Creative Director Christian Acker - Conversations with Tyler podcast

Conversations with Tyler Podcast

Thanks To

Dan Rothschild
Executive Director

Tyler Cowen
Faculty Director

Jeff Holmes
Director of Creative & Product

Dallas Floer
Podcast Producer,

Ben Brophy
VP of Strategic Engagement

Cantilever
Web Design Partner

Who

Mercatus Center

Where

Adnauseum, Inc

When

2016

Role

Strategist,
Creative Director,
Brand Designer

You can’t imitate a worldview

...but you can form your own by listening and learning (and learning how to listen).

Conversations with Tyler is built around Tyler Cowen's restless curiosity. His questions move beyond what guests think to how they think—probing the experiences, contradictions, habits, and ideas that formed their worldview.

In 2016, Mercatus brought me in to help reposition the podcast beyond its academic audience and build a brand capable of reaching founders, operators, and a growing intellectual and entrepreneurial culture.

The opportunity wasn't to make Tyler more accessible.

It was to make the value of listening to Tyler more legible.

Tyler Cowen is an economist, author, professor at George Mason University, co-founder of Marginal Revolution, and one of the most prolific public intellectuals working today. Conversations with Tyler extended that practice into long-form conversation.

Production Function

Tyler's output was prolific. But output wasn't the interesting part.

Across his writing, teaching, blogging and conversations, the same behavior kept recurring: Tyler listens in order to learn. And he learns in order to produce new connections between ideas.

That gave us the strategic premise for the brand:

Listening Produces Knowledge.

The identity turned that production function into a visual and verbal system.

The identity is anchored by a C built as a labyrinth—a path that requires you to retrace your steps to find your way through. Like Tyler's conversations, understanding rarely follows a straight line. It comes from doubling back, reconsidering assumptions, following unexpected connections, and sometimes returning to where you started with a different point of view.

The mark makes that process visible: listen, question, reconsider, know.

The 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 is the input. Better questions, unexpected connections and new understanding are the return.

Knowledge compounds, but it also reveals the limits of what we know. Epistemological humility means that 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.”

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. Christian 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

Strategy is design
Design is strategy

The visual system didn't begin with aesthetics. It began by articulating what Tyler's audience was actually coming for—and why.

That strategy was a culmination of workshops wth Mercatus’ leadership and staff. Those sessions gave us the language, identity and system for everything that followed.

Results

The CWT podcast saw exponential growth in unique downloads and social engagement. Increasing bookings with high-caliber guests and expanded audience reach.