Conversations with Tyler

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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Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
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