Mercatus Center Podcasts

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Canal • 8 programas

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Ciências Sociais

Ciências Sociais

Atualizado a 02/12/2025
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Ciências Sociais

Ciências Sociais

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Política

Atualizado a 24/06/2025
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4/03

Henry Oliver on Measure for Measure, Late Bloomers, and the Smartest Writers in English

Sign up for the Chicago CWT Listener Meetup. Henry Oliver is the preeminent literary critic for non-literary nerds. His Substack, The Common Reader, has thousands of subscribers drawn in by Henry's conviction that great literature is where ideas "walk and talk amongst the mess of the real world" in a way no other discipline can match. Tyler, who has called Henry's book Second Act "one of the very best books written on talent," sat down with him to compare readings of Measure for Measure and range across English literature more broadly. Tyler and Henry trade rival readings of the play, debate whether Isabella secretly seduces Angelo, argue over whether the Duke's proposal is closer to liberation or enslavement, trace the play's connections to The Merchant of Venice and The Rape of Lucrece, assess the parallels to James I, weigh whether it's a Girardian play (Oliver: emphatically not), and parse exactly what Isabella means when she says "I did yield to him," before turning to the best way to consume Shakespeare, what Jane Austen took from Adam Smith, why Swift may be the most practically intelligent writer in English, how advertising really works and why most of it doesn't, which works in English literature are under- and overrated, what makes someone a late bloomer, whether fiction will deal seriously with religion again, whether Ayn Rand's villains are more relevant now than ever, 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 January 12th, 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 Henry 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 00:01:40 - What Shakespeare is really saying in Measure for Measure 00:29:17 - The best way to consume Shakespeare 00:32:26 - Jane Austen, Adam Smith, and Jonathan Swift 00:39:29 - Advertising that works 00:44:37 - Things that are under- and overrated in literature 00:51:24 - Late bloomers 00:58:36 - Outro Image Credit: Sam Alburger

4/03

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59 min
-5 DIAS

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on the Quandary of Global Demographic Decline

Subscribe to the new Macro Musings YouTube Channel! Jesús Fernández-Villaverde is a professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Jesús returns to the show to discuss his rise on X, how to frame global demographic decline, the three accelerants of demographic decline, the role of housing in family size, how AI will play a role in global demographics, what we know about AGI, the question of dollar dominance, and much more. Check out the transcript for this week's episode, now with links. Recorded on February 20th, 2026 Subscribe to David's Substack: Macroeconomic Policy Nexus Follow David Beckworth on X: @DavidBeckworth Follow Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on X: @JesusFerna7026 Follow the show on X: @Macro_Musings Check out our Macro Musings merch! Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:07:22 - Demographics 00:39:28 - Artificial Intelligence 00:54:07 - Currency Dominance 01:03:20 - Outro

-5 dias

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1 h 4 min
09/03/2022

Sam Bankman-Fried on Arbitrage and Altruism

Whether it's scaling an arbitrage opportunity or launching an ambitious philanthropic project, Sam Bankman-Fried has set himself apart. In just a few years, he's not only made billions trading crypto, but also become a leading practitioner of effective altruism, with the specific aim of making lots of money in order to donate most of it to high-impact causes. He joined Tyler to discuss the Sam Bankman-Fried production function, the secret to his trading success, how games like Magic: The Gathering have shaped his approach to business, why a legal mind is crucial when thinking about cryptocurrencies, the most important thing he's learned about managing, what Bill Belichick can teach us about being a good leader, the real constraints in the effective altruism space, why he's not very compelled by life extension research, challenges to his Benthamite utilitarianism, whether it's possible to coherently regulate stablecoins, the implicit leverage in DeFi, Elon Musk's greatest product, why he thinks Ethereum is overrated, where in the world has the best French fries, why he's bullish on the Bahamas, and more. Check out Macro Musings. Follow Macro Musings on Twitter. Subscribe to Macro Musings on your favorite podcast app. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video. Recorded January 6th, 2022 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter Follow Sam 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.

09/03/2022

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50 min
18/02

Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and What Development Actually Requires

When Tyler called Joe Studwell's How Asia Works "perhaps my favorite economics book of the year" back in 2013, he wasn't alone: it became one of the most influential treatments of industrial policy ever written. Now Studwell has turned his attention to Africa with How Africa Works. Tyler calls it excellent, extremely well-researched, and essential reading, but does Studwell's optimism about the continent hold up under scrutiny? Tyler and Joe explore whether population density actually solves development, which African countries are likely to achieve stable growth, whether Africa has a manufacturing future, why state infrastructure projects decay while farmer-led irrigation thrives, what progress looks like in education and public health, whether charter cities or special economic zones can work, and how permanent Africa's colonial borders really are. After testing Joe's optimism about Africa, Tyler shifts back to Asia: what Japan and South Korea will do about depopulation, why industrial policy worked in East Asia but failed in India and Brazil, what went wrong in Thailand, and what Joe will tackle next. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded January 23rd, 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. Image Credit: Nick J.B. Moore

18/02

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53 min
2/03

Chris Meissner on the History of Globalization

Subscribe to the new Macro Musings YouTube Channel! Chris Meissner is a professor of economics at University of California at Davis and is the author of the recent book One from the Many: The Global Economy Since 1850. In Chris's first appearance on the podcast he discusses the historical bend towards greater globalization, how we should really define the global economy, the impact of the Great Financial Crisis on globalization and populism, the scope of globalization from the 1820's to today, the validity of the China Shock, the United States' current move away from globalization, and much more. Check out the transcript for this week's episode, now with links. Recorded on February 19th, 2026 Subscribe to David's Substack: Macroeconomic Policy Nexus Follow David Beckworth on X: @DavidBeckworth Follow Chris Meissner on X: @CmicMeissner Follow the show on X: @Macro_Musings Check out our Macro Musings merch! Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:01:50 - History Tends Toward Globalization 00:05:55 - What Is the Global Economy? 00:19:08 - Great Financial Crisis 00:22:15 - First Wave of Globalization: 1820–1914 00:29:42 - Interwar Period: 1918–1938 00:40:51 - Post-War Bretton Woods Arrangement 00:49:36 - The China Shock 00:55:40 - Detour from Globalization 00:59:44 - Outro

2/03

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1 h
7/01

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

7/01

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1 h 1 min
08/05/2019

Karl Ove Knausgård on Literary Freedom

What is Karl Ove Knausgård's struggle, exactly? The answer is simple: achieving total freedom in his writing. "It's a space where I can be free in every sense, where I can say whatever, go wherever I want to. And for me, literature is almost the only place you could think that that is a possibility." Knausgård's literary freedom paves the way for this conversation with Tyler, which starts with a discussion of mimesis and ends with an explanation of why we live in the world of Munch's The Scream. Along the way there is much more, including what he learned from reading Ingmar Bergman's workbooks, the worst thing about living in London, how having children increased his productivity, whether he sees himself in a pietistic tradition, thoughts on Bible stories, angels, Knut Hamsun, Elena Ferrante, the best short story ("Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"), the best poet (Paul Celan), the best movie (Scenes from a Marriage), and what his punctual arrival says about his attachment to bourgeois values. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded March 15th, 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.

08/05/2019

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1 h
4/02

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

4/02

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56 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 1 min
03/07/2018

Juan Pablo Villarino on Travel and Trust

Travel writer Juan Pablo Villarino had visited 90 countries before making the trek to exotic Arlington, Virginia for this chat with Tyler. Amazingly enough, this recording marked his first trip to the mainland United States, which is now the 91st country in an ever-expanding list. The world's best hitchhiker talks with Tyler about the joys of connecting with people, why it's so hard to avoid stereotypes (including of hitchhikers), how stamp collecting guides his trips, the darkest secrets of people he's gotten rides from, traveling and writing books with his wife, the cause of violence in the Americas, finding the emotional heart of a journey, where he's going next, and more. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Recorded May 4th, 2018 Other ways to connect Follow us on Twitter and Instagram Follow Tyler on Twitter Follow Juan 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.

03/07/2018

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1 h 1 min

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