Host

Tyler Cowen

@tylercowen

Tyler Cowen

American economist. Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and co-founder of the Mercatus Centre. Prolific blogger (Marginal Revolution, with Alex Tabarrok) and author of numerous books on economics, culture, and innovation. Host of Conversations with Tyler.

Cowen is known for unusually wide intellectual range and a rapid-fire, pressure-testing interview style. His conversations move across economics, philosophy, history, science, literature, and cuisine within a single session. Guests report that he prepares by reading their entire body of work and asks questions that expose hidden assumptions rather than eliciting prepared talking points.

Show

Conversations with Tyler — long-form interviews covering every domain of intellectual life, produced by the Mercatus Centre at George Mason University. 90–105 minutes, full official transcripts on the episode page. Free on YouTube and all podcast platforms.

Episodes hosted

  • Henry Oliver — Measure for Measure, close reading, Austen and Adam Smith, advertising, and late bloomers
  • Bob Spitz — the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Springsteen, and the craft of biography
  • Gaurav Kapadia — New York City governance, concentrated investing, contemporary art, and craft
  • Jonny Steinberg — South African policing, prison gangs, the Mandela marriage, and the post-apartheid state
  • Donald S. Lopez Jr. — Buddhist theology, history, and the West’s romanticisation of Buddhism and Tibet
  • Joanne Paul — Thomas More’s biography, Utopia’s riddle, and Tudor politics
  • Craig Newmark — Craigslist, institutional decay, giving away control, and philanthropy
  • Dave Baszucki — Roblox, the creator economy, and platform child safety
  • Arthur Brooks — the science of happiness, reinvention, and Catholic faith
  • Brendan Foody — evals, expert labour markets, and Mercor’s rise
  • George Selgin — monetary economics, the New Deal, and free banking
  • Steven Pinker — appeared twice, 2016 and 2025
  • Andrew Ross Sorkin — markets, banking, the 1929 crash
  • Joe Studwell — development economics and industrial policy
  • Abhijit Banerjee — development economics, RCTs, and Indian society
  • Dani Rodrik — trade, premature deindustrialisation, and the globalisation trilemma
  • Brad DeLong — economic history and the long twentieth century
  • Cliff Asness — quantitative and factor investing, market efficiency
  • John Cochrane — asset pricing, the fiscal theory of the price level
  • Diarmaid MacCulloch — history of Christianity and sexuality
  • Toby Wilkinson — Egyptology and the ancient Mediterranean
  • Katja Hoyer — modern German history
  • Dan Wang — China, technology, and the engineering state
  • Yasheng Huang — the political economy of the Chinese state
  • David Deutsch — quantum physics, many-worlds, and the reach of knowledge
  • Richard Prum — evolution, beauty, and aesthetic selection
  • Peter Singer — utilitarianism and practical ethics
  • William MacAskill — effective altruism and longtermism
  • Kwame Anthony Appiah — cosmopolitanism, identity, and ethics
  • Kenneth Rogoff — monetary policy, sovereign debt, and inflation
  • Larry Summers — macroeconomics and economic policy
  • Jason Furman — productivity, competition, and antitrust
  • Velina Tchakarova — great-power competition, China and Russia
  • Samantha Power — foreign policy, human rights, diplomacy
  • Fareed Zakaria — global order, ideas, and classical liberalism
  • Stephen Kotkin — Stalin, Soviet power, and the art of biography
  • Kim Bowes — the economic life of ordinary Romans
  • Ada Palmer — the Renaissance, censorship, and historical contingency
  • Daniel Kahneman — judgment, noise, and behavioural science
  • Carl Zimmer — the science of the aerobiome and life’s edges
  • Michael Nielsen — quantum computing and the science of science
  • Ray Dalio — investing, diversification, and the changing world order
  • Matt Levine — finance, markets, and financial writing
  • Chris Dixon — blockchains, crypto, and digital ownership
  • Agnes Callard — Socrates, aspiration, and the philosophical life
  • Harvey Mansfield — Machiavelli, Straussianism, and political philosophy
  • John Gray — pessimism, the limits of liberalism, and theism
  • Walter Russell Mead — American foreign policy and grand strategy
  • M. Gessen — Russia, autocracy, and totalitarianism
  • Niall Ferguson — the uses of history, empire, and counterfactuals
  • Jill Lepore — American history, democracy, and the longue durée
  • Paul Gillingham — the political history of modern Mexico
  • Adam Tooze — financial history, central banking, and crises
  • Jonathan Haidt — moral psychology and the politics of disgust
  • Paul Bloom — the psychology of empathy, morality, and children
  • Annie Duke — decision-making, probabilistic thinking, and poker
  • Philip Tetlock — forecasting, superforecasters, and good judgement
  • Alison Gopnik — child development, learning, and AI as cultural technology
  • Joseph Henrich — cultural evolution and WEIRD societies
  • Daron Acemoglu — institutions, the state, and why nations fail
  • Claudia Goldin — the gender pay gap, labour, and economic history
  • Raj Chetty — social mobility and empirical public economics
  • Atul Gawande — surgery, checklists, and the systems of medicine
  • Ezekiel Emanuel — bioethics, health policy, and the practice of medicine
  • Theodore Schwartz — neurosurgery, consciousness, and brain-computer interfaces
  • Ed Boyden — optogenetics, brain mapping, and neurotechnology
  • Sam Altman — OpenAI, AI safety, and the future of intelligence; a return CWT guest (episode slug ‘sam-altman-2’), also interviewed on Lex Fridman Podcast
  • Cass Sunstein — liberalism, behavioural economics, and AI’s rights; a return CWT guest (episode slug ‘cass-sunstein-2’)
  • Robin Hanson — signalling, hidden motives, and futurism
  • Bryan Caplan — the economics of education and learning
  • David Brooks — character, morality, loneliness, and the American psyche
  • Austan Goolsbee — central banking, inflation, stablecoins and shadow banking, and the decentralised Fed
  • Nate Silver — poker, risk, forecasting, AI timelines, and prediction markets
  • John Arnold — natural-gas trading, the energy transition, and evidence-based philanthropy
  • Helen Castor — medieval English power, the deposition of Richard II, and biography
  • Annie Jacobsen — nuclear war, missile defence, and the secret world of the intelligence agencies
  • David Commins — Wahhabism as state-building theology, Saudi state formation, and the Gulf’s future after oil
  • Chris Arnade — walking the world’s cities, walkability, and street-level sociology
  • Any Austin — YouTuber and video essayist on the hermeneutics of video-game infrastructure
  • David Robertson — conducting, Pierre Boulez, and musical interpretation
  • Seamus Murphy — Afghanistan, photojournalism, and the patterns that recur across cultures
  • John Amaechi — earned leadership, principle over loyalty, and being gay in professional sport
  • Blake Scholl — supersonic flight, regulatory one-way doors, and defence-manufacturing reform