Category: Media

My Conversation with the excellent Noam Dworman

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am very pleased to have recorded a CWT with Noam Dworman, mostly about comedy but also music and NYC as well.  Noam owns and runs The Comedy Cellar, NYC’s leading comedy club, and he knows most of the major comedians.  Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Tyler sat down at Comedy Cellar with owner Noam Dworman to talk about the ever-changing stand-up comedy scene, including the perfect room temperature for stand-up, whether comedy can still shock us, the effect on YouTube and TikTok, the transformation of jokes into bits, the importance of tight seating, why he doesn’t charge higher prices for his shows, the differences between the LA and NYC scenes, whether good looks are an obstacle to success, the oldest comic act he still finds funny, how comedians have changed since he started running the Comedy Cellar in 2003, and what government regulations drive him crazy. They also talk about how 9/11 got Noam into trouble, his early career in music, the most underrated guitarist, why live music is dead in NYC, and what his plans are for expansion.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: If you do stand-up comedy for decades at a high level — not the Louis C.K. and Chris Rock level, but you’re successful and appear in your club all the time — how does that change a person? But not so famous that everyone on the street knows who they are.

DWORMAN: How does doing stand-up comedy change a person?

COWEN: For 25 years, yes.

DWORMAN: Well, first of all, it makes it harder for them to socialize. I hear this story all the time about comedians when they go to Thanksgiving dinner with their family, and all of a sudden, the entire place gets silent. Like, “Did he just say . . .” Because you get used to being in an atmosphere where you could say whatever you want.

I think probably, because I know this in my life — and again, getting used to essentially being your own boss, you get used to that. Then it just becomes very, very hard to ever consider going back into the structured life that most people expect is going to be their lives from the time they’re in school — 9:00 to 5:00, whatever it is. At some point, I think, if you do it for too long, you would probably kill yourself rather than go back.

I’ve had that thought myself. If I had to go back to . . . I never practiced law, but if I had to take a job as a lawyer — and I’m not just saying this to be dramatic — I think I might kill myself. I can’t even imagine, at my age, having to start going to work at nine o’clock, having a boss, having to answer for mistakes that I made, having the pressure of having to get it right, otherwise somebody’s life is impacted. I just got too used to being able to do what I want when I want to do it.

Comedians have to get gigs, but essentially, they can do what they want when they want to do it. They don’t have to get up in the morning, and I think, at some point, you just become so used to that, there’s no going back.

Recommended, interesting throughout.

My excellent Conversation with Reid Hoffman

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

In his second appearance, Reid Hoffman joined Tyler to talk everything AI: the optimal liability regime for LLMs, whether there’ll be autonomous money-making bots, which agency should regulate AI, how AI will affect the media ecosystem and the communication of ideas, what percentage of the American population will eschew it, how gaming will evolve, whether AI’s future will be open-source or proprietary, the binding constraint preventing the next big step in AI, which philosopher has risen in importance thanks to AI, what he’d ask a dolphin, what LLMs have taught him about friendship, how higher education will change, and more. They also discuss Sam Altman’s overlooked skill, the biggest cultural problem in America, the most underrated tech scene, and what he’ll do next.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Given GPT models, which philosopher has most risen in importance in your eyes? Some people say Wittgenstein. I don’t think it’s obvious.

HOFFMAN: I think I said Wittgenstein earlier. In Fireside Chatbots, I brought in Wittgenstein in language games.

COWEN: Peirce maybe. Who else?

HOFFMAN: Peirce is good. Now I happen to have read Wittgenstein at Oxford, so I can comment in some depth. The question about language and language games and forms of life and how these large language models might mirror human forms of life because they’re trained on human language is a super interesting question, like Wittgenstein.

Other good language philosophers, I think, are interesting. That doesn’t necessarily mean philosophy-of-language philosophers à la analytic philosophy. Gareth Evans, theories of reference as applied to how you’re thinking about this kind of stuff, is super interesting. Christopher Peacocke’s concept work is, I think, interesting.

Anyway, there’s a whole range of stuff. Then also the philosophy, all the neuroscience stuff applied with the large language models, I think, is very interesting as well.

COWEN: What in science fiction do you feel has risen the most in status for you?

HOFFMAN: Oh, for me.

COWEN: Not in the world. We don’t know yet.

HOFFMAN: Yes. We don’t know yet.

COWEN: You think, “Oh, this was really important.” Vernor Vinge or . . .

HOFFMAN: Well, this is going to seem maybe like a strange answer to you, but I’ve been rereading David Brin’s Uplift series very carefully because the theory of, “How should we create other kinds of intelligences, and what should that theory be, and what should be our shepherding and governance function and symbiosis?” is a question that we have to think about over time. He went straight at this in a biological sense, but it’s the same thing, just a different substrate with the Uplift series. I’ve recently reread the entire Uplift series.

Self-recommending!

My Conversation with Noam Chomsky

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is the episode summary:

Noam Chomsky joins Tyler to discuss why Noam and Wilhelm von Humboldt have similar views on language and liberty, good and bad evolutionary approaches to language, what he thinks Stephen Wolfram gets wrong about LLMs, whether he’s optimistic about the future, what he thinks of Thomas Schelling, the legacy of the 1960s-era left libertarians, the development trajectories of Nicaragua and Cuba, why he still answers every email, what he’s been most wrong about, and more.

I would stress there is no representative sample from this discussion, so any excerpt will not give you a decent sense of the dialogue as a whole.  Read the whole thing, if you dare!  Here is one squib, in fact it is the opener, after which we ranged far and wide:

COWEN: If I think of your thought, and I compare it to the thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt, what’s the common ontological element in both of your thoughts that leads you to more or less agree on both language and liberty?

CHOMSKY: Von Humboldt was, first of all, a great linguist who recognized some fundamental principles of language which were rare at the time and are only beginning to be understood. But in the social and political domain, he was not only the founder of the modern research university, but also one of the founders of classical liberalism.

His fundamental principle — as he said, it’s actually an epigram for John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty — is that the fundamental right of every person is to be free from external illegitimate constraints, free to inquire, to create, to pursue their own interests and concerns without arbitrary authority of any sort restricting or limiting them.

COWEN: Now, you’ve argued that Humboldt was a Platonist of some kind, that he viewed learning as some notion of reminiscence. Are you, in the same regard, also a Platonist?

CHOMSKY: Leibniz pointed out that Plato’s theory of reminiscence was basically correct, but it had to be purged of the error of reminiscence — in other words, not an earlier life, but rather something intrinsic to our nature. Leibniz couldn’t have proceeded as we can today, but now we would say something that has evolved and has become intrinsic to our nature. For people like Humboldt, what was crucial to our nature was what is sometimes called the instinct for freedom. Basic, fundamental human property should lie at the basis of our social and economic reasoning.

It’s also the critical property of human language and thought, as was recognized in the early Scientific Revolution — Galileo, Leibniz — a little later, people like Humboldt in the Romantic era. The fundamental property of human language is this unique capacity to create, unboundedly, many new thoughts in our minds, and even to be able to convey to others who have no access to our minds their innermost workings. Galileo himself thought the alphabet was the most spectacular of human inventions because it provided a means to carry out this miracle.

Humboldt’s formulation was that language enables language and thought, which were always pretty much identified. Language enables what he called infinite use of finite means. We have a finite system. We make unbounded use of it. Those conceptions weren’t very well understood until the mid-20th century with the development of the theory of computation by Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and other great mathematicians, 1930s and ’40s. But now the concept of finite means that provide infinite scope is quite well understood. In fact, everyone has it in their laptop by now.

COWEN: Was it the distinction between natural and artificial language that led Rousseau astray on politics?

I will say that I am very glad I undertook this endeavor.

My excellent Conversation with Seth Godin

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript from a very good session.  Here is part of the episode summary:

Seth joined Tyler to discuss why direct marketing works at all, the marketing success of Trader Joe’s vs Whole Foods, why you can’t reverse engineer Taylor Swift’s success, how Seth would fix baseball, the brilliant marketing in ChatGPT’s design, the most underrated American visual artist, the problem with online education, approaching public talks as a team process, what makes him a good cook, his updated advice for aspiring young authors, how growing up in Buffalo shaped him, what he’ll work on next, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: If you were called in as a consultant to professional baseball, what would you tell them to do to keep the game alive?

GODIN: [laughs] I am so glad I never was a consultant.

What is baseball? In most of the world, no one wants to watch one minute of baseball. Why do we want to watch baseball? Why do the songs and the Cracker Jack and the sounds matter to some people and not to others? The answer is that professional sports in any country that are beloved, are beloved because they remind us of our parents. They remind us of a different time in our lives. They are comfortable but also challenging. They let us exchange status roles in a safe way without extraordinary division.

Baseball was that for a very long time, but then things changed. One of the things that changed is that football was built for television and baseball is not. By leaning into television, which completely terraformed American society for 40 years, football advanced in a lot of ways.

Baseball is in a jam because, on one hand, like Coke and New Coke, you need to remind people of the old days. On the other hand, people have too many choices now.

And another:

COWEN: What is the detail you have become most increasingly pessimistic about?

GODIN: I think that our ability to rationalize our lazy, convenient, selfish, immoral, bad behavior is unbounded, and people will find a reason to justify the thing that they used to do because that’s how we evolved. One would hope that in the face of a real challenge or actual useful data, people would say, “Oh, I was wrong. I just changed my mind.” It’s really hard to do that.

There was a piece in The Times just the other day about the bibs that long-distance runners wear at races. There is no reason left for them to wear bibs. It’s not a big issue. Everyone should say, “Oh, yeah, great, done.” But the bib defenders coming out of the woodwork, explaining, each in their own way, why we need bibs for people who are running in races — that’s just a microcosm of the human problem, which is, culture sticks around because it’s good at sticking around. But sometimes we need to change the culture, and we should wake up and say, “This is a good day to change the culture.”

COWEN: So, we’re all bib defenders in our own special ways.

GODIN: Correct! Well said. Bib Defenders. That’s the name of the next book. Love that.

COWEN: What is, for you, the bib?

GODIN: I think that I have probably held onto this 62-year-old’s perception of content and books and thoughtful output longer than the culture wants to embrace, the same way lots of artists have held onto the album as opposed to the single. But my goal isn’t to be more popular, and so I’m really comfortable with the repercussions of what I’ve held onto.

Recommended, interesting throughout.  And here is Seth’s new book The Song of Significance: A New Manifesto for Teams.

Might AI possibly boost social trust?

by  Tyler Cowen in

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:

The point is not that LLMs won’t be used to create propaganda — they will — but that they offer users another option to filter it out. With LLMs, users can get the degree of objectivity that they desire, at least after they learn how they work.

Still, this is a safe prediction: Within a year or two, there will be a variety of LLMs, some of them open source, and people will be able to use them to generate the kinds of answers they want. You might wonder how this is an improvement on the status quo, which now affords viewers a choice of polarized media sources such as Fox News or MSNBC, not to mention voices of all sorts on Twitter.

I hold out some hope for improvement in part because LLMs operate on a “pull” basis — that is, you ask them for what you want. Even if you are working with a “right-wing” LLM, you can always ask it for a left-wing or centrist perspective, and vice versa. It would be like watching Fox and having a button on your remote that you can click to get an opposing or contrasting view — within seconds. This is a vast improvement over cable TV, in terms of immediacy if nothing else. LLMs also make it very easy to generate a debate or a “compare and contrast” answer on just about any issue.

Again, there is no knowing how much balance people will want. But at least AI will make it easier to get balance if they so choose. That seems better than having a particular cable TV channel or a pre-established Twitter feed as the baseline default.

The impersonal nature of many LLMs may also be a force for ideological balance. Currently, many left-wingers don’t want to switch to Fox (or visit their neighbor) to hear a different perspective because they find the personalities offensive or obnoxious. LLMs offer the potential to sample points of view in their driest, least provocative and most analytically argued forms.

We’ll see how this goes, and any analysis or prediction here should be quite hedged, but I am more optimistic than many people on this front.

My Conversation with the excellent Kevin Kelly

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the summary:

…Kevin and Tyler start this conversation on advice: what kinds of advice Kevin was afraid to give, his worst advice, how to get better at following advice, and whether people who ask for advice really want it in the first place. Then they move on to the best places to see traditional cultures in Asia, the one thing in Kevin’s travel kit he can’t be without, his favorite part of India, why he’s so excited about brain-computer interfaces, how AI will change religion, what the Amish can teach us about tech adoption, the most underrated documentary, his initial entry point into tech, why he’s impressed by the way Jeff Bezos handles power, the last thing he’s changed his mind about, how growing up in Westfield, New Jersey affected him, his next project called the Hundred Year Desirable Future, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: Do you ever feel that if you don’t photograph a place, you haven’t really been there? Does it hold a different status? Like you haven’t organized the information; it’s just out on Pluto somewhere?

KELLY: Yes, I did. When I was younger, I had a religious conversion and I decided to ride my bicycle across the US. And part of that problem — part of the thing was that I was on my way to die, and I decided to leave my camera behind for this magnificent journey of a bicycle crossing the US. It was the most difficult thing I ever did, because I was just imagining all the magnificent pictures that I could take, that I wasn’t going to take. I took a sketchbook instead, and that appeased some of my desire to capture things visually.

But you’re absolutely right. It was a little bit of an addiction, where the framing of a photograph was how I saw the world. Still images: I was basically, in my head, clicking — I was clicking the shutter at the right moments when something would happen. That, I think, was not necessarily healthy — to be so dependent on that framing to enjoy the world.

I’ve learned to wean myself off from that necessity. Now I can travel with just a phone for the selfies that you might want to take.

COWEN: Maybe the earlier habit was better.

Recommended.  And here is Kevin’s new book Excellent Advice: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier.

Is the Great Awokening a global phenomenon?

by  Tyler Cowen in

And perhaps it did not start in the United States?  Here is more from David Rozado, including a full research paper:

What young people say is driving changes in their mental health

by  Tyler Cowen in

I would stress this point. Most of the explanations for declining teen mental health invoke contagion at one stage of the argument or another. That in turn means the initial causes can be fairly small, relative to the final outcome. Contagion itself is arguably the most important cause.

What to Watch: Holiday Edition 2022

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Glass Onion is a con job. It temporarily fools the viewer into thinking it original and clever and yet it is actually derivative and dumb. The ending left me bitter. It should be noted, however, that it is artfully constructed and the authors knew what they were doing. Benoit Blanc, the detective, stands in for the audience and comes to the same conclusion, “it’s all so obvious and also so stupid.” The name also gives a clue—it appears to be multi-layered but it’s glass so you can just look and see what is going on.

The Fabelmans—a paean to movie making and a close biography of Spielberg. He waited till his parents had died to make this movie. Yes, his mother actually brought home a monkey as a pet. The parents, the arty, flighty wife and the analytical, scientific husband couldn’t make it together but produced Spielberg who can and does—the opening scene with Spielberg watching his first movie between his parents says it all.

Avatar 2 I saw it in IMAX 3D. As spectacle it was great, especially the quieter water scenes. As movie it was good but broke no new ground. Indeed, Avatar 2 was exactly the same as Avatar only with more water. If you can’t see it in 3D or at least on a giant screen don’t bother. 

The Recruit (Netflix): A fun CIA series which is ridiculous but rises a bit above the genre with some insight into the functions of a bureaucracy which kills people but attempts to do so legally.

Acapulco (Apple TV). On the surface it’s a situation comedy about Maximo, a young Mexican man who sees opportunity in Los Colinas, the local resort run by a coterie of oddball characters, including the aging ex-starlet owner, Diane, who is fast approaching Norma Desmond territory. The situation is narrated by an older Maximo who has become rich and fabulously successful. At first the narration seems to be a mere device, but, over time, we begin to see that the writers are aiming at something bigger. How did Maximo become so rich? What lessons about life and business did he learn at Las Colinas? The second, hidden story line gives deeper meaning to the events of the first. Season one of Acapulco is almost entirely about Las Colinas. Only in season two do the two stories begin to converge. Can the writers pull off a denouement that brings everything together? I don’t know but the purposeful pacing and the fact that the writers aren’t showing all their cards makes me think we are seeing more than we first imagine. The opposite of Glass Onion in many ways.

Plod has a bunch of questions

by  Tyler Cowen in

From my request for requests, here goes:

– What does the NYT do well? And conversely what are they bad at?
– What is your theory on the rising lack of male ambition?
– Why do modern fantasy authors (Martin, Rothfuss, others) not finish their works?
– If you were chief economist czar of the US, what is the policy would you implement first? In the UK?
– Will non-12-tone equal temperament music ever become popular?
– What do you think will become of charter cities like Prospera?

I will do the answers by number:

1. The New York Times can publish superb culture pieces, most of all when they are not pandering on PC issues. Their music and movie reviews are not the very best, but certainly worth the time.  International coverage is high variance, but they have plenty of articles with information you won’t find elsewhere. Some of the finest obituaries.  The best parts of the Op-Ed section are indispensable, and the worst parts are important to read for other reasons.  Perhaps most importantly, the NYT has all sorts of random articles that are just great, even if I don’t always like the framing.  Try this one on non-profit hospitals.

On the other side of the ledger, the metro and sports sections I do not very much read (probably they are OK?).  The business section has long been skimpy, and is not currently at its peak.  Historical coverage with racial angles can be atrocious.  The worst Op-Eds are beyond the pale in their deficient reasoning, and there are quite a few of them.  On “Big Tech” the paper is abysmal, and refuses to look the conflict of interest issues in the eye.  They just blew it on a new Covid study.  The book review section used to be much better, I think mainly because it has become a low cost way to appease the Wokies.

2. Male ambition in the United States is increasing in variance, not waning altogether.  But on the left hand side of that distribution I would blame (in no particular order): deindustrialization, women who don’t need male financial support anymore, marijuana, on-line pornography, improved measurement of worker quality, the ongoing rise of the service sector, too much homework in schools, better entertainment options, and the general increasing competitiveness of the world, causing many to retreat in pre-emptive defeat.

3. Male fantasy writers do not finish their works because those works have no natural ending.  There is always another kingdom, a lost family member, a new magic power to be discovered, and so on.  And the successful fantasy authors keep getting paid to produce more content, and their opportunity cost is otherwise low.  Why exactly should they tie everything up in a neat bow, as Tolkien did with the three main volumes of LOTR?

4. For the United States, I would have more freedom to build, massive deregulations of most things other than carbon and finance, and much more high-skilled immigration, followed by some accompanying low-skilled immigration.  For the UK I would do broadly the same, but also would focus more on human capital problems in northern England as a means of boosting economic growth.

5. Non-12-tone equal temperament music is for instance very popular in the Arabic world, and has been for a long time.

6. I have been meaning to visit Prospera, but have not yet had the chance to go.  I expect to.  My general worries with charter cities usually involve scale, and also whether they will just get squashed by the host governments, which almost by definition are dysfunctional to begin with.  Most successful charter cities in history have had the support of a major outside hegemon, such as Hong Kong relying on Britain.

Richard Hanania interviews me

by  Tyler Cowen in

78 minutes.  With transcript.  It starts off as a normal “talent conversation,” but soon takes other paths.  We discuss feminization in some detail, libertarianism too.  Here is part of Richard’s summary:

Another one of Tyler’s traits that came out in this conversation is his detached skepticism regarding fashionable intellectual trends. For example, I’d taken it for granted that social media has made elite culture more pessimistic and angry, but his answer when I asked about the topic made me reconsider my view.

Interesting throughout, and here is one excerpt:

Tyler: It seems to me social media are probably bad for 12- to 14-year-old girls, and probably good for most of the rest of us. That would be my most intuitive answer, but very subject to revision.

Richard: I think it’s good. I mean, I think it’s good for me…

Tyler: But they’re bad for a lot of academics. I guess, they get classified in…

Richard: They might be at the…

Tyler: They get lumped in with the 12 to 14-year-old girls, right?

Richard: [laughs] There might be a similarity there.

Tyler: They have something in common.

Recommended.

My excellent Conversation with Matthew Ball

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the audio, video, and transcript.  Here is part of the summary:

Ball joined Tyler to discuss the eventual widespan transition of the population to the metaverse, the exciting implications of this interconnected network of 3D worlds for education, how the metaverse will improve dating and its impacts on sex, the happiness and career satisfaction of professional gamers, his predictions for Tyler’s most frequent uses of the metaverse, his favorite type of entrepreneur, why he has thousands of tabs open on his computer at any given moment, and more.

Here is one excerpt:

COWEN: As I read your book, The Metaverse, which again, I’ll recommend highly, I have the impression you’re pretty optimistic about interoperability within the metaverse and an ultimate lack of market power. Now, if I look around the internet — I mean, most obviously, the Apple Store but also a lot of gaming platforms — you see 30 percent fees, or something in that neighborhood, all over the place. Will the metaverse have the equivalent of a 30 percent fee? Or is it a truly competitive market where everything gets competed down to marginal cost?

BALL: I think neither/nor. I wouldn’t say that market power diffuses. There’s currently this ethos, especially in the Web3 community, that decentralization needs to win and that decentralization can win.

It’s a question of where on the spectrum are we? The early internet was obviously held back by heavy decentralization. This is one of the reasons why AOL was, for so many people, the primary onboarding experience. It was easy, cohesive, visual, vertically integrated down to the software, the browser experience, and so forth. But we believe that the last 15 years has been too centralized.

At the end of the day, no matter how decentralized the underlying protocols of the metaverse are, no matter how popular blockchains are, there are multiple forms of centralization. Habit is powerful. Brand is powerful — the associated trust, intellectual property, the fundamental feedback loops of revenue and scale that drive better product investment for more engineers.

So I struggle to imagine the future isn’t some form of today, a handful of varyingly horizontal-vertical software and hardware-based platforms that have disproportionate share and even more influence. But that doesn’t mean that they’re going to be as powerful as today.

The 30 percent fee is definitely going to come by the wayside. We see this in the EU, whose legislation dropped yesterday. I have absolute certainty that that is going to go away. The question is the timeline. A lawyer joked yesterday, Apple is going to fight the EU until the heat death of the universe, and that’s probably likely. But Apple will find other ways to control and extract, as is their profit motive.

COWEN: Where is the most likely place for that partial market power or centralization to show up? Is it in the IP rights, in the payment system, the hardware provider, a cross-platform engine, somewhere else? What’s the most likely choke point?

BALL: There seem to be two different answers to that. Number one is software distribution. This is your classic discovery and distribution of virtual experiences. Steam does that. Roblox does that. Google does that, frankly, the search engine. That gateway to virtual experiences typically affords you the opportunity to be the dominant identity system, the dominant payment system, and so on and so forth.

The other option is hardware. We can think of the metaverse as a persistent network of experiences, but as with the internet, it may exist literally and in abstraction, but you can only access it through a device. Those device operators have an ever-growing network of APIs, experiences, technologies, technical requirements, and controls through which they can shape it.

Recommended, interesting throughout.

My Conversation with Barkha Dutt

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the link, and here is part of the CWT summary:

Barkha joined Tyler to discuss how Westerners can gain a more complete picture of India, the misogyny still embedded in Indian society, why family law should be agnostic of religious belief, the causes of declining fertility in India, why relations between Hindus and Muslims seem to be worsening, how caste has persisted so strongly in India, the success of India’s subsidized institutes of higher education, the best city for Indian food, the power of Amar Chitra Katha’s comics, the influence of her English liberal arts education, the future of Anglo-American liberalism in India, the best ways to use Twitter, and more.

And from the conversation:

COWEN: Many outsiders have the impression that relations between Hindus and Muslims and the aggregate in India have become worse over the last 10 to 15 years. If you put aside particular actions of particular political personalities, and you try to think of a structural reason why that might be true — because normally the intuition is, people grow richer, they’re more tolerant, there’s more commercial interaction, there’s more intermingling — what would be your structural account of why, in some ways, that problem has become worse?

DUTT: You just spoke of intermingling, Tyler. I think that one of the biggest reasons for the worsening relations, or the othering, as it were, of communities that are not your own is the ghettoization of how people live. For example, if there were neighborhoods where people live cheek by jowl — that still happens, of course, in many cities, but it also happens less than it used to, and that is true. We are seeing a Muslim quarter, to give an example, or a Christian quarter in a way that we wouldn’t have before our cities were so ghettoized.

I think that kind of intermingling, of living in the same housing societies or neighborhoods, participating in each other’s festivals as opposed to just tolerating them — those are the structural changes or shifts that we are witnessing. It’s also true that it is tougher for a person from a religious minority — in particular, an Indian Muslim — to get a house as easily as a non-Muslim. I think I would be lying if I did not acknowledge that. Also, the last point is interfaith marriages or interfaith love. This is a deeply politicized issue as well.

While I’m talking to you, in the last 24 hours in the Southern city of Hyderabad, one of our big technology hubs, we’ve had reports of a Muslim family that attacked a Hindu man for marrying a Muslim woman. In reverse, we see Muslim women also targeted all the time if they choose to marry Hindus. This is not helped by the fact that you’ve had several states now talking about what they call love jihad. That’s the phrase they use for marriages that are across religious communities, in particular between Hindus and Muslims.

The percentage of Indians marrying not just outside their religion but also outside their caste — which in Hinduism is a hierarchical system of traditional occupation that you’re born into — is woefully low. I don’t know if I remember my data correctly, but I think less than 5 percent of Indians actually marry outside of their own communities. I would need to go back to that number and check it, but that’s what I remember off the top of my head.

Those are the structural reasons: the fact that people don’t love or have relationships outside of their community, don’t live enough with people of diverse faiths, and don’t participate in each other’s lives.

We used to have this politically correct phrase called tolerance, which I actually just hate, and I keep nudging people towards the Indian military. The Indian military actually has a system of the commanding officer taking on the faith of his troops during religious prayers. The military has multireligious places of worship. It even has something called an MMG, which is not just a medium machine gun but a Mandir Masjid Gurdwara, which is all the different faiths praying together at the same place. We don’t see a lot of that kind of thing happening outside of the military.

Another survey done by Pew reinforced this when it spoke of Indians today being more like a thali than khichri. Let me just explain that. A thali is a silver tray where you get little balls of different food items. Pew found that Hindus and Muslims — when surveyed, both spoke of the need for religious diversity as being a cornerstone of India. They like the idea of India as a thali, where there were different little food items, but separate food items. The khichri is rice and lentils all mixed up and eaten with pickle. The khichri is that intermingling, the untidy overlapping.

We are just seeing less and less of that overlapping. In my opinion, that is tragic. Where there is social interdependence, where there is economic interdependence, where there is personal interdependence is when relationships thrive and flourish and get better. But when they remain ghettos, separations just tolerating each other — that, I think, remains in the realm of othering.

Recommended, interesting throughout.

My excellent Conversation with Marc Andreessen

by  Tyler Cowen in

I’ve been wanting to do this one for some while, and Marc did not disappoint.  Here is the audio, transcript, and video.  Here is the summary:

Marc joined Tyler to discuss his ever-growing appreciation for the humanities and more, including why he didn’t go to a better school, his contrarian take on Robert Heinlein, how Tom Wolfe helped Marc understand his own archetype, who he’d choose to be in Renaissance Florence, which books he’s reread the most, Twitter as an X-ray machine on public figures, where in the past he’d most like to time-travel, his favorite tech product that no longer exists, whether Web will improve podcasting, the civilization-level changes made possible by remote work, Peter Thiel’s secret to attracting talent, which data he thinks would be most helpful for finding good founders, how he’d organize his own bookstore, the kinds of people he admires most, and why Deadwood is equal to Shakespeare.

And the opening:

COWEN: Simple question: Have you always been like this?

ANDREESSEN: [laughs] Yes. I believe that my friends would say that I have.

COWEN: Let’s go back to the junior high school Marc Andreessen. At that time, what was your favorite book and why?

ANDREESSEN: That’s a really good question. I read a lot. Probably, like a lot of people like me, it was a lot of science fiction. I’m one of the few people I know who thinks that late Robert Heinlein was better than early Robert Heinlein. That had a really big effect on me. What else? I was omnivorous at an early age.

COWEN: Why is late Robert Heinlein better?

ANDREESSEN: To me, at least to young me — see if older me would agree with this — a sense of exploration and discovery and wonder and open-endedness. For me, it was as if he got more open-minded as he got older. I remember those books, in particular, being very inspiring — the universe is a place of possibilities.

COWEN: What’s the seminal television show for your intellectual development in, say, junior high school?

ANDREESSEN: Oh, junior high school — it’s hard to beat Knight Rider.

COWEN: Why Knight Rider?

ANDREESSEN: There was a wave of these near science fiction shows in the late ’70s, early ’80s that coincided with . . . Some of it was the aftermath of Star Wars, but it was the arrival of the personal computer and the arrival of computer technology in the lives of ordinary people for the first time. There was a massive wave of anxiety, but there was also a tremendous sense of possibility.

Recommended, excellent throughout.