Conversations with Tyler

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 domesticity instead. That disorienting reversal is the engine of her book Motherland, a National Book Award finalist that reconstructs modern Russian history almost entirely through its women. Her account, drawn from her own family's history as well as the archives, keeps returning to one plain observation: Soviet policy pushed women into the workforce, the medical schools, and even into combat, while asking so little of men that low expectations became self-fulfilling—and Russia is still living with the results.
Julia joined Tyler to discuss why so many of Russia's great constructivist painters were women, why the tsarist government established women's medical courses in 1872, changing attitudes towards abortion and birth control in the 20th century, why the Soviet regime turned prudish, how Khrushchev's plan to "replace the dead" institutionalized single motherhood, Russian superwomen, why Jewish men were a prized commodity amid rampant antisemitism, the cultural significance of flowers, why a few Russian names still dominate, why Russian women think Western feminists have their priorities backwards, how gender attitudes and autocracy feed into each other, three underrated Russian novels, what she wants to write about next, and more.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube. 
Recorded April 7th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:06:38 - Bolshevik feminism
00:08:41 - Birth control, abortion, and prudery
00:14:48 - The Russian mating market
00:23:06 - Russian superwomen
00:32:02 - The importance of flowers
00:37:35 - Common Russian names
00:39:51 - Russian vs. American feminism
00:44:23 - Gender attitudes and Russian politics
00:49:54 - Russian novels
00:54:33 - Outro
Photo credit: Max Avdeev

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.
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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

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 them: throwing tennis matches as a bored teenager, getting shipped off to shovel manure at a feed yard twelve hours later, then spending five years battling Brazilian bureaucracy to build a fertilizer terminal that should have taken one. Today he is Executive Vice President of Origination and Partnerships, leader and donor to Stand Together, plays lead guitar in a band named for the law of entropy, and has a new book with his father on principle-driven leadership.
Chase and Tyler discuss if any of his father's lessons never stuck, the guilt-trip letter his grandfather wrote three months after Charles was born, why Chase started throwing tennis matches, what Rafa's grit taught him about stoicism, who he admired most from the 1992 Dream Team, whether the Spurs should jettison De'Aaron Fox, the David Gilmour solo that hooked him at eleven, what drew him to jam bands, how he built a boom-box business out of his parents' garage, why his father interviewed Snoop on a Zoom call during Covid, why his band is named for the second law of thermodynamics, what it's like working with MrBeast, how Koch Inc has evolved, what he learned from Marc Andreessen, the philosophy behind hiring the "farm team," why he is teaching himself to code with Claude at his fourteen-year-old's urging, where he's traveling next, 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 June 16th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:56 - Familial Influences
00:08:25 - Tennis and Basketball
00:15:00 - The Music Industry
00:28:36 - MrBeast
00:31:24 - The Evolution of Koch Industries
00:35:54 - The Midwest
00:44:37 - AI
00:49:01 - Politics
00:53:35 - Outro

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 didn't compound. What changed, according to Mokyr, was twofold: first, you need to know why something works, so that one advance can seed the next; second, you need a culture willing to tolerate the disruption. His new book contrasts Europe with China, showing how Europeans learned to cooperate with people they weren't related to, in guilds, monasteries, cities, and universities, while China organized itself around the extended clan. One path led to internal stability and peace; the other, more restless and outward-looking, was the one that decided the world could always be made better.
Tyler and Joel discuss European corporations vs. Chinese clans, why the Catholic Church became obsessed with cousin-marriage, how persistent cultural trends really are, why Chinese cities became so populous relative to Europe, why it took so long for European living standards to surpass China's, why sinified invaders kept getting swallowed by the dynasties they conquered, how geography kept Europe fragmented and China unified, where India fits into the story, why the Romans never made spectacles, why British soldiers stood two inches taller than the French, what powered the sudden rise of 19th-century German science, how disruptive winning a Nobel is, 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 February 20th, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:00:54 - Europe vs. China's Paths to Prosperity
00:10:22 - China's Growth
00:13:24 - Europe's Growth
00:18:56 - The Fall of Song China
00:21:56 - India
00:25:08 - Industrial Revolution
00:39:52 - 19th-Century German Science
00:43:37 - Being a Nobel Laureate
00:45:29 - Outro
Photo Credit: Shane Collins

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 paths not taken are a way of asking whether our own world had to turn out this way. Her biography Thomas More: A Life takes its subject in that spirit, refusing to reduce More to either martyr or monster.
Tyler and Joanne discuss how More influenced Erasmus, what to make of Utopia, why fear drove More's persecution of heretics, how Holbein's portraits of More and Cromwell differ, what movie depictions get wrong about More, how his execution was viewed at the time, how the Tudor period paved the way for Shakespeare and the scientific revolution, the surprising social mobility of the period, how the City of London governed itself and where that clashed with the Crown, Joanne's upbringing in Canada and what drew her to English history, what she thinks sits beneath a lot of Britain's current stagnation, the subject of her next book, 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 February 19th, 2026.
This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.
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Follow Joanne on X
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Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.
Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:03:42 - More's Utopia
00:10:50 - Whether More Should be Admired
00:13:39 - Play and Movie Adaptations of More
00:19:25 - English Catholicism as the Reformation Approaches
00:22:29 - Shakespeare and the Growth of Education
00:26:08 - The Quality of Tudor Art
00:27:24 - Tolerance and Social Mobility in 16th Century England
00:32:49 - London's Governance
00:34:23 - Canada
00:38:12 - Choosing English History to Study
00:41:23 - Touring and Living in England
00:43:06 - Religion, Politics, and Economics in the UK
00:49:32 - Outro