Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 11/18/25 Barry Eisler on the CIA, Venezuela and Using Novels to Wake People Up

Episode Date: November 21, 2025

Scott interviews novelist Barry Eisler about his background at the CIA, how he woke up to the realities of the American empire, the insanity of Washington even considering a war with Venezuela, how he writes his novels and more. Discussed on the show: The Heart of the Matter - Eisler’s Substack Endings: The Good, the Bad, and the Insanely Great Barry Eisler is a novelist and Substack writer. He formerly worked for the CIA but grew disillusioned and left to work as a lawyer and write thriller novels. Check out his books and story at his website BarryEisler.com Audio cleaned up with the Podsworth app: https://podsworth.com Use code HORTON50 for 50% off your first order at Podsworth.com to clean up your voice recordings, sound like a pro, and also support the Scott Horton Show! For more on Scott’s work: Check out The Libertarian Institute:  https://www.libertarianinstitute.org Check out Scott’s other show, Provoked, with Darryl Cooper https://youtube.com/@Provoked_Show Read Scott’s books: Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine https://amzn.to/47jMtg7 (The audiobook of Provoked is being published in sections at https://scotthortonshow.com) Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism: https://amzn.to/3tgMCdw Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/3HRufs0 Follow Scott on X @scotthortonshow And check out Scott’s full interview archives: https://scotthorton.org/all-interviews This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Incorporated https://rrbi.co Moon Does Artisan Coffee https://scotthorton.org/coffee; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom https://www.libertyclassroom.com/dap/a/?a=1616 and Dissident Media https://dissidentmedia.com You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ https://scotthortonshow.com or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest reporting to the American people what's going on in this country. Because the babies are making this. We're dealing with Hitler Revisited. This is the Scott Horton Show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visited, that means that it is not illegal. We're going to take out seven countries in five years. They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

Negotiate now. End this war. And now, here's your host, Scott Horton. All right, you guys. Welcome to show and introducing Barry Isler. He is a former CIA officer, which is very suspicious. Also, he's a novelist and an analyst and current events observer and writer on a substack. The Heart of the Matter is the name of his subspace.

Stack here. Welcome to the show, Barry. How you doing? I'm good, Scott. Thanks for having me on. It's very nice to chat with you. Yeah, yeah, good to have you here. So, first of all, uh, pretty sure this is the first time you've been on the show that we met, uh, one time, a long time ago. Uh, tell me about your career in the CIA and why anyone in the audience should trust you at all rather than simply considering you an enemy because, you know, they say once you're in the mob, you're always in the mob. I mean, once you're in the agency, You're always in the agency. I get that all the time at book signings.

Inevitably, someone will come up to me and say, you know, you never left because you can't really leave. That's not how it works. And my response to that is, how do you know how it really works? Yeah. And do you think... It doesn't really work. There's some guy in the basement at Langley

who's written these 19 novels for short stories and a bunch of screenplays. None of them produced yet in fairness, but still. But yeah, why should anybody trust me? The same reason you should trust or distrust anybody I think I try to just listen to people's arguments and make whatever I will of them. I try not to – I know you asked a question as a joke, but I actually think there's a lot of – there's an interesting dynamic in response, which is a lot of people are like,

oh, I don't like the thing that person said about X topic, and so I don't listen about anything. And my response is usually – I don't agree with him or her on X topic, but I like where they're coming from on Y topic, and they're worth listening to on that. That's it. So when I joined the CIA in 1989, my politics were, I would describe as extremely conventional. I was overeducated or at least well educated. And with an education, as Noam Chomsky points out, comes a lot of inculcation. In fact, George Carlin would say that's the main point of education in America.

Yeah. So I just had a typical American belief that America was a city on a hill and a light unto nations and American exceptionalism and we bomb people. It was beneficent bombing. It was for their own good good good. And they should thank us. And if there was a mistake made, well, mistakes get made. But we're really the good guys. Fundamentally, that's it. That's the way I looked at the world. I'm not proud of it. But I'm not ashamed of it either. I mean, when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And at the time, at the time, time I read, I started reading a lot in college. I've always read a lot since I was a little kid, a lot of fiction. But in college, I started reading a lot of stuff about current events. And I was thinking, well, I want to read a broad section of coverage. And I obsessively read the following. This isn't even a complete list. It's been a while. But every time, every day in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. And then the Atlantic Monthly, the Far East Economic Review, New York review of books, the economist, of course. And I thought, on foreign affairs and foreign policy, and I thought I was getting a cross-section, an ideological and ideologically diffuse view

of all these different events. And what I didn't realize was that, sure, there are differences at the margins among these publications, but mostly what you're getting is an American establishment, a Western establishment, view of the world with no variation in that. And it was only about close exosportico close to 20 years ago my encounter with the early days of the blogosphere and particularly Glenn Greenwald was one of my early influences when he was he had unclaimed territory was his blog at the time people were calling him glenzella and i was reading his articles and i was just like i couldn't argue with it his critiques of the empire and that sort of thing i couldn't really argue with his takes and particularly his takes on media and that just

opened a door and then people like you came flooding through. So we were talking about this a little bit before we started recording. And it's a very interesting question, I think, with regard to what you've just launched, the Scott Horton Academy. How do you get people to change their minds? It's in part by giving them new information. Some of it is just on this journey of life when you're ready. You look at things differently. But yeah, at some point I want to think more about what was it about myself and my experience that enabled me to look at my own country and culture in a more disinterested, dispassionate way. Because that's the biggest challenge, I think, for everybody. We're encased in skin and ego. And that's all evolutionarily designed. So it's there

for a reason. But it makes it really difficult for us to see other people the way they see themselves and to see ourselves the way other people see us. And that's the real trick of it. So, You know, just take Ukraine for a second, and I don't mean, whatever, anybody who's watching this, at least on your end, has already read, provoked and knows about what you've done there. But there's obviously all the information in the world in that book, and that's vitally necessary. But to appreciate that information, to be open to it, you have to, you have to be able to see NATO's expansion and what was going on in Ukraine, not over the last four years, but over the last four years. but over the last 14 or at least going back, I would even argue, to the time the Berlin Wall came down, is what you need to, you have to have some understanding of that,

and you have to have some understanding of how Russia viewed all these events following the fall of the Soviet Union. And if you don't understand that, then you're just going to be like, a plucky democracy invaded by the new, new Hitler, and it's Chamberlain Hitler appeasement. And that's the end of the story. worry. So I don't know. It's a longer answer and a more discursive answer to your question that I intended. But somewhere along the line, I got past all the overeducated, over inculcated framing

in my mind and started to be able to look at things, as I say, in a more dispassionate, more disinterested way, the way a Martian might or the way someone from another country or culture might. And that's been, that's where I'm coming from these days. So, you know, if anybody finds that untrustworthy, I get it. I think a lot of things that people, a lot of times a mistake that people make, if they're dealing with someone like me who I'm pretty sure I can say this honestly, to the extent I know myself, I don't hate America. I'm not trying to be unduly hard on America.

I'm just trying to see America the actions of my government, the way other people from other places might see the actions of my government, the way a Martian might see the actions of my government. And if you're deeply set in a framework of us and them, in group, out group, good guys, bad guys, then you encounter someone like me and you'll feel like, well, then, like, what's wrong with you? Why do you hate America? I'm like, don't hate America. Trying to be even in the application of my principles.

That's it. If that seems like I hate America to you, just take a closer look at yourself. Anyway, for anyone who heard those long and discursive introductory remarks, If you still distrust me for having spent three years at the CIA from 1989 to 1992, that's okay, too. Just try to evaluate my arguments based on whether they make sense or not, not based on where I used to work. Yeah. Well, no, I like that because, you know, you're kind of saying, look, don't mistrust me too much because I used to work for the government, but also don't mistrust me too much because now I'm so much the opposite of that that I'm spending all my time criticizing the government.

but so and then that was what I was interested was what years were you at the CIA and what can you tell us about your job there because that's a somewhat brief tour but during a very important period of time of course right at the end of the Soviet Union and the launch of Iraq War I so it's I guess like implied meaningful that you would endorse my book because presumably you know something about it already and so you you know that I'm not wrong rather than you're just like learning something for me and saying, oh, well, that seems right. You're saying, uh-huh, this guy knows what's right because I already know it, right?

Yeah, I was there during a really interesting time and the Berlin Wall came down and then the start of Iraq War I won. But the truth is, most of what I did there, it's funny when I say this too, there's like, you know, some people be like, oh, come on, tell me about the coups and the assassinations. It was really mostly training. It was only three years. I didn't do that much. So, you know, these things were going on, and they were a pretty big deal within the agency.

I was working at the Japan desk, the Japan branch when Bush 1 invaded Iraq. And this had nothing to do, really, with what was going on with my responsibilities with regard to Japan. But I do remember, this actually I think shows some of the promise. Like this guy's got a chance of getting out of the intellectual boxies in. I remember the head of that branch sitting down everyone in the office and saying, giving a little speech about how important it is now that we've invaded Iraq and how this is going to change things. And I still remember her saying, because in a time of war, blah, blah, blah.

And I was struck by that. I was like, it just sounds suspicious to me. Like, it's so fancy and sort of oninistic, like, in a time of war. And I just felt suspicious that, like, what are you trying to sell me with that kind of language? Like, yeah, we invaded Iraq, I know. Anyway, so maybe that showed there was some promise. But I really didn't know all the stuff that I've subsequently learned from people like you and Jeff Sachs about Ukraine, for example. And all the framing that some of it is from my own efforts and some of it is from following.

I don't know if you know Bob Wright, Robert Wright, the guy who wrote, yeah, the guy who wrote why Buddhism is true, he's got something he calls cognitive empathy, which is really just Sun Su, know your enemy, just be, how does the other side see itself and how do they see you, that kind of thing. A lot of this, I really, I learned after the fact, but I was open to it because I'd already started to have my doubts about, are we really the good guys? You know, it's like that, I don't think this can be widely viewed enough. There's some, I think it was a BBC or some British comedy show, which I'm not familiar with because I only know this one clip, but it's a couple of British actors. And they're playing Nazi soldiers on, I think it was the Eastern Front in World War II. And one of them says to the other, like, I've been having some thoughts lately. Oh, yeah.

Are we the baddies? And these guys are wearing, you know, Nazi stalled cabaret. Are we the baddies? And there's so much truth to that. Like, it can all be there right in front of you. and yet you still think you're the good guys even really even

do you think Nazi soldiers thought they were the bad guys they didn't and when you realize that it should at least open you up to the possibility of asking are we

maybe we are the good guys maybe we are I'm not saying we're not but are you really asking the question because if everybody else even Nazis thinks that they're the good guys

then you're human most of us have far we have far more in common than we do differences, I think, as a species. Maybe you're doing something wrong. Maybe you're not, at least maybe you're not as good as you think. Maybe the other side has a small point that's worth considering. Yeah. Well, you know, you pointed out earlier that our U.S. government has a great alibi in that

they get to call themselves America. And then even when you're criticizing a specific policy by a specific group of men who control the national government, and you call it America. We all do. Like, it's just, you just, it's a really good point. Israel is doing this or that. And then to somebody who doesn't want to hear it, they're going, I can't believe. This guy is so anti-American.

When if you just rephrased it, what you really said was you don't like Bill Clinton, the face-biting rapist, or George Bush, the cross-eyed idiot, or Barack Obama, the Tommy traitor, or, you know, whichever is your thing. And then when you focus on that and you go, oh, Joe Biden, the absolute senile idiot who was. At the top of his game had an IQ no higher than like 82, 83 in the first place. You know what I mean? And then now he's in his early 80s and is completely, you know, suffering from the side effects of his medications and everyone can tell. Well, when you put it that way, you know what I mean? Like you can criticize Joe Biden all day. I don't get upset about that.

I totally agree. And I try. It's hard. You get in habits. And it's hard to get out of them. I actually try when I discuss these things, especially with people who I know are going to be somewhat resistant to and even hostile

to my views. I try to use useful and accurate terminology. So, right, for example, I talk about Israel a decent amount and especially with Jewish friends. It's challenging. I don't want to have a fight. I don't even want to have an argument or a debate. I just want to have a discussion,

a good faith conversation, and I try hard to say things like the Israeli government, because I'm not speaking for every Israeli citizen, not at all. I know quite a few, in fact, I have a neighbor, got a good friend from many years ago. These are good people. Most people, again, this is George Carlin, you know, most individuals are good people trying to do good things. A government, rulers, the ruling class, the elite, the establishment, this is a separate entity with interests that are radically different from those of ordinary people.

Again, there's George Carlin. George Carlin's like the foundation of so much of my worldview at this point. Yeah, one of the things I did with my daughter starting, which he must have been 10 years old, I said, listen, you're going to get good stuff in school, but there's going to be a lot of inculcation too. And so what I'm going to do is provide an antidote for the inculcation. His name is George Carlin, and we would watch videos of his on YouTube. And I think that did a lot of good for her, and it was fun for both of us. You know, he starts jamming in New York where he says,

I got a lot of idiot rules. One of them is, I don't believe anything the government tells me. Nothing. Zero. And, you know, he goes on to complain about corporate America and stuff like that, too. He was a leftist. You know what I mean? He was not a libertarian or a right-wing or any kind.

But he was from that post-Vietnam era where the government, even according to the commies, right? The government is like the ruling committee of capitalism. or whatever. Absolutely. And, you know, it's funny because what he's saying there should be so axiomatic. I mean, nobody should, I don't even know how you could dispute it. It's Eye of Stone.

All governments lie. This isn't a theory. It's an empirical fact. It doesn't mean that the government never says anything that's true. But this is, it's always been curious from me. And I think I have an answer, actually. But all of us in our ordinary lives. if you're friendly with someone and then you catch that person in a lie,

might not cut that person off forever. But from then on, if that person tells you a story that sounds even the least bit suspicious, you'll be suspicious because you know this person lies. And the more you catch, and if you catch them lying a second, a third time, at some point you're just going to be like this person's a lie. I'm not going to believe anything. They say how many. So right now, the government, the U.S. government is trying to gin up a war with Venezuela.

And it's the propaganda. I mean, this might even be good news. The propaganda has gotten so ridiculous that it's good for almost nothing other than comedy. Still, as I'm listening to the terminology, things like narco terrorists and the excuses, and Marco Rubio preemptively saying there's a bunch of stuff that's going to be Venezuelan false flag operations. He doesn't use those words, but it's what he's talking about. My tweet on this was all, I was like, hey, watch out. Next thing, those Venezuelans are going to blow up Nord Stream 2.

Yeah. And I'm thinking, like, okay, do you know anything about the Gulf of Tonkin incident? You know, anything about the WMDs that weren't in Iraq? Do you know anything about any of this stuff? Remember the main, you can go back farther than even just Vietnam. Why would you take these latest articulations of a cause for a war? Like, we've got to do something to Venezuela, bomb them, invade them, whatever. Why would you accept these things?

devoid of any evidence at all as the truth. It's crazy behavior. You know, it's funny, man, is I'm glad you're bringing this up because it's so bananas that I have trouble taking it seriously. Like, I should be the world's greatest alarmist about Venezuela right now.

Aren't I the editorial director of anti-war.com? All hands on deck. We got to stop this. Call the White House. Oh, my God. But on the other hand, I'm going, come on. I really get a start of war when,

They're not even bothering to lie us into it. They don't even have a fake pretext for war. This is like Obama and Libya or something. But Obama did. You know, I just, and yet, I mean, Venezuela is a big country with an armed population. And, you know, the government there has been very bad for the people. But the poor support the regime,

certainly as opposed to a foreign invasion force attempting to. Which is often, and maybe even always the case. So it just seems impossible. to me that anybody's even seriously considering this only on at the same time look at the military force that's being a raid over there I mean they just pulled the Gerald Ford into orbit um and in the end to your example of Obama and Libya well we did bomb Libya we didn't invade so maybe that's the plan I think which he announced in a press conference from Brazil right he didn't go get go to the capital and give a speech or anything he says in a press conference

we're bombing them I didn't even know that I don't remember that. And, you know, when he started bombing Yemen, he made no announcement at all. They just had Bernadette Meehan from the State Department put out a press release. We're now at war with Yemen. That was it. So I guess what the hell again? Glenn Greenwald makes this point regularly. And once you see it, you can never unsee it. It's one of the absolutely deeply bizarre things about America. And here I'm not even just talking about the government, although obviously this implicates the government. We're just constantly bombing people. It's all the time and it's background noise. It's so normal that when we bomb

the latest country, the president doesn't even feel like it warrants at this point. It certainly doesn't warrant an Article 1, Section 8 Declaration of War by Congress. It doesn't even require any sort of a press conference and Q&A session in the White House. Why would it? It's the most ordinary thing in the world. And you get used to that as an American. But if you live abroad ever, Glenn's in Brazil. I lived in Japan for four years, you realize this is really weird. And then when you hear U.S. pundits like Van Jones, what was he talking about Iran? I think there's sometime in the last year, I forget exactly, but he described Iran as like a deeply bizarre country. And it was so, this is what I'm talking about. We're like, do you have any idea how

your country seems to other peoples? Do you have any? No, I assume not, because there are so We didn't have a name for it, but we kind of jack off to it. It's American exceptionalism. And I'm like, that itself, that's a nice way of saying the neutral term would be atypical, less neutral would be weird, things like that. You just said it yourself, you're different in some way. And these ways are not always good. We have more violence, both at home and abroad than pretty much any other country that's not in the middle of a war. Who's really the bizarre country here?

And yet, one of my favorite Japanese expressions is Saru No Shidiwada. The monkey laughs at the other monkey's ass. It explains so much of human behavior. Anyway, so yeah, I'm not surprised that Obama started bombing Libya and was one of how many presidents to bomb Yemen because it's just, you know, it's like he's just getting a snack from the refrigerator, you know, make an announcement about that, taking a leak, you know, I'll be right back. Yeah.

The audiobook, I know. People are always asking me, when are going to be done with the audio book for Provote. Well, the fact is, I had to put it on hold for a bit while I'm working on the academy. But the fact the matter is, I have published the H.W. Bush chapter and the Bill Clinton chapter, which is already, I think, nine or 12 hours, an audiobook worth just right there. And I have finished recording all of W. Bush, all of Obama, and about at least half of Trump won. Although I still have a lot of editing to do on all those before I can publish them. But you will be the first to know if you sign up and subscribe at my substack.

where I am publishing this audio in pieces until I get the whole thing ready together for Audible eventually. So sign up at Scott Horton's show.com. That's my substack, Scott Horton's show.com. Hey, you guys should buy my books. You know, my first one was called Fool's Air and Time to End the War in Afghanistan.

It was really good and it all came true too. Watch me predict the end right there in the preface of the thing. Also, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. That's all the wars from Jimmy Carter all the way through the first Donald Trump administration. And then my latest is provoked how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Tucker Carlson says it's the definitive take. Expanddesigns.com. That's my friend Harley Abbott's company.

And he is the webmaster for the Scott Horton Show as well as the Libertarian Institute. He is the guy that redesigned the Ron Paul Institute for PC. and prosperity website. He's done a lot of great work for other friends of mine. And unlike a lot of webmasters and web developers and different guys that I have worked with over the years, the thing is about Harley Abbott and his team is they do what they say they're going to do when they say they're going to do it and are just extremely reliable and extremely knowledgeable and 100% vouch for the great Harley Abbott over there. You got a website. You need it fixed up, you need a new one, you're setting up a business, working on any kind of

online project like that. Check out expanddesigns.com. And, you know, although look, when Obama bomb Libya, they had a substantial force of al-Qaeda terrorists on the ground to provide air cover for, to accomplish that regime change. And there were, and not just the bin Ladenites, although they clearly started it, the guys who were just home from Iraq War II out in from the far east of Libya. But there were different tribes. that joined up in the faction fight against Qaddafi's tribe in order to do that and all that. And so it was simply a matter of time.

With American air power over this, you know, broadly wide open desert country. And anti-Keddafi forces on the ground. Yeah. Now, it's been nothing of chaos there since, but it's not, you know, American GIs caught up in the thing or whatever. I don't know how anybody could be advising Donald Trump that an attack on Venezuela would be,

anything like as easy as the nine-month air war in favor of al-Qaeda against Gaddafi was. If that's like the mark of a relatively easy war, then, you know, Venezuela, it would be, well, god damn. I hate to quote the great American fraud, David Petraeus. Who knows if he even said this, but supposedly when they started the invasion of Iraq, he said, tell me how this ends. Right, right. And the answer was, with you arming the Sunni insurgency and then arming the Shiite Bada Brigade to go and fight them and torturing people to death, David, that's how.

But anyway, and lying about it for morning to night. But, yeah, a war against Venezuela. I mean, who knows? I guess they figure maybe there, I guess that New York Times story was, well, one option would be they'd get a good lucky decapitation strike against the regime and then things would work out well after that. Yeah, what, install the Nobel Peace laureate. who's asking for more bombing.

I don't even post it anymore. You know, we've always been at war with East Asia War as Peace. It's too literal now. It's not, you know, parody satire. Do we even know what is the deal? I mean, you know, I went to look up the oil companies in relationship with Venezuela. Yeah. Who has the heavy oil refineries that are needed for heavy Venezuelan crude available?

It's a good question. I know. It's Chevron and Citgo and Coke oil has. a thing down in Corpus Christi, but there are others in Louisiana and I think in Galveston that can handle that kind of heavy crude. And that's mostly Chevron and Sicko,

and you can see where they have been lobbying the government to lift sanctions on Venezuela or at least complaining against any new ones. And please don't disrupt business any more than it already is. But then I read this... We're already making money

from our commercial interest in Venezuela. Yeah, they just want to... They don't give a damn who. rules Venezuela, they're just pumping oil and selling it. As long as they're allowed to do that, they're happy. Right. But then Exxon, apparently, and this is a little more

like, what's the word for it, tendacious type? That's the bad, not very good word for it. The tenuous type connection, I'm not exactly sure. But Exxon mobile

bank rolls, the CSIS, which is for international science and security, whatever the hell, I was get it wrong. And they had put out a big thing saying we need regime change there. So Harrison Berger or Berger wrote this thing in the American conservative saying, you know, it looks to him like its Exxon is behind this. And so then maybe this is like a corporate war between Exxon and Chevron, or Chevron is already in there and would rather do business.

and Exxon would rather have a regime change and take it away. And I don't know enough about it really like to verify all that. But that was, for all I know, Chevron is lobbying for regime change too. I mean, I don't know. Wow. Well, I'm going to have to thank Harrison for that. You know what I mean? Oh, one more thing.

Let me raise this. I swear I'll shut up. A guy sent me this saying that, you know, a lot of this has to do with the Israelis. The Israelis are pissed off because Maduro is in bed with Hezbollah. And I don't know if that's really true. I mean, there must be some colonels of truth to it that he is, I know that because of all the sanctions, people are going hungry and they invited an Iranian firm to come in and open grocery stores in Venezuela because the Iranians were the only ones who were willing to defy the sanctions

and do business with them. So there is some relationship there, and you could see how that would be cause for resentment among the Israel lobby. And the Israel lobby just happens to overlap with the war party on every other issue in America, too. So if it's Marco Rubio, then that's just one. more reason to push for regime change in Venezuela if the Israelis also don't like them, you know? That is super interesting and I don't know, but first I'm going to thank Harrison for giving me the plot from my next novel, maybe, because that could be a great thriller.

There's a certain kind of solution to problem in this world that I've noticed, and probably other people have been like really just notice this barrier that sometimes happens. It's okay. it's like it's the alleged solution that makes the problem worse requiring even more of the solution and this sounds like that kind of thing is like so wait so we're sanctioning in venezuela why i don't really know they have oil they want to sell it uh there are western commercial interests they're helping to refine the oil extract the oil uh why are we actually it's the rhetorical question we come back to it why because dominance and the need of the u.s empire to dominate but um but we sanction the hell out of that country and in desperation they turn to one of a few countries that

is willing to do that might be willing to defy the sanction regime and that's Iran and now it's like well look what they're doing now they're they may have a connection with Hezbollah so we need to the sanctioning isn't enough we even we need war and again like the solution of trying to overthrow the Venezuelan government so our regime supposed to call it a regime not a government leads to a need for even more of the solution. The best case of this that I'm aware of is NATO expansion following the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact.

This was not only predictable. It was predicted by people like George Cannon in the New York Times. I think he was writing about this in 1997. I don't have to tell you, obviously. This would be flip-note 6,337 in Provoked. But it's obvious that if the problem is Russia is unspeakably dangerous.

Therefore, we need to expand our military to get closer and closer to Russia. Russia gets twitchy about this and starts pushing back. We're like, what do we tell you? This is, I mean, George Cannon literally said this again. I know you know this. Look how aggressive they are.

They're getting really irate. We need to encircle them even tighter. And it just building this military alliance closer and closer to Russia until we finally reached its historically most sensitive border, that's Ukraine, because Russia's been invaded, through Ukraine twice in the 20th century,

what is Russia? And finally Russia's like, enough. And then we're like, what have we been telling you? And we frame it as Putin is the new, new Hitler and just woke up one Tuesday morning and said, you know what, I really need to invade someone today. And that becomes the narrative in the West and how it's Chamberlain and Hitler and all that stuff all over again.

And the other thing, the other major example of this that I'm seeing play out in real time. And it's tragic among other things is the baseless accusations of anti-Semitism against anyone who, even in good faith, in the gentlest way, questions the utility of the relationship between the American government and the Israeli government. It's a completely fair question. And if you take even a half step back, you see things that I try to characterize these things in neutral terms. Like really what I want to say is, is profoundly weird and bizarre. But let's just

call it unusual. It's unusual for the politicians of one country to pledge devotion to the welfare of another country. That's unusual. Nobody can say, no, no, no, Barry. That's all over the world. It's like that. Chinese leaders are constantly talking about Uzbekistan and how they just want, Like, you know, I was elected to serve the interests of Uzbekistan, and from the first day, I, a Chinese leader, I have been doing that. This is not a thing. It's not a thing anywhere else, as far as I know, and it's not a thing in America except with regard to one country. And we have politicians. I know you know all this stuff.

We have some of it I've learned from you. We have politicians who outside their offices in Congress. The Rayburn building, the Hart Senate office building, they've got the flag of a foreign country hanging outside. Their U.S. politicians elected by American voters. If you just, again, it's not even like a step back. It's like an inch back just because it's so normal. It's like the U.S. government bombing all these other countries all the time. At some point, you just stop noticing.

But whoa, whoa, there's nothing like this anywhere in the world, including in our country, except with regard to this one other country. What's up with that? Maybe I'm missing something. What's up with that? And then you get, you anti-Semite, you self-hating June? I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, maybe I'm wrong. I always start that way.

I don't know everything. I look into things reasonably deeply, but I don't know everything. Tell me why I'm wrong. And this is something I wish more people could understand. When you respond to an argument with an accusation, that should be a signal to you. you that you should examine your own position. Maybe it's the right position.

I'm not telling you it's wrong. But if you think about it, it's a weird way to conduct a conversation. It's even a weird way. It's a terrible way, in fact, to try to change someone's mind, to try to get someone to see something the way you see it. Someone asks a question, and it's dumb to assume that the question's in bad faith. It's not, I'm not saying there are no bad faith actors in the world. Of course there are.

But most people, ordinary people, operate in good faith that they ask a question about something, it's probably in good faith. Even if they have ideas you think are bad or dangerous, the best way to get them to see things differently is to engage them with respect. So the notion that you should respond to an argument with an insult or an accusation, has that ever worked? Has anyone's mind ever been changed by being accused of some vile thing or being insulted in some way? Never. I mean, literally not once in human history has someone's mind. ever been changed that way. So then my question to anyone who accuses any, if you're accusing people who question the Israeli government, American government relationship, if you're reflexively

accusing someone like that of anti-Semitism, why? You're not going to persuade anyone. Well, no, they're not trying to, they're trying to bully you and scare you so that you're afraid to be labeled that because what if your boss finds out that you've been labeled that? Yeah, yeah. All the people at church say, oh, I heard that this guy hates Jews. news now, man, those guys, and that you won't be willing to risk your reputation by saying something moral about Israel's crimes. Yeah, and it actually makes me wonder whether shunning is some innate genetic trait in human. We don't call it shunning anymore because we're modern.

Now we call it cancellation, and it's only the other side that cancels. It's never, my tribe would never cancel anyone. We're the enlightened ones. I do sometimes wonder that. But I actually think it's both. I think in some instances, there's a rubric I noticed somewhere along the line, and I found it really helpful when understanding human behavior. I call it, is it cynical or is it clinical?

Like, is it deliberate propaganda or is it neurotic? I think among a lot of ordinary people, if you criticize the behavior of the Israeli government or the relationship between the two governments, I think a lot of people who are like, what are you anti-Semitic, do you hate Jews, or something like that, I just think that's, it's almost a reflex that has been programmed into them. They don't really mean anything bad by it. They're not really trying to do anything except maybe defend their own worldview, which is very common.

But I totally agree with you that the Bill Crystals of the world and the Wall Street journals and people who are attacking that guy, I forget his name, the Head of the Heritage Foundation right now, for defending Tucker Carlson. With these people, I don't think it's clinical. I think it's cynical. They know exactly what they're trying to do. and since they weren't able to destroy Nick Fuentes

for the questions he's been asking, what they do is they shift their fire to someone like Tucker Carlson for having a conversation with him. And the point of the exercises, as you say, to demonstrate to anyone that I've forgotten the name of this actress who has just dropped by her talent agency, Gersh, because she talked with Nick Fuentes on her podcast. Again, I got to say, I just think it doesn't matter what your views are of almost anyone.

I know you and Daryl, Daryl Cooper talked about this on the podcast, provoked. We can probably come up with edge case exceptions. I'm not sure I could think of any off the top of my head, honestly, they may exist. My attitude that I will talk to anyone. I want to have a good faith conversation with almost anyone. And actually, this relates to something having to do with the Scott Horton Academy that I was thinking about. Your demolitions of people like Bill Crystal are awesome. I'm trying not to laugh because I feel like it's not really the point that they're so enjoyable, but they are. And it kind of is

the point because ridicule is a powerful weapon against the powerful establishment figures, ruling class, whatever. Ridicule is a very powerful weapon. And you're not trying to persuade Bill Crystal, nor should you be trying. Nobody could persuade Bill Crystal. It's not possible. And it's not the point of the exercise. The point is to reveal him as the ass that he is so that other people will be less persuaded by his brand, which is a kind of establishment brand. And for most people, it's like, well, he's an establishment brand. Then that means I can trust him. So you'll reveal him to be an idiot. And that's useful. But with, again, ordinary people who you just engage with at a you know just out in the street in the world at

the workplace whatever um in my experience they're not operating in bad faith they've just unconsciously imbibed a lot of bad frameworks how do you engage those people in a way that that just gets them to take even a first step because everything every journey starts with your answer is you write them novels to read right so that is one way actually um and i do Tell us about that, man. I'm interested in that. I mean, I'm no storyteller, but I'm interested in your career. No, that's actually not true because I read Provoked and it's a story.

So it's interesting. And I'll answer the first question first, but I'm interested in the way our minds are, let me say this. Our minds, I believe, are wired for story, for narrative structures. We're just built for it. Who knows why? What a kid say, you know, at bedtime? Like, tell me a story, daddy or whatever. We all love stories.

We just were born to it. And then there are different kinds of stories. There are nonfiction stories, and those have to be told a certain way, or they won't be compelling. And there's a structure there that matters, or people won't get it. They'll tune out. It won't land. Fiction is another kind of story, a more traditional kind of story. And what I've learned, and what I try to do in my fiction is this.

First, they always say, as Graham Green, Graham Green called his novels, which he thought weren't that important, which, Jesus, anyway, can't agree with them on that, but called them entertainments. And I think it's fair to, I don't want to be, never want to be pretentious about anything I do or anything I write. A relative a few years ago asked me, how would you rate your novels? And I said, I'd actually never thought about this. I said, I think it's mostly going to be up to my readers.

I mean, what would I say? I would say they're not shit and they're not Shakespeare. they're somewhere in between and other people have to have to make that decision for themselves. I do want to make them as entertaining as possible. They're political thrillers. They have to thrill. If they don't thrill you, if you're not in the edge of your seat, if you don't believe these characters or feel,

if you don't feel these characters are real, if you don't deeply feel all the challenges they're going through and the dilemmas they face and the emotional consequences and physical other consequences that they're facing because of all the events of the story and how they're handling them. And then I failed in my job. I shouldn't be writing a novel. I should be doing something else,

writing something else or doing something else. So that's the first thing. It's a novel. It's got to entertain. It's got to be gripping and it has to feel real. Like these are real people facing real things. But so you can think of this as being delicious. But the food I serve, I do want it to be delicious and it needs to be delicious.

But I also do want it to be nutritious. And not at the expense of the taste, but the good news is I don't think those two things are necessarily in conflict. Like I wrote an article for NPR quite a few years ago. I don't think it was exactly what they were expecting. But it analyzed 1984, George Orwell's 1984, as a political thriller. But it's not the thing about what makes that novel work, the things we remember it for, all the things like the two-minute hate

and Emmanuel Goldstein and we've always been a war with East Asia and war is peace, ignorance, strength, freedom, and slavery, all that great stuff. surveillance cameras everywhere. Yeah, the telescreen. We remember all the warnings, which turns out were a bit more of an instruction manual, but still it wasn't intended that way. We remember these things, but the structure of that novel is actually, it's classic.

It's a great political thriller. It's all there. So I think that's why people read the novel. It's a great story. They didn't read it. I mean, it's much better known and more widely read than his short essay. I think it's three pages, politics in the English language. which is like everybody should read politics in the English language.

School children should be reading that from the earliest age. But I don't think it's nearly as widely known as 1984 because it's not in a fictional narrative structure. So this is just something I've tried increasingly to do as I've written more and hopefully gotten better at my craft. When you put your latest book on Substack, right? Is that a first? I put some, I put excerpts of it.

Hey, you guys know I got a new show? Yeah, it's called Provoked. And it's me and the great Darrell Cooper, Martyr Made, and we come on live every Friday night at 8 o'clock Eastern Time, 7 o'clock, Texas. And, you know, we talk about things. I think you really like it. So check us out over on the YouTube and at provoked.com. You know, they always said, Scott, you keep drinking that much coffee.

You're going to turn into a cup of coffee, and then it finally happened. I am coffee now. And if you go to scothorton.org slash coffee, you two can get Scott Horton show flavored coffee, branded coffee there. It's Ethiopian mixed with Sumatran blended coffee. It's so good. And I have some of it right here. In fact, I'm drinking in my Libertarian Institute mug, you can see. This is how I wake up in the morning and this is how I stay awake in the afternoon.

And if I was a drunk, it would be how I get home. from the bar at night. So sound advice to you guys there, you know, take an Uber. Moondos, artisan coffee. Get it, they hate Starbucks because Starbucks, well, first of all, doesn't taste that great. And then also, they support the war party. But Moondos, artisan coffees does not.

They support peace. So check us out at scothorton.org slash coffee. Man, y'all should check out Tom Woods Liberty Classroom. It's really great. It's like the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy. freedom, only it's Tom Woods and his guys, teaching you the history and economics you did not learn in college, but shoulda for the price you paid. But he'll help you make it up. Just click the link in the right-hand margin at Scott Horton.org. All right, you guys, me here for Roberts

and Roberts Brokerage, Inc. at rrbi.com. That's rrbi.co. And it's such a great company. They'll help you get your precious metals at very reasonable prices with the minimal take. They'll never steer you wrong and never into any kind of scams or upsell you on some weird coins that you don't need or anything like that, man. It's straight business. Tim Fry does a solid job over there. And just think over all these years, if you guys had taken my advice when I told you, Mike Swanson says you ought to buy metals and Tim Fry says he'll help you buy some, then boy, would you be making money this year, huh? That's rrbi.co for Roberts and Roberts, Brokridge, Inc. I might have excerpted one of my novels before. It's interesting. I don't think, I didn't really

do that because I thought, at least not consciously, I wasn't thinking, oh, my, what I post on substack is, is a lot more like what we're talking about here, critiques of our rulers and a lot of framing things. Sometimes I'll just listen to conversations and it's all heat and no light. And I'll try sometimes to offer some thoughts on how you can have a more productive conversation. That's what I those sorts of things on substack. And so yeah, my latest novel, The System is about a first term congresswoman Valeria Velas who is an idealist. Whatever you might think of her ideals, you might not agree with them. She's, she's something of a socialist in her leanings, although she doesn't think of herself that way. And it's funny, like a lot of people react

to that. And I don't, I don't really care for me. The point, she could be anything. She could have been a libertarian. It doesn't matter what she is. The point is she's about to get an education about how power really works in America. Where is real power exercised in America? The arms industry, Wall Street, establishment media, maybe the oil industry, big lobbying outfits, that sort of thing. And that's what interests me. What happens when idealism confronts real. power in America, all within a dramatic context with enormous personal and maybe even physical consequences. And look, for anybody listening who's interested in fiction, if you're writing fiction, I'm just going to give a very quick recommendation. There's a screenwriter named Michael Arndt.

This is the guy who wrote Little Miss Sunshine. He's the guy that they, he did the first draft of Star Wars 9 that they threw in the trash. That's right. It made the second or third worst movie ever produced. I'm not, you know, I got to admit, I'm not a big Star Wars fan. I know, which leaves me out of a lot of the cultural zeitguise. But I read, I saw like a YouTube that was like what his version of episode nine would have been instead. And it was so much better and had the liberation of Corazon and all this cool stuff in it. Okay.

He's a terrific writer. And if anybody's curious, he wrote one of the best videos on the craft of writing fiction. This is about screenplays, but it doesn't matter. But it's about storytelling. It's called endings, the good, the bad, and the insanely great. great. It's about an hour and a half. He compares Star Wars, the graduate, and his own movie Little Miss Sunshine. And what he's talking about specifically are external, internal, and philosophical stakes. And I can go on and on about it, but I won't because I just want to say, like, these are

things that if you're writing fiction, probably if you're writing anything, are just good to have in mind. Even if you just love fiction, right, love reading fiction or love movies, it's an interesting thing to keep these different kinds of stakes in mind. And so in the system, yes, I've got all three stakes in play and hopefully you feel the characters are true. But I am also trying to portray to depict power in America as it's really exercised. Who are the people who want it? What happens to them if they get it? What happens to their ideals as they find that the only way to get anything done in America if you're a politician is to compromise with other sources of power? And what happens is you continuously compromise.

What happens to your ideals? What happens to your soul? Again, all presented in the dramatic context. My hope is, my primary hope is that people will read this book and they'll laugh and they'll cry and they'll be titillated and they'll be on the edge of their seat with their hand over the mouth because, oh my God, like, what's going to happen? What's going to happen?

If the novel doesn't do that, then it wasn't a good novel. But I also hope that when they're done and they're talking about it with their friends, peers, you're in a book club or whatever, they'll talk about what I've depicted in the book, what Valeria encounters, what she has to do, the compromises she has to make. What are the results of those compromises?

Is this the way it really works in America? And the answer is, it really is the way it works in America. And while I don't have 6,000 plus footnotes like you do and provoked, I don't know other novelists who have bibliographies and footnotes the way I do,

but I do this because one is I do base, everything I depict is from my, my first book, I wasn't doing it consciously like I was trying to build a brand. But at some point, I realized, oh, this is becoming part of my brand. This realism is becoming part of my brand. So the footnote sections have been getting longer since that first book. Nobody has to read them.

I mean, I could just leave them out, obviously. That's cool, though. No, that's great to do, man. Thank you. I agree. And I get a lot of nice feedback because you read the story and there may be some way out stuff in there. Like in my book, the God's Eye View, I was depicting this vast domestic surveillance

apparatus, which I'd been thinking about before Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poetress, Bart Gellman. So a reader might have thought you were exaggerating. Exactly. I actually, when I started reading their reporting in 2013, this is when I was just gearing up to write the book. And I was like, oh, my God, the stuff I was worrying that people would think is too, it's, come on, nobody's really doing this. It's too crazy.

It wasn't crazy enough. So I had to make it even faster. But then I was aware, people are going to say, come on, Barry. There's no way the U.S. government is doing this kind of stuff. It has this kind of ability that it's actually exercising over the American citizenry. So I put all these footnotes in at the end of the book, like, hey, to thank God's eye, the program, this is what it's based on. These are the scientific, the technological capabilities that exist today. This is how they've been deployed as far as we know.

In some ways, I'm reading between a line, but these technologies do exist. And here's an analog that the government actually did this stuff. And I get a lot of nice feedback from people saying, you know, I read your book and I really liked it. And it was super entertaining. but I was like, oh, come on, government's not doing that. And then I got to the footnotes on page, whatever. So that's really gratifying for me. Because, again, I do want people to have the literary equivalent of a delicious meal

when you read my novels. But I definitely also want you to feel nourished at the end and to have, yeah, I want the characters to linger in your mind. Again, great characters do. Well, it's important to do, man. Look, that stuff, I know that, like, when I was a kid, I read, I can't remember what it was called anymore. I read a novel by Dean Kuntz

where the main antagonist in the book is like a secret police agent of the national government who goes around murder and whoever he wants and break whatever he wants and has access to the mama computer that has access to all the major databases in America and he can take control of any police department

and essentially do whatever he wants and it's very much written in that after Waco spirit of 1990s, governmentness, you know, and that was great for reinforcing what I already thought about how much I hate these people, you know what I mean? Yes. Yes, Dean Coons knows, man, that like real patriotism means hating the government and doing everything you can to delegitimize them.

So that's interesting because in the case of that story and you, I think he was pushing against an open door. Nothing wrong with that, obviously. Sure, yeah. But I think the bigger challenge is how do you get someone to look at something that they're resisting? And that's why I think like another Orwell novel like Animal Farm, it's about animals, so people are less resistant. And, you know, I got to watch this HBO series, Chernobyl, which I've heard nothing but incredibly positive things about. to me my guess is high level this is about absolute government ineptitude and if you're

American you probably you probably without even realizing it to some unconscious level you're like well our rulers must be reasonably squared away right no no these are some of the least competent most self-interest of people in the world yeah that's but a lot of people are resistant to that notion so if you want to show them if you want to open a door to the possibility that your own rulers are inept and massively self-interested to the point where they'll put their citizenry at enormous risk of almost anything to preserve their own power, privileges, put it in a different place and a different time. Right.

And then it's not threatening. And then if with a little work, you've gotten someone to accept a premise that, oh, there was a government that was super incompetent and super self-interested. And now they're one step closer to saying, we're talking about just not one government, but governments generally, do you think this is the only government that we can address this way? One of your recent articles was about why in Zelensky calling it quits.

And the answer is because it's not in his interest to call it quits. Exactly right. Never mind what's in the interest of his government. And in fact, I'd raise you one and say, he could very easily be assassinated if he calls it. Oh, I totally agree. I totally agree. There are forces to the right of him

that have threatened his life numerous times. I'm sure he's keenly aware. Not a sunk cost until you stop. That is exactly. Now, all the guys who died in the war are, they're sort of in limbo. But they haven't died in vain until the war is lost. It is. In that day, they will have died in vain.

Yeah, that's right. That is exactly right. And for anyone listening, what Scott just called it, it's a sunk cost, Google sunk cost fallacy. And I could go on about sunk cost fallacy, but I'll say just one thing. It's an interesting thing. It's all about connections. Like you realize something in one area and you start to realize it. in others. And I didn't even know what some cost fallacy was, but I was living it way back

in the dark ages when if you wanted to watch a movie at home, you went to Blockbuster Video. Now, some of our listeners today might be younger than I am. You might not remember Blockbuster those days, but I'll give you a very quick refresher. Blockbuster video, they rented tapes, VHS tapes, take them home and you could watch a movie at home. And the deal was, you get the video, you get the cassette for two nights. You pay $3, take it home for two nights, watch a movie, and return it. You're good to go. But no worries, if you didn't get to watch the movie and you want to hold it for another day, that's fine.

Just pay a dollar for the day you're late. And if you're late for two days, pay another dollar after that at infinitum. And what kept happening to my wife Laura and me is we'd go to the store, let's watch a video tonight. And by the time we get home, maybe we're tired or whatever, we wind up not watching it at that night. We don't watch it the second night.

Now we're faced with the problem of, do we return the video now? We've spent $3 for nothing. Or we could just keep it for one more at night. watch it tonight and then return it and then okay four dollars or yeah four dollars for something is better than three dollars for nothing but for whatever reason we wouldn't get to watch it that and you could see where this is going pretty soon it's like geez i really should return this video on 20 dollars in 20 dollars for nothing if we could just watch this video tonight

21 dollars for something is is far better than 20 dollars for nothing and i was aware of this into some it's not like it was that bad all the time like 20 dollars for nothing but i i started to realize by the way, Blockbuster was making most of its money from late fees, not from renting the videos, but she'd tell you something about the power of this dynamic, some cause fallacy. And you're like, wait a minute, I'm George W. Bush in the Embar province right now. That is exactly the connection I finally made. And I was like, wait a minute, this is true for Vietnam, too. The Pentagon papers, the government knew, though at a minimum, the war couldn't be won.

The government knew early on that the war couldn't be won. But if they kept it going, then it wasn't lost. And it was really, except for the consequences, which are obviously trivial in the case of Blockbuster, and obviously as dire as it gets with regard to destroying a country and a whole region. But the underlying dynamic is the same. If we could just do it for another Friedman unit, you know, then maybe we can have a little something to show for this increasing cost in lives, destruction, and wasted money.

And so it goes on forever 20 years in Afghanistan. By the way, the one thing I'm willing to give Joe Biden a lot of credit for is ending the war in Afghanistan. And it was fascinating to see the liberal established media, Rachel Maddow and others, turned on him for ending this. The economist had on their cover, and you can always count on the economists to do a show like this. They put in the cover debacle. That was it like in giant black, block letters debacle. She did really botch the dismount there. You know, by delaying the withdrawal for months, he just really screwed himself.

And that would have been out by May. the deal, the Taliban would have begun their takeover as the last of the American believing instead of having this ridiculous overlap. And I'm not saying that's not worth pointing out, but to make that the whole focus. Right. For the economist, it's propagandistic. They just love war, sorry, Western interventions, sorry economists, interventions and defense spending and all that stuff.

This is deliberate. They're going to say, like, the implication is this wasn't a tobacco. until Joe Biden ended it. That was the debacle, 20 years over there. That wasn't a debacle. Maybe we even could have, maybe we could have even returned the video after having watched it

and gotten something for our investment. So anyway, that was a good thing. We got it right here. So that's one I would say, for anybody who's curious if you want to go further on this, some cost fallacy is a really important thing to understand. And look, while I'm mentioning these things

that were big eye-opiners from me along the way, For anybody who is not invested in the idea that I still secretly work for the CIA, and this is some kind of, I don't know, reverse psychology, siops conducted in conjunction with the guy who writes all the novels in the basement at Langley. Another, just one last thing I would recommend people look into is this, fundamental attribution error. I sometimes call it the fundamental misattribution error.

But this is something Robert Wright, Bob Wright, talks about a lot on his podcast, zero sum. And it's in very briefly, it is, is the tendency of we humans to gauge ourselves by our good intentions and to gauge, to judge others by their bad behavior. And it's an asymmetry that causes a lot of friction and worse in human affairs. And if you want to understand trivial things,

like relatively trivial things, like a freeway shooting or a freeway fight or something like that, on the one hand, or even the most dire geopolitical events like the war in Ukraine and other such wars, it pays to have an understanding of the fundamental attribution era. I would recommend looking into it

because then so many other things you start to develop a new framework. And it's funny, this comes from my novels too. I think a lot about structure, storytelling structure, which I could talk about all day, but I won't do it here. Structure is really important.

Framing is really important. It could have a lot of great things, but if the structure is bullocks up, the story won't have the emotional impact you want it to and the part of the reason I think that concepts like fundamental attribution error some cost fallacy are so important and even high level things like I have some all governments lie things like this or George Carlin's dictum really axiom that they don't care about you the ruling class your owners as you cause them they don't care about you they don't care about you at all at all at all if you can adopt these things as a framework and a

foundation, then so many things start to make a different kind of sense, that not everybody is the new, new Hitler, and that these wars that your own government is trying to gin up in Venezuela or that it's supporting fueling and funding in Gaza, I'm going to think we should call Gaza a war, and falling into that propagandistic terminology, but whatever, the war in Ukraine, you start to look at these things in a really different way. Maybe it's in an accurate way, but at least you've got an alternative to what's been pumped into your head by osmosis over all these years. That's why I think the framing is so important.

And it's, again, something I tried to do in my novels without being overly direct about it, without interfering with the pleasure of the story. But in such a way that afterwards, maybe people be like, damn, is it really like that? I'm like, I don't know, but I do have all these footnotes. Take a look at the footnotes. Take a look at the footnotes.

All right. And look, people you can check out the system, or at least excerpts of it serialized here at the heart of the matter, which is Barryisler.substack.com. And then you can also find his musings on carnivance and other great stuff here as well. A great interview, man. Thank you for your time.

Barry appreciate it. Oh, it was a complete pleasure, Scott. Thanks for everything you're doing. The Scott Horton show is brought to you by Roberts & Roberts, Brokerage, Inc. Mundo's Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom, APS Radio News, and Dissident Media. Subscribe to the show at Scott Horton.

Scott Horton.org, Scott Horton Show.com, Libertarian Institute.org, YouTube.com slash Scott Horton Show, iTunes, Spotify, et cetera. And check out my books. Fools Aaron, enough already. And my latest, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine at Amazon.com. And I'm serializing the audiobook of Provoked at Scott Horton Show.com and patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. See you next time. Thank you.