Category: Music

Why I do not use LLMs more

by  Tyler Cowen in

They are so very, very good at matching me to the books I wish to read and the music I wish to listen to.  In this odd sense they are not very sticky.  The LLMs are amazing, but the world is awesome too!  Thus the LLMs keep on sending me away.  There is quality travel as well.

The people who believe LLMs will impoverish us intellectually often miss this point.  And it might also provide a cap on market demand.  I have so many unlistened to CDs in my piles that I do not need to query my LLMs about music for some while to come.

Bundesrepublik Deutschland

by  Tyler Cowen in

At times we forget what an amazing wonder the Bundesrepublik Deutschland was.  At the end of the World War II, Germany was one of the sickest and cruelest human societies in history, ever.  Not too many years later, it was one of the best and most successful societies ever.

By the 1980s, living standards had caught up to the United States, with the provision of public goods sometimes superior.  The country was fully democratic, pro-Western, and largely pro-American.

Their rail system and postal service were amongst the best ever created.

For thinkers of note there were Hans Blumenberg, Habermas, Peter Weiss, Gadamer, late Heidegger and late Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck, the underrated Klaus Theweleit, Niklas Luhmann, and perhaps you value some of the other members of the Frankfurt School.

The visual arts were very strong, with Richter, Polke, Baselitz, Beuys, Penck, Palermo, and much more.

Music produced Stockhausen, Henze, Lachenmann, Rihm, Zimmerman, Kraftwerk, Can, and all of Krautrock, later techno, though right at the time of unification rather than during the BRD per se.  The list of vocalists, instrumentalists, and conductors is strong.  Was there anywhere better for hearing opera?

Perhaps I prefer the fiction from Austria and Switzerland, but at the very least Germany provided a major market for those authors and it was an extraordinarily literate country with amazing bookstores.  For domestic authors there were Böll, Patrick Süskind, Siegfried Lenz, Wolfgang Koeppen, can I count Uwe Johnson?, and Arno Schmidt maybe?  I do not like Grass, but it seems wrong not to list him.

The food could be very good, especially in the southwest.  There were Michelin star restaurants all over the country (still are, to be clear on this point).  So many well-functioning cities, with many of the world’s best transit systems.  Lots of nuclear power and a strong industrial base.  West Berlin was an exciting city with an air of mystery.  Some might say no speed limit on the Autobahn, though I am less sure that was a virtue.  Plenty of beautiful women and reasonable attitudes toward sex.

If you had to choose, what was the worst thing about the country?  No shopping on Sundays?  Workplace and shopping hours discrimination against women?  Too much smoking?  Obsession with Waldsterben?

Are there features of post-unification Germany that can compare to this earlier era?  So much seems not to work well.  So many policy mistakes have been made.  So much leadership lost in the areas mentioned above.  So much pessimism, sadly a lot of it seems to be justified.

Where did all the good performance go?  And why did it leave?  Lack of a communist enemy?  Absorption of East Germany?  The simple accretion of distance from pre-WWII German creativity?

The wonder that was the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.  Johannes, we hardly knew ye.

I DJ for Rick Rubin about music and patriotism

by  Tyler Cowen in

MUSIC EPISODE: “You think you understand patriotism, you have your hands around it–it’s the simple thing, but it turns out it’s not. And maybe, music and the history of music shows us all that better than mere discourse about it.”

@tylercowen

0:00:00 Tyler Cowen

0:00:24 Intro: Patriotism in Music

0:03:09 John Philip Sousa & Stars and Stripes Forever

0:07:38 Country Joe & the Fish: The Anti-War Song

0:16:49 Andrews Sisters & Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy

0:22:04 Liszt & Bartók: Hungarian Independence

0:36:29 Dvořák, Rossini & William Tell

0:47:24 Stockhausen, Percy Grainger & Sacred War

0:59:59 Trinidad, Congo & Brazil: Independence Songs

1:21:49 William Byrd & the Sex Pistols

1:28:00 Elgar, Charles Ives & Chuck Berry

Here is one link to the podcast itself, here is another.  Recorded in Tuscany, definitely recommended, all fresh material.

The Queen song ’39

by  Tyler Cowen in

I only recently learned what it is really about, namely very rapid travel into space and time dilation mattering for the return voyage.

I had never before listened carefully to the lyrics.  I heard the “’39” reference at the beginning, the mention of volunteeers sailing away, and the general nostalgic British music hall mood to the piece, and assumed it concerned the Second World War.  But no, the volunteers sailing away are going to the stars, and their eventual return to the Earth will be for them a sad and tragic event, as everything they had known will be gone.  You can listen to the song here.

Here is one of the most direct excerpts:

In the year of ’39 came a ship in from the blueThe volunteers came home that dayAnd they bring good news of a world so newly bornThough their hearts so heavily weighFor the Earth is old and grey, little darling, we’ll awayBut my love, this cannot beOh, so many years have gone though I’m older but a yearYour mother’s eyes, from your eyes, cry to me

Here are the full lyrics.  Brian May, who wrote the song, is not only a wonderful guitarist but he has a PhD in astrophysics.

p.s. no synthesizers!

Cross-ethnic casting

by  Tyler Cowen in

I complained about the casting of The Odyssey per se (the blind beggar was best), but in general I do not mind cross-ethnic casting.  I am glad Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra, Dev Patel played David Copperfield, Denzel Washington played Macbeth, black and Latino actors play white parts in Hamilton, and that Morgan Freeman can play God well (God himself would not be “white,” but God as black is nonetheless a conscious choice), and there was Jessye Norman (among others) singing and playing many traditionally white roles on the opera stage.

Recently in a private conversation I suggested that Nabeel Qureshi be cast as the next James Bond.  He has a British accent, was born in (northern!) England, is tall and is good-looking.  He does not remind anyone of Roger Moore.  He is old enough where you could believe he has some experience as a spy, and at the baccarat table, but young enough where he could do those stunts without it seeming ridiculous.

I recall the talk of a black Bond, a notion which likely would end up dull and cliched.  But a Bond of Pakistani ethnic origin?  Now that would occasion some debate.

I am not saying it always works.  I likely would object to a remake of Zulu with an all-Chinese cast.  Or there can be major cultural mistakes which are not cross-ethnic, such as casting a Liverpudlian in the role of a London elite.  Everyone in The Sopranos should at least be pretending to fit their roles, and indeed Tony himself grew up in New Jersey.  I would have done fine in a cameo role.

My excellent Conversation with Chase Koch

by  Tyler Cowen in

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

Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father’s lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa’s grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De’Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents’ garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it’s like working with MrBeast, how Koch Industries has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the “farm team,” why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old’s urging, where he’s traveling next, and much more.

Excerpt:

COWEN: N.W.A., are they good? I like them.

KOCH: I had my phases. My first business, Tyler, was when I was 15 years old and one of my best friends to this day, Askia Ahmad, he was wiring up car stereos and building custom boom boxes and all that. We basically built a business out of my parents’ garage because they had all the tools and materials and everything. Like, “Let’s build a business out of here. My parents hopefully will pay for the machinery, and then we can sell these boom boxes to our friends at high prices and capture a big margin.” Through that, I learned about the whole gangster rap. Your listeners may be surprised, but it started with me, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Eazy-E, of course—

COWEN: It’s so good.

KOCH: Dre.

COWEN: Snoop.

KOCH: Snoop.

COWEN: You know Snoop, right?

KOCH: It’s so good, so good. Yes.

COWEN: What’s Snoop like?

KOCH: Snoop? Okay. This goes back to what I was mentioning on the power of music to unify people. So I’ve been with Stand Together. For the listeners that don’t know, it’ll give context to your question. Stand Together is an organization that has really a community of like-minded leaders that all believe in one thing, in the power of human potential, and that every human has a gift.

We all know that there’s so many barriers in society that are holding people back, whether it’s barriers in education, barriers in regulation, so you can’t start a business, barriers in our criminal justice system, you name it. What Stand Together does is we have basically a comprehensive strategy that addresses everything from education to policy to bottom-up empowerment in communities to drive real social change. I’ve been a part of this for as long as I can remember.

My father’s been working on social change for 60 years. My passion for music, as you can see from your last line of questioning, with Stand Together and that whole community, we never tapped into culture. When I say culture and what the next generation pays attention to—sports, music, YouTube, entertainment, creators, media. During COVID, I had this idea that we’ve never tapped into music to drive social change.

And on one specific point:

Back to your question on energy, 4 percent of the overall capital consumed at Koch is in refining, which is basically where my grandfather started the company. I think that surprises a lot of people because I think a lot of people are still stuck in this, “Well, you’re this energy company.” No, we’re not. We touch the majority of the economy now, and we’re in everything from forest products, consumer products, software, as I described, glass manufacturing, to energy and fertilizers as well.

Interesting throughout.

Wiesbaden notes

by  Tyler Cowen in

Who goes to Wiesbaden these days?  The era of Russian nobles taking the cure here and gambling is long since gone.  And yet here we are.  The proximate cause of this trip is the desire to see Grigory Sokolov, one of the world’s great pianists and a cult figure of sorts.  He rarely tours North America, maybe these days never as he is 76.  The current program includes Beethoven’s fourth piano sonata, Beethoven’s Op.126 Bagetelles, and Schubert’s last piano sonata.  How can one say no?  Sokolov also was a favorite of Tom Schelling, I might add, especially his recording of The Art of the Fugue, in my view one of the best classical music recordings of all time.

Besides, I have long been a believer in semi-random excursions to mid-size, slightly neglected German cities.  There remains a strong cultural federalism in Germany, and so you might see and hear wonderful things in many different parts of the country.

I perceived two difficult Wiesbadens.  In one, if you walk through the cheaper part of the pedestrian zone in the evening, the city seems mostly Muslim.  But if you walk around during the morning, the city seems mostly German.  I might add that some of the younger Muslim women show signs of assimilating, at least based on how they dress and present themselves.  The older women tend to stick with the headscarves.

Over the last twenty years, inflation-adjusted real estate prices in Wiesbaden have gone up about forty percent, an OK performance.  At times the city “does not feel like Germany any more,” but I think it is holding on.  The proportion of new building is roughly equal to the population growth, so I do not think this price effect is a NIMBY effect.  Rather it reflects the fact that Wiesbaden is still a pretty nice place to live.  that said, in some significant ways Germany in the traditional sense is failing to reproduce itself.

It was stunning to me to discover how hard it is, in most of the downtown, to find plain, ordinary German food.  At any price level.  There is no current equivalent of Wienerwald or Nordsee to be seen, never mind a decent Wiener Schnitzel.

Much of Wiesbaden was destroyed and rebuilt, but the best fifteen or twenty buildings show the previous wealth and splendor to good effect.  You will see these gems walking around, though only periodically.  There is also an old Roman wall and a moving, more recent Holocaust memorial.

Most German ice cream just isn’t that good, so try L’Art Sucre for something French.

Museum Reinhard Ernst is the new institution in town, and it specializes in color field abstract art.  The building is impressive, but the collection is weak except for a few Stellas.  Why organize a museum around that basis unless the underlying collection is super strong in that area?  This one is not.  I can forgive the absence of the expensive American Ellsworth Kelly, but no Blinky Palermo or Günther Förg?

Nonetheless their restrooms might forestall this kind of Larry David conflict:

(At Museum Ludwig in Köln, by the way, you get the discount for being disabled only if you have “fifty degrees of disability,” however they might measure that.  Slight disabilities are not enough, you must be truly “schwerbehinderte,” as judged by the state, heaven forbid the museum rely on the honor system.)

Museum Wiesbaden in contrast was an unexpected delight.  Although it is mainly a natural history museum, they have one of the world’s best collections of Art Nouveau and the single best Jawlensky collection, and you can have these all to yourself.  Very few people seem to go there.

As for the economy, here are some Germany facts of the day.  Yet Germany continues, and visits remain a source of pleasure and interest.

Sokolov, by the way, played six encores.  Where should the Germany trip target next year?

Jackson Dahl podcasts with me and Nabeel on aesthetics

by  Tyler Cowen in

Filmed at home, this ran about two hours, and yes that is Nabeel Qureshi, with a cameo from Spinoza toward the very end.  From Jackson:

Links

From the episode summary:

Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=wC78q_BeD27XDnLN&v=qPHV-BezoIc&feature=youtu.be

Excerpt:

Tyler: (18:31) I think I’m very mundane in many ways. When Marc Andreessen had that famous tweet about not being too introspective, I know he got slammed for that, but I sympathize with that in many ways. I have my work. I focus on it. I want to go see places I haven’t seen before. That really drives me. I feel pretty well motivated. I do think all kinds of deep thoughts, but to me those deep thoughts feel more superficial than my so-called superficial urges to go around doing things. And I’m fine with that.

…Jackson: (23:25) Do you experience art primarily by thinking or by feeling?

Tyler: (23:29) I don’t even know what those words mean. I experience it by looking at it. I don’t think I have very deep emotional responses. I think it’s pleasure and I feel I learn a lot from it. When I go out and look at other works of art or just the world, I see a lot more than people who don’t live with art. I don’t think I feel that much. I’ve never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts of someone seeing a Madonna and weeping, it makes no sense to me. It’s like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There are positive-sum gambles for you. Here are a few.

There is much more of interest, self-recommending!