Conversations with Tyler podcast | Listen online for free

Available Episodes

5 of 243

Joe Boyd on the Birth of Rock, World Music, and Being There for Everything
Sign Up for the Boston Listener Meet Up Joe Boyd was there when Dylan went electric, when Pink Floyd was born, and when Paul Simon brought Graceland to the world. But far from being just another music industry insider, Boyd has spent decades exploring how the world's musical traditions connect and transform each other. His new book And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, is seventeen years in the making, and is in Tyler’s words “the most substantive, complete, thorough, and well-informed book on world music ever written.” From producing Albanian folk recordings to discovering the hidden links between Mississippi Delta blues and Indian classical music, Boyd's journey reveals how musical innovation often emerges when traditions collide. He joins Tyler to discuss why Zulu music became politically charged in South Africa, what makes Albanian choral music distinct from Bulgarian polyphony, what it was like producing Toots and the Maytals, his role in the famous "Dueling Banjos" scene in Deliverance, his work with Stanley Kubrick on A Clockwork Orange, his experiences with Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd, how he shaped R.E.M.'s sound on Fables of the Reconstruction, what really happened when Dylan went electric at Newport, how the Beatles integrated Indian music, what makes the Kinshasa guitar sound impossible to replicate, and how he maintains his collection of 6,000 vinyl LPs and 30,000 CDs, what he’ll do next, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded December 27th, 2024. Help keep the show ad free by donating today! 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.
--------
1:00:42
Scott Sumner on Monetary Rules, Blooming Late, and the Death of Cinema
Scott Sumner didn't follow the typical path to economic influence. He nearly lost his teaching job before tenure, did his best research after most academics slow down, and found his largest audience through blogging in his 50s and 60s, in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Yet this unconventional journey led him to become one of the most influential monetary thinkers of the past two decades. Scott joins Tyler to discuss what reading Depression-era newspapers revealed about Hitler's rise, when fiat currency became viable, why Sweden escaped the worst of the 1930s crash, whether bimetallism ever made sense, where he'd time-travel to witness economic history, what 1920s Hollywood movies get wrong about their era, how he developed his famous maxim "never reason from a price change," whether the Fed can ever truly follow policy rules like NGDP targeting, if Congress shapes monetary policy more than we think, the relationship between real and nominal shocks, his favorite Hitchcock movies, why Taiwan's 90s cinema was so special, how Ozu gets better with age, whether we'll ever see another Bach or Beethoven, how he ended up at the University of Chicago, what it means to be a late bloomer in academia, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded December 27th, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Scott 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.
--------
1:08:14
Conversations with Tyler 2024 Retrospective
Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year in the show and more, including covering the most popular and underrated episodes, fielding listener questions, reviewing Tyler’s pop culture picks from 2014, mulling over ideas for what to name CWT fans, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded December 17th, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Jeff 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.
--------
58:05
Paula Byrne on Thomas Hardy’s Women, Jane Austen’s Humor, and Evelyn Waugh’s Warmth
Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give What can Thomas Hardy’s tortured marriages teach us about love, obsession, and second chances? In this episode, biographer, novelist, and therapist Paula Byrne examines the intimate connections between life and literature, revealing how Hardy’s relationships with women shaped his portrayals of love and tragedy. Byrne, celebrated for her bestselling biographies of Jane Austen, Evelyn Waugh, and Barbara Pym, brings her unique perspective to explore the profound ways personal relationships, cultural history, and creative ambition intersect to shape some of the most enduring works in literary history. Tyler and Paula discuss Virginia Woolf’s surprising impressions of Hardy, why Wessex has lost a sense of its past, what Jude the Obscure reveals about Hardy’s ideas about marriage, why so many Hardy tragedies come in doubles, the best least-read Hardy novels, why Mary Robinson was the most interesting woman of her day, how Georgian theater shaped Jane Austen’s writing, British fastidiousness, Evelyn Waugh’s hidden warmth, Paula’s strange experience with poison pen letters, how American and British couples are different, the mental health crisis among teenagers, the most underrated Beatles songs, the weirdest thing about living in Arizona, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded November 14th, 2024. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Paula 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.
--------
54:42
Stephen Kotkin on Stalin, Power, and the Art of Biography
Donate to Conversations with Tyler Give Crypto Other Ways to Give In his landmark multi-volume biography of Stalin, Stephen Kotkin shows how totalitarian power worked not just through terror from above, but through millions of everyday decisions from below. Currently a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution after 33 years at Princeton, Kotkin brings both deep archival work and personal experience to his understanding of Soviet life, having lived in Magnitogorsk during the 1980s and seen firsthand how power operates in closed societies. Tyler sat down with Stephen to discuss the state of Russian Buddhism today, how shamanism persists in modern Siberia, whether Siberia might ever break away from Russia, what happened to the science city Akademgorodok, why Soviet obsession with cybernetics wasn't just a mistake, what life was really like in 1980s Magnitogorsk, how modernist urban planning failed there, why Prokofiev returned to the USSR in 1936, what Stalin actually understood about artistic genius, how Stalin's Georgian background influenced him (or not), what Michel Foucault taught him about power, why he risked his tenure case to study Japanese, how his wife's work as a curator opened his eyes to Korean folk art, how he's progressing on the next Stalin volume, and much more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded November 13th, 2024. 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.
--------
1:26:25

More Education podcasts

Trending Education podcasts

About Conversations with Tyler

Tyler Cowen engages today’s deepest thinkers in wide-ranging explorations of their work, the world, and everything in between. New conversations every other Wednesday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Podcast website