Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

More from Conversations with Tyler

1. 

   E268 · 21 Jan 2026 · 1 hr

   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 sweeping histories of Christianity and the Reformation, and his latest on sex and the church, which demonstrates what MacCulloch calls the historian's true vocation: unsettling settled facts to keep humanity sane. Tyler and Diarmaid explore whether monotheism correlates with monogamy, Christianity's early instinct towards egalitarianism, what the Eucharistic revolution reveals about the cathedral building boom, the role of…

2. 

   E267 · 7 Jan 2026 · 1 hr 1 min

   Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

   At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading verse to economists building evaluation frameworks—and has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history. Tyler and Brendan discuss why Mercor pays poets $150 an hour, why AI labs need rubrics more than raw text, whether we should enshrine the aesthetic standards of past eras rather than current ones, how quickly models are improving at economically valuable tasks, how long until…

3. 

   E266 · 23 Dec 2025 · 1 hr

   Conversations with Tyler 2025 Retrospective

   Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year on CWT and more, including covering the most popular and underrated episodes, why single-subject deep dives made for some of the best conversations this year, the biggest AI surprises and how LLMs changed the show's production function, what happened with the Magnus Carlsen episode, listener questions on everything from hotel selection to AI x-risk discourse, Tyler's serene acknowledgment that uncontrollable…

4. 

   E264 · 10 Dec 2025 · 1 hr

   Gaurav Kapadia on New York City, Investing, and Contemporary Art

   Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Gaurav Kapadia has deliberately avoided publicity throughout his career in investing, which makes this conversation a rare window into how he thinks. He now runs XN, a firm built around concentrated bets on a small number of companies with long holding periods. However, his education in judgment began much earlier, in a two-family house in Flushing that his parents converted into a four-family house. It was there where a young Gaurav served as de facto landlord, collecting rent and negotiating late…

5. 

   E263 · 3 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 33 min

   Dan Wang on What China and America Can Learn from Each Other

   Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Dan Wang argues that China is a nation of engineers while America is a nation of lawyers, and this distinction explains everything from subway construction to pandemic response to why Chinese citizens will never have yards with dogs. His prescription: America should become 20% more engineering-minded to fix its broken infrastructure, while China needs to be 50% more lawyerly so the Communist Party can stop strangling individual rights and the creative impulses of its people. But would a more lawyerly…

6. 

   E292 · 30 Sep 2026 · 51 min

   Luis Garicano on Spain, Europe, and the Future of Work

   Luis Garicano has one of the more unusual résumés in economics: trained at the University of Chicago Booth School under Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy, and Sherwin Rosen, he left academia for a stint as a member of the European Parliament before returning to research, now at the London School of Economics for a second time. His new book, Messy Jobs , co-authored with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, argues that AI won't cause mass unemployment for a surprising reason: it will make jobs messier, not simpler, and messiness is precisely what AI struggles with. Tyler and Luis start their conversation with Spain…

7. 

   E291 · 23 Sep 2026 · 56 min

   Gita Gopinath on Trade, Currencies, and Economic Transformation

   Gita Gopinath has spent the last several years inside the room where the world's monetary plumbing gets fixed — or doesn't. As first deputy managing director of the IMF and, before that, the Fund's chief economist, she worked on sovereign debt restructuring, followed Argentina's disinflation up close, and built her academic reputation on ideas like dollar dominance and the dominant currency paradigm. Now back at Harvard launching a new Global Economics Lab, her conversation with Tyler ranges from why exchange rates don't adjust the way models predict, to what stablecoins really cost, to…

8. 

   E290 · 16 Sep 2026 · 56 min

   Annie Lowrey on the Time Tax, Fraud, and Rationing by Paperwork

   Annie Lowrey's new book, The Time Tax , argues that the most regressive levy in American life is the hours each of us must spend on hold, in waiting rooms, and filling out forms a competent state would have pre-filled — roughly fifty a year on average, and far more if you're poor. Tyler spends much of this conversation pressing the opposite case, asking whether that bureaucracy is quietly serving a useful purpose by rationing knee surgeries that don't work, deterring fraud, or screening for immigrants with gumption. So Tyler and Annie hash it out over an hour, covering why TANF and other…

9. 

   E289 · 9 Sep 2026 · 52 min

   Jared Diamond on Leaders, Luck, and Irreplaceability

   Is leadership overrated? That's one simple reading of what Jared Diamond argues in his new book . Asked by Tyler to name the least replaceable leader in human history, Jared declines to name one — not Christ, the Roman Empire having had prophets to spare — and observes that even Genghis Khan happened to be born at an auspicious moment for a conqueror of the steppes. Conditions ripen; somebody turns up. So which leaders do make a difference? Tyler and Jared debate that question , including conditions what a religious founder needs to succeed , whether destructive leaders matter more than…

10. 

    E288 · 2 Sep 2026 · 42 min

    Michael Moritz on Origin Stories, Exile, and Obsessive Curiosity

    Michael Moritz has written books through every phase of his life: the first history of Apple and an account of Chrysler's near-death while he was a journalist at Time , a study of Alex Ferguson's Manchester United in the middle of his 38 years at Sequoia, and now Ausländer , a family memoir, after leaving the firm. Moritz calls himself a dilettante with too many interests, but listen to him on learning to paint in his 40s, or the questions he would ask a ten-year-old boy in a German village in 1890, and you may decide that unsatisfied curiosity is not a small thing to build a life on. Tyler…

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