Tyler Cowen & Nabeel Qureshi - An Appetite For More

**Tyler Cowen** (0:00)
There's this funny race, approximately, it's between, obviously, Anthropic and Open AI, but it's a race that never ends. But when you ask the question, when is this settled? Maybe the answer is just never.

**Nabeel Qureshi** (0:09)
People say, you know, I'm tired, and it's like, well, pace yourself.

**Tyler Cowen** (0:13)
We're in the first inning, sir. And when Mark 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. So all these debates, is Claude conscious? I would way sooner ask, like, is Tyler conscious? But at the same time, I like to say, I'm only conscious enough to avoid philosophical self-refutation. I don't think I feel that much. I've never cried in front of a painting. When I read these accounts, oh, I saw the Madonna and I started weeping. It makes no sense to me. It's like people who do sports gambling. Why do you do that? There's positive some gambles for you. Here's a few.
Here's the S&P 500

**Nabeel Qureshi** (0:46)
A work of art has never made you cry?

**Tyler Cowen** (0:48)
Never.

**Nabeel Qureshi** (0:49)
I would say the last one, I think we saw this maybe together was Memoria. And the scene at the end where they're both lying by the river and there's some kind of weird transmission that takes place moved me to tears.

**Tyler Cowen** (1:00)
That's too good a work of art for me to cry over.

**Jackson Dahl** (1:03)
Why do you write books?

**Tyler Cowen** (1:05)
I think Mentors and Mentees, which is the title of the next book, might be my last book. The world is changing very rapidly and a book takes two and a half years or more.

**Nabeel Qureshi** (1:14)
I just want to cut in and say this is my least favorite Tyler take.

**Jackson Dahl** (1:18)
Welcome to Dialectic episode 50 with Tyler Cowen and Nabeel Qureshi. I want to do something special for episode 50 And Tyler Cowen is somebody who frankly I was a little intimidated to interview. My friend Nabeel Qureshi who had been on the show episode 13, one of my favorites who's become somebody I've learned a tremendous amount from, had suggested Tyler a few times. And I frankly, I think Tyler's a little bit incompressible. So I wasn't sure about my normal dialectic style. And so I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point to talk to Tyler. And I interviewed the two of them. If you're not familiar with Tyler, he is a PhD economist at George Mason University and leads the Mercatus Center. But he is also so many other things. He's blogged almost every day for over 20 years at Marginal Revolution. He has interviewed hundreds of people on his podcast, Conversations with Tyler. He's one of the best interviewers in the world. He's written nearly 20 books. Tyler and Nabeel both are prolific, brilliant generalists.
So I decided to focus most of the conversation on an area that I know is common ground for them, which is art and aesthetics. And for lack of a better word, taste. In the conversation, you'll hear it. Tyler says Nabeel has some of the best taste of anyone he knows, particularly in movies, which is actually how they got to know each other. And I wanted to talk to these two about great art and why they respond to it. We also talk about AI and acceleration, commitments, what is sacred, mentorship, friendship, and much more. I think you could probably talk to Tyler Cowen and Nabeel Qureshi about almost anything. And the moderator certainly isn't doing much heavy lifting, so I was just glad to be in the room. I hope you enjoy the conversation.
And thank you for coming along for the ride for 50 episodes so far of Dialectic. I hope to see you for 50 more and beyond. You can get a full transcript for the show and all the linked references in the description below. And before we get into the things, I'd like to thank Notion, Dialectic's presenting partner. Speaking of 50 episodes, Notion came on board towards the end of last year and it's been an amazing journey to have them support the show and make so much more possible. Notion is collaborative workspace for your life's work that has reinvented itself for the AI era. Some of you may know Notion from using it in the past and see it as a great collaborative workspace, a great note-taking tool, a great database tool, whatever. But I think Notion is incredibly well suited to the AI era because of how important context is for using these tools, whether it be individual models, plugging into tools like Codex and Cloud Code, being able to have a shared substrate for you and everyone you collaborate with, that updates in real time, that treats models and agents as first-class citizens, and is up-to-date with every single model as soon as it's released, is remarkably powerful. Notion is the harness, it's the context layer, it's the canvas that holds all of that for me, for dialectic, for research I'm doing, for understanding guests, for thinking about who might be able to come on the show in the future and for preparing things for all of you. I also appreciate that Notion is deeply principled about the work that we automate, and the ultimate mission of what Notion founder Ivan Zhao calls thinking together, the goal for us and our collaborators and increasingly these new intelligences to think together and do great work. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic and I think you'll be pretty blown away, especially if you haven't checked things out in a while. With that, here is my conversation with Tyler Cowen and Nabeel Qureshi.