Transcription
So, you've got five scenarios laid out on these cards in front of you here that you think could happen next. I'm going to ask you to explain to me what the five scenarios are and then tell me which one you think is most likely to occur.
So, scenario one, which is the one that I think Trump is I think Israel wants this one. Iran is destroyed. Okay. If that happens, we're all gone because to destroy Iran, you're going to have to use nuclear weapons. Okay. You can't destroy it without obliterating it as nuclear weapons do. And that's the scariest. I don't think it's going to happen. My main hope here is that Iran realizes that possibility and they've got a way to neutralize not America's nuclear weapons, but Israel's.
You think it's a possibility?
It's a possibility, and it's what scares the out of me because if this happens, then we're all dead. Obviously, a nuclear bomb doesn't just blow up an individual target. everything within reach gets exploded into the atmosphere. That's what led people to realize that you couldn't have a nuclear war back in the days when we had mutually assured destruction as the as the policy. If you attack a country, then you will also die.
But can't they use narrow nuclear weapons? Is that not a thing?
Well, um smaller nuclear weapons.
Well, again, if the country is smaller, you're talking about destroying Europe. the weapons you'd need to make sure you got every last potential element of Iran neutralized. You're talking about bombing something which is, you know, virtually the size of Western Europe. The amount of weapons you got to drop to do that and you've got to if you if you don't get it right, then they're going to come at you with what they've got left.
The world has dropped nuclear weapons before and people survive. Other neighboring countries survived.
only twice and only small weapons. The weapons we're talking about in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they're about equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. We're now talking weapons to 20 million tons of TNT, the biggest nuclear weapons. And if you wanted to hit a country the size of Iran and know you've neutralized it, so you destroy the whole thing, you're talking hundreds of those weapons.
If you had to give a percentage probability of that outcome occurring, would it be less than 1%?
If we didn't have a madman in Washington, yes, be less than 1%. Um, if we didn't have madman in Israel, less than 1%, I think probably 5%.
5% probability that.
that's a possibility. I mean, again, you know, this is trying to make sense of the senseless.
Okay.
But I'd put it about less than 10% but still scary as a possibility.
If we end up there, we're all gone. I mean, you know, I know very little about all these things, so that's the disclaimer. Um, I'd say that I don't think Israel would intentionally wipe out the rest of the world or cause a nuclear winter because that would obviously impact them as well. But I I I am quite scared of president's setting. And what I mean by that is if we establish it being okay to drop nuclear weapons on people you don't like, the sort of domino effect of that for people in Ukraine and other parts of the world where there's conflict might then lead to,
you know, mutually assured destruction.
Yeah. It's the it's the last possibility you want to have happen. The fact that it's even possible to contemplate it is a terrifying prospect.
Let us hope.
Yeah. So scenario two is Iran destroys the Gulf power infrastructure. I think that's highly likely.
Iran destroys Gulf power infrastructure. What does that mean?
What it means is that Iran all the Gulf states have got their own power systems mainly based on burning oil for obvious reasons. Uh if you take out their power structure systems then those countries become uninhabitable.
Is that what's happening already? Cuz I know Iran have attacked a few sort of power facilities in the region.
There have been a couple of well there was one attack on a Saudi Arabian power systems and that took out two of the 14 units that are critical for creating liqufied natural gas and apparently it'll take 5 years to rebuild them and there are only five companies on the planet that can actually do that rebuilding. One quarter of the world's liquid natural gas comes through the straight of Hamos. One tenth of that has been destroyed. It's like 2 and a half% of the world's energy supply is gone for the next 5 years until those are rebuilt. If Iran destroys the Gulf power infrastructure, then Saudi Arabia, Qatar, uh Dubai, they all become uninhabitable. And we're seeing that happen in parts. I mean, it sounds like this these attacks have slowed down a little bit, but it was interesting that Iran's strategy was to attack their neighboring sort of partners and specifically targeting a lot of their energy infrastructure.
Is that in part to apply pressure?
Yeah. If I attack Dubai, the leaders of Dubai are going to call Trump and say, "Listen, cut this out."
Oh, yeah. I mean, the pressure coming back from the Arabian states on America, I imagine, is quite immense right now, saying, "Don't do it." It's quite possible Israel could do it, like attack Iran and then Iran does a retribution attack. Trump, if you would have seen his tweet this morning, I think he's put it off to April the 6th before he says he starts attacking power infrastructure. if he attacks power infrastructure in Iran. Iran has said we will attack power infrastructure in the Gulf States. So we've got till you know what 8 days. I think he's bluffing. I hope he's bluffing. But if he does do the attack then Iran will respond by destroying either an equivalent component of the Gulf States or the whole infrastructure.
I don't think people quite realize how costly it is for regions like Dubai when Iran attack them. I was looking at some of the data.
Yeah.
And according to current estimates and historical risk assessments by Dubai officials,
they lose a million per minute, which is 60 million per hour or 1.4 billion a day when there's an unplanned emergency shutdown just of their airport.
Their airports, let alone their power systems. Yeah.
As we probably saw on the news, Iran had flown it seemed like a couple of drones into Dubai's airport, which meant that it had to shut down. Yeah.
if they're losing a billion a day because that airport is closed, I think it's the biggest airport in the world.
It is economic pressure which will then trickle down to Trump and sort of force his hand. So, they've got a clear incentive to cause chaos.
Yeah.
And that partly what Iran is saying. It's it's like a game of bluff. You don't want to do this bluff. If that bluff happens then the Saudi Arabian peninsula becomes uninhabitable and therefore all the I mean that if if people have are forced out of there and most of the residents in those countries are not Saudis. They're third world workers from India and Pakistan and the Philippines and so on. They're being paid lousy wages to to work on all these systems. If they leave because the power is not there to support them anymore. they try to leave then we lose the entire energy contribution that that region makes to the global economy.
and and the figure screwed.
and that figure I cited includes not just lost airport revenue but then the immediate impact on airlines cargo logistics and the missed opportunity cost of thousands of highv value business travelers attending the region that Dubai's GDP is roughly 30% dependent on the aviation and tourism sectors so when the airport closes it impacts tourism hospitality real estate investing global supply chains and everything so it's Um, it's quite remarkable specifically with Dubai.
because Dubai I think Dubai is a lovely place. I've been multiple times. I I I love going there.
But it felt really safe and so a lot of people.
It's not safe. Yeah.
It's not safe.
Yeah.
Yeah. A lot of people had chosen to uproot their lives and move there and you'd almost kind of forgotten you were in the Middle East to some degree.
Yeah. Yeah.
But I think this is going to be a pretty traumatic reminder for a lot of people there.
how fragile.
how fragile this area is and like that's the lesson we're learning. the fragility of the society we take for granted.
So that was scenario number two.
Okay. Scenario three, that's the one that really scares me because that is the Samson doctrine. You know the story of Samson. Yeah. Okay. Samson is a enormously strong individual who's strong because of his hair. And then he gets conned. This is an ancient story from the Bible. And the woman who's conned him shaves his hair. So he's weakened. And then they put him in a temple where he's standing between two pillars and his hair is gone. He's bald. He can't do a thing. They forget the fact that his hair is starting to grow. His hair gets to the stage where he's now got his strength back. He pushes those pillars and the whole thing collapses and everybody dies. That's the Samson doctrine. And that involves Israel's nuclear weapons. If they realize that they are going to lose this war and it becomes existential for them then one of the things they have claimed that they do is unleash destruction on the rest of the world like Samson pushing the towers and the whole thing comes collapsing down. This is I mean going back to the situation with Iran and Israel. One of the things I was thinking a lot about from some commentary that I'd seen is Israel really have a motive to get rid of Iran because Iran have repeatedly threatened Israel. It's also because I mean Israel is trying to get rid of the Palestinians and in that sense Iran has been probably the major bulkwood supporting the Palestinians say let the Palestinians survive. let the Palestinian people continue existing. And the Israelis have been pushing and pushing and pushing the Palestinians out. You know, it's a hornets's nest. We've provoked a hornets's nest. Iran is responding right now, I think, in a very judicious way. But if the Israelis realize they're facing an existential defeat, that scenario, it would again mean uh civilization potentially gets destroyed. And just looking at some of the things that Iran have said about Israel, historically, the Supreme Leader of Iran stated in 2015 that Israel would not see the next 25 years. Other officials said things like, "The end is near."
and in March 2026, Iran's tone shifted from ideological to purely retaliatory with the speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Muhammad, stating that Iran has officially declared that it considers all Israel energy, water, and IT infrastructure legitimate targets for irreversible destruction with zero restraint.
If we think about this from a psychology perspective, you've got two neighbors. They're both either implying implicitly or explicitly that they want to wipe the other one out.
Yeah.
Trump is sort of this third party in in the arrangement who's not in the region, so he might be a little bit safer.
Those two parties that are against each other, one of them has nuclear weapons and the other appears to be trying to make one. the neighbor that is Israel presumably cannot let that happen because if it gets to a point where they both have nuclear weapons and they both want to wipe each other out.
No, I I actually think that the old days of mutually assured destruction were a more stable time than what we're in now because if you realize that if you attack you also die, you don't attack.
But what if you think of death as being a better thing than life? You you have to have a society continuing after you die. If you're going to be a martyr, there has to be people who are going to mourn your death. If you believe being a martyr means everybody else so so dies and you don't do it.
So, do you think if Iran had nuclear weapons, it would be a safer world?
I think it'd be safer because it would tell the Israelis, stop attacking your neighbors.
I sat with um a few nuclear experts and one of the things that was shocking that I learned is.
if the United States wanted to launch a nuclear weapon today.
Yeah. It is one person's decision.
I heard that. And that's what Trump can actually just make that decision.
He can make the decision on his own. He doesn't need to consult Congress or anybody else. He has someone who walks around with a briefcase that has the nuclear codes in at any moment. They call it Yeah. And when I think about the same in this region, actually, you don't need a whole state to decide that they don't like their neighbor. All you need is one supreme leader.
or Netanyahu to say, "Do you know what? I'm near the end of my life and these people have really pissed me off."
Yeah, that's right. And that's I mean I thought there was at least some control. I saw I saw that segment with Annie Jacobson. Yeah.
I thought there was at least some control. He had to consult someone.
But if and or they had to have circumstances were justified not consulting someone.
If he's got that right, then we it comes down to what's the behavior of the person who carries the nuclear football. Does he let Trump get hold of it? And like there there was another incident way way back I think in this 70s or 80s that the Russian early warning system reported that there was a nuclear attack on the way to Russia and there was one submarine commander or one element of a submarine command system and they had to have three people in the submarine who agreed to to launch an attack and this particular person refused. If he'd agreed with the other nuclear war at it, even the Russian submarine had three people who had to make that decision. So, we didn't have a nuclear war. Now, we've got one maniac in this White House who could do it. I'll play Annie Jacobson's clip now where she talks about the idea of sole authority which I think is an important thing for people to understand because when we think about who we're electing to lead our nuclear capable countries.
you have to think about who you want to give sole authority to.
the United States president has sole presidential authority to launch a nuclear war.
what does that mean?
it's exactly like it sounds what's so interesting is a lot of this stuff this nomenclature that gets thrown at If you just break it down, it's sole solo presidential. He's the pus authority. He doesn't have to ask anyone for permission. Not the SEC staff, not the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, not the Congress. I love the worried look on your face in this moment because it is once you know that.
you say, well, first you might Google, is it really true? And you will get, for example, on Reddit like that's not really true. You'll get like hundreds of thousands of people, you know, coming in with their opinions about how that's not really true. Well, it is really true. It's absolutely true. And in fact, during the former President Trump administration, Congress became so sort of and I want to say motivated or alarmed by this issue, meaning they were being asked questions by the powers that be. Is this actually true that they released a report stating specifically and I quote in the book, "Yes, it is true. As commanderin-chief, the president has this sole authority. He doesn't need to ask anyone."
So, what is scenario four in your envelopes there?
Iran disables Israel's nukes. Nobody can know, but I do believe that Iran has not developed nuclear weapons.
So, you're hoping Iran disables Israel's nuclear weapons?
I am. I hope that happens because that takes out the nuclear option. Okay, we won't see nuclear war as a result of this if the only nuclear weapons that we know exist in the Middle East are destroyed.
But if Iran starts disabling Israel's nukes and attacking Israel that effectively, there's going to be an even bigger problem.
Well, not not if we're talking conventional weapons. If it's conventional weapons and ground troops, then you don't end up with nuclear winter and the death of everybody on the planet. Wait, so you're saying you hope Iran invades Israel and takes out their nuclear weapons?
That's necessarily invasion. It could be the missiles they've got left. Again, we don't know how capable their missiles are. The level of planning that Iran has done in this war, I I had no idea of of the fact they had those 31 regions, for example, until the war began. My special is economics, not global military politics. But once I learned that, I thought they have really thought this through. They have wargamed what happens if they get attacked by America and they've wargamed it comprehensively. Now I hope they've also wargamed if we start defeating Israel and Israel realizes they're going to be wiped out. Then the possibility for the Samson doctrine comes in, we have to disable that before it happens.
How could they possib They They don't have a functioning military left in any sort of typical sense. They don't have ships left. They don't have planes left.
They don't have ships. They don't have planes, but they have got missiles. And we don't know how many missiles they've got. We don't know where the missiles are. Certainly the Americans would have some intelligence. I think the word's got to be used with inverted commas these days, but some intelligence over where they are located in Iran. But if you listen to the Iranians talking about it, they say they've got hundreds of these facilities buried hundreds of meters below the ground. If the with the weapons they've developed, the the um advanced rocketry they've developed, they can evade RIL's Iron Dome, maybe they can also get into and destroy Israel's launch capabilities. And if that happens, I think that's that would be the best possible outcome because we have a a rogue state in the Middle East which has nuclear weapons which will neither admit that it has or won't sign it. They're not part of the nuclear non-prololif proliferation treaty. They won't sign that treaty. We should never have allowed that to happen. And if Iran gets rid of them, I think it's the world's a safer place.
Israel are just going to make more nuclear weapons.
They have the resources.
Uh you need a hell of a lot of technology and a hell of a lot of intelligent people to do that. You've already lost the war to.
How could Israel lose the war?
You've got 90 a population of 90 million in Iran and a population of less than 10 million in Israel.
But they've got it's a sort of technological gulf. It's not as big as we thought it was. We're only realizing now the level of technology that Iran has. I mean, the things which Iran are doing in this war so far have surprised everybody who's hasn't got the background of intelligence to tell them what's going on. Uh it's an educated, sophisticated culture far more so than the caricature have got from the west has been about it in the past. So they.
they don't have near nearly the same level of resources and technology and uh and I would say maybe sort of sophisticated yeah advanced systems from a war perspective that Israel do.
We think we don't know. We're assuming.
even the intelligence services even their like their planes and their missiles and their defense systems are like profoundly more advanced than Iran's.
If that was the case we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's 3 weeks after the war began or 4 weeks. You know, the original belief that Trump has to be over in one day. That's proved false.
I think that's in part because of what you said because they've prepared for decapitation. If I was the supreme leader of Iran, yeah, that's the sort of approach I would have taken, which is you take me out and actually you've got a bigger problem because now you've got to negotiate with 41 or 31 different sort of submillitaries and that's an impossible task.
Yeah. Yeah. And that's the Iranians were aware of that and they've got a you know a huge army. They've got they can conscript far more people than Israel has. Um it's to me if it gets down to an conventional military then it's possible that you know Israel could lose that as well.
On March 21, Trump threatened to obliterate Iran's power plants if they did not fully reopen the straight of Hormos within 48 hours. He then came out and said that he was pausing that because Iran were negotiating. Um, and he says he he thinks he's negotiating with the right person.
As of yesterday, Trump has announced a 10day pause until April 6th on destroying energy plants, claiming that indirect talks are going very well and that Iran is begging to make a deal according to the Guardian. So.
what's going on there in your view?
I think he's gaming the markets. I really think he's using it to cause the almighty price to go up and down and gaming at either side and somebody in his circle people are making a fortune playing that's the case.
Yeah, I do. I mean.
because there's lots of ways to make money that don't involve crashing the global economy, losing the midterms.
Yeah, you'd think of that. You've got you've got ethics, you've got empathy, you've got morals. Trump has none of those things. Do you not think it's just it's just again if we look at Trump's pattern of behavior over time even with the tariffs?
Yeah.
The same pattern of behavior occurred there where he would come out and say every leader is calling me. They can't stop calling me. They all want to make a deal. I'm going to do a tariff on you 10%. Wait, no, I'm not. Pause. Call me.
Yeah.
It's the same pattern of behavior. It's you you system. Yeah.
You then blackmail the person to try and negotiate with you. when they don't, you hit them with the thing hard and eventually in the end of the day, you don't really do any of the stuff you threaten to do.
because you've sort of.
manipulated a person into getting your way. It's the same pattern of behavior. We're going to smash you if you don't call me.
Yeah.
they do or don't call. He announces to the world that they called. They're begging. Look, it says here, "They're begging me for a deal. I'm going to give them 10 more days."
To me, it sounds like he's trying to build his golden bridge to get the out of there. What he's imagining is he's dealing with somebody like himself in Iran. Okay? He's he's projecting what how he would react to these things. He's obviously projecting his own behavior onto the system. And it's projection rather than understanding. So if you decapitate, you know, if you took out Trump, the fear of being, you know, assassinated, yes, well bargain, what do you want me to do? He thinks that works in Iran. It doesn't.
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