Who should Tyler Cowen interview?
Every so often Tyler asks for podcast guest recommendations. Rather than typing the same stuff over and over, I'm collecting my notes here.
This is not just a list of my favorite living writers who have never been on the show. I've reviewed Tyler's theory of podcast-guest quality1 and am making judgments on that basis.
In alphabetical order:
- William Deresiewicz. My favorite working critic. Consistently thoughtful and brave, and excellent as a podcast guest. His background as a teacher always comes through.
- Byrne Hobart. I'm sure Tyler is well aware of Byrne, the one writer whom I think of as sometimes "out-Tylering Tyler."2
- Zvi Mowshowitz. Zvi's structural choices are striking: why such long posts, and in that style? What does his information stream look like? Yes, he and Tyler could hash out various disagreements, but I'm most curious about their overlapping but strikingly different approaches to being high-output infovores.3
- Reviel Netz. Behind the enthusiasm Tyler has sometimes shown for Netz's work is, I think, a shared commitment to tough and sustained intellectual work, along with a shared willingness not to be doing what everyone else is doing. The dramatic tension here might be in the contrast between the similarity of those commitments and the disparity of the shape of their actual outputs. (Is it better to bring a high intellectual workrate to a very wide domain, or to fewer questions more deeply?)
- Matt Sienkiewicz. If you judge a writer on how engaging their least interesting pages are, Matt has to be near the top. (Pick a page at random from his output; it will be interesting.) I'm fairly sure Tyler has had good things to say about at least one of Matt's outputs (though I can't find it), and for years I've been half-expecting Tyler to spend an afternoon reading the whole corpus and writing up some notes.
Those guidelines are also a pretty good argument for doing podcast interviews in person: if podcasts are really about dramatic interactions, we shouldn't be surprised that they work much better face-to-face. (Do you watch a lot of theater where the actors are talking via FaceTime?) The Henry Oliver interview was one of my favorites in a long time; I doubt it's an accident that this was in person.↩
This means that (i) Tyler has some set of reasons for not interviewing Byrne or (ii) Byrne has declined an invitation. I'm guessing it's (i), and can imagine various of those reasons and why they don't persuade me, but that would be a different, longer, and extremely niche post.↩
See above footnote.↩