Tyler Cowen: commitment

Transcript context

…— millions of times. But I’ll tell you why I love Jurassic Park. As a child, before I got into the Romans, before I got into the Greeks, I was obsessed by dinosaurs. I was one of those boys. I was a child at an age where there wasn’t very much about dinosaurs. They weren’t on the television very often. I remember there was an Open University course on paleontology done by professors, not at all aimed at children, and they had one about dinosaurs. It was the most exciting program that I watched through the entire span of my childhood. Anything about dinosaurs, I was obsessed by. The films that were shown then — the dinosaurs in them were not very good. They were slow, ponderous. You could see that they’d been that Ray Harryhausen-type models. So, when CGI enabled Spielberg to recreate dinosaurs in the way that he did in Jurassic Park, for me, it was a wonderful, wonderful moment. You may remember, in Jurassic Park, the two paleontologists are in the jeep. They’re being taken by Richard Attenborough, and suddenly they hear a bellow, and they look round, and there’s a famous sequence where Sam Neill takes his hat off and goes huhhh — like that. I hadn’t yet seen any of the CGI dinosaurs. When they showed the Brachiosaur coming up out of the lake and leaning up and feeding from the tree, the sense of wonder that Sam Neill’s character was obviously feeling — I felt that sense of wonder. I was so moved. I was moved almost to tears. I think as a film, I’ve just watched it over and over and over again because that sense of wonder has never entirely left me. I will again remind our audience members of Tom’s current book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. The final question is, after that, what will you do next? I am carrying on with my own podcast, The Rest Is History, as I said. We’ve just done three episodes on the Cathars. We have various episodes coming up, some with definitely an American bent. We’re doing some episodes on Ronald Reagan. We’ve got the fall of Saigon to come. All kinds of things like that. I’m able to do that and to devote myself to that because I’ve just finished a third book in the series of books that I’ve written on Roman history. The first, Rubicon, was about the fall of the Roman Republic. I mentioned that. The second was Dynasty, about the family of Augustus, ending with the death of Nero. This new book, Pax, is about the heyday of the Roman Empire. It runs from the death of Nero up to the time of Hadrian. It covers the era of the four emperors, the sack of Jerusalem, Pompeii, the Coliseum, Hadrian’s wall, so lots of great stuff. That is out in America in October.…

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