Transcription
Really want to focus on what's going on in the world right now because there's so many questions. It's, it's all quite confusing, extremely, and understanding the layers of motivation that, you know, Trump has, Iran has, Israel has is, um, it's a difficult jigsaw puzzle to put together.
I guess the, the question that I keep asking myself is, like, what is going on? You can't get away from the fact that we've basically elected a mafia don to president of the United States. You've got a guy who admires the mafia who's running the country. So what we're getting in some ways is a shakedown rather than anything driven by any sense of political necessity. Okay. So that's, that's a crazy element to begin with. And the American deep state, as it's called, has been anti-Iran for 40 or 50 years. Israel has wanted to defeat Iran for that length of time. Trump is stupid enough, but also cunning enough, it's a combination of the two, to take on what Israel wanted to do, which was destroy Iran. They're now trying to do it, and they're finding that they've, they've bitten off far more than they can chew.
Trump is someone who cares a lot about people's opinions of him, and he must have known that this would be politically unpopular to target Iran at this moment in time. I don't think so. I had a relationship with somebody with narcissistic personality disorder. So that's something over and above what I learned academically that I, when I think about his behavior and somebody like that, they want to be the center of attention at all times. They can't stand it when somebody else is being spoken about. It's ridiculous, but it's, it's a pathology. So he's interested in people's opinions so long as they're positive and they're about him.
So you are, you're saying that he attacked Iran and started this war in part because he wanted attention? That's always something with somebody who's got that disorder. Yeah.
I mean, what do you think about his rationale? He's saying that he attacked Iran because they had nuclear weapons and they were, there was an imminent threat. We still don't know whether Iran has nuclear weapons. Okay. We know that Israel has. If you're going to attack a country with you, you'd attack Israel, not Iran.
But you can't attack Israel, can you? I cannot make sense of what politicians all over the planet are doing these days. There's a huge gap between what politicians are saying about global politics and what people in the street are saying about it. So people on the street have seen the Gaza genocide. They've seen all the conflicts Israel has started there. And I think the general sentiment in most countries in the world today is anti-Israel because of the way it's treating the Palestinians. And that's what people are thinking about. The top echelons, like in this country, as you know, if I, if I say "Free Palestine," I say that outside on the street, I can be arrested. It's crazy. What? There's a huge divorce between what people are thinking and what their politicians are saying, and I can't give any explanation for that divorce apart from believing that Israel has something over our political leaders.
What do you mean? You think they have something over our political leaders? I think there, we know about the whole Epstein. The, the way that the Iranians refer to what's happening is they say they're fighting the Epstein class. And there's belief that there's something where Epstein has been working for with the Israeli intelligence service and has blackmailed worthy material on a huge range of politicians. And that's the only way that I can explain the, the sort of things that politicians are supporting when their populace is angry about those same policies. So you get demonstrations here, you know, "Free Palestine" demonstrations, 80-year-old female vicars being arrested for saying this sort of stuff. You go back 40 years ago, there was a, a belief in the public and a belief amongst politicians that Israel had a right to exist and it was all pro-Israel. And now after 40 years, the type of abuses that have happened in Palestine have hit individual ordinary people's attitudes to Israel. So ordinary people are saying Israel's the aggressor. Israel's making the mistakes, but the politicians are all saying it's, it's, it's anti-Semitic to criticize Israel.
If you had to give a, a one-sentence answer as to why this war started, because we sort of hypothesized a few things there. What would that one-sentence answer be? Again, this is trying to make sense of the senseless. I just think Israel wanted to destroy Iran. They thought they could do it and they thought they had an American president who would help them do it, and they, I drastically underestimated how prepared Iran was for that conflict.
Why would Israel want to destroy Iran? What's the context there? This goes back to religious elements. The Zionist state had the right to that whole region and there's an expansionist element to Israel's behavior for the last 40 years. And the major rival they saw themselves as having in that sense was Iran. They can invade Jordan. They could attack, uh, Lebanon. Uh, they could do all these things. Of course, they, the '67 war, uh, they wiped out the invading Arabian armies in six days. They have this past history of being militarily dominant in the area, and they, they knew that Iran was too big for them to take on on their own. They thought they could get the Americans in there, and I think they drastically underestimated how prepared Iran was for this situation.
When you say Iran were prepared for this situation and it somewhat surprised Israel and the US, what is that preparedness you're speaking about? Well, it's, for a start, the, the fact that Iran witnessed that there were, um, decapitation attacks on other countries in the region going way way back, not just the last 10 years, but the last 40 or 50 years.
Decapitation. Take off the leader, you kill the leaders, and then with the leaders killed, the army is in disarray, and you can come in and invade and take over. So getting rid of Saddam Hussein, that sort of thing, you know, wipe out Saddam Hussein's power base, and then the whole system collapses. That was the Iraq story. But the Iranians observed that, and they have broken their military into 31 divisions. There were 31 provinces, like 31 states in that sense inside Iran. Their military has broken into those 31 units. They've got their own fail-safe system running in the background. They've got their own resources, their own missiles, production systems, all that sort of stuff. So, you've got to take out the whole 31, and then they'd have that sub-area. So, the only way you can beat the country is by literally bombing it back to the Stone Age.
Which is appears to be what they've been trying to do. Trying to do. But the thing is, it's a huge country. I mean, look, you know, scale of Iran on the map's always distort how large. So, that is larger. That's more than half the size of Western Europe. It's got a population of 90 million, about one-third or one-quarter the population of Europe. Far more than Iraq.
I mean, it looks like it's double the size of the UK or more. Or more than double. I mean, you know, one thing about the Mercator projection.
No. What's that? Okay. It's that it's, it makes the northern hemispheres twice as large as the southern, and Iran's in the northern hemisphere, but not as far north as England. So, the distortion gets amplified the further north you go. So it's bigger than France and Germany and Italy and Spain and possibly Poland in terms of area. And then if you even see just looking on the map itself, you can see the corrugations there versus what you can see.
Corrugation. The what representing mountains, okay? There's more mountains inside there. It's a horrendous terrain to fight a war on. I think what Trump is doing at the moment is a pump and dump scheme. He's trying to drive up the oil price, tell friends beforehand that he's about to make an announcement which will cause the price to fall, and he's just oscillating this way up and down and exploiting it for his friends and for his own wealth in the process.
Do you actually think that's the case? Because he makes sense of this stuff. This must be hurting his friends economically because this, you know, the stock market's going to take a dip if he's not careful, and his friends are all shareholders in different big companies. So, you know, and also if you know, like the one of Keynes' great lines was that there's no point in buying a stock which you think is going to increase in value over time if you think it's going to slump in the immediate future. So, he's making an announcement which causes oil markets to panic. So, the price goes up. We've given him control of the most powerful country on the planet. He knows if you make an announcement, it moves markets. He has no compunction whatsoever in exploiting that to cause rises and falls in prices and try to exploit them himself and with his friends.
I did, I mean, I did see that. I've got the data here on the floor showing those graphs. I, I generally looked at that and thought, yeah, you know, maybe. But it's also conceivable that Trump is quite a predictable character, and he tweets at the same time every day. And it's also, I think me and you both know that before the markets open on a Monday morning, he's going to want to say something really positive. He has a track record of doing that. So is it conceivable that they knew he was flying because it was tracked that he was going to be on this plane journey? There's going to be a press gaggle. We know he's going to give an interview. I actually think that was quite predictable. If I was a betting man, I would have gone Sunday night, Monday morning, I would have put a bet on oil prices coming down, the stock market going up.
Yeah. And like, for example, one of the things he said most recently, he talked about getting a present from Iran. And then he finally, let's look at what the present was, and was letting eight ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Oh. Those eight ships were not American. They were other allies. I think what he's thinking is, these, um, that's going to mean the oil market gets calmed down. That means the price is going to fall. Uh, so I can then do another pump and dump.
Let's explain the Strait of Hormuz. Oh god. As if we had to explain it for 16-year-olds because there's been lots of coverage on it, and I think some people have kind of skipped past the importance of the region. What is the Strait of Hormuz and why does it matter? Well, it's the choke point in the Persian Gulf to get through. You've got like 21 kilometers. Okay, that's an incredibly narrow gap for ships to pass through. And that means that all the countries that pump not just oil, but fertilizer, uh, helium, all these critical elements for the production system all have to pass through this point. And obviously, that's well within reach of any weapons from Iran. So they can say you do or do not pass depending on whether we approve or don't approve of your political, your country's attitude towards our country.
You said fertilizer. Yeah. Oil and helium. Yeah. Helium.
Where are they coming from? They're mainly coming from, I think, from mainly from the Saudi Arabian side. Saudi Arabia and like Iran would have the same things, but Iran would keep it, keep those for themselves. But Saudi Arabia is the main source of gases and oils which are refined, and as byproducts, we get sulfur dioxide and we get helium. This is the helium.
Yeah. Okay. That's, you know, a couple of kilos of helium. But helium, it's an element which there's no substitute.
So helium is inert. What does that mean? It means it doesn't interact with other chemicals. You want to give it a try? I've never done it. I don't think there's any in here.
Oh, what a pity. Okay. What I would have done to give it a try. You got any real helium? Oh, bloody hell. Helium balloon.
Okay. Does it change your voice? I don't know. Has my voice changed? A bit. I'll give my voice a try. Okay. Um, okay. I've never done this before, but I've heard it at parties. Okay. And now I think my voice has changed somewhat from the fact you can do it. Oh my god. That is a riot. Okay.
Where is helium coming from? It's coming from a gas field. So about 30% of the world's helium comes from a gas field which spans both Saudi Arabia and Iran. If you don't trap helium physically somehow, it goes to outer space. That's the ultimate destination of the stuff. So it's trapped in the same things that trap oil. And then when you drill for oil, you also get helium coming out. And then helium is absolutely critical for the semiconductor industry. It didn't matter 100 years ago.
And semiconductors are important for what? Everything. I mean, you, you know, you take the semiconductors out of that, you've got a brick. Okay. The, the processors, the CPUs, the memory chips, they're all made. Helium is an essential element to make them.
For our iPhones, our tablets. Everything electronic. If you need semiconductors, you need helium. So if you cut off 30% of the world's helium supply, you cut off the capacity to produce 30% of the world's semiconductors.
And Iran have blocked that gap. And that means that we've suddenly lost 30% of the world's helium. I've got a quote from March 2026 from leading helium expert Phil Cornblutch. He said, "We're looking at a minimum two to three months shutdown of helium production with up to six months before supply gets back to normal." And he explained, you can't stockpile helium because it leaks through containers. So once supply is cut off, semiconductor production will stop entirely. South Korea gets 65% of its helium from Qatar in that region and makes two-thirds of the world's memory chips. Their government has launched an emergency investigation into the shortage. Nobody's talking about this.
I know. And this, this is one reason it's quite terrifying about the scale of what we're going through because people just thinking it's going to be oil's going to be more expensive. That's the sort of mindset we have. But in fact, critical elements of the production system are being terminated by this conflict. You can't produce chips anymore. And you can't, well, you got, hang on. You can't produce these chips either because the fertilizer is disappearing.
So, you're holding a potato in your hand. Yeah. How are potato chips going to be impacted by the war? Because the fertilizer. If we don't have the fertilizer, we can't grow the potatoes. And it's not just potatoes. It's a whole range of crops. We eat food, okay? We eat this green stuff. It actually starts as brown stuff because the fertilizer is an essential part of growing all the food we eat. And the fertilizer is produced by a process called the Haber-Bosch process, which takes petroleum and nitrogen and fixes them in such a way that you can put this on the on the field and your plants will grow courtesy of the fertilizer. If we didn't have fertilizer at all, guess how many billion people the planet could actually support?
Between one and two. And fertilizer comes from this region. Again, 20 to 30% of our fertilizer comes through that region. Through the Strait of Hormuz.
Where's it coming from? It's coming again from the, the same gas field that's producing the helium produces a side effect of fertilizer. And you need, you need, and I'm not a chemist, okay? So I can get these things wrong, but you need sulfur. You need sulfuric acid as well as part of these production processes. 20% of the world's fertilizer, helium, sulfuric acid, all pass through that strait. And if you take them away, then you can't make microchips, which is what Korea is suffering from. You can't make fertilizer, which, which everybody will suffer from. If we lost 20% of the world's fertilizer, we'd lose roughly 20% of the world's food. And it caused a global famine. We've never had this experience before. We've had localized famines. You know, countries like India have had famines, parts of Africa and so on. But if this is not available, the globe has a famine.
And what's the last, uh, tanker you've got down there? There's one more on the floor. Oh my god. Okay. Hey, that's pretty good. It was accidental, but that's, that's petroleum. Okay. A petroleum tank, obviously empty. 20 liters.
So that's oil. That's oil. Oil. Okay. And so if that, that's what we're losing right now, and people are focusing upon the price of this, but the really important point, and I can bring up one of my own charts here, is the role of energy in production because if we don't have energy, we can't produce goods and services, and the link is incredibly tight. This is looking at change in energy and change in gross world product over the last 40 years.
I'll throw this graph on the screen for people that are watching. Okay. What, what you've got here is the annual percentage change in gross world product and the annual percentage change in gross energy consumption. And they're virtually lockstep, and they're the same magnitude.
So when energy goes up, GDP goes up. And when energy goes down, GDP goes down. Now we're losing 20% of the world's liquefied natural gas, a substantial proportion of its oil as well. We could see a five or ten percent fall in energy. We will certainly see a five or ten percent fall in global world gross world products.
So explain that to me. So where is the oil in this region? Oh, it's everywhere.
I mean, this, this is one of the accidents of history that the oil is a large part is concentrated here and a large part over here and a bit in Russia.
So over here, for people that can't see, you're pointing at Iran, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, Iraq. And then there's a lot in the United States, and there's a lot. And you've got some in Russia as well. There was a small amount, like the North Sea had a substantial amount of oil as well at one stage.
And the type of oil in this region, I hear, is quite important. It's very. I mean, oil, there's no such thing as a homogeneous product.
What does homogeneous mean? Homogeneous means everything is the same everywhere. You can, if you don't get it here, you can substitute for something over here. That's a myth that economists actually unfortunately believe. They basically could persuade people to think that everything is homogeneous. In fact, oil from Venezuela is almost like tar. Oil from here is flows like water comparatively. You need different processing systems to to extract that oil than you need over here. Uh, if we lose this, we can't replace it with something from over here. So once that goes, then the production system of the planet is damaged. Uh, this has been the shocking thing for me as a citizen has been the fact that a war with one country could decapitate what, 20 to 30% of global production.
Global production of oil. Yeah. And food. That's a vulnerability if I've ever heard one.
I know. And this is like one reason I'm a critic of mainstream economics. They trivialize all this stuff. They don't teach their students how critical this is. So most people are like you, even people who've done a PhD in economics, even worse in that sense than other people, they don't understand how critical and how fragile our production systems are. So people can talk about a war in Iraq and think, "Oh, that's a war in Iran, and that's going to cut off our oil supply." No, it's going to cut off your food supply.
And for the average person listening now, what will they start to experience if this war doesn't immediately end? Two or three months, India is going to run out of fertilizer, and so there'll be a famine in India. Food production on the planet could fall 10 to 25%. And therefore, there simply won't be enough food for everyone on the planet. And then it's a question of who's going to starve. Now, you'd think the wealthy countries are going to be safe there. Like for Australia, my old home country has about 30 days oil supply. When it runs out, it can't get food from the farm to the city anymore. So Australia is incredibly vulnerable. We're all far more vulnerable than we realize, and this war is threatening everybody on the planet.
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