Conversations with Tyler

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Arthur Brooks reckons he's on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French horn player, economist, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and now Harvard professor and evangelist for the science of happiness. His new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, argues that happiness isn't a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, he calls them — and that most of us are gorging on the wrong ones. Tyler, naturally, wants to know: what's the marginal value of a book on happiness, and what does spiral number five look like?
Along the way, Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you'll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that's not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI's effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he's reading Josef Pieper, how he'll face death, 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 March 19th, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:02:10 - The Macronutrients of Happiness
00:07:54 - What Happiness Books are Worth
00:12:28 - The Habits of the Happiest People
00:14:27 - Why the Young Reject Happiness Advice
00:17:35 - Curiosity's Role in Happiness
00:20:22 - Self-Deception
00:22:04 - Facing Death
00:25:44 - Choosing a Religion
00:28:41 - Immigration
00:30:27 - The American Right Wing
00:33:55 - AI's Role in Happiness
00:37:12 - What Drives Generosity
00:38:37 - Oprah's Political Views
00:40:16 - Which Political Leaders Arthur Admires
00:41:59 - The Best French Horn Players
00:43:40 - Arthur's Spiral of Careers
00:48:20 - The Future of Think Tanks
00:49:50 - The Future of Classical Music
00:51:27 - Living in Spain
00:55:34 - Age and Peak Performance
00:56:12 - What Arthur Will Do Next
00:59:14 - Outro
Image Credit: Jenny Sherman

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Tyler calls Paul Gillingham's new book, Mexico: A 500-Year History, the single best introduction to the country's past—and one of the best nonfiction books of 2026. Paul brings both an outsider's eye and ground-level knowledge to Mexican history, having grown up in Cork — a place he'd argue gave him an instinctive feel for fierce local autonomy and land hunger —earning his doctorate on the Mexican Revolution under Alan Knight at Oxford, and doing his fieldwork in the pueblos of Guerrero.
He and Tyler range across five centuries of Mexican history, from why Mexico held together after independence when every other post-colonial superstate collapsed, to why Yucatán is now one of the safest places on earth, what two leaders from Oaxaca tell us about Mexican politics, how Mexico avoided the military coups that plagued the rest of Latin America, what Cárdenas's land reform actually achieved versus what it promised, whether the ejido system held Mexico back, why Mexico worried too much about land and not enough about human capital, how Mexico's fertility rate fell below America's, why Guerrero has been violent for two centuries, why the new judicial reforms are a disaster, where to find the best food in Mexico and Manhattan, what a cache of illicit Mexican silver sitting on a ship in the English Channel has to do with his next book, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded February 27th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:30 - Post-Independence Mexico
00:05:18 - Peace in Yucatán
00:6:54 - Quintana Roo
00:08:24 - Mexican Infrastructure
00:10:26 - Oaxaca
00:13:54 - Great Food Outside Cities
00:16:39 - Leaders from Coahuila
00:17:50 - Military Rule and Civil War in Mexico
00:21:47 - The Cárdenas Regime
00:24:03 - The Ejido System
00:25:49 - Human Capital
00:40:59 - Doing Mexican History as a Brit
00:42:43 - Guerrero
00:48:37 - Michoacán Violence
00:50:44 - Monterrey
00:52:40 - Judicial Reforms
00:54:44 - The Best Mexican Film, Music, and Novel
00:59:42 - The Best Trip Around Mexico
01:04:05 - Outro

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Few living scholars can claim to have shaped how we read Machiavelli as decisively as Harvey Mansfield. His new book, The Rise and Fall of Rational Control, argues that Machiavelli didn't just write about politics—he invented the intellectual machinery of the modern world, starting with the concept of "effectual truth," which Mansfield credits as the seed of modern empiricism. At 93, after 61 years of teaching at Harvard, Mansfield remains cheerfully unimpressed by most of contemporary philosophy, convinced that the great books are self-sustaining, and that irony is what separates serious philosophy from the rest.
Tyler and Harvey discuss how Machiavelli's concept of fact was brand new, why his longest chapter is a how-to guide for conspiracy, whether America's 20th-century wars refute the conspiratorial worldview, Trump as a Shakespearean vulgarian who is in some ways more democratic than the rest of us, why Bronze Age Pervert should not be taken as a model for Straussianism, the time he tried to introduce Nietzsche to Quine, why Rawls needed more Locke, what it was like to hear Churchill speak at Margate in 1953, whether great books are still being written, how his students have and haven't changed over 61 years of teaching, the eclipse rather than decline of manliness, and what Aristotle got right about old age 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 January 22nd, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Bumper
00:00:36 - Intro
00:01:20 - Machiavelli's "Effectual Truth"
00:05:56 - Conspiracy Theories
00:12:39 - The Vulgarity of Democracy
00:16:35 - The Future of Straussianism
00:34:30 - Why the Supply of Great Books has Dried Up
00:37:56 - Rational Control vs. Spontaneous Order
00:40:25 - Winston Churchill
00:43:30 - Students at Harvard
00:46:05 - Manliness
00:47:34 - Death and Politics
00:48:56 - Outro
 Image Credit: Erin Clark via Getty Images

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Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's conviction that great literature is where ideas "walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world" in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry's book Second Act "one of the very best books written on talent," sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly.
Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke's proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play's connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece, assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it's a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says "I did yield to him," before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn't, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand's villains are more relevant now than ever, 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 January 12th, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:40 - What Shakespeare is really saying in Measure for Measure
00:29:17 - The best way to consume Shakespeare
00:32:26 - Jane Austen, Adam Smith, and Jonathan Swift
00:39:29 - Advertising that works
00:44:37 - Things that are under- and overrated in literature
00:51:24 - Late bloomers
00:58:36 - Outro
 Image Credit: Sam Alburger

When Tyler called Joe Studwell's How Asia Works "perhaps my favorite economics book of the year" back in 2013, he wasn't alone: it became one of the most influential treatments of industrial policy ever written. Now Studwell has turned his attention to Africa with How Africa Works. Tyler calls it excellent, extremely well-researched, and essential reading, but does Studwell's optimism about the continent hold up under scrutiny?
Tyler and Joe explore whether population density actually solves development, which African countries are likely to achieve stable growth, whether Africa has a manufacturing future, why state infrastructure projects decay while farmer-led irrigation thrives, what progress looks like in education and public health, whether charter cities or special economic zones can work, and how permanent Africa's colonial borders really are. After testing Joe's optimism about Africa, Tyler shifts back to Asia: what Japan and South Korea will do about depopulation, why industrial policy worked in East Asia but failed in India and Brazil, what went wrong in Thailand, and what Joe will tackle next.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.
Recorded January 23rd, 2026.
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Image Credit: Nick J.B. Moore