Conversations with Tyler

By Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Society & Culture Education

What's Conversations with Tyler about?

Tyler Cowen hosts thought leaders from across the spectrum?—?economists, entrepreneurs, authors and innovators. All have one thing in common?—?they are making an impact on the world because of their ideas.

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Patricia Fara on Newton, Sc...

02.24.2021

Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University and well-known for her writings on women in science. Her forthcoming book, Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career, details the life of the titan of the so-called Scientific Revolution ...

Conversations with Tyler episodes:

02.24.2021 Patricia Fara on Newton, Scientific Progress, and the Benefits of Unhistoric Acts Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University and well-known for her writings on women in science. Her forthcoming book, Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career, details the life of the titan of the so-called Scientific Revolution ...
02.10.2021 Brian Armstrong on the Crypto Economy Brian Armstrong first recognized the potential of cryptocurrencies after witnessing firsthand the tragic consequences of hyperinflation in Argentina. Coinbase, the company he co-founded, aims to provide the primary financial accounts for the crypto economy. Their success in accomplishing this, he ...
01.27.2021 Benjamin Friedman on the Origins of Economic Belief Benjamin Friedman has been a leading macroeconomist since the 1970s, whose accomplishments include writing 150 papers, producing more than dozen books, and teaching Tyler Cowen graduate macroeconomics at Harvard in 1985. In his latest book, Religion and the Rise of ...
01.13.2021 Noubar Afeyan on the Permission to Leap “The world of innovation is very much one of toggling between survival and then thriving,” says Noubar Afeyan. Co-founder of Moderna and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, the biomedical innovator, philanthropist, and entrepreneur credits his successes to his “paranoid optimism” shaped ...
12.30.2020 Conversations with Tyler 2020 Retrospective Want to support the show? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. On this special year-in-review episode, producer Jeff Holmes sat down with Tyler to talk about the most popular—and most underrated—episodes, Tyler's personal highlight of the year, how well state capacity libertarianism has fared, ...
12.16.2020 John O. Brennan on Life in the CIA Want to support the show? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. Growing up in a working-class city in New Jersey, John Brennan’s father was an Irish immigrant who always impressed upon his children how grateful they should be to be American citizens. That deeply-instilled ...
12.02.2020 Zach Carter on the Life and Legacy of John Maynard Keynes After reading Zach Carter’s intellectual biography of Keynes earlier this year, Tyler declared that the book would qualify “without reservation” as one of the best of the year. Tyler’s assessment proved common, as the book would soon become a New ...
11.18.2020 Jimmy Wales on Systems and Incentives Jimmy Wales used to joke that choosing to build Wikipedia on a non-profit, non-advertising model was either the best or worst decision he ever made—but he doesn’t joke about that anymore. “If you think about advertising-driven social media…it's driven them ...
11.04.2020 Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Art and Literature Edwidge Danticat left Haiti when she was 12, she says, but Haiti never left her. At 14 she began writing stories about the people and culture she loved, and now is an internationally acclaimed novelist and short story writer as ...
10.21.2020 Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders Michael Kremer is best known for his academic work researching global poverty, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019 along with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. Less known is that he is also the founder of five ...
10.07.2020 Audrey Tang on the Technology of Democracy Audrey Tang began reading classical works like the Shūjīng and Tao Te Ching at the age of 5 and learned the programming language Perl at the age of 12. Now, the autodidact and self-described “conservative anarchist” is a software engineer ...
09.22.2020 Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism To Alex Ross, good music critics must be well-rounded and have command of neighboring cultural areas. “When you're writing about opera, you're writing about literature as well as music, you're writing about staging, theater ideas, as well as music,” says ...
09.09.2020 Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low Matt Yglesias joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on his vision for a bigger, less politically polarized America outlined in his new book One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger. They discussed why it’s easier to grow Tokyo than ...
08.26.2020 Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth Note: This conversation was recorded in January 2020. Tyler credits Jason Furman’s intellectual breadth, real-world experience, and emphasis on policy for making him the best economist in the world. Furman, despite not initially being interested in public policy, ultimately served ...
08.12.2020 Nicholas Bloom on Management, Productivity, and Scientific Progress What might the electrification of factories teach us about how quickly we’ll adapt to remote work? What gives American companies an edge over their competitors on the international stage? What value do management consultants really provide? Stanford professor Nick Bloom’s ...
07.29.2020 Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development Nathan Nunn’s work history includes automotive stores, a freight company, a paint factory, a ski hill, photography, book publishing, private tutoring, and more. Having grown up in a lower-income Canadian family, he recognizes the importance of having multiple pathways to ...
07.15.2020 Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence Explaining 10 percent of something is not usually cause for celebration. And yet when it comes to economic development, where so many factors are in play—institutions, culture, geography, to name a few—it’s impressive indeed. And that’s just what Melissa Dell ...
07.01.2020 Annie Duke on Poker, Probabilities, and How We Make Decisions For Annie Duke, the poker table is a perfect laboratory to study human decision-making — including her own. “It really exposes you to the way that you’re thinking,” she says, “how hard it is to avoid decision traps, even when ...
06.17.2020 Rachel Harmon on Policing Long before becoming a legal scholar focused on police reform, Rachel Harmon studied engineering at MIT and graduate philosophy at LSE. “You could call it a random walk,” she says, “or you could say that I’m really interested in the ...
06.03.2020 Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty Ashley Mears is a former fashion model turned academic sociologist, and her book Very Important People: Status and Beauty in the Global Party Circuit is one of Tyler’s favorites of the year. The book, the result of eighteen months of ...
05.20.2020 Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard Paul Romer makes his second appearance to discuss the failings of economics, how his mass testing plan for COVID-19 would work, what aspects of epidemiology concern him, how the FDA is slowing a better response, his ideas for reopening schools ...
05.06.2020 Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future Adam Tooze is best known for his highly-regarded books on the economic history of Nazi Germany, the remaking of the global economic and political order starting in World War I, and his account of how the economic effects of the ...
04.29.2020 Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert Glen Weyl is an economist, researcher, and founder of RadicalXChange. He recently co-authored a paper that sets forth an ambitious strategy to respond to the crisis and mitigate long-term damage to the economy through a regime of testing, tracing, and ...
04.22.2020 Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox Accuracy is only one of the things we want from forecasters, says Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. People also look to forecasters for ideological assurance, entertainment, ...
04.08.2020 Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar When Tyler requested an interview with novelist Emily St. John Mandel, he didn’t expect that reality would have in some ways become an eerie mirror of her latest books. And Emily didn’t expect that it’d be boosting sales: “Why would ...
03.25.2020 Ross Douthat on Decadence and Dynamism For Ross Douthat, decadence isn’t necessarily a moral judgement, but a technical label for a state that societies tend to enter—and one that is perhaps much more normal than the dynamism Americans have come to take for granted. In his ...
03.19.2020 Russ Roberts and Tyler on COVID-19 Tyler and Russ Roberts joined forces for a special livestreamed conversation on COVID-19, including how both are adjusting to social isolation, private versus public responses to the pandemic, the challenge of reforming scrambled organization capital, the implications for Trump’s reelection, ...
03.11.2020 John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason) Who can you ask about the Great American Songbook, the finer Jell-O flavors, and peculiar languages like Saramaccan all while expecting the same kind of fast, thoughtful, and energetic response? Listeners of Lexicon Valley might hazard a guess: John McWhorter. ...
02.26.2020 Garett Jones on Democracy (More or Less) Why is Garett Jones willing to write books about risky topics like the case for reducing democratic accountability? Is it the iconoclastic Mason econ culture? Supportive colleagues like Tyler? Those help, but what ultimately gives Garett peace of mind is ...
02.12.2020 Tim Harford on Persuasion and Popular Economics To Tim Harford, mistakes are fascinating. “We often only understand how something works when it breaks,” he says, explaining why there’s such an emphasis on errors throughout his work. They also tend to make great stories, which can stoke the ...
01.29.2020 Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized In his new book, Ezra Klein argues that polarization in America has become centered on partisan political identities, which has subsumed virtually every form of identity, be it where we live, what team we root for, the church we attend, ...
01.15.2020 Reid Hoffman on Systems, Levers, and Quixotic Quests When Reid Hoffman creates a handle for some new network or system, his usual choice is “Quixotic.” At an early age, his love of tabletop games inspired him to think of life as a heroic journey, where people come together ...
01.08.2020 Slavoj Žižek on His Stubborn Attachment to Communism This bonus episode features audio from the Holberg Debate in Bergen, Norway between Tyler and Slavoj Žižek held on December 7, 2019. They discuss the reasons Slavoj (still) considers himself a Communist, why he calls The Handmaid’s Tale “nostalgia for ...
12.30.2019 Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. Long before Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 economics Nobel with Michael Kremer and Esther Duflo, he was a fellow graduate student at Harvard with Tyler. For Tyler, Abhijit is one of the brightest ...
12.23.2019 Tyler Looks Back on 2019 (BONUS) Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. For this special retrospective episode, producer Jeff Holmes sat down with Tyler to discuss the past year in conversations and more, including who was most challenging guest to prep for, the most popular—and ...
12.18.2019 Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. Esther Duflo’s advice to students? Spend time in the field. “It's only through this exposure that you can learn how wrong most of your intuitions are and preconceptions are,” she explains. For Duflo, ...
12.04.2019 Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society What determines the economic, social, and political trajectories of nations? Why were settlers in colonies like Jamestown and Australia able to escape the extractive systems desired by their British masters, while colonial subjects in Barbados and Jamaica were not? In ...
11.27.2019 Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen on the Nature and Causes of Progress (Bonus) Over the past year Mark Zuckerberg has held a series of interviews themed around technology and society. This conversation with Tyler and Patrick is the last in that series, and covers why they think the study of progress is so ...
11.20.2019 Shaka Senghor on Incarceration, Identity, and the Gift of Literacy How do you survive seven years in solitary confinement? The gift of literacy is what saved Shaka Senghor. Reading, journaling, academic study, and writing books was a way to structure and survive an inhumane, mentally toxic environment. And after 19 ...
11.13.2019 Lunch with Fuchsia Dunlop at Mama Chang (Bonus) Three years after her first appearance, Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop joins Tyler to celebrate the release of her latest cookbook and talk all things food and China. This time the conversation was held over a special homestyle meal at ...
11.06.2019 Ted Gioia on Music as Cultural Cloud Storage To Ted Gioia, music is a form of cloud storage for preserving human culture. And the real cultural conflict, he insists, is not between “high brow” and “low brow” music, but between the innovative and the formulaic. Imitation and repetition ...
10.23.2019 Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas The one concept most valuable for understanding the news today might be Henry Farrell’s theory of weaponized interdependence. Whether it’s China’s influence over the NBA, the US ban of Huawei, or whether social media should be regulated on a global ...
10.09.2019 Ben Westhoff on Synthetic Drugs, Dive Bars, and the Evolution of Rap Ben Westhoff has written some of Tyler’s favorite books on everything from dive bars to the evolution of American rap music to how fentanyl is driving the opioid epidemic. So how does he get it done? Not from the outside ...
09.25.2019 Alain Bertaud on Cities, Markets, and People Markets, Alain Bertaud likes to say, are like gravity: they exist everywhere. But while urban planners are quite good at taking gravity into account, they tend to ignore market forces entirely in their designs, resulting in city development that too ...
09.11.2019 Samantha Power on Learning How to Make a Difference A former war correspondent and UN ambassador, Samantha Power has had her share of tough assignments. But writing a memoir about it all is also a daunting prospect. The format itself is a challenge: how do you convince the reader ...
08.28.2019 Hollis Robbins on 19th Century Life and Literature As a graduate student, Hollis Robbins helped Henry Louis Gates, Jr. unravel a mystery about the provenance of a mid-19th century book. Robbins helped date the book by discovering allusions to popular literature of that period — her focus at ...
08.14.2019 Masha Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia What sort of country would compel you to flee it, draw you back ten years later, then force you away yet again after two decades? Masha Gessen knows the answer all too well, having dedicated her career to writing and ...
07.31.2019 Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World Born to a Ghanaian father and British mother, Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up splitting time between both countries — and lecturing in many more — before eventually settling in America, where he now teaches philosophy at New York University. This, ...
07.17.2019 Neal Stephenson on Depictions of Reality If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied ...
07.03.2019 Eric Kaufmann on Immigration, Identity, and the Limits of Individualism Going back and forth between Canada and Japan during his childhood sparked Eric Kaufmann’s interest in the question of identity. As a foreigner in an international school, he encountered young individuals from at least 60 other countries, and this made ...

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