Conversations with Tyler

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. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Luis on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: [email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. 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

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. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Annie on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: [email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. 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

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. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: [email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. 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

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. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Daron on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: [email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. 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

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 includes a forgotten liberal sect — the Remonstrants and Collegiants, Christians without a church who believed peace would come through reading and toleration rather than a returning Messiah. Recover that world and a woman alone in a sunlit room is a radical image in a Europe where half of Germany had just died in war. If he's right, the label beside every Vermeer in every museum will one day have to change. Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we'd rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of the Catholic Faith, whether Vermeer painted for money or pointedly refused to, where the Gardner's stolen Concert might be, why Dutch music never blossomed as much as Dutch painting did, how the Church of England rivaled the Cultural Revolution in wiping out British art, whether you can still spot an English painting on sight, the love that saturates late Rembrandt and the mystery of his soaring print prices, the nail on the wall that proves two Vermeer paintings are a pair, why the French are to blame for George Stubbs' lack of status, whether we can still love Malevich, why Andrews calls recent Richter "almost like printing money," why female artists and antique textiles remain absurdly cheap, why nobody builds beautiful neighborhoods any longer, and much more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded April 7th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Andrew on X Sign up for our newsletter Join our Discord Email us: [email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:44 - The Mystery of Vermeer 00:12:53 - Dutch Music 00:15:51 - English Art 00:19:49 - Rembrandt 00:23:17 - Attributions 00:26:22 - Exhibitions and Restorations 00:30:05 - Underrated French Artists 00:35:16 - Howard Hodgkin 00:38:00 - Difficult-To-Love Artists 00:40:53 - Other Dutch Painters 00:44:20 - Contemporary Art 00:48:05 - Buying Art 00:50:39 - Neighborhood Aesthetics 00:54:39 - Advice for Aspiring Art Critics 00:56:14 - Outro Image Credit: Aliona Adrianova