YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Horton

lines on the record: 802
first: 2025-08-24
most recent: 2025-08-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, that's what I'm saying. It could have been, dude. Listen, the Republicans of the United States of America nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney instead of him. You explain that to me when we got George Washington himself only without the slaves and without the bloody hands. The only vet in the race but he was a doctor in the Air Force. Only one he got up on stage and quoted Jesus, and they booed him. He's the guy that's supposed to be president.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's married to his high school sweetheart since her sweet 16 party. Okay? No scandals, not a hint of it. He's got, I don't know, 150 grandchildren or whatever it is. It's the American dream. It's perfect. And nobody's got nothing on him. Right, he's just the best”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, yes, and he's a doctor, not a lawyer. He delivered 4,000 babies. And you know, I met his sister-in-law who married his older brother Wayne and she says to me, yeah, well, when you guys say that Ron Paul delivered 4,000 babies, well, I did too, because I'm his head and nurse and I delivered every one of myself too, along with him and all of that thing. So that's where he comes from. Decent, sweet old country doctor.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a baby doctor, right? He's not going anywhere. He didn't have, he wasn't soliciting donations. He wasn't asking you to join his cult or his sect of Protestant Christianity. He was just saying, we don't have to do this stuff. We don't have to believe in this. They say these things, but geez, that doesn't seem right, because what about this thing? And he's just so wise and so good. And his aides, by the way, his right-hand men all that time were also really great guys too, especially Jeff Dist and Annie McAdams have been his right-hand man and his great, you know, advisor this whole time.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is the famous Benjamin Franklin quote to the Baker lady what do we have, a monarchy or a republic, a republic if you can keep it? And then the sequel was called, I'm sorry, Mr. Franklin, we are all Democrats now. And it was just so good. And I would give this to people in the cab. Hey, did you know there's one good congressman? One. And he's not good. He's better than Thomas Jefferson. Read this and read this and read this. And this is the light and the way. And the thing is, is All I'm selling you is a peaceful foreign policy. I'm not saying like, well, and freedom overall, as this is what Ron Paul emphasized, if he's asking for your trust or your faith in anything, it's just that you trust in freedom, that it does work. It's why we have all this stuff is because of liberty in the first place. And so you can count on that, you know. But otherwise, he's not selling you anything. He delivered like a third of the population of his district.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And mostly Protestant and Catholic Christians and American patriotic folk, they're good people. And the editor of their magazine at that time was the great William Norman Grigg. He would run Ron Paul stuff constantly. He would cover Ron. And then I used to be a pirate radio guy, so I had, I would call his weekly update. I don't know if he still does this. It was 888-322-1414. And then I would just play the Ron Paul Weekly update and put that out over the air. And it was always just killer stuff, dude. Monetary policy and boom and bust and the evils of war. I would drive around to my cab and I would have printed out Ron Paul speeches. And there was one that was called A Republic if you can keep it”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In this guy, and then I'm reading the new American magazine, which is the John Bircher's magazine. They have a very bad rap as racist and stuff, which is totally not true. They're conspiratorial, and I don't agree with them on everything, and they're more conservative than me. They're good people. They're George Washington's Constitution, Guys, and”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's up with that? And now, and we still have all these sanctions and doing all these things, and we're so responsible for this guy's evil in the first place after we had backed him all that time and all these things, and this is not wise foreign policy, mister Speaker. We ought to come home. And I'm like, wow, that any congressman would say anything that honest on the record inside the Capitol building like that. I couldn't believe it, and I looked at the bottomless screen and says Ron Paul R Texas. And I'm like, no way. Because, you know, Bush Sr. himself is nominally from here, right? He's from Connecticut, really, but he made his fortune here in oil and lived here for a very long time. And, you know, raise his family in West Texas for much of the time and that kind of thing. So he's extremely important guy in Texas politics. So for this congressman to dare to say that. And he's essentially accusing Bush of treason. Okay.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Except whoever was filling in in the speaker chair. Mr. Speaker, I have here my hands reports from the British press today about how George Bush was selling chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein leading right up to the invasion of Kuwait”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Ron Paul convinced me of a lot of things, man. He's really been a North Star to me this whole time ever since then. I was so excited from the, I'll tell you, the first time I ever saw Ron Paul was ten years before everybody else got their big Giuliani moment when Ron Whoop Rudy Giuliani in that debate in March, pardon me, May of 2007, where they fought over the motivation of Osam bin Laden to attack us on 9-11. Ron says, because we were bombing Iraq from bases in Saudi for 10 years. Everybody knows that. And Giuliani flipped his lid and Ron was, of course, heroic and right. But my Giuliani moment was a decade before. I saw Ron in the middle of the night on C-SPAM, Dr. Paul. On CSPAN, the middle night speaking to an empty Congress.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, during that era, they're really right about a lot of things, and I would have rather hung around them, even though I wasn't culturally right-wing like them, but William Norman Grigg at the New American Magazine was really a great. Of course, Ron Paul came back to Congress in 97. Paul”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I shied away from the libertarian movement for a long time because that's what I thought the libertarian movement was. And I would rather pile around with a bunch of right-wing militia guys because at least they care about the branched idiotians. And there was in Austin at that time, there's kind of a thriving, what they called the Patriot movement, which is like the civilian side of the militia movement, basically. And it's all like, yeah, right-wing conspiracy guys who are right about everything then, about who started that fire in Waco, about who helped blow up Oklahoma City, about the sanctions in Iraq killing kids, about the Gulf War illness that they were covering up illness says, I should say, that they were covering up and saying, oh, drink a beer and chin up, and don't be a whimp, and all this. These guys were dying of cancers and other diseases that they got from what the Pentagon did to them and expose them to in Iraq War I. And so, you know, the conspiracy kooks were batting 100, batting 1,000, whatever, I'm not a baseball guy, I'm a skateboarder. They're batting a”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's kind of funny I'm kind of angry at them, so I'll put them on blast anyway. I don't care. When I was young, I read Reason magazine and I thought, I hate these guys. That's what a libertarian is that they think their job is debunking Gulf War illness. They think their job is debunking the number of Iraqis starving to death under Bill Clinton's sanctions? And they don't give a damn about the branched Davidians. They don't give a damn about any of this, right? I don't know what they're good for, lower taxes and maybe guns, not that they're doing anything important about it.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, I'm a skateboarder type and I'm just anti-government type. Like I say, I learned about Ronald Reagan being a dope pusher when I was a child. Bill Clinton burned the branched Davidians to death in front of my eyes and called it a suicide when I was sixteen. Covered up the Oklahoma bombing, blamed it on one guy two years later. They're no longer getting away with that. There's a brand new book out called Blow Back and I haven't read it yet, but I know the fact checker, and I know that it's right. That McVeigh had friends, they were undercover FBI informants. At least two of them, Roger Moore and Andre Strassmeyer, were agent provocateurs, and they covered it up because it was their own guys who did it. I'm not saying the government did it on purpose, but I'm saying the FBI is essentially a sting that they were meant to stop it and they didn't stop it. And they cover that up. And they got the whole media to go along with that. And then, you know, I was a big fan of like, see.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of all of this capacity being directed into militarism and then going away, but people get fooled into thinking that this is what's good and this is what's necessary. And of course, Lockheed does things and the rest of them too, Boeing and the rest, they have explicit gerrymandering type policies where they will have one small part of every weapon system made in as many factories as possible all across the country so that if Congress ever wants to roll back anything, they will have an army of lobbyists to threaten them that we're talking about six hundred jobs in your district, Congressman. Is that what you're willing to do? And then they all just snap right into line. You know, again, what they say, hey, we're just supplying the weapons that the Congress demands, no they're not. They're rigging the whole game so we have no choice but to give into them, essentially.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way around. And a lot of times, goods that can never be reused. Again, the plane can fly again, but the bombshir can't. F thirty five's fall out of the sky all the time in the headlines again today. And so this is all a net loss.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's all of the brilliant guys of the Austrian school, especially Robert Murphy and Tom Woods, and all the guys at the Ludwig von Mises Institute. And imperialism and militarism are at the heart of this. David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's former budget advisor, calls this the great deformation. He says all these little bubbles, like 87 and 92 and 99 and 08, these are the little bubbles on top of the big bubble of America's overall inflationary monetary policy since the end of the Second World War in order to make the militarism seem artificially cheap, to make it seem, where, imagine how deceived people would have to be to think that war is good for the economy because they notice the Russian spending and the immediate stimulative effect when this is the difference between the scene and the unseen. Where's all that wealth coming from? And now where's it going? It's going to make tools of death and destruction, net losses in property values.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to lose sooner than them. You're going to lose before they have a chance to get screwed. So even if you know better, you still have to. Expand beyond what you really know that you can do. So, like, one example that Austrians like to use, I think, is like if the circus comes to town for a month or whatever and this the local dairy queen is really busy, and then the guy builds a giant extension onto the thing, thinking that like this is how it's going to be now. But no, this is just temporary. This is a boom, followed by a bust, right? Well, so this is the artificial value of those customers in that time induced by the traveling circus, but in our case we're talking about money artificially inflating the value of certain firms and certain banks' investments and these kinds of things. This is what leads to the cluster of errors that leads to the collapses. And people can read the, of course, the brilliant Ludwig von Mises in his theory of money and credit from 100 years ago. Then, of course, there's Murray Rothbard, what has government done to our money and the case against the Fed.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you have, especially in the higher order goods like mining and quarries and machine tools and the kinds of things that are then used to sell the other businesses to make other things and these kind of things, they make long-term farmers or other ones. They make long-term loans at artificially low interest rates that then they end up getting screwed later because they're not able to produce to keep up when the crash comes. Now let's say you own a quarry and you're an Austrian school guy and you see what's going on here. Well, Alan Greenspan's just printing a bunch of money. And so all my competitors are hiring new workforces and they're buying new machine tools and they're getting way ahead of me in their productive capacity. But I know that they're screwed because they're going deep into debt for all this stuff and the music's going to stop. However, if I don't, if you, the quarry owner, if you don't play the same game,”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Were all these businessmen are making all these bad bets all at the same time that then leads to these terrible crashes and resets and corrections? And the answer is it's inflationary money and artificially low interest rates because what it does is it's manipulating the price of money, artificially valuing money with government control and leading producers to follow false price signals and to mistakenly believe that there are more resources available in the economy for use than there really are. If you had free market interest rates, then the more capital you use to invest, the more it costs to borrow more capital, right? And when savings are low and capital is low to invest in new things, then interest rates would naturally go up. But when the Federal Reserve Bank holds interest rates low, then that doesn't happen.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People aren't libertarians at all. If people lean any degree left or right from me and from Austrian school libertarian things, it's totally fine. Disagree with me on whatever you want, warfare, welfare, anything. But it's just true, man. It's just true. The Austrians are correct about the cause of the business cycle, the boom and bust. Now, of course, if the frost wipes out all the oranges, then that's going to cause disruptions in that one market or whatever. But what caused what Ludwig Bommis called?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolute decimation that came after that. And then what Obama do came and printed even more money, built up an even bigger bubble to try to deal with that. Then, of course, the COVID lockdowns essentially played the role of high interest rates in just crushing the economy and forcing a massive recession on people. But then what they do? They didn't just have the Fed lower interest rates and lower reserve ratios so that they could expand money even more. They literally just mailed everybody checks of brand new money from the treasury, all brand new money. And by some measures, they create two-thirds of all US dollars that were ever created were created since 2020. And so that's Trump's fault and Biden's fault for doing those giant monetary expansion acts. That's what has led to the giant inflationary crisis today is this absolutely incompetent managers of our economy. And this is the thing where”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In every bracket by 6% so that we can launch an aggressive war against Iraq so that Israel can save a nickel a barrel hopefully if they can get their silly pipeline they want built. People say, hell no. When they print the money, remember this, George Bush sent people, anyone who paid income taxes, got a refund check of an extra $300 or $400 depending on your bracket in 2003 and 2004. This was meant to look like, well, I infer this, it was meant to look like your dividend. It was meant to fool you into thinking that the Iraq war is profitable, that America is making money off of this, like in the cliche that you would hear from people in the neighborhood. Well, war is good for the economy. And look, we're all directly benefiting from this, apparently. We all get an extra three or four hundred dollars. But of course, they just printed that money. And all that inflation during the W. Bush years is what led to the giant housing bubble and the crash of 08.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's almost entirely like, well, big government overall relies on inflationary money, but then yes, this is a massive part of our budget is the annual militarism for the global empire. And so like to turn it around, Jonah Goldberg from the National Review, Mr. Ledine doctrine, says, well, we can't have a gold standard. Because what if there's a war? But then that's Ron Paul's point. That's why we should have a gold standard. So Jonah Goldberg can't have a war, right? Because they have to print the money. If they had to raise your taxes to go stop Tojo, maybe even then they had to print money and borrow money. But people sure as hell took Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan seriously enough to fight and they still had to conscript millions of people to do it, but whatever. At least you got a credible threat there. But you're going to tell the American people, hey, we're going to have to raise everybody's income.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Monetary expansion, the expansion, especially of bank credit, although in our very current era because of Donald Trump and Joe Biden's massive stimulus bills that they signed during COVID.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Supply, stop taxing me, leave me alone. Me and my buddies will invest in private businesses and we will produce the wealth society needs. Fine, what we all have to agree is that this has to all come to an end, where we let them take trillions and trillions of our dollars, but they can't tax they borrow and what they can't borrow they inflate. And with the inflation, this is the absolute crisis of confidence. Again, bin Laden invited our government to do this, quote, self-inflicted wound, meaning really our government wounding all of us. And this is the absolute crisis of our era is price inflation. It's why people can't pay the rent. It's why they can't afford to feed their family. It's why they're forced to send their children to government school like a German or a Russian. It's why they are brokes, why young men and women can't start families and buy homes. It's because of price inflation, which is the result of my”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's part of the book where Winston Smith is being brought under the wing of his future torturer, O'Brien and O'Brien gives him the manual for how we do it, right? And he holds up in his bedroom and reads the book, How We Do It. And it says in there that, listen, we keep them in a permanent state of war at all times to keep them on edge, to keep them insecure, to take any excess wealth that the people would otherwise spend improving their own lives, and we sink it into the ocean in the form of the floating fortress, or we blast it off in a space in the form of these missiles and rockets that we're building, so that the people can't have it. So we cannot build up our society to protect our own needs and interests. Now, of course, anyone leaning left listening to this would prefer that the government spend this money on public school and healthcare and infrastructure. Anybody right leaning listening to this says that's my money, stop printing money and inflating the money.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Public schools, but he talks about like private investment and the comparisons that every bit of money that we spend on this is wealth that comes from the American people that the government then denies to us, takes from us, and destroys. Lexa, if you ever read 1984 in the part of”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's the other one is the cross of iron speech, where he calculates the cost of battleships compared to schools and grocery stores and things. It's not all public or, you know, so-called public goods like.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The black access program, special access program in the military, is Fletcher Proudie and them their argument about the thing, which, whatever. Whether that's true or not, it's believable enough. And what Eisenhower said that on his last day in office. Sorry, Charlie. I did the best I could. Maybe this is half my fault. Good luck to you. And then quit and was out the door. But have we ever had a major reckoning since then where what? Oh, after Vietnam and Nixon was impeached, that was when we destroyed the military industrial complex? No. Right? That never happened after the end of the Cold War. Is that what happened? No, we went to Bosnia and then we went to Iraq. We went to Bosnia and stayed in the Middle East and expand wherever we can.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To try to keep these men from their demands where they were constantly demanding more divisions, more divisions, more divisions. And he said, no, I'm going to build more missiles instead. You guys get away from me, and only he had the power to do it at the time. I'm not taking a stance on this, but it's widely believed that these same forces blew the head off of his successor for getting in their way. You know, which is at least possible, if not likely, right, that that was what happened in Dallas.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem with these crony corporations. No, indeed, we do. And in fact, again, not again, but go back, who coined the term military-industrial complex. It was Dwight David Eisenhower, the five-star Army general, who was the commander of all United Nations forces in Europe in World War II, and then came home and was the two. Who is the one who did the coup in'53 in Iran, who's the one who built as many nuclear missiles as he possibly could? But why to try to hold the army at bay? Eisenhower said, God help. The next president of this country who doesn't have the experience with the army that I do.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And even the most conspirators type scene, if you just leave out the secret society crap and just focus on Lockheed and the Israel lobby and the Republican Party and oil interests and whatever where all these things come together, it's all very clear. You know what I mean? And you don't have to be a Chomskyite leftist to see it that way at all. Like I'm a libertarian and we're pure free market types, which means we find it morally criminal for any company to get a government contract for anything, right? Like we want no public-private partnerships of any kind. When we say privatization, we don't mean government contracts. We mean privatization. Get government out of it and let free people figure it out. Any corporation on welfare deserves to be destroyed to a libertarian. So you don't have to like identify somehow as like, well, only an anarcho-syndicalist in the Chomskyite mold would think that we have this.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hey, I think all the time about, I mean, there's a lot of cabaret I don't remember, but there are a few that I do where it was I got something wrong. And the guy goes, nah, nah, nah. It's not like that. It's like this. And he was right and I was wrong. And I went, ah, you know, I really picked up something there. You know what I mean? Like one of those, as I said, I was kind of a New World Order cook back then. And one of the go was, I still remember where I was on Mopac where the guy said to me that like, listen, man, it ain't conspiracy. It's just politics, okay? It's the game over who controls the power. You don't need secret societies. You just need oak tables, man. This is business. And that's how it goes.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a good question. To him, the answer was built into the thing that actually the cab driver couldn't possibly be right because the people in Washington would not lead me to believe that this has anything at all to do with avenging the innocent dead Americans slaughtered on september eleventh, airplanes full of little kids on their way on vacation, that what do you mean this has nothing to do with that? What's more likely your cab driver knows better? Or that no, you are right to disbelieve and believe in authority that swears that they're doing this to protect you from the enemy that attacked you. And so that's the kind of cognitive dissonance that is always baked into these kinds of things. It's the same thing with Israel now. Well, if this is the most barbarian society on the planet, how come we're their best friends? Yeah, again, a very good question, but it's not answered by. They must not be. They must be really great. Otherwise, we wouldn't be, which is what the cognitive dissonance would be.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a real nice guy. We had a long conversation because I wouldn't let the poor SOB go. And I'm beating him over the head and I'm telling him, damn it, I swear to God that this is true, okay? George W. Bush, Connolly Zerice, Colin Powell, George Tennett, none of them have said that Saddam did nine hundred eleven. Now Dick Chaney did, but he's a damn liar, but there's a real important reason. Why, Bush and Powell are not saying that. Okay? They're perfectly happy to leave you with that impression that that must be what they were trying to imply, and that's what you thought you heard them say, but you didn't. And you promised me you'd go inside and you Google, you look hard, you will not find them directly saying that. And he says to me, but come on, man, I mean if Saddam Hussein didn't do nine eleven, then why are we attacking him then?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, and I like telling this story too. So I'll go ahead and write on the guy to YouTube. I had a guy in my cab. Who was like a Mr. Fan's pants man about town? I dropped him off at some very swanky bachelor pad apartments off of South Mopac there.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Principles. Our principles are that elites, you know, like David Wormser and Richard Pearl, who are so smart that only they can understand the real truth in the subtext of the truth and everybody else is some idiot who has to be lied to with noble lies by their philosopher kings because they won't do the right thing for the right reasons. They have to be told false reasons to make them do the right thing and all these things and they got to justify all their lies by wrapping it up in all those justifications that they know what they're doing. When of course these people are just clowns there's no difference and I know look at the time I was driving a cab in this town on this up and down this street, okay? And the average idiot around here knew better than all of this, right? And it wasn't because they had special knowledge, but they just knew you don't start a war. God knows what could happen. You had no idea, dude, how many just regular people told me.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you'd probably be terrified of them if they did. You know what I mean? Because you got people like that. I'm going to use that courage. Again, this is sort of the irony of the neoconservatives they say, you know, Henry Kissinger's a monster, his amoral foreign policy that says, well, if the Indonesians feel like killing all the Timorees, I guess they have to or whatever, that not like us, we're a morality-based foreign policy. That's why we have to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein is so immoral and we have to go and bring light and goodness to the world by doing the right thing by starting another war, and so that you write those are your two choices. You have amoral and immoral in the name of morality, you know, and using that excuse, and as they would always put it, the Straussians, because he was one of the former Truskyites that then a lot of these guys studied under. And he would say, oh no, we're all philosopher kings, see. And unlike Lockean or Jeffersonian type American.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that was the way that he was trying to frame it to W. Bush himself, that of course you can't take the risk of running for re-election in oh four with Saddam Hussein still sitting there. What have you lost just like your dad? Your family could never live that down. Saddam's still in the chair after two bushes got unelected after only one term Parish the thought that he had”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was Saddam Hussein still in charge over there? So I think that it's just an obvious matter of course that he will have to invade Iraq in his first term, and I encourage that and think it's great and he should. And I saw Crystal say that probably during the campaign before he was even elected president, somewhere around there. And again, I wasn't quite sure who Crystal was, and I surely didn't know who his father was in the neoconservative movement yet, but I knew that this is the guy from the weekly standard that's always on a”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was 17. I said, You see what they're doing? They're making sure that one or the other, at least of these guys, will be a second-term governor in the year two thousand. Then they can run for president and go back to Iraq, which means the Democrats are going to, I mean, which means the Republicans are going to run a weakling in 96 and throw the election for Bill and let him win again so that they can run a fresh bush in 2000. Nailed it, dude. And why? Because of the humiliation. That was my high school thinking at the time because of the humiliation that Saddam's still there, but Bush is gone. Bush lost after only one term. And then, so that's got to be avenged. And that's clearly what they're doing here. And then Bill Crystal said the same thing. Now, Bill Christol is bullying W. Bush, right? Bill Crystal ain't me. He's him up there. And he's saying, well, I just can't imagine that W. Bush would risk being unelected after only one time.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To your mouth. In 1994, when the day that they announced or the next day after they announced that W. Bush was going to also run for governor, just like his brother Jeb is running for governor in Florida. I said to my math teacher, Oh, you see what they're doing.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in fact, Crystal said, I remember seeing Crystal on TV say, well, and see, wait, wait, before a crystal, I said this to my math teacher in eleventh grade.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he says they had to wait a couple of days for Saddam Hussein to quit gut laughing to get his quote. And then he goes, we have nothing against America. We just want to see George Bush beheaded and his head kicked down the road like a soccer ball. And then Bill goes, wow, me and Saddam Hussein, we're like this. Who would have thunk it?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like, generically speaking, he wanted to stick it to big army and give their money to the Air Force and the Special Operations Forces instead. Again, the Lockheed promo video, where what we do is we send in special operations forces and air power to whoop anybody in a few weeks and then move on to the next one. We want to stay light and fast and not get bogged down. That was one of their excuses for letting Bin Laden go, well, we didn't want to get bogged down. Oh, what? Killing bin Laden and Zawahiri, the two most important guys that you could possibly target in the thing who are both there. You know, come on, but that was part of their excuse. Light and fast, keep it going. W. Bush, I think, wanted to prove he was tougher than his father, in a sense, probably wanted to avenge his father from the fake assassination plot, but also the humiliation. Again, Bill Hicks was so wise about this, that the humiliation of H.W. Bush being voted out of office while Saddam Hussein was still in the chair.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Complimentary way. Yeah, no, I appreciate working class folk. I've done plenty of that kind of work myself. But he climbed electric poles and stuff like that. He's from out west and as a cowboy and a conservative and a right-winger and a nationalist and a tough guy. That's his problem. Donald Rumspeld was previously the Secretary of Defense and had his own plans for there was this whole debate back during that era of the transformation of the military. Everybody knows now that the Soviet Union's gone and it's the whole new order. What order is it and what should the military look like? What sort of weapon systems should we focus on this and that? And Rumsfeld had his own ideas.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Neoconservatives and whatever. Well, to be perfectly clear, as everyone knows, George W. Bush is a Methodist, right? He's the son of Episcopalian wasps from Connecticut, and Dick Chaney is some kind of redneck for Mountain Wyoming, and I mean that in a”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having another election for another three years, and so this is the security force we got. And so we better support it because what we're trying to send a signal to the world that you better know that we're all one for all and you better not mess with us or whatever, buddy, what are we really doing? We're telling George Bush that he has a mandate to do anything he thinks he can get away with and that we do nothing but support him after the greatest failure of any president in all of American history for that to be allowed to happen on his watch and when we all know of course that they knew it was coming and that at least parts of the CIA were warning and trying desperately to get the White House to pay attention to the fact that this attack was coming and that Bush refused to pay attention, I think because he didn't want to be distracted with going after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan when he was trying to go to Iraq, which is another important point to bring up back to the debate with Dubowitz there where, oh, the Jews this, the Jews that and”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the first thing would be to get used to the idea that they're lying to you next time too, right? They've done nothing but take advantage this whole time. There's no reason to give your government the benefit of the doubt that they care what's true or that they want you to understand the truth. That's not what they're about. They're trying to get you. I mean, just think about how they operate. Always, they're trying to get you upset so that then you'll let them do something, right? Like I'm detecting a pattern here, and it doesn't mean that everything is a false flag or anything like that, but it's just they do nothing but create crises and then exploit them. It's a monopoly on security services. His approval rating goes up to ninety percent because we can't fire the national government and replace it with another one.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source