Handpicked podcast conversations about economics, building a business and the working life — without the hustle noise.
01
September 6, 2026
EconTalk · Ben Southwood · 1 hr 14 min
A patient argument that the biggest change in human material life had causes we still misread. Roberts pushes back, which is the point.
02
September 2, 2026
Acquired · Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal · 3 hr 48 min
The story of a company built to make itself less profitable on purpose, and how that quiet decision moved trillions. Long, and worth the whole length.
03
August 28, 2026
Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr · 46 min
Mokyr has spent a career on why sustained growth started where it did, and Cowen pushes him past the textbook story into culture, clans and institutions.
04
August 20, 2026
Acquired · Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal · 3 hr 12 min
The story of the single most important company most people cannot name, told with the patience of a long book and the clarity of a great lecture. By the end you understand not just a business but the physical substrate of modern life.
05
August 19, 2026
Search Engine · PJ Vogt · 1 hr 2 min
PJ Vogt takes a question most reporting answers with a statistic and follows it all the way down to the economics, the chemistry and the human decisions underneath. Curiosity done properly, without a single moment of outrage-farming.
06
August 18, 2026
EconTalk · Michael Munger · 1 hr 8 min
Two economists who normally argue about markets sit with an uncomfortable question: what does economics get wrong when it treats a moral catastrophe as an efficiency problem? The conversation is patient, self-questioning, and never reaches for a slogan.
07
August 17, 2026
The Ezra Klein Show · Nilay Patel · 1 hr 12 min
Two people who have spent their careers inside the attention economy talk honestly about what it has cost. It is not a lecture about screen time; it is a conversation about what happens to a culture when everything is optimised for a click.
08
August 16, 2026
Decoder with Nilay Patel · Brian Chesky · 1 hr 6 min
A slogan got loose on the internet and this is the conversation where someone is actually pressed on what it means. Chesky is unusually specific about how he runs things, and the interviewer does not let vague answers pass. Useful whether you agree with him or not.
09
August 14, 2026
Planet Money · Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon (archival) · 24 min
Two men made a public bet about whether the world was running out of resources, and the story of who won is far less interesting than why the argument never ended. Twenty-four minutes that reframe every doom forecast you will read this year.
10
August 8, 2026
Odd Lots · Zoltan Pozsar · 52 min
One of those rare interviews where an analyst lays out an entire worldview instead of a forecast. Whether or not the thesis holds, following the argument end to end teaches you how money actually moves.
11
August 6, 2026
Fall of Civilizations · Paul Cooper · 2 hr 4 min
Paul Cooper writes history the way a novelist writes a slow ending, and this is his most patient work: an empire that took a thousand years to fall, told without hurry and without hindsight cleverness. It is the rare long episode that never asks for your patience twice.
12
August 5, 2026
99% Invisible · Roman Mars and Katie Mingle · 34 min
Long before anyone argued about AI, aviation had already learned what happens to human skill when the machine does most of the work. This episode turns one flight into a quiet, unforgettable argument about the cost of handing over control.
13
July 31, 2026
EconTalk · J. Doyne Farmer · 65 min
Physicist J. Doyne Farmer argues that standard economic models miss what chaos theory and agent-based simulation can capture about real human behavior. Russ Roberts pushes back throughout, which keeps the conversation honest rather than one-sided. It's a genuine debate about what economics is even trying to predict.
14
July 30, 2026
Acquired · Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal · 119 min
Long before Nvidia became a trillion-dollar AI bellwether, it was a scrappy graphics chip company that nearly died more than once. Ben and David trace those near-collapses and the stubborn technical bets that eventually paid off, which makes today's AI boom look far less inevitable and far more earned. It's a masterclass in how founders survive years of being almost wrong.
15
July 27, 2026
Hidden Brain · Sheena Iyengar · 49 min
Sheena Iyengar spent her career studying why more options don't necessarily make us happier, and this conversation distills that research into something usable. It reframes daily decision fatigue as a design problem rather than a personal failing. Recorded during early pandemic uncertainty, its insights about control and choice have only grown more relevant.
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