Hello, you found the portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and today I get to sit down with one of my favorite conversationalists.

Tyler Cowan, who's here from George Mason University, where he's a professor of economics, Tyler, welcome to the portal.

Thank you, Eric.

Now, when we were talking about what topics we could begin with, I didn't want to begin with economics, and you suggested the apocalypse as a great place to start.

Now, the great benefit of this is that if we get past it, the rest of the conversation will be post-apocalyptic.

The apocalypse itself is economics, of course, but I was just thinking that virtually any good theory of politics needs some notion of the apocalypse.

Let's say you thought the time horizon for the universe or human civilization were potentially infinite.

You would then be so concerned with minimizing existential risk that nothing would get done.

Whereas if you think, well, mankind has another 800 years left on Earth on average, and by that time probably will have blown ourselves up or an asteroid will come.

Then you think what glorious things can we do with those 800 years, and it's quite a difference in perspective.

So an infinite time horizon might actually choke off rational thought about political decision-making.

So is there any possibility for keeping the apocalypse exactly 800 years away, like a donkey with a carrot dangled in front of it at a fixed distance?

That would be the Straussian view, right? That you always think it's 800 years away.

But think of it as like a problem from finance, so you're right and they could put on a security.

Well, it's going to bankrupt you at some point, but any given month, any given day, the chance of that happening is probably quite small.

So the apocalypse may be like the proverbial they could put.

It's out there. The chance is very small. The optimists always sound like they're right.

In a sense, they are right. That Stephen Finger would claim.

But at the end of the day, if the clock ticks for long enough, it's boom and by.

But in the meantime, let's do something grand and glorious.

Tyler, you have a sort of a portfolio of different ways of communicating with the world.

Have you ever dragged Stephen Finger onto a podcast, which you do under conversations with Tyler, or have you discussed his bizarre notion of optimism on your famous economics blog,

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