2016: A Year in Conversation
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We released eleven episodes of Conversations with Tyler this year, and despite the variety of guests, some themes persist throughout. Watch or read below to hear from each guest on topics like food, travel, popular culture, the singular politics of 2016, and living wide.
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On (classic) movies and TV shows
TYLER COWEN: Other than the movies you’re in, which I love, by the way, what’s your favorite movie, and why?
KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR: Oh, jeez. Why would you ask me that? I’m a big movie fan, so just the classic movies, The Maltese Falcon, I totally enjoy that. I can continue, Shane, The Shootist, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: I was raised in a time, 1950s, when Hollywood was competing with television by doing something which television couldn’t do, with those gigantic screens. Like in The Ten Commandments, there’s a giant thing of Pharaoh, a giant sculpture. It starts at one end of the screen and you watch it go to the other end of the screen. Phenomenal. Lawrence of Arabia, oh my God, the dunes of Lawrence of Arabia with that music.
There’s no sense of the large. Young people have no sense whatever of the expansive, of the big gesture.
TYLER COWEN: What’s your favorite television show?
JOE HENRICH: Star Trek.
TYLER COWEN: Which one?
JOE HENRICH: I’m really a next generation guy although I think I like them all.
TYLER COWEN: If you think of the implicit vision of how cooperative different groups can become, including people from different planets in various varieties of Star Trek, as an anthropologist that seems realistic to you or utopian?
JOE HENRICH: I just thought it was fun.
STEVEN PINKER: Let’s see. I like the Ed Sullivan Show.
TYLER COWEN: Why Ed Sullivan?
STEVEN PINKER: Where else could you see Italian acrobats, and then a Jewish comedian, and then the Beatles, and the Supremes, and then another Jewish comedian, all in an hour?
TYLER COWEN: He was an early proponent of integration on TV. You probably know this.
STEVEN PINKER: Absolutely.
TYLER COWEN: Very influential.
STEVEN PINKER: Absolutely. Particularly he had the Supremes on I think more than any other single act, in an era where America had just barely started to desegregate. So yes.
I liked Hill Street Blues. I don’t even know if that’s available on streaming. I like Cheers. As you can see, I haven’t done a lot of TV watching recently.
Most academics I think secretly watch TV as a guilty pleasure and then deny it. I’m the other way around. I don’t watch a whole lot of TV, and I feel like I ought to watch more.
On music
TYLER COWEN: The singer Leonard Cohen, underrated or overrated?
FUCHSIA DUNLOP: Underrated!
TYLER COWEN: Tell us.
FUCHSIA DUNLOP: He’s my favorite singer. Extraordinary master of songwriting.
TYLER COWEN: What’s your favorite Tom Lehrer song?
FUCHSIA DUNLOP: “The Masochism Tango.”
MARGALIT FOX: It’s true, in light of modern sensibilities, you can certainly hear squeaks and occasional bits of strangeness in Casals’s cello suites. I suspect he was older when he recorded them. He lived to be, of course, almost 100. Recording technology has improved since then, and I think he was on such an exalted plane that he gets a bye. He can be and should be forgiven any of these little transgressions that make him seem mortal.
TYLER COWEN: If you had to pick a favorite cellist — I know it’s hard to do, but do you have a pick?
MARGALIT FOX: It depends on the genre. I like different cellists for different things. The great, doomed Jacqueline du Pré, of course, was a wonderful cellist. Rostropovich. Starker, whose obit I wrote.
KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR: I know for a fact that jazz isn’t dead because it has taken on around the world — so many people around the world want to play jazz. You see jazz musicians now coming from all kinds of places that you would not think of like Azerbaijan and Indonesia and people that can sit down and play all of Duke Ellington’s repertoire.
There was an alto saxophonist from Azerbaijan that had all of Charlie Parker’s licks down — all of them. That’s all he had done. It’s incredible.
I think the fact that jazz has affected music around the world and there are still people who enjoy classical jazz will make it survive. The whole idea of prophets being strangers in their own country, I think, is more or less what has happened to jazz, but I don’t think it’s dead.
CASS SUNSTEIN: I’m going to say The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. And it’s a bit of a risky choice because people don’t think it’s bad. It’s in the top seven, probably, and some people would put it in the top five.
It has a terrible title, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The Freewheelin’ anyone — that would be a terrible title. There’s no one — The Freewheelin’ Han Solo. That’s awful. There’s no one for whom that’s a good title.
Bob Dylan — whatever he is, he’s not freewheelin’. He’s, you know, complicated, or mischievous or something, or troubled. But the title wrong-foots you. But I think that’s his greatest album, actually, and so it’s underrated.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: Jimi Hendrix is one of the great geniuses of any instrument in the last a hundred years. Obviously, his music has lasted and is still fresh. For me, there’s a whole period there I teach in my Art of Song Lyrics course. I just was doing Crosby, Stills & Nash, “Wooden Ships,” and it still has this incredible power.
I love that entire period of the 1960s, the music. It was a magic moment. Still in the ’70s, Led Zeppelin, “When the Levee Breaks.” It still has enormous power. A lot of that music that Jimmy Page was doing. A lot of it working in the studio, actually. It wasn’t just live music.
On food and other drugs
JONATHAN HAIDT: Psychedelics have an incredibly positive track record in terms of enriching people’s lives versus damaging them. So to the extent that they are rarely used, and widely feared, I would say that they are underrated and I’m basing this on the research that was done in the ’60s and just starting now that when you give people psychedelic drugs in controlled settings, be they cancer patients, or criminals in jail, the therapeutic effects tend to be quite positive.
The moral panic against drugs in the ’60s through the ’80s was too much, and therefore psychedelic drugs in particular are now underrated.
TYLER COWEN: You once wrote, I quote, “My substitute for LSD was Indian food,” and by that, you meant lamb vindaloo.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: Yes.
TYLER COWEN: You stand by this.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: Yes, I’ve been in a rut on lamb vindaloo.
TYLER COWEN: A rut, tell us.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: It’s a horrible rut.
TYLER COWEN: It’s not a horrible rut, it may be a rut.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: No, it’s a horrible rut. It’s a 40-year rut. Every time I go to an Indian restaurant, I say “Now, I’m going to try something new.” But, no, I must go back to the lamb vindaloo.
All I know is it’s like an ecstasy for me, the lamb vindaloo.
TYLER COWEN: Like De Quincey, tell us, what are the effects of lamb vindaloo?
CAMILLE PAGLIA: What can I say? I attain nirvana.
On travel
NATE SILVER: I was in Thailand, by contrast, this Christmas, and I had to build the goddamn primaries election model, and so yeah, your enjoyment goes down a lot. A little bit of work, working 20 percent of the time, I think reduces your enjoyment by 70 percent.
PAGLIA: I think the idea of sending young people abroad is great. I think that is a proper use of the money that’s going down the tubes at the major universities right now. For parents to think — it would profit young people a lot to be exposed to the world. Right now, our primary school education is absolutely appalling in its lack of world history and world geography.…It is absolutely shocking how little they know. This is a recipe for a disaster. I say yes, send them abroad. Fantastic idea.
EZRA KLEIN: I do not think I’m actually particularly good at travel. I envy your facility here very much. The one thing I really love about it, that maybe is a little bit weird, is I think that a lot of what is great about travel is focusing your attention on a place in a way that is not necessarily related, actually all the time, to being there.
Often times, when I’m traveling somewhere, part of why I learn so much about the place I’m going is that I’m thinking about it, I’m reading about it as I’m there watching it. A lot of it is the mustering of other kinds of attentional resources, watching movies, or documentaries, or consuming other kinds of culture from it before. There is more than just the seeing.
TYLER COWEN: There’s a book I read a review of — I’m sure you’ve heard of it, maybe read it — Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Very positive reviews, right? It’s 704 pages, and they’re fairly dense pages.
I thought of reading the book, and then I sat down and I said to myself, “With the time it would take me to read this book, I could fly to Jamaica and spend an additional three days.” I’ve only been to Jamaica once. And therefore, it didn’t make sense for me to read the book. How do you feel about that reasoning?
MICHAEL ORTHOFER: Well, I’m full of admiration if you think you could capture — you know, if spending three days in Jamaica would be the equivalent. I don’t think it’s equivalent. I think it really is a separate experience…One of the things we have to remember, when someone is writing a book, a work of fiction, there’s usually years of work in that. And I think that is reflected in the final product.
On reading
MARGALIT FOX: Narrative nonfiction. The great contemporary masters — John McPhee, Tracy Kidder — plus the wonderful old masters of essays — E. B. White, Red Smith, Twain of course. Always Twain.
Twain is completely symptomatic for the people I love to read because you not only get the paramount stylist, the nonpareil of stylists, but you can also see through the writing. It’s a window onto how the man’s mind works. And that, I love.
EZRA KLEIN: One of my favorite books is The Muhammad Ali Reader. It is the case that basically every great writer of the 20th century did their Muhammad Ali piece. You can just go through there and it is an amazing tour of particularly New Journalism, but there is a capacity to use sports to write about anything in the American experience. It is really tremendous.
JOE HENRICH: I’m a big fan of Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond). I would also have to say Culture and the Evolutionary Process (Boyd and Richerson, 1985).
STEVEN PINKER: I have a big stack of bicycling magazines, and I am obsessed about the difference in weight in grams between various kinds of derailleurs and water bottle cages.
TYLER COWEN: You’ve written favorably about the 18th-century Chinese novel, Dream of the Red Chamber. Most Americans haven’t read that. Tell us why it’s important.
FUCHSIA DUNLOP: It’s like a whole world into Chinese culture of the Qing Dynasty. It’s the story of two grand families and their rising and falling fortunes over a number of years. It’s got amazing characters. It’s like a soap opera of Chinese characters. You will learn about Chinese rituals, about Chinese food, about cultural preoccupations.
MICHAEL ORTHOFER: It’s basically a novel which has everything. It’s comprehensive. It’s such a sweeping book. It’s really one that you can get lost in over a long period of time. It’s a book that is very easy to return to, because there is so much in it.
FUCHSIA DUNLOP: It’s just totally captivating. The English translation I read it in, the Penguin version, is five volumes. It’s about this big. It just took over my life for five months because I just wanted to see what happened to these people.
MICHAEL ORTHOFER: It’s just a compelling story. It really describes these characters and their feelings very well — and a wonderful picture, also, of the China of the times, which is a totally different world.
On trying new things
JONATHAN HAIDT: One of my little small moments of insight and I sat in disgust, was when Paul Rozin and I were working with a Japanese colleague, Sumio Imada, and he brought in a can of honey‑covered grasshoppers from Japan, into Paul’s office, in about the year 1990. I was a disgust researcher, and I thought, “OK, good, I’ve never eaten an insect before, I’m going to try it.” I took one, I brought up to my mouth intending to eat it, and my throat just gagged.
I’ve never had such a clear gag response, my throat said no way, you’re not putting that in. I just forced my hand into my mouth, once beyond the lips, interestingly, once it’s beyond the lips then disgust, it’s sort of too late, and then I was able to eat it. But no, I still find eating insects disgusting.
COWEN: Let’s say I want to learn how to enjoy sea cucumber, which believe it or not, I am not currently able to do, but I’m not against the idea. I would like to learn this. What is your actual advice for me? Other than try it. I’ve tried it, I still don’t enjoy it. I don’t hate it. What do I do next?
FUCHSIA DUNLOP: What you have to do is firstly, go to a good place so you feel good. It’s nice surroundings. You have to put it into your mouth and set aside all your mental prejudices, and just try to experience it in a sensory way.
Try to feel it. Try to feel that slightly slithery, gelatinous quality, that little crispness in the bite. It’s like what I like to think of is edible oxymoron, this softness and crispness. Chinese love these sensory contradictions.
On the Star Wars prequels
SUNSTEIN: I think you are right in saying the prequels are underrated. And we need a movement — you may have just started it — for the revival of the prequels as an object of admiration. And the reason I think they deserve admiration is, you know, multiple. One is just your point that they boldly go where — I won’t finish the sentence.
COWEN: Nor will anyone go there again, I think.
CASS SUNSTEIN: They boldly don’t do as the standard movie of this kind does, focus on individuals. There’s individual stuff, but it’s about institutions. And they have something to say about both how people go bad — and here I think it does get deep, especially about a little boy who loses his mother and then his loved one, who was much older and in some ways a mother figure. That’s extremely interesting, I think, psychologically. And he kind of loses her, too. And it’s the threat of loss that gets to him. I think that’s super interesting.
And there’s something very similar that happens with the Republic. So, the institutional failure of a squabbling legislature leading to interest in a strong paternal leader — that’s mirrored in the democratic process as it is in the individual life. And that’s great.
CAMILLE PAGLIA: It was Revenge of the Sith — after the great volcano planet climax of Revenge of the Sith. I think it’s one of the greatest sequences in all of modern art. The thing is once I had written about it, I realized, as I went out in the world, how few people had actually seen the movie, because people had given up on the prequels long before.
Therefore, I think anyone who dismisses what I say about the sublime quality, the vision, the execution, the emotions, and the passions of that scene, they don’t know what I’m talking about, because they haven’t exposed themselves to it.
On Trump and, well, 2016
NATE SILVER: Some of it is thinking about, frankly, this Donald Trump phenomenon.
TYLER COWEN: I’ve heard of him.
NATE SILVER: Yeah. It just made me consider that a lot of assumptions a lot of people made about how American politics work are really based on a relatively narrow slice of history, post–World War II through 2000 or so, maybe even briefer, 1980 through 2000. It’s not really a lot of history.
In many other contexts, there are all types of places around the world where nationalism is a much bigger phenomenon than it is in the United States. Race and racism is embedded in a great deal of political turmoil in the United States.
In some ways, I kind of wondered after the Great Recession, “How come we haven’t seen more social upheaval?” Maybe we’re seeing that a little bit delayed. It’s more of a revolution of rising expectations. At the same time, there is such a tendency now to focus on — in politics, people focus on a very small number of stories that are not representative of the big picture.
STEVEN PINKER: I don’t think that the Trumpism shows that our attitudes have changed, that we’re becoming more misogynistic or racist. You can do some Google searches that are quicker than Gallup or Pew polls to track some of these changes.
Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has shown that, for example, if you Google for various racist or sexist terms that are used in jokes, you get a pretty good barometer of racism that people may not be willing to admit to in public. If you do that, you don’t see a sudden U‑turn in the popularity of racist jokes in the last, say, six months.
EZRA KLEIN: We do not have a language for demographic anxiety that is not a language that is about racism. And we need one. I really believe this, and I believe it’s been a problem, particularly this year. It is clear, the evidence is clear. Donald Trump is not about “economic anxiety.”
TYLER COWEN: A bit, but not mainly, I agree.
EZRA KLEIN: That said, I think that the way it’s presented is a choice between economic anxiety and racism. And one I don’t think that’s quite right, and two I don’t think that’s a productive way of having that conversation.
TYLER COWEN: Why don’t we have that language? Where did it go, or did we ever have it?
EZRA KLEIN: I don’t know if we ever had it. We probably did have it. We have properly been working very, very hard in this society to make racism socially intolerable. We have a society that continues to have a lot of racism, a lot of sexism, a lot of bigotry of different kinds. But I do think that as a by-product of that debate and that effort, there isn’t a good way to have people discuss slightly more inchoate feelings of losing power that aren’t necessarily in their view, about taking it away from other people. It’s more about losing it themselves. I think that’s a big difference in this.
Arlie Hochschild, who I’ve had on my show —
TYLER COWEN: Which I’ve heard; it was a very good episode.
EZRA KLEIN: Thank you. Something she talks about in there is this kind of deep story that she found among — she’s a sociologist who spent five years with tea party folks in Louisiana — she talks about this deep story of feeling like they’ve been waiting in line, and now other people are getting in front. It’s not so much that they don’t want those other people to get ahead, it’s that they want to get ahead themselves. They are feeling a loss in a zero-sum competition, and they may actually be correct about that.
TYLER COWEN: Can you readily imagine that 30, 40, 50 years from now we’ve in some way regressed and become much more zero-sum? Or would that be extremely unlikely?
JOE HENRICH: I think it’s a ready ability for us to see the world in zero-sum terms and I don’t think it takes very much to push people into zero-sum thinking.
TYLER COWEN: You think it’s scarcity or slow growth or ethnic conflict or what? What are the triggers?
JOE HENRICH: The main thing would be negative growth, and yeah, conflict with various groups. We don’t know yet, but those are my suspicions.
On mixing it up for yourself
NATE SILVER: That’s part of why even though now we’re very immersed in the election cycle, it’s part of why I wanted to make sure that FiveThirtyEight was not just an election site. We’re going to blow an election sooner or later. We might blow this one. To be doing a whole diverse array of things both intellectually and commercially is important.
FUCHSIA DUNLOP: The first thing I would say is go to a market, see what produce people are using. The markets are getting harder to find in the big cities, but seek one out. The chances are you’ll see not only the very interesting produce, but you’ll also find snack stalls around the market, which will also be interesting…Try to order a variety of dishes. One great mistake you can make is just order all dishes which are deep-fried or red-braised. You always want to have some lighter dishes that might seem less exciting, like simple stir-fried vegetables or a refreshing broth, but that’s part of the whole experience of the meal.
JOE HENRICH: But my take on the history, at least of invention (that’s something I’ve spent a little bit of time on; it could be different in other domains), is great ideas actually come from a recombination. If you’re a cultural learner and you learn a little bit from this guy and a little bit from this guy and a little bit from that guy and recombine them, you get a brand-new thing. But you actually didn’t. You actually were just cultural-learning from three different people. Knowing people in very different domains of knowledge that normally don’t meet is a great way to be an innovator.
KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR: [laughs] I would have to say that, stealing this from somebody that I can’t remember the quote I’m stealing — life is short, but it’s very wide. Try to get into the width of it and experience as many things as you can, and maybe you’ll learn a few things.
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