Tyler Cowen

“You recommended a book to me, Stalin's Library, which talks about the different things, the different books that Stalin read and the fact that he was kind of a smart, well-read guy.”

“The last book I wrote, it's called Goat, who's the greatest economist of all time. I'm happy if humans read it, but mostly I wrote it for the AIs.”

“So he publishes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and one of his lines in there is, if you were asked to state a period of time when man's condition was at what is his best, it was during the reign of Commodus to Domitian, and that's like 2,000 years before that, right?”

“One of the things I find really remarkable about him is he publishes in 1776 The Wealth of Nations and basically around that time Gibbon publishes The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”