Tyler Cowen explains it all

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, News, News Commentary, Philosophy, Society & Culture

4.5 • 11.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 March 2017

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I have never come across a mind quite like Tyler Cowen’s. The George Mason economist, and Marginal Revolution blogger, has an interesting opinion on, well, everything. He’s a genuine polymath who can talk knowledgeably about more subjects than I even know exist.So coming in to this interview, I had a simple plan: ask Cowen for his thoughts on as many topics as possible. And I think it worked out pretty well. We discuss everything from New Jersey to high school sports to finding love to smoked trout to nootropics to Thomas Schelling to Ayn Rand to social media to speed reading strategies to happy relationships to the disadvantages of growing up in Manhattan. And believe me when I say that is a small sampling of the topics we cover. We also talk about Tyler’s new book, “The Complacent Class,” which argues, in true Cowenian fashion, that everything we think we know about the present is wrong, and far from being an age of rapid change and constant risk, we have become a cautious, even stagnant, society. This as information dense a discussion as I’ve hosted on this podcast. I took a lot away from it, and I think you will too. Books:-Autobiography of John Stuart Mills-Derek Parfitt’s Reasons and Persons-Fisher Black’s On Business Cycles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	The following podcast contains explicit language.
0:15.9	Hello, welcome to another episode of The Asher Client Show.
0:18.4	I am Asher Client and my guest this week is Tyler Cowan, not Cohen, which is a mistake I made
0:23.9	and I am ashamed of and now apologizing for a publicate. Tyler Cowan, he is an economist
0:29.5	at George Mason University, the author of the Marginal Revolution blog, which is just an excellent
0:34.0	blog. And the author of the new book, The Complicant Class, the self-defeating quest for the American
0:39.7	Dream, which is a very, very fascinating argument that Americans are as much as it may seem,
0:46.2	that everything is changing fast as much as it may seem that people are suddenly open to all
0:50.2	kinds of crazy ideas. It is an argument that we've actually become complacent, that we have become
0:54.5	narrow, that a lot of what looks like stress in the society is actually us becoming extremely
1:00.8	attached to the status quo. Like all of Tyler's books and thoughts, I am not sure I agree with all of
1:06.8	it, but it is more thought-provoking, perhaps, than anything else I've read in a long time, so I
1:11.5	highly recommend it. This is a fascinating, I'm not even sure I'm going to call it a discussion.
1:17.3	Tyler has more interesting ideas on things than basically anyone I've ever met. So my hope in this
1:23.7	was to just have him explain his ideas on many, many, many, many different things, his rules for
1:29.7	living, both personally in terms of how to find a romantic partner, how to have a successful
1:35.2	experience in college, where to find good food, how to travel, and then also conceptually. What
1:40.4	does you think of a universal basic income? What does you think of the idea that we all live in a
1:44.2	computer simulation? What does you think of American exceptionalism? I would say pretty much every
1:49.4	single one of his answers was completely fascinating. So I enjoyed this immensely. I hope you do too,
1:54.1	as always, a couple quick requests. Please, please share this podcast and to your friends,
1:58.5	put it out on Twitter. On Twitter, you can use a hashtag the eKshow and I will check it out and
	...

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