Last month, after years of you people begging us, we finally had on the great Russ Roberts—author, educator, and proprietor of the phantasmagorically influential podcast EconTalk. The extremely wide-ranging conversation, whose pre-Pivot-to-Video video is available to Never Fly Coach subscribers, one of the most could you please unpaywall this so I can share it? episodes in recent memory, and so here we are.

You SAID you wanted to share this. So share this! Pretty please?

* Russ’s drinks by the pool with Hitchens

* How potato chips are made. And what it tells us about economics

* Backwards towards “artisanal”

* How will a NatCon economy perform?

* It ain’t all doom and gloom (surprisingly)

* Do academic economists matter?

* Russ talks to Milton Friedman

* Do long-term economic trends tells us anything??

* On moving to Israel

* On returning to a (relatively) calm America

* Notes from Russ’s father

* A TikTok war

* Was Moneyball wrong? Or do people just not understand Moneyball?

* The Close Encounters mashed potato mountain

* And much, much more

The Fifth Column’s resident Kanye aficionado Kmele Foster sits down with Nico Ballesteros, director of In Whose Name?, a 100% verité documentary that follows Kanye West over the course of six tumultuous years. Just 18 years-old when the project began, and shooting on an iPhone, Ballesteros spent 15 hours a day recording every aspect of Kanye’s life from…

It’s fine if you want to listen to this episode on Apple podcasts or Spotify or Substack. We get it! That’s the way you’ve always done it! But you do realize that after 525 episodes (not including the hundreds of subscriber-only episodes), we’ve finally launched the Fifth Column video podcast, right? And you know that you are required by federal law to subscribe to the new Fifth Column YouTube channel? Ok...thanks...and now...Megyn Kelly...

* Botox and Scotch

* When Megyn went “temporarily insane”

* To be frivolous and Oprah-like

* You’re my inspiration, Ben

* From traffic cop to a truncheon-wielding cop

* Escalation is bad. “Yes, but one must fight fire with fire.”

* Principle vs. vengeance

* Does Andy McCarthy have Trump Derangement Syndrome?

* Megyn “speaks fluent MAGA”

* More MAGA than libertarian or NRO…

* We need to talk about Candace

* “Tucker is in a different camp”

* Wait, Moynihan has some opinions about the awfulness of Candace

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