Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…There’s so much to say about that. I’m going to narrow the lens a little bit and say I think it’s really interesting that there are very few male romantic but platonic relationships that are very creative. I think this is a particular type of relationship that you see recurring a few times throughout history, and it often makes a big difference. There’s a big leap forward to some creative or intellectual revolution that happens. I think it’s distinctive to this relationship where they’re not lovers, they’re not just mates, and they’re not homosexual, but they are two men who have very, very intense feelings for each other, and that feeds into the creativity. I was thinking about a couple of examples recently. One is Wordsworth and Coleridge. In some ways, it mirrors John and Paul. They’re a couple of years apart. Coleridge is a bit younger. They’ve got very different personalities. Coleridge is flamboyant and voluble. He talks a lot, he’s wild, he takes drugs. Wordsworth is a little bit more distant and a little bit cooler, a little bit more methodical. But they turn each other on. They spend a lot of time thinking and writing poetry together and really birth the Romantic poetry movement together. Then the other example I was thinking about — the best 20th-century analogy for John and Paul, I think, is Kahneman and Tversky. If you read Michael Lewis’s book, The Undoing Project, as I have, the similarities are just too strong to ignore. Here, it’s Tversky who’s this wild font of insight and speech. Kahneman is a little bit calmer, more reflective, but they’re completely in love with each other. Kahneman said to Michael Lewis, “Well, I’ve been in love and all, but with Amos, I was just rapt. I was completely compelled by him. I was lost.” They just spent hours and hours together, just wanted to be with each other all the time. Kahneman’s wife said, “This is much more intense than a marriage.” Of course, when something is really intense like that, it’s going to explode. In all these cases, the partnership splinters, and sparks, and falls apart at some point. Then there’s this great aftermath of sadness. It’s inevitable because there are really two ends to a relationship. You can have a sustainable, steady marriage-type relationship where you love each other in this wonderful, loving, calm way, or you can have this wildly creative, impulsive, dramatic, and volatile relationship, but that can’t last forever. One thing that struck me is just how few examples there are. Another one that occurs to me is Picasso and Braque. Obviously, that doesn’t last. You have a lot of examples where the people do quite different things, like Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Stravinsky with both Balanchine and Diaghilev. Those work, but they’re not competing against each other at all. They’re just working together. I think of Jagger-Richards as ultimately a business relationship, where they’re quite happy to give up being creative just to make a lot of money, and it becomes not interesting for 50 years. Exactly. There’s nothing wrong with that. I think Jagger and Richards is much more like a marriage versus a love affair. I think they love each other, but they’re not wildly compelled by each other. I’m not sure they ever were. They always thought, “Yes, this is the guy I want to make music with. He’s obviously great, and our talents fit together. Let’s get married.” It was nothing like this intense, jealousy-ridden, tempestuous, conflicted, hot, John-and-Paul relationship. I think there’re other examples like Picasso and Braque. I don’t think they were like John and Paul either. They were just partnerships who came together, got on with each other, but turned each other on creatively and then spun apart, and that was it. I doubt that Picasso gave Braque much of a thought after they stopped working together, and probably vice versa, whereas John and Paul’s relationship was much deeper. I think that’s important because, actually, I think the scale of the achievement of what they did together was rooted in that incredibly rich and deep relationship. It wasn’t just a byproduct or a coincidence.…

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