Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Yes, I know. There’s always a little bit of hypocrisy sometimes, I suppose. I think celebrity is dead. I put that down because I was curious what are your thoughts on that as well. I think people look toward influencers as celebrities now. The celebrities themselves are just sort of these figments of movies. An influencer is somebody who’s going to be your “best friend,” somebody that you tune into every aspect of their lives, and they give you access to every aspect of their lives. I think that far supersedes everything that we’ve ever gotten from a celebrity. I think of celebrity as having peaked maybe in the 1980s. You have Eddie Murphy, you have Schwarzenegger, you have Madonna, Michael Jackson, and it was a thing. Then that starts to collapse and break down, and we recreated this very different thing, the influencer. That’s you, right? I don’t love the word. This is just probably me getting up on a high horse, but I feel like I talk about the economy. I don’t really talk about my life. I guess if I’m influencing people on economic theory, perhaps. I consider an influencer somebody more who is essentially a marketing ploy in disguise, and I don’t consider myself that entirely.…

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