Tom Cruise's Body of Work (with Aled Maclean-Jones)
5/18/20261 hr 8 min
What can Tom Cruise's last impossible mission teach us about usefulness in the digital age? Aled Maclean-Jones argues that dangling from cargo planes, soldering hard drives, and skydiving nineteen consecutive times is really an extended tribute to embodied knowledge. Listen as MacLean-Jones and EconTalk's Russ Roberts analyze the unique concept of competence presented in Cruise's films. Along the way, they cover London cabbies who refuse to use Waze, a fatal dive at the sound barrier, solo sailing around the globe, and the small triumph of fixing a broken toilet by oneself. They conclude by exploring the possibility that physical mastery may come to matter more as computers take over the work of the mind.
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First 90 secondsRuss Roberts· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Welcome to EconTalk 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 and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to two thousand and six. Our email address is mail@econtalk.org. We'd love to hear from you. [upbeat music] Today is March eighteenth, twenty twenty-six, and my guest is the writer Aled Mac clean Jones. His Substack is Rakes Digress or Digress. Aled was last here in February twenty twenty-six talking about Swiss watches. Aled, welcome back to EconTalk.
Aled Maclean-Jones· Guest0:52
Thank you, Russ. It's a real pleasure to, pleasure to be back.
Russ Roberts· Host0:55
I wanna say our topic for today is Tom Cruise, but don't leave. Listeners, don't, don't, don't switch 'cause that's not really the topic, but it's related to an essay that you, Aled, wrote in the Metropolitan Review that we'll link to called The Last Useful Man. Uh, what we're, uh, really gonna be talking about is our sense of ourself in the modern world, given the extraordinary technological advances and how we think about our mind versus our body, uh, the nature of knowledge, uh, the nature of really reality. So let's get started. Uh,