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Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense. I'm your host, Julia Galeith, and today's guest is Tyler Cowan.

Tyler probably needs no introduction to my audience, but in a nutshell, he is an economist at George Mason University,

a blogger at Marginalrevolution.com, host of the excellent podcast, Conversations with Tyler,

font of endless knowledge about everything from the best new economics papers to the best

restaurants, and of course the author of many thought-provoking books, including The Great

Stagnation, and just in the last few weeks, big business, a love letter to an American anti-hero.

And Tyler is what I like to call a high entropy thinker, which means that it's unusually hard to predict what his position is going to be on any one particular issue just from knowing his positions on other issues, which means he's always interesting to talk to.

Tyler, so great to have you on the show.

Thank you for having me, Julia.

So the immediate impetus for this episode was the publication of your new book, Big Business,

which I found to be a great read, unsurprisingly, because it, in Tyler's style, makes a bunch of

counterintuitive but compelling arguments about

important things. So we're going to start by talking about big business. And then I have this

...