hello everyone and welcome to the 2024 conversations with Tyler retrospective where we look back at past episodes take listener questions review Tyler's pop culture picks from 2014 in this case and cover numerous other topics besides I'm Jeff Holmes I'm one of the producers of conversations with Tyler and of course I'm joined with the man himself Tyler welcome hello Jeff thank you for having me on the show my pleasure
so we did 30 episodes this year Tyler it's not a record but you know it's a it's a pretty Full Slate when you look over this list of episodes how how do you feel about it well and there's the new podcast with Alex tabarok that's right so it's a lot of episodes I thought we had a very good year you know each year you think oh well it's not going to be that good this year but this was very good only a few Week episodes uh yes and we'll get into
underrated episodes and most popular but I'm glad you mention the marginal Revolution podcast we just uh released the last episode of season one this this morning uh that we're recording this um give the listeners a sense of uh of
season one of the margin Revolution podcast what you and Alex are hoping to do why should why should they check it out we had what seven episodes so it's all economics unlike conversations with Tyler uh neither one of us interviews
the other we go back and forth and Alex and I have worked together now for about 35 years so we have a good sense of each other Good Rapport and we just dive into economics and a bit like conversations with Tyler we talk as we would talk to each other pretty much so it's like a window into actual conversations yeah for me an alternate title of it was going to be GMU lunch because I think it captures the spirit of you two sometimes
with a group of other professors are just like-minded folks going out and having lunch and talking about there's more shrieking at lunch cuz you have Ryan Kaplan and Hansen there but it's like the calm version of GMU lunch the
calm Cooperative version uh and Alex uh on his post on the options pricing Theory episode today also asked people to comment with ideas for season two so if you want to propose a topic for season two of The marginal Revolution
podcast head over to the marginal Revolution blog and find that post and leave a comment there and just to be clear conversations with Tyler will continue as it has been and we hope to do even more episodes so no basic change in uh this product yeah all right so returning to cwt let's go over top episodes so first top by download I know the answer you don't but if you re as you look over the uh 29 episodes it's 30 including this
one which one do you think was our most downloaded episode this year and we're talking about just audio downloads we're not counting YouTube well to paraphrase Peter teal I'll say never bet against Peter teal he likes to say never bet against Deon musk so I think Peter typically is the most downloaded episode for many people and that's my pick and that bet pays off he is number one uh he broke uh the first day first week
listening records for the show actually several people broke listening records but he's he's on top um John height would be my number two pick which was contentious people of fights arguments debate different from a lot of the other
episodes Hot Topics John took that all in very good spirits yeah Jonathan height is number two so you're two for two you want to try to ground out the top five or maybe the top three I think they're pretty predictable through the
top three I think I'm just guessing here but Mark andrees is always a good pick to be a top download am I right you're wrong because keep in mind that was not that was a panel audio the a16z event so we can that's not a full-on conversation with Tyler episode episod so he did not make the top five what would be another guess KY scandin I don't know after that it's hard for me to say Nate silver I guess would be my guest Toby lka Nate
silver Nate Sil you threw out a couple names you're raging a little bit but I'm gonna take Nate silver that was number three and then rounding out the top five number four was Patrick McKenzie number five was Paul Bloom um so all of those are very close you know within you know maybe a thousand downloads of each other um so it got so we're pleasing people too much is that the lesson maybe so I I sent out an email to our newsletter
about this and I think you know you have to say it's a little predictable it only gets a maybe a little eclectic towards the end but uh this was very much fan service I think these top five um so it would be nice to see maybe a less um
less well-known person cracking that top five but something for us to Aspire to next year um moving on to underrated episodes so episodes that weren't necessarily breaking download records but are still very very good um you
could think of them as a personal favorite um I've got my picks do you want to throw out a couple well one underrated episode was massaki Suzuki because most people don't know enough about Bach to really love what he said yeah plus he had an accent that may hurt downloads a bit uh but that one I was very fond of fared Zakaria you got to see the real fared even his son loved the episode I don't know how many downloads it got but it has to be
underrated Michael neelson uh most are underrated Tom tugan who did not make it to uh be head of the conservative party but somay still might and certainly ought to be yeah uh those are good picks uh mazaki Suzuki was a was a fan mention as well a favorite of my wife's um so check that one out if you haven't I would also throw out um Steven cotkin so pretty recent episode codin performed very well that's one of the best episodes of all
time but it clearly just established itself in the pantheon you know going you think about like Lazarus Lake in the past or um Richard prom which are some of my favorites just as soon as you listen to it it's a clear favorite if
you check out the YouTube comments uh many people are commenting that it's their favorite Steven codin interview and and people are still listening so that will climb in the numbers and Paula burn was a tremendous episode Paula burn
was another pick of mine uh I definitely that one just released last week but it's definitely tracking low and I would say look you've got like you've got Hardy's marriages why they fell apart uh couples counseling I mean what's not to love about uh listening to someone who does couples therapy um and also the story of the poison pen letters and how she flushed out this um you know maybe jealous academic who was harassing her
via very cleverly written letters and mailing them to her and other people it's the funniest cwt episode of all time I think and she's the one who's funny not me yes producer Sam alberger told me after the recording that it's
probably the most he's heard you laugh in an episode and he was cracking up as well during it so check that one out the last one I had was Alan Taylor um I joke because I feel like Alan Taylor is also squarely in the cwt kind of interest uh
area of Interest I mean it's history and this episode covers like Revolutionary War history War of 1812 we've got a lot of males I think a lot of dads and what Dad doesn't love military history speaking as a dad so check out Alan
Taylor um another one I'll throw out that was mentioned by fans is Kyla scanlin so she wasn't like a I'm not sure if she cracked the top 10 but she was mentioned by fans and people particularly appreciated how she kind of
turned the tap on you and it ended up being an interview of you almost as much as it was an interview of Kyla great Rapport and Charisma and she of course is a big star and uh will continue to climb absolutely um so those were my picks uh listeners if you have yours you can still send them in let me know I'm always curious to hear which ones uh spoke to people you could I like the Christopher kiroff episode and how he
never said the word um you know you might edit out an um here and there with Christopher you don't need to edit MH it's just you get it yeah word for word yeah I I I love that episode for me it was something I know very little about
um so it was one of those and this is military technology for those of you who don't know yeah so the world of procurement and defense and defense technology uh is not something I know a lot about so it is one of those just big
door opening episodes or was for me at least of and becoming increasingly important I'm sorry to say it has to absolutely all right let's uh let's jump into some listener questions we have a lot so and we had this one guy who wrote a long document of like very good very detailed questions for me and he sent it to you yes his name is David Kramer I picked I've got three questions I pulled out he probably has I don't know 30
questions they're all very good we'll link to it in the transcript uh first question from David Kramer I know you think that Cinema is the great art medium of the 20th century do you think there's a chance for video
games to Eclipse that he asked a couple questions about video games and I I like something we don't talk about on the show a lot but I something I think about too on their current trajectory I don't see that happening I even have people in
video games telling me that the seminal games are now all a bit old and it's becoming more derivative so there's something about video games it's two context specific to the person playing it and doing it and it doesn't quite manage to generate narrative and vision in a way that is inter subjectively understandable where it could become part of a cannon so I'll say no on that one but you don't play video games no
and they they've had a lot of time to establish themselves aesthetically and again the numbers on usage Revenue you know everything off the charts that one cannot deny but in these other areas I don't really see that they're climbing
or have established much of anything well one way you could think about the success of video games is how how vibrant the subcultures are around video games and one thing that I get immense Joy from is is particular on YouTube is
there are so many subgenres of criticism or analysis on YouTube about video games and I think there's something very for me very resonant about today where for instance there's YouTube channels that just take a look at these big Virtual Worlds that are created in video games and they they say where do all the rivers go and they try to map the river systems or they try to map the power infrastructure and there's this feeling
you can get where as you're exploring these worlds and you're always kind of wondering was this intentional or was this an accident and it can give you a weird feeling of you know almost the the transcendental or something that you're
walking around kind of wondering you know was this touch by the Creator and I find so many of those sub genres so interesting even if I never play the games myself and I think actually the the criticisms in the analysis that you
see is really high quality in a way that I don't think many people appreciate outside of video games but I would sooner say that shows the growth of YouTube criticism as an amazing genre which it is so In classical music there can be recordings that sell 3 400 copies at most yeah uh and then the number of people who listen to someone doing the critical review of the recording can be tens or even hundreds of thousands yeah
and that's weird right but I think that's the future are there any people who do critical reviews of cwts on YouTube is that a genre yet I I haven't encountered it but I heartily encourage it so which sweater did Tyler bring this
time would be the start and they talk about all the weird little things yes in the episode yeah um I would subscribe to that channel um it would get more listens than an actual episode perhaps right possibly so I think it touches on
some of the things that we've mentioned even with llms and like econ goat uh this the the site that we created to um uh last year um where we published your book and and had this AI companion where you know the more and more you can engage with the thing without consuming the thing so it might be the criticism on YouTube or it might be that you ask the llm to kind of give you the summary and you might get more value out of the derivative
product than the product itself how about YouTube criticisms of llms giving you derivative summaries yeah well uh we'll just keep following that all the way down second question from David Kramer which cultural code once cracked caused you the strongest update for you either from admiration to horror or vice versa well that's going to be something when you're young right almost certainly so when I moved to Germany when I was I
guess 22 years old to spend spend a year there and I had hardly ever been abroad before I'd been to Oxford and London but in a way that doesn't count and just had to live there and that was incredible and every day there were new puzzles to think about and figure out and I would say in the mid 80s West Germany then as we called it was at a kind of peak that is you could go there and wonder was this a better country better way of life
than the United States and you wouldn't be sure you wouldn't really ask that question today I mean Germany is in trouble in a number of regards but that was just a fantastic year and the most thought-provoking year of my life and it
was all about cultural codes I also leased a car and drove around a lot to Switzerland the Netherlands France of course other places oh I haven't I had heard that part of that you leased a car well the dollar was very strong back
then right it was right before uh it plummeted so when I started in Germany it was like 3.45 marks to the dollar which people now will forget but that was an incredible exchange rate like 2x for the dollar what it should have been by PPP last question from David Kramer what which major branch of traditional art do you have the least native or I think I would say intrinsic appreciation for well if by art that includes music I
think renaissance music I'm more skeptical of than many people I think it's not until Monto Verity that music truly starts to reach its Peaks that the means are just too Limited and I really quite like or even love William bird palestrina but at the end of the day for me in music there is a break with Monto Verity and then Bach or I just think it attains much higher levels yeah and a number of people I know will winse to
hear me say this yeah but it is my view I just recommended some Renaissance church music to someone it's one I feel like actually have higher than normal or higher higher than average appreciation for um which feels weird for me to say that I don't I don't feel like I have a deep appreciation of many genres of music but thanks to and I think you just linked to this again but thanks to the game I mentioned this on the podcast at least a
couple times but thanks to I think it was civilization 4 I was playing that game and they play a lot of renaissance music during the Renaissance period of the game which composers did they play a lot of coral Works um which IA which I find really transportive um that's a very good work and um yeah the music in general is very good but I I actually a friend of mine uh was asking for some recommendations and I said check these out um all
right let's see one uh one listener Tom uh emailed and just had a bunch of questions about demographics and kind of analytic stuff which I can answer so you know how many people bail on episodes on average uh people listen to about 2/3 of
the episodes so when you aggregate everyone's drop off on average people are listening to about 2third of the episode which is pretty good um and that's been very stable for many years Delta between like most popular and
least popular YouTube is changing this uh certainly the algorithm drives you know virality or popularity more on YouTube than the podcast so if you just talk about audio downloads the Delta is not large you know you might have a 20 or 30% difference in downloads between and say the first week or first month between Peter teal who was number one this year and you know the middle of the pack um and even at the bottom of the
pack it's not much more of that on YouTube it can be you know 10 times as many downloads uh just because once you get caught up in the algorithm on YouTube it it sweeps you away so right now um someone like uh Steven cotkin has you know 10 times the views of Paula burn just because cotkin took off like wildfire and not as many people checking out Paula bur um success rate in getting potential guests to accept you know probably like 80% um
probably like implicitly it's the people we don't ask because we don't have an in with them or we don't sort of know how to reach them um that would raise that failure rate higher but for the most part when we actually get in touch with someone they say Yes um there are a few exceptions to that is it hopeless to try Magnus again someone asked about Magnus we've gotten very close I mean I think in front of him I think he's seen it or
is that your impression I'm not sure or his father has which probably is more useful perhaps I don't know but yeah we can certainly try again let's try again with Magnus I'm willing to fly to him if you Magnus if you're hearing this uh
he's not hearing it if someone I'm hearing him but he's not hearing this if uh if someone knows Magnus has has a connection please let us know similarly with Paul McCartney someone was asking about Paul McCartney that's the true
long shot I don't think we've gotten anywhere near Paul McCartney but if if you happen to know Paul um you know let us put us in touch put us in touch we're more than happy to have him on uh how often do we get solicitations
from people hoping to be guests uh now it's like every day uh and and I'm sure you get some to your email we get some to the generic weekday for sure yeah to the cwt and they're typically boring there's here's my new book and you must
think this is a Hot Topic because Corporate America is talking about it right there here's my new book on of the impact of tech on America's youth or something just very cliche generic topics yeah nothing nothing against the people pitching them but they're usually not at all targeted to this show and so they're kind of going for more of a more of a topical business or news podcast than us specifically if the person is actually
targeting us more specifically and it's clear they're actually they've actually done a little bit of homework about the show I I will definitely look at it um and and take a closer look at the guest but when it's a generic one I don't even I don't even spend a second on it I I delete it immediately I know that's tough I know when you're pitching lots of shows that's that's tough to do but but they should make a case that the
person is an impressive polymath even if they've done nothing and have no book yeah like that we would consider yeah or the person has done something very strange I mean perhaps with their their body like we're trying to get this woman
who is climbed Mount Everest right more than anyone else right we should try her again I know she didn't respond but uh I don't think it's a waste of time M all right how would you the current development of your previous
ideas that you've popularized on the blog how have subsequent events Vindicated or called into questions ideas such as the great stagnation averages over State capacity libertarianism that's from GK well the great stagnation I think was
seen as radical when I stated it in 2011 it's now widely considered to have been true I think it's over not everyone thinks it's over I think with AI and advances in biomedical science that ended a few years ago but I think that
one turned out very well basically average is over is a story in the works uh will artificial intelligence boost or lower income inequality that we don't know yet uh but the predictions I made in my book averages over that AI would be the next big thing and it would all be about how well can you work with AI That's done very very well so I think I deserve more credit for those predictions in fact and state capacity libertarianism
I still hear the phrase all the time uh like Vic once reached out to me a few months ago and he said oh I love stay capacity libertarianism let's meet and talk about this now we'll see what comes of that but when I wrote that post I was convinced like this was going nowhere and it's still a thing so I'm not saying it's a thing that will succeed but I think as libertarianism more narrowly has scattered and diffused it's one of
the strands that's still alive so I'm hopeful another question you are in a sense both an Insider and an outsider to the econ profession what parts of the profession do you feel are most underrated and most overrated I think I'm mainly just an outsider not an Insider uh the thing that is most overrated is just uh entry barriers in terms of bureaucratization are higher and higher you have to have gone to a very good undergraduate school have
letters of recommendation from highly credible people maybe have done a pre-doc and that's ruining it for people I know at least five like truly talented individuals who were teenagers at first thought they wanted to become economists then learned what was involved and just thought I'll never really quite be able to get anything done going this path and now they're all doing other things and in no case do I feel like I should be
nagging them telling them oh you really should have done economics they probably shouldn't so that's the biggest problem many people are aware of it but it's one of these I'm aware of it and not going to do anything about it sorts of issues
yeah uh now what's most underrated I don't know I mean the quality of the median paper is pretty high I don't know if it's underrated but just the standards and the care you have to put into it but that's related to the
entry barriers being higher so it's a tradeoff I think uh economic is a lot less fun and actually less impactful than it used to be the Biden Administration relied much less on economists than the Obama Administration
did Trump will'll see what happens but I would bet against academic economists being highly influential there maybe in very indirect roundabout ways but not in the standard sense that they're given credit and invited in on the red carpet
so as a profession I mean we're losing status and influence and that should be a radical wakeup call and I don't see that we're heating it we're doubling down on previous strategies and we're going to regret that a lot more economists should be doing podcasts is one way to put it and why why should they not be excellent at it if they're smart people who have things to say they have plenty of experience giving seminars teaching they
should be great at doing podcasts a lot of them are not frankly looking back at past history but that itself tells you something relatedly another question from Steve how should places such as the marcada center measure success uh he
talks about the KO Institute when they report they list a bunch of their outputs op EDS Congressional meetings so on but but how do you but how do you map that to your mission well every nonprofit does and should create reports
and metrics But ultimately my view is if you've really succeeded you know it without measuring it and it's just obvious so I mean take uh Ralph nater I don't agree with a lot of what Ralph nater did but he's I think still around and he had a big impact and I could go out and measure Ralph nater in different ways but I don't need to Peter Singer has Peter Singer gotten his way on most issues I would say no but has he made
many more people vegetarians MH uh and probably influenced pro-animal legislation I would say definitely yes and I've never measured that so it's when you don't need to measure that you have real successes what are our successes say in the past last year Marcus that you think you just know it without without having to measure it we've changed Minds change behaviors or attitudes well it depends what you mean by the phrase at mercatus so Hester
Pierce used to work here she studied crypto for us she has since become a commissioner at the SEC due to her heroic efforts crypto is still alive and well it's a Hester Triumph not a mercus in the narrow sense Triumph but that's exactly the kind of thing we should be trying to do so someone said on Twitter recently that there's was Joe lale there's no limit to what you can achieve if you're willing not to get much credit
for it and I think that should be our attitude to some extent it is our attitude and what would marus be without its people to paraphrase someone else all right uh which guests have had the biggest impact on you in the past year that's from Alan Wright I don't know impact on me maybe even in your the collective set of guests take up most of my time that's impact yeah but you couldn't pin that on any one guest who was the hamasaki
Suzuki invited me to his hondle Messiah concert on December 20th and I'm going to go okay so that's impact and I'm sure it will be magnificent that's wonderful uh who was uh who was your most difficult prep you think looking over this list this year most difficult prep oh it's probably Steven cotkin that took the most reading and then Alan Tor they're the two historians almost always historians are the hardest but another difficult prep was
uh Philip ball who wrote so many books on science science you can't prep for history you can just read more books yeah and if you're an economist you know some history anyway through economic history but a body of work in science it's like oh do I start reading a a biology text or something so he was hard as well another reason cotkin and and uh Alan Taylor are underrated then is you got to you've got to you've got to make Tyler's prep worth
it all right well I learn more from doing those people so say when I did Joseph stiglet I had already read his major pieces indeed many of his minor pieces over the years it hardly took any prep but I learned less too
mhm all right now guest that that's had a big impact on you uh Rick Rubin this is related to that if you were a DJ in a different life what kind of music would you play and where would you perform also what would same question for DJ
Tyrone that's from Bart darus well I love music of All Sorts uh I've done some DJing for Rick and I played for him a lot of what is misnamed world music but from different countries such as Madagascar or pygmy music or MH you know Algerian rap or whatever MH uh I love playing Paul McCartney for people I feel I know that area very well we have an episode coming up with Ian Leslie and uh he'd better be ready because I'm ready I don't need to prep
for him he has this new book coming out on John Lennon and Paul McCartney I feel I've never been more ready for an episode so uh I think good DJing you should surprise people and mix in a lot of different things and what and Tyrone would feel the same way but what what would his artist be maybe he just play a tonal music for people but Tyler would do that too so Tyler and Tyrone merge yeah when it comes to music Tyler has a
little more empathy for the for the group I think I'm not sure about that uh any update on yonas the person in Ethiopia you supported uh he and his wife had another baby uh the war is over in the immediate sense uh their food problems have been alleviated he does not have enough money to complete his house which is a big problem for him they're back on their feet but it's very tough and tourist demand for the business he wanted to create has not
materialized because of the war MH and uh he's performed very admirably but Ethiopia has let him down I would say I think you commented at the time it was more difficult than it should have been to get him the money uh when you supported him it required some jumping through through hoops is that still the case I now have an electronic payments Network set up the first time I used it my bank cancelled my account I had to go
in person because it does look sketchy to be sending just a single transfer to Ethiopia all of a sudden yeah and I think that's resolved but I'm afraid the next time I send they'll cancel my account again so I don't know we'll see payments in the United States is still screwed up stripe has done amazing work I hope they keep keep on going I'm pretty sure they will but it still all needs fixing all right question from DB
respectfully and in a spirit of good intention uh oh it's not as bad as you think why is it that you seem to dislike measures to make practical cycling in cities safer and more comfortable so you've had a number of posts where you
you kind of say that the idea that people I think Craig May him wrong but the way I would summarize you is you think it's without evidence you know installing bike lanes and these things the ROI is not there to you is that fair
correct as far as I can tell from the numbers I've seen use of DC bike Lanes has been declining M uh I suspect it's not the future it's a relatively slow and late 19th century mode of Transport if you look at downtown Washington it's much harder to drive around in I get that's partly by Design but there is a real economic CA to that and the bike lanes are mostly empty it does seem to work for much of Manhattan I think one
should be an empiricist I know Amsterdam and Copenhagen quite well it works great there a Houston decided not to do it that was almost certainly the correct decision so one should be an empiricist and I think bike lanes are by the people
I come into contact with very much overrated if you ask the simple question where's the cost benefit analysis that adds up all the costs I never see it no one has ever sent me one ever mhm and I did a long post there were a large
number of comments people would say things like oh you dummy don't you see copenhagen's a great City yes it is it's worked well there but at the margin how many American cities should make big investments in this direction I still want to see the cost benefit analysis and no one's coming up with it all right and if you send mu on that is serious and taking all the costs into account including the cost of the land I will
read it and indeed review it but some kind of partial oh here's a few people who were better off because we put bike Lanes in I'll look at it but no I'm not going to review that and that's what people have been sending
me you published your list of the best new books of the year and we'll get to those uh at least for 2014 what about the best new ideas that's from Bob buing do we have new ideas I mean generative AI you wouldn't quite call it a new idea
but it has reached new Peaks and the very best models uh obviously 01 one pro for GPT is right now the best model and it's just astonishing it beats humans at most things today or is it yesterday the new Google video model came out I haven't played around with it yet people say it's incredible so those are the new ideas that matter and the rest is often people just spinning their wheels it's not a great time for like new ideas in
books the new ideas are all stuff also in biom medicine and it's just been incredible mind-blowing you've said before that the the best ideas are the things people do they're embedded in the projects people do so like llms would be
one but that's a recent development so say 10 15 years ago you had all these new semi- poopular semi-serious science economics Books A lot of them had new ideas you could say Jared Diamond started that Trend it now seems to me
mostly over those books seem a bit flat at the moment uh and yeah it's uh we're waiting for people to reinvent the book we tried our own version of that thank you again for your help with goat Eon goat. but those are the new ideas or doing things well what about maybe we're stretching what's an idea but versus say an initiative but in the policy world we have Doge would you count that as a new idea I'm all for it I hope it succeeds
but I don't think it's a new idea if you read David Stockman's old book the Triumph of politics they tried a version of that and the the first term of the Reagan Administration it didn't work they're trying it again I think they'll
try harder and with the benefit of knowledge of failures in the meantime but no I don't see it as a new idea okay well we're we're also gonna have Jennifer PA on to talk more about that in the new year so look out for that one
and settling more is is not a new idea right let's root for it but it'll be tough and it's not new all right what supplements do you take how do you feel about the life extension projects that are out and about that's from Nicholas Krauss uh I drink mineral water does that count as a supplement why not uh I don't take a lot of medications or I don't take medications in general I'm skeptical um I think life expectancy will continue
to increase slowly mhm my guess is there's some natural limit due to the brain it somewhere between 100 and 120 MH and I don't see how you repair the brain without replacing who is the person mhm so I don't think individuals
can live forever but to get to the point where large numbers of people who buckle their seat belts Live Well into their 90s I expect where on the way to doing that right now uh your kids might be able to expect to live well into their
90s for instance how long would you like to live in an Ideal World in your body as long as I can as long as there is history to follow I won't be bored so I'm not worried about that I I'm the same way I some people say no I don't want to live forever because then all of your people around you presumably will start dying unless unless they're just also I guess buckling their seat belts and taking the same non-s supplements you byebye I mean
I already know a lot of people have passed away it's terrible but I've kept on going yeah yeah yeah I um I don't know I like and I have a lot of new friends also you have to you know as you get older you need to make real efforts to make and keep new friends but you can do it and if Rick Rubin or gome Dorman they're like pretty new friends for me yeah to me it to to be maybe a little glib it's sort of like not getting a new
pet because your old pet died and just being a little fatalistic of like I'm not going to bring joy into my life because that Joy might end um I don't know I i' if there's anyone out there who can help me with this I'd
love to live uh I'd love to live longer than than say 80 or 90 a lot of emergent Ventures winners are working on this my guess is they'll simply help us live to 100 which is still a great investment but many of them think aging is a a
specific thing that can be stopped or reversed or cured like you can cure a disease I hope they're right uh We've made bets on them but if you just ask me what I think I do think there's an upper limit that is more or less at where the oldest living people live to today which is like about 110 perhaps maybe we can get that up to 120 M listener uh PK asks how do you invest your own money buy hold and diversify I do very little I don't
sell things don't really rebalance as I save more buy more stuff and that's it there's nothing interesting about that story I don't think I can beat the market and I don't try to I'm wondering if he's if they I should say are also asking this question because of your challenged people to short the market if they're if they're bearish on things have you ever yourself taken out a financial position that kind of bet on your belief in that way uh
I've never shorted anything note that my wife works for the SEC so I'm not allowed to short anything legally in fact a lot of individual stocks I can't buy uh all I can do it's it's in fact what I want to do anyway but is Buy hold and diversify M but I have no degrees of freedom in this so take make of that what you will all right and I'm optimistic I don't want to short the market even if I could okay let's move on to pop culture
picks so for many many years on the marginal Revolution you've been listing your best uh your favorite non-fiction fiction movies from the year it's tradition on this show to look back a decade ago uh so in this case 2014 and
look at your picks I always forget to prep for this and I ought to know by now I'm silly so 2014 also coincides I joined marcadas in October 2014 so the snake is kind of eating the tail here where up to now these picks have been
before I joined Marcus and before cwt got started but next year when we do this cwt will have begun perhaps that will be reflected in the lists now starting with non-fiction there are a lot there are way too many I think to go by one by one so let me just mention the ones where there is some connection with cwt so interestingly you uh one of the books you mentioned was Steven cotkin Stalin volume one so that was one of the
greatest biographies of all time y an incredible achievement we got Adam 2's the Deluge the Great War and the remaking of World Order 196 1931 you say it starts low but after about 133% becomes fascinating especially about the internal politics and Germany and Russia I must have read that on Kindle if I said 133% so there you go you got we've got TW and kotkin on there TW was on I think in 2020 um other books that you mentioned I
can't there are probably maybe 30 books listed here um but we have pik's second Machine Age Tim Harford had a book Megan mccardle's upside a down Lane Kenworthy and social democracy these are all people that are kind of in your network you say fourth Revolution by John Mel Daniel drar the system worked Frank Buckley why the Canadian system government is better Russ Roberts how Adam Smith can change your life so there's another CW I'm not
sure the Frank Buckley book has held up well okay you know chrisa Freeland just resigned as we're recording and Trudeau is very unpopular and Canada is still in a recession now is that due to their system of government you can
debate uh but I I suspect Frank himself might revisit that claim uh other books I'll run through them you can interrupt me if uh if something jumps out at you uran OST haml the transformation of the world to global history of the 19th
century I'd love to read more from him but it seems to me that book probably took him 30 years and I wonder when the next one is coming you said it was long exhausting and wonderful Christopher hail Massacre and Malia or Malaya Howard Island and Michael W Jennings Walter Benjamin and critical life the very the very revved John Drury music at midnight the life and poetry of George Herbert that was a great book that might have been the best book of
that Year everyone should read that John K Midnight's descendants a history of South Asia since partition Alice gofman on the Run fugitive life in an American city she got in trouble for that book people claimed she got too close to her
subjects or was involved in whatever I don't want to repeat allegations but it's become quite controversial okay uh many others but I'll I'll end on this one uh that I missed another cwt connection you uh mentioned Tom
Holland's translation of Herodotus Herodotus herod's histories there we go and he was a great guest and has an amazing podcast he does they are our force of nature often the number one podcasts in the UK and I think you know probably top you know whatever maybe top 25 top 100 in the US they're a model for Alex for the marginal Revolution podcast in fact he listens to them a lot yes I I love them too I know he went to a live show and
they they can sell out venues and um uh I I also thought about well maybe we should just try to call your podcast the rest is economics and uh just join their family um but we went with Marg Revolution instead okay let's there are many more you can check the post listeners if you want some other ones but let's move on to fiction Michael Faber the book of strange new things saber my wife loved that book she asked me about it like a
day ago or two days ago yeah great book I still think about it I read that when your recommendation and enjoyed it Emanuel carer carer I'm not sure if I'm saying that right limonov the outrageous Adventures of the radical Soviet poet who became a bum in New York a sensation in France and a political anti-hero in Russia he's done very well we should consider him as a guest about a week ago I read his new book about the trials of
the Islamic ter terrorists in France that's excellent he's just racking up successes Andre noyman Talking to Ourselves not ringing a bell with me must not have stuck Javier circus or kirkus Outlaws a novel oh sure ccus he's a great Spanish writer very good again he has a number of important books uh not that well known in the English-speaking World mhm quality Richard Flanigan the narrow road to the Deep North and he had a book this year
that Henry Oliver just reviewed uh again he's done very well uh someone also we should consider having as a guest Hassam Blossom the corpse exhibition and the other stories of Iraq yeah hasn't stuck with me Andy but let's do Richard Flanigan okay Richard Flanigan yeah Andy Weir the Martian incredible guest great book yes and he's still on a roll and I'm dying for the next one uh I am very excited so I read uh project Hail Mary um a year or
two ago I thought that book was excellent AG it's like the Martian but it's better even but better because there's there's more of a plot than just a thought exercise um which is what people loved about the Martian is just
this extended thought exercise it's got that in Project Hail Mary but also a really exciting narrative they're making a movie um I think Lord and Miller or uh attached to Lord and Miller um are known for their kind of Comedy uh and uh I'm
very excited to see how that one turns out so I feel I'm picking good authors actually people who have held up and done even better last one Jeffrey Hill broken hierarchies and poems 1952 to 2012 he passed away I think a few years ago he's a brilliant conceptual poet I'm not sure one goes back to him but I'm not sure one needs to uh strong thinker and writer all right those are your fiction picks let's move on to best movies you
say kicking it off I found this to be a diffuse year in movies one where old style Mainline releases lost their grip and open up the market for more quality and diversity my cinematic self came away from the year quite happy yet
without a clear favorite or a definite sense of which movies will last the ages well let's see how well they've aged over 10 years The Invisible Woman the secret which is about the secret love life of Charles Dickens you remember
that one excellent movie I was thinking I should watch it again Particle Fever Particle Fever was that the documentary it's a science documentary about the hadren collider yeah uh dripping to watch probably out of date but good background yeah I'd still recommend it the weekend a brutal tale of a vacation and a marriage collapsing uh you've got to be strong to watch that one but for some people yes go ahead under the skin Scarlet
Johansson movie Incredible right and it's held up very well it's become a famous movie and book The Lunchbox that's the Indian one yes about Logistics in India way ahead of its time and showing you what India is good at accomplishing so highly instructive movie and a lot of fun Viola an Argentinian take on Shakespeare's 12th night you remember that one yeah uh there's there are more good Shakespeare movies than people think but the good
ones are all really weird like chimes at night or the one with Leonard you know DiCaprio and CLA Dan's uh where they do Romeo and Juliet with Haitian voodo so yeah that's another one A Touch of sin this is a Chinese movie it's become an all-time classic maybe the greatest Chinese movie ever made I can't pronounce his name but it's what z h n g ke it's an absolutely mustat on the big screen if you can Godzilla um this was the one with
like and Cranston was the lead there's been so many Godzilla movies but this one was just called Godzilla I try to see them all I never regret it I can't quite defend them but that itself tells you something about Aesthetics yeah this
is the one directed by Gareth Edwards I don't know which one I meant but again I've never regretted seeing a single Godzilla movie in my entire life uh Transformers 4 that's the great one again it has become iconic it's just
action every moment visually complex highly inventive and is underrated by serious film critics and I don't like the other Transformers movies they're just silly but not four right I I I never you're making me want to watch Transformers 4 I never I dropped out on the Transformers series you were rational but yet the world will surprise us sometimes Obvious Child oh give me some more context let me find it's a Paul Simon song Obvious
Child that comes to mind too quickly and it blocks the movie from my mind it's a romantic comedy written and directed by Jillian robes Pierre um stars Jenny slate Gabby Hoffman David Cross not sure okay Elo Elo a movie from Singapore about a Filipina immigrant excellent film and a good look at the other side of Singaporean life that people don't always see the one I love uh this is a movie starring Mark duplas and Elizabeth
Moss um it's kind of an it's an indie movie um where uh they they go to um this is kind of a hard movie to summarize but uh as I recall they're in a they're in kind of a vacation home together and realize that they're interacting with like clones of
their partner yeah she's very good in that it's an interesting film I'm probably botching that summary a little bit but uh it's it's very good I also check that one out skeleton twins skeleton twins give me some
context context sces let me be your human llm another American Comedy I don't know this one by name either but this starred Bill haer and Kristen wig um uh twins Milo and Maggie have an unexpected reunion after a set of near tragedies comedies I tend to forget but I don't mean that as a criticism of comedies and you can't really rewatch them you just watch them once and then forget about it that's optimal uh Lucy your second Scarlet
Johanson movie yeah she is amazing uh Fury that's the World War II tank movie with Brad Pit I like World War II movies uh that's one of the good ones yeah I watch Blitz was the one this year I watched it I watch Fury in the
past year um enjoyed it and again for all my you know military dads out there there if you haven't checked out Fury um that is a is a great World War II movie uh Interstellar there's been some I don't like that anymore I think it's a bit
unwatchable I know it's the iconic movie for men it's all over Twitter tech people love it I don't think Christopher Nolan's a good movie maker I know that's heresy but it's all to excess and there's it's not really tinged with
actual drama for the most part only in some scenes so I'm going to NX that one but you're you're are you throwing out the baby with a bath water yeah I'm going to throw it all out the baby the bathwater the tub let's just throw it
all out is this just like Oppenheimer you got just a bad taste in your mouth with Oppenheimer and I mean surely it's not all bad with Nolan Mark Andres promises me that tennet makes sense he's probably correct it might be a great movie uhuh I might try it again but I don't know I think there's some way in which uh there's just too much on the screen and it it's not properly cinematic somehow I uh I have a soft spot for
Interstellar I totally get the criticisms of interstellar particularly that it it kind of all collapses into love being like a force of of nature uh like gravity is um which I know for sci-fi focus is just not not what you want and it's just too parasitic on its own special effects uh but I do appreciate just on a production level I appreciate Nolan I I think you're underrating the craftsmanship of those films um even
from just a production design approach um I think they're very good um I agree with that but it matters less to me and I guess he'll never be a guest on this show now uh you say you picked Fury number number one uh uh summing up and along with a touch of sin you say both of them need to be seen on a large screen touch of sin is really the one that has become a big deal uh and you include a TV pick you say the more modern Orthodox Jewish
dating show shim I'm yeah suim which is incredible it's now massively popular I feel very good about that pick and uh highly recommended and the problem with a lot of romance today is where does the drama come from you know they could just sleep with each other too quickly or if someone needs to divorce it just happens yeah so Victorian literature had solutions to these problems right and suim which covers modern Orthodox in contemporary
Israel has Solutions as well it's a great great TV show I'd say one of the best ever made and if you like it you'll like it right away it's not one of these you need to sit through three episodes and then make up your mind so looking
back over non-fiction fiction I didn't you know I'm not sure if you picked music I didn't see it but apologies if I miss the music picks but if you go to Mr you can you can look at the data archives and find out for yourself um
looking back over these lists um how do you think they've aged I'm biased but I think extremely well and I think that was a great year for many things it wasn't a great year for the resumption of highspeed economic growth or maybe not technological progress but it was a calm stagnation Rich year where people were remarkably creative MH very good in Aesthetics all right let us move on to something new for us this year so you have another
document in front of you actually several several documents we have asked listeners to send us ideas for a name that we can use to describe the collective fan base and basically there's a functional reason for this of like when we address emails to folks instead of dear listener we we kind of want to have a name for everyone uh so dear blank you know Taylor Swift fans are called swifties we're interested in developing our own
version of that we got a bunch of suggestions um I would ask you to browse this list we're going to narrow it down to a short list and then ask folks to vote on it um I'll start reading off some of these and you can tell me if if
any jump out to you um we have the underrated or underrated how about the overrated so there are every variation so there's the correctly if Winter's curse holds like we're pursuing them as an audience uh and that's Winter's curse
for us like we've bid too much for their loyalty so we must be overrating them would be the simple economic argument so it has to be the overrated uh Tyler writes of these should have my name in it I agree I actually I love some of them but I think it's against the spirit of the show that it it use your name it's about the guests more than anything else uh but I would say um but just to name some of the ones that do include
your names I I love cuts that just that just rolls off the tongue um inor is maybe is good because that if anything binds our listeners it might be that I like infavor there's like you know cwt uh there's but no one else will know what that means right yeah the tycoons again if we use your name the marginal revolutionaries well I think we have to save that for the other podcasts uh let's see if there's any other ones I really liked I'll say in
if it's up to me maybe it's up to them it'll be up to them some of these I don't understand but I appreciate people's effort the stubbornly attached how do you feel about the stubbornly attached if only if you tell me a lot stop listening at two-thirds of the way through maybe the stubbornly not fully attached yeah yes and unfortunately also a little difficult to use as a salutation and email dear dear the stubborn attached it doesn't quite do
what we needed to but I I I appreciate that one whoever said I like it though I like the spirit and that it's not about me yeah I think the conversationalists it's a little too General it would apply to too many things I think of the Copa movie Jean Hackman I don't know it's also straan for us because we don't actually have conversly this is probably the closest uh we get to a conversation on a on cwt all right well the listen is going to be
quite narrowed down since I and I I totally agree with this we should not have variants of your name in there um so if you haven't sent in a suggestion already send it in we'll narrow it down to a short list and then we'll ask people to vote um but I think there are some there are some good ones in here all right last bit of business we need to do before we take our leave for the year is um we are currently running our endof
Year campaign and uh people can give financially support the show one of the incentives we offered was a shout out um so if you gave more than $250 or more to the show uh I'm going to give you your shout out and we thank you very much so
here's all the folks who gave us uh who who donated to uh the cwt end of year campaign this year and qualified for this incentive Eric Ward Chris Millo Dave padulla Carl MTH Drew naton Shon Alan goldhammer Philip Kay Dave Raa
Christian feedler Joe Krauss Ethan horsefall David Kemp Adam Shapiro Chris Leman Jake Chinet Ben Stein Roman Yaki Anish Peter Samuel con Ethan monreal Jackson Howard Y Chad wonderling elu thank you all very very much for your donations um thank you all as well truly people have been very generous this year with their donations we really appreciate it um people who suggest questions they're very valuable so a thank you to all of
them as well yeah and you can email in at any time reach out to us reach out to Tyler um with guest ideas and and your questions we're happy to receive them um lastly let me thank let me thank some folks from the show and thanks to you
Jeff for being producer and overseer of all of this among your other responsibilities it's uh my favorite thing to do this episode is always my favorite thing to do this year so it's always a treat and it's it's great it's
very gratifying people now tell me that this is one of their favorite episodes of the year um because it gives them uh a kind of a recommendation for uh episodes they may have missed among other things so I love doing this I love being here I'm glad I made it there is a sickness everywhere all around us we're in the studio by ourselves because uh because folks are dropping like flies but they're not dropping they're just
sideline they're they're recumbent on a on a sofa uh you know hopefully recovering um but thanks to your health regimen and mine evidently we've we've made it here today I was an India so I'm very healthy Dallas and Sam are great I'm gonna thank them in advance they're great to work with they put up with me Dallas and Sam do uh most of the work on the show besides Tyler I just get to uh slide in and do fun things like this um
in addition to Dallas and Sam who produced the show there's Jen Whistler Karen plant Christina beee Haley Larson Mary heran Ashley Schiller Serena dib and of course there's many others at Marcus who contributed as well this year
so thank you all very much and when I say like let's do more all of you are always game and that's phenomenal it's not that easy to work with people who are like that and who really mean it let's do more and Jeff let's do more all
right let's do more more let's do more in 2025 and uh if I don't see you listeners before then I'll see you at the end of 2025 and we'll see how we did thank you Tyler looking forward to the next year thank you Jeff hello everyone
and thank you all for listening to conversations with Tyler of all the different things I do in my job it's the one that means the most to me and the one I enjoy the most our plan is to continue and do more podcasts upgrade
the series if we can make them better and have more guests on so I can learn more and so I can talk to more interesting people special thanks for all of those of you out there who have supported us financially just a reminder that it is not too late to support us still for this calendar year we very much greatly appreciate anything you're able to do I look forward to seeing you all in future conversations with Tyler