Conversations with Tyler

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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Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
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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Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
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