It's Thursday, June 12th, 2025, and welcome back to Goodfellows, a Hoover

Institution broadcast examining social, economic, political, and geopolitical concerns.

I'm Bill Whelan.

I'm a Hoover Distinguished Policy Fellow Fellow and I'll be your moderator today. Looking

forward to a spirited conversation, not with three, two, but one good fellow. In fact, maybe you should rename the show Goodfellow instead of Goodfellows. And here's the reason why we have only one Goodfellow on today. Summertime has hit the Hoover Institution and we dial back Goodfellos a little bit in the summer. You'll notice this. We'll have a couple shows out in July as well as August. But to keep you engaged, we periodically will give you a one-on-one good fellow, and that's what today is. And the first one out of the shoot, it's the Hoover Institution's Rosemary and Jack Anderson's senior fellow, author of the Grumpy Economist blog, Wall Street Journal columnist, and it's a book coming

out next week we're going to talk about. Please welcome John Cochran. John, good to see you.

Thanks. Pleasure as always. Wow, I don't have to fight for airtime this week.

At long last, no Neil, no HR, live the dream. Uh, yes. Yeah. You just got back from a flight.

I hope your flights did well for you yesterday. I noticed I had a real adventure flying a couple weeks ago to South Carolina to see family, but I got there and I got to spend a few days with my sister's grandsons. And they're really fun to hang it with John because they're between the ages of nine and seven and they're becoming little men and they think they've got the world figure out and the latest episode is they now know what they want to do with their lives two of the boys want to play football one of the boys wants to be a millionaire and the fourth one john this is the one i have my eye on because i can decide if he's going to be an underachiever or a white collar criminal he's just decided he's not going to do anything he's going to live with his wealthy cousin. So they've all got their lives mapped out. I mention this, John, because we all go through life

trying to figure out what it is that we should be doing or what it is we want to do. Sometimes we

know this before college. Sometimes we discover during college. Sometimes we have a career course

correction after college as well. But if you're lucky,

you land on what it is that you really enjoy doing this. And you seem to really thrive at being

an economist. My question you, John, when did you decide to become an economist? It was a long

process. And you get an important thing. You have to find something you really enjoy and something you're good at and avoid the things that you're bad at.

So learning I was bad at a couple of other things helped a lot in that decision.

I had gone to, and I do want to say also, I was lucky to be born in an era where you could move around and try things in a way that I don't think is possible or easy anymore.

I went to college thinking I'd be an aeronautical engineer.

I thought I would design gliders. I quickly learned there's only one job.

There's two jobs doing that. They're in Germany and they're taken.

And the aeronautical engineering major, I saw, you know,

hypersonic flow and propeller theorists, and I'm not interested in that.

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