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

“And so there are people who went to prison for decades for life, essentially and literally for just possession of the same drugs that the government was bringing in. And so how are you ever going to believe in a security force like that again? I never have. I don't know why you'd even need to see a Waco mask or any other in a rock war or any other thing to detest these people. That's who they are. I had this only part I really remember about it, but there's this great film producer named Kevin Booth. He was Bill Hicks' best friend and producer. And he did a documentary about the drug war where they show this guy and he goes, oh, they're all in prison and they're filming him through the gate. And they're all yelling and whatever. You can't really make out much, right? They're all like yelling over each other. And one guy finally makes everybody be quiet and he looks at the camera and he goes, listen, I'm doing 35 years because I had a few rocks in my pocket. Does that sound right to you?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Psychologically destroyed. That's right. Yeah, they put the gun in his mouth either way. For doing the right thing. But anyway, and didn't get any facts wrong. The only thing that anyone had to attack him on was the graphics editor put a phrase out of context big on the page or something in the newspaper. You know what I mean? It was like something silly that made it sound like he was saying the purpose of the mission was to destroy the black community. He never said that. What he said was they didn't give a damn about those people. I don't even know if he addressed that, right? But he certainly wasn't saying that was what it was about. It was about funding the contras. But anyway, so they found their separate ways of doing it. And this is one of the things that made me like this is I don't even have any idea where I first learned this, but I knew this while Reagan was still in office or at least by the time Bush Sr. was in office, when I was still just like maybe a freshman in high school or younger than that, I knew that Ronald Reagan was a dope pusher, the same guy with the just say no, and the same guy with a massively increased penalties for people engaging in just simply the possession, much less the sale and trade and drink.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely right. And then they completely destroyed the heroic Gary Webb for exposing this. And they didn't murder him, but they drove him to suicide. And, you know, his good friend Robert Perry, the great journalist, verified that. No, it really was a suicide. People thought it was suspicious because he shot himself twice, but that does happen sometimes where people flinch on the first one. But it was his father's gun and he was totally depressed and he'd signed his house over to his wife. And somebody stole his motorcycle and he was like at the end, but they had run him out of his job at the San Jose Mercury News. They first ran to the Hollywood beat and then he eventually he just quit and went to become an investigator for the California state legislator.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Florida in the same way, and this is where the crack epidemic came from in South LA and throughout the country, really, in many places. And they just don't give a damn about us, man. Congress said you can't have any money to fund the contrast. And they said, yeah, but we want to anyway. So this is how they did it.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is, of course, supposedly a side story, but a huge part of the side story is it absolutely was true, as the great Gary Webb reported, in the Dark Alliance series and in his great book Dark Alliance, that in many other great journalists as well, that the CIA had a massive operation to bring cocaine into the United States by the truckload and plane load, to sell it to poor Americans, blacks, especially in LA, but also, yes, it's true. They even made a Tom Cruise movie after years of calling us conspiracy cooks and all this. The movie's about a guy named Barry Seal, whose job it was to fly guns and money down there, and cocaine up here for the contrast for the CIA and into Bill Clinton's Arkansas, where he was read in on this and the operation was run out of the vice president's office, George H.W. Bush. And that much is true. And the same, they had no less about, but they had, this is where all the cocaine from Miami vice was coming into.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, Saddam Hussein's solution to that was to conscript all these people and force them into his army and march them east against Iran and use them in that way. And this led to an absolutely brutal World War I. Maybe Russia, Ukraine-style trench warfare tanks, artillery, and there's planes and ships, and it was a hell of a war for nine years all through the nineteen eighties, as the United States almost entirely backs Saddam Hussein. Except for when they backed the Ayatollah, remember Iran Contra. And during Iranra, what do they do? They went to the Israelis, and they said, hey, you're still friends with the government in Iran? You guys don't mind the Ayatollah one bit and have maintained your friendship there. We want to sell them some missiles and try to get the hostages out and then take the rest of the proceeds from the missiles and give them to the Contras in Nicaragua.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He had Christians and Kurds and Shiites in his government and things like that. It was not just a caricature or whatever. It was a balance of power act. But after the Iranian Revolution, Saddam had real reason to fear that the Shiite revolution was going to spread to Iraq and that Iraqi Shiites, at least the armed and convinced ones, would choose their religious sect and their alliance with Iran on that basis over their national and ethnic sect as Iraqis and Arabs, right? Separate from the Persians. And he had real reason to believe that, including that members of the Dawa party and people loyal to the Hakim family were Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and his people, they left to go to Iran and they chose.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes So, another aspect of the Carter doctrine was that Carter gave the green light to Saddam Hussein. Invade Iran. Now, first thing is, why Saddam Hussein want to invade Iran? It ain't just because he likes doing what Jimmy Carter says. He had his own reasons. Now, picture your map over Iraq. I know you got one in your head there. Everything from Baghdad over east to Iran and down to Kuwait, that is what you could call Shia stand, predominantly Shiite Iraq, right? And then they're sixty percent of the population, super majority. In the north you have the Kurds who are Sunnis, but they're Kurds as separate ethnicity than the Arabs. And then you have the Sunni Arabs who are another 20%. Well, Saddam Hussein was a secular Sunni Arab, leading essentially like on the Simpsons, the Kami Nazis, the Both Party, who are like sort of both. Just a fascist state, essentially, right, with Arab characteristics or whatever. And not an entirely sectarian way.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely specialize in Iraq, Afghanistan, exposing the entire fraud of David Petraeus and his career. He wrote the book Manufacture Crisis on the Iranian Nuclear Program. That is by none the very best book on that.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to say, I believe that he is the most important journalist of the war on terrorism era. I call him Gareth the Great. He's a good friend of mine. I've interviewed him three hundred something times on my show about essentially everything he's written since 2007. He is the Best of the best of 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
“Document that he only found in the State Department records that showed that just after the Carter Doctrine speech, Brzinski in a private meeting with the Saudi foreign minister and also with his deputy Warren Christopher, who was later Clinton Secretary of Defense, he admitted that we don't think there's really a Soviet threat to Iran. Himself admitted that. So the pretext for the Carter Doctrine was fake and he admitted it himself. They weren't really afraid of that. Even though they were pretending to be afraid of that, as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that they were trying to provoke.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've told that story to people before, and they're like, I never knew that. I always thought that it all happened in one big show, you know, and never do they admit, unless sometimes the Republicans accuse Carter of this. They'll tell the part about that Carter was so naive as to send the Ayatollah home, although that's usually always left out. But so now he announces the Carter doctrine, giving a war guarantee to Iran that he now officially hates and is holding our hostages and completely humiliating him, right? And there's Operation Eagle Claw, where they sent forces into Iran, and that was a, it was supposed to be a rescue mission that ended up in disaster where the planes and the helicopters crashed into each other. They were already leaving anyway because it was going to be botched and then they crashed on the way out. And so that was a big humiliation for Carter as well. And then, oh, and I should also tell you that Gareth just found this is a class.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're the great Satan and burning our flag. So when so many people, when the story begins, with their calling us great Satan and burning our flag, then well, they just hate us, and so we're just going to have to do something about that. And, you know, I remember meeting a guy one time who said, listen, Al-Qaeda hates us for all these complicated reasons. And he explained them. And then he goes, but not Iran. They just hate us. I remember when I was a boy, they were burning our flag and calling us Satan. So it's like, yeah, but, well, they had a reason too. Not that it justifies them doing anything sinful or criminal, but I'm just saying they also had reasons for reacting the way that they reacted. America had launched a coup in 53 from that same embassy, and by saying that they were going to cure the Shaw's cancer seemed to be an indication of them that we were going to try to reinstall him in power and cancel the revolution. And so they were preempting that. Again, not a justification for everything that happened there or whatever, but just to tell the whole story in a way.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The hostage crisis breaks out in November 79 because David Rockefeller from, of course, Standard Oil of New Jersey, aka Exxon and Aramco and all those things, the chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank at that time, he was very close with Jimmy Carter, and he convinced Carter to let the Shaw into the United States for cancer treatment. That was what caused the riot at the embassy and the seizure of the hostages. Now, I don't know, and I'm sure there are books about this that I just haven't read yet, you know, kind of thing that explain whether it really was the IRGC that took the lead in that or whether it was the students who did it or what, but obviously the government held the hostages and kept the thing going. So they bear responsibility for that. But the point being that America had been trying to work with the Ayatollah up until then. The idea was not that, oh, Shiite fundamentalist Islam says that all white Christians from North America must lay down dead right now because that's their religious belief. Look at them ranting.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gulf is now an American lake, and we will take any move by any power, read the USSR, to move into the Persian Gulf as an attack on the United States itself, right? We're like bringing the Gulf those waters into NATO, right? Given a full war guarantee to keep the Soviets safe. And by the way, oh, I'm sorry, I'm skipping one. See, go back. Forgive me for the, it's hard to stay in line here.”
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, the initial effects of the invention are likely to be adverse for us for the following reasons, and then he says that it'll make the hawks talk about how we better do something about Iran, and he says this could bring us into a head-to-head confrontation with the Soviets. So this is very interesting, Lex, because, well, one, this is why America's passing intelligence to the Ayatollah about threats from the Soviets. We think that now that Iran is essentially destabilized because of the revolution, and we just deliberately, or at least we're trying to and apparently succeeded in a sense in baiting them into invading Afghanistan, now we're worried that they're too expansionists and that they're going to roll into Persia next, and then they'd be right on the Persian Gulf. And we can't have that. So that was when Jimmy Carter announced in his speech in 1980 that Carter Doctrine that said that the Persian”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the important part here, I mean, there's a lot, it's a bit, but if you go down, you will see where, oh, here, this could become a Soviet Vietnam while it could become a Soviet Vietnam. In other words, see, they're already talking about in that context here in writing, we see. And it's from Robert Gates' first memoir, by the way, where he says it was Brasinsky and Slocum. By the way, that's my source for.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way and hurt him in doing that. So that's what they were trying to do. That was the wisdom behind the operation in the first place. And now if you go, click back one to Brzezinski, you'll see where, and he later misparaphrases this a little bit. He's kind of cute, Brzezinski, but”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They came up with this brilliant idea that what we'll do is we will bait the Soviets into overexpansion. Now we don't want them to invade West Germany, but the Afghans are expendable. So if we can bait the Soviets into Afghanistan and bog them down, we will be adding straw to the camel's back. This is a way to inflict because by then think of it. The word Vietnam, that's not even the name of a country over there somewhere anymore. Vietnam at that time, that word means some horrible, stupid no wind quagmire thing that you shouldn't have done. You shot yourself in the foot and the leg, and lost your friend Jimmy down the street and everything. We don't want to do that, you know? That was what Vietnam meant to America was like, God dang, what a mistake that was. So now they're saying let's do that to the Reds, okay? We'll bog them down, believe them to bankruptcy, and force them out the hard way.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Regime. It was not one of the Soviet republics, right? But they had a sock puppet regime there, but they wanted to. Maintain it, and it was falling apart, so they rushed to intervene. However, Lex, the point still remains that the United States of America was trying to bait the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan. We're going to get back to why this is so relevant to the Iran thing in just one second, but let's stop and talk about this for a second. Why would they do that? And they would do that also because of Vietnam. Because at the end of Vietnam, Americans had what the government considered to be a mental illness, Vietnam syndrome. that meant that Americans didn't want to do this anymore. Contain communism at this cost? Who really cares if Vietnam goes commemorate? We do business with them now, you know, and so people weren't into it anymore. So this is where Zabigne Brzinski and he was National Security Advisor under Jimmy Carter. And his, I guess, counterpart at defense, a guy named Walter Slope.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the important part is provide unilaterally or through third countries as appropriate support to Afghan insurgents. This is now a finding is an order from a president to the CIA to do something. That's what a finding means. So this is an order to CIA to do this. Now, on that order, they did start pouring in support to the Mujahideen. Now, I have to tell you that my best experts on this, like Eric Margalies, and I got this also from reading Andrei Sakharov, the famous Soviet nuclear physicist and dissident, that they both said that it was an American support for the Mujahideen that really provoked the Russians into invading Afghanistan. Because what it was was the sock puppet dictator was a basket case, and he had created so many enemies that he just couldn't hold it together. So the first thing the Soviets did when they invaded in December of 79 was take him out back and shoot him and replace him with a new guy. So that was really the cause of the Soviet intervention there. They had a commisc puppet.”
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'm skipping ahead a step, but I just like that part. But so, okay, so America supports the revolution in 1979, in February. They're warning this guy, hey, you better look out for Saddam Hussein and his intentions, and we're going to get back to that in one moment here. And they were also warning them about the threat from the Soviet Union. Now, why is that? Well, that's because skip over Iran. Now we're talking about Afghanistan and Zabitin Brzinski's policy that let's support the Mujahideen in Afghanistan in order to try to provoke Soviet intervention there. And so A memo, people can find this at scotthorton.org if you want to look at it. It's from, you want to go ahead and pull it up?”
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 what, by the way, I usually forget to mention this when I tell this story takes another few seconds to mention it. Saddam Hussein had been groomed by the CIA since the 1950s, on and off, and he had been part of different dictator regimes on and off. He'd been in exile in Cairo for a little while and this kind of thing. And then in the 70s leading up to the coup, I think it was really closer to the Soviet Union. And so we'll get to the, I guess I'll mention it now, the huge irony of the fact that in the Iran-Iraq war. Was America supporting Saddam Hussein and his Soviet military versus Iran and its American one, right?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you've already been bested at that point. I mean, they could all rush the stage, but that ain't going to do them any good, you know? But before you.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, he was a psychopath, man. No question. He was a brute of a dictator, right? There's a lot of El Presidentes in the world. Not all of them train their sons to torture people from the time they're young and stuff.”
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's got a huge stadium of guys, and he just starts calling names, and everybody whose name he calls has to go out back and get shot. Like, it's gnarly, man.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your triumphant return, Mr. Ayatollah, right? Which USA is just completely aiding and abetting, right? These are shots they called and made happen, right? They sent him home to inherit the thing. And then they did work with him. People forget, man, and I was just very young at that time. But I, you know, was raised kind of in the atmosphere of all of this and even back then people conflated the revolution itself with the hostage crisis as just one story at all is spoken in one breath. But in fact, the revolution was in February of 1979, and the hostage crisis didn't break out until November. So what was happening in the meantime? Well, one of the things was the Americans were warning the new Iranian regime about threats from the new dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, who had just overthrown the government in a bloody coup d'etat, no revolution there. And you can watch the video of this. Have you ever seen the video of Saddam's overthrow in Iraq?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know there's so much, but we're going to do it, man. So here's what happens America goes ahead and allows Ayatollah to get on the plane in Paris, France and go home. Now, I remember even as a kid, but aren't the French our friends when they had checked?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not my responsibility. All I did was do it. You know, and that's how they are. And they have, that's their, this is also part of the economics of democracy too, where they have such, and I'm not arguing for the opposite, but I'm just saying the reality is you have such short terms of office, you have a very high time preference, right? Instead of like working on long-term projects about what's the future of mankind going to look like 100 years from now, you're looking at a much shorter time horizon, you know, including who's going to finance your next election so that you'll have any say so whatsoever. And as Yoda and Palpatine agree that all who have power are afraid to lose it, because what if the other guy had it instead? It would be worse. Everybody knows that, which is, of course, a huge part of the story of the American Empire here, you know?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it showed. And that was the deal. And that was why it was such a big deal and how he made Nixon's enemies list and all these things, even though it didn't really expose Nixon. It exposed LBJ and the predecessors, but it was a huge shock that they had been lined us and lined us and lined to us deliberately, knowing that this has got to be somebody else's problem, right? There's a phone call of LBJ saying to a Republican senator friend of his that I can't be the first president to lose a war. He's just going to retire first and make it Nixon's problem. Same as George W. Bush said, oh, the end of Iraq? Well, that'll just have to be up to other presidents to decide.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“South Vietnamese government could not stand. They did not have popular consent that the insurgency in the South was not just based on support from the North, but their own indigenous revolution against what they see, you know, as intolerable for an intervention and wanted to force this out. And it's funny because McNair later says that I guess he didn't read the Pentagon papers that, no, we were just sure that it was the capitalist versus the communists like all this stuff about they didn't want to be ruled over foreign white devils. That never occurred to us, you know, like, come on. You know, as Chomsky said, come on, America invaded South Vietnam, that the government that was inviting us to stay was the government that we put in there, or at least after we overthrew the one we didn't like, the one we put in there, no different than, as we're going to talk about, Hamid Karzai inviting us to please stay in Afghanistan. Come on, who's zooming who here?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the Pentagon papers, first of all, was, and he wrote this while he was working at RAN, that he had full top secret clearance, and they were commissioned by Secretary of Defense McNamara to write a real secret top secret history of the Vietnam War and the entire history of our involvement in Indochina since the end of the Second World War. And so that was what they did was they wrote like eyes only for the Secretary of Defense type material. So it had everything in there. Ellsberg was in charge of writing it along with Leslie Gelb, who shut his mouth and went along and later became the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and was a good dog, right? But anyway, they were the ones who wrote it together. And Ellsberg was brave enough to liberate the thing, and he tried to leak it to the Senate over and over and over again. Mike Gravelle eventually started reading it into the record and then finally the New York Times got the courage to start publishing the thing. And it showed that they knew that they couldn't win all along. They knew that the...”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then he sees the president run with it anyway. And now the historian Gareth Porter says that actually McNamara lied to LBJ and he can prove it. And I can't cite all the chapter and verse, but I trust Gareth. He's great. And he says it actually was McNamara LiDWJ when they knew that it was a mistake.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And narrow that thing down. So that's part of the guy's background where he comes from. I beg people to read, it's called Secret. It's a memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and then also the doomsday machine. And by the way, his first book, Secrets, begins with his first day on the job. I was joking around earlier. He's deputy undersecretary of state for whatever it was. I can't remember if his state or defense. Maybe it was defense. It had to have been defense. Forgive me for before. And then the first thing that happens when he clocks in that day for his job is the thing starts coming across the teletype. Ships attacked in the Tonkin Gulf. And then he's reading, oh, never mind. That was a mistake.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going on here And he was at Rand, right? His job was riding, and this was when Rand, I guess, was much more important and very closely tied to the Pentagon. And their whole thing was like riding up game theory nuclear warfare plans. One of the things he did was he found out and Jack Kennedy had to fight like mad. They had to go back and forth over and over and over to even get the war plan from the Pentagon. And they finally got the war plan from the Pentagon and it said if we have a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, we nuke every single city in the Soviet Union and China. So that would be, I don't know if that includes all the Warsaw Pact, but it includes all the republics and China. And the thinking was that if America and the Soviet Union destroy each other and Europe, well, we'll be damned if we're going to leave Earth to those dirty Chicombs. So we're going to kill all them too. And that was the thinking and thing. And it was Ellsberg told Kennedy that, and Kennedy told Ellsberg to make sure and force the Pentagon to rewrite the plan.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Papers. And then all the papers that he had hidden away, he gave them to his brother and his brother lost them. And so then he decided later, you know what? I remember enough of this stuff that I can go ahead and just write from memory. And he was so brilliant, dude. I mean, I don't know what his IQ was, but I know his father built the first assembly line for the atom bomb. And they asked him if he would do the same for the H-bomb and he refused for moral reasons. So that was his background in the first place. And he's just such a great guy, man.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yeah, he's an absolutely brilliant guy. I'm proud to say I was a friend for 10, 15 years there. I don't know, quite a while. So he endorsed my first two books. I'm very proud to say, and he did not have a chance to read provoked, unfortunately. But I know he would have liked it because we were email buddies and I know that he thought very much along the same lines as me and John Mearsheimer and others, you know, as people are probably familiar, think we'll get more to that. But on that issue, he was great. But he was a brilliant genius and he was a nuclear war planner. That was his second book. It was called The Doomsday Machine, Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. And he had liberated a bunch of documents about nuclear war as well. But he had decided with his quote-unquote co-conspirator that they should just focus on Vietnam first. That's the thing that it matters the most right now, and that was the Pentagon.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And she could know a lot of secret things, but without understanding what he understands, she does not understand what she needs to know. I can promise you that much, you know?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was in the interview that I asked her about, I can't remember the exact context, but I asked her about, well, don't you read Patrick Coburn? And she goes, who's Patrick Coburn? And I go, who's Patrick Coper? Patrick Coburn is the most important Anglo in Iraq. He's the one who understands all of this stuff more and better than all of y'all. And he writes in the independent you can read it for free. Just register with your email address for God's sake, man. I can't believe. And she's like, who even is that?”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There and it's going to declare independence for you. How are you going to handle that? Like, they don't seem to think this through. And I have to say, one of the great disappointments of growing up is you find out that the rest of the adults aren't so smart. They're just regular dudes like you. And I think a lot of times State Department people might have very advanced knowledge. Doesn't mean they have very advanced wisdom. You know, there's something else Daniel Elsberg talks about is when you have access to classified information, then you don't pay any attention to anybody who doesn't because what do they know? You know all these things that they couldn't possibly be taking into account. So you immediately close your circle of people who you listen to. And I'll tell you great example this from my own experience was I interviewed a CIA analyst, apparently a pretty important executive at one time in the Terra War named Cynthia Storber. And I asked her, I forget if it was in the interview or not. I hope I'm not like speaking out of school.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your government bureaucrat getting paid way above the market, then what do you want to do? Go get a job. A great example of this I cite in the book is at the end of the Afghan war, there are multiple military officers, like not too, too high, but like high enough to be quoted by the news saying, well, now that that's over, we're looking for other things to do. So we're going to pivot to Africa and go find some Islamists there because we are looking for ways to stay globally engaged. Because, of course, that's their interest to do, whether that's good for Africa or good for the American people is just, it's kind of a separate question that they're not really dealing with. And so I think that's a huge part of it. I mean, one of the things was William Sullivan said that, well, Khomeini, he's like the Iranian Gandhi. Well, first of all, he's not a pacifist. But second of all, didn't Gandhi kick the British Empire out of India? So what are you saying? You're deliberately putting in a guy who's going to limit your influence.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say and do as they can in committee, like come to a consensus. And then a lot of times once those decisions are made, now to go back on that decision means that you are attempting to disgrace the people who led the decision making on that thing and say that they were wrong and they shouldn't have done the thing they did. Now they got to do this instead. And so you see just an absolute unwillingness to make change. And this is something that capitalism ultimately, like everybody's got ego problems. But ultimately the boss has to look at an accounting sheet and say this isn't working. So I'm going to have to swallow my pride or go out of business, right? In government, it's not like that. The worst they do, the better off they are. This is why it was the soldiers in Vietnam called the military itself, the army itself, the self-licking ice cream cone, because it means that they cause chaos, but then chaos is their job, is to go and fix that. And so, you know, and if”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ellsberg tells a story of where he's the deputy undersecretary of state for making up nonsense or whatever it is or defense of the no state I believe and his whole job is making his boss look good whether he agrees with him or not and then the hope is that next year he'll be and his boss's position and his boss will move up one and then his job will be making his boss look good then and how and he explains how the truth and reality just gets washed out of this right another famous one or should be famous is my friend David Hardy who wrote the best book about the Waco massacre he is a great lawyer and he had been a former interior department cop and he said there's truth and there's falsity like that's the world we live in but in government work there's our position and our position takes place on an entirely different plane than truth and falsity our position is the thing a bunch of people in a room agreed that they”
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 a lot of things, and the whole time we're in our discussion here, we'll be talking about a massive conspiracy of interests at play all the time, but this is, and I've never read a bunch of books about this, I probably should, at least interview these guys. You'd be interested in this if you don't already know the subject is public choice theory. It's kind of a branch of libertarian political economy studies that says that essentially one of its major aspects is that there really is no national interest the way you and I might think of it sitting here hashing it out across the table because what becomes the national interest is the interests of the people in charge of making the decisions for the nation. And so they all ultimately are private choices, aren't they? And the national interest becomes subsumed by what's good for me now, and so telling all my bosses they're all wrong is not good for me now, and on the very basic level, you know, I've read quite a few books just from former insiders like Daniel Ellsberg and other people like that.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Will the CIA and the State Department told Jimmy Carter, listen this Ayatollah Khomeini, he's not so bad. We know this guy. He was part of a group of Shiite clergy who helped to agitate against Mosedek in nineteen fifty three, and so we have at least some contact, and we think that we can deal with him today.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really afford, and it helped to destabilize his regime somewhat. And then I don't know the full extent of America turning on him before the revolution, but I know that by the time of the Revolution in nineteen seventy nine, he was sick with cancer and very sick, and the Americans secretly knew that, CIA knew that, you know, but it was not public knowledge, that it was whatever stage four or whatever he was doomed. And so they knew the revolution was coming, and they were trying to figure out how to handle it. And there was, the revolution was coming anyway. And it wasn't just, there's going to be a change of leadership. When we say revolution here, we mean mobs in the street demanding an end to the old regime in huge numbers, right? A very large-scale popular revolution. And they're trying to figure out how to get the handle on it. Some of Carter's critics said what he should have done was had the military.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so the slow version is. Store at the end of Vietnam. Okay, so one major aspect of the end of Vietnam was that Richard Nixon felt like he had to bribe the military industrial complex some other way. And so one of the things that he did was he turned to the Shah of Rezapalavi in Iran and asked him to increase arms sales. Now I guess I could go back. I think everybody knows that the CIA helped with the coup of 1953 to reinstall the Shah, who was the son of the last dictator and had already been in for a while. And they put him back in. And so now this is, and that was in 53. So now this is in the early 70s, 20 years later. And Nixon's saying, hey, you know what really helped me would be if you would buy a bunch of fighter jets. So I think it's kind of notorious, right, that Iran still has F-4s and F-14s. That's where they got them from was the Nixon Ford administration this push to do that, and the Shah was apparently pretty obsessed with looking very first world with his very fancy first world army.”
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, so I'll try to tell the somewhat fast version, although Lex has a kiss of death every time I say that. We'll go through”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether they lost their limb in war or otherwise. If you want to boil it down, what did anyone get out of this other than, you know, some people got a dividend check from Lockheed or that kind of thing? But that's not to the benefit of the society whatsoever. So that does not count. You want to talk about what society got out of it? What America got out of it? We have better Luke Skywalker hands than before. That's it.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they say that this could lead to suicide because, of course, we know that, right? They even have to say that on TV sometimes. Some of these drugs cause suicidal or homicidal obsessions and this kind of thing, that we know that's one of the side effects. So some percentage of these guys might have made it if the government healthcare system hadn't helped them in the end is another bitter irony, you know. The whole thing is just, you know, you said we got nothing out of it. I said half in jest, but it is serious, but it's also, it shows by relief what a disaster this is that the only thing we did get out of it, like literally, was advancements in prosthetic limbs for amputees.”
2025-08-24 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #478 – Scott Horton: The Case Against War and the Military Industrial Complex · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source