Tom Cruise's Body of Work (with Aled Maclean-Jones)

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 18 May 2026

⏱️ 68 minutes

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Summary

What can Tom Cruise's last impossible mission teach us about usefulness in the digital age? Aled Maclean-Jones argues that dangling from cargo planes, soldering hard drives, and skydiving nineteen consecutive times is really an extended tribute to embodied knowledge. Listen as MacLean-Jones and EconTalk's Russ Roberts analyze the unique concept of competence presented in Cruise's films. Along the way, they cover London cabbies who refuse to use Waze, a fatal dive at the sound barrier, solo sailing around the globe, and the small triumph of fixing a broken toilet by oneself. They conclude by exploring the possibility that physical mastery may come to matter more as computers take over the work of the mind.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.9	I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
0:13.8	Go to EconTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation.
0:21.2	You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.7	Our email address is mail at econTalk.org.
0:30.0	We'd love to hear from you.
0:36.6	Today is March 18th, 2026.
0:38.3	And my guest is the writer, Al Ed McLean Jones.
0:41.3	His substack is Rakes digress.
0:44.3	Or digress, Al Ed was last year in February,
0:47.3	2026, talking about Swiss watches.
0:50.3	Alad, welcome back to Econ Talk.
0:52.3	Thank you for us. It's a real pleasure to be back.
0:55.9	I want to say our topic for today is Tom Cruise, but don't leave.
0:59.1	Listeners, don't switch because that's not really the topic, but it's related to an essay that you,
1:04.6	Allet wrote in the Metropolitan Review that we'll link to a called The Last Useful Man.
1:10.5	What we're really going to be talking about is our sense of our self in the modern world,
1:16.5	given the extraordinary technological advances and how we think about our mind versus our body,
1:22.0	the nature and knowledge, the nature of, really, reality.
1:27.3	So let's get started. Why did you think about Tom Cruise at all?
1:31.8	What does the last useful band mean? Yeah, so I think there were two things that sort of led into
1:38.3	writing the essay. So the first was I was thinking a lot about this kind of question of usefulness and the fact that
	...

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