Sam Stein, JVL and Mark Hertling React to Trump's Iran Address

0:00Okay, first of all, let me just apologize to people who are tuning in. We had some technical difficulties. I'm not sure how to describe what you missed. If you're watching that, at first, honestly, guys, I thought, okay, there's something, there's a structure to this, there's a purpose to this. He's going to outline some path outward. And then it just, honestly, and I know this is a cliche, but it was an extended truth social rant. It really was. That basically boiled down to, we are very close to meeting our core objectives, and also about to bomb them into the storage. Now is it contradictory claims with no actual strategic vision, Javille's sort of not fully in agreement, but why, what do you, what, what are you going to get wrong with, is not, it's not that enough. He says, we're very close to our core objectives. I don't believe he outlined any core objectives. He, I mean, just as a piece of performance, was that a guy who sounded together to you guys,

1:10because that sounded, I mean, I don't want to make light of cognitive decline, but holy shit, if you have kids in the military, and that's the commander in chief, do you think to yourself? He's got his fastball. Don't worry. He is dialed in. He knows just what's going on. No, I mean, I just, he was sort of terrifying. Like, if my, my oldest kid is going to turn 18 next week, was enlisting, I would like chain him to a pipe or something and say, you cannot go in the military with this guy running that, I mean, it, it's insane. It was sleepy. It was ad libbed. I'm pretty sure was ad libbed. I mean, I, I'm almost positive as ad libbed, at least portions of a red libbed. It was incoherent parts. It went to weird sides like leave it to your imagination, but they can't believe what they're saying. What are you talking about? Again, it was contradictory. There was no actual, I'm not sure what the purpose was.

2:11It just was a resummerization of everything you said. That's not only to ask Mark, what do you think, because this, this wasn't a impromptu thing on the tarmac or something like this? Like, I mean, this was a plan, this was a set piece. What do you think the strategic or political or communications objective of this was? Well, I, I got to tell you, I, I was writing notes, scribbling notes like crazy. The only thing of any value I took off that was halfway coherent when he start talking about the strategic objectives, but then he named our objectives were to eliminate the Navy. They're now destroyed to take out their air force and missiles and those are all now gone his term. Not mine. The industrial base is gone. Those were the three I heard. Then he went into what I think we should probably appropriately call the rape pillage

3:15Trump doctrine because he invited all of Europe and anybody else that wanted oil just to go in and take it because he doesn't need it. I mean, we don't need it. We've got more than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, which is an outright lie. So the, the one thing is I was scribbling. I finally, I just thought to myself, who's writing this speech for him? Who is putting this thing together? Who is his speech writer? And what kind of communication process do they have to actually get some kind of coherence and precision and discipline into the things he's communicating to the entire American people? He asked for air time for this tonight and it's just amazing that anybody gave it to him and he's not going to probably get it anymore unless he beats the whole thing. I disagree. I am so glad that they gave it to him. I'm happy people got to see that.

4:16I think it's important people see that because it was, if you, if you just read his truth, that's not the, that's not the vast majority of the population. But this is his rambling truth and to see it in the flesh was remarkable. Tim Miller is joining us. Tim, I, you're very hot on this. What's going on? I just, I wasn't supposed to be on tonight. But what in the fuck was that? Like, like, honestly, what in the fuck was that? And to, to general hurtling's point about who wrote it, whoever's writing the truth social posts is who wrote it. So maybe the golf caddy, I guess the golf, yeah, I think the golf caddy probably wrote it because he writes his own posts, he dictates them to an A. So that, yeah, I think it was probably him because it was just a rambling truth social post. Like, the as best as I could tell, like, if you were coming into this clean, like, if you had watched the Artemis launch and then went and cooked dinner and then, like, accidentally left CBS on and came back and like, he was talking, you know, and you're trying to figure

5:17out, what are we doing there? Like, why is this war happening still? The best thing that I could tell that he said was, was we're there to help. It's like, we're there to help. And Israel and the entire Middle East would be wiped off the map if I hadn't won. And that's why we're doing this and we can't let them have a nuclear weapon. There was never a pitch for like why actually we care if they had a nuclear weapon. I got to understand the abstracts, et cetera, but I don't know, I just as me sitting there on the couch watching this rambling old man talk about this war, I'm like a little bit more worried about Donald Trump using the nuclear weapons that all he needs to do is press a button. Then the mullahs in Tehran enriching uranium through a multi-year process and attacking us with nuclear weapons, not to say it's not a concern that Iran would have a nuclear weapon. But like, there is no pitch like this was an urgent thing that could matter to somebody who lives in Topeka like that that there is a, you know, so the other wise, the Iranians

6:18might extort the rest of the Middle East the way they're currently extorting the Middle East. Right. I mean, the pitch was literally, we're there to save Israel. Like, it's literally the pitch, like, we're there to save the Middle East and our other friends, there's one of our other friends are good friends, they're giving us a free point. It's like, we have to keep, and then there's no announcement. There's no like, so in service of that, we are going to do this that and the other thing. Right. In service of that, we're going to send in troops to ishran and like, we want to go get their uranium. Like, that's the point. As Iran has two weeks to make a deal or else we're going to send people in, we're going to go get the uranium and take it out so that you never do it again. That would be an insane, I don't know, Mark Hardling would probably know better than me. That seems like that would be an insane mission. But like, that would at least be a coherent strategy that, like, or something, I can, I can notion that they're giving people, that's not what he offered.

7:19It was just a rambling mess where he's like, whatever, I know, if he, if they get the nuclear, then maybe the Middle East would go away and something, something, something, we can't have it. Other presidents could have had it. Oh, by the way, do you know how long the Korean War was? Like, that, I want to trust that Korean War, I want to address that. Mark, Mark, Mark, once again, once again, let's play that video and mark address that after because this one just blew my mind when he was comparing this to World War II and World War I and the Korean War as if, you know, it's just like it's a minor inconvenience that we're having here. So why don't we play that and mark on the other side, go off. The nuclear sites that we obliterated with the B2 bombers have been hit so hard that it would take months to get near the nuclear dust and we have it under intense satellites surveillance and control. If we see them make a move, even a move for it, we'll hit them with missiles very hard again. We have all the cards they have done.

8:20It's very important that we keep this conflict in perspective. An involvement in World War I lasted one year, seven months and five days. World War II lasted for three years, eight months and 25 days. The Korean War lasted for three years, one month and two days. The Vietnam War lasted for 19 years, five months and 29 days. Iraq went on for eight years, eight months and 28 days. We are in this military operation, so powerful, so brilliant against one of the most powerful countries for 32 days and the country has been eviscerated essentially is really no longer a threat. All right, Mark, you could have run that with the help of CHAT GPT, but what are your thoughts? Yeah, you know, that was the part where I said to myself, who the fuck is writing his

9:21speeches? I mean, seriously. You know, I've had the opportunity during combat operations to meet with or be with for short periods of time, a couple of senior leaders and the president of the United States. And I got to tell you, you walk away with conviction. You understand better because they communicate, you know, after listening to this, you know, if I were a four-star general today in his military, I think I'd walk out of the room saying something along the lines of, we're all going to die because he doesn't know what he's doing. I mean, he has no friggin' clue. Well, first of all, I mean, you know, you could talk about each one of the calculations in the war. Yes, the United States was in World War I for a year and however many a number of days, but that thing went on for 10 years and it was a slug fit. I mean, I don't even want to get into the military history, but again, who gave him that information?

10:23He didn't get it himself. I mean, he's not his own researcher on this stuff. So someone is feeding him this stuff and the people who are feeding them this stuff are the same ones that are allowing the entire U.S. government to go haywire right now. And we have said it so many, I'm sorry, go ahead. I'll finish, finish. No, Tim, I've heard you say it so many times on different media outlets of where are the people standing up and saying enough? This man, I mean, I don't care what your ideological background is. This guy does not have common sense. He just doesn't have a sense of reality. And again, it's people around him that are allowing, I mean, when the teleprompters were set up in the wherever he was given the speech from and they allowed him to give this speech, like that's, it's criminal. Who writes? Yeah, no, I'm just going to say briefly this, sorry, that Jimmy could go just like, even

11:23if they aren't all given, you know, that's being a little cheeky, like who the hell knows? Sure, maybe everybody's like, maybe they do a ground accursion, they didn't announce anything. Right. So short, even short of people are going to die, like let's say he does the opposite, right? Which is like, hey, in two weeks, I give another speech just like this, where I talk about how we won and we haven't done anything differently in whatever we've won. That is, that is not as bad of malpractice because people won't be dead, but that is also not like there is real damage happening all around the world, like to about to Americans but to the people living countries that are allies every day this goes on, you know, like we are, you know, people are going to have shortages, like they're going to be gas lines in the UK and in Japan, like not far from now, like people in this country that are struggling to make ends meet, like, are going to have their prices go up on everything and he can't enunciate why at all. It's just like, well, we're just going to keep on keeping on for a couple of weeks and who knows? Maybe we'll degrade their missiles more. It's like, who care? Why? Yeah.

12:24JVL. I mean, I feel silly even asking this, but so when Trump and Biden had their first debate, we went to our first commercial break and the during the commercial break, we had like us on to talk and I remember saying to people, well, okay, well, he's going to have to drop off the ticket because this is the equivalent of a health event on national television. Didn't this kind of look like a health event on national television? No, I mean, and it's one thing to ramble when it's just about look at all the things we've done or maybe we'll invade Greenland, but you're in a hot war. I mean, you do have American service members in harm's way. You've had people killed. You have like actual bombs going off. This seemed like a health event. And is it crazy to think that no Republican in Congress is going to walk out and say,

13:28look, we all saw that, right? You guys saw that too, right? I am curious. I want to see what the reaction is on the online right because there have been people who in the lead up to this, the sort of people who are waiting for an off ramp. We're getting excited about all these leaks, right? There's a bunch of leaks being like he's going to declare this thing is over. He's going to say he's winding it down. The objectives have been achieved and he did do that at the top and then he didn't do that. He went from we're here to help. The world will be over quote very shortly to we will be hitting Iran very hard over the next two to three weeks. These are contradictory, it is, but I do think Sam, I think that he implicitly closed the door to ground troops. We'll elaborate. So the reason I say this is because if you give this speech and you tell the country in the first real way that you've addressed me into a war period, hey, we're almost done.

14:29It'll just be another two to three weeks. We're really close. We've almost achieved all of our strategic objectives and you don't prepare them for ground troops. You don't say it's possible that we're going to put boots on the ground and then you do it. The political fallout for the normal prison, that's the prison of a normal politician now. I think, I think, I think, I don't know. I just think his whole issue. I know. I can do whatever I want. And then to send in ground troops after this, doing what he's doing is political damage. He also spent tonight saying he's going to commit a war crime, right? He said he will not, he will bomb the power plants of Iran's simultaneous, all simultaneously. So we're acting like, well, you know, he's an irrational person here saying irrational things. I don't think we can be like, well, he didn't say he'll send in ground troops, therefore there's no ground troops, right? I just think he's. I think he's trying to get through the debt. It's not even the, the, the, the, it's not even nod to it or say, and who knows we may

15:32have to. And I agree that it's crazy. I just don't know if there was any implicit message. I don't know. I think. Here's the thing. I'll add to that. I mean, you know, I've had family members while I was deployed while our sons were deployed who took, they were asswaged by members of the government coming on TV and saying, here's what's happening. Here's what's going to happen in the future. It's a tough fight. Hama Hama. And I remember my wife one saying one time that when during desert storm, when people like Colin Powell or, or Dick Cheney, I mean, even Dick Cheney getting on the air and, and speaking what was happening, okay, we know our soldiers are over there for omission. Right now, if I were not so much a soldier, it would scare the hell out of me as a soldier watching this speech. But if I were a family member of one of those 60,000 people who are deployed to the Middle East right now in, in ships and, and mues and, and army brigades, I'd be scared to death.

16:37I really would. I want to talk about the oil stuff for a second, because I talked about Josh Barrow and the podcast for a long time about this today. And I think he was really sharp about how, like, you know, we're about to go through a period. Like we're not there yet, because a lot of the trolling was on ships and stuff or only, he said we're doing this for two or three weeks and we're about, during that time period, kind of towards the end of that time period, we're about to be a place where there's like actual shortages. People are going to have to cut down on their behavior to offset the shortages we have. There'll be less of a problem here than it will be in the rest of the world, but it's a global market. We've had the largest, like, monthly increase in gas prices, I think ever this month. The chart went to hockey stick during that speech. And the speech was like, even at the end of three weeks, it wasn't like, oh, the straight is going to be open. Basically, like, if you're trying to read through his gobbledygook, you know, dentures, like talk, like to take away is like, well, actually, no, it's not actually it could be

17:38who knows how long after that before straight open, let's actually, let's play that. Let's play that. We're all going to have to deal with it. Okay. Let's play the clip. Let's play the clip. Let's play the clip. For the straight itself. And I will just before we play it, I just say, he also said, and this kind of went unnoticed. He said, we could bomb their oil, but we're not going to because we want them to rebuild, but we could bomb their oil. So let's do take, let's do take the oil clip and then Kim finish your thought on the end of that. The countries of the world that do receive oil through the hormones straight must take care of that passage. They must cherish it. They must grab it and cherish it, they can do it easily. We will be helpful. Sounds like a rapist. They should take the lead in protecting the oil that they so desperately depend on. So to those countries that can't get fuel, many of which refuse to get involved in the decapitation of Iran, we had to do it ourselves. I have a suggestion, number one, bio oil from the United States of America.

18:38We have plenty. We have so much. And number two, build up some delayed courage. Should have done it before. Should have done it with us as we asked. Go to the straight and just take it, protect it, use it for yourselves. Iran has been essentially decimated. Okay. Other for you guys are the geopolitics of this, of taking the straight by the pussy or whatever his plan was for the UK, but like on the just economics part of it, we're talking about the economics. We're going to be in a period of shortages and he's like, okay. So the straights going to, you guys are going to figure that out. It's going to take a while for that to figure out. I'm just doing basic Adam Smith here. We don't want the world by our oil, actually. We should probably put some backspot band back on like if we get into the situation, like we should be hoarding our, I just want to share about America for more, wouldn't it Tim? I mean, if the demand, yes, if the demand, because foreign countries want to buy our oil instead of having a sell it domestically, supply demand, right?

19:39Supply constant demand goes up, price goes up. Yeah. Guys, I'm going to share your plan. Sorry, his plan would drive it up even more. No, yes, that's what you guys are going to be. Sorry, we're saying the same thing. I thought you were saying what I was suggesting, what, what, yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's a little, I mean, it's, it's great. Guys, check, check out this, check out the oil futures graphic we want to put up. Tell me if you can see the time when Trump started speaking. Yeah. Man. Real direction chart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's like, okay, we're going to sell the people the oil. No, wrong. Like, he has no, he has no concept for how fucked the economic situation is. Like he's like walking around with it. What this reminds me of is I went skiing like the weekend before Tom Hanks got COVID. And we are on the mountain. We're going down the blues and it's like, whatever, you know, we hear that there's this thing out there.

20:40There'll be a little disruption. And the next thing, you know, like that, it feels like he's skiing right now, like during, like right before, we're about to have a very serious economic crisis. And it's like, I've got no, no plan at all. Can I raise something for the group? Sure. Sure. So one of the thing, you know, one of my little sessions is about like the decline in the American led world order and all of the advantages that that once afforded us. Trump's plan is that other nations, presumably led by China, formed their own alliance and association to exert control over the state of Hormuz. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. He's, he's willing into existence a global strategic competitor for America. Yeah. That's the crazy shit I've ever heard. Yeah. We have a super user, we have a super user question actually on this that I want to get. And I'm going to pose as one to Mark actually, it's from Joe LT 49.

21:43He says, if the straight home moves was so easy to open defense, Trump claimed it was, then why hasn't our own military already done it? Because it's not because it's not, I mean, we've talked about this. I've written about it several articles in the bull work. It's hard. You know, this whole combat thing, it ain't easy. And, you know, especially when you're, you're miffing it as this current administration is with no planning, as you said earlier, JBL, it's, it's not just long term planning, it's short term planning, it's any planning at all. You have the cause and effect when you're trying to use military force as the principal element of national power before you've done anything else. And when you don't put the military force into action with a required end state, we don't know what we're doing other than bombing things. Something has gotten into his head thinking that we can get into and out of wars using air

22:45power alone with some special operators every once in a while to snatch and grab people or to create regime change. That's not how it works. And it gets back to just a simple understanding. If you're going to wear the title of Commander-in-Chief, you sort of need a little bit of information about what the military does and how they do it. And you don't put to marine muse of 2500 Marines a piece and an airborne brigade in an area of the size three times of Iraq and expect to overcome the country and do great things and take over a straight that's a major choke point in the world. It takes a lot of people to do that. And it's really, really hard when you've got an enemy that gets a vote. Can I bring up a question about Jail Trump, elect Martin Hartling, was a comment I saw across the screen there, and I don't hate that, as this was. I hate it a lot. I want to bring up something, I'm going to go to JV on this one first.

23:46There was no, there was a newsworthy bit of a mission in this speech, okay, for the past. Actually, 24, wow, the most news we were, I think, last 24 hours we've been told that Trump is going to use this speech to talk about NATO and how angry he is at NATO and how he wants to get the US out of NATO. Unless I missed it, he did not mention NATO. He did talk in the abstract about allies, he needs to take the oil, but he didn't mention NATO. Now, earlier in the day, he was at some prayer event for Easter and he said this. So this is just the, the preface for you guys. This was leaked or posted by the White House accidentally and ripped it off. Well, I said, but let's play that comment he made about NATO earlier in the day and then I'm curious to JVL, for JVL, why did he not mention it tonight? First the speech. And so I learned about NATO, NATO won't be there if we ever have the big one, you know what I mean by the big one. We ever have the big one, hopefully we won't, relationships are very good with the big one, better than with NATO, but they won't be there.

24:50And we spend billions, you know, we didn't have to go into Ukraine, Ukraine's thousands of miles away across the ocean, we helped them. We didn't go into Ukraine. We had a president. Stupid individual. Is it the big one, China? I don't know what to think. Who is he talking about? Not totally sure. The big one is. Anyways, that's, that's the preface for the speech. We all expected him. All, you, me and Mark were talking about this week, thought he was going to go off for NATO. Yeah. Yeah. Why? Forgot. Sorry. I don't know. The commenter said Brian is the big one. Sorry. I, you know, it was the thing I thought you'd probably been a close. I thought he was going to go after it for a couple of reasons and go after NATO. All the reasons he would have presented would have been wrong. And it just amazed me that all he said basically was they didn't help us out or any use the, the they versus NATO didn't help us out, which surprised me. But you know, truthfully, it doesn't matter because I'm not sure NATO wants us anymore.

25:55If, if we continue the, you know, it's interesting. I had a conversation with someone in Europe the other day and they said, you know, for the first term of his administration and for part of the first year, we were feeling sorry for you guys and, you know, because you had this guy leading you. But now you're all with him, you know, nothing's changing and he's still doing crazy stuff. So we don't blame him alone anymore. We're blaming all of you, which I found to be an interesting dynamic from someone in the Nordic region that has a lot of influence. My serious answer to your question, Sam, is that I think that the previous clip answered your question. Like I think that he feared they feel like they covered the FU NATO bit with the good luck opening the straight. You know, I think that it was more about kind of that, you know, because he makes that fly. He thinks it's fly. I guess comment about like, you guys could show some courage. You haven't showed courage yet, but better late than never.

26:55And I think that was kind of the deal. Also, maybe he didn't realize that Mark Rude was coming to town next week and Mark Rude has been buttering him up a little bit. They're golfing buddies. I don't know. Mark Rude might have it being an all-in-one polymer type situation with him. I'm not sure. I ask a real question. A little dangerous. Please. Will my question is not real? No, no. Dangerous question. Yeah. Sure. What exactly does America get from being Israel's partner in this war? No, it's not a dangerous question. So here's, I mean, I just want to say, like, if everything is transactional, like if everything is transactional, and we are allied with El Salvador because we give them money and they take our prisoners, right? And we are allied with Delce Rodriguez because even though she's a socialist autocrat,

27:56she does what we tell her to do. I mean, Israel gives us nothing. Israel takes a great deal of aid. And Iran could open this way. Our weapons. They buy our weapons. They buy our weapons with the aid. But sure. Yeah, no, I'm with you. Do you know, like, I don't... Again. Again, from his... Now, I could make the, like, well, Israel's a democracy, like, you know, I could give you the old Republican Neocon reasons why. And from his point of view, why is he extending himself for Israel? He says it is, too. Like, this is the other thing. Like, this in the speech, he says, like, we are here to help Israel and the Middle East would be off the map if we didn't do this. So like, he's saying that we're doing this as part of the deal is, and I, you would lump in UAE and Qatar and Saudi with Israel, I think, as this country is talking about and talking to the leaders of, like, those other countries are buying him off.

28:59Maybe Israel's also buying him off. I don't know. The Gaza, the board of peace, he wants to control Gaza, he wants to be the king of the world. They're going to put... Jared's going to put some condos there. I don't know. I guess that's the answer. But like, but he is explicitly, it is such an attack on America first, right? Like, which is why you see the backlash within America first. But the speech is essentially, like, we're doing this to help them. And I don't... I'm with you. I don't know. You know, again, you could say the democracy thing. You could say it. Other thing that people would say is that it's important to have an ally in the region, because of the radical Islam and where you go come from, Israel is the first line of defense. Like, there's a lot of other things you could say. Nice people for guy who's purely transactional. That's what I'm trying to get my head around. Like, I can tell you why America would be allied with Israel, right? Yeah. This is not my expertise here. But I do think... And I'm curious if we had, if we could find someone smart to talk about this. If you look back at the first term, the thing that they really were most proud of on a

30:00foreign policy level was the Abraham Accord. And they talked a lot about reorienting the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East around a set of agreements between certain countries and Israel and creating a sort of nexus' stability. And Iran was obviously not part of that agreement. And they were very close to getting Saudi, the Saudi Arabia, to be part of the agreement. I'm not sure where that stands right now. But putting that alongside with the weaponry that Israel buys, the intelligence sharing that we have with the Israelis, the historical alignment as a democracy in the Middle East. And obviously, there's a coastal relationship that I believe Jared Kushner has with Phoebe and all that stuff. You get a kind of larger idea that you can pivot the Middle East politics around a series of these agreements. Now, that being said, it's clear that these really, and I talked to Sue Gordon about this deal. I'll lie that. That's a pretty compelling explanation. Can I add one element to that? Sure. Sue Gordon.

31:00Let me just finish on Sue Gordon quickly, and then I'll say, Sue Gordon was the principal deputy DNI for Trump's first term. And she left when Dan Coates was fired, but she was involved in all that stuff. I mean, she was pretty open about it. Israel's objectives here are very much different than ours. And they're forcing our hand in ways that she doesn't, and I don't think Trump quite appreciates. And Mark, you talked a lot about who's advising him and who's giving him strategic advice and why aren't serious people in the room. And I guess the only sort of caveat to that is there might actually be quite serious people advising him just not in a very oval. Right. Go ahead. Yeah, just two thoughts on that. One, it's still obvious what Sue Gordon is saying. This is, you can be the most low IQ person in the country who knows nothing about geopolitics who's just watching this. And it's like, obviously, this war is way more in Israel's interests. It just is. Israel would say it. America would say it. It's in their acute security interest, right?

32:02And so then this is how conspiracies begin to blossom because people like, so then why are we doing it? You know what I mean? Why is somebody who said he was America first doing it? And he can't enunciate it. And so to me, I think that just as an aside, like if you're concerned about anti-semitism, you should be concerned about this, like Donald Trump can not enunciate why he's doing something where obviously the mission is so misaligned from Israel. The other, just to answer JBL's question really quickly. What is Donald Trump getting about this? Sam sparked a thought. I think which is really the answer. He's getting puffed up. Like, baby, it's like you're so great. Are there other folks that world like you're so great? You're going to be the one. You're going to bring peace to the Middle East. This is your legacy. It's related to the courts and safety forever. And they're going to build the Donald Trump statue in Tel Aviv. To me, that's something that I can wrap my head around from thinking about it from the Trump perspective. I think that's right. I didn't want those lines. Just quickly, John, another commenter, and I'm trying to get some of these viewer comments

33:04in here because I want to make sure they feel hard. But this does kind of get to what you were saying two seconds ago. I'm going to throw it to you, Tim. Jonathan says, if Trump had resisted doing an old office dress to this point, or other similar trappings of war to avoid the optics, what changed now to get him to do a traditional speech that still had very little content? Like, why do this now? I'm sorry, Jonathan. I have no idea. I mean, I came on and said, what the fuck was that? I truly have no idea. He offered, he announced nothing. Maybe he was thinking that there was like, the Artemis was happening today and this was going to be a big, you can sign Trump's brain. I don't know. This is a big moment for America and the rocket ship was going to go up and I was going to do Ra Ra. Maybe his team kept telling me he had to and finally he said, okay, a lot of times people think about this stuff as strategy when really it's just human, whatever, frailty and inertia and stuff, or it's just like, finally he had to answer.

34:05I hope it do a better theory if somebody has one, but he didn't say anything. I wasn't supposed to be on today. If you want to hear Mark Hurtley, anyway. So we're going to let Mark Hurtley know. No, no, no. It's interesting because I think the conversation about Israel is important because, I mean, this is a blinding flash of the obvious, but Israel is in a bad neighborhood. So does Iran. I think it's fascinating that we're hearing reports about how other Arab nations were pushing Trump to continue, especially nations that contributed a lot of money to his son-in-law. They want him to finish this because it means they don't have to. Israel has the concept of mowing the grass whenever the terrorist in Gaza or southern Lebanon or the proxies or Iran starts getting a little froggy. Every other Arab nation in the region doesn't care all that much for the malign instincts

35:06of Iran as they put their foot against Saudi Arabia, against UAE, against Iraq, against every other country in the region. So what you've got is competing bookends in this region. And unfortunately, it seems like the president and his family is connected to both sides of those. Well, Mark, let me ask you a follow-up question because you raised an interesting prospect. Let's say these Arab governments could snap their fingers and go back to the day before the war. Nothing had happened. They'd all take it, right? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Would Israel? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you know, they see this initially as a good thing because Trump was acting. I don't think most of the Arab governments realized as well as some members of other administration, what the fallout was going to be. It was predictable. This thing has been war-gamed and red teamed for the last three decades within the Department

36:11of Defense. It's obvious what was going to happen. The straits were going to be closed. The proxies were going to be used. There's all kinds of hidden weaponry inside of Iran, just like there was inside of Iraq that, I mean, every time you felt you had fixed and finished all the Iraqi arms caches, there were 20 more on their horizon. They do their policy through weaponry, and that's a fact. So you're not going to destroy all the weapons, no matter what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Pete Higgseth tell the country. You're just not going to do it. And diplomacy, in my view, being a soldier, is probably a first resort, not a last resort. We keep relying on the military to fix and bomb everything, and we're going to continue to have these kind of quagmires if you continue to do that. JVL, what do you think about that? I don't know if the other Arab states, Mark would know this better than I do.

37:18I don't know that the Israelis would do a take back here, though. And the reason I said is only because I've read some reporting in, I want to say it's financial times and heirats, but it could have been someplace elsewhere. What do you mean by a take back, though? Not doing work, just knowing what they know now. I don't think that's the case at all. Oh, okay. I just misunderstood. I misunderstood the question, then. I'm sorry for that. Yeah, if they could bottle it back up, if they could say this never happened, we'll go back to early February, no bomb had ever been dropped and we'll just go back to that status quo. Israel would definitely, I don't think Israel would do that at all. I mean, they've been pining for this for years. Would Saudi Arabia take it back? Possibly. I mean, they've seen what the hoodies do to them on their southern border. They don't want any part of this, so they want these people destroyed. But they don't want the kind of after effects that we're seeing right now.

38:22You know, we're sort of all beating around the larger question, I guess, and Trump is feeding into it because he didn't get us any specifics and that. But the real sort of big question is, what is the off-rand? Like, how do we get out of this, right? And so Max Brooks, 8657, who knows if it's one of the more famous Max Brooks's, but whatever it is. It's not the zombie war, Axe, Max Brooks. I don't think so. Is there any action? This is for Mark. Is there any actual off-rand for Trump to take? How do we actually see this ending from a realistic perspective or a realist perspective? Two weeks ago, I had this fear too, that I'm sorry, Sam, that there was not going to be a potential good off-rand that the best, and in fact, I said at one time on some channel that the best we could gain out of this was a draw. That's the best. And the only off-rand I could see, and I thought the president was going to do it tonight was to say, it's over.

39:23We've done what we wanted to do and now we're pulling out. And it would have been disastrous, but it would have been the best thing for the country. He didn't do that. He didn't do that. Now, the courses of actions are still up in the air. We don't know what he's going to do next because he still has a lot of military forces in the region. There's been no conclusion to what's going on. Iran is still doing things that he's saying they're not doing. And I don't see an off-rand right now without a global, at least global dysfunction in terms of supply chain and the oil economy. And I hope I'm wrong. I'm not an economist. I'm a simple soldier, but that's the way I see it going down. I mean, I would just say this. I'm going to probably be wrapping up soon, but it does appear to me that Iran will exit this war in a stronger strategic position than it entered.

40:25They will have lost a bunch of material. They will have lost a bunch of infrastructure, but they navigated a succession crisis, which was going to hit them anyway in a couple of years, which is always dangerous for an authoritarian regime. They proved the viability of a strategic weapon that they had long threatened, but never used before, which was the ability to close the trade of foremost. They did it, which means that that has to be taken into account forever, right? It's no longer a theoretical, well, maybe they could. It's now everybody knows that if there's a war, they can do this. They will likely be resupplied by the Chinese with material very quickly falling into the war. They now have the ability to project power in the region in ways they didn't before the bomb started from Operation Epic Fury. I just, to all the people who were like right or die with Trump, purely because they hate

41:31the Iranian regime, which by the way, I hate the Iranian regime too. They're very bad. They're terrible, terrible people. They will be more strategically sound and more able to project power as they exit this because of this war, and I just think that that's unfalible. Can I add something to that, JBL, because I think something's important that I learned, one of the many things I learned spending a lot of time in the Middle East, is we in the West are concerned with personalities. Who is our leader? What are they doing to organizations? How does the dynamic of that personality work to build something strong? In the Middle East, to include Persia, we're talking more about a dependence on institutions as opposed to personalities. All of the institutions in Iran, even though they've been damaged, they are still intact. The theocracy is intact. The IRGC is still intact, although dramatically damaged.

42:35Their weapon systems, in many cases, have been destroyed. The people are still looking for a leader, so there is still that essence of systems versus personalities working in that country. I think that lands credence to what you were just saying in terms of them regaining their solid footing, rebuilding a little bit if they can get the economy running again, and they're going to come out of this stronger than we went into it. I'm going to just we're going to close in about a couple of minutes here, and thank you guys for doing this. Again, apology to everyone for the earlier technical snapples. I want to play a clip again from Trump earlier in the day talking about how he was going to tell the world that he was doing a great job tonight, and then we're going to look at what actually transpired. Get a little speech at 9 o'clock, and basically I'm going to tell everybody how great I am, what a great job that's done. What a phenomenal job, what a phenomenal job I've done.

43:37All right, well, as of 10 or 5, so about, you know, 43 minutes or so since he's finished speaking, a few things just go through. Edward oil is up, Brent is up, Dow is down, features, S&P is down, NASDAQ is down. We have some graphs about this if we can pull them up. I mean, that is just brutal, brutal. That's a 500, apparently this is a $550 billion in market cap in 25 minutes as he addressed the nation. He gave no, just to summarize, he gave no reason for being in Iran, and he gave little explanation for how we are going to get out of Iran, and people are just sort of wondering where we go from here, and we've tried to game plan it out on this conversation, and I think we've come to some conclusion that we are just stuck in a really bad spot.

44:38And we'll see what happens of the next two or three weeks. Mark JVL, thank you guys for doing this. For everyone else who watched, thank you for doing this as well. Oh nice, Sue Gordon texts me to say she's watching Sue. Come on anytime. For everyone else, thank you for coming on, subscribe to the Bullwork, we love you guys, we love our fans. Sorry, we couldn't get some more of your questions in the conversation, but we'll try to do better. Fellas, take care, good luck America. Thanks guys.