 Welcome to Free Thoughts. I'm Trevor Burris. And I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is PJ O'Rourke, writer and political satirist contributing editor at the Weekly Standard, H. L. Minkin Research Fellow at the Kato Institute, and author of 19 books. The newest being None of My Business. PJ explains money, banking, debt, equity, assets, liabilities, and why he's not rich and neither are you. Welcome to Free Thoughts, PJ. Well, thank you. I will get to the book, but I'd like to ask you about your first job, which in a book you have called Agent Gile, The Innocence of a Bad Haircut, do you say it was at a Baltimore newspaper called Harry? Harry, H-A, in fairness, H-A-R-R-Y, although H-A-I-R-Y probably would have described the era pretty well. Yes, we had an underground newspaper, not that there was anything illegal about it. I mean, there was a fair amount of illegal things that we were doing while we were there. Well, one smoking pot. Which was very illegal. It was very illegal, but certainly nobody had tried to suppress our free speech. And we, yeah, we were against the war and against capitalism and in favor of bell-bottom pants and walking into the wall because you were stoned out of your gourd. And I think the only thing that really set Harry apart from a lot of the noise that was being made was that we continually got the giggles. We couldn't stay too serious about being hippies because there was something innately hilarious about hippies that even we perceived. And so it was the rare element in the new left that had some measure of a sense of humor. Did you have called yourself a socialist or something at the time, do you think? Oh, I think a Maoist. Not that I had any idea what that would mean. Not that I'd ever read a single word of Chairman Mao. And to this day, I have it, I don't believe. Was the war the biggest political issue? Oh, the war was. To understand the 60s and 60s politics is really very simple. It was the 60s. We were having an absolutely great time. The birth control pill had been discovered. The economy was going great guns. Everybody was prosperous. The cars were very cool. You know, the safety Nazis hadn't gotten in and screwed up all the cars yet. And then marijuana had been discovered. I mean, even back when I was in high school, not that we could find any, but we were trying hard. And we were just having an absolutely great time. It was a beautiful sunny period in American history. And all of a sudden, here comes the draft in this war. And we're having a party, man. And they want us to, they want to cut our hair off. And they want to send us to some place with noxious flora and fauna and terrible weather to shoot people that we didn't even know. And what was worse, those people were expected to shoot back. Bummer. I mean, if they'd want, you know, I'd been willing to cut my hair if they wanted to send me to shoot my stepfather drunk on the couch. But you know, that wasn't the idea. And so it just came as such a surprise. And if you listen to those, if you listen to mid 60s music, you hear a really sunny landscape. If you listen to Motown, if you listen to the Beatles, even the Rolling Stones, the darker British import, you know, it's all really very upbeat. It was really fun. It was really happy. We were having a great time. And along came this stupid war. And that's really all you need to understand about. You don't need to understand whether the war was right or whether the war was wrong or some sort of like deep political shift was going on in the United States. It wasn't. It was just the interruption of a party. And it goes to show you the aftermath of the 60s having been quite horrible. It goes to show you how much trouble you can get in if you interrupt a party. So how'd you end up in National Lampoon? You know, it was pretty, I was working, like I said, this thing called Harry in Baltimore. And I decided I really wanted to be, you know, some kind of writer, magazine writer of some kind. And in those days, all the magazine work was done in New York. So I moved up to New York, worked on one of those underground newspapers up in the East Village Other. But all the time keeping my feelers out for a real job and not that National Lampoon looks in retrospect like a real job, but it did at the time. They actually paid money. And so, you know, I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody and managed to weedle my way in there. What was the mantra of National Lampoon? I mean, I have an idea. I don't think my dad has old issues and stuff. It hasn't been prominent for a while, but was it just humor or were you going for... Oh, no, it was just humor. The idea was to knock and mock everything. It was absolutely... it was humor at its most destructive. So was there a political element? Was it going after the right more than the left, would you think? Well, we ran one issue called Is Nothing Sacred with a picture of Shea Guevara on the front getting a pie in the face. No, I don't think it had any particular politics. I mean, I think taken one by one, a number of the National Lampoon writers were pretty lefty. And then there were some like myself and John Hughes who were much more libertarian or even borderline conservative. But no, the point was just to make fun of things. Were you there with... you were there with John Hughes at the time? Oh, John Hughes. I took over the magazine at the end of 77 and John and I had been working together on a variety of projects and he became my... yeah, John Hughes once worked for me. He wrote a... it isn't the movie Vacation based off of a piece he wrote for that... Exactly. ...called My Summer Vacation 1955 or something like that. There were a number of things that he worked on at the National Lampoon that would show up in one form or another in his movies later on. He and I did a Sunday newspaper parody back when Sunday local newspapers were still a big deal. And the Dacron... the Dacron, Ohio, the Dacron Republican Democrat, you know, there had been two papers in the town but they couldn't quite support it so they merged. And John and I wrote a lot of that and John did a terrific job. And that was a little bit of the genesis of the world that he created with his teenage... you know, his teenage... Breakfast club. Breakfast club. Exactly. And pretty in pink and 16 candles. She described... among the people writing National Lampoon you would have been at least not only libertarian in your views. So I guess the question is how did you get from the Maoist days of Harry's to I guess now being the H. L. Menken fellow at Cato? Because that's quite a shift in perspective. Well, you know, it became clear as the 60s went along that the new left was an angry authoritarian destructive influence. And I think one of the things that really shook me was the beginning of the weather underground where they started bombing... You know, this didn't... peace, love and understanding did not seem to be, you know, part of the equation with, you know, the more radical left. Also partly getting a job, you know, it was very simple. When I got a job, I first got a job in New York. It was actually my actual first job in New York was... I was a messenger for a weekly newspaper. And I was paid... I think I was making $75 a week. We got paid every two weeks, so I'm really looking forward to $150. And I net out at, like, $86.50 after all the taxes. And I go, wait a minute, I'm a communist, you know. And somebody just, like, took all my money. I'm not Rockefeller, you know. So that was an eye opener. But yeah, it was a very gradual process for me. And it started... as the left got more violent, I began to drift away from that. And as I saw the lives of my hippie friends kind of coming to nothing or coming a cropper, I just saw the fallout from the... The 60s were great on two-thirds of the libertarian idea. Individual liberty for sure. Individual dignity, pretty good on. Individual responsibility. No. Didn't work out that well. Didn't work out. But it's interesting with the violence of the left, because in your new book, in the last chapter, I think you have this part about antifas. Yes. And then you say, then I realized I was one of them, or had been, or had tried to be. So that violence on the left, I mean, it was, as you pointed out, the weather underground and the stuff in the late 60s, early 70s. But it seems like it's back. Does it look familiar to you? Yes, it totally does. Although, you know, as usual with these things, they come around first as... History repeats itself first as tragedy and then as comedy. And so the antifas, you know, they don't seem to be having as much fun as we were. But they do fall into that same category of... The impulse to violence is like lots of fun at a distance and in theory. And everybody feels violent impulses. But when it's actually put into practice, whether it's put into practice with the weather underground bombings or antifa demonstrations or school shootings, for that matter, all of a sudden, ooh, ooh, you know, this is real. People actually get hurt from this. You know, people I might care about. People like people, such as myself, you know. You know, once the reality takes shape, sensible people start to back away. I've always felt with the, you know, the school shootings is that no sensitive kid goes all the way through school without some thought of blowing up the building. You know, it's like, it's maybe a horrible thing to say, you know, but you don't put that thought into action. So coming out of, I mean, working as a humorist and coming out of this tradition of humorous publications, maybe you can shed light on one of the things that I always wondered about, which you look at the state of comedy today or even art in general. And it seems like with obvious exceptions, most of the good stuff is on the left or comes from the left, right? That right-wing, self-consciously right-wing comedians tend, are frequently fairly cringe-worthy or self-consciously right or right-of-center movies or books are equally cringe-worthy and the good works being done on the left. Is there something about the left that's doing that or is there some reason? No, there's something about show business that does this. The show business and left-wing politics are always going to have an affinity for each other because it's essentially a crowd-pleasing idea. The first mission of any entertainer is to please his or her audience. And one of the things that, one of the ways that you can please that audience is to reassure the audience that whatever's going on out there in the world that they don't like is not their fault, that they are special, and then you want that whole sort of lovey-dovey, there used to be a phrase in England, lovey's for labor. You want that sort of lovey-dovey thing where you say, oh, we're all in this together, everybody is equal, and we're all victims of some nastiness. And if you try and be a right-wing entertainer, you end up standing there saying to the audience, it's your fault. The line I've been using for years about education is show me the politician who's got the nerve to stand up and say, no, I can't fix public education. The problem isn't funding, the problem isn't overcrowding in the classrooms, the problem isn't teachers' unions, the problem isn't lack of school choice or lack of computer equipment in the classroom. The problem is your damn kids. And so, you know, if you're going up to be an entertainer and you don't want to be telling the audience that it's the audience's problem, so there's always this collectivist side to an entertainment venue that leads it in a kind of naturally leftist, there are plenty of conservative comedians, but it's not evident in their stuff. I would say Jerry Seinfeld is very conservative. He doesn't talk about politics that way. It's just that, you know, Jerry belongs to an observational kind of comedy that says, you know, if it's new, it's probably wrong. Because it hasn't been tried, you know, or somebody's probably tried it before and decided it's stank. So after National Lampoon, you went to Rolling Stone, and was it the immediate shift there? No, there was a couple of years where I flopped around trying to figure out what to do, but somebody, Michael Kinsley, founder of Slate, was then editor of Harper's, and he sent me to the Soviet Union. And I thought, boy, this is great. This is what I want to do. I want to be a foreign correspondent. And then I got back and Michael had gotten fired from Harper's and so I spent a couple of years trying to flop around trying to figure out who I could get to send me to do this stuff. And it was finally, it was Rolling Stone. And I said, okay, we'll do it. You know, we'll send you to cover this. And you talk about in the new book a little bit. You had a book, All the Trouble in the World, before you talked about more of it where you went to some seriously dangerous places. Yeah, you know, it wasn't safe as houses. Yes, actually, I retell some stories in this, none of my business book. I retell some stories that are in earlier books, notably of covering Somalia, the Civil War in Lebanon, the kind of social collapse in Albania as a result of the pyramid schemes. But this time, I'm doing it to show economic points. Originally, I've been, you know, covering news or writing about politics, but all of this, there's a little economic education in all of this. So I retold some of the stories, you know, asking the readers, you know, if there's somebody who'd read this before, you know, I'm sorry. But telling some of these tales from an economic point of view. Yeah, the market in Mogadishu. Was that the craziest place you think you went to when you were... I think that Somalia was just about the pits. Yeah, I don't know if it was a flat-out the craziest place, but it certainly was the most chaotic. Yeah, and probably the most dangerous. It was more civil disturbance, especially when it's very violent civil disturbance the way it was in Somalia. It's much more dangerous than war. I mean, war has a direction. War has an internal logic to it. The murderous clan infighting in Somalia was... Doubtless there was some logic in it, but it was not discernible by the outsider. What do you think of the state of journalism today? Oh, it's pretty lousy. Journalists, you know, journalism used to be a trade. I mean, I'm old enough that when I started out on... I worked on a weekly newspaper and not an underground newspaper, a regular weekly newspaper in New York in 1970, 1971. And I was, you know, around the daily newspaper journalists and so on. It was a blue-collar trade. It used to be, say, you grew up in a poor Irish neighborhood and you like to read and you didn't want to get up early in the morning and lift heavy things. Well, you basically had two choices. You could go into the church or you could become a newspaper reporter. So, you know, you'd debate with yourself, would it be whiskey in women or just whiskey? And so it was a craft. And it was basically... H. L. Menken describes it very well in his newspaper days. You just got a front-row seat at everything happening in the world. And the reporter didn't feel that it was incumbent upon him as a... Of course, it mostly was him. Him as a reporter to judge everything. You know, that would be for the sob sisters. That's for the junk on the editorial page. He would just, hey, there's a terrible traffic accident. You can't go see the traffic accident because the police have yellow tapes around. But I can go on the other side of the yellow tapes and I'll come back and tell you, whoa, that was a bad traffic accident. I don't have to lecture you about you should wear your seatbelt and so on and so forth. I'm just telling you about the traffic accident. And then along came the world savers. I blame it on Woodward and Bernstein. I'm good friends with Carl, but I'm still going to blame it on him. It was all the president's men. All of a sudden journalism saved the world. Get out of here. Journalism doesn't save the world. It just tells you what happened. It's up to you to save the world. And all sorts of people who should have joined the Peace Corps decided to become journalists instead. And not only that, but they went to journalism school, whatever that may be. Well, they teach you in journalism school. Keep your eyes open. So, yeah, I think that's my sort of despair but it's become one of those pious do goody professions that we really don't need any more of. Do you think that that saved the worldness with the Trump administration has gotten worse? Oh, sure. You know, I mean, it's... I mean, this has been coming for a long time, but when you get somebody as, you know, frankly inexplicable, deplorable, and ridiculous as the president of the United States, and you mix that in with a bunch of do goody journalists, you're going to get just endless, endless. I mean, if H. L. Mencomore around today would be enormously amused, and I am enormously amused, but everybody else seems to be furiously angry. I think it's a pretty good show, but, you know, I would warn journalists against covering it too much, paying too much attention to Trump. Trump's a big toddler. He wants all the attention. He wants all the oxygen in the room. And by golly, he's been getting it. You know, there's just been no space for anybody else. He makes for good TV. He does. You know, it's hilarious. And, of course, what makes for good TV always makes for bad life. That's a good little... We should tweet that one out. A lot of your new book covers changes in the world, I think, is good things that have changed rapidly in different ways. And you touch on some points that you make it. You touch on a lot of your work, which one of them is, is that baby boomers are the worst. And now we have the millennials, which you have two millennial daughters that you use to write about. I do. Yeah. So, first of all, why did... How did baby boomers ruin the world? My dad has said this for years, too. He's your age. Yeah. And he has said these. I guess, we're the worst generation ever. I like my parents. Like, I like you, but what's wrong with your generation? Spoil rotten is what it came to. I mean, between luck and intent, a whole bunch of guys came back from a great big war, a great big, really horrible war, determined to have a better life and give a better life to their kids and also determined to work hard and be prosperous. They created an extremely prosperous and stable world after decades of instability because, really, the teens were unstable because of World War I, the 20s because of social change, the 30s because of Great Depression, the 40s because of World War II. They were determined to have a stable world, so they created a stable, closeted world in which a bunch of kids were brought up with much higher standard of living that had been, you know, higher median standard of living than it had ever been experienced by any other generation. We were spoiled. We felt entitled. We were protected on every front. And when we came up against our first major crisis, which was the war in Vietnam, all the intellectuals took our side. You know, I mean, it was a tough period, but all the grown-ups, all the serious grown-ups, were also saying, oh, how terrible this war is, too. So we just, like, grew up feeling that everything was all right and we were right about everything. And, yeah, does that make for a good society? No. So then what's wrong with the millennials? Yeah, what's wrong with the millennials? What's wrong with the millennials? I think that the millennials are just, their mind is fogged and not without reason by such incredibly rapid changes in the economy, the technology, and my sort of social interactions as determined by that economy. I think millennials are deeply confused, but I cannot blame them a bit. They've grown up in a deeply confusing situation. And actually, the fact that they're confused shows that they're not insane. You know, if they weren't confused, if they were certain about stuff, they'd be nuts. So I appreciate the attacks on both of the book-ending generations of my own, which is obviously Gen X is the greatest generation. But so looking forward, then, is these problems that you've identified, both the boomers and then with the millennials. Do you think that we can dig our way out of that culturally? Do you see things potentially getting better with whatever it's at Gen Z now and whoever comes after that? Oh, sure. I mean, we'll age out of the boomer problem. Actuarial statistics will take care of the boomer problem, you know. And it's gonna take a while because the boomers are very fussy about their health and they probably will stick around for a lot longer than the greatest generation did. And they stuck around for a while. But I'm assuming that if we manage to maintain our values as a free society, that we'll sort out the social and economic transitions. It's not to be forgotten. The last time we had a major economic transition, a transition as important as the transition to sort of the digital economy or whatever you want to call it, was the Industrial Revolution and that there were tremendous dislocations in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. I mean, not for nothing do we have all those Thomas Hardy novels and all the Blake's dark satanic mills and so on. It caused people to move in from rural areas all over the world, concentrate on cities. It destroyed families. It put religion in jeopardy. And, you know, we'd just begin to sort out. We were just beginning to sort out the after effects of the Industrial Revolution and get them so that they, harness them so that they benefited everyone when along comes the Digital Revolution. They start over again. But, you know, we'll be okay in the long run. Although, you know, as John Maynard Cain said, in the long run, we're all dead. I like you point out in the book that you ask your daughter, what do you think of the digital economy? And she's like, you just mean the economy, right? Exactly. It's like, there's something funny about even the Digital. And if you said, you know, in the Industrial Revolution, what do you think of the industrial economy? Yeah, if you were for good. If you mean just the economy, the regular economy. You do say, though, that, yeah, I think it's your younger daughter who comes to you and complains about too much politics on her social media that she wants to shut it off. Did that surprise you? No, no. I can see how that would be annoying. I mean, we fancied ourselves. Do you do social media? No. Okay. We fancied ourselves to be very politically alert and aware back in the 1960s. But as I recall, starting not just the hippie 1960s, but back in the civil rights era in the 1960s, too. But a little bit of it went a long way when you're a kid, because you've got more important things on your mind like where to get pot and beer and where to meet girls or boys or whatever it is you want to meet. Well, you write that someday you think that we'll look back on the personal electronic communication fad with as much bafflement as we look back on the hula hoop. Sure. Do you think that we'll be doing this, looking at our phones less in 10 years or 20 years that we do now? I would assume the novelty factor alone will have more... People will start to realize just how exhausting it is to be constantly connected to everybody else, you know? How like being in a noisy room it is. I mean, kids didn't ever figure that out with like the telephone. I mean, they didn't stop calling each other all the time until they got Twitter. No, but then the telephone was self-limiting to a certain extent. You know, I mean, telephones when they were wired into the walls were so... Yeah, we used them a lot, but you could only use them so much. Before your mom got mad at you, yeah. That's true, yeah, because there's usually only one line in the house. Now, last year, your last book was how the hell did this happen? Right. We tried to explain the 2016 election. Is anything... Have you learned anything more since you wrote that book about... No. ...what about that year? Or has anything about Trump been different than what you expected? Is it better? Is it worse? I would say it's a little better in the sense that... Oh, not better, right? But in the sense that... America does have a lot of keel, and it is not easy to disrupt the general course of America, even though it may be headed the wrong way and sometimes it's not easy to turn it around. So I think that the... Trump presidency, for all of his scary volatility and infantile behavior and so on, touch wood, the outcomes have not been as frightening as I might have worried that they would be. But it could get worse. Now, since you... We started with the 60s and your... Roll your life at that time on the anti-war left, and that's often cited as the most divided time of this country until now. Does it seem that way? Does it now start to seem like the 60s in some way to you? Does it seem better or worse? I don't think it's quite as bad. I would say actually the 60s, that period was worse division in American society than we've got now. The causes of division, the fault lines were somewhat different. But there was an enormous amount of anger. I mean, our cities aren't on fire. The 60s... We have better building codes now. That could be it. They have sprinkler systems. Yeah, and the other thing is that a lot of our poverty has been dispersed to old suburbs, so they're a little harder to burn down. Only go one house at a time. But yeah, no, I would say the 60s was a really, really nasty period. You know, the latter half of the decade. I just said how sunny and wonderful it was. But what comes to divisiveness in America was much more violent. When people talk about the Civil War, which keeps coming up, that things are so divided now that we might have an American Civil War. Yeah, well consider the real Civil War. If you want to look at division in America, division, incidentally, we survived in 1861. I mean, I'm not seeing any incoming. Well, 500,000 people didn't. Well, there's that. Yeah, I know the price was high, but the nation, the union did survive. No, I don't think, I mean, it's an unpleasant period of divisiveness, but I don't think it's terminal failure.