Conversations with Tyler
- Episodes
- 307
- Released
- weekly
- Latest episode
- Nov 11, 2026
About the podcast
Tyler Cowen engages today's deepest thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between. New conversations every other Wednesday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Episodes 307
Terence Tao on Proof, Beauty, and the Future of Mathematics
Tyler calls Terence Tao arguably the greatest mathematician of his generation: a Fields Medal winner who has published serious work across harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, number theory …
Show notes
Tyler calls Terence Tao arguably the greatest mathematician of his generation: a Fields Medal winner who has published serious work across harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, number theory, probability, and compressed sensing, among many other fields. His new book, Six Math Essentials, is the occasion for this conversation, but Tyler spends much of it asking something more personal: not what the proofs say, but what they feel like. Tao's answers reveal a mathematician who treats beauty as a real signal, finds Gödel's incompleteness theorem genuinely unsettling even decades later, and is remarkably candid about failing both Fortran and quantum mechanics as an undergraduate.
Tyler opens by asking Terence what it feels like to contemplate Euler's identity, quantum mechanics, the Riemann hypothesis, and Gödel's incompleteness theorem, before moving into why mathematical history gets stripped out of classrooms, whether abstract math is a lottery ticket or a unified whole, string theory's beauty versus its lack of confirmation, why real analysis arrived so late, why zero took until the 7th century to be invented, game theory, the Black-Scholes model, Bostrom's simulation argument, and Newcomb's paradox, math education and the case for teaching more statistics, Tao's view that AI has pushed mathematics from an era of "proof scarcity" into "proof abundance," what that means for the research paper, why video talks may become more valuable than papers themselves, Tao's favorite Hong Kong action movies, his unconventional path through an Australian university at age 13, his most unusual work habit, his verdict on the Collatz conjecture, and more.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded October 8th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:06 - On math and emotions
00:08:19 - On the history of mathematics
00:09:15 - On abstract mathematics
00:10:55 - On string theory
00:12:27 - On geometry and analysis
00:14:38 - On zero
00:16:07 - On game theory and the limits of rationality
00:22:26 - On math education
00:28:41 - On the end of proof scarcity
00:32:35 - On the future of the math paper
00:36:22 - On Terence's education and habits
00:43:07 - Outro
Richard Hanania on Conrad's Nostromo, Latin American Crime, and Populism
Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, widely considered his masterpiece, follows a fictional Latin American country torn apart by corruption and its uneasy dependence on foreign capital. Tyler and Richard Hanania picked it …
Show notes
Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, widely considered his masterpiece, follows a fictional Latin American country torn apart by corruption and its uneasy dependence on foreign capital. Tyler and Richard Hanania picked it hoping to talk about something other than politics — a bit ironic, given Hanania's new book, Kakistocracy: Why Populism Ends in Disaster, is all about the stupidity of current politics. From early on, the two see the novel quite differently: Is its hero a rotten fraud or a flawed but decent man? Is Conrad quietly a classical liberal, or a tragedian who thinks every political ideology curdles into "folly and murder"? Is comparing regimes even the right way to read him at all?
The first half of the conversation stays close to the text, covering the novel's political backdrop, its deliberately scrambled timeline, the near-total absence of religion in Conrad's universe, Nostromo's own vanity and treatment of women, a close reading of the "folly and murder" passage, the Fredric Jameson claim that no Latin American author could have written this book, and their very different research methods for preparing. Then the conversation opens outward, moving through why Latin America has unusually high crime despite not being especially poor, Panama's surprising success story, Shakespeare's objective greatness, the state of media criticism after the AI boom, who on the populist right is actually worth reading, why conservative women hug and liberal women shake hands, what Hanania wants to write and learn next, and more.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded June 16th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:18 - On the context of Nostromo
00:23:32 - On Nostromo's scrambled timeline
00:24:59 - On the absence of religion in Nostromo
00:27:15 - On romanticizing politics
00:30:14 - On writing about Latin America
00:34:18 - On reading Conrad's works
00:39:01 - On crime in Latin America
00:44:10 - On Shakespeare's objective greatness
00:49:05 - On the media after the AI boom
00:51:16 - On populism
01:00:00 - On what's next
01:02:30 - Outro
Roman Mars on Flags, Phones, and the Design of Everyday Life
Roman Mars has built one of podcasting's great empires out of noticing things everyone else walks past. His show, 99% Invisible, has racked up over 500 million downloads telling stories about the unnoticed …
Show notes
Roman Mars has built one of podcasting's great empires out of noticing things everyone else walks past. His show, 99% Invisible, has racked up over 500 million downloads telling stories about the unnoticed design choices that quietly shape how cities and objects work, from speed bump psychology and flag design to the shape of a good street sign. His TED Talk on vexillology (the study of flags) is so influential that it has reportedly spurred 250 to 300 municipal flag redesigns across the country, including in Pocatello, Idaho, a city he once publicly called out for having the worst flag in America. Tyler asked questions about nearly every visual surface of modern life, and Mars's answers keep circling back to the same tension: beauty and efficiency are often at odds, and most of what looks ugly to us is just a compromise we haven't yet learned to love.
Tyler and Roman discuss street signs, why classic cars were so much more distinctive than today's SUVs, Waymos, New Jersey jughandles, yellow streetlights, lane-stripe colors, why Houston keeps growing despite its lack of charm, whether any post-war American suburb is actually beautiful, the Chrysler Building's rocky reception, brutalism done right and wrong, Central Park as an urban miracle, what Jane Jacobs got wrong, e-bike lanes, Tokyo's bike-free transit model, the placelessness of global coffee shops, why the iPhone looks boring now, the ugliest country he's visited, his love for Australia's polymer notes, his soft spot for the dollar's "locked in amber" weirdness, underground power lines, how to warn future civilizations about nuclear waste, why highway signs lie to you about speed limits, the principles of a great city flag, the Pocatello redesign saga, his own studio, why 99% Invisible works precisely because it's audio-only, the most unusual habit behind his long productive career, and more.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded August 28th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:08 - On urban and suburban design
00:21:55 - On phone design
00:24:36 - On the world's ugliest places
00:26:03 - On currency design
00:28:33 - On power lines, speed bumps, and nuclear warning signs
00:34:31 - On city flags
00:40:39 - On building 99% Invisible
00:45:06 - Outro
Liaquat Ahamed on Financial Crises, Gold, and the Lessons of 1873
Liaquat Ahamed has spent years making central bankers into compelling characters. His 2009 book Lords of Finance won the Pulitzer Prize for its account of the bankers whose decisions helped cause the Great …
Show notes
Liaquat Ahamed has spent years making central bankers into compelling characters. His 2009 book Lords of Finance won the Pulitzer Prize for its account of the bankers whose decisions helped cause the Great Depression; his new book, 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World, tells a stranger story — a severe deflationary crisis that barely dented global growth but poisoned politics for a generation. Tyler pushes him hard on the central puzzle of those two books — why did one financial crisis derail the world, while another left growth almost untouched?
Tyler and Liaquat start with that puzzle before moving through Gladstone's startlingly self-interested bet on Egyptian bonds, Bismarck's role in destroying bimetallism and deflating the world economy for two decades, whether a global silver or symmetallic standard could have worked, Britain's fateful decision to re-peg the pound to gold in 1926, Hjalmar Schacht's transformation from the economist who stabilized Weimar's currency to opportunist collaborator with the Nazi regime, Montagu Norman's spiritualist beliefs, why the 1920s produced such a creative cultural moment, lessons from the IMF on Ireland's housing bubble and Pakistan's two dozen bailouts, what went wrong in the eurozone crisis, Britain's baffling modern stagnation, and finally to his own restless career and what he wants to write next.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded July 28th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:13 - On 1873 vs. the Great Depression
00:15:32 - On bimetallism and the gold standard
00:21:32 - On the 1920s and Weimar hyperinflation
00:29:29 - On Ireland, Pakistan, and the Eurozone crisis
00:36:21 - On Liaquat's career and Ismaili Islam
00:44:37 - Outro
Luis Garicano on Spain, Europe, and the Future of Work
Luis Garicano has one of the more unusual résumés in economics: trained at the University of Chicago Booth School under Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy, and Sherwin Rosen, he left academia for a stint as a member of …
Show notes
Luis Garicano has one of the more unusual résumés in economics: trained at the University of Chicago Booth School under Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy, and Sherwin Rosen, he left academia for a stint as a member of the European Parliament before returning to research, now at the London School of Economics for a second time. His new book, Messy Jobs, co-authored with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, argues that AI won't cause mass unemployment for a surprising reason: it will make jobs messier, not simpler, and messiness is precisely what AI struggles with.
Tyler and Luis start their conversation with Spain — housing, NIMBYism, and the productivity crisis; Spanish literature and why the Civil War still looms so large; and what Chicago taught Luis about party discipline in European politics. Then to the EU's unanimity problem, capital markets, and Denmark's flexicurity model; a round of overrated-versus-underrated on Rosalía, Penélope Cruz, and Sgt. Pepper's; and finally into Messy Jobs — why retraining programs fail, whether AI's leisure dividend has arrived, and whether Spain could ever achieve AI sovereignty.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded July 28th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:05 - On Spain's housing and political paralysis
00:11:08 - On Spanish literature and the Civil War
00:16:52 - On Basque and Catalan public finance
00:18:59 - On party discipline and political selection
00:22:03 - On the EU's unanimity problem
00:28:47 - On flexicurity and European labor rigidity
00:30:24 - Overrated vs. underrated
00:33:12 - On the future of Spanish language
00:35:01 - On why AI won't cause mass unemployment
00:48:38 - On what's next
00:50:11 - Outro
Gita Gopinath on Trade, Currencies, and Economic Transformation
Gita Gopinath has spent the last several years inside the room where the world's monetary plumbing gets fixed — or doesn't. As first deputy managing director of the IMF and, before that, the Fund's chief …
Show notes
Gita Gopinath has spent the last several years inside the room where the world's monetary plumbing gets fixed — or doesn't. As first deputy managing director of the IMF and, before that, the Fund's chief economist, she worked on sovereign debt restructuring, followed Argentina's disinflation up close, and built her academic reputation on ideas like dollar dominance and the dominant currency paradigm. Now back at Harvard launching a new Global Economics Lab, her conversation with Tyler ranges from why exchange rates don't adjust the way models predict, to what stablecoins really cost, to whether AI's growth dividend will show up on schedule.
Tyler and Gita discuss why trade balances are only weakly related to real exchange rates, before turning to Argentina, Milei's fiscal discipline, the peso, and dollarization. Then they discuss whether economists got the euro wrong; whether trade imbalances with China are really the problem; stablecoins, CBDCs, and the Treasury market; and whether AI will ease the debt burden, cause stagflation, or transform economics itself. Finally, they turn to her family's Kerala roots: why the state keeps electing communists, the relationship between matriarchy and social indicators, single-sex education, and what she's building next.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded August 27th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:57 - On why currencies don't adjust the way models predict
00:15:46 - On Argentina after triple-digit inflation
00:26:05 - On living with the euro
00:28:50 - On China's problematic surpluses
00:34:02 - On digital currencies
00:39:33 - On AI and the productivity question
00:48:51 - On why Kerala keeps electing communists
00:52:52 - On what comes next
00:55:15 - Outro
Annie Lowrey on the Time Tax, Fraud, and Rationing by Paperwork
Annie Lowrey's new book, The Time Tax, argues that the most regressive levy in American life is the hours each of us must spend on hold, in waiting rooms, and filling out forms a competent state would have …
Show notes
Annie Lowrey's new book, The Time Tax, argues that the most regressive levy in American life is the hours each of us must spend on hold, in waiting rooms, and filling out forms a competent state would have pre-filled — roughly fifty a year on average, and far more if you're poor. Tyler spends much of this conversation pressing the opposite case, asking whether that bureaucracy is quietly serving a useful purpose by rationing knee surgeries that don't work, deterring fraud, or screening for immigrants with gumption.
So Tyler and Annie hash it out over an hour, covering why TANF and other welfare programs are the worst offenders, the political economy of submerged benefits like the child tax credit, whether the postal service should be zeroed out over ten years the way Denmark did, whether the government should be nudging people out of rural areas, lessons from the COVID unemployment fraud, areas where the time tax is flat instead of regressive, which private sector time taxes are most onerous, whether AI agents will pay these taxes for us within five years, the logic of easy benefits plus randomized harsh audits, the case for less federalism, whether voting should be easier or harder, how the UBI studies changed her priors, where you can find the best moss in the world, her favorite example of Brutalist architecture, tattoos as permanent ephemera, Christianity's role in liberalism and the post-Christian right, how reporting beats tourism, the time tax of friendship, what she'll learn next, and more.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded September 1st, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:58 - On taxing our time
00:19:47 - On private-sector time taxes
00:22:57 - On AI eliminating paperwork
00:25:03 - On immigration as a filter
00:28:49 - On reducing fraud
00:33:03 - On federalizing bureaucracy
00:35:12 - On breaking up New York
00:36:25 - On making voting easy
00:38:28 - On updating universal basic income
00:41:29 - On banning exotic pets
00:42:13 - On deserts and moss
00:43:18 - On beautiful brutalism
00:43:50 - On tattoo culture
00:44:38 - On Christianity after Christianity
00:48:29 - On escaping the global monoculture
00:51:42 - On the time tax of friendship
00:54:49 - On what comes next
00:55:43 - Outro
Jared Diamond on Leaders, Luck, and Irreplaceability
Is leadership overrated? That's one simple reading of what Jared Diamond argues in his new book. Asked by Tyler to name the least replaceable leader in human history, Jared declines to name one — not Christ …
Show notes
Is leadership overrated? That's one simple reading of what Jared Diamond argues in his new book. Asked by Tyler to name the least replaceable leader in human history, Jared declines to name one — not Christ, the Roman Empire having had prophets to spare — and observes that even Genghis Khan happened to be born at an auspicious moment for a conqueror of the steppes. Conditions ripen; somebody turns up. So which leaders do make a difference?
Tyler and Jared debate that question, including conditions what a religious founder needs to succeed, whether destructive leaders matter more than constructive ones, why individual leaders have mattered so little in Papua New Guinea, whether we undervalue preventers, how much Rachel Carson and the Resnicks really mattered, whether Botswana's success will endure, Jared's own place in intellectual history, and what he'd tell an ambitious 25-year-old about how to become consequential. They go on to cover whether New Guineans are smarter, his reasons for why the Industrial Revolution started in England, what he learned from Jim Robinson about natural experiments, why he's more optimistic about the environment than when he wrote Collapse, what he'd do about nuclear risk, the 189 bird species on his street in Los Angeles, why the MacArthur "genius grant" left him depressed for a week, why he's listening to one Bach cantata a week, what he hopes to work on as he enters his nineties, and more.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded August 21st, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:11 - On whether any leader is irreplaceable
00:21:35 - On his own replaceability
00:24:55 - On the decline of face-to-face skills
00:29:02 - On intelligence and genetics
00:32:57 - On why the Industrial Revolution began in England
00:36:38 - On environmental optimism
00:41:11 - On nuclear risk and the Dvorak keyboard
00:42:55 - On birdwatching
00:44:07 - On writing and productivity
00:47:06 - On what his parents gave him
00:49:51 - On what comes next
00:51:36 - Outro
Michael Moritz on Origin Stories, Exile, and Obsessive Curiosity
Michael Moritz has written books through every phase of his life: the first history of Apple and an account of Chrysler's near-death while he was a journalist at Time, a study of Alex Ferguson's Manchester …
Show notes
Michael Moritz has written books through every phase of his life: the first history of Apple and an account of Chrysler's near-death while he was a journalist at Time, a study of Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in the middle of his 38 years at Sequoia, and now Ausländer, a family memoir, after leaving the firm. Moritz calls himself a dilettante with too many interests, but listen to him on learning to paint in his 40s, or the questions he would ask a ten-year-old boy in a German village in 1890, and you may decide that unsatisfied curiosity is not a small thing to build a life on. Tyler and Michael discuss his childhood in Wales, where his love for visual arts came from, why he disappointed his Latin teacher, having Thanksgiving dinner with Philip Roth, why children don't interrogate their parents about their history, what he feels visiting Germany and why he now holds German citizenship, how a history major with no technical background talked his way into Sequoia, his unpublished Don Valentine profile, what people underrate about Steve Jobs, obsessives versus dilettantes, why capitalism was more ablaze in China than America, what funding the Booker Prize taught him about his own ignorance, how to improve San nonprofits, how an incurable cancer diagnosis changed his calendar, why Britain's stuck, what he'll learn next, and more.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded July 21st, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:04:57 - On living with difficult art
00:09:44 - On Jewish literature
00:13:00 - On why children don't interrogate their parents
00:15:54 - On returning to Germany
00:23:37 - On stumbling into venture capital
00:28:49 - On obsessives and dilettantes
00:33:03 - On supporting the Booker Prize
00:34:17 - On improving San Francisco's nonprofits
00:37:26 - On controlling your own calendar
00:38:43 - On why Britain is stuck
00:40:06 - On what comes next
00:41:10 - Outro
Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desire, Catholicism, and the Age of Social Contagion
Luke Burgis left Wall Street after two years, founded a few successful companies in his twenties, then walked away to spend three years in a Roman seminary on the path to the priesthood. He now runs the Cluny …
Show notes
Luke Burgis left Wall Street after two years, founded a few successful companies in his twenties, then walked away to spend three years in a Roman seminary on the path to the priesthood. He now runs the Cluny Institute and teaches at Catholic University. His book Wanting made René Girard legible to a general audience; the new one, The One and the Ninety-Nine, takes mimetic theory into the dynamics of self and crowd in an age of social contagion.
He joined Tyler to discuss whether the age of pessimism is ending, why the Anglo world in particular seems so unhappy, whether Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann better diagnoses modernity, the kind of reader his own book would ruin, why he thinks AI will make social contagion weaker, what put him off consulting with Anthropic on Claude's constitution, what effective altruism misses, why men and women are drifting apart, what he'd fund in every American city, the case for reintroducing friction, whether a Gnostic reading of the lost sheep explains our moment, what Rod Dreher gets right about withdrawal, why Genoa is Italy's most underrated city, what confession times reveal about a church, why Italians seem tired of their Catholicism, why he didn't become a priest, where he differs from Ross Douthat, why exorcists appear to be on the rise, the sudden mimetic antisemitism on the right, the book his 23-year-old self would have hated, what he secretly admires about Silicon Valley, why Michigan never left him, what the original Cluny can teach a modern talent network, how he hopes to face his own death, what he'll do next, and more.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded April 30th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:05:08 - On overapplying mimetic theory
00:06:35 - On AI and social contagion
00:07:53 - On declining Anthropic's invitation
00:09:36 - On the widening gap between men and women
00:12:25 - On anti-mimetic postures, jazz, and porn
00:16:46 - On Genoa, Naples, and societal escape fantasies
00:18:31 - On Italian Catholicism
00:26:59 - On not becoming a priest
00:29:13 - On beauty, enchantment, and the Gnostic sheep
00:40:22 - On what Wall Street taught him
00:43:50 - On Michigan
00:45:12 - On the Cluny Institute
00:48:41 - On dealing with death and what else is next
00:51:21 - Outro
Image credit: Kirth Bobb
Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism, Automation, and the Educated Elite
Daron Acemoglu returns for his second appearance with a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which Tyler reads as an attempt to redefine and revitalize liberalism for our times. Where Daron's first …
Show notes
Daron Acemoglu returns for his second appearance with a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which Tyler reads as an attempt to redefine and revitalize liberalism for our times. Where Daron's first visit was about how states and societies contend for the narrow corridor in which liberty survives, this one asks what liberals themselves got wrong, and the answer implicates the educated elite—that is to say, you.
Tyler and Daron discuss what's wrong with social contract theories and Rousseau's general will, whether Acemoglu is more objectivist than Rorty, why he blames left liberalism's own establishment power for its collapse, what standard is left once you refuse to have a book of higher values, nondomination versus noninterference, who counts as working class, why automation alone will not lead to widespread prosperity, how he can call himself a free speech absolutist while wanting to regulate social media, why he worries we've given up on educating Americans, whether teachers' unions need to be reconstituted, what the life expectancy for an educated twenty year old is today, whether open-source models undercut the centralization worry, what pro-worker AI actually means, why the fertility crisis leaves him strangely close to a real business cycle position, whether AI will raise his own already prodigious paper output, why Armenia has disappointed economically, what he wants to learn next, and more.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded July 15th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:08:57 - On the working class vs. the elite
00:13:16 - On automation
00:22:33 - On free speech
00:27:22 - On immigration
00:31:08 - On artificial intelligence
00:50:36 - On Armenia
00:53:22 - On what comes next
00:54:51 - Outro
Image credit: Bryce Vickmark
Julia Ioffe on Russian Women, Missing Men, and the Roots of Autocracy
Julia Ioffe left the USSR as a child and came back as an adult journalist to find that the confident, credentialed women she remembered from her Soviet childhood had largely been supplanted by those chasing …
Show notes
Julia Ioffe left the USSR as a child and came back as an adult journalist to find that the confident, credentialed women she remembered from her Soviet childhood had largely been supplanted by those chasing marriage and domesticity instead. That disorienting reversal is the engine of her book Motherland, a National Book Award finalist that reconstructs modern Russian history almost entirely through its women. Her account, drawn from her own family's history as well as the archives, keeps returning to one plain observation: Soviet policy pushed women into the workforce, the medical schools, and even into combat, while asking so little of men that low expectations became self-fulfilling—and Russia is still living with the results.
Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia's great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist government established women's medical courses in 1872, changing attitudes towards abortion and birth control in the 20th century, why the Soviet regime turned prudish, how Khrushchev's plan to "replace the dead" institutionalized single motherhood, Russian superwomen, why Jewish men were a prized commodity amid rampant antisemitism, the cultural significance of flowers, why a few Russian names still dominate, why Russian women think Western feminists have their priorities backwards, how gender attitudes and autocracy feed into each other, three underrated Russian novels, what she wants to write about next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded April 7th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:06:38 - Bolshevik feminism
00:08:41 - Birth control, abortion, and prudery
00:14:48 - The Russian mating market
00:23:06 - Russian superwomen
00:32:02 - The importance of flowers
00:37:35 - Common Russian names
00:39:51 - Russian vs. American feminism
00:44:23 - Gender attitudes and Russian politics
00:49:54 - Russian novels
00:54:33 - Outro
Photo credit: Max Avdeev
Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists
Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was thinking about. In Vermeer's case, that …
Show notes
Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was thinking about. In Vermeer's case, that context includes a forgotten liberal sect — the Remonstrants and Collegiants, Christians without a church who believed peace would come through reading and toleration rather than a returning Messiah. Recover that world and a woman alone in a sunlit room is a radical image in a Europe where half of Germany had just died in war. If he's right, the label beside every Vermeer in every museum will one day have to change.
Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we'd rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of the Catholic Faith, whether Vermeer painted for money or pointedly refused to, where the Gardner's stolen Concert might be, why Dutch music never blossomed as much as Dutch painting did, how the Church of England rivaled the Cultural Revolution in wiping out British art, whether you can still spot an English painting on sight, the love that saturates late Rembrandt and the mystery of his soaring print prices, the nail on the wall that proves two Vermeer paintings are a pair, why the French are to blame for George Stubbs' lack of status, whether we can still love Malevich, why Andrews calls recent Richter "almost like printing money," why female artists and antique textiles remain absurdly cheap, why nobody builds beautiful neighborhoods any longer, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded April 7th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:44 - The Mystery of Vermeer
00:12:53 - Dutch Music
00:15:51 - English Art
00:19:49 - Rembrandt
00:23:17 - Attributions
00:26:22 - Exhibitions and Restorations
00:30:05 - Underrated French Artists
00:35:16 - Howard Hodgkin
00:38:00 - Difficult-To-Love Artists
00:40:53 - Other Dutch Painters
00:44:20 - Contemporary Art
00:48:05 - Buying Art
00:50:39 - Neighborhood Aesthetics
00:54:39 - Advice for Aspiring Art Critics
00:56:14 - Outro
Image Credit: Aliona Adrianova
Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy
Chase Koch grew up receiving Sunday philosophy lessons from his father Charles and, by his own account, spent most of them half asleep while his sister supplied the answers. The principles didn't land until he …
Show notes
Chase Koch grew up receiving Sunday philosophy lessons from his father Charles and, by his own account, spent most of them half asleep while his sister supplied the answers. The principles didn't land until he lived them: throwing tennis matches as a bored teenager, getting shipped off to shovel manure at a feed yard twelve hours later, then spending five years battling Brazilian bureaucracy to build a fertilizer terminal that should have taken one. Today he is Executive Vice President of Origination and Partnerships, leader and donor to Stand Together, plays lead guitar in a band named for the law of entropy, and has a new book with his father on principle-driven leadership.
Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father's lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa's grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De'Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents' garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it's like working with MrBeast, how Koch Inc has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the "farm team," why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old's urging, where he's traveling next, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded June 16th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:56 - Familial Influences
00:08:25 - Tennis and Basketball
00:15:00 - The Music Industry
00:28:36 - MrBeast
00:31:24 - The Evolution of Koch Industries
00:35:54 - The Midwest
00:44:37 - AI
00:49:01 - Politics
00:53:35 - Outro
Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth
Joel Mokyr co-won the 2025 economics Nobel for exploring the question that traces back to the beginning of economics: how did sustained economic growth suddenly become normal? For nearly all of human history …
Show notes
Joel Mokyr co-won the 2025 economics Nobel for exploring the question that traces back to the beginning of economics: how did sustained economic growth suddenly become normal? For nearly all of human history, cleverness didn't compound. What changed, according to Mokyr, was twofold: first, you need to know why something works, so that one advance can seed the next; second, you need a culture willing to tolerate the disruption. His new book contrasts Europe with China, showing how Europeans learned to cooperate with people they weren't related to, in guilds, monasteries, cities, and universities, while China organized itself around the extended clan. One path led to internal stability and peace; the other, more restless and outward-looking, was the one that decided the world could always be made better.
Tyler and Joel discuss European corporations vs. Chinese clans, why the Catholic Church became obsessed with cousin-marriage, how persistent cultural trends really are, why Chinese cities became so populous relative to Europe, why it took so long for European living standards to surpass China's, why sinified invaders kept getting swallowed by the dynasties they conquered, how geography kept Europe fragmented and China unified, where India fits into the story, why the Romans never made spectacles, why British soldiers stood two inches taller than the French, what powered the sudden rise of 19th-century German science, how disruptive winning a Nobel is, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded February 20th, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:54 - Europe vs. China's Paths to Prosperity
00:10:22 - China's Growth
00:13:24 - Europe's Growth
00:18:56 - The Fall of Song China
00:21:56 - India
00:25:08 - Industrial Revolution
00:39:52 - 19th-Century German Science
00:43:37 - Being a Nobel Laureate
00:45:29 - Outro
Photo Credit: Shane Collins
Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World
Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she's drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and …
Show notes
Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she's drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.
Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More's persecution of heretics, how Holbein's portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne's upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain's current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded February 19th, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:42 - More's Utopia
00:10:50 - Whether More Should be Admired
00:13:39 - Play and Movie Adaptations of More
00:19:25 - English Catholicism as the Reformation Approaches
00:22:29 - Shakespeare and the Growth of Education
00:26:08 - The Quality of Tudor Art
00:27:24 - Tolerance and Social Mobility in 16th Century England
00:32:49 - London's Governance
00:34:23 - Canada
00:38:12 - Choosing English History to Study
00:41:23 - Touring and Living in England
00:43:06 - Religion, Politics, and Economics in the UK
00:49:32 - Outro
Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play
Dave Baszucki is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the user-generated gaming platform where all the games are built by the community itself. With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings …
Show notes
Dave Baszucki is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the user-generated gaming platform where all the games are built by the community itself. With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between.
Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he's skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son's experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he'll learn next, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded May 27th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:44 - Roblox by the Numbers
00:08:54 - Competition
00:12:13 - Everything Apps
00:19:50 - AI Language Translation
00:21:18 - Token Costs
00:24:01 - Beauty and Gaming
00:27:01 - Robux
00:29:28 - Social Media and Younger Audiences
00:40:56 - AI and Gaming
00:45:44 - Mutiny on the Bounty
00:47:38 - David's Earlier Companies
00:51:16 - Mentors
00:52:35 - Outro
Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian who has made a career out of explaining Germany to the world—and, just as importantly, to Germans themselves. Born in East Germany in 1985 and now based in Britain, she …
Show notes
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian who has made a career out of explaining Germany to the world—and, just as importantly, to Germans themselves. Born in East Germany in 1985 and now based in Britain, she has written acclaimed histories of the German Empire, the GDR, and most recently the Weimar Republic.
Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler's own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it's no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany's nudist culture, what Merkel's East German background did and didn't give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she'd rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler's citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany's current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she'd choose to live on, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded March 30th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:05:34 - East German Artistic Creations
00:10:55 - Angela Merkel's East German Background
00:14:08 - East German Underrepresentation Today
00:17:02 - East Germans vs. West Germans
00:20:32 - Goethe and Weimar's Cultural Heritage
00:27:09 - What Weimar Knew About Buchenwald
00:31:10 - Why the Weimar Constitution Failed
00:35:21 - Prussia, Bavaria, and Where Nazism Took Root
00:38:23 - Rewriting the Treaty of Versailles
00:39:59 - Historical Antisemitism in Germany
00:42:27 - Hitler's Citizenship problem
00:45:14 - Weimar's Best Cultural Creations
00:47:02 - The Most Underrated German Thinker
00:49:07 - Improving Weimar
00:52:58 - Germany's Economic Malaise
00:55:38 - Living in Britain as a German Historian
01:00:49 - Outro
Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization
Toby Wilkinson is one of the world's leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra …
Show notes
Toby Wilkinson is one of the world's leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, covers the 300-year Ptolemaic period — stranger and more modern-feeling than the Egypt of the pyramids, built around commerce and cosmopolitanism rather than divine kingship, and home to the greatest concentration of scientific talent the ancient world ever saw.
Tyler and Toby cover how Alexander took over the empire almost without a fight, why Alexandria became the Manhattan of the ancient world, whether the era was as philosophically fertile as it was scientifically, whether your ancient doctor's visit had positive expected value, what Egypt was actually exporting and selling, whether living standards rose above subsistence or stayed Malthusian, how the ethnic divide between Greek rulers and Egyptian subjects shaped society, what constrained the Ptolemaic Empire from becoming the next Rome, whether Cleopatra has been overhyped, what Julius Caesar was really thinking when he sided with her over her brother, the new frontiers in archeology, whether Herodotus can be trusted, what ancient Egypt knew about Israel and India, when Egyptian jewelry peaked and why, what triggered the sudden emergence of civilization across the ancient world, why a six-year-old Tyler knew King Tut better than Napoleon, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded March 23rd, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:04:29 - Intellectual Activity of Alexandria
00:11:07 - The Alexandrian Economy
00:14:36 - The Ptolemaic Empire
00:21:19 - Unanswered Questions in Ptolemaic Egypt
00:23:32 - Modern Alexandria and the Future of Archaeology
00:26:37 - Other Topics in Ancient Egypt
00:42:10 - Toby's Career
00:45:26 - Outro
Photo Credit: Benjamin Frei
Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography
Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started …
Show notes
Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John's American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that's the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.
Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles', whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick's London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles' breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon's second act, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded April 28th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:44 - The Sound of the Rolling Stones
00:05:25 - Underrated Rolling Stones Songs and Albums
00:09:06 - Charlie Watts and Brian Jones
00:11:18 - Art Colleges and Rock 'n' Roll
00:13:06 - The Stones' Stability
00:16:32 - Mick Jagger: Closet Economist?
00:17:53 - Pop Music's Lack of Relevance
00:20:10 - The Beatles
00:28:14 - Led Zeppelin
00:31:30 - Bruce Springsteen
00:36:20 - Bob Dylan
00:39:40 - Julia Child
00:42:29 - The Knicks
00:45:21 - Ronald Reagan
00:49:01 - Robert Caro
00:52:03 - Writing
00:55:00 - Outro
Craig Newmark on Institutional Maintenance, Giving Away Control, and the Internet We Were Promised (Live at 92NY)
Craig Newmark's career, in retrospect, looks like a series of deliberate subtractions: he kept Craigslist plain, stepped aside as CEO early on, gave his equity to his foundation, and now funds people and gets …
Show notes
Craig Newmark's career, in retrospect, looks like a series of deliberate subtractions: he kept Craigslist plain, stepped aside as CEO early on, gave his equity to his foundation, and now funds people and gets out of their way. His theory, arrived at gradually, is that recognizing your limitations and relying on your network is how you get more done.
Tyler and Craig discuss why webpage design has gotten worse for 30 years, what Craig's "obsessive customer service disorder" taught him about human nature, why trusting people and maintaining a nine-second rule for scams aren't as contradictory as they sound, why roommate ads are a better way to find love, why Craigslist never added seller evaluations, why Leonard Cohen speaks to him more than Bob Dylan, what William Gibson's Neuromancer got right about the internet, why Jackson Lamb is now one of his role models, why large foundations lose accountability, what two painful Ivy League grants taught him philanthropy, what he gets from rescuing pigeons, the hard lesson he learned about confronting people who lie for a living, his favorite TV shows and movies, the one genuine luxury he can't go without, what he still needs to learn, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded April 14th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:41 - Stepping Aside as CEO 00:04:20 - Customer Service and Social Skills 00:16:27 - Restaurants 00:18:06 - Music 00:19:27 - Science Fiction 00:20:14 - TV Shows 00:26:03 - Philanthropy 00:30:20 - Journalism 00:31:55 - Pigeons 00:32:50 - Entrepreneurship 00:35:09 - Craig's Personal Philosophy 00:37:37 - Major Regrets 00:39:17 - Audience Q&A 00:46:23 - Outro
Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent
Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through …
Show notes
Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.
Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim's not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome's unraveling, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded February 2nd, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:06 - Roman Housing 00:08:28 - What Early Roman Christians Actually Believed 00:16:29 - Roman Economic Thought 00:18:39 - Roman Banking and Money Practices 00:28:48 - The Economics of Roman Slavery 00:31:56 - What Held The Roman Empire Together 00:36:46 - Roman Cookery 00:39:17 - The Romans as Masters of Scale 00:42:05 - Rome's Contact with Asia 0043:59 - The Vesuvius Challenge 00:45:13 - Ancient Carthage and the Fall of Rome 00:49:43 - The Realities of Doing Archaeology 00:57:15 - Touring the Roman Empire 01:00:42 - Outro
Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of Happiness
Click here to find Tyler's new generative book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution! Arthur Brooks reckons he's on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French horn …
Show notes
Click here to find Tyler's new generative book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution!
Arthur Brooks reckons he's on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French horn player, economist, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and now Harvard professor and evangelist for the science of happiness. His new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, argues that happiness isn't a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, he calls them — and that most of us are gorging on the wrong ones. Tyler, naturally, wants to know: what's the marginal value of a book on happiness, and what does spiral number five look like?
Along the way, Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you'll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that's not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI's effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he's reading Josef Pieper, how he'll face death, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded March 19th, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:10 - The Macronutrients of Happiness 00:07:54 - What Happiness Books are Worth 00:12:28 - The Habits of the Happiest People 00:14:27 - Why the Young Reject Happiness Advice 00:17:35 - Curiosity's Role in Happiness 00:20:22 - Self-Deception 00:22:04 - Facing Death 00:25:44 - Choosing a Religion 00:28:41 - Immigration 00:30:27 - The American Right Wing 00:33:55 - AI's Role in Happiness 00:37:12 - What Drives Generosity 00:38:37 - Oprah's Political Views 00:40:16 - Which Political Leaders Arthur Admires 00:41:59 - The Best French Horn Players 00:43:40 - Arthur's Spiral of Careers 00:48:20 - The Future of Think Tanks 00:49:50 - The Future of Classical Music 00:51:27 - Living in Spain 00:55:34 - Age and Peak Performance 00:56:12 - What Arthur Will Do Next 00:59:14 - Outro
Image Credit: Jenny Sherman
Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together
Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Tyler calls Paul Gillingham's new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single best introduction to the country's past—and …
Show notes
Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY!
Tyler calls Paul Gillingham's new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single best introduction to the country's past—and one of the best nonfiction books of 2026. Paul brings both an outsider's eye and ground-level knowledge to Mexican history, having grown up in Cork — a place he'd argue gave him an instinctive feel for fierce local autonomy and land hunger —earning his doctorate on the Mexican Revolution under Alan Knight at Oxford, and doing his fieldwork in the pueblos of Guerrero.
He and Tyler range across five centuries of Mexican history, from why Mexico held together after independence when every other post-colonial superstate collapsed, to why Yucatán is now one of the safest places on earth, what two leaders from Oaxaca tell us about Mexican politics, how Mexico avoided the military coups that plagued the rest of Latin America, what Cárdenas's land reform actually achieved versus what it promised, whether the ejido system held Mexico back, why Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital, how Mexico's fertility rate fell below America's, why Guerrero has been violent for two centuries, why the new judicial reforms are a disaster, where to find the best food in Mexico and Manhattan, what a cache of illicit Mexican silver sitting on a ship in the English Channel has to do with his next book, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded February 27th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:30 - Post-Independence Mexico
00:05:18 - Peace in Yucatán
00:6:54 - Quintana Roo
00:08:24 - Mexican Infrastructure
00:10:26 - Oaxaca
00:13:54 - Great Food Outside Cities
00:16:39 - Leaders from Coahuila
00:17:50 - Military Rule and Civil War in Mexico
00:21:47 - The Cárdenas Regime
00:24:03 - The Ejido System
00:25:49 - Human Capital
00:40:59 - Doing Mexican History as a Brit
00:42:43 - Guerrero
00:48:37 - Michoacán Violence
00:50:44 - Monterrey
00:52:40 - Judicial Reforms
00:54:44 - The Best Mexican Film, Music, and Novel
00:59:42 - The Best Trip Around Mexico
01:04:05 - Outro
Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy
Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Few living scholars can claim to have shaped how we read Machiavelli as decisively as Harvey Mansfield. His new book, The …
Show notes
Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY!
Few living scholars can claim to have shaped how we read Machiavelli as decisively as Harvey Mansfield. His new book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, argues that Machiavelli didn't just write about politics—he invented the intellectual machinery of the modern world, starting with the concept of "effectual truth," which Mansfield credits as the seed of modern empiricism. At 93, after 61 years of teaching at Harvard, Mansfield remains cheerfully unimpressed by most of contemporary philosophy, convinced that the great books are self-sustaining, and that irony is what separates serious philosophy from the rest.
Tyler and Harvey discuss how Machiavelli's concept of fact was brand new, why his longest chapter is a how-to guide for conspiracy, whether America's 20th-century wars refute the conspiratorial worldview, Trump as a Shakespearean vulgarian who is in some ways more democratic than the rest of us, why Bronze Age Pervert should not be taken as a model for Straussianism, the time he tried to introduce Nietzsche to Quine, why Rawls needed more Locke, what it was like to hear Churchill speak at Margate in 1953, whether great books are still being written, how his students have and haven't changed over 61 years of teaching, the eclipse rather than decline of manliness, and what Aristotle got right about old age and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded January 22nd, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Bumper
00:00:36 - Intro
00:01:20 - Machiavelli's "Effectual Truth"
00:05:56 - Conspiracy Theories
00:12:39 - The Vulgarity of Democracy
00:16:35 - The Future of Straussianism
00:34:30 - Why the Supply of Great Books has Dried Up
00:37:56 - Rational Control vs. Spontaneous Order
00:40:25 - Winston Churchill
00:43:30 - Students at Harvard
00:46:05 - Manliness
00:47:34 - Death and Politics
00:48:56 - Outro
Image Credit: Erin Clark via Getty Images
Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English
Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup. Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's conviction …
Show notes
Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup.
Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's conviction that great literature is where ideas "walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world" in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry's book Second Act "one of the very best books written on talent," sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly.
Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke's proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play's connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece, assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it's a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says "I did yield to him," before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn't, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand's villains are more relevant now than ever, and much more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded January 12th, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:40 - What Shakespeare is really saying in Measure for Measure
00:29:17 - The best way to consume Shakespeare
00:32:26 - Jane Austen, Adam Smith, and Jonathan Swift
00:39:29 - Advertising that works
00:44:37 - Things that are under- and overrated in literature
00:51:24 - Late bloomers
00:58:36 - Outro
Image Credit: Sam Alburger
Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires
When Tyler called Joe Studwell's How Asia Works "perhaps my favorite economics book of the year" back in 2013, he wasn't alone: it became one of the most influential treatments of industrial policy ever …
Show notes
When Tyler called Joe Studwell's How Asia Works "perhaps my favorite economics book of the year" back in 2013, he wasn't alone: it became one of the most influential treatments of industrial policy ever written. Now Studwell has turned his attention to Africa with How Africa Works. Tyler calls it excellent, extremely well-researched, and essential reading, but does Studwell's optimism about the continent hold up under scrutiny?
Tyler and Joe explore whether population density actually solves development, which African countries are likely to achieve stable growth, whether Africa has a manufacturing future, why state infrastructure projects decay while farmer-led irrigation thrives, what progress looks like in education and public health, whether charter cities or special economic zones can work, and how permanent Africa's colonial borders really are. After testing Joe's optimism about Africa, Tyler shifts back to Asia: what Japan and South Korea will do about depopulation, why industrial policy worked in East Asia but failed in India and Brazil, what went wrong in Thailand, and what Joe will tackle next.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded January 23rd, 2026.
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Image Credit: Nick J.B. Moore
Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929
Andrew Ross Sorkin sees the crash of 1929 as a tale of excessive leverage and irrational speculation, but Tyler wonders: maybe those sky-high 1929 prices were actually justified given America's remarkable …
Show notes
Andrew Ross Sorkin sees the crash of 1929 as a tale of excessive leverage and irrational speculation, but Tyler wonders: maybe those sky-high 1929 prices were actually justified given America's remarkable century ahead. Maybe the real problem was the "Negative Nellies" who panicked afterward rather than the speculators everyone blamed. For that matter, isn't 2008 looking less and less like a bubble with each passing year?
Tyler and Andrew debate whether those 1929 stock prices were justified, what Fed and policy choices might have prevented the Depression, whether Glass-Steagall was built on a flawed premises, what surprised Andrew most about the 1920s beyond the crash itself, how business leaders then would compare to today's CEOs, whether US banks should consolidate, how Andrew would reform US banking regulation, what to make of narrow banking proposals and stablecoins, whether retail investors should get access to private equity and venture capital, why sports gambling and new financial regulations won't make us much safer, how Andrew broke into the New York Times at age 18, how he manages his information diet, what he learned co-creating Billions, what he plans on learning about next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded October 30th, 2025.
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Image Credit: Mike Cohen
Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts
Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading. This work includes his award-winning Cranmer biography, his sweeping histories of Christianity and the …
Show notes
Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading. This work includes his award-winning Cranmer biography, his sweeping histories of Christianity and the Reformation, and his latest on sex and the church, which demonstrates what MacCulloch calls the historian's true vocation: unsettling settled facts to keep humanity sane.
Tyler and Diarmaid explore whether monotheism correlates with monogamy, Christianity's early instinct towards egalitarianism, what the Eucharistic revolution reveals about the cathedral building boom, the role of Mary in Christianity and Islam, where Michel Foucault went wrong on sexuality, the significance of the clerical family replacing the celibate monk, why Elizabeth I—not Henry VIII—mattered most for the English Reformation, why English Renaissance music began so brilliantly but then needed to start importing Germans, whether Christianity needs hell to survive, what MacCulloch plans to do next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded October 29th, 2025.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Image Credit: Barry Jones
Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work
At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading …
Show notes
At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading verse to economists building evaluation frameworks—and has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history.
Tyler and Brendan discuss why Mercor pays poets $150 an hour, why AI labs need rubrics more than raw text, whether we should enshrine the aesthetic standards of past eras rather than current ones, how quickly models are improving at economically valuable tasks, how long until AI can stump Cass Sunstein, the coming shift toward knowledge workers building RL environments instead of doing repetitive analysis, how to interview without falling for vibes, why nepotism might make a comeback as AI optimizes everyone's cover letters, scaling the Thiel Fellowship 100,000X, what his 8th-grade donut empire taught him about driving out competition, the link between dyslexia and entrepreneurship, dining out and dating in San Francisco, Mercor's next steps, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded October 16th, 2025.
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Timestamps
00:00:00 - Hiring poets to teach AI
00:05:29 - Measuring real-world AI progress
00:13:25 - Why rubrics are the new oil
00:18:44 - Enshrining taste in LLMs
00:22:38 - Turning society into one giant RL machine
00:26:37 - When AI will stump experts
00:30:46 - AI and employment
00:35:05 - Why vibes-based hiring fails
00:39:55 - Solving labor market matching problems
00:45:01 - Scaling the Thiel Fellowship
00:48:11 - A hypothetical gap year
00:50:31 - Donuts, debates, and dyslexia
00:56:15 - Dating and dining out
00:59:01 - Mercor's next steps
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