Conversations with Tyler
by Mercatus Center at George Mason University · 304 episodes
EducationSocietyCulture
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.
Latest episodes
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45 min
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 decisio…
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51 min
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 academ…
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56 min
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…
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56 min
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 c…
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52 min
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 decline…
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42 min
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 A…
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52 min
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 pries…
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56 min
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…
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55 min
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 s…
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57 min
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…
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54 min
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 pr…
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46 min
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…
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50 min
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 med…
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53 min
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 an…
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1 h 01
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…
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46 min
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 Ale…
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56 min
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 credent…
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47 min
Craig Newmark on Institutional Maintenance, Giving Away Control, and the Internet We Were Promised
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, a…
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1 h 01
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 boo…
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60 min
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-s…