AI, Employment, and Education (with Tyler Cowen)

Tyler Cowen is bullish on the integration of AI into higher education. He's also not worried about its effects on the future workplace. Listen as Cowen speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the reasons for his optimism, and argues that college classes should devote significant time to learning how to use AI. They discuss the future of writing (and thinking) in an academic context, and Cowen's solution to dealing with worries about cheating. Cowen also shares how he personally has adapted to AI, and whether he thinks there's value to a college education designed not to ensure mastery of a subject, but instead to help students become the kind of people they want to be.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is February 24, 2026, and before introducing today's guest, I want to give you the results

• 0:42Speaker 00

  from our survey of your favorite episodes of 2025. Here are your top 10. 10th, a tie between The Economics of Terrorists and Trade with Doug Erwin and Why Christianity Needs to Help Save Democracy with Jonathan Rausch. 9, How to Walk the World with Chris Arnadi. 8, The Music of John and Paul with Ian Leslie. 7, Will Goddara on Unreasonable Hospitality. 6, Econ Talk, episode number 1,000, that was a solo episode with me. Number 5, The Magic of Tokyo with John McReynolds. Number 4, The Perfect Tuba with Sam Kianous. 3, Shampoo, Property Rights and Civilization with Anthony Gill. Your second most favorite

• 1:26Speaker 00

  episode was A Mind-Blowing Way of Looking at Math with David Besse. And your favorite episode, listed by 33% of listeners in the survey, What is Capitalism with Mike Munger. I want to thank everyone for voting and for your comments, which I love receiving. And now for today's guest, Tyler Cowen of George Mason University, Marginal Revolution and Conversations with Tyler. This is Tyler's 20th appearance on the program. He was last year in November of 24, 2024, talking about the great Vasily Grossman novel, Life and Fate, which many of you read profitably and enjoyed. I appreciate hearing from you. Tyler, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Always happy to be here, Russ.

• 2:09Speaker 00

  Our topic for today was inspired by a recent talk you gave at the University of Austin that we will link to, and we'll also link to the top 10 episodes, so you can go back and revisit them if you'd like. Your talk was about how AI will or should or could change higher education with some other things along the way. Before we get there to that topic and some of your thoughts, I want to start with your current thoughts on the disruptiveness of AI to the job market. A lot of people have been saying recently, we're in for a very tough time, we might lose all our jobs, AI could do everything better than a person, except for maybe comforting someone with a warm look.

• 2:52Speaker 00

  Is that going to be the only occupation left for us poor humans? A lot of jobs are going to probably go away and then not come back, but how many? A lot? All of them? Or most of us going to be unemployed and very poor? There's an immense amount of doom and gloom this week and the last couple of weeks on social media, and I want to get your thoughts, Tyler. Do you agree?

• 3:16Speaker 01

  There'll be plenty of new jobs under AI. Just look at the energy sector. To the extent AI takes off, we'll need much, much more energy. Those jobs require people. It will change where jobs are and what individuals do. Or look at biomedical trials. Again, to the extent AI does well, it will produce all kinds of new and interesting ideas for drugs, medical devices. These will need to be tested, they will need to work their way through the regulatory process. I also think, somewhat counterintuitively, AI will lead to more lawyers. I'm not sure that's a good thing, but we'll need to write a lot of new laws for the AIs. Now, a big part of me believes the AIs would write those laws better than humans could,

• 3:59Speaker 01

  but I don't think we'll let them do it, rightly or wrongly. So, humans will use AI assistance in drafting those laws. I think lawyers who work in government will be a growth sector for the foreseeable future. So, those are just a few areas, but as you well know, it can be very hard to predict where future jobs come. If you go back to the early days of the Industrial Revolution and you tell people all these agricultural jobs are going away. Would you have two people sitting around, you know, the campfire saying, oh, yes, a lot more of us will become podcasters? Well, no, right? They'd have no idea. So we're in that same position. I do think there'll be more leisure time. And if that's what one means by fewer work, it's mostly a good thing. It may not be a good thing for everyone.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  But I think that will be one effect of this. There's already more leisure time because tasks you do at work, the AI can help you with more quickly. It's just not reported to the boss that this is going on.

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Now, you suggested that the legislation that AI would write might be better or would likely be better than what humans would write. I don't know if this was an actual quote, but I saw something in quotation marks from Sam Altman suggesting that governance would be, need to be improved in a world of a much more important AI in the job market. I don't think AI is going to be good at that kind of thing. Trade offs, the kind of things we're going to care about as human beings. It's not a, you don't optimize governance. Governance is almost inherently about trade offs. Do you agree with that? Or do you think there's a role for AI in figuring out how we ought to restructure, say, regulation in a more, a bigger AI world?

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Well, I would vote for Claude or GPT over most of our current leaders, or even people in the regulatory apparatus. But that's not how it's going to work. It will be used as an aid. The real problem is whether humans will listen to it. I think it gives, on average, better governance answers. It's not exactly my point of view, the different leading models. But again, better than what we typically have in office. I think in the short run, some governance will be worse. Just imagine the process for regulatory comments being overloaded by high quality but pointless AI generated comments. I think we're already seeing this. So there'll be a lot more spam. Any kind of open process that receives input will become overloaded, I think.

• 6:24Speaker 00

  Are you pessimistic at all about the economic, financial implications of AI, of a world where AI is much more integrated to the workforce? The doom and gloomers are suggesting there might be a collapse of aggregate demand, half the people won't have jobs, so they won't enjoy any of the benefits of the low prices. What's your take on that?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  There's a lot of different issues wrapped up into that. You said, "Am I pessimistic at all?" The words "at all" carry a lot of weight there. I can tell you my biggest worry, and that is AI will change governance in ways that are hard to predict. We have worse political models than economic models in general, no matter what your point of view. And it's possible governance becomes worse, and if governance becomes worse, that's bad for the economy. I don't, really, I don't rule that out at all. So that's a significant worry. But in terms of normal economic mechanisms, I expect we will have more wealth, we will not have fewer jobs. Many people at the very bottom will get all kinds of services for free or near free.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  I do think we will have more billionaires and more mega billionaires, because you will have small numbers of people building these companies that are quite large in revenue terms. That will be easier than it is today. But those new companies will mean new projects, and that will create many new jobs. And I don't think we're headed for anything like mass unemployment, absolutely not.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  And the so-

• 7:54Speaker 01

  But that doesn't mean I have no worries, right? I have plenty of worries.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  When you said your biggest worry was governance that might affect the economy, is that your biggest worry in economics or your biggest worry overall?

• 8:08Speaker 01

  It's my biggest worry with or without AI, right? That if politics gets worse, economies become worse also. There's plenty of negative mechanisms operating today. Most of them do not have to do with AI. But if you add AI into that mix and just see it as a big change- Where the people in charge may not regulate it well, may not regulate it properly, may not do whatever. There's just so many scenarios where things politically get worse. And again, with economics, we have models like price system, Hayek, comparative advantage, Say's laws, you know, often true, different ways of thinking through how things will go. Politics, I don't think we have very good models. There's median voter theorem, that's worth something.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  But we don't even know what the median voter wants when it comes to AI.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  I guess I'm a little worried about a lot of leisure. If we get some kind of nirvana of not having to work very much, you know, the Keynes essay for his grandchildren world that he imagined if we got a lot wealthier tends not to have been a, he was right about half right there. He said we were going to get a lot wealthier. He was right. He thought we'd take a lot more leisure. He was wrong. We don't, at least we don't take it at a point in time. We might take it over our whole lifetime. But people still work obviously very hard. I guess the question would be if AI did displace lots of skills, that could be troubling. And also, I guess the speed, you know, I worry a little bit about driverless

• 9:40Speaker 00

  cars, which I think eventually will come, and what that does to the millions of folks who drive cabs and trucks. And if that happened quickly, it would be hard to, that transition might be politically very unpleasant. Thoughts?

• 9:55Speaker 01

  If you take something like trucking, a trucking job has a lot more to it than just driving. There's all sorts of ways in which you, you know, load, unload cargo, deal with points of contact. I think those changes will come relatively slowly. When will Tesla be ready to displace Waymo as a truly cheaper alternative with driverless vehicles? Again, I expect that within 10 years, but I don't think it will all happen in two or three months. So, a lot of humans still will want a taxi driver. Tesla and Waymo are not free. Taxi drivers do not earn that much. It's not completely obvious to me what the equilibrium there looks like. I know there's a difference between fixed

• 10:40Speaker 01

  costs and marginal costs, but a lot of systems end up having higher marginal costs than you think at first, once you make them universal, and they have to handle all possible problems. So we'll see, but jobs have changed over the long sweep of human history. I think they will change somewhat faster this time. I'm not that worried about additional leisure time. It's bad for some people. We saw that during COVID. But if you want to work, your chance to control, manipulate and manage projects will be far, far higher than it ever has been in the past. And that'll keep us busy.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Whether it's for earning monetary income or not.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  Have you been in a driverless car?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yes, it's fun.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  I think it's fabulous. I could never, I would never choose a human driver over a driverless car in the current situation.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Well, you're not paying the full cost of a Waymo.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  So it's subsidized to you. And people claim the Tesla network will, over time, prove better because it's accumulating data, then the marginal cost of that will be very low. But as things change on the roads, rules change. I don't know what people expect changes. Maybe we'll want people, you know, driving vehicles to be performing other services. It will be connected to package delivery. I'm not sure, but you know, we shouldn't over predict the future. And if that one job truly just totally does go away, I think that will be fine.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. Things, again, things will get cheaper in all kinds of ways. If that's what ultimately happens.

• 12:19Speaker 00

  I guess the thing that seems to me when I was thinking about it at some length, and I, I think you're sympathetic to this. As long as there's growth, and I think there's an, there's an assumption in the current world that AI will mean that there'll be 11 people who will be able to make a really enormously extraordinary living and everyone else is going to be having cheap products and otherwise will have very little to do with their time. That's not the world I envision. As long as there's growth and there's a chance for people to improve themselves, their economic opportunity, I think the world will be in a, in a much better place with an AI world. And to me, that's the only question. Will there be opportunity for self, self-growth? Career paths that are interesting.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  There will be things to do for humans, I think for sure. Will there be a vision of improvement that'll be possible?

• 13:12Speaker 01

  Once there's more goods and services, which is what it means to say AI is working, it's relatively hard to get to a conclusion where most people are worse off. The goods and services are sold, if need be, their prices fall, the production, marketing, distribution of the goods and services generates income of its own. Keynes had this one scenario in mind where you produce more, but it's all hoarded in the form of currency, the liquidity trap. That's not plausible for an AI-enriched world, where there are all these new and fascinating things people want to buy. So some version of Say's law is likely to hold, the production of these goods and services generates incomes, and incomes for people to buy those same things. So that is by far the most likely scenario.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, my only disagreement is that when you use the phrase "people will be better off," it sounds like what you have in mind is they'll have more goods and services. That's not the only thing. They do care about it. We do care about those things.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Their jobs will be less routine also, right?

• 14:12Speaker 00

  I hope so. That would be great, right?

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:16Speaker 00

  I think work as a source of meaning is not unimportant in the modern world, so it'll be interesting to see how that plays out. I don't know.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Many people may prefer routine jobs. That's one worry I have. Another worry I have is it's possible the people who are most displaced will be the upper, upper-middle-class, white-collar workers, and they will have to move to Houston and work for energy companies, which is not the end of the world, but politically they will hate that. And rather than being, you know, say, a consulting partner for $1.4 million a year, they'll be sent to Houston and they'll earn $300,000 a year. And politically, they're a very influential group, so that... I don't know how we survive that politically. What are they going to vote for, right?

• 15:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Those individuals, you could say, in a sense, run the Democratic Party, and they're not going to be happy under a lot of scenarios. So that gets back to my main worry being the politics.

• 15:12Speaker 00

  I guess my thought was that a lot of people were saying, well, you know, consulting firms are all going to die because AI can do in a tiny fraction already, a tiny fraction of the cost, a really pretty good job giving you advice, companies advice. But I think a lot of what people pay for when they hire a consulting firm isn't the solutions because they're often, I don't think particularly good. But for the chance to talk to real human beings about their organization and to react to the observations of an outsider and sometimes make a difference. I don't think they're paying for the the report per se.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  I agree with that, but I think they could do that with, say, a third of their current employees.

• 15:49Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  And I think in the short run, there'll be a boom in consulting because everyone needs consultants to tell them how to integrate AI into their workflows, though the consultants themselves may not know how to do that. But in the medium term, I do think the demand for consulting services will be down.

• 16:06Speaker 00

  So let's turn to higher education, an area that many people think is going to be changed by AI. But as you pointed out in that talk, and I think as is the case in many industries, there's a lot of inertia. Higher education is not the most nimble institution in America.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Those are polite words, but yes.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  So it's not obvious to me that it's going to be revolutionized, anything like overnight. And it's not clear it can be revolutionized at all. People are paying for a variety of things when they go off to college. But let's think about just the education part. You start off with a piece of advice that was that's kind of startling. You suggest that a third of college courses should be devoted to using AI well. Explain what you meant.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  Or a third of total course time.

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. So explain what you meant by that.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Well, almost every job in the future will involve knowing how to use AI well. In most schools, that isn't taught at all in any formal sense. Particular professors might teach it, as indeed I do. So I think what we should do is devote a significant part of the curriculum to a skill everyone will need, and right now is quite scarce. And keep in mind, when you're teaching people how to use AI well, it's not at the expense of teaching them other things. So you can teach them, here's how to use AI to better read and understand Homer's Odyssey, and you're teaching them Homer's Odyssey at the same time. But you're teaching them the combination of Homer's Odyssey and AI. So to take a third of curriculum time and devote it to AI, you're not pushing out other

• 17:50Speaker 01

  things very much. You may in fact be enhancing them. Everyone will be learning better. The main problem is our own faculty don't know how to do this, and our administrators are probably even less so. So who's going to do the teaching? The students? You could have the students maybe teach the professors, because the students probably have been using it to cheat.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  But we'll come to cheating in a minute, because I think you have a really nice insight on that. Could you really imagine? Well, you could tell them about your own experience. When you say, "Teach people how to use AI," do you mean how to write a better prompt? What do you have in mind there?

• 18:28Speaker 01

  It depends what the area is. So right now, you might be teaching people something like Kodak's, how to use AI to program better, and programming will do your tasks. But for some of the humanities, it is just how to write a better prompt. So if you're asking it questions about Homer's Odyssey, how do you ensure you get the best possible answers, the smartest answers? Which advanced model should you ask? Whatever it is you need to know. But over time, less and less of it will be about prompting. Good prompting will occur automatically. People will learn that pretty quickly.

• 19:04Speaker 00

  I think, you know, at this stage, I think the bigger challenge is people don't think to use it, right?

• 19:10Speaker 01

  Sure, just telling people they need to use it. But if biology is the class, how to integrate AI systems into a lab would be the thing to be taught. Again, I fully recognize there's no one there to teach it yet, but that's what you'll need to know. So why shouldn't we just be teaching people what they need to know and have that as our goal?

• 19:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm gonna talk about what that means in a minute, need to know, but sticking with the question of using it, I just want to point out that you can use AI to understand the Odyssey, Homer's Odyssey, by you're struggling to remember what happened back in book two, and et cetera, et cetera. For me, the biggest value of it in reading the Odyssey is saying, give me a list of the characters, tell me what page they first appear on in Fagel's translation, and tell me what their main characteristics are so I can keep them straight. Right? I assume they're people, many of them older, but I think young people are probably pretty good at it. But older people would go like, oh, you can use AI for that? But

• 20:12Speaker 00

  that'll, that'll all be gone in the next year or two. I think people will figure all that stuff out and how to prompt, in thoughtful ways, right? That's not a, it's gonna be very small time consume, time source.

• 20:25Speaker 01

  But there's other questions one might have about Homer's Odyssey. So to teach people how to ask better questions is an unending task. So for instance, you probably know much more ancient history than what the students would reading Homer's Odyssey. You live near the Mediterranean. But just what are the questions about the historic era of Homer that one should ask? Was it composed orally? How was it passed down? What was the role of oxen in these economies? What did they use for money? What do we know about whether these events really happened? Maybe it's trivial to you to know to ask those questions. You've been podcasting, how many episodes?

• 21:02Speaker 00

  A lot, over a thousand.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  A lot, but other people need to learn how to ask questions better. That's why we're not all podcasters.

• 21:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a great, that's a great observation. And I think the next set of questions would be about its impact on the rest of the world and, right, what its legacy is and so on.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  Or if someone said, let's say it's an archaeology class, not a classics or literature class, and then you want to have good questions to ask about Homer's Odyssey. I'm not even sure that you and I would have the best questions.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  Fair, fair enough.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  And we need to learn how to do that. In fact, you can learn it using the AI.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  I would ask them, what are the good questions? It's kinda easy.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  But you need to put more structure on it. Like, what are the good questions for which purposes? How do I follow up and so on?

• 21:48Speaker 00

  So I want to talk about writing because I think about that a lot.

• 21:54Speaker 00

  You had some suggestions on how we ought to deal with writing in a modern curriculum that has AI in it and how to think about how to catch people who are overusing AI to their perhaps to their own detriment, but in pursuit of a credential or a better grade.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  The cheating problem with AI is much overrated. We're simply unwilling to do something about it. Now, it's not that you can detect AI style necessarily. Maybe you can now, maybe you can't, but over time you won't be able to. But just take students and for say, 2% or 3% of their output over the course of their college career, lock them in a room and test them. And if what they're handing in and how they do on the test diverge dramatically, just call them in for a chat. I'm not saying send them to jail, but look into the matter. And it requires a certain harshness that you're actually willing to pursue, you know, a strong differential performance. I don't think you have to kick

• 22:56Speaker 01

  them out, but I think as an incentive against cheating, it will work much better than anything we're doing right now.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  So you're saying that you put them in a room where they can't have access to AI or the internet. You make them write an essay and then you compare that to an essay they've written with where they have the freedom to not be in the room. And if the essay is much better when they have the freedom to not be in the room, it suggests they've used AI. That's the claim, right?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's just a sampling problem. And you could just make them write more of their essays locked in a room. If you think something fishy is going on, you don't have to expel them. You don't have to write this up in a manner where they can't get a job in the future because some people just get nervous when they're locked in a room, right? Nonetheless, I think there is much more cheating today than there would be under my recommended scheme.

• 23:47Speaker 00

  But I want to define what cheating is and push back on that a little bit. I think in the same talk we're discussing, you point out that you don't use AI for your writing for the columns that you write, which I get. But most people use it for their writing and they use it anywhere from zero to 100. Zero might be your style. I don't want to have my style tampered at all with by AI. I'm not going to even have it look at it. The other end, you say, I have to write a piece on how AI is going to affect employment. Please write that, Claude. And Claude spits out a perfect 500-worded, 750-word op-ed piece. But in between, there'd be all kinds of things where I'd say, in theory, I don't use it either,

• 24:32Speaker 00

  but that's because I'm old and set my ways. But I could say, you know, I feel like this is a little disorganized. Could you reorganize it for me? Is that cheating? If I could say, is there a sentence here that you find awkward or confusing? Could you fix it for me? Is the definition going to be you can't use it for anything in those writing classes that you're talking about?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think you need to split up the tasks. So a big portion of those writing classes, you force the students to write with AI. This is what I'm doing with my current History of Economic Thought class. And you just say, well, the standard for a good paper is higher. Use AI. You have to use AI. Try to teach them how to do it. And you grade the joint product. So you should teach them that and how to write on their own. And you're teaching them how to write on their own, mostly as a way of teaching them how to think. Most people may not need to know how to write on their own for its own sake, but they will need to know how to think. And writing is a great path to thinking, as you and I both know.

• 25:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a strange thing, by the way, right? It shouldn't, it's not a separate skill, but I think people tend to think of it as a separate skill. But obviously, my ability to think comes greatly from my ability to write and they get all tangled up.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  I can't think in the shower. Like, I hear these stories of people, the idea came to me in the shower. Like, I'm just wet. I'm showering. That's my think. You know, nothing, nothing else comes. The soap comes. So I need to write to think, or I need to talk to people.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, we did it. We did an episode with Lauren Bachmann on that topic. I think it's we'll link to it. That's a I haven't to agree. I think it probably depends on the person. So then the question would be the following. So as I think, you know, I here at Shalem College, we have a core curriculum where people sit in most of their first year classes studying the same thing in groups of 25 or fewer. They might be reading a great book. They might be reading Plato's dialogues. They might be reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. They might be reading the Iliad or the Odyssey. And they're struggling alongside their classmates to grapple with the meaning of the text, the import of the

• 26:47Speaker 00

  text, the lessons to be gleaned from the text, the questions that could be raised that cannot be answered with a yes or no about the text and its and its import. And that's an extraordinary experience that most of us, and I can't speak for you, Tyler, but there was very little of that in my undergraduate education and my personal experience. In fact, the only thing that that probably parallels that in my lifetime as a student was in graduate school when we would sit in groups of in our study group of four people and struggle to answer problem sets that had no clear answers. And a huge portion of my education as a graduate student came from those sessions. No instructor, just four of us arguing, struggling

• 27:31Speaker 00

  has a huge impact. And seminars also have an impact. AI can't do that, I don't think. And when I say that, I mean, help you internalize deep lessons and understandings and what we might call wisdom and common sense through the process itself. Or do you disagree?

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Well, you and I were both fans of Adam Smith, right?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  And we know what Adam Smith's proposal was, that different classes and different professors compete with each other. So I gave my talk at U Austin, which is not UT Austin, it's University of Austin. It's a small school. In a semester, they told me they offer 30 classes. 30 is not a lot. It does not cover the entire sweep of human knowledge. I made them a simple proposal. Each year, let a student take one class with AI. No more than one, just one, or even one every two years, or even one every four years, just once.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  And see what they think. If you want, you can have the students take the class in a small group. Well, you need to recruit three people to do it with you. And you choose the topic of Tutor England, which they do not currently offer a class in. It's an important topic. I asked the student body in my talk, how many of you want a class in Tutor England? Seven or eight hands went up. So let those people try with AI. And just see what they think. See what works. Let different groups of students design different kinds of AI-driven classes. If they don't like it, they'll just stop doing it, right? This is Adam Smith's point. So let people in your institution, and I will pose the same challenge to you. Just try it once. And see what they think.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  But layout, to be clear. We're very proud of the fact that we are not selling a credential per se. Obviously, we provide a credential, our students graduate from an accredited institution. But that's not what we're selling. We're selling transformation here, right? I like to say that people come to Shalem not to study something, but to become something. So it's a very different environment here in terms of competitiveness and grade consciousness. We're not so big on all that. So that's great for your experiment, because I want to put that to the side. That clouds the conversation. But I want you to elaborate for listeners who didn't maybe hear your talk at University of Austin.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  When you say, take a class with AI, let's get into the weeds a little bit. For your talk, you generated a syllabus. So talk about that and then how it would be. Assignments would be done and so on.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  You would, at least at first, work with a coach. Let's say the class is in Tutor England. The coach does not have to be an expert in Tutor England. But they have to know something about how a class should be structured. So you prompt the AI, it generates a reading list. You go off and you do those readings. You prompt the AI to generate quizzes. I did all this for the audience during my talk. There's a link where one can do this. The AI can grade the quizzes for you. And again, students would decide, should this class have a paper? Only quizzes? You know, three short papers, one long paper? But the AI would grade, you know, the papers, the quizzes, whatever you have.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  And at the end of it all, if you want, you can reintroduce a human to grade the whole thing. I don't think you need to, but I understand people will feel a lot better. If we have the coach come along and just certify that somehow the AIs were not insane lunatics here. And then you have a grade and you have a course of study. And there you go. Now, I have more radical ideas that I think are actually better, but let's just start by having AI try to copy a human class. My more radical idea is you just chat with the AI for, say, three months, 15 weeks, whatever. And at the end of it all, you have a different AI grade your chat with the first AI. Like, what did the person learn from

• 31:35Speaker 01

  this chat? A lot? A little? B minus? A plus? I think that is eventually how it will work. But I know that's too radical. Let's start just by copying how a human would teach a class, but put in an AI instead. As you're a marginal cost to you. And again, if it's missing in human warmth, or insight, or depth, or in-person discussion, and that really matters, students won't take it. But I think you'll have a lot of students who want to learn about, say, Tudor England. And I suspect your college also does not teach a class in Tudor England.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  We do not.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And they'll do that instead for one of their classes. And then just see over time, where were the students flocking? Do they want more AI or less? I think, you know, as Iachians, we can say, we're not sure. But let's let a kind of market discover that, as Adam Smith himself had indicated.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  So I, I think the fascinating example of having the, the conversation, which, by the way, when you first do it, it's really extraordinary, right? When you first, I'm sure you've done this, I've done it, you know, there's a topic you wish you knew more about. So you approach AI and you say, treat me like a high school student, or treat me like a freshman in college, or treat me like a novice. And you start going back and forth. And then you say, give me three examples, so I can see whether I really understand it. And then you say, I didn't really get it, I don't think. Can you make it clearer for me? And it never gets tired, never gets bored, right? You just. Just relentlessly is waiting for you to talk to it. It's a kind of an amazing thing. Now, whether you could sustain that over the 13, 14 weeks you're talking about, I think is

• 33:14Speaker 00

  a little harder. I'm not, maybe we'll get used to it, but that strikes me as difficult. And it would be hard because you wouldn't know exactly what you should be talking about. So part of the challenge would be setting it up. So you told the AI what you wanted to talk about to help you learn something from that because you know, you've got the exam at the end from the, from the other AI. But I think the creativity is going to come for, you know, educational entrepreneurs in doing more than that, as you point out, that, that's a great, interesting pilot, first step, and it's a particularly important pilot first step where you're trying to transfer information, right? So if you're trying to understand, say, how the cell works, right? You, you need lectures. Yeah. You know, you're not going to figure that out sitting around

• 33:57Speaker 00

  a room with a, with a coach in the absence of anything else and, and, and acquire the kind of information you need to become a, have an understanding of biology. But if you're reading the Odyssey and, or just take a, you know, a poignant example, my, my students who've, you know, come back from war, literally, and are reading the Iliad, which is about wrath and vengeance and, and bloodshed and the challenges and trauma of war, doing that on your own in a 15 week conversation with a machine is not the same as doing it alongside people who've, who've gone through that as well. So the question is-

• 34:37Speaker 01

  But keep in mind, my initial proposal, if the topic so requires, you can mandate groups of two, three, five, 10, whatever, if that's important, and it may be for the Iliad, especially in Israel. So that's fine. You can do that.

• 34:51Speaker 00

  Well, that's-

• 34:51Speaker 01

  You know, the person doesn't have to be alone.

• 34:54Speaker 00

  Well, that was-

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Furthermore, we're going to see the whole 15 week thing as highly artificial, right?

• 34:58Speaker 00

  You think?

• 34:58Speaker 01

  We're going to move away from that over time.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  You think?

• 35:01Speaker 01

  I do.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  It's a weird thing, isn't it? It's such a weird thing, and you gotta fill it up somehow, even if it doesn't deserve being filled up, given the topic of the class. You gotta teach it the whole time.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Imagine the class in the Iliad, and you have everyone read it in six weeks, and then they move on to, you know, another text on warfare. So there's so much more flexibility in the AI model. But just to pose you this as a challenge, you're a president of a college. Will you allow this experiment that a student can take one class with AI and just see how they like it, as Adam Smith more or less recommended?

• 35:38Speaker 00

  But what I was gonna, I was trying to get to, which you beat me to it, because, but we agree, is that if you think that doing it in a group is important, that can be part of the experience. And of course, the extraordinary part of this, that's, as a president of a college, I'm very aware of, is that the coach might be cheaper than somebody with a PhD in classics, right?

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Much cheaper.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Right.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  And they won't insist on all kinds of other treatment.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  And they won't insist on passing on their own pet theory of the Iliad that they learned from whatever. It's, it's a very appealing vision, but I'm just trying to think out loud about how this group experience could be captured. So if the four of us, me, you, and two others, say, we're gonna read The Odyssey together, right?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  How would we, some of the time, we're gonna be alone. We'll be reading the text alone, usually, not always. We might read it aloud together, and parts of it, harder parts, challenging parts, provocative parts, but a lot of it, we'd read alone. A lot of it, we'd talk to the AI back and forth on our own, where we couldn't understand something, we're trying to clarify. What would we do when we come back together? And what could the coach do that would make that more akin to what is the current experience of a great teacher and a great class?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  We could help each other with our papers.

• 37:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, sure.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  And help directly, but help use the AI to learn about the topic your paper's on. Just discuss with each other, and you could have the AI record a group discussion, and then just ask it, well, what do you think? And then say, well, people made these points. Were there any factual errors in the points people made? Or would you add something to this? And it can speak out loud if you want. It could have your voice, right? We can do this.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Everyone could take a class with the president. We could ask the AI, what do you think Russ Roberts would say here? Everyone, we get to have some weird version of a class with you on Homer. There's so much material from Russ Roberts. The AI is an excellent model of you. So the possibilities are endless.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Well, let's talk about your history of economics class. What are you doing there? Do you talk?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  I do. I lecture.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Why?

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Also, I think there's something about the vividness of human face-to-face communication. But I gave them an assignment last week. I said, use AI to teach yourself the Ricardian model. And they've all been doing this. And then I said, this week, which is later today, I'm going to go in and I'm going to teach you the Ricardian model. And I said, you don't have to report back, but I just want you to mentally compare how it did and how I did. You don't ever have to say anything, but that's a big part of the lesson.

• 38:27Speaker 00

  It's fabulous.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  And that's what we're doing.

• 38:31Speaker 00

  Your jokes will be better, but it's that may be your only advantage. Tyler, I worry.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  We'll see, but clearly, over time, I will lose some number of what might be my current advantages. And if I end up doing different things than what I do now, I'm fine with that. I'm ready to adapt. I do much more podcasting because of competition from AI, which competes with my writing more than my podcasting. And I do more personal appearances, which the AI can't do at all. So I'd say I've adapted at least half of my time usage already because of what you might call AI competition. So I'm very ready for this.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  You mentioned an application or a company, I don't know what it's called, Learn LM, which is trying to improve the quality of tutoring of AI. What are your thoughts on what that's going to actually do? Do you know anything about that in terms of nuts and bolts, or what they're trying to achieve?

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Only a little. I mean, I've seen quite a few projects of people who take an AI, there's a base model, and they modify the base model. So it won't tell you the answer right away, or it talks you through the steps of learning, or 30 different other things. There's a lot of ed tech startups. My intuition is none of those are, or few of those will succeed. The people are just going to use the basic foundation model. I'm not even saying that's better, but it's what they're used to. And I don't think the bells and whistles on top will be the equilibrium. So when I teach using AI, I just stress not here's some company with a neat little thing that will walk you through, talk you through, just here's the base model, here's how to use it.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  That's what I think we'll be doing.

• 40:16Speaker 00

  So let's get

• 40:18Speaker 01

  People want one model to work with, I think.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's true. But let's be a little more radical even than than the last version you gave. So as you say, I'm president, so I can, let's pretend I can do whatever I want, which is we, as we know, is not true, even in a corporation, let alone a college. But what, let me say it differently. Tyler, you, let's say you start a college.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Okay. Yes.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  The college is, you have to design your own major, your own curriculum, it's all AI, everything, with some coaches, let's have some human coaches.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  And, and let's have the potential for interaction with the other students as well, either socially as well as educationally. But, you know, 15 weeks is artificial, four years is artificial, eight semesters is artificial. If I walked into your college, I'm 18 years old and I'm bright and curious, which are the two things I care usually the most about when I think about education. And I say, I want to be transformed. I want to become something. I don't want to just become a, I don't want to know the base of knowledge of, say, economists. And as you, as you and I both know, most economic education is, is telling people

• 41:38Speaker 00

  what economists think about how the world works. It isn't teaching people about how to think about how the world works, which are, should be the same, but they're not. So let's say I'm that person, let's just, let's narrow it down, let's do economics. I come to you and I say, I want to know what you know, more or less, about how the economy and how economics works and what I can learn from it. I'm, I'm an idiot, right? I'm, I'm a tabula rasa. I might need your advice, but would you let me? I want you to imagine a world where I then get to not just create my own class on Tutor England, but my own class on economics.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  Maybe, you know, our former colleague, the late Walter Williams, which is one of my favorite things. He would give out on the first day of his graduate class, I think 100 questions, maybe a little more than 100 over time it grew. And he'd say, the final exam will be 25 or 10 of these questions. So you've got the questions in advance. The problem is they're not questions like, what's the capital of England? They're really hard questions. And you can find these online. We'll put a link to them. It's a fabulous educational resource because it says, to answer these questions, you have to know a lot about how to think like an economist. And you'll learn a lot about how the world works.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  So could you imagine a world where I give a degree in economics based on something creative? What would it be? What would be your, now that I have this incredible tutoring tool, how would I certify mastery?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  You just test people, grade their papers. I mean, British have a tutoring system to this day in many parts of the country.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  It works acceptably well. It could be 10 or 20 times better with AI assistance. So we know some version of that works, right? We can just do it now much better. Now, it may be possible to improve on it further yet. I would say, get a few years of data, feed it into the AIs that have been doing this and ask them how to improve it. You don't really quite have that same possibility without the AIs. So they'll be figuring out what works and what doesn't. That's another reason to do this. You're feeding them the actual data.

• 43:57Speaker 00

  When education was somewhat elite and not expected to be the, I'm talking about higher education. When higher education was for a small part of the country, small part of the population, a lot of these issues weren't relevant. People came.

• 44:17Speaker 00

  To quote be educated, to get mastery of a set of subjects. It's so many different things in America right now and in most places. The acquisition of wisdom is not the focus of most education. Is there room for a college that, a startup that would certify that experience? You'd think that would sell like hotcakes. Is it not here because?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Doesn't your college do that? You know much more about that than I do. Doesn't University of Austin do that?

• 44:49Speaker 00

  I don't know. I mean, I know what we do, but I don't, I don't, no, I don't think so. I think, you know, the phrase I used before, I think is worth thinking a lot about, to become something rather than to study something. A lot of what I think we do here at Shalam is to help people figure out what they want to become, not just to help them become that thing. It's both. It's happening at the same time. People come here with, if I can use a fancy word, I think it's the right word, inchoate ambition to make their country better. They're not sure how to get there from here. We tried, we don't give them a path, but we try to give them the education that will equip them to make a difference in their country and to make it better.

• 45:33Speaker 00

  That's such a crazy goal, right? It's not anything related to what we normally think of, I think, as education in America when I was going through that experience as a faculty member. But it's an amazing goal. It's an amazing goal. It's a fabulous goal. It's, it's what everybody would want if they believed it would work. And it, you know, if they believed they could still get a job, and our students do, and they do very well, but there's anxiety about that naturally by many people.

• 45:57Speaker 01

  A lot of people do that off campus, of course. That's how you and I mainly learn.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  It's called life. Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  It's called life. So there's life, which includes the internet and AI, right? And we don't learn in 15-week batches, you and I. We pick up things as we wish. We learn, we stop, we go forward, we stop, we pick up another thing. So we're the supposed experts and that's what we're doing? And we insist that everyone else has to do it some quite different way? That, to me, is what's weird.

• 46:27Speaker 00

  But isn't that because we've run this second business of certification, right? We want to stamp on their forehead that they've acquired some minimal level of competence, either in knowledge or in mastery, not complete mastery, obviously, but some minimum level of competence. And once you contaminate the educational experience, and I'll use that word "contaminate", with that side project of telling, say, employers that this person is either smart or knows this set of stuff, it changes everything, right?

• 46:58Speaker 01

  The AI can outcompete us in certification, easily. We're not doing that yet, but it's the future equilibrium. Just have a person spend a day with the AI, and in this case, you have the AI pre-arranged to be testing the person across a number of areas. You'll get great certification, strengths, weaknesses, temperament, what they know, what they don't know, way better than these As and Bs, or I guess at Harvard and Stanford, it's only As you get. So, again, it's only an issue of will. We can solve that problem whenever we want to. I get that we don't want to do it because we don't want to unravel the bundle, but sooner or later, that's what will happen.

• 47:40Speaker 00

  I asked a high-ranking former member of the Israeli military establishment how they would, if they were in my job, change the admissions process to help select for leadership. So I care about two things here, right? I care about intellectual aptitude, which is a combination of brain power and curiosity. And then I care about ambition to make the country better and the capability of actually achieving that. So I was asking him, "How do you do that second thing? How would you interview people? What would you do differently?" He said, "Well, I'd take them for three days. I'd put them in the woods."

• 48:21Speaker 00

  I don't think that's going to be an effective marketing strategy for my college. It's interesting. It might. It might appeal to a certain group of people, but probably not going to be what I can do. But I'm thinking about you. We had a great conversation about talent, and you have to seek out talent for your philanthropy project, Emergent Ventures, which is an incredible project. And we talked about how do you interview people? How do you... So have you thought about, and maybe you already do, using AI for that? I mean, do you say to people, "Go off for a day and send me the transcript"? Let the AI get to know you.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  They use AI for it.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  That makes it harder for me.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  They ask the AI, what's Tyler going to ask me, right?

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  So I need new questions all the time. I think AI soon will be better than most human interviewers. It may well be already. I'm not sure it will soon be better than the best human interviewers. But again, if it beats most, we've gotten somewhere.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  It seems a lot of the challenge of that would be the fact that it is awfully obsequious.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Well, you can change that very easily.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  Right, you can, but I'm just saying, if you told me to go off and talk to an AI, I guess you'd have to ensure that I told it, don't suck up to me too much because I need this to be somewhat objective, right?

• 49:44Speaker 01

  And that's part of what we'll teach people in the third of the curriculum devoted to teaching them AI, how to get different moods from it, right? But it's not hard. And eventually, there'll be a greater diversity of models available, so it'll be easier yet.

• 50:02Speaker 00

  So, I don't know if you saw this post from a former past econ guest, Noah Smith. He said, you know, I get so much, I get the kind of pleasure from using AI that I used to get when I first started using social media. And then I found out that social media is ruining the country and corrupting our institutions. And I don't remember the exact wording he used. I apologize if I'm getting it wrong. But what he meant was, the social consequences of social media weren't as attractive as they were for me, sitting by myself scrolling. Do you think about that, about AI at all? I mean, it's obvious, I think, to me and probably to listeners that you really enjoy this world, this door we've walked through.

• 50:46Speaker 00

  And there's parts of me that I just find it so extraordinary, right? I love using it when it's, when it's, you know, a lot of it's just that it can do it at all. What you ask it to do is so fun. And it's going to get better. And as you point out, this is an important thing I wanted you to talk about. Most people don't really know what its capabilities are because they're using the free model.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  That's right, very important.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  There's a lot of users of it, but most of them are using a free model. And there are very, very few people using the higher end models. And they're very, very different. Are you confident this world we're walking through is going to be a world we're going to be happy to live in?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  I don't know what the word confident means here. I think people on the whole do not love change. And these are big changes.

• 51:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  Did people love the Industrial Revolution at the time? No. Some did. Is it arguably the best thing that ever happened to humans? Basically, yes. So I think it will be like that. I said once in some other interview, like, the more people are upset, you know, the better we'll know that things are going. That was tongue in cheek. But there's some truth to that. And it will just change expectations about what jobs will be like or what future your kids will have in a way that the people who are clued in will find quite unsettling. I wouldn't deny that at all. It worries me. It gets back to this point. We don't know how the politics of this will evolve.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Including in China, you know, we're only talking about America, but China faces its own version of this, the EU does, the rest of the world. We're going to have a lot of different decisions made. But I think for the most part, it will prove too difficult or too costly to stop.

• 52:35Speaker 00

  I think that's true. You wrote a book a while back, we talked about it, called Stubborn Attachments, which is one of my favorite books here, is maybe my favorite book. It's a defense of growth. And, you know, I hear the echoes of this in your assessment of where we are, that we're going to have more stuff. I have no doubt about it. Maybe an enormously larger amount of stuff. And so when you say the Industrial Revolution was maybe one of the greatest things that ever happened to humanity, I assume that's what you have in mind.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  No, I'll take out the maybe, but it's not just stuff. It's creativity, it's opportunity, it's liberation of women, it's human rights, it's much more than just stuff. That's part of the core message of Stubborn Attachments.

• 53:21Speaker 00

  Expand.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  You need resources to pay for making people's lives better in all kinds of humanitarian ways. Very poor societies typically do not have a lot of tolerance, do not grant rights to women very readily. They're worse places to live, not just because they don't have, you know, the flat screen televisions. They're worse on human rights and dignity and most of the other things we care about. So GDP per capita and what you might call non-GDP gains, they seem to correlate by about 0.95, which to me is quite striking. So you want economic growth, and for Israel in particular, there's a national security angle.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  If you don't have AI, I mean, you're toast.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Now, if you're Brazil, you might be safe anyway, but you are not Brazil.

• 54:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. I remember very vividly, you told me, and I think probably our first conversation about AI, that Israel should have its own AI initiative, and I thought, that's interesting. And obviously, over the last two years, I've thought a lot about that comment. There's an immense amount of AI happening, research happening here.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:35Speaker 00

  So there's nothing to worry about, at least in terms of effort. I'm pretty confident we're on the cutting edge, or very close to it. It's kind of an amazing, amazing technology society, innovation society here. Doesn't mean we may always make the right choices, but...

• 54:55Speaker 01

  A lot of small countries don't have that option.

• 54:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Most do not.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, it's unusual. It's very striking.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Geopolitics will change radically.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Let's close with advice. So, there was some point, my youngest child is, I think, 26 or 27 right now. So, eight years ago, when he was thinking of going to college, I, there was a part of me that said, maybe he shouldn't go, you know? Does he really need to go in today's world?

• 55:29Speaker 00

  Would he not be better off taking four years to do something extraordinary? Doing something he couldn't do because he was sitting in those 15 week long classes in that four-year rigid experience? But I didn't give him that advice. He went. He got a lot out of it, I think, both educationally and life-wise. But it's an interesting question whether a person should go to college these days. But what is clear is that some of the advice we were giving 18-year-olds five years ago was not good advice. You've got to learn how to code. Well, that turned out not to be good.

• 56:12Speaker 00

  By the way, I was told that about Shalom. It should be a required class in Shalom, coding, because in the modern world, that's where so much is happening and you have to understand it. You have to... So that probably wasn't good advice. But how do you tell a young person, an 18-year-old today, about this brave new world there that's about to hit them? What are your thoughts?

• 56:36Speaker 01

  Tell them to learn AI. Tell them to look for what Luis Carracano called messy jobs in a very good online essay. He said, "In the AI world, the premium will be on messy jobs where you do many different things that cannot be routineized or turned into formula and that involve a lot of face-to-face contact in solving difficult problems with and/or caused by other human beings." So that would be my advice. That is my advice. I get this question really, literally, every day.

• 57:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think the face-to-face thing is obviously important. People do, I think, will value face-to-face even more than they have in the past. The human skills of empathy, communication, listening are all going to be important. I guess the question is, you know, what I referred to earlier about the ability to grow in your career, right? It's not enough to just have a pleasant job. For many people, it's not enough to have a pleasant job that pays a decent amount. They like to aspire. They like to be creative.

• 57:48Speaker 00

  They like to imagine what could be around the corner that will be even more interesting. And that's a harder question, I think, to think about with in terms of giving advice. Do you have any thoughts on that?

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Well, we're talking about advice for them, but this is supplies to us also. We're not done. You know, we can reallocate our energies at any moment. If anyone has the ability to do that, it's the two of us. So start with yourself. You know, is another thing I say, and I've reallocated my time and energy quite a bit. Emergent Ventures is part of that. Traveling more, doing more face-to-face presentation is part of that. Doing more meetings is part of that. So try living your own advice and then maybe then give some more.

• 58:36Speaker 00

  Do you write as much as you used to?

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Somewhat less for this reason. Now, I've become more efficient generally, so my writing hasn't declined as much as my other outputs have increased, but I do write less and it's for this reason. And I write for the AIs. I think, what do the AIs need to learn and what do they need to learn about me? They're my best readers. They're very patient. They always understand the background to what I'm saying. And yeah, full steam ahead. They're reading, they're listening right now.

• 59:08Speaker 00

  When you say you write for the AIs, do you mean is when they use your writing as training data?

• 59:16Speaker 01

  Of course. But I also want to build a model of myself so they know what I want and how I think. I use that and people in the future can use it also.

• 59:29Speaker 00

  How are you dealing with privacy issues at all, if you're dealing with them at all? Do you let, do you give AI access to all your emails, all your work?

• 59:38Speaker 01

  No, not at all. Now, if you use Gmail, there's a complicated question, like what is Gemini reading? What can they read? Gmail is not important for me. But my dialogues with the AIs, they're very formal, very scientific. There's nothing embarrassing in there. I don't need to restrain myself. That's what I would want to do anyway. But I would not put detailed information about your personal life into the AIs. Probably not. I have a pretty high degree of trust in those systems, but I don't know, things can change. Company goes bankrupt, company gets hacked by China, whatever. I don't know. I wouldn't do it. It's not that

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  I'm against those companies. I'm not. But for the time being, I just wait. Same with a lot of confidential job information, national security questions. There's all these reports that US military uses it for actual planning. I don't know. Maybe it's an expected value positive. But like, I don't have to do things like that. I'm asking it how to read Homer's Odyssey, and that's fine. If the world could see my logs, I think it'd actually be very flattering for me.

• 1:00:57Speaker 00

  Well, that should be your next book. You should publish the logs. People would love to read those, Tyler, actually. I'm not, you don't even need to write a book out. You should just have a parallel Marginal Revolution site where you just publish your daily back and forth with Claude.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  I send people those logs all the time. Or they'll ask me a question, and I'll say, no, wait, you know, GPT has a better answer than I do, and I send them that. But they still get to hear back from me. I hope they're not insulted, but I feel I'm being suitably modest.

• 1:01:31Speaker 00

  Funny. My guest today has been Tyler Cowen. Tyler, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  An honor as always, Russ. Take care.

• 1:01:46Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.