Gwern Branwen

It's more just a way to make nicer essays.

It's a purely kind of aesthetic goal to make it as nice an essay as I possibly can.

And I'm really waiting to see kind of what happens next.

What would be the next thing that I'll be provoked by to end up writing about?

It's passing the time in between sudden eruptions.

For many writers, you sort of like can't neglect this kind of gardening process, right?

You don't harvest every day.

You have to tend the garden for a long time in between harvests.

Yeah.

If you start to neglect the gardening because you're gallivanting around the world, let's say you're going to book signing events, maybe you're doing all the publicity stuff, then you're not really like doing the work of being in there tending the garden.

And that's undermining your future harvest, even if you can't see it right now.

If you ask kind of what is Tyler Cowen's secret to being Tyler Cowen, my guess would be that he's just really good at tending his garden even as he travels a crazy amount.

That would be his secret, that he's able to read books on a plane.

You know, I can't read books on a plane.

He's able to write everything in the airport.

I can do a little bit of writing in the airport, but not very much.

And he's also just very robust to the wear and tear of traveling.

I'll be like collapsing in the hotel room after talking to people for eight hours.

He's able to talk to people for eight hours and then go do podcasts and talk to someone for another four hours or whatever.

It's extremely admirable, but I just can't do that.