How to Teach Millions of People with Your Blog — Tyler Cowen & Alex Tabarrok

The internet has enabled us to teach hundreds of thousands of students. Well, millions. Wow. You're never really fully on anyone's side. We're not Socrates, but uh that is the paradigmatic example, right? You want to be on Twitter, you want to be on YouTube, you can't let anything goow. You have to be there. Tyler creates complexity and chaos, and you simplify and create order. If you're confused about what the post said, that's a Tyler post. If you understand exactly what the post said and you're mad as hell about it, that's an Alex post.

So, Alex, it was October 2003 and you

wrote, "Yesterday we breached 10,000 visitors for the first time. Keep coming. You're in good company." Talk about that. Yeah. So I mean we started in August of 2003 was the first uh post and uh there was no social media there was no Twitter back then uh there was really was before the iPhone so there was really no phones so like how do you advertise this thing we didn't even have any way of advertising it but within a few days people had commented on the very first post oh you know maybe there's something here and uh then yeah 10,000 seemed like a lot at the time within in, you know, just really a matter of weeks. So, I guess we were pretty stoked about that.

Do you remember the conversations that you had that led up to this or what was going on that sparked the genesis of MR?

This could be our Rashimon moment, right? Cuz I feel I know the story, but you say first story. So, my remembrance is that I came into Tyler's office and I said, "We should write a textbook." And Tyler said, "Yes, but first we should write a blog." And I'm like, "What's a blog?" Maybe it wasn't quite that bad, but it was really early on, you know. Um, and uh, so we did. So, and that was kind of the the genesis of it. Um, and I think that was the correct ordering.

And this is exactly my version. But one thing I said, we should write a blog. And I said, we'll become famous. And by famous, I meant, well, maybe 5,000 people would read us. Right. Right. Yeah. And uh, you were like, well, you know, and then we just did it. And early on, we didn't even know people were reading us. We're like, we're going to do some posts for practice. And it turned out people were reading. You think that's one of the keys? Just this cuz this is one thing I noticed about you, Tyler, is you're driven by what's fun, what's joyful for for me as like your core thing.

If I keep on doing it, I figure I'll get somewhere with my writing and most other people don't find it that fun. So, it's a competitive advantage just to be choosing things you're intrinsically interested in. Does it feel like work to you working on MR or sometimes? I feel I I I spend a lot of time to try and craft my pieces. You know, I sort of think, well, if we've got 50,000 100,000 readers, if I, you know, reduce the time it takes them to read this by, you know, a second or two, well, that's socially very beneficial.

So, I should spend a few minutes to to do that. And they're high opportunity cost readers, a lot of them. Yeah, exactly. You're high opportunity cost readers. But I do feel that it's worthwhile putting some effort in to craft something which is short uh and tight. You know, we we think about MR as dim sum for the mind, right? Little bites for the mind and uh we've kept at that for a long time. Ah, that's a good rabbit hole. Talk to me about these little heristics. Dim sum for the mind, high opportunity cost readers, like walk me through some a much better world, right? That's our subheading. The notion that you can do something that seems small, but the way you get to a much better world is through the accumulation and compounding returns from these small steps. There's whiners, there's pukers, there's pessimism, right? That's those are the dominant strands. But where small steps toward a much better world? And we had

an argument. Should we put the word much in there? Not an argument. And Alex said we should put much in. I'm like, no, that's that's crazy. You can't put in much. Like a better world is better enough. But he was right. We put in the much. And looking back clearly was the right way to go. Why? I mean if you think about it we have done very many small steps 20 years of writing all these posts but it has led to a lot of big things like fast grants you know co and and that that was that was huge the effect of alter speed your participation but the hint of ambition but it a little bit hidden you know with the much. So if someone notices the much like okay you know gets them thinking these guys are about much in fact small steps much.

If you had much first and then the small steps I'd be worried but we we got the

sequence right. Do you feel like there were moments early on when one of you posted something and the other person was like that's not really what we're going for. No I he must have because I post I've posted more. No. Yeah. No. I I I don't think I ever thought that. Not even the NBA posts. No, they've done very well, by the way. Yeah, I don't do them anymore. But one of our best read posts of all time was about Shaquille O'Neal.

What was that one? I was arguing he's a plausible candidate for greatest basketball player of all time, which is not a common view. And I would say in retrospect his career was too short for that to be plausible conclusion. But the notion of if you were building a team out of one player that you might have plausibly picked Shaq. And keep in mind at that time LeBron didn't have nearly the longevity he has now. Now no way could it be true you'd pick LeBron. But anyway put this post out there got enormous amount of feedback attention. So what does that teach us about MR that that post would do so well? Because intuitively it wouldn't seem seems like it would be a flop.

Be true to yourself. If you are thinking about something, put it out there for the world. What do you think? People also love to rank things, right? That's right. Yeah. So, you know, and everybody has an opinion on those sorts of questions. It's not actually a good thing. I think maybe not, but everyone can contribute a little bit. And so, like if we write something about, you know, some area of economics where we're sort of experts, then people feel less inclined to comment and say, "Oh, well, what about this? What about this?" But if you talk about Shaquille O'Neal, you know, people feel that they have a a worthwhile opinion and and maybe they do.

And you want to randomize topics a bit. And keep in mind, especially for blogging, a big motivation of your readers is they want to take you down a peg. So you actually have to give them some chances to do that. And a post on something like Shaquille O'Neal, they can say, "Oh, Tyler, you don't know anything about basketball. Even when Shaq was playing, Hakee was a better center." Maybe true, maybe not. but they love being able to put me down and you actually have to lean into that somewhat.

Were there moments throughout this throughout this time where you felt like maybe it starts off as an experiment, now it becomes a thing and then things become things at sort of different stages where you're like, "Wow, we're we're we're really doing this." Because presumably it starts off as a small conversation and now it's one of the

defining parts of your career. Are there moments of wow or serendipity where you said, "Oh my goodness, I can't believe what we've built." Well, I thought it would be this big success at 5,000 readers who would be twothirds academics, the more broader academics in the economics profession, and that I was just going to be delighted with that. That was my vision. Uh we we've got that, but we got a lot lot more. And just how much the real world cares about ideas has been one of the biggest things I've learned. And that's wonderful. It's very exciting and optimistic that people out there who don't do ideas for a living really care what you and others think.

Yeah. And things like, you know, Marginal Revolution University, the expansion to video, and the idea that we have students who are using our videos. We get emails all the time, you know, I passed my class, a student in South Korea, a student in India, Pakistan, you know, they're writing to us um because they they watch the videos. And so like out there they're all there are all these students we never thought we would have. Right.

That's right. That's incredible. I mean we think usually we're teaching like five at a time, 30 at a time. You have a class of 200 like oh my god that's enormous. I can't handle that. Yeah. And the internet has enabled us to teach hundreds of thousands of students which is incredible. Millions. Millions probably. Yeah. By now. Yeah. Millions. Yeah. So there's three core pillars to the stool because everyone thinks of the blog, but there's also the YouTube channel and the textbook and the podcast and Twitter. There's there's more in fact, but go on.

Well, talk to me. You you once called it a intellectual blitzkrieg. So talk to me about this whole consortium of projects. It's an integrated product line which we participate in to varying degrees. Like writing the textbook, Alex does more of that than I do. Uh the podcast is something I do, but the goal is that you introduce your audiences to each other and to the different products and people consume information different ways. So you want to be on Twitter, you want to be on YouTube. We're not on TikTok. You want to be out there with the written word. I've had columns for New York Times and Bloomberg. Alex writes pieces all over the place other than on the blog and then they show up on the blog.

And uh you can't let anything, you know, just goow. You have to be there. and that these things complement each other. What makes you a good textbook writer,

Alex? Um, he's better than I am. And tell him the honest reason why. I'm not as smart as Tyler. That's the honest reason why. So, that's not how I would put it. I'll tell you. So, to me, I have to simplify things down, right? So, that's naturally how I think. Tyler and I think in very different ways. So, but we often

arrive at a similar conclusion. So, like Tyler will start with the most complicated version of the story, okay? And like all the qualifiers and the ifs, ands, and buts and and I said, Tyler, the students never going to understand that. We need to simplify it. And I start with the like like cut all the, you know, uh cut all the bells and whistles off, simplify things down to the most stark, you know, um uh uh situation. And then I add, you know, some bells and whistles. And then I'll go to Tyler. Well, we'll take away some bells and whistles. and we arrive at the same place. But I think it does help me to teach students in that I can understand why they're confused. Okay?

Because I would be also confused, you know, it's not obvious to me. So like I have to simplify uh things down so that I can understand them. And so I think that helps me when I'm writing for somebody else who is just learning this material for the first time. I would say my problem is I enjoy confusing them more. That's the most Tyler sentence ever. And Alex, you know, some of it he's just doing the work, but he also reigns me in when I'm contributing. And even apart from his comments, I'm writing and it's like, oh, Alex is going to read that.

You know, you got to make that simpler and more clear because, you know, what's Alex going to think? So, when you're writing the textbook, how do you think about stories versus

reality? Because if you go fully indexed on reality, it's just too complicated. But if it's just stories, it loses its basis in reality. Yeah, it's difficult because you can't tell the students the entire truth. I mean, you need multiple textbooks, but you have to recognize that this is just the first step. This is econ 101. And we try and give them enough of the context so that they can see over the hill a little bit. But you first of all, you got to get them, you know, quite a bit up to the top of the hill or close to the top of the hill.

And then you can say, "Oh, well, now you can see there's some mountains in the distance that you might want to come back to and look at later." But as a teacher, you have to start with where they are and move them in the right direction. So, we don't think that we're going to move everyone to capital T truth. But if you have that vector, we get them closer to the right direction, then I think we've done our jobs. And many then go to the blog where they are confused every day, right? And I'm

happy about that. How when you're writing these textbooks, talk to me about your process for editing and improving the back and forth. How does that work? Is this in a Google doc? What is actually happening there? People don't understand. You write a chapter the first time that chapter is what 40 referee reports. Is that is that how many? Sure. What does that mean? It's sent out to 40 different readers, all of whom have opinions. You don't literally have to make them all happy, but you have to take it into account. I mean, the company, the textbook company has the final say. and Tyler and I are back and forth a lot. Um, one of the things which I think distinguishes our textbook is that, you know, some textbooks like with two authors, you know, one author will write the micro and one author will write the macro. And hey, these two things, they don't they don't sound the same, they don't look

the same, use different styles. While our textbook, everything is written by Tyler and Alex. It's all in one voice, Tyler and Alex, right? And uh so we work hard uh to to get ourselves so that we're both on the same page literally and figuratively. And no RAS, no like junior authors. It is truly us videos done by us. Uh all of that linked to the blog. So we've been explaining economics ideas on the blog for years. That helps us make the textbook better.

The textbook in turn feeds back to the blog gets us more readers. So again integrated product line complimentarities a lot of textbook authors uh someone else chooses the pictures for the textbook and no no no every single picture we choose right this reminds me of the there's a Seinfeld interview with HBR where the the interviewer goes why wouldn't you hire McKenzie to you know to do whatever and Seinfeld goes well are they funny and the interviewer goes no and Seinfeld goes well That's the problem. That's why Seinfeld is great cuz I was on every single part of the show and that's why it had this integrated product. That's why it was amazing cuz I was obsessed and utterly consumed by this project.

A bunch of people think we have this like team of helpers like putting together assorted links on marginal revolution. Like it's us. What is being taken away by virtue of having referees and a publisher who's insisting on this or that? Well, the blog is self-publishing, so we do that every day. So of course we self-publish but it's important to do both and say when I write columns I get feedback from my editor that's very valuable for helping to make the blog better the textbook. It's not that you try to make your blog post like your column but by working with wonderful editors writing books textbook you just learn so much about writing and we've been blessed to have excellent editors all the different things we do when we're not you know self-publishing.

There is an interesting tension with the uh textbook which actually there's a econ whole economic theory about and that is that as authors we kind of want to make the textbook so that people love it right and that uh there's the huge like a classic textbook like Alien Allen right that has this massive love for the textbook from maybe a small group of people but we really want them to love it while the textbook company they just care about profits they just want to get one more reader Right. So there's that they want that no one hates it is one way.

Yeah. They want that no one hates it. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So there is that uh tension but I in in the end I think it's a um a useful tension because we also want obviously we want lots of students

to read it. We want to we want to teach economics to more people than has ever been taught in the entire world. And that's one way of doing it. My college girlfriend was an economics major and I was very insecure that I didn't know economics. So after we broke up, I was living in New York and I still didn't know economics. So I sat down and every day at lunch and dinner when I was eating by myself, I watched your YouTube videos and now I know economics and so I want to talk about the YouTube videos.

How was writing those? How did they go from the the textbook into the videos? Obviously you do help have help with that unless your masters in Final Cut Pro, which I don't think is the case. So tell me about that process. Marginal Revolution University is the number one economics education site in the world. It's on YouTube. It's completely free. There are no ads, no tricks to that. It's just there. You can consume it in whatever amount you want. So, we saw early on YouTube online video would be a big thing. We thought we have to be in on this that we had the chance to and that we had the experience explaining concepts. I don't find writing the scripts has been so hard. And there's a few of the scripts that we had a grad student write. I'll admit that that was uh typically Mary Cla, but especially early on, we did all the writing of the scripts. And even if someone else wrote the script, they'd be drawing from our

text. But recording it is what's hard. Just being in the studio and having to do so many cuts, you all know about this, to get a minute or 30 seconds of usable material, it has to be just right. And I'm not a natural person on camera. I think I can speak clearly and to the point, but I don't have TV personality, TV looks. Uh, I don't like to smile really. So, video for me was a stretch. What would you say? You don't like to smile? That is true.

It's very hard to get Tyler smile. Yeah. I mean, it is I'm happy to be clear. I just don't like to smile. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Recording is is brutal. It's very difficult. Yeah. I mean as as you know like even just to um have enough breath control to I had never realized it was anything like you know it's like singing uh when you're speaking to the camera for you know 10 minutes or something like that uh the breath control alone is quite quite difficult. So we were very fortunate I mean we started out just bare bones right it's just Tyler and I speaking with a maybe a narrated PowerPoint basically with an iPad app with an iPad app $5.

Exactly. Um, and people liked it. And then we got funding, you know, to up our game. And so then we got the we were very fortunate to have excellent uh people filming, but also doing animations and sound and and so forth. So Roman Hardgrave became manager of the project. He now drives a lot of what happens. It's been great working with Roman. And a lot of it's made right here in the same studio. And our goal is to be in 25% of American high schools by 2025. But I actually think our more important audiences are in India, South Asia, Middle East.

Uh we have plenty of subtitles. Uh whatever is needed and I think abroad

will eventually have the largest impact. If I were to go into the MR analytics on YouTube, on the blog, what would that tell me about the world that I wouldn't understand intuitively? You know, one way to think of this is, hey, there's actually a lot of intellectual interest in India, which is what I'm sensing from you increasingly over the past few years. You know, I deliberately don't look at analytics. Periodically, people tell me things, so I wouldn't say I know zero about it, but I like to be focused on the process being fun every day. M I just figure over time that will win and if you know what gets more hits you start chasing that even if only subconsciously so I'm mostly in the dark but I do know India is by far our number two market very likely it will end up at number one and if I give a public talk in India just as a matter of course someone in the audience will go oh you're the MRU guy every single time and

there's nowhere else like it might happen in the United States but it's more like oh you're the guy or whatever, you know, but in India it's like, oh, you're the MRU guy. And that to me is a very hopeful sign that we're getting somewhere with that.

An interesting technological aspect to this was the uh subtitles, which is something we never planned on or really thought about it, but you put your video on the web and then Google starts automatically adding subtitles, right? And then with Deep Mind, they're automatically converted into a 100 different languages in the world, right? That's not something we did. That's something which came with the technology. And so that broadened our scope tremendously. And it's incredibly useful for the students because they don't actually want to uh read the subtitles sort of in in their language. What they want is help with the English and so they can listen and have the subtitles in their own language and that is how they learn English. So it's kind of doing a dual uh learning process. You learn economics, you learn English. Um and language teachers, how else are they going to learn the word elasticity,

right? Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. You spoke earlier about the process of

killing ideas. I want to hear how that shows up for you. Presumably, you don't have a 100% hit rate of open up blog, publish blog. So talk to me about that process of I'm not going to publish this. I'm not going to share this. I write a lot of posts that I just don't use ever. Sometimes I think they're wrong or the news cycle passes them by or I just figureh I'm actually sick of that topic. Or maybe it's good and I'll just sit there kind of devilishly and say it's better to leave people wanting more or this good thing. I'm going to like hold this one back. Not to like to screw them over, but just you shouldn't always be pandering all the time.

So, a lot of different reasons. What would you say? I mean this is something I learned from Tyler very very early on. uh he gave me a chapter of a book which he was uh working on and I gave some comments whatever um and then I I he I saw a second version of the chapter you know like you know three or four or five weeks later it was completely different and I'm like what what's going on right and just that idea of you got to kill stuff be willing to kill things write it again do it over you know work at it until it's right Uh, you know, that's a very LeBron kind of uh thing.

You know, in terms of my books, I think I have I'd guess 2500 pages, never published. Um, like mostly not good, but it some of it's like interesting, if only in a bad way. Like it's not truly terrible.

What is the binding constraint on the success of MR? Just individuals, but in that sense, it's not binding like we have the two of us. We don't want more people per se. The goal is not to help them. The goal is for us to learn things by doing it. And we have the two we want by definition. And I don't know. I don't care if we get more readers. I'm actually worried we might get more readers. Why? They want to write you with stupid things. Right now, we have mostly smart readers. So, they write me and that's great. Like 80% of the email I get is smart.

Yeah. Which means I can respond to virtually all of it. And that could change. I hope it doesn't. If it starts to change, maybe I'll try to confuse people more or make it all more obscure or something. Something which which people really don't believe. Uh you know, I was this is not the part that people don't believe, but you know, I was Tyler's RA, his his research assistant early on. And um I come by his office one day and I says, "Do you need anything?" And Tyler says, "Yeah, can you get me this this set of books from the library?" It's like 10 books. And so I go to the library, I get the books, I deliver them to Tyler.

I come back the next day and I said, "Do you need anything today?" Tyler says, "Hey, can you return these books, please?" And I'm like, "What a jerk. You know, this guy is like wasted my time. He's just like doing some power. What is this? Some power thing, you know, like that." And then sometime later, I came and I asked Tyler to read a paper for me that I'd written. And so I give the paper to Tyler and I go to leave. He said, "No, no, no. Sit down." And he go and he he starts going like this. Okay.

Oh, you should look at Arrow 1958. Oh, that's wrong. He goes like this. Oh, this is a good point. I was like, unbelievable. But like Tyler literally reads several books. I don't know, four or five books a day is not unheard of. Uh he easily does that. It's like true. Tyler reads multiple books a day. And that of course is one of the things which is responsible for MR success is that Tyler always had something interesting and original to say. This is what is scarce in blogging like it's not scarce to marginal revolution. You have a few other figures like a Ben Thompson and Matt Yuglacius Scott Alexander Ezra Klene they take information in in different ways and different modes but there's just not many people like that and that's what's scarce in the sector as a whole because to keep on going and not just become repetitive you have to take in information at a clip that people like literally won't believe. I don't

even try to tell them. I found after I started podcasting, many more people believed it because they hear it coming out in real time. Uh but you know, whatever, just keep on going. He was your research assistant. What was particularly exceptional about Alex? Well, we decided to start writing papers together early on and how quickly he would come back with something written and then I would in turn respond pretty quickly. But we learned each other's work habits right away. And that was a key to all the later collaborations. I just knew I could always trust Alex to actually do the thing and do the thing well. And that if there was any disagreement, we had methods for resolution that we both found, you know, good enough. There's plenty of people you can boss and bully like, oh, we're going to do it my way and maybe they have to go along or they can do that to you. Uh, but actual collaboration is

oddly scarce. So, how would you describe your work habits as a writer?

Um, yeah. I mean, I just try and put nose to the grindstone and do the work. And I always think that uh if I'm co-authoring, collaborating with somebody, I always want to put that first because then you give that back to them and then you have time to do your own work and then you get twice as much done, right? So if I do my work first and then then Tyler's not working because he doesn't have my, you know, my draft back yet. So I work on anything.

If we're collaborating, not just with Tyler, but with other people, I do the collaboration first because then you have the other person who's working for you while you're working on your own stuff. You can get a lot more done that way. And I know he's like this and I try to screw it up. Like he'll give me something and I'm like, you can't work on your stuff. I'm going to get this back to you really quickly so I can work on my stuff and then he'll do the same to me.

Yeah, Tyler's amazingly quick in responding. There's a core thing here that core theme about speed that we keep coming back to like why not do it now? Yeah, this also comes up like with uh I actually I don't want to say this because depending on who's listening, but like referee reports, you know, this is something which we're supposed to do as academics and I always tend to do them right away because I know I'm not going to be less busy in 3 weeks from now. I could tell myself that, oh, you're going to be less busy. Like if I'm going to do it, I might as well do it now because I'm not going to be You're going to be more busy by a snid, right? On average.

Yeah. I mean, so you know, either you say you're going to do it and do it now or or say don't do it. But to say I'm going to do it, but I can't do it for four four weeks. That's that doesn't make any sense cuz in four weeks you'll have something else to do. Have there been moments of conflict between you? I'm just amazed that you I think so. I know. It's just been 20 years and you're just laughing like, you know, two kids at a cafeteria. It's just incredible. We somehow don't like emotionally get our egos too much connected to how the thing is going to turn out. So we can actually both focus on what's the right answer.

That's how I would put it. But what would you say? I mean, it's funny because we disagree about things all the time and we argue about things and that's part of what's fun. But I would never say to Tyler, "Oh, you shouldn't have written that post or this is going in the wrong direction." You know, this is I do that with all my other colleagues. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. I do. We really do. sometimes we'll both discuss and they know who they are. If you're listening, I want you to know. I mean you.

Yeah, absolutely. How do you feel like your writing has changed, Alex? Um, so it's definitely gotten better. Um, especially on the internet, uh, you know, you have to get to the point very quickly because people are one click away from leaving you, right? So that's part of the dim sum for the mind is that you get the post uh you can read it in 10 minutes or whatever and uh you get the dopamine hit, you know, and you can move on. Um so I just crafting things of that length I think we've gotten very good at.

And we've each developed more separate modes of writing. So if I'm writing a column, I put my column hat on as opposed to the blog hat and so on. And that's hard to do when you start. You're struggling to get one mode you can work with. And just we each have more modes over time. You're like David Bowie with his different characters. Sure. He's Canadian by the way. And maybe this is an important part of the collaboration. He born and grew up in Canada and somehow that gives us slightly different perspectives.

Uh, and you've had to see America through Canadian eyes and synthesize that and I've lived in a bunch of other countries and somehow that coming together I I feel matters because some of the people I object to when they write things, they've never lived anywhere but here. I find that's a common element. Yeah. Because one of the things that I've seen you write, Tyler, is that a lot of economists overestimate the similarities of people's motivations. And you've said art and travel is a really good way to combat that. And it humbles you because you see so much. You clearly don't know what's going on. Um, and there's plenty of people who travel in a way where they don't encounter that. They just travel for fun. That's fine. But to try to be in there cracking the cultural codes is a big part of how I think about my life as a whole, not just the writing. And uh it helps you with the writing because

you can express things from different perspectives and understand different perspectives. Yeah. I once asked on the blog, you know, if you had to predict someone's views, uh say of a French a French person, would you rather know that they were an economist or that they were, you know, French? Right. And uh I think knowing that they're French actually tells you a lot more than knowing that they're economists even though supposedly we should have some one unified model and so forth but actually you get very different perspectives and then you start wondering what are my biases and you can't get rid of them but you can at least encircle them and see them in some kind of broader perspective and one hopes communicate that and we have people reading us from a lot of different political religious points of view a lot of different countries and I think they have a sense that even if they disagree with us at some level like

their perspective is very welcome where we are even if it's not ours and a lot of writing by other people I feel doesn't communicate that it's a bit like take it or leave it. A lot of columnists you know they lay down the line maybe that's even popular but it's a take it or leave it attitude you get from them. Do you think that your writing style

influences that? Like one of the things that I definitely noticed with you Tyler is you have a a sort of softness to the way that you write. And actually last night at dinner we were talking about high context cultures and low context cultures. So a high context culture has there's a lot of assumptions that are that are embedded within that. So Japan is a high context culture and then a low context culture everything's very direct and sharp and to the point. We're going to give you everything and you're sort of a higher context writer. you leave room for interpretation and I think through that there's a there's sort of a flow in your writing that I think contributes to that friendliness.

I like having that as a filter on who

reads us like it shouldn't be too easy. Context is that which is scarce is one of my favorite sayings and you get better people writing you emails and you get end up with a better social network, better connections, learning more from those who read or listen to you and for me that's a huge plus. That's maybe the biggest plus. I think that helps with our readers too in the sense that they get uh accustomed to Tyler's high context and then they'll get a low context, you know, pose for me like a punch in the gut, right? And oh my god, you know, they get angry, right? And probably uh each of us has, you know, some people favor Tyler, some people favor me, whatever. Um, but each of our viewers benefits from hearing the other person, you know, as well, right? So, I I think that's important and it really needs to be a joint enterprise, the blog, in my opinion. Uh, there's something about an underlying

sense of camaraderie that we hope comes through that people find very attractive. In some ways, you need to think about your blog a bit like a TV sitcom. Mhm. You think of like Seinfeld, you know, getting past all the vicious insults they would hurl at each other. Just you would have sense how much they enjoy all meeting in the, you know, Jerry's living room or going out to the diner and they should take that away from a blog or news site as well. Yeah.

Like so many people want to come come for lunch, the GMU lunch, right? Of course, because that's become a thing, right? Because we we sort of made it, you know, into a thing. And so that's kind of one of the uh you know the I metaphors or something like that of of of the blog. Do you find that the conversations that you have lead to a lot of your blog posts? So so much of what I write stems from conversation. So I don't think I'm great at sitting down and just thinking up stuff or in the shower when walking.

Many people do that. Good for them. Uh but I'm very bad at that. I need some kind of interaction with a text or better yet with a person, a dialogue and then sort of gets the blood moving and I have have more ideas. Are you you're a shower guy at times? I'm more of a shower guy. I'm never a shower guy. Shower to me is about water and soap. So talk about that moment for Epiphany. How does that show up in your life? It's presume you're in the shower. What do you storm out? I'm still got soap all over my body. I need to write this. or is it more of a more of a stew that takes a while to broil?

Yeah. So, I mean like one of my papers I wrote on the patent system and um so this was early in the uh.com uh 2000 I was in uh I was living in Oakland and so uh everyone around me was getting rich and this was you know the first boom and and so I had this idea. So, you take your cell phone and you take a picture of the barcode and then you'd get information about the product and prices and, you know, things like this, right?

This sounds obvious now, but it it was new back then. And then, um, I thought, "Oh, this is a great idea." And I looked it up on the patent system. I found like there were already three patents on this already. And I thought, I just thought of this in my shower. Like, how could you get a patent on something you just thought of in the shower? Like, the actual patents, they were not any better than I've just described to you. Uh, so it was literally some guy taking what I wanted to do uh in the shower and writing it down. I thought you shouldn't be able to get a patent for just an idea. You should actually have to have some fixed costs. That's the whole point of the patent system is when the innovation costs are much higher than the imitation costs and to just be able to patent stuff you think in your shower um that doesn't actually reflect what we

want the patent system to be doing. So that you know turned into a a paper I wrote. Talk to me about imitation and innovation. That's a interesting thread. Let's see if we can wrap it into MR. But that's fascinating. Pharmaceuticals are the classic example where the first pill costs a billion dollars and the second pill costs 50, right? And so uh if you let anybody imitate once the formula is known then price is driven down to 50 cents and the guy who innovated you know spent a billion dollars to get the first bill with the formula they don't have enough money to recoup their research and development costs. So uh uh so the idea of the patent system at least the way the economists talk about it is that you need to give some monopoly in order to let the first guy recoup his costs. But when it comes to the actual law, there's no discussion of innovation and imitation costs at all.

So the economic theory is not reflected in the actual patent law. And so one of my suggestions was we ought to maybe have a patent system of say 3 years, 10 years, and 20 years. If you want a three-year patent, okay, fine. We just give it to you uh pretty quick. If you want a 10 or 20-year patent, then you better show you've spent some money on research and development costs.

Interesting. We were talking earlier about conversation. And when I talk to my students, they're like, "Oh my goodness, I have writer's block." I would say, "Right from conversation, find people who you can have a good conversation with. Talk to them about the ideas and then just learn to recognize when there's an interesting idea that's emerging either from you, from the other person." And often that gets people going, gives them momentum.

But there's another form of writing from conversation which is you share something and then your readers respond. And I think that one of the big benefits of marginal revolution is that the comment section has really grown over time. Now often you have 200 comments on a post. And so there's a two-way interaction with literally thousands of people a week. Those are high variance. Those comments, they can be very useful, sometimes wonderful. Uh but they're often very pessimistic and the internet does bring out people's worst sides at times and their comment section reflects that as well.

Yeah. Usually the most valuable comments is when somebody you can find somebody in the world who is like the number one expert on this topic and they have some facts. Uh the comment section is terrible for theory. Yes. But quite often there'll be some facts which people will know which are interesting that comes out in the comment section. It's also a way to gauge what other people are thinking even when it's terrible. You learn where the terribleness is at. And I find that quite useful. Uh maybe at times discouraging. But keep in mind a big reason why people read online material is to take the writers down a peg whether in the comment section or on Twitter. And psychologically you've got to be stealed for that. It's another reason blog writing is a bit scarce that you have to be quite detached and separate your ego from the the interactions or people just get too hurt.

We're usually not happy when a post gets a huge number of comments. Exactly. Usually a bad sign. It's usually a bad sign. I think the number one post for comments was Tyler just wrote a post Sarah Palin comment. That's that that's like a thousand comments. It's all it's all the post was and it's all theory, right? The very few comments in there. Exactly.

Yeah. But there's another comment section which is direct emails. And those are excellent. Like I said, 80% or so of the email I get is really worthwhile. And we met by you called emailing me. That would be an example of a great email I got. Yeah. Um so keeping that working the way it's been working for a long time is really a priority for me. Yeah. and getting introductions to people all over the all over the world who sort of know you and invite you to come give a talk or something like that.

You meet a very high level group of people and almost any city in the world you can go to. Maybe not Pyongyang but just say I'm going there like help. Yeah. And you you get so much out of that either tips or people actually spending time with you literally anywhere in the world with a few exceptions like I think North Korea is probably an exception. When I book travel, I search the place I'm going for in MR as the very first thing I do.

It's a great thing to do. Marginal revolution search function is extremely underrated. I agree. Yeah. What else is underrated about MR? And then we're going to do overrated. So, don't worry about inflating your egos here because we're coming the opposite way in a second. No, very little about it is overrated if I may say so myself. But sometime, you know, posts will go up at 1 or 2 a.m. People think I'm writing at that hour and like no way. It's all on autopublish. It amazes me how many people have that misconception.

I have that misconception. Really? They haven't seen an active autopublish. Well, also you autopublish at like 1:26 a.m. Like if it was 1:30, I'd be like, "Oh, that's autopublish." But you pick the most random times. Well, it's picked randomly, right? So, the minute will be given by what minute it's at when you're setting up the autopublish and the hour you change and you just inherit the minute. I think the underrated is the search function in the in the sense it's a little bit disappointing. The biggest disappointment is that uh people it's like a newspaper people read it and then it's gone. Um not always but you know there's a lot of wisdom a lot of good posts um which are sort of you know become diffuse and forget about and people don't refer to them again and things things like that.

But there's a lot one could learn by going back and people don't do that which is understandable but that would be my one sort of disappointment. Tell me about Walter Grinder. He was an early mentor of mine. I met Walter I believe I was 14 and he was this guy who had just read so many books and the notion that you could be a person who had read so many books was the the biggest thing I learned from Walter in addition to a lot of particulars. He sadly passed away a few months ago. Uh but I think it's very important when you're young just to meet people who can be role models to make vivid for you oh like you can be a writer you can be someone who writes every day you can read all these books and that it's instantiated in the form of a living breathing walking human uh in an online universe maybe we're underrating that right now. Yeah, I feel very fortunate uh that my kids uh grew up with like Brian Kaplan and Robin

Hansen and Tyler as mentors and but also as people they've spent many many hours uh playing Dungeons and Dragons with Brian Kaplan, right? And uh but you learn a lot. You learn a lot that way. And just uh my kids will hear, "Oh, Tyler's coming over." You know, be prepared. This is somebody, you know, you know, things like that. So, yeah, I feel fortunate. My kids have grown up in this very specialized uh environment. And both of them have substacks, which is kind of amusing.

And now when I see Max, I see him more than Connor. I'll just like sit down next to him. Okay, Max, what are we going to talk about? just like what's it gonna be like like we used to do. Yeah. How often do you hang out? It's usually in like small group settings, but we don't just like go out for beers ever really. We end up at stuff together. There's lunch. There's different group settings, events. Yeah. Tyler's office is just down the hall from mine, so we see each other.

We're both in. We have like a meeting every day that we're both in. But it's very informal meeting and it can be just five minutes long. And then we might find ourselves in the same place. Uh which has happened you know more than once even not intentionally but some we we were both in South Korea at the same time and conferences and we've been we would been to India together. We've done some travels. We even went to Al Salad. Salvador.

Yeah. Yeah. Just for fun. That was fun. That's before the murder rate fell also. When real men went to Al. Exactly.

Alex, I know you really like the writing in the show Succession. How come? Uh yeah, I mean the season 3 was very very interesting because uh the everything changed in like the final two minutes of that that show, right? And uh your interpretation of everything which had happened before changed and yet it was entirely characterdriven. It's like so many shows today um you just have some you know it's driven by some random plot element right something happens and you know that this is whatever it's lazy writing but on succession everything is totally logical you can understand exactly what happened from the characters and even though you might not have predicted it like at the end you oh my god yes I see that you know it's all it was all laid out for me to see and in that final two minutes the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle goes in you go oh my god I didn't see it but it's all was it's just was a brilliant

piece of writing have movies and TV shaped MR in any sort of way with stories and narrative it's very fairly factual blog but sometimes these these inspirations like Tyler I know that you love movies how does that shape your writing well in part one can blog about movies but I think on a deeper level it it forces you to think critically what attracts people to a something and uh television shows although I watch very little TV but I think they've influenced them more and more than movies so I sometimes cite the TNT halftime show with Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith now Shaq as a way of generating camaraderie and analytics together and their blend works not that I or we try to copy them but when you have a few examples or like the Seinfeld living room I think you approach your own efforts which a much with a much clearer sense of purpose. You're trying to create your own version of that, but

you have to see some other successes of it first. Now, movies are oddly poor at generating that. So, you can have the Star Wars, you know, heroes together and then the movie ends. There's something about the TV shows that serial uh that the blog captures and a movie wouldn't. Another interesting one like that is this uh Formula 1 drive to survive, right? And what's interesting about that is that every single episode is exactly the same and yet it is so wellcraftrafted, right?

The story of the rise of some drivers, the fall of others, you know, risk and reward, and it's just so well uh crafted that you could watch many episodes, and each one is interesting. And so I think the blog is a little bit like that in that um in a sense every day on MR is sort of the same um but yet it's all a little bit new and and uh you kind of get some rise and some fall and you know even within a blog post itself I try and craft things so that there is a you know um a a a climax to the post and you know you hit them at the end with a a pathy saying or something like that. Um, so I think that's important and curb your enthusiasm influenced by blog writing. So you see Larry David, he'll put in all these references to other much earlier episodes and never try to explain them. So he has the courage to do that and just to see someone do that so consistently and you know we can do the same. There's

plenty of early episodes on marginal revolution like you know we're just going to do this and maybe 17 people will get it. That's fine. Why is that good writing? I don't think it's good writing. I don't know. I don't care. It keeps me interested in doing it again the next day. In that sense, it's good writing, right? That's in a way the binding constraint. At the margin, we're not paid. There's other stuff we could do that would pay us more. So, it better be fun.

Better be fun. Yeah. It seems like George Mason was the perfect place to do this because I worry if you were at Harvard or some institution that had this crazy reputation, it'd sort of be hard to experiment. But if you were at some very, you know, C-grade school, it wouldn't have the credibility. MR was perfectly suited for George Mason and the kind of school that we have here. There are other blogs in our department.

Uh, and I find it interesting like if I'm at Harvard visiting anywhere really, the people at Harvard are nicer to me than I am to them. I don't mean that I'm a jerk to them, but they're courting me in some way. So, at some level, they won't admit that they take it seriously and maybe in some ways they don't, but again, I would reiterate they go to far greater lengths to be nicer to me than I do to them. And that has definitely changed over time as well. Like when we started, blogging was definitely a sort of low status uh thing thing to do.

But then particularly with the rise of you know empirical economics and you start getting economics regularly referred to you know in the New York Times and you the columnists who are economists and things like that. Um people wanted attention right this is driving our current culture attention. So now, yeah, people, these theorists are coming to us, you know, can you blog this? And, you know, we're like, maybe if you're really nice to me.

What kinds of blog posts lead to the

most interesting inbound? I think it's the sum total of teaching a person how you think is my guess, but that's hard to measure. That's what I think gives you interesting inbound rather than any oh that point about corporate tax was so brilliant that doesn't really happen like is there such a point about corporate tax at this margin I don't even know but how you think is what sticks with people to the extent anything does yeah I think that's right and inbound be interpreted in different ways but one of the most interesting inbounds has been students coming to George Mason saying I've been reading you since I was 12.

Yeah, happened a lot and that's happened or doing marginal revolution university and you're right and so now we have uh students who are reading us who who started reading us at age 12 who are now getting their PhDs and that's amazing. It's weird but weird for us. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think that your core project is intellectually? I mean my core project or one of the core projects I think is just to uh spread good economic ideas around the world. Uh most of the world has not caught up to Adam Smith, right? And so uh learning how to think about economics, how to think about issues and um teaching the principles of economics to as many people as possible who still have not gotten. That's a big deal. It's a big deal for me. The core project is showing people how to live the life of an infavoror, but admittedly with a central focus on economics. Like here's a way you can live and think. I want to embody

this. I know you're going to find your own version. You shouldn't copy my version anyway, but to put that out there like unashamedly. And you know, Larry David does the same with the show. It's a certain kind of rudeness and humor perhaps, but he's just going to put it out there and then people will, you know, iterate against that. And that's how I think of like the whole big project. There's an analytical cut to marginal revolution too.

A kind of detachment. Uh we're not going to start by taking sides, but we'll approach an issue by thinking it through with quirky insights along the way because we're not so totally beholden to any one thing. But you make enemies that way, too. Why? You're never really fully on anyone's side, but you're partly on a lot of people's sides. And there are many people who hate you more if you're partly on their side than if you were just totally against them.

We're not Socrates, but uh that is the the paradigmatic example, right? If you think for yourself, you're going to be against somebody. Alex, in 2004,

you wrote some writing advice. You must be brief. You must get to the point. There are a lot of boring web logs, but you learned pretty quickly. If you want to be read, you better be interesting and timely. Would you still give that same advice? Yeah, abs. Absolutely. I wouldn't use a web log. I know. I read that. I was literally reading that just now. I was like, did I just write a typo or something? And I was like, wait, hold on. This is a whole other era back then.

Yeah. So, absolutely. So one of the things which uh I'm tend to be pretty good at um which speaks a little bit to this is like uh pathy sayings right so like the subtitle of our textbook is um see the invisible hand understand your world or um yeah marginal revolutions you know small changes towards a much better world things like that um so or you know a classic from our our textbook is um A price is a signal wrapped up in an incentive.

One of my favorites. Of course, I've heard you say that a million times. Yeah. So, and he totally fully did that. I had no hand in that whatsoever. That is an Alexism if I've ever heard one. So, that's what I mean by part of, you know, getting to the point quickly, saying something memorable, something sticks in the sticks in the head. I think that is uh useful. So, Tyler creates complexity and chaos, and you simplify and create order. very

crude, but that's sort of something I'm sensing in the partnership between you that's really helped. There there is a post which I wrote uh to how to tell which is a Tyler blog and which is a Alex post. And I think the number one is if uh if you're if you're confused about the post about what the post said, that's a Tyler post. If you understand exactly what the post said and you're mad as hell about it, that's an Alex post.

But I think over time there there's actually a lot of intersection and overlap. For sure. For sure. Yeah. Like say Tyler and I usually we arrive at the same place but from very different directions. So I'll start simple and then add complications and Tyler starts complicated and then makes it simpler and then we arrive. So we you know we agree along a lot of most things. There was a post I wrote during pandemic. It's a kind of deliberate homage to Alex. it was on first doses first for uh you know with the vaccine that you should allocate and not wait for certain people to have their second dose and I just thought for this post to work it has to be more like an Alex post and I very gladly did that and that was fun.

That's an astounding post. It's funny that he just say I didn't know that but uh it's one of Tyler's best posts in my view. I I guess I didn't realize it was uh because I know exactly the post you're talking about, but there it's a brilliant post and it sums everything up so succinctly and so carefully and just pounds it and uh I was jealous I had not written that post. There's another post I did which you retweeted. You probably really liked it.

It was looking at who actually worked to defend the vulnerable during the pandemic. And I thought well to write this post I've got to be in the Alex Tabarok, you know, frame of mind. This is like another tribute to Alex. And a lot of the post was about Alex, in fact. And then I saw him tweeting it like, "Oh,

this is such a good post by Tyler." Alex, one of the in your TED talk, you have a line that says, "One apple feeds one man, but an idea can feed the world." And that feels like a very marginal revolution sentence. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Um, yeah. So that whole talk is about uh that idea is about economic growth about kind of some of Paul Romer's works of the importance of ideas. Um I was very enthusiastic and still am about you know think about all of the new scientists and engineers which are being produced in India and and China never before you know happened right and so now the total worldwide stock of people you know working on research and development has grown and so I think that is an exciting um aspect for for the future you got more people more people thinking out of get them off the farm where they're just self-subsistent basically and get them into the idea producing sector where you

have these massive externalities benefits other people feeds the world that's a hugely tremendous source of growth yeah I mean what we're doing with right of passage I remember I was in rural Morocco and I was thinking of just my ideal writing student the one that gives me the most excitement and the person who is rural if they didn't have the internet they'd be stuck it'd be hard for them to explore their intellectual pursuits. They find the internet. Now the world is totally open to possibility

for them. They can write online and create opportunities for themselves. And I think that's what MR does too, where you have a bunch of people who wouldn't be exposed to these ideas 30 years ago who can now just go on their phone, go on their iPad, and basically sit right in the capital of America in terms of ideas. I think that's very, very cool. This may sound weird, but I think the world still has not digested how much the internet will be changing the world.

Sam more the power of the written word has never been higher and the openness of the discourse has never been greater. And I see so many oldline establishment institutions, they'll take on the internet in various superficial ways. Oh, we put our PDFs on the internet. Or they'll have like a Twitter feed run by their comm's team, which is quite boring. It is maybe has modest impact, but that there are fundamentally new norms of discourse and writing all over the world. They're basically just winning, you know, hands down, flat out.

And if you can do them, you can really have an influence. And I don't think the world's fully digested yet that yet. Maybe half the world has, but half hasn't. And then on top of that you have AI and chat GPT and you know more of that to come. It's incredible. Internet is the foundation of artificial intelligence. No one thought that. I see marginal revolution and the audiences you've that you've built as sort of this foundation this launching pad for any project that you do.

Absolutely. So it basically raises the launching pad. And so marginal revolution might not ever be the thing, but it makes all the things that you do way more successful from the outset. Oh yeah, absolutely. Like emerging ventures, right? People know to apply and can they put up with reading marginal revolution frequently? It's a pretty good filter because they're, you know, a mix of confused by me, battered by him, or whatever. And if someone makes their way through that, great.

Yeah. And it's a tremendous uh forum for amplifying good ideas. Some of which are our ideas, but some of which are other people's ideas. But that amplification

is incredible. A lot of people on the internet, they overrate their own role as writer and underrate that they ought to be editor a bit more and having the proper balance. A lot of what we do is editor role. My father was an editor professionally and not writer. and ego and writer. I see too many people with their substacks. It's like same old same old same old. It becomes more personal each time, more like full of emotion, but it gets boring.

And one thing I've always worried about with Substack, it doesn't encourage people that much to play editor in a way that traditional blogging can do. If I came to you and I said, "Hey, I'm really into psychology. I'd like to start marginal revolution for psychology." What advice would you would you give me? Do it. That would be my advice. What does that mean? But I would say pin down a part of psychology at least to begin with.

Psychology is far less unified than economics. One nice thing about economics is different say from political science. You can write a blog for pretty much all economists. Political science, psychology, there's like social psychology, cognitive psychology, and much less overlap. Not a single unified model. Now, economics in a way is losing that unified model as we move closer to psychology and political science, but it's still there underneath it all. Have something new every day.

That's the hardest part. Yeah. Uh obviously with with Tyler, without Tyler, it's not possible. Um so you do need I think there are different models of blogs. I don't want to say that we're the only model. Um, but the idea of something new every day, I think is important that you feel people feel on the internet. Uh, oh, I I'm a little bored. Let's go to Marginal Revolution. Let's see what's new, right? And so, anytime in the day, you might want to go, oh, let's see, there's something new there, right? Uh, you always feel that that's going to be the case. If you go to a blog and it's the same thing, you know, uh, hasn't been updated in a week, you're going to get bored. Um, so if you were to do a blog on psychology, I think you'd probably need two or three people who are unified in some way, but you have enough so that you can have something which is constantly going and updated. And that's

hard. That's hard to do. We have not missed one day in almost 20 years. Yeah. There's not even a day like with only one post. Every day is four to five posts basically the whole time. There's a few days like with three posts, maybe a weekend, but every single day. So if you wake up one morning and there's nothing there, you'll know something's up. Why is that so important to the point of almost being religious about it?

Well, maybe you can take away the almost. But if you set a rule, you're going to meet the rule and there's slippery slope dangers in the other direction and there are things you want to say, so why not do it? And then if a person knows on any day, if they know every day you're there for them, uh that feels to me like a radio station that you can turn on every day. A successful radio station's there every day. Like why should we be exempt from that? We're not. So I feel very lucky that I don't feel pressured to do that because I know Tyler uh does that. So I I feel Yeah. very fortunate that if I don't have something to say or if I'm working on other stuff, you know, I can take a break.

I don't feel bad pressured though. I'm not stressed about it. Yeah. Uh it's fun and I can't think of a time when I've been like upset, Harry. Oh my goodness, how am I going to do this? I guess I can't go out to dinner tonight or just somehow it happens. You keep a stock of a few posts that can be evergreens. Put them up if you feel dry at that moment. There's things you can do to always have something. I'm curious

for both of you, what what makes MR and just the process of writing worth spending 20 years on it. That that is a huge commitment and investment through your life. I learned from it and I meet incredible people, you being one of them, and it keeps me in touch with Alex, which is also amazing. Yeah. I mean, it it didn't we weren't thinking about it as a 20-year project when we began. Um, but it just evolves and uh you come at it every day and it's fun. It's still fun to do and I'm I'm happy to It's still growing. You know, the whole project as a whole, the MR University, you know, um the textbook, it's all growing. So, that's kind of exciting, right? So, if it if it were, you know, fading away, um then it might be less fun, but to see that even 20 years in that we haven't peaked, uh that's kind of fun.

And it keeps you sharp. Like, what are you supposed to do? Consulting? People end up bored with themselves. It's a good thing about being a university professor is that uh we get older every year, but our students stay the same age. So, we have to keep on our toes. We got to keep up with our students, right? Even keep ahead of our students even harder. Do you feel like your students get it now a lot more than they did 10 years ago? One thing that Amar does is it gives students early on a glimpse into what the life of a professor might be like, what the life of a person who is interested in ideas might be like. Now sometimes it becomes a little disconcerting when you understand that but before I get there I got five years of you know hell and then I got to get you know publisher parish and all things things like that. But uh I I think giving that perspective, giving that view of what this kind of life of the

mind or thinking is like that that's important. Yeah. Even if it's a super atypical picture of academic life, that they have one at all is extremely important. And that they see someone, you know, living it for real in a super enthusiastic authentic way. Yeah. A lot of people are always complaining about being a professor. Yeah, they will. Crazy. What? you're doing something wrong is my respon. It's the greatest job ever. It's unbelievable. I I asked Tyler once, you know, what uh uh uh yeah, why do you like being a professor? And he says, well, at any point I could go into, you know, uh the the chairman's office and tell him, "F you."

And I said, "But Tyler, you're a very calm guy. You never do that." He says, "I know, but just the idea that that I could do it, you know, no boss. It's incredible. It's incredible. And I think that's one of the other big parts of this project. Just the idea that intellectual curiosity can get you somewhere. Yes. That is not something that I realized until I was in my 20s, until I started reading blogs like Marginal Revolution.

And that was a transformative thing in my life. Something is wrong in the world. But we have the internet to partially save us. Ideas are debated, shaped, formed on the internet more than ever before. That has its downsides. But my view is you need this constructive vision of how to move forward with that and make it a better thing rather than a worse thing. That was fun. Thank you, David. Thank you, Alex. Thank you,