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

More from Conversations with Tyler All episodes →

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. 

   E265 · 17 Dec 2025 · 1 hr 1 min

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

   Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of the world from limited data. Her central insight is that babies learn like scientists, running experiments and updating beliefs based on evidence. But Tyler wonders: are scientists actually good learners? It's a question that leads them into a wide-ranging conversation about what we've been systematically underestimating in young minds, what's wrong with simple nature-versus-nurture frameworks,…

5. 

   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…

6. 

   E262 · 26 Nov 2025 · 1 hr 20 min

   Cass Sunstein on Liberalism and Rights in the Age of AI

   Cass Sunstein is one of the most widely cited legal scholars of all time and among the most prolific writers working today. This year alone he has five books out, including Imperfect Oracle on the strengths and limits of AI and On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom . In his second appearance on the show, he brings his characteristic intellectual range to exploring liberalism's present precariousness and AI's implications for law and speech. Tyler and Cass discuss whether liberalism is self-undermining or simply vulnerable to illiberal forces, the tensions in how a liberal immigration regime…

7. 

   E261 · 19 Nov 2025 · 38 min

   Blake Scholl on Supersonic Flight and Fixing Broken Infrastructure - Live at the Progress Conference

   Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he's building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he's equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it's airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept. Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why…

8. 

   E260 · 12 Nov 2025 · 57 min

   Donald S. Lopez Jr. on Buddhism

   Register for the Austin listener meetup Donald S. Lopez Jr. is among the foremost scholars of Buddhism, whose work consistently distinguishes Buddhist reality from Western fantasy. A professor at the University of Michigan and author of numerous essential books on Buddhist thought and practice, he's spent decades studying Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, including a formative year spent living in a Tibetan monastery in India. His latest book, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth , tackles the formidable challenge of understanding what we can actually know about the historical Buddha. Tyler and Donald…

9. 

   E259 · 5 Nov 2025 · 55 min

   Sam Altman on Trust, Persuasion, and the Future of Intelligence - Live at the Progress Conference

   Register for the Austin listener meetup Sam Altman makes his second appearance on the show to discuss how he's managing OpenAI's explosive growth, what he's learned about hiring hardware people, what makes roon special, how far they are from an AI-driven replacement to Slack, what GPT-6 might enable for scientific research, when we'll see entire divisions of companies run mostly by AI, what he looks for in hires to gauge their AI-resistance, how OpenAI is thinking about commerce, whether GPT-6 will write great poetry, why energy is the binding constraint to chip-building and where it'll come…

10. 

    E258 · 28 Oct 2025 · 52 min

    Jonny Steinberg on South African Crime and Punishment, the Mandelas' Marriage, and the Post-Apartheid Era

    Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg's particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee's journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist's emotional insight. Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African…