Conversations with Tyler

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.

Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work 01/07/2026

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 enhanced with helpful links, or watch the on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded October 16th, 2025. Other ways to connect Follow us on and Follow on X Follow on X Join our Email us: Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts . 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 /episode/index/show/cowenconvos/id/39629295

Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective 12/23/2025

Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture 12/17/2025

Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. to Conversations with Tyler today. 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 enhanced with helpful links, or watch the on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded October 30th, 2025. Other ways to connect Follow us on and Follow on X Follow on X Join our Email us: Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts . 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 /episode/index/show/cowenconvos/id/39432785

Gaurav Kapadia on New York City, Investing, and Contemporary Art 12/10/2025

Gaurav Kapadia on New York City, Investing, and Contemporary Art Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. to Conversations with Tyler today. 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 enhanced with helpful links, or watch the on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded October 8th, 2025. Other ways to connect Follow us on and Follow on X Follow on X Join our Email us: Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts . 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 /episode/index/show/cowenconvos/id/39344725

Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other 12/03/2025

Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. 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 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 enhanced with helpful links, or watch the on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded October 31st, 2025. Other ways to connect Follow us on and Follow on X Follow on X Join our Email us: Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts . 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 /episode/index/show/cowenconvos/id/39243880

Cass Sunstein on Liberalism and Rights in the Age of AI 11/26/2025

Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure - Live at the Progress Conference 11/19/2025

Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism 11/12/2025

Sam Altman on Trust, Persuasion, and the Future of Intelligence - Live at the Progress Conference 11/05/2025

Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era 10/28/2025

Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era 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 South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons, why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren't foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more. Read a enhanced with helpful links, or watch the on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded September 29th, 2025. Other ways to connect Follow us on and Follow on X Join our Email us: Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts . Timestamps: 00:00:40 – Policing and crime in South Africa 00:11:15 – Prison culture 00:22:04 – Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s marriage 00:24:47 – Was Winnie Mandela just a bad person? 00:29:20 – Nelson Mandela’s masks 00:32:04 – Mandela’s legacy and the ANC 00:36:51 – Reasons for optimism in South Africa 00:50:58 – His forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes 00:55:15 – Where to visit in South Africa /episode/index/show/cowenconvos/id/38808435

George Selgin on the New Deal, Regime Uncertainty, and What Really Ended the Great Depression 10/15/2025

John Amaechi on Leadership, the NBA, and Being Gay in Professional Sports 10/01/2025

Steven Pinker on Coordination, Common Knowledge, and the Retreat of Liberal Enlightenment 09/24/2025

David Commins on Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, and the Future of the Gulf States 09/17/2025

Seamus Murphy on Photographing Patterns Across Cultures 09/03/2025

David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche (Live at 92NY) 08/20/2025

Nate Silver on Life’s Mixed Strategies 08/13/2025

Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War, Intelligence Operations, and Conspiracy Realities 08/06/2025

Annie Jacobsen on Nuclear War, Intelligence Operations, and Conspiracy Realities 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 world in 72 minutes, and madness that everything hangs by the thread of deterrence. But to Tyler, life is "a lot of different kinds of madness," and the real question is simply getting the least harmful form available to us. It's a conversation sparked by her latest book Nuclear War: A Scenario, which Tyler calls one of his favorites from last year—and which is compelling enough that Denis Villeneuve is turning it into a screenplay. Tyler and Annie explore whether we should be more afraid of nuclear weapons or if fear itself raises the risks, who should advise presidents during the six-minute decision window, whether moving toward disarmament makes us safer or more vulnerable, what Thomas Schelling really meant about nuclear war and rational actors, the probability that America would retaliate after a nuclear attack, the chances of intercepting a single incoming ICBM, why missile defense systems can't replicate Israel's Iron Dome success, how Pakistan-India nuclear tensions could escalate, why she's surprised domestic drone attacks haven't happened yet, her reporting on JFK assassination mysteries and deathbed phone calls, her views on UFOs and the dark human experiments at Area 51, what motivates intelligence community operators, her encounters with Uri Geller and CIA psychic research, what she’s working on next, and more. Read a enhanced with helpful links, or watch the on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded May 19th, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by today! Other ways to connect Follow us on and Follow on X Follow on X Join our Email us: Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts . /episode/index/show/cowenconvos/id/37700960

Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities 07/23/2025

Helen Castor on Medieval Power and Personalities 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 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, , 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 enhanced with helpful links, or watch the on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded April 2nd, 2025. Help keep the show ad free by today! Other ways to connect Follow us on and Follow on X Follow on X Join our Email us: Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts . Photo Credit: Stuart Simpson /episode/index/show/cowenconvos/id/37517470