Tyler Cowen — The #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans

1. 0:00 – 15:45

   Economic Growth and AI

   1. TCTyler Cowen0:00

      (instrumental music plays) The people here, to me, are the smartest people I've ever met. But I think a side result of that is that people here overvalue intelligence, and their models of the world are built on intelligence mattering much, much more than it really does. Most of Sub-Saharan Africa still does not have reliable clean water. The intelligence required for that is not scarce. We cannot so readily do it. We are more in that position than we might like to think.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel0:25

      What are the specific bottlenecks? Why-

   3. TCTyler Cowen0:26

      Humans, here they are. Bottleneck, bottleneck, hi.

   4. NANarrator0:30

      (laughs)

   5. TCTyler Cowen0:30

      Good to see you. And some of you are terrified.

   6. NANarrator0:32

      (laughs)

   7. TCTyler Cowen0:33

      You're gonna be even bigger bottlenecks. The last book I wrote, I'm happy if humans read it, but mostly I wrote it for the AIs. And my next book, I'm writing even more for the AIs. Again, human readers are welcome.

   8. NANarrator0:43

      (laughs)

   9. TCTyler Cowen0:44

      You should be doing this. You're an idiot if you're not writing for the AIs.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel0:49

       Tyler, welcome.

   11. TCTyler Cowen0:50

       Dwarkesh, great to be chatting with you.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel0:52

       Why won't we have explosive economic growth, 20% plus, because of AI?

   13. TCTyler Cowen0:57

       It's very hard to get explosive economic growth for any reason, AI or not. One problem is that some parts of your economy grow very rapidly, and then you get a cost disease in the other parts of your economy, that for instance, can't use AI very well. Look at the US economy. These numbers are guesses, but government consumption is what, 18%? Healthcare is almost 20%. I'm guessing education is six to 7%. The nonprofit sector, uh, I'm not sure of the number, but you add it all up, that's half of the economy right there. How well are they going to use AI? Is failure to use AI gonna cause them to just immediately disappear and be replaced? No, that will take say, 30 years. So you'll have some sectors of the economy less regulated, where it happens very quickly, but that only gets you a modest boost in growth rates, not anything like, oh, the whole economy grows 40% a year, in a nutshell.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:46

       The mechanism behind cost disease is that there's limited amount of laborers, and if there's one high productivity sector, then wages everywhere have to go up, so your barber also has to earn twice the wages or something. With AI, you can just have every barber shop with 1,000 times the workers, every restaurant with 1,000 times the workers, not just Google. So why would the cost disease mechanisms still work here?

   15. TCTyler Cowen2:06

       Cost disease is more general than that. Let's say you have a bunch of factors of production, say five of them. Now all of a sudden we get a lot more intelligence, which has already been happening, to be clear, right? Well, that just means the other constraints in your system become a lot more binding, that the marginal importance of those goes up, and the marginal value of more and more IQ or intelligence goes down. So that also is self-limiting on growth, and the cost disease just one particular instantiation of that more general problem that we illustrate with talk about barbers and string quartets and the like.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel2:37

       If you were talking to a farmer in 2000 BC and you told them that growth rates were 10X, 100X, you'd have 2% economic growth, uh, after the Industrial Revolution, and then he started talking about bottlenecks, um, (laughs) what- what do you, what do you say to him in retrospect?

   17. TCTyler Cowen2:52

       Uh, he and I would agree, I hope, I think, he, I would tell him, "Hey, it's gonna take a long time." And he'd say, "Hmm, I don't see it happening yet. I think it's gonna take a long time." And we'd shake hands and walk off into the sunset.

   18. NANarrator3:02

       (laughs)

   19. TCTyler Cowen3:03

       And then I'd eat some of his rice or wheat or whatever, and that would be awesome.

   20. NANarrator3:07

       (laughs)

   21. DPDwarkesh Patel3:08

       But the idea that you can have a rapid acceleration in growth rates and that bottlenecks don't just eat it away, I mean, you- you could agree with that, right?

   22. TCTyler Cowen3:17

       Could, I don't know what the word could means. I would say this. You look at market data, say, real interest rates, stock prices. Right now, everything looks so normal. I want startlingly normal, even apart from AI. So what you'd call prediction markets are not forecasting super rapid growth anytime soon. If you look at what experts on economic growth, right? We had Chad Jones here yesterday. Uh, he's not predicting super rapid growth, though he thinks AI might well accelerate rates of growth. So the experts and the markets agree. Who- who am I to say different from the experts and the market?

   23. DPDwarkesh Patel3:47

       You're an expert. (laughs)

   24. TCTyler Cowen3:49

       Yeah, but I'm with the other experts.

   25. DPDwarkesh Patel3:51

       So, uh, in his talk yesterday, Chad Jones said that the main variable, the main input into his model for growth is just population. If you have a doubling, an order of magnitude increase in the population, you plug that number in, in his model, you get explosive economic growth.

   26. TCTyler Cowen4:04

       I don't agree with his model.

   27. DPDwarkesh Patel4:05

       Why not buy the models?

   28. TCTyler Cowen4:06

       His model is far too much a one factor model, right? Population. I don't think it's very predictive. We've had big increases in effective world population in terms of purchasing power. A lot of different areas have not become more innovative. Until the last, say, four years, most of them became less innovative. So it's really about the quality of your best people or institutions, as you and Patrick were discussing last night. And there, it's unclear what's happened, but it's also fragile. There's the perspective of the economist, but also that of the anthropologist, the sociologist. They all matter, but I think the more you stack different pluralistic perspectives, the harder it is to see that there's any simple lever you can push on, intelligence or not, that's gonna give you breakaway economic growth.

   29. DPDwarkesh Patel4:49

       I mean, what you just said, where you're bottlenecked by your best people seems to contradict what you were saying in your initial answer, that you're bottlenecked-

   30. TCTyler Cowen4:55

       Best people are bottlenecked.
2. 15:45 – 30:19

   Founder Mode and increasing variance

   1. TCTyler Cowen15:45

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel15:45

      Yesterday, Patrick was talking about how important it is for the founders of different institutions to hang around and be the ones in charge. Y- I've heard you talk about, like, you know, The Beatles were great because The Beatles were running The, The, The Beatles. Why do you think it's so important for that to be the case?

   3. TCTyler Cowen16:01

      Uh, I think courage is a very scarce input in a lot of decisions and founders, they have courage to begin with, but they also need less courage to see through a big change in what the company will do. So, Facebook, now Meta, has made a, quite a few big changes in its history. So, Mark had a lot of courage to begin with. But if Mark Zuckerberg says, "We're gonna do this, we're gonna do that," it's pretty hard, you know, for everyone else to say no, in a, in a good way. I really like that. So, uh, it economizes on courage having a founder and you're selecting for courage. Those would be two reasons.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel16:36

      How does that explain The Beatles' success?

   5. TCTyler Cowen16:38

      Well, The Beatles are an interesting example. I mean, they broke up in 1970, right? Rolling Stones are still going. That tells you something. But The Beatles created much greater value and The Beatles are the group we still all talk about much more-

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel16:50

      Yeah.

   7. TCTyler Cowen16:50

      ... even though The Rolling Stones are still with us. So, they were always unstable. There's, like, two periods of The Beatles. Early Beatles, John is the leader, but then Paul works at it, and John becomes a heroin addict, and Paul gets better, better, better, and ultimately there's no core, there's not a stable equilibrium. The Beatles split up. But that creative tension for, like, those core seven to eight years was just unbelievable and its four founders, Ringo not quite a founder, but basically a founder 'cause Pete Best was crummy and they got rid of him right away. Uh, it's an im- it's one of the most amazing stories in the world. I like studying these amazing productivity stories, like Johann Sebastian Bach, Magnus Carlsen, Steph Curry, The Beatles. I think they're worth a lot of study. They're atypical. You can't just say, "Okay, oh, I'm gonna be like The Beatles." Like, you're gonna fail 'cause The Beatles did that. Uh, but nonetheless, I think it's a good place to look for getting ideas and seeing risks. Hello, everyone. This is Tyler Cowen and I would like to personally thank Jane Street for sponsoring this podcast episode with Dwarkesh Patel. I've been visiting Jane Street for some number of years. They're renowned for their brainy, challenging environment, and also for their ability to spot and recruit talent. Those are some of the reasons why, for me, those are the trips and the visits I look forward to the most. I would just say this: if it is an appropriate option for you, please do consider working there. I've always had a blast during my visits, learned a lot, and I recall one time when I gave a talk, we all went out to dinner, and then quite late, while people didn't go back home, but they all went back to the Jane Street office to play chess, Bug House, and other games. They're better (laughs) at these games than you might think. So, please update your other expectations accordingly. Thank you again.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel18:34

      I'm incredibly grateful to Tyler for volunteering to say a few words about Jane Street. This is the first time that a guest has participated in the sponsorship, and I hope you can see why Tyler and I think so highly of Jane Street. If you wanna learn more about their open roles, go to janstreet.com/dwarkesh. All right, back to Tyler again. What did you think of T- uh, Patrick's observation of the competency crisis?

   9. TCTyler Cowen19:00

      I see it differently from Patrick, and he and I have discussed this. So I think it- there's basically increasing variance in the distribution. So young people at the top are doing much better, and they're far more impressive than they were in earlier times. And if you look at areas where we measure performance of the young, chess is a simple example. We perfectly measure performance. Very young people are just better and better at chess. That- that's- that's proven. Even like NBA basketball, uh, you have very young people doing things that they would not have been doing, say, 30 years ago, and a lot of that is mental and training and application, and not being a knucklehead. So the top of the distribution getting much better. You see this also in science, internet writing, the very bottom of the distribution. Well, youth crime has been falling since the '90s. So the very bottom of the distribution also is getting better. I think there's some thick middle above the very bottom and extending like a bit above the median that's clearly getting worse. And s- because they're getting worse, there's a lot of anecdotal examples of them getting worse, like students wanting more time to take the test or having, you know, flimsy excuses or mental health problems with the young or whatever. There's a lot more of that 'cause of that thick band of people getting worse, and that's a great concern. But I see the very bottom and a big chunk of the top of the distribution as just much better, and I think it's pretty proven by numbers that that's the case. So I would say this increasing variance with the weird mix of where the gains and declines are showing up.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel20:29

       If you-

   11. TCTyler Cowen20:29

       And I've said this to Patrick, and I'm gonna say it to him again, and I- I hope I can convince him.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel20:34

       It seems concerning then the composition is that the average goes down if you look at PISA scores or something.

   13. TCTyler Cowen20:38

       The median goes down. You know, a- a lot of tests, they've pushed more people into taking the test, PISA scores in particular. So I- I suspect those scores adjusted for that are roughly constant, which is still not great. I agree. And I think there's some decline, some of it is pandemic, and we're recovering a bit slowly, getting back to human bottlenecks. But I think a lot of the talk of declining test scores is somewhat overblown. At- at most, there's a very modest decline, I would say.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel21:06

       If the top is getting better, what do you make of the anec- anecdotal data he was talking about yesterday where the Stanford kids come up to him and say, you know, "All my friends, they're stupid. You can't hire anybody from Stanford anymore." That's- that should be the cream of the crop, right?

   15. TCTyler Cowen21:17

       There's plenty of data on the earnings of Stanford kids. If there were a betting market in, you know, what's the future trend? I'm long. How long I should be? I don't- I really don't know. But I visit Stanford, not every year, but, you know, regularly, and there's selection in who it is I meet, but yeah, we're talking about selection, and they're very impressive. And Emergent Ventures has funded a lot of people from Stanford. Uh, as far as I can tell, as a- a group, they're doing very well. So that is of no concern to me. If like you're worried about the Stanford kids, like something seems off in the level of salience and focus in the argument 'cause they're overall doing great. And they, you know, they have high standards. That's good too. Like J- you know, Paul McCartney thought John Lennon was a crummy guitar player, and John thought a lot of Paul's songs were crap. Like in a way, they're right. In a way, they're wrong. But it's a sign what high standards The Beatles had.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel22:08

       Yeah, I- I mean, you'd hope for-

   17. TCTyler Cowen22:09

       How old are you, by the way?

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel22:10

       24.

   19. TCTyler Cowen22:11

       Okay. Now go back whenever, however many years. Was there a 24-year-old like you doing the equivalent of podcasting? Like it's just clearly better now than it was back then. People-

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel22:22

       We- we're-

   21. TCTyler Cowen22:23

       And you were doing this a few years ago, so it's just obvious to me, you know, the- the young peaks are doing better. And you're proof.

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel22:29

       Wasn't- wasn't Churchill by the time he was 24, uh, an international correspondent? Cuba, India, and was, I think the highest paid, uh, journalist in the world by the time he was 24?

   23. TCTyler Cowen22:39

       Uh-

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel22:39

       I mean, similar.

   25. TCTyler Cowen22:40

       I don't know. I mean, what was he paid and how good was his journalism? I just don't know.

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel22:44

       (laughs)

   27. TCTyler Cowen22:45

       I don't think it's that impressive a job to be an international journalist.

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel22:49

       (laughs)

   29. TCTyler Cowen22:49

       Like what does it pay people now? (laughs)

   30. NANarrator22:52

       (laughs)
3. 30:19 – 33:53

   Effective Altruism and Progress Studies

   1. TCTyler Cowen30:19

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel30:20

      What's your most underrated cult?

   3. TCTyler Cowen30:23

      Most underrated cult? Progress studies?

   4. NANarrator30:27

      (laughs)

   5. TCTyler Cowen30:28

      (laughs)

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel30:28

      I, I think you called peak EA right before SBF fell.

   7. TCTyler Cowen30:33

      That's right.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel30:33

      Yeah.

   9. TCTyler Cowen30:33

      I was at an EA meeting, and I said, you know, "Hey, everyone. This is as good as it gets. Enjoy this moment. It's all basically gonna fall apart. You're still gonna have some really significant influence, but you won't feel like you have continued to exist as a movement." That's what I said. And they were shocked. They thought I was insane. But I think I was mostly right.

   10. NANarrator30:53

       (laughs)

   11. DPDwarkesh Patel30:53

       And like what, what, what specifically did you see? What was... Was exuberance too high? Did you see SBF's, uh, balance sheet? Like what, what did you see?

   12. NANarrator31:00

       (laughs)

   13. TCTyler Cowen31:01

       Well, I was surprised when SBF was insolvent. I thought it was a high risk venture that had no regulatory defense and would end up being worth zero. But I didn't think he was actually playing funny games with the money.Uh, I just have a long history of seeing movements in my lifetime from the 1960s onwards, including libertarianism, and there are common patterns that happens to them all. We're here in Berkeley, my goodness. Free speech movement. Where's free speech in Berkeley today? Like, how'd that, you know, work out in the final analysis?

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel31:34

       (laughs)

   15. TCTyler Cowen31:34

       So it's a very common pattern, and just to think, wow, the common pattern's gonna repeat itself, and then you see some intuitive signs, and you're just like, "Yeah, that's gonna happen." And the private benefits of belonging to EA, like they were very real in terms of the people you could hang out with or like the sex you could have.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel31:50

       (laughs)

   17. TCTyler Cowen31:50

       But they didn't seem that concretely crystallized to me in institutions, the way they are like in Goldman Sachs or legal partnerships. So that struck me as very fragile, and I thought that at the time as well.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel32:01

       Sorry. I'm not, I'm not sure I understood. Uh, uh, what were the intuitive signs?

   19. TCTyler Cowen32:06

       Well, not seeing like the very clear, crystallized permanent incentives to keep on being a part of the institutions. Uh, a bit of excess enthusiasm from some people, even where they might have been correct in their views. Uh, some cult-like tendencies, the rise of it being so rapid, uh, that it was this uneasy balance of secular and semi-religious elements that tends to flip one way or the other or just dissolve. So I saw all those things and I just thought, like the two or three best ideas from this are gonna prove incredibly important still, and from this day onwards, I don't give up that belief at all. But just as a movement, I thought it was gonna collapse.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel32:46

       When do we hit, uh, peak progress studies?

   21. TCTyler Cowen32:49

       You know, when Patrick and I wrote the piece on progress and progress studies, he and I thought about this, talked about it. I can't speak for him, but my view at least was that it would never be such a formal thing or like controlled or managed or directed by a small group of people or like trademarked or it would be people doing things in a very decentralized way that would reflect a general change of ethos and vibe. So I hope it has in s- in many ways like a gentler but more enduring, uh, trajectory. And I think so far, I'm seeing that. Like I think in a lot of countries, science policy will be much better because of progress studies. That's not proven yet. You see some signs of that. You wouldn't say it's really flipped, but a lot of reforms, you're in an area like no one else has any idea, much less a better idea or a good idea, and some modestly small number of people with some talent will work on it and get like a third to half of what they want, and that will have a huge impact. And like if that's all it is, I'm thrilled, and I think it will be more

4. 33:53 – 45:45

   What AI changes for Tyler

   1. TCTyler Cowen33:53

      than that.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel33:54

      I asked Patrick yesterday h- you know, how do you think about progress studies differently now that you know AI is a thing that's happening?

   3. TCTyler Cowen33:59

      Yeah.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel33:59

      What's the answer for you?

   5. TCTyler Cowen34:01

      I don't th- I don't think about it very differently, but again, if you buy my view about like slow takeoff, why should it be that different? We'll have more degrees of freedom. So if you have more degrees of freedom, all your choices, decisions, issues, problems are more complex, so you're in more need of like some kind of guidance. So all inputs other than the AI, like rise in marginal value, and since I'm an input other than the AI or I hope that means I rise in marginal value, but I need to do different things. So I think of myself over time as less a producer of content and more like a connector, people person, developing networks. In a way where if there somehow had been no like transformers and LLMs, uh, I would have stayed a bit more as a producer of content.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel34:46

      When I was preparing to interview you, I asked Claude to take your persona-

   7. TCTyler Cowen34:50

      (laughs)

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel34:50

      ... and compared to other people I tried this with, it actually works really well with you. (laughs) Well-

   9. TCTyler Cowen34:55

      'Cause I've written a lot on the internet?

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel34:57

       Yeah, that's why. (laughs)

   11. TCTyler Cowen34:58

       (laughs)

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel34:59

       Um-

   13. TCTyler Cowen34:59

       This is my immortality, right?

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel35:00

       That's right. So I've heard you say in the past, you know, you don't expect to be remembered in the future. At the time, I don't know if you were considering that because of your volumes of text, you're gonna have an especially salient persona in future models. How does that change your estimation of your intellectual contribution going forward?

   15. TCTyler Cowen35:17

       I do think about this, and uh, the last book I wrote, you know, it's called GOAT: Who's the Greatest Economist Of All Time? I'm happy if humans read it, but mostly I wrote it for the AIs.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel35:27

       (laughs)

   17. TCTyler Cowen35:27

       I wanted them to know I, like, appreciate them.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel35:30

       (laughs)

   19. TCTyler Cowen35:30

       And my next book, I'm writing even more for the AIs. Again, human readers are welcome.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel35:35

       (laughs)

   21. TCTyler Cowen35:36

       It will be free. But sort of, oh, who reviews it? Like, oh, is DLS gonna pick it up or... Like, it doesn't matter anymore. Uh, like, the AIs wi- wi- will trawl it and know I've done this, and that will shape how they see me in I hope a very salient and important way. And as far as I could tell, no one else is doing this. No one is like writing or recording for the AIs very much. But if you believe even in like a modest version of this progress, like I'm modest in what I believe relative to you and many of you, like, you should be doing this. You're an idiot if you're not writing for the AIs. They're a big part of your audience and they're like purchasing power. We'll see, but over time, it will accumulate and they're gonna hold a lot of crypto.

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel36:19

       (laughs)

   23. TCTyler Cowen36:20

       We're not gonna give them bank accounts, at least not at first.

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel36:24

       Um, what pers- part of your persona will be least captured by the AIs if they're only going by your writing?

   25. TCTyler Cowen36:29

       I think I should ask that as a question to you. What's your answer?

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel36:33

       I don't think- I think-

   27. TCTyler Cowen36:34

       I don't think AIs are that funny yet. They're better on humor than many people allege, but I don't use them for humor.

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel36:40

       It's interesting that you learn so much about a person from when you're interviewing for, them for a job or for you for emerging ventures. You can read their application by just in the first 10 minutes, their vibe.

   29. TCTyler Cowen36:49

       Three minutes, but yes.

   30. DPDwarkesh Patel36:50

       Yes. And so what, whatever is going on there, that's so informative, the AIs won't have just from the writing.
5. 45:45 – 50:41

   The slow diffusion of innovation

   1. TCTyler Cowen45:45

      done both.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel45:46

      Okay, I really wanna go back to this diffusion thing we were talking about at the beginning with the economic growth.

   3. TCTyler Cowen45:49

      Yeah.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel45:50

      'Cause I feel like I don't... W- w- what am I not- I'm not understanding? The- I hear the word diffusion, I hear the word bottlenecks, but I just, like, don't have anything concrete in my head when I hear that. What- what am I- what are the people who are thinking about AI missing here when they just plug in these things into their models?

   5. TCTyler Cowen46:05

      I'm not sure I'm the one to diagnose, but I would say when I'm in the Bay Area, like, the people here, to me, are the smartest people I've ever met, on average. Most ambitious, dynamic, and smartest, like by a clear grand slam, compared to New York City or London or anywhere. That's awesome and I love it. But I think a s- a side result of that is that people here overvalue intelligence, and their models of the world are built on intelligence mattering much, much more than it really does. Now, people in Washington don't have that problem. (laughs) We have another problem, uh, and that needs to be corrected too. But I just think if you could root that out of your minds, it would be pretty easy to glide into this expert consensus view that tech diffusion is pretty, universally pretty slow, and it's, that's not gonna change. No one's built a real model to show why it should change, other than the sort of hyperventilating blog posts about everything's gonna change right away.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel47:08

      The model is that you can have AIs make more AIs, right? That you can have them-

   7. TCTyler Cowen47:12

      Diminishing returns. Ricardo knew this, right? He didn't call it AI, but Malthus, Ricardo, they all talked about this. It was just humans for them. Well, people then would breed, they would breed at some pretty rapid rate, there were diminishing returns to that. You had these other scarce factors. Classical economics figured that out. They were too pessimistic, I would say, but they understood the pessimism intrinsic in diminishing returns in a way that people in the Bay Area do not, and it's better for them that they don't know it. But if you're just trying to inject truth into their veins rather than ambition-

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel47:45

      Sorry what-

   9. TCTyler Cowen47:46

      ... diminishing returns is a very important idea.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel47:48

       In what sense was that pessimism correct? Because we do have seven billion people and we have a lot more ideas, as a resul- result, we have a lot more industries.

   11. TCTyler Cowen47:54

       Yeah, I said they were too pessimistic, but they understood something about the logic of diffusion where if they could see AI today, I don't think they would be so blown away by it. "Oh," you know, I read Malthus, Ricardo would say, "Malthus and I used to send letters back and forth. We talked about diminishing returns. This'll be nice, it'll extend the frontier, uh, but it's not gonna solve all our problems."

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel48:18

       One- one concern you could have about progress in general is, if you look at the famous Adam Smith example, you've got that pin maker, and the specialization obviously has all these efficiencies, but the pin maker is just, like, he's doing this one thing, whereas if you're in the ancestral environment you get to do, you get to basically negotiate with every single part of what it takes to keep you alive and every single, every other person in your tribe. Does individuality, is- is that, like, lost with more specialization, more progress?

   13. TCTyler Cowen48:45

       Well, Smith thought it would be. I think compared to his time, we have much more individuality, most of all in the Bay Area. That's a good thing. Uh, I worry, you know, the future with AI, that a kind of demoralization will set in in some areas. I think there'll be full employment pretty much forever. That doesn't worry me. But what we will be left doing, what exactly it will be and how happy it will make us, again, I don't have pessimistic expectations, I just see it as a big change. I don't feel I have a good prediction, and if you don't have a good prediction, you should be a bit wary and just like, "Oh, okay, we're gonna see." But, you know, some- some words of caution are merited.

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel49:27

       When you're learning about a new field-... I, uh, the vibe I get from you when you're doing a podcast is like, you're, you're picking up, like, the long tail of different... You talk to interesting people or you read the book that nobody else would have considered. How often do you just have to, like, you gotta, like, s- read the main textbook versus you can just look at the esoteric thing? Uh, how do you, how do you balance that trade-off?

   15. TCTyler Cowen49:46

       Well, I haven't interviewed that many scientists. Like, Ed Boyden would be one. Uh, Richard Prum, the ornithologist from Yale. Those are very hard preps. I think those are two excellent episodes, but I'm limited in how many I can do by my own ability to prepare. Uh, I like the most doing historians because the prep is a lot of work, but it's easy, fun work for me. Uh, and I sort of kn- um, I, I know I always learn something, so now I'm prepping for Stephen Kotkin, who's an expert on Stalin and Soviet Russia, and that's been a blast. I've been doing that for, like, four months, reading dozens of books. And it's very automatic, whereas you try to figure out, like, what Ed Boyden is doing with the light shining into the brain, it's like, "Oh my goodness, do I understand this at all or am I like the guy who thinks the demand curve slopes upward?"

   16. NANarrator50:33

       (laughs)

   17. TCTyler Cowen50:34

       So it just means I'm only gonna do a smallish number of scientists, and that's a shame. Uh, but maybe AI can fill in

6. 50:41 – 53:07

   Stalin's library

   1. TCTyler Cowen50:41

      for us there.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel50:42

      You recommended a book to me, Stalin's Library, which talks about the different things... uh, the different books that Stalin read and the fact that he was kind of a smart, well-read guy. And the book also mentioned, I think in the early chapters, that, look, he never... Th- y- in all his annotations, if you look through all his books, he ne- there's never anything that even hints that he doubted Marxism.

   3. TCTyler Cowen50:59

      That's right.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel51:00

      What's going-

   5. TCTyler Cowen51:00

      There's a lot of other evidence that that's the correct portrait.

   6. DPDwarkesh Patel51:03

      Wh- what's going... Like, smart guy who's read all this literature, all these different things, never even questions Marxism. What's going on there? What do you think?

   7. TCTyler Cowen51:11

      I think the culture he came out of had a lot of dogmatism to begin with. And I mean both Leninism, which is extremely dogmatic. You know, Lenin was his mentor, like Patrick's thing about the Nobel laureates. It happens in insidious ways too. So Stal- you know, uh, Lenin is the mentor of Stalin. Soviet culture, communist culture, and then Georgian culture, which appealing and fun-loving, uh, and wine-drinking and dance-heavy as it is, there's something about it that's a little, you know, you pound the fist down and you tell people over the table how things are. He had all those stacked vertically, and then we got this bad genetic luck of the draw on Stalin, and it turned out obviously pretty terrible.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel51:55

      And then you buy Hayek's explanation that the reason he rose to the top is just because the most atrocious people win in autocracies? What- what- what is that explanation missing?

   9. TCTyler Cowen52:03

      I don't think... I think what Hayek said is subtler than that. And I wouldn't say it's Hayek's explanation. I would say Hayek pinpointed one factor. There are quite a few autocracies in the world today where the worst people have not risen to the top. UAE would be, I think, the most obvious example. I've been there. As far as I can tell, they're doing a great job running the country. Uh, there are things they do that are nasty and unpleasant. I would be delighted if they could evolve into a democracy. But the worst people are not running UAE. This, I'm quite sure of. So, uh, it's a tendency. There are other forces, but culture really matters. Hayek is writing about a very specific place and time. I would say it really surprised me there are these family-based Gulf monarchies with very large clannish interest groups of thousands of people that have proven more stable and more meritocratic than I ever would have dreamed, say, in 1980. And I know I don't understand it, but I just see it in the data. It's not just UAE. There's a bunch of countries over there that have outperformed my expectations, and they all have this common, broadly common

7. 53:07 – 1:00:33

   DC vs SF vs EU

   1. TCTyler Cowen53:07

      system.

   2. DPDwarkesh Patel53:08

      It makes me wonder, wh- when you go around the world, 'cause I know you go outside the Bay Area and the East Coast as well, and you talk about progress studies-related ideas, what's the biggest difference in how they're received versus the audience here?

   3. TCTyler Cowen53:19

      Well, the audience here is so, so different.

   4. DPDwarkesh Patel53:22

      Yeah.

   5. TCTyler Cowen53:22

      Like, you're the outlier place of America. And then where I normally am outside of Washington, DC, that's like the other outlier place. And in a way, we're opposite outliers. I think that's healthy for me, both where I live and that I come here a lot and that I travel a lot. Uh, but you all are so, like, out there in what you believe, uh, I'm not sure where to start. You all, you know, and... You come pretty close to thinking in terms of infinities on the creative side and the destructive side, and no one in Washington thinks in terms of infinities. They think at the margin. And like, overall, I think they're much wiser than the people here. But I also know if everyone or even more people thought like the DC people, like, our world would end. We wouldn't have growth. They're terrible. People in the EU are super wise. Like, you have a meal with, like, some sort of French person who works in Brussels. It's very impressive. They're cultured, they have wonderful taste, they understand all these different countries, they know so- something about Chinese porcelain. And if, like, you lived in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative one percent.

   6. NANarrator54:29

      (laughs)

   7. TCTyler Cowen54:30

      (laughs) So there's some way in which all these things have to balance. I think US has done a marvelous job at that, and we need to preserve that. What I see happening, UK used to do a great job at it. UK, somehow the balance is out of whack, and you have too many non-growth-oriented people in the cultural mix.

   8. DPDwarkesh Patel54:49

      The way you described this French person you're having dinner with-

   9. TCTyler Cowen54:52

      Which I've ha- it's- it's- we have dinners, yeah.

   10. DPDwarkesh Patel54:54

       (laughs) Yeah, I mean, just like-

   11. TCTyler Cowen54:54

       And the food is good too.

   12. DPDwarkesh Patel54:55

       I don't know. It kind of reminds me of you in the sense that you're also, uh, well-cultured and you... all these different esoteric things. I- I don't know. D- d- uh, uh, w- what's the difference between you and... W- what's, like, the biggest difference between you and these French people you have dinner with?

   13. TCTyler Cowen55:09

       I don't think I'm well-cultured would be one difference. There are many differences. First, I'm an American. I'm a regional thinker. I'm from New Jersey, so I'm essentially a barbarian, not a cultured person. I have a veneer of culture that comes from having collected a lot of information. So I- I'll know more about culture than a lot of people. And that can be mistaken for being well-cultured, but it's really quite different. It's like a barbarian's approach to culture.... uh, it's like a very autistic approach to being cultured-

   14. DPDwarkesh Patel55:36

       (coughs)

   15. TCTyler Cowen55:36

       ... and should be seen as such.

   16. DPDwarkesh Patel55:37

       (laughs)

   17. TCTyler Cowen55:38

       So, I feel the French person is very foreign for me, and there's something about America they might find strange or repellent, and I'm just so used to it. I see intellectually how many areas we fall flat on or are destructive, but it doesn't bother me that much because I'm so used to it.

   18. DPDwarkesh Patel55:56

       What is most misunderstood about autism?

   19. TCTyler Cowen56:00

       Well, if you look at the formal definition, it's all about deficits that people have, right? Now, if you define it that way, like no one here is autistic. If you define it some other way, which maybe we haven't been down yet, like a third of you here are autistic.

   20. DPDwarkesh Patel56:14

       (laughs)

   21. TCTyler Cowen56:14

       I don't insist on owning the definition. I think it's a bad word. I would... It's like libertarian, I would gladly give it away. But there is, like, some coherent definition where a third (laughs) of you here probably would qualify, and this other definition where none of you would, and it's like kids in mental homes banging their head against the wall. So, I don't know. It seems that whole issue needs this huge reboot.

   22. DPDwarkesh Patel56:36

       Th- these D.C. people... You know, o- one frustration that tech people have is that they have very little influence, it seems, in Washington compared to how big that industry is.

   23. TCTyler Cowen56:45

       Mm-hmm.

   24. DPDwarkesh Patel56:45

       And industries that are much smaller will have much greater sway in Washington. Why is tech so bad at having influence in Washington?

   25. TCTyler Cowen56:52

       Well, I think you're getting a lot more influence than maybe you realize, uh, quickly through national security reasons. So, the feds have not stopped the development of AI, whatever you think they should or should not do. It's basically proceeded. And national security as a lobby, they don't care about tech per se, but it is meant that on a whole bunch of things in the future, you will get your way a bit more than you might be expecting. But a key problem you have is so much of it is in one area, and it's also an area where there's a dominant political party. Even within that political party, there is, in many parts of California, a dominant faction. And you compare yourself to, like, the community bankers who are in... Like, so many American counties have connections to every single person in the House of Representatives. Your issues in a way are not very partisan. Uh, the distortions you cause through your privileges are invisible to America. It's not like, you know, Facebook where some John Hyde has written some bestselling book complaining about what it is you do. There's not a bestselling book complaining about the community banks. And they are, like, ruthless and powerful and get their way, and I'm not gonna tangle with them.

   26. DPDwarkesh Patel58:00

       (laughs)

   27. TCTyler Cowen58:01

       And y- you all here are so far from that. In part because you're dynamic and you're clustered.

   28. DPDwarkesh Patel58:07

       Final question.

   29. TCTyler Cowen58:08

       Yeah.

   30. DPDwarkesh Patel58:08

       So, I think based on yesterday's, uh, session, it seems like Patrick's main misgiving with progress is that you look at the younger cohort, there's something that's not going great with them and it seems to... You know, you would hope that over time progress means that people are getting better and better over time, i- if you by his view of what's happening with young people. What's your main misgiving about progress? The thing you're, you're like, "Ah, if I look at the time series data, I'm not sure I b- I like w- where this trend is going."

Episode duration: 1:00:33