Conversations with Tyler Podcast
Who
Mercatus CenterWhat
Think Tanks
PodcastsWhen
2016Why
Listening Produces KnowledgeThanks To
Dan Rothschild
Executive DirectorTyler Cowen
Faculty Director
Jeff Holmes
Director of Creative & ProductBen Brophy
VP of Strategic EngagementDallas Floer
Podcast ProducerCantilever
Web Design PartnerRole
Brand Strategy
Creative Direction
Brand Design
Art Direction
MissionMake Curiosity Legible.
Conversations with Tyler is built around economist Tyler Cowen’s restless curiosity, moving beyond what guests think to uncover how they think.
The opportunity was not to make Tyler more accessible.
It was to make the value of listening to Tyler more legible.
The ChallengeHow do you broaden an intellectual brand without diminishing its rigor?
Mercatus Center wanted to move the podcast beyond its academic audience to a growing community of founders, operators and curious thinkers.
The challenge was expansion without dilution: invite discovery without simplifying the ideas that made the podcast valuable.
The StrategyBuild the brand and UX around the productive power of listening.
Tyler Cowen is an economist, author, professor at George Mason University, co-founder of Marginal Revolution blog and one of today’s most prolific public intellectuals.
Across Tyler’s writing, teaching and conversations, one behavior consistently emerged:
He listens to learn, and learns to create new connections.
We built the brand and audience experience around that behavior: listening is not passive consumption, but a productive act.
Insight to Tagline PipelineListening Produces Knowledge.
Through workshops with Mercatus leadership, we turned that observation into a positioning idea the organization could use:
It became more than a tagline—a shared language for the podcast, its audience and the value of Tyler’s particular way of thinking.
The Tyler Cowen Production FunctionThe Limits of Knowing
Listening is usually treated as passive. Tyler treats it as productive.
Learning isn't simply the accumulation of knowledge; it's learning how to learn.
A production function describes the relationship between inputs and outputs. Here, listening produces knowledge—but knowledge isn’t an endpoint. It changes the questions we ask, reveals the limits of what we know, and sends us back to listen again.
The more you know, the more you recognize how much you don't.
And sometimes typography knows something epistemology doesn't.
Rakim said it best: “You gotta know the ledge.”
Brand Strategy that has endurance
Almost 10 years on and I still refer to the CWT brand guide, when having conversations with Mercatus colleagues around who we are serving and how our work is actually moving the needle.
This wasn’t just marketing jargon. Mythic workshopped our leadership team to get to articulating the real issues we face and why we do what we do.”
“
— Ben Brophy, Vice President,
Strategic Engagement, Mercatus
The IdentityMake the pursuit of understanding visible.
The identity is anchored by a “C” constructed as a labyrinth—a path that requires the viewer to retrace their steps to find the way through.
Like Tyler’s conversations, understanding rarely follows a straight line.
It comes from questioning assumptions, following unexpected connections and sometimes returning to where you began with an entirely different point of view.
The mark makes that process visible:
Listen. Question. Reconsider. Know.
That logic extended across every touchpoint: interviews, events, campaigns, web, social and the listening experience itself.
Qualitative > QuantitativeBuilt to last.
Nearly a decade after launch, the positioning and brand framework remain in active use at Mercatus—a shared language for understanding who the podcast serves, what it offers and why it matters.
