Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Again, another great job to develop endurance for sleeplessness, working shifts on a scalloper out of New Bedford where you, basically, are switched on 20 hours a day, day after day after day at sea. I’ve never made these. These are good questions. Clearly, they have informed my work throughout. The thing that I like to do — and I can’t always do it, but if I have the opportunity — is join people in work. If you can get into somebody’s workshop, if you can get into somebody’s field, if you can get onto somebody’s canoe, somebody’s boat, if you can join them pushing sheep across the Anatolian Plain, you are going to be admitted into that person’s world. And you’re going to be able to see that person’s identity in a way — self-identity, how they self-identify. People identify themselves by the work they do in ways that many, many long interviews, sitting in a newsroom, will just not get. Working on scallopers and in all these other manual jobs that I did when I was younger helped me comprehend that fact, that there’s a really quick way into somebody’s head and heart, picking up the tools that they’re using and working alongside them. How did growing up in Central Mexico help shape this project? As you know, there’s a long-standing Central Mexican tradition of walking porters. In pre-Conquest times, they carried salt around, I think, even through the late 18th century. Salt and guacamaya feathers, and you name it. Well, that’s maybe when this project really started, right? You can make the argument that that’s when my journey began, was when my parents took me across my first international border. I was five and a half, pulled out of kindergarten in Southern California and thrust into Mexican public schools from one day to the next. Growing up in a small community on the edge of a big, sprawling, exploding city — Guadalajara — back when I was growing up in this place, it was called Zapopan. There were corn fields, and all my friends, my Mexican playmates, were the sons and daughters of farmers. If I went back today, I would not be able to find my old home because it’s been completely absorbed by urbanization. I think that gift that my parents gave me and my brothers and sisters was the primordial key to the storytelling that I’m still doing. In a sense, I’m still walking back to Mexico, right?…

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