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Dan Wang argues that China is a nation of engineers while America is a nation of lawyers, and this distinction explains everything from subway construction to pandemic response to why Chinese citizens will never have yards with dogs. His prescription: America should become 20% more engineering-minded to fix its broken infrastructure, while China needs to be 50% more lawyerly so the Communist Party can stop strangling individual rights and the creative impulses of its people. But would a more lawyerly China constrain state power, or just create new tools for oppression? And aren't the American suburbs actually sterling achievements where the infrastructure works quite well?

Tyler and Dan debate whether American infrastructure is actually broken or just differently optimized, why health care spending should reach 35% of GDP, how lawyerly influences shaped East Asian development differently than China, China's lack of a liberal tradition and why it won't democratize like South Korea or Taiwan did, its economic dysfunction despite its manufacturing superstars, Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives, a 10-day itinerary for Yunnan, James C. Scott's work on Zomia, whether Beijing or Shanghai is the better city, Liu Cixin and why volume one of The Three-Body Problem is the best, why contemporary Chinese music and film have declined under Xi, Chinese marriage markets and what it's like to be elderly in China, the Dan Wang production function, why Stendhal is his favorite novelist and Rossini's Comte Ory moves him, what Dan wants to learn next, whether LLMs will make Tyler's hyper-specific podcast questions obsolete, what flavor of drama their conversation turned out to be, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 31st, 2025.

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Timestamps
00:00:00 - American infrastructure and suburban life
00:05:18 - American vs. Chinese infrastructure buildouts...
00:12:25 - And health care investment
00:17:52 - Chinese suburbs
00:20:10 - The existing lawyerly influence in East Asia
00:25:12 - China's lack of a liberal tradition
00:29:35 - Why China's won't democratize
00:33:49 - China's economic disfunction
00:38:44 - China's expansionism
00:41:55 - Chinese pragmatism and bureaucratic incentives
00:46:50 - Chinese cities and regional culture
00:59:44 - James C. Scott, Zomia, and elite culture
01:06:27 - A 10-day Yunnan itinerary
01:11:57 - On Chinese arts, literature, and cultural expression
01:18:23 - The Dan Wang production function
01:30:34 - Tyler's grand strategy, or lack thereof

Cass Sunstein is one of the most widely cited legal scholars of all time and among the most prolific writers working today. This year alone he has five books out, including Imperfect Oracle on the strengths and limits of AI and On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom. In his second appearance on the show, he brings his characteristic intellectual range to exploring liberalism's present precariousness and AI's implications for law and speech.

Tyler and Cass discuss whether liberalism is self-undermining or simply vulnerable to illiberal forces, the tensions in how a liberal immigration regime would work, whether new generations of liberal thinkers are emerging, if Derek Parfit counts as a liberal, Mill's liberal wokeism, the allure of Mises' "cranky enthusiasm for freedom," whether the central claim of The Road to Serfdom holds up, how to blend indigenous rights with liberal thought, whether AIs should have First Amendment protections, the argument for establishing a right not to be manipulated, better remedies for low-grade libel, whether we should have trials run by AI, how Bob Dylan embodies liberal freedom, Cass' next book about animal rights, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 10th, 2025.

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Blake Scholl is one of the leading figures working to bring back civilian supersonic flight. As the founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, he's building a new generation of supersonic aircraft and pushing for the policies needed to make commercial supersonic travel viable again. But he's equally as impressive as someone who thinks systematically about improving dysfunction—whether it's airport design, traffic congestion, or defense procurement—and sees creative solutions to problems everyone else has learned to accept.

Tyler and Blake discuss why airport terminals should be underground, why every road needs a toll, what's wrong with how we board planes, the contrasting cultures of Amazon and Groupon, why Concorde and Apollo were impressive tech demos but terrible products, what Ayn Rand understood about supersonic transport in 1957, what's wrong with aerospace manufacturing, his heuristic when confronting evident stupidity, his technique for mastering new domains, how LLMs are revolutionizing regulatory paperwork, and much more.

Recorded live at the Progress Conference, hosted by the Roots of Progress Institute. Special thanks to Big Think for the video production.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 18th, 2025.

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Photo Credit: Jeremi Rebecca

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Donald S. Lopez Jr. is among the foremost scholars of Buddhism, whose work consistently distinguishes Buddhist reality from Western fantasy. A professor at the University of Michigan and author of numerous essential books on Buddhist thought and practice, he's spent decades studying Sanskrit and Tibetan texts, including a formative year spent living in a Tibetan monastery in India. His latest book, The Buddha: Biography of a Myth, tackles the formidable challenge of understanding what we can actually know about the historical Buddha.

Tyler and Donald discuss the Buddha's 32 bodily marks, whether he died of dysentery, what sets the limits of the Buddha's omniscience, the theological puzzle of sacred power in an atheistic religion, Buddhism's elaborate system of hells and hungry ghosts, how 19th-century European atheists invented the "peaceful" Buddhism we know today, whether the axial age theory holds up, what happened to the Buddha's son Rahula, Buddhism's global decline, the evidently effective succession process for Dalai Lamas, how a guy from New Jersey created the Tibetan Book of the Dead, what makes Zen Buddhism theologically unique, why Thailand is the wealthiest Buddhist country, where to go on a three-week Buddhist pilgrimage, how Donald became a scholar of Buddhism after abandoning his plans to study Shakespeare, his dream of translating Buddhist stories into new dramatic forms, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 6th, 2025.

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Sam Altman makes his second appearance on the show to discuss how he's managing OpenAI's explosive growth, what he's learned about hiring hardware people, what makes roon special, how far they are from an AI-driven replacement to Slack, what GPT-6 might enable for scientific research, when we'll see entire divisions of companies run mostly by AI, what he looks for in hires to gauge their AI-resistance, how OpenAI is thinking about commerce, whether GPT-6 will write great poetry, why energy is the binding constraint to chip-building and where it'll come from, his updated plan for how he'd revitalize St. Louis, why he's not worried about teaching normies to use AI, what will happen to the price of healthcare and hosing, his evolving views on freedom of expression, why accidental AI persuasion worries him more than intentional takeover, the question he posed to the Dalai Lama about superintelligence, and more.

Recorded live at the Progress Conference, hosted by the Roots of Progress Institute. Special thanks to Big Think for the video production.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded October 17th, 2025.

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Photo Credit: Jeremi Rebecca

Tyler considers Winnie and Nelson: Portrait of a Marriage one of the best books of the last decade, and its author Jonny Steinberg one of the most underrated writers and thinkers—in North America, at least. Steinberg's particular genius lies in getting uncomfortably close to difficult truths through immersive research—spending 350 hours in police ride-alongs, years studying prison gangs and their century-old oral histories, following a Somali refugee's journey across East Africa—and then rendering what he finds with a novelist's emotional insight.

Tyler and Jonny discuss why South African police only feel comfortable responding to domestic violence calls, how to fix policing, the ghettoization of crime, how prison gangs regulate behavior through century-old rituals, how apartheid led to mass incarceration and how it manifested in prisons, why Nelson Mandela never really knew his wife Winnie and the many masks they each wore, what went wrong with the ANC, why the judiciary maintained its independence but not its quality, whether Tyler should buy land in Durban, the art scene in Johannesburg, how COVID gave statism a new lease on life, why the best South African novels may still be ahead, his forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes, why English families weren't foolish to move to Rhodesia in the 1920s, where to take an ideal two-week trip around South Africa, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded September 29th, 2025.

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Timestamps:

• 00:00:40 – Policing and crime in South Africa
• 00:11:15 – Prison culture
• 00:22:04 – Nelson and Winnie Mandela's marriage
• 00:24:47 – Was Winnie Mandela just a bad person?
• 00:29:20 – Nelson Mandela's masks
• 00:32:04 – Mandela's legacy and the ANC
• 00:36:51 – Reasons for optimism in South Africa
• 00:50:58 – His forthcoming biography of Cecil Rhodes
• 00:55:15 – Where to visit in South Africa

George Selgin has spent over four decades thinking about money, banking, and economic history, and Tyler has known him for nearly all of it. Selgin's new book False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933–1947 examines what the New Deal actually accomplished—and failed to accomplish—in confronting the Great Depression.

Tyler and George discuss the surprising lack of fiscal and monetary stimulus in the New Deal, whether revaluing gold was really the best path to economic reflation, how much Glass-Steagall and other individual parts of the New Deal mattered, Keynes' "very sound" advice to Roosevelt, why Hayek's analysis fell short, whether America would've done better with a more concentrated banking sector, how well the quantity theory of money holds up, his vision for a "night watchman" Fed, how many countries should dollarize, whether stablecoins should be allowed to pay interest, his stake in a fractional-reserve Andalusian donkey ownership scheme, why his Spanish vocabulary is particularly strong on plumbing, his ambivalence about the eurozone, what really got America out of the Great Depression, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded September 26th, 2025.

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Photo Credit: Richie Downs

John Amaechi is a former NBA forward/center who became a chartered scientist, professor of leadership at Exeter Business School, and New York Times bestselling author. His newest book, It's Not Magic: The Ordinary Skills of Exceptional Leaders, argues that leadership isn't bestowed or innate, it's earned through deliberate skill development.

Tyler and John discuss whether business culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated, what rituals leadership requires, the quality of leadership in college basketball and consulting, why Doc Rivers started some practices at midnight, his childhood identification with the Hunchback of Notre Dame and retreat into science fiction, whether Yoda was actually a terrible leader, why he turned down $17 million from the Lakers, how mental blocks destroyed his shooting and how he overcame them, what he learned from Jerry Sloan's cruelty versus Karl Malone's commitment, what percentage of NBA players truly love the game, the experience of being gay in the NBA and why so few male athletes come out, when London peaked, why he loved Scottsdale but had to leave, the physical toll of professional play, the career prospects for 2nd tier players, what distinguishes him from other psychologists, why personality testing is "absolute bollocks," what he plans to do next, and more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded September 15th, 2025.

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