The Fifth Column

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.

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* 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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Oh sure, everyone’s go-to for imperial collapse tends to be Rome, but what broad lessons are there to be gleaned from every single other civilizational implosion, from Mesopotamia to the Mayans to the forgotten pyramid builders along the Mississippi River? Such is the intriguing set-up for Goliaths Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, the…

* If you’re a Never Fly Coach subscriber, remember that you get to watch the video version of this episode!

* The morning after pill and Roy Campanella’s glove

* Why does Moynihan look like late-stage Nick Nolte?

* Have a SoCal venue suggestion for a Fifth live show?

* Comparatively, Alex Jones isn’t that bad (Ed. note: Spoke too soon! Immediately following this rec…

Matt and Michael are joined by John Spencer, Executive Director of the Urban Warfare Institute.

•Gary Busey and the B-movie military raid on the Turkish Embassy

•Bagging and tagging isn’t as bad as it sounds

•20/20 De-Baathification

•Post 9/11 Islamophilia

•The hockey analogy for war with Hamas

•Human shielding & bomb shelter inequities

•Gaza vs Berlin 1945

•Journalism in Gaza

•The IDF’s absent PR operation

•Starvation, genocide, and Wikipedia

•Amalek

•Trump’s 180 on Ukraine

•Comedian Dave Smith on military aid

•God bless Russian incompetence

•Red Dawn had it all wrong

•Cancel John’s tickets to Stalingrad

•John Spencer, expert? The New York Times is on it.

•NFC-level members get a video preview of this episode here!

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* Pretty sure FIRE president Greg Lukianoff is the perfect guest for this moment…

* A requirement of Judaism

* FIRE on fire these days

* Come on man, it was the FCC!

* My husband got Kimmel fired!

* The latest campus free speech ranking

* FYI, lots of dumb young people are cool with political violence

* Is does the university have a psycho incubation problem?

* So who should be …

* See below for the video version of this episode!

* On Candace and Megyn

* That source, says Thor, the Venezuelan, is a big booster of the shittiest people on Earth

* How they shot my mother (Hugo Chavez edition)

* The failure of the Human Rights Industry™

* How Venezuela collapsed

* It’s not a country. It’s a drug cartel

* The hierarchy of South American drug trafficking

* The real reason the US struck those “drug boats”

* So the 93% cannot defeat the 7%?

* Was former congressman Aaron Shock corrupted by Venezuelan commies?

* Crooked congressmen. Crooked Kennedys?

* A crooked American oil magnate?

* On dissident heroism—and American cynicism

* The nobility of the human spirit

* The useless UN

* The million dollar roller bag

* How the bad guy$ $pread their influence

* And much, much more!

As previously mentioned, Never Fly Coach-level subscribers have access to our early video efforts. Wonky angles, swiveling chairs, ugly timecodes, no title sequence…you get the idea. BUT…your feedback has been amazingly positive thus far. If you want to add your two cents (and see our ugly mugs), upgrade and get access to the ever-evolving pilot episodes!

* See below for the video version of this episode!

* 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 …

A very bad day for American politics, recorded within an hour of a young father’s death. Political violence, outgroup hatreds, and a side of media malpractice. With a sidebar conversation on 9/11, plus extended outro on the murder in Charlotte and subsequent discussion about race.