Mercatus Center Podcasts

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Canal • 8 programas

Educación

Educación

Cada dos semanas
Economía y empresa

Economía y empresa

Cada semana
Ciencias sociales

Ciencias sociales

18/11/2025
Filosofía

Filosofía

Cada dos semanas
Ciencias sociales

Ciencias sociales

Dos veces al mes
Política

Política

19/12/2023
Ciencias sociales

Ciencias sociales

Cada dos semanas

4 FEB

Andrew Ross Sorkin on Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929

Andrew Ross Sorkin sees the crash of 1929 as a tale of excessive leverage and irrational speculation, but Tyler wonders: maybe those sky-high 1929 prices were actually justified given America's remarkable century ahead. Maybe the real problem was the "Negative Nellies" who panicked afterward rather than the speculators everyone blamed. For that matter, isn't 2008 looking less and less like a bubble with each passing year? Tyler and Andrew debate whether those 1929 stock prices were justified, what Fed and policy choices might have prevented the Depression, whether Glass-Steagall was built on a flawed premises, what surprised Andrew most about the 1920s beyond the crash itself, how business leaders then would compare to today's CEOs, whether US banks should consolidate, how Andrew would reform US banking regulation, what to make of narrow banking proposals and stablecoins, whether retail investors should get access to private equity and venture capital, why sports gambling and new financial regulations won't make us much safer, how Andrew broke into the New York Times at age 18, how he manages his information diet, what he learned co-creating Billions, what he plans on learning about 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 30th, 2025. 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. Image Credit: Mike Cohen

4 feb

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56 min
26 ENE

Tyler Muir on How to Understand the Fed's Quantitative Easing

Tyler Muir is a professor of finance at UCLA. In Tyler's first appearance on the show, he discusses how he became a leading scholar on quantitative easing, what things the Fed can learn in responding to crises, why QE matters, how QE transformed the bond market, the new "Tyler Rule", QE's role in the COVID Pandemic, and much more. Check out the transcript for this week's episode, now with links. Recorded on January 8th, 2025 Subscribe to David's Substack: Macroeconomic Policy Nexus Follow David Beckworth on X: @DavidBeckworth Follow Tyler Muir on X: @TylerMuir Follow the show on X: @Macro_Musings Check out our Macro Musings merch! Subscribe to David's new BTS YouTube Channel Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:33 - Tyler's Background 00:08:36 - Financial Crisis and Risk Premium 00:14:40 - Intermediaries and Asset Prices 00:22:18 - QE and Why It Matters 00:28:40 - QE and the Bond Market 00:32:38 - The Tyler Rule 00:37:51 - When Selling Goes Viral 00:41:01 - QE During COVID 00:49:26 - Shrinking the Fed's Balance Sheet 00:55:03 - Outro

26 ene

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56 min
2 FEB

Scott Sumner on Monetary Policy Confusion in Our Current Policy Debates

Scott Sumner is the Ralph G. Hawtrey Chair Emeritus of Monetary Policy and the founder of the Monetary Policy Program at Mercatus. Scott returns to the show, to discuss his life post Mercatus, nominal GDP counterfactuals of the pandemic and the Great Financial Crisis, the role of QE in inflation, the fears about Fed independence, and much more. Check out the transcript for this week's episode, now with links. Recorded on January 15th, 2025 Subscribe to David's Substack: Macroeconomic Policy Nexus Follow David Beckworth on X: @DavidBeckworth Follow the show on X: @Macro_Musings Check out our Macro Musings merch! Subscribe to David's new BTS YouTube Channel Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:34 - Scott's Life Post Mercatus 00:05:28 - Nominal GDP Targeting 00:19:53 - Quantitative Easing 00:38:28 - Fed Framework Review 00:42:36 - Fed Independence 01:04:33 - Outro

2 feb

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1 h y 5 min
HACE 3 DÍAS

Dan Awrey on the Future of the U.S. Payments System in a Digital World

Dan Awrey is a professor of Law at Cornell University and the author of the new book Beyond Banks: Technology, Regulation, and the Future of Money. Dan returns to the show to discuss his new book, the shadow monetary system, the case for markets to correct this problem, Gresham's new law, his proposals for fixing the payments system, and much more. Check out the transcript for this week's episode, now with links. Recorded on January 13th, 2025 Subscribe to David's Substack: Macroeconomic Policy Nexus Follow David Beckworth on X: @DavidBeckworth Follow Dan Awrey on X: @DanAwrey Follow the show on X: @Macro_Musings Check out our Macro Musings merch! Subscribe to David's new BTS YouTube Channel Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:16 - Beyond Banks 00:16:04 - Shadow Monetary System 00:26:07 - Can't Markets Solve Payment Problems? 00:28:16 - Gresham's New Law 00:40:27 - Dan's Proposal for Money and Payments 00:55:51 - Outro

hace 3 días

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57 min
7 ENE

Brendan Foody on Teaching AI and the Future of Knowledge Work

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. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Brendan 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 - 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

7 ene

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1 h y 1 min
05/11/2025

Sam Altman on Trust, Persuasion, and the Future of Intelligence - Live at the Progress Conference

Register for the Austin listener meetup Sam Altman makes his second appearance on the show to discuss how he's managing OpenAI's explosive growth, what he's learned about hiring hardware people, what makes roon special, how far they are from an AI-driven replacement to Slack, what GPT-6 might enable for scientific research, when we'll see entire divisions of companies run mostly by AI, what he looks for in hires to gauge their AI-resistance, how OpenAI is thinking about commerce, whether GPT-6 will write great poetry, why energy is the binding constraint to chip-building and where it'll come from, his updated plan for how he'd revitalize St. Louis, why he's not worried about teaching normies to use AI, what will happen to the price of healthcare and hosing, his evolving views on freedom of expression, why accidental AI persuasion worries him more than intentional takeover, the question he posed to the Dalai Lama about superintelligence, and more. Recorded live at the Progress Conference, hosted by the Roots of Progress Institute. Special thanks to Big Think for the video production. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded October 17th, 2025. Other ways to connect Follow us on X and Instagram Follow Tyler on X Follow Sam 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. Photo Credit: Jeremi Rebecca

05/11/2025

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55 min
21 ENE

Diarmaid MacCulloch on Christianity, Sex, and Unsettling Settled Facts

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. 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. Image Credit: Barry Jones

21 ene

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1 h
15/09/2022

Nishant Vats on the Impact of Income Guarantee on Farm Incomes in India

This episode is the first installment of a series in which Shruti speaks with doctoral candidates and postdoctoral scholars about their research as they enter the job market and the world of academia. In this episode, Shruti talks with Nishant Vats about his job market paper (co-authored with Pulak Ghosh), "Safety Nets, Credit and Productive Activity: Evidence from a Guaranteed Income Program for Small Entrepreneurs." Vats is a Ph.D. candidate in finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. His primary research interests are finance and development, financial intermediation and corporate finance, with a secondary interest in macroeconomics and political economy. Recorded September 8th, 2022 Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Follow us on Twitter Follow Nishant on Twitter Follow Shruti on Twitter Click here for the latest Ideas of India episodes sent straight to your inbox.

15/09/2022

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34 min
02/03/2023

Alain Bertaud on Order Without Design

In this episode, Shruti speaks with Alain Bertaud about how Indian cities have evolved, utilities pricing, land use restrictions such as floor area ratio and floor space index, slums, charter cities, urbanization in Africa and much more. Bertaud is an urbanist, distinguished visiting scholar at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and senior research scholar at New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management. From 1980 to 1999, he was the principal urban planner at the World Bank. His book about urban planning is titled "Order Without Design: How Markets Shape Cities." Recorded February 7th, 2023 Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Follow us on Twitter Follow Shruti on Twitter Follow Alain on Twitter Click here for the latest Ideas of India episodes sent straight to your inbox.

02/03/2023

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1 h y 35 min
17/12/2025

Alison Gopnik on Childhood Learning, AI as a Cultural Technology, and Rethinking Nature vs. Nurture

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

17/12/2025

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1 h y 1 min

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