← Provoked with Darryl Cooper and Scott Horton
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- [00:00]
A
We're live tonight on the show. We talk about stuff.
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All humans break. The difference between humans and gods is that gods can break humans.
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A
Negotiate now.
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C
End this war.
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A
You're watching Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton debunking the propaganda lies of the past, present and future. This is Provoked. All right, it's fair. They keep calling me a baby boomer, even though I'm like, the very youngest. Edge of Generation X here, all you millennial kids, but it's fair. I just can never remember how many times I have to click Go live before it goes live compared to how many times I have to hit record to make it record. You got to hit record, like four times. I guess you only have to hit Go live once. I thought it was twice, though. I don't know. And then Streamyard's got this thing where I double click on the intro and it says, no, actually, I'm gonna sit here for a minute and make you look even dumber and then play the intro.
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B
You guys see what I gotta deal with?
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A
Probably a Israeli plot against me, you know, maybe not.
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C
Whatever.
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A
Hey, Darrell, how are you, man?
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B
I'm better. I was not feeling so good. I feel a lot better. So nice to be back.
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A
Little bit of the flu, huh? Well, I'm glad you're better. Hey, check this out. I have a good excuse for missing the show last week besides you being sick, which was I wasn't around at all. I was playing hooky because I went to go see Ryan Long. He is great, man. I laugh my ass off and he's so good. And there are times where I see stand up comedians and I'm like, I know I'm funnier than that guy. If that guy can be a stand up comedian, I can be a stand up comedian. I want to be a stand up comedian. But then I see Ryan Long and I go, oh, no, I'm not funny at all. Standup comedy is for dudes who are funny, like Ryan Long. And they're for me to enjoy, not to try to mimic or, you know.
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C
Did you.
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B
Did you see on. I think it was the most recent Kill Tony that came out. There was that dude talking about Mossad and he was talking about the Lillehammer assassination back in the day. He said Oslo and he got a little bit of it wrong. But it was funny to see everybody's reaction up there. The one thing like that he got wrong, other than the fact that it was Lillehammer, not Oslo, is that this dude that they followed around for a while and decided was a terrorist that they were going to take out in Norway. It wasn't his friend that they shot this dude in front of. They shot. They blew his brains out with a shotgun right in front of his pregnant wife. And then these idiots, these like Mossad agents, they are super sloppy. They're supposed to, like, get rid of all their documentation, all this stuff, they all get caught. One of them, because he did, he wanted to hang out in Norway for an extra day rather than go home right away. So, like, they all get caught. And of course the Israelis pull whatever special strings they always seem to have, and all those guys get off with no charges and sent back to Israel, but just straight up murdered and totally innocent guy in front of his pregnant wife. It's brutal.
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A
Yeah, yeah, that's what stand up comedy is good for. Hey, you ever hear about the Levon Affair? Dude, I'll tell you what, Kurt Metzger, too. I love Kurt Metzger. Like, I had dinner with him one time and we were like on a little chat group together, whatever. So I like, kind of know him, but I hung out with him at. When Dave was in town doing comedy too. But he got to do a guest spot up there and he just killed too. Man, he's so funny. That guy's like a Tasmanian devil. He's like a son. Just a ball of energy, just, well, not a ball. He's huge, but he's just like, man, he brings heat. The audience was just, you know, under Kurt Metzger's onslaught, you know, it's awesome.
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C
It's so much fun.
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A
Okay, so there's that. We got business later on in the show today. We're going to have Joe Solis Mullen from the Libertarian Institute, and he is a legitimate Austrian school economist and a professor. I think he teaches history. But we're going to talk about Trump's economic record because I don't know if you saw at least the first part of his Davos speech was all about all of the great successes of the first year in economics. So we're going to have Austrian school guy give his take on that. And there's definitely some pluses and, and minuses to go over there. Also, I want to thank Fred Flights. I had no idea that a guy that used to work for John Bolton and George W. Bush could. Yeah, this seems like a decent guy, man. I don't know. And you know, the America First Policy Institute, I sort of look at that as like, you know, it's a Likud kind of attempt to monopolize the America first message. And by the. He seems sincere enough. Like there's two ways to, to consider it at least, right? Like the first way would be that because he told me before the thing he watched some videos of me and like, hey, I really like what you say. And he was very nice to me and we had a nice little conversation, you know what I mean? So one way to interpret that would be like, just on the face of it, like, yeah, exactly what he said that he thought that we agree on enough that like, yeah, we could be friends and what's the problem kind of.
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B
Thing your videos to John Bolton and get his opinion.
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A
Well, he's no Bolton fan anymore. He, he's turned on Bolton and, and abandoned him now. But so then another way to look at that would be, if you want to be a little bit cynical about Daryl might be that our narrative of what America first is and is supposed to mean is dominant and that he and his friends know that if they want to sell interventionism, they have to sell it as non interventionism. Basically they have to say that Cheneyism is Ron Paulianism and you're just not supposed to be able to tell the difference. Try to conflate these things together as best as we can. And so. But he had a lot of good explicit denunciations of the neoconservatives and I don't believe he ever was a leftist.
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C
I don't believe.
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A
Think he's much more like Bolton as like a neocon fellow traveler. He worked for the center for Security Policy with Frank Gaffney for a very long time and you know, was. Had a reputation as a hawk when he worked for W. Bush for sure. But anyway, anyway, he was a decent guy and we had a good old talk and I. Go ahead. It was on the Zero Hedge debate. I just wanted to thank them for having me.
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B
Yeah, the problem with them trying to push that narrative is just the, the circumstances of the current historical moment, you know, where we did this insane thing. When you just step back and think about it, if, like you had no context, you're an alien watching from, you know, orbit is you had Israel have this terrible thing happen on October 7th and they fly into just a rage of revenge. I mean, they're saying insane genocidal things at the top of their government, all that. And what do we do but say, okay, you control our foreign policy for, I don't know, next few years or something, just whatever you need, whatever you want. Like an insane thing to do. Like, you know, if we should have obviously done the exact opposite, realize that like they're, they're not in their right minds right now. If anything, we need to be trying to hold them back. And so because of Israel's just, you know, ultra aggressive posture right now and the sort of corner that they've backed themselves into over the last few years, I mean, it's really hard to imagine any non interventionist policy that is going to be pro Israeli, you know what I mean? Like, if anything, if I was advising those guys, would I probably try to go the opposite direction And I would say, say look, yes, there intervent. Some interventions will be necessary, targeted, small, you know, just tailored to like each given situation. But the goal is we need to fix all this permanently. We don't want to have to come back in 10 years or have the Israel. We need to make it so that the Israelis aren't trying to manipulate our foreign policy ten years from now because like it's all settled or whatever, we need to get it all done. I don't buy that. I mean, that's what we were told in 2001, 2003 and 2011, you know, but that might work. I mean it's got a better chance of working than, you know, trying to sell, you know, neoconservatism as, as non intervention.
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A
But yeah, I mean, and I'll tell you, he said, and you know, whatever is live in its circumstances. But when he said, listen, supporting Israel is part of America first, I said, well, I'd like to politely differ with you on that. I think that like for one example, and I, I could have focused on Gaza, but I said for one example, the Israeli lobby essentially has America supporting the bin Ladenites because they hate the Shiites more, but that's Israel's problem. So if you look at, you know, zoom in on Syria, we're supporting the bin Ladenites there because they got rid of the previous government that was close with Iran and Hezbollah, but it was not Hezbollah that knocked our towers down. The American people's enemies are the bin Ladenites. But you see where our priorities are just completely at odds there. They're 180 degrees opposite. And yet our loyalty to Israel's goals ends up putting us on the opposite side of our own damn terror war. And then he did not have an answer to that at all. He did not even try to argue the point at all. We just went on to the next thing after that. He didn't follow up when it was his turn to ask me a question, he asked me a nice question about the premise of my book provoked and about how America Started the war in Ukraine, which he, you know, seemed to like what I had to say about that. And so. But he didn't want to say that, like, no, you're wrong about that whole Sunni, Shia thing, you see, because the real thing is Iran is more of a threat than the bin Laden. He didn't try to argue that, you know what I mean? Because how could you? I'm right about it. So. But anyway, it was funny, man, I'll tell you, I, I like kind of talk myself into like a little bit of anxiety on the way into this debate because I thought, you know what, Bill Crystal is just a big fat blowhard idiot and Wesley Clark, you know, Colonel Hackworth called him a perfumed prince. And you know, McGregor likes him, but, but to me, Wesley Clark is lightweight and he's like 80 something, I don't know. And I thought, you know, I always wanted to bait John Bolton because he's a mean sob, you know what I mean? And like, so this guy, you know, if you look at Fred Flights's biography, he was in the CIA, the DIA and the State Department for 25 years. He was part of WinPAC, which was like their. I really wish I'd been able to ask him some questions about Iraq War two and the weapons stuff, because when pack was where they pushed the big aluminum tubes lie in the CIA, that was the one big lie that on the weapons that the CIA would really sign on to was the aluminum tubes thing. But anyway, but he has a severe career in the federal government and I thought, like, this is by far going to be the most capable, capable person I've ever debated and come up against or whatever. And then he just didn't want to fight. He just thought we would have a nice conversation.
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B
What was the question? Up for discussion? What was the question? What was the debate frame?
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A
Yeah, it was, it was judging Trump's foreign policy on his first year of his second term. Okay, So I went through and said, here's what I like and here's what I don't. And then he did the same. And then we just kind of talked about it. Yeah, and then it was kind of cool too. And this might only be interesting to me, I hope people don't just all click away. But I asked, I was like, man, you worked for John Bolton in 2002. For my. So my question for him was like, about how they pushed North Korea out of the non Proliferation Treaty and toward nuclear weapons and what the hell was the plan there, man? You're on your way to Baghdad, you're not going to be able to go to Pyongyang. So you're forcing them out of the npt. But then like what were you going to do about it? And he didn't answer that part of it.
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C
He did.
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A
And I don't know about this. I have to really go back and, and check some of this stuff. But his claim was that, oh, they definitely had an advanced uranium enrichment program then it wasn't just some aluminum tubes and they were, you know, experimenting around. They were enriching uranium to weapons grade. And he says, although they've never tested a uranium nuke, that all their tests have been a plutonium bombs. He said he thinks a bunch of their nukes are uranium nukes and that they were violating the deal. Although, you know, I talked about this with Gordon Prather back in the day that like, in fact, even if they had a secret uranium enrichment program that was not actually a direct violation of the Safeguards Agreement or of the Agreed Framework deal, and maybe it was a violation of the spirit of the Safeguards Agreement and, but it wasn't explicitly forbidden because they can. Uranium is used for fuel for their civilian Yongbyong reactor which was actually built by the Soviets to take highly enriched uranium. So if, you know, I even followed up that. But like, yeah, in hindsight, even if they're doing all that, like shouldn't you have dragged them back to the table then? Because look at like what you did was you took these four or five major belligerent steps and you kicked them out of the npt. They left the npt, kicked the inspectors out and they only, we know they only started actually making nukes after that. So, but, so I got like a little bit more detail and insight into their thinking there, which and which he does not take back at all. Like even in hindsight and even now that he detects best. John Bolton, he was like, no, we were right about that. Even Colin Powell agreed with us about that. He says, you know, kind of thing. So anyway, I still think that was interesting, like a little more insight into.
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B
It given his career background being so deep into that world for so long. You know, if there was, if there was a rebuttal to your point about us supporting the bin Ladenites and all that, he, he would have been the guy to give it. He, you know, he would know. And so the fact that he didn't rebut it at all is pretty telling.
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A
Yeah, I thought so. And you know, so yeah, like you again, you could look at it like a good fake thing that he just didn't think there's that much daylight between us and thought, let's be friends. And then a more cynical take would be like, yeah, the lobby sent him to try to infiltrate the more anti interventionist right wing now and to try to dress up Zionism as, oh, you guys are right wing nationalists, we're right wing nationalists. I'm like, yeah, you know, kind of thing, like for public relations reasons. And so if you look at it from that point of view, then that still means that. What does that mean? That he didn't, he didn't think he ought to get up there and shout me down. He thought he ought to get up there and, and try to get on board with what we're doing, which is apparently the dominant narrative on the right in America now is we should not be doing this. I know things look disappointing there when they did the Venezuela thing and when they're, you know, threatening Iran that Trump's most loyal base is going to whoop it up and some of his more famous influencers, influencers on Twitter are going to stand behind him and stuff. But by and large, out in the country, the right wing is anti war now and they're staying that way. You know, it's like 70% opposition to starting another war with Iran right now. I mean, that includes huge numbers of Republicans who we know all voted for Trump, you know, so, you know, there's, I'm sorry if I'm repeating myself from another show or something, Dar, but it, I think, you know, for W. Bush to say, well, I don't know, maybe we should have a humble foreign policy. And then some guys kamikaze are towers right now. All bets are off. He can do whatever he wants and forget all that. He's George Bush's son, after all. Give me a break. Right? But all he said, he like, mumble, mumble, humble something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But Donald Trump is like, I hate war. I'll kill war. You know, I'm like, how do you.
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C
Turn around from that?
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A
You know what I mean? I'm the greatest peacemaker who ever lived. And, and then, oh, no, I'm. I meant I am the most effective warlord who ever made demands. Like, you know, it's pretty, pretty whiplash inducing for people who really bought into the peace stuff, you know, because he can. He's just so hyperbolic. No matter what he says that it's just. That ain't just a flip flop, man. That's a just. I don't know what you call it, but it's a yeah, well, it's a free cow on the audience side.
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B
You know, a narrative that has emerged over the last 10 years. And you know, some people were, would have been talking about this beforehand but like not your sort of normie conservative. You know, where you're gonna see, you might see Jesse Waters say it on, you know, Fox News or certainly if you're on social media, any kind of right wing social media, you're gonna see the fact that these new wars, like if, if it happens, we're the ones that are going to fight it. Like the right wing in America, you know, Appalachia, all these like red states are the ones that's going to send their sons over there to go do it, you know, especially like in the actual combat forces, the frontline combat forces. It's overwhelming. It's like basically if you took away Texas and Florida, we probably wouldn't even have an infantry, you know. And so like that's kind of really hardened, I think a lot of the right wing in, into their anti war position. And I wouldn't necessarily call it like anti war in the sense that a libertarian's anti war. It's not doctrinaire. They just look at it as like you need to, you need to actually, you know, there was this video from when Nixon was vice president to Eisenhower and they were going to talk, you know, this is before Vietnam got started. But it was kind of on the agenda and it was, things were going on and they had Nixon. You can watch this on YouTube. Like he sat there and had like a 30 minute prime time, you know, slot on all channels. He had a big board behind him with maps and everything. And he sat there and you don't have to agree with the case he made, but he tried to make the case to the American people of exactly why this is important and why they should care. And it was a good faith effort to explain a position that you can agree with or not agree with. But they tried. And if, you know, I think right wingers are fine with that. If you could actually sit down and say, look, here's why, and then this is going to lead to that. And if it doesn't lead to that, we have outs and we can, you know, things we can change. But they don't do that at all. Like they just sort of, you know, the way every Single war since 2001 is gone has been. You wake up one day and we're just kind of in it and oh no, it's going to hell like in a handbag. And what do we Do. Well, just stay in the handbag, I guess, because it would be, you know, damaging to our international reputation if we, if we left. And you know, and so they don't want that. Like, they, they, they want somebody to treat them like adults and actually make a case to them if that's, if there's a case to be made, you know.
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C
Yeah.
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A
And which there's not. I mean, if we needed to have a war with Iran, we'd have had it a long time ago. The fact that we're still talking about whether we might or not just goes to show that there is no casus bell here. This is especially when it's clear on.
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B
Behalf of a foreign power, it is like so obvious and so clear that Iran does not want to fight with us. Like, it's obvious, like, and if you have, you know, if you have two parties and one of them clearly does not want to fight to the point that, you know, after you blow up their nuclear facilities, that they've spent decades making all these kind of things in a, you know, just a very sort of public way, their, their national prestige is on the line, the prestige of the regime is on the line, all this kind of stuff. Not to mention they just suffered all the damage from the Israelis and they still call ahead and let us know that, hey, we're going to be launching these missiles like from this location, at this location, just have yours. The fact that they still did that, I mean, they clearly don't want to fight with us, you know, and the fact that we're still breathing down their neck, it just, you know, it's just for me, I was thinking about this as I was, you know, I was kind of going back and forth with some of my followers, right wing followers on the ICE stuff and you know, I'm an immigration super hawk. I think we need to obviously enforce immigration law, but we need to dramatically reduce legal immigration as far as I'm concerned. Just like catch our breath for a while, get to know each other, the.
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C
People who are here.
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B
But something I realized over just sort of my discussions and arguments with a lot of the other right wingers who, you know, feel the same way about immigration, but we differ on ISIS tactics, is that my whole politics basically these days just sort of boils down to my dislike for bullies of bullies. I just don't like bullies. I don't like seeing bullies. Like, it doesn't matter who it is. I don't like seeing people I don't like get bullied. And I don't like my country, acting like a bully, which is kind of by definition what you are if, you know, you're trying to pick a fight again and again and again with a comp, with a country that clearly doesn't want to fight you.
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A
You know, we got a bunch of business, and we got a guest. So first, let me just show real quick here. Everybody go to this guy right here. You're running a business, especially, but even if you're not, you're just paying your taxes. You want to not go to jail. You want to pay them as little as possible. You want to find as many ways to depreciate assets and whatever you can do to avoid taxes legally. This is not some technicalitarian, you know, Irwin shift scam that gets you in trouble. This is, yes, you have to pay them, but no, you don't have to pay as much as they say you do. And Matt C. At Agorist Tax Advice is your guy to save your ass from those pigs. And that is very, very important. And then also, I'm sorry, man. I wanted to start with this, and I. I screwed up, dude. I. I forgot to do this. But this has got to be said.
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B
Where did it go, man?
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A
I'm so bad at this, dude. This has got to be done on the show tonight, man. This guy was acquitted this week, Darrell. His name is Adrian Gonzalez, and he was acquitted of abandoning the children in the school in Uvalde where the first graders were massacred. He was the first cop on the scene, and a lady said, oh, my God. A guy with a gun. He ran right in there with the little kids, and he stood there and did not go in and did not save the children. Now the chief of police is. Has his own separate responsibility, and he's going on trial soon. It's amazing that either of these two were charged. I asked Rock to make this statue for us here of Adrian Gonzalez hanging his head in shame. The greatest coward in the history of Texas. And the thing is, Darrell, you know, I know you're a military guy, or, you know, you were. I'm not pretending that I'm a tough guy. I mean, I can take a slam on a big ramp, but I'm not pretending to be some light warrior type dude. Although, you know, the day that that happened, I was with my friend Josh Holmes, who was an infantry man, and we were hanging out in New Hampshire, and I asked him, what do you do in a situation like that? And he said, close with the enemy and destroy it. That's what you do. That's the Job, man. You're an armed like, man of the state. Your job is protection. You got children. And you know, I know the courts have ruled that police do not have the obligation to protect you, but you know what? They've also ruled that police officers assigned to schools do have a positive obligation to intervene to protect children as and regardless of whatever court ruling. Of course they do. They're the monopoly security force. Of course they are obligated to die trying to, to stop somebody from killing children. And this guy Adrian, when he dies, if there's such a thing, Jesus, I'm sure is going to send him to hell to be tortured forever and ever and ever and ever. But at the very least, he will be remembered in the history of the great state of Texas as the worst one of us who ever lived, or at least equal to the guy who committed that massacre and slaughtered those children. So you, Adrian Gonzalez, and everybody who loves you.
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C
Good.
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B
Okay.
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A
And then. Okay, we'll do more spots later. But Daryl, let me ask you if you could please brief us on something I know that is very important to you that we've been meaning to talk about for a couple weeks now, which is this important developing split between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are, you know, they were allies. Mohammed bin Zayed is like the boss basically of Abu Dhabi, which is boss emirate of the other Emirates, basically. And he was best buddies with Muhammad bin Salman. They started the war in yemen together in 2015 and backed various factions there. And I know that Saudi backed Muslim Brotherhood factions, who they usually don't favor, but they do favor in Yemen, have been fighting against the Southern Transitional Council, which is backed by the uae. And I'm not sure whose side Al Qaeda is taking in that one. Probably UAE side in that one. But that's just a symptom of a broader problem developing throughout the region here, which I want to learn a lot more about. So please talk about that and, and then we will in a few minutes get to our great guest Joe Mullen here.
- [24:33]
B
Sure. So I've been trying to catch myself up on this and obviously it's difficult because all the Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia, like, they're so closed off, it's really hard to get good information out of there. But people have been talking about this more and more lately as it's, as the rift has become public. And you know, the, you mentioned mbz, the head of Abu Dhabi, the Amir there. He, you know, they're sort of like the driving force of this apparently, you know, excuse me, UAE obviously, is a federation of multiple Arab emirates and got Dubai and others, and several of them are, you know, like, Dubai is not really dependent, as dependent on oil and natural gas for its income. It has a sort of like, you know, a tourist industry, things like that. Abu Dhabi is much more dependent on that. And their, their leadership is a lot more ambitious and has a lot larger sort of regional and. And even extra regional goals that, that the rest of the Emirates don't share, but they're kind of being dragged along with them. And this is, you know, what, what we saw, I think this was like a couple weeks ago, you know, the, The Emiratis had a bunch of tanks and armored vehicles and other supplies that were all staged to go to the STC in, in Yemen. And the Saudi Arabian air force blew them up. The Saudis have been publicly speaking against the UAE's little civil war thing they got going in Yemen. They've been speaking out against. This is like in. On Al Arabi and like other Saudi media, they've been speaking out against what the Emirates are doing in. In Somaliland and their stance on that. And so you're starting to see is like. Or actually. And one more thing. The, you know, there, There was news recently that the last time it seemed like, you know, Trump was maybe gonna strike Iran when he was kind of given the signals himself that like, maybe the, maybe the planes are in the air, you know, that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, those two primarily, I think that they, that they called them up and said, and said, don't do it. And so, you know, it was apparently one of the factors that led to them not doing it. But the Emirates, they were not a part of that. You know, they're apparently very afraid of showing any daylight between themselves and Israel, which is. Which is, you know, this relationship that's been kind of emerging and is. Is a source of strife right now because as. As Iran is. Is declining in. In regional power and influence right now with the loss of their proxies and just their economic problems and everything else. You started. You're starting to see the Saudis, the Egyptians, Qatar and Turkey sort of emerge as this new Sunni axis. That. And Pakistan, I guess you'd have to include in that because Saudi has a defense pack now with Pakistan. And so all, you know, all we really know about where that's headed right now is that the UAE is not part of it. And, you know, if you read Saudi sources, which is mostly where I've been getting this, so I, you know, I haven't been getting to Emirati's side of the story so much because most of the people, for some reason writing about it, seem to be either from Saudi or telling the Saudi side that, you know, they. They are almost like. It seems like they're almost prepared to take military action if necessary like that. They're almost at that point, and it seems like maybe they've sort of backed UAE back into their. Like, put them back in their box. You know, there are a lot of, like, they didn't strike back after their stuff got blown up in Yemen. They haven't really been pushing back too hard. Like, it seems like they did overextend themselves and. And they kind of know it. Once their bluff got called, they've kind of been pushed back. But, yeah, you're starting to see Saudi become a lot more assertive in the region and take more of a leadership role that they really haven't in a long time. You know, I mean, not. Well, I wouldn't say that they. That they didn't have an assertive role in the region, but it was very much tied to American policy. It wasn't an independent policy so much, you know, And I'm sure there's still obviously a lot of integration there at this point. But, you know, Mohammed bin Salmans is really interesting guy because the whole Saudi leadership structure for so many years was all a bunch of guys who went to the London School of Economics in Georgetown and were classmates with Bill Clinton and all that kind of stuff. This dude doesn't even speak English.
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C
He's.
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B
He went to the University of Saudi Arabia, or I think it's Ibn Saud University, whatever it is. Like, he's. He's very much like. Like a Saudi guy. Like, he, you know, and in Saudi Arabia, if you talk to people from over there, you know, it's an interesting thing where, like, if you talk to a lot of people in a lot of different European countries and a lot of South American countries, say a lot of countries just around the world, they kind of know that there are these great powers, centers of world culture and military power and economic power and everything, and that they're sort of defined by their relationships to them. And you have a couple countries and there's really only a few, and it's one's the United States, another's China, maybe Japan, I guess, and, you know, India, Saudi Arabia, Russia. Just a few countries that really don't. They see themselves as the center of the world. Like, their. Their world maps have them smack in the middle of it. You know, that's just how they kind of see themselves and they understand history and, and the future going forward, like in those terms. And so MBS is very much cut from that cloth. And yeah, it's just going to be interesting to see how it develops. Like I said, I, I can't like break the whole thing down right now because it's. I don't think we even have enough information to really say what's going on behind the scenes or where it's headed. But it's something to watch for sure. It's one of the major stories in the region to watch. Yeah.
- [30:22]
A
Look, let me take one tangent from there before we get to our guest, Darrell, which is about their role in this board of Peace and the governance of the Gaza Strip supposedly going forward and, you know, whatever. Hamas isn't giving up their rifles. So I don't know how much of this is ever going to happen at all. But the idea is that they're going to create this new pseudo state administered by Turkey and Saudi in the Gaza Strip. Right. And so, you know, the Qataris and the Turks have always been very close to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Egyptians, you know, I guess the Egyptian regime hates them, but they have a strong presence there. But they sit in the parliament in Qatar. And of course, you know, if you go back, I don't know everything about Turkey's relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood, but I know they backed Arar al Sham and all of their friends back 15 years ago in the dirty war and that they're sure, you know, friends with Al Qaeda guys now. So I even, I even read a claim which I'm just, this is so contra my bias that I'm like, man, I don't know. But whatever, I don't know. You tell me what you think. I read a guy say, man, Trump is sticking it to Netanyahu here. This is not what he wants to have the Turks and the Saudis come in and have anything to do with the administration of the Gaza Strip. Trump is really is taking the issue away from Netanyahu and I'm just not sure he has the will to do any such thing or. That's a good read on that. But what do you think of that?
- [31:44]
B
Well, I'll tell you something. I heard from a source that gets face to face with Trump, you know, after the recent Iran almost strike or whatever that was, what he said was that Trump essentially was calling Netanyahu's bluff by he, he knew that the, that the Israelis were not prepared for another conflict at that time and that he and I, again, I Don't know if this is true. This may be something that this guy is getting from just like the rumor mill in Washington, D.C. or something. But, I mean, he's, he's very connected. That, you know, when Trump, when they activated the, just sort of the, the big insurgent network that threw gasoline onto the fire of those protests, which were legitimate protests at first, by the way. That's important to note that, you know, there's the, the, the, the protests in Iran did start out as, as a, it wasn't a regime change protest. You know, it's not what the people were out in the streets for. They were complaining about actual things that were going on, failures of the government. And the Israelis decided to just activate this network that they'd spent 15 years or longer sort of building up. And the idea was to put Iran into a position where, you know, where you could convince Trump that. Because, like, look, the thing you got to understand about Trump's foreign policy when it comes to, or his, like, his, his willingness to commit to kinetic action is you have to be able to sell him on the idea that this is going to be fast, it's going to be easy, it's going to be a quick, easy, good win, and, like, you'll get to go brag about it and it's all over. And like, that's, and they were able to do that with Venezuela, for example, and they hadn't been able to do it with, with Iran. And so when they activated all these groups and it started really heating up over there, that was the plan, according to, according to somebody I was talking to, that the plan was to be able to now bring this to Trump and say all you got to do is basically just deliver the coup de grace. Right? And that Trump sort of delayed and delayed and delayed, and that this was on purpose. Again, I'm not saying this myself. I'm just telling you what I've heard, that this was sort of on purpose and that he basically let the Israelis burn up this network that they've been cultivating for over a decade. And at the last, at the last second, once Iran had sort of stamped down on the protests and everything, said, okay, yeah, I'm ready to, I'm ready to do these strikes. You know, let's do it. And that Netanyahu, as well as the Saudis and them, for different reasons, but Netanyahu asked him not to go forward with the strikes and that, you know, that the idea, the idea was, according to my guy, is that basically he was, you know, now, like, they've been pushing him. The neocons, the Israelis have been pushing him, pushing him, pushing him. All the people who gave him all this money, Miriam Adelson and her network, pushing him ever since he got into office about military action against Iran and that now he can be like, hey, look, I was ready to go, I had planes in the air, I was ready to rock and roll and you told me to call it off, so stop bothering me. I don't know if any.
- [34:54]
A
That's a nice story.
- [34:56]
B
Yeah, yeah, but that's just, yeah. At least you know, there may around.
- [35:00]
C
In D.C. something to that.
- [35:02]
A
I mean. Yeah, I don't know, man, I'll tell you, let, let's just drop it for now. I, we can't even talk about Syria. We don't have time. There's so much going on in Syria as well. We can focus on next week but we got to get to our guest here. This stuff is also crucial. I just, you know, you and I both are obsessed with foreign policy first all the time, which is good, but America also is important and our state of being here. So let us introduce our great guest, it's Joe Solis Mullen and he is a fellow at the Libertarian Institute and a good friend. He's also a professor at, I forgot what you call it, university up there in Michigan. And let me show you here his great archive at the Libertarian Institute here. Trump's tariffs made his farm bailouts inevitable. Is his latest the thirty Years War. Political and religious dimensions considered. It's brilliant stuff, guys. Airstrikes in Nigeria, war in the making of the American state in the 20th century. You see what I mean? War in the growth of the American state in the 19th century. The year ahead in Sino American relations. This is top quality stuff, you guys. All available for you there@libertarianinstitute.org and I'm very happy to welcome you to the show. Joe, how you doing?
- [36:20]
C
I'm real, Scott. Real well, Scott, thank you to you and Daryl for having me.
- [36:24]
B
Yeah, man, it's great to talk to you.
- [36:26]
A
Yeah, absolutely.
- [36:28]
C
Yeah.
- [36:28]
A
So let me see if I can do this right. I want to play some of this Trump speech. Let me preface it here while I'm trying to figure out if I'm going to be able to get this to play right for us with by saying that when I, when I saw Trump speak at the Libertarian Party national convention in 2024 where he came to get our vote, whoever wrote that speech for him was pretty libertarian or maybe you would call like a very thoughtful and, and Serious and well informed fiscal conservative, if you want to call it that. But I'll tell you, I was impressed with him. I was impressed with his statements about all of his deregulation that he accomplished in his first term, which was really extensive. And people just don't appreciate the regulatory burden on people trying to do business in this country. I mean, it's like living in national socialism or something. It's just ridiculous. And he got up there and went on this well written by somebody else rant about what he really had done against the fourth branch in so many ways. And he is a businessman after all. He ain't Joe Biden. I don't know, we all kind of hate and want to like the guy. I don't know. But so here he is. I want to play a little bit of this because of course he's all very braggadocious about the state of the economy now and I'm not so sure. But I want to play a little bit of this and maybe I'll put it on a little bit faster speed and, and then we'll ask Joe to get into analyzing some of this stuff.
- [38:05]
B
Can't hear him, Scott.
- [38:07]
A
I'm sorry, you say you can't hear it.
- [38:08]
B
Well, I can't hear it at all.
- [38:10]
A
You guys can't hear it at all.
- [38:12]
B
I can't.
- [38:12]
A
Well, never mind then. It's playing in the room. I'm sorry, I don't know. Well, anyway, whatever. Inflation is gone, growth has gone wild. Everything's great. In fact, he announced today we're going to be able to abolish the income tax because the tariffs are going to pay for everything. And look, I mean, he came into office after a massive monetary inflation under his Covid act and then especially Biden's Covid and infrastructure bills and everything where they just introduced all of this new currency. And so there's been a lot of correction. I think that's already taken place in a lot of markets. I don't know exactly where we are in the business cycle. Now Trump clearly, I don't know if he's an Austrian, but he's a business, a real estate tycoon and he knows low interest rates are good and high interest rates are going to lead to a correction that he does not want to have to suffer. So he's even like waging war against the Fed now to try to get them to keep cutting rates to inflate more because it's better than the correction from his point of view, which makes a lot of sense from his point of View. But anyway, let me try to come up with a good question to start you off here, Joe. I guess, you know, not too broad, but can we start with what his claims about inflation finally being licked here, where in other words, whatever new money is being created is actually going into real productivity, not just diluting the value of the rest of the money out here.
- [39:32]
C
Okay, sure. So, so the question of are we going to see a rise in the general price level has a couple of different components. And obviously when Austrians talk about inflation, they're talking about monetary inflation. They're talking about adding to the monetary base. It's just a simple question of if you have a certain amount of something, it has a value. And then if you increase the amount of that thing, the quantity of it, it's going to have less value. Keteris paribus. All other things being equal. So that has not studied. So monetary expansion is still going on. If anyone wants to go and look, you can go to the Fed's St. Louis website and just Google M2M2 St. Louis Fed and it'll show you a graph showing that we are still seeing a healthy amount of monetary expansion. This is nothing outside the ordinary. That's, that's quite normal in terms of what he's really interested in, especially because that speech, which I watched the Davos speech twice and it really sounded a lot like an election year speech. Right? It sounded a lot like an election year speech. It was especially important, I think, number one, your, your, your audience there, this is a leading of world economic leaders. So you are pitching your economic policies to them. And we can talk about what his policies are, what their intended effects are and what we've seen so far, which it's hard to say a lot about it because we're, we're really less than a year in really, and we haven't even seen a concerted application of one specific thing because it's, it's kind of been all over the place. There's tariffs now there's not tariffs. We're going to delay those. So it's hard to say exactly. But then there's also the domestic audience. I thought it was extremely telling that even the Wall Street Journal, which is a very sympathetic paper to Donald Trump, at least on, on his economic policies, you know, in terms of deregulation and tax cuts and things like that. Even they, and, and for years they've been trumpeting what a great economy it is. And you know, normal people just don't understand how great this economy is. They don't get it even they had some, some public polling data that they released that they had done that showed that voters are souring on the economy and that they kind of are blaming Trump for it. And that the watchword within the Trump administration's economic team right now is affordability. And that's why you've seen this emphasis on things like, like preventing large corporations from buying single family housing the year cap on credit card rates. So there's a big emphasis on, on affordability. So that's, that's one part of it. And so I, I don't know what you'd like me to say specifically about that, but that's, that's kind of how I view that. Part of it is, is that there's a lot of domestic stuff going on there. Then there's also the stuff that's, that's intended for, for the European leaders because as difficult as it is to do business in the United States with the burdensome regulations here, it is many, many, many times worse in, in Europe as well as the, the taxes as well. I happened to speak to a, to a German businessman when I was over there last summer and he told me I, I pay almost 80% of my, my earnings in taxes and that, that's wild to me. That's, that's, that's incredible. That's, that's absolutely incredible. So, and then there's their energy policies. You know, I think people are coming around to recognizing that, golly, when you mothball, you know, all your fossil fuels and you don't embrace nuclear, oh my gosh, now all of a sudden energy costs a bazillion dollars and you're de, industrializing your, your economy. And here I'm speaking specifically about Germany, which is a very export driven economy and Germany's economy is, is dead in the water and that's, that's Europe's engine right there. So I, I thought Trump had very good things to say to the Europeans. Lutnick gave a speech as well that, you know, was pretty bruising. Pretty bruising. I don't know if you caught his, his comments, but you know, he's trying to get their attention. I thought, you know, he's very, very straightforward guy. You know, he said we, we'd love to be allies with the Europeans, but we only want strong allies. And when I look at Europe, obviously it's not a military force. There's no serious military power in Europe. And they made a bet on geo. Economic power. And certainly the European Union is a large market. But show me a European firm that's a leader in anything other than maybe like luxury handbags.
- [43:53]
B
It seems to me like, you know, Trump is a real estate guy, business guy, obviously. He's, he, his whole career has been built on, on debt, right, which most real estate developers are, are that way. I mean, that's sort of the lens through which he sees the economy and sees growth, sees the world. Like, I wonder to myself, like, you know, as good Austrians, you know, we, we would like to see the inefficiencies get purged. The correction has to happen. It can happen now or it can happen later and be worse. It's up to you. Take your medicine and all that. But, you know, our debt is $40 trillion now. And I don't know what the interest payments are at the moment, but I do know that, I do know that the turnover in terms of the average treasury maturity date is pretty sure. I think it's like, maybe, you know, better, it's five or six years or something like the, the average turnover. And so that means, like, interest rates, as they go up, start to get baked in to the, to the interest payments we got to make more and more quickly. You know, is he just, is he, is he sort of making the bet that, like, okay, you're a person who makes 50 grand a year and you owe $10 million and you are never paying that back. It's never going to happen in a million years. It's just you're really functionally already bankrupt. And so the only thing to do is to borrow another 10 million and put it all on black and just hope that you can do that. And like, maybe he's doing that with the AI stuff because, like, the tech guys are very embedded other things. He's just hoping that he can pull that off.
- [45:23]
C
That's a great question. And he actually addressed this in the Q and A afterward, where the moderator asked him, how do you keep the growth going because you've got the American economy growing. How do you keep it growing? You know, are you concerned about America's debt? So, first of all, maturity, average maturity turnover on debt, little under six years. Average interest Slightly over 3% annual interest paid out almost a trillion dollars. Okay, so I actually wrote an article and I can post a link or whatever on my Twitter so that it's more modern, because I know it can be kind of hard to search hundreds of articles, but it was basically showing, okay, what would need to happen to grow our way out of the debt. Because that was Trump's answer. Trump's answer was, look, the economy is going to be growing so fast that the, the $40 trillion in debt isn't going to matter because we're going to grow so fast that it's not going to matter. This is highly, highly optimistic. I actually have done some more recent calculations on this kind of looking at how, how fast would it have to grow? So the debt, because of the accumulating interest and the, just the sheer amount and we're not even talking about unfunded liabilities. We're not talking about all the things the government has promised to pay people in entitlements down the road, which is like well over $100 trillion. Let's just stick with what they've already borrowed and are on the hook for. That's growing by over 6% per year.
- [46:46]
B
Okay.
- [46:46]
C
And that's, that's actually going to accelerate as budget deficits continue. Now in, we're averaging over the last several years right around 3%. This year it's going to come in probably under 2%. We don't have the final numbers yet, but as you can see if the debt is growing 6% compounding annually and we're only growing 3%. Good year. And that 3% is pretty solid because a solid estimate. I mean barring something unusual happening because that's pretty much what the average has been over the last six decades. So you know, it's fine to bet that you're going to grow your way out, but that was the promise that Reagan made, that was the promise that Bush made, that was the promise that Obama and Trump made. The only two presidents who didn't promise that were H.W. bush and, and Bill Clinton, who I don't like either of those guys, but they worked with their congressional opposition to create a balanced budget ultimately. And we were on track. We, we, Clinton left office with budget surpluses and we were on pace to have the debt paid off by the end of the first decade of the 2000s. Now that wouldn't have solved all the problems because of course we had all these unfunded entitlements staring down the barrel in the future. But I look at that and say, wow, because we have to look at the opportunity cost. This is, I wrote an article about the opportunity costs of the war on terror because everyone looks at the headline number and says, oh my goodness, $8 trillion. That's so much money. It's like, that is a lot of money. But let's pretend instead of spending that $8 trillion, we invested it in a risk free asset like US Treasuries yielding 2 and a half or 3% over the last 25 years. Oh my goodness. Now we went from negative $8 trillion to like positive $17 trillion. So we're in a huge, we're in, we're in huge trouble. I mean, without serious inflation, serious inflation, I mean, and when I say inflation, we're talking here. Here's the most realistic way for the national debt to get paid off. We need about 4% GDP growth every year. We need sustained budget surpluses. They don't need to be huge. But we can't run any more deficits and we need inflation to run at about 5% a year for about the next 15 years. That's just not politically possible to do.
- [49:03]
B
It's just not, hasn't, hasn't a lot of our growth over the last decade or so, maybe since the financial crisis, even been driven by government spending, like a lot of the growth itself. And so if we pulled that back, obviously a lot of that's going to go away. Maybe they could do it in targeted ways that it wouldn't have such an impact. But I mean it, it really seems like we're caught between a rock and a hard place in the sense that, you know, if there is a, a correction, the correction that's, that probably needs to be made, we're going to run into the limit on our ability to service that debt really quickly. And if, and if that happens, I mean, I don't even think we have, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't. Maybe you can, maybe you can tell me. But it seems to me like we don't even have really a model for how that would go because of how central the United States dollar is to just economies all over the world. And so it just seems like it would be a complete and total disaster that they're just trying to put off.
- [49:57]
C
I, yes, I think you're absolutely right. They're definitely trying to kick the can down the road. I think it's important to emphasize that the United States government has defaulted three times on their obligations. And these were what we call technical defaults. This is where you basically change the, the, the terms of which we lent you the money. Whether it's, you know, reneging on the gold clause, changing the gold clause in the 30s, or closing the dollar convertibility window in the, in 1971. Interestingly, I think a gradual de. Dollarization is the only real hope that champions of re industrializing the United States, people like Donald Trump, for example, they want to re industrialize the United States, eliminating the Dollar's role as the global reserve currency is the absolutely necessary critical step for that happening. And so there's, there's always been this tension here and it's, it's been recognized. Trump has talked about wanting a weaker dollar because it, it's very disadvantageous for American exporters. A strong dollar means that foreigners can buy fewer of your goods. And this was something that was recognized all the way back during World War II when they all met at Bretton Woods. There was an argument between Harry Dexter White, who is the American representative and also probably a commie spy. It turned out. A commie. Yeah, it turns out he might have been a commie spy. It's, you know, he says he wasn't. There's, he definitely there was something going on there. And John Maynard Keynes and Harry Dixer White said, dollar hegemony is going to be how this goes. The American dollar is going to be the global reserve currency. Everyone's going to hold our dollars. We are going to have the control of the global financial system. And Keynes objective and said, look, this is, this is going to create a natural structural imbalance that the trade cycles are not going to be able to clear. What's going to happen? So in classical economics and under a pure gold standard, what would happen is budget, is trade surpluses, trade deficits would naturally correct each other. Because what would happen here is if I'm exporting a lot and people are buying a lot of my stuff, that's going to bid up the price of my currency and that's going to raise the cost of my wages and my exports are going to lose their competitiveness, my businesses are going to start laying people off, right. My trade surplus is going to go down.
- [52:23]
B
Right.
- [52:24]
C
And it's going to drop to a point that the dollar becomes weaker, wages become lower, it becomes competitive again. And it's kind of this like nice gradual undulation between different trading partners. And Keynes recognized, look, if we are artificially holding the dollar this way, what's going to happen is you're going to de. Industrialize the United States eventually everything is going to be purchased on debt and the dollar is going to be held up artificially made, artificially strong. And certainly no fan of John Maynard Keynes, but he was absolutely right about that. He said that what we needed was this thing called a neutral unit of account. And he called it a bancor. And so there'd be this International Settlements bank and you, all, you, all of you would, would use your currencies to buy Bancorp and it would be this neutral currency that you all use so that no one could, could, could, you know, monopolize the global financial system. And he argued that it wasn't even going to be good for the United States. And he was actually entirely right about that. And it makes it impossible for the United States to, to, to, to re, industrialize in a big way. And that's obviously a big goal of, of, of Donald Trump's administration. And obviously he's only been at it for one year and it's way too early to say that it's been a failure. You know, I don't really like making predictions about the future because, you know, you can wind up being wrong and then this will exist on the Internet forever as me having been wrong. But I will say, so far the numbers don't look good. We're have, we have fewer manufacturing jobs today than we did when he started. Our, our trade deficit with the rest of the world is on pace to be even larger than last year. And China's trade surplus, which is how their economic model is designed, and we can talk about why it's, why it's built that way. Theirs is going to be over a trillion dollars with the globe. So their trade surplus with the world is at a record, and our trade deficit with the world is also at a record. So. And as you said, we're also running out of fiscal room and more. Monetary expansion is not the recipe. It's not the recipe at all. We've had about 3% inflation CPI increases annually since 2000. And look what's happened to the price of the median home in America. Just look at it. We're broke. We're so broke. I ran some calculations earlier when the Wall Street Journal's thing came out talking about median income and stuff, and look how rich we are. Look, back in 1974, the median income was just over $11,000, right? Today it's over $70,000. Okay, but if you measure the buying.
- [55:02]
B
Household or individual household, sorry, D. Household.
- [55:06]
C
It was individual.
- [55:07]
B
You didn't say.
- [55:08]
C
Okay, so median household income in 1974 was just over $11,000. Today it's slightly over $70,000. But if you measure the purchasing power of that $74,000 today, in $1974, you wind up with slightly less than $25,000, which is the equivalent of about $9,500. So in real terms, since 1974, the median household income has actually fallen in purchasing power from slightly over $11,000 to just over 90 $500. We're just getting way poorer we're getting way poor. Like people can't afford homes. You have to have two people working. You can't have four or five or six kids. My grandfather had seven kids. My grandmother didn't work and he was a police officer and he sent them to private school. They owned their home, they had two cars and they retired when he was like 62 or something. That's, that's, that's, that's so dead. And it's, it's again, it's a function of the monetary inflation which hits assets like housing and stocks first. And that's one of the reasons people say there's so much wealth inequality. Wealth inequality. It's like, yeah, get rid of the central bank. It is, it is a totally financialized economy. So of course that's where the assets see the greatest increase first. And it's a very small subset of the population who owns the majority of these financial assets. It's just not that complicated.
- [56:34]
B
De dollarization, gradual or not, I mean that pretty much entails interest rates in the US going up, right? I mean that's the, being the reserve currency. And also I guess just the fact that we're the only game in town large enough to soak up the mountains of capital that the trade surplus countries are putting out there, that holds our interest rates down. For interest rates go up though, as you said, the turnover on average is about six years. I mean we're going to default pretty fast if that happens. And I mean I, you know, the message, I think a lot of Austrians, I mean, this is on where, where I think I'm probably at, on the issue is that that's inevitable and it would be better to like admit it and start doing it in a managed way rather than waiting until it hits the brick wall. But, no, but, but in a, you know, in a, in a political system where we elect people to office, I mean that's really like a non starter. Nobody's going to do that and eat that bullet, you know.
- [57:33]
C
Well, I think you're right. So, so for years I've said, I've said defaulting is. Let me just, let me, can I.
- [57:37]
A
Add to that real quick that.
- [57:39]
C
Yeah, yeah.
- [57:39]
A
That this is supposedly the reason this is the excuse for the so called independence of the Fed is that I learned this as a kid, that this is one of the first things I ever learned about inflation at all. It's like, why is there even a central bank at all? And it's because the Congress and the President will only ever inflate, inflate Inflate, inflate, because they'll never want to have a correction. And so you have to have an independent central bank that is willing to do the hard thing and raise interest rates. Take the punch bowl away at the party right when things are getting out of hand so that they don't get out of hand and somebody has, in other words, once you have an inflationary monetary system, somebody's got to have a break on it. And if it's just up to the elected politicians and they're very, you know, short two, four and six year time horizons and time preferences, then they will only ever inflate. And so that becomes the excuse then for the Fed being completely independent from the elected government at all. But I just wanted to add this real quick here too. Chris Rossini is Ron Paul. You know, Dan McAdams, they do the show four days a week about foreign policy. But on Fridays Ron's showed the Liberty Report. He has Chris Rossini as his Austrian economics advisor guy and he's a great guy and a great follow on Twitter. And he had this Tweet, he said U.S. deficit spending record high. U.S. government debt record high. Interest payments on government debt record high. And that's the one that really gets me. That's just the IRS confiscating people's hard as hell earned wealth and just setting it on fire. It's just, oh, it enrages me. American household debt record high. And that means credit card debt on insane userous interest rates to because people can't just keep taking out bank loans for slightly lower rates for personal expenses and things. Owning a house record high. This is where they say oh, Americans are wealthier than ever. People who already own a home, it gets artificially inflated. But that's really just saying they've made houses so expensive nobody can buy them and that they've made it where people have had to waste fortunes just on a place to live. So it's completely back aster. It's talking about opportunity costs. If a house was affordable. Think of all the other stuff you could be doing with that money. And then the gold price as he puts it, the measurement of dollar destruction record high. It's a race to total bankruptcy. And then so here's where I get to the only thing that I really understand about economics that enrages me the most, I guess other than paying interest on the debt, where the cost of the interest on the debt now is more than the world empire. It's more than Medicare, but less than Social Security still. But it's Just insane to think about that. But anyway, it's the boom bust cycle. I lived it my whole life. When I was a kid, there was a giant real estate crash. Nobody could sell their houses for years and years and years in the neighborhoods where I grew up and stuff. They had built entire neighborhoods, streets and curbs. But then they never built the houses because they just. The economy was called off for like 15 years. And then we had another major crash, of course, in 1999 with the DOT com bust. You talk about Bill Clinton surpluses. That was all the Fed printing money, shoveling it to these corporations that are paying the taxes in the bubble for that surplus was all that was. That was a bookkeeping trick anyway. But then, of course, the massive crash of 2008, and then we were due for a crash when the government locked the whole country down for Covid. So that was equivalent, I think, to them raising interest rates through the roof and liquidating all the bad debt and having a big crash and correction, which we would do for anyway. But then they created like one third of all the money that. All the dollars that have ever been created since then. So we've had a massive boom since then. So I guess I'm leading up to a real question, which is am I right that in my conception of the thing, and based off of what Chris is saying here, too, that this growth is essentially completely hollow, right? This is. They're saying that huge percentage of the growth of the economy and in the stock market and everything is just these few AI companies and Nvidia and whatever. And it's all based on. It's all vaporware and. And based on funny money. No different than 1999. And while everything else is, I mean, you see, people are driven to socialism and, and, you know, strong nationalism or worse, in a war against what the centrists and the liberals have done with the economy, especially on the most basic issue of can a man buy a home so he can shelter a woman and children within it? Which is sort of the kind of the basis of having a civilization which they are making impossible. So I just wonder, I guess, really like where we are in the business cycle here. Obviously, Trump is trying everything he can to keep inflating and keep inflating and keep cutting taxes, do everything stimulative that he can to prevent the correction from coming. But I just wonder, like, when you think it is and how bad you think it's going to hit when it finally comes compared to, say, 2008, for example.
- [62:47]
C
Well, there's a lot there so I'm going to, I'm going to try and take it kind of in, in reversal.
- [62:52]
A
Plus you were, you were, and you were picking up, you were saying something in response to Daryl too, that was along those same lines I think too, if you can, if you remember and can incorporate all that too. Joe, come on.
- [63:04]
C
I'll admit. So I'm here in Michigan, so It is after 9 o' clock and I was teaching all day, so my brain is not as sharp as it could be. I, I'm so sorry, Daryl. I cannot remember what we were saying. If after this you want to remind me, that would be great.
- [63:19]
B
My bad.
- [63:19]
A
I'm sorry guys. I thought I was. Little comment in there.
- [63:23]
C
Okay, so.
- [63:25]
A
Yes, of course someone in the comments will remember.
- [63:29]
C
There's, there's a great, there's a great guy over at the, The Misesu, Ryan McMake, and he's, I think he's the chief editor over there, but he's been writing for years. Every time they'd release GDP numbers he would say here's what, here's what GDP was without all the government spending. And so you can, you can always find his art. So it's true a lot of our GDP is, is government spending. As far as, as far as the, the Fed manipulating the money supply and the business cycle and stuff. Yes, I think there's a, there's a few things that are going on here. So when we talk about the 1990s and we talk about the great moderation, right, that was, it was the great moderation, we can have monetary policy lower, interest rates lower. There I, I've written several articles about this, giving Greenspan's justifications for doing so. Everything from like the Tequila Crisis to the Russia crisis to the y2k scare to the LTCM, all these reasons, there was always a reason to keep monetary policy loose, keep interest rates lower. Now the lower the interest rate, most of the money is actually created by the banks, right? And so what, what the Fed actually controls is the cost of the money. That's, that's what they're trying to influence is the cost of money. And the idea of course is that if you raise interest rates, you make the money more expensive and if you lower interest rates, they, they get cheaper. Now China joins the WTO and we get all of these additional cheap imports. Well, if, if, if the, the CPI is staying lower because that, you can also have monetary policy be lower for that reason. Now the problem with holding monetary policy low like that is it creates distortions in the bond market. And when you can't get yield in the bond market, it tends to push these investors into more risky assets. And this was the story of the Latin American debt crisis, the East Asian crisis. This was the story of the dot com bubble bursting. This was also the story of the subprime market crash. This was all essentially due to yield manipulation. And when you saw the bubble reinflate post crash, it was because interest rates at times, real estates were basically negative. You, you're not going to invest money and where you're paying to have invested the money, that's insane. So what it did is it pushed people into these, these tech stocks right where you said, now the economy is just a handful of tech stocks that are bouncing around and the housing prices have gotten completely out of control. Yeah, they poured tons of money into houses and real estate and these high flying tech stocks that promised a big future return. But a lot of that was because the bond market was so out of whack. There was a, there was a yield desert there all while I was in college and grad school, you know, from 2009 really till like 2019 it started to get back to normal. But then Covid hit, then Covid hit and they dropped rates to zero again. And all of a sudden you had all this money flooding into these very, you know, speculative investments. But that's because the money is so cheap and you can't get decent yield investing in something like high grade corporate debt or a 30 year Treasury. When did the money start pouring into treasuries? In 2022 when Powell Co. Yanked the interest rate back up towards what historically was more normal. When you look back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, you know, getting that, getting that rate up around 6, 7, 8%, we got used to, and the economy got used to lots and lots of cheap, basically free at times money. And so when Trump is saying we have to get the interest rates lower, we have to get the interest rates lower. It's, it's really a function of the fact that so much of the economy is built on debt, so much of corporations and households is built on debt. He understands that this party can't keep going with interest rates this high. And so if it means letting inflation run at 3 or 4 or 3 and a half percent instead of the 2% that it's supposed to be, so be it. His calculation is that that's going to be better. And of course for himself. You mentioned, you know, short term political calculations. Obviously as we sit here theorizing about like gradual dollarization or you know, all these different things. Like no politician who's facing election in two years or four years or even six years can invest the kind of real capital, the real political capital you need to invest in order to pursue strategies that in the short term are going to be painful. There's no question these are going to be painful. Even if we pursued the most intelligent, wise de dollarization strategy where it was all very carefully coordinated with the rest of the world, it wasn't some kind of like immediate default interest rates shoot through the roof, it is going to raise interest rates. Even if we did it gradually, things are going to get more expensive. But that is the right move long term. There's no question that the path we're on is completely unsustainable. And there are tons of off ramps, but they're costly. And when you talk about someone like the Fed and Fed independence, the Fed is just a firefighter. I mean, yes, you can say that he's pumping gas on the existing fire and then when the blaze gets out of control, he's trying to tamp the fire out by throwing more gasoline on there. So that's not very helpful. But that's the only tool that the Fed has. Right? That's all they can do is put more money in the system. What they need is Congress to do something. They need Congress to stop running $2 trillion annual deficits. It's just insane to me that these continuing resolutions come up and it's like we'll just keep doing what we're doing.
- [69:06]
B
Yeah. Your point about people, investors having to move into risk because there's no yield on bonds. As you know, a lot of the big institutional Money Take Like CalPERS, the public employees pension fund in California. Gigantic. I don't know what it's worth now. It's huge. Trillions, I think. Yeah, I read this was, this was a few years ago back in the 2010s, I guess. But you know, I was reading that, you know, the amount that California state workers pay into that fund doesn't cover the retired workers. Like the fund has to make something like 7% a year on the money it's got in order to meet its obligations to the people who already have their pensions going. And so if it, I mean, it has to make 7% if it's going to make those payments. And so, you know, if you can get a good chunk of that at 5% in 10 year treasuries and you got a little bit of room to operate with, you know, with the, with the riskier stuff. But if any, I mean, if any kind of government, treasury, stable government bond anywhere or really stable corporate debt or anything is going to give you a half a percent or 1 or 2%, you got no choice but to go into things that really pension funds have no business being in anyway.
- [70:19]
C
Yeah, that's exactly right. And we've seen some pension funds get into huge trouble. We've seen some maturity mismatches sink some regional banks and they're just trying to survive. I mean these are minor players. Even a big pension fund like California is like, when we talk about the blackrocks and the JP Morgan's like, or the Federal Reserve for goodness sakes. I mean, so it's, I don't know, I mean, I look at some of the policies that are being pursued by the current administration and I think, you know, I, I see the logic here. I, I see the end goal. I just don't think that the, the means match the stated goals. And I, I wouldn't be surprised if it, if it doesn't work out because you know, I look at the choice to de, industrialize the United States, which it, it was a choice. It started with Bretton woods, but it continued thereafter. And I've written numerous articles about the choice and by the foreign policy and national security establishment that really dominated the government during the Cold War, during the 50s, 60s, 70s, there was a deliberate choice to use economic policy to achieve security ends. And this, this was, this was openly stated. You can go read all the documents, it's all declassified now. And they said, you know, we need to think about these economic trade offs in terms of trade, in terms of their security implications. And so it was never free trade. It was asymmetrical trade liberalization. It was okay Japan, okay West Germany, you can export as much stuff you want to the United States with minimal interference, taxes, tariffs, anything like that. But you can keep the protective tariffs and the subsidies in your own economy as long as you do what we say, foreign policy wise and you let us have our bases there and you march to the beat of our drum. And it was, it was that simple. And it's again, at the time, you know, it wasn't said that way, but you can read all the documents now, all the national security documents. It's all out there. There was a really great book that came out when I was, I think I was an undergrad at the time, but it was called Trading Factories for Finance and it was by Judith Stein and it was about the necessary financialization of the American economy in the Name of basically propping up the dollar as the global reserve currency. I think it was like Princeton University Press or something. But I have it in here somewhere. It's a great book if anybody wants to read it, full of like first quotes.
- [72:39]
B
It's somewhere along the line, by the time the Cold War ended, you know, the people who instituted those policies might have known they were making certain trade offs for security reasons in the Cold War and all that. Somewhere along the line, I think people forgot why we had that stuff in place because it became a sacred doctrine that, you know, when Trump started mentioning tariffs, putting aside whether they're good or bad for, you know, a given industry or whatever, when he even mentioned it, it wasn't sort of a, you know, a recoiling horror that people felt because this is just going to do so much damage economic. It was, how dare you, how dare you change this system. And you know, it was a system that was put in place to, for strategic reasons during the Cold War, you know, and it was a, it was a trade off we understood at the time. That seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle somewhere when you talked about.
- [73:29]
A
You know, people being forced to make risky investments and all of that. How come it is that even if like say the interest for mortgage is 6 or 7%, if you have a savings account, they'll pay you like half a percent or something. It seems like when interest rates go up at all, it not for a regular person with a savings account, they don't. You got to go and make a bet on something or another, a Bitcoin or a sports team or something.
- [73:55]
C
Well, when, when the underlying interest rates went up for a while there you could get savings accounts and CDs to pay you a couple percent. But that was highly unusual and it's, it's since come down like that. That was, that was the norm when my parents were, well, I guess really starting in like the 80s because there were actually interest rate, the government actually used to cap the amount of interest rates, interest that could be offered in savings accounts. And that was part of the whole deregulation of the financial system in the 1970s and 1980s to allow like interstate banshee bank branching. And they removed the, the interest rate caps. That's why you'd like. Did your grandma ever talk about like going down to the bank and getting a toaster or something? Okay, yeah, they'd like, they'd like give you things because the government said you can't pay them more interest. But during the 1970s when inflation got out of Control and their savings were being eaten alive. And the banks were like, we've got to raise the amount of interest we're paying these people because they're going to leave and put their money in these like new jumbo CDs and all these different things. And the government was like, no, we're.
- [75:03]
B
Not going to do that.
- [75:04]
C
So they'd come up with things that like, pay you in kind. Like, hey, if you have $1,000 in your savings account, you're in the drawing for a new Buick. And so they, you know, and they'd have like toasters, you know, and all sorts of different stuff. But yeah, no, so, and then.
- [75:20]
A
Is that because the government.
- [75:22]
C
Sorry, go ahead.
- [75:23]
A
I was to say, is that because the government's trying to force regular people to invest in the stock market instead of just having a savings account and something?
- [75:30]
C
No, no, this was. They're trying to force money on other involvement in the stock market. This was pre popular involvement in the stock market. This was back when like 15 of people had any stock market exposure at all. That's one of the reasons that the stock market today, if you pull up the S&P 500 and you look at it, you say, holy smokes, it's just like it's way above. Well, there's a bunch of different reasons for that. And monetary inflation is part of it. But another part of it is so many people back in the 60s, 70s, they had, they had defined benefit retirements. Their employer was going to pay their retirement. So you didn't have like a 401k full of stocks. You didn't have all these equity mutual funds. The, the stock market was a thing for like mostly professionals and institutional people. It wasn't something that the average person did that came in the, in the 90s. Really the 90s was when the stock market started to be something that average people, normal people started putting their money in to be able to retire. And part of that was just easier access, you know, brokers, the nasdaq, over the counter stuff. And part of it too is the fact that all these corporations were saying, yeah, we're not actually going to pay your retirement. Sorry about that. So, yeah, yeah, I don't know. It's a tough economy for, for, for pretty much anyone under. Golly, I don't know. I just think about when I was a kid and it was like, wow, if your, if your parents, if your household was making $75,000 when I was a kid, you guys were great. You were going on vacation, a couple cars, mom probably didn't work. And now 80,000 bucks.
- [77:04]
B
I remember, you know, an aunt and uncle of mine, my uncle was a construction worker. She was a hairdresser, my aunt. And we all thought they were rich. Like, we literally thought they were rich. I mean, I had nice cars, nice house in the, you know, in a nice little housing development, went on vacations, went skiing and it was, you know, he's a construction worker and a hairdresser. And you could, you could kind of do that even in the 90s to a degree. Although I think we see now like a big part of that is, you know, ever since maybe, I don't know when this really kicked off me in the 70s or. Or the 80s, you know, a lot of that has been made up by consumer debt explosion, you know, so.
- [77:40]
C
Yeah, but I think the biggest. And that's true consumer debt was a thing in the 90s, I can remember that's when my parents got like their first credit cards. Credit cards were like not a thing prior to that. And part of that was just with like credit scores and computers, more people could have a credit history and so lenders could have a better idea of like, what kind of credit risk are you. So, like, there wasn't really like a subprime or like near prime credit market. It was too risky. But when you look at the amount of monetary inflation that has occurred and the amount of government debt that has piled up, that's. That's where our standard of living went. That's where it went. I mean, you can literally slap a graph of like M2 and home prices and the cost of living, and they line up boom, boom, boom, like one on top variable because it's not complicated. The government has spent us into being broke in order to pay for subsidizing the world, running the empire, doing dumb stuff like just frankly, dumb stuff like they, you know, pay for all these infrastructure things that don't even get built. You know, remember that. That global charging network that we were going to get? You see, you've seen these. They're everywhere. They're at every. I'm just kidding. Of course they didn't get built, right. Like, of course not. So, you know, I mean, I have five kids.
- [78:57]
A
All right. What?
- [78:57]
C
Five kids. So I, I feel it. I feel the pinch of the economy.
- [79:01]
A
I bet. Well, listen, I know that you actually have to go and retrieve one of your kids from somewhere here, so I don't want to keep you too long. We're still talking about economics. Yeah, I bet it must be a pretty big truck you drive. But I'm not sure. Maybe you guys could help me understand this. I'm not exactly sure what the criticism is supposed to be, but there's a big gotcha in the chat room, which is that I'm a Ren. So I'm not sure what difference that makes if I'm complaining about what interest rates are or what housing prices are for other people when they're trying to buy a house. And I'm a special case because I work for peanuts for nonprofits for many years, and the IRS just filed on me and claimed that I owed them almost a hundred thousand dollars. So it took me about 15 years of lawyers to try to get them to, you know, off of my back. And I only just finally got them off of my back. I'd have bought a house a long time ago. Right now, even though prices are way down in Central Texas, they were only way down from their very peak, but they're still up by a hundred thousand dollars over what they were in 2019, before all the new inflation, the COVID you know, BS and all the Californians moving here and all the inflationary money and all of that. But I don't see what difference it makes if I'm homeless or if I'm a billionaire, if I'm complaining that the average schmuck can't get married and buy a house and have kids and live in it because the average age of new home ownership is 40 years old because of the absolute economic holocaust the government is perpetrating against the people of this country. If I own a house, if I owned a house all along and its value had been inflated and I was the king of the world, that would still be wrong. That's still just welfare. I didn't build that. And that's just ridiculous. And it's not fair that poor people and young people or working people are priced out of home ownership over price inflation. The fact that I'm a renter, what does that mean? I'm still paying the mortgage and the property taxes and everything for this place anyway. What do you think the price of my rent is? And it keeps going up, too. So I don't know why that's a gotcha. I think maybe, Otis, it's just an. But maybe you guys can help me understand his. His point. If I missed it, I don't know.
- [81:19]
C
I mean, I didn't get it. Yeah, I mean, the. I mean, the problem is with the rent being so high, and was it Herman Cain who years ago ran on just the rent being too high no.
- [81:29]
B
It was a different black dude.
- [81:30]
C
No, what was.
- [81:32]
A
There was a black dude in New York, ran for mayor or something, who was saying, yeah, the rent is too damn high. He's got those big old lamb chops.
- [81:39]
C
And being like, you know, the rent is really high. Because I can remember running at the time and it was like, man, we're trying to save up money for a down payment. And I'm talking to my dad who bought his first house for like $20 in a firm handshake, you know, And I'm like, dang, I've been saving for a while. When is this going to happen? I started running the numbers, and back in like, 1982, yeah, the interest rate on your mortgage was 12%, but you could have that thing entirely paid off in like three or four years because the median home price was only about one and a half times your annual median salary. And now it's like 10 times that. And the cost of everything else has gone up a bajillion dollars, too. So, no, I don't. I don't get that at all. And one thing that I do, because I'm always kind of, I don't know, obviously I don't trust the government and think they're always out to get us, obviously. But I look at the way they've grossly inflated the value of all these boomers houses, and part of me is like, did they do this on purpose so that when they die, they can just crush everyone on these, like, inheritance taxes and stuff? Because, like, if. If they sell them, you're going to get hit with capital gains. And if they try and pass them on and they haven't done their, like, estate planning properly, which, like, very few people have, like, adequate estate planning. And some of these boomers are sitting on like, two, three properties. The government's just going to make a killing on that. All these poor kids are going to inherit their parents stuff and be like, oh, wow, now we finally have a home. And the government's going to be like, not unless you can pay us $120,000 in inheritance taxes, you're not. So that.
- [83:08]
B
That would have a level of forethought to the decision makers that I don't credit them with. So, yeah, yeah.
- [83:17]
A
You know, I saw Dave Ramsey saying, I mean, this is one huge thing that you could do for home ownership right now to balance things back out again is there's already an exemption up to $500,000 of house value that you can sell it free of capital gains. And he said, just raise that to a million, because you have. You would have so many boomers who would downsize their house now and move into a smaller place now that their kids are gone and all that, if they didn't have to get murdered on the capital gains tax to do is this massive disincentive that's keeping bigger houses for younger families out of the market and keeping old people in big houses with empty rooms. You know, people wonder why I'm a libertarian. It's because anything the government does is a distortion in the way things are supposed to be. It's only going to make things harder for everyone. And how could anyone be a grown adult and not have figured this out yet? They have to just stop doing everything and then everyone be everything, be fine. But it's a hell of a correction. The point you guys were making earlier, you know, and the, the new Dave Chappelle thing he talks about. One of the things f Trump is that in his town in Ohio, there's.
- [84:27]
C
A lot of federal workers.
- [84:29]
A
And when Doge did almost nothing a year ago, that was enough to cause a few people to get laid off. Federal government employees to get laid off in Dave's town. It was a huge hit to Dave Chappelle's town. And he's like, f you, Trump, for this horrible economic consequence that you have inflicted, just for laying off a few government tax parasites who nothing but a burden on the rest of us who ought to all have to go and get real productive jobs in the world instead of, you know, being our overlords. But on the scene and the unseen and all of that stuff, it just looks to Dave Chappelle like an economic war against the people of this country. How dare you lay off these solid government employees, the very best of us, after all. And this kind of crap, you know what I mean? How do you get out from under that? Just like with Ron Paul always said, not until just the dollar breaks and we have an absolute economic national suicide. That's when it'll all end, because you'll have no choice then, you know.
- [85:26]
B
Yeah.
- [85:26]
C
And, you know, that was one of the things that I really, I was really pleased to see the Trump administration was able to get rid of so many federal employees. It was one of the only things that he was able to do that. My, my fear there is that people who are his supporters kind of view it as. And he actually mentioned it in his Davos speech, like, we just saved a ton of money. You know, we saved a ton of money. The budget deficit. We've basically taken care of it, because we've got this tariff money and I laid and I got rid of all these federal employees. And it's like, sir, as much as I love that you did that, that is, that is not the problem. I wish that was the problem. I wish that's why we had these budget deficits. It'd be that easy. But it's not the drop in the bucket. And I also worry that, you know, the government is going to be just as intrusive and quote, unquote efficient because a lot of these workers were just people who, whose jobs could be automated, whose jobs could be done away with. I just, I really worry about the fact that people view this as like, yeah, we like shrunk the government. Especially like my Republican friends, which I teach at like a pretty conservative college. There's a lot of like Republican professors there. And they're like, yeah, but we're shrinking the government. I was like, hold on. We're, we're lowering the amount of staffing in the government. But has the purview of the government, the scope of its abilities, has any of that changed? Okay, so let's not confuse the issue here.
- [86:45]
A
Yeah. All right, listen, we'll let you go. We've done a bonus extra long show and I know you got errands to run, Joe, but thank you so much, everybody. That's Joe Solis Mullen and we published two of his great books. He's a fellow at the Libertarian Institute. He wrote the Fake China Threat and It's Very Real Danger and also the National Debt. And you. And you can find both of those@libertarianinstitute.org books and check out his great archive there. Just go to LibertarianInstitute.org writers and click on his handsome mug there and check out his great archive. And thank you very much for joining us on the show tonight, man.
- [87:21]
C
Yeah, that was Darrell. Real pleasure. All right.
- [87:26]
A
All right, man. And here, one last thing, everybody. Check out the Scott Horton Academy. Sign up for my long form courses on, on the terror wars, on the new Cold war with Russia and the war in Ukraine. You can learn all about Israel, Palestine from the great Ramsey Barood Debunking Christian Zionism with Adam Francisco. And so much great stuff and more coming soon. And buy my coffee, Scott Horton flavored coffee from Moon Doze Artisan Coffee. Get you a big old bag of it. Get it Mundos because they hate Starbucks because Starbucks supports the war party and Mundos supports peace. And so that's Mundo's Artisan coffees. Go to Scothorton Dot Org coffee and I'll get a kickback and you will get something good to drink to get you up and going in the morning. And with that, any closing words, Mr. Martyr Maid podcast, sir?
- [88:17]
B
Yeah, just actually I noticed in the chat a lot of people were talking about AI and we didn't really get to that. It didn't really. It wasn't really an opportunity to get to it but just yesterday and it'll be releasing this weekend. I interviewed John Rob for about three hours and we talk a ton about a coming effects on the economy. Yeah, he's really good. We I asked him about coming on with us. He'll come on with us one of these days, so.
- [88:41]
A
Oh great.
- [88:41]
B
So check that out. Turn me on. Subscribe martyrmade.com and I'll have that out this weekend.
- [88:49]
A
Cool. Yeah man. So you know, after we did that show about is the Terminator going to Kill us all and all that, I found this book, why Machines Will Never Rule the World. AI is stupid. Don't get carried away. I made up the subtitle there Artificial Intelligence Without Fear by Jobst Land Grebe and Barry Smith. So I haven't gotten a chance to break into it yet, but I'm really looking forward. I also I got bought the Kindle version of the if anyone builds it, we all die. So I'm going to finish that. It was already terrible. And then I'm gonna read this. And so I'm very interested in that subject too. But yeah, so listen, thank you very much martyrmaid. Subscribe.myrmade.com is actually the URL there for Daryl's great podcast. And you know what? Check out my great substack too where if you subscribe you get the My Scott Horton show interviews a day early and without ads. And you can also listen to the parts of the audiobook of Provoked that I have posted so far. They're all at my substack. That's Scott HortonShow.com and so. All right, that's it. Thank you. Goodbye. See you next week, bud.
- [89:51]
B
Later.
- [89:53]
A
This has been Provoked with Daryl Cooper and Scott Horton. Be sure to like and subscribe to help us beat the propaganda algorithm. Go follow at Provoked Underscore show on X and YouTube and tune in in next time for more Provoked.