Latest Adamsmith Podcast Episodes
Surviving in a Multipolar World
Edifice of Trust - August 22, 2023 14:57 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingThe world is changing, and if you are one of the billions of people who have benefitted from the Western rules-based world order, not in a good way. Change, of course, is inevitable. But countries that hope to survive in changing conditions, and possibly even thrive, need to prepare for a future ...
Ukraine Model
Edifice of Trust - August 08, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingMany foreign policy experts have been recommending the armistice between North and South Korea as a model for the resolution of the war on Ukraine. The circumstances of these two conflicts are very different. The seventy years of relative peace on the Korean Peninsula has allowed South Korea to ...
This Is How They Think
Edifice of Trust - July 27, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingA recent open letter from some leftist college professors urges President Biden to defy the recent Supreme Court decisions. The letter not only exposes how the progressive left views the US Constitution as an impediment to the implementation of their woke agenda, it also reveals what they really ...
Whither Europe?
Edifice of Trust - July 25, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingThe welfare state was invented by German Chancellor Bismarck to placate the masses while he created an industrial empire to dominate Europe. The industrial empire envisioned by Bismarck has passed away but the welfare state remains. The never-ending welfare state is slowly debilitating Europe has...
RINOS and DINOS
Edifice of Trust - July 17, 2023 13:00 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingI really like Joe. I thought he would have made a good Vice President. What? No, I am not talking about Joe Biden. I am talking about Joe Lieberman. Joe Lieberman was elected to the Senate as a Democrat in 1989 but when the Democratic Party in Connecticut wanted to go further left, Joe Lieberman ...
The Wrong Way to Make Law
Edifice of Trust - July 10, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingThe left is mad at the Supreme Court. They are mad because the Court under Chief Justice John Roberts is refusing to endorse the social justice policies that have been imposed on the American public through executive orders, administrative policies and even faulty opinions of previous courts – al...
The Difference between Lying and Delusion
Edifice of Trust - June 29, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingRussian President Putin has a deluded vision of a Russian-led Eurasian civilization of which Ukraine is an integral part, justifying his invasion of that country. He lies a lot but it is hard to tell his lies from his delusion. But Putin is not alone. Many leaders around the world also suffer fro...
Postmodern Prehistory
Edifice of Trust - June 12, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingIn their recent book, The Dawn of Everything, Authors David Graeber and David Wengrow attempt to redefine human prehistory through the lens of their progressive left ideology using the analytical techniques of postmodern philosophy. Using narratives, feelings and a lot of guesswork they attempt t...
War of Attrition
Edifice of Trust - May 22, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingHistorian Stephen Kotkin asserts that the War on Ukraine has evolved into a war of attrition. He further asserts that two key elements to continue such a war are the ability to resupply the unceasing casualties and the depletion of military equipment and munitions backed by the willpower to conti...
Vivek Who???
Edifice of Trust - May 08, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingWho is Vivek Ramaswamy? When Vivek Ramaswamy announced that he would seek the Republican nomination for president of the United States everyone (including me) said, “Who the heck is Vivek Ramaswamy?” Since that announcement, Mr. Ramaswamy has been writing position papers and appearing with the Su...
A Postmodern Future
Edifice of Trust - April 27, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingThe bizarre and previously fringe philosophy that is postmodernism has become mainstream among US academics as the principal Counter-Enlightenment school of thought. It is the philosophical underpinning of the woke ideology that has infected the American left. But while postmodernism can be effec...
Ideological Justice
Edifice of Trust - April 13, 2023 13:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingThe progressive left has long desired that the US judicial system become more activist in promoting their progressive agenda unconstrained by an originalist interpretation of the US Constitution. They want the courts to forge ahead on abortion rights, gun control and many other controversial issu...
Explaining John Wayne
Edifice of Trust - March 31, 2023 15:44 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingTo kids growing up in the 1950s, John Wayne was the symbol of what those kids should grow up to be. A bit gruff, but honest. Fierce, but protective of those in need. And from westerns to war movies, he represented what it was to be a patriotic American. But today’s kids don’t know who John Wayne ...
Perp Walk
Edifice of Trust - March 23, 2023 19:04 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingIs Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg trying to indict former President Trump in order to incarcerate him or to assure that he becomes the presidential candidate for the Republican Party? And what is going through the mind of the former president as he announces on social media is coming arrest and arraign...
Two Decades
Edifice of Trust - March 17, 2023 13:00 - 15 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingWhere will we all be in two decades? A better question is where should we be in two decades? Seventy percent of American think we are heading in the wrong direction. But what is the right direction? We need to think about where we want to be in twenty years in order to determine what direction t...
The Fed that Should Be
Edifice of Trust - March 08, 2023 16:00 - 13 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingThe Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System have been put in charge of running the US economy. But it shouldn’t be this way. The Fed wasn’t created to run the economy, but only to manage a small part of the economy. The Fed has the tools and the expertise to manage the money and the inte...
Democracy is not a Verb
Edifice of Trust - February 28, 2023 16:21 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingYale professor Timothy Snyder recently did a Ted Talk where he asserted that democracy should be a verb, something that you do. He asserts, “democracy has to be understood as a spirit.” He appears to believe that the more democracy the better. Then why did the Founders include limitations on demo...
A Color Blurred Society
Edifice of Trust - February 17, 2023 14:59 - 9 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingDespite heightened rhetoric about systemic racism and arguments about disparate outcomes, everybody from ordinary people to superstar quarterbacks are the blurring the lines that define racial and ethnic identity. There is a growing disparity between the world defined by diversity, equity and inc...
The Junzi Way
Edifice of Trust - February 13, 2023 15:29 - 15 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingLee Kuan Yew, Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 until 1990 incorporated the concept of junzi, the Confucian ideal of being a moral person, as a key element in his plan to raise Singapore from a swampy, corrupt backwater into a modern metropolis. Henry Kissinger describes how Mr. Lee accompli...
Can Artificial Intelligence Cure Healthcare?
Edifice of Trust - January 30, 2023 15:51 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingHealthcare in the United States is a mess. And it is a mess because of people. Different people want different things. And powerful people and the institutions they lead have the ability to enact policies that primarily benefit themselves. All these different people and different policies have re...
Non-Trivial Pursuits
Edifice of Trust - January 24, 2023 14:05 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingGotchas, paybacks and vendettas do not make for a legislative agenda. They may appeal to the Freedom Caucus, but most Americans want Congress to address the important issues that affect their lives. Not raising the debt ceiling is another act of political theater that will not solve our public de...
Urgent Priorities 2023
Edifice of Trust - January 12, 2023 16:57 - 30 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingLast year I published a podcast (Urgent Priorities, December 30, 2021) on the urgent priorities that America had to confront in the year 2022. Since many of those priorities were addressed very ineffectively or were not addressed at all, I was tempted to simply republish that commentary again thi...
Wakanda Dreamin'
Edifice of Trust - December 27, 2022 14:00 - 11 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingOn a recent podcast, professors Glenn Loury and John McWhorter were discussing how slaveowners had used techniques to break a slave’s bond to their past (their history, their language, their religion, their culture) to make them easier to control and dependent on the slaveowner - a process called...
The Real Message of Welfare
Edifice of Trust - December 07, 2022 17:27 - 11 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingMany people may need public assistance from time to time but the structure of the American welfare state encourages behaviors that perpetuate impoverishment and increase the need for taxpayer paid welfare. The only beneficiaries of the US welfare state are the politicians, the welfare administrat...
Conservatism is not Enough
Edifice of Trust - December 01, 2022 14:00 - 12 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingLabels can be confusing, especially when they keep changing. They are more like brand names than descriptors of political philosophy. When a candidate says “I am a strong conservative” or “I am very liberal” it is hard to tell what they really stand for. But they need to stand for something. In t...
Don't Twerk on My Parade
Edifice of Trust - November 23, 2022 16:13 - 10 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingCultural changes have come to Central Texas in the form of competing Christmas/Holiday parades in the rural town of Taylor. Change is inevitable but not all change is good. In this podcast, the Edifice of Trust host, Victor Bolles, looks at some ways that the people of Taylor can manage the impac...
Toxic Magic and the Red Ripple
Edifice of Trust - November 11, 2022 18:07 - 8 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingAn endorsement from former President Donald Trump was magic for his chosen candidates in the Republican primaries, but the results of the 2022 mid-term elections have shown that his endorsements are toxic in the general election. Mr. Trump plans to make a major announcement on November 15th that ...
The War on Profit
Edifice of Trust - November 07, 2022 14:00 - 11 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingJoe Biden and the Democrats have a problem with profit. Not just the “outrageous” and excessive profits that the oil companies are reaping now. All profit. Because they think profit comes from exploitation. But profit is much more than that. Profit is a great motivator and change agent, and the D...
The Cult of Woke
Edifice of Trust - October 31, 2022 13:00 - 11 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingThe proponents of the Woke progressive-left agenda appear resistant to logical argument and react with outrage at any criticism of their movement. They reject analyses based on empirical evidence and doubt that the scientific method can discover objective truth. They react with fury at any criti...
Wake Up! Dems
Edifice of Trust - October 24, 2022 13:00 - 10 minutes ★★★★★ - 1 ratingNoble Prize winner Daniel Kahneman explained in his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, that the human brain can be viewed as being divided into two separate brains, the fast thinking instinctual brain that we inherited from our hominid ancestors and our slow thinking cerebral cortex that sets us apar...
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