Threat From South America | Axel Kaiser | EP 475

So she's like a force of nature, and this is why the regime is so afraid of her. Her charisma is so powerful that even members of the Armed Forces have backed her. That's, by the way, one of the reasons why they had access to the documents showing that they won the presidency. Because members in the military were leaking these documents to the opposition. A hundred soldiers are imprisoned, and they humiliate them, and they torture them, and so on because they are behind Maria Corina and not behind Maduro.

Hello everybody! My wife Tammy and I recently had the privilege of touring through Mexico and South America. We didn't tour obviously through the whole continent; we went to a couple of places in Brazil and to Chile and to Mexico. 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 Baren von Hoen-Haagen.

He's a Chilean German lawyer, a master in investments, commerce, and arbitration, with a master of arts and a doctor of philosophy from the University of Heidelberg in Germany. It's a very good university. 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. He's also a senior fellow at the Archbridge Institute in Washington and director of the Friedrich Hayek chair at an Austrian University from 2016 to 2024.

So why are we talking? Well, I thought it would be good to bring everyone an update on the political and ideological situation in South America. 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. Much of what we focused on was related to the events that are transpiring in Venezuela, where the age-old conflict between what's essentially a crooked, corrupt, propagandistic, draconian, communist totalitarian state and the people and the opposition to that state is transpiring.

And so, we walked through the situation in Venezuela. There was a recent election there; the incumbent, the aforementioned totalitarian Maduro, apparently lost and is very unlikely to give up power. Why should anyone care? Well, the world is a small place now, and what happens everywhere has an effect that's local. If South America is destabilized, you can expect a lot more trouble, for example, at the southern US border. And by a lot, I mean a lot. I mean millions of people.

If the Communist dystopians and their Iranian, Chinese, and Russian propagandistic backers and troublemakers get their way, there's going to be plenty of dystopia in South America. And don't be thinking you're going to escape unscathed from that because you're not. So we talked about Venezuela, we talked about Chile, and we talked about Argentina and Mali, the new government there. And we talked about different schools of economics as well and what influence they all had in the way that geopolitical affairs lay themselves out.

So join us for that and learn along with me about what's transpiring with our southern neighbors. Well, Dr. Kaiser, let's just jump right into it. Let's talk about Venezuela. Maybe you can give people a bit of an update about the current situation, and then we could delve into that historically. Then we'll move into the topic of South and Central America more broadly. So give us your thoughts on Venezuela.

Well, it's a very, you know, sad situation we are living now. I started my career in Venezuela in Caracas back in 2005. I was studying the Socialist Revolution in Caracas and came to the conclusion that Chavez had come to power and he would never leave, which is what usually socialist dictators do. At the time, my friends in Venezuela had the hope that they could vote him out; it never happened, as we all know.

What we really are experiencing is the consequences of decades of socialism. You can't vote socialists in, but you cannot vote them out. This is one of the main lessons that you have in Venezuela, especially if you have weak institutions. What we have now is a horrible regime—it's a tyrannical dictatorship that has been there for decades already.

Maduro is systematically engaging in human rights violations. He told the election; we all know that. A couple of weeks ago, the friends we have there are fighting on the ground, literally risking their lives. A good friend of mine was recently arrested by the Maduro regime with no warrant or whatever. I mean, just the police came to her house, they took her to prison, and who knows what they are doing to her—just because she was posting some content on social media.

The problem that Venezuela poses for the whole region, and not only Latin America, but also the United States, is that the Maduro regime is a big narco dictatorship. They are in bed with the Cartel de los Soles. They are running the Soles cartel, which is the Sun cartel, and they are exporting cocaine everywhere. Not only that, they are in bed with the Iranian regime and with Russia, so they're being supported by Russia, Iran, and also by China.

I think this poses a security threat to the United States because they have, you know, Hezbollah training camps in Venezuela. If you have these open borders with Mexico, I'm sure they have infiltrated people coming from Venezuela to the United States that are not the regular criminals that you can see nowadays operating in New York or other parts in the United States.

These are also Islamic terrorists—I'm pretty sure that you have some of them now that came from Venezuela via Mexico into the United States. So this is a dramatic situation, and I have a message from the group of Maria Corina Machado, because I've been in contact with them. She's the opposition leader; she's a good friend of mine—to the international media.

They are really very upset by the way that the press in the Western world has been covering all this, and they have a double standard when it comes to left-wing dictatorships as compared to not left-wing or right-wing dictatorships. You have several newspapers like El País in Spain, for instance, that have called Maria Corina Machado a far-right extremist, which is complete nonsense. She is fighting for freedom and democracy.

Then you have other media like the New York Times, who have been very biased as well. They sent me a message, and I'm using this platform. Thank you, Jordan, for this interview because they need the support of the international community if you want a transition to happen in Venezuela, which is looking increasingly unlikely with the passing of time. It's very sad, and this is poisoning the whole region, and I think if it's going to be a big problem for the United States if they don't push enough to get rid of Maduro right now for the reasons I already mentioned.

Alright, so there's a lot in what you just said. Let me take it apart piece by piece. You said, for example, that if you vote in the socialists, you don't get to vote them out. We probably want to draw a distinction or at least have a discussion about socialism versus communism or a discussion about whether or not that distinction is even reasonable.

It’s definitely the case that in some Western countries, more left-leaning regimes are voted in and voted out with some degree of regularity. Canada has a Socialist Party—the New Democratic Party—and it has never won an election federally and is unlikely ever to do so, I would say because it never seems to gain about more than about 20% of the population. But it certainly has run many provinces, and you know, often not cataclysmically; sometimes even intelligently, depending on who it was that was running the show, let’s say.

People tend to presume that countries like Sweden and Denmark and Norway are socialist countries, even though fundamentally they adhere to free-market principles. So do you want to distinguish, first, maybe some definitions? What do you think the difference is between a socialist country and a communist country? And how should people draw a distinction?

Well, I would distinguish between social democracy, which is the left that we have usually in the Western world, in the developed nations. People like Biden or people like, you know, Justin Trudeau—people like that, who can be very far-left when it comes to the woke issues and all of this value conflicts that we have now in the West.

I believe that they are responsible for endorsing an ideology that will end up destroying the West if they are successful in the end. But they are not revolutionary socialists that we have now in Latin America or that we used to have in the Western world during the Cold War, like you had them in Italy and France. You had them in Germany; you had terrorist groups that were fighting against the establishment being funded by the Soviet Union and so on.

So I would make a distinction there. Also, if you have countries with more solid institutions—even within Latin America—they are never able to achieve their goal of concentrating power in their own hands. Like Chile is a good example of that. We had a constitutional referendum a couple of years ago, and the left proposed a very radical constitution, a very woke constitution, but at the same time, a communist constitution. And over 60% of Chileans voted against that.

So we were saved by this decision in the referendum. They failed in their attempt to, you know, control power. I would say in the classical definition of socialism and Marxism, they used to be more or less the same during the Cold War. I mean, it would be hard to argue that a socialist was not at the same time someone who believed in the Soviet Union-type system, central planned economy. This is a point that Hayek and Mises were making during the Cold War fighting against the socialists because the socialists were arguing for a central planned economy, which in the end would have destroyed all sorts of political liberties and democracy as well.

I would distinguish more, as I said, between the social democrats, and within the social democrats, you have also more extreme types of people than others, and the socialists and communists. Even if some political parties have the name of socialist nowadays, they are more like social democrats than true socialists that are inspired 100% by the Marxist and Leninist doctrine that they followed in the times of the Cold War.

So that's a distinction I would make.

So what we could say, just to clarify this further for everybody watching and listening, is that in countries like, I think the Scandinavian countries are probably the best example of this. The first thing we should note is that they're relatively small countries and until recently they were relatively homogeneous ethnically, and that makes governance more straightforward.

The systems simply aren't as complex because there are fewer people and there is more of an implicit consensus on which way is up and which way is down, let’s say. But the Scandinavian countries, like Canada, the classic socialists were really free-market people all things considered, believed in private property more or less.

But they were more interested than the libertarians or the conservatives in producing a broad and encompassing safety net. And so, most of the political action in Canada had to do with the expansion of the social safety net, and that was what the left-wingers and the labor union types were pushing for with a certain degree of success.

And the distinction you're drawing on—and you referred to a couple of Austrian economists, Hayek and Mises—is that the communists go full-fledged planned economy, the full-fledged planned economy route, and they are not in favor of private property. They believe that an untrammeled free market ends up concentrating economic power in the hands of a very small number of people and that replacing that with a planned economy would fix that problem.

Which it certainly doesn't and can't. I know the Austrians who you referred to also make the case that a planned economy is something that appeals to people who are very presumptuous in their intellect because the fabrication of any given commodity, consumer item, let's say, or commodity for that matter is complex—almost beyond, well it's complex beyond comprehension.

Unless you have a distributed system of pricing to make rational, intelligent decisions, your economy will eventually grind to a cataclysmic halt. I think about it as a computational problem, right? And I think this fits in very well with the Austrian economist line of thinking: Do you want to have a distributed network of computation, each person calculating their own hierarchy of values, each person with their eyes on the particulars of their local situation, sum all that together in some distributed manner, and allow decisions to be made that way?

Or do you want to put decision-making power in the hands of a small group of people who can't hope to know what's going on? You know, I think the Soviet Central Committee was making something like 300 pricing decisions a day, and like I've run companies where we've tried to price our offerings and just pricing one thing is almost impossible, and you have to do that in concert with your market.

You don't know what something is worth. The best you can do is find out what people are willing to pay for it, given all the other things that they're trying to accomplish simultaneously. Alright, so the communist types, they're focusing on planned economy.

Now let's go back to Venezuela. So before the Socialist Revolution took place, in your opinion, how was Venezuela doing? Modern people often ask themselves: Why do I have to study history? Well, you’re a historical being; you need to know who you are and where you came from and why you think the things you think. That's why you have to place yourself in the proper tradition.

I'm taking four of my esteemed colleagues and you across the world. Oh, wow, this is amazing, to rediscover the ways our ancient ancestors developed the ideas that shaped modern society. It was a monument to civic greatness to visit the places where history was made—that is ash from the actual fires on the Babylonians' burn in Jerusalem from 2500 years ago—to walk the same roads.

We are following the path of the crucifixion and experience the same wonders. We are on the site of a miracle. What kind of resources can human beings bring to a mysterious but knowable universe? Science, science, art, politics—all that makes life wonderful, and something new about the world is revealed.

So, Venezuela is an interesting case because it had the highest per capita income in Latin America in 1970. It was the country with the largest degree of economic freedom. You can measure that; the Fraser Institute in Canada does that work of measuring economic freedom. In 1970, Venezuela was 14th in the world in terms of economic freedom; it was about like 90 countries more or less that they were measuring back then.

Chile was one of the last countries because we had had the socialist experiment of Salvador Allende, which was an attempt to impose a totalitarian communist system in Chile. We were last in the country, and we had hyperinflation and scarcity of basic goods and services and so on. It was a complete catastrophe that ended up in the coup of 1973, led by General Pinochet. But Venezuela, over time and over the decades, especially after they nationalized in the 70s the oil industry, we have to remember Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves in the world.

They nationalized it, and they started falling in the ranking of economic freedom systematically. By the time Chavez came to power in 1988, Venezuela was doing very poorly in the rankings of economic freedom. You had a very kleptocratic corrupt system—a rent-seeking society, let’s say. Everyone was trying to live off of government handouts and the corrupt deal between the corporate interest and the politicians.

Chavez was elected; he had been a soldier who had attempted a coup in 1992 against Carlos Andres Perez, so he was a gold-pista, what we call a gold-pista in Spanish—someone who tried to overthrow a democratically elected president and install a dictatorship. Everyone knew who Chavez was. Many people died in 1992, and he ended up in prison.

But well-meaning center-leftists in Venezuela pardoned him so he could go out of jail. He then went to see Fidel Castro, and Fidel Castro recognized immediately that he had a puppet that he could guide in order to take control over Venezuela. Castro and Cuba have been the masterminds behind what is going on in this country, and they have extracted huge sums of wealth from Venezuela because, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, at some point Russia stopped funding the Cuban dictatorship.

Venezuela played that role, and Chavez saw in Fidel Castro a fatherly figure for him. This is really an important thing because he was loyal to Fidel until the very end. The intelligence services from Cuba, which are very effective, we have to say—in consolidating power, they have been there in Cuba for over 60 years, so they know what they're doing. 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.

Venezuela was already in a situation where they had lost their economic freedom, and the per capita incomes, as compared to other countries in Latin America, started to fall dramatically. While Chile embraced free market reforms, especially influenced by The Chicago School of Economics—Milton Friedman, Arnold Harberger, George Stigler, and people like that—and we became the wealthiest country in per capita terms in Latin America.

So you can see that in the 70s, Chile was at the bottom of the economic freedom ranking. We went up to the top, even top 10 at some point, and we became the wealthiest country in Latin America. Venezuela did the complete opposite; they went from being the freest country in Latin America to now being the last country in the ranking—in the world, 162 among 162 countries that are measured, and it's a complete disaster.

This is socialism; this is what I mean. The Nordic countries are really on the top—as countries in terms of economic freedom. These are not really socialist countries, and I remember Bernie Sanders saying this all the time. He got a response, I think it was the Prime Minister from Sweden, who told him, "We are not socialists."

You have corporate tax in Sweden that is lower than in the United States, more or less, in some of these Nordic countries. So what they do is tax very heavily personal income. I don't like it because you have lots of capital human capital flight—people who are very qualified who go to the United States or other parts. But still, they’re very productive countries, and they have very large degrees of economic freedom.

Economic freedom means free trade, stable currency, protection of property rights, and reasonable size of government, and so on. So it is a social democracy, like Anthony Giddens type of social democracy—what Tony Blair and Bill Clinton were at the time or German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who made all the reforms in Germany allowing Germany in the 2000s to then experience an economic boom that Merkel benefited from.

Okay, so what we have is the extreme far-left experiments that are very anti-capitalist, and this is what you see in Venezuela now—is the consolidation of all this ideology. We have to remember that Maduro was chosen by Chavez as his successor. 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; he was the par socialist.

He was foreign minister to the Chavez administration and was instrumental in building up the whole network of Venezuela and chavismo on an international level—in Europe, in Asia, in different parts. Chavez aligned himself very rapidly with Russia, Iran, and China. This is part of the Cold War 2.0 that we are experiencing; Venezuela is playing for them.

Now, I want to stress this, Jordan, because it's important: you have a minimum wage of $3 in Venezuela, you have accumulated inflation of 2 million percent or more, you have a collapse of 70% of GDP, and a collapse of over 80% of oil production in Venezuela. They have squandered almost a trillion dollars in wealth, and when Chavez came to power, you had a barrel of oil at $8 or so. It skyrocketed to over $120, and only because of that they got almost a trillion dollars. They destroyed all of that wealth.

People say, "Oh, this is, you know, Caribbean type of politics." This is the result of socialism everywhere you go, and you see what the socialists do when they implement this system. Again, I don't mean the Nordic type of welfare state, which is not socialism—not real socialism, at least. They destroy the country where they run it; you can see it in East Germany compared to West Germany during the Cold War—it was a very poor country compared to West Germany, and so on.

I mean, everyone knows the different examples—North Korea, South Korea, and so on and so forth. But it's important to remember that Fidel Castro, Cuba, and Russia—Vladimir Putin, and Iran—Hezbollah are behind Maduro. I have to stress this because this is not only a Venezuelan problem; this is going to be a crucial problem for the United States and for national security in the United States.

Let’s dig into that. One of the other, so there are three, four things I’d like to cover as we move forward right now. I want to talk about the opposition in Venezuela and what you think people outside Venezuela can do to aid the opposition. I want to talk about the ordinary life of the typical Venezuelan now. I want to talk about where that trillion dollars went.

Maybe we can do that while talking about your claim, for example, that the Maduro government has basically also become a narco dictatorship. Now, you made a variety of extremely serious allegations—the misuse of a trillion dollars, certainly being one of them—but then you also said, well, the Maduro government is in bed with the narco cartels. 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 to the stability of the entire Western Hemisphere.

But then you also added to that the fact that Maduro is in cahoots with, well, Cuba, Iran, Russia, and then Hezbollah. This is a lot for people to digest because it sounds like a stew generated by a conspiracy theorist, in a sense, right? Because there’s almost nothing that is bad that you’re not accusing the Maduro government of participating in, and so the easiest thing for a listener to do is to just say no to all that.

So we should walk through those issues one by one. I guess the thing I'm most curious about to begin with—let’s do it in this order: What the hell happened to a trillion dollars? Like, that's an awful lot of money. Where do you think most of that—especially given that you have a 70% collapse in GDP and an 80% reduction in oil production? It's like, and then everybody in Venezuela is poor, and yet a trillion dollars came pouring in.

So what's your sense of who that money went to, and what sort of people did that money go to, and what are they doing with that money?

So, part of the money funded some very asistencial social programs at some point during the Chavez administration. But a large part of it went to fund revolutionary groups and political parties all over Latin America. We have to remember that the Castro vision, which is the important figure I think here—the Castro vision was to spread the revolution all over Latin America.

In his worldview, what he was doing, believe it or not, is Christ's work on Earth. He was bringing paradise to Earth; he said that literally many times. Castro had been educated by the Jesuits in Cuba, and he believed that capitalism and, you know, liberal democracy—individualism—were the sources of corruption.

That Christ was the first communist revolutionary; and this is, by the way, something very similar to what Pope Francis said at some point when he argued that it was a communist who thought like the Christians. He said that literally, Pope Francis, who is a Jesuit himself.

And Castro was promising to create this, but this had to be an expansionist project. So when Chavez came to power, he had all of these resources in his pockets. Plenty of them went to Cuba, of course, to sustain the island.

But then he started supporting different regimes or movements and terrorist organizations all over Latin America. At some point, I had this conversation with former president Alberto Ruiz; he was also a good friend. At some point he told me, "I was the only non-leftist, non-socialist president in most of South America." It's true! And all of these regimes, even the Kirchner dynasty in Argentina, the corrupt Kirchner dynasty, got some loans, special loans, from the Venezuelan government when they needed money.

So they stole a lot of money! I mean, the Chavistas and their families have billions of dollars in bank accounts in Europe, in the US, and different parts. So it's amazing; you saw Ferraris in Caracas while people were starving. You have almost 8 million people have left Venezuela because you don't find things to eat—8 million is a quarter of the population who have left the country because of the desperate situation.

You have over 80% poverty rate, and so a large part of the money, as I said, went to fund all of these movements. But also within Venezuela, they started creating a parallel army: the Círculos Bolivarianos. Chavez very early on understood—probably because Castro advised him to do so—that he needed parallel troops in order to contain any threat that could come from within the army, and he was right.

In 2002, the army staged a coup against Chavez, and Chavez was taken into custody; he was imprisoned. But then some generals regretted the decision of getting rid of him, and they reinstalled Chavez. He, of course, used the muscle of the intelligence services of Cuba to purge the military as much as he could.

But he was never entirely sure that there would not be traitors within the army, so he created the Círculos Bolivarianos, which are armed, and these are the guys, by the way, that you see nowadays in the videos attacking Venezuelans from the opposition who are just protesting on the streets, and they are shooting at them. They are taking them in and torturing them. Most of the people doing the dirty job are this Círculos Bolivarianos, the Bolivarian circles.

That’s a lot of money that went there also. You can squander wealth with no end. I mean, if you are supporting other countries and you want to install regimes all over Latin America that are favorable to you, a trillion dollars is not even a lot of money, you know. But the worst part—and I finish the point with this—is that we saw people all over the West in the 2000s when it was already clear that Chavez was a dictator, that he was completely undermining the separation of powers, that he was imprisoning the opposition, and that he was violating human rights and so on.

We saw very famous people like Joseph Stiglitz, for instance, coming to Venezuela and praising Chavez for what he was doing. He did the same, by the way, with Castro. He’s been a longtime supporter of the Castro dictatorship, 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.

But you could read the New York Times; you could read different BBC; you could see different news media outlets or even on television—they were sympathetic to Chavez when he started doing this, and it was already clear where this was going.

So, I share the frustration of the Venezuelan friends in their assistance because the West has not shown one standard for everyone. When it's the leftists, they support them or they turn a blind eye to what they do.

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Okay, so let's talk about, let's move from that. So you accounted for a fair bit of the spending—a lot of it has disappeared into the pockets of corrupt politicians. You see exactly the same thing, for example, with the Palestinian leadership; all of those people end up with billions of dollars in their accounts.

That’s appalling beyond comprehension—they sacrifice their own people, and they often live elsewhere. So the socialist redistribution of wealth ends up meaning that everyone's much more poor than they used to be, except for the small minority of people who have power instead of the evil capitalists, and they have untold wealth at their fingertips.

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. Okay, so you can spend an awful lot of money doing that and cause an awful lot of trouble.

And you also pointed out that that's been aided and embedded by the, what would you call them, useful idiots of the western media, and so we'll get back to that. Let's turn to the other element of the corruption, and that's, you described Maduro as a narco—at the Maduro regime as a narco dictatorship.

So talk to everyone, if you would, a little bit about the role of the cartels in Central and South America because that's not something that's well understood in North America at all.

Well, by the way, people who think I’m making these things up, they can Google it. It's all online—you can see in very serious media; you can read articles about this. The United States, they know about this, about the Iran connection, about the drug cartels, and so on and so forth.

But now, in Latin America—because this includes Mexico—we have a problem that more and more the cartels are taking over politics, and you don't need to do the revolution. Actually, this is really interesting. Chavez used to be a proponent of what he called 21st-century socialism. That is what he used to talk about.

We are doing 21st-century socialism. So what did that mean? After the fall of the Berlin Wall, they came all together in Brazil, you know, the São Paulo Forum with Lula and so on, and they said, "Okay, we are going to use democracy. We are going to use democracy in order to create the socialist system."

We are not going to fight a revolutionary war necessarily, but we are going to use it in order to come to power, and then once we are there, we establish our system and we never leave if we can avoid it.

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. They would come into Venezuelan territory, and Chavez would protect them.

The Colombian Army couldn't go into Venezuelan territory because that would have meant probably war with the Venezuelan Army. So they started with that, and the cartels also started channeling money to the regime.

At some point, the regime itself—especially Diosdado Cabello, who is very high up in the Maduro Administration—became a cartel boss. Now you have regions in Venezuela but also in Mexico—for instance—30% of the Mexican territory is controlled by the cartels. In Venezuela, you have complete regions, complete states that are being run by the cartels.

And now we have a country like Chile, that used to be a safe country, like the most advanced country. The cartels are taking over complete regions of the country with their guns and so on.

Now these cartels have connections with Hezbollah; they work with them. Hezbollah is creating now, in Bolivia, which is also a far-left administration and which is a big producer of coca, establishing facilities to produce drones for military purposes.

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—they have uranium, which is important for the Iranians for the nuclear program that Iran wants to develop.

So the cartels have become a source of funding. They have become the government in the case of Venezuela, and they don't want to lose their business model. That's why I think they're not going to accept a transition to democracy in Venezuela, but they are destabilizing the whole of Latin America because they're a business—they're expanding everywhere they can in order to make more profits.

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.

We have many free trade agreements, and we have ships here that go everywhere, and we have basically no control on the border with Peru and Bolivia, and they bring all this cocaine through the northern border and then export it via the Chilean port to the United States, to Europe, and everywhere.

So this is corrupting everything in Latin America. I've heard, and I think this is in the media also, that the Tren de Aragua, which is one of these cartels and organized crime groups, are also operating in New York and other cities in the United States. Of course, why not? I mean, if it's easy to get into the United States, it’s a huge market—why not?

This is the problem; we are becoming a narco region or a region controlled by the narcos, and politicians are working for the narcos. The problem with this is that Iran, Russia, and China, they don't care about this. They just use these cartels or the connections with the cartels for their own purposes, and that's why you see the first countries recognizing Maduro's fraud, saying that he was democratically elected, where China, Russia, and Iran—these three countries—this is not a coincidence.

Okay, so let’s speak to something more practical and psychological for a moment. 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. You know, there are lots of things that are besetting the typical American voter at the moment. The situation in the United States is far from stable; I would say the same thing about Canada.

There are many catastrophes and looming catastrophes to be concerned about, and what happens typically is that anything to do with South and Central America takes a pretty—what? It takes a backseat to, say the least.

I mean, when we met in Chile, you were obviously interested in pursuing this conversation, as I was. What would you say to people who are listening in the United States and Canada, 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?

I mean, South America has always been a relatively unstable place from the perspective of the Northern West, and in some ways, this is par for the course. I mean, the Cold War has been played out in a manner similar to this for as long as I can possibly remember, in what—what is it that you want to bring to the attention of the typical person in Canada and the US regarding what's happening down south, and why should they care?

Well, you know, the thing is that the United States used to care a lot about Latin America—a lot during the Cold War. They intervened in every country in order to prevent them from becoming communists and Soviet-aligned countries because the KGB back then had the theory that the Cold War would be won in the third world, basically.

Henry Kissinger, for instance, when Salvador Allende in Chile was elected in 1970—he was the first Marxist president ever democratically elected in history—said, "The Allende election is the gravest threat that has ever arisen in the Western Hemisphere in a long time."

Because he understood that, you know, this could have a domino effect—other countries would follow, not only in Latin America, but also in Europe.

But now, you have the following problem: The United States, after September 11th, they completely forgot about Latin America. We don’t exist anymore, okay for them in terms of foreign policy—and I'm not really exaggerating. If September 11th would not have happened, I think the history of Latin America would be completely different right now.

So they forgot about us, and now they have Russia, and they have China, and they have other problems that look more important than Latin America. But the thing is that the main migration force in the United States are 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—millions.

Among them, you will have the Iranian, Hezbollah people and so on and so forth. So from that point of view, it is really important for national security. Then when they are in the United States, Latinos tend to favor the Democratic Party—two-thirds of Latinos vote for the Democratic Party. I think this is changing a little bit, but not enough.

So if you have 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 substantial. Why do Latinos vote for the Democratic Party? Because when we immigrate to the United States, we bring our belief systems with us. It's not like because we're in the US, suddenly we love Thomas Jefferson—that's not how it works.

They favor the welfare state and government handouts, and I'm not saying everyone. Most of them are very hardworking people and so on, and we cannot complain. Most people hate Maduro, for instance, the Venezuelans who have escaped. 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 coming into the United States 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 institutions, limited government, and so on.

So which is when they speak about the purple states—people moving from California to Texas, for instance, and they tell them, "Don't vote for what you left for." No, so, but it’s the same with Latinos going into the United States. It’s the largest minority, and it is really important to have a stable region so you don’t have these influxes of people coming into your country, first.

But then also because it poses, as I said, a risk for national security. And on top of that, geopolitically Latin America is extremely important in this new world order because supply chains are de-globalizing now; you know you have this trade war going on with China, and you need countries where you can produce your stuff.

You need raw materials—China is buying everything in Latin America. They're buying ports in Peru; they are buying mines in Chile; they are buying everything you got in Panama—everywhere they’re buying up natural resources, and Americans are looking the other way. So I think this is not—a this is the backyard. There is a reason why you had the Monroe Doctrine at some point in 1832 when they said, "We are not intervening in Latin America; we will not accept any foreign power also going into Latin America and intervening there and having this region as their sphere of influence."

But the Monroe Doctrine seems not to exist anymore, but this is a new development. 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.

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? Victory had been attained—the end of history, let’s say—and it turns out that the spirit of the envious radicals was in no real way diminished by the cataclysm—catastrophe of the Soviet Union.

In fact, to some degree, quite the opposite, 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.

But now the Soviet Union has disappeared, and so it's much more difficult to point to something that's happening right now—while you could point to Venezuela, you can point to North Korea—but they are economies that didn't have the scale or the presence obviously of the Soviet Union and so all of this has gone back underground.

The attractiveness of the communist revolutionary ideas hasn't seemed to diminish at all. Now, your point is okay—so let’s summarize this: 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. That seems like a bad idea if you're trying to maintain a certain degree of stability, even in your own country.

That manifests itself in all manner of economic collapse that drives migration northward. 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.

So the idea that the US and Canada, by implication, can separate themselves from the geopolitical occurrences in South America—that's a fool's delusion, 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.

All of that is playing itself out in South America and driving migration northward. Exactly. And I would add, in the end, Jordan, if China, Iran, and Russia—your main enemies as the Western world—really care about Latin America, you should too, 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 operatives; even the Wagner Group has been seen in Venezuela. 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.

I mean, it is so obvious, but I don't know—I mean, even in the conservative movement in the US, this is not understood. I think someone like Marco Rubio understands this very well, or maybe Ted Cruz, but I think the traditional Republican politicians do not understand this. They don't see how big of a threat we can become if China and Russia and Iran take over these countries.

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, and manufacturing capacity in Latin America is also very strong.

So for all these reasons, I think it's not a smart move to just ignore what's going on in your backyard. It's never a good idea.

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Well, that was certainly my sense when I toured through South America for what that's worth. I mean, no, it’s obvious that what's playing out there needs to be attended to.

A case of—let's flip back to Venezuela specifically for a moment. So could you give us an account, for example, of what ordinary life is like for a Venezuelan, for the typical Venezuelan citizen now? You said that 25% of the population have decided to vote with their feet, and that's an awful lot of people.

You said that the GDP has collapsed by 70%, oil production is down 80%, and that 80% of the population lives in poverty. So what is the typical, what is the typical reality for a Venezuelan citizen now? Because we never hear about it. We, we have no idea.

Well, it's what you would expect in a socialist paradise. It's basically you don't have enough food to eat. Calorie intake in Venezuela has collapsed over the last 15 years, 20 years—you don't have medicine, you don’t have hospitals that are functioning. You have no electricity; you have problems all the time in Caracas, everywhere—in a country that is very hot. Many regions of Venezuela are very hot; you don't have air conditioning; you don’t any of that.

Only people who can get access to dollars—because there are remittances going to the country—they manage to survive. But this is the reason why almost a quarter of the population have left. And if Maduro is reinstalled in January, you will have another couple million leaving Venezuela, by the way. This is going to happen, and we are expecting that all over Latin America.

You have no rule of law, zero rule of law, so you basically have a regime that controls the judiciary, the legislative—everything. The police—any day someone can knock at your door and take you a prisoner, and you disappear; no one knows anything about you anymore.

You have to be—if you are in the opposition, you have to be hiding and very careful. I am on a blacklist, I was told, and that's one of the reasons why I've never been back to Venezuela since the last time I was there—in 2014.

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—probably in at least in the United States and Latin America and Spain—I’m not welcome. So, imagine people who are living there. My friends are hiding from the regime.

Many families have been torn apart, completely destroyed because, you know, let me tell you also an anecdote that is really interesting for the audience. I was once in Miami, and I took an Uber, and I started talking to the driver, and I thought that he was very well educated and really intellectual—like more than the normal. He knew a lot about law, for instance. And I said, "What did you do back in Venezuela?"

He said, "I was a minister of the Supreme Court—in Venezuela. I’m now your Uber driver." So this is the reality of millions of Venezuelans—not only poor people or middle-class people but also people who were very successful. They had their jobs; they had their companies, and they lost everything. They lost their families; they lost everything. And many of them have family members that have been killed by the regime also.

So the situation is so desperate that I think Venezuelans are going to fight to the last breath in order to make change possible. Maria Corina Machado, by the way, has said this: "The fight is until the end," and so I don't know how this is going to look like.

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. By the way, a point that is important: Chavez, when he was in government, disarmed the Venezuelan population.

He banned guns for every citizen in Venezuela. The only people who could have guns were his THX, basically, and the Círculos Bolivarianos—the parallel army groups that they have funded and financed. So now you have a situation where Venezuelans don’t even have a pistol to defend themselves from these hordes of assassins that their regime is sending to kill them or to imprison them. They have over 2,000 people—in the last weeks—who have been imprisoned, mostly young people who want a better future.

So this is what Venezuela looks like right now. It's hell on earth.

Let’s talk about the structure of the opposition. So it's Maria Corina Machado. I’m butchering that name obviously, 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? What role does she play? What threat does she currently face? What can people from the outside do to shed light on this and to help?

Well, Maria Corina Machado has been the main opposition leader for over a decade, I would say even a decade and a half. Even if, at some point, in 2013, for instance, after Chavez died, you had an election where Enrique Capriles lost by a small margin to Maduro, but Maduro sold that election.

They stole millions of votes; this is not the first time that this happens—and the reason is because the system in Venezuela requires that you have sort of an ID and you go and vote. But the system is not integrated in the sense that you can, with different IDs, vote in different parts.

One member of the government got, let’s say, 100 IDs, and he could go to 100 different places and vote for the same candidate. This is the way they stole the last election in 2013. And back then, the population wanted to rebel, but Capriles said, "No, stay home; we got nothing to do here," and so it gave oxygen to the regime.

Maria Corina has always been the voice of, I think, reason and courage because she was willing to fight, but the opposition was very fragmented and has been for a long time. This is the first time that they are all together against the regime, which is very good.

She has become the undisputed leader of the opposition, even though Eduardo Gonzalez is the president elect and candidate. He is Eduardo Gonzalez, but why? Because Maduro banned Maria Corina from running as president. They have been doing this forever in Venezuela since Chavez came to power.

Maria Corina endorsed Gonzalez for the election, and Gonzalez won with a distance of over 30 points. Now the opposition—at least they are all together against the regime—but the main face of the opposition is Maria Corina Machado, which, by the way, deserves the Nobel Prize for Peace because she has been so courageous in trying to bring democratic change to Venezuela.

But she's not going to get it because she is not a leftist, so I think there is not a big hope that she would get this. She faces now the possibility of being imprisoned, and who knows, maybe being killed. She's willing to give her life for the cause. I mean, she's not going to turn herself over to the regime just, you know, as simple as that.

I think she will try to prevent them from capturing her, but she could be imprisoned and maybe killed. So this is what she's facing—Maria Corina and her family. So she had Eduardo Gonzalez run in her stead, in essence. Is she in hiding at the moment?

Yes, she is. I think she's sort of in hiding because the government wants to bring her in and take her to prison. She’s very active on social media, and she has showed her face at some public rallies.

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. So it's a problem for them because she is too symbolic. They are not going to probably go after her where everyone is looking or watching.

I mean, this is probably not going to happen, but they would break into her house in the middle of the night or something like that. They would do that, but I don't think they know where she is. But she is at risk, of course, and there are some orders that were given by the government to detain her.

So I think it’s a very dangerous situation for her, and as long as some regimes, like the Biden administration, keep pushing for a democratic transition, maybe she has a chance.

But we have communist or socialist, let's say far-left presidents in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil, and they are in bed with Maduro also to some extent, and they are sort of protecting Maduro. They are not really pushing Maduro to accept that he lost and just rule the country until January, which is the date where he should leave the presidency and accept Eduardo Gonzalez as the next president.

But this is a life or death situation for Maria Corina and most of the opposition leaders. As I said, one of her right-hand friends of mine was taken to prison by the armed forces, or by members of the dictatorship, and we don't know anything about her.

So tell me about Maria Corina. So why is she—what is it about her that's made her a popular figure? I’d like to know some more about her background, and also, you know, why she doesn’t quit now.

You explained, at least to some degree, why she's still alive. You believe that it would be a scandal of such preposterous magnitude if there was something that happened to her 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.

So she’s protected in so far as that’s the case, but what tell me about who she is. You know, you mentioned yourself earlier in this podcast that she’s being—how would you say it—feathered like anybody who isn’t a communist for being far-right now, because that's happening everywhere.

And so, but again, you know, the far-right epithet is a very effective one, and it doesn't take much agitation, especially from the mainstream press, in order to make that accusation stick. It’s clear that, to the degree that you're trustworthy, you trust Maria Corina.

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

So I think that she’s the most courageous woman—I think this is maybe—many people will think this is an overstatement, but I think she’s the most courageous woman in politics right now in the world.

I cannot imagine someone with more courage than her, I mean, she is unbelievably courageous and charismatic. She has this force; she’s like a force of nature, and this is why the regime is so afraid of her.

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 because they’re afraid this is going to, in the end, bring change in Venezuela.

Her charisma is so powerful that even members of the Armed Forces have backed her; that’s, by the way, one of the reasons why they had access to the documents showing that they won the presidency, because members in the military were leaking these documents to the opposition.

They have imprisoned over a hundred soldiers, and they humiliate them, and they torture them because they are behind Maria Corina and not behind Maduro. But she is in favor of free markets, which is not the case with most of the opposition in Venezuela.

People remember Leopoldo Lopez, who was in prison for a long time, and it was a scandal all over the world. I believe he’s now in Spain. Once I gave a speech with Leopoldo Lopez’s father in the European Parliament, and Leopoldo Lopez’s father was defending socialism, which was to me, was incredible.

He was saying, "No, socialism does not do what Chavez has done or what—it’s exactly the opposite." He was very naïve when it came to this, 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 that Chavez was the good guy and Maduro is the bad guy.

Which is a narrative that the left is trying to create in order to save the socialist revolution in Venezuela. It's the same narrative they did with Lenin and Stalin—oh, Lenin was a good guy, but Stalin was a criminal. Stalin was a—you know, the coming from the proletarian who didn't know anything, and he was a criminal.

They're doing the same with Chavez, Maduro, and it to me, it was shocking that someone like Capriles, who is in the opposition and who wants regime change, would fall for this trap.

Maria Corina has never considered anything. She has always been very coherent; she believes in liberal democracy, in the rule of law, and the free market. I guess that qualifies you as far-right nowadays, so it doesn’t happen only to her, I guess.

But it is really appalling that we read this sort of nonsense from the established media. There is no one more democratic. She hasn’t called for a rebellion against the government to a, you know, violent march towards Miraflores palace to kill Maduro; she hasn’t done any of that.

It’s just peaceful protests—that's why I’m saying she should, she should get the Nobel Peace Prize, really! Because she’s risking her life for millions of Venezuelans.

And 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. Do you think she’d do a podcast?

I think she would, yes, absolutely! Let’s see if we can make that happen, yeah. I can try to help out with that. Because people need to see her, and I mean, all over the world. Yes, 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—not only the most stable economy but also the most stable democracy.

This offers also a lesson, right? It doesn’t matter how well or how good your country looks like at some point in history; it can change very rapidly. Me being a German—my family came from Germany; you know, Germany was the Athens of the modern world and so on—and in a couple of, in a decade or two decades, you lose everything, and you sink into the most horrible barbarism.

This was in Central Europe. This can happen to anyone; it happened to Venezuela. It can happen to you. I mean, like the UK.

Well, there you go. There you go. I mean, the UK is—what is going on there is really shocking to me. 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, but now you see this totalitarian degeneration going on in the UK, 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—but you could always say, "Okay, here the things don’t look very, very well in terms of democracy and liberty."

But you have the UK, or you have Canada, or you have the United States, but now, it's like everywhere you are having the same problems—maybe not to the same degree, but you are having the same problems.

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. You don’t see the American political class celebrating the Fourth of July as they used to do 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, 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: The idea that you only have good people here is indigenous peoples who were pure-hearted and didn't know envy or jealousy or anything else, and then the Europeans came and they corrupted everything.

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 the Europeans 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.

I see this development happening also in the United States more and more with the W movement, let's put it that way. The incapacity of many Democrats, even moderate Democrats, to stop it and to face it—you know, and confront it as they should.

That's why I'm very worried about the future of the West.

I’m wondering—let me step sideways for a moment, and then we’ll return to our discussion about Venezuela and South America in general. You know, I don’t—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.

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. 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—he said he’s a communist in his family, and so, you know, 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.

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. You want to distribute resources as equitably as possible. Your interaction with your children and your wife is based on essentially an ethos of care.

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, and modern civilizations are not families.

Here’s some proof of that from the psychological perspective. So the personality trait agreeableness is associated with maternal care, let’s say. It’s the dimension of empathic, self-sacrificial care, and women are substantially higher in trait agreeableness across the world than men.

What predicts success in a complex society on the personality side isn’t agreeableness; in fact, managers who are more agreeable do worse because people take advantage of them. What predicts success on the personality side in a large-scale society is conscientiousness.

Conscientiousness is dutifulness and industriousness and orderliness, and it’s the ethos of hard work. It’s a meritocratic ethos, and it’s a cold virtue. To be conscientious isn’t the same as to be emotionally caring.

I wonder if part of the reason that the politics of the left, so to speak, constantly mutate and transform—they’re immune to criticism, say by reference to history. You can’t just say, well, every communist regime in the 20th century was a brutal, bloody, dictatorial disaster. It doesn’t hold water.

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.

And so if you’re a harsh and discriminating person, if you’re very meritocratic-oriented, 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 harsh voice, and you might be a necessary voice to keep civilization itself running.

But that doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily an attractive voice, especially to people who think instinctively in terms of an ethos of care. It’s very, very easy to appeal to that, and so I think part of the problem—and then you might add to that another problem—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 that.

The meritocratic have to rise to the top because otherwise catastrophe looms. If you’ve been in a situation where economic security has been granted to you in some ways effortlessly for several generations—even if 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, but also perhaps haven’t been served well by the conscientious ethos.

So I’m wondering about your thoughts on that, you know, because we usually think about this—well, some people have left-wing beliefs and some people have right-wing beliefs, and that's the battlefield.

It’s like I don’t think that’s a good level of analysis because I don’t exactly think this is about ideas. 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, maybe your moral system as a whole to impose a meritocratic—like a cold virtue meritocracy on top of that.

And obviously, we haven’t been doing a very good job of that, so I’m curious—you're well-versed in the Austrian School of Economics. I’m wondering what you think of that kind of theorizing.

No, I fully agree. This is really interesting because Friedrich Hayek wrote a paper called The Mirage of Social Justice, where he argued exactly what you are saying. He said that this idea of social justice—that we had to, you know, redistribute wealth so everyone gets an equal share or guarantees the survival of the community—is an idea that he attributes to our past.

For thousands of years, we were small communities—tribes, basically. We had this family ethos—the care ethos—and it was the way to survive, but we were communities only of a couple of dozen people, or maybe over a hundred, but not more than that. You knew everyone.

This is the instinct, he says, we evolved in this type of environment. Socialism in the end wants to apply this moral instinct to the complex society—the larger society, you know—which is civilization basically. That’s why you have this regression towards tribalism, and you have it with socialism and communism and with nationalism.

When nationalism is exacerbated, like the Nazis did in Germany, then you go back to the tribe, and you feel protected by the tribe. You have this unifying rhetoric and this identity, and you are, you know—the organism, and you are part of a whole; you're not just an individual looking for yourself.

This is the care ethics ethos that you were talking about. It’s really interesting also because Gerald Cohen, who was a very famous Marxist professor at Oxford University, he wrote a book titled Why Not Socialism?

By socialism, he didn’t mean the Nordic type of welfare state or something like that; he meant really equality of outcomes, more or less. He was saying that the instinct, the socialist ideology, 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.

Yeah, so I fully agree with that analysis, and this is why civilization is so fragile.

Okay, let me add two data points to that, okay—or three. So we did a study in 2016 looking at personality and cognitive predictors of politically-correct authoritarianism, so that wouldn't be democratic socialism; that would be the far-left authoritarian types.

And the things that predicted it were low verbal intelligence, which was a walloping predictor. So you could imagine it’s a very simple narrative, right? There are victims, and there are victimizers. That explains everything, and if you're moral, you're on the side of the victims.

That’s something like a predatory infant instinct, right? There are predators; they’re infants. You’re obviously on the side of the infants, and to hell with the predators. So you can think of that as an instinctual orientation, and an effective one under certain conditions.

Okay, what else predicted? Feminine temperament—high agreeableness in particular. Then, and then there’s another—the other data point, I would say, is that if you look in the United States right now, the people who are holding the radical utopians in power are women between 18 and 34, okay?

Now, they’re particularly targeted by the Iranians and the Chinese on TikTok, right? And they’re bombarded with images, for example, of dying Palestinian children. That’s a targeted attack; we know that. We know that the Iranians are behind that, and the Chinese—and it’s extremely effective.

Women between the ages of 18 and 34 are wildly discordant in their political view in relationship to everyone else. Now, 50% of them are also childless, right?

So there’s an element of the maternal instinct running amok on the political landscape, because you could easily say—and I don’t think that it’s an exaggeration, and our empirical data supported that—that maternal instinct is going to find its target. It’s going to find its expression.

If it doesn’t find its expression within the confines of a family where there’s some real demand to take care of those who are unable to take care of themselves—children, essentially, infants primarily—then it’s going to find its expression politically.

And that can be exploited, as it certainly is, by the Chinese and the Iranians on TikTok. So the battle that we're engaged in politically, I believe, is better construed in the manner that we just described. It’s a battle between an instinctive orientation towards care and a higher order cognitive interpretation that’s associated with conscientiousness that notes how complex systems operate.

It introduces a different standard, which would essentially be something like the cold-hearted meritocratic standard. Okay, so you see that—you see a parallel between that and what the Austrian School economists proposed.

Okay, that's what I thought, so okay. Okay, okay, okay! So, that's that. I’m going to bang that around in the back of my head.

Maybe we could turn our attention to developments that are arguably somewhat positive. Chile is somewhat positive; what do you think about what’s happening in Argentina with Milei? And we also have the example of El Salvador under Bukele with its embrace of both Bitcoin, interestingly enough, and the US dollar.

So what let’s start with Argentina: What are your views on what’s happening in Argentina? Is what Milei is doing, is that producing any success on economic grounds? Because it’s very difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff in terms of anything approximating legacy media coverage of Argentina.

Well, I have to disclose here that I’m a good friend of Milei, and we have been working for the cost of freedom in Latin America for over 10 years, together. So what is happening in Argentina is the most fascinating and interesting thing that I've seen, of course, in my lifetime, but also I think in the last half a century.

Because what is really taking place is a cultural revolution in a positive sense—not the Chinese Mao-type of cultural revolution—but Argentina was the wealthiest country in the world in 1896, with the highest per capita income in the world.

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. He was a classical liberal conservative—a classical liberal. He believed that government had to be limited, and 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.

Because we expected everything from an omnipotent government. He actually has an article called Omnipotent Government and he said, "The Americans, on the other hand, they expect from government nothing—they fix things for themselves."

Okay, so he created the 1853 Constitution, and after that, Argentina became the most successful country in the world in terms of per capita income. If you went to 1914, you had half of the population in Buenos Aires was born not in Buenos Aires; they were foreigners coming from Europe.

It was a legitimate question to ask yourself: Are we immigrating to the United States or to Argentina in the late 19th century? This is what happened back then, and this is why also the Argentinian population looks so European in general.

You had, in the last World Cup, all these nonsensical articles saying, "Why are there no black people in the team in Argentina?" and so on. This is—and this is a very European population.

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. He had met Mussolini, actually, in Italy. He was anti-communist at the same time; he didn't want the central-planned economy for the whole thing, but he wanted a corporatist type of very corrupt economy.

They changed dramatically institutions, and Argentina became a declining nation, a poor nation compared to the rest of the world—at least the developed world. What did Milei do? Milei managed—the free-market movement, the classical liberal movement, conservative movement in Argentina—I played a role also there. We managed to transform dramatically the mindset, especially of young people in Argentina.

You are allowed to vote at 16, so between 16 and 24, Milei got 70% of the votes. 70%! And this young people forced the change towards a very hardcore, radical free-market regime. But not because people were upset because inflation was so high and so on—no, that was not the reason.

There is a structural change in Argentina. All of these people—they would have been Peronists 20 years ago or 30 years ago; now they are libertarians.

How did we achieve that? Well, a lot of going to media, giving interviews—that especially social media, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube were crucial to change the mentality of millions of people. And of course, the style—Milei has a charisma, a style that is very, you know, eccentric, let’s put it that way.

He's irreverent; he has the rhetoric of a revolutionary, which is very Argentinian, by the way. It’s not really strange in that country. He’s very theatrical, but he’s also intellectually very solid. So, he came to power, and he’s doing exactly what he said he was going to do.

He didn’t lie! He said, you know—all of the—I mean the last years that he has been on television, over the last five or six years, he has been saying what was going to happen and what it takes to fix it. 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%. You know—food inflation, it’s zero percent now. So, zero percent food inflation. Then you have a fiscal surplus; since January, since he came to power, you have a fiscal surplus every month—a consecutive way.

And you are starting to see a little bit of a reactivation of the economy because you first had to deal with inflation. They were on the verge of hyperinflation! If Milei had not come to power, you would have inflation at over 15,000 percent in Argentina right now—15,000 percent! It would be a complete catastrophe.

And he has been a very skillful politician because he doesn’t have much of a majority in Congress, but even so, Congress has passed, after several negotiations and failed attempts to pass, the Bases Law, which dramatically changes the structure of the Argentinian economy, which is really a rent-seeking society.

It’s really, you know, corporate interests embedded with the politicians and exploiting everyone else for their own benefit.

Okay, so so let’s do this. We’ve got another half an hour to talk on