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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...