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We're potentially barreling our way into a world war.

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And it looks like World War III.

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And once wars start, it's really hard to stop them.

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But we have reckless people running some very large and important countries around the world, and they're all lying about it.

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And here's the problem with normalizing lies.

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The Soviet Union collapsed in large part because it was built on lies.

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And you might be one of the most knowledgeable people that I think I've ever spoken to on the subject of World War III, but I don't know what the going on.

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So history's moving really fast.

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It's like the logjam's busted, and we don't know which way it's gonna go, and it's tremendously frightening.

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Putin decided to kick over the chessboard by invading Ukraine.

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Donald Trump decided to get into a recreational war in Iran, and this war has trashed the U.S. economy.

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It has blown the U.S. alliance system, but it also has the collateral damage of taking down the world's economy.

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And this is the problem with having these dark personalities running countries.

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Like Putin, he doesn't care how many people he kills.

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These people are historically unqualified.

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But Trump has made a deal with Putin for diesel exports.

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Oh, this is disinformation.

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Russia has no capacity to export diesel in sufficient quantities to make any difference whatsoever.

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As usual, he's lying.

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Trump's not going to back out of Iran.

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It doesn't sound like Putin's going to back out of Ukraine.

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They're going to go forever.

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If we continue on the direction of travel we're on now, what does the future look like?

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Well, you've got to prevent these things from breaking out, because once they break out, then things are really over.

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So I can give you concepts.

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Here we go.

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Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins.

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Dr Sarah Payne.

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What I see on the streets of Paris, where we were yesterday, is rioting and I see disorder.

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But I don't know where, what the first domino that fell, that caused everything that we're seeing now, occurred, or what the sort of background context is.

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So I'm going to ask you,

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Where does this all start?

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Well, history doesn't start.

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It's a long continuum.

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But I'll try on some concepts that might be helpful.

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The way countries used to organize themselves, and often they were empires, was by land was a currency of power.

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So the continentalist world is all about taking territory for others, right?

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And when you're doing that, you're burning wealth because you've watched it in all these places.

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Then later, an alternate possibility came.

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It originated from maritime powers, but ultimately it becomes a maritime world order to something different.

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Britain is a maritime power, but then you get to the Industrial Revolution, where suddenly you can compound wealth.

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And that's a game changer, because it changes the currency of power, which formerly in that continental world I've just described, it's all about land.

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It's changing the currency of power to industry, commerce, and trade.

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That if you do those things, you get compounded wealth.

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And with that, you can buy your armies or do whatever you want.

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And then the maritime order is about compounding wealth from just having universal rules.

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Like you've been traveling all over.

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Your little piece of plastic works everywhere, right?

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That's based on rules-based order.

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And then you've got a small company and you operate in various countries.

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No one's taking you down for your money that you're making, right?

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All your transactions are working across the world.

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This is the rules-based order.

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If it goes away, the billionaires who have been funneling their money into the continentalists, their world will disappear too.

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They will become casualties of it.

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And then when I think about what's important on this planet, it would be you, the young.

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Like, please tell me what is more important than the next generations that follow.

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Just tell me.

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What is it?

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Nothing.

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Are you concerned about the next generation?

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Yeah.

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Why?

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We're potentially barreling our way into a world war.

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We have reckless people running some very large and important countries around the world.

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And as you've noticed, once wars start, easy to do that part.

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really hard to end them.

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Why?

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Because whoever's losing doesn't want to lose.

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So they keep doubling down long after they've lost.

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You made a comment there.

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You said you think we're sort of barreling towards a world war.

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People, you know, have probably said that every year since World War II.

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Ah, do you have negative and positive objectives here?

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Ah, yeah, here we go.

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Negative and positive objectives.

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So a positive objective, you make something happen, like, I don't know, I want to snatch Maduro and put him in a New York prison.

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We can verify that the guy's in a New York prison.

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You snatched him, that's a positive objective.

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A negative objective would be preventing something from happening.

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And how can you prove how many times a world war was avoided in the last whatever years?

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You can't.

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And it's also controversial, right, on deterrence, because you can say, ah, I've invested in whatever it is, and this has deterred everybody.

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Then it's prove it.

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Well, you can't prove it.

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And yet, the example I use as a parent, if you have a little kid, a lot of it's negative objectives, preventing the little kid from getting run over.

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You hold their hand on the street.

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If you're living in New York, how many times in a day, just walking up the street, did you save that child's life?

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Because you were hanging on to their hand before they, you know, took off in front of traffic.

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And so, you know, you're going to have a lot of time.

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So negative objectives are incredibly important.

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And since I'm on this topic, governments, I believe, are primarily about negative objectives, preventing disasters.

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So disaster number one would be like foreign invasion.

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But other things, preventing bridges from collapsing, we inspect them.

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Preventing all kinds of malpractice across professions.

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We license people.

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Having everyone be illiterate.

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You have education.

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And so governments don't actually get credit for what they do because on a normal day, it's normal.

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So you think, well, my government hasn't done anything for me lately.

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Untrue.

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And that applies here to the idea that, you know,

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People have probably through history said that there was going to be a war a lot.

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And so is there particular writing on the wall at this moment in the time?

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Yeah.

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What is the writing on the wall?

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Well, the Iran war is probably one of the most incompetent wars in human history.

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Was that a mistake?

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Yes.

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Well, yeah, let's do some concepts of how to analyze that.

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One is in a war, if you're doing it right, if you really must have a war, you put all the costs on the person you're fighting and then you minimize costs yourself.

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Well, this war has trashed the U.S. economy.

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It has blown the U.S. alliance system.

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Yes, Iran is hurting, without a doubt.

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But it also has the collateral damage of taking down the world's economy.

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So this now transforms the United States to an annoyance to just about everyone's primary adversary for threatening their economies.

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That's breathtakingly incompetent.

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What was the misunderstanding?

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I'm not privy to the decision-making.

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So let's do another thing about assessment.

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This is when you do an assessment before you even do a war, you need to look at not just my strengths and if you're Iran, your weaknesses, which clearly that was part of the assessment.

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We're strong.

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We figured all that out.

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But also your strengths and my weaknesses.

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Oh, and plus all the other people who might be interested.

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Yeah.

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And clearly that was absent.

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Or the people who should have been saying, hey, the first thing they're going to do is shut down Hormuz weren't there, right?

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It's like a hot water bottle.

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If you cork that thing, it means anybody who lives there who doesn't have an alternate coastline

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cannot get things out by sea.

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Does that make sense?

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Narrow seas in wartime, easy to shut down.

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Ukraine shut down the Black Sea.

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These places closed down in wartime because between shore artillery and mines and other stuff, things don't move.

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So when the United States had its big base in, yeah, Bahrain, that's where the big naval base is, okay, how are we going to get to the naval base?

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I don't think so.

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So then where are we going to go?

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Oh, we're going to have to go to Diego Garcia.

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That base would be 2,500 miles away.

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And that little base is like in the middle of nowhere.

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That would be a mess.

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And this is why I asked the question about the misunderstanding, because you'd think lots of smart people at the White House would have figured out.

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You're talking first Trump administration, when there was a guy named General Mattis around.

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We now have Major Pete.

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Major Pete.

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And Major Pete is really good at identifying blacks and women and firing them.

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I mean, great, Pete.

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And now they're doing testing on testosterone.

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I kid you not.

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And I don't know if you remember when you were an adolescent when testosterone's peaking, if we think there's a correlation with that in your greatest reasoning powers.

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I don't know.

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All right.

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Good luck with it, Major Pete.

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So these people are not, they're historically unqualified for a job.

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That makes them profoundly dangerous.

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They've undermined the futures of their own children, and they're undermining the prospects for the Republican Party, which they care about.

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What do you think they thought was going to happen?

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How do I know?

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I'll give you another thought about just generics, what I call type A and type B American hubris.

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Type A American hubris is all decisions in the world that matter, they happen in the United States.

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Okay, good luck with that one.

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And the second one, type B American hubris, which applies to some of the tech bros, is just because you're really good at something doesn't make you really good at everything.

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And you need to have the humility to understand the limits of your expertise and when you need to listen to others.

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And another piece of it is listening to divergent opinions.

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So I can't find my blind spots, but maybe you can.

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And it's really important to talk across political divides.

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But this, what's going on now is just straight up yes men.

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And they've committed pivotal errors.

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They have permanently damaged U.S. national security.

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It's the first time in my life that I've heard of a U.S. president start talking about taking other people's countries.

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It's almost like Trump was talking about taking Venezuela.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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He's a continentalist.

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He's a real estate guy.

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Yeah, he sees real estate.

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He was saying he was going to take Canada, make it the 51st state, I think.

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And then he thought that Iran would be a walk in the park, that he would behead the leader, the people would rise up.

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I mean, this is what they said.

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Yeah, yeah.

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What's fascinating, if you study—so, there's another one, what I call half-court tennis—

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Half-court tennis, you're only looking if you're American, Team America, and you just, you cross the net and you aren't even looking at things, right?

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And let's talk about football, and I don't care whether it's American or European football, it works either way.

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That those who are real football enthusiasts, they know not only about the home team, but they know about all the teams, right, all the major ones.

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And you all, you know about the players, too.

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This is a recreational sport.

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Right.

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And then in foreign policy, you're not studying the other side?

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And I don't know if you've seen Iran's Lego videos.

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Oh, you need to, on the plane trip back, you need to look at Iran's Lego videos.

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Oh, where they're taking the piss out of America?

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Yeah, they're taking these little Lego characters.

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What they demonstrate is the Iranians have a deep understanding of Americans, whereas Americans don't know up from down on what's going on.

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Here's another, maybe a concept that'll help.

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Situation or problem.

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In life, there are certain things that, as desirable as they are, are just not attainable.

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Right?

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It would be great if everyone on the planet was a multimillionaire.

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Right?

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It's not feasible.

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And if you're going after an unfeasible objective...

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You're going to overextend yourself.

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It's going to have a very bad ending to it.

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A problem is something that maybe you can solve.

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And the United States, the greatest generation understood that Soviet Union, lethal threat, we couldn't solve it, right?

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You try to solve that and it will be the nuclear end to all of us.

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And so then what you're into is managing it.

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And then you use various elements of national power.

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One of them was sanctioned so that you're going to depress Soviet growth.

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And then, unlike now where we're tariffing everybody, crazy land, what you're trying to do is maximize the growth within your alliance system.

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So for those who behave, you want to maximize their growth.

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Those who can't behave, you want to minimize theirs so that over time, the relative threat diminishes over time.

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Does not solve it.

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And then you're also trying to get accurate information out, not propaganda, but accurate information, hoping that in generational change that maybe the other side reassesses.

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And if they don't, you're perfectly safe behind the castle walls and you're handling this thing at affordable cost because the sanctions are really costing them much more than you're costing.

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A problem, if you can figure it out, by all means solve it.

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But we're trying to solve Iran.

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There are 90 million of them.

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All right, now to give you some data on how to understand this, because I was trying to figure it out.

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Nazi Germany, and it had extended borders.

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It's not just what Germany is today.

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00:14:26.560 --> 00:14:28.602
It probably includes Austria and other things.

228
00:14:28.922 --> 00:14:32.064
It had a population, I think, of about 80 million, isn't it, Ron, like 90 million?

229
00:14:33.305 --> 00:14:46.468
I think the occupation force, as best I can tell, and I'll defer to some World War II historian who tells me I'm wrong, is about one and a half million was the occupation force after World War II, just to occupy Germany.

230
00:14:46.808 --> 00:14:51.389
But that's not taking into account all the millions of people coming from Russia, everywhere else.

231
00:14:51.869 --> 00:14:54.450
So when you're talking Iran equivalent size...

232
00:14:55.190 --> 00:14:55.990
It's not feasible.

233
00:14:56.111 --> 00:14:57.571
And, like, why would you want to do it?

234
00:14:57.971 --> 00:14:59.092
They're a bunch of Iranians.

235
00:15:00.072 --> 00:15:08.256
You want to contain the nuclear thing at affordable cost, and that was the Obama deal, right?

236
00:15:08.397 --> 00:15:15.700
That was all the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council signed on to that and the EU, and they thought it was the best they could do.

237
00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:21.663
Had this really intrusive inspection system to get Iran to dial back its nuclear capabilities.

238
00:15:21.703 --> 00:15:22.503
Was it perfect?

239
00:15:22.603 --> 00:15:23.164
No.

240
00:15:23.744 --> 00:15:27.730
But it was feasible, and it mitigated the threat to make it bearable.

241
00:15:28.031 --> 00:15:29.833
Now, what's the lesson for Iran?

242
00:15:31.296 --> 00:15:33.219
What do you suppose the lesson is for everybody now?

243
00:15:34.641 --> 00:15:35.322
Call it get anew.

244
00:15:36.495 --> 00:15:36.735
right?

245
00:15:37.696 --> 00:15:38.357
With these wars.

246
00:15:38.397 --> 00:15:40.398
It's like, if you don't have one, you're toast.

247
00:15:41.579 --> 00:15:44.021
We have incentivized proliferation.

248
00:15:44.842 --> 00:15:48.405
Putin with his war initially, and then us with this Iran thing.

249
00:15:48.825 --> 00:15:50.867
It's profoundly self-defeating.

250
00:15:51.868 --> 00:15:54.670
You referred to it as a pivotal era, which is another one of your-

251
00:15:55.951 --> 00:15:56.631
Your concepts.

252
00:15:56.651 --> 00:16:02.073
Well, I think that these concepts, the reason for doing it is you can use them for other things.

253
00:16:03.073 --> 00:16:12.556
All right, pivotal error is once you've made it, the choices that you had before, they're a lot better than the ones you have now.

254
00:16:12.996 --> 00:16:14.657
And you never get the old ones back.

255
00:16:15.365 --> 00:16:21.168
So you think about Vladimir Putin, his invasion of Ukraine, pivotal error.

256
00:16:21.548 --> 00:16:27.111
Russia is just, has burned through its Cold War arsenal.

257
00:16:27.651 --> 00:16:40.518
Putin would have been much better when he did the easy walking with his little green men into Crimea and Donbass of just sitting with that and slowly destabilizing Ukraine over a number of years, right?

258
00:16:40.978 --> 00:16:45.960
Instead, he has massively contributed to Ukrainian national identity.

259
00:16:46.260 --> 00:16:48.400
National identities often come out of wars.

260
00:16:49.361 --> 00:17:03.405
In fact, Britain massively contributed to the development of the U.S. national identity during the American Revolution, because it was all these separate colonies that, by the time that revolution was over, had a much more cohesive sense of nation.

261
00:17:04.305 --> 00:17:08.128
and all these national institutions that grow up as a result of it.

262
00:17:08.148 --> 00:17:10.330
You see Ukraine's doing that as well.

263
00:17:10.350 --> 00:17:11.131
So pivotal error.

264
00:17:11.531 --> 00:17:17.056
And then for us on the Iran war, we've lost our alliance system.

265
00:17:17.576 --> 00:17:23.401
Sure, someone else can reassess and we'll try to restore stuff, but we will never be the trusted partner ever again.

266
00:17:23.861 --> 00:17:24.222
It's done.

267
00:17:26.143 --> 00:17:28.325
You said the post-World War II world is collapsing.

268
00:17:28.345 --> 00:17:28.485
Right.

269
00:17:30.250 --> 00:17:36.072
and we are now going into a second Cold War that could end in nuclear war.

270
00:17:36.172 --> 00:17:38.113
What is it that's collapsing, Sarah?

271
00:17:38.213 --> 00:17:41.434
Sarah Well, isn't it the way systems work is by norms?

272
00:17:41.935 --> 00:17:42.995
That we follow norms.

273
00:17:43.055 --> 00:17:44.576
And the way I think about it is like traffic.

274
00:17:45.156 --> 00:17:51.038
So, most of us, whatever side of the road you're supposed to drive on in whatever country you're in, you do that.

275
00:17:51.398 --> 00:17:53.219
And then there's stoplights and you do that.

276
00:17:53.519 --> 00:17:58.742
And I get it, the people's speed and other stuff, but mostly people are following the rules of the road.

277
00:17:59.162 --> 00:18:00.402
And there aren't nearly enough.

278
00:18:00.503 --> 00:18:04.945
If everyone decided to just do whatever on a given day, there aren't enough policemen ever to enforce that.

279
00:18:05.345 --> 00:18:06.646
It would just be mayhem, right?

280
00:18:07.286 --> 00:18:12.288
So the rules-based order was always based on norms of following them.

281
00:18:12.729 --> 00:18:17.971
And the U.S. legal order was based on norms of everyone more or less following them.

282
00:18:18.031 --> 00:18:19.392
Give me an example of some of those norms.

283
00:18:19.832 --> 00:18:28.399
when you lose an election to go, I congratulate the other side and I will do better next time instead of, oh no, they cheated.

284
00:18:29.960 --> 00:18:33.042
Now, the United States is pulling out of this order.

285
00:18:33.763 --> 00:18:40.448
The existential threat that this is posing has led to the most rapid institution building in Europe.

286
00:18:40.548 --> 00:18:41.929
It's incredibly fast.

287
00:18:41.989 --> 00:18:42.949
Institution building.

288
00:18:43.270 --> 00:18:43.370
Yeah.

289
00:18:43.390 --> 00:18:43.990
What does that mean?

290
00:18:44.010 --> 00:18:46.572
You've got the Baltic Eight.

291
00:18:47.113 --> 00:18:47.373
Who's that?

292
00:18:47.393 --> 00:18:47.753
Who's that?

293
00:18:47.873 --> 00:18:50.355
So you've got Nordic countries, right?

294
00:18:50.375 --> 00:18:53.457
You've got Finland, Sweden, Norway, and then Denmark.

295
00:18:53.477 --> 00:18:54.097
That makes four.

296
00:18:54.537 --> 00:18:56.659
And the Scandinavian countries.

297
00:18:56.739 --> 00:19:00.341
And then you've got the Baltic, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

298
00:19:00.882 --> 00:19:02.883
And then Iceland's part of this as well.

299
00:19:03.403 --> 00:19:07.006
And so they've been organizing all sorts of security things together.

300
00:19:07.346 --> 00:19:09.607
There's remilitarization going on.

301
00:19:10.068 --> 00:19:12.950
There's also work on spaceports all over the place.

302
00:19:12.970 --> 00:19:13.050
Wow.

303
00:19:13.790 --> 00:19:16.472
Britain is, since the 60s, has spaceports.

304
00:19:16.552 --> 00:19:18.092
So has Norway, Sweden.

305
00:19:18.573 --> 00:19:20.994
Britain's going to build a new one up in the Shetland Islands.

306
00:19:21.654 --> 00:19:24.416
And it's because you all are going to be launching your own satellite system.

307
00:19:24.636 --> 00:19:29.539
And I think also you all are sick of our credit card payment systems.

308
00:19:29.559 --> 00:19:31.160
You're going to do that locally.

309
00:19:31.620 --> 00:19:33.061
There's an app that's been put out.

310
00:19:33.101 --> 00:19:40.265
Apparently, if in Europe you want to buy stuff, your app will tell you immediately whether a product is American or not, so you don't have to buy that product.

311
00:19:40.686 --> 00:19:46.749
It's called the B word, boycott, which is happening to America right now as a result of doing all of this.

312
00:19:47.330 --> 00:19:53.594
And you've seen Prime Minister Carney of Canada traveling everywhere, organizing the middle powers.

313
00:19:54.174 --> 00:19:55.535
That'll be the new world order.

314
00:19:56.175 --> 00:19:56.996
It's unfolding.

315
00:19:57.956 --> 00:19:59.477
And the United States is...

316
00:20:02.260 --> 00:20:03.401
it's gone rogue.

317
00:20:03.781 --> 00:20:11.529
As America, we're on the right side of two world wars, made an incredibly positive contribution in many, many ways.

318
00:20:11.669 --> 00:20:17.355
And what we're doing now is so negative, and it's profoundly negative for the futures of our children.

319
00:20:18.142 --> 00:20:21.766
What do you say to the people that say, Sarah, we should stay out of these wars?

320
00:20:22.307 --> 00:20:24.069
We should stay out of the Ukraine situation?

321
00:20:24.830 --> 00:20:31.238
By all means, do not send combat troops all over the place, which is what we were doing in the Middle East.

322
00:20:31.879 --> 00:20:34.482
You position people like Ukraine to succeed.

323
00:20:35.002 --> 00:20:36.624
You don't have to send any troops there.

324
00:20:37.505 --> 00:20:41.147
but give them what they need to solve this.

325
00:20:41.207 --> 00:20:42.768
That is the cheap thing to do.

326
00:20:43.568 --> 00:20:47.550
The uncheap thing to do is blow our alliance system.

327
00:20:47.590 --> 00:20:48.971
So now people are boycotting us.

328
00:20:49.011 --> 00:20:57.195
There are all kinds of industries in the United States that are being hurt by this from, what is it, Kentucky bourbon makers have to shut down?

329
00:20:57.535 --> 00:20:58.135
Kid you not.

330
00:20:58.575 --> 00:21:00.937
Because the Canadians won't buy our booze.

331
00:21:01.317 --> 00:21:03.098
And you think about if you have a business,

332
00:21:03.838 --> 00:21:06.139
Let's say Canada is only 5% or 10% of your business.

333
00:21:06.400 --> 00:21:08.741
Well, if they boycott you, that might be your profit margin.

334
00:21:10.482 --> 00:21:10.722
Right?

335
00:21:11.222 --> 00:21:18.907
Canada's arranging to sell its energy to Europe and other places and trying to de-risk from us.

336
00:21:19.427 --> 00:21:20.668
And it's entirely our fault.

337
00:21:20.788 --> 00:21:21.529
We threaten them.

338
00:21:22.229 --> 00:21:26.492
People say that, you know, we don't want to have to pay for someone else's wall, Sarah.

339
00:21:27.292 --> 00:21:28.373
We don't know how long it's going to last.

340
00:21:28.413 --> 00:21:29.393
It's going to cost so much money.

341
00:21:29.693 --> 00:21:30.494
What do you say to those people?

342
00:21:30.514 --> 00:21:30.614
Yeah.

343
00:21:30.614 --> 00:21:33.015
It goes back to limited and unlimited objectives.

344
00:21:33.635 --> 00:21:40.019
An unlimited objective is regime change, and the most unlimited variant is genocide as well.

345
00:21:40.059 --> 00:21:41.479
So Hitler had both, right?

346
00:21:42.160 --> 00:21:52.185
And Putin has very unlimited variant because he wants to not only take over Ukraine, but he also wants to shoot up a good part of the government down to small children.

347
00:21:52.465 --> 00:21:54.946
He was trying to execute the Zelensky family.

348
00:21:55.466 --> 00:21:56.767
What person does that sort of stuff?

349
00:21:57.347 --> 00:22:02.972
In addition, he wants to eliminate the purveyors of Ukrainian culture and kill them.

350
00:22:03.833 --> 00:22:05.274
And that's called genocide.

351
00:22:05.915 --> 00:22:07.336
So you can have a whole continuum, right?

352
00:22:07.356 --> 00:22:13.761
You can have the most unlimited thing of genocide plus regime change, and you come a little bit over and it's just regime change.

353
00:22:14.042 --> 00:22:22.489
And then the limited stuff means, I only want half your country to, all the way down to, I don't know, I want you to be polite to me at football games, whatever it is.

354
00:22:22.749 --> 00:22:25.010
So this is where Russia comes in.

355
00:22:26.090 --> 00:22:31.913
I believe, and I could be wrong, and the key on being right or wrong is you should constantly reassess.

356
00:22:32.833 --> 00:22:34.094
Don't worry about being wrong.

357
00:22:34.854 --> 00:22:39.036
What you do when you realize you got it wrong is say, I got new information, and here's why I think differently.

358
00:22:39.056 --> 00:22:46.879
But I believe that Russia has unlimited objectives, that Putin wants to restore the old Soviet empire.

359
00:22:47.799 --> 00:22:49.241
There are many problems with that.

360
00:22:50.042 --> 00:22:52.526
One of them is you think about Russia.

361
00:22:53.767 --> 00:22:58.293
Russia's been the backwater of Europe forever under the czars.

362
00:22:58.534 --> 00:23:01.758
Can you think of one Russian product that you have ever wanted to buy?

363
00:23:01.778 --> 00:23:03.120
No comment.

364
00:23:03.743 --> 00:23:04.063
Okay.

365
00:23:04.463 --> 00:23:05.564
And let me give you a little hint.

366
00:23:06.344 --> 00:23:09.565
Smirnoff's is a British company, right?

367
00:23:09.625 --> 00:23:11.045
They don't even produce the vodka.

368
00:23:11.565 --> 00:23:15.286
So it's these manufactured goods.

369
00:23:15.366 --> 00:23:18.527
No, it's just a basic primary goods.

370
00:23:18.767 --> 00:23:20.468
So it has a failing economic model.

371
00:23:20.808 --> 00:23:26.470
Then during the Cold War, it's exporting communism everywhere, setting back...

372
00:23:27.430 --> 00:23:29.190
living standards everywhere.

373
00:23:29.491 --> 00:23:37.332
When you do that, it involves a lot of deaths because there are children who aren't getting vaccines, all kinds of things that are not happening when you're doing that.

374
00:23:37.592 --> 00:23:38.753
So that's what Russia's done.

375
00:23:39.073 --> 00:23:45.114
And now Putin thinks, based on his sheer legacy of incompetence, that now he has the right to rule everyone else.

376
00:23:45.454 --> 00:23:46.354
What's really going on?

377
00:23:46.374 --> 00:23:47.395
He's a continentalist.

378
00:23:48.375 --> 00:23:50.736
And so he wants to steal everyone else's stuff.

379
00:23:50.756 --> 00:23:54.476
Right in the beginning of the Ukraine war, people were stealing washing machines.

380
00:23:54.816 --> 00:23:56.797
That would be a rather heavy item to steal.

381
00:23:57.818 --> 00:23:58.618
Who would do that?

382
00:23:59.119 --> 00:24:00.560
Someone without washing machines.

383
00:24:02.061 --> 00:24:02.301
Right.

384
00:24:03.422 --> 00:24:06.145
And the Ukrainians don't want to live that way.

385
00:24:06.165 --> 00:24:07.826
Did he underestimate them?

386
00:24:08.366 --> 00:24:08.787
Yeah, of course.

387
00:24:08.807 --> 00:24:09.507
That's typical.

388
00:24:10.268 --> 00:24:12.270
There's probably Russian type eight hubris.

389
00:24:12.890 --> 00:24:16.934
The Russian soul superior to all others because they can't figure out what they're superior on.

390
00:24:16.954 --> 00:24:20.076
So they're going to come up with something that's abstract, like their soul.

391
00:24:20.116 --> 00:24:20.677
Well, prove it.

392
00:24:21.077 --> 00:24:28.843
Zelensky told me that when the Russian soldiers rolled in, he found that they had brought food for three to ten days.

393
00:24:28.964 --> 00:24:30.745
So they thought the war would be over in three or ten days.

394
00:24:30.925 --> 00:24:36.670
And also that they brought uniforms to celebrate, to do a victory parade, because they thought the war was going to be that easy.

395
00:24:37.150 --> 00:24:41.013
And what they were met with is Ukrainian civilians throwing Molotov cocktails at their tanks.

396
00:24:41.514 --> 00:24:41.674
Yeah.

397
00:24:43.166 --> 00:24:44.346
You look as if you have another question.

398
00:24:44.366 --> 00:24:53.568
No, it's just, it's interesting because, yeah, it's, again, we were just talking about underestimating Iran, but there is a hubris as well that's taken place with the Russians.

399
00:24:53.608 --> 00:24:56.289
They've underestimated the culture of the people.

400
00:24:56.829 --> 00:24:57.329
Death ground.

401
00:24:57.749 --> 00:24:57.949
Yeah.

402
00:24:58.590 --> 00:25:08.332
If you have an unlimited objective, what you're doing is, if I have an unlimited objective against you, I'm putting you on death ground.

403
00:25:08.372 --> 00:25:09.132
What does that mean?

404
00:25:09.752 --> 00:25:12.473
It means if you don't fight, I'm going to just come kill you.

405
00:25:13.774 --> 00:25:18.918
And so your only alternative is to fight because they're going to just kill you.

406
00:25:19.519 --> 00:25:25.264
So if you have these unlimited objectives, expect one hell of a fight.

407
00:25:26.164 --> 00:25:32.770
And it can transform the most dysfunctional country into a lethal adversary, as Hitler discovered, or a lethal adversary.

408
00:25:32.970 --> 00:25:35.591
with the Soviet Union back in the day.

409
00:25:35.651 --> 00:25:38.151
Stalin had shot a lot of his officer corps.

410
00:25:38.491 --> 00:25:49.573
He created a famine in Ukraine, which is a breadbasket, which is exactly what Putin has done to Ukraine now and what the United States is undoubtedly doing to Iran.

411
00:25:49.593 --> 00:25:54.794
My understanding is the Ayatollah who's gone was against having nukes.

412
00:25:55.034 --> 00:25:57.335
No one says who comes after him is against having nukes.

413
00:25:58.235 --> 00:26:04.887
If they're on death ground, as long as Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu are in power, what do you think they're going to do?

414
00:26:06.670 --> 00:26:09.795
They're going to cause trouble until those two people are out of power.

415
00:26:11.305 --> 00:26:11.485
Right?

416
00:26:11.545 --> 00:26:19.570
And so people who want to keep Netanyahu and Trump in power longer just understand it's going to make Iran go on longer.

417
00:26:19.990 --> 00:26:25.373
And then I'm terrified that Trump will do something like drop a tactical nuke somewhere.

418
00:26:25.673 --> 00:26:26.954
And then things are really over.

419
00:26:28.015 --> 00:26:32.857
The United States will be forever this despicable country.

420
00:26:32.877 --> 00:26:38.761
The only country in the world that's ever dropped nukes on anyone, twice on Japan, and then we're going to do a third on Iran.

421
00:26:40.473 --> 00:26:41.353
Do you think that's plausible?

422
00:26:41.913 --> 00:26:42.874
I have no idea.

423
00:26:43.274 --> 00:26:49.716
If you had told me 10 years ago that where we're at was even remotely positive, I would say you're insane.

424
00:26:50.196 --> 00:26:51.397
What have you been smoking lately?

425
00:26:52.257 --> 00:27:04.101
The United States was going to toss our alliances, tell Canada you're our 51st state, and then tell Green NPS we're going to take Greenland from you and therefore behave yourselves?

426
00:27:04.841 --> 00:27:06.082
I would have thought that's just ludicrous.

427
00:27:06.102 --> 00:27:06.642
Who would do that?

428
00:27:07.915 --> 00:27:12.336
What do you say to people who are experiencing their gas prices go up at the pump?

429
00:27:12.436 --> 00:27:16.557
They're seeing costs rise because of this war, because of the energy shock that's taken place because of it.

430
00:27:17.077 --> 00:27:18.477
And they want it to end.

431
00:27:18.637 --> 00:27:19.457
So they're saying, listen.

432
00:27:19.758 --> 00:27:20.038
Vote.

433
00:27:21.018 --> 00:27:21.198
Vote.

434
00:27:21.878 --> 00:27:24.359
One third of Americans voted for where we're at now.

435
00:27:25.279 --> 00:27:28.359
One third voted for anything but this.

436
00:27:28.919 --> 00:27:30.660
And then one third couldn't get off their couch.

437
00:27:31.740 --> 00:27:35.603
Get off your couch and vote because it matters for your children.

438
00:27:36.344 --> 00:27:40.107
That in the United States, Americans need to start talking to each other.

439
00:27:40.167 --> 00:27:42.369
This only my party can win.

440
00:27:42.629 --> 00:27:43.049
Crazy.

441
00:27:43.369 --> 00:27:47.913
A two-party state is absolutely necessary because how do you see blind spots?

442
00:27:48.293 --> 00:27:49.954
Also, you will watch Trump.

443
00:27:50.134 --> 00:27:52.176
You want your gas prices to go down.

444
00:27:52.336 --> 00:27:53.937
He's not going to reassess on this war.

445
00:27:53.957 --> 00:27:55.098
He's just going to keep on going.

446
00:27:55.979 --> 00:28:01.103
The way you reassess in democracies, since people are reluctant to say, gee, I got it wrong.

447
00:28:01.479 --> 00:28:05.222
and we all get it wrong, is you elect in the other party.

448
00:28:05.803 --> 00:28:10.146
But if I just think about what's going on here in Europe, because I'm thinking about a particular friend who's been doing some tweets recently.

449
00:28:11.227 --> 00:28:27.541
And she's been tweeting that because the costs in the UK seem to be rising, petrol and other things, we should just let, this is what she said, she said we should just let Russia take the Ukraine, and then that'll mean that energy will be stabilised.

450
00:28:27.981 --> 00:28:30.282
I get it where she's coming from.

451
00:28:30.562 --> 00:28:31.082
I get it.

452
00:28:32.163 --> 00:28:43.108
But it's one of the staples in war colleges is the enemy gets a vote, meaning that the Russians are going to come for you whether you like it or not.

453
00:28:43.708 --> 00:28:44.488
How do we know that?

454
00:28:44.568 --> 00:28:46.109
You don't know, right?

455
00:28:46.749 --> 00:28:47.329
You don't know.

456
00:28:47.410 --> 00:28:49.010
But I can look at Russian history.

457
00:28:49.050 --> 00:28:50.051
They're continentalists.

458
00:28:50.091 --> 00:28:51.631
They go forward, forward, forward.

459
00:28:52.072 --> 00:28:57.514
And then I think you've got some kind of map that shows what Transnistria and all those places,

460
00:28:57.794 --> 00:28:58.354
I want this one.

461
00:28:58.514 --> 00:28:58.835
Yeah.

462
00:28:59.515 --> 00:28:59.775
All right.

463
00:29:00.236 --> 00:29:02.357
So, if I can do it this way.

464
00:29:02.837 --> 00:29:05.539
So, these are the places that Putin has taken.

465
00:29:06.099 --> 00:29:07.300
Well, this one's earlier.

466
00:29:07.840 --> 00:29:09.862
And this one comes to the end of the Cold War.

467
00:29:10.162 --> 00:29:11.162
This is his buddy.

468
00:29:11.663 --> 00:29:13.464
So, he's basically taken Belarus, but...

469
00:29:14.184 --> 00:29:15.785
Yeah, that's right.

470
00:29:16.325 --> 00:29:18.466
And so, and he's taken all this stuff from Ukraine.

471
00:29:18.646 --> 00:29:25.950
But these places he took, Putin comes to power in the second Chechen war and Russians like that.

472
00:29:26.790 --> 00:29:27.811
That's how he rises.

473
00:29:28.151 --> 00:29:32.813
And then in 2008, he goes after Georgia and helps these two places separate.

474
00:29:32.993 --> 00:29:35.955
But if you look at it, if you could draw a circle here.

475
00:29:36.855 --> 00:29:43.378
It's a continental, I don't know if you ever watched the Jetsons, the cartoon where you've got a spaceship that's around.

476
00:29:43.718 --> 00:29:51.262
Continentalists is looking at their dashboard, but it's 360 degrees around their little spaceship on all those borders, and you want to extend outwards.

477
00:29:51.542 --> 00:29:57.965
So this is the plan A, and then after you get plan A, they keep on going.

478
00:29:58.686 --> 00:30:00.427
It's been this way for a long time.

479
00:30:01.367 --> 00:30:05.772
And for your friend, it'd be like, what evidence do you have?

480
00:30:07.053 --> 00:30:08.915
Show it to me that they're going to stop.

481
00:30:09.516 --> 00:30:10.117
Show me that.

482
00:30:10.337 --> 00:30:12.059
What in their history gives you that?

483
00:30:12.299 --> 00:30:14.001
I understand that you wish it to end.

484
00:30:14.782 --> 00:30:16.423
This is another tragedy.

485
00:30:17.044 --> 00:30:17.925
So we had...

486
00:30:19.179 --> 00:30:29.444
The Cold War that ended on Western terms with Bush Sr. and Helmut Kohl did a masterful job at war termination, truly masterful on Western terms.

487
00:30:30.244 --> 00:30:37.048
And then we had the magical, this is when you were growing up, the magical inter-Cold War period where China and Russia turn inward.

488
00:30:37.848 --> 00:30:46.392
And the United States is more or less following the rules so that you don't have opposing sides funding opposing sides of insurgencies all over the world.

489
00:30:46.472 --> 00:30:47.653
And war is just torch.

490
00:30:49.131 --> 00:30:49.731
wealth, right?

491
00:30:50.111 --> 00:30:55.233
Think about if Putin keeps any part of Ukraine, it's a glowing mess, right?

492
00:30:55.253 --> 00:30:56.093
It's been leveled.

493
00:30:56.693 --> 00:30:57.974
You're just destroying things.

494
00:30:58.154 --> 00:30:59.834
But they're going to continue to fight as well, aren't they?

495
00:31:00.274 --> 00:31:01.395
This is what Zelensky told me.

496
00:31:01.435 --> 00:31:02.715
He said- They're going to go forever.

497
00:31:02.955 --> 00:31:03.575
What did he say?

498
00:31:03.955 --> 00:31:04.776
He's the real person.

499
00:31:05.136 --> 00:31:09.677
He said something to me, which I found to be quite illuminating, and I don't think people consider.

500
00:31:09.737 --> 00:31:13.078
He said to me, he had gone and found, just one example-

501
00:31:13.718 --> 00:31:18.623
a trench, what the Russian soldiers had left, where there was 500 tortured bodies in it.

502
00:31:18.923 --> 00:31:19.964
These bodies were tied up.

503
00:31:20.164 --> 00:31:20.805
Oh, God.

504
00:31:20.865 --> 00:31:22.266
And they were of all ages.

505
00:31:22.407 --> 00:31:30.434
And he said, he kind of implied that it's very naive to think that the families of those people in those ditches are just going to allow...

506
00:31:31.355 --> 00:31:36.416
there to be a sudden stop to this, and that they're not going to continue to want revenge.

507
00:31:36.936 --> 00:31:43.197
And Zelensky said to me, he said, after seeing that, and he said it, he said, I probably shouldn't say this, but he said that he wants revenge.

508
00:31:43.677 --> 00:31:46.538
He says, if you see what I saw, you would want revenge to.

509
00:31:46.658 --> 00:31:50.279
The Russians are, it's unspeakable what they've done.

510
00:31:50.939 --> 00:31:57.600
In most of my life, Germans wore the crown of infamy for what had happened in World War II.

511
00:31:58.320 --> 00:32:04.102
Less so World War I, but it's World War II where they just, it's really, it takes heinous to a new level.

512
00:32:04.543 --> 00:32:18.228
Well, Vlad the Bad, he now owns that crown for Russians going in, because Germans have reformed their educational system, and there's no German now who has any responsibility for what happened back then.

513
00:32:18.468 --> 00:32:21.809
But there are lots of Russians who have responsibility for going on right now.

514
00:32:22.169 --> 00:32:26.390
And oh, another piece of Russians, they go, oh, Soviet Union has nothing to do with us.

515
00:32:26.410 --> 00:32:28.471
That's, you know, we're Russians, that was the Soviet Union.

516
00:32:28.631 --> 00:32:31.912
Excuse me, Russia is what ran the Soviet Union.

517
00:32:32.212 --> 00:32:33.593
It's yours, you own it.

518
00:32:34.113 --> 00:32:42.955
And you think about like the way French use the word France, it includes all five republics, includes all the monarchies, includes Napoleon and stuff.

519
00:32:43.316 --> 00:32:44.296
We all know it's France.

520
00:32:44.336 --> 00:32:46.717
It's just the Russians who are trying to say, oh, it's the Soviet Union.

521
00:32:46.937 --> 00:32:47.957
We had nothing to do with that.

522
00:32:47.997 --> 00:32:49.297
No, you had everything to do with that.

523
00:32:49.878 --> 00:32:50.798
You're unrepentant.

524
00:32:51.338 --> 00:32:56.282
So for your friend, if you look at the long arc of Russian history, it's terrible.

525
00:32:56.642 --> 00:33:05.228
It used to be under the Romanov dynasty, at least, they aspired to have connections with Western Europe.

526
00:33:05.288 --> 00:33:10.091
Although I think Nicholas II said, well, you know, we're 200 years behind, so we're going to do it our way.

527
00:33:10.111 --> 00:33:14.595
Well, once you get the communists, they want to overthrow the entire country.

528
00:33:15.315 --> 00:33:16.637
capitalist world order.

529
00:33:17.018 --> 00:33:18.279
And Putin hasn't changed.

530
00:33:18.620 --> 00:33:20.822
The continentalists are profoundly dangerous.

531
00:33:21.203 --> 00:33:28.112
What they want to do is divide the world into spheres of influence, like the old empires of Eurasia.

532
00:33:28.593 --> 00:33:32.378
And so they're going to be fighting on the edges of these spheres of influence about who gets what.

533
00:33:32.798 --> 00:33:33.759
Who are the continentalists?

534
00:33:33.839 --> 00:33:34.660
Russia, China?

535
00:33:34.780 --> 00:33:36.401
Yep, Russia, China.

536
00:33:36.621 --> 00:33:37.101
Donald Trump?

537
00:33:37.582 --> 00:33:39.023
He's claiming Canadian territory.

538
00:33:39.063 --> 00:33:40.644
He's claiming Greenland.

539
00:33:41.125 --> 00:33:43.547
He's kidnapped a head of state.

540
00:33:44.127 --> 00:33:44.447
I get it.

541
00:33:44.487 --> 00:33:45.348
The guy's reprehensible.

542
00:33:45.368 --> 00:33:46.629
I'm no fan of Maduro.

543
00:33:46.869 --> 00:33:48.150
I mean, look at the war.

544
00:33:48.530 --> 00:33:50.832
We've discussed all the problems from the war in Iran.

545
00:33:50.852 --> 00:33:55.276
You're talking about your friend in Britain who's being wrecked by the petrol prices.

546
00:33:55.716 --> 00:33:56.757
Okay, whose fault is that?

547
00:33:58.476 --> 00:33:58.796
Trump's.

548
00:33:59.036 --> 00:33:59.796
Yeah, it is.

549
00:34:00.257 --> 00:34:01.637
Trump would say it was Biden's fault.

550
00:34:02.237 --> 00:34:03.378
Oh, everything's Biden's fault.

551
00:34:03.818 --> 00:34:08.800
You know, he often, his favorite line is to say this, well, never would have happened if I was in power.

552
00:34:09.420 --> 00:34:10.460
That's what he says all the time.

553
00:34:10.900 --> 00:34:12.221
Yeah, except he started this one.

554
00:34:12.761 --> 00:34:26.006
So what's fascinating, in having studied foreign policy forever, it doesn't make me right about anything, but it's really rare, or like domestic policy as well, that you do a policy, whatever it is, put a new law in effect,

555
00:34:27.086 --> 00:34:29.527
And then there are consequences of it.

556
00:34:29.567 --> 00:34:32.768
But the consequences usually roll out over years.

557
00:34:33.028 --> 00:34:36.489
So it's hard to say, did this law exactly cause this outcome?

558
00:34:36.629 --> 00:34:37.390
It's hard to say.

559
00:34:38.090 --> 00:34:39.010
Not in this war.

560
00:34:39.270 --> 00:34:40.050
Which one?

561
00:34:40.090 --> 00:34:40.851
The Iran war.

562
00:34:41.251 --> 00:34:42.171
It's just obvious.

563
00:34:42.711 --> 00:34:48.933
Every time you load up at the pump, you have a weekly reminder that Donald Trump's war has done a number on you.

564
00:34:50.014 --> 00:34:50.754
It's not Biden.

565
00:34:51.374 --> 00:34:53.735
He would say we couldn't let Iran get nuclear weapons.

566
00:34:54.082 --> 00:34:59.311
It's much more likely now that they will get nuclear weapons doing what he's incentivized them to get nuclear weapons.

567
00:34:59.532 --> 00:35:00.934
Here's my thing about Donald Trump.

568
00:35:01.355 --> 00:35:04.601
Is he known for providing accurate information?

569
00:35:06.550 --> 00:35:10.453
You know the answer to that question, as do all of your viewers.

570
00:35:10.933 --> 00:35:16.197
And here's the problem with normalizing lies, which is what's going on in the United States.

571
00:35:16.658 --> 00:35:18.299
A, no one likes being lied to, right?

572
00:35:19.040 --> 00:35:25.044
If you're an insider trader, maybe you like it if you get your little truth and then everyone else is being lied to.

573
00:35:25.064 --> 00:35:25.785
All right.

574
00:35:25.825 --> 00:35:32.069
The Soviet Union was a society that collapsed in large part because it was built on lies.

575
00:35:32.109 --> 00:35:32.890
Here's how it worked.

576
00:35:33.812 --> 00:35:50.802
Since it's all run by a plan, this communist plan, so you're running your little, let's say they even had podcasts, and you decide however many cameras you need a new year and how many you got on stock or whatever you think your staff is, you're going to exaggerate what you think you need because you aren't sure the plan's going to give it to you.

577
00:35:51.422 --> 00:35:55.525
And you're going to understate what you have, again, because you're not sure you're going to get things.

578
00:35:55.925 --> 00:35:57.886
So everyone's doing that across an economy.

579
00:35:58.106 --> 00:35:59.708
They're aggregating all that data.

580
00:36:00.348 --> 00:36:01.069
It's garbage.

581
00:36:01.389 --> 00:36:04.892
The further up the food chain you go, the more ludicrous the data is.

582
00:36:05.273 --> 00:36:09.476
But there in central Moscow, they're coming up with a plan that's going to allocate things.

583
00:36:09.737 --> 00:36:17.864
They're grossly misallocating capital, labor, and they don't notice that it's a disaster until it's metastasized.

584
00:36:19.265 --> 00:36:20.686
And it shatters the place.

585
00:36:21.626 --> 00:36:28.789
Another thing to give you, an economy doubles at different growth weights according to the following equation.

586
00:36:29.489 --> 00:36:32.410
The natural log of 2 over whatever that growth rate is.

587
00:36:32.890 --> 00:36:39.893
If your economy grows at 1% per annum, it'll double in 69, 70 years, something like that.

588
00:36:40.793 --> 00:36:45.635
If you grow at 3%, so it's a 2% differential, you'll double in 23 years.

589
00:36:46.915 --> 00:37:08.945
So if you do dumbassery, like tariff yourself, or you get into a war that's going to send prices up and just mess things up, or if you're a little smarter and you sanction the other guy so only the other guy is experiencing this, and you knock off 2% growth, instead of waiting 23 years to double, you're going to wait 71.

590
00:37:08.985 --> 00:37:09.865
That's a long wait.

591
00:37:10.345 --> 00:37:13.747
So these are the things that people aren't considering.

592
00:37:14.687 --> 00:37:19.330
of the cumulative effects of making the kind of errors that we're making.

593
00:37:19.950 --> 00:37:22.792
Also, the advantages of sanctions over wars.

594
00:37:23.252 --> 00:37:27.895
Sanctions don't solve problems, but you're shrinking the opposing piggy bank.

595
00:37:27.955 --> 00:37:31.116
And if you cooperate with allies, you're growing yourself.

596
00:37:31.457 --> 00:37:32.897
So it's a form of chemotherapy.

597
00:37:32.918 --> 00:37:36.219
You don't eliminate the tumor, but you try to shrink it back.

598
00:37:37.140 --> 00:37:39.001
You have a PhD in Russian.

599
00:37:39.021 --> 00:37:39.781
Is it history?

600
00:37:39.901 --> 00:37:40.122
Yeah.

601
00:37:40.402 --> 00:37:42.263
So what does Russian history tell us?

602
00:37:43.747 --> 00:37:49.811
and I guess geopolitical history generally, is likely to happen next as it relates to the Russian-Ukraine situation?

603
00:37:49.871 --> 00:37:52.833
And is it dependent on what other allies do?

604
00:37:52.853 --> 00:37:57.296
Or do you think there's already a pivotal error that's been made by Putin?

605
00:37:57.496 --> 00:37:58.457
Oh, it's already done.

606
00:37:58.497 --> 00:37:59.578
He's just going to go forward.

607
00:38:00.278 --> 00:38:01.279
He's just going to go forward.

608
00:38:01.299 --> 00:38:03.282
He's just going to escalate and keep going forward.

609
00:38:03.302 --> 00:38:03.402
Yep.

610
00:38:03.722 --> 00:38:04.643
Because he can't.

611
00:38:04.663 --> 00:38:05.384
He can't go back.

612
00:38:05.964 --> 00:38:06.425
He doesn't strike.

613
00:38:06.445 --> 00:38:07.046
I mean, not that I know him.

614
00:38:07.066 --> 00:38:08.707
Well, this is the problem with dictatorships.

615
00:38:08.968 --> 00:38:13.533
What's wonderful about elections, so they throw you out of office, but no one kills you.

616
00:38:14.274 --> 00:38:16.035
No one takes your bank accounts away.

617
00:38:16.616 --> 00:38:21.601
It really takes a lot of the white knuckle event out of it.

618
00:38:22.402 --> 00:38:31.764
And in Russia, on your Stalin, when he was busy shooting everybody, he dies and eventually you get Khrushchev as his successor.

619
00:38:32.044 --> 00:38:43.047
That successor generation decided they wanted to make it so you didn't get killed when you left office, that they send you to your little dacha, or that's your summer house in Russia.

620
00:38:44.027 --> 00:38:48.928
Putin's problem is, this is the problem with dictators, for many of them, there's no off-ramp where they're alive.

621
00:38:48.948 --> 00:38:49.068
Right.

622
00:38:50.829 --> 00:38:51.049
Right.

623
00:38:51.490 --> 00:38:54.352
What happens to Putin when he gets swapped out of power?

624
00:38:54.532 --> 00:38:57.995
If he just dies naturally, OK, then that happens to all of us.

625
00:38:58.676 --> 00:39:02.098
But he's arranged it so there is no retirement plan except something really ugly.

626
00:39:02.399 --> 00:39:02.639
Why?

627
00:39:02.759 --> 00:39:02.959
How?

628
00:39:03.640 --> 00:39:04.240
A dictator?

629
00:39:04.400 --> 00:39:06.502
Well, how would you ever replace Putin in Russia?

630
00:39:07.263 --> 00:39:10.065
Couldn't he just step down and go off to his mansion and chill out?

631
00:39:10.562 --> 00:39:16.970
Probably not, because there will be people who will come kill him on his immediate entourage.

632
00:39:17.010 --> 00:39:20.034
He's the whole protection racket that's running stuff.

633
00:39:20.394 --> 00:39:22.857
Is it possible for him to be overthrown by the Russian people?

634
00:39:23.498 --> 00:39:23.718
Yeah.

635
00:39:23.979 --> 00:39:26.502
It is possible, because it just seems like he's got such a tight grip on

636
00:39:27.142 --> 00:39:31.944
Oh, well, that's the thing about dictatorships is they seem eternal until the day they shatter.

637
00:39:32.104 --> 00:39:34.225
And then it's impossible to predict.

638
00:39:34.565 --> 00:39:35.305
How do they shatter?

639
00:39:36.186 --> 00:39:37.706
Oh, the Romanov dynasty.

640
00:39:37.907 --> 00:39:47.510
Nicholas II, like Vlad the Bad, decided to get into a recreational war they didn't have to, which is the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, 1905.

641
00:39:48.131 --> 00:39:50.131
And why Russia, this is the whole thing about Russia.

642
00:39:50.171 --> 00:39:51.752
Why does Russia need more territory?

643
00:39:51.772 --> 00:39:53.513
It is the largest country on the planet.

644
00:39:54.473 --> 00:39:55.733
They have tons of resources.

645
00:39:55.773 --> 00:40:07.096
Their problem is they have no economic model to develop it because they refuse to go by the norms of having rules so people can start businesses like a young person like you who can start a business.

646
00:40:07.516 --> 00:40:10.137
And then when you start doing well, you can actually keep your money.

647
00:40:10.377 --> 00:40:11.397
That's not what happens in Russia.

648
00:40:11.417 --> 00:40:12.318
You'll get shaken down.

649
00:40:13.058 --> 00:40:14.878
So Nicholas II does that war.

650
00:40:14.918 --> 00:40:15.659
He loses it.

651
00:40:15.679 --> 00:40:17.259
But then there's another concept.

652
00:40:17.799 --> 00:40:18.780
opportunity costs.

653
00:40:19.381 --> 00:40:23.884
So if you spend all of your money fighting that war, what are you not doing?

654
00:40:24.245 --> 00:40:30.490
You're not building a railway system here in the western part of Russia.

655
00:40:31.791 --> 00:40:33.152
So come World War I,

656
00:40:33.807 --> 00:40:35.929
Nicholas can't deploy his troops very well.

657
00:40:36.530 --> 00:40:48.343
He's got no way in for his allies to supply him, because Russia's, this is Russia's stuff, main ports for getting things by sea are here, the Baltic are here, the Black Sea.

658
00:40:48.363 --> 00:40:49.865
Well, those things shut down in wartime.

659
00:40:51.046 --> 00:40:52.027
Nothing goes through them.

660
00:40:52.607 --> 00:40:58.192
So if Nicholas hadn't done his dumbassery here and built railways, he might have had a different outcome.

661
00:40:58.272 --> 00:40:59.533
And why does he get overthrown?

662
00:41:00.314 --> 00:41:02.355
Because there are food riots in St. Petersburg.

663
00:41:02.376 --> 00:41:03.677
That was the capital in those days.

664
00:41:04.017 --> 00:41:05.078
Okay, better railways.

665
00:41:05.118 --> 00:41:06.319
You would have delivered the bread better.

666
00:41:06.779 --> 00:41:09.542
Also, you might have gotten food aid from other places.

667
00:41:10.262 --> 00:41:12.104
These opportunity costs are huge.

668
00:41:12.424 --> 00:41:14.886
Now, Vlad the Bad has done his magic here.

669
00:41:14.906 --> 00:41:15.006
Yeah.

670
00:41:15.967 --> 00:41:16.928
Who's supporting him?

671
00:41:17.008 --> 00:41:20.429
Well, China is providing what's vital for him right now.

672
00:41:20.669 --> 00:41:22.710
Why are they supporting Vladimir Putin?

673
00:41:23.090 --> 00:41:23.691
Why not?

674
00:41:24.391 --> 00:41:24.651
Oh, God.

675
00:41:24.671 --> 00:41:25.612
Why don't they just stay out of it?

676
00:41:26.352 --> 00:41:30.454
From their point of view, they want the United States just out of everyone's business.

677
00:41:31.174 --> 00:41:34.716
And they also don't particularly like Russia either.

678
00:41:34.776 --> 00:41:38.478
So if Russia is going to go weaken itself here, uh...

679
00:41:39.358 --> 00:41:41.460
China will benefit from this.

680
00:41:41.500 --> 00:41:42.801
China needs their resources.

681
00:41:42.841 --> 00:41:55.431
My graduate dissertation was a history of the Russo-Chinese border, and Russia took territory from the Chinese sphere of influence greater than all of U.S. east of Mississippi.

682
00:41:55.812 --> 00:42:01.957
It's all this stuff that was part of the Chinese sphere of influence.

683
00:42:02.237 --> 00:42:04.178
Do you want to tell me the Chinese don't remember that?

684
00:42:04.999 --> 00:42:08.361
So China are supplying Russia with resources they need.

685
00:42:08.441 --> 00:42:09.561
Yeah, to make missiles and things.

686
00:42:10.181 --> 00:42:11.322
They're charging them for that.

687
00:42:11.522 --> 00:42:11.782
Of course.

688
00:42:11.802 --> 00:42:12.522
They're making money from it.

689
00:42:12.603 --> 00:42:13.843
But they're also weakening Russia.

690
00:42:13.943 --> 00:42:18.765
Yeah, because Russia has been sanctioned on its energy and other things.

691
00:42:18.785 --> 00:42:21.707
So China's getting all these things at much reduced prices.

692
00:42:22.607 --> 00:42:24.048
And they're driving a hard bargain.

693
00:42:24.688 --> 00:42:31.154
And the Russians in the past had all these nuclear weapons and other things to dissuade the Chinese from playing Mr. Tough Guy.

694
00:42:31.714 --> 00:42:35.017
Except Vladimir Putin has squandered all of that.

695
00:42:35.277 --> 00:42:38.160
He can't even deal with Ukraine, let alone this.

696
00:42:39.261 --> 00:42:41.483
So they've done massive pivotal error.

697
00:42:41.883 --> 00:42:42.644
They're in real trouble.

698
00:42:42.744 --> 00:42:49.449
And then they're not having kids, and so the long-term effects are getting worse and worse from them.

699
00:42:49.750 --> 00:42:52.352
Russia have the missiles just to flatten Ukraine, don't they?

700
00:42:53.295 --> 00:42:54.397
I don't know the details.

701
00:42:54.837 --> 00:42:56.179
But they have like nuclear weapons.

702
00:42:56.239 --> 00:42:56.780
Yeah, they do.

703
00:42:57.261 --> 00:42:57.702
They do.

704
00:42:58.563 --> 00:43:00.586
This is beyond my expertise.

705
00:43:01.307 --> 00:43:03.991
And in order to have them, you have to maintain them.

706
00:43:04.371 --> 00:43:06.274
And the Russians are consummate liars.

707
00:43:06.595 --> 00:43:07.015
Who knows?

708
00:43:08.237 --> 00:43:08.617
Who knows?

709
00:43:09.038 --> 00:43:15.184
My understanding is that India and China have told Russia that would be a massive no-no if they do that.

710
00:43:16.206 --> 00:43:22.933
But when people get cornered, then others have no influence over them when they're totally cornered.

711
00:43:23.774 --> 00:43:24.615
So I don't know the answer.

712
00:43:24.635 --> 00:43:25.075
Yeah.

713
00:43:25.295 --> 00:43:32.138
So it sounds like from speaking to Zelensky, he will not yield an inch of Ukraine to Putin.

714
00:43:32.838 --> 00:43:39.641
And it sounds like Putin has to walk away looking like he got a victory of sorts for his people and for his power.

715
00:43:39.881 --> 00:43:44.683
And really for the message, you know, to some of these other people that he sits on a border with and to NATO, I guess.

716
00:43:45.484 --> 00:43:48.245
The two things can't be true, in my view.

717
00:43:49.253 --> 00:43:54.054
No, that's the problem with unleashing unlimited wars.

718
00:43:54.334 --> 00:43:55.234
World War II?

719
00:43:56.514 --> 00:44:02.915
Yes, the Allies won, but at obscene cost.

720
00:44:03.136 --> 00:44:05.636
Tens of millions of Russians died.

721
00:44:06.096 --> 00:44:07.796
Millions of others died.

722
00:44:08.556 --> 00:44:09.537
What is it supposed to be?

723
00:44:09.557 --> 00:44:11.117
55 million people died in that thing?

724
00:44:11.617 --> 00:44:12.777
You want to do that over again?

725
00:44:12.797 --> 00:44:16.198
Really, these unlimited wars are ugly.

726
00:44:16.218 --> 00:44:16.658
Right?

727
00:44:17.238 --> 00:44:19.079
It is not the way to handle things.

728
00:44:19.539 --> 00:44:24.341
It is far better to deploy your diplomats and lawyers to international institutions.

729
00:44:24.901 --> 00:44:39.106
Sure, the deal isn't perfect for what you wish you had gotten, but the wealth will compound if you have people your age to go start their businesses, have laws that allow them to do it instead of trying to poach everyone's stuff.

730
00:44:39.566 --> 00:44:41.466
That is the way to do things.

731
00:44:42.407 --> 00:44:44.047
So yeah, of course Ukraine won't give up.

732
00:44:44.908 --> 00:44:46.108
And we should support Ukraine.

733
00:44:47.188 --> 00:44:49.710
because they're doing the heavy lifting for all of us.

734
00:44:49.930 --> 00:44:51.411
That's the answer to your friend.

735
00:44:52.071 --> 00:44:53.612
You want to be fighting on the front lines?

736
00:44:55.093 --> 00:44:55.273
No.

737
00:44:56.033 --> 00:44:56.714
So help them.

738
00:44:56.734 --> 00:44:59.996
Now, morals matter in this world.

739
00:45:01.036 --> 00:45:01.517
They matter.

740
00:45:02.277 --> 00:45:03.178
Honesty matters.

741
00:45:04.678 --> 00:45:05.679
Civility matters.

742
00:45:07.182 --> 00:45:08.142
All these things matter.

743
00:45:08.742 --> 00:45:11.183
Oh, and there's another piece I think matters.

744
00:45:11.243 --> 00:45:12.244
What do governments do?

745
00:45:12.984 --> 00:45:13.764
Primary things.

746
00:45:14.924 --> 00:45:16.225
Protect your national security.

747
00:45:16.565 --> 00:45:17.245
That's number one.

748
00:45:18.305 --> 00:45:19.686
And protect your prosperity.

749
00:45:19.886 --> 00:45:21.546
Try to increase your prosperity.

750
00:45:21.566 --> 00:45:22.066
Those are two.

751
00:45:22.547 --> 00:45:28.408
So for your friend, what is going to protect British national security?

752
00:45:28.548 --> 00:45:29.789
And that will involve Europe.

753
00:45:30.429 --> 00:45:36.093
Because if Britain's alone, it's not going to do well without Western Europe being healthy as well.

754
00:45:36.373 --> 00:45:42.157
Has this somewhat fallen at an unfortunate time because Europe is not doing the best economically at the moment?

755
00:45:42.889 --> 00:45:45.691
And there are lots of sort of internal conflicts taking place.

756
00:45:45.731 --> 00:45:49.534
I mean, I was in France yesterday and I left my hotel.

757
00:45:49.554 --> 00:45:50.315
The streets are on fire.

758
00:45:50.975 --> 00:45:55.459
At nighttime, there's balaclava people running into all the shops and smashing them to pieces.

759
00:45:55.559 --> 00:46:05.346
And, you know, then I think about the UK, you know, maybe not in a worse position, but I actually, I mean, I read just before I came out here to speak to you, I read a headline from...

760
00:46:06.247 --> 00:46:13.572
The Sunday Times that reads, this is in today's newspaper, Britain is going broke, it's just a matter of when.

761
00:46:13.913 --> 00:46:20.257
With three trillion debt and interest of 110 billion a year, the new Chancellor has little room to manoeuvre.

762
00:46:20.878 --> 00:46:21.798
From Jessica Cook.

763
00:46:22.539 --> 00:46:25.661
This is like the sentiment that is quite prevalent at the moment in Europe.

764
00:46:25.681 --> 00:46:27.322
So when you think about...

765
00:46:28.704 --> 00:46:30.867
spending money on another nation.

766
00:46:31.808 --> 00:46:33.951
You know, this is probably one there's a lot of people that are against it.

767
00:46:34.571 --> 00:46:35.613
Europe feels weak.

768
00:46:36.234 --> 00:46:36.574
Yeah.

769
00:46:37.435 --> 00:46:40.359
And here's the story for your generation.

770
00:46:40.900 --> 00:46:44.825
Because I'm going to age out of this mess, but you're going to have to live with it.

771
00:46:44.845 --> 00:46:45.366
Yeah.

772
00:46:45.626 --> 00:46:48.168
Think about the generation that's the end of World War II.

773
00:46:49.048 --> 00:46:50.069
Europe's leveled.

774
00:46:51.870 --> 00:46:54.511
Everyone's indebted right after that war.

775
00:46:55.852 --> 00:47:05.277
And that generation, within 10 years, had set up the institutional architecture that held the peace in Europe for the next three generations.

776
00:47:05.697 --> 00:47:07.578
That is quite an achievement.

777
00:47:08.459 --> 00:47:11.441
And what's going on now is history's moving really fast.

778
00:47:12.201 --> 00:47:18.346
I mean, it's just, it's like the logjam's busted, and we don't know which way it's going to go, and it's tremendously frightening.

779
00:47:18.826 --> 00:47:28.694
But on the other hand, it is a tremendous opportunity to, before the concrete sets again, for people to get moving.

780
00:47:28.714 --> 00:47:29.134
What is it?

781
00:47:29.174 --> 00:47:31.156
When the going gets tough, the tough get going.

782
00:47:31.556 --> 00:47:32.176
Get going.

783
00:47:32.316 --> 00:47:32.637
And do well.

784
00:47:32.657 --> 00:47:32.757
Yeah.

785
00:47:33.277 --> 00:47:42.360
And work on the next set of institutions that will help growth rates in Europe that have not been great, that need to be better.

786
00:47:42.420 --> 00:47:49.482
Probably part of that has to do with streamlining regulations, and then that's beyond my capabilities of understanding.

787
00:47:50.023 --> 00:47:53.884
Americans think all their problems are about immigrants coming across the border, right?

788
00:47:55.186 --> 00:47:57.209
And I'm all for having legal immigration.

789
00:47:57.269 --> 00:48:01.134
Why would you have, you know, people should have to follow rules, etc.

790
00:48:01.655 --> 00:48:03.777
You don't have to be cruel on how you expel them.

791
00:48:04.258 --> 00:48:05.620
You can do that humanely.

792
00:48:06.501 --> 00:48:07.983
Being gratuitously mean I don't see it.

793
00:48:08.444 --> 00:48:09.024
But so...

794
00:48:10.326 --> 00:48:15.611
People, well, as in Europe, identify that there's this problem that for the young, it's just hard to make it.

795
00:48:15.651 --> 00:48:16.712
What's going on here?

796
00:48:17.293 --> 00:48:20.236
And this feeling there are no opportunities and it's just hopeless.

797
00:48:20.576 --> 00:48:23.439
Okay, that's probably a correct identification of problem.

798
00:48:23.780 --> 00:48:27.703
But in the United States, I suspect the answer is not immigrants.

799
00:48:28.504 --> 00:48:30.006
It's probably our tax code.

800
00:48:30.579 --> 00:48:35.861
So tax code is what sends money one way or the other.

801
00:48:36.521 --> 00:48:40.742
It's what's going to make money available for spending things one way or the other.

802
00:48:41.042 --> 00:48:49.145
So in the United States, you've got a handful of people who've become billionaires literally over the last 15 years.

803
00:48:49.505 --> 00:48:51.166
Can't do that without the tax code.

804
00:48:52.046 --> 00:48:55.708
And then there's, I know another piece in the United States, you know, monopolies, right?

805
00:48:55.728 --> 00:49:00.810
You own all of a particular industry and then you can set prices of what you sell stuff at.

806
00:49:01.330 --> 00:49:10.794
But then there's monopsony, which means you hire such a large percentage of the workforce or in what a particular area you're at, you dictate wages.

807
00:49:11.854 --> 00:49:18.458
Well, we got problems with wages in the United States that they've been driven downwards.

808
00:49:19.859 --> 00:49:24.601
And people are working 40-hour weeks and more than that, and they can't make ends meet.

809
00:49:25.001 --> 00:49:25.962
What's going on here?

810
00:49:26.282 --> 00:49:27.303
They're being underpaid.

811
00:49:28.083 --> 00:49:32.965
And then the money is just being funneled into a handful of families' coffers.

812
00:49:32.985 --> 00:49:37.967
I think in the United States, there are apparently a thousand families that are worth a billion or better.

813
00:49:38.747 --> 00:49:39.968
It's not actually very many people.

814
00:49:40.508 --> 00:49:45.930
Because the world is different now and there's a sort of digital assets, well, at least assets that you can move digitally.

815
00:49:46.651 --> 00:49:52.233
Is it harder to use the tax code as a tool for fixing inequality?

816
00:49:52.747 --> 00:50:01.432
I mean, you'd have to talk to a tax specialist, but the U.S. tax code... That allows people to become hugely wealthy is an error.

817
00:50:01.472 --> 00:50:14.821
Well, this is where there's a missing podcast in the United States, which would be someone actually reading the tax code and breaking it, literally breaking it down into pieces and then talking the human connection of it all.

818
00:50:15.301 --> 00:50:18.363
And there's a lot of there there, but it hasn't been...

819
00:50:18.983 --> 00:50:20.444
I guess it would be too boring to read it.

820
00:50:20.464 --> 00:50:23.085
I think actually there's a lot in there.

821
00:50:24.906 --> 00:50:27.807
I have a stat here that genuinely shocked me.

822
00:50:28.107 --> 00:50:34.710
It says that sales teams spend about 50% of their time on admin and manual CRM updates rather than selling.

823
00:50:34.830 --> 00:50:36.931
That is deadly for their bottom line.

824
00:50:37.011 --> 00:50:42.493
And that is part of the reason why a decade ago at my previous company, I switched to using Pipedrive, who are our sponsor.

825
00:50:42.593 --> 00:50:52.384
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826
00:50:52.504 --> 00:50:56.749
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827
00:50:56.869 --> 00:51:02.355
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828
00:51:02.515 --> 00:51:03.936
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829
00:51:04.076 --> 00:51:10.920
It's in there to take notes so you don't need to, and it turns those notes that it takes into accurate auto-draft CRM updates.

830
00:51:11.340 --> 00:51:14.121
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831
00:51:14.221 --> 00:51:22.786
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832
00:51:23.226 --> 00:51:24.567
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833
00:51:24.827 --> 00:51:27.529
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834
00:51:27.909 --> 00:51:30.570
If you're in sales and you run a sales team, I don't think you'll regret it.

835
00:51:31.591 --> 00:51:34.873
There's this philosophical principle called Occam's razor.

836
00:51:35.033 --> 00:51:37.434
Simply put, the simplest solution is often the best one.

837
00:51:37.814 --> 00:51:41.996
And there's been plenty of times in my life where that's helped me tremendously.

838
00:51:42.216 --> 00:51:45.778
The process of following a complex solution is complex itself.

839
00:51:46.158 --> 00:51:56.923
So if you want to lose a couple of pounds, let's say, and you have a calorie tracker, you have some electronic weights, you have an AI that's coaching you every day, that's more complexity to the process of losing weight.

840
00:51:57.103 --> 00:52:01.545
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841
00:52:01.725 --> 00:52:11.129
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842
00:52:11.189 --> 00:52:16.251
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843
00:52:16.391 --> 00:52:31.846
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844
00:52:33.528 --> 00:52:34.609
The midterms are coming up.

845
00:52:34.969 --> 00:52:35.510
They are.

846
00:52:36.491 --> 00:52:39.634
For people that don't know what the midterms are, which is probably most of the world.

847
00:52:39.814 --> 00:52:39.974
Mm-hmm.

848
00:52:41.165 --> 00:52:43.547
What is the significance of the midterms and what is it?

849
00:52:43.727 --> 00:52:50.973
Well, you're electing a percentage of the U.S. Senate and all of the House of Representatives.

850
00:52:50.993 --> 00:52:53.655
The House of Representatives, each term is two years.

851
00:52:53.715 --> 00:52:57.679
Senators are six years and the Senate seats are staggered.

852
00:52:58.119 --> 00:52:58.359
Right.

853
00:52:58.379 --> 00:53:03.624
So you're doing a selection of them and then you're doing governors as well and

854
00:53:04.224 --> 00:53:05.945
So let me repeat this back to you and tell me if I've got it right.

855
00:53:06.185 --> 00:53:13.128
So essentially, in the midterms, right now Trump has power because he controls the House and the Senate.

856
00:53:13.268 --> 00:53:13.448
Yep.

857
00:53:13.668 --> 00:53:15.709
In terms of there's more Republicans than Democrats.

858
00:53:15.729 --> 00:53:16.309
And the Supreme Court.

859
00:53:16.630 --> 00:53:17.430
And the Supreme Court.

860
00:53:18.090 --> 00:53:21.812
But in the midterms, it's very likely that he will lose the Senate.

861
00:53:23.589 --> 00:53:24.250
That I don't know.

862
00:53:24.290 --> 00:53:25.650
There's much speculation.

863
00:53:25.670 --> 00:53:26.851
The polls suggest.

864
00:53:26.871 --> 00:53:31.154
The polls were originally, he might well lose the House, maybe the Senate.

865
00:53:31.194 --> 00:53:32.195
Now it looks like both.

866
00:53:32.535 --> 00:53:41.020
But then if he's going to be sending ICE agents to all the polling stations, and then people are going to walk away with the voting machines.

867
00:53:41.040 --> 00:53:43.602
And he's offering people $5,000 if they vote for Republicans.

868
00:53:43.622 --> 00:53:45.983
Well, this is called the end of the norms.

869
00:53:46.944 --> 00:53:51.607
And if Americans, it's going to be a national IQ test for the United States.

870
00:53:52.830 --> 00:53:53.653
on how they vote.

871
00:53:54.215 --> 00:53:58.489
Because every time they go to the pump, they know why their prices have gone up.

872
00:53:58.967 --> 00:54:02.569
What's sad is people often identify with party.

873
00:54:03.149 --> 00:54:04.269
Parties come and go.

874
00:54:04.669 --> 00:54:09.812
The Republican Party today isn't remotely what it was with Eisenhower or Ronald Reagan.

875
00:54:09.852 --> 00:54:10.772
It's a different party.

876
00:54:11.172 --> 00:54:12.153
It's all about one guy.

877
00:54:12.993 --> 00:54:16.334
And you should identify around what your goals are.

878
00:54:16.755 --> 00:54:21.577
And I recommend protect national security, promote prosperity.

879
00:54:22.117 --> 00:54:24.058
You can look at this war and go, it's wrecked both.

880
00:54:24.878 --> 00:54:27.160
And whether you like the guy or don't, it's his fault.

881
00:54:27.781 --> 00:54:31.484
And it's the fault of the party that has enabled him at every point.

882
00:54:31.904 --> 00:54:38.630
And Pete Hegseth, who's a major, right, it's an okay rank, but not to run the Pentagon.

883
00:54:39.050 --> 00:54:40.852
The Republican Party confirmed him.

884
00:54:41.212 --> 00:54:45.295
It was an act of supreme dereliction of duty, of doing that.

885
00:54:45.816 --> 00:54:50.119
They could have demanded another General Mattis, and we might not be in Iran today.

886
00:54:50.920 --> 00:55:00.303
And if Trump loses or the Republicans lose the midterms, essentially what it means is they're going to have to cooperate a lot with the Democrats.

887
00:55:00.403 --> 00:55:02.164
No, they're not going to cooperate.

888
00:55:02.184 --> 00:55:04.544
They've made clear they're not cooperating with Democrats.

889
00:55:05.345 --> 00:55:06.345
But to get things passed.

890
00:55:06.365 --> 00:55:07.625
That would be bipartisan.

891
00:55:07.946 --> 00:55:09.806
They've rejected being bipartisan.

892
00:55:10.967 --> 00:55:12.407
The old Republican Party, yeah.

893
00:55:12.627 --> 00:55:13.827
But how do they get things passed then?

894
00:55:13.848 --> 00:55:14.288
They won't.

895
00:55:15.008 --> 00:55:18.249
But Trump has executive power, so he can still sign executive orders.

896
00:55:18.796 --> 00:55:22.998
Yeah, and this is another thing about norms.

897
00:55:23.038 --> 00:55:27.701
He just does things and changes facts on the ground.

898
00:55:27.741 --> 00:55:32.043
If it later turns out to be illegal, he's already done the thing, right?

899
00:55:33.303 --> 00:55:37.565
There's this golf course that he cares about in Washington.

900
00:55:37.585 --> 00:55:39.466
He's cut down all the legacy trees.

901
00:55:40.227 --> 00:55:42.748
I mean, imagine, what is it, Richmond Park in London.

902
00:55:43.288 --> 00:55:47.190
Imagine someone goes in there and just levels all the 800-year-old trees.

903
00:55:48.971 --> 00:55:51.755
There's no walking that back.

904
00:55:51.855 --> 00:55:52.676
That's what he does.

905
00:55:54.178 --> 00:55:55.580
Does the West have an enemy?

906
00:55:56.381 --> 00:55:57.402
And if so, who is the enemy?

907
00:55:57.422 --> 00:55:58.804
Because we often think, oh, it's China.

908
00:55:58.844 --> 00:55:59.485
Oh, it's Russia.

909
00:55:59.525 --> 00:56:00.005
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

910
00:56:00.225 --> 00:56:00.526
It is.

911
00:56:01.447 --> 00:56:02.428
Let's forget about the West.

912
00:56:02.448 --> 00:56:03.850
Let's talk about Democratic Corps.

913
00:56:04.335 --> 00:56:05.336
Okay, what's Democratic core?

914
00:56:05.576 --> 00:56:09.939
The Democratic core in my books are the democracies.

915
00:56:10.199 --> 00:56:13.161
And so it's Western, it's through Central Europe.

916
00:56:13.682 --> 00:56:22.728
It would be Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, definitely Canada, the United States.

917
00:56:23.929 --> 00:56:24.169
No.

918
00:56:24.930 --> 00:56:27.492
I mean, we're threatening to invade Greenland.

919
00:56:27.832 --> 00:56:30.394
That does not make you the Democratic core when you do that.

920
00:56:31.614 --> 00:56:31.875
You know...

921
00:56:33.403 --> 00:56:36.658
I mean, we're threatening to make Canada our 51st state.

922
00:56:37.020 --> 00:56:37.904
Who the hell does that?

923
00:56:39.745 --> 00:56:40.965
Why do you think Trump is saying that?

924
00:56:41.125 --> 00:56:41.806
I have no idea.

925
00:56:41.826 --> 00:56:43.006
I'm not a psychiatrist.

926
00:56:43.626 --> 00:56:45.187
Well, you follow his recent speeches.

927
00:56:45.227 --> 00:56:46.087
Can you follow them?

928
00:56:46.707 --> 00:56:48.768
Well, I'm asking you because you've studied dictators.

929
00:56:48.788 --> 00:56:51.109
I haven't studied senile narcissists.

930
00:56:51.809 --> 00:56:55.550
The problem with, say, little Taiwan and China.

931
00:56:55.570 --> 00:56:57.331
It's like, why would... Look at Taiwan.

932
00:56:57.471 --> 00:57:00.292
It's like 1 250th the size of China.

933
00:57:00.312 --> 00:57:01.152
I mean, give me a break.

934
00:57:01.172 --> 00:57:02.252
It's a little teeny-pony place.

935
00:57:02.893 --> 00:57:04.253
Why does China give a damn?

936
00:57:04.273 --> 00:57:05.713
There are a bunch of Taiwanese sitting there.

937
00:57:05.753 --> 00:57:06.454
Why would you care?

938
00:57:06.474 --> 00:57:06.574
Yeah.

939
00:57:07.574 --> 00:57:13.597
It's because it's showing that you can have a vibrant democracy in a Han.

940
00:57:13.757 --> 00:57:24.161
The preponderant ethnic group of China is the Han, and their rather racist ideas were that, well, democracy is not in the Han or mutually exclusive.

941
00:57:24.201 --> 00:57:26.982
Well, the Taiwanese have proven that that's nonsense.

942
00:57:27.683 --> 00:57:32.125
And for these dictators, it's like, why not hold a fair election, boys?

943
00:57:32.625 --> 00:57:33.925
Because they wouldn't be elected.

944
00:57:34.365 --> 00:57:35.046
That's why.

945
00:57:36.007 --> 00:57:41.169
If there were fair elections, Xi Jinping would no more be the head of China, nor Vladimir Putin be the head of Russia.

946
00:57:41.909 --> 00:57:42.149
Right?

947
00:57:42.469 --> 00:57:45.391
And they regard that as the existential threat.

948
00:57:46.051 --> 00:57:50.312
On the other hand, what is it the sorts of societies that produce massive wealth?

949
00:57:50.973 --> 00:57:51.793
The democracies.

950
00:57:52.433 --> 00:57:52.773
Why?

951
00:57:53.214 --> 00:57:55.535
Because we tolerate each other.

952
00:57:56.096 --> 00:57:58.037
We give each other legal protections.

953
00:57:58.517 --> 00:58:04.221
We allow people to start their businesses and keep the fruits of what they make from these businesses.

954
00:58:05.362 --> 00:58:10.305
Whereas these other folks, if you think about when China became wealthy,

955
00:58:10.745 --> 00:58:16.730
It's when it joined the maritime rules-based order and when it was following the rules.

956
00:58:17.470 --> 00:58:19.452
Now, it hasn't done it yet.

957
00:58:20.012 --> 00:58:24.376
It can compete compounding wealth, but not if it's going to be launching some wars.

958
00:58:24.756 --> 00:58:25.436
That'll be it.

959
00:58:25.797 --> 00:58:27.058
China seems to stay out of wars.

960
00:58:27.758 --> 00:58:28.980
What do you mean with Vietnam?

961
00:58:29.080 --> 00:58:35.206
It's been a while, but China is created over a succession of wars.

962
00:58:35.667 --> 00:58:39.011
Basically, the Qing Dynasty falls in 1911, 1912.

963
00:58:39.731 --> 00:58:45.498
And then you have what's called the Warlord Period, where all the different provincial leaders are all duking it out with each other.

964
00:58:46.238 --> 00:58:55.746
And eventually that coalesces into a bilateral communist nationalist fight circa 1927.

965
00:58:56.166 --> 00:58:57.548
So all that's going on in the background.

966
00:58:57.888 --> 00:59:08.857
And then you have the United States in its infinite wisdom, the first America firsters in 1930, in response to the Great Depression, decide they're going to put huge tariffs up.

967
00:59:08.977 --> 00:59:14.942
And the economists come to President Hoomer and say, buddy, don't do it because everyone else is going to respond in kind and he does it anyway.

968
00:59:15.542 --> 00:59:17.523
And then we're into a massive trade war, right?

969
00:59:17.623 --> 00:59:18.503
America puts up tariffs.

970
00:59:18.523 --> 00:59:19.643
What do you suppose everyone's going to do?

971
00:59:19.763 --> 00:59:20.464
Put up their tariffs.

972
00:59:21.024 --> 00:59:24.765
And then you're tanking economies globally, and it deepens the Great Depression.

973
00:59:25.005 --> 00:59:28.046
So here's trade-dependent Japan going, now what?

974
00:59:28.086 --> 00:59:29.727
We always cooperated with these people.

975
00:59:29.767 --> 00:59:30.647
Now they've shut us off.

976
00:59:30.687 --> 00:59:36.909
So they decide in those days, the only solution is we need an empire large enough so that we can become self-sufficient.

977
00:59:36.929 --> 00:59:39.049
So they move into Manchuria in 1931.

978
00:59:39.069 --> 00:59:39.190
Okay.

979
00:59:40.770 --> 01:00:00.125
So the reason why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor later on is because the United States is sending aid to China, and the Japanese want us to stop, so they attacked Pearl Harbor, which in those days, Hawaii's not a state, doesn't become a state until 59, looks like it's a U.S. colony, and they thought we'd wise up and quit, but no, we doubled down, we'd come after Japan.

980
01:00:00.425 --> 01:00:01.486
So think about it.

981
01:00:01.506 --> 01:00:05.989
Massive warfare that's tearing China apart, starting right after 1911, 1912,

982
01:00:07.950 --> 01:00:10.993
continuing all the way through 1945.

983
01:00:11.013 --> 01:00:12.575
Then you have the Chinese Civil War.

984
01:00:13.295 --> 01:00:15.597
That does not end until 1949.

985
01:00:16.498 --> 01:00:22.743
And then you have all of Mao's political campaigns, anti-rightist—well, you have the Korean War.

986
01:00:22.804 --> 01:00:24.385
That's the other one from 50 to 53.

987
01:00:24.665 --> 01:00:26.387
So that's another war.

988
01:00:26.827 --> 01:00:33.053
And Deng Xiaoping does his number on Vietnam, and that is costly, and it's short and quick.

989
01:00:33.073 --> 01:00:33.573
Okay.

990
01:00:33.753 --> 01:00:41.515
And before then, there's the 62 border war with India, where Chinese trounce India and turn India into a permanent enemy.

991
01:00:41.555 --> 01:00:42.395
That was a mistake.

992
01:00:42.815 --> 01:00:48.916
Then you have anti-rightist campaigns, cultural revolution, where Mao is churning things so that he remains in power.

993
01:00:49.316 --> 01:00:53.677
Oh, and while all that's going on, you have the Great Famine, which is created by his great leap forward.

994
01:00:53.697 --> 01:00:57.358
He keeps exporting food because that's where he gets his pocket change and people are starving.

995
01:00:57.858 --> 01:01:02.139
So, after that, you think the Chinese want any more wars?

996
01:01:03.479 --> 01:01:04.300
Right?

997
01:01:04.680 --> 01:01:06.781
They want to chill out of this thing for a while.

998
01:01:06.921 --> 01:01:15.367
But basically, all those people who did all that fighting and might have a sense that maybe you don't want to do any more of that, they're all dead.

999
01:01:16.408 --> 01:01:18.409
If we continue on the direction of travel we're on now,

1000
01:01:20.157 --> 01:01:21.637
What does the future look like?

1001
01:01:21.797 --> 01:01:23.638
It looks like World War III.

1002
01:01:24.118 --> 01:01:25.599
Back to the negative objectives.

1003
01:01:25.779 --> 01:01:27.999
You've got to prevent these things from breaking out.

1004
01:01:28.439 --> 01:01:31.560
Because once they break out, look at Iran.

1005
01:01:31.920 --> 01:01:33.521
Is Donald Trump going to want to back down?

1006
01:01:33.541 --> 01:01:34.341
No.

1007
01:01:34.741 --> 01:01:36.782
He's going to want to show that somehow he's won.

1008
01:01:37.942 --> 01:01:42.824
This is a chart showing how many nuclear warheads each country has.

1009
01:01:43.305 --> 01:01:58.192
When you say that World War III could be next if we continue on this trajectory, my rebuttal is, but we now live in a nuclear-powered world where if any one of these players gets into a serious situation, they could basically wipe out life for everybody on planet Earth.

1010
01:01:58.272 --> 01:02:00.053
So does this keep us safe to some degree?

1011
01:02:00.413 --> 01:02:00.613
No.

1012
01:02:00.913 --> 01:02:02.074
Mutually assured destruction.

1013
01:02:02.094 --> 01:02:05.957
Well, Putin has already taken that little thing and flipped it over.

1014
01:02:06.538 --> 01:02:16.305
When he is threatening NATO countries, he has been violating the airspace just in the last few days, sending drones into the territorial waters.

1015
01:02:16.325 --> 01:02:17.646
I thought of Bulgaria and Romania.

1016
01:02:17.686 --> 01:02:19.307
You can correct me if I got that wrong.

1017
01:02:19.788 --> 01:02:20.969
And they were shot down there.

1018
01:02:21.369 --> 01:02:24.531
At some point, you're into Article 5 territory.

1019
01:02:24.892 --> 01:02:28.654
Europeans don't want to do it because it'll be an ever-loving mess.

1020
01:02:29.495 --> 01:02:31.957
Article 5 being NATO's.

1021
01:02:31.977 --> 01:02:35.239
Then you all go to war together.

1022
01:02:35.579 --> 01:02:38.040
That's part of NATO's treaty to defend every inch.

1023
01:02:38.060 --> 01:02:48.066
Well, that was the strength of it, is while the generation who remembered World War II, while they lived, they were really careful not to trigger that.

1024
01:02:48.927 --> 01:02:50.888
And that's not true of who we've got now.

1025
01:02:51.308 --> 01:02:54.450
If Putin invaded Poland, do you think World War III would begin?

1026
01:02:57.981 --> 01:02:58.742
Uh, yeah.

1027
01:02:59.342 --> 01:02:59.763
You think so?

1028
01:02:59.883 --> 01:03:01.644
And what would World War III look like?

1029
01:03:01.664 --> 01:03:04.386
Because my memories are all... Look, I have no idea.

1030
01:03:04.626 --> 01:03:17.016
But you can get on a nice computer program, and you can pick your megatonnage of your nuclear weapon, and then you can put it over a city of your choice, and you can look at how many people die.

1031
01:03:17.817 --> 01:03:18.697
It's obscene.

1032
01:03:19.178 --> 01:03:24.442
And this is the problem with having these dark personalities running countries.

1033
01:03:24.462 --> 01:03:24.922
Yeah.

1034
01:03:25.062 --> 01:03:27.224
Like Putin, he doesn't care how many people he kills.

1035
01:03:28.165 --> 01:03:31.027
There's a problem when people like that reach those positions.

1036
01:03:32.868 --> 01:03:33.149
Right?

1037
01:03:33.729 --> 01:03:42.616
We human beings have real trouble identifying dark personalities until they become Adolf Hitler and go, oh, whoops, there are concentration camps going on here.

1038
01:03:43.397 --> 01:03:50.643
And I think it's because most of us can't imagine wanting to inflict that kind of obscene pain on other people.

1039
01:03:51.504 --> 01:03:55.308
But you can see the consequences of putting them in power.

1040
01:03:55.849 --> 01:03:56.770
It's really ugly.

1041
01:03:57.611 --> 01:03:59.453
Trump's not going to back out of Iran.

1042
01:03:59.733 --> 01:04:03.638
It doesn't sound like Putin's going to back out of the Ukraine.

1043
01:04:04.018 --> 01:04:11.147
There is a solution for the United States is with the next Congress impeach and convict him and then just say, sweetheart, you're retired.

1044
01:04:12.002 --> 01:04:14.103
Someone else is going to have to then step into his shoes.

1045
01:04:14.263 --> 01:04:16.685
Well, yeah, but this is the problem with the pivotal error.

1046
01:04:16.985 --> 01:04:21.047
Whoever will do it will back out on really bad terms.

1047
01:04:21.708 --> 01:04:27.371
And I think the Republicans want the Democrats to do that, because then you can go blame the Democrats and said, no, it's your war.

1048
01:04:27.611 --> 01:04:30.873
In fact, on wars, look for those who start them.

1049
01:04:31.353 --> 01:04:34.555
Those are the ones you want to blame, not for those who end them.

1050
01:04:35.536 --> 01:04:37.357
How do you think history is going to remember Zelensky?

1051
01:04:38.237 --> 01:04:39.578
He's a hero for all time.

1052
01:04:42.062 --> 01:04:44.743
Oh, he's, he's, you met a great statesman.

1053
01:04:45.023 --> 01:04:46.203
There are very few of them.

1054
01:04:46.343 --> 01:04:47.023
He's one of them.

1055
01:04:47.824 --> 01:04:48.524
Yeah, think of him.

1056
01:04:48.924 --> 01:04:52.245
He could have left Ukraine, right?

1057
01:04:52.505 --> 01:04:55.046
He told me Biden called him and offered him a ride.

1058
01:04:55.226 --> 01:04:55.786
Yeah.

1059
01:04:55.966 --> 01:04:58.107
What was the famous, I don't want a ride, I want, what is it?

1060
01:04:58.507 --> 01:04:59.487
I want ammunition.

1061
01:05:00.035 --> 01:05:01.375
Yeah.

1062
01:05:01.415 --> 01:05:05.497
He's also a man who can really communicate.

1063
01:05:06.217 --> 01:05:09.538
And I cannot believe that we're not supporting him.

1064
01:05:09.838 --> 01:05:15.199
It is one of the most clear-cut wars of aggression you can possibly imagine.

1065
01:05:15.739 --> 01:05:19.340
And then the brutality with which the Russians are treating people.

1066
01:05:19.621 --> 01:05:23.722
And you've got to ask yourself, who are these people doing these sorts of things?

1067
01:05:24.922 --> 01:05:26.185
There's something wrong with them.

1068
01:05:26.205 --> 01:05:30.313
And you don't want them anywhere near the rest of Europe.

1069
01:05:32.133 --> 01:05:33.274
And I get it.

1070
01:05:33.974 --> 01:05:35.075
It's really scary.

1071
01:05:35.415 --> 01:05:36.956
But it's scary because of these people.

1072
01:05:37.457 --> 01:05:37.877
The Russians.

1073
01:05:38.037 --> 01:05:38.197
Yeah.

1074
01:05:39.078 --> 01:05:55.549
You need to get Ukraine totally on its feet and Russia to cease dropping ordinance on everybody and give them a massive timeout from the middle powers that Carney and friends are busy organizing even as we speak.

1075
01:05:57.370 --> 01:05:59.171
They've done a lot of work in the last few years.

1076
01:06:01.078 --> 01:06:01.798
And they'll do more.

1077
01:06:02.478 --> 01:06:05.799
Do you think the world is pulling away from the United States?

1078
01:06:05.839 --> 01:06:07.800
I mean, Europe and— They're fleeing.

1079
01:06:08.120 --> 01:06:10.861
So the United States takes good old Maduro.

1080
01:06:11.241 --> 01:06:12.461
So what's everyone else doing?

1081
01:06:12.982 --> 01:06:16.863
Well, when you have a heart attack like the United States can just take your leader away, what would you do?

1082
01:06:16.883 --> 01:06:21.164
You're going to counterbalance with China as the less lunatic option.

1083
01:06:21.884 --> 01:06:25.725
So here's the United States wanting to proclaim this a U.S. preserve.

1084
01:06:26.026 --> 01:06:30.447
Well, what we've done is guaranteed that these folks are going to be incredibly welcoming.

1085
01:06:30.987 --> 01:06:36.208
Isn't that a real paradox of strength, that the minute you use it, you kind of lose it in a weird way, almost?

1086
01:06:37.009 --> 01:06:37.329
Well.

1087
01:06:38.269 --> 01:06:48.592
Because then United States really flexing their power and threatening people and going into Iran and going into Venezuela has actually made everyone else feel less safe.

1088
01:06:48.612 --> 01:06:49.712
Oh, we've killed our power.

1089
01:06:50.252 --> 01:06:51.873
So they've gone and partnered with each other.

1090
01:06:51.893 --> 01:06:52.253
Yeah.

1091
01:06:52.273 --> 01:06:52.373
Yeah.

1092
01:06:53.017 --> 01:06:54.838
And actually, what do they call it?

1093
01:06:55.298 --> 01:06:56.039
Peace through strength?

1094
01:06:56.659 --> 01:06:57.460
Or strength through peace?

1095
01:06:57.480 --> 01:06:58.981
Probably strength through peace, but I don't know.

1096
01:06:59.001 --> 01:07:00.082
Something like that, yeah, where you just...

1097
01:07:00.102 --> 01:07:00.462
I don't know.

1098
01:07:00.802 --> 01:07:03.264
Everyone knows you're strong, so you don't ever have to really prove it.

1099
01:07:03.364 --> 01:07:04.965
And that's kind of what keeps up the illusion.

1100
01:07:05.405 --> 01:07:14.311
If you look at global wars, and what they are is over the nature of the world order, of whether it's going to be these continentalists ruled by dictators...

1101
01:07:15.011 --> 01:07:20.636
Who, if you lived in Russia, if someone wants your business and if they're connected, that's it.

1102
01:07:21.276 --> 01:07:22.017
They take your business.

1103
01:07:22.577 --> 01:07:25.099
It just, oh, and by the way, you're going to be put on the front lines.

1104
01:07:25.139 --> 01:07:25.800
You have no choice.

1105
01:07:25.860 --> 01:07:27.921
It's just the way it goes.

1106
01:07:27.942 --> 01:07:32.125
Or are we going to keep going with democracies?

1107
01:07:32.165 --> 01:07:35.448
And democracy is the only ones with really high per capita standards of living.

1108
01:07:36.088 --> 01:07:36.248
Right.

1109
01:07:36.448 --> 01:07:39.570
Democracies are the ones that are really capable of generating wealth.

1110
01:07:40.171 --> 01:07:41.211
It's been wonderful.

1111
01:07:41.632 --> 01:07:43.893
And then there are many things that I find appalling.

1112
01:07:44.574 --> 01:07:51.238
But as the United States is picking on immigrants, so they're worried about the one off illegal who murders someone.

1113
01:07:51.418 --> 01:07:52.199
And that's terrible.

1114
01:07:52.219 --> 01:07:52.659
I get it.

1115
01:07:53.099 --> 01:07:59.404
But I'm thinking about the tech billionaire immigrants who are now buying our elections.

1116
01:08:00.563 --> 01:08:05.628
Elon Musk has put $160 million into the state of Texas.

1117
01:08:06.650 --> 01:08:08.391
He's a dysfunctional South African.

1118
01:08:09.332 --> 01:08:11.455
What right does he have to buy our elections?

1119
01:08:11.535 --> 01:08:14.898
I used to live in Texas, and they have a saying, don't mess with Texas.

1120
01:08:15.739 --> 01:08:16.119
Really?

1121
01:08:16.180 --> 01:08:18.562
So you want Elon to be messing with you in this way?

1122
01:08:19.183 --> 01:08:20.884
And then the other ones as well.

1123
01:08:21.645 --> 01:08:26.669
There are many of the tech billionaires, not all of them, but many of them are foreign-born.

1124
01:08:26.929 --> 01:08:27.910
No problem with that.

1125
01:08:28.210 --> 01:08:29.451
No problem coming to the United States.

1126
01:08:29.851 --> 01:08:32.293
Every problem when you're trying to take down our democracy.

1127
01:08:32.833 --> 01:08:36.656
And just so you pay, you're afraid of paying higher taxes.

1128
01:08:36.996 --> 01:08:48.262
You're afraid of people regulating your media platforms so that there's some way to slow down on the lies that are going through.

1129
01:08:49.522 --> 01:08:52.384
Americans have missed it who the dangerous immigrants are.

1130
01:08:52.604 --> 01:08:55.625
There are a handful of them, and they're trying to buy our elections right now.

1131
01:08:55.985 --> 01:08:56.546
How dare they?

1132
01:08:58.346 --> 01:09:03.469
I mean, in recent weeks as well, America seemed to have turned against Zelensky and the Ukraine.

1133
01:09:03.829 --> 01:09:04.510
America didn't.

1134
01:09:04.530 --> 01:09:05.350
Donald Trump did.

1135
01:09:05.968 --> 01:09:07.089
Donald Trump has, certainly.

1136
01:09:07.149 --> 01:09:07.989
He's not America.

1137
01:09:08.550 --> 01:09:09.150
He's himself.

1138
01:09:11.752 --> 01:09:12.573
That's incredible.

1139
01:09:12.973 --> 01:09:15.094
Yeah, he's killed the U.S. legacy.

1140
01:09:15.995 --> 01:09:24.001
Wasn't he a guy who goes through serial bankruptcies and because he's rich and has lawyers, he just leaves the trash behind him and he moves forward?

1141
01:09:24.661 --> 01:09:25.662
America did vote for him.

1142
01:09:26.242 --> 01:09:32.747
Yeah, a third of America voted for him, a third of America didn't, and the other third wouldn't get off the couch.

1143
01:09:35.058 --> 01:09:36.219
They need to get off the couch.

1144
01:09:37.220 --> 01:09:39.562
And reassessment, it's not a bad thing.

1145
01:09:40.382 --> 01:09:46.568
It's sure Americans were correct that it's not working for Americans.

1146
01:09:47.309 --> 01:09:50.972
Therefore, they voted for the guy who was going to throw over the chessboard.

1147
01:09:51.453 --> 01:09:54.495
Well, it turns out that was worse than the alternatives.

1148
01:09:55.475 --> 01:09:55.735
Right.

1149
01:09:56.156 --> 01:10:00.079
And the thing is not to double down on that.

1150
01:10:00.399 --> 01:10:04.162
Like, for instance, if I buy a lousy pizza, I thought it looked really good.

1151
01:10:04.262 --> 01:10:05.664
I'm not going to go tell you it's a good pizza.

1152
01:10:05.684 --> 01:10:06.705
I'll tell you it's really lousy.

1153
01:10:06.785 --> 01:10:07.345
I bought it here.

1154
01:10:07.465 --> 01:10:08.206
Don't ever touch it.

1155
01:10:08.966 --> 01:10:16.953
OK, you do something really consequential, like you vote for someone who gets into a war that's tanked the economy and then you're you're not going to reassess.

1156
01:10:18.114 --> 01:10:18.274
Right.

1157
01:10:18.554 --> 01:10:29.078
Isn't life that as you live, you learn things like at your age, you think you've learned everything you've got to learn for the rest of your life that that everything that there is to know that in your life, you already know it right this moment.

1158
01:10:29.158 --> 01:10:29.658
Of course not.

1159
01:10:29.878 --> 01:10:30.198
Right.

1160
01:10:30.819 --> 01:10:34.300
And it'd be like death in a way if this is it.

1161
01:10:34.940 --> 01:10:39.822
And so presumably as you keep going, you'll go, oh, I used to think this, but now I think that.

1162
01:10:40.602 --> 01:10:40.962
Do you know what?

1163
01:10:41.303 --> 01:10:42.464
I'm 34 years old now.

1164
01:10:42.684 --> 01:10:43.525
I've just turned 34.

1165
01:10:43.685 --> 01:10:59.378
And I say that in part because when I sit here and I hear people like yourself who understand history better than I do, tell me that there's a danger or a threat of a World War III, there is part of me that has grown up with such privileged order that just can't imagine it.

1166
01:11:00.275 --> 01:11:00.615
Amen.

1167
01:11:01.096 --> 01:11:04.798
I can't imagine bombs flying over my head.

1168
01:11:04.958 --> 01:11:06.440
And I've just never seen it before.

1169
01:11:06.520 --> 01:11:11.723
Would you like President Zelensky's memories of the things he's had to look at?

1170
01:11:12.144 --> 01:11:12.744
Yeah, he told me.

1171
01:11:12.824 --> 01:11:14.385
Yeah, he started out like you.

1172
01:11:15.106 --> 01:11:16.607
He hadn't seen any of this either.

1173
01:11:18.180 --> 01:11:21.222
And then he doesn't have the pleasure of averting his eyes.

1174
01:11:21.742 --> 01:11:30.407
What is your message for people like me that have grown up in very sort of privileged Western lives, democratic societies, who are seeing all this stuff happen around the world now?

1175
01:11:31.007 --> 01:11:37.110
And to some degree, I guess, we're at risk of turning a blind eye because we don't know history that well.

1176
01:11:37.170 --> 01:11:41.413
And our history is a short one, and it's an orderly one.

1177
01:11:41.973 --> 01:11:43.774
And things happen, but they happen far away.

1178
01:11:45.495 --> 01:11:45.935
Well...

1179
01:11:47.607 --> 01:11:55.276
I feel like starting on an apology that what my generation is leaving you is such a mess.

1180
01:11:56.537 --> 01:11:59.581
And you're supposed to make it better for the people who come after.

1181
01:12:00.307 --> 01:12:05.648
And not all, there are many who've made it better, but currently the United States is making it a lot worse.

1182
01:12:06.228 --> 01:12:14.550
And I cannot tell you the sorrow I feel for the negative things that the United States is doing right now.

1183
01:12:15.611 --> 01:12:23.812
For young people, I urge you to read and to keep learning throughout your life, to talk to other people,

1184
01:12:31.695 --> 01:12:33.776
and vote.

1185
01:12:34.897 --> 01:12:36.318
Get out there and vote.

1186
01:12:37.379 --> 01:12:38.660
And it's your civic duty.

1187
01:12:38.920 --> 01:12:39.920
It isn't that hard.

1188
01:12:40.501 --> 01:12:43.523
You can arrange your day so you can show up and vote.

1189
01:12:44.128 --> 01:12:45.569
Do you not think there's just so much going?

1190
01:12:45.589 --> 01:12:52.634
I don't know whether this was always the case to history, but for young people these days, in part because we're so connected to the internet, we're seeing war over here in the Middle East.

1191
01:12:52.694 --> 01:12:53.975
We're seeing war in Ukraine.

1192
01:12:53.995 --> 01:12:54.736
We're seeing Iran.

1193
01:12:54.756 --> 01:12:56.077
We're seeing this- Your draft age.

1194
01:12:56.097 --> 01:12:57.558
... situation of Gaza.

1195
01:12:57.578 --> 01:13:00.520
We're seeing this thing called AI coming in and they're telling us we're going to have no bloody jobs.

1196
01:13:00.900 --> 01:13:07.087
You've got global warming over here, and they're saying everything's going to flood or burn and forest fires everywhere.

1197
01:13:07.307 --> 01:13:07.807
It's a lot.

1198
01:13:08.088 --> 01:13:09.009
Yeah, it is a lot.

1199
01:13:09.049 --> 01:13:15.055
But here's the flip is when I meet people and you've met many more people than I have with your job.

1200
01:13:15.375 --> 01:13:17.998
There are many more wonderful people all over the world.

1201
01:13:18.378 --> 01:13:21.301
The dark personality types are actually very few in number.

1202
01:13:21.321 --> 01:13:21.601
Yeah.

1203
01:13:22.502 --> 01:13:31.307
And all the rest of us, if we all do what we can in our various spheres, because we all do different things, we will get through this.

1204
01:13:31.807 --> 01:13:33.208
So I'm a retired professor.

1205
01:13:33.388 --> 01:13:34.449
What little can I do?

1206
01:13:36.029 --> 01:13:37.150
I can give you concepts.

1207
01:13:37.930 --> 01:13:39.871
Ah, disinformation.

1208
01:13:40.412 --> 01:13:41.492
That's what Putin does.

1209
01:13:41.833 --> 01:13:47.796
Then when you believe it, but don't know its lies, you're spreading misinformation.

1210
01:13:48.216 --> 01:13:49.937
So that's a problem.

1211
01:13:50.633 --> 01:13:52.855
What other concepts haven't we covered that are pertinent?

1212
01:13:53.195 --> 01:13:54.516
Oh, I know what we haven't covered.

1213
01:13:54.536 --> 01:13:55.577
All right.

1214
01:13:55.978 --> 01:13:58.960
So let's talk about tactical level.

1215
01:13:59.721 --> 01:14:00.442
Tactile.

1216
01:14:02.043 --> 01:14:08.249
Anyway, the tactical level of war would be, I got a tank.

1217
01:14:08.289 --> 01:14:10.090
It has certain capabilities, certain range.

1218
01:14:10.150 --> 01:14:11.171
It's got certain armor.

1219
01:14:11.231 --> 01:14:13.413
Certain things can take it out.

1220
01:14:13.473 --> 01:14:14.534
Oh, I love it.

1221
01:14:14.814 --> 01:14:15.675
Good little tank down here.

1222
01:14:15.715 --> 01:14:16.376
Guys in there.

1223
01:14:18.112 --> 01:14:18.672
their things.

1224
01:14:19.112 --> 01:14:19.472
Okay.

1225
01:14:19.952 --> 01:14:26.914
But then at the operational level, you're either going to fight a battle or succession of battles, which is called a campaign.

1226
01:14:27.174 --> 01:14:30.434
And then you're going to put together tank units and other different units.

1227
01:14:30.494 --> 01:14:33.415
And you're going to use, I don't know, an information campaign, whatever.

1228
01:14:34.295 --> 01:14:38.036
And it's probably to take that hill or do whatever.

1229
01:14:38.436 --> 01:14:42.417
But then there's a level that really counts, which is this one, the strategic level.

1230
01:14:42.497 --> 01:14:43.757
Like, why are you fighting in the first

1231
01:14:48.458 --> 01:14:56.644
So at the strategic level, for politicians, it should be protecting our national security and promoting national prosperity.

1232
01:14:56.664 --> 01:14:57.444
That's what it should be.

1233
01:14:58.165 --> 01:15:05.470
And in the war in Iran, you're worried about nonproliferation, except that war is incentivizing proliferation in the worst possible way.

1234
01:15:05.830 --> 01:15:08.492
And it's doing it in an incredibly costly way.

1235
01:15:08.772 --> 01:15:10.893
So here's the problem with the Republican Party.

1236
01:15:10.913 --> 01:15:11.454
Right.

1237
01:15:11.934 --> 01:15:27.345
This war and the guy who's running it and his truly incompetent administration, they have enabled him to do all these things that have, by blowing our alliance system, that's the alliance system that will protect their children and their grandchildren.

1238
01:15:27.906 --> 01:15:28.586
It's bad for them.

1239
01:15:29.107 --> 01:15:30.268
So they're at the operation.

1240
01:15:30.288 --> 01:15:34.791
So now if we're going to apply this to politics, because we're not doing war, you can have tactics.

1241
01:15:34.811 --> 01:15:34.931
Right.

1242
01:15:36.616 --> 01:15:54.462
Which might be, oh, since you were talking to President Zelensky, so one tactic, which I've described before, is when Trump had him in that Oval Office evil interview where the two native English speakers, Trump and Vance, are going after Zelensky, who must have thought it was a routine photo op, and they're trying to humiliate him in public.

1243
01:15:54.482 --> 01:15:55.022
You remember this.

1244
01:15:55.363 --> 01:15:56.983
So that would be a tactic, right?

1245
01:15:57.603 --> 01:16:01.925
Other tactics would be denying who won the election, right?

1246
01:16:02.425 --> 01:16:03.926
Joe Biden won the election.

1247
01:16:04.146 --> 01:16:05.627
The evidence is in on that.

1248
01:16:06.048 --> 01:16:07.309
All the rest of it's lies.

1249
01:16:08.089 --> 01:16:11.812
At politics, operational level, it's got to win the election.

1250
01:16:12.132 --> 01:16:15.494
So that's where the Republicans are all focused, right here.

1251
01:16:16.015 --> 01:16:20.758
They're going, if we dump the orange guy, we won't get reelected.

1252
01:16:21.519 --> 01:16:21.939
Maybe.

1253
01:16:22.599 --> 01:16:27.163
In fact, if you dump the orange guy in first term, it would have been so much better for you.

1254
01:16:27.183 --> 01:16:27.243
Oh.

1255
01:16:28.113 --> 01:16:30.454
Or better yet, don't support him in the second term.

1256
01:16:30.474 --> 01:16:31.594
Be so much better for you.

1257
01:16:31.614 --> 01:16:34.276
You'd actually have a functioning Republican Party on your hands.

1258
01:16:34.876 --> 01:16:37.957
Instead, you've killed the party and you've destroyed your children's futures.

1259
01:16:38.577 --> 01:16:39.418
Who the hell does that?

1260
01:16:39.638 --> 01:16:41.398
It's focusing on this operational level.

1261
01:16:41.618 --> 01:16:45.200
So officers, they love focusing on the operational level.

1262
01:16:45.560 --> 01:16:52.243
They want to use this to kill a lot of people and go, ah, when I kill more of your guys than you kill my guys, must mean I won.

1263
01:16:53.063 --> 01:16:54.184
oh, really, Vietnam War?

1264
01:16:54.484 --> 01:16:55.905
They took a multiple of our casualties.

1265
01:16:55.925 --> 01:16:56.585
They won that thing.

1266
01:16:56.605 --> 01:16:58.726
There's no South Vietnamese government left.

1267
01:16:59.447 --> 01:17:08.511
You know the people with this Ukraine-Russia situation that say, well, you know, NATO promised it wouldn't encroach on Russia's borders, and it came closer and closer and closer.

1268
01:17:08.551 --> 01:17:10.412
So those people might say, well, you know...

1269
01:17:10.692 --> 01:17:11.293
They do say.

1270
01:17:11.333 --> 01:17:14.274
You're repeating Putin's propaganda points.

1271
01:17:14.394 --> 01:17:14.595
Yes.

1272
01:17:14.875 --> 01:17:15.455
Yes.

1273
01:17:15.555 --> 01:17:17.496
All right.

1274
01:17:17.896 --> 01:17:19.657
Let's do the history of all of this.

1275
01:17:19.977 --> 01:17:20.578
First of all,

1276
01:17:21.438 --> 01:17:28.504
The United States didn't go around and try and strong arm everyone and say, you must join NATO, you must join NATO.

1277
01:17:28.524 --> 01:17:29.885
It was absolutely the opposite.

1278
01:17:30.425 --> 01:17:33.187
These folks were stampeding to NATO's doors.

1279
01:17:33.607 --> 01:17:34.068
Which folks?

1280
01:17:34.708 --> 01:17:36.850
Everybody who was in the Soviet bloc.

1281
01:17:37.510 --> 01:17:39.091
So Germany used to be divided.

1282
01:17:39.512 --> 01:17:42.854
But you have Poland and Czechoslovakia used to be one thing.

1283
01:17:43.215 --> 01:17:44.956
But Austria was neutral.

1284
01:17:44.976 --> 01:17:48.398
But Hungary and then Yugoslavia was bigger anyway.

1285
01:17:48.459 --> 01:17:49.219
It was all its pieces.

1286
01:17:49.499 --> 01:17:49.920
Romania.

1287
01:17:49.940 --> 01:17:50.060
Yeah.

1288
01:17:51.121 --> 01:17:51.662
Bulgaria.

1289
01:17:52.022 --> 01:17:57.270
At the end of the Cold War, all those people wanted NATO in the worst possible way.

1290
01:17:57.631 --> 01:17:57.931
Why?

1291
01:17:58.152 --> 01:18:00.155
Because they know Russia wants empire.

1292
01:18:00.255 --> 01:18:05.262
And already what Russia's doing is they're bringing in all their cadres, and

1293
01:18:05.863 --> 01:18:13.407
whom they trained during the war, and they're like Bulgarian communist expats, Romanians, Hungarians, putting them in place.

1294
01:18:13.787 --> 01:18:21.732
And then they're taking over the power ministries, which are the military, the Department of War, whatever it's called, because that determines whom you can shoot.

1295
01:18:22.332 --> 01:18:24.273
In those places, it's the interior ministry.

1296
01:18:24.293 --> 01:18:29.334
In our country, it would be the Justice Department, because that's who gets arrested, and you control the courts.

1297
01:18:30.114 --> 01:18:36.716
And then if there's an information ministry in those days, you want to control who has access to information.

1298
01:18:37.136 --> 01:18:44.678
And then also they wanted agriculture, because when you're going to collectivize and de-collectivize, that's going to determine patronage possibilities.

1299
01:18:45.079 --> 01:18:49.680
So our generals are writing back and going, they're doing all this stuff, and we can't stop them.

1300
01:18:50.420 --> 01:18:53.821
And so they do it throughout Eastern Europe.

1301
01:18:54.341 --> 01:19:03.284
They wind up doing massive purges of people who had run for other parties, murdering loads of them, murdering many leaders.

1302
01:19:03.364 --> 01:19:03.924
I'm not kidding.

1303
01:19:03.944 --> 01:19:04.964
They're murdering people.

1304
01:19:04.984 --> 01:19:06.345
They're putting people in jail forever.

1305
01:19:06.665 --> 01:19:09.206
And then they say, you have to do this communist thing.

1306
01:19:10.186 --> 01:19:11.286
And so they're stuck with it.

1307
01:19:11.706 --> 01:19:16.888
And then there are Germans who aren't too happy with it, and the Russians are beating them up at 53.

1308
01:19:17.448 --> 01:19:25.070
And then you have Hungarians saying, look, we need to do some adjustments here because the communist thing isn't working.

1309
01:19:25.230 --> 01:19:25.830
They're correct.

1310
01:19:26.250 --> 01:19:30.411
Russians send tanks, and they shoot their head of state, even though they promised they wouldn't.

1311
01:19:31.191 --> 01:19:35.238
And the Russians have never atoned for what they did and never acknowledged all of this.

1312
01:19:35.478 --> 01:19:42.108
And so now they've made up this story that you're purveying, that you get from others, that, oh, it's NATO expansion that did all of this.

1313
01:19:42.850 --> 01:19:45.754
And I think I've given you serious facts.

1314
01:19:46.455 --> 01:19:51.157
to tell you why people living in these countries were terrified of Russians.

1315
01:19:51.217 --> 01:19:52.698
They're brutal when they come in.

1316
01:19:53.438 --> 01:19:54.298
They're incompetent.

1317
01:19:55.179 --> 01:19:58.680
So I was living in the Soviet Union when it still was, 88, 89.

1318
01:19:59.260 --> 01:20:02.942
So this is early Gorbachev, but the supply system's falling apart.

1319
01:20:03.942 --> 01:20:08.643
and went into one of their grocery stores, and it had a total of 77 items.

1320
01:20:08.683 --> 01:20:15.125
And I think that compares to, I don't know, a candy rack as you're exiting some convenience store, right?

1321
01:20:15.505 --> 01:20:19.786
If you went by the meat counters, the smell from the rotting meat just about knocked you down.

1322
01:20:20.486 --> 01:20:21.646
You just avoided all of that.

1323
01:20:22.206 --> 01:20:26.647
And then occasionally they would have items called importnaya, imported, i.e.

1324
01:20:27.067 --> 01:20:33.229
anything from anywhere else is better than what we've got because you can sell it on the basis of calling it imported.

1325
01:20:34.330 --> 01:20:40.457
I was eating rotting Hungarian apples because at least they could produce apples.

1326
01:20:40.517 --> 01:20:41.579
I made applesauce.

1327
01:20:42.300 --> 01:20:44.983
Oh, it was the Romanians who made some pretty good canned tomatoes.

1328
01:20:45.664 --> 01:20:47.606
It was just incredible what the Russians couldn't do.

1329
01:20:48.555 --> 01:20:59.580
So, I mean, I think I got the evidence of why the reason these people want to be part of NATO is because of what Russia does.

1330
01:20:59.880 --> 01:21:01.500
So Russia looks at the entire world.

1331
01:21:01.801 --> 01:21:03.101
So I've talked about half-court tennis.

1332
01:21:03.121 --> 01:21:05.842
Boy, they're like half-court whatever it is up there.

1333
01:21:06.383 --> 01:21:13.926
They look at it as if everyone else is picking on us instead of, excuse me, have you ever threatened other people?

1334
01:21:14.086 --> 01:21:16.787
Have you ever done anything vaguely naughty to anybody else?

1335
01:21:18.144 --> 01:21:18.424
Right?

1336
01:21:19.405 --> 01:21:21.967
It's huge what they've done to other people.

1337
01:21:22.948 --> 01:21:26.811
And then they have the nerve to say that these people are threatening them.

1338
01:21:26.851 --> 01:21:27.171
Excuse me.

1339
01:21:27.372 --> 01:21:28.453
Look how large it is.

1340
01:21:29.233 --> 01:21:29.694
Russia, yeah.

1341
01:21:29.794 --> 01:21:31.275
Why do you need more territory?

1342
01:21:32.496 --> 01:21:34.277
Why can't you develop what you have?

1343
01:21:34.497 --> 01:21:37.940
I mean, a great example is talk about a lousy piece of real estate.

1344
01:21:38.181 --> 01:21:40.402
Let's look at the Scandinavian countries.

1345
01:21:40.923 --> 01:21:41.904
They aren't whining.

1346
01:21:41.924 --> 01:21:42.064
Right?

1347
01:21:43.021 --> 01:21:45.862
And look what they've done with their resources.

1348
01:21:46.743 --> 01:21:49.404
They're these fabulous functioning states.

1349
01:21:49.905 --> 01:21:50.925
Russia could have done that.

1350
01:21:52.086 --> 01:21:53.787
Instead, it's trying to steal things from others.

1351
01:21:55.147 --> 01:22:00.910
So for your friend, the further back you stop these people, the safer you are.

1352
01:22:01.450 --> 01:22:06.153
Also, why should Ukrainians become the slaves of their murderers?

1353
01:22:07.439 --> 01:22:07.759
Why?

1354
01:22:08.940 --> 01:22:09.240
Why?

1355
01:22:09.960 --> 01:22:14.222
What's so privileged about you and Britain that you can just sort of go, oh, well, that's great.

1356
01:22:14.683 --> 01:22:15.163
Who cares?

1357
01:22:17.284 --> 01:22:17.984
Morals matter.

1358
01:22:19.405 --> 01:22:21.346
And this is where the norms matter.

1359
01:22:21.486 --> 01:22:22.307
Honesty matters.

1360
01:22:22.627 --> 01:22:23.447
I can be wrong.

1361
01:22:23.887 --> 01:22:27.169
By all means, let me know that I'm wrong, and I'll try to square it away.

1362
01:22:30.131 --> 01:22:32.972
But hear other people out.

1363
01:22:34.385 --> 01:22:35.526
Keep doing what you're doing.

1364
01:22:36.226 --> 01:22:43.490
You need to have accurate information from many points of view so that people can come to their own conclusions.

1365
01:22:43.730 --> 01:22:51.915
What Americans have done is forgotten their core values, which are in a nasty document from your point of view, it's the Declaration of Independence.

1366
01:22:52.556 --> 01:23:03.542
But in there, it talks about the rights of life, and it's not the right to take someone else's life, but preserve your own liberty.

1367
01:23:04.283 --> 01:23:08.808
Not the liberty for me to tell you what to do, but the liberty for me to make my own choices.

1368
01:23:09.709 --> 01:23:13.333
And pursuit of happiness, not as you define it, but as I define it.

1369
01:23:13.894 --> 01:23:20.681
It appears in the last week or two, because I think it was diesel prices in particular have gone up at the pump to something like $6.00.

1370
01:23:21.742 --> 01:23:31.029
Trump has made a deal with Putin for diesel exports, in part because of his war in Iran has caused this sort of global energy change.

1371
01:23:31.069 --> 01:23:33.110
Oh, this is disinformation.

1372
01:23:33.270 --> 01:23:33.470
Really?

1373
01:23:33.650 --> 01:23:34.771
The disinformation.

1374
01:23:34.851 --> 01:23:41.956
Russia has no capacity to export diesel in sufficient quantities to make any difference whatsoever.

1375
01:23:42.536 --> 01:23:45.679
The correlation for when diesel prices go up...

1376
01:23:46.339 --> 01:23:47.640
is with the Iran War.

1377
01:23:48.460 --> 01:24:01.728
Once the Iran War hits, and it has to do with who produces what grades of oil there and what kind of refineries they have in order to refine diesel, because these refineries apparently are set up to produce certain grades of output

1378
01:24:02.248 --> 01:24:11.573
And yes, you can change a refinery to do a different grade output, but I believe you're talking millions of dollars and a certain amount of time to redo your refinery.

1379
01:24:11.953 --> 01:24:16.956
So the diesel stuff is absolutely Trump's war's fault.

1380
01:24:17.677 --> 01:24:20.398
And he's trying to blame Ukraine.

1381
01:24:21.379 --> 01:24:22.359
It's despicable.

1382
01:24:24.180 --> 01:24:25.401
As usual, he's lying.

1383
01:24:27.353 --> 01:24:30.335
And so Americans, really, you want the liar in chief.

1384
01:24:30.555 --> 01:24:31.996
How well has it worked for you?

1385
01:24:32.517 --> 01:24:37.781
Really, I mean, are your grocery prices, are they better or are they worse?

1386
01:24:38.181 --> 01:24:42.844
Are they better in the last two years or have they gotten dramatically worse in the last two years?

1387
01:24:42.864 --> 01:24:43.905
I think it's pretty obvious.

1388
01:24:44.265 --> 01:24:50.109
I was at the supermarket recently and oatmeal was like $10 for a little dumb package of it.

1389
01:24:50.129 --> 01:24:51.571
It's mind-blowing.

1390
01:24:51.591 --> 01:24:52.231
Right?

1391
01:24:52.331 --> 01:24:53.131
Just mind-boggling.

1392
01:24:53.191 --> 01:24:54.011
Thank you, Donald Trump.

1393
01:24:54.211 --> 01:25:00.393
And then tariffing all this food imports from Mexico and Canada.

1394
01:25:02.153 --> 01:25:03.594
I'm not making it up, right?

1395
01:25:04.814 --> 01:25:06.974
I haven't been—I never used to be partisan.

1396
01:25:08.435 --> 01:25:12.275
But I'm looking at the Republican Party and thinking, how can you do this?

1397
01:25:13.136 --> 01:25:14.576
It's your children, too.

1398
01:25:16.115 --> 01:25:18.657
You're wrecking the United States.

1399
01:25:19.498 --> 01:25:26.503
And you're doing it not temporarily, but you're doing it for as long as anyone who's alive at this moment and will remember it.

1400
01:25:28.825 --> 01:25:31.727
Can the Ukraine win against Russia?

1401
01:25:31.887 --> 01:25:32.187
Sure.

1402
01:25:32.207 --> 01:25:34.329
It is winning right now.

1403
01:25:35.018 --> 01:25:36.558
because it's able to defend itself.

1404
01:25:37.239 --> 01:25:48.322
Ukrainians have developed all these different kinds of drones, and I get it, Starlink's messing up with some of their interceptors, but they've been developing ballistic missiles that are going to happen rapidly.

1405
01:25:48.842 --> 01:25:59.025
And, oh, the United States, by Musk doing the kill switch on Starlink, has made it so no one's going to be, Sirius is going to be buying Starlink.

1406
01:25:59.125 --> 01:26:00.365
India was thinking of it like,

1407
01:26:00.745 --> 01:26:03.727
No, not if in the middle of the war you're going to turn it off.

1408
01:26:04.247 --> 01:26:04.728
And what is it?

1409
01:26:04.768 --> 01:26:10.491
The shares for whatever the French alternate company is, it's gone way up in the last few days.

1410
01:26:10.511 --> 01:26:12.172
You can check whether I got this right.

1411
01:26:12.672 --> 01:26:17.736
But people are looking and going, okay, so Elon, maybe short-term gain, but long-time loss on all of this.

1412
01:26:18.036 --> 01:26:27.982
And then for U.S. Patriot Missile Systems, if Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been president during the Biden administration when the second phase of the Ukraine war kicked off,

1413
01:26:28.522 --> 01:26:34.788
He would have gotten that company to mass produce it and saying, look, you're not going to be making your money on unit costs.

1414
01:26:34.808 --> 01:26:36.530
You're going to be making it on the quantity.

1415
01:26:37.051 --> 01:26:46.540
But people are saying, you know, with Trump turning his back on Zelensky and Putin being in bed with China and President Xi there, Zelensky has no chance.

1416
01:26:46.720 --> 01:26:48.961
No, that's bull.

1417
01:26:49.041 --> 01:26:53.203
No, he's developing his own missile systems.

1418
01:26:53.543 --> 01:26:57.364
Russia can't afford to replace all these refineries.

1419
01:26:57.404 --> 01:26:58.905
It's based on Western tech.

1420
01:26:59.625 --> 01:27:00.826
The oil refineries.

1421
01:27:00.866 --> 01:27:05.608
Yeah, I can't remember what percentage of the refining capacity that Russia's down to.

1422
01:27:05.668 --> 01:27:08.789
I don't know whether it's less than half now, slightly more than half.

1423
01:27:08.809 --> 01:27:10.790
You can Google it and get the data.

1424
01:27:11.190 --> 01:27:15.232
And then the Ukrainians have gone after Yandex and whatever they're...

1425
01:27:15.792 --> 01:27:20.255
They're equivalent of Google and blowing away these things.

1426
01:27:20.836 --> 01:27:24.358
Russia has lost up to 50% of its operating oil refinery capacity.

1427
01:27:24.378 --> 01:27:25.019
That's what I was telling you.

1428
01:27:25.039 --> 01:27:26.720
I didn't know because it varies, right?

1429
01:27:26.900 --> 01:27:29.562
They start fixing it, then another one gets hit.

1430
01:27:30.383 --> 01:27:34.326
And Ukraine's doing that on its lonesome.

1431
01:27:34.366 --> 01:27:37.108
No Starlink involved in that because it's over Russia's.

1432
01:27:37.628 --> 01:27:40.509
Russian territory, and they're developing stuff more rapidly.

1433
01:27:40.529 --> 01:27:41.630
And who's going to be buying all these?

1434
01:27:41.750 --> 01:27:43.970
Because they're producing more than enough of some of these things.

1435
01:27:44.391 --> 01:27:49.172
They're going to be the go-to defense supplier, because our stuff in the United States is way too expensive.

1436
01:27:49.672 --> 01:27:53.414
And this Patriots stuff, this is why it's just breathtakingly incompetent.

1437
01:27:53.674 --> 01:27:58.135
The fact that we have a shortage of these interceptors and this fighting's been going on for an end number of years.

1438
01:27:58.435 --> 01:28:05.438
Franklin Delano Roosevelt started telling people how many tens of thousands of airplanes he wanted, and people thought he was nuts.

1439
01:28:05.898 --> 01:28:07.821
And he got the businessmen around the table.

1440
01:28:07.841 --> 01:28:08.342
What do you need?

1441
01:28:08.362 --> 01:28:09.163
You're going to make it happen?

1442
01:28:09.223 --> 01:28:09.844
It happened.

1443
01:28:10.385 --> 01:28:16.573
Do you think if funding does dry up for Zelensky, external funding from Europe and from the United States?

1444
01:28:17.375 --> 01:28:18.496
I don't think it will from Europe.

1445
01:28:18.536 --> 01:28:18.736
Why?

1446
01:28:18.757 --> 01:28:22.602
Because Europe, Russia will be coming for the rest of Europe.

1447
01:28:23.367 --> 01:28:23.987
It will be coming.

1448
01:28:24.567 --> 01:28:27.408
They are on death ground, too, with Putin's little model.

1449
01:28:28.508 --> 01:28:34.569
Think about how European attitudes on security changed on a dime because of the 2022 war.

1450
01:28:35.269 --> 01:28:36.310
That hasn't changed.

1451
01:28:37.450 --> 01:28:45.851
And I don't know what—there's tremendous disinformation that good old Vlad the Bad is putting out to get people thinking that he's winning.

1452
01:28:45.911 --> 01:28:46.471
He's not.

1453
01:28:47.352 --> 01:28:48.572
He's wrecking his country.

1454
01:28:49.352 --> 01:28:54.836
So I have no idea whether his little friends will put something special in his breakfast some morning.

1455
01:28:54.876 --> 01:28:55.477
Probably not.

1456
01:28:56.538 --> 01:28:59.060
He's under enormous stress at 74.

1457
01:28:59.140 --> 01:28:59.560
I don't know.

1458
01:28:59.920 --> 01:29:01.742
I wouldn't want to be living with his stress levels.

1459
01:29:02.302 --> 01:29:03.063
Wrong age for it.

1460
01:29:04.083 --> 01:29:10.508
And alternatively, at what point do the young men at the front lines riot?

1461
01:29:11.649 --> 01:29:15.392
At what point do they take their guns and just go after their commanders?

1462
01:29:17.155 --> 01:29:20.337
I mean, we saw that almost happen, didn't we, with... Prigozhin.

1463
01:29:20.537 --> 01:29:21.138
Prigozhin, yeah.

1464
01:29:21.238 --> 01:29:21.578
Yeah.

1465
01:29:22.319 --> 01:29:23.640
At what point does that happen?

1466
01:29:24.060 --> 01:29:28.543
And also, when you think about these kids that are being sent to the front, they're only children.

1467
01:29:29.644 --> 01:29:33.526
This is not Russia and Stalin's day, the pre-birth control Russia.

1468
01:29:35.768 --> 01:29:36.489
Right?

1469
01:29:36.649 --> 01:29:39.871
These are very special young men that are going to the front.

1470
01:29:40.611 --> 01:29:41.592
They're the only ones.

1471
01:29:43.033 --> 01:29:45.635
And there's also at what point that their mothers put their foot down.

1472
01:29:47.921 --> 01:30:04.206
The economic cost of the war in Ukraine on Russia has been profound, shifting the nation's economy towards a high-risk war footing, where record defence spending consuming roughly 40% of the national budget boosts artificial GDP numbers, while draining funds from health, education, and civil infrastructure.

1473
01:30:04.666 --> 01:30:10.648
The heavy state spending coupled with acute labour shortages caused by military mobilisation and the emigration...

1474
01:30:11.368 --> 01:30:19.511
of hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals triggered persistent inflation and forced the central bank of Russia to hike interest rates above 20%.

1475
01:30:20.251 --> 01:30:37.978
Simultaneously, Russia lost its lucrative European energy export market, saw 300 billion in central bank reserves frozen by Western sanctions, and faced severe domestic fuel shortages following repeated long-range drone strikes to its oil refineries, which have caused oil refinery capacity to drop by up to 50%.

1476
01:30:38.860 --> 01:30:40.041
So that's called winning a war?

1477
01:30:40.542 --> 01:30:41.122
I don't think so.

1478
01:30:42.183 --> 01:30:43.524
They can't go on like that forever?

1479
01:30:44.225 --> 01:30:46.867
No, they can't.

1480
01:30:47.388 --> 01:30:51.852
But as long as Vladimir Putin lives, he will keep doing it.

1481
01:30:52.412 --> 01:30:56.176
And apparently his cronies there are going to go down with the ship.

1482
01:30:56.696 --> 01:30:57.697
The off-ramp would be...

1483
01:30:59.078 --> 01:31:10.033
for the West under the table to offer them something like a safe passage out with however many billions they need in return for giving Vladimir Putin a retirement plan.

1484
01:31:11.334 --> 01:31:12.015
Who is our enemy?

1485
01:31:12.436 --> 01:31:13.237
The continentalists.

1486
01:31:13.818 --> 01:31:14.799
So China and Russia?

1487
01:31:14.819 --> 01:31:14.919
Yeah.

1488
01:31:15.857 --> 01:31:16.457
United States.

1489
01:31:16.958 --> 01:31:18.459
Donald Trump is what the future is.

1490
01:31:18.519 --> 01:31:18.759
Yeah.

1491
01:31:19.099 --> 01:31:31.028
I mean, telling Canada we're going to take them over, it's either a really bad joke, which I don't think it is, or it's actually where Donald Trump lives.

1492
01:31:32.633 --> 01:31:36.618
And we have a Republican party that hasn't thrown them out of office for doing that.

1493
01:31:37.399 --> 01:31:40.483
So democracy, what is it?

1494
01:31:41.084 --> 01:31:49.695
I think it's apocryphal, but it's a pretty good one, of Churchill that democracy is the worst system of government except for all the alternatives.

1495
01:31:50.275 --> 01:32:05.059
Because it's messy, and you're arguing all the time, and the people like Xi Jinping will think, oh, no, we're superior because we've got this orderly thing, except you guys double down on poor decisions, and you keep doing the same thing, and the longer you do it, the worse it gets.

1496
01:32:05.599 --> 01:32:10.001
And the young in China are not happy with the way things are.

1497
01:32:10.281 --> 01:32:17.803
The much better thing is really multi-party system, accept the outcome of elections, try harder the next time, and...

1498
01:32:19.887 --> 01:32:31.755
allow people have try to keep developing fairer and fairer laws and rules is it possible for russia to have a democratic leader do you think after putin

1499
01:32:33.012 --> 01:32:33.993
Not anytime soon.

1500
01:32:34.313 --> 01:32:37.794
I think the story is that Russians today are actually for the war.

1501
01:32:38.395 --> 01:32:42.957
I've never heard that there are a bunch of Russians who think that they shouldn't own Ukraine.

1502
01:32:43.337 --> 01:32:52.402
I've never heard that there's Russians who think that the costs of the war they don't like, and they don't want to lose children in Ukraine.

1503
01:32:53.022 --> 01:32:58.665
But I've never heard that Russians think it's a bad idea to take Ukraine.

1504
01:32:58.685 --> 01:33:01.567
So what happens when Putin dies?

1505
01:33:02.727 --> 01:33:03.948
What is the system in Russia?

1506
01:33:04.349 --> 01:33:06.290
Is there an election, a democratic election?

1507
01:33:06.350 --> 01:33:07.311
Is it... Give me a break.

1508
01:33:07.491 --> 01:33:09.113
No, it's a free for all.

1509
01:33:09.593 --> 01:33:10.013
Think about it.

1510
01:33:10.273 --> 01:33:11.915
How do you have a democratic election?

1511
01:33:12.555 --> 01:33:15.178
You have all these institutions for how the votes are counted.

1512
01:33:15.238 --> 01:33:17.479
And look at the United States.

1513
01:33:17.920 --> 01:33:18.861
We're having trouble.

1514
01:33:18.901 --> 01:33:22.884
We have these deeply embedded democratic institutions.

1515
01:33:22.944 --> 01:33:23.504
And now we're

1516
01:33:24.625 --> 01:33:27.186
wondering about who's going to be fiddling around with the counting.

1517
01:33:28.147 --> 01:33:32.008
So Russia's got none of that.

1518
01:33:32.208 --> 01:33:34.429
Putin's really good at doctoring his elections.

1519
01:33:34.889 --> 01:33:36.770
So no, you're going to have, so he dies.

1520
01:33:36.790 --> 01:33:38.271
All right, how to think about this?

1521
01:33:39.211 --> 01:33:41.212
Think of him like a family tree.

1522
01:33:41.292 --> 01:33:44.393
There's Vlad the Bad up top, or he's sort of like a mafia don.

1523
01:33:44.793 --> 01:33:47.534
And then he has his consigliere underneath him, right?

1524
01:33:47.915 --> 01:33:50.476
And then they've got their consigliere underneath him.

1525
01:33:50.876 --> 01:33:52.817
And so there's this whole network.

1526
01:33:53.077 --> 01:34:00.161
So when he dies, he's gone, and then it's which one of these guys, or is it someone from over here, who's going to take over?

1527
01:34:00.561 --> 01:34:01.041
And you know what?

1528
01:34:01.301 --> 01:34:03.722
They don't know either, right?

1529
01:34:04.223 --> 01:34:06.444
And it's a massive free-for-all.

1530
01:34:06.744 --> 01:34:11.086
And now we've got a lot of Russians with military training, which wasn't the case before.

1531
01:34:11.766 --> 01:34:13.447
And whom are they going to line up with?

1532
01:34:13.598 --> 01:34:16.019
So there might be a bit of a civil war?

1533
01:34:16.099 --> 01:34:16.699
Possible.

1534
01:34:17.439 --> 01:34:18.000
Unknown.

1535
01:34:18.360 --> 01:34:21.301
But what it means is profound instability.

1536
01:34:21.721 --> 01:34:23.802
And then it's a Humpty Dumpty situation.

1537
01:34:23.822 --> 01:34:26.103
It takes a while to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

1538
01:34:26.343 --> 01:34:32.845
That's where I think in terms of these dictatorships, depending how bad the shatter is, it'll take longer to put it together.

1539
01:34:32.865 --> 01:34:34.586
But I'm going to make up a number and say 10 years.

1540
01:34:35.326 --> 01:34:40.613
So the Democratic Corps should have a plan for when various dictators die.

1541
01:34:40.633 --> 01:34:41.954
It's why you have a war plan.

1542
01:34:41.974 --> 01:34:49.082
You just have them on the shelf so that when the unexpected event finally happens on the day you never knew, you've got at least some previous thinking.

1543
01:34:49.122 --> 01:34:52.546
And then you have got something to start, like a first draft where you adjust it.

1544
01:34:52.827 --> 01:34:54.469
But we ought to be thinking in these terms.

1545
01:34:54.809 --> 01:34:55.490
It could be worse.

1546
01:34:56.821 --> 01:34:59.923
As in someone else could go in there that's even more... Oh, you could have loose nukes.

1547
01:35:00.204 --> 01:35:04.287
That was the fear at the breakup of the Soviet Union.

1548
01:35:04.307 --> 01:35:16.135
There's all these loose nukes, and that was one of the reasons they were taken away from Ukraine, and Ukraine was willing to have it taken away because we promised to protect them, and we broke that promise.

1549
01:35:16.996 --> 01:35:17.957
That's a problem.

1550
01:35:18.437 --> 01:35:26.500
Because if you want to be a big boy on the block, if your promises mean nothing, I mean, this is where Trump's having trouble with leverage over Ukraine.

1551
01:35:26.841 --> 01:35:32.643
Since they know that he's sold them out and he's always going to sell them out, it means he has no leverage over them.

1552
01:35:33.444 --> 01:35:33.844
It's over.

1553
01:35:35.563 --> 01:35:43.024
It was back to your comment about power, that the best strategies, the ones that really work, are win-win.

1554
01:35:43.604 --> 01:35:47.165
So that you get something out of it, I get something out of it, so of course we'll do it.

1555
01:35:47.565 --> 01:35:51.446
And that's why the maritime order is strong.

1556
01:35:51.846 --> 01:35:55.166
If it's a win-win, everyone plays well together.

1557
01:35:55.766 --> 01:36:04.468
And you look at Europe, each country's been ponying up to help Ukraine, one at a time, and sometimes together.

1558
01:36:05.496 --> 01:36:10.679
What is the most important thing that's happening in the world at the moment that we haven't talked about, Dr. Sarah Payne?

1559
01:36:10.939 --> 01:36:12.900
Wars are negative sum.

1560
01:36:13.581 --> 01:36:17.143
They destroy wealth incredibly rapidly.

1561
01:36:18.123 --> 01:36:23.927
The only infinite game positive sum world order is a maritime.

1562
01:36:23.987 --> 01:36:28.809
It's maritime because, what is it, 90% of the world's trade goes by these oceans.

1563
01:36:28.829 --> 01:36:32.672
This is how you, the world's original network that reaches everything are these seas.

1564
01:36:32.712 --> 01:36:32.852
Right.

1565
01:36:33.392 --> 01:36:33.652
Right?

1566
01:36:34.353 --> 01:36:41.539
Containership will take 21,000 containers, whereas a choo-choo train, I don't know, 600 containers if you're lucky.

1567
01:36:42.139 --> 01:36:44.041
Yeah, this is the efficient way to get things around.

1568
01:36:44.781 --> 01:36:51.186
As flawed as international institutions are, they are the feasible thing that avoid this.

1569
01:36:51.206 --> 01:36:53.929
If you get into this, it's all over.

1570
01:36:54.529 --> 01:36:56.831
So better to build institutions.

1571
01:36:57.131 --> 01:37:01.494
And if you can't reform the UN to make it better, then you create a parallel institution.

1572
01:37:01.874 --> 01:37:06.678
And then your government gradually says, hey, we're no longer doing the office in New York City.

1573
01:37:07.138 --> 01:37:08.739
We're moving to whatever this new one is.

1574
01:37:08.759 --> 01:37:10.541
All right, you care about Uyghurs?

1575
01:37:10.761 --> 01:37:13.903
This is the Chinese practicing genocide.

1576
01:37:14.704 --> 01:37:17.546
When Xi Jinping came to power in 2012,

1577
01:37:19.887 --> 01:37:25.110
By the next year, he was summoning his experts on the Soviet Union to say, well, what happened?

1578
01:37:25.150 --> 01:37:30.133
Because the last thing the Communist Party of China wanted is to go the way of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

1579
01:37:30.833 --> 01:37:37.296
And what they told him is that the Soviet Union had been organized on the basis of ethnicity.

1580
01:37:37.577 --> 01:37:43.940
And what the Russians had always had a Russian who ran each of these places and the ministries and things within them was,

1581
01:37:44.280 --> 01:37:47.182
But then the number two would be the token number two.

1582
01:37:47.683 --> 01:37:51.426
And then they would sponsor all kinds of dictionaries in the Uzbek language.

1583
01:37:51.446 --> 01:37:54.488
And you could do your folk dances and your embroidery and all that stuff.

1584
01:37:55.189 --> 01:37:57.650
And while the Soviet Union was holding it together, it looked great.

1585
01:37:58.111 --> 01:38:02.774
But when it shattered, it meant it was really easy for it to shatter on these ethnic lines.

1586
01:38:04.155 --> 01:38:08.499
And Xi Jinping, I suspect that explains his genocide of all the Muslims.

1587
01:38:09.420 --> 01:38:19.148
And the Uyghurs, what he's done is he's put the men into concentration camps, the children into what this country used to do to Native American children.

1588
01:38:19.548 --> 01:38:24.352
It's terrible putting them under these schools where you're—it's cultural genocide.

1589
01:38:24.553 --> 01:38:27.055
You're bringing them up to be like honorary white people.

1590
01:38:27.916 --> 01:38:30.699
And so they're bringing up these kids to be honorary Han.

1591
01:38:31.019 --> 01:38:38.308
And then the women, I don't know, white slavery, whatever it is, because China's got a shortage of women of childbearing age.

1592
01:38:40.751 --> 01:38:42.493
You've written so many fantastic books.

1593
01:38:42.513 --> 01:38:43.474
I've got several of them here.

1594
01:38:44.215 --> 01:38:48.917
I'm going to link everybody to your lectures online, the full-length lectures online.

1595
01:38:48.937 --> 01:38:54.859
So if you're listening right now, you can see a link below to Sarah's full-length lectures, or 14 of them.

1596
01:38:55.259 --> 01:38:56.659
No, there are seven.

1597
01:38:56.859 --> 01:38:59.160
Well, there are other things that people have posted.

1598
01:38:59.560 --> 01:39:02.261
It would be the Sarah Payne Lecture Series.

1599
01:39:02.301 --> 01:39:04.362
And you can see the logos on top.

1600
01:39:04.602 --> 01:39:06.083
They have this kind of look to them.

1601
01:39:06.523 --> 01:39:10.124
And they start with zero, and then they go one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

1602
01:39:10.204 --> 01:39:11.285
And then there's finale.

1603
01:39:11.365 --> 01:39:12.365
So there are nine total.

1604
01:39:12.842 --> 01:39:17.547
What an interesting time to be someone who has your experience in education.

1605
01:39:18.688 --> 01:39:19.349
How does that feel?

1606
01:39:19.409 --> 01:39:22.432
I mean, you studied this your whole life, and now it's the topic of conversation.

1607
01:39:22.452 --> 01:39:27.958
Well, when I was a little younger than you, I thought I want to learn about Russia and China.

1608
01:39:28.478 --> 01:39:28.578
Why?

1609
01:39:28.598 --> 01:39:30.020
It'll take me a long time.

1610
01:39:30.560 --> 01:39:31.061
Why did you care?

1611
01:39:31.958 --> 01:39:34.362
Oh, because I'm born in 57.

1612
01:39:34.402 --> 01:39:37.026
That's the year Sputnik went up.

1613
01:39:37.266 --> 01:39:38.068
Sputnik being rocket.

1614
01:39:38.108 --> 01:39:43.636
Yeah, this satellite where the Russians put a little dog, who was on a one-way trip.

1615
01:39:44.738 --> 01:39:44.898
Yeah.

1616
01:39:45.158 --> 01:39:47.259
I sent Laika up there.

1617
01:39:48.539 --> 01:39:54.982
And the United States was terrified because this meant that the Russians could eventually have ballistic missiles coming after us.

1618
01:39:55.703 --> 01:39:57.263
And we were behind on all that.

1619
01:39:57.283 --> 01:40:03.466
And that's when the Cold War—so you can pick your year when you think the height of the Cold War would be, but that might be one of them.

1620
01:40:03.806 --> 01:40:05.467
So that's the year I'm born.

1621
01:40:05.527 --> 01:40:07.368
And I grew up where everyone's talking about—

1622
01:40:08.228 --> 01:40:19.277
Russia being the evil empire and curious about that and growing up as a little kid during the Vietnam War and then watching that unfold poorly.

1623
01:40:19.738 --> 01:40:22.200
And I thought, well, I want to learn more about this.

1624
01:40:22.640 --> 01:40:27.364
Dr. Sarah Payne, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they're leaving it for.

1625
01:40:28.145 --> 01:40:31.728
And the question left for you is, what makes you emotional?

1626
01:40:33.009 --> 01:40:34.250
What makes me emotional?

1627
01:40:40.207 --> 01:40:47.630
watching sorrow, watching other people suffering, watching children suffering?

1628
01:40:48.951 --> 01:40:49.611
Why should they?

1629
01:40:51.292 --> 01:40:56.033
We have adults that are willing to allow tremendous numbers of children to suffer.

1630
01:40:57.194 --> 01:41:04.577
Like, go back to the Republicans, you need to make it better for children, for the generations that follow.

1631
01:41:06.015 --> 01:41:07.596
So you lose the next election.

1632
01:41:07.896 --> 01:41:08.776
Do the right thing.

1633
01:41:09.696 --> 01:41:11.377
It's past do.

1634
01:41:12.597 --> 01:41:14.118
Don't support Continentalists.

1635
01:41:15.438 --> 01:41:18.740
And I'll say it over and over again.

1636
01:41:19.260 --> 01:41:22.421
What is more important than the generations that follow?

1637
01:41:23.661 --> 01:41:24.042
Nothing.

1638
01:41:25.782 --> 01:41:28.543
So do something for them instead of grifting.

1639
01:41:30.344 --> 01:41:32.144
Dr. Sarah Payne, thank you so much.

1640
01:41:32.485 --> 01:41:33.585
Thank you for having me.