Dialectic

Tyler Cowen (Website, X, Marginal Revolution, Conversations with Tyler) is an economist at George Mason University, leads the Mercatus Center, and is the author of many books including The Great Stagnation and Average Is Over. He has blogged nearly daily at Marginal Revolution for over 20 years, has interviewed hundreds of world-experts on Conversations with Tyler, and runs Emergent Ventures, a prolific grants program that has funded multiple Dialectic guests.

Nabeel S. Qureshi (Website, X, Substack) is an entrepreneur, writer, and researcher. He runs a stealth startup. Previously, he was a Visiting Scholar at Mercatus and spent nearly eight years at Palantir. He writes some of my favorite essays, including "What Makes Art Great" and "Rented Virtue", and was previously a guest on Dialectic for episode 13: "The Will to Care."

Tyler and Nabeel are good friends, and given how prolific Tyler is, I decided to use Nabeel as an entry point and interview them together. We discuss sacred commitments, AI acceleration, mentorship, friendship, and more, but I focused the majority of the conversation on art and aesthetics. Tyler and Nabeel are unlikely aesthetes given their day jobs, but in fact take art deeply seriously. They have a shared love for and similar tastes in art, music, and film, in particular. We discuss strange and beautiful art, aesthetic stagnation, and a wide range of favorites: The Beatles, Mozart, Mondrian, Springsteen, Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, Cassavetes, The Sopranos, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and more.

Please enjoy, and thank you for supporting, listening, and watching through fifty episodes of Dialectic. I can't wait for the next fifty!

Transcript and all links: dialectic.fm/tyler-nabeel

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Learn more about Notion's new developer platform and workers here. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps:

(0:00) Opening Highlights

(1:18) Intro to Tyler & Nabeel

(3:02) Thanks to Notion

(4:38) Start: Sacred Commitments, AI, Markets, and Acceleration

(20:36) How Art Moves Us

(27:22) "Beauty," Strangeness, Great Art, Music, and The Beatles

(44:35) Film, Critics, Learning to Appreciate Depth, More Music, "Lowbrow" Art

(1:02:55) New Aesthetics, Sources of Inspiration, Optimism & Pessimism

(1:11:52) The Internet & Twitter's Virtue, Group Chats, and Cities

(1:22:06) Mentors, (Possibly Quitting) Writing Books, Friendship

(1:35:27) Interviewing, Identifying Talent, and Agency

(1:47:21) Closing Questions

(1:53:38) Thanks Again to Notion

Jasmine Sun (Substack, X, LinkedIn) is an independent writer and journalist. She is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and also writes for other major publications, like The New York Times. She previously led core product at Substack.

Jasmine focuses on Silicon Valley and AI, and is something of a participant observer, living among the strange and inspiring people pulling the future forward in San Francisco. In her writing, she plays to both sides: focusing on a more endemic audience with her newsletter while telling the broader world about what she learns in flagship pieces for major publications. Several of these anchor around memes that she thinks may deeply matter: “the permanent underclass,” “chinese peptides,” and “claude code psychosis,” to name a few.

Jasmine has done many interviews about these individual topics, so I wanted to focus on her and her approach: playing to both audiences, her taste in questions and topics, doing both “serious” journalism and more personal writing, how going independent wasn’t so risky, what she admires in great writing, AI and her coming “AlphaGo moment,” China, and more. Please enjoy.

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Learn more about Notion’s new developer platform and workers here. Check out Brian’s X/Twitter sync worker. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps:

(0:00) Opening Highlights

(1:30) Intro to Jasmine

(2:13) Thanks to Notion

(3:24) Start: Being a "Historian of Vibe" and Learning to Look

(15:00) Taste for Questions & The Depth Behind Memes

(24:28) Translating Between Silicon Valley and The World

(40:27) Substack vs. "Serious" Journalism and Integrity as a Writer

(47:35) Integrity when Using AI and the AlphaGo Question

(58:42) Strategy Across Publications & Maximizing an Idea's Reach

(1:06:45) Going Independent, Risk, and Commercial Tradeoffs

(1:24:35) Great Writing: Style, Voice, and Resisting Summary

(1:35:35) Literary Inspirations, Favorite Essays, Writing vs. Thinking, and Getting Better

(1:51:09) Writing to Publish, Authenticity, and Art

(2:00:38) Grab Bag: China, Silicon Valley's Virtues and Problems, AI Transition, The Relational Economy, Parties, Debates, Self Belief, and More

(2:35:16) Thanks Again to Notion

Select Articles From Jasmine


Silicon Valley is Bracing for a Permanent Underclass (NYT)


‘Chinese Peptides’ Are the Latest Biohacking Trend in the Tech World (NYT)


Claude code psychosis (Substack)


Notes on AI, labor, and China (Substack)


America against china against america (Substack)


The Human Skill That Eludes AI (The Atlantic)

Henri Stern (X, LinkedIn) is the co-founder and CEO of Privy.

Privy builds wallet infrastructure for developers, enabling them to let their users hold and use crypto, including stablecoins. Privy was acquired by Stripe in 2025, and remain an independent organization within the company. They work with large fintechs like Ramp and Klarna while also supporting some of the most notable crypto-native platforms like Hyperliquid. Henri also supports a number of other crypto efforts within Stripe.

Henri is thoughtful, measured, and principled. Yet he is also pragmatic. He doesn’t like to play philosopher and yet he is one of my favorite people ask big questions about our future and our digital lives. Our conversation is anchored in the phrase at the bottom of Privy's website: "technical decisions are moral decisions."

He and Asta Li started Privy to focus on user data privacy, and we talk about what digital privacy means and why it still matters. After realizing they were trying to serve the market something it didn’t want, Privy found an inflection point initially by enabling developers to embed crypto wallets in their apps. We talk about the painful decision to pivot, and later, to commit to both ends of the crypto market: hardcore, trading-oriented products and stablecoins as they flooded into traditional fintech infrastructure. We also talk about joining Stripe, what Crypto’s future looks like, and his level-headed mindset for our tumultuous future.

All links and transcript available at dialectic.fm/henri-stern.

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Learn more about Notion’s new developer platform and workers here. Check out Brian’s X/Twitter sync worker. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

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Timestamps:

0:00 - Opening Highlights

1:40 - Intro to Henri

3:10 - Thanks to Notion

4:51 - Start: Technical Decisions are Moral Decisions

15:41 - Ambition, Startups, and Crypto

23:39 - Why Digital Privacy Matters: Self-Determination, Security, and Identity

41:52 - Embedded Wallets, the Pivot, and Privy's Core Bet

55:18 - Reinventing Around Stablecoins Without Abandoning Crypto-Natives

1:06:42 - Joining Stripe, Privy Today, and What Stripe Is Becoming

1:22:54 - Crypto's Future, Power Laws, Optimism and Pessimism

1:38:14 - Closing: Asta, Stripe's Leaders, Being French, and Never Compromising

1:52:48 - Thanks Again to Notion

Paul Scherer (X, LinkedIn) is the founder of Eigen (check out their beautiful website), where he’s building a mutual friend: an AI that brings people closer together and helps us belong.

Paul grew up in a small town outside of Frankfurt, Germany, and dropped out of high school at seventeen to work on startups, including Augment. He recently raised $15M from Benchmark, with legendary partner Peter Fenton comparing him to the founders of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. I was introduced to him by Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, who is an angel investor in Eigen. Dialectic guest Brie Wolfson has also been working with Paul, so I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and why so many people I respect were so enamored with a kid who has yet to publicly launch a product.

We start with Paul’s central influence: Michael Ende’s children’s novel, Momo, and the little girl who reminds a village to be present in the face of Time Thieves quietly pushing them to be more efficient. Then we talk about how even though the internet has shaped both of our lives and relationships, it increasingly feels that social media is making us feel both more connected and more alone. Paul explains what they are working on at Eigen, why we need an (AI) mutual friend, why it should be a single “person,” and why it feels less like engineering and more like parenting or growing someone/thing you don’t have complete control over. I also ask Paul about the pressures and psychology around being “blessed” by Silicon Valley’s powers that be, and why authenticity, or something like it, is in short supply.

I hope you are inspired to be courageous in your convictions, even if they are strange, and to listen to the voice inside that so many of us stop listening to in adulthood.

All links available at dialectic.fm/paul-scherer

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Learn more about Notion’s new developer platform and workers here. Inside Notion by Brie Wolfson & Camille Ricketts for Colossus. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps:

(0:00) Opening Highlights

(1:13) Intro to Paul

(2:33) Thanks to Notion

(3:28) Start: 'Momo', Presence, Friendship, and Time

(11:10) How the Internet Connects Us and Isolates Us, and Conflating Social and Media

(25:12) A Future Where We Talk to AIs

(33:55) Paul and Eigen are Building a Mutual Friend to Help Us Connect with Other Humans

(48:01) Why Do We Need a Mutual Friend? And Making a Friend We Can Trust

(1:16:53) Belonging, Building the team at Eigen, and Inventor as Outlaw

(1:25:38) Managing the Psychology of Being a Promising Young Founder

(1:36:53) Maintaining a High Bar, Fighting Entropy, and Influences

(1:53:50) Self-belief, Authenticity, Seeing the Water

(2:10:30) Courage, and a Final Question from a Mutual Friend

(2:15:04) Thanks Again to Notion

Nicole Seah (X, Substack, LinkedIn), aka Nix, is a writer at Starting From Nix and investor at Costanoa Ventures. She recently launched New Ontologies, where she profiles founders and companies thinking ambitiously about the future. Her first piece is live now, on Ando: the team building a chat platform for the era of agents.

Nicole balances identities with poise, moving between the literary and the practical. I spoke to her about different kinds of beauty and how it takes us out of ourselves, Nietzsche’s case for tolerating strangeness, and choosing reality over fantasy. Then we discuss duality and balancing intensity and lightness, and talk through Borges, Hesse, Miyazaki, Alyssa Liu, and Joan Didion. Nicole argues that freedom comes from not collapsing yourself into a single identity. I asked her about the drive behind New Ontologies, her obsession with techne, and Rebecca Solnit's "cosmology of self.” We then skate across a range of ideas, including memory, appetite and desire, and friendship and why other people’s unknowability is part of what makes them wonderful.

I hope this conversation inspires you to look for and love what is real, to be patient with and attuned to the multiple people inside you, and to give freely with your creative life.

Full transcript and all links and references: dialectic.fm/nix.

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Dialectic is presented by Notion. Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace where teams think together and create their best work. Notion recently launched custom agents: helpful AI teammates that handle recurring work across your entire suite of tools. Automate you and your team’s repetitive tasks so you can focus on the deep work. Inside Notion⁠ by Brie Wolfson & Camille Ricketts for Colossus. You can learn more at notion.com/dialectic.

Timestamps:

00:00 - Opening Highlights

01:14 - Intro to Nicole

02:04 - Thanks to Notion

03:48 - Start: Beauty — Effort, Attention, Strangeness

19:59 - Fantasy and Reality

29:41 - Multiple Identities, Intensity, and Lightness

49:08 - New Ontologies: Profiling Founders Building the Future

1:08:57 - Memory, Lineage, and Process

1:18:41 - Appetite and Honesty

1:23:47 - Friendship, Proximity, and The Unknowability of the Other

1:41:18 - Closing Notes: Solitude, Noticing, and Generosity

1:53:40 - Thanks Again to Notion