Conversations with Tyler

Chart trend

Position in the Education chart (US), last 90 days.

#1#65#128JunJulAugSep

#23

all-time peak

days in the top 3 since Nov 2024

Latest episodes

Showing 20 · updated from the feed

Luke Burgis on Mimetic Desire, Catholicism, and the Age of Social Contagion

Luke Burgis left Wall Street after two years, founded a few successful companies in his twenties, then walked away to spend three years in a Roman seminary on the path to

Aug 19
52 min

Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism, Automation, and the Educated Elite

Daron Acemoglu returns for his second appearance with a new book, What Happened to Liberal Democracy?, which Tyler reads as an attempt to redefine and revitalize liberali

Aug 12
55 min

Julia Ioffe on Russian Women, Missing Men, and the Roots of Autocracy

Julia Ioffe left the USSR as a child and came back as an adult journalist to find that the confident, credentialed women she remembered from her Soviet childhood had larg

Aug 5
55 min

Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was

Jul 22
56 min

Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy

Chase Koch grew up receiving Sunday philosophy lessons from his father Charles and, by his own account, spent most of them half asleep while his sister supplied the answe

Jul 15
54 min

Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth

Joel Mokyr co-won the 2025 economics Nobel for exploring the question that traces back to the beginning of economics: how did sustained economic growth suddenly become no

Jul 8
46 min

Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she's drawn to the 16th century because it sits betwe

Jun 24
50 min

Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play

Dave Baszucki is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the user-generated gaming platform where all the games are built by the community itself. With over 100 million daily activ

Jun 17
53 min

Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian who has made a career out of explaining Germany to the world—and, just as importantly, to Germans themselves. Born in East Germa

Jun 10
1 h 01 min

Toby Wilkinson on Ptolemaic Egypt and the First Great Commercial Civilization

Toby Wilkinson is one of the world's leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egyp

May 27
45 min

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, h

May 13
55 min

Craig Newmark on Institutional Maintenance, Giving Away Control, and the Internet We Were Promised (Live at 92NY)

Craig Newmark's career, in retrospect, looks like a series of deliberate subtractions: he kept Craigslist plain, stepped aside as CEO early on, gave his equity to his fou

Apr 29
46 min

Kim Bowes on the Economic Lives of Rome's Ninety Percent

Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite eco

Apr 15
1 h 01 min

Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of Happiness

Click here to find Tyler's new generative book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution! Arthur Brooks reckons he's on the fourth leg o

Apr 1
59 min

Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together

Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Tyler calls Paul Gillingham's new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single b

Mar 25
1 h 04 min

Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli, Straussianism, and the Character of Liberal Democracy

Buy tickets for the live Conversations with Tyler recording with Craig Newmark at 92NY! Few living scholars can claim to have shaped how we read Machiavelli as decisive

Mar 18
49 min

Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup. Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of su

Mar 4
59 min

Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires

When Tyler called Joe Studwell's How Asia Works "perhaps my favorite economics book of the year" back in 2013, he wasn't alone: it became one of the most influential trea

Feb 18
53 min

Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929

Andrew Ross Sorkin sees the crash of 1929 as a tale of excessive leverage and irrational speculation, but Tyler wonders: maybe those sky-high 1929 prices were actually ju

Feb 4
56 min

Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading. This work includes his award-winning Cranmer biography, his sw

Jan 21
59 min

Chart positions

Where Conversations with Tyler ranks today in each Apple Podcasts chart (US, Sep 3, 2026).

#55 ▲ 56 Education US

What listeners say

A curated, balanced selection of Apple Podcasts reviews.

Tyler has an incredible fund of knowledge and this podcast gives you a chance to join in. You will be introduced to a smorgasbord of thinkers and ideas that you otherwise may not encounter. Take a break from partisan filters and open yourself up to new ideas.

Auntminnie111 · Jan 2025

The breadth and depth of topics is unparalleled, presenting a wonderful way to indulge curiosity and gain exposure to all sorts of ideas. Tyler is a pleasure to listen to and questions are always intriguing.

TylerGolato · Oct 2024

I listen no matter the topic and they are broad ranging. Always learning and I love Tyler’s style of interviewing and his preparedness.

Nelly_12 · Oct 2024

Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, could really be called Professor of Knowledge, with interests in many topics both highbrow and lowbrow. It is a pleasure to learn from him about many different subjects and to hear how highly intelligent and influential people engage with his challenging questions. Highly recommended.

Matt Bengtson · Sep 2023

I was a regular listener until the episodes with Marilynne Robinson and Jonathan Haidt. Both are highly articulate thinkers who can develop extended arguments when they have an interlocutor who is able to listen carefully and follow with their thought process. Tyler’s form of engagement, however, continually interrupted the flow of their reflections in an unhelpful and frustrating way. I was disappointed by his insensitivity to the natural flow of those conversations, and I began to realize that this podcast’s method simply does not allow guests to develop longer trains of thought. So I stopped listening and have not missed it.

JB20152015 · Jun 2024

The podcast universe is overpopulated. But Tyler is one of the early entrants, so perhaps he is a pioneer of sorts. But there is so much variety and so many hidden gems that Tyler seems dated and predictable. Even though he tries to surprise us with his abrupt shifts in tone and questioning somehow no one can believe that he is actually probing deep into his guests’ contradictions or trying to catch the guest on their weak side. Everyone is on this silly game. I think of his recent interview with the British journalist, John Gray. Tyler treated him with a reverence that one would assign to John Rawls or Robert Nozick or Ronald Dworkin. But that’s the thing: Gray is a journalist trying to pass himself off as a political theorist. You have to have lived in Britain to know that Gray is a poseur. Tyler even gets close to pinning him down early in the conversation where Gray mouths platitudes about young people and their beliefs and wriggles out of questions that should be followed through. This is proof: Gray and Cowen are in a sense kindred spirits. Really just entertainers!

sidneyhart · Aug 2024

We strive to present a balanced view by showing a diverse range of reviews from Apple Podcasts.