The Magic Mountain

Stephens holds degrees from the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics.

Part of this conversation, now on YouTube, covered many things, including the negotiations to end the war, the Strait of Hormuz, the price of oil and gasoline, Iran's nuclear program, and the status of their enriched uranium.

Also, President Trump's war leadership, the war response of the regime in Iran, and the consequences of war.

Part two of our conversation will continue now with America at its 250th birthday, also its relationship with Israel and the world.

But yeah, I think that that's, especially in the next two years, it's going to be something that we have to pay close attention to.

But as economists, though, I want to remind one thing, that I once wrote a book sort of stealing the title from Thomas Mann called The Magic Mountain.

And I argued that when we're thinking about how we're what we're handing to our kids when we have government policies, that you have to look at sort of the costs and the benefits.

And so if we do something like, I don't know, a big corporate reform that increases capital formation a lot, but because you're expensing in the first year or two, then revenue goes down.

that breathe through it all.

I think last year, also, I was rereading Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg, The Magic Mountain.

The first time I read it, I hated the book.

The second time, I loved it.

Yeah, a lot of this read to me...

I know, dir- did we talk about this, our book club that we had to duck out of because of reading Thomas Pynchon very closely about, uh, [laughs] we were reading M- The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann.

Mm-hmm.

A lot of this felt very Magic Mountain-y, especially the...

"We each have antennas, don't we, tuned to recognize our own?"

Yeah, so this is where he, uh, talks one-on-one with Sigmund, first-name basis, uh, about Greta's fantasies and, uh, anxieties, and then really starts to put two and two together about all of these missing children, how she, her shoes keep coming in caked in black mud.

And the bit about the orchestra playing this music reminded me in a big way of The Magic Mountain-

Mm-hmm