your life. Hello, everybody, and welcome. Today we have a special episode for you.

Myself and my good old co-host, Christian Heinz, the Oracle of Virginia and our resident

historian, political prognosticator, all of those things. We've been having this kind of ongoing

conversation for a while, where we're talking about kind of these two themes, right?

One is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History, which is this idea that, you know,

kind of the Western concepts of openness and tolerance and whatnot have prevailed.

And that is the way to do it.

And now it's just a question of when we're going to impose it on other countries.

And then there's samuel huntington's

book the class of civilizations which essentially explores this idea that well no it isn't the end

of history and people will actually revert to you know the various things which define their culture

and they'll they'll they'll defend those things but But there's another book, the return of the strong

gods. And what we're going to talk about today is some of the themes within that book. And we're

also going to talk about this idea of empire. Because there's a lot of people that say,

Oh, America has an empire. No, we don't. I mean, yeah, we have spheres of influence. And yeah,

we got a lot of powerful, we're powerful economically, militarily, but we don't. I mean, yeah, we have spheres of influence. And yeah, we got a lot of powerful.

We're powerful economically, militarily, but we don't have an empire in the sense that Rome had an

empire or the British had an empire or the Germans had an empire or anything like that.

It's very, very different. And as we discussed this whole concept of America first, right,

that means different things to different people. It is not a well-defined term. Some people use it

synonymously with MAGA. Some say, no, it's a little bit different. Some people associate with

just isolationism. Like we don't care what the rest of the world does. They can all just, you know, go pound sand. We're going to focus on things here at home. Other people are like, no, no, no, we should. We should flex our military and economic muscles for those things, which are best for the United States. And today, Christian and I, on Friday, we're just going to have a fun conversation on what would that version of America

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