Conversations with Tyler

As a writer of profiles, Larissa MacFarquhar is granted the privilege of listening to, learning from, and sharing the stories of extraordinary thinkers like Derik Parfit, Noam Chomsky, Hilary Mantel, and Paul Krugman. And she’s often drawn to write about the individual thinking behind extreme altruism, dementia care, and whether to stay in a small town. Motivating her is a desire to place readers inside someone’s head: to see what they see and to think how they think. In their dialogue, Larissa and Tyler discuss the thinking and thinkers behind her profiles, essays, and books, including notions of moral luck, exit vs voice, the prose of Kenneth Tynan, why altruistic heroes are mainly found in genre fiction, why she avoids describing physical appearances in her writing, the circumstances that push humans to live more extraordinary lives, what today has in common with the 1890s, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded December 17th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Larissa on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Before she ever studied them as an academic, Rebecca Kukla was fascinated by cities. Growing up in the middle of Toronto, she spent her days walking the city and noticing the way people and place interact. That fascination stayed with her, and motion, embodiment, and place has become a subtle through line in both her professional philosophy and personal interests. In her conversation with Tyler, Kukla speaks about the impossibility of speaking as a woman, curse words, gender representation and “guru culture” in philosophy departments, what she learned while living in Bogota and Johannesburg, what’s interesting in the works of Hegel, Foucault, and Rousseau, why boxing is good for the mind, how she finds good food, whether polyamory can scale, and much more. We're coming to San Francisco! Join us for a live podcast recording with Sam Altman on January 28th. To learn more and register for the event, click here. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded November 16th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

If you enjoy Conversation with Tyler, consider making a year-end donation at ConversationsWithTyler.com/donate. All gifts will support the show’s production, including future live podcast recordings like this one. You might be surprised by what occupies Daniel Kahneman’s thoughts. “You seem to think that I think of bias all the time,” he tells Tyler. “I really don’t think of bias that much.” These days, noise might be the concept most on Kahneman’s mind. A forthcoming book, coauthored with Cass Sunstein and “a brilliant Frenchman you haven’t heard of” is about how random variability affects our decision-making. And while we’ve spent a lot of time studying how bias causes error in judgment, Kahneman says, we aren’t thinking nearly enough about the problem of noise. In November, Kahneman joined Tyler for a live conversation about bias, noise and more, including happiness, memory, the replication crisis in psychology, advice to CEOs about improving decision-making, superforecasters, the influence of Freud, working in a second language, the value of intuition, and why he can’t help you win arguments with a spouse. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded November 12th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Throughout his career, Paul Romer has enjoyed sampling and sifting through an ever-growing body of knowledge. He sometimes jokingly refers to himself as a random idea generator, relying on others to filter out the bad ones so his contributions are good. Not a bad strategy, as it turns out, for starting a successful business and winning a Nobel Prize. Just before accepting that Prize, he joined Tyler for a conversation spanning one filtered set of those ideas, including the best policies for growth and innovation, his new thinking on the trilemma facing migration, how to rework higher education, general-purpose technologies, unlocking the power of reading for all kids, fixes for the English language, what economics misses about the ‘inside of the head,’ whether he’s a Jane Jacobs or Gouverneur Morris type, what Kanban taught him about management, his recent sampling of Pierce’s semiotics, Clarence White vs. Gram Parsons, his favorite Hot Tuna song, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded November 14th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Paul on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Is John Nye the finest polymath in the George Mason economics department? Raised in the Philippines and taught to be a well-rounded Catholic gentleman, John Nye learned the importance of a rigorous education from a young age. Indeed, according to Tyler he may very well be the best educated among his colleagues, having studied physics and literature as an undergraduate before earning a master’s and PhD in economics. And his education continues, as he’s now hard at work mastering his fourth language.  On this episode of Conversations with Tyler, Nye explains why it took longer for the French to urbanize than the British, the origins of the myth of free-trade Britain, why Vertigo is one of the greatest movies of all time, why John Stuart Mill is overrated, raising kids in a bilingual household, and much more.  Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded October 30th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

The son of an economist, Eric Schmidt eschewed his father’s profession, first studying architecture before settling on computer science and eventually earning a PhD. Now one of the most influential technology executives in the world, he still however credits his interest in network economies and platforms for a large part of his success. In this live event hosted by Village Global in San Francisco, Tyler questioned Schmidt about underused management strategies, what Google learned after interviewing one job candidate sixteen times, his opinion on early vs. late Picasso, the best reform in corporate governance, why we might see a bifurcation of the Internet, what technology will explode in the the next 10 years, the most underrated media source, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.  Recorded September 21st, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Eric on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Not only is Ben Thompson's Stratechery frequently mentioned on MR, but such is Tyler's fandom that the newsletter even made its way onto the reading list for one of his PhD courses. Ben's based in Taiwan, so when he recently visited DC, Tyler quickly took advantage of the chance for an in-person dialogue. In this conversation they talk about the business side of tech and more, including whether tech titans are good at PR, whether conglomerate synergies exist, Amazon's foray into health care, why anyone needs an Apple Watch or an Alexa, growing up in small-town Wisconsin, his pragmatic book-reading style, whether MBAs are overrated, the prospects for the Milwaukee Bucks, NBA rule changes, the future of the tech industries in China and India, and why Taiwanese breakfast is the best breakfast. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded October 15th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Ben on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

In this special episode, Rob Wiblin of 80,000 Hours has the super-sized conversation he wants to have with Tyler about Stubborn Attachments. In addition to a deep examination of the ideas in the book, the conversation ranges far and wide across Tyler's thinking, including why we won't leave the galaxy, the unresolvable clash between the claims of culture and nature, and what Tyrone would have to say about the book, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded September 21st, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow 80,000 Hours on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

After winning the Nobel, Paul Krugman found himself at the "end of ambition," with no more achievements left to unlock. That could be a depressing place, but Krugman avoids complacency by doing what he's always done: following his curiosity and working intensely at whatever grabs him most strongly. Tyler sat down with Krugman at his office in New York to discuss what's grabbing him at the moment, including antitrust, Supreme Court term limits, the best ways to fight inequality, why he's a YIMBY, inflation targets, congestion taxes, trade (both global and interstellar), his favorite living science fiction writer, immigration policy, how to write well for a smart audience, new directions for economic research, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded September 25th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Paul on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox. 

Political scientist Bruno Maçães has built a career out of crossing the globe teaching, advising, writing, and talking to people. His recent book, born out of a six-month journey across Eurasia, is one of Tyler's favorites. So how does it feel to face Tyler's rat-a-tat curiosity about your life's work? For Bruno, the experience was "like you are a politician under attack and your portfolio is the whole of physical and metaphysical reality." Listen to this episode to discover how well Bruno defended that expansive portfolio, including what's missing from liberalism, Obama's conceptual foreign policy mistake, what economists are most wrong about, how to fall in love with Djibouti, stagnation in Europe, the diversity of Central Asia, Hitchcock's perfect movie, China as an ever-growing global force, the book everyone under 25 should read, the creativity of Washington, D.C versus Silicon Valley, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded September 3rd, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Bruno on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.