Ian Leslie on McCartney, Lennon, and the Greatest Creative Partnership of All Time

Political scientist Bruno Maçães has built a career out of crossing the globe teaching, advising, writing, and talking to people. His recent book, born out of a six-month journey across Eurasia, is one of Tyler's favorites. So how does it feel to face Tyler's rat-a-tat curiosity about your life's work? For Bruno, the experience was "like you are a politician under attack and your portfolio is the whole of physical and metaphysical reality." Listen to this episode to discover how well Bruno defended that expansive portfolio, including what's missing from liberalism, Obama's conceptual foreign policy mistake, what economists are most wrong about, how to fall in love with Djibouti, stagnation in Europe, the diversity of Central Asia, Hitchcock's perfect movie, China as an ever-growing global force, the book everyone under 25 should read, the creativity of Washington, D.C versus Silicon Valley, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded September 3rd, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Bruno on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

26 Sep 201857min

Michele Gelfand is professor of psychology at the University of Maryland and author of the just-released Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World. In her conversation with Tyler, Michele unpacks the concept of tight and loose cultures and more, including which variable best explains tightness, the problem with norms, whether Silicon Valley has an honor culture, the importance of theory and history in guiding research, what Donald Trump gets wrong about negotiation, why MBAs underrate management, the need to develop cultural IQ, and why mentorship should last a lifetime. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded August 31st, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Michele on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

12 Sep 201856min

Claire Lehmann is the founding editor of Quillette, an online magazine dedicated to free thought and open inquiry. Founded in 2015, the magazine has already developed a large and growing readership that values Quillette's promise to treat all ideas with respect, even those that may be politically incorrect. As an Australian, Claire tells Tyler she doesn't think she could have started the magazine in America. Even in risk-loving San Fransisco, where this conversation took place, people are too afraid to speak their minds. "You celebrate entrepreneurs and courage in making money and that kind of thing, but there is a general timidity when it comes to expressing one's honest views about things," she tells Tyler. "I find that surprising, and particularly among people who are risk-taking in all sorts of other domains." She and Tyler explore her ideas about the stifling effect of political correctness and more, including why its dominant form may come from the political right, how higher education got screwed up, strands of thought favored by the Internet and Youtube, overrated and underrated Australian cities, Aussie blokes, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded July 19th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Claire on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

29 Aug 201847min

Michael Pollan has long been fascinated by nature and the ways we connect and clash with it, with decades of writing covering food, farming, cooking, and architecture. Pollan's latest fascination? Our widespread and ancient desire to use nature to change our consciousness. He joins Tyler to discuss his research and experience with psychedelics, including what kinds of people most benefit from them, what it can teach us about profundity, how it can change your personality and political views, the importance of culture in shaping the experience, the proper way to integrate it into mainstream practice, and - most importantly of all - whether it's any fun. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded July 20th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Michael on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

15 Aug 201859min

Perhaps no one else in the world more appreciates the challenges facing a better understanding of autism than Michelle Dawson. An autistic herself, she began researching her condition after experiencing discrimination at her job. "Because I had to address these legal issues and questions," she tells Tyler, "I did actually look at the autism literature, and suddenly I had information I could really work with. Suddenly there it was, this information that I was supposed to be too stupid to work with." And so she continued reading papers - lots and lots of papers - and is now an influential researcher in her own right. For Michelle, the best way to understand autism is to think of it as atypical information processing. Autistic brains function differently, and these highly varied divergences lead to biases and misunderstanding among typical thinkers, including autism researchers. In her conversation with Tyler, she outlines the current thinking on autism, including her ideas about cognitive versatility and optionality, hyperlexia and other autistic strengths, why different tests yield wildly different measures of IQ among autistics, her 'massive bias' against segregating autistics, how autistic memory is different, why sometimes a triangle is just a freaking triangle, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded July 9th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Michelle on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

1 Aug 201853min

At the intersection of programming, economics, cryptography, distributed systems, information theory, and math, you will find Vitalik Buterin, who has managed to synthesize insights across those fields into successful, real-world applications like Ethereum, which aims to decentralize the Internet. Tyler sat down with Vitalik to discuss the many things he's thinking about and working on, including the nascent field of cryptoeconomics, the best analogy for understanding the blockchain, his desire for more social science fiction, why belief in progress is our most useful delusion, best places to visit in time and space, how he picks up languages, why centralization's not all bad, the best ways to value crypto assets, whether P = NP, and much more. Do you have a world-changing idea like Vitalik? The Mercatus Center is launching a new fellowship and grant program called Emergent Ventures to support transformational thinkers and doers. Listen to Tyler talk about the new project on the latest Mercatus Policy Download. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded June 25th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Vitalik on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

18 Juli 201852min

Travel writer Juan Pablo Villarino had visited 90 countries before making the trek to exotic Arlington, Virginia for this chat with Tyler. Amazingly enough, this recording marked his first trip to the mainland United States, which is now the 91st country in an ever-expanding list. The world's best hitchhiker talks with Tyler about the joys of connecting with people, why it's so hard to avoid stereotypes (including of hitchhikers), how stamp collecting guides his trips, the darkest secrets of people he's gotten rides from, traveling and writing books with his wife, the cause of violence in the Americas, finding the emotional heart of a journey, where he's going next, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded May 4th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Follow Juan on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

3 Juli 20181h 1min

Elisa New believes anyone can have fun reading a poem. And that if you really want to have a blast, you shouldn't limit poetry to silent, solitary reading  - why not sing, recite, or perform it as has been the case for most of its history? The Harvard English professor and host of Poetry in America recently sat down with Tyler to discuss poets, poems, and more, including Walt Whitman's city walks, Emily Dickinson's visual art, T.S. Eliot's privilege, Robert Frost's radicalism, Willa Cather's wisdom, poetry's new platforms, the elasticity of English, the payoffs of Puritanism, and what it was like reading poetry with Shaquille O'Neal. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded May 8th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter  Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.

20 Juni 201854min