Episode 190: "Cancel Culture Comes to Banking” with Todd Zywicki and Paul Watkins
Release Date: 05/31/2022
Episode 246: "What Really Happens at Burning Man: An Insider's Story" with Kenny Reff
The Bill Walton Show
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 experience.” This year Burning Man was much in the news because of the sensationalized coverage about the rain that fell on it. But was it as bad as the press made it sound? In this...
info_outline
Episode 245: “Climate Catastrophe, or Simply the Weather?” with Jay Richards
The Bill Walton Show
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 or the UN coerce us do it, and along the way essentially shut down the modern economy. There are a lot of breathless claims being made. Bryan Moynihan, the CEO of Bank of America and a...
info_outline
Episode 244: How Financial Regulators Have Become a (Progressive) Law Unto Themselves” with Todd Zywicki
The Bill Walton Show
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 Federal Consumer Financial Law and served as Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review. Todd’s recent article “Restoring the Rule of Law in Finance” served as our...
info_outline
Episode 243: “Capitalism’s Promise: Essentially Infinite Resources and Human Flourishing” with George Gilder and John Tamny
The Bill Walton Show
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 contrarian thinker John Tamny, founder of Parkview Institute, editor of RealClearMarkets and author of the recently published The Money Confusion: How Illiteracy About Currencies and...
info_outline
Episode 242: “The Surgeon General Now Wants To Cure Your Loneliness: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?” with Stella Morabito and Mark Tapscott
The Bill Walton Show
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 isolating us from one another. This effort is intensifying and spreading throughout society’s institutions. “Isolation, and how rulers use it to control people, is really the greatest threat...
info_outline
Episode 241: A Victory for Free Speech with Jenin Younes
The Bill Walton Show
“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 only the courts, need to recognize what is at stake.” But the calvary may finally be arriving. With the recent ruling in the “State of Missouri vs Joseph R Biden et...
info_outline
Episode 240: An Early Look at a Certain Bestseller: "Motorhome Prophecies” with Carrie Sheffield
The Bill Walton Show
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 . 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 Administration’s massive spending and its obsessive focus on diversity equity & inclusion and its climate change agenda. The Women’s Bill of Rights and IWV’s work with a more traditionally leftist feminist group...
info_outline
Episode 239: “The Sporting Life” with Haven Pell
The Bill Walton Show
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 lifelong sports participant, and who has tried more than 100 different ones. Perhaps the most unusual is court tennis, the predecessor to modern tennis, which is still played by about...
info_outline
Episode 238: “When ‘Free Trade’ Does More Harm Than Good” with Robert Lighthizer
The Bill Walton Show
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 America’s trading partners, but with Congress, domestic constituencies, and rival factions within the executive branch. There are sharp - almost theological - differences in...
info_outline
Episode 237: Financial Regulation: Boring, or Terrifying? with Chris Iacovella and Norbert Michel
The Bill Walton Show
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 regulators, mega banks and entrenched special interests who are the chief beneficiaries our system of opaque and complex financial regulation. Adding to this mix is the progressive Left who are now...
info_outline