Latest / TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast / #730: Trump's Geopolitical Poker Game with Tom Luongo

Transcript

#730: Trump's Geopolitical Poker Game with Tom Luongo · TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

• 0:00
  Mr. Long, oh, we meet here on yet another Friday evening.
• 0:03
  It seems to be our time of recording, choice of recording over the years.
• 0:09
  Like I was just telling you, I need you to pull me back from the edge.
• 0:12
  I'm doom scrolling a lot this week.
• 0:15
  We are.
• 0:16
  I don't know if you're reading my Twitter feed, but it's about 3 o'clock in the morning trying to take people off the edge and go, no, everything.
• 0:24
  It's as funny.
• 0:26
  It's good to see you, Marty.
• 0:27
  And yes, I do. I do like doing these on Friday afternoon with you.
• 0:30
  It's like we get an opportunity to sit down, kind of look at the week that was the last couple of weeks for us.
• 0:35
  You know, it's a good time to do this. And we're both tired after a long week.
• 0:40
  So it's like, yeah, man, like this, it's not going to be fireworks tonight.
• 0:43
  It's going to be, you know, that kind of thing. And which is a good thing.
• 0:48
  I do enough of those or I do enough of the firework, fire breathing Tom during the week.
• 0:52
  so um i i you know it's funny since this thing began um you know and again i'll back up for a
• 1:00
  minute in the lead up to it i was looking at it going at first i'm like is he just playing a game
• 1:07
  right and then i saw the like full two carrier strike groups and i thought about what he did
• 1:14
  in venezuela and the way he handled venezuela and i'm like no there's going to be an operation
• 1:21
  of some form or another here because um venezuela was very much targeted uh uh operation wasn't it
• 1:29
  you know apparently just an insanely efficient operation as well um and then right after that
• 1:36
  he goes to freaking davos and um all of that and you know the same weekend he's like what is he he
• 1:43
  said where's he's at davos yeah and he's giving them their speech and he's like you know he's
• 1:48
  taking on CJ and Jay and, and, and then G and, and Halesco and, you know,
• 1:54
  taking out El Mencho. I'm like, all right, it's March.
• 1:57
  Who's he going to take out next? And when you, you know,
• 2:01
  you know how I feel about this stuff,
• 2:04
  that this is all kind of art and parcel of the whole old money network,
• 2:10
  right. You have, you know,
• 2:12
  You have the middle layer of money, of basically imperial money flows or old colonial money flows.
• 2:20
  My wife just was driving up, and so the dogs were going crazy.
• 2:23
  But I think that's where we are.
• 2:26
  We have to realize that that's a very important part of this conversation that we just don't talk.
• 2:31
  Most people can't talk about because they don't have a frame of reference for it.
• 2:35
  And I do my best to try and make it understandable.
• 2:40
  Let's kind of break it down in three layers.
• 2:42
  You have the original, you know, when he first came into power, the first thing he did was cut off all the public money.
• 2:46
  So, hey, at least the American taxpayer isn't directly funding the NGOs that are destroying the country.
• 2:54
  OK, that's the easy part.
• 2:56
  He can just, you know, stroke the pen, all the land, take that down because he's the executive and he doesn't, you know, and he has that power.
• 3:05
  it's the next layer that's the hardest one for people to wrap their heads around,
• 3:11
  which is the organized crime, which is the system of money flow around the world,
• 3:15
  of being able to basically have the old colonial extraction system centered in City of London
• 3:22
  with outposts in places like Davos and Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong and Singapore and Vancouver
• 3:29
  and all these other places, right?
• 3:32
  That, you know, that's the illicit money.
• 3:36
  That's the money that runs around the world,
• 3:38
  trafficking children, trafficking drugs,
• 3:41
  you know, running protection rackets,
• 3:44
  pulling in, and now we get to find out.
• 3:47
  And we get highlighted for us.
• 3:51
  Insures all the global shipping around the world
• 3:53
  while the U.S. Navy is harassed to enforce it all.
• 3:56
  And somehow someone else is getting paid
• 3:58
  for the defense work that we're doing.
• 4:02
  Like when we stop as Americans,
• 4:05
  just stop and take a look at and think about what that is,
• 4:09
  that should drive us all crazy.
• 4:13
  When you really stop to think about it,
• 4:15
  it's like we go out and we spend a trillion dollars a year
• 4:19
  on the military.
• 4:20
  So however much money we spend on the Navy
• 4:22
  to police the world and make sure
• 4:24
  that global shipping runs relatively smoothly,
• 4:27
  the only pirates that are really left in the world are the ones that somehow are linked to
• 4:32
  all the old colonial system through a network of banks and and and old relationships that exist
• 4:40
  in iran venezuela dubai blah blah and hong kong mexico city like all around the world and you look
• 4:49
  around the world and you see the same thing every everywhere which is that that money cannot flow
• 4:53
  as Alex Greener likes to point out, without complicity from the Canadian, UK,
• 4:58
  some American banks.
• 5:00
  It can't happen because it's too much money.
• 5:02
  It has to move that way.
• 5:05
  Not only are they making money off of that,
• 5:09
  they're insuring the ships that we're defending.
• 5:12
  Now, let's stop for a second and think about what Lloyd's of London actually is.
• 5:19
  I've talked to people about this, and they're like,
• 5:21
  there are no actuaries at Lloyd's of London.
• 5:23
  there are no risk assessors at Lunds London.
• 5:26
  There's a bunch of guys, a bunch of limeys in there collecting, writing contracts.
• 5:32
  It's right across the Thames from GCHQ, otherwise known as MI6.
• 5:38
  So MI6 goes around the world, stirs up chaos around the world.
• 5:42
  Maybe with the help of the Mossad or Saudi intelligence,
• 5:48
  elements of the CIA refuse to say rogue elements of the CIA
• 5:51
  because the rogue elements of the CIA are the patriots, right?
• 5:57
  And, you know, creating chaos around the world,
• 5:59
  which raises the risk premium for everybody to actually do business around the world
• 6:03
  and who's getting paid for that.
• 6:06
  So they're on both sides of the trade.
• 6:08
  They're getting paid to run drugs and, you know, harass everybody and everything else.
• 6:13
  And they're getting paid on the insurance contracts on the other side.
• 6:16
  It's all big frigging shakedown operation.
• 6:19
  and American taxpayers are getting, frankly, fucked,
• 6:23
  coming, going, on the way in, on the way out,
• 6:27
  after they've left the party and after their kids are dead.
• 6:32
  Donald Trump's like, no, we're getting paid for that.
• 6:36
  So in the lead up to February 28th,
• 6:41
  or I guess it was after mid-life,
• 6:45
  March 1st, last February 28th,
• 6:49
  It came really obvious.
• 6:50
  If you take Trump and his word and just read and just listen to what he said in that eight-minute statement, he laid it all out pretty freaking clearly.
• 6:59
  And it's very consistent with everything he's been saying for years, which is Iran can't have a nuclear weapon because they're a bunch of crazy Persians or whatever they are.
• 7:10
  You call them Shia crazies or whatever.
• 7:12
  They're crazies of one form or another.
• 7:14
  Or maybe they're just another node of organized crime around the world.
• 7:19
  the Arabs like to talk out of both sides of their mouth because they're making money coming and going
• 7:23
  on the oil and the natural gas. They don't really care. You know, so everybody's like talking out
• 7:30
  of both sides of their mouth. The Israelis are, you know, are up in arms about everything because
• 7:35
  that's who they are. And maybe they have a good right to be. Maybe they don't. I don't really
• 7:40
  care. Like, I don't like Iran. I don't like the Israelis. I don't like the Saudis. I don't like
• 7:44
  the Qataris. I don't like any of these people. They're all shit, as far as I'm concerned. And
• 7:48
  And 90% of the time, we're shit too.
• 7:51
  But we have the opportunity because we're the ones with the big stick.
• 7:56
  That if we decide to use the big stick for our interests, whoa, we get the last three weeks.
• 8:04
  We've all been living our entire lives, especially my entire life.
• 8:07
  And I know your entire life because you're far younger than I am.
• 8:10
  That we've been living in a world where the United States keeps doing all this shit that's not in our own best interest.
• 8:14
  We don't even know what that looks like.
• 8:16
  We don't know what it looks like when our government actually acts in a purposeful, strategic manner in the interest of the United States.
• 8:25
  And so we've been so conditioned in thinking that we can't possibly be doing that because we never do that.
• 8:30
  We've got all this history.
• 8:32
  We've got all this DNA.
• 8:33
  We've got all this lived experience to say that they're not doing that.
• 8:37
  And then all of a sudden we're like, we don't know what to do with it when it's actually staring us in the face.
• 8:41
  We have to distrust it.
• 8:44
  That's what's happening, Marty.
• 8:45
  It's not hard.
• 8:47
  We're literally saying London doesn't get to pull the insurance vig.
• 8:51
  They don't get to control the pricing of oil around the world.
• 8:55
  They don't get to do this.
• 8:56
  They don't get to do that.
• 8:57
  They don't get to fund all the proxies.
• 8:58
  They don't get to play these games because London is at the center of Venezuela, Jalisco,
• 9:04
  Vancouver, Hong Kong, Singapore, this one, all of it, and Iran, and Israel.
• 9:11
  and this is the hardest part that people have to realize is that they're on both sides of the
• 9:16
  trade in a lot of these conflicts they're they're fun and they're they're always like
• 9:22
  handing money and guns and whatnot and again when i say london it's a it's in in some ways
• 9:27
  it's a metaphor it's the system of the way the money flows and who benefits from the
• 9:35
  the way the money flows.
• 9:37
  That is what London represents.
• 9:39
  It all flows through City London and its subsidiaries
• 9:42
  because of the very special rules that it has,
• 9:46
  the carve-outs that it has in order to make money move that way,
• 9:51
  which it doesn't exist anywhere else on the planet,
• 9:54
  but it all happens to London that way
• 9:55
  and all the offshore banks and the Caymans and blah, blah, blah.
• 9:58
  So when you look at it from that perspective,
• 10:03
  What Trump had to do was at some point finally call the Iranians bluff and go, look, I see what you're doing.
• 10:14
  You've been told, just keep negotiating with Trump.
• 10:19
  He doesn't really want to start another war.
• 10:21
  He's vain.
• 10:22
  He's stupid.
• 10:23
  He doesn't think.
• 10:24
  Literally, listen to the people in Europe.
• 10:28
  Listen to the people in London.
• 10:29
  Listen to all of them.
• 10:31
  Listen to all of his critics.
• 10:32
  And some of them actually believe this nonsense.
• 10:35
  Others don't.
• 10:36
  Others are trying to gaslight you into believing he doesn't know what he's doing.
• 10:41
  But there are some that really do believe this.
• 10:44
  They really do believe that they have enough control and enough people and systems and institutions and bureaucrats and everything around the world that they can just believe him out over time.
• 10:56
  And then we'll get back to status quo after he's gone.
• 11:00
  And I'm sure that Iran was told, like, I'm sorry, the IRTC, Aragache, all these people, were all told the same damn thing.
• 11:09
  Just keep bleeding them out.
• 11:11
  So bleed them out for time.
• 11:14
  No different than Zelensky.
• 11:15
  At a certain point, when you look at the, and since the war has begun, and since the war has been prosecuted the way it's been prosecuted,
• 11:23
  you'll notice that the Iranians are negotiating over a war.
• 11:27
  they've lost the exact same way that Zelensky has been negotiating over where he's lost.
• 11:33
  Same thing. Why? Because he's got somebody else in his back pocket saying, don't worry about it.
• 11:38
  We're on top of this. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. We're going to do this.
• 11:41
  You just keep bleeding him out. And eventually Trump was like, no, fuck you now.
• 11:46
  And then because the Israelis are really good at what they do. Now, this is, again,
• 11:52
  don't hate the play. I hate the game. Like, right. The Israelis are good at this because
• 11:57
  they have to be. Like it or not, you don't have to like Israel to respect their ability to play
• 12:02
  the game. And because we saw, and I wouldn't have any of this in my head, I wouldn't have this
• 12:09
  perspective. I wouldn't have had this memetic lapse of the way I used to see the world if we
• 12:14
  didn't have the 12-day war last year. Because the 12-day war last year was the time when I had to
• 12:20
  finally go, are we really just that much better than everybody else? Is this all just been a bunch
• 12:27
  gaslighting by a bunch of Persians and Russians and Chinese and Indians and British and everybody
• 12:32
  else. They really aren't a paper tiger. And we are really that good. We didn't spend $850 billion
• 12:39
  a year on defense or whatever the hell we've been spending and get $50 billion worth of return on
• 12:45
  investment. We have the toys, folks. We have the men. We have the material. We have the personnel.
• 12:50
  We have the, all we needed was the political will and the organizational will in, from, from the Pentagon on down.
• 13:01
  Let those guys do what they do well.
• 13:05
  And I was talking to Joaquin Flores the other day.
• 13:08
  And I, and I was shocked.
• 13:10
  Like I, the 12 day war shocked the crap out of me.
• 13:13
  Right.
• 13:14
  And, uh, because my, I wanted to be conservative and I wanted to be generous to everybody I saw in the game.
• 13:20
  board. I wanted to say the reasonable position is the U.S. is lying about something. The Iranians
• 13:26
  are lying a little bit. The Russians are lying a little bit. The Chinese are lying. Everybody's
• 13:31
  overselling what they have a little bit. And then we just, I mean, the Israelis pulled off one of the
• 13:41
  most brilliant combined arms operations in military history on June 12th last year.
• 13:46
  Like it or not.
• 13:48
  I mean, with human intelligence on the ground, air, intelligence forces, ground forces, everything.
• 13:58
  The war was over before it started.
• 14:00
  So we already knew that we were capable of doing it.
• 14:05
  So Trump was going to go for the big kill shot, not on Iran, because this war is not about Iran.
• 14:13
  Iran is a network node.
• 14:14
  This is about the United States getting control over the system that it's a part of, and it has been funding to its own detriment for 80 years.
• 14:31
  That conversation, in the immortal words of Tyler Durden, is over.
• 14:35
  right that moment in fight club when edward norton's at top of the stairs and fire turns
• 14:41
  at the bottom of the stairs he's fighting with helena bottom carter he goes this conversation
• 14:44
  is is over done that's it now everybody understand what's happening oh that's what he's doing so if
• 14:55
  you don't think that he didn't know that the straits were going to get closer that iran wasn't
• 14:59
  going to do this nonsense i don't think they expected to be though so they've already said it
• 15:04
  We didn't expect to be this successful.
• 15:07
  And you knew they were successful because on day two, the Iranians were threatening to close the straits.
• 15:14
  I'm sure they were convinced that they were going to be able to stand up for a couple of weeks, inflict a tremendous amount of political and propaganda damage on the American military.
• 15:24
  That we were going to lose planes and lose dudes and have to defend this.
• 15:31
  right and that they were going to use that they didn't get that opportunity this war was over in
• 15:38
  the first 24 hours operationally strategically however you want to put it not operationally but
• 15:43
  strategically it was over the iranians were done it was just a matter of mopping everything up
• 15:49
  afterwards and i said as much on twitter like i'm the next day i'm like this war's over like if if
• 15:54
  they're not firing if they don't fire a thousand missiles tomorrow they're done oh they're gonna
• 15:59
  play possum and eventually three weeks from now we're going to see 3 000 okay fine you keep
• 16:05
  believing it keep believing that we've flown 15 000 sorties we've run out of things to kill
• 16:11
  and they're not the groundhog from caddyshack
• 16:16
  so like just to step in here there's a lot of sure sure the last three weeks just observing this
• 16:27
  I think there's three lenses through which I've been viewing this.
• 16:33
  It's like your lens, because we've been having these conversations for five or six years now.
• 16:37
  Five or six years.
• 16:38
  The lens of like the mainstream, which is evangelical Christians and Zionist Jews are trying to bring about the anti-Christians.
• 16:46
  And the Christian Zionists and all of them created by, again, City of London.
• 16:51
  You've got Kushner and all that.
• 16:54
  So you've got like this Israeli influence over the government.
• 16:56
  And then the third lens is like, are we just witnessing like Mad King?
• 17:00
  Like just hubris, like personal Trump, like wants to make a mark,
• 17:05
  wants to be the one to drop the nuke.
• 17:07
  And like I said, it's like hard to pull back from the edge.
• 17:11
  Like when I saw the city of London pulled the insurance and the government
• 17:17
  stepped up, I was like, Hey, that's a point in Tom's, Tom's lens.
• 17:20
  That's a point in Tom's lens.
• 17:21
  That's like all the, it's the only ones that matters.
• 17:23
  Cause I didn't think, I'll be honest with you.
• 17:25
  So like, I think I said, it was either on Saturday or Sunday.
• 17:31
  Their mouthpieces on Twitter started to give it away.
• 17:32
  There's that guy, Perara, who's the Sri Lankan guy that's in Australia that all of a sudden showed up.
• 17:39
  And he was like the Ian Carroll of MI6 Agile prop.
• 17:45
  He showed up like, I don't know, nine months ago.
• 17:47
  And then him and the other guy, like the other guy, Spencer Hockenough.
• 17:51
  They're both the city of London, in my mind.
• 17:53
  um i started calling him mr mouthpiece because you could read his stuff and it's all ai slot
• 18:00
  it's all ai written slop anyway but he you know you can see the first half bit is he's gotcha he's
• 18:05
  gotcha he's gotcha and then bodies were 90 degrees into like into la la land and i'm like
• 18:11
  okay hold on you take i'm gonna take this asshole apart but if you read him carefully he's telling
• 18:18
  you what their strategy is going to be and how they're going to do x y and z i've got all my
• 18:22
  people trained to like watch this stuff like i'm i'm sitting here monitoring my slack server all
• 18:27
  day long and i got a half a dozen guys going oh did you see this oh this is what they're going to
• 18:31
  do next and this is their next and i'm like this is their next narrative going on i think you're
• 18:35
  you're you're 80 right we're going to tweak it like this this and this i've i've been we've just
• 18:40
  been doing this like almost 24 7 now for three weeks and and it's just hilarious because you can
• 18:45
  predict what they're going to do next in real time and so i took him apart he he made the the point
• 18:52
  He said, oh, they're going to close the straits.
• 18:55
  London is going to pull their insurance.
• 18:59
  They're going to close the straits, and they're going to try and drive wedges between Trump and the Gulf Arab states, Omar and Bahrain, the others, and then go to the UN and try and make him into the bad guy.
• 19:15
  And then close the straits, and everybody's freaking out because oil's $300 a barrel.
• 19:19
  Mike didn't mention the insurance angle on it at all.
• 19:25
  He didn't say that.
• 19:26
  I said, oh, this is what he's saying they're going to do diplomatically?
• 19:29
  I'm like, no.
• 19:30
  Tomorrow, Lloyd's London is going to pull all the insurance contracts.
• 19:33
  And to the day, bingo, it happened.
• 19:38
  What I was surprised at was that Trump shows up on Taco Tuesday.
• 19:45
  And that's Taco Tuesday.
• 19:46
  Trump always chickens out.
• 19:48
  On Taco Tuesday, Trump turns around and goes,
• 19:51
  I've got a plan for insurance, shipping insurance.
• 19:54
  We're going to escort the ships.
• 19:55
  We don't have a lot of, we don't have all the details yet,
• 19:58
  but we're going to do this.
• 19:59
  I was expecting like a week, maybe 10 days.
• 20:03
  Now he goes 48 hours.
• 20:04
  Oh my God, he seems to completely control the situation.
• 20:08
  He led them into that trap, knowing full,
• 20:13
  and then once you saw him do that, you're like, whoa.
• 20:16
  Straits are closed.
• 20:17
  He wants the straits closed.
• 20:19
  Now he's going to use the straits to put the fork onto the Europeans.
• 20:24
  And Putin was right there.
• 20:26
  He had Trump's back immediately because he sends Besson out there to say,
• 20:34
  well, we're going to unsanction some Russian oil that's sitting in tankers.
• 20:38
  Russian's got like 40 million barrels or 100 million barrels.
• 20:41
  He sitting on tankers and ports and everything that on the ocean right unsanctioned so it can be sold anywhere as opposed to only being sold in the shadow of the quote shadow fleet and then putin comes around the next day and says
• 20:55
  right the later that day is this and i don't think we're going to sell any of that to the europeans
• 21:00
  game set match like i'm watching this going on this is like are you kidding me this is like they
• 21:08
  went into the back room you know the the nexus came i'm like i'm playing a game of dune the nexus
• 21:13
  comes up everybody we have a chance to negotiate make me make a new alliance like
• 21:16
  putting the drummer in the back room making a secret deal yeah we're all right now it's a
• 21:21
  you get the voice and i get the i get your power and you get this i don't know we'll go let's go
• 21:26
  take cart and let's go take siege table like you know that's the way i think of this stuff
• 21:29
  and you can see it in real time and i was like oh this is hilarious i mean it's not i mean it
• 21:37
  can go wrong there's all these tail risks that the israelis can go off half cocked and do something
• 21:41
  terrible and bubble a lot there's all sorts of little uh things and ways this could still go bad
• 21:46
  and yes iran may not have been dead at that point so but you're like in the you're in the probability
• 21:51
  field of this thing is probably 75 over and then five or six days into it you're like oh yeah
• 21:56
  like and then and i'm just i'm over like this not yet i'm over it like we're flying a-10 warthogs
• 22:07
  doing close assault in the straits, killing fast attack boats and guys sitting in, you know,
• 22:13
  I don't know, the guys sitting in the rocks along the straits, you know, they're blowing everything
• 22:19
  up, like flying A-10s for Christ's sake. Like, once you're flying A-10s, like there is no air,
• 22:24
  there is no air support. There is no anti-air support, you know, for the Iranians. They have
• 22:29
  no way to defend against that because the A-10 is, I mean, the Air Force has been trying to get rid
• 22:33
  the A-10 for 30 years.
• 22:35
  Dumbly, I might add.
• 22:37
  This is like one of the greatest
• 22:38
  fucking airplanes ever produced.
• 22:42
  But they want to keep replacing it
• 22:45
  because they can't keep up
• 22:46
  with modern anti-air systems.
• 22:51
  Yeah, they've got a point.
• 22:52
  But if you blow all that away,
• 22:54
  then the A-10s just come in
• 22:56
  and secure those out.
• 22:58
  Now you can bring troops in.
• 22:59
  You can do whatever the hell you want.
• 23:00
  You have operational control
• 23:01
  at that point
• 23:02
  because everybody you see turns into a pink mist.
• 23:05
  I hate to be rude, but everybody who shows up to try and fight them
• 23:08
  is going to turn into a pink mist.
• 23:10
  Fast attack boats, gone.
• 23:12
  I mean, if you really aren't sure what an 1A10 Warthog can do,
• 23:19
  I invite you to just sit down and kind of look at it.
• 23:23
  Okay, and just go through a typical loadout for that particular operation,
• 23:27
  understand what that cannon on the front of that thing can do.
• 23:32
  and I want you to, I want you to explain to me how a bunch of catamarans and a bunch of, you know,
• 23:41
  I don't want, how those things are going to survive long enough to do whatever they're going
• 23:47
  to do. Lay mines, do this, do that. I don't know. Like ram our carriers, like all that old crap that
• 23:52
  we used to hear about the war games that, you know, every time, you know, Doug McGregor used to,
• 23:56
  still does unbelievably
• 23:59
  still pedals this shit so did
• 24:00
  Jim Rickards back in the day they all did
• 24:03
  and it was all bullshit it was all agiprop
• 24:05
  it was all bullshit
• 24:06
  every bit of it
• 24:08
  it was all nonsense
• 24:09
  we weren't going to be allowed to do that
• 24:13
  as long as Obama was president
• 24:14
  because Obama was always
• 24:18
  London's asset
• 24:20
  and that's where I was
• 24:23
  and over the years I've had to
• 24:24
  fine tune
• 24:26
  my worldview. And I used to make it more complicated than it is. It's not complicated
• 24:31
  anymore. There's London and their assets and there's everybody else. And then there's the
• 24:36
  United States who they're trying to destroy. The Russians are their own node. The Chinese are their
• 24:39
  own node. And everybody else is kind of caught in the middle trying to figure out who's going to win
• 24:44
  and all the middle powers, the Saudis and the Indians and the Brazilians and everybody else
• 24:48
  trying to figure out, is it going to be Davos and see the London that wins or is it going to be the
• 24:52
  United States that wins. And the Russians and Chinese, of course, form a bit of a coalition
• 24:57
  together in order to antipode to stop that. That's what BRICS was always about. BRICS was never about,
• 25:03
  you know, it was never a good idea. It was always a necessity. And the minute the United States
• 25:08
  pulls out of that whole arrangement, starts acting like a sovereign nation as opposed to,
• 25:12
  you know, a bunch of globalist shitbags. It's amazing how much the world changes.
• 25:17
  and that's the kind of that's the that's the the calculus we have to do and it's hard don't get me
• 25:23
  wrong i mean it's not easy for people to see you have to live eat shit and breathe this stuff like
• 25:27
  i do right and you have to have a good framework at to begin with as the change is happening
• 25:34
  in order to see it in real time i get it i i don't i don't begrudge anybody who's confused
• 25:43
  it's a great intelligence operation the hallmark of a great intelligence operation is everybody's
• 25:48
  really confused that's like the definition of a good intelligence op right you're a good
• 25:53
  intelligence op is you're confused for a little while a great one is you can you can bamboozle
• 25:58
  two generations of people into believing bullshit that was a good one yeah trump just blew it all
• 26:05
  up he's like literally pulled out his like big long sword that says gordian on it leaving knots
• 26:10
  left and right like a fucking like he's hacking through the forest it's hilarious it's like his
• 26:15
  lightsaber you know it doesn't it doesn't glow blue it says gordian on the side of it yeah he's
• 26:20
  got a special you know sam jackson has purple lightsaber you know trump's got fucking neon
• 26:25
  lights on his you know what i mean a gold foil to go along with it well that you know i mean so
• 26:32
  again like hilarious if you want me if you want my honest opinion but yeah i'm sorry so i've been
• 26:37
  watching this with like the three lenses and like yours being one and like
• 26:39
  whenever I get emotional about something through another lens I'm like
• 26:43
  alright let me put this through Tom's lens that's one thing I've been curious to
• 26:46
  ask you like right in terms of like collateral damage particularly to the
• 26:51
  infrastructure the energy infrastructure that's being materially impaired is that
• 26:57
  expected is that by you and like to what extent is that is that can you
• 27:05
  stomach that collateral
• 27:07
  damage because
• 27:08
  you blow it all up
• 27:11
  and it creates... Yeah, no, I agree.
• 27:13
  You're asking
• 27:15
  the right question, which is
• 27:17
  you know,
• 27:18
  what are we going to have
• 27:21
  to deal with on the backside of this?
• 27:23
  Clearly the Iranians went off and
• 27:25
  blew up a bunch of shit
• 27:26
  in fury.
• 27:29
  But if you look at it, I would say
• 27:31
  this.
• 27:33
  That was their, quote unquote,
• 27:35
  their Samson option, right? Which is, you know, they have this, you know, we've all been told
• 27:41
  about their great mosaic defense and everything else. I'm going to stop for a second just to
• 27:45
  remind everybody. The Iranians had a very good strategy, but they had a very good strategy for
• 27:51
  the wrong war. If we had decided to fight the neocons of war on their terms, the way we would
• 27:59
  have fought every other war that they were trying to sucker us into, we would be in trouble today.
• 28:04
  a lot of trouble you know why all the things that people said 92 million people it's a place the
• 28:10
  size the texas the texas oklahoma it's a huge country right um mountainous horrible terrain
• 28:18
  to fight through yada yada yada it would be like invading the united states the united states
• 28:21
  terrible terrible landscape to to invade one because it's huge and two there are mountain
• 28:30
  ranges and there's this and there's that and there's all this crap right and you know that's
• 28:35
  why it took us 200 years to you know get from one end of the continent to the other right i mean
• 28:41
  it wasn't an easy right and we have other than and then there's and then there's guys like me
• 28:45
  like you know what i mean like yeah you're you're going to be marching troops into you know into
• 28:49
  tennessee or florida or wherever i happen to get to time like yeah okay that's good like the average
• 28:53
  dude and the average dude you know in places that i live you know has has three truck guns because
• 28:58
  the first two might jam.
• 29:01
  You know?
• 29:03
  What else are you going to do with the fucking things?
• 29:05
  And by the way, they're all barreled
• 29:07
  in the same fucking caliber, too.
• 29:09
  So they have one ammunition
• 29:10
  and a whole bunch of, you know, you know what I mean?
• 29:13
  And, um...
• 29:14
  But that war that they prepped for,
• 29:19
  their Mosaic defense,
• 29:21
  we've heard all this stuff about,
• 29:23
  was a good strategy.
• 29:24
  It just happened to be...
• 29:26
  We didn't meet them on ground that they prepared.
• 29:32
  So, you know, like it or not, you know, Trump's not an idiot.
• 29:36
  He's got good people around him, and they decided to fight the war differently.
• 29:39
  And they had the Israelis in their back pocket with all their human intelligence and all of their on-the-ground intelligence and everything else.
• 29:46
  and like it or not, the two of them, those two forces, when they're acting, you know,
• 29:56
  in a mission critical or, you know, goal oriented behavior, it's kind of disturbing.
• 30:04
  So now let's talk about your original question, which is about collateral damage.
• 30:08
  so I think what you what we've seen and you know I may get corrected by some of my you know my
• 30:16
  military friends about this but I think what we've seen is when you knock out your their command and
• 30:21
  control when they when you they don't have when they're not getting orders when it's just a bunch
• 30:25
  of guys basically on a shortwave talking amongst themselves I'm not saying this isn't the the the
• 30:30
  case on day one day two or day three but now clearly um they have a they were given instructions
• 30:37
  if you don't get these orders by this time after this do this and they did that and
• 30:46
  and then you send aragache out there to try and you know do whatever he's going to do in terms of
• 30:52
  you know to work the diplomatic channels and everything else um and i just find it and that's
• 30:58
  what they've done and i'm you know i don't begrudge them trying to fight the wars that they have on
• 31:03
  they're now trying to fight the war they have versus the war they prepared for the best way
• 31:07
  they know how and i would expect them to fight hard and i would expect them to get some hits in
• 31:12
  and to get some licks in and did and did they yes you know it and let's put it this way in that
• 31:20
  respect and again i'm not here to talk about morals here folks okay i mean we'll do that in a
• 31:26
  minute i'll give you my opinion on why we were justified to do this in a minute but just purely
• 31:32
  strategically and whatnot,
• 31:35
  but dispassionately,
• 31:36
  do you have to put it on the board that
• 31:38
  they're going to get these hits in?
• 31:40
  They're going to have these effects. There may be
• 31:42
  some downstream effects from that,
• 31:44
  meaning you hit Hellevive hard.
• 31:47
  You may or may not have gotten
• 31:48
  Netanyahu,
• 31:50
  much sad, very cry
• 31:52
  on my part. I hate
• 31:54
  Bibi.
• 31:57
  But
• 31:58
  and that may
• 32:00
  sending Israelis to do something in response that, you know, creates another aftershock
• 32:06
  that's, you know, that, you know, Richter scale terms is one or two points higher than it should
• 32:10
  have been, right? Because then they fight amongst themselves and the Iranians fight, you know,
• 32:13
  like, you know, that's where we are. And so we've had some oil infrastructure and oil and gas
• 32:19
  infrastructure hit. I'm sure Trump's not shedding a tear over it because, you know, if the Qataris
• 32:23
  can't export LNG, that just means that we're going to export more of it. And Donald Trump's
• 32:27
  very transactional and frankly amoral framework.
• 32:33
  That's good for America.
• 32:35
  We get paid for that shit.
• 32:36
  They owe us that money anyway, these fucking people.
• 32:38
  I'm sure that's what he's thinking in the White House.
• 32:41
  And I'm also sure he's thinking simultaneously, just surrender and let's get this over and
• 32:48
  done with.
• 32:49
  And let's get you back to acting and let's get the civilian.
• 32:53
  In the perfect world, what Trump wanted was a perfect decapitation strike, right?
• 33:03
  Get the Iranians to realize they're beaten.
• 33:08
  And then the civilian government that still exists goes, yep, okay, we're done.
• 33:13
  And we're getting rid of these guys, which is, it's not realistic, obviously.
• 33:17
  um and then trump's like cool uh we're in control of the oil flow coming out of the straits
• 33:23
  and we're going to make sure that your oil makes it to market and you're going to get paid for it
• 33:27
  and then it becomes venezuela 2.0 because what he did in venezuela was pretty obvious
• 33:32
  he goes in exfiltrates maduro for a variety of reasons not the least of which is to get maduro's
• 33:38
  friggin uh evidence about the 2020 election and you know all the and all that stuff and all the
• 33:44
  ledger books of what they've been, of what money and stuff has flowed through Venezuela all these
• 33:49
  years. Maduro, I never looked at as an actor that had any agency. He was a captured pawn sitting on
• 33:56
  a throne that we're all supposed to hate. And meanwhile, he's got his Praetorian, as Ian
• 34:00
  Burlingame likes to put it, his Praetorian guards around him, keeping him in check and keeping him
• 34:04
  there. Trump comes in, exfiltrates him and the wife, just secures his family, slaughters all the
• 34:11
  Praetorian guards. They're in and out in four hours or six hours or whatever the hell it is.
• 34:17
  And then let's make a deal with the existing government that's there.
• 34:21
  Let's take that boot off of their neck and then allow the Venezuelan people to come up
• 34:27
  out from underneath that. And we begin the process, the slow process of allowing them,
• 34:33
  of helping them come out of this terrible position. It's kind of the same thing he's
• 34:37
  doing with Cuba. Those negotiations are going on. And it's kind of the message. It's not kind of
• 34:45
  the message. It's exactly the same message you sent to Mexico and the cartels. Oh, by the way,
• 34:49
  you're next. And he keeps trying to tell more Kearney. Oh, by the way, I can see you up in
• 34:54
  Canada. And you're too fucking stupid to see what to see what's coming for whatever reason,
• 34:59
  or just arrogant or whatever. And I see Alberta, sir. I see Alberta. I see so many things in my
• 35:05
  future let's not even go there and but iran was also one of these network nodes that needed to be
• 35:10
  dealt with and iran would be the biggest problem which would require the biggest operation right
• 35:17
  over the most important physical choke point on the planet left panama canal mostly taken care of
• 35:25
  english channel not really important anymore straits of malacca it's important but we're not
• 35:32
  We're the ones patrolling it, so we're not going to stop the ships from flowing because under Trump, we don't care that the Chinese get oil through the Straits of Malacca.
• 35:40
  When the neocons and the British were running our foreign policy, oh, the Straits of Malacca were important, which is why Singapore is a thing.
• 35:47
  Singapore is only a thing because of the Straits of Malacca.
• 35:49
  And if you go back, I invite everybody to really look at a lot of the types of conflicts and low-level conflicts and whatnot that have happened in places like Malaysia and Myanmar and Bangladesh and especially Shan State in the northern part of Myanmar and then northern Thailand and all that.
• 36:14
  If you look at all that, I used to study all this.
• 36:16
  I used to work with a guy.
• 36:17
  You know, when I first started doing this, I was transitioning into doing it professionally before I went to work for Newsmax.
• 36:22
  I was working with a guy over in Vietnam.
• 36:24
  So I learned all about this.
• 36:25
  I was there 2011, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, watching the Chinese try to figure out a way to get out from beyond the Straits by building up a port in Myanmar.
• 36:37
  So that they didn't have to be bottled up by the Straits.
• 36:39
  and they were bringing in, they had a big oil and gas pipeline that they brought in from Myanmar to Kunming,
• 36:44
  the industrial city in the south, just north of Thailand, right?
• 36:49
  Go through all that stuff.
• 36:50
  And every time you saw the Chinese trying to break around the bottleneck at the Straits of Malacca,
• 36:55
  all of a sudden there was sectarian violence between Muslims and someone else or whatever,
• 37:01
  in Myanmar or this place or that place.
• 37:03
  I could literally pinpoint it to individual places.
• 37:06
  because you could just see it happen
• 37:08
  over and over and over again.
• 37:10
  I'm like, oh, that's so obvious.
• 37:11
  That's kind of what began to train me
• 37:14
  in how to look at the world that way, right?
• 37:17
  And then you could look at what you saw at.
• 37:19
  And then, so there's others around the world,
• 37:21
  but these are the geographic choke points
• 37:25
  that need to go away.
• 37:26
  These are the single points of failure
• 37:27
  that can be spun up at a moment's notice
• 37:29
  in order to create an outsized response
• 37:33
  that then blackmails the world.
• 37:36
  and say, no, you have to allow us, and then the Iranians come around and go,
• 37:40
  you have to allow us to have nuclear weapons because it's our right,
• 37:43
  or we're going to bring global trade to a halt.
• 37:47
  Ah, fuck you, no.
• 37:50
  How about fuck you, no?
• 37:53
  Like, seriously, I mean, why do we even have to, like, what gives you the right?
• 37:57
  Because fuck you, that's why.
• 38:01
  I mean, seriously, no, you don't get to do that.
• 38:04
  we have the right we as the humanity get to say no
• 38:09
  it's like the guy sitting at the end of the it's like the guy who controls who controls the property
• 38:17
  next to the next to the um the the stick the the the the entryway to the burb clave
• 38:25
  saying oh no you got to pay me a toll after you after you register with the dude after you register
• 38:31
  with the rent-a-cop at the freaking door.
• 38:33
  And we're like, and everybody in the neighborhood behind him
• 38:35
  is like, in America, like, lock and load,
• 38:38
  walk up with the 12-gauge going,
• 38:40
  ah, fuck you, dude.
• 38:40
  No, this is what the audience are doing.
• 38:44
  Except it's a nuclear weapon.
• 38:46
  And why?
• 38:46
  Because he mounted a 50 cal on his house?
• 38:48
  So he's going to then tell us that we have to all,
• 38:50
  like, no, at that point, we all turn around
• 38:52
  and figure out a way to get, you know,
• 38:54
  get into his house, take his 50 cal away from it,
• 38:56
  beat him upside the fucking head, go,
• 38:58
  no, dude, and that's enough.
• 39:00
  like you know how about elbow me draw like done like and i'm doing that of course today because
• 39:07
  you know chuck norris just died and you know rest and chuck you know all hail all hail to
• 39:14
  chuck norris that dude was fucking badass um so like i don't know like this i i when a certain
• 39:22
  point when you stop and you bring it back to its primitives where we are they're threatening
• 39:29
  they're going to steal all our money they're going to like make our children's lives terrible
• 39:33
  they're going to do this they're going to well you can just give us what we want and it would
• 39:37
  make sense that if these points of control around the world now the focus being straight
• 39:43
  affirming is is so critical and important to uh the city of london then they would fight like
• 39:50
  death over it right and of course they would and they would and they would build this thing
• 39:56
  in Iran up into this implacable enemy in the minds of everybody. They'd run the psychological
• 40:02
  operation. They would run the, they would, they would, they would support, absolutely support
• 40:08
  horrific Iranian propaganda for, I mean, give the Persians their due. Like it's the same thing
• 40:14
  with the Russians. Give the, give the Russians their due. They're really good at propaganda.
• 40:18
  Like the Russians are really good at it. And I, and, and I have a soft spot for the Russians. I
• 40:22
  think they're justified in Ukraine. So, you know, I was just, I always felt the Russians were
• 40:27
  justified in Ukraine to stop NATO aggression in the same way that I think we're justified in going
• 40:30
  after Iran. I don't think Iran's a good guy. I never did. I, you know, at one point, I, you know,
• 40:35
  in the past, I'll say this in the past, especially, you know, the world has changed after 10, 7,
• 40:41
  like it or not. Okay. And not for the better, but it was clearly the inciting incident to get us to
• 40:48
  where we are today in this phase of history. And I wish it didn't happen and all and everything.
• 40:55
  I don't never wanted to see the Israelis lose their minds and go, you know, blow up the
• 41:00
  Palestinians the way they did. It's disgusting. Right. It's disgusting. I mean, I'm not, you know,
• 41:05
  I'm not mincing words here. You know, my nose is not big because I'm Jewish. It's because I'm
• 41:10
  fucking Italian. Hey, like, I don't care. I was raised Roman Catholic for Christ's sake. I, you
• 41:16
  I don't even, I fucking know a goddamn thing about anything.
• 41:19
  I don't care.
• 41:20
  I don't like the Israelis.
• 41:21
  I never have.
• 41:23
  Okay.
• 41:23
  But I can also dispassionately separate that from my opinion of them.
• 41:31
  And with them acting in their national interests you can argue whether or not you think they deserve to have national interests or not That fine I don care That not reality Reality is they have national
• 41:47
  interests. Iran has national interests. But Iran chose a path. They chose a path to fake negotiate
• 41:54
  while they pursued nuclear weapons. They chose a path to not negotiate in good faith.
• 42:01
  I have peers that believe that they were.
• 42:06
  I disagree with them.
• 42:07
  I've told them this.
• 42:08
  Alex Cranor disagrees with me.
• 42:10
  Joaquin Flores disagrees with me.
• 42:12
  That's fine.
• 42:12
  You can believe what you want to believe.
• 42:14
  I believe that they were negotiating exactly the same way they were when Obama was negotiating with them over the JCPOA.
• 42:21
  I haven't seen any change in behavior on their part.
• 42:24
  I don't make any justifications for their actions.
• 42:27
  Period.
• 42:29
  And they've been lying.
• 42:30
  And we've known for years that they were relying to the IAEA about their enrichment program, number of centrifuges they had running and everything else.
• 42:39
  I can even sit back and be generous and try and separate the clerics, not even calling them the mullahs, right?
• 42:47
  Call them the clerics who say, yeah, we issued a fought law against nuclear weapons.
• 42:51
  Okay, great.
• 42:53
  Well, the IRGC is pursuing a nuclear weapon.
• 42:56
  What are you doing to stop that?
• 42:58
  well maybe your shia clericism or whatever you want to call it your religious weight isn't enough
• 43:05
  to stop these religious crazies that are a military doing this terrible thing therefore
• 43:11
  i can so i can even look at hominy the late the the late hominy or they both could be late at this
• 43:18
  point um as like maduro a captured pawn right i can see it i can i can construct that argument i
• 43:26
  don't have to believe it i don't have to believe it but i can construct it and then i can say well
• 43:32
  yeah maybe he was a captured pawn and maybe the maybe his foreign minister and the president and
• 43:37
  everyone and the civilian arm of the government and them were trying to negotiate with the united
• 43:41
  states on the up and out but they were never going to do so if the irgc put a gun to their head and
• 43:46
  said negotiate like this the same way that maduro for years you know had a gun to his head and
• 43:52
  negotiated the way he did until Trump could guarantee for him he had his family safety.
• 44:00
  And then he rolled the dice and bet the farm on Delta Force. Pretty good bet on his part.
• 44:09
  And the United States went in. And the only reason we did that was because Maduro had value to us
• 44:15
  as an asset.
• 44:18
  Now, for the Iranians,
• 44:20
  they could have negotiated
• 44:22
  a new arrangement.
• 44:23
  They could have said,
• 44:24
  we no longer work.
• 44:25
  Yeah, they could have turned to London
• 44:27
  and gone,
• 44:29
  Trump's offering is this.
• 44:33
  What do you got?
• 44:36
  And if they say,
• 44:37
  we don't have anything,
• 44:39
  which the British don't,
• 44:41
  and the Iranians still chose war,
• 44:44
  brat and then the 810
• 44:48
  more hunt shot
• 44:48
  I mean that's my
• 44:52
  version of what happened
• 44:53
  and the
• 44:55
  week leading up to February 28th
• 44:58
  that became
• 45:00
  a higher and higher and higher probability for me
• 45:02
  that that was what was going to happen
• 45:03
  and I even thought that Trump was just going to do limited
• 45:06
  strikes to take out most of the
• 45:08
  IRGC's command and control and then hope
• 45:10
  that that was going to be the end of it and then we get
• 45:12
  like a 12 day war and then
• 45:14
  Give the Iranians the ability to do a fake bombing on one of our bases and save face and do this.
• 45:21
  And we do the same thing we did before.
• 45:23
  I never, ever thought we didn't bomb Ford out in the pants.
• 45:29
  See, this is where some of my peers, again, I'm not trying to, I'm not saying, I'm trying to throw Alex and Joaquin under the bus here.
• 45:39
  They had a different interpretation of events than I did.
• 45:42
  And they premised their analysis based on that premise.
• 45:48
  And then when, so they were convinced that last year it was a fake bombing.
• 45:54
  And it was a fake set of bombs and it was a movie.
• 45:59
  When we attacked the centrifuges?
• 46:02
  Yeah, when we attacked the Fordow and the Tans, they just dropped a bunch of bombs out in the desert and didn't do anything.
• 46:08
  I'm like, that's a, I said from day one, when that happens, whatever that was, June 26th or whatever, I said, oh, that's a bad, no, no, no, we bombed that.
• 46:20
  I know Americans well enough to know that we bombed that.
• 46:22
  I know Trump well enough to know we bombed that.
• 46:25
  You don't, don't overcommit to that, to that, that interpretation of events.
• 46:30
  because it could lead you in the future
• 46:34
  to a bad analysis in the future
• 46:38
  if this ever comes up again,
• 46:40
  which did, and they were both convinced
• 46:42
  Trump's not going to attack.
• 46:43
  The Iranians are negotiating in faith.
• 46:45
  We're setting up for the same exact thing
• 46:47
  as the last time, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 46:48
  We all thought this before Putin
• 46:51
  and moved into Ukraine.
• 46:53
  We all said that it's not going to be a war.
• 46:55
  Then Putin comes in, shock and awe,
• 46:56
  does exactly the Trump thing.
• 46:58
  And he's knocking on the door of Kiev.
• 47:00
  in the first 12 hours.
• 47:04
  24 hours, 40 hours, whatever the hell it was.
• 47:08
  Everybody keeps making that mistake
• 47:09
  because no one wants to invite that level of chaos
• 47:12
  into their thinking,
• 47:13
  but they don't want to plan for it.
• 47:15
  We said all of a sudden,
• 47:16
  that becomes a very difficult thing.
• 47:18
  Look, it speaks to their humanity.
• 47:21
  It speaks to their qualities as human beings
• 47:23
  that they don't believe that that's the way they view Trump,
• 47:28
  that he wouldn't do something to them
• 47:30
  that was that apparent. And so therefore, you know, when you think of the psychology of the
• 47:36
  situation, and I again, don't mean to speak for, you know, grown men and everything else, but I'm
• 47:40
  trying to be as generous and as multi, you know, I'm trying to be not as generous, but just as,
• 47:45
  just as I can see it from a variety of different perspectives. But when I got done with the 12 day
• 47:51
  war last year, I sat down and I really, I really, me personally, I sat back and I went, I've got a
• 47:56
  lot of rethinking to do. I have a lot of recalculation to do. And I did.
• 48:00
  And I came down on the, oh, no.
• 48:04
  That was an impressive operation. And
• 48:08
  Iran better have gotten the message. And if they didn't get the message,
• 48:14
  okay, one, then I get to
• 48:16
  double down over and over and over again that my
• 48:20
  newly found insight that at that point that Iran was actually
• 48:24
  working with Steve London, red ants, black ants, the Alex Cranor, put the red ants and the black
• 48:28
  ants in the jar, shake them up and let them fight. They're funding the Iranians on one side,
• 48:33
  they're funding the Israelis on the other, you know, welcome to war. They profit on the chaos.
• 48:41
  Hey, it's a good business model. It's been serving the British for fucking 300,
• 48:43
  400 years. Between the British and the Dutch and everybody else, it's a great business model.
• 48:48
  It's good work if you can get it.
• 48:52
  It's horrific for humanity, obviously, and for the victims of it.
• 48:56
  But from their perspective, it's a good business model.
• 48:59
  And Iran's actions, or at least the IRGC and the theocracy's actions after that,
• 49:09
  support my interpretation of events, my map of whose incentives map to what
• 49:14
  and whose relationships map to what.
• 49:16
  You get the Promethean action ladies and some other ones coming in and going,
• 49:18
  oh yeah, well, you know, this guy's got this money and, you know, a billion in a row in London,
• 49:22
  and they've got this and they've got that. And then what you're watching after that is a bunch
• 49:27
  of people having to justify and cope that those relationships don't exist. And now we have to
• 49:34
  prove, and now they're trying to prove that negative as opposed to just saying, no, those
• 49:37
  relationships still exist. And so there's a fundamental difference of perspective, which has
• 49:45
  led to a fundamental difference in analysis.
• 49:49
  And then I'm an American.
• 49:57
  Sorry.
• 49:58
  Yeah.
• 49:59
  At a certain point, it's stressful.
• 50:03
  It's anxiety driven.
• 50:06
  And everybody's laying out their anxiety on their phones every day,
• 50:10
  including me.
• 50:12
  I'm not going to sit there.
• 50:13
  I sleep well at night.
• 50:21
  But everybody, I've been saying this for a while now.
• 50:24
  When we get maximally stressed, when we are having our base assumptions about how we think the world works, changes or is being challenged.
• 50:35
  We revert to primitives.
• 50:40
  And you know what my primitive is?
• 50:43
  Patton.
• 50:46
  I'm not kidding.
• 50:48
  Like I go back and I watch the frigging day.
• 50:51
  First,
• 50:51
  I watched the opening speech,
• 50:52
  George C.
• 50:53
  Scott as Patton.
• 50:54
  I watched that and I'm like,
• 50:55
  I'm 12 years old again.
• 50:58
  It's terrible.
• 51:00
  I say it's terrible.
• 51:01
  I think in reality,
• 51:02
  in hindsight,
• 51:03
  and it's funny,
• 51:04
  I mentioned this about two months ago.
• 51:07
  I said,
• 51:08
  I need to watch Patton again.
• 51:09
  Yep.
• 51:11
  And I watched it again.
• 51:12
  And I said,
• 51:13
  and I was watching it and I went, oh, and I learned, and then I learned a lot more about
• 51:17
  Patton. I stopped, stopped just taking the movie as gospel. I really sat down and did a deep dive
• 51:22
  into Patton for about three days. Didn't get a lot of sleep. I was up on YouTube until six
• 51:26
  o'clock in the morning, like multiple nights in a row, watching stuff about Patton. And I realized
• 51:30
  something about Patton I hadn't, I hadn't understood, which is that Patton fought war
• 51:33
  to minimize damage, to minimize loss of human life. He wanted to beat the enemy so fast that
• 51:39
  they did not know that they were beaten, capture all of them, capture the position, move on to the
• 51:44
  next target, keep going, keep going, keep going. And before you know it, the war is over. A couple
• 51:48
  of thousand men are killed, 250,000 men are captured, and the war's over. And the civilian
• 51:55
  damage has been almost none. Everybody wins. If you're going to fight a war, fight it like that.
• 52:04
  If you want to know how we're fighting the war here in Iran,
• 52:09
  The guys who were still picking up weapons, they're getting vaporized.
• 52:13
  Yeah.
• 52:14
  How, you know, but the civilian casualties are pretty low.
• 52:18
  I mean, they're not zero, but they can't, you can't, you can't expect them to be zero.
• 52:24
  Like at some point, you know, it's a tragedy.
• 52:27
  It's terrible.
• 52:29
  You know, this is humanity.
• 52:31
  We're messy.
• 52:32
  Yeah.
• 52:33
  I mean, the bombing of the girls' school, that was hard to stomach.
• 52:39
  But again, just looking at this dispatch and going down.
• 52:44
  So that's another thing I'm trying to figure out in my mind now.
• 52:47
  Speaking of collateral damage coming in many forms, obviously energy, infrastructure.
• 52:52
  One quick thing about the school.
• 52:55
  I did not know anything about it.
• 52:58
  I didn't spend any time looking at it.
• 53:00
  I was listening to my friend Blaine Holt about this this morning.
• 53:03
  crypto rich the other day and he said um oh by the way um we have good intelligence now that
• 53:09
  that was actually a misfired iranian weapon that went backwards and you know it was they were doing
• 53:17
  you know it it was a terrible thing it's collateral damage it's you can say we we we caused it we did
• 53:24
  not bomb the school and again i'm i'm i'm okay i'm not saying that's like oh my god we're the
• 53:31
  americans are so great and i'm trying to hope my way around it no if we bomb the school we bomb
• 53:35
  school like obama bombed drone struck americans for fuck's sake okay you want to talk about why
• 53:40
  i crashed out as a human being saying okay as fuck this you these people don't get to do anything
• 53:45
  on my watch anymore because of the drone striker in chief and this i used to call him obamia
• 53:50
  right oh dash bomb dash yeah that was my name for him for years and it still is i still think he's a
• 53:56
  fucking scumbag. And, you know, and he's drone striking Americans, no less everybody else.
• 54:03
  You know, look again, you know, we can sit here and we can talk about it. However, we can talk
• 54:13
  about, you know, I can sit here and I can flash to, you know, Ozymandias at the end of Watchmen
• 54:19
  going, I did it. And, you know, do you have to swallow it? I don't know. I mean, you hope that
• 54:27
  you don't, you know, he dropped a nuclear bomb for all intents and purposes. Movie version,
• 54:33
  he drops a nuclear bomb. Comic book version, he drops a freaking psychic weird, you know,
• 54:38
  thing on New York and kills 6 million people. Ethical, moral argument, the same, but
• 54:49
  I'm not making that decision.
• 54:51
  I don't have to agree or disagree with the decision in that respect.
• 54:56
  If the long-term outcome is that this amount of violence leads to a lot less violence in the future
• 55:02
  and a lot less cost for everybody, and the Iranian people get to live the way they want.
• 55:08
  If they choose that they want to go back and live like they did before the war, that's their prerogative.
• 55:13
  Just expect that in about 15 or 20 years, the United States is going to come back over again.
• 55:16
  They're going to bomb the fuck out of you.
• 55:19
  well that's i you know because that's what america's americans are pretty much
• 55:25
  in agreement about that because the polling i'm seeing on the war is like yeah this is justified
• 55:29
  well that's what i i i question the polling whether or not it's legit no i think i i don't
• 55:35
  yeah i don't i really don't the one i'm not seeing any other day was like mega 100 support
• 55:41
  that's obvious that's obvious fucking thank you but like it was like like 89 90 of of republican
• 55:47
  voters and you know 75 or 60 to 70 percent of of americans in general and obviously do trump
• 55:53
  hasn't tried to really justify the war he's just been he's just been running it he's not really out
• 55:58
  there every day going we're doing this for because he knows the american people won't believe it
• 56:02
  anymore bush used to go out there and do that but obama and clinton went out there and tried to sell
• 56:07
  it as a humanitarian war i'm like no i'm not selling this is not a humanitarian war this is
• 56:11
  purely in our geostrategic interests.
• 56:14
  That's it.
• 56:15
  And that's it.
• 56:17
  It's power politics.
• 56:17
  So we're not going to, you know,
• 56:18
  not trying to,
• 56:19
  not trying to sugarcoat this folks.
• 56:21
  This is what we have to do.
• 56:23
  Well, I mean,
• 56:24
  and through his credit in that respect,
• 56:26
  that's the,
• 56:26
  and that's what he's doing.
• 56:28
  Well,
• 56:28
  that's going to take the political hit for it as well.
• 56:31
  I've noticed.
• 56:32
  Well, that was,
• 56:32
  that was like the point I was going to make,
• 56:34
  like the timing of it all leading up to midterms,
• 56:37
  like another form of collateral damage is possible.
• 56:40
  What happens in November?
• 56:41
  Trump said the other day, he said, someone asked him directly about the, well, why did you do this?
• 56:45
  It may hurt you in terms of, he's like, because it's the right thing to do.
• 56:50
  And if I have to make every decision based on what some short-term political gain or loss is going to net me, I can't govern the country.
• 57:00
  This is the right thing to do, and I get it.
• 57:02
  And I'll, you know, and basically, I'll fix it in post if I have to.
• 57:06
  I think he'll be fine from a political perspective if this thing doesn't drag on too far.
• 57:10
  And again, everybody like trying to turn around and say, oh, it's not over in three days.
• 57:14
  And it's clearly awesome.
• 57:16
  That's just adjent prop, a low quality Iranian adjent prop.
• 57:19
  That's bullshit.
• 57:22
  It's also high.
• 57:23
  It's also people in high neuroticism that are worried about.
• 57:27
  I have friends who are hyper worried about what Israel is trying to get us to do and what they're going to do.
• 57:35
  And I and we're talking about people who are Israeli.
• 57:40
  okay. And I've been listening to them very carefully. Um, and, um, and I understand their
• 57:51
  worry. And then again, at one point I said, but you know, you know, yeah, choose being nervous
• 58:01
  about things. It's kind of part of the course. There are, there are people that are, that are,
• 58:06
  that are high in anxiety and they have every right to be i'm not again that's not a judgment
• 58:11
  right that's just a statement of you know the dominant personality traits of most jews and
• 58:16
  like i grew up in new york i grew up on behalf of my friends i mean seriously dude i grew up in
• 58:21
  like new york like do you understand that more p more jews live in new york city than live in
• 58:26
  tel aviv right like i grew up in upstate new york like half of my own half of the kids that i
• 58:33
  took my honors classes in high school with that i went to school with from the time i'm
• 58:38
  fucking five until i graduated at 18 half of these kids were jewish i mean so many of them i didn't
• 58:44
  think it was whether i didn't give a shit one way the other half were italian the 20 10 percent of
• 58:49
  them were irish i'm not kidding right it was literally like you know so a couple of irish
• 58:53
  a bunch of italians and a bunch of jewish kids and a couple of heritage you know crosses that
• 59:00
  were effectively heritage Americans.
• 59:03
  You know, I mean, I, you know,
• 59:05
  I'll give you a perfect example.
• 59:07
  My best friend that I grew up with
• 59:08
  all my entire life, all the way up to 18,
• 59:12
  his mom's family traces back to Francis Lewis,
• 59:16
  who signed the frigging Declaration of Independence
• 59:18
  and his father was a German Jew.
• 59:22
  Okay.
• 59:22
  And he was the town engineer.
• 59:26
  And they were Democrats.
• 59:28
  and my dad was like the only Republican in town.
• 59:31
  Like, you know what I mean?
• 59:32
  Like, not really.
• 59:34
  It's, you know, upstate New York is much more red than,
• 59:36
  you know, I'm talking not very upstate New York.
• 59:39
  I grew up in Orange County.
• 59:42
  And it was just like, you know,
• 59:43
  it's like the Bronx, Westchester, Rockland, Orange, right?
• 59:48
  So it's just up the Hudson River,
• 59:50
  about an hour north of the city.
• 59:54
  Is there?
• 59:54
  No, I'm like, I'm very comfortable with understanding
• 59:58
  those people.
• 1:00:01
  In that respect, what I know,
• 1:00:03
  I'm like, I'm friends that are really good at you.
• 1:00:05
  But they're also lovely people.
• 1:00:07
  What are they worried?
• 1:00:08
  They're worried about Israel going off half-cocked
• 1:00:11
  and wanting
• 1:00:13
  to do what they did
• 1:00:14
  in Gaza
• 1:00:15
  to the Iranians and getting the ISA to do it
• 1:00:19
  for them.
• 1:00:19
  And I don't
• 1:00:21
  have a... Again,
• 1:00:23
  they're saying this
• 1:00:24
  because
• 1:00:26
  they're, you know, this is, you know, they're not cheering this. They're very worried about it.
• 1:00:35
  They don't want to see that because then they say then, and then, and then they go from there to,
• 1:00:38
  and then World War III happens, you know, and none of us want that. So that's their, you know,
• 1:00:43
  they're going through the tail risk that, and they're, but they're focusing on the weaknesses
• 1:00:47
  and threats of the SWOT analysis, SWOT analysis, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats.
• 1:00:53
  They're focused on weaknesses and threats as opposed to strengths and opportunities.
• 1:00:56
  Now, so what I tend to do, because so many people focus on weakness and threat, because that sells click-wise, and because that is the default state of our media, both mainstream, conventional, legacy, and alternative, and all of the psyops that these people have access to money-wise to produce,
• 1:01:22
  I tend to stay and spend more of my time looking at the converse because that's who I am and look
• 1:01:32
  at the strengths and the opportunities and then try and balance everything out because the
• 1:01:36
  weaknesses and threats are like in front of everybody but no one's talking about the strengths
• 1:01:40
  and the opportunity very few are talking about the strengths and opportunities and so you know
• 1:01:45
  again you can hate me for it if you want I'm talking to the audience not you I know you not
• 1:01:49
  you hate me for it if you want that's fine you can call me i've been a part of the seven thousand
• 1:01:54
  dollar club or i'm this and that shit like i don't care like i am like i get accused of that 20 times
• 1:02:00
  a day on twitter it's great um i just have a very large block file not hard right um and uh and i'm
• 1:02:09
  still such a fundamentally free speech kind of guy i still feel bad about blocking people even though
• 1:02:13
  i know they're bots i mean i want to have a conversation with everyone i'm not i know i
• 1:02:18
  can't do that. I'm not in a position to do that anymore. I'm not a guy with 1200 people
• 1:02:22
  following or 150 people following me on Twitter trying to have a conversation I a guy with a fairly reasonably platform that trying to move the needle and interject you know some something approaching signal into all of this
• 1:02:38
  noise for you to digest and do with what you will. I don't, you know, I don't, I have no control over
• 1:02:44
  that. So I'm not going to try. And if you want to have a conversation with me, honestly, like you
• 1:02:48
  and I do, whenever we get together, um, you want to have that, even have that on Twitter, we can do
• 1:02:52
  that just understand that my hackles are up all the time because they have to be so you know come
• 1:02:57
  in i mean to the audience if you want to have a conversation with me on twitter come in and make
• 1:03:02
  sure that you're you structure your tweet properly don't say tom i love you but that's an auto block
• 1:03:08
  because that's mi6 like all day every day okay just don't say that like just just come in and
• 1:03:14
  go and say honest question blah blah blah if i answer you with an with an honest response
• 1:03:20
  and you give me a second honest, an honest response to that.
• 1:03:25
  I know, I know that you're not going to get blocked anytime soon.
• 1:03:27
  I'll say just like lose patience with your argument or just mute you or whatever.
• 1:03:32
  But I will at least give you the opportunity.
• 1:03:35
  Like, like a lot of people, they'll get one strike now.
• 1:03:38
  I used to give everybody three strikes.
• 1:03:39
  Now you get, you get a lot of people get one.
• 1:03:42
  Most people get three.
• 1:03:43
  And a lot of people don't, you know, get an infant number because I know they're,
• 1:03:47
  because I've been talking with them for so long that I know they're the people.
• 1:03:49
  they may disagree with me that's fine
• 1:03:51
  so
• 1:03:53
  leaning into strengths and opportunities
• 1:03:55
  I mean I think the most
• 1:03:57
  obvious if you're looking to the
• 1:03:59
  fog of war is
• 1:04:00
  this sort of
• 1:04:03
  shifting of
• 1:04:05
  leverage in terms
• 1:04:07
  of control over energy systems
• 1:04:09
  from the Mideast
• 1:04:11
  to the United States
• 1:04:13
  and I think there was a deal between Japan
• 1:04:15
  and the US yesterday with
• 1:04:17
  selling Alaskan
• 1:04:19
  oil to Japanese.
• 1:04:22
  Inas El-Haji had
• 1:04:23
  that analysis
• 1:04:25
  a few days ago.
• 1:04:27
  I'm actually going to speak with Inas on Monday.
• 1:04:32
  Inas is an interesting guy.
• 1:04:34
  I don't always agree with him, but he's at least not.
• 1:04:36
  I think he's an honest broker.
• 1:04:38
  Well, he actually, part of his analysis
• 1:04:40
  made me think of you because there was a whole narrative
• 1:04:42
  about they're only letting
• 1:04:43
  Chinese ships through because they're
• 1:04:46
  settling in yuan
• 1:04:48
  outside the dollar, and this is like a retaliation,
• 1:04:50
  but then Anas pointed out, well, actually,
• 1:04:52
  the Chinese ships are getting through because they have Chinese insurance,
• 1:04:54
  and they are actually insured.
• 1:04:57
  I was like, oh, I didn't hear that.
• 1:04:58
  They're insured, and the Iranians don't dare,
• 1:05:01
  as Anas has pointed out multiple times,
• 1:05:03
  the Iranians actually don't dare blow up a bunch of oil tankers
• 1:05:07
  because then they can't run their desalination plants,
• 1:05:09
  and then they destroy their power base by cutting off their head
• 1:05:12
  despite their nose, their very large Persian noses.
• 1:05:16
  You know what I mean?
• 1:05:18
  It's a zone in that respect.
• 1:05:21
  Do you view this as one of the strengths of now a potential outcome?
• 1:05:24
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:05:25
  No, it's absolutely a strength.
• 1:05:26
  It's absolutely the, I think it's the point of the entire exercise.
• 1:05:30
  The point of the entire exercise is to remove the straight as a physical choke point for the entire world if the entire world wants it to happen.
• 1:05:39
  Meaning if the people on this, the people on, this is the problem with the straights and the Persian Gulf.
• 1:05:46
  So one side doesn't want, wants everybody, doesn't really want the oil to flow.
• 1:05:52
  They want to use it as a means by which to, you know, either put up a toll booth or, I'm talking about the Iranians now, or threaten everybody and then use that to get advantages and then get rent in other forms, right?
• 1:06:06
  Concessions that they don't deserve, money, pallets of money from Obama, whatever the fuck it is.
• 1:06:09
  On the other side are all the Gulf states, and they're playing, and they've been playing the double game for years.
• 1:06:14
  and you note that Trump has like worked really hard to bring them all in line and you know like
• 1:06:21
  Qatar and Bahrain and others they're all UAE they're all in fucking London's pocket back but
• 1:06:26
  they've been in London's back pocket for years like they're not they're not independent actors
• 1:06:31
  either it is again two sides of the same coin here or the same side of two different coins same thing
• 1:06:35
  they just want to sell oil right they just want to make money they're just you know they're just
• 1:06:41
  about the nouveau riche Arabs
• 1:06:43
  at the end of the day.
• 1:06:47
  But Trump
• 1:06:48
  has an ally
• 1:06:50
  in MBS in Saudi Arabia.
• 1:06:53
  Saudi Arabia
• 1:06:53
  rules the roost.
• 1:06:56
  These guys are effectively
• 1:06:57
  just the same group of people.
• 1:07:04
  So
• 1:07:04
  he goes back,
• 1:07:06
  go back to Trump's first
• 1:07:07
  foreign
• 1:07:08
  visit.
• 1:07:11
  first term, where'd he go?
• 1:07:13
  With Saudi Arabia.
• 1:07:16
  And it was the start
• 1:07:17
  of this process that we're
• 1:07:19
  not paying off now.
• 1:07:21
  So we end that
• 1:07:23
  nonsense where
• 1:07:25
  everybody gets to pay, gets to charge
• 1:07:27
  a little extra for the oil and their LNG and this
• 1:07:29
  and that and everything else because of the
• 1:07:31
  Persian Gulf and because of the Straits of our moves
• 1:07:33
  and because we've got
• 1:07:34
  this whole network of incentives
• 1:07:38
  bound up on this
• 1:07:39
  really messy chess board.
• 1:07:41
  Right. And I'm going to, I'm going to make a, I'm going to make a,
• 1:07:45
  an analogy here in a minute that I think you'll appreciate.
• 1:07:53
  But the straights don't have to be a physical choke point, right? It doesn't, it doesn't have
• 1:08:00
  to be. It is this way because of this, this messy chessboard that the British and the French and,
• 1:08:06
  and, and the local players have all created for everybody else to fucking deal with.
• 1:08:11
  And then we were forced.
• 1:08:14
  And then we, because we were getting paid on our oligarchs were also getting paid for years on this.
• 1:08:20
  And we were aligned with the British to do this terrible friggin shit.
• 1:08:23
  Like, you know, we were getting paid too.
• 1:08:25
  Okay, fine.
• 1:08:26
  And then we were in worse than everything else.
• 1:08:28
  The British were doing it all.
• 1:08:29
  And we were getting blamed for it.
• 1:08:31
  As the world was getting tired of this whole thing.
• 1:08:33
  Because we all, everybody's tired of the American empire.
• 1:08:36
  Like running around like free Rambo without a job strap.
• 1:08:38
  Blowing up people, starting color revolutions and all this shit.
• 1:08:41
  We're all tired of this game, but it's the British's game.
• 1:08:45
  But we're getting all the flack for it, right?
• 1:08:49
  And in some ways, the Iranians are getting a lot of our flack now.
• 1:08:52
  So how about we all stop taking flack for somebody else?
• 1:08:57
  Let's handle that system.
• 1:08:59
  That's basically what Trump's offer has been to everybody in the region.
• 1:09:04
  The countries that got to show up at the Board of Peace to rebuild Gaza
• 1:09:08
  is your um is your prima facie evidence that everybody's ready for this moreover russia and
• 1:09:15
  china trying to bring as many people into the bricks is also prima facie evidence that everybody's
• 1:09:20
  tired of the game but with a different outcome right that was built if that was built on the
• 1:09:26
  premise that the united states was inseparable from nato in europe right that's what bricks was
• 1:09:31
  based on but if that is no longer the case because clearly trump wants out of fucking nato and he
• 1:09:35
  months out of all this shit, well, then Brexit is unnecessary now. So now the Board of Peace
• 1:09:39
  becomes a much more interesting angle on this because now it circumvents all the post-World
• 1:09:45
  War II institutions that were created, the IMF, the World Bank, specifically the UN,
• 1:09:52
  obviously now NATO and all this stuff. All these things can be broken down. So there's an
• 1:09:55
  opportunity, right? Here's the strength. We get rid of the straits and the whole chaos premium of
• 1:10:02
  the entire planet. If you take Iran off the board, you take Lloyd's of London off the board,
• 1:10:06
  you take this, you bring the Arab countries in line and say, look, at the end of the day,
• 1:10:09
  you have to like, you know, you have to pay. If you don't want to provide shipping insurance for
• 1:10:14
  your own ships, you don't want to insure your own voyages, that's fine. We'll do it for you.
• 1:10:18
  You can do it through our system. And you don't want to build a Navy? Fine. You only want to
• 1:10:22
  build a commercial fleet? Fine. Then you're going to pay the U.S. Navy and the U.S. insurance system
• 1:10:27
  directly so the american taxpayers want to pay for it we can turn a cost center
• 1:10:32
  into a mild profit center with a cost plus business model
• 1:10:36
  that's the way trump is thinking about this and that is a strength of the entire world
• 1:10:44
  because now all of a sudden the chaos premium for goods and services and moving shit around the world
• 1:10:49
  comes down because there's nobody actually fomenting well assuming that the united states
• 1:10:55
  and revert to all the shit that we learned from the British and start then becoming the dudes that
• 1:11:01
  do the terrible thing. But if you look at the way Trump has been building all of his trade deals,
• 1:11:06
  he's been building his trade deals to cut everybody as a partner. Hey, let's get your
• 1:11:11
  natural gas or your oil or your minerals or whatever, and let's get it. Let's get them up
• 1:11:15
  out of the ground. Let's build businesses. And let's put those businesses in Australia,
• 1:11:19
  where we're extracting the iron ore from or whatever it is that we're going to do with the
• 1:11:24
  Australians or the coal or this or that. Same thing in Thailand, same thing in Central and
• 1:11:30
  South America. He's trying to cut everybody in as a partner, not be a colonial extraction
• 1:11:35
  saying, we want all your oil at pennies on the dollar. No, we just want everybody to pay retail.
• 1:11:41
  And maybe at the end of the day, we really, you know, and again, like, and this is how you know
• 1:11:45
  that you're dealing with Americans and not Jews, because he wants everybody to pay retail. Oh,
• 1:11:50
  I'm sorry, I just made a joke, didn't I?
• 1:11:51
  And make money by bringing down the cost of protection.
• 1:11:55
  Right, the cost of protection, the cost of the chaos.
• 1:11:58
  What does it cost to run the world in insurance costs
• 1:12:03
  and forex costs and this and that
• 1:12:05
  and the stress of the budget,
• 1:12:07
  the political costs domestically?
• 1:12:09
  And we all have to spend,
• 1:12:11
  how much money are we spending on income taxes
• 1:12:13
  and regulatory fees and this?
• 1:12:15
  And then all this like draws that we're all looking at.
• 1:12:18
  I saw something this afternoon that was hilarious.
• 1:12:21
  And, you know, again, at the end of the day, I'm like, what does it mean?
• 1:12:24
  But somebody ran an analysis through Grok of, like, the entirety of the EU's regulatory scheme.
• 1:12:30
  And Grok said, we can get rid of 86% of it.
• 1:12:33
  And nothing, and honestly, nothing about the EU would change, I think.
• 1:12:37
  Because I think it was, you know, it's like, and we can do the same thing with the Code of Federal Regulations.
• 1:12:41
  Like, the CFR, the Code of the CFR, have you ever read the CFR?
• 1:12:44
  No.
• 1:12:45
  Like, I've had to, when I used to be a chemist, I used to have to read all the code of federal regulations for the sections pertaining to, you know, environmental analysis, which is where I was.
• 1:12:57
  I was working in environmental labs, testing water and soil and everything else.
• 1:13:00
  So I had to know what all the methods were.
• 1:13:02
  They were on the CFR.
• 1:13:04
  Like, they're on it.
• 1:13:05
  And everything downstream.
• 1:13:07
  So I had to know all those rules.
• 1:13:08
  I had to know all that shit.
• 1:13:09
  You wanted to be a QC officer of an accredited laboratory, and I had to know this stuff, right?
• 1:13:14
  Like, I, dude, like, there's nothing, like, I'm already a difficult, I'm already, it's
• 1:13:21
  really hard for me to read in the first place.
• 1:13:23
  I've never been a particularly good reader.
• 1:13:25
  And I'm not very fast.
• 1:13:26
  Oh, my God, my eyes dry right the fuck out.
• 1:13:28
  And I'm asleep in 13 seconds.
• 1:13:30
  It's awful.
• 1:13:32
  It's really bad.
• 1:13:33
  I don't know how anybody does it.
• 1:13:34
  What I want to touch on before is, like, obviously, the war, the narratives about the war, the
• 1:13:42
  energy infrastructure, all very visible.
• 1:13:44
  right in front of everybody one of my favorite sort of uh under the radar signals that i love
• 1:13:51
  talking about what's going on with interest rates what um how are they reacting so it's
• 1:13:56
  what are they telling you brilliantly actually this is why again this is a part of the reason
• 1:14:01
  why when you ask me like how's it going i'm like everything is everything is proceeding as i have
• 1:14:06
  foreseen i hate to say it right um i hate to invoke the sheave palpatine but you know um
• 1:14:12
  um, British guilts, 10-year British guilts, uh, closed at just over 5% today. German,
• 1:14:19
  uh, 10-year German bonds closed over 3%. LeGuard is losing control over the German 10-year,
• 1:14:25
  um, because everybody's, money's going to the ground. So everything's getting sold.
• 1:14:32
  Gold got hit, silver got hit. I didn't look at the equity markets. I can actually pull them up.
• 1:14:36
  I'm sure that the Dow is down today a little bit.
• 1:14:39
  And it's not really that important.
• 1:14:42
  But with the big one, I was watching bond spreads.
• 1:14:44
  And I've been watching them all week because I'm watching them widen.
• 1:14:49
  And so while the U.S. yield curve is selling off, I mean, in this environment, money should go to ground, right?
• 1:14:57
  Money should just go.
• 1:14:58
  I don't know what the fuck to do.
• 1:15:00
  Like oil is $100 a barrel.
• 1:15:02
  I've got contracts.
• 1:15:02
  I've got derivatives blowing up.
• 1:15:05
  I've got private equity.
• 1:15:07
  I need money.
• 1:15:10
  That's it.
• 1:15:12
  So the U.S. tenure closed to 438,
• 1:15:16
  but the U.K. closed 62 basis points above that.
• 1:15:21
  Now it was trading in the 20s before the war,
• 1:15:23
  20 basis points over the U.S. rate,
• 1:15:26
  now right into 62.
• 1:15:28
  When it starts getting into the 60s,
• 1:15:30
  governments start falling,
• 1:15:31
  or something bad,
• 1:15:33
  or the Brits need to cut a deal
• 1:15:34
  in order to keep their government from falling,
• 1:15:36
  as this has happened before.
• 1:15:37
  So they're clearly the target here
• 1:15:40
  because they're the ones that are losing control
• 1:15:44
  over the markets.
• 1:15:44
  Moreover, then we take it one step further
• 1:15:47
  and we look at the Brent WTI spread.
• 1:15:50
  And that's $13, $14.
• 1:15:53
  What is that telling you?
• 1:15:55
  It's telling you that the world is,
• 1:15:57
  there's plenty of WTI out there,
• 1:15:59
  but the Brent contract is rising.
• 1:16:02
  you know oman i think oman was like loading at 160 a barrel today or something i don't know some
• 1:16:07
  you know the numbers are all out there and everybody's doing their agit prop thing on
• 1:16:10
  twitter because we're all looking at the same shit right um and we all think we're informed
• 1:16:16
  we're all looking at the same shit we all think we're informed
• 1:16:18
  right well what's important is what does that mean what it means is that trump is okay with
• 1:16:25
  uh and you know in donald trump's world we're getting an extra 30 a barrel for oil
• 1:16:31
  that we were before.
• 1:16:35
  Qatar's not exporting LNG.
• 1:16:37
  We got plenty of LNG.
• 1:16:40
  Natural gas prices are $3 a million BTUs in the United States.
• 1:16:45
  You know who's making money hand over fist right now?
• 1:16:47
  Ten here.
• 1:16:49
  The guys who run the big export terminal down in Louisiana,
• 1:16:53
  they're making a fortune because LNG prices around the world
• 1:16:55
  are through the roof and feedstock prices are boring.
• 1:16:58
  or at the bottom of the long-end trading range coming out of winter,
• 1:17:04
  where, come on, in like 10 years, going to make money hand over fist this year, right?
• 1:17:10
  And their last earnings report was quite good, actually.
• 1:17:16
  So Trump's saying, oh, yeah, we got plenty of energy.
• 1:17:19
  This is great.
• 1:17:19
  The country's getting rich.
• 1:17:21
  In his mind, money that comes back to the United States in that respect
• 1:17:25
  is the United States getting rich.
• 1:17:27
  He's not wrong, right?
• 1:17:28
  We're getting a premium from our stuff.
• 1:17:30
  And so to him, that's a strength that gives him the opportunity to then turn around and continue to press harder.
• 1:17:36
  Meanwhile, natural gas prices on the Dutch trading floor have doubled since before the war.
• 1:17:47
  And they can't afford it there.
• 1:17:49
  Now they're like screaming at everybody.
• 1:17:51
  Now, they're screaming at everybody.
• 1:17:53
  You have to turn down your air conditioners.
• 1:17:55
  You have to do this.
• 1:17:55
  You have to not heat your homes.
• 1:17:57
  You have to take cold showers and all this stuff.
• 1:18:00
  Typical frigging Europeans.
• 1:18:01
  Like, we fucked up, but you have to do what we tell you to do.
• 1:18:05
  How about no?
• 1:18:07
  How about I'm going to buy whatever I can do?
• 1:18:09
  And there's impoverished new people left and right.
• 1:18:12
  And then there's Ursula von der Leyen standing out there going,
• 1:18:15
  we haven't decided yet whether or not we're going to accept Russian oil.
• 1:18:19
  Even though last year they bought more natural gas than the Russians
• 1:18:22
  than they ever have, by the way, which is hilarious.
• 1:18:25
  She does this shit, and it's just pathetic.
• 1:18:28
  And they just laundered through India, right?
• 1:18:30
  Yeah, I can just do that too, exactly.
• 1:18:32
  It doesn't really matter.
• 1:18:33
  Like, at the end of the day, I mean, it was the simplest run in the world, right?
• 1:18:37
  St. Petersburg to Rotterdam and back again.
• 1:18:39
  Like, it was the simplest run, and it's been shut off for four years.
• 1:18:47
  And, okay, what do you think you're going to accomplish with this?
• 1:18:51
  like
• 1:18:52
  they still think that consensus
• 1:18:55
  politics matters
• 1:18:56
  consensus politics does
• 1:18:59
  not matter notice how when
• 1:19:01
  when they were trying to get
• 1:19:03
  consensus politics over 90 billion
• 1:19:05
  dollar loan to Ukraine
• 1:19:06
  and Hungary and Slovakia
• 1:19:10
  said no
• 1:19:10
  they gave Ukraine the money
• 1:19:12
  anyway
• 1:19:14
  guess that velvet gloves gotten
• 1:19:17
  worn real fucking thin because I can see
• 1:19:19
  the iron fist you look you know
• 1:19:21
  You Nazi bitch.
• 1:19:23
  Like, yeah, seriously.
• 1:19:24
  Like, there it is.
• 1:19:28
  Oh, look, it's made of iron.
• 1:19:29
  And it's even a little rusty because, you know, they lost control.
• 1:19:35
  They don't even have the good steel going through the German plants.
• 1:19:38
  They were coming out of frigging the iron ore coming out of the Sedaten land,
• 1:19:41
  which is why we're invading the Czechs in the first place,
• 1:19:44
  because they have the best steel.
• 1:19:46
  And that's why Czech guns are better than everybody else's guns.
• 1:19:48
  Yada, yada, yada, yada.
• 1:19:49
  I'll now turn Marty's channel into a CZ commercial.
• 1:19:54
  We'll be here all night while I show you pictures of my gun.
• 1:19:58
  I'll go get my podcast gun and go bring it out.
• 1:20:01
  I love my CZ. There's a reason for it. It's a great gun.
• 1:20:04
  It's made out of this fucking Czech steel that you can't kill.
• 1:20:10
  Do you think they're getting to the point where
• 1:20:14
  they are stressed enough where it's like, okay, let's make a deal?
• 1:20:18
  not quite yet
• 1:20:20
  not quite yet
• 1:20:21
  they're not going to give Trump this one yet
• 1:20:24
  they're not
• 1:20:25
  the French, the Germans, the Italians
• 1:20:29
  the Japanese
• 1:20:29
  interesting you say those four names together
• 1:20:33
  the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese
• 1:20:35
  you mean our four enemies in World War II
• 1:20:37
  and I mean that
• 1:20:39
  when I say the French
• 1:20:40
  they're all finally saying
• 1:20:42
  we'll send ships to the
• 1:20:44
  to the Strait of Hormuz to protect the oil
• 1:20:47
  it only took them 24 hours you know trump's like we'll just leave nato all right all right fine
• 1:20:53
  we'll come it's like i was like spain at the end of the beginning of the war we're not gonna let
• 1:20:57
  you refill your ships in spain fine embargo spain i don't know that was just felipe he cray cray
• 1:21:02
  that's not no no don't listen to him no no you can you can refill your ships like like
• 1:21:08
  fuck do you think you have any leverage over the united states spain like really okay like this is
• 1:21:16
  the part that everybody, I hate the, I know the, I know people hate it when I do this, but
• 1:21:22
  as you know, everybody's tired of the vulgar American, you know, reminding everybody that
• 1:21:28
  we're more powerful than they are, but kind of are. What you hope for is that we use that power
• 1:21:33
  responsibly. And what everybody's angry about, including myself for many, many years that we
• 1:21:38
  didn't. So how about to cut Trump a little bit of slack and say he's using this power. It's an
• 1:21:47
  awesome power. The danger is that he gets the messianic complex and starts overusing it.
• 1:21:56
  That's actually, to me, the biggest hell risk out here is that Donald Trump's sense of
• 1:22:01
  grandiosity gets the better of him. I know that's why I'm not president.
• 1:22:04
  mad king lens yeah mad king lens as you would say dude seriously that's why that's why there's
• 1:22:10
  never going to be a president luongo because dude i'd have bombed iran fucking 15 years ago
• 1:22:16
  and i and i'd use nukes i'm dude i'm italian and i'm a little sicilian i i i'll cray cray
• 1:22:25
  um uh but i go really we're gonna play that game oh yeah you get into the disrespect game
• 1:22:34
  with Italians like that's it we're done
• 1:22:36
  we go from zero to IE to have no time
• 1:22:38
  Trump is far more
• 1:22:40
  far more
• 1:22:41
  statesman like than I am
• 1:22:43
  Dexter White and I talk about this shit all the time like there's a reason why
• 1:22:46
  we're not president
• 1:22:47
  we're good at what we
• 1:22:50
  do for this reason and this is
• 1:22:52
  our ceiling we're good
• 1:22:54
  with this you know that's it no more
• 1:22:56
  and
• 1:22:57
  I don't
• 1:23:00
  I had
• 1:23:01
  Putin like wipe out the
• 1:23:04
  What about the CIA in Afghanistan 15 years ago?
• 1:23:07
  I'd have paid Putin to send the Spetsnats in and kill all the CIA.
• 1:23:11
  And he's a poppy shield.
• 1:23:12
  Oh, absolutely.
• 1:23:13
  Absolutely.
• 1:23:16
  No, and President Luongo, I would have done that at the inauguration on the Jumbotron.
• 1:23:19
  I would have had the satellite footage of them getting of our guys getting wiped out by the Russian Spetsnats on the Jumbotron at the inauguration.
• 1:23:29
  Yeah, no, no, not good.
• 1:23:34
  Not very statesman like, but this shit is over.
• 1:23:38
  No, this is not good.
• 1:23:40
  So taking it, you know, coming back to reality and getting rid of all the, you know, Roger Waters, you know, wall-like fantasies.
• 1:23:54
  What Trump is doing is a very, in many ways, targeted and measured thing.
• 1:24:00
  It just doesn't look it because Iran is actually a sincere, was a sincere enemy.
• 1:24:03
  I mean
• 1:24:05
  the way I look at the way
• 1:24:07
  Operation Epic Fury, I hate these fucking
• 1:24:09
  names, but it is what it is, so Trump
• 1:24:12
  Operation Epic Fury
• 1:24:14
  oh my god dude, seriously
• 1:24:15
  okay fine, Operation
• 1:24:17
  Midnight Hammer, like okay whatever
• 1:24:19
  it's like he's still running
• 1:24:21
  The Apprentice or some shit but
• 1:24:23
  at the beginning of it
• 1:24:27
  they didn't fuck around, they respected
• 1:24:29
  Iran's ability to strike back and that's
• 1:24:31
  why they went in the way they did
• 1:24:33
  And, you know, we can, you know, I'm trying to keep it as, and we're talking about heavy, heavy shit here.
• 1:24:39
  So I'm trying to keep it at least reasonably entertaining, right?
• 1:24:44
  Give the, you know, give the Iranians their due, right?
• 1:24:48
  So one of the things I've thought about in this whole thing is the Iranians like to play chess because they created the game.
• 1:24:58
  That's their game.
• 1:25:01
  Chess is a Persian game.
• 1:25:02
  yeah I mean maybe the Russians play it better than everybody else
• 1:25:05
  you know
• 1:25:05
  the great Russian
• 1:25:07
  chess masters over the years right
• 1:25:10
  but this isn't Iranian
• 1:25:13
  games the way they think
• 1:25:14
  people build games
• 1:25:16
  and the games they build are a reflection of their culture
• 1:25:19
  so
• 1:25:22
  Europeans make very dry board games that are all about
• 1:25:29
  they're all very technocratic
• 1:25:30
  I play a lot of them
• 1:25:32
  I like a lot of them
• 1:25:33
  I have 200 of them on my bookshelf
• 1:25:36
  down in Florida
• 1:25:37
  I also have about 20 or 30
• 1:25:40
  American games which are
• 1:25:42
  messy
• 1:25:42
  and there's a lot
• 1:25:46
  of random and there's a lot of
• 1:25:48
  we call them Ameritrash
• 1:25:50
  I'm not kidding
• 1:25:52
  in the board game community there's Ameritrash
• 1:25:54
  and there's Euro
• 1:25:55
  this is a Euro style game this is an Ameritrash
• 1:25:58
  there's like all these not hybrids
• 1:26:00
  that you're coming out with.
• 1:26:01
  And then some of the game design stuff
• 1:26:02
  is really interesting.
• 1:26:04
  But what's the quintessential American game?
• 1:26:08
  Monopoly?
• 1:26:09
  No.
• 1:26:10
  It's poker.
• 1:26:11
  Oh, yeah.
• 1:26:13
  Specifically, it's Texas Hold'em.
• 1:26:16
  Yeah.
• 1:26:17
  Bluff.
• 1:26:17
  Specifically, not five-card stud,
• 1:26:21
  or it's five-card draw.
• 1:26:21
  Not five-card draw, not seven-card stud.
• 1:26:25
  Not any of the Texas fucking Hold'em.
• 1:26:27
  and specifically, no limit, Texas Hold'em.
• 1:26:34
  Texas Hold'em is a game of partial,
• 1:26:38
  it's a perfect game in that respect
• 1:26:40
  because it's a game of somewhat hidden information
• 1:26:45
  and somewhat shared information, right?
• 1:26:47
  Cards in the middle, everybody gets shared,
• 1:26:49
  but we all have our hold cards.
• 1:26:51
  Those hold cards are everything.
• 1:26:52
  How you bet your hold cards,
• 1:26:53
  what your strategies are and everything else,
• 1:26:55
  how you bluff your hold cards.
• 1:26:57
  Iranians aren't particularly good at playing poker.
• 1:26:59
  They're actually, I mean, the IRGC, the people who've been running Iran,
• 1:27:03
  they're terrible at playing poker.
• 1:27:04
  They're the worst poker players in the world because their tells are all over the place.
• 1:27:08
  You can, I can watch, I can almost predict what they're going to say next
• 1:27:13
  and whatever their little, whenever they sit down to start doing their negotiations.
• 1:27:18
  Well, let's negotiate about this war we just lost.
• 1:27:20
  You don't get to negotiate over what you've lost.
• 1:27:23
  Sorry.
• 1:27:24
  So what they did was they were trying to bind up the game board with all this chess.
• 1:27:30
  Well, if this happens, then they do this.
• 1:27:32
  And I've got this worked out six moves in advance.
• 1:27:35
  And you've only got five moves in advance because you're Donald Trump and you're not, you know, you're Donald Trump.
• 1:27:40
  You only think two moves in advance because you're an American.
• 1:27:42
  We think six, seven, eight moves in advance.
• 1:27:45
  And that's what the Iranian propaganda that we see on Twitter is all about.
• 1:27:49
  Well, you don't realize that the Iranians have got this up their sleeve and then they're going to do this and then they're going to do this.
• 1:27:53
  And I'm like, that's cute.
• 1:27:55
  Trump's like, all in.
• 1:27:58
  We're not playing chess.
• 1:28:00
  We're playing poker.
• 1:28:03
  Sun Tzu.
• 1:28:04
  I don't know.
• 1:28:04
  I haven't read Sun Tzu in years.
• 1:28:06
  I don't remember much of it.
• 1:28:07
  But I'll tell you this.
• 1:28:08
  There's only a couple of precepts you really have to remember.
• 1:28:12
  Always leave your enemy a golden bridge to retreat over And never fight on ground prepared by your enemy If you want to win
• 1:28:22
  the Iranians and the British,
• 1:28:23
  who also love to play this messy game,
• 1:28:27
  and specifically, as Vince Lanchi reminded me
• 1:28:30
  one day when we were doing this,
• 1:28:31
  when I was having this conversation,
• 1:28:33
  he's like, oh, and the British Open in chess
• 1:28:35
  is to muck the whole fucking board up.
• 1:28:38
  Just bind it all down.
• 1:28:39
  It's called the British Open.
• 1:28:41
  right i'm serious i has a name apparently i'm not a chess i'm not a chess player because i don't
• 1:28:46
  have the fucking patience for it i'm a poker player and i play poker like trump i'm a very
• 1:28:51
  aggressive poker player it gets it catches me in the ass and i have a very very certain limit i know
• 1:28:56
  i know exactly where i'm going to lose all my money that's the guy i'm going to lose all my
• 1:29:01
  money to yep there it is it's gone i many times um but at least i know my limit right i know my
• 1:29:08
  I'm not making a pun about the no limit versus the limit.
• 1:29:12
  I know what my ceiling is and skill as a poker player is.
• 1:29:17
  I can have moments of brilliance, but I don't have the stamina to play 12, 15 hours and do it right.
• 1:29:27
  But I understand well enough to know that what Trump did was he took a chess board and said,
• 1:29:33
  we're not playing chess.
• 1:29:34
  Game's over here, and it's no limit hold.
• 1:29:36
  and I got a big stack
• 1:29:38
  and you're fronting like you got a big stack
• 1:29:41
  and a bunch of rebuys
• 1:29:42
  but you have a teeny stack and I know you do
• 1:29:45
  fuck you
• 1:29:47
  I'm moving all in and I know you've got two ten offsuit
• 1:29:49
  and I know you're playing a Doyle Brunson
• 1:29:51
  and
• 1:29:52
  we didn't flop a two or a ten
• 1:29:55
  that's the way he played
• 1:29:59
  this
• 1:30:00
  and I
• 1:30:03
  you know to me that's a
• 1:30:05
  very smart and strategic dude like don't play their game he's done this so he's a power politics
• 1:30:14
  kind of guy he's a power poker kind of guy he negotiates that way you know he does it all the
• 1:30:21
  time the europeans keep wanting to play these technocratic games and then it's all about i
• 1:30:28
  I scored 212 points and you scored 211.
• 1:30:31
  So I won.
• 1:30:33
  By what?
• 1:30:34
  One point?
• 1:30:34
  Like who cares?
• 1:30:36
  You know, that kind of thing.
• 1:30:37
  It's just like, it's very passive aggressive.
• 1:30:39
  It's very, I mean, they're fun.
• 1:30:41
  They're fun puzzles.
• 1:30:42
  I'm getting it wrong.
• 1:30:42
  I play a lot of these rooms.
• 1:30:43
  And I think, and I play them for blood, of course.
• 1:30:47
  But, you know, and they are fun and they're good diversions.
• 1:30:50
  And they're also very good exercises for brain training and puzzle, you know, all that stuff.
• 1:30:57
  Great.
• 1:30:57
  but at the same time
• 1:30:59
  at the end of the day
• 1:31:00
  there's the messy shit about hidden information
• 1:31:03
  tactics versus strategy
• 1:31:06
  and how you sucker somebody into
• 1:31:09
  making a move that they don't know how to plan
• 1:31:11
  so I look at the Iranians and I'm like
• 1:31:13
  oh look, their limit is
• 1:31:15
  they can play at the 3-6 table
• 1:31:16
  you know, if you're playing at the limit hold'em
• 1:31:19
  Trump's a fucking 500-1000 player
• 1:31:21
  like he can play
• 1:31:23
  at the 500-1000 table
• 1:31:25
  You know, he can walk in to Vegas with 60 rebates with, you know, with $60,000 in his pocket and comfortably play at that table.
• 1:31:33
  Yeah.
• 1:31:34
  Yeah.
• 1:31:34
  The Aragotchi and those guys, you know, they better not bring more than $300 to the table or $500 to the table because they're going to get fucking white.
• 1:31:43
  Well, I guess to end it on that, like when will we know if they have been white?
• 1:31:49
  Hmm.
• 1:31:50
  I think this thing's over next.
• 1:31:52
  I think I hate to make predictions like this, obviously.
• 1:31:55
  but we're starting to see the cracks the strips are starting to move these straights
• 1:32:00
  trump laid out the conditions today for getting our insurance which is or getting our escort navy
• 1:32:05
  escort which is you have to buy our insurance boys is of course arm twisting everybody behind
• 1:32:10
  the scenes saying if you sign up with trump you're never gonna get any insurance from us ever again
• 1:32:14
  and that's nice and that's going to slow things down it's part of the reason why this is taking
• 1:32:18
  It's going to take longer than everybody is comfortable with.
• 1:32:22
  The Iranians who are trying to negotiate are trying to negotiate with their pile of uranium and the Straits.
• 1:32:29
  They're trying to set up a toll booth on Kashm Island and charge a toll.
• 1:32:35
  That's cute and all, but the Tripoli and the light carriers are coming.
• 1:32:41
  and that's a very big tell that Trump understands what the mission is there,
• 1:32:48
  to bring the Marines in with those ships.
• 1:32:51
  When I understand, I'm not a military armaments expert,
• 1:32:54
  but I've talked to enough people who are.
• 1:32:55
  They're like, no, these are the exact right tools for the job,
• 1:32:58
  along with whatever else we're flying and what we're doing out of Bahrain and Doha.
• 1:33:06
  So what I would say and now Diego Garcia because the British finally let us like yeah okay we were flying shit out of the area If we weren flying shit out of the area or Garcia because the British finally let us like yeah okay we were flying shit out of Diego If we weren flying shit out of Diego Garcia because the British were you know holding their nose and you know being British I lose respect for Trump
• 1:33:25
  I would have flown fucking planes out of Diego Garcia on day one and go, fuck you, Keir Starmer.
• 1:33:33
  Like, say what again, motherfucker, like Sam Jackson at the beginning of the Pulp Fiction.
• 1:33:37
  Say what again, motherfucker.
• 1:33:39
  What?
• 1:33:39
  I got guys.
• 1:33:41
  I got snake eaters sitting in the north of England.
• 1:33:44
  We'll just go and take fucking 10 Downing Street.
• 1:33:46
  Fuck off.
• 1:33:47
  We're doing this.
• 1:33:48
  And we know you're involved.
• 1:33:50
  And everything Trump has said, has done, his entire demeanor is so obvious.
• 1:33:56
  This is what he's doing.
• 1:33:58
  They're the fucking target.
• 1:33:59
  He wants their business.
• 1:34:01
  He wants their business.
• 1:34:02
  and he wants to provide it cheaper and with less drama than what we've seen in the past.
• 1:34:10
  And if you take all the nuclear weapons off the table, and I'm going to leave everybody with one last little bit of hope.
• 1:34:16
  But all of those things, I think, are signals that if we see movement on all those fronts,
• 1:34:21
  including the Iranians continuing to try and negotiate over a war they've lost,
• 1:34:27
  that this could be over very quickly, two, three weeks, or whatever it's going to take.
• 1:34:31
  oil prices will start to come down well we're we've got the secondary effects that there's a
• 1:34:37
  a big there's a potential liquidity crunch here and and credit squeeze and banks are going to go
• 1:34:43
  under and also i think that's already happening i'll be honest with you i think it's happening in
• 1:34:47
  it was happening before i think it's happening in uae i think it's going to happen in london i think
• 1:34:52
  it's going to happen in various other places i've already seen some stuff about that but
• 1:34:56
  And the big one is this.
• 1:35:00
  I'm going to just put this in everybody's head.
• 1:35:03
  You do realize that maintaining nuclear weapons is extremely expensive.
• 1:35:08
  They have a very high cost technical maintenance cycle.
• 1:35:12
  They keep those warheads refreshed to the point where you have a critical mass.
• 1:35:16
  Because if they go subcritical, they don't go boom.
• 1:35:20
  So, supposedly, Pakistan is a nuclear state.
• 1:35:25
  Pakistan's poor.
• 1:35:26
  the british are poor can they mean have are they mean are they fronting that they have
• 1:35:33
  even have nuclear weapons the israelis aren't particularly rich either by the way
• 1:35:37
  unless we're you know we're uh maintaining them what about the british
• 1:35:45
  warheads that are our warheads if trump is like fuck you people
• 1:35:52
  i'm not going to maintain your nuclear weapons for you
• 1:35:56
  we could be trump to me trump looks like a guy who just wants to get rid of nukes
• 1:36:01
  like hey everybody let's get rid of the nukes and do we really need nukes anymore when we have
• 1:36:08
  lasers from space yeah and drones have those and drones and this and everything else and precision
• 1:36:14
  missiles which can hit 99 of the time hit military targets and leave the civilian population alone
• 1:36:23
  why do we have to threaten civilian mass casualties the reason we develop nuclear
• 1:36:28
  weapons is because we couldn't not hit civilian targets we had nothing but dumb bombs now we got
• 1:36:33
  like these we now we can like put a fucking tomahawk through a goddamn window right like
• 1:36:39
  we don't have to involve the people i mean we don't have to threaten the people this is not to
• 1:36:47
  say that these wars are going to be fought with zero civilian casualties but we can minimize or
• 1:36:52
  we can maximize the ratio of military assets wiped out versus civilian infrastructure and
• 1:36:57
  civilian casualties and if we can reach that level and i think we're already there what the
• 1:37:02
  fuck do we need nuclear weapons for anymore why don't we just spin down all that uranium and use
• 1:37:08
  it to to power power plants and do other things with it wouldn't that be nice plutonium and
• 1:37:15
  everything else wouldn't that be a better world have you all had enough weapons we have enough
• 1:37:19
  weapons to beat the shit out of each other with conventional weapons the great uh using bitcoin
• 1:37:24
  for denuclearization you prove that you're denuclearizing by hash rate going up it's been
• 1:37:28
  a theory uh yeah yeah that that is that's not a bad it's not a bad argument like i i that's it's
• 1:37:36
  something that's been in my head now for a little while i don't talk about it very often because
• 1:37:40
  invariably we know i never get to it um but i've thought about it you know i've talked about it a
• 1:37:45
  couple times now in the last month or so and the more i think about it the more i'm like
• 1:37:48
  Like, I've just been saying, like, we have the ability to go back and fight 15th century wars.
• 1:37:55
  Where the king raises an army the army meets on the field the two armies meet on the field they fight one retreats the other wins then the generals show and everybody calls a truce the generals show up they sign a peace treaty borders move And other than the armies that were mustered you know stealing from the people on their way in which they did
• 1:38:17
  But other than that, and the taxes that were used from the people to pay for the army at the end of the day.
• 1:38:24
  Yeah, and there were conscripts.
• 1:38:25
  I know, but most of warfare wasn't fought by civilians.
• 1:38:31
  They weren't threatened.
• 1:38:32
  It was the King's War.
• 1:38:33
  It was over there.
• 1:38:34
  Now, it's far more the operative model than what we've been dealing with in the industrial age of warfare, which is horrific and horrible and an affront to humanity.
• 1:38:48
  Why do we stop doing that?
• 1:38:50
  If we have these precision weapons, we don't need to do that anymore.
• 1:38:53
  We just blow the armor up and then look at each other and go, this is really dumb.
• 1:38:56
  We're wasting money.
• 1:38:57
  We're wasting good men.
• 1:38:59
  like it's like it's like that it's like that scene in patent where he's like wiping out um like at
• 1:39:06
  el guitar and this is the first at the first battle he goes what a waste of fine infantry
• 1:39:11
  right yeah everything he says as his guys are wiping out the germans he's like god what a
• 1:39:19
  what a waste of fine infantry yeah that's let's let's let's change the mindset that way i want
• 1:39:27
  well i did on that i just want to say i asked you help me step back from the ledge somebody's been
• 1:39:35
  looking through different lenses letting one lens dominate the other at different points in times i
• 1:39:38
  hope you're right like that's uh that's sort of why marty everybody hopes you know obviously we
• 1:39:46
  all you know i hope i'm right i don't know if i'm going to be right and you know and even if i'm only
• 1:39:51
  65 right it's still better than what most people are projecting so you know we're going to be dealing
• 1:39:57
  with probabilities here and we're going to be dealing with, you know, outcomes as best
• 1:40:01
  we can. They're not, we're not going to be comfortable with all of them.
• 1:40:05
  The return of power politics, when we've all been trained to believe in
• 1:40:09
  consensus politics, makes us all uncomfortable.
• 1:40:13
  Because when we watch people, when we watch people do it, we're like, holy shit.
• 1:40:17
  Yeah. Because we were all told that that's the,
• 1:40:21
  those are the actions of dictators. Well, what if they're not the actions of dictators?
• 1:40:25
  What if that's actually what responsible leadership is supposed to look like?
• 1:40:30
  Yeah.
• 1:40:31
  Yeah.
• 1:40:32
  I mean, I've never lived in it, so I don't know.
• 1:40:34
  And my natural instinct is like yours to go, but I've had to like really embody that mindset.
• 1:40:41
  And I was able to do so because I was able to go back to an old version of myself when I was younger and far more belligerent than I am today.
• 1:40:52
  And go, oh, and then incorporate everything I've learned over the years about why the violence is wrong and all the shit's wrong.
• 1:41:02
  And go, okay, nope.
• 1:41:04
  Every once in a while, a war is just.
• 1:41:07
  You can disagree with me whether you think this war is just or not.
• 1:41:10
  Given the last 300 years of history and given how badly we've been fucking with the Iranian people, I'm sorry.
• 1:41:17
  The IRGC is fucking evil and needs to be wiped that fuck off.
• 1:41:20
  fuck off the line and I don't give a shit anymore. And I, and I'm done,
• 1:41:23
  and I'm done being blackmailed by a bunch of belligerent frigging Muslims with
• 1:41:28
  nuclear fire. I'm over it. And I'm, and I'm over it with the British,
• 1:41:31
  the Limeys and I'm over it with the Jews and I'm over it with our, with,
• 1:41:34
  with our people and everything else. No more, none. That's it. I'm done.
• 1:41:38
  I check out at nuclear fucking fire. So let's, we'll, we'll, we'll,
• 1:41:43
  we'll lay the, we'll, we'll plant the flag there.
• 1:41:45
  And then we'll start working backwards from it.
• 1:41:47
  Because somebody asked me that when I said that the other day on Twitter,
• 1:41:49
  or somebody would go, well, what about Pakistan?
• 1:41:51
  I'm like, I don't think Pakistan should have fucking nukes either.
• 1:41:53
  And I'm still angry with the British for giving them to them in the first place.
• 1:41:56
  As a matter of fact, I don't think the British should have fucking nuclear weapons.
• 1:41:58
  What the fuck have they done to deserve nuclear weapons?
• 1:42:03
  Yeah.
• 1:42:05
  Done.
• 1:42:06
  It's always a great way to end on Friday.
• 1:42:09
  Yeah, that's the way I look at it.
• 1:42:11
  Yeah, I think we should catch up in a few months.
• 1:42:15
  Hopefully, again, like I said, I hope you're right in a few weeks.
• 1:42:18
  Yeah.
• 1:42:19
  Me too.
• 1:42:20
  I really do.
• 1:42:21
  And my schedule is going to be, you know, my podcast schedule is going to be down in April.
• 1:42:25
  I've got, I go to Cornerstone with Calgary next week, and I've got a bunch of stuff happening in April and May and June.
• 1:42:31
  Actually, I'm going to be traveling for most of the summer, and I'm going to be recovering from getting my tooth pulled.
• 1:42:36
  I've got a lot of stuff going on.
• 1:42:37
  So it's going to be one.
• 1:42:38
  So, yeah, I think I'll probably be ready to chat with you again.
• 1:42:42
  I mean, you know, I may or may not, but, you know, July is what is looking good, like late June, early July.
• 1:42:48
  He did the summer.
• 1:42:49
  He did the summer.
• 1:42:51
  It'll be perfect.
• 1:42:51
  It'll be 80 degrees out here.
• 1:42:53
  I'll be sweating a little bit and pontificating.
• 1:42:55
  It'll be fantastic.
• 1:42:56
  Sounds good.
• 1:42:57
  All right, Marty.
• 1:42:58
  You have a great weekend.
• 1:42:59
  Best of the sprog and the wife and all your children and all of that stuff.
• 1:43:02
  And we'll talk soon.
• 1:43:04
  You too, brother.
• 1:43:04
  Peace and love, freaks.
• 1:43:05
  Okay.