Before he was California Poet Laureate or leading the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia marketed Jell-O. Possessing both a Stanford MBA and a Harvard MA, he combined his creativity and facility with numbers to climb the corporate ladder at General Foods to the second highest rung before abruptly quitting to become a poet and writer. That unique professional experience and a lifelong “hunger for beauty” have made him into what Tyler calls an “information billionaire,” or someone who can answer all of Tyler’s questions. In his new memoir, Dana describes the six people who sent him on this unlikely journey.
In this conversation, Dana and Tyler discuss his latest book and more, including how he transformed several businesses as a corporate executive, why going to business school made him a better poet, the only two obscene topics left in American poetry, why narrative is necessary for coping with life’s hardships, how Virgil influenced Catholic traditions, what Augustus understood about the cultural power of art, the reasons most libretti are so bad, the optimism of the Beach Boys, the best art museum you’ve never heard of, the Jungianism of Star Trek, his favorite Tolstoy work, depictions of Catholicism in American pop culture, what he finds fascinating about Houellebecq, why we stopped building cathedrals, how he was able to effectively lead the National Endowment for the Arts, the aesthetic differences between him and his brother Ted, his advice for young people who want to cultivate their minds, and what he wants to learn next.
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Newsletter
Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox
Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar
Ross Douthat on Decadence and Dynamism
Russ Roberts and Tyler on COVID-19
John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason)
Garett Jones on Democracy (More or Less)
Tim Harford on Persuasion and Popular Economics
Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized
Reid Hoffman on Systems, Levers, and Quixotic Quests
Slavoj Žižek on His Stubborn Attachment to Communism
Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India
Tyler Looks Back on 2019 (BONUS)
Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action
Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society
Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen on the Nature and Causes of Progress (Bonus)
Shaka Senghor on Incarceration, Identity, and the Gift of Literacy
Lunch with Fuchsia Dunlop at Mama Chang (Bonus)
Ted Gioia on Music as Cultural Cloud Storage
Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas
Ben Westhoff on Synthetic Drugs, Dive Bars, and the Evolution of Rap
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