PODCAST · science
Spedup Conversation With Tyler
by cwt_speedup
Conversation with Tyler, sped up with PodcastSpeedup to equalize the speeds of the different speakers.
Episodes
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Conversations with Tyler 2020 Retrospective
Want to support the show? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. On this special year-in-review episode, producer Jeff Holmes sat down with Tyler to talk about the most popular—and most underrated—episodes, Tyler's personal highlight of the year, how well state capacity libertarianism has…
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John O. Brennan on Life in the CIA
Want to support the show? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. Growing up in a working-class city in New Jersey, John Brennan’s father was an Irish immigrant who always impressed upon his children how grateful they should be to be American citizens. That deeply-instilled patriotism and the...
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Jimmy Wales on Systems and Incentives
Jimmy Wales used to joke that choosing to build Wikipedia on a non-profit, non-advertising model was either the best or worst decision he ever made—but he doesn’t joke about that anymore. “If you think about advertising-driven social media…it's driven them in many cases to prioritize agitation…
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Zach Carter on the Life and Legacy of John Maynard Keynes
After reading Zach Carter’s intellectual biography of Keynes earlier this year, <a href=...
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Edwidge Danticat on Haitian Art and Literature
Edwidge Danticat left Haiti when she was 12, she says, but Haiti never left her. At 14 she began writing stories about the people and culture she loved, and now is an internationally acclaimed novelist and short story writer as well a MacArthur Genius Fellow. Rather than holding herself out as...
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Michael Kremer on Economists as Founders
Michael Kremer is best known for his academic work researching global poverty, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019 along with Esther Duflo and <a href=...
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Audrey Tang on the Technology of Democracy
Audrey Tang began reading classical works like the Shūjīng and Tao Te Ching at the age of 5 and learned the programming language Perl at the age of 12. Now, the autodidact and self-described “conservative anarchist” is a software engineer and the first non-binary digital...
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Alex Ross on Music, Culture, and Criticism
To Alex Ross, good music critics must be well-rounded and have command of neighboring cultural areas. “When you're writing about opera, you're writing about literature as well as music, you're writing about staging, theater ideas, as well as music,” says the veteran music journalist and staff...
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Matt Yglesias on Why the Population is Too Damn Low
Matt Yglesias joined Tyler for a wide-ranging conversation on his vision for a bigger, less politically polarized America outlined in his new book One Billion Americans: The Case for...
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Jason Furman on Productivity, Competition, and Growth
Note: This conversation was recorded in January 2020. Tyler credits Jason Furman’s intellectual breadth, real-world experience, and emphasis on policy for making him the best economist in the world. Furman, despite not initially being interested in public policy, ultimately...
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Nicholas Bloom on Management, Productivity, and Scientific Progress
What might the electrification of factories teach us about how quickly we’ll adapt to remote work? What gives American companies an edge over their competitors on the international stage? What value do management consultants really provide? Stanford professor Nick Bloom’s research studies how...
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Nathan Nunn on the Paths to Development
Nathan Nunn’s work history includes automotive stores, a freight company, a paint factory, a ski hill, photography, book publishing, private tutoring, and more. Having grown up in a lower-income Canadian family, he recognizes the importance of having multiple pathways to climb the socioeconomic...
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Melissa Dell on the Significance of Persistence
Explaining 10 percent of something is not usually cause for celebration. And yet when it comes to economic development, where so many factors are in play—institutions, culture, geography, to name a few—it’s impressive indeed. And that’s just what Melissa Dell has accomplished in her...
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Annie Duke on Poker, Probabilities, and How We Make Decisions
For Annie Duke, the poker table is a perfect laboratory to study human decision-making — including her own. “It really exposes you to the way that you’re thinking,” she says, “how hard it is to avoid decision traps, even when you’re perfectly well aware that those decision...
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Rachel Harmon on Policing
Long before becoming a legal scholar focused on police reform, Rachel Harmon studied engineering at MIT and graduate philosophy at LSE. “You could call it a random walk,” she says, “or you could say that I’m really interested in the structure of things.” But despite her experience and...
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Ashley Mears on Status and Beauty
Ashley Mears is a former fashion model turned academic sociologist, and her book <span...
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Paul Romer on a Culture of Science and Working Hard
Paul Romer makes his second appearance to discuss the failings of economics, how his mass testing plan for COVID-19 would work, what aspects of epidemiology concern him, how the FDA is slowing a better response, his ideas for reopening schools and Major League Baseball, where he...
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Emily St. John Mandel on Fact, Fiction, and the Familiar
When Tyler requested an interview with novelist Emily St. John Mandel, he didn’t expect that reality would have in some ways become an eerie mirror of her latest books. And Emily didn’t expect that it’d be boosting sales: “Why would anybody in their right mind want to read Station...
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Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized
hr In his new book, Ezra Klein argues that...
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Slavoj Žižek on His Stubborn Attachment to Communism
This bonus episode features audio from the <a class="markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" href= "https://www.uib.no/en/udir/131536/2019-holberg-debate-slavoj-%C5%BEi%C5%BEek-%C2%ABwhy-i-am-still-communist%C2%BB" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-href=...
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Emily Wilson on Translations and Language
In a recent Twitter thread, Emily Wilson listed some...
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Adam Tooze on our Financial Past and Future
Adam Tooze is best known for his highly-regarded books on the economic history of Nazi Germany, the remaking of the global economic and political order starting in World War I, and his account of how the economic effects of the 2008 financial crisis rippled across the globe for a...
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Glen Weyl on Fighting COVID-19 and the Role of the Academic Expert
Glen Weyl is an economist, researcher, and founder of RadicalXChange. He recently co-authored a paper that sets forth an ambitious strategy to respond to the crisis and mitigate long-term damage to the...
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Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox
Accuracy is only one of the things we want from forecasters, says Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of <span...
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Ross Douthat on Decadence and Dynamism
For Ross Douthat, decadence isn’t necessarily a moral judgement, but a technical label for a state that societies tend to enter—and one that is perhaps much more normal than the dynamism Americans have come to take for granted. <a href=...
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Russ Roberts and Tyler on COVID-19
Tyler and Russ Roberts joined forces for a special livestreamed conversation on...
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John McWhorter on Linguistics, Music, and Race (Live at Mason)
Who can you ask about the Great American Songbook, the finer Jell-O flavors, and peculiar languages like Saramaccan all while expecting the same kind of fast, thoughtful, and energetic response? Listeners of Lexicon Valley might hazard a...
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Garett Jones on Democracy (More or Less)
Why is Garett Jones willing to write books about risky topics like the case for reducing democratic accountability? Is it the iconoclastic Mason econ culture? Supportive colleagues like Tyler? Those help, but what ultimately gives Garett peace of mind is that...
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Tim Harford on Persuasion and Popular Economics
he To Tim Harford, mistakes are fascinating. “We often only understand how something works when it breaks,” he says, explaining why there’s such an emphasis on errors throughout his work. They also tend to make great stories, which can stoke the curiosity...
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Reid Hoffman on Systems, Levers, and Quixotic Quests
When Reid Hoffman creates a handle for some new network or system, his usual choice is “Quixotic<span...
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Abhijit Banerjee on Theory, Practice, and India
s Want to support future conversations? Visit conversationswithtyler.com/donate. <span...
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Tyler Looks Back on 2019 (BONUS)
Want to support future conversations? Visit <span data-contrast=...
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Esther Duflo on Management, Growth, and Research in Action
Want to support future conversations? Visit <span data-contrast=...
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Daron Acemoglu on the Struggle Between State and Society
What determines the economic, social, and political trajectories of nations? Why were settlers in colonies like Jamestown and Australia able to escape the extractive systems desired by their British masters, while colonial subjects in Barbados and Jamaica were not? <a href=...
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Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen on the Nature and Causes of Progress (Bonus)
Over the past year Mark Zuckerberg has held a series of interviews themed around technology and society. This conversation with Tyler and Patrick is the last in that series, and covers why they think the study of progress is so...
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Shaka Senghor on Incarceration, Identity, and the Gift of Literacy
How do you survive seven years in solitary confinement? The gift of literacy is what saved Shaka Senghor. Reading, journaling, academic study, and writing books was a way to structure and survive an inhumane, mentally toxic environment. And after 19 years in total...
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Lunch with Fuchsia Dunlop at Mama Chang (Bonus)
Three years after her first appearance, Chinese food expert Fuchsia Dunlop joins Tyler to celebrate the release of her latest cookbook and talk all things food and China. This time the conversation was held over a...
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Ted Gioia on Music as Cultural Cloud Storage
To Ted Gioia, music is a form of cloud storage for preserving human culture. And the real cultural conflict, he insists, is not between “high brow” and “low brow” music, but between the innovative and the formulaic. Imitation and repetition deaden musical culture—and he should know, since he...
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Henry Farrell on Weaponized Interdependence, Big Tech, and Playing with Ideas
The one concept most valuable for understanding the news today might be Henry Farrell’s theory of weaponized interdependence. Whether it’s China’s influence over the NBA, the US ban of Huawei, or whether social media should be regulated on a global scale, Henry Farrell has...
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Ben Westhoff on Synthetic Drugs, Dive Bars, and the Evolution of Rap
Ben Westhoff has written some of Tyler’s favorite books on everything from dive bars to the evolution of American rap music to how fentanyl is driving the opioid epidemic. So how does he get it done? Not from the outside in, by finding exotic experiences as he originally...
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Alain Bertaud on Cities, Markets, and People
Markets, Alain Bertaud likes to say, are like gravity: they exist everywhere. But while urban planners are quite good at taking gravity into account, they tend to ignore market forces entirely in their designs, resulting in city development that too often fails to address...
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Samantha Power on Learning How to Make a Difference
A former war correspondent and UN ambassador, Samantha Power has had her share of tough assignments. But writing a memoir about it all is also a daunting prospect. The format itself is a challenge: how do you convince the reader you’re worth spending time with? How do you...
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Hollis Robbins on 19th Century Life and Literature
As a graduate student, Hollis Robbins helped Henry Louis Gates, Jr. unravel a mystery about the provenance of a mid-19th century book. Robbins helped date the book by discovering allusions to popular literature of that period — her focus at the time. The realization that...
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Masha Gessen on the Ins and Outs of Russia
What sort of country would compel you to flee it, draw you back ten years later, then force you away yet again after two decades? Masha Gessen knows the answer all too well, having dedicated her career to writing and reporting about Russian society from both within and...
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Kwame Anthony Appiah on Pictures of the World
Born to a Ghanaian father and British mother, Kwame Anthony Appiah grew up splitting time between both countries — and lecturing in many more — before eventually settling in America, where he now teaches philosophy at New York University. This, along with a family scattered...
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Neal Stephenson on Depictions of Reality
If you want to speculate on the development of tech, no one has a better brain to pick than Neal Stephenson. Across more than a dozen books, he’s created vast story worlds driven by futuristic technologies that have both prophesied and even provoked real-world progress in...
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Eric Kaufmann on Immigration, Identity, and the Limits of Individualism
Going back and forth between Canada and Japan during his childhood sparked Eric Kaufmann’s interest in the question of identity. As a foreigner in an international school, he encountered young individuals from at least 60 other countries, and this made him think more about...
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Hal Varian on Taking the Academic Approach to Business
Before he became the <a class= "markup--anchor markup--p-anchor" href= "https://www.wsj.com/articles/silicon-valley-doesnt-believe-u-s-productivity-is-down-1437100700" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-href=...
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Russ Roberts on Life as an Economics Educator
What are the virtues of forgiveness? Are we subject to being manipulated by data? Why do people struggle with prayer? What really motivates us? How has the volunteer army system changed the incentives for war? These are just some of the questions that keep Russ Roberts going...
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Ezekiel Emanuel on the Practice of Medicine, Policy, and Life
Ezekiel Emanuel is a reflection of his upbringing: a doctor for a father who loved to travel, a mother interested in policy and community activism, and all the competition and friendship that comes with growing up closely with two brothers. Put those...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Spedup Conversation With Tyler have?
Spedup Conversation With Tyler currently has 129 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Spedup Conversation With Tyler about?
Conversation with Tyler, sped up with PodcastSpeedup to equalize the speeds of the different speakers.
How often does Spedup Conversation With Tyler release new episodes?
Spedup Conversation With Tyler publishes regularly with 129 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to Spedup Conversation With Tyler?
You can listen to Spedup Conversation With Tyler on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Spedup Conversation With Tyler?
Spedup Conversation With Tyler is created and hosted by cwt_speedup.
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