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President Trump is very soon going to be, if he's not already leaving China and heading back to the United States where front and center, everybody's going to be focused on what comes next in the Iran America war. Will he go back to active bombing? Will he walk away? Will he have some kind of negotiated deal? Everybody's waiting to find out. Since now then that's off the table. The focus is on that. And of course, as you know, everything on this channel is always focused on what what is really happening on the ground, what is the reality. We put what different people say on all sides of this to see what's what they're saying. Then we see what's happening on the ground. Well, we're going to look at a different aspect of this today, something we have talked about on the margins, but we have an expert with us today that we've never had on the show. And I'm very grateful to have Simon Dixon, who is from Bitcoin, OG an investor, geopolitical and financial analyst and was actually recommended for our show by one of our viewers. So after watching some of your shows and some of the information you put out, I've been very fascinated and eager to have you on. Simon, welcome to the Daniel Davis deep dive.
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I'm really happy to be here, Daniel Davis, because I've been looking, I watched some of your content throughout the Russia episode and obviously the more recent stuff. So it's a real pleasure to see if I can bring some new angles to look at in our analysis.
A
Well, I'm really excited because you're going to bring a viewpoint that my expertise, frankly, doesn't permit. So I can only look at, you know, from a distance, especially on the issue of finances, what is really going on behind the scenes, because I think more often than even I would be aware of or comfortable with, I think that there are additional forces beyond the headlines and even behind the scenes, extra national in some ways, beyond the nationalities, supernational if you, if you will. And, and I think that's some of the of your expertise. So we're looking forward. One thing I want to start off right at the top. You, you have said recently that a lot of what we see and leaving a lot of what we talk about here is, is more theater than it is actual, has something to do with the war here. And just to kind of set the stage, I have this which I think is more thespian than than it is senatorial from Senator Kennedy. The fact of the matter is that if you think the theocracy
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run by
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the government of Iran, the Charlie Mansons, was dangerous to the world, and I do then the world is a much safer place today. And that's just a fact. Well, that's just a fact says Senator Kennedy. But that sounds, that sounds more like, it looks more like a cut from a movie than it does from, from reality. But he's basically, and this is part of a long speech that he gave where he's laying out that, listen, this is all about. These guys are bad actors, man. They're bad hombres. We got to get them off the stage because they would get a nuclear weapon, they would use it. They're religious Nazis. That's what this is all about. What do you say?
B
Well, every war needs a good narrative and a good story. And what we're normally dealing with in war is a well defined business model. And I've studied the business behind war. And what it tends to be is in the name of empire. You have the process of financing a war which is often paid by the taxpayer and paid for by inflation, but the yield is always received by what I call the financial industrial complex, which is a complex of financial institutions, much like the military industrial complex is a complex of military institutions. You have a financial industrial complex, and there is a business model which is profit from financing war that leads to increased budget to military companies. The financiers are also the shareholders in all of those military companies. It leads to the issuance of more bonds, which is when you get an increased Pentagon budget, which leads to the purchase of more bonds. And then the war is used for resource extraction as well as resetting prices. And with all of those prices, there's the opportunity to trade both sides of the outcome of the war, whether it's to the upside or the downside, whether it's to the failure or the success. And so quite often when we say somebody lost a war, there is the financiers that benefited from both outcomes and were hedged. And so in order, once you have a war, you either have the business model of the forever war, which is where you get lots of contracts that can carry on for an awful long time. In the case of Afghanistan, you had 20 years and a couple of trillion dollars, or you lead to a new order within that country where you normally have a regime change and you install a dictator that's going to give the new rebuild contracts to the empire that started the war. And in order to make that acceptable, and often you test new technologies that act as a brochure for many of the military contractors and you get to in the rebuild phase, there is the profit from all of the new contracts, the new leadership, and now more recently the installation of police and surveillance state through technocracies. So if you look at the Board of Peace, it's simply a pay to play system to get a foothold in some of the rebuild contracts and data centers and technology that they would like to install in Gaza. And so when you come at it from the perspective of understanding a well defined model and in other cases like Venezuela, it leads to the oil refining contracts and of course the vast resources that are needed as components for much of this technology. When you look at it like that, you understand that you always need a boogie monster. And I think a book that explains this business model very well from somebody that actually was an economic hitman was a guy called John Perkins who wrote a book, Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Another book which I like is Operation Gladio by Paul Williams. And what Operation Gladio talks about is how you use the media and you use the intelligence apparatus to fund what looks like extremist groups but are actually for rent militias. And then you have a boogeyman story, whether it's the communists or whether it's the terrorists. You have these loaded terms and you can do false flag operations in order to make people think something else is happening. One of the classic examples of this is a long term multi decade strategy to destabilize the Middle East. Now one such model is having what Operation Gladio would call strategic tension. And so on the one side you have significant funding going over to Israel that is then used to repurchase weapons and destabilize the region. And on the other side you have, you know, the death to America, death to Israel. We're two weeks away from a nuke and they're funding terrorists that are surrounding, you know, and want to kill all the Jews. And you, you create stories. And what tends to happen when you have strategic tension is that on both sides the countries adjust to this reality. The empire is making trillions of dollars at the expense of the American or British people. But the strategic tension then leads through things like sanctions, a shadow black market. And that shadow black market in countries then benefits from the status quo. And so once you have something like sanctions, you have all the oil trafficking routes, you have the weapon trafficking routes, you have the new currency pairs with gold and other sanctioned countries and you create almost like a shadow war economy sanction system that when you actually want to change something, there is vested interest within that country that protects the status quo. And then you end up with false flag operations and all sorts of stuff. So when, when I, when I look at war and when I see a boogie monster being created, I just see narrative. And then I follow the money and I try and think, well, is this real? If, and by real, people get very, very upset. And I can understand why when I say theatrics, I don't mean that it's like fake deaths. The deaths are real, the bombing and the destruction is real. But it's also profitable for somebody.
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So, so let me ask, I'm going to ask you to, to give us a couple of examples or I'm going to give you a couple of real world examples and ask you to explain how things are working beyond what we see. But, but let me ask, what is the, the nexus between the political leaders who have to initiate these things and whatever the, the, the, the narrative, the, the theater, as you call it, to what extent does one or the other either precipitate the other or hide behind the other? Because, for example, you know, a lot of this stuff, like with Netanyahu, he's been saying since 1986, at least as far back as I can find in a public sphere that, oh, Iran is heading for a nuclear weapon. And then all the times at the UN So he, you know, is talking about this, and he seems to just have this, this lust for, you know, to taking down Iran. But how much of that is actually his messianic, if that's probably a perversion of the word here, but this obsession with Iran and how much of it is, is, you know, the follow the money thing underneath it in which predominates.
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Yeah, absolutely. So if you look at Israel after the 67 war, you know, we had the 1973 Jungkapo war, and that was as a result of America having to default on its gold standard in 1971. And you know, so you had JFK, you had 70, 71. And it was no longer allowed for people to convert their dollars into Gold after 71. So we set up a new monetary system. Now Israel, you know, we had the aggression that led to the Yukapur War, that had a reaction, and that led to an oil embargo by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, aligning with other forces around the region. King Faisal was assassinated. And after his assassination, we ended up with the petrodollar. And once we had the petrodollar negotiated after a regime change, there was funding set up that always goes back to lending those dollars back to the US Government, purchasing them on Defense contracts and that money recycling back into the US stock market. That was really the petrodollar model. And then you have the covert operations. And I'll put this together to answer the question. You had a covert operation set up by George Bush called Safari Club that was a network of intelligence agencies, including Saudi intelligence, including Israel, including CIA, MI6, French intelligence, and those were the training camps that led to the creation of Osama bin Laden via weaponizing extremist Wahhabi ideologies in Saudi Arabia.
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Then what year was that, that process? That roughly.
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So the Safari Club was right after the creation of the petro dollar, the assassination of King Faisal. So around about 73, 74, 75.
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So that was when George Bush was CIA director, I guess.
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Correct? Absolutely, yes. And George Bush. And remember, George Bush comes from oil family, right? So his wealth is in oil. And so you have these different operations. But Netanyahu, effectively, most people think of him working for Israel. Just like in America, you have the Israeli lobby, you have the military lobby, you have the financial lobby, and you can buy politicians. You set them tasks, you tell them, I'll fund you 10 grand, I'll fund you 20 grand, but here's the policy I want to happen. And then you spread that network around Congress and Senate, and then politicians prove themselves, and as they become more useful at fulfilling your lobby agenda, they climb the ranks until eventually they could be president, when you've given full utility to the lobby networks. And so that's kind of how the same happens in Israel. So most people think of Netanyahu ruling, well, there is an. There is an Israeli lobby within Israel, and that lobby is the private financial interest. So if you look at the Israeli stock market, they've been privatizing all the resources from state assets to private assets. And 40% of it is banks. The rest is military technology. And then you've got cybersecurity, artificial intelligence and technology. Then you've got some resources underneath it. Now, those lobbies also control Israel. And so Netanyahu works for them. And Israel is mostly aligned with the faction of power within America, which I would call the military industrial complex is the neo cons within America is the evangelical Christians that push or have been pushed into a narrative and is the ultra Zionist within Israel. Their job is to create a narrative, the Greater Israel Project. And as they acquire more land, they negotiate more resources for financial power, military power and technical power. But you have a convenient, plausible deniability story because the American corporate and military interest, they get to go to a jurisdiction, use Jurisdictional arbitrage. Get Israel as a Palestinian laboratory, commit crimes against humanity, genocide, whatever, but always say it was them, it wasn't us. And you keep that relationship going for as long as you can, but eventually it becomes, you know, competing forces or monetary forces kick in. And what's kicking in right now is the rise of China. Not to go too far. And so what you have is Netanyahu writing, you know, everyone seeing, well, all the wars, they came from Israel, they were for Israel. And the average American says that cost us trillions. We failed. We spent $2 trillion to replace the Taliban with the Taliban. And then you have clean break memo. You know, you have all of this plausible deniability. It's all done through corporate shells. But the end result is it's not popular to say, by the way, our companies and our stock market is a function of crimes against humanity. So you have a plausible deniability and you use proxies. And Israel is one of those proxies.
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So let's look at that. You brought up the Afghanistan war. One would imagine that, that I, I don't know if cartel is the right word, but just this organization, which is filthy in my view, it seems like it was benefiting for 20 years. There seems like it would have been happy for it to go another 20 years. And there was definitely those in the US that wanted it to continue on. And yet public opinion rose up and, and Biden ended up taking it down. So that would seem to have gone against that cartel. Does that imply either that the, this, these organizations to follow the money people lost that battle, or was that actually, did they want to just close that off and move on to another business?
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Yes, where you have to go a slightly layer up above the national interest. So most people think of countries as countries. Most countries are captured by corporate, particularly in the West. So Israel is America is, UK is, Europe is, Australia is Canada is. And then you have a puppet politician and that politician has to fulfill four lobby. Now, what is that lobby? That lobby, the most powerful lobby, is the one that controls all the stocks. So you could simplify it down to. And it's a lot more complicated, but you could simplify it down to BlackRock, State street and Vanguard that managed $30 trillion of stocks. And in those stocks, they have 20,000 board seats across every company you can imagine. And they own the largest shareholding in all of those companies, including all the military companies, all the technical companies, all the energy companies, all the resource companies. And they manage a portfolio, as it were. And so they could for example, engineer long term strategies. But are they America first? The answer is no, because every deal they do is in partnership with transnational capital. So then you look at who are transnational capital? Well, you got the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, you've got the Gulf sovereign world funds, many of them there, you've got the Singapore sovereign wealth fund and you've got China and the largest sovereign world fund, which is China. So here you have a layer called transnational capital and they utilize their control over governments in order to manage their portfolios. And so if you want to for example, have the pushing of investment in renewable energies in Europe, which requires manufacturing from China, while simultaneously manufacturing and energy crisis through the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, for example, then you can take your oil prices up to the peak and you can sell them across America, across opec and you can benefit from getting the right amount of time where you don't let oil prices go crazy, where it creates a depression and demand destruction. But you keep it round about a cap of $120 and that's the peak that happened throughout this closure of the straight of Hamus. And what you'll notice throughout this is whenever it hit $120 and some things in the bond market, you got a taco or a capitulation to get the price back down, you got some insider trading and then you got a narrative that would get it back up again. And so they're optimizing these oil prices and people are saying like oh, America benefits. No, America doesn't benefit because America doesn't have a sovereign wealth fund. Four companies in America benefit, Chevron, Exxon Cheniere Energy and the Golden Pass. The Golden Pass is 70 owned by Qatar Energy and 30 owned by Exxon Cheniere Energy. If you look at the largest shareholders, BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard, and then what are they doing? They're selling record liquefied natural gas at the same time as manufacturing a narrative that China is about to take over the world if we don't win the AI race. It just so happens that all the components that we need, all the energy that we need is maximizing revenue. So if you look at blackrock, during this war, you had the stock market going to new all time highs, you had the bond market showing stress which is just dumping debt on the American people. Record high debt. You had energy prices that are pricing people out which creates bankruptcies where the investment banks then come in, merger and acquire all the companies upwards to the large companies and you got to sell as much of your Oil at these peak prices for as long as you can. And you renegotiated all your LNG contracts with Europe. So now you get a trade deal that's announced where Europe has to acquire $750 billion of energy from the very same companies that are a part of the portfolio that also have military companies. And under the military companies you have the deep state MI6, CIA, Mossad. And they have the ability to create the war in the first place so you could tie that together. So the reason I went through this long circle is because it's got nothing to do with the politician that happened from Trump to Biden to Trump. You know, that was 2014, Ukraine color revolution, operations, regime changes, install puppet. Then you can look at, you know, Covid was a wealth transfer upwards to multinational, got everyone on technology. Then you look at the escalation by CIA in order to tease Russia into a war. You end up with all the resources and negotiation contracts across the Crown, the British Empire, the American private corporate interest. They get all their rare earth minerals, they get these oil prices, they get a financial stress in the banking market. And what happens when you get financial stress? You get a bailout. And so you've got a bailout from the inflation. All that is happening is every single crisis is concentrating wealth up and taking out all of the small businesses, taking out the small man that can't afford in the cost of living crisis and concentrating wealth up to the wealthy and a few companies until eventually
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correct. If I'm wrong here, and there's like a thousand questions I have from just so far, but let's just look at this one right here because I think it's real central. You can only concentrate wealth upwards so long before it causes a foundational crack. And even if you have a lot of money up here, but the foundation below it cracks, you're going to be in a world of hurt. How do they navigate that?
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Well, every business that goes bankrupt they get to acquire. So if you look at tariffs, for example, tariffs led to small businesses in America having to pay an import tax because America is has a net trade deficit. It also led to a bunch of export dependent countries being acquired up to a fewer and fewer companies. The crisis right now is the farmers are going bankrupt, right? But there's four companies that are buying all of that that are all floated on the stock market with Blackrock as the primary shareholder. So what you're doing is you're concentrating up and for the everyone else, you give them debt, you give them credit cards, you give them mortgage it you give them a 30 year mortgage and a 50 year mortgage, you get them to defer and you allow them to have enough debt, enough jobs, not entrepreneurship jobs, until eventually you can afford to pay your subscription service. So what they're doing is they're turning people into debt slaves and subscription services. And that's going all the way up to smaller and smaller concentrated wealth. Now eventually that country can no longer be extracted. It starts to hit the end of a debt cycle. You've maximized the government debt, you've, you've bankrupted as many of the small business and the people, they're all maxed out on their credit card. And so at that stage you start resetting the chessboard in order to invest in a new market. And so we know that there's only a couple of three, three regions in the world that have got birth rates that are able to grow and then you can sell them new products and consume. That's Africa, that's Southeast Asia, and that's the Middle East. And so transnational capital can then say, all right, let's end the forever war in the Middle east and let's move to regional stability. What does that require? We've got to stamp out and regime change radical Zionism in Israel so that it's no longer at all for the military industrial complex. It has to be dumped. So let's slowly create a narrative to expose Israel for what it is. And so you push out the media, you work away for a few years, you create an operation like October 7th, you document everything, you basically turn it into a toxic asset for distressed acquisition. Then at the same time, you need to tease out the factions of the IRGC in Iran that benefit from the strategic tension and change them to a version of the government that's kind of normalized with China because China normalized between Iran and Saudi Arabia. And you need to create massive change within America. You need to destabilize America a lot. Release the Epstein files, show the system for what it is, pretend you're taking down the deep state. And so you install someone like Trump who has the perfect narrative for that. And then what you do, you also have things like, you know, let's close the borders, which creates the technology that's needed to beta test on the people and the legislative changes that is needed in order to have a more surveillance police programmable state. All this to say is that there were transnational capital is working over 100 cycles and they subordinate countries and then utilize them as just assets on their balance sheet. Okay, and then they lobby to install the politicians to deliver what they need.
A
I see. All right, more on that part in just a second. But let's, let's, let's keep with the. This crisis, this manufactured crisis in the Middle east as you describe it, that would imply that this transnational financial power is able to induce the gcc, Israel and even Iran. Like almost somehow they're all three working. At least somebody is moving these pieces as they see fit towards some outcome. So first of all, how would Iran and Israel work together in this? In such a ways that their people are, and some of their buildings and people are getting killed in both countries. And now then there's all kinds of economic deprivation within Iran because of our blockade, among other things. So how does that, how does that work out together? And then the most important question is, according to this theory, where do you think then that it would go? What does that tell you?
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Yeah, so again, people look for a simplistic narrative. It's not quite as simple as I'm explaining because you can never think of Iran as a country or Israel as a country or America as a country. You have to think of it as factions of power and they're competing within a power struggle. So they're not like one unified monolith. They're a vested interest. And when you follow the money, you can see that there are factions of power within the IRGC that are aligned with a vision that China has. And China doesn't want a Middle East. I mean, they want Middle east to be West Asia and they want regional stability because they're purchasing Iran's energy, Gulf countries energy, and everybody's energy, Russia's energy, and they've got a manufacturing base and they've created this network of alternative payment rails. And just to give you a side note, it's vital for Iran and UAE to plug together in those alternative payment rails. They have a very strong relationship in circumventing sanctions and de dollarization. And so when you understand that, that UAE and Iran are actually China's their number one trading partner and UAE is Iran's number two trading partner today. And in order to get these gold to oil trades and alternative payment rails connected to the Chinese banking system, Iran and UAE have to work together. Now, does that mean that they're friends and everything's fake? No, it means that they're willing to engage in bounded escalation. Bounded escalation means that there are vested interests, but they have to work together. And so we're never in the narrative of I'm going to Destroy everything. And so what ends up happening, you end up with Iran taking out strategic targets connected to the Western empire and America within uae and that needs to be rebuilt as will Iran. And so Israel and America are taking out strategic targets within Iran. And then there are resistance groups against that that will say hold on, I'm going to fight against that. But there are other factions of power that are trying to move towards a regional stability model and manage a transition here. And, and, and that's when it, it becomes a, a bit more funky. But if you want an example of this, look up the CIA disclosed documents on Iran Contra affair and you will see that there is intelligence sharing between Iran and Israel. And I'm not saying they're traitorous. It's pragmatism based upon the reality of geopolitics and how things actually work. Sometimes you have very misaligned interests, other times you have aligned interest and you have to work together covertly. And so if you look at Iran Contra affair, it was after the 79 Iranian Revolution and then almost immediately they were working with America on these weapons trafficking as a result of the hostage for weapons trade that happened in the settlement, those weapons came from Israel and the money had to go through the UAE banking system in order to get to the drug trafficking routes in Nicaragua in order to. Nodes in that network require Lebanon as a port and a route as well as UAE as well as the connection via Hong Kong into the gold market and gold trades there. And so when you look at this, you can see there is a shadow network that is transnational and you can look back in history and kind of say, is that possible? Well, how was Israel created in the first place? Well, it was created by the British Empire through the Rothschild networks and that led to legacy banking infrastructure. Then you had all The Iranian history, CIA, MI6 overthrow British Petroleum. Then you had the overthrow of the Mossadegh and the democracy. Then you had the installation of the Shah that moved away from British interest to American interest. Then those American interests were disrupted with the Iranian revolution. Now is it possible that part of that revolution was funded by British interests And was there partnerships there? Well, he came from France, you know, and so then there was Iran Contra affair and then America funded Saddam Hussein and then you end up with the Iran Iraq War. So could these be European and American covert wars? Well, it certainly was the case for factions of power. And there is evidence that all of the Iran Contra affair happened via Switzerland, via Credit Suisse. And so you've got Western banking interests or European banking interests. British interests as well as the different things that were set up over time. And so there is evidence through Iran Contra affair that, that actually you could be at some level of war and some level of cooperation through pragmatism across the board.
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So what does that tell you about where the Iran war is headed now? Because we're at a crucial junction. Either President Trump is going to listen to at least a lot of the public, a lot of the theater anyway. One group is saying definitely go in and restart the war here. But that would almost certainly result in the destruction of, of a lot of the ability to produce weapons in the gc, I'm sorry, oil in the GCC countries as well as Iran. And then the other group is saying, you know what, just do the walk away theory, just walk away from this. You can declare victory, whatever you want to do, and then leave and everything starts to get rebuilt. What does this theory tell you about where that's heading?
B
Yeah, so that, that's if we're looking at the follow the money theory in the back end you will see that China normalized between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Who was the normalization? Well, it was the people that were sat around the negotiation table prior to this war, which is Arachi, which is the Prime Minister. All of those people are still alive. There are other people that weren't that are not alive today that would not be on board with such a new China's vision of what they want for the Middle East. And what China wants is Israel not being used as a Western proxy to destabilize the region. They also want to recognize that the Gulf countries now compete with America. And so what did Saudi Arabia do? Well, Saudi Arabia started building refineries in Texas, the one that is going to be receiving most likely the refinement contract for the Venezuelan Oil is 100% owned by Saudi Aramco. And Saudi Aramco put 1% of its float on the stock market. And Qatar as well is got significant investments. UAE got an FX swapline and came out of OPEC that breaks the petrol, that breaks the petrodollar that was set up in 73. And so now you've got the financial layer in UAE. You've got the only country in the world that has an infrastructure that can refine, you know, that has a cost base of 2 to 10 cents on their oil, having much of the benefits from Venezuelan oil, most likely in refinement for refining in Texas. And you have the new Golden Pass routes that they were able to hedge. Now UAE and Saudi also had their alternative routes that didn't require the straight of the moose in order to pump out some oil. And so there is a, there is certainly a hit, but it's not fatal. And to say that the Gulf countries can't take this hit is not a recognition of reality. UAE has $2 trillion of assets and in fact Scott Besant said please don't sell your bonds, please don't sell your shares. You can't crash the US stock market, you can't crash the US bond market. We'll give you a line of credit which previously was reserved for just the bank of Japan, the bank of England, the Swiss Central bank, the European Central bank and the bank of Canada. Now UAE is in an elite club where they get to create dollars, have the guarantee of the Federal Reserve System while also integrating into the Chinese system while also hosting alternative payment rails. So all this to say is that I think Iran is destroying infrastructure that leads to renegotiated rebuild contracts and those rebuild contracts will be invested with transnational capital that it consists of the China Belt and Road Initiative, the Gulf sovereign wealth funds sanction relief from Iran and the financial industrial complex in the west that is transitioning away from a US dollar dominated empire to a multipolar world order and would like to have Iran, UAE and Saudi have the control of the Petro Yuan and Petrodollar. And if you look at who is who created the alternative and this is all created long term, long before the war. Where did Iran start integrating their central banking system into prior to this? Aman and they created a network of central bank digital currencies that circumvent Swift which plugs together Saudi Arabia, uae, China, Hong Kong and all the important nodes in, in the Iran and Russia circumvent sanctioned circumvention networks. So all this to say I believe there are multiple operations that are happening here. There is a acceptable way to, for Iran to transition to China's version of normalization and regional stability. There is a weakening of Israel to be acquired by Black Rock State street and vanguard the privatization and regime change and strategic weakening of Israel with the narrative that Israel rules the world and all the crimes are them. It is them. I don't want to, I don't want to alleviate them from the crimes against humanity that they're committing. But who do they work for? Go layers up, you know, and, and the money goes back to the US stock market and the Israeli stock market and then who are the shareholders? Transnational Capital. So you can see that now Transnational Capital owns $69 trillion of U.S. assets and controls the lobbies. That's not a sovereign country. That's a country where you can rent the US Military as a militia in order to go get resources and change the world order. Not for America first.
A
Still tell me if I'm understanding this correctly because it sounds like that there's this transnational money and transnational interest and that's, that's pretty clear. But it sounds like that it's a diffused system where there's also, there are also regional slash Chinese as opposed to the United States here. So there is still some clash in, in this transnational system, maybe some kind of cooperation around the edges, but still some conflict in different visions about how things need to happen. But that seems to be, and there's a lot of things we could talk about, but I'll limit it to this one for now. Narrowing down on the Iran situation because I can see, and I'm thinking out loud here, you tell me if I get this wrong, it seems like that there still could be some competition even at this transnational level between one group that wants to have this managed to come in, probably would benefit from the walk away theory. So nothing else gets destroyed now than you get to rebuilding all the things you just described. And then there could be another that says yeah but I don't want this Chinese transnational organization to succeed. So I'm okay with Iran launching into an even more destructive because then that's going to cause even more financial upset. It's going to undo these guys here. And if I'm thinking, you know, five, 10, 20 years down the road, maybe I'm willing to pay that price if I'm one of these groups here. So there still could be some debate about whether there's going to be resumption of the war or the walkway is any that close?
B
Yes. So if I look in Iran right now, I'd split it in to simplify into two factions, a faction of power within the IRGC that would prefer America not to lift the sanctions because they benefit from the entire network that relies upon sanctions to exist as a survival strategy. There's another faction that wants the sanctions opened and that's what I think China wants and that's what I think transnational capital wants. That's what I think the Gulf countries want. That's what I think the financial industrial complex want. In order to get there, you need to appease the military industrial complex. The faction of power across America, IRGC and Israel that wants the status quo. That's the ones that Believe in the Greater Israel Project. That's, that's carnage. IRGC that want sanctions because they've got the alternative rail set up and the neocons in America that are effectively funded by military companies, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamic, Raytheon and their job is to deliver the weaponization of religion and evangelical Christianity and protect Israel type of stuff. Those factions of power are being regime changed in order for this faction of power which wants regional stability. And what you have to do is you have to compensate them with other war zones. And so you need to make sure that the Ukraine, Russia war doesn't end, I'd estimate for another three years because there's another trillion dollars of profits you can compensate them with if you can get them to fight to the last Ukrainian, do all the drone warfare and carry that on for a while. And so you've got to get Putin on board with that negotiation. There is everybody that would be involved in any kind of opening up of sanctions because once you open up Iran from sanctions, you've got two to $4 million or sorry barrels of oil that enter onto the market that impacts opec. Iran's a member of opec. Is that going to be priced in the petro yuan or the petro dollar? The real people negotiating that is Xi Jinping of the ccp. And then he has his networks because Iran is economically 100% dependent on China in the current sanctioned economy. But if you're going to no longer sell that oil for discount and it's going to go at full price and 2 to 4 million barrels are going to go on the market and you price those in Chinese yuan, that resets a big chunk of the petro dollar. Petro yuan. Who's in charge of the petrodollar? Well, you've got uae, you've got Saudi, and then you've got the private interest. And who's sat in Shanghai right now? Goldman Sachs, City Group, Blackrock, Blackstone, everyone who's anybody who will be negotiating the future of the petro yuan and petro dollar in line with a global model of what does the world look like once US shrinks to a regional power. How does the military get compensated and what defense and rebuild contracts? And how do we divvy all of that up between China, Russia, the Gulf countries, Iran and transnational capital? That's what's being negotiated. I think this is the biggest change that we will ever experience of our, of our lifetime. And there is one more agenda that I think needs to be factored into the equation. There are, there are Factions of power, let's call it the World Economic Forum that are crushing it. The longer the Strait of Hormuz is closed and if Trump works for them and not the American people, then Trump doesn't care if it opens because the stock market's benefiting, new contracts are being negotiated and record profits are being distributed to private corporate interest within America. And so put all that together, you've got to get to an equilibrium which really is, let's simplify it to Larry Fink and Xi Jinping and Jamie Dimon via Trump with the IRGC which consists of the pragmatist reformed government as well as the members of IRGC minus the ones that don't want sanction relief because they benefit from the war economy and strategic tension. That's the negotiation that we're witnessing right now that can take quite some time. And in the meantime the longer it goes on for the worse the World Economic Forum agenda gets for us because we're all being priced out. The small businesses are being bankrupted, supply chains are breaking is just like Covid. The longer it goes on for, the longer the lockdown goes on for the more it concentrates wealth upwards into that that faction of power.
A
Okay, so so how does that then lead to this? Because it's still it's a profound difference of how that is calculation unfolds. If we go back to conflict or if we do the walk away, how. How do you see those forces coming to a conclusion on that question?
B
If we go back to conflict just purely on a follow the money again not factoring in all your areas of expertise which I learned from, but purely on a follow the money it will just be because there are more decapitation campaigns that need to happen. Part of this deal is that Iran stops supporting resistance because the Gulf countries don't want resistance anymore. China needs to make sure that Iran and the GCC are normalized by splitting up the petro yuan. And so does the the finance companies want as much as they can get in Syria, in Lebanon, Israel's getting them more land. Each land will get a better deal for the private banks that get more leverage in these negotiations. And so what you'll notice is if you look at the bond market, the bond market is foreign investors in this is are selling their bonds and that's why gold's gone to or went to new all time highs corrected. If we were in something that looks like World War 3, oil would be going up, gold would be going up to all new all time highs together. And the bond market would be pushing out. And what, what I mean by that is when a foreign investor sells their bonds, that crashes the price of the bond. But the inverse of a bond is the yield it pays. So it pays 5% on it. The more the price crashes, the higher the yield. We just sold, America just sold its first bond since 2007, a 30 year bond that paid above 5% interest. That's the point at which the mortgage market goes up to 7% and that means you can't refinance and the American economy can get wrecked. The only way, the only way to stop that is to regime change the Fed, which happened, and get them to buy all the bonds. And so now you need a justification for ginormous money printing. And that's where it goes into the AI track and everything that's happening in China right now. If you're creating a ginormous AI bubble, we're turning the whole world upside down. For AI and robotics, the entire world, this is all about AI, robotics, energy, rare earths, manufacturing, data centers, water, all of that. All of that needs to be negotiated in this new world order that's effectively being constructed. But all of the growth in the US stock market, 100% of it is AI and data center build out last year America would have had no growth if it wasn't for data centers. The stimulus of the trillion dollar budget, you know, operate all the different government budgets that produced all the growth and that's what's propping up the stock market now.
A
Okay, so I'm sorry, but what does that have to, how is that going to determine whether we go back to war or whether we don't?
B
You can't have it. You can't have bond yields above 5% every time they get above 5%. Trump tacos. If you can keep tacoing, then you can benefit from keeping the straight closed longer. But eventually the market will stop believing the taco. And when this, when, when Trump can, can have oil prices at 110, 30 year builds below 30 year yields below 5%, those are the parameters at which you have to stop the war. If you can create a narrative that pushes them back down again, or you can get the Fed to buy them, then you can continue the war and you can continue with the operation to reprice and manufacture a crisis. And that's what you'll see if you follow those. Every time Trump says we're doing peace is when it hits that 5% mark. And the one year future oil futures goes to about 120.
A
So. But if the war starts you have the physical destruction of the infrastructure and now the oil is going to have to go up whether anybody wants it to or not because there won't be enough of it to go around. But by a physical constraint how is that working out?
B
Well you have demand destruction. The best solution for high oil prices is make it where no one can. No one wants to buy oil. And so I'm sorry we're running really
A
low on time here. Actually I'm completely out of time here. We're going to have to have you back here. I'm so sorry that we ran out of time. I've got a million questions. I definitely want to have you back and focus on the Russia Ukraine war because I think that's a whole show by itself. But we are really grateful for you to come on and exposing some of this stuff and educating myself and our audience. Thank you so much Simon.
B
Thank you for having me.
Episode Date: May 14, 2026
Podcast Host: Simon Dixon (with Daniel Davis, guest hosting Deep Dive)
In this incisive episode, Simon Dixon joins Daniel Davis for a “deep dive” into the economic machinery and geopolitical theater connected to the ongoing Iran–America war and wider Middle Eastern turmoil. Using his “follow the money” approach, Dixon peels back the curtain on the financial drivers behind conflict, exposing how transnational capital, sovereign wealth funds, and shadow banking interests shape global wars, regimes, and narratives far more than state actors or ideological rhetoric.
The discussion delivers a provocative map of how the financial-industrial complex—through war, sanctions, and manufactured crisis—systematically extracts wealth, consolidates power, and seeds new world orders, even as visible leaders and popular narratives serve as cover for these machinations. The Iran crisis is positioned as a case study in this “business model of war.”
On the business model of war:
[03:08] Simon Dixon: “In order, once you have a war, you either have the business model of the forever war… or you lead to a new order within that country where you normally have a regime change and you install a dictator that’s going to give the new rebuild contracts to the empire that started the war.”
On media narratives and ‘boogeymen’:
[06:45] Simon Dixon: “If you look at the Board of Peace, it’s simply a pay to play system to get a foothold in some of the rebuild contracts and data centers and technology that they would like to install in Gaza.”
On corporate transnationalism:
[17:04] Simon Dixon: “BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard… own the largest shareholding in all of those companies, including all the military companies, all the technical companies, all the energy companies, all the resource companies. And they manage a portfolio, as it were.”
On the upcoming reset:
[23:34] Simon Dixon: “For everyone else, you give them debt, you give them credit cards… enough jobs, not entrepreneurship jobs, until eventually you can afford to pay your subscription service. So what they're doing is they're turning people into debt slaves and subscription services.”
On Iran and Israel’s covert cooperation:
[28:14] Simon Dixon: “Sometimes you have very misaligned interests, other times you have aligned interest and you have to work together covertly… When you look at this, you can see there is a shadow network that is transnational.”
On who really benefits from “walk away” vs escalation:
[49:33] Simon Dixon: “You can’t have bond yields above 5%. Every time they get above 5%, Trump tacos. If you can keep tacoing, then you can benefit from keeping the strait closed longer… When Trump says ‘we’re doing peace’ is when it hits that 5% mark.”