We’re inundated with reports from media, governments, think tanks, and “experts” saying that our climate is changing for the worse, and that it is our fault because of man-made CO2 emissions.  But despite apocalyptic predictions about climate, our earth, the planet is improving.

In this candid and insightful episode of the “Bill Walton Show,” Stephen Bryen, a seasoned expert with over half a century of experience in national security and arms trade, shares his incisive views on the current state of global geopolitics.

You can’t fix what is wrong in the world if you don’t know what’s actually happening.

Polls show that most smart people tend to believe that the state of the world is getting worse. In the United States, almost 3/4 of Americans believe the world is getting worse and only 6% think it’s getting better.

But according to Marian Tupy, our guest on this episode, “this dark view of the prospects for humanity, and the natural world is, in large part, badly mistaken.”

The Chinese Communist Party sees technology innovation as the main battlefield of its industrial policy – and its ultimate weapon for achieving global dominance.

Winsome Earle-Sears sent shock waves across Virginia and the country at large when she pulled off her stunning upset victory in November 2021 and became the first Lieutenant Governor of Virginia who is a woman, the first naturalized female citizen, the first female veteran elected to statewide office and who also happens to be black. 

China is the single most formidable strategic threat the United States has ever faced. It alone has the potential to replace the United States as the world’s hegemon.

China is not a typical foreign adversary on another shore, gathering behind its army, aggressive, thinking about land warfare, even nuclear warfare. This is an enemy that’s permeated the United States, it’s infiltrated into our culture and China’s strategy of “elite capture” is working. A lot of the leadership class in America seems to be in the pocket of the Chinese.

In the United States just four networks: Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, and HBOMax spend almost $75 billion every year on film, TV and streaming content. And most of this spending goes toward woke, progressive-themed entertainment.

The progressive Left has come to dominate our institutions and our culture and they’ve been remarkably successful in using the art of narrative storytelling to promote their agenda.

Our guest on this episode of Backstage with Bill Walton is Bill’s cardiologist Dr. Joshua Yamamoto who has some startling and optimistic things to say about our heart health. 

Once a year, roughly 70,000 “Burners” gather two hours north of Reno in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, a temporary city “dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance.” Burners declare that Burning Man isn’t a “festival.” Rather, “it’s a city wherein almost everything that happens is created entirely by its citizens, who are active participants in the experience.”

In this episode I’m joined by Jay W. Richards, Ph.D. to talk about “climate change.”

We are both skeptical about the claims that man is causing abnormal changes in the climate, mainly by adding CO₂ to the atmosphere, and that we need a political solution – fast! – to somehow arrest the spread of this toxic combination of molecules. We’re even more skeptical that the solution is for governments or the UN coerce us do it, and along the way essentially shut down the modern economy.

In this episode I’m talking with Todd Zywicki, the George Mason University Foundation Professor of Law in the Antonin Scalia Law School and former Executive Director of the GMU Law and Economics Center. 

He is also one of the most engaging and clear thinkers about the vast and complicated world of consumer financial services. He was Chair of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Taskforce on Federal Consumer Financial Law and served as Editor of the Supreme Court Economic Review. 

Todd’s recent article “Restoring the Rule of Law in Finance” served as our launching point for a fascinating – and disturbing – conversation about how financial regulation has become a key weapon in the progressives arsenal to fundamentally change America.

I’m talking in this episode with the upbeat and visionary George Gilder, one of America’s leading economic and technological thinkers, and the author of the groundbreaking books, Wealth and Poverty, Knowledge and Power, The Scandal of Money and now: 

Life after Capitalism: The Meaning of Wealth, the Future of the Economy, and the Time Theory of Money 

In one of our most talked about episodes, Stella Morabito came on the show in May to talk about her book The Weaponization of Loneliness: How Tyrants Stoke Our Fear of Isolation to Silence, Divide, and Conquer.

We talked about the dangerous tyranny of thought creeping into American lives. Government, social media and a new kind of “ruling class” are increasingly working to control speech and behavior and isolate us from one another. This effort is intensifying and spreading throughout society’s institutions.

“America needs to come to terms with the reality and scale of the assault on free speech. Our government has established a vast system of censorship. By keeping it largely secret, it has been able to exert unconstitutional control over medical, scientific and political speech, suppressing debate over questions of great public importance. This is a shocking constitutional violation. All of us, not only the courts, need to recognize what is at stake.”

This is a different kind of episode of The Bill Walton Show. My guest is the charming and insightful polymath Carrie Sheffield who is a columnist and broadcaster now with the Independent Women’s Voice.

Sometimes, no it’s almost all the time, I wish I could spend more time playing the many sports I love to play.

But I don’t.

Instead, like most of us, I get caught up in organizations, politics, work, and all the other stuff that life seems to tee up.

For regular listeners, you know I like to take on complicated subjects, and try to make clear what’s at stake for all of us.
In this episode the Bill Walton Show we take a another deep dive into one of the most complicated and contentious areas of economic policy:
International trade.

A slew of financial crises that stretch all the way back to the banking Panic of 1907 have been exploited to justify erecting a financial regulatory system that has vastly centralized and expanded federal power over our money. 

This show only occasionally gets into election politics but we now have a candidate for U.S. Senate from Virginia who is superbly equipped to run a substantive campaign articulating the real issues facing Americans.

In this episode I’m introducing Scott Parkinson, who’s running for the Senate in the Commonwealth of Virginia, to replace Virginia Senator Tim Kaine.

Until recently, no precise legal definition of sex—and especially the terms “male” and “female”—was needed because no one contested it. 
Up to now. 

Gender activists are rapidly moving to redefine sex in federal laws and regulations, such as Title IX, to include “gender identity.” If this succeeds, it will subvert all preexisting legal references to sex, contrary to their plain intent.

Two months ago I wrote “the war in Ukraine drags on at a terrible cost for all involved with no seeming end in sight. Ukraine is on the ropes and running out of manpower with its most of its elite forces destroyed. Missiles for its air defenses are depleted. Both sides are dragooning teenagers and old men for their armies. Russia’s military command is in disarray.” 

“Would you want your DNA and other healthcare data going to an authoritarian regime with a record of exploiting that data for repression and surveillance? Let’s be specific, would you want it going to China?”

Global streaming services are projected to reach over 1.5 billion subscribers in 2025 with worldwide spending on TV, film and documentary production reaching over $220 billion a year. Netflix, Disney, Amazon Prime, and HBO Max alone account for more than $75 billion of that spend with almost all of it on woke progressive themed entertainment. Looking only at documentaries and small independent features, the Left spends tens of billions of dollars each year.