Tyler Cowen

I think those are two excellent episodes, but I'm limited in how many I can do by my own ability to prepare.

I like the most doing historians because the prep is a lot of work, but it's easy, fun work for me.

And I know I always learn something.

So now I'm prepping for Steven Kotkin, who's an expert on Stalin and Soviet Russia.

And that's been a blast.

I've been doing that for like four months, reading dozens of books.

And it's very automatic.

Whereas you try to figure out what Ed Boyden is doing with the light shining into the brain, it's like, oh my goodness, do I understand this at all?

Or am I like the guy who thinks the demand curve slopes upward?

So it just means I'm only going to do a smallish number of scientists, and that's a shame.

But maybe AI can fill in for us there.

That's right.

There's a lot of other evidence that that's the correct portrait.

I think the culture he came out of had a lot of dogmatism to begin with.

And I mean both Leninism, which is extremely dogmatic.

You know, Lenin was his mentor, like Patrick's thing about the Nobel laureates.

It happens in insidious ways, too.

So, you know, Lenin is the mentor of Stalin.

Soviet culture, communist culture, and then Georgian culture, which appealing and fun-loving

and wine drinking and dance heavy as it is, there's something about it that's a little, you know, you pound the fist down and you tell people over the table how things are.