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UNLOCKED: Russ Roberts, on the Weight of History & the Elasticity of Memory

UNLOCKED: Russ Roberts, on the Weight of History & the Elasticity of Memory

The Fifth Column · Matt Welch

October 7, 20251h 39m

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Show Notes

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



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