Tyler Goodspeed on Challenging the Way Economists Look at Recessions

Tyler Goodspeed is the former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors and is currently a chief economist in the private sector. In Tyler's first appearance on the podcast he discusses his new book highlighting a different way of looking at recessions, the challenge of breaking away from the human inclination of ascribing patterns to random phenomena, whether recessions are more Dorian Gray or Peter Pan, what history and stories like Jay Cooke tell us about recessions, how to evaluate supply side shocks and the 2008 Financial Crisis, why Milton Friedman's Plucking model might be the best we have at modeling recessions, and much more.

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Recorded on April 15th, 2026

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Timestamps

00:00:00 - Intro

00:00:43 - Recessions

00:07:07 - Epiphanies or Apophanies

00:26:40 - Peter Pan vs. Dorian Gray

00:33:40 - Jay Cooke and the Railroad

00:39:00 - Models of Recessions

00:47:55 - Supply Shocks

00:50:12 - Recessions in Different Places

01:00:25 - Outro