• 52 minutes 1 second
    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 Catholic University. His book Wanting made René Girard legible to a general audience; the new one, The One and the Ninety-Nine, takes mimetic theory into the dynamics of self and crowd in an age of social contagion.

    He joined Tyler to discuss whether the age of pessimism is ending, why the Anglo world in particular seems so unhappy, whether Dostoevsky or Thomas Mann better diagnoses modernity, the kind of reader his own book would ruin, why he thinks AI will make social contagion weaker, what put him off consulting with Anthropic on Claude's constitution, what effective altruism misses, why men and women are drifting apart, what he'd fund in every American city, the case for reintroducing friction, whether a Gnostic reading of the lost sheep explains our moment, what Rod Dreher gets right about withdrawal, why Genoa is Italy's most underrated city, what confession times reveal about a church, why Italians seem tired of their Catholicism, why he didn't become a priest, where he differs from Ross Douthat, why exorcists appear to be on the rise, the sudden mimetic antisemitism on the right, the book his 23-year-old self would have hated, what he secretly admires about Silicon Valley, why Michigan never left him, what the original Cluny can teach a modern talent network, how he hopes to face his own death, what he'll do next, and more.

    Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

    Recorded April 30th, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:05:08 - On overapplying mimetic theory

    00:06:35 - On AI and social contagion

    00:07:53 - On declining Anthropic's invitation

    00:09:36 - On the widening gap between men and women

    00:12:25 - On anti-mimetic postures, jazz, and porn

    00:16:46 - On Genoa, Naples, and societal escape fantasies

    00:18:31 - On Italian Catholicism

    00:26:59 - On not becoming a priest

    00:29:13 - On beauty, enchantment, and the Gnostic sheep

    00:40:22 - On what Wall Street taught him

    00:43:50 - On Michigan

    00:45:12 - On the Cluny Institute

    00:48:41 - On dealing with death and what else is next

    00:51:21 - Outro

    Image credit: Kirth Bobb

    19 August 2026, 12:00 pm
  • 55 minutes 38 seconds
    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 societies contend for the narrow corridor in which liberty survives, this one asks what liberals themselves got wrong, and the answer implicates the educated elite—that is to say, you.

    Tyler and Daron discuss what's wrong with social contract theories and Rousseau's general will, whether Acemoglu is more objectivist than Rorty, why he blames left liberalism's own establishment power for its collapse, what standard is left once you refuse to have a book of higher values, nondomination versus noninterference, who counts as working class, why automation alone will not lead to widespread prosperity, how he can call himself a free speech absolutist while wanting to regulate social media, why he worries we've given up on educating Americans, whether teachers' unions need to be reconstituted, what the life expectancy for an educated twenty year old is today, whether open-source models undercut the centralization worry, what pro-worker AI actually means, why the fertility crisis leaves him strangely close to a real business cycle position, whether AI will raise his own already prodigious paper output, why Armenia has disappointed economically, what he wants to learn next, and more.

    Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

    Recorded July 15th, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:08:57 - On the working class vs. the elite

    00:13:16 - On automation

    00:22:33 - On free speech

    00:27:22 - On immigration

    00:31:08 - On artificial intelligence

    00:50:36 - On Armenia

    00:53:22 - On what comes next

    00:54:51 - Outro

    Image credit: Bryce Vickmark

    12 August 2026, 11:10 am
  • 55 minutes 14 seconds
    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. That disorienting reversal is the engine of her book Motherland, a National Book Award finalist that reconstructs modern Russian history almost entirely through its women. Her account, drawn from her own family's history as well as the archives, keeps returning to one plain observation: Soviet policy pushed women into the workforce, the medical schools, and even into combat, while asking so little of men that low expectations became self-fulfilling—and Russia is still living with the results.

    Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia's great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist government established women's medical courses in 1872, changing attitudes towards abortion and birth control in the 20th century, why the Soviet regime turned prudish, how Khrushchev's plan to "replace the dead" institutionalized single motherhood, Russian superwomen, why Jewish men were a prized commodity amid rampant antisemitism, the cultural significance of flowers, why a few Russian names still dominate, why Russian women think Western feminists have their priorities backwards, how gender attitudes and autocracy feed into each other, three underrated Russian novels, what she wants to write about next, and more.

    Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

    Recorded April 7th, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:06:38 - Bolshevik feminism

    00:08:41 - Birth control, abortion, and prudery

    00:14:48 - The Russian mating market

    00:23:06 - Russian superwomen

    00:32:02 - The importance of flowers

    00:37:35 - Common Russian names

    00:39:51 - Russian vs. American feminism

    00:44:23 - Gender attitudes and Russian politics

    00:49:54 - Russian novels

    00:54:33 - Outro

    Photo credit: Max Avdeev

    5 August 2026, 11:23 am
  • 56 minutes 46 seconds
    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 liberal sect — the Remonstrants and Collegiants, Christians without a church who believed peace would come through reading and toleration rather than a returning Messiah. Recover that world and a woman alone in a sunlit room is a radical image in a Europe where half of Germany had just died in war. If he's right, the label beside every Vermeer in every museum will one day have to change.

    Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we'd rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of the Catholic Faith, whether Vermeer painted for money or pointedly refused to, where the Gardner's stolen Concert might be, why Dutch music never blossomed as much as Dutch painting did, how the Church of England rivaled the Cultural Revolution in wiping out British art, whether you can still spot an English painting on sight, the love that saturates late Rembrandt and the mystery of his soaring print prices, the nail on the wall that proves two Vermeer paintings are a pair, why the French are to blame for George Stubbs' lack of status, whether we can still love Malevich, why Andrews calls recent Richter "almost like printing money," why female artists and antique textiles remain absurdly cheap, why nobody builds beautiful neighborhoods any longer, 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 April 7th, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:00:44 - The Mystery of Vermeer

    00:12:53 - Dutch Music

    00:15:51 - English Art

    00:19:49 - Rembrandt

    00:23:17 - Attributions

    00:26:22 - Exhibitions and Restorations

    00:30:05 - Underrated French Artists

    00:35:16 - Howard Hodgkin

    00:38:00 - Difficult-To-Love Artists

    00:40:53 - Other Dutch Painters

    00:44:20 - Contemporary Art

    00:48:05 - Buying Art

    00:50:39 - Neighborhood Aesthetics

    00:54:39 - Advice for Aspiring Art Critics

    00:56:14 - Outro

    Image Credit: Aliona Adrianova

    22 July 2026, 11:30 am
  • 54 minutes 6 seconds
    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 matches as a bored teenager, getting shipped off to shovel manure at a feed yard twelve hours later, then spending five years battling Brazilian bureaucracy to build a fertilizer terminal that should have taken one. Today he is Executive Vice President of Origination and Partnerships, leader and donor to Stand Together, plays lead guitar in a band named for the law of entropy, and has a new book with his father on principle-driven leadership.

    Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father's lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa's grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De'Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents' garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it's like working with MrBeast, how Koch Inc has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the "farm team," why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old's urging, where he's traveling next, 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 June 16th, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:00:56 - Familial Influences

    00:08:25 - Tennis and Basketball

    00:15:00 - The Music Industry

    00:28:36 - MrBeast

    00:31:24 - The Evolution of Koch Industries

    00:35:54 - The Midwest

    00:44:37 - AI

    00:49:01 - Politics

    00:53:35 - Outro

    15 July 2026, 11:30 am
  • 46 minutes
    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. What changed, according to Mokyr, was twofold: first, you need to know why something works, so that one advance can seed the next; second, you need a culture willing to tolerate the disruption. His new book contrasts Europe with China, showing how Europeans learned to cooperate with people they weren't related to, in guilds, monasteries, cities, and universities, while China organized itself around the extended clan. One path led to internal stability and peace; the other, more restless and outward-looking, was the one that decided the world could always be made better.

    Tyler and Joel discuss European corporations vs. Chinese clans, why the Catholic Church became obsessed with cousin-marriage, how persistent cultural trends really are, why Chinese cities became so populous relative to Europe, why it took so long for European living standards to surpass China's, why sinified invaders kept getting swallowed by the dynasties they conquered, how geography kept Europe fragmented and China unified, where India fits into the story, why the Romans never made spectacles, why British soldiers stood two inches taller than the French, what powered the sudden rise of 19th-century German science, how disruptive winning a Nobel is, 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 February 20th, 2026.

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

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:00:54 - Europe vs. China's Paths to Prosperity

    00:10:22 - China's Growth

    00:13:24 - Europe's Growth

    00:18:56 - The Fall of Song China

    00:21:56 - India

    00:25:08 - Industrial Revolution

    00:39:52 - 19th-Century German Science

    00:43:37 - Being a Nobel Laureate

    00:45:29 - Outro

    Photo Credit: Shane Collins

    8 July 2026, 12:00 pm
  • 50 minutes 4 seconds
    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 way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.

    Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More's persecution of heretics, how Holbein's portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne's upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain's current stagnation, the subject of her next book, 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 February 19th, 2026.

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

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:03:42 - More's Utopia

    00:10:50 - Whether More Should be Admired

    00:13:39 - Play and Movie Adaptations of More

    00:19:25 - English Catholicism as the Reformation Approaches

    00:22:29 - Shakespeare and the Growth of Education

    00:26:08 - The Quality of Tudor Art

    00:27:24 - Tolerance and Social Mobility in 16th Century England

    00:32:49 - London's Governance

    00:34:23 - Canada

    00:38:12 - Choosing English History to Study

    00:41:23 - Touring and Living in England

    00:43:06 - Religion, Politics, and Economics in the UK

    00:49:32 - Outro

    24 June 2026, 11:00 am
  • 53 minutes 5 seconds
    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 one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between.

    Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he's skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son's experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he'll learn next, 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 May 27th, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:00:44 - Roblox by the Numbers

    00:08:54 - Competition

    00:12:13 - Everything Apps

    00:19:50 - AI Language Translation

    00:21:18 - Token Costs

    00:24:01 - Beauty and Gaming

    00:27:01 - Robux

    00:29:28 - Social Media and Younger Audiences

    00:40:56 - AI and Gaming

    00:45:44 - Mutiny on the Bounty

    00:47:38 - David's Earlier Companies

    00:51:16 - Mentors

    00:52:35 - Outro

    17 June 2026, 12:00 pm
  • 1 hour 1 minute
    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 histories of the German Empire, the GDR, and most recently the Weimar Republic.

    Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler's own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it's no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany's nudist culture, what Merkel's East German background did and didn't give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she'd rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler's citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany's current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she'd choose to live on, 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 March 30th, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:05:34 - East German Artistic Creations

    00:10:55 - Angela Merkel's East German Background

    00:14:08 - East German Underrepresentation Today

    00:17:02 - East Germans vs. West Germans

    00:20:32 - Goethe and Weimar's Cultural Heritage

    00:27:09 - What Weimar Knew About Buchenwald

    00:31:10 - Why the Weimar Constitution Failed

    00:35:21 - Prussia, Bavaria, and Where Nazism Took Root

    00:38:23 - Rewriting the Treaty of Versailles

    00:39:59 - Historical Antisemitism in Germany

    00:42:27 - Hitler's Citizenship problem

    00:45:14 - Weimar's Best Cultural Creations

    00:47:02 - The Most Underrated German Thinker

    00:49:07 - Improving Weimar

    00:52:58 - Germany's Economic Malaise

    00:55:38 - Living in Britain as a German Historian

    01:00:49 - Outro

    10 June 2026, 11:30 am
  • 45 minutes 57 seconds
    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 period — stranger and more modern-feeling than the Egypt of the pyramids, built around commerce and cosmopolitanism rather than divine kingship, and home to the greatest concentration of scientific talent the ancient world ever saw.

    Tyler and Toby cover how Alexander took over the empire almost without a fight, why Alexandria became the Manhattan of the ancient world, whether the era was as philosophically fertile as it was scientifically, whether your ancient doctor's visit had positive expected value, what Egypt was actually exporting and selling, whether living standards rose above subsistence or stayed Malthusian, how the ethnic divide between Greek rulers and Egyptian subjects shaped society, what constrained the Ptolemaic Empire from becoming the next Rome, whether Cleopatra has been overhyped, what Julius Caesar was really thinking when he sided with her over her brother, the new frontiers in archeology, whether Herodotus can be trusted, what ancient Egypt knew about Israel and India, when Egyptian jewelry peaked and why, what triggered the sudden emergence of civilization across the ancient world, why a six-year-old Tyler knew King Tut better than Napoleon, 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 March 23rd, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:04:29 - Intellectual Activity of Alexandria

    00:11:07 - The Alexandrian Economy

    00:14:36 - The Ptolemaic Empire

    00:21:19 - Unanswered Questions in Ptolemaic Egypt

    00:23:32 - Modern Alexandria and the Future of Archaeology

    00:26:37 - Other Topics in Ancient Egypt

    00:42:10 - Toby's Career

    00:45:26 - Outro

    Photo Credit: Benjamin Frei

    27 May 2026, 11:30 am
  • 55 minutes 30 seconds
    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 unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John's American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that's the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

    Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles', whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick's London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles' breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon's second act, 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 April 28th, 2026.

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    Timestamps:

    00:00:00 - Intro

    00:02:44 - The Sound of the Rolling Stones

    00:05:25 - Underrated Rolling Stones Songs and Albums

    00:09:06 - Charlie Watts and Brian Jones

    00:11:18 - Art Colleges and Rock 'n' Roll

    00:13:06 - The Stones' Stability

    00:16:32 - Mick Jagger: Closet Economist?

    00:17:53 - Pop Music's Lack of Relevance

    00:20:10 - The Beatles

    00:28:14 - Led Zeppelin

    00:31:30 - Bruce Springsteen

    00:36:20 - Bob Dylan

    00:39:40 - Julia Child

    00:42:29 - The Knicks

    00:45:21 - Ronald Reagan

    00:49:01 - Robert Caro

    00:52:03 - Writing

    00:55:00 - Outro

    13 May 2026, 11:30 am
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