Conversations with Tyler

Mercatus Center at George Mason University

  • 1 hour 4 minutes
    Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together

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    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 books of 2026. Paul brings both an outsider's eye and ground-level knowledge to Mexican history, having grown up in Cork — a place he'd argue gave him an instinctive feel for fierce local autonomy and land hunger —earning his doctorate on the Mexican Revolution under Alan Knight at Oxford, and doing his fieldwork in the pueblos of Guerrero.

    He and Tyler range across five centuries of Mexican history, from why Mexico held together after independence when every other post-colonial superstate collapsed, to why Yucatán is now one of the safest places on earth, what two leaders from Oaxaca tell us about Mexican politics, how Mexico avoided the military coups that plagued the rest of Latin America, what Cárdenas's land reform actually achieved versus what it promised, whether the ejido system held Mexico back, why Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital, how Mexico's fertility rate fell below America's, why Guerrero has been violent for two centuries, why the new judicial reforms are a disaster, where to find the best food in Mexico and Manhattan, what a cache of illicit Mexican silver sitting on a ship in the English Channel has to do with his next book, and more.

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

    Recorded February 27th, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:01:30 - Post-Independence Mexico

    00:05:18 - Peace in Yucatán

    00:6:54 - Quintana Roo

    00:08:24 - Mexican Infrastructure

    00:10:26 - Oaxaca

    00:13:54 - Great Food Outside Cities

    00:16:39 - Leaders from Coahuila

    00:17:50 - Military Rule and Civil War in Mexico

    00:21:47 - The Cárdenas Regime

    00:24:03 - The Ejido System

    00:25:49 - Human Capital

    00:40:59 - Doing Mexican History as a Brit

    00:42:43 - Guerrero

    00:48:37 - Michoacán Violence

    00:50:44 - Monterrey

    00:52:40 - Judicial Reforms

    00:54:44 - The Best Mexican Film, Music, and Novel

    00:59:42 - The Best Trip Around Mexico

    01:04:05 - Outro

    25 March 2026, 11:30 am
  • 49 minutes 27 seconds
    Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy

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    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 Control, argues that Machiavelli didn't just write about politics—he invented the intellectual machinery of the modern world, starting with the concept of "effectual truth," which Mansfield credits as the seed of modern empiricism. At 93, after 61 years of teaching at Harvard, Mansfield remains cheerfully unimpressed by most of contemporary philosophy, convinced that the great books are self-sustaining, and that irony is what separates serious philosophy from the rest.

    Tyler and Harvey discuss how Machiavelli's concept of fact was brand new, why his longest chapter is a how-to guide for conspiracy, whether America's 20th-century wars refute the conspiratorial worldview, Trump as a Shakespearean vulgarian who is in some ways more democratic than the rest of us, why Bronze Age Pervert should not be taken as a model for Straussianism, the time he tried to introduce Nietzsche to Quine, why Rawls needed more Locke, what it was like to hear Churchill speak at Margate in 1953, whether great books are still being written, how his students have and haven't changed over 61 years of teaching, the eclipse rather than decline of manliness, and what Aristotle got right about old age 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 January 22nd, 2026.

    This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Bumper

    00:00:36 - Intro

    00:01:20 - Machiavelli's "Effectual Truth"

    00:05:56 - Conspiracy Theories

    00:12:39 - The Vulgarity of Democracy

    00:16:35 - The Future of Straussianism

    00:34:30 - Why the Supply of Great Books has Dried Up

    00:37:56 - Rational Control vs. Spontaneous Order

    00:40:25 - Winston Churchill

    00:43:30 - Students at Harvard

    00:46:05 - Manliness

    00:47:34 - Death and Politics

    00:48:56 - Outro

    Image Credit: Erin Clark via Getty Images

    18 March 2026, 11:30 am
  • 59 minutes 7 seconds
    Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

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    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 ideas "walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world" in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry's book Second Act "one of the very best books written on talent," sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly.

    Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke's proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play's connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece, assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it's a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says "I did yield to him," before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn't, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand's villains are more relevant now than ever, 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 January 12th, 2026.

    This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:01:40 - What Shakespeare is really saying in Measure for Measure

    00:29:17 - The best way to consume Shakespeare

    00:32:26 - Jane Austen, Adam Smith, and Jonathan Swift

    00:39:29 - Advertising that works

    00:44:37 - Things that are under- and overrated in literature

    00:51:24 - Late bloomers

    00:58:36 - Outro

    Image Credit: Sam Alburger

    4 March 2026, 12:00 pm
  • 53 minutes 24 seconds
    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 attention to Africa with How Africa Works. Tyler calls it excellent, extremely well-researched, and essential reading, but does Studwell's optimism about the continent hold up under scrutiny?

    Tyler and Joe explore whether population density actually solves development, which African countries are likely to achieve stable growth, whether Africa has a manufacturing future, why state infrastructure projects decay while farmer-led irrigation thrives, what progress looks like in education and public health, whether charter cities or special economic zones can work, and how permanent Africa's colonial borders really are. After testing Joe's optimism about Africa, Tyler shifts back to Asia: what Japan and South Korea will do about depopulation, why industrial policy worked in East Asia but failed in India and Brazil, what went wrong in Thailand, and what Joe will tackle next.

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

    Recorded January 23rd, 2026.

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    Image Credit: Nick J.B. Moore

    18 February 2026, 12:30 pm
  • 56 minutes 20 seconds
    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 problem was the "Negative Nellies" who panicked afterward rather than the speculators everyone blamed. For that matter, isn't 2008 looking less and less like a bubble with each passing year?

    Tyler and Andrew debate whether those 1929 stock prices were justified, what Fed and policy choices might have prevented the Depression, whether Glass-Steagall was built on a flawed premises, what surprised Andrew most about the 1920s beyond the crash itself, how business leaders then would compare to today's CEOs, whether US banks should consolidate, how Andrew would reform US banking regulation, what to make of narrow banking proposals and stablecoins, whether retail investors should get access to private equity and venture capital, why sports gambling and new financial regulations won't make us much safer, how Andrew broke into the New York Times at age 18, how he manages his information diet, what he learned co-creating Billions, what he plans on learning about next, and more.

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

    Recorded October 30th, 2025.

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    Image Credit: Mike Cohen

    4 February 2026, 12:30 pm
  • 59 minutes 42 seconds
    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 on sex and the church, which demonstrates what MacCulloch calls the historian's true vocation: unsettling settled facts to keep humanity sane.

    Tyler and Diarmaid explore whether monotheism correlates with monogamy, Christianity's early instinct towards egalitarianism, what the Eucharistic revolution reveals about the cathedral building boom, the role of Mary in Christianity and Islam, where Michel Foucault went wrong on sexuality, the significance of the clerical family replacing the celibate monk, why Elizabeth I—not Henry VIII—mattered most for the English Reformation, why English Renaissance music began so brilliantly but then needed to start importing Germans, whether Christianity needs hell to survive, what MacCulloch plans to do next, and more.

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

    Recorded October 29th, 2025.

    This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

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    Image Credit: Barry Jones

    21 January 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 1 hour 1 minute
    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 evaluation frameworks—and has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history.

    Tyler and Brendan discuss why Mercor pays poets $150 an hour, why AI labs need rubrics more than raw text, whether we should enshrine the aesthetic standards of past eras rather than current ones, how quickly models are improving at economically valuable tasks, how long until AI can stump Cass Sunstein, the coming shift toward knowledge workers building RL environments instead of doing repetitive analysis, how to interview without falling for vibes, why nepotism might make a comeback as AI optimizes everyone's cover letters, scaling the Thiel Fellowship 100,000X, what his 8th-grade donut empire taught him about driving out competition, the link between dyslexia and entrepreneurship, dining out and dating in San Francisco, Mercor's next steps, and more.

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

    Recorded October 16th, 2025.

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    Timestamps

    00:00:00 - Hiring poets to teach AI

    00:05:29 - Measuring real-world AI progress

    00:13:25 - Why rubrics are the new oil

    00:18:44 - Enshrining taste in LLMs

    00:22:38 - Turning society into one giant RL machine

    00:26:37 - When AI will stump experts

    00:30:46 - AI and employment

    00:35:05 - Why vibes-based hiring fails

    00:39:55 - Solving labor market matching problems

    00:45:01 - Scaling the Thiel Fellowship

    00:48:11 - A hypothetical gap year

    00:50:31 - Donuts, debates, and dyslexia

    00:56:15 - Dating and dining out

    00:59:01 - Mercor's next steps

    7 January 2026, 1:00 pm
  • 59 minutes 32 seconds
    Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective

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    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 and underrated episodes, why single-subject deep dives made for some of the best conversations this year, the biggest AI surprises and how LLMs changed the show's production function, what happened with the Magnus Carlsen episode, listener questions on everything from hotel selection to AI x-risk discourse, Tyler's serene acknowledgment that uncontrollable laughter is something he has neither experienced nor desires, reviewing his pop culture picks from 2015, and a dispatch from Muscat, Oman.

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

    Recorded November 5th and December 15th, 2025.

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    Timestamps

    00:00:00 - Favorite episodes of the year

    00:12:08 - AI's impact on the show

    00:15:05 - The lost Magnus episode

    00:17:13 - Tyler's #1 hotel amenity

    00:18:40 - Tyler's growing influence and thoughts on tariffs

    00:21:15 - AI x-risk discourse

    00:26:22 – Copying Tyler's interview style

    00:28:50 - Tyler's lack of joy

    00:32:55 - How well ChatGPT answers as Tyler

    00:35:15 - Tyler's 2015 movie picks

    00:40:44 - Tyler's 2015 book picks

    00:45:00 - Tyler's 2015 music picks

    00:48:16 - Most popular episodes and thoughts on Oman

    Photo Credit: Kevin Trimmer

    23 December 2025, 10:00 am
  • 1 hour 1 minute
    Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

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    Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of the world from limited data. Her central insight is that babies learn like scientists, running experiments and updating beliefs based on evidence. But Tyler wonders: are scientists actually good learners? It's a question that leads them into a wide-ranging conversation about what we've been systematically underestimating in young minds, what's wrong with simple nature-versus-nurture frameworks, and whether AI represents genuine intelligence or just a very sophisticated library.

    Tyler and Alison cover how children systematically experiment on the world and what study she'd run with $100 million, why babies are more conscious than adults and what consciousness even means, episodic memory and aphantasia, whether Freud got anything right about childhood and what's held up best from Piaget, how we should teach young children versus school-age kids, how AI should change K-12 education and Gopnik's case that it's a cultural technology rather than intelligence, whether the enterprise of twin studies makes sense and why she sees nature versus nurture as the wrong framework entirely, autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories, whether the success of her siblings belies her skepticism about genetic inheritance, her new project on the economics and philosophy of caregiving, and more.

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

    Recorded October 30th, 2025.

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    Timestamps

    00:00:00 - How children—and scientists—learn

    00:14:35 - Consciousness, episodic memories, and aphantasia

    00:23:06 - Freud's and Piaget's theories about childhood

    00:27:49 - Twin studies and nature vs. nurture

    00:39:33 - Teaching strategies for younger vs. older children

    00:44:07 - AI's ability to generate novel insights

    00:53:57 - What Autism and ADHD diagnoses do and don't reveal

    00:58:02 - The success of the Gopnik siblings

    Photo Credit: Rod Searcey

    17 December 2025, 12:30 pm
  • 59 minutes 56 seconds
    Gaurav Kapadia on New York City, Investing, and Contemporary Art

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    Gaurav Kapadia has deliberately avoided publicity throughout his career in investing, which makes this conversation a rare window into how he thinks. He now runs XN, a firm built around concentrated bets on a small number of companies with long holding periods. However, his education in judgment began much earlier, in a two-family house in Flushing that his parents converted into a four-family house. It was there where a young Gaurav served as de facto landlord, collecting rent and negotiating late payments at age 10. That grounding now expresses itself across an unusual range of domains: Tyler invited him on the show not just as an investor, but as someone with a rare ability to judge quality in cities, talent, art, and more with equal fluency.

    Tyler and Gaurav discuss how Queens has thrived without new infrastructure, what he'd change as "dictator" of Flushing, whether Robert Moses should rise or fall in status, who's the most underrated NYC mayor, what's needed to attract better mayoral candidates, the weirdest place in NYC, why he initially turned down opportunities in investment banking for consulting, bonding with Rishi Sunak over railroads, XN's investment philosophy, maintaining founder energy in investment firms and how he hires to prevent complacency, AI's impact on investing, the differences between New York and London finance, the most common fundraising mistake art museums make, why he collects only American artists within 20 years of his own age, what makes Kara Walker and Rashid Johnson and Salman Toor special, whether buying art makes you a better investor, his new magazine Totei celebrating craft and craftsmanship, 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 October 8th, 2025.

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    Timestamps

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:01:32 - Queens and NYC's geography

    00:08:36 - New York City mayors and electoral politics

    00:13:22 - Building a career in investing

    00:18:50 - XN's investment philosophy

    00:24:35 - Maintaining founder energy in investment firms

    00:30:45 - The sociology of finance in NYC, London, and UAE

    00:32:21 - How AI is reshaping investing

    00:36:53 - Museum operations

    00:42:21 - Favorite artists

    00:50:39 - Tastes in art and how the canon will evolve

    00:57:22 - Totei, a new venture

    10 December 2025, 11:30 am
  • 1 hour 32 minutes
    Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other

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    Dan Wang argues that China is a nation of engineers while America is a nation of lawyers, and this distinction explains everything from subway construction to pandemic response to why Chinese citizens will never have yards with dogs. His prescription: America should become 20% more engineering-minded to fix its broken infrastructure, while China needs to be 50% more lawyerly so the Communist Party can stop strangling individual rights and the creative impulses of its people. But would a more lawyerly China constrain state power, or just create new tools for oppression? And aren't the American suburbs actually sterling achievements where the infrastructure works quite well?

    Tyler and Dan debate whether American infrastructure is actually broken or just differently optimized, why health care spending should reach 35% of GDP, how lawyerly influences shaped East Asian development differently than China, China's lack of a liberal tradition and why it won't democratize like South Korea or Taiwan did, its economic dysfunction despite its manufacturing superstars, Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives, a 10-day itinerary for Yunnan, James C. Scott's work on Zomia, whether Beijing or Shanghai is the better city, Liu Cixin and why volume one of The Three-Body Problem is the best, why contemporary Chinese music and film have declined under Xi, Chinese marriage markets and what it's like to be elderly in China, the Dan Wang production function, why Stendhal is his favorite novelist and Rossini's Comte Ory moves him, what Dan wants to learn next, whether LLMs will make Tyler's hyper-specific podcast questions obsolete, what flavor of drama their conversation turned out to be, and more.

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

    Recorded October 31st, 2025.

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    Timestamps 00:00:00 - American infrastructure and suburban life 00:05:18 - American vs. Chinese infrastructure buildouts... 00:12:25 - And health care investment 00:17:52 - Chinese suburbs 00:20:10 - The existing lawyerly influence in East Asia 00:25:12 - China's lack of a liberal tradition 00:29:35 - Why China's won't democratize 00:33:49 - China's economic disfunction 00:38:44 - China's expansionism 00:41:55 - Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives 00:46:50 - Chinese cities and regional culture 00:59:44 - James C. Scott, Zomia, and elite culture 01:06:27 - A 10-day Yunnan itinerary 01:11:57 - On Chinese arts, literature, and cultural expression 01:18:23 - The Dan Wang production function 01:30:34 - Tyler's grand strategy, or lack thereof

    3 December 2025, 12:50 pm
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