Conversations with Tyler

Roman Mars has built one of podcasting's great empires out of noticing things everyone else walks past. His show, 99% Invisible, has racked up over 500 million downloads telling stories about the unnoticed design choices that quietly shape how cities and objects work, from speed bump psychology and flag design to the shape of a good street sign. His TED Talk on vexillology (the study of flags) is so influential that it has reportedly spurred 250 to 300 municipal flag redesigns across the country, including in Pocatello, Idaho, a city he once publicly called out for having the worst flag in America. Tyler asked questions about nearly every visual surface of modern life, and Mars's answers keep circling back to the same tension: beauty and efficiency are often at odds, and most of what looks ugly to us is just a compromise we haven't yet learned to love.

Tyler and Roman discuss street signs, why classic cars were so much more distinctive than today's SUVs, Waymos, New Jersey jughandles, yellow streetlights, lane-stripe colors, why Houston keeps growing despite its lack of charm, whether any post-war American suburb is actually beautiful, the Chrysler Building's rocky reception, brutalism done right and wrong, Central Park as an urban miracle, what Jane Jacobs got wrong, e-bike lanes, Tokyo's bike-free transit model, the placelessness of global coffee shops, why the iPhone looks boring now, the ugliest country he's visited, his love for Australia's polymer notes, his soft spot for the dollar's "locked in amber" weirdness, underground power lines, how to warn future civilizations about nuclear waste, why highway signs lie to you about speed limits, the principles of a great city flag, the Pocatello redesign saga, his own studio, why 99% Invisible works precisely because it's audio-only, the most unusual habit behind his long productive career, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded August 28th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:08 - On urban and suburban design

00:21:55 - On phone design

00:24:36 - On the world's ugliest places

00:26:03 - On currency design

00:28:33 - On power lines, speed bumps, and nuclear warning signs

00:34:31 - On city flags

00:40:39 - On building 99% Invisible

00:45:06 - Outro

Liaquat Ahamed has spent years making central bankers into compelling characters. His 2009 book Lords of Finance won the Pulitzer Prize for its account of the bankers whose decisions helped cause the Great Depression; his new book, 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World, tells a stranger story — a severe deflationary crisis that barely dented global growth but poisoned politics for a generation. Tyler pushes him hard on the central puzzle of those two books — why did one financial crisis derail the world, while another left growth almost untouched?

Tyler and Liaquat start with that puzzle before moving through Gladstone's startlingly self-interested bet on Egyptian bonds, Bismarck's role in destroying bimetallism and deflating the world economy for two decades, whether a global silver or symmetallic standard could have worked, Britain's fateful decision to re-peg the pound to gold in 1926, Hjalmar Schacht's transformation from the economist who stabilized Weimar's currency to opportunist collaborator with the Nazi regime, Montagu Norman's spiritualist beliefs, why the 1920s produced such a creative cultural moment, lessons from the IMF on Ireland's housing bubble and Pakistan's two dozen bailouts, what went wrong in the eurozone crisis, Britain's baffling modern stagnation, and finally to his own restless career and what he wants to write next.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded July 28th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:13 - On 1873 vs. the Great Depression

00:15:32 - On bimetallism and the gold standard

00:21:32 - On the 1920s and Weimar hyperinflation

00:29:29 - On Ireland, Pakistan, and the Eurozone crisis

00:36:21 - On Liaquat's career and Ismaili Islam

00:44:37 - Outro

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 — housing, NIMBYism, and the productivity crisis; Spanish literature and why the Civil War still looms so large; and what Chicago taught Luis about party discipline in European politics. Then to the EU's unanimity problem, capital markets, and Denmark's flexicurity model; a round of overrated-versus-underrated on Rosalía, Penélope Cruz, and Sgt. Pepper's; and finally into Messy Jobs — why retraining programs fail, whether AI's leisure dividend has arrived, and whether Spain could ever achieve AI sovereignty.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded July 28th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:05 - On Spain's housing and political paralysis

00:11:08 - On Spanish literature and the Civil War

00:16:52 - On Basque and Catalan public finance

00:18:59 - On party discipline and political selection

00:22:03 - On the EU's unanimity problem

00:28:47 - On flexicurity and European labor rigidity

00:30:24 - Overrated vs. underrated

00:33:12 - On the future of Spanish language

00:35:01 - On why AI won't cause mass unemployment

00:48:38 - On what's next

00:50:11 - Outro

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 whether AI's growth dividend will show up on schedule.

Tyler and Gita discuss why trade balances are only weakly related to real exchange rates, before turning to Argentina, Milei's fiscal discipline, the peso, and dollarization. Then they discuss whether economists got the euro wrong; whether trade imbalances with China are really the problem; stablecoins, CBDCs, and the Treasury market; and whether AI will ease the debt burden, cause stagflation, or transform economics itself. Finally, they turn to her family's Kerala roots: why the state keeps electing communists, the relationship between matriarchy and social indicators, single-sex education, and what she's building next.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded August 27th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:57 - On why currencies don't adjust the way models predict

00:15:46 - On Argentina after triple-digit inflation

00:26:05 - On living with the euro

00:28:50 - On China's problematic surpluses

00:34:02 - On digital currencies

00:39:33 - On AI and the productivity question

00:48:51 - On why Kerala keeps electing communists

00:52:52 - On what comes next

00:55:15 - Outro

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 welfare programs are the worst offenders, the political economy of submerged benefits like the child tax credit, whether the postal service should be zeroed out over ten years the way Denmark did, whether the government should be nudging people out of rural areas, lessons from the COVID unemployment fraud, areas where the time tax is flat instead of regressive, which private sector time taxes are most onerous, whether AI agents will pay these taxes for us within five years, the logic of easy benefits plus randomized harsh audits, the case for less federalism, whether voting should be easier or harder, how the UBI studies changed her priors, where you can find the best moss in the world, her favorite example of Brutalist architecture, tattoos as permanent ephemera, Christianity's role in liberalism and the post-Christian right, how reporting beats tourism, the time tax of friendship, what she'll learn next, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded September 1st, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:58 - On taxing our time

00:19:47 - On private-sector time taxes

00:22:57 - On AI eliminating paperwork

00:25:03 - On immigration as a filter

00:28:49 - On reducing fraud

00:33:03 - On federalizing bureaucracy

00:35:12 - On breaking up New York

00:36:25 - On making voting easy

00:38:28 - On updating universal basic income

00:41:29 - On banning exotic pets

00:42:13 - On deserts and moss

00:43:18 - On beautiful brutalism

00:43:50 - On tattoo culture

00:44:38 - On Christianity after Christianity

00:48:29 - On escaping the global monoculture

00:51:42 - On the time tax of friendship

00:54:49 - On what comes next

00:55:43 - Outro

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 constructive ones, why individual leaders have mattered so little in Papua New Guinea, whether we undervalue preventers, how much Rachel Carson and the Resnicks really mattered, whether Botswana's success will endure, Jared's own place in intellectual history, and what he'd tell an ambitious 25-year-old about how to become consequential. They go on to cover whether New Guineans are smarter, his reasons for why the Industrial Revolution started in England, what he learned from Jim Robinson about natural experiments, why he's more optimistic about the environment than when he wrote Collapse, what he'd do about nuclear risk, the 189 bird species on his street in Los Angeles, why the MacArthur "genius grant" left him depressed for a week, why he's listening to one Bach cantata a week, what he hopes to work on as he enters his nineties, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded August 21st, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:11 - On whether any leader is irreplaceable

00:21:35 - On his own replaceability

00:24:55 - On the decline of face-to-face skills

00:29:02 - On intelligence and genetics

00:32:57 - On why the Industrial Revolution began in England

00:36:38 - On environmental optimism

00:41:11 - On nuclear risk and the Dvorak keyboard

00:42:55 - On birdwatching

00:44:07 - On writing and productivity

00:47:06 - On what his parents gave him

00:49:51 - On what comes next

00:51:36 - Outro

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 and Michael discuss his childhood in Wales, where his love for visual arts came from, why he disappointed his Latin teacher, having Thanksgiving dinner with Philip Roth, why children don't interrogate their parents about their history, what he feels visiting Germany and why he now holds German citizenship, how a history major with no technical background talked his way into Sequoia, his unpublished Don Valentine profile, what people underrate about Steve Jobs, obsessives versus dilettantes, why capitalism was more ablaze in China than America, what funding the Booker Prize taught him about his own ignorance, how to improve San nonprofits, how an incurable cancer diagnosis changed his calendar, why Britain's stuck, what he'll learn next, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded July 21st, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:04:57 - On living with difficult art

00:09:44 - On Jewish literature

00:13:00 - On why children don't interrogate their parents

00:15:54 - On returning to Germany

00:23:37 - On stumbling into venture capital

00:28:49 - On obsessives and dilettantes

00:33:03 - On supporting the Booker Prize

00:34:17 - On improving San Francisco's nonprofits

00:37:26 - On controlling your own calendar

00:38:43 - On why Britain is stuck

00:40:06 - On what comes next

00:41:10 - Outro

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 Mann better diagnoses modernity, the kind of reader his own book would ruin, why he thinks AI will make social contagion weaker, what put him off consulting with Anthropic on Claude's constitution, what effective altruism misses, why men and women are drifting apart, what he'd fund in every American city, the case for reintroducing friction, whether a Gnostic reading of the lost sheep explains our moment, what Rod Dreher gets right about withdrawal, why Genoa is Italy's most underrated city, what confession times reveal about a church, why Italians seem tired of their Catholicism, why he didn't become a priest, where he differs from Ross Douthat, why exorcists appear to be on the rise, the sudden mimetic antisemitism on the right, the book his 23-year-old self would have hated, what he secretly admires about Silicon Valley, why Michigan never left him, what the original Cluny can teach a modern talent network, how he hopes to face his own death, what he'll do next, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded April 30th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:05:08 - On overapplying mimetic theory

00:06:35 - On AI and social contagion

00:07:53 - On declining Anthropic's invitation

00:09:36 - On the widening gap between men and women

00:12:25 - On anti-mimetic postures, jazz, and porn

00:16:46 - On Genoa, Naples, and societal escape fantasies

00:18:31 - On Italian Catholicism

00:26:59 - On not becoming a priest

00:29:13 - On beauty, enchantment, and the Gnostic sheep

00:40:22 - On what Wall Street taught him

00:43:50 - On Michigan

00:45:12 - On the Cluny Institute

00:48:41 - On dealing with death and what else is next

00:51:21 - Outro

Image credit: Kirth Bobb

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 liberalism's own establishment power for its collapse, what standard is left once you refuse to have a book of higher values, nondomination versus noninterference, who counts as working class, why automation alone will not lead to widespread prosperity, how he can call himself a free speech absolutist while wanting to regulate social media, why he worries we've given up on educating Americans, whether teachers' unions need to be reconstituted, what the life expectancy for an educated twenty year old is today, whether open-source models undercut the centralization worry, what pro-worker AI actually means, why the fertility crisis leaves him strangely close to a real business cycle position, whether AI will raise his own already prodigious paper output, why Armenia has disappointed economically, what he wants to learn next, and more.

Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded July 15th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:08:57 - On the working class vs. the elite

00:13:16 - On automation

00:22:33 - On free speech

00:27:22 - On immigration

00:31:08 - On artificial intelligence

00:50:36 - On Armenia

00:53:22 - On what comes next

00:54:51 - Outro

Image credit: Bryce Vickmark

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, and even into combat, while asking so little of men that low expectations became self-fulfilling—and Russia is still living with the results.

Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia's great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist government established women's medical courses in 1872, changing attitudes towards abortion and birth control in the 20th century, why the Soviet regime turned prudish, how Khrushchev's plan to "replace the dead" institutionalized single motherhood, Russian superwomen, why Jewish men were a prized commodity amid rampant antisemitism, the cultural significance of flowers, why a few Russian names still dominate, why Russian women think Western feminists have their priorities backwards, how gender attitudes and autocracy feed into each other, three underrated Russian novels, what she wants to write about next, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.

Recorded April 7th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:06:38 - Bolshevik feminism

00:08:41 - Birth control, abortion, and prudery

00:14:48 - The Russian mating market

00:23:06 - Russian superwomen

00:32:02 - The importance of flowers

00:37:35 - Common Russian names

00:39:51 - Russian vs. American feminism

00:44:23 - Gender attitudes and Russian politics

00:49:54 - Russian novels

00:54:33 - Outro

Photo credit: Max Avdeev

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 museum will one day have to change.

Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we'd rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of the Catholic Faith, whether Vermeer painted for money or pointedly refused to, where the Gardner's stolen Concert might be, why Dutch music never blossomed as much as Dutch painting did, how the Church of England rivaled the Cultural Revolution in wiping out British art, whether you can still spot an English painting on sight, the love that saturates late Rembrandt and the mystery of his soaring print prices, the nail on the wall that proves two Vermeer paintings are a pair, why the French are to blame for George Stubbs' lack of status, whether we can still love Malevich, why Andrews calls recent Richter "almost like printing money," why female artists and antique textiles remain absurdly cheap, why nobody builds beautiful neighborhoods any longer, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded April 7th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:44 - The Mystery of Vermeer

00:12:53 - Dutch Music

00:15:51 - English Art

00:19:49 - Rembrandt

00:23:17 - Attributions

00:26:22 - Exhibitions and Restorations

00:30:05 - Underrated French Artists

00:35:16 - Howard Hodgkin

00:38:00 - Difficult-To-Love Artists

00:40:53 - Other Dutch Painters

00:44:20 - Contemporary Art

00:48:05 - Buying Art

00:50:39 - Neighborhood Aesthetics

00:54:39 - Advice for Aspiring Art Critics

00:56:14 - Outro

Image Credit: Aliona Adrianova

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 the law of entropy, and has a new book with his father on principle-driven leadership.

Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father's lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa's grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De'Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents' garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it's like working with MrBeast, how Koch Inc has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the "farm team," why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old's urging, where he's traveling next, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded June 16th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:56 - Familial Influences

00:08:25 - Tennis and Basketball

00:15:00 - The Music Industry

00:28:36 - MrBeast

00:31:24 - The Evolution of Koch Industries

00:35:54 - The Midwest

00:44:37 - AI

00:49:01 - Politics

00:53:35 - Outro

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 universities, while China organized itself around the extended clan. One path led to internal stability and peace; the other, more restless and outward-looking, was the one that decided the world could always be made better.

Tyler and Joel discuss European corporations vs. Chinese clans, why the Catholic Church became obsessed with cousin-marriage, how persistent cultural trends really are, why Chinese cities became so populous relative to Europe, why it took so long for European living standards to surpass China's, why sinified invaders kept getting swallowed by the dynasties they conquered, how geography kept Europe fragmented and China unified, where India fits into the story, why the Romans never made spectacles, why British soldiers stood two inches taller than the French, what powered the sudden rise of 19th-century German science, how disruptive winning a Nobel is, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded February 20th, 2026.

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:54 - Europe vs. China's Paths to Prosperity

00:10:22 - China's Growth

00:13:24 - Europe's Growth

00:18:56 - The Fall of Song China

00:21:56 - India

00:25:08 - Industrial Revolution

00:39:52 - 19th-Century German Science

00:43:37 - Being a Nobel Laureate

00:45:29 - Outro

Photo Credit: Shane Collins

Joanne Paul is a historian at the University of Sussex, author, and a go-to Tudor expert on YouTube. She tells Tyler she's drawn to the 16th century because it sits between the medieval and the modern, and because its paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.

Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More's persecution of heretics, how Holbein's portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne's upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain's current stagnation, the subject of her next book, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded February 19th, 2026.

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:03:42 - More's Utopia

00:10:50 - Whether More Should be Admired

00:13:39 - Play and Movie Adaptations of More

00:19:25 - English Catholicism as the Reformation Approaches

00:22:29 - Shakespeare and the Growth of Education

00:26:08 - The Quality of Tudor Art

00:27:24 - Tolerance and Social Mobility in 16th Century England

00:32:49 - London's Governance

00:34:23 - Canada

00:38:12 - Choosing English History to Study

00:41:23 - Touring and Living in England

00:43:06 - Religion, Politics, and Economics in the UK

00:49:32 - Outro

Dave Baszucki is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the user-generated gaming platform where all the games are built by the community itself. With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between.

Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he's skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son's experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he'll learn next, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded May 27th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:44 - Roblox by the Numbers

00:08:54 - Competition

00:12:13 - Everything Apps

00:19:50 - AI Language Translation

00:21:18 - Token Costs

00:24:01 - Beauty and Gaming

00:27:01 - Robux

00:29:28 - Social Media and Younger Audiences

00:40:56 - AI and Gaming

00:45:44 - Mutiny on the Bounty

00:47:38 - David's Earlier Companies

00:51:16 - Mentors

00:52:35 - Outro

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian who has made a career out of explaining Germany to the world—and, just as importantly, to Germans themselves. Born in East Germany in 1985 and now based in Britain, she has written acclaimed histories of the German Empire, the GDR, and most recently the Weimar Republic.

Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler's own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it's no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany's nudist culture, what Merkel's East German background did and didn't give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she'd rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler's citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany's current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she'd choose to live on, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded March 30th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:05:34 - East German Artistic Creations

00:10:55 - Angela Merkel's East German Background

00:14:08 - East German Underrepresentation Today

00:17:02 - East Germans vs. West Germans

00:20:32 - Goethe and Weimar's Cultural Heritage

00:27:09 - What Weimar Knew About Buchenwald

00:31:10 - Why the Weimar Constitution Failed

00:35:21 - Prussia, Bavaria, and Where Nazism Took Root

00:38:23 - Rewriting the Treaty of Versailles

00:39:59 - Historical Antisemitism in Germany

00:42:27 - Hitler's Citizenship problem

00:45:14 - Weimar's Best Cultural Creations

00:47:02 - The Most Underrated German Thinker

00:49:07 - Improving Weimar

00:52:58 - Germany's Economic Malaise

00:55:38 - Living in Britain as a German Historian

01:00:49 - Outro

Toby Wilkinson is one of the world's leading Egyptologists, whose books have ranged across the full sweep of pharaonic history. His latest, The Last Dynasty: Ancient Egypt from Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, covers the 300-year Ptolemaic period — stranger and more modern-feeling than the Egypt of the pyramids, built around commerce and cosmopolitanism rather than divine kingship, and home to the greatest concentration of scientific talent the ancient world ever saw.

Tyler and Toby cover how Alexander took over the empire almost without a fight, why Alexandria became the Manhattan of the ancient world, whether the era was as philosophically fertile as it was scientifically, whether your ancient doctor's visit had positive expected value, what Egypt was actually exporting and selling, whether living standards rose above subsistence or stayed Malthusian, how the ethnic divide between Greek rulers and Egyptian subjects shaped society, what constrained the Ptolemaic Empire from becoming the next Rome, whether Cleopatra has been overhyped, what Julius Caesar was really thinking when he sided with her over her brother, the new frontiers in archeology, whether Herodotus can be trusted, what ancient Egypt knew about Israel and India, when Egyptian jewelry peaked and why, what triggered the sudden emergence of civilization across the ancient world, why a six-year-old Tyler knew King Tut better than Napoleon, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded March 23rd, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:04:29 - Intellectual Activity of Alexandria

00:11:07 - The Alexandrian Economy

00:14:36 - The Ptolemaic Empire

00:21:19 - Unanswered Questions in Ptolemaic Egypt

00:23:32 - Modern Alexandria and the Future of Archaeology

00:26:37 - Other Topics in Ancient Egypt

00:42:10 - Toby's Career

00:45:26 - Outro

Photo Credit: Benjamin Frei

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John's American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that's the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all.

Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles', whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick's London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles' breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon's second act, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded April 28th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:02:44 - The Sound of the Rolling Stones

00:05:25 - Underrated Rolling Stones Songs and Albums

00:09:06 - Charlie Watts and Brian Jones

00:11:18 - Art Colleges and Rock 'n' Roll

00:13:06 - The Stones' Stability

00:16:32 - Mick Jagger: Closet Economist?

00:17:53 - Pop Music's Lack of Relevance

00:20:10 - The Beatles

00:28:14 - Led Zeppelin

00:31:30 - Bruce Springsteen

00:36:20 - Bob Dylan

00:39:40 - Julia Child

00:42:29 - The Knicks

00:45:21 - Ronald Reagan

00:49:01 - Robert Caro

00:52:03 - Writing

00:55:00 - Outro

Craig Newmark's career, in retrospect, looks like a series of deliberate subtractions: he kept Craigslist plain, stepped aside as CEO early on, gave his equity to his foundation, and now funds people and gets out of their way. His theory, arrived at gradually, is that recognizing your limitations and relying on your network is how you get more done.

Tyler and Craig discuss why webpage design has gotten worse for 30 years, what Craig's "obsessive customer service disorder" taught him about human nature, why trusting people and maintaining a nine-second rule for scams aren't as contradictory as they sound, why roommate ads are a better way to find love, why Craigslist never added seller evaluations, why Leonard Cohen speaks to him more than Bob Dylan, what William Gibson's Neuromancer got right about the internet, why Jackson Lamb is now one of his role models, why large foundations lose accountability, what two painful Ivy League grants taught him philanthropy, what he gets from rescuing pigeons, the hard lesson he learned about confronting people who lie for a living, his favorite TV shows and movies, the one genuine luxury he can't go without, what he still needs to learn, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded April 14th, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro 00:02:41 - Stepping Aside as CEO 00:04:20 - Customer Service and Social Skills 00:16:27 - Restaurants 00:18:06 - Music 00:19:27 - Science Fiction 00:20:14 - TV Shows 00:26:03 - Philanthropy 00:30:20 - Journalism 00:31:55 - Pigeons 00:32:50 - Entrepreneurship 00:35:09 - Craig's Personal Philosophy 00:37:37 - Major Regrets 00:39:17 - Audience Q&A 00:46:23 - Outro

Kim Bowes is an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania whose book, Surviving Rome: The Economic Lives of the Ninety Percent, Tyler calls perhaps his favorite economics book of 2025. By sifting through the material remains of Roman life — shoes, bricks, ceramics, and the like — she uncovers a picture of ordinary Romans who could evidently afford to buy multiple sets of colorful clothes, use gold coins for daily transactions, and eat peppercorns sourced from thousands of miles away. This vast web of commerce, she argues, both bound the empire together and provided the tax base that kept it running — and when it unraveled, Rome unraveled with it.

Tyler and Kim discuss what would surprise a modern visitor to a Roman elite home, what early Roman Christianity actually looked like on the ground, why Romans never developed formal economic reasoning, what decentralized money-lending reveals about the Roman state, whether there were anything like forward markets, why Romans continued to use coins even as the empire debased them, the economics of Roman slavery, whether Roman recipes taste any good, the Romans as hyper-scalers rather than inventors, what Rome made of China and Egypt, why Kim's not a fan of the Vesuvius challenge, the practicalities of landscape archaeology, how a vast belt of factories along the Tiber Valley went undiscovered until twenty years ago, where to go on a three-week tour of the Roman Empire, what she thinks is ultimately behind Rome's unraveling, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded February 2nd, 2026.

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Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:06 - Roman Housing 00:08:28 - What Early Roman Christians Actually Believed 00:16:29 - Roman Economic Thought 00:18:39 - Roman Banking and Money Practices 00:28:48 - The Economics of Roman Slavery 00:31:56 - What Held The Roman Empire Together 00:36:46 - Roman Cookery 00:39:17 - The Romans as Masters of Scale 00:42:05 - Rome's Contact with Asia 0043:59 - The Vesuvius Challenge 00:45:13 - Ancient Carthage and the Fall of Rome 00:49:43 - The Realities of Doing Archaeology 00:57:15 - Touring the Roman Empire 01:00:42 - Outro