TRASHFUTURE - The Vulcan Neck Bench feat. Seamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: October 20, 2026

Middle East correspondent Seamus Malekafzali returns to discuss the possible closure of the Bab-al-Mandab strait by the Houthis, why an $80bn Saudi defence budget Saudi can’t stop them, and how the US and Israel started something they couldn’t stop if they wanted to… and how this makes every fake Saudi arts or sports or tech washing project more worthless than usual. Check out more from Seamus 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)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this free episode of TF. It is Riley and Nova under one roof. Yeah. Today. Sharing the studio again, like old times. That's right. We also have, we have Hussein across town. And of course, from our Middle East Bureau, which I guess is in New York, it's Seamus Malikimselli. Shamus, thanks for coming to the show. Always a pleasure. Always a pleasure. Now, there's quite a bit we wanted to discuss today, especially given the Christmas of my year, the Saudi my Christmas and birthday rolled

into one. Is it Rileymus already? Feels like it gets earlier every year. Well, you know how in September like Tesco's will start putting out the Saudi Arabia Davos in the Desert Future Investment Initiative merchandise? Yeah, it's a whole card. Yeah. Well, it's been postponed.

They had to postpone Davos in the Desert because Ansarola keeps on blowing up the country and now they can't do their like fake fun stuff like the FII and their fake tennis tournament. And the Red Sea Film Festival. A year of disappointment for Saudi Arabia, huh? Yeah, that's right. So this is

what we have Seamus on to talk about primarily, but before we get there, I am being handed a TF Vindication Total Champion 7 to 10 times hat as N-scale. You may remember them from our episode's Scaffled to Heaven. Yes, the data center that was going to be built in Essex that they didn't have planning permission for

and was just a sort of bricklayers, Yes. Yes. That one. Yes. The whole thing where Microsoft, the $20 billion investment from Microsoft was more or less Kirstarmer's entire AI strategy. Yeah. What happened to him? We're going to give a scaffolding yard 20 billion. We're going to put 20 billion on scaffolding. Yeah, Microsoft pulled out of that deal. That funding is no longer happening because it is still super a scaffolding yard. It's not. It's not a data center. It doesn't have power. I have a sort of question downstream of this, which is. Because we've seen this happen. We've seen character AI go bankrupt from not making enough of a profit,

getting kids to kill themselves. How deep underwater does the sort of prow of the Titanic have to be before we can start playing near my God to be? Like at what point do we stop going? We're going to be right any second now and start taking the victory lap. Oh, so that's a, that's difficult, but I can tell you, it's like all of these little projects failing, right? They're failing because a lot of them are bad businesses.

Yeah. They're the weaker Ibexes in the herd. Yeah, and they can't just keep getting more and more and more investment. In this sort of analogy, the Ibexes are fundamentally like flawed animal. Yeah, you know, these IBEXs that are really great at seeking investments so long as they're fast. No, so basically, right, as long as the labs keep getting people to invest in them, then the merry-go-round will keep going. It's tough to say what the thing will be that stops that. But the unit economics still aren't fixed.

Companies still aren't getting lots of value out of it. And nothing fundamental has changed. What is different worth saying is compute is getting cheaper, but that's not fixing the problem still because you still can't build enough data centers because there aren't enough gas turbines. It's sort of one of those things like Silicon Valley Bank, right? Where knowing it to scam in advance kind of doesn't help you. It doesn't count until Sam Altman has sort of like run

and you hear the sound of his like Kurnigzegger accelerating away. Yeah, I'll bet he'll be back any minute now with my stock. Any second. But look, that was a brief bulletin. There are a couple other news items I wanted to discuss. There's a real kind of like rub mindset one that I want to talk about first. Listen, there are some people who are seeing waves washing over the bow of the Titanic and going, yeah, but the end I'm on is rising.

Yes. Oh, this is. And Seamus, I don't know if you've seen this, there's a trend among AI researchers to take up smoking to make a point. You see, you gave me the notes of, well, more or less what you wanted to go over. here and you did title it, Claude, make me a safer cigarette, no mistakes. I did not realize that that was basically the crux of it. And I didn't realize, I should have thought, you know, if Azala is using Claude to build their hypersonic missiles, how is it not possible for us to build a cigarette that does not give you cancer? I feel like this is very easy. These guys in Yemen are using

Claude, among other things, to defeat an $80 billion defense budget. And yet we can, can't solve one simple problem. I mean, I think that might, you know, sort of be predicated on the idea that this $80 billion defense budget is mostly kind of grafted and waste. But, you know, who would say such a thing as that? Unlike the tobacco industry. QED. Interesting.

Yeah. I just, it's a great piece of kind of idiot long termism, like cryogenic freezing or whatever, to be like, yeah, I'm going to start smoking now because Zins aren't epic enough for me and I'm making a conscious bet. Claude will cure cancer by the time I get it. You're your prestigiousing health. The thing about the cigarette and the Zinn is that the cigarette has something that the Zinn doesn't, in the sense of the cigarette, and I don't know whether you guys have heard this

before, but the cigarette, the tobacco is actually toasted. They're saying, why are you wearing the Don Draper suit for this episode? And I've got the whiteboard out as well. That's how I imagine, like, working at an AI company. It's like, you walk in in your, like, vintage suit. with your whiteboard and you write toasted with two and you underline it and everyone's really

impressed but they're mostly impressed me that you know how to write? And I'm just like, oh my God, how did you get clawed to do that with your hands? And that's how you become the smartest person in the room. Yeah, just got Series A funding by going to the investors and shoveling a bunch of looses ins into a toaster in front of them.

The room smelled horrible. Just got Series A funding by taking an unsolvable math problem, which is of course the shapes sorter for babies. So, this is, so many researchers said... Researchers said through a hacking cough. So this was Shyam Sankar,

who's actually like CTO at Palantir, who's speaking not in support of this. He's like, Dan, everyone's kind of going a bit crazy. He's on CBS's Face the Nation. He says, so many researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI. Very funny to be sort of, you know, senior at Palantir and be like,

some of these AI people are getting kind of like stupid and chudded with it, you know? Anyway, time to go. Time for my nine o'clock with Alex Carp. Yeah, time to go meet with the one guy in the sword and then look for the Antichrist in the computer. Great. Many of these folks he went on in Silicon Valley were building this technology have filled the god hole with the machine god of AI. Oh, the God hole. That's in the sort of playbox thing.

You got to put God in the hole. But the problem with the God-shaped hole is that it's kind of ineffable. While it's unclear how many researchers are actually smoking cigarettes to project some kind of confidence the potential of AI to cure cancer, nicotine products are reportedly making comeback in offices. Palantir itself has stocked vending machines in its DC office with free Zin pouches for employees 21 and over. I mean, I know it smell crazy in there and not just because of those rumors about Palma Larkie. Yeah. Business Insider also reported last month that some startup founders have shunned the health max.

That's one thing I would like to go away is I'd like people to stop using fucking clavicular language. in normal articles. Mocking. Awful. Sure. To take up smoking, partly to help with networking. Avi Schiffman,

CEO of the wearable startup friend, former guest of the show, said, by the time you do get lung cancer, our robots will have cured that. Jamie, a crypto alum.

The guy built a pendant that spies on you. It's like, yeah, but this is, you know what, I built the pendant that spies on you.

The other guy, the team built like the pendant that sort of just makes you socially unacceptable by doing very rude accents to people.

Yeah. That's like one, you just allow, You stretch that line out. You just keep drawing. I mean, listen, Riley, are you an oncologist? Because I'm not an oncologist either, right? And I don't.

If, listen, chemotherapy, right, came from an accident with mustard gas in the Second World War. That is true. And you can look it up. We don't know for certain that the cure for cancer isn't going to originate from the necklace that makes you socially unacceptable to be around. Jamie, a crypto love who asked not to share his last name, met a backer for his raw milk startup at a Miami-Cava. Bar. Pitching raw milk in Miami. Wasn't there a president who died that one?

He struck up a conversation with a jacked Harley-Riding investor while chain smoking marbrose. Oh, that's epic, dude. Yeah. Jamie told the investor about his startup, and the two talked about alternative wellness between drags. A week later, the investor signed a check. She's like, sharing a mulber over some Miami

temperature raw milk. Oh, yeah. You know what? It says it gives you the best breath in history. All right. And there's another thing I was needing to get to before we get to our main topic. Again, I want to turn to our guests. Shamus, when are you getting your flying roadster? I had a question about that. Yes. One, surely, like the purpose of the original Tesla's and all that was that it was supposed to be sellable. You were supposed to drive these on the road at some point. Yeah. Flying cars are not legal. They will never be legal for many different reasons. There is no

fucking way that this thing can support an actual car with the weight on it. I think it's got to be a frame, right? The frame of a car that's being supported this way. Oh, yeah, it's the frame of a car that is full of several different highly unstable propellant gas canisters kept under high pressure.

You know what, you're saying all this? This is going to be legal in five years. I don't know why I'm pulling this stuff. No, no, absolutely. Absolutely. I'm, this is, I'm opening day. Yeah. He's getting to deliver to my fucking place. Yeah. It's going to be one of those things. Where it's not legal, but people just do it anyway, like the self-driving, I think is maybe the idea. Oh, because the one thing, though, the one thing protecting us, here's the thing.

Nobody owns a Tesla Roadster. It doesn't exist. There's one Tesla Roadster, Elon Musk has it. He has been accepting deposits for them for 10 years, promising that they're going to be out in the next couple. So you put down a $50,000 a dollar deposit, and then you pay the other $200 at delivery, and you get your Tesla Roadster. That has never happened. He's had to refund it. large number of people whose deposits, he's probably just like made a pretty appreciable sum of interest on in the last like 10 decade. If instead of, you know, getting in early on PayPal, he had just been a sort of like minor 3D printer owning idiot. He could have been a fantastic Kickstarter scammer. Oh, imagine the game he would have promised to make. Let's not get, hmm, let's not get too

much into that, please. No, no, no. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. And I will note, we have not taken a penny of pre-orders from people. It's true. In this case, so Elon Musk has said, hey, instead of making the roadster and selling it to people, boring, cocked, soy, it's not a cool way to do business. I've been saying for a long time, there's nothing gayer than buying a car from another man.

That's true. You want to be taken away by him? Oh, you want to get in the car together and drive around for a bit to see if you like it? Why, because you're gay? Tesla unveiled its long-anticipated roadster on Thursday during a dramatic event in which the vehicle used compressed air thrusters to fly off a ramp and perform a mid-air maneuver. So, turns out the future really does have flying cars, said Elon Musk at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, with Vice President of Vehicle Engineering adding flying cars are real.

Again, they just, they're so... I just worry he's spreading himself a bit too soon. What with that and the kind of optimist robot and the going to Mars and the data centers in space. Oh, don't forget his remake of The Odyssey that's going to not be won't. the anti-woke remake of The Odyssey, yeah. Yeah. I just, I worry for his own kind of, you know, welfare. What about the tunnel that connects the Las Vegas Convention Center to the strip?

And the tunnel that connects to the airport? Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The other tunnel that's going to replace the high-speed California train. Yep, yep. It's just I struggle with this kind of like task management stuff too, you know? Yeah.

Tesla's reservation page for the Roadster lists another $50,000 reservation payment for their performance version and a $250,000 reservation payment for the thrust version, which features acceleration thrusters, and an in-blight-only rocket variant is a single-seat model with a full-flight system. I mean, the thing is you have to consider this basically as a kind of highly advanced level of Reddit gold. Oh, you did a good post, and I want to give you some money, and I'm going to give you an amount of money that is trivial to me, a guy who would buy this. I think it's one more than that.

They've invented, they looked at Ocean Gate. Uh-huh. Now, those were people who knew, when the Titanic was going down. We don't just have to have artisanal ocean gates created by single people, you know, where they own the whole process of production. We can mass produce stochastic

ocean gates all around the world. A guy can crash his like flying car into your house like GTA online at any time. Imagine. Anyone who's a fan of friend of the show Tom Walker's streams knows his playing GTA with the cars at 10,000 percent speed or whatever. Yeah.

What if that was just life? And it was just anywhere there were too many rich people, you had to contend with the fact that all the cars are at 10,000 percent speed. I think, having seen those dreams, it would keep us all on their toes. Or like, imagine going to the store to buy a pack of $90 eggs and you're instantly and fatally crushed by Palmer Lucky, who is just laying candy crushed behind the wheel and decided to jump over. Because that's the fantasy, right?

It's jump over traffic. Yeah, you know. It's the same as the giantness of the pickup truck. right it's if you're rich enough you can just have a flying car and you can take off jump over traffic and then the fact is you know you and everyone around you will be killed either in a pressurized gas explosion or because every car accident is 1,000% more fatal. No, that's fine. I think we as a society can survive, you know, seeing every second of every day a guy in a quarterdip hanging out the side of a fucking flying car like Anakin Skywalker. Now that's pod racing. Shavis, you said at the beginning, right, flying cars will never be real.

This is basically why, right? Like, you would just, they would just instantly crush everybody around them. This is the thing. The more you talk about it, the more I see, like, clear utility to be utilized by tech pros and very rich Wall Street types.

And even though I can't really envision a few, up back to the future, Part 2 style future, I am envisioning like 10 years from now, 15 years from now, there are select few people who have these things and are just causing, regularly causing the kind of havoc that made it so it was illegal to fly a helicopter over Manhattan for a time.

Like the stuff that like you can't lay the helicopter on Pan Am because these things are inherently just incredibly fucking dangerous. But there's like some sort of loophole that allows us to happen that it's not been exploited yet. But we can we can get clawed to get on this. And they can find out how to do this. The executive class yearns to die in an air accident. I do love the idea that the end result of this,

in the event that it succeeds somehow, which it won't, but in a hypothetical world where you can sort of get the cars to fly for, like, longer than a car, like a mile, but you will just sort of invent pod racing. In which case, like, I would very much like to be the subalba of this scenario. Well, because I was also sort of thinking about, like, and this is this because, like, I had recently, I've had like an experience with,

I've had many experiences in my life, but this experience. Sorry. Oh my God. It's like podcasting with Albert Camus. Your brain is just so cool. I had an experience with like one of these kids that has like they do like do the car mods.

Like you know where like the exhaust pipe does like the weird sort of like popping sounds and the cars are really shitty but they've just like modded the fuck out of it. Yeah, sure, sure. And it just kind of looks, it looks kind of dumb, but like whatever. And all I can, all I can imagine are like, these kids sort of doing the same thing, but with the flying cars and really pissing off like everyone who thinks that this is sort of, this is like a luxury. Like, imagine sort of like having your big flying Tesla and you're sort of like flowing above

other people and you think are great. And you just get like overtaken by a teenager who's just like, um, modded the fuck out of their sort of like whatever flying car they've got. It's making this weird popping sound and like being sourced fumes are sort of going all over you and the sort of like barely legal woman who you're like, you're now dating. And she's now very, very impressed with like the other kid's car. And like, imagine Matt. You get cut in the air. That's crazy. There is a class character to this as I think you identify, right? Well, we all have the death drive, right? But the thing is, we're all going to get killed driving different

preposterously fast vehicles. Your proletarian version of this is you're illegally modified e-bike, right, that you twist the handle and it goes up to 500 miles an hour instantly and splatters you across the nearest wall, right? That's one thing. But then if you're in, if you're the billionaires, then that's when you achieve true greatness because you get to get killed by the Tesla roadster. I mean, like, I go back to this for every single flying car proposition, right? Which is the fantasy always is that there will be two roads, a road for like the pores.

Yeah. Who will get crashed on and that will kill the person crashing, right? And the road for the riches, which is going to be these flying taxis, flying cars to be around. They won zero lanes. Like, you know, like the Soviet one, where you just have a central lane and you just have that just for like, you know, important people. It's just I never thought, I guess maybe I did. It's just I didn't think that this is how we would have an era of mass casualty events that are immediately following a Rick and Morty quote. I just never.

The last thing you'll ever hear is I'm Pickle Rick. and then you'll be splattered all over the wall by Palmer Lucky's Tesla rocket. Just completely atomized by Palmer Lucky's distracted driving. So, you know, hey, you know what I'm looking forward to? You have to get killed by the right billionaire flying car, right? Like, you have to pick, like, a good car to get run over by. Oh, yeah. Like, a more classic, like a finance billionaire flying car.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Imagine the lack of dignity, like, getting killed by, I don't know, like fucking Wyatt Coke. Remember him? Honestly? He's still making his shirts, by the way. I looked it up. He's still making the shirts. Yeah.

Oh, good for him. That's good. Stick to it. I would love to be killed by like, maybe not a flying car, but I love like a model T or like a 1920s car so that when they take a photo of me, it looks like I was killed in the 1920s in a very comical way. Otherwise, I don't want an undignified Lexus slamming it to me from 20 feet up in the air. Oh, no, no, no. It's a little bit trad, a little bit elegant. You want to be like impaled on the sort of hood ornament of like a Bentley or something.

Something has lines, you know? Okay. Check this out. Check this out. Ken Griffin from Citadel decides he wants to get into stunt driving. He does drive a flying car. And because he's put all of the, like, gnaw's canisters that, by the way, as soon as they run out, you die on his, like, Rolls Royce or whatever. I didn't want to get rid of all his nice seats.

Everyone's become Vin Diesel and Fast and Furious. Yeah, I'm just walking about my day. And I'm like, oh, hey, it seems to have gotten dark all of a sudden. Vertical drop. Ah, pancakes. Yeah. Pancake by Ken Griffin's. Motted Flying Rolls Royce. That's the way to go.

Is listeners right in? How would you like to be killed by a flying car? He was killed two days before they cured all cancers. He was just about to light up. All right, all right. Look, I want to talk about our core subject here today. As I mentioned, it was announced on October 14th. There will be no Six Kings slam. Everybody's favorite event in the world of tennis.

What do you mean? I don't get to watch people play tennis. this in like 400 degree heat anymore? Yeah. You don't get to watch a non-ranked, non-competitive exhibition tournament where everybody's getting paid a billion dollars to go and pretend that Saudi Arabia has a like a flourishing natural sports scene. But I really wanted to.

I wanted to go to Wimbledon in the desert. I am being a bit facetious here talking about the Six Kings slam and the Red Sea Film Festival, the future investment initiatives, all the things that Saudi Arabia does to project its sort of modern cosmopolitan image to try to watch. itself. Quite difficult for the tennis players because they have to play on AstroTurf. Well, it's quite difficult for the tennis players because they have to dodge a bunch of drones and missiles.

Yeah, that's true. And, Seamus, this is what we really want to talk about today, right? Which is the events precipitating the movement of the Six Kings slam to the dead zone between Christmas and New Year's. Saudi Arabia has an $80 billion defense budget, and yet they seem to now be unable to land a plane. Let's talk

about it. Yeah. Saudi Arabia really invested a lot. in modernizing its military. I mean, similar to a lot of different Gulf states, most especially the UAE. But the UAE has the luxury of, or at least, well, that may change within the near future, but seems to be something about them maybe getting back involved with Yemen because this is becoming a very intractable issue. But Saudi Arabia does not have the luxury of just kind of leaving this alone, or at least they do, in a sense,

but they are directly bordering the country. They had a disaster with the original intervention in Yemen, and they seem to have enough sense to not get into a unilateral war with Iran, and the same with the UAE did. But they have done absolutely nothing to ensure that they are a competent military actor. They're still operating under the idea that, unsaudelaah, the Yemenis that they have been fighting, people in sandals, people who are incapable of striking. deep within, which was already a mistaken assumption in 2015 when they initially started the intervention, but now it's deeply mistaken. Are we suggesting

that a country that sends all of its young officers to Sandhurst to learn, you know, I mean, yes, okay, to learn about like doing coke and passing out on people's front gardens and stuff, but also the sort of section attack stuff, that they might have developed something of a kind of colonial mentality.

Oh, that's crazy. Well, well, well, I mean, let's not go, let's not go so far as to say that these people are, you know, have, have heightened views of themselves. But there is certainly a mentality that both, I mean, as a Yemena Khashoggi, used to say, that these are Nazis on the border, that essentially the Yemenis on the law are like the Nazi empire. Iran is the Nazi empire and the Yemenis are part of the Nazi empire. They pose that kind of threat. But also these people are insects who are very easily destroyed

as long as there is a shore force. I don't think about how insects work, but okay, all right. All insects are Nazis. Yeah, because, like, I know a guy used to, like, live of good, like, his thing was, like, getting rid of rodents. But he was, like, sort of, you know, he'd been around the block, like, you know, he's killed. Yeah, he was Antifa. He hated Nazis. But the thing he told me is, like, the thing about the insects is that, like, you can't beat him.

Like, every day is a struggle. He was actually very poetic, actually, I'm thinking about it. He was just like, he was a... Again, the Al-Al-Al Camu of podcast. But we have this situation, right? For the last 10 years, the Saudis have been attempting to crush this movement in Yemen. They have always seemed to have been failing to some degree. Recently, they have failed to an enormous degree.

And one of the things I kind of wanted to talk about, Seamus, this is something you published recently in an article, is how much of all of this is just downstream from the total paradigm shift in Middle Eastern politics that happened about three years and one week ago from the day of recording? I mean, yeah, like a lot of Gulf states are still attempting to pull things back to how they were pre-October 7th. Where Iran was still able to be, if not negotiated with and at least was able to be predicted. Saudi Arabia has actually, I think, had a foreign policy that is more reasonable than so in this neighbors, like Kuwait or Bahrain of the UAE with regards to Iran. There was an incident that I think was supported in Reuters where they had done a retaliatory strike against Iran at some point in March.

But they had used that in order to open a deconfliction mechanism and prevent further major strikes on Saudi Arabia in the future. That seems to have worked out for them. But they still definitely contain an inkling of hubris with regards to what Saudi Arabia is able to do on its own. Or more specifically, what they're able to do on their own and encumbrance. and in a coordination with their partners because Saudi Arabia has been engaging in defense pacts first with Pakistan and that expanding it out to Turkey with the Mecca pact. But they are definitely under the impression that they are still in the driver's seat with regards to the region or they can be in the driver's seat because when they attempted

to bomb Samoa airport, when they bombed supplier appreciation, they shouldn't say attempted. They were hoping to cut the direct air link that had suddenly been created between Iran and of the Yemeni Capital that is under on solar lock control. But that loan act completely unraveled this ceasefire that had been going on for a number of years. And it's backfired in such a catastrophic way. And to do that against, I think, the one actor that we can confidently say has improved its strategic positions like October 7th. It has improved its technology, has improved its power. And every sector has become more influential and seems to operate as if it were a regional power, even if it is the poorest country in Middle East. It shows how far behind the Saudis are

in recognizing how things have changed, because now they're trapped in the situation where all of these countries are not coming supposedly to their defense. I mean, Pakistan has pledged support, Egypt, maybe even pledging support, which would be big. But none of them are talking about going into Yemen itself. They're not doing the 2015 intervention where everybody from Qatar on down thought that it's totally cool to send troops in because this is going to be an easy, easy thing. No, there is a recognition of how badly this is going to go, but there is no recognition of how to actually change the course of events that leave them up to that place. So you have this very difficult situation that is entirely of their own making,

and is not an especially sympathetic decision to talk about. I think that airport bombing is significant just militarily, right? because they were firing these Storm Shadow cruise missiles, right? Which are British made, by the way. You know, that have been used very, very effectively by Ukraine, for instance. And they fired 10 of these things, which cost them probably $20 million at the sort of maximum extent of their range because they were very scared about losing one of these typhoons to, you know, Yemeni air defense, basically. And they did sort of very little damage because they're not really meant for that.

And it was a huge waste that also really revealed a great deal of fear, really, I would say. Yeah, well, it's an entire army of gamers who they're all hoping that they can like do the one grenade throw at the beginning of the level where it lands on another spawn point. Yeah, well, there's something particularly, I guess, you know, ironic about seeing Ukraine, which, you know, sort of like begs for years and years to have access to these things. They finally get one and you get sort of like, you know, footage of them, you know, flying this, you know, upside down through a tunnel like an ace comment. combat game or whatever to like, you know, sort of blow up a Russian general staff headquarters. Meanwhile, the Saudis just fire 10 of these at concrete and miss, you know? So the airport attack that we mentioned, right, Saudi Arabia can't land a plane, the people who they're trying.

I mean, they had a couple of tries out at once a few years ago. Come on, whoa, hey, hey, oh, oh. What's happened is these people who they are subjecting to these, like, I would say combination of high-tech ultra-courness. They attacked a Saudi airport in return, killing 12, wounding 309, the deadliest attack in the kingdom in more than a decade. Flights are now diverted. There are now travel advisories to not go to Saudi Arabia, which when you're trying

to become a modern cosmopolitan hub where you want people to come to like go to your film festival and watch your sort of fantastic event. It's this kind of, you know, commercializing program that involves kind of building the whole country out as kind of an airport lounge. You can't land a plane. You can't have an airport lounge. Because what you mentioned, Seamus, they couldn't allow this air bridge, right? What you wrote was that they were specifically trying to assassinate a delegation from the

funeral from Ali Khomeini, the assassinated Iranian Supreme Leader, right? That, well, there was a flight coming. But to prevent them from land it to get them to go elsewhere. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. That they were trying to do this, that this backfired spectacularly, that they have been unable to assert any more control over the region. And so what's happened now is, once again, with the Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces reeling, you wonder where this begins to, like,

have sort of ripple effects in the wider global economy. Well, now the west coast of the country is under control of Anzara. And they're able to threaten a lot of like the shipping that previously, like Iran could only threaten the Strait of Hormuz. Well, now like a group aligned with them control the other side of the exit of the peninsula, right? Yeah. I mean, I mean, there had been an attempt to launch, like, a major offensive. I think the reason reporter Matthew Petty compared the idea to, like, Assad announcing, like, their government announcing that they were going to do a whole thing to take back the country right before they fell. Like, there was a minor offense in which there was a slight advance into an open desert area.

Within that, I mean, there was evidence of war crimes. I don't know if any of you saw the video of this one of these proxy trials. troops, officially the Yemeni government, running over in their car, surrendering Ansar al-Laa fighters. Yeah. Like, able to do nothing strategically, but clearly capable of just exert, just incredible violence against people. They don't have the capability, which means that the Baban Mendeb, whereas previously it was under partial control by Azzarla is now under its complete control, basically.

And the potential double closure of the Baban Mendeb and the Straton-Mand-Dab and the Straton-Mendab is, Because the bad moment that was only currently closed to Saudi shipping at the moment. But obviously, like, if anybody remembers the phases that happened at 2024, I mean, they were expanding it to, you know, Israeli shipping than anybody who was, you know, any companies that were doing business of Israel. And then they were saying that we're going to go into the Indian Ocean and then the Mediterranean. Like, they have the ability to escalate this. And whereas they might not have been able to strike in a Mediterranean before, they certainly launched missiles in that regard. And I would argue, considering the fact that they were able to hit Bangurian at least once in 2025, I would not place a bet that they're not going to be able to do something crazy in any future confrontation,

something, you know, clearly when you were bombing Riyadh airport with such precision, you are, I mean, I saw a story the other day about them trying to create their own Chebarshikand drones, ones that can strike anywhere in Israel and Saudi Arabia. Like, again, all of this is to say that Assad a lot of law. is in a deeply significant strategic advantage at the moment, one that puts the rural economy in significant jeopardy. And we're talking about raised oil prices, more so than they already raised ones that we're talking about now, significantly depleted government revenue in Gulf states, like in Saudi Arabia, like in Qatar, like other allies at them.

My tennis. I mean, well, this is the thing, and that when Saudi Arabia, is steering down the barrel of a contraction, the government revenue of like 17% but I don't remember the statistics I used. You are having to, I mean, not only voluntarily cut quarters

probably in the future. I mean, already live golf, that's a pre-vis thing. The failure there. But, I mean, you had attached, I was shocked,

I didn't even hear about this. The tennis tournament that was sponsored by Aramco, I mean, that's an example of something that I think is a bit in jeopardy at the moment. I mean,

this is, kind of similar to the whole business of how Israel sells itself. In that it has to be kind of under attack that's part of its image, but it also has to portray that it is a safe haven, that it is a great place to do business. And this is similar to how the UAE sells itself. But Saudi Arabia did not have to sell itself like this up until, you know, a little less than 10 years ago.

And that jeopardization of that is very deeply harmful to how it does business. because Nikki Minaj is not going to do stuff in Jeddah if there is a threat of a missile alert every single day. That's going to be harder to sell. You're going to have to really raise those paychecks. And Israel has a military to facilitate that, whereas the Saudis, you know, for a number of reasons, you know, sort of largely coup-shaped ones,

don't like the idea of having a military. They like the idea of having a kind of colonial gendarmery, right, that can do some war crimes at armament. length and you know, fire some very expensive missiles at arms length. And, and war is hard and you don't always get the option to do that. And then all of a sudden you're sort of watching videos of, yes, of sort of like your proxies doing war crimes, but of your proxies in pickup trucks that you bought them just doing donuts in the desert as the Houthis fire mortars at them and hit all of them, which they really shouldn't be able to do. Yeah. And what I want to go back to, right, is whether

you're talking about Saudi or the sort of oil that is the lifeblood of the empire that we live in, these enormous assumptions about infinite stability were being made. Everybody bought into the end of history. A little bit, that at any point, if any of these choke points, all of which are on huge international fault lines, like for example, I always go back to the world's biggest supplier of oil is on one geopolitical fault line. The world's biggest supplier of computer chips is on another. I wouldn't worry about that other one.

Yeah, that's fine. You got at least three years to not worry about that one. And the economic planning, because I want to go into a few little more of the economic effects that you mentioned, Seamus, the economic planning always seems to assume that, well, so long as fine for another day, we're just going to keep on carry on as though nothing will ever be destabilized by anything. I think, I'm sorry to keep talking defense here, right? But there was this whole kind of bureaucracy and this whole kind of think tank thing that grew up around this idea of containment and management, right? Whether that's in Israel, mowing the grass, whether that's in D.C., Britain too, with this idea of like, yeah, stuff can have. happen. But like, you know, we can sort of work around it. We can plan around it. I think one of the things that's revealing as far as sort of outside context problems go, because we're thoroughly outside

context now, right, is I remember reading earlier this year, somebody asking a lot of these kind of defense-minded people, you know, like RUSI and other places, hey, what happens if both of those things that you talked about happen at the same time? You know, what happens if the oil and the semiconductors get turned off at the same time? And the answer was, well, well, we don't think about that here because it would be bad. That would be quite difficult. And if I lunch break, what I was shocked by was like in researching economic reports

about what people thought were going to happen, there were some banks, there were some risk analyst firms that had, you know, incorporated the threat because obviously this has been threatened. Yeah. But there are also quite a few who did not or like outright said, we cannot predict them. Like we're in completely uncharted territory if both of these routes are turned off, essentially, and made dangerous.

Because like the U.S. government has attempted. I mean, there was this big push, I think a week or so, going to claim that, you know, the oil levels are right back to where they were pre-war. The course of the pre-war. That was a big thing. And, you know, it cut down oil prices for a little bit. But then as you investigated, it was like, well, no, the three to four moves is still very much closed. and not a lot of ships are going for, even if there's some ships, but a lot of this is like overland routes.

And then also these overland routes are being bombed by a sub-bub. It's not really a permanent thing. All these things are very much like still in the firing range of not only the amenities, but also the Arapi militias. Like none of these are permanent fixes. None of these are things that can easily just simply be rerouted because they're getting into overdrive mode. Like you are really in a situation, a dangerous situation, a very volatile situation that I think a lot of firms are not able to compute.

Well, when your job kind of depends on computing it in a way that is non-disastrous, you know, then that's how everybody ends up thinking like, well, bluntly, Israeli intelligence on like October 5th or so. Oh, you just have to get to the next day of nothing bad happening. And so long as everyone else thinks what you think, there won't be that much consequence. for you, just enormous consequence for everything else. Why did we build everything on a kind of like confidence incentivized system again? Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. Okay. But like, we talked about like, there's a very real prospect of both roots out of the Gulf,

both sea routes out of the Gulf, being utterly shut down. It's a real prospect. Sure. No one seems to have, very few people seem to have modeled it. But like, what's, what are the actual like global economic implications of both the straight of Hormuz and the Babalmanda being turned off? I mean, look, as I said in the piece, I mean, you again, looking at lower government revenues in these states, but you're also seeing already when the street of four moves was closed, you are talking about severe disruptions to not only oil, which is the big goona, but you were talking about, you know, disruptions to fertilizer. You were talking about disruptions to the kinds of materials they put in the conductors. Like, so much stuff flows out of ports in the UAE in particular. I mean, Dubai ports world really made itself. the center of a lot of things.

And now UAE ports are basically blockaded and have been for a very long amount of time. And you are getting to a point where, at least in the oil market, a lot of these buffers that initially existed, the kinds that Trump had talked about being almost out, which is why he made peaceably run back in June or attempted

to, those are also running out, which is why you're no longer seeing the kind of wide volatility in oil prices that happened before this album out by MOU was signed. With the closing of the Babylon, if that happens, I mean, there are already disruptions when the Red Sea blockade happened in 2024, even if there was that total control. Things that cause severe delays in

shipping, in Israel, I mean, in particular, it caused the complete closure of the port of Iliad, which is their main red sea. It went bankrupt. It does not operate. And it also led to delays in the ability of the IDF to ship in medical supplies in 2024. I mean, it led, directly to that. But in the IDF's operational capabilities, I mean, you're already looking at the doubling of jet fuel prices, more so than regular diesel prices or gas prices, which makes IDF's operations much more costly. And also the American military is driving up its cost of being able to do its kind of business because of these rising prices. You're looking at the disruption of around 30% of global trade, pretty much, across like all kinds of industries. Not a total stop,

because these are not places that can enforce a total naval block and they don't have that kind of technology. But you are looking like this is like all I can't, it is kind of difficult to talk about specifics because you were talking about two gigantic routes of which like every like almost everything under the sun kind of flows through and has to flow through because even if you are driving oil in particular through all these overland routes, the reason why they're loading everything on these container shits is you can't do that. this overland. You have to do all of this stuff on the sea. And when it is no longer available to you, you were looking at all of these bottlenecks. You were looking at wildly increased costs at shipping, increased inflation.

And even if they are able to, I mean, there were predictions and also calls from the IRC being like, we want oil to go up to 200. We want oil to go up to go up to 500. That's inside trading. But like, like, there is

something that I'd like to investigate more with like, how the speculative market worked were like it was able to be gained in this way for such a long time, even as supplies dwindled. But even if it doesn't go up that high, you are still looking at reduced supply and you are still looking at a much higher price of oil that has remained pretty consistently high for a very long amount of time. Even if Iran is not being currently bombed, and if Iran is going to be bombed in the future, and by that I mean outside of so many Iran, because suddenly Iran still is bombed that occasion. I cannot imagine a situation where traders are going to fall for it to the same scale. Because traders are known for fall for it.

But I think there is more of an understanding now considering how much firms are talking about how bad the situation is and how easily it can be seen that things are not as before with prices. I think that's going to be hard to justify. It's going to be bad. It's going to be bad for a lot of things. I think as well as this, in this moment of extreme sort of prehistoric, precaracy as well. I don't want to say that this is going to happen, right, because there are a number of reasons why it doesn't tend to, right? And I don't want to get too Tom Clancy about this, right? But if you're the

US in this moment, right, and you're in this position of really kind of unique vulnerability, you're looking at, you know, Russia looking at, say, Nava or the Savalchi Gap or Romania or Moldova, right? And you're looking at China, looking at Taiwan. And your kind of plan there is to hope, well, A, you know, they can't do the things that maybe they want to do. And B, to go to them and go, oh, please don't exploit this situation because we really wouldn't like it if you did. So, I mean, that remains to be seen.

It's weird that the global economy is vulnerable to a Vulcan neck bedge. Yeah. Yeah, it turns out. Well, this was the thing, right, is people in Iran knew this for a long time, right? And some of those people got killed by Donald Trump, right? as part of his like eating the chess pieces strategy. But the problem is, there is still a kind of chest gambit that is successful enough based on the sort of like nature of the board that you can still eat a bunch of pieces and still

lose. It's that like what I've noticed, and this is something I've noticed for the last, I think, three years, is that the American-Israeli Saudi empire, right? This empire, whatever it is. Yeah. Continues to run up against reality. Yes. It has reached, I think what we are seeing in.

in the Red Sea and in the Strait of Hormuz is the limits of that power. The limits of that power to compel oil to flow through the system so that they can continue to do as they will. Everybody gets a turn at this. Everyone, like Russia's had it in Ukraine, China, may yet get it in Taiwan. You know, Iran is also experiencing this kind of thing of, here are the limits of your power because we are in the finding out years. And, you know, more of the finding out, right, you have to remember.

And the reason I sort of want to bring this back to Israel as well is that the Yemeni mobilization is directly tied to Gaza that the reason that there is a war between the U.S. and Iran is the same, right? Is this once again, it's the actions of a garrison state, a rogue garrison state that are completely and unquestionably backed by its guarantor are causing both to slam repeatedly into the walls of the, limits of their power. And it is at the cost of enormous suffering, you know, around the, especially in Gaza, but all of these places that have been destabilized as well. And for the purposes of as far as I can see, nothing, because the Saudis don't want to confront the reality that as long as they're part of this like American-led empire, they will never really be able to reliably have the Red Sea Film Festival. Right? You're never going to be able to do that, that the U.S. is confront. that is, again, I don't want to be too much of a millennium challenge head, but they're not

really able to do anything with Iran, which we've been saying on this Zencaster call different versions of for many years, this exact group of people, the U.S. is going to try it with Iran. It's not going to work, and they tried it, and it's not working. And now that it hasn't worked, they don't seem to have ever thought about what to do if it doesn't work, I guess. Oh, sure, sure. I mean, like, it's ancient history now. But like, in the first days, the war against Iran, heck Seth was claiming that, you know, they control the air, they can control

the sea from the air. If it could, like, we had won. You know, Trump is saying we had won the first few minutes. Yeah, they took over testosterone from all the Iranian men and they're going to give it to the U.S. troops. Like, like the idea was that these kinds of wars, not only the idea that the Iraq war, the war in Afghanistan,

or failed wars because of nation building, but that's one discussion. but also, or that they were politically correct or some bullshit like that. But the idea that America was capable of doing all of this without landing troops anywhere was a very, like, interesting development in the sense that it really does not make a whole lot of sense.

Like, like, it is based firmly in the idea that, like, taking out bin Laden with a squadron is something that could be just, like, expanded out to an entire country, that you can affect regime change, that you can change the behavior of a country, country that you can do all this with just a wide bombing campaign Torabura style, but without actually having any of the messiness of Manning a checkpoint or doing anything like that.

This is definitely a dissolution on contact with reality for sure. And the fact that they have not been able to extract themselves in the situation, I think has been a success of the Iranist strategy, even if Iran itself is finding out more about its limitations. The fact that America has tried multiple different times to just clean their hands. It's like, yep, we're getting out of there. We're going to continue doing what we do, but this war is over. And it's like, ah, ah, you started this stuff. Like, you got to, you got to do more than that.

You've got to give us some stuff. You got to make some guarantees. And I think the one, if I can talk about it, like a major failure of the Iranians, is believing that the United States was going to, for even a minute, if they were going to follow their own concessions in these al-Ban MOU, that they were ready to accept the idea that they were going to get Iran $300 billion for reconstruction. Now they're going to sit down and play chess with us.

Yeah. Well, and this is the thing, that I think Iranian diplomats, I think their continuing failure, is their idea that Americans can be reasonable in some regard, that there is something that can convince them to be reasonable. I feel so bad for Iranian diplomats whose job appears to mostly be going and the horse moves like this. What we're getting to, I think, as well, is relying on the imperial states to change their politics, right, to change what they're doing. I think there might be some, like, there are elections coming up in both the United States and in Israel.

Gotta have high, high hopes. Quite, right? I mean, I think the Israeli election is, which we can talk about first, yeah, diarrhea forever versus bloody diarrhea forever. And it's a coalition, so you get both. Yeah, I mean, is that a good assessment of the situation, Chavez? Um, I mean, pretty much. It's a really interesting dynamic because you have, I mean, like, in every single instance.

I mean, like, you know, in the last election, Nafda Lee Bennett was supposed to be this person who was representative of the anti- and then-yahu opposition. And this is a West Bank settler who was one of the primary drivers of his early publicity far right before Ben-Givir became assented of this regard or in the spoke to which as well. But right now, I mean, it's kind of especially, I don't know what the word, heightening the contradictions, if I'm using that correctly, in that the main person in charge of being the anti-Nanyahu reasonable liberal opposition is the progenitor of the Dahlia doctrine.

You know, the reason why Gaza was fought in the way that it was is because of this ban and what he did in Southern New York in 2006. Purposefully punishing civilians for the actions of military groups, destroying neighborhoods, wholesale, driving them out, using that as explicit military policy instead of hidden military policy as it was before. Or at least that's how I shouldn't say he'd it in a way, but like a little bit more, get it, a little bit more like we're not actually saying this. And your, you're, your, Gadi Aisinkut, this person is, is right now the biggest opponent in that Yahoo. But you just go all the way down.

And even when you get to someone like Yaira Gholan, who is the leader of the Democrats, this is supposed to be the person who is representative of the liberal opposition. And this is somebody who, there was a controversy, you know, maybe a month or so ago, maybe a couple months ago, where another person has already said that Judea and Samaria, the, the, the, the, the, a settler name for the West Bank was a right-wing term. And he disagreed. He got really bad. Cool. And then, but of course, like the left wing opposition, what we would like recognize as left-week opposition really doesn't exist. There are examples of that like with Hadash, with Mackey, you know, Arab parties, but they, those are either being targeted by the government, by the electoral commission to disqualify the candidates or they're so marginal that they are functionally not existent. I mean, like, like an open out and about anti-

line as like Ofer Kasif is not only has he been, I think, barred from running him. He's been impeached. He's, you know, very, very marginal in terms of how, of how this goes. You were really dealing with a situation in which there are just no good options. Everybody is kind of competing with one another to be more racist than the other, but like more efficiently and with less government waste. God, I can't believe that they've become England. I got to say, things, things are looking bad over there. Like, more so than usual. I know that's the whole gimmick of this podcast, but like I was seeing the stuff about them ending their

labor ending their power sharing agreements with the Green Party over the Zionism vote. And it's like, you're shooting yourself with a dick over this? Like, to go to bat for what, like fucking Eisencoat? That's who you're, that's who this is for? Again, it's like that scene in casino, Johnny M, you fucking went to back for Johnny M, whack this prig.

Put him out of misery. You, I had to pop your eye out. for this? It's like, no, it doesn't make any sense. It's purposefully, a self-flagellating, I don't even know what. Yeah, I mean, it's engaging with a version of the country that exists only in the heads of people here, right? You have to imagine that it is something else. And again, this is what I make, again and again, and again, the story is of very confident managers slamming into contact with reality. Yeah. You have to deal with Israel as this exists now, right? And maybe always has and was always going to rather than the kind of mythical sort of, you know, liberal

version of it. Yeah, the Tel Aviv Pride Parade or the Deloitte Pride Parade, both just are different things in people's imagination. Sure, sure. You know, but like these other thing is, right, it seems as though, and the reason I want to talk about like these ratcheting up effects in the global economy of like the double pressure point on either side of the Arabian Peninsula possibly being hit by this conflict is that Israel started. the cycle that it can't stop on its own, doesn't want to, I think. Iran spent the last three years learning it can demand concessions and essentially exert, it has a huge force multiplier that no one knows how to deal with. And I suspect, because Israel can't stop what it's doing and no one's

going to stop them, then the conflict on both sides of the Arabian Peninsula is going to bringing it back to Russia. It's going to become like the Donbass. I think it will become a frozen conflict if it's not one already. Real quick, Riley, what happened after that in Ukraine? Unfroes. Yeah, yeah, it did do that, didn't it? But it unfroes and then just... And then the sort of meat grinder.

Yeah, the meat grinder. Yeah, okay, sure. Right. It's like meal prep. Yeah, right. It's meat future. Yeah, perfect. And we're the meat.

And the other thing on the economy point, right, with the Seamus is pointing out like all of these price rises that would be basically inevitable should the Baboamanda be closed and that are coming just more slowly, should the Strait of Hormuz remain closed, is that the greatest global transformation in global North politics happened in the 1970s

because of OPEC raising oil prices as a result of the six-day war. That was the thing that raised energy prices which caused government debt suddenly to be cut to spike, which then caused neoliberalism. That was the set of conditions for which the neoliberal turn was the answer. I wonder what this is going to cause,

aside from us taking up smoking. Anyway, answers on a postcard But it does see history Mayn't repeat itself But it certainly does rhyme Write your answer on a postcard Place that postcard into a Tesla rocket And have it sort of delivered to us at bone smashing velocity

Perfect Shamus any final insights before we call it a night I think the situation is really bad I just want to emphasize that I think it's going to be It's going to get bad I think after both the Israeli election and the midterms in the United States, I think that is going to be whoever wins in Israel, I think it's immaterial to this. Because in some other way, the situation will worsen, even if it is not personally from Netanyako.

I think everybody is kind of waiting for like the moment where they don't have to hedge as much. And this is what hedging looks like. Like, think about what happens when they think that they don't have to hedge anymore, even if it's going to work out very badly for them. We're about to invent finding out too. Yes. Yeah. Sorry to be a doubter, but that is kind of why I come on, I think.

All the sort of like British and American commentators are saying that once Netanyahu's out, if he's out, because actually it's a good chance he won't be. But if he's out, everything's going to be fine. So, you know, I'm choosing to be optimistic. And I think there's actually going to be a free state solution. Bad czar, bad boyars. I'm saying this. Just swap them around.

However, the system of that they are governing, perfectly fine system. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Shamis, if you ever want to have a more fun conversation with at least two of the three of us, come on. No cuts, no mayor. I've been saying, no gas, no mayor.

I would love to come on. I would love to discuss Mr. Zach any. I would love to discuss any mayor in the Middle East. Absolutely. Please, please do. All right. We'll set that up. Anyway, anyway, Chavis, thank you so much for once again making your, I don't know,

50th appearance. on the show. If the people want more Seamus, where can they find more Seamus? They can go to shamis-hifemate malikafsili.com. There will be an article up this week about Itamar Ben-Givir that I think people will... Oh, that's scammer.

Not enjoy, but I think maybe they'll get something out of. And if they want to follow Man Trude, they can go to Shamus underscore Malik. Amazing. Perfect. Well, thank you everybody for listening. There is also a Patreon. It's five bucks a month for a second episode of this every week. So we will

see you there. Bye, everybody. Bye.