Jared Diamond on Leaders, Luck, and Irreplaceability

More from Conversations with Tyler

1. 

   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…

2. 

   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…

3. 

   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…

4. 

   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…

5. 

   E287 · 19 Aug 2026 · 52 min

   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 the priesthood. He now runs the Cluny Institute and teaches at Catholic University. His book Wanting made René Girard legible to a general audience; the new one, The One and the Ninety-Nine , takes mimetic theory into the dynamics of self and crowd in an age of social contagion. He joined Tyler to discuss whether the age of pessimism is ending, why the Anglo world in particular seems so unhappy, whether Dostoevsky or Thomas…

6. 

   E286 · 12 Aug 2026 · 56 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 liberalism for our times. Where Daron's first visit was about how states and societies contend for the narrow corridor in which liberty survives, this one asks what liberals themselves got wrong, and the answer implicates the educated elite—that is to say, you. Tyler and Daron discuss what's wrong with social contract theories and Rousseau's general will, whether Acemoglu is more objectivist than Rorty, why he blames left…

7. 

   E285 · 5 Aug 2026 · 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 largely been supplanted by those chasing marriage and domesticity instead. That disorienting reversal is the engine of her book Motherland , a National Book Award finalist that reconstructs modern Russian history almost entirely through its women. Her account, drawn from her own family's history as well as the archives, keeps returning to one plain observation: Soviet policy pushed women into the workforce, the medical schools,…

8. 

   E284 · 22 Jul 2026 · 57 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 thinking about. In Vermeer's case, that context includes a forgotten liberal sect — the Remonstrants and Collegiants, Christians without a church who believed peace would come through reading and toleration rather than a returning Messiah. Recover that world and a woman alone in a sunlit room is a radical image in a Europe where half of Germany had just died in war. If he's right, the label beside every Vermeer in every…

9. 

   E283 · 15 Jul 2026 · 54 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 answers. The principles didn't land until he lived them: throwing tennis matches as a bored teenager, getting shipped off to shovel manure at a feed yard twelve hours later, then spending five years battling Brazilian bureaucracy to build a fertilizer terminal that should have taken one. Today he is Executive Vice President of Origination and Partnerships, leader and donor to Stand Together, plays lead guitar in a band named for…

10. 

    E582 · 8 Jul 2026 · 46 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 normal? For nearly all of human history, cleverness didn't compound. What changed, according to Mokyr, was twofold: first, you need to know why something works, so that one advance can seed the next; second, you need a culture willing to tolerate the disruption. His new book contrasts Europe with China, showing how Europeans learned to cooperate with people they weren't related to, in guilds, monasteries, cities, and…

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