Conversations with Tyler

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 European Parliament before returning to research, now at the London School of Economics for a second time. His new book, Messy Jobs, co-authored with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, argues that AI won't cause mass unemployment for a surprising reason: it will make jobs messier, not simpler, and messiness is precisely what AI struggles with.

Tyler and Luis start their conversation with Spain — housing, NIMBYism, and the productivity crisis; Spanish literature and why the Civil War still looms so large; and what Chicago taught Luis about party discipline in European politics. Then to the EU's unanimity problem, capital markets, and Denmark's flexicurity model; a round of overrated-versus-underrated on Rosalía, Penélope Cruz, and Sgt. Pepper's; and finally into Messy Jobs — why retraining programs fail, whether AI's leisure dividend has arrived, and whether Spain could ever achieve AI sovereignty.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded July 28th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:05 - On Spain's housing and political paralysis

00:11:08 - On Spanish literature and the Civil War

00:16:52 - On Basque and Catalan public finance

00:18:59 - On party discipline and political selection

00:22:03 - On the EU's unanimity problem

00:28:47 - On flexicurity and European labor rigidity

00:30:24 - Overrated vs. underrated

00:33:12 - On the future of Spanish language

00:35:01 - On why AI won't cause mass unemployment

00:48:38 - On what's next

00:50:11 - Outro

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 worked on sovereign debt restructuring, followed Argentina's disinflation up close, and built her academic reputation on ideas like dollar dominance and the dominant currency paradigm. Now back at Harvard launching a new Global Economics Lab, her conversation with Tyler ranges from why exchange rates don't adjust the way models predict, to what stablecoins really cost, to whether AI's growth dividend will show up on schedule.

Tyler and Gita discuss why trade balances are only weakly related to real exchange rates, before turning to Argentina, Milei's fiscal discipline, the peso, and dollarization. Then they discuss whether economists got the euro wrong; whether trade imbalances with China are really the problem; stablecoins, CBDCs, and the Treasury market; and whether AI will ease the debt burden, cause stagflation, or transform economics itself. Finally, they turn to her family's Kerala roots: why the state keeps electing communists, the relationship between matriarchy and social indicators, single-sex education, and what she's building next.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded August 27th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:57 - On why currencies don't adjust the way models predict

00:15:46 - On Argentina after triple-digit inflation

00:26:05 - On living with the euro

00:28:50 - On China's problematic surpluses

00:34:02 - On digital currencies

00:39:33 - On AI and the productivity question

00:48:51 - On why Kerala keeps electing communists

00:52:52 - On what comes next

00:55:15 - Outro

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 — roughly fifty a year on average, and far more if you're poor. Tyler spends much of this conversation pressing the opposite case, asking whether that bureaucracy is quietly serving a useful purpose by rationing knee surgeries that don't work, deterring fraud, or screening for immigrants with gumption.

So Tyler and Annie hash it out over an hour, covering why TANF and other welfare programs are the worst offenders, the political economy of submerged benefits like the child tax credit, whether the postal service should be zeroed out over ten years the way Denmark did, whether the government should be nudging people out of rural areas, lessons from the COVID unemployment fraud, areas where the time tax is flat instead of regressive, which private sector time taxes are most onerous, whether AI agents will pay these taxes for us within five years, the logic of easy benefits plus randomized harsh audits, the case for less federalism, whether voting should be easier or harder, how the UBI studies changed her priors, where you can find the best moss in the world, her favorite example of Brutalist architecture, tattoos as permanent ephemera, Christianity's role in liberalism and the post-Christian right, how reporting beats tourism, the time tax of friendship, what she'll learn next, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded September 1st, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:58 - On taxing our time

00:19:47 - On private-sector time taxes

00:22:57 - On AI eliminating paperwork

00:25:03 - On immigration as a filter

00:28:49 - On reducing fraud

00:33:03 - On federalizing bureaucracy

00:35:12 - On breaking up New York

00:36:25 - On making voting easy

00:38:28 - On updating universal basic income

00:41:29 - On banning exotic pets

00:42:13 - On deserts and moss

00:43:18 - On beautiful brutalism

00:43:50 - On tattoo culture

00:44:38 - On Christianity after Christianity

00:48:29 - On escaping the global monoculture

00:51:42 - On the time tax of friendship

00:54:49 - On what comes next

00:55:43 - Outro

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 Empire having had prophets to spare — and observes that even Genghis Khan happened to be born at an auspicious moment for a conqueror of the steppes. Conditions ripen; somebody turns up. So which leaders do make a difference?

Tyler and Jared debate that question, including conditions what a religious founder needs to succeed, whether destructive leaders matter more than constructive ones, why individual leaders have mattered so little in Papua New Guinea, whether we undervalue preventers, how much Rachel Carson and the Resnicks really mattered, whether Botswana's success will endure, Jared's own place in intellectual history, and what he'd tell an ambitious 25-year-old about how to become consequential. They go on to cover whether New Guineans are smarter, his reasons for why the Industrial Revolution started in England, what he learned from Jim Robinson about natural experiments, why he's more optimistic about the environment than when he wrote Collapse, what he'd do about nuclear risk, the 189 bird species on his street in Los Angeles, why the MacArthur "genius grant" left him depressed for a week, why he's listening to one Bach cantata a week, what he hopes to work on as he enters his nineties, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded August 21st, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:11 - On whether any leader is irreplaceable

00:21:35 - On his own replaceability

00:24:55 - On the decline of face-to-face skills

00:29:02 - On intelligence and genetics

00:32:57 - On why the Industrial Revolution began in England

00:36:38 - On environmental optimism

00:41:11 - On nuclear risk and the Dvorak keyboard

00:42:55 - On birdwatching

00:44:07 - On writing and productivity

00:47:06 - On what his parents gave him

00:49:51 - On what comes next

00:51:36 - Outro

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 the middle of his 38 years at Sequoia, and now Ausländer, a family memoir, after leaving the firm. Moritz calls himself a dilettante with too many interests, but listen to him on learning to paint in his 40s, or the questions he would ask a ten-year-old boy in a German village in 1890, and you may decide that unsatisfied curiosity is not a small thing to build a life on. Tyler and Michael discuss his childhood in Wales, where his love for visual arts came from, why he disappointed his Latin teacher, having Thanksgiving dinner with Philip Roth, why children don't interrogate their parents about their history, what he feels visiting Germany and why he now holds German citizenship, how a history major with no technical background talked his way into Sequoia, his unpublished Don Valentine profile, what people underrate about Steve Jobs, obsessives versus dilettantes, why capitalism was more ablaze in China than America, what funding the Booker Prize taught him about his own ignorance, how to improve San nonprofits, how an incurable cancer diagnosis changed his calendar, why Britain's stuck, what he'll learn next, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded July 21st, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:04:57 - On living with difficult art

00:09:44 - On Jewish literature

00:13:00 - On why children don't interrogate their parents

00:15:54 - On returning to Germany

00:23:37 - On stumbling into venture capital

00:28:49 - On obsessives and dilettantes

00:33:03 - On supporting the Booker Prize

00:34:17 - On improving San Francisco's nonprofits

00:37:26 - On controlling your own calendar

00:38:43 - On why Britain is stuck

00:40:06 - On what comes next

00:41:10 - Outro

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 and teaches at Catholic University. His book Wanting made René Girard legible to a general audience; the new one, The One and the Ninety-Nine, takes mimetic theory into the dynamics of self and crowd in an age of social contagion.

He joined Tyler to discuss whether the age of pessimism is ending, why the Anglo world in particular seems so unhappy, whether Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann better diagnoses modernity, the kind of reader his own book would ruin, why he thinks AI will make social contagion weaker, what put him off consulting with Anthropic on Claude's constitution, what effective altruism misses, why men and women are drifting apart, what he'd fund in every American city, the case for reintroducing friction, whether a Gnostic reading of the lost sheep explains our moment, what Rod Dreher gets right about withdrawal, why Genoa is Italy's most underrated city, what confession times reveal about a church, why Italians seem tired of their Catholicism, why he didn't become a priest, where he differs from Ross Douthat, why exorcists appear to be on the rise, the sudden mimetic antisemitism on the right, the book his 23-year-old self would have hated, what he secretly admires about Silicon Valley, why Michigan never left him, what the original Cluny can teach a modern talent network, how he hopes to face his own death, what he'll do next, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded April 30th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:05:08 - On overapplying mimetic theory

00:06:35 - On AI and social contagion

00:07:53 - On declining Anthropic's invitation

00:09:36 - On the widening gap between men and women

00:12:25 - On anti-mimetic postures, jazz, and porn

00:16:46 - On Genoa, Naples, and societal escape fantasies

00:18:31 - On Italian Catholicism

00:26:59 - On not becoming a priest

00:29:13 - On beauty, enchantment, and the Gnostic sheep

00:40:22 - On what Wall Street taught him

00:43:50 - On Michigan

00:45:12 - On the Cluny Institute

00:48:41 - On dealing with death and what else is next

00:51:21 - Outro

Image credit: Kirth Bobb

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 about how states and societies contend for the narrow corridor in which liberty survives, this one asks what liberals themselves got wrong, and the answer implicates the educated elite—that is to say, you.

Tyler and Daron discuss what's wrong with social contract theories and Rousseau's general will, whether Acemoglu is more objectivist than Rorty, why he blames left liberalism's own establishment power for its collapse, what standard is left once you refuse to have a book of higher values, nondomination versus noninterference, who counts as working class, why automation alone will not lead to widespread prosperity, how he can call himself a free speech absolutist while wanting to regulate social media, why he worries we've given up on educating Americans, whether teachers' unions need to be reconstituted, what the life expectancy for an educated twenty year old is today, whether open-source models undercut the centralization worry, what pro-worker AI actually means, why the fertility crisis leaves him strangely close to a real business cycle position, whether AI will raise his own already prodigious paper output, why Armenia has disappointed economically, what he wants to learn next, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded July 15th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:08:57 - On the working class vs. the elite

00:13:16 - On automation

00:22:33 - On free speech

00:27:22 - On immigration

00:31:08 - On artificial intelligence

00:50:36 - On Armenia

00:53:22 - On what comes next

00:54:51 - Outro

Image credit: Bryce Vickmark

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 and domesticity instead. That disorienting reversal is the engine of her book Motherland, a National Book Award finalist that reconstructs modern Russian history almost entirely through its women. Her account, drawn from her own family's history as well as the archives, keeps returning to one plain observation: Soviet policy pushed women into the workforce, the medical schools, and even into combat, while asking so little of men that low expectations became self-fulfilling—and Russia is still living with the results.

Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia's great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist government established women's medical courses in 1872, changing attitudes towards abortion and birth control in the 20th century, why the Soviet regime turned prudish, how Khrushchev's plan to "replace the dead" institutionalized single motherhood, Russian superwomen, why Jewish men were a prized commodity amid rampant antisemitism, the cultural significance of flowers, why a few Russian names still dominate, why Russian women think Western feminists have their priorities backwards, how gender attitudes and autocracy feed into each other, three underrated Russian novels, what she wants to write about next, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded April 7th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:06:38 - Bolshevik feminism

00:08:41 - Birth control, abortion, and prudery

00:14:48 - The Russian mating market

00:23:06 - Russian superwomen

00:32:02 - The importance of flowers

00:37:35 - Common Russian names

00:39:51 - Russian vs. American feminism

00:44:23 - Gender attitudes and Russian politics

00:49:54 - Russian novels

00:54:33 - Outro

Photo credit: Max Avdeev

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 includes a forgotten liberal sect — the Remonstrants and Collegiants, Christians without a church who believed peace would come through reading and toleration rather than a returning Messiah. Recover that world and a woman alone in a sunlit room is a radical image in a Europe where half of Germany had just died in war. If he's right, the label beside every Vermeer in every museum will one day have to change.

Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we'd rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of the Catholic Faith, whether Vermeer painted for money or pointedly refused to, where the Gardner's stolen Concert might be, why Dutch music never blossomed as much as Dutch painting did, how the Church of England rivaled the Cultural Revolution in wiping out British art, whether you can still spot an English painting on sight, the love that saturates late Rembrandt and the mystery of his soaring print prices, the nail on the wall that proves two Vermeer paintings are a pair, why the French are to blame for George Stubbs' lack of status, whether we can still love Malevich, why Andrews calls recent Richter "almost like printing money," why female artists and antique textiles remain absurdly cheap, why nobody builds beautiful neighborhoods any longer, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded April 7th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:44 - The Mystery of Vermeer

00:12:53 - Dutch Music

00:15:51 - English Art

00:19:49 - Rembrandt

00:23:17 - Attributions

00:26:22 - Exhibitions and Restorations

00:30:05 - Underrated French Artists

00:35:16 - Howard Hodgkin

00:38:00 - Difficult-To-Love Artists

00:40:53 - Other Dutch Painters

00:44:20 - Contemporary Art

00:48:05 - Buying Art

00:50:39 - Neighborhood Aesthetics

00:54:39 - Advice for Aspiring Art Critics

00:56:14 - Outro

Image Credit: Aliona Adrianova

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 them: throwing tennis matches as a bored teenager, getting shipped off to shovel manure at a feed yard twelve hours later, then spending five years battling Brazilian bureaucracy to build a fertilizer terminal that should have taken one. Today he is Executive Vice President of Origination and Partnerships, leader and donor to Stand Together, plays lead guitar in a band named for the law of entropy, and has a new book with his father on principle-driven leadership.

Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father's lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa's grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De'Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents' garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it's like working with MrBeast, how Koch Inc has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the "farm team," why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old's urging, where he's traveling next, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded June 16th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:56 - Familial Influences

00:08:25 - Tennis and Basketball

00:15:00 - The Music Industry

00:28:36 - MrBeast

00:31:24 - The Evolution of Koch Industries

00:35:54 - The Midwest

00:44:37 - AI

00:49:01 - Politics

00:53:35 - Outro