Conversations with Tyler
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Conversations with Tyler
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.
Recent Episodes
298 episodes
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 sem...
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...
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 Sovie...
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 knowin...
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 siste...
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 growt...
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 b...
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...
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...
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 D...
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 Jul...
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 h...
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 perh...
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...
Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together
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Tyler calls Paul Gillingham's new book, Mexico: A 500-...
Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy
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Few living scholars can claim to have shaped how we read...
Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English
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Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Rea...
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...
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 pri...
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 Cranm...
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...
Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective
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On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and produ...
Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture
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Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at...
Gaurav Kapadia on New York City, Investing, and Contemporary Art
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Gaurav Kapadia has deliberately avoided publicity throu...
Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other
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Dan Wang argues that China is a nation of engineers whi...
Cass Sunstein on Liberalism and Rights in the Age of AI
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 fiv...
Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure - Live at the Progress Conference
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...
Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism
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Donald S. Lopez Jr. is among the foremost scholars of Buddhism, whose work consistently distinguishes B...
Sam Altman on Trust, Persuasion, and the Future of Intelligence - Live at the Progress Conference
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Sam Altman makes his second appearance on the show to discuss how he's managing OpenAI's explosive growt...
Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era
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 und...
George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression
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...
John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports
John Amaechi is a former NBA forward/center who became a chartered scientist, professor of leadership at Exeter Business School, and New York Times be...
Steven Pinker on Coordination, Common Knowledge, and the Retreat of Liberal Enlightenment
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...
David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States
David Commins, author of the new book Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, brings decades of scholarship and firsthand experience to explain the kingdom's...
Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures
Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker who has spent decades documenting life in some of the world's most challenging places—from Taliba...
David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche (Live at 92NY)
David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture. Having evolved from a Democratic socialist to a neoconservative to what h...
Nate Silver on Life’s Mixed Strategies
In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Nate Silver looks back at past predictions, weighs how academic ideas such as expected utility th...
Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War, Intelligence Operations, and Conspiracy Realities
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...
Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities
Helen Castor is a British historian and BBC broadcaster who left Cambridge because she wanted to write narrative history focused on individuals rather...
David Robertson on Conducting, Pierre Boulez, and Musical Interpretation
David Robertson is a rare conductor who unites avant-garde complexity with accessibility. After serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemp...