00:06:41.640It's been like a rising trend for like 40 years, but this administration has been exceptionally shameless about it.
00:06:47.660Yeah, no, that's been a theme of the Trump administration is, you know, people voted for Trump because they are sick of like how like barely concealed any of this was under previous administrations.
00:07:02.200And then Trump turned around and concluded, well, obviously, I get to do it without even trying to conceal it because these people have been doing it forever.
00:07:11.840And it's like, no, we wanted you to stop them from doing this.
00:07:17.380We didn't want the we wanted principle.0.63
00:07:23.080We didn't want the mask of hypocrisy gone and just shameless decay.
00:07:27.980I think it's definitely true that Trump was less connected with certain Washington insiders than, say, like a Bush or Romney administration.
00:07:34.580But to actually instill the level of virtue that would be expected of, say, a 19th century administration would require a tremendous amount of discipline, which is the thing that Trump lacks more than anything.
00:07:55.120The level of purging of oligarchs and senior officials and senior members of the military that the Chinese Politburo does today is like the level, the minimum cadence required.
00:08:08.500Yeah, like I was listening to the Joe Kent interview on Tucker, which is an interesting one.
00:08:15.900It's also very interesting, the things he does not say.
00:08:18.900uh uh joe kent i expect might run for president or might become a major figure uh like over the
00:08:28.560next eight years uh but like listening to that interview it was a lot like reading pete haggs
00:08:34.620book uh the war on warriors where it's like uh how where it's like you can see the individual
00:08:42.300positioning themselves for their future careers like uh the war on warriors you read it and it's
00:08:47.580like hank says spends the first three chapters on like boomer slop slop uh fox newsism so you think
00:08:56.140oh this is a garbage book then you read like the latter half it's like oh that's actually like
00:09:01.180a policy recommendation that's actually like true like his talk about uh women in combat or um0.93
00:09:08.320how dei hiring uh infected the military and like you had promotion specifically to
00:09:17.220just have like someone of a certain ethnicity get promoted i mean i agree with him here but
00:09:23.200this is also basically like fox boomer slop at this point i yes but this is this is it became
00:09:31.920fox boomer slop but the thing is he was doing it like when it was still uh like a new statement and
00:09:39.040he was talking about this stuff like in a fair amount of detail at that point and then towards
00:09:45.220the back of it he suddenly go veers into like like uh his insane pastor Douglas Wilson uh like
00:09:54.980Israel crusader uh Rowdy and like the thing is it's it's an interesting book not because he's
00:10:03.460right but because you can see him exactly positioning himself for where he was in like
00:10:08.4802021 i think the book came out in 2024 so like only right before this administration
00:10:16.140yes oh yeah 2023 2024 sorry like right after covid uh putting it out specifically for that
00:10:26.200moment in the biden administration to position himself to become secretary of defense and the
00:10:32.260joe kent interview is interesting because like uh you watch it and you can see all the all the
00:10:40.740taboos that he violates and all the taboos that he doesn't uh it's interesting right like i think
00:10:47.520joe kent is a principled person i don't agree with him on everything but uh it also seems like he
00:10:55.260has failed to politically utilize his position to actually affect change
00:11:03.100within the administration or build a coalition, right?
00:11:05.620Because just, like, putting in, like, becoming a podcast bro
00:11:09.080is, like, a very common fate for, like, people within the Trump world.
00:11:15.320It's just very hard for them to translate that into, like, real power.
00:11:19.140So my impression is that, like, the Trump admin heading massive
00:11:25.260power struggle like uh over summer of 2025 which like we could see this like elon was forced out
00:11:33.620in june 2025 and then the 12 day war happened that uh the like this is this
00:11:42.900i haven't introduced this episode yet this is hyposomata returning yes uh uh he was here
00:11:52.640one month ago for the iran talk before then has been with us for many many podcasts you might be
00:11:58.660the most returning guest guest ever uh i just like to talk about jets man
00:12:07.020i love to have you here for it but uh but this is like uh one of the themes that um0.60
00:12:15.560like Israel is going for broke right now like I don't like uh I
00:12:22.800before this episode comes out um I have an episode with Pete Quinonez that's coming out0.65
00:12:29.000he's uh one of the guys who's popularized the entire like anti-semitic tradition in America
00:12:36.860in America in a lot of ways like uh like I read the high IQ like deep ethnographic books from
00:12:44.180uh like going back through through the history of it and as well as like jewish critics of judaism
00:12:50.600and like commentaries on the back and forth of like how jews and zionists rose to power
00:12:56.560power in the u.s and one of the big things that like i'm actually amazed that my piece from like
00:13:03.6002023 right after the uh the uh the um october 7th attack happened i wrote this piece israel
00:13:12.960could really lose this one about how, you know, Israel getting involved in a quagmire in Gaza
00:13:19.480and Lebanon could, like, death spiral into a regional war that they just can't extract
00:13:26.520themselves off from and wind up burning through all their political capital.0.74
00:13:32.960I recently reread that article that I've written, you know, because we had things over a year,
00:13:39.720And I was amazed at the stuff I got right.0.75
00:13:41.360But one of the things I'm blowing my mind is I feel like Israel has accepted this and they're like going for broke now.
00:13:52.160Like they they are trying to hold on to like political capital or like relationships in a way.0.51
00:14:00.240They know that this is the last war that they can drag the U.S. into.
00:14:05.140Regardless of whether the left or right wins in the next election, they will not be able to commit all of CENTCOM's aircraft to any further strike.
00:14:15.140So it is their last chance, in a certain way, to bring the Iranian regime to its knees.
00:14:22.320As of a few hours ago, Israeli airstrikes hit all three of Iran's largest steel plants, Mubarakat, Esfahan, and Kuzestan.
00:14:31.380and uh the iranian steel industry is actually fairly robust um it's iran's second largest
00:14:36.920export outside of oil in the bedrock of their industrial economy so israel has
00:14:41.400now fully committed to a counter value strategy of crippling the iranian economy
00:14:46.460yeah which strikes me as like um a a like very high risk like not a good idea plan because um
00:14:58.380Of course, Israel is already in an eight-front war, and it's much smaller than Iran and has a lot less redundancy.
00:15:07.120Like, the general rule of life is you do not get in a traditional fight with someone who has more people than you.
00:15:15.720Like, you don't get in a money-spending battle with a billionaire.
00:15:20.780You don't get in an ink-spilling battle with a, like, newspaper man.
00:15:25.900uh you don't get in a um you don't get in a smack talking com competition with like a
00:15:35.320televangelist uh you don't get in a shooting war with him with uh the russians and and like
00:15:44.920you just don't get in a traditional fight with someone who has more people than you
00:15:49.660than years so this is like I would hesitantly disagree with that I think that the relative
00:15:55.880importance of population peaked in around 1870 and has been declining since uh true power in
00:16:04.040the 21st century comes from the number of people that you have with an IQ above 130
00:16:09.100uh yes but that is like far more more complicated than i'd say not least because uh you know the
00:16:25.560western world has committed itself to completely sidelining every person they have with an iq above
00:16:30.700130 like um like the goal of the western education system is to yes the western education system is
00:16:37.560dysfunctional but in this narrow case right like israeli cognitive elites who uh who run say the
00:16:43.280or their their cyber espionage programs or their air force or their reconnaissance strike complex
00:16:48.980they have been able to do a tremendous amount of damage to iran you know i'm not convinced of that
00:16:55.800actually no interesting so this is like this is an endless problem with like everything air power
00:17:04.080related uh uh who was it who was it not meersheimer um oh god colonel wilkerson i think
00:17:14.120it was uh allegedly colin powell um he approached colin powell or colin powell appoint approached
00:17:23.300the head of the joint chiefs and uh i'm screwing up the story already but uh the punch line is he
00:17:30.240begged him please don't or please don't put an air you wanted to go after iran rather than iraq
00:17:39.020right no no no the line was please don't put an air force general in charge of any of this again
00:17:45.660because air force generals always always overestimate the effectiveness of air forces
00:17:51.720because and this is the problem with air power power is that you make a strike and then the air
00:17:58.420And then the jet leaves and doesn't figure out, like, there isn't an immediate consequence, whether the strike was effective or not, to the pilot.
00:18:09.040So pilots always, always report successful hits.
00:18:13.620And this, like, this is a problem in all military branches, you know.
00:18:18.240The people who have 130 confirmed kills actually have, like, probably had 80 kills total.
00:18:24.580Like, kills and everything else gets overstayed massively.
00:18:28.420But air power, it's just like this recurring thing that that you go into the numbers afterwards of like, what was the actual losses reported on the enemy side?
00:18:38.820And it doesn't line up with the Air Force's self-reported hits.
00:18:44.620Yeah, I think Wilkerson was an army officer in Vietnam.
00:18:48.640So Vietnam was the peak of Air Force's like overclaiming, especially because they were striking targets in the dense jungle that could not be directly observed by like a BDA authority.0.69
00:18:58.420um a lot better with the sheer like bandwidth of the isr complex that is available
00:19:06.060but uh this at the current moment but the thing is hits also
00:19:12.340hits also aren't binaries so like this is one of the problems with um i i've been playing a drone
00:19:20.320simulator lately which i highly recommend you out there like download a drone simulator i'm playing
00:19:27.240like FPV battleground but there's like tons of these that like go of their way to accurately
00:19:35.480accurately or not so accurately represent FPV warfare but they're all based on basically the
00:19:42.680same the same engines that simulate the physics that like actual FPV operators in combat use to
00:19:50.900train train up and get their handles on the drone on steam no no uh i i played like two or three i'm
00:20:02.540playing fpv battleground right now which like probably isn't the best one but like is decent
00:20:08.280enough but uh this is one of the things problems with fpv drones is like you see the you see like
00:20:15.660the last frame of the drone before it explodes so you know where it vaguely was on like a tank or
00:20:22.980vehicle or whatnot before the charge detonated but you actually don't know what the charge did
00:20:28.260to the target so like uh so in the actual ukraine war it's usually general practice to have like an
00:20:34.980observer drone you know like a hundred meters above the target to confirm impact yes yes and
00:20:43.360that's the reason why they do which is actually like very logistically like you've just doubled
00:20:50.320your logistical headway to have that that there but uh the like even a shape charge going off
00:20:57.340right next to a tank you have no idea like okay did you destroy the tread did it like just
00:21:02.580bounce off the armor did it did penetrate but like not actually take it out and they're actually
00:21:08.440able to roll it away and fix it up like this is a problem with anything hitting a vehicle is that
00:21:15.520you first is that a good percentage of the time either it doesn't damage it or it damages it in
00:21:22.840some way that's actually like fairly recoverable um at you know ask my car about my driving but uh
00:21:30.140the right it's general practice to keep on hitting a vehicle until it burns with you know more and
00:21:36.360more follow-up strikes yes exactly but uh this is this is where i strongly suspect especially um
00:21:45.260israel uh part of this is is just the psychology of like the judge people and part of this is jet
00:21:54.860is uh what western governments have defaulted to ukraine being kind of the example of one of these
00:22:13.700Like, they turn up the propaganda machine,
00:22:16.460no, we're winning, no, we're winning, no, we're winning.0.88
00:22:19.600And suppress, you know, Israel has one of the great,
00:22:24.220great censorship regimes in place now.
00:22:27.200Like, if you take photos or video of missiles landing or, like, damage to buildings, like, you can get years in prison for that in Israel.
00:22:38.920Yeah, I've seen Chinese camera crews, like, from, like, state media filming impacts, and then Israeli cops immediately coming over to beat them up, regardless of press credentials.
00:22:49.560Yes, which, you know, they're officially, officially the reason for this is because you don't want to confirm.
00:22:57.200which is like respectable enough you don't want you know a media crew like knowingly or accidentally
00:23:03.720acting as like like providing sighting correction but uh the thing is china has
00:23:11.640has you know satellites they can see where the missiles head and they're and they're they've
00:23:17.900been providing uh like satellite imagery to iran the real reason that it is and that like it's not
00:23:25.900okay you can't do this within like a week but you can afterwards you know have the media like catch
00:23:32.340the public up on a time delay is because of the propaganda purposes is that you know as much as
00:23:41.640you listeners at home might think that um that you're getting the historic picture of the war
00:23:48.700you're being fed a load load of crap and you know narrative control and spin is everywhere in the
00:23:54.500u.s uh within israel it's actually far more intense than then you can see like occasional like0.98
00:24:01.060breakouts and meltdowns downs of it uh there's been there's a story that came out recently that
00:24:08.200um an israeli general has said that the idf is actually near near a state of exhaustion or
00:24:16.580or i think the word he used was collapsed but he would have said in hebrew so like
00:24:21.520That would be a translation thing, like the word he used wasn't collapse.
00:24:28.540But this war in Lebanon, you know, all Israeli media will report that it's going well.
00:24:37.760And then Hezbollah reports that they hit 45 Merkava tanks in a day.
00:24:43.740But then actually it comes out that, yeah, there was this confirmed thing from this...
00:24:51.520This Israeli source, that was at least 10 Merkava tanks in a day they were hit, which, um, which if you, if you've been following the various wars around the borders of Israel closely for the past three years, which I have on and off.
00:25:11.620The first thing you notice is that casualty numbers and attrition numbers do not make sense at all.
00:25:21.680They stop and start depending on whether or not reporters are in the area.
00:25:29.840Basically, if they can achieve a blackout and say nothing happened, they will do that.0.91
00:25:35.260The official casualty numbers from both sides are always garbage, right?
00:25:39.360Like, each side will always claim that we're killing four times or seven times as many enemies as we're losing or whatever.0.95
00:25:47.000I have been impressed by Hezbollah's ability to regenerate themselves.
00:25:50.880They're putting up a level of resistance to Israeli conventional armor, roughly commensurate with the first time that they got modern ATGMs, you know, Cornet systems in the early 2000s.
00:26:04.800um this time they're also adding in large number of fpv drones that they didn't really have two
00:26:10.640years ago well a big thing is that um fpv drones but also um like the homebrew shaped charges
00:26:21.380that um a lot of these middle eastern countries have been able to come up with i'm sorry these
00:26:27.360middle eastern like paramilitaries have been improving massively like they're not really
00:26:33.420homebrew right they just take a shape charge from an rpg or an obsolete atgm and slap it onto
00:26:40.540their drone they're i don't think no my my impression is that they have actually been
00:26:47.500making them in garages like they've been mixing the chemicals and then like pouring them into
00:26:53.720a like welded structure with something with some of the actor like hezbollah which is fairly
00:27:00.720sophisticated and has you know like a multi-billion dollar budget that's plausible to make like a
00:27:04.960shape charge you just need very fine precision machining which was difficult in the 1950s but
00:27:10.720these days anyone who buys like a cnc machine off of alibaba can do yeah uh the real limiting
00:27:18.140factor um an actual shape charge like anyone can really make uh like like a shape charge is just
00:27:28.080a charge that has an impression in it that it leaves outwards but uh the for anti-tank stuff
00:27:34.680the the actual threshold like the curvature of the um shape of shape of the charge uh you have
00:27:42.920to have it like a lens it's like a lens that uh distorts the um the copper right the monroe effect
00:27:52.440jet right like it's yeah it's a solid jet actually not like a liquid one as the popular
00:27:58.520misconception goes but with for fbv drones this is actually easier because with like a conventional
00:28:03.720atgm you're sort of assuming that you have to shoot at the front of a tank because that is the
00:28:08.380side of the tank that is presenting itself to you and so you might have to go through like the
00:28:12.120equivalent of like something like 800 millimeters of rolled homogenous armor but like you know in
00:28:17.160composites and and uh like say an era or whatever but with an fpv drone you can attack from the top
00:28:24.700or the rear of the turret and you're you only really need to penetrate like an inch or two
00:28:28.380and then you're into the fighting compartment yes exactly all aspects of the crew compartment equally
00:28:34.580yeah so so the thing is the exact same amount of explosive depending on the the precision of the
00:28:43.520shape of that lens that you you make that like concave cave shape with the the various metal
00:28:49.760metals around it um the difference of like a few microns or a few millimeters can be the difference
00:28:58.940of you know hundreds of millimeters of penetrate penetration you know a thousand millimeters of
00:29:05.080penetration maybe if you're like out of a millimeter or two because the exact effect of
00:29:10.080having it lends gesture just right is that dramatic but the thing is if you're attacking
00:29:16.460from the side or the rear you don't need a really precise shape charge you just need something
00:29:22.240that's like vaguely gonna gonna do it and you know it's producing a jet of something sort of
00:29:30.180and it might like you know it might uh spray off in three jets instead of like one really tight
00:29:37.160tight one but uh if you aren't hitting something that's like like uh composite armor that's slanted
00:29:46.700just so like right on the front if you're hitting it like from the from the top or in a thin section
00:29:53.640you know a janky good enough like like shaped charge sort of sort of is like still going to
00:30:03.780be very effective this is where um hamas in gaza uh there are all those videos coming out of them
00:30:10.460placing like these cone things on the top of um rakava tanks like just running up and placing
00:30:18.720them on the back of the tank and that could do real damage to them because the fight despite
00:30:24.340the fact that they're these homebrew monstroses welded in in tunnels you know that's the thin
00:30:30.020card for the armor they would put it like between the turret and like the engine deck where there
00:30:34.960is literally no composite armor it's just like you know 20 millimeters of steel uh because the
00:30:41.260tank designer back in like the 90s or whatever just never expected that it would be hit there
00:30:45.220um yeah this is the hamas guys actually were handing out pamphlets to their fighters on like
00:30:52.420day one of the war detailing all of the weak points of like merkavas and namers and nagmachan
00:30:57.560afvs so that their fighters who didn't have that encyclopedic war thunder memory would know exactly
00:31:03.240where to to put their hits yes yes uh gamers have hours of experience everyone else reads a pamphlet
00:31:12.200but uh but no this is like uh this is one of those things that it's not actually clear how
00:31:19.840me Merkava tanks and like infantry fighting vehicles Israel like has left that are like
00:31:27.300fully functional because um the thing is basically all basically all um like military vehicles are
00:31:36.220designed so that they can be like fairly reliably cannibalized so like if you hit and cripple like
00:31:43.280three three enemy like infantry fighting vehicles say and like you don't get them to actually like
00:31:51.940explode and throw their throw their top uh that that they managed to go out there with their
00:31:58.000recovery vehicle and recover them those three vehicles that you took out is going to quickly
00:32:03.000turn into one vehicle that's completely cannibalized and two that are back in action
00:32:07.500probably or like they're going to be able to like slap on new treads or what have you which is why
00:32:15.300you want like a plan to to if you have an enemy vehicle crippled uh to to get destroyed so that
00:32:23.800can't be cannibalized back until like you know 0.5 of a of an armored vehicle but uh because
00:32:31.580they've been operating at such a tempo
00:33:56.320and uh m113 derivatives that are just in storage waiting to be used they it would lead to higher
00:34:03.200casualties if they were forced to pull them out but um i don't think they're going to run out of
00:34:07.160tanks anytime soon no that that's what i'm referring to is that that once you're thrown
00:34:13.880back on the old equipment all of a sudden those casualties start to add up way more and you start0.57
00:34:18.520to have like way more frictions right the question is like can hezbollah survive until that point and0.83
00:34:25.300And while they have outperformed my initial expectations, I'm not sure that they can make it to the point where Israel starts cannibalizing itself to sustain force generation at the front.0.89
00:34:37.820So this is one of the things that this is why I want to have you on, because obviously the Middle East is heating up right now.0.69
00:34:52.960Their underground launch capacity is still very much intact, and shipping cannot transit the Strait of Hormuz.
00:35:05.260Yeah, I think the Houthis actually gave a warning like two hours ago that they may be considering to be ready to join the war if the U.S. continues crossing their red lines.
00:35:19.340I think that Iran has actually not wanted the Hussies to join the war until right now, because they still want to have cards in their diplomatic quiver, cards yet to play, in order to have leverage at the negotiating table.0.80
00:35:33.180But as Israel has shown no willingness to negotiate, the only thing that they can do is inflict maximum pain in order to restore deterrence, because they utterly failed to restore deterrence after the 12-day war of last year.0.79
00:35:46.780Their missile strikes were just nowhere near as devastating as they had hoped.0.76
00:35:51.720Perhaps this global energy campaign will be enough.
00:35:55.820Yes, this has actually been an interesting point of this war,0.95
00:35:59.440is that Iran actually hauled back on several things that you think it would do very quickly
00:36:06.080if it thought it could lose its capacity quickly.
00:36:10.440Because usually this is why, so for a very basic model, like nuclear weapons exchanges, like nuclear war, part of the reason nuclear war, once it starts in almost all models, escalates immediately to like a full exchange is because nuclear weapons are used or loose.
00:36:35.820you know if you don't launch them there's a very good chance that the enemy's nukes are going to
00:36:39.840land on your nukes i think that's very true in the 1950s or 1960s scenario where all of your
00:36:44.540nuclear weapons are on uh air bases um very ineffective first generation silos that take
00:36:52.140like two days to fuel up or uh tactical weapons at the front but by the time you have both
00:37:09.240So so going off of that analogy of like early nuclear warfare, where where you have to launch the ICBMs earlier, else you might never get to launch them.
00:37:19.340uh what you would have expected from iran with uh this massive pounding coming in is uh they would
00:37:26.680have played if they like actually fear losing it they would have played their cards early
00:37:31.120and yet they've actually like held back on the escalate on the various like escalation stages
00:37:38.600like very tightly and waited to play this tit-for-tat game back and forth so um the
00:37:45.780desalination plants could be best responded to with a proportional response right because
00:37:51.440over commitment just means that you don't have those options for future iterations uh i think
00:37:57.460i had a different read of it actually okay so so for example iran wasn't hitting new israel's
00:38:06.780or the gulf's uh power plants until its power plants were hit and then hit back or um
00:38:14.340desalination plants it hasn't hit desalination plants so then like it hit one when its desalination
00:38:22.100plant was said and you see this um this uh inch by inch escalation i don't actually think they
00:38:30.360did this because like they wanted an off-ramp you know their their supreme leader like their pope
00:38:37.060you know the ayatoll was more of like a figurehead kind of like the queen of england
00:38:41.980than, like, the actual day-to-day administrator of the country.
00:44:42.340I fully agreed there that Russia wants this to last a long time, right, precisely because a fiscal crisis in the European Union likely means significant cutbacks to the Ukrainian war budget, which as of right now, if they don't manage to extend that loan backed by Russian assets, Ukraine is going to run out of money in June.
00:45:04.760yeah and ukraine as it stands like uh like they have hard physical limits that kind of hit around
00:45:15.040it around it's last i heard it was like two years like they basically have to have lost because um
00:45:24.780the the physical math of like what they have available versus attrition hits hits at that
00:46:02.640Because all those cartels immediately have a massive recruiting pool and all the unemployed white male Europeans who hate all the migrant Muslims in their countries, which is almost certainly why the EU has pushed this war so much and paid the Zelensky budget so much.
00:46:23.980As of right now, it's literally just Hungary vetoing the loan package.
00:46:28.860but um they've threatened to assassinate orban over it like they made like a very like thinly
00:46:36.220veiled threat threat that i think they're probably just going to default to lawfare right find some
00:46:41.820sort of way to circumvent the veto through procedural manipulation of committees rather
00:46:47.000than anything kinetic right like the eurocrat doesn't lead lean towards like you know poison
00:46:51.700or shootings to deal these things they they're all lawyers no ukraine uh threatened it i think
00:47:18.820China, I could also see really wanting the U.S.
00:47:22.080to get drawn into, like, a nose-bloodying war in Iran.0.60
00:47:27.020Because if the U.S. like recoils or has like domestic stuff erupt over a failed Iran war, like heaven help them if the U.S. tries to implement a draft which would like probably immediately go to civil war, like American white men would much rather have fight a war in America than go to Iran to fight.
00:47:47.480i very much don't think a draft is happening right i can i agree that china wants the u.s
00:47:53.040to expend all of the tie-in weapons they every you know jasm er or jsao or like aargm expended
00:47:59.800against iran is one that cannot be expended against the pla but i do not put it past the0.86
00:48:06.300boomers to try to trap trap people like a lindsey graham would 100 do it uh all the boomers
00:48:13.380like the more basically the more like uh the more like a valley like anti-semitic like young white
00:48:24.520men get in result to in response to the iran more the more the boomer instinct is is uh oh we need
00:48:31.420to morally reform these young men or uh let's let's draft them that'll sort them out like
00:48:37.760like as soon as you talk to like any boomer about this uh uh the the like old man hatred of the
00:48:46.240young like comes out immediately because there is a remarkable consensus among boomers that like a
00:48:53.880draft would be good for the young it would solve our social problems you don't have to worry about0.99
00:48:58.580housing or i don't know porn or whatever if you're out fighting the persians yeah they they can't1.00
00:49:04.260admit for the life of them that their own
00:49:34.260And the more, like, the more this war escalates, the more it goes wrong, the more young white people say, it's Israel's fault, it's these goddamn Jews, you know, which, like, you can see this immediately that, like, support for Israel has collapsed, but, like, actual anti-Semitism, like, avowed anti-Semitism is, like, completely normalized amongst people under 30.0.91
00:49:59.360like uh like holocaust class doesn't mean anything when the holocaust was like a hundred0.95
00:50:06.660years ago and there's no survivors left and like Anne Frank is just as dead as like you know
00:50:12.760Cassandra from Troy within like the professional class right like uh people in their 20s like it's
00:50:19.940no I people are exposed to a lot of you know anti-Israeli pro-Palestine stuff but it's only
00:50:27.020really possible to be pro-Palestine from like a leftist perspective and retain your job yes but
00:50:34.900like young people are like especially online it's like already kind of the default places but like
00:50:44.400at dinner tables and like at family get-togethers and whatnot you know you aren't losing your job
00:50:50.680over what you say at Christmas dinner so young people are just saying saying this stuff to0.64
00:50:56.880their boomer parents of the booer parents for the life of them are not going to admit that like uh
00:51:02.640you know making their kids watch schindler's list at like age six was a mistake say you know they
00:51:10.660aren't going to accept that their like moral authority has been lost so as it escalates and
00:51:15.980as things go wrong all suddenly the entire boomer vote i could see it coalescing like with lots of
00:51:22.740fox news guidance around yeah we need a draft and then you just have an intergenerational
00:51:28.100summer war and i could see like china is looking at at that possibility and like really likes the
00:51:35.600idea of the u.s like having in its internal divisions explode as opposed to like having
00:51:42.020deal with like something functional in this strait of taiwan and china already does this like china
00:51:47.900already like very instincts mediate against this right like there are a lot of the anti-interventionists
00:51:54.440have been pushed out of the administration and the neocon wing has won a great victory in authorizing
00:52:00.220this expedition to begin with but uh i i do think the president is has strong enough political
00:52:07.020instincts that he knows that a draft would be the absolute death of his legacy i i'm not so convinced
00:52:14.940because remember he's 79 like uh he's he's not the man he was when he ran for fresen in 2015
00:52:22.980like he's old and senile and golfing with lindsey graham and his instinct and you see this again
00:52:30.580again is when he's like challenged or gets pushed back upon his instinct is to double down unless
00:53:37.800Or you can be the guy who had the nerve to to act with will and and decide and win because you acted with with will.
00:53:49.740And I could see that pitch really working.
00:53:52.920I could see the reason the U.S. instituted like conscription like in the early stages of the Vietnam War is that it was overwhelmingly popular on a bipartisan level to do that.
00:54:02.740Right. Like the political class was something like 90 percent aligned.
00:54:07.800with like lbj deciding to conscript you know hundreds of thousands of boys to uh you know
00:54:12.860fight in the jungle but this time the entire democrat party is publicly against it right
00:54:17.580there are some democrat elites that do think that this needed to happen they wanted it to happen
00:54:22.180under trump but they're not going to come out in public and support a draft right and the neocon
00:54:26.840wing of the republican party while it is i think still a slight majority of the party
00:54:30.960you cannot really institute a draft if you have a support only the support of say 30 percent of
00:54:38.380the american political class so oh okay i uh i'm not talking about like at this moment i'm talking
00:54:46.520about like over this the summer when things like yes okay so explain to me why you think like the
00:54:52.720democrat party by the summer will be pro-draft okay so so right now we're seeing a movement of
00:55:01.460ground troops into the millies and we're seeing this uh logic building that uh oh we need some
00:55:08.780kind of like ground strike that that airstrikes haven't done it we need some limited ground
00:55:16.220operation to to like unstick the uh stock drain of the stratiformis uh the like part of this is
00:55:30.340i'm going to be using a lot of analogies because they don't actually have a strategic
00:55:35.320plan for what i can tell like they're trying to extricate themselves from this so i'm trying to
00:55:41.020describe institutional decision-making processes but uh what you see like already building up and
00:55:47.520like has been built up like amongst the fox news demographic totally is uh the idea of a limited um
00:55:55.700uh ground operation for there's about four targets they've identified there are the islands
00:56:05.000In the Persian Gulf, there's Karg Island, where Iranian oil transits, which, again, is insane because we're blockading Iranian oil, leaving the Strait of Hormuz.
00:56:17.400Like, if you want to intercept that oil, you could just intercept it on the sea.
01:15:08.360Like, they have not adapted, like, really at all to the quadcopter.
01:15:15.280I think the entire U.S. Marine Corps is procuring about 10,000 ultralight, you know, FPV-type drones this year.0.77
01:15:22.540The Ukrainians go through 10,000 in, like, 10 minutes.
01:15:26.520Yeah, Ukraine was up to, like, 30,000 a month, like, two years ago.
01:15:33.560They're probably, like, going through 70,000 now.
01:15:36.260like you just burn through these things like crazy um uh playing uh i think they claimed that
01:15:42.940we produced four million last year so uh yeah so that's four million that's like three hundred
01:15:50.300thousand a month you know which is which is about a thousand a day uh but uh the quadcopter drone
01:16:00.080like the thing with it is traveling about three kilometers like uh if you play any of these drone
01:16:06.720simulation games that like models the space well or like makes you play out the uh search and find
01:16:14.420aspect of a drum warfare um like you spend a inordinate amount of time searching for a target
01:16:22.520um and the version i pay play has a bad draw distance so it's actually easier to find the
01:16:28.540targets because the trees the targets pop in before the trees do and this is a great disappointment
01:16:34.680but basically once you know where the target is once you intuitively know okay this is the path
01:16:40.500to the target the first thing you do after your drone hits or misses and there are a lot of misses
01:16:48.240or gets shot down is you immediately send up another you know you radio to your buddies this
01:16:54.300is the precise location these coordinates of a tank or an infantry fighting vehicle or a or a
01:17:02.220infantry position or what what have you and what you do is it takes like one minute to travel that
01:17:09.660that like two to three kilometers again and hit them with another drone and hit them with another
01:17:15.140drone and hit them with another drone and if they're moving in formation you know
01:17:18.620you know ultimately drone teams return to base you know they extract after they've used up all
01:17:27.660the all their drones you know you might go out there with 20 20 or 30 and burn through 30 30
01:17:34.560kamikaze drones and then you go back and you get get more and that which actually creates an
01:17:43.200incentive because you get to get out of there and go home the faster you you use them up that
01:17:50.200you really want to identify and then go hard on targets uh and quite frankly i do not see
01:17:58.560uh any way that that the u.s military gets in the situation that they don't get hit hard by
01:18:07.000fbb drones we've already seen uh i think the iranians are only at like maybe ukraine or
01:18:13.500russia 2023 levels of drone integration right like attacking a force with a late 2025 or 2026
01:18:20.660level of drone density per unit would be you know even more insane yeah but even the domestic drone
01:18:29.540production that you know ukraine has by now right they don't have the same levers to be able to
01:18:34.580import drone components from china uh i mean they can to a certain degree but the u.s can also
01:18:40.260interdict those railheads but like even 2023 have you seen a 2000 meter standryvka yes uh so this is
01:18:50.260a film it's up on youtube i'll link it in the show notes it's kind of ukrainian it's ukrainian
01:18:55.260propaganda it's 100 ukrainian propaganda but it's fascinating to watch because um it's all
01:19:00.960go pro footage of this uh campaign campaign to take a village um across this like linear force
01:19:11.200like like this force between two fields is the only cover and they're like following it like a
01:19:16.940highway up towards uh this village it's a horrifying movie to watch like it's all like
01:19:23.160right there on the helmet like uh uh like warfare watching these poor people um suffer day day in
01:19:32.560day out but the thing is you watch 2000 meter sandrivka and even at that point so 2023 uh
01:19:41.460platoons really aren't units anymore like uh the platoon is no longer a unit of modern warfare
01:19:49.720uh even even in 2023 they had switched out to like five man squads you know four to five
01:19:58.940yeah five is a large unit you know like uh you know five you if you had five people you divide
01:20:09.300it up into a group of three and a group group of two to go go out that like warfare is down to like
01:20:16.400what hideo kojima depict is like kojima depict kojima predicted modern warfare perfectly that's
01:20:23.600like oh yes it's this this one to three man snaking mission where you're going like many
01:20:29.960kill mirrors deep into the front with all these like with all these threats that you're hiding
01:20:36.100from and then once you get there you use these uh complex technological systems to play these like
01:20:43.840like weird techno mini games to hate your enemy without being seen seen and then extract again
01:20:53.840and like that's modern warfare modern warfare is melior solid like two or three uh which
01:21:00.420melior salt to hideo kojima predicted the drones he wasn't actually showing quadcopters he's showing
01:21:06.920like old marine cipher teas from like from like 80s and 90s experiments that they decontinued
01:21:13.840because DARPA is incompetent and like missed the revolution in modern warfare by like 30 years
01:21:21.500and so instead all look up the marine cipher tea uh I think that's the correct name I think I know
01:21:31.920what you're talking about it's the one with like the ducted fan and the camera on top right
01:21:35.640Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh, the Steaker Sky Cipher T. Cipher. Cipher or Cipher 2. It's a single, like, helicopter propeller with a camera on, like, three poles above it. And it had its first flight in 1988. And when was it canceled? They don't have a good history of it on Wikipedia.
01:22:05.640But these were, like, canceled in the 80s and 90s, and Kojima included in Meliarsol 2, which is supposed to be picking Warfare in, like, 2007, you know, the sci-fi feature of 2007 in a game that released in 2001.
01:22:20.280and this was and basically this behaves exactly like a spotter drone you know it's slightly
01:22:27.860bulkier it's jankier it requires vastly more logistics almost certainly and it's more expensive
01:22:35.660yeah i think those are gasoline powered rotary engines rather than the electrics that are
01:22:39.660in common usage yeah but it's like uh you know the u.s had basically achieved like the spotter
01:22:47.780drone revolution and they got rid of it for like price savings and and other reasons and well okay
01:22:55.400so i in defense of the u.s way of war right like these drones are great for militaries that lack
01:23:02.140real air forces and they have much less of a comparative advantage if you do have a real air
01:23:07.120force uh so plus the cypher type drone of the the 80s and 90s would be still significantly more
01:23:15.980expensive than the expendable drones of the 2020s right like these days combatants are spending
01:23:21.660like what like 500 or less for like a low-end spotting drone the the cypher i i would be very
01:23:28.820surprised if they could bring the cost under 100k so the thing that the quad capter drones i disagree
01:23:35.700that they achieve uh what air forces achieve like uh what the spotter drone really achieves
01:23:42.140is it's a basically anti-vehicle, anti-material missile
01:28:34.000You know, these, like, lone one-to-two, these one-to-two-man teams that are now, like, the basic unit of war can take on a, like, tank or an armored, or a, like, small armored platoon with, you know, their eight kamikaze drones and inflict significant damage on it.
01:32:47.960i'm wondering it i'm just wondering if uh the only game changer from like a
01:32:54.840technological perspective that would allow the u.s to to countermeasure this assuming that there was
01:33:00.460still a sufficiently moment heron willing to wage this apocalyptic like drone war0.77
01:33:05.880would be either mass a cheap network swarming uh counter uas drone of our own right like the0.60
01:33:15.080ukrainian ones that are in service right now but um with uh better kinematics and sensors
01:33:20.100or commercialization of something like a like a 200 kilowatt tactical laser something cheap
01:33:26.620enough that you can that can be put on a trailer plopped on every oil tanker put one on every
01:33:31.360destroyer that can you know theoretically engage you know hundreds of drones before
01:33:35.520parts need to be replaced neither of those systems are ready yeah the actually the only
01:33:43.660fallback i i could think of that would like kind of make it work is if you like fled the zone with
01:33:50.660like cheap manned aircraft like uh like if you just pulled like tons of uh of like very
01:34:00.160there is no such thing as a cheap manned aircraft no no get that out of your brain right now no no
01:34:06.140No, like, uh, if, if you pulled out, like, a ton of, like, like, old 1960s, like, gun aircraft that are just there to intercept, set the Shahid drones.
01:34:18.360Okay, like, just to, just to, like, get an understanding of what you think a 1960s aircraft is, what year do you, do you think the F-4 Phantom debuted?
01:34:28.580I might be thinking of a 1953 aircraft now that you mention it.
01:34:32.260okay because the phantom first like flew in like the the late 50s as well and this is a mach 2.2
01:34:42.780heavy fighter right right no um so like uh special operations command has like um like a cheap
01:34:52.500uh counterinsurgency aircraft well relatively cheap by u.s standards right the air tractor
01:34:57.580or something derived from a crop duster and uh the ukrainians have ukrainians have been using old
01:35:04.120yak trainer aircraft with uh with an observer with a machine gun for drone interception sorties
01:35:11.080although less and less these days that was like a an early 2024 era expedient but again these things
01:35:17.500are just expedients that are still way more costly right like even operating in like a 1950s sky
01:35:22.580or like a late 1940s corsair is still far far more expensive than operating a shahead um
01:35:30.180yeah but it's less expensive than a it's less expensive than like a million dollar interceptor
01:35:37.060yes that i mean that is true but um the advantage of the million dollar interceptor is versatility
01:35:43.600right like a destroyer can only carry a certain amount of of top weight tonnage before it starts
01:35:49.480being unbalanced right carrying a lot of low-end systems is not really a viable way to conduct
01:35:55.260modern naval warfare no i'm not talking about like uh i'm not talking about for like general
01:36:01.200purpose i'm talking about like for the specific use of uh securing the strait of hormuz against
01:36:07.880shahed drones like as a very specific regional expedient you might see something like the
01:36:13.200ukrainian like baba yaga drone right like the carrier drone um likely fixed swing rather than
01:36:19.620octocopter that carries like a you know half dozen micro interceptor drones uh and is itself
01:36:27.760linked in with a high altitude uh aerial surveillance drone something like maybe on
01:36:34.240the global hawk platform with a powerful hook down rate like pulse doppler like active
01:36:41.200electronically scanned array radar right you need like all three layers of that system to work
01:36:46.240before like you can actually have more than one level of of nines of reliability right just like
01:36:53.040how in world war ii you needed a high performance interceptor a good radar and a excellent air
01:36:58.820defense coordination center in order to defend against bombers if you lacked any one of those
01:37:03.200three the system did not work as like japan found out yes and in order to operate those you'd you
01:37:11.180need them to not get shot down themselves so you need to have some control you need to be able to
01:37:18.840deny immediate ground forces the opportunity to shoot them down over the persian gulf right so
01:37:24.020you need more strike underground strike drones like babysitting them right like it's an entire
01:37:28.740network but uh like some of what i'm saying is is that work it's like 10 years away what i'm saying
01:37:34.980is that for this hypothetical technology to like block out the drones you'd have to have all this
01:37:42.820hypothetical technology there and then that would justify the ground war to secure the perimeter
01:37:48.780of the persian gulf and like that's the only way that a grand war that you could hypothesize a
01:37:56.320scenario in which a ground war is needed to stop these drones or would be useful to stop these
01:38:02.300drones that didn't also, like, involve constructing, like, 2 million people to push on Tehran.
01:38:08.660Right. So as of right now, the Saudis, the UAE, and Kuwait, their governments have said
01:38:13.400fairly hard-line statements on the desirability of regime change, right? But, like, they're not
01:38:19.960even willing to bomb Iran, right? All of these countries have more than, like, you know, hundreds
01:38:24.460of fourth generation fighters that are more than capable of offensive action but as of right now1.00
01:38:29.120they're still only taking defensive action are they the kuwaitis might be net negative given0.98
01:38:32.740that they shot down a bunch of f-15s uh in the first week of the war um the arabs are just
01:38:38.320totally unwilling to commit while oman qatar bahrain they they have all said that uh regime
01:38:44.980change isn't going to happen and we need to give concessions to iran in order to to secure their
01:38:49.080cooperation for a negotiated solution. Although it is very funny that the UAE and the Kingdom of
01:38:55.720Saudi Arabia are on the same side of this, given their Cold War in the Middle East over everything
01:38:59.640else. Amazing. And I'm not sure if that's true that we know that those air forces, how functional0.98
01:39:08.860those air forces are. I am assuming that the air forces are fairly dysfunctional in the sense that
01:39:16.260if they were asked to conduct a high-end campaign against a peer opponent they would not turn in an
01:39:22.480adequate performance but even the saudis can bomb targets that aren't shooting back right like the
01:39:29.380the saudi air campaign in yemen was basically you know three years of them doing that right
01:39:35.060and they'd have some attrition but they probably wouldn't completely lose capacity over the course
01:39:42.920of it right and i think unlike the u.s they would be unwilling to get in load to hunt individual
01:39:47.540vehicles right so we want to stay at high altitude and hope that the u.s has sanitized all you know
01:39:55.100high altitude air defenses for them so what so the other theory i've seen about the build-up
01:40:03.660ground forces in the middle east is it's a faint and the u.s is actually going to yellow them all
01:40:08.680into lebanon to bail israel out of the problem there and that that's where ground forces
01:40:17.540can be like pretty cheaply effective but also do nothing for the situation in the
01:40:23.540middle east and probably i get more i mean if you decided to seriously commit you know a carrier
01:40:30.900group and i mean marine expeditionary unit and like you know much of a marine division not sorry
01:40:35.980much of an airborne division to liquidating hezbollah they could do it right they would take
01:40:40.140you know maybe casualties in the low hundreds uh but it just it doesn't seem like something
01:40:46.360that's politically desirable for the u.s in any sense like only the the most adamant of like0.96
01:40:52.840zio cons are are for that yeah so that's the one like they're sewn out they're screaming well
01:41:01.260they're not doing this they're going to to lebanon but uh i i i doubt it and also like that would be
01:41:09.680a huge loss of face for the israelis if they need the u.s to bail them out in lebanon while all this
01:41:14.740is going on but uh but so the question is because israel is like burning through all of its political
01:41:22.980capital during this like uh the u.s like um like the u.s is losing like a lot of imperial prestige
01:41:31.960over this matter but like ultimately uh you know trump could do something vaguely face-saving and
01:41:45.040say and then like negotiating grovel like a dog and then say yes we had a multi-generational
01:41:51.380peace and i'm the greatest leader ever and and you know half his supporters would have his
01:41:59.380remaining supporters would believe it and half would be willing to just repeat the lie because
01:42:03.800we're out of the ran you know i i think a lot of his critics would be willing to repeat that lie
01:42:09.260because just to avoid just to get out of this this situation you know even i think that like
01:42:17.120the the core like maga boomer right is absolutely willing to turn on a dime based on what trump is
01:42:23.640doing right like yeah which makes sense at a strategic level in order to give the leader1.00
01:42:27.600freedom of action but uh the at the individual level often looks very stupid yes yes indeed but0.94
01:42:38.540But what I, the thing is, though, like, Trump can't do that because he, like, the backbone of his coalition right now is Israel.0.93
01:42:48.820And he looks increasingly like he is blackmailed by, like, the Epstein network.
01:42:56.380And there's also, like, lots of conspiracy theories about, like, follow-on options that the Israeli leadership have.0.55
01:43:04.200Like, there's been a lot of talk about, like, the pagers as, like, a premonition of, like, the pager attack that happened in Lebanon where these emergency pagers, you know, the kinds that are still used in the West by, like, nurses and, like, first responders.
01:43:26.520These were also used like somewhat by Hezbollah as well as by like other, you know, Lebanese first responders.
01:43:36.120And they blew these up like in Israel had executed a famous supply chain attack on them, blowing up all these pagers that they had actually compromised the factory and like loaded a small amount of plastic explosive into all these pagers that they could set off with like the correct.
01:43:55.520correct message uh a lot of people have interpreted that as symbolic of um other supply chain attacks
01:44:03.660israel has carried out throughout the west uh i know some of these are like some of these get
01:44:10.060really galaxy brain so like some people interpret like all the drones that were operating like
01:44:15.840around new jersey and other places in the u.s as a like searcher sniffer drones looking for
01:44:23.440loose nukes that that people speculate the israelis might have smuggled in as an ultimate
01:44:29.880like backup samson's samson option nuclear blackmail like oh you better not hang us out to
01:44:36.240dry because we've also got this we've also got this we've also got like uh these implicit threats
01:44:43.960that lie behind everything and the thing is you you listen to like the the zio shills like you
01:44:52.080listened to a lot of like the lore loomer types and others it's very clear that like the more of
01:44:58.000a zionist supporter you are the more you believe in these conspiracy theories like it's not the
01:45:03.380case that's like oh all anti-semites believe this and and only them it's like no if you actually
01:45:10.760pay attention uh a lot of like the boomers in dc and a lot of the like zio shills seem to believe
01:45:19.360this even more in a scrap and ascribe like semi-magical abilities to israeli intelligence
01:45:25.340that uh they you know their enemies are are just like two weeks away from receiving a
01:45:33.420a musad visit at some point and disappearing forever but uh and it's very clear that the
01:45:41.520of anything you know the the adults in the room the responsible uh dcites are if anything more
01:45:50.160conspiracy minded than a lot of their critics but uh there is this like real concern of of like
01:45:58.800how is it real uh affecting all this influence like are they just like spending money and like
01:46:06.500burning through their political capital and patience that quickly or do they have you know
01:46:13.440some backup card in play or is this like uh is this the intersection of of politics with crime
01:46:22.360that uh that there are all these criminal networks involved in israeli intelligence and like vaguely
01:46:29.280associated with like former jewish mafia stuff uh uh that that theory has become increasingly
01:46:36.080mainstream over like the last year for obvious reasons i'm still hesitant to endorse um the most
01:46:42.460maximalist of that interpretation but the levers of power that uh institutional power that the
01:46:48.860israelis have over u.s decision making is evidently real but not infinite right like they they did not
01:46:56.060manage to get the u.s to support full liquidation of gaza right like they did not manage to get the
01:47:01.180u.s to actively intervene in the lebanon war um yes even this required them to pull out all the
01:47:08.080stops and burn a lot of accumulated political and physical capital yeah a huge this is why
01:47:16.220i want to really emphasize that uh that like a lot of israeli supporters seem to also have
01:47:22.960these conspiracy theories because it really seems to be that like a big part of their political
01:47:28.120capital and they're like uh and they're like foreign policy um the softer hard power whatever
01:47:38.600you want to call it is this perception of like conspiratorial omnipotence that uh you kick
01:47:47.080that none of these people can go against them because they they control all the doors you know
01:47:52.180they are running the matrix matrix which like is actually quite a perception to cultivate when
01:47:59.660you're an intel agency and a weak nation nation and a very valuable asset to have but seem
01:48:05.920but uh this is where i get frustrated with a lot of my uh my uh jq pilled uh follows and stuff
01:48:15.880that uh it's very important to recognize how strong your enemies are and not stronger
01:48:22.200and no stronger like you have to like accurately assess if they're a hundred times stronger than
01:48:29.320you you have to recognize that that's different than being a thousand times stronger than you
01:48:34.140you have to get the order of magnitude right and what what i'm consistently seeing is that they
01:48:40.980is that um they're burning through tons of money and tons of um
01:48:48.740tons of will and they're the big they're burning through seems to be human capital
01:48:56.460like of the like of all the all the stuff like you look at the shills that they have
01:49:03.840have out speaking like the people who are defending uh israel's action or in our who are going to the
01:49:11.280wall and like if i had any concern at all about anti-semitism rising in the u.s or u.s perception
01:49:20.560of israel i would not let laura loomer or mark levine say a word like uh the like the big loss
01:49:30.980of influence they seem to seem to have has been in terms they're not targeting you right these
01:49:36.940figures are targeting boomers and i for their intended target they're still reasonably effective
01:49:44.500uh i'm i'm not sure if they are not uh laura loomer mark levine ben shapiro these they built
01:49:53.640up a ton of political capital but uh if you actually look at their numbers they're like
01:49:57.800having precipitous decline like monthly or weekly weekly it seems that they're really
01:50:04.420cashing this in going very hard which means they have i haven't looked at this very carefully but
01:50:10.340uh do you know how many like uh views like say shapiro gets on one of his podcast episodes or
01:50:14.680something uh shapiro it it was in the millions and is still in the millions but it's been
01:50:21.020declining intensively uh i know mark levin's in like the top 10 podcasts in the world but the
01:50:30.460the thing is with a lot of love these is that uh like a lot of those metrics especially downloads
01:50:39.620can be like fairly easily like uh like astroturf like a lot of the follows and stuff that you see
01:50:47.580from a lot of like shill accounts like uh they they have like tons of bots that are
01:50:54.960liking or buy buy and you can see this when you go into like the submetrics and
01:51:00.920and stuff it just doesn't line up quite right yeah and i wonder like what percentage of like
01:51:07.460their views come from like i don't know india or something yes very very much so um0.78
01:51:12.920heaven help them the indians like probably like them and agree with them because they're attacking1.00
01:51:17.640the muslims but uh but uh my my impression is they burned through tons and tons of like actual1.00
01:51:25.900meaningful like political capital like uh like if you were ben shapiro and you're out for ben0.99
01:51:31.940shapiro like in terms of like as a like major public fair like he's only in his like early
01:51:37.84040s as far as i i know i haven't have looked like uh you know he could have a 30 year longer career
01:51:46.100as a like public intellectual uh like from that position you would not want to like burn through
01:51:53.640all this credit at this stage in your career which means that like either yeah genuinely
01:52:01.680loyal to israel which you know i i respect to a certain degree he's genuinely loyal but what i
01:52:06.900suspect is a lot of these figures are like have to be paid increasing amounts of money to like
01:52:14.620burn through this cap all of theirs like just logically you know if if i've if someone wanted
01:52:22.500me to do something that uh was going to burn a lot of my support and like damage my reputation
01:52:28.100and, like, throw me into the cline in respect amongst my readership,
01:52:34.820you know, my very unique and special reputation that I have
01:52:39.760as someone who's, like, out there and, you know.
01:52:42.720It's funny that a lot of the supposed right-wing, like, podcasts,
01:52:47.240like, chattering class will sell out for a disturbingly small amount of money.0.93
01:54:18.380but like what i'm seeing is that like all these all these figures like they do have to be bought
01:54:26.480off and that money is getting spent and if anything happens to like the the u.s dollar
01:54:34.400if anything happens to the u.s dollar right like the dollar the petrodollar search to implode like
01:54:45.260the way currency crises happen is is those institutional players that that are benefiting
01:54:56.500from like access to cheap credits whatnot that dries up amongst the quickest quickest of the
01:55:03.540actors like uh right like the capital flight phenomenon is very real right like you see what
01:55:08.840happened to dubai right like something like several hundred billion dollars has already left
01:55:13.200and went to singapore or hong kong or somewhere perceived to be slightly safer uh like a cascade
01:55:19.680effect there would be the end of the u.s you know people like ray delio have been predicting that
01:55:23.740for a while although yeah i doubt it'd be the end of the u.s to make them be the global reserve
01:55:30.540currency right like they're happy having a basket of currencies used as uh used for trading so the
01:55:39.140u.s i i always think that we're one good military coup away from having the u.s function
01:55:46.600if you are a senior military officer listening to this uh study coup d'etats in detail because
01:55:56.900you are the only one who can save america but uh like the u.s um there may be a future podcast
01:56:03.920episode about a a movie filmed on the exact premise based on the famous lutwak book yes i
01:56:10.920am reading the lutwak book now and i i would love to do a podcast with you on uh on
01:56:18.880on coup d'etat the book and uh power play the film but uh like to my mind the u.s like
01:56:28.620like would be a wonderful you know hostile takeover case of just like fire the management
01:56:35.700and the like make the institutions work and fire all the the waste employees in the u.s government
01:56:43.120and like all the deal with all the like liability americans like i like it would be very trivial
01:56:51.900if you just had, like, you know, military force to make the U.S. a wonderful place.
01:56:59.200The accumulation of technological capital in the U.S. of prosperity has allowed, you know,
01:57:04.440the amount of waste and rent seeking to increase.
01:57:08.240But the U.S. is also remarkably coup-proof in the sense that American military units
01:57:13.940seem almost purposely designed to prevent any sustained loyalty from building up to one individual personality.
01:57:21.900right it's very depersonalized um yes this is this is where um like the u.s isn't really
01:57:29.720like it wouldn't like uh the role of the military in the u.s that not actually fulfilled by the
01:57:36.420military it's fulfilled by like intelligences and special forces unit units like uh they're
01:57:42.860the ones who actually have like relationships and like like extended like positions in government
01:57:50.500Right. Like, in SOCOM, like, instead of doing a rotation out between, like, a different staff office every two years, there are some officers who retain a position for, you know, maybe a decade or more, which does allow personalities to emerge.
01:58:02.840But, like, SOCOM can't take over the country, right? Like, it's just not plausible. You need, like, mass organization to do so, right? Like, like, Caesar needed, like, four legions.
01:58:13.000i i i think it yeah i remember that like your special forces still tens of thousands
01:58:19.840yes but not all of those people are special operators there are a lot of support personnel
01:58:25.260that are under socom yeah but but if the personnel who are under socom are also influenced by the
01:58:34.080personalities and the personalities because they've been allowed to accumulate reputations
01:58:40.020can have relationships with like like wider institutions and you know relationships with
01:58:47.420the intel agencies anything i think that the the true right-wing praetorian guard that is emerging
01:58:52.460is ice right like the massive increase in ice spending and the flood of potentially ideologically
01:58:59.380motivated right-wing leading people to ice is creating an institution that if allowed to could
01:59:07.160grow into something dangerous in, like,
01:59:36.380focusing on iran we're we're nearing the end you want to keep keep this to a limited bit uh
01:59:44.060the the thing that has amazed me about the iran crisis is that peter zaihan was right i've saved
01:59:52.400this till the end because i didn't want to admit it but uh peter zaihan was right about everything
01:59:58.680uh if you read his book uh the end of the world is only the beginning uh every single um like
02:00:09.480supply chain flow uh so peter's eye hand for those who don't know the character uh he's kind of
02:00:17.640he he's kind of annoyingly centrist a lot of things but uh he's he's an analyst who does
02:00:26.100like a lot of basically he analyzes like economics and world resource flows the way like uh
02:00:32.820the way a hearts of iron four player would you know tracking predicted middle east instability
02:00:39.100for a long time rather than this war in particular but since predicting middle east instability in
02:00:45.060general is almost always correct no no no the the unique thing he discussed was how um
02:00:51.520the closing of core waterways so he identified like uh the red sea and the strait of hormuz
02:00:59.920since core samples that uh that because of lloyd's of london the way the insurance and
02:01:05.400just on time delivery of world resources work uh like uh like like oil and other resources
02:01:13.260are actually incredibly cheap in terms of the shipping costs because of
02:01:18.020extraordinarily cheap right i get that and like the follow-on effects with
02:01:25.000you know petrochemical manufacturing and fertilizer and food but that's real but i
02:01:30.400don't think zyhan specifically has an insight that anyone else doesn't because all the
02:01:34.520global major financial institutions have known this since like the 80s so all the institutions
02:01:39.340have known this but like where zyhan i found him like rather special is he laid all out like uh
02:01:46.800all the individual like uh resource flows uh potash and nitrogen fertilizer and artificial
02:01:54.960nitrogen fertilizer and all this stuff any very readable very short book that is like comprehensive
02:02:01.840enough that you develop a very strong mental model of this while predicting something approximating
02:02:08.100this exact crisis and the collapse of like the global trade system because of it and so far
02:02:16.420zaihan's understanding of the supply chains although i people like zaihan and like like
02:02:22.080adam twos always systemically underestimate the ability of private firms to like adjust
02:02:27.560to demand shocks and to make incremental decentralized changes to uh decrease exposure
02:02:35.020to risks right like they they always like doom far more than like uh than say the median
02:02:42.620commentator and like every year that like something bad does happen right they look like
02:02:47.800profits but like during years of normalcy you know no one calls them out on being wrong maybe
02:02:52.500it'll be right next year right like zaihan has predicted that china will collapse since like
02:02:56.120the early 2000s like fair enough fair enough i'm sort of the opposite i'm sort of always the
02:03:03.060nothing ever happens guy which is also wrong like i i don't think that i've that i accurately called
02:03:09.320say this war a year ago but um uh i lost a bet on this specific war um i bet in summer last year
02:03:19.720that there would be boots on the ground in iran in the next six months and i told the guy hey
02:03:25.080it was 10 to 1 like i couldn't refuse a bet i told the guy hey you know this is six months
02:03:31.540if you win the bet i'll i'll i'll re-up it for the six months after but then i didn't meet him
02:03:36.880to re-up it so we met up and i i uh paid him what i owed him and he's like yeah i wouldn't retake
02:03:44.740that that now because of course i might take you at three to one but uh but uh yeah so i lost a
02:03:53.800hundred bucks and he's like yeah no i feel like i really dodged a bullet that i didn't meet you
02:03:58.760in december uh because because i'd be sweating bullets right now if uh i was on the hook for a
02:04:07.300thousand dollars that uh boots don't land a ground in in iran so that it was like kind of a moral
02:04:15.420victory i still lost money which disappointing but uh that's the nature of markets very much so
02:04:25.260The market, timing, timing, timing, as Larry Silverstein said on 9-11, but my expectation is that, like, we're probably going to see a lot of countries that have been, like, very poorly administered endure, like, really horrifying consequences because of this crisis.
02:04:53.920I'm not sure if it will actually be, like, the complete declassive globalization, like World War III scenarios I hand lays out, but, like, India, Europe, and China has, like, a lot more runway and redundancy, but, like, a lot of these countries are, like, incredibly, incredibly exposed to Middle Eastern oil supply.
02:05:22.500Germany was decommissioning nuclear power plants just in the past few years.
02:05:41.780I recently read an analysis saying that India will probably be okay.
02:05:47.120They have medium amount of exposure, but they also have fairly strong buffers against it.
02:05:51.780it's uh countries that are you know slightly poorer and uh don't have domestic energy
02:05:58.980sources that are fucked right like india at least has a lot of coal so the thing with india is
02:06:04.160that like india is like like a lot of india's per captain numbers are are like deceptive because0.84
02:06:14.040what indy like india is a like incredibly incredibly poor country of like 800 million
02:06:20.960and the like like you know there's about 600 million or so they're like moderately devolved
02:06:28.920they're used to living next to these poor people but like but like yeah like in australia on top
02:06:37.120of a brazil on top of like a sub-saharan africa yes exactly uh like uh like and this is where
02:06:45.540like uh what you know people are incredibly racist against indians now why did people
02:06:51.940suddenly start getting racist against indias in the like 2020s well the reason is like there is
02:06:58.600a lot of indian migration to north america like like throughout the 90s and right like indian
02:07:05.120migration into the 1980s was like the top like dozen indians in all of india right yeah and
02:07:11.200people thought of them a lot the way they think of the chinese they thought of them as like
02:07:16.100like foreign but like just like weird asiatic people whereas like as soon as you get exposed0.99
02:07:23.020like a slightly lower tier of indians like uh like that that well is an abyss like once you get1.00
02:07:32.220you start going down like ever so slightly so this is one of those things where like1.00
02:07:36.720especially because india is one of those countries that cooks all its books all the way all the time
02:07:43.440i'm sure you saw that report from a few weeks ago about how much of india's gdp growth over
02:07:48.140the last 10 years might be fake i would not be shocked at all because like the thing is if you1.00
02:07:54.480fake it gdp grow you attract investment which is like how an indian like industry would make0.79
02:08:02.100make money soak uh let me let me submit you then um i should have that open somewhere0.98
02:08:08.380yeah i'll uh toss it in the chat i'll include in the show notes uh well like i would not be
02:08:16.760shocked at all that like a shock like this it was from their former chief economic advisor who says
02:08:23.340that 22 of their gdp may not exist yes and also it's not clear how much of their gdp is
02:08:31.140like a huge percentage of it will be remittances and it's not clear how much of that is uh
02:08:36.940of like their supposed internal gp would just be like fall on from that so there's like like
02:08:45.400i'm convinced that there's something like their national economic model right during trade
02:08:49.740agreements like that's what modi wants more than anything else to send indians abroad
02:08:53.520invest productively at home that has high return on investment options for domestic capex would
02:09:00.960never consider something like this but uh it's just apparently not possible over there yeah
02:09:06.520because there's so much like fraud you cannot get anything done in india it's like sub-saharan0.98
02:09:11.880africa where it's like uh you know the it's all moral like familism like clannishness
02:09:18.200uh and also like there there are no institutions that have the power to force compromises between
02:09:27.820each other right each individual like cast or landlord or even like religious temple has a
02:09:34.180veto power over any form of development it's like the failure modes of the west combined with the
02:09:39.980failure modes of the developing world yes but it's also beyond that like like that india just0.97
02:09:48.840does not have like any culture of honor or uh or like craftsmanship that like you normally associate
02:09:57.680with other countries so like uh india if like a plumber like goes to your house and does a bad
02:10:04.160job and like doesn't clean up after his like work he's proud that he gets away with it yes exactly
02:10:11.580which is like incomprehensible to people in the the west who have like you know we've had like
02:10:17.720thousands of years of like both warrior honor culture but also like craftsman honor culture
02:10:23.900you know the journeyman uh his entire social status is bound up with like like no i am the
02:10:31.160the master craftsman of this i do excellent work work and that higher past devoted to like
02:10:39.100craftsmanship and like uh industry but um it doesn't seem to have percolated through the
02:10:47.100rest of the culture in any meaningful way yeah this is where like a lot of commentators predict
02:10:53.080that like something like like the taliban or isis will probably form in india when they have their
02:10:59.400next national crisis because like like it will take something like that like like incredibly
02:11:05.680violent forceful uh like relationship of just pure power to like enforce standards and development on0.57
02:11:13.860on india which can enforce development right i think like just like isis they can drown the
02:11:21.900north indian plane and a tidal weight of blood perhaps but uh the to translate that into
02:11:28.600development is something that requires a more disciplined level of leadership right like right
02:11:35.340now no stalling right they who have managed to combine hindu nationalism with some fairly
02:11:44.680pro-developmental goals that the legacy congress party could not achieve right it's still nowhere
02:11:50.400near as effective as say like don't shalping in china but um they really have done a bit better
02:11:55.560than before uh the prospect of truly radical hindu nationalism right like of approaching the
02:12:02.660isis or the taliban level that would require like an economic collapse perhaps triggered by say
02:12:11.520a limited nuclear exchange with pakistan or maybe just this this war's oil crisis lasting for four
02:12:18.360years or something yeah so this is one of the things where if this crisis like like goes on
02:12:25.380we could see a lot of like like regime changes in a lot of different random countries like uh
02:12:33.380does the term the fire rises mod mean anything to you oh yes yes that's that's one of my favorite
02:12:40.080memes i i've okay yeah i'm mind the soundtrack for that this war lasts like we we seem to be
02:12:45.920edging closer to that timeline yes i could very much see the fire rises coming out of this uh
02:12:52.380like britain its oil reserves are like dwindling down europe this could be the thing that tips over
02:12:59.180a lot of like european scenarios uh we already discussed that uh that ukraine uh uh the longer
02:13:08.420this war goes on the more likely ukraine just collapses from like lack of money money from like
02:13:15.560the european side of things uh india might have more runaway than i originally thought egypt you
02:13:24.440mentioned mentioned uh yeah especially for the last five years like egypt has been reliant on
02:13:31.840very cheap saudi debt you know artificially subsidizing them through artificially low
02:13:36.740interest rates to fund you know projects like um the construction of their new capital or whatever
02:13:41.900Right now that the Saudi financial situation is in the toilet, the Egyptians are doomed, especially as other regional actors like Ethiopia put pressure on them.
02:13:52.240Yeah. And Egypt was already like politically challenged because they're the one right next to Israel and have this like national rivalry with them, but are also like bought off by the Americans not to do anything.
02:14:06.380Right. Like, their entire economy is controlled largely by the military. There have been some attempts to reform, but not successful yet.
02:14:13.220Well, this is where, like, Egypt has had two regime changes.0.99
02:14:16.340If you buy the narrative of drastic climate change in the 21st century, they're absolutely fucked.0.99
02:14:22.780Yeah. This is where Egypt, like, has had two regime changes in the past 15 years.0.99
02:14:30.120uh the arab spring and then the military overthrowing the muslim brotherhood who were
02:14:36.560elected in the arab's arab spring and it's like you know that's not it will be around for a while
02:14:43.540i think like he'll still be running egypt in 20 years if it doesn't collapse if classic dictator
02:14:49.960for life architect i could i i could see it but like like uh there there comes there comes a point
02:14:59.360of like internal pressure where it's like uh where i could see him say you know the classic
02:15:06.580military dictator move is that well if you're facing this internal pressure which might boil
02:15:12.220over at any moment what you do to like postpone it well you start a foreign war who do you start
02:15:17.180a foreign war with well who do your people want you to start a foreign war with uh sisi is a
02:15:23.920military man he knows that it's it's that's unwinnable with the current state of the israeli
02:15:28.500armed forces um even as they're engaged in lebanon the egyptian military right like all their
02:15:36.000colonels are running you know four-star resorts no one is doing drills in the desert sweating it
02:15:40.720out in their command vehicle when they they could be capturing significant chunks of the economy
02:15:45.400right like all things he needs to do is buy off the loyalty of the military itself and then move
02:15:51.480the organs of government out of central cairo into his new planned capital to keep them away0.56
02:19:46.960I think American truckers have already been largely systemically dispossessed by importation of huge numbers of foreign truckers, you know, massively pushing down wages and, you know, also increasing crashes.
02:19:58.000The Trump administration has done some things about it, but certainly hasn't deported all of them, which has, you know, only exacerbated tensions.
02:20:06.880but in the absence of real political leadership it like the these people you know as respectful as
02:20:16.060as they are will largely just be pushed out of the industries that they used to
02:20:21.340dominate by cheaper foreign labor without ever picking up a gun or a knife
02:20:24.960it it's a question because like usually these like the class that that you actually see like
02:20:36.460kind of dominate this stuff tends to be owner operator types where it's like it's not just
02:20:42.740their labor that like right like the true high agentic ones the the most effective ones will
02:20:48.880move into the operator class and end up hiring a bunch of foreigners right the less agentic ones
02:20:54.100will be pushed into like the uber driver class hmm i could see it i could see a few different
02:21:04.980things things happening there it doesn't it seems like much more nebulously undefined at this point
02:21:12.080uh the same way the urban mob uh was still relatively new in like the 1780s 1790s relative
02:21:21.880to you know where it had been before that point point like uh like you'd have to go back to like
02:21:29.760ancient rome to find uh urban mobs behaving in the exact same way that they behaved in the 1780s
02:21:36.4001790s in the same way the the like yeoman like owner operator class uh like
02:21:46.040like it's not exactly clear what the historical analogy to them is at this point and
02:21:52.560what it states or in the west more broadly it's like the first society that is rich enough to
02:21:59.720really have this class even exist at all right because we had like i don't know kulaks in
02:22:05.280pre-modernity and uh antiquity right like the richer farmer who had you know one or a couple0.97
02:22:11.100farmhands you know a larger herd of of pigs or chickens and his neighbor but uh the the era
02:22:19.140where you know a plumber can own a recreational watercraft like two suvs and a mcmansion is
02:22:27.960something that only really emerged in like the 70s and 80s i i disagree i think this is still alive
02:22:37.880like uh like that's true of in the absolute sense however in the relative sense uh i would argue
02:22:48.500that these classes like uh if you go back to like the bergers of like uh of like the german city
02:22:55.480states or like the yeomanry of england or like there are several historical analogies for exactly
02:23:02.500this this sort of class uh the the town citizen citizenry maybe like the hoplite hoplite class
02:23:11.840of ancient greece or whatever but yeah there are analogous ones and it like uh well i'm not saying
02:23:19.920that you're you're wrong i'm saying that like i think that largely is able to secure their
02:23:27.280interests through the ordinary organs of politics right like uh you know in in ancient greece they
02:23:34.120elected an archon here they elect donald trump right and he while he has not truly moved to
02:23:41.620liquidate their enemies he has done enough that these people are not violent yes well that's the
02:23:48.060question in the coming crisis like uh because we are in the stage of like uh
02:23:55.980of like plan trusting or fell for it again awards or dooming as the weekly news comes in is that
02:24:06.060that we have these pieces in place play but we don't actually know the actual stage of the game
02:24:12.620uh i i like i'm gonna borrow that analogy the fire rises timeline i'm just gonna start
02:24:18.780referring to that because that obviously like my entire the project of an arconomicon assumes
02:24:27.080that we are going to get on the fire rises timeline uh sooner or later within the next
02:24:32.540next 20 years uh maybe as soon as this year maybe as late as the 20 20 40s but basically
02:24:40.940uh the way demographics uh uh national debts and and the flows of institutions and
02:24:49.020and the decay of the west the decline of the west uh west fallen uh
02:24:54.440uh basically my entire project presumes that we are going to get on the fire rises timeline
02:25:01.440uh sooner or later in my lifetime while i'm still young i could still do things
02:25:08.320uh and it i i wouldn't be shocked if the i wouldn't be overly shocked if it happened like
02:25:17.360this year or or next given the fact that this conflict is quite admiring and complicating in
02:25:25.320ways that none of the actors making decisions seem able to reliably anticipate the singular
02:25:33.840next move up let alone the next next five move moves up and the fact that israel is in an a front
02:25:42.300war they my my prediction from 2023 has come to pass that they have fallen into the tragedy of
02:25:50.260the central position where they've not been able to like end decisively end with victory any of
02:25:57.180their con their conflicts and this is just dragging and all these are dragging on the burning
02:26:04.860political capital and like material capital and like their own populace's patience and they're
02:26:13.100they have the like high pressure veto over american political leadership so as they get desperate
02:26:19.960the american political class gets insane at the exact time we need delicacy i i wouldn't be shocked
02:26:26.580like there's a lot of like very likely maybe more likely than not scenarios where
02:26:33.440where this cascades like very uncontrollably like uh like in the back it's still somewhat
02:26:43.740unlikely it would require like in the 30 of the american political class that is aligned with the
02:26:51.000neocon agenda to utterly dominate the 70 that is against it but um that that super majority is
02:26:58.660much more uncoordinated than the much tighter neocon cluster well the like the problem is
02:27:05.960the raw incoherence of like the situation like uh like to explain the actual state of the board
02:27:14.980like the seven the seven to 12 actors at play immediately in the middle east and then be like
02:27:20.760dancing interests of like the surrounding like four superpowers you know the americans the euros
02:27:26.920the russians the chinese uh to explain all that like like we've covered this entire episode and
02:27:36.200you know heaven help any of our listeners that this they haven't followed this at all all up
02:27:41.340tell this episode and are trying to gleam it all from like me ranting and raving uh going forward
02:27:47.280like like this is a hard crisis inherently to follow like this is like this is a complicated
02:27:53.640game of diploma diplomacy the board game and diplomacy the board game on its own is natural
02:28:00.080complicated like uh well yeah i i can't like when you have that level of complexity forming
02:28:09.520political coalitions in a mass distributed like committee like decision by committees which is
02:28:16.420what democracy is it's decisions by committees like uh you can't navigate that internal coherence
02:28:23.540right that can that can pivot on a dime and doesn't devolve into endless infighting
02:28:28.920is automatically going to punch far above its weight class yeah and this is where i think like
02:28:35.240like the neocons in the israeli lobby like have every opportunity and every incentive
02:28:44.360to make this go as insane and as possible right now because they're going to lose tons of
02:28:51.000influence the second this crisis is over over and they have maximum leverage right now because
02:28:57.340even saying well what would be the correct thing to do to extricate us from the situation you know
02:29:04.600there's five dozen different things that you could hypothetically do or like you could
02:29:11.440hypothetically pull back or you could hypothetically negotiate and you know there isn't any coherent
02:29:18.040opposition to them because no one knew they were going to be in this situation uh on february 26
02:29:25.060you know you know this has been escalating so fast so quickly there's already so many factions
02:29:32.040involved uh iran who knows what their internal doctrine was or has become uh with regards to
02:29:42.300this uh i think this is this could like very easily become like the big world crisis of like
02:29:51.140the next decade like the start i see that path i don't think it's likely but i i see the past
02:29:56.540more clearly than i did a month ago it um i'm still long in the market but uh perhaps i shouldn't
02:30:05.600be i i i've i've taken a lot of money out and i've put a lot of money into like
02:30:13.780into uh precious metals and armaments so
02:30:19.340Ah, golds, bullets, and beer, the free commodities of the apocalypse, or even any marginal recession.