The Ricochet Podcast - All Hands on Deck!

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

Good News! James is back! The whole crew is reunited. Even our guest Matthew Hennessey – a self-professed Ricochet nerd – was missing him. Matt’s got a new book heading our way. It’s called Visible Hand: A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market. Matthew proves to the hosts that Economics doesn’t have to be mind-numbingly boring. (And our host who’s had the pleasure of reading it goes so... Source

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Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lylex. Today we talk to Matthew Hennessey about the dismal science. Let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Usually at the end of this, we just have Rob Long expostulate at length, at fascinating length, about all the reasons to join Ricochet. But he's got something to promote today, don't you, Rob? Yeah, just one thing. I want to let everybody know a week from today, Friday, April 8th, 5 p.m. Eastern, 2 p.m. Pacific. We're doing another No Dumb Questions. This time, I'm really, really, really honored. The guest is Glenn Lowry, professor of economics at Brown, among other things.

But especially, he is host of Ricochet's own new podcast, The Glenn Show. It's an opportunity for us to get to know him a little bit better and to ask a lot of questions. And I guarantee you, I will ask questions that are technically dumb, but because you call it no dumb questions, they cannot be categorized as such. In order to be here and be there, we want you there to ask questions and really kind of mix it up with Glenn. You got to be a Ricochet member. It's a members only event.

One of the many members only events we have. So if you're not a member and we'd love for you to be a member, here's your chance to join us. Go to ricochet.com slash join, get 14 days free. That will of course include Glenn, no dumb questions, Glenn Lowry.

And we will see you there. And if you are new and you uh show up to this thing or even if you join uh say hi on the member feed or say hi when you're at the no dumb questions because we want to say hi back to you um you know we're a collegial group don't you think so peter extremely rob i had uh was lucky enough to have dennis prager on the no dumb questions last week and it was fun because because in regards to the question posed to the Supreme Court nominee, I asked him, is it is what is a woman a dumb question? And off Dennis went and we had a great time.

We talked about it. It didn't require much from you, I think. Yes, that show should have been titled One Dumb Question. It's up there for Ricochet members to listen to. And speaking of these members only thing, when I heard Rob say that, it reminded me that I was looking through Amazon the other day for a spring weight jacket. And what did I find? I found members only jackets. Oh, sure.

And not only were they the same brand, but it was the exact same style as the 80s classic with a little thin epaulets and the rest of it. And I thought that I had that I can get that again. And I had my finger was poised over the button until I realized how pathetic would it be to go about wearing something that is a complete rehab, complete, you know, revisitation of my 80s. Look, no, no, no. Likewise, you would think that statements that were made in the 80s, in particular geopolitical situations, should not be compared to things said today. For example, if you were wearing a members-only jacket while Ronald Reagan said tear down this wall, Peter Robinson's great contribution to Western society, that's one thing. It's another thing when Joe Biden makes a statement that some are now trying to make a gaffe.

He's finding his spine. Finally, it's an unforced error, endearingly so. Something else. Biden says Putin cannot remain in power. And Bill Kristol was there to defend him. Gentlemen, discuss. I defer to Mr. Robinson. Yes. So, all week long, people have been asking me, was Ronald Reagan's line a gaffe? Does it really compare with Joe Biden's? And so, my answer at this point is going to be a little bit pat, but I can count on the two of you to rough me up, to unpat my answer. Let me begin with the pat answer. The pat answer runs as follows. I had a first response, and then I had a second, much more considered response, and they were both identical. Comparing Joe Biden to Ronald Reagan is just preposterous.

Reagan's gaffe wasn't a gaffe. You could disagree with it. You could say that, as the State Department and the National Security Council did over and over again for the three weeks before he gave the speech, you could say he ought not to have said it, but it wasn't a gaffe. The president considered it carefully. He didn't ad lib it and it fit into the policy context of the moment where Gorbachev was talking about glasnost and perestroika. There had

been no official American response, and Ronald Reagan responded and said, if you're serious about liberalization, you can prove it by coming here and taking down this wall. Okay. Contrast that with Joe Biden, for whom I have considerable sympathy. He shouldn't be president. He's an older man now, and he gets carried away. That is the bitterest, that is the, please don't ever sympathize with me that way. I don't know it's over. So he's reading this text that's prepared for him, and he's looking for a way to fit his own oversized personality into this text someplace. Don't I get to say something of my own?

And he follows the emotional logic, and there's this little outburst at the end. The problem with the outburst at the end is that we're trying, as I understand it, to sort out a deal with these people. And saying Putin can't remain in power has to suggest to Vladimir Putin that the president of the United States wants to... And remember, Putin is convinced that there's a Western plot to get him and to destroy Russia. I've talked to Mike McFaul about this. Mike McFaul said, oh yes, he really, truly believes all kinds of crazy things. This comment probably wasn't helpful. I understand why he said it. I'm right there with the emotional logic myself, but it wasn't a considered purposeful statement by a president of the United States there does that fly with you guys that's that's kind and gentle and generous rob yeah i yeah i mean look i i will i will shrink from making a

medical diagnosis as you know i'm not licensed to practice medicine in the state of new york where i am now um the the the two statements are very very different, but they're different, and I think it's interesting why they're different. One is a call to a person to do something. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Yes. You have said this, this, this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this. Okay. I take you at your word.

Tear down this wall a personal call from one leader to another to do a certain thing i happen to think it was the right thing to do he didn't do it um it came down anyway um but he when it came down he let it happen you gotta there's a certain there's a certain heroism to mikhail gorbachev you have to allow there is uh when when push came to shove he didn't push or shove the second part is a really kind of a strange call to sort of passive action this this man can't remain in power well that is categorically not true he can he can easily remain in power he probably will remain in power he's not asking anyone to do anything he's not asking the west to do anything it's very dangerous when leaders you know it's kind of like any

negotiation or anytime you know we've all been in this position where somebody asks you to do something and it's not specific right that's a very dangerous thing to do especially in the middle of a war um and i suspect that uh he um he no longer has that i mean he look joe biden never had control over his mouth at any point in his career has he ever been able to moderate his language there's been no reason for him to even think that he should when has he suffered from it right john john pod told a story on Glopp sometime within the last year about when John was working on the staff of the Washington Times. This is in the 80s. Senator Biden came in for a meeting with the editorial board.

They had 45 minutes. They had a dozen questions prepared. They asked one question, and Joe Biden talked for an hour and a half. Yeah. All right. So that's, you know, so he's, I don't think this is a sign that he's getting older this is a sign that he's reverting to mean um and we're now normal right and we're starting to see the problem and uh and you know politically he was dumb uh then the walking it back was this it always surprises me about this white house it really

does it surprised me about the whole team they put together these are not new these are not they are new but they aren't these are sort of seasoned politicos you don't spend 48 hours weasel wording what he said well no he didn't this and that and the other and then have him come out for well for later a few days later with a full-throated yes i meant it i was speaking from my heart all that that's what you say an hour later right that's if you took you four days to get to that spin there is a problem in that white house that white house is a a a clown car and it shouldn't be i mean i look i disagree with them politically and on policy but i just didn't expect this level of um disarray right well you know the clown car supposedly contains infinite number of clowns but what we worry about is that is that after biden gets out kamala harris shifts into the driver's seat and then goes and drives away

um we're we're looking at you know as somebody who is maybe a dog. There's a dog about. There's a dog about, not my dog. Would it be Peter's dog? Okay. Peter's nodding. We're looking at how many more years of this, and then we're also looking at Biden's possible replacement,

and nobody has any enthusiasm there. The question is, I mean, leaving aside what he said, it is indicative of what we got what are they going to come up with next in order to convince people that this is the democrat party is going to be the vanguard for the future and i don't really think we were arguing about this in rinkershay last night i don't think they have anybody they don't have a bill clinton who can come out and sister soldier the aoc types and uh and play the sax and be cool and telegenic and all the rest of it they don't so you know that's three years from now on the ground however um putin didn't go anywhere you're right putin may at this point say that

ukraine has crossed a line you may have read that there was an explosion at a fuel depot inside the russian border that was performed apparently by ukraine this morning's news i about nine years ago or nine years seems like it uh nine hours or so ago oh okay it's been a while have you i was asleep nine hours ago big oil big big fuel depot that was supplying their tanks which according to one report were going into battle half with you know half a tank to begin with, the tanks with half a tank. So now they're down an awful lot of fuel, which complicates the problem even more. How they did that is fascinating. How did they get helicopters across the border? Do they have some information about what codes to use? Nobody

expected this was going to be the case after five weeks. And now Putin is perfectly able to say, we went on a special operation to denazify them and look what's happened. Now Ukraine is invading us. Well, when you put together with this, with the UK and the US intelligence analyses about the massive cock up in the fact that they're seemingly pulling back from Kyiv, what do you guys think actually is going to be the end game here i know we've been talking about this for weeks but we've got new information on the ground and how long do you think it's going to take oh i have no idea um i i think um last week neil ferguson had a

really interesting way of looking at it. And one of the things he said is he said he believes that it is now in the sort of Biden administration strategy to keep it going, which I found chilling, but logical in a kind of a creepy way. And so in a way to distance the West from the deal that zielinski has to make um and i feel like that's probably so i don't know i don't know the answer of the timetable but that's certainly what it feels like to me that that's what's for those who didn't hear the podcast explain why he thinks it's in the interest of the west or the interest of the administration to keep to keep it going i don't think he thinks it's in the it's not correct in the he i don't he he does not agree with it and then he's just looking at the moves they're making well because you're you're uh you're strengthening europe you're

you know there's a continual military build-up you are um if you're biden you think it's going to give you a little bump um although he seems to be fruiting that away anyway um i don't know it's just it makes it makes a certain amount of sense from the western perspective that you weaken putin weaken him we can weaken him the problem is getting out gets harder and the stakes get harder i mean just the reparations alone are going to be staggering um you know he's destroyed countless cities those cities need to be you know people need to pay for that um so i it feels to me like this is that this is going to be an intractable probably something along the lines of a frozen war either the bad version of it is north korea uh maybe a somewhat bad version of it is um

azerbaijan and armenia with a disputed zone in which there are constant low-level terrorist attacks for the next 30 years, that seems to be the most likely. Right. For those of us who didn't hear, for those who didn't hear the podcast, you mean because they were off waltzing around somewhere close to the equator getting a tan? It's available. James Lilacs? It's possible. It's been known yes yes yes

let's spring uh so um i have colleagues at the hoover institution who know more than i that actually doesn't distinguish the most people know more than i do but i have one colleague in particular who has a family in ukraine and i have another colleague who's Russian and did time in prison in the old days in the Soviet Union and was one of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's best friends. In other words, he really knows Russia. And so we were chatting about this and I said, well, aren't the terms of the settlement already clear? Putin gets eastern Ukraine and Zelensky gets the rest. And that's fine because that gives Zelensky a country that really is pro-Western and he gets a chance to operate. Why can't they both just settle for that?

And my friend who understands Ukraine very well said said it's too late for that now even in eastern ukraine even the russian speaking ukrainians now hate the russians so much that they will shoot them every chance they get ordinary citizens cannot be counted upon to obey the law if it becomes part of russia because it comes in next or putin sets up public governments there it's too late the ukrainians hate the russians and want to kill them okay and then my friend who knows russia very well said he's not sure how things will come out but it strikes him as entirely possible that over the next couple of years we'll see russia begin to break up that putin's chain of command is breaking down already that factory managers and people who are managing pumping stations for oil are now being told that they're going to get paid in rubles uh putin has insisted that customer russia's customer pay pay in rubles rather than dollars.

Nobody in Russia wants to get paid in rubles. They're used to hard currency now. So they'll begin asking themselves, what can Moscow do for me? Nothing. What can Moscow do to me? And if that answer begins to become nothing as well, we could see Russia itself break up. And then my friend said, we have this interesting problem, which is who's in charge of those almost 6,000 nuclear weapons. We are back to 1992.

Right, right. This is one reason why Joe Biden probably shouldn't have said this man can't remain in power without a very thoroughly thought through plan about what might come, how he would be removed from power, and what would come next. So, by the way, both of these colleagues of mine at the Hoover Institution, I felt a little bit better about this, both of them said that, like me, they supposed that at most Putin would try to slice off a little bit of eastern Ukraine. He'd try, in one way or another, to assert control of the Donbass. That they both were, that they themselves were totally taken by surprise when he launched airstrikes across the whole country and made it clear that

he was going to make a bid for all of Ukraine. So this is all. By the one neil mentioned last week that ukraine there was fighting against the soviet union in ukraine into the 1950s and i looked that up absolutely right yeah these people kept fighting even after the second world war they kept fighting against the soviet union there was an insurgency that wasn't finally settled until the 1950s. So Ukraine is a heavily armed country. They now hate the Russians, and these people fight. So to answer James' question, what's the way out? Rob will now sum it up.

Well, actually, before I go to a commercial that Rob is going to spoil, Rob had another point that sort of tied it all together. The entire segment, a neat little ball no i i i was just going to go back to politics because um i have no answer to what's going to happen to ukraine except that there is a slightly worse situation for those poor oil workers uh peter because um russia will take payment in euros now um you can the the the gazprom bank will take it to euros but they are going to pay those workers in those rubles they're gonna they're gonna launder that and take and skim the top as they've been doing for years but anyway so um what i was gonna say was that what's interesting is you have two most successful democratic presidents uh in recent memory two-term democrats you have um bill clinton and barack obama bill clinton had a lot of problems uh bill clinton lost the house and the senate i believe at some point um uh but uh but

and he left the party um not disastrously uh they they had lost state houses they lost governorships which are really the governorships are the are the farm team for the presidency um but not not catastrophically so that that was obama the most popular democratic president maybe personally popular since since jfk probably right um he left the party in shambles they threw everything over the board for barack obama you can't say this democrats now they won't admit it but just look at the numbers they don't have any governors they don't have they have no farm team administrators uh and i will say a southern democrat governor in american politics is nearly unstoppable that is the gold that is gold-plated politics for you and if you don't have any because you've run them out of the party

because you've gotten too weird um you're in trouble and then what you have is a bunch of blowhards and talkers in the senate uh and i don't mean that part in a partisan way i believe that all senators are the worst and they are blowhards um and probably only under certain conditions should be allowed anywhere near the white house so it really does matter i think what your party stands for surprisingly the democrats which was which for a long time were the biggest huge party encompassed this giant umbrella of American perspectives and politics. I mean, we had conservative Democrats. You had Texas Democrats. You had, you know, you had a party with the lbj and uh lloyd benson and also the democratic socialists of america somewhere somewhat voting right somehow and it became a very narrow party ideologically and that's um and they're not built for that and they're gonna reap the whirlwind

the uh i walked by msnbc yesterday and they were having a conversation about why the right is freaking out and starting a culture war about gay and transsexual people, transgender people. They had somebody from Slater Salon or Stallon or whatever it was. Because this came from nothing. They're scratching their heads trying to figure out the genesis of this. Why, all of a sudden, is the right casting about and looking for a villain and they found disney innocent disney which has done nothing said nothing now they're the enemy and it's q of course it's q anon and their fascination with i mean they they honestly believe that this fight was begun the whole desantis uh you know bill which they mischaracterized from day one

was begun and ginned up by the right was not a reaction know bill which they mischaracterized from day one was begun and ginned up by the right was not a reaction to cultural change they look at the ncaa women's swimming and they think that that's the way it's been for a hundred years and that but for some strange reason because the republicans are desperate because they're all weird people that they suddenly looked at this and said we have to imagine we have to manufacture a societal cultural war crisis about this so they will be surprised they will be surprised come the fall but hey right now it's spring and because it's spring guys it doesn't mean you have to spend all your time hunting for your eggs now the right pair of underwear puts your eggs in one basket and keeps them there that's tommy john's hammock pouch underwear, he said proudly.

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Never had that with any Tommy Johns. They look as good after and innumerable wears as they did when you take them out of the package. Shipping returns, they're free because every pair is backed by Tommy John's, quote, best pair you'll ever wear or it's free, end quote, guarantee. Get 20% off your first order right now at TommyJohn.com slash Ricochet. Go to TommyJohn.com slash Ricochet for 20% off. That's TommyJohn.com slash Ricochet.chet see site for details and we thank tommy john for sponsoring this the ricochet podcast and now we welcome to the podcast matthew hennessey contributor for city journal an op-ed editor of the wall street journal and the author of the soon to be published visible hand a wealth of notions on the miracle of the market and he's

here to tell us how learning economics needn't necessarily be miserable. Visible hand and wealth of notions. I get the references, but I'm guessing that the target market perhaps doesn't. You're here to make economics fun, to teach them about it. Is that even possible? And how much work has to be done to inform the average voters about the consequences of their political decisions. And thanks for joining us today. No, thanks for having me. This is I have to start by saying this is a huge treat for me because I've been on this podcast.

This is the third time I've been on this podcast, and I am so grateful you keep bringing me back because I know I don't bring a whole lot of audience with me. But the previous times I was on this podcast, James wasn't here. So I'm a huge i'm a ricochet nerd so this is like for me this is like completing my my uh completing the set the trifecta well uh you are very easily sad i dream bigger dreams man that's my my advice to you uh well the biggest dream i ever dreamed was to get married to a wonderful lady who has also been on this podcast so i think that there's not too many uh husband and wife duos who have who have i mean there's a few i can think of uh who have been on this podcast who have put up some

numbers way more times than i have but i believe you're the i can only think of three uh three sets uh i can only think of two guys um hemingway mark and and molly and i think we had um bethany oh that's that's a kind of you're kind of like the trio power couple there uh also ursula was on i think one of the second she was on the second or third podcast i know you guys have done hundreds and hundreds of them but but... Yeah. So, all right. Hey, Matt, okay, enough of this chit-chat. You're a wonderful person and a glorious writer, but so far you're a lousy salesman. The name of the book is Visible Hand, a Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market. It happens that I've already read the book.

It is just marvelous. It is a writer, not an economist for whom English is a second or third language. It is a writer explaining economics. The intended audience is clearly young people, but I enjoyed every sentence. It's two things that almost no books on economics are these days it's a pleasure to read and it's a celebration of free markets and the voice listen i kept i know enough about your background i know you grew up helping your dad run a bar and the voice is the relaxed, warm, friendly, well-meaning, good-hearted voice of the guy who's wiping down the bar and asking questions in chat. It's just lovely. So why do kids embrace... So we'll put it in political context and then I'll shut up. But the name of the book, again, is The Visible Hand. It's brief, too. Kids can actually just sit down and read this and enjoy

it. Why did you write it now? And in other words, what's the market? Did you come up with this idea? Did somebody say, well, I think there's a market? What's sort of the opening for the book? And why does poll after poll after poll show that college kids are in favor of socialism? Well, thank you for all those wonderful, nice words, Peter. I come from a long line of English majors. People in my family are, for the most part, daydreamers, amateur poets, wannabe musicians, teachers, you know, in the respectable lanes of society, but not too many mechanical engineers or, you know, doctors. There's a few, but not too many. So, for most of my life, because of that, I thought of economics as something that was really necessary to avoid just as a matter of mental hygiene, not something that I could wrap my brain around.

It sounded like homework to me. It had the whiff of math. I remember very vividly I was in high school when the Black Monday, the stock market crash of 1987, and I had this friend, I went over to his house and we're hanging out. I don't know, I was looking at the stuff in his room, baseball cards or whatever. And he had saved, this kid had saved the front page of the New York Times from the day of the stock market crash. And I said, what do you got that for? What's that all about? He said, man, this is an important piece of financial history here. I want to save this.

It's going to be great. And I just, I could not believe that there were people in the world for whom that was the least bit interesting. That kid, of course, went on to work at big banks and stuff and has a wonderful life. I'm still plugging away in the ink-stained depths of the newsroom such as it is. But my whole, the earliest part of my life I spent trying to avoid this stuff. I ended up going to college very late. I was a 30-year-old freshman, and I took an economics course. Hold on. And why did it take you a while to get to college? What career were you attempting to pursue first? Can I just plug for a minute? I write about that, not you, but I write about that process this week in the Washington Examiner, my column. Just to let you know.

Okay. Anyway, I'll interrupt you while you're... Those would be some good memories for me then, too. That's right. I took this course completely as a sort of a challenge to myself, like, you need to grow up, you're 30 years old, you need to understand what people are talking about when they refer to economics. I didn't even know what the word meant. I had heard about supply and demand in a kind of like, here and there, as you do. I'd heard of the invisible hand. I thought I knew what that meant turns out

i didn't really uh but i just fell in love with this class and so this i i once said to somebody if i could take economics 101 micro introduction to microeconomics every day for the rest of my life i think i would be pretty happy there which is a surprise a surprising kind of a thing to realize when you've spent all your time you know daydreaming about being a poet and an actor and a musician. So I fell in love with economics and not the scary kind of economics, not what people like me sort of tend to think economics is or should be. But I found out that it's actually beautiful and that it's very intuitive. It shouldn't be intimidating to people. For a lot of people, I think the idea of the producer price index or some esoteric

cryptocurrency conversation is like snooze-ola. It just puts you right to sleep. But that's not what economics really is at its heart. so uh i like the way you described the book although i couldn't help but think it sounded like a book for children the way you were describing it i think that i would love it if if if high schools across america uh were to buy this book and uh and assign it in in uh you know i don't know what classes i don't think they're teaching too many economics classes in high schools anymore but there might be some uh week during uh an american history course where you could throw this book and it's i you know i didn't write it for teenagers but i could see how it would be pretty useful if you have someone in your house who is flirting with

some abomination like collective economics collectivist economics this might just be the thing that could but isn't that what i mean just to break isn't that what they are teaching in school i mean economics is really the study of choices right i mean the the it starts from the premise that you're you get it you get to make a choice and then what choice you're going to make you do this you're going to do that how are you going to analyze your choices for sure we even have that in intellectually the the language of the marketplace is something we say about the marketplace of ideas although now if you go to us go to pretty much any university or even some schools i guess high schools it's the marketplace of idea right isn't that a problem i mean

is the study of economics i guess it's a study of economics a way out of this does it have something in addition to arguing okay when i was in high school i didn't have any option to study anything related to economics all i got in high school was the history of the labor movement and the civil rights movement. Right. If this was available, I would have leapt at it. You said economics is about choice. Absolutely correct. But you have to go back one step before that. And what you would hear on the first day of that intro economics course is that

economics is about choice in an environment of scarcity. Right. Which is probably the most fundamental thing you need to sort of wrap your brain around if you're going to understand how the world works. As Mick Jagger said, you can't always get what you want. Life is about trade-offs. And that's sort of like the theme I keep returning to in the book, that you simply can't have everything you want. If you want something, you are almost certainly going to have to give up something to get it. And you're going to have to give up something that means something to you, something of value. I'll just tell you another quick story about my high school years.

There was a guy who was a science teacher in my high school. And I tell this story in the book. One day I'm walking through the hallways and I see him out on the step ladder with a little satchel and he's pulling paints and stencils out of his bag. And like a crowd formed around him and people are kind of watching this. And he starts stenciling out on the hallway, like above the lockers in the space there, a saying. And it was, life is not about what you want. Life is about the choices you make. And I remember sitting there kind of like stroking my teenage chin thinking, what the heck is that all about? And I went about my business and I went to high school and I went off and tried to become an actor and everything. And then every once in a while, this thing would pop into my head. Life is not about what you want.

Life is about the choices you make. It ended up like sort of turning my whole head around because it's absolutely true and undeniable that, you know, what you want kind of doesn't really matter at all. So, you know, the problem with young people, listen, that's great. Whenever that phrase comes out of your mouth, you always have to laugh. So, the problem with young people is that it's almost all about what they want they want um equity they want fairness they want a better world we should have this we should be allowed to have this right now and the people who are standing in our way are you know grumpy old hogs like hennessy who insists that life is about trade-offs and that we can't have

what we want. So hopefully if someone reads Visible Hand, A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market, they will understand more fully how very much life is about trade-offs. I didn't mean to suggest that the book was aimed at school-aged children, although I'm sure they would profit by it, because there are plenty of people who are adults who still have, and they generally seem to be on the left, alas, these sort of attenuated adolescent romantic notions about the economy, that if we want the right things, then the right things will happen. If we pass the right bills and say the right magic words, there will be no economic second and third causes that follow on. And it seems impossible sometimes to dynamite them from that because their belief in the omnipotence and benevolence of institutions,

power, and nice ideas seems untouched by reality, even if you've been seeing the results for 30 years. But I want to talk about something else, and that is right now, most of the, a lot of the people I know who are really into crypto are young and they have a, their idea of, of economics and how it works is focused almost exclusively on crypto. It's a religion. It seems

sometimes the other day in the grocery store, I saw a machine, a Bitcoin machine in the grocery store where you could deposit money and get Bitcoin, which seemed to me the sort of crypto version of that moment, that anecdote in the twenties where the guy said, I knew it was time to get out of the market when I was getting stock market tips from my shoe shine guy. Is it, are we, are we at that point now with crypto? And is this going to be an economic lesson for people who that's all they really know about markets is what they've been doing online and in their little apps? Yeah, this falls under the heading of what I call strawberry fields economics, which is nothing is real. Right. So currency, that's not even real, man.

We made that up. We can unmake it if we want to you know interest rates uh the national debt there's uh modern monetary theory which which uh i call magical monetary theory just to double up on the beatles references uh you know you you suggested that this is a this is a brain disease of the left but unfortunately that's not true there are far more, shall we say, dirigiste economic thinkers on the right than many of us realized only years ago, pushing all sorts of fantastical options for remaking a better world through economics, through state power, through policy. Let's just stop there. How? What are the policies and the ideas that they are pushing that are as equally phantasmagorical and unmoored from reality as those people on the left

who believe in MMT and the rest of those things? What? Well, broadly speaking, it's an approach to uh state power that involves seizing the power uh and doing it doing it for the right reason so sometimes uh we call this uh you know you could broadly call this common good conservatism there are other people that fall under that banner who've actually sort of thought things through a little better like or and cast not that i agree with the idea of having an industrial policy for the united states or uh you know you know rejiggering the tax system to uh favor uh certain outcomes that we consider to be good ones like you know giving

people uh you know uh or bond style bonuses for big families and this kind of stuff right but it runs very far into looney land on the uh at the at the at the at the margins shall we say where um there's just a general disregard for the laws of economics or the fundamentals of a market economy um and and a belief that you can simply pitch them aside and make something better. As you just said, it's not like we haven't been running this experiment for a long time. The free market is fundamentally a better option. And if you try to circumvent it or if you try to fight it, if you try to fight the laws of supply and demand, you're going to lose. Just like you're going to lose if you try to fight the laws of supply and demand, you're going to lose, just like you're going to lose if you try to fight the laws of gravity. You can believe all you want

that you shouldn't fall off the high dive and smash into the pool, but if you jump off the high dive, that's what's going to happen. So from the far left to the far right, there's a lot of stinking thinking in the economic space these days. I was just going to say, I fought the law and the law won, since you're using music song titles to get your point across. I would go with a Bobby Fuller four for you next week.

Noted. So I've got a question, though. Isn't it just this natural human impulse to try to order and plan the future, this thing, this giant big fat question mark that starts tomorrow? And if the de registre idea, which is really sort of planned economy, I mean, it's irresistible. I mean, don't we tend to that left and right just sort of naturally because the future is a scary thing? And what economics teaches us is that that's no, it's it's scary but it's scary good right i mean it's it's exciting and people don't like excitement that's what's what socialism is supposed to do

is supposed to remove excitement i mean isn't that i mean isn't that the uphill you have in trying to convince people? I don't know, Rob. I think people like excitement. I think that you're right. People are afraid of, you know, uncertainty is scary. You know, I think that it probably is some kind of basic human impulse to try to control things. But my job is to fight those impulses. I have a lot of bad impulses that I have to strangle.

So, you know, what you're describing basically is the old me. I was afraid of the future. I was afraid of what I would find behind the curtain if I took that economics class. But what I find is actually reassuring because it's very intuitive, actually. You start to realize that, that wow this is how the world works this is what happens when i um you know go shopping in the marketplace like i do understand a lot of this stuff without having to be told or without having we don't need any graphs i guess what i mean is just to do a little sociology which is another dark science i love to do sociology

let's do a little do a little bit of it uh it's yeah um it and i could be wrong it does seem like uh communism socialism planned economies um they're more popular now than ever before at a time when more than ever before we have enormous progress across the world a billion two billion people out of poverty and starvation because of free market economics and only because of free market economics this should be a time when your book should be like one of 27 books repeating, you know, the boilerplate of the time. I mean, isn't it weird that people at a time when I think free market economics should be making a victory lap, where people are thinking, well, maybe we should just go back to having the government plan everything? Is that strange to you? Because it's strange to me.

Well, you know, bad ideas never go away they just they just sleep for a while and then they come back i mean the what's the worst idea in the world is is is i've got something for you and it's not going to cost you anything like that is a very attractive notion that's true it shows up all the time. And, you know, perhaps there's been some historical forgetting about the horrors of collectivism. You know, it's tempting to think that the forgetting is willful because it's never been easier to find stuff out. there was some debate over whether there was a famine in Ukraine and there was some confusion or, you know, reports of the Holocaust initially sort of were, did we know what was happening or didn't we? And you sort of get the answer 20, 30 years later, but it's never been easier to find out what a garbage system communism is. So, yeah, it is sort of shocking that people keep falling for it. But

you know, liberty is only one generation away from extinction. It's just, there's going to need to be a book like this every five or 10 years. And I'm here to write it. If I can interrupt here for just a second, I want to ask you the listener something. How are you today? Really? How are you doing? And you're saying, I was better before you interrupted. Okay. I get that. I get that. But you know, have a thing. Take a minute if you want to, right? If you're feeling hyper or you're tired or annoyed with me, or just, well, maybe it's time to connect with your feelings by starting your mental health journey with Headspace. We all say, fine, I'm fine when we don't mean it. Fine isn't really an emotion,

you know, is it? How many times have you told yourself I'm fine when really what you're really feeling is anger or sadness or nerves? Headspace is a scientifically proven way to help you manage your feelings and mental health. In fact, a recent study proved that in just two weeks, Headspace can reduce your stress by 14%. Now, whether you want to relieve stress and anxiety or sleep better or improve your focus, Headspace is your everyday dose of mindfulness for real life. Rob, we know, loves that. And as a matter of fact, he's not able to give an endorsement right now because he probably is taking his moment of mindfulness. The reason that I like it is because I don't have to rely on my watch. I have this stupid watch, which periodically taps me and says, be mindful.

No, I got stuff to do. No, I'm not. That's a gimmick. Headspace is not a gimmick. It's a program. It's a journey. It's a way to find your way back through mindfulness. So however you're feeling, try Headspace at headspace.com slash ricochet and get one month

free from their entire mindfulness library. This is the best Headspace offer available, so go to headspace.com slash ricochet today. Headspace.com slash ricochet. And we thank Headspace for sponsoring this, the Ricochet Podcast. Matt, this is an aside. I have now, it has occurred to me, I now have a complete curriculum in economics

for anyone of college age or later who really wants to understand this stuff. The third book to read, because it's several hundred pages and goes into topic after topic after topic, is Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell. The second book, and there are only three, is Free to Choose by Milton Friedman. And the first book, because you really should be introduced to an otherwise intimidating subject by a man of charm and self-deprecation who can actually sling words, the first book to read is The Visible Hand. Okay, that's just my aside. That's my three-book, total, all-you'll-ever-need curriculum in economics. So, here's the question. A couple years before he died, I happened to have dinner with Milton Friedman, and we

were talking about, well, there's almost no such thing as small talk with Milton. In any event, what it came down to was this. He looked at me, I was much younger then than I am now, I can tell you, and he said, the challenge for my generation, meaning my Milton Friedman's generation, was to provide an intellectual defense of liberty. The challenge for your generation, meaning you, Peter, your generation, is to keep your liberty. In my judgment, the visible hand is not only a lovely, really lovely primer, you're the only person I know who in talking about economics, in his very first answer to a question on a podcast like this, would note that it's beautiful. But the book is part of a battle. You're younger than I am. You've got five little kids how do you think

things are going well my kids aren't so little anymore in fact my oldest daughter is um going off to college in the fall oh no wow yeah oh my god wow this is this is an issue that is very much this has gotten very depressing yeah uh listen can I give you one fatherly advice? When you come home after dropping her off, you must have something for Ursula to do right away. Take the kids, big dinner at home, family dinner, take her to them. Just do something. Because when a woman says goodbye to her firstborn, in my humble experience, and I've heard the story, I've seen it with my own eyes, and I've seen it happen to many families. When she comes home and that bedroom is empty, it's a difficult moment.

My wife dug a swimming pool. Okay, sorry, sorry, Matt. I like that you think that each of my kids has their own bedroom yeah no that well let's say when that bunk bed is empty when that particular bunk is empty yeah okay all right so what was the question uh are we losing yeah yeah very sad things are going well here's the thing people ask so i work at the wall street journal um and i'm an editor and so people think I know all sorts of things. And I guarantee you that the three of you know more about economics, trillion imaginary dollars in the last 12 to 16 months uh that seems like it's going to have a long tail uh as the economists like to say uh

you know so the country once again feels like it's uh going to hell in a handbasket, and I'm going to be handing out copies of this book, you know, in my living room. Hopefully, some young warriors in the Hennessy household will decide to study something other than, you know, heroine poetry or interpretive ballet. But, you know, every generation or interpretive ballet. But, you know, every generation has to fight this fight. Now you have to fight it in your house before you have to fight it in the

streets. So I think the answer to your question is I have no idea, Peter, one day at a time. Perhaps they will learn the lesson that when the government backs the loans, the people who are running the schools, jack up the prices. And it's a spiral that doesn't seem to have any end, and is a wonderful manifestation of what

happens when you get government involved in such these things. But also, Matthew, let the record state that you said the three of us know more than you, and not one of us issued a peep of protest, which I find fascinating. So I'm now raising my hand in a peep of protest. I know nothing compared to what you have in your book, and everybody should read it. Peter has and thinks it's a wonderful, visible hand, a wealth of notions on the miracle of the market. Matthew Hennessy, thank you for joining us. Corral your wife after the kid goes off to school and bring her on to the show here. We've all been there, and I know what it's like.

I was going to say, I know Ursula. I suspect she's going to be tough. I don't know. Is that right? It's just a moment. Toughness has absolutely nothing to do with it. I honestly feel like I should shut up. I can't think of a single useful thing to say that's not going to get me in trouble. Except if she does come on with me the next time, and this is by no means meant to... We will not hold you to this, but I want to find out if we can maybe go for the record on the husband and wife thing.

It's on the list. You'll have Mark Hemingway sort of beating down your door trying to get ahead of you. He's not going to sleep on this, by the way. Hemingway is going to be in the in the fighting so oh we should do some sort of key party event where we just have all of the couples on and then just have them pair off ideologically in some of the other little permutations matthew thanks we'll talk to you we will talk to you again and everybody buy the book all right guys thank you so much thank you thanks give our best to ursula uh yeah when the kid goes away oh boy that's hard and

uh it doesn't uh getting better so what do you do sometimes well you um distract yourself i guess from that and as i mentioned that my wife busied herself around the house people do different things slap on your earphones try to find some upbeat music they're not those earphones are any good those things don't work actually rob you'd be surprised. And there's the wire. Well, the wire is not. It connects to the thing. You can't move around. That's so 2001, 2002.

When I was down in Mexico recently, I found myself, of course, in need of my headphones. And I needed them to be long-lasting. And the longest-lasting headphones I have ever found are my Raycons, period. Now, look. Here we are. April. A few months into this. A lot of people did not make resolutions at the start of the year. And you know what? lasting headphones I have ever found are my Raycons, period. Now look, here we are, April, a few months into this. A lot of people did not make resolutions at the start of the year, and you know what? That's okay. It doesn't mean you shouldn't still find a way to shake things up,

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My Raycon blues didn't fall out, but if they had, they would have been right there. There's also an awareness mode. That's for when you kind of, you know, need to listen to your surroundings and hear what's going on. So you can take Raycons with you wherever you go. With optimized gel tips for the perfect in-ear fit, these earbuds are so comfortable and they will not budge. Trust me on this one. So Raycons offer eight hours of playtime and a 32-hour battery life. They're priced just right, too. You get quality audio at half the price of the premium audio brands. It's no wonder Raycons' everyday earbuds have over 48,000 five-star reviews. So right now, Ricochet listeners can get 15% off their Raycon order at buyraycon.com slash ricochet. That's buyraycon.com slash ricochet to save 15% of your Raycons. Buyraycon.com slash ricochet. And we thank Raycon for sponsoring this Ricochet podcast.

Well, before we go, a couple of other things. While I was in Mexico, they had an Oscar night there at the big theater. They showed it in Spanish and they had Oscar statuettes. We were handed little glasses of bubbly as we walked in and they had a casino where you could play blackjack. And there was a very interesting dealer who had all kinds of sleight of hand to make sure that everybody won because the fake money that you got afterwards, you use for an auction.

Well, everybody's really interested in playing these games of chance, the roulette, the blackjack. Nobody, really interested in playing these games of chance the roulette the blackjack nobody nobody was watching what was going on on the screen for the oscars nobody seemed to care and would anybody have cared rob had it not been for the slap heard around the world well i don't know i mean it was uh they had a giant jump after the slap so people clearly were like saying you gotta watch you gotta watch you gotta watch um but it still was like i mean look it was the second lowest rated oscars ever was it even in spite of yeah but because it's hard you know you have to cum it up over all those

hours anyway um but it was the but last year was the worst the lowest so this is the second lowest so that you know the trend's moving up you know you could you could cover yourself if you want um the movie business just doesn't know what it is because it's not what it was so the oscars represent something that doesn't exist anymore and they're trying desperately to figure out what to do like there's there's you know you got three choices one is to throw in the towel the second is to say full speed ahead. We are still going to be the Oscars no matter what. And the third is to sort of muddle through the way they're doing.

I mean, Coda one best picture. It's a great movie. It is a classic Hollywood movie with no stars, but it's still a kind of a movie that you could see winning 10 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, feel good movie, that kind of thing. The you could see winning 10 years ago, 15 years ago. You know, feel good movie, that kind of thing.

The rest of them, but then the poor producers of Coda, no one's talking about Coda after the Oscars. Usually the Oscars, you get an Oscar bump, but people go, oh, I didn't see that movie. I'll go see that movie. I mean, I think people probably don't even remember who won best picture. It's not even a week away because of this giant thing that happened that, that took everybody's attention. The movie business is so different now, not the business, but just movies as a cultural entity are so different than when I was growing up. When I was growing up, a movie was announced. You waited for it. It came to town. It was there.

There was a big ad in the Fargo form for four days days then the ad got smaller until finally there was a note that says last day jungle book you know above the town theater then it was gone and when it was gone it was gone it was gone it wasn't coming back you couldn't flip around and call up some of the theater right you couldn't turn on your television set maybe it would come to television in a couple of years chopped up put on the small screen but without the experience that he had of the popcorn and the sticky floors and the creaky seats and the rest of it. That seems to me to be, I mean, what seems to me like it's a brilliant observation. That model's dead. It's gone. And I like what we have now and that everything is available. But when everything is available at the touch of a button and the flick

of a rocker switch, nothing is particularly important. Nothing has the same value that it did before. And you don't watch it because there's something else, because I'll watch that great movie later and then you never do. And meanwhile, the streaming services curate and hone and edit until the library of American popular cultural seems to get smaller and smaller and smaller. I don't like any of this. I don't like any of this. I don't like any of this.

I like going to the movies. I like being overwhelmed by all of it. Somehow I knew you would. I like going to the office. I like going to the movies. And it makes me feel like I'm the most archaic person imaginable who just doesn't understand how wonderful these events, sluicing through the American culture, how transformative they are.

Get with it. Get with it get with it old guy but you can't there's there's no um the music is the music business has always is sort of like the you know if you want to see what's going to happen in media there are two places to look one is pornography and the second is music pornography because people just like it and they'll pay money for it you know the pornography on the internet is what really paved the way for a payment system that people trusted on the internet, as hard as it is for us to all accept. It colonized the home video market. It sort of subsidized the beginning of this unlimited bandwidth, which means that you can stream music and you can LimeWire it, which means you can file share. And that was the big problem in the early 2000s. And record companies tried everything they could do to try to keep people from, what they said, stealing music, which is what it was. But they tried to do that, which was kind of like a quixotic journey.

But what they forgot is that the second part of it is unlimited store width. So if you experience the way you used to listen to music, where the three of us are very old, we would listen to it on vinyl. And like you had your vinyl and you got to put a record on the return table, you listen to it. And then it's like, you got to get up off your ass and go change the record. Or maybe if you were in the seventies, you had a little stack of records. You could like stack seven of them. By the time you got to the seventh the speed was a little slower

than 33 rpms um and all of that was and then you put it away and you never looked at it and that's what the cd racks were in the 80s 90s and 2000s right these racks of cds that you never really looked at you just get up and change them now new old music, all of the music you've ever heard or wanted to hear is available. It's all competing with each other. And as you put it, it's the same way with movies. New movies, old movies, movies you've seen a million times, they're all competing. They're all as easy to watch as anything. And it's store width that's killing it.

But it's not really killing it, because there's some really good movies, some really good, but we're getting other things. I mean, if you like Breaking Bad, or Better Call Saul, or The Sopranos, or Game of Thrones, or any of those things, those were inconceivable 10, 15 years ago.

So, we're changing. Maybe. And the movie becomes less important. The movie is just a standalone thing, or it's another chapter in an extended universe. Giant, big spectacle with big speakers. I'm watching a show on Apple television that's about, it's essentially a nine-hour movie. Twin Peaks Returns was a 13, 14-hour movie. That's how David Lynch conceived it. But we don't think of it that way. A movie to us is a discrete thing, 90 to 120 minutes. It fits

in a box and that's what it is. Now you're right. Our tastes have changed and we want the long stories to give us something to do at the end of the night. It's the Dickens experience, right? I'm going to read for an hour, a chapter a gigantic saga and eventually i'll end that and then i'll start another one and that's what i mean i'm not talking about the quality necessarily but that is the human experience of spending an hour at night doing a thing and immersing yourself in a continuing storyline you're probably wondering um what this has to do with the national journalism center and a ricochet uh thing that's coming up. You'd be right, wouldn't you, Peter?

You're wondering, when are we going to get to the important stuff? Enough about this ridiculous things. Hold on. I have something important. Oh, I have. It's not important. What year did The Sound of Music come out? Five, 66?

Something like that. Okay. 65. Okay. I just want to, because you opened with this, which I loved, of reading the newspaper in Fargo and seeing the big ad, smaller, smaller. Here's my memory of movies in the old days. This is my memory since we're doing Lost Worlds. Here's a glimpse of a lost world.

I was a little kid, but I can still remember that when we went to see the sound of music my mother dressed up and my father wore a jacket and tie and there was an intermission an intermission yes right yeah the people came out and milled around and we talked with neighbors and all the men were wearing jackets and ties this world is gone a world a world in which i didn't experience that world a movie i don't even think that was true i think it's your memory no it's a world in which a movie would have an overture yeah the west side story has an overture i think ice station zebra for god's sakes had an overture i know that one had an intermission. Sure. Actually, I can take that one step farther, that the theater, I didn't understand this until years later

when my father explained it to me, but I grew up in a small town in upstate New York, but the movie theater was big, elaborate, with painted ceilings and balconies on the side that nobody ever went into, and they were all old vaudeville houses so they had been live entertainment which my father when he was a boy had seen anyway speaking of lost world so that's enough of that

no we've talked about this we haven't talked about the big event which i think is pretty good yes yes over to james well no i actually i thought it would be over to rob because seems to be our go-to guy here for no no i look i i uh i saw it later um i'm writing about it uh today in fact my deadline is this afternoon um i mean i think it's gonna people be thinking about this for a long time like all america like like all american culture um the minute really within within 15 20 minutes of the slap and then the bizarre speech and the sort of quizzling standing ovation um everyone had a take on it that somehow confirmed their prior political positions. It was racist.

It was not racist. It was, it's racist to talk about it. It was all about race, which doesn't seem to be, to be right. You know what? Comedians go too far anyway.

I mean, it all does seem to conform to our general feeling that, that we just don't like it. We just don't like humor anymore. We just don't have the kind of ability to. And somebody with tremendous forensic skills on the internet found a YouTube clip of Will Smith on a late night talk show making fun of the band leader.

It was Arsenio Hall, that was it. He was making fun of the band leader who had no hair and had the same condition that Will Smith's wife had. And they have him making fun of the guy and then looking at the audience and saying, Hey, it's just a joke. There's a clip out there for everything. I tell you, it's a clip for everything.

It's exactly right. We wanted to, we wanted to note the take back our schools initiative. I thank again to the national journalism center and young America's foundation for hosting the take back our schools event earlier this week, ramping up these in-person events. We are so stay tuned for more news, including some fun member-only meetups where, you know, you're going to find. For example,

Colleen B., we wanted to give a shout-out as the kids say to longtime Ricochet member Colleen B. for making the trip to that event. Another reason to join Ricochet is you can hang out with cool people like Colleen B. or Rob or Peter or, you know, depending on what happens. I'm still wondering what we're going to do for number 600, but perhaps we'll learn that in episode number 588.

More details on the memberships at ricochet.com. Join. I will say this. Yeah. So just because it's not on my little things to say, but on probably, I think this is going to happen. We'll have plenty of time. April 30, Saturday, April 30, New York City.

We're going to do a pub crawl. We're going to meet in a bar and maybe go to two or three bars with another group. And I'm going to invite some friends along. So maybe you'll see some people that you know from their bylines or wherever. And so put that on your calendar, but you got to be a member. So you got to join. Can I come? Can you come? Of course. Okay. All right. let me look at my schedule you are getting cordially invited i'm getting out in the world these days and i'm having great time

doing so because i got that tommy john to wear i got the headspace to keep me calm and i got a raycon to keep me entertained in my ears please support them for supporting us and join ricochet today he says for the 19th time how about 20 join ricochet then you can go to podcast leave us a five-star review which of course gives more listeners to the show, which helps keep the show going, et cetera, et cetera. The same thing I've been saying for 500 times. And look forward to saying 500 more. Rob, Peter, it's been a pleasure.

And we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. You'll be here next week, James? I will. What was that all about? Next week. Next light. Next week. Next week. Next week. He took her in and said, well, they're sad, I'm talking bad But looking out across the city from love asleep is pretty The lights, they flick and flutter, he told her how he loved her

Next night he called for her, but that protected daughter And told him she was falling, a lover's told that surely So Michael felt rejected, this wasn't quite expected He drove off to his local, where he felt antisocial She cried all night at missing the boy she could be kissing While he was falling over, he drunk himself back sober And went home in a taxi and crashed down in the backseat He slept just like a baby, which he hadn't done just lately.

He saw her in the morning, out with his sister Polly. She felt all shy and sloppy. He acted cool and cocky. He said, tonight at Charlie's, there's gonna be a party. I'll meet you at house seven. She visualized the heaven. Ricochet.ized the heaven. Ricochet. Join the conversation.

If you ever change your mind, which you do from time to time, never chew a pickle with a little slap and tickle. You have to throw the stone To get the pool to revolve That night they danced together It looked like a forever He put his head on her Like you should have loved one

She said he tried again much later It seemed to aggravate her He drove home in silence A a bored and more violent. She said, let's watch a city, from love asleep is pretty. I think I need the fresh air, she pulled a comb through her hair. They thought she'd turn to kiss him, but Farrah never missed him. And put her hand on his leg, he felt a tongue in his head If you ever change your mind

Which you do from time to time Never chew a pickle Whether it'll slap and tickle You have to throw the stone To get the pool to rip off Thank you.