Valuetainment - April 07, 2026


“Trump Will Get NOWHERE” - Prof. Jiang BREAKS DOWN Why U.S. Needs Russia & China For Iran Peace Deal

Hosted by
Patrick Bet-David
Mentioned
Trump Putin Ayatollah Khomeini Shahids Qasem Soleimani Ruhollah Garcorp Shahid Gianc
“186K Is A HUGE Number” - March Jobs Report STUNS Experts Despite Iran War Costs “Operating In China’s Gray Zone” - Jiang DODGES CCP Censorship On YouTube

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

179.59

Word count

2,272

Sentence count

101

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

17

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with my good friend and long-time friend, Peter Bergen, to discuss the current situation with Iran. We talk about the current state of relations between the U.S. and Iran, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, the current economic situation in Iran, and much more.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Iran, IRGC, your opinion on them, you hear the phrase, you know, they're the biggest
00:00:07.020 producers of terrorism, or there's many different phrases people use against them.
00:00:11.660 How dangerous do you think Iran is led by the current regime to the world, especially to the 0.66
00:00:17.560 Gulf states, the six GCC countries you're talking about, but how dangerous you think they are to
00:00:22.660 society if this regime stays in power? So I think there are many factions within Iran that are
00:00:29.980 are very concerned that if this war continues, the Revolutionary Guards will be able to control
00:00:35.800 all of Iranian society. So right now, they control about 50% of the economy. But if this 0.76
00:00:41.300 war continues, they might control 100% of the Iranian economy. And this would be disastrous 0.94
00:00:46.260 for other factions within Iran who want a progressive, secular society. And remember
00:00:54.860 that these people have a grudge against America.
00:00:59.080 So in 1979, students in Tehran overran the American embassy
00:01:04.080 and took people hostage.
00:01:06.080 People don't know this, but those students are now running
00:01:09.040 the Reverend Gar Corp.
00:01:11.540 Also, their leader, Qasem Soleimani, was killed by the Americans
00:01:15.540 in January 2020, and they wanted revenge against Americans
00:01:19.060 for the longest time, and now it's a perfect opportunity.
00:01:22.220 So there's a lot of blood, bad blood between the Americans and the Reverend Garcorp. 0.93
00:01:28.520 And the Reverend Garcorp see this as an opportunity to destroy the Americans once and for all, even at the cost of their own society.
00:01:35.260 So there's a real threat here.
00:01:36.660 That's interesting.
00:01:37.320 So if you know, have you ever watched The Godfather, The Godfather series?
00:01:41.240 I'm assuming you have.
00:01:41.940 I have.
00:01:42.300 OK, so if you know this and you know that if Iran hated us a year ago, if Iran hated us eight years ago when we killed Ghassan Soleimani, how much more do they hate us today after taking out the 50 plus leaders that we have in the last, you know, four or five weeks?
00:01:59.940 Whatever. How many days are we at? 43, 44 days? I don't know the exact days.
00:02:04.040 how much more do they hate us?
00:02:05.780 So don't you think from a purely a power play standpoint,
00:02:10.440 if you went this far and you killed everyone and you back off,
00:02:16.380 whether you support this happening or not, we're already in it.
00:02:19.920 Of course, we could have had the debate 45 days ago, don't do it.
00:02:23.260 But now we're in it.
00:02:24.500 If you're this far and you get out,
00:02:27.980 didn't you just make Iran even angrier to want to retaliate
00:02:32.260 to U.S. and the rest of the world?
00:02:36.940 Yeah, I mean, I think it's very hard to see an off-ramp here
00:02:40.580 because the Iranians will not give up.
00:02:42.900 Even if Americans were to leave,
00:02:44.760 the Iranians would assert control over the GCC, right? 0.98
00:02:48.380 And that's why Saudi Arabia and the UAE 0.85
00:02:51.640 are pressuring Trump to finish this war, right?
00:02:54.920 So it's easy to start a war,
00:02:56.360 but once you start the war...
00:02:57.860 What do you think is the right move?
00:02:59.420 You're an advisor.
00:03:00.860 You've said a lot of crazy things, which is very interesting.
00:03:04.240 And I like to hear what you're saying because, you know,
00:03:06.780 when everybody is saying the same exact thing, you're not learning leaks.
00:03:10.340 You need to hear what other people are saying.
00:03:12.740 What do you think is the right move to do here right now
00:03:14.900 for both U.S. and the Gulf states?
00:03:20.180 If I were the Gulf states and if I were the United States,
00:03:23.780 my advice would be to organize a conference for four countries,
00:03:27.880 the United States, Russia, Iran, and China, do not include the Europeans, do not include
00:03:34.380 the GCC, do not include Israel, just these four countries, United States, Russia, China,
00:03:41.160 and Iran, and come to a collective agreement where these four nations agree on a new trade
00:03:49.680 relationship based on the U.S. dollar. I think all four nations are interested in maintaining
00:03:53.260 the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency because no one else wants that global reserve
00:03:57.160 currency status um why would why would you why would you do that if the if those three all hate
00:04:04.020 you and if you're in a meeting with them China's not necessarily an ally Russia's not necessarily
00:04:10.480 an ally Iran's not necessarily an ally why would I hold this meeting no one is three against one 0.79
00:04:15.720 Trump would never host a meeting like that no one the leverage isn't on him right and so he
00:04:20.560 he's got the support of Gulf states they're on his side he knows he doesn't with China he knows he
00:04:26.940 doesn't with russia he knows he definitely doesn't with iran why host a meeting like that
00:04:32.460 i don't see the logic behind that feel free to push back i don't see the logic behind that
00:04:37.020 well i mean the reality is that um america is gonna have a hard time holding onto its empire
00:04:45.340 and trump has said this many times uh because america is the world reserve currency because
00:04:51.980 America is responsible for protecting the sea lanes, then America is basically screwed by the
00:04:57.500 world, especially the Europeans, who don't have to pay for their own defense and who can use 0.98
00:05:04.000 their savings to fund their lavish welfare and pension system, right? So it's not in the best
00:05:10.180 interest of America to maintain its empire. If you're an average American, you're paying way too
00:05:15.840 much um for this empire so why not just retreat back into the western hemisphere the western
00:05:23.260 western hemisphere is completely self-sufficient it has can as mexico hey if i'm trump i'm like
00:05:28.280 you know what screw iran screw ukraine i don't need these places i'm going to over canada and 0.78
00:05:32.780 mexico because mexico has a surplus of labor cheap labor and canada has infinite resources
00:05:38.180 a lot of people agree with you on that a lot of people agree with you but but here's the problem
00:05:41.920 though. Gianc, the problem is
00:05:43.780 we're in too deep right now.
00:05:46.800 So this is a good conversation
00:05:48.280 45 days ago.
00:05:50.000 I'm saying to you, we just killed the
00:05:51.920 top 50 leaders.
00:05:54.980 These are, they're not
00:05:55.900 going to, they're a martyr type community.
00:05:58.020 Like, you know how you ever go against a company and they're
00:05:59.960 very litigious and you want to play 1.00
00:06:02.020 nice? And they're like, no, we're
00:06:04.040 litigious. Sue, sue, sue, sue, sue, sue.
00:06:06.300 You have to fight, fight, you know,
00:06:08.000 fire with fire. So I'm talking
00:06:09.820 today. If you go in the room and say,
00:06:11.780 okay, let's play nice with Iran. 0.82
00:06:13.220 They're like, you're out of your flipping mind.
00:06:15.460 And if we say, hey, Iran says we want to play nice, 0.99
00:06:17.860 you're out of your mind.
00:06:18.740 And we know Russia and China are going to side with them.
00:06:21.480 I don't know if that strategy works today.
00:06:24.540 I do know.
00:06:25.020 Do you think Trump has a ton of leverage over NATO right now?
00:06:28.920 Do you think the leverage he has over NATO?
00:06:31.860 Look, you can make the argument that Trump is not just at war with Iran.
00:06:35.720 Trump is ultimately at war with the globalists, right?
00:06:37.680 The Sea of London, Wall Street, global finance.
00:06:39.980 Yes.
00:06:40.140 Right?
00:06:40.380 So NATO represents a globalist, and Trump hates NATO, and NATO hates Trump.
00:06:46.480 I think Trump has been trying very hard to come to an agreement with Putin for the longest time.
00:06:51.920 They had that Anger to Alaska meeting, and what happened afterwards?
00:06:55.280 Well, NATO and Ukraine are continuing to attack Russia.
00:07:01.080 There was that drone assassination attempt against Putin.
00:07:04.040 the ukrainians have blown up 40 percent of uh russia's oil exports just most recently so there's
00:07:13.100 a lot but bad blood between um ukraine and russia between the globalists and and and trump so if
00:07:20.140 you're trump right who's your enemy is your enemy iran russia and china or is your enemy
00:07:24.900 nato and the globalists well he he's he's constantly complimentary of his relationship
00:07:35.180 with g and putin if you ever notice when he speaks his luck you know i'd rather be friendly
00:07:40.600 than not friendly we had a good talk we're going to go visit back in may we have some scheduling
00:07:45.340 conflict we're going to go back i had a good talk with putin had a good talk with g so he he knows
00:07:50.600 how to speak to these power players and have them under control.
00:07:54.120 It looks like, you know, that night when he was giving a speech,
00:07:56.500 the 23-minute speech, which 9 p.m., I think this was last week,
00:08:00.140 I thought he was going to say something radical like we're leaving NATO.
00:08:04.020 I thought he was going to say the Gulf has announced they're funding the war.
00:08:07.080 I thought he was going to make some kind of a big announcement like that.
00:08:10.560 I don't think there was any big announcement there.
00:08:12.160 But to me, if you had an easier way to get rid of IRGC, question for you,
00:08:18.900 Is the world a better place with IRGC no longer being in power and it being replaced by some sort of a democracy?
00:08:27.400 Look, I completely agree with you in that the great fear is that Iran becomes much more extremist and much more theoretical, theocratic than it is now. 0.76
00:08:38.420 The Ayatollah Khamenei was considered a pretty moderate individual.
00:08:42.900 His son is not considered moderate and also he's considered incompetent.
00:08:47.660 And so the people around him will be able to control him.
00:08:52.180 We can expect like the most hard line elements in our society will emerge triumphant from this war if this war continues.
00:09:01.060 So my again, my best advice is for these four countries to sit down together, see Putin and Trump will agree to pressure together Iran to come to a settlement.
00:09:13.620 Listen, at the end of the day, Russia is supporting Iran. 0.72
00:09:16.800 If Russia were to support – sorry, if Russia were to pull its support, it would be very hard for Iran to continue this war effort.
00:09:23.520 That I agree.
00:09:24.000 Putin has a lot of leverage over Iran, right?
00:09:27.420 And that's what I'm saying.
00:09:28.100 You need these four countries to sit down together to come to an agreement.
00:09:31.080 If Trump were trying to negotiate with Iran directly, you would get nowhere.
00:09:35.020 But if China and Russia entered the negotiations and they agreed on a mutually beneficial global trade relationship, then I think you can get somewhere.
00:09:44.340 And Trump would, I think, excel in such negotiations.
00:09:48.860 Yeah, maybe the meeting is a better meeting if it's Russia, China, and U.S.
00:09:54.580 and not involving Iran on phase one, just to kind of get the pulse there.
00:09:59.320 Because the leverage, you're right, because Russia, they kind of help each other, right?
00:10:03.040 Because they were selling the cheap drones, the Shahids, I don't know what they're called, 0.99
00:10:06.360 Shahids or Shahids to Russia. 0.99
00:10:10.260 and Russia was buying it from them back and forth
00:10:12.440 because Iran makes some of the best small drones similar to Ukraine.
00:10:16.620 Shahid, yeah, the drones that they make, the loud ones, 1.00
00:10:19.440 very effective in a war like this.
00:10:22.780 Okay, so that's interesting to see what happens there.
00:10:25.120 But you do agree that the level of extremism that IRGC has,
00:10:30.880 if there is a way to get rid of that regime and be more of a democracy,
00:10:36.340 the world would be a safer place with them being gone.
00:10:39.680 You would agree with that?
00:10:42.200 Yeah, no, I would agree that it is not good.
00:10:46.940 It is not in the best interest of Iran to be a theocracy.
00:10:50.700 I think these are Persian people.
00:10:52.580 These are the most enlightened people with a long history.
00:10:57.980 They want to be Persian. 0.96
00:10:59.220 And so I think that what emerges after this war is a more vibrant Persian nationalism as a counter to Shia theocracy. 0.82
00:11:06.660 So you would want to see the religious, the, you know, Ruhollah, the Khamenei's, all that to be gone, and it's just ran by a government, not a theocratic type of a government.
00:11:16.680 You'd like to see that happen.
00:11:18.140 Do you think there's a safe landing where we can get there?
00:11:21.800 Do you think there's a possibility where we can get there?
00:11:23.820 um given what's happened so far um and given that trump seems intent on attacking iran's
00:11:33.240 critical civilian infrastructure yep i think this is all this is only this will only embolden and
00:11:38.600 empower uh the most extreme religious elements in uh iranian society because these are the ones who
00:11:45.400 are willing to die um for what they believe in yeah i live with them i lived there for almost
00:11:50.920 11 years so i witnessed what they're like and the level of radicalism that they have is a whole
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