Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Then third in popularity this year was Noam Chomsky. People turned out for Chomsky. If you look at the MR [Marginal Revolution] comments, people complain. They’re like, “Oh, Chomsky is terrible on some of these subjects. Why didn’t Tyler challenge him more?” What were your thoughts? What were you trying to get out of Chomsky? He’s doing a lot of interviews now. He’s 94. His birthday’s actually tomorrow — we’re recording this on December 6 — according to Wikipedia. Maybe it’s hallucinating. But what were you trying to get out of it? That’s a unique experience. You have a chance to do Chomsky. Maybe you don’t even want to do it, but you feel, “If I don’t do it, I’ll regret not having done it. ” Just like we didn’t get to chat with Charlie Munger in time, though he’s far more, I would say, closer to truth than Chomsky is. I thought half of Chomsky was quite good, and the other half was beyond terrible, but that’s okay. People, I think, wanted to gawk at it in some manner. They had this picture — what’s it like, Tyler talking with Chomsky? Then they get to see it and maybe recoil, but that’s what they came for, like a horror movie. The engagement on the Chomsky episode was very good. Some people on MR were saying, “I turned it off. I couldn’t listen to it.” But actually, most people listened to it. It did, actually, probably better than average in terms of engagement, in terms of how much of the episode, on average, people listen to.…

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