TRASHFUTURE - Golf Cooperation Council feat. Séamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

We’ve got some serious issues: Iran is too real of a country to ignore, and Saudi Arabia is becoming a real country in that it suddenly can’t find $300m to fund the LIV Golf tournament in Louisiana. Because something happened regarding the thing that it uses to make all its money from? We also dig into Israel’s occupation of Lebanon as “means of thwarting a peace deal” and as default function in a state run by people who need a war happening to stay out of prison. But don’t worry, we keep it really optimistic. Get more from Séamus here! And also check out the Turbulence podcast here! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Okay, planning session for the Trash Future podcast corporate retreat, which as we all know, was going to be visiting LiveGolf, Louisiana as a tour of the public investment funds, boondoggles, moderated, of course, by Seamus Malik of Zelly. I have some very bad news for everybody here. And I want you to sit down and I hope you're going to be okay with this. But the Live Golf Tour in Louisiana has been canceled. we're going to need to find another place for the trash future podcast corporate retreat. This is the worst things ever happen to me. You're telling me I don't get to do Saudi-funded golf adventurism in the Louisiana summer. This is awful. Seamus, you were supposed to be involved in this. I know this must be surprising and disappointing to you that the Saudis seem to no longer be interested in remaking the world of professional golf. I look, you know, fun fact, back when the Americans were first investing in Aramco in the 1970s, they would build golf courses in Saudi Arabia where they would till the golf courses with oil in order to properly format it for golf.

This is true. I felt like if they were willing to do that, they would be willing to go into Louisiana heat and do this. But apparently the entire initiative I'm to understand is collapse. this news to me. They could survive pouring literal oil on the ground to do it, but not money becoming real. Yeah. Something that has filled all of us, really. When we do this sort of like, you know, paycheck just arrived, I'm going to like buy all the

shit that I want. And then two weeks later, it's ice soup. That's fine. But I wasn't expecting it to happen to Saudi Arabia. Yeah. This has come hot in the weeks, hot in the heels a couple weeks ago of the following statement made by Live Golf CEO Scott O'Neil. Yeah, he said Live, laugh, golf.

So he's consistently claimed that he's been in meetings with interested investors and downplayed concerns with the upcoming schedule of tournaments. Though he raised eyebrows again in a recent interview and asked about the ability for Liv to put on its remaining four tournaments without the Saudis injecting more money. O'Neill said, I can say they've been terrific partners so far. I assume he was looking at a bone saw just out of frame. You have to take an incredible organization like the PIF at their word. That's what they were saying to their banks as well. For me, what I find so odd about it is that, like, as far as rich people dumping money into obvious tax, dodge, fake charity things in America, golf tournaments are like the uppermost tier.

So the idea that they're unable to find anyone besides the Saudis to bail them out for this, I'm somewhat surprised. Does that mean that we're going to see a sort of receding of all of the Saudi sports money? Because that would be so funny. No more Saudi e-sports? What am I going to do without it? This is the thing. like there was the World Cup

that they're supposed to hold in 2034 which FIFA blew everyone out of the water in terms of like you cannot submit your bid. Only Saudi Arabia can submit that they're bid on time. And the stadiums that they're trying to build are these like Halo

Combat Evolved type levels but also they're doing there still have matches said for the Neom Stadium on the line and the line is basically not getting built and I'm wondering what the plan is for almost all of these stadiums. Getting really, really concerned when I've been trying to get the payment for the next

installment on construction and this guy named Ozzymandius isn't signing the checks anymore. It's just you administer the Saudi Public Investment Fund and you're just like trying to find ways to make the checks stretch out longer. You've got 61 missed calls from golf. Like you're trying to dodge different like stand-up comedians and esports people and every possible thing that they've tried, like, they've promised money for. That's, that's a beautiful dream.

So, by the way, this, but to, Seamus, to answer your question, when I think it'll happen is the same thing that happened to the Asian Winter Games, which is they're in Kazakhstan now because that's all. That's what happened. Look, look, look. Saudi Arabia has a deeply developed football league system. I mean, Ronaldo's there. Clearly, they have real talent, but they do not.

They have stadiums, but they don't need to do, you know, the the cyberpunk dystopia type deal for all of these, certainly. At least in my mind. I don't think MBS could handle it. I don't think he could handle having a football tournament that the world is watching in normal stadiums. But, so this is from O'Neill. We're at full steam ahead.

The players are locked in and the management team is locked in. Locked in a suitcase. Yeah, physically. Yeah. I was going to say, it feels like the Saudis desire a certain degree of whimsy, but it's whimsical in the sense. of Metropolis, the movie, being whimsical,

that it's just like, oh, yeah, there's this guy, chain to the machine, cranking shit all day long until his body gives out. It's like, but we find it whimsical. The other thing is, Nate, to your point, right? Oh, it's Trash Feature, by the way. It's Nate Nova, Riley, and Seamus Malikivzelli. Hello.

Our, is the straight of Hormuz open correspondent. Now, the thing is, is that the reason LiveGolf existed was because the Saudis figured, with their public investment fund, they could just create such ludicrous, like, purses for each tournament that like they would be able to do for golf what Uber did to cabs and just destroy every other league by making themselves the only game in town.

Like that was the point to monopolize golf. It's just the problem is the Saudis kept on trying to monopolize industries that they thought were fun and cool like video games, golf and like building a cyberpunk city as opposed to the one industry that they learned how monopolized by building a country on top of it. So Liv received 66 million from the PIF in May. $130 million in June, but the tour has to find $400 million more dollars to fund player contracts. Because why wouldn't you spend if you have Saudi Arabia telling you, yeah, money taps on? Of course you're going to be like, do not worry about it.

Get the most expensive thing of everything. We're going to get the most expensive golf balls or golf wedges or rackets or whatever the fuck, right? And then at some point, Saudi Arabia calls you and goes, so have you heard of the strait of whore Hey, so we were having a manic episode and we were getting a bit spendy. So, but also the Saudis now, they've not providing the money anymore. So Liv Gull was like, fuck, we need $400 million like right away. They call him. Mahan bin's spending.

Thank you. Okay, new episode title. Liv's media future rights are also completely uncertainness from Axios. Should the full investment not be secured, it will have to be reliant on a rights deal with a new media organization. so I guess they could go to Elon to be rescued and the Live Golf will be streamed exclusively on X. Do you want to pay $250 million to stream to broadcast our golf?

We really need it. Please. It's like there are two sources of really insane, dumb money in the world. MBS and Elon Musk. Well, what would be more humiliating? All right? Because Tucker Coros and clearly made Tucker on X work for him.

to a certain extent. But the daily wire plus also seems to be spending exorbitant amount of money. Would that be less humiliating for them to engage with? If they're keeping up the same standards as the like Jonathan Majors movie, then I'm excited to see like a golfer fall out of a window on the course somehow. But I think the thing is with golf is that there's definitely a kind of like buying your way into the prestige of it. And if the only way your golf tournament can be paid for is if it's got the sort of like X, version of Twitch live emotes, but really racist, like, then that's not really going to stand

up to the sort of, yeah, prestige-hungry nature of it. No, you can't do an XFL version of golf, for sure. No, I mean. Just most of all golfers on the grain at the same time. Yeah, it's the enhanced game's version of golf. Tiger Woods is getting a DUI but on the golf course. We're doing golf rally cross. Stand the fuck back.

We have folded golf into the UFC stable of sports and Dana White is now in charge of A few changes. No, I mean, the thing is, there is one other, like, guy with money who loves golf, but the only problem is that he hates spending money, and he especially hates giving money to the Saudis. They could go to Trump and go, President Golf, please save us. Wait, wait, wait, wait, before before you go on, I was curious, I thought, has there been a time which Dana White attempted to buy a golf league?

And no, UFC CEO Dana White is famously known for his absolute hatred of golf. He has publicly described it as a miserable fucking sport and the most frustrating game ever invented. He could fix it. He can fix it. He can fix golf. He knows. He's lived in. We hired Dana White to make golf alpha.

So, but the crazy thing is, right? This is like a syneciki for kind of everything going on with Saudi Arabia now that the economy is real. And it wasn't the straight of Hormuz that kicked off the economy being real for Saudi Arabia, but it definitely accelerated the reality timeline by very much. a long time. Maybe we could celebrate America's sesquicentennial by inventing as a nation between Donald Trump and Dana White, golf too, golf for chuds. Finally, the traps are actual traps, like with Ponji sticks. But the collapse of various Saudi flights of fancy domestically around the world underscores this thing, which Vision 2030 was essentially like Saudi Arabia's

attempt to turn itself into a global northwestern country that happens to have a politically powerful king. But like so many things, they chose the dumbest parts. I was reading about this from the Carnegie Endowment. And obviously, they're celebrating the dumbest parts, but it's factually worthwhile. They say, Vision 2030's high-profile economic bets include efforts to wind down state provision of jobs, housing, and basic services, such as education in favor of private sector alternatives. Stanching the growth of high-benefit civil service jobs is one of the unsung achievements of Vision 2030. Homeownership is expanding, but only for citizens who can afford commercial mortgages. Government is spending up to 67 percent more overall.

since 2015, but education spending is up by less than 3% over the same period. The Saudi government has also sought to limit growth in spending and higher education specifically, putting mounting regulatory pressure on universities to raise their own funds and eliminate weak or outdated programs. Yeah, that's right. You're not going to be able to do woke gender studies at Riyadh U anymore. Well, actually, there's this big controversy right now at KSU over whether or not to continue funding like Arabic courses, like Arabic literature courses.

That's your whole thing. That's you. Kind of soft power thing for being incredibly rich center, sort of by default. Who the fuck is going to KSU to study English elite or whatever the fuck? They successfully westernized in a way that they became Britain. They got Britain's higher education sector. The best thing of all is BCG did the strategic review of higher education in Saudi Arabia. BCG, they fucked him on the way up and they fucked him on the way up and they fucked him on

way down. They're not the same guys. The same guys. The same rimless glasses guys are going to be your burial society, you know? Yeah, it's like, even if it's like two different firms, like, let's just, it's the same class of rimless glasses guys who told you, yeah, you could have the moon in different colors back when the money was fake. And then money is real. You call them back in and they're like, yeah, you got to get rid of like half of your higher education courses. You should meet Saudi Arabia should start means testing stuff. Yeah. It's a, it's a, It's a different experience trying to sell the car back to the same car salesman, isn't it? I mean, there's an interesting thing here, right?

And that like Vision 2030 was sort of like, we're going to become sort of like, we're going to modernize. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to change the deal, right? And my understanding of the deal is if you're a Saudi citizen, right? You accept no politics. You don't do politics, but we pay you off with the social services and stuff. And you probably get like a do nothing job where you work like three hours a week, right? And they tried to cut all of that stuff. And like, I don't know to what extent this is austerity and to what extent this is like actually getting rid of some of those cynicures.

But it seems like it's fucking everything. Seamus, I'm interested to see like Vision 2030 in this way, westernized Saudi Arabia's economy but keep the sort of totally authoritarian king. What happens there? Well, I mean, the original plan was just to rely on the economy not being real. Right. You can have your cake and you can eat it too because the Aramco IPO, all these different, you know, exposing all of these previously private or state controlled industries to public investment that will create so much money that Saudi Arabia does not have to make compromise on anything. With the idea being that once peak oil is reached, there will be so much money. There will be so much investment in Saudi Arabia that diversification will be incredibly easy by default. And 2030, I thought, you know, at the time was a bit soon to do a lot of these things.

Neum and the line were supposed to be done by that time, or at least some supposed to be done. And that's absolutely not happened. I don't think there was a plan. I do not think that there was an actual plan in place to do any of this other than just hope that like, you know, if the economy stuck together this long, then surely it'll continue to do so in the future if we just keep doing the same things, which I don't know if that has ever been the case anywhere. Yeah, MBS is like, I am the best player on tutorial island. I'm going to go out and I'm going to absolutely mug everybody else in the PVP zone because what he's done is he has said every other country that has massively cut their like various shock absorbers

that keep the global economy from directly affecting living standards too much. They've all experienced huge amounts of political unrest. They've experienced sort of the rise of, like, challenges to their political systems. What happened to me, though? I'm going to be, I'm going to expose my country to the vagaries of global capital in a way that

doesn't completely destroy its social base. And guess what asshole? You're branded now. I'm going to take my Fisher Price car onto the Nuremberg ring and see what happens. If you're a Saudi Arabia and you see how successfully the UAE did it. right or house up until recently

like the UAE was able to Dubai is not an oil based economy it is primarily a tourist based economy and it was able to turn this you know this essentially what was a backwater an economy primarily based on perhaps pearl diving and made it into this gigantic petropolis that everyone wants to go to

surely this is replicable in someplace like Viyadh or Jeda or or some other Saudi Arabid which is to be built, not just the up, but perhaps over the future. And that works less successfully in a country that has more Saudi citizens that is not willing to completely turn its country into a hotbed for migrant labor to where 90% of the country are not citizens. But are people who you have on temporary visas and then you can deport at will if they ever gain political consciousness? Sort of like the impression I get is the rest of Anaheim being like, why can't we be Disneyland? It's like no, like other, like the UAE does this because it's an incredibly, it's, you know, setting itself on top of like a very thin needle and has managed to balance itself.

But you can't do that on every needle, right? Especially if you have other things weighing you down, weighing you down in big quotes, that weighing being like you are a function, you are a country. before 1971. Yeah. Yeah, and so, like, the whole story of Vision 2030

as encapsulated by Live Gulf debacle, I think, is just, and suddenly arguing over which university programs to fund. Like, yeah,

Saudi Arabia, you're a normal country now. You've lost the invincibility. Deeply unfortunate. But, like, just get it. It's hard to understand, but, like,

you'll be better once you, once you'll comprehend. that. Once you understand that and you can function like a normal country with the rest of us. But it's also funny too because like Saudi Arabia had a great big drop in living standards. I mean, a long time ago, basically in the

80s oil glut and like they've had plenty of warning like, hey, you might want to transition your economy away from this. And it's like, instead in this case, it's what you just described Riley, but then also it's like, but we're going to keep Wahhabism. We're going to keep the incredible conservatism. I

don't really know of the same degree of like come start your business in Saudi Arabia having very much purchase with people who might choose to do this, you know, in another country. And I guess it's like, and also this isn't like a, I mean, it is a macroeconomic thing, but it's not like, oh, damn, they're producing too much oil. We've got to cut back on oil production. It's like Iran put up the great big roadblock with mines on it and now you can't ship the thing that makes you money. And now, and now you're a normal country. It's like, yeah, I asked MBS whether Vision 2030 would be good and he just kind of frowned at me

and said it would be historically progressive. I'm not sure what that means. Well, Nova, you clearly don't understand the class struggle from Marx's viewpoint. So, I want to move on, though. Before we get to our main segment, which is essentially the same question that we've been asking,

Seamus, a few times, is the Strait of Hormuz open? I've been thinking, and Seamus, you've been thinking as well, what's up with the Iranian monarchists? You'd got to be more specific, man. Is this something recently? I just want to check in on these.

guys, you know? Like, see what the vibe is. Temperature check with some of the strangest people in the world. You've recently written about how Iranian monarchists are like showing up in protesting World Cup games. So I'll quote, you're writing back to you.

Iranian-American demonstrators have shown up at the Iran men's national teams games not to protest FIFA's lack of action to protect the team against harassment from the United States, which has been ongoing, but to disavow the nation's presence at the World Cup and cheer on their opponents. These protests, these protesters have accused the team of being agents of the IRGC, agents of the Ayatollah, agents of the Iranian

regime in general. One protester who'd purchased a ticket to the New Zealand game said he and others would be booing during the anthem so loudly that their voices, quote, will we reach all the way to Iran? I think it's beautiful that every nation has a Steve Bray. Yeah. There is some loud, annoying guy who wants to go back to some time in the past, which again quoting in your article, Seamus, the protesters outside the stadiums now represent a section of the diaspora rapidly spinning

out, chanting for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to finish the job and expressing their hopes to Israeli reporters that their country will be liberated after, depending on how you count it, 47 or 1400 years. This is an odd group of people, and

something Hussein has observed to me recently, Just imagine being a populist right now. How must you feel? But, Seamus, what's the state of the monarchist diaspora right now? They're not dealing with the current situation very well. No. At least for my observation. I mean, they've been protesting Iran's inclusion in every World Cup before this.

This is not necessarily new. It became much more intense in the 2020s when the diaspora by a large got much more radicalized. You know, by Saudi money going into. I mean, hundreds of millions of dollars of Saudi money went into Iranian opposition news networks, which have radicalized a lot of people, which is an unequivocal success for their foreign policy goals, for sure. But they have not been handling the fact that this war that was supposed to free them very quickly turned into a war that was supposed to destroy the country and very much not paved the way for any sort of regime change, but rather destruction of the state, destruction of the country, preventing it from becoming strong again,

not caring whether or not democracy or anything like that comes around, just eliminating it as a threat of any sort to Israel or American foreign policy objectives. There's a lot of confusion over what to do, which I've been noticing, and Rassau-Pin-Levy especially has been kind of playing it very close to the chest and does not like answering questions about what he expected to happen. But he's normally so garrulous. He went on French television right after the war, came to a ceasefire in April,

and he insisted that he had never advocated military intervention. This was something that was wrought upon the Iranians, of course, because of the Islamic Republic and because of their crimes, but he never advocated for that unless you had gone back a month ago on another French television station, and he had said exactly what he advocated for. They're struggling, because if this war, if war, if military action cannot dislodge

his law republic, then what can? And there isn't a good answer to that. It's this lesson as well for Tehran, right, that like with enough help from Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, you can just kill your way out of like any opposition movement. And I guess you just did a lesson. with like the weirdest kind of residue of people who are left like screaming at football games.

Yeah. And like the thing is, and this is something that I've noticed, is there is a precipitous drop-off in everybody except Pallavists talking about the original sort of ostensible reason for this whole thing in the first place, right, which is, oh, we have to protect the protesters. Iranian civil society must be protected. Come on, we're going to greet us as liberators. We're going to drop weapons to you. Yeah, they're all dead now. Like, they, they, they, They killed those guys. And there is that justification, nobody's talking about it anymore. This is, it's, it's completely forgotten with just, okay, well, we have to actually protect

Israel, which is like, as soon as the war starts going badly, then you no longer care about miniskirts in Tehran. You're like, okay, maybe we can't go back to miniskirts in Tehran, but we can maybe get some oil through, maybe. But before we move on from Palavi, he's been a bit of a media tour the last month or so. Mm-hmm. where he says, in reacting to Trump implying that the Iranian parliament speaker, Mohamed Bahir Kalbaif, is a very reasonable and solid figure who could be a workable partner for the states,

Palavi is presented with this. It's like, well, Trump seems to endorse this other guy and says, what I would expect not just President Trump to say, but for that matter, any other government from the outside looking in, is that it's for us to determine who should be the next leader of Iran. It's up to the people of Iran. As a Western democracy, America has always advocated for the people to decide. The Shah said, let the ballot box determine the future. All right, all right, all right, all right. I will say a couple of different things. One, if we want to go by that measure,

obviously, his own republic has many problems with this democratic system. I will not deny that. But Ghalyboff is an elected member of the parliament. He was elected by somebody in his district. Two, the Iranian parliament during the Shah's days, especially in the 1970s, it was a two-party system in which both parties loved the Shah and only did what he said

and every other party was made illegal. It was somehow an even worse situation than the current system. It was not all hunky-dory. Three, I love the confusion after seeing the Delci Rodriguez situation where Iranians were like, there was one Iranian interviewed in the financial time shortly after the war started where they were like, why was bloodless regime change happening in Venezuela while it cruelt. couldn't happen in Iran. And it's like, oh, you really don't fucking get it, right?

Like, of course, they would like to just install a new guy in there, I'm sure. It would be less work for them. But they'll just kill you. They'll kill all of you until they get to the right guy. And the idea was that surely Klaudebawv will do it. And then Mongolibov didn't do it. That's when they started talking about wanting to assassinate him again. It's like, it's like, no, no, no, they hate all of you.

If they could kill every last one of you, they would. would do it. This is not, they don't, they're, what is, what is this horse shit about the Iranian people deciding? When, when has America ever give it a shit about any of that? I, I, I would, I, I struggle with this a lot. The sort of like World Cup, like, pitch flag size fell for it again award of being a palavist at this point, you know? And he, he says, if you look at the Democratic opposition in Venezuela, they're happy Maduro is no longer there, but do they want the situation that's been concocted now to be the end result? Of course not. I can tell you about. I can tell you experience, having done this for 46 years,

when you find to manufacture something falsely, and legitimize it from outside, the Shah said it doesn't work. It's like, listen. Come on, man. I've been a loser for a long time. No one's a loser like Reson Shah Palavi. As someone who is constantly hoisted on their own petard,

I actually find I have a panoramic view and I can speak to a lot of circumstances. Many people don't have the scope of my vision. It is kind of embarrassing to be like under this like sort of cloud of fell for it against stickers, right? Of being the guy who's like, I'm a lunch pale loser. I come into work every day and the CIA gives me a new plan for a coup. And this one's looking like amateur out. Yeah, you're basically Matt Damon and the departed talk about I can put up with a wrong thing for the rest of my life about fucking being a pal-lavas and being like someday, someday we're going to restore pre-1978 and it's going to be everyone's going to love it because they love it. loved it back then and it was wonderful.

Yeah, we, we, the Savak polled everyone if they loved it and a hundred percent of people said they did. We're gonna be like water, right? We're gonna find every possible course until we find the one of least resistance until we get back to mini skirts and pulling out fingernails. And right now it's seeming like it's, I don't know, vibes. I also love that his objection to Goli, to like, the Delci Rodriguez situation why it wouldn't work in Venezuela, is that Ghalibov is like, well, he was a former commander of the IRC. He has much blood on his hands as the next guy in the system, said the Shah's son. You cannot all of a sudden beautify that, said the Shah's son. It's like putting lipstick on a pig.

Awesome. But the pig's son. I mean, one of the things that I would point out, too, is it like, all right, yeah, I agree. It's very difficult. It's legitimized something abroad and then to sort of put it in by force and have people accept it. But also, when you look at a country like Iran, there's been deliberately cut off from the international system since the late 1970s. And with no rest, with no break, like, that's, it's. that's been the case for almost 50 years now.

Like, you're going to have a much harder time imposing things on effectively like entropy that's been created by the system there because there aren't, you know, the sort of shady business guys in Dubai, like there have been with other sort of like soft power and or just intelligence services actions that have gone on in the Middle East. Like, it's, there's the degree of of, of it being cut off from the ability of like the way that they would influence things like this in other countries. I mean, I mean, there's still, there's still immense corruption within, this archipublic system, but you are corrected that because it's cut off from these major

international institutions, you create much more localized networks within the region, and also because there is a deep institutionalization of the system. In contrast, the socialist government in Venezuela, it is very hard dislodge all of that. And they're also, because they want to stay corrupt, let's say in that, if we're trying to construct those equations, they know. They know that the American administration right now is not a reliable partner even in corruption. Like, they are going to sell you down the fucking river the second they can. They are not, they are not consistent partners in this. What we're getting to is Saudi Arabia is too fake a place to be a normal state and Iran is too real of a country. You can't just go roll them. But before we

move on, Nur Pahlavi, granddaughter of the last Shah, this is from your article again, Seamus, accused camera crews of cutting away from people waving the monarchist flag and thereby, quote, bending over backwards to protect the Islamic Republic with one popular monarchist telegram channel deriding the bastard Gianni Infantino. He's sided with the mulles. That's the main thing. Johnny Infantino, the one guy who is given like... That's the one bad thing about him. The guy who gave the FIFA Peace Prize, the greatest diplomat of them all, awards the FIFA Peace surprise to both Moshhthva Khlamini and Trump. Perfect.

You know, they cut him off before the end of the speech. They quoted him selectively. He said, I am black, I am gay, I am a 12-a-shear. I do support the Iran, the Islamic Revolution. And I vote. I'm a 12-R-Shiya. I'm a hardliner IRGC guy, and I'm a Pesish-Khanist. I'm in the Green Revolution.

I was in the Islamic Revolution. I'm everybody. Oh, my God. Yeah, so 47 years, 1,400 years, let's become pre-Islamic. Why not? Take that to the football. 1,400 years of hurt. One lion on the flag?

Yeah, it doesn't make the 1966, you know, two World Wars and one World Cup seems so long ago when you've got to deal with 1,400 years of hurt. It's all relative. So, Oster. Let's go, Menekeism. So, anyway. I wanted to come back, though, which is, is the straight of Hormuz open, Shemez? Uh, sort of. Okay.

Awesome. Cool. Thank you so much for coming on. It's a difficult question to answer. I mean, look, look, look, I believe right now, as of right now, the Strait of Hormuz is officially open, but you are supposed to take the official route provided by the Persian Gulf Strait Authority, which you can be accessed online. If you do not, then you will be fired upon.

Can we put the link in the description? Yes. They have to, like, it's, it's an English, man. You can do what you want. Check them out on Twitter, support their Patreon for 2 million Redmond B. Those are 2 million U.S. dollars in Redmond B, excuse me. Oh, it's not at a toll. It's merely a fee for environmental protection.

It's a tip. It's a tip. You're tipping it. The RJC boats, they give you a giant screen, and then you have to tap. you know, which one? The IRGC, they make less in minimum wage because they know, like, they're supposed to get tipped.

The real question is, does it get shared with the guys in the back office, or just the guy, like, talking to your tanker? Mr. Pink, at the controls of, like, a grain carrier being like, no, I don't tip, I don't believe in it, and getting a drone shot through the fucking bridge. I was radicalized by my experience as a bus boy

in the straight-of-re moves. No one ever shared their, tips with me. So, yeah, the, so the, so the straight of Hormuz is, depending on who you ask, sort of open and sort of closed. It's like customarily open, but like, look, look, look, if you take the official route provided by the IRGC, you will go through. Yeah.

But if you don't, you will be fired upon immediately. Yeah. So just take that as you will. And also, transiting through the official route, whether or not you can, transit to the official route at any point, depends on how recently has Israel violated the ceasefire with Lebanon. Yes. That is also very incumbent on that. Please incorporate all of that into your insurance quotes and it'll be just fine. The thing about these ships, right, they can stop and start and turn around really quickly, right? Like in a hurry. Oh yeah. Remember that 10 minutes when everyone was

obsessed with that ship that was stuck in the Suez Canal for 10 minutes? That was really easy to maneuver. So the U.S., so basically, as far as I'm aware, the U.S. says it's open. The Iranians say it's closed except for this one route, except for when Israel violates the terms of the ceasefire with Lebanon, which Israel says it has no intention of honoring. And because of all of that, insurers are just saying, yes, it's open, but it's too expensive to insure now so it may as well be closed. I was under the impression that some insurers, this was a few weeks ago, I bet it clearly, that some insurers were only authorizing it if they went through the official IIGC route. Yeah. I would not be shocked, however, if they just decided to, fuck. Like, I, I, I, I, look, I am a known public on the record. I have a backer of the closure of the three to four bows.

However, if you are someone driving one of these ships, I do not envy your position. I feel very bad for what's going on with you guys. The guy I feel worse for was the guy, the, like, captain of the one ship, who got effectively stream sniped. by like crypto scammers posing as the IRGC. Oh yeah, that, that hurt. That hurt. Paid the toll to those guys, went for it, got shot at,

and was on the radio being like, why are you shooting at me? I paid you. That took some untimbing, I think. God. So, basically, we have this straight, I think the global economy is now in superposition, where the straight of Hormuz is simultaneously, more or less, in every possible configuration.

Yeah, I just met with MBS. He told me the global economy was in a super position, so feeling pretty good about my golf tour. Yeah, time to polish my driver and get to work. I assume I'll be going to Louisiana tomorrow. So I think that the main thing that seems to be creating unpredictability

in the question of, is the Strait of Hormuz open or not, is the Israel-Lebanon ceasefire, which Iran is saying has to be included. It is Israel, right? Because Israel... To be clear, yes. Their position is we will not stop bombing nor, indeed, occupying Lebanon, which, yeah, okay,

and Iran is sort of, I would say, reasonably deciding that's not going to accept that and still let you use the strike. Yeah. So, Seamus, can you tell us a little bit more about, like, how the various actors are tangled in this whole thing, and what everyone is going to do about the fact that Israel is saying, we refuse to cease hostilities in such a way that anybody near us would find acceptable until we achieve total victory, which we assume we can. Well, oh, God, it got really complicated

over the past, I want to say two days. I mean, originally, of course, Israel insists they're not party to this agreement. This is an MOU between the United States and Iran. We're not party to this. We're going to continue something instead of Lebanon as long as Israeli national security requires it, which, you know, is it

infinite amount of time, but that's eternity. And Iran, obviously, understanding the actual relationship between American Israel insisted, no, Israel is going to have cease firing everywhere on all fronts involved in this regional war. And that means that they have to withdraw as well. That was the guarantee that Trump gave to Iran that Israel will withdraw from the Lebanese border in order in in order to convince them to sign on to that MOU, which was already very conciliatory to the Iranians. You know, 300 billion in reconstruction funds, all of that, but they needed that provision in there

for the ending of the war in southern Lebanon, permanently and immediately. Now, when Israel did not do that, that's when they closed the street of Hormuz, and almost only a few minutes afterward, there were suddenly reports in the Israeli media that, oh, there's a... A report has come down from Netanyahu and Israel Katz saying that IDF soldiers can't do offensive operations anymore.

No mention of what caused this. But they all got like hamstring poles, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, but obviously this was a major blow to the Israelis. And they needed to find some way out of this. And there have been negotiations with the Lebanese government from during the war in order to come to some sort of of normalization-esque framework. And what was achieved this week is something that is maybe more humiliating than any other agreement in the past decades between Arab states and Israel,

in that Israel has made an agreement with the Lebanese government where it will stay in southern Lebanon indefinitely until Hezbollah is disarmed not only in the south, but all over the country. And Lebanon not only has to acknowledge this and will only send its soldiers to occupy zones that Israel allows it to occupy in some sort of pilot's own system, but it also disallows Lebanon from pursuing war crimes tribunals or pursuing any kind of international justice for Israeli actions taken in Lebanon. It is a total undermining of the agreement that Iran was working toward to end the war everywhere in the country to get the Israelis out totally. And now they are signing on to this in the interest of Lebanese sovereignty, exercising that. It is so unbelievably insane. And now the Israelers are saying, well, we have this agreement. Why on earth would we listen to the Iranians attempting to do this when the government says we could do one thing?

The government that is in Beirut says one thing. But it doesn't matter if Israel listens to the Iranians and says what the government in Beirut says because the Iranians are still on the straight. No, well, they can make this sort of fucking argument that like, well, you're undermining the real agreement that we had here, that you're trying to impose the argument that has been made by the Israelis

is that Lebanon is actually being occupied by Iran, right? So we're actually working to liberate Lebanon and you're interfering here and then they can make that argument to be Americans. And like, I don't know if it will work permanently. Obviously, Iran has these levers which are very difficult to deal with, and Israel did not go into this war understanding that. I don't know if you saw Nanyahu's interview on 60 minutes where he was asked by the journalist he handpicked to interview him. And even when he

asked him on the street of form where he was like, we're learning as we go about the importance of it. Go on. And it's like, man, do like, see anything else. You had so much time to prepare for this. he must have learned public speaking from Pahlavi A poll by Israel's Channel 12 So like this is the international sphere Was shifting into domestic A poll by Channel 12 on Thursday Appeared to mark a break

With years of wide public support for the U.S. And Trump in particular Only 11% of Israelis feel like their country Has won the war interesting to use past tense there And an overwhelming 71% Say they no longer trust the Trump administration To safeguard Israeli interests See, this is the thing, right, is we've blown past the idea that the US could exercise any kind of restraint on Israel ever, really.

And unless you do some kind of like J.D. Vantz-style, have you even said thank you once thing to Netanyahu again, right? And make it stick this time. Then you're just left with this situation where you're going to keep compromising with Netanyahu, who is chasing the, like, further and further right bits of the Israeli electorate to stay. out of jail and in office. This is going to lead to, like, him compromising his way into trying to nuke Tehran. Yeah, like, where does that go with the, it seems like the U.S. Israel relationship at the public sentiment level being permanently damaged, unless, of course, as Noah says, they can get the U.S. to nuke Tehran. I think that there is a worry inside of the Nenayahu government that if they do not proceed with escalation,

and tearing up all these other agreements, that they will lose next election. With the understanding that the centrist opposition Netanyahu are going to be even more hawkish and even more racist and even more endeavoring to destroy widespread of Lebanon and Iran. No, this whole political system is effectively a, again, spinning out until supernova, right? They're all on the same deal.

they all know what needs, quote unquote, needs to happen. And there is no party on any real level that it's going to advocate pulling back because there is no constituency unless you are a Palestinian citizen of Israel or you are one of the maybe 90 Israelis that exists which opposes Israeli expansionist thought. You know, like these like back, I think it would be June 2025 war, the big peacemaking gesture was that the Israeli Communist Party made a joint statement with Tudair, the Iranian Communist Party,

and said that they were both against the war. It's like any relevant party collaborating with an exile party, which has not been relevant in 50 years, and they're presenting this as the big peace-making gesture. Like, no, nobody's, no, this is going nowhere. There is no native-born movement to end any of this.

I think this is, again, this is something November mentioned earlier, which I think is worth bringing forward, mentioned earlier to me before it's recording which is that fundamentally this is a story

about heightening and rising contradictions and heightening and rising contradictions where most of what we've actually spoken about with you Seamus is the recently

after we've finished watching I think body of lies no Charlie Wilson's war yeah yeah yeah yeah is the remaking of global politics by the events of October 7th the knock on has

I'm going to list this here bringing Iran Israel into open hostility, hampering the Abraham Accords, permanently creating an atmosphere of distrust between the U.S. and its golf clients, as well as the Gulf states and one another, putting the U.S. and Israel at odds as much as possible, massively ramping up Iran's deterrence credibility over the strait while maintaining a great deal of Fizal material, the flying lawnmowers that turns out are way more important, and also reshaping the world of professional golf. I think more accurately, you could say, Yaya Sinwar has, among other things, canceled the live

New Orleans golf tournament. Yeah. Ultimately, like this is, Yayas Inwa has been devastating to golf leaders. So, I think that this is like, a lot of what we're looking at now,

whether it is attempts to get to reign in Israel. It's this kind of contradiction, right? It reminds me of nothing so much as like bits of the Eastern front of the First World War, right? We have a bunch of competing nationalisms and a bunch of kind of like incoherent, dying empires

collapsing in different ways, right? And it just strikes me that we're stuck in this kind of post-October 7th interregnum, right, where if you think of like Gavrilla Princhot assassinating Franz Ferdinand, right, that's a sort of like insistence that the contradiction of we're going to have all of these nice Westphalian states and there's going to be like a balance of power and you can maintain these kind of colonial possessions, that's a kind of Serbian insistence that like, no, you can't. It's, you know, war until something else, right? Or John Brown's raid on Harper's ferry, right, is an insistence that, like, the contradiction of slavery cannot stand. It's going to be like war until something else, right? And I think you have to put October 7th in that same category of

this is not something that can just be put back in the box now. And we're seeing so many attempts to try. And they're always so incoherent. I think it's sort of like the death knell of this idea that Israel can maintain an occupation and the kind of slow genocide as normal, right? And instead of that, all of the shit that's abnormal is going to be happening in sequence until something else happens. I mean, I go back and forth on this. It's, I do not believe that Israel in its current form, whatever the current form you may desktated as, I don't believe that it is sustainable in the long term.

the threat that it is facing from, I don't want to scaremonger, fearmonger about like birth rates or something like that. But in terms of its ultra-orthodox population, that is a major time bomb for it. The fact that it is unable to function unless it is constantly at war is a major factor against it.

And I think that civil war is not on the immediate horizon, but something akin to civil conflict, I think is in its future between the forces that are inside of it. But whatever form its failure takes, its collapse takes within the next several decades, it is going to take a lot of people down with it, a lot of places, a lot of regions, a lot of countries, even. And whether or not that occupation is perpetual or eternal or permanent, effectively, it may be able to destroy a lot of places in that certain things are going to lie in complete ruins, depopulated, unable to rebuild.

And they may be able to affect that kind of permanent change that way. Like a country that has the Samson option is not thinking about itself with a great deal of permanency, even if it likes to talk that way a lot of the time. Like if we're looking at sort of like Israel, I think is the place where these contradictions are the sharpest because it's where most of the day-to-day visible violence happens. But I think you could even zoom out and you could say it's it's the whole. the whole contradictions that are working themselves out right now are the, the sort of very, even say they're from, they're from 2001 even, right?

Where the idea of an infinitely strong American empire in the Middle East with no regional competition that props up various kinds of secular dictators or religious monarchs, but not the Muslim Brotherhood, is just something that took sort of infinite energy to maintain and the deal was always, well, we'll get infinite energy back. And I think it's that that deal is just falling apart, that international deal. And the place where it first broke is the place where the violence that was used to suppress that contradiction is at its most visible, which is why all politics in the region is now post-October 7th politics. Yeah. I mean, Israel has fundamentally broken all of this. And America

I mean, I written about this right when the war started talking about the Israelization of America, not that Israel controls America or, you know, but in the sense that America was increasingly adopting the self-destructive tactics that Israel had been utilizing in its attempt to be more like Israel. And that is, the more that that takes hold in the United States, the more that we are going to go toward,

self-destruction more generally. This is not a state that is going for long-term sustainability anywhere. And any state that is going for long-term sustainability, like Saudi Arabia post-this war, even, they are going to find themselves at the other end of a gun wielded by Israel and the United States because that is not the deal. The deal is that you kill yourself for us. You do not get to live in this equation without total subservience.

that will eventually destroy you. And I don't think that many states understand this yet, that that is the dichotomy that is being created. Well, it certainly sounds like they can enforce that forever. So, uh, I mean, look, look, look, either that or you all get nuked. And that's, that's within their, uh, that's within their purview. I hate living in Europe. Oh.

So annoying. And look, I guess if you zoom out even more, right? this whole sort of the Middle Eastern security architecture basically collapsing. Well, weirdly, the European security architecture was able to kind of hold itself together so far in the face of, in the face of, like, wars happening in them.

Yeah, sounds out. What does, what's every other mid-sized power actually learn from watching what's going on here? Nothing. Get nukes. Get nukes now. I would say, I would say, I do that. But also, it's kind of shocking how, like, there does seem the understanding building about how Europe needs to be separate from the United States.

Yeah. But also, they love a lot of the stuff that the United States is doing. It is actively including themselves in it in very major ways. Like, Mark Roth said on, I believe, Fox the other day, that, like hundreds of missions against Iran were flown from Italian bases. And he's saying this in his capacity as, you know, the leader of NATO. They're very proud of this. When the war started, Root was on Fox and Friends, being like, this is fucking great. They had this kind of rupture, right?

With the Italians, because the Italians would only allow, like, not directly launching, like, strikes on Iran from Italy, but everything else going through was fine, per, like, kind of NATO's, like, rules of order or whatever. And this led to this kind of row with Maloney, which is now boiling over, where it's like, she's a neo-fascist, right? She, like, has all of the same enemies, but is now stuck in this position where, like, Trump loves drama too much to sort of weld this thing together. And he hates Europe because he thinks that we're all woke and gay and soy.

And so even the fascists are too woke and gay and soy for him. Yeah, it puts you in an impossible situation if you were brought to power on a wave of sort of, like, resurgent. ethno-nationalism and sort of nation-state far-right fascism as Maloney has been. And then you encounter Trump being like, I will disrespect Italy all day long because you're fucking weak and embarrassed. I don't have to respect you at all. Actually, you're pathetic. You just do what I say. It's like, well, she has to turn around and sell that to Italians. Yeah. I've talked about this before, like a big sort of weight on the scale with like the US's security guarantees with Europe was like dignity and ego, right? Not doing that shit. And so,

if you sort of force that issue, then you end up with a Europe that is like, no, we have to have a defense establishment because the U.S. is unreliable, even though we agree on all of the same, like, racist things, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, it's like, unfortunately, I agree with you at everything, but the people who vote for me are Italian. So it puts me in an impossible situation. Yeah. But like, also, if you're, if you're, say, Taiwan right now, the only possible lesson to take from this is, or like South Korea, right?

The lesson you take from this is get nukes, get nukes now, get one million cheap drones, strap a Playmore mine to your forehead, nail it, we do not call 911 sign to the front door. Because like there is no help coming. And so it's just, I think there are lots of ways that that makes the world a more dangerous place without sort of buying into the assumptions of all these security guarantees, tearing them all up in the way that we've seen, seen Frump kind of do on the, half of Israel is, uh, frightening. Maybe. Odd. Od.

Also, it's odd. Who knows? Maybe. I don't know. That's what we are. That's like, in some ways, like, yeah, who knows, maybe? I don't know. That's see, that's because everybody is just improvising and you're like, Reza Pahlavi is improvising for a place of weakness. Right? MBS is improvising from a place of, I would say, sudden, unexpected poverty. just suddenly like, why have I just got a text from my bank about my overdraft limits?

Sort of. Yeah. Uh-huh. And then Trump is improvising from a quagmire and Netanyahu is improvising from a place of desperation. Everybody's playing a domestic politics game because ultimately the like nice umbrella, nice, quote unquote, nice, the umbrella that made this easy for the West to have its, to have its like, AirSat's empire around the world has fallen apart. Yeah, the only goes who are actually having to. Are there, like, Israelis who really, really loved the killing? Like Smotrick's having a great time or like Ben-Vir, having a fantastic time.

They're furious all the time, but they love that. And so, like, who's winning? If it's over, who won? China? Guys on Kalshi? I don't know. I mean, like, yeah. Yeah.

You're killing. You're killing me, man. I remember I got a, I'm not saying this is like the question where I remember I remember. I was on a podcast that shall not be named and I got a question by somebody being like, can you give me the 30 year plan

for Saudi Iran in relations? It's like, I don't know. It's like, who won, man? We're all gonna die, man. It's all over. Everybody, everybody, it's gonna, oh, God, it's all, it's all gone. I would say, I would agree,

I would agree with Nate. Get on on gambling. Everybody. Become, become gamblers. I think like, if you put on, like 20 on something, I think you could probably get huge dividends. I bet a lot of money on Iraq beating France, and that was a huge mistake.

And I need a lot of money right now, and if you could just do that, that'd be great. That's the whole world, right? We're all in on this. We are all sort of like now gamblers who keep losing bets that are sensible. And I think this is, I say this every World Cup, this is the funniest year for England to win. And I think they're going to do it. I think put hundreds of dollars on England

winning right now. All of your life savings right now, while the odds are still bad. Get in on that. I have to say this year started out with a guy making a couple hundred thousand dollars on a bet on Calci because it turns out his IP address was located

at Eglet Air Force Base because he was a member of 7th Special Forces Group on the mission to get Nicholas Maduro. He bet on Nicholas Maduro being taken out of power It's like that kind of set the stage in a way. It's like, so much of this has just been pump and dump schemes. Like I don't want to just explain it away or make like a glib statement about it. But it feels like there's a lot of opportunism because none of the people driving it have any fucking idea.

Like, God knows, a 30 year plan. They didn't even have like a next month plan. All they're just making it up as they go. Everybody is improvising. Everybody is just kind of hoping that they, I would say that China is very well positioned because they actually have the ability to do long-term planning on this, unlike every other country of planet Earth. But I remember that,

like, it's still illustrative of that because I remember seeing that story in 60 minutes. And the way that the guy tried to cover his tracks was just deleted his account right after. And it's like dumbass. Yeah. They can still see that. Yeah. Oh, it didn't happen, actually. It's stupid bullshit forever.

And this is like true even of like multipolarity. I read an interesting foreign policy article about sort of Putin's decision making, the thrust of which is, it's really bad. And like, so he's going to do some more shit, like, probably because, again, all of these people are just improvising because everyone is gambling. And we're just going to keep rolling the dice forever until we all get nuked or something else happens. Or Israel nukes Rome for some reason.

Because we do have one plan. It's this fucking insane plan we came up in the 80s. And it's like, well, it's been signed off on. All right. Well, here's what's going to happen, right? is we, Harry Kane, the fattest, oldest, baldest, stupidest cunt in the history of association football is going to kick a second goal past, you know, France or Portugal or whoever else to win the World Cup for England in stoppage time. And then the light of one billion suns is going to

open up over the stadium as Benjamin Netanyahu nukes fucking Miami. That's the only possible conclusion I can come to is it may as well be that. And I think that's as good a place as any to put a little bow on it. All right. Seamus, I want to thank you so much for coming on and speaking with us today. You had said, you had mentioned earlier this is where I realized I've been coming out of this podcast for six years now. Oh, God.

Yeah. Wow. In the Middle East is still not fixed. It's still not, it's still not done. It's crazy how we've been right about everything, though. Consistently. I do, I do want to take 30. seconds here consistently. This podcast has delivered incredible takes. It has been a light

into my life and I'm announcing here on your podcast that I'm killing myself right after I get off this call. I am going to wait for my England bad to come in and enjoy oh, milliseconds of joy before I am vaporized along with everyone else. Shame is if people want to hear more of your dulcet tones, where can they go? If you want to hear more threats of suicide they can subscribe to Turpidlitz podcast at turdoletspod pod.sef.com they can read

at shamis-maelacassellead.com and they can also follow me on Twitter.com slash shamis underscore Malik. And I'm sure there are other social platforms I'm on that I no longer check. Amazing. Perfect. Well, in the moments of life you have left after England wins,

do try to do that. Thanks again, Seamus. Thank you for listening. This has been a free episode. There's going to be a bonus episode in a few days. So do check that out. Nate, I was going to say also, listen to No Gods and the Mayors, listen to Kill Gilles Fawn. Yeah. Be gay and solve crimes. Listen to my, my band, Second Homes. Listen to Lines Live by Donkeys. There's all sorts of stuff out there. All the plugs. It's a lot of things to plug. But you know what? I mean, we got to say it now because Seamus won't be on anymore once this episode's over and our listenership's going to drop like shit. So got it all in now.

I wanted to have Shavis on to, we've long talked about to Shamus about coming on talk about some Iranian mayors, but I guess we can't do it. It's too late. It's already written. I didn't plan this out at all. All right. All right. All right.

Thanks a lot, everybody. We'll see you on the bonus episode in a few days. Bye. Bye.