B.NVINVINITUS, that's California for welcome to the December 9th edition of National Review's Radio Free California Podcast.

I'm Will Swain. I'm from the California Policy Center. You can find

my colleagues and me at California Policy Center.org. You can find my friend and co-host David Bonson right here. He's an economist. He's the host of the Capital Record podcast. Great episode this week. The author of full-time, work and the meaning of life. And of course, he's founder of the eponymous investment firm, the Bonson Group. Hello, David. Hello, Will. Good to be with you.

Always a pleasure.

Your episode this week on Capitol Record regarding government intervention in the economy,

specifically, I think it was on artificial intelligence data centers. Yeah, well, that and then also

this thing about the Netflix Warner Brothers merger. And President Trump's concerned that, well, that and then also this thing about the Netflix Warner Brothers merger,

and President Trump's concerned that, well, they may be too big. We're going to look at that

and see what their market share is. He's a Democrat, right? Well, that is not something that I believe

Republicans would have taken well to if President Obama had said it or done it. Well, David, the Monroe Doctrine is

back in the news. It's being offered is the logic behind the Trump administration's decision to

blow up Venezuelan drugboats in the Caribbean, but it's unlikely most Americans know that the

Monroe Doctrine announced this month in 1823 was a direct response to events in California. To understand that story, we begin

with the establishment in 1799 of a fur-trapping settlement in Sitka, Alaska, Russia's opening

gambit to expand into North America. But in 1805, just five years after Sitka's founding, it was clear the project was in deep

trouble. The Russian fur traptors had wiped out the local sea otter populations. Savage North

Pacific storms had sunk countless resupply ships dispatched from Siberia. The settlers' attempts to

cultivate crops in that frozen, rocky soil came to nothing.

Scurvy and starvation stocked the settlers.

Into this desperate scene sailed Nikolai Razzanov, a high-ranking envoy of the Russian Empire,

tasked with saving the Russians. He faced a practical problem in Sitka. The nearest relief

supplies might be available in Spanish, California, but the Sitka colony had no ship capable of

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