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.
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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...
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 ...
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...
In this conversation, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark explores why web design has become overly complex and advocates for simplicity and user-centricity, contrasting this with his "subtractive" approach to business and philanthropy. He shares insights from his "obsessive customer service" days, discussing trust, combating online scams, and the authenticity of online connections. Newmark also delves into his unique philanthropic strategies, including supporting veterans and journalism, reflecting on personal growth and lessons learned in an engaging Q&A session.
Kim Bowes, author of 'Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent,' challenges common perceptions of Roman daily life, from colorful homes and complex financial systems to unique culinary practices. She explains how a robust consumer economy, fueled by extensive trade and taxation, served as the empire's adhesive, and proposes new economic and demographic theories for its eventual decline. The conversation also delves into archaeological methods and future research frontiers.
In this episode, Arthur Brooks delves into his "macronutrients" of happiness: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, emphasizing how scarcity enhances savoring and accepting suffering enriches life. He discusses the genetic component of happiness, the crucial role of habits, and why younger generations often resist well-being advice. Brooks also explores the impact of AI on society, his political and religious views, and his unique "spiral career" path, concluding with reflections on aging, the future of classical music, and approaching one's own mortality with courage and purpose.
Paul Gillingham discusses his new book, "Mexico: A 500-Year History," with Tyler Cowen, delving into why Mexico remained unified after independence, unlike other post-colonial superstates, attributing it to a long tradition of hands-off federalism and local autonomy. The conversation spans topics from regional violence in Guerrero and Michoacán, the impact of land reforms and the Ejido system, to Mexico's unique demographic transition and economic growth. Gillingham also shares insights on judicial reforms and cultural recommendations, offering a rich historical and contemporary analysis of the nation.
Veteran Harvard scholar Harvey Mansfield explores his latest work on Machiavelli, arguing that his concept of "effectual truth" laid the groundwork for modern empiricism and political thought. The discussion delves into Machiavelli's view on conspiracy, the vulgarity of democracy, the future of Straussianism, and philosophical approaches to great texts. Mansfield also shares reflections on the decline of great books, the nature of manliness, and insights from witnessing Winston Churchill speak.
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 ran...
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 de...
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Tyler Cowen engage in a thought-provoking discussion on market bubbles, drawing parallels between the 1929 crash and the 2008 financial crisis, emphasizing the pervasive role of leverage and policy choices. They examine the historical context of Fed decisions, the evolution of banking regulation like Glass-Steagall, and societal shifts in debt perception. The conversation extends to the future of banking, including consolidation, shadow banking, and retail investor access to private markets, concluding with reflections on media, personal journeys, and the intrinsic risks of the economy.
Diarmaid MacCulloch explores Christianity's complex relationship with sex and society, detailing shifts from early egalitarianism and Paul's revolutionary views on marriage to the enforcement of clerical celibacy in the 12th century. He critiques Foucault's historical interpretations and discusses the impact of the Reformation, emphasizing Elizabeth I's role, the rise of clerical families, and the enduring legacy of cathedrals. The conversation concludes with insights into the state of modern Anglicanism, the necessity of belief in hell, and the historian's vital role in unsettling established narratives for human sanity.
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 t...
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 covering the most popular and underrated episodes, why single-subject deep dives made for some of the best conversations this year, the biggest AI surprises and how LLMs changed the show's production function, what happened with the Magnus Carlsen episode, listener questions on everythi...
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 limited data. Her central insight is that babies learn like scientists, running experiments and updating beliefs based on evidence. But Tyler wonders: are scientists actually good learners? It's a question that leads them into a wide-ranging conversation about what we've been systematic...
Investor and art collector Gaurav Kapadia offers a rare glimpse into his mind, covering diverse topics from New York City's complex urban fabric and political challenges to XN's concentrated investment strategy and the impact of AI on finance. He also delves into the operational realities of art museums, his personal philosophy on art collecting, and the future of artistic canons, concluding with his new magazine, Totei, which celebrates craftsmanship.
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 everything from subway construction to pandemic response to why Chinese citizens will never have yards with dogs. His prescription: America should become 20% more engineering-minded to fix its broken infrastructure, while China needs to be 50% more lawyerly so the Communist Party can stop st...
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 of AI and On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom . In his second appearance on the show, he brings his characteristic intellectual range to exploring liberalism's present precariousness and AI's implications for law and speech. Tyler and Cass discuss whether liberalism is self-underm...
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 needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he's equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it's airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else h...
Donald S. Lopez Jr. offers deep insights into Buddhism, exploring the historical Buddha's omniscience and death, the concepts of karma and reincarnation, and the elaborate system of hells. He challenges Western misconceptions of a universally peaceful religion, dissects the "axial age" theory, and details the historical evolution of Buddhist art and oral traditions. The discussion also covers the schism between Theravada and Mahayana, the decline of monastic Buddhism, the unique succession of the Dalai Lamas, the origins of the "Tibetan Book of the Dead," the distinctiveness of Zen, and the impact of technology on its modern practice.
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 special, how far they are from an AI-driven replacement to Slack, what GPT-6 might enable for scientific research, when we'll see entire divisions of companies run mostly by AI, what he looks for in hires to gauge their AI-resistance, how OpenAI is thinking about commerce, whether GPT-6 w...
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 particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee's journey across East Africa—and then renderi...
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, 1933–1947 examines what the New Deal actually accomplished—and failed to accomplish—in confronting the Great Depression. Tyler and George discuss the surprising lack of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the New Deal, whether revaluing gold was really the best path to economic reflation, h...
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 Skills of Exceptional Leaders , argues that leadership isn't bestowed or innate, it's earned through deliberate skill development. Tyler and John discuss whether business culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated, what rituals leadership requires, the quality of leadership in ...
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 accepting paper money to toppling dictators. But Tyler wonders: if most real-world coordination works fine without recursively looping (a glance at a traffic circle), if these models break down with the slightest change in assumptions, and if anonymous internet posters are making corr...
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 for Saudi state-building, the treatment of Shiites in the Eastern Province and whether discrimination has truly ended, why the Saudi state emerged from its poorer and least cosmopolitan regions, the lasting significance of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure by millenarian extremists, wh...
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 left recession-era Ireland in the 1980s to teach himself photography in American darkrooms, Murphy has become that rare artist who moves seamlessly between conflict zones and recording studios, creating books of Afghan women's poetry while directing music videos that anticipated B...
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 argues that America's core problems aren't economic but sociological—rooted in the destruction of our "secure base" of family, community, and moral order that once gave people existential security. Tyler and David cover why young people are simultaneously the most rejected and most p...
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 lens of risk and prediction. Tyler and Nate dive into expected utility theory and random Nash equilibria in poker, whether Silver's tell-reading abilities transfer to real-world situations like NBA games, why academic writing has disappointed him, his move from atheism to agnostici...
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 world in 72 minutes, and madness that everything hangs by the thread of deterrence. But to Tyler, life is "a lot of different kinds of madness," and the real question is simply getting the least harmful form available to us. It's a conversation sparked by her latest book Nuclear W...
