hi everyone this is Jeff producer of conversations with Tyler it's the end of the year and today we're doing a special retrospective episode so I sat Tyler down in the studio and we reflected on the past year of the show we talk about how Tyler's production function has changed in the past year which guest was the most challenging for him to prep for most popular episodes most underrated conversations I also challenged Tyler to
several rounds of segment I call name that produ function we took your questions from Twitter I went back to Marginal revolution in December 2009 and asked Tyler how he thought his pcks held up from them for best books and movies it's a great conversation I really enjoyed it and I hope you also enjoy this peak behind the scenes before we get to it the last thing I'll say is that if you'd like to support the show
before the end of the year please go to conversations withth tyler.com donate on behalf of me and the rest of the conversation with Tyler team we really appreciate it thank you and enjoy the special end of year retrospective conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at [Music] arcades.in conversations withth
tyler.com [Music] I love going to a hotel often a bad one when all they have is cereal and then I can have it again I and I don't have to feel guilty and I won't have it any other time actually one of my questions for you Tyler was what your favorite sort of packaged grocery store item is so I know you love chocolate and you have sort of things you eat but if you were kind of buying a package good off the Shelf in a
grocery store what's your favorite thing well the funny thing is I don't really buy any packaged Goods so I hardly buy any canned goods I love Goya small white beans I cook them with chili and I love Goya small red beans I cook them with Mexican dishes but I'll buy fruit vegetables meat fish cheese and very little processed or packaged I can't even think off hand if you count smoked trout wrapped in
plastic that's kind of package but it's still basically buying fish yeah so you follow the typical the kind of healthy advice where you stay around the perimeter of the grocery store and you're in the fresh fruits and you're in the meats but you're not in those interior aisles where they typically are stocking the candy bars and potato chips and things like that that's right but I'm not sure it's motivated by health I
just like the other items better but you said cereal so is cereal one of those foods for you that you would you indulge at at a hotels but you won't buy it for yourself now I don't buy it ever and I only indulge at it in bad hotels like if I'm staying in Meno Park where the hotels are bad unless you're paying a lot and they'll just have like cereal and bad eggs and bacon I'll just have the Corn Flakes but it's so
delicious and to do that five times a year makes me very happy so this is a story I think is known at mercus um it's part of the lore of Tyler is that when you were studying in Germany you had someone sh you cereal this is before you had your Awakening tell us tell us that story I think you can get away more with eating cereal when you're younger but I had a favorite cereal which then was Product 19 and it was very hard to get
in Germany the only place you could get it was at American army bases and then you had to pretend to be part of the American armed services which involved costs of its own so one very nice person working at mercus sent me a bunch of boxes of Product 19 this is the first Marcus export maybe in a way was Tyler kowen and Product 19 that's correct to Germany so when was that what year was that that must have been 1984 possibly
85 85 I think when was your Awakening uh in terms of food so it wasn't in Germany that was year so I was starting to experiment I think I was 23 when I went and graduate school and then I got to Germany and everything was different so if you're thrown out of your status quo you'll experiment with many other things too I think that's interesting General principle people don't experiment enough with their own lives and you'll find
yourself trying things that were not part of the initial experiment and that's what Germany did to my food life right so I started trying say Korean food which I hadn't had before I don't even know that it was that good in Germany but I didn't know and it's like I'm not going to eat German food every day so let's try you know Bogi yeah I think my first Indian food was when I was living in Germany and how was it I I
just remember it in my mind it was the first time I'd had a curry so it was pretty tasty yeah and it was one of my favorite things and I thought this is amazing and it just happened to be in Germany yeah so my experience Bears it out a little bit too some of the things you mentioned about physical space and experimentation are going to come up in this conversation so we've already gotten started for those of you who
don't know I'm Jeff Holmes I produce conversations with Tyler I'm joined with our host Tyler and we're going to do sort of a year in review and talk about the show but go beyond it's the end of a decade and we've done this before so I'm going to go a little further a field if you like this segment we'll do it more so let me know let Tyler know but I thought it was a great time here at the
end of the year to look back on the state of the podcast we're going to do a few things uh we're going to look back at past episodes talk about them we're going to do a segment I like to call name that production function which I'm very excited about and then I've actually uh looked back at uh marginal Revolution from 10 years ago and I'm very curious to hear your thoughts about the productivity uh and the changes in
marginal revolution in the past decade I will fail all of these memory tests but first very focused on the next podcast just to be clear as my producer tells me to be yes well that is the the prime directive for conversations with Tyler we're here at the end of the year actually all of our episodes through the end of the year have been recorded but we we do have always more in the queue more in the pipeline your prep is as
intensive as ever um so total this year do you have a count nearly 30 yeah this is the second year that we uh so starting last year we started the every other week and then we usually have a few bonus episodes um so this year that was true to form as well um so we do it minimum now 24 and then usually there's a little bit extra and so as you look back over those episodes and you have the list in front of you you know what
strikes you about it uh can you keep up the pace I think I can I felt it was an incredible year our best guests maybe the most diverse group a very few Week episodes and for me basically a thrill each time people I thought I'd never have a chance to do a podcast with and here they are have you had to adapt your research process to accommodate more guess and I think we have more guess on that you're not as familiar
with that you can't just rely on a base knowledge you really do have to kind of get in at a ground level not just read everything they know but maybe get more of the contextual work down have you adjusted or you just you go for and you just had to shift other priorities uh I've had to shift other priorities economists are the easiest to prep for like in principle you could try doing it with no prep Ed boen was one of the
hardest because he studies the brain and even Ed will tell you we don't understand the brain so if Ed doesn't understand the brain how well do you think I understand the brain but I still have to ask him some questions can noward I had to revisit a lot of Norwegian literature which I had already read but that wasn't actually very easy that was an especially difficult prep and uh anytime I have to read fiction
which I just read slower it's not the fault of the author but Neil Stevenson was a very difficult prep long books long books and you can't just freeze through them because like you've absorbed the material in some other capacity and then Jordan Peterson's a hard prep not that he's written that much but there's so much of him on YouTube and you can only listen to it that quickly and you've got to decide what am I going to do about this guy and
at some point you just drop it and you put your energy into thinking through how how should the conversation actually be but the hardest prep of all was Emily Wilson who translated Homer and in in a way that was mainly one book but it was one book I had to read about five times and it's a very hard book so that was like the single killer prep for me during the year and that was very rewarding but that was tough let me give
you a rundown of the stats so do you have a sense of what was the most popular podcast this year uh no idea whatsoever are you allowed to tell me uh sure uh I'm benchmarking this in the first week of release to sort of to to control for life to control for release age but the most popular podcast in the first week was Jordan Peterson not surprising no of course not right Jordan Peterson was was by far the the most
downloaded in the first week and that was closer to his popularity Peak than today yes and I thought a very good conversation because I've reviewed the conversations leading up to this and I was surprised at how you know Jordan as you say Jordan Peterson very exposed person a lot out there but I found a lot of what he said very good and it was actually a conversation yeah which is not always the case right and I uh I
really did I thought um his comments on Fame and having to be careful I thought he revealed something about himself that was that was very interesting I encourage everyone if you're new you should definitely check that out do you have a sense of what might be the most underrated conversation if you look here and you think about our typical listenership in one they may have skipped I have my answers I'm curious to
hear yours most underrated I suppose I think that's going to be Canard who was brilliant but highly literary and very much into things Norwegian so my guess is that did not get the number of listeners it deserved but I'll defer to you you've got the data yeah I'm not equating it necessarily with listens but that is true um I think koward under formed relative to the quality of the conversation and how well he is known
within literary circles and for me koward was also a highlight it was fun also just to record that uh it was in London he left his black bread he left his to eat it right that was awesome it's like I'm eating KES guard's black bread yes he he came in he left it was actually a bag of pastries um and we realized too late that he left them apparently this is common for koward that he forgets things and leaves them
behind I ran confiscate the food for all all of our guests and producers I uh we divied it up amongst you your wife uh and myself um and another producer who was sick and I don't think got to enjoy it but um I actually one of those pastries I brought all the way back to the States and and my wife even enjoyed one of canard's pastries but I also love that conversation because he talked about he talked about fatherhood and
writing in a way that I found very very affecting as someone with a young child so even as someone who's never read koward which is me um I thought it was a great conversation the best part of that was his opening look which is not on the audio or the transcript it was clear he's sick and tired of doing media and he got the first question and his eyes shifted as he realized this was going to be an actual conversation and that was
maybe the cwt highlight of the Year for me was to see Canal card's eyes shift and just how quickly and how smartly he realized that he was for something different it did not take him long yes uh this is in editing these we do take out pregnant pauses and people do stop to think that's something I I do wonder I do know people wonder about is sometimes the conversations seem so fast-paced and usually they are but
sometimes guests do take a moment and they think about something do I do that I don't think Carter is saying no I don't edit I don't edit them anymore I don't think we're cutting out pauses for you as much and actually I think for guests it's they don't have the time to regroup because you're so fast I've definitely heard that from guests um that the pace is kind of thrown off for them but we try to leave in a hint of
when there was a pause but we definitely condense and shorten um so these people aren't always superhumans but I remember with kowar in particular as I as I recall he did take quite a bit of time after that first question to think uh and that wasn't reflected in the final product so which is the most underrated according to you I would say Kosar and the other one I would say say is Emily Wilson I was going to say that so we
agree actually and Emily was fantastic yeah but Homer is not the biggest draw with our audience but she was perfect she knows everything there was something just mellifluous about the whole Rhythm of the dialogue yeah and she is someone who has found a way to use Twitter effectively to Market and storytellin Wilson so yeah those would be probably my two top picks for underrated conversations as you look
over any other Reflections on on the year surprises for you like if you would have thought at the beginning of 2019 that we're going to have some of these people on because some of them we know some of them we don't they come very quickly well I didn't think Mark Zuckerberg would ask me that was a surprise uh I said yes that would be the biggest surprise uh the physical setting of the chat with Alain Berto where the World Trade Center had
been that over Overlook site where all of New York was around with the open windows and as the chat proceeded you know it turned to dark and the lights came out again the listeners have no sense of that but for me that was pretty incredible yes we were on top of one World Trade Center for that conversation and it was we did it right at Sunset and it was it it was a special event for that reason the subject matter the
setting kudos to our event producer for that she Caitlyn Schmidt she did a great job Margaret Atwood making fun of me and the art collection in quame Anthony aia's home those are two other very memorable moments uh and that will come up actually I'll use that to transition to a segment I'm going to slip in at various points in the conversation but we're going to do name that production function and we have music we're going
to keep oh we don't have music uh so I've gone through and obviously a recurring theme is that you ask about their production function sometimes explicitly sometimes it just comes up organically where they talk about how they do what they do um so I've grouped them into different themes before you you do that I just want to say it's one of my core views we should just study successful people more like how they do
this yes there's a very superficial version of that in the media all the time but like actually trying to figure out how they did it to me is one of the most interesting topics on that question when people give their production function how much do you believe they're aware of it let's say for a cwt guest how often do you think this is actually true or this is something they think but is not the true production function I
don't think it's untrue but I think on average they're too modest and they're not quite willing to express their sheer ruthlessness at being successful in a way and the Glee they take in that so it's a biased estimate I would say yeah I one of my things that I'm always curious to hear people name and a production function is the is the people that surround them that they have built a team around and sometimes it may be
more of a leadership team but sometimes it might just be people who are very good at using producers say or people like administrative assistant and how that plays into people's production function and allows them to focus on the things that really matter I know this is something that people talk about in Academia uh some as well that academics tend to get settled with a lot of administrative work but honestly I think
one of the underrated aspects of any person's production function is the extent to which they can plug into an infrastructure and have certain things just not be a focus of worry for them and Ed boen saw that but a lot of our guests didn't emphasize it yeah and I feel that's another bias by being excessively modest they're in some bizarre way also being too egocentric yeah they're not talking about like how
am I good at building a team or letting someone else build a team around me yes okay so first theme name that production function uh these are all related to several guests gave answers related to physical space um so the first one I have a very big desk from Ikea I have a huge orange cat who's mostly on it I also have a couple of Greek dictionaries Greek text sounds like emilys but that's
a soft that's a softball so Emily Wilson really stressed having a big desk with a lot of text round it she translates home or you need a big desk to do that and a big orange cat as the cat yes and the Greek dictionaries okay second person who emphasized physical space I almost always work on the column at the weekend in the living room of our house in another state in New Jersey that's easy that's a Pia yeah so he said I work for
six or seven hours and he emphasized that he can't do certain work in certain spaces like he has a study but he doesn't do any work there multiple locations are underrated I have two offices in Arlington and Fairfax I used to have three and I work a lot at home and I work a lot now on the road including going to these podcasts so that's four different locations on that question particularly physical spaces
working on the road do you have any tips or tricks it's been maybe my biggest productivity boost in the last two years I've learned how to work on the road much better I think I was always pretty good at it but now my productivity uh is maybe not even lower for most trips so I'm not sure what I did to get there is it preserving the schedule or is it you've just figured out how to do work in incidental spots as you're traveling
that you more the latter and learning greater flexibility so being able to write even if I'm not just writing Early in the Morning has been part of it right some I feel like you have to go into two spaces you either have to try your best to preserve a schedule even when on the road or you have to get much much better at just working where you can and not being precious about it and I've done the lad without breaking my rigid
schedule at home all right so we'll go back to production function but now we're going to uh let's do some listener questions so I asked uh I asked for some questions on Twitter and um I picked some of my favorites this is still the conversation I want to have so I did Skip some all right so we got some questions from Twitter here's one uh our uh former Mara scholar make America boom again Advocate Eli Dorado his question
was simply what is it like being Tyler and this felt like an inside joke to me I don't know if it is but I have an addendum to it as well so answer that question and then my followup to it would be is there a difference in what it's like to be Tyler uh from 2009 to now how has it changed in the past 10 years I think I'm very calm and it's really quite rare that I have an unhappy day it's hard for me to remember one so
this extreme evenness of temperament is actually a real thing and uh I guess that's what it's like being Tyler it has some downsides but it's great for getting work done because your emotions are not distracting you from the task in front of you and it just happens so that's what it's like part of what it's like being Tyler I've never I've never witnessed a Tyler Ty raade uh I think you never will yeah I I
was a Tyler fan for many years started reading marginal Revolution probably in 2006 probably and uh you know they say don't Meet Your Heroes that's always a concern but I would say you are exactly as you appear to be and meeting you has been great and working with you has been great thank you for the kind words that you you are exactly how I think most people perceive you to be there is no other Dark Side of Tyler there is no
Tyrone luring in the shadows that's a problem perhaps but I think it's an interesting question whether you should aspire to be better or worse than your public self and you can make an argument either way so there are people who are just in when you read their writing and when you meet them there's nothing wrong with them but you don't get anything extra out of meeting them yeah and I guess I feel that's a worse way to be
that if the person is better than the product maybe it in some ways the product is worse right it's easier to exceed a lesser product uh but nonetheless philosophically that's what I prefer in people is for the person to be better than the product you have your product as writings and your and your thoughts that are out in the web but you still have not I I don't think most people would consider you Overexposed
still or they feel like they've gotten to the depths of Tyler and uh I think that maybe that time can come maybe there is a limit but I don't think we found it yet one thing Jordan Peterson figured out it's one thing that made him successful is there's a certain way in which on the internet you can't be Overexposed that if there's just a steady stream of you mhm it feels like being Overexposed compared to the
standards of 1987 or whenever but in fact it's not and people are picking and choosing and you end up just dominating a particular space in a particular kind of way yeah and I think most older people have not made that transition mentally to understanding how you should exist intellectually on the internet yeah I'm sure it does feel like that to to a Jordan Peterson I feel like in 2006
2007 I could go on YouTube and watch literally every video that existed of you and now I can't but I also choose not to watch them I mean it's amazing now if you would ask me 10 12 years ago oh there's there's new Tyler content out and I still love it and I read marginal Revolution every day but I also do that filtering myself that I'm like well I still have my Canon or or the core reading that I do and some of the other
like one thing is I I almost never read your Bloomberg columns yeah it's fine I they're for a different audience and yeah something you something well how do you think about that difference well if you think about Bloomberg the the first tier of readers are those people who subscribe to the terminals right and a lot of them most of them are a finance audience they tend to be highly analytical uh High income uh with a
particular set of interests and uh I think it's fine great to write for them I love them as an audience but they're not like the blog audience or the cwt audience at all so so you've got sort of a portfolio now you feel yes how does the podcast fit into that do you feel like you're reaching a new or a bigger Niche how does that sort for you I mean I don't even know who I'm reaching when people see me in public they now mention
the podcast more than the blog so that tells me something but like part of the strategy is in a way to ignore the audience and this is the conversation with person X that I want to have and it's true because that that's the only reason to do it in a way not an income earner should people approach you if they see you or do you depends who they are and if a listener to the podcast sees you in in an airport or train
station in the current equilibrium I'm happy when they do but I'm not sure it would be true across all margins do you have rules of etiquette that you want us to communicate here and now that say hello but yeah sure yes no no reason not to celebrities have to learn the rules here about you can say hello but maybe no photos what's whatever you know whatever a person wants so okay you heard it whatever you want no in the
current equilibrium right so it's a Lucas critique issue well let us know if you announce the current equilibrium is fine it it's already shifted it shifted already okay next question from Twitter uh this is from Benjamin fiser does Tyler have any thoughts on the legacy of Robert crumb do you know Robert crumb you mean the uh guy who did the comic books the movie is about I've never really read them I saw the preview for
that movie many times and somehow it didn't appeal to me and I haven't read comic books since I was a kid when I read a lot of DC Comics when I was quite young and uh my interest with it has died there I'm not against it but it just has not been a live thing for me just like graphic novels are not a live thing for me yeah I love the Sandman series by Neil Gman but most of them just they don't click with me somehow
yeah the fault is mine I would readily admit all right we're gonna move off of listener questions and go back to production function here we go all right these are on writing habits first one I've never written as much as I have after I got the children after I started to ride at home after I kind of scard canal scard the Norwegian and as I mentioned this was a part that really struck home with me he talked about
trying to write and like literally lock himself in you know a Nordic Lighthouse or whatever it was um but he establish a routine in the middle of life and I like that so much that I put that as part of the title it became less religious for him less sacred all right so that was koward second person I certainly do not write every day and I don't think that's a bad thing I think it's sometimes good not to be purposeful in what you're
doing you're distilling thoughts there's a lot of Merit to allowing your thoughts just to meander in your head and make weird connections before you push them on the page I'm guessing a bit on this one but Margaret Atwood that's uh mcf farker actually mcf farker okay yeah all right next one when I first dreamed of being a writer I thought I needed all these life experiences I needed to go running with the bulls being an
alcoholic now I think just the opposite there's plenty of stories out there the things to write about are all around you and you need to discipline yourself get your health right I tend to be very careful about what I eat I exercise running yoga getting my body right it's not glamorous but I feel like it benefits my work a lot sounds like Neil Stevenson it's not Neil Stevenson it's not who do who's your second guest it
sounds like a fiction author running with the bulls it's not fiction either uh because who else would need to Ben West off yeah it was Ben West journalist okay last one this is uh this was one of my favorite answers of all production function answers I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high quality inputs into my mind every day of my life that's why I spend maybe two hours a day writing I'm a writer sounds
like me but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music people think that's creating a problem but I say no this is the reason I'm able to do this because I have constant good quality input that is the only reason I can maintain the output I think only Ted Joya would mention so many hours of Music yes but it is also me that would completely apply to me he articulated something I
think is very true of info Wares generally but I've haven't heard it I think on cwt yet is that idea that saving the time for the inputs is what allows you to do the thing that's right and music always having a role and what's going on as well okay back to some questions and we'll move on from production function uh Eevee fellow llama she uh she asked you if you had a restaurant what Cuisine would you serve
uh I think it would be food from Central Mexico and I would cook it so that's my favorite food to cook like chicken mole is my best dish I think how long does it take you to make a mole I've gotten it down to about an hour's worth of Labor time but it has to sit overnight so it's not ready in an hour but if I rush and do it perfectly my part of it is done in an hour and then uh the sauce sits overnight and then the next day the
chicken roasts for about an hour and five hour and 10 minutes so it depends what you count but it feels like it takes an hour and what style is it is it like a chocolatey mole or chocolatey mole okay yeah another question from uh mercus scholar Emily Hamilton who works on affordable housing land use what do you think of fast casual architecture have you heard that term I don't think I know the term what does she mean by that
it's uh think of something like the Southwest WARF in DC where it's a big sort of Master Plan it's kind of this upper middle class develop they bring a lot of higher-end retailers you might have a Whole Foods you might have some fancy restaurants and it's all kind of part of this master plan part of an Urban Design I find so much of America dispiriting ugly but I've learned to prefer that that it keeps our
minds open for other things and the towns that are in a way Picture Perfect like gent or Brugge or Bean Norway where I just was uh that's stultifying so I guess I quite like fast casual precisely because I don't like it that if architecture is what is controlling your mind rather than music I suspect you'll end up in a worse place and you don't want your visual physical environment to be too perfect in any one dimension that
that ends up stopping or haling your thinking in some way so to grow up in Paris maybe now at this point is limiting I'm not saying it always was but Paris is a completely static City at this point at least Central Paris it's like my goodness it somehow can't be good for a public intellectual another Twitter question this is from venzo Luna what's the biggest change in the shortest period of time you've ever
witnessed something either personally or professionally and he says to clarify I mean anything from a near instantaneous transformation but or something that proceeded incrementally but you saw it from start to finish and you thought wow that was amazing well the growth of China would be one example I'm not sure I can rank anything as the very most extreme but I first went to China 30 years ago and I've been there many any
time since and each time I go my jaw drops and the difference between 30 years ago and today I even wrote a Bloomberg column about that you didn't read uh but the point got made it's really quite phenomenal that is one of my regrets is that that I haven't visited China and the idea that you can see things changing almost in real time which that's over there now I mean it will still change a lot but not at 10%
rates of growth back to production function questions this is kind of a grab bag one my father always told me when you travel you don't look enough every time he traveled a lot he would say I have not looked enough I've not looked enough this was ingrained in me all the time I think I have no idea on that one uh but maybe the first part of his answer Al Berto Ela Berto that was a guess he uh he emphasized that his he would travel
with his dad for business and his dad would more or less give him a map and say here's some places to go and he would sort of report back and his dad would almost quiz him on what he had seen yeah and he always got critiqued for not looking carefully enough or noticing enough all right here's another one I keep a calendar of future plans many people do but then I also keep a calendar of the past which logs how long
it actually took for me to write that Grant or to meet with that person or eat dinner or whatever over time I've learned a lot about how long it takes me to do something is that Ed boen it was who else writes grants right he has a lab so that's how I figured that one out not memory induction boen has a lot of great tips in his I could have selected any number of things but that was he was one of the best for actually
understanding how he succeeded yes and great great insights into how you try to solve a problem how you get a team to work together like especially for an academic but even just in terms of the full roster of cwt guests I thought he was great on that stuff and I suspect the unedited Ed boen would be so much better yet on Administration personnel management working within a university my goodness the things he could say all
right let's go to another uh theme in production functions interestingly two of our guests mentioned voice recording first this is literally all this person said about it they didn't elaborate but I use voice recognition software and you were asking about how they produce their work this was very recent I don't think I have any idea who uses voice recognition software who is it it's Daron asoglu and he gave it as
an aside and wasn't dwell on or elaborate on but that's what I keyed in on is that he said he basically it sounded like he actually drafts his papers by essentially dictating by talking Gordon TK did that of course yeah with a tape recorder not with software and then he would have someone type it out on that note second person something like this person said they write in the morning they stop at about
11: as I'm walking around for the next 15 minutes or so sentences will come into my head by and large they're the best sentences so I've learned to carry a recorder with me now it's just the voice recorder app in my phone because I know that if I jump in the car and start driving somewhere I'm going to have a few of those lines and I don't want to lose them is that Russ Roberts no that was Neil Stevenson Neil Stevenson okay
yeah which I thought was great that his mind is still working and he leaves the work but he knows some stuff is going to spit out do you find yourself having write notes or no I don't write notes yeah you just sit down you write and when you're done that's that's it it's a discreet kind of thing that do if I need to remind myself of something I'll send myself an email which is the worst possible way of managing your production
function but it works to use your inbox as a to-do list I think it's actually underrated okay though I've read all the critiques I don't need to email myself much it's maybe one thing every three days and the rest I just remember yeah one of my insights about you I don't know if you would agree with this but when I email with you you're very responsive generally like you'll if you're near a computer you'll respond
nearly instantly yes and then often there will be a flurry of emails like as if a real-time conversation was happening and for me often times it feels like we're actually texting with each other but you never text I never text I'm against texting but here's the thing Tyler you email like a texter but when you're emailing you can type and when you text you have a little phone you have big thick fingers it doesn't
make any sense to me I actually because I'm on a Mac I can text from my laptop and I actually text a lot from my keyboard well then it's like emailing that's fine so if I got you hooked up with the technology maybe you would maybe you could be texting I don't see the advantage because with texting you're in essence telling people they can jump a particular queue and I'm not sure why you would want to give them
that right rather than reserving yourself the ordering privilege for the emails right so I always have my iPad and iPhone with me so I can have as much immediacy as I want and why let people jump the queue right yes this is the bane of of texting of slack something that it it does create a presumption that you're kind of at the head of the line now responding to all your emails right away as I do also creates that
presumption but somehow it feels different okay a few people talked about using social media as a tool so we're still on production function so first person I would say I read widely I play with a lot of ideas most of which don't come to fruition again this is one of the advantages of social media that Henry frell Henry frell and he talked about doing little micro threads on Twitter is a kind of experimental thing
and he's very good at that yes yep all right second one killing me I'm losing my you need to send yourself an email that's right okay second one that's what I mean when I say that spending time on Facebook is really part of my work I try to have a sense of the temperature of the air the flavor of the conversation that's where social networks used strategically I think are extremely useful it's the kind of research tool
that I didn't have as a young journalist Masha gesson of course I gave you the I gave you the clue there at the end but even without that I would have known yeah I remember that passage quite well yeah and she talked about I thought it was interesting that her friend described is an empty pot that she absorbs information and then it just it leaves her do you find that true of yourself I mean I think most people
would say no you're a sponge and you keep it all in no I feel I don't retain hardly any of it that I can somehow summon it back if I cram on something but at any moment like I feel like I know nothing or close to nothing it's deep in there but you have the tools to you can't access it off hand but if you focus on it somehow that you you know it doesn't feel lost but it doesn't feel on the tip of my fingers either last one
this is a random one I played poker I've played a lot of Poker in college and I think I learned more about life and business from that than I learned in college I would not say I'm a great poker player but I'm pretty good the thing that makes me I think good about that is getting good at quickly evaluating risk it's got to be Sam Altman right it is Sam Altman who's uh whose production function most clearly
mirrors yours you think of these guests maybe Ted joia yeah but I like Sam's Qui Ness and emphasis on speed also is a way of thinking about other people so I felt I had more in common with him than maybe I was expecting to and it kind of do it right away obsession with speed and how he evaluates other people by their speed I very much sympathized with it was one of my favorite parts of that discussion just how quickly do they respond to
their email yeah who are the uh so Alman brought up that as a Founder thing do you have any sense of a pattern among you know you send out a lot of invites to to conversation with Tyler and generally email with some of these people so who are the who are the speed responders I don't think I remember Russ Roberts perhaps uh Mark Zuckerberg but I think uh maybe yeah if it's younger people and you don't know how to evaluate them it obviously takes
on greater weight in your impression and it's kind of an arrogant like why shouldn't you respond to me right away but I think it's true and it's fine if they want to downgrade me I don't take that personally like they're going to do something else but then I figure I should downgrade them and that's the equilibrium very well some more questions from Twitter and then we'll talk uh we'll go back in the decade a
little bit and look at marginal Revolution Through The Years actually just through one year 2009 new recusant on Twitter what econ related facts surprised Tyler the most in the last decade Bitcoin China what surprised you uh Bitcoin surprised me multiple times uh China I thought what have an excess capacity debt crisis and it didn't so those would be two big picks uh that the rate of unemployment fell to such a low
rate definitely surprised me those would be the three big ones that come to mind right away Trump winning not an economics thing but it surprised me sure looking back over the last decade so I went back and I looked at every post from December 2009 okay partly to look at your end of year list because I think people would I'm going to bring up some of your recommendations in December 20 see how they held up what's your s do
you remember what you were writing about in December 2009 well not month by month but I know that time there was plenty on the financial crisis of course and I think the blog like 2005 to 2010 or so was very different than the blog today and I do understand I think those differences so 2009 for you um the book that you had published was create your own economy which was renamed in paperback to age of the info War that's
right is that your only book that's been sort of rebranded like that as far as I know so as before the original title was bad so I'm glad they renamed it but it's a sign of failure in a way so I bought it I bought it with the original title and I I was living abroad at the time and I had it shipped to me and I emailed you um and I respond quickly you did I think within two I checked it last night
you responded within two hours I'll screenshot it for the transcript you responded within two hours because I sent you a picture cuz you know I had I was living um in a place where it wasn't easy to get a book I couldn't go to a bookstore let's put it that way oh this was from Africa yeah it was from so that was you I remember that email but I didn't know it was you amazing that was me okay and I was sitting in um yeah
paying taxes in Rwanda and I read a third of the book sitting my opinion of my own memory just went up that's good yes I my opinion of my own laterality just went down when I look over your post from 2009 what struck me is some of it feels sort of old blogosphere old internet in the sense that some of the links are broken some of the blogs don't exist right but I was struck by how many of the themes to me felt very still topical
obviously there was sort of credit crunch you and you and Alex talked about Avatar because it was the biggest movie that came out uh which is bizarre completely falling down a memory hole although they're going to do like five sequels right yes yes I don't understand that I will go see them so there is some of that but what struck me is is yeah the consistency and so your ing Scott sner you know I'm sure there's scottt
now at Marcus of course and Scott's now at Marcus there's like a a Henry there's probably like a Henry Ferell thing in there somewhere you yeah getting into some of actually what was the real lesson is the supply of bloggers is in elastic right there is and what should we infer from that I'm not sure but it's significant well I'll get to this now so Alex has a post discussing Paul RoR who we've had on and won the no priz
year before last year and talking about how the average age of people who are getting grants is going up and he wonders if that's the reason why there's a Slowdown in productivity or progress uh which I thought was very very funny um there was also a weird coincidence in that December 2009 Paul Samuelson had just died that's right um so we're Paul vulker as we're recording this has just passed away one thing that
surprised me is that I was clicking through the posts and I was going from December 31st back and I clicked to like the second page of posts and I still wasn't even to Christmas and the output I thought was much higher and I looked and you had on Mr in December 2009 you had like 160 posts so you were posting like five times a day between you and Alex right this month it looks like you're on Pace maybe to do about 130 so
four a day yeah and so your productivity slowed down and what are your reasons is it is it the age or do you have other explanations no it's on purpose I'm doing more other things and including the podcast uh but I think in 2009 I was still experimenting in some fresh way with blogging as a new medium and what it meant and in some ways the blog was better then for that reason whereas now marginal Revolution it's a bit like well
the economists magazine plus a dose of me and that's a set formula I don't know that there's that much more experimentation I can do or should be doing maybe that drains a little bit of energy out of it but people know what to expect more and I think that's biggest difference my explanation too would be this was really before Twitter took off and so I would think that some of those marginal posts are now just tweets
that's right so you used you used to have a segment called like the best paragraph I read today I don't think that you would do a lot of just you still do to some extent but I think a lot of that would actually just be a tweet today and not a post and if you think about like the transcripts behind a cwt and they go on the blog they're like equal to a lot of posts and so are Bloomberg columns they're 800 words
typically right and that's longer than an average post so people have to click but I think if you adjust for that the amount of material is not really down at all okay so uh the rate of progress the rate of productivity for marginal Revolution for Tyler cow and Alex tabaro it's presented more economically but it has not Fallen okay let's get into some of the recommendations so you you've now like it's become more of an institution
for you interestingly you do recommendations but they're they're more offhand they're a little flip like you when you talk about movies you say these are what come to mind whereas I know now you actually kind of catalog it and you try to keep a list running through the year and then that's right do you have any sense let I don't try to keep a list I keep a list right there a big difference yes you keep a list I've seen
it I have privilege to the marginal Revolution drafts post and I see it in there and I do peek because I'm always curious let's do movies first do you have any sense in 2009 what your favorite movies of the year were no idea whatsoever and what movie was exactly which year other than Star Wars I'm not sure there's like a single movie I could tell you or just a small number uh so the list you gave was Tyson which I
don't even know what that is I didn't look it up Tyson I love you man comedy MH District nine okay up the Pixar film Bruno Let the Right One In And The Hurt Locker and documentary man on wire District nine Let the Right One In and man on wire aged the best on that list and Bruno probably has aged the worst it's still a good list I think yeah of course it was what you could see then was a bit different than what you could
see now yeah uh it was pre- Netflix so the list would be different now there would be more movies from the year before on Netflix disc yeah fiction you say my favorite works of fiction this year were the new pamuk Oran pamuk who comes up when you interviewed like Danny Rodrick you brought him up with D that was still a good pick yes the Museum of innocence was the book right Gail haran's the confession of Noah Weber you
know I met her this year she was phenomenal I loved meeting her I was very honored uh Natasha and I were in Israel and we made a point of contacting her and I still love that book a great pick and a happy marriage by rapael glacius who is an extremely underrated writer he's the father of Matt and more people should read him speaking of the old blogosphere who is obviously still continuing at Vox and Dr neruda's cure
for evil is maybe Raphael's best book and he has a new one online which I haven't read yet and I've been meaning to I wish he would get more attention yeah for non-fiction you said the new Gabriel Garcia Marquez biography which I don't know what the title of that was the link was broken and I forgot to look it up do you remember off hand what not the exact title but a good book Chris wickhams the inheritance of Rome yes
good pick Eric siblings the cello jsbach Pablo Cal and the search for a baroque Masterpiece I feel very good about my ult pick I have to say I bought the cello SES on that recommendation I read it with my now wife okay and we had a great time reading it together I've bought many books off marginal Revolution as I suspect uh listeners have so you feel good about your picks I do yeah at least from 2009 the the
cinema like one or two of them are off and all the others still seem kind of perfect okay uh do you feel um it's interesting that Cinema picks are more uncertain about how they hold up over time it makes intuitive sense but I'd like to have a good theory as to why that is yeah well something like Avatar which is the biggest movie of the time has been as you've I think it's been noted on the marginal Revolution just
completely disappeared from the cultural Consciousness it is not made we know the sequels are coming right but beyond that but I feel if I saw it again and maybe I will I wouldn't say gee how could I have like that it would feel like gee that was some weird but brilliant dead end and a lot of wonderful movie should be weird but brilliant that ends what's fascinating is I think it was Alex link to a post of a of a you know a think
piece on Avatar and it was about white privilege and you know I I just thought that that was so funny because it felt like such a present day take on Avatar it was actually happening in 2009 blue privilege you might say all right so looking forward 2029 are you still blogging yes are you still podcasting TW 10 years from now probably not but it's possible I'm not quitting anytime soon if you said five
years I'd say oh definitely 10 years hard to say we my voice might give out we know that the we've often talked about this you and I that the power cwt listener is actually a reader that they read the transcript right you yourself don't listen to podcast actually do you have any that you ever you may maybe you have to for some reason but sometimes I have to and I don't mind but never want to listen to any podcast including my
own it's just too slow and I'll listen to podcasts when I'm prepping for a guest and then I quote unquote have to but that's it so I have no idea like who really is a good podcast so given that you don't listen to them a lot of our sort of most successful listeners don't listen to it they read the transcript most don't offer a transcript so what they do with other podcasts I don't know some people have their own transcripts
made right but does that mean that podcast themselves are overrated in a sense and that writing and the written word is still underrated yeah the whole genre mystifies me I don't see why anyone does it or listens or cares it's bizarre given that I produce the output but I never would have predicted it and it always feels to me like a bubble I don't think it is at this point it's less of a bubble than
blogs were I think the big Insight was that people were wasting their time a lot more than we thought and mobile and social media and podcasting all filled that space yes I think it is a way to fill up some of that idle time with content that actually is better than what you're typically going to consume if to the extent that we're competing with like mobile games which I think is one of the things you're going to do
with your idle time for an average person I feel you know our audience listens and reads but podcast as a whole I wonder is it just like some kind of drone in the background like musac musac with a human voice I don't know I'm sure some people listen to it that way for me it's actually replaced uh music which may not be a good thing but I stopped you know this is back in iPod days I've been listening to podcast for a long
time and it just replaced a lot of the music that I might have been listening to I feel music is a dynamic influence on ourselves and when music gets replaced we should worry and music can change and you listen to different kinds of music and there's a repulsiveness to it that the spoken voice doesn't haveh so uh you've made me more worried but at least for the next year we'll keep it we'll keep it going maybe five
years we'll see no I don't mind inflicting the human voice on people I'm happy to corrupt them and tear them away from beloved music but just viewed aesthetically if you think of say the 1960s and 70s music was Primary in that era and there was something very creative about that and that was a time when we made a lot of big bold decisions not all of them good ones but nonetheless and maybe the Drone of the voice in the background reflects the
compl y of our time and podcasting is a form of complacency maybe on that happy note let's wrap up and look forward to another year and more of working together that's right I have enjoyed this and for those of you listening please do let us know if you did too we'll do it more before we close I'd like to shout out the other people at marcadas who work behind the scenes on this Dallas floor Carter woly Sloan
sheerman Ashley Schiller Christa Chavez Kate delanoy Kate Brown Caitlyn Schmidt Karen plant Christina beeh for all of us uh this is just one of the things we do at mercus and it's a lot of fun and just everyone else at mercus people who do infrastructure the IT people the finance people the receptionists they all do their bit a guest shows up how do they get back to the studio right someone
does it it's not always us it's part of the production function unheralded uh but on behalf of Tyler this is Jeff Holmes and you're all great to work with thank you Tyler thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the [Music] show