TRASHFUTURE - Escape from Mental Palm Jumeirah feat. Matthew Petti

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

      What if we put new, unwoke Switzerland on a major geopolitical fault line? We look at the world the day after the US-Israeli attack on Iran, including how Europe, the Middle East, and UAE based crypto hustlers will respond. Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! TF Merch is still available here! *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Okay, I have a pitch for you. Okay. Okay, you know how Switzerland is like woke and soy now? Yeah, it's cucked now. It's cucked. Because they did like one regulation that said that like, if you are Joseph Coney, pinky promise you have to tell us.

Actually, if we know you're committing a crime, we may share elements of your details if we are really forced to with a country investigating you. Yeah, it's like, okay, fine, bring in the big, like, burlap sack with a dollar sign, but it can't still have blood on it. Yeah, and so, obviously, Switzerland washed, new Switzerland needed. So the world, hunting for a new Switzerland, the sort of global, some of the most awful people in the world hunting for the new Switzerland, they decided, okay, how about? Check it out.

It's Switzerland, and you get to own humans. However, positive, and positive. You know how normal Switzerland is ringed by mountains and entirely landlocked. And also contains lots of the stuff that like old money likes to do like skiing and outdoors and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boring, not interesting. What if you had all of the stuff that new money likes? Yeah, okay.

And it was like in a desert. So there's no water. That's very crucial, right? There's no water. And all of the water has to either get like trucked in or, it like, you know, gets desalinated. And it's like five miles away from a bunch of missile batteries. Okay.

Well, hey, Switzerland has mined all their bridges and tunnels. So that is a bit similar. Yeah. What if, right? Constantly, you were living in like a sort of like glass and steel tower built by slaves, but it could get like rockets and drones fired at it. Just like the drop of a hat, like ready to go. I think that's really an essential aspect of this kind of investment vehicle we're talking about.

Like the West as a broad project has decided to place two, one important technological. It's a beautiful idea. If only it were real. We're just stuck with regular, boring old Switzerland, you know. There's nowhere I can invest my money where I'm going to be put at risk of maybe like the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. like blow up my Coke dealer. Yeah. I mean the Kenahans. But yeah, it's the, it was the, it is the place where Instagram influencers meets real estate

influencers, meets crypto hustlers, meets international drug kingpins. Yeah. And they all then interact with like every one of those friendship groups ends up just having like some British person from Milton Keynes. And you don't quite know what they do, but they are just like hanging out. And like that all of this just empty wretchedness was all supposed to be. because this was the place where politics never came. A glittering city on the Straits of fucking Hormuz.

I can't believe we started with the obituary for Dubai. Here's the thing, though. I think lots to talk about this week. Like what? Well, it's the end of the Laboooo. It is, it is. And with the end of the Labibu comes the end of the 20th century. Sorry, I just need to interrupt.

I was just pitching my new Switzerland idea. Has something happened? So here's the thing. You remember work from home? Uh-huh. Yes. You remember how we all loved working from home because you didn't have to be in the office? Uh-huh.

Well, it turns out that in Iran, you know, that they're sort of very innovative as a regime. They've established a good way to sort of like fuck up Dubai and the Gulf, but they've also discovered a new downside to making everybody come to an in-person meeting. I like the idea of like a domino meme where it begins with work from home and it ends with World War Free. I warned people this would happen. Well, I was going to say,

I was going to say, there's probably like something in the running for some telegraph columnists to just do that. Like, Alistair Heath, if you're listening to this show, and I know that there's a chance you might be, because you are like an insane person now.

Like, do the piece. Do the piece about how work from home caused World War Free. It's just the opposite. You want me to come to the office? the thing that killed Ayatollah harmony? Oh, that's so true. Yeah, if he took a mental health day, he would be alive.

That is literally, he would be on a peloton right now in a like a bunker 70 miles underground and he would be fine. Yeah, he loved going to the office. He loved the social interactions that came with being in that environment and that's what killed him. Yeah. All of the potential Delcizeges that the US has now apparently obliterated

in its, I would say, next sort of gaping sort of hell mouth of imperialism opens under Iran. They all could have avoided that by just saying yep, nothing from me, thanks. And then that's it. Going back to music yourself. Yeah, I,

the thing is, right, you remember how last time I got kind of frustrated because we were doing stuff out of order and I was like, there's not going to be anything left for war episode. You remember how I said that immediately before the in person all hands me

thing that really changed the composition of the top levels of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Yeah. So if you can't tell, it's TF, we're talking. It's war episode. It's war. It's war episode now. War episode arrives seldom when you expect necessarily. Later on the episode, we'll be talking with Matthew Petty about some of the international relations dimensions of the opening up of another maximalist blood-soaked Forever War with unclear, largely impossible aims that is not even bothered to build any kind of consent for at home. Yeah, whisper it, but this might be our first non-Ed Zittron episode of Is That Good? Is That Good has a guest host this week. So, but before we do that, I do want to talk a little bit more about Dubai.

Yeah, because it's, that's, it's not easy to find comedy podcast in World War III. And so you have to take these things as you find them. And I think it is conceptually funny for the revolutionary guards to drop a UAV on Tom Skinner's fat, sunburned head. I think that, you know, legally they're a prescribed organization. You're not allowed to express support for the IRGC. Maybe that was what they got Mandelson on. I don't know. But I think I'm allowed to say it would be funny if it happened.

Or more specifically, I actually read what I think to be the funniest line here about this. This was an interview with a fund manager in the FT. He said, it's pretty scary. This is going to have some implications for some of my guys. The trade was that by moving to Dubai, you were not getting exposed to geopolitics. I hope that was the same fund manager who said we can say the R word now the Trump's been elected. Just the wrongest man in history being interviewed time and time. time again. Yeah, they keep promising that I can do things that belittle people and also not have any, not face any consequences. And I keep having to face consequences. And I want my money back. Yeah. I think that like the flights, the first evacuation flights back from Dubai, they should have some kind of HMRC SWAT team waiting at the gate. And you just get like tackled instantly. Well, how do you think they sort of like rank like with sort of people of importance who get to leave?

I guess it's like, on one hand, it's like, is it based on like the number of followers you have? Just grabbing a like emirati border guard being like, no, you don't understand. I founded Brew Dog, let me out. Yeah, and the piece goes on, sort of interviewing people in Dubai, said one British expat to Dubai who said he witnessed the explosion

in front of the airport on Sunday as a Shahed drone for 50 meters overhead said he would absolutely not leave. We're absolutely safe here. You know what? Yeah, fucking fair enough. Like, you know, I would rather face like bombs dropping on my sort of shitty condo in like Marina Beach or whatever it's called, then go back to Huddersfield. Fair enough.

There's an interesting thing that's going on here where I, I've been guessing on Elon Musk's X.com, the everything app, French tweets because I speak enough French to like the occasional French tweet. And French Twitter, absolutely in the same position with French. people, like French expats in Dubai, there is, like, I saw a screenshot of a woman who's like, hey, so is like Cafe de Paris safe? This is all in French, by the way. And someone said, no, it's not safe. It's all a war zone. You're getting rockets fired at you. And she said, Ethan Smoky Beach. And I have had the phrase, Mem Smoky Beach in my head ever since I saw that.

This is a pan-European phenomenon, right? Like, all of our worst people are all. getting on Instagram live, like running outside for a few minutes to gloat about how safe they are. And they're all doing this all on the Palm Jumaira within a fucking hundred meters of one another in some cases. You can see

Andrew Tate from Samuel leaves his video. If you can like airdrop the Iranian military the capacity to make a missile that like homes in on a DJI Osmo Pocket vlogging camera, we would be an order of

magnitude better off as a country. Yeah. Well, look, I also, I wonder where, like, where's David Gesser? What's he up to? Are we going to do a rooftop? Are we going to do like a rooftop set? Like an anti-war set. Shout out to his family in reference to Khamini. Yeah, like,

let's go. I, you know, I was also thinking about like some of our sort of like esteemed British personalities who have moved to Dubai for various reasons. I know that on the Imannos who you have referenced one, Isabel Oakshot. Yeah. Like, you know, she seems to be being quite normal about it or do you think I could like pass the Iranian military

my ex-landlord's details the guy who was letting out his flat to me while he lived in Saudi Arabia because previously my plan was to like you know go to the Saudi Ministry of Interior and be like yeah I buy all my bibles and alcohol from this gay guy but like I'm thinking that now

there might be an easier way to solve this problem. Going back to what you said to say about Isabel Oakeshott, I have a wonderful quote from her. Here is the spirit of Dubai in one act. My daughter has a severely disabled teacher who gives her lessons at weekends. He's wheelchair bound. Today we expected him to cancel, yet he's taking a special vehicle to get across town and get to her. That's just how we are. Yes, we, we, we, Isabel Oakeshott. We here in Dubai. I had someone get mad at me for laughing about Dubai and they said to me, Well, you wouldn't be laughing if this was happening to Miami. I can assure you.

I can promise you. Pick any other city. We're absolutely safe here. One of the people interviewing the FT goes on. And residents are even antagonistic towards anyone considering leaving. The idea of leaving paradise of your own volition is just seen as so absurd. They're going to have to ship me out. They may have to.

They may have to. And of course, we also, once again, we have to spare a thought for. the people currently sheltering in like extremely segregated bomb shelters in Israel because I have just seen a very funny photo of Quentin Tarantino in a bomb shelter and I just you never want to hand it to the theocracy

right but like anything that inconveniences that man is a tonic to the fucking soul now just before we move on to speak with Matthew right yeah before we get into the sort of like darker aspects, if we can find them of the kind of like world conflagration. It's just like, we're going to talk a lot about the day after plan for Iran, but what the fuck is the day after plan for the like small Gulf monarchies where your whole thing, like Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, your whole thing is absolute authority, absolute safety,

and an ironclad social contract that guarantees an easy, life for the small pampered native populations, a pretty easy life for European, American, and Australian expats, and then utter misery for sort of tens and hundreds of thousands of enslaved, basically enslaved guest workers. What do you going to fucking do? Build a fucking Sam site on the Palm Jumaira. That doesn't make any sense. It's contradictory. It's kind of holding for the moment in the sense that like, you know, I believe the UAE is like intercepting about like 90% or more of everything that's being sort of fired at them. We'll see how that calculation changes.

I don't want to make too much of, like, you know, magazine depth for interceptors or anything. But I think Iran, I guess, has probably made the entirely correct calculation that these are the softest people in the world, like European expats in Dubai. And you only have to, because, like, at time of recording, they hadn't done much because of that, you know, 90% plus interception rate. But they blew up the fucking port-cochere at, at least. like a five-star hotel,

much like the, I feel like Halo Master Chief guy. And maybe that will be enough. It's certainly enough to have people scurrying for the airports, you know? What it looks like when they sort of like having to make difficult decisions about what to intercept, I have no idea,

but like, I don't think the Brew Dog guy's staying for that, and I don't know if he's coming back. Yeah, the whole point of these places, as you say, is that they sold a fantasy of paradise to some people. And there are plenty of other places

that will do that. They are lining up to be like, hey, you should park your money with us instead. Yeah, there is, there is like the sort of sell for like most,

not all of these places, but for most of these places was just like, especially to Westerners, kind of being, you know, your countries and your sort of civilization is on the verge of collapse

and we have all the treats. And I think that's it. It's very much like, they advertise themselves on the basis, especially Dubai, where it's like, we have all the treats.

If you want to live a life that is sort of guided by treats and treats alone and is not involved in politics because like, you know, we're not democracies, you know, come over here and like the cell was basically good until it wasn't. Yeah, I mean, the funniest possible miscalculation of personal safety you could make is moving to Dubai because you got scared by an AI generated video of roadmen using a water park and moving to the flight path of an Iranian ballistic missile.

Well, there's also, yeah, and I was also thinking about this in terms of like, and this is a very niche category, but still nevertheless, I did chuckle a little bit, unfortunately, which is like the sort of, um, like religious types of people who moved to Dubai because they wanted to get away from all like the woke LGBT stuff, right? And like Dubai was the place to do that. And now I'm just sort of wondering like, yeah, was like, was like the one small street in London where they have like a couple of gay clubs still? Like was that, you want to like, you know, was that really that bad? Getting, getting bombed by the Iranians who are also extremely homophobic is a great bit. The last frame of your life, the last sort of conscious visual information you process

is a nose cone of an Iranian rocket which has a like homophobic slur spray painted on it and fuss. I don't want to be about person this is like, oh, you know, you sort of get what you deserve, etc. Like, you know, I imagine it's like a very, I know, I know people who like live in Dubai for various reasons and it is like, we have family in Dubai and like, you know, they can here bombs like, you know, bombs in the distance. And, you know, also there's a lot of infrastructure that is just not there because they, I guess, like, the Gulf never really expected this to happen. Yeah. So soon. And so it is crazy that they never expected it to happen. And so, I imagine it's like, you know, it is a fairly pretty, it's a pretty like scary situation if you

are, if you happen to be there and, you know, there's. And also like, even if you are sort of like an expat, so to speak, like, you know, you are now in a position where, you know, I think something like this is also a real recognition of like where you stand in the society because like it's very easy when things were good in Dubai to be like, yeah, I'm an expat. I don't really have like citizenship. I don't have a passport. I don't really have like, you know, my existence here is precarious. But I sort of like, I'm a magnitude ahead of like, you know, the sort of foreign labor that live on the outskirts of Dubai who like make the city work. Right. Now it's very much a situation of like, oh, okay, you know, these bombings are happening or like, you know, now I have to sort of face politics

where I have to face like the reality of being sort of an individual within a historical context. And yeah, I'm in an incredibly precarious position where, you know, move comes to shove, like I will not be saved. And it doesn't matter what type of like crypto adjacent job I came here for on like a seven, seven year like tourist visa. Yeah. Ultimately, you know, this is goes back to this is reality intruding on the fantasy. And if you did move to Dubai because you were tired of.

being a landlord in a country with so many tenants rights is the UK or because you don't worry you can still do it from Dubai yeah you or you were tired of uh yeah you were tired of scaring yourself with as you say Nova and you thought you were going to get acid attacked and so you're like no this is fine I'm just going to I what I'm going to do is I'm going to uh get a condominium that is going to get blown up instantly I you have an incredible view of the Iranian launch system I assume it's decorative. And you know what? This is, this was, I mean, the whole place is built on fantasy.

It's built in the fantasy of infinite hydrocarbons. It's built on the fantasy of high finance. It's built in the fantasy of fucking influencer glamour. God, it really is, Britain. Yeah, it is. I mean, good God, that's why there are so many of us there. But it is this moment where the fantasy cannot sustain a crack in its facade because the whole point is about feeling,

like you can live a life free of anxiety that people who you should think are beneath you won't frighten you or won't stand up to you or whatever. And guess what? You live in the real fucking world and apparently that's on the Straits of Hormuz. So the other thing I want to talk about

before we go into talking to Matthew just very quickly is we saw last week in the UK the kind of beginnings of an antidote to this sort of thing, of course, where we saw a by-election in Gordon and Denton go very much our way, let's say.

Yeah, remember all the shit we said about how if Matt Goodwin ate shit, he would still be an MP at the next election, but he would be seething for the rest of time. I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying it a lot. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I want to bring up a few things before we go on, just that I think are relevant to this. Number one, Zach Polanski and as well as the Spanish Prime Minister,

are two European politicians for examples of saying, we should have nothing to do with this. This is probably the worst thing that could happen. One of the worst things that could happen, we should stand against it for the sake of international law, for the sake of not turning a nation of 90 million people into Syria times several.

Like Syria in 2011 times several. It should be something that we stand against. And guess what? That guy, his profile was just raised. and the domestic anti-war politics is now, I think, probably more important than ever. And unlike in 2003, there appears to be a political party that is actually a national contender and lots of opinion polls for more than a few seats that actually seems to be so far standing against it.

Yeah, because it's crazy that reform have immediately gone, yes, sir, Mr. Trump, love the Forever Wars, you know, may we have some more? And I think the other thing is, I don't want people to kind of misread Stama on this, right? Because now we're involved, right? It's, you know, formally, I think people are going to maybe suspect that we got dragged in by, you know, the IRGC sort of like, you know, blowing up like a porter cabinet, Acciteria or whatever. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true of other European leaders either. I think what you're looking at is an intervention that we,

was so obviously stupid that only the Americans and the Israelis wanted internet, but that everyone wanted to do. Right. And now there's enough of a pretext for Stama and for other European leaders to be like, yeah, sure, absolutely. We will take, we will take a piece of the action here. So it's just something that needed that little bit extra sort of like rationale to it, you know? So I wouldn't, I don't want to give Stammer any credit whatsoever for withholding cooperation with the U.S. until now. Yeah, it was, it was inconvenient for him that he couldn't. Now he's been given his reason. And, you know, as you say, going back to reform, you know, they are the, fundamentally they are, like, Trump was always the war guy.

The Democrats were the war people too, but Trump was the war guy. Fucking Starmor's the war guy. Guess what? So is Farage. Because they all represent the same thing. and to get taken in time and the gap. Do you want the war guy brackets pretending to be smart, or do you want the war guy brackets reveling in being dumb?

Yeah. And, you know, just sort of going back to the campaign a little bit, or the aftermath of the election a little bit before we talked to Matthew, the reaction on behalf of the sort of political mainstream, from Starmor to Goodwin to Farage, has essentially been to keep on saying the most frightening words they can, sectarianism, family voting. Listen, every Muslim woman is being robotically controlled by her husband to vote green, I guess.

That's the only reasonable, moderate conclusion. No, the other conclusion is, and I don't know why Matt Goodwin's complaining. Like, what if you, like, have four wives and you've told them that you should vote for Matt Goodwin, right? Traditional values. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, that's like Matt's part for not, like, investing enough in, you know, the sort of, you know, in the Muslim communities of which he is imagining entirely in his head. He should have been doing more kind of wife outreach. Look, you should have been debating your headmates

and convincing them of your policy position. You cannot complain about it. Well, he is remedying that in that if he, I don't know if you saw the photo of him at the count where he's just like on his phone sullen. As he's been, I think, like a man with two moods, on his phone bracket sort of like eyebrow waggingly provocative and on his phone sullen rage.

I think we have a sort of aspect of this. Obviously, we know that all of these accusations of like family voting and Muslim blocks and stuff are all just like fucking bullshit. Of course. It's been bullshit. But like on a very basic level, it's like a new form of why. Like it feels like a kind of sort of new incredibly whiny take when like the sort of position is like, well, okay, you've basically built policy platforms that are overtly anti-Muslim on the grounds that you think that like this is the type of populism that's going to get you elected, right? you know, you spent a local election campaign talking about like fucking birth rates and civilizational collapse and, you know, the sort of takeover of like the Saracens and everything. And then you

want them to still vote for you, right? I don't understand like, yeah, there might be a Muslim block vote, right? There could be a Muslim block vote. But that block vote isn't like because it's being coordinated by fucking like Zach Palansk in the Green HQ. It's because you've been a fucking dick to them and obviously they're going to vote against you. Like, what are you talking about? what, like, on what position, in what universe would you think that, like, running a fucking position that's like, I'm going to ban headscarves and I'm going to, like, basically close down the moss. And like, they haven't sort of said that directly, but like, anyone with half a brain cell can sort of read between the lines. And also just like, you know,

Matt Goodwin has also very open, been, like, quite Islamophobic. Like, you know, I'm not, you know, I don't think that's like an unfair position to make because it has, it was politically salient for him to do so. All the shit about like, you know, like, you sort of like downfall of Christianity or whatever. It is very much embedded in that narrative if you sort of think about it for more than five seconds. Why do you think they would vote for you? I don't get it. It's just being mad that politics is happening. Hey, hey, I was a reform candidate. I was promised I was going to be immune from politics. Well, this is it. Like, and it goes back to the stuff that we were talking about, like, Dubai and like the Brits that go there and the expats that go there, which is like, you know, they want to live in a world where they don't have to engage with anyone other than in this sort of like very transactional capacity in which, they are sort of like given deference and are sort of like, get like entitled to sort of permanent servitude by like a lower class of people, right? But like a basic level,

like they don't want to interact with anyone. They want the power and they want the privilege without having to actually like reciprocate any of that. The reform, but we know we've spoken about this before. The reform platform like for the most part has been like we are not going to offer you anything that's going to improve your life and you should be happy and you should just sort of accept that.

And now like we are having to. face this problem both on a party level and as an individual, like, in regards to Matt Goodwin, where it's like, no, you actually do have to talk to people and you do actually have to figure out like what kind of stuff they want. And you, some of those people may not, or they may not be glued to their phone and they may not be on X like you are. And you're going to have to be okay with that, right? You're going to, you're going to have to get out of your echo chamber. Well, I think we're going to go talk to a different Matthew now. But to Matt Goodwin, a poster to the end consigned to the dustbin of political history, like so much Paul Masonry. I hope this is the

last we see of you. All right, all right. Let's talk to Matthew. See you in a second, everyone. Hello and welcome to the second half, where we have Matthew Petty, the assistant editor at Reason, unusual poll for us, but go with it, who's covering national security policy, the Middle East, and has been pretty consistently right about the horror, evil, and stupidity all being unleashed at once by the Epsteinist clique in charge of the White House. Matthew, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So, Nova, there was a quote from one of Matthews articles

that you read to me earlier that I found, I want to say, completely horrifying. Please, if you don't like kicking us off. Yeah, absolutely. So this is sort of part of the broader question, I guess, of who, where is this going? What is the plan in Iran? And Matthew, you quoted Trump telling the New York Post,

I don't have the yips with respects to boots on the ground like every president says. I understand the yips here to be a golfing term for like nerves to be like in your own head. And it just struck me that between that and now watch this drive, we're at a sort of 20 year golfer hegemony

of yes, yeah, of like a sort of like golfing Boomer walking us into war in the Middle East with not really a goal, let alone a plan. Do you think that sort of like jimes with what you've read? I think, yeah, I think

as I've said, it's not so much that they have like a specific end goal, but there's this animal instinct of like, you bite into something like this weak enemy, you can bite into it and grab it. And I think maybe some fact that the administration have some idea of what they want. I think,

think the American sort of military deep stay wants what General Van Cain said pretty much explicitly wants to make an Iran that cannot project power outside of its own borders that can't challenge the U.S. and Middle East. And then you have, I think the Israeli goal is much more of just like state collapse of just like a sort of more extreme version of the American goal, just like not only make it not be able to project power outside its own borders, but also within its own borders. And And then you have like, you know, Iranian diaspora opposition and various factions. The Trump administration maybe have these like delusions of grandeur that they are going to bring the monarchy back to power. Like I, you know, and I think all these people basically have maybe different goals or sort of incoate goals or like they just sort of understand that they own together think the U.S.

should take that big hammer swing at Iran. And I think that's very telling. the goal of swinging the hammer is to swing the hammer that the president, the U.S. president has said, we are just sort of hoping that the Iranian people will spontaneously generate a liberal democracy that also is. They're basically hoping that there is some combination between Ahmed al-Shara and Nelson Mandela who's waiting to just take power and, I don't know, get a spread in Monaco magazine, basically. I don't think that I don't think anyone really believes. for the liberal democracy think.

I don't even think that the Iranian opposition who lobby the U.S. believe in it. I think that Ahmed Ashara is much closer to what they want than Nelson Mandela. Nobody wants, you know, they don't believe in this spreading democracy stuff. They believe on the American side that, yeah, we could just replace this government

with something that's more amenable to our interests. And I think within the Iranian monarchists community, I mean, they're monarchists. They believe let's turn the clock back to 1978. So, yeah, I don't think anyone's serious. Democracy is sort of this byword for just like, yeah, like vaguely pro-United States, you know, socially liberal, free market kind of thing. I don't think they want democracy in the sense of like civil and political rights.

Maybe someone doesn't believe in their heads that like, okay, we'll get that. But I'm, I don't think that this is like the primary vision, even explicitly for a lot of these kids. It's very, it's very funny that like, uh, Patovi, was sort of like asked about coming back to Iran sort of wishcasting that and he was like, well, I did it part time. And I think the idea of having a sort of king who's in the country part time to reduce Iran to the level of kind of like

Persian Canada is just a really sort of like doomed endeavor. But I mean, not just just like throw quotes at you, but there was a sort of brief bit on the BBC Life blog today that caught my eye and that I think speaks to the kind of incoomely. in Trump's own mind. Where it says, the president said it was projected the war would last four to five weeks, but that will take whatever time it takes. Referring to a suggestion he'd heard in the media that he might get bored,

he said, there is nothing boring about this. There was then some nervous laughter in the room as he went off script and started praising the room's curtains, which he chose in his first term, and describing the ballroom he's constructing at the White House. So if that's Trump, right, and you have this kind of coalition of different interests, lobbying around him, you can kind of, where does this lead then? Like, which one of them is sort of like likely to predominate in his, I guess we can call it, thinking?

I think we're past that point. I think we're past the point of like who's lobbying the president. I think, yeah, like this war is the result of that. Now I think we're, frankly, at a point where dynamics on the ground just sort of take us where they take us. Because, you know, I think Trump went to the Atlantic yesterday and said, the Iranians. asked to talk to me and we're going to talk to them. What I heard and what the Israeli newspaper Yediyos Ahern wrote, which most people known as Wynet, reported was actually, was the other way

around. It was that Trump called up the Iranian side and said, let's talk. And I think Iran was like, no. Or maybe theoretically they were open to talk him and not to just ending the war quickly. I think that, yeah, right now it's just, unfortunately, it's like military dynamics. It's a question of when both sides exhausts themselves. And I really don't know how long that'll be. I mean, I think the Gulf states, if they had any of Trump's ear, are probably screaming at him, like, stop, stop, stop. But, I mean, I think the Israelis are probably screaming at him, go, go, go. I don't know what the U.S. military wants in this, like whether how, I think they have more endurance to keep going, but I don't know how much more. I'm a little bit surprised at how

little markets seem to be taking this seriously. Like, there's a lot of very serious immediate economic damage to the Gulf with, I mean, oil is the big obvious one, but I've been kind of screaming this for a while. It's not just oil that's in the Gulf. There's a lot of capital in the Gulf. There's like a lot of, you know, finance capital tied up in the Gulf. There's a lot of money in Gulf real estate. There's fucking data centers and crypto and like a lot of all that stuff right now that's just on fire, literally. The Gulf is a major air travel hub that's going to be shut down indefinitely, a major transshipment hub. I mean, all that stuff is disrupted in very serious ways. And the stock market seems to just have taken this as like, oh, you know, Taco Trump isn't going to be over in two days. I don't think

it's going to be over in two days. But I do think actually the market response is going to be part of the dynamic of like how far this goes. And then on the other side, it's like how much does Iran co-shear as a state? And like everybody's been talking about their interceptor stockpiles and and how many missiles Iran can lob before the U.S. and Israel and the Gulf were an out of interceptors. But I think another clock that's running down is just like how much damage can the U.S. do to Iranian society as a whole

before the government just falls apart. I was sort of wondering about that because I had this sense that Iran was in a sort of position where they had been forced to respond sort of maximally and quite messily in order to restore kind of anything like deterrence. But within that dynamic, there was also the question, And this was something that Trump himself said of like, well, we thought we were going to do the sort of Venezuela thing.

And then we killed all of the Delci Rodriguez as kind of like day one. Do you have a sense like which one of those is sort of like predominating or is it just sort of like both at the same time, you know? To what extent is that do they have the kind of capacity to decide that at this point? Oh, like how coherent is Iran as a government? Yeah. I think Ali Larry Johnny is, Lari Johnny is running the show. I don't think there's any. I think Iran does have a decentralized military command right now, but I think that's a lot more tactical than strategic. I think Iran is playing up how decentralized

it is to like kind of scare the shit out of everyone, mad dog kind of thing. I mean, they were talking to the Arab states like, oh, sorry, we didn't mean to bomb you. It's just commanders on the ground. Ali Lari Johnny is definitely in charge of the Iranian government. I mean, on paper they have a triumvirate that's supposed to replace a Supreme Leader, but I think that it's very clear that, like, Larijani, since before this war, since the protest movement,

it's widely reported that he's running the show. The Iranian military is decentralized and the government has sort of played that up. They've told the Arab states, oh, I'm sorry, we can't, like, we're sorry, we didn't mean to attack you. It's just commanders on the ground taking initiative. I think there's some element of that tactically,

but I don't think we're yet at a point where it's like strategically, of control where they just have rogue warlords and stuff running around. I think this is still a coherent government, but we are in day three only of some pretty fucking heavy bombing. And bombing that seems like intended to disrupt government functions, like they're bombing police stations, courthouses, things like that. So I guess we'll see as this drags on. I mean, I've said a worst case scenario where nobody's happy is there's like a civil war in Iran and then you do have this warlordism where there, you know, some every week.

or something. Some warlord shoots a bunch of drones at an oil tanker. And so, but I don't think we're there yet. But yeah, I do think that's like sort of an open question of where that goes. But at the moment, I do think that there's an Iranian government that's coherent and can issue order as they just are not ready. I think it's not even about restoring deterrence. I think people overuse that. I think it's just straight up like they see they, it's about imposing enough of a cost on the U.S. that this won't happen again in six months. which I think is not just deterrence. This is like compelence.

This is like coercion. Like they're really trying to get the U.S. to back off. They don't see any reason. They basically really do believe they're cornered. Their back is to the wall. And I mean, you talk about like getting the U.S. to back off. I mean, with the people in charge,

because it's tough to understand what exactly it is they want other than to be doing this, basically. It's tough to understand what would make them back off. I mean, how many boots in the ground, how many more F-15s have to crash into one another or whatever, more American service members, let alone, like, all the girls killed in the school bombing in Maynab,

are going to have to sort of stack up before the U.S. realizes that their goals are so maximalist and fantastical as to be unachievable without, I say, like, creating permanent chaos in the region or failing entirely. And then Iran is just, let's just say it was proven right in its need to have a pretty significant conventional and non-conventional deterrence program. That's a good question. I mean, I think this is where I was really scary uncharted territory. I suspect on the American side there's two factors. One is, again, if the economy starts screaming, if the economy really internalize, like the market really internalizes of like, this is not going to be over in two days. The global oil and gas supply. are really going to be constrained for like a lot of the investments in the Gulf states like go up

in literally go up and smoke that might cause discontent where Trump has to pull back another thing is if the US military just straight up starts not being able to achieve what it sets out to achieve like it's physically like we physically run out of interceptors or something

and Iran can just keep bombing and bombing and bombing that might also get them to back off but I mean these are just I'm just hazarding a guess Like, I really don't know. I think to some extent, it's up to us, like the American populace, which has been pretty indifferent because, you know, is the wars that are over in a day and don't affect anything to see if people actually, you know, if like the public in the political system actually does

start to, like, impose a cost and pump breaks on this. But I really don't know. I really don't know how far they'll take this. I mean, it's possible they just keep pushing through until they break the Iranian state. I think it would be a horrible, I mean, it would be a success in their eyes. to be a horrible outcome, like, morally, practically for the world. But, I mean, it could be that there's literally impossible to impose a high enough cost to, like, take the boomers off this one-track obsession with just destroying Iran as a civilization.

Yeah, I mean, I have seen it written before that, like, Donald Trump is essentially trying to tie up the loose, every boomer loose end before he himself dies, where he's going for Iran. He went for Venezuela, going to go for Cuba, is going for Iran, to enjoy. enormously, let's say, overstretch a quite strategically, like a morally repugnant, but also strategically incoherent empire. And when you talk about strategic incoherence, it's sometimes difficult to talk about it as though you're saying they should be more strategically coherent. No, it should be, they should just not be there. But given that they are there, that they have this spread out military, they have been throwing like missile equivalent of Lamborghinis

and more or less every problem, whether that's in Ukraine, whether that's in Israel, in Saudi, sort of countering the Houthis, for years. And they have not decided to live in the world where that is actually not an effective way to pilot a globe-bestriding bloodstained imperial colossus, where that is actually strategically self-defeating, where that is ineffective, except at, you know, maybe facilitating the causing of mass casualties. And at every turn, there is sort of simply more quagmire, more horror. I mean, I think partly as well, this is influenced by

the success of the operation to kidnap Maduro, and you just imagine that this will work again. And Gaza as well. Yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, I think part of it is they're really setting out to prove that like, we, the restrainers are wrong, you guys are chicken shit, and we can do whatever

we want, like, all the things you warn about won't happen. And it's worked a few times. I mean, people forget first term Trumpy, kill so and money. Everyone expected a regional war and it didn't happen. So, yeah, I mean, I think part of it is like they're setting out to prove that this is a good way to run an empire that you can throw caution to the wind. And nobody's really stepped up to challenge them except for Iran. I kind of had a feeling right after Venezuela. I was like, the next thing, my wife thought I was crazy. She's like, come on,

you can't predict this. I'm like, they are going to be really high on their own supply. The next thing they're going to do is attack Iran and they're going to step on a big rake. And it's going to cause a big catastrophe. But even then, I mean, we don't know really if this is going to impose a high enough, again, morally, this is already horrible. But we don't know if they're going to impose a high enough strategic cost where the U.S. really is like, oh, that was a mistake. And this, like, actually disrupts the functioning of the global empire. I suspect it will. But we haven't seen that yet. And we haven't really seen other states, you know, take even if the U.S. is in sort of like, in sort of absolute decline. We haven't seen other states in relative terms really take advantage of that. I mean, Russia tried to muscle Europe. as we saw three years ago and four years ago now and it really just like blew up in its face. So I guess the real question is after the dust clears of this, would, would China actually do more? I mean, China has been pretty happy not to challenge the U.S. and just sort of like carve out its own sphere of influence, its own, not even sphere of influence, just as sort of like own independent island in the world economy. But we'll see if, you know, the U.S. seemingly stepping into rake actually

does disrupt the functioning empire. I mean, then again, I was pretty bearish on just generally the Trump administration actually, like I was thinking going into this, maybe they'll just get away with it. Maybe nothing will happen. And now something has happened. So maybe that's the case. But I do think like, you know, a lot of you can point out like, yeah, this is strategically stupid. The cost benefit doesn't work. But I think in their mind, it's like, no, we're trying to prove that these are costs we can absorb and that in the end, this is like sustainable. I think they're going to have to pay the butcher's bill one way or another. But the question is how maybe I'm wrong, but also how long will that take? Because Trump might die before it happens, right? They might be, a lot of these guys might be comfortable knowing for the next 20 years until China finally takes Taiwan and the US finally has his pants around its ankles. It was interesting. All of the announcements among the sort of like rightward end of the kind of Natsakh blowup of like, oh, blowback is over. You know, we've actually finished it, it's fine. When, you know, the kind of the Ukraine angle, the Taiwan angle both

interests me, both because, you know, I said that, like, watching this in Taiwan must feel like being a Jehovah's Witness with appendicit, right? Well, like, watching this in Ukraine, watching the same Iranian drones that Russia's is sort of like, has been using, you know, get sort of attristed, sure, but for like a fraction of the cost of the interceptor and just thinking this has been going on for four years and you didn't even like you were supplying the interceptors and it didn't occur to you that this would happen. It's just, it's just bizarre. And I just wonder, you know, obviously it's sort of like we're supposed to try and predict this stuff, but like, I wonder whether the US is going to like living in this world, it seems set on establishing,

where the first thing you do is, okay, yeah, you just do stuff. But the first thing you do is you start with the assassinations. And then you just kind of go, all of the stuff that follows this isn't real. So I think there's a few thoughts on that. It's like one is the blowback is overthinking. It reminds me that tweet that's like RIP to all those people killed by hubris, but I'm smarter than all of them, maybe even smarter than God. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And when we're talking about blowback, that's like a reference to like second order effects,

20 years down the line. We're not even done with first order effect. We're not even like, we're just at the beginning of first order effects. And we don't know how this is going to go. It seems pretty chaotic already. I mean, if you ever read the book, the short history of bombing by Sven Lindquist, a really good obscure book about like sort of the,

it's a lot of things, but one of them is this sort of literary history of air power and how people thought about air power. And a hundred years ago, European empires had exactly the same idea of like, oh, we don't have to expend any cost on governing, we can just bomb the shit out of them because we're in the second place.

And I think that goes to the second point you make of like, oh, do we want to live in this world? world that we created because what ended that hubris was World War II and then the nuclear standoff and suddenly it's like, oh, wait, you know, as what's the name of the British general, bomber Harris said, the Germans entered the war under the rather childish notion that they would bomb people and not get bombed. The double irony to that is that Harris was a consummate colonialist who had actually had that exact same childish notion in his head that he can go bombs and not get bombed. And I think that like, yeah, the minute China decides to actually exercise some kind of hard power against the U.S.

is going to be a very scary moment indeed. But again, I mean, maybe that doesn't happen for 20 years. I mean, China doesn't seem in any rush to do this. And the U.S. doesn't, I mean, seems more satisfied not picking on people its own size. I thought on the specific question of drones, I have a friend who's a Pentagon reporter, a very sharp guy who pointed out like years ago. There's a difference between known capabilities and demonstrated capabilities. I think the U.S. military has a lot of very smart, well-prepared professionals who had

gamed out in Irania war and had basically, out of all, like, made a million different possible scenarios, this being one of them, of like Iran just successfully harassing the Gulf states with lots high volume of drones. But I think that, like, I don't think anyone in the political leadership internalized that. I think they all, like, sort of, you know, we are, we are human beings. were all creatures of experience. And so they all had the experience of like the military people's warnings being, you know,

oh, whatever. So then I think they really weren't expecting because I remember during the 12-day war, drones had, the Iranian Shah had drones have been completely useless against Israel because they had to cross like five different other countries' airspace and were easily shot down. But in this case, it's just very

different because the U.S. bases in the Gulf are like right there. They, drones do not have to cross much hostile airspace. And Iran has a lot more of them than it does missiles and the cost. I mean, like, I think people are a little bit hung up on the dollar amount. The real problem with interceptors versus missiles is like the rate at which you can build them. I think that like right now, it's not like Iran can be building missiles quickly anyways, but drones are so cheap and easy. Cheap in terms of like the resources and time and like facilities.

You don't need these big factories with these big mixer mixing units, mixing fuel. Like it's like a lawnmower engine or something that you solder. on to a pair of wings. I want to talk a little bit as well about the intelligence leading to this activity, right? You sort of, you alluded earlier to military planners. I think broadly realizing that this happening would be pretty much inevitable, not stopped by a decapitation strike, and very undesirable for all the, all the reasons we talked about at the beginning, right, shutting down not just oil production, but effectively, you know,

reducing, say, real estate values in the Gulf, which are a pretty significant asset class, nothing, like that this is not desirable, pretty much inevitable, and that these briefings are just increasingly ignored by a sort of more insular, paranoid White House that just feeds the briefings that they want to the senile guy, you know, the dying guy in charge. I mean, that he just seems to have received these hyper-optimistic reports that were prioritized for executive consumption by the people around us. And you can even, I think, tell some of that by how he talks about it. For example, there was an interview with the New York Times where he gets so fixated on the concept that this will be a four-week entanglement that I believe he says four weeks five to six times in one brief exchange with a journalist.

Yeah, it's sort of like this failure to sort of grasp the idea that Iran also has a vote in the war with Iran. And the other thing that strikes me as well is the intelligence being ignored in favor of, well, what feels good? What feels good for us to do? What would be satisfying, right? You want to talk about vibe coding? They brought Claude along for this. Claude, I can imagine the interceptor crew, the air defense crews in Kuwait being like,

Claude, what kind of fighter jet is that? And then Claude taking a long time, oh, you're right, that wasn't F-15. I promise not to do that again. What else do you want to talk about today? I promise not to do that for a fourth time. as of time of recording, the UK is now sort of participating on some, you know, larger level than it was than it had been sort of withholding from the US before. And I think there's a lot of talk about the UK and Europe more generally getting like dragged into the war with Iran or this being part of Iran's response.

I've kind of been of the opinion. And I wonder if I'm right about this, that this is something that a lot of European policymakers had just been itching for a pretext to do anyway. Yeah, I mean, people talking about Europe getting dragged in. It's like they literally inserted themselves into it. There's no, like, what is the drag in? They'd be, like, throwing themselves on. They did seem to get a little bit spooked. I mean, Britain has sort of flip-flopped on this, especially after Iran hit the base in Cyprus, the drone.

And Germany apparently walked back. Like, there was a being, like, we're not going to get involved of this war. But, yeah, I mean, the European powers, I think part of it is, like, it was like the U.S. turning against Europe with the whole Greenland thing, spooked them. But it didn't spook them in the,

I think what they internalized was not like, oh, like this world that we helped build can be turned against us. It was like, we shouldn't be treated like Browns. We're a white country. We need like American Atlantis, white solidarity. I mean, that was the whole Marker Rubio's speech in Munich, basically, basically was, you know, segregation today, segregation tomorrow or segregation forever on a global scale. And they all gave them a standing ovation because Europe gets included. Unlike the like Steve Miller, J.D. Vance. really psychotic version of that, where Europe also gets to be treated, pushed around like a brown country. And I think Iran was just like the logical, I mean, I think it just made sense as a target

for a lot of different factions in power. One of them was Europe. I mean, Europe has been, has been pissed at Iran for supplying Russia with drones, which I think probably rightfully so. I mean, that was a very stupid decision of the Iranian government. And that seems to have gone nothing from Russia. Yeah, I was struck by those, a line from Lavrov a few years back where he said, what the sort of asked about cooperation with Iran on defense, he said, the sky's the limit. Which, if you read that 100% literally, is true today.

But I think what you're describing to me, right, is again, this, that everybody involved, right, with the European, European states who want to get to live in the Atlantis this world that they're all familiar with, or the fucking crypto people in Dubai were saying, you're going to have to carry me out of here in a stretcher

whose house value that they own just might have taken a, let's say, have a little bit of a security impairment on its pricing now, or to the American imperial apparatus that is kicked into gear yet again, but in something, in an engagement that may significantly damage it, because it thinks that it will be as easy as Venezuela, which is nearby where the relationship between the political authority was concentrated in a person. It was really vulnerable, and it had a Delci Rodriguez waiting in the wings, and that wither the Iranian Delsey, you know. I mean, I think people expected Lari Johnny to be the Iranian Delsey because he is more of a pragmatist.

I mean, everyone under Hamé, he is more of a pragmatist than him. He's like some weird, weird literature head who's like, woman is flat. And they're like, sir, the country's on fire. He's like, woman is flower. You can't be a real romantic anymore. They'll kill you. But yeah, like, well, he's on me supposed to be Iranian Delsey. But this is just the only point I'm making is what he, but the thing is part of his pragmatism is not rolling over immediately and being like, oh,

okay, they're trying to kill us. And I guess what I see is everybody who I'm talking about, whether it's European leaders who want to feel Atlantis, property investors in Dubai who thought they were immune from politics, U.S. imperial planners who just figured this would be as easy as Venezuela, everybody is living in their own fantasy world that does not engage with the idea that, as you say, Matthew, Iran does get a vote on how it reacts to being bombed. We're all living in the Dubai of the mind. Yeah, quite.

You can't escape the mental Palm Jumaira that you are trapped in. Nothing has happened to them before. It's worked before. This is sort of the point I'm trying to make about demonstrated versus known capabilities. Like, this has worked so many times. I mean, I don't even know if this is enough of a cost for them to say it's not working. It's certainly not working out like it, like they wanted it to. But it's just, yeah, they haven't really faced a real cost for this.

And so it's like, okay, why should, why should, why should, their mindset change. I guess I, not to say that this is the sort of end point where it starts to matter because it masses now and it mattered in Venezuela, but I guess we'll find out in Greenland, you know, I'm looking forward to sort of like dying face down in a ditch and sort of like frozen, like mud. That would be cool. Mm-hmm. Yeah, look, look, look, they've done it, what, like, pre-time? What are they going to do? As a similar, like, great thinker of the American right one said, maybe, I think it's in Hake or maybe in Schilling. Fool me once. Shame on you.

Fool me. You can't get fooled again. That's right. I think that's all the time we have for today. But Matthew, I want to thank you very much for fighting through some ropy Wi-Fi connections to talk to us today. Thank you. And if the people want more, Matthew, where can they find you?

I mean, God, are you going to let me do this? But I'll just say read Reason Magazine. That's right. Publish. And you could, if I'd be on substack and on Twitter, I don't use substack so often anymore. And my Twitter, I'm like half the time I'm public, half the time I'm private. I'll never give anyone rhyme or reason for why, although I have my reasons. But I was really fun actually to go into Twitter occultation right before I published the Epstein thing.

And then just cryptically tweet, I'm not suicidal. And then suddenly go public with like, I have obtained. This was just for context, like, basically before the Epstein files came out in like a big way, I had obtained some hacked emails between or, I mean, I wasn't, didn't exclusively a pain and they were floating around. But I had was the first reserve report on this tranche of hacked emails between Jeffrey Epstein and his business partner, former Israeli Prime Minister Ayud Barak, last summer. And so, yeah, no, I went into a Twitter occultation for like a couple weeks while just reporting it out

and asking people for comment and stuff. And then, you know, as I said, just like, I'm not suicidal. And then boom, went public. So that was a fun. So follow me on Twitter. Maybe you get to get some fun adventures like this. Wonderful. Anyway, we will be back on the bonus episode later this week.

But until then... Until then, always work from home. Yeah, perfect. Great. Thank you. Until then, work from home. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's not safe.

Bye, everyone. Bye. Awesome. Thanks so much.