Podcasts · Education · Society & Culture

Conversations with Tyler

Mercatus Center at George Mason University

300 episodes

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 page 1 of 6

  1. Liaquat Ahamed on Financial Crises, Gold, and the Lessons of 1873

    · 45 min · Episode 293

    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;…

  2. Luis Garicano on Spain, Europe, and the Future of Work

    · 51 min · Episode 292

    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…

  3. Gita Gopinath on Trade, Currencies, and Economic Transformation

    · 56 min · Episode 291

    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…

  4. Annie Lowrey on the Time Tax, Fraud, and Rationing by Paperwork

    · 56 min · Episode 290

    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 —…

  5. Jared Diamond on Leaders, Luck, and Irreplaceability

    · 52 min · Episode 289

    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…

  6. Michael Moritz on Origin Stories, Exile, and Obsessive Curiosity

    · 42 min · Episode 288

    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…

  7. Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desire, Catholicism, and the Age of Social Contagion

    · 52 min · Episode 287

    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…

  8. Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism, Automation, and the Educated Elite

    · 56 min · Episode 286

    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…

  9. Julia Ioffe on Russian Women, Missing Men, and the Roots of Autocracy

    · 55 min · Episode 285

    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…

  10. Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

    · 57 min · Episode 284

    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…

  11. Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy

    · 54 min · Episode 283 · Explicit

    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…

  12. Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth

    · 46 min · Episode 582 · Explicit

    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,…

  13. Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

    · 50 min · Episode 281

    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…

  14. Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play

    · 53 min · Episode 280

    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…

  15. Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character

    · 1 h 01 min · Episode 279

    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…

  16. Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization

    · 46 min · Episode 278

    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…

  17. Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

    · 56 min · Episode 277

    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…

  18. Craig Newmark on Institutional Maintenance, Giving Away Control, and the Internet We Were Promised (Live at 92NY)

    · 47 min · Episode 276 · Explicit

    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…

  19. Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent

    · 1 h 01 min · Episode 275

    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…

  20. Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of Happiness

    · 1 h 00 min · Episode 274

    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,…

  21. Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together

    · 1 h 05 min · Episode 273

    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…

  22. Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy

    · 49 min · Episode 272

    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…

  23. Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

    · 59 min · Episode 271

    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…

  24. Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires

    · 53 min · Episode 270

    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…

  25. Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929

    · 56 min · Episode 269

    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…

  26. Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

    · 1 h 00 min · Episode 268

    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…

  27. Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

    · 1 h 01 min · Episode 267

    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…

  28. Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective

    · 1 h 00 min · Episode 266

    Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year on CWT and more, including…

  29. Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

    · 1 h 01 min · Episode 265

    Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of the world from…

  30. Gaurav Kapadia on New York City, Investing, and Contemporary Art

    · 1 h 00 min · Episode 264

    Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Gaurav Kapadia has deliberately avoided publicity throughout his career in investing, which makes this conversation a rare window…

  31. Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other

    · 1 h 33 min · Episode 263

    Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Dan Wang argues that China is a nation of engineers while America is a nation of lawyers, and this distinction explains…

  32. Cass Sunstein on Liberalism and Rights in the Age of AI

    · 1 h 20 min · Episode 262

    Cass Sunstein is one of the most widely cited legal scholars of all time and among the most prolific writers working today. This year alone he has five books out, including Imperfect Oracle on the strengths and limits…

  33. Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure - Live at the Progress Conference

    · 38 min · Episode 261

    Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he's building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies…

  34. Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism

    · 57 min · Episode 260

    Register for the Austin listener meetup Donald S. Lopez Jr. is among the foremost scholars of Buddhism, whose work consistently distinguishes Buddhist reality from Western fantasy. A professor at the University of…

  35. Sam Altman on Trust, Persuasion, and the Future of Intelligence - Live at the Progress Conference

    · 55 min · Episode 259

    Register for the Austin listener meetup Sam Altman makes his second appearance on the show to discuss how he's managing OpenAI's explosive growth, what he's learned about hiring hardware people, what makes roon…

  36. Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era

    · 52 min · Episode 258

    Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg's…

  37. George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression

    · 1 h 09 min · Episode 257

    George Selgin has spent over four decades thinking about money, banking, and economic history, and Tyler has known him for nearly all of it. Selgin's new book False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery,…

  38. John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports

    · 1 h 00 min · Episode 256 · Explicit

    John Amaechi is a former NBA forward/center who became a chartered scientist, professor of leadership at Exeter Business School, and New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, It's Not Magic: The Ordinary…

  39. Steven Pinker on Coordination, Common Knowledge, and the Retreat of Liberal Enlightenment

    · 46 min · Episode 255

    Steven Pinker returns to Conversations with Tyler with an argument that common knowledge—those infinite loops of "I know that you know that I know"—is the hidden infrastructure that enables human coordination, from…

  40. David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States

    · 51 min · Episode 254

    David Commins, author of the new book Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, brings decades of scholarship and firsthand experience to explain the kingdom's unlikely rise. Tyler and David discuss why Wahhabism was essential…

  41. Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures

    · 55 min · Episode 253

    Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker who has spent decades documenting life in some of the world's most challenging places—from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to Nigeria's Boko Haram territories. Having…

  42. David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche (Live at 92NY)

    · 1 h 10 min · Episode 252

    David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture. Having evolved from a Democratic socialist to a neoconservative to what he now calls "the rightward edge of the leftward tendency," Brooks…

  43. Nate Silver on Life's Mixed Strategies

    · 1 h 04 min · Episode 251

    In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Nate Silver looks back at past predictions, weighs how academic ideas such as expected utility theory fare in practice, and examines the world of sports through the…

  44. Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War, Intelligence Operations, and Conspiracy Realities

    · 58 min · Episode 250

    Annie Jacobsen has a favorite word for America's nuclear doctrine: madness. It's madness that any single person has six minutes to decide the fate of civilization, madness that we've built weapons capable of ending the…

  45. Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities

    · 1 h 07 min · Episode 249

    Helen Castor is a British historian and BBC broadcaster who left Cambridge because she wanted to write narrative history focused on individuals rather than the analytical style typical of academia. As someone…

  46. David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation

    · 1 h 00 min · Episode 248 · Explicit

    David Robertson is a rare conductor who unites avant-garde complexity with accessibility. After serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez's storied contemporary-music ensemble, he went…

  47. Austan Goolsbee on Central Banking as a Data Dog

    · 59 min · Episode 247 · Explicit

    Austan Goolsbee is one of Tyler Cowen's favorite economists—not because they always agree, but because Goolsbee embodies what it means to think like an economist. Whether he's analyzing productivity slowdowns in the…

  48. Chris Arnade on Walking Cities

    · 59 min · Episode 246

    Most people who leave Wall Street after twenty years either retire or find another way to make a lot of money. Chris Arnade chose to walk through cities most travelers never truly see. What emerged from this approach…

  49. Any Austin on the Hermeneutics of Video Games

    · 1 h 06 min · Episode 245

    Any Austin has carved a unique niche for himself on YouTube: analyzing seemingly mundane or otherwise overlooked details in video games with the seriousness of an art critic examining Renaissance sculptures. With…

  50. John Arnold on Trading, Energy, and Evidence-Based Philanthropy

    · 1 h 05 min · Episode 244

    John Arnold built his fortune in energy trading by surrounding himself with smart people, maintaining emotional detachment, sensing market imbalances through first-principles analysis, and focusing with laser intensity…

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