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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Sep 30, 2026 · 50:51
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…
Sep 23, 2026 · 55:53
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,…
Sep 16, 2026 · 56:23
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…
Sep 9, 2026 · 52:19
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…
Sep 2, 2026 · 41:54
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…
Aug 19, 2026 · 52:01
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…
Aug 12, 2026 · 55:38
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…
Aug 5, 2026 · 55:14
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…
Jul 22, 2026 · 56:46
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…
Jul 15, 2026 · 54:06
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…
Jul 8, 2026 · 46:00
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?…
Jun 24, 2026 · 50:04
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…
Jun 17, 2026 · 53:05
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…
Jun 10, 2026 · 1:01:20
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…
May 27, 2026 · 45:57
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…
May 13, 2026 · 55:30
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…
Apr 29, 2026 · 46:54
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,…
Apr 15, 2026 · 1:01:15
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…
Apr 1, 2026 · 59:44
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…
Mar 25, 2026 · 1:04:36
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…
Mar 18, 2026 · 49:27
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…
Mar 4, 2026 · 59:07
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…
Feb 18, 2026 · 53:24
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…
Feb 4, 2026 · 56:20
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…
Jan 21, 2026 · 59:42
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…
Jan 7, 2026 · 1:01:18
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…
Dec 23, 2025 · 59:32
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…
Dec 17, 2025 · 1:01:18
Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children…
Dec 10, 2025 · 59:56
Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Gaurav Kapadia has deliberately avoided publicity throughout his career in investing,…
Dec 3, 2025 · 1:32:58
Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Dan Wang argues that China is a nation of engineers while America is a nation of lawyers,…
Nov 26, 2025 · 1:19:46
Cass Sunstein is one of the most widely cited legal scholars of all time and among the most prolific writers working today. This year alone he has five books out, including…
Nov 19, 2025 · 37:46
Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he's building a new generation of…
Nov 12, 2025 · 57:04
Register for the Austin listener meetup Donald S. Lopez Jr. is among the foremost scholars of Buddhism, whose work consistently distinguishes Buddhist reality from Western…
Nov 5, 2025 · 54:53
Register for the Austin listener meetup Sam Altman makes his second appearance on the show to discuss how he's managing OpenAI's explosive growth, what he's learned about hiring…
Oct 28, 2025 · 52:04
Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and…
Oct 15, 2025 · 1:08:42
George Selgin has spent over four decades thinking about money, banking, and economic history, and Tyler has known him for nearly all of it. Selgin's new book False Dawn: The New…
Oct 1, 2025 · 59:32
John Amaechi is a former NBA forward/center who became a chartered scientist, professor of leadership at Exeter Business School, and New York Times bestselling author. His newest…
Sep 24, 2025 · 45:58
Steven Pinker returns to Conversations with Tyler with an argument that common knowledge—those infinite loops of "I know that you know that I know"—is the hidden infrastructure…
Sep 17, 2025 · 51:07
David Commins, author of the new book Saudi Arabia: A Modern History , brings decades of scholarship and firsthand experience to explain the kingdom's unlikely rise. Tyler and…
Sep 3, 2025 · 54:41
Seamus Murphy is an Irish photographer and filmmaker who has spent decades documenting life in some of the world's most challenging places—from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to…
Aug 20, 2025 · 1:10:18
David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture. Having evolved from a Democratic socialist to a neoconservative to what he now calls "the rightward…
Aug 13, 2025 · 1:03:43
In his third appearance on Conversations with Tyler, Nate Silver looks back at past predictions, weighs how academic ideas such as expected utility theory fare in practice, and…
Aug 6, 2025 · 57:38
Annie Jacobsen has a favorite word for America's nuclear doctrine: madness. It's madness that any single person has six minutes to decide the fate of civilization, madness that…
Jul 23, 2025 · 1:07:18
Helen Castor is a British historian and BBC broadcaster who left Cambridge because she wanted to write narrative history focused on individuals rather than the analytical style…
Jul 9, 2025 · 59:34
David Robertson is a rare conductor who unites avant-garde complexity with accessibility. After serving as music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez's…
Jun 25, 2025 · 58:40
Austan Goolsbee is one of Tyler Cowen's favorite economists—not because they always agree, but because Goolsbee embodies what it means to think like an economist. Whether he's…
Jun 18, 2025 · 58:55
Most people who leave Wall Street after twenty years either retire or find another way to make a lot of money. Chris Arnade chose to walk through cities most travelers never…
Jun 11, 2025 · 1:05:48
Any Austin has carved a unique niche for himself on YouTube: analyzing seemingly mundane or otherwise overlooked details in video games with the seriousness of an art critic…
Jun 4, 2025 · 1:04:45
John Arnold built his fortune in energy trading by surrounding himself with smart people, maintaining emotional detachment, sensing market imbalances through first-principles…
May 21, 2025 · 57:34
Get tickets to the CWT live show at 92NY with David Brooks! Theodore Schwartz stands at the pinnacle of neurosurgical expertise. With over 500 published articles, 200 pieces of…
May 7, 2025 · 1:02:40
Few understand both the promise and limitations of artificial general intelligence better than Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic. With a background in journalism and the…
Apr 30, 2025 · 1:00:34
Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff approaches global finance with the same strategic foresight that made him a chess grandmaster. Author of the new book Our Dollar, Your Problem,…
Apr 23, 2025 · 1:02:51
Chris Dixon believes we're at a pivotal inflection point in the internet's evolution. As a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of Read Write Own , Chris believes…
Apr 16, 2025 · 59:22
It's Beatles day! In this deep dive into one of music's most legendary partnerships, Ian Leslie and Tyler unpack the complex relationship between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.…
Apr 9, 2025 · 54:08
Jennifer Pahlka believes America's bureaucratic dysfunction is deeply rooted in outdated processes and misaligned incentives. As the founder of Code for America and co-founder of…
Apr 2, 2025 · 59:11
Sheilagh Ogilvie has spent decades examining the institutional structures that shaped European economic history, challenging conventional wisdom about everything from guilds to…
Mar 19, 2025 · 1:08:40
What happens when a liberal thinker shifts his attention from polarization to economic abundance? Ezra Klein's new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance , argues for an agenda of…
Mar 5, 2025 · 51:43
Carl Zimmer is one of the finest science communicators of our time, having spent decades writing about biology, evolution, and heredity. His latest (and 16 th ) book, Air-Borne:…
Feb 19, 2025 · 1:23:14
How much of your life's trajectory was set in motion centuries ago? Gregory Clark has spent decades studying social mobility, and his findings suggest that where you land in…
Feb 5, 2025 · 1:13:38
Sign Up for the Boston Listener Meet Up For Ross Douthat, phenomena like UFO sightings and the simulation hypothesis don't challenge religious belief—they demonstrate how…
Jan 22, 2025 · 1:00:42
Sign Up for the Boston Listener Meet Up Joe Boyd was there when Dylan went electric, when Pink Floyd was born, and when Paul Simon brought Graceland to the world. But far from…
Jan 8, 2025 · 1:08:14
Scott Sumner didn't follow the typical path to economic influence. He nearly lost his teaching job before tenure, did his best research after most academics slow down, and found…
Dec 25, 2024 · 58:05
Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show…
Dec 11, 2024 · 54:42
Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give What can Thomas Hardy's tortured marriages teach us about love, obsession, and second chances? In this episode,…
Dec 4, 2024 · 1:26:25
Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give In his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin shows how totalitarian power worked not just…
Nov 25, 2024 · 1:01:41
In this crossover episode with EconTalk , Tyler joins Russ Roberts for an in-depth exploration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate , a monumental novel often described as the…
Nov 13, 2024 · 47:19
Neal Stephenson's ability to illuminate complex, future-focused ideas in ways that both provoke thought and spark wonder has established him as one of the most innovative…
Oct 30, 2024 · 56:38
Christopher Kirchhoff is an expert in emerging technology who founded the Pentagon's Silicon Valley office. He's led teams for President Obama, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs…
Oct 16, 2024 · 49:03
Subscribe to Pluralist Points on YouTube , Spotify , or Apple Podcasts Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and assistant professor at Stony Brook University whose research explores…
Oct 9, 2024 · 50:26
Tom Tugendhat has served as a Member of Parliament since 2015, holding roles such as Security Minister and chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. Before entering…
Oct 2, 2024 · 1:05:04
Kyla Scanlon has made it her personal mission to bring economics education to a larger audience through social media. She publishes daily content across TikTok, YouTube,…
Sep 18, 2024 · 54:04
Tobi Lütke is the CEO and co-founder of Shopify. 20 years ago, he was just a German coder who emigrated to Canada to launch some ecommerce platform with another German. Now he's…
Sep 4, 2024 · 1:11:56
Register for our LA Listener Meetup Philip Ball is an award-winning science writer who has penned over 30 books on a dizzying variety of subjects. Holding degrees in chemistry…
Aug 21, 2024 · 59:45
In his second appearance, Nate Silver joins the show to cover the intersections of predictions, politics, and poker with Tyler. They tackle how coin flips solve status quo bias,…
Aug 7, 2024 · 59:13
Paul Bloom is a renowned psychologist and writer specializing in moral psychology, particularly how moral thoughts and actions develop in children. But his interests and books…
Jul 24, 2024 · 57:06
Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Alan Taylor is Tyler's pick for one of the greatest living historians. His many books cover the early American Republic, American westward…
Jul 10, 2024 · 58:12
Register for the DC Listener Meetup It's not just the churrasco that made him fall in love with Brazil. Brian Winter has been studying and writing about Latin America for over 20…
Jun 26, 2024 · 49:38
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz joined Tyler for a discussion that weaves through Joe's career and key contributions, including what he learned from giving an…
Jun 12, 2024 · 51:50
Take our Listener Survey You could try playing out the four-dimensional chess game of how the global order will shift in the next 10-15 years for yourself, or you could hire…
May 29, 2024 · 1:02:10
Take our Listener Survey Michael Nielsen is a scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and the modern open science movement. He's worked at Y Combinator, co-authored on…
May 15, 2024 · 1:06:08
Take our Listener Survey Benjamin Moser is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer celebrated for his in-depth studies of literary and cultural figures such as Susan Sontag and Clarice…
May 1, 2024 · 56:59
Coleman Hughes believes we should strive to ignore race both in public policy and in our private lives. But when it comes to personal identity and expression, how feasible is…
Apr 17, 2024 · 1:14:36
In this conversation recorded live in Miami, Tyler and Peter Thiel dive deep into the complexities of political theology, including why it's a concept we still need today, why…
Apr 3, 2024 · 59:56
In The Anxious Generation , Jonathan Haidt explores the simultaneous rise in teen mental illness across various countries, attributing it to a seismic shift from a "play-based…
Mar 27, 2024 · 1:07:12
Those who know Fareed Zakaria through his weekly column or CNN show may be surprised to learn he considers books the important way he can put new ideas in the world. But Fareed's…
Mar 20, 2024 · 49:05
Marilynne Robinson is one of America's best and best-known novelists and essayists, whose award-winning works like Housekeeping and Gilead explore themes of faith, grace, and the…
Mar 13, 2024 · 27:31
In this interview, recorded at a16z's 2024 American Dynamism Summit, Tyler and Marc Andreessen engage in a rapid-fire dialogue about the future of AI, including the biggest…
Mar 6, 2024 · 56:06
Marc Rowan, co-founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management, joined Tyler to discuss why rising interest rates won't hurt Apollo's profitability, why liabilities have…
Feb 21, 2024 · 56:38
A conductor, harpsichordist, and organist, Masaaki Suzuki stands as a towering figure in Baroque music, renowned for his comprehensive and top-tier recordings of Bach's works,…
Feb 7, 2024 · 54:28
Ami Vitale is a renowned National Geographic photographer and documentarian with a deep commitment to wildlife conservation and environmental education. Her work, spanning over a…
Jan 24, 2024 · 1:03:53
Rebecca F. Kuang just might change the way you think about fantasy and science fiction. Known for her best-selling books Babel and The Poppy War trilogy, Kuang combines a unique…
Jan 10, 2024 · 54:18
Few can measure the impact of a blog post they wrote, in the millions of dollars a year, but Patrick McKenzie has the receipts. His 2012 post on salary negotiation is read…
Dec 27, 2023 · 1:07:52
On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including the most popular and underrated episodes, the…
Dec 13, 2023 · 1:42:22
In her third appearance on the show, Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop joins Tyler and a group of special guests to celebrate the release of Invitation to a Banquet , her new…
Nov 29, 2023 · 1:01:54
John Gray is a philosopher and writer renowned for his critical examination of liberalism, atheism, and the human condition. His unique perspective is shaped over a decades-long…
Nov 15, 2023 · 59:44
Jenn ifer Burns is a professor of history at Stanford who works at the intersection of intellectual, political, and cultural history. She's written two biographies Tyler highly…
Nov 8, 2023 · 1:01:18
Brian Koppelman is a writer, director, and producer known for his work on films like Rounders and Solitary Man, the hit TV show Billions , and his podcast The Moment , which…
Nov 2, 2023 · 45:25
As a follow-up to the episode featuring Stephen Jennings , we're releasing two bonus conversations showing the daily life, culture, and politics of Nairobi and Kenya at large.…
Nov 2, 2023 · 42:37
As a follow-up to the episode featuring Stephen Jennings , we're releasing two bonus conversations showing the daily life, culture, and politics of Nairobi and Kenya at large.…
Nov 1, 2023 · 53:42
Stephen and Tyler first met over thirty years ago while working on economic reforms in New Zealand. With a distinguished career that transitioned from the New Zealand Treasury to…
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