Mercatus Center at George Mason University
303 episodes listed below
Economist Tyler Cowen cross-examines one scholar's book per episode, claim by claim.
Conversations with Tyler is an interview series built around exacting questions and unusually patient answers. Recent episodes move from Roman household decoration to Mexico after independence, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, African development, market bubbles, happiness, and Christianity.
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The show is a single-host, single-guest interview format: Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University and the Mercatus Center, conducts every episode, which run roughly 50 to 70 minutes and are released every other Wednesday. Guests are typically scholars or nonfiction authors promoting a specific book — examples in this sample include a church historian (Diarmaid MacCulloch), an archaeologist (Kim Bowes), a historian of Mexico (Paul Gillingham), a writer on South Africa (Jonny Steinberg), a developmental psychologist (Alison Gopnik), a monetary historian (George Selgin), and a Mercatus research fellow writing on late bloomers (Henry Oliver). Episodes are structured around close reading of the guest's argument or evidence, often opening with a direct, pointed question and proceeding through Cowen's follow-ups rather than a loose survey of the guest's biography. Recurring throughlines include the history of institutions (church, monarchy, banking, empire), how scholarly consensus forms and gets revised, and economic reasoning applied to historical episodes like the New Deal or Mexican state formation. Tangents into music, literature, and biography (Bach, Shakespeare, the Mandelas) appear within otherwise history- or economics-focused episodes. The show benefits listeners already familiar with economics, history, or a given guest's field, since conversations assume background knowledge and move quickly into specific claims and counter-evidence. Production is unadorned spoken-word interview audio with no narration, sound design, or multi-host banter. Occasional non-interview segments announce live tapings at outside venues. The guest roster skews toward university-affiliated historians, economists, and social scientists over journalists or celebrities.
Made for: Listeners with existing interest in economics, history, or academic nonfiction who want detailed, argument-level interviews rather than introductory overviews.
What sets it apart: Unlike broader history or economics interview shows, each episode centers on a single guest's specific book and evidence base, with the host actively contesting claims (e.g., pressing a guest's reading of a Shakespeare line or a historian's account of the Reformation) rather than conducting a promotional Q&A.
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.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Tyler turns wide-ranging interviews into rigorous tests of economic history, institutional explanations, research standards, and the assumptions beneath expert claims.
Tyler builds interviews around precise, testing questions, then follows the answer wherever the underlying assumptions lead. Conversations with George Selgin moves through the New Deal, banking regulation, the gold standard, and competing economic responses to the Great…
Tyler turns one question about monogamy into an intellectual border crossing before you notice.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Isabella's ending isn't a bad one, and Shakespeare wasn't a secret Catholic -- Oliver makes both arguments and keeps moving.
Henry Oliver, author of the late-bloomer study "Second Act," joins Tyler to work through two contested readings of Measure for Measure: what Isabella's ending actually means, and whether Shakespeare's Catholic themes point to a secret faith.
McCulloch finds centuries of editorial work behind Christianity's settled assumptions about sex and family.
McCulloch's approach is quiet demolition. Polygyny, he notes, survived in Jewish communities within living memory -- a detail that loosens the assumption that monotheism and monogamy were always natural companions.
A decade of sharp interviews, and the live question is whether the field's most durable arguments have ever faced a referee.
Ten years and more than 250 conversations in, Tyler's retrospective becomes something other than a highlights reel: a live dispute over whether AI safety arguments -- some of Eliezer's among them, said to have circulated for fifteen to twenty years -- have ever actually faced…
Gopnik measures the old Freud-Piaget intuitions against the developmental record and shows what held.
Gopnik's central claim is old enough to have roots in Piaget and Freud: infants are active inference engines, not passive recipients, and the developmental record has spent decades backing her up.
Policing, prison letters, and a marriage watched from both sides of a wall.
Joni Steinberg opens with South African policing: two officers in a township on a Saturday night, calculating that ten or twenty young people in a crowd are not worth confronting, so they don't show up. That unheroic, specific observation sets the register.
Selgin and Cowen on the Depression-era economists who got it right, and the ones who didn't.
George Selgin brings decades of revisionist monetary history into a conversation with Tyler Cowen built around his book 'False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933 to 1947,' which Cowen calls the best book on its topic.
Stephen Dubner tests bourbon economics, Alzheimer's research, and money advice against hard data.
Daily business news with Kai Ryssdal, tracking Fed policy, oil shocks, and private credit.
Galloway rotates Office Hours Q&A, Raging Moderates politics, and China Decode geopolitics weekly.
Joel and Matt answer listener money questions weekly in the show's Ask HTM segments.
Tyler Cowen speaks with Kim Bowes, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, about her book Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the 90%.
Tyler Cowen opens with Paul Gillingham's book, "Mexico, a 500-Year History," and frames it as a major introduction to Mexico's past.
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Why do monotheism and monogamy seem tied together?
Why does an AI company pay poets $150 an hour to teach models how to write poetry?
Ten years is the frame.
A child knows more than the evidence seems to allow.
This episode features an interview with Gaurav Kapadia discussing topics including New York City, investing, and contemporary art, while also celebrating the podcast's 10th anniversary and soliciting listener donations.
Tyler Cowen celebrates 10 years of his podcast by asking for donations to continue producing conversations with deep thinkers.
Tyler Cowen interviews legal scholar Cass Sunstein about his new book on liberalism and other works.
Tyler Cowen interviews Blake Scholl about supersonic aviation and innovative airport design.
Tyler Cowen interviews Donald S.
Sam Altman discusses how he manages increased productivity at OpenAI through better time allocation, delegation, and hiring great people.
Tyler starts with real force.
George Selgin starts with monetary consistency.
Tyler Cowen interviews former NBA player and leadership expert John Amici about his new book and the concept that culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated.
Tyler Cowen interviews Steven Pinker about the concept of common knowledge and its role in money, power, and everyday life.
Tyler Cowen interviews David Commons about the history of Saudi Arabia and the role of Wahhabism in state building.
Tyler Cowen interviews photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy about his work in Afghanistan and his diverse creative projects.
Tyler Cowen and David Brooks discuss the paradox of young people being both more productive and more sad, exploring mental health trends and societal pressures.
Tyler Cowen interviews Nate Silver about risk, expected utility, and equilibrium in poker and online discourse.
Tyler Cowen interviews Annie Jacobson about her book 'Nuclear War: A Scenario' and the importance of understanding nuclear threats.
A retrospective episode where Tyler Cowen and producer Jeff Holmes review the past year's episodes, listener questions, and pop culture picks.
Tyler Cowen interviews Kyla Scanlon about her background, her book on how money and markets work, and her approach to explaining economics.
Tyler Cowen interviews Shopify CEO Toby Lutke about e-commerce, remote work, and startup management.
Tyler Cowen interviews scientist and author Philip Ball about his new book on biology and his wide-ranging expertise.
Tyler Cowen interviews Nate Silver about his new book and the role of risk and happenstance in his career.
Tyler Cowen interviews psychologist Paul Bloom about the limits of psychological understanding in everyday life.
Tyler Cowen interviews historian Alan Taylor about his new book on the American Civil Wars and broader American history.
Tyler Cowen interviews Brian Winter, editor-in-chief of America's Quarterly, about Latin American politics and culture.