Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 9/10/26 John Dudlicek on the Dire State of America’s Infrastructure

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Scott interviews John Dudlicek, a civil engineer from Indiana, about the critical state of America’s water mains, dams and other crucial components of the infrastructure we rely on every day. John Dudlicek is a civil engineer and VP of a construction firm based in Northwest Indiana.  Sign up for the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Freedom at scotthortonacademy.com 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/43D82oY (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/4eMQblu Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan https://amzn.to/4a5fKvx 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: Tax Attorney Matt Sercely https://agoristtaxadvice.com; 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; and Crowdhealth https://www.joincrowdhealth.com/ (use promocode Horton) You can also support Scott’s work by making a one-time or recurring donation at https://scotthorton.org/donate/ or https://patreon.com/scotthortonshow 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! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yes, sir, it's the Scott Horton show brought to you by expat money. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. Ladies and gentlemen of the press have been less than honest reporting to the American people. What's going on in this country? We're dealing with Hitler revisited. This is the Scott Horton show. Libertarian foreign policy, mostly. When the president visit, that means that it is not only...

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, introducing John Dudlachek, and he is a civil engineer from Indiana and a friend of the show and wrote me concerned about some things going on in the country that he thinks that people should know about.

And it's something that's been on my mind, although I concede not exactly the focus of my attention, but it is a crucial issue, and that is the state of America's infrastructure and on the most basic kind of levels. So welcome the show, John. How are you doing? I'm good, Scott. Thanks for listening to me here. Sure. Yeah. It's in my book that in the most recent book, Provoked, I'm kind of wax and philosophical at the end about what the hell are we doing here? and one of the things that had really, there are a couple of things I cite there that really got my attention.

One was the hurricane that hit North Carolina. Of all things, a hurricane comes up from the Gulf and then parks itself over the Appalachian Mountains and just floods these people to death in their valleys there. And then the Biden government was like, y'all voted for Trump.

F you, dude, and just did not care about them at all. And this was in the run-up to the election when they're supposed to be pandering to everyone. And they're just like, no, we hate you, dude. Go die. It was amazing. And then at the same time, too, Biden had announced right around then that, guess what? I have an idea.

We're going to launch a huge investment infrastructure program in order to try to get rid of the last of the lead drinking water pipes in America, which are still there. And it was like hundreds of millions of dollars or something, maybe more than that. I forget. There's some incredible number. And then so it just kind of hit me that like, wow, people are still drinking out of lead pipes in America. And of course, that means like in the poorest, least educated places still, right? And so those are the people who are going to stay the poorest and least educated with brains full of lead poisoning and stay in jail for that matter.

And so it just occurred to me that like, God, geez, you know, if only we could go back in time, And I mean, obviously, Bush Senior and Bill Clinton and whatever, too, if you want. But like, especially if we could just go back in time and just not have a president in the 21st century, instead of doing what George Bush and Barack Obama and Donald Trump and Joe Biden wanted. If we had just, the American people just been left to their own devices to somehow, you know, work on our own country here. And as Dr. Paul said, we want to change the world. How about we do the best we can for our own society and serve us?

as an example and just seems like the opportunity costs and and just everything that has been wasted in terms of of you know obviously life and wealth and priorities in this country where you know people are desperate people are screaming and now you wrote this giant kind of report to me about how not because we don't know the half of it because what's about to happen is everything crucial in a lot of towns is about to break. And when you say crucial, you mean water and sewage mains and dams holding back lakes. For example, I know there were three at least semi-major dam failures in 2024. That's another thing got mentioned in the book.

There, like, how can we have it where we're fighting a war for Deepan Nosco-Provatsk? And we have dams failing over American towns. It's just our priorities are so screwed up. So anyway, tell us the bad news. bad is it really because I know that you're really concerned. Yeah, I am really concerned. And, you know, I got to get to that part and provoke. That's a really thick book, Scott. It's a lot of you. I mean, I don't care what to leave out of there. And I wouldn't, you know, it's funny, you call that a large report. That's what I sent to you and you asked, you know, what do you,

tell me about what you're saying a little bit. And I just dictated that really quick because it's, I talk about it every day. And you know, right away, you go to wars and all that. And Dude, I don't, you know, when it comes to war and I, look, I listen to you. I got nothing to say about that. But what I do have to say about is, yeah, this municipal infrastructure, most specifically, like in the suburbs of America, you know, that, and specifically our drinking water and our Santeroosures, like you mentioned. But, you know, just to, like, who am I to listen to?

You know, what have I know? I've been installing and maintaining these systems for over 30 years now, and Northwest West Indiana and the greater Chicago area. And that's the region I'm talking about, like, not just Chicago, but every major city, right outside of the major city, that big boom that happened post-World War II up and through the mid-80s, you know, just like the baby boomers boomed, everything boomed, all kinds of institutions, including, you know, this safe neighborhoods and all that that we wanted to have after, you know, World War II, the worst disaster ever happened to humans.

60 million people die, we wanted to have safe streets, you know, and safe communities, and we built these beautiful communities, fine. Feel however you want about the growth of the American Empire during, but that period it happened, and it's, and it did. We put a bunch of water main and sanitary sewers and whatnot in the ground, it's terrific, but it's long outlived its life. And, I mean, these systems, I'm an engineering. Like there's designed to live a certain amount of time.

We're way past that. I mean, the stuff that was installed in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, that stuff, majority of it's still in the ground in those suburbs. Like where, you know, I said, I'm in North West Indian, Lake Porter, La Porte, County, that region there, that all of the smaller towns there, which we're talking about a lot of people,

still on drinking water mains that are approaching 80, 9 years. years old. Now, here's a thing, like water mains are a lifetime are analogous to that of a human being. So like, if you think of just that period of the baby boomers as a people is very similar to the condition of the water mains in these suburbs. I mean, they're old, they're, you know, 70, 80, 90 years old. They've got little repairs, you know, stints in their veins. It's the same thing. It's little repair clamps all over these systems. I've got crew, you know, I run 14, 15, crews and they're out there repairing these things all the time.

I mean, I mean, the local city, Valprazo, Indiana, they had over 100 water main breaks last year. My own town, you know, every two, three days, there's a break. And it's not just that there's, that's been going on for a while water main breaks, but what we're finding out,

and you don't have to listen to me, listen to American society, civil, and engineers, they got reports on us, everything. The water mean is thinning out. There's only so much time before there's no repairing it. There's no putting clamps on it. The system breaks just and dies, just like a human at some point dies.

Those of us that do this, I mean, I've talked to many of my colleagues of trying to find, you know, what I'm seeing here is what you're seeing and we're all seeing the same thing that, I don't know how many years left. I don't want to turn into, you know, you know, doom and gloom saying, you know, in three weeks we're going to have a disaster in our water main system. But it's a slow progress that's happening right now.

I mean, I do not know, and neither do any of my colleagues know of water mains in any substantial volume quantity that lasts longer than 80 years, 90 years. Anything over 100, there's some wooden water mains and whatnot, some old cast iron that's really thick. but all that duff, dill iron stuff we put in during the 60s, 70s, and 80s, that shit is dying. Right now, it's happening. And, I mean, there's communities

like Gary, Indiana, that's close to me that there's sections that just aren't repairable. Dixmore, Illinois. We were on an Army Corps project. We were to replace parts of their system. There was sections that buildings literally burnt down because they didn't have water. You know, and so the picture is,

we have a homogeneous aged infrastructure system in America. I'm specifically most knowledgeable about the water mains. But like you said, the dams, sanitary sewer, pump stations, all that kind of stuff is all about the same age. And most of those things live about the same amount of time, and they're all dying at once. Hmm. artisan coffees.

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All right, you guys, me here for expatmoney.com slash Scott. And what it is is this great guy, Mikhail Thorup, and he's a world traveler and a real expert in what you can do to buy property and invest in property overseas, protect your assets, and look into even living overseas if that is your interest. And if you just go to expatmoney.com slash Scott, you can get this free. handy booklet, plan B residences, and instant citizenships. That's expatmoney.com slash Scott. Well, here's the problem, too.

The government, which is, you know, monopoly responsible for a lot of this stuff, whatever libertarians, you know, however we might like it to be, I know people listening to this are like privatize everything. Well, sure, but like whatever in the world that we live in, where the political government is responsible for all this stuff, They're broke and they can't tax us anymore or it's out with the pitchforks and the torches, but then they can't borrow anymore because they got to bail out Japan so that they hopefully have enough to bail out themselves.

And then, right, and they can only print so much money when we already have this massive price inflation and people are just moving towards socialism and worse. Yeah. Actually, you get something there that bugs me a lot. So, because I get a lot of the purists, the libertarian purists that, you know, that shouldn't be owned by government anyway. So good, let it die. Well, here's the thing, you know, if you're...

I don't think anybody ever says that, but they just say, like, magic wish, let some company take it over or whatever, but that's not really on the table, right? What we're talking about is, are we letting the main break or not? And, of course, you run a private company that works on contracts doing all these repairs. Obviously, it's, you know,

it's a question of, like, sovereignty over it. And they're just not about to privatize. every roadway and every right of way to where, you know what I mean, like fully private. It's going to be a matter of contracting. In other words, look, it's just the same as when we argue about whether we should have bases in the Persian Gulf or not. We're talking about all other things being equal.

Not every conversation is a philosophy about, you know, how anarcho-capitalism could provide for national events or whatever. We're not talking about that. We're talking about the dams and the water mains and the things that are owned by the regime now, and they're the ones responsible. They won't let anybody else take responsibility for these things. And yet they are now completely bankrupt, $40 trillion a year.

And, you know, I'm not an expert on the bond yields and this and that, but it means that the interest on the debt is out of control. We're at a crisis point right when you're saying, we need to divert real wealth into restoring this most basic infrastructure that we all rely on. Correct. And now, yes, all of that is. spot on. And as soon as we start talking about bond markets and, you know, and understanding

national debt and everything, that gets real hard for like the guys that work for me and the guys I see out the job sites to like understand, you know, yeah, I read at Griffin's book and I understand fractional reserve banking and I, you know, I understand central banks and all that kind of stuff. But man, that's, I'm a weirdo that obsesses about this stuff and, you know, join Scott Horton. I don't know this from experience. Anyone on the construction site, if you tell them what the national debt is and you say what that means is essentially we can't go any further they will say well that sounds right you know 40 trillion i'm not exactly sure how much that is but i think that's like a

stack of hundred dollar bills to jupiter and back or something and so like okay you're making sense if you're telling me at some point they blew it for all of us you know right but those guys definitely can uh comprehend what we're you know that that yeah we're in deep shit like i can't afford a house i'm working freaking 50 hours a week and a union wage, which is a good wage, and I can barely freaking feed my wife and kids. They understand that. Do they understand that's tied to this national debt that, you know, debasing our money and everything? I don't know if they quite grasp all that, but they absolutely grasp the idea that our infrastructure fail. And I can't feed my kids. We're more worried about wars overseas or paying baby boomers, some social security

that doesn't make, that's not going to be there for me. And like America's leaving us workers, like laying behind in the dust here. And, you know, as, you know, all my grandparents are out, you know, on their vacation cottage homes because they're, you know, in their 80s and they did a good job of, you know, securing their 401k or whatever. They just, you know, trying to make ends meet, you know. And so that whole story is tied in here. And I don't know, I guess one of the things that, you know, being part of, you know,

paying attention to Liberty Movement and everything. I think we'll get a point here where we've got a pretty big voice or you've got a pretty big voice, you know, and talking about Thomas Massey running for president or whoever, whatever, the Liberty Movement's going to be behind. I guess I'm trying to say to the movement, like, this subject needs to be on the table because there's only so many people are going to listen to all the shit about,

you know, the debasing the currency and, you know, and all the crazy shit that you and I types talk about. But they understand that, you know, we've got a failing infrastructure and we're constantly out there fighting it. And I know it's normally a boring topic. That's something that drives me nuts to is people say, you know, yeah, but that's a boring topic. No one's going to be able to run on a platform of that and get elected.

Okay, I don't know what to say. But if they don't, we got a damn problem in our hand. I mean, it took us, you know, 30 years to build this shit. It's going to take a lot longer to replace it. I mean, here's the thing. When it was built, there was nothing there. You could trench, open trench. You didn't have to worry about all this fiber optics and gas mains and telephone lines and all this shit on top of the water and sewer.

But now all that's there. It's a developed thing. It's like, this is a big ass problem in front of us and talk to any civil construction duty. Either an operator, a labor, a company owner. And they're like, yeah, we got a, I don't know. the clear pathway to fix this and no one's freaking talking about it and I guess maybe there's some space there

in this movement, the liberty movement, to be talking about it more. And get that. If, you know, for somebody running for president or something, if the line is not that like, here's my huge project to do something about it, at the very least who could be pointing out what we're wasting money on instead.

Yes. These are the most fruitful needs of the American people. I mean, I would argue, you know, or federalism that the national government should have very little responsibility for this kind of thing, other than maybe some ports or whatever, but, you know, interstate river, you know, control or however they work all that stuff out. I don't know. But for the most part, this should all be state-level projects.

But the thing is, the American people are productive enough that we can't afford to do this. It's just our government diverts all of our money onto all of these other priorities, you know, determined by politics, not really by the wishes of the people. or than the burden on the backs of the states from the federal government and then we're not able to work fully effectively. We've got a lot of, you know, I guess I'd say BS out there that we got to wrestle with on top of it. It all comes from the federal government.

It doesn't come from, you know, we can deal with our states. We can deal with our local. Explain what you mean by that. I mean, I mean, I mean, the disadvantaged business enterprise thing, So that's a tax on the system that comes from the feds. I mean, Trump tried to erase it with an executive order, but that's an executive order. That's just going to come back.

So what that is is for each project that we do, you know, a federal highway project, we've got to have a certain percentage that's really unattainable of classified special interest companies. And that's just, I mean, that's a tax on us. I mean, and ask any of the construction companies out there doing the work, the dudes that are these supposed disadvantaged business are just normal people. I mean, I don't know why they get this special class just because of whatever,

whatever that is. But, you know, we got a subcontract 12% of our contracts to a disadvantaged business. That's a tax on the job. It's not an actual benefit. There's other stuff like the EPA stuff, erosion, control measures. It's like every job we walk on, the first thing we've got to do is burn $5,000 or $10,000 worth of crap. That has nothing to do with anything. It's an EPA regulation that is not real. And any talk to any civil construction guy, like tell me about erosion control. It's a bunch of BS.

I mean, I did some back of envelope calculations in state of Indiana. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion, one billion dollars we spend per year on erosion control. And that's, I watched that whole thing happen. That was a government regulation that came through the EPA that was all about selling products. It was lobbyists trying to sell more silk vents, inlet protectors, all this crap. It was a corporate lobby group that put that, I watched it in my career happen.

I'm on these construction sites. We don't have an erosion problem, especially in freaking northwest Indiana. It's all flat as a pancake here. So it's like stuff like that, you know, OSHA's got a bunch of nonsense. You know, that I know that whole story, and OSHA didn't help anything. That is already being handled by private markets.

So, yeah, I don't know. That's the start of what it happened. Yeah, sure. Well, so, man, you had some somewhat astounding numbers, but you kind of clarified, too, that, you know, don't jump to too bad a conclusion. here, but tell us a little bit about the dams. Apparently, you've been doing a bit of research into that.

Yeah, you know, we've got, so yeah, I've got some, I'm very familiar with the Ruff River Lake Dam. That's what got my eye to it because I got some property down, or a place down there anyway. So our dam, so, you know, there's a reason why this, America wasn't populated when we got here and, you know, and they sailed the ocean blue. It wasn't just because we weren't.

over here, it's because it's a pretty wild landscape. You know, all the rivers that run through the middle of the U.S., you know, during rain events, they flood, they meander, and it goes, you know, 30 feet wide to several hundred feet wide to miles wide. And so the first thing we had to do to, like, inhabit this land and, like, make it a place that we could live is we had to control those flood systems. and we started building dams throughout the country. And we've got something like 16,000 dams in the U.S.

There's 2,500 of them, though, 2,500 of them that have been identified by the Army Corps of Engineers as in serious need for disrepair. I forget, or serious need for repair, that they're at the level where they're unacceptable any longer. And so, like, the one I'm on in Rough River, there's a $900 million dam reconstruction project going on for that one, that's one of the 2,500 of them.

You know, I actually, I'm a runner. I physically ran that dam and I saw water leaking through the dam. I mean, that's where we are with these things. We have, yeah, 2,500 of them in that, I wouldn't say they're in that condition exactly the same, but they're all in the condition that the Army Corps has been them need replacement, like, more or less immediately. Without those, you know, and we talk about a mess.

America first, like, what's the first thing we can do to, like, inhabit and live in and have a civil society in America? It's like when it's a control of floods, they don't kill people. And now that we built these gigantic things, which is great, I mean, damn failures are so unbelievably catastrophic, so immediately unbelievably catastrophic. I mean, if we'd start to have a series of those, that's, that's, that's hard to even fathom where we would go as a country. What happened here in the U.S. is something that was the first time the world ever saw it. Post-industrial revolution, post-war, no debt ceiling, let's build. And we built all these things, dams, water mains, all that stuff. And in such a rapid succession that the world has never saw before that.

And all of it's living longer than we hoped. Great. and we're just happy for that. But the problem is, and I'm circling back, but it's, man, it's all dying at once. You're talking about the Midwest, but what about the Northeast and Southern California and Texas and Florida and the South and whatever?

Scott, I don't want to get on my lane. I don't know, man. I work in northwest Indiana, and I know the Midwest. I mean, that's my bailiwick. Yeah, but you talk to people's stuff. Is this the kind of thing that you heard about it was going, around the whole country? Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's a group build with it. It's a podcast I was on Dirt Talk. And through that group, there's contractors all across the country. And so, yes, my peers in California have got stories about, you know, their own same type of thing. So, you know, specific.

So, you know, which communities are worse and all that. I don't know. but I do know that it's systemic, it absolutely is basically anything that was built during that period. And most of it's still here. And it's not just the, in fact, New York, I mean, you look at New York outside. And, you know, the older cities are in pretty good shape because it's a heterogeneous system. There's not like big blocks all age the same. But you get up to the suburbs of those.

And I mentioned New York because that one's so big. There's so much of it there. You know, those are the areas that are concerned because there's too many connected systems of miles and miles upon the same age. But so, yeah, it's happening everywhere. Hey, guys, it's fun raising time at the Libertarian Institute. We don't do this very often, but we got to do it.

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and he will help you construct your taxes in such a way where you pay the absolute minimum. That's agoristtaxadvice.com for Matt Sersely, agoristtaxadvice.com. Man, all right, well, hell, I'm not sure what else to ask you. Oh, I know. I was going to say about something you were saying earlier about, you know, the way that this was all done so long ago where, if I understand this right,

I just, I only know this from people talking about in Mexico. They put the water line down first and then they put the sewage line on top of that. And so whenever there's a leak, the sewage gets in the water and all that. But as Manazuma's revenge, you know, in America, at least they figured out that, no, you put the sewage at the bottom and then the water above that. But then you got every kind of fiber optics and copper and whatever other things that I'm not thinking of that go above that. So to replace the sewage lines and the water lines and all these places becomes a much more complicated thing because you've got to basically dig around all that other stuff or dig it up and move it out of the way and then put it back or how's that work? Right, right.

And so what you're saying, it's like, man, I guess this is why this topic gets like pushed aside. It's like I'm trying to explain a 30-year trade, like, to get it to every. And here's the thing, like, that we're not, yeah. So the guys that, guys and gals, companies that do this work aren't even at the table. Like, what drives everything related to what are we replacing, what gets funded, what gets money, is whatever's the easiest pathway to the funding. It's not. about what's the what's the most critical infrastructure

what's the most critical situation and how critical is it and having people like us at the table for those discussions it's all in the politicians hands who know nothing about I mean you're asking questions and you know a thing or two. I mean, it's so hard to explain to people that like what you just said like the water main on top of the sanitary

you know, yeah, that's that's a thing. So yeah, I talk about. about the water mains dying so critically right now. But damn it, that sanitary sewer is fine, but if you replace the water main now, you'll, and only, and you don't get the sanitary fixed, shit, we're just 20 years from now. We're going to have to be dealing with that, you know?

And that getting a systemic picture of all that is not being done out there. It's, you know, that, I don't know, the reason I guess I'm even brought it to you or starting to talk about it in this context is because, you know, nobody in that Congress or White House or any of them know what the hell they're talking about on these topics at all. In the Indiana Department of this and that, right?

There's got people like yourself who are just like real professionals and experts and care about this kind of deal, no? Yeah, yeah. So they're only bound by whatever Fed's push on them. I mean, the Indiana Department, of this and that, man. Gosh, see, this is where I'm going to get in trouble.

Well, don't get in trouble. Yeah. If they're going to regulate your ass, say something nice first. Well, I mean, it's seriously, well, here is something nice. Indiana's doing pretty good in this regard, I think, in terms of the whole infrastructure thing. And I think individually states can, but there is, it's like, it's beyond, oh, man, I don't even know how articulated.

The systems that are in place now of these gigantic governments, even at the state level, is so blind to the truth of what's happening. And I don't know, we've gone on autopilot on a lot of these. Like Indiana Department of Transportation, it used to be that, yeah, dude, I can't do it. I can't do it, Scott. I can't.

I can't. Oh, yeah. No, that's all right. Go ahead. For something else. Yeah. Say something else. I can't, dude.

You know, you know, I can't. Like I work in, you know, so my job is civil infrastructure that's paid by taxpayers' money. My, our, 95% of our work is public works. I work for public entities. And they are all honestly trying to do their best. But, you know, Indiana Department's transportation only has so much money themselves. This is, you know, this is a money problem that was pushed onto us by destroying our fucking currency. And so now we're in the situation where, yeah, the Indiana Department of this and

that, they can't afford what needs to be done. They've got like rigid, rigid, rigid federal rules that cannot be broken whatsoever. You know, you can't touch this, you can't touch that, this wetland, this and this wetland that, or, and federal highway regulations, heavy burdens on the state DOTs, heavy burdens. And yeah, what is the federal government having to do with Department of Transportation, those are should be up to the states, you know, maybe some coordination stuff, but all of the funding is now filtered through the big government, and that's fucking up. So what needs it happen is we need to liberate the states from the Fed government.

That's the problem. We got this huge burden. And like, dude, I struggle, the reason we get into these topics I struggle is like, I don't know shit about money, okay? I hate money. I don't know how to finance projects real well. My thing is like, I know how to fix water main. I know how to build construction crews that know how to fix these stuff and do this stuff.

And everybody around me that actually boots on the ground in the trenches are saying, holy shit, dudes, this is, I mean, I don't know. It's happening now. Is it 10 years, 20 years? I don't know. It's like we got this gigantic problem. And all these people that claim to know what they're doing related to money and regulations and everything, clearly don't know what the fuck they're doing because we're in a situation here that is.

fucked up. And so, you know, and I'm trying as running a construction company. I'm chief operating officer of a, you know, of a company in my region that does this work and has a strong reputation for doing quality work. And yeah, and in my region, people, you know, the towns, the cities and, and even I'm doing, we're doing an emergency repair for NDOT right now on I-94. And yeah, even the state will call me and say, hi, how do we fix this? And like, it's kind of, there's something nice. I mean, like, here we have local, stuff that's working pretty good. But when we zoom out and say,

how are we going to replace our infrastructure? Well, shit, I don't know, because we fucked everything up so bad from the connection we have to this huge empire that did everything it did to create this situation where, yeah, $40 trillion in debt. And all we do is talk about money instead of talking about like,

what's, you know, about fixing infrastructure. So I get stumbling on my work. because of that. It's like, I don't know. I don't know what to do about that huge empire that's shitting on us all the time. But I can tell you down boots on the ground, we got a damn problem.

And I'm absolutely positive of it. I mean, I can show you ridiculous pictures of all these, you know, disasters that happen when sewers and water mains fall apart. And they're happening every day in these communities. And again, not just the northwest thing. And it's every major state that had suburbs. Yeah.

Well, you know, I'd hate to say, like, organized as, you know, a business interest lobbying for more contracts or whatever, but, you know, creating something where the real point is just in the larger sense, fine, give the contract to somebody else, but the point is raising the concern and making it a priority, you know, it seems like you're highly motivated to be the leader of a group of concerned professionals along these lines, you know? The only way I know not do it is doing it by, you know, I, on a national, sense. I don't know, dude. I'm going to leave that for you all guys to deal with.

I mean, in your state, you know. But with our state and within your own community, like, you know, we've got this thing now podcasting and a way to reach out to local communities. I mean, so, you know, we used to have radio. No one listens to the radioists. Young kids, they listen to podcasts, right? And I say young kids, you know, that 20, 30, 40s, year old are young to me, I'm 55 years old. They listen to podcasts, right? And so yeah, yeah, you know, if there were, you know, if there's any construction guys listening out here or whatever, start a podcast or a local, you know,

construction podcast about what's going on. Because you know what, the guys that do civil works like me, and there's a ton of companies like this throughout the country, we know what's going on in the towns. We know which town boards are, you know, effective and which ones are, which towns have trouble with their sewer and water main.

We ought to be focusing on. this and that because we're out there working in the communities, in the streets. And get a program going at that, I mean, a podcast program. We're having your local officials, you know, come in and talk to you and, and have those conversations that at least locally can actually have an impact. And then, you know, how we scale all that up and do it the bigger picture, I think, is just little decentralized versions of that. Yeah.

All right. Sounds good, man. Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on the show and talking about this stuff with us. I know it's crucial and I know that it goes just completely under the radar most of the time. It does. It does. And, you know, I guess maybe one day we're forced to deal with it because of some bad shit happening. I don't want that.

I don't know how to stop that fully other than doing what I'm doing. Right. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you again, John. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Scott Horton show is brought to you by the Scott Horton Academy of Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy and Freedom, Roberts & Roberts Brokridge, Inc., Moondos Artisan Coffee, Tom Woods Liberty Classroom,

and APS Radio News. Subscribe in all the usual places, and check out my books, Fools Aaroned, enough already, and my latest, Provoked, how Washington started the new Cold War with Russia and the catastrophe in Ukraine. Find all of the above at Scott Horton.org, and I'm serializing the audiobook of Provote at Scott Horton Show.com and patreon.com slash Scott Horton Show. Bumpers by Josh Langford Music Inter and outro videos by dissident media Audio mastering by Potsworth Media

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