Conversations with Tyler

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, which makes this conversation a rare window...

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, and this distinction explains everything...

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 Imperfect Oracle on the strengths and limits...

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 supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies...

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 fantasy. A professor at the University of...

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 hardware people, what makes roon special...

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 thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg's...

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 Deal and the Promise of Recovery...

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 book, It's Not Magic: The Ordinary...

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 that enables human coordination, from...

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 David discuss why Wahhabism was essential...

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 Nigeria's Boko Haram territories. Having...

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 edge of the leftward tendency," Brooks...

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 examines the world of sports through the...

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 we've built weapons capable of ending the...

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 typical of academia. As someone interested...

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 storied contemporary-music ensemble, he went...

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 analyzing productivity slowdowns in the...

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 truly see. What emerged from this approach is...

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 examining Renaissance sculptures. With...

John Arnold built his fortune in energy trading by surrounding himself with smart people, maintaining emotional detachment, sensing market imbalances through first-principles analysis, and focusing with laser intensity...

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 commentary, and 5 patents to his...

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 humanities that sets him apart in Silicon...

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, Rogoff doesn't sugarcoat America's future...

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 the current internet, dominated by large...