A 700-year clock and a trembling hand: Tyler Cowen’s war on mediocrity

Lex Fridman opens by asking whether economics is art, science, philosophy, or magic. Tyler Cowen, the George Mason economist behind *Marginal Revolution* and *Conversations with Tyler*, takes all four. Magic is the idea that you can make a change and everyone is better off — a modern spell that replaced the old kind. Art is that the models are inexact; science is that a proposition is occasionally falsified; and a few basic facts, however trivial they sound, will ruin you if you do not know them. From the outside, Fridman says, economics sometimes looks like an *E = mc²* for society. Cowen does not think it will ever be very predictive. Game theory never called whether the United States and the USSR would go to war. Know game theory, though, and a discussion of strategic conflict immediately gets more interesting. The biggest use of economics is helping you ask better questions.

Mutually assured destruction is the awkward counterexample: an explanation that not only frames better questions but seems to describe why two superpowers did not burn the planet. Cowen is not surprised the weapons have stayed holstered so far. He is a little surprised it came as close as it did — a flock of birds that might have been read as a first strike. Keep running the clock on a low-probability event and it will happen. It may not be the United States and China, or the United States and Russia. It could be Saudi Arabia and Turkey. It might not be nuclear at all; it might be bioweapons. His generous bound is seven or eight hundred years. Cheaper weapons of mass destruction raise the chance. A catastrophe that kills every last human is, for now, more like an asteroid or a supernova: exogenous. A catastrophe that sets civilization back an extraordinary degree is, in his view, coming.

Fridman pushes the other model: repeated games, humans who get their act together as the deadline nears. Cowen is not that negative on human nature. As an economist he sees the gains from cooperation constantly. Then he asks the outlier question: was there a Hitler? Obviously. Let the clock tick, and another Hitler with nuclear weapons who does not per se care about his own destruction will appear. Fridman names the setup a trembling-hand equilibrium: cooperation as the basic logic, even between enemies, with periodic craziness you cannot always beat. Bureaucracy gets an unexpected defense. To climb a bureaucracy you have to build alliances and compromise; pure evil is selected against. It keeps out the worst apples. Cowen still asks you to imagine, 35 years from now, a future Osama bin Laden with nukes or very bad bioweapons. Osama was pretty evil and still failed. That is what the 700 to 800 years are for. His thought experiment is uglier: if willing a city’s death cost a million dollars and got you executed, how many months until it happens? Be nicer to the wealthy, he adds. Trash-talking Bill Gates does not inspire the next one.

Fridman immigrated from the Soviet Union and grew up in Moscow. America meant a place where you could invent, scale, and matter. Cowen’s ledger splits in two. The highest-earning groups in the United States now come from India and Iran, a fairly new development. Both can be called persons of color; both may have faced religious discrimination; they did it anyway. That, he says, is amazing, and it says great things about America. Native-born Americans are a trickier story. People think intergenerational mobility has fallen a lot recently. For native-born Americans it has been fairly constant for about forty years, which is sort of good, and much lower than in earlier eras. He is not sure the old rate can be copied. At the start of the twentieth century few Americans finished high school or had much wealth; there was not much credentialism, so there was more room to climb. Blaming the modern world for failing to reproduce that is, in his view, unfair.

The live injustice is who gets into Harvard or Cornell, and whether the bottom half of Americans have too little opportunity. Absolutely, he says: it is a disgrace how the country has evolved, and in that sense the American dream is clearly ailing. It has had problems from the beginning, for Black people, for women, for many other groups. The contemporary version has a sharp new kink. The value of joining the American English-language network is much higher than it was thirty years ago, mostly because of the internet, which steepens the returns to immigrating to the United States, Canada, or the UK relative to, say, France. France is still rich and pleasant. Fridman’s chance of a globally known podcast would have been much smaller there.

Is the cultural influence just English? Cowen thinks there is something above language: a sense that entertainment really matters, that connecting with an audience and being direct and getting to the point matter, that humor can sit next to science in a way the European continent does less well. Britain has its own version, hugely influential in music and comedy. Canada’s best talent tends to come south. Scientists, culturally, are not very cool; most people can name Einstein and maybe Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is a communicator. Ask a different question — which country is most comfortable with inegalitarian rewards for scientists, fame or money — and Cowen still picks the United States. Some of that is the tax rate; some of it is that a lot of America is set up for rich people to live well, which attracts talent. The two best vaccines in his telling: a Pfizer shot with German and Turkish roots, distributed through the United States, and Moderna, via an ethnic-Armenian immigrant who came through Lebanon and Canada to Boston-Cambridge. America nailed the scaling.

Capitalism, Cowen says, is a word people use in too many ways. The literal meaning is private ownership of capital goods, which he favors in most areas. He does not want the private sector owning F-16s; government water utilities seem to work about as well as private ones. With those caveats, business innovates better than government, orients toward consumer service, and the biggest firms tend to pay the highest wages. The United States is fundamentally a nation of business, which makes it a nation of opportunity. The downsides are old and specific: an enduring racial problem, the taking of land from Native Americans, a precariousness of life that Germany or the Netherlands soften, weaker communities than northwestern Europe. Those minuses have pluses. It is a better country in which to be a weirdo than Germany or Denmark.

Weirdo, here, is Elon Musk’s kind of weirdo: outside the norm, breaking conventions, acceptable or even admired, or simply a loner. A nation of immigrants selected for people willing to leave families behind and undergo a brutal switch. Denmark is wonderful and not a nation of weirdos. Ideally, Cowen says, you want part of the world fully weird and innovating, and another part a little chicken, risk-averse, enjoying six weeks off and free-riding on the innovation. American way and European way are complements. Russians who come, he adds, fit: Alyosha in *The Brothers Karamazov*, Grigori Perelman the mathematician, a different weirdo tradition. A week later they have adjusted, and they can stay grumpier than Americans, think people who smile are idiots, and no one takes that away from them. Perelman turning down the Fields Medal is, to Cowen, great. Prizes corrupt; Nobel winners, in his experience, become less productive and repeat older messages. Turning your back and keeping on working is a bigger prize.

Is competition good for the world of weirdos? What really matters, Cowen says, is how good the legal framework is. Competition in nature, for food, is bloody. Under the rule of law and clearly defined, reasonably just property rights, competition probably works very well. It is not an unalloyed good. Military competition is sometimes itself good; it is not good per se. What should be kept away from competition first is the fight for territory — anything that involves actual physical violence. He does not think current borders are just. Hungarians, Romanians, Serbians, Bosnians will talk your ear off, and some of them are probably right. There is an international order, and he would rather more or less stick with it. If Catalonians keep at it, let them go. Healthcare in this country, by contrast, should be much more competitive. Hospitals and doctors do not treat you like a customer. They treat you like an idiot, a child, or a third-party-payment case. The experience is often humiliating.

A “pure free market” is not well defined, because you always need a legal order, and that order has to decide whether intellectual property matters more than ever, what penalties are, how much to put into law enforcement. Saying “free market” does not pin those questions down. Markets do generate a lot of rules through private norms and trade associations; international trade is mostly private and by norms. At the end of the day you need governments to draw very clear lines, or it turns into a mafia-run system. Fridman has been hanging out with anarchists. Cowen would not press a button to scrap the current Constitution, which he views as pretty good and quite wise. The deeper point is that all societies are in some regards anarchistic, and we should take the anarchists seriously. Globally there is a kind of anarchy across borders; even inside federal systems there is often no clear transitivity of who has the final say. You want a good anarchy rather than a bad one. Squish your anarchy into the right corners. There is no theoretical answer for how. You start with a country and ask whether it is working well enough now.

Ayn Rand arouses love and hatred in a way Fridman finds strange. She was a big influence on Cowen growing up. The book that mattered was *Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal*: wealth creates opportunity and good lives, and we ought to valorize it and give it very high status. He thinks that idea is completely correct, and that she has the most profound and articulate statement of it. As a philosopher he disagrees with her on most things, and did even as a boy. He read Plato first. In a Socratic dialogue, points of view are thrown around, and whoever you agree with, you understand that the wisdom is in the coming together. Rand does not have that. Altruism can be wonderful. Humans are not actually that rational. Self-interest is often poorly defined. Pounding the table to say “existence exists” may not be false; he is not sure it is a very meaningful statement.

The secret to Rand, he says, is that she was Russian — much more Russian than she seems at first, including the purging of friends from Objectivist circles, which he compares to how Russians, especially Russian women, so often purge friends. If she were alive he would have her on his podcast and ask only about Russia, which she mostly stopped talking about after *We the Living*. What trauma did she carry? What did she actually love in music and literature? How did her view of the sexes differ from America’s? Why does her fiction still carry an old Russian vision of extreme sexual dimorphism with very strong women? That, to him, is her actual philosophy, not table-pounding metaphysics. If she had been less certain she could have been a Dostoevsky. Certainty made her a cult figure in a somewhat Russian manner, and brought the hatred with the adoration.

No one human possesses wisdom, he says, and no one idea is the wisdom. The coming together is the wisdom. Boswell’s *Life of Johnson* is in essence a co-authored philosophy book commonly sold as a biography. John Stuart Mill was in a sense co-authoring with Harriet Taylor, and is a better philosopher than even his high rating suggests. Plato and Socrates. Goethe’s *Faust*, drama and philosophy. Shakespeare, maybe the wisest thinker of them all.

In *Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero*, Cowen’s hardest evidence is the pandemic. Amazon upped delivery more or less overnight, with very few hitches. He ordered hundreds of packages; DoorDash, Uber Eats, Whole Foods through Amazon, all remarkably well. Higher education switched to Zoom in about two weeks, and Zoom held. The NBA canceled the season early, sent a public signal that this was real, then pulled off a bubble with testing set up in advance and not a single found case of COVID. Look at resources, competence, incentives: the star performers were firms. Throughout the broader course of American history, in his view, big business has mostly been a hero.

Why the negativity? Fridman offers in-flight Wi-Fi: the moment it exists, people complain that the connection is shitty. Twitter enabled a platform of communication, and the loudest talk is about the censorship of a few individuals, including the removal of Donald Trump. Cowen does not think we can fix it. Humans are beings of high neuroticism. Ten nice things and one insult, and you are more bothered by the insult, especially if it is somewhat true. Congress catches a lot of grief, some deserved. Religion is not attacked the same way, but religiosity is declining. The military still polls well. People are disillusioned with many things. Martin Gurri’s thesis is the mechanism: because of the internet you see more of things, and the more you see of something — good, bad, or in between — the more you will find to complain about. Clubhouse, then new, drew New York *Times* pieces asking whether it would wreck things. Give people who are getting something done a chance, Cowen says. A very Randian point.

Clubhouse itself he has enjoyed and does not think is for him in the long run. Podcasting has greater reach, and his core asset is that he is a very fast reader; audio is not to his advantage, and he listens at 1.0x. Live rooms have a magic Fridman loves — Elon Musk asking Robinhood’s Vlad if someone is holding a gun to his head — and a tribute to Steve Jobs, anecdotes stepping up without a one-to-one format, is 110 percent what the app is for. Loneliness, Cowen thinks, will persist after vaccines. People have broken ties. Fridman suspects an iceberg of loneliness even in happy relationships, something AIs might one day soothe. Cowen’s jab: why not program your own session, characters included, better than ordinary Clubhouse if not Elon and Putin? What current systems lack is long-term memory, Fridman says — sharing highs and lows. Immigration is the American version of that glue. Texas and California are not going to break off. We have been through too much together.

Eric Weinstein’s line is that the American system assumes growth forever. Cowen had long agreed with Weinstein, Peter Thiel, Robert Gordon, and others that growth had slowed; that was the argument of *The Great Stagnation* in 2011, and even then he called it temporary, maybe gone in twenty years. The last two years have made him much more optimistic. Breakthroughs are arriving in clusters: green energy and batteries; mRNA vaccines that will repair GDP and save millions of lives; a malaria vaccine in stage-three trials that probably works; CRISPR for sickle-cell anemia; space. Many of them, he says, are rooted in superior computation, ultimately Moore’s law and access to it. Driverless vehicles, even partial, will be a big deal. A New York *Times* symposium of “experts” in April had guessed vaccines in four years at best; we beat that by a mile. His remaining pessimism is not that innovation will trickle. Whenever there are major new technologies they tend to be used for violence, directly or indirectly. Radio did not hit people over the head; it enabled dictators. The new tools will cause a lot of trouble. He is bullish on America in general, and will not forecast the rest of the century.

Communism, like capitalism, means too many things. His life as a tenured professor comes closer to communism than anything the human race has seen, and it works pretty well. The Soviet Union devolved quickly into a decentralized set of destructive incentives: not even central planning, weird mixes of barter and malfunctioning prices, good at a bunch of things, a failure at progress, innovation, and consumer goods. It required an ever-increasing pile of lies. By the end the elite no longer believed, and number 30 in the hierarchy was better off as a middle-class person in Switzerland. Prices set too low, shortages, a culture of bartered bribes and favors, information decaying until no one believed. Putin still rides a few years of excellent growth from 1999–2000. Since then, stretches of negative four to five percent. The economy is too dependent on fossil fuels. The structural problem is concordance: economic, social, and political power do not have to be identical, but they have to be allocated consistently. Putin’s incentives are to keep economic power in a small number of hands, undiversified. As set up now, the system will not deliver sustainable gains in living standards — except some good years if fossil prices spike.

Putin’s high approval rating is, for Cowen, a bearish signal. Control of the press inflates it; anyone discussed by the press looks worse, as Singapore knows and tech executives are learning. He does not think it is all insincere. He would feel better about the country if people were more pissed off. Entrepreneurial culture is thin, and it is history as much as today’s rules: hostility to commerce that outlived the USSR, corruption, a legacy distribution of wealth from the auctioning of assets that is not conducive to a broadly egalitarian democracy. A few power points control information and wealth and are not keen to encourage others. The return of the old Orthodox Church is the same piece: not pro-commerce, traditionalist, pro-family, safer ideas. The safety valve is talent outflow. The most ambitious learn English, can blend in anywhere, leave, and are not a source of opposition. That keeps the whole thing running another generation.

China has done amazing things and, compared with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, has still done much worse, not even close, on living standards and on freedom. The CCP, for a while, was really good at governing. Cowen does not know how long that streak lasts with so much authority in one person; selection pressures for the next generation of high-level members probably get worse. State-owned enterprises are losing relative productivity. Holding Jack Ma on an island so he can issue weird hello statements “kind of smells bad.” He does not see China crashing, or supplanting America as number one; enough talent to muddle through with very serious problems. A common mistake: post-Mao, the Party dismantled the iron rice bowl — healthcare protections, a lot of the welfare system, guaranteed jobs. China’s economic rise coincided with the weakening of welfare. By a lot of economic metrics, not control over lives, the United States has more government than they do. What they do consistently is a one-way meritocracy: rich kids get unfair privilege the system can afford; a smart kid from the countryside with nothing is elevated by exams into good schools. The Soviets had a version of that for chess and Romantic piano, and where they had it they were tremendous. Jack Ma was riding a bicycle teaching English in his late twenties. UBI, for Cowen, makes the most sense as a Mitt Romney version for kids. Before the pandemic, the two most robot-intensive societies, Japan and the United States in manufacturing, were at full employment. A high UBI that lets you sit at home will make loneliness worse. Heirs to fortunes are almost never important novelists. Inheriting too much money is like winning a prize. On Weinstein, two more fights in this time-slice: immigration of scientists (Cowen wants more, including Katalin Karikó stubbornness America might not have produced) and free trade (a good thing, with exceptions for vaccines and naval parts). His campaign slogan: open borders for Belarus.

What the hell is money? No one knows, Cowen says; probably no one ever knew. Medieval bills of exchange — were they money? Gold, silver, copper coins, metals counted as legal tender that did not always circulate, credit. Being confused about moneyness is the natural state of affairs, and if there is more of that, he is inclined to call it a good thing. Bitcoin has taken over a lot of the space held by gold, and that looks sustainable. He is not short Bitcoin and has no view that the price has to be other than wherever it is this minute. On the rest of crypto — prediction markets, DeFi, visions of using it for transactions — he is 40–60 optimistic, meaning somewhat more likely they fail than succeed, and he still takes them seriously. Bitcoin as one of the world’s main currencies, he does not think will happen. It is too costly. Holding it like gold may be fine; gold is also costly. Ethereum has some chance of being a more effective currency. He would bet against it, but he would not give you a definitive no.

Could Bitcoin hit a million dollars? We do not have a good theory of Bitcoin’s value. If people decide it is worth a million dollars, it is worth a million dollars. The analogy is Andy Warhol. Early shoe sketches, probably no value; a good Warhol now over $50 million. Bitcoin is on a similar trajectory, and he does not pretend to know where it stops. Warhol could be out of fashion in a century. You are not holding money. You are holding what people think of Andy Warhol. Warhols perform some money-like functions, even as collateral in ugly deals, and they are not basically money, nor is Bitcoin. Transactions velocity, if anything, is likely to fall. Dogecoin and celebrity coins he thinks of as baseball cards: every player has a card, stars’ cards are worth real money, a stable ecology for decades. Could LeBron James issue a currency instead of a card? Absolutely. Whether that is macroeconomically important, he doubts. If it is a new class of collectibles people have fun with, bring it on.

Fiat, in his lived example, works really well. He sent money to a family he helps support in Ethiopia; they had it in less than 24 hours, through BB&T, a “primitive dinosaur” Mid-Atlantic bank headquartered in North Carolina, Fed-chartered, FDIC- and OCC-regulated. The exchange rate was not so great. Once you count last-mile problems, he does not see crypto close to beating that, and people are not sitting around complaining about fiat. Crypto people who must postulate an out-of-the-blue hyperinflation with no evidence are, to him, not thinking clearly about how hard they have to work. Same pattern as autonomous vehicles: exciting, and not trivial to outcompete a human-driven Uber on cost, effectiveness, and experience. The Biden people, he says, will regulate crypto soon. Some of DeFi’s cheapness is regulatory arbitrage and will not be allowed to go on forever. The banking lobby is strong; capital and reporting requirements will eat a lot of the advantage. He would rather see more tolerance. He does not expect it.

Tell a group of people, coordinated through the internet, that you are going to play a fun game, it might cost you money, you will make headlines, and there is a chance you will screw over some billionaires and hedge funds, and enough people will play. Cowen does not think WallStreetBets is of macroeconomic importance. The medium-term price of those stocks will end up wherever it ought to be. He thinks of it as a new brand of esports, maybe more fun than the old brand, more expensive than chess, a place to push anarchy into a corner where he does not mind it. People see a real macro phenomenon — everyone is weirder now — and then force every micro story to fit the narrative. GameStop fits the narrative. That does not mean its importance does.

The internet either allows us to be weirder or makes us weirder; probably both. Imagine you are a bit weird and neurotic, and the only messages you get are Dwight D. Eisenhower, *I Love Lucy*, and network TV. That keeps you within bounds, good and bad. That frame is gone. You can connect to QAnon and to all sorts of fantastic things. Chess players today play far more weird openings than twenty years ago, because they can research any line online. Does it matter? Probably not. A lot of what we see is just weird chess openings. Figuring out which lines are openings and which are fundamental to a new, growing weirdness is what a hedge-fund type should be trying to do. Cowen thinks no one knows yet. The guessing game is itself part of the fun.

On science, Fridman says MIT’s machine-learning world resists the weird, and it is hard to hire weird faculty. Cowen and Weinstein split here too: Weinstein thinks academia is totally bankrupt; Cowen thinks it is only partly bankrupt. The fix is up-and-coming schools that end up better than where they started. MIT was once one of them. In some areas it has become the problem. Chicago is not up-and-coming, but it is still different, and that is great. The biggest problem is rank-absurd conformism at second-tier schools, maybe top 40 but not top dozen, trying to be a junior MIT: mediocre, copycat, the most dogmatic enforcers of the new weirdness. Harvard is more open than those places. They climb the rankings by another three spots, never touching MIT, and that direction is harmful. Better they pick a model, like Chicago or Caltech, and be weird in it. They might fail. That is socially better. Junior faculty are the most boring of faculty: technically interesting work, passion ground down, drudges. A few sneak by, a young Max Tegmark who knows how to play boring and does the weird on the side. They are few. The Broad Institute in biomedical, Cowen suspects, supports junior weirdness more than the formal departments. Diversity talk has oddly become a new mechanism for enforcing conformity. The conformity machine finds the hot topic and uses it. Why doesn’t MIT kick Stanford’s and Google’s ass in deep learning? CSAIL used to be a beacon. Have those meetings too. The humanities, he is optimistic about: they innovated through podcasts, including his and Fridman’s, a huge end run on the internet while university humanities took the bad press. Fridman’s show is outcompeting the Media Lab. The internet will outrace universities for a long time, maybe forever. That is all right if they keep in.

Cowen has argued that UFO sightings should be taken more seriously, a rare stance against his usual circle. The Navy data seemed quite serious to him, even though he does not pretend to have the technical ability to judge it. Numerous senators at the highest levels, and former CIA director John Brennan — Cowen interviewed him — sat down, were briefed by their smartest people, and around the table the answer was: we don’t know. Brennan, in Cowen’s telling, put alien origin as the single most likely explanation. You do not have to agree. If you know how government works, that sociological data is something Cowen takes very seriously. He has not seen a technical debunking of the eyewitness reports, images, and radar. The taboo means people with good equipment do not collect, which leaves Bigfoot-blurry video and a divide: scientists ignore it, the curious public leans in, the government leaks confusion.

He still suspects the objects are not of alien origin. The gung-ho case is reasoning in reverse, an argument from elimination: not a Russian advanced vehicle, not Chinese, not people from Earth’s future, therefore aliens. You can talk yourself into a lot of mistaken ideas that way. The positive evidence that it is aliens is still quite weak. The positive evidence that it is a puzzle is quite huge. Whatever the solution is may be fascinating, or trivial in a way that is weird on its own. When Avi Loeb is attacked rather than answered, Cowen gets suspicious of the critics. If Loeb is wrong about ‘Oumuamua, tell him why; his ears are open. Dismissing Nietzsche or Rand the same way is unproductive. Wisdom is in the meeting of the debate.

If everything were declassified, Cowen thinks we would find a lot more evidence, all pointing toward the same puzzle. There are not alien men being held underground. There is not a secret file that lays out whatever is happening. The real lesson about government is that it cannot bring itself to any new belief on this matter. Government is more puzzled than it wants to admit, which he is actually okay with; it should not panic people in the streets. At some point it should take the thing truly seriously, the way it should have approved the AstraZeneca vaccine, which does work, and had not. He is not sure the government has that mental capability.

Most of us do not long to create art. Cowen’s guess is that about 10 percent of humans do, which is a lot and still somewhat weird. He does not aspire to it. Nonfiction writing is art-like and a different urge. Pay him $500 to spend an hour painting and he would be happy when the hour ended, not proud of the result. As a young man he played guitar, never well, because he wanted to know how chords work, how jazz improvisation works, how blues differs from classical guitar. You can learn a lot without being good, or trying to be. The two most moving works he has encountered, by a clear margin, are both Michelangelo: the *Pietà* in the Vatican and the *David* in Florence. You cannot pull them out of historical context; standing in Florence or the Vatican already primes you. Technically, in how they express the emotion of human form, he thinks they are the two greatest at that job. In painting, the work that stunned him at 23 was Vermeer’s *The Art of Painting* in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum: reproductions had not prepared him for the scale of the thing in front of him, and the city was priming him too. It is not his current favorite. It is the historical peak of being blown away.

The single biggest mistake really smart people make, he says, is to think contemporary art or contemporary music is a load of junk. It is a kind of mathematics they have not learned yet, hard to learn, maybe impossible for some. There is a large community of super-smart, well-educated people who spend their lives with it, love it, talk about it in a common language. To think they are all frauds just is not true. You do not have to like it, as you do not have to like a particular house of music. For him it is highly rewarding, and if someone does not get it he has the conceited response of thinking that in that area he is simply smarter. Eric Weinstein is in general smarter than he is. When it comes to contemporary artistic creations, Cowen says he is smarter than Weinstein. The learning curve is steep for many people, because you have to know the story. The distribution is funny: some small children get abstract art more easily, a wall of color they fall in love with, while Vermeer or Rembrandt leaves them cold. Entry barriers are super high or super low, not that often in between. It is one of the most profound bodies of human thought out there, part of the humanities. There are also people who do not like podcasts.

Last meal, if Fridman were to murder him in the suit: fly to Hermosillo in northern Mexico. Oaxaca and Puebla might be as good or better, but he has spent a lot of time there; scarcity still holds, and he wants one more dose of a city he had only two days in. The food is nominally the Mexican food Americans think they know — burritos, fajitas — and tastes nothing like it, which makes it the most radical, because you have to rethink everything you thought you understood. Hardly any tourists; nothing to see except eat; dirt cheap; you sweet-talk a taxi driver into the best stands. Beef dry-aged in the air until it turns green, in a way the FDA would never permit, and phenomenal. Many more kinds of chili, fresher. Wheat territory, not corn, more diverse and complex. Unpasteurized cheeses, legal throughout Mexico, white and gooey. The food chain does not rely on refrigeration. Russia and the United States were early pioneers in food refrigeration, which made a lot of their food worse quite early, and it took a long time to dig out, because they are big countries with long rail systems, easy to freeze and ship. There is also no brain drain out of cooking. In the United States a talented person is pulled a thousand ways. In Mexico, as in China and India, the density of talent in food is high.

Sushi’s obsessive perfection he analogizes to the Beatles’ White Album. People think it is simple and not overproduced. In a funny way it is their most overproduced album, produced just perfectly. It is really hard to make music sound that simple and not like sludge. *Let It Be* has great songs; a lot of it sounds like sludge — “One After 909,” “I Dig a Pony.” “Dear Prudence” sounds perfect and simple; “Cry Baby Cry” is not simple; “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is super complex. Sushi is like that, starting with the rice: refine it until it appears super simple, which is the most complex thing of all. Cowen is happy they do it and feels bad about it. He thinks of the masters as sacrificial victims he benefits from. Ten years packing rice before they let you do anything else, like Indian sarod players tapping rhythms for five years. Fridman, from years of martial-arts drilling, and from people who sit in monasteries, offers the other side: you start to see beauty in the tiniest details, a free lunch in not moving around so much. Cowen thinks that is like art. Some percent of people are like that. Most are not. His own free lunch is to move around a lot in search of lunch.

Three books that marked him: Plato’s dialogues, which he started at thirteen; Rand’s *Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal*; and Friedrich Hayek’s essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” in *Individualism and Economic Order*. A copper mine has trouble in Chile or Bolivia; the price of copper rises; around the world people economize, look for substitutes, change production, change what they buy, build homes a different way. One tiny change in information, and society reorganizes in a coherent way across many dimensions. Hayek laid that out very clearly. It is an AI problem, Cowen tells Fridman, and for many things we have already solved it. At thirteen or fourteen he learned the distributed nature of things, and also the constraint of attention: how little we can take in, and how many advances of modern civilization are a response to that limit. Open-access versions of the essay are online. You do not need the whole book.

Advice for a young person is mostly context-specific. Two generic pieces. First, get a mentor, for a career and for anything you want to learn. People write him asking what book to read on contemporary art. That is probably not going to work. You need someone to frame the books, take you around, talk. Get as many mentors as you can. Bad mentors do not do that much damage, because they are easy to drop and hard to maintain; good ones are busy, bad ones are busy, and you can try them on. His undergraduate mentor was a Stalinist who edited *The Essential Stalin*, a brilliant man. Was a Stalinist a good mentor for a Hayek fan? No. For a year it was tremendous, including a tour through Soviet and Eastern European science fiction. How do you find one? Be interesting, be direct, and try. There is no perfect formula. It is amazing how many people do not even do those things. Second, build a small group of peers, not necessarily your age, often your age if you are younger, broadly similar interests, different points of view, talking every day or almost every day about the thing you care about. You like them; they like you; you care what you think of each other. That is for human connection and for the development of ideas, and those are not that different. The Beatles were a classic small group, with drama; the Florentine artists too. Small groups tend to split up, which is fine, like mentoring relationships ending. It is remarkable how little has been done that was not done in small groups.

Love has layers. The lowest is Darwinian: if we were not this way we would not have reproduced and built alliances, and that answer is far from complete. The highest is poetic; start with Keats. Cowen’s wife was born in Moscow, in Sokolniki. He adopted his daughter, not her biological father, and genuinely raised her; she was born in Russia and came at one. He is a New Jersey boy, not a Russian soul. His father-in-law had died a week earlier, after six years in their house: lived in Russia until seventy, saw the Stalinist era, his own father sent to a camp, lived through World War II, never really learned English, part Armenian. Cowen absorbed something Russian from him. Division of labor: others in the family take care of that part; he is more superficial. His romanticism is Bruce Springsteen, specifically *Born to Run*, unfashionably the overproduced pop album, and in his view far and away the best on song quality, then *Darkness on the Edge of Town*. Every detail right, every lyric, Phil Spector-perfect, bursting onto the open road. He saw Springsteen young and was a little disappointed; like Led Zeppelin, more of a studio band than you think.

He does not think about his own mortality much, which is probably a good thing. Death will be bad. He would not say he is afraid of it. The worst thing about death is not knowing how the human story turns out. If, right before dying, he could read a Wikipedia page called “the rest of human history,” with a few days to absorb it — oh, 643 years from now, that is when all the atomic weapons went off, and here is what happened in between — he would feel much better dying. That is not how it will be. He hopes that page will not have a section on the meaning of it, because that section could be written now and will not be very good. There are no general statements about the meaning of life that have that much meaning. You get it by studying cultures, the arts, travel, mathematics, whatever your thing is. It is in Wikipedia in a bigger sense. He does not want to read the page on the meaning. No friend has ever sent it to him. He checked: it is mostly links to other sections. Fridman closes with Adam Smith: little else is required to carry a state to opulence from barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice.