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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.
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Richard Hanania on Conrad's Nostromo, Latin American Crime, and Populism
Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, widely considered his masterpiece, follows a fictional Latin American country torn apart by corruption and its uneasy dependence on foreign capital. Tyler and Richard Hanania picked it hoping to talk about somethin
Roman Mars on Flags, Phones, and the Design of Everyday Life
Roman Mars has built one of podcasting's great empires out of noticing things everyone else walks past. His show, 99% Invisible, has racked up over 500 million downloads telling stories about the unnoticed design choices that quietly shape
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 decisions helped cause the Great Depression; his new book, 1873: Th
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 academia for a stint as a member of the European Parliament before
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 that, the Fund's chief economist, she worked on sovereign d
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 competent state would have pre-filled — roughly fifty a year
Jared Diamond on Leaders, Luck, and Irreplaceability
Is leadership overrated? That's one simple reading of what Jared Diamond argues in his new book (https://www.harpercollins.com/products/profits-prophets-coaches-and-kings-jared-diamond?variant=46262156066850). Asked by Tyler to name the lea
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 Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in the middle of his 38 yea
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 priesthood. He now runs the Cluny Institute and teaches at Cathol
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 times. Where Daron's first visit was about how states and s
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 supplanted by those chasing marriage and domesticity instead.
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 about. In Vermeer's case, that context includes a forgotten
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 principles didn't land until he lived them: throwing tennis ma
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 nearly all of human history, cleverness didn't compound. Wha
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 medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a
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 and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is
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 and now based in Britain, she has written acclaimed histori
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 Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, covers the 300-year Ptolemaic
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 credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unkn
Craig Newmark on Institutional Maintenance, Giving Away Control, and the Internet We Were Promised (Live at 92NY)
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, and now funds people and gets out of their way. His theory, a
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 book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman
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-shaped career: French horn player, economist, president of th
Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together
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 bo
Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy
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. His new book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Cont
Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English
Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup. Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's conviction that great literature is where
Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires
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
Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929
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. Maybe the real probl
Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts
Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading. This work includes his award-winning Cranmer biography, his sweeping histories of Christianity and the Reformation, and his latest o
Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work
At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading verse to economists building eval
Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective
Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year on CWT and more, including covering the most popular a
