hello everyone and welcome to this the 2022 year in review episode of conversations with Tyler I'm Jeff Holmes the one of the producers of conversations with Tyler and this has become a tradition now where at the end of the year we take stock of the year in conversations I have a bit of a conversation with Tyler that I want to have we take questions from listeners and we also go back and look at Tyler's
pop culture picks of 2012 in this case and Tyler lets us know how he thinks they've fared but first Tyler let's get straight into the year of conversations when you look at this guest list reflect on this roster of of guests compared to years past what do you think I think we should have more Irish people on Roy Foster was great he was a definite favorite uh we had two moments that went completely viral uh one of which was misunderstood
Shruti was awesome as a host uh Walter Russell Mead throws great dinner parties Mary gateskill was a wonderful kind of quirky and very often the best guests are not the ones who you think will be the best that would be my years taken summary when you say a moment when that went viral but was misunderstood what are you referring to well I asked Mark Andreessen about web 3.0 and everyone on Twitter went crazy about this Mark had a
perfectly normal answer to a normal question now I'm still not convinced by web 3.0 and Marx answer didn't convince me but people treated it as some kind of massive scandalous admission of something and it was just a normal conversation after it was recorded I don't think either mark Or I thought anything about that moment but somehow that was the time when people wanted to jump down Mark's throat over something
and they picked up on that clip and I think the best answer to what's the use case for web 3.0 is just we don't know yet there are lots of talented people working on it at the moment as you might have said with the early internet now I'm still skeptical but it's not a terrible answer and uh that was the Misunderstood viral moment I would say yes but the other viral moment I think I know what you're referring to was the
excerpt in the sandbankment freed conversation right that's correct there are really two of them but there's one that's gotten most of the attention where I asked Sam would you keep on playing double or nothing with the world's population at you know 51 to 49 odds and he says you know yes I feel strongly about this and I say well everything's going to be destroyed then he's saying well there's some chance you'll end up creating something
wonderful and it did seem that captured something about his approach to many different things that was immortalized in that moment and if I may sound self-satisfied for just a second I was very pleased that I had the insight to ask him exactly that question yeah so we gotta we got several questions on Twitter about the SPF conversation and Joseph Walker specifically asked before everything unraveled in the
moment what did you did you think that that 5149 question was a red flag and I'll add on to that how did your perception of SPF change um during the interview right when everything was unfolding when that tweet went viral and now we're in you know middle December he's just arrested how have you shifted in your mental model of SPF well SPF you know was ND is extremely smart uh he proved that in the interview anything you can throw at him
he can come back very quickly maybe you don't like the answer but he has fully understood the question and answered it in some Manner and actually not that many guests can do that but at the same time then and obviously now it seemed to me there was something quite Reckless about the plan I didn't at all imagine how things turned out I just thought there was this view that FTX could become the exchange for everything that that belief seemed to me
absurd and that if I asked him some questions about risk tolerance I thought he wouldn't be able to answer them well he answered them incorrectly to oh keep playing double or nothing but he answered them very well in the sense the response was immediate the reasoning wasn't some screwy way internally consistent he had thought about it before and so on so that made me less optimistic about his future prospects uh
the prediction I was making privately at the time was simply that he had ignored regulatory risk at some point The Regulators would shut him down uh the value of the concern would go essentially to zero and it wouldn't work but again I had no sense of the underlying I don't even know what to call it for you know fraud is too simple a word but this to say the shenanigans yeah my impression one of the things
that I appreciated that he mentioned that I responded to was he mentioned this need to the a focus on operationalizing uh what you're trying to do and having people who can coordinate and make things happen and then as I've seen what's happened uh it seems like part of the a big part of the problem was that operationally they were a mess that's right and he said that is what is truly scarce so he actually had a deeper understanding of
the scarcity of good operational talent that I realized at the time but the other thing he said that reads very differently in retrospect when he praised Elon Musk and said elon's greatest achievement is not Tesla the car but Tesla the brand and that's interesting for at least two reasons first Tesla the brand has changed quite a bit since Elon took over Twitter in many people's eyes uh but also the sense that what a company
really is is just its image and you can skate along with that I really did not pick up at the time that's what he was saying though it's quite clear when you read it that I should have picked it up at the time and when you reread it in light of what's happened you get a sense of like uh oh he presumably thought that way about FTX as long as like the brand was strong he could always somehow trade his way out of trouble one effect of the
Fallout with FTX has been on the effect of altruism community in particular will mccaskill who's a guest on the podcast was involved with some of the FTX philanthropy philanthropic projects one of our guests on Twitter asked what do you think is the future of of the movement do they need new leadership how are they going to recover speaking of branding how are they going to recover from from The Fallout with
with one of the biggest personalities of earn to give now being you know wholly disgraced it's hard for me to say you know sometimes losing some funding can help a movement because what's really strong are the ideas and if I think of say
libertarian ideas they were really very strong in the 1970s when there was not much money attached to it and actually relatively few people but you had very strong thinkers you have Milton Friedman Bob nozick others
and a great deal of impact in the late 70s throughout the 80s some of the 90s and the better funded movement may be never matched those achievements so I don't really have a prediction for Effective altruism but I don't think we should hold this against it I think leadership at open philanthropy is excellent and whatever you know virtues or qualms you might have about the movement uh it's continuing yeah
all right switching back to looking at the year in conversations if we run through the numbers uh we release 28 episodes this year so our usual amount plus a few bonus episodes so I'm counting this one that's counting this one as well um and uh do you have a sense of what the most popular episode of the year was I never have a good sense of this if you count that Viral clip I'll say Mark Andreessen if you don't count the viral
clip maybe you know SPF will overtake all the others whether or not it has done so yet those would be my guesses but I suspect I'm wrong Chuck lasterman maybe was popular so you tell me good guess I this one is surprising to me and we're looking just at podcast downloads and not sort of overall Impressions so it may well change if we if we factored those in but the top downloaded episode this year was tamapiketti
picketti okay yeah yeah I thought people were a little tired of all that I was very surprised by the response to that but it's the most popular episode this year most popular episode in terms of the first week of any episode so far it
was a good episode because you you got to see this Clash of different points of view I thought yeah and uh and I'm amazed people stuck with it because it was it was the the uh the audio quality was a little rough and
people stuck with it and and were very engaged by that episode do you ever since people are liking to sort of debate so my episode with Byron a geese uh which I certainly liked when we did it but it's proven to have longer legs than I would have expected and it's just a very clear case of two people debating labor market value of Education how can we get people without college degrees into jobs in a very Stark way Jeremy
Grantham was a bit like that debating environmental issues in a very Stark way back and forth he even apologized at the end for being a little what was the word he used not grumpy but combative and I was like yes you know got it please yeah
please teach our other guests to push back when they need to and uh Mary gateskill I think is someone who not combative but uh you said I think on Twitter or maybe it was your post on marginal Revolution that this is
you know someone who doesn't feel the need to like impress you and just is giving you her thoughts on the matter and doesn't particularly care whether you think they're here there or anywhere like it's just what she thinks and that's what we're here to to to to to listen and learn from and it was one of my favorite moments of the year when she has to end the episode a few minutes early because she's really hungry and
just says that not some kind of polite excuse they're really hungry did we include that in the episode we did oh yes we did we can uh yeah I I remember listening to that when I was reviewing the episode and and yeah it was uh I mean stuff like that in um we're kind of touching on it already but what are your picks for underrated episodes of this year I I let me let me preface that by saying this year a pattern I saw was
I feel like the the dispersion is has gotten tighter um in terms of listens that there's really just two tiers this year there's like the people who really um got a kind of a surge and maybe did 15 20 percent uh better than the than the second tier but there wasn't like these clear sense of like oh people just didn't tune into that one it was sort of like either it was really popular or it was just pretty good um how do you model that
that were less dependent on external celebrity there is what I'd like to think is that people are accepting the value of the cwt Tyler Cowan filter and they're giving episodes every episode a chance now if I if I appear deeper into looking at how long people listen to episodes maybe you'd see more drop off on some of those less popular episodes but that's what I'd like to think is that they're at least giving giving everyone a chance
like if they're on the show they're probably pretty good so let me at least tune in whereas before I think we had more of the problem where someone if it was an unknown name or we've talked before about some of the biases people have in terms of women or actually even people with accents you know they might just be like I can't I can't listen to this uh maybe that's not been such a a factor this year but what's your pick for
underrated Vaughn Smith the polyglide and carpet cleaner probably is an underrated episode the people who listen to it seem to quite like it I already mentioned Roy Foster Ireland just doesn't have that larger population but that was a great take on Irish history I liked most of them I have to say so uh yeah I had I think a lot of them are properly rated yeah I had Roy Foster and Von Smith I I would throw in you know if
you look at download counts like maybe Lydia Davis a little underperformed but I think she still performed well and then I personally really enjoyed Walter Russell meet I could absolutely it's just a great back and forth um and you could have him on an endless number of times and he would always have something to say he's one of those kinds of guests now speaking of Roy Foster are you going to accept the Roy Foster
challenge to to go to Ireland and check out their database and look up the Cowans that was the one question you know he wouldn't engage with you on is tell me tell me a bit about the the Cowan clan that surprised me because they've had a prime minister Karen right yes he would have known of him I think I would sooner fly to Salt Lake City into Ireland for that purpose but I don't know how I would ever know that it were my cowins
right so oh you could see a bunch of cowens from say some County well are they my Cowans are they his Cowans I don't know like what's the actual bridge I think to hire someone who's worked in Salt Lake City archives would be a better approach than for me to be digging around in a library or maybe we should do uh get you on finding your roots and uh with Henry Louis Gates uh yeah maybe we can we've we've asked Henry Lewis gates to be on
the show and he uh famously hosts finding Roots where he takes celebrities through their family history I think it's time for a Tyler Cowan episode of Finding Your Roots I believe mine is quite in New Jersey history with no roots in the South moving on to some more Twitter questions James brawl uh I think the Mary getskill interview speaking of underrated was one of the most interesting of the Year largely because of her genuineness
coming through so strongly so here's a question what makes a guest more genuine or authentic and I should mention that's mercatus research fellow James burrow and also I believe you advise this PhD right yeah Jim's great you go to my gym can I call him Jim roll I don't know you have to call him James I can call him Jim okay being a CEO makes you less authentic now one thing about Mary she's quite well known as a writer but the outlets
that interview her are not uh they're not mass media there'd be places like book forum and she's she has no fiduciary responsibilities per se and if people come away with the sense that she's unusual or quirky there's no problem in that for her so people who are loan operators tend to be more authentic uh Von Smith the polyglot and carpet cleaner I thought was extremely authentic so he's hardly ever done any interviews
before he was extremely articulate but just you got Von Smith I'm pretty sure so people who are not used to arguing in the media not used to being criticized they approach it more innocently in a good way yeah do you think do you think people uh on conversations with Tyler um well Ken Burns would be an example of someone some people joked on Twitter and I knew having worked for him and seen his media interviews people joked that
he had the conversation he wanted to have that is correct and Ken is very good at delivering eloquent monologues that may or may not actually relate to the questions he was asked but he knows how to hit the points he wants to make so he's to my mind an extreme outlier in the sense that he has a very clear Direction he wants to take interview questions and he's very good at it um versus other people who are maybe self-conscious
and then all the way on the other side people who just kind of don't even think about the fact that they're on the podcast um what are some do you do you do you have a sense of that in the interview of are they very aware that this is going out to a lot of people and people I forget that often as they're speaking now you know Ken and I don't other than that interview but I have the sense that maybe that was the authentic Ken Burns right
it is the authentic Ken burner that is that is how he is yes so in a way he was the most authentic guest though it would not have appeared that way to someone who didn't know better yes I I can say as someone who listened to him um I worked in the production house where he was editing films and when he was talking about us you know reviewing a cut of a movie and talking about what needed to change he is just as eloquent
talking about something on the Fly that needs to change in a movie recalling very specific details from what are often three four hour cuts of what needs to be cut down to maybe an hour hour and a half he has an amazing mind for that and can deliver that on the Fly very eloquently so yes you're absolutely right that actually is very authentic Ken I thought John Adams the American composer was also quite authentic he was willing to
be grumpy to complain about film music to say the music of Belize is a you know kind of torture to listen to I'm pretty sure it's what he really thinks yes and he didn't have to say those things and he was polished but I felt you got the actual grumpiness of the man yes uh yeah John Adams was fun for me because I told you before the fact that one thing that I find fascinating about John Adams is that I discovered him
because his music was featured in the game civilization 4 and in that game you build a civilization and there's different eras and when you get to the modern era they play John Adams music and I found it so immersive and perfect and when you asked him that question in his interview he thought about some commercial where his music he was very upset about the commercial but he didn't respond to the game and I
I it's just fascinating because I don't think he actually cares that much but there is a whole generation of people probably about my age who love John Adams music because of the game civilization it's his largest Audience by far right um yeah and and so his saltiness is kind of like I'm I'm good with that I I still enjoy the music and I enjoy listening yeah I enjoy recalling that at that time in my life as well it
brings me back it's very Vivid for me okay Joseph Yao on which topics do you do your views have the highest error rates why error rates well what are the topics that are hard to predict so who's going to win a contest in most areas it's hard to predict not in chess Magnus Carlson just played Carolina he in his speed he beat him 22-4 and didn't lose a single game and that was not hard to predict the margin of victory was hard to
predict but not that Magnus would win but if you ask me who will win the NBA title this coming year very hard to predict the history of China is very hard to predict so switching from zero covid to Covet free for all I was not predicting I don't think I got that wrong publicly but I know in my own mind I wasn't expecting that China in general does very rapid shifts that are hard to predict in advance in a way say that India does not
so my backup answer after Sports would be China is very hard for me or indeed anyone to predict yeah Pavlo garageev asks who would you love to have on your podcast but can't because of the language barrier it seems to me from what I've seen on YouTube that Michelle hulbeck does not speak English very well so I'm not sure how good a guest he would be but I would love to have him in any case just to see what he would be
like and there are possibly language is a barrier uh various rural Mexicans I know whose first language is Novato but even in Spanish I don't think I would quite be good enough to make for a satisfying podcast and most of our listeners don't understand Spanish anyway I'm pretty sure so they would be some fascinating guests but there would be logistical difficulties uh the people I might interview in German pretty much all
speak good enough English if we want to do them yeah so those would be some answers okay and related Corey Paddock asks who are the guests you'd like to have but were unable to secure Paul McCartney everyone knows that right you don't even know how to ask him but you also figure he's just not going to do it like he's Paul McCartney Right yes and I pulled out the list we have reached out to many many guests who we either haven't heard
a response to or they've said no um so just going through some of the highlights uh Charles Barkley David Bentley Hart William Shatner Tilda swin Haruki murder let's try Shatner again because he has a new book out yeah I think we did yeah we did we did we checked uh after the new book came out uh Mark Cuban Mr Beast the YouTuber Dolly Parton oh she would have been great how about the Thai film director whose name I can't pronounce
he just did Memoria and he did Uncle Boon me why don't we ask him he does speak English okay real-time real-time guest suggestions going on and that would be a coup to get him and I suspect he's not asked all that often and he might be quite authentic okay yeah we have Werner Herzog would be another name Han Zimmer Peter zai Han Stanley 2G so actually early this morning You released a a blag on marginal Revolution and asked for guest
ideas and uh we've got some good new ideas but some of some of those names have either been asked or they've been on our long list and so uh before the recording Tyler and I were talking about triaging some of those and reaching out but we have what's wrong with these people I mean seriously like what's your theory we don't have her afraid that's not too busy I think the stand the standard filter is if it's not coming through a
personal connection you know don't even don't even bother with it so I doubt I doubt some of these have actually gotten to the actual person so if you're listening to this and you have a connection to any of the names you mentioned or just someone you think would be good for the podcast please reach out I am jayhomes at mercatus.gmu.edu send me an email because we love some personal connections with some of these people
and they can email me too you know either way and it's online yeah and it's online okay moving back to Twitter questions okay here's I want you to answer this rapid fire because it's it's uh just answer this as quickly as you can it's it's kind of a it's kind of a grab back question fikosh palette what are the so there's three questions what are the pluses and minuses of ending the FED what are the top three ways you would
change the US Health Care System what's the ideal tax system look like according to you in reverse order the ideal tax system is a progressive consumption tax with a relatively light rate of Taxation on Capital Income though it can't be zero because otherwise people will reclassify their labor income into capital income best ways to change the Healthcare System a lot of that is frozen into place I'm more focused in my current
roles on improving the rate of progress in science and getting more Innovation and reforming the NIH and NSF and making them more Dynamic and quicker to respond to change so people don't usually call that the Health Care System but that would be my emphasis and if you look at say the MRNA vaccines or what seems to be coming against malaria against Dengue possibly against cancer that's yielding huge dividends and fighting over the
scraps of like Medicaid expansion or something ultimately seems to me like a misallocation of talent ending the FED what do you replace it with you can't answer that question in the abstract but I suspect what you replace it with uh will not do better the price of gold is much too volatile to have a gold standard now even if you liked the classical gold standard I'm not sure it was better than the FED but it wouldn't
be workable now and what Bitcoin that's that's a non-starter right so replace the FED with what just a frozen stock of dollars uh again seems to me worse than what we have now all right vikash you got your answer answers answers Mark bisball Arias what is the thing you are most excited about or looking forward to next year uh the next 28 guests on conversations with Tyler right could it could it be anything better
walking into the studio you know singing Maybe I'm Amazed for us and we're the ones who are amazed okay next year 28 guests Paul McCartney Brian Eno Werner Herzog they're all coming in they will all be in the Mercado Studio mark my words Twitter user breaking extent asked does Tyler think TV shows are a waste of time have you watched many TV shows this year well for whom are they a waste of time I haven't watched a lot of TV this year I
plan on starting the new Disney Plus show and or it's very good and my other friends tell me the same so I think I'll like that I don't know that I found anything good other than the new season of barnegan which came to the us this year that was excellent and very different from the earlier years yeah uh grumpier more cynical about politics you could say more right wing in the Danish sense which is not the same as more
right-wing in the American sense and that was great but I think that's all I've really liked or even watched Natasha start some things and I turn away quickly uh most TV it seems to me it it doesn't interest me I much prefer movies yeah uh what what does Natasha put on that you turn away from do you even do you even recognize what it is uh I think there's some show is it called hackers or hacks or hacks yes the
comedy uh the show about the stand-up comedians is that what you're thinking I'm not I didn't get far enough it's on I think HBO Max yes it's about a uh it's about a a kind of an elder Statesman female comedian who's you know doing her show in Vegas right that's right yes it seemed to be backed by talent but it's just not for me it's not informationally dense enough not challenging enough somehow constructed to string people along through
subsequent Seasons which is the commercial incentive I get that no grudge shelled here but no I'd rather watch uh you know to the movie tar I loved uh Memorial I loved I I haven't seen tar but that that's that's been a a big movie this year that people have really really responded to and Saint Omer the French Senegalese movie was excellent I saw that a few nights ago at AFI in Silver Spring so movies to me way above TV uh but I
don't think it's a mistake for most people yeah all right why don't we use that as an entree uh we'll come back to some Twitter Twitter questions but let's go uh to 2012 picks and see what your favorite movies were in 2012. so in your post you say Hollywood continues to collapse into mediocre tentpole franchise that switches absolutely true because this that was the Marvel decade among other things but overall it has been a
splendid year for movies here were some of my favorites noting that I count by the year I saw them especially for foreign films so not necessarily A year of release so here we go one a separation I've taught that movie I think five times since then so I re-watch it every year and it's incredible it's one of the best movies period it's an Iranian movie about a couple who are separated and the difficult decisions they face what to do
with the daughter and whether or not they should leave her on a plus yeah I watched that on this recommendation and and enjoyed that movie and my students love it also two Giro Dreams of Sushi I haven't re-watched it I have fond memories of it I hear people cite it still that's a good sign about a movie so I'm still very favorably inclined it's probably now a little underrated because that style of documentary that was
especially so food focused but the story itself was very compelling has now become the same filmmakers went on to make series for Netflix called chef's table and they've taken that format and now it's become TV and so now I think if if someone went back and watched your dreams of sushi they would be like well what's what's special about this I can put this up on Netflix at any time and hear someone's dedication to food and
also some story about their biography that reveals why they're so obsessed or what's what you know something that that gives you insight into why they are the way they are but I suspect the movie's more subtle and the TV show is too
literal would be my guess not having seen the television show you don't have as much time so they're more like vignettes and that was much more of a deeper study not just of of of the uh not just of the Master Chef but also his
sons because that was a key part of Jiro Dreams of Sushi was the sons who were I think in their 40s uh but we're still in the shadow of their dad and clearly one of the subtexts was when is he gonna let us step into this role and take on the mantle uh three Marley Marley oh the Bob Marley movie that was fantastic yeah it's like a very long movie set in Jamaica uh excellent and I don't think you have to love the
music of Bob Marley to watch it as a movie Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and you added boring for most people big screen only I suspect I mean every movie is that but especially slow moving far in films it's just much harder to pay attention at home but again seemed to me a very strong movie and that now that I am hearing these titles was just a great year four movies though not Hollywood movies okay well here's where it gets very Tyler
coward sideways your next two movies next one the dictator which is the Sasha Baron Cohen uh comedy it's aged poorly yeah okay I was gonna ask some of the TV show is still quite good I think but uh you were a big Ali G fan yeah is that your favorite character of his that he that he does so he's Borat Ali G other ones I can't even remember like the mini episode where he interviews Donald Trump is a double plus and Trump just
immediately sees the guy as a fraud and just walks out and says you know good luck yeah so the Peaks are high but it's it's not really watchable anymore okay dictator and then next one The Three Stooges this is the comedy remake uh uh of The Three Stooges I think it was a fairly Brothers movie the original is too good I think is the problem so I'm very surprised that major list I'm not sure what I I'm just trying
to think about what you found in that movie that you were like best of the year next one the Raid Redemption better Indonesian martial arts you will not see you say nor have I seen better Indonesian martial arts since then and the thrilling movie yeah you have to be up for that kind of movie yeah but the best one in a long time the rate the raid is a is a a a strong favorite of a lot of people I know your sister's sister
this is an indie movie with Emily Blunt Rosemary DeWitt Mark duplos I don't remember it so I guess I have to give it a thumbs down you say it was straussian I'm not familiar with it maybe it was two steps Circo Mexican circus movie hasn't stuck with me okay let's go through these you've got quite a few of them so let's go through them quickly and you see if you respond to any of them Take This Waltz Beasts of the Southern Wild Margaret
which I think is a Margaret Thatcher documentary nope totally wrong it's uh that was quite interesting it's a narrative movie with Anna Paquin yeah but Beasts of the Southern Wild really has stuck with me hmm and it's a it's a portrait of a certain way of life that you find only in America and this movie shows that way of life better than any other movie AI weiwei never sorry I think he's milked it too much at this point and
become a marketer so that not the movie is a movie but all that has gone down in my eyes not that interesting anymore samsara again another one you say this probably only makes sense on the big screen say the name again samsara it is I'm looking it up filmed over a period of it's not a narrative movie almost five years in 25 countries some star explores the wonders of the world from sacred grounds to
Industrial sites oh that movie it's just visuals yeah and it's great as visuals on a large screen but a huge mistake to click on Netflix it's just not going to do it for you Searching for Sugar Man incredible movie and I saw him in concert a few years ago uh you know he's the South African star who well he he's from Detroit and he became a huge star in South Africa and didn't even know it and he learned this quite
late in his life yes this is this you know country full of people a lot of whom worship Him and uh excellent music in concert still a wonderful film unique original memorable day night day night I don't think I'd
ever heard of this movie the description is a gripping drama that follows a young suicide bomber on her mission to wreak havoc in Times Square it was good foreign one of these movies that's focused on one thing and does it well yeah and some
people just don't get it but a good movie and then you added to uh a week or two later you added uh Lincoln the Steven Spielberg movie no it's too sappy it's aged poorly for me people react as strongly because uh you know Spielberg has this movie coming out the Fable men's which is excellent and I thought I would hate I saw the preview the preview was unwatchable the marketing for it is generally considered really poor yes uh
to to give you a sense of what the movie is but you also kind of gave a brief Spielberg ranking and um I think in particular you suggested that some of his most commercially successful like Jurassic Park are his worst movies that's right an ET is not very good I'm with you more on ET but Jurassic Park the novel is better it seemed to me too Hollywood too manipulative this you know the special effects are now completely out of date
and that made the movie something actually that's one of the things that people think is age well is the special effects they're definitely moments but because the mix of practical and special it's aged pretty well are you wrong on that Tyler I don't know I I will absolutely agree with you though I'm glad we managed to bring Michael Creighton into this because Creighton who wrote Jurassic Park and lost world and many other science
fiction stories by far like my favorite author as a kid I loved Michael Crichton and I loved those books but I still love Jurassic Park lost world was another story he was a tremendous art collector and he wrote a great book on Jasper John's he would have been a first-rate cwt guest yeah absolutely you know I actually emailed you this is before I worked at mercatus but when Michael Crichton died I emailed you and asked
you if you would write anything and I think you said nothing like particular is occurring to me to say that would be of any value but I I loved Michael Crane and I knew here is a wonderful book yeah I think you've said it was one of one of your favorite my favorite yeah yeah sphere is great what do you think of the movie sphere I I didn't want to see it because it would wreck the book for me so it got so-so reviews yeah I just stuck with the
buck Andromeda Strain of course Very Yes quite relevant uh okay and then the last one you added was Life of Pi I would like to see it again I found it engaging at the time a lot of smart people I know turned against the movie maybe it's too manipulative or too corny or to in some way condescending like toward India or maybe Bollywood but it touched me nonetheless I think it's probably still a good movie I I didn't watch the
movie and I didn't particularly enjoy the book it was obviously a big book and I don't love the book so that's why I took me so long to see the movie okay moving on to books favorite fiction Jillian Flynn Gone Girl is it Gillian Flynn Jillian Flynn I'm not sure I don't know either Gone Girl well it's become really quite famous it's fine and engaging and totally manipulative but it's become a thing and
I think that I picked it as to my credit if I may say and we have asked her we've either considered her or outright asked her to be on cwt I'd have to check my notes uh Gone Girl uh I have read the book I've read the screenplay which she also wrote and I've watched the movie and sometimes I do that to just see how do you adapt something especially if it's the same author it's interesting the choices you have to make going from
novel to screenplay and then seeing what actually made it to screen next one Nell freudenberger the newlyweds yeah forgotten Alonso Cueto the blue hour Peruvian excellent novel Peruvian literature uh is a thing underrated not all of it's translated I have a few in Spanish and my pile to read but it takes me so long I don't know when I'll get to them but that's a very good book Peter sis the conference of the birds you say
it's mostly Illustrated beautiful in any case that's uh the old Persian poem I think this is let me look it up this is celebrated children's book author his first book for adults a beautiful and uplifting adaptation of the classic 12th century Sufi episode that's a wonderful poem uh definitely recommended and there's a new translation of that that came out a year or two ago that's also very good Alice Monroe dear life stories she's a
double plus read everything by her one of the deepest uh writers and thinkers and you said I can cancel I can confidently put this on my list without having read it yet and I was right and then you add uh I was disappointed by most of the well-known novels to have come out this year including the Tom Wolf unreadable last I'm not sure which one that was in McEwen okay but not distinguished mantel is somehow too
dense for me and I do not enjoy it the fault may be mine I'd rather read history than than her stuff sad to say that in a year when she passed away but it never clicked with me all right favorite non-fiction books first when Charles Murray coming apart the state of White America in 1960 to 2010. it's now so well known but it was quite ahead of its time and the notion that parts of the nation were in some way coming apart he
completely nailed so that's an important book and he was right on Target and he gets full credit for that one but do you need to read it now you've heard it too many times so I would say in that sense no uh but definitely a big hit for Murray okay you've got a lot of these so let me let me run through these fast and you can jump out you can say anything if anything jump out at you David ackett Fisher fairness and freedom
a history of two open societies New Zealand the U.S everything by him is great and we should consider having him on as a guest look at this some people recommended that in the comments today all right there you go yeah George Dyson turing's Cathedral the origins of the Digital Universe I wonder how that would look today I think good but there's been enough other books that it may not it's not so special anymore probably you
don't need to read it but I think it's still fine John gertner the idea Factory Bell labs and the great age of American innovation great topic great book excellent author Michael Michael important than before because the corporate lab has appeared increasingly important with time Michael Durda on Conan Doyle or the whole Art of Storytelling I'm a big fan of Sherlock Holmes that's a good book uh dirt is a very smart guy I left his
stuff for the post so yeah it's good James Fallows Chyna airborne it is out of date but at the time it was in some ways the best analysis of the problems in China and Chinese business different ways in which lack of trust meant you could not manufacture certain very high quality Goods again it is fairly out of date but still an excellent book for its time Greg wolf Rome an Empire story so many round books uh somewhat
forgotten but I don't mean that as a slight you know it was probably quite good reach out to Tyler for your blurb on the next Rome book so many room books the number of sources is limited so there's new archeology but until we read those you know burnt codexes and the like just rehashing with another interpretation it's diminishing returns maybe better to read the Romans I don't know it's hard hard at the margin to improve your understanding of
Rome I find odd Arnie westad Restless Empire China and the world since 1750. very good book well there aren't that many good books on Chinese history that will be intelligible to a western reader but that's a good one uh Robert Kaplan the Revenge of geography I like geopolitics some of the claims are overstated he generalizes too much but that's better than a writer who won't tell you anything Barry eichen green Dwight Perkins Khan
ho Shin from Miracle to maturity the growth of the Korean economy there are way too few books on Korean economic growth that's one of them excellent on facts quite boring in terms of style but just for what it covers and what it does strong recommendation so those are your picks I did not uh I may have missed it but I didn't see music pics from 2012 but what do you think of your picks how they aged overall well by whose account you know do I
still like what I liked mostly but that doesn't mean they've aged well right yeah not not the dictator not The Three Stooges can't get over that Tyler sorry um all right let's go back to I tell you what let's go to production function uh this will be easier this year in one sense because you only explicitly asked it three times this year um I know you kind of embed it in the conversation and it comes up more
organically but was there any intent this year especially just literally not even saying the words production function or kind of getting a lot into to process as a discrete segment was there any intent behind that or just just happened that way if listeners like something too much maybe you should move away from it that's the intent you get trapped or caught in your own memes a bit as I sip for myself recommending mug exactly so that's why I
did less of it just to kind of screw with people like well you thought you liked this now I'm going to take it away from you but I'm still interested in the question Tyler your cruel mistress um okay let's do the three though okay first of all uh so I will read out the the answer to the production function question or where they talked about it and you guessed the name okay quote my dad is a good guy I think it showed something
about my interest in taxonomy uh he's talking about bug collecting I believe I think bug collecting showed something about my interest in taxonomy which is probably not unconnected to later becoming a baseball reporter as I became a stat head in high school and in college so there is probably a story to tell there it's got to be Chuck lasterman right it's not your classroom it's a good guess though who is it
it's Jamal Green Ah that's right you asked him a question as Dad uh yeah yeah okay number two there's a huge amount of power in being quantitative uh there's a huge power in thinking about things not just from a qualitative angle but putting numbers on things building statistical models doing that in a world where you know you're forgetting an enormous number of factors how do you do that I think that is one of the core things here getting
quantitative numerical when it's really hard to do so [Music] um was that SPF it was Sam Bateman freed indeed it was your first question was a production function question uh so he emphasized the quantitative and and um and putting numbers on things so and learning how to count yes okay third and last one frankly I don't understand people who go quiescent intellectually as they get older in a way getting older you get
more control of your time and you have more Savvy on how to do things and how to make things happen who to call when you have a question and all that stuff so your ability to investigate stuff especially with the internet now is going up all the time why would you let curiosity fade sounds like either Mary Gates skilled or Lydia Davis it's Stuart Brandt Stuart Stuart Brandt who up until Jeremy Grantham was our oldest cwt guest I
think Grantham Dallas is that right Jeremy's two months older than Stewart Jared Dallas floor other cwt producer confirms that there's two months difference between Stuart brand and Jeremy Grantham I'm glad someone knows these things who is our youngest guest ever ooh good question any guesses I don't think it was anyone from this year Anna vidovich is young I don't think she's the youngest she was the first guest this year
Patrick Collison would have been 27. yeah I don't know if he's the youngest but he must be close yeah I would think that it's someone probably in their late 20s would be the youngest and we've taught we have reached out to people younger we've reached out to teenagers um Tavi gevinson we tried right yeah and there's been yeah there's been several people like that who have done something exceptional some of them have been like
headline newsmaker type people and we've tried to get them on but for various reasons no no dice let's try someone else very young yeah and that's something you've you've talked to us explicitly about too I'm a little reluctant that if they're that young it's not that I think they'll screw it up but they do get branded by the episode and that's a responsibility on our part that makes me a little nervous yeah so
there's some people where you know that will be fine and I would want to make sure it's a young person in that position yeah yeah there is there you have to be careful the younger they get there's definitely people who are cwt worthy but there's there's more to consider for them in coming on the show to be sure uh switching on to some of the questions I had when we get a few minutes to have the conversation I want to have it's all
been the conversation you want to have I believe that's right especially the Three Stooges part yes the through line of this episode is the is The Three Stooges remake from 2012 absolutely none of our listeners remember but did it does exist but just paying tribute to the original Three Stooges deserves a mention I think so I don't regret having put it on the list are you a Three Stooges Laurel and Hardy Abbott and
Costello what's your ranking I watched a lot of Abbott and Costello as a kid because my father did but I have to say I never found it funny I think you can see roots of Larry David in Abbott and Costello and that I find interesting but now it's unwatchable like who's on first it's just not funny Laurel and Hardy there's a bit uh WC Fields the bank dick I like better Charlie Chaplin I like better Buster key and I like better most early comedy I
don't love and I think that tells us something about the nature of Comedy I'm an Abbott and Costello guy I think I watched the most of that and I I think I think some of that holds up others maybe not so much the best movie is with Frankenstein and the Wolf Man Yes actually a good Frankenstein in the world I watched that movie many times as a kid it's very good all right um you wrote a you wrote one of your
kind of your uh one of your big marginal Revolution essays this year last year you did one on state capacity libertarianism and this time you did one on the new right what was your thought process going into that did you you said for the SEL one the state capacity libertarian one that you were sort of like typing it with Glee you knew it would be kind of a poking the bear or something for the new right what what were you trying to
accomplish for yourself and for your readers well when I go to events I very often meet quite smart young people and those who are not on the left and who are not effective altruists those who are on the right they tend more and more to be some version of the new right for lack of a better term even though that's a quite diverse set of views and I wanted to write a piece that would actually try to persuade those people
and make them more in the direction of classical liberals but recognize what it was they might be correct about but still give reasons why I thought they weren't on the proper path forward so that was my thinking there I think it's the most influential piece I've written this year is my guess probably the most widely read as well or these movements now just getting Fast and Furious is that one place in which things are getting more Dynamic and
changing all the time is every year now we're going to be writing you know Tyler's gonna be writing a new essay on some new intellectual or political movement that's coalescing probably so there's a lot of fracturing old views are breaking down uh with the internet everyone's eclectic so there's always more to write about in terms of other people's views you had a book come out this year with Daniel gross called Talent how did that
tour go how does it how did it compare to previous book tours any noticeable differences the tour is still going uh so I'm still giving talks webinars whatever about the book quite often a lot of Institutions are using the book in a way that I find rewarding I'm not sure I'm free to let on what they all are but like some pretty good places and I think the book has a remarkably dedicated set of readers sort of per reader it's the most
influential book I've written in terms of changing something about practice and of course a lot of the credit there goes to Daniel so I've been very happy with how the book has gone did anyone ask you your question which is what are you working on next anyone in a podcast anyone in that kind of press tour oh you've said that no one needed you know you've mentioned that one of the things no one ever asked about is what's
your next book or what's your next project did you get that this time I I did a few times so you know I've always been thinking about a sequel with Daniel I don't think that will be the next thing I don't think we have replenishment of fresh material on a rapid enough basis and uh I'm writing a book my take on the greatest economists of all time hi again Smith Martha smell and why they're interesting or where they went wrong and
that's pretty far along it's over three quarters done I would say oh that's exciting Tyler I'm excited but it won't come out soon so there has to be the paperback of talent that will take a while then that goes through this run the paperback of talent prevents us from learning about the talent and economics that's exactly right in a funny way this is a sequel to Talent it's case studies so you were on RT and trium's good time
show uh one of the questions they presented to you was about the NBA halftime show and you said you really liked it and you liked it because um the people argue with each other but they seem to love each other they're really highly analytical but trying to get to the truth of things this is the TNT show in particular with Charles Barker Kenny Smith Shaq and Ernie uh they're not always analytical but they have fantastic chemistry and
they know how to make it work and it's one of the best things to study I think to understand podcasting yeah he mentioned in the context of podcasting and do you do you know where that format came from originally no yeah because it was an intentionally created format to have how do you how do you have something on TV that's argumentative but compelling and insightful right and they use visuals
very well too yeah and one of the uh this readers can correct me listeners can correct me if I'm wrong here but I believe one of the sources that people point to that format is actually the Cisco on Ebert show that starred in the 80s and that was the thing that they figured out is how to have two people who were a little cantankerous and a little antagonistic but fundamentally love movies had two different points of view and could
argue about a movie in a way that was still instructive and it took them time to dial that in but one of the big producers of sports shows like on ESPN directly credit Siskel and Ebert with giving him the idea to do shows like the halftime show I didn't know that that's great and you know it took a while for them to work Shaq into the group and it's fine now but at first I was like this isn't going to work it took
and it took Siskel and Ebert and I think this is a this is an instructive lesson for everyone is it took them a while to figure that out it is very difficult to make that work and to operate in that environment whether you're on a podcast NBA halftime show or talking about the movies it takes and this is something I think we we think about it mercatus all the time is how do you have that insightful dialogue where there's some
tension but you know you're trying to get to the truth of the matter and that is the really powerful format for actually developing understanding and insight for things that Sports has got to figure out and Seinfeld did also early Seinfeld episodes are pretty iffy right but at some point it becomes funny and interesting yeah I I have to say I'm not a Seinfeld person I like Larry David um Curb Your Enthusiasm it's a more pure
thing but for Ensemble work I think Seinfeld is where one goes and Seinfeld we have I think had a direct line to we did have a connect with Seinfeld and we we sent an invitation pre-covet I think or maybe during covid but uh but no no luck with Seinfeld but I think he would be a really good guest as well um we should try Larry David and Larry we promise not to ask about who also yes but weirdly Larry David even though he
was marketing FDX he played the guy who thinks it's a bad idea so he's coming out Aces on this uh lastly I forgot to ask one of the most important questions of this retrospective which comes from uh fellow cwt producer Dallas floor she says I saw Limp Biscuit in concert this past summer and it was one of the best concerts I've ever been to what are some of Tyler's best or favorite concerts you've ever attended
Master musicians of jajuka they're a Moroccan I would call them a noise band that's one of the best shows I've ever been to seeing live gamelan music in Bali is one of the best shows I've ever been to the Paul McCartney tour in the early 90s seeing Roger McGuinn and Gene Clark play at NYU in what would be I guess was the mid-1980s was the top show uh those are like a few that come to mind off the top of my head I saw Horowitz play at
Carnegie Hall Once piano he did Beethoven Opus 101 Schumann Carnival some other great work some Chopin that was amazing even though it was not Horowitz at his Peak ushida playing Mozart was incredible so so many for top concerts I wouldn't know where to stop if those are good picks I'm not sure how they step up stack up against Limp Biscuit though okay before we close let me give a shout out to everyone on the team who helped
out this year that's Limp Biscuit Fan Dallas floor Morgan Hamilton Kate delanoy Sloane Argyle Caroline bear Karen plant Christina be he Haley Larson Katie kinderknecht Anna McVeigh and Ashley Schiller if you count all the people that helped out here in Mercedes with Live Events and things like that it'd be a much longer list but we thank you for all your help and we look forward to another year in conversations thank you Jeff thank you Tyler