Show Notes
Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today. Gaurav Kapadia has deliberately avoided publicity throughout his career in investing, which makes this conversation a rare window into how he thinks. He now runs XN, a firm built around concentrated bets on a small number of companies with long holding periods. However, his education in judgment began much earlier, in a two-family house in Flushing that his parents converted into a four-family house. It was there where a young Gaurav served as de facto landlord, collecting rent and negotiating late payments at age 10. That grounding now expresses itself across an unusual range of domains: Tyler invited him on the show not just as an investor, but as someone with a rare ability to judge quality in cities, talent, art, and more with equal fluency. Tyler and Gaurav discuss how Queens has thrived without new infrastructure, what he'd change as "dictator" of Flushing, whether Robert Moses should rise or fall in status, who's the most underrated NYC mayor, what's needed to attract better mayoral candidates, the weirdest place in NYC, why he initially turned down opportunities in investment banking for consulting, bonding with Rishi Sunak over railroads, XN's investment philosophy, maintaining founder energy in investment firms and how he hires to prevent complacency, AI's impact on investing, the differences between New York and London finance, the most common fundraising mistake art museums make, why he collects only American artists within 20 years of his own age, what makes Kara Walker and Rashid Johnson and Salman Toor special, whether buying art makes you a better investor, his new magazine Totei celebrating craft and craftsmanship, 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 October 8th, 2025. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Gaurav 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. Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:32 - Queens and NYC's geography 00:08:36 - New York City mayors and electoral politics 00:13:22 - Building a career in investing 00:18:50 - XN's investment philosophy 00:24:35 - Maintaining founder energy in investment firms 00:30:45 - The sociology of finance in NYC, London, and UAE 00:32:21 - How AI is reshaping investing 00:36:53 - Museum operations 00:42:21 - Favorite artists 00:50:39 - Tastes in art and how the canon will evolve 00:57:22 - Totei, a new venture
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Liaquat Ahamed has spent years making central bankers into compelling characters. His 2009 book Lords of Finance won the Pulitzer Prize for its account of the bankers whose decisions helped cause the Great Depression; his new book, 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World, tells a stranger story — a severe deflationary crisis that barely dented global growth but poisoned politics for a generation. Tyler pushes him hard on the central puzzle of those two books — why did one financial crisis derail the world, while another left growth almost untouched? Tyler and Liaquat start with that puzzle before moving through Gladstone's startlingly self-interested bet on Egyptian bonds, Bismarck's role in destroying bimetallism and deflating the world economy for two decades, whether a global silver or symmetallic standard could have worked, Britain's fateful decision to re-peg the pound to gold in 1926, Hjalmar Schacht's transformation from the economist who stabilized Weimar's currency to opportunist collaborator with the Nazi regime, Montagu Norman's spiritualist beliefs, why the 1920s produced such a creative cultural moment, lessons from the IMF on Ireland's housing bubble and Pakistan's two dozen bailouts, what went wrong in the eurozone crisis, Britain's baffling modern stagnation, and finally to his own restless career and what he wants to write next. Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube. Recorded July 28th, 2026. 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. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:13 - On 1873 vs. the Great Depression 00:15:32 - On bimetallism and the gold standard 00:21:32 - On the 1920s and Weimar hyperinflation 00:29:29 - On Ireland, Pakistan, and the Eurozone crisis 00:36:21 - On Liaquat's career and Ismaili Islam 00:44:37 - Outro
Luis Garicano has one of the more unusual résumés in economics: trained at the University of Chicago Booth School under Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy, and Sherwin Rosen, he left academia for a stint as a member of the European Parliament before returning to research, now at the London School of Economics for a second time. His new book, Messy Jobs, co-authored with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, argues that AI won't cause mass unemployment for a surprising reason: it will make jobs messier, not simpler, and messiness is precisely what AI struggles with. Tyler and Luis start their conversation with Spain — housing, NIMBYism, and the productivity crisis; Spanish literature and why the Civil War still looms so large; and what Chicago taught Luis about party discipline in European politics. Then to the EU's unanimity problem, capital markets, and Denmark's flexicurity model; a round of overrated-versus-underrated on Rosalía, Penélope Cruz, and Sgt. Pepper's; and finally into Messy Jobs — why retraining programs fail, whether AI's leisure dividend has arrived, and whether Spain could ever achieve AI sovereignty. Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube. Recorded July 28th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Luis 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. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:05 - On Spain's housing and political paralysis 00:11:08 - On Spanish literature and the Civil War 00:16:52 - On Basque and Catalan public finance 00:18:59 - On party discipline and political selection 00:22:03 - On the EU's unanimity problem 00:28:47 - On flexicurity and European labor rigidity 00:30:24 - Overrated vs. underrated 00:33:12 - On the future of Spanish language 00:35:01 - On why AI won't cause mass unemployment 00:48:38 - On what's next 00:50:11 - Outro
Gita Gopinath has spent the last several years inside the room where the world's monetary plumbing gets fixed — or doesn't. As first deputy managing director of the IMF and, before that, the Fund's chief economist, she worked on sovereign debt restructuring, followed Argentina's disinflation up close, and built her academic reputation on ideas like dollar dominance and the dominant currency paradigm. Now back at Harvard launching a new Global Economics Lab, her conversation with Tyler ranges from why exchange rates don't adjust the way models predict, to what stablecoins really cost, to whether AI's growth dividend will show up on schedule. Tyler and Gita discuss why trade balances are only weakly related to real exchange rates, before turning to Argentina, Milei's fiscal discipline, the peso, and dollarization. Then they discuss whether economists got the euro wrong; whether trade imbalances with China are really the problem; stablecoins, CBDCs, and the Treasury market; and whether AI will ease the debt burden, cause stagflation, or transform economics itself. Finally, they turn to her family's Kerala roots: why the state keeps electing communists, the relationship between matriarchy and social indicators, single-sex education, and what she's building next. Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube. Recorded August 27th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Gita 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. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:57 - On why currencies don't adjust the way models predict 00:15:46 - On Argentina after triple-digit inflation 00:26:05 - On living with the euro 00:28:50 - On China's problematic surpluses 00:34:02 - On digital currencies 00:39:33 - On AI and the productivity question 00:48:51 - On why Kerala keeps electing communists 00:52:52 - On what comes next 00:55:15 - Outro
Annie Lowrey's new book, The Time Tax, argues that the most regressive levy in American life is the hours each of us must spend on hold, in waiting rooms, and filling out forms a competent state would have pre-filled — roughly fifty a year on average, and far more if you're poor. Tyler spends much of this conversation pressing the opposite case, asking whether that bureaucracy is quietly serving a useful purpose by rationing knee surgeries that don't work, deterring fraud, or screening for immigrants with gumption. So Tyler and Annie hash it out over an hour, covering why TANF and other welfare programs are the worst offenders, the political economy of submerged benefits like the child tax credit, whether the postal service should be zeroed out over ten years the way Denmark did, whether the government should be nudging people out of rural areas, lessons from the COVID unemployment fraud, areas where the time tax is flat instead of regressive, which private sector time taxes are most onerous, whether AI agents will pay these taxes for us within five years, the logic of easy benefits plus randomized harsh audits, the case for less federalism, whether voting should be easier or harder, how the UBI studies changed her priors, where you can find the best moss in the world, her favorite example of Brutalist architecture, tattoos as permanent ephemera, Christianity's role in liberalism and the post-Christian right, how reporting beats tourism, the time tax of friendship, what she'll learn next, and more. Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube. Recorded September 1st, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Annie 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. Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Intro 00:00:58 - On taxing our time 00:19:47 - On private-sector time taxes 00:22:57 - On AI eliminating paperwork 00:25:03 - On immigration as a filter 00:28:49 - On reducing fraud 00:33:03 - On federalizing bureaucracy 00:35:12 - On breaking up New York 00:36:25 - On making voting easy 00:38:28 - On updating universal basic income 00:41:29 - On banning exotic pets 00:42:13 - On deserts and moss 00:43:18 - On beautiful brutalism 00:43:50 - On tattoo culture 00:44:38 - On Christianity after Christianity 00:48:29 - On escaping the global monoculture 00:51:42 - On the time tax of friendship 00:54:49 - On what comes next 00:55:43 - Outro
Is leadership overrated? That's one simple reading of what Jared Diamond argues in his new book. Asked by Tyler to name the least replaceable leader in human history, Jared declines to name one — not Christ, the Roman Empire having had prophets to spare — and observes that even Genghis Khan happened to be born at an auspicious moment for a conqueror of the steppes. Conditions ripen; somebody turns up. So which leaders do make a difference?