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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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

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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.

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• Follow us on X and Instagram
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• 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

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

Alison Gopnik is both a psychologist and philosopher at Berkeley, studying how children construct theories of the world from limited data. Her central insight is that babies learn like scientists, running experiments and updating beliefs based on evidence. But Tyler wonders: are scientists actually good learners? It's a question that leads them into a wide-ranging conversation about what we've been systematically underestimating in young minds, what's wrong with simple nature-versus-nurture frameworks, and whether AI represents genuine intelligence or just a very sophisticated library.

Tyler and Alison cover how children systematically experiment on the world and what study she'd run with $100 million, why babies are more conscious than adults and what consciousness even means, episodic memory and aphantasia, whether Freud got anything right about childhood and what's held up best from Piaget, how we should teach young children versus school-age kids, how AI should change K-12 education and Gopnik's case that it's a cultural technology rather than intelligence, whether the enterprise of twin studies makes sense and why she sees nature versus nurture as the wrong framework entirely, autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories, whether the success of her siblings belies her skepticism about genetic inheritance, her new project on the economics and philosophy of caregiving, 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 30th, 2025.

Other ways to connect

• Follow us on X and Instagram
• Follow Tyler on X
• Follow Alison 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 - How children—and scientists—learn

00:14:35 - Consciousness, episodic memories, and aphantasia

00:23:06 - Freud's and Piaget's theories about childhood

00:27:49 - Twin studies and nature vs. nurture

00:39:33 - Teaching strategies for younger vs. older children

00:44:07 - AI's ability to generate novel insights

00:53:57 - What Autism and ADHD diagnoses do and don't reveal

00:58:02 - The success of the Gopnik siblings

Photo Credit: Rod Searcey