The Wrighter’s Block Episode 76 – Andrew Heaton Gets Wrighter’s Block

DISCLOSURE

FULL TRANSCRIPT TEXT

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throwing parties [Music]
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don’t bother swimming at it to save me i will only drag you down i’ll try to use
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your body as a life raft cause if there’s room enough for one there must be
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[Music] turns blue [Music]
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in the evening news i will be [Music]
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[Applause] [Music]
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[Music] i don’t need anybody’s
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yes everybody it is me matt wright coming to you i’m actually not coming to you live today uh this is a pre-recorded
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episode i don’t do them often but when they do that means they are going to be even better than normal so thank you all
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for tuning in on this fantastic thursday night um there are a lot of things that
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you could be doing on a thursday night and i truly appreciate that you choose to not do those other things and choose
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to spend them here with me on the writer’s block uh first and foremost allow me to thank
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the wonderful and fine people uh actually i made this cava this time this is leftover kabba from my birthday so
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i’m not thanking anybody because i paid for it and i made it with these two hands the way that men are supposed to
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so i’m thinking myself uh so bulavanaka
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and i made it really strong so hopefully that doesn’t affect me at all later
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but this week’s episode like all the other episodes are brought to you by
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joe soloski he is running for pennsylvania governor uh if you live in
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the pennsylvania region of these united states and are looking for a real liberty candidate in pennsylvania i
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highly recommend joe soloski uh he is the voice of the muddied waters of freedom he has the voice that could go
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on wkrp at any time and if you are a pennsylvanian who wants to
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you are a pennsylvanian who uh wants to defeat the sword of tyranny uh joe
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soloski is the key to pennsylvania’s success
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the libertarian party waffle house [ __ ] is the fastest growing and second largest caucus in the libertarian party
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we don’t actually do anything we post memes all day long and we don’t support any political candidates but uh
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we do truly appreciate good waffles uh if you want to become a member of the libertarian party waffle house caucus
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just head on over to the facebook group and hit the join button uh and uh if you want to become a voting member which is
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absolutely meaningless because we don’t vote on anything head on over to
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muddywatersoffreedom.com store and pick yourself up a waffle house caucus shirt or button
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the gravy king are you sick and tired of waking up in
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the morning and saying man what i want right now is a delicious cup of piping hot coffee that’s going to nuzzle me
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like a lover from years past and instead
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i want something that tastes like i stepped in something my dog left in the backyard
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that will give me 1 7 of the caffeine and will somehow keep me awake all day long well have i
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got good news for you mud water the most aptly named sponsor of muddied waters media is a coffee
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alternative made with masala chai cacao mushrooms turmeric sea salt cinnamon and that is it yes it has one-seventh the
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caffeine of coffee and tastes just awful i highly recommend adding honey to it
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yes i do drink this on occasion when i decided that i’ve hated myself enough for this day
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so if you want to make this switch and you want to know what it’s like to go through severe caffeine withdrawals
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go to muddywatersmedia.com mud and make the switch today
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i am very excited to have my guest on uh very excited uh he
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has been on the muddied waters of freedom he was one of the first guests we’ve ever had on the muddy waters of freedom he was one of my first guests on
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the writer’s block way back in the day he is the host of the political orphanage
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on world’s smartest podcast network uh he is the host of friday release valve
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which is how i like to spend every one of my friday commutes home uh he was the host of
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mostly weekly on reason ladies and gentlemen please welcome
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mr andrew heaton hello matt good to be back thank you for having me on no i am so happy to have
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you on uh it is always a pleasure to get you on i spend
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an obscene amount of time with you in my ears um and
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i truly appreciate any time that you have to come on over and uh talk to me about whatever is going on in your world
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well that’s very flattering and uh i i’m thrilled to find out that i’m i’m regularly piped into your brain
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uh and and hope that i’m i’m living up to it when actually talking to you in person uh you have you have yet to let me down
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in any way shape or form um i’d for for all of the people out there
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and for you i’m gonna gush a little bit when i first started watching uh you on
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mostly weekly i was like this is who i want to aspire to be like
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you don’t want to be you need to pick a better person a better l or f level celebrity to emulate
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right and i was like this this is it this is who i want to be this is like i want to be like andrew heaton except better
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looking um and yeah exactly right better looking better credit rating uh more
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access to sex there’s me plus all those things should be terrific right
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okay that’s that that’s all right i might have you beat on many of those aspects um but except for the credit
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rating i don’t know that’s that’s going to be up or down um but i was like this is i want to emulate
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your career and when you first said yes to coming on muddy waters of freedom um that was like one of the highest moments
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of my early podcasting career at that time um and ever since then i was like
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i’m gonna follow this guy no matter what he does and i have held true to that uh but
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every time you are on it is an honor and uh i just want to let you know that i
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my dog just literally like ninja kicked the door open that is shut and locked
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he was just like nope um well that’s very flattering thank you very much
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he was very upset by me giving you praise and not him he was just like yeah no dogs are real jealous of podcasters
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people don’t know that they used to be dogs and cats now it’s dogs and pockets dogs and podcasters but no uh again
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thank you so much for coming on um how i like to start most of these shows
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is you’re not i listen to a lot of your stuff and you can kind of explain it to everybody else
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but you’re not republican you’re not democrat you’re not really libertarian you’re just kind of you’re informed on a lot of different
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issues but you’re not really you don’t take sides yeah you know i i only claim to be an independent at this point uh i’m
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definitely not a republican or a democrat um i although i am an ethnically i’m a republican i was raised
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republican that’s my my kind of initial background i i became a let’s say converted i converted to democ democr uh
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the democratic party when i was in college uh and then i became a libertarian um i i share a lot of
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libertarian sensibilities uh but i like if we’re defining libertarian as
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you don’t take people’s stuff or make them do things unless you’ve got a really good reason and you can prove
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that there’s a it’s going to be efficacious there’s a clear public need freedom works pretty well the government doesn’t like if it’s something like that
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then yes but i but i find a lot of the time that when i would say like oh i’m libertarian that um when i talk to
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progressives they would go so you want to put children in coal mines and i’d be like no they’re not very good at that
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that wouldn’t there’s no use in putting children in coal mines at this point we could have robots and things but then meanwhile i found out that the
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libertarians would find out that like i’m in favor of a government existing sometimes like i want a tiny one but i
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want a government and then they would flip out oh you’re not a real libertarian unless you think all stop signs should be privately funded
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publicly funded stop signs are a form of slavery i was like all right then i’m just an independent i don’t want to
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fight with you over this so i only report to be an independent but i’d say broadly speaking i share many libertarian sensibilities
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in that again i think freedom works very well i think individual liberty is very important and i think uh central uh uh
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command economies and central planning tend to not work very well so i generally am
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on the skeptical side of government efficacy so the reason i
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sorry the reason that uh you are on this episode today is actually somewhat topical uh since we are
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barreling toward a potential uh massive global war um
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and the more the president talks the more terrified i get but as much as the white house tries to walk it all back uh
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it’s not gonna stop anything um but at least he’s super on the ball you know we’ve got a guy that
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definitely definitely is like at the height of his mental acumen and the zenith of his life in terms of early
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middle age it is my it is it is my grand pleasure that i can say that yes
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he is just on the ball he is sharp his attack and we have decorum back in the white house again and you don’t have to
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worry about any weird ad-libs that might cause international incidents um
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but yeah i gotta say that is something to keep in mind like the this isn’t my joke but one of the better jokes from
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2016 was i i had a friend that was like guys we can’t have hillary clinton elected president because if we do
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bill clinton’s going to be the first man and he’s going to bang all the wives of the foreign leaders probably get us into a war which is probably true you’d have
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to like you don’t want him involved there right and then meanwhile like biden like i i think biden’s a nicer guy
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and less like like better in terms of discourse than trump but that’s not even then though
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like if if biden had a family sigil it would be a man stepping on a rake like
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he has a really long history of just walking into dumb statements and that was when he was in his prime game that
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was before now where like someone will ask him you know uh do you have the nuclear football and he’ll respond with
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like a conversation like he’ll talk to us about a malt shake he had in the 50s and that’ll like you’re like i guess
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there’s a point to this so yeah he’ll talk about a train ride that he never took at some point because
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when i was back there riding on the amtrak every day for 50 years
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what what does that have to do with anything um
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but uh you came out with an episode on st patrick’s day uh march 17th my my
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former favorite holiday um called how you hate irish people you
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really about face on that you’re like no laplanders those are the ones for me from now on that’s right those
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laplanders um uh okay i i still love the irish people
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i want to say i love the irish people uh i’m a firm neutral don’t dislike them
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don’t particularly care for them i’ve never like i’ve never met an irish person i haven’t liked uh but a lot of
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their whiskey has caused me to do a lot of things i do not like
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that’s because irish whiskey’s too smooth they triple distill it you guys need to knock that off it’s like drinking water so you don’t think about
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like like scotch you’re like you i drink too much scotch but at least when you’re drinking it because it feels like you’re
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like you’re drinking like rusty screws sometimes or maybe like like just like you face planted the earth
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you at least kind of slow down irish whiskey can sneak up on you you got to be careful about that yes it absolutely
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can and that’s how you get duis um or worse things happen
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but you came out with an episode on st patrick’s day called how to prevent or provoke stupid wars which
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the title was enough to drag me in um thank you because i was originally gonna call it a primer on international
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relations theory and i was like no one’s gonna listen i need to have something a little bit
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more clickbaity and flashy than that but i feel like i delivered in terms of the headline yeah i loved it and i will say
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you you started off this episode by saying i hope you have your cup i recommend you get a cup of coffee
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because we’re about to go into international relation theory and that’s not really the most exciting um that’s not the most exciting uh topic
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and i only had mud water this morning which was only one seventh of the caffeine and i was enthralled the entire way through
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so oh for the record i meant that you should get uh coffee because it was going to be slinging a lot of ideas at you not because it was going to be
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boring i don’t do boring shows when i was dealing with a ton of concepts was like i i would if this were
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new to me i would need some stimulant to follow along that’s fair that’s fair because yeah there were a lot there was
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a lot of information in this um and i like i told you before the show um
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this was by like i was enthralled the entire way through and i listened to it twice just to make sure that i didn’t
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miss any of the information and it was incredible absolutely incredible um
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so let’s talk a little bit about international relation theory and i’m going to
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attempt to sound anywhere near as educated as the garrison keeler meets
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fred rogers that i have on my show today um yeah garrison keeler plus freedom right
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[Laughter] like garrison keeler with a handgun and wanting to legalize mushrooms or
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something oh also i’ve not been me too yet going strong that’s
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and you know in the liberty movement that gets harder and harder to say every day um yeah maybe there’s there’s not as
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many ladies to get in trouble with so just in terms of the sheer scope of the
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yeah yeah yeah if i’m not heading out the neckbeard guys so i’m okay right
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so there are multiple so they’re the way that you lay it out is actually
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quite brilliant uh because you’re like and you see this so often um you see it
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where when a democrat’s in office and they’re saying okay we’re gonna go to war in you
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know yemen or we’re gonna go to war in uh in syria all the republicans are like no
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we shouldn’t be doing this blah blah blah blah blah and when a republican’s office and they’re saying you know the
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exact same thing democrats are like no we shouldn’t be doing this blah blah blah blah blah and they just all rabble rouse around we’re
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anti-war at this point but nobody ever takes a look at the grand theories
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behind why these wars are actually happening and the way you broke it down was actually quite brilliant so i’d like to
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start off with some of the uh theories that you talked about in it um like the realist theory was one that you
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brought up and i think that this is the one that i subscribe to pretty much the most in my
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in my thinking um so can you describe kind of what that is for everybody
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yeah well so first of all i think you hit the nail on the head by saying that the international relations theory is
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useful um not in a you know it is useful academically but that’s not why it exists it exists as a kind of predictive
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model of how how do states operate with each other and why do they go to war with each other which is important
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because you need to have some kind of theory as to why that happens to inform the policies that you’re going to do so
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in the case of the republicans and democrats both of them have for the most part been what we call muscular liberals
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or muscular liberalists uh over the course of my lifetime which is to say both of them tend to think that an
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engaged robust deployment of american forces abroad is a smart thing to do but the reason they do that is because
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pretty much everybody saved trump in my lifetime has been a liberal in in an ir
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sense which is different than like a liberal democrat in congress they the terms don’t mean the same thing um but
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that’s in essence what ir theory is is why why are states going to war with each other how do we avert war with each
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other and if if um even if you’re a you know die-hard ron paul libertarian who’s
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just like i don’t even need to know any of this because we should be isolationists it’s still useful in terms of okay but what are all of the
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authoritarian regimes that might attack you gonna do even if you don’t want to go to war what might they do that you’re
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going to have to respond to at some point uh i i’m with you i i probably lean more towards realism than anything
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else uh we’re at least insofar as our rivals go um realism is the idea that
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states interact with each other based on power that power dynamics are the primary element that is informing the
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relationship between them states operate in an anarchy that is to say that there is no super government um the united
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nations is not a super government it’s a talk shop there’s it doesn’t have the ability to pass laws there’s no jail you
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can put nations in there’s no judge for nations it’s just bilateral treaties that is to say that if there is an
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international criminal court or wto or something like that that has an ability to influence what countries do it’s only
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because the country agreed to join it and they can pull out at any time but there’s no overarching authority for that reason
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states all are very concerned with being able to
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maintain enough power to not be dominated by rival states and states are constantly
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under the realist mindset trying to expand the power they have either to dominate their neighbors or simply to
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keep from being dominated and uh it’s sort of the billiards ball model of international relations theory or as i
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point out in the episode the risk board episode or the uh the risk board theory of international relations theory if
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you’ve played risk and risk you’re not really thinking about like well the blue player is he’s a social
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democrat but the red player he’s a fascist to the green player oh that guy’s an a monarchist well you’re not
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really doing that in risk you’re just you’re just forming alliances based on
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what is strategically advantageous for you to not be dominated by another player and you’re hoping you’re gonna you’re gonna end up dominating the board
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so realism very much comports with that when i so when i was a kid i’ve never
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played risk full disclosure never never played risk when i was when i was a child um i asked my parents
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uh the same year i asked them i was like nine or ten i said i want a pocket knife and risk and they looked at me and they
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said this kid may be the antichrist i don’t think we should be giving him weapons or teaching anything about
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global domination smart move yeah that was that was really brilliant by my parents so i’ve never
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played risk uh but i i understood uh what you were saying one of the things that you said in there uh was if
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you start out risk strong like if you start out uh aggressively uh and you take a lot of things
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uh at the beginning for the rest of the game everybody’s going to be wary of you even if you don’t have the power to do
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what you’re supposed to do right um and that even though i’ve never played the game
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it spoke to me in a more broad sense um it’s sort of the and then you were
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talking about giving up uh you started talking about nukes and uh south of south africa used to have
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nuclear arms and they gave them up um and ukraine as we know
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also had nuclear weapons as recently as 1994 uh and they gave them up in a deal
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with england the us and russia and they said don’t worry if anything ever happens we will protect you
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um well that no that that didn’t happen the the agreement between ukraine and the united states and nato was not that
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we would be defending ukraine but rather an assurance that we would not be invading ukraine um so the the the you
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know previously like another big part of realist theory is deterrence the idea that right you because power is the
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primary thing you want to do you want to stock up on arms guns and armies so that people think twice about wanting to
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invade you well the biggest deterrent which exists is nuclear weapons there’s no larger deterrent than that
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and i guess hopefully there never will be and uh so if you have a nuke people think twice about invading you north
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korea is a pretty good example of this like we’re we think long and hard about invading north korea because they couldn’t presently
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nuke us but they could nuke tokyo if they felt like it and they might well do that uh just to piss us off and ruin the
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global economy so they’re they’re kind of safe from foreign invasion ukraine had nuclear weapons because it inherited
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them from the soviet union right uh and we basically talked them out of it uh and and said look you don’t need nuclear
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weapons to deter us from invading you we’re just going to promise we’re not going to invade you which so far i think
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we’ve been pretty good about yeah we haven’t done it but had they still had the nuclear weapons
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russia wouldn’t be they still had the nuclear weapons there’s a good chance that russia would not be invading them right uh there it depends i mean it kind
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of like it’s it’s also it’s very high stakes right because like as you pointed out at the beginning of your program matt uh if we end up
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getting sucked into a war it’ll probably escalate into a thermonuclear war so like any conflict between great powers
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that are nuclear powers are very high stakes right now in the limited conflict that
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is russia versus ukraine it is a humanitarian crisis but it’s not a
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global extinction level event if ukraine had nukes
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putin would have thought twice about invading it but if he did uh man there’d be a lot of dead people
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uh if it actually escalated to that level uh and not just in russia and ukraine i’m planning on doing an episode
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on nuclear uh warfare on my show the political orphanage here in the next couple of weeks and uh one of the things
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that i recently learned is that if say india and pakistan were to go to war with each other in a limited nuclear war
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you’d still have about a billion people die outside of just those two countries
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the reason being so much soot would rise up from a a nuclear war of even
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limited scale that it would it would reduce the amount of sunlight coming into the world by about 40 percent for
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three to six years which means that all of the agriculture everywhere in the world would drop by
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about half by precipitation so just just in terms of people dying from starvation about a billion people so uh in in any
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event yeah nukes nukes are real dangerous and they work great as a deterrent but if but if they ever don’t
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work we’re screwed right it’s it’s it’s the mutually assured destruction
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theory on right if somebody uses this it’s gonna be terrible but who’s gonna be crazy enough to actually do it
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because of how this will turn out right um
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um so when it comes to uh realist theory
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when it comes to real estate do you think that the kind of republican i i equate it to
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the republican theory of we need to spend all of our federal funding on uh building up our military we don’t need
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to worry about anything else like that would be a good way to spend the federal dollars or
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is that not something that a realist would uh so
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yes and no yes a a realist is going to want to bump up their national military budget no i don’t think that that’s how
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republicans think and i’d caution people to be careful about um about trying to apply international
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relations theory and map it onto the system you’re you’re less likely to do this being a libertarian i think libertarians just sort of intrinsically
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by virtue of where where they’re positioned aren’t going to be binary thinkers the way a lot of conservatives and democrats
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are because like right i’m sure you feel the exact same way when people are like you right-wing or left-wing i’m like i don’t i’m not defined by a bunch of dead
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frenchmen i kind of i’m doing my own thing and maybe like like and i for a while they’re like oh libertarians
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they’re just republicans who like pot you’re like no they think differently they’re not we think this is a different thing it’s not just that we also uh think
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heroin is okay too um yeah and prostitutes so so so that yeah
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there’s so there’s a whole different thing so um i think for a lot of people there’s this um uh or liberal phrases i
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think corporate media has a vested interest in sort of getting people to think in terms of this this binary gutter of republican versus democrat and
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so a lot of people have been trained to do that and will hear a new concept and
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what they’re really doing okay which one of these is republican which one’s democrats so i know which one i hate which one i like um ir theory doesn’t
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doesn’t correlate to republican versus democrat uh insofar as it does there’s a consensus between republicans and
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democrats trump is the only deviation from that in in living memory and and prior to that i’d say like you have to
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go pretty much all the way back to nixon uh before you you get out of muscular liberalism so um liberalism which we can
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talk about in a minute is not the realist perspective or if you don’t mind me jumping in uh no please
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liberalism please do liberalism which again when i say liberal in an international relations sense i do not
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mean just the foreign policy version of liberal democrats which is a different in the same way that classical liberals
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different than liberal democrat right liberals um are their their international relations is
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the idea that uh power is important the realists are correct about that but that you are
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going to likely mitigate the risk of conflict and maintain peace
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by having open markets and democracy the idea being that authoritarian regimes
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are more likely to be belligerent regimes democratic regimes suffer war weariness because they have to resp the
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the the voters have a say in the fact that they’re doing rationing or they’re being sent off to die um democratic
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regimes view each other as more legitimate than they view authoritarian regimes and there’s an idea that i think
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makes a lot of sense that economically interconnected nations are less likely to go to war with each other because
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it’s so counterproductive financially and counterproductive to in a democratic
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regime the people who are probably running it which are the people that are successful and own businesses and things like that so the the liberal position on
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international relations is that conflict is more likely to arise from an
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authoritarian regime than a capitalist democracy therefore we have a vested
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interest in expanding the free world and getting other countries on board with our capitalist democracy and that of our
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allies right and the way that that is typically done with liberals is by expanding institutions i.e nato which is
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a military alliance between such countries the wto which is a way of trying to
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ratchet down tariffs and get everybody enfranchised into open markets and free markets
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the european union’s a very good example of a liberal institution where germany and france aren’t thinking about
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going to war with each other nobody’s worried in spain about belgium invading or vice versa it’s actually been very successful in that regard so most
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american presidents uh republican or democrat have been liberals um over the course of my lifetime i mean certainly
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from george h.w bush on but i think reagan i think you’d probably say that too of
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is the person i would think that reagan would also fall under that uh yeah under that i
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think so yeah and i think like the other thing too for anybody that’s like ah reagan no he the cold war
32:21
if if you tend to view the cold war as most people do as a primarily ideological conflict and and it was
32:27
because we were against the commies not just because russia was a big power but because it was a communist power that
32:33
would be more in line with liberal thinking than realist thinking realist thinking would be look it doesn’t matter if russia is a capitalist democracy too
32:40
we’d still be juxtaposed to it because countries are always going to fight whereas liberals would go no the problem was we had the free world versus the
32:47
authoritarian world we’re pushing the freeway and i think nick i think reagan would be a part of that i think you pretty much have to go back to nixon to
32:53
get into the realist camp of like i don’t care it’s just a bunch of guns right that’s why nixon like went like
32:59
we’re gonna drop the shred of pretending taiwan is the real china the real china is the one with beijing everybody knows
33:05
it’s like that so nixon’s in the realist camp right i think george h.w bush carter reagan um george
33:12
w bush for sure bill clinton for sure and now biden they’re all liberals and and wants to promote democracy
33:18
capitalism and institutions abroad um trump i don’t think is a liberal i i guess he is closest to a realist um in
33:26
that he wanted to get us out of nato or at least he he opined that he wanted to get us out of nato for a while which is
33:32
more uh i think it certainly i don’t know if that would necessarily be realistic certainly not liberal because a liberal would see nato
33:39
as being very much crucial to the experiment that they’re doing uh and uh
33:44
you know uh real quick when when um when the journalist does oh god the
33:50
journalist that was killed in saudi arabia uh solomon yeah khashoggi i think khashoggi solomon was the general uh yeah
33:56
khashoggi when khashoggi was killed in uh saudi arabia and a lot of people
34:02
especially from the democrat left they were saying we need to go over there and you know
34:08
they killed an american journalist and we need to go over there and fight i will never forget what trump said
34:14
because he he looked at the cameras and he said i am not going to blow up the global economy over one journalist
34:22
and it was it was a statement that it it was a statement that was one of
34:28
the most honest things i’ve ever seen a president say um
34:34
like not like not a trump guy never voted for him wouldn’t in the next time but
34:39
when he said that i was like that is the most honest you will ever see a politician be about anything happening
34:44
on a global scale uh because he was absolutely he just said nope not gonna do it
34:49
because that would destroy the entire global yeah i think you’re right about that and the inverse of that would be
34:55
the politicians including biden right now who are saying you know um uh the the conflict in ukraine and
35:03
russia is a conflict between an authoritarian regime and the free world and we are on the side of the free world hold on
35:09
i’m gonna i’m gonna go down to saudi arabia for a hot minute to talk to our allies down there because like you think about like why are if if if our foreign
35:16
policy is actually based on ideology we wouldn’t be friends with saudi arabia because it’s a despotism it’s a
35:22
homophobic feudal dictatorship and it has nothing to do with any american civic values
35:28
right we wouldn’t be negotiating with iran we wouldn’t be uh we wouldn’t be uh friends with saudi arabia we wouldn’t be
35:34
making deals with venezuela right now uh we wouldn’t continue trading with china
35:39
which we can get into china later because the walmart thing that you touched on in your episode blew my mind
35:45
and i was like that is such a fantastic point um but if it was just pure ideology and
35:52
we’re just doing this for free people and free you know democracies all over the world we wouldn’t be doing so many
35:58
of the things that we are doing on a foreign policy uh yeah and i guess to to
36:04
to play devil’s advocate for for liberals and i’ve got a touch of it in me i just kind of to give everybody where my position might my position is
36:09
we should be liberals with our allies we should be realists with our rivals so if we’re talking about france and iceland and england we should be thinking in
36:15
terms of institutions and how to enfranchise each other and how to get our economies interconnected and promote
36:21
democracy those are all good things and i like it and like probably something that i would disagree with with uh you
36:26
matt and a lot of your listeners is like i like nato i think nato is a good thing uh whereas i think a lot of libertarians
36:31
would be like nope we don’t want any entangling alliances which i get um but when when you’re getting into like
36:37
um rival countries a la russia and china i’m like let’s drop the pretenses here and just view these as billiard balls
36:43
just assume they’re concerned with power i think that the liberals would many liberals would respond and go it’s not
36:49
so much that liberalism and realism are completely juxtaposed it’s more like liberalism as an asterisk you’re putting
36:55
on realism of like yes uh power is very important it is the most important thing
37:01
it’s maybe 60 or 70 percent but there is 30 to 40 which is these other factors we want to discuss whereas a realist would
37:07
be like no it’s 90 it’s everything else is just marginal that’s that’s fair um
37:14
but yet so the lip like with many of the presidents in
37:19
in both yours and my pretty much all of the presidents in both yours and my lifetime um being more of the liberal
37:27
kind of philosophy when it comes to international relations yeah or if you want to say we could we
37:32
could say muscular liberalism just so our brains don’t trip that wire and we start right now
37:37
so i’m going to use it for that reason but that’s fair yeah we’re not thinking about ill hand home our
37:43
aocs like going off into battle um but uh
37:49
so being that they they’re more of the muscular liberal uh international philosophy uh
37:57
where is the disconnect like where is the disconnect between them when it’s when a republican and verse one of
38:03
democrats and if they are all users oh there is but it’s in-house uh i mean
38:09
like that that’s part of it and i think that’s something that libertarians are very good at spotting and rightly so is
38:14
that uh republicans and democrats are as you point out like the the democrats are
38:20
very against war until they have an opportunity to wage it then they’re very much in favor of it right right in the same way that republicans really
38:26
care about the budget when they can’t do anything about it uh and when they actually have power they love spending money oftentimes on tanks and corn
38:32
subsidies things right because they’re they’re both to a large extent pretending of this stuff um they’re they’re on the same page broadly
38:39
speaking when it comes to foreign policy and most of the fights that have been in foreign policy over the last few years have either been um not questions of
38:47
theory and worldview but of just pragmatic application um like the war in
38:53
iraq of like basically did did saddam actually have weapons of mass destruction or not that was really more
38:58
of a debate of like just reality and intelligence gathering it wasn’t so much a debate of of um theory where the
39:06
theory came in even then it was still in that liberal camp the the debate that was going on in the united kingdom in
39:12
the united states was do we do we apply liberal theory that is to say do we push
39:17
democracy in open markets and liberal institutions do we do that um
39:23
multilaterally where we get a big coalition together were we willing to go in alone with like us and poland if it
39:29
comes down to it and that was the big division between like obama and bush was just he was a
39:34
unilateralist and obama was a multilateralist but they both agreed on all these things i mean that’s why
39:40
obama’s two terms in office were just an extension of george w bush’s last term in office like
39:46
we didn’t pull back on anything significantly we didn’t we expanded operations yeah we expanded operations
39:52
and started several new wars in seven different countries uh right so we’re
39:57
like libby in the case i mean like i’m gonna say iraq is much more of a foster clock than than libya was but like libya
40:04
is also kind of a foster clock and like the reason that obama went into that was the thinking was well this is a humanitarian crisis and also this is an
40:11
authoritarian dictator and we ought to help the liberal forces trying to fight the authoritarian dictators so we’re
40:16
going to provide uh a uh what do you call it a no-fly zone which sounds like a force field just
40:22
means we’re going to shoot down airplanes if they come in there um and that was that was obama right and then biden’s very much on board with this who
40:29
also voted for the war in iraq right um so moving on just just a little bit um
40:37
the when nixon came when nixon came into office and as we touched on earlier like
40:43
the united states recognized taiwan as china that taiwan is china the beijing no and nixon came in and he said
40:51
but there’s no way we can deny this is what it is like we are absolutely we have to
40:57
say yes we’re going to recognize that this is an area and yes this i’m just going to work with the prc
41:04
um and so that was when america started kind of recognizing beijing as china and
41:10
right that ended up leading to some of the trades that we have going on now um
41:16
as you stated uh and it also also was instrumental in driving a wedge between the soviet union and the
41:23
people’s republic of china which is something that nixon did not want to have happen and which would not have been advantageous to the united states
41:28
uh you you didn’t want to have these two commies being all chummy and making kami babies you wanted them to to
41:34
pull apart which largely happened we were able to kind of keep them on a different page right and uh as you said walmart is the
41:42
largest trader with china in the world yeah yeah walmart is the largest trading partner with china like like every every
41:49
country like save america because walmart’s out of america um like no one country would
41:55
would come close to so to walmart uh walmart’s a massive trading partner and um this this goes into liberal theory
42:01
actually the idea that like well for that reason china and walmart aren’t super likely like walmart and china
42:07
aren’t going to go to war i’m going to go out on the table but probably america and china aren’t
42:12
going to go to war i feel like i feel it’s safe that the waltons aren’t going to pick up arms and head on over to
42:17
beijing yeah i’m with you i don’t i don’t think they’re going to like you know get in a jeep and drive over uh do that um
42:24
uh and this this goes i mean this goes way back right so like like the the first liberals in terms of uh international relations theory you have
42:31
emanuel kant who’s proposing the democratic piece you have adam smith uh and locke
42:37
who are kind of positing this cooperative world view and an idea that markets are good and
42:42
markets make people interconnected and i think there’s something to that now there are some very big data points against that too like i i am very
42:49
sympathetic to that position and generally think that that’s true uh i’m also very much in favor of open and free markets so i’ve got a vested interest in
42:56
this but i do think that you’re less likely to go to work now world war one and world war ii france and germany were
43:01
each other’s largest trading partners so it’s not it’s not a fail-safe this does sometimes still happen
43:07
but it would seem that on balance when you have a lot of trade between the two you don’t want to have mutually assured
43:12
destruction economically if you’re a democracy the people that are able to lobby the government are very likely to
43:18
lobby you not to bomb their assets in another country and then the andrew heaton spent on it is i’m trying to get
43:24
uh like a pulitzer prize you know a nobel prize in economics for what i call heaton’s theory of foreign mistresses
43:31
the idea being if i’m a capitalist with one country but i’ve got cat i’ve got a bunch of mistresses in bangkok i don’t
43:37
want to bomb bangkok no more so you know if we can get a bunch of uh action going on between businessmen and different
43:43
countries maybe they won’t do it so this is actually a good argument on why bill clinton should be first man
43:49
because he would have mistresses all over right no you gotta send him the deal is
43:55
you gotta send him to other countries though he’s just on a constant uh good rotation right
44:02
spraying bill all over the place i never thought i’d hear spraying bill
44:07
on this show but yep um yeah so um
44:14
we um so one of the other theories you talked about was the uh the
44:20
marxist theory on international relations um and can you describe what that is for everybody out there because
44:27
this actually i was unaware i’ve heard of this theory
44:33
but i also have preconceived notions of marxism so i was sure so this was actually kind of new to me
44:40
well and the weird thing is there’s actually a lot of overlap between libertarians and marxists when it comes to ir theory right um so in the same way
44:48
that we need to make a distinction between liberals and ir theory and liberals in terms of domestic political
44:54
economy these are different concepts everybody listening should do their best to not think of marxism in terms of the
45:00
you know the protoplasm of communism right um really marxism in a nutshell when it comes to
45:06
ir theory is whereas realism is saying uh war is the confluence of power
45:13
dynamics between countries marxists think that it’s economic dynamics between countries that you can most wars
45:19
are explicable through a ruling class trying to make money and so a great like what would really really
45:25
well comport with marxist international relations theory would be if you think we went into iraq
45:31
for oil that is more in line with marx’s thinking you’ve got um uh built uh dick
45:36
cheney who’s who’s got stock and enron or whatever it was but he owns money in an oil company a lot of the republicans
45:42
dude bush is a texan oil guy he doesn’t have stock in it directly but no doubt a bunch of his family members do and
45:49
they’re going into iraq because they want to get cheap oil right that’s very much marxism would predict that um
45:54
whereas like a realist uh would well actually i’ll say like international or excuse me a liberal would go no like
46:02
really we wanted to go into iraq because we wanted to have a uh we wanted to have a democratic regime over there bush
46:08
thought that if we went in and we liberated them they would become a pleasant hayekian liberal democratic
46:14
country like ours and then it would spread throughout the middle east right so there’s there’s a juxtaposition between those two things um i think
46:21
libertarians actually have a lot of overlap with marxist theory because right you can basically if instead of critiquing capitalism you
46:27
just slap the the preface crony in front of it all of a sudden it sounds very much like ron paul
46:32
do you think do you think crony capitalists are doing things to drive us to war yes do you think crony
46:39
capitalists are exacerbating international conflicts so that they can juice up stock and
46:44
northrop gunman and lockheed martin and things like that do you think that the very lucrative defense contractors are
46:50
pushing america towards certain foreign policy outcomes in order to get rich and like any halfway decent libertarian would go
46:57
yes yes um but so so with the marxist and the marxists would just they would be saying that the primary drive of of
47:03
international relations is in fact economic and things like lockheed martin and defense contractors and things like
47:09
that so when you look at like ukraine and russia we’d probably look at that from a marxist perspective and say the
47:14
the fight going on right now in russia is really a proxy battle between america and her allies that want to have access
47:22
to ukrainian markets and labor and russian wanting to do the exact same
47:27
thing and it has less to do with with ideology it has more to do with who controls these various assets or
47:33
alternately can somebody make a buck off of it is is lockheed martin selling the bombs to the ukrainians that are being
47:38
dropped over there and so forth yes um they are uh but
47:44
so like if you were to take those three theories alone just those three theories and look at it
47:50
you can say fro sort of from a realist point of view if the ukrainians had never gotten rid of their
47:56
new nuclear weapons this may have may have happened may not have happened we don’t know but we know
48:01
that nuclear weapons are a good deterrent um from a marxist theory you can say that
48:07
russia wanted the resources of the oil resources of the natural gas resources of the wheat and access uh more accesses
48:14
to the ports that they have on the sea uh and then from probably something about gazprom and the big gas line
48:20
running through right like i don’t know everything about that but probably it’s economically motivated right and then you also have the
48:27
uh liberal theory with with what putin is saying where he’s saying you know we’re in there we’re trying to get rid
48:32
of the nazis and the genocide and we want to instill so you kind of have
48:38
three different what’s the right three different spends
48:43
depending on which way you’re looking at this one war and as a result
48:48
very different ways of mitigating the danger which is the flash point here because like a lot of the time like i said i think a lot of the time being
48:54
generous to liberals liberals are not saying power dynamics aren’t important they’re just saying it’s like 70 30 and
49:00
the other 30 percent which less important but very important is democracy and open markets and institutions and ideas right whereas
49:07
like your classical liberals like your excuse me you’re i should say i’m getting your your garden variety realist and
49:14
think like otto von bismarck or cardinal richelieu is like no it’s just we’re talking about billiard balls and like
49:20
whether they’re stripes or solids that’s the level of impact that that all of these ideas have right um so a lot of
49:27
the time that’s that’s how that works we’re like almost you could almost view liberals as just nuanced realists
49:32
however in the case of ukraine this leads to very different interpretations of what’s happening and very different
49:38
interpretations of how to mitigate the danger going on if you are a liberal and that would include bill crystal it would
49:44
include hillary clinton it would include anybody that’s a part of the foreign policy establishment in the united
49:50
states anthony blinken joe biden george w bush dick cheney uh the ghost of donald rumsfeld all these guys would be
49:56
muscular liberals right they’re looking at this and charitably they’re saying uh
50:02
america is the is a part of the free world and western civilization and ukraine is thinking about of its own
50:09
volition joining our fantastic world order we just we we have an obligation to the
50:15
free people of ukraine who want to be enfranchised to our clearly superior system to allow them to do so and by
50:22
doing so we also safeguard ukraine from becoming a more dangerous place on the
50:27
international stage so what we ought to be doing is trying to get ukraine into nato the european union or
50:34
a partnership or something like that the same way we did with the baltic countries which are not giving us any trouble at all uh lithuania latvia
50:41
estonia all friends of ours poland great friend of ours part of the european union right that’s what we need to be doing and get it out of uh
50:48
the the suzerainty and imperial pretensions of a
50:53
despotic madman over in russia if you were a realist you were going
50:59
that’s a bunch of gobbledygook uh if you’re a realist you’re looking at this going in realism
51:05
great powers are like billiard balls they have a zone of influence unlike billiards they’ve got a zone of influence they have a backyard and they
51:12
get pissed off at you if you go in their backyard so a realist is looking at this going like look they have their own monroe doctrine and they’ve been very
51:18
clear on this they’ve been very clear that if we went into ukraine or the baltics which we did they were going to
51:24
flip out and so from a realist perspective what what what’s happening is
51:29
america has made overt pretensions to enfranchising ukraine into our orbit in 2008 george w bush announced that nato
51:36
is going to take ukraine into nato it’s just it’s not a question of when or a question of if it’s question of when
51:42
we’re gonna and we’re also gonna take in georgia which is bordering russia right right about a month later
51:47
georgia gets invaded by russia and uh and according to sources putin flipped out when this happened because
51:54
saying we’re going to eventually enfranchise ukraine and georgia into the into the western world would be like
52:01
russia forming an alliance with canada or russia forming alliance with canada and mexico we would view that as a
52:08
direct threat to us and that is exactly what’s happening so from yeah it would be very much like the cuban missile
52:14
crisis back in yeah one
52:21
in cuba right or like in this instance with ukraine it wouldn’t even be cuba it’d be
52:27
like it’d be like russia putting uh weapons in vancouver or manitoba or something like which is real close to
52:33
the capital right right um so if you’re a realist you’re looking at this and you’re going
52:39
we have like no one’s claiming putin’s a good guy no one’s claiming that he’s ethically justified in his things we’re
52:46
just saying from not not in terms of ethics just in terms of rational thinking and in terms of how the physics
52:52
of nation states work we have provoked russia into doing this and what we need to do is pull back and and come up with
52:59
some kind of peace ideally ukraine will be neutral but the fact is it is their backyard much the same way that mexico’s
53:05
in our backyard we would not be okay with china putting in air force bases we would invade it to stop them that’s what’s going on right now so what we
53:11
need to do is pull back and so uh and and then like john mearsheimer who’s kind of the prominent realist right now
53:16
would say like we need to be pulling in nixon right now and making sure that china and russia don’t team up because
53:22
we’re moving towards a tripolar world um but that that is a big flashpoint policy-wise because the the liberals are
53:28
like yeah like get get ukraine into nato get it into the european union let’s let’s do this let’s pull it out of
53:34
russia’s backyard put it on ours the realists are saying no you’re gonna like you’re gonna put them on def con 4
53:39
forever you’re going to permanently put us at the break of nuclear war if you do this and it’s not going to stop until
53:45
they don’t feel threatened in the same way that if we had a bunch of nukes pointed at us from vancouver we wouldn’t sleep as well at night
53:50
yeah so with the sanctions that we’ve that you know the united states and much of the
53:57
rest of uh europe and some other areas of the world have been putting on russia
54:03
i see it and i could and i could be completely wrong because i am not a foreign policy expert by any means but
54:08
the way i see it is they are actually uh bolstering the relationship between
54:14
russia and china and making them stronger allies and more reliable trading partners because it seems like
54:20
anything that we’re like okay we’re going to put a sanction on oil coming out china’s like we’ll take it
54:27
and everything just seems to be feeding that way making that a much stronger
54:32
alliance which seems to be undoing everything that nixon did back in 1969 or
54:40
70. yeah no i think that’s a very fair point um i i don’t know that um
54:45
under normal circumstances they would be buddying up more than they are right now but the fact that they’re basically
54:51
being forced into an economic relationship um and and china’s willing to have that i would think would be
54:57
would be facilitating all of that and and they have like a uh uh the
55:03
leader of china has said what is it like there is no limit to the friendship of our states or something like that they
55:08
appear to be budding up and they make comments to that on a regular basis um yeah the sanctions are
55:15
i am usually very skeptical of sanctions but they kind of they sort of serve three purposes that
55:21
potentially um serve something right so the big one that sanctions do is just virtue signaling usually sanctions are just the
55:27
economic version of virtue signaling where a country goes we’re going to slap say we’re uh we’re putting
55:33
40 tariffs on beads coming out of euro that’s how much we hate your authority
55:38
doesn’t do anything at all uh and a great example of this is cuba where we’ve had sanctions since
55:43
castro came in and he lived a long full authoritarian commie life despite
55:49
us putting sanctions on them so sanctions a lot of the time really exist as a message to your own
55:54
base they have no effect on or minimal effect on international relations other than they hurt the people at the bottom
56:00
of whatever country they’re in because like if if the gdp drops by 10
56:05
in communist cambodia i guarantee you the people running the politburo don’t suddenly eat 10 less food
56:13
there is there is targeted sanctions which i think are fine uh and if not laudable targeted sanctions you’re
56:18
basically saying like look we’re not trying to target the people of russia we’re trying to target vladimir putin
56:23
and the thug cronies and oligarchs that run this country we’re gonna try and piss them off okay i i like that because you’re
56:31
not hurting people at the bottom and then there’s the final idea which is we are going to make
56:36
um sanctions so onerous that we’re going to either force regime change or policy
56:43
change um normally it’s not very useful it did it did happen with iran um there there were
56:48
multilateral sanctions that were opposed on iran that forced them to the the negotiating table with their nuclear
56:53
ambitions so sanctions did work in that instance but rarely do they work that most of the time they don’t work um in the case of
57:01
russia what might happen is it’s possible that we could make the sanctions so
57:07
intense that we just shut down their economy to the point where they can’t prosecute the war i do not think it’s
57:12
very likely that the russians are going to rise up and kill putin that is kind of the hope with some of these things is
57:17
that we’ll stir up the economic base some people will not be able to they can’t go to mcdonald’s they can’t buy iphones
57:24
their bank account’s been freeze the stock market plummets and enough people are like all of my money’s gone we should kill the leader i i don’t see
57:30
that happening i think when you got somebody worth that much money that’s been in the kgb that’s that paranoid i don’t see him getting knocked out
57:37
you might we might be able to though it’s possible that we might be able to just cut off the gas lines to all the tanks going into russia russia has a
57:44
um russia is like maybe the ninth eighth or ninth largest economy in the world it’s it’s not as big as italy italy has
57:51
a larger economy than russia russia’s economy is about 1.5 trillion 1.4 trillion dollars so more money than i’ve
57:57
got uh but a lot less money than the united kingdom america france have uh
58:03
it’s it’s actually a pretty small economy and it’s just a petrol economy they don’t have a service economy like ours which is why those sanctions might
58:09
work to some extent although even then and we’re now really getting into the weeds i think that i think that they’ll
58:15
have an initial choke point and then and then i think it won’t work right so the reason i say it is oil is a fungible resource people can buy oil from china
58:22
if they want so there is a lag effect where the supply chains have to re-route through china and that means that for a
58:28
while the money won’t be happening once that straightens out i’m like well you kind of missed your window but
58:34
theoretically we could just make like literally deprive them of the funds necessary to buy bullets and feed guys
58:40
over there that’s what like when they were saying like uh visa and mastercard were
58:45
shutting down operation and uh that they were gonna cut off um they were cutting them off to
58:52
everything like you can’t get pornhub over there anymore which wow yeah poor poor russian that’s the
58:59
one that’s going to push him over the edge that’s that’s the one that’ll be the one right um but they just started i
59:05
mean obviously not pornhub they’re not getting pornhub from china but uh like they just started doing deals with
59:12
with chinese banks like just every every every sanction that i saw that we had
59:17
put on them it just seemed like that just bolstered another portion of the chinese russian alliance
59:24
and she’s like okay now we’re banking with them okay now we’re selling our oil to them okay now we’re gonna trade with
59:30
them on this and it just seemed like every single sanction
59:35
on top of hurting your average russian citizen who many of them don’t want this war happening it just seemed as though
59:42
everything was hurting them now they’ve got to wait for new uh new bank cards in order to get on yeah
59:47
i’ll go a step further in terms of the average russian person not not only do a lot of them not want the world though the polling would indicate a little more
59:54
than half of them do but but even then they didn’t get to pick vladimir putin as their leader he’s
59:59
not a freely elected democratic leader like i mean even i’m i’m very hesitant to
1:00:04
ever attribute collective guilt to a large group of people but um in this case i don’t think there’s any because
1:00:11
he they’re not a democratic regime the people of russia are not accountable vladimir putin is not accountable to the
1:00:18
people of russia whether they like him or not he’s in there right so for us to try to punish them i think would be immoral
1:00:24
for the most part we’ve not been well our leaders have not been trying to do that they’ve been collateral damage in
1:00:30
effect you are seeing that kind of idiocy happen i think on the cultural level where like uh you know there was some symphony
1:00:37
in wales where they decided not to do a tchaikovsky concert or rather they did it but they knocked out all the military
1:00:43
marches and things like that i think that’s all dumb like figure skaters don’t have anything to do
1:00:49
with this they can skate as far as i’m concerned there was a somewhere i think it was in wisconsin and that could just
1:00:55
be my own biases against wisconsinites but there’s a and because it happened at a
1:01:02
mustard museum but they took out all the russian mustards oh god that’s so good
1:01:09
sounds so dumb and places were saying they weren’t serving russian dressing and i’m like it’s ketchup and mayonnaise
1:01:14
mixed like if they if if the goddamn wisconsin mustard museum actually gave a
1:01:19
[ __ ] what they could have done is they could have said hey we’re gonna give 10 of all profit today to ukrainians that
1:01:27
have been displaced and the massive humanitarian crisis that’s happening this is one of one of the things that i
1:01:32
find irritating about all this the biggest thing here right now is that there are a lot of
1:01:38
nice people that do not deserve this that have been killed or bombed or forced out of their homes and that’s all
1:01:44
very sad that’s the top thing but in terms of what irritates me beneath that there’s a [ __ ] ton of people that don’t
1:01:50
actually want to do anything but want to get moral credit for being on the right side and that’s why like
1:01:56
if if you are i i’m not claiming i’ve done anything by the way i’ve not given any money to ukraine i haven’t
1:02:01
volunteered so i’m i am morally neutral i am not a good person in regards to this i am at best of zero on a negative
1:02:08
10 to 10. right but if i put a little orange and yellow or orange and blue flag or blue and yellow flag on my my
1:02:15
twitter proof i didn’t do anything um i like all it’s like i don’t know there’s a lot of people that want to get credit
1:02:22
for doing things that don’t involve them sacrificing time or money and i am disinclined to give them credit for it
1:02:28
yes um i yeah whenever i see the blue and yellow flag on somebody’s profile or
1:02:36
whatever and i’m just like is that what you’re doing like now that i think about it that’s how you twitter could do a great thing too what twitter
1:02:43
could do if they wanted to be smart about this twitter could say we are selling ukrainian flags that you
1:02:49
can put on your your twitter profile if you want to get a ukrainian flag it’s ten dollars or however much beyond that
1:02:55
you want to pay and we send all of it a hundred percent of those then yeah and if at that point you wanted to
1:03:01
get them i’d give you credit for it i’ve like you know like thank you for doing that i like regardless of what you’re cause this is nothing to i don’t care
1:03:06
what your intentions are i care about the impact of what you’re doing so like if you just wanted to show off your friends but you’re giving that money to
1:03:12
ukrainian refugees good for you i’ll give you that credit yeah there’s a lot of that stuff going on yeah and even if
1:03:17
it’s only 10 bucks still it’s 10 bucks and that’s yeah that’s going to help someone somehow some way i would i would
1:03:24
love for somebody uh if there’s any like really badass economists that are good at quantitative analysis listening to
1:03:30
your show i would love for somebody to write a um
1:03:35
write a paper on how many twitter followers you need to have
1:03:41
before it is more effective for you to tweet your opinion than it is to just give a dollar to any charity because i
1:03:48
suspect that for the vast majority of people on twitter myself included it would literally be better for me to
1:03:55
just give fifty dollars to charity every year than to tweet all the asinine crap i care about because most people don’t
1:04:01
care aren’t listing all those things right so like but like you know kim kardashian if she if she wants to leverage her massive power mate that
1:04:08
probably does change the world right but like for the average person literally giving a dollar one dollar is so much more effective
1:04:15
than you retweeting like i stand with zelinski or whatever that’s not doing anything right so um yeah if anybody if
1:04:21
anybody can do a quant analysis on that i would love to read it so we so we’ve covered uh realistically
1:04:27
we’ve covered liber muscular liberal theory uh we’ve covered marxist theory and uh
1:04:34
what’s what’s the last one i’m blanking on the last one well i’ll do the last one and then unfortunately i’ve got to go no but but
1:04:41
we we’ll we’ll roll that one up and then and then say our goodbyes um the other one uh that uh is the big one that’s
1:04:48
brought up uh a lot is social constructivism that’s it uh and social constructivism is predominantly
1:04:54
concerned with individuals and ideas so as a recap again realism is power
1:05:00
politics uh liberalism is power ideas democracy markets
1:05:07
marxism is it’s all economics and uh social constructivism is ideas and
1:05:13
individuals and norms and things like that so it’s very nuanced it’s very granular the problem that i have with
1:05:19
with social constructivism is that i don’t see how it can be useful predictively um it’s it’s it’s useful
1:05:25
for like if we’ve already decided to to focus on a particular country then social
1:05:31
constructivism is useful so like social constructivism where it comes in handy is like um
1:05:37
okay yes power’s very important but you know germany and austria are both german speakers and so they’re more
1:05:43
likely to like each other uh england or canada and america are separate regimes
1:05:49
but they both speak english they both have uh you know shared historical background with the british empire and
1:05:54
all of those lights so so money or a military arms buildup is going to be different to canada than it
1:06:00
is to cuba in regards to the united states so there’s these are all true the the the nuance is
1:06:05
accurate but it but you get into so many minutia with social constructivism of
1:06:11
ethnicity language religion dynastic background old grudges sports all these
1:06:18
things to where it’s like i don’t really see how it’s useful it kind of came into its own from what i can tell um during
1:06:25
uh during the ensuing terrorist conflicts we had with 9 11 and thereafter that was really what everybody was focusing on
1:06:31
because non-state actors are very difficult to apply to liberalism or realism like realism if it’s billiard
1:06:38
balls well like terrorists aren’t really a billiard ball so like how do we even think about that right um like like do
1:06:43
we okay terrorists aren’t billiard balls what do we how do we get the terrorists into nato that doesn’t make any sense so
1:06:48
like social constructivism was kind of useful as the sort of like miscellaneous dust bin for stuff that didn’t work um but
1:06:55
but i i don’t personally think it’s super useful i i think it’s it is kind of playing at the margins and
1:07:01
wasn’t kind of based on something churchill did where he was trying to like bring together english-speaking countries to form
1:07:08
yeah i mean i i don’t know that i i don’t know that you’d say that he was a social constructivist um i think like
1:07:14
you could you could argue that churchill was a liberal and that he was trying to build a a um you might call him a
1:07:21
realist too i actually don’t know that much about his foreign policy other than he beat the hell out of the nazis uh
1:07:26
like like i’m you could make the argument he’s a realist because he was happy to team up with the soviet union to fight the nazis which is a very
1:07:32
realist thing to do um you could make the argument that he was liberal as well because he was very concerned with
1:07:38
establishing a alliance of english-speaking peoples um and and he which kind of like like nato
1:07:45
kind of type thing but he in his idea as the uh the british empire was beginning to set he really wanted to make sure
1:07:52
that the former british empire was now the british commonwealth and the united states were going to be
1:07:59
in a in a good relationship and to a great extent he he pulled that off it’s called it’s called the special
1:08:05
relationship uh and that’s a the special relationship between the united kingdom and america
1:08:10
i believe is taken from a churchill speech the same speech that he talks about the iron curtain descending across
1:08:15
europe but but that would be an example of like this is an institution that binds multiple powers
1:08:20
through um shared values and markets um
1:08:27
yes uh yeah that i mean i don’t really have any questions on that one great well i gotta
1:08:33
go man thanks for having me back on uh i can make a pitch to your audience please
1:08:38
you’ve got a lot of the really good stuff in this conversation with matt but there’s other good stuff on the political orphanage so if you thought i
1:08:44
was funny or i gave you an erection or you learned something and you think maybe that could happen again i invite
1:08:49
you to come check out the political orphanage where you will find a lot of other deep analysis of issues
1:08:56
that run opposed to that whole red versus blue dichotomy we talked about earlier
1:09:01
well thank you so much for spending the time with me uh i still owe you a copy of my last book uh if you email me your
1:09:08
address i will send it to you it’s the one about the uh dissociative identity disorder um so i will email or i’ll send
1:09:14
you a copy of that if you give me your address and uh i look forward to whenever i get to have you on again it
1:09:20
is always a pleasure it is a highlight of my year every time um and
1:09:27
and uh i can’t wait to finally meet you in person so we can uh just kind of sit down and hang out and
1:09:33
have a beer rob a bank all that good stuff oh we can rob a bank all right i’ll talk to you soon you have
1:09:39
a good one bye bye all right everybody that was the one the
1:09:44
only the mighty heaton host of the political orphanage uh be sure to follow him subscribe he is
1:09:51
amazing he’s got a lot of great ideas again as he said he does not subscribe to libertarian viewpoints but he’s not a
1:09:56
democrat he’s not republican so you’re gonna find things that you disagree with him on you’re gonna find things that you uh agree with him on no matter what
1:10:05
he is a great person to uh follow to listen to and uh he’s he’s hilarious
1:10:10
he’s he’s just a great dude um since this is being pre-recorded i don’t
1:10:17
remember the date it’s gonna air uh i believe i can say this tomorrow tune in
1:10:22
for an all-new episode of mr america the bearded truth which will be airing at two o’clock
1:10:28
eastern to 2pm eastern and uh then
1:10:34
we will hope you have a fantastic weekend uh before next tuesday when spike cohen
1:10:42
and myself get together for an all-new episode of the muddied waters
1:10:48
of freedom where spike and i will parse through the week’s event like the sweet
1:10:55
spri spring now right yeah spring sweet spring
1:11:03
tula that we are um and then next wednesday will be an all-new episode of
1:11:11
uh my fellow americans then next thursday right here on muddy waters media you can tune
1:11:17
no you can’t because we don’t air those anymore uh because we don’t want to get kicked off social media but they we will
1:11:23
be hosting the muddied zoom for all of our subscribers if you are one of those out
1:11:30
there who want to join the muddy zoom just head on over to anchor dot fm slash
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muddied waters slash subscribe and you can be one of the chosen few who get to
1:11:43
come on and talk with spike cohen and myself
1:11:49
as we uh just talk about whatever the topic of the day seems to be uh thank you all so
1:11:55
much uh also a special shout out to sarah superfan sarahandrag for giving me a
1:12:02
book of facts so i don’t have to keep looking for them at the end of each episode on thursdays but your fun fact
1:12:09
of the week is german is considered the sister
1:12:14
language of english have a great weekend everybody and
1:12:19
remember matter if you’re white if you’re black if
1:12:25
you’re male if you’re female if you’re trans if you’re uh skinny if you’re fat if you’re
1:12:31
whatever at the end of the day
1:12:37
it’s night
1:12:45
i am [Music]
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[Music]
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to convince [Music]
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cause if there’s room enough for one there must be [Music]
1:13:42
i am
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in the evening news [Music]
1:14:05
[Applause] [Music]
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to save me i will only drag [Music]
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[Music] this [Applause] anybody’s
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[Music]