TACO Tuesday? Trump's Iran Ultimatum, Energy Shock Fears, and Dubai's Fragile Future

All right. Good morning, Doug. We're in some, it's like D-Day almost if you read Twitter

too much with Trump. You know, he's threatening the whole civilization will die in Iran at

8 p.m. today if they don't meet his demands. Let me think about what's going on.

Well, I've got to say he's become genuinely unhinged. I mean, he's acting like he's actually

crazy because my wife, who was very smart and has been a fan of Trump. His reasoning is,

I think, our reasoning was in the past is that the U.S. is in serious trouble and some things

had to be done. And of course, that everybody's an anarcho-capitalist and mistakes are made.

But, you know, you give Trump the benefit of the doubt. He was trying to destroy the

woke movement and he did a lot of good work in that direction. He was trying to stop the

takeover of the U.S. by millions of migrants that don't belong here and go on the dole and

all this type of thing. Okay, this is, you know, trying to maintain what was left of American

civilization, which was most of it. So you saw that. But then, then he went off to a thing

on some crazy windows. And the big one was for some reason, getting involved in Iran for

absolutely no good reason at all, calling them, you know, actually going out looking for trouble,

or was it Washington or Jefferson that said, we shouldn't go out hunting dragons and foreign lands.

And this is exactly why. Because nobody benefits from this except Israel. Because if the U.S.

destroys Iran, it's destroying Israel's last state enemy in that part of the world. So the

whole thing is screwed up, but it's gotten out of control now. And the things he said, do you have

some of the things he said that offhand by any chance? Well, your bonkers. Yeah, yesterday, he said,

they better fucking open the street called them crazy bastards and then signed off, you know,

praise be to Allah or something like that. So that was, that was, I was sorry, that was on Sunday,

not, not yesterday. That was on Sunday. I used to Sunday. That's great to say on Easter Sunday,

praise be to Allah. And then there was some other implication in a previous email. I saw where he

said, glory be to God. I mean, this is not like God bless America. Okay. I mean, glory be to God.

I mean, and that is kind of ties in with Pete Hegseth, who increasingly

impresses me as a loony tunes. I mean, good things about Hegseth. Yeah, he got

a little bit of luck to get rid of wokeism and military, which was really a long overdue. I mean,

officers wearing high male officers wearing high heels and things like that. I mean, that was crazy.

All right, that's great. And the fact that he's in great physical condition and getting in the

push up contest. Okay, that's great too. Just because you're secretary of defense for a general,

this man, you should be pot-balling. Oh, so that's great. But then these wild tattoos that he has,

most of them with religious significance. Crusader. Crusader. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So I'm afraid

Hegseth was kind of bonkers to and Trump clearly has surrounded himself and with

with sick offense who don't argue with them. They're afraid they agree with them to start with,

but they don't argue with them. And I think he's living in an ultra tight silo. He's living

in a bubble. I really think so, where that's what everybody says that speaks off the record.

I think he's gone crazy. Well, here's his tweet. Here's his tweet from today, Doug. Let me read it

to you and have a comment because I know you haven't seen this one. He said, a whole civilization

will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen, but it probably will.

However, now that we have a complete and total regime change where different smarter and less

radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionary, revolutionary, wonderful can happen. Who

does? We will find out tonight. One of the most important moments in the long and complex

history of the world, 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless

the great people of Iran. Well, yes, I'm not looking at the so tweet from him, but as usual,

as he randomly capitalized words and misspelled words, both of these things indicate

somebody that saw Scott Thomas, especially if you're the president of the U.S. or not. Oh, there it is.

Less so than normal, though, I nearly capitalized who knows.

Yeah, much less yes. And this whole 47 years thing, it actually started

in 1953 when the U.S. overthrew their government and installed the Shah, who was popular,

almost everybody's a double-edged sword. There were good things about the Shah, I would say,

and things that were very bad about the Shah. So he was righteously overthrown as he was just

another crazy dictator. He did some good things, in my opinion, anyway, and replaced with Thal.

These religious people, but Iran has not been a terrorist state for the last 47 years. The only

times that they've killed Americans is when Americans were doing military things on their territory,

or when they were aiding Hamas and Tazbollah, which kind of like,

righteously fighting against the Israelis, and don't want to get into all this type of thing,

who owns Israel and all this type of thing. But this has gotten out of control,

and the average American believes that now believes it seems that the Iranians are going to

nuke us and try to kill us. Well, maybe they'd feel like it now after all the things that we've

done to them, but what are the things? I mean, I don't know how we think that we can,

I mean, a lot of Americans are concerned about the borders. We know that millions of people

unchecked across the borders, certainly increasing the threat in the United States of basic crime,

of course, but of also potential terror, right? So we, you know, we, like, you have to assume that's

the backdrop to it of this whole situation. And then when we're saying we're going to genocide them,

which I think is the term, if you're going to cut off all the electricity of a modern,

urbanized society, you are essentially sentencing them to death. I mean, there's going to

imagine if American city was completely cut off from power. What would happen there in a couple

days? So when you're threatening that, it's just threats at this point, I guess, so that's good.

You know, I hope he'll taco out of it. But if he follows through on that,

Americans should expect it will happen in the US. They have to.

That's right. And I think the Iranians have been very, very prudent and restrained so far

because assuming that they have teams in the US to destroy things, then it would kind of be

came on because the average American would say, see, they can filter it or just there are enemies.

We have to take them out. I think they understand that. And they don't want to do that.

They don't want to do that. But it's counterproductive to their efforts, not that they wouldn't

strategically. It's a bad choice. Even if they really didn't want to kill all Americans,

it would be a mistake. Yeah, but Trump is backing them into a corner and things that they've done

in the Middle East or around the Gulf are strictly to American interests all in the Middle

East, as far as any reporting that I've seen, where American companies are involved,

Bahrain, where the fifth fleet is, so forth, Kuwait, same things, strictly American interests.

What will Trump do tonight if he doesn't taco? He's got to. I hope. I hope he tacos. I mean,

people don't understand the consequences of this. There could be consequences where it can come

back to the US. But if nothing else, you have to at least assume that Iran will do what they

said they would do, which is just to lash out at all the Gulf, all the allies of the US in the

area and blow up infrastructure that the world needs, needs it to function. And if we have to,

I mean, I guess it's been like a 10 million roughly reduction and output of oil, which hasn't hit

yet, you know, the ships are still landing that sailed out of the Middle East. So we haven't even

experienced the consequences of that area being shut down. But if they permanently destroy

that, it's hard to explain the consequences of that. I mean, if you had to reduce your,

you know, the global economic output equivalent to the energy inputs of 20% or whatever,

like that's a global depression, isn't it? I mean, is it could it go either way?

And already in the Orient, all over the Orient, because that's where all the oil goes,

it's basically to the Orient, there are severe shortages, severe shortages where they just

don't have the oil, forget about higher prices. So where is that going to end? And of course,

this is all happening in a time of ultra high debt around the world, which people could default on,

as the economy slows down. And with the stock market, and actually the bond market too,

well, the stock markets at all time highs and the bond market is still very, very high, especially

with all that so. And of course, that is starting to be defaulted on. This has happened with

things like Cliffwater and Apollo that have been making basically junk loans to secondary corporations

where they're charging them, they're charging them 13%. Basically, that's kind of like the average number

for we're talking hundreds of billions of dollars. And after taking a 3% rake off the top,

paying investors 10% or 10% interest, that looks pretty good. And now I think things are going to

start coming on a globe. Finally, don't want to be anywhere around us.

I think it could lead to the, not the end, not the complete end, but the huge reduction of

civilian air travel. Because if you have a shortage of oil, I think it'll produce the most

necessary things first from it, right? So jet fuel is going to be, especially for tourism,

it's going to be on the lowest end of the value chain. For military purposes, of course,

they'll keep doing it. But they need diesel more, you know, and gasoline more. And I mean,

the implications of all this are just shocking to me actually. And if he doesn't taco,

I think people have no idea how bad it gets. Diesel prices are the most leveraged

area of the crack spread. And they've essentially doubled most places. And that's not good for truck

drivers, which everything knows by truck. Yeah, just let me actually share this chart of the US

diesel prices. This is it. So over the last year, you can see how much the change is already.

But this is nothing yet. We haven't even gotten any, there's been no reduction of supply yet

in the US at all. But it's coming. And especially when it is said, and I kind of believe it,

because it's been true for years, I think. The average American basically has no savings.

And it's living paycheck to paycheck. And this is exactly the time when a lot of paychecks are

going to stop coming in for one reason or another. So disaster. Well, let's, let's hope for tacos.

It's two, it's actually Tuesday and we're recording Taco Tuesday's the thing I've always liked.

So, you know, yeah, of course, maybe that will prove quite, quite appropriate. I think

at this point, they have to exercise 25th amendment for Trump, which is to say, take a

amount of office for mental or physical incapacity. I mean, Biden was incapacitated. And who knows

who was running his regime in the final months of it? Was it his wife or was it some nebichels

that were using his auto pen? Who the hell knows? Maybe we'll never find out.

Because there's no indictments that have been handed down on that yet either for the criminality

of the Biden regime. But Trump can't do the things that he's doing. You cannot insult personally

insult people. They take it personally and it redounds to the entity that you manage. I mean,

the fact that he insulted been Salman, the Saudi crown prince. I mean, there's a disaster too.

If somebody is doing his best to destroy Saudi Arabia in his own ways, I think it doesn't deserve it.

But you insult somebody like that personally. It ain't going to be forgotten and they will get back

at you. You know, you're not the only person calling for a 25th amendment. I've seen more and

more calls for this. And even I just, I saw in Twitter this morning Alex Jones was saying the same

thing. So everybody all across the spectrum is calling for it. Yeah. Yeah. This is this is a

serious, serious trouble. Well, we'll know at eight o'clock tonight. So yeah. We'll see.

This is like waiting for the next edition of a night time soap opera where Husha JR, I don't

know if you remember that from the big deal. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I do. I do. So same type of thing.

So some people are asking us, so where should we run and hide? Where should we go? Well,

I'm happy being here in Buenos Aires. And tomorrow, this time, I'm going to be back in

Uruguay. I'm a farm. Uruguay yourself now. But oddly enough, I read an article from NPR

about Tristan Dekunia today. And I've long been kind of a fan of Tristan Dekunia. It's one of

those oddball places in the world, like Pitcaren Island, which is where the mutiny boutoniers went

in the, you know, middle of nowhere in the South Pacific. And the focal islands, which have about

what, three thousand or some residents, but Tristan Dekunia in the middle of the South Atlantic,

nothing there except a big island and some little islands. And it's very interesting. After

the Napoleonic Wars, some soldiers got stationed there, kind of a few of them wanted to stay. And

one thing in another says about 225 people living in their own society on Tristan. And they have

sheep, which they monitor because it's not a desert island, but there's no trees on it. And

you can't let sheep overgray. And cattle, they have cattle, I'm sure they have chickens,

didn't mention that. And there's a picture of a boat because you can only get there by boat.

You can't land a plane there. And of course, you can't land a helicopter in this way on a

range. So you take this little kind of ferry and those storms that come up as a picture of a

storm. And I got to say that the article, which was done by NPR, was not bad. Didn't cover a lot

of things that should have, but then again, it's their article, not my article. And like any right

thinking person, I just buys NPR in the people that work there, but occasionally they turn out

interesting stuff. And this is one of them. Lobsters is the main thing that they do to generate

foreign exchange. That's a line of sheep who are looking at it. So yeah, great photography,

though, they got of this place. Oh, yeah. And of course, now just done has internet,

like St. Elon Musk. So I guess you could go there and live there. The island is owned in common.

It appears by the residents, although everybody owns his own house. And everybody has a garden plot.

I wish they'd mention what the market prices of these things are as if you want to sell them.

Talk about any liquid market. But anyway, there's places like this, surprisingly large number of

their islands in the world where stuff like this goes on. So somebody might want to further

research this. I don't know if anybody's got any boots on the ground experience with the place.

Yeah, well, I wonder how many visitors they get annually. I mean, the only population of 225,

if you can't imagine, can't imagine this much. Well, there's some corporation that has a 30-year

lease on the lobster-producted production grounds. And that's what most of the

fucklanders do is they harvest lobsters and freeze them because they've got electricity and

freezers now. And then they, lobsters, are expensive, they pick them up. And that's basically how

they get by. I think amazing, amazing. I didn't even know those places existed until you said,

that's pretty shocking to me, actually, if you think about that. Today's day, there are

these little places isolated in the middle of nowhere. And nobody, well, of course, nobody knew the

fucklands existed before that war and stamp collectors, stamp collectors knew they existed.

But that's that's about it. But then kind of like the mirror image or well, I'm not sure

that's even the right word. Kind of like the polar opposite of all the fucklands is Dubai.

So with buildings being hit selectively by the Iranians who are just across the straight from Dubai,

what's happened to real estate prices? Because this has been one of the, you know, great real estate

developments along with cities in China in the world. Dubai is unique. It's exceptional.

I mean, it's the desert. Like I said before, when I was first there in 1980, it had an airport

the size of, well, it was like 5,000 square feet. I mean, there was nothing, nothing there.

And it turned into one of the great commercial tourists, whatever centers in the world,

immense amount of building. So is it all going to go back to the desert because they're

fighting the desert constantly, the heat and the sand and the wind and the lack of water?

It's all artificial. So question is, can it be maintained, especially in a war zone?

Well, and I think you alluded to these potential financial problems that are coming.

You know, and what happened when Dubai last had a big market bust. I think the first time I was

there was in late 2009, 2010, you know, and they had all these skyscrapers and stuff. But very

few lights on, you know, nobody was living there. It was just, you know, it was like it was kind of like

a ghost city in some ways. I mean, it was, it was, you know, during the financial crisis,

it's really suffered from that. And you got to imagine if this work continues, you also get

the financial crisis part of it. It seems like that'll be unavoidable. And it seems like Dubai

has got to be highly sensitive to financial markets. It must be. Yeah. And people have

exited on mass now. Oh, and of course, the financial thing is yet to come. But

that places like Lamborghini and Ferrari central. And my question is, how many cars are just going

to be abandoned there? Abandoned there? Were they released or whatever? And the owners aren't

going to come back and get them. So this could be an opportunity. Of course, the other argument

that can be made is that, hey, cars are dead, ducks, everybody's going to be, you know,

moving around with, there's a lot of alternatives to cars that are coming up like personal

drone type aircraft that you won't need to drive a car and everything. But this could be an

opportunity to go go there and buy really cheap cars and have them shipped out or really cheap

real estate. But the real estate hasn't really collapsed as it, according to. No, it hasn't.

The transaction volumes are way down apparently like half of what they were in the past. But the

prices have been sticky. But I don't think that the volume proceeds price, you know, that's the

thing is, you know, before each year a price decline, you'd probably see a volume decline. I mean,

that's in real estate markets anyway. You know, I was just looking up about car abandonments because

I remember there were, there was widely reported that during the financial crisis, lots of people

in Dubai lost their jobs, you know, and had a car lease or whatever were just going to their

port and leaving it and getting out of there. And, you know, there were thousands of people that

did that during that time. But I'm just saying, it also says the Dubai municipality data for more

recent years reports that 1387 impounded vehicles for the first half of 2025. And essentially,

these are people who left their cars, who cars that were tagged and impouted as abandoned

at their ports are in 2025. So it's apparently a normal thing. Even during good times, 2025,

it says, oh, the 1300 of them for the first half. Well, I guess the markets dealt with that type

of thing in the past. But if they're inundated now with tens of thousands of cars, it's going to be

hard to deal with. And the question is, what's going to happen to all those apartments? Because,

okay, you buy an apartment, that's one thing. But maintaining it in desert type conditions

is something else. The condo fees and the type of thing are quite high, I think,

amongst those apartments. And the thing with real estate like that is nobody has to buy it.

It's not like a must-have it. But if you don't want it, you got to sell it. So there's going to be

a lot more, a lot more sellers than buyers. The market's going to collapse there. Now, the question

is, is this a good speculation? Because maybe oil, because this war is going to stay up at $100

or maybe 150 for the next several years. But beyond that, I don't know.

Yeah, it seems to me that's not, I know you like investing in a crisis, but it just seems to me

it's not quite at that point of that vomit stage yet, you know, where everybody really wants out.

Yeah, I agree. It's too early to speculate on an apartment and do buy. And even there,

it's just a short-term speculation. It's not a buy-and-hold thing, I'm afraid.

So I mean, it's kind of like, it's like, it always, it felt to me completely artificial when I was

there, because it is. But with the environmental conditions as they are, it's like living on the moon

in my mind or living a thousand feet below the surface of the sea or something. It's artificially

contained environment that nature wants to go away, you know, you're fighting against everything,

you're beating back the deserts constantly in order just to maintain things as they are.

Yeah, living in Dubai is actively and aggressively fighting the second law through

a dynamics, which is trying to take everything back to the desert. So that's a fight you can't win.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I hope you're interested in seeing what happens in Dubai. I have to say that a lot of,

a lot of the people, everybody who I know who has a connection to Dubai, you know, has some

investment in Dubai, they're all still very, you know, they think it'll this will pass and you know,

it'll be fine. That's what they're even, you know, people who want on our VIP call, there's a guy

who has, you know, he owns a condo there himself, but he also has a lot of friends that are there

and he's like, oh, yeah, it's not really a problem, you know, it's everything's fine. So that's,

that's what you hear. Yeah. I think, you know, I've enjoyed myself in Dubai so

as long as everything works, it can be pleasant enough, but I think it's one of those places

where everything is fine until it's not fine anymore. That's right. I mean, if the whole civilization

will die in Iran, I'm pretty sure the consequences will be very serious for Dubai.

Yeah. Is he actually threatening nuclear war to the Iranians?

It's what it sounds like. I mean, never, never, ever, as a, in the context of war,

civilization ending is associated in my mind with nuclear weapons. Yeah. Yeah. And we haven't

heard from Netanyahu and the Israelis, who were the ones that really have an interest in that

happening either. Well, I did see a tweet from a reporter by one of the Israeli news agencies that

said, if Trump makes a decision after 8 p.m., they have their, you know, their strikes lined up

and ready to go after civilian infrastructure. Yeah. Well, I guess the good news is they've said,

there won't be any Israeli boots on the ground. That's for, that's for Nagan's holders to do.

It's true, but it sounds like they have their hands full in Lebanon right now.

Yes, it does. They've lost. Last I heard about 30 Mercava tanks. That's quite a few.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, Doug. Well, I guess we just got to see it. I'm about whether or not it's

Taco Tuesday. Was that the way for that? Oh, the soap opera continues. All right. Well,

barring anything else. I guess we'll talk on Friday. All right. Sounds good, Doug. Thanks so

much. See you then. Thanks.