Mercatus Center Podcasts

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Canal • 7 programas

Educación

Educación

Quincenal
Economía y empresa

Economía y empresa

Semanal
Filosofía

Filosofía

Quincenal
Ciencias sociales

Ciencias sociales

Quincenal
Ciencias sociales

Ciencias sociales

02/12/2025
Ciencias sociales

Ciencias sociales

Bimensual
Política

Política

24/06/2025

22 jul

Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists

Andrew Graham-Dixon's new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, rests on the conviction that you cannot understand what's in a painting without knowing what its maker was thinking about. In Vermeer's case, that context includes a forgotten liberal sect — the Remonstrants and Collegiants, Christians without a church who believed peace would come through reading and toleration rather than a returning Messiah. Recover that world and a woman alone in a sunlit room is a radical image in a Europe where half of Germany had just died in war. If he's right, the label beside every Vermeer in every museum will one day have to change. Tyler and Andrew discuss whether it was inevitable we'd rediscover Vermeer, how that vanishingly rare sect left its fingerprints all over his life, why the Met has misread its own Allegory of the Catholic Faith, whether Vermeer painted for money or pointedly refused to, where the Gardner's stolen Concert might be, why Dutch music never blossomed as much as Dutch painting did, how the Church of England rivaled the Cultural Revolution in wiping out British art, whether you can still spot an English painting on sight, the love that saturates late Rembrandt and the mystery of his soaring print prices, the nail on the wall that proves two Vermeer paintings are a pair, why the French are to blame for George Stubbs' lack of status, whether we can still love Malevich, why Andrews calls recent Richter "almost like printing money," why female artists and antique textiles remain absurdly cheap, why nobody builds beautiful neighborhoods any longer, 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 April 7th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Andrew 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 00:00:44 - The Mystery of Vermeer 00:12:53 - Dutch Music 00:15:51 - English Art 00:19:49 - Rembrandt 00:23:17 - Attributions 00:26:22 - Exhibitions and Restorations 00:30:05 - Underrated French Artists 00:35:16 - Howard Hodgkin 00:38:00 - Difficult-To-Love Artists 00:40:53 - Other Dutch Painters 00:44:20 - Contemporary Art 00:48:05 - Buying Art 00:50:39 - Neighborhood Aesthetics 00:54:39 - Advice for Aspiring Art Critics 00:56:14 - Outro Image Credit: Aliona Adrianova
15 jul

Chase Koch on Principles, Music, and Overcoming Entropy

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. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler 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 00:00:56 - 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
8 jul

Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth

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 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 00:00:54 - 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
24 jun

Joanne Paul on Thomas More and the Tudor World

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
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Demystifying AI with Katharine Jarmul

On this episode of Virtual Sentiments, Kristen Collins talks with Katharine Jarmul about how transparency, open-source AI, and privacy intersect in today's debates over artificial intelligence. Together they unpack the differences between proprietary, open-weight, and truly open-source AI models. They also explore how AI companies shape user experiences through design choices that often remain invisible, why smaller task-specific models may offer important advantages over increasingly centralized frontier models, and what concepts like data sovereignty and individual autonomy mean in practice. Rather than framing AI as an inevitable force beyond public influence, Collins and Jarmul make the case that curiosity, transparency, and community participation can help people reclaim agency over the technologies shaping their lives. Katharine Jarmul is a data scientist who focuses her work and research on privacy and security in data science, deep learning and AI. She is the author of the well-received O'Reilly book, Practical Data Privacy, and has more than 10 years’ experience in machine learning and AI, where she has helped build large-scale AI systems with privacy and security built in. **This episode was recorded on June 24, 2026** Show Notes: Probably Private: A newsletter on data privacy by Katharine JarmulYoutube Channel | Probably PrivateHow AI / ML Memorization Happens: RepetitionKatharine Jarmul, Busting AI Myths and Embracing Realities in Privacy & SecurityRobert McMillan, “How Heartbleed Broke the Internet — And Why It Can Happen Again” (WIRED, 2014)Sebastian Raschka, Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)C. E. Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” (The Bell System Technical Journal, 1948)Ken Yeung, “The New Side Hustle for Graduate Students: Training AI” (The AI Economy, 2025)Ruth Fowler, “I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI” (WIRED, 2026)Laura Kelley, “The Work of Helping A.I. Destroy Work” (NYT, 2026)Joel Mokyr, "The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth" (The Journal of Economic History, 2005)If you like the show, please subscribe, leave a 5-star review, and tell others about the show! We're available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the Hayek Program on Twitter: @HayekProgram Learn more about Academic & Student Programs Follow the Mercatus Center on Twitter: @mercatus
08/01/2020

Slavoj Žižek on His Stubborn Attachment to Communism

This bonus episode features audio from the Holberg Debate in Bergen, Norway between Tyler and Slavoj Žižek held on December 7, 2019. They discuss the reasons Slavoj (still) considers himself a Communist, why he calls The Handmaid's Tale "nostalgia for the present," what he likes about Greta Thunberg, what Marx got right about the commodification of beliefs, his concerns about ecology and surveillance in communist states like China today, the reasons academia should maintain its 'useless character,' his beginnings as a Heideggerian, why he is distrustful of liberal optimism, the "Fukuyama dilemma" we face, the importance of "empty manners," and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded December 7th, 2019 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter Email us: cowenconvos@mercatus.gmu.edu Subscribe at our newsletter page to have the latest Conversations with Tyler news sent straight to your inbox.
10 jun

Katja Hoyer on Weimar, the GDR, and the German Character

Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian who has made a career out of explaining Germany to the world—and, just as importantly, to Germans themselves. Born in East Germany in 1985 and now based in Britain, she has written acclaimed histories of the German Empire, the GDR, and most recently the Weimar Republic. Tyler and Katja discuss why communism made East Germans more loyal to the system while it bred dissidents in Poland and Hungary, how happy or unhappy life in the GDR actually was, Tyler's own bleak day-trip to East Berlin in 1984, the underrated literature of the GDR (Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann), whether Good Bye, Lenin! got the era right, why it's no coincidence that Richter and Polke came from the East, the strange coexistence of communist prudishness and Germany's nudist culture, what Merkel's East German background did and didn't give her as a chancellor, why East Germans remain dramatically underrepresented in leadership positions today, what makes Weimar the cultural and spiritual heart of Germany, why relatively few Jews ever settled there, how much the citizens of Weimar knew about Buchenwald, what actually killed the Weimar Constitution, how she'd rewrite the Treaty of Versailles, Hitler's citizenship problem, underrated German thinkers, the complacency behind Germany's current economic decline, which side of the Weißwurstäquator she'd choose to live on, 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 March 30th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Katja 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 00:05:34 - East German Artistic Creations 00:10:55 - Angela Merkel's East German Background 00:14:08 - East German Underrepresentation Today 00:17:02 - East Germans vs. West Germans 00:20:32 - Goethe and Weimar's Cultural Heritage 00:27:09 - What Weimar Knew About Buchenwald 00:31:10 - Why the Weimar Constitution Failed 00:35:21 - Prussia, Bavaria, and Where Nazism Took Root 00:38:23 - Rewriting the Treaty of Versailles 00:39:59 - Historical Antisemitism in Germany 00:42:27 - Hitler's Citizenship problem 00:45:14 - Weimar's Best Cultural Creations 00:47:02 - The Most Underrated German Thinker 00:49:07 - Improving Weimar 00:52:58 - Germany's Economic Malaise 00:55:38 - Living in Britain as a German Historian 01:00:49 - Outro
17 jun

Dave Baszucki on Roblox, Teen Entrepreneurs, and the Future of Play

Dave Baszucki is co-founder and CEO of Roblox, the user-generated gaming platform where all the games are built by the community itself. With over 100 million daily active users and projected revenue bookings of $7 billion this year, it is one of the largest gaming economies in the world—and one that has made millionaires out of teenage developers in Argentina, South Korea, and everywhere in between. Tyler and Dave explore why Roblox decided early against prioritizing advertising revenue, why Dave thinks the main competition of Roblox is its own execution speed rather than Fortnite, whether every mega platform inevitably becomes an everything app, how falling token costs will change the platform, why he insists all the games on Roblox are beautiful, whether Robux should have a floating exchange rate, why admitting you have kids under 13 on your platform turns out to be a competitive advantage, why he's skeptical of blanket social media bans, what his son's experience with bipolar disorder taught him about metabolic health, his two-year sabbatical between companies that involved a motorhome trip across North America and a stint hosting talk radio in Santa Cruz, why Mutiny on the Bounty remains one of his favorite books, what he'll learn 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 May 27th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Dave 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 00:00:44 - Roblox by the Numbers 00:08:54 - Competition 00:12:13 - Everything Apps 00:19:50 - AI Language Translation 00:21:18 - Token Costs 00:24:01 - Beauty and Gaming 00:27:01 - Robux 00:29:28 - Social Media and Younger Audiences 00:40:56 - AI and Gaming 00:45:44 - Mutiny on the Bounty 00:47:38 - David's Earlier Companies 00:51:16 - Mentors 00:52:35 - Outro
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Arthur Brooks on Reinvention, Religion, and the Science of Happiness

Click here to find Tyler's new generative book, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution! Arthur Brooks reckons he's on the fourth leg of a spiral-shaped career: French horn player, economist, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and now Harvard professor and evangelist for the science of happiness. His new book, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, argues that happiness isn't a feeling but a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning — the macronutrients of happiness, he calls them — and that most of us are gorging on the wrong ones. Tyler, naturally, wants to know: what's the marginal value of a book on happiness, and what does spiral number five look like? Along the way, Tyler and Arthur cover how scarcity makes savoring possible and why knowing you'll die young sharpens the mind, what twin studies tell us about the genetics of well-being and why that's not actually depressing, the four habits of the genuinely happy, the placebo theory of happiness books, curiosity as an evolved positive emotion, the optimal degree of self-deception, why Arthur chose Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy, what the research says about accepting death, how he became an economist via correspondence school, AI's effect on think tanks, the future of classical music, whether Trumpism or Reaganism is the equilibrium state of American conservatism, whether his views on immigration have changed, what he and Oprah actually agree on, which president from his lifetime he most admires, Barcelona versus Madrid, what 60-year-olds are especially good at, why he's reading Josef Pieper, how he'll face death, 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 March 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 Arthur 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 00:02:10 - The Macronutrients of Happiness 00:07:54 - What Happiness Books are Worth 00:12:28 - The Habits of the Happiest People 00:14:27 - Why the Young Reject Happiness Advice 00:17:35 - Curiosity's Role in Happiness 00:20:22 - Self-Deception 00:22:04 - Facing Death 00:25:44 - Choosing a Religion 00:28:41 - Immigration 00:30:27 - The American Right Wing 00:33:55 - AI's Role in Happiness 00:37:12 - What Drives Generosity 00:38:37 - Oprah's Political Views 00:40:16 - Which Political Leaders Arthur Admires 00:41:59 - The Best French Horn Players 00:43:40 - Arthur's Spiral of Careers 00:48:20 - The Future of Think Tanks 00:49:50 - The Future of Classical Music 00:51:27 - Living in Spain 00:55:34 - Age and Peak Performance 00:56:12 - What Arthur Will Do Next 00:59:14 - Outro Image Credit: Jenny Sherman
13 may

Bob Spitz on the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and the Art of Biography

Bob Spitz has written major biographies of the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, and now the Rolling Stones — but also, somehow, Ronald Reagan and Julia Child. In rock, his credentials were hard won: he started out hustling gigs for an unknown Bruce Springsteen for six years, moved on to handling Elton John's American business, and spent long enough in the world to find himself jamming with Paul McCartney and chatting with Bob Dylan on a stoop in the Village. The Reagan and Julia Child books are harder to explain, and perhaps that's the point—Spitz seems to do his best work when he has no business writing the book at all. Tyler and Bob discuss how the Stones became so great so quickly, what they added to the blues, how their melodies stack up against the Beatles', whether Exile on Main Street deserves its canonical status, which songs are most underrated, what Charlie Watts actually got out of playing in a rock band, the rise and fall of Brian Jones, how the Stones outlasted nearly everyone, the influence of Mick's London School of Economics training, why popular music has lost its cultural influence, what we should still be asking Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, whether the Beatles' breakup was good for the world, how senile Reagan really was in his second term and whether he was ever truly a communist, how good a cook Julia Child actually was, his next book on Lennon's second act, 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 April 28th, 2026. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Bob 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 00:02:44 - The Sound of the Rolling Stones 00:05:25 - Underrated Rolling Stones Songs and Albums 00:09:06 - Charlie Watts and Brian Jones 00:11:18 - Art Colleges and Rock 'n' Roll 00:13:06 - The Stones' Stability 00:16:32 - Mick Jagger: Closet Economist? 00:17:53 - Pop Music's Lack of Relevance 00:20:10 - The Beatles 00:28:14 - Led Zeppelin 00:31:30 - Bruce Springsteen 00:36:20 - Bob Dylan 00:39:40 - Julia Child 00:42:29 - The Knicks 00:45:21 - Ronald Reagan 00:49:01 - Robert Caro 00:52:03 - Writing 00:55:00 - Outro

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