Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…Oh, yes. Eating at the kitchen table and watching is absolutely . . . I love the question. Well, yes, you should eat your food, have a conversation with yourself or your family, depending on your situation, and then get ready and watch stuff. On the other hand, if you’ve worked really hard all day, and you just want to sit down and eat and watch something . . . I feel like for certain things — I’ll use the word read — to read them, I do think that there’s a wrong and a right way to read certain pieces of material. On the other hand, it’s entertainment, so if people want to be entertained while eating a burger and watching the thing, I think that’s all right. I think the people making stuff, to a person — I would say, just to circle to your question earlier, man — people making this stuff are trying really hard to make it as well as they can. The answer is never that they’re not working themselves to their greatest capacity, given their level of exhaustion. But I don’t think, then, they require you to watch it under certain circumstances. I think you want certain people watching it that way. I would prefer that someone writing about the work is focused on it. How do you feel about audiobooks? Do you feel that somebody on a run, listening to one of your books, is having an experience similar to the experience of sitting down with a pen and underlining when they read it? Or is it not at all similar to that? If I was reading it, I would feel fine about it. I don’t like to listen to audiobooks, but if my readers are listening, I think that’s great. But the people who read them — they’re somehow weird and corny. I feel it ought to sound like me, and it doesn’t. I get that if it sounded like me, it might sell fewer copies, but I don’t care about that. If I were you, I would insist on doing it yourself. You don’t do it yourself now?…

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