Michael Pollan has long been fascinated by nature and the ways we connect and clash with it, with decades of writing covering food, farming, cooking, and architecture. Pollan's latest fascination? Our widespread and ancient desire to use nature to change our consciousness.

He joins Tyler to discuss his research and experience with psychedelics, including what kinds of people most benefit from them, what it can teach us about profundity, how it can change your personality and political views, the importance of culture in shaping the experience, the proper way to integrate it into mainstream practice, and - most importantly of all - whether it's any fun.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded July 20th, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow Michael on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

Perhaps no one else in the world more appreciates the challenges facing a better understanding of autism than Michelle Dawson. An autistic herself, she began researching her condition after experiencing discrimination at her job. "Because I had to address these legal issues and questions," she tells Tyler, "I did actually look at the autism literature, and suddenly I had information I could really work with. Suddenly there it was, this information that I was supposed to be too stupid to work with." And so she continued reading papers - lots and lots of papers - and is now an influential researcher in her own right.

For Michelle, the best way to understand autism is to think of it as atypical information processing. Autistic brains function differently, and these highly varied divergences lead to biases and misunderstanding among typical thinkers, including autism researchers.

In her conversation with Tyler, she outlines the current thinking on autism, including her ideas about cognitive versatility and optionality, hyperlexia and other autistic strengths, why different tests yield wildly different measures of IQ among autistics, her 'massive bias' against segregating autistics, how autistic memory is different, why sometimes a triangle is just a freaking triangle, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded July 9th, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow Michelle on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

At the intersection of programming, economics, cryptography, distributed systems, information theory, and math, you will find Vitalik Buterin, who has managed to synthesize insights across those fields into successful, real-world applications like Ethereum, which aims to decentralize the Internet.

Tyler sat down with Vitalik to discuss the many things he's thinking about and working on, including the nascent field of cryptoeconomics, the best analogy for understanding the blockchain, his desire for more social science fiction, why belief in progress is our most useful delusion, best places to visit in time and space, how he picks up languages, why centralization's not all bad, the best ways to value crypto assets, whether P = NP, and much more.

Do you have a world-changing idea like Vitalik? The Mercatus Center is launching a new fellowship and grant program called Emergent Ventures to support transformational thinkers and doers.

Listen to Tyler talk about the new project on the latest Mercatus Policy Download.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded June 25th, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow Vitalik on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

Travel writer Juan Pablo Villarino had visited 90 countries before making the trek to exotic Arlington, Virginia for this chat with Tyler. Amazingly enough, this recording marked his first trip to the mainland United States, which is now the 91st country in an ever-expanding list.

The world's best hitchhiker talks with Tyler about the joys of connecting with people, why it's so hard to avoid stereotypes (including of hitchhikers), how stamp collecting guides his trips, the darkest secrets of people he's gotten rides from, traveling and writing books with his wife, the cause of violence in the Americas, finding the emotional heart of a journey, where he's going next, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded May 4th, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow Juan on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

Elisa New believes anyone can have fun reading a poem. And that if you really want to have a blast, you shouldn't limit poetry to silent, solitary reading - why not sing, recite, or perform it as has been the case for most of its history?

The Harvard English professor and host of Poetry in America recently sat down with Tyler to discuss poets, poems, and more, including Walt Whitman's city walks, Emily Dickinson's visual art, T.S. Eliot's privilege, Robert Frost's radicalism, Willa Cather's wisdom, poetry's new platforms, the elasticity of English, the payoffs of Puritanism, and what it was like reading poetry with Shaquille O'Neal.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded May 8th, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

For two hours every morning, David Brooks crawls around his living room floor, organizing piles of research. Then, the piles become paragraphs, the paragraphs become columns or chapters, and the process - which he calls "writing" - is complete.

After that he might go out and see some people. A lunch, say, with his friend Tyler. And the two will discuss the things they're thinking, writing, and learning about. And David will feel rejuvenated, for he is a social animal (as are we all).

Then one day David will be asked by Tyler to come on his show, and perform this act publicly. To talk about his love for Bruce Springsteen, being a modern-day Whig, his "religious bisexuality," covenants vs. contracts, today's answer to the "Fallows Question," why failure is overrated, community and loneliness, the upside of being invaded by Canada, and much more.

And though he will be intimidated, David will oblige, and the result is here for you to enjoy.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded May 14th, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow David on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

Though what Taleb was really after was a discussion with Bryan Caplan (which starts at 51:50), the philosopher, mathematician, and author most recently of *Skin in the Game* also generously agreed to a conversation with Tyler.

They discuss the ancient Phoenicians and Greco-Roman heritage of Lebanon, philology, genetics, the blockchain, driverless cars, the advantages of Twitter fights, how to think about religion, fancy food vs. Auntie Anne's pretzels, autodidactism, The Desert of the Tartar, why Taleb refused to give a book tour, inverse role models, why math isn't just a young man's game, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Click here for the full transcript where Bryan Caplan interviews Nassim.

Recorded May 2nd, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow Nassim on Twitter
• Follow Bryan on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

"No single paper is that good", says Bryan Caplan. To really understand a topic, you need to read the entire literature in the field. And to do the kind of scholarship Bryan's work requires, you need to cover multiple fields. Only that way can you assemble a wide variety of evidence into useful knowledge.

But few scholars ever even try to reach the enlightened interdisciplinary plane. So how does he do it?

Tyler explores Bryan's approach, including how to avoid the autodidact's curse, why his favorite philosopher happens to be a former classmate, what Tolstoy has that science fiction lacks, the idea trap, most useful wrong beliefs, effective altruism, Larry David, what most economics papers miss about the return to education, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded April 17th, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow Bryan on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

When Balaji Srinivasan sat down for his conversation with Tyler he was the CEO of Earn.com. Today he is the CTO at Coinbase, which acquired his company in the intervening weeks (congrats Balaji!). But while his job title has changed, his passion remains the same: harnessing the power of the blockchain to launch a new generation of entrepreneurs, businesses, and entire markets.

Balaji talks with Tyler about the potential of the blockchain and beyond, including how firewalls may become the new immigration policy tool, why drones are still underrated, the future of news and academia, what the Silicon Valley opener reveals about how America views the tech industry, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded April 2nd, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow Balaji on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

Is a written dialogue the best way to learn from philosopher Agnes Callard?

If so, what does that say about philosophy? Is Plato's Symposium about love or mere intoxication? If good people lived forever, would they be less bored than the bad people? Should we fear death? Is parenting undertheorized? Must philosophy rely on refutation? Should we read the classics? Is Jordan Peterson's moralizing good? Should we take Socrates at his word? Is Hamlet a Cartesian? Are we all either Beethoven or Mozart people? How do we get ourselves to care about things we don't yet care about? To what should we aspire to?

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

Recorded March 22nd, 2018 Other ways to connect

• Follow us on Twitter and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on Twitter
• Follow Agnes on Twitter
• Email us: [email protected]
• Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.