I have listened to every single podcast, at least once. My horizons have been expanded, my knowledge increased, my life changed. It is simply the best podcast anywhere.

The podcast universe is overpopulated. But Tyler is one of the early entrants, so perhaps he is a pioneer of sorts. But there is so much variety and so many hidden gems that Tyler seems dated and predictable. Even though he tries to surprise us with his abrupt shifts in tone and questioning somehow no one can believe that he is actually probing deep into his guests’ contradictions or trying to catch the guest on their weak side. Everyone is on this silly game. I think of his recent interview with the British journalist, John Gray. Tyler treated him with a reverence that one would assign to John Rawls or Robert Nozick or Ronald Dworkin. But that’s the thing: Gray is a journalist trying to pass himself off as a political theorist. You have to have lived in Britain to know that Gray is a poseur. Tyler even gets close to pinning him down early in the conversation where Gray mouths platitudes about young people and their beliefs and wriggles out of questions that should be followed through. This is proof: Gray and Cowen are in a sense kindred spirits. Really just entertainers!

It’s not as much conversations with Tyler as it is more choppy interviews with Tyler. There’s no flow. It’s not organic or natural as a conversation. The material is ok but Tyler comes off as aristocratic

Yikes. Who thought she would be a good guest? Back to drawing boards guys and gals.

I was a regular listener until the episodes with Marilynne Robinson and Jonathan Haidt. Both are highly articulate thinkers who can develop extended arguments when they have an interlocutor who is able to listen carefully and follow with their thought process. Tyler’s form of engagement, however, continually interrupted the flow of their reflections in an unhelpful and frustrating way. I was disappointed by his insensitivity to the natural flow of those conversations, and I began to realize that this podcast’s method simply does not allow guests to develop longer trains of thought. So I stopped listening and have not missed it.

Congrats on the amazing podcast!!

Tyler uses a fascinating method, rhythm to elicit answers from fascinating guests. Thank you for the education.

Nice job

Tyler is insightful and direct. This is one of the most intelligent podcasts out there.

Great selection of guests with usually interesting questions, but sometimes Tyler is so off-the-wall with his random questions he sounds like a college Freshman showing off that he did the reading. Also, for how smart and well-read he clearly is, he sometimes comes across as lacking any common sense. Example: in the Jon Haidt episode, he kept trying to argue that social media is good for children. Like, has he ever met a teenager?

Similar format in that very smart guests talk at length. Difference is the hosts is smart and prepared. One of the last places to hear conservative American ideas without also getting scams and a cult of personality

One can learn a lot about the world and it’s people from this podcast.

Which is why I found the interview with Rebecca Kuang remarkable. She seemed young and not smart. The sort of college student who can babble on selected abstract subjects but if asked directly what she ate for breakfast, takes a long pause then starts, "Well, I'm not a historian..." Having recently listened to Tyler's excellent retrospective episode, I wonder if he was disappointed by Kuang.

I think Paul did a great job, finding time to think about very in-depth questions that did not seem joined together in a natural way. I liked the questions and I liked how Paul answered them… but I think letting him know you were going to ask some of those questions would’ve led to better answers because of the speed and complexity of them.

There’s not much by way of onboarding for this podcast. It is an acquired taste, but for me it only took a few episodes to become a disciple. Tyler’s respect and concern for others are underrated qualities of his. Those attributes paired with his general brilliance are what impressed me most about him.

Enjoyed the Koppleman interview. Would Dr. Cowen share his opera list with us?

Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, could really be called Professor of Knowledge, with interests in many topics both highbrow and lowbrow. It is a pleasure to learn from him about many different subjects and to hear how highly intelligent and influential people engage with his challenging questions. Highly recommended.

So so happy to find this podcast. Wonderfully refreshing to simply hear smart people conversing without any ideological smugness.

I’ve been listening to “Conversations With Tyler” for the past five years or so, usually through earbuds while going on long walks. The guests are invariably brilliant, hyper articulate and usually willing to go along with Tyler’s off the wall interviewing style, which involves scanning every single subject the guest has ever read, written about, studied or researched, picking a random assortment of these, and asking pointed, challenging, sometimes oddball questions about them, in no particular order. Tyler specializes in the “out of left field” question: in fact, in the episode I just listened to with David Bentley Hart, Hart literally accused Tyler of asking him something “out of left field”, whereupon Tyler’s next question was to ask this philosopher and theologian “who played left field for the 1970 Baltimore Orioles?!” In sum, I can say with total confidence that, while I typically understand less than 50% of what Tyler’s guests are saying, can’t discern the intent of 3/4 of Tyler’s questions, and do not recognize 80% of his and his guests’ cultural references— I somehow continue to listen to this podcast and to learn something new each time. That must mean I like it a lot, I guess.

Wow it’s all so smart! Tyler is a smart guy!

He researches and ask important questions of his terrific guests. Tyler would have been a great journalist if he weren’t busy being a genius.

I found this podcast recently and I really liked it. The host is great at asking relevant questions.

Professor Cowen has the best interview approach. Great diversity of guests and topics and yet an undertone of classical liberalism often shines through.

I don’t usually read economists, so I didn’t know anything about Tyler Cowen, and from what I gather from listening to most of the episodes of this pod, I probably won’t, because he seems like a typical economist douche who rushes to simplify any situation into quantifiable terms while missing the point. But as an interviewer, he’s amazing. His questions are playful, stimulating and wide ranging and he knows how to let people talk. His guests are all over the place, and so are the quality of the interviews, the most interesting parts are often Tyler’s questions. Tyler if you are reading this, great pod, good job. Please interview Tarn Adams, Karl Deisseroth, and Douglas Hofstadter

No one he interviews matches or exceeds Tyler’s breadth of knowledge and his knack for asking pertinent, interesting questions that get to the essence of the interviewee. He is a real polymath.

Cowan asks penetrating, informed, often amusing, questions of his extraordinarily interesting guests. The range of topics is breathtaking.

Great questions, interesting topics and top-shelf guests….Happy when I see a new podcast has dropped.

I’ve learned so much from Tyler and his interviewees. Sometimes the topic or the pace get me but with patience and a little digging on Wikipedia I manage to get excited about most of the subjects. I’m always learning. It would be good to see a list of sources, references, book’s mentioned in each interview. I love the pace, the span and detail. I also love how it so often circles to philosophy and economics with a tip of the hat to politics and commercial realities. Makes me realize that my education as a biologist was poor in breadth and inadequate to be a citizen of the free world. As I grow older - and listen to Tyler - I am coming to value increasingly the concept of a liberal arts education. Life is a learning experience…

Think Tyler is one of the most interesting and thoughtful thinkers alive today. I think he is a great interviewer and asks loads of outstanding questions. However, far too many of his guests are just either ill informed or purposely wrong. They make claims that can easily be disproved and it seems they go out of their way to be provocative. Hope the guests start to equal the quality that Tyler brings.

I love Tyler’s interview style, and I learn so much from the amazing array of guests. This podcast is intellectually challenging, informative, and entertaining!

Tyler is a Renaissance man for our times. A true polymath! And great guests, pithy questions, an extraordinary range and depth of knowledge. But…Ray Dalio?? Why did Tyler let this uninteresting, quasi-ignorant, totally arrogant individual onto his show? Dalio is an interesting guy for his views on markets but his historical and intellectual pretensions are excruciating! On the other hand the talk with Vaughn Smith was amazing. Very warm, extraordinary depth and breadth of knowledge, humor and true affection between the two of these guys.

For me, the most interesting podcasts include unexpected & challenging questions… Tyler’s extraordinarily high level of curiosity makes for a conversation filled with complex & wide ranging questions that often result in me taking notes to dig deeper on topics & ideas long after the podcast has finished.

Tyler appears to have good taste that ranges an enormous breadth, and he brings that to the podcast. He has an ability to craft questions to niche experts that are excellent, and this is often times commented by the guests.

Episode with Ed Glaeser had much more back and forth than usual. And we’ll thought out questions. learned a lot.

Love Conversations with Tyler! He is such an empathic interviewer! He gets to the core of the subjects he discusses with his guests with gentle but probing questions.

This is one of the most intellectually stimulating podcasts. I love the range from economics to arts to philosophy. It makes me so excited to have access to such brilliant people’s ideas. Tyler the host is an astonishing polymath.

Generally interesting podcast with thoughtful if limited interviewer. Especially enjoy the deep consideration he gives the arts, but there is a comical avoidance of irony and queer perspective.

Tyler is so well-regarded, he has guest that other interviewers can't. Well-researched questions, and good responsiveness to the guests' answers.

These are consistently the most intelligent conversations I have encountered on any podcast. They never seem to talk down to the listener. The range of topics covered is mind expanding in its breadth. Many of the most interesting conservations turn out to be with people I have never heard of on topics that I imagined would be profoundly boring. But I listen to them anyway and am nearly always glad I did.

In an age of partisanship and narrative adherence, this show is probably the best source for honest conversation around. They do a great job varying the types of guests they have, so I’ve been introduced to many great thinkers and artists courtesy of this production. Many thanks!

Excellent, thoughtful interviews. Thank you and your team for doing this!

There’s a consistent roster of fascinating guests, and Tyler does an excellent job of probing without being confrontational. The conversations tend to be more broad than deep given Tyler’s propensity to ask many questions (cf the Making Sense podcast, which is deeper and less broad); nevertheless this is a substantive podcast that should be a mainstay of any intellectual’s media diet.

Brilliant

Thoughtful.

Interesting guests, terrible interviewer. Tyler begins the interviews without giving much of an introduction or background information on the person he's interviewing, so the listener doesn't have much context for what's being talked about. Additionally, as the title of my review implies, they're not exactly "conversations". Tyler usually just asks a series of questions to the guests and rarely responds to their answers with anything more than "Why?" or "How so?" Very often the questions are not related to the question he asked before or the response the guest gave - there's no transition between topics. It often sounds like he's just reading off a list of questions that he had written down in advance. This is not the way a good host conducts an interview. If you want to hear actual conversations, listen to EconTalk instead.

Put simply if for some weird reason podcast went extinct and there were only to be one. This is it!

Difficult to place on the political spectrum—in some ways Cowan seems to hold positions that are on the left, right, and center all on the same episode. That in itself is a good thing if you are tired of predictable and easily pigeon-holed thinkers. Another strength of the show: it brings in articulate guests from all sorts of fields of interest. It’s sometimes out of my depth—and I wouldn’t change a thing.

Very enjoyable conversations. Mr. Cowen is an excellent interviewer who does his research and asks surprising questions.

Interesting people, great questions.

A lighthearted yet deep discussion with various academics & otherwise experts of their fields. This podcast is both enlightening & relaxing!