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.

Other ways to connect

• Follow us on X and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on X
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• 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 - 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.

Other ways to connect

• Follow us on X and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on X
• Follow Joanne 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 - 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