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hello everyone and welcome to a special episode of conversations with Tyler my name is Jeff Holmes and I'm here in my capacity as a producer of conversations with Tyler but I'm here in another capacity as well as a reader of marginal
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Revolution the economics blog that Alex tabarok and Tyler Cowan started in August of 2003 we're recording this in August of 2023 which of course marks the 20th anniversary of marginal Revolution so today for the podcast we will be
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talking about the now 20-year history of the blog but first welcome to the two co-founders of marginal Revolution Alex tabarak welcome thanks great to be here Tyler welcome thank you for all the great work Jeff and in addition to the co-founders and writers of marginal Revolution we're joined by two other long time readers of the blog first Ben Casanova Ben is an author writer and investor he's founded and run several businesses blogged
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written best-selling books and is the co-founder and partner of Village Global which invests in early stage startups Ben welcome thanks Jeff and vitalik buterin co-founder of ethereum and one of the most influential
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thinkers and writers in crypto vitalik welcome thank you okay to start off we're here in Chennai India we're here for a mercatus center conference and 20 years ago would you have thought that the growth of the blog would lead to the rising prominence and
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influence of George Mason economics the rising prominence and influence of the Mercator Center which I work for such that we would now be sitting here in Chennai India running a conference in part because of the success of the blog
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what does that say to you my original Vision was if we were lucky we would have 5 000 readers and I thought it would be mostly academics people like team or Quran who wanted something more interesting I didn't understand we would
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end up in a world where kimur karan's wife reads the marginal Revolution so the reach of not just blogs but just online writing now it's maybe sub stack or Twitter or whatever uh I always knew it was going to happen but it's gone far
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past what I ever expected there was definitely an inflection point at the very beginning when we started out you know blogging was something that other academics sort of looked down upon you know turned their noses down of all
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you're just speaking to the public and then maybe about five years in beginning with the sort of the empirical Revolution people like theorists and high name people would start sending us their papers like obviously try could
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you you know put this on the Vlog right and so that was a real uh a shift in the in the vibe as it were So speaking of that I think about different eras of marginal Revolution but I think the first era of marginal Revolution is 03 to 08 it's kind of the
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rise of New Media uh podcasting and blogging and also the rise of popular economics so a lot of the younger readers to Mr may not even be aware of like for economics being released in 2005 and there's just this onslaught of like popular economics books um a reader wrote in and talked about that first would you agree that that's kind of a distinct era in Mr and what are your thoughts on that time period yeah absolutely I think it is part of
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the rise of popular economics so we sort of timed uh that well uh you know there were sort of the grandfathers like Stephen Landsberg and uh people like that but then with the Freakonomics phenomena you know I remember seeing uh
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Steve Levitt uh on The Daily Show and uh Jon Stewart like freaking hummus oh my God you know it was like so it was very very strange um but you knew something had changed and we covered no macroeconomics then there just wasn't much to say there
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weren't that many interesting debates that too was part of it then you started reading Mr in that era what's kind of how did you discover marginal Revolution what's the story there I can't remember how I discovered
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it but I remember being struck by uh the incredible Curiosity on display on the blog but also the Relentless optimism that infused all the posts and I think what was striking about that era of the blogosphere was how civil and polite it
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all was and that's clearly changed a great deal and I wonder when you look back on that era is there a wistfulness for the tone and the camaraderie of the bogosphere now it feels like such a toxic so social media ecosystem and so
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much noise here you've maintained the tone both of you over all these years which I think is really impressive but is there something about that era that you feel like was different in terms of the other blogs you were reading the
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commenters the quality of the comments and so on when I look back to that era it seems like a golden age but I suspect if I had to go back and read everyone's posts I'd be pretty bored and the people get more to the point now is a good thing so
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there is something about Twitter and other social media that encourage Jabs and the kind of nastiness but I actually prefer the world we're in now and the fact that you have all these repeated interactions it made people
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nicer but repeated interactions are themselves a little problematic you know like well it's not quite collusive but maybe it's better that it's sharper even though we remain sunny and optimistic as always we get to work with each other
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like that's what that's true that's true the only thing it is a little bit sad but what has been said actually is that we're almost the last man standing right so all of those blogs you get all your friends die so we haven't quite gotten
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there but in terms of blogs you know the blogs have just sort of disappeared and faded away and and we are sort of the last ones still remaining from that era that's a little bit wistful vitalik Ben do you consider yourself
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bloggers I mean I have a Blog so I guess so versus say like an essayist or something maybe a little more pompous what is the difference I don't know programs but I would say vitalik's a blog or something interesting to me an essay is
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something you uh write for I'm in high school in exchange for getting grids Ben what about you do you self-identify I do but I do think there's you know when Mr started when I was blogging uh in 2004 there were RSS readers you would
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read every post um you really felt like you had a connection with the person you were reading um it was a smaller Community one Google Reader when Google killed Google Reader I felt like that was also distinct end to a chapter and the blog
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is here because suddenly all the distribution went to Twitter and Facebook and you didn't read every post anymore um and so I think a lot of people so I used to consider myself a blogger when I felt like there was a dedicated
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readership that read every post but now it feels like you're a publisher on Facebook or something as the the identity and you really have to bow down to the um to those algorithms to ensure that your posts get distribution I used
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to uh I would I aggregated a lot of my blogs in those days in Google Reader but I saved marginal Revolution as a bookmark because I wanted to check marginal Revolution so for some reason I didn't want it to be in that kind of
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stream I wanted to check it as a destination and I still do actually because of the frequency I mean I think what's so it's so rare for a Blog to publish multiple times a day so that if you click refresh in the browser you'll
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actually get new content you don't have to wait for it to Syndicate to RSS so yeah we average four to five a day for most of the history of the blog and when they come up is timed somewhat strategically and I think it's why you
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you schedule oh absolutely ah okay the death of the blog is here there's just not that many internet sites you can go to that are at all interesting and also not gated so we've just picked up a lot of people oh they've been to New York
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Times already or they've been you know Financial Times and how many other places can they go and they come to Marginal Revolution so you optimize postings based on what like Western reader time zone like so we're in India today you're gonna write something this afternoon it's the middle of the night you know in in California are you thinking about this the timing of them I spread mine out so they come during the Western work day in North
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America but the very first post or two I have come up at 1am because this way people in Europe can see it for lunch but the people waking up say at seven in New York City that it's been stale for six hours they don't really know very generous with the Europeans to give them at least I think that is one as someone who has access to Marginal revolution's back end I don't think people I think their model is you guys write the post and and smash
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that publish button and a lot of these posts your schedules it's really strange when people ask you were you up at 1am in the morning posts like that I'm uh I'm the opposite I don't schedule the publish time is the time is the time
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it's published very good I was going to ask all of you while we're on this what are some independent blogs that you still read or what's your favorite independent blog not sub stack right like not the analogs but like an actual blog blog
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I was gonna say suede store codex but then I guess it became a sub stack then in vitalik obviously not just being polite Scott Sumner I definitely still read [Music] yeah I mean I got Paul Paul Krugman it's sort of a Blog you know
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um it's not a Blog anymore it's just periodic yeah periodical yeah it doesn't sound like a Blog anymore yeah yeah and what does that say I mean it you guys really have been the last Hangers On correct and and do you have
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any plans uh to change the format would you move to sub stack or something like that we have no plans to change yeah no I mean people ask us periodically you know to do do something else and but and you know should we should we price it right you know should
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we do a sub stack uh model subscription model and so forth um but we've always kept it free always kept it open and no ads for a long time yeah uh and we're happy with that I mean that's part of the reason why we're here
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in Chennai right I mean it's about Distributing the ideas it's about um reaching as many people as possible and we're just much more interested in doing that than you know monetizing something but it also there's a
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remarkable consistency to the design and layout and I think I've been giving grief to Tyler for years on hey you might think about you know redesigning this portion and I think the best analogy that I have for Mr and the internet is Craigslist incredibly
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successful incredibly well traffic hasn't changed one pixel in 20 plus years and and weirdly like for as much as people hate on Craigslist design there's the familiarity is so rare on the internet today like like companies
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everywhere are higher brand marketers and they can't help themselves to do a brand refresh you know every five years and the fact that Mr the same two people same design same format same style of posts I mean it's kind of stunning in
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the world of constant change I think people like take refuge in the Mr approach and Alex didn't you pick the shade of green from George Mason University green yeah correct yeah that's our like little straps again allegiance to our own school but people
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don't know that somehow yeah George Mason itself has rebranded at least once or twice I think in that time uh and you know the subheadings small steps toward a much better World Alex and I argued so I thought it should say
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small steps toward a better world and he thought it should say much better world and he was totally right but it's an important Point actually do you agree Alice I'm not sure I know I know I know you like that Floyd but you know I like asking people how ambitious are you yeah small steps to a giant leap forward would have been better perilous with the moon but it would have also had another association yes so the that was the first error we were
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talking a little bit about the first era in marginal Revolution the second one I would say is is 2008 um to 2016 you have the great uh recession the financial crisis of 08 which after the rise of popular economics suddenly huge crisis that everyone has to talk about right now it's clearly the biggest economic issue in the world um and then that leads on to great stagnation and how do we bounce back because it was such a long recovery
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what are your general again do you agree that that's the right way to think about that era and what do you think of that time in Mr history yeah 2008 2010 the financial crisis I think was the uh the peak of the blogosphere
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um and to me like watching in real time uh people trying to figure out what is going on uh and really not having actually not having a clue but seeing people like Tyler Scott Sumner Paul Krugman Mark Thoma really a bunch of macro economists uh top people
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the very best people right in the world were literally in real time struggling to understand what was going on and trading ideas with one another and uh we were invited to you know the the treasury to talk with um yeah yeah exactly yeah I mean that
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was incredible right so the bloggers were were talking with top treasury officials and it wasn't that made sense because really so few people uh understood what was going on and everyone was trying to help one another
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and kind of get a different perspectives on it and so that was really a remarkable time that was the era when the blogosphere or more generally internet as a tool of intellectual calculation became developed the notion
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that it's a kind of computer of its own and that if you learn how to play the keys you could figure out the best sense of what was going on but not from any one blog so a lot of them are in those areas you need to think of it as part of this
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larger like organ of intellectual calculation and we were a cog in that machine it's not true now it wasn't true in the earlier popular economics years but that's how I think of that time why isn't it true now anymore well there aren't many other blogs and back and forth between us and Twitter there's a little of it but I think you can use Twitter so econ Twitter doesn't count no it does yeah but it's not so it's migrated and I think that's isn't
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that kind of sad because we've moved the long format that y'all pioneered on Mr allowed for substantive exploration do you think the set is this is the quality of the conversation as good on econ Twitter today
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you get better helpful suggestions about how to say run a particular kind of regression but the debate is much worse an econ Twitter has tended to lean somewhat left and it's less balanced than the Elder bogosphere was the debate is worse but I
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would say actually as we're speaking right now we're seeing some things are parallel not with blogs but uh understanding super connectivity right and seeing all of these people around the world trying to replicate these Korean results that feels to me very
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similar to the blogosphere in 2008 everyone trying to figure out what is this Shadow banking system where where what is happening to credit you know what why is this when the banks are still giving out credit you know why are
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people saying we can't get any money what's going on like that was like the replication of the superconductivity today I believe you started reading Mr so in the second era 08 to 2016 is that about when you started reading margin
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Revolution yeah sometime between the 2010 and 2012 not sure exactly when and and how old were you um somewhere between 16 and 18 not sure exactly how old and what were you what were you reading do you remember how you came across
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marginal Revolution kind of paint us a picture of what what was your intellectual so this was the time when I was uh really getting into what was back then the Bitcoin world because back then Bitcoin was basically the only crypto out there and it was very closely connected with uh Austrian economics um you know libertarianism uh rationalism effective altruism like that whole bubble of uh well there's there's whole bubbles of movements right and I
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Mr was definitely a kind of in the mesh like it was uh something that I would get I would see links to from other places I think I would uh I've probably would have seen links to it from Twitter as well though I think my Twitter usage
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was definitely pretty low back then um we were one of the first places to report on bitcoin at all someone sent it to me as a link and I didn't understand it not just I didn't understand it in a deep way I didn't even understand it in
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The Superficial way but I thought well this sounds interesting you know we're like a forum for new ideas this is a new idea you didn't buy Bitcoin at the time no that's why we're all still here but to see people who began reading us
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at a younger age and then turn into a metallic or something like that that's one of the biggest Thrills we could Tyler and I could possibly uh have I mean it's incredible you know we have we've had students at uh George Mays and
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who come and you know I've been reading you since I was 12. right and you know now they're getting their phds right that's sort of mind-blowing yeah no these things can make an influence I mean outside of Economics the other one was I read aubry's book on ending aging when I was around 13 and that's uh definitely stuck with me is pretty much forever since then would you say you were more influenced by blogs and internet thinking versus
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books I definitely did all the standard round of books the internet hive mind uh always the libertarian inner and I have mine told you to read back then like you know I went through mine rans went through my Human Action
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um well you know what through all of the standard good stuff at the time um I think I'm like I definitely yes probably moved over to being more blog driven somewhat later I think nearer the beginning like I was more seeking out like one or a
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very small number of Big Ideas that would explain a whole bunch of things and I guess I became somewhat more intellectually pluralist over time um but I think to Alex's point about the folks who've been influenced like vitalik
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um and myself I mean I think it's not just the direct influence but it's also the community of readers there's so many people who are now close friends of mine who first discovered me via Mr and now in a very offline way we're good friends
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and so there's this like second and third order effect of these communities and I do think that's what's rare about Mr and Jeff you've pointed this out as the richness of the comment section and the sort of it's its own social network
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and so the layers of influence is not just one degree it's like the offline communities that get built the genuine friendships have there been any marriages there is an MR marriage Kathleen and Eric who at the time lived in the state
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of Texas I think they still do it turns out it's legal in Texas that if you pledge marriage through backtrack feature of blogging which goes back that it counts as a legally binding pledge and they literally legally married on
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marginal Revolution and I think they met few more well you guys are like almost beating the blockchain here what is the state of their marriage are the trending well do we know I visited them a few years ago they seemed very
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happy but that's a while back now Ben opened the door to commenters and readers uh in readership so let's go into that right now um if we snapped our fingers and removed the comments section how would Mr change out of you know historically or how would it if you did it now how would how do you think it would change you know I tried doing that for two weeks a few years ago just to be arbitrary and a lot of people complain to me that they no
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longer had context for the posts so my style in particular is to assume the reader knows everything and give them nothing and they all think it's like stressian or some secret code it's not it's just like you don't know what I'm
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talking about that's fine but people readers use the comment to Norm and hone in on what I'm saying I'd like to see who gets upset by it for instance and when the comments were gone they felt rudderless and at Sea and I that was more or less the correct
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reaction so the only thing worse in the comment section is no comment section I mean the comment section could be uh hit or miss uh it usually misses on Theory people are not good at that but you can sometimes find the one person in the world who knows more facts about the issue that you're writing about uh and that the ability of the blog to kind of uh bubble that person to the top who has this really specific knowledge about
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this tiny tiny area of the world and then you can learn from them that I think is very valuable about the comments do you guys read the yeah Twitter responses to the Mr posts no I don't hmm if I see it on Twitter I would read it
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but if it's not Tyler Cowan I do but it's that Margaret because I just do one click to my mentions but we would look on the blog we look in the comments but we don't get upset by them it's almost become a Reddit style repository of
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knowledge as it relates to travel so one of the things that I've learned to do when searching the internet for stuff is just to add the word Reddit to the end of a query to avoid all the seo'd crap at the top of the results and just get
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right to the Reddit pitch on a given topic and for certain travel resources because you know how would Tyler know where to eat if it wasn't a Blog on the blog about where to eat in some random City and you know middle nowhere but not
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after 20 years both of you have there's so many these open common threads about food recommendations Hotel recommendations things to do in Singapore things to do and Bolivia wherever uh it's kind of remarkable and
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so I found myself years later just going on to Mr searching some country or city and using that to guide travel planning I do that too and it might have been my post but the Mr search function is the most underrated part of the blog I think
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and that you call it the Mr search function which is quintessential Tyler phrase that you've been using since the beginning so if marginal revolution has been going for 20 years you're posting you know three five times a day for 20 years
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so now people jumping in just in the past couple of years it's almost like The Simpsons I mean where do you even start you know is it is a 15 year old first blog post ever these are Greatest Hits no I've literally not done that for one
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thing I might change my mind but I don't want people to feel there's some easy way of skimming the cream they just have to keep on riding along with us I think it's too easy to make them work for the inside yeah exactly so like it's not about them it's about me and Alex this is the not the blog they want to read right exactly so uh but you have no plans to somehow kind of get out of that flow model and provide kind of the best of or
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the stock because at first it was relatively easy to kind of get the stock of Mr now it's just a river you've got to jump in and let it carry you away let people play around with the Mr search function maybe we'll do a book or
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something like that but you know I had looked at this at one point and just to get like a PDF of the blog post like I said read them and see them it broke all of the it was just too big it was just too big so we had to sort of do
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it year by year and you know I mean you think about that that's like I don't know thousands of posts and and the whole thing but just to read it all to find the best posts it's going to take some time I wonder if Chad GPT is going
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to change it like what happens if you type in like what does marginal Revolution say about what you do and say what you should do in Singapore does that work some at some point it will yeah I think some point soon in the next two years
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so maybe the Mr search function is not as important well it may become less important but until for now it Remains the most underrated and it's still easier to use than say GPT score it's just right there and it's free and it's pretty quick at some point we'll be able to ask even for a city that Tyler has never been to we could say what restaurant would Tyler common like gpt4 is pretty good at that and I do that actually fairly often where would
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you tell Tyler Cowan to go eat that's the prompt you need this works better for you than for me I think if I if I did this it would just answer oh vitalica butter and would obviously wants to go to a decentralized restaurant
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or like Eastern European Foods right um it'll pick it'll take decentralized I uh I like eating cryptographically verifiable it'll tell you to go to a chain restaurant that's some good jokes guys I'm really impressed with that just off the dump
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all right favorite Mr commenters I'll throw out one notable one Barclay J Rosser um he passed away in early 2023 when he passed away you called him out as a long time commenter and I went and looked he left nearly 4 000 comments on marginal
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Revolution the first in May 2005 in the last in December of 2022. um so he that averages to about a comment every other day for 17 and a half years he was a very good polymath super smart but like every 50th comment or so he
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just called his intellectual opponent a total followed by some obscenities and then he'd be back to totally cool [Laughter] every 50 comments that's right what did this guy do what did did he have a job or oh Professor yeah he's a professor of Economics but Chaos Theory mathematician Soviet economy yeah yeah Soviet economy yes well here's your chance to kind of lift up the best commenters so who in your mind right now or or throughout the
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history of Mr who stands out to you is a good commenter someone who always right now sure is the best commenter I don't know who he or she is probably it's a he given our comment section but just a lot of concrete points especially about the healthcare medical system yeah probably a doctor very knowledgeable sure is good uh dan111 or 111 I don't know which one it's good but it definitely changes over the years not everybody has come as long
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you know so it changes but it's like the intellectual calculation of the common section there will be lists of comments and maybe every comment is bad but actually in the aggregate you learn a lot from like triangulating against it well
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here's what these people would say well adding the upvote feature to me was like long overdue but it substantially improved the quality of the comment section okay right the Reddit style like being able to just see the top comments
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versus wading through it all I think it's been a big Improvement there's a lot of manipulation though I think it's an improvement but are people coordinating among their friends and family to upload their comment and
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manipulate them they write scripts I believe wow it's possible to do but it's a sign about serious to hack the comment section of Mr wow and those critical people are our biggest fans in my view it's like you're bothering to go after us I feel really
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flattered I love you the opposite of love is not hate it's indifference that's right exactly very close together exactly there are people who are you know very invested in the maintenance and operation of the marginal Revolution
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comment system and so much to the Chagrin of some people you can put any name you want um and people you know who have probably commented maybe as long as Rosser did want sort of their identity protected and it really bothers some people when
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they can't do that and anyone can claim to be who they are have you thought about you know giving people that that ability or changing in a way that it's a little less gameable in that sense people register it can be hacked or they maybe they don't trust us so I don't want to force people to have these identities so this is one fellow actually when he was a kid he trademarked the name Bill he has IP in the name Bill and there's another bill
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who comes along violates this guy's property rights so the first Bill calls the second one fake bill and they slugged this out and first bill the guy with all the IP rights to the name he's convinced fake bill is actually equestrian
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and he writes us and tells us look at the posting of the timing and look how it was it must be you guys need to get rid of fake Phil and it's there's no Grand conspiracy it's just there are many bills um let's go back to eras of Mr okay so we
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did 06 to 2016 and I think the third error of Mr is 2016 to 2020 Which is popular is the rise of populism Trump um it's a smaller shorter period because of covid and things that happen around 2020 but what about that specific time both for Mr and again the kind of intellectual discourse online it definitely fell and the thing which marked it to me was actually our most commented I believe is our most commented on post was just Tyler's post
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and it just said Sarah Palin that was it that was it and that is the most commented that's the title of the post the Kane had just picked her yeah yeah nothing else I didn't I didn't heard of her I said what are you people gonna say
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I was very innocent on that part and and the the comment section just went nuts and like everybody has gotten has got an opinion and it was it was just it was a little distressing in the sense that it's that's precisely the sort of thing
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that Tyler and I don't want to do right but at the same time if you don't give the comment section an opportunity to speak on the so-called issue of the day they will take some other post which is on something entirely different and say but what about Sarah Palin no so you have to give them that outlet that's right they sound like children I think we're the children yeah and they may be like Disturbed sometimes or just very smart people
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wasting their time but I think in this era uh in this era of the political discourse the level-headedness of Mr which sounds both truly reflective of your Natures but also an intentional Norm that you tried to establish lives
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as needed as ever right the cool-headedness even in the even in the Trump era I can't recall any posts that were over the top in their emotion we had some very good think pieces in that era I thought both of us yeah what does
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I think based like longer like a little longer but about politics but not candidates about politics at a conceptual level what is going on here how can this be happening sort of pieces yeah I mean Mr is the market share of my
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mind's definitely increased during that period I think yeah definitely so other spaces declining inequality and you know Mr didn't steal its great credit which I think was great all right now uh kind of a short-lived error because in 2020 obviously pandemic
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uh and then somewhat resulting from that though some of this stuff was seated before we have these big essays on progress State capacity libertarianism but also of course pandemic response so maybe we separate those two but covet and just becoming similar to the financial crisis similar to you know the the other examples like this where everyone's learning in public everyone's trying to figure out what's going on what was that like for you too
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we were stuck inside so we put up more posts links would have 10 rather than five or six definitely a strange era um you know I found myself uh I was invited to give this talk to uh the White House the the domestic policy and uh on using
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incentives to accelerate uh vaccine development um so I get on the call and um turns out that they had invited me and uh Michael creamer who's number one world expert on precisely uh this question and I was very direct you know
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I said you got to do this you got to do this it's when the economy was losing you know like 200 billion dollars 250 billion dollars a month right and so there was almost uh nowhere you could go wrong right so where I was promoting an
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operation warp what turned into operation warp speed saying look you got to spend some money here you know I said look I'm known as a sort of conservative free market Economist guy I've never said these words in my entire life
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before but now is the time to throw money at the problem and uh Michael Kramer turned out was in complete agreement um which was good it gave me a lot of credibility uh he's sort of more soft-spoken but uh that that was a good
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uh teamwork and then uh afterwards the invited us they asked us to write a report um and then Michael got you know a bunch of other people like Susan Athie and Chris Snyder a top Economist and we wrote this report with promoting
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something like what became operation warp speed I have no idea what influence uh we had but we we certainly uh put it out there and so then I became because of the blog I sort of became the the spokesperson for some of these uh ideas
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first first doses first and fractional uh dosing and you know using a sentence operation warm speed all that kind of uh stuff and then what was peculiar I think strange uh so I had that role and then Tyler started fast grants so we we both
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had this tremendous kind of involvement in one way or another but in a very different respect yeah and Mr became a kind of information Clearinghouse with other blogs gone clearly there was Twitter for the pandemic right but if
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you wanted one website where you didn't have to scroll or fend off other things uh we made that the place to go it's amazing to me in retrospect how many people have held that against us because a lot of what we did was just
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covering different facts held what against you that we gave so much attention to the pandemic they think we're like to the fake pandemic oh I see gotcha the big pandemic yeah the one where the vaccines give the people remember
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it is I hadn't I hadn't really thought about it in that way that marginal Revolution enabled both of you uh to have applied you know real world responses to the pandemic but in separate ways they're very close to do your independent thing
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you're both on the blog obviously covering this stuff getting your ideas out there but then Alex you're much more giving policy makers a very specific idea of something to do and Tyler goes for let's get grants out there as quickly as we can and fast grants has raised over 50 million dollars and most of the donors were Mr readers and I think in part they felt they trusted me in the operation because they had known of Mr for so long and they
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knew Alex was doing operation warp speed and it felt very credible and I wonder if this is a good time to talk about the differences between the two of you and the way that you write and the way that you engage with the world because your co-authors and
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obviously share so much but the differences are sometimes amusing to see so I was telling Alex earlier I always know when I'm in my RSS reader looking at Mr posts that I have to click on the ones or the capitalization is proper in
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the title of the post because I know Alex will capitalize uh the words in a posterist Tyler will do lowercase you know uh words in the title then obviously Alex posts infrequently longer form usually Tyler's Relentless daily output say some talk about some of the differences between the two of you in terms of how you think how you write and are these subtle differences that show up at Mr revealing of any deeper difference in your approach to life
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worldview work style Etc you wrote a post on this right do you remember what you said so I said something like if if the post has got you know uh five different explanations for the same phenomena right then it's a Tyler post
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if it has one explanation you know simplifying everything down then it's an Alex post um if you don't understand what the post says it's a Tyler post if you do understand what the post says and you hate it I think that that rules pretty well yeah
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we do the way I put it is that um yeah I the first thing I do when coming to a problem is strip away as much complexity as I possibly can and get down to what I think is the the nut of the problem and try try and deal with that well the first thing that Tyler does is think about let's think about the five or six or seven things which could influence this and then we'll work with those you know seven different things and try and come up with a
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solution and so we're very different in that way but then if you sort of force me to like add in some complexity and what about this what about this and this period of time and then you and if you were to force Tyler to take away some complexity which is really hard to do okay so you have to get Tyler you have to gang up on him with like Brian Kaplan and Garrett Jones people at lunch do you gang up on Tyler and make him strip away the complexity
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and you make me add complexity then actually we come to the same place but from very different thinking styles and and how about the Cadence of the output I mean Alex are you ever like tempted or inspired to publish more
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frequently or Tyler have you ever thought about doing twice a week or what's that about the difference no I have no plan on changing I think one thing I try to do in many of my posts is to mix moods so I presented this notion of mood
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affiliation people are like optimistic or pessimistic or they have their loyalty to the mood and that's usually a cognitive mistake and I found a few mixed moods in a post you can say things that are entirely correct and people
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will just get angry they'll think you're confusing them you're kind of messing with their minds and this is deliberate but I think it's trying to teach people a lesson you know once I wrote the book The Great stagnation the title great stagnation
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okay but the whole last chapter of the book is about how we're going to get out of it all these wonderful breakthroughs will be coming because of the internet no one ever mentions that last chapter they only take one mood away from a book
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so I I'm happy with the post if I feel I've sent mixed moods and what I'm saying I think is true and it's going to bug people and confuse them then I'm like yes interesting it reminds me of the post that I wrote last week on world
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coin where I think yes a good example right look what are the things that happened is that you know the people who are pro World coin basically said like look um you know the haters are crazy if italic explains it really clearly and
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then the people who are antsy basically yeah said like look here's the section where he outlines what the four crazy risks are and uh people yeah it seems like everyone just kind of walked away yeah I mean I mean I hope some people
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and I think lots of people did I get uh the interesting information but definitely many walked away just uh certain that you know their their existing opinion is correct which is uh unfortunately the default response to most writing anywhere so do you people people don't I mean to answer your question Ben it's not about being tempted you're being tempted to you know write more often the production budget just doesn't Encompass that ability and
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people you know they don't believe Tyler reads as much as he does but he honestly does it's true I only cover a small fraction of what I mean that's the funny thing I mean it's true Tyler skins but the way I would put it is this is that he very
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quickly is able to find uh something in a book which he doesn't know and then he reads that section but this what this means is that the more Tyler reads the faster he can reap because he just skips the stuff he already knows and so I mean
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he's just a unique uh ability uh and that he's I didn't you know there's nobody else I think in the world who can produce as much original interesting new content as Tyler so I'm very grateful uh for that since I feel I don't have to feed the blog quite as much speaking of reading let's move to a segment I'm calling mysteries of Mr so a couple times I think from like 06 to 08 you hosted book clubs um there were maybe two or three
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there was a Keynes book club on the general theory and it just stopped halfway through why did it stop I'm not sure I remember I I was happy with it in the comments section on this post was often quite good it stopped at chapter 12 and your last
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post is basically a long quote of the chap you know an excerpt of the chapter and then you say a lot of insights in here chapter 12 is the best chapter of the general theory so maybe I just felt it would be going downhill
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okay not a satisfactory I feel like I'm the only one in the world who's wondering I was participating at the time and to me it just ended and it was never spoken of again maybe 13 will be coming soon who knows why no more book clubs
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comment section is worse I think we're also not in an era of that many seminal books so there aren't books I'm tempted to cover I think there's a large number of excellent history books coming out but they don't make sense for book clubs
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you need some theory in a book for it to fit into a book club so if everyone can say something what do you think is the last book that was um like even on the level of like things like human action or you know
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like the stuff that uh animated a lot of people in the last century it was a 15 to 20 year period maybe starting with Jared diamond constrips and steel yeah where you have at least 30 or 40 books and I couldn't remember which was the last but things
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like the right Queen selfish Gene right in many different Freakonomics and everyone had to read all those books to be intellectually illiterate I don't think we're in that time anymore yeah I've definitely found my uh for myself
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at having a harder and harder time answering the question what's the most interesting book that you've read so I just mainly read history and those are interesting especially if you read them in clusters or clumps I will read about
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history of Ireland for six to nine months but there's not any single book it's like oh you have to read this book yeah and everyone's still trying to write books like the Jared Diamond kind of book uh I'm not saying they're all bad books but I don't think they're really succeeding in grabbing anyone's attention feels played out that genre do you think we're just in like less of a big idea age and more of a many small ideas Age The Big
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Ideas are things people do like large language models ethereum and so on so on and those are the big ideas they're fantastic but they're not books in a sense the books were a poor substitute for the actual Big Ideas
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that's the way I look at it I'd rather have the big Ideas if superconductivity comes through how many books is that worth [Music] so for a long time you've made the claim that you've never missed a day of posting on margin Revolution it's not a
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claim it's a fact please I've often wondered if anyone checked that I've checked actually I've checked too yeah and it's not true what Alex your first post was uh on August 21st okay okay there was no post on August 22nd so Tyler you hadn't started
44:50
yet so maybe you can still keep this claim but there is one day that I've only been able to find where there is no Mr post ah have there been any close calls like you know plane got delayed it's 11 50 p.m the post hasn't gone up
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or is it is it's not actually a thing that we try I mean I've evolved into trying but I just have had a lot to say yeah it's just yeah it's just Tyler's natural uh Pace do you have any memory of you know so you wrote the first post on the 21st and then Tyler you just started two days later do you have any memory of why Alex started first or there was the two-day delay we were doing all these practice posts thinking no one would read them
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and we would just get up to speed and then we learned people were writing us like oh loved your post just like wondering oh what did we say yesterday and you have to also understand okay Tyler is not that good at technology okay
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so uh so I set the blog up right so then I had to kind of uh you know to use your password Tyler you know here's how you post so it took Tyler a few uh a week or two before he really hit stride no I still come to Alex with very simple questions
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how does this work and yet at the same time you've been a more active user of Chad gbt and then probably the great majority of other people I don't think I'm ecological side of it the conceptual side maybe there are things I grasp
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because of my background in the humanities that would be it let's move to uh probably the last official segment of the conversation but this is a recurring segments and memes of marginal Revolution so I'll throw out a few that I've noticed in vitalik and
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Ben you can jump in with any you know but throughout the history of the blog there's been these recurring things best sentence I read today a very early one claims my Russian wife laughs that I don't know if you remember that
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sentences you won't let me call her Russian anymore so oh okay that's one reason that one disappeared sentences to ponder shout it from the rooftops pictures of puffins and Alex I don't know how long you've done this but every
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at the end of the year now you do a stats rundown and I've where you show off the most popular post to Marginal Revolution and to me when I read it I think this is uh Alex's way of saying like I don't write nearly as many poses Tyler but I usually have the top ranking post on margin Revolution is that is that am I correct in that or is it you're just providing that's fair yeah it's to have it but but to be also to be fair to have the the top post
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which I don't always do by any means that's not necessarily a good thing right that goes back to uh you know if it's an alley if you understand the post and you hate it it's an Alex post so those tend to get a lot of comments I
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think the uh one of my favorite uh points of levity and Mrs when I think Tyler you once wrote a post after doing all these assorted Links of course which is a standby on the blog one day you just did assorted link and the whole
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post is just number one with a link it's like what a clever reversal but I think it'd be remiss if we're talking about memes Jeff I feel like we have to honor the third co-author of the blog who's not here with us in this conversation
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that's Tyrone and yeah he's he's given a lot to martial Revolution over the years and just you know curious Tyler just be honest with us where is he what have you done with them uh he lives in the Attic Tyrone there hasn't been that much Tyrone in
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the last six or seven years and I think the reason for that is the real world itself has become so weird and bizarre that what is a Tyrone post or what is funny in a Tyrone post it's changed and it's somehow more tragic and I would like to let Tyrone out of the attic but I also find it's a lot of emotional energy to write a Tyrone post much more than to write a Tyler post because you have to keep it within certain bounds but you have to let the
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Juices Flow and that's really hard it has to be plausible enough but people should not think as indeed they shouldn't that Tyrone's view is Tyler's because we all know that's never true and Tyrone's for the uninitiated
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Tyrone's world view or essential style is what for those who haven't been part of the blog for a long time this they've heard about Tyrone only in the abstract how would he characterize I'm so close to Tyrone I think we have to let Alex
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answer that question I mean I will say Tyrone will come to lunch but he never announces himself so the way the Tyrone operates is he will say something outrageous and then everyone will you know at the lunch conversation will try and uh I would argue overcome and then he'll give a lot of good Arguments for this it's very disturbing because then you go home and oh my God Tyrone dismissed with my mind you know what what was wrong it seems
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totally wrong and yet the argument seems logically correct and so uh Tyrone is a troublemaker okay he's troubled and a troublemaker so that's what I I would say and Tyrone uses his gifts for to do evil Deeds Okay Tyler uses his gifts to
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benefit the world and to create fast grants and immersion Ventures and to stimulate all kinds of people Tyrone uses his gifts uh to confound people and confuse them and set them on wrong paths so we want to keep Tyrone pretty boxed
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my father wanted to name me Tyrone that's where the name comes from and my mother refused she's like Tyrone that's a terrible name she held firm I became Tyler but it's some kind of modal reality in the David Lewis sense and every now and then readers should be allowed to peek behind that curtain we should all I suppose reflect in ourselves at this moment of who is our inner Tyrone and how to get in touch with our shadow that's part of the point
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of the post there you go it's actually a tool from I think maybe cognitive behavioral therapy to give your negative thoughts a name and say oh that's that's Tyrone talking that's not Jeff right so maybe I'll steal yours yeah um other I
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feel like stressianism kind of is a meme in itself but I think a lot of people misread that I feel I've expressed forthright opinions on more topics possibly than any Economist ever and it is true that when I write a post I never or hardly
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ever explain the references or give links it's super informationally dense partly doing so bores me partly trying to mess with people's minds a bit but if they know all the references it's actually crystal clear and there's plenty of topics for all
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here's what Tyler thinks and I say it I mean hundreds thousands of topics and people think I'm the straussian I tell people like how to find the Strauss and others right Alex [Music] okay some general questions to close how
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much time per week right now do each of you spend like directly writing thinking about the blog all of it but look writing it takes way less time than people think way less all right let's say just writing I don't
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writing like just actually crafting the posts getting them ready to go I don't know two hours a day yeah I mean when I write it does take some time because I think especially when you have a lot of readers and and you think or I think uh you know if I
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can save a reader a few seconds of time and you do the you know expected altruism sort of calculation where only got thousands of readers so if I can you know my a minute for me and saves them you know hours yeah yeah Tyler just likes to get it down as your audience has grown is there a sense do the stakes seem higher are you going to spend more time sort of thinking of reviewing posts perhaps even self-censoring like gosh in the old days
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I would have published this but now that I've got all these influential readers I can't just you've got to resist that and there's a few recent times where I did resist that and I'm glad I did but for me a key thing is like can you ever sit there and still giggle and if that disappears I feel I'm doing something wrong but I definitely can still sit there and giggle yeah I wouldn't say we self-censor I don't feel I self-censor but except in the
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following sense there's just a bunch of topics that I think the world just does not need to know my opinion right a wouldn't be useful and wouldn't be useful for them wouldn't be useful for me so like you know why bother so there
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are things like that so obviously and what do you think about this topic yeah the floor is yours so the blog has allowed you to gain so much influence notoriety um what's kept you at Mason and mercatus have you have you had offers what's kept
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you uh what's kept you if these at this kind of institutional home I've had good offers or potential offers uh but support for what I'm doing great people to work with Alex most of all but not only everyone at mercatus and uh where it is I think it's the best location in the United States to be for a number of reasons at least for me uh it's been great no I go to economics conferences and you know you go hear some talks and they're
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often boring and then I find myself it's it's bizarre but I find myself I want to go here Tyler's talk or Robin and the stalker Brian Kaplan and like I can speak to these guys every day right why would I possibly do this and yet
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it often turns out they are the most interesting people you know on the agenda and you know Tyler like I talked to can talk to Tyler every single day but you'll go present at a conference and he'll say things I've never heard him say before
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um so it's not like you know I say Tyler is like uh you know heraclotian uh thinker you know you can never enter the same Waters uh twice because every single day it's something uh different and uh so what a joy what a pleasure
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what a honor you know it is for me to be in a department with just an amazing group of thinkers who stimulate uh and you know you try and just keep up uh even a little bit and and it's incredible we never get sick of it and George
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Mason's a good school for free speech definitely yes you feel supported there what are the types of blog posts that you think have generated the most impact in the sense of cultural Revenue resonance or influence are they like the very
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prescriptive policy things are they the philosophical treatises what do you think is it one post or is it actually more of the the chorus it's very hard to know but two things I would cite one is my post on state capacity
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libertarianism which is still a good statement of where I am philosophically I think that's held up well and when I coined the term that's the case where I was sitting there you know giggling like oh this term is so absurd no one will
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ever use it so it's just right and people still use it but I wrote a post about emergent Ventures we're at the emergent Ventures winners meet up and I outlined the philosophy behind emerging Ventures I don't think it's our
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most red post I don't think it's our most cited post but a lot of donors read that post and were persuaded and without that post I don't think we would have emergent Ventures as a large thing so given how much talent we now have
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over 400 winners have come through emergent Ventures that's like a super influential post even though at the surface level it may not look that way we try and keep either increase the Overton window or try and stop the Overton window from from shutting down
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um I think some of the you know the covet posts um like on first doses first and things like that even though in the United States we didn't do first doses first but Britain and Canada did hopefully I may have had some influence there but what I think is interesting is that when we did Monkey pox okay CDC went along with first doses first for monkey pox so that's what I mean by sort of keeping that Overton window so even though like
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no one's going to cite you know oh tabrock said this on first those is for covid it made it possible for people to think that this is an idea we should be thinking about right and so the next time it the virus a virus came around
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you have a bigger pot of ideas from which to pull and this idea which once seemed totally radical now seems hey maybe we can try this um so I I think that has been on first doses first there was a major decision maker from an actual country
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who just sent me a message like hey do you guys really mean this and I said yes and the next day it happened no I'm not saying it happened because you know of that only thing right but people are really listening to an extent
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that it's you know scary sometimes well I think there are two vectors of influence from mr1 as the specific Jeff posts in a specific uh ideas he put forth in the world that had real impact but there's another Vector of influence
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which I think is more subtle but it's probably how I would identify being influenced because if you ask me what are the five posts that have most influenced me I probably couldn't tell you the five but there's this General
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mood a a temperament an approach to the world um a way of thinking about ideas a level-headedness that kind of like a fish in water after hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of posts just seep into every aspect of your worldview and way of thinking about the
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world but I think that's that's the really profound Legacy of Mr to me as a reader hard to put my finger on exactly how or where but I think it's ultimately a much deeper level of influence on perhaps a small smaller number of people but um it's really really incredible and I'm so grateful for that before I close vital like any general questions you had other things you're curious about so how did it happen that the two of you
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are on the same blog and uh Brian and Robin are officer are often there on separate playgrounds could it could things have ended up differently I can speak to that and this is the origin story of Mr correct me if I'm
59:27
getting anything wrong but Alex came into my office one day and he said we we ought to write a textbook and I said something like that's a great idea Alex but first we need to write a blog and become much better known and then we'll write a textbook
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and without Alex I wouldn't have done it and I love Brian I love Robin but I wouldn't have done it with them and whether Alex might have done something with them he could speak to and I've supported their writing a lot but I don't feel it meshes with mine
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somehow the thing that Ben just outlined this kind of cumulative vision of a way to be I think Alex's take on that is different than mine but I feel his doesn't interfere with mine and it supports it and complements it and for
1:00:09
Brian and Robin it doesn't and that's why I didn't pick them hmm yeah I think that's great we both have pluralist ways of thinking in a slightly different way yeah um yeah that's why I agree with that and it's worked well for the blog uh you
1:00:26
know Tyler is obviously posting every day uh and I'm giving people a little bit more of the red meat which sort of keeps them coming back as well so I think uh and you know we've done the book we've done marginal
1:00:38
Revolution University uh together so uh we have a long history of projects which have come out pretty good we've worked together now 33 years I believe you know well before Mr keep that in mind yeah we wrote a whole bunch of papers together
1:00:53
what would be the reason to end marginal Revolution death senility not super conductivity though would senility actually end marginal Revolution I guess a sufficient amount of it would well you could take away the
1:01:10
keys for me that's right so okay the responsibility lies in my hands yeah um congratulations on entering your third decade of marginal Revolution I think I speak for Ben and vitalik and myself that and all the all the readers
1:01:27
that we look forward to continue reading and to hearing your ideas and seeing your influence in the world um so thank you Alex thank you Tyler thank you Ben vitalik and thank you all for listening let's see another 20 years thank you thank you