The Bill Walton Show

In this age of fake news, disinformation, shadow banning and government agencies like CISA aiming to manipulate what it calls our "cognitive infrastructure" it is hard to answer this question.  To explore how we can go about finding what's true and what is not,  Jim Agresti, the founder of Just Facts , returns to help clarify our thinking.  Just Facts is an institute dedicated to publishing facts...

When Javier Milei was elected president of Argentina in November, Argentinians empowered the first self-proclaimed "anarcho capitalist" as a head of state in modern history. It's a wild, even dangerous sounding term and almost no one knows what it means. So in this episode, Jeffrey Tucker and I dig into what Javier Milei and the philosophy of anarcho capitalism are all about. Jeffrey, a brilliant...

On September 27, 2023, the New York Stock Exchange and the Intrinsic Exchange Group submitted a proposal to the Securities and Exchange Commission to create a new type of company called a "Natural Asset Company" , or "NAC" whose primary purpose would be to manage and grow so-called "ecosystem services" on land throughout the United States. NACs would be empowered to manage every type of property: ...

Is 2024 going to be the year that determines whether the United States remains as the global superpower or whether it truly becomes a declining power surrounded by rising powers, especially China? Lots of strong views in this episode as Brandon Weichert again joins The Bill Walton Show to discuss geopolitics and national security. It's filled with some dire warnings, as well as gallows humor. At o...

World-class gymnast, author, filmmaker, and next-in-line to become CEO of Levi Strauss, Jennifer Sey talks pandemic-era school lockdowns and the backlash she received for speaking out against the school shutdowns with Bill Walton. Jennifer was a seven-time member of the U.S. Women's National Gymnastics Team and the 1986 U.S. Women's All-Around National Champion. Her transition from the world of sp...

We're inundated with reports from media, governments, think tanks, and "experts" saying that our climate is changing for the worse, and that it is our fault because of man-made CO2 emissions.  But despite apocalyptic predictions about climate, our earth, the planet is improving. Why? And why aren't we hearing about it? It is possible that Co2 is not a pollutant? Rather, that it's a miracle, and no...

In this candid and insightful episode of the "Bill Walton Show," Stephen Bryen, a seasoned expert with over half a century of experience in national security and arms trade, shares his incisive views on the current state of global geopolitics. Stephen Bryen's been called the Yoda of the arms trade. He was the Pentagon's top cop, the man whose job it was to ensure that sensitive technology would be...

You can't fix what is wrong in the world if you don't know what's actually happening. Polls show that most smart people tend to believe that the state of the world is getting worse. In the United States, almost 3/4 of Americans believe the world is getting worse and only 6% think it's getting better. But according to Marian Tupy, our guest on this episode, "this dark view of the prospects for huma...

The Chinese Communist Party sees technology innovation as the main battlefield of its industrial policy - and its ultimate weapon for achieving global dominance. The United States and the Biden Administration needs to confront the reality of what has been called China's "brute force economics" and abandon the possibility that competing on a level playing field with China's is possible. We have to...

Winsome Earle-Sears sent shock waves across Virginia and the country at large when she pulled off her stunning upset victory in November 2021 and became the first lieutenant governor of Virginia who is a woman, the first naturalized female citizen, the first female veteran elected to statewide office and who also happens to be black.   Not relying on identity politics, she earned intense national...

China is the single most formidable strategic threat the United States has ever faced. It alone has the potential to replace the United States as the world's hegemon. China is not a typical foreign adversary on another shore, gathering behind its army, aggressive, thinking about land warfare, even nuclear warfare. This is an enemy that's permeated the United States, it's infiltrated into our cultu...

In the United States just four networks: Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, and HBOMax spend almost $75 billion every year on film, TV and streaming content. And most of this spending goes toward woke, progressive-themed entertainment. The progressive Left has come to dominate our institutions and our culture and they've been remarkably successful in using the art of narrative storytelling to promote...

In this episode of the Bill Walton Show, my conversation is with Amy Chua,  a provocative and original thinker about culture, world politics, and political tribes. Our main topic is her latest book, The Golden Gate, is a novel set in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1930s and 1940s.   Best known for her Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother , a memoir about her parenting journey using strict Confuciani...

Our guest on this episode of Backstage with Bill Walton is Bill's cardiologist Dr. Joshua Yamamoto who has some startling and optimistic things to say about our heart health.  "There is almost no such thing as heart disease: it's just natural aging and you can manage it," declares Josh. "We now look at aging not just as a bag of diseases, but as a process." While health issues are not normally amo...

nce a year, roughly 70,000 "Burners" gather two hours north of Reno in Nevada's Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, a temporary city "dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance." Burners declare that Burning Man isn't a "festival." Rather, "it's a city wherein almost everything that happens is created entirely by its citizens, who are active participants in the experi...

In this episode I'm joined by Jay W. Richards, Ph. D. to talk about "climate change."  We are both skeptical about the claims that man is causing abnormal changes in the climate, mainly by adding CO₂ to the atmosphere, and that we need a political solution - fast! - to somehow arrest the spread of this toxic combination of molecules. We're even more skeptical that the solution is for governments o...

In this episode I'm talking with Todd Zywicki , the George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law in the Antonin Scalia Law School and former Executive Director of the GMU Law and Economics Center.  He is also one of the most engaging and clear thinkers about the vast and complicated world of consumer financial services. He was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on F...

I'm talking in this episode with the upbeat and visionary George Gilder, one of America's leading economic and technological thinkers, and the author of the groundbreaking books, Wealth and Poverty, Knowledge and Power , The Scandal of Money and now:  Life after Capitalism: The Meaning of Wealth, the Future of the Economy, and the Time Theory of Money   Co-hosting with me is the equally upbeat and...

In one of our most talked about episodes, Stella Morabito came on the show in May to talk about her book The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer. We talked about a new kind tyranny creeping into American lives. Government, social media and a new kind of "ruling class" are increasingly working to control speech and behavior and isolat...

"America needs to come to terms with the reality and scale of the assault on free speech. Our government has established a vast system of censorship. By keeping it largely secret, it has been able to exert unconstitutional control over medical, scientific and political speech, suppressing debate over questions of great public importance. This is a shocking constitutional violation. All of us, not...

This is a different kind of episode of The Bill Walton Show. My guest is the charming and insightful polymath Carrie Sheffield who is a columnist and broadcaster now with the Independent Women's Voice .  We were slated to talk about economic and women's issues, which we do for the first 25 minutes and cover a lot interesting ground:  Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve Board The Biden Administratio...

Sometimes, no it's almost all the time, I wish I could spend more time playing the many sports I love to play.  But I don't.  Instead, like most of us, I get caught up in organizations, politics, work, and all the other stuff that life seems to tee up.  So it was a joy to catch up on this episode with my friend Haven Pell, a man who has successfully managed to do these things while also being a li...

For regular listeners, you know I like to take on complicated subjects, and try to make clear what's at stake for all of us.   In this episode the Bill Walton Show we take a another deep dive into one of the most complicated and contentious areas of economic policy:  International trade.  International trade negotiations are incredibly complex multilevel games—there are negotiations not just with...

A slew of financial crises that stretch all the way back to the banking Panic of 1907 have been exploited to justify erecting a financial regulatory system that has vastly centralized and expanded federal power over our money.   The irony is that these crises were largely caused, or at least exacerbated, by poorly designed government regulations.   What we have now is an unholy alliance of regulat...

This show only occasionally gets into election politics but we now have a candidate for U.S. Senate from Virginia who is superbly equipped to run a substantive campaign articulating the real issues facing Americans. In this episode I'm introducing Scott Parkinson, who's running for the Senate in the Commonwealth of Virginia, to replace Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.  In a crowded primary field, Scott...