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conversations with Tyler today I'm here with Chuck cluster and Chuck I would describe as a person who basically has on everything but most notably from our point of view he has a new book out called the 9s Chuck welcome hey thanks for having me on I appreciate it I have
some questions about the 90s what was our biggest cultural fear or worry from back then that never came to fruition so what was the one that never came I suppose well I mean the easy answer would be why 2K that was of course at the very end and whether or that that didn't come to fruition I suppose
depends on if you're the kind of person who thinks well this is an example of them seeing a problem diagnosing it correctly taking all the steps to stopping it from happening and then having a non-event or if you're someone who's like well you know some countries barely did anything had the same sort of
result as we did how come our microchips didn't stop working in our dishwashers it was never going to happen so it was the event that didn't occur either way it wasn't a tragedy but it was certainly something we talked about for an entire year and thought about constantly and
kind of perceived as sort of you know the possible end to the way we understood civilization if you go to the very early part of the 9s I suppose it was the idea that well the Cold War was still sort of kind of in its death throws but I think the fear was oh what if a suitcase bomb gets out of Russia
someone blows up Chicago or something I think that was something that never came to fruition there's a specific thing that you kind of had in mind when you asked that question well I had the fear that Russia might invade the Ukraine which now is Ukraine that's come back but the notion that Japan would buy up
the entire world this idea that you had like crack babies who would become these super Predators there were a lot of fears that in retrospect seem relatively slight compared to what we now face although that is common I think to sort of amplify fears in the moment and then
retroactively look at anything that didn't happen and sort of perceive it as well well I guess you know maybe we were amplifying that too much at the time I mean if 911 doesn't happen we look at the attacking of the USS Cole very differently we look at the first attempt on the World Trade Center very
differently now that seems like a precursor to a plan that had been existed for this long stretch of time and that this was always the goal but if 911 doesn't occur it's almost a forgotten event so it's really difficult I mean when writing about history but particularly history that people have
lived through you know the hardest thing about writing a book about the 90s I found was the kind of bifurcation between people who remember the90s almost like they just happened that these things you know the release of never mind or like Quinton Tarantino films and all these things that this is
still the history they're living in and then for other people it's no different than the moonlanding it's just Exposition about an event that they didn't experience how do you write a book with the idea that maybe maybe half the audience is going to be in category a and half the audience is going to be
in category B it was kind of a complicated problem like did I need to literally explain what a compact disc is I asked that myself at one point you know then I would be like well you know when I was growing up I fully understood what a real toore was and what a atra was even though if I didn't necessarily
purchase them but something has changed about the way time is perceived and I sense that you've recognized this too it's 10 years is different now than the way it used to be I think there's a breako maybe it comes at 9911 but since then everything has felt weird and a lot
of Aesthetics hasn't changed very much music doesn't go through phases the way it used to movies intensify maybe in terms of special effects or number of superheroes but they don't evolve the way they used to the 90s to me was the last part of earlier history well I mean I think it's possible very easy in fact
to argue that the 90s were the last decade deade of the 20th century but also just the last decade that was sort of this immutable framing of time one thing I talk about a little bit in the book maybe I should have talked about more but I find I wanted to get away from you know seeing the past through
the prism of the present but like like this guy Mark fiser who's dead now had this idea about like the slow cancellation of the future I feel like that's one of the most profound ideas that I've come across in the last 10 years of my life and it seems so palpable that this is occurring that you
know like example I will often use is you know if you take say 10 minutes from an obscure film in 1965 with like no major actors and then you take 10 minutes from an obscure film from 1980 where nobody became famous and you show anyone these 10-minute Clips they will have no problem whatsoever
figuring out which one came first even like a little kid can look at a movie from 1965 and a movie from 1980 and instantly understand that one predates the other but if you do that with a film from 2005 and a film from 2020 again sort of an obscure film where you don't
recognize the actors you're just looking at it aesthetically and trying to deduce which one came first and which one came second it's almost impossible and this phenomenon just seems to almost be infiltrating every aspect of the culture this idea that everything to a degree
now is somewhat retro and that certain kind of natural Evolutions that happened because culture was lost or sort of Forgotten or just kind of moved Beyond which doesn't really happen now it's like so easy to access the recent past that all sort of becomes pushed into the same sort of kind of Gumbo or whatever
the 90s to me sort of signal the end of when you were able to look at certain things or certain qualities or a certain vague sense and identify it as from that period I fear that that may be over although I'm not sure why I fear it but why did it change what happened when did we sense the flip there what drove that
difference well the answer the easy answer or the predictable answer or the answer anyone would give they would say is the internet that the internet emerges in the 90s it makes kind of a big jump in '95 but it's still sort of when you think of the internet in the 90s it's really more of a mechanical
discussion more than a cultural discussion but then when you move Beyond about 2001 kind of Beyond 911 and you see the introduction of social media and all these things and just the ability that it is so easy for anyone to instantly access something like anything something or anything I mean I use this
example a lot you know it's like when I worked in newspapers in the 9s they would always be like a person at that newspaper maybe they had once been a reporter now they're on the night desk or something and you would go up to a person like that and you'd be like hey
you know I'm I'm trying to think of this movie it's like I don't know was like about cars and I think there's a beach boy in it and I feel like the film burns up and they'd go oh that's two lane black top like their job was to remember kind of cultural minutia that is gone now because now everyone has the machine
that does that which is I guess maybe personally disappointed because it seemed like that was what my life was going to become like the person who remembered all these sort of insignificant things and sort of remembered what kind of you know but that seems to be over now now that it's
all so available instead of culture having depth it's more like a real shallow ocean that's very easy to wade into and scoop up whatever you need and it's vast but it doesn't go deep yeah is Seinfeld still funny and here I have in mind two points of view one is the view
that well now it's just like rude so the girlfriend named mulva you couldn't get away with that right and the other view is well it's not rude enough like now we have Curb Your Enthusiasm and that's really rude and it makes Seinfeld and Jason Alexander just not necessary what's your take is Seinfeld still good
and funny I still find it funny although I will admit it might be difficult for someone who experienced it first to have a real accurate understanding of that one thing that I have found when I talk to young people is that they tend to like friends more than Seinfeld they see
friends almost as this Timeless situation dealing with problems that everyone goes through where Seinfeld seems more rooted in this kind of like worldview that doesn't exist as much anymore so I might be a hard person to gaug that it does still seem funny to me I think the thing that matters though is
that the tone of Seinfeld was both unlike the culture of today but also massively popular that is the thing that just kept coming up over and over again whenever I would write about television this idea that we have these events now like oh the finale of Game of Thrones
the finale of Madmen or whatever that seem like these points in the Zeitgeist that everyone is discussing simultaneously and yet any episode of Seinfeld was seen and experienced by more people which meant that experience was just kind of normative entertainment it's always so tempting when you look
back at any period of time to look for sort of these strange Apex moments the outlier that sort of seemed in congruous with everything else that was happening and maybe seems closer to what's happening in the culture of the present and you go like well this is what really mattered I always sense that the thing
that really mattered was the things that we did not even view as having that sort of ancillary secondary meaning they were just what was being consumed and sort of the ideas and the morals and sort of like the values I guess within that so like what was important about Seinfeld
wasn't that it was more kind of rude and brusk and kind of adversarial with the classic idea of a sitcom where everything is happy and everything works out that was important but the bigger thing was that those ideas were just on and people just watched them because there they were and that sort of sets
the texture of an era more than say Twin Peaks or something that doesn't seem like it fits in the time that it came did the Golden Age of American TV end after the 90s and if so what happened to it because you have The Sopranos wire the years differ but it's around that time right well I would say that there's
the first golden area of Television which everybody kind of understands is sort of it sem period where you know back when television was like still like a New Concept I would say the second golden age of Television actually probably comes post 9s if we're looking at the value of the content I mean I
think that when you look at that early part of the 21st century where you still have The Sopranos you have the wire Mad Men is there breaking mad you know it's like there these shows that probably were for that period of time generally Superior to what was happening in Cinema
which was seemed like an unthinkable thing at the beginning of the 9s to even assert that somehow television could be better than movies from a like a critical perspective was just kind of Unthinkable Seinfeld was a great show but I wouldn't say the 90s where a golden age of Television they were
probably closer to the 80s in a lot of ways the real jump came when shows either kind of moved away from the network concept or even within the network concept you could make a show like lost which wasn't really like something that you would have seen in the past what's our biggest
misconception about the 9s I would say that one of the things that I found interesting was I am not certain it is a misremembered period I think that there is a caricature and like an idea of the 90s I think I kind of in this book I kind of describe it as kind of like a low stakes grunge cartoon
kind of and that's not perfect but but it's not radically incorrect I mean the '90s are still close enough that a lot of the things I think that we project upon that period aren't so far from the truth and okay when you look at like David hbert stams the 50s or books written about the 60s or books written
about the 70s typically the author is sort of pushed or maybe feels obligated to contradict the widespread perception of the period like you know we thought the 7 were boring actually there was all this tomal going on you know it's always like we thought this and we were wrong
someone could do that with a book about the 90s but I felt that that would be kind of a misshapen view of how it was like my goal in this was to write a book that was not looking at the 90s the way we think about the culture now and sort of jamming that retrospective view into sort of a modern ideology but to go back
and try to capture what it actually felt like to experience that time like in some ways it's like it's easy to seem smart by looking back and finding little signposts that signal a future but it's also not difficult to do that what's much harder is to describe what it felt
like to kind of hang around that signpost with no understanding that it had any sort of future symbolic value now the 1960s you have the professor on Gilligan's Island you have Spock on Star Trek how does the popular culture of the 9s portray science well I think with a pretty palpable degree of
fear which is not uncommon I mean you look back at a Godzilla movie and it's like you know Atomic Testing is going to cause this you know calami Frankenstein is founded on this in the 90s of course we have this cloning of Dolly the sheep and that's kind of a hingo for the way
like the idea of genetic engineering was seen and there was just this immediate fear that genetics was going to be used very often to reanimate things from the past a little bit like Jurassic Park I mean Jurassic Park is the biggest mainstream example that's not really an anti-science book or an anti-science
movie but it is that the scientists have gone too far I did find it very intriguing to realize that after Dolly the sheep was cloned in Scotland like Bill Clinton was trying to introduce legislation that would stop the cloning of a human being that there was like we got to get ahead of this that's odd when
you look back when you think about it in retrospect that's an odd fear that we had that somebody would clone humans immediately because the technology existed but that fear was around it was like a you know like many things in the 90s it was this strange combination of
anxiety and excitement like it was thrilling this was occurring and yet also seemed like the recipe for disaster so it was like you had to sort of embrace the idea why also stopping it was the 90s the last era of musical subcultures and if so why did they go away I think there are still musical
subcultures but they're exclusively online now I think the idea of the physical Mass subculture is probably gone and you know and of course these are easy things to be wrong about but part of that had to do with the fact of scarcity and not that the records didn't exist but that you had to pay for him
and people in teen culture had limited amount of funds so you had enough money to buy one CD so you bought the Cure and you listen to that real intensely because it's the only one you got that week and when you go back in two weeks maybe you buy Sisters of Mercy or 9in
nails or something that's vaguely tied to it and then you kind of realize that the people who like the cure seemen to shop at this place called Hot Topic so maybe you start shopping there the next thing you know you're part of this subculture because you had a real limitation you were limited in your
choice and you were limited in the number of directions you can go after Napster and just with file sharing in general and then moving into things like Spotify and apple music there is no pressure to sort of go down the same path over time like music is now a buffet and its value its tangible value
is less so people kind of just pick and choose and everyone just sort of creates a playlist or a mixtape that suits their personality in specific and that fights against the idea of creating a subculture because with that subculture what you need are the people who have
shared values by default in other words what they decide is cool or uncool is not totally just based on what they think but what their peers seem to think and what the artists that these peers are listening to seem to think and if you consider yourself a goth kid or a metal head or any of these things that
happened at that time the way your group was perceived kind of calcified or galvanized the meaning of those signifiers and that's just not really how it is now that's gone now there again is something I kind of miss that I'm not sure why I miss it is it just because I was familiar with it I don't
know like to ascribe actual value to its complicated maybe back then you were more likely to use music to Signal your personality type so you're an indie girl who's going to go to Brown you listen to RM right you could be a dead head you could listen to metal whereas now you
have you know your Instagram page tells everyone what you're like so you just go off and consume the buffet absolutely but can you still be shocked today by music you hear so when I first heard Smells Like Teen Spirit or Sonic Youth or My Bloody Valentine I was shocked I'm never shocked today are you shocked well
no I guess the short answer is no but that's like what you're describing in some ways though is is really is like the slow cancellation of the future that music from say 1991 92 93 like Nirvana's never mind came out the same day as blood sugar Sex Magic came out you know
there was a whole bunch of records that came out that day had you played them to someone from 1971 it would not have seemed even like music I think that somebody who was into rock in 1971 who was listening to Leed Zeppelin and the early Beetle solo records and all that you played them this music they would be
like well it seems dissident it doesn't seem songful doesn't seem like music at all I don't like the way it's recorded it would be just really you know troubling it is very unlikely that someone would have that experience from hearing music now who had really been into music at the turn of the 21st
century it would not seem that different it's very difficult Now to create something that isn't at least partially retro I mean in fact it almost seems to be gone entirely now you grew up in North Dakota you loved metal you documented it for Spin and other media sources if you were coming of age today
what would be your passion in music what would be your thing what would be your at least partial subculture that's a almost impossible question but a great one like it's fun to think about that but the answer I give is going to be completely worthless because if I'm coming up in rural North
Dakota now okay so my hometown had 500 people and I lived outside of that town in my hometown there was essentially two kinds of music there was metal and there was country like ACDC was kind of the crossover act that's kind of all there was you know there was top 40 music that
no one seemed to care about and even as high school students we seem to view as like shallow and superficial while we were listening to bands like poison and mle crew so there's lots of contradictions here it doesn't always make sense but I fell into that music like my brother came back from the Army
he had a mly crew cassette he had a Aussie Osborne cassette I had been listening to like you know huie Lewis and like you know Eddie Grant and Madness and Prince got this I just loved it immediately and it kind of became my whole identity for a while so how would that experience possibly happen now like
I would be on the internet I assume that instead of just sitting in my bedroom listening to an Aussie Osborne cassette and just reading the liner notes over and over again I would be on a computer and the experience of having my brother drop something off and then leave would
be replaced by someone online that I find interesting sort of leading me in some direction I don't think that I would have the same experience with music that I had growing up in a situation where my options were limited where there was you know long stretches of time when I had six cassettes that
was all I had and I would just play them over and over and over again and think about them and see things in that music that probably didn't exist it seems odd to say this now and it seems almost crazy but I think part of the reason I was able to succeed as a Critic was because I came from a place where I was
so limited in the art I was consuming that I had to think about it differently you know I didn't have MTV I think if even if I'd grown up in Minneapolis cu the people that I became friends with later in life most of which came from bigger towns you know the people who seemed like me as an adult
they were the people who listened to the Smiths and who kind of thought Guns and Roses was terrible or whatever you know but Guns and Roses was the most interesting thing I had I would look at Axel Rose the way somebody else might think of I'm not even thinking of like
David burn or something like like I had to get all this meaning from him so that really worked to my advantage I think as I kind of matured and was able to experience these other kinds of art but still kind of working from the way it was when I kind of had nothing so I don't know know what I would be like now
I don't even like reading my early books because I can't relate to the person who wrote them so the idea of me thinking about what I was like at 13 no idea why did Spin Magazine fail like even I subscribed well the first thing I would say is like it started I think in
1988 and was still going pretty well till 2006 so it didn't really fail it had a long life why is it still not like a factor in the way like the music industry operates well lots of reasons one magazines in general matter less more significantly though is the idea is that like you know when I was reading
spin as a college student you would read about a band like pavement or you'd read about a band like teenage fan club and those records weren't even out yet so you would be reading this review of someone trying to sort of describe what the music was and and if you would like
it if it applied to you or whatever and then you'd wait for the record and finally hear it and you would have had this whole kind of built-in super structure in your mind over what this music was and now you're finally hearing it whereas now it would be you would hear about the band the same time you
heard it for the first time and that kind of takes away the significance of a magazine like spin I read spin because I thought it had the best writers about music but I wouldn't need people to write about music if I could instantly hear the song itself so I think that's
part of it what made Grantland so wonderful I appreciate you saying that I think it was that you know they just kind of went out and got the best writers they could find and paid them enough to do projects that other places probably wouldn't see a real demand for and kind of let him do it I mean the
first story I wrote for Grantland was about going to a junior college basketball game when I was like a sophomore in high school and it was a Native American team who was playing and they only had six guys on the roster and three three of them followed out and they won the game three on five but this
was a small junior college game in won North Dakota from the 0s there's no place to present that story to but at Grantland it was like go ahead like the weirder the better you know from the perspective of being a writer grantlin almost is like almost an unrealistic scenario just like we want you to be you
you know and as a consequence I suppose if we really went back and we read everything that was on Grantland we would find a lot of junk that just kind of I don't know seems ridiculous is now but at the same time the things that people remember were the best parts you
what is it in non-american culture that you're most interested in Canada not counting no Neil Young no Janie Mitchell non-american culture boy I'm a pretty American person in a lot of ways I'm sure a criticism of This Book Is that instead of being called the 90s it should be called the American 9s I have
a somewhat sort of maybe myopic view about how culture works but in 2008 I was a guest professor at the University of leig and I taught American studies there for a semester and it was in East Germany so it was very interesting it was like German's the main language the second most popular
language was Russian so like I could teach a class at this University but I couldn't mail a letter because I'd go to the Post Office and no one knew what I wanted but being in East Germany the thing that fascinated me was talking to Germans especially German students about their perception of America and I think
that the most valuable thing about traveling is the greater understanding you have of the place you're from from the way it is perceived and and you know your natural inclination is to almost argue with these people I was teaching a class called 20th century pop culture
it's the first day and I'm walking to class and a graduate student just starts walking alongside of me and he seems like a nice guy and he ask me what I'm doing and I tell him I'm teaching this class on 20th century pop culture and he's like well that should take 10 minutes because like they just perceive
America as having no culture but it was crazy CU they all loved hip-hop and I would be like well well hip hop is American culture and they'd be like oh no that's an immigrant culture I'm like well not really that's kind of a weird way to perceive it but I know what you're really asking more about but like
Asian Cinema in the 90s was a big deal for me I discovered Hong Kong movies changed my whole worldview of movies and I think that to be honest I was pretty unsophisticated in that way in that I thought that I was getting deeper into Culture by pursuing what I was already
kind of into so I would see a movie like run L LA run or and I would think oh now I'm understanding this thing but I was just seeing one part of it there's a bunch of stuff I could make up but I think in reality my interests are like domestic they really are there were tons of bands I liked from Britain but that
somehow didn't seem in any ways separate from us culture like the Beatles seem like part of American culture like Led Zeppelin seems like part of American culture in fact Leed Zeppelin seems more like it's part of American culture than UK culture I was really into groups like
pado 5 like Japanese pop music I really like Swedish pop music But there again that's something that's been so integrated into our world here it's almost like saying oh like I love food from other countries general zo's chicken that's what I love you know it's like it's a form of the other or
whatever that is actually a form of us yeah are you up for a lightning round of overrated versus underrated sure feel free to pass on any of these George Harrison overrated or underrated wow well I would say you've seen get back right he's a wher and he walks off stage yeah well he's not
transparent who who would hire him but I don't know if any of those qualities factor into someone being overrated or underrated I mean I would say this it is almost impossible to say a member of The Beatles is underrated not because they are overrated but because you know we
look at their work in such a way that you know there's nobody out there saying that like All Things Must Pass isn't good so I suppose if you had to make an assessment you could say that George's Music was a little more Samy than jonner Paul that fundamentally his songs follow a similar kind of chord
structure and a similar sort of delivery pattern that All Things Must Pass is many versions of three good songs so I suppose that makes him slightly overrated but I mean like I love George Harrison so I hate to say that but I guess if I had to pick one or two that's
what I pick okay here's a softball Eric Clapton over or underrated well I mean overrated forever and now underrated because of his sort of political position in the sense that people now have decided that not only do they not like him but that somehow cream was bad and that dererk and The Dominoes was bad
so he was overrated my whole life like there was a long period where if you would have said who are the most overrated figures in rock history I would be like that's easy like Jim Morrison and Eric Clapton you know but it changed so dramatically and so radically that now it's almost as though
we can't think of him as you know probably the most significant white blues guitar player of all time so I would say now he is slightly underrated did but it's his own fault okay here's a guy on the injured list Anthony Davis okay let's see is he overrated or underrated I would say he is
probably somewhat overrated because he is often injured he is really more of an elite Defender than an elite scorer even though he is a good shooter he's like not he's a great player he's an Allstar but I would say that if if I'm listing in order the best players in the league I would guess I would Place him further
down on the list than a lot of my peers so I would stay slightly overrated my local guy Bradley Beal over or underrated I would say slightly underrated but only by the Casual consumer I think people who follow the NBA pretty closely have a relatively accurate view of Bradley Beal like he
might be properly rated I guess among people who understand basketball and follow basketball closely and certainly people who live in Washington but I would say there are a lot of people who might classify themselves as basketball fans if you ask them about Bradley Beal
they might not know who he is or where he plays you know to me he lacks ambition and that's a big no no so even though I think insiders know that about him I still put him as a bit overrated when you say he lacks ambition ambition to be great the ambition to win to become a different player really to be
the best or be on the best team he doesn't seem to care which is fine he might be a happier guy than a lot of his Spears but nonetheless well that's a hard thing to measure you know because in sports we actually reward people emotionally if they are obnoxious like I mean I remember when Justin Herbert came
out of college people didn't want to draft him because they were like he's not an emotional leader like he'll never succeed because he's just quiet he keeps to himself like somehow someone like Baker Mayfield who sort of tries to draw attention is perceived as being being
like more dedicated and more intense but it's confusing I mean like you know I grew up my favorite player was Larry Bird and I remember being very surprised when I found out that Larry Bird was constantly talking and trash talking his opponents because as somebody who was just watching at home as a kid for some
reason I thought of him almost as a stoic person you know that's how I viewed it because he was talking to other players he wasn't talking to the media of the great NBA players take something like the top 100 whatever you'd like who's the most underrated of that lot who's still
underappreciated I think that this is a strange answer because he's very famous but I think to a degree Wilt Chamberlain has become underrated in the fact that people discount his statistics as sort of a vestage of a previous time but even within that previous time the statistics
he compiled are really Unthinkable the fact that you will sometimes see lists of the greatest players of all time and he will be outside the top five I think that's that's very weird I don't know if he would you know be in the top 100 but like there were guys like Sydney monrie who were just good for years and kind of
good in every way but we would never include them sort of in this top tier because pro basketball has also adopted this I guess maybe predictable but also kind of curious perception that winning a championship matters almost too much now that like if if you have not won a
title you can't be classified as a great player and it's strange you'll watch like the TNT show and like Kenny Smith will still kind of hold this over Charles Barkley like somehow that they are equal as Veterans as former players because Kenny Smith won two titles and Barkley won none and Barkley's aware of
it they've made this decision almost collectively this decision has been made that in basketball because there's only five guys on the floor and we can kind of credit the best player as being the reason that team succeeds or fails winning a title has become everything and it sort of skews the way we
understand this and it's why you see guys like trying to get titles late in their career like ring chasing or whatever I think they believe if they can just do that that will somehow recontextualize everything else about them I might say Kareem just High total value High Peaks and high total and for
me he's clearly top three I'm not sure he's viewed that way necessarily I think that there is a camp that places him third that kind of goes but it's a camp it should be a nation it should be a universe right I guess okay Van Morrison was he any good is he any good is he an
Eric Clapton figure who's now hated because he opposed lockdowns or was he brilliant for decades or just had an early Peak part of it yeah he did have an early Peak you know he's a strange figure in the sense that he was a guy who was you know he's 22 years old and he's seeing nostalgically about this
lost past you know I think that if you know people who are fans of Van Morrison they see him as like interesting songwriter with a very distinctive voice I guess compared to Eric Clapton now of course they're tied together because they sort of share this vaccination platform or whatever he doesn't seem to
me as a fraction as significant in the history of music as Clapton is so I guess I would still say a little bit overrated I guess yeah but that's like taste too why aren't the current Portland Trailblazers better than they are as we're speaking they're eight games below 500 right on paper they
looked pretty good no one thought they would win a title but they were maybe like the fifth best team in the west and now they stink what's your meta model of the Trailblazers yeah I think they were a team that sort of overachieved for a period that people didn't really think
of them as a premier franchise and we'd get into the playoffs and there was this realization that Lillard was this kind of incredible scoring machine and CJ McCollum is good and they had you know all these various pieces and then it was like they hit some kind of abstract ceiling where there was like a almost an
understanding within the team itself but also oddly with the fan base that they could never win a title they could probably never even get out of the West and once that belief sort of became like the foundational idea of the team it just collapsed and now you might as well blow the whole thing up so so it was
almost as though they were just like they kind of convinced themselves that they were just limited there was a limit to the success they could have and as so often is the case self-awareness is what destroys you like there's self-awareness of their limitation was the problem so
as you've written the 1980s you have the Celtics versus the Lakers it's one of the great Sports rivalries of all time can we still have sports rivalries at all and if not why not where'd they go you can have the Collegiate level for sure because you know part of the reason
I find myself drawn to college sports more than Pro Sports very often is that even though the kind of person who goes to a school to play football or basketball is different than the student body in a sense if Stanford is playing Arizona or if Texas is playing Georgia there is a sense that like we have an
understanding of what kind of person tends to go to those schools and we can sort of apply it to the players and even though the players might be outside of that kind of world like they kind of adopt those characteristics so like the Rivalry between like Michigan and Ohio
State and Auburn and Alabama those aren't going to go away at the pro level though it will be difficult to see two teams that dynastic at the same time where like the Lakers and the Celtics were clearly the two best teams in the league throughout that period yes the Sixers were good in there the Bucks were
good in there the Rockets had success but the Sixers had to get Moses Malone in order to get over the hump to beat the Celtics and like when the Rockets beat the Lakers it was an anomaly so like these two dynastic teams that were also completely different even to the just the most casual viewer race was
part of it but also playing style and also this understanding that you know they were on different coasts and that there was something diametrically different about what it would be like to be a Celtic fan and what would be like to be a Laker fan it's hard to imagine that now like if you look at the NFL the
Patriots have had sort of this dynasty over a long period of time and teams have kind of come and gone what would have needed to happen would have been like if the Packers or the Cowboys had had the same kind of success as the Patriots over that same period of time and that's almost impossible now it kind
of defies logic that the Patriots have been able to succeed that the way they have for 20 years doesn't really make sense especially in the NFL which is just you know designed to sort of allow every franchise to eventually get good and to create almost a inorganic degree
of parody in college basketball if so many of the good players are one and done the coach doesn't get to imprint an identity on the franchise players just want to Signal they have upside potential to become lottery picks how is it that college basketball is even still worth
watching well the first thing I will say is that when I think about sports experiences in my life and I'm discounting like oh you know this team I wanted to win lost or this team I hated succeeded and I discount like terrible injuries to people or like the death of Len Bias or whatever when I think about
things in sports that have disappointed me over the course of my life the decline in college basketball is probably at the top of the list I would say that and the introduction of instant replayer the two things that disappoint me most about the way Sports has changed over time and you know college
basketball now is solely the March Madness tournament that seems to be the only thing even relatively serious college basketball fans care about and because the best players play the shortest amount of time it is real difficult to get a sense of what these guys are like and and what
the coach is trying to do Beyond succeed I guess that is part of it you think of college basketball in the 70s and the 80s you think of like you know John Wooden and Bobby Knight and Dean Smith and John Thompson and all these guys you think about these coaches who had consistently strong teams and teams that
had a real clear identity like you could look at these teams and you would almost see when a kid graduates and a new kid is recruited like he's the replacement for that guy both as a position on the floor but also as like what they would bring to the team and that is kind of
gone now I mean it's like the fact that Duke does this I think people thought they might be like the last hold out of this but they are not when cipy succeeded at Kentucky it sort of proved that this is the best way to build a great team to get the best collection of
kids coming out of high school put them together and accept that college basketball now is more an extension of aaou basketball than high school basketball so if you're asking me it's like why is it it worth watching it's like well I guess I still watch it but I will say this there was a long stretch
of my life where if there was a pro game on and a college game on I would always watch the college game and now that's never the case now I will always watch the pro game is there too much gambling money in sports today too much what do asking for Scandal the flow of betting on professional sports is much higher
than the revenue of the sports themselves there's room for conflicting incentives people selling inside information about player injuries referees not quite being deliberately dishonest but just not always looking too hard at the fowls of one team and so on relative to the flow of beding money
why should we have great faith in the process okay so I think that officiating is the issue where this kind of does become a little dangerous and fragile like one thing that sort of came out of the whole Tim donath situation you know there was a scandal that the NBA did a
pretty good job of kind of like just sweeping away and everyone's forgot about it but one of the things that came out of that was was a realization that a referee can sort of dictate the outcome of a game simply by calling the game straight in the sense that they don't have to create fowls or you know try to
look for situations where they can dictate the outcome they can just occasionally call traveling the way traveling actually is or they can call Lane violations on free throws which they normally just completely ignore so it becomes almost this invisible way of manipulating the spread because they're
not doing anything they're not wrong about anything they're actually just being correct in a way that is usually forgotten so there is some risk with that the fact of the matter is pro athletes are now compensated to a degree where it would be difficult to convince them to throw a game or manipulate a
spread with the risk that is there with the amount of money they're already making I mean like there was the controversy about like Len Dawson when he played for the Chiefs in Super Bowl 4 before that Super Bowl there was this idea that maybe he had some you know relationship with gamblers and the fact
of the matter is in the early 1970s what a guy was making you could definitely see how you know giving a guy $10,000 or whatever could be like a legitimate amount of money at the pro level now the amount of money you'd have to pay these guys to make it worth the risk is huge
at College harder to say I mean like here in Oregon now I could gamble if I wanted to on the Oregon State Lottery you can't gamble on college games I suppose they would see that that's still an area of danger that you know you could convince particularly since you can gamble on anything now like I think
if somebody wanted to do this what they would do is they would probably get involved with like the mid- majors and very small college teams where it wouldn't be that difficult not only to get to a player but to give him something that would be worth his time I think though that there was just this
fear that Sports might become so spit splintered that it could kind of recede from the culture and they had to find a way to keep it as popular as it ever was and gambling was the answer because gambling makes people who don't care care a lot why are so many people so
interested in East Sports have regular Sports failed us what's going on there I think that the fact that for a lot of people their relationship to gaming starts so early that they perceive it as really no different than an athletic except they were never comfortable playing athletic sports and this is a
way to do it and seeing people do it at the highest level to them is is not any different than watching LeBron James I mean it it is strange my son is eight he will watch YouTube clips of people playing video games it seems bizarre to me it doesn't seem remotely strange to him yeah when you teach writing how is
it that you teach that's different from how other people teach writing I'm probably worse okay but how are you worse what what is it you failed to succeed at well the most important quality of writing in my view at least is the unteachable element which is voice you know it's like if writing has
voice the content I wouldn't say it's irrelevant but voice can compensate for a lot so a lot of times when you're teaching kids like you know about writing they ask questions like how do you find your voice or how did you find your voice is something they often want to know and the reality is your voice
exists inside of you you just have to pull it out you're not finding it you're not going to find it from Reading other people in fact my take on this is that you know I think of my life and you know there was this variety of writers you know I was in high school and I really
lik Dave Barry and then I went to college and I was into Douglas Copeland and then I was into Raymond Carver for a while it's I want to read all of this you know and then it was like oh Michael laner I thought that was real great and then David Foster Wallace I was obsessed
with that but he was the last one and I think that you don't become a writer until you no longer want to be like other writers that's sort of the key the key is getting beyond the idea that there is some idea of what you think writing is that you can somehow match or find or replicate and you just kind of
go off and do your own thing that only you can do I I feel pretty strongly about that but there again it's like I'm going by my experience I think that you teach mechanical aspects of writing to someone and you can make like one little jump you can make somebody who's kind of
like a very mediocre into okay and you can turn somebody who's okay into pretty good and somebody who's pretty good maybe you can make very good but to really change the experience for people consuming that work to like to take someone and say like if you do these things you'll be able to become the
writer you want it doesn't seem like that's how it works to me so you know I taught her W in class and I just I think it was kind of useless because the the same way I was when I was in college you know I was a editor at the school paper and I found that I was a real bad editor
because I had two natural inclinations that were kind of dissident either I would be like I'm going to rewrite everything in this because this is terrible or I would be like that's him it's her she gets to do what she wants just put it through like it's hard for me to be that middle person cuz anytime
I read anything like any book I read as I'm reading it I'm changing the sentences in my mind I'm just that's how I've always been now you've put out a deck of cards called hypotheticals and I'll ask you one of your own questions and here I'm quoting you every person you have ever slept with is invited to a
banquet where you are the guest of honor no one will be in attendance except you the collection of your former lovers and the Caterers after the meal you're asked to give a 15-minute speech to the assembly what do you talk about well thing I always think about with this
question is what is the likelihood that the people at this banquet are going to recognize why they are there that's never said in the question so I think some people hear that question and they assume they have been asked to this event for this reason and they're coming because they are part of this sort of
weird sorority or whatever and then some people imagine the people are just there they don't know why they've been asked they don't know what their reason like what the relationship is to each other and that's usually how I think of it that the people in this room they don't
know why they're there if they know each other it's by chance and they happen to know each other in life so I think I would probably give a speech where I would kind of go over the trajectory of my life and discuss all of the things about the past that I regret and I feel like by doing that it would somehow
connect with every person there you're with your parents in the honesty room you can ask them any question they'll give you an honest answer what do you ask them well my dad is dead now my mom is very old and you know what's interesting about that is at one point I interviewed my parents just cuz I
thought I'm just going to ask them about their life you know so I just put a tape recorder on I asked my parents questions my Dad loved this my dad talked about every detail of his life my mom was like interviewing Tom York like she didn't want to say anything like she did not
want to give me a response to anything you know the simplest questions I guess what I would ask them is like sort of a I guess a narcissistic question I would ask them are you proud of me are you happy with the person I turned out to be because that's very important to me and I know they would never give me a real
answer on that I'll always wonder that you know did they think you were cooler than Billy Joel well my parents would know who Billy Joel is so probably yes I guess I don't really care if my parents think I was cool my fear always was that you know the difference between my life and
my parents' life and their experience I can't prove this but I think it's probably greater than most writers I mean it's like due to the age of my parents kind of the level of poverty they grew up in fact that we were in such a rural Place they've never totally understood and anything about my career
I kind of hope they haven't read my books but even if they have I don't think it would make any sense to them maybe the novel downtown owl might but none of the other ones but yet they can also see how other people react to me they have a sense that somehow that I did okay or whatever I would like to
know if they feel like I made them proud or if it's embarrassing you know that I ended up this you know that I ended up becoming the person I am so that's probably what I would ask them I know which answer I would bet on crypto does it represent the final break with the
1990s well shouldn't that be something I should be asking you about because it's like to me cryptocurrency I didn't know anything about it so I was like well I should kind of look into this just to understand and it's very difficult to understand as far as I can tell but I
came across something an idea that I'm wondering what you will say as an economist so my assumption always was that cryptocurrency in some ways was like we're breaking away from the way money used to be and there's a real opportunity to make a lot of money in this like this is kind of a wild west
scenario but I came across some information that seems to suggest that for someone like me it might be smart to look at kind of cryptocurrency as like a safety net because in fear that the US economy collapses or the world economy collaps es I mean is there any value in
looking at cryptocurrency not as like this radical change but as like a backup early crypto prices are very counter cyclical they're like gold once had been in more recent times crypto prices have become highly cyclical that is they move with everything else now what would happen if a big part of the world
collapsed I would say we don't know I suspect some small percentage of your portfolio should in fact be in crypto just because it helps you diver ver ify I mean I see the world as follows like every decade to me is super weird but the 1980s and 90s pretended they weren't weird the 80s pretended to be good
versus evil the 90s pretended that good won but when crypto comes and persists you have to drop all pretense that the age you're living in isn't totally weird you have internet crypto and everyone just admits like right now everything's weird and that to me is the fundamental
break with the 1990s because everyone pretended most things were normal and that like like Seinfeld was your dose of weird right Jason Alexander that's like a very manageable weird oh absolutely some guy in an apartment in New York City cracking sarcastic jokes like whipy doo the 90s there was not the sense that
culture was unraveling which I think is a common feeling now that crisis is not unmanageable well I mean okay so I have a financial adviser and he always wants me to take more risks but I always have this fear that like at some point the way the economy of the United States
works it could just sort of collapse and he always tells me it's like well if that's your concern it's like it's a concern for everybody you can't build that into your portfolio the idea of what happens if there's like a just a catastrophic end to capitalism but as an economist what is the likelihood of the
way our economy is built just completely hemorrhaging and falling apart like would you say there's a 2% chance of that a 20% chance of that that is it always 50/50 I don't think economists are especially able to judge that I am mostly optimistic and the biggest risks I worry about are at the level of
International Peace China Taiwan Russia Ukraine right big problems that I'm sure I don't understand but I'm not sure they're going to work out well I used to think like the counter cyclical asset was to have a second residence or Savings in some other country but increasingly I'm wondering if the
counter cyclical asset isn't the United States and you're already in a sense over invested in it maybe it's parts of Florida or the counter cyclical asset wouldn't that be weird how about North Dakota even not impossible right like buying land you're saying there's fracking climate change it could become
warmer all the better for agriculture I know there's nuclear silos there but I don't really think anyone's going to attack you can have cheap Hobbies watch basketball enjoy the internet listen to your music till you die so my guess is you're more invested in the counter
cyclical assets than your adviser thinks and then you think which does mean you can take more risk it's the person who lives say in Singapore where if China becomes a truly dominant Pacific Power might start feeling they're screwed they're the ones that have a hard time truly diversifying you don't yeah I mean
it might be though just like what your personality is like like there's a certain kind of personality whose goal seems to make more money and my personality is like don't lose the money you've made I seem so lucky to have had the things work out the way they have that my fear always is that in the end
I'm going to have nothing again that somehow I'm going to have put all this time in and done all of these things to sort of accumulate this wealth that seemed absolutely unfathomable to me for most of my life but somehow I'm going to end up exactly the way I started it's
not going to happen unless you blow it through some kind of weird addiction but I would say like high quality real estate and cheap hobbies and I'm sure you have at least one of those right now probably both are the best edges you've got them take take more risk okay okay
and you're human capital right no one can touch that short of you destroying yourself or just dying and the more money you spend like spending money is ensuring against an early death because if I hit 96 years old and I'm broke I'm like oh my goodness I made it to 96 I can at least read Wikipedia every day
this is still pretty awesome do you have kids oh you did said she's a huge fan of yours and she just had a daughter baby girl beautiful I can enjoy her for free I'm kind of hedged the real risk is premature death in my view so you want to do things that are fun now so if you
like die when you're 63 you still will feel you know I got my stuff in whatever that's going to be and I bet you do that well that's an interesting way to look at it I guess but I I don't know if I look at it that way but 63 so I'm 14 years away from that or whatever do I even look 14 years ahead I don't think I
do I feel like I am almost trapped in this kind kind of Perpetual now it's hard for me to think about my life in the future but very easy to fix it in my life in the past it probably means you should take more risk if you just hold safe assets and we have above average
inflation you get hammered right so you lose compound returns every year that accumulates real estate equities you at least have a chance of outrunning the demon so to speak and you can always earn more that's another great thing about being in your position until your seile you can supply more labor earn
more give talks write more books what you know consult teach whatever you want to do your golden well we'll see we'll see we will see that brings me to my final question but first I'd like to just plug Shuck's book The 90s on the cover it's called the 9s a book I promise you it is a book you turn to the
inside it's just the 90s this is an excellent fascinating book about the '90s decade which also I will recommend but final question what is it you will do next oh like what writing project doesn't have to be writing it could just be I'm going to spend a year Watching high school basketball or I'm going to
you know listen to all my heavy metal records again anything your true project huh the one you haven't told anyone about that I haven't told anyone about I am just trying to appreciate the high likelihood that in some distant future I will look back at this period of my life
as the best period I had and I'm trying to stay conscious of that as it's happening like my daughter is six and she still kind of likes me to like lay in bed with her and hold her hand before she falls asleep and sometimes you know that's kind of a drag or something I kind want you know it's like look last
night for example I wanted to see what was going on in the football game and I was like well you know but then another part of me is like well when I am dying and I'm thinking about the moments in my life that mattered it's probably going to be things like lying in bed with my
daughter and holding her hand in this kind of extraordinarily intimate situation you know like we're so close to each other both physically and intellectually that if I could build a time machine on my deathbed that's probably where I go back to so what I'm really trying to do now is try to be
cognizant of the fact that all the things that I wanted in life not only I've got them but like it's Way Beyond it like I don't know what you're supposed to do when your actual life has completely usurped any dreams you had but that's totally how it is like I say I used to read Spin Magazine in
college so when I worked there in the early 2000s all my friends from college was like ah your dream you've realized your dream and I was like I never dreamt that when I was reading that magazine I knew somebody wrote it but I didn't I could get that job I was always thinking if I wrote one book in my life that
would be amazing but now I've written 12 so it's sort of like why doesn't that make make me completely happy why am I not completely Satisfied by the fact that everything that I was hoping for has not only happened but happened many times over because it doesn't it's like
in some fundamental way you stay the same and in some ways I feel the same as I did 30 years ago even though my life then I would never want to really revisit except maybe on a vacation but I wouldn't want to re experience or whatever so that's not really an answer to the question but I guess the answer
is that I'm almost not thinking about what's next like I'm trying to think about what I'm doing now and failing there's an old 17th century French saying I'm quite fond of and it goes something like things are Never As Good or as bad as they seem it's true hey I want to ask
you something yeah sure before I did this podcast I wanted to kind of you know so I listened to your podcast with zizic oh yeah that was hilarious are you friends with him it sure seemed like it in that like and if you are what is it like to be with him when he is not not in a performative scenario I met him at
that event I had a breakfast with him it was like the day before the talk he and I hit it off very well yeah and just spent like three four hours going crazy talking at each other so we became friendly but hadn't met before there's only one mode of engaging with him and
for me it was fun because he's one of the few people I've met you can ask him a question about anything and whether or not you agree and often I don't but he has an intelligent informed answer immediately on tap full of detail and he can run with it and a lot of times it's interesting yeah oh it's always
interesting although I think one thing that over time I have come to realize is that a lot of his responses to things are always kind of driving back to some of these things he likes of to think about yes but like you probably saw this like he recently like reviewed the Matrix movie the new Matrix movie it was
this really good review and then at the end he's like also I have not seen The Matrix and that proves my point kind of and I was like well in a way ites does it's like in a strange way the epitome that you can look at something and have it only mean things outside of itself so
much so you don't even have to look at the thing itself but yeah I think he's underrated I mean he has his cult followers and presumably a lot of them overrate him but a lot of serious people don't think of him as a force is as a person truly a force in a way not actually that many thinkers are so I'm a
big fan even though I really don't agree that much with him so am I but like the underrated overrated thing it's hard to kind of place on him because in a sense his notoriety for what he does completely goes beyond the vast majority of people who are like philosophers or
whatever right so in that sense if you go from an individuals maybe importance to their field relative to their notoriety in that field I think he might be at the top of that like you know is just not many people I think Cornell West maybe or whatever it's like you find a few people who are philosophers
who are famous but in terms of of his ideas themselves they could be underrated because I think that his notoriety is very often used against him and the fact that he'll like talk about Titanic or whatever in this kind of very Commercial Way you know builds in this assumption that these ideas must not be
really meaningful as much as they are like attention grabbing in some weird way he's a little bit like Evan dond of the Lemonheads where like Evan dond of the Lemonheads was making records that people kind of made fun of and didn't take seriously because he was so kind of
overtly handsome like he was good-looking in an obvious way so there was this assumption particularly at that time in the 990s that if you were just like a kind of a conventionally good-looking or kind of Bal good looks or whatever that made people look at his songwriting as like kind of meaningless
but now we go back and listen to him as a songwriter it's like oh he was real good like he was better than most it was like we thought he was bad because he was handsome I think sometimes people think that zzak is full of sh because he's famous but that's not necessarily
true his best side I think is his heelan side when he insists that truth is to be found in the reconciliation of diametrically opposing ideas and then I think he's quite good if he gets too wrapped up into Mars or some of the heavier Continental stuff sometimes I just think he is drifting but yeah it's
also amazing when you're with him how he uses his body is such an integral part of how he thinks and talks and a lot of us aren't used to that so he sort of is hurling his whole body at you all the time and how he moves is part of his thought and that's a funny notion but I
think you need to meet him to grasp him I mean physicality is part of Charisma of course it's like Charisma is a real thing and in a way I think sometimes we put Charisma into a category kind of like grit or like authenticity or something it's like well it's a thing that we throw at people when we write
about them and it's just sort of this kind of imaginary construct but I have found found over and over again that Charisma is one of the realest things in the experience of being alive that there are people who are different when you're around them than they are when you see
them on a screen or you read them and it changes everything and then there are some people who can transmit that Charisma through the screen or through the page and in some ways it's just like the most attractive quality a performer can have you know and the most desirable I guess I said like voice is the most
important part of writing there's also like a voice to his identity just his being he's an athlete in a funny way yes but what's weird is even the things that were saying about him and could be used as evidence for the criticisms of him it's like here I am talking about how I
like this philosopher and I'm kind of bogged down on the fact that he has Charisma that can break through a TV screen or whatever you know that's not philosophy right I always think when I write stuff it's like my goal is to be as accessible as possible like my self-editing is constantly making
sentences straighter and more simple and and more clear but then you can become accessible to a fault where it looks easy to some people and it also seems obvious to people because it hits someone so directly that they assume that they thought that themselves which in some way is the weird goal to make
the person feel like they're writing the book as they read it but if you succeed at that goal they're going to think you're a bad writer it's strange and you might like the book lasts you know years from now also like are you writing for your current self your future self even your past self you
might write for and you've written about this issue yourself as you well know true anyway it's been great chatting with you again Chuck closterman the 90s a book yeah I should probably tell you my name is actually pronounced Kerman oh apologies Chuck Kerman but I hate telling people that because there's no
oot over it I don't care but it's like my dad used to always say like well you should tell people to pronounce your name right but like my son he now goes by claer it's really funny he's eight but he's made the decision and you know what he's totally right like I spent all
this time telling people on radio hosts and stuff like that it's like oh just so you know I don't really care but my name is clran well if I don't care why am I telling people but I just feel this obligation to do it I felt obligated to tell you even though if anybody now realizes you mispronounce my name
they've listened to an hour and a half of a podcast it's like what do they care now it's like you know I face the cow and Cohen issue and it's Cowen oh people think it's Cohen that's what I thought but it's Irish Cowen but I let people say Cohen whatever you know I guess it's
strange thing about names it's like the most and least important thing about you it really is it's like you have a baby and you're coming up with its name and any name can work and yet the thing you do name it is going to be the one thing that's going to follow that person for
the totality of their life you know it means nothing it's just a collection it could name your kid stick it' be fine if my name was stick cluster nothing about me would probably be different and then part of me is like or would it if I had went by Charles cler that would be different truck cler would I be taken
more seriously I don't know would I be seen differently because truck makes it seem like you know I just kind of came off the football field or whatever it's it's like I don't know I have no idea if my life would be different if I had gone by Charles or if I'd gone by Charlie
would I be more playful I you know it's often the combination of names that matters like in my case Tyler and Cowen they're not rare but it's sort of together you just don't find them much so if someone combines the two I figure they're close enough they could even call me Tyrone Cowen and it's like well
you know someone will think it's me Tyler seems like a more modern name like when I only knew your name I did assume you were younger I was the only Tyler in my day like the only one Henry Kissinger's dog was named Tyler there was no other kid named Tyler now it's one of the more common names was that
the reason you were named Tyler because of Kissinger's dog my father really wanted to name me Tyrone because of Tyrone Power the movie star whom he liked and my mother thought that was crazy and she insisted at being sort of knocked down to Tyler and they compromised on Tyler H that's the story
yeah worked out worked out yeah my parents wanted to name me Fred Frederick but my sister who was three years older couldn't say Fred she said fed and even though she was only three for some reason my parents were like that would be a problem so then they named me Charles but you know I I always think if
I had been named Freddy if I had been like Freddy Kerman somehow I makes me seem like I would get ahead of like a career as a con artist or something like where I was like trickier you know Freddy is like a horror movie name I think you don't want to be a Freddy well
now only if it's a y now if somebody has a y at the end but if it's f r e d d i e that doesn't really seem like a horror movie thing on YouTube it's all Freddy right yeah I don't know it's like when did it become more common to spell the word John J N than JN sure seems like
that I mean I realize there are J N John's throughout time but when I was a kid every John was JN now was that because I came from a place where everybody was Catholic and Lutheran is J often used I mean seems like a lot of like Jewish guys named John often have J but just younger people now it seems
like J is more common than JN I don't know when that happened I think a key thing for your kid you want your kid to be googleable if you have any faith in them at all right so you don't think they'll be a convicted criminal in which case you want them not to be googleable
but if your kid's John Smith like who can find them say you want to hire John Smith you want to get a date with John Smith you Google John Smith you're screwed well I think wouldn't it always be an advantage to be ungoogleable though to have the inability for someone to find you easily because once they
meet you they'll be able to find you they'll know other things about you if all they know is your name I think it would be better if you were unfindable if that's all they know look it's clearly better for you that you're findable someone types your name into Amazon search right your actual books
come up same for me that's true more and more areas are becoming like what we do you don't have to be a writer but someone hears about you and they might want to offer you something if you want to cooperate with people on average more than you want to run away from them you want your kid's name to be googleable
well that's a good argument I guess that's a good argument against anonymity that could be a book title against anonymity seems like that would sell now you know it's like David Brinn wrote a book like that called the transparent Society I think he overlooked some of
the costs to that but again at least for your kid you want to assume on average your kid will be successful like you've been and on average that's a pretty good guess well I hope you're right about that you know I hope you are I hope people are Googling him in a positive way you know your kids will have your
talents on average and the talents of other parents and that's good but it really is on average though there's seven kids in my family and there are strong similarities kind of visually or our use of our hands when we talk and maybe our fundamental ideas about like money and safety and spirituality and
stuff but skills wise like it's pretty disconnected I think that on average of course what you're saying is true but I wonder I have two kids and I'm shocked by how different they are you know it seems like they should be more similar than they are they're have the same parents they're having the exact same
experience so I don't know but you compare them to other kids right then they look a lot more similar yes but the way they interact with other kids is really the key difference like that is how they seem different to me the way they view sort of how they operate in society and what
they want from other people and what they want from friendships and what they want from themselves I mean what I'm saying is that like it's not like they're so diametrically different I can't believe they're brother and sister but they're also playing Niche strategies within the family and they'll
become more similar as they age ABS the genes will matter more that's absolutely true the niche strategies will matter less I mean definitely having kids does seemingly solve the nature versus nurture thing it seems like nature like it really seems obvious but you can't
tell that to somebody because now to say that somehow seems like I don't know they think you're eugenesis or something like you're somehow claiming that like the experience of society doesn't matter but I think the exper in society generally makes people more similar it's their nature that makes them different
you know and their peers May matter more than the direct environment of their parents especially over time not at age six but at age 14 for sure I think even now to some degree more than I would have liked anyway it's been wonderful oh yeah thanks for having me on I really
appreciate it was interesting conversation thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show