Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure - Live at the Progress Conference
Conversations with Tyler
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 needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he's equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it's airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept. Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be...
info_outline
Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism
Conversations with Tyler
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 Michigan and author of numerous essential books on Buddhist thought and practice, he's spent decades studying Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, including a formative year spent living in a Tibetan monastery in India. His latest book, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, tackles the formidable challenge of understanding what we can actually know about the historical Buddha. Tyler and Donald discuss...
info_outline
Sam Altman on Trust, Persuasion, and the Future of Intelligence - Live at the Progress Conference
Conversations with Tyler
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, how far they are from an AI-driven replacement to Slack, what GPT-6 might enable for scientific research, when we'll see entire divisions of companies run mostly by AI, what he looks for in hires to gauge their AI-resistance, how OpenAI is thinking about commerce, whether GPT-6 will write great poetry, why energy is the binding constraint to chip-building and where it’ll come from,...
info_outline
Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era
Conversations with Tyler
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 particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee's journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist's emotional insight. Tyler and Jonny discuss why...
info_outline
George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression
Conversations with Tyler
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, 1933–1947 examines what the New Deal actually accomplished—and failed to accomplish—in confronting the Great Depression. Tyler and George discuss the surprising lack of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the New Deal, whether revaluing gold was really the best path to economic reflation, how much Glass-Steagall and other individual parts of the New Deal mattered, Keynes’...
info_outline
John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports
Conversations with Tyler
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 Skills of Exceptional Leaders, argues that leadership isn't bestowed or innate, it's earned through deliberate skill development. Tyler and John discuss whether business culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated, what rituals leadership requires, the quality of leadership in college basketball and consulting, why Doc Rivers started some practices at midnight, his...
info_outline
Steven Pinker on Coordination, Common Knowledge, and the Retreat of Liberal Enlightenment
Conversations with Tyler
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 accepting paper money to toppling dictators. But Tyler wonders: if most real-world coordination works fine without recursively looping (a glance at a traffic circle), if these models break down with the slightest change in assumptions, and if anonymous internet posters are making correct but uncomfortable truths common knowledge when society might function better with noble...
info_outline
David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States
Conversations with Tyler
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 for Saudi state-building, the treatment of Shiites in the Eastern Province and whether discrimination has truly ended, why the Saudi state emerged from its poorer and least cosmopolitan regions, the lasting significance of the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure by millenarian extremists, what’s kept Gulf states stable, the differing motivations behind Saudi sports investments, the...
info_outline
Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures
Conversations with Tyler
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 left recession-era Ireland in the 1980s to teach himself photography in American darkrooms, Murphy has become that rare artist who moves seamlessly between conflict zones and recording studios, creating books of Afghan women's poetry while directing music videos that anticipated Brexit. Tyler and Seamus discuss the optimistic case for Afghanistan, his biggest fear when...
info_outline
David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche (Live at 92NY)
Conversations with Tyler
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 argues that America's core problems aren't economic but sociological—rooted in the destruction of our "secure base" of family, community, and moral order that once gave people existential security. Tyler and David cover why young people are simultaneously the most rejected and most productive generation, smartphones and sex, the persuasiveness of AI vs novels, the loss of...
info_outlineHelen 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 in individual psychology and the functioning of power, Castor finds medieval England offers the perfect setting because its sophisticated power structures exist in “bare bones” without the “great apparatus of state,” bringing individual power plays into sharper relief. Her latest book, The Eagle and the Hart, exemplifies this approach by examining Richard II and Henry IV as individuals whose personal choices became constitutional precedents that echo through English history.
Tyler and Helen explore what English government could and couldn't do in the 14th century, why landed nobles obeyed the king, why parliament chose to fund wars with France, whether England could have won the Hundred Years' War, the constitutional precedents set by Henry IV's deposition of Richard II, how Shakespeare's Richard II scandalized Elizabethan audiences, Richard's superb artistic taste versus Henry's lack, why Chaucer suddenly becomes possible in this period, whether Richard II's fatal trip to Ireland was like Captain Kirk beaming down to a hostile planet, how historians continue to discover new evidence about the period, how Shakespeare’s Henriad influences our historical understanding, Castor’s most successful work habits, what she finds fascinating about Asimov's I, Robot, the subject of her 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 April 2nd, 2025.
Help keep the show ad free by donating today!
Other ways to connect
- Follow us on X and Instagram
- Follow Tyler on X
- Follow Helen on X
- Sign up for our newsletter
- Join our Discord
- Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
- Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
Photo Credit: Stuart Simpson