“Unipolar Moment is Over” How America Lost Its Ultimate Power – and what comes next.

Summary

• Geopolitical Shift: The podcast discusses the end of America's unipolar moment and the rise of new global powers like China and the BRICS nations, challenging US hegemony.
• US Foreign Policy: Scott Horton critiques the US foreign policy as overly aggressive and costly, arguing that it has led to unnecessary conflicts and economic burdens.
• Economic Consequences: The discussion highlights the financial strain of maintaining a global empire, with the US paying more in interest on its debt than on social programs, impacting the domestic economy.
• Military Spending: The podcast criticizes the vast resources spent on militarism, suggesting that reducing military expenditure could benefit the US economy and society.
• China's Rise: The conversation touches on how US policies inadvertently strengthened China, turning it into a formidable economic and military power.
• Domestic Impact: Horton argues that the US's global ambitions have led to domestic issues, including increased national debt and social unrest, suggesting a need to refocus on internal affairs.
• Alternative Approach: The idea of America stepping back from its imperial role is proposed, advocating for a focus on diplomacy and economic power rather than military dominance.
• Investment Insight: The podcast briefly mentions the potential for finding high-return investments in stable, cash-flowing businesses during market downturns.

Transcript

My guest today is making the rounds on some of the biggest platforms in media today. Names like Tucker Carlson and Lex Freriedman because of his ability to dispute the most common narratives that the public is being sold every single day. His name is Scott Horton. He's a multiple times best-selling author and this episode is exciting. Welcome to the Jay Martin Show where we dissect the greatest minds in geopolitics and finance. Here is Scott Horton. Enjoy. This is J. Martin. All right, here I am with Scott Horton. Scott, thanks so much for making the time today. Thanks for having me. Good to be here. Okay, there's a handful of directions I want to take this conversation. Uh, but here's where we'll start. If you were to step back from any of the regional conflicts that people are paying attention to right now and just say here is the biggest thing about foreign policy in the US that the public misunderstands. What comes to mind? Uh I think the overall posture of the United States and the world. I think most people really do know this but there's a bit of cognitive dissonance about it. So you know at any football game everyone will agree that we're number one. America is the world's superpower. And as George Bush senior said, what we say goes. On the other hand, America is not an empire. Oh, you know, all we do is, you know, go and defend people and try to spread freedom and do, you know, Superman things like save kittens from trees because we know we're good people. So obviously whatever we're doing is good and because it's a democracy and the democracy chooses the best leaders to express the will of the people in the thing. So obviously whatever we're doing over there in Eurasia probably has something to do with helping flood victims, right? Or something gentle. Or if not, then um yes, violence as a desperate lastditch effort to save goodness from evil, right? when the fact of the matter is that if you just, you know, I'm from Texas, but just pretend you're from anywhere else in the world and just look at the situation, right? What happened is very clear. We had a bipolar world during the first cold war with the Soviet Union where everybody with any power anyway was answerable either to Washington or to Moscow and you had the unaligned countries in the third world but they didn't have any power to exercise anyway or they would have been taken over and integrated into one or the other of the two major blocks. But then the Soviet Union ceased to exist and their Warsaw pack dissolved. All of Eastern and Central Europe were liberated. And not only did it cease to exist, but the Russian Federation that was left as the rump of the old Soviet empire had just I don't know a hundth of the power of the USSR. Their their influence in the world was just decimated. So this then became what was called at the time the unipolar moment. That was what the neoconservative um I guess thinker uh writer Charles Crowutamemer called it. And the idea was that and even then it's if the word moment is built into the thing you notice right the idea is that now with no one in our way we can remake the world how we want it to be and for a while because one of the things about the world and the way we want it to be is we want the world to adopt what Bill Clinton called and I don't mean in the most literal sense but I mean in the Bill Clintonian very watered down center-left democrat type sense. We wanted them to adopt free markets and democracy. Well, compared to communism, that means that we are forcing or uh we are helping we are attempting to help the former communist block countries become wealthy. Right? the the Chinese were starving by the tens of millions until finally Mao died and they sent Milton Friedman over there to convince essentially the right-wing of the Communist Party to abandon Marxism and adopt property rights and prices otherwise you're dead. And so they did. So what does that mean? That means China is now an incredibly wealthy country that can afford its own navy, right? Which means that that unipolar moment was a moment and it's over. The real problem, one of the real problems we have, I mean, first of all, is trying to enforce this global hijgemony in the first place. But then in the second place, it's the refusal to admit that our power is spent. That in fact, the stewards of American empire after the end of the cold war, they blew our whole wad. You could have never had a more incompetent generation of leaders than the Clintons, the Bushes, McCain, and Biden, and the people that ruled the consensus since the end of the last cold war. Our debt just finally crossed $37 trillion. Paying a trillion dollars a year in interest on the debt. More than we're even paying for the empire. More than we're even paying for social security and Medicare. We're paying just an interest to sovereign bond holders, to central banks elsewhere in the world to prop up our phony currency that our government continues to expand just so they can pay for all this big government, for all this war. And right at a time when you have other countries in the world who are now wealthy enough to essentially guarantee their own independence. And this is you know you have um just as you would have with any other world empire. The more we squeeze the more they squirm right. And so this is the invention of the bricks is attempts by the medium ranked powers of the world to combine together to ignore us to use each other's currencies and all their major transactions to try to find a way to neutralize American hedgemonic power including economic power that we hold over the world. You might have heard of this. anybody crosses us for any reason whatsoever, ongo the sanctions, on go, you know, direct economic warfare against essentially any country in the world. And we talk about how bad communism is for Venezuela, but a huge part about what's wrong with Venezuela is that America has outlawed any multinational firm from doing any business with them whatsoever. So you say communists can't run an oil industry, of course they can't. But they could hire a multinational firm to come in and run it for them, but we won't allow that. We'll put any sanctions on any company that comes in there to help them. So then we have a refugee crisis of Venezuelan gangsters and murderers and rapists all across our country. And wonder why is because the USA is using its power to destroy that country for daring to step out of line. Um, and just as simple as that, the communists, and believe me, we could spend the rest of the show probably on this. just how they took one of the most diverse economies in Latin America and destroyed it, right? Um through central planning. It was before Maduro ever got there. Hugo Chavez had completely ruined Venezuela. But then what does America do? We come try to set the whole thing on fire after that. We try to make it worse to punish them. And then where unlike when you're talking about destroying Middle Eastern nations where all those refugees run to Europe, these refugees run here and and are, you know, really if you look at all the worst crimes of illegal immigrants or many of the worst crimes of illegal immigrants in the United States over the last, you know, decade or so, it's Venezuelans. You know, when they talk about gangsters taking over entire apartment complexes and all these kinds of things, those are Venezuelan gangs. What are they even doing here? They're, you know, America is exercising this kind of power over their country for the worse, just as you would expect if you ask John McCain to make a decision. What do you think he's going to do? He's going to ruin it, whatever it is. And the same for the Bushes and the Clintons and the Bidens and whoever these people this whole time. So, they've taken ultimate power beginning if we if we start at the end of the last cold war. They've got a decade until the new millennium. And what are they going to do? and they're going to ruin everything. That's what they're going to do. Here we are 30 years later and you know the the charts of whether America's on the right track and whether we're doing the right thing and whether people can afford to feed their families and all these things. All of these indicators are down. And this is before the big crash. This is still bubble times before the next big correction. You know, it's really bad. And and it shows that I don't know what it shows about whether they care about us or not. I think they don't. But it definitely proves that if this is their best effort, then our national government needs to be just completely defenseed and and demonetized and taken down 99 pegs back to its constitutional role. And then let a free society handle these problems on our own without their leadership. I think a lot of my viewers are nodding along with you in agreement as you make that case. You know, I was in Colombia a few times in like 2017, 18 and 19. And even then, the flood of Venezuelans coming to Colombia just to get out of the country, right, to begin wherever they would go next. Many didn't stay in Colombia, but it was a major point of conversation um in a couple of the cities I was in. So just to recap some of this, you know, migrating out of the um USSR, USA era, right, into the unipolar moment and suddenly the US found themselves as the sole superpower in the world and decided therefore to reshape the globe in their image effectively, right? combat communism wherever it be found. Turn these countries into uh democratic capitalist societies and lifting people out of poverty as a consequence. But as a consequence, once you're lifted out of poverty, you want to fly the coupe. You don't want the control that was imposed on you that maybe lifted you out in the first place. And now we have powerful countries effectively America's created competitors in the form of China, the BRICS nations, as you mentioned. These nations now have they have control, they have u extensive resources, they have leverage, and now they have alliances, right, to combat what was the sole superpower. And that's now the world that we live in today. And it's almost like we're at this tipping point where we're learning whether or not the new powers and the new alliances are more powerful than the sole superpower that's dominated for the last 40 years. Is that a decent summary? Yeah, in a way. Although I don't think they're really trying to challenge our military power. I mean, China clearly is building up enough of a navy to keep us away. I don't think that they're trying to really create, you know, the kind of navy that we have to rule the seven seas. Um, and all of that the way that we have. Um, but yes, I think, you know, I saw I don't know, maybe it was just a YouTube comment or something that said that, you know, Israel is going to destroy the American Empire. And I thought, "Oh, well, finally we figured out they're good for something, right?" Like, you know, it's too bad that Israel had to convince us to blow our own brains out this way and destroy our society so that we don't have the power to control anybody else's anymore. We could have just listened to Ron Paul and just gave up the empire because we're not supposed to be an empire anyway. James Monroe said, "You stay out of our hemisphere. We'll stay out of yours." Let's just do that. Right. Um, let's, you know, I'm in my old age, I'm getting weak on my ideological commitment to libertarianism here. I will go ahead and concede to you that maybe we could even extend war guarantees to Canada and Mexico. But then again, I don't know. The Brits ruled Canada for the first half of this country's existence. No problem. The Spanish, the French, whoever ruled in Mexico. Maybe I don't really care about that. I guess if it was Russia and China and they wanted to build military bases and deploy nuclear weapons in our neighboring states, okay, you talk me into intervention then. But otherwise, you know, there's it's very convenient, right? It's a it's a it's a great self-justification from the dennisens of Washington and New York City, right? That if they weren't holding the whole world together, it would tear itself apart, right? If it wasn't us, it would be Russia or China or worse, it would be no one and no one would be in charge and then just everyone would fight, right? And the thing is like, yeah, that's what every government official thinks about their job, right? Is that good thing they were here because if it wasn't for them, but I think those questions ought to always remain in dispute and undecided, you know, on a permanent basis here. I don't know why, you know, if you ask people why they support the United Nations, they'll say, "Well, because we want people to be able to get together and talk these things out. There is no real world government. So, at least we want the national governments to be able to sit in a hall together and negotiate instead of just fighting. I mean, that's what people will tell you is what they think the point of it is, right? not as a fig leaf for American power but as a way for countries to resolve issues without American or anybody else's intervention right and I think you know this is kind of maybe cliche or whatever but there's this old speech by William Jennings Bryan who I know was a commie for his day but whatever he's an old Democrat a long time ago and he was against World War I you know the guy with the cross of gold speech ironically and all that uh we demand inflationary money now was his speech Um but he gave this speech this other speech. Um, I guess it was just called Behold a Republic. And he goes on and on about, you know, behold our great country America, where we do things this, that, and the other way, right? And part of it is is he boasts that we are not weighed down by our armament industry the way that the Europeans are, and that we're not weighed down by militarism, you know, sucking the life force out of our society uh through the merchants of death and all these things. Again, this is in the pre-Wro Wilson era, and he's saying, "Behold, a republic that," this is poorly paraphrased, "that hosts peace conferences that resolves wars instead of starting them." Right? And now, this is not an America that would promise to pay Egypt $3 billion a year to pretend to not hate Israel, right? This is an America that would host a conference for them to hash out their differences without making promises on behalf of this country that shouldn't have the power to intervene over there either way. But if you guys need Washington to serve as Geneva and you can come and meet here and host a peace conference, then let's do that. you know to Trump's credit I think it's probably true um there are you know reports like this that when India and Pakistan started fighting I don't know if ISI did it or not but there was like a a group of Pakistani terrorists lat types killed some um I think Indian tourists in Kashmir and this started off um some pretty bad fighting you know uh dog fighting and missile attacks across the border and evidently Trump picked up the phone and said listen just stop I don't want this you don't want this and I insist that you quit it. Now, I don't, as far as I know, I don't think it was reported he made any specific threat. What's he going to do? They both have atom bombs, too. The worst he could actually threaten them is like, hey, this could jeopardize our friendship going forward and our economic relationship and something, right? But I don't even think he specifically threatened either of them with sanctions. He said, "Hey, your good friend America wants you to chill out." And they did. And evidently he did the same thing with the um border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand a couple of weeks ago where he just said, "Listen, the world doesn't want to see fighting right now." Now, maybe this is just cuz he wants his peace prize. Mhm. Uh he sure killed a hell of a lot of people. He's bombed Somalia more even than Barack Obama, which is I think takes away from these phone calls. But I think you don't have to be a world hedgeman. America can be a major economic power in the world without being the major dominant military force in Eurasia. And I think Trump could still do essentially those same things. Pick up the telephone and say, "Listen, guys, if the borders need adjustment, we're going to figure this out at a table. Nobody wants to see this violence." And after all, like even if you're talking about relatively poor countries like Cambodia and Thailand, everybody has so much to lose in violent conflict, especially in this day and age with the technology uh that we have of fully automatic everything plus drones and the rest. It's just a nightmare. Um you know, we should have all had learned this lesson by the end of the American Civil War, if not World War I, that you just can't have mechanized powers fighting each other, dude. It's just too ugly. Look at what's going on Ukraine right now. Yeah. And look at how much Ukraine and Russia both have lost in waging this war. It ought to be a severe lesson to everyone that whatever minor territorial gain is almost certainly not worth the expenditure to make it. And so um that doesn't solve every problem. But then again, American power doesn't solve every problem either. I mean you might have noticed as Martin Luther King said then that America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. So, you can say that it's all for good, but it's like a drunken murderous cop going around at the very best, accidentally starting fires everywhere he goes, crashing into cars, killing families, and shooting the wrong guy in the back and the rest. What would you say to somebody, Scott? You you must hear this counterpoint as vague. I I'll make it kind of vague here, but the world's a dangerous place, and we'd love it to be a peaceful utopia where everybody got along and had free trade agreements, and we understood the value of doing business with each other exceeded trying to control someone else's resources, right? We should just figure out how to do this harmoniously. But in reality, people don't operate like that. We compete, right? There's always conflict over territory and there always has been as long as there's been written history of human beings. We compete for territory and resources and therefore the world is a dangerous place. So we have to be dangerous and there's a cost of the standard of living that we've achieved in the west becoming the global superpower. And that cost isn't pretty. We don't like to acknowledge it but it's the cost of the quality of life that we all want. Uh you must hear that. What what's what would you make of a a statement like that? Well, a couple of things. I mean, first of all, and no fault of yours, but it's even kind of unclear the way that you stated it. Wait, this is why we have our great standard of living or this is at the cost of our great standard of living that we would have if we weren't doing this, which I think is correct. I think people very falsely assume that, well, you know, war is good for the economy and without the empire, we'd have to pay market rates for bananas and all of that. And so, boy, we wouldn't be able to live the way we live if we weren't ruthlessly exploiting the rest of the planet this way. That's all just completely false. I mean, we waste trillions of dollars on militarism, far more than we spend on foreign oil or foreign timber or foreign anything, right? Um the just the cost of our navy alone um for guaranteeing, you know, essentially free security on the high seas or socialized security costs on the high seas for American corporations. um to have their goods produced overseas at with in lower wage countries the expense of American jobs and all of that is far outweighed right like any benefit even of of the cheaper wages there to other consumers if not the those who would have been employed is is already completely wasted by the cost of that Navy that's you know just constantly turnurning bill you know burning hundreds of billions of dollars a year accomplishing nothing mostly. Um, so no, it's just not worth it at all. This is at as as Garrett Garrett said in the American Empire, everything goes out, nothing comes back. And cheap labor, that's a marginal thing that helps some companies. That's not America's overall economy is dependent on overseas cheap labor. And if you listen to Americans, they would like to be employed, please, right? They they would rather be the expensive labor here than exploit cheap labor there, you know? um when it comes down to that. And then also notice, and this is again not your fault, just the reality that you're reflecting in your question, there was a an very important word that was missing from your statement. And oh, two words, sorry. To us, the world is a very dangerous place to us missing because no, it's not a dangerous place to us. We have two weak and friendly neighbors, 5,000 hydrogen bombs, and two massive oceans, and the world's most powerful navy. And actually, the world is not a dangerous place to the United States of America at all, unless you count blowback from our own government's terrorist mercenaries who sometimes killed thousands of us as revenge for our Israelentric foreign policies in the Middle East. Otherwise, we're friends with every single power in Europe and including we're some kind of frenemies with the Russians. This is nothing like the Cold War against the Soviet Union as bad as that was. Right? We still have trade relationships. We still share rockets. They boost our guys to the International Space Station on a regular basis. Still, even during this war, right? At worst, we're economic competitors with China. We're not really enemies with China unless Taiwan, which is not even a state in China's union, is a state in our union. Um, which is completely preposterous, right? So, the world's a dangerous place because, I don't know, Myanmar and Bhutan might get into a border dispute. Well, that sucks for them. That's very dangerous world for Bhutan. Too bad for them that they live in that weird coast east of India there, right? What the hell does that have to do with me? Nothing. Why in the world did Texans have to pay out of our pocket interest on the debt to Chinese bond holders and South Korean bond holders to pay for militarism to pretend to keep the peace between Myanmar and Bhutan? Are they even neighbors? Um, they're pretty close. Um, it's completely insane. And if the American people had a choice in any of this, we wouldn't do it. Just the same as even in the world wars they couldn't get the American population of fighting age males to go volunteer even to fight Hitler and Tojo even after Pearl Harbor they had to conscript that is enslave by force 16 million men to go and fight because even when it's World War II the veterans of World War I didn't want to send their sons. Yeah, Hitler is bad. That sounds like a Czechoslovakia problem. That sounds like a Stalin problem. Why should we go save Stalin anyway? Are you sure we want to save communism from fascism? Because it's that much of a superior system. Is that it? Or what? Um, even in the worst case scenario, you have to enslave Americans to go and participate in this thing. The rest of the time, you have to lie to us. George W. Bush apparently believed. He told Pat Robertson, "We would have zero casualties in Iraq War." I mean, we had 200 in Iraq War I where we didn't try to go to the capital city and overthrow the dictator and install a new regime and lord an occupation army over the population for years. But he prayed. He told Pat Robertson, "We won't have any casualties. It'll be easy." And he told the American people, "Imagine September 11th, only this time Saddam Hussein has given al Qaeda chemical weapons. to try to just outright lie as bad as he possibly could to scare your mom and dad into supporting aggressive war. And they wouldn't do it. The focus groups say they won't do it until you threaten them. In fact, even the chemical weapons thing didn't work. They said, "We can't wait for the final proof, the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud over an American city." Coen Powell, George W. Bush and Condisa Rice, all three used that um that focus grouped workshopped phrasiology that came from the White House Iraq group that was run by Karen Hughes, the TV news lady, and Carl Rove, the Spinmeister, right? Now, these people, they they practice. What do we have to lie to the American people to get them to let us do this? Mhm. Saddam Hussein could nuke your hometown. Then you'd regret not letting us preempt his attack, wouldn't you? And only then can you get the American people to go for this kind of thing. Let me ask you a question because you made a statement that I've picked up on a lot recently. You said you said, uh, you know, as Americans, if we had a choice, we wouldn't do this. You know, and you were kind of relating that to many of the military endeavors around the world. And, um, you know, I've heard that a lot lately. and the if we had a choice um I I want to sort of hang on to that for a minute and let me ask you about state creep uh state capitalism but state creep into private lies in America and I think if you go back a generation too when uh uh you know the Americans lifted China out of poverty to some extent the idea was if we liberalize the Chinese economy they'll become more like Americas they'll become more democratic and capitalist and to a degree that's been true. They've got their sort of capitalism with Chinese characteristics as they call it. It's this hybrid model, communist capitalist. It's more like a corporate structure actually, right? That's how I see the Chinese economy. But my point is this. If we look at some of the decisions out of the American administration just over the last year, we see more and more involvement in private business. Whether it's the blocking of the Nippon Steel, US Steel merger until the American government was awarded the golden share in that transaction. So they can now appoint board members to US Steel. They can influence operations. That sounds like Russia. I didn't even know that. That's the point, right? That's the US government got the controlling share in that deal. It's it's a concept called a golden share. So yes, Trump can appoint can appoint a board member to the US board. They can prevent uh board member. Wow. It's not a Philip Drew administrator. Have you ever read Philip Drew? I haven't. No. Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. Well, it's just they can they can prevent uh they can yeah influence American operations, prevent them from shutting down American facilities, influence who they sell steel to abroad, all this stuff. It's very sort of state control. Um you know, and like a different take on the Nvidia deal recently where now Nvidia is kicking back 15% the sale of certain ships that they sell to China, all of this. Um and this is these are novel deals in America, but they're the course of business in China. This is normal, right? Golden shares are appointed to the Chinese administration all the time, right? They have massive influence in mega corpse in that country. My question is this, the idea generation ago was if we liberalize China, it will become more like America. If we reflect on the trajectory of America today, it's almost like we're heading that direction, right? Maybe we're going to meet in the middle somewhere, but you know, which is more true, right? And what's your what's your take on this, Scott? Yeah, that's a good way to put it. You know, I used to be in the 1990s like a new world order conspiracy guy where the the grand design, as Geoder Griffin called it, you know, from the author of The Creature from Jackal Island, the old Birch Guy. Um the theory was that America and Russia will become more and more like each other and merge together and to create a one world army, essentially a one world white army of the North. um Russia would join NATO and it would be the former enemies, you know, the the the two opposites now the synthesis in the middle would be the new order. And so that's what we would always, you know, I would always joke back then is you see as they become more like us under Boris Yeltson, we become more like them under Bill Clinton, right? With his totalitarian regime that they were forcing on us then. And of course, what's funny is, and this is my most recent book, is I was totally wrong about that. The American idea of the new world order was the Russians are going to kiss our feet, or worse, that's putting it very politely, and we're not going to share any power with them whatsoever. We're not bringing them into NATO. Um, and all that. So, you know, the first two chapters of my book are basically about how I didn't know what I was talking about when I was 22. But um but uh but that part of it where like yeah as you call it the state creep um where we get you know this was the John Burchers they were the most right-wing um conservatives in America but they what really got them kicked out of polite society was their opposition to the Vietnam War. Robert Welch said why are we fighting the commies in Vietnam when we're empowering them here? We're creating a total state here, whether you have a Republican or a Democrat in charge of the thing. Ultimately, what's wrong with communism? It's too much government control over free people's decision-m, man. Why are we doing this to ourselves in the name of thwarting it overseas when in fact this was um the the justification for the cold war from William F. Buckley, the founder of the National Review. he had written back in 1952, "We must accept a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores, even with Truman at the reigns of it all, in order to fight the Cold War to to stop the Soviet Union." And Robert Wells said, "No, nuts to that. What's the point of winning the Cold War against the Reds if we have to create a totalitarian bureaucracy on our shores to do so? Forget it, dude." And by the way, communism is a real idiot way to run an economy and an empire anyway. It's not going to work anyway. They can't afford to take over the world. They can't even run their own society worth a damn at all. And so the it was threaten inflation. And honest right-wingers could see that at the time. Murray Rothbart and and other libertarian writers and thinkers said the same thing that that the Soviet you was a paper tiger essentially um you know built up as a threat in order to justify American militarism in response. supposed response. But now, as far as China goes, you know, I hear this said a lot, and there is something to this, right, that I guess Milton Freriedman, and in fact, I heard um uh John Mirshimer talked about this on the Tucker Carlson show a couple weeks ago that he says, you know, he's from the same realist school as the Big Nazinski, you know, who was a Rockefeller guy after all. But he goes, "The big was always a couple of clicks to the right of me on everything." But I debated him one time about China and I said it's the most idiot thing in the world to build up China to give them most favored nation status to essentially have a government policy bent toward not just teaching them Milton Freriedman economics but like helping them like having policies um geared around toward helping American companies offshore from here to go there instead to build them up to be the industrial power of the world as we deindustrialize allies and offshore all that to them just on the assumption as Brzinski thought that as you said they'll become a democracy and then they'll just be another western nation like Japan is right a deacto western nation and you know one of our allies and we'll go from there essentially without recognizing that like well no they'll be wealthy enough to maintain their independence from us and they will seek to defend their own interests not just go along with ours Right? I mean, what is it about Boris Yeltson? It's that he's weak and drunk. That's what it is about him. But if he had the power, like say his handappointed successor, Vladimir Putin, to assert independence and and maintain it, he's going to do that. Of course, he would. Any state that has the ability to maintain their political independence from any major power is going to do so if they can. And so I don't think that Mir Shimemer would have recommended, you know, encouraging Marxism in China to keep them starving to death, right? But that doesn't mean we had to do everything we could to build them up. But here's the thing, though, that people miss out on that is we're not supposed to be the world empire in East Asia anyway. And so it's it shouldn't really matter to us if they become the regional hedgemen. I mean, what are you saying that only 99% of the Pacific Ocean is an American lake, but 1% of it is not? Okay, that's maybe a threat to the US Navy's hijgemony in the Pacific. It's not a threat to the United States of America, right? You have to blow that way out of proportion. Then they want to extrapolate and say, well, if China's may take Taiwan at some point, which they might, they've built up a naval force capable of doing so anyway, but it's their lost province. It's 90 miles off their shore, not ours. Imagine China is saying they guarantee the independence of Catalina Island off the coast of Los Angeles. We nuke Beijing. They're not going to put up with that whatsoever at all. And I have to say, and for the people in Taiwan listening to this, I'm very sorry, but f you. Figure out your own problems, if you want to be more like Hong Kong than the Dawnbass, then I suggest you negotiate because it's been America's official policy for 50 years. 53 that Taiwan is part of China and we will not guarantee your independence. Now China has the ability to take Taiwan back by force. Are you willing to have a nuclear war? Trade your hometown, your home state, our entire civilization in a hbomb war with China over their sovereignty over Taiwan. Oh, I heard they got some microchips there. Oh, yeah. Well, then move the factory to Austin then. Pack it up. We got really big airplanes nowadays. You could pack up a whole pack. You ever seen those planes that they have that they ship other planes in? Yeah. Right. Like it's a plane that you can ship the wings for a 787 inside this other thing. Yeah. You just put the factory in that and move it out of there. Then why' you put, you know, dire economic interests in such a dangerous security situation in the first place? sounds like somebody else's fault and somebody else's problem, right? And and then oh, China may be able to take that over and get a hold of the microchips. They'll have those same microchips in five years anyway through their own research or whatever, right? In that Moors law, they're going to figure it out. Um uh soon enough, you know, you can't really keep that technology from them overall anyway. and and and quite frankly they have somewhere, you know, between three and 600 hydrogen bombs, which means if we get into a real war with them, we are at a real risk of losing our entire civilization over something that couldn't possibly be of a severe interest of ours. And then we're supposed to say, oh, if they threaten Taiwan, then whatever. One, two, skip a few. Now they're going to take South Korea and Japan and Australia. Yeah. Or maybe not, right? Like give me a break. Why in the world should we believe that that's true? So So, so in other words, you know, this trap where the old empire has to fight the rising new empire is only a trap if you're the idiot old empire who won't just give it up. Right? You don't have to fight China. Just come home. We're not supposed to be the world empire anyway. It's impossible to have a limited constitutional republic and a world empire anyway. This whole thing is illegal by our constitution. And so just forget it. And then that way if China wants to get into it with Myanmar and Bhutan, well that's their problem, but it's not ours. And I think um and oh and then here's one other thing that people always forget about that too is in this era where China started really getting rich. We had Bill Clinton and George Bush and Barack Obama and for that matter Trump and Biden too, but especially like these three were in charge of the world empire during that time. I guess Clinton and um and uh Jiang Zaman, they had a pretty good relationship I guess essentially and and W. Bush wasn't you know that hawkish on China at the same time especially I mean Bill Clinton too but especially W. Bush his foreign policy in the name of spreading democracy of launching violent aggressive wars and doing multiple color-coded revolutions which are just coup d'etas dressed up as popular revolutions and his essentially unrelenting pressure of regime change against anybody who was out of line of the American empire that put everybody off of America and what we're doing and what we're like and whether we're trustworthy. and all of these things in a way far beyond we could just measure with some kind of graph or something. You know, his father had said back at the dawn of the new order during Iraq War I, he says, "The world trusts us with this power because they know that we are good people and that we are responsible and that we will do the right thing with our power." Right? which was nonsense, but it was a lot closer to the truth than after his son just slaughtered millions of people for nothing and all in the name of freedom and democracy and the Declaration of Independence and all of these things. And it it put just severe just in the overall market. It put severe pressure against everything Western and everything especially American. From you know at the at the very start of the Iraq war Egyptians who all drank Pepsi cuz they don't drink. It's a Muslim country. No alcohol. Everybody drink soda. They all drink Pepsi. They all stopped drinking Pepsi in um I forgot where it was where they were it was Levi's jeans were the huge bad in I guess it was in Iraq and in pre-invasion times or whatever it was they just all stopped wearing western clothes drinking western uh sodas and all of that kind of thing. Um I'll never forget this preacher who used to be a regular on Fox News. I can't remember his name anymore. This is a long time ago. uh he did the Sean Hannity show and he had just gotten back from I'm not exactly sure I guess Southeast Asia um not China but um somewhere in Southeast Asia and he goes on the Hannity show and this is like in 2004 or something like the very worst Hannity of all in that era that I rock two era and the guy says Sean we have to stop the war we have to get out of Iraq right now and Sean Hannity goes what what are you talking about and he goes I just got back from Asia. Or maybe he was still there, like via satellite or whatever. I think I just got back from Asia and and I'm a missionary and I've had the worst luck and the worst time recruiting people to Christianity of my entire career, my entire lifetime. And you know what they say to me? They say, "Jesus, Christianity, isn't that the religion of the Americans that invaded Iraq? Forget it. Get away from me. I don't want to hear it. That's what you are. That's what your society represents. Lies and aggressive war and murderous violence against women and children. You guys are devils. Why would I want to believe in the same religion as you? Now, if that was, you know what I mean? Like that's just one small part of it. Think overall. Now extrapolate out the opportunity costs in terms of not just American corporations ability to export a USA brand name crap to the world but just overall global sentiment about our country, who we are and what we mean. There was a time where you could talk about the Declaration of Independence with a straight face. You could talk about freedom and liberty and free markets and these things and people wouldn't just break out laughing at you. These were things that America did stand for. Does anyone believe that now when we have the most corrupt economy in the world? Does anyone believe that now when we launch all the aggressive wars? We killed 4 million people in the last 25 years at least. Maybe five now if you count the Ukraine war. 37 million 40 million people uh you know forced from their homes aiding and abetting the genocide against the Palestinians. America's government is evil and the people of the world rightfully reject its illegitimate authority. So now back to China and never mind their ruling regime, but them too, but also just the population of the country. When we say you guys ought to have a limited government like ours, you guys ought to get your government out of big business and have free markets like ours. You guys ought to have a better bill of rights and process for those accused of crimes or civil infractions in your society. You should protect property rights better. You should be less of an aggressive threat against your island neighbors. How could any of them take us seriously? We clearly couldn't possibly mean it, right? In fact, they say any sovereign nation has the unalienable natural right. I read this in the New York Times today. Russia refuses to accept Ukraine's natural right to independence, sovereignty, and a military alliance with the West. Oh, okay. Is Oh, it was I'm pretty sure it was the military alliance with the West part that got them right. and they go, "No, it's Ukraine's sacred, unalienable right to choose to join NATO if they want to." Well, the Solomon Islands go, "Well, we're thinking about getting into a military relationship with China." And America says, "Not unless you want to be killed because we'll kill every single last one of you before we let you join in an alliance with China." 104. Roger that. Your sacred unalienable right ends where American interests begin. Is there anyone out of the eight billion of us on this planet who don't understand that to be true? That America is nothing but Bill Clinton, the faceing rapist, church burning murderer, liar, W. Bush, aggressive warrior. You know, they call Saddam Hussein Hitler. They say it's the Russians who are demanding to be appeased. Does anyone outside of North America see it that way? I severely doubt it. And I think that if, and I'm sorry because I'm rambling, but to your actual point, if America was not this way, if America had elected Ron Paul and Harry Brown and Rand Paul and good libertarians to run this society, run this government uh and and take charge of this foreign policy in this time, then I think that we would have the moral authority to criticize China for the things about their society that absolutely do deserve of criticism. Same thing for, you know, I guess I said this in the book. Take a look at Libya, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan. These countries all have horrible problems, right? Even even Iran. Um, they have horrible problems. They have horrible tyrannies. They have, you know, in East Africa and in Kurdistan, they have this tradition of female circumcision, which is a euphemism for absolute butchery, right? Um it's they have, you know, in in poshtoune culture, um the the way that essentially it's normalized that they have sex with each other's sons and little brothers instead of their sisters, right? Each I mean each other's sisters, right? And that's who you date is like girls in your neighborhood. No, they that's they are they got it all wrong. The rest of humanity figured this out about male female relations. The poses, yeah, not so much. Right. And yet out of all of these states, the very worst things about them is the United States of America and our worst there. The mass killing that we have done, the corrupt butchers that we have installed in power as their police chiefs and mayors. You want to talk about child rape in Afghanistan? The Taliban would hang a guy from the neck for that kind of thing. America spent 20 years making those people the police chief and the mayor and the governor. Okay, that's the reality. The worst things, you know, you talk about Iran, the morality police lording it over the women of Tyrron who would rather live like New Yorkers apparently. Okay. But the worst thing about Iran is the economic devastation of America's crippling sanctions and maximum pressure policy against their country for the last 25 years. A refusal to allow them to trade and engage with the rest of the world and make money and take care of their own society. And that's a country that we haven't bombed off the face of the earth. That's one where we didn't do a regime change. Well, we bombed them a bit. Um, but I'm talking about, you know, even in the leadup to this war is still the worst thing about Iran is USA. By far the worst thing about Somalia, Iraq, Palestine, Syria is Let me ask you. So, I I'm curious about your optimism of turning this cycle around or if that's even possible. And there's a couple directions we could go here, but like you know when I think about the you referenced America um encouraging a country like China to have a US centric constitution, you know, and the beauty of the US constitution from my perspective was how it limits the power of any one person. That was the original point. I think you could dispute that if it still stands today. We talked about some of the state creep already. I think today there's now 800 uh troops in DC kind of taking over the capital and co-opting the police force and and I don't you know when I talk about the Nvidia deal, the Nip on Steel deal, the DC occupation, whatever, I'm not I'm not throwing shade at our current president, the current president, because I think once precedent is set, it's just picked up and carried forward by whoever comes next and these sort of power grabs just become the new normal. But being that that's the case, you know, where where do you stand on you're in Texas, my wife's from Texas, my family holds Canadian and American passports. We spent about half our life in Indonesia. We just want options, right? I got three little boys. We're thinking about where's the best place to raise a family today where they could be surrounded by as much opportunity as I was growing up, right? I was really fortunate to grow up in the era I did. Uh what's your take though long long long term like uh whether we get we get into like are we truly in the remaining sunset years of the American empire um and what's that look like or you know um you mentioned kind of the accidental empire argument a couple times right America never intended on being an empire this wasn't in the plans originally um that's sort of a George Freriedman take and he would also argue that you know despite things looking pretty bad right Now we're in our adolescence. These are growing pains. America America's trying to figure out how to operate in its new capacity and our brightest days are still ahead of us. Yeah, I know that too. I'm I'm a Morning in America guy. If everybody just listen to me, right? Like um you know during the crash of08 I talked with the great historian Robert Higs. You love this guy by the way if you're not familiar. You talk about state creep. He's the guy that wrote the book Crisis and Leviathan Critical Episodes and the growth of America's government. and he's the guy that coined the term the ratchet effect. He said every time there's a crisis, the government grows in power and ratchets down on our liberties. Then when the crisis abates, the handle of the ratchet goes back, but the part that turns the bolt does not, right? And so our freedoms remain lost and the growth of of government stays and then it gets tighter and tighter and tighter, right? So that's his book, Crisis and Leviathan. Anyway, brilliant guy, great libertarian, economist and historian. Um but so he told me in the crash of08 that it's Higs, Robert Higs. Um he told me in the crash of08 that like look man so what's happened here is we've had this massive financial crash but you have to remember that and this is Austrian theory right the business cycle theory is that the boom and the bust is caused by the artificial creation of new bank credit and and government just expanding the money supply itself as well leading to way more new money being created than new wealth being created right And then that's what leads to these bubbles um and then the great crashes. But the point being that the property in the country is all still very real and including a lot of the stuff that is built up during the bubble. Now a lot of times people go broke but then their actual you know valuable assets get bought up in bankruptcy court and live to survive to produce further goods and services going forward. So, for example, if you have a quarry or you have a trucking business or whatever, you might lose everything in the crash, but those trucks don't just drop dead. They're still there, right? As long as they don't they're not allowed to just go to rust. If if someone else can get their hands on them, those trucks are still there. And so this country, zoom out, is lousy with gigantic freeways and warehouses and machine tools and universities full of brains full of engineering knowledge and all of these things. All of our electric plants, all of our dams, all of our infrastructure that we already have, that's all still here. And so the idea that we could ever suffer something like the Great Depression of the 1930s again is impossible because there's too much actual real wealth and and capacity of whatever however many tens of millions of different businesses to provide goods and services to people throughout this economy. That that just can't go away. You will have, you know, layman brothers come and go and this kind of thing and you'll have regular people of course who get caught up in those things. um whether through any fault of their own or not, we will obviously have to suffer through the booms and all the inflationary pricing during the booms and plus the crashes and all the terrible results from the crash. The the regular people get screwed coming and going in this system. But overall, all that has been built ain't going away. So, you know, I I really think again that that the empire itself is a net loss. Um and and we are just wasting so much money on militarism and imperialism and and just on talent and and on brawn for that matter. Just think of our millionman army. All those guys should be out doing something productive. Um and and contributing to the economy instead of take you take your most capable people and you put them in charge of destroying all the excess wealth of everybody else. It's completely stupid. this the whole thing is so upside down. And so I think, you know, I'm not an economist. I don't know exactly how it would be, but I'm fairly certain that if we just brought our empire home, we downsized our military by 90%, we downsized our federal government by 90% and just fired all those bureaucrats and including got rid of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and all of the federal entitlements and all the regulations, commerce, education, energy. Well, energy holds the nukes. Somebody has to hold the nukes other than the Pentagon, please. Um, but other than that, you know, you just decimate the national government. We just don't need them. And then I think we would have a severe correction for a few months, right? Let prices seek level. Let all these federal government bums get real jobs and and maybe living out their life stream. You know, you got some guy designing and redesigning and redesigning and redesigning the same machine gun over and over again in the Pentagon's basement right now. Maybe you put him to work out there, he'll design something that'll really help improve the standard of living for his fellow humans. You know what I mean? Give these people a chance to actually be productive. And I think American society would just be fine. And some prices would crash. You might find out that, oh wow, your house really is not worth $500,000. that was all, you know, federal government monetary finagling and and so, you know, there would be corrections. Um, and yet like what is it? What do we think that that government employment brings prosperity? That government management and regulation that these people, all of these tax feeders are ultimately the ones that make us prosperous when no, they don't. They're the ones who, you know, at the very best they're helping to create a level playing field where others can manage in the market, but mostly that's not their job, is it? Right? Mostly they are a giant weight around the rest of our necks. So, I think that um I don't know exactly what George Freriedman was saying about all this, but I believe that if you just This is something that Ron Paul always teaches. I guess maybe it is the only thing that I do believe in is that freedom works. And if you just let it work, it'll be fine. You got to give it a chance. Yeah. And you know, as as we hear more and more, I mean, you know, every every week there's a new sort of tariff adjacent headline. And uh it always struck me as ironic um you know, that that uh the sort of freedom voting MAGA supporters are cheering on the tariff strategy as if a government has ever regulated itself to prosperity. And that was kind of the message behind these, right? It was like, "We used to be rich because of tariffs." And it's like, "That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard. America became the greatest economy in the world because of free market capitalism." The lack of government regulation. That's what did it. To think we're going to regulate America to prosperity is a complete misunderstanding of the most basic economics. But as we began this interview, you're like, there's the reality and then there's a story that we're told, right? And those two things are very decoupled. Uh and and as long as the story is controlled and the narrative is fed to the public that's driving the voter base and all this stuff, you can have whatever reality you want, right? It's not going to be the message. The message is the message. It's different. And I even would ask you this question here. You know, America values freedom, right? If you ask the, you know, the average American what makes America great and unique, they'd say freedom. It's like, okay. America also leads the world in incarcerated citizens per capita. You're more likely to be locked in a cage in America than any other country in the world. Until recently, El Salvador surpassed because they locked up a third of the country, right? That's unique case. It's not because America became more lenient. That's not why those that's an oxymoron, is it not? Can you have the a country that truly values freedom and also leads the world at locking people in cages? And I it leads me to say that American Freedom is just the most effective branding campaign that the world's ever seen. But on the street, it's anything from it. What's your take on that, Scott? Well, I'm I'm torn. I mean, you obviously have a good point. There is a hell of a lot of freedom still here. Um I don't I've never lived all around the world. I don't know exactly how to compare it to the way all other people live and all that kind of thing, but I know that, you know, if if nothing else, it's the land of opportunity where you really can strike it rich and then keep your money and they'll the warlords will tax a certain percentage of it away. But essentially, you can trust that the security situation is going to be stable enough. You're going to be able to hang on to your money, even deposit it in somebody else's institution, and be able to, you know, have that stability um and and the ability to control more money than you can keep on your person, you know what I mean? Um and and rely on it. So, so there is a lot of that. Um and and depending on who you are and where you are, um you might never have to deal with the cops or or regulators in in any kind of particular way. And I think, you know, when people complain about police abuse and prosecutorial abuse, a lot of times you have entire segments of the population who are like, I don't know what you're talking about. You know what I mean? It's that famous Richard Prior bit where he's like, you white folks, you're like, oh, hi, Officer Timson. are you going bowling this Thursday? See you there. And then but like to black people it's just different. It's like bank just got robbed nword looked just like you. And then you know full body cavity search and all this on the side of the road and then you know sweetheart I don't really even feel like going out tonight dude. Let's just go ahead and go home. Like it's just a different experience depending on on who you are and where you are. And and it's not really as much a race thing as it is a class thing. If if people have the ability to defend themselves or if they're even wealthy enough, like upper middle class enough that they might be related to a judge or a state senator or something like that, then cops tend to go easy, right? People do cocaine on the west side of Austin. The police don't do cocaine raids on the west side of Austin. M they do cocaine raids in East Austin where nobody's got any juice and nobody's going to get in any trouble for getting anybody in trouble. And I think people understand that that's really the way it works. And I know from just being a punk ass kid and getting pulled over by the cops all the time cuz probably most of those really were my fault or whatever. But I remember going, you know, spent many an hour in the waiting room at municipal court and I would just go up to people and be like, "So, what did you do? What are you doing here?" What? and and it was always some petty BS, either something they didn't really do at all or some ridiculous buy or fee. And now they're losing their job because they have to spend all day Wednesday afternoon sitting down at the damn municipal court waiting for hours and hours and hours to even be called to have to deal with their thing and their boss won't put up with it. So now they don't have a job anymore and this kind of thing. And it's just the the oppression tax on poor people in this country. You might think, and you can see why they do think a lot of times, you'll hear especially poor black people say the system is designed to prevent us from ever not being poor, right? They this is designed to keep us in this place, right? Because there's always going to be an endless amount of fines and fees and tickets and whatever it is. And and it's just it can be impossible to get out from under that. If you're on a low wage fixed income, you're making a couple of grand a month. Half of that is your rent. The rest is food if you're lucky. And then, oh, now you're on probation and you have to pay probation fees and you have to take off every third Tuesday to go down there and take a class on alcoholism, which is not a problem that you have and all of these things. Like, it's just madness. Um, I know I knew a dude who got busted with some weed. He was my old weed dealer in high school. Got busted with a couple of pounds of weed. If he had just gone to prison, he'd have been out in six months. Instead, he took the deal and he was in and out of prison. and he ended up doing like three or four years in prison plus all the probation, all the probation classes, all the probation fines and fees and then they end up revoking him and sending him to prison anyway for for missing one alcoholism class or whatever it is, right? And like it's just like that, man. It sucks. Like once they got their their clause into you and you're part of the system, you've been convicted of any felony, whether it has anything to do with actually committing a crime against another person at all or not, but even just a certain quantity of contraband in your possession or unlicensed gun in your possession or whatever like this, once they got their hooks into you, you can really suffer at the hands of the American state. And this is to me is so frustrating about these damned, you know, George Sorosian uh progressive prosecutors uh come and you know immediately like every libertarian has been demanding whatever we wouldn't call it this cuz we know better, right? But some sort of reform of the criminal justice system because of just how completely unrepentantly screwed up it is. Like for example, no one gets a jury trial. They just threaten you with so many decades in prison that you plead guilty to something. It's like 90% of cases or 90 plus% of cases. That's not how it's supposed to be. If they would repeal a whole hell of a lot of the laws um making offenses out of things that are nothing, then they could actually prosecute the crimes and give people fair process. But you have people doing years in the pen after they confess to a crime that they didn't commit because it was either that or have essentially zero chance at trial. They will not get a fair trial like on Matlock on TV or whatever. They'll get completely screwed at trial and now they're facing 30 years and never see their family again. And that's a life sentence, you know. Um it's it's really it's really bad. And then the progressive prosecutors come and what do they do? They legalize armed robbery and murder and rape. What? We had 1,000 fines and fees and offenses that needed to be lifted and they legalized real crime, which is the one and only thing that we ever wanted the police to do. You take the armed robber and you hang that guy, right? You take the murderer, you hang those guys, you put them in prison, leave everybody else the hell alone. But that never even occurred to them. They go, "Well, it's just not fair that more black people are prosecuted for murder than white people." Well, I pardon me. We're talking about individuals who either did or didn't commit a murder here. But they're like, "No, the these these laws against murder are enforced with a racial bias. So instead of what? Prosecuting more white murderers? Let's prosecute fewer black ones." Or like, I don't know what it would take to be illiberal. can't imagine how any person could exist on the political left and just I would have the most splitting of headaches. I don't know how they deal with the dissonance of like, yeah, we're reforming the law. Um, yes, we're we're persecuting more poor people for offenses than ever before, but we're letting the murderers and the rapists and the armed robbers go, so at least there's progress there. you you just mentioned something that stuck with me when you said I can't imagine um effectively how a liberal can exist with that mindset and thought process and it struck me as like you know we're at this place where the divisions between the call it the left and the right although I honestly hate those terms I feel quite politically homeless personally but there's defin definitely irrevocable differences that have become entrenched in culture and they deepen with every election cycle and the pendulum swings harder and harder and harder and we could expect it to continue to do so. Um, so you could look at that scenario and say every every year, every 5 years, these divisions become greater, the ability to communicate between parties becomes less, and this is a one-way street that ends in a really bad place. However, I asked that same question to the former prime minister of Canada, Steven Harper, who grew up during the political violence in the '60s. And he's like, "Yeah, look, these the this populism divide looks really bad." And it is. It's very serious and severe and it's going to go worse before it gets better, but we've also been in a worse place in the past. He's like, I grew up and political leaders were actually being assassinated in the US. this is, you know, so relative to that, although it feels very irre irrevocable today, irreconcilable today, uh, we've come back from worse. So, what's your take? And you got got guys like Ray Dallio now calling for the probability of a civil war to be over 50%, I think, was his latest. How do you make a claim like or you know, a forecast like that? But anyways, what's what's your take on on that scenario, Scott? Yeah. Well, if you're in the markets, bet against that guy. Uh, that's not right. Um, look, um, I may have that wrong. I just want, my audience will fact check it. Maybe he's at 30%. E either way, just whatever. Yeah. No, I don't think that's right. I mean, look, what it's going to be town versus country in all 50 states, right? It's not like we have a north south divide here. And what? all the liberals from the cities are going to march out to enslave the right-wingers in the countryside or all the right-wing militias are all going to sack the city council building and take over all the downtowns are like no you know you could have where things really deteriorate you you would have what you'd have assassinations and kidnappings and crime and all that but that's what the FBI counter intelligence and counterterrorism and whatever units are for that that was why Hoover built them in the first place was to absolutely absolutely squatchch any kind of violent descent, especially from the far right and the far left in this country. And the FBI are a lot of things, including child killers and liars and murderers, but are they completely incompetent at framing up and wrapping up right-wingers and leftwingers? No, I would not say that. You know what I mean? They can look at what they did to these, you know, kind of pseudo militia guys in Michigan. you know, the snap of our fingers, they made it look like they were going to try to kidnap and murder the governor and put him in the pen, most of them, or at least some of them. Um, so there's just we're not headed that way. Um, but the thing is, you know, in all the frustration that you're seeing where people are moving further to the left and to the right, it is a very negative consequence. Again, I pin it all on the empire first. It's the it's the heart of the corruption of the American empire. uh and the the heart of the pardon me the the empire is the heart of the corruption of the American economy and the the rigged game for few at the uh expense of the rest of us and it makes it gives what we call American capitalism a very bad name when it's so tied up with all this cronyism and unfortunately as people move further to the left and the right the good news is they're more and more populist right they're less and less elitist and they're more and more looking at what it's like to be a regular working person out in the world making less than $100,000 a year and trying to or maybe much less than that and and trying to figure out how to survive. But then when you move further to the left and the right, your economics get dumber just like we're I mean obviously I think in this conversation the idiocy of socialism mostly goes without saying. We already touched at it in terms of China and all that but like the I can hear Harry Brown the little angel on my shoulder. Call it what it is. It's national socialism. That's what this is. To have this national economic policy, all these tariffs and all these interventions and all these things. We are not supposed to be doing this. But it becomes more and more acceptable to people because they can see the absolute corruption of the Bill Clinton George W. Bush centrist way. And so they want to move further to the left and further to the right thinking that and you know I've heard he's my good buddy now no offense but Tucker Carlson is like well blame libertarianism for America's economic problems because like in a way you do have like that Milton Freriedman at least kind of influence that's focusing more on free markets right in a again like a Bill Clinton W Bush way um rather than like real Rothbartian libertarianism or anything like that. But you know, in other words, for for one major example, freer trade under NAFTA and GAT and all of that and the WTO freer than before and then you see all these negative economic consequences for the people and make a direct uh connection and and there is somewhat of a connection, right? When you have the government working so hard to help companies offshore and then they refuse to repeal the regulations and the taxes that are really encouraging them to do so, it's really been a national economic project to de-industrialize the country. Right? Nuke Gingrich ran as a Trumpian or you know try to act as a Trumpian populist um trying to reverse all this. But he was the guy that wrote the forward to the toofflers's book in the 90s about the third wave and how we need to completely de-industrialize the country and just teach everyone to code. It'll be fine. We don't need to make anything anymore. We'll have the Chinese make everything for us and we'll just be uh intellectualbased economy, right? A prop intellectual property based economy entirely. Right? Like that was the idea. This wasn't let's allow free markets to work. This was let's make it this way with this central planning. Now they're trying to central plan it back the other way again, right? Instead of just allowing free markets to to reign. So So the the good news is the attitude is more populist. The bad news is the economics are more socialist when what we actually really need is libertarianism. What we really need is not to move further to the left or to the right, but further to the freedom, further to the free market and get rid of all the taxes and regulations that are bogging down American business that make it financially uh difficult, if not impossible to run factories here and that that give so many companies the incentive to want to offshore. And let's see if they'll just come back instead of forcing them to come back. You know, I mean, I've seen this over and over. I don't read the business press nearly enough, but I read it enough. I have enough. I've seen just over and over again where companies talk about, man, we're like, we're moving to Indonesia, but it's only by one percentage point or two percentage points. Like, god dang, if you guys would just lift a few of the regulations off of our neck, we wouldn't have to leave. But we do. We just cannot break a profit or break even, you know, the way that you've got us now, but just a little bit less tax and a little bit less regulation and we'd be able to stay. But oh well sayara and then they go and so um you know what again if people would just follow Ron Paul's best advice you know the guy that everyone agrees now was right about everything the whole time all along with no exceptions. Yeah. What he said was just have faith in freedom. We don't need a new national economic policy of one kind or another. We need a new lack of one and let the companies sink or swim on their own. Again, if a company, for example, has been on US government welfare through various means and has a artificially boosted price and value on the market now and they have to suffer in the crash, that's okay in in the only way to free markets from statism is toward them. And it might be even innocent people get hurt in the thing, but that's a consequence of rigging the game in the first place. Yeah, but whatever actual useful assets those companies have, they'll get bought up at bankruptcy court by somebody else, right? The the actual wealth doesn't cease to exist. The actual inventions don't cease to exist. It's just um you know whether they're economically viable for another company to pick up and run with or not 100%. And you have to let those deaths occur. I mean, what's the analogy? Science advances one funeral at a time. It's because we have to fail to learn, you know, and then iterate and build again. Uh the same is true in business. I completely agree with you. Um uh look, um Scott, I want to I want to point to your books, uh because I am just amazed actually at the cadence with which you write, uh and the depth at which you go. But um your most recent book, Provoked, I'd love to hear about it today. Um and we can touch on enough already. fool's errand. Hotter than the sun. I wanted to jump into hotter than the sun. We were talking about the sort of arms race and the the the nukes that are being used as leverage. Um but but walk me through your your mission behind your work. Like why why are you writing these books? You go deeper into this subject matter, foreign relations, than probably anybody. What's behind it? What drives you? Um well, I don't know. I guess it's just my comparative advantage in the thing. You know, I um as I said, I was kind of a New World Order cook in the '9s. So that meant even though I was wrong about the grand design of a merger with Russia, um I sure did learn a lot about the real history of the 20th century. And right like the the center of the conspiracy of the old John Burch conspiracy is the Rockefeller's Council on Foreign Relations. That's the secret government behind the evil plan. Well, wait, what is it again? The Council on Foreign Relations. Why? Because America's relationship with the rest of the world is the single most important determining factor in its own form and the and the national government that we have to deal with here at home. And so um that was always their focus. I think for good reason that as long as we have this activist government overseas, of course we have an activist government here at home. uh we would have to get rid of the illegitimate part of it uh the completely illegitimate foreign part of it first. Then we could argue that the rest of these agencies are not befitting a limited republic. They do work with a world empire. They're they're necessary parts of a world empire maybe um but they wouldn't fit with a constitutional republic. So um that was kind of my whole basis of of my interest in foreign policy in the first place is understanding that America's role in the world is the most important determining factor in its relationship with us here inside the country as well. And then when I was a kid, Bill Clinton was the president and all he ever did was murder people and lie about it, support terrorists and cause terrorist attacks and was just absolutely horrible. bombed Iraq on average every other day for eight years. Uh and the horrific starvation blockade that uh it was enforced from bases in Saudi Arabia that helped turn America and Britain and Saudi Arabia's al-Qaeda mercenary terrorists against the United States. Um and and kick off our whole, you know, horrible terror war and all of that stuff. And then when W. Bush came. I mean, you know, I was a cab driver at the time and I was a, as I said, I was a New World Order cook and whatever. And so, like, I may have been a cook, but I was a pretty smart one. And I was able to, you know, extrapolate out in a way that other people I could see just around me could not tell. They just, to me, this is the most obvious thing in the world. And they did not know that Governor Bush is going to be a war president. He is going to take us to war in his first term. He is going to invade Iraq 100%. He'll probably have to allow a terrorist attack in order to justify it and then we're going to Iraq because look, his dad lost after one term with Saddam Hussein still in power over there. It's a Bill Hicks joke and everything. It's the ultimate humiliation for the Bush family. And now you're going to have a President Bush who in his first term is going to go to Iraq. because he cannot possibly take the risk that he would lose after one election uh after one term with Saddam Hussein still in the chair some more again just like his dad. So we are going to war and nobody else seemed to understand that. I told people that in my cab from like I mean I I told this story before it's true. The day that W. Bush announced he was also running for governor just like his brother Jeb in Florida. I told my math teacher I was in 10th grade and I told my math teacher you see what's going on here. They're making sure that one of the two will be a second term governor so he can run for president in the year 2000 and then we're going back to Iraq. Guarantee. This was when you were in grade 10. This is Yeah. In 10th grade. Told Jane the math teacher that and was this is the most obvious thing in the world. So and then um you know I was really interested in all this stuff and then I started reading anti-war.com in like 2002. I had read it before in like 99. I knew it existed. I knew it was owned by libertarians, but I really wasn't on the internet. I was just driving a cab. And I was paranoid enough about all of this stuff that I just wanted to live off the grid and not really be surveiled on the internet all day the way everybody else was. And I was trying to stay away from all of that. But then by 2002, it was like, no, look, first of all, I can't just keep driving a cab forever. I got to get, you know, my act together and and figure out what I'm really going to do for a living. And then, um, W. pushes lining us into war with Iraq. And I start reading anti-war.com and the head writer there was a guy named Justin Roando. Now he died back in 2019. So your audience may not be familiar with him, but man was he a brilliant genius. He was basically a big gay Archie Bunker if you could picture like a Pat Buchananite from Queens only moved to San Francisco. Um, but that's Justin and and he was I mean I remember when I started reading him that I just would always ask how does this guy know all this stuff? He was just so plugged in. And a big part of it was because as I was just learning that the libertarians were the longtime avowed enemies of the neoconservatives that we our movement and theirs were sort of kissing cousins in a way where we had agreed on the new left and agreed on like you know civil rights and on affirmative action and this kind of thing. And you know in the 60s the liberals the left became more statist well hell even with Karl Marx right the left became more statist even than the conservatives. So libertarians oftent times end up allies with conservatives against the overreach of the left. Um and at least conservatives are nominally free market property rights gunowning folk whereas you know the leftists make no such pretense of those things right so we have these kind of alliances but the problem is the neoconservatives they were a bunch of excommunists they never really believed in the things that we believed in Bill Crystal's father Irving wrote a book called two cheers for capitalism right um that was their whole thing they were essentially centrists they're like W Bush guys they came from the left but then they never move further to the right than W Bush that is one hair to the right of center Right. Um and and and of course they're the vanguard of the war party on behalf of Israel and but the ne but the libertarians, you know, in in their original generations, they came from a lot of the same social classes and the same kind of groups and and universities and think tanks as some of these guys. They all kind of knew each other. The Wasps at the CFR wouldn't let the Jews and the Catholics in. So, but the libertarians and the neoconservatives were largely Jews and Catholics, right? So they all kind of knew each other. They were like upper middle class guys who went to college and were intellectuals, but they weren't born real rich, right? They weren't Rockefeller types, and they weren't like the Waspy Wasps in the Brook Brothers suits, Brooks Brothers, whatever thing that you had to be part of to fit in with the old dominant Wasp culture. And the that was really just kind of spent and running out after Vietnam. But anyway, so so they all kind of knew each other and they hated each other. And so Murray Rothbard, for example, there's this hilarious article uh called I hate Max Learner and it's he goes I hated Max Learner when he was a Stalinist and I hated Max Learner when he was a Troskyite and I hated Max Learner when he was a shockmanite and I hate Max Learner now that he's a Reaganite and and he goes on and on and on about you know that's the great Murray Rothbart. So this is the tradition that Justin came from was he knew every single one of these neoonservatives names, their intellectual pedigree, why their father was a communist, and where they all came from, and why we should all hate them so much in a way where I just did not know. I thought a Republican was James Baker III. Again, like the the Wasp from the family of Sith Lords, right? The the lawyer for Exxon. That's the Republican establishment, right? No, it's Israel's fifth column. That's the real Republican establishment now. It's the neoconservatives. Forget all this Carol Quigley crap. All this John Burch crap about the new world order and the Rockefellers and the building up the United Nations. That's not what this is about. This is about Lood using and abusing the American people to destroy all their enemies for them to create a greater Israel or the Lakood party essentially. And and that was exactly what was up. And Justin just knew and I when I started reading Justin I knew very quickly that I was wrong about what's going on here. this guy obviously knows what's going on here and you know I guess I could say became a very close disciple of his and I ended up working for anti-war.com became his assistant editor essentially filling his article uh his articles with links uh three days a week making sure he was right about everything and and I would encourage anybody just find you maybe it's some middle of August is bad way to put it but find you a rainy Sunday and lock yourself inside and just read everything Justin Romano ever wrote for anti for anti-war.com starting in 1999 and read through all of his Kosovo articles and everything in the leadup to Afghanistan, all his stuff on the Balkan Wars and and then Afghanistan, Iraq War II, and all the rest of the terror wars, at least through W. Bush and at least through like the first half of Barack Obama. There's no question in my mind that Justin Romano was the most important writer in America. Um, and for everybody who missed out, they missed out. This was the guy who knew more, understood most and best about America's wars and the neocons who were lying us into war for Israel and why and all all that stuff. So once I started ping around with the anti-war.com guys and then you know I'm an interview show. I've done 6,000 interviews since 2003. So that was really what I started doing was I was a radio guy anyway. I just sit up here. You can see how I am. I just sit here and complain for 12 hours a day. I don't care. But then I thought, you know what I need to do is I need to start interviewing the guys that they run at anti-war.com and really learning the most about them. And then the plan was hopefully if I interview enough of them, eventually I'll be one of them and people maybe listen to what I have to say instead, too. And then so that was basically the plan. And then it is, you know, and I I agree with Justin about this and and and um his great hero was Garrett Gerrett, who I already mentioned who said everything goes out and nothing comes back. He had written the great book, The People's Pottage and Defend America First. And um he said, it was Garrett Gerrett who said um I'm going to very poorly quote this, but it was something like between a republican form of government that is limited constitutional um and empire, there is mortal enmity. One system must either forbid the other or will destroy it. And so, um, that's the story of of essentially the American Republic, right? It blew its own brains out, right? Just like in Star Wars, there's the Republic didn't get conquered by the Empire. The Republic abandoned freedom and became the Empire. And that's, you know, of course, Lucas, the the movie was about us. People don't really get that, but that was what it was. It wasn't about the Soviet Union. It was about the United States and and what we had done. And so, um, uh, that was that was basically my my thing. Once I fell in with the guys from anti-war.com, I just, you know, I I still am interested in all these other subjects, you know, law and order and to a lesser degree, I guess, immigration. I'm more interested in that issue now, but like obviously I'm into Austrian school economics, hard money, and and I love beating everyone over the head with why the business cycle is actually the government inflationary money um boom and bust cycle. uh as taught by Mises 100 years ago. Uh the world's time to catch up now with that. Um so I have all those other interests too, but I think where I have a comparative advantage is in the foreign policy stuff. And I think now as far as he asked me about why write these books, my friend Cornbread told me for years that I needed to write a book, man. You need to write a book about all this stuff. I never really knew where to begin or what to do or exactly what I wanted to say. I got a lot to say, but I didn't know exactly what I want to say. And then Tom Woods came to me and goes, "Listen, dude. Let's do a book together and it'll be like the war on terrorism for dummies and we'll just have a little bit on each of the wars." I go, "Oh, yeah, bet. Of course, that makes perfect sense." So, I wrote him an outline in like 15 minutes. Here's what we're going to say. And then I just wrote the thing and poor Tom, he he had other jobs. And then, so I started writing enough already. Then I got stuck on chapter 2, Afghanistan. And so, chapter 2 became Fool's Erand. My first book was just about Afghanistan. Then I went back and I started over and did enough already keeping Afghanistan short and sweet and then moving on with the rest. And then so that has the rest of all the terror wars, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Syria, Somalia, uh Afghanistan, Pakistan, whatever all in there. Um and then provoked is it's essentially the same motive here is that because I hate writing books. I'm really not an author. I'm a radio guy. Um, there are people and I read enough. I know what it is to read a talented writer. I am not that. I'm a names and dates guy. Like, okay, I'm good at names and dates. Like, as far as being a writer, I'm really not. I would much rather just do radio and podcasting and things. Um, but the reason I wrote the books is because I figured that I really do have a comparative advantage at this point where in my mind's eye, I can tell you one story all the way through. I don't know if you saw the Tucker Carlson interview, but that was like me doing enough already basically in one take. We'll start with 1953, explain how that led to 79. Here's a bunch of things that happened in 79, Afghanistan, the u obviously the Iranian uh revolution, and then in 1980, the Iran Iraq war, and how the Iran Iraq war led to Iraq war one, and how Iraq war one led to Iraq war one and a half, where Bill Clinton decided to stay in Saudi Arabia for eight years, the rise of al-Qaeda and their war against us. Then we get to September 11th in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Iraq War 3, and Yemen. And it's just essentially at that point it's just um chronology. But I think I guess what it is is I have read so much about all of these things, so many books and so many articles about all of these things. And I thought that essentially I hadn't seen anyone put it together in one causal chain all the way through the way I thought I could. And there are a couple of like in in the timeline in my head there are a couple of important pieces that people seem to usually miss that to me are crucial. I'll give you just one example is after I war I there was the Shiite and Kurdish uprising against Saddam Hussein's rule that was encouraged by the United States. George Bush Senior went on Voice of America radio and encouraged the Iraqi army divisions to turn on Baghdad and overthrow Saddam Hussein. They dropped leaflets over uh the army divisions as well. But then what happened was they changed their mind and they let Saddam Hussein keep his tanks and attack helicopters and kill 100,000 people to put down the insurrection. Why? Like I always knew that was important and everybody knew it was important and it was a a major part of um then America's excuse to stay in Saudi Arabia after driving Iraq out of Kuwait. Well, now we have to stay to protect the Shiites and the Kurds from Saddam as though he was just going to keep killing them all when the insurrection had been crushed, right? It was silly. But that became the excuse. But then what I finally figured out, I finally read a thing that explained, oh, it was because the Brigade, the militia of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, they were coming across the border from Iran. They were the Iraqi traders who chose Iran's side in the Iran Iraq war, even fought on Iran's side in the Iran Iraq war. Now they are coming to inherit the revolution. So you see from Bush Senior's point of view he this because he was Reagan's vice president his entire cabinet other than Dick Cheney had been in Reagan's government. So these were literally the men who had just spent 8 n years backing Saddam Hussein to contain the Shiite Iranian revolution. Now they are the ones importing it and they are going to help the Iranians men sack Baghdad. and they go, "Oh no, that was why they choked and that was why they let Saddam Hussein keep his tanks and helicopters and crush the insurrection." And then that became the reason they had to stay in Saudi Arabia. So it was little things like that where to me that was the piece of the puzzle that I needed to be able to tell that complete story through in a way that like not just that it makes sense that you can follow me what I'm telling you, but so that you and I both understand that guess what? Eight years later, when W. Bush went to Baghdad, guess who he took to power with him on his heels, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and their Brigade militia. And that's who rules Iraq to this day. That's who he fought Iraq War II for was the same people that Bush's father had betrayed in 1991. And for good reason, right? When he shouldn't have encouraged them to uprise, he shouldn't have done that war at all. But anyway, he shouldn't have encouraged Saddam to invade Kuwait of all the things he shouldn't have done. Um, but so that was why I decided to write it is because I thought I can tell this story as one story all the way through in a way that I think is and maybe it's because I'm a libertarian and um at least I would never claim to be an economist, but I'm like under the influence of the Austrian school, right? So for me, every question about public policy or or any social problem of any kind always begins with why is this the US government's fault in the first place? We always ask that first before we ask what solution do they have to bring to bear? Because 99% of the time or better, the real solution is just to make them stop doing the stupid damn thing they did in the first place to make it this way rather than double down and triple down and try to correct the problem that they caused. So if it's the same with economics, like for example, why do we have a giant illegal immigration problem? Because big business needs illegal immigration. Because it's the inflation fighter. Because big business's biggest problem of overhead is wages. So when the government prints money all day and the government licenses banks to print money all day and they destroy the currency, creating massive upward pressure on wages, then big business demands that the Democrats let 100 million people into the country to work illegally to drive down that upward pressure on wages. when what we needed was gold money in the first place. If we didn't have inflationary money, we wouldn't need the inflation fighter in all those illegal immigrants, would we? Right? And so that's how you answer the question of illegal immigration. How about we stop printing money? How about we lift our sanctions on Venezuela? How about we stop insisting on militarized drug wars in Mexico? How about we stop doing all the things our government is doing to cause the crisis in the first place rather than what's Trump's solution? declare war against the cartels and double and triple down on the same problem. So, it's the same thing here. And that's my analysis of the Middle East. This is all Jimmy Carter's fault. Every bit of it. Him and everybody in power who came after him who did nothing but make stupid decisions, right? Especially W. Bush, but especially all of them. Um, they just ruined everything. And you could say, "Oh, Saddam was bad." I don't care. USA. Washington DC is a thousand times more sinful and criminal than Baghdad could ever be. And when it was the most criminal regime in the world, it was under American occupation. Right. Right. Simple as that. Yeah. So, you know, we just did a piece covering the uh sort of rise in poppy production and opium refinery growth during the American occupation of Afghanistan, which yeah, is a whole another thread. But um you know I feel like it's it's it's very optimistic that you are appearing on some of the biggest platforms in the world, Lex Freriedman, Tucker Carlson, etc. uh because of you know what's behind your books is like your truth teller right that's the intention here and provoked not justified your most recent book which directly disputes the most common headline and rationale that everybody was sold about the Russia Ukraine war the unprovoked invasion all this that's why you titled your book provoked let's just actually be real about this provoked not justified being the full title both those things are true uh not not exclusive um and you know Even with the I'm not foolish enough to think any any politician is altruistic at their core, but I do think the message that was behind Trump's presidency was one of deregulation. Um, and people bought into that. No, I don't know that he's delivering on that. Would question it. Maybe certain pockets, right? It's not a binary thing, right? There are certain segments where absolutely that is the case. But the point is that's what people voted for. Whether or not he delivers on it, the people are beginning to understand that's what's in their best interest, right? And I think that actually goes tandem with uh platforms like yours gaining more notoriety today because people are looking for ways to cut through the noise and get to the signal and understand the incentives behind global development, not the narrative. If you understand the incentives, things make a lot more sense. Um whether or not you agree with the incentives, most of the time you probably won't. Um but Scott, I I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for coming on the show. Congratulations on the books. Uh again, I'm just sort of in awe. the massive undertakings um and the cadence with which you write. Uh uh thanks again, man. It's been a fun conversation. Thank you very much. It's been good to be with you. All right. 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