Episode 216: “What The Grateful Dead and Successful Dealmakers Have in Common” with Marc Morgenstern
Release Date: 02/25/2023
Episode 229: “You May Not Be Interested in CISA, But CISA is Certainly Interested in You” with Ben Weingarten and Frank Gaffney
The Bill Walton Show
“Overwhelming evidence suggests that federal agencies – led by among others, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), buoyed by senior executive branch officials and lawmakers, colluding with Big Tech, and a coterie of often government-coordinated and government-funded “counter-disinformation” organizations, have imposed nothing less than a mass public-private censorship regime on the American people.” Explains Ben Weingarten, one of America’s leading investigative journalists, at a recent Homeland Security Oversight hearing. As you’ll learn in this...
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Episode 228: “Google’s Utopian Vision and the 2024 Election” with Dr Robert Epstein and Jenny Beth Martin
The Bill Walton Show
Voter and ballot fraud may just be a small part of the problem that conservatives face in the upcoming 2024 elections compared to the power of Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube. Using its “total data collection” systems it can sway the opinions of millions of people and influence how they vote. We’ve known about this issue since at least 2016 and it has not gone away. If anything, with the emergence of AI, the threat has grown even more ominous. Executives at Google have stated that “investments in machine learning and AI” are a big opportunity to address...
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Episode 227: “It’s Time for the US to Use Its Power to Bring the War in Ukraine to an End” with Stephen Bryen
The Bill Walton Show
The war in Ukraine drags on at a terrible cost for all involved with no seeming end in sight. Some estimate that there have been almost 400,000 total Russian and Ukraine casualties so far, although both sides claim their losses are much lower. Ukraine is on the ropes and running out of manpower with its most of its elite forces destroyed. Missiles for its air defenses are depleted. Both sides are dragooning teenagers and old men for their armies. Russia’s military command is in disarray. But no one knows what is really going on. A key problem understanding the war in Ukraine is...
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Episode 226: "The Weaponization of Loneliness" with Stella Morabito
The Bill Walton Show
“Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other.… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism “Americans have long sensed a new kind tyranny creeping into our lives. This disquiet has hovered in the background for a long time, though most of us couldn’t put our finger on it. Trends to control speech and behavior are isolating us from one another, and they have begun to intensify rapidly and spread throughout society’s...
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Episode 225: “Protecting Investors from an Overreaching Regulatory State” with Chris Iacovella
The Bill Walton Show
When Walmart went public in 1970 and soon thereafter listed on the New York Stock Exchange, its SEC disclosure prospectus was 20 pages long. Today, a prospectus requires massive numbers of mostly obscure disclosures imposing very real liabilities for the issuing company - but which no one reads, except for lawyers who charge $2,000 an hour to read it and to write it - and which can run upwards to 300 pages or more. Under President Joe Biden’s whole of government effort to weaponize federal agencies, this regulatory creep has become an outright onslaught of new regulations. Except...
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Episode 224: “The FBI’s Ambitious New Plans” with J. Michael Waller
The Bill Walton Show
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is proceeding with plans to build a new headquarters which would be twice the size of the The Pentagon, the world’s largest office building. The new FBI headquarters is to be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres. The Kremlin in Moscow —a walled fortress containing the administrative offices of the Russian central government, the official presidential residence, massive auditoriums, an arsenal, a museum, four palaces, three cathedrals and several churches—is just over 66...
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Episode 223: The Differences Between Men and Women: Warriors and Worriers with Joyce Benenson
The Bill Walton Show
What are the evolutionary differences between men and women, and how do they survive and thrive through differing competitive strategies? In this episode, Dr. Joyce Benenson talks with Bill about her book, Warriors and Worriers, which draws her extensive lifelong research on children’s interactions. The result is fascinating array of studies and stories that explore the ways boys and men deter their enemies, while girls and women find assistants to aid them in coping with vulnerable children and elders. Dr. Benenson, a retired professor of psychology at Emmanuel College and an associate...
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Episode 222: “What You Need to Know About Your Money and the Federal Reserve” with Cato’s Norbert Michel
The Bill Walton Show
Is the Federal Reserve a godlike Zeus able to control our money and the economy, preserve financial stability and keep a lid on inflation? Or is it like the Wizard of Oz? A little man behind the curtain pulling levers to create smoke and noise to terrify and control people, but in the end only one market participant among many worldwide. If you’re a bond trader in New York, trying to predict minute day to day changes in interest rates, it’s more like Zeus. For the rest of us, I believe, it’s like Oz. Trying to figure out the Fed is a complicated business and I'm...
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Episode 221: “Are We Really Surprised We’re Having Another Banking Crisis?” with Alex Pollock and Steve Dewey
The Bill Walton Show
It looks like the bill is finally coming due after decades of reckless monetary policy and out of control federal spending. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation. Interest rates have risen dramatically. Mortgage rates have more than doubled. And commercial banks are now sitting on more than $600 billion of unrealized bond losses. Of course, and as expected, with the Silicon Valley Bank bailout, the Regulators have pulled out their default playbook declaring yet another institution systematically risky, taking another step toward the federalization of...
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Episode 220: “Silicon Valley Bank: The Bill Finally Comes Due for Decades of Reckless Monetary, Fiscal and Regulatory Policy” with Rick Manning and Robert Romano
The Bill Walton Show
This week, Americans for Limited Government published a provocative and insightful piece about the banking system asking, "Has the United States banking system become too big to save?” In the past three years, to finance massive federal spending, the Treasury has issued almost $8 trillion new treasury bonds with almost $4 trillion bought by US banks during the tail-end of the Fed’s era of zero interest rates. US Treasury Bonds? Sounds like a safe investment for a bank, but here’s the problem. After 40 years of relatively stable prices, we now have raging inflation...
info_outlineBackstage with Bill Walton
In this episode I compare notes and share stories with veteran dealmaker and entrepreneur Marc Morgenstern.
In today’s polarized world, where people seem intent on not agreeing, Marc has had a long and successful career helping opposing sides come to agreement.
He’s completed billions of dollars of M&A transactions, buying, selling, and financing businesses as a managing partner of law firm Kahn Kleiman and as a venture capitalist.
Marc’s new book The Soul of the Deal: Creative Frameworks for Buying, Selling, and Investing in Any Business creatively reframes and radically changes how we can approach dealmaking of any type.
Marc is a brilliant synthesist who weaves in, for example, what he’s learned as a successful door-to-door encyclopedia salesman, as a leader of several rock bands in college (Yale) and as a lifelong fan of The Grateful Dead.
He’s come to believe - and I think this is right - that much of the conflict in dealmaking comes from seeing the other side as an opponent. They’d do better to listen like musicians rather than as lawyers.
“When you saw the Dead over time in many different venues, in many different cities, a thousand seats to a hundred thousand seats, you realize that they took into account, whether it's conscious or unconscious, that this is a different audience, these are different acoustics. I'm in a better mood, I'm in a worse mood. It doesn’t matter,” explains Marc.
“So the fact that you played something five nights ago one way, doesn't mean you’re going to play it that way tonight.”
“In the deal world, I think of each counterparty as my audience and in every deal I've got a different counterparty with different needs.”
A wise and creative man, Marc’s also has taught at UC Berkeley and is on the boards of both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Rex Foundation, which was started by members of the Dead.
This is a fun and enlightening conversation and Marc has a lot to teach us. Backstage and off the beaten path.