00:04:12.960An escalation trap happens when a strong power attacks a weaker power.
00:04:17.800And the strong power is initially successful.
00:04:20.840Bombs hit targets, bombs kill leaders, but the weaker power gets stronger.
00:04:26.220When that occurs, the strong attacker is in a trap.
00:04:30.860If the strong attacker concedes, says, oh, well, that didn't work out.
00:04:35.480This is politically disastrous for that strong power. The strong power then, instead of conceding, often doubles down, escalates up, moves up the rung. So it's an escalation trap.
00:04:48.300It's not because each rung promises a 100 percent, 90 percent chance of victory success.
00:04:56.440It's because at each step, there's a ratchet.
00:04:59.840If you back down as that stronger power, you're the leader, the government, the political party, the platform of the leader is in deep trouble.
00:05:11.500And at every rung, it gets worse and worse and worse.
00:05:16.980That's why we can't just easily get out of it. That's why the idea of President Trump just walking away was always unlikely. I offered numerous off ramps, did this in March, did this in April. At no point did the administration take any of those off ramps.
00:05:37.960So this was not a case where there weren't off-ramps.
00:05:41.240This is a case where every off-ramp came with a political price, and at every stage, the political price keeps getting worse and worse and worse.
00:05:55.520This is a devastating problem to get out of, and think of it like a gambler playing roulette, where a gambler will go in and roulette you can bet on red.
00:06:28.320The gambler keeps going till they're out of chips, out of money altogether.
00:06:32.680there. That is the escalation trap in human terms, human examples. And we've seen this numerous times
00:06:41.140in history. This is probably the most wicked escalation trap in modern history, because it's
00:06:48.040not just about the political consequences for the leader who started it. It's not just about
00:06:55.640the consequences to the society of the leader who started it. This is having worldwide economic
00:07:03.960consequences that are truly, truly devastating. We all hope they don't get worse. But as I've
00:07:12.580been explaining, we are on a trajectory that they will continue to get worse and worse. So the
00:07:17.980escalation trap comes with enormous consequences. That's why this is the most devastating in history.
00:07:24.780so modern history let the you've explained the structure beautifully now let's put some meat on
00:07:30.200the bones of that if i am an ordinary american who sort of you know got a several kids and a job and
00:07:36.940all kinds of other responsibilities i'm busy living my life i in around march i turned on
00:07:43.040the tv or i looked on my phone and i saw that we'd attacked iran i'm looking up now going on
00:07:49.120still going? Like, what has actually happened in this time? And where are we in terms of the
00:07:55.240conflict itself? What is going on right now? So, as the escalation trap has played itself out,
00:08:02.740we've gone through several stages of the escalation trap that are useful to lay out.
00:08:09.380And they're probably best understood from the perspective of Iran in the escalation trap.0.79
00:08:15.080You see, when the escalation trap began, we bombed the United States and Israel together, bombed Iran February 28.
00:08:23.380President Trump thought it was just going to be a couple-day war.
00:08:26.420Well, we did hit the target, did kill the leaders, but almost immediately Iran gained power by gaining selective control over ships moving through Hormuz.0.74
00:08:37.920Now we're all very familiar with that.0.92
00:08:39.900But in that stage, in March and then early April, the big thing Iran learned is it would survive. It would survive. That was not clear before the bombing started. Now, it was likely true. I argued it would be true.
00:08:58.180But those are predictions ahead of time. Those are what we what what happened wasn't just my predictions came came true, but Iran saw it would survive.0.97
00:09:10.200Well, that then shifted to a new phase of bargaining, and it was bargaining, though, on Iran's terms, because there was a ceasefire, but almost from the beginning, on April 8th, and this you also saw written down in the Memorandum of Understanding on June 17th, were terms Iran was setting for what peace would look like.
00:09:37.320That was a very different stage. So we went from Iran surviving to Iran setting the terms of peace.
00:09:47.760That comes as a shock to the administration. Public is still trying to figure this out,
00:09:54.000understandably. And the administration during this period decides to shift from bombing to
00:10:00.400an economic blockade strategy, also a known historical loser. So in this escalation trap,
00:10:08.300the administration, the United States has gone from regime change bombing, known historical
00:10:15.320loser since World War I, to a long air campaign, known historical loser since World War I,
00:10:24.360to economic blockade, known historical loser since World War I.
00:10:29.760Can we pause there for one second? You say economic blockade, known historical loser.0.69
00:10:35.440People with no expertise, but the sort of a logical, rational perspective might go,
00:10:40.220hold on a second. If Iran is so reliant on their oil and gas and diesel and fertilizer or whatever
00:10:47.120exports, and we cut that off and they can't get any money in, surely that's a great solution.
00:10:53.420We are the bigger power. The world is a much bigger economy than Iran. That's a no-brainer.1.00
00:10:58.720If this was a business deal, that would be exactly the way to approach it.
00:11:04.540A lot of folks, and I've talked to many, many, many folks in business about this, because they make deals all the time.0.90
00:11:11.360Well, what do you mean that there's not an incentive for Iran?0.76
00:11:15.040The problem is that the difference is in a domestic business deal, if I get squeezed and we cut a deal and we sign on the dotted line, there's some court, there's a judge, there's a power to enforce your side.0.54
00:11:38.820Courts, power in domestic politics enforce that.
00:11:43.380International politics, there's no court. There's no power. The only enforcement tool is my power to hit you back again. That's a very different world.0.94
00:11:54.920And so what that means is if I concede because you're hurting me now and I give you that concession, I am going to be weak now with my own public.
00:12:06.740My government is embarrassed and so forth, but it's worse than that because I'm now incentivizing you six months from now, a year from now to come back for another bite of the apple.
00:12:20.140I already if I give in to you now at stage one, I am demonstrating to you I am vulnerable at stage two, three and four.
00:12:32.280And there is nothing holding you back.
00:12:37.740The U.N. is not an international government that has an army that will come and sit on top of New York City and enforce any deal that Trump signs.
00:12:48.000That's why Trump could sign the MOU literally in front of all of our eyes and five days later, break it almost four or five different articles.
00:12:57.520And it all just falls apart as I one of the big predictions after your show, one of the big predictions I made.
00:13:04.860So I think on our notes, they're going to lay out all the eight predictions and you'll see the dates that I made those predictions.
00:13:11.980They're on the sub stack. You'll see that these are predictions before the fail.
00:13:16.840and you'll see that eight out of eight correct calls over these months. And one of them was
00:13:22.320what I just laid out, the failure of the MOU in exactly those terms.
00:13:27.640So it goes to attempted counter-blockade effectively, right?
00:13:32.240That's right. So the blockades in history on their own are known failures and they lead to then
00:13:41.880ground forces usually to actually succeed. So in World War I, Britain with Winston Churchill as
00:13:50.160First Lord of the Admiralty did a major economic blockade on Germany in World War I. 700,000
00:13:57.820German civilians died due to that blockade. Let me say that again. World War I, the British
00:14:05.780blockade kills 700,000 German civilians. Germany doesn't concede. Now, Germany does ultimately0.92
00:14:16.940concede when there's a massive ground war and influx of a huge amount of new fresh troops from
00:14:25.280America. That changes the balance of power that had been stalled for so long. So it's not that
00:14:34.540the blockade wasn't there. It's not that the blockade wasn't incredibly vicious on German0.85
00:14:40.360civilians here. It's that this logic I just explained, which is once you concede to that0.60
00:14:48.500punishment, you're just making yourself more vulnerable for another round. And there's nobody
00:14:54.160out there to protect you. You have no protector of a court. So that's why this is not a business
00:14:59.980deal. See, I think we went into this war with not a great understanding among our leaders of how
00:15:09.020international politics really works. They might have good understanding how business works. I'm
00:15:14.760really not challenging that issue here. I'm really challenging the issue of whether what works in
00:15:22.960business is going to translate into international politics directly. And this war is showing no.
00:15:29.980No, there's a huge disconnect here.0.70
00:15:32.660And if we keep thinking, oh, we just have to find the strike price with Iran.0.99
00:15:37.100We just have to keep putting enough pressure on them until they crumble.0.99
00:15:43.880No, and I think President Trump, now we're into over eight months.
00:15:47.760We're starting to get into the ninth month of the war.
00:15:49.980I think he's finally got the memo that this is not working out like a real estate deal.
00:15:55.900I mean, that's really concerning, because what you've basically said is when it comes to international politics, they're incompetent.
00:16:05.400Yes, I think that's right. I think that saying they're incompetent is not the same thing as saying they're dumb individuals.0.98
00:16:13.180So I want to be clear. I have for 30 years, I taught for the U.S. Air Force. I taught the best pilots in the world.0.97
00:16:21.520these are not dumb people. Just want to be super clear. I've taught at the University of Chicago
00:16:29.180for decades. I'm not teaching dumb undergraduates, dumb graduate students. I'm not interacting with1.00
00:16:35.220dumb faculty of any kind whatsoever. I deal with very smart business people since we're here. I0.95
00:16:41.140come to New York almost once a week now. That's why I've come in and out so frequently. And I'm
00:16:47.080often dealing with people behind the scenes, but these are wickedly smart people, unbelievably
00:16:53.220smart. Nonetheless, they're not that well informed about, well, how well has bombing really worked
00:17:03.020on its own in the 40 plus strategic air campaign since World War I? How well have economic blockades
00:17:12.080on their own really worked. And so what I do is when I'm teaching and teaching in kind of venues
00:17:20.100like this, we're short, we have a little bit of time. I teach at the University of Chicago,
00:17:24.60010-week courses where we go through this in detail, case after case after case.
00:17:30.580And whether it's a short course like this or a long course, I'm always saying,
00:17:36.720name me the case that goes the other way. Name me the case. And this is, I'll say this to generals.
00:17:44.440I'll say this to admirals. Being a general and admiral doesn't mean you have actually studied
00:17:49.760this. It means you're a practitioner. You're a tactician. So in a command, there's two things
00:17:56.540that are privileged in the military. One is tactics. Remember, I taught the best pilots in
00:18:02.480the world. They weren't asking me how to put a bomb on a target. They wanted to know the
00:18:06.580consequences of hitting these targets. And there's also command. That's what equals a flag officer.
00:18:14.980Those are the two. Now, if you can also squeeze in some background on how well strategies and
00:18:21.760other decades and so forth, well, more power to you. But that's not so easy to do. That's why the
00:18:28.940school i taught for at the u.s air force didn't exist before 1991 it was specifically created
00:18:36.140it's called the school advanced first it was school advanced air power studies now it's school
00:18:40.320advanced air and space studies it was started by the chief of staff of the air force and a few other
00:18:46.380four stars because they believed that uh the air force didn't know air strategy in vietnam
00:18:54.700Not they didn't know tactics. And that was the origins of that school. It dovetailed with a lot of my work, which is on the strategy, which means you have military tactics, military action. You have a political outcome. What's in the middle? What is the mechanisms in the middle? The escalation dynamics.
00:19:18.940That's a very specialized understanding that no matter how many times you bomb a target, no matter how many times you're in the ready room, you're putting, you're assorting, well, do you want to use a Moab or do you want to use a MOP?
00:19:33.620Which bomb do you want for which tactical situation?
00:19:39.080That does not equate to, will that actually produce concessions?
00:19:44.220Will that actually produce the political outcome you want?
00:19:47.580But it's it's it's that's why the school was built.
00:19:53.380That's why my work has been highly militaries around the world have found this valuable.
00:20:04.640I don't think our issues here were with the military.
00:20:07.720I think the issues here were with civilians.0.96
00:20:11.060And I think that is often true in war.
00:20:13.680And we're glad we have a civilian control of our military.
00:20:17.580But I also think that there's it's probably we're probably going to discover when the actual briefing documents are eventually released.
00:20:25.840And at this point, I don't see any reason why they should be still classified.
00:20:29.480We're probably going to discover that the military here was not being as forceful as they could have been about the downside risks that were being run.
00:20:39.800Well, you say they're not being as forceful as they could be.
00:20:41.980look, there's going to be ordinary people across the US, across the UK, across Europe going,
00:20:48.540why did they not see this coming? Why were they not being forceful? Why is it that we are stuck
00:20:55.020in an escalation trap and all of a sudden my diesel prices are through the roof?
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00:21:37.520So the big answer to that is that we have been working with a model of war that is 35 years out of date.
00:21:49.100It comes from the first Gulf War in 1991, and that was the Splendid Victory War.
00:21:57.580That was the war in 1991, before many of the people you've described were even born, where in 1991, Saddam Hussein, with a giant army, conquered Kuwait, and the United States built a coalition and decided it wanted to kick Saddam's army, Iraq's army, out of Kuwait.
00:22:19.700It's very similar, by the way, to the problem we have now with Iran controlling Hormuz, almost not identical, but very, very similar.
00:22:28.700What happened in 1991 is the United States, for about a decade and a half, had been working under the radar on a new precision, not just bomb, but precision military that was fusing the stealth technology with laser guided and GPS guided bombs and then satellite information and then other sensors that had not really been used in war.
00:22:58.700before. That was what's called the first precision revolution. And it turned out to be an enormously
00:23:09.520powerful instrument, powerful tool. It was so powerful that in 1991, the United States brought
00:23:18.16010,000 body bags to the region because we were worried it wasn't going to work. All this technology
00:23:25.060hadn't really been shown before. When I taught the pilots in the Air Force who were the first
00:23:29.920to bomb Baghdad in their first bombing runs, to a person, they said they all threw up in their laps.
00:23:36.800They didn't know this was going to work. I mean, they had thought it was going to work. They had
00:23:40.280trained for it was going to work. But this is real now. This is for real. They're flying into the
00:23:45.780teeth of all of that anti-aircraft fire in Baghdad. So this isn't just playing a video game anymore.
00:23:54.260So we, though, discovered it truly did work.
00:23:58.560We didn't lose anything like 10,000 soldiers.
00:24:05.780Now, you don't want to lose anybody in a war, but we kicked Saddam Hussein's over 300,000 troops, not just a few troops, out of Kuwait with a combined air and ground war in 43 days.
00:24:49.400but this is one of the big reasons why in the 1990s,
00:24:52.660all of the militaries in Europe, they all gutted their military. They cut their military budgets
00:24:58.680way down. Why? Well, if you've got Uncle Sam with this precision instrument, how bad could it ever
00:25:06.020really get? You see, so it's, there's once you, and then if you look at China, China's looking0.88
00:25:14.020at this and they had three and a half million men in arms before the first Gulf War. They cut it
00:25:19.540down to 2 million. Why have all those people in arms as targets for America? Because you can't
00:25:25.880win in this. So this was an amazing change of the world. This was the American unipolar moment.
00:25:33.780This is what led to globalization, the rise of trade as a fraction of world product, because
00:25:39.100suddenly we could be really confident about the low risks in all these trade routes that we had
00:25:46.580around the world, including in the Persian Gulf. Well, this is the war that has upended all of
00:25:53.020that. It has upended all of that. You see, in the 35 years since America, even with its near trillion
00:26:03.260dollar military budget, has just been buying based on the model of the first Gulf War.
00:26:09.000We're, in fact, still going to put out a new aircraft carrier in the next two years.
00:26:13.880Think about that. We're about to put a new aircraft carrier out that is a vulnerable, essentially obsolete on day one. And this is because we have been building according to this model of 1991.
00:26:29.300Other folks around the world, they haven't been just sticking with that model. So some like the Chinese have tried to catch up with that model, and that's what they have been doing, and I explain that.0.84
00:26:39.840Others, though, like Ukraine, the Houthis, and now Iran, they have been taking full advantage of the diffusion of globalization.
00:26:52.040So let's just talk about what globalization has made possible.
00:26:55.980This device, this is now diffused all around the world.
00:27:00.620Every place I go, everybody has one of these, right?
00:27:22.420that's the drone that Iran uses to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
00:27:27.160Most of those parts are knockoffs of these being made in India.0.76
00:27:33.500So, what you are seeing is that globalization occurred. It led to a lot of diffusion of civilian, sophisticated technology. We all use it. And so, now, why wouldn't that be integrated in weapons systems, cheap weapons systems?
00:27:58.740See, the first Precision Revolution, you had to be the richest country on the planet to have that system that I just laid out.
00:28:09.420That's why others just were, oh, there's no way anybody's going to take on America.
00:28:15.720We did see terrorist groups try, but nobody willing to really go toe-to-toe with us in a real war with another state.
00:28:23.260Right. And then now, though, as this began to diffuse and as it began to integrate with drones, this has changed the world, the whole world, not just this war.
00:28:41.180And it is the big failure of what we missed.
00:28:45.820And what we will be arguing about is how we could have missed this.
00:28:50.880Because the first real clear evidence that this world, I call it the second precision revolution, just to be clear, that's my name for this.
00:29:03.160It was already in train about 10 years ago as these parts were diffusing.
00:29:07.920And you see little bits of it, but with the Ukraine war, this was really the first major demonstration of the Second Precision Revolution.
00:29:18.960You see, in February 2022, Russia, with 200,000 roughly ground forces, invades Ukraine, including in circles, Kiev.0.54
00:29:30.580They hold on. But Kiev and Ukraine, they don't just hold on over the next year or two. They start to innovate. And they start in late 2022 to build drone factories. Those drone factories were not coming from the Biden administration. They weren't coming from the EU. They weren't coming from the British government.
00:29:54.880they were coming from donors. And I know because some were in the city of Chicago.
00:30:01.240Illinois has billionaires. People can go and look at the list, and then they can go and look at the
00:30:07.220list of which billionaires have connections historically to Ukraine. So I'm not going to
00:30:12.520name them, but at the University of Chicago Center, my center, the Chicago Project on Security and
00:30:17.800Threats, we deal with donors because this research costs money, so they're natural people to don't.
00:30:23.420And so in dinners in 2023 with these donors, these are private, a little bit not too different than where we're sitting right now.
00:30:31.920They were starting to say, you know, I'm part of this new consortium and it's going to cost X tens of millions of dollars, tens of millions of dollars.
00:31:36.160Well, that is essentially this camera on a drone.
00:31:38.760So you can see right away how that diffusion of civilian technology was already occurring in a globalized way.
00:31:48.740There hadn't been the pressure to really kind of concentrate the innovation.
00:31:54.620That pressure comes with the Ukraine war.
00:31:57.280It really hits in 2023, and it happens through donors.
00:32:02.020So the governments are Johnny-come-latelys here because they're stuck in the 91 model.
00:32:06.620they're stuck in the 91 model um and that's not just the american government that's the british
00:32:12.660government that's the french government so this is a generalized failure um and then what happens
00:32:19.280the houthis the houthis now the houthis are if you look at any description of them um they're
00:32:27.120they're numerous but they're not technologically sophisticated the word primitive comes to mind
00:32:32.300Yes, and this would not be wrong. But if you look at what the Houthis do in the fall after October 7th, so the October 7th major terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel, Israel lashes back against Gaza. Well, this, of course, upsets the whole world. The Houthis are on the side of Hamas and Gaza.1.00
00:32:56.000Just to stop you there, there are people who are listening to this going, where are the Houthis based, who are they, etc.?
00:33:01.360the Houthis are often called a rebel group, and they are in Yemen. So if we think of the
00:33:09.200Arabian Peninsula, and if we think of, and I'm not sure which side to explain this on,
00:33:17.260but let's say this is Iran, this is Saudi Arabia, Yemen is just under Saudi Arabia on the other side
00:33:25.080of Saudi Arabia from Iran. And they are Shia. Iran, Shia. Not 100% Shia, same with none of
00:33:33.960these are 100%, but Iran, very Shia, is Shia. The Houthis are Shia. Hezbollah is Shia up in Lebanon.0.90
00:33:41.500But the Houthis, them, were a rebel group that has been fighting different conflicts since the
00:33:50.04090s, long time, long time, and including with Saudi Arabia. But what happened starting in 2023
00:33:57.480is they started to get some better drone technology, better missile technology,
00:34:03.320and they're watching from where? Most likely just Ukraine. And they start to attack ships,
00:34:11.960Israeli ships, and then other ships in the Red Sea. The Biden administration tries to have a
00:34:19.360little war with them. The Biden administration couldn't beat them. A year later, the Trump
00:34:26.720administration comes in, and the Trump administration in the spring of 2025 fights a 52-day
00:34:33.800war against the Houthis. 52 days. Two aircraft carriers. Basically, it's an air war. And what
00:34:42.440are the houthis doing using precision drone and missile attacks against the ships after we lose
00:34:51.940uh we we we have um they they're using these shaheed 136s are maybe 20 000 bucks a piece maybe
00:35:00.34050 000 we have drones too our drones are 35 million a piece so we are in we're using again
00:35:06.880drones built on the model of the 91 model of war.
00:35:11.820Well, the Houthis end up shooting down0.92
00:35:13.960seven of our $35 million drones, these Reapers.1.00
00:36:02.700with a bigger version of the houthis iran this is now 92 country of 92 million the strongest
00:36:11.740opponent the united states has gone up against since germany in world war ii iran has a space
00:36:18.260program the houthis don't have a space program okay so i'm just saying we're right to say
00:36:23.460That's a very apt description, but they have the drones and there's lots of relationships here between Iran and the Houthis with the drone technology.
00:36:36.920So this is not a this is Intel 101 here.
00:36:41.840And and so what's happening is there is a second precision revolution unfolding in front of our eyes.
00:36:49.600And we are actually even engaging with it, either supporting Ukraine or up against the opponent, the Houthis that have it.
00:36:57.540And we are not taking this seriously enough.
00:37:01.600So when you say the ordinary person is sort of flummoxed by this, they should be flummoxed by this, because there's going to be a lot of books written about the unbelievable disaster we should have seen coming.
00:37:21.700So this is not a case where this is a disaster that no one saw coming.
00:37:46.840and laying out what to expect with the Iran war.
00:37:51.520And walking through the stages of the escalation trap,
00:37:54.900the stuff that we all talked about here,
00:37:57.320this was 10 days before we kicked off.
00:38:00.060And I just have to tell you that a lot of the model, I've done modeling for 20 years of this.
00:38:07.080A lot of the folks in that room I was briefing had also modeled for 20 years.
00:38:11.960It's I'm I'm able to fuse myself a little more of the political consequences than simply the military.
00:38:18.820But a lot of the military that I'm briefing, they're well aware and right on the issues of Hormuz, the issues of the different advantages.0.90
00:38:29.260Iran is going to have with controlling Hormuz.0.78
00:40:45.580what has been the economic impact of this conflict?
00:40:51.560So the economic impact of the conflict is now touching the wallets, pocketbooks, budgets
00:40:58.540of everybody in America, everybody in Europe. I just a month ago spent two hours at the EU
00:41:04.280parliament talking to members of parliament there. So absolutely. And also in Asia, also in India,
00:41:12.620also in Africa, also in Brazil. I've just been invited to go and give a big talk in Brazil.
00:41:18.260So this is touching, this conflict is touching those pocketbooks in more places around the world
00:41:26.280than we have seen in my lifetime. In my lifetime. Vietnam War did not have this consequence.
00:41:33.720I was not born, I was born after World War II. So this was not the Korean War. It's not the
00:41:40.540Vietnam War. This is not the two forever wars. This is an extremely different problem. Now,
00:41:46.600the core reason for this, everybody now knows, which is Hormuz is the choke point for 20%
00:41:54.300of the world's energy. If you combine that with the Red Sea, it's 25% of the world's energy. So
00:42:01.140this is really a highly concentrated area. But as you said, people were really worried about this
00:42:06.860in March and April, and then they kind of lost interest. And why would that be? It's because
00:42:12.080of very predictable reasons. And I've laid this out on the different substack posts from having
00:42:19.320studied war and economic blockades and how this will unfold over time, which is it goes through
00:42:25.280stages. It goes through stages when you have a supply constraints. You see the first stage,
00:42:32.780stage one of a supply constraint, this would be true of the economic blockades I just talked
00:42:38.380about in World War I or World War II, is the scare stage with the prices. So prices go up
00:42:44.620immediately. However, in stage one, although prices go up and you get, there's a scare that
00:42:51.640goes, there's a lot of stockpiles. There's stockpiles we don't even know we have. And
00:42:59.720there are books about this in World War I and World War II, that as the blockades come in,
00:43:06.960the stockpiles we find in America, we find stockpiles of aluminum we didn't know.
00:43:13.820We have aluminum drives. We do things to get the extra bits of, think of it as money under the
00:43:22.080cushions of the couch, you know, that we just kind of forget about. Well, if you're hungry enough,
00:43:26.620you'll go and get those pennies out. Well, that's the first few months. That's what happened in
00:43:32.280March, April into May. So there was an initial scare. Prices go up. But then what happened is
00:43:39.900we discovered we had some cushions. And what were the cushions, the big ones? The Strategic
00:43:46.860Petroleum Reserve cushion was a big one. The fact that- What's the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
00:43:53.280It is 60 caverns in the southwestern United States, 60 caverns that are gigantic, and each of those caverns holds tens of millions of barrels of oil.
00:44:09.580And we started this in the 1970s after the first oil shock.
00:44:15.140It really opens up in 77, 1977, so we didn't have it before that.
00:44:20.120and we filled it up and some points we had 700 million barrels well here for various reasons
00:44:28.180we start this war with about 420 million barrels and that's a lot that's that turns out to be a
00:44:35.300lot i could explain but we start drawing it down and other countries have some supplies as well
00:44:40.720so we um we start and what that does is provides a cushion what that means is the prices don't keep
00:44:48.860soaring because the traders start to see and this is why there's this big debate going on about what
00:44:54.740happened and one of the big things that happened is just the strategic petroleum reserve and then
00:45:00.520we got another cushion because it turned out Saudi Arabia already had an east-west pipeline
00:45:05.600they weren't using it this was a pipeline that was going from Hormuz all the way across Saudi
00:45:11.200Arabia it's a long way to the Red Sea this port called Yanbu and that was another five million
00:45:17.780barrels of oil a day, just right there, a day. And then you had China, and we still don't know
00:45:24.600the quid pro quo. China buys less oil, imports less. We think that Trump made some deal with Xi
00:45:32.140throwing Taiwan somewhat under the bus to make this happen. That is the early part of the summer
00:45:40.240and very predictable. And so you can see these timelines. And my work in the Escalade Trap is
00:45:46.940actually literally tracking these timelines. And then I say on June 15th, I have a big post,
00:45:53.380which on June 15th, I say Iran's period of maximum leverage is about to start. June 15th,0.82
00:46:01.360escalation trap, where I show these buffers are likely to all plateau or reverse or run out.
00:46:10.880and I show the SPR, that's the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, is going to plateau. There's a set of
00:46:18.020reasons for that, I'm glad to explain. China's not going to import still less oil, so that's
00:46:24.140going to flatten out. And then also, I said, and that will lead then the Houthis to open the Red0.95
00:46:31.700Front, to open and attack Saudi oil. That will be, and it's going to come not in April, it's not
00:46:39.160going to come in November. It's going to come in the summer. And it's going to come in the summer
00:46:43.360because this will create maximum leverage for both Iran and the Houthis. And it's exactly what0.77
00:46:50.360happened. I mean, literally almost to the week, you can see as the SPR plateaus, that's when the
00:46:57.080Houthis start attacking the Saudi tankers in the Red Sea. And then it gets worse and worse.
00:47:02.860As the SPR, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, bottoms out, and it's now bottomed out, we can't go any lower without a risk that the salt walls of the caverns will literally cave in on themselves.
00:47:16.880So it's a physical limit at this point.0.98
00:47:19.600But with that plateauing, that is when the Iran and the Houthis turned up the economic notch.0.93
00:47:28.660Then I explain, and this now gets to stage three.0.96
00:47:32.980Those who are listening, we had stage one.
01:00:05.920This is the ultimate strategic disaster, and the consequences are playing itself out.
01:00:12.400So why am I also so familiar with also the consequences? These would be the consequences. These are what you would always have explained is why would America want to prevent an oil hegemon in the Middle East?
01:00:27.520It's because if one country controls 20 to 25 percent of the world's energy, it is going to be able to use it as a club for whatever it wants politically over and over and over again.0.72
01:00:45.200And the only choice that we have right now, I do think we have another option that I'd like to talk about when we get a chance.
01:00:53.000But right now, the only choice in the next couple months is dramatic escalation, which is most likely going to make all this worse, not better.
01:01:03.940And this is how we got into the escalation trap.
01:01:08.440And the escalation trap right now is so tight, it's because of the midterm elections.
01:01:15.300That timetable is incredibly, is driving all of the politics right now.0.77
01:01:21.580So everything is essentially in Iran's favor at the moment.
01:01:25.960And part of the reason is, as unpleasant it is to say, is because we're a democracy.0.76
01:01:32.060They're an autocracy. So they've got all the time in the world.
01:09:30.520He talked a little bit of this language.0.99
01:09:34.060He threw it all away when he bombed Fordow.
01:09:36.280But I'm just pointing out that this option here.
01:09:39.620Now, I'm not sure how much this was ever developed, but this is an option that I believe is extremely important and not just for what he should have done.
01:09:51.540This would have been the option I'm going to lay out for you is if I were there on February, Friday, February 27, 315, when all this is being discussed in the Oval Office, this is the plan I would have put forward.
01:10:04.280And it would have been a plan, a three-year, a multi-year plan for all the way through the end of Trump's presidency, and it would have set up another president to continue it.
01:10:15.540So this is not a plan where we can get this over and done with in a day.
01:10:20.760That whole logic is one of the reasons we're stuck in this trap.
01:13:46.200Do you want multiple states with nuclear weapons on your borders or near your country?
01:13:52.300They might accept that, but this is a real conversation now.
01:13:56.280And so now you can start to have a real diplomacy where there's actual reasons here on the table for all the sides to come to a more stable agreement.
01:14:10.860I'm not telling you that regional balancing is 100% likely to solve every problem.
01:14:17.180What I'm telling you is it's a true third road that does diminish many, many, many problems.
01:14:24.940And what it does is it balances interests. So America has an interest, but America's interest is not greater than Saudi Arabia's interest here in preventing Iran. And if it turns out that Saudi Arabia literally cannot stand up, they can't develop to the 40 percent that what I'm describing, then my position has been very clear.0.94
01:17:43.820This is not just several hundred thousand guys.
01:17:47.160This is a military that now has actual mid-level officers.
01:17:52.800They also have, in the eastern part of Ukraine for eight years, a bit of a training ground here where there's a little bit of a war going on, so you can use it a little bit.
01:18:02.860I put that as a secondary factor. It's not the dominant factor.
01:18:07.060Well, what is that? That's called regional balancing.
01:18:10.820That's what regional balancing looks like.
01:18:13.820It doesn't look sexy. It doesn't look—and notice that most people don't even know we did that, you see?
01:18:21.000because they're focusing on what's the dollars we're giving to Ukraine?
01:18:24.860How many patriots, how many javelins are we giving to Ukraine?
01:19:37.480See, we're so busy talking about why we're losing and so forth.
01:19:42.360We're only at the beginning of the understanding here, folks.
01:19:46.560So, and I really appreciate the fact that we can actually now open this up to the wider audiences here of the world, the smart folks on social media, because I'm seeing the deep hunger for this understanding.
01:20:00.220And this is what we now, with eight months of the war, this is somewhat of a silver lining, which is we're about, the world is about to learn a whole lot about why strategies fail and why certain strategies can win, but it's not a matter of pulling a rabbit out of the hat.
01:20:17.100This is not a case where, oh, President Trump could just have this third PAPE option here, and that would save him for November 3rd.
01:20:26.360He wouldn't have this. No, no, this would have to be the option of February 27th.
01:20:32.500He would have to commit to a multi-year commitment to this, then try to work it out that he would hand this off to either, you know, who are Vance or Rubio if it's a Republican or a Democrat.
01:20:43.680So this is how you actually have a strategy that works.
01:20:47.960And by the way, Obama had a regional balancing strategy against ISIS.
01:21:11.640Well, every politician is going to say that. So I'm not here to give credit. My my my role as a strategist is is not to build a bigger presidential library for somebody. That's just not what I do. All right. So all the presidents, all these folks are the best politicians on in America.
01:21:30.260They may often seem like they're dunderheads, but they're the best politicians.
01:21:34.760They will figure out how to spin it to their advantage.0.94
01:21:38.820The role for someone like me is to present the strategic alternatives that will actually work in America's interests and, I believe, in their interests at the same time.
01:21:51.380you see, because I believe that unless the president does, if he, if the, unless the
01:21:57.300president pursues America's interests, the president's legacy is ultimately going to go
01:22:02.720down in flames. That's the real, that's why I'm, I don't think there's as much difference here.
01:22:08.160And that's also why I've advised every white house since nine 11, that's Republicans and
01:22:14.820Democrats. Why is that? Because America's interest is ultimately in their interest as well.
01:22:21.380sometimes you have to explain it. So I guess the question is, where do we go from here,
01:22:28.020particularly when we're looking at the midterms, particularly with the Trump administration?
01:22:31.740Yeah. So between now and January 3rd, I don't think we can do, we can, we, there is a little
01:22:39.560bit of movement to this regional balancing strategy I'm laying out in the last month
01:22:44.520with saudi arabia and you're seeing it's lumpy it's difficult saudi arabia is not just taking
01:22:51.480orders from washington there but this is how regional balancing works okay so it's going to
01:22:56.940be a lumpy process and it's only at the beginning and um uh in saudi arabia mbs may make mistakes
01:23:03.640along the way but this is this is the actual best option for him as well it's not clear he knows that
01:23:09.600yet, but it is the best option. But between now and January 3rd, we have a more immediate problem
01:23:18.220that's about to get white hot, which is so far we spent this whole time just talking about
01:23:24.660the escalation trap and the Iran war. But for the last five years, I've also been working on
01:23:32.340American political violence, American democracy, the internal divisions in America that are
01:23:40.160pulling America apart. That's in this book that's just come out, Our Own Worst Enemies.
01:23:46.560That is, the subtitle is America in the Age of Violent Populism. That is an era where what
01:23:56.660we're about to see in November and December is the coming together of the escalation trap and
01:24:03.720violent populism. That is my nightmare scenario that I've worried about for years. So this is
01:24:10.580exactly about to happen to us in November and December, because when President Trump,
01:24:19.300if we go forward to November 3rd, the blue wave that's coming, Democrats, of course,
01:24:28.140can be very, very happy about that blue wave. This is going to be of enormous consequences
01:24:33.500and not just for the Iran war. This is going to be enormous consequences here internally in America.
01:24:40.880Now, a couple of key points that are very important to understand about America's
01:24:46.380domestic political situation. So violent populism means that there is a large minority, not a
01:24:56.360majority, but a large minority inside of the public that's not a fringe, it's part of the
01:25:03.080mainstream, that would rather support political violence than accept losing an election. Accept
01:25:11.500political violence rather than losing an election. And the book that I just talked about,
01:25:20.180The Five Years of Research, is built on 20 nationally representative surveys over five
01:25:26.260years every few months, and we just did one a month ago, on support for political violence in
01:25:31.640the United States, focus groups, studying the perpetrators of political violence in the last
01:25:37.380eight years, studying all 1,575 individuals prosecuted for January 6th. And here are some
01:25:46.620key things to understand. Number one, there are literally today tens of millions of Americans
01:25:54.620on both sides of the aisle, that is both Republicans and Democrats, who support political
01:26:01.440violence. On the Republican side, they support political violence for President Trump using
01:26:07.920the U.S. military to suppress Democratic protesters. In our survey that we just literally
01:26:14.760took, got out of the field a month ago. Sorry, Robert, just to interrupt, by Democratic
01:26:19.480protesters, do you mean peaceful Democratic protesters? They will be defined by the0.60
01:26:25.940administration as not peaceful. The Democratic protesters will look to all normal eyes as
01:26:32.140peaceful. And you just saw this in Minneapolis last January. So in January, you had an instance
01:26:39.100of exactly how these numbers play themselves out and why those two deaths of the Democratic
01:26:47.700protesters in Minneapolis did not calm things down. In fact, they may well have fired up
01:26:52.760both sides. So what happened in Minneapolis in January is that ICE, that's an immigration unit,
01:27:03.860very heavily armed, very heavily armed, looked like a military unit, was doing surprise raids
01:27:11.040in neighborhoods. This happened in Chicago as well. I did a big report on this. I've studied
01:27:16.220all 284 instances of ice raids into neighborhoods in Chicago. So this is what my center does. We
01:27:23.260have big research teams. We do lots and lots of this expansive work. So this isn't just a one-man
01:27:29.840show, but this allows me to know in detail what's occurring. That was called in Chicago,
01:27:35.980Operation Midway Blitz. In Minneapolis, Minnesota, it was called Metro Blitz. Very similar set of
01:27:42.780operations. And what happened in these cases is that the ICE raids were surprise raids going into
01:27:50.360neighborhoods, and they were hunting down usually specific individuals. So sometimes they were just
01:27:57.520doing checkpoints on roads. So it's not always they have a specific individual in mind. But in
01:28:03.280these situations, they were in ordinary neighborhoods. This would be in around London,
01:28:08.820putney yeah going to putney okay so people in america don't know what putney is all right but
01:28:14.420you know what putney is so just yes it's a lovely town so imagine there are there are raids happening
01:28:20.940here or black hawk helicopters coming to putney that's what happened in chicago a mile away from
01:28:25.340my office all right so black hawk helicopters it's not baghdad all right so this is uh think of that
01:28:31.320as as uh coming into uh um uh say hyde park in london for people that don't know putney
01:28:37.120So, but the bottom line is, as they came in and they're chasing the person they wanted to go get, the community has said, oh my God, what's going on here? And so they start to organize. They start to be worried about their kids. Putney, walk your kids to school, right?
01:36:40.020here on the fringe. And that is happening pretty much year on year on year. What's happened in the
01:36:46.600last five years, we haven't gotten rid of that hate. We've added to that hate. But why now in
01:36:53.560our country? Why not 30 years ago or 30 years from now? And what is the commonality with the 1960s?
01:37:01.340Well, this is the big thing I wanted to understand in the book. This is really the purpose of the
01:37:07.080book to get to the root causes of this. Because you see, we didn't have an internet in the 1960s,
01:37:12.780so you could say it's about the internet. Or we didn't have gerrymandering in the 19th. So there's
01:37:17.760a lot of things that you might think are driving it. But when you have bigger aperture, you can
01:37:24.580get a little better understanding. The most important thing is social change. You see,
01:37:31.440when there's rapid social change in a country, this often creates radical politics in a country,
01:37:41.560which can create rising political violence in a country. And we study this in many countries
01:37:50.360around the world. Why does Lebanon have so many civil wars? There's a lot of the demographic
01:37:55.100issues and social issues. But when it comes to mature democracies like the United States or
01:38:01.040France. We're just seeing violent populism now last weekend in France. Notice that the folks who
01:38:06.500study mature democracies, they don't tend to study the violence. Now, there are people who study
01:38:11.840violence in less mature democracies like, let's say, Venezuela or other countries that were sort
01:38:17.000of like, you know, temporary or fledgling democracies. But we're talking about the United
01:38:22.340States here. We're talking about France. We're talking about Britain. We're talking about Canada.
01:38:26.780we're talking about germany these are this this is the most mature democracies we have on the
01:38:31.620planet you see this has been my area what's going on here in america and then of course i'm going to
01:38:37.780be telling you thoughts on on other countries as well social change is the crucial and is the
01:38:44.620crucial variable the crucial factor when you have rapid social change and the details can vary you
01:38:51.700often create radical politics. The two social changes that are happening in our country right
01:38:59.240now are, number one, a demographic shift from a white majority democracy to a white minority
01:39:07.420democracy for the first time in our country's 250-year history. So since 1776, or the first
01:39:17.320census is actually 1791. The book will trace this through. America has been essentially 80 percent
01:39:25.180white. That includes the slaves. So this, you can include the slaves in these counts as well.0.96
01:39:31.700That started to change, and I can, the date is there, but let me just give you a key data point
01:39:37.820so that we can follow this. In 1990, we were 76 percent non-Hispanic white as an American people.
01:39:46.080Today, we're 57% non-Hispanic white. It'll be another 10, 15, or 20 years, depending on what?
01:39:55.760Mass deportations. Now you can see why that's the lightning rod issue before we'll become a white0.91
01:40:02.540minority democracy. And that social change is enormously critical for politics. It changes0.80
01:40:12.580the political parties, the composition of the political parties. The Republican Party is still
01:40:20.420heavily, heavily the white party in the United States. The Democratic Party, by far the more0.94
01:40:27.100minority-based party. It changes literally who will govern America. So you're seeing right now0.93
01:40:35.740with Mamdami and others, you're seeing not just new politicians, not just young politicians,
01:40:41.420but coming from different social backgrounds. This is very different. This is the kind of change
01:40:50.300that when it happens rapidly, and we're now in the tipping point generation,
01:40:55.980is upends politics in other countries. And that is what's one of the key things that's happening
01:41:02.260in our country right now. Politicians, they can make this worse. So this doesn't have to guarantee
01:41:10.000you upend politics. Unfortunately, politicians being politicians, they often stoke the flames.
01:41:17.320It's often the way for easy votes, easy clicks now on social media. And so I don't want to tell
01:41:24.260you that you must necessarily have the problem if you have objective these facts. But it is the
01:41:31.080case that politicians want to take advantage of this. There's a second big change that's happening
01:41:37.960literally in the same decades. We have shifted massive wealth to the top 1 percent.
01:41:44.840Massive wealth to the top 1 percent. And this means the bottom 90 percent of America
01:41:52.400is losing that wealth. That's not just poor people. That's working people. That's middle
01:41:59.400class people. That is upper middle class people. And this is happening on both sides of the aisle.
01:42:05.580This is happening for Republicans. This is happening for Democrats. And it's also known as the affordability crisis, but there's a red edge to the affordability crisis, which is this is also leading to why people are so willing to burn down the establishment.
01:42:24.900it. In our focus groups, so one of the big, we have surveys. The surveys will show you how these
01:42:31.200two factors are the key leading drivers of support for political violence. They'll show you how they
01:42:37.060interact with each other. But one of the key things that was so eye-opening in doing this research
01:42:42.900were focus groups. So when I first got these survey results, I didn't know whether to believe
01:42:49.900them. Our research teams, we have PhDs who worked on this. They're all thanked in the book. Well,
01:42:54.960the question is, well, are these just random box checking? Is this stuff even real? You see what
01:42:59.740I mean? So how do you find out? You focus group people. You basically pick, you know, these are
01:43:05.720the people who check these boxes and these are people who didn't check these boxes. So let's get
01:43:10.560them in focus groups. And I didn't set it up as he said, she said fights among the people, because
01:53:57.460The solution is not the courts are rigged, the courts are junk, they're only good if they come up with the side we want to win.
01:54:05.780Or if the Supreme Court votes the wrong way, what we've got to do is we've got to come in and we've got to pack that court.
01:54:13.680We've got to change the number of justices on the Supreme Court because we've got to pack the court.
01:54:18.640Well, what that's going to mean is the courts are suddenly not independent, completely hostage to the short-term wins, political wins.
01:54:29.680So what I'm saying is that this situation of violent populism, and especially overlapping with all the possible tensions here with the Iran war, and we haven't started to talk about the different ways they could interact.
01:54:44.800now's the time to stand up for the rule of law that includes uh organizations like the federalist
01:54:55.780society on the right very conservative group of lawyers the federalist society why are they called
01:55:02.260the federalist society because they support the constitution what what would be uh and by the way
01:55:11.020It doesn't have to be just the Federalist.
01:55:13.060What about the American Bar Association?
01:55:15.340And what about the Federalist Society and the American Bar Association jointly making
01:56:48.060And now what we're seeing with the Iran war is this is haunting us.0.77
01:56:52.880But we don't have to just sit with it.0.65
01:56:54.700What we can do is we can use the period of time now, we can use the understanding that we have to take some proactive steps to head these problems off before they become another January 6th or another problem like we saw in France over the weekend.
01:57:16.120Where then the issue is, do you declare emergency powers?
01:57:22.220In this country, that would mean the Insurrection Act.
01:57:24.940So if we wait until these problems metastasize into stage four cancer, the solutions here
01:58:36.940Hence, they're prepared to be violent about it.
01:58:41.800Now, the problem I have, and I don't mean to be doomerous about this,
01:58:44.860but all the things you called for people to do,
01:58:47.400I don't see the current players doing that.
01:58:52.500They won't unless we go to the untapped resource the book identifies.
01:58:59.280So when you diagnose a problem, you often discover there are some solutions.
01:59:06.240We just talked about regional balancing in the other case.0.51
01:59:09.440Here, the very important fact that is maybe the most important fact, even beyond the violent minorities, is 70% of the American public, and that's 70% of Republicans and 70% of Democrats, abhor political violence.
01:59:33.440Let me say that again. Seventy percent of Americans on both sides of the aisle abhor political violence. And that is true today. So we just did this survey. The book goes through this and you'll see there's a consistent pattern here in our past surveys.
01:59:54.560This is the untapped resource. This is the untapped resource in our country that we need to lean into. And it's why when we've had assassination attempts, such as when we had a year ago, an assassination attempt against Charlie Kirk, I made this pitch.
02:00:16.900and the very same pitch I'm making here
02:04:12.780Well, the real danger of political violence in an election is similar to what we saw six years ago,
02:04:18.780which is the moment the voting stops and the counting begins. Because it's the counting in
02:04:25.200an election season that's about the transfer of power. And that's why the counting is so
02:04:32.720controversial. That's why the certification of the count is so controversial. And that's why
02:04:40.940the seeding of the winners who have been certified is so controversial. What I just mentioned a few
02:04:49.580minutes ago, the Trump Department of Justice wanted to invalidate the results of the Senate0.63
02:04:57.160race in Alaska. That hasn't even been held yet. And they're talking about invalidating the
02:05:02.100certification. It's the certification they're going to pull the rug out from. Oh, if they're
02:05:07.200trying, they're trying to. This is the actual danger of political violence. It's, this is how
02:05:14.300political violence is the danger to democracy, not just a few people. And this is what we have
02:05:21.640to talk about now, because we're coming to these critical months. There are actual steps we can
02:05:28.620take. And social media, although we complain about it all the time, it's our way to communicate with
02:05:36.080the 70%. So what's the 70% solution I'm proposing? I call it the 70% solution. You want to activate1.00
02:05:44.700the 70% who abhor political violence. You want them to say protest, yes, but protest peaceful,
02:05:54.340right next to each other. In the United States, just a year ago, we had an example of this on
02:06:00.860the left, and it could happen on the right too. I'm not saying this could be limited to the left,
02:06:05.620called the No Kings protest. It was October 18. I know because it was a Saturday, city of Chicago,
02:06:11.440we had 250,000 people show up. Bi-Center tracks political violence. There was zero violence,
02:06:19.640not just in Chicago. There was zero violence in any of the cities. There were 7 million who showed
02:06:25.480up, and we did not have political violence on that day. Well, why not? Did it just magically
02:06:33.060turn out that Democrats don't do political violent protests? No, we have a lot of evidence
02:06:38.100that they do. So why not? Well, I talked to a number of the organizers ahead of the event,
02:06:45.900and I made a case to them. And I said, look, democracy is protest, but you've got to see
02:06:55.740the dangers of it going violence. And so put side by side protest with peace, protest with peace
02:07:04.220right on the website. Don't bury the peaceful part in the fine print. And by the way, this was a
02:07:10.220little bit controversial because people might say and organizers might say, well, wait a minute,
02:07:15.440Professor Pape, we got to get turnout. Why the politician? We got to get turnout. Well, the
02:07:21.060argument i made to them is the 70 percent of horror political violence you'll get bigger turnout
02:07:27.740if they think it will be peaceful you'll actually get more people if you if you do this there's and
02:07:36.060you can't prove that this is what happened but it is consistent with what happened um the the fact
02:07:42.360is the 70 percent don't want to be part of something that's going to go south it's just
02:07:47.600They don't want to be tarred with this.
02:07:49.940OK, so it's a it's a lot different knowing or having a much higher degree of confidence that what you're going to do when you have these demonstrations and there could be good reasons to demonstrate.
02:08:01.040And it could happen on both. I'm not trying to tell you there won't be grievances and so forth.
02:08:05.520What I'm trying to say is we need to already understand that there is a danger zone coming, and that danger zone is something that we can do something about, and the 70% is the solution, and we need to use social media, and that's what we're doing here, in order to communicate with the 70%.
02:08:31.860have them understand the situation more deeply, have tools at their disposal. There are things
02:08:38.640they can do. And the third thing, a message I really want to give, because this came through
02:08:44.720in our focus groups, the 70% is not alone. You are not alone in part of that 70%. You are not
02:08:51.640helpless. You are not alone. You really are the power in the democracy. You see, the feeling
02:08:59.700when you're just sitting on your couch
02:10:39.820not every scholar does this, but a number do.
02:10:42.000Well, in my world, that means going to rallies.
02:10:45.020So I went to four Trump rallies. I went to four Kamala Harris rallies. I did them in different parts of the country. So I had a much better understanding. And with President Trump rallies, these are all weekend events. And why is that? You have to fly in on Friday night because you got to be there at 7 a.m. and you're already three hours late.
02:11:06.540so you're not the the gates don't open till 10 okay so you're you're not you're you're already
02:11:12.820thousands deep by 7 8 a.m you see so you you can't come floating in well he's not speaking until 5 or
02:11:21.1406 p.m all right so so this is an all-weekend commitment uh now i also because i knew that
02:11:27.620would likely happen um i wanted i also brought with me survey instruments so i said hey let's
02:11:34.200take advantage of the fact i'm gonna have to be there all day um and so i had these little cards
02:11:38.880where i asked people to fill out so and you're on and they're all standing they're all going to be
02:11:42.800there all day by the way um some of them didn't want to do it but a lot of them did because they've
02:11:48.020had a lot of time on their hands and you could do it with your phone and so forth but then that led
02:11:53.000to conversations because you're also just there for hours and hours and hours and by the way you
02:11:58.660once you're at that, that, those route, I went to the return to Butler rally. So this is not the,
02:12:04.720this was Western PA, Butler. Um, I'm from Erie, Pennsylvania. I went to the University of
02:12:09.600Pittsburgh as an undergrad. I had a girlfriend in Butler. So, so I'm very familiar with this,
02:12:14.040this neck of the woods. Um, and, um, uh, the return to Butler rally was where he went after
02:12:20.520he was shot. And, and, um, I said somewhere between 60 and a hundred thousand, it's hard
02:12:25.920to know how many people were there. It was so huge. But you couldn't, once you were there in
02:12:32.360the crowd, you can't leave your spot. Because if you left your spot, that was just going to get
02:12:38.200filled in. So you were going to be back at the bottom of the 100,000 people. So there's no saving
02:12:43.140your spot. You brought a few bottles of water with you, and you stayed there. And that's why
02:12:48.520hundreds of the people dropped over. And they had EMTs, paramedics to take care of people.
02:12:54.160and they felt, you might say, well, my God, didn't that make a mess? No, they felt they had purple
02:12:58.500hearts. They thought they were literally going to walk on coals for this man who was an inch away
02:13:05.780from dying for the country. And just listening to them, the commitment and so forth, it's
02:13:14.420unbelievable to be there for hours and just ask them, just, you know, why were you here? Did you
02:13:20.420come to the first one. And, um, I, I, I would say over two thirds of the people that I talked to
02:13:26.980that day had not come to the first one. It was the first one that brought them to the second one.
02:13:31.900So that was the moment in early October. I thought that this really was going to go big
02:13:38.540wave for Trump, uh, because there was a lot of, uh, this passion that was not really being
02:13:46.180captured here. But it was passion, you see. And that's very, very hard to find unless you
02:13:53.600physically go and engage with people. And that's what I'm telling you is that at the root of
02:13:59.560violent populism as well, there's passion here. And there are people listening to their leaders
02:14:06.740and the leaders need to restrain their own constituents. Because once you're a Democrat
02:14:14.360and you're going to go and lay down the law on those Republicans or vice versa? This is the
02:14:20.980spiral model. Well, I was going to say two things there, Robert. The first one is when you and
02:14:26.040Francis were talking about President Trump's potential assassination. And then you talked
02:14:31.800about the back to Butler rally. You can see very easily that being the victim of political violence
02:14:40.160activates people. And it was very clear after that assassination attempt that, well, a lot of
02:14:46.160America moved right behind them. You could see that with the big tech CEOs and Mark Zuckerberg
02:14:51.820and lots and lots of other people moving over. But then the spiral is inevitable because if you're
02:14:59.300saying 30% on both sides support political violence, once violence begins, then the other
02:15:03.980side gets activated and it's all over. And then you say, you know, the leaders have to restrain
02:15:09.340their base. I put it to you, the leaders should begin by restraining themselves.
02:15:15.300Oh, without a doubt. I couldn't agree.
02:15:17.800And I'm not sure you've got the casting right for this one, if you know what I'm saying.
02:15:22.160Well, let's go back to this example that I just gave you with Charlie Kirk.
02:24:14.900It's still the 70%, but what should the 70% do?
02:24:18.360What are the policies that would actually help?
02:24:20.560Well, the book, chapter nine, the conclusion explains.
02:24:23.160Number one, the core, core thing is we need to understand this logic of rapid, rapid social change, which is making the political system fail at accommodating it.
02:24:40.080When you have rapid immigration like this, as you just explained, the possibility of peaceful assimilation, it can't happen.
02:24:50.800and why not well we actually know our sociological studies of assimilation and we've known this for0.63
02:24:57.320decades have a very clear finding which is it's the third generation that assimilates generation
02:25:03.220ones typically do a bad job of assimilating my grandfather never really spoke I'm from my
02:25:09.780grandfather came from Italy Italian Catholic World War I and he didn't do such a great job
02:25:17.660assimilating okay um he had he in fact when he was 30 uh got an ordered a mail order bride from
02:25:25.120italy that was my grandma and so i never met him because he died he was so old uh i never met him
02:25:31.760but my grandmother also italian and also barely spoke english explained to me that she really
02:25:37.720thought by the time he died he loved her just think about that okay but now his kids very
02:25:44.400different. So sometimes it does happen in the second generation. My father, who was a Catholic,
02:25:49.780ends up marrying my mother, who was a Protestant. But I'm just trying to point out that first
02:25:58.180generation, assimilations don't happen there a lot. Where they happen is in the second, third,0.72
02:26:05.860fourth generation. And we know this. This is not a he said, she said argument. This is something0.57
02:26:12.500we just understand, this from sociological studies. So what that means is things have to
02:26:18.000slow down. You don't necessarily need to think about stopping it. Now, what would that mean
02:26:23.380in this case? Policies that look very, I wish I had brought these charts, but if when a couple
02:26:33.940months, we'll see, we'll do this again after January 3rd, I'll bring the charts. If you saw
02:26:39.680the pattern of deportation and immigration under Obama and Trump until the very last year of
02:26:50.860President Trump. They're almost exactly the same. Almost exactly the same. See, Trump never did
02:26:56.200build his wall. OK, he does. It does get lower. And this was the chart, by the way, at Butler
02:27:02.180he was pointing to. And he was bragging that he finally, finally was able. But if you look at
02:27:08.080the period of almost 12 full years, that's eight years under Obama and four years under Trump,
02:27:15.800you have a very, very similar pattern here, which is you have controlled immigration,
02:27:22.380where immigration is happening in our country year by year. Obama had the dreamers,
02:27:27.420and also deportations of the worst of the worst are happening.
02:27:31.420So a point I make is, why don't we just use that as the basis?
02:27:36.080just let's let's just go there and uh and and and i realize it's it's going to be a fight because
02:27:44.460some people are going to say well i don't want to do it because obama did it and others say because
02:27:47.940i'm just trying to say this is a reasonable policy right okay um and uh jay johnson with dhs secretary
02:27:55.980under uh under obama um he's often on fox news trying to this is i think a reasonable policy
02:28:02.980Now, will it stop America from becoming a white minority democracy?
02:29:09.340Not for your house, not for charity, no exemptions whatsoever.
02:29:14.320And this is an idea, Warren Buffett put it this way, which is, why is he paying less tax than the person who is doing his taxes or the person who cleans his house?
02:29:25.240So why does that make any sense whatsoever?
02:29:28.140And we all know that does not make sense. So that does not mean that millionaires and billionaires cannot make millions and billions. That's not the issue. But it is an issue if it's compounding so fast that their advantages are being that money is being used.
02:29:47.960So it just essentially goes into a spiral where they're just making more and more gain on the amount of effort and things are already doing.
02:29:57.500And so that's those are two very simple ideas.
02:30:25.540Similar to our previous conversation, they're just better than the alternatives by far.
02:30:31.320And that means we should move to them unless somebody truly has a better idea.
02:30:37.080So just picking it apart and say, well, that doesn't solve this or that.
02:30:40.400No, no, no. Let's let's really let's really explain.
02:30:44.400We have the choices here of mass deportation when you have Republican in office or we have open borders with Democrats.
02:30:52.500This is the world we've lived in. Is this really working out for America?
02:30:58.160OK, so then let's go back to the moderate policy.
02:31:01.140Is it really working out for America that we are just going to have multi-billionaires able to come in and throw, you know, $300 million at an election just in the last minute and try to flip elections?
02:31:17.980Is that really what we think is a democracy?
02:31:22.680And so I think the answer here are pretty self-evident.