Economics episodes
21 episodes so far
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15 min
The Energy Ceiling: How Every Leap in Power Remade Human Society
From fire to fossil fuels, why the story of human history is really a story about power
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19 min
Worth Its Weight in Pepper: The Bloody History of the Spice Trade
Before oil, before data, the world's most coveted resource was sitting in your kitchen cabinet
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17 min
Pricing the Future: How Insurance Turned Risk into a Business
The hidden science of turning uncertainty into a commodity
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Free
17 min
The Invisible Hand of the Market Place: How Markets Work Without Anyone in Charge
Inside the silent, spontaneous language that coordinates billions of strangers without a single plan
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22 min
The Price of Civilization: How Taxes Built Empires and Sparked Revolutions
From grain tithes to digital levies, the story of how states learned to harvest human wealth
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17 min
Who Owns the Ground? How Land Became the World's Most Contested Asset
From feudal fields to modern real estate empires, how land ownership quietly shapes who holds power
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Free
19 min
The Attention Economy: Who Profits When You Can't Concentrate
Why your concentration has become the most fought-over resource in human history, and what that is costing you
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16 min
The Status Game: How Prestige Became the World's Most Traded Currency
Why humans spend fortunes on things that have no price tag, from royal purple to Michelin stars
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17 min
Climbing the Ladder: The Promise and Reality of Social Mobility
Why the belief that anyone can rise is so powerful, and what the evidence shows about who actually does
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16 min
Selling the Airwaves: How the Radio Spectrum Became a Battleground
The high-stakes battle to control the invisible resource around us
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16 min
The Rebel Seed: Who Owns the Genetics of Our Food?
A farmer taken to the Supreme Court for replanting soybeans, a vault dug into Arctic rock, and the seed keepers who treat every envelope as a family record
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15 min
The Economics of Envy: Why Inequality Drives Ambition, and Sometimes Revolt
Why richer countries are no happier, why soldiers who were promoted faster felt worse, and when wanting what others have turns into revolt
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17 min
The Debt of Nations: Five Centuries of Countries Going Broke
A Spanish king who defaulted four times, an empire that handed its taxes to foreign bankers, and a hedge fund that seized a navy ship
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21 min
The Economics of Scarcity: Why There Is Never Enough
Why diamonds are priced like rarities, how worrying about money taxes the mind, and who decides what counts as scarce
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13 min
Forgive Us Our Debts: Five Thousand Years of Owing
Clay-tablet loans, royal clean slates and sovereign defaults, and why owing has always felt like guilt
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13 min
The Price of a Life: Putting a Dollar Figure on Staying Alive
Why regulators quietly value each life at about ten million dollars, and what a carmaker's fuel tank memo revealed about the math
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12 min
Game Theory: The Science of Strategy and Decision-Making
**TITLE: Game Theory: The Science of Strategy and Decision-Making**
HOST: Every day, you make dozens of strategic de...
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16 min
The Price of Everything: When Algorithms Set What We Pay
Why the same flight can cost more the second time you look, and what happened when machines took over the markets
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21 min
The Tragedy of the Commons: Why Shared Resources Fail, and When They Don't
Collapsed cod fisheries, a warming atmosphere and Maine lobstermen who quietly policed their own waters
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8 min
The Dawn of Universal Basic Income: Experiments, Insights, and the Future of Work
Exploring the global trials of UBI and their impact on societies, economies, and human dignity
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13 min
Money Without Borders: The Rise and Ripple of Digital Currencies
Picture this: You're standing in a bustling marketplace in Lagos, Nigeria
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