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- [00:07]
Tom Luongo
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be.
- [00:37]
Marty
Mr. Long. Oh, we meet here on yet another Friday evening. Seems to be our, our time of, time of recording, choice of recording over the years. Like I was just telling you, I need you to pull me back from the edge. I'm. I'm doom scrolling a lot this week.
- [00:51]
Tom Luongo
I watch we are. I don't know if you've ever read my Twitter feed, but it's three o' clock in the morning trying to like take people off the edge and go no, everything. It's just funny as I. It's good to see you Marty. And yes I do, I do like doing these Friday afternoon with you. It's like we had an opportunity to sit down kind of look at the week that was the last couple weeks for us, you know and it's a good time to do this and we're both tired after a long week. So it's like yeah man, like this. It's not going to be fireworks tonight. It's going to be, you know, that kind of thing and which is a good thing. I do enough of those, I do enough of the fire breathing Tom during the week. So it's funny since this thing began, I'll back up for a minute. In the lead up to it. I was looking at it going at first I'm like is he just playing the game? And then I saw the full two carrier strike groups and I thought about what he did in Venezuela and the way handle Venezuela and I'm like no, there's going to be an operation of some form or another here because Venezuela was very much targeted operation, you know, apparently just an insanely efficient operation as well. And then right after that he goes to freaking Davos and all of that and you know, the same weekend he's like what is he? He said where is he? He's at Davos. Yeah. And he's giving their speech and he's like, you know, he's taking on C.J. and J and, and M.G. and, and Jalisco and you know, taking Out El Mencho. I'm like, it's March. Who's he gonna take out next? And when you, you know, you know how I, I, I feel about this stuff, that this is all kind of part and parcel of the whole old money network, right? You have, you know, you have the middle layer of money, of basically imperial money flows or old colonial money flows. My wife just is driving up and so the dogs are going crazy. But I think that's where we are. We have to realize that that's a very important part of this conversation that we just don't talk. Most people can't, don't, can't talk about because they don't have a frame reference for it. And I do my best to try and make it understandable. Let's kind of break it down in three layers. You have the original. When he first came into power, the first thing he did was cut off all the public money. So, hey, at least the American taxpayer isn't directly funding the NGOs that are destroying the country. That's the easy part. He can just stroke the panel, all the land, get, take that done, take that down. Because he's the executive and he doesn't, you know, and he has that, that power. It's the next layer that's the hardest one for people to wrap their heads around, which is the organized crime, which is the system of money flow around the world, of being able to basically have the old colonial extraction system centered in City of London with outposts in places like Davos and Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong and Singapore and Hong Koover and all these other places. Right. That, you know, that's the illicit money, that's the money that runs around the world trafficking children, trafficking drugs, you know, running protection rackets, pulling in. Yeah. And now we get to find out, and we get highlighted for us, ensures all the global shipping around the world while the US Navy is harassed to enforce it all. And somehow someone else is getting paid for the defense work that we're doing. When we stop as Americans, just stop and take a look at and think about what that is. That shouldn't like, that should drive us all crazy. When you really stop to think about it, it's like we go out and we spend a trillion dollars a year on the military. So however much money we spend on the Navy to police the world and make sure that global shipping runs relatively smoothly, the only pirates that are really left in the world are the ones that somehow are linked to all the old colonial system through a network of banks and old relationships. That exist in Iran, Venezuela, Dubai, blah, blah, Hong Kong, Mexico City, all around the world. And you look around the world and you see the same thing everywhere, which is that that money cannot flow, as Alex Craner likes to point out, without complicity from the Canadian, uk, some American banks. It can't happen because it's too much money has to move that way. Not only are they making money off of that, they're insuring the ships that we're defending. Now let's stop for a second and think about what Lloyds of London actually is. I've talked to people about this and they're like, there are no actuaries at Lloyds of London. There are no risk assessors at Lloyds of London. There's a bunch of old. There's a bunch of guys, a bunch of limeys in there collecting writing contracts. It's right across the Thames from GCHQ, otherwise known as MI6. So MI6 goes around the world, stirs up chaos around the world, maybe with the help of the Mossad or Saudi intelligence. Elements of the CIA refuse to say rogue elements of the CIA, because the rogue elements of the CIA are the patriots, right? And creating chaos around the world, which raises the risk premium for everybody to actually do business around the world. And who's getting paid for that? So they're on both sides of the trade. They're getting paid to run drugs and harass everybody and everything else. And they're getting paid on the insurance contracts on the other side. It's all big frigging shakedown operation. And American taxpayers are getting frankly fucked. Coming, going on, the way in, on the way out, after they've left the party and after their kids are dead, Donald Trump's like, no, we're getting paid for that. So in the lead up to February 28th, or yeah, I guess it was after midnight. So March 1st, last February 28th became really obvious. If you take Trump at his word and you just read and just listen to what he said in that eight minute statement, he laid it all out pretty freaking clearly and it's very consistent with everything he's been saying for years, which is, Iran can't have a nuclear weapon because they're a bunch of crazy Persians or whatever they are. You call them Shia crazies or whatever, they're crazies of one form or another, or maybe they're just another mode of organized crime around the world. The Arabs like to talk out of both sides of their mouth because they're making money coming and going on the oil and the natural Gas. They don't really care, you know, so everybody's, like, talking on both sides of their mouth. The Israelis are, you know, are up in arms about everything, because that's who they are. And maybe they have a good right to be, maybe they don't. I don't really care. Like, I don't like Iran. I don't like the Israelis. I don't like the Saudis. I don't like the guitars. I don't like any of these people. They're all shit as far as I'm concerned. And 90% of the time, we're shit, too. But we have the opportunity because we're the ones with the big stick, that if we decide to use the big stick for our interests, whoa, we get the last three weeks. We've all been living our entire lives, especially my entire life, and I know your entire life, because you're far younger than I am, that we've been living in a world where the United States keeps doing all this shit that's not in our own best interest. We don't even know what that looks like. We don't know what it looks like when our government actually acts in a purposeful, strategic manner in the interest of the United States. And so we've been so conditioned into thinking that we can't possibly be doing that, because we never do that. We've got all this history, we've got all this DNA, we've got all this lived experience to say that they're not doing that. And then all of a sudden, we're like, we don't know what to do with it when it's actually staring us in the face. We have to distrust it. That's what's happening, Marty. It's not hard. We're literally saying, London doesn't get to pull the insurance vig. They don't get to control the pricing of oil around the world. They don't get to do this, they don't get to do that. They don't get to fund all the proxies. They don't get to play these games because London is at the center of Venezuela, Jalisco, Hong Koor, Hong Kong, Singapore, this one, all of it. And Iran and Israel. And this is the hardest part that people have to realize is that they're on both sides of the trade in a lot of these conflicts. They're fun, and they're always handing money and guns and whatnot. And again, when I say London, in some ways it's a metaphor. It's the system of the way the money Flows and who benefits from the way the money flows? That is what London represents. It all falls through City of London and its subsidiaries because of the very special rules that it has that the carve outs that it has in order to make money move that way, which it doesn't exist anywhere else on the planet, but it all happens to London that way and all the offshore banks and the Caymans and blah, blah, blah. So like, when you, when you look at it from that perspective, what Trump had to do was at some point finally call the Iranians boss and go, look, I see what you're doing. You've been told, desk, keep dust, keep negotiating with Trump. He doesn't really want to start another war. He's vain, he's stupid, he doesn't think like literally listen to, listen to the people in Europe, listen to the people in London, listen to all of them, listen to all of his critics. And they, some of them actually believe this nonsense, others don't. Others are like trying to gaslight you into believing he doesn't know what he's doing. Okay, but other people, but, but there are some that really do believe this. They really do believe that they have enough control and enough people and systems and, and, and, and institutions and bureaucrats and everything around the world that they can just bleed him out over time and then, you know, we'll get back to status quo after he's gone. And I'm sure that Iran was told like, I'm sorry, the irtc, Aragachi, all these people were all told the same damn thing, just keep bleeding him out. So bleed him out for time. No different than Zelensky. At a certain point, when you look at the, and since the war has begun, and since the war has been prosecuted the way it's been prosecuted, you'll notice that the Iranians are negotiating over a war they've lost the exact same way that Zelenskyy has been negotiating over war he's lost, same thing. Why? Because he's got somebody else in his back pocket saying, don't worry about it, we're on top of this, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this. You just keep bleeding him out. And eventually Trump was like, no, fuck you now and then, because the Israelis are really good at what they do. Now this is again, don't hate the play, I hate the game. The Israelis are good at this because they have to be. Like it or not, you don't have to like Israel to respect their ability to play the game. And because we saw. And I wouldn't have any of this in my head. I wouldn't have this perspective. I wouldn't have had this memetic collapse of the way I used to see the world if we didn't have the 12 day war last year. The 12 day war last year was the time when I had to finally go, fuck, are we really just that much better than everybody else? Is this all just been a bunch of gaslighting by a bunch of Persians and Russians and Chinese and Indians and British and everybody else? They really are just a paper tire here. And we are really that good. We didn't spend $850 billion a year on defense or whatever the hell we've been spending and get $50 billion worth of. Worth of return on investment. We have the toys, folks. We have the men. We have the material. We have the personnel. All we needed was the political will and the organizational will from the Pentagon on down. Let those guys do what they do well. And I was talking to Joaquin for years the other day, and I was shocked. The 12 day war shocked the crap out of me, right? And because my. I wanted to be conservative and I wanted to be generous to everybody I saw on the game board. I wanted to. I wanted to say the reasonable position is the US Is lying about something. The Iranians are lying a little bit, the Russians are lying a little bit. The Chinese are. Everybody's over selling what they have a little bit. And then we just. I mean, the Israelis pulled off one of the most. Most brilliant combined arms operations in military history on June 12 last year, like it or not. I mean, with human intelligence on the ground, air intelligence forces, ground forces, the war was over before it started. So we already knew that if we. That we were capable of doing it. So if Trump was going to go for the big kill shot, not on Iran, because this war is not about Iran. Iran is a network node. This is about the United States getting control over the system that it's a part of. And it has been funding to its own detriment for 80 years. That conversation, in the immortal words of Tyler Durden, is over. Right? That moment in Fight Club when Edward Norton's at the top of the stairs and Tyler Durden's at the bottom of the stairs, he's fighting with Helena Bonham Carter, he goes, this conversation is over. Done. That's it. Now everybody understand what's happening? Oh, that's what he's doing. So if you don't think that he didn't know that the Straits were going to get closer, that Iran wasn't going to do this nonsense. I don't think they expected to be those. They've already said it. I don't think we didn't expect to be this successful. And you knew they were successful because on day two, the Iranians were threatening to close the straits. They were, I'm sure they were convinced that they were going to be able to stand up for a couple of weeks, inflict a tremendous amount of political and propaganda damage on the American military, that we were going to lose planes and lose dudes that have to do, you know, have to play, you know, and have to, have to, you know, defend this right and that they were going to use that. They didn't get that opportunity. This war was over in the first 24 hours, operationally, strategically, however you want to put it. And operationally. But strategically, it was over. The Iranians were done. It was just a matter of mopping everything up afterwards. And I said as much on Twitter the next day. I'm like, this war is over. Like, if they're not firing, if they don't fire a thousand missiles tomorrow, they're gone. Oh, they're going to play possum. And eventually three weeks from now, we're going to see 3,000. Okay, fine. You keep believing. Keep believing that we've flown 15,000 sorties, we've run out of things to kill, and they're not the groundhog from Caddyshack.
- [16:55]
Marty
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- [19:01]
Tom Luongo
Sure, sure, sure.
- [19:02]
Marty
The last three weeks just observing this, I think there's three lenses through which I've been viewing this. It's like your lens because we've been having these conversations for five or six years now.
- [19:14]
Tom Luongo
Five or six years.
- [19:15]
Marty
The lens of like the mainstream, which is evangelical Christians and Zionist Jews are trying to bring about the.
- [19:24]
Tom Luongo
And the cran. The Christian Zionists and all, you know, all of them created by again, city of London.
- [19:28]
Marty
But yeah, you've got Kushner and all that. So you got like this Israeli influence over the government. And then the third lens is like, are we just witnessing like mad king, like just hubris, like personal Trump, like wants to make a mark, wants to be the one to drop the nuke. And like, like I said, it's like hard to pull back from the edge. So like, like when I saw the city of London, pulled the insurance and the government stepped up, I was like, hey, it's a point in Tom's, Tom's lens. That's a point in time lens.
- [19:58]
Tom Luongo
That's like all the, it's the only ones that matters. Because I didn't think, I'll be honest with you, I'm like. Because I said what I think I said, it was either on, it was either on Sun Saturday or Sunday. Their mouthpieces on Twitter started to give it away. There's that guy Pereira from, who's the Sri Lankan guy from. That's in Australia that all of a sudden showed up and he was like the Ian Carroll of, of, of MI6 agit prop. He showed up like, I don't know, nine months ago to like, you know, and then him and the other guy, like the other guy, Spencer Hawking, they're both City of London. In my mind. I started calling him Mr. Mouthpiece because you could read his stuff and it's all AI slot, it's all AI written slop anyway. But he, you know, you can see the first half is, he's gotcha. He's gotcha, he's gotcha. And then bodies were 90 degrees into, like, into La la land. And I'm like, okay, hold on, I need to take, I'm gonna take this apart. But if you read him carefully, he's telling you what their strategy is going to be and how they're going to do X, Y and Z. I've got all my freaking people trained to like, watch this stuff. Like, I'm, I'm sitting here monitoring my Slack server all day long, and I got half a dozen guys going, oh, did you see this? Oh, this is what they're going to do next. And this is their next. And I'm like, this is their next narrative. You're 80% right. We're going to tweak it like this, this and this. I, I, I've been, we've just been doing this like almost 247 now for three weeks. And, and it's just hilarious because you can predict what they're going to do next in real time. And so I took him apart. He, he made the, the point. He said, oh, they're going to, they're going to, they're going to close the Straits or London's, London is going to pull their insurance. They're going to close the Straits and they're going to try and draw for drive wedges between Trump and the Gulf Arab states, Omah and Bahrain, you know, the others, and then go to the UN and try and make him into the Bad guy. And then. And then close the straits. And everybody's freaking out because oil's $300 a barrel. Mike didn't mention the insurance angle on it at all. He didn't say that. I said, oh, this is what they're going. This is what he's saying they're going to do diplomatically. I know tomorrow Lloyds of London is going to pull the insurance contracts. And to the day, bingo, it happened. What I was surprised at was that Trump shows up on Taco Tuesday. And that's Taco Tuesday. Trump always chickens out on Taco Tuesday. Trump turns around and goes, I got a plan for insurance, shipping, insurance. We're going to escort the ships. We don't have a lot of. We don't have all the details yet, but we're going to do this. I was expecting like a week, maybe 10 days. Now he goes, 48 hours. Oh, my God. He's in complete control of the situation. He let. He led them into that prep knowing full. And then once you saw him do that, you're like, whoa, straits are closed. He wants the straits closed. Now. He's going to use the straits to put the fork onto the Europeans. And Putin was right there. He had Trump's back immediately because he sends Besson out there to say, well, we're going to unsanction some Russian oil that's sitting in tankers. Russia's got like 40 million barrels or 100 million barrels. He's sitting on tankers and ports and everything that's on the ocean. Right. Unsanctioned. It so can be sold anywhere, as opposed to only being sold in the shadow of the quote, unquote, shadow fleet. And then Putin comes around the next day and says, the later that day is this. And I don't think we're going to sell any of that to the Europeans. Game, set, match. Like, I'm watching this going on. This is like, are you kidding me? This is like they went into the back room. You know, the. The Nexus came. I'm like, I'm playing a game of Dune. The Nexus comes up, everybody, we have a chance to negotiate. Make me make a new alliance. I'm like, Putin, the drummer in the back room making a secret deal. Yeah, we're all right now. It's like, you get the voice and I get the. I get your power and you get his. We'll go, let's go take Cart and let's go take Siege Tab. Know, that's the way I think of this stuff. And you could see it in real time. And I was like, oh, this is hilarious. I mean, it's not. I mean, it still can go wrong. There's all these tail risks that the Israelis can go off half cocked and do something terrible and blah, blah, blah, blah. There's all sorts of little things and ways this could still go bad. And yes, Iran may not have been dead at that point. So, but you're like in the, you're in the probability field that this thing is probably 75% over. And then five or six days into it you're like, oh yeah, like, and then, and I'm just, I'm over, like this, I'm over it. Like, we're flying a 10 Warthogs doing close assault in the straits, killing fast attack boats and guys sitting in, you know, it with, you know, I don't know, the guy sitting in, in the rocks along the straits, you know, they're blowing everything up. Like flying A10s for Christ's sake. Like once you're flying A10s, like there is no air, there is no air support, there is no anti air support, you know, for the Iranians. They have no way to defend against that because the A10 is, I mean, the air force been trying to get rid of the A10 for 30 years, dumbly I might add. This is like one of the greatest airplanes ever produced. And, but they want to keep replacing it because they can't keep up with, you know, modern anti air, you know, anti air systems. Yeah, they've got a point. But if you blow all that away, then the A10s just come in and you know, secure the zone. Now you can bring troops in, you can do whatever the hell you want. You, you have operational control at that point. Because everybody who's everybody you see turns into a pink. I hate to be rude, but everybody who shows up to try and fight them is going to turn into a pink mist. Fast attack boats gone. I mean, if you unders, if you really aren't sure what an 1, a 10 Warthog can do, I invite you to just sit down and kind of look at it, okay? And I just go through a typical loadout for that particular operation, understand what that cannon on the front of that thing can do. And I want you to, I want you to explain to me how a bunch of catamarans and a bunch of, you know, how those things are going to survive long enough to do whatever they're going to do. Lay minds do this, do that. I don't know, like ram our carriers like all that old crap that we used to hear about the war games that, you know, every time, you know, Doug McGregor used to. Still does, unbelievably, still pedals this shit. So does. So did Jim Rickards back in the day. They all did. And it was all bullshit. It was all agitprop, all bullshit. Every bit of it was all nonsense. We weren't, weren't going to be allowed to do that as long as Obama was president, because Obama was always London's asset. And that's where I was, you know, and over the years, I've had to, like, I had, I've had to fine tune my, my worldview. And I used to make it more complicated than it is. It's not complicated anymore. There's London and their assets and there's everybody else, and then there's the United States who they're trying to destroy. The Russians are their own node, the Chinese are their own node, and everybody else is kind of caught in the middle trying to figure out who's going to win. And, you know, all the middle powers, the Saudis and the Indians and the Brazilians and everybody else are trying to figure out is it going to be Davos and City London that wins or is it going to be the United States that wins? And the, and the Russians and Chinese, of course, form a, a bit of a coalition together in order to antipode to stop that. That's what BRICS was about. BRICS was never about, you know, it was never a good idea. It was always a necessity. So the minute the United States pulls out of that whole arrangement, starts acting like a sovereign nation as opposed to, you know, a bunch of globalist shitbags. It's amazing. What. It's amazing how much the world changes. And that's the kind of, that's the calculus we all have to do. And it's hard, don't get me wrong. I mean, it's not easy for people to see. You have to live, eat shit and breathe this stuff like I do. Right. And you have to have a good framework to begin with as the change is happening, in order to see it in real time. I get it. I don't begrudge anybody who's confused. It's a great intelligence operations. The hallmark of a great intelligence operation is everybody's really confused. That's the definition of a good intelligence op, right? A good intelligence op is you're confused for a little while. A great one is you can bamboozle two generations of people into believing that was a good one. Yeah, Trump just blew it all up. He's like literally pulled out his big long sword that says Gordian on it, leaving knots left and right like a bucket. Like he's hacking through the forest. It's hilarious. It's like his lightsaber, you know, doesn't, it doesn't glow blue. It says Gordian on the side of it. Yeah, he's got a special, you know, Sam Jackson has purple lightsaber. You know, Trump's got neon lights on his. You know what I mean? And gold foil to go along with it.
- [29:05]
Marty
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- [31:58]
Tom Luongo
Yeah, no, I agree. You're. You're. You're asking the right question, which is, you know, you know, what are we going to have to deal with on the backside of this? And clearly, the Iranians went off and blew up a bunch of that, you know, in. In fury. But if you look at it, I would say this. That was their, quote, unquote, their Samson option, right? Which is, you know, they have this. You know, we've all been told about their great Mosaic defense and everything else. I'm going to stop for a second just to remind everybody. The Iranians had a very good strategy, but they had a very good strategy for the wrong war. If we had decided to fight the neocons war on their terms, the way we would have fought every other war that they were trying to sucker us into, we would be in trouble today. A lot of trouble. You know why? All the things that people said, 92 million people. It's a place the size the Texas. You know, Texas, Oklahoma. It's a huge country, right? Mountainous, horrible terrain to fight through. Yada, yada, yada. It would be like invading the United States. The United States system, arable, terrible landscape to. To invade one because it's huge. And two, there are mountain ranges and there's this and there's that and there's all this crap, right? And, you know, that's why it took us 200 years to, you know, get from one end of the continent to the other. Right? I mean, it wasn't an easy right. And we have then. And then there's, and then there's guys like me, like, you know what I mean? Like, yeah, you're, you're going to be marching troops into, you know, to Tennessee or Florida, wherever I happen to be at the time. Like, yeah, okay, that's good. Like the average dude and the average dude in places that I live, you know, has, has three truck guns because the first two might jam. You know, what else are you going to do with things? And they're, and by the way, they're all, and they're all barreled in the same caliber too. So they have one ammunition and a whole bunch of, you know, you know, I. But that war that they prepped for their Mosaic defense, we've heard all this stuff about was a good strategy. It just happened to be. Didn't. We didn't meet for. We didn't meet them on ground that they prepared. So like it or not, Trump's not an idiot. He's got good people around him. And they decided to fight the war differently. And they had the Israelis in their back pocket with all their human intelligence and all of their on, on the ground intelligence and everything else. And like it or not, the two of them are those two forces. When they're acting, you know, you know, in a mission critical or, you know, goal oriented behavior, it's kind of disturbing. So now let's talk about your original question, which is about collateral. Collateral damage. So I think what we've seen, and I may get corrected by some of my military friends about this, but I think what we've seen is when you knocked out their command and control, when they don't have, when they're not getting orders, when it's just a bunch of guys basically on shortwave talking amongst themselves. And I'm not saying this is the case on day two or day three, but now clearly they were given instructions, if you don't get these orders by this time after this, do this. And they did that. And, and then you send Aragachi out there to try and, you know, do whatever he's going to do in terms of, you know, work the diplomatic channels and everything else. And I just find it that's what they've done. And I'm, you know, I don't begrudge them trying to fight the wars that they have on. They're now trying to fight the war they have versus the war they prepared for the best way they know how. And I would expect them to fight hard and I would expect them to get some hits in and to get some licks in. And did. And did they? Yes, you know it. And let's put it this way in that respect. And again, I'm not here to talk about morals here, folks. Okay. I mean, we'll do that in a minute. I'll give you my opinion on why we were justified to do this in a minute. But just purely strategically and whatnot with dispassionately do you have to put it on the board that they're going to get these hits in? They're going to have these effects. There may be some downstream effects from that. Meaning you hit hella deep hard. You may or may not have gotten Netanyahu much. Sad. Very cry on my part. I hate, hate BB but. And that may send the Israelis to do something in response that creates another aftershock. That's that Richter scale terms is one or two points higher than it should have been. Right? Because then they fight amongst themselves and the Iranians fight. That's where we are. And so we've had some oil infrastructure and oil and gas infrastructure hit. I'm sure Trump's not shedding a tear over it because if the Qataris can't export lng, that just means that we're going to export more of it. And Donald Trump's very transactional and frankly amoral framework, that's good for America. We get paid for that shit. They owe us that money anyway, these fucking people. That's. I'm sure that's what he's thinking in the White House. And I'm also thinking, I'm also sure he's thinking simultaneously, just surrender and let's get this over and done with and let's get you back to acting and let's get the civilian. In the perfect world. What Trump wanted was a perfect cast decapitation strike, right? Get the Iranians to realize they're beaten and then the civilian government that still exists goes, yep, okay, we're done. And we're getting rid of these guys, which is, it's not realistic, obviously. And then Trump's like, cool, we're in control of the oil flow coming out of the straits and we're going to make sure that your oil makes it to market and you're Going to get paid for it. And then it becomes Venezuela 2.0. Because what he did in Venezuela was pretty obvious. Take those in. Exfiltrates Maduro for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to get Maduro's friggin evidence about the 2020 election. And you know, all the, and all that stuff and all the ledger books of what they've been, of what money and stuff has flowed through Venezuela all these years. Maduro I never looked at as an actor that had any agency. He was a captured pawn sitting on the throne that we're all supposed to hate. And meanwhile he's got his praetorian, as Ian Burlingame likes to put it, his Praetorian guards around him, keeping him in check and keeping him there. Trump comes in, exfiltrates him and the wife, secures his family, slaughters all the Praetorian guards. They're in and out in four hours or six hours or whatever the hell it is. And then let's make a deal with the existing government that's there. Let's take that boot off of their neck and then allow the Venezuelan people to come up out from underneath that and we begin the process, the slow process of allowing them, of helping them come out of this terrible position. It's kind of the same thing he's doing with Cuba. Those negotiations are going on and it's kind of the message. It's not the kind of the message. It's exactly the same message he sent to Mexico and the cartels. Oh, by the way, you're next. And he keeps trying to tell more Carney. Oh, by the way, I can see you up in Canada and you're too fucking stupid to see what's to see what's coming for whatever reason or just arrogant or whatever.
- [39:46]
Marty
And again, I see Alberta, sir, I see Alberta.
- [39:50]
Tom Luongo
I see so many things in my future, but I don't know, let's not even go there. And, but Iran was also one of these network nodes that needed to be dealt with. And Iran would be the biggest problem, which would require the biggest operation right over the most important physical choke point on the planet. Left Panama Canal mostly taken care of. English Channel, not really important anymore. Straits of Malacca, it's important, but we're the ones patrolling it. So we're not going to stop the ships from flowing because under Trump, we don't care that the Chinese get oil through the Straits of Malacca. When the neocons and the British were running our foreign policy, oh, the Straits of Malacca were important which is why Singapore is a thing. Singapore is only a thing because of the Straits of Malacca. And if you go back and I invite everybody to really look at a lot of the types of conflicts and low level conflicts and whatnot that have happened in places like Malaysia and Myanmar and Bangladesh and like especially Shan State in the northern part of Myanmar. And then like, and then, you know, northern Thailand and all that. If you look at all that, I used to study all this. I used to work with a guy, you know, when I first started doing this, I was transitioning into doing it professionally. Before I went to work for Newsmax, I was working with a guy over in Vietnam. So I learned all about this stuff. I was there 2011-2010-2011-2012, 2013, watching the Chinese try to figure out a way to get out up from beyond the straits by building up a port in Myanmar so that they didn't have to be bottled up by the straits and they were bringing in, they had a big oil and gas pipeline that they brought in from Myanmar to Kunming, the industrial city in the south, just north of Thailand, right? Go through all that stuff. And every time you saw them try, you saw the Chinese trying to break around the bottleneck at the Straits of Malacca, all of a sudden there was sectarian violence between Muslims and someone else or whatever in Myanmar or this place or that place. I could literally p it to like individual places because you can just see it happen over and over and over again. I'm like, oh, that's so obvious. That's kind of what began to, you know, train me in how to look at the world that way, right? And then you could, then you could look once you saw that and then. So there's others around the world, but these are the geographic choke points that need to go away. These are the single points of failure that can be spun up at a moment's notice to, in order to create a, an outsized response that has that then blackmails the world, say no, you have to allow us. And then the Iranians come around and go, you have to allow us to have nuclear weapons because it's our right. And. Or we're going to. Or we're going to bring global trade to a halt. Fuck, you know, how about fuck, you know? Like, seriously, I mean, why, why do we even have to like, what gives you the right? Because fuck you, that's why. I mean, seriously. No, you don't get to do that. We have the right. We as the humanity get to say no. It's like the guy Sitting at the end of the, it's like the guy who controls, who controls the property next to the, next to the, the, the stick. The, the, the, the, the entryway to the burb clave saying, oh no, you got to pay me a toll. After you, after you register with the dude, after you registered with the rent, the cop at the freaking door, and we're like. And everybody in the neighborhood behind him, like in America, like, lock and load, walk up with the 12 gauge going, fuck you, dude. No, this is what the Iranians are doing. Except it's a nuclear weapon. And why? Because he mounted a.50 cal on his house. So he's going to then tell us that we have to all like, no, at that point, we all turn around and figure out a way to get, you know, get into his house, take his.50 cal away from it, beat him upside the fucking head, go. No, dude. And that's enough. Like, you know, how about elbow me jaw? Like done. Like. And I'm doing that of course today because, you know, Chuck Norris just died and you know, rest Chuck and Chuck, you know, all hell. All hell. The Chuck Norris, that dude was badass. So like, I don't know like this. I, I. When a certain point when you stop and you bring it back to its primitives where we are, they're threatening, they're going to steal all our money. They're going to like, make our children, children's lives terrible. They're going to do this, they're gonna, well, you can just give us what we want.
- [44:23]
Marty
It would make sense that if these points of control around the world now, the focus being the straight from Riz is so critical and important to the city of London, then they would fight like death over it, right?
- [44:37]
Tom Luongo
And of course they would. And they would. And they would build this thing in Iran up into this implacable enemy in the minds of everybody. They'd run the psychological operation. They would run the, they would, they would, they would support, absolutely support horrific Iranian propaganda for, I mean, give the Persians to do like, it's the same thing with the Russians. Get the, give the Russians their due. They're really good at propaganda. Like the Russians are really good at it. And I, and, and I have a soft spot for the Russians. I think they're justified in Ukraine. So, you know, I was just, I would, I always felt the Russians were justified in Ukraine to stop NATO aggression in the same way that I think we're justified in going after Iran. I don't think Iran's a good guy. I never dab I, you know, at one point, I, I, you know, in the past, I'll say this in the past especially, you know, the world has changed after 10, seven, like it or not, okay? And not for the better, but was clearly the inciting incident to get us to where we are today in this phase of history. And I wish it didn't happen and everything. I don't never wanted to see the Israelis lose their minds and go, you know, blow up the Palestinians the way they did. It's disgusting, right? It's disgusting. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm not mincing words here. You know, my nose is not big because I'm Jewish, because I'm fucking Italian, okay? Like, I don't care. I was raised Roman Catholic for Christ's sake. I fucking know a goddamn thing about any of this. I don't care. I don't like the Israelis. I never have, okay? But I can also dispassionately separate that from my opinion of them. And with them acting in their national interests, you can argue whether or not you think they deserve to have national interests or not. That's fine, I don't care. That's not reality. Reality is they have national interest. Iran has national interests. I want, you know. But Iran chose a path. They chose a path to fake negotiate while they pursued nuclear weapons. They chose a path to not negotiate in good faith. I have peers that believe that they were. I disagree with them. I've told them this. Alex Craner disagrees with me. Joaquin Forest disagrees with me. That's fine. You can believe what you want to believe. I believe that they were negotiating exactly the same way they were when Obama was negotiating with them over the jcpoa. I don't, I don't haven't seen any change in behavior on their part. I don't make any justifications for their actions, period. And they've been lying, and we've known for years that they were lying to the IAEA about their enrichment program, number of centrifuges they had running and everything else. I can even be, I can even sit back and be generous and try and separate the clerics, you know, not even calling them the Moors, right? Call them the clerics who say, yeah, we issued a bot wagon nuclear weapons. Okay, great. Well, the IRGC is pursuing a nuclear weapon. What are you doing to stop that? Well, maybe your Shia cleric ism or whatever you want to call it, your religious weight isn't enough to stop these religious crazies that are a military doing this terrible thing. Therefore I can, so I can even look at Khamenei, the late, the, the late Hominy. Or they both could be late at this point as like Maduro, a captured pawn. Right. I can see it. I can, I can construct that argument. I don't have to believe it. I don't have to believe it, but I can construct it. And then I can say, well, yeah, maybe he was a captured pun and maybe, maybe his foreign minister and the president and everyone and the civilian arm of the government and them were trying to negotiate with the United States on the up and out, but they were never going to do so if the IRGC put a gun to their head and said negotiate like this. The same way that Maduro for years, you know, had a gun to his head and negotiated the way he did until Trump could guarantee for him he hit his family safety. And then he rolled the dice and bet the dice and bet the farm on Delta Force, pretty good bet on his part. And the United States went in and the only reason we did that was because Maduro had value to us as an asset. Now, for the Iranians, they could have negotiated a new arrangement. They could have said, we no longer work. Yeah. They could have turned to London and gone. Trump's offering is this. What do you got? And if they say we don't have anything, which the British don't, and the Iranians still chose war brat and then the A10 war on Shaw, I mean, that's my version of what happened. And the week leading up to February 28th, that became a higher and higher and higher probability for me that that was what was going to happen. And I even thought that Trump was just going to do limited strikes to take out Most of the IRGC's command and control and then hope that that was going to be the end of it. And then we get like a 12 day war and then give the Iranians the ability to do a fake bombing and you know, on one of our bases and save face and do this and we do the same thing we did before. I never ever thought we didn't bomb Ford. Alan the pants. See, this is where some of my peers. Again, I'm not trying to, I'm not saying I'm trying to throw Alex and Joaquin under the bus here. They had a different interpretation of events than I did and they premised their analysis based on that premise. And then when. So they were convinced that last year it was a fake bombing and, you know, it was a fake set of bombs and it was a movie
- [50:46]
Marty
when we attacked the centrifuges.
- [50:48]
Tom Luongo
Yeah. When we attacked for now in the Tans, they just, they just dropped a bunch of bombs out in the, out in the desert and didn't do anything. I'm like, that's a. I said from day one, when that happens, whenever that was, June 26th or whatever, I said, oh, that's a bad. No, no, no, no, no. We bomb that. I know Americans well enough to know that. We bomb that. I know Trump well enough to know we bombed that. You don't, don't over commit to that, to that, that interpretation of events, because it could lead you in the future to a bad, you know, analysis in the future if this ever comes up again, which did. And they were both convinced Trump's not going to attack. The Iranians are negotiating good faith, we're setting up for the same exact thing as the last time, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, we all thought this before Putin and moved into Ukraine. We all said there's not going to be a war. Then Putin comes in shock and awe, does exactly the Trump thing. And this, you know, he's on, he's knocking on the door of Kiev in the first 12 hours, 24 hours, 40 hours, whatever the hell it was. Everybody keeps making that mistake because no one wants to invite that level of chaos into their thinking, but they don't want to plan for it because then all of a sudden that becomes a very difficult thing. Look, it speaks to their humanity, it speaks to their quality as human beings that they don't believe that that's, you know, that that's the way they view Trump. Right. That he wouldn't do something to them that was that abhorrent. And so therefore, when you think of the psychology of the situation, and again, don't mean to speak for grown men and everything else, but I'm trying to be as generous and as multi, you know, I'm trying to be not as generous, but just as, just as I can see it from a variety of different perspectives. But when I got done with the 12 Day War last year, I sat down and I really, I really, me, personally, I sat back and I went, I've got a lot of rethinking to do. I have a lot of recalculation to do. And I did. And I came down on the, oh, no, this, that was an impressive operation. And Iran better have gotten the message. And if they didn't get the message, okay, one, then I get to double down over and over and over again that my newly found insight that at that point that Iran was Actually working with City of London red ants, black ants, the Alex Craner put the red ants in the black ants in the jar, shake them up and let them fight. They're funding the Iranians on one side, they're funding the Israelis on the other. You know, welcome to war. They profit on, they profit on the chaos. Hey, it's a good business model. It's been serving the British for 354 years. Between the British and the Dutch and everybody else. It's a great business model if you, it's good work if you can get it. You know, it's horrific for humanity obviously, and for the victims of it, but you know, from their perspective, it's a good business model. And you know, Iran's actions, or at least the IRGC and the, and the. And the theocracy's actions after that support my interpretation of events, my map of whose incentives mapped to what and whose relationships mapped to what? You get to Promethean action ladies and some other ones coming and go, oh yeah, well, you know, this guy's got this money and you know, billionaire row in London and they've got this and they've got that. And then what you're watching after that is a bunch of people having to justify and cope that those relationships don't exist and have it like now we have to prove. And now they're trying to prove that negative as opposed to just saying, no, no, those relationships still exist. And so there's a fundamental difference of perspective which has led to a fundamental difference in analysis. And then I'm an American, sorry, yeah, at a certain point it's stressful, it's anxiety driven and everybody's playing out their anxiety on their phones every day, including me. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna like sit there and go, I sleep well at. But everybody, I've been saying this for a while now. When we get maximally stressed, when we are having our base assumptions about how we think the world works, changes or is being challenged, we revert to primitives. And you know what my primitive is Patent. I'm not kidding. Like, I go back and I watch the friggin first. I watched the opening speech, George C. Scott as Patton. I watched that and I'm like, I'm 12 years old again. It's terrible. I say it's terrible. I think in reality, in hindsight, and it's funny, I mentioned this about two months ago. I said I need to watch Patent again. And I watched it again. And I said, and I was watching it and I went, oh. And I learned, and then I learned a lot more about Patton. I stopped just taking the movie as gospel and I really sat down and did a deep dive into patent for about three days. Didn't get a lot of sleep. I was up on YouTube until 6 o' clock in the morning, like multiple nights in a row, watching stuff about Patton. And I realized something about Patton I hadn't understood, which is that Patton fought war to minimize damage, to minimize loss of human life. He wanted to beat the enemy so fast that they did not know that they were beaten. Capture all of them, capture the position, move on to the next target. Keep going, keep going, keep going. And before you know it, the war is over. A couple of thousand men are killed, 200,000, 250,000 men are captured, and the war's over. And the civilian damage has been almost none. Everybody wins. If you're going to fight a war, fight it like that. If you want to know what we're, how we're fighting the war here in Iran, the guys who are still picking up weapons, they're getting vaporized. Yeah, how, you know, but the, the civilian casualties are pretty low. I mean, they, they're not zero, but they can't, you can't, you can't expect them to be zero like at some point. You know, it's a tragedy, it's terrible. You know, this is humanity. We're messy. Yeah.
- [57:19]
Marty
I mean, the bombing of the girls school, that was hard to, hard to stomach. But again, just looking at this dispassionately and going down like, so, like, that's, that's another thing I'm trying to figure out my mind now, like, speaking of collateral damage coming in many forms, obviously. Energy infrastructure.
- [57:40]
Tom Luongo
One quick thing about this, the school, I, I was, you know, I did not know anything about it. I didn't spend any time looking at it. I was listening to, like, my friend Blaine Holt about this this morning, Crypto Rich the other day, and he said, oh, by the way, we have good intelligence now that that was actually a misfired Iranian weapon that went backwards. And, you know, it was, they were doing, you know, it, it was a terrible thing. It's collateral damage. It's, you can say we, we, we caused it, but we did not bomb the school. And again, I'm, I'm okay, I'm okay. And I'm not saying that's like, oh my God, we Americans are so great, and I'm trying to poke my way around it. No, if we bomb the school, we bomb the school like Obama bombed drone struck Americans for sake. Okay, you want to talk about why I crashed out as a human being saying, okay, as this, these people don't get to do anything on my watch anymore because of the drone striker in chief and this, I used to call him Obama, right? Oh, Dash Bomb Dash, yeah, that was my name for him for years and it still is. I still think he's a scumbag and you know, and he's drone striking Americans, no less. Everybody else, you know, look again, you know, we can sit here and we can talk about it, however we can talk about, you know, I can sit here and I can flash to, you know, Ozymandias at the end of Watchmen going, I did it. And you know, do you have to swallow it? I don't know. I mean, you hope that you don't, you know, he dropped a nuclear bomb for all intents and purposes. Movie version, he drops a nuclear bomb. Comic book version, he drops a freaking psychic weird, you know, thing on New York and kills 6 million people. Ethical, moral argument, the same. But I'm not making that decision. I don't have to agree or disagree with the decision in that respect. If the long term outcome is that this amount of violence leads to a lot less violence in the future and a lot less cost for everybody and the Iranian people get to live the way they want and if they choose that, they want to go back and live like they did before the war, that's their prerogative. Just expect that in about 15 or 20 years the United States going to come back over again, they're going to bomb the fuck out of you. Well, that's, I mean, you know, because that's what America's Americans are pretty much in agreement about that. Because the polling I'm seeing on the war is like, yeah, this is justified.
- [60:16]
Marty
Well, that's what I, I, I question the polling, whether or not it's legit.
- [60:21]
Tom Luongo
I, I don't, yeah, I don't, I really don't.
- [60:24]
Marty
The one on CNN the other day was like mega 100 support.
- [60:28]
Tom Luongo
That's obvious, that's obvious. Take, but like it was like, like 89, 90 of Republican voters and you know, 75 or 60 to 70% of, of Americans in general. Yeah, if we do. Trump hasn't tried to really justify the war. He's just been, he's just been running it. He's not really out there every day going, we're doing this for, because he knows the American people don't believe it anymore. Bush used to go out there and do that. Obama and Clinton went out there and tried to sell it as a humanitarian war. Trump's like, no, I'm not selling this. This is not a humanitarian war. This is purely in our geostrategic interests. That's it. And that's, it's power politics. So we're not going to, you know, not trying to, not trying to sugarcoat this, folks. This is what we have to do. Well, I mean, and there's credit in that respect. That's the end. That's what he's doing. Well, and he's going to take the political hit for it as well, I've noticed.
- [61:18]
Marty
Well, that was, I was like the point I was going to make, like the timing of it all leading up to midterms, like another form of collateral damage is possible. What happens in November?
- [61:28]
Tom Luongo
Trump said the other day, he said someone asked him directly about the, well, why did you do this? It may hurt you in the midterms. He's like, because it's the right thing to do. And if I have to make every decision based on what some short term political gain or loss is gonna, is gonna net me, I can't govern the country. This is the right thing to do. And I get it. And I'll, I don't, you know, and basically he's not. Fix it in post if I have to. I think he'll be fine. From a political perspective, this thing doesn't drag on too far. And again, everybody trying to turn around and say, oh, it's not over in three days and it's clearly lost. I'm like, that's just agitprop, a low quality Iranian agin prop. That's bullshit. It's also people with high neuroticism that are worried about, I have friends who are hyper worried about what Israel is trying to get us to do and what they're going to do. And I, and we're talking about people who were Israeli, okay. And I've been listening to them very carefully and, and I understand their worry. And then again, at one point I said, but, you know, you know, yeah, choose being nervous about things. Kind of par for the course. There, there are people that are, that are, that are high in anxiety and they have every right to be. I'm not. Again, that's not a judgment, right? That's just a statement of, you know, the dominant personality traits of most Jews. And like, I grew up in New York. I grew up on behalf of my friends. I mean, seriously, dude, I grew up in like New York. Like, do you understand that more people, more Jews live in New York City than live in Tel Aviv, right? Like, I grew up in upstate New York. Like half of my, half of the kids that I took my honors classes in high school with, that I went to school with from the time I'm five until we graduated 18, half of these kids were Jewish. I knew so many of them, I didn't think it was whether I didn't give a one way. The other half were Italian, the 2010 of them were Irish. I mean, I'm not kidding, right? It was literally like, you know, so a couple of Irish, a bunch of Italians and a bunch of Jewish kids and a couple of heritage, you know, crosses that were effectively heritage Americans. You know, I mean, I, you know, I'll give you a perfect example. My best friend that I grew up with my entire life, all the way up until 18, his mom's family traces back to Francis Lewis who signed to the friggin Declaration of Independence. And his father was a German Jewish, okay. And he was the town engineer and they were Democrats and my dad was like the only Republican in town. Like, you know what I mean? Like, not really. It's, you know, upstate New York is much more red than, you know, I'm, and I'm talking not very upstate New York. I grew up in Orange county and. Which is like, you know, it's like the, the Bronx, Westchester, Rockland, Orange. Right? So it's just up the Hudson river about an hour north of the city,
- [64:40]
Marty
is there.
- [64:41]
Tom Luongo
So I'm like, I'm, I'm very, I'm very comfortable with understanding, you know, that, you know, those people. I'm like, in that respect, what I know, I'm like, I'm friends of the room today, but they're also lovely people. What's that? What are they worried? What are they worried? They're worried about Israel going off half cocked and, you know, wanting to do what they did in Gaza to the Iranians and getting the ISA to do it for them. And I don't have a, you know, and again, this is, they're saying this because they're, you know, this is, you know, they're not cheering this. They're very worried about it. They don't want to see that because then they say then, and then, and then they go from there to, and then World War III happens, you know, and none of us want that. So that's their, you know, they're going through the tail risk that. And they're, but they're focusing on the weaknesses and threats of the SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis. Strengths, weaknesses, operation, opportunities, threats. They're focused on weaknesses and threats as opposed to strengths and opportunities. Now so what I tend to do because so many people focus on weakness and threat because that sells clickwise and because that is the default state of our media, both mainstream, conventional, legacy and alternative and all of the psyops that these people have access to, money wise to produce. I tend to stay and spend more of my time looking at the converse because that's who I am and look at the strengths and the opportunities and then try and balance everything out because the weaknesses and threats are like in front of everybody. But no one's talking about the strengths and the opportunity. Very few are talking about the strengths and opportunities. And so, you know, again, you can hate me for it if you want. I'm talking to the audience, not you. I know you don't hate me. You can hate me for it if you want. That's fine. You can call me, I've been a part of the seven thousand dollar club or I'm this. I don't care. Like I am like, I get accused of that 20 times a day on Twitter. It's great. I just have a very large block file now. Not hard. Right. And, and I'm still such a fundamentally free speech kind of guy. I still feel bad about blocking people, even though I know they're bots. You know, I mean, I want to have a conversation with everyone. I'm not, I know I can't do that. That I'm not in a position to do that anymore. I'm not a guy with 1200 people following or 150 people following me on Twitter trying to have a conversation. You know, I'm a guy with a, you know, fairly reasonably sized platform that, trying to move the needle and, and to interject, you know, some something approaching signal into all of this noise.
- [67:26]
Marty
Yeah.
- [67:26]
Tom Luongo
For you to digest and do with what you will. I don't, you know, I have no control over that. So I'm not going to try. And if you want to have a conversation with me, honestly, like you and I do, whenever we get together, you want to have that, even have that on Twitter, we can do that. Just understand that my hackles are up all the time because they have to be. So, you know, come in, I mean, to the audience, if you want to have a conversation with me on Twitter, come in and make sure that you're. You structure your tweet properly. Don't say, tom, I love you, but that's an auto block that's MI6 like all day, every day. Okay, just don't say that. Like just, just come in and go and say honest question, blah, blah, blah, blah. If I answer you with an, with an honest response and you give me a second honest, an honest response to that, I know, I know that you're not going to get blocked anytime soon. I'll say just like lose patience with your argument or dismute you or whatever, but I will at least give you the opportunity. A lot of people, they get one strike now. I used to give everybody three strikes. Now a lot of people get one. Most people get three. And a lot of people don't get an infinite number because I know they're, because I've been talking with them for so long that I know they're good people. They may disagree with me. That's fine.
- [68:39]
Marty
So leaning into strengths and opportunities. I mean, I think the most obvious, if you're looking through the fog of war is this, this sort of shifting of leverage in terms of control over energy systems from the Mideast to, to the United States. And I, I think there was a deal between Japan in the US yesterday with selling, selling Alaskan oil to Japanese. Had that, that, that analysis a few days ago. I'm actually going to speak with the NOS on Monday.
- [69:18]
Tom Luongo
This is an interesting guy. NASA is an interesting guy. I don't always agree with him, but he's at least not. I, I think he's an honest broker.
- [69:24]
Marty
Well, he, he actually part of his analysis like made me think of you because there was a whole narrative about they're only letting Chinese ships through because they're, because they're settling in yuan outside the dollar. And this is like a retaliation. But then the NAS pointed out, well, actually the Chinese ships are getting through because they have Chinese insurance and they are actually insured.
- [69:43]
Tom Luongo
I was like, oh, they're insured. They're. They're insured and the Iranians don't dare. As an ASS has pointed out multiple times, the Iranians actually don't dare blow up a bunch of oil tankers because then they can't run their desalination plants. And then they destroy, then they destroyed their power base by cutting off their head despite their. No, they're very large Persian noses. Yeah. You know what I mean? In that respect, do you view this
- [70:08]
Marty
as one of the strengths of now, a potential outcome?
- [70:11]
Tom Luongo
Oh yeah, no, it's absolutely a strength. It's absolutely the, I think it's the point of the entire exercise. The point of the entire exercise is to remove the straight as a physical choke point for the entire world, if the entire world wants it to happen. Meaning if, if the people on this, the people on this is the problem with the Straits and the Persian Gulf. One side doesn't want, wants. Everybody doesn't really want the, the oil to flow. They want to use it as a means by which to, you know, either put up a toll booth or I'm talking about the Iranians now, or threaten everybody and then use that to get advantages and other. And, and then get rent in other forms, right? Concessions that they don't deserve money, pallets of money from Obama, whatever the fuck it is. On the other side are all the Gulf states and they're playing, and they've been playing the double game for years. And you note that Trump has worked really hard to bring them all in line. And Qatar, Bahrain and others, they're all uae. They're all in fucking London's pocket back. They've been in London's back pocket for years. They're not independent actors either. It is, again, two sides of the same coin here or the same side of two different coins. Same thing. They just want to sell oil. They just want to make money. They're just a bunch of new ro. Rich Arabs at the end of the day. But Trump has an ally in MBS in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia rules the roost at the end of the day because all these guys are effectively just same group of people. So, So goes back, go back to Trump's first foreign visit, first term, where to go with Saudi Arabia. And it was to start this process that we're not paying off now. So we end that nonsense where everybody gets to pay, gets to charge a little extra for the oil and their LNG and this and that and everything else because of the Persian Gulf and because of the Straits of Hormuz, because we've got, you know, we've got all, we've got this whole network of incentives bound up and this really messy chessboard, right? And I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a, I'm gonna make a, A, an analogy here in a minute that I think you'll appreciate. But the Straits don't have to be a physical choke point, right? It doesn't have to be. It is this way because of this, this messy chessboard that the British and the French and, and, and the local players have all created for everybody else to fucking deal with. And then we were forced. And then we, because we were getting paid on our oligarchs were also getting paid for years. On this and we were aligned with the British to do this terrible friggin shit. Like, you know, we were getting paid too. Okay, fine. And then we were end worse than everything else. The British were doing it all and we were getting blamed for it as the world was getting tired of this whole thing because we've all, everybody's tired of the American empire like running around like free Rambo without a job strap blowing up people, starting color revolutions and all this, right? We're all tired of this game, but it's the British's game. But we're getting all the, we're getting all the flack for it, right? And in some ways the Iranians are getting a lot of our flak now. So how about we all stop taking flak for somebody else? Dismantle that system. That's basically what Trump's offer has been to everybody in the region. The countries that got to show up at the border. Peace to rebuild Gaza is your prima facie evidence that everybody's ready for this. Moreover, Russia and China trying to bring as many people into the BRICS is also prima facie evidence that everybody's tired of the game but with a different outcome. Right? That was built, if that was built on the premise that the United States was inseparable from NATO in Europe, right? That's what BRICS was based on. But if that is no longer the case, because clearly Trump wants out of NATO and he wants out of all this, well then BRICS is unnecessary now. So now the Board of Peace becomes a much, much more interesting angle on this because now it circumvents all the post World War II institutions that were created, the IMF, the World bank, the specifically the UN obviously now NATO and all this stuff, all these things can be broken down. So there's an opportunity, here's a strength. We get rid of the straits and the whole chaos premium of the entire planet. If you take Iran off the board, you take Lloyds of London off the board, you bring the Arab countries in line and say, look, at the end of the day you have to, you know, you have to pay. If you don't want to provide shipping insurance for your own ships, you don't want to insure your own voyages, that's fine, we'll do it for you. You can do it through our system and you don't want to build the navy, fine. You only want to build the commercial fleet, fine. Then you're going to pay the US Navy and the US insurance system directly so the American taxpayers don't have to pay for it. We can turn a cost center into a mild profit center with a cost plus business model. That's the way Trump is thinking about this. And that is a strength for the entire world. Because now all of a sudden the chaos premium for goods and services and moving shit around the world comes down because there's nobody actually fomenting. Well, assuming that the United States doesn't revert to its, to all the shit that we learned from the British and start then becoming the dudes that do the terrible thing. But if you look at the way Trump has been building all of his trade deals, he's been building his trade deals to cut everybody in as a partner. Hey, let's get your natural gas or your oil or your minerals or whatever and let's get it, let's get them up out of the ground. Let's build businesses and let's put those businesses in Australia where we're extracting the, or the iron ore from, or whatever word is that we're going to do with the Australians or the coal or this and that. Same thing in. The same thing in Thailand, same thing in Central and South America. He's trying to cut everybody in as a partner. Not at, not be a colonial extraction, saying, we want, we want all your oil at pennies on the dollar. No, we just want everybody to pay retail. And maybe at the end of the day we really, you know, and again, like, and this is how, you know that you're dealing with Americans and not Jews. Because he wants everybody to pay retail. Oh, I'm sorry, I just made a joke, didn't I?
- [76:38]
Marty
And make money by. Make money by bringing down the cost of protection, right?
- [76:42]
Tom Luongo
The cost of protection, the cost of the chaos. What, what does it cost to run the world in insurance costs and forex costs and this and that and the stress of the budget, the political costs domestically. And we all have to spend. How much money are we spending on income taxes and regulatory fees and this and all this, all this, like, dross that we're all looking at. I saw something this afternoon that was hilarious. Again, at the end of the day, what does it mean? But somebody ran an analysis through GROK of the entirety of the EU's regulatory scheme and GROK said we can get rid of 86% of it and nothing and, and honestly, nothing about the EU would change. I think is, I think that was, you know, it's like, like. And we could do the same thing with the code of federal regulations, like the cfr. The code of the cfr have you ever read the cfr? No. Like I, I've had to. When I used to be a chemist, I used to have to read all the, the, the code of federal regulations for the, the, the sections pertaining to, you know, environmental analysis, which is where I was. I was working in environmental labs testing water and soil and everything else. So I had to know what all the, the methods were. They were on the, they're on the cfr. Like they're all, they're in and, and everything downstream. So I had to know all those rules, I had to know all that. You wanted to be a QC officer of, of an accredited laboratory and I had to know this stuff, right? I, dude, like there's nothing, like I'm already a difficult, I'm already, it's already hard for me to read in the first place. I've never been a particularly good reader and I'm not very fast. Oh my God. God, my eyes dry right the fuck out and I'm asleep in 13 seconds something awful. It's really bad. I don't know how anybody does it.
- [78:21]
Marty
What I want to touch on before is like obviously the war, the narratives about the war, the energy infrastructure, all very visible right in front of everybody. One of my favorite sort of under the radar signals that I love talking about. What's going on with interest rates? What, oh, how are they reacting?
- [78:42]
Tom Luongo
So it's, what are they telling you? Brilliantly, actually. This is why, again, this is a part of the reason why. When you ask me like, how's it going, Tom? Like everything is, everything is proceeding as I have foreseen. I hate to say it right. I hate to invoke the Sheave Palpatine, but you know, British guilds, 10 year British guilds closed at just over 5% today. German 10 year German bonds closed over 3%. Lagarde is losing control over the German tenure because everybody's money's going to ground. So everything's getting sold. Gold got hit, silver got hit. I didn't look at the equity marks. I can actually pull them up. I'm sure that the Dow was down today a little bit and it's not really that important. But the big one, I was watching bond spreads and, and I've been watching them all week because I'm watching them widen. And so while the US yield curve is selling off, I mean in this environment, one money should go to ground, right? Money should just go. I don't know what the to do. Like oil's $100 a barrel. I've got contracts, I've Got, I've got, you know, derivatives blowing up, I've got this, I've got that, I got private equity going for. I get, dude, I need money. That's it. And so here's the. So the US 10 year closed at 438, but the UK closed 62 basis points above that. Now it was trading in the 20s before the war, 20 basis points over the US rate. Now, right in the 62 when it's just getting into the 60s, governments start falling or something bad or the Brits need to cut a deal in order to keep their government from falling because this has happened before. So they're clearly the target here because they're the ones that are losing control over the markets. Moreover, then we take it one step further and we look at the Brent WTI spread and that's 13, $14. What is that telling you? It's telling you that the world is, there's plenty of WTI out there, but the Brent contract is rising. You know, oh my. I think Oman was like loading at $160 a barrel today or something. I don't know. Some, you know, the numbers are all out there and everybody's doing their Azure prop thing on Twitter. Because we're all good at the same shit, right? And we all think we're informed, we're all going to the same shit. We all think we're informed. Right. What's important is what does that mean? Well, it means is that Trump is okay with and you know, in Donald Trump's world, we're getting an extra $30 a barrel for our oil that we were before. Qatar's not exporting LNG. We got plenty of LNG, natural gas prices of $3amillion BTUs in the United States. You know who's making money hand over Fist right now 10 year? The guys who run the big export terminal down in Louisiana. They're making a fortune because LNG prices around the world are through the roof and feedstock prices are boring. They're at the bottom of the friggin. The bottom of the long end trading range coming out of winter where, come on, like 10 year is going to make money hand over fist this year, right? And their last earnings report was quite good actually. So Trump's saying, oh yeah, we got plenty of energy. This is great. The country's getting rich. His mind, money that comes back to the United States in that respect is the United States getting rich. He's not wrong, right? We're getting a premium from our stuff. And so to him That's a strength that gives him the opportunity to then turn around and continue to press harder. Meanwhile, natural gas prices, you know, on. On the Dutch trading floor have doubled since before the war. And they can't afford it there now. They're, like, screaming at everybody now, you know, they're screaming at everybody. You have to turn down your air conditioners. You have to dish, do that. You have to not heat your homes. You got to not take. You got to take cold showers and all this stuff. And like, typical freaking Europeans, like, we up. But you have to do what we tell you to do. Like, how about. No, how about I'm gonna buy whatever I can? And then there's impoverishing your people left and right. And then, you know, and then there's Ursula von der Leyland standing out there going, we haven't decided yet whether or not we're going to, you know, except Russian oil. And even the last year, they bought more natural gas from the Russians than they ever have, by the way. Which is hilarious. He does this, and it's just. It's just pathetic.
- [83:14]
Marty
They just launder it through India, right? Or is that.
- [83:17]
Tom Luongo
Yeah, I can just do that too. Exactly. It doesn't really matter. Like, at the end of the day, I mean, it was the simplest run in the world, right? St. Petersburg to Rotterdam and back again. Like, it was the simplest run. It's been. And it's been shut off for four years and. Okay, what do you think you're going to accomplish with this? Like, they still think that consensus politics matters. Consensus politics does not matter. Notice how when. When they were trying to get consensus politics over $90 billion loan to Ukraine and Hungary and Slovakia said no. They gave Ukraine the money at the end. The. The money. Anyway. Guess that velvet gloves gotten worn real thin because I can see the iron fist, you know, Nazi. Like, you know, seriously, like I could. There it is. Oh, look. It's made of iron. And it. And then it's even a little rusty because, you know, because they lost control. Check the. They don't even have the good steel going through the Germans. German plants anymore. Coming out of freaking. The iron ore coming out of the sedan line, which is why Killer B the checks in the first place, because they have the best deal. And that's why Czech guns are better than everybody else's guns. Yada, yada, yada, yada. I now turn Marty's channel into a CZ commercial. We'll be here all night while I show you pictures of my gun. Like. And I'll go get My podcast gun and go bring it out. Like I love by cz. There's a reason for it. It's a great gun. It's, you know, it's made out of this check steel that you can't kill. I mean, are they back?
- [84:58]
Marty
Like, do you think they're getting to the point where they are stressed enough, where it's like, okay, let's make a deal.
- [85:06]
Tom Luongo
Not quite yet. No, not quite yet. No, not quite yet. They're not gonna. They're not gonna give Trump this one yet. They're not. They. The. The French, the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese. Interesting. You see those four names together? The French, the Germans, the Italians, the Japanese. You mean the four. Our four enemies in World War II. And I. I mean that when I say the French, they're all finally saying, okay, we'll bring ships. We'll send ships to the. To the straight of Hormuz to protect the oil. It only took them 24 hours. You know, Trump's like, well, let's leave NATO. All right, all right, fine. We'll come like. Like Spain at the end of the beginning of the war. We're not going to let you refuel your ships in Spain. Fine. Embargo Spain. No, no, no, that was just Billy B E Cray Cray. That's not. No, no, don't listen to him. No, no, no. You can. You can refill your ships. Like. Like, do you think you have any leverage over the United States? Spain? Like, really? Okay, like, this is the part that everybody. I hate the. I. I know the. I know people hate it when I. I do this, but. Because, you know, everybody's tired of the vulgar American, you know, reminding everybody that we're more powerful than they are, but kind of are. What you hope for is that we use that power responsibly. And what everybody's angry about, including myself, for very many years, that we didn't. So how about you cut Trump a little bit of slack and you say he's using this power. It's an awesome power. The danger is that he gets the messianic complex and starts over using it. I am. That's actually, to me, the biggest hell risk out here is that, you know, Donald Trump's sense of grandiosity gets the better of him. I know. That's why I'm not president.
- [86:51]
Marty
Matt King Lens.
- [86:53]
Tom Luongo
Yeah, Matt King Lens. As you would do. Seriously, that's why. That's why there's never going to be a President Luongo, trust me. Because, dude, I bombed Iran fucking 15 years ago, and I didn't use nukes, dude. I'm Italian and I'm a little Sicilian. I, I, I cray cray. But I'm like, oh, really? We're gonna play that game? Oh, you get into the disrespect game with Italians, like, that's it. We're done. We go from zero to Aida. No time Flag. Trump is far more, far more statesmanlike than I am. Dexter White and I talk about this shit all the time. Like, there's a reason why we're not president and we're good at what we do for this reason. And this is our, this is our ceiling. We're good. We're good with this. You know, that's it. No more. And. Putin, like, wipe out the, wipe out the CIA in Afghanistan. Fifteen years ago, I'd have paid Putin to send the Spetsnats in and kill.
- [87:56]
Marty
And kill all the coffee shields.
- [87:58]
Tom Luongo
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And no. And President Luongo, I would have done that at the inauguration on the Jumbotron. I would have had the satellite footage of them getting of our guys getting wiped out by the Russian Spetsnaz on the Jumbotron at the inauguration. Yeah, no, no, not good. Not very statesmanlike, but this shit is over. No, this is not good. So, so taking it, you know, coming back to reality and getting rid of all the, you know, Roger Waters, you know, wall, like, fantasies. What Trump is doing is a very, in many ways targeted and measured thing. It just doesn't look it because Iran is actually a sincere, was a sincere enemy. You know, I mean, I, I, the way I look at the way Operation Epic Fury. I hate these fucking names, but that is what it is. So Trump, Operation Epic Fury, like, oh, my God, dude, serious, like, okay, fine. Operation the Night Hammer. Like, okay, whatever. It's like he's still running the Apprentice or some. But at the beginning of it, they didn't around. They respected Iran's ability to strike back, and that's why they went in the way they did. And, you know, we can, I'm trying to keep it as we're talking about heavy, heavy shit here, so I'm trying to keep it at least reasonably entertaining, Right? Give the, you know, give the Iranians their due. Right? So one of the things I've thought about in this whole thing is the Iranians like to play chess because they created the game. That's their game. Chess is a Persian game. Yeah. I mean, maybe the Russians play it better than everybody else, you know? Although the great Russian chess masters and videos Right. But this isn't Iranian games the way they think. People build games and they are the games they build a reflection of their culture. So Europeans make very dry board games that are all about. They're all very technocratic. I play a lot of them, I like a lot of them. I have many. I have, I have 200 of them on my bookshelf down in Florida. I also have about 20 or 30American games which are messy and very. There's a lot of random and there's a lot of. We call them Ameritrash. Not kidding. In the board game community, there's Ameritrash and there's Euro. This is a Euro style game. This is an Ameritrash game. And then there's like all these now hybrids that are coming out. And then some of the game design stuff is really interesting. But what's the quintessential American game?
- [90:54]
Marty
Monopoly?
- [90:55]
Tom Luongo
No, it's poker.
- [90:57]
Marty
Oh, yeah.
- [91:00]
Tom Luongo
Specifically, it's Texas.
- [91:01]
Marty
Texas hold them. Yeah. Bluff.
- [91:04]
Tom Luongo
Specifically. Not five card stud or five card draw. Not, not five card draw, not seven card stud, not any Texas holder. And specifically, no limit, Texas Hold'. Em. Texas hold' Em is a game of partial. It's a perfect game in that respect because it's a, It's a game of somewhat hidden information and somewhat shared information. Right. Cards in the middle. Everybody gets shared, but we all have our whole cards. Hole cards are everything. How you bet your whole cards, how you, what your strategies are and everything else how you block your whole cards. The Iranians aren't particularly good at playing poker. They're actually, I mean, the irgc, the people who've been running Iran, they're terrible playing poker. They're the worst poker players in the world because their tells are all over the place. They, you can, I can watch, I can almost predict what they're going to say next. And whatever. They're like little. Whenever they sit down to start doing their, their, their negotiations. Well, let's negotiate about this war we just lost. You don't get to negotiate over why you've lost. Sorry. So what they did was they were trying to bind up the game board with all this. It's chess. Well, if this happens and then they do this and I've got this worked out six moves in advance and you've only got five moves in advance because you're Donald Trump and you're not, you know, you're Donald Trump. You only think two moves and two moves in advance because you're an American. We think six, seven, eight moves in Advance. And that's what every. That's what the Iranian propaganda that we see on Twitter is all about. Well, you don't realize that the Iranians have got this up their sleeve, and then they're going to do this, and then they're going to do this. That's cute. Trump's like, all, and we're not playing chess, we're playing poker. Sun Tzu. I don't know. I haven't read Sun Tzu in years. I don't remember much of it. But I'll tell you this. There's only a couple of precepts you really have to remember. Always leave your enemy a golden bridge to retreat over. And never fight on ground prepared by your enemy if you want to win. So the Iranians and the British, who also love to play this messy game, and specifically, as Vince Lanci reminded me one day when we were doing this, when I was having this conversation, he's like, oh, and the British Open in chess is to muck the whole fucking board up. Just bind it all down. It's called the British Open. Seriously has a name. Apparently, I'm not a chess. I'm not a chess player because I don't have the patience for it. I'm a poker player, and I play poker like Trump. I'm a very aggressive poker player. It gets. It catches me in the ass. And I have a very, very certain limit that I know. I know exactly where I'm going to lose all my money. That's the guy I'm going to lose all my money to. Yep, there it is. It's gone many times, but at least I know my limit, right? I know my, you know, I'm not making a pun about no limit versus limit. I know what kind of, what my ceiling is and skill as a poker player is I can have moments of, like, brilliance, but, you know, I don't have the Stamina to play 12, 15 hours and do it right. So. But I understand well enough to know that what Trump did was he took a chessboard and said, we're not playing chess games over here, and it's no limit. Hold. And I got a big stack, and you're fronting like you got a big stack and a bunch of revis, but you have a teeny stack. And I know you do you. I'm moving all in. And I know you've got 210offsuit, and I know you're playing the Doyle Brunson, and we didn't flop a 2 or a 10. That's the way he Played this. And to me, that's a very smart, strategic dude. Don't play their game. He's done this. So he's a power politics kind of guy. He's a power poker kind of guy. He negotiates that way. He does it all the time. The Europeans keep wanting to play these technocratic games. I scored 212 points and you scored 211. So I won by what, one point? Like, who cares? You know, that kind of thing. It's just like, it's. It's very passive aggressive. It's very. I mean, they're fun. They're fun puzzles. Don't get me wrong. I play a lot of these games, I think, and I. And I play them for blood, of course, but, you know, and they are fun and they're good diversions and they're. And they're also very good exercises for brain training and puzzle, you know, all that stuff. Great. But at the same time, the end of the day, there's the messy shit about hidden information, tactics versus strategy, and how you sucker somebody into making a move that they don't know how to play. So I look at the Iranians and I'm like, oh, look, their limit is. They can play at the 3, 6 table. If you're playing limit hold', em, Trump's a fucking 5001000 player. He can play at the 5001000 table. You know, he can walk in to Vegas with 60 rebuys with, you know, with $60,000 in his pocket and comfortably play at that table. Yeah, yeah, the Aragachi and those guys, you know, they. They better. They better not bring more than $300 to the table or $500 to the table, because they're going to fucking wipe.
- [96:30]
Marty
Well, I guess to end it on that, like, when. When will we know if they have been wiped?
- [96:37]
Tom Luongo
I think this thing's over the next, I think. I hate to make predictions like this, obviously, but we're starting to see the cracks. The strips ships are starting to move through the straits. Trump laid out the conditions today for getting our insurance, which is. Or getting our escort, Navy escort, which is. You have to buy our insurance. Boyd's is, of course, arm twisting everybody behind the scenes saying, if you sign up with Trump, you're never going to get any insurance from us ever again. That's nice. And that's going to slow things down. As part of the reason why this is taking was going to take longer than everybody is comfortable with. The Iranians who are trying to negotiate, are trying to negotiate with their pile of Uranium and the Straits. They're trying to set up a toll booth on Cashem island and, you know, charge a toll. That's, that's cute and all. But the Tripoli and the light carriers are coming and that's a very big tell that Trump understands what the, what the mission is there to bring the Marines in with those ships. When I understand I'm not a military armaments expert, but I've talked to enough people who are. They're like, no, these are the exact right tools for the job, along with whatever else we're flying and, you know, what we're doing out of Bahrain, so, and Doha. So what I would say. And now Diego Garcia because the British finally let us, like, yeah, okay, we were flying up there. If we weren't flying Diego Garcia because the British were, you know, holding their nose and, you know, being British, I, I, I would, I lose respect for Trump. I would have, I would have flown planes out of, out of Diego Garcia on day one and go, you here, Starmer, like, say, say what again? Like Sam Jackson at the beginning of politicians say what again? What I got, guys, I got snake eaters sitting at, in the north of England. We'll just go and take fucking 10 Downing Street. Fuck off. We're doing this. And we know that you're, and we know you're involved. And Trump's. Everything Trump has said has gone. His entire demeanor is so obvious. This is what he's doing. They're the fucking target. He wants their business. He wants their business and he wants to make it and he wants to provide it cheaper and with less drama than what we've seen in the past. And if you take all the nuclear weapons off the table and I'm going to leave everybody with one last little bit of hope. So. But all of those things, I think are signals that if we see movement on all those fronts, including the Iranians continuing to try and negotiate over a war they've lost, that the skinning could be over very quickly, two, three weeks or whatever it's going to take. Oil prices will start to come down. We've got the secondary effects that there's a big, there's a potential liquidity crunch here and credit squeeze and banks are going to go under. And also I think that's already happening. I'll be honest with you. I think it's happening in, it was happening before Iran. I think it's happening in uae, I think it's going to happen in London. I think it's going to happen in various other places. I've already seen some stuff about that. But the big one is this. I'm going to just put this in everybody's head. You do realize that maintaining nuclear weapons is extremely expensive. They have a very high cost technical maintenance cycle to keep those warheads refreshed to the point where you have a critical mass. Because if they go subcritical, they don't go boom. So supposedly Pakistan is a nuclear state. Yeah, Pakistan's poor. The British are poor. Can they main have, are they main, are they fronting that they have even have nuclear weapons? The Israelis aren't particularly rich either, by the way, unless we're, you know, we're maintaining them. What about the British warheads that are our warheads? If Trump is like, fuck you people, I'm not going to maintain your nuclear weapons. 40 we could be Trump. To me, Trump looks like a guy who just wants to get rid of nukes. Like, hey everybody, let's get rid of the nukes. And do we really need nukes anymore when we have lasers from space? Yeah, and drones. And drones and this and that and everything else. And precision missiles which can hit 99% of the time, hit military targets and leave the civilian population alone. Why do we have to threaten civilian mass casualties? The reason we developed nuclear weapons is because we couldn't not hit civilian targets. We had nothing but dumb bombs. Now we got like these. Now we can like put a fucking tomahawk through a goddamn window. Right? Like, we don't have to involve the people. We don't have to threaten the people. This is not to say that these wars are going to be fought with zero civilian casualties, but we can minimize or we can maximize the ratio of military assets wiped out versus civilian infrastructure and civilian casualties. And if we can reach that level, and I think we're already there, what the fuck do we need nuclear weapons for anymore? Why don't we just spin down all that uranium and use it to, to power power plants and do other things with it? Wouldn't that be nice? Plutonium and everything else. Wouldn't that be a better world? We don't have enough weapons. We don't have enough weapons to beat the shit out of each other with conventional weapons.
- [102:09]
Marty
The great using bitcoin for denuclearization. You prove that you're denuclearizing by hash rate going up. It's been a theory for a while
- [102:17]
Tom Luongo
that that is, that's, that's not a bad, it's not a bad argument. Like I, I, that's, it's something that's been in my head now for a little while. I don't talk about it very often because invariably we. I never get to it, but I've thought about it, you know, I've talked about it a couple of times now in the last month or so. And the more I think about it, the more I'm like, I've just been saying, like, we have the ability to go back and fight 15th century wars where the king raises an army, the army meets on the field, the two armies meet on the field, they fight, one retreats, the other wins. Then the general show, and everybody calls a truce. The generals show up, they sign a peace treaty, borders moved. And other than the armies that were mustered, you know, stealing from the people on their way in, which they did, but other than that, and the taxes that were used from the people to pay for the army at the end of the day. Yeah. And there were conscripts. I know it was. But most of warfare wasn't fought by civilians. They weren't threatened. It was the king's war. It was over there. Now it's far more the operative model than what we've been dealing with in the industrial age of warfare, which is horrific and horrible and of an affront to humanity. Why do we stop doing that? If we have these precision weapons, we don't need to do that anymore. We just blow the armor up and then look at each other and go, this is really dumb. We're wasting money, we're wasting good men. It's like, it's like that, it's like that scene in Patton when he's like wiping out, like at El Guitar. And this is the first, at the first battle, and he goes, what a waste of fine infantry. Right? Yeah. As he says, as his guys are wiping out the Germans, he's like, God, what a waste of fine inventory. Yeah, that's. Let's, let's, let's change the mindset that way.
- [104:14]
Marty
I want, we'll end it on that. I just want to say. Yes, you help me step back from the ledge. Somebody's been looking through different lenses, letting one lens dominate the other at different points in times. I hope you're right.
- [104:26]
Tom Luongo
Like, that's, that's. So do I, Marty. Yeah. Everybody hopes, you know, obviously we all, we, you know, I hope I'm right. I don't know if I'm going to be right. And, you know, and even if I'm only 65% right, still better than what most people are projecting. So, you know, we're going to be dealing with probabilities here, and we're going to be dealing with, you know, outcomes as best we can. They're not. We're not going to be comfortable with all of them. The return of power politics, when we've all been trained to believe in consensus politics, makes us all uncomfortable because when we watch people. When we watch people do it, we're like, holy shit.
- [105:04]
Marty
Yeah.
- [105:06]
Tom Luongo
Because we were all told that that's the. Those are the actions of dictators. Well, what if they're not the actions of dictators? What if that's actually what responsible leadership's supposed to look like?
- [105:16]
Marty
Yeah. Yeah.
- [105:18]
Tom Luongo
I mean, I've never lived in it, so I don't know. And my natural instincts is like, yours to go. But I've had to, like, really embody that mindset. And I was able to do so because I was able to go back to an old version of myself when I was younger and far more belligerent than I am today and go, oh. And then incorporate everything I've learned over the years about why the violence is wrong and all this shit's wrong and go, okay. Nope. Every once in a while, a war is just. You can disagree with me whether you think this war is just or not. Given the last 300 years of history and given how badly we've been with the Iranian people, I'm sorry, the IRGC is evil and needs to be wiped out the. Off. Off the planet. I don't give a. Anymore. And I. And I'm. And I'm done being blackmailed by a bunch of belligerent freaking Muslims with nuclear fire. I'm over it. And I'm over with the. The British, the limes. And I'm over it with the Jews, and I'm over with our. With. With our people and everything. No more. None. That's it. I'm done. I check out at Nuclear Fire. So let's. We'll, We'll. We'll. We'll lay the. We'll. We'll plant the flag there, and then we'll start working backwards from it. Because somebody asked me, when I said that the other day on Twitter, somebody went, well, what about Pakistan? I'm like, I don't think Pakistan should have nukes either. And I'm. And I'm still angry with the British for giving them to him in the first place. As a matter of fact, I don't think the British. Nuclear weapons. What the. What the. Have they done to deserve nuclear weapons? Yeah. Done.
- [106:53]
Marty
It's always a great way to end a Friday.
- [106:55]
Tom Luongo
Yeah, that's the Way I look at
- [106:57]
Marty
it, yeah, I think we should catch up in a few months, hopefully. Again, like I said, I hope you're right. A few weeks.
- [107:06]
Tom Luongo
Me too.
- [107:06]
Marty
Things I really do.
- [107:08]
Tom Luongo
And my schedule is going to be, you know, my podcast schedule is going to be down in April. I've got. I go to Cornerstone for Calgary next week and I've got a bunch of stuff happening in April and May and June, actually. I'm gonna be traveling for most of the summer and. And I'm gonna be recovering from getting my tooth pulled and I got a lot of stuff going on. So it's going to be one. So, yeah, I think I. I'll probably be ready to chat with you again. I mean, you know, I may, may or may not, but, you know, July is what is looking good. Like late June, early July.
- [107:35]
Marty
He did the summer. He did the summer.
- [107:37]
Tom Luongo
Sure. It'll be 80 degrees out here. I'll be sweating a little bit and pontificating. It'll be fantastic. Sounds good. All right, Marty, you have a great weekend. Best of the sprog and the wife and all your children and all of that stuff. And we'll get. We'll talk soon.
- [107:50]
Marty
You too, brother. Peace and love, freaks. Okay, thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app and go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time,