-winner, it's a very tight field. It's not like there's some runaway winner. These are all very, very similar. But if you look at the top, the top for retention, as it's called, Brad DeLong, number one. Okay. And Seth Godin. So as a measure of engagement, like the ones that people really tended to stick to to the end, those were the two at the top of the pack. I would think Vichy Anand might have won that also because there's plenty of reasons why you might not care. But you know up front, it's a bit like Chomsky. Like, he's a chess player. You're going to get chess. Yeah. If you don't want chess, don't even start. Yeah. All right. I'm going to move on to underrated. And I'll tip my cap a little bit here and say that Vichy was actually one of my picks for underrated episodes this year. He kind of, he did fine. But actually, I think his engagement was lower. His download numbers were lower. And I think it was, as you said, that a lot of people looked and said, I don't know anything about chess. So they either didn't listen to it at all or they gave up on it at some point in the interview. And that's one of my picks for underrated episodes this year because I'm not a big chess guy, but there was some really good stuff that Vichy had in there about competition being hard on yourself. In particular, I think his anecdote about being a bad loser and saying like he takes defeat probably the hardest of anyone he knows. He has just enough composure to get through the post-game, the post-match press conference. But then he goes to his hotel room and he's just self-flagellating in there. It's maybe our very best episode on human psychology of the whole 200. Yeah. And he was also just so delighted to talk about chess. And not have to dumb it down. So that was one of my picks. I agree. What would your picks be for underrated? We went through the most popular ones, but what do you think underrated? Well, I don't know how these are rated, but I thought Lazarus Lake was one of the best episodes. Absolutely. He just captured something about him. Maybe, I don't know how many listeners that had. Catherine Rundell is one of my all-time favorites. Rick Rubin was a great deal of fun for me and a real honor. Noam Dorman, I thought we had very good rapport and back and forth. But they're all underrated, I have to say, right? Lazarus Lake, that was one of those episodes. Every once in a while, there's an episode where as soon as you listen to it, you think, this is really special. I would say like Richard Brum was one of those episodes. Yes. And I had the experience listening to the Lazarus Lake episode similar to that where I was like, this is an old timer for me. There was something about it where the way that he was, the topics he was talking about, it was actually kind of heartwarming and affirming, but there was also some good stuff in there about competition and self-improvement. And I had a number of other people reach out to me, or they've said it on Twitter, they've told me in person that Lazarus Lake was like their favorite by far. So I think clear number one pick, Lazarus Lake, if you haven't listened to that one, check it out. It's really good. The ones you mentioned are great. The other one that I would throw out there is Glenn Lowry. Travel-wise it did fine, but if you haven't listened to that one, it has one of the most unexpected kind of affecting endings of any conversation with Tyler episode where you ask him about death, and he gives a very genuine from-the-heart answer. And it's really compelling, and I wonder why it's not a typical Tyler question. I don't think this is one of your talent questions, but why were you compelled to ask him about death? It's one of our most moving episodes, but I think it is a Tyler question. How is it you feel you're going to face death? And I want to ask more people that one. Yeah. It's hard to be yes in response to that question without sounding like an idiot. So that makes it a Tyler question. And you get a sense of how thoughtful a person is and how they respond on the fly, because I don't think too many people have a ready answer. They're not used to hearing that in an interview. Oh, and by the way, you know, President Carter, how do you feel you're going to face your own death, right? It doesn't come up that much. I'll go ahead and ask it. How do you feel you're going to face death? I think it will come suddenly, and I won't be faced with that much of an issue, but that could be a delusion. That's my hope. I feel like the hope is that it will come suddenly and you won't be aware of it. I have a fear, like a lot of people, that if I know death is coming, that there will be moments I will be very at peace with it and moments where I'll completely lose composure. And my hope is that I can actually have my final moments be one where I have composure and not be in a panic. But I don't feel like I have a way of ensuring that in any way. Robin Hansen has looked into this a bit, and he tells me in people's final moments, they're typically very, very weak and just have way less of reactions, period, than they think they're going to. And it's not that much of a question. It's his empirical finding. Okay, some solid empirics on that, too. That's waged my panic about it. Solid empirics remain underrated, I would say. So those were our picks for underrated. I definitely encourage all of you. We had a listener meetup earlier this year, and I was surprised to find that, I've heard this sense that many listeners use this episode as a way to, as an episode guide of sorts, to go back and check out episodes if they miss them. Some people actually kind of hold them in reserve and use this as a guide. So definitely check out the episodes that we've mentioned, but I would be curious to hear what other people's picks were as well. So let us know. I'm curious to know. There's definitely a lot on this list. I think that we also got feedback that especially in the second half of the year, people really felt like the show was on a roll and it was just like really good interviews, really interesting people, episode after episode after episode. We didn't have many bad episodes. But I won't say how many we had. John the GPT Swift, that guy was just hard to deal with. Well, he had a commanding knowledge of history. You can say that for him. Absolutely. Last year on the retrospective, I asked you, I think it was in the context of asking what you'll be working on next. And you mentioned that you had a book that you were working on about top economists, who's the best economist. And you indicated that it wouldn't... It was kind of dependent on publishing things like maybe the paperback of talent would be coming out. So you're not sure, but it was basically ready. And now here we are a year later, and that book has arrived. Mercatus ended up publishing it in a non-traditional fashion. It's called Goat, and it's available all the time. And why does it matter? So you haven't done a ton of interviews or press about it. There's the Econ Talk with Russ Roberts that released in late November, I think. But tell us that story. Why were you compelled? You have this manuscript. Why were you compelled to release it in the way that you did? The site is econgoat.ai. And most of the book I wrote during the depths of the pandemic. I didn't know when a book could come out in any form. How the pandemic would evolve. But I thought, well, this is timeless if it doesn't come out for a number of years. That's not a problem. So by the time things were real, I thought, well, I don't know what to do with the book. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to do with it. So by the time things were reopening, most of the book was written. And I just thought, well, I'm going to sit on this for a while, improve it slowly, and there'll be a chance at some point to do something really interesting with it. And then GPT-4 came along and I started thinking, well, this should be the first book published in GPT-4. It's 100,000 words. You can access it through GPT-4 or just read it like a regular book or interrogate a GPT-4 based app that you helped build and oversaw the construction of and ask it to summarize chapters, ask it for more background, ask it what mistakes it thinks I made. That's the future of a lot of learning. So I thought, let's be in advance of this. And you're planning on using it, I believe, in a class that you're teaching next semester? History of Economic Thought. It's a graduate class I'm teaching already fully subscribed. And of course, the book to the students and everyone else, it will be completely free and they can just ask away. And a professor at Purdue I believe reached out to us and said she was planning on doing the same. So, does that seem like I wasn't necessarily thinking of that as a use case, but it makes complete sense that it's hard to pinpoint, I think in this case the professor was mentioning that it's hard to pinpoint sometimes a specific book do you do a bunch of readings? Well, maybe you can do a reading or two, but also just use a tailored A.I. assistant to help give you that context that you would get from multiple readings. That's right, and it's a kind of meta book so you can ask it, what did Joseph Schumpeter say about Valra and it will give you a reasonable answer. Right. So there aren't that many history of economic thought classes period anymore, but I think the topic is making a comeback online with non-professional economists who just want to read great books smart books, so I hope this is speeding along that comeback because Adam Smith, Keynes, John Stuart Mill they're some of the greatest thinkers of all time and as I re-read them it just amazed me how much even smarter they were than I had thought that's the main thing I learned from doing that book. Who got the biggest upgrade and who got the biggest downgrade in the writing of the book? John Stuart Mill got the biggest upgrade just how much Mill there is it's either 32 or 33 volumes and if you just open up to pages randomly it's interesting almost all the time and he wrote about, you know, the ancient world wrote about Plato and Socrates wrote about the French historians in addition to the well-known works reviewed Tocqueville so that to me was the biggest upgrade I don't think that anyone got a downgrade maybe Hayek didn't get much of an upgrade but that's because I liked his best pieces so much already Yeah I, you'll be happy to know I read this in the Tyler Cowan fashion where because I was working on the A.I. assistant for the book I will say I looked at every page of the book as you have said from time to time so in that sense have I read it maybe but I've worked a lot with the A.I. assistant I read some of it traditionally and I've looked at every page so I think this is encouraging people to rethink how they read so with the app you can just ask it well the chapter on Cain's give me three anecdotes for a cocktail party I don't want to read the chapter it will do that quite well now if that's how most people read anyway and there's a lot of evidence from St. Kindle that that is how most people read why shouldn't we cater to that demand now underneath the surface there's a slight Straussian mocking of the reader like this is what you want we'll give it to you at the same time I honestly think we should accommodate that and give people the option but also just let them read the book straight through if they want there's that that's maybe a cynical view of what people read books for there's also mostly they just don't read them mostly they don't read them and certainly podcasts have substituted for books and so on some level there's a cynicism it's a signaling thing you're just trying to show a certain intellectual level of sophistication but there's also a level of thinking on the margin with some of this stuff like if I can listen to a podcast interview with the author and get 80 or 90% of the insight why would I read the book similarly if I can sit down with the tutor for an hour or two can I get a level of insight that's sufficient it's not just cocktail party fodder it's I get the learning I need to I'm fine with that competition most authors are running away from it I think we should run toward it and embrace it and then if you have to figure out well this is actually my comparative advantage it's fantastic to know that right most authors never know that when you read nonfiction books one of the ways you can read very fast but you also read really efficiently you can skip parts of the book that you're like I know this which is often the case yes when would an LLM get good enough you feel like it could kind of help you do that so it's almost like it can just excise the stuff that you don't even need to see I think in less than two years now whether that's a product on the market that I can subscribe to I'm less sure of but technologically speaking it's probably possible right now and if not it's a question of at what cost so what's the token cost if it's two dollars per query to do that well I'm not going to do that even if I could afford it but again it'll be affordable in a few years time you'll train it on Tyler Cowan and then say just take out the parts that Tyler already knows how do you, what would give you the certainty that it's doing the job where you, and would you actually I don't have the certainty now that I'm doing the job I'd be fine with that I think it'd be sort of 87% accurate and I'd get to read much more and then I'd apply my own rules to what's left in there if it leaves in too much I would have been faced with that anyway so you can always set type one versus type two error like it almost certainly has to be a help I don't see the scenario where it's not a help it puts you though in a digital reading context you can't, I mean unless you're having it print on demand for you somehow give that another year or two so if there's something like a Kindle but more sophisticated now that's a kind of digital reading enough like reading a book with some kind of screen or it's an audio book and it just tells me the parts I didn't know Speaking of audio books after this recording we're going to sit down and record a sample of you reading the book to generate a synthetic Tyler voice I don't think we even told you about this but we're going to take five minutes and have you record a sample so there's not enough of my voice already with 200 episodes, it has to be my book voice the Tyler Cowan talking about Adam Smith book voice is a special thing I suppose there is enough that we can do it but we've been told by those that we'll get even better results if it's you actually reading the book so now a five minute sample will improve things give me advice on how my book voice should be different than my podcast voice should it be more pompous it shouldn't be more giggly right that's a question I'm not a big consumer of audio books we talked about it on the Brian Koppelman episode and what came out of that is a I think it is true that a lot of people do at least with nonfiction, they want to hear the actual author speak the words and they imagine it I think most people tend to imagine it in their voice if they have any conception of the author's voice so one is it should be you but I don't think I just don't think you have that many register style that's good, it makes it easy then we really need to worry too much about it I think actually it would be totally fine as we were originally doing where we just took an episode of conversation with Tyler and said here you go but we'll give this a try and see what happens it needs to learn how I pronounce Smith right yes and so all that and yeah maybe it will take with you some of your more eosyncratic pronunciations as well which is important to preserve so I don't know if I even connected the dots there but we're doing that to generate an AI audio book that audio book will be ready do you know right now it's a function I think mainly of when they give the synthetic voice back to us and how long it might take us to it's a fairly long book so how long it will take us just to edit it but it's something that it's a matter of assuming we get the voice back relatively promptly it's you know days or weeks it's not a it's not a long process it's just a human actually package that audio file in a way that is presentable there's also a version in which we release it and say we haven't even listened to this really so here it is let us know what goes wrong I would think with any year an AI should be able to edit it but again I don't think that's a service currently available but technologically it should be possible right now you feed it the text you let it listen you ask it about the discrepancies it sends you a list and the nature of this is that you can't imagine there being a lot of outright errors it's more about maybe having to divvy it up into chapters or things like just packaging is an audio book but it's really not as labor intensive what it gets you though is you don't actually have to worry about was there a flub that we didn't catch because it's just a synthetic voice reading the text so there might be weird mispronunciations or weird mispronunciations there you go there might be weird mispronunciations or there might be weird inflections but that's it there's not going to be an outright mistake or perhaps it reads a footnote or something and it's not supposed to or does chapter headings but those are say when I write about Keynes being into eugenics I'm not sure myself what's the right tone for that discussion but I wonder if the AI I mean I'm pretty sure they don't change the tone at all yeah well what's great it should sound more grave or something that's a great question I don't know to what extent there's an ability for it to have that contextual awareness of this is a more serious grave matter I'm sure there is I don't think there is now in the current product again I don't think it's at all difficult but it's not set up maybe you just have to kind of pick up you just select a mood and say go for it possibly so yeah there might be some weird there might be a weird mood for some of these where it's a very light and lilting exposition on eugenics or whatever when Adam Smith is kidnapped by the gypsies it's all joyous yeah of course it sounds fun so that is coming up as well let's see incidentally on the goat thing you and Russ Roberts at the end of your econ talk conversation you had a bit of a discussion about goats in various fields I think this book has inspired people to think about you were inspired by Bill Simmons writing about the greatest of all time in basketball you did it for economics what are you looking at next what do you want to see someone make a good case for as a field for who's the goat well almost anything it can work so it's been done plenty for basketball there's my take on economics I think the fundamental innovation is not goat per se but writing from the perspective of a fan it's what a lot of people actually want if you read say theringer.com it's written from the perspective of a fan which is great so to have many more things written from the perspectives of fans to me is more important than whether or not they do goat goat may not apply to a lot of fields political science it's much more heterogeneous and varied than say economics so maybe there is no goat of political science even possibly that's fine but you could write a book about your favorite political scientists again with this perspective of enthusiasm and why they got me excited about things and that's what I want and academic incentives are precisely to do the opposite of that here's why it's not really very exciting at all that's not how it's described but that's the way it turns out that's very much the Bill Simmons brand and I think the success of the ringer has shown that that kind of thing is really enticing when you hear people come to it from deep appreciation and enthusiasm and the goal is to teach people how to appreciate so how can you do that if they can't even see you appreciating it's insane like the key thing is plenty of information but how do you motivate people to want to study teaching them the art of appreciation is what CWT has been about from the beginning I've learned to appreciate these people and you hope your listeners either appreciate them or just learn the general art of learning how to appreciate that's like the whole mission what's strange is Bill Simmons has even said that he noticed that that wasn't the case always in sports writing that he would read columns and think this person doesn't even care about what they're writing about or they actively disliked it so how do you model that I don't understand I mean I do but if you can find people whose profession is to commentate on sports or these other things that seem like dream jobs and they still don't seem to actually like it what's the model for that and how do we have hope that that can be brought to bear on things like who's the goat of political science well you used to have these comprehensive media outlets that did sports pages was never their specialty and probably didn't have much influence over marginal subscribers or not subscribers so the Washington Post, New York Times they would sometimes have very good sports reporting but a lot of the ordinary stuff was just not that interesting it didn't use analytics it wasn't from the perspective of a fan so New York Times has now mostly switched to the athletic which is much better and places like ESPN or the ringer just way out compete in the sports section of say the post or ordinary newspapers that don't really do sports and that will disappear them doing sports right one way or the other and that's for the better Washington Post should cover politics and the ringer ESPN and substacks should cover sports and that's what we're getting what's not to like and podcasts cover sports like Bill Simmons by the way we definitely need to I hope we have Washington we've got to capture your Washington that's a Tyler that's a Tyler but I don't know if it's in the goat book because none of the goats are in Washington we've got it either way let's move on to some Twitter questions we've got a few from either past or actually upcoming conversations with Tyler I guess so let's start with those first from Hollis Robbins if the humanities are dying what are the opportunities for revival with AI? I don't think the humanities are dying and podcasts show that so I don't have data but I suspect more people are reading Shakespeare than ever before certainly if you're counting India and China that's quite likely the presence of classical music on YouTube is very high poetry I wouldn't quite say it's popular but it's a thing and I think it's robust so they're being removed from the Academy that's probably good for them at current margins so I'm bullish on the humanities I think they're showing time and again that people who have studied them have special and unique talents Peter Thiel would be a simple example that he's such an incredible judge of who will be a good CEO comes in part from Peter having studied the humanities and others are seeing that so you go on Twitter and someone like Tommy Collison is saying what have you read this weekend? and everyone just knows he means great books I've seen the latest Robert Harris novel although some of them are not terrible and there's just you know Catherine Project with Zina Hitz and many other groups I think there's a huge revival of the humanities right now Harold Bloom has become a popular thing people ask me about Harold Bloom all the time and like why is that? I didn't even know Harold Bloom he's a guest we should have had by the way but he was ill for too long and I'm very optimistic there Upcoming conversations with Tyler Guest Patrick McKenzie says asks what has changed the most in your production function since LLMs became widely available and what will change the most over the next five years assuming continued improvements What I do when I prepare for a guest who hasn't written a lot I keep on interrogating the LLM about background and context and that works very well I mentioned that already with Lazarus Lake in general when I'm reading books unless I know the area quite well there's all sorts of references where I just don't know really what they're talking about and I just type a query into my GPT-4 usually I'll experiment with the other services too and it will tell me a lot and I find that is more useful than trying to read more books is taking one book and the things I don't know asking questions so that would be the main difference but over time it's hard to predict what I've already started doing is I do more personal appearances and give more talks because I think simply writing isn't good enough anymore you don't have to believe the next GPT will write a better book than Person X but I do think many more people will be playing around with LLMs rather than reading books so we need to diversify more out of only doing books has chat GPT condensed the number of tabs you typically have open or is it expanded or is it just substituted maybe one for one with what you might Google for? Well I have several LLM tabs always open like Anthropic as well which is a great service more to come and so it's going to increase the number of open tabs by four or five in equilibrium I don't have access to X yet their AI service open source I've played around with but I'm not using it yet on a regular basis but I will be once there's open service fine tuned on what I want it to have read that's not very far away so it's five more open tabs perpetually? Do you see it collapsing if you continue to make the analogy with Google do you see it collapsing into one thing that you're using I mean you're mainly using chat GPT but you're experimenting with others eventually there's a leader and you're just going to whatever that service is or do you think that it will persist where you're going to have? Well there's a leader now but I strongly believe diversity will persist for one thing there'll be differences in prices which is not the case at Google it's all P equals zero so if you're in Kenya you'll probably want cheaper free open source and it may not be as good as what I'm using but it will make sense for them and open source will just allow a lot of diversity of product and the different companies well they'll be less gated Elon Musk's will have less reinforcement learning it'll be ruder in some ways more interesting character AI will play out different historical characters or some offshoot service so I would be shocked if there were just a single dominant provider. John Starker asks what does he think about Aaron Wren's reasons for why you don't come across more Protestant intellectuals. So you said you made a comment in a marginal revolution that you don't sort of perceive there being these leading Protestant intellectuals like there are Catholicism and then Aaron Wren wrote a response what do you make of it? Well I don't hang out in Protestant intellectual circles that's the main reason why I don't meet more of them I do hang out in Jewish intellectual circles like part of it's just called academia Catholic is trickier but I think there's something systematizing about Catholic philosophy where I'm more likely to end up interacting with those people than I would be for the Protestants there's a lot of Protestant theology when I read it mainly on board that's probably my defect but I'm more likely to read something in Thomist philosophy because it's closer to other things I know in terms of the way it thinks what have your favorite things Sri Lanka changed after your last visits? Joshua Perrick asked this question you had an old post on marginal revolution I think actually maybe from 2013 ten years ago that's when I went to the first time yes or you say you'll list some of your favorite things Sri Lanka but you say you're kind of not happy with your picks and you say I'll try better next time the architecture of Jeffrey Bawa especially the hotels is one of the great glories of the world I haven't heard of it and you can see so much of it in Sri Lanka so I would elevate that over all else I understand the food much better so there's very good western food in Sri Lanka which I hadn't understood on my first visit baked goods in particular can just be first rate and if you get tired of hoppers and string hoppers which everyone does at some point I don't care what you say you get tired of it and well what do you have next you can cook or Chinese food or you can get western baked goods so on the second trip my view of Sri Lanka changed a good deal and I recommend it highly as a vacation spot and one of my best friends just did two weeks there and he loved it and he was blown away by the quality of the architecture and the food and it's quite safe and very affordable do you want to do more deejaying of your favorite songs like you did with Rick Rubin ask roommate Dave after my CWT with Rick Rubin he recorded a podcast with me at his place in Italy and that was quite a fun experience so I went to visit him and he just asked me to deejay for him so I had no prep for this this is intimidating I've got a deejay for Rick Rubin but we did that I guess total for seven or eight hours and he turned about two hours of it into one of his podcasts now since then he's asked me to make a number of playlists for him that will be on a new website he's building and I've sent him two already one is on avant-garde music this is a Spotify playlist and the other is like African slash world music slash jazz which is world music too and those are done and ready, they're not out yet but they exist and I'm going to do at least two more in classical music one will be like the best performances of some of the best pieces but restricted to shorter pieces and then the other would be what are obscure pieces by the best known composers that are wonderful nonetheless and those I'm working on right now Wow, that's amazing are you you say it's a seven or eight hour deejay session are you literally just sitting in the room playing songs and talking about them for eight hours straight it's over the course of three days so it's actually maybe I don't know ten hours and he'll play for me too so there are breaks and he has work breaks, I have work breaks there's meal breaks but it's a very intense experience it is taken very seriously in exactly the right way do you think there's an analogy there to developing taste appreciation for other fields what would be the equivalent of that in even something like economics is that just a seminar well you could have a group of three to five people read the same piece and talk about it and we do that at George Mason pretty often like with Alex Tabarak Robin Hansen, Brian Kaplan, Garrett Jones I recommend that academics don't do it enough there's somehow no space for it you learn more that way than for most seminars you can even have a guest or visitor come if you want but if you do music appreciation with Rick you learn a great deal about talent he's one of the greatest talent judges of all time and you learn a lot about appreciation so I think one of the things he and I have in common is we're both quite keen to get other people more excited about appreciation Eric Silver asks will there be more clustered shows as with the three tattoo city episodes and I'll broaden that to say do you think you'll experiment more with format or guest ideas or we also have the Jerusalem Demses book club where we just read books and talked about those three books so we had three big experiments this year one is the GPT episode the other is the Kenyan trilogy and the two Kenyans I had never met before nothing to read by them Demses doing the books so I want to experiment more and I'm looking for ideas so ideas are welcome Tom Mong asks given his interest in cultural dynamics it could be intriguing to discuss how he sees cultural shifts affecting global economics and politics particularly in relation to the rise of virtual communities and remote work he's thinking about digital nomad groups educational communities centered around say YouTube channels you could think of Vitalik Zuzaloo kind of three month conference in Montenegro as an example of this what do you think? I think there'll be much more of that I'm going to visit one of those groups in January in Honduras, Prospera so they're running a two month experiment it's called Vitalia and one of the integrating themes is people going there are interested in life extension I don't know very much about it at the moment I would be going there anyway but I'm very curious to see it and interact with it and try to learn something so I think this is appealing from the user point of view to do this you meet other very interesting people you're in an interesting location for a while the cost shouldn't be that high so if it can be done I think it's going to happen much more Whammo asks what guest appearances on other podcasts have been your favorite this year when I was on Rick Rubens that would by far be my favorite I would encourage everyone to check that out so there's two there's an interview with you and actually it ends up being one where you talk a lot about yourself more of your personal bio but then the DJ session is great as well and turned me on to some new tracks and artists that I had never heard of that was great so if you haven't listened to those just jump on that I did many other podcasts this year they tend to blur together in my mind so I don't even know anymore which are the favorites and I don't listen to them afterwards unlike with CWT I don't read through a transcript afterwards so some of them are good is all I'll say Heype Johansson says I'm going to summarize this one but he's pointing out that when you look at the goats in different fields Beatles, Bach, Homer Shakespeare and is there is there a bias there in that it feels like we look more to older figures as goats especially like if Shakespeare really the best the best writer or the best playwright yeah he's the best but it's going to be older by its nature it doesn't mean modernity is collapsing but if someone did something amazing two years ago it wouldn't be a game in gaming it just won't be called goat yet you'll even wonder well maybe it'll be surpassed next year just like say the Beatles surpassed the Rolling Stones so things to qualify for goat they're not going to be that new but we're generating goat like outputs all the time we just don't know yet which are the most wonderful in their areas all right well let's switch gears and go to a version of goat these are your picks pop culture picks from 2013 Grand List on Marginal Revolution I've gone back to 2013 and here are your picks favorite music you say these are favorites from a radically incomplete sampling not a best of list which I don't know that you usually put that qualification on there but you did this time so let's run through them Kanye West Yeezus his best album by quite a bit it's a very very good album I'm no longer sure it's his best but it's held up very well Kanye himself is a more problematic matter but people still listen to it and they should MBV by My Bloody Valentine you say if you had to ask who did better after a 20 year hiatus Kevin Shields or Bobby Fischer this is decisive evidence in favor of Shields a totally unexpected renaissance strong agree it's still a very good album acid rap by Chance the Rapper I don't listen to rap much anymore I'm not sure why not it's very innovative and there's a lot of high quality work but somehow it strikes me as being in a rut and a lot of it doesn't stick with me Chance is very good but I don't listen to it these days I don't regret picking it but yeah Wed 21 by Juana Molina you say why isn't she better known she's from Argentina she does a mix of pop and avant-garde she's coming to Barnes at Wolf Trap on my teaching night I'm sad to miss her I still think about her and her music so yes strong agree held up well Matangi by MIA you say her first album had enough posturing that I figured that was it but by now she has compiled an impressive streak the streak ended she stopped she was an incredible talent I may have been family obligations I'm not sure but she is not a part of my musical life in terms of new output but again quality on the older work is held up also starting to light churches bones of what you believe my favorite jazz album of the year has been Charles Lloyd and Jason Moran Hagar's song and I have more on order Charles Lloyd had an incredible renaissance I mean not that he really ever stopped at quite an old age you would think playing the saxophone is hard to do when you're very old but his last few albums were some of his best some of the best jazz period so I like my picks for that year it's like I learned something between 2012 and 2013 favorite movies so at the end of the year in a residence maybe with 2023 the movie her came out and you were a big fan of it so it came out after you released your best of but that movie I think has held up really well and people are returning to it now because it feels like it got some things right one is just the natural feel of how it's already possible now to chat with an AI and for it to feel very seamless there's now humane which has made an AI pin that the primary interface with it is voice and the other thing it got right by the way is if you look at the costume design in the movie her it very much imagines that the future will look like an updated version of like the 50s and 60s the trousers will be higher wasted the cuts will be looser, things like that and that is totally coming to pass so great job whoever did the costume design on her I think you got that one right what will go down is one of the great movies of it's time like frankenstein or city lights are gone with the wind total clear winner relatedly you did a review of google glass in 2013 so thinking about google glass you were not a fan of it I think you found it just hard to use now in 2023 we have this product that I guess will launch next year that's an AI pin that you primarily talk to it's supposed to be in some sense a substitute for your phone so you're not in your screen all the time what do you make of that will you try it out I will try out the pin the thing I most bullish about is the meta glasses, they're not out yet I believe they'll be priced below $200 and they'll be what google glass was trying to be we have all the tech so I was very sympathetic to the idea of google glass I give google a lot of credit I don't think it worked, the market agreed with me but that was step one and with LLMs being so much better we're ready for a step that people are going to want to use now the privacy issues will be tricky but it's going to happen in some form no matter what and the notion that you can wear glasses and talk to your glasses and they'll tell you whatever you want to know that's going to be here to stay alright let's go through the favorite movies you have a lot of favorite movies you say it's been an excellent year for movies I can't remember a period so good this is after 2012 when you were like it's good but a lot of tentpole studio stuff so let's run through these not always released in 2013 but it's when I saw it Amor by Michael Hanakie very dramatic, very European I don't like a lot of his movies they're too negative but that's a good one the Chilean movie No which is an account of how even in the strangest of circumstances democracy's filter policy outcome as indeed autocracies do too in different ways one of the best movies about elections, politics and public choice, strong plus Spring Breakers that was just fun that movie has really stuck it's full of energy it's cinematic in every shot I thought it was great and still do The Gatekeepers a documentary I taught and you taught it in a law and literature class it's about six former heads of Israel's secret service agency discussing their successes and failures in the sixth day war in 1967 we all should watch that one again right excellent film another resonance with 2013 as you were actually in Israel and so that was another resonance with me when I was reviewing it so I think you were also doing a dive more into Israel at the time as you were want to do Room 237 a documentary an excellent mock on Straussians through the medium of fandom cult for Kubrick's The Shining it's about these people who think there are all these secret hidden meetings in The Shining it's a hilarious film more people should watch it I'm surprised it hasn't become better known because Strauss has become much better known and more widely discussed so I would recommend that Room 237 that's the title right? Oblivion Tom Cruise movie directed by Joseph Kosinski who went on to direct Tom Cruise in Top Gun Maverick which just was the biggest movie of last year maybe it's a bad sign that I don't remember but which one is Oblivion I've never seen it but a lot of people remark on Oblivion as being a visually spectacular movie you say that's actually what you say so I'm quoting you it's one of the most visually spectacular movies I've seen the first half is a very good movie in its own right the second half is mostly narcissistic trash only periodically compelling in which Cruise also rewrites the story of his breakup with Nicole Kidman well there you go I must have been right it's been one that I have meant to check out for its visual style but you might need big screen though next on the list Stories We Tell by Sarah Polly she's an incredible filmmaker the very recent one about women talking I couldn't stick with I was a big fan of it I like the idea of it and away from her also is another amazing Polly movie so I'm glad to see she's gotten the recognition she deserves Stories We Tell is a very unique documentary it's about the stories we tell and it relates to her life and upbringing and it's a very well done and crafted documentary I highly recommend it as well she will still do great things I think before midnight completes the trilogy realistically with Charmin Byte people love that trilogy again it will go down as a classic achievement of the age maybe it's too poppy or too popular or too cliched but it does cliche in just the right way and it's a bit self-mocking I think those are great I think they'll age well I'm a fan of the trilogy I think they will age well next one In A World this is probably your most kind of out there pick do you remember it In A World tell me something it's a comedy about voiceover artists in a world yes I like movies about how things are done how things are made something very CWT about it and more people should watch it random question for me what is an intellectual romance or gossip book what does that mean to you there's a number of recent books about early 20th century intellectuals and their love lives and I reviewed them on MR and those were just fun and you don't have to read all of it you can just pick out figures you're interested in so there's one of them it's about what different top central European thinkers were doing often with their love's lives right before World War I broke out there should be more books like that it brings things to life it helps you appreciate it makes it vivid you get some sense of what might have actually motivated them or it's like if you read the letters Heidegger and Hannah Arendt a very strange romance Nazi really selfish it's fraught romance but there was a really deep electrifying connection between the two as well and of course you should read that stuff there's a very Tyler book I don't know if you've invented a new genre there but the reason this came up is you spoke positively of a book called Lives of Wives 5 Literary Marriages oh yeah that's a good example that's from this year moving back to politics the autobiography of Nikolaj Ciescu I don't remember it well I know I liked it must have been good I feel with a lot of history of communism I feel a bit too much I know this story and a lot of things haven't stuck with me maybe that's me oversimplifying but I'm not going back to that topic very much Piyetta a beautiful Korean tale developing money lenders in non-priced compensation schemes Korean movies for almost a 20 year period are just some of the best in the world and the ones that are known at all are quite good at a success rate of about 90% in another country is another pick Korean and French juxtaposed World War Z you say was surprised how serious a movie it is deeply politically incorrect it is including on third real issues such as immigration, ethnic conflict um songs of peace the Middle East you also mention the attack Lebanese and Israeli in its sources that's an incredible film the attack you know the Z one I don't know if watching it would hold up well but part of it is this story about like killers scaling offense and we should rewatch it and see the film was willing to take chances I suspect a lot of it doesn't hold up but you know fundamentally creative and I'm for that kind of effort the act of killing documentary with interviews with indonesian gangsters and murderers from the 65 pogroms Saturday night I was talking to the cellist in the jack quartet about this movie the act of killing and he and I both agree it's just phenomenal one of the best movies just flat out you know of its time happy people a year in the taiga depicts the life of the people in the range of bakta in the eastern Siberian taiga hasn't stuck with me gravity so you have you you end the list with three Hollywood picks gravity by Alfonso directed by Alfonso yeah captain Phillips and 12 years a slave we should try to get caught on the show remember that 12 years a slave it was good to Hollywood I think I would like it less now and what was the little one again captain Phillips Tom Hanks you know Somali pirate based on a true story it would bore me now I mean it's a well done Hollywood movie I'm fine with that the reason that movie has stuck I think it's kind of lived on in YouTube fame for the clip where Tom Hanks depicts going in shock after it's in the final minutes of the movie and he very realistically portrays what it's like to go through shock as he's being treated and it's just this really surprising punch right at the end of the movie where he's just breaking down as he's being treated and for a lot of people I think that's why Tom Hanks is still still a top contender for goat in terms of actors today is because just the skill of being able to go through these range of emotions and portray it so realistically he gets all these little nuances of it exactly right I watch it on YouTube all the time I don't know why but it comes up for me all the time like I'm going to watch Tom Hanks go through shock again Who is the goat of actors? Carrie Grant Jimmy Stewart Harrison Ford Clint Eastwood I'm very biased towards for me I don't watch enough old movies that I could give you a pick for older and I think the style has changed so much it's such but I think if you were looking for criteria they would have to have critical success commercial success How about Tom Cruise the Kubrick eyes wide shut Tom Cruise is an absolutely contender I'll say Tom Cruise He's worked with top directors he has been in critically adored films now he's in a phase where he's doing just shooting for the moon blockbusters with physical stunt work and that could be another dimension of it is the physical demands of the role absolutely a contender for goat Alright so those were picks let's move on movie picks let's move on to fiction and we'll have to run through these quickly because we're running short on time Carl Knausgaard my struggle book too A Man in Love You know I called Knausgaard early even the earlier book about the angels I basically said this guy's going to be great so I feel very good about that one and he of course has been a guest in one of my most favorite episodes Yeah that's an underrated pick from years past Claire Massoud the woman upstairs She's done good things since then good pick on my part Amy Sackville Orkney Well I love the Orkney Islands so that made that one work for me I'm not sure everyone should read it Mohsin Hamid how to get filthy rich in rising Asia That's one of these fun books you read on a plane it's good for that I don't think you need to read it now Catherine Davis duplex a novel Her work is very deep it seems to have slipped a bit out of people's attention but people who like very serious fiction should take a look at her Alright Favorite non-fiction quite a lot here why don't I just run through them and you stop me if you want to say anything Jeremy Adelman Jeremy Adelman Worldly Philosopher The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman Obviously a great book self recommending as they say as they say Daniel Brooke A History of Future Cities Lawrence Wright Going Clear Scientology Hollywood in the Prison of Belief that's a very of its moment pick I liked Neil Powell Benjamin Britten A Life for Music and self recommending a couple books on Benjamin Britten Emmy Thomas Confessions of Associopath Rana Mitter China's War with China or China's War with Japan 1937 and 1945 it's called in the U.S. Forgotten Ally Confessions of Associopath People Should Still Read I mean sociopaths are underrated I think is the key point of that one I'm serious Please elaborate They can be problematic but the notion that they can be super smart high achieving people People are beginning to learn this and her book is one of the best statements of how you could think more deeply about sociopaths Are you willing to bite the bullet on They're not psychopaths to be clear right Right So are you willing to bite the bullet on this idea that a lot of things that might be considered like mental disorders of one form or another are more about just cognitive diversity and if there are specific problems or behaviors that's one thing but in general maybe we should be more open to You toss me that bullet I'll bite it I'll swallow it Moving on Emile Simpson war from the ground up 21st century combat as politics Hasn't stuck with me William Hazeltine affordable excellence the Singapore health system Self recommending Claire Jacobson new museums in China it's mostly a picture book A lot of them are still empty but the construction boom there and how the Chinese state tried to use aesthetics that book has very important lessons and we should all think about that more Mark Lawrence shrod vodka politics alcohol autocracy in the secret history of the Russian state The roles of alcohol and drugs in war people are starting to pay attention to that book was an early move in that direction way ahead of its time I would say a very good pick by me Tweeting someone else or linking to a piece that was making that point just recently about people don't appreciate if you don't engage with the role of alcohol and particularly with Russia you're missing a fundamental component of the dynamics there and how many of the Nazis were on speed or some version thereof Paul Sabin the bet Paul Ehrlich Julian Simon in the gamble over Earth's future you know in any given year changes who is looking better in that bet the funny thing I've realized is that Ehrlich's in a funny way is the more optimistic prognosis that rising resource prices is a sign that AI is working so I think the price of energy is going to go up a lot because people will need compute and they'll be building all these new projects and that's a good thing so in a funny way the Simon side is pessimistic Charles Moore Margaret Thatcher biography that's an incredibly detailed and thoughtful piece of work the several volumes just amazing more detail than most people need to know I don't think I'll read them all but you got to give that one in a plus from books you say close at hand you very much like The Power of Glamour by John List, Ory, Guineasie and Virginia Postrell Lant Pritchett The Rebirth of Education and Tim Harford's it was the Undercover Economist Strikes Back was the book in 2013 I know all those people they're great they're just obvious picks everything they do is quality and interesting and Tim's been on the show another past CWT guest if I had to offer my very top picks for the year you say would be Joe Studwell how Asia works success and failure in the world's most dynamic region, Alan Taylor the internal enemy slavery and war in Virginia 1772-1832 Mark Lewison tune in the Beatles all these years volume one Peter Baker days of fire Bush and Cheney in the White House The Studwell book has become seminal and I'm happy I had a role in its spread so it's the book a lot of people go to to understand Asia until I was early to that the Alan Taylor book Jon Elster recommended to me one of the best history books I think of its generation I don't think it's really stuck with say the smart people on Twitter who read great books I'm not sure why but more people should know about it Beatles have made a huge comeback in the public eye Mark Lewison is one of the best books about them what was the other one you mentioned let me go back it was did you mention there was days of fire Bush and Cheney in the White House and Taylor the internal enemies slavery and war in Virginia the Taylor yes the days of fire I'm tired of all that stuff so people don't talk about that time so much anymore which is interesting but overall I think my 2013 recommendations might have been like my best year ever of recommendations because so many of them turned out so well that is all of your pop culture picks that I could find anyway from 2013 so I'm glad to hear your assessment is positive I think it means I've gotten worse right we'll see we're catching up to the year in which I actually knew you and we've been working together this year was a year in which I feel like especially in movies I watched a lot of the movies either coincidentally or on your recommendation so I felt a little more up to date in some ways with your recommendations this year compared to previous years but quite quite a few as well I think an uncommonly large amount of recommendations from this year so those are the pop culture picks last question for me before we close returning to our number one underrated episode with Lazarus Lake what did he teach you about emergent ventures and specifically with the application process did you learn anything from Lazarus Lake there that you want to apply he strengthened something I've been feeling for a while which is that it's very difficult to get true geographic diversity in your winners maybe where they're from you can do but where they live now so he is in central Tennessee as he takes pains to emphasize I don't think I've ever gotten an application much less a winner from central Tennessee and I know that's a kind of failure on my part but it's a hard problem to overcome and his success just drove that home to me all the more before we close let me give a shout out to everyone who helped out on the show this year that's Dallas Floor, Sam Alburger Jen Whistler, Morgan Hamilton Karen Plant, Christina Beehe Haley Larson, Ann McVeigh Ashley Schiller and there's many others who have contributed as well in small ways thank you all very much and we look forward to another year in conversations in 2024 years, right? thank you Jeff thank you thank you so much for your support of Conversations with Tyler for me I feel it's the most important thing to do teaching people the art of appreciating humanity and appreciating talent if you would be in a position to support us in any way possible please let us know send us your contributions we plan to continue producing conversations with Tyler but we're only able to do this because of the support of individuals such as yourself