Tyler considers Diarmaid MacCulloch one of those rare historians whose entire body of work rewards reading. This work includes his award-winning Cranmer biography, his sweeping histories of Christianity and the Reformation, and his latest on sex and the church, which demonstrates what MacCulloch calls the historian's true vocation: unsettling settled facts to keep humanity sane.

Tyler and Diarmaid explore whether monotheism correlates with monogamy, Christianity's early instinct towards egalitarianism, what the Eucharistic revolution reveals about the cathedral building boom, the role of Mary in Christianity and Islam, where Michel Foucault went wrong on sexuality, the significance of the clerical family replacing the celibate monk, why Elizabeth I—not Henry VIII—mattered most for the English Reformation, why English Renaissance music began so brilliantly but then needed to start importing Germans, whether Christianity needs hell to survive, what MacCulloch 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 October 29th, 2025.

This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

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Image Credit: Barry Jones

At 22, Brendan Foody is both the youngest Conversations with Tyler guest ever and the youngest unicorn founder on record. His company Mercor hires the experts who train frontier AI models—from poets grading verse to economists building evaluation frameworks—and has become one of the fastest-growing startups in history.

Tyler and Brendan discuss why Mercor pays poets $150 an hour, why AI labs need rubrics more than raw text, whether we should enshrine the aesthetic standards of past eras rather than current ones, how quickly models are improving at economically valuable tasks, how long until AI can stump Cass Sunstein, the coming shift toward knowledge workers building RL environments instead of doing repetitive analysis, how to interview without falling for vibes, why nepotism might make a comeback as AI optimizes everyone's cover letters, scaling the Thiel Fellowship 100,000X, what his 8th-grade donut empire taught him about driving out competition, the link between dyslexia and entrepreneurship, dining out and dating in San Francisco, Mercor's next steps, 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 16th, 2025.

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• Follow Brendan on X
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Timestamps

00:00:00 - Hiring poets to teach AI

00:05:29 - Measuring real-world AI progress

00:13:25 - Why rubrics are the new oil

00:18:44 - Enshrining taste in LLMs

00:22:38 - Turning society into one giant RL machine

00:26:37 - When AI will stump experts

00:30:46 - AI and employment

00:35:05 - Why vibes-based hiring fails

00:39:55 - Solving labor market matching problems

00:45:01 - Scaling the Thiel Fellowship

00:48:11 - A hypothetical gap year

00:50:31 - Donuts, debates, and dyslexia

00:56:15 - Dating and dining out

00:59:01 - Mercor's next steps

Help us keep the conversations going in 2026. Donate to Conversations with Tyler today.

On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes look back on the past year on CWT and more, including covering the most popular and underrated episodes, why single-subject deep dives made for some of the best conversations this year, the biggest AI surprises and how LLMs changed the show's production function, what happened with the Magnus Carlsen episode, listener questions on everything from hotel selection to AI x-risk discourse, Tyler's serene acknowledgment that uncontrollable laughter is something he has neither experienced nor desires, reviewing his pop culture picks from 2015, and a dispatch from Muscat, Oman.

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

Recorded November 5th and December 15th, 2025.

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: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu
• Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here.

Timestamps

00:00:00 - Favorite episodes of the year

00:12:08 - AI's impact on the show

00:15:05 - The lost Magnus episode

00:17:13 - Tyler's #1 hotel amenity

00:18:40 - Tyler's growing influence and thoughts on tariffs

00:21:15 - AI x-risk discourse

00:26:22 – Copying Tyler's interview style

00:28:50 - Tyler's lack of joy

00:32:55 - How well ChatGPT answers as Tyler

00:35:15 - Tyler's 2015 movie picks

00:40:44 - Tyler's 2015 book picks

00:45:00 - Tyler's 2015 music picks

00:48:16 - Most popular episodes and thoughts on Oman

Photo Credit: Kevin Trimmer