50: Tyler Cowen & Nabeel Qureshi - An Appetite For More

[00:00] There's this funny race, approximately, it's between, obviously, Anthropic and OpenAI, but it's a race that never ends. But when you ask the question, when is this settled, maybe the answer is just never. People say, you know, I'm tired, and it's like, well, pace yourself. We're in the first inning, sir. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. So all these debates, is Claude conscious? I would way sooner ask, like, is Tyler conscious?

[00:30] philosophical self-refutation. I don't think I feel that much. I've never cried in front of a painting when I read these accounts. Oh, I saw the Madonna and I started weeping. It makes no sense to me. It's like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There's positive some gambles for you. Here's a few. Here's the S&P 500. A work of art has never made you cry. Never. I would say the last one, I think we saw this maybe together, was Memoria and the scene at the end where they're both lying by the river and there's some kind of weird transmission that takes place [01:00] That's too good a work of art for me to cry over.

[01:03] Why do you write books? I think Mentors and Mentees, which is the title of the next book, might be my last book. The world is changing very rapidly, and a book takes two and a half years or more. [01:14] I just want to cut in and say this is my least favorite Tyler take. [01:18] Welcome to Dialectic, episode 50, with Tyler Cowen and Nabeel Qureshi. I wanted to do something special for episode 50, and Tyler Cowen is somebody who, frankly, I was a little intimidated to interview. My friend Nabeel Qureshi, who had been on the show, episode 13, one of my favorites, who's become somebody I've learned a tremendous amount from, had suggested Tyler a few times.

And I, frankly, I think Tyler's a little bit incompressible, so I wasn't sure about my normal dialectic style. And so I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point [01:48] of them. If you're not familiar with Tyler, he is a PhD economist at George Mason University and leads the Mercatus Center, but he is also so many other things. He's blogged almost every day for over 20 years at Marginal Revolution. He has interviewed hundreds of people on his podcast, Conversations with Tyler. He's one of the best interviewers in the world. He's written nearly 20 books.

Tyler and Nabil both are prolific, brilliant generalists, [02:12] So I decided to focus most of the conversation on an area that I know is common ground for them, which is art and aesthetics, and for lack of a better word, taste. In the conversation, you'll hear it. Tyler says Nabil has some of the best taste of anyone he knows, particularly in movies, which is actually how they got to know each other. And I wanted to talk to these two about great art and why they respond to it. We also talk about AI and acceleration, commitments, what is sacred, mentorship, friendship, and much more.

[02:42] almost anything. And the moderator certainly isn't doing much heavy lifting. So I was just glad to be in the room. I hope you enjoy the conversation. And thank you for coming along for the ride for 50 episodes so far of Dialectic. I hope to see you. [02:57] for 50 more and beyond. You can get a full transcript for the show and all the linked references in the description below. And before we get into the things, I'd like to thank Notion Dialectics presenting partner. [03:06] Speaking of 50 episodes, Notion came on board towards the end of last year, and it's been an amazing journey to have them support the show and make so much more possible.

Notion is a collaborative workspace for your life's work that has reinvented itself for the AI era. Some of you may know Notion from using it in the past and see it as a great, [03:26] collaborative workspace, a great note-taking tool, a great database tool, whatever. But I think Notion is incredibly well-suited to the AI era because of how important context is for using these tools, whether it be individual models, plugging into tools like Codex and Cloud Code, being able to have a shared substrate for you and everyone you collaborate with.

[03:47] that [03:48] Updates in real time that treats models and agents as first-class citizens and is up-to-date with every single model as soon as it's released is remarkably powerful. Notion is the harness, it's the context layer, it's the canvas that holds all of that for me, for dialectic, for research I'm doing, for understanding guests, for thinking about who might be able to come on the show in the future, and for preparing things for all of you. [04:18] The goal for us and our collaborators and increasingly these new intelligences to think together and do great work.

You can learn more at com slash dialectic. And I think you'll be pretty blown away, especially if you haven't checked things out in a while. With that, here is my conversation with Tyler Cowen and Nabeel Qureshi. [04:39] Gentlemen. [04:40] Thank you for being with me. [04:42] Thank you for coming over. Or I should say thank you for having us, Tyler. As I was just telling you guys, I'm excited to... [04:48] use Nabil as a little bit of an entry point to the... [04:52] Incompressible Tyler Cowen, it's an honor to be with you.

I want to start with this piece that Nabeel and Will Manitis wrote fairly recently on Rented Virtue. [05:01] and [05:03] It's an essay about a few different things. I think it's an essay about... [05:06] work and secular institutions and religion and God, uh, [05:11] But I think maybe more than anything else, it's an essay about commitments. [05:16] or at least a big part of what it's about is about commitments. And so I guess my first question is for Tyler, but maybe we can open it up to both of you, which is can a society sustain itself effectively [05:28] without [05:29] some level of sacred commitments.

[05:32] I think about this all the time. If I ponder Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, they seem on the surface quite secular societies. [05:41] But you could say they're all built upon earlier matrices. Christianity in the case of Sweden and the United Kingdom, something more complex. [05:50] in the case of Japan. So empirically, you know, how distant do you have to be from your origins before you say the society is not built upon that anymore? [06:01] I think there's a lot of momentum in this, that a lot of people in Japan are genuinely afloat in some sense.

Maybe that's why they're not as happy as they might be. But it is a society. It's one of the most wonderful places on Earth, even though I feel they're missing something fundamental. So I do think it's possible. I'm not sure it's desirable. [06:24] I think of the saying, I think it's like everything is about sex except sex, which is about power. And I feel like the modern equivalent of that is like everything is about AI, except AI, which is about power. And so actually, I feel like in the shadows of that piece, it's really about acceleration.

So if you read, I think one of the philosophers that's very important for the current moment is Nick Land. [06:54] There's a very powerful thing he puts his finger on in this concept of just pure acceleration, right? Acceleration with no human end or purpose in mind. And it does increasingly feel like that is where we are going eventually, right? If you believe that AGI is coming and AI is accelerating, then you kind of just get hyper, hyper capitalism. So the piece kind of traces this arc of commerce from... [07:21] Initially, a thing that's very much tangled with how we view goodness and morality and virtue and religion, right?

So you've got the Quakers, you've got Adam Smiths. [07:30] um and the implicit thing is like okay we're here now where they're kind of coming apart [07:35] but... [07:36] Unless we, I'm not saying we have to do something, but there is some sense in which they're going to come apart very, very aggressively in the next 50 years. And do we actually want that or not? And I think that was the animating question for me in writing that piece. [07:48] I don't think you need the word eventually to describe this accelerationism.

It's happening now. There's this funny race, approximately. It's between, obviously, anthropic and open AI. But it's a race that never ends. Well, there's a separate race between the United States and China. But when you ask the question, when is this settled? When can we slow down? [08:08] When can you just retire and write this off as, you know, the way we did with the Cold War? [08:13] Maybe the answer is just never. And that, to me, is such a strange future. Yeah. Because it keeps on cycling itself, producing a better version of itself.

[08:22] Yes. Maybe at faster rates. [08:24] People say, you know, I'm tired, and it's like, well, pace yourself. We're in the first inning, sir. Yeah, exactly. Right. And then, you know, there's this debate right now over, like, are we seeing the beginnings of self-improvement or not? And clearly, in some sense, [08:38] It's beginning, but there's a question of how fast it will go up. Right. But things will get faster is the way to put it, I think. And the notion we all, I think, agree, like right now you should be working very hard.

You are working very hard. [08:52] Because the world's changing a lot, you need to be ready. And when you ask yourself the question, when can I stop working really hard and enjoy Keynes' 15 hours a week of work and lots of leisure? [09:03] If it keeps on accelerating and change doesn't let up, [09:08] Again, you're asking, when does that day come? [09:11] You don't think we have more leisure time now as a society? [09:15] We had it until very recently. Now when a new model comes out, half of me is excited.

The other half of me looks at my calendar and says, oh, no, could you please wait a week? I don't have time to play around with it just now. [09:28] And there may be a point where [09:30] You can just stop worrying about such things and ignore it. But I don't see that being next year. [09:36] Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, the number of weekend days I've burned just playing with Claude Kudel Kodak for these new things, but also like... [09:43] you know, there's... [09:45] The point is, as these things get better, I think the returns to doing very human things also go up, right?

So like, the returns to certain deal making, for example, are much higher now, because if you make the right deal, then the amount of value you can unlock with the AI is much higher. And so I'm also flying around everywhere making deals at the same time. You've got to learn the AI to make the right deal, right? Yeah. And it's like the bottle of wine that keeps on getting better as it ages. Like, well, I'll make an even better deal tomorrow once I learn more about the AI. [10:15] But do you think there's something to that?

You know, young people are going to mass more and there's kind of this Catholic revival online. Do you feel like we'll get this religious revival coming back a little bit? [10:26] I see it within the elites. I don't see it at the mass level. And I know there's New York Times stories, young men in the Orthodox Church, [10:34] But in the aggregate, it's hard to see in the numbers. Hmm. [10:38] But the people I know, it's massive. [10:42] Do you think that markets can form virtue in us, or does the virtue have to come from something outside of it?

It's two ways and endogenous. So markets can boost virtue. I don't think they can form it. A lot of it is just in you genetically. And then you hope to have some beneficial interaction with the environment, where the virtue supports the environment, the environment further supports the virtue, and so on. The West, for a lot of its history, has had that. [11:08] For how long that keeps on going, I guess we're going to test that proposition. [11:12] There's no reason why it has to go on forever. It might be self-undercutting, right?

That's Albert Hirschman's famous claim that the real problem with capitalism is it works so well, it becomes self-undercutting at some margin. [11:25] Are we forming... [11:27] you could take a view that we're basically forming [11:31] the intelligences of the future primarily with markets. [11:36] Like we are instilling them with the values of markets. [11:41] Maybe you guys disagree, but if that's true and there isn't [11:44] some other place virtue is coming from and we are in full speed ahead. Like where, where do you think that leaves us? [11:52] I think we are doing that, but we are also – there are only so many frontier AIs, right?

And so somebody like, you know, Amanda at Anthropic or somebody like that who's writing The Soul of Claude,, actually potentially has a lot of influence, you could argue. Now, the other side of that would be, well – [12:11] eventually Claude will be in the shape that market demand wants it to be, right? So, like, you could kind of make the argument two ways. Same with Grok. I mean, if you look at it, like, clearly the way it behaves is in part... [12:21] the way that Elon wants it to... [12:23] behave.

But I always joke that if I were... [12:27] let's say a Mormon missionary or a particularly religious person, I would be going and camping outside the offices of the AI companies and I would try to send my brightest young people to get jobs there and essentially like influence the AIs to adhere to your particular religion. Cause I think I actually do think religious values could be a really interesting thing. [12:45] attractor for the AIs to behave in the ways we want them to be just as they are for human beings.

[12:50] So far, the AIs seem to be evolving in a manner similar to pets. Coexistence and mutuality with humans, that's the better case scenario. I don't see that changing soon, but it may not be that way forever. I once joked, the AIs you really need to worry about are the Wall Street AIs, because they're not really taught to cooperate with humans. And the normal AIs that everyone talks about, they're just going to be like puppy dogs, more or less forever. [13:16] Do you think current competition is making open AI and anthropic AIs more likely to trend towards being what you mean by Wall Street AIs, though?

No, it's making them more like pets. Really? Like Spinoza the dog. He's hanging around the house. He's so nice. He's so sweet. He'll come over. He wants to be petted. [13:33] He'll wag his tail at you or whatever. And yeah, I think that's what we're seeing. Yeah. So for business, for example, you need it to be reliable, right? And so like an AI that tells you it's written the code and then you check and it hasn't actually written the code, which they do in some cases right now. That's considered a bad behavior and it will get stamped out over time.

[13:51] So you'll get kind of the maximally helpful AI eventually. [13:55] So a certain degree of centralization and high fixed cost might be good because you only get pet-like AIs. But as AI becomes really cheap, fixed costs fall. [14:04] Again, like the Wall Street AIs, you might have very, very good AIs not bound by those same selection pressures. [14:10] And then you should start worrying. [14:12] And you see this when people think about AI and war, even if it's the good guys, [14:18] running the AIs. Over time, you might be evolving AIs that are, in fact, trained to kill.

And in many instances, of course, that's what you want. But the longer term repercussions of that, you know, should make us nervous. [14:30] Yeah, I can't help but... [14:31] The comparison to pets, while [14:34] It makes a ton of sense. I think of, I mean, you wrote a piece for Wired years ago about [14:38] Maybe the argument that in referencing Ilya Satzkever talking about AI is becoming something like a loving parent to humanity. But a parent and a pet are very, very different. [14:47] form factors, I can't help but feel that a pet is...

[14:51] Maybe where we are today, but certainly not where we are a year or two from now in terms of its stature. [14:57] Yeah, my point in that piece, which like... [15:01] I think it was behind a paywall, so I didn't think it was read very widely, but I was quite proud of it because my argument was basically like, you are not going to get anywhere by trying to control how the AI responds in all these restrictive ways, right? So you hear this concept of, oh, we have to make sure that...

[15:16] given the same input, the AI produces the same output or things like that, we need to make it more reliable. And to me, like this is, you're not taking AI seriously enough, right? Like at the limit, AI has become like other agents, they become other people, practically speaking. And so how do you [15:32] When you have a child, how do you educate the child? You teach it morals or you teach it religion or whatever. You imbue it with the right values. It kind of figures out what you mean by them in some mysterious way, and then it ends up behaving in roughly the ways you want it to.

And my point there was like, I think we're going to have to [15:50] teach the AIs to adhere to some of those same values, whether it's through teaching them religion and the kind of facetious way of putting it is like love is all you need, right? You need to teach them how to love, which is like, it's a little bit of a provocative framing. But yeah, I do think like you need to figure out how to put the right values in them. And like that is going to become more important as they exceed human intelligence.

[16:11] But if you want to hunt for worries, at some point there'll be an open source. Call it an S&M. [16:15] AI, right? And it won't be very important. It won't even be the best or strongest AI, but over time it might evolve in strange ways. And if the world is going to end, [16:25] Maybe we can blame other people who practice S&M and then train their AIs to help them. And the normal AIs, again, that everyone worries about, they're just going to be like docile pets. [16:34] Right. Well, I think this is the case for, I think Vitalik came up with this term defensive acceleration, right?

And so the idea is simply that you, the good guys get the AIs first, and then you kind of patch up the world such that it's very robust. And then by the time something like what Tyler said happens, you've kind of like hardened the defenses enough that the defenders will always win. And that's why we should be accelerationists for the most part. Yes. Yeah. [16:58] to maybe go back to the beginning of the first... [17:00] part of that conversation. I'm curious for you, Tyler, [17:05] Is anything sacred for you? [17:07] I'm not a religious person, so when you ask what is sacred, I could take that in a number of ways.

[17:14] in some ways, a fairly religious life in the Protestant sense of being oriented toward projects. [17:21] and feeling that I need to fulfill a certain personal role in those projects. And if you want to call that sacred by any other name, I wouldn't object. [17:29] but I don't deploy the word myself. [17:31] And [17:33] You've talked a lot about [17:35] increasing productivity, um, [17:38] Is there anything more ideologically that you're, [17:41] particularly committed to. [17:43] Aesthetics in my personal life, obviously particular personal connections, curiosity, travel. I'm very strongly committed to all those.

[17:53] So [17:55] I think there's a maybe... [17:57] This is... [17:59] maybe not the right word, but there's a sort of liberal view that says we should choose individual-aided commitments, basically. Kind of along the way you just described, I think I would relate to that. I think Namil would relate to that. [18:11] Part of maybe the idea at least rooted in the Quaker stuff that you guys were exploring is like a commitment that is – [18:16] not only outside of yourself, which I would describe the things you just set up, [18:20] as being that, but also like [18:23] Um, [18:24] part of a larger whole or something like that?

Do you relate to anything in that way? [18:29] Or not really. I think I'm very mundane in many ways. And when Mark Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective. Yeah. I know he got slammed for that. But I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. [18:43] I focus on it. [18:44] I want to go see places I haven't seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. [18:51] I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but actually, to me, those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things.

And I'm fine with that. [19:01] What about your influence? [19:03] I don't know. I think influence is quite temporary and my influence will not survive my passing. But I think you're deeply influential now. [19:13] Maybe. [19:14] You know, there's so many nonlinear effects. Who's really influencing? It's very hard to say. I would say don't worry about it too much. If you are going to be influential, [19:24] You'll be less influential if that's what you're trying to maximize. Ah. I feel like one way of putting this maybe is like you – [19:31] You are a very exterior person.

Everything is exterior. You want to write something and push it out. You want to travel the world and interact with it. It's like you don't value your inner states necessarily so much. [19:42] You're like in the world, right? Well, I think I'm not that conscious to get a little more radical here. So all these debates, is Claude conscious? I would way sooner ask, like, is Tyler conscious? [19:52] And I'm sure I am a bit. If I were not at all, there'd be an obvious self-contradiction. [19:57] Right? The transcendental argument here does apply.

But at the same time, I like to say I'm only conscious enough to avoid philosophical self-refutation. [20:07] And I think the real me is mostly underneath, as it is with all people. And there's this thin veneer of feeling in charge that somehow nature chose to give us. [20:16] And I'm fine with that. Maybe I don't want to be more conscious. Like I'm used to how it is. It's gone well for me. [20:23] How about you? We're surrounded by a lot of sacred art. Do you feel like if you were more religious, you would see it differently or something like that?

Yeah. [20:32] If I were more religious, it would be harder for me to have all this art around. Some of it is a kind of pagan Catholicism. Some of it is Asian voodoo religion. Some of it is Soviet art. [20:42] And I'd have all these inner conflicts, like, what am I doing with this? What am I doing with that? And being what I call a non-believer, [20:49] Maybe agnostic, maybe atheist, but a non-believer. I can enjoy it all, learn from it. [20:55] be in this intense environment where it's around me every day and just take it in and still relax.

[21:01] It's like not a statement in the way that it might be for a religious person. I've had religious people come over here and they're terrified by the voodoo art. And they're like, Tyler, why do you have that here? [21:12] It's like it's not going to come and get you. [21:16] But they don't quite believe that either. [21:18] And these would be Christians, you know, not practitioners of voodoo. There was once a Nigerian woman over here. [21:24] who did have ties to native Nigerian religions, and I think she was terrified.

[21:29] Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, I don't have that burden. [21:33] I feel like I'm sort of an art as experience guy, right? So I do feel like the... [21:38] the experience of encountering a work of art is the thing that we value in it and like what what sort of happens inside you, if you will. Right. So like, [21:46] I don't know if we disagree on that, but it feels like you sort of emphasize it less in some ways. [21:50] Yeah, maybe. I'm sure you've read those... [21:54] Well, the people who understand art the best are the museum guards.

I don't think that's a crazy opinion. It's not quite correct, but it's closer to correct than many people would like to think. I love going to a gallery and you see the guards and they're all scrolling that phone. And it's like Van Gogh's everywhere. But they look at it plenty. Yeah. And most of them who typically are not that well educated, they do grow to love abstract art. [22:16] or works that might be strange, rejected often by many more educated people, because they just spend so much time with it, and it starts making sense to them.

[22:24] And I give that kind of response a fair amount of priority. [22:28] Did you ever have a moody sort of German romantic phase, like maybe when you were a teenager or something? Well, when I lived in Germany, it was a big thing. It's partly why I went to Germany, but it wasn't that moody. [22:39] I would say it was distanced romantic phase, which is this contradiction in terms. But I wanted to read Goethe. I wanted to live in South Germany. I wanted to imbibe all of that, which today, by the way, is mostly gone.

But this was early to mid-1980s. [22:54] And then you still felt it. [22:56] So I was in Freiburg, [22:58] which is where Hayek actually was living. Heidegger had connections there. It was fantastic. [23:04] We have a mutual friend who I won't name, but their take is that you're actually a deeply emotional person, but you sort of like push it to one corner of your mind and don't interact with it too much. [23:16] I think I have a fair degree of equanimity. And every morning I wake up happy. [23:24] Thank you.

[23:25] Do you experience art? [23:27] Primarily by thinking or by feeling? [23:29] I don't even know what those words mean. I experienced it by looking at it. [23:34] I don't think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it's pleasure, and I feel I learn a lot from it. And then when I go out and look at other works of art or just the world – [23:43] I see a lot more that people may not who don't live with art. [23:47] I don't think I feel that much [23:50] I've never cried in front of a painting when I read these accounts.

Oh, I saw the Madonna and I started weeping. [23:56] It makes no sense to me. [23:58] It's like people who do sports gambling. It's like, why do you do that? There's positive some gambles for you. Here's a few. Here's the S&P 500. A work of art has never made you cry. [24:09] Never. No film, no novel, nothing. If there's a really schlocky film, and like the hero is rescued at the end, there's like a few tears, typically in lesser movies rather than great works of art. [24:22] But I go to museums of the world now.

Nothing brings me at all close to crying. [24:27] Or laughing, for that matter. [24:29] What's interesting to me, though, is that there are a lot of people in the world who are probably... [24:35] Closer in the Venn diagram to you, especially on the surface, than the [24:41] highly emotional art lover or the traditional person when you think about an artist. And yet you seem to, Nabil and I were talking about this, you seem to love art more than almost anyone else. [24:49] I've ever met. [24:50] And that's peculiar, I should say.

[24:54] I think that entire description is true. [24:59] Where are you on the spectrum, so to speak? Yeah, I mean, I think I do have strong emotional responses to work. I guess I would probably cry maybe once every three years in response to something. It's like not a super high rate, but something really good will come along and evoke that response. And what makes you cry? [25:19] Um... [25:22] I think when just, you know, it's almost like... [25:25] It's like you said, when you're looking at it, right? And then it's like your whole body is responding to it or something.

And then it's almost like something... [25:31] overflows like i would say the last one i think we saw this maybe together was memoria and the scene at the end where they're both lying by the river and there's some kind of weird transmission that right takes place moved me to tears yeah so that's too good a work of art for me to cry over yeah so i'm something like the final scene of top gun i might shed two or three tears oh my god like out of embarrassment i don't defend this [25:56] But it does motivate me to do that.

It makes me suspicious of crying, in fact. I don't feel like, oh, I should be crying at... [26:04] you know, the Rembrandt painting, I feel, oh, I should be suspicious of crying. Yeah, I didn't necessarily think it's [26:11] what I would call an intelligent response as sort of just a fact about the world, I think. But, um, I do, I do think that, uh, the experience of being emotionally moved by an artwork as part of the value we, [26:24] get out of it in some way like i think if you don't experience any emotions when you're seeing it but you still consider it very valuable that's like harder for me to pass if that makes sense [26:33] Like what's emotions, what's cognition?

Right. That's quite blurry for me. Okay. Yeah. [26:39] But the tears you do not see, that I can report. [26:43] I will say, I don't cry a lot, but the causality is quite random. Like, I cry during NBA highlights sometimes, like watching LeBron in 2016. [26:52] I... [26:53] That moves me, I guess. That makes some sense, yeah. [26:56] Do you cry at all in your life? [26:59] No, not in decades. [27:02] In decades. Yeah, that I can... Now I can't think of anything. Hmm. [27:07] Hmm. [27:09] Nabil also wrote a piece recently about [27:12] What makes great art?

[27:14] And he has this kind of set of criteria in it where he's talking about surprise and echoes and depth and something that was absent from it. [27:23] that I was curious for your guys' perspective on is beauty. Obviously, beauty could be heavily wrapped up in all three of those things. But is beauty... [27:31] a necessary factor in great art. [27:34] Yeah, I was trying to go one level below that, I guess I should say. Like, to me, those things add up to what we call beauty. But the thing I was really just very puzzled by, right, is like, firstly, when you read AI writing, at least for me, I find it very irritating.

And like, I know a lot of people in whom that it evokes that response. [28:04] You know, they can do better math than many mathematicians now, right? So there's some ways in which they're extremely intelligent, and yet they can't produce an essay as good as, let's say, a Joan Didion essay or something like that. So it was like kind of why. [28:17] um and and and so to me if you just say well the paragraphs that's produce producers are not beautiful enough that's not really an answer because you're like okay well why and so i wanted to try and i don't think i fully succeeded by any means but i wanted to try and give more of like almost like an engineering answer to what some pieces of beauty might be and so that's why it's it's very like a mechanistic kind of essay right it's like if these words kind of are knitted [28:47] But I think beauty itself is like a very high level feature and you need to explain what it is.

[28:52] Isn't beauty a little boring, though? Like, if I ask you to name beautiful piece of music, beautiful work of art, don't you just seize up a bit and all of a sudden you're not sure what's actually beauty or maybe you like parts of it because it's ugly or... [29:06] Or Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, parts of it are scary or angry or sad, and that's why it works. It's actually not that beautiful, though it at first lures you in with some promise of beauty. [29:16] The opening measures. Right. Like when you say beauty, I think of Mozart or something like that.

But it's harder to apply it. So much of Mozart, the best Mozart is tragic, I think. Right. Or comic. Yeah. Yeah. But like something like you and I saw a concert recently by this band Sun O. And it's harder to describe that as beautiful straightforwardly, right? Even though it's aesthetically very cool. Yes. Yeah. [29:38] Thank you. [29:40] Is there art that you love that completely lacks beauty? [29:45] It's in the eye of the beholder, but I like a lot of brutalist architecture, especially in Eastern Europe. Now, I might try to defend its beauty in some funny, weird way.

[29:54] But by ordinary standards, yeah, it lacks beauty. [29:57] this is when I'm, cause part of the, I don't know, I was, I've listened to, or read and talked to you extensively about art. You have some amazing conversations, particularly with Rick Rubin about music and about art. And one of the consistent themes you highlight is this, like, [30:13] almost all truly great art, at least at some point, contextually, was so deeply strange and weird. And I'm interested in this relationship between strangeness or even grotesqueness or other words you might use and beauty.

One of my favorite bits about the Rick conversation, you're talking about Venice Bitch by Lana Del Rey. And you make the point that you kind of say the best part of the song is like the first two, three minutes, which is just angelic. And then the rest of the song, you're just kind of like, I wish I could go back to the first part. But that's why it works. Yeah, [30:43] it never delivers. If it delivered, it would be a much worse creation. [30:48] So maybe that's – it's like we can't have it all – you can't just have ice cream all the time or something like that?

You can't have ice cream all the time. Like if you think what is quote-unquote beautiful art, maybe I'd say something from the 18th century like Tipolo in Würzburg or some parts of 18th century music, which are mostly beauty, but they feel a bit limited. Yes. And I still – [31:11] like them a lot and enjoy them but i want something else a colloquial way of putting it might be that like good the really good stuff actually keeps you on your toes right so like if you listen to we were just discussing um the song happiness is a warm gun by the beatles and [31:28] That song really keeps you on your toes.

The time signature keeps changing and the guitar goes from soothing to suddenly he's kind of stabbing it and the vocals go from a lullaby to a yelp. It's constantly changing. This is kind of the point I was trying to make with the... [31:42] um shakespeare sonnets in in that essay is like they keep destabilizing you just as you think you know what's going on he says something completely off the wall and you have to kind of reinterpret everything yeah and so maybe i think tyler's taking beauty to mean something that's kind of like a nice vase or something right but it's not geo right yeah yeah that's beautiful right and it is [32:06] But [32:08] You're in a house with plenty of voodoo art, right?

Is that beautiful? It depends. [32:12] Is all the art in this home beautiful to you? [32:16] Again, I'm not sure what you mean, but it's not chosen on that basis. I want something that's more challenging. [32:21] Yeah, it attracts me, obviously, almost by definition. [32:25] Hmm. [32:28] There is a thread in something you had written that led me to this piece that Christopher Alexander wrote in 2016, Making the Garden. A couple of quick excerpts. This has all come to light because of my intense interest and focus on architecture and conventional philosophy.

There is nothing that allows one to test the reality of God or a vision inspired by God. But we ask people to compare two buildings or two doorways and to decide which one is closer to God. Different people will answer this question the same way and with a remarkably high reliability. [32:58] Thank you. [32:59] And... [33:00] I think it's worth noting Alexander is typically talking about architecture, which has a functional role, too. But when he talks about the quality without a name, when he talks about a certain kind of beauty that has God in it, [33:14] Thank you.

[33:14] There's a [33:15] element of it that maybe is pointing at something like wholeness or cohesion. [33:20] That's another part of this that I'm curious about, like certain art [33:24] can be really surprising, but have that element of wholeness or cohesion and other art can be strange and surprising and even beautiful, but, but doesn't have, it's almost to still language from Alexander. It's almost like it doesn't have God inside it. Um, [33:38] I'm curious for both of your thoughts, but especially you, Nabil, I'm curious how you relate to that idea and whether at least you personally are seeking for that.

[33:48] again i'm struggling for a word the wholeness yeah i think it's a really interesting point i think he's right but i think the prompt matters if that makes sense right so his prompt is like can you find god inside it [34:03] I think when you give people that prompt, they probably will answer in similar ways. But is that the prompt that matters for everybody? I don't know. I think part of having or developing your own taste is that, at least for me, it's pretty instant if something is interesting or not, even if it's immediately ugly to me.

Right. So like the first time I ever listened to I think it was My Bloody Valentine. [34:27] Absolutely amazing. I think Loveless might be one of my favorite albums. Same here. Yeah, it's incredible. But it made no sense to me. It makes no sense. But I knew I was going to explore it. Yes. Yeah, yeah. It's like sort of ugly, sort of strange. Now if you ask me, like, do I see... [34:42] do I feel God in it? Like I would say yes. Yeah. Right. But like, I don't know if I'd have said that initially.

Yeah. We talked about Jesus last time we talked. Yeah. Similar element with Kanye. Like I hated it so much at first. That I loved right away. Did you? You're ahead of us all, Tyler. No longer lists him as one of the 30 greatest living American songwriters. So he's been canceled. [35:05] Yeah, it's interesting there, right? I mean, I actually also had the same response as Jackson where I hated it straight away and then [35:10] It became my favorite album of his. But then you can't really reason much from that because his latest stuff, I hated it right away.

And then I've not really changed my mind and liked it for the most part. I think the most recent one is decent. But the few albums in between the gospel one and where we are now, I would say are not good. [35:28] I agree. [35:28] Music is a [35:30] area where [35:31] sort of the more you listen, you, you even said something like this, Tyler, I think something along the lines of like, the more you listen, the more your appetite grows for it. Um, and [35:39] And I would also say...

[35:41] the more you listen to one in particular thing, the more you're likely to like it. Maybe that's true for all art, but I think it's especially true in music. [35:48] I'm curious, as someone who has such wide taste and has had a lot of time, how do you know when to go back to something that you didn't connect with? [35:59] If it's just running through your mind, you go back to it, you put it on again. [36:04] I think it's a mistake to be too systematic about that. And whatever listening plans you might have, you should always disrupt them.

Just suddenly do something else. [36:13] Go off on a different tangent. There's always YouTube, right? That'll give you some ideas. [36:18] There are some areas of music you just don't really resonate with that much, right? [36:25] Or you wouldn't say so. [36:26] There's not that much in metal I love. I don't object to it. [36:30] Country, I like early country and Western quite a bit. A lot of modern and country and Western. I say, I like this in principle, but I would like to like it a bit more than I actually do.

Those would be the two main areas. Electronic music. [36:44] I love complex techno and Aphex Twin, Richard T. James, and... [36:48] A lot in that direction. But just plain EDM to me is a little boring. It's just dance music. But I can get sick of musics forever. So this... [36:58] Ethnic musics, you listen to them for a while. You're very glad you listen to them. [37:03] But you don't go back to them that much. And I think that's fine. [37:07] Could you try to pick out a quality that most has you going back?

[37:12] to the stuff you really love, whether it's classical or otherwise? [37:15] Well, hearing different things in it all the time. But another thing that happens with some genres, you decide I'm only going to do the live in concert version of this. So I'm at that point with a lot of jazz. I like it more than ever before, but it's so good in concert. You just say, I'm not going to put it on the stereo really ever again, but I'll work hard to see some good concerts. And otherwise, I'm done with it.

[37:39] And that feels kind of optimal to me. You're almost like not spoiling the live performance. That's right. And not settling for the lesser. And ethnic musics tend to be like that. They're created for live performance out of cultures that didn't have recording. [37:54] So like Haitian rah-rah music, the first time you hear it on disc, it's amazing. But then you see some in Haiti and you feel, I'm not going to listen to this on disc anymore. And OK, you can't go back to Haiti right now or maybe never, but you're still not going to put on the disc.

[38:09] Yeah, something I feel like maybe we have in common is like the stuff we are drawn to is almost, it's very puzzling. There's some puzzle in it that you have to... [38:17] that keeps drawing you back. So like the EDM comment, I don't like EDM either. I just think the patterns are so obvious and simple. And like, once you figure out what those patterns are, it's like not that rewarding to listen to for me. Whereas like something like Apex Twin, it's so odd and jagged somehow that you keep wanting to go back and figure out what's making it happen.

[38:36] Early orb would be another example, early square pusher. [38:41] I don't know either of those. Nicholas Yar. Incredible. [38:44] I got some homework. I was thinking about [38:47] context is that which is scarce particularly in the con i mean i think it applies to [38:51] a lot of thinking about you, Tyler, but... [38:55] particularly in the context of art, [38:57] And it almost seems as though [39:02] maybe it's just I'm substituting a word for complexity, but it seems like the things that are most compelling to you across all domains and especially art are the things that just have more context to gain on them.

Almost. I have to wonder about like, if you were able to have a new dimension of, [39:18] context on country music. [39:22] via some person in your life or otherwise. Like, is that, am I approximating it the right way or is that too orthogonal an idea? I may be just locked out of it. [39:32] So Garth Brooks maybe will always be a bit boring to me. But I put on, you know, the Casey Musgraves album, the really good one, like from six years ago, whenever. And that's excellent. But to me, it's just great songwriting.

[39:45] I don't... [39:46] really imbibe the country element that much. So Hank Williams, I think I can enjoy a great amount. Johnny Cash. [39:55] Leuven brothers. But somehow, the sheer fact of the [40:00] country and western or countryness of it doesn't register with me that well maybe it's just where i grew up which was new jersey [40:08] Why do you think the Beatles register so much? Is it the same thread? Because they're the best. So why? What does that mean? You had the world's two greatest songwriters and two greatest vocalists together in the same band.

[40:20] active in a significant way for seven years together. And you never had that before. You may never have it again. [40:26] I love the Beatles and they're certainly like, I go listen to strawberry fields. You could listen to it a million times. It could be their best song. Yeah. [40:35] But a lot of the Beatles aren't that complex. I love In My Life, as an example. That's very complex. Really? Oh, of course. That's a bad example. Why? [40:44] Just everything about it, I'm just totally wrong. [40:47] The way the melody meanders, the backwards piano part played by George Martin, the modulations, the way the vocals are interwoven, I think that's a phenomenally complex song.

And again, one of their best. A lot of the times they do sound simple and then you talk to a musician about it and they're like, wow, I would never would have thought to go from this chord to this chord. Even an early, apparently very simple song like From Me to You. Very complex. [41:17] just do it and it's an amazing song [41:20] Uh, [41:21] melodically harmonically and this no one else could have done it then [41:26] But it sounds very simple. They do have some songs that are just flat out simple, but surprisingly few.

[41:32] You listen to even things like What Goes On, which for a long time I didn't even like [41:37] But it's both a wonderful song and highly complex. And I talked to Rick Rubin about this. He completely agreed. He goes, oh, yes, that's amazing. I love it. And he's right. One of my favorites is Ya Blues. Of course, the two different guitar parts going in. [41:51] Different rhythms. Unbelievable. That one is just satisfying to hear. I think it's Paul and he's just yelling. No, that's John. That's John? Yeah. Okay, yeah.

It's just yelling. It's very satisfying. And the drum and bass interplay. [42:04] Yeah. Yeah. [42:05] I had this, I took a Beatles class in college, and my professor was obsessed with this idea that ever since John did Twist and Shout, [42:12] Paul was just obsessed with trying to match him in the yelling for like the next decade, almost. I always think of that when I think of Paul's attempts. I think it's true, by the way. [42:24] Paul wanted to best John and many other things as well. Yes. But the first is Long Tall Sally, right?

And then many, Jet, later on. [42:31] Many, many attempts which succeed. What do you think the best Beatles song is? [42:36] So, [42:37] I don't know that there is one. Strawberry Fields is a good nomination. The classic pick, Day in the Life, I would not choose. It's a little overblown. The one I enjoy hearing the most is You Won't See Me, 1965 Rubber Soul. And it's so complex in the background. The harmonies, the piano parts, the bass, everything. Unbelievable. Listen to it with headphones. [42:58] That's my favorite at the moment, but it's always changing, too.

I was going to say, so it would have been different a year ago? [43:04] No, but maybe three years ago. Yeah. Yeah. [43:08] how about you it changes like depending on the day but right now i'm feeling um you never give me your money oh in my love that song that might have been my favorite three years ago yeah that one's amazing did geese do a cover of that golden slumber is amazing i might have covered that i think that maybe that's why it was in my head yeah i've been sorry god i was gonna ask did you get it all into uh cameron winter last year tyler do you know you heard him [43:38] Yeah, I like that a lot.

So that person is named Cameron Winter. Okay, I didn't know that. He did a solo album, which you have to listen to. Yeah, it's on the CD rack right now. It's there. Yeah. I don't know if he is explicitly Christian, but he does all his performance in churches. [43:56] Uh, and I feel like he's very, there's, there's a certain born again, this to his lyrics. Oh, good. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. [44:02] Yeah, in a subversive way, yes. I saw him at Carnegie Hall solo in December. It was very special. One question, maybe rehashing a little bit, but...

[44:13] I'm curious to the extent you think that appreciating art [44:16] Um... [44:17] is a skill that [44:19] can be practiced beyond just consuming more. [44:23] Thank you. [44:23] When you read about art, its history, I think you learn a lot of relevant material, you get context. What Duchamp was doing makes sense when you look at what followed him, what came before. So there's plenty you can do, and I think it all works. [44:39] A certain amount of openness is required, but not too much else. [44:43] Education can hold you back as much as help you in the formal sense of education.

Getting back to the museum guards point. [44:52] And if you go to, say, rural Mexico, where I spent a lot of time, I wrote a book about it, and a lot of the artwork in this house is from rural Mexico, people there love the art that they create. They'll talk about it for hours, analyze it. They're very astute observers. [45:06] And maybe they wouldn't understand Picasso. [45:10] but they have a lot in their aesthetic lives that's visual [45:14] And they would talk about it, say, better than we would, and were quote-unquote educated, and they never even went to high school.

[45:21] The word openness. [45:23] Have you always... [45:24] been this open... [45:25] Maybe to everything, but especially to art. [45:27] No, when I was younger, I was much more closed, like I would... [45:31] not eat a lot of foods, [45:34] And by my early 20s, I was over that. But I just thought, well, only a certain number of foods are good, and I would stick with those. [45:41] But I learned out of that pretty quickly. It wasn't a hard struggle. I just had to try some. [45:46] On the appreciation point, I'm a big advocate of critics.

You have to find the right ones. I would say, like, very few of them are actually good. But, like, I've learned a ton from just reading Tyler's posts on various movies or books, right? And then, you know, in the movies, you know, you read someone like Pauline Kyle, who I think you like as well. Yeah, selectively, but absolutely. Yeah, but, like, I think it's amazing to watch the same movie as somebody else, and they get way more out of it than you do. [46:16] read that and then you go back to the work and then you kind of do this process again and again you learn to get more out of the same thing too and same with literary criticism i think the best literary critics have taught me [46:26] a lot [46:27] And we became friends basically because of movies.

So I visited Nabil's homepage, and there's a list of his favorite movies. And there's only two people I've ever met in my life that I think have perfect taste in movies. [46:39] And that's Nabil and Scott Sumner. [46:41] Maybe I don't agree with them 100%, but even where I disagree, I feel the judgment here is as good as any that could be brought to bear on the movie in question. [46:51] And they're the only two I've ever met, including professional movie critics. When I read, I think, no, they're off, they're off.

Nabil and Scott, I never think they're off, even if my opinion is not exactly the same. [47:01] So, yeah, during the pandemic, we used to, well, Tyler would book a movie theater because they were closed because of, you know, lockdown and such. And so it was very cheap to actually just book out a movie theater and you could bring your own disc or Blu-ray. And Tyler has a vast collection of CDs. So every week, you know, me and him and whoever was around would kind of go and see some crazy movie.

And it was it was Hong Kong classics. Yeah. And it'd be a hundred bucks. Say you have six people. Wow. [47:31] now for a normal viewing. [47:32] So we had a great time. [47:34] Yeah, I can't do it. Probably. Well, maybe you could do it today. I don't know. There's [47:37] Prices are higher, right? Supply and demand. There's an opportunity cost. [47:41] You mentioned that for a while your wife referred to Tyler as the movie guy. [47:46] I didn't know this. [47:48] No one else calls me that. She says, oh, yeah, the movie guy, because she used to come sometimes, too.

Yeah, no. And then, you know, she didn't know about you through your blog the way I did. So she's like, oh, yeah, the guy we used to see the movies with. [48:02] You said... [48:04] Use the words judgment. [48:05] Describe Nabil and Scott's [48:07] Movie Taste. [48:09] When it is particularly when it isn't overlapping exactly with your opinions, you guys, as far as I understand, have quite similar taste. What what is inside of that? What do you mean by why is his judgment good? [48:21] like take Cassavetes movies which are favorites of Nabeel's I recognize they're very very good [48:29] and I wish I could like them more than I do.

And when I watch them, [48:33] I feel how good they are. [48:35] But I don't relate to it or enjoy it the same way I would like a Bergman film or... [48:39] A lot of classic European cinema. [48:42] But I don't at all feel my views better than his. If anything, I think his view is probably better than mine. But I'm just not there either. [48:49] I'm lacking the context. Those are extremely messy, so maybe I prefer the mess than you do even. [48:56] Yeah, I don't know. I mean, this maybe goes back to your earlier line of questioning a little bit, right?

Because I think... [49:03] Cassavetes is very just... [49:06] puts you in these very difficult experiences and kind of it's almost like torture watching his movies in some weird way where people are acting all crazy and weird and you sort of just have to sit there and tolerate it a little bit um and i think you grow through the process of doing this but maybe maybe you could say that tyler values this type of experience and not less than i do i don't know maybe that's a reach but and mike lee movies he likes more than i do yes again i don't [49:36] half, and I don't like them as much.

So that one's me being a regional thinker. I mean, Mike Lee is a British director. I grew up in Northern England. He often makes movies set in... [49:46] very, you know, deprived parts of England. And there's definitely a piece of that where I just recognize my own, you know, nighttime strolls through Manchester or London, and a lot of the characters are sort of derelict. So people on the on the margins of society, shall we say, but I probably have better taste in the Sopranos than Nabeel would. So I don't think he would dispute my claims necessarily.

I'm planning to watch that this year, actually, for the first time all the way through. [50:12] I recognize about 80% of the locales. Wow. [50:15] Even the quite obscure ones, not just the famous ones, like the drive over the bridge. Like, oh, that's Sporting Goods Store. That's on Route 17. I remember that. Is The Sopranos the ultimate New Jersey work of art? Well, that and Bruce Springsteen, early Springsteen, yeah. My favorite Springsteen song is Thunder Road, by the way. [50:32] You know, I just did an episode with Bob Spitz, who worked with Springsteen in his early years and who written biographies of Bob Dylan, Beatles, Rolling Stones.

They're great books. And he thinks Thunder Road is Bruce's greatest achievement. And he's probably right. [50:47] The alternative would be the song Born to Run. Yes. Or I would say the sequencing of songs on the Born to Run album. Maybe you'd put above it all because it also contains those two. But something about the sequencing. It's perfect. Jungle Land and what comes at the beginning, the end. [51:01] Unbelievably good. [51:03] Yeah, I'm a little sad about it. I don't know what you think about this, Jackson, because you listen to a lot of music, but the album as an art form feels like it's less and less important in relative terms.

You still get it, right? I mean, Gieser doing this quite well, I think. [51:18] In Rainbows maybe was the last album, choir album that I can think of that was really, really great. I was thinking of, totally different from your guys' opinion, but I was thinking of Nebraska. [51:29] And like, I don't know if I can name a song on Nebraska. [51:32] I think of the album, you make a point somewhere, Tyler, that like when I'm 64, I'm, [51:37] on Sergeant Pepper versus [51:39] As a random song on Spotify. It's like very silly.

[51:43] uh yeah it's i don't know these these types of questions are always so hard to not just be like oh i'm not in my 20s anymore i'm mad about how the kids are what do you think tyler [51:55] It's very important to keep on listening to new music. [51:58] About albums specifically. Oh, yeah. The death of the album. They're mostly dead. Yeah. [52:02] I think music today, there's a large number of quite wonderful and entertaining songs. In that sense, there's no decline. But for real breakthroughs, maybe I'm too much an old fogey.

[52:14] But I don't really see there's been so much since the 90s.