The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 475. Threat From South America ｜ Axel Kaiser

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00:00:57.420 Hello, everybody.

00:01:11.200 My wife, Tammy, and I recently had the privilege of touring through Mexico and South America.

00:01:19.620 We didn't tour, obviously, through the whole continent.

00:01:23.900 We went to a couple of places in Brazil and to Chile and to Mexico, and I met some very interesting people along the way, which is always something that happens, including the gentleman I'm talking to today, Axel Kaiser Behrens von Hohenhagen.

00:01:39.620 He's a Chilean-German lawyer, a master in investments, commerce and arbitration, master of arts and doctor of philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

00:01:51.780 It's a very good university.

00:01:53.840 He is co-founder and president of the Foundation for Progress in Chile, one of the most influential free market think tanks in Latin America.

00:02:02.140 He's also a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute in Washington and director of the Friedrich Hayek chair at Adolfo Ibanez University from 2016 to 2024.

00:02:14.680 So why are we talking?

00:02:16.880 Well, I thought it would be good to bring everyone an update on the political and ideological situation in South America.

00:02:26.840 Now, that's an impossible thing to do, obviously, in the course of a 90-minute podcast, because it's very complicated to talk about a whole continent.

00:02:33.940 And much of what we focused on was to do with the events that are transpiring in Venezuela, where the age-old conflict between what's essentially a crooked, corrupt, propagandistic, draconian, communist, totalitarian state,

00:02:55.020 and the people and the opposition to that state is transpiring.

00:03:00.160 And so we walked through the situation in Venezuela.

00:03:03.600 There was a recent election there.

00:03:04.920 The incumbent, the aforementioned totalitarian Maduro, apparently lost and is very unlikely to give up power.

00:03:18.620 Why should anyone care?

00:03:20.620 Well, the world is a small place now, and what happens everywhere has an effect that's local.

00:03:29.000 If South America is destabilized, you can expect a lot more trouble, for example, at the southern U.S. border.

00:03:35.800 And by a lot, I mean a lot.

00:03:38.100 I mean millions of people.

00:03:39.320 And if the communist dystopians and their Iranian, Chinese, and Russian propagandistic backers and troublemakers get their way, 0.86

00:03:51.040 there's going to be plenty of dystopia in South America.

00:03:53.740 And don't be thinking you're going to escape unscathed from that, because you're not.

00:03:58.760 And so we talked about Venezuela, and we talked about Chile, and we talked about Argentina and Malay, the new government there.

00:04:06.800 And so we talked about different schools of economics as well,

00:04:12.960 and what influence they all had in the way that geopolitical affairs lay themselves out.

00:04:19.080 So join us for that, and learn along with me about what's transpiring with our southern neighbors.

00:04:27.000 Well, Dr. Kaiser, let's just jump right into it.

00:04:30.920 Let's talk about Venezuela.

00:04:32.800 Maybe you can give people a bit of an update about the current situation,

00:04:37.340 and then we can delve into that historically.

00:04:39.800 Then we'll move into the topic of South and Central America more broadly.

00:04:44.720 So give us your thoughts on Venezuela.

00:04:47.700 Well, it's a very, you know, sad situation we are living now.

00:04:52.780 I started my career in Venezuela, in Caracas, back in 2005.

00:04:57.280 I was studying the socialist revolution in Caracas,

00:05:02.200 and I came to the conclusion that Chavez had come to power and he would never leave,

00:05:08.760 which is what usually socialist dictators do. 0.87

00:05:11.700 And at the time, my friends in Venezuela had the hope that they could vote him out.

00:05:18.140 It never happened, as we all know.

00:05:20.460 And what we really are experiencing is the consequences of decades of socialism.

00:05:29.600 You can vote socialists in, but you cannot vote them out.

00:05:33.300 This is one of the main lessons that you have in Venezuela,

00:05:36.660 especially if you have weak institutions.

00:05:38.060 And what we do have now, it's a horrible regime.

00:05:41.980 It's a tyrannical dictatorship that has been there for decades already.

00:05:47.660 And Maduro is systematically engaging in human rights violation.

00:05:53.300 He stole the election.

00:05:54.800 We all know that a couple of weeks ago.

00:05:58.320 And the friends we have there, they are fighting on the ground,

00:06:04.700 literally risking their lives.

00:06:06.060 A good friend of mine was recently arrested by the Maduro regime

00:06:11.560 with no, you know, warrant or whatever.

00:06:16.760 I mean, just the police came to her house.

00:06:19.380 They took her to prison.

00:06:22.560 And who knows what they are doing to her?

00:06:25.080 And just because she was posting some content on social media.

00:06:28.280 And the problem that Venezuela poses for the whole region, 0.68

00:06:33.080 and not only Latin America, but also the United States, 0.50

00:06:36.460 is that the Maduro regime, it's a big narco dictatorship. 0.97

00:06:41.520 So they are in bed with the cartel de los Soles.

00:06:45.120 They are running the Soles cartel, which is the Sun cartel.

00:06:48.820 And they are exporting cocaine everywhere.

00:06:53.480 And not only that, they are in bed with the Iranian regime and with Russia.

00:06:58.060 So they are being supported by Russia, Iran, and also by China.

00:07:02.420 So I think this poses a security threat to the United States,

00:07:06.760 because they have, you know, Hezbollah has training camps in Venezuela.

00:07:12.640 And if you have these open borders with Mexico,

00:07:17.060 I'm sure they have infiltrated people coming from Venezuela to the United States 1.00

00:07:21.060 that are not the regular criminals that you can see nowadays operating in New York

00:07:26.100 or other parts in the United States. 0.99

00:07:27.620 These are also Islamic terrorists. 0.90

00:07:30.300 I'm pretty sure that you have some of them now 0.96

00:07:33.340 that came from Venezuela via Mexico into the United States.

00:07:36.640 So this is a dramatic situation.

00:07:38.480 And I have a message from the group of Maria Corina Machao,

00:07:41.600 because I've been in contact with them.

00:07:43.480 She's the opposition leader. 0.79

00:07:45.020 She's a good friend of mine.

00:07:47.220 To the international media,

00:07:49.960 they are really very upset by the way that the press

00:07:53.840 in the Western world has been covering all this.

00:07:58.160 And they have a double standard when it comes to left-wing dictatorships

00:08:01.900 as compared to not left-wing or right-wing dictatorships.

00:08:07.080 And you have several newspapers like El País in Spain, for instance,

00:08:12.200 that have called Maria Corina Machado a far-right extremist, 0.96

00:08:15.660 which is complete nonsense.

00:08:16.940 She is fighting for freedom and democracy.

00:08:21.000 And then you have other media like The New York Times,

00:08:23.640 who have been very biased as well.

00:08:26.120 And they sent me a message.

00:08:29.540 And I'm using this platform.

00:08:31.180 And they thank you, Jordan, for this interview,

00:08:33.180 because they need the support of the international community

00:08:36.700 if you want a transition to happen in Venezuela,

00:08:39.560 which is looking increasingly unlikely with the passing of time.

00:08:44.980 So, it's very sad.

00:08:49.020 And this is poisoning the whole region.

00:08:51.920 And also, I think it's going to be a big problem for the United States

00:08:56.620 if they don't push enough to get rid of Maduro right now,

00:09:00.740 for the reasons I already mentioned.

00:09:02.300 All right.

00:09:04.700 So, there's a lot in what you just said.

00:09:07.240 So, let me take it apart piece by piece.

00:09:09.800 You said, for example, that if you vote in the socialists,

00:09:12.540 you don't get to vote them out.

00:09:13.980 And so, we probably want to draw a distinction,

00:09:17.820 or at least have a discussion about socialism versus communism,

00:09:22.560 or a discussion about whether or not that distinction is even reasonable.

00:09:28.860 It's definitely the case that in some Western countries,

00:09:32.900 more left-leaning regimes are voted in and voted out with some degree of regularity.

00:09:39.360 Canada has a socialist party, the New Democratic Party,

00:09:45.240 and it has never won an election federally and is unlikely ever to do so, I would say,

00:09:51.680 because it never seems to gain more than about 20% of the population.

00:09:55.740 But it's certainly run many provinces and, you know, often not cataclysmically,

00:10:04.160 sometimes even intelligently, depending on who it was that was running the show,

00:10:09.360 let's say.

00:10:10.960 So, and then, of course, people tend to presume that countries like Sweden and Denmark and Norway

00:10:16.720 are socialist countries, even though fundamentally they adhere to free market principles.

00:10:24.780 So, do you want to distinguish first for maybe some definitions?

00:10:29.000 What do you think the difference is between a socialist country and a communist country?

00:10:33.300 And how should people draw a distinction?

00:10:39.360 Well, I would distinguish between social democracy, which is, you know, the left that we have usually

00:10:46.340 in the Western world, in the developed nations, people like Biden or people like, you know,

00:10:55.160 Justin Trudeau, people like that who can be very far left when it comes to the woke issues

00:11:02.740 and all of this value conflicts that we have now in the Western.

00:11:06.160 I believe that they are responsible for endorsing an ideology that will end up destroying the West

00:11:10.720 if they are successful in the end.

00:11:12.680 But they are not these revolutionary socialists that we have now in Latin America

00:11:18.400 or that we used to have in the Western world during the Cold War.

00:11:21.760 Like you had them in Italy and France, you had them in Germany, you had terrorist groups that were fighting

00:11:27.960 against the establishment, being funded by the Soviet Union and so on.

00:11:31.820 So, I would make a distinction there.

00:11:34.740 And also, if you have countries with more solid institutions, even within Latin America,

00:11:41.660 they are never able to achieve their goal of concentrating power in their own hands.

00:11:47.080 Like, Chile is a good example of that.

00:11:49.140 We had a constitutional referendum a couple of years ago, and the left proposed a very radical constitution,

00:11:56.540 a very woke constitution, but at the same time, a communist constitution.

00:12:01.720 And over 60% of Chileans voted against that.

00:12:04.980 So, we were saved by this decision in the referendum.

00:12:09.920 So, they failed in their attempt to, you know, control power.

00:12:13.460 So, I would say in the classical definition, socialism and Marxism used to, or communism,

00:12:23.020 they used to be more or less the same during the Cold War.

00:12:25.440 I mean, it would be hard to argue that a socialist was not at the same time someone who believed

00:12:32.180 in the Soviet Union type of system, central plant economy.

00:12:36.960 This is a point that Hayek and Mises were making during the Cold War, fighting against the

00:12:42.640 socialists, because the socialists were arguing for a central plant economy, which in the end

00:12:48.980 would have destroyed all sort of political liberties and democracy as well.

00:12:54.080 So, I would distinguish more, as I said, between the social democrats.

00:12:59.440 And within the social democrats, you have, you have also more extreme type of people than

00:13:06.240 others, and the socialists and communists.

00:13:10.040 And even if some political parties have the name of socialist, nowadays, they are more like

00:13:15.080 social democrats than true socialists that are inspired 100% by the Marxist and Leninist

00:13:21.540 doctrine that they followed in the times of the Cold War.

00:13:26.080 So, that's a distinction I would make.

00:13:29.440 So, what we could say, just to clarify this further for everybody watching and listening,

00:13:34.540 is that in countries like, I think the Scandinavian countries are probably the best example of

00:13:40.180 this, the first thing we should note is that they're relatively small countries, and until

00:13:43.860 recently, they were relatively homogenous ethnically.

00:13:47.820 And that makes governance more straightforward.

00:13:50.780 The system simply aren't as complex because there are fewer people and there is more of

00:13:56.320 a implicit consensus on which way is up and which way is down, let's say.

00:14:01.660 But the Scandinavian countries like Canada, the classic socialists, were really free market

00:14:09.360 people, all things considered, believed in private property, more or less.

00:14:13.600 But we're more interested than the libertarians or the conservatives in producing a broad and

00:14:21.460 encompassing social safety net.

00:14:24.980 And so, most of the political action in Canada had to do with the expansion of the social safety

00:14:32.200 net.

00:14:32.660 And that was what the left-wingers and the labor union types were pushing for with a certain

00:14:38.500 degree of success.

00:14:39.280 And the distinction you're drawing on, and you referred to a couple of Austrian economists,

00:14:44.920 Hayek and Mises, is that the communists go full-fledged planned economy, the full-fledged

00:14:51.420 planned economy route, and they are not in favor of private property.

00:14:56.320 They believe that an untrammeled free market ends up concentrating economic power in the hands

00:15:03.220 of a very small number of people.

00:15:04.980 And that replacing that with a planned economy would fix that problem, which it certainly

00:15:09.640 doesn't and can't.

00:15:11.680 And I know the Austrians who you referred to also make the case that a planned economy is

00:15:18.680 something that appeals to people who are very presumptuous in their intellect because the

00:15:25.380 fabrication of any given commodity, consumer item, let's say, or commodity for that matter,

00:15:31.000 is complex almost beyond, well, it's complex beyond comprehension, unless you have a distributed

00:15:36.400 system of pricing to make rational, intelligent decisions, your economy will eventually grind

00:15:43.620 to a cataclysmic halt.

00:15:45.840 So I think about it as a computational problem, right?

00:15:48.640 Is that the, and I think this fits in very well with the Austrian economist's line of thinking,

00:15:54.380 is like, do you want to have a distributed network of computation, each person calculating

00:16:02.100 their own hierarchy of values, each person with the eyes on the particulars of their local

00:16:08.580 situation, sum all that together in some distributed manner and allow decisions to be made that way?

00:16:16.860 Or do you want to put decision-making power in the hands of a small group of people who can't

00:16:22.280 hope to know what's going on?

00:16:24.820 You know, I think the central committee, the Soviet central committee was making something

00:16:28.560 like 300 pricing decisions a day.

00:16:31.620 And I've run companies where we've tried to price our offerings and just pricing one thing

00:16:37.780 is almost impossible.

00:16:39.700 And you have to do that in concert with your market.

00:16:43.280 You don't know what something is worth.

00:16:47.460 The best you can do is find out what people are willing to pay for it, given all the other

00:16:52.000 things that they're trying to accomplish simultaneously.

00:16:54.820 So, okay.

00:16:55.460 So the communist types, they're focusing on a planned economy.

00:16:59.260 Now let's go back to Venezuela.

00:17:02.480 So before the socialist revolution took place, in your opinion, how was Venezuela doing?

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00:18:01.520 Modern people often ask themselves, why do I have to study history?

00:18:11.580 Well, you're a historical being.

00:18:14.840 You need to know who you are and where you came from and why you think the things you think.

00:18:21.420 That's why you have to place yourself in the proper tradition.

00:18:25.220 I'm taking four of my esteemed colleagues and you across the world.

00:18:31.580 Oh wow, this is amazing.

00:18:33.040 To rediscover the ways our ancient ancestors developed the ideas that shaped modern society.

00:18:38.680 It was a monument to civic greatness.

00:18:42.020 To visit the places where history was made.

00:18:44.360 That is ash from the actual fires when the Babylonians burned Jerusalem from 2,500 years ago. 0.62

00:18:51.780 To walk the same roads.

00:18:53.420 We are following the path of the crucifixion.

00:18:55.900 And experience the same wonder.

00:19:06.120 We are on the site of a miracle.

00:19:11.180 What kind of resources can human beings bring to a mysterious but knowable universe?

00:19:17.120 Science, art, politics, all that makes life wonderful.

00:19:21.780 Science, art, politics, all that makes life wonderful.

00:19:24.780 Science, art, politics, all that makes life wonderful.

00:19:25.780 And something new about the world is revealed.

00:19:33.040 So Venezuela is an interesting case because it had the highest per capita income in Latin America in 1970.

00:19:39.100 And it was the country with the largest degree of economic freedom.

00:19:44.120 You can measure that.

00:19:45.840 The Fraser Institute in Canada does that work of measuring economic freedom.

00:19:49.700 And in 1970 Venezuela was 14th in the world in terms of economic freedom.

00:19:57.440 It was about like 90 countries more or less that they were measuring back then.

00:20:02.320 Chile was one of the last countries because we had had the socialist experiment of Salvador Allende,

00:20:07.260 which was an attempt to impose a totalitarian communist system in Chile.

00:20:10.720 And we were last in the country and we had hyperinflation and scarcity of basic goods and services and so on and so forth.

00:20:17.700 So it was a complete catastrophe that ended up in the coup of 1973, led by General Pinochet.

00:20:24.720 But Venezuela over time and over the decades, especially after they nationalized in the 70s the oil industry,

00:20:31.180 we have to remember Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

00:20:36.300 They nationalized it and they started falling in the ranking of economic freedom systematically.

00:20:43.260 So by the time Chavez came to power in 1988, Venezuela was doing very poorly in the rankings of economic freedom.

00:20:49.920 You had a very kleptocratic, kleptocratic, corrupt system that, you know, a rent-seeking society, let's say.

00:20:59.300 Everyone was trying to live out of their government handouts and corrupt deals between the corporate interests and the politicians.

00:21:07.860 And Chavez was elected, he had been a soldier who had attempted a coup in 1992 against Carlos Andrés Pérez.

00:21:20.440 So he was a golpista, what we call a golpista in Spanish.

00:21:23.980 So someone who tried to overthrow a democratically elected president and install a dictatorship.

00:21:31.680 So everyone knew who Chavez was.

00:21:33.420 Many people died in 1992 and he ended up in prison.

00:21:36.660 But a well-meaning central leftist in Venezuela pardoned him so he could go out of jail.

00:21:46.100 And then he went to see Fidel Castro.

00:21:49.360 And Fidel Castro recognized immediately that he had, you know, a puppet that he could guide in order to take control over Venezuela.

00:21:59.500 So Castro and Cuba, they have been the masterminds behind what is going on in this country. 0.54

00:22:06.660 And they have, you know, extracted huge sums of wealth from Venezuela because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at some point, Russia stopped funding the Cuban dictatorship.

00:22:19.360 And so Venezuela played that role.

00:22:21.360 And Chavez saw in Fidel Castro a fatherly figure for him.

00:22:28.360 And this is really an important thing because he was loyal to Fidel until the very end.

00:22:35.360 And the intelligence services from Cuba, who are very effective, we have to say, in consolidating power.

00:22:43.640 They have been there in Cuba for over 60 years.

00:22:45.580 So they know what they're doing.

00:22:47.980 These are the people advising the regime as to what to do to deal with the opposition and to purge the military and things like that.

00:22:56.340 But Venezuela was already in a situation where they have where they have lost their economic freedom and their per capita incomes as compared to other countries in Latin America started to fall dramatically.

00:23:09.820 And while Chile embraced free market reforms, especially influenced by the Chicago School of Economics, Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger, George Stigler and people like that.

00:23:20.820 And we became the wealthiest country in per capita terms in Latin America.

00:23:26.060 And so you can see that in the 70s, Chile was at the bottom of the economic freedom ranking.

00:23:33.140 We went up to the top, even top 10 at some point, and we became the wealthiest country in Latin America.

00:23:39.260 And Venezuela, the complete opposite.

00:23:41.040 They went from being the freest country in Latin America to now the last country in the ranking in the world.

00:23:47.740 It's about 162 among 162 countries that are measured, and it's a complete disaster.

00:23:54.260 And this is socialism.

00:23:55.580 This is what I mean.

00:23:56.400 So the Nordic countries are really on the top countries in terms of economic freedom.

00:24:02.880 These are not really socialist countries.

00:24:05.260 And I remember Bernie Sanders saying this all the time, and he got a response.

00:24:09.720 I think it was the prime minister from Sweden who told him, we are not socialists.

00:24:14.800 You have corporate tax in Sweden that is lower than in the United States, more or less, in some of these Nordic countries.

00:24:22.120 So what they do is they tax very heavily personal income, right?

00:24:26.500 And this is, I don't like it because you have lots of human capital flights, people who are very qualified who go to the United States for other parts.

00:24:34.640 But still, they're very productive countries, and they have very large degrees of economic freedom.

00:24:40.380 And economic freedom means free trade, stable currency, protection of property rights, reasonable size of government, and so on.

00:24:47.920 So it is the social democracy like Anthony Giddens type of social democracy, what Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were at the time at some point, or German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who made all the reforms in Germany, allowing Germany in the 2000s to then experience a boom, an economic boom that Merkel benefited from that.

00:25:12.120 Okay, so, but here, what we have is the extreme far-left experiments that are very anti-capitalist.

00:25:20.400 And this is what you see in Venezuela now, is the consolidation of this ideology.

00:25:28.460 We have to remember that Maduro was chosen by Chavez as his successor.

00:25:32.780 And the reason for this was that Maduro, compared to Diosdado Cabello, who is another criminal and one of the main leaders of this Soles cartel, Maduro is a doctrinaire.

00:25:46.240 He was the hardcore socialist.

00:25:48.700 And he was foreign and first minister to the Chavez administration.

00:25:51.680 And he was instrumental in building up the whole network of Venezuela and the Chavismo on an international level, in Europe, in Asia, in different parts.

00:26:07.580 And Chavez aligned himself very rapidly with Russia and with Iran and with China.

00:26:13.520 So, this is part of the Cold War 2.0 that we are experiencing.

00:26:19.620 Venezuela is playing for them.

00:26:22.780 And now we have, and I want to stress this, Jordan, because it's important.

00:26:30.000 You have a minimum wage of $3 in Venezuela.

00:26:33.600 You have accumulated inflation of 2 million percent or more.

00:26:37.020 You have collapse of 70 percent of GDP, 70 percent.

00:26:41.880 You have a collapse of over 80 percent of oil production in Venezuela.

00:26:47.140 And they have squandered almost a trillion dollars in wealth.

00:26:52.940 Because when Chavez came to power, you had a barrel of oil at $8 or so.

00:26:59.040 And it skyrocketed to over $120.

00:27:04.400 So, only because of that, they got almost a trillion dollars.

00:27:07.840 They destroyed all of that wealth.

00:27:10.000 And people say, oh, this is, you know, Caribbean type of politics.

00:27:12.860 This is the result of socialism.

00:27:14.900 Everywhere you go and you see what the socialists, when they implement this system, and again, I don't mean the Nordic type of welfare state, which is not socialism, not real socialism, at least.

00:27:25.680 They destroy the country where they run it.

00:27:30.280 You can see it in Eastern Germany as compared to Western Germany during the Cold War.

00:27:35.440 It was a very poor country compared to Western Germany, and so on.

00:27:38.400 I mean, everyone knows the different examples.

00:27:40.540 North Korea, South Korea, and so on and so forth.

00:27:43.100 But it's important to remember that Fidel Castro Cuba and Russia, Vladimir Putin, and Iran, Hezbollah, are behind Maduro.

00:27:55.620 I have to stress this because this is not only a Venezuelan problem.

00:28:01.060 This is going to be a crucial problem for the United States and for national security in the United States.

00:28:07.260 Well, let's dig into that one of the other—so there's three, four things I'd like to cover as we move forward right now.

00:28:15.880 I want to talk more about the opposition in Venezuela and what you think people outside Venezuela can do to aid the opposition.

00:28:25.100 I want to talk about the ordinary life of the typical Venezuelan now.

00:28:28.640 I want to talk about where that trillion dollars went, and maybe we can do that while talking about your claim, for example, that the Maduro government has basically also become a narco-dictatorship.

00:28:42.360 Now, you know, you made a variety of extremely serious allegations, the misuse of a trillion dollars certainly being one of them.

00:28:50.620 But then you also said, well, the Maduro government is in bed with the narco-cartels. 0.97

00:28:56.520 And see, I don't think people in North America exactly understand what that means or exactly how nefarious those cartels are and what a danger they pose, well, to the stability of the entire Western Hemisphere.

00:29:10.060 But then you also added to that the fact that Maduro is in cahoots with, well, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and then Hezbollah.

00:29:20.560 And so this is a lot for people to digest because it sounds like a stew generated by a conspiracy theorist in a sense, right?

00:29:31.140 Because there's almost nothing that is bad that you're not accusing the Maduro government of participating in.

00:29:40.880 And so the easiest thing for a listener to do is to just say no to all that.

00:29:46.980 So we should walk through those issues one by one.

00:29:50.420 I guess the thing I'm most curious about to begin with, let's do it in this order.

00:29:55.060 What the hell happened to a trillion dollars?

00:29:58.440 Like, that's an awful lot of money.

00:29:59.960 Where do you think most of that, especially given that you have a 70% collapse in GDP and an 80% reduction in oil production?

00:30:08.380 It's like, and then everybody in Venezuela is poor, and yet a trillion dollars came pouring in.

00:30:13.720 So what's your sense of who that money went to?

00:30:18.340 And like, what sort of people did that money go to?

00:30:21.420 And what are they doing with that money?

00:30:24.120 So part of the money funded some very existentialist social programs at some point during the Chavez administration.

00:30:31.580 But a large part of it went to fund revolutionary groups and political parties all over Latin America.

00:30:39.520 We have to remember that the Castro vision, which is the important figure, I think, here,

00:30:47.100 the Castro vision was to spread the revolution all over Latin America.

00:30:51.140 And in his worldview, what he was doing, believe it or not, is Christ's work on Earth.

00:31:01.380 Like, he was bringing paradise to Earth.

00:31:03.560 He said that literally many times.

00:31:05.800 So Castro had been educated by the Jesuits in Cuba.

00:31:09.520 And he believed that capitalism and, you know, liberal democracy, individualism were the sources of corruption,

00:31:19.100 that Christ was the first communist revolutionary.

00:31:24.120 And this is, by the way, something very similar to what Pope Francis said at some point

00:31:29.280 when he argued that it was the communists who thought like the Christians.

00:31:33.900 He said that literally, Pope Francis, who is a Jesuit himself.

00:31:37.560 So, and Castro was promising to create this.

00:31:41.620 But this had to be an expansionist project.

00:31:45.060 So when Chavez came to power and he had all of these resources in his pockets,

00:31:51.780 plenty of them went to Cuba, of course, to sustain the island.

00:31:55.340 But then he started supporting different regimes or movements and terrorist organizations all over Latin America.

00:32:03.740 At some point, I had this conversation with former President Álvaro Uribe, who is also a good friend.

00:32:09.920 At some point, he told me I was the only non-leftist, non-socialist president in most of South America.

00:32:17.040 And it's true. 0.56

00:32:18.520 And all of these regimes, even the Kirchner dynasty in Argentina, the corrupt Kirchner dynasty, 0.88

00:32:25.700 got some, you know, loans, special loans from the Venezuelan government when they needed money.

00:32:31.160 So, and they stole a lot of money.

00:32:34.060 I mean, they have, the Chavistas and their families have billions of dollars on bank accounts in Europe,

00:32:43.180 in the U.S., in different parts.

00:32:45.860 And so it's amazing.

00:32:48.760 You saw Ferraris in Caracas where people were starving.

00:32:53.200 You have almost 8 million people have left Venezuela because you don't find things to eat.

00:32:57.900 8 million is a quarter of the population who have left the country because of the desperate situation.

00:33:05.820 And you have over 80% poverty rate.

00:33:09.600 And so a large part of the money, as I said, went to fund all of these movements.

00:33:17.140 But also within Venezuela, they started creating a parallel army, the Circulos Guadivarianos.

00:33:24.020 Chávez very early on understood, probably because Castro advised him to do so,

00:33:30.040 that he needed a parallel troops in order to contain any threat that could come from the, within the army.

00:33:38.280 And he was right.

00:33:39.300 In 2002, the army staged a coup against Chávez.

00:33:43.960 And Chávez was taken into custody.

00:33:47.100 He was imprisoned.

00:33:48.140 But then some generals, you know, regretted the decision of getting rid of him.

00:33:54.360 And they reinstalled Chávez.

00:33:56.580 And then he, of course, used the muscle of the intelligence services of Cuba to purge the military as much as he could.

00:34:03.400 But he was never entirely sure that there would not be traitors within the army.

00:34:07.980 So he created the Circulos Bolivarianos, which are armed. 0.97

00:34:11.280 And these are the guys, by the way, that you see nowadays in the videos, in the videos, attacking Venezuelans from the opposition who are just protesting on the streets.

00:34:21.220 And they are shooting at them.

00:34:22.920 They are taking them in and torturing them.

00:34:24.680 And most of the people doing the dirty job are these Circulos Bolivarianos, which is the Bolivarian Circles, you know. 0.99

00:34:34.040 And so that's a lot of money that went there also.

00:34:39.720 And, you know, you can squander wealth with no end.

00:34:42.860 I mean, if you are supporting other countries and you want to install regimes all over Latin America that are favorable to you,

00:34:51.540 I mean, a trillion dollars is not even a lot of money, you know.

00:34:56.020 But the worst part, and I finish the point with this, is that we saw people all over the West in the 2000s,

00:35:03.000 when it was already clear that Chávez was a dictator, that he was completely undermining the separation of powers.

00:35:09.540 He was imprisoning the opposition and he was violating human rights and so on.

00:35:15.100 We saw very famous people like Joseph Stieglitz, for instance, coming to Venezuela and praising Chávez for what he was doing.

00:35:24.960 And he did the same, by the way, with Kirchner's, with Fidel Castro.

00:35:30.020 He has been a longtime supporter of the Castro dictatorship.

00:35:33.540 And he now writes books called The Road to Freedom and pretends to be the savior of the West or the killer or the undertaker of neoliberalism or something like that.

00:35:44.320 But you could read the New York Times, you could read different BBC, you could see different news media outlets or even on television.

00:35:54.500 They were sympathetic to Chávez when he started doing this and it was already clear where he was going.

00:36:01.040 So I share the frustration of the Venezuelan friends in the resistance because the West has not shown, you know, one standard for everyone.

00:36:12.000 When it's the leftist, they support them or they turn a blind eye to what they do.

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00:37:55.620 Okay, so let's talk about, let's move from that.

00:38:03.400 So you accounted for a fair bit of the spending.

00:38:06.300 A lot of it has disappeared into the pockets of corrupt politicians.

00:38:10.820 You see exactly the same thing, for example, with the Palestinian leadership.

00:38:14.960 All of those people end up with billions of dollars in their accounts.

00:38:18.240 And so that's appalling beyond comprehension.

00:38:20.860 They sacrifice their own people and they often live elsewhere. 0.99

00:38:26.220 And so the socialist redistribution of wealth ends up meaning that everyone's much more poor than they used to be,

00:38:32.180 except the small minority of people who have power instead of the evil capitalists.

00:38:37.000 And they have untold wealth at their fingertips.

00:38:39.960 And then you also said the money was distributed around South America and Central America to destabilize and to promote revolution and maybe elsewhere in the world as well.

00:38:52.040 Okay, so and that you can spend an awful lot of money doing that and cause an awful lot of trouble. 0.99

00:38:57.040 And you also pointed out that that's been aided and abetted by the, what would you call them, useful idiots of the Western media. 0.99

00:39:04.720 And so we'll get back to that. 0.99

00:39:06.620 Let's turn to another element of the corruption.

00:39:11.600 And that's the, you described Maduro as a narco, the Maduro regime as a narco dictatorship.

00:39:18.520 So talk to everyone, if you would, a little bit about the role of the cartels in Central and South America,

00:39:26.340 because that's not something that's well understood in North America at all.

00:39:30.800 Well, by the way, people who think I'm making these things up, they can Google it.

00:39:37.380 It's all online.

00:39:38.380 This is, you can see in very serious media, you can read articles about this.

00:39:44.300 So the United States, they know about this, about the Iran connection, about the, you know, the drug cartels and so on and so forth.

00:39:53.020 But, you know, now in Latin America, because this is including Mexico, we have a problem that more and more the cartels are taking over politics and you don't need to do the revolution.

00:40:09.480 And actually, this is really interesting.

00:40:11.840 Chavez used to be a proponent of what he called 21st century socialism.

00:40:18.120 That is what he used to talk about.

00:40:19.680 We are doing 21st century socialism.

00:40:23.040 So what did that mean?

00:40:25.160 After the fall, the fall of the Berlin Wall, they came all together in Brazil, you know, the Sao Paulo Forum with Lula and so on.

00:40:32.800 And they said, OK, we are going to use democracy.

00:40:35.400 We are going to use democracy in order to create a socialist system.

00:40:41.300 We are not going to fight a revolutionary war necessarily, but we are going to use it in order to come to power.

00:40:48.660 And then once we are there, we establish our system and we never leave.

00:40:53.020 If we can, if we can avoid to leave, we are going to stay.

00:40:56.500 OK, so the cartels have been playing an important role in this because at some point Chavez needed them and he offered refuge to the Colombian cartels from the attacks that the Uribe administration was engaging in.

00:41:17.320 And they would come into Venezuelan territory and they would come into Venezuelan territory and Chavez would protect them.

00:41:22.240 And the Colombian army couldn't go into Venezuelan territory because that would have meant a proper war with the Venezuelan army.

00:41:29.620 So they started with that and the cartels also started channeling money to the regime.

00:41:38.540 And at some point, the regime itself, especially with Diosdado Cabello, who is a very high up in the Maduro administration, became a cartel boss.

00:41:51.680 Now you have regions in Venezuela, but also in Mexico, in Mexico, for instance, 30 percent of the Mexican territory is controlled by the cartels, 30 percent.

00:42:02.000 In Venezuela, you have complete regions, complete states that are being run by the cartels.

00:42:09.800 OK, and and now we have a country like Chile that used to be a safe country, like the most advanced country.

00:42:16.880 The cartels are taking over complete regions of the country with their guns and so on.

00:42:23.220 Now, these cartels have, again, connections with Hezbollah.

00:42:27.140 They work, they work with them.

00:42:28.680 And Hezbollah is creating now in Bolivia, which is also a far left administration and which is a big producer of coke, Bolivia. 0.97

00:42:40.820 They are creating or establishing facilities to produce drones that are for military purposes.

00:42:50.780 But also, we have to remember that Bolivia and Venezuela, I know this for a fact in Venezuela, but I think it's also true for Bolivia.

00:42:56.880 They have uranium, which is important for the Iranians, for the nuclear program that Iran wants to develop.

00:43:03.520 So the cartels have become a source of funding.

00:43:06.600 They have become the government in the case of Venezuela, and they don't want to lose their business model.

00:43:15.600 And that's why I think they are not going to accept the transition to democracy in Venezuela, but they are destabilizing the whole of Latin America because they are a business.

00:43:27.120 They are expanding everywhere they can in order to make more profits.

00:43:31.140 And a country like Chile, for instance, which used to be free from this problem, now has become the third largest exporter of cocaine to Europe because we are integrated with the rest of the world.

00:43:45.820 We have many free trade agreements, and so you have ships here that go everywhere, and we have basically no control on the border with Peru and Bolivia.

00:43:56.720 And so they bring all this cocaine through the northern border, and then they export it via the Chilean ports to the United States, to Europe, and everywhere.

00:44:05.500 And so this is corrupting everything in Latin America. 0.96

00:44:10.780 And I've heard, and I think this is in the media also, that the Trendaragua, which is, you know, one of these cartels and organized crime groups, are also operating in New York and other cities in the United States.

00:44:27.060 Of course, why not?

00:44:28.360 I mean, if it's easy to get into the United States, it's a huge market.

00:44:31.880 Why not?

00:44:32.380 So this is the problem.

00:44:34.200 We are becoming a narco region, or a region controlled by the narcos, and politicians are working for the narcos.

00:44:42.280 And the problem with this is that Iran, Russia, and China, they don't care about this.

00:44:46.700 They just use these cartels, or the connections with the cartels, for their own purposes.

00:44:53.100 And that's why you see the first countries recognizing Maduro's fraud, saying that he was democratically elected, were China, Russia, and Iran, these three countries.

00:45:02.380 This is not a coincidence.

00:45:05.200 Okay, so let's speak to something more practical and psychological for a moment.

00:45:13.200 So many people who are watching and listening will be wondering, at least in some corner of their imagination, why the hell they should care.

00:45:21.320 You know, there's lots of things that are besetting the typical American voter at the moment.

00:45:28.640 The situation in the United States is far from stable.

00:45:31.340 I would say the same thing about Canada.

00:45:33.260 There are many catastrophes and looming catastrophes to be concerned about.

00:45:39.160 And what happens typically is that anything to do with South and Central America takes a pretty, it takes a backseat, to say the least.

00:45:49.940 So, I mean, when we met in Chile, you were obviously interested in pursuing this conversation, as I was.

00:45:58.060 And what would you say to people who are listening in the United States and Canada, let's say, and elsewhere in the world, about why they should care about what's happening with regards to China and Iran and Russia in South America and the cartels?

00:46:12.180 I mean, South America has always been a relatively unstable place from the perspective of the northern west.

00:46:18.140 And in some ways, this is par for the course.

00:46:23.180 I mean, the Cold War is being played out in a manner similar to this for as long as I can possibly remember.

00:46:31.300 What is it that you want to bring to the attention of the typical person in Canada and the U.S. with regards to what's happening down south?

00:46:40.420 And why should they care?

00:46:42.560 Well, you know, the thing is that the United States used to care a lot about Latin America, a lot.

00:46:49.440 During the Cold War, they intervened every country in order to prevent them from becoming communists and Soviet-line countries.

00:46:57.600 Because the KGB back then had the theory that the Cold War would be won in the Third World, basically.

00:47:06.240 And Henry Kissinger, for instance, when Salvador Allende in Chile was elected in 1970, he was the first Marxist president ever democratically elected in history.

00:47:18.760 And Henry Kissinger said, and I'm quoting him literally, the Allende election is the greatest threat that has occurred in the Western Hemisphere in a long time.

00:47:31.960 Because he understood that, you know, this could have a domino effect.

00:47:36.020 Other countries would follow, not only in Latin America, but also in Europe.

00:47:39.120 But now you have the following problem.

00:47:42.220 The United States, after September 11th, the country completely forgot about Latin America.

00:47:47.840 We don't exist anymore, okay, for them in terms of foreign policy.

00:47:51.600 And I'm not really exaggerating.

00:47:53.140 If September 11th would not have happened, I think the history of Latin America would be completely different right now.

00:48:01.720 So they forgot about us, and now they have Russia, and they have China, and they have other problems that are, they look more important than Latin America.

00:48:08.820 But the thing is that the main migration force in the United States are Latinos.

00:48:13.640 Latinos, and if the continent continues to destabilize, because of narco cartels, because of people like Maduro and so on, you will have millions more people coming into the United States. 0.59

00:48:26.640 Millions.

00:48:28.160 And among them, you will have the Iranian Hezbollah people and so on and so forth.

00:48:34.340 So from that point of view, it is really important for national security.

00:48:38.080 And then, when they are in the United States, Latinos tend to favor the Democratic Party. 0.83

00:48:46.780 Two-thirds of Latinos, they vote for the Democratic Party.

00:48:51.000 I think this is changing a little bit, but not enough.

00:48:53.260 So if you have a change, a substantial change in the demographics in the United States, and we know this is happening, this will have a political impact that is really, really, will be very substantial.

00:49:09.660 Why do Latinos vote for the Democratic Party? 0.98

00:49:12.560 Because when we emigrate today to the United States, we bring our belief systems with us.

00:49:18.160 It's not like because we're in the U.S., suddenly we love Thomas Jefferson.

00:49:21.840 That's not how it works.

00:49:24.360 They favor the welfare state and government handouts.

00:49:28.280 And I'm not saying everyone.

00:49:29.760 Most of them are very hardworking people and so on.

00:49:32.880 And, I mean, we cannot complain.

00:49:35.820 And most people hate Maduro, for instance, the Venezuelans who have escaped.

00:49:39.620 But the point is that if I was an American, I would be worried that the cultural landscape in my country would be changing so much because of this migration force that is coming into the United States, 1.00

00:49:56.220 that at some point it will be politically unmanageable for someone who wants to keep your country the way it was in terms of, you know, the ideas, the institution, limited government, and so on.

00:50:06.200 So, which is when they speak about the purple states, people moving from California to Texas, for instance.

00:50:15.260 And they tell them, don't vote for what you're left for, you know?

00:50:20.800 But it's the same with Latinos going into the United States. 0.97

00:50:24.140 It's the largest minority.

00:50:26.280 And it is really important to have a stable region so you don't have these influxes of people coming into your country first. 0.99

00:50:34.140 But then also because it poses, as I said, a risk for national security.

00:50:39.700 And on top of that, geopolitically, Latin America is extremely important in this Second World War because supply chains are de-globalizing now.

00:50:51.400 You know, you have this trade war going on with China.

00:50:53.900 And you need countries where you can produce your stuff.

00:50:57.500 You need raw materials.

00:51:00.200 China is buying everything in Latin America.

00:51:02.560 They are buying ports in Peru.

00:51:04.700 They are buying mines in Chile.

00:51:07.280 They are buying everything you can in Panama, everywhere.

00:51:11.140 They are buying up natural resources.

00:51:14.320 And Americans are looking the other way.

00:51:17.340 So I think this is not, this is the backyard.

00:51:20.440 There is a reason why you had the Monroe Doctrine at some point in 1832, when they said, okay, we are not intervening in Latin America.

00:51:30.000 We will not accept any foreign power also going to Latin America and intervening there and, you know, having this region as their sphere of influence.

00:51:39.840 But the Monroe Doctrine seems not to exist anymore.

00:51:42.280 But this is a new development.

00:51:45.960 For most of its history, the United States has really cared about Latin America because they understood how important it was for them, for their national security and for their national interest.

00:51:54.580 Well, I think we made the great mistake in the West of assuming that because the Soviet Union collapsed, the victory over the ideology that it made manifest was not only complete, but in some ways self-evident, right?

00:52:15.460 Victory had been attained, the end of history, let's say.

00:52:17.940 And it turns out that the spirit of envious, of the envious radicals was in no real way diminished by the cataclysmic catastrophe of the Soviet Union. 0.73

00:52:33.900 In fact, to some degree, quite the opposite.

00:52:36.480 Because when I was younger and the Soviet Union was still in full operation, you could point to the Soviet Union as an object lesson in the dangers of an anti-free market ideology.

00:52:53.320 But now the Soviet Union has disappeared.

00:52:55.900 And so it's much more difficult to point to something that's happening right now.

00:53:01.780 Well, you could point to Venezuela, you can point to North Korea, but they're economies that didn't have the scale or the presence, obviously, of the Soviet Union.

00:53:10.460 And so all of this has gone back underground that the attractiveness of the communist revolutionary ideas hasn't seemed to diminish at all.

00:53:21.960 So now your point is, okay, so let's summarize this.

00:53:25.520 Well, it's probably not a good idea to distribute a trillion dollars to radical leftist utopian criminal dictatorships all over South America and the world.

00:53:35.580 That seems like a bad idea if you're trying to maintain a certain degree of stability, even in your own country.

00:53:41.520 That manifests itself in all manner of economic collapse.

00:53:45.020 That drives migration northward.

00:53:46.860 We've seen tremendous pressure on the American border, and by all appearances, especially if Kamala Harris wins, however that might play itself out, that's only going to get worse. 0.97

00:53:57.740 And so the idea that the U.S. and Canada, by implication, can separate themselves from the geopolitical occurrences in South America, that's a fool's delusion.

00:54:13.900 And that's especially the case if it's Venezuela with all that oil money, let's say, and oil that the rest of the world needs, is in bed not only with the narco cartels, who are brutal criminals beyond the comprehension of any normal person to imagine, but also simultaneously in bed with Iran, which is one seriously bad actor, Russia, which is basically at war with the West, and China, which is the biggest threat to freedom that the world has ever seen since the Soviet Union.

00:54:42.560 And so that's all playing itself out in South America and driving migration northward.

00:54:48.760 Exactly.

00:54:49.420 And I would add, in the end, Jordan, if China, Iran, and Russia, your main enemies of the Western world, really care about Latin America, you should too. 0.82

00:55:00.580 You know, because they are, you know, because they are here, they are involved in these countries, they are investing tons of money, at least the Chinese, Russia is sending effectives, even the Wagner group has been seen in Venezuela.

00:55:13.840 They know that they need strongholds close to the United States, and they want to destabilize the region because they also know that this destabilizes the United States.

00:55:25.540 And so, I mean, it is so obvious, but I don't know.

00:55:32.740 Even in the conservative movement in the U.S., this is not understood.

00:55:38.180 I think someone like Marco Rubio understands this very well, or maybe Ted Cruz, but I think the traditional Republican politicians, they don't understand this.

00:55:48.920 They don't see how big of a threat we can become if China and Russia and Iran, they take over these countries. 1.00

00:55:56.740 And, by the way, we have some of the largest reserves in natural gas in the world, copper, lithium, silver, gold, whatever, oil, all these things you have here.

00:56:12.000 And manufacturing capacity in Latin America is also very strong, and you will need that at some point.

00:56:18.180 And we are a relatively young population still in Latin America, as compared to Europe or even the United States or Canada, who are growing old very rapidly.

00:56:28.580 So, for all of these reasons, I think it's not a smart move to just ignore what's going on in your backyard.

00:56:34.900 It's never a good idea.

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00:57:46.040 Hmm.

00:57:47.180 Well, that was certainly my sense when I toured through South America for what that's worth.

00:57:52.780 I mean, no, it's obvious that what's playing out there needs to be attended to.

00:58:00.080 Okay, so let's flip back to Venezuela specifically for a moment.

00:58:03.320 So could you give us an account, for example, of what ordinary life is like for a Venezuelan, for the typical Venezuelan citizen now?

00:58:12.740 You said that 25% of the population has decided to vote with their feet, and that's an awful lot of people.

00:58:19.520 And you said that, you know, the GDP has collapsed by 70%, oil production is down 80%, and that 80% of the population lives in poverty.

00:58:31.160 And so what is the typical, what is typical reality for a Venezuelan citizen now?

00:58:38.200 Because we never hear about it.

00:58:39.540 We have no idea.

00:58:41.360 Well, that's what you would expect in a socialist paradise.

00:58:43.980 It's basically, you don't have enough food to eat.

00:58:47.740 Calorie intake in Venezuela has collapsed over the last 15 years, 20 years.

00:58:53.320 You don't have medicines.

00:58:55.400 You don't have hospitals that are functioning.

00:58:59.920 You have no grid, electricity.

00:59:03.040 You have problems all the time in Caracas, everywhere in a country that is very hot.

00:59:06.820 Many regions of Venezuela are very hot.

00:59:08.600 You don't have air conditioning or any of that.

00:59:10.480 And only people who can get access to dollars, because there are remittances going to the country, they manage to survive.

00:59:21.460 But this is the reason why almost a quarter of the population have left.

00:59:26.420 And if Maduro is reinstalled in January, you will have another couple of million leaving Venezuela, by the way.

00:59:32.060 This is going to happen, and we are expecting that all over Latin America. 0.60

00:59:35.440 You have no rule of law, zero rule of law.

00:59:39.740 So you basically have a regime that controls the judiciary, the legislative, everything, and the police.

00:59:46.600 Any day someone can knock at your door and take you, a prisoner, and you disappear, and no one knows anything about you anymore.

00:59:53.320 You have to be, if you are in the opposition, you have to be hiding and very careful.

00:59:59.860 Even I am on a blacklist.

01:00:01.820 I was sold, and that's one of the reasons why I've never been back to Venezuela since last time I was there, 2014.

01:00:07.600 Even if I'm not really relevant within the country, but because I have argued against the Maduro regime in different media all over the West,

01:00:14.580 probably at least in the United States and Latin America and Spain, I'm not welcome.

01:00:19.800 So imagine people who are living there.

01:00:22.820 My friends are hiding from the regime.

01:00:26.140 You have many families that have been torn apart, completely destroyed.

01:00:32.860 Because, you know, let me tell you also an anecdote that is really interesting for the audience.

01:00:38.360 I was once in Miami, and I took an Uber.

01:00:40.260 And I started talking to the driver, and I thought that he was very well-educated and really intellectual, like more than the normal.

01:00:52.560 He knew a lot about law, for instance.

01:00:55.140 And I said, what did you do back in Venezuela?

01:00:58.020 I was a minister of the Supreme Court in Venezuela, a member of the Supreme Court of Justice in Venezuela.

01:01:03.600 And now I am your Uber driver.

01:01:06.640 So this is the reality of millions of Venezuelans.

01:01:12.680 You know, not only poor people or middle-class people, but also people who are very successful.

01:01:20.020 They had their jobs, they had their companies, and they lost everything.

01:01:24.320 They lost their families, they lost everything.

01:01:25.940 And many of them have family members that have been killed by the regime also.

01:01:30.100 So, and so the situation is so desperate that I think Venezuelans are going to fight to the last breath in order to make change possible.

01:01:41.400 And Maria Corina Machado, by the way, has said this.

01:01:43.940 The fight is until the end.

01:01:46.240 And so I don't know how this is going to look like.

01:01:49.300 But if the Biden administration does not convince Maduro and the regime to transition back to democracy, you will maybe have a bloodbath even worse than the one you have now.

01:02:07.100 By the way, a point that is important.

01:02:09.340 And Chavez, when he was in government, he disarmed the Venezuelan population.

01:02:16.360 He banned guns for every citizen in Venezuela.

01:02:20.240 The only people who could have guns were his thugs, basically, and the Circulos Bolivarianos, the parallel army groups that they have funded and they were financing.

01:02:34.020 And so now you have a situation where Venezuelans don't have even a pistol to defend themselves from these hordes of assassins that their regime is sending to kill them or to imprison them.

01:02:47.860 And they have over 2,000 people in the last weeks have been imprisoned.

01:02:51.420 Mostly young people who want a better future.

01:02:54.640 So this is what Venezuela looks like right now.

01:02:57.360 It's hell on earth.

01:02:59.260 Let's talk about the structure of the opposition.

01:03:05.040 So it's Maria Corina Machado.

01:03:07.420 I'm butchering that name, obviously.

01:03:10.640 And it's difficult from the outside to understand because tell me how the last election, who was put forward as opposition in the last election?

01:03:20.720 What role does she play? 1.00

01:03:22.580 What threat does she currently face? 0.87

01:03:24.580 And what, well, what can people from the outside do to shed light on this and to help?

01:03:31.060 Well, Maria Corina Machado has been the main opposition leader for over a decade, I would say, even a decade and a half. 0.93

01:03:39.540 Even if at some point in 2013, for instance, after Chávez died, you had an election where Enrique Capriles lost by a small margin to Maduro.

01:03:51.580 But Maduro sold that election.

01:03:53.100 They stole millions of votes.

01:03:54.520 This is not the first time that this happens.

01:03:56.640 And so, and the reason is because the system in Venezuela, it requires that you have sort of an ID and you go and vote, but the system is not integrated.

01:04:11.540 So in the sense that you can, with different IDs, you can vote in different parts.

01:04:16.700 So one member of the government got like, let's say, a hundred IDs and he could go to a hundred different places and vote for the same candidate.

01:04:24.580 And this is the way they stole the last election in 2013.

01:04:28.640 And back then, population wanted to rebel.

01:04:33.140 But Capriles said, no, stay home.

01:04:36.120 We have nothing to do here.

01:04:37.580 And so it gave oxygen to the regime.

01:04:41.580 And Maria Corina has always been the voice of, I think, reason and courage because she was willing to fight.

01:04:50.700 But the opposition was very fragmented and has been for a long time.

01:04:54.200 This is the first time that they are all together, together against the regime.

01:04:58.400 So, which is very good.

01:05:00.120 And she has become the undisputed leader of the opposition, even though Eduardo Gonzalez is a candidate and the president.

01:05:09.120 The president-elect is Eduardo Gonzalez.

01:05:10.560 But why?

01:05:11.580 Because Maduro banned Maria Corina from running as president.

01:05:16.560 So, and they have been doing this forever in Venezuela, since Chavez came to power.

01:05:21.520 So, Maria Corina endorsed Gonzalez to the election, and Gonzalez won, we all know, with a distance of over 30 points.

01:05:32.520 So, with a difference of over 30 points.

01:05:36.080 So, now the opposition, at least, they are all together against the regime.

01:05:41.900 But the main face of the opposition is Maria Corina Machado, which, by the way, deserves a Nobel Prize for Peace.

01:05:49.500 Because she has been so courageous in trying to bring democratic change to Venezuela.

01:05:56.960 But she's not going to get it because she's not a leftist.

01:05:59.720 So, I think there is not a big hope that she would get this.

01:06:02.480 But she faces now the possibility of being imprisoned.

01:06:06.220 And who knows, maybe being killed.

01:06:08.580 And she's willing to give her life for the cause.

01:06:11.900 I mean, she's not going to turn herself over to the regime.

01:06:15.880 Just, you know, a simple, I mean, like, I think she will try to prevent them from capturing her.

01:06:23.760 But she could be imprisoned and maybe killed.

01:06:27.680 So, this is what she's facing.

01:06:30.360 Maria Corina and her family.

01:06:31.720 So, she had Eduardo Gonzalez run in her stead, in essence.

01:06:39.020 Yeah.

01:06:39.220 Is she in hiding at the moment?

01:06:41.900 Maria Corina and her family.

01:06:43.320 Yes, she is.

01:06:44.120 She is.

01:06:45.620 I think she's sort of in hiding because the government wants to bring her in and to take her to, you know, to prison.

01:06:57.000 So, but she has, she's very active on social media and she has showed her face on some public rallies.

01:07:05.800 So, I think the government is in a situation where they don't really want to do this very publicly because they could upset the world and the people in Venezuela even more than they are right now.

01:07:19.000 So, it's a problem for them because she's too symbolic. 0.98

01:07:22.240 Like, they are not going to probably go after her where everyone is looking or watching at her.

01:07:30.060 I mean, this is probably not going to happen.

01:07:32.620 But they would break into her house in the middle of the night or something like that.

01:07:36.500 They would do.

01:07:36.960 So, but I don't think they know where she is.

01:07:39.260 So, but she's at risk, of course, and there are some orders that were given by the government to detain her.

01:07:48.480 So, I think it's a very dangerous situation for her.

01:07:56.300 And as long as some regimes like the Biden administration keeps pushing for a democratic transition, maybe she has a chance.

01:08:04.200 But we have communists or socialists, let's say far-left presidents in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil.

01:08:13.340 And they are in bed with Maduro also, to some extent.

01:08:17.440 And they are sort of protecting Maduro.

01:08:20.020 They are not really pushing Maduro to accept that he lost and then just rule the country until January, which is the date where he should leave the presidency and accept Eduardo Gonzalez as the next president.

01:08:38.300 But this is a life or death situation for Maria Corina and most of the opposition leaders.

01:08:43.600 As I said, one of her right hands, a friend of mine, was taken to prison by the armed forces or by members of the dictatorship.

01:08:52.780 And we don't know anything about her.

01:08:55.420 So, tell me about Maria Corina.

01:08:57.940 So, what is it about her that's made her a popular figure?

01:09:03.080 I'd like to know some more about her background and also, you know, why she doesn't quit. 0.96

01:09:09.920 Now, you explained, at least to some degree, why she's still alive.

01:09:14.740 You believe that it would be a scandal of such preposterous magnitude if there was something that happened to her,

01:09:20.360 that the Maduro regime is afraid that would turn international attention on them with sufficient drama to actually be a threat to the continued stability of their regime.

01:09:34.020 So, she's protected insofar as that's the case.

01:09:36.480 But what, tell me about who she is. 0.89

01:09:40.800 You know, you mentioned yourself earlier in this podcast that she's being tarred and feathered like anybody who isn't a communist for being far right now because that's happening everywhere.

01:09:50.960 And so, but again, you know, people, the far right epithet is a very effective one.

01:09:57.920 And it doesn't take much agitation, especially from the mainstream press, in order to make that accusation stick.

01:10:05.940 And so, it's clear that to the degree that you're trustworthy, you trust Maria Corina.

01:10:13.200 Tell us about her so that people have some sense of who it is that is standing in opposition to Maduro.

01:10:20.060 So, I think that she's the most courageous woman.

01:10:25.380 I think this is, maybe many people will think this is an overstatement, but I think this is, she's the most courageous woman in politics right now in the world.

01:10:34.380 I cannot imagine someone with more courage than her, than hers.

01:10:38.940 I mean, this is, I mean, she's unbelievably courageous and charismatic.

01:10:45.260 And so, she has this force.

01:10:49.300 So, she's like a force of nature.

01:10:51.360 And this is why the regime is so afraid of her.

01:10:54.400 And she has managed to bring the whole opposition together and to create a movement of such magnitude in Venezuela that even the dictatorship with all the guns and so on is shaking.

01:11:08.660 Because they are afraid that this is going to, in the end, you know, bring change in Venezuela.

01:11:17.160 And her charisma is so powerful that even members of the armed forces have backed her.

01:11:24.140 That's, by the way, one of the reasons why they had the access to the documents showing that they won the presidency.

01:11:31.860 Because members in the military were leaking these documents to the opposition.

01:11:38.180 And they have imprisoned over 100 soldiers are in prison and they humiliate them and they torture them and so on because they are behind Maria Corina and not behind Maduro.

01:11:49.260 So, but she is in favor of free markets, which is not the case with most of the opposition in Venezuela.

01:11:58.180 People might remember Leopoldo Lopez, who was in prison for a long time and it was a scandal all over the world.

01:12:06.180 I believe he's now in Spain.

01:12:08.480 But I once gave a speech with Leopoldo Lopez's father in the European Parliament.

01:12:13.920 And Leopoldo Lopez's father was defending socialism, which was, to me, was incredible.

01:12:19.540 He was saying, no, socialism does not do what Chávez has done or what, and it's exactly the opposite is the case.

01:12:26.780 And he was very naive when it came to this.

01:12:29.120 And Enrique Capriles, the same thing, the last opposition leader before Guaidó, Enrique Capriles, who lost in 2013, the other day tweeted along these lines, like Chávez was the good guy and Maduro is the bad guy.

01:12:43.820 Which is a narrative that the left is trying to create in order to save the socialist revolution in Venezuela.

01:12:52.260 It's the same narrative they did with Lenin and Stalin.

01:12:55.320 Oh, Lenin was a good guy, but Stalin was a criminal. 0.85

01:12:58.440 Stalin was, you know, coming from the proletarian who didn't know anything and he was a criminal. 0.99

01:13:05.220 They are doing the same with Chávez-Maduro. 0.99

01:13:09.060 And to me, it was shocking that someone like Capriles, who is in the opposition and who wants regime change, would fall for this crap and this trap. 0.96

01:13:18.160 So Maria Corina has never considered anything. 0.97

01:13:21.800 She has always been very coherent.

01:13:23.980 She believes in liberal democracy and the rule of law and the free market.

01:13:29.820 But I guess that qualifies you as a far right nowadays.

01:13:33.100 So it doesn't happen only to her, I guess.

01:13:36.580 But it is really appalling that we read this sort of nonsense from the established media.

01:13:46.040 There is no one more democratic.

01:13:48.080 She hasn't called for a rebellion against the government to a violent march towards Miraflores Palace, to the post-Maduro.

01:13:57.500 She hasn't done any of that.

01:13:58.540 She never did that. 0.99

01:14:01.240 It's just peaceful protest.

01:14:03.160 That's why I'm saying she should get the Nobel Peace Prize. 1.00

01:14:09.060 Really, because she's risking her life for millions of Venezuelans.

01:14:12.840 And so you will never, and I hope you meet her one day, because you will never meet a woman with more, you know, not only courage, but also integrity.

01:14:23.260 Do you think she'd do a podcast?

01:14:25.560 I think she would, yes.

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01:14:42.100 Absolutely.

01:14:42.660 Absolutely.

01:14:43.660 Well, let's see if we can make that happen.

01:14:46.280 Yeah, I can try to help out with that, because people need to see her all over the world. 0.68

01:14:55.840 Her fight is everyone's fight, people who believe in freedom, and especially Venezuela is such a dramatic case, because it was also the most stable democracy in Latin America for decades.

01:15:08.040 Not only the most stable economy, but also the most stable democracy, which offers also a lesson, right?

01:15:15.780 It's, I mean, it doesn't matter how well or how good your country looks like at some point in history.

01:15:22.620 It can change very rapidly.

01:15:24.420 Me being a German, my family came from Germany.

01:15:27.500 Germany, you know, Germany was the Athens of the modern world and so on. 0.63

01:15:33.520 And in a couple of, in a decade or two decades, you lost everything and you sunk into the most horrible barbarism.

01:15:41.200 And this was in Central Europe.

01:15:43.680 This can happen to anyone.

01:15:45.520 It happened to Venezuela.

01:15:46.820 It can happen to...

01:15:47.320 You mean like the UK?

01:15:49.160 Well, there you go.

01:15:50.800 There you go.

01:15:51.220 I mean, the UK is, what is going on there is really shocking to me.

01:15:56.240 I'm a great admirer of the Anglo-Saxons, because as Montesquieu said, they have done more for liberty than any other people in the world.

01:16:03.520 But now you see this totalitarian degeneration going on in the UK.

01:16:09.200 And it's very scary, because the thing, Jordan, is that for us who grew up in Latin America, I also spent some time, my childhood in Germany and so on.

01:16:18.240 But you could always say, okay, here the things don't look very, very, very well in terms of democracy and liberty, but you have the UK or you have Canada or you have the United States.

01:16:33.520 But now, it's like everything, everywhere, you are having the same problems.

01:16:40.860 Maybe not to the same degree, but you are having the same problems.

01:16:43.860 You don't see people really defending freedom of speech in the UK as you would have seen probably 50 years ago or 40 years ago.

01:16:53.700 You don't see the American political class celebrating the 4th of July as they used to do it, you know, 50 years ago or 40 years ago, because you have a part of the establishment that believes that they are an oppressive society that deserves to disappear.

01:17:09.900 And they have replaced the founding myth of the United States, which was moral equality, basically, that was the founding myth of the United States, you know, all men are created equal and so on, by the noble savage myth, which is the founding myth of Latin America.

01:17:25.240 The idea that you only have good people here, these indigenous peoples were pure hearted and they didn't know envy or jealousy or anything else.

01:17:35.520 And then the Europeans came and they corrupted everything. 1.00

01:17:37.580 And this is part of the reason why we have all these revolutions all the time, because this idea that we were corrupted by foreign powers, first Europe and then the United States, is a rhetoric that is being used over and over again by people like Chavez and others, in order to say we have to restore the original purity before capitalism, before exploitation, before private property, before all of that.

01:18:04.080 And, and I see this development happening also in the United States, more and more with the woke movement, let's put it that way, and the incapacity of many Democrats to, even modern Democrats, to stop it and to face it, you know, and confront it as they should.

01:18:27.260 That's why I'm very worried about the future of the West.

01:18:30.360 I'm wondering, let, let me step sideways for a moment and, and, and then we'll return to our discussion about Venezuela and South America in general.

01:18:42.660 You know, I, I don't think it's really appropriate now to conceptualize what's happening around the world, but particularly in the West, in political terms precisely, because it's something deeper than what's merely political.

01:18:56.420 And one of the ideas I've been toying with, I'd like your opinion about it, is that the default human moral stance is probably left wing.

01:19:07.640 You know, Ben Shapiro said something to me at one point, just off the cuff, that tangled its way into my thinking, and I suppose is one of the motivations for this idea, that with, he said he's a communist in his family.

01:19:21.780 And so, you know, if you, if you have a family, if you have children, you're really hoping for something like, at least a part of you is hoping, especially when they're kids, for something like equality of outcome.

01:19:36.200 You want everyone to do well, you're willing to intervene on the side of the person who's, you know, bearing what, who's not quite as successful at any given moment.

01:19:49.500 You want to distribute resources as equitably as possible.

01:19:53.780 You, you, your interaction with your children and your wife is based on essentially an ethos of care.

01:20:00.240 But, you know, if you look at organizations that move beyond the scope of the family in size, that ethos of care and equitable care, let's say, doesn't scale well.

01:20:16.300 And modern civilizations are not families.

01:20:19.640 And here's, here's some proof of that from the psychological perspective.

01:20:25.300 So the personality trait agreeableness is associated with maternal care, let's say.

01:20:31.920 It's, it's the dimension of empathic, self-sacrificial care.

01:20:36.800 And women are substantially higher in trait agreeableness across the world than men.

01:20:41.760 What predicts success in a complex society on the personality side isn't agreeableness.

01:20:49.540 In fact, managers who are more agreeable do worse because people take advantage of them.

01:20:55.780 What predicts success on the personality side in a large-scale society is conscientiousness.

01:21:03.560 And conscientiousness is dutifulness and industriousness and orderliness.

01:21:08.640 And it's, it's, it's the ethos of hard work.

01:21:12.480 It's a meritocratic ethos.

01:21:14.620 And it's a cold virtue.

01:21:16.520 Like, to be conscientious isn't the same as to be emotionally caring.

01:21:22.640 And so I wonder if part of the reason that the politics of the left, so to speak, constantly mutate and transform,

01:21:31.840 they're immune to criticism, say, by reference to history.

01:21:39.020 You can't just say, well, every communist regime in the 20th century was a brutal, bloody, dictatorial disaster.

01:21:46.160 It doesn't hold water.

01:21:47.880 Maybe it doesn't hold water because it's actually extremely difficult to socialize people so that they can take their place in a complex society without defaulting to the underlying ethos of familial care.

01:22:05.060 You know, and so if you're a harsh and discriminating person, if you're very meritocratically oriented,

01:22:10.440 if you say to someone, I don't give a damn about your feelings, it matters what sort of job you do, you know, you're a, you're a harsh voice.

01:22:18.440 And you might be a necessary voice to keep civilization itself running, but that doesn't mean that you're necessarily an attractive voice,

01:22:26.580 especially to people who think instinctively in terms of an ethos of care.

01:22:30.700 And it's very, very easy to appeal to that.

01:22:33.820 And so I think part of the problem, and then you might add to that another problem.

01:22:37.520 So imagine that if you're driven by necessity, when times are hard, it becomes obvious that those who can should be allowed to do or should be pushed forward to do,

01:22:52.360 that the meritocratic have to rise to the top because otherwise disaster looms.

01:22:57.020 If you've been in a situation where economic security has been granted to you in some ways effortlessly for several generations even,

01:23:06.020 it's also perhaps much easier to default to that ethos of care and to attend to the outliers in society who haven't served themselves well,

01:23:16.500 but also perhaps haven't been served well by the conscientious ethos.

01:23:21.780 And so I'm wondering about your thoughts of that, you know, like, because we usually think about this,

01:23:26.020 well, some people have left-wing beliefs and some people have right-wing beliefs and that's the battlefield.

01:23:31.080 It's like, I don't think that's a good level of analysis because I don't exactly think this is about ideas.

01:23:37.200 I think the default human position might be equality of outcome in small groups and that you have to struggle against that mightily with your education system,

01:23:48.280 maybe your moral system as a whole, to impose a meritocratic, like a cold virtue meritocracy on top of that.

01:23:56.500 And obviously we haven't been doing a very good job of that.

01:24:00.340 So I'm curious, you're well-versed in the Austrian school of economics.

01:24:04.720 I'm wondering what you think of that kind of theorizing.

01:24:08.220 No, I fully agree.

01:24:09.380 And this is really interesting because Friedrich Hayek wrote a paper called The Mirage of Social Justice,

01:24:15.540 where he argued exactly what you are saying.

01:24:17.820 He said that this idea of social justice, that we had to, you know, redistribute wealth so everyone gets an equal share or in terms that guarantee the survival of the community.

01:24:33.440 It's an idea that he attributes to our past for thousands of years.

01:24:40.540 We were a small community, tribes, basically.

01:24:44.240 We had this family ethos, the care ethos, and it was the way to survive.

01:24:49.080 But we were communities only of a couple of dozen people or maybe over a hundred, but not more than that.

01:24:55.160 You knew everyone, and this is the instinct, he says, we evolved in this type of environment.

01:25:06.140 And so socialism, in the end, wants to apply this moral instinct to what he called the complex society, the larger society, you know, which is civilization, basically.

01:25:19.860 And that's why you have this regression towards tribalism, and you have it with socialism and communism and with nationalism.

01:25:29.620 When nationalism is exacerbated like the Nazis did in Germany, then you go back to the tribe and you feel protected by the tribe. 0.75

01:25:36.380 And you have this unifying rhetoric and this identity, and you are, you know, like you are, again, like this organism and you are part of a whole.

01:25:46.060 You are not just an individual looking for yourself.

01:25:48.300 And this is the care ethics ethos that you were talking about.

01:25:52.280 It's really interesting also because Gerald Cohen, who was a very famous Marxist, a professor at Oxford University, he said, he wrote the book, Why Not Socialism?

01:26:02.620 And by socialism, he didn't mean Nordic type of welfare state or something like that.

01:26:08.000 He meant like really equality of outcomes, more or less.

01:26:10.740 And he said that the instinct, the socialist ideology or the socialist philosophy appealed to an instinct that was so ingrained in human nature that it was going to come back over and over and over again.

01:26:27.640 So, so, so, so I fully agree with that analysis.

01:26:32.100 And this is why civilization is so fragile.

01:26:34.060 Okay, let me add two data points to that, okay, or three.

01:26:38.820 So, we did a study in 2016 looking at personality and cognitive predictors of politically correct authoritarianism.

01:26:46.940 So, that wouldn't be democratic socialism.

01:26:48.920 That would be the far left authoritarian types.

01:26:51.520 And the things that predicted it were low verbal intelligence, which was a walloping predictor.

01:26:57.780 So, you could imagine it's a very simple narrative, right?

01:27:00.520 There are victims and there are victimizers.

01:27:02.760 That explains everything.

01:27:04.200 And if you're moral, you're on the side of the victims.

01:27:06.320 And that's something like a predatory infant instinct, right?

01:27:11.980 There are predators.

01:27:13.480 There are infants.

01:27:14.520 You're obviously on the side of the infants and to hell with the predators.

01:27:17.840 So, so, so you can think of that as an instinctual orientation and an effective one under certain conditions.

01:27:23.920 Okay, what else predicted?

01:27:27.920 Feminine temperament, high agreeableness in particular.

01:27:33.120 And then, and then there's another, the other data point I would say is that if you look in the United States right now,

01:27:39.520 the, the people who are holding the radical utopians in power are women between 18 and 34. 0.88

01:27:47.840 Okay, and now they're particularly targeted by the Iranians and the Chinese on TikTok, right? 0.89

01:27:56.580 And they're bombarded with images, for example, of dying Palestinian children.

01:28:01.200 And that's a targeted attack.

01:28:03.220 We know that, we know that the Iranians are behind that and the Chinese. 1.00

01:28:06.340 And it's extremely effective.

01:28:07.980 And women between the ages of 18 and 34 are wildly discordant in their political views in relationship to everyone else. 0.65

01:28:15.960 Now, 50% of them are also childless, right?

01:28:21.420 So, so there's an element of the maternal instinct run amok on the political landscape because you could easily say,

01:28:28.160 and I don't think that it's an exaggeration, and our empirical data supported that,

01:28:32.340 is that that maternal instinct is going to find its target.

01:28:39.080 It's, it's going to find its expression.

01:28:41.720 If it doesn't find its expression within the confines of a family, where there's some real demand to take care of the,

01:28:50.340 of those who are unable to take care of themselves, children, essentially, infants, primarily,

01:28:55.720 then it's going to find its expression politically.

01:28:58.100 And that can be exploited, as it certainly is by the Chinese and the Iranians on TikTok. 1.00

01:29:02.720 And so the battle that we're engaged in politically, I believe, is better construed in the manner that we just described.

01:29:11.560 It's, it's a, it's a battle between an instinctive orientation towards care and a higher order cognitive interpretation that's associated with conscientiousness

01:29:22.940 that notes how complex systems, systems operate, and introduces a different standard,

01:29:29.400 which would essentially be something like the, the cold-hearted meritocratic standard.

01:29:34.780 Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort.

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01:29:49.100 Okay, so you see that, you see a parallel between that and what the Austrian school economists proposed.

01:29:56.020 Okay, that's, that's what I, that's what I thought.

01:29:58.900 So, okay, okay, okay, so that's, that, I'm going to bang that around in the back of my head.

01:30:04.060 Maybe we could turn, we don't have a lot of time for this,

01:30:08.500 because we're running out of time on the YouTube side,

01:30:10.760 but maybe we could turn our attention to developments that are arguably somewhat positive.

01:30:17.160 Chile is somewhat positive.

01:30:19.600 What do you think about what's happening in Argentina with Malay?

01:30:22.840 And we also have the example of El Salvador.

01:30:25.940 Yeah.

01:30:26.560 And, and with its turning to both Bitcoin, interestingly enough, and to the U.S. dollar.

01:30:32.620 So, I'm, what, let's start with Argentina.

01:30:37.400 So, what are your views on what's, what is happening in Argentina?

01:30:41.360 Like, what Malay is doing, is that, is that being, is that producing any success on economic grounds? 1.00

01:30:47.620 Because it's very difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff in terms of anything approximating legacy media coverage of Argentina.

01:30:54.960 Well, well, I have to disclose here that I'm a good friend of Malay and we have been working for the cause of freedom in Latin America for 10 years together.

01:31:06.980 So, what is happening in Argentina is the most fascinating and interesting thing that I've seen, of course, in my lifetime,

01:31:13.920 but also, I think, in the last half a century, because what, what is really taking place is a cultural revolution in, in a positive sense, not the, not the Chinese type of Maoist type of cultural revolution.

01:31:27.740 But Argentina was the wealthiest country in the world in 1896, with highest per capita income in the world.

01:31:37.020 We had a constitution in place, the 1853 constitution that was designed by Juan Bautista Alberti, who was an admirer of the founding fathers of the United States.

01:31:47.520 He was a classical liberal, conservative classical liberal.

01:31:50.700 He believed that the government had to be limited.

01:31:52.720 And he, he saw in the French revolutionary tradition of people like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the main reasons why Latin America was not prosperous enough.

01:32:05.580 And because we expected, expected everything from an omnipotent government.

01:32:09.720 He actually has an article called Omnipotent Government.

01:32:13.280 And he said the Americans, on the other hand, they, they, they expect from government, nothing.

01:32:17.100 They fix the things for themselves.

01:32:18.580 Okay.

01:32:19.160 So he created the 1853 constitution.

01:32:23.400 And after that, Argentina became the most successful country in the world, in terms of per capita income.

01:32:29.980 But if you went to 1914, you had half of the population in Buenos Aires was born, not in Buenos Aires, where there were foreigners coming from Europe.

01:32:39.200 So it was a legitimate question to ask yourself, are we emigrating to the United States or to Argentina in the late 19th century?

01:32:46.040 This is what happened back then.

01:32:48.280 And this is why also the Argentinian population looks so European in general.

01:32:52.000 And you had in the last World Cup, all this nonsensical article saying, well, why there are no black people in the soccer team in Argentina and so on.

01:32:59.680 This is, and, and, and it's this very European population.

01:33:03.820 But in the 20s and 30s, and then especially 40s with Juan Domingo Perón, who was a fascist general, a collectivist fascist general, admirer of Mussolini.

01:33:14.340 He had met Mussolini actually in Italy, but he was anti-communist at the same time.

01:33:18.700 He didn't want the central plan economy for, you know, the whole thing, but he, he wanted the corporatist type of very corrupt economy.

01:33:25.840 And then they, they changed dramatically the institutions and Argentina became a declining nation and a poor nation compared to the rest of the world, at least the developed world.

01:33:39.340 And, and what did Millet do?

01:33:42.140 Millet managed, Millet and the free market movement, the classical liberal movement, conservative movement in Argentina.

01:33:47.820 I played a role also there.

01:33:48.980 Um, so we managed to transform dramatically the mindset, especially of young people in Argentina, you're allowed to vote with 16.

01:33:58.040 So between 16 and 24, Millet got 70% of the votes, 70%.

01:34:03.440 And, uh, this, this, uh, young people, uh, forced the change towards, uh, Millet above very, uh, hardcore radical free market, uh, regime, but not because people were upset.

01:34:18.640 Because inflation was so high and so on.

01:34:20.600 No, that was not the reason.

01:34:22.300 There is a structural change in Argentina.

01:34:24.760 All of these people, they would have, they would have been Peronist 20 years ago or 30 years ago. 0.73

01:34:29.500 And now they are libertarians.

01:34:31.560 And how, how did we achieve that?

01:34:33.360 Well, a lot of going to medias, giving interviews, especially social media, TikTok, uh, Instagram, and YouTube were crucial to change the mentality of millions of people.

01:34:44.160 And of course the style, Millet has a charisma, uh, a style that is very, uh, you know, eccentric, let's put it that way.

01:34:52.420 And he is irreverent.

01:34:54.740 He's, he has the rhetoric of a revolutionary, which is very Argentinian, by the way, it's not really strange in that country.

01:35:01.840 Uh, he's very theatrical, but he's also intellectually very solid.

01:35:06.000 Right. So he came to power, uh, and he's doing exactly what he said he was going to do.

01:35:11.620 He didn't lie.

01:35:12.480 He said, you know, all, all of the, I mean, the last years that he has been on television over the last five, six years, he has been saying what was going to happen and what it takes to fix it.

01:35:23.240 Everything came as he predicted, and now he's in government, he has brought down inflation from over 25% a month to less than 4%.

01:35:32.900 Uh, you know, uh, you know, the inflation in, in terms of, um, goods, um, to food, it's not, it's 0%.

01:35:43.580 So 0% food inflation, then you have, uh, fiscal, fiscal surplus since, since January, since he came to power, you have a fiscal surplus every month, a consecutive, uh, uh, way.

01:35:57.720 And then, uh, you are starting to see a little bit of a reactivation of the economy, um, because you, you, you first had to deal with inflation.

01:36:09.300 They were on the verge of a hyperinflation.

01:36:11.380 If Millet had not come to power, you would have inflation at over 15,000% in Argentina right now.

01:36:18.760 15,000%.

01:36:20.160 It would be the complete catastrophe.

01:36:23.060 Um, and he has been a very skillful politician because he doesn't have majority in Congress, but even so Congress has passed after several negotiations and failed attempts to pass.

01:36:35.200 But the Bases Law, which is a law that dramatically changes the structure of Argentinian economy, which is really a rent-seeking society.

01:36:43.920 It's really, you know, a corporate interest, uh, in bed with the politicians and exploiting everyone else for their own benefit.

01:36:50.920 Okay.

01:36:51.480 So, so let's do, let's do this.

01:36:53.740 Let's do this.

01:36:54.480 Let's, we, we've got another half an hour to, to talk on the Daily Wire side.

01:36:59.520 I think, why don't we delve more deeply into what's happening in Argentina and also to give some consideration to that as a model for what could occur in South America more generally if the leftist utopian tide could be stemmed.

01:37:15.720 So, if, does that seem reasonable to you?

01:37:18.180 That's perfect.

01:37:18.460 Let's do that.

01:37:19.360 So for everybody, good, good.

01:37:20.680 So for everybody in watching and listening, most of you know that I do an additional half an hour with my guests on, on the Daily Wire platform.

01:37:28.300 And so that's what we're going to do.

01:37:29.660 And if you found this discussion useful and interesting, you could give some consideration to joining us there.

01:37:35.840 I can delve further into the sorts of things that we've been talking about.

01:37:39.540 And so, um, and so I think that's what we'll turn to.

01:37:43.680 And I would say, uh, thank you to the Daily Wire for making this discussion possible.

01:37:49.040 And, and, uh, Dr. Kaiser, thank you very much to you for agreeing to talk to us today.

01:37:56.160 Um, obviously we could talk for a much longer period of time and perhaps we'll do that again in the not too distant future.

01:38:02.940 There's lots of things to discuss in more detail with regard to Venezuela, let's say.

01:38:07.820 But for now, we'll, we'll turn our attention to, um, to Argentina and maybe with a foray into El Salvador.

01:38:17.140 And we'll do that on the Daily Wire side so you can all join us there.

01:38:21.000 Thank you very much, sir, for agreeing to talk to me today.

01:38:23.640 I know we only scratched the surface, but at least it's a start.

01:38:27.560 Thank you very much for having me.

01:38:28.680 This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort.

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01:39:03.600 Discover more at viking.com.

01:39:05.840 Amen.

01:39:06.180 Thanks for having me.

01:39:17.560 Amen.

01:39:23.140 Thank you.

01:39:23.740 Amen.

01:39:24.340 Amen.

01:39:24.480 Amen.

01:39:24.520 Amen.

01:39:24.940 Amen.

01:39:25.480 Amen.

01:39:26.720 Amen.

01:39:27.540 Amen.

01:39:28.260 Amen.

01:39:28.340 Amen.

01:39:28.980 Amen.

01:39:29.560 Amen.

01:39:30.800 Amen.

01:39:31.740 Amen.

01:39:32.020 Amen.

01:39:32.640 Amen.

01:39:33.020 Amen.

01:39:33.040 Amen.

01:39:33.560 Amen.

01:39:33.980 Amen.

01:39:35.180 Amen.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 26, 2024

475. Threat From South America ｜ Axel Kaiser

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