Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…Stendhal has had some very passionate fans. John F. Kennedy read a lot of Stendhal. Robert Alter, before he translated the Torah, wrote a biography of Stendhal called A Lion for Love. I think one other remarkable thing about Stendhal is just that he inspires passion among those of us who appreciate the Italian ecstatic commitment to the art of song. I will reread. Before the last two questions, let me just plug your book again, which I was very happy to have blurbed. Dan Wang, it is Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. Final two questions, possibly related. First, what do you want to learn about next? Second, what will you do next? I would really like to curl up on my couch, and read a lot more novels, follow the Henry Oliver, Hollis Robbins’ Great Books program to just read a lot more authors. I have a lot of history books that I am very keen to read, and follow along the Stephen Kotkin program for reading a lot of excellent histories. These are the two genres that I’m interested in thinking about. I think I am thinking in terms of my professional life, having more extensive following along evaluation of the US-China competition, and I am trying to come to a net assessment of what is going on between the US and China. What is competition, coexistence? The contest really look like over the longer term? I think that this is going to be something that we’re all living through, something I have some perspectives and views on that I think is going to be fruitful for thinking about the future. Tyler, I want to ask you that you have had these really remarkable pivots throughout your life. You had your PhD in economics from Harvard. You studied under a great adviser, Thomas Schelling. You published in top economics journals. You were an early economics blogger. You have been doing all sorts of new things related to Marginal Revolution University and Emergent Ventures. Now, you are doing a lot of things on AI. You’ve started this extraordinarily successful podcast, which I’ve always felt we should maybe rectify the name, sir. Rather than having this be called Conversations with Tyler, maybe we should call this Interrogations by Tyler.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.