Transcript
Jordan (0:00)
Second breakfast twice in a week. It's, are you guys sick of us yet? We're going to talk Iran. Trump's promise of a $500 billion late Christmas present, Raytheon getting put on blast, as well as whatever else we get into. Who wants to kick us off?
Brian (0:22)
Yeah, I think we, I think we start off, let's start off with Iran because they're in the news. The former king's son, Reza Pahlavi, over the last couple of days had a couple of tweets, One calling for a night of protest to start at a specific hour in Tehran and Isfahan and across Iran. And then we saw that happen. There were actually, they're calling it days of rage and nights of protest and fire kind of across Iran where the Internet has been cut off as of last night in the country. So like flight awareness apps are no longer working and Internet dropped to zero. But yeah, looks, looks precarious for the, for the Ayatollah and the, the Islamic supreme jurisprudence that rules Iran currently.
Eric (1:15)
They are also not responding to the, the Peacock throne that this is. The monarchists chasing events once again as exiles are known to do. What are the sources of instability that we're monitoring? You know, I am not an Iran expert, but I worked on Iran paramilitary activity professionally. So there are segments of the Iranian state and their partners and proxies that I've invested a substantial part of my life trying to understand. So that makes me, I guess, somewhat qualified, but not an expert. What are the pressures? The capital city of Tehran is witnessing a like once in a thousand year drought. So the water tables are extraordinarily low. So we got water challenges. There are currency valuation challenges that are making purchasing of basic house staples limited. There is challenge faced across Iranian society with accessing what have historically been extraordinarily subsidized fuels. There is generalized discontent with, with Iranian military performance vis a vis the United States and Israel, while Iran continues to back partners and proxies internationally, some of which, like Lebanese Hezbollah, have collapsed in on themselves. And we are still just six years removed from the, the killing of Ghassem Soleimani and the arrival of COVID 19 into Iran. So I think there is a lack of appreciation of just how badly that pandemic attacked Iranian civil society, state capacity. And there are a series of injects that are pressuring this revolutionary state that has not delivered on its promise of functioning state or revolution.
Brian (3:40)
Yeah, I think, I think that's, I think that's right. I think, I mean if you look at the government of Iran, I think last week they announced that they were going to offer $7 a month payments, what accounted to $7, US$7 a month payments to households in Iran. So they clearly see, like, the finance is like the number one thing. But there's. There's this weird. There's also a weird. It's a weird inflection point for Iran because after Khomeini, into Khomeini, there was a weird transition period where the way the constitution was written for the leadership of Iran, basically only Khomeini could have been the leader. You had to have, you know, years of jurisprudence, you had to be an ayatollah, you had to have issued the right number of fatwas, you had to be a certain level Shia cleric. And really, he described a position that only he had and only he had attained. So then when he passes away, there is no clear error. And Rafsanjani, who at the time was the president and one of the leading speakers, he's passed away in the last decade. But he comes out and he's like, on his deathbed, he told me it was gonna be this guy. And there is literally nobody now in the wings who can take over for. For Khatmani. And he's old. He's been ill for a long time. He's never been in the best of health. If you ever watch or see photos of him, one of his hands is crippled. He actually kind of keeps it hidden because it's been crippled for most of his life and there is nobody next. So his son is in charge of the besiege, which is their paramilitary police force that comes out whenever there's protests. And there's been talk that, what if he makes him the. The next ayatollah or he somehow gets named in the thing. But it's. It's a weird inflection point because he's old. There's been all these. There's been all these happenings. We've seen a reduction in power of the irgc, both internally and externally to Iran. And then you've got just the. The geopolitics around it are destabilizing. On top of all of those pressures, though, you have iron. On 5 January, Netanyahu secretly approving the publicly released authorization to potentially conduct strikes against Iran if unknown triggers are met. Which just doesn't make. I don't know. I don't understand that, because we were talking about it beforehand. But the one thing that has been shown to unify Iranians in their past is an external Attack, especially by a country they hate.