The Complicated Global Economy with Ron Dodson

Conversations That Matter

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00:28

Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. My name is John Harris, and we have a special guest today.

00:34

We're gonna talk about a number of things. I'm not actually certain yet where the conversation will take us, but I know wherever it takes us, it will be edifying for you as a believer and for non -believers listening.

00:45

Hopefully it will be convicting and help you come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ. And with that,

00:51

I just need to make one quick announcement before we introduce our guest. We do have a conference coming up in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, Christianity and the

01:00

Founding, Christianityandthefounding .com if you wanna find out more. We also have a really great dinner that is going to be in conjunction with that conference.

01:10

I would love to see you there. Okay, with that, let's start the podcast and let me introduce to you

01:16

Ron Dotson. Ron Dotson is a hedge fund manager. He's there with the

01:21

Dallas Skyline in the background in the new founding office. And you can follow him on X and it's very simple.

01:27

It's his name, it's Ron Dotson or on Substack. So Ron, thank you and welcome to the podcast. Oh, thanks for having me,

01:33

John. Appreciate it. Yeah, it was really good to meet you. Actually, I met you, I think about a year ago, but to get to know you a little better, not too long ago as I was in Dallas.

01:44

And you have a lot of different hats that you wear. And so maybe take a minute and introduce people to who you are because I know you're a guitarist, you're a hedge fund manager, you give all this sage wisdom to people there in the new founding office.

02:01

Who is Ron Dotson? I'm a lifelong Dallasite Texan.

02:10

I went to SMU, played baseball at SMU and then went to UT grad, got in my family businesses and multifamily real estate.

02:21

But really wanted to go kind of chart my own path for a bit. And so I, in grad school, studied derivative finance, went to work for a hedge fund, did that.

02:34

And then kind of been doing my, I've kind of been one foot in each of those, in each of those areas for my career.

02:45

I was basically a family office manager. So running an internal hedge fund for a lot of my career for the money that we were producing in multifamily.

03:00

And so we sold the biggest part of that business a couple of years ago. I opened this up and which runs side -by -side to the hedge fund that I manage.

03:09

But while all that was going on, I've always been very interested in theology and where it crosses over with philosophy.

03:23

I studied Latin for five years when I was young and then kind of taught myself a coin a when

03:33

I got out of school. Really have a huge interest in the intertestamental period because I think as Protestants we, you know,

03:44

I don't think the Apocrypha should be considered scripture, but it's interesting history.

03:50

And I, but as Protestants, you know, we kind of ignore that period and it's hugely formative to Christ's mission and interaction with the

03:59

Pharisees and Sadducees. So that's, and then, you know, did some work with the Center for the

04:04

Study of New Testament Manuscripts. And so all that stuff is very, very interesting to me.

04:11

Has been for a long time. And I was encouraged to, I taught big

04:17

Sunday school class at my church. I'm PCA Presbyterian officer in that and in my church.

04:25

And so was encouraged to start writing and I've been doing that for a couple of years now. And you got saved or however you wanna phrase that.

04:34

Jesus found you and you repented of your sins at a very young age, right? Yeah, well, my folks were divorced in the seventies.

04:42

My mom was a beauty queen and my dad was a quarterback and they got married at 19.

04:47

And so, you know, I had single parents in the seventies and all that implies, but my father, my grandfather on my dad's side was very devout and spent a lot of time with him.

05:02

He was born in 1903. So he was fireman for Bell Helicopter.

05:07

He was the fireman on the flight line. This was during Vietnam. And so he would wear the foil suit and go out on the flight line while they were testing the

05:17

Hueys and the Cobras before creating them up to send them to Southeast Asia. And he was just a hero to me.

05:24

And I saw him every night. I spent a ton of time with my grandparents because my folks were divorced and I saw him every night reading his

05:31

Bible till one or 2 a .m. And he encouraged me. He helped me learn to read at a very early age, reading the sports page and then encouraged me to read and gave me a

05:42

Bible at an early age. And of course, it just that he poured into me in a way that was completely a sign of God's sovereign grace.

05:54

So it was really encouraging and he loved people. His favorite thing was once he retired, he'd grab his wife, my grandmother and me and we'd go to the local mall and walk around and he'd just talk to anybody who would listen about Jesus.

06:10

And not in a manipulative way either, just in a,

06:17

I'm so happy to be saved by the sovereign king kind of thing. And he's

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Southern Baptist. So I was baptized Southern Baptist and have a lot of, still have a lot of love for my

06:31

Southern Baptist brothers and sisters. And even though I, by conviction of am

06:39

Presbyterian, I had to accept John Calvin into my heart at one point. So that's a joke. That's kind of who

06:46

I am. All this, one of the things that really convicts me is as Protestants is that we are, if we're not seeing our mission as a prophetic mission to the whole of the church, then it's kind of a

07:01

LARP and we can't just be a holy huddle. And so, and I don't mean giving up our distinctives.

07:10

I think those distinctives are important, but they're distinctives meant to, the reformers really wanted to reform the church and the protest was a part of that.

07:21

And so that's a real conviction of mine. So I really am a,

07:27

I wanna be without being liberal ecumenical, I'm kind of a big tent guy who still holds to the distinctives.

07:37

And that makes for interesting conversations slash arguments at times. But that's really what drives me.

07:45

And I think a lot of the things that I study, maybe play a part in that, the writing that I do.

07:51

Well, you write about a broad range of topics and you have a very encouraging kind of disposition.

07:57

And so I've noticed that you're on a lot of other podcasts that would be somewhat adjacent to this one.

08:04

And so, I'm sorry that you're kind of late in coming to the conversations that matter podcast here, but I want to talk about a few things.

08:14

We just obviously briefly mentioned before starting the show, kind of what you just mentioned about where Christians fit in, what

08:21

Christians should be thinking of and doing, how they should be engaging the world around them.

08:28

But the world around them is changing very quickly. And this is going to impact a lot of things, things that maybe we, someone like yourself even, who is looking towards the future may not even know fully yet because it's so volatile and so many different directions could manifest themselves.

08:47

So I think a good way to enter this conversation since you're a finance guy especially is to talk about what's happening right around us.

08:55

And that is the tariff issue. And every morning there's new headlines about what's going to happen with the tariffs.

09:02

One of the things I've noticed is a lot of guys on the Christian right, and maybe this is a good thing, who don't know a lot about economics, but they are in on the

09:14

MAGA agenda, will frame it this way. They'll say the market economy was fake and the money, it just wasn't real.

09:24

We were living in a deception and Trump is writing the ship. He's actually revealing, pulling the curtain back, revealing what our economy actually is like.

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And he's, it may affect people who have 401ks and that kind of thing, but that's a good thing.

09:39

It needed to happen. And so it's kind of like the guy who's overweight and needs to go on a diet.

09:46

America needs to slim down. We need to get back into a more fighting spirit and a spirit of readiness and all of that.

09:54

So that's not very helpful to some people who really want to understand what's going on, but that's how I've heard it framed.

10:00

So why don't you just take it away and explain to us what's really going on, the thinking behind this, and then maybe broadly speaking, how does this fit into the globalist kind of, or the global political situation that we have?

10:17

Well, I think what you said in describing kind of the down the line

10:23

MAGA positioning, there's some truth in that, but I think what we need to hold as Christians, what we need, there's very basics that we need to hold onto.

10:37

And so there is a Christian, I believe there's a Christian economic ideal, and that is, from a very early time, if John, you had a goat and I had maybe a parcel of land, a tiny bit of land or something

10:58

I wasn't using, and we could trade, both of us would say, thank you, right?

11:04

And that's tied to, I mean, Jesus, even when he's saying the one anothering statements, there's an economic aspect to that.

11:12

And so free price discovery and the arm's length transaction, I think are endemic to a

11:19

Christian economic ethic. That's, I think that anything that gets, that moves towards, there's a reason that communism has to reject

11:34

God, especially Trinitarian views of God, because it flattens out those, well, again, we're reflecting perichoresis, the relationship within the

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Trinity itself. And so when I go right over here, across the street to this 7 -Eleven, and the guy who, and I buy a pack of gum because I ate lunch and my breath stinks, and I give him, or I put my cart down, and 7 -Eleven gets a little bit of money, and I get my thing of ice, whatever, gum, both of us are better off, right?

12:20

And that is basic, but hugely important. I think what is lost, so let's go further on,

12:31

Adam Smith comes along and says, wow, look at the geopolitical world is set up in these nations that due to where they are and who they are, have different advantages.

12:47

And those different advantages are similar to the John and Ron meeting together and doing the double thank you, can that be applied to nations as well?

13:00

And the answer is yes, but what we forget is that Adam Smith assumed

13:07

Christendom. He assumed an equanimity of presuppositions.

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In other words, that when Ron and John get together, we both have basic ideas of equal scales and we're not trying to cheat each other, and we worship the same

13:27

God and the value structure that that implies. So a global, if we wanna take

13:39

Adam Smith to a global system, what that says is all those equal scales, all those sameness of presuppositions has to be erased.

13:51

That's not important anymore. What's important is the, what's truly important and we can get, I don't wanna get too super ridiculous sophisticated, but is the instantaneous liquid flow of capital across borders.

14:05

That's what ends up being most important. And when you do that, then what you're really saying is, is those dollars or whatever the currency is, the dollar just happens to be the reserve currency of the world and it still is.

14:18

It may have been weakened a little bit. We can talk about that because that's driving some of this as well.

14:24

That those currencies end up having more importance than the citizens themselves.

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And so that's part of what this MAGA, the guys who are pushing kind of the

14:36

MAGA view on all this, that's what they're sensing, even if maybe they're not explaining it very well. It has to do with,

14:42

I just wrote about this, what's called Dutch disease. And Dutch disease is, well,

14:49

I think we need to come up with a new name, but it's in Holland found in their territorial waters,

14:56

I think late 60s, early 70s, a huge deposits of natural gas. And traditionally

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Holland is just a big farming, traditionally farming, a little bit of shipbuilding, but mostly it's just in a very diverse economy.

15:12

And when natural gas was found, it's so dwarfed the output, the

15:19

GDP output, GDP's kind of fake anyway, we get to that.

15:25

Charles Haywood just wrote an excellent essay six weeks, eight weeks ago on that, if you wanna go at the worthy house, if you wanna go get a, spent 45 minutes talking about how

15:38

GDP's kind of a poor substitute for actual economics, and it's great. But anyway, natural gas in Holland dominated the economy.

15:49

And so, and it hollowed out all these other industries. And what I mean is, is all the human capital, all the smart people ended up going into this natural gas industry.

16:00

And then when the natural gas kind of dried up, Holland was a shell of itself. And so that became, that thing is called

16:08

Dutch disease. And the United States, especially since, so you had a kind of a three stage way in which the

16:17

United States has its own Dutch disease. Number one is, or maybe four stages, but you had, the first stage was

16:25

FDR for his own reasons. It was really to finance the three letter expansion and the social safety net, social engineering project of FDR took real, he was the guy, everybody blames it on Nixon, but it was

16:40

FDR took us off the gold standard, said the Federal Reserve is gonna have basically carte blanche with the dollar, with the

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Federal Reserve note, which is what our dollars are. They're like a check written on, they're a bank note and the bank is the

16:55

Federal Reserve. The second deal was after World War II and you had the

17:00

Marshall Plan, which is where we basically financed the rebuilding of Europe. We did this with, this is how the dollar became, really started to become the world's reserve currency.

17:13

And then the third stage is because of that Marshall Plan, and you had Bretton Woods, which was this way where all the other currencies were kind of pegged to a channel of value that was centered on the dollar.

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But we had exported so many dollars, there was no way we could keep this artificial peg to gold anymore.

17:38

And so Nixon really, his hands were tied and he said, we can't do this gold peg anymore.

17:46

And then you had China enter the world, you have the creation of the World Trade Organization and China entering into it to where everybody just said, hey, you know what?

17:54

We'll let China build everything. So in that four stage process, the dollar became our natural gas for Holland to where it dominated the entirety of the economy to where all the smart, not all the smart people, but smart people ended up wanting to be hedge fund managers.

18:19

And instead of going into, in the 1960s, if you were really smart and had that kind of mind, you were going to work either for NASA or one of the, we were going to the moon and we were going to, you went to work for NASA or IBM or one of the

18:39

Rockefeller, Rocketdyne. Rocketdyne was the old, they built the F1 engines for the bottom stage of the

18:46

Saturn V. Or you were going to work for one of these JPL or some type of industrial thing.

18:56

And that eventually changed over time to where now if you're smart, you're trying to figure out how can

19:03

I write a program in Python in order to extract value using the dollar as this cudgel to the rest of the world.

19:13

And it's hollowed us out. Why do we want to make anything? We're finance bros, you know?

19:19

And so it's a real problem. And then there's all kinds of issues that flow from that.

19:29

And so what accelerated this issue is, is you had,

19:38

I mean, and the ruling classes is really changed from a classical, in the

19:46

United States, better or worse, was never a traditionally rightist kind of place.

19:54

You had traditional rightists, you know, Washington was kind of a man of the right.

19:59

You know, he was part of the old Royal line in England. And you see some of this, you know, a more perfect union is a call to, can we do

20:10

England better kind of thing? Can we do a UK that is better?

20:18

But once you had the second republic, which is what the modern, you know, we had the

20:24

Articles of Confederation. Once you get to the constitution and you have these co -equal branches and really a

20:33

Madison really pushing against any type of establishment. And Madison writes in his letters, look,

20:41

I want to weaken the church as a whole so that it's not a political force.

20:48

And that's hard for us as conservative, you know, kind of as dissident right

20:53

Christians, that's hard for us to hear, but that's just part of it. So these liberal assumptions were baked in.

20:59

And so we've got to just be cognizant of that, but it changed from classically liberal to this neoliberal idea.

21:08

And the neoliberal idea is really that is multicultural. Citizenship really doesn't matter that GDP, modern economics really says that John, you and me, we're not individual reflections of the image of God.

21:25

We're fungible economic units. And so, and Carl Schmitt wrote very cogently.

21:31

I know he's a controversial guy, but his writing is fantastic. He writes that, look, if you're gonna in the, it's either crisis of parliamentary democracy.

21:40

I think that's where it is. He's a guy who wrote political theology, which is absolutely brilliant.

21:47

Then he wrote a concept of the political, but in crisis parliamentary democracy, he basically says that this neoliberal, he doesn't call it neoliberalism, but that's the move that was happening in the first part of the 20th century, that really if your idea is that all opinions are the same, as opposed to a discovering the best way to reflect what is true and right, that's transcendent, then everybody, you've got to flatten everything out.

22:15

So you get this deracinated cosmopolitanism that citizenship doesn't matter.

22:24

What matters is how can liquidity flow as fast, how can capital flow as fast as possible?

22:31

So that's coming home to roost. That's what we're living in, and that's why citizenship doesn't matter.

22:36

That's why, why do you care if all these people flow in by the boatloads? And my last point, golly,

22:42

I've been going on forever, but what really brought this to bear is in the

22:49

Biden presidency, and which was neoliberal maximalization, which was kind of the extension of the

23:01

Clinton, Obama, and interestingly enough, those two camps really don't get along, but they were different flavors of the same impetus, this neoliberal impetus.

23:13

You had Putin invade Ukraine. And so what's the problem there?

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What do we have to do? And forget all the conspiracy theories, which I think have a lot of basis in truth about what was going on in Ukraine, some at least, some of the corruption, but what's the big deal?

23:33

The big deal is, wow, borders on the one hand don't matter, but they really do matter if this big, the biggest advocate for anti -liberalism is gonna cross one, right?

23:50

And so the response to that was to basically shut

23:56

Russia and the Russian acolytes out of the dollar system. So, oh, we're gonna punish

24:05

Russia by doing these things. And hey, you know, Russia, absolutely the aggressor.

24:11

We can argue whether or not it was, they were provoked or unprovoked. The answer is they were provoked.

24:17

But that being said, that's my opinion at least, that if when shutting them off, when you have this reserve currency, this

24:28

Dutch, American Dutch disease, or our chief export is dollars.

24:33

Well, the problem is Russia's one of the chief producers of the things that trade in dollars.

24:39

That's oil and gas. And so suddenly when you have a reserve currency, the cool thing is you can produce all the deficits in the world, and they don't matter because the rest of the world is this dollar sponge that soaks it up.

24:55

And we cut off a huge portion of that. And that's what drove this massive inflation that was hugely underreported, unbelievably underreported.

25:06

You can go to shadowstats .com and look at some real measures of what inflation did under Biden.

25:13

So we caused this crisis that the neoliberal ideal probably could have gone on,

25:21

I don't know, for a while, but kind of bringing this to a head in how we responded to the

25:30

Russian incursion on Ukraine. So that's kind of my, I think that's a good place for me to stop and then -

25:37

We're good. Yeah, there's two things I want to explore. I think that was great. The first one is you had mentioned early in your presentation there that Adam Smith had assumed

25:50

Christianity and fair trade. Well, Christendom at least. Christendom, yeah, that there was a sense in the market of we're not going to give you unjust balances and these kinds of things.

26:02

So I'd like to expand on that a little bit. Because Trump has been consistent for decades saying that we're getting a raw deal with China specifically, that they're devaluing their own currency to manipulate us.

26:20

And I don't know all the ins and outs of that, but we've heard this for years. And I think in 2016, people weren't ready for that.

26:27

They didn't understand it and it wasn't a resonating message. So Trump, and I'm not saying that he did this strategically but he became the wall guy and that really resonated.

26:37

I think this term though is now, this is Trump's baby. It seems to me like this is the term

26:42

Trump wanted initially because he's been talking about this forever. So explain to us maybe what you meant by Adam Smith assumed

26:52

Christendom, we don't have Christendom and these countries that don't have Christendom are somehow being unfair.

27:00

And cause it's free trade versus fair trade, right? That's the distinction we're always seeing. What is that? Well, there's a lot of issues there and it's separate.

27:08

The Asian question is separate from the European question. So let's do Europe first because it's a little,

27:14

I think it's a little easier. We rebuilt Europe with this Marshall plan and the Marshall plan at some point had to end because you can't finance.

27:23

It's like, let's say, I mean, let's say you're the oldest brother and your little brother is maybe not quite as smart, doesn't have quite the work ethic, but you figure you can, man, you really wanna, you're 10 years ahead of him and you can help him pay for college and get him set up.

27:40

But at some point he's gotta do his own thing, right? That's the European thing. So we look the other way with these massive, we were such a big and growing market.

27:51

We wanted Europe to be a NATO partner because of the

27:57

Soviet Union, not Russia, but the Soviet Union, these godless communists.

28:04

And we were, even though, even that's kind of complicated because we partnered with these godless communists in World War II and that's a whole nother, that's coming to a head too, by the way.

28:18

I mean, everybody's realizing that, wow, we basically financed the Soviets' victory in World War II.

28:25

And that goes against every, we're finally able to start talking about that. So everybody, the idea in World War II is can we just keep a radical tyrant from running half of Europe?

28:38

And we went over there and a lot of our men died and a radical tyrant ran half of Europe.

28:44

It was just the other guy, the guy we partnered with. Right. And even more people died.

28:50

Anyway, so we built this Marshall Plan and Europe was the younger brother that we needed to be strong in order to kind of counterbalance

28:58

Eastern Europe, which was under the thumb of the Soviets. Well, the Soviets went away and we, honestly, we don't really need

29:05

NATO anymore other than just as we built up, we used an ethnic hatred and I don't wanna get into, there's stuff that I think is nasty in some of our circles that I don't wanna get into, but our state department in this anti -Soviet positioning became and we employed a lot of people who had a natural ethnic hatred of Russians because it just was easy for them to do.

29:42

And so we're still dealing with that. And so when the Soviet, when the

29:48

USSR went away, instead of immediately kind of partnering with the guys who ran off communism, we still had a state department that was just really anti -Russian and we're still dealing with that.

30:02

Hey, you may agree with that or not, but there's some ethnic hate animosities that are still there that we're dealing with that you may or may not agree with.

30:12

I personally don't, but a lot of people do. And I get that. That's what we have.

30:18

So instead of this Marshall building up this little European little brother for the purposes of helping him be big and strong to him and the

30:30

Soviets and the Soviets went away and now, hey guys, you're ready to, hey, be on your own.

30:36

We just kept building this thing. And now, so we look the other way on tariffs and all these kinds of things.

30:45

The French didn't wanna compete with our wine. They didn't wanna compete with our farming. The Italians didn't wanna compete with our auto building.

30:53

The Germans really didn't wanna do that. The Brits had a bunch of tariffs. We look the other way because the bigger thing is we need a big, strong buddy over there, a little brother to fight the

31:05

Soviets and then the Russians, okay? And that's just, we're, and Trump is like, we're done with that.

31:13

We don't need that anymore. Y 'all are, can y 'all do, I mean, y 'all need to do your own thing.

31:20

And he's got enough people in his, he can't completely cut it off because NATO is this 800 pound gorilla that he can't do away with.

31:30

And there's a lot of people who still hate Russia and hey, that's why we've gotta build up, we still gotta have a strong Europe.

31:37

Well, Europe, I think everybody can see is a shell. You know, what is,

31:43

Germany's a disaster. The French are a little bit stronger because at least they still, they have a lot of nuclear power, but still a little, you know,

31:52

Spain completely depends on tourism and their coastal real estate.

31:59

England isn't even England anymore. You know, I hear horror stories from London.

32:06

And so that's ending. What the end game is,

32:12

I don't know, but Trump is like, hey, we can't do this whole deal where we just finance you and look the other way on tariffs.

32:18

So that's what's going on over there. Asia is a different thing because whereas in theory, and also part of the

32:27

European thing is, Christianity's turned into this tiny little minority because they've imported half of Africa and Saharan Islam.

32:40

And so we just don't have the same presuppositions anymore. It's like an alien place.

32:49

And I'm sorry, I know, you know, metaphysics, the neoliberals tried to outlaw metaphysics, but they didn't go away.

32:59

We still have to have, it's still real. Yeah. Metaphysics were always an alien thing for Asia, always.

33:09

We just had a different thing. And so with China, the issue is, it didn't start with they're gonna make everything.

33:24

The issue that underlied the otherness of China, how did this otherness, this completely radically different presuppositional framework manifest, whether just it's this, oh, good night, what's the term for it?

33:39

I just wrote about it. Now I'm having a brain fart. But this idea that there is no, there is no propriety over the ownership of ideas.

33:51

That is an alien thought, especially among the

33:56

Han. That's the ruling race of China, the

34:02

Han Chinese. Full disclosure, I have two, I have two, my godchildren are both

34:10

Chinese. So I have no disdain. I love all people everywhere,

34:16

I really do. But I'm talking about the ruling class and Maoist communism is ugly.

34:25

It's a special kind of gross because you wanna talk about people don't matter.

34:31

I mean, they've starved 30 million, at least maybe 50 of their own people just didn't.

34:39

Oh, yeah, reading a biography of Mao was the most horrific thing. And I've read deeply about Holocaust stuff and Japanese treatment in World War II of their even noncombatants.

34:54

It's despicable. But the worst thing I think I've ever read was about Mao and what

34:59

Mao did. Struggle sessions and starving people. Oh, it's horrific, people aren't even people.

35:07

People aren't people, and that's the communist thing. You remove God, you remove metaphysics, you remove transcendence, and this is what you get.

35:18

You either get that or in America, you get this rise of kind of a

35:23

Nietzschean. Anyway, we can talk philosophy in a minute. So in Asia, there's just no, we start trading with the

35:32

Chinese and suddenly all our stuff, there is no such thing as IP, of intellectual property.

35:40

And there's a litany of stories about, I wanna start a factory here and build this thing, and you can't because of regulation.

35:51

And you can do it for 10 cents on the dollar over there. So you send a prototype of your product over there.

35:58

Yeah, we can build this for you. We can do it for this, great. And then you never see any product and you're except on Amazon under a different name and you've got no recourse.

36:10

And this happens over and over. That's the small level. The higher level is stealth technology, atomic technology, pretty good evidence that the

36:21

Clintons wanted that. And I know for a fact from, how can

36:27

I talk about this? I did some work, some analyst work in the 2010 to 2012 timeframe when the

36:41

Chinese were starting the work in the Spratlys of building up, basically annexing the

36:46

South China Sea. And the feedback from the

36:52

Obama administration on some of this analysis was basically, hey, these guys are gonna be able to blockade

37:02

Malacca Strait in a half day cruise from where they are. Well, now they've even built a naval base in Laos.

37:11

So Malacca is done. Anyway, Malacca is the Strait between Singapore and whatever the island is, it's a

37:19

Borneo, I can't remember, right across the Strait from that Strait. And 30 % of the world GDP goes through that Strait.

37:26

And the Obama administration basically came back and said, this is a feature, not a bug of what we're doing.

37:34

So they wanted all this, they really did. And I think the idea is if China builds all our stuff, then we've basically got a

37:42

Mexican standoff. We've got the world reserve currency, they make everything.

37:48

We're not gonna, business partners at this level can't go to war with each other.

37:54

Well, sure they can, because they also make all our, you just, you lose all your sovereignty. So anyway, that's the difference between Europe, the dynamic in Europe, it's leading to the same place and the dynamic with Asia, specifically

38:07

China. Yes, hey, look, we need, if we're gonna be a sovereign nation where citizenship matters, and these are

38:14

Trump's big ideas, we need to be sovereign over our own deal. When we trade, we can't, do

38:22

I think Trump's an expert on Dutch disease? No, but I think he has it in his gut, he does understand.

38:28

And I've come up, I've dealt with him in business, in real estate, our lending team and his lending team back at Lehman Brothers way back in the day were the same group.

38:39

So I know how he understands certain aspects of these things. He, in his gut, understands sovereignty over a deal that you have to, if he's representing the people of the

38:54

United States, then he has to have some type of leverage in order to represent them.

38:59

So I, and all these other theories just support his gut does that make sense?

39:07

Yeah, I mean, the comeback is from the more libertarian wing and some guys who would say they're not even libertarians, but they're operating perhaps that way is that we are getting obviously a better price at a cheaper, it takes, and we're not suffering some of the same social costs and environmental costs that China is incurring in order to make the products that we use in our homes.

39:34

And so this is a good deal for us that the consumer is preferred in this. And so Trump is trying to prefer

39:42

United States corporations and businesses over the consumer. How do you think about that?

39:49

Because that's the big critique that I see out there. I don't know how he's supporting corporations.

39:55

If he was supporting corporations, I mean, look at the response in the stock market. You know, he, look, the libertarian,

40:06

I was a member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, you know, read,

40:12

I've got von Mises and Hayek and Hoppe on my bookshelf. Hoppe was hugely informative to my thinking.

40:25

So I appreciate those guys, but the big takeaway from Austrian, the Austrian based bedrock of what became libertarianism is that you need a sovereign in order to guarantee these basic freedoms.

40:43

You know, Hoppe is a monarchist even. Well, and I, just to clarify, I didn't mean, so the corporations obviously want to build their factories in places where they can employ people with cheaper wages and that kind of thing.

40:55

I meant like, in the sense of Trump wants strong corporation, he wants strong businesses to stay in the

41:01

United States. Right, right. And of course he says that he's doing this for the American worker, because he wants to drive up wages and stuff.

41:09

But the downside of it is that the consumers end up paying a higher price. And so in the end we lose.

41:15

That's the argument. And obviously there's things that are more important.

41:22

That's what I think. Like, there's just things more important than getting the cheap price on some of this. Losing out, as you,

41:30

I think rightly described, losing the soul of your country, having it hollowed out is a lot worse. But yeah, maybe explore that for a moment.

41:37

Cause I know people are listening to people that are in our circle sort of, that are saying this kind of thing.

41:44

Yeah, well, there's two aspects to this. There's the realist kind of the

41:50

John Mearsheimer, who I'm a huge fan of. The John Mearsheimer approach to things.

41:58

And let's come back to that in just a second. And then there's the value approach. And so the value approach is what you're talking about.

42:05

In that, look, is a nation simply an economic zone?

42:11

Are we fungible? Are Americans not unique reflections of the image of God?

42:18

Or they're instead just fungible economic units? And so we measure everything is in the aggregate and damn the individual.

42:28

Well, the problem is the libertarian should be the champions of the individual, right?

42:34

The libertarian ideal is that the individual is the individual sovereignty, right?

42:41

If you wanna go full anarcho -capitalist, right? And so I don't understand.

42:47

So, but again, Hoppe was great on this. In order for the individual to be, have any hope for sovereignty, there has to be a guarantor.

42:56

There has to be a super sovereign in order to guarantee that. We know this from covenantal theology.

43:04

If you're not dispensationalist, if you're kind of an old school, Presbyterian or Reformed Baptist or whatever, you understand that every covenant has a guarantor.

43:16

Otherwise, a covenant can't be self -enforcing, not in the grand sense, because I could just, who's gonna keep me from just walking away, right?

43:28

And so on the value side of this argument, the idea is

43:35

I've got to have something that the nation matters, that we are a unique people with a certain set of values that aren't determined simply by our desire to consume, that we are a people who have a certain, the founding documents said that these values are coalescing the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but that was assuming a

44:06

Christian framework. So either, again, that metaphysical basis for things matters and we have a unique way of life that is worth defending, or shoot, just do away with all borders and if somebody loses their job or loses their, if you die, you die, who cares?

44:27

Well, then the corporatists, the communists, everything we fought against in the 20th century as Christians, everything, then the left is right.

44:39

And really, all these basic things, Jesus claiming, I always remind people that the

44:46

Great Commission, the Great Commission that forms the backbone of all, of nice Christianity, is the preamble to that is that Jesus says, all power and authority have been granted to me.

45:03

So the basis of everything we do is under the sovereignty of the Lord Christ. So that either matters or doesn't, that either informs what we're doing or not, but that implies a way of life.

45:16

And so I think the full neoliberal understanding is not just the other side of the same coin, it's not, it is the other end of the spectrum to this.

45:32

So all that matters, that's the value argument, that's the worldview, and there's problems with worldview and all that, but that's the worldview argument, that ultimately

45:43

Jesus is saying that not only am I free, but it's an ordered freedom that produces a unique way of life, that we'll have different emphases and flavors among the different nationalities of the world, okay?

46:00

And yes, my post -millennialism is coming out. But I'm happy with optimistic amillennialism too.

46:11

I'm a big tech guy. So now, yeah, go ahead. Well, the -

46:17

I was just gonna say, to put a cap on what you just said, the tariffs are economic borders. That's what that is, the financial border, and that's how you have to look at it.

46:26

Okay, keep going, sorry. It's just, this is our sandbox, and we do things a certain way here.

46:33

And it's a certain way here because we don't have sovereignty over there, especially where people don't share our presuppositions.

46:40

They don't share our metaphysics. They don't share our values. They don't share our way of life. And so there has to be some level of, you know,

46:49

Nick Land, who is not a Christian, although he's flirted with it, Nick Land has been brilliant writing about this for the last 30 years about that capital, if capital is fully, moves at light speed without borders, then capital is going to be the

47:07

God you serve. And it will destroy every aspect of any other

47:13

God. So brilliant. Now, Nick is super esoteric, hard to understand at times, but he's been prescient, just a prophet in a small piece sense on all this stuff.

47:31

Xeno -cosmography on Twitter used to be outsideness. And then I think he lost his,

47:36

Nick got sick and lost his login credentials. For his whole Twitter account, I think that's what happened.

47:42

Anyway, this isn't a podcast about Nick Land. Now, the realist view of all this, the

47:49

John Mearsheimer approach, and John Mearsheimer is a absolutely brilliant professor of foreign policy geopolitics at the

47:57

University of Chicago. I think John's Catholic. Go and look up his, he's given a bunch of speeches over the last four or five years on these topics.

48:14

Brilliant, highly recommended. But he talks about that you have to be, you have one foot in the values.

48:27

What are our values that we have? But also what are just the geopolitical realities? And the globalist, neoliberal, full borderless world is growing increasingly impossible to sustain.

48:43

Why is that? Just for the simple mechanics, look what's happened. Suez has been shut down because of the

48:52

Houthis in Yemen, because the calculus of how you fight is different than it was even five, 10, 15 years ago.

49:02

Used to, there was one, again, we talked about a sovereign being the guarantor of a covenant.

49:08

The old covenant, not in a religious sense, but the old world covenant was of a borderless world because we were the guarantor.

49:18

We have 10, 11 carriers of which four or usually four or five, three to five are at sea at any times.

49:29

And man, that carrier group could enforce, could make sure all those choke points were moving easily.

49:37

That's why, for instance, that's why Turkey, why is Turkey a member of NATO?

49:42

Because Turkey controls the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. The entrance in and out of the

49:48

Black Sea. And we can't do, they straddle that.

49:53

So Turkey was gonna be, we can't really sail a carrier group through that without their okay. So how about y 'all be part of NATO?

50:02

So this global soup, so to speak, was everybody had a seat at the, you know, had a spoon because we were making sure they could.

50:12

There were no world or peer or near peer people who could, you know, have any hope against a carrier group.

50:23

And we could send two to each ocean. Now, I'm sorry, with hypersonics, with drones, with everyone having access to spy sats, heck, even guys like me, if I wanna spend the money,

50:40

I have access to spy sats. There's, you know, like three meter resolution spy sats that are commercial now that anybody can, where do you wanna, where are we gonna task it?

50:53

Wow. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So, well, that's the big, you can just go on Google world.

51:00

Yeah, well, sure. So, except you can get it updated, you know. Anyway, point being is the old calculus is impossible.

51:10

So what's coming? Well, and Trump again, just in his, he's got a great gut, not just in size, but in, but he gets the fact that the kind of, and he surrounded himself, unlike the last deal where he, you know, he didn't exert a lot.

51:29

And he didn't know, he just, he wasn't a politician where he kind of surrounded himself with some enemies.

51:35

He's got a great team around him now. And even, you know, like Scott Besant, who

51:40

I wouldn't make his life choices. We wouldn't agree on that, but this guy is an absolute stud at treasury secretary.

51:50

That guy is easily the smartest treasury secretary in my life that I've, since I've been paying attention to these things.

52:00

Absolutely brilliant. Again, not one of us from a lifestyle point of view, you know, kind of hurts my presuppositionalism a little bit.

52:13

And I'm kind of halfway classical and halfway kind of a John, kind of half

52:18

John Frame, half Gerstner. By the way, your talk on presuppositionalism a couple of months ago was outstanding.

52:26

Everybody, if you haven't listened to John, and who are you talking to,

52:31

Tyler on that deal? Oh, that was Chris Bolt, I think. Chris Bolt. Absolutely, it was

52:36

Chris, not Tyler Cox. Chris Bolt, absolutely great conversation.

52:42

Go listen to it, you owe it to yourself. Anyway, but to put a bow on this Merchant, this realism deal, that's why you see this return to kind of a

52:51

Monroe doctrine, why we put so much emphasis on the Panama Canal, because that is the one choke point we can control.

53:00

We have, as a United States, we're blessed. We have the Atlantic Ocean on one side, an unchallenged coastline, the

53:08

Pacific Ocean on another coastline. We have incompetence to the north and a narco -failed state to the south, zero challengers.

53:19

And so we have three choke points that we have to worry about. Two are pretty easy, and that's the north and southern side of Cuba between Florida, the

53:32

Keys, and the Yucatan to the south, and then the

53:38

Panama Canal. And so we are gonna be, by the way, today, as we tape, I don't know when this will air, but as we are taping, tape, listen to me,

53:47

I'm old. As we are streaming this, he is hosting the

53:53

Cayley today. So hugely important. Trump is at the

53:58

White House. The kind of a Monroe Doctrine to where this hemisphere,

54:04

North and South America, are ours. And this is making the Canadians very frustrated.

54:10

And we ought to be, we should have some kind of kid gloves towards Canada, but I can understand some of Trump's brusqueness towards them because they just got rid of maybe the worst prime minister in this hemisphere.

54:30

Well, you had a bunch in South America, but it's probably the worst that Canada has ever had. His dad was pretty bad too, but man,

54:37

Trudeau's terrible. Yeah. But anyway.

54:44

Yeah, so Greenland's part of this too. Absolutely it is. Yeah. Hey, the northern trade passage, if the world is warming, it may or may not be.

54:53

I don't think it's really under much human control, but it probably is. We're at a kind of, if you look over a long period of history and by conviction,

55:04

I'm young earth, but God gave us all this geology to look at for some reason.

55:11

So if you look at that and take an old earth view, it seems as though we're at a kind of a transitory low in temperature.

55:20

So earth is probably gonna warm up regardless of anything we do. And if that's true, the northern trade passages in a long -term are hugely important.

55:32

So that's why he's talking about Canada as a 51st state and Greenland and all that. But that's all

55:37

Monroe, that's long -term Monroe doctrine. Again, I think Trump's gut on all this is just absolutely brilliant.

55:44

I think Trump is looking at temperature charts. No, but he just gets it. I just really do think he gets it.

55:52

Tell you what, the guy was brilliant in real estate. I mean, brilliant.

55:57

Some of the maneuvering he did, I talked on Pete Canona's show about this, so I don't wanna repeat myself, but some of the maneuvering he did to set up how he did some of his developments to maneuver on the risk and capital stack, just very smart guy, very smart guy.

56:19

Yeah. Yeah, what did Bill Maher say recently? And I can't stand Bill Maher, but he said he went to the

56:25

White House, visited Trump, and said, there's a sane man in the White House. He just plays an insane man on TV. And I don't necessarily agree fully with that analysis, but I think there might be a kernel of truth to that, that he says things that he knows he can read a crowd and know what reaction he wants, and he gets it.

56:46

Well, he's absolutely not a neoliberal. Everybody says, well, he's basically

56:55

Clinton. Maybe, but his gut is more of a kind of old rightist.

57:06

I mean, people say he's a bit of a mercantilist. I don't think that's actually the case, but he would definitely skew more towards that I think he's where most

57:17

Americans are, actually, in some ways. We still have, I think, a very kind of old right instincts and soul about us in this country, most places

57:30

I go, but we feel we have to justify them with ideology, and we can't really just come out and say that we want what we want.

57:41

We have to figure out other reasons, and it leads us back down weird paths, and one of the things

57:47

I was thinking about when you were talking, because I've been hammering the ideology thing quite a bit, especially as I see kind of this ascendant

57:54

Christian right, and it can go in many different directions because it's pretty young.

58:01

A lot of the people who are leading this are very young, and there's a lot of different ideas.

58:06

There's a lot of people who would, I think, want to co -opt a group like that too, and I keep trying to warn people, just be really careful of ideology.

58:13

Be careful of boiling everything down to one universal basic principle that determines everything.

58:19

Not every single motive that affects someone, or every single action that exists in the world is because of Jewish people, or because of, it's the patriarchy, or because of, fill in the blank with whatever.

58:35

Feminism. Whatever you want to say. I think one of the things that you've highlighted here is there's a lot of complicating things.

58:43

There's a lot of history that's happened all over the world that has affected a lot of different things, and you can't really understand what

58:51

Trump's trying to do unless you understand at least some of that, and so we've been talking for almost an hour, which is,

58:59

I'm amazed actually how fast that time went, but there's so many other questions that we could get into.

59:05

I was gonna ask you, in what sense is China manipulating currency, because Trump always complains about that, but I want to kind of give you the floor in the last few minutes we have, because we really weren't gonna talk about tariffs as much.

59:18

That was gonna be a sideshow, but that became the podcast, and kind of where the globe is going.

59:26

You kind of wanted to talk about Christianity, and I wasn't exactly sure where you wanted to go with this, but I think specifically you said something about applying scripture, and people who say you can't apply scripture or shouldn't apply scripture.

59:44

So you can explore that with the last minutes that we have. Take it whatever direction you want to take it.

59:50

Well, just real quick, reflecting on what you just said about ideology, because I think it ties in.

59:57

Ideology makes the same mistake that modern economics does. It makes the same critical error in that it flattens everybody out.

01:00:05

It assumes that every human being, I can model humanity perfectly.

01:00:16

Look, our minds are limited, and so we're always looking for these heuristics that make the world comprehensible to us.

01:00:27

And there's a certain extent to where the world reflects the infinitude of God.

01:00:36

I make a living trying to model the financial markets, and that's just one tiny little bit.

01:00:43

And there's always this unexplained degree of freedom or factor that's out there that could throw a wrench in things.

01:00:54

So just as economics should be understood as a soft social science, that's how the

01:01:02

Austrians really wanted to frame economics, getting back to the libertarian deal.

01:01:09

And as it's become a hard science and made this and therefore deracinated and de -individualized humanity to the point of everything, so does ideology.

01:01:24

Ideology makes that same exact category error, in my opinion.

01:01:30

It doesn't mean you can't have interesting ways to describe things that are in the aggregate.

01:01:38

But what I was just really convicted about just recently is that the online right, we need to remember that we serve, if all of this isn't about serving

01:01:55

Christ, coming from a Christian perspective, if this isn't about understanding the mind of God and thinking his thoughts after him in a more clear way, then what are we doing?

01:02:09

I sometimes think that in some of these arguments and discussions

01:02:17

I see among so -called Christians, it's like Jesus is an afterthought.

01:02:23

And I know that Jesus juking is always, I don't wanna sound like a second grade

01:02:30

Sunday school teacher, but really, I mean, this is all, really it is about being faithful to our gracious king, to our heavenly father, and being sensitive, in a sense, to the

01:02:45

Holy Spirit who is there to convict us of these things. And so for me,

01:02:53

I've just tried to, for instance, on Twitter, instead of just being in a Smart Alec -esque poster at times, which is, hey, that's a, there's a reason everybody hated the prophets, right?

01:03:12

I'm not saying I'm a prophet, but if you've got something to say, it's sometimes there's a serrated edge.

01:03:18

I know Doug Wilson once wrote a book called The Serrated Edge, and there is a right application of a little bit of vitriolic humor.

01:03:27

I'm not suggesting that's not the case. But our chief, I've noticed that, man, people are responding.

01:03:35

I'll just do two or three threads a week of nothing super long, but seven to 10 posts of just explaining how as Christians, what's my perception of how we should think about these things?

01:03:52

You don't have to agree with me. I'm just a guy, right? But if we can, how can we be

01:03:57

God -oriented in these questions? How does the Lord feel about borders or about finance or about,

01:04:05

I'm writing about Holy Week this week, about, I hear a lot of people wanting to do the whole, especially my

01:04:13

Bible church friends, doing the Passover Seder thing. So I wrote about that. Just how do we think about that?

01:04:19

Is that the right way to approach these things? Or do we have something that's uniquely Christian? A new covenant way of thinking about these things.

01:04:26

And the response has been great. And I think, again, the point isn't, when you're doing this, isn't to get people to necessarily agree with you.

01:04:34

It's to get people to be Jesus -oriented, to agree with God.

01:04:41

And if you're just trying to build your own kingdom, sometimes I think that you're gonna, and yeah, hey, building your own kingdom is profitable.

01:04:50

That's a profitable enterprise. But it's not what we're put here to do.

01:04:55

We really are put here to build Jesus' kingdom, to see what are the gifts He has given each of us as unique individuals, as unique reflections of His glory, that we might build each other up to love and good deeds.

01:05:11

Working out our salvation every day with fear and trembling. Having an answer for every question, but with reverence and fear.

01:05:20

And so those are the things that we need to always remember. And I think ideology, putting a bow on it, crowds that out at times.

01:05:30

Yeah, that's a good word. Something I've been thinking about quite a bit too, and convicted sometimes when

01:05:35

I get away from that and I'm in theory land and can't, yeah, I need to be able to relate it back to the reason

01:05:42

I'm even here on earth. Yeah, and I mean, theory stuff is great. Here's right here on my desk.

01:05:48

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. You know, and this, hey, this guy was writing about justice and his word for justice, same word

01:06:00

Paul uses in, Paul is the apostle of righteousness.

01:06:07

He's always talking about the righteousness of God or from God. Dikaiosune, it's the same word.

01:06:13

Isn't that interesting? Yeah. That's really been blowing my mind lately. I quoted in a sermon yesterday,

01:06:19

I was preaching at a church, Paul Tyson's book, Christian Platonism. And he goes through a number of these passages and talks about how

01:06:28

Paul assumes some of these platonic categories. And if you don't see that, then it's hard to understand what

01:06:33

Paul's talking about. But 2 Corinthians 4, you know, towards the end, and then into chapter five, temporal world, spiritual world.

01:06:41

He talks about these tents that we live in. He's talking about our physical bodies, but that we're going to inhabit this earthly, or sorry, this heavenly dwelling.

01:06:51

And we're on our way there. And that's kind of the point is all of us are on our way there. And what we do in this earth has an impact on even what will take place in the future that should motivate all our actions.

01:07:05

It should give us satisfaction, but it also should orient our lives to heavenly categories and higher ends.

01:07:12

Amen. But just because Plato didn't have all the language to understand it completely, just because he saw in a mirror dimly, and just because the neoplatonic

01:07:21

Gnostics took it in a weird direction, doesn't mean we don't have, you know,

01:07:26

God didn't raise up Gentile prophets at times. Small p, they didn't have the direct word of God and inspiration, but they were wrestling, really wrestling with these things.

01:07:38

Sorry, I had to silence something. And so that's hugely, hugely important.

01:07:45

I write at American Reformer pretty often. And I wrote a thing about the

01:07:52

Socratics being, you know, the idea that possibly they were a type of Gentile prophet.

01:07:59

You know, it's not as though when the Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants came along and the restoration covenants that God just forgot about the

01:08:07

Gentiles everywhere on earth. You know, God was still working through them.

01:08:14

I mean, look at the wise men were probably Zoroastrian, you know, maybe descendants of Jonah's converts.

01:08:23

And God was still working in the Noahic covenant. It's interesting because we could talk about this.

01:08:29

It would be probably fun. But Acts 15 is kind of a recapitulation of the

01:08:34

Noahic covenant, the Jerusalem council. And so, you know, there's, we miss that sometimes

01:08:42

I think as Protestants because it's all about salvation. It's all forensics.

01:08:47

And we miss some of these other richer themes that are also present in our, that run throughout our whole scripture.

01:08:56

But that's for another podcast. We could do that. That's what I was gonna say. We could do that on another podcast because you're kind of a

01:09:03

Renaissance man. There's all these different things that, you know, curiosities you have that are actually highly relevant right now in the discourse that's in front of me all the time.

01:09:12

So I really want people to follow you though, if they're on X. And so if you're on X, if you're not on X, I, you know, maybe don't go on X actually, but if you're already there, if you're already there, follow

01:09:22

Ron Dodson. It's just his name, Ron Dodson, and you'll be blessed. So with that, thank you,

01:09:28

Ron. I appreciate all, everything you've said today. It's been really helpful. Thanks, John. I appreciate you.