From psychedelics to cyberculture, hippie communes to commercial startups, and the Whole Earth Catalog to the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand has not only been a part of many movementshe was there at the start. Now 83, he says he doesnt understand why older people let their curiosity fade, when in many ways its the best time to set off on new intellectual pursuits. Tyler and Stewart discuss what drives his curiosity, including the ways in which hes a product of the Cold War, how he became a D...
Jan 26, 2022•57 min•Ep 142•Transcript available on Metacast In this special crossover special with EconTalk , Tyler interviews Russ Roberts about his new life in Israel as president of Shalem College. They discuss why there are so few new universities, managing teams in the face of linguistic and cultural barriers, how Israeli society could adapt to the loss of universal military service, why Israeli TV is so good, what American Jews dont understand about life in Israel, what his next leadership challenge will be, and much more. Check out Macro Musings ....
Jan 19, 2022•59 min•Ep 141•Transcript available on Metacast Is genius born or made? For Croatian-born classical guitarist Ana Vidovi the answer is both. Born into a musical family, she began playing guitar at five and was quickly considered a prodigy. But shes seen first-hand how that label can trap young talents into complacency, stifling their full development. Shes also had to navigate changing business models and new technologies, learning for instance how to balance an online presence with her love of performing for live audiences. She joined Tyler ...
Jan 12, 2022•45 min•Ep 140•Transcript available on Metacast Want to support the show? Visit donate.mercatus.org/podcasts . On this special year-in-review episode, Tyler and producer Jeff Holmes talk about the past year on the show, including one episodes appearance on Ancient Aliens , Tylers picks for most underrated guests, how his 2021 predictions fared from last years retrospective, further reflections on the most downloadedand most polarizingepisode of the year, how David Deutsch influenced Tylers opinions of Karl Popper, why he thinks his interviews...
Dec 29, 2021•56 min•Ep 139•Transcript available on Metacast Want to support the show? Visit donate.mercatus.org/podcasts When Ray Dalio was 23, President Nixon announced that the United States would no longer be adhering to the gold standard for American currency. Clerking on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Dalio expected to see chaosbut instead stocks soared. Curious to understand this phenomenon, he began to read about similar events in 1933, and it opened his eyes to the lessons that could be drawn from history. His latest book draws on the ...
Dec 15, 2021•59 min•Ep 138•Transcript available on Metacast The most challenging part of being a biographer for Ruth Scurr is finding the best form to tell a life. You can't go in there with a workmanlike attitude saying, I'm going to do cradle to grave. Youve got to somehow connect and resonate with the life, and then things will develop from that. Known for her innovative literary portraits of Robespierre and John Aubrey, Scurrs latest book follows Napoleons life through his engagement with the natural world. This approach broadens the usual cast of ch...
Dec 01, 2021•51 min•Ep 137•Transcript available on Metacast Baltimore native David Rubenstein is a founding figure in private equity, a prolific philanthropist, and author. From leveraged buyouts to his patriotic philanthropy to his leadership roles within institutions like the Smithsonian, Kennedy Center, and the National Gallery of Art, David has spent much of his life evaluating what makes institutionsand peoplesucceed. He joined Tyler to discuss what makes someone good at private equity, why 20 percent performance fees have withstood the test of time...
Nov 17, 2021•56 min•Ep 136•Transcript available on Metacast When the audience for visual art expanded from small circles of artists and collectors into broader culture, the way art was experienced shifted from aesthetics to explanation. Art, it became thought, should be about something. But David Salle rebukes this literal-mindedness: according to him, what we think and feel when reacting to a piece of art is more authoritative than whats written on the label next to it. A painter, sculptor, and filmmaker, David is also the author of How to See: Looking,...
Nov 03, 2021•47 min•Ep 135•Transcript available on Metacast Stan McChrystal has spent a long career considering questions of risk, leadership, and the role of Americas military, having risen through the Armys ranks ultimately to take command of all US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, a force representing 150,000 troops from 45 countries. Retiring as a four-star general in 2010, he has gone on to lecture at Yale and launched the McChrystal Group, where he taps that experience to help organizations build stronger teams and devise winning strategies. His lat...
Oct 20, 2021•54 min•Ep 134•Transcript available on Metacast Harvard professor Claudia Goldin has made a name for herself tackling difficult questions. What was the full economic cost of the American Civil War? Does education increase or lessen income inequality? What causes the gender pay gapand how do you even measure it? Her approach, which often involves the unearthing of new historical data, has yielded lasting insights in several distinct areas of economics. Claudia joined Tyler to discuss the rise of female billionaires in China, why the US gender ...
Oct 06, 2021•49 min•Ep 133•Transcript available on Metacast What is our right to be desired? How are our sexual desires shaped by the society around us? Is consent sufficient for a sexual relationship? In the wake of the #MeToo movement, public debates about sex work, and the rise in popularity of incel culture, philosopher Amia Srinivasan explores these questions and more in her new book of essays, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century . Amias interests lay in how our internal perspectives and desires are shaped by external forces, and ...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Ep 132•Transcript available on Metacast With remote work becoming more common and cities competing for businesses its become easier than ever before for educated Americans to relocate, leaving cities more vulnerable than theyve ever been. In their new book, Survival of the City: Living and Thriving in an Age of Isolation , economists David Cutler and Ed Glaeser examine the factors that will allow some cities to succeed despite these challenges, while others fail. They joined Tyler for a special joint episode to discuss why healthcare ...
Sep 08, 2021•1 hr 19 min•Ep 131•Transcript available on Metacast When Zeynep Tufekci penned a New York Times op-ed at the onset of the pandemic challenging the prevailing public health guidance that ordinary people should not wear masks, she thought it was the end of her public writing career. Instead, it helped provoke the CDC to reverse its guidance a few weeks later, and medical professionals privately thanked her for writing it. While relieved by the reception, she also saw it as a sign of a deeper dysfunction in the scientific establishment: why should s...
Aug 25, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep 130•Transcript available on Metacast Upon learning he was HIV positive in 1993, Andrew Sullivan began writing more than he ever had before. Believing that he didnt have long to live, he wanted to leave behind a book detailing his best argument for refocusing the gay rights movement on marriage equality and military service. Three decades later and Sullivan has not only lived to see the book published, but also seen the ideas in it gain legal and cultural acceptance. This, along with the fact that the pace and influence of his writi...
Aug 11, 2021•55 min•Ep 129•Transcript available on Metacast While the modern historical ethos can be obsessed with condescending to the past based on our current value system, Scottish-born historian Niall Ferguson has aimed to set himself apart with his willingness to examine the past in its own context. The result is some wildly unpopular opinions such as The British Empire was good, actually and several wildly popular books, such as his latest Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe . Niall joined Tyler to discuss the difference between English and Scottish...
Jul 28, 2021•54 min•Ep 128•Transcript available on Metacast Alexander the Grate has spent 40 years more than half of his life living on the streets (and heating grates) of Washington, DC. He prefers the label NFA (No Fixed Address) rather than homeless, since in his view were all a little bit homeless: even millionaires are just one catastrophe away from losing their mansions. Its a life that certainly comes with many challenges, but that hasnt stopped him from enjoying the immense cultural riches of the capital: he and his friends have probably attended...
Jul 14, 2021•45 min•Ep 127•Transcript available on Metacast Richard Prum really cares about birds. Growing up in rural Vermont, he didnt know anyone else interested in birding his own age. The experience taught him to rely on his own sense of curiosity and importance when deciding what questions and interests are worth studying. As a result, he has pursued many different paths of research in avian biologysuch as behavioral evolution, where feathers come from, sexual selection and mate choicemany of which have led to deep implications in the field. In 201...
Jun 30, 2021•50 min•Ep 126•Transcript available on Metacast What can studying the lives of philosophers tell us about how to organize and interpret our own lives? Elijah Millgram is a professor of philosophy at the University of Utah whose research focuses on the theory of rationality. His latest book, John Stuart Mill and The Meaning of Life , analyzes the relationship between the ideas of the famous theorist and their impacts on Mills life. His forthcoming book examines the life and work of Frederich Nietzsche through a similar lens, combining philosop...
Jun 16, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep 125•Transcript available on Metacast Tyler describes Oxford professor and theoretical physicist David Deutsch as a maximum philosopher of freedom with no rival. A pioneer in the field of quantum computing, Deutsch subscribes to the multiple-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. He is also adamant that the universe (or multiverse) is not incomprehensible believing that the multiverse and human beings within it have maximum freedom. He joined Tyler to discuss the importance of these principles for understanding the nature of re...
Jun 02, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Ep 124•Transcript available on Metacast As a Canadian economist who once served as the Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney has had many occasions to reflect on the importance of values. Whether its ingratiating himself as a public servant in a foreign country, managing a central bank, or addressing climate change, hes seen the power of shared objectives and the importance of value alignment in addressing critical and complex problems. As the global economy attempts to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, Carney has published t...
May 26, 2021•55 min•Ep 123•Transcript available on Metacast Gifted young Argentines tend to leave home to make it in America and never look back, but after earning a degree from Harvard, writing a book about the Spanish Civil War , and living in the United States for 12 years, Pierpaolo Barbieri has returned to Argentina. And hes bringing foreign capital and talented expats with him. Pierpaolos FinTech startup Ual works to bring universal banking to a Latin American market in which huge swaths of the population are still stuck using cash for everything. ...
May 19, 2021•56 min•Ep 122•Transcript available on Metacast Daniel Carpenter is one of the worlds leading experts on regulation and the foremost expert on the US Food and Drug Administration. A professor of Government at Harvard University, hes conducted extensive research on regulation and government organizations, as well as on the development of political institutions in the United States. His latest book Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation , details the crucial role petitions played in expanding the franchise and shaping modern ...
May 05, 2021•1 hr 8 min•Ep 121•Transcript available on Metacast A self-professed nerd, the young Shadi Bartsch could be found awake late at night, reading Latin under the covers of her bed by flashlight. Now a professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, Dr. Bartsch is one of the best-known classicists in America and recently published her own translation of Virgils Aeneid . Widely regarded for her writing on Seneca, Lucan, and Persius, her next book focuses on Chinese interpretations of classic literature and their influence on political thought in C...
Apr 21, 2021•1 hr•Ep 120•Transcript available on Metacast Before he was California Poet Laureate or leading the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia marketed Jell-O. Possessing both a Stanford MBA and a Harvard MA, he combined his creativity and facility with numbers to climb the corporate ladder at General Foods to the second highest rung before abruptly quitting to become a poet and writer. That unique professional experience and a lifelong hunger for beauty have made him into what Tyler calls an information billionaire, or someone who can ans...
Apr 07, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep 119•Transcript available on Metacast What can new technology tell us about our ancient past? Archaeologist and remote sensing expert Sarah Parcak has used satellite imagery to discover over a dozen potential pyramids and thousands of tombs from ancient Egypt. A professor of anthropology and founding director of the Laboratory for Global Observation at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Sarahs work combines technology, historical study, and cultural anthropology to advance discoveries about the past while navigating the politi...
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Ep 118•Transcript available on Metacast What unites John Cochrane the finance economist and grumpy policy blogger with John Cochrane the accomplished glider pilot? For John, the answer is that each derives from the same habit of mind which seeks to reduce things down to a few fundamental principles and a simple logical structure. And thus, piloting a glider can be understood as an application of optimal portfolio theory, and all of monetary policy can be made to fit within the structure of a single equation. John joined Tyler to apply...
Mar 10, 2021•59 min•Ep 117•Transcript available on Metacast Patricia Fara is a historian of science at Cambridge University and well-known for her writings on women in science. Her forthcoming book, Life After Gravity: Isaac Newton's London Career , details the life of the titan of the so-called Scientific Revolution after his famous (though perhaps mythological) discovery under the apple tree. Her work emphasizes science as a long, continuous process composed of incremental contributionsin which women throughout history have taken a crucial partrather t...
Feb 24, 2021•58 min•Ep 116•Transcript available on Metacast Brian Armstrong first recognized the potential of cryptocurrencies after witnessing firsthand the tragic consequences of hyperinflation in Argentina. Coinbase, the company he co-founded, aims to provide the primary financial accounts for the crypto economy. Their success in accomplishing this, he says, is due as much to their innovative approach to regulation as it is anything technological. Brian joined Tyler to discuss how he prevents Coinbase from being run by its lawyers, the value of having...
Feb 10, 2021•55 min•Ep 115•Transcript available on Metacast Benjamin Friedman has been a leading macroeconomist since the 1970s, whose accomplishments include writing 150 papers, producing more than dozen books, and teaching Tyler Cowen graduate macroeconomics at Harvard in 1985 . In his latest book , Religion and the Rise of Capitalism , Ben argues that contrary to the popular belief that Western economic ideas are a secular product of the Enlightenment, instead they are the result of hotly debated theological questions within the English-speaking Prote...
Jan 27, 2021•1 hr 7 min•Ep 114•Transcript available on Metacast The world of innovation is very much one of toggling between survival and then thriving, says Noubar Afeyan. Co-founder of Moderna and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, the biomedical innovator, philanthropist, and entrepreneur credits his successes to his paranoid optimism shaped by his experiences as an Armenian-American. Exceptional achievements like the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccine, he believes, arent usually unpredictable but rather the result of systematic processes that include emb...
Jan 13, 2021•56 min•Ep 113•Transcript available on Metacast 
