Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/26/26: Trump Threatens Iran, Pentagon preps Ground Troops, US Enlistment Age Increase

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

Krystal and Saagar discuss Trump threatens Iran as peace talks collapse, Pentagon preps ground troops, US enlistment age increased.    Robert Pape: https://escalationtrap.substack.com/      To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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breakingpoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at breaking points.com. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday. We have an amazing to everybody today. Indeed we do. making new threats against the Iranians as they mock him relentlessly. Lots to dig into there. We've also got a new Barack Ravid report about what the next steps in the war may be. So we'll dissect that. New polls on just how unpopular the war is and those numbers are only going down, along with Trump's approval rating, which is truly hitting new lows. Oil markets are extremely

confusing at this point. The market seemed to be perhaps irrationally expecting that the war is going to end and things are just going to go back to normal. That does not seem to be the case to us layman here, but we'll dig into what we can tell. Professor Robert Pate is going to join us again. Always an honor to get to speak with him and hear his thoughts on where we are and where we are going. And we're also going to include in this show an interview that Ryan did when he was down in Cuba with the top official there, who offered some, you know, pretty significant accommodations to the United States of America, the kind of deal that you would think that Trump would be eager to take.

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like he has headed in that direction. But we will share that with you today, very significant reporting a friend. Ryan. That's right. Props to Ryan went on the ground. It's already caused a lot of discourse here in the United States. Debating Newsmax hosts. What else could you possibly ask for? You know, Ryan, I don't see him get that exercise that often. That was the most exercise I think I've ever seen that Newsmax interview. That was amazing. You got to give you got to give the man props. Thank you to everybody who's been subscribing to the show, breaking points.com. Also, we are at 1.96 now YouTube. 1.96 million YouTube subscribers.

go to $2 million. Let's just get to $2 million. Then we can all just relax. We could sail off into the sunset. I really never thought we would hit $2 million. I mean, theoretically, but I was like, yeah, you know, we'll get there eventually. We hit one. That's all you need. But we're so tantalizingly close. Okay. So let's go ahead, hit the subscribe button, if you will. And if you listen to us the podcast, please share an episode with a friend. We've had Titanic growth on our podcast, probably the most in our, at least in the last several years. So seriously, thank you to all of you. I think it's the most in our history, honestly. And probably, I'd have to check the lifetime charts.

But the growth has been unbelievable over the last month, which means a lot of you are sharing. It is the hardest platform actually to grow. So seriously, if one of your relatives or a friend or something like that is like, hey, what's going on with Iran? Please just send them one of your favorite episodes on the subject so they can be informed as well. With that, let's go ahead and start with Donald Trump. Yeah, so he made some new comments last night about these alleged negotiations which he swears is happening. The Iranian swear are not happening. Let's take a listen to that.

We settled eight wars, people sort of forget. And we're winning another one, I tell you, we're winning so big. Nobody's ever seen anything like we're doing in the Middle East with Iran. And they are negotiating, by the way, and they want to make a deal so badly, but they're afraid to say it because they figure they'll be killed by their own people. They're also afraid they'll be killed by us. There's never been ahead of a country that wanted that job less than being the head of Iran. as best we can tell, these negotiations are a fantasy. Not that things have not been sent from the

U.S. to Iran via intermediaries, but in terms of any either direct or indirect negotiations, you know, the reporting from Skahill and others indicates that is simply not the case. And the Iranians have been quite adamant that that is not the case. Let me play another piece here from Trump, which I thought was very revealing in a way that he, you know, sort of uniquely can be where he talks about how, well, he doesn't want to call it a war because that would mean he needs to get approval from Congress. Let's take a listen. But they're doing it for two reasons.

Number one is they want to deflect from all of the tremendous success that we're having in this military operation. I won't use the word war because they say, if you use the word war, that's maybe not a good thing to do. They don't like the word war because you're supposed to get approval. So I'll use the word military operation, which is really what it is. It's called a military decimation. But they don't like the good people.

publicity, they don't like to see us succeed. They want to see our country fail. And I know it seems quaint at this point, but just all but acknowledging Sager how he's flagrantly violating the Constitution knows damn well. He's supposed to get approval from Congress. Congress, on the other hand, you know, equally pathetic. There was, there is a push for war powers resolution, another vote in the House and Democratic leaders because it looks like it may actually succeed. They are trying to push that back a month. I don't know why. The war is happening like you need to take this vote right now. But, you know, they low-key support ideologically the war.

They also think that it is damaging for Trump. So they also, low-key, want it to continue to go on. It is deeply cynical and disgusting, but that is where we are. Exactly. Thank you. Let me give a huge shout out to all of the war powers, activists who are working on this behind the scenes, to people like Thomas Massey, to Rocana and many of the other heroes in the house who are actually trying to do this.

Everybody else is either looking at through a political lens or some cowardly, really. The Senate Republicans just yesterday moved to make sure that a war powers act, a war powers vote would not come before Congress. And this is so important for our democratic process because it's what shows the ability for the populace to buy in. If we're going to talk later about military recruitment and a draft, I mean, look, I don't think any of that is going to happen. But this is the path that we are now on. And you cannot have, I mean, look, even in Vietnam, we had the sham Gulf of Tonkin resolution. even during Iraq. We had the actual vote. There was a debate. People had to live and die on that, but they do not want to be held accountable for their actions now so far. And it's really important that we all just like put a pin in this for our democratic process, especially as we move to some potential ground invasion, to have boots on the ground in a foreign country with no authorization is the absolute height of cowardice from every single member of the United States Congress. Yeah, that's absolutely right.

And if nothing else, like, I don't think any of us really expect that even a vote in favor war powers resolution and ultimately against the war, that that would constrain this administration. I don't think we're naive enough. It would create some problems for them, as I think it's sort of like an acknowledgment. It would create problems. But just to have everyone on the record is extremely important because it will be hard to hold people accountable after the fact because they'll, you know, oh, well, I, I don't. did express my concerns, et cetera, et cetera.

No, what did you do at the moment? How did you vote? Where were you on these issues? And so, you know, it's just extremely disgusting the way that Congress continues to cede all of their power to the White House. Just go and be a podcaster if you don't want to have, like, actual power in the political arena. In any case, we've got, let's put A2B up on the screen, new true social here from Trump. He says, the Iranian negotiators are very different and strange in scare quotes for some

reason. They are begging us to make a deal again with the scare quotes, which they should be doing since they have been militarily obliterated. Doesn't seem like it. Anyway, with zero chance of a comeback also doesn't seem like it. And yet they publicly state that they are only looking at our proposal. Wrong. They better get serious soon before it is too late because once that happens, there is no turning back and it won't be pretty president D.J.T. You know, the Iranians seemed, I mean, understandably, like just, thinking about this ratcheling from their perspective. Number one, the terms that the supposed 15 points that were offered from the Trump administration

were completely unsurious. You know, the Iranians view, and I think rightfully so, view themselves as winning this war at this point. You know, the U.S. has failed to accomplish any of the stated strategic objectives. The Iranians are, you know, have escalation dominance here. They've been able to match what the U.S. and Israel are doing, not in terms of total damage. in terms of, okay, you hit our gas field, we're going to hit you back, we're going to make you pay, we're in exact pain in the global economy.

There's a new report we'll get to in a moment here from the Washington Post. You know, all of our troops in the region are basically working remotely now because all of the bases are effectively unusable because of the damage that has been inflicted and, you know, and also dangerous. So that is, I mean, that is extraordinary. That is different from anything we've seen before. It's, you know, we make these comparisons to Vietnam, and obviously the parallels are not exact. But, you know, this is the ability to project power from the Iranians is unlike any adversary we've

faced in a very long time. Well, it's just a proof of 21st century warfare. We have, there's every, every big war, there are signs of where things could have been. So like the script for the First World War, the trench warfare, was written in the siege of Petersburg at the end of the civil war. Just the Europeans thought that they were better than us and they would be a, able to fight differently. They were totally wrong. The script for the Second World War, there were multiple skirmishes and other, even before the U.S. entrance, you could see how things

were working with Poland, with the Iraq War, Vietnam, obviously. Even with Vietnam, it was not our Vietnam, but France's Vietnam. We just decided to redo that. And for this one, the proof has been there for four years now in Russia and Ukraine, is that it doesn't matter. Like, you can have all of this fancy stuff, but at the end of the day, these cheap little drones have the ability to destroy infrastructure, to kill troops, suicide drones, and the asymmetry of a global powerhouse like Russia, which has all these awesome tanks and all that, just gets completely mired in the mud and held up by the Ukrainians with not, you know, all that expensive military technology. Now I'm not saying they're going to win, but you can hold off for a long time.

It's asymmetry in the cost. And the perfect example of that is suicide drones taking out billions of dollars worth of natural gas infrastructure, while a multi-billion-dollar carrier gets taken out by a laundry fire or whatever and has to sail to port and is out of commission now for two years. So, you know, at every turn, you see very quickly that anyone paying attention to warfare,

you know, for literally for the last four years, and even before that, in Syria, we saw that for, you know, with the, and even, you know, the ISIS war with the body cams and the drones and all that, like everything was there for the last 15 years. Or October 7th as well. October 7th, exactly, good example.

I mean, they bond the hell on Hamas. Hamas doesn't have anything like the capability, of Iran, and you still couldn't defeat them. And they were able to penetrate into Israel and create havoc and, you know, kill all kinds of both civilians and IDF. And, you know, again, using just some of this little drone technology to take out the cameras. So, you know, you're full if you think this is going to be easy. And the Iranians, of course, willing to take on much more pain and damage, because for them, this is existential. For us, we don't even want to be there. Let's go ahead and pay. play a little bit of Caroline Levitt here because clearly the memo went out yesterday. Okay, the Iranians

are ruthlessly mocking these, you know, the supposed negotiation from Trump. I mean, all these videos that they're putting out, the rhetoric that they're using, I mean, really just like trolling and mocking the White House. And so they've rebuffed these fake negotiations. And so now the move has shifted from Trump and from Caroline Levitt and others to, okay, now we're going to, we're going to threaten you. threaten to punish you for not acceding to our demands here. Let's go ahead and take a listen to Caroline Levitt yesterday at the White House. But the president's preference is always peace. There does not need to be any more death and destruction. But if Iran fails to accept the reality of the current moment, if they fail to understand that they have been defeated militarily and will continue

to be, President Trump will ensure they are hit harder than they have ever been hit before. President Trump, Dutt is not bluff, and he is prepared to unleash hell. Iran should not miscalculate again. Prepared to unleash hell, Sagar. Yeah. What do you make of the White House tactics here? Because the Iranians feel that these negotiations, again, the demands are fake, but also they feel it could be like an intelligence gathering op.

Which they're right. To figure out where their leadership is so they can murder them, which of course they've done many times in the past. They're probably correct about that. It may also be a stalling tactic. It's also obviously designed to calm the markets, which, you know, Trump has a problem. with not only with the oil prices, but also with the bond yields, maybe even more of a significant issue. So that seems to be the sort of desperate strategy here being employed by the White House.

Absolutely. So what you're seeing is a lot of wishcasting. And this is why we talked earlier. And Trump actually reminds me a lot of LBJ. I think we're going to talk a lot about this with Professor Pape in that LBJ was the ultimate dealmaker, the ultimate consummate Washington politician. His problem always is he would apply that deal-making domestic political skill to war with Ho Chi Minh, who fundamentally was an anti-colonialist communist, who was like, I will basically never make a deal with you. I have the ultimate and total objective of keeping my country first safe and second of the reunification, northern south, and taking it over.

There was no deal really to be made. There was only just we have to get out. And that's very difficult for these type of people to accept. You could say over and over again, I'm not going to be the first son of a bit. to lose a war, like the first American president. And you can watch how Trump is trying to do what he did in politics, to great, obviously, for victory, for himself. He's trying to shape the conversation.

He's making sure and pushing things. He's like, they want to negotiate so bad, but I'm not gonna let them. That works maybe when you're dealing with Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi. It works when you're dealing with Ted Cruz in the 2016 primary, but doesn't work whenever you're dealing with an enemy who you basically have given no choice.

You declare unconditional surrender. surrender, you've killed the Ayatollah, you've made it a war of total survival on their part, and you've actually, you know, so far, have ballooned their ego because the Iranians are right now in the best poll position that they could be. But the biggest mistake that Trump has made is that he has made it so that the ground that could be laid for any negotiation is gone. They can never actually trust our word. They can't trust Wittkoff. They've been bombed twice. And this is why when that happened, I remember thinking, I go, how are we ever going to be able to make a deal in the future with Russia, with Ukraine, with China, with anyone, if you're going to

bomb somebody other than the cover of diplomacy. And so you can see the consequences of his actions. And he's trying to work in a vacuum and not in the context now fully of how he has behaved in his administration. Yeah. That's the prison that he has locked himself into, locked all of us into. That's the tragedy of it. Yeah. And part of what's different from Vietnam is, you know, I mean, it destroyed obviously LBJ's presidency, but the end of the day, they could just walk away. You can't just walk away here. I mean, it will destroy Trump. I think, Trump's presidency will be destroyed either way at this point. But, you know, the Iranians have projected, like, no, we say when this ends. So you may want to leave, but is Israel going to stop firing?

I mean, this is, they want to make this the last time that they have to deal with the U.S. and Israel coming in and bombing them. And that is what they are trying to achieve. That's what they feel like they can achieve. But I don't believe that they think that they're there yet. And to your point about the, you know, the arrogance and the hubris of doing these, you know, negotiation ruses and then murdering the people involved, let's say the Iranians did want to talk to the U.S. Let's say they wanted to have some sort of a channel of communication just to keep the lines open, see what was possible, et cetera. How would you do that?

Yeah. They certainly aren't going to meet anyone in person and give up their location. They certainly don't want to communicate electronically with them because the self-revelling. phone can be tracked, the communication be track, whatever. Literally, how are you going to communicate? I mean, so the U.S. has basically made it impossible even to have those negotiations if the Iranians want to. Now, what we know right now is, you know, they're passing, the U.S. is passing things through Pakistan, they're path through Turkey, you know, through Egypt, and Iran is also in communication with them. But if you were going to have any sort of direct exchange, it's effectively impossible

at this point. You've also got, let's skip ahead to A5. You've also got this, you know, continuing victory narrative, which is increasingly just completely implausible. And American people are not buying it one bit. The vast majority of Americans think the war is going really badly or somewhat badly. In any case, this is Caroline Levitt talking about how we're very close to meeting the objectives of Operation Epstein Fury. Let's take a listen to that. We are very close to meeting the core objectives of Operation Epic Fury, and this military mission continues unabated. From the outset, President Trump and the Department of War estimated it would take approximately four to six weeks to achieve this critical mission.

25 days in, the greatest military the world has ever known is ahead of schedule and performing exceptionally. This is very Vietnam-esque. This is exactly what they said before the Tet Offensive. They were like, oh, well, we've Operation Rolling Thunder. But, you know, people really should go and study Rolling Thunder. Rolling Thunder had the exact same escalation logic. We're going to go in, we're going to bomb.

And then every time that they don't back down, we're going to do a little bit more, and then we're going to do a little bit more, and then we're going to do a little bit more. And the entire time, they're telling the American public, hey, what we've done, we've degraded 10,000 heck takers or whatever. We've taken out 90 million Viet Cong. I'm exaggerating, obviously. And then what happened? And then what happened is exactly very similar circumstance to what we see right now, where U.S. troops

are working remotely. You have multiple U.S. bases which are declared uninhabitable. You have an aircraft carrier, which has to leave the region. We're running dramatically low on interceptors. The military logic of it all starts to be foreseen. And then you have a big event which shows for the final moment, you're like, oh, my God, everything they told us is a total lie. Remember, the vast majority of people are still not paying attention to this war. They're mostly just going on with their lives to the extent that they have paid any attention whatsoever.

Probably gas prices, if I had to guess. That's basically it. You know, they're mostly going about their lives. They know something is kind of happening, but it's not yet there. They're hearing some of the White House stuff, and they're like, ha, sounds ridiculous, but whatever, just moving on. But the big one, when it comes, that's what you want to avoid at all cost. Because that is those emperor have no clothes or even empire has no close moments.

You never come back from. Nope. You absolutely never come back from it. We're already. We're inching towards it. We're already in a place where things will never be quite the same. That's right. We're all right.

However this ends, things will not be the same on the. the other side of it. Let's go and put Iran's five conditions that they've been pretty consistently holding out here about what they would need in order to end the war. So they say Tehran is therefore characterized the latest overture, which was delivered by a friendly regional intermediary as a ploy to heightened tensions and has responded negatively the official outlined five specific conditions under which Iran would agree to end the war. They include, number one, a complete halt to aggression and assassinations by the enemy. Number two, the establishment of concrete mechanisms to ensure the war is not reimposed on the Islamic Republic. Number three,

guaranteed and clearly defined payment of war damages and reparations. Number four, the conclusion of the war across all fronts and for all resistance groups involved throughout the region. And just to pause on that one, there's reporting that they want to make sure Lebanon is included in any sort of, you know, war-ending deal here and Hezbollah is included in that. So they want to make sure not only is the war ended here, but also on the additional front that Israel's opened up there. International recognition and guarantees regarding Iran's sovereign right to exercise authority over the Strait of Hormuz. The official further noted these stipulations are in addition to demands previously presented by Tehran during the second round of negotiations in Geneva, which

took place just days before the U.S. and Israel carried out a fresh round of aggression on February 28th. So they say they want everything to stop. They want to make sure it can't restart in the future. and they want reparations because they feel correctly, they were attacked, that it was, they were illegally attacked, all kinds of damage has been done to their country, and they think that the U.S. and Israel should pay them for that, for what they have done to them. Now, I ask you, you know, in the Iranians' minds, they feel they're winning. You know, they feel they block the U.S. from being able to achieve any of their strategic objectives. They feel they are, you know, they're in control of the Strait of Hermuz. They get to say how big and how quickly this war, you know,

how much this expands, how much pain the region and the U.S. and the globe ultimately are going to, you know, going to feel. And so they think it's entirely reasonable that they get paid back reparations. Do you think that Trump and Israel, do you think they're anywhere near feeling like this is, you know, this is something we're going to accept? No, Trump has to save face here. He has to save face. Because if he, let's say he accepted these conditions and walked away, it is the end of his press. I mean, it is humiliating. Like, already we're in a situation where, you know,

they've, Washington Post is saying, they've given up on regime change. They've given up on ending the nuclear program. Now the war is to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which the war closed. So I saw Arnaudan, he's like, it's the war to reopen the thing, the war closed. Yes.

That's how much of a disaster this has already been to the U.S. That's all more logic, though. This is how it always works. And this is why the traders and the markets, they're all like, oh, well, Trump wants to end the war. You think that the Kaiser didn't want to end the war in 1914? Like, you think LBJ didn't want to end the war in 1966.

You think that, you know, Abraham Lincoln didn't want the war to end in 1861. Yeah. Everybody wants to end the war. That doesn't mean that the war is going to end. Speaking to this, this is what you're referring to this Wall Street Journal piece that's like, Oh, Trump is. Let's put it up there on the street. Trump wants a speedy end.

He's looking for an off ramp. It's like, okay, good luck. Good luck. Because this is what we've always warned about. Once you're in, it's not. easy just to walk away. It's, you don't get to just, I'm bored with it. I mean, they talk in this article about how he's basically, like, bored with the war and wants to get back to, like, I don't know, talking about his ballroom or sicking ice agents on a mirror or whatever. He's like, I'm kind

of over this and it's kind of a wrong for the midterms. Okay, you may feel that way. How are you going to get out of this? Because it doesn't seem obvious to me at all, or a lot of experts that I've been listening to how you could even end this thing at this point. Yes, and that is that's actually why I just feel really despondent, because it would take the most supreme act of courage from now two separate individuals, not just one. First is the Ayatollah or whoever is running in Iran. He would have to have the recognition. This is probably the best we're going to get. Let's drive it home and let's actually do something with the Americans and have a last and a final piece. However, and if I'm being honest, if I was one of his advisors,

I would tell him not to do it. Because if I'm looking purely from the lens of an Iranian who is now fighting, we cannot trust these people. What actual confidence can we have that they're going to restrain the Israelis? And then second, on Donald Trump, it would actually take genuinely the act of supreme courage to restrain now all of the Israeli action for forever, for now and forever to make sure that we're not going to let that happen. And that we're actually going to take this massive political hit, which we know that we are, where it's better in the long run to just say, enough.

We're not doing this anymore. We're going to sign a deal. But all of the bellicosity, moving the troops, the easy decision from Donald Trump's perspective right now is to do what every wartime leader has always done, escalate to de-escalate. We'll break the back of the enemy, and then what we'll do is make a deal on the other side.

For the Iranians, it's very similar. They're like, well, we haven't even hit oil at 200 yet. We haven't made them feel the pain. We need to feel the pain. Ultimately, this is a power. mismatch. And what it means, though, is that the actual power of the U.S. Empire is going to have to fully get involved, ground troops. And even then, remember, we're only talking about a couple thousand ground troops right now. This could be, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of

thousands. That's how it works. It starts with a few. Oh, and then, you know, 20 guys get killed, well, we have to avenge their death, and now we're on. And this is why you don't want to get into this situation in the first place. Why anybody who had a hand in this can never be forgiven because what they've unleashed already, do not only the damage to our credibility, diplomatically, our standing in the world. I mean, you know, I remember how many of these neocons used to talk about America's humiliation after Afghanistan and how that encouraged the Russian invasion of Ukraine? Let's say that that's true, which I don't even think it's fully true, but let's say it's partially.

It had some impact on it. What do you think if you're China or Russia, any of these countries, looking at how the United States just held up in a very limited ballistic missile exchange with Iran and think, And then our own political capacity to stand for a war of choice like this, what are you going to take away from that? You're like, wow, this is much easier than we ever thought it would be. This is why this is really, really bad. And we also see the escalation that continues. Let's put A10 up here on the screen. Iran just yesterday, they struck a chemical complex in the Negev Desert, which is linked to white phosphorus production. So the ballistic missile program is there. They're hitting targets in Israel. complexes causing a huge blast. Why does that matter? Because the interceptors are running low.

They're able to take out more critical infrastructure. And when you can take out critical infrastructure, you can take out interceptors, you actually become the great boogeyman threat that the Israelis always said you were. Now they really could be an existential threat to Israel. So what does Israel do? They might have to use a nuclear weapon. They don't have any forces. That's why, like, you know, everybody thinks you sound hysterical, but things move very, very quickly in war. And you can already see the strategic logic from the Israeli perspective. That's why they're opening, that's why they're expanding their borders. That's why they want and are pushing the United States, because now this really is the boogeyman

for the United States. We have to save face. We need to save the global oil market. We can't just sign a deal. And then from the Iranians, same thing. Like, they haven't exacted the pain that they want because they want this to be the last war, not just one war. And, you know, all this language, every history book you'll read.

You hear them all say the same thing. This needs to be the war to end all wars. This needs to be, you know, if we just do this, then the enemy will capitulate. It turns out, especially when you put people in a total war situation, which is what Trump's threat is, it's only going to drag on even longer and longer and longer. And I'm just, I do not see a way out of this. None of these people have the courage to do what needs to be done. Israeli logic, which apparently the administration Trump has bought into completely, is there just one, bombing campaign away from like perfect peace and security.

There's always one more bombing campaign, one more round of assassination, one more of people's lot. And a few square miles more of territory. Yeah. Outside. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, they're already projecting they're going to go to war with Turkey next after this. I mean, they've already picked their next target. Like, this is the logic that they operate under. And of course, there is no, like, there is no final answer here. At the end of the day, you're going to have to figure out some negotiated settlement, figure out how to live with people so you're not constantly at war with them. But that is the polar opposite. of the Israeli approach and certainly the Netanyahu approach.

To your point about the amount of damage that Iran continues to be able to inflict, and I want you all to really take in how much you were gaslit by this administration and by the Western media about how, oh, they've taken on all of Iran's missile launchers and they're not going to be able to do anything anymore. And oh, look at how their missile launches are going down, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, the number of missiles they're launching has gone down, but those missiles are finding their targets far more often because Iran, unlike us, They didn't underestimate us.

They took us seriously. We thought that, you know, we, Trump came into this like, oh, they're going to close down the straight of Maroons. I can't believe that. They've been planning for this for decades. They've expected this conflict and planned for it. So smartly, what did they do first? They tried to blind us, you know, take out the radar capabilities, exhaust the interceptors.

And now they're at the point where their missiles are finding their targets more frequently. So put A-11 up on the screen. This is the other way that you've been gaslit and lied to. and a lot of the damage in the region has been actively covered up by this administration with the collaboration of these private satellite companies, by the way. But in any case, this is Aaron Bastani of Navarra Media. By the way, they do great work. You guys should check them out.

Many of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops are all but uninhabitable. He says a pretty extraordinary admission in the New York Times. You know it's bad when they are being that candid. A ground invasion certainly makes a lot more sense after reading that. And let me just read you a little bit of this piece from the New York Times that he's quoting here. He says, Iran has bombed U.S. bases across the Middle East in retaliation for the U.S. Israeli War, forcing many American troops to relocate to hotels and office spaces throughout the region, according to military personnel and American officials.

Now, we've been told many times this is them using civilians as human shields, right? Isn't that what's going on here? Isn't that, you know, the definite, oh, you're in these civilian population, these civilian hotels? Aren't you putting civilians at risk? Isn't it now not Iran's fault? if civilians get killed when they're targeting U.S. military personnel, that's what we were told by the Israelis for years and years. It says, so now much of the land-based military is, in essence, working remotely, with the exception of fighter pilots and crews operating and maintaining warplanes

and conducting strikes. They go on to talk about, you know, some of the specific damage to the various bases in the region. But, you know, Saga, the fact that meant most of the 13 military bases have been damage to the extent that they are effectively uninhabitable and that our personnel feel so endangered there that now they're in civilian hotels and office. I mean, this is extraordinary. I mean, shocking, I cannot even describe it to you. Yeah, I wouldn't, I genuinely would not have thought at the beginning of this way. I thought Iran could do damage. I thought they could definitely strangle the global economy. I didn't think that they could just, you know, willy-nilly hit our military bases and force our troops to have to relocate to hotels and office space. I knew it intellectually. I didn't know it for real.

And that's really what I meant is, you know having more. I mean, anybody can download Telegram and you can watch men die every single day on the Russian front. You actually can. And that's part of the tragedy, is that you can see the exact same playbook. I don't know if anybody seen the videos, the first person view videos of them taking out like an Army ambulance helicopter, 10 million dollar helicopter, $20,000 drone. I mean, it's just story. You could see this every time that we are in one of these types of conflicts, but we didn't prepare properly. At the end of the day, we had a ton of confidence in our interceptors. Herod, Imperial hubris, a tale as old as time, right? That's the tragedy of it.

And now you have tens of thousands of troops working remotely. God help us if some hacker or something takes out Internet access, now what? I hope it works out. Yeah. Hope E Starlink keeps working up there. Doesn't take much. Actually, just think about the actual problem with that. And then also you have all this dispersal, which causes kinds of chaos.

You have also the humiliation of having to evacuate a large base. By the way, as I just said earlier, this shows you how having these large concentrated basis aircraft carriers, et cetera, probably not the way that you want to be prepared. Oops, that's the way our entire empire is structured right now. Very, you know, very, what is it? Very vulnerable to attacks and to tactics like this, which every military in the world who's an adversary of the United States will now be studying for all time. So you can just see how the script for the next.

big one, you can study this very easily, the vulnerabilities, do we really trust our military industrial complex and our leaders to make any changes? They're going to keep buying these multi-million dollar weapon systems. They're going to keep, you know, investing in these things. Even with the interceptors, they're going to spend 15 million to shoot down a $10,000 drone, will probably even more. And that logic will make it so that when it truly becomes existential, that we could be left genuinely defenseless, or it could invite real aggression in the future is why we never ever should have done this. So I don't see a way out. I just don't. The last thing I want to do in this block, if we could put A7 up on the screen just to get a taste

of how the Iranians are talking about this, this is their military spokesperson. He says, have your internal conflicts reached the point where you're negotiating with yourselves? Don't call your defeat an agreement. You will see neither your investments in the region nor previous energy and oil prices return until it is our will. Nothing will return to how it was that will only happen when the idea of acting against the Iranian people is completely erased from your minds. Our position from day one has been clear and remains unchanged. Someone like us will never come to terms with someone like you, not now and not ever. So that is the message the Iranians are putting out in response to all Trump's talks of, oh, they're so they're desperate to negotiate, they're begging

for an end to this, et cetera, et cetera. This is the message they're putting out to the world and to their people right now. Yeah, exactly. And you know, you can see, exactly the logic around this about the message of the Iranian regime internally and then here in the U.S., this desperate want for negotiation. By the way, this is part of the problem with Trump's timelines because at a certain point, he only ever has taco or fulfillment. And both are bad, right? Because if he continues to taco, while I am pro ultimate taco in the interim, he's just going to keep leaving things open-ended. So let's say if you look at what's the only real piece? peace deal. Trump has signed. Was Gaza? Right? Well, was it really a peace deal? We have this weird

board of peace. People continue to die in Gaza every single day. There's no lasting settlement for what post-governance is going to look like. Hamas remains largely in power over the population. The Israelis have total security control, like of the ability to impose a blockade and everything on top of that. Nobody has any future that that will work out. And by the way, for the Iranians, they see that very clearly. They're like, we can't enter an open-ended some sort of fake ceasefire where Israel just gets to continue to attack us every day. The only option is to continue to bomb the shit out of them and continue to bomb us. So the existing framework and infrastructure is not a real pathway to real peace with this conflict. So you can actually see how Trump's

preference for dealmaking is to keep everything open-ended, where you're dealing with an adversary which can still punch back, not like Hamas could, which could only internally, but could actually inflict some sort of damage and remains largely politically intact. Well, they're never going to accede to that. The only way to get them to do that would be to invade and to occupy them.

And yeah, we can. We could do that. It would be a nightmare, right? Politically, for the people of Iran and also our own service members. I mean, we, at our peak, I think we had like 170,000 service members on the ground in Iraq.

And Iraq, Iran is, four times the size of a rock and has notoriously extraordinarily difficult geography to control, by the way, because it's so mountainous. So, I don't know. I mean, yeah, we couldn't, but this, even if we, like, went all in, it still would be a very difficult military. Yeah, this is not, you know, this isn't a gimmy. Even if we did do a full on hundreds of thousands of troops on the ground type invasion, I don't know. What a mess. That's all you can say. What a mess. Yeah, I mean, I think in Vietnam, I'm looking it up. I want to say it was several hundred thousand at its absolute p—yeah, 543,000 troops in country. In Vietnam.

And that's South Vietnam, which is half of Vietnam, which is not a very big country. Now compare that to Iran. Right. So, I mean, when I say we could do it, like, we could do it politically. Like, we could take over Tehran and a few of the population centers. Can you truly occupy the whole country? No. I mean, even that. And why would you even want to? Right? Yeah, exactly. So you can see, I hate to be so catastrophic. I've just been mulling it. You know, I see the Iranian response. I see the way that Trump is talking. He doesn't have a way out. You see the Israelis who are assassinating everybody that they possibly can. Just yesterday, they came out and they go, we have taken the foreign minister off the kill list. And you're like, oh, okay. I mean, so you were trying to kill him. Before that, you're like, thank you, I guess. But But they want, they want, it's what they did with Hamas.

Who could even believe them also? And they want, they just want to kill everybody who could possibly negotiate. That's literally what they did with Hamas to make it so that the only viable option was total destruction, which even then they weren't able to achieve. So with all that big preamble, let's get to the ground troop stuff. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart

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described. Could it all be posturing? Certainly could, but we should take it seriously. He says, the Pentagon is preparing for a massive, quote, final blow of the Iran war. A final, I have never heard that word before in history, have I? Usually it accompanies a massive invasion that doesn't work out. It has to lead to another final blow. And just this time, it will break the enemy. The Pentagon is developing military options for the final blow. A dramatic military escalation will grow more likely if no progress is made. They think a crushing show of force to conclude the fighting would create more leverage in peace talks or simply give Trump something to point to and declare victory. Iran, of course, has a say in how the war ends. Many of the scenarios would risk prolonging

and intensifying the conflict. It would include potentially invading or blockading Karg Island, invading Larak, an island that helps Iran solidify its control of the Straits of Hormuz, seizing the strategic island of Abu Musa and two smaller islands which lie nearer, near the western entrance to the strait and are controlled by Iran, but also claimed by the UAE, and blocking or seizing ships that are exporting Iranian oil on the eastern side of the Hormuz Strait. The military has also prepared plans for ground operations deep inside the interior of Iran to secure the highly enriched uranium buried within nuclear facilities. Instead of conducting such a complicated and risky operation, they could also carry out large-scale

air strikes on those facilities to try to prevent Iran from ever accessing that material. Now, you put this together with all of the troops that are currently on their way to the region, and you could be reasonably confident that something like this could happen absent a huge diplomatic breakthrough in the next four hours. Starting tomorrow is when the five-day deadline slash extension expires. Slash the market is closed, right? Exactly. Tomorrow at 4.30 p.m., everybody opened their eyes. I joked, it brings a whole new meaning to weekend warriors.

You can only fight. You know, we literally are weak and worse. We can only fight when the market is closed. What a, imagine trying to time D-Day with when the S&P was going to open in New York City. But that's the world. Which stage of capitalism is this? I don't even know. Let's go to the next one. Let's put this up here on the screen. Big indication that something is happening is that at least three congressional Republicans, including the chair of the House and the Senate Armed Services Committees, are, quote, hinting strongly that a ground operation in Iran is planned and could potentially be underway soon.

All of them have voiced frustration with the lack of information that has been shared from the Pentagon. One of them also, Nancy Mace. Senate Armed Services Committee, of course, is the committee responsible for appropriating funds for the Pentagon. Many of the leaks that we've gotten, for example, about the billions in damage, how much, you know, munitions, et cetera, has been fired. that comes from legal updates that the Pentagon must make to the Senate Armed Services Committee, and especially why, remember that they're going to request some $200 billion in the future. This is the way that it's all going to play out. Now, why do we need to do a ground invasion?

Why does something need to change? It's very simple. Flagged on the show from day one. Interceptors. The math doesn't math. Let's put this up here on the screen. So this is from the Royal United Services Institute. It is one of the oldest, I believe it might be the oldest defense think tank in the world.

It's a UK-based think tank. And very similar, let's say here to the United States, the CSIS, the what is it, Center for Strategic Institute studies, something like that. But these are very respected defense think tanks, usually very tied into the military industrial complex and almost always actually have a pro-war bias. However, they're very good at what they do. They do a lot of analysis around interceptors, math, they read budget proposals, they look at open source, and they compile all the data together. So I want to be clear here. They don't have the exact data, but they have a very good track record. Now, here is what they warn.

Let's put my tweet, please, up here on the screen. So the Royal Service Institute now estimates Israel is days away from running out of arrow interceptors and that the United States has already burned about 40% of the available THAAD stockpile in the Iran War and only has about three weeks left. So let me linger here a little bit on all of the types of munitions, the arrow two and arrow three munitions. These are the interceptors that come up, hit the Iranian missiles. By the way, they haven't even been working that well. Do you notice, Crystal, the date on the projected depletion date? March 27th, 2026. The current date is March 26.

Now, they could be wrong. They could be wrong. This was based on the projections of the first 16 days of the conflict. And, you know, one reason they might be wrong is they had to stop firing them. So they might extend the runway a little bit, but that's not good.

The second, Allied FAD interceptors, partner operated, UAE, Jordan, right, etc. Other countries which have access. Projected run date is April 3, 2026. Israel, they have the Blue Sparrow, air-launched ballistic missile, projected runout date, April 5th, 2026. David Sling, defensive April 6th, 2026. Israel, rampage supersonic missile, April 9th, 2026.

U.S., okay? April 12th, April 26. Thad, Israel operated, April 11th, and then Thad, U.S. operated April 17th, only a couple of weeks. And then, if you actually look at the percent of the total stockpile, Arrow 3 in the first 16 days was already 80 percent depletion. U.S. was at 40. And so just imagine at 40. And we'd already burned 25 percent of the existing stockpile in the 12-day war. And we're already at 40 in the first 16 days. So the math is almost certainly correct if you just look at how things worked in the 12-day war to today. This means that the current way that things are going is It's impossible. We cannot keep this happening because all critical infrastructure, U.S. bases, everything is now free, is going to be free game. If things just continue to operate as they do, because we have been unable to take out all the drones or all the ballistic missile programs. As we warned, you could take out 95%, but even that 5%, if the interceptors are low, they can do a shit ton of damage.

So here we are. Now we have to do something to change the strategic calculus because the status quo is not going to work. So you could either have diplomacy or you would have a lot. have to have an invasion to go in and to secure and to change the status quo. And that is the problem. Also, don't just take my word for it. Put B4 up there on the screen. Another piece of analysis. This is from the Jerusalem Post, who obviously would know, Operation Epic Fury has drained one-third of the bad supply, so their estimates even higher are a little bit lower. And replenishment could take eight years. While the 90% hit rate is elite, every launch against Iran depletes the readiness needed for potential conflict with China. And remember, we already stripped a decent amount out of

South Korea, of a lot of these interceptors, and they take years to rebuild, literally only, you know, for some Patriot, I think it's just like one facility, et cetera. The biggest problem now is, okay, so ground troops, to do what? Well, as they said for this final blow, to take control of the Straits of Hormuz, I think that the nuclear facility, option is the one that makes the most sense. And it's because for every one of these wartime leaders to change things, they need to do something big, and especially Trump, spectacular. And you can declare victory. So taking control of the straight is basically a continuation of the war. Now, I could see it as in, I'll take control of the straight away from Iran, which means that

they'll have to break because they'll have no more money. And that's their only real point of leverage. But that isn't something that's actually going to wind up the war. The only way that I see that he could truly try to declare victory and say this is all over is to go in and actually take out their entire nuclear stockpile in terms of the material that could be enriched at some of their facilities. But that is fraught with risk in the middle of mountains. They're going to turn it into a death trap. A lot of it is buried under rubble because we did that. And so it's not even that easy to go and get. There's no good options here. Like in terms of ground options, taking islands, you're sitting ducks for drones, for missiles, for, you know, they want us to invade. They've even said that. They're like, we've been preparing for this, and we want you to come and to try and take

our territory. We're happy to try and to fight you. A lot of them will die, but it will actually probably mobilize their population more than ever. And, of course, they want the American populace to turn against casualties. So for them, it might even be a good thing. Now, on the islands and the straits and all that stuff, the military logic would not necessarily be one that would truly break, you know, the negotiation power. I really think that the nuclear option is the only one. Or is the only one where he could potentially try and sell it as the end.

Now, I don't even think it would be the end. I don't even think it would be the end. I think it would probably get us deeper into it. But in his mind, a true surrender is not on the table. You have to do something. That's all I can see them trying to do right now. Of course, this is just me. I could be wrong. He's a big risk taker. He's a big gambler. So, I mean, I think there's a logic to what you're saying because they name all these different islands that they could come in and occupy. The problem with all the islands is the same. I mean, first of all, it's not easy. You're like a sitting duck there, but let's say you're able to take over the island. Then you're there and you continue to be a sitting duck. And then you have to occupy it, what, forever? So no, that's not,

if you're looking to be able to declare mission accomplished and walk away, that's the opposite of that. That's you being embedded indefinitely on this Iranian island, you know, getting your troops having your troops expose and killed, whatever the Iranians feel like it, and doesn't take that much for them to be able to, again, exact pain if you've got American service members occupying one of these islands, it will not fully solve the problem with the Strait of Hormuz. And again, you're there indefinitely. So, okay, that's one option. If you're trying to find some spectacular off-ramp and you've, you know, you're still high

on your quote-unquote success in Venezuela, yeah, maybe you go with the, what is truly like an insane and insanely risky option to try to drop, you know, paratroopers on the ground in Iran and secure this loose nuclear material that is buried underground and some of which they don't even know where it is and try to use that to declare mission accomplished problem is there too. Not only, okay, let's say that by some miracle you pulled this off or some facsimile of it off enough so that you can say, look, we did it. Okay, we're going away. You think Israel is going to stop? Are you going to constrain Israel? Because there's no evidence of that. the Iranians do not, you know, accept the idea that Israel acts independently of us because they

don't. So, you know, they're not fools enough to buy intel. Oh, that's just Israel doing that. We have nothing to do with it. So if Israel continues to attack them and mess with them, and they're going to continue to, you know, hit our service management, hit our bases in the region, etc. And then we're right back where we started. So I don't know. That's why we look at all of this and it's very hard to see how any of it, even if in the, you know, fantasy land where it succeeds spectacularly beyond anyone's wildest dreams, it still doesn't seem like it's any way to get to an off-ramp. It seems more likely to get a bunch of service members killed and, you know, push us one more chaining up the escalation ladder and get us further embedded and meshed and this thing

indefinitely. The other thing I've been thinking a lot about, let's put the next one up here, just to kind of prove this point out, is that we actually have made this existential for a couple of parties. One is Israel, because now they're screwed. They have to finish the job, right? for them because now they really are a threat and they're really low on interceptors. The other is the Gulf. So how can the Gulf truly be safe with an existing Iranian regime? They can't, right? They have, they need regime change now at this point, even though they wanted to avoid it in the past. Well, here we have some reporting from the New York Times that Emily flagged, which is that the MBS, the leader of Saudi Arabia, has been arguing that the United States should consider putting ground

troops in Iran to seize energy infrastructure and to force the government out of power. Why? Because for them, they've taken hits now in Aramco, Daran, they've got these Houthis down in the Red Sea. They've had their refineries at Yanbu hit. They've had the straits close. This is an insane, actual existential threat to Saudi Arabia, to the UAE, to Qatar, to all of these countries. So Qatar has been courageous. I'll give them credit. They're like, look, we have to live with Iran. It is what it is. We're a small country. They're a big country.

We're not that far away from each other. But Saudi UAE means they're filthy, rich, large powers. For them, they've had tremendous economic damage. And they rely on foreign investment and foreign buyers more than anything. So you mess with oil, we can't be having this. So for them, they're actually itching to try and get into the war, the Saudis. They've been calling Trump, hey, yeah, let's do it. Let's put ground troops in there.

That's another issue is now you have allies who have. divergent interests from ours. They need us to go all in to finish the job for them. They don't have the capacity. So that's a big problem. Now you have Israel and you have the Gulf, who again, we put them in danger, but the Gulf, at this point, they're stuck with us. It's like a marriage and they're like, well, no, you have to go. And so that escalates the logic. Well, and how much money does Trump and his family have business investments throughout the region, too, that are totally cooked as long as you have, you know, a Iranian government in there that could any day send one of their Shahid drones over and bomb your

hotel. Not just Trump, right? We've got our entire VC class, the entire Silicon Valley Eco. You know how how much Saudi money is sitting in Uber or even in Twitter? I mean, on Twitter, you want to talk about all these massive Fortune 500 companies. Do you have any idea how much the Saudi rate, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, the Emirates, how much money they have flowing in U.S. banks and all that. And of course, for them, they're like, hey, all right, well, maybe we'll pull it out if you don't finish the job and secure our interest for us. Not even to mention here the backbone of the Northern Virginia economy is what? Defense contractors. Who do you think keeps these people afloat?

Not just the U.S., UAE and everybody, they've already purchased multi, they've already put in purchase orders in the last month for more thads, for more missiles, all granted under emergency authority, which is a huge boon to the defense contracting industry. So put all that together. So you have the region itself, which actually is aligned, Israel, the Gulf, they need regime change. America's got the only troops that actually do anything about it. And now, though, let's look at the other side to close the loop. Let's put this up here on the screen. The Iranians here now saying, based on some data, Iran's enemies with the support of one of the regional countries, are preparing to occupy one of Iranian islands. All enemy movements are under full surveillance. If they step out of line, all the vital infrastructure are. of that regional country, will, without restriction, become the target of relentless attacks, probably a shot at Saudi Arabia. We're not exactly sure. We have also seen some reporting from many of the analysts in the Gulf is that one thing about Iran is that they've done horizontal escalation, right, is they've gone all the way out. Well, if we try to see some of their coast, what if they tries to seize the UAE or Kuwait or Qatar, right? You only need a couple

boats and some, you know, I mean, how well defended are these countries from an amphibious assault? Nobody knows. Have they even thought about it? Probably not. The two places I saw most theorized were UAE and Bahrain. Right. And Bahrain is, you know, roughly 50-50 Shia Muslim. We've already seen some unrest there where the population is like, oh, yo, we're actually on Iran side.

We're not on your side. We don't like these. I mean, these are installed family dictatorships that, you know, we prop up. because they do what we want them to do. And in exchange for that, you know, we protect them and do these deals with them, et cetera, although I don't think they're feeling too protected anymore. In any case, I mean, UAE, how many actual, like, UAE citizens even are there? Not many.

Oh, sorry, I'm the only thing of Dubai, but, yeah, it's probably, like, five to one foreigners to to actual natives in the UAE. So. So, yeah. I mean, if, and that's why Iran hasn't come close to exhausting the things they could do. They haven't come close, right? I mean, in the early days, we saw some luxury hotels and things hit, which is not totally clear that it was Iran, but there was definitely, you know, damage in Dubai and some shocking things. How easy would it be?

I mean, you've got U.S. service members staying in hotels now throughout the region. You don't think they have any idea where any of them are. Of course they do. They know where some of them are. You know, you've got a population, some of whom are hostile to their own governments. You don't think they're feeding information to the Iranians posting things on social media to let people know, you know, what's going on. there. So they could do, they could do that. The Houthis have not gotten involved over on the Red Sea. They could do that. They could actually, like you said, change the, change the borders themselves.

Okay, you're going to invade and occupy us in Lebanon or whatever. Okay, well, we've got our own ideas for the region and, you know, going into Bahrain or going into UAE. There are so many more things. They could more aggressively even shut down the Strait of Hormuz, where right now they're letting friendly ships through, which is easing some of the pain in the oil market. We'll talk about that in a moment, you know, by at least having some of that oil in the global market, they could take a more hardline approach there as well. So there are many more things that the Iranians actually could do so they have far from exhausted their capabilities in terms of the pain that they could inflict here. Yes. And then finally, I think what we need to mention here is about tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a very important day. Let's put this up here on the screen, B9, please, is that the thousands of Marines are now set to arrive in the region in CENTCOM on the exact same day as the Trump deadline. So keep that very much in mind. That is the Japan-based amphibious assault ship USS Tripoli, roughly 2,200 Marines on board from the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit. You have another one, which is on its way. And of course, you also had the 82nd Airborne where, look, we don't know exactly. We do know, based on the reporting, we know a couple of things. Number one, the command element was given orders to go to SendCom, to go to the region. The actual number of troops, it's probably classified. They're going to try and keep it, you know, as under wraps as

possible. They could already be there. They might be on their way. Their mission is to be able to deploy in 18 hours anywhere in the world. So obviously, they're well trained for this. It would probably happen under the cover of darkness. There'll be decoys, et cetera. So we're never actually going to know. They really already could be there and prepared, ready to go. So keep that in mind as well is that you have Marines, and some of this is faints. If you were to ask me, I think that the Marine element is probably the faint, because what I would think is that they're going to try and pose as if they're about to take over some island that's kind of what they want to concentrate their military resources, while you have a paratrooper unit, which is capable of coming in and deploying anywhere

across the country. So they want to keep the Iranian attention divided and uncertain as to where actually some sort of landing or some sort of attack is going to actually take place. But some of these units may be employed at any time, obviously, to go in and to participate in a very, very risky operation. And the reason why it's the truly risky is that it's not a lot of people. Like they would have to come in for something for what? And are they really going to have the protection that they need? Very unlikely. That's the danger.

And Iran is taunting us. They're saying to American soldiers, come closer. I know. Sending out memes. Arachi from the beginning has been like, we are waiting for them. Come on, like we're waiting for. I mean, they're practically begging us to do some sort of ground invasion because they think that, you know, they can trap as an effectively a killbox. So I think, you know, and I don't think it's just bluster. I think they do feel, I think they

feel very confident about the amount of pain that they could inflict there. So it's, you know, and so you'd look at it and go, I mean, these options all seem insane. And even as I, I agree with your logic about, you know, the way Trump would probably think, although he is so erratic that it's just very hard to say and changes in mind on a dime, depending on a whim, blah, blah, blah, and we've seen that many times. But I will say one thing, you know, you really can't take anything he says seriously because he's such a fabulous liar. I mean, you just make things up on the fly, et cetera. We did learn allegedly this big gift that the Iranians supposedly gave was allowing some tanker through the Strait of Hormuz, but they were already doing that. In any case,

You can't listen to what he says, but I will say, you know, the buildup to Venezuela, there were actually, you know, they actually moved things, move military assets into the region. So I mean, we paid very close attention to. And unlike with his other various threats against Greenland or Mexico or Canada or whatever, there were actually military assets there. Exactly. And in the build up to Iran, same thing. All of these military assets brought into the region.

So I would pay much more close attention to what assets. are being mustard versus the words that, you know, constantly flow out of his mouth, which oftentimes are contradictory and make no sense. When he has brought military assets to the region, he has used them. So I think that's the, you know, that's the thing to look at from past behavior. That is the indication of where we are very likely going. Absolutely. And, you know, you know, part of the reason why almost every president does it is it's the easy option. The diplomacy stuff, that's actually hard. That's way harder. A couple troops. And you've got some guy, Raisin Cain, he's wearing his Patagonia vest, and he's sitting there, they're selling you a dream.

Of course we could do it, right? A couple a tepid thing, you got an idiot like Pete Hegseth and others in the Oval or in the Situation Room. You've got a bunch of people who allegedly were against the war and just not, you know, they're telling Trump whatever he wants to hear. You know, did we do the highlight real thing? Do we have that? No, I thought we had it. I was looking forward to. Maybe we can add it in post, but Ryan and Emily mentioned it yesterday.

But it really is an important window into Trump's information bubble. And this is all, by the way, the way he constructed his administration. Okay. What he gets in terms of a briefing is like a boom, boom, pew, pew highlight reel of Americans doing badass bombing. It's like, you know. It's like, boom. Yeah. And very little information coming from, you know, about the amount of damage the Iranians have been able to do.

He's getting very little information about that. he's getting these little short, couple minute long brief, like hype reels. That's the president of the United States. That is what he's getting. Like the equivalent of the stupid fucking, like DHS Twitter feed. That is what he's taking in. I mean, it's just, it's, it's so disturbing and disgusting. But when you're thinking about how he's viewing all of this and all of these insane things

and all the victory narrative about, oh, they're obliterated and we've won and victory is ours and they're begging us to talk, et cetera. Just keep in mind that his old-ass declining brain is just being fed like Fox News propaganda condensed down into these two-minute reels. It's the two-minute reels plus Fox News propaganda. So those two things are a very— Devastating. Very potent and a dangerous combination. How do we get to this point where—

We'll have time for that. It's—I mean, it's just— You see these Iranians like multiple PhDs and whatever, and they're actually like have thought about this. and have a strategy and we're just like, um, Middle Eastern War, I don't think that'll affect the oil markets. Do you? Be careful where you go down this road, because you may find out that totalitarianism often can breed decently.

That's a whole other, that's a whole other conversation. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are at them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the honest talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.

So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Bailey Taylor and this is It Girl. You may know me from my It Girl series I've done on the streets of New York over the years. Well, I've got good news. I am bringing those interviews and many more to this podcast. Yes, we will talk about the style and the success, but we are also. talking about the pressure, the expectations, and the real work with the women's shaping culture

right now. As a woman in the industry, you're always underestimated. So you have to work extra hard, and you have to push the narrative in a way that doesn't compromise who you are in your integrity. You know, I like to say I was kind of like a silent ninja. Each week, I have unfiltered conversations with female founders, creatives, and leaders to talk about ambition, visibility, and what it really takes to build something meaningful in the public eye. Because being a Nick Girl is, isn't about the spotlight, it's about owning it. I think the negatives need to be discussed and they need to be told to people who maybe don't do this every day, just so they know what's really going on. I feel like pulling the curtain back is important.

Listen to It Girl with Bailey Taylor on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why hasn't a woman formally participated in a Formula One race weekend in over a decade? Think about how many skills they have to develop at such a young age. What can we learn from all of the new F1 romance novels suddenly popping up every year? He still smelled of podium champagne and expensive friction. And how did a 2023 event called Wag A Geddon change the paddock forever? That day is just seared into my memory. I'm culture writer and F1 expert Lily Herman,

and these are just a few of the questions I'm tackling on no grip, a Formula One Culture podcast that dives into the under-explored pockets of the sport. In each episode, a different guests and I will go deeper into the wacky mishap, scandals, and sagas, both on the track and far away from it, that have made F1 a delightful, decadent dumpster fire for more than 75 years. Listen to no grip on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Turning now to enlistment and part of the other potential dangers here for the United States. I'm going to put this up here on the screen. The U.S. Army has now raised enlistment age to 42, and eased marijuana policies to bolster their ranks. The change takes effect April 20th,

alongside a new rule dropping restrictions for recruits with a single marijuana possession conviction. Obviously, I think people know my feelings on the marijuana front, but generally, not usually a good thing. Whenever you have to say, hey, you've been caught with drugged before, no worries. Oh, oh, you're only 36. Come on in here. Let's raise the age up to Only in your early 40s? Come on down. Yeah, you're only 40. This is like Ukraine-level stuff, right?

In addition to the age requirement, the Army has removed restrictions for recruits who have a single possession of marijuana or drug paraphernalia. Previously, that would have required a waiver from the Pentagon and the passing of a drug test. Wait, we're not going to drug test guys who've been caught with drugs before? What are we doing here? All right?

You want some weed addict to be serving in the military behind a machine gun? Plenty of a military, according to Seth Harb. That's even worse, okay? get them out too. Currently, the Navy and Air Force permit recruits over the age of 40, but the Marine Corps has a maximum age of enlistment for 28. Fiscal year 2025, the Army did see a recruiting bump following seven years of decline, but in 2022, in many of the years prior, they significantly missed a recruitment goal. Part of the problem, I'm assuming, is that the 2025 Army recruitment bump or U.S. military recruitment bump is not enough to make up for like

a 25% deficit for years under the Biden administration. And so having to raise the recruitment age, it's just not something I would personally do in a time of war. Because this was, by far, of all the news that's broken through, I saw this one break through the Normie firewall more than anything. People are like, wait, what? They're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. They're like, I didn't sign up for any of this. I will say this is personally why I support a draft because part of the problem with all volunteer military, while yes, I think it makes it much more professional, is it makes it much easier to deploy without democratic consent, and I mean of the governed.

So for example, post-Vietnam, they said, well, what was the most unpopular part of Vietnam? The draft. Well, let's just get rid of the draft part. And by getting rid of that, Iraq, Afghanistan, the years of the forever wars, you take the best and the brightest of these poorer areas,

promise them the moon, the sign-ups and Ford F-150s and all this other stuff, and then you just ship them off. And it actually enables, you to keep it going for a longer period of time. So that's what I look at this recruitment age expansion as is to try and expand the pool to be able to offer all of these incentives, like the financial incentives and stuff, which I don't, I'm not opposed to any of that per se, but what it does

is it creates the space to actually bring more people in the military and have less democratic consent. Like only 1% of people ever served in the U.S. Armed Forces, very few people actually know people who've served in the armed forces. It's one of the biggest class device. If your upper income, you probably don't know anybody you served in a military. It's extremely rare. If you're college educated, again, very, very rare. Your closest connection might be like ROTC people on your campus, but you're not even going to know necessarily like enlisted folks. And that's the issue, which we saw is that with Vietnam, you know, yes, we had a draft, but we had basically the draft exclusion for a lot of the upper elite who didn't have to go and to serve is it ends up

becoming like the poor, the uneducated, who are either forced by circumstances, or tricked or told to be to go into the war and it creates exactly this type of situation. When you are expanding recruitment age, it's usually a sign either that the populace is too obese, which is true, true, true, you know, for a variety of reasons like ineligible to serve. But you have to create this where you have to like suck people more in for incentives and it sends the message of we don't have enough people and we might be coming for you. And that's the danger.

Even though I do support a draft. But it's one of those where I support it because I know that it would do what it did under Vietnam where people were like, I am not going for this war. Like this is not happening, which will force you to engage harder in the democratic process. It's a matter of life and death. We also have reports that, you know, the number of conscientious objectors is surging. That you have service members who are saying things like, I don't want to die for Israel. So there is a lack. I mean, think of who the military is largely young men, right?

some of many of whom may have supported President Trump. Statistically probably did. The vast majority of whom very likely opposed this war. Because, I mean, if you look at the numbers, generationally, young people are the most opposed to it. So you're going to have a lot of service members who are in the military right now, who are not down with this mission.

So you have that issue. You also, you know, just zooming out to the sort of more macro perspective, the best recruitment tool is the like a miseration of the population because if people are desperate then and you're like, oh, we'll give you this perk and that perk and you'll be able to like live and earn a decent salary and, you know, and have some prospects in life. And so as AI comes for like the, you know, it's already destroyed a lot of the blue collar job path. As AI now comes for the white color jobs as well, look, my daughter's graduating high school. I know a lot of kids who she's graduating with that in my era would have definitely been college bound who are now going

the military. I know a lot. And so, you know, I think you've got now this expansion, obviously, it's very ominous at a time of war when you're looking at a giant country like Iran, 90 plus million people, you know, all sorts of capabilities, present, threatening ground evasion. And that's the moment when you jump the enlistment age from 34 to 42. I mean, that's also a big jump, right? And we've seen what's happened in Ukraine. I mean, it's just very disturbing. And to your point about the draft, if that doesn't give them the numbers and we end up in some big war in Iran, guess what the next tool is? It is a draft. So I know these things seem insane right now, but let's not forget, Caroline Levitt was asked, hey, people are worried about a draft. What do you have to

say to that? She wouldn't rule it out. Let's take a listen to that moment. Mothers out there are worried that we're going to have a draft, that they're going to see their sons get in and daughters get involved in this. What do you want to say about the press? plans for troops on the ground. As we know, it's been largely an air campaign up until now. It has been, and it will continue to be, and President Trump wisely does not remove options off of the table. I know a lot of politicians like to do that quickly, but the president as commander-in-chief wants to continue to assess the success of this military operation. It's not part of the current plan right now, but the president, again, wisely keeps his options on the table. And, you know, the most charitable reading of that saga was that she was not responding directly to the piece about the draft.

She was responding to, like, you know, ground troops or whatever. But did they ever come out and be like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no drafts. Like, you guys took that out of the con. No, they didn't. They let it stay. Just like they let, you know, stand what Mike Huckabee said about Greater Israel Project, let that stand. They let this stand. Look, they're happy to put on a tweet, you know, oh, the fake news media is twisting her words.

No, we didn't get any of that. Yeah, exactly. And this is why, I mean, as I said intellectually, I suppose. court draft. Like, if you want me to leave my wife and my daughter, well, it better be for a damn good reason. Like, the entire populace, but, and also me and nobody else should be able to buy their way out like they have in the past. Like, if we're in, okay, let's go. But then we all better be bought in to this decision as a populace. We have clear, defined ends. All of our congressmen and others have voted for it. Fine. I actually, I can make peace with that. I can't make peace with

some sort of piecemeal system and to watch the lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan, because you were talking about economically, this is part of the tragedy of it. Because here's the truth. Joining the military is a fantastic financial decision. You will get free education. You get paid actually pretty decently compared to like a normal market wage, especially if you're a newer graduate. If you're trying to buy a house in the future, USAA, I mean, there's no better program in America than if you join the military. And that's part of the why a lot of people do it, which I have zero issue with. I do have an issue whenever it creates this incentive at a time of war to potentially have to go and serve in something which other people

who are more financially privileged don't have to do when they're not bought into it. If the whole populace is not, and then those people are economically disenfranchised, it creates this. There's also a cultural difference. There's a lot of people talking about it in the South. There's a military culture, so you're more likely to join the military. And then it creates a lot of division in our society. We lost four or five thousand people during the global war on. Actually, no, 7,500 people in the global war on terror. But if you look statistically at the counties that they're concentrated in, the people who are quote unquote elite or richer had almost no contact with those people or those families.

So Iraq was a distant conversation. And unfortunately, it looks like that's what they want to recreate. Like, yeah, who are the type of people who even have marijuana convictions or drug paraphernalia conviction in the first place? Who are the type of people who are going to want to join the military at age 30? I mean, who's a 39-year-old who wants to join the military? It's usually not like Uber Patriot. It could be. And no, you know, if you are one of those people, God bless you.

Most of the time, it's probably, I've got two kids. I need, you know, I need health insurance. I need a mortgage. I got to make this shit work. Yeah. That's the worst possible thing. Look, I understand your, and I don't even disagree with your, like, philosophical argument in favor of a draft.

But let me tell you, if they try to implement a draft right now for this fucking unpopular monstrous, idiotic, illegal, offensive war of choice. Abs of fucking lootly not. American people didn't want this. They didn't vote for this. You explicitly ran against this. Like, no, no, no, no, no. We are not doing this.

And the people who've already died, it's been way too... I mean, every single one has been too many. I know. And to your point, I mean, a bunch of, like, reserve, you know, reserve. They were thinking, I'm on this base, you know, in Kuwait. Like, they're not thinking that they're at risk. And it does sit in there in a double wide trailer, getting blown up by a shot drone or whatever.

I mean, it's just the cavalier way that they will just throw lives into a meat grinder. And, you know, I have to connect it to the AI piece because they know that there's going to be tons of extra superfluous human beings that have nothing to do. And what better to do with them than send them into some meat grinder? I honestly, I genuinely think that's part of what's going on here, too. the logic of the oligarchs as exposed in the Epstein files. If it's perfectly with that notion, they don't see your sons and daughters as fully human. They don't care about whether they live or die.

What they're looking at is how do I profit? What does this do for me personally? What does it do for my legacy? That is, or what sort of compromising material might people have on me? That is the way that these people think and the way that they operate and it shows in this war. Yeah, all right. Let's get to polling.

a millionaire overnight and lost everything that actually mattered. Hold on, Sophia. Did you just say they lost everything after becoming a millionaire? That's right. And it gets worse. It's narrating too much drama week on the okay story time podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, I just inherited a fortune after losing my mom, and now my girlfriend's entire family is coming out of nowhere with her hands out. And my girlfriend is already giving my money away. So the girl he wants to marry is already sending money out the door. To find out how it ends, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lori Siegel, and on my new podcast, Mostly Human, I'll take you to some wild corners of the tech world.

I'm about to go on a date with an AI companion at a real world cafe right here in New York City. There's no playbook for what to do when an AI model hallucinates a story about you. Mostly Human is your playbook for how tech can work. for you. Anyone can now be an entrepreneur. Anyone can build an app. And it's very empowering. Listen to mostly human on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. In 2023, Bachelor star Clayton Eckerd was accused of fathering twins. But the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax. You doctored this particular test twice, Ms. Sondes, correct? I doctored the test once. It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.

Two more men who'd been through the same thing. Greg, a lesbian, Michael Ranjini. My mind was blown. I'm Stephanie Young. This is Love Trapped. Laura, Scottsdale Police. As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.

Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.