Conversations with Tyler
@cowenconvos • 13,471 subscribers
@tylercowen engages today’s most underrated thinkers. New episodes every other Wednesday (+ occasional extras). Produced by @mercatus.
Videos
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 views • 9 months ago
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 views • 9 months ago
![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 views • 2 years ago
.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 views • 11 months ago
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 views • 7 months ago
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 Tyler54,196 views • 2 years ago
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 views • 1 year ago
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 views • 1 year ago
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 Tyler22,286 views • 1 year ago