 Welcome back to The FeeCast. I'm Richard Lawrence and I'm happy to be hosting this next episode for you today. We are talking about current events through the economic lens, yet again with our fabulous panel from Foundation for Economic Education. We have Brittany Hunter, Dan Sanchez, Mary Ann March, and our special guest who is appearing in front of the camera this time, usually behind the camera, Sean Malone, Fee's Director of Media. It's great to be here guys. How are you doing? And incidentally, because this actually matters for the rest of our discussion, you are also the producer of Fee's latest hit video from the Out of Frame series, and we talked about it a little bit last week, and it's entitled What's Wrong with Wakanda. Great video. And of course it has everything to do with the 18th film in the whole Marvel universe that keeps churning out awesome hit films that cost arm and a leg and are all, at this point, I think, filmed here in Atlanta. And that was all about Black Panther. And we'll get into that a little bit today as well as the 19th film, which of course just came out about a week ago called Avengers Infinity War. And I know we'll probably have some opportunity to talk about that as well. And so I wonder why these Marvel movies, they keep coming out this latest one, Infinity War. How big is it? Why is it so big? We'll talk about that. But there's some box office numbers that you've got, Mary Ann. Yeah, April in particular has been a record breaking month. So Infinity War, although it hasn't been out for very long, has already broken the $1 billion mark in record time. And this is the first month where movies are breaking billion dollars. Anyways, Black Panther worldwide has grossed $1.3 billion, and Infinity War, which is newer, has grossed worldwide $1.2 billion. And like Sean's video makes the point that Black Panther didn't have pre-established characters. Like it was in the same universe, but it was all new characters. So that's what makes it even more extraordinary. And we were introduced to this version of the Black Panther at the end of the previous Avengers movie. Is that right? Well, Captain America's Civil War, not technically an Avengers movie, but basically. And that was King T'Challa, who was a prince at that point. Yes, he's a prince. And it's also the name of your hedgehog that you have at home. Also true. Yeah. So this is a long standing interest on your part. It is. And my hedgehog's name predates me knowing that the movie was going to come out. So there's there's that. I'll give myself some. You got the Black Panther cred a little bit. And he also rules your household, doesn't he? Kind of a little bit. He's spiny. He's spiny. He's from Africa. So, you know, kind of made sense. And of course, the dog is subservient to the spine. He has to be. It must be that way. For his own self-interest. For his own self-preservation. Yeah. So I'm curious. So we this is a huge movie franchise that keep coming out. They're going to keep coming out. Why is this so big, Sean, in your view? Well, look, I think there's a lot of reasons why this is. I mean, first of all, we're talking about, you know, decades of pre-established cultural history and all that kind of stuff. So that helps a great deal. Although it's worth sometimes noting that Marvel, when they started started with their worst characters, they started with because they at the time, this is just behind the scene studio junk. Like they did not have the rights to most of their primary, the X-Men, Spider-Man fantastic for all those, all those characters. Because they had sold it for a song. Yeah. They sold it for nothing because they were bankrupt. I mean, literally bankrupt. And what they've been able to do with characters that I think nobody thought was were really nobody, nobody cared about really at the time at all has been really impressive. But I think a lot of it comes back to this need to tell stories and to communicate values to people through allegory, right? And I think that, you know, we've all talked about this through the hero's journey and through, you know, Joseph Campbell kind of stuff, you know, I know Britney's a fan, Carl Jung, like these kinds of stories really impact the way that we think about the world. So that I think is part of why people are really still gravitating to this, even though it's been around for a decade now. On that point, Sean, I think one of the reasons that I'm a big fan of these types of fantasy stories, comic book stories is because they do follow that tried and true formula of the hero's journey, which like you mentioned, Britney has written a lot about actually sort of showing how stories from mythology, religion, all kind of and going into the Marvel series follow this same general pattern of the hero's journey. Yeah, it's the same with even like the Bible, like even someone who doesn't believe in religion or even subscribe to that can still look at the Bible and say like here are lessons about heroes, overcoming obstacles. There's some moral at the end of the story. They become a better person in, you know, Native American culture sometimes are thrown into the wilderness, see if you get out alive. And after that, you know, the individual aspires to greatness. So yeah, these stories are. And so the hero's journey basically happens where you have the call to adventure, you leave your home and you actually fight your demons, right, whether they're Thanos or whoever else. You fight them or succumb to them. Exactly. And then if you fight them and succeed, then you become a hero in your own self and return home and impart these lessons back to the community from once you came originally in it. It all kind of generally follows that pattern. Star Wars follows that pattern. Again, the Bible, the Bible's that pattern. Yeah, a lot of other religious traditions have stories that follow this pattern. A lot of this stuff, I mean, does come from it's the interesting thing to me, I think a lot of the time is that I think a lot of this is really emergent. It's the way that people have always told stories. And it's also sort of the way that we experience life in in our own heads, at least we we experience these moments of of what you call, you know, synthesis, antithesis or it, you know, thesis, antithesis and synthesis, right, which is the sort of narrative term of we have the world is as it is now. And we're not very happy with it. Here is the challenge to this world that we need to to deal with. And it and it affects us on some deep level. And then now we've merged the two. We've we've learned something. We've become changed by that experience. That's how we all sort of experience life. And so I think that's sort of emerged into dramatic story structure, into playwriting, into three act structure in in, you know, stage plays, musicals, film and television, all that kind of stuff. We should have braced ourselves for all of this special terminology. Yeah, I think you're introducing here. And like you should have written a musical. That's what you're going to say. That'll be what you and I do afterwards. Give that a shot at some point. Like you said, it goes way back to the dawn of history and went into prehistory because you had heroes in tribal cultures. The hero was someone who went out and brave the wilderness and confronted the danger that was menacing the whole tribe, confronted chaos and, you know, slayed the dragon, so to speak, but was actual animals. It was often like a lion or a snake in the ancient myths. And and then came back reintegrated into a society as a hero. And basically, that's the format that we have in in Black Panther and and in Avengers, too. And I think people can relate because, although Dan, you and I aren't running around slaying dragons, maybe we're slaying our own internal dragons and art imitates life. Exactly. And what's so powerful about these stories is that they are so symbolic. Like you could tell someone with abstract verbal terms, you know, you should confront your challenges that you're afraid of and you will get stronger, but it doesn't resonate as much as seeing a character, seeing a hero or hearing about it in an oral tradition, hearing about a hero going through an adventure. That reaches people on a deeper level. Yeah, I think one of the things that people will say, and I, you know, I don't need to read all of them, but there were some some of the comments on the video that we put out. This is what's wrong with what kind of this is what's wrong, which, of course, we have below so you can click on it immediately and watch everything that we're talking about. Go ahead. Yeah, they're just they're a handful of comments in there where people are saying, oh, this is stupid. It's comic book movie, you know, why bother to talk about this stuff? But we talk about this because allegories affect the way that we think and the way that we view the world, you know, and it's not because we think that we're going to just walk down the street and uber us up a flying car, although that is a new thing that is happening right now. So maybe we will very soon, but it's because we can look at that society and say, oh, what about that society is working? What's not working? What about it? You know, is it's the reflection in the mirror, right? What what is it that we like and see in ourselves? So it's valuable to critique these things. Of course. And I think actually the only mainstream fantasy science fiction story writer of the 20th century who's actually denied his stories being allegory, our course is, of course, J. R. Tolkien, who insists that Middle Earth and the Shire and Hobbiton and all these plays Mordor, they're totally not allegorical, which a lot of people disagree with him entirely. And what he's saying is that there aren't clean, clear cut, you know, the Sauron represented Hitler or anything like that. But he does, you know, there are broad societal lessons. So in addition to individual lessons in the movie Civil War, Captain America Civil War, basically it was personifications of liberty versus order playing out on the big screen. Yeah, well, authoritarianism. Yeah. And we'll get right back to that and a lot of other stuff when we get back from these messages. One year ago, over 700 students, scholars, philanthropists and business leaders from five continents gathered in Atlanta for a brand new one of a kind event, FICON. But get ready, this year is going to be even bigger. 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We are back to the FICAST and before we left we were talking about what's wrong with Wakanda and this has been a big video for us since last week when we released it. How big has it been for us? Maybe not $1.3 billion worth. Not $1.3 billion worth. It doesn't really work for us anyway. But no, in less than a week now we've had over 360,000 views on this video, 130,000 on YouTube alone, which is sort of a rarity for us. We don't put a lot of specific attention into YouTube so the fact that it's getting a lot of organic reach on that platform is really, really exciting and I guess we just sort of touched a nerve with this. And is that the pop culture reference? The fact that people are searching for Black Panther? I don't know, maybe. I think some of it's definitely gonna be that. I mean, obviously like between Black Panther doing as well and being as well received as it was plus Infinity War being out. We're definitely helped from that stuff. But also, I mean, there's another video right now. I'll give a shout out to some, calling friends of ours, I guess, at the Film Theorist channel who did another sort of similar video where they actually talk about the paradox of plenty and they talk about how Wakandan society is a little weird. So I've gotten some comments on there which reference that and maybe we're getting a little bit of cross traffic from over there. But I'm just thrilled, it's been really good to see. Well, let's dive into it because there's a lot in that video which of course people should watch and see what you're talking about. One of the topics that you talk about is centralization, central planning, which I think we've talked about a couple of times on the FECAST up to this point, but Brittany, there's a particular individual that we love talking about who has a lot to say about the challenges of central planning. I was gonna make a joke and say Karl Marx and I couldn't even do it with a straight face. So that would be F.A. Hayek. And what he kind of teaches us is that central planning is almost useless because it doesn't work. And what we're doing is we're inhibiting the market. So when regulators put these regulations on the market, you're not even creating value as much as you could because now you're stifled. So that kind of plays into this, I guess when we talk about isolationism and the free market, adding value to different cultures and different peoples. So I think it definitely has a tie in with Wakanda. And in Wakanda, of course, this is a government that's run by an absolute monarch and a sort of council of elders from the different tribes that formed Wakanda originally. And the whole issue that you bring up in the video is this inconceivably advanced society cannot necessarily come out of such a central plan. Yeah, this has been a little bit of, I guess I'll call it a little bit of humbug for myself for a long time, which has been that like we see this in fiction a lot where there's this society or even characters and things like this which are established one way, but then the outcomes or the decisions that they make or the results of those decisions don't make any sense at all. And this is, you know, it's more obvious a lot of times with characters, you know, if a character is presented as being really smart, like we see this in the alien movies a lot. All the characters are scientists and they're really smart in some of these movies. In my favorite series as well, Star Trek, they're all like PhDs who know how to fire phasers. And then they, you know, walk into the first trap that's available to them. They look over the alien spore, they take their helmet off on the planet that they don't know anything about, right? But so it's easier to see in characters. I think it's a lot of times less easy to see on a social societal level, but the reality is if you present a society as they do with Wakanda, that is essentially a dictatorship. I mean, right now it's a benign, benevolent dictatorship, but it could be not so much. And, you know, in the film, I don't want to give away too many spoilers. It becomes less benevolent over the course of that movie. It's already got a dictatorship. It's isolationist. It doesn't communicate with the rest of the world particularly. Most of the rest of the world doesn't even know what exists particularly. They have all this wealth that supposedly comes from a mineral, essentially. Just flew out of the sky, just dropped right into their laps. But if you look at the real world, any time you see that combination of features, the results are not a fantastically, technologically advanced, peaceful, wonderful society. They are kind of the opposite of that. Well, if your entire economy is based on one mineral deposit that can be commandeered by the central authority and they have all economic power, that's conducive to central planning, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. It's a very weak kind of situation, a very delicate, fragile situation to have. And in fact, Marion, you and I and the FECAST team were talking a little bit earlier about the fact that Sean mentions North Korea and Venezuela in this article, in this video. And I know that you have some background in sort of their notion of Juche, which is all about sort of self-reliance. And it's kind of similar to what the Wakandans do. Yeah, as we talked about on previous FECAST, immediately following the Korean War, North Korea was rebuilding faster. They were coming back from the war more quickly than South Korea was. But because they did take this policy of isolationism, it didn't last. And we've seen what that's turned into. Disasterous results under one family. Can you describe Juche a little bit? Because I know a little bit about that. But I think it'd be beneficial for people to know. Because I do think there is some parallels to Black Panther. In a nutshell, it is the policy of self-reliance that we don't want to look outside of our borders. We don't want to look outside of the people who live in our country. And I think one thing that's interesting about the notion of relying on one mineral or even one industry, we don't even have to look across any kind of body of water to see that. Look at Detroit. They didn't diversify their economy at all. They put everything into their auto manufacturing plants. And when things took a turn, they haven't been able to weather the storm. That's elsewhere, too. It's places like in Pennsylvania, where only steel was a local industry that most folks worked for. And then further afield, obviously, in places like Russia, you've only got natural gas, natural minerals that need to be extracted from the ground. Where's the diversity in the market there? What happens if, for instance, we become independent of fossil fuels? Russia needs to have some diversification there. And that gets into some of the stuff. One thing I want to say about the Jewish thing is, and as I see it relating to Black Panther, is it's also got a nationalistic quality to it. It's got a very culturally unifying nature to it. But it's a belief in the Korean-ness of those people. And Wakanda has that same thing. It's us versus basically the rest of the world in that case. And largely, they're responding to what they think of as cultural imperialism. But they're also responding, in some sense, to real colonialism, too, that the rejection of the outsider is also wrapped in the fact that there are colonial powers that are trying to themselves take over the natural resources. On colonialism, I was actually fairly impressed that that was referenced so directly in Black Panther. I thought it was a bold choice. I thought it was maybe an uncomfortable choice for people who would be watching the movie. But pretty directly mentioned there a few times. They actually called one of the villains a colonialist. And that was like the big insult. Well, the villain calls basically everybody else colonialists, right? That's Killmongers, Michael B. Jordan's character's main motivation in the film is to basically take over Wakanda and then distribute this technology out to all of the rest of the colonized parts of the world or the parts of the world that he sees as having been oppressed by. Well, and to use it for military aggression. Yes, and to use it for military purposes. But one of the things that we talk about a lot in this episode of Out of Frame is that this kind of isolationism actually produces poverty. And it doesn't produce fancy military technology. It doesn't produce any of these. I mean, geez, we look at North, I mean, I'm talking about North Korea. And it's come out recently that their nuclear tests, maybe they stopped their nuclear program because they blew themselves up. The mountain collapsed. Mountain collapsed on them. They're not isolating themselves and producing, you know. They're known as the hermit country. And so we have a lot of that in history, too. So one of the things we talk about in the Out of Frame episode is Matt Ridley's book, The Rational Optimist. Which is a fantastic book. How, oh, it's a wonderful book, and how isolationism actually reduces the quality and the amount of technology that people have over time. Because that skill set diminishes. And the regression occurs just like in Tasmania. We've talked about on previous feed casts. One of the things that I wanted to mention before we go to a break is that this notion of isolation leading to prosperity is not unique to Black Panther, duh. There are places in storytelling all over. Like in Lord of the Rings, there's Lothorian, which is the elvish kingdom in the trees. Where Galadriel, exactly. Galadriel and all of her kin are there, and they're living in this beautiful, peaceful place. You've mentioned, which of course has a special resonance to me, the Klingons in Star Trek where they just seem to be aggressive warrior types that don't have any investment in science and technology at all. And Warp Drive is something that they have available to them. So this notion of the pure society, which is reflected in Wakanda, is not unique. Britney's written tons about Game of Thrones. What are they called? People who, the Wildlings, right? They're not allowed in. There's a wall built specifically so the Wildlings can't get in. So it is that same cutting off culture. And no spoilers, but eventually the Wildlings are necessary for certain things. I can't confirm or deny. Well, we're going to take a quick break, and we'll be back for the FeeCast. Hi, I'm Sean Malone, director of media for the Foundation for Economic Education. And I want to talk to you today about Fee's podcasts. You're currently listening to our wonderful FeeCast. But did you know we also have two other amazing podcasts for you to listen to each and every week. There's Words and Numbers featuring Antony Davies and James Harrigan, where they talk about economics, political theory, and current events every Wednesday. We also have a brand new offering called the Fee Audio Experience, where we bring you content from our seminars and events held all across the country. You'll get to hear fascinating talks from speakers and panelists, which we'll make available to you right after each event. So be sure to check out the FeeCast, Words and Numbers, and the Fee Audio Experience right here on our homepage at fee.org slash shows, and also subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and Google Play. Thanks for listening. We are back for the FeeCast, and we've talked a lot about Wakanda. Now we're gonna switch gears a little bit. Same universe, different movie. The latest movie is Avengers Infinity War. And this has brought up some interesting conversations online in regard to sort of the ultimate scheme of the villain, who my understanding is he's like the main villain in all the Marvel universe, and that's Thanos. He's the sort of long running villain that they've been building up to for years and years and years. He's actually a pretty interesting villain in the comics too, but we won't really get into that too much. But yeah, his main motivation in this case is sort of crass Malthusianism. He wants to murder half the population of the universe because we have too many people and they're consuming too many resources. And if he gets his hands into the Infinity Gauntlet with all of the magic powers that he needs, sorry comic fans, I'm trying to make this a little easier. We know you're an expert. Keep going with it. We have, he'll get his hands into this gauntlet. It's got all the power in the universe. With a snap of the finger, he can wipe out everyone. Well, and isn't that every totalitarian's dream? Of course. To just with a snap of your fingers get exactly what you want, even coercively over half of the population. Would you push the button? That's the question. I think everyone would push the button. That's another topic. But the interesting things, much like, I feel like, and this is Marvel's two films in a row now where they have villains with what I feel like are believable motivations. They're not smart motivations, they're believable motivations. Thanos is operating off of something, off of a set of ideas that we've seen play out in the real world many, many times. And Sean, you mentioned crass Malthusianism. Yes. What is Malthusianism? Well, I think you guys talked about this last week a little bit too, right? But it's based on Thomas Malthus' idea of carrying capacity sort of applied to the whole world, saying the earth has, and Thanos says this very clearly in the films. The resources are finite, the universe is finite, everything that we need to survive is finite in the ultimate sense, right? And as a result, his point is we will, if we keep consuming, we will consume everything and then everyone will be dead. So he is the hero of his own story. And he says, if we only eliminated half of the population that the remaining half will live in abundance and prosperity. Yes, he calls it one planet that he does this to, he literally calls a paradise. He says after he murdered half the population, all the children experiences full bellies and blue skies, I think he says. And not only in historical, with historical economists like Thomas Malthus, but today in response to this movie, there was an article called tons of Avengers Infinity War fans think Thanos might be right. And it's actually sympathetic to Thanos' scheme. One of the quotes is, Thanos earnestly believes in a proactive solution, one that is technically genocide, but also one that you might argue is viable. Viable? Viable. Oh, that's, that's scary. Especially when I feel like the people saying these don't realize that they might be some of the people who are on the, you know. It was assumed that they're gonna be the ones saved and probably not if you're spending your hours commenting on the internet. I always find that, I mean, I don't know how, there's nothing wrong with commenting on the internet. This is maybe an obscure thing. I don't know how frequently you guys interact with like sort of the harder core utilitarians, but it's a feature that I find whenever I talk to them that they always like, well, we'll get rid of this population or we'll sort of experiment with soft eugenics and all of this kind of stuff. Soft eugenics? Well, cause they don't, cause they don't get into it, right? Yeah, sterilization I guess. Yeah, they'll do sterilization or they'll do birth control. But they won't kill you. They won't kill people. Well, and the problem is that, but they always assume that it's never gonna be them, right? And the problem is that it's a really bad utilitarianism too. Because it's totally wrong that the remaining half will thrive afterwards because of the same reasons that we talked about why Wakanda being small and isolated won't thrive. Because we need like the more people, the greater the division of labor and the more efficiency we have in production because not everybody again is a mouth that we're also a pair of hands and a mind. So the more people, the more innovation there is and the more cross-pollination of these productive ideas. So I have two questions. One is, how can Thanos be sure he's killing the right half? He's doing it randomly. Okay, so he's leaving it up to chance entirely. He did it up to chance. All right. The second question is- Which he says is fair, in fact. Okay. It's a point of fairness. All right, interesting. My second question is for the treatment of the movie. I haven't seen the movie yet, but in the movie itself, is it presented as an evil idea? That's an interesting question. Thanos is one of the most, probably the most fleshed out villain that Marvel's ever had. I think that the Russo Brothers should direct the film. I was watching an interview with them and they made this claim. And I think it's probably supportable is that Thanos has the most screen time of any character, which is really rare for a villain in any movie, let alone one of this scale with as many other characters as it has. He's really the central, I mean, you could argue that it's actually his story, which is interesting for another reason too, because if you treat it as Thanos' story, it's not a tragedy or like a story about a villain. It's his own hero's journey, which is kind of fascinating to do. Like hero, like into the dark side? Like, okay. Kind of, yeah, right? Just internally to do something. So in a way they don't present it as a bad thing. Well, even to the extent that they rebut it, it's a really weak rebuttal because their only answer to it is that, well, you're committing genocide and you're killing half of the people. That's self-evidently bad. Or you don't know that, like you don't know it's gonna be bad. And that's what bothered me, it also bothered me about Black Panther as well, which is that Killmonger gets a rebuttal, but his rebuttal is your means are bad because you wanna kill people. And okay, yes, your means are terrible because you wanna kill a lot of people. But your ideas are actually also wrong. And that's true of Thanos as well. Like Thanos is bad, he's evil because he wants to murder half the population of the universe. That sort of goes without saying. He's also fundamentally incorrect about his ideas. And nobody in the film really has a rebuttal in that sense. In the intellectual world. Do they even think that? I mean, or maybe they agree and it's kind of like. I don't think so. And I think some of that goes back into Hollywood writers and the way that a lot of people do think about this stuff. And that's worth critiquing because in the same way that morals of stories about individual success and failure are important because if they're true to life, then they're a useful story that is useful for our individual lives. In the same way that if the moral of the story is false or muddled for society, then it's gonna have like a bad impact. Yeah. Well the question is, do you say that the heroes have this very weak rebuttal where they say it's axiomatic? You know, it's self-evident that the killing of half of the universe's population is bad. But we keep sort of in our own minds in generation after generation, returning to this notion that there is a finite carrying capacity of the world. And new people articulate this old argument repeatedly. And Marianne, you and I were talking a little bit earlier about some of the information historically about sort of how the world has actually progressed. Human life has actually progressed as population has increased, as we've continued to understand how to use raw materials into resources. That's right. We're at 7.6 billion people for the global population. That's as of May 2018. And we've also seen standards of living increase. We're sitting right now in an air conditioning building with electric lights and running water and iPhones in our pockets. And I think that perhaps some of these Hollywood producers just need a little bit of Hans Rossling in their lives. Because I think that he would say that one of the best ways to deal with a growing population is to raise people out of poverty through economic freedom. That the slowing population growth rates through getting people out of poverty is the best way. Right, poverty is the problem. Freedom and prosperity are the antidote to that. And obviously the way forward is to find out how to do more of that than how to keep people or subsidize poverty. And you mentioned in your video this notion of the collective brain. Yeah, that was a Matt Ridley concept, which I really like. And it's about the way that trading networks in particular allow people to interact with each other in a way where they transmit ideas to each other. But it's not just transmission of ideas, right? Like we all experience this every day where you see something or if you're an entrepreneur, especially you see something done one particular way. But if you're smart, you add to that with your own ideas. And so you can take an idea that somebody else has had and then build on that and make it even better. And that's only really possible if you have a lot of people and a lot of ideas and Dan said it best. I think people are not just mouths, they're also hands and brains, right? And with that in mind, you could imagine a truly heroic Thanos as someone who actually connects the different worlds that he's going from place to place trying to reduce everyone by half, actually connecting them. Imagine the collective brain of a galactic network. And it sounds like we're probably not going to have any shortage of Marvel movies. So maybe we will have the anti-Thanos, Thanos come soon and show us exactly how he might do things. But we're gonna take a break for now. We're gonna come back next week and hopefully talk more about these ideas in the context of what people are talking about online and Reddit threads that we all kind of patronize. And we'd love to tap into your collective brain. If you have any comments or suggestions about what we might cover on the FeeCast, please let us know in the comments and we look forward to seeing you next week.