Richard Hanania on Conrad's Nostromo, Latin American Crime, and Populism

Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, widely considered his masterpiece, follows a fictional Latin American country torn apart by corruption and its uneasy dependence on foreign capital. Tyler and Richard Hanania picked it hoping to talk about something other than politics — a bit ironic, given Hanania's new book, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, is all about the stupidity of current politics. From early on, the two see the novel quite differently: Is its hero a rotten fraud or a flawed but decent man? Is Conrad quietly a classical liberal, or a tragedian who thinks every political ideology curdles into "folly and murder"? Is comparing regimes even the right way to read him at all? The first half of the conversation stays close to the text, covering the novel's political backdrop, its deliberately scrambled timeline, the near-total absence of religion in Conrad's universe, Nostromo's own vanity and treatment of women, a close reading of the "folly and murder" passage, the Fredric Jameson claim that no Latin American author could have written this book, and their very different research methods for preparing. Then the conversation opens outward, moving through why Latin America has unusually high crime despite not being especially poor, Panama's surprising success story, Shakespeare's objective greatness, the state of media criticism after the AI boom, who on the populist right is actually worth reading, why conservative women hug and liberal women shake hands, what Hanania wants to write and learn next, and more. Read a transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/richard-hanania/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/txDPOpbdK5c on YouTube. Recorded June 16th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://x.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://x.com/tylercowen on X Follow Richard https://x.com/RichardHanania on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.com/invite/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:18 - On the context of Nostromo 00:23:32 - On Nostromo's scrambled timeline 00:24:59 - On the absence of religion in Nostromo 00:27:15 - On romanticizing politics 00:30:14 - On writing about Latin America 00:34:18 - On reading Conrad's works 00:39:01 - On crime in Latin America 00:44:10 - On Shakespeare's objective greatness 00:49:05 - On the media after the AI boom 00:51:16 - On populism 01:00:00 - On what's next 01:02:30 - Outro

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:26Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am sitting here live in Arlington with Richard Hanania, whose name I often cannot pronounce entirely correctly. Richard has a new book out called Cacistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster. I'm happy to have blurbed that book. A lot of the book is about the stupidity of our current politics, but I decided I was rather sick of the stupidity of our current politics. So I said to Richard, why don't we talk about some other stupidities instead? So we decided jointly we would start off the conversation by discussing Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, a book which I reread, and he was reading, I think, for the first time. And here we are. Richard, welcome.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure, Tyler. And I think that was an excellent selection. I think you showed your kind of genius by picking it because it's perfect for what we're going to talk about today.

• 1:19Tyler Cowen?

  Do you want to start by just giving a very brief sense of where Nostromo starts? Like, what is it about? Where does the novel open?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's in a fictional Latin American country called Costa Guana. I think of it as a combination of Colombia and maybe Argentina and Mexico and maybe Venezuela. And so you're focusing on the something called the Occidental Province, which is the west coast of the country. So it's facing the Pacific Ocean. You basically have this mine that is central to that region. It revolves around a man named Charles Gould, who's an Englishman, but who has roots in Costa Guana, who runs the mine. He and other, what Conrad calls, material interests, so basically Western money men are invested in the country. They're supporting some kind of conservative, moderate regime that is letting them develop the country. And there's an uprising, basically

• 2:10Speaker 01

  led by the Minister of Defense named Montero. And so that's the basic conflict of the book. It's also the title, Nostromo, is a seaman. He works for the ONS Shipping Company, which is one of the Western interests. And a lot of the story revolves around him and his relationship with Giorgio Viola, who's a hotel proprietor in the city, and then also his wife and two daughters.

• 2:33Tyler Cowen?

  I'll add just a bit to that. So this novel comes out in 1904. It's published in serialized form. Today, it's typically considered to be Conrad's greatest novel. I think I agree with that assessment. It was the British literary critic, F. R. Levis, who really resurrected the reputation of this book, which for a long time was ignored. It's not short. In my addition, it's about 560 pages. I find it difficult to read, but it's one of my favorite novels. It would be in, say, my favorite 50, maybe even my favorite 30. But there's a lot of different moving pieces. The story does not always come in synchronous form. And it's just on purpose, a complicated story, because the world is a complicated world.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. This is where you're happy to have AI, because you could put things in there and you could say, what does this mean? What is it? What is about this? What is this again? Even the geography, I thought, the first 30 pages or so, where it's showing you what the, it's telling you what Costa Guana is. And because all this stuff is going to be very relevant for the plot, I Googled Costa Guana, what is a map? And you got a nice map online. So yeah, you read it with some aids to actually understand what's going on.

• 3:40Tyler Cowen?

  I'll give you my answer afterward, but tell me, like, you reading this for the first time and then hearing it again on audiobook, like, what most struck you about it? Maybe the word surprise is a little too strong, but what piques your attention so much about Nostromo?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  So the political angle, I thought, was very interesting in that I think of Latin American dysfunction to be kind of caused by socialism, kind of ideas that started to take off in the 20th century, in the second half of the 20th century. And it is so modern, even though the word socialism doesn't appear in the book until near the very end, or not even anything that really is, not even the concept of socialism in any real sense. So basically, you have these Western interests, they're doing things in the country. I think it's a very, we'll get to this, I think it's a very pro-business book, maybe, I think, a little bit of a more, a kind of iron rand with like, less caffeine or something like that. It's more realistic, kind of more of a realist novel. But yeah, just like how recognizable it is for anyone who knows anything about Latin American history.

• 4:40Tyler Cowen?

  And the way I read Conrad, he's clearly not a socialist, but he views socialism as more of a symptom than a cause. There's this dead hand of history and rent-seeking and plutocracy and corruption. And socialism is a particular later form of that. But basically, the place is trapped. And how effectively he portrays a trapped society in a world where a lot of countries do not develop very effectively.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:05Tyler Cowen?

  Though published in 1904, again, to me, also seemed remarkably topical, that if you were doing development economics, and you were to send people, say, to five novels, House from Mr. Biswas, a few others, this would be one of the five.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, it's kind of a timeless lesson in that these countries, they need Western capital and Western expertise in order to develop. The problem is, there's nothing politically less popular than just a bunch of rich foreigners coming around and doing a bunch of things. And that's easier to demagogue. And that's the balance. It's like, the mine is bringing, you know, it's bringing development. It's beloved in the region, at least for the time, whether that's the case in the long run, that's one of the lessons of the book. But then, at the same time, it's just every, all the discourse surrounding kind of what's going on there is just hostile. And they're constantly, like, fending off threats to that ability to develop the country.

• 5:57Tyler Cowen?

  Here's one thing that struck me, and I'm not sure you'll agree, but early in the novel, there's all this talk about the Italians and Garibaldi and liberty, and the extent to which I think this book is also a critique of classical liberalism, is what surprised me, reading it for the second time. The first time was probably, I guess, 30 years ago, that Conrad is not against the classical liberal prescription, really, but he views it as another pathology inserted into a hopeless situation. And it just morphs into some form of corruption and interest groups. And it's replaced by the autocrats, but it turns out to not really matter more. There's, again, this dead hand of history, the indigenous groups,

• 6:40Tyler Cowen?

  their customs, their norms are really what rule the area. And the foreigners come and go, and they may steal or extract wealth. But at the end of the day, the talk of liberty and democracy, for him, it's a kind of fraud. So I think it's also a recognition that imperialism was not going to do the job.

• 6:57Speaker 01

  But don't you think that the Occidental Province had a higher GDP per capita than the rest of the country? It wasn't just they made money. It seems like there was real wealth. And so getting to the end, to the spoilers, the miners actually march on the city, right? Because they're so loyal to Gould. They like what's going on, right? So there is actual improvement in people's lives. So it's not that nihilistic, right?

• 7:17Tyler Cowen?

  It may be higher GDP, but keep in mind, GNP may be what counts. But I don't think Conrad thought in those terms. I don't read him as a consequentialist, though I'm mostly one myself. But for him, progress is about moral progress. And he doesn't see a lot of moral progress in this setting. And the point that that's not happening is, for him at least, more important than, oh, living standards went up a bit, or, well, isn't this better than the, you know, even poorer societies they had earlier on?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:46Tyler Cowen?

  So I think, you know, he grew up in what we now call Poland, but then was ruled by Russia. And the idea of foreign rule is something he had such a strong instinctive dislike of. And you see it in his other books as well, that he's a cynic about foreign presence. Though I don't think he's saying things were better before.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  No, I don't think, I don't think I agree. So there is.

• 8:07Tyler Cowen?

  I didn't think you would agree. That's why I said that.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  But there's a part of it, there is a kind of noble savage kind of idea. There's one part where he goes into rant when that Satillo, the general, is torturing Hirsch. And I think he goes into a rant about how primitive man did not devise, like, you know, as much, like, you know, as much sadistic torture, which I don't think is probably true, but that's Conrad's idea. And basically, that they were kind of, there's a kind of innocence there. I look at the Hernandez and the robbers and the people who are living in the countryside. Those people are kind of, you know, purest case of noble savage. So there is part of that. You're right. Conrad is into honor. This is a book about love and men caring about women. There's Moynihan, the doctor's loyalty to Mrs. Gould, and then Decoud's loyalty to Antonia. His other books

• 8:50Speaker 01

  are about this. So yes, he's a romantic. He's a romantic. He doesn't, he's not a romantic in politics. He thinks politics is a dirty, unromantic world. But is he critiquing, like, if he thinks, like, you know, socialism and populism, like, on a scale of 1 to 10, or like a 1, and classical liberalism is a 4, to me, he's a classical liberal, right? Even though he doesn't think, he's not an 8 or a 9 on classical liberalism.

• 9:14Tyler Cowen?

  I think I read him as believing in contingency as the most important truth of politics and a kind of geographic relativism. So I don't think he has much Rousseau in him of idealizing the noble savages, but he sees the noble savages are not noble, they're terrible. But what's terrible in them gets recreated in us at higher levels of wealth and power.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:35Tyler Cowen?

  And that for him is the most fundamental truth of politics.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  There's more of that in Into the Heart of Darkness, which is about a guy who just goes crazy and becomes worse than the worst savages.

• 9:44Tyler Cowen?

  And there it's more explicit, I think.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Yes. Is it here, though? Like, is Gould like a savage? I think they come across well. I think the Western, you know, compared to the demagogues, compared to the Montero, these kind of half literate, you know, various kind of guys who go around torturing people and just trying to grab as much wealth as possible. Like Gould, what's his biggest flaw? Like, he's not emotionally expressive, right? I mean, you know, there's the kind of the sins of the Western material interests just pale in comparison to what the alternative is.

• 10:15Tyler Cowen?

  I think Mrs. Gould comes across as fine. Mr. Gould just seems captured by where he's lived for what now, three generations?

• 10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:22Tyler Cowen?

  So he's sort of a pretend Englishman. And I think it's Conrad poking fun at people who are actually Englishmen and have not lived abroad for three generations, but pointing out how quickly they become corrupted by the places they go, which for him would include Malaya, India, many other locations.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  What would a non-corrupt Gould look like? What would he have done?

• 10:41Tyler Cowen?

  Well, Mrs. Gould is the non-corrupt Gould. And again, I think she's fine and nice enough.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Could she run the mind?

• 10:46Tyler Cowen?

  But has no power. No, she's.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  She couldn't run the mind, though. That's, that's like, you won't get a mind if you won't have someone like Gould, right?

• 10:53Tyler Cowen?

  That's right. Yeah, that's the contrast.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Can you run the mind and be like better than Gould in the way, in the way his wife is? Like, no. So it's like, it's a tragic story, unquestionably, right? They're not, this isn't Ayn Rand. I mean, there's so, there's so many like hints of it. Like, I don't know what Conrad's influence on Rand was, but this guy idea that we're going to destroy the world and bring it down with it, she must have gotten it from him, right? I don't know if it's.

• 11:14Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Convergent evolution. But it's, it's not as kind of cartoonish, right? It is still this, this man who can accomplish great things and wants to be left alone. And, you know, he doesn't like cheat his workers. He doesn't steal their money. He doesn't whip them. You know, there's nothing, none of this other stuff that you find in people who are more skeptical of Western interests.

• 11:33Tyler Cowen?

  Keep in mind, the novel is named Nostromo, not Gould.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:36Tyler Cowen?

  So he's the central character. One thing that struck me is how much he has, you know, four different names. So the first one, Nostromo, it's like nos, you know, our man, you could say, out of Italian and Latin. So he's presented as our man. He turns out to be a fraud. He doesn't mind the notion of killing Hirsch, or, oh, if he's tortured, maybe we don't really need to do that. He won't bless, you know, Mrs. Viola. He's a bastard. He cares about his own reputation. He becomes a thief. His real name, Gian Battista, sort of gets forgotten that he's in fact from Italy is part of what's forgotten in the novel, just like Gould being originally English is forgotten. For a while, he's called Capitaz de Cagadortes. Oh, he's the man of capacity. He gets things done. But the

• 12:21Tyler Cowen?

  novel's always poking fun at that version of Nostromo. And finally, he's called Captain Fidanza, Captain of Faith. Like, all the belief in him all along was just that of faith. And he's a rotten guy who's a thief and doesn't mind killing people.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Is he a rotten?

• 12:35Tyler Cowen?

  He's a rotten guy.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  But who, who does he? I mean, I don't, I don't know. I mean, is he a rotten guy? I think Conrad admires him. He's an anti-hero, right?

• 12:43Tyler Cowen?

  Conrad always has a bit of sympathy for the anti-hero, but he's not.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  But he's not, he's, you're right, he's a thief, but it's the most understandable kind of sympathetic kind of thievery you could imagine, right? Everyone thinks this thing has sunk. He's basically sacrificed himself. He's vain. I think his, that's his problem, right? He's vain. And this is not seen, I think, as much of a sin in Conrad's time as it would be today. There's this idea that people basically care about the reputation of others. It's not like Battista, like, or Nostromo runs away from that. He admits that, right? And then, you know, Viola, the wife, Teresa, thinks he's just a fool for this. But still, it's, it's presented as like an acceptable kind of morality. There's not a sadistic streak. He doesn't, you know, he doesn't, he's, he's poor, right? He's

• 13:27Speaker 01

  poor up until the point he gets tempted by the silver. So he's not motivated by these kind of venial concerns like these generals are, right? He's, he's, he's, you know, not a self-sacrificial, like, he's not a saint or anything. But I thought he was a good guy. I don't think he was a bad guy.

• 13:41Tyler Cowen?

  No, I think he's a bad guy. Teresa has the best critique of him. Oh, you just care what people think of you. People are paid to praise you. You're really a fraud. She basically says, I think Conrad is showing us he's a victim of the place he moves to, and he's not any worse than what surrounds him. But he is, in essence, swallowed up by that world, by the silver mine, by the culture surrounding him.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:02Tyler Cowen?

  And just as Kurtz goes evil in Heart of Darkness, Nostromo is in a less evil place.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:09Tyler Cowen?

  But he goes corrupt. I think this is something maybe in a way we're supposed to accept, but not approve of.

• 14:14Speaker 01

  I, I don't know. I think Conrad, like, what would virtue look like to Conrad in someone in Nostromo's situation? I think that actually being brave, being the kind of person that people look up to for a reason, his reputation is an earned kind of reputation, right? He's known for being this guy who's like seduces women and is brave and like is taking care of people. It's a kind of, it's the opposite of like a toxic masculinity. It's kind of a more healthy masculinity when you compare it to the other people in the region. So I think like, no, I think like Nostromo is kind of like the best case for like, you know, he's not an intellectual. He's not like some, somebody like that. But like, someone whose instincts and his heart are basically in the right place. I, I disagree strongly on this.

• 14:50Tyler Cowen?

  But even his involvement with women, to me, is a negative. He's considering the two Viola daughters. They're called girls, right?

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:57Tyler Cowen?

  Now, your views on this may not be the normal current views, but I think.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  How old are they? How old are they at the end, by the way, when he's about to marry?

• 15:04Tyler Cowen?

  But they're called girls.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  They started.

• 15:06Tyler Cowen?

  And there is some passage of time.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Uh huh. Yeah.

• 15:08Tyler Cowen?

  But they're not that old. I read Nostromo, again, this is guessing, as being in his 30s. He's like maybe a 37-year-old.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:16Tyler Cowen?

  And he doesn't really relate to either girl.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  But come on, this is, this is the early, this is the turn of the century.

• 15:22Tyler Cowen?

  But Conrad is disapproving. And it's superficial, I think. And there were real love relationships in the story elsewhere, even the Goulds, right?

• 15:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I don't think.

• 15:30Tyler Cowen?

  Or Decoudin, the woman he's in love with. So Nostromo has the worst relationship to women. It's all mediated through the father. He sort of treats the two as interchangeable. Well, they'll pick at some point. He doesn't love them. He doesn't care that they don't love him. It's at best transactional or rooted in some desire for sex or domination. And again, I think Conrad is not simply a moralizing author, but he's observing and showing, and he's not asking us to admire this.

• 15:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, I don't think he's asking us to admire his, what's going on with, with the girls. Yeah, he's, it's, you're right. That's a good point about the contrasting the relationships. But I still look at this as basically Nostromo's vain. Like, stop the presses. We know that, right? He's not out there, you know, there are worse things you can be, right? There's no science of like, you know, you can, you can imagine someone being even worse with women. Like, he seems to want to leave them better off. That one scene that, there's a striking scene in the beginning where she's like, aren't you my love, Nostromo? I'm a girl. And like, my reading of that scene is that basically he wants to elevate her status. He, she's, he's, it's a girl maybe he's not in love with. He's not, you know, a big deal. But he wants to make her feel good. And he wants to give her the privilege of having known Nostromo. Now, he's not giving her like,

• 16:43Speaker 01

  sacrificing his life to her and making a wife and having a traditional family and all that stuff. But again, he's vain. You know, he's, he's a playboy. His heart is in the right place. I don't think there's some like, you know, terrible sin that. I mean, I think the Linda thing where he chooses the younger daughter, you know, I think he was just, it's him being, it's him being vain and wanting to be unfettered. Like, I feel like he was thinking she was going to nag him for the rest of his life. Like, she loved him too much, right? He wasn't trying to hurt anyone, though. He's, he's, you know, he's, he's a limited character, but not a bad guy.

• 17:13Tyler Cowen?

  Let me read you a quotation from Charles Gould, which I think is important, and you tell me what you think of it. And I quote, "He would blow everything up from loyalty and from hate, from hate of those liberals, as they call themselves, liberals. The words one knows so well have a nightmarish meaning in this country. Liberty, democracy, patriotism, government, all of them have a flavor of folly and murder." Now, I think that's Conrad telling us what he thinks. Conrad wants to be a liberal, sort of broadly is a liberal, left Russian tyranny for England, preferred England. But he goes around the world and he sees what those principles are translating into. And he thinks that it all does have the flavor of folly and murder. So what's, what's your take on that passage in my view?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  He's, I think you're right. That is Conrad's view. Does that mean he thinks classical liberalism is something that you shouldn't even bother trying to bring to the third world? Or that's something that is like destined to end terribly? I don't know if it's that cynical. I think he's, he has this phrase called negro liberalism, which I'd never heard before, which I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to mean. But to me, that strikes me as it's, it's a bastardization, right? It's like, it's like kind of, if you want to put it in modern terms, it's like classical liberals not liking leftists saying, calling something liberal. Like, if there was a, if there, like, I think the, I think probably the, maybe the best case against what you're saying is Jose Avianos. That, I think, is the most uncomplicated, probably the best character in the, in the story. Conrad

• 18:41Speaker 01

  in the, in the kind of the, this very strange forward, which is like, sounds real, but is obviously made up, where he says, the author read the history of Avianos and that's the basis. This guy is just a good guy. And see, he likes Gould, he likes the mind, he likes classical liberalism. I see him as kind of like the conscience of the, of the novel.

• 19:00Tyler Cowen?

  But here's, I think, a point where we disagree. But first, a side remark. Supposedly, there's a Venezuelan author called Ramon Paez, where the concept of negro liberalism came from him.

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 19:11Tyler Cowen?

  And he was presenting it in a way similar to what you described. But I think Conrad has a quite ironic twist on this. And here's the passage concerning Avianos. And I'm quoting, "The clamor of this negro liberalism," capital letters, negro liberalism, "frightened Signor Avianos. A newspaper was the only remedy."

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:30Tyler Cowen?

  So Conrad is mocking. Oh, we have a newspaper in response to the classical liberals are just as absurd. And the newspaper, as you know, is called Port Venier, it's Spanish word for future, right? Which is again, just mocking.

• 19:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:44Tyler Cowen?

  So I think he's taking the people who are worried about what they were calling Negro liberalism. And just saying the classical liberals, they're in their own dream world. Like, I'm sort of on their side, but come on, get real. Look at what's actually happening here. They're running around like a bunch of fools.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I, I think we're maybe we're not that far in disagreement. I think we're just emphasizing kind of different things. To me, it's comparative, right? They're fools. They have too much faith in newspapers. Okay.

• 20:12Tyler Cowen?

  And the cow kills himself, right?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:14Tyler Cowen?

  He's also broadly liberal, most of all rationalist.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  That's, that's an interesting one, because that's a, that's a kind of another issue. But what I was gonna say is, you compare them to the alternative. These guys, Montero, he says at one point, General Montero, and this guy is like, he read, he learned to read just enough to read the newspapers. I know he was a great general who's did great things and he wasn't getting his respect, right? They're like, you know, they're, they're nasty, they're just, they have no ideas. They just wanna grab, they're vain, they're, they're cowardly too. As Attilo, the way he kills Hirsch, the way he hides, thinks about hiding under his desk at one point. They're, they don't have any virtues at all. And these are the political leadership. These are the people who get to the top of the army. These are the ones who demagogue, these are the ones who draw the crowds. He has them behaving like buffoons. I like that scene where they're talking about the men with many teeth. And then the other one goes, oh, and he's also a dentist.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  And I'm not sure what that means, but it's, it's actually, it's just funny. Yeah, they, they're like, these are people with flaws, all of them. But just, my God, the, the, the domestic kind of organic political leadership that emerges in Castaguana. It's just a horror show. And that's what strikes me. And like all the other stuff that he says about the material interests and the Westerners and how silly they are. I, I take it all in, but just from a comparative perspective, yeah, it's obvious that the other side is much worse.

• 21:30Tyler Cowen?

  But you're such a comparativist. This may come from your background in political science, but also being a modern, facing political choices. I don't think Conrad is. I think he's more interested in showing us a fundamentally tragic nature of reality. And comparativism, correctly or not, it's the last thing he wants to bring into the question. He is like Shakespeare, in fact. Shakespeare is rarely, you know, debating, well, the different kings he writes about, you know, were they better or worse than some other king would have been? He's trying to teach us something about the situations people are in. And that's also how I read Conrad, is quite Shakespearean. And you're a comparativist, which is fine.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:12Tyler Cowen?

  But that's maybe accounting for some of the different ways we're reading this book.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, but yeah, possibly. I mean, it is his most political novel, right? At least of the ones that I've read, although The Secret Agent is, is political too. Yeah, I mean, Nostromo's interest, deepest interest, isn't politics. It is humanity, it is kind of honor, it is kind of bonds that, bonds that kind of bring people together across the world. But it's, it's also, I mean, there is an implicit political vision in there, right? It's all the, all these books are about, and this follows his life, are people who go out there, they have some, not all of his books, but, but at least three of the big novels are people who go out there, they have an adventure. They're meeting people from different races and different backgrounds. They are experiencing something, everything is tragic.

• 22:56Speaker 01

  Like, there is an implicit politics behind that, but I agree with you, the, the human factor is first and foremost.

• 23:01Tyler Cowen?

  And I read Secret Agent, among other things, but it's being about how pathetic and menial these terrorists are. Oh, they're assassins, you know, it's, you think it's supposed to be exciting and it's just a crummy story of idiots.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, I think that's right. I'm trying to get what the lesson is of The, The Secret Agent. There was a news story at the time that it was pretty much the same thing. They were trying to blow up the exact place that was getting blown up. And yeah, it's just a kind of tragedy. The story of the wife in that story, kind of the way, maybe we're giving away too many spoilers for this one too. But yeah, I found the ending to that very tragic.

• 23:34Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah. Now, why is Nostromo told in such a manner where it does not have a normal synchronization of the narrative? So time shifts radically, pretty frequently. It's one reason why it can be hard to read. Why is it done that way?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Conrad's books are mostly, you know, mostly like this. There's a few that are, I think, chronological. But yeah, they're, you know, I was thinking about this and it's kind of, I think, I mean, it's, it's fun for me. I don't know, you said it was difficult. It was kind of fun to me for Sigur out, like, wait a minute, where are we in the timeline here? This, oh, wait, that was last night, but that was literally the first page of the book, right? And now we're near the end of the book. It's kind of just, it is, I think, a fun way to do it. But also, you know, I think that there's a meta kind of story in here about how Conrad thinks we look at events, right? So he, he at the end, one of the most striking things, where he's talking about Captain Mitchell at the end, and Captain Mitchell, how he tells the story of what happened to people in the years after the revolution and the years after the Occidental Province got its, got its independence.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  And the way he tells the story is basically like, they can't even keep up with what he's saying, right? They have no idea. He's referencing things, he's like, I'm gonna get back to you on this. And they don't even know what the point is or who these characters are. And I guess in retrospect, it just kind of all looks like a jumble. And it's like that kind of when you're reading it too. And I guess the idea would be for someone who's unromantic about politics is like, it seems so much and it seems like there's a straight line. But, you know, what's the headline gonna be in 10 years, 20 years, when someone looks back on this story? It's just gonna be a jumble and they're gonna remember maybe one or two things about what happened.

• 25:01Tyler Cowen?

  There's no God, really religion or priests in this story either. And in general, in Conrad, there's not, right?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:07Tyler Cowen?

  What do you make of that? For me, it's the point about tragedy again. That religion really doesn't matter, so why even put it into the story? You would think, well, this is Spanish colony with changing political status. There's an indigenous religion, there's Catholic Church, but this is completely pushed offstage, right?

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Well, it is, it does appear in a very strange place at the end when they say Nostromo becomes religious and he's attending mass. What do you, what do you make of this? I was, I was confused about this. I, I didn't know what to do with it.

• 25:36Tyler Cowen?

  Another source of being foolish? I don't know. We know Conrad himself was not a believer.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:41Tyler Cowen?

  And paid no heed to religion.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:43Tyler Cowen?

  So.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  It would have been unusual to, like, was, like, religion was not a factor. Like, we don't, didn't have, like, you know, the religious right or something like that back then, right? The major forces in politics were like kings, you know, there were these anarchists and socialists. There were still the classical liberals, there was nationalism, so it'd be weird.

• 26:00Tyler Cowen?

  But there's a state religion, it was all pretty religious, at least in superficial ways.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:05Tyler Cowen?

  How many people believed exactly what? I'm not sure.

• 26:07Speaker 01

  Well, there is, Avianos is a father Kobolon, is that how you say his name? There is, there is kind of this, this little side plot where, yeah, it's not represented as, as anything noble or anything interesting. It's kind of just a way to be reactionary and to like, look for opportunities to advance the interests of the church at the expense of the people. So there is a little bit of religion, I don't think it's portrayed very well.

• 26:28Tyler Cowen?

  And in Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is setting himself up as a kind of god or godlike being.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:34Tyler Cowen?

  It's what happens when you have a religious vacuum. And it's maybe also Conrad telling us what he thinks of religion, that it's domination.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:40Tyler Cowen?

  And he's just not crazy about it.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:42Tyler Cowen?

  But it's striking the novel's perspective on religion.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And this is the kind of.

• 26:46Tyler Cowen?

  It also makes it quite modern, right?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I kind of, this is, this is the thing about Conrad. I really like a lot that's in there. I like the storytelling. I like, you know, the extent that there's politics in there. I like, I like the way he portrayed honor. But yeah, it's a little bit too much for my taste, right? There's no, there's no, no redemption. I love, you know, I love Lord Jim. Again, I don't wanna spoil people who are just getting into Conrad, but I love the way that story unfolds. You know, the romance of the individual and his principles and his passions kind of is the replacement for the politics, right? And I, I do love that. I, even though I'm a person who's into politics, I think that politics should be a lot less romantic. And we should get these sources of meaning from like our day to day lives. But that being said, like, it just can't be the individual, right? There has to be, there has to be something else.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  I, this, I was thinking about this when I read that essay Autocracy and War that you recommended.

• 27:36Tyler Cowen?

  Right. Written by Conrad.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:39Tyler Cowen?

  Basically, it's about Russia and Japan and he's anti-Russian.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, it's amazing, I mean, it's amazingly perceptive, right? He's saying the wars are gonna be worse going forward. He says, he says Russia is finished and something else terrible might come. Like, yeah, you, that was well timed argument. And he thought that he's talking about, at the beginning, I'm like, which wars are you talking about? Oh, he's talking about the Russo-Japanese War. And he thinks that's bloody a way to, wait till what comes next.

• 28:00Tyler Cowen?

  We're now in the midst of Russia versus Ukraine and it's still all happening.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:03Tyler Cowen?

  It's an amazing piece.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is, it is incredible to read. But what I got from that was like, he is, there is a kind of nationalism in Conrad, but it's a nationalism where like, you can't, you can't force it, right? Like, he would not like the modern, like, nativism, right? Like, he wouldn't, he didn't, he wouldn't, didn't like Kaiser's Germany. He did, definitely didn't like Tsarist Russia. It's like, a nation tries to be virtuous and then good things happen. And I think he thinks the, the English are like the closest thing to that in history. And that was his adopted homeland. And I think to the extent that he admired any country, it was clearly, clearly the English.

• 28:38Tyler Cowen?

  Revisiting a lot of Conrad, another view I came away with is I think he sees travel and geography as the most fundamental forms of knowledge, including political knowledge. Again, it's not ranking or comparative. Is this better than that? Though he had his views there. But that it's going around and seeing these things, that's what it means to understand them. And that's what it means in a sense to be political, is to have seen things. And that's at a time when different parts of the world, at least some places are more different than they are today. And you look at the works in their entirety, Heart of Darkness is a super clear example. But Lord Jim, basically all the others, he goes somewhere, someone is somewhere, it's in different places.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:19Tyler Cowen?

  And it's the seeing of them that reveals what they're like, the being there.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, I think that's right. And I wonder kind of what he would think today if he were alive, but he was going to, you know, the, the jungles of Indonesia and he was seeing them, you know, throwing plastic garbage on the floor and, you know, looking at pornography or whatever they happened to be doing. Yeah, I think he would think we'd lost something. That's, that's Conrad being a romantic. It's strange because people who are romantic about nationhood, they tend to be nationalist. He's romantic about something much more kind of finely grained, right? It's like, it's like, kind of cool that, you know, there's even a bit of race science. It's kind of cool that these different ethnicities and cultures are different in a way, but it never coalesces into like, you know, this people should conquer this people, or even that you should have a political project out of that. It's, it's an appealing form of nationalism. It's, it's a kind of a more

• 30:04Speaker 01

  natural, like a more natural, kind of more organic, less dangerous, but also like, meaningful kind of nationalism. And I don't know if anyone's developed ideas based on this, but there was something original there.

• 30:16Tyler Cowen?

  Frederick Jameson once wrote famously that a Latin author could not have written Nostromo. Agree or disagree?

• 30:23Speaker 01

  I don't know. I, it's maybe a little not, is it the, the fact that it's not, it's too unsympathetic to Latin America and kind of not as optimistic about what its domestic politics can produce, perhaps?

• 30:35Tyler Cowen?

  Garcia Marquez is often writing about Colombia. And there is something misty and nostalgic about much of it, even though he was very much a critic of the Colombia he grew up in. And Conrad, to me, doesn't have any of that.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  He doesn't have any of the-

• 30:50Tyler Cowen?

  The romantic nostalgia of having grown up in Latin America. And indeed, he had never really been to Latin America. He'd been off the coast.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:57Tyler Cowen?

  But one thing striking to me is how well he understood this imaginary place where he had never been to the closest equivalent, such as Colombia. Some people say Paraguay, this other, you know, parts of Bolivia.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, it's kind of, it's almost like there isn't a Latin culture. It's kind of an amalgamation of kind of different ethnicities, right? The Italians are here, the, you know, there's always mentioning these, he's the Indo's and kind of their culture. You're right. There is like Latin America, like a specific Latin American kind of, or someone's an Englishman, or someone is Jewish. Like, it's almost like Latin America is just a geographical region for like, these different races and these different cultures to play against one another. Yeah.

• 31:37Tyler Cowen?

  And then toward the end of the story, the United States starts taking a role. It's a bunch of brief mentions, but Conrad seems to understand that's the future. The English people, the Goulds. Well, they're trapped and they're of the past anyway. And it's US capital that will transform the region. That hasn't quite in fact happened yet, somewhat, certainly in Panama, you could say it did.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:00Tyler Cowen?

  But this lurking giant, playing a bigger role in the story than it may seem on first read.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's what happened. Of course, he was writing this at the same time when Panama broke off from Colombia. And it was the United States that was supporting Panama there. And I don't know, we look back at kind of Panama's, Panama's a success story as far as Latin America, America goes. So yeah, I wonder if Conrad would be surprised by that because at the end of the book, the Occidental Province, it's worked out, but the kind of the specter on the horizon is they're getting too ambitious and they want to go and they want to liberate the rest of the country. That seems to be what the danger is. And yeah, I don't know if Conrad ever wrote explicitly what he thought about the Colombia situation. I know he was close to some people who were kind of anti-colonialists and didn't like what was going on. But to him, it seems like the problem, it's like, maybe salvage what you can. And that's what happened in Panama. And maybe that's, that's

• 32:47Speaker 01

  what he wished would happen. That would be the optimistic scenario for the Occidental Province. It's maybe not that hopeless then, because like, if they just do nothing, like, they might be okay, I think is the, the lesson at the end, but they, but they won't. We, we know that.

• 32:59Tyler Cowen?

  You ask if he would have been surprised by Panama. I mean, I was surprised. So circa 1980, which I remember well, it was not obvious Panama would be a success. And it is today. Part of that's the rise of China, the greater importance of the canal, but just they've kept okay governance and switching in a better regime, which the US did, worked remarkably well. When that happened, I'm thinking like, oh my goodness, another one of these interventions. This might be the next Vietnam. But I was wrong, right? It went very well.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:27Tyler Cowen?

  Panama is one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America. It's pretty peaceful. It's, a lot of it's safe. Not the Caribbean coast isn't always that safe, but definitely a relative success story.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. Grenada too, another intervention in the, around the same time period. And yeah, I mean, the Maduro raid, it's pretty early, but still looking good. So-

• 33:45Tyler Cowen?

  But they never grew that much. Like, they're clearly better off not being Marxist.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:49Tyler Cowen?

  And it's peaceful.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:50Tyler Cowen?

  But Panama is like really a success.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:52Tyler Cowen?

  Lebanese choose to go live there, right?

• 33:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:54Tyler Cowen?

  That's one marker of success.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. We remember the bad interventions. We remember when they go poorly. Nobody talks about Panama today. Yeah. It's, it's worth bringing to people's attention.

• 34:03Tyler Cowen?

  Now, let me ask you a meta question. So we both read this, we both prepared. Some of our listeners might read this book, but they're certainly reading other books. Like, what did you do to read this? How did you read it? What else did you do? Give us your production function for having read this book. And like, what worked, what didn't work?

• 34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I started just by reading Nostromo. I like to go in fresh. I don't, even when watching movies or novel, I like to know nothing. So like, I, you know, Googled enough to know kind of like, the basic thing, checked it out, ended up reading the book, wanted to get a feel of Conrad. So I went through the various novels. The biography you recommended is Jessenoff, is that how you say the woman's name? Jessenoff? I read the biography. And then I would get to a point where it's like, the biography was very good. It got to a point where like, here I'm going to talk about The Secret Agent. I would put the book down and then I actually just went and read The Secret Agent because I don't want just, you know, the summary of the book. I wanted to get this off. So I, I, I read the, I read the, the four big novels, read the essay you recommended, read the biography.

• 34:59Tyler Cowen?

  Which essay was that?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  That was Autocracy and Autocracy and War.

• 35:01Tyler Cowen?

  Okay, yes, yes.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I got, you know, I, I dove into the Conrad, like, literature a little bit, like, kind of the, the, you know, the English professors, what they'd written. I didn't find anything that that was pretty compelling, you know? And yeah, that's it. Read the book, read, read about Conrad.

• 35:15Tyler Cowen?

  One thing I did, I went to J Store, I typed in Conrad Nostromo. I printed out the first 20, the ones I could print out. It was probably 16 of them, I guess. Most were worthless. There were two I thought were good. One is the Robert D. Kaplan essay, Conrad's Nostromo and the Third World. And he's more a current political and geopolitical commentator. I'm sure you know his work. And then there's one by Claire Rosenfeld, An Archetypical Analysis of Conrad's Nostromo. And the rest I just thought were wasting my time. And these were the top 20 entries, right?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  There was one that was, won a prize in like, the 1980s. And it was just, eh, you know, I didn't think it was worth reading the secondary literature.

• 35:51Tyler Cowen?

  One worry I have, I don't know the authors of all those pieces, but how much they've traveled or been to Latin America. I just became suspicious that they only knew literature and didn't actually know the world that well. That was one reservation I started having.

• 36:06Speaker 01

  One thing I did was this, Into the Heart of Darkness, I was fascinated by kind of the way he portrays Congo River and kind of how the, and then also the Jessenoff biography, because Conrad went down there. And so there's like, some places where there's rapids, you can't go and you have to take a railroad and then other places where you can actually take the river. I watched some BBC documentaries of just people going on the Congo, you know, the Congo River, a place that hasn't economically grown like, that much over time. So it's maybe closer to what it was in the early 20th century. And yeah, it was fascinating. It's just being able to kind of see, like, the river is, it looks like you're in an ocean. And when you're there, it's just so gigantic. And it's like, got such a force of its own. And they go off to the sides and like, you know, there's, there's these villages there and these people trying to sell you stuff. But yeah, I, the geographical aspect

• 36:50Speaker 01

  of like, the Congo River and what's going on there is just fascinating.

• 36:52Tyler Cowen?

  And Congo is especially interesting because they have a 20-year period where they grow a lot. So up through some part of the 1960s, they become probably the wealthiest part of Africa, other than Southern Africa, Rhodesia. And then they lose it all. So they were probably much richer in 1960 than they are today.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:10Tyler Cowen?

  And that's also to me, a very Conradian kind of story. They had some kind of chance, it seems, even in the mid 70s, were holding the world boxing championship there. Remember, you know, Ali and Zaire?

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Right, yeah.

• 37:24Tyler Cowen?

  People thought it was a bit weird, but it didn't seem totally insane to put it there.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. What do you, what do you think happened? I mean, what happened in the decades? It's, I mean, usually, it's one of, it's one of the few, I remember, yeah, people make lists of these countries where they're worse off than they were 30, 40 years ago. Congo's on there, Afghanistan's on there. Yeah, it's just a handful of them.

• 37:41Tyler Cowen?

  The superficial and not incorrect answer is corruption, but that's begging the question, right?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:47Tyler Cowen?

  Because a lot of Africa is somewhat better off. And what we then called Congo is not.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:53Tyler Cowen?

  Maybe the wrong kind of resource wealth at the wrong time.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:57Tyler Cowen?

  But it's, I've never been there also. So, thinking that travel is a fundamental form of knowledge, I feel I'd have a better sense of visiting.

• 38:03Speaker 01

  Mobutu's daughter was in the biography, the documentary that I watched. And yeah, they go back to his old palace in like, the north of the country. And she's like, oh, my, my, my dad killed people? No, he was such a nice guy. You kind of, you're like, okay, this is, this is the culture, kind of the, the big man culture of, you know, taking care of the family. This is, you know, basic anthropology of Africa. You just see it by, by, from the documentary.

• 38:25Tyler Cowen?

  I also found it very important to read this novel twice and twice in a row.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:30Tyler Cowen?

  So I'd read it once, something like 30 years ago. That helped me a little, but not actually that much because I've never worked on it since then. But to read things twice in a row, I'm a big fan of, at least if they're high quality. And I'm very glad I did that here and you did it as well, the second time being with the audiobook.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Well, the second time was switching off between audiobook and the Kindle version. So I would get, get up, you know, you'd listen and go back and then read. When you get a good, when you get a person who's good at this stuff, who's good with the voice, they could do the characters. It's, it's like, it's watching a performance. It's not just like reading a book. So yeah, that's another way to experience it.

• 39:03Tyler Cowen?

  Now you had written previously on the question, why does Latin America have so much crime? And then you read Nostromo, right? Did it change your mind on that topic at all?

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Not, no, not really. I mean, I looked at this as kind of, because they don't have a lot of crime and they don't have a lot of crime in Costa Guana, like street crime, like you don't think, you look and think about it and you don't see like people getting mugged or robbed, or you don't hear anything like that, right? There's violence, there's political violence, but it's a different thing. This seems to be a kind of more modern thing. It seems to be a lot of democratization and development. It seems that things have gone worse in the last 30, 40 years in a lot of places. So yeah, I don't know if it's there in Nostromo, maybe the roots of it are the political dysfunction, but it's kind of, it's kind of a tenuous kind of long link.

• 39:46Tyler Cowen?

  So why does Latin America have so much crime? At least parts of it, not Uruguay, but much of it.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I mean, when I look at kind of these news stories, the things that strike me the most is like of all the stories you could read about Latin America in the newspaper, the ones where like they are in jail and they are running their drug empire. Like there was one, I think of Columbia or something where there was like this, this cartel leader. And he's just like, or it's, you know, being in jail is barely a hindrance to him carrying out his work. Right? And so like, what is going on here? Like, why can't a state control the people that it has in its own jail? Right? You think about another region that I studied a little bit is the Middle East, right? Unthinkable, right? Like somebody would be running a criminal gang that is antagonistic to the state while being locked up.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  And it seems that like Latin America actually takes these democracy and civil liberties and these ideas pretty seriously. So it seems that they have this combination of democracy and civil liberties, but low state capacity. And that seems to be a bad combination. If you look at the countries that are much more violent than their, than their level of wealth would predict, they're basically all countries that are, have high democracy scores. There's no other kind of country that is just an outlier in the amount of violence. And a lot of those countries are concentrated in Latin America.

• 40:59Tyler Cowen?

  And often very poor countries don't have much crime, or they may in intermittent ways, but on a daily basis, they can be some of the safest places because you have small towns. Everyone knows each other. There's not that much to fight over. You have to cooperate or you can be sent away and then it's not clear what your future looks like.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember, yeah, my, my mom's family comes from Jordan and they were rural, poor rural people in Jordan. And when I think about kind of like, if anybody would have had dysfunction, like if anyone was a criminal, it's kind of unthinkable, right? Their entire family would have disowned them. It would have been a kind of life or death kind of thing for the entire community, the extended family, the people they care about. So yeah, I think when you're very poor, first of all, you don't care about human rights that much. But second of all, there's this kind of denseness of social relations that seems to be conducive to, maybe not conducive to development, but conducive to actually safe streets and less, less kinds of dysfunctional behavior.

• 41:48Tyler Cowen?

  If we're talking about Columbia, I think much of the problem is a mix of incomplete nation building and very rapid urbanization. So there's a fair amount of wealth. It's not that poor Columbia. Drug markets are to some extent worth fighting over. And to some extent, you're fighting over export privileges, right? But there's not a central authority. Getting around to different parts of the country is very difficult. You can't easily or safely just do it by road.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:13Tyler Cowen?

  Even today, when the country's safer than it was 15 years ago. So as in Mexico, the central government is not really in charge or only some parts. There's unsettled relations across different groups. So it's not carved out like who's really in charge in the way that in much of India, China, which have their own problems, but it feels to me due to millennia of previous fighting, it's a bit carved out who's in charge, whereas in Colombia, it so often isn't.

• 42:41Speaker 01

  Is it, I mean, these, there's some things about state capacity and kind of geographic and trying to, you know, reach the state power into these rural or these mountainous areas. But the, the problems of these countries seem deeper than that because they can't control their inner cities. Right? We in America can't control our inner cities, but this seems to be a dysfunction. That's kind of different from just like a lack of ability to reach something, right? There, there, there is just something that is completely dysfunctional in the political system. It should be the first thing you're able to fix is monopoly of violence within a city. It's cheaper, you know, with, with cheaper to police, the government's right there. Like it's something we should talk about a lot more. This is why Bukele, I mean, for all his flaws, like causes so much excitement because people are like, why can't anyone figure this out?

• 43:21Tyler Cowen?

  I think there's also a Yimby versus NIMBY issue. So if you go to South Africa, which is very violent, but the violence, at least near Cape Town, is quite concentrated in the townships. And people who live apart from the townships can live somewhere reasonably safe. You go to Brazil, where there's been massive building of tall apartment blocks in all the cities. Everything's mixed together. There's not much NIMBY and you walk down the street and you're scared because the violence is near you.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you think, you think that that's the case, that's the best case for NIMBYism.

• 43:52Tyler Cowen?

  Well, it's not a great case because the NIMBY places have not done very well, Brazil.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, for at least for crime.

• 43:57Tyler Cowen?

  Better, but for people than South Africa. But for crime, Brazil is the strongest case against YIMBYism.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, crime everywhere is concentrated among a certain class of people. So yes, segregation or separation does work in that case.

• 44:13Tyler Cowen?

  Now here's a question I warned you, I was going to ask you. The beginning of Nostromo, there's a quotation from Shakespeare and I quote, Conrad shows this, so foul a sky clears not without a storm. Which I think is from King John, but lovely part. What's your current view on Shakespeare? You bad mouth Shakespeare in the past, now you like Conrad. Have you come around on Shakespeare?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  No, it would be wrong to say I bad mouth Shakespeare. Okay.

• 44:37Tyler Cowen?

  That's what you said.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  I probably, I did not probably explain this well. So the, the, it started with SBF. There was a controversy where you said, what are the, what, you know, he did this kind of what people think would be an autistic analysis. What are the odds? Shakespeare is the greatest writer because, you know, the population is so much larger now, so on and so forth. And I said, okay, there's, if you want to talk about the greatness of Shakespeare, there are two definitions of greatness. I'm taking, I'm riffing off the SBF quote, which people were upset about, which is the idea that if Shakespeare, if aliens came down to earth and they like, you know, read every single author in human history, they would say Shakespeare is objectively the best English language writer. I don't believe that's the case. I believe the way we appreciate art, the way we consume it is based too much on prestige signals, too much on social proof, too much, too much on signaling.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  It's that, that's one aspect. So the idea that like somebody, I could produce something that could look like Shakespeare. Look, there's a, there's a Monet painting right now that is a controversy of whether it's the real thing. And people cannot tell, but they have to do this like forensic stuff.

• 45:37Tyler Cowen?

  But I could tell, I saw it.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  Well, that's what you say. Yes. When you do the AI stuff and you test people on this, they're, they're usually, you know, the, the confidence, the confidence is maybe misplaced. And so I think that's, it's like that with any great artist. It is so much of the greatness is prestige. Now, if you want to say Shakespeare is great because he was unusually innovative from the time and influenced English literature and influenced the culture. And I'm not saying that I could do something that innovative for the time in 2026. Like I'm not saying that in that aspect, I'm happy to grant Shakespeare's greatness. So it's not a bad mouth Shakespeare. It's a part about kind of the subjectivity and the social role of art.

• 46:13Tyler Cowen?

  Who is the greatest English language writer then?

• 46:15Speaker 01

  I mean, from that perspective, like from the second perspective of.

• 46:19Tyler Cowen?

  Just in your opinion, from your perspective, all things considered.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 46:23Tyler Cowen?

  I'll say it's Shakespeare.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  I would, I would defer to the, yeah, the opinion of history. Yeah, there's nobody.

• 46:27Tyler Cowen?

  Well, then it's Shakespeare.

• 46:28Speaker 01

  It's Shakespeare. Yeah.

• 46:29Tyler Cowen?

  But you started off by saying that was the claim you wanted to.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  I was saying objectively, like if you ask me, who is the objective best English language writer of all time? I would say that's an unanswerable question. That's like, what is the objectively best painting or something like that? From our social perspective, from our like understanding of history and how it played out and who was doing something great at the time. By the way, there's a guy I know, Dennis McCarthy, who wrote a very convincing book that I think, I don't want to, maybe this is too much of a digression, but thinks that Thomas North actually wrote Shakespeare. So whoever wrote Shakespeare.

• 46:59Tyler Cowen?

  It's not likely to be true.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, check out his book because I read it and I, my opinion was this guy either is just making stuff up or there's something really there.

• 47:07Tyler Cowen?

  The elites have decided.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Will you, will you, will you check out the book if I send it to you? Because I've been trying to get people to look at it.

• 47:14Tyler Cowen?

  I'll ask GPT-PRAY what it thinks and then I'll decide whether to check out the book.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  He's got some peer reviewed scholars, so he's, he's not completely out of nowhere.

• 47:22Tyler Cowen?

  You're retreating to a meta point about aesthetics, which I would just say is difficult to settle. But I think on Shakespeare, you're seeding a lot of ground. You're saying, well, I agree with the elites. The elites mostly would nominate Shakespeare.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I never look, I

• 47:37Tyler Cowen?

  You're agreeing with Conrad, who loved Shakespeare.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I'm saying that I am, the people were mad at Sam Bankman Fried. Okay, and I'm just defending his honor because I'm saying there is a point here, which is like, yeah, like objectively, like if you wanted to read objectively, the best literature that's going to blow your mind like, it's not necessarily Shakespeare, maybe it is Shakespeare because you know it is Shakespeare and you know you're sharing this experience with people over multiple centuries and people all over the world today. I'm, I'm fine with that. I'm fine with, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't feel any need to knock Shakespeare off his pedestal. I just think the way people think about art is, is I think it's wrong to think that there's something like objective there that like some alien would appreciate that is independent of, you know, how we think about these things, how we perceive these things socially.

• 48:21Tyler Cowen?

  You're sentenced to confinement, desert island prison, whatever, and you can take the works of one English language author. Complete works. Whose do you take?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  Oh, English language author. Can I, can it be a living author? I want to keep up with the news. Yeah.

• 48:38Tyler Cowen?

  You have Twitter and then you can pick one author.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Okay. Yeah, I still want to, I mean, I want to dig deeper into, dig deeper into Conrad. I mean, there's, I've read four of the novels. I want to read more. I mean, it's

• 48:47Tyler Cowen?

  He's a good pick. He'd be in my top 10.

• 48:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've started the memoir. So yeah, probably Conrad, I, you know, yeah, let me, let me think if there's somebody kind of going further back.

• 48:58Tyler Cowen?

  He's also a good reread, Conrad.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:00Tyler Cowen?

  And that's important.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's true. Yeah, you're, you're going to be away on that island for a long time. You want, you want something to struggle with. You don't want a straight, straight story. Yeah.

• 49:09Tyler Cowen?

  Now Conrad and Nostromo, and I think elsewhere, he's pretty critical of the media and you've written in defense of the media.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:15Tyler Cowen?

  That was a few years ago. Now that you have a few more years of data, we see the media covering AI, covering all sorts of things. What's your update on the current Richard stance on how good the media is?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, once again, we, it's a comparative perspective, right? So I've seen the media the last three, four years. I've also seen what's happened.

• 49:32Tyler Cowen?

  Gone down in my eyes, I'll say.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it might have, but at the same time, I've seen kind of what's the Twitter space? What's this, what's the podcast space? And the gap, I think, continues to grow. I think the media is still, is still better. You know, there's kind of like a meta point of like how we know anything, right? And I just don't think it happens. I, I think we've seen the alternative, what happens if we do not have media, if we don't have like fact checkers in journalistic institutions. And it's really a terrible place, a place I don't want to live in. And so, yeah, critique the media all you want, but my God, you do have to think about the alternative.

• 50:05Tyler Cowen?

  That I agree with, but I would say this sort of people of on the right. I'd been pro media, like 90th percentile, like relatively pro media.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:15Tyler Cowen?

  And I've worked a lot in media at these places, so I see different sides of what goes on, still relatively pro media. But I look at the coverage of AI, some of it is just hostile, some of it is whining. A lot of it is just New York Times didn't cover GPT-4 for a week. All sorts of things go on and they're not really covered or they're not covered well. And I really don't think it's a conspiracy. But man, it's pretty disappointing and I think less of the media now than I did a few years ago, I have to say.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially on tech, there is such a negativity bias on everything happening with tech. Now I believe more in the, in the phones theory of everything and it's making people miserable more than you do. So I think that's place, there's a point, but it's just every single thing that could possibly go wrong, every, you know, theoretical problem with AI and just, you know, social media platforms and things like that. Yeah, I agree with you. There's, there's too much of a negativity bias. And we've seen this over time, kind of the people who've done the sentiment analysis. It's 1960s, 1970s, it's been going down. You know, maybe it's just the, that's what the market wants. It's been kind of perfecting the product over time.

• 51:19Tyler Cowen?

  And you've written a book on populism. Again, it's your new book, Cochracy. Conrad's Nostromo, parts of it can be read as about Latin American populism.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:29Tyler Cowen?

  Does it budge you in any way or what insights do you draw from it?

• 51:32Speaker 01

  No, I think it's, you know, I think if, you know, I'm thinking about this from a comparative perspective, I'm always thinking about this because I'm, you know, a person who pays attention to politics. So I'm thinking of kind of like, yeah, the media is bad, but what is, what is the alternative? We've seen actually these people be knocked down a peg in status. And we've seen other kind of alternative political figures and movements and, and media sources be raised in status. And so now it's a point where like you have to compare them. And so when I say, you know, Gould, like whatever his flaws he, he has, like compared to the Montero brothers or kind of these, or these other generals, like there's to me clearly like, there's a clear story of who Conrad would rather be in charge. So I think it's something, you know, it's the same principle in the book and the kind of grand level. It's like, yeah, things are bad, but

• 52:16Speaker 01

  things are bad with the media. You can sit there, you can critique them all day. I've done it a lot, but there's some anchor, some kind of institutional production of knowledge that we need, that you can't just toss aside.

• 52:28Tyler Cowen?

  But what do you think of the hypothesis that some more general collapse has been going on? It does come first in the least well-capitalized places, which would be people tweeting, people on Substack, people on TikTok, and it comes last to the more capitalized places. But in essence, all the dominoes are falling and media looks better now. But just as a lot of parts of populism have spread to the Democratic Party in these terrible Bernie Sanders kinds of ways, that it's happening to media as well, and it's all going to end up the same mess. Agree or disagree?

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's possible. I mean, this is a, a theory that I've kind of run through in, in my mind. Look, there does seem to be some core of people who want to read serious content. That doesn't seem to like it's going to disappear completely anytime soon. The communications technology changes over time. I'm optimistic about AI. It does, things don't always have to get worse. Things don't always have to be like Twitter that make us stupider. AI, you know, there's amazing research out there that basically people trust it, like people who need it most, like people on Twitter who are subject to misinformation are asking Grok all the time whether something is true and Grok might not be as good as ChatGPT or Claude, but it's certainly better than the normal ways that a lot of these people get information. Absolutely.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  And there's good research on how AI can talk people out of conspiracy theories. If you talk to conspiracy theorists, you don't know what they know, right? They have 10 different studies that you've never read. They know more about a topic than you have. So they're actually very difficult to argue with. But AI is just going to sit there and take apart their points one by one. It's not going to get sent to them, condescend to them. It's not going to tell them that they're idiots. So yeah, I think I'm optimistic AI could actually help us here. There might be, you know, the, the technology of the last 25, probably 30, 40 years, probably going back to cable news and talk radio and then social media took off, but maybe with AI, it goes back in the other direction.

• 54:19Tyler Cowen?

  So who is the content creator on the populist right? Who is most insightful, most worth reading, most valuable?

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Hmm, on the populist right, who is most insightful?

• 54:28Tyler Cowen?

  Not classical liberal, right?

• 54:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:30Tyler Cowen?

  Not centrist.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  It depends on how you like, are you including like new right people or just anyone?

• 54:37Tyler Cowen?

  I don't even know what the phrase new right means anymore, but name some names and we'll see if I think they fit.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, Steve Saylor, I mean, he's kind of playing the heads in recent years, kind of phoning it in, but I think the basics of Saylorism are, you know, I think he was ahead of the trans issue. Helen Andrews, I like some of her stuff. I think that some of the stuff has the flaws of right wing, kind of like always looking, starting with the conclusion of looking for the story. I wasn't a big fan of the feminization stuff. But some of the stuff on like kind of inner city crime and stuff like that, I think is, I think is good. Let's see, who else? Dominic Cummings, if you want to, I think he's more sympathetic to these people than he is to a lot of other people in politics.

• 55:14Tyler Cowen?

  Those are three picks. And what in your model of the world is making them better, them and the others you would, if you had a longer list, than the ones you think are worse?

• 55:22Speaker 01

  I, my least favorite thing in the world, I, I've been thinking about this a lot. To me, the lowest form of bias is partisan bias. Like you could, like me and you are biased, everyone has biases. Maybe we're biased in a classical liberal direction. Maybe we read Conrad in a certain way. But to me, when you are biased in the direction of my side is right on the political spectrum, it's, you're abdicating being an intellectual, you're just giving your mind over to the mob. So I think a lot of the right wing stuff, it's kind of, it hates liberal. It's not necessarily that it loves Trump. Sometimes, sometimes it is that, that's like the lower grade version of it. They hate liberals so much that there's so much motivated reasoning that the bias is always liberals are terrible people and they're doing evil things.

• 56:02Speaker 01

  And I think that's the problem. And I, I look for a little bit of independence where you don't see that, where it's just, you know, a one sided story about how terrible these people are.

• 56:10Tyler Cowen?

  This is June 2026. If the populist right is so terrible, why is the stock market so high?

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Well, the question is, could it be, could it be better?

• 56:19Tyler Cowen?

  Of course it could be better, but in absolute terms, aren't things okay?

• 56:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we are the center of the AI boom. Now there was an economist, I think it was, it might've been a cover story where we're saying the Trump tax and they took the Trump tax and they said AI is doing great. But at the same time, the Trump tax is basically tariffs and immigration. And I'm like, wait a minute, you're going to give Trump, you're going to detract immigration and tariffs, but you're not going to give him credit for the AI boom. Like he didn't have to take this, you know, perspective on AI. There were people who wanted to do a lot more, want a more government, more government control over what was going on. And so, yeah, look, the right wing populists we know are better than left wing populists, just because they have better economic ideas. Trumpism is a combination of libertarianism and these kind of retrograde nationalism and nativism, but also just like personal corruption.

• 57:07Speaker 01

  And it might work out economically, like the, the benefits of just letting AI go might overwhelm everything else. You know, there is a part of me that is, you know, kind of like Conrad, like there's an honor thing, right? When I watch these cabinet beatings and, you know, there was a New York Times analysis where like one in five sentences or something are praising Trump or attacking his enemies. There's something degrading about that. And maybe it works out economically. I'm still open to the idea that maybe Trump winning in 2024 was better for the stock market in the long run. But we can't just, we can't be that utilitarian. There's, there's, there's a point where we have to draw the line.

• 57:40Tyler Cowen?

  Why do conservative women hug and liberal women shake your hand?

• 57:44Speaker 01

  I like that. That's, that's funny. Yeah. The, the liberal women, I think there are norms. So it's not just the liberal women. It's, it's the men. The men are less kind of flirtatious, they're less aggressive. And I think the HR norms are more dominant among liberals. And I think as conservatives become like more just like self-consciously anti-liberal, they lean into the other direction. You know, you see it around like just people, like you see women these days on, in right wing circles, just being open that they want to marry a rich guy. You know, I think if you were a Republican politico, you know, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, it wasn't that explicit. There was, they were more conforming to like the norms of, you know, whatever a person who's reading the Washington Post and listening to NPR, there's just this kind of divergence in values.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  So the right is leaning into human nature. The left is leaning into kind of this refined understanding of sexuality and relations between the sexes.

• 58:34Tyler Cowen?

  Aren't the right wing men more bi modally distributed that they're either like Trump, right? We know what that is. Or they're quite honorable, like say you like Mitt Romney.

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:43Tyler Cowen?

  And the men on the left, they're much more likely to be hypocritical. There's more Bill Clintons on the left. I'm not saying they all are by any means. A lot are just loyally married. You look at well-educated Democratic men. They have pretty awesome demographic results in terms of marriages, children, education, income, right?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:59Tyler Cowen?

  But the right wing men just are weird all over the map.

• 59:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you said bimodal, you said some are like Trump and some are like Romney. I thought you were going to say some were incels and like shut ins.

• 59:07Tyler Cowen?

  Well, maybe.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that gets at something in that the left wing people just do seem to be more conformist, right? It's like kind of, you know, 1960s, you know, beatniks, you think it's going to, they're the people challenging the system. Like, no, at some point liberalism became the establishment. And if you're a person who is just conforming to the dominant ideas of your society, you're going to be a liberal. And part of that is probably monogamy and not being too much of a cad. I was surprised when I went to graduate school, I thought wokeness was kind of this surface thing that maybe a few crazy people believed in. And like things like little things like ethics rules, like the IRB, like when I was, I remember being in grad school and I remember like not feeling any moral obligation to like do the ethics review before I like did a survey or something.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  But then people around me would actually take it seriously. And I'm like, wow, these people are, these people are different than I am. I'm sure the Trump administration, the people are not like that.

• 1:00:04Tyler Cowen?

  Now, I once wrote a post called how public intellectuals can extend their shelf lives. You've written a book on populism. The future of populism is uncertain. It could die out or it could just be everything becomes populist. And in a sense, in that scenario, maybe you can't just keep on writing books about populism. Where do you see your own emphases headed?

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I've written, I've reinvented myself on more than one occasion. So I think that's, you know, I'm always kind of developing. I have three books. The first one is on foreign policy, the one, the second one, civil rights law. The third one is this one on populism. Yeah, I don't know what I'm going to be at in two or three years. I do like fiction. I do want to, you know, to go back to the Shakespeare thing. I do want to try my hand at it. I've written two fictional essays and they were both big hits. So maybe I want to take a fiction at some point, but I don't know. Like I never know exactly where I'm going. It's kind of, I read, I think, I observe events and then I just kind of go in a direction.

• 1:00:59Tyler Cowen?

  Does writing books still make sense?

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Makes sense from what? From like a knowledge producing perspective or like from an individual's perspective?

• 1:01:04Tyler Cowen?

  Either.

• 1:01:05Speaker 01

  From an individual's perspective, I think it does. It just, if you want my thought on like different issues, it's kind of fragmented in different places. There's a tweet here and there, there's an essay here and there, there's an op ed here and there. I see my, my books as like a consolidation of ideas that I've been thinking about. So each one of my three books was like basically what I've been thinking about the last two, three years, how I synthesize it and kind of what I think are the nuggets there that are really, really important that people, people should get. So from my perspective, it makes sense also, you know, provides a reason for people to talk about you and get you on podcasts and things like that. So it makes sense just from an intellectual level and from like a promotional level. And then for kind of like as a knowledge producing device, I'm not sure. I'm not sure if it ever did. Maybe we should all just be reading like, you know, bullet points like Axios or something

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  like that, but it still makes sense for an individual who's trying to get his ideas out there.

• 1:01:54Tyler Cowen?

  Final question. What in particular do you wish to learn about next?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  I am going to do, this sounds, this sounds completely random, but I do want to do like a month on quantum physics. And I mentioned that in passing on like the Substack and I had like, you know, two or three smart physicists reach out and say, if you need anything, reach out to us. I think there's philosophical implications there. I don't know what they are, but I, I don't know what they are. I don't know what direction I'll go in, but I feel like this is something at a deep level I have to have an opinion about. And I'm going to take, at some point, I'm going to take two or three months and I'm gonna, I'm gonna really dig into it. And maybe I'll learn, maybe my brain cannot comprehend, but at least I need to try once in my life.

• 1:02:34Tyler Cowen?

  Richard, thank you very much.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure, Tyler.

• 1:02:39Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen and the show is at Cowen convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.