Conversations with Tyler

Mar 19 2025 247 ep. 61 mins 9.6k

Conversations with Tyler Podcast artwork

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.

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Ezra Klein on the Abundance Agenda

Mar 19 2025 68 mins

What happens when a liberal thinker shifts his attention from polarization to economic abundance? Ezra Klein’s new book with Derek Thompson, Abundance, argues for an agenda of increased housing, infrastructure, clean energy, and innovation. But does abundance clash with polarization—or offer a way through it? In this conversation, Ezra and Tyler discuss how the abundance agend

Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe

Mar 05 2025 51 mins

Carl Zimmer is one of the finest science communicators of our time, having spent decades writing about biology, evolution, and heredity. His latest (and 16th) book, Air-Borne: The Hidden History of the Life We Breathe, explores something even more fundamental—how the very air around us is teeming with life, from pollen to pathogens to microbes floating miles above the Earth. He

Gregory Clark on Social Mobility, Migration, and Assortative Mating (Live at Mercatus)

Feb 19 2025 83 mins

How much of your life’s trajectory was set in motion centuries ago? Gregory Clark has spent decades studying social mobility, and his findings suggest that where you land in society is far more predictable than we like to think. Using historical data, surname analysis, and migration patterns, Clark argues that social mobility rates have remained largely unchanged for 300 years�

Ross Douthat on Why Religion Makes More Sense Than You Think

Feb 05 2025 73 mins

Sign Up for the Boston Listener Meet Up For Ross Douthat, phenomena like UFO sightings and the simulation hypothesis don't challenge religious belief—they demonstrate how difficult it is to escape religious questions entirely. His new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious makes the case for religious faith in an age of apparent disenchantment. In his third appearance o

Joe Boyd on the Birth of Rock, World Music, and Being There for Everything

Jan 22 2025 60 mins

Sign Up for the Boston Listener Meet Up Joe Boyd was there when Dylan went electric, when Pink Floyd was born, and when Paul Simon brought Graceland to the world. But far from being just another music industry insider, Boyd has spent decades exploring how the world's musical traditions connect and transform each other. His new book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, is seventeen year

Scott Sumner on Monetary Rules, Blooming Late, and the Death of Cinema

Jan 08 2025 68 mins

Scott Sumner didn't follow the typical path to economic influence. He nearly lost his teaching job before tenure, did his best research after most academics slow down, and found his largest audience through blogging in his 50s and 60s, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet this unconventional journey led him to become one of the most influential monetary thinkers of the pas

Conversations with Tyler 2024 Retrospective

Dec 25 2024 58 mins

Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including covering the most popular and underrated episodes, fielding listener questions, reviewing Tyler’s pop culture picks from 2014, mulling over ideas for what to name CWT fans, and more

Paula Byrne on Thomas Hardy’s Women, Jane Austen’s Humor, and Evelyn Waugh’s Warmth

Dec 11 2024 54 mins

Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give What can Thomas Hardy’s tortured marriages teach us about love, obsession, and second chances? In this episode, biographer, novelist, and therapist Paula Byrne examines the intimate connections between life and literature, revealing how Hardy’s relationships with women shaped his portrayals of love and tragedy.

Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography

Dec 04 2024 86 mins

Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give In his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin shows how totalitarian power worked not just through terror from above, but through millions of everyday decisions from below. Currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution after 33 years at Princeton, Kotkin brings both deep archival work and p

Russ Roberts on Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate

Nov 25 2024 61 mins

In this crossover episode with EconTalk, Tyler joins Russ Roberts for an in-depth exploration of Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, a monumental novel often described as the 20th-century answer to Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Russ and Tyler cover Grossman’s life and the historical context of Life and Fate, its themes of war, totalitarianism, freedom, and fate, the novel’s polypho