[5][6] When Roberts was asked in 2015 to pick his most interesting episode, he mentioned two podcasts and included the Friedman interview he had conducted almost a decade earlier.

Because the podcast series unabashedly favors a laissez-faire approach to economic regulation, some center-left news organizations view it with a certain wariness.

However, the series' reputation for thoughtful analysis also creates genuine interest: a 2010 editorial in the left-leaning British newspaper The Guardian warned that EconTalk is "far too trusting of free markets," but concluded by saying, "at the end of an hour, the dismal science doesn't seem so bad after all, but a fun and useful set of tools to approach some of society's biggest questions.

"[14] Roberts has a particular interest in spontaneous order and related theories from Friedrich August von Hayek which emphasize the role and nature of knowledge.

[15][16] The essay explains that a free market with an uninhibited price mechanism at its core will make much more efficient use of information that is broadly dispersed among numerous members of society than will a centrally planned economy.

[17] In an EconTalk interview released on March 9, 2009, the co-founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, said that he read "The Use of Knowledge in Society" as an undergraduate and that it had a "deep impact" on his thinking.

Later, his decision to structure the Wikipedia project as a collaborative encyclopedia that anyone could edit reflected the essay's point that decentralized knowledge is often superior to centralized, processed information.

A surprisingly large number of podcast episodes[20] are dedicated in their entirety to Smith's lesser-known book first published in 1759, The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

Ideas from the podcast series are discussed in the United Kingdom,[28] China, India,[29] France,[30] Australia[31] and elsewhere; by think tanks,[32] among international aid organizations and those interested in development economics.