Today’s episode of the Building Bridges podcast is my conversation with Tyler Cowen, an economist, director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, blogger at Marginal Revolution, and host of the podcast Conversations with Tyler.
I first met Tyler back in 2019 when my colleague Zineb Mekouar and I spent a few days in Washington, DC to promote my book Hedge and to connect with John Dearie’s Center for American Entrepreneurship. We had lunch with Tyler and his colleague and co-author Alex Tabarrok in a Chinese restaurant near George Mason University. Most of our conversation that day was about exchanging ideas and impressions about the relative situation of America, Europe, and the rest of the world.
Since then I’ve kept reading everything I could find about the political situation in the US, the state of the transatlantic relationship, and recently how COVID-19 was impacting the distribution of power and wealth across the world. Then last year, I realized something: Americans are, by far, the most inspiring contributors to this conversation—yet alas they’re mostly speaking about America, leaving the rest of the world untouched, uncommented on, almost undocumented!
In this context, how about launching a podcast series in which I’d interview American thinkers, but having them focus the conversation on Europe?
Fast forward to today: my 2020 idea has morphed into the Building Bridges podcast which I’m co-hosting with my wife Laetitia Vitaud. The value proposition of our podcast is to provide a platform for anyone who has interesting ideas to share with our vast community of “unapologetic globalists” (to quote my recent guest Chris Schroeder).
Not everyone that’s part of this roster has much to say about Europe. But whenever I catch one who does, I make sure to focus our conversation on that very subject—and I must say Tyler is one of our recent guests who has the most to say and to share about the Old Continent!
And so if you’re interested in Europe, economics, libertarianism, or the prospects of various other regions in the world, I urge you to give my conversation with Tyler a listen. Here’s what you’ll hear:
What Tyler likes and dislikes about Europe, and the various countries he’s lived in or traveled to here (which is most of them!).
Why he thinks Europe is one of the least fragmented regions in the world—which is the exact opposite of how I view Europe!
Why Americans should be present and invest in India if they want to retain some influence in the future.
What advice he would give to young Europeans and young Americans who want to prepare themselves for our coming world.
Why he expects Europe to remain a wealthy and prosperous region, despite, well, everything. And many, many more interesting topics and ideas.
This podcast and the related article were originally published at Around Europe w/ Tyler Cowen. Lobbying. Startups Across Borders. Biden’s Global Tax Reform. as part of my newsletter European Straits (which is about the Entrepreneurial Age, viewed from Europe).
Follow Building Bridges on Twitter! You can listen to all our podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Also Building Bridges is part of a network of Substack newsletters, which you may want to discover: there’s Laetitia Vitaud’s Laetitia@Work (about the future of work, with a feminist perspective), and my own European Straits (about the Entrepreneurial Age, viewed from Europe).
(Credit: Franz Liszt, Angelus ! Prière Aux Anges Gardiens—extrait du disque Miroirs de Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)
Around Europe (and the World)