Conversations with Tyler
Tyler Cowen pushes guests to make falsifiable claims, across economics, history and ideas
50:51AI's true target isn't new jobs—it's the clean work outsourced to India a decade ago
Work with clear boundaries, verifiable results, and single tasks was already shipped to India; now AI takes over. What actually resists AI is messy work that runs on relationships and political deal-making.
56:23Government Doesn't Just Waste Your Money, It Wastes an Hour of Your Week
Plenty of countries file taxes for their citizens; the IRS is legally barred from doing it for you. The time tax hits the poor, immigrants and the formerly incarcerated hardest — and AI may not save them.
52:19No Irreplaceable Leaders, Only Irreplaceable Luck
Diamond says history has no irreplaceable leaders — Genghis Khan just happened to be born on the wettest grassland in two thousand years. But people like Rachel Carson and Resnick really did move things up by ten or twenty years.
41:54Former Sequoia Partner: I'm More of a Dilettante Than an Obsessive
Michael Moritz says he isn't an obsessive but a dilettante, because he has too many interests; but he also admits that people who take one thing to its extreme — like Frank Auerbach, who painted every day and took off only Christmas — are the true obsessives.
52:01Contrarianism Is Imitation Too: AI Will Weaken Social Contagion
In an age of contagion, escape is not the cure. Burges bets that AI will actually weaken social contagion, and, drawing on Catholicism and on Cluny, argues that the real work is rebuilding intermediary institutions.
55:38Liberalism Died of the Educated Elite, Not Automation
Acemoglu dismantles three myths: liberalism is dying of the educated elite rather than automation; AI productivity will not break out for a decade; regulating algorithms is not a restriction on speech, and pro-worker AI is the direction.
55:14The USSR Forged Women Into Superhumans and Spoiled Men Into Wrecks
After World War II killed 27 million Soviets, men became a scarce resource; the state used abortion bans, rewards for out-of-wedlock births, and the decriminalization of domestic violence to forge women into superhumans and spoil men into wrecks — an order that still underpins Putin's patriarchal mobilization.