Conversations with Tyler

Tyler Cowen talks with Jared Diamond about his new book arguing that historical conditions, not individual brilliance, drive outcomes. They debate whether any leader is truly irreplaceable, the undervaluation of disaster preventers, Diamond's own replaceability as a thinker, why he's now more optimistic about the environment, and how he stays productive in his nineties.

Michael Moritz, former journalist and Sequoia partner, talks with Tyler about his varied life. They explore his childhood in Wales, his journey from history major to venture capitalist, and the role of unsatisfied curiosity in a life well-lived. Moritz reflects on exile, returning to Germany, and the dynamics of parenting and memory. He also shares lessons from supporting the Booker Prize, improving nonprofit governance, and controlling his own calendar after a cancer diagnosis. The conversation covers art, literature, and why broad curiosity may be undervalued.

Luke Burgis joins Tyler to discuss mimetic desire in the age of social media contagion, drawing on his books Wanting and The One and the Ninety-Nine. Their conversation ranges from why the Anglo world seems uniquely unhappy to why AI might actually weaken social contagion, and why Burgis declined to consult with Anthropic. Burgis brings a Catholic framework to bear on everything from the widening gap between men and women to the sudden rise of mimetic antisemitism on the right, offering a lens that treats desire itself as socially mediated rather than individually generated.

Daron Acemoglu returns to Conversations with Tyler to discuss his new book *What Happened to Liberal Democracy?* and his diagnosis of what liberalism got wrong. Tyler Cowen presses him on the role of the educated elite, the limitations of automation for widespread prosperity, free speech paradoxes, and how to make AI work for workers. The conversation ranges from social contract theory to the economics of Armenia, with Acemoglu offering a distinctive blend of political philosophy and empirical economics.

Julia Ioffe discusses her National Book Award finalist *Motherland*, which reconstructs modern Russian history through the lives of its women. She explores how Soviet policies pushed women into the workforce, medicine, and combat while demanding so little of men that low expectations became self-fulfilling—a dynamic Russia still grapples with. The conversation ranges from Bolshevik feminism and the Soviet turn to prudery to the post-Soviet mating market, the cultural significance of flowers, and why many Russian women see Western feminism as misguided. Ioffe also examines how gender attitudes and autocracy reinforce each other, and why a few Russian names still dominate the country.

Andrew Graham-Dixon discusses his new book Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, arguing that Vermeer's art cannot be understood without the context of a forgotten liberal Christian sect. The conversation covers how this sect's ideals of peace and toleration shaped his paintings, why the Met misread its Allegory of the Catholic Faith, and the physical evidence that proves two Vermeers are a pair. They also explore broader art market mysteries, including why female artists and antique textiles remain undervalued, and whether anyone builds beautiful neighborhoods anymore.

Chase Koch, Executive Vice President of Origination and Partnerships at Koch Industries and co-author of a new book on principle-driven leadership, sits down with Tyler Cowen to discuss how his father Charles's Sunday philosophy lessons only took root through lived experience—throwing tennis matches, shoveling manure, and battling Brazilian bureaucracy. The conversation ranges across stoicism, music, organizational philosophy, and the evolution of Koch Inc, weaving together business principle, personal discipline, and the role of constraint in character formation.

Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr joins Tyler to explore how sustained economic growth became normal after millennia of stagnation. Mokyr argues that two conditions made the difference: a scientific understanding of why things work, allowing innovations to compound, and a culture willing to accept the disruptions that progress brings. He contrasts the European model—where guilds, universities, and cities encouraged cooperation among unrelated people—with China's clan-based organization, which provided stability but limited the reach of disruptive innovation. The conversation ranges from the Catholic Church's campaign against cousin-marriage to geography's role in keeping Europe fragmented, and from the rise of German science to why British soldiers were taller than the French.

Historian Joanne Paul joins Tyler to discuss Thomas More and the Tudor era. She explains why the 16th century fascinates her as a transitional period between the medieval and the modern, and why examining 'paths not taken' can help us question the inevitability of our own world. The conversation covers More's complex legacy, his influence on Erasmus, the ambiguous nature of Utopia, and how fear drove his persecution of heretics. They also explore how the Tudor period set the stage for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, and highlight surprising social mobility in 16th-century England.

Roblox CEO Dave Baszucki joins Tyler to discuss the platform's 100 million daily active users and $7 billion projected revenue, built entirely by community developers. He explains why Roblox avoided ad revenue in favor of its virtual economy, and argues that his true competition is internal execution speed, not external rivals like Fortnite. The conversation extends to platform evolution into everything apps, how falling token costs may reshape the experience, and why transparently serving a young audience is a strategic advantage rather than a liability. Baszucki also shares personal reflections on his son's bipolar disorder and his own two-year motorhome sabbatical.

Historian Katja Hoyer explores three crucial periods of German history with Tyler Cowen: the Weimar Republic, East Germany (GDR), and the broader German cultural character. They discuss why communism created loyalty in East Germany while breeding dissidents elsewhere, the cultural richness of the GDR despite its repressive system, Angela Merkel's East German background and its limits, and the current underrepresentation of East Germans in German leadership. Hoyer argues that Weimar remains Germany's cultural and spiritual heart, and examines what citizens knew about atrocities like Buchenwald.

Egyptologist Toby Wilkinson discusses the Ptolemaic period (300 years after Alexander the Great), exploring how this era transformed Egypt from a divine kingship centered on monuments into a cosmopolitan, commerce-driven empire. Alexandria became the ancient world's intellectual and economic powerhouse, home to unprecedented scientific achievement. The conversation ranges from why the Ptolemaic model failed to match Rome's durability, to Cleopatra's actual historical significance, to what made Ptolemaic Egypt feel oddly modern compared to pharaonic Egypt.

Bob Spitz, biographer of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones, joins Tyler to discuss his unconventional path into rock biography and his surprising books on Reagan and Julia Child. The conversation covers how the Stones rose so fast, the band’s chemistry, underrated songs, the enigma of Charlie Watts, and the fate of Brian Jones. They also touch on Mick Jagger’s LSE training, why popular music lost its cultural dominance, what remains to ask Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the Beatles’ breakup, Reagan’s senility and communist flirtation, Julia Child’s cooking skills, and Spitz’s next project on John Lennon.

Craig Newmark explains his philosophy of deliberate subtraction: stepping aside as CEO, giving away equity to his foundation, and trusting others. He discusses how years of hands-on customer service shaped his understanding of human nature and the nine-second rule for catching scams. He reveals why Craigslist never added seller evaluations, how painful Ivy League grants reshaped his philanthropy, and why the internet's early promise feels lost in today's cluttered web design.

Archaeologist Kim Bowes reveals how ordinary Romans lived through material evidence — shoes, ceramics, coins — showing a vast, interconnected commercial network that bound the empire together and funded its expansion. Her book Surviving Rome challenges the elite-focused historical narrative by examining pottery shards, trade routes, and daily transactions to reconstruct the economic lives of the 90 percent who kept Rome running. Tyler and Kim explore how this commerce unraveled with the empire, why Romans never developed formal economic theory despite their sophistication, and what landscape archaeology reveals about Roman factories, Christianity, and the practical realities of imperial life.

Click here to find Tyler's new generative book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution!

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.

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.

Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup. Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds.

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.

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.

Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading.

At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record.

Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today.

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.

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 into how he thinks.

Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today.

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.

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.

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.

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

Alison Gopnik on how children learn, what AI can learn from children, and why the nature vs. nurture debate is wrongly framed. Children are the best learners in the known universe — and understanding how they learn could transform AI.

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.

George Selgin has spent over four decades thinking about money, banking, and economic history, and Tyler has known him for nearly all of it.

Cass Sunstein on how AI challenges liberal rights frameworks. When algorithms make decisions about hiring, lending, and criminal justice, traditional rights concepts (due process, equal protection) need updating for a world of automated judgment.

Donald Lopez on Buddhism — its history, philosophy, and Western reception. Lopez challenges the popular Western image of Buddhism as a 'scientific religion' compatible with secular humanism. The real Buddhism is stranger and more radical than the Western version.

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.

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.

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.

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.

David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture.

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.

David Brooks on the American character, moral formation, and why relationships matter more than achievement. Brooks's journey from achievement-obsessed columnist to relationship-focused moral philosopher.

Annie Jacobsen has a favorite word for America's nuclear doctrine: madness.

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.

Nate Silver on On the Edge and how poker players, traders, and other professional risk-takers think differently. Silver argues that the 'River' (risk-taking rationalists) and the 'Village' (consensus-following institutionalists) need each other.

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 on to rejuvenate the St. Louis Symphony.

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.

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.

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.

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 on a single niche until he dominated it completely.

Get tickets to the CWT live show at 92NY with David Brooks! Theodore Schwartz stands at the pinnacle of neurosurgical expertise.

Few understand both the promise and limitations of artificial general intelligence better than Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic.

Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff approaches global finance with the same strategic foresight that made him a chess grandmaster.

Jonathan Rauch on the threats to liberal democracy from Christian nationalism and other illiberal movements. Rauch argues that the Constitution of Knowledge — the epistemic institutions that produce shared truth — is as important as the political Constitution.

Doug Irwin — the leading historian of American trade policy — on tariffs, protectionism, and why history shows that trade barriers usually harm the countries that impose them.

Chris Arnade — former Wall Street trader turned walker of American back roads. His book Dignity documented the forgotten people of abandoned America. Walking reveals what data misses about communities.

Scott Sumner on monetary policy, blooming late intellectually, and the art of cinema. Sumner didn't become influential until his 50s — when his blog made NGDP targeting a serious policy idea. A conversation about patience, influence, and aesthetic taste.

Tyler Cowen and producer Jeff Holmes look back on 2024's 30 episodes. Most popular, most underrated, and most controversial episodes. Cowen reflects on what makes great conversations and how his interviewing style has evolved.

Daron Acemoglu fresh off winning the Nobel Prize in Economics. Tyler probes his views on institutions, AI governance, and whether economics has lost its way. One of CWT's most important episodes.

Stephen Kotkin on his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin. One of the best CWT episodes ever. Kotkin explains how a mediocre student from Georgia became the most powerful dictator in history through institutional mastery, not ideology.

Stephen Kotkin discusses his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin — how totalitarian power worked through millions of everyday decisions, the relationship between individual agency and structural forces, and what living in the Soviet Union as a scholar taught him about how people survive under tyranny.

Christopher Kirchhoff discusses how the US military innovates (and fails to innovate), the drone revolution in Ukraine, and why bureaucratic organizations struggle to adopt technologies that threaten existing power structures.

Kyla Scanlon on making economics accessible through social media. She coined 'vibecession' — the disconnect between positive economic data and negative economic sentiment. Cowen probes how she manages a massive following while maintaining analytical rigor.

Historian Alan Taylor reframes the American Revolution as a continental civil war rather than a simple independence movement. The revolution divided families, communities, and nations in ways the founding mythology obscures.

Henry Oliver on his research into late bloomers — people who achieve breakthrough success after conventional prime. The cult of precocity ignores that some of the greatest achievements come from people over 40.

Coleman Hughes on colorblindness as a moral and practical ideal. Cowen explores Hughes's views on race, jazz, philosophy, and the tension between individual identity and group belonging.

Peter Thiel on political theology — why secular politics inevitably takes on religious structures. Thiel argues that modern political movements (progressivism, libertarianism, environmentalism) are secularized religions, with their own eschatologies and heresies.

Peter Thiel returns for a live conversation on political theology — Carl Schmitt's resurgence, why Thiel opposes Calvinism and rationalism, whether the Old Testament leads to wokeness, and how AI disrupts the relationship between wordcels and shape rotators.

Jonathan Haidt on The Anxious Generation and how smartphone-based childhood is rewiring young brains. The most contentious CWT episode of 2024. Cowen pushes back hard on Haidt's causal claims while acknowledging the correlational evidence.

Fareed Zakaria discusses Age of Revolutions, why books remain his most important medium despite hosting CNN's flagship foreign affairs show, and how the current moment of populist upheaval compares to previous revolutionary periods.

Marilynne Robinson on Genesis, Calvinist theology, and the American character. Robinson argues that the Bible is the most underread book in the West — people who dismiss it haven't actually engaged with it. Genesis as literature and philosophy.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Marilynne Robinson discusses Genesis, the American character, the decline of mainline Protestantism, and why she believes contemporary culture has lost its capacity for wonder.

Fareed Zakaria on his book Age of Revolutions and the recurring pattern of revolutionary change across centuries. Revolutions in technology, economics, and politics follow similar patterns — and understanding the pattern helps navigate the current one.

Marc Andreessen on AI optimism and American dynamism. Recorded at a16z's 2024 American Dynamism Summit. Andreessen argues against AI regulation and for maximizing technological progress as the path to human flourishing.

Ami Vitale on her journey from war photographer to wildlife conservationist. After covering conflict in over 100 countries, she found that hope stories are as important as crisis stories. Conservation photography as a form of moral responsibility.

Jonathan Haidt discusses The Anxious Generation — his argument that the transition from play-based to phone-based childhood is causing an epidemic of teen mental health problems. Cowen pushes back on the causal claims.

Rebecca F. Kuang on publishing five novels by age 27. Her novel Babel explores how translation can be a tool of empire. Cowen probes her disciplined creative process, influences, and views on the publishing industry.

Patrick McKenzie on building internet businesses, living in Japan, and the hidden complexity of payments infrastructure. Few people can trace the impact of a blog post to millions of dollars — McKenzie has the receipts.