Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Tom Freston is a media executive, investor, and the cofounder of MTV Networks. His route to television began after an early entrepreneurial venture sourcing and exporting apparel in South Asia, before he joined the team that made MTV a defining global youth brand and grew the company’s roster to include Nickelodeon, VH1, Comedy Central, and CMT. He later served as CEO of Viacom, overseeing major entertainment businesses including Paramount Pictures and Simon & Schuster.

His new memoir, Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, chronicles his unconventional journey through business, media, music, and global travel. Freston is now a principal of Firefly3, a media-and-entertainment investment and advisory firm, and board chair of The ONE Campaign.

Roger Avary is an Academy Award-winning screenwriter, director, and producer. Best known for co-writing Pulp Fiction with Quentin Tarantino, he shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Avary made his feature-directing debut with the 1994 crime thriller Killing Zoe. He later directed Mr. Stitch, adapted Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction, and returned to the crime genre with Lucky Day. His screenwriting credits also include the horror hit Silent Hill and Robert Zemeckis’s animated epic Beowulf. Additionally, he is the founder of Pulp Time, a social movie platform for always-on programming and interactive public and private watch parties. Currently, Avary is set to write and direct a feature adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost with Ex Machina Studios, set to release in 2027.

Projects

Beowulf

Pulp Fiction

Video Archives Podcast

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To honor the 250th anniversary of America, Tyler Cowen plays Rick patriotic music from the United States and around the world in this special listening episode. In addition to his work as an economist, professor, and bestselling author, Tyler Cowen is a longtime music enthusiast with an expansive repertoire in classical and choral music, rock n’ roll, and world music.

Moving from John Philip Sousa’s vision of classic patriotism and Country Joe and the Fish’s antiwar satire to the Andrews Sisters, Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók, Antonín Dvořák, and the Sex Pistols, Cowen explores how music can express, question, and reimagine what it means to love one’s country.

PLAYLIST

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Tyler Cowen is an economist, author, and professor who holds the Holbert L. Harris Chair of Economics at George Mason University and serves as chairman and faculty director of the Mercatus Center. He co-authors the long-running economics blog Marginal Revolution with Alex Tabarrok, co-founded Marginal Revolution University, and hosts the interview podcast Conversations with Tyler. Cowen’s books include The Great Stagnation, Average Is Over, and Talent; his newest project, The Marginal Revolution: Rise and Decline, and the Pending AI Revolution, is a free interactive book on the history of marginalist economics and the implications of AI for the field.

Books:

Marginal Revolution

GOAT

Talent

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Steven Pressfield is a bestselling novelist, nonfiction author, and screenwriter. He published his first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, in his early fifties, launching him onto the literary map and leading to a 2000 film directed by Robert Redford. Pressfield’s 1998 Spartan epic Gates of Fire became a modern classic of military historical fiction and is widely read in military circles around the world, selling over one million copies worldwide. He is also the author of the 2002 bestseller The War of Art and subsequent titles like Turning Pro and Do the Work, which have made him a key voice on the inner challenges of writing, work, and creative life.

Steven Pressfield is a bestselling novelist, nonfiction author, and screenwriter. He published his first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, in his early fifties, launching him onto the literary map and leading to a 2000 film directed by Robert Redford. His 1998 Spartan epic Gates of Fire became a modern classic of military historical fiction, widely read in military circles around the world and selling more than one million copies.

His newest novel, The Arcadian, published in 2026, returns to the terrain of war and the warrior’s inner life in a genre-bending story set in sixteenth-century Spain. Following the mercenary Telamon across time and lifetimes, the novel explores fate, violence, redemption, and whether a man made for battle can ever truly lay down his sword.

Pressfield is also the author of the 2002 bestseller The War of Art and subsequent books including Turning Pro and Do the Work, which have made him a defining voice on resistance, discipline, and the inner challenges of writing, work, and the creative life.

The War of Art

Gates of Fire

Tides of War

The Arcadian

A Man at Arms

The Legend of Bagger Vance

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