Conversations with Tyler
@cowenconvos • 12,630 subscribers
@tylercowen engages today’s most underrated thinkers. Produced by @mercatus. Join us on @discord 👉 https://t.co/ESSqSYvfyr
Videos
New ep! Ezra Klein and tylercowen go deep on abundance: how it clashes with polarization, whether it’s elitist, “dark abundance”, and more. What’s a true abundance agenda for health care? Ezra and Tyler discuss a few ways the government can play a role: COWEN: What if someone said, a true abundance agenda — of course, this could never happen — but it’s basically to zero out Medicare and Medicaid, which is a lot of money, and spend all of that on science and birth subsidies and social security for that matter. Why isn’t that the true abundance agenda? KLEIN: The true abundance agenda would be to zero out Medicare and Medicaid and spend — ? COWEN: Christian Scientists — they still have decent life expectancy. People would have maybe higher social security. They could still buy healthcare. We’d have many more people. It’d be a much younger society, more dynamic society. Scientific advances would mean we’d cure many more diseases, forms of cancer. People would probably live longer. Why not do that? Just go crazy on innovation and number of births. KLEIN: One, I think that’s hugely probably a false choice. You can fund innovation, but if you don’t have provision of healthcare . . . This is the other side of your arguments about drug pricing, but your view is that you get a huge innovation signal from the fact that in a rich country, virtually everybody — and certainly all older people — have healthcare and they’re able to buy it. One, I don’t buy that you could close down Medicare and Medicaid without substantially harming innovation. I don’t buy that on a political level at all. One of the — COWEN: It’s not going to happen but you could have prizes for really good drugs, right? KLEIN: It doesn’t fit my politics. COWEN: Why not?
Conversations with Tyler239,408 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
The seeds of Gaurav Kapadia’s interest in investing were planted in a two-family house in Flushing that his parents hacked into a four-family house. It was there where a young Gaurav served as de facto landlord, collecting rent and negotiating late payments at age 10. "You really have a great sense of humanity when you are a landlord in Queens in transition," he tells tylercowen. That instinct for reading people and situations is what drew Tyler's attention. He describes Gaurav as someone with a rare eye for quality across domains, not just in how he runs XN, his concentrated investment firm, but in how he evaluates cities, talent, and contemporary art. 0:00:00 - Intro 0:01:32 - Queens and NYC’s geography 0:08:36 - New York City mayors and electoral politics 0:13:22 - Building a career in investing 0:18:50 - XN’s investment philosophy 0:24:35 - Maintaining founder energy in investment firms 0:30:45 - The sociology of finance in NYC, London, and UAE 0:32:21 - How AI is reshaping investing 0:36:53 - Museum operations 0:42:21 - Favorite artists 0:50:39 - Tastes in art and how the canon will evolve 0:57:22 - Totei, a new venture
Conversations with Tyler108,154 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
Dan Wang (Dan Wang) says that America should become 20% more engineering-minded to fix its broken infrastructure, while China needs to be 50% more lawyerly so the Communist Party will stop strangling individual rights and the creative impulses of its people. But would a more lawyerly China constrain state power, or just create new tools for oppression? And, asks tylercowen insouciantly, aren’t the American suburbs actually sterling achievements where the infrastructure works quite well? 0:00:00 - American infrastructure and suburban life 0:05:18 - American vs. Chinese infrastructure buildouts... 0:12:25 - And health care investment 0:17:52 - Chinese suburbs 0:20:10 - The existing lawyerly influence in East Asia 0:25:12 - China’s lack of a liberal tradition 0:29:35 - Why China’s won’t democratize 0:33:49 - China’s economic disfunction 0:38:44 - China’s expansionism 0:41:55 - Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives 0:46:50 - Chinese cities and regional culture 0:59:44 - James C. Scott, Zomia, and elite culture 1:06:27 - A 10-day Yunnan itinerary 1:11:57 - On Chinese arts, literature, and cultural expression 1:18:23 - The Dan Wang production function 1:30:34 - Tyler’s grand strategy, or lack thereof
Conversations with Tyler85,048 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
How persuadable are humans, really? Sam Altman returns to discuss accidental AI takeover, why GPT-6 might crack real science, when we'll see AI CEOs running the show, and the question he asked someone to pose to the Dalai Lama. Timestamps 0:00:00 – Sam’s basic trick for productivity 0:01:22 – Hiring hardware vs. software people 0:05:46 – How long before an AI CEO 0:10:48 – Government backstops for AI companies 0:13:26 – Monetizing AI services 0:18:04 – Negotiating deals with Saudia Arabia and the UAE 0:22:00 – How good GPT-6 will be at poetry 0:25:15 – Chip-building and where the energy will come from 0:29:04 – Sam’s changing health habits 0:30:20 – UAP’s and conspiracy theories 0:31:43 – Revitalizing St. Louis 0:33:12 – Regulating AI agents 0:34:39 – New ways to interface with AI 0:38:12 – How normies will learn AI 0:44:36 – The trajectory of healthcare and housing prices 0:46:57 – Reexamining freedom of speech 0:50:08 – Humanity’s persuadability Recorded live with tylercowen and Sam Altman at the 2025 Progress Conference, hosted by Roots of Progress Institute. Thanks to Big Think for the video production.
Conversations with Tyler74,177 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back commercial supersonic flight as the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic. But he's equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it's airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept. 0:00:00 - Reimagining airports 0:02:52 - Airport security 0:06:12 - Fixing traffic 0:10:42 - Fixing boarding and improving airplane interiors 0:14:49 – The contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon 0:18:25 - The rise, fall, and return of supersonic flight 0:27:24 - The practical implications of commercial supersonic flight 0:31:14 - American manufacturing and defense procurement 0:35:41 - Learning across domains and reducing the cost of change 0:39:06 - Future innovation Recorded live with tylercowen and Blake Scholl 🛫 at the 2025 Progress Conference, hosted by Roots of Progress Institute. Thanks to Big Think for the video production.
Conversations with Tyler49,981 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
"I'm a technological pessimist who became an optimist through repeated beatings over the head of scale," says Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark. And yet when estimating AI’s impact on US economic growth, he suggests it's more likely to boost annual growth rates to 3-5% rather than the utopian 20-30% some claim. “Every time the AI community has tried to cross the chasm from the digital world to the real world, they've run into 10,000 problems that they thought were paper cuts but, in sum, add up to you losing all the blood in your body."
Conversations with Tyler66,683 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
![New episode! Michael Nielsen joins tylercowen to discuss the beauty of the universe, quantum computing, Simone Weil, finding good collaborators, and...the status of linear algebra? COWEN: Is the status of linear algebra rising? NIELSEN: [laughs] That’s a great question. It probably has, yes. COWEN: It’s prominent in quantum, right? It’s prominent in AI. NIELSEN: Google is built on matrix multiplication. It’s prominent for a lot of reasons. COWEN: What should we infer from that about the whole nature of the world?](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1795818141567656228/ext_tw_video_thumb/1795811841341362176/pu/img/OzlqPuImT0XgjY1F.jpg)
New episode! Michael Nielsen joins tylercowen to discuss the beauty of the universe, quantum computing, Simone Weil, finding good collaborators, and...the status of linear algebra? COWEN: Is the status of linear algebra rising? NIELSEN: [laughs] That’s a great question. It probably has, yes. COWEN: It’s prominent in quantum, right? It’s prominent in AI. NIELSEN: Google is built on matrix multiplication. It’s prominent for a lot of reasons. COWEN: What should we infer from that about the whole nature of the world?
Conversations with Tyler94,765 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
New ep! Andrew Ross Sorkin sees the crash of 1929 as a tale of excessive leverage and irrational speculation, but Tyler wonders if the real problem was the Negative Nellies who panicked afterward rather than the speculators everyone blamed. After all, isn't 2008 looking less like a bubble with each passing year? Plus: why we should consolidate banks, the inscrutable risks of private credit, and Sorkin's budding obsession with tulips. Timestamps: 0:00:00 - Was 1929 really a bubble? 0:06:34 Was 2008 really a bubble? 0:11:34 Alternate policy responses to the ‘29 crash 0:20:11 - Understanding Glass-Steagall 0:23:45 - What else is interesting about the 1920s 0:27:25 - Business leaders then and now 0:31:47 - Rethinking banking regulation 0:46:14 - Fed independence 0:49:49 - Sorkin’s career Watch the full episode with Andrew Ross Sorkin and tylercowen here or at the links in the next post.
Conversations with Tyler23,075 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
.George Selgin) has spent over four decades thinking about money, banking, and economic history, and tylercowen has been swapping ideas with himsince George was a grad student at NYU. In George’s new book, he explains why the New Deal was neither what its champions nor critics think it was. For one, it was hardly a spending spree—Roosevelt largely ignored Keynes's "very sound" advice on recovery, and fiscal stimulus would've worked far better than the hodgepodge of programs that he ended up pursuing. For another, it wasn’t WWII military spending that finally cemented recovery, but a big post-war private investment boom thanks to a friendlier climate towards business. Timestamps for the conversation, which was recorded live at Cato Institute: 0:00:57 – A simple summary of New Deal 0:06:39 – Rundown of which New Deal policies helped, hurt, or didn’t matter 0:13:52 – What better fiscal policy would’ve looked like 0:16:34 – Causes of the Great Depression 0:22:02 – Keynes’s sound but unheeded advice, Hayek’s miss 0:32:04 – Whether fewer, bigger banks is better 0:38:36 – How the quantity theory of money holds up 0:43:18 – Central bank independence 0:46:56 – How many countries should dollarize 0:49:31 – Stablecoins 0:52:07 – George Selgin production function 01:00:10 – Q&A Watch the full episode here or follow the links in the next tweet.
Conversations with Tyler31,506 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg's particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee's journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist's emotional insight. Watch the full conversation between tylercowen and Jonny Steinberg here or follow the links in the next tweet. Timestamps: 0:00:40 – Policing and crime in South Africa 0:11:15 – Prison culture 0:22:04 – Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s marriage 0:24:47 – Was Winnie Mandela just a bad person? 0:29:20 – Nelson Mandela’s masks 0:32:04 – Mandela’s legacy and the ANC 0:36:51 – Reasons for optimism in South Africa 0:50:58 – His forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes 0:55:15 – Where to visit in South Africa
Conversations with Tyler28,766 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
New episode! Jonathan Haidt is back on the podcast to chat about his latest book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt blames the rise of teen mental illness since the early 2010s on the shift from a "play-based childhood" to a "phone-based childhood." The negative effects of this 'great rewiring of childhood' will continue to worsen, he argues, without the adoption of several norms and a more hands-on approach to regulating social media platforms. But might technological advances and good ol' human resilience allow kids to adapt more easily than he thinks? tylercowen and Haidt debate the question:
Conversations with Tyler54,187 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
Steven Pinker (Steven Pinker) returns to Conversations with Tyler with an argument that common knowledge—those infinite loops of "I know that you know that I know"—is the hidden infrastructure that enables human coordination, from accepting paper money to toppling dictators. But tylercowen wonders: can there be too much common knowledge? COWEN: For a while now, we’ve had this thing called anonymous posters on the internet. Do you think, on average, they make the world better or worse? PINKER: Interesting. Probably worse. COWEN: They help make some things common knowledge. If there are things that are not common knowledge, some anonymous poster will say it. There’ll also be misinformation. Is that a clue that maybe at the margin, we have too much common knowledge rather than too little?
Conversations with Tyler22,273 Aufrufe • vor 9 Monaten
With millions of viewers hanging on his every word about fluvial flows in Breath of the Wild or unemployment rates in the towns of Skyrim, YouTuber any austin has become what Tyler calls "the very best in the world at the hermeneutics of infrastructure within video games." But underneath this entertaining veneer is a deeper mission: "I want to show people that it’s not inherent that you have to think about video games in these terms, which is overly technical, extremely focused on narrative. There’s so much comparative analysis. Nobody can get through a video game review without saying it’s like this game plus this game. Stop. We don’t need to be doing that. It’s really not that important. Tell me what it made you feel but also what it is. What is it? Literally, what are we looking at? That’s the thing when we talk about let’s follow the rivers in this game. Yes, I love hydrology. I love teaching. I think one of my tertiary goals is, can we get the number of hydrology master’s students up by 3 percent, 4 percent? Can we get the number of college admissions for engineering up by 3 percent, 4 percent? I don’t know where they are now, but just the idea of, yes, it’s important to learn about those things, too. It’s an excellent veneer, but underneath all of it, it’s kind of a mindfulness exercise in a way. Let’s look at it. What is it? Let’s talk about it."
Conversations with Tyler27,769 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
In his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin shows how totalitarian power worked not just through terror from above, but through millions of everyday decisions from below. Currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution after 33 years at Princeton, Kotkin brings both deep archival work and personal experience to his understanding of Soviet life, having lived in Magnitogorsk during the 1980s and seen firsthand how power operates in closed societies. tylercowen: Do you think Georgian blood feud culture influenced Stalin at all in this? KOTKIN: Yes. So, there were a lot of Georgians and there’s one Stalin. People argue that he got into fights in the schoolyard, and that the fights were nasty, and therefore he became a certain type of person. They argue that his father beat him, and therefore he became a certain type of person. The problem with arguments like that, Tyler, is that I got into fights in the schoolyard when I was his age. People beat me up because I was a half Catholic, half Jew at a Catholic school. COWEN: This was in Englewood, New Jersey, right? KOTKIN: I was small, and people knew that they could maybe take me on bully-style because I wasn’t as big as they were. My father also disciplined me with the proverbial belt when I got out of hand. I didn’t go on to collectivize agriculture. I’m not responsible for the deaths of 18 to 20 million people. So, you’re not going to be able to explain Stalin as a phenomenon or even as a personality with those types of tropes. What explains Stalin, at least in my view, what I argued and continue to argue in the biography, is the experience of getting into power and then exercising power. It’s building and running the dictatorship. It’s managing Russian power in the world that makes Stalin who he is, not because there’s some kind of DNA there. I don’t go for cultural DNA–like arguments.
Conversations with Tyler36,321 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
New ep! Christopher Kirchhoff and tylercowen cover the ascendancy of drone warfare and how it will affect tactics both off and on the battlefield, the sobering prospect of hypersonic weapons and how they will shift the balance of power, EMP attacks, AI as the new arms race (and who's winning), the completely different technology ecosystem of an iPhone vs. an F-35, why we shouldn't nationalize AI labs, the problem with security clearances, why the major defense contractors lost their dynamism, how to overcome the “Valley of Death” in defense acquisition, how Unit X began, the most effective type of government commission, what he'll learn next, and more. Why is the U.S. government struggling to attract top talent? Chris explains how layers of oversight — from lunch waivers to IG reviews — have steadily diminished executive authority and made public service increasingly burdensome.
Conversations with Tyler35,553 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
John Amaechi is a former NBA forward-center turned psychology professor and leadership expert. He's known for turning down $17 million from the Lakers, being one of the first openly gay NBA players, and his best-selling memoir Man in the Middle. tylercowen and John Amaechi OBE discuss what a Star Wars-obsessed psychologist thinks about the Jedi's leadership skills, why the end of his NBA career was a relief, retreating into science fiction as a kid, and more. 0:00:00 - Culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated 0:04:10 - Types of leadership rituals 0:05:38 - Quality of leadership in college and other places 0:08:50 - Doc Rivers' skills as a coach 0:10:47 - Retreating into science fiction 0:16:47 - Turning down $17 million 0:23:12 - Jerry Sloan and Karl Malone 0:26:03 - What % of NBA players love the game 0:30:36 - Being gay in professional sports 0:37:52 - London's peak and England's nostalgia for the past 0:44:15 - Reforming the NBA 0:48:06 - Post-NBA prospects for lower tier players 0:51:45 - On becoming a professor 0:57:30 - Personality tests are bollocks Watch the full episode here on twitter or find links everywhere else in the next tweet.
Conversations with Tyler16,286 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
Annie Jacobsen (Annie Jacobsen) calls America’s nuclear doctrine "madness"—one person with six minutes to decide civilization's fate, weapons that end the world in 72 minutes, everything hanging on deterrence. But for tylercowen, life is "a lot of different kinds of madness," and isn’t the real question getting to the least harmful form available to us? It's a conversation sparked by Annie’s latest book Nuclear War: A Scenario, which Tyler calls one of his favorites from last year—and which is compelling enough that Denis Villeneuve is turning it into a screenplay.
Conversations with Tyler16,090 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten