Conversations with Tyler

Glen Weyl is an economist, researcher, and founder of RadicalXChange. He recently co-authored a paper that sets forth an ambitious strategy to respond to the crisis and mitigate long-term damage to the economy through a regime of testing, tracing, and supported isolation. In his estimation the benefit-cost ratio is ten to one, with costs equal to about one month of continued freeze in place. Tyler...

Accuracy is only one of the things we want from forecasters, says Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction . People also look to forecasters for ideological assurance, entertainment, and to minimize regret–such as that caused by not taking a global pandemic seriously enough. The best forecasters aren't just i...

When Tyler requested an interview with novelist Emily St. John Mandel, he didn't expect that reality would have in some ways become an eerie mirror of her latest books. And Emily didn't expect that it'd be boosting sales: "Why would anybody in their right mind want to read Station Eleven during a pandemic?" she wondered to Tyler. Her reaction was pure bafflement until she found herself renting Con...

For Ross Douthat, decadence isn't necessarily a moral judgement, but a technical label for a state that societies tend to enter—and one that is perhaps much more normal than the dynamism Americans have come to take for granted. In his new book , he outlines the cultural, economic, political, and demographic trends that threaten to leave us to wallow in a state of civilizational stagnation for year...

Tyler and Russ Roberts joined forces for a special livestreamed conversation on COVID-19, including how both are adjusting to social isolation, private versus public responses to the pandemic, the challenge of reforming scrambled organization capital, the implications for Trump's reelection, appropriate fiscal and monetary responses, bailouts, innovation prizes, and more. Read a  full transcript  ...

Who can you ask about the Great American Songbook, the finer Jell-O flavors, and peculiar languages like Saramaccan all while expecting the same kind of fast, thoughtful, and energetic response? Listeners of Lexicon Valley might hazard a guess: John McWhorter. A prominent academic linguist, he's also highly regarded for his podcast and popular writings across countless books and articles where oft...

Why is Garett Jones willing to write books about risky topics like the case for reducing democratic accountability? Is it the iconoclastic Mason econ culture? Supportive colleagues like Tyler? Those help, but what ultimately gives Garett peace of mind is that he'll never have to go hungry because he has a broad and deep knowledge of econometric tools. It's a skillset he recommends to all research...

To Tim Harford, mistakes are fascinating. "We often only understand how something works when it breaks," he says, explaining why there's such an emphasis on errors throughout his work. They also tend to make great stories, which can stoke the curiosity necessary to change minds. A former persuasive speaking champion, he was made an Officer of the O rder of the British Empire "for services to impro...

In his new book , Ezra Klein argues that polarization in America has become centered on partisan political identities, which has subsumed virtually every form of identity, be it where we live, what team we root for, the church we attend, or any other. This stacked form of polarization thus carries much more weight and is activated by a wider range of conflicts than before. But is polarization real...

When Reid Hoffman creates a handle for some new network or system, his usual choice is " Quixotic ." At an early age, his love of tabletop games inspired him to think of life as a heroic journey, where people come together in order to accomplish lofty things . This framing also prompted him to consider the rules and systems that gu ide society— and how you might improve them by identifying key poi...

This bonus episode features audio from the Holberg Debate in Bergen, Norway between Tyler and Slavoj Žižek held on December 7, 2019. They discuss the reasons Slavoj (still) considers himself a Communist, why he calls The Handmaid's Tale "nostalgia for the present," what he likes about Greta Thunberg, what Marx got right about the commodification of beliefs, his concerns about ecology and surveilla...

Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate . Long before Abhijit Banerjee won the 2019 economics Nobel with Michael Kremer and Esther Duflo, he was a fellow graduate student at Harvard wi th Tyler. For Tyler, Abhijit is one of the brightest economic minds he's ever met , and "a brilliant theorist who decided the future was with empirical work ." But according to...

Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate . For this special retrospective episode , producer Jeff Holmes sat down with Tyler to discuss the past year in conversations and more, including who was most challenging guest to prep for, the most popular—and the most underrated—conversation, a test of Tyler's knowledge called " Name That P roducti on F unction," liste...

Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate . Esther Duflo's advice to students? Spend time in the field. " It's only through this exposure that you can learn how wrong most of your intuit ions are and preconceptions are," she explains. For Duflo, it was time spent in the Soviet Union on the brink of collapse. While there she saw how Jeff Sachs used the tools of e...

What determines the economic, social, and political trajectories of nations? Why were settlers in colonies like Jamestown and Australia able to escape the extractive systems desired by their British masters, while colonial subjects in Barbados and Jamaica were not? In his latest book , Daron Acemoglu elevates the power of institutions over theories centering on human capital, culture, or geography...

Over the past year Mark Zuckerberg has held a series of interviews themed around technology and society. This conversation with Tyler and Patrick is the last in that series, and covers why they think the study of progress is so important, including how it could affect biomedical research, the founding of new universities and foundations, building things fast, housing and healthcare affordability,...

How do you survive seven years in solitary confinement? The gift of literacy is what saved Shaka Senghor. Reading, journaling, academic study, and writing books was a way to structure and survive an inhumane, mentally toxic environment. And after 19 years in total behind bars, he was finally able to apply that gift and create employment for himself as a writer and organizational leader upon rejoin...

Three years after her first appearance, Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop joins Tyler to celebrate the release of her latest cookbook and talk all things food and China. This time the conversation was held over a special homestyle meal at Mama Chang , the newest restaurant from Chef Peter and Lisa Chang. Together with their daughter Lydia Chang, Fuchsia selected a menu to share with Tyler and a g...

To Ted Gioia, music is a form of cloud storage for preserving human culture. And the real cultural conflict, he insists, is not between "high brow" and "low brow" music, but between the innovative and the formulaic. Imitation and repetition deaden musical culture—and he should know, since he listens to 3 hours of new music per day and over 1,000 newly released recordings in a year. His latest book...

The one concept most valuable for understanding the news today might be Henry Farrell's theory of weaponized interdependence. Whether it's China's influence over the NBA, the US ban of Huawei, or whether social media should be regulated on a global scale, Henry Farrell has played a key role articulating how global economic networks can enable state coercion. Tyler and Henry discuss these issues an...

Ben Westhoff has written some of Tyler's favorite books on everything from dive bars to the evolution of American rap music to how fentanyl is driving the opioid epidemic. So how does he get it done? Not from the outside in, by finding exotic experiences as he originally thought. Instead he found that it comes from the inside out: eating right, exercising, getting sleep, and journaling. Do those t...

Markets, Alain Bertaud likes to say, are like gravity: they exist everywhere. But while urban planners are quite good at taking gravity into account, they tend to ignore market forces entirely in their designs, resulting in city development that too often fails to address the needs of their residents. Following the release of his recent book, Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities , Alain...

A former war correspondent and UN ambassador, Samantha Power has had her share of tough assignments. But writing a memoir about it all is also a daunting prospect. The format itself is a challenge: how do you convince the reader you're worth spending time with? How do you paint a relatable portrait without oversharing and losing your dignity? For Samantha the answer was settling upon a purpose for...

As a graduate student, Hollis Robbins helped Henry Louis Gates, Jr. unravel a mystery about the provenance of a mid-19th century book. Robbins helped date the book by discovering allusions to popular literature of that period — her focus at the time. The realization that this perspective would bring valuable insight to other 19th century African American literature prompted her to make that her sp...

What sort of country would compel you to flee it, draw you back ten years later, then force you away yet again after two decades? M. Gessen knows the answer all too well, having dedicated their career to writing and reporting about Russian society from both within and outside their native country. A true polymath, Gessen's wide-ranging books and articles cover mathematics, history, human rights, c...