Iran War Expert: "They Want America to Destroy Itself!" Young Men Will Be Trapped | Robert Pape

- Today's guest is an expert on warfare, political violence, and the collapse of empires. - Ron, I believe, their number one objective is to damage America economically. We've taken on the most difficult country to beat since Germany and World War II. - A political science professor at the University of Chicago, he's taught generals now running the Iran War and advised every U.S. president since 9/11. - What we're coming to are the most dangerous elections in our lifetimes, 40 million American adults believe the use of force is justified to remove Trump from the presidency. Republicans may never win another election. In this episode, we'll break down the simulation he's been running for 20 years that predicted this war, expose the trap pulling America deeper into a fight we might not win. And question, if the most powerful empire in human history is one wrong move away from total collapse. - I'm 24, American man, will I get drafted to this war? Professor Robert Pape, welcome to the Jack No podcast. - Thanks Jack, thanks for having me. It's really, I've done a lot of podcasts, but yours is really particularly an exciting opportunity for me, really is an honor. I'll start it off here saying a lot of my audience is young men, many of which have never voted, likely couldn't find a run on a map a year ago. - Why do you think young men should care about the war on a run? - They should care because this is the conflict that will, the international conflict that will affect their futures more than the conflicts since 9/11, so we had two forever wars after 9/11, we had this forever war in Afghanistan, forever war in Iraq, and that did affect some small subset of America's males of their futures. But that was purely through voluntary induction and volunteering to go into the military. And for most Americans, and this is most males in America, the economy was not racked. This did not really have a big effect on jobs, for example. And so unless they chose specifically to go into the military, which was again, relatively small segment here, the impact on this of those wars was not really, was not gonna change their life, it just didn't change their life. Now for those who did serve, it many changed their life. We had between the 6,600 killed as in the military, that's double the number we lost on 9/11, just to be clear. And we have tens of thousands who are badly wounded for the rest of their lives. They've survived, but it's real. The amount of personal injury here was quite serious. Now this war, so far, have very little personal injury to those that serve. That may or may not continue. I think this war is going on long enough, that may actually change. But the one thing that is happening already is the economic consequences. And these economic consequences are gonna be felt first and foremost by the youngest in our country. And that's definitely going to be affecting young men. That's gonna have significant effects in whether guys who are, say, 18, who don't wanna go to college decide they wanna get a job, this gonna be much more difficult. Right now, just today, yesterday, Jack, the unemployment rate is 4.3%. If we can keep it under 7% by the end of the year, we're doing fantastic. As time goes on, it could become even worse than that. Inflation is also likely to go up tremendously over the next six to eight months. This is gonna impact people who are 18 years old. Now then, there's also folks who are gonna say, well, okay, so I won't get a job. What I'm gonna do is I wanna go to college, either get an associate's degree or get a bachelor's degree. Well, here, the problem is colleges, we're already getting hurt economically because there's a big battle with the Trump administration and universities, but now what's gonna happen, with the economic fall out of the war, those universities are gonna lose funds even more. What that means is the offers to have tuition relief, some sort of various forms of scholarships. These will be shrinking over time. And they'll be shrinking right for the people we're talking to here on this podcast. Then, though, you have another factor here. Universities in the last 30 years have gone to international students in droves to cover full freight that is to get them to pay the full costs. Well, with the Trump war on universities, this is having a dramatic effect on the international students. And I know 'cause I teach international relations at the University of Chicago. I was just in China last June. So what you're getting is you're getting the shrinkage of that pool. So what that means is that the need for the American students to pay higher freight, maybe not quite still full freight, is going up. So the price of this is going up, that was before the Iran war, okay? So this is what they're really, these are the real pressures here. They're gonna come to bear. And why a lot of folks are now just giving me the third pressure 'cause I see this idea, I've spent like four hours last night with 45 students who are all 21 to 23 years old talking about various things, but AI. So now there's the idea, well, wait a minute. Okay, so now I'm gonna take out all this debt and it's gonna get worse with the Iran war. And when I get out, I'm gonna have even less chance of getting a job and an unemployment rate might already be Professor Pave saying, "Going up significantly." And that's not even taking AI into account. So these are the real challenges, the reasons why the last thing 16 to 22-year-olds want is this Iran war. Taking on Iran, we've taken on the most difficult country to beat since Germany in World War II. Or maybe the Soviet, say the Soviet Union. Okay, but Iran wasn't a great power like Germany. It wasn't a great power like the Soviet Union. We're making Iran a major power as we go forward. But this was the biggest one. Much more difficult than Vietnam. Much more difficult than Iraq. Much more difficult than Afghanistan. And so the consequences of taking on that much more dangerous difficult foe are gonna be with us really significantly longer. This is not just going away. We don't have an easy out over the next few weeks. Are we spending like, what is it, 500 million a day? It's probably one to two billion a day. Now, with the funny account, the phony, so at the moment, I don't trust any of the accounting coming out of the administration. So when I look at what is likely the cost of this war, about two weeks into the war, the Trump administration went to Congress to get an extra 200 billion to cover the next six months of the war, 200 billion for about 180 days. And I think that's probably as good as you're gonna get as what the best accounting is until we go through several years. Two or three years from now, we'll probably get 80, 90% clarity on that accounting. We may never get 100% clarity. But in the middle of this war where we're failing strategically, I mean, it's a disaster of the first order. The last thing that's gonna happen is direct honest accounting where the administration is gonna come forward and say, okay, let's really release all this when Trump came in. The very first thing he did and Doge did was get rid of all of the accounts, so to speak. Rather than continue them and rather than just say, oh, well, we just need our own political appointees. No, no, they just zeroed out the offices altogether. So what that means is the umpires, so to speak, have been removed from the game. So it's like playing a baseball game without umpires on the field, you're expecting the players now to call balls and strikes and whether who got tagged out at first or not, you don't really have the umpires anymore. No one's making sure we have enough money, essentially. Well, that's right. And with our debt situation, $40 trillion in climbing, the last thing we need is a war that is gonna be a global in nature of an economic nature. What I'm saying is you're gonna have a global crush of the economy because we're not in the good position economically to withstand that. When do you predict that would happen by? It doesn't work that way, Jack. So having or what would be an indicator? Oh, the bond rates. Oh, you'll see it coming with the bond rates. So the first thing people look at to try to understand the health of the economy is to look at the stock market. Well, it's really important to know, though, that only half of the adults population has any money in the stock market at all. And 80% of the stock markets value is held by 10% of the adults. 10% of the adults. These are basically rich people at the casino table, okay? So for everybody else, you may want to be that rich person at the casino table. I can certainly see you're 16. I want to get there. I want to be in that 10% or even better than that. But the fact is it's a measure of the money that's sloshing around to investing companies and a much better sense of the health of the of the country are interest rates. Things that are boring. You don't even see them reported very often. You have these bubbles in the stock market that burst here. The interest rates are the leading indicator. And when those interest rates start to go up here, it's a it's a serious problem because what that means in ordinary people's languages, when you borrow money from like your folks here and they don't charge interest rate usually. When you borrow from a bank, they charge interest rate. Well, these bonds that I'm talking about, this is the government borrowing the money. So they got to pay that interest rate. And those interest rates go up. You lose a lot of your money right real quick. How many years or months would the war have to go on before you think that would be pretty likely? A good benchmark here is 1973-74 because that's when there was an oil embargo on the United States, on the world essentially from these countries in an organization called OPEC. It's the group of oil producing countries. Saudi Arabia is the biggest in OPEC. And what they did is they were really angry about America supporting Israel in the 1973 war between Israel and the Arab countries. And so these are mostly Arab states in OPEC. They decide to cut off oil. That's a pretty big deal. And they kept it off for 151 days. That was only 6% of world supply. Hormuz today is 20%. But they kept it off for 151 days. That is what led to the doubling of inflation, the doubling of unemployment within 12 months. And over the next 6 to 8 years, interest rates of today, the interest rate on a home is a little over 6%. In the 1970s, it was 16%. That came as a ripple effect, a wave effect of that 151 days. But where we are today is around a 70, just to put it in perspective. If we get to say July, August, and there's been no real change here, and that is completely plausible. So in the short term, Jack, this looks like $5 gas. In July, maybe we're talking about 650 gas. And people will then start to notice unemployment going up. Because as you have the gas prices go up, you have to lay off people. You're not just paying more money. You're literally going to be laying off people. Because a lot of industries can't afford that. The airplanes are the leading case of that. They're always the leading indicator because jet fuel is so expensive. So do you think with what's happening right now? About six months to a 12 months is when you can have a gigantic problem. And that's why we need to try to do something within that period of time. So do you think with what's happening now, do you think Iran is trying to destroy the US dollar? All right, so imagine you need relationship advice. And you ask your friend who hasn't been on a date since COVID and has three matches on his dating apps, even after paying for premium. Like, how would you do that? There's a reason you wouldn't ask that guy to handle your love life. Just like there's a reason Morgan and Morgan is America's largest injury law firm. Not all law firms are the same. Hire the wrong one and you might be beat before you even start. Morgan and Morgan has been fighting for the people for over 35 years. They've recovered over 30 billion dollars for their clients. And hiring them is like hiring your own army to go into battle for you. They've got more than a thousand lawyers in a hundred offices nationwide. If you're injured by someone else's negligence, you deserve to be paid. And their fee is free unless you win. So if you're ever injured, you can check out Morgan and Morgan. For more information, you can go to ForThePeople.com/JackNeil and see if you have a case. Again, that's ForThePeople.com/JackNeil. But anyway, guys, back to the podcast. It's probably trying to do that more directly. My assessment is the way they're thinking about it is what can they do to destroy the Trump presidency. So if you look at it from a security, like let's say I'm the national security advisor of Iran. And what is my number one problem? Well, my number one problem is not the blockade and it's not even the bombing that's already happened. The number one problem is for the last several years Israel and the United States have bombed me and bombed me extensively just whenever they felt like it. They've killed my negotiator. So instead of, you know, I might say I'll have a negotiating track with them. But twice now when Iran has been negotiating a deal with President Trump, the Israelis have literally used the tactical intelligence of where those diplomats will be to kill them. If you're looking at this from Iran's perspective at all, how are you going to stop that? How do you get yourself out of a situation where Trump was trying to close the negotiation with the negotiator in three days before he was about to sign it. The Israel military killed the guy in June. We had what was called the 12-day war. Well, that was started when Israel decided that they would take advantage of knowing where the Iran negotiators were going to be. And so the the fact is Trump was going to meet with them and he can't. He couldn't because they were killed. They were literally killed. But what that shows you is that when you're when you're thinking about this from Iran's perspective, well, you can talk about negotiations, but that's a giant question mark at every single stage. So what do you do to deter, prevent, stop, or diminish the risk of future attacks by the United States and Israel? You would like to wreck the Trump administration, not that he would be removed from office. In fact, you want him badly hobbled. You want him discombobulated. You want him where there's many internal problems that are just consuming his every waking moment. You don't really, if you're Iran actually want him replaced with a more effective leader, that would not that would not suit your goals. So you're really are in a situation where Iran, I believe their number one objective is to wreck the Trump administration politically in the United States. And then let it stay there for another two years here in a hobbled state. And does that mean that America will never attack you? No. But it probably gives you as much protection as anything else you're going to do. And then you can also see right away, Jack, why the odds that you're going to want to surrender like your control of war moves. This is just very unlikely. I mean, if you give war moves back and we go back to the status quo, Annie, like the Trump administration is saying, well, then why isn't the Trump administration a few months later just going to go and start up the war again on some other grounds? Now, part of what that means then to hurt the Trump administration politically is to damage America economically. It's also when the more you damage the world economically right now, the blame is going directly on Trump. So who is Europe most mad at? Who's merits the leader of Germany? Who are they most mad at right now for the economic problems and all the problems they're facing here? It's actually not Iran. It's Trump. It's or America. It's actually even bigger. It's bigger than Trump now. They just blame America because America's real elected Trump elected them twice. So this isn't even just a Trump problem from the Europeans' perspective. This is America who's really the blame. And without America, then they think Israel wouldn't have done the bombing. So yes, they would blame Israel too. But it's really America who's getting the lion's share of the blame. And that's true for Asia as well. That's true for Japan as well. So it's not just our allies are not rushing to come to our aid or an aid of the Trump administration's bad war with throwing their assets into a bad plan. They're just seeing Trump as the cause of the problem. And it's America who's underneath that because we elected the guy twice. So you add all this up. And Iran doesn't have incentives to fix the economic problem for the world. They have incentives to let it ride probably at least another four or six months. Maybe by the time we get into January of next year, the world will stop blaming America. in Israel maybe it'll start blaming Iran more but it's going to take time to do that because so much anger has already come out here and it's so obvious that the war would not have started if Trump had not given the green light to Israel and then we jumped in on February 28th. There's just no plausible story to spin. Iran was not about to attack the straight-of-formos. There's no plausible pretext here, you see what I mean. So this is why Iran is gaining power. It is hurting the world's economy by gaining that control of hormones which is then fragmenting America's allies in the Gulf with Kuwait Saudi Arabia now just this week telling us they really don't want to use us using their airspace anymore here because that means we they're getting hurt so their survival's going down just to give people an idea that are unfamiliar. Brief breakdown on straight-of-formos, why it's important and I want to ask you about Xi Jinping's meeting with Trump and what kind of that will be about. Iran is on the north eastern side of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf states on the other side and what you see right away with this waterway is a very narrow wastes around this area called Hormuz. Then you will say oh my god you mean 20% of the world's energy. That's 20% of the world's oil, 30% of the world's natural gas. There's other things like 30% of the world's fertilizer. That'll come through that little narrow wastes, that little bitty space and you can see right away. Boy if if Iran's mad why don't they just grab it. Okay. What was the thing that triggered them closing it? So in the 1930s is when oil was discovered in the Persian Gulf. Saudi Arabia was the first 1938 and once you've discovered the one in Saudi Arabia then it was quick soon after that you discovered oh Iraq has a puddle of oil. Iran has a puddle of oil and so does Kuwait. Those are the four big puddles of oil in this area and they're all like a horseshoe man around Hormuz. So what happened was Iran has always been we've had concerns for decades that Iran would in a military conflict close the straight of Hormuz. So because Iran used to be run by the Shah of Iran who was an American puppet we helped install him in the 50s then got toppled in 79 that's the revolution we hear about here and well since 1979 there's been a huge concern that Iran might close the straight of Hormuz if there was a conflict and so what does that mean if you're in the Pentagon you've got to think about well what are my priorities here what are the dangerous things I need contingency plans on and the number one is going to be Hormuz. If you wanted to crash the global economy or maybe the US economy like is there any one action that would do more damage than keeping the straight of Hormuz permanently closed. Now there are some other choke points just so you know there's a straight call the straight of Malakah here nowhere near as big as what and there are lots of ways around the straight of Malakah here with the straight of Hormuz. The problem is so it's literally a horseshoe with water that is a dead end and the only way out is Hormuz. There's no other way out. They built some pipelines which can carry a couple percent of that oil out but the challenge here is that once you are down to that horseshoe it's not just the ships that are vulnerable but those pipelines are vulnerable too they're not being protected by anything and so you the real issue is there you're quite right there is no other spot on the planet that could wreck the world's economy as efficiently as Hormuz. If you were designing if you if you can't if you you know we're looking at whether we have UFOs now that came out yesterday and if you're saying well okay I'm coming from another galaxy and I want to wreck the planet earth's economy. What would I do? You wouldn't need AI. You would just do a mapping and you would see right away you would do something to totally shut down traffic on that little little artery that little choke point called Hormuz and what would you do if you wanted them to shut it down versions of what we're doing so what we're doing is blocking the ships. There's no way to get those that oil and gas out of that area except by ship it's too heavy so you can't fly it out you might think well okay if we really need it couldn't we just fly it out? No you're moving this stuff out and there's no way to do it except by ship so how do you block the ships? You can literally have a blockade where you have US ships or you have Iranian vessels here that say if you cross my line I will sink you. You can have drones which you don't need an actual line you just use your drones to shoot down the ships or you could literally mine the entire straight you could just Iran has 5,000 mines these are essentially similar to World War 2 vintage mines if you ever saw the movies they're just big fat hunks of iron that have explosives in them and they are set to go off most of them on contact you you touch it goes it goes off. Can you clarify for me so like what military resources, ships, weapons, humans etc like our currently in Hormuz from the US and then what did the Iranians have there? The last several years we've had a set of 13 bases in the Persian Gulf these are I mentioned one base that was at IUD air base and that is in Qatar. Qatar is a little peninsula island like a country just on the it's on the western side of the Gulf and it just kind of jets out a little bit like a peninsula. Well we would have in addition to those bases and the Navy you need some logistics support so somewhere around 30 40,000 troops but these were not organized as combat troops they weren't tank divisions they weren't aircraft we did have some aircraft in IUD air base because that's one of our bomber bases so there was some fighter units but most of it was actually just logistics then what happened is starting in January we added so that was the the foundation if you would check then starting in January we over a period of about six weeks we moved hundreds of land base fighter aircraft fighter bomber aircraft these are F-35s other aircraft we added an additional carrier we added destroyers we we added what's a destroyer the way we organize our Navy is we we build our entire concept around a carrier so the carrier is a floating airfield and then we have ships around the carrier the destroyers the accruiser and then also submarines and what they're doing is a double mission mission number one protect the carrier that's like your king and chess you got to protect the king but just as in chess here the pieces that protect the king can also attack so that's what's happening with the way the organization of a of the Navy is is set up we had some naval forces there before it was mostly a naval mission and then it was set up for what's called presence to just sort of give confidence that we're there and an anchor of support like an insurance policy if ever needed that's what the idea of just being there is about well then what we did those starting in January is we expanded and this goes on for about six weeks and and it could be that we that maybe that's when they started to have the idea we were going to do this bombing mission or it could be they were there initially to do something like say support the pro democracy movement that was getting clobbered in in Iran at the time and then maybe things just evolved from there but the bottom line is when they added they added the aircraft those aircraft were part of then what became the air campaign that was going on day after day how did we hit 12,000 targets you did it with a lot of that land based aircraft so what was the first action we took on a law so this then we get to February 28 so this happened was triggered by the day before at three o'clock three 15 in the oval office president Trump met with Jared Kushner Steve Whitkopf these were the two people negotiating with the Iranian diplomats and the Iran had presented a deal and the deal was that Iran would keep the 3.5 percent enriched uranium on its soil it would promise not to enrich beyond that and it would dilute at 60 percent enriched uranium to make it in with a 3.5%, but it would keep it on its soil. And just to clarify on that point, so you're saying that I think it's, Iran has the capability to potentially build 13 nuclear bombs and they have enough fennel. 10 to 16. 10 to 16. There's a little bit of ambiguity because it's a little hard to know exactly how efficient they can be. So 10 to 16 is a real number. And I'm guessing what Trump was told was something along the lines of, I, like they are months away from these nuclear capabilities. They're being, they're measuring it in months and weeks, right? So the bottom line is that for Iran to build a working nuclear weapons, they need a certain amount of 90% enriched uranium. And to get to 90% enriched uranium, they have to go through a process where it's a serial process. You first enrich it from zero to 3.5%, then from 3.5%, it's the next stage which is to 20%, then the next stage is to 60%, then the next stage is to 90%. And at each stage, it's, you can measure the time it takes. It takes about three months at each stage. So it's, it's, the last stage goes a little quicker, but it's the bottom line is, it's about a year to go from uranium ore in the ground to the material for, for a bomb, whether you're going to have material for one bomb, 20 bombs, doesn't, it's that time is, is, is very, very predictable. So we then can measure this by knowing the quantity, how far Iran is from a working nuclear weapon. If you have the 90%, it's important to know that it's going to take probably somewhere between three months, six months, nine months for them to fashion it into a working weapon. Were they at 90%? They were 60. They were at 60. So they were about five or six weeks away from finishing it to get to 90%. That's when we bombed last June. So when we bombed last June, they were at 60% and they could have it, we don't know if they were doing it, but they could have gotten to 90% easily within two months, within six weeks. So they were only a few weeks away from the 90%. But that's not quite means it's a bomb because you have to then fashion that material into a working weapon. That does not take years and years. This is World War II technology. This is metallurgy coming out of a metal shop. You don't need the fancy stuff that we do that we developed in the 50s and 60s with bombs and have yields much bigger than Hiroshima Nagasaki. So when we're measuring this, we're measuring their ability to do a Hiroshima or Nagasaki, which by the way is pretty awful. So once you have that, the rest of it becomes, when I teach this, the students become much less interested in how to build a hydrogen bomb because their Hiroshima bomb is already so bad. Dumb question here. If you blow up like enriched uranium at 90%, does nothing happen? No, yes, that's right. So in order to, so I'll give you a mini version of this lecture here. So one of the key things to know about an atomic bomb is people often often think that an atomic bomb is all about the complicated way to trigger a bomb to an atomic bomb to go off. What they don't realize is that when you're working with this enriched uranium, it is already unstable. And so what you're doing with the enriched uranium is you're increasing it to 90%. So that the instability of each atom, an electron of one atom comes off and bounces into another atom or causing another atom to lose an electron and then you end up having a chain reaction so that it geometrically occurs quickly, like in a 500th of a second. And what you're doing then is it's a function of whether that material is all together. So it's actually 90%. If I literally had 90% enriched uranium in this cup here, okay, and it's actually going to be bigger than I don't see a gallon jug. But if I had a gallon jug of it, it would go off right in the jug, okay? So you need to store it in ways that the atoms and the electrons don't bounce into each other all the time at what's called a critical mass. And the critical mass of uranium 235 is 40 pounds. So that's a gallon jug here. So if you bring 40 pounds of uranium 235 together, even if it's just piled up right here on this table, you're going to get a chain reaction, a nuclear explosion is going to occur right in front of us. And an atomic bomb does what the weapon does is keep the pieces of that far enough apart. It doesn't go off. And then it brings it together when you want it to. It looks like a gun shooting at another one. Yep. And what the gun is doing is you take that 40 pounds. And so I'll use this as an example. Okay, you have an artillery tube here and this is the snout of the gun. And you build us as a cylinder that has a hollow middle. And that hollow middle then is the bullet that's on this end of the gun. So how do you make the gun type? This was the fat man that did Hiroshima. How do you make it go off? You literally just have some gun powder. You just hit it just like an artillery tube, that ignites the gun powder. It shoots the bullet, but the bullet is the uranium 235 now. And in the one five thousandth of a second that there is a fit between the two parts of the metal here, boom, that's what causes it to go off. And that's why what's when you when you drop these things here, the odds of them going off are actually quite remote because usually if you drop an atomic, these, one of these bombs, the pieces go the other way. I do want to just clarify. So if they have enriched uranium at 90% and you blow that up, is that blow up bigger? It goes out the problem is that there will be some, it'll be like a, a radio, it's called a radiological bomb. You'll have some pollution. So it's not benign. If you blow it up and you scatter it here, you end up with these radioactive particles, it's not a bomb. So it's not as bad as a bomb. It's usually called a fizzle or something like that, but it's a, it is going to cause pollution. So this is why the idea that we would just go in and keep like say bombing the area over and over and over again. No, somebody is going to probably just excavate this stuff out. The Iranians may have already done that already, but you're, you're not going to be satisfied by just keep bombing it. It's because even if you tried to really create this, you're going to leave so much pollution for it to then waft around. Bad things are going to happen is this is just not a realistic approach. The realistic approach here is to go after the stuff is either the Iranians voluntarily give it to us, or we physically take it from them in a fist in an actual fight where we're going to use military force to go get it. There's not a, an alternative here. We've probably even thought about, you know, using like attack nuke to try to take it out and the problem is attack nuke creates all the, all the ways you would think about trying to encase this in some way are just not satisfactory here because either, because the means like a tactical nuclear weapon, well, that's just another way in which the radiation is going to come wafting back. Yes, you will, you'll eliminate one problem, but you'll create another problem. So it seems to me that Iran wasn't weeks away from building a bomb. Would you say that's true? I think most likely six months at the fastest, I would say, most likely six months to nine months is a more realistic, they hadn't tested one before. So they still have to go through the trouble of doing everything for the first time. They would need another month, probably six weeks to have gone from 60% to 90%. Then they need another six months after that to confidently go to weaponizing the parts of the bomb. So that's why I say it's six, seven months, nine months, but not two, three years, not five years, not seven years within a, within a six, nine month period of time for sure. So you've been simulating this war for over 20 years and accurately predicted the bombing of Fordo, Iran closing the Shred of Hormuz and US Marines being sent off the coast of Iran. For everyone watching this right now, when they open their phones to tomorrow morning. What's the one thing they should look for in the news to tell them where this war is actually going? Number one thing to see is whether or not and you could do this every single morning is how many ships have passed through hormones. So this is the by far the absolute leading indicator. So we we know as a fact that 140 ships a day on average pass through the straight of hormones before the war. We know there are over 1500 ships in that upper horseshoe band I was describing waiting just sitting there waiting to leave and war is going to change materially in the next the next few days or the next week or so with materially for the advantage of the United States the West the world economy it's going to be with the number of ships passing through hormones. So there's an absolute straightforward indicator and that's the very first thing to see. Now if you don't see those ships and we have not seen this change much in the last 70 days. So there's been a tiny little wiggle room here where some days it's near zero some days it's five some days it's been up as high as 10 or 11 a day but that's pretty far away from 140 a day. So we have nothing that looks like the pre-war status quo and then if you don't see that moving the next thing is to look for indications of logistic flights. These are the flights that you bring in just before you're about to unleash a wave of military action. When I was looking at tracking the whether or not we were going to start the bombing on February 28 exactly what I was looking at was was the straight was open but what I was looking at was the movement of aircraft to the region carriers to the region and then as we got closer the movement of the C-17s and then especially when we started to fly in a lot of what are called KC-135s. These are the aerial refueling tankers. So once we once we started to move the true logistic footprint of of the operation that I've never seen that happen without bombs falling. Would you consider troop movements to be a major indicator? Yes yes but we that's what I was telling people watch in the first two weeks of the war. When I was being interviewed then I was walking through the stages of the escalation trap I call it where I had modeled this for 20 years. We're about to get into a trap where we're going to have bombs hit targets. This will not topple the regime. The regime in fact will strengthen and lash back and because we hadn't moved enough force there's a very easy target for them to lash back against which is Hormuz and so then as they control Hormuz will be in a ground-powered dilemma. That was stage 3 where we would then have to be thinking seriously about ground force options as the only way to take back Hormuz and so as the bombs then fell and as we had stage one just as I laid out and then stage two just as I laid out people said well okay what are the indicators we might be moving to ground operations and I said well the key indicator is just literally moving the Marines and then we started to move the Marines so the bottom line is you're right that you would also track troop movements well that's what I was saying in the first few weeks because we hadn't moved those ground troops in. Now we've moved at least the beginning of those in now if we move more ground troops in well for sure and then but that'll be so obvious you won't need paper for that what paper is there to tell you it's a forecast here or to give indicators that are not so obvious to the media that's mostly what I'm doing with the sub-stack and it's the things that the professionals are looking at they're looking at the logistic flows they're not just looking at the troop movements the troop movements are the tippy part of the spear the logistics make the spear move right so when Trump launched Operation Project Freedom last week what is project freedom and did Trump just make a bet that could end America yeah so he made a bet when he did this and what he's betting is with project freedom that he could literally run the blockade by Iran and Iran would not fire back now how could he think he could run the blockade well I just explained you sort of hormones has there's a horseshoe at the one end and then there's a wastes place well there are these narrow channels through hormones and Iran had blocked one of those several of those with mines well what what we have done is we have verified a certain very narrow with of water that you can pass through hormones that has no mind and that's what I mean by President Trump want to send ships to run the blockade so he's these couple of ships that we got through they went through this narrow band of water that we had verified were clear to mine so we we know the dangers pretty low for mines and and what Trump was doing um was a betting that Iran would not fire back would not try to sink those ships would not try to attack the Navy ships that are we we moved a couple of destroyers closer to help protect the ships if they needed it Trump was betting that Iran would not send what are these little fast boats these are these little cigarette boats and they have squads of guys between say six and ten on the boats here and they'll carry weapons and they can even carry mines anyway and so but what happened here is he got two through two boats two ships came through but then that was all they got through because Iran did immediately respond almost immediately respond here and they attacked the South Korean ship here and so that South Korean ship did not make it through and then the other ships you know turned around so that stopped ships coming through but on top of that Iran did two other things first of all they fired missiles at our destroyers now we claimed that we they were going to hit the destroyers and we shot them down Iran claimed they were warning shots and not meant to hit the destroyers but the bottom line is they were near enough to our destroyers that that's a that's a real threat here so that so Trump lost the bet right there the idea I mean it's one thing you could say well he didn't lose the bet because it was only a South Korean ship once he's once there's fire against our U.S. ships he lost the bet right there was there any scenario in which he would have won that but oh sure that the Iran would have not fired Iran would have just stepped down Iran would have been intimidated or you could maybe kind of imagine China would tell Iran that it had enough and and China would tell Iran to let the ships pass or you could imagine Russia would tell Iran to let the ships pass I don't know what was making the Trump or the White House confident they could actually run this blockade it's a that's it's a real risk and it's a bet that Trump was never likely to win in my estimation but then on top of that there's a third thing that happened which is Iran attacked a an oil facility that was actually a UAE oil facility on the other side of the straight-of-formos which was in this Gulf of Oman that's a little further out on the Eastern South Eastern part of Hormuz and that was at this area called Fragira which was the tail end of a pipeline that the UAE had that's a working pipeline which is the only oil coming from the UAE that was getting out was going and bypassing the straight-of-formos altogether and coming out at Fragira and then getting into the Gulf of Oman and then going on its merry way well when Iran hit Fragira that scared everybody that's when the oil prices went up to 115 or whatever it was they they jumped again because right away that makes it absolutely clear that Iran is going to gain more control of the straight-of-formos oil that already gotten about 75 percent control of the oil maybe 80 percent but then now it's starting to take away the pipelines hadn't done that before it let those pipelines allow and the UAE is one pipeline Saudi Arabia had a bigger pipe so this is putting at risk the final little bits of oil that were getting out from the Persian Gulf the Saudis called up and said we don't want anything to do with this and to the White House and then also Kuwait and so that's when President Trump pulled the plug on his own plan within 24 hours of having started this whole plan it was a it was a disaster I think they're still trying to start it back up but that what you're seeing Jack is this is what's underneath these these skirmishes where you're you're now getting Almost every day, some shooting going back and forth between the Iranians and the American Navy. And it's over. You coerce Iran to stand down, Iran voluntarily stands down, or you take the coastal region and prevent Iran from attacking those ships. There's not a third way. So Trump lost the bet. If America loses that bet under pretty much every scenario, except if you like, why did Trump take this bet at all? Well, notice, this is now the third time he's taken a bet. So on February 28, he started what he said was supposed to be just a two or three-day air campaign. And it's going to, in his mind, cause the current regime to completely collapse. And it's then going to be replaced by some pro-democracy movement, which he's opening the gateway for is the way that he's describing it. Well, that failed. It failed, Jack, because what happened is we, the bombs hit their targets. The leaders were killed that were targeted. But instead of the regime collapsing, the politics of the regime just brought the regime even closer together and made it even more aggressive. What we call the regime in Iran, you can think of it as a three-part regime. You can think of it as the original Supreme Leader who we then killed, but the original leader was a cleric, a religious man. And he was at the top. But then he was over the military. That's the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. And then he was also over the political leaders, like say the parliament or the president or the foreign minister. So that's a three-part regime. And what happened when we killed the Supreme Leader, the new Supreme Leader was elevated essentially from the Revolutionary Guards. He was the son of the Supreme Leader, but he was somebody who stood toe-to-toe in battle on the front lines with the Revolutionary Guards in the 1980s, in the war with between Iran and Iraq. And front line fighter. This is not somebody who's off in a nightclub while everybody else is doing the fighting. This is a guy who was right there with the Revolutionary Guards. So he was not actually that much of a cleric. He doesn't have much of a religious standing here the way his father did. So what happened is, instead of the softies, so to speak, coming in to power, what happened is you took the old Supreme Leader off and you elevated the Revolutionary Guards. We also killed 20 other people who could have filled the position, right? Who were the softies? Right, right. And it was actually Israel. So this is the second time. So Israel is the one who started the bombing on the morning of February 28th, when it started, and they told us what they were going to do. They told Trump who they were going to kill. And Trump himself has told us that they killed the Supreme Leader, and the leader was meeting with these 20 people. That's how they knew the timing of why they wanted to strike, then they knew the meeting was going to occur at a certain time, and they wanted to get all 20. What do you think the new Supreme Leader of Iran is more dangerous than the previous one? Oh, for what I'm saying, he's coming from the military essentially. He's not a coming from the clerical route, even though he's the son of a cleric and has some lower status as a cleric. He is a frontline revolutionary fighter who's put his life on the line, and then in addition to that, the bombs kill his father, the bombs kill his wife, the bomb kill some of his children here. So the bombs hurt him. He was wounded in the bombing as well. So he survived, obviously. But you have a situation where this new Supreme Leader just has layer after layer of reasons to want to, first of all, not make concessions and want payback or what has happened. So the idea that this was going to weaken the regime, it just hasn't happened. What you've got was a stronger, more aggressive single leader, but even broader than that, Jack, when you study these cases of bombing against regimes, which I've done for decades in detail, what you see is that the politics never works out the way the bombing state thinks it's going to work out. Bombing state has always got some story they tell themselves. This is going on since, you know, for 100 years, even with dumb bombs. Some story they tell themselves about how well you're going to attack this regime, and when you attack the regime, it's going to soften it. And the new leaders will become more pliable and do what you want them to do. This just never works out that way because what happens inside of the group, this co-activity here is there's, once you kill the current leader, there's a group around and they're vying for authority. They're vying to be the leader. If they don't want to be the leader, they have an easy thing. They can just go run away. But the group around here, they want to be the next leader. Well, in order to be the next leader, you're never going to find this group rally around somebody who says, "Oh, hey, guess what? I got a great idea. Let's go and surrender and turn our whole futures over to the guy who just killed our previous boss." This just doesn't happen. Now, if somebody were to make that suggestion, there's every reason to expect they'll get a bullet in the back of the head at the meeting. This is not an environment where they're looking for someone to surrender and carry the surrender papers, they're looking for, they're having meetings among themselves to figure out who's got the plan to fight back. That's why the new leaders who come in are either just as bad or they're even more aggressive when you do go through these. So you're saying when a country gets attacked, a more radicalized, aggressive leader goes into place. Political reasons. It's a set of political dynamics, not personality driven dynamics. It's even if you thought they were soft ahead of time, the people who come to the fore, even among the most dovish here, are going to be much more hard-line, and it's for the political reason I'm saying. So what's the opposite of that, like what would a country or cabinet, people in power vie for, if, say, a leader launched an attack on another country, like would it be the opposite effect? Well, say it in one more time, Jack, so I make sure I understand it. So you're saying that if a country gets attacked, a more radicalized leader appears. That's right. But what happens to a country when there's an election coming up in that previous leader? That's when you tend to see things more fracture. When you have the normal churning of politics in a country without the outside power doing the attacking, there are gaps between the society and the regime. And there's clearly was true in Iran. Probably something like 20% of the population of Iran worked for the government, literally got a paycheck from the government. They were the supporters. Maybe there's a few more supporters of the government who aren't getting a paycheck. But you could reasonably imagine before the bombs falling that 80% of the public just didn't like their government, some maybe to the point of even willing to risk dying to oppose it. But the government only had minority support. What we did when we intervened and we have the foreign U.S. juggernaut, we're an 800 pound gorilla. We're a juggernaut coming in here. And we're not just putting our thumb on a scale. We're literally saying we're going to kill this leader and we're choosing the next one. That we choose who the next leader is. Well, once you make it clear that it's Washington who's running the country now, that tends to unify whatever the gap was between society and the regime tends to condense, it tends to close because even the most pro and opposition movements to the government don't want to become puppets or America. That's the traitor that's being treasonous. That's being anti-Iranian. Another way to put it, Jack, is a lot of Democrats right now do not like President Trump and haven't liked him since he came down the escalator 2015. But that said, if Iran were to assassinate President Trump, how many Democrats are going to call on the Iranian assassins to come to Times Square and party with them? None. They're not going to do that. In fact, they're going to probably be some of the leaders of we need revenge and fight back here if Trump is assassinated. And so this is the same thing. This is the dynamic that's true in politics, in all modern nation states. It's not that there are some countries more vulnerable to this than others. It's literally the bombs change the politics in the country. And that's the mistake that's made by governments over and over. So governments read these pre-war trends. And as I'm saying, it's quite reasonable to say. 80% of the public was opposed to the Iranian regime, pre-war trend. And they say, no problem. I'm just going to knock off that regime that 80% will love me for it. They'll do our bidding. Never happens that way. Because once you do, once you the foreign government doing the bombing, you change the politics. That pre-war trend doesn't matter anymore. It's gone. It's not that you were misreading the pre-war trend. It's you changed the game. It was a game changer, and it's a self-defeating strategy. It's literally a contradictory strategy, which is why for over 100 years, we have zero cases of success. It has always backfired, and it's only a matter of the degree of backfiring, but it's never worked out positively. I guess what I'm asking here is domestically, how does that change like our midterm and presidential elections? Oh, you mean here? Does that make it favorable for the incumbent conservative Republican party? Or does that make it favorable for the Democrats? Well, almost. So right now, in the current trends, what you're seeing is Trump is clearly to blame for starting the war inside of the American public. And that's why he's lost, he already lost the support of the Democrats, but he's lost support among almost all the independents. And even probably about 15 or 20% of the Republicans now are saying he's doing a bad job. Now that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to vote Democrat, because right now, this is all being judged based on the consequences of the Iran war. When we get to the midterms, you can absolutely, and you already see this, and I was already telling my class to expect this, what Trump is going to do is he is going as the closer we get to the midterms, he's going back to the social issues. He got elected on social issues big time. Remember, the immigrant issue, the trans issue, he's going to remind everybody why they voted for him in droves over Kamala Harris. And he legitimately won in 2024, he didn't hoodwink anybody. So that he will undoubtedly come back to that strategy and it's already occurring here. So what looks like a gigantic tidal wave of support for the Democrats here is probably more of a mirage at the moment. Now that said, if the economy, as I'm saying, is going to continue to go south here, this will work to his political disadvantage. So and we get into the midterms here. Now what you have, Jack, is my nightmare scenario. This is something I worried about several years ago. And it's where you have a gigantic international crisis. It's really hurting America at home. In addition to the political crisis that we've been facing for the last five years. For five years, we have had, we've been in an era I call the era of violent populism. This is, you've seen the rise of political violence on the right, on the left. We've seen January 6 on the right during the George Floyd protests, five to seven percent of the George Floyd protests were violent. To this day, you can go into downtown Chicago and you'll find Water Tower Place is still not open. That's where Oprah had her apartment at the top. They're only now talking about maybe bringing it back in 2028s here. So the consequences of all of that violence here, which I'm saying, it was only five to seven percent of the protests were violent, but that's six hundred protests or a violent, because it was such a massive situation. Well, that was on, and then we had a lower level of violence, of course, the campus protests that happened after October 7 here, so that was another wave of this era of violent populism. So we've had, for five years now, this rising political violence, lone wolf and collective political violence, you've had the rising normalization of political violence. I track this in these national opinion surveys. We do it in my center, the University of Chicago project on security and threats here. And so now what you're seeing in the fall, these lines are crossing. These lines are literally crossing, and they're happening not five years from now, they're going to happen in these midterms. So I think these midterms, and also probably 2028, what we're coming to are the most dangerous elections in our lifetime. And my lifetime is a lot longer than your lifetime, so I mean my lifetime here. This is really with the Iraq, with the Iran War, you're bringing these two things together in ways we just, we haven't seen since the 60s. The last time we had this hugely unpopular war, and this domestic chaos was the 1960s. And it was, that was also a string of political assassinations and so forth. Do political assassinations typically bode well for the incumbent party or the opposition party? Well, normally the assassinations, you know, it would say normally in a time not a violent populism. We're in a specific era, Jack. But if you think about the assassinations that occur outside of that, say 1981, Henkley, I'm going to name it Henkley, tries to assassinate Ronald Reagan. Well, that's pretty clearly a one off, there's not, there, this was a good period of time after the 1960s. So it's essentially an isolated event. And what it does is it actually brought a lot of sympathy for Reagan in the short term. Didn't really last a long time politically because nothing, if it's just a one-off event, nothing really lasts very long in our country. Politics just gone too many big things here. So normally politically doesn't really matter. It will matter for a few days when there are one-off events. I guess when you think of JFK and like the Lyndon B. Johnson was part of that. JFK was in '63. So this is the early part of the '60s irreviolent populism really gets going a few years later. So when JFK is assassinated, it's essentially a one-off, as people felt it at the time. Now in hindsight you can see it as part of maybe a connected, but it's too early in the process to be viewed as part of an era or a hinge event of a new era. The truth is it was a period of pretty great sympathy across the country and it was viewed again as a one-off, an exceptional event. Compare that to the assassination of Martin Luther King. This happens in early April, 1968. This is happening after a whole string of violence had happened in our country. You have riots and cities. You have anti-war violence going on. So the second half of the 1960s is not like the first half of the 1960s. The second half of the 1960s is essentially an era of violence. I have a whole chapter on this in the book I have coming out in a few months here. It's called our own worst enemies here. Anyway, what you see there is a completely different set of reactions. So when Martin Luther King is assassinated in Chicago, which is 500 miles away from King where King was assassinated, you have a whole two-mile strip of downtown Chicago literally burned to the ground, literally burned to the ground. It was two miles of a smoking ruin. That was because of the reaction to Martin Luther King's assassination. Well, you didn't see anything like that with JFK. You see, if anything, there was a reaction, it was positive. It wasn't because JFK was a Democrat here. It's just because we were in an era where public support for political violence hadn't yet occurred, it will occur a few years later in the '60s, and that changes everything. Once you have tens of millions of Americans support political violence for their own political goals, that changes everything about political violence. It's not just about mongwisha groups anymore. It's not just about a lone wolf. The lone wolf has an enormous incentive to commit violence once there's tens of millions who he can look to as people who will support him, endorse him. today on top of the tens of millions we have social media where you can see almost instantly the support for political violence. It just happens and that motivates the would-be well-n-well-n-wells to do even more. How did the pandemic affect political violence in the U.S.? Quick question, how many different AI tools are you using right now to run your business? Because if you're like me, you're probably using ChatGBT for brainstorming, clawed for emails and copywriting, some Chatbot service for customer support, and probably an AI voice agent to make your calls. And that's why our team is so over-to-high level. It saves us so much money, and it's super convenient having all the AI tools for our business in one place. Like with their AI studio, you get voice agents that answer calls and book appointments 24/7, a Chatbot that responds to leads within seconds. And with just a simple problem, you can create a website, a lead funnel, social media posts that are all connected to the same CRM. So if you guys want to stop paying for a dozen different AI tools to run your business, just go to Jagno.com/highlevel or scan the QR code on screen. Again, that's Jagno.com/highlevel if you want to run your entire business with one AI platform. So this is when I first started to worry about political violence in the U.S. It was actually with the pandemic. So the pandemic, just to remind everybody, was starts it in small ways in late January 2020, early February, but the lockdown happens in the middle of March. Right away, I wanted to know what did the pandemic mean for political violence? What did it? Because I study violence. That's what I do. What does it mean for war? Where are we going to go to war against China, for instance? Because this was a China virus, you remember? So to that mean we're about to watch an invasion of China. Wait, what did all this mean? You see what I mean? So I teach courses on strategy for us to discuss it here. So I already, when we did the lockdown, I decided, okay, middle of a couple weeks in, I'll give a lecture. So I'll spend time reading all the books. All the, a lot of professors are doing this. I read a book that very few other professors probably would have read because a lot of them would have gotten out the histories of epidemics, pandemics, and so forth. I did that too, but I also read another book. It was by William McNeil, historian called Plagues and Peoples. And this was a book that was about the impact of disease on war. And it stops in the 19th century. It doesn't even get to World War I in the Spanish world. So not coming up on CNN. No one's talking about this book, okay? But this is the book. Okay, now the fact it doesn't deal with the Spanish flu and dot, dot, dot, no, this is dealing with the actual problem here, not just the narrowness of a virus. It's in, and what it shows in this book is that the consequences of mass, like pandemics, the black plague was a big one, is political fragmentation of the first order. When the, what happens is when you have disease, it makes people, individuals fearful of being near each other. So we had the six-foot distance, right? Well, this was also having not just social effects, but political effects. It makes us more likely to see each other as rivals, as enemies. And that's what McNeil was tracking in Plagues and Peoples. So what this told me is, this is beyond what we call, we already had what we called political polarization. That's where you just have extreme disagreement on policy. That's not what McNeil's tracking. What he's showing in this little 250 page book. Again, not even dealing with the Spanish flu, which is the closest coronavirus event that we had here is there's going to, there, there is political fragmentation, which is far more extreme. Can you define fragmentation really quick as opposed to bifurcation and polarization? Yeah, what, what he is describing is a situation where you have a community. And there is a community that is under threat here. Normally, when a community comes under threat, say by an external actor like another country, it will bring that community together. And that's what I just described with the bombing that's happening and bringing the Iran society and its regime closer together. It makes it more cohesive. And that's been true for lots of wars, lots of conflicts. 9/11 brought a lot of Americans closer together, made us more warlike too. That's how we started to forever wars. But we did this together. 70% of the public supported those forever wars. This was not a case of big bifurcation between polarization between Republicans and Democrats on how to respond to 9/11. What McNeil was showing, which you don't see in normal international politics, his most international politics is about great power wars or states fighting wars, which bring the societies closer together. This was different. What he was showing is there is a threat, but it's not a threat from an outside country. It's a threat of a disease. And what the disease, the threat that the disease poses to every person is every person. Every person is the threat to every other person. So just to remind everybody what it was like during the pandemic, when you would go walking, you would stay on the other side of the street of people. The most you would do is you wouldn't go and actually talk to them and even get within six feet of them because we were told we could kill each other essentially. So the biggest threat to other people, to each person was the other person, not a foreign country, the other person. So this told me there was, I didn't know how it was going to unfold, but there was a chance we were going to have a serious political violence in the United States. So I started to revactor my research teams, which I had been having them do work on international terrorism. I said, you know, we've got to do some historical studies here on domestic political violence. Now, we had known about this some, but we started to do some more serious studies. And this was in April of 2020. This is before any violence had happened. And sure enough, the George Floyd video came out that created a lot of peaceful protests, but it created a lot of violence as well, just as McNeill would have said was going to happen. And that then set me off on tracking with the research team in the top 100 American cities, the protests and the violence every day in those top 100 cities. So that's how I got into the issue of studying American political violence in the first place. If there was a pandemic tomorrow, what would be the effect with everything going on now? Well, it would it would fragment us again. So we have this this cruise ship right now. There's a there's a virus that's starting out there and it's reminding everybody of how this thing started with the coronavirus here. So if it if it were to unfold, I think what you would see is for the first few months, you would see that just as happened in the spring of 2020, probably not much more violence. In fact, you might even have the initial low of violence. But then just as we saw with the the coronavirus, that fear that that that fear induced telling us that every person we meet could be though, you know, our death sentence. That is then what can lay the groundwork here for reacting much more violently to events than we would imagine. It's really the only thing that can divide every individual from each other. That's right. Disease is the only thing that can divide it and it's insidious. I'm saying because and this is true with political violence in general is what's insidious about political violence. It's not happening on a schedule that's linear. You get lulls. You get there's a famous statement by people that have been in combat, which is because in say Vietnam or in Iraq, they were in these tours that were one year long, which is what it's like to be in combat are weeks of boredom punctuated by seconds of absolute terror. So it's a punctuated problem. And the fact that you have this punctuated crisis of terror with the violence and then you have weeks or months of a while, well, no, that doesn't mean the problem's over. It just means that this type of phenomenon is not a linear phenomenon. Let me ask you this. if you wanted to in the American Empire, you might close the of her moves. You might launch a pandemic. What else would seal the deal on that? Well, if you launch the pandemic, it's not guaranteed. It did not morph into violence against China. But if you look at the public opinion data, you'll see that it predates the pandemic, but it gets more aggressive during the pandemic. This anti-Chinese set of attitudes starts to become much, much more serious. Now, we don't end up having that vectored into a war against China or military conflict against China. Thank God. That's the last thing I want to see happen. But I think that we should be careful. Did it make China stronger? Well, it does over time. I was in China in June for two weeks. When we were bombing 4-0, I was in China visiting its advanced industries, and they had a plan that predated the pandemic. You could say the pandemic made them stronger, but the truth is what happened is when she came in the current president of China. When he came in in 2013, he started a process where by 2015, he had a strategy called digital China. They showed me these plans for what this looked like, and China goes by these five-year plans. They had the five-year plan from 2015 to 20, the next one, the next one. I got not just these tours of the advanced industries, the shop floors, the robots, and so forth, but I got more of the background of what's the strategy? What are the plans? Where's all this come from? What happened with China is she comes in, and he comes in with this idea of digital China, then Trump came in and slapped some tariffs on China, which then revectored or sort of shaped some of these early plans of she to have China's growth plan be much more independent of America. If you're going to really zoom ahead, the last thing you're going to want to do is let your plans be hostage to your rival, and once Trump came in, it became very clear if Trump was going to try to disrupt the plan. The Chinese started right away, early in this process, to develop plans for a digital China that we're going to be much more impervious to, say, tariffs, loss of market in the United States, and that's why they don't even sell their great electric vehicles. They have the best electric vehicles in the world are made in China. I don't mean that they have caught up to the best in the world. They're the whole next level beyond Tesla. I know because I've been there. I've been in them. The BYD electric vehicles, their SUVs, where you want to sit is in the back seat. When you're in my RAV4, you don't really want to sit in the back of the RAV4. That's where the kids are supposed to sit or your passengers are supposed to sit. But when you're in the BYD SUV, the back has turned into a cabin that looks like first-class cabins in aircraft, where the seats lay absolutely flat. You can't get this cool stuff. That is fascinating. I think it ties to some other ideas. I do want to close the gap, though, on the question of what could really hurt America, aside from the straight of Hormuz, a potential, a pandemic right now might really hurt us. But what else would be like a third thing? Well, I think that the difference between Hormuz and a pandemic is that America weathered the coronavirus pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, better than any other country on the planet, because we're the richest country. The problem with the straight of Hormuz is this is a chronic problem that can be with us for 20 years. For the rest of the world to make up the loss of 20 percent of the world's energy, oil and gas. That is a five-year problem at minimum just to make a serious dent, because there are certain oil fields, there's offshore drilling, there's different approaches here to try to make up for that loss of energy. All of them are very expensive. All of them require not just a few months, but many years of development. And what that means is that it's going to take some time before the companies would even go down that road, because if I need to be assured that it's going to take me a five-year investment in offshore drilling to get serious oil out of this, and then I need to be assured I'm going to make money for another five years after that. What's in it for me as a company to invest all this money upfront, have somehow Iran just reopen the straight or something happen, and then I've lost all my investment. No, no, no, no, no. This is where this idea that we're just going to do our own drilling or drill baby drill our way out of this much more difficult, because if Iran is smart, and you notice how smart they've been so far, Iran is going to play the game of keeping the oil price right where they do most a sweet spot, where they're making a lot of money and they're not creating so much trouble that this is going to incentivize all those companies to fix the problem. So they're going to want to string this out, Jack. This play is not a forever play, but 10 or 15 years, a long time in international politics. It's a long time to hurt the American economy. You can have crises where you go through, and you wreck the American economy. We have a recession where I'm not an economist, but I think you can already see the TV. It's almost surely going to end up in recessions here starting in the fall. But anyway, you end up playing the game from Iran's perspective. You can try to modulate this, and you can modulate it so that just like OPEC was modulating the price of oil. Now, Iran has the incentive to modulate the price of oil, and part of that is to milk as much as you can out of the system. Part of it is you want to damage your political rivals, political system, so they don't attack you. Part of it is you don't want those oil companies to be able to start thinking they can take these five-year investments that'll put you out of business. So these are all the predictable futures that I'm sure are being front and center as they're thinking about what to do with their new power. So I don't think that if you layer the pandemic here, at least the one that we just experienced onto this, I don't think it's quite as bad as Hormuz. I think having Iran control Hormuz, they're going to become a, I call it now emerging because this will take a year or two, the emerging fourth center of world power. What that means is they will control the fate of the economies of many countries in the world. That's power number one. They control the fate of many countries in the world economically. 20 to 30 percent of the UAE, Saudi Arabia's economy is all hinging on Iran right now. Same Japan's economy very much hinging on on this. And then over time, there's a very good chance that we're going to have to give them money. This is what the deal was what it's going to look like, Jack, into the future, which is Iran's going to get to sell its oil. And then it's going to get to charge the tolls. Or if we don't do that, we're going to have to take it back physically here with war, with probably ground war. So these are the real choices that we have. And then the third part of Iran-graining world power is I think any analyst who, if you ask them just straight up, what are the odds that Iran will have a working nuclear weapon, say 18 months from now, just based on the physical possibilities of it. It's over 90 percent. This is just the reality of the situation. If we, in fact, Iran gave up all of its enriched uranium, shipped it all out of the country. They have gigantic uranium oramines in the country itself. They're not shipping in uranium ore. They would still be about a year away from working nuclear weapons. So the problem here is they have all the know-how, the materials. They're just right there. They have now deep underground caverns where they can manufacture things. They don't need the facilities we just destroyed to do this. And if you look at all those layers, what you see is, this is about as much as you could imagine hurting America as if you had said, well, let's just design the absolute worst. The pandemic, I think, will turn out to be the lesser of the two because it's something to be over. Is there a third thing that would do it? Well, if we come apart as a country, yes, the bigger thing here, Jack, is so you think those two events alone will lead to this political compartmental session. These nightmare scenario that I'm describing here, where we're bringing these two streams of problem, the international crisis of Iran. Now we have the age of violent populism and they're coming together. This is leading to some really severe strain because we know that poverty is a major cause of potential violence. Now it doesn't always lead to violence, but we know that's a problem. So if we see the poorest or the poor among us getting poorer and that's happening on both sides of the aisle, it's not going to pick parties. That's adding to the age of violent populism already. Does the data you have suggest that there's one group or one common enemy or two main groups, three main groups that people are going to be particularly violent toward? They're going to be violent toward each other, our own worst enemy. What you are seeing is that in the United States, we're going through a set of social changes. The social changes are very profound. We're transitioning from a white majority democracy to a white minority democracy for the first time in our history. That is happening across the country. That's a huge change. Never happened in 250 years when you have gigantic demographic changes in countries. Politics is a common cause of radicalized politics, a common cause of that radicalized politics becoming violent politics. The change, because when you have demographic change, it is not agnostic politically. Our parties do not have the same percentages of white and minority in them. That means as the balance of whites and minorities in the country's shift, so to political power, so to does the possibility that political power will not come back to one party. The permanent exclusion of one party from political power is on the horizon. That has really been a problem for a while. We've had essentially oscillation between Republican and Democratic administrations. Once you start to see the relationship between the demographics and political parties and then the shifts, you can start to see that it's not at all a illusion to see that as the white minority population occurs, whites become a minority, Republicans may never win another election. Now, that will take time to have happen, but it is that fear of political exclusion which often pushes people to political violence. In this generation, I call the tipping point generation, where the numbers show that this demographic change I'm talking about starts really in the 1970s, but we're at the tipping point 20 years, where this will really happen in the next 20 years. That's why immigration has been not just a policy issue like it was under Obama, but a front and center view issue of existential politics that we haven't seen under Obama or in the years before. It's because it really is mattering to the future of political power in ways that hadn't happened before. The balance here is shifting now and it's shifting in ways which may end up becoming permanent. Are you more worried about people on the left or people on the right because we're worried about both? Yeah, I'm worried about both. And what's happening is the demographic change of this tipping point generation corresponds to the rise of Donald Trump on the right, it corresponds to why his signature issue is immigration and why then it's not just been about immigration, it's been about changing voting rules and changing who counts as a citizen here because it's about the right trying not everybody on the right. I want to also be clear, I'm painting with broad brush wear in our data, it's a subset of the right. They want to stop the transition and reverse it if they could. Well, that energy to stop the transition and reverse it is what's creating a counter reaction on the left. So the left is seeing the trend and it doesn't need violence, it's going to be the big winner here, especially the progressive liberal idea of America, that's coming into being. So the progressive liberal side of the house, they just really don't need violence to ultimately carry this forward unless the other side, the right stops it. Now you have real energy that's very, very hostile to the right and that's what you're seeing in our country. So that's why you're seeing political violence rise on both the left and the right almost at the same time. It's because this change is occurring, it's occurring in the country and Donald Trump is both a cause and a symptom of all of this. It's not that if Trump went away tomorrow, all the problems would be fixed because the demographic change is still going to happen. There's going to be others and you see this with JD Vance's approach to what counts as being an American. JD Vance went to Europe a year ago to explain to the Western Europeans that they're letting too much immigration come in. They're changing what it means to be European and so he wants to have more right wing governments take over from the left wing. So he's basically exporting the Trump revolution to Europe here, but it's on the demographics as I'm explaining. Marco Rubio is giving very similar speech, is not as quite as aggressive as JD Vance, where he's talking about Western civilization and what is Western civilization. It's very much a white civilization. So you end up with more and more of the leaders here on the right congealing around this goal to stop the demographic shift. That's what's underneath ice and the deportations. And then on the left, they see this coming and they've been seeing it even before the actual policies occur because they can see the talk. They see it coming and they're very sensitive to this. So that's where you have it happening on their side as well. So you're seeing both sides here of tens of millions of people in the public support violence for their goals. And that doesn't mean the tens of millions will take a bar or something like that. But it does mean that when violence happens, they tend to excuse it on their side. They tend to look the other way. When Trump was just, we had the third assassination attempt on Trump. What was one of the big story lines on social media? It was all fake. It wasn't real. It was all fake. Well, the problem is the guy had shotgun and the guy shot people and then there's real bullets flying. So this very unlikely to be anything that this is not a fake event. The claim that everything is fake is just another way to say that we're not going to worry about that. That's just not going to be something we're going to we're going to care much about. Or you're accepted. Why do you think Americans didn't care when Trump got shot the third time? It's very likely here that what you see on social media and what we've seen in our past surveys is that what you see on social media does reflect actual attitudes in a representative survey of Americans. So with the Mangione shooting of the healthcare CEO, for instance, we saw this in the surveys that. Do you have a stat line on that? I'm actually really curious about that one. Like, what's the correlation between social media perceived opinion and then actual survey data? Oh, we never did that. Well, maybe we'll do this in the future, Jack. So I'm telling you just from having, we spend so much time with the actual surveys because that is what gives us the pool of data that allow us to see why the support for political violence is what it is. We can correlate risk factors. So for example, if you are upset about white decline that I'm describing, you can see how much does that matter? or to your support for political violence to keep Trump in office or to punish or to use force against Democrats. Or if your view is that America is a racist country and always has been, how much does that correspond to your view that political violence to remove Trump from the presidency is acceptable? So when we look inside the surveys, we're using highly reliable data, not just to track the portion of Americans supporting political violence, but we want to know more about the likely reasons. And we can see some good risk factors there called of that, and they correspond quite a bit to these demographic changes. What's the most shocking piece of data you have? Well, the most shocking for sure is the raw number. So if the absolute shocking data is not even the reason, it's literally the raw number Jack January, 2026 survey, that's the one we did right at the end of the month there. We found that 21% of American adults, that equates to 40 million American adults, believe the use of force is justified to remove Trump from the presidency. We've done other deeper surveys, focus groups to know, what does that phrase use of force justified means? Half of the people who, it's 55% actually, by mean by that phrase, assassinating him with guns, killing him. So this doesn't use the force does not mean yelling at him. So that at a minimum is something like 25 million American adults. That's just on the left, that's on the one side, okay. So then we have those are Democrats or like almost all some of them are, well, almost all like 75% of those are Democrats, but then you get a lot of independence because it's a independence here can go both ways. And then you will pick up some Republicans, what percentage of Republicans supported assassinating Trump to remove him from office? It would be something like 5 to 8% something like that, but it's a, these would be the group of people who are the Republicans who are very angry that Trump is distorting their party, their angry, a lot of Republicans were embracing Hispanics by the way. This was the Jeb Bush Republican, but this was who, who Trump beat in 2015. When Trump came down the escalator in 2015, he was out of sync with the Republican party. The Republican party was a party, and you mean in the primaries, right? I mean in the primaries, that's what he was doing in the primaries. What Trump was doing in the primaries wasn't just beating individual candidates. He was changing the policy and ideological positions of the Republican party. Jeb Bush was sort of the nominal front runner, and he was married to his wife's Hispanic for years. The Republican party has seen this demographic change coming, and Jeb Bush was the leader of, well, the way you move forward is you embrace the Hispanic side, and you especially do it with religion, so just to be clear. There is still, Trump does take a little bit of advantage of that, but the truth is what Trump was doing was replacing the Jeb Bush part of the Republican party. And now the Jeb Bush part is a much smaller part. A Nikki Haley probably still represents that part of it, but you were just getting a smaller portion of that now. The more dominant part is that is the part of the Republican party that wants to deport millions of immigrants, so that's not where Jeb Bush was going. He was going more down the path of a citizenship over time, want to get rid of the worst of the worst, but this is what Trump did. So now on the left or on the Trump side today on our January poll, 16% of Americans support the use of force by the use of the military by Trump to suppress democratic protesters. That's a question wording that we've come to is our best measure of core support for political violence on the right, and that's what you saw here play out with the Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, also in Metro Blitz in Minneapolis, where for the country is a whole. I don't just mean what happened in the local parts of the city. I'm talking about for the country as a whole massive support for ICE, even as they were killing good and pretty on the videos here, so this wasn't just like polarization in the normal sense where we're divided about what a policy should be. We're literally seeing violent populism and action where there's support for ICE to keep doing its actions on the right, even as you're getting the killing of American citizens. What number would you have to see from your polling to believe that we are currently in a civil war? We're currently somewhere around 15 to 20%, and we need to double that number essentially to get to civil war territory. And that number is people that support, it's just supporters. It's not just about that number alone, Jack, so you asked me that number directly and I gave you that, but that makes it sound like that's the one and only single feature that you need. What you also are looking for with civil war is where you have the beginnings of true divided sovereignty. What divided sovereignty starts to look like is when, say, one state, say California, since you're from California, would stop paying income taxes to the federal government. So Gavin Newsom last summer in June when ICE went into LA in June for a hot second he talked about not sending the money from California to the federal government that is supposed to go. Then he took it back. Because once you start to go down that road, now you're really talking about true divided sovereignty, separation, and those tend to be these precursors to civil wars here, even more so than just the popular support alone, so that it's not just the popular support, but you're starting to truly fragments the body, politic in ways that you can start to have organized violence. So what a civil war is that's different than violent populism is where with a civil war, a true civil war, you have large organizations, whether it's large armies or whether it's large terrorist groups that are organized for the purpose of violence. In the 1960's, we got some small little bits of this with the weather underground, the weathermen, the weather underground. These were just 25 people, maybe a little bit larger than that, very small, nothing of the size of hundreds of thousands of people here or even tens of thousands of people organized for violence. So it's not that we haven't seen the beginnings of what we'd call a domestic terrorist group before and we saw that in the 60's, but the fact is to get a true civil war, you don't necessarily need two armies toe to toe like you saw with the US civil war in 1860. I think it's a mistake to think we're heading to civil war because civil war is raising the expectations of what this is going to look like in a way that is number one, not likely to happen. And number two, it's like chicken little saying the sky is falling, you keep telling people their problem is we're right around the corner to civil war, it doesn't happen. And so what you're really doing is creating a world in which the real problem of violent populism, this middle ground can grow and grow. And that's already pretty bad, January 6th are pretty bad, different versions of that that are even more aggressive where they actually take control of different parts of the government. That's pretty bad. Well, what I'm doing in this work, Jack, is I'm deliberately trying to develop a concept called violent populism. I'm trying to explain, there's a middle ground here, it's not just nasty politics and it's not civil war. I call it violent populism. It's where you have this normalization of political violence and these patterns of collective violence that keep happening and these patterns of lone wolf violence that keep happening. And this is a distinct animal. It happened in our country before in the 1960s. It happened in the early 20s from 1920 to 25. There's a period there with the rise of the second KKK. So in the 20s this was a mostly right wing phenomenon. In the 60s it was mostly left wing. Today what's especially distinctive about our era of violent populism. The third one is that it's coming on both the right and left. And that is what's very distinct. It's not just we have a distinct or we already in that era or we just yeah we crossed the Rubicon here with with so in I believe that you saw the brink really change last summer in the summer of 2025. So we had the political assassinations in Minnesota. A few months later we had the Charlie Kirk assassination. Then we had the political violence by the state by ice in operation in Chicago and in Minneapolis. And the one I was really concerned about was you would get the the use of political violence essentially the ice operations. Because this is a another level here and it's what's going to cause this. Once you you escalate a partisan issue of deportation and you say well the reason we can do it is because our president want one which means you're just going to ram it through because you have the legal authority to do it. That doesn't mean you have the political legitimacy in the country to do it. And and that is what is causing the fracturing of legitimacy in our country. So we're in an era I'm I'm saying it's this era violent populism now is is we're in the stage of fractured legitimacy. Do you believe the government is using violence in a legitimate way? Well once you don't accept once you you fund once large parts of our body politic don't accept that the federal government is using violence for the common good to really just reduce criminals or to really just enforce public safety. Once that is an asymmetric view legitimacy is broken and that's what happened with ice and the fracturing of legitimacy. It's literally causing the it's an escalation within an era of violent populism because what's yes president Trump is his he is the president. He has the legal power to do many things but power is not the same as legitimacy. Legitimacy is that idea that will go along with it because we fundamentally believe it's the right thing. Can I ask a dumb question? So how did Charlie Kirk's assassination affect people's support for political violence? First is like how does I don't know like how do you think something like playing call of duty affects someone's support for political violence? Yeah well they're different parts of the pipeline so when you say playing called duty what you're talking about is some behavior that somebody's engaged in for months or years and whether or not that has sort of impacted their brain in waves that they're just numb to actual violence that's occurred in the world. When we first started to do our surveys we wanted to test that by asking how much time a day do you spend on social media where we don't mean so I'm not counting the hours we've had in our podcast now is I'm on social media although it's my app is open the X is open that doesn't count I mean how much time would you spend scrolling on social media and what we found is that as you might expect if you spend eight hours or more a day scrolling you are more likely to support political violence but we also found because we're doing nationally representative surveys we can see the proportion of the public that fits that bill we also found that is only true that that pattern of behavior is only true for five seven percent of the population maybe ten percent at most that you don't have. Is there a specific demographic that's true within? It's younger yeah it is younger but it's not only I mean you think people answer honestly about how well we scroll. Yeah so we we haven't stress tested that question but what we did is we started to do this work in the spring of 2021 we I told you the origins of how I got into this whole thing and then the George Floyd protests and then we had January 6 so after January 6 that's when I became persuaded there was something that was likely a mass phenomenon because these are too big it's and it's also happening on both right and left not to the same degree I'm not painting an equivalence but you're seeing things that are just undeniable so what I did was I started to meet with David Axelrods he is a black belt at trying to understand political attitude now he's doing it for trying to judge who's gonna win an election I'm focusing on support for political violence so it's not quite the same thing but nonetheless he's the one who just immediately told me that there's simply no point and you really have to understand that if you don't do a nationally representative survey you're just not gonna get good enough information and and that's probably why you see a lot of bad political polls because they're not really paying the money to have them really they're sort of you know sort of papering over they say they're more representative than they really are the true probability samples are just expensive some polls are just propaganda uses media tools and some polls are actual data you know actual data and the more you want actual data the more expensive it is the bottom line here is that social media is like pouring gasoline on the fire but it's probably not the fire itself and this is why when we deplatform Trump it didn't matter okay so we took away his social media it didn't matter took away Tucker Carlson it didn't matter and there's an audience there that what's there's there's a they are providing supply to a demand and that demand is coming from the social change I'm telling you and so they are both a symptom and a cause and I got into big debates with certain people about this in say 2022 because my data this data was showing that social media was an accelerant it wasn't the heart of the matter but people didn't want to hear that they wanted to hear we did platform Trump here we do this and we do that we're gonna stop this problem in its tracks well I went toe-to-toe with those folks they got their way they chose to ignore what I was saying and then they basically came back later because what happened was their way didn't work out as they thought it would and I had the explanation if mine was a work coherent explanation for what was going on I'm actually really fascinated in that but I do I want to tie it back to the radicalization we're seeing in Iran so on day one of this war one of our missiles hit a girls primary school in Menab Iran 170 people died most of them children it's actually multiple Tomahawks it's not just one multiple was it three three so three or it's either three or four but it's certainly multiple so you have two waves first wave they the Tomahawk first wave hit this school area and that caused the girls to go into their prayer room the second one Burnham death in the prayer room there might have been others that got close as well but this certainly the second wave is the one that Tomahawk I think that did the real how many of those girls brothers are going to grow up to kill Americans before working on American political violence a big part of my life was international terrorism suicide terrorism and so looking at the backgrounds of suicide bombers suicide attackers suicide terrorists and we have thousands in our database now so we have the biographies the backgrounds of these and what you see is that a significant portion and it's a little difficult to get too definitive on this but something like probably 20 or 25% of the suicide bombers and attackers that that we were able to track from the 1980s through say 2010 here that period of the forever or the heart of the forever wars here and then just before had friends relatives brothers, sisters, killed, aunts, fathers, mothers, killed in the conflicts. So you're saying 25% of suicide terrorists have a direct family connection to people who were killed in the family or close friendship connection of people who were killed in the conflict. So why do suicide bombers actually do it? The why and share, the biggest proportion, don't have a connection to a family member. The biggest proportion are doing it because they are themselves simply angry at the atrocities, even though they don't have the family members there. That's a large fraction, I would say probably half is probably fits that bill. Now some of these would be people who are seeing the atrocities like up close and personal. So we have, you know, there's a range of, say, female suicide bombers. Some of the early female suicide bombers in for Hamas and Al-Aqsa were ambulance drivers. They were essentially people who were the first responders who were picking up the bodies of the people that Israelis had killed. Now they themselves, that was not a direct relative, but they're really just directly seeing the death for themselves. And then they're going down that road of wanting revenge for that. They might also getting propaganda where you're getting the militant groups, the terrorist groups, Hamas, Al-Aqsa. They're funneling in the images here. And so that's a, that's what I mean by they're being mobilized or being upset by the atrocities themselves. So it's not just Islam. Well, very few are mobilized because they were brainwashed in Madrasas in Islam. So very few, like what percentage of God, it's under 5% in our day. I mean, we don't, because we're told like I was growing up 9/11 happened because of radicalized terrorist under Islam. And your data suggests that that's for example, the Hezbollah suicide attackers in the 1980s, 10% of them are Christians. They're Christians just to be clear. So this is the kind of picture that you're getting here with these top level clickbaits, which is happening before clickbait, by the way. So this is the, it's just simply not true. That's why my work was. So controversial in 2005. And also called pathbring because it's and it's actually providing the raw underlying verification. So it's not a claim that's verifiable. The Bush administration, the Pentagon was starting this and they wanted more evidence, more information. Well, they didn't just want reports with like 20 page reports with summaries. I was sending whole volumes of the actual data itself on which every judgment was being made. I mean, these were three ring binders here that would fill this whole table. Then I collected all the martyr videos I could in the world at a certain point. We subtitled them. We translated them into English so you could read the English at the bottom. This was eye opening for the intelligence community because they hadn't collected. I sent students to buy things on black markets and be rude and Damascus. And so to really get to the bottom of this was a massive information collection campaign. And so this isn't just looking up stuff on a weekend and hand wavy collecting things from Google. This is the actual primary source information itself. What was the most surprising realization you had after seeing the videos, the documents of hundreds of suicide bombers. Like what was the one thing you noticed the one thing I noticed was they they were such true believers in their protection of their community. The hardest thing here. So I come at this. So I started my work to go and get a PhD in the 1980s. I was going to go into the foreign service. I was going to go become a foreign service officer and support American democracy around the world. So I'm a big believer in America. I believe that we should have strong security, a strong country, very wealthy country. But what it was really very hard to see is that our military presence oversees the actual military presence even when they weren't the troops were not doing atrocities. This was the number one motivator or the suicide bombers because when you have military troops of a foreign country on your territory. This is just so alienating and the way I used to describe it 20 years ago was was imagine we're here in Chicago and the Bush administration tells us that we need 100,000 Chinese troops to police the city of Chicago. And it's the Bush administration telling us that how many Americans do you think are going to pick up guns after a few months maybe not on day one and want to shoot those Chinese lots. And yeah, you can hear that your government is behind that and they've signed off on this on the dotted line. Okay, but the fact of the matter is you're just going to have all kinds of reasons why those Chinese troops those 100,000 because that's we're talking about large numbers of troops overseas in these foreign countries are going to do things which they're going to not realize even that they're doing things to disrupt religious services because the Chinese they don't pay attention to our religion and they don't know what that is about how much training are they're getting and Catholicism and Islam and all the different religions we have Judaism even in the United States they're probably don't know much about that at all. This is just like our troops we might have a little bit of training here but we're not giving them years of training and so the problem here is that you see this in the the voluminous information there last video will and testament it's like a video video will. And their testimonials are a lot of times to their their mothers their fathers their parents their their their their sometimes they're they're saying and and I'm so sorry mom I didn't pick up the the milk or the this or that at the so you know they're they're literally saying goodbye and some of it is to the the foreign troops some of it is to their own governments or their own leaders. But some of it is just directly to their their parents which is common or we had the oldest one with a martyr video we had we had a grandmother who was in her early 60s and she was doing a suicide attack and she was explaining to her grandkids why she was doing a suicide attack which was for the kids and it's because of what the Israeli military meant and what it was doing to disrupt the society and their way of life. And she wanted them to have this this way of life that they were in charge of not Israel telling them what they should be thinking and doing and that it's it's to see a 62 year old grandmother you know saying goodbye to her grandchildren and explaining why and she did she did go and do the suicide attack this is not a mission that did not happen. This is a mission that happened that's one of the wildest things I've heard I think it would be great to do a couple. Just maybe quick yes no sentence answer one sentence answers very good do you think Xi Jinping is about to decide how this war ends no no no I think he is very happy to let things ride and I think that he doesn't want nuclear weapons used so I think there will be some limits here but I think that he is probably seeing that this is what I saw when I went to China met with all those business leaders for the for very long dinners what they were telling me is that they would expect that yes America gets into a war with Iran this will mean a loss of one or two percent of GDP for China but overall what's going to happen is America is going to get sucked into a quagmire that's going to help them grow and jettison beyond America so I think that this is probably where where she is she she may want some concessions from Trump. Here another one do you think Iran has already won this war no Iran is winning the war and this will be going on for months and months but this is not a war that is likely to. end with a peace agreement. This war could easily end up looking like Russia, Ukraine, where Russia went into Ukraine. It was supposed to be a six-day war. Just like we went in here, it's supposed to be a three, six-day war, and four years later, you still have the ongoing nature of war. The reason it won't end, Jack, is because in order for this war to truly end, you would have to pull back American troops to their December 2000 and 25 status, and even if we have a Democratic president come in, this is going to be very hard to do, because we have so radicalized Iran, we've so radicalized this regime, there's a, we will worry about not just them developing nuclear weapons and not just them controlling hormones. We are going to worry about terrorism coming, we're going to worry about lots of things. So for us to just simply walk away from this, I think this is just a very, this is what a lot of people would like to have happen, and I bet a lot of people in Russia wanted the war to end too when Putin failed, and failed again with the next plan, and failed again with the next plan. Here, what does Israel actually get out of America fighting this war? I think it thought it was going to get cover for greater expansion, weakening their most important adversary, breaking its back, and instead what it's done is it's set off a, a, a real, tidal wave of growth for their, their most probably the, the biggest existential enemy they, they think they had, they've, they've actually triggered growth in that, and they don't have any good way to stop that. Plus question, I'm 24, American man, will I get drafted to this war? I'm going to do everything possible with my public work here to see that that doesn't happen, Jack. I wish I could say it was impossible. I would say that it's probably, barrel, it's somewhere, it's somewhere between highly unlikely and plausible, and the reason is because the trajectory of this war, long wars here have, have really nasty trajectories, and if we have a big terrorist attack in this country, if we have, so right now we know that there have been, Israel has bombed a site that they thought just in the last month was involved with chemical weapons. Imagine if Iran starts to put chemical weapons, nerve gas agents on its drone missiles. Bad things can happen here, and during the Iran-Araq war, Iraq used nerve gas agents on Iran. So I'm not saying they're going to, this is all likely. What I'm saying is that the reason we didn't want to go down this road at all is because we don't have good off ramps. We can't just call this whole thing off because we decided it was a bad idea here. We've created a problem, and I think that the best way to go forward here is probably to accept that Iran is going to become the fourth center of world power and to work with that, and maybe then build more support for our allies in Saudi Arabia and the UAE so that they don't end up becoming toppled as Iran becomes more and more power. The best thing to do now is to, I think, accept that we're not going to have a direct U.S. military solution to this, which means we are going to have to accept Iran is going to become an emerging fourth center of world power, and then build more of a containment approach here with Saudi Arabia, UAE, to strengthen the ability to limit how far that power could spread onto our allies. Otherwise, here I think that we don't really have a stable place to go, a stable strategy. Beautiful. Well, everyone, this has been your guest, Robert Pape, Professor Pape. I appreciate you coming on the deck. Oh, yes, yeah, thank you very much for having me.