Dire Straits feat. Josef Burton

Summary

TRASHFUTURE — “Dire Straits” feat. Josef Burton

Date: March 17, 2026
Guests: Josef Burton (writer, ex-diplomat)
Panel: Riley, Hussein, Nova, Milo (rotating hosts)

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Episode Overview

This episode dives into the surreal state of global politics and capitalism, driven by escalating conflicts in the Middle East, bizarre startup culture, and the increasingly delusional ambitions of Western elites. The panel is joined by returning guest Josef Burton, tackling Israel’s latest defense-tech fantasies (from railguns-to-the-moon to canal-digging by nuclear bombs) and the collapse of American soft power amid ongoing war with Iran. The conversation is laced with biting satire, UK-centric asides, and a bleak recognition that old myths, from imperial exceptionalism to Dubai’s tax haven allure, are crashing headfirst into geopolitical reality.

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1. Absurd Startup Culture: Israel’s Moon Railgun

00:16–17:31

Key Points:

• The show opens with banter about “how many layers of Israel are you on?”, segueing into Israel’s defense-tech startup culture.
• Focus on the wildly ambitious (and underreported) Israeli startup “Moonshot”:
  • Concept: A maglev railgun to launch payloads into orbit—think “railgun to space.”
  • Founders: Led by Hilla Haddad Shmelnik (ex-Iron Dome, Arrow missile engineer) and a board stacked with ex-Israeli military engineers.
  • Purpose: Kinetic orbital launches for bulk materials, not people (“If you want to deliver your moon miners to the moon, they're gonna arrive as marinara” — Co-host, 05:34).

Quote:

• “Space exploration is getting more diverse and more complex...as any industry that’s evolving, there needs to be more than one mode of transportation.” – Host, citing Times of Israel [04:00]

Memorable Moments:

• Imagined future of being forced to mine the moon for Israel, compared to “fraud concocted by a czarist officer in the 1900s.” [04:22]
• “We're going to build a gun to shoot stuff at the moon.” — Host [06:28]
• “If you want to get all your tungsten ingots to the moon...” — Co-host [06:40]

02:57–07:32: Detailed breakdown of Moonshot’s claimed technology and its Israeli defense-industry roots.

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2. Securitization of the Moon & Geopolitical Escalation

09:34–17:31

Key Points:

• Israel’s ambitions to extend “security architecture” to the moon—paranoia about losing out to China/Iran.
• Strategic logic: Control of lunar resources equated to sovereignty (“participation is not about prestige, it's about preventing strategic marginalization”—Host quoting Jerusalem Post [12:28]).
• Jokes about anti-Semitic tropes (“Jewish space laser bullshit”) and the inanity of defense debates.

Quote:

• “The moon will become an extension of Earth’s security architecture.” – Host quoting Hilla Haddad Shmelnik [09:34]

Critical Satire:

• “What if the Israeli moon gun is throwing off the tides because they keep shooting gravel at it and now we’re getting flooded?” – Co-host [13:20]
• “All of these anti-Semitic conspiracy theories will probably not be helped by this endeavor.” — Guest 1 [13:28]

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3. American Megalomania: The Ben Gurion Canal & Wunderwaffe Fantasies

14:46–17:31

Key Points:

• Discussion of Newt Gingrich’s proposal: “Just nuke a canal through the Negev as an alternative to the Straits of Hormuz.”
• This proposal is linked to earlier Cold War “Project Plowshares” (peaceful nukes for civil engineering).
• The notion that contemporary American and Israeli leadership have mentally regressed to daydreaming impossible, disastrous mega-projects.

Quote:

• “When the belligerent parties to a conflict are doing April 1945 Wunderwaffe plans about like, secret moon guns and new channels…they’re usually winning.” — Josef Burton [15:15]

Segment Name:

• “The Great Ideas Segment: The Brilliant Plans” — Host sums up this era as ‘politics in search of impossibilities’ [17:31]

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4. The Iran War: Delusional Empire, Stalled Power

17:53–47:43

Key Points:

• Response to President Trump’s (unhinged) “truths” about quickly defeating Iran and keeping the Hormuz Strait open (19:21).
  • Reality: Iran smartly calibrates closure, targeting only “enemy” shipping, not a “blanket closure.” [22:49]
  • U.S. allies, led by Japan and the UK, are publicly reluctant—to the point of non-participation—in American coalition requests.

Quotes:

• “Iran is not closing the straits; they’re putting straits blanket closure as like an escalatory step.” — Josef Burton [22:49]

• “You're forced into a chess game where you can't just eat pieces. It's just sort of this, this mess.” — Co-host [23:43]

• The “disconnect between U.S.-Israeli operational achievements and the disastrous fallout for the global economy and broader U.S. national security interests.” — Host, quoting Brookings [26:25]

• The U.S. administration’s magical thinking:

  • “If Iran thinks they're going to get President Trump to back down because they're going to make our economy weak, they just don't understand economics.” — Kevin Hassett [26:56]

• Iranian response is both strategic and information-savvy. High-ground in propaganda, resilient in the face of U.S./Israeli escalation.

Notable Moment:

• Elliptical discussion about how the “wrong podcasters” have seized power—satirical nod to the blurring lines between infotainment and U.S. decision-making [30:10].

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5. American & Israeli Delusions, Propaganda, and Recursion

33:02–50:50

Key Points:

• Analysis of how decades of elaborate U.S. war-planning—without serious political direction—enabled impulsive decisions.
• The U.S. now finds itself ideologically committed to an unwinnable policy: its purpose drifts, caught between supporting Israel and avoiding catastrophic blowback (e.g., global economic collapse).
• Recursive logic: funding opposition groups, believing one’s own hype, lacking off-ramps, relying on failed “insider resistance.”
• Iran, meanwhile, holds real strategic leverage—can close Hormuz to adversaries, hit U.S. bases, outlast and outmaneuver.

Quotes:

• “If you build the tool, they're going to use the tool… You know, I invented the Torment nexus as a contingency plan.” — Josef Burton [33:02]
• “The delusion was that this would be easy and it would all just work out...nobody even bothered to create an ideological superstructure for this.” — Josef Burton [44:40]

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6. Collapse of Expat Fantasies: Dubai Unraveling

51:03–63:24

Key Points:

• Gulf war reaches Dubai, shattering the city’s image as a safe haven for Western expats and non-dom tax exiles.
• Britain's wealthy elite scramble to avoid UK tax liability as Dubai is hit by drone strikes.
• Stories of British/Dubai expats, including teachers and businesspeople, reeling from the illusion that the city is immune to violence—a metaphor for broader Western exceptionalism cracking under duress.

Quotes:

• “If you exceed those [non-dom] days, you’re on the hook for a lot of money. Cool, that’s my days, no flexibility there. Can’t come back to the UK until the end of the tax year, which is great—until your port cochere starts getting blown up by drones.” — Co-host [52:39]

• “Wait, wait, my status here was temporary? Even though I am higher than several rungs, I still need an exit visa? Like, this is all the same thing—Western exceptionalism is taking just a huge punch to the jaw right now.” — Josef Burton [58:27]

Memorable Moment:

• “Getting shocked out of the Matrix by Iranian Morpheus.” — Co-host [60:17]

• End with stories of Pakistani and Nepali expats who, lacking elite protections, are simply planning to leave, foreseeing that “Dubai is finished.” [61:07]

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7. Conclusions & Overarching Themes

63:24–end

• The Western order is being de-masked, exposed by its own contradictions—in everything from startup moonshots to geopolitics to rich people's tax avoidance to the collapse of imperial comfort zones.
• The episode closes with the recognition that reality, long deferred, is finally intruding and making life profoundly uncomfortable for the people (and countries) who always believed they were untouchable.

Quote:

• “A pattern we have observed: the oafs have become the overseers ... all the sensible stuff is ruled out.” – Host [46:11, paraphrased]

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Notable Quotes (with Speaker Attribution and Timestamps)

• “We're gonna use a gun to shoot the moon with stuff that we want.” — Host [03:45]
• “If you want to deliver, like, your moon miners to the moon, they're going to arrive as, like, marinara.” — Co-host [05:34]
• “It's as best symbolized by what we're going to talk about in the rest of the episode, which is wanting to get off Mr. Larajani's wild ride.” — Co-host [17:53]
• “As much as I laugh at the idea…China does have one ship in the Hormuz Strait…just there sucking up everyone’s data.” — Co-host [19:51]
• “The ideal Iranian endgame is a situation where certain countries have the ability to just, no problem, go through Hormuz, and everyone else gets immediately blasted into pieces.” — Josef Burton [23:56]
• “If you build the tool, they’re going to use the tool…you know, I invented the Torment Nexus as a contingency plan.” — Josef Burton [33:02]
• “It is just a world where…US exceptionalism is taking just a huge punch to the jaw right now. And this is actually the psychic shock of that.” — Josef Burton [58:27]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:16 — 03:45: Opening banter, Moonshot startup intro
• 04:22 — 07:32: Moonshot tech and Israeli militarism
• 09:34 — 13:55: Securitizing the Moon, Israel’s lunar ambitions
• 14:46 — 17:31: Newt Gingrich, nuclear canal plans, Great Ideas segment
• 19:21 — 26:25: Trump, Iran, the Hormuz Strait, military delusions
• 33:02 — 36:45: US-Kremlinology, recursive strategies, infowar
• 50:57 — 63:24: Dubai in crisis, expat disillusionment, unraveling Western privilege

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Tone & Language

The show maintains its signature sardonic, irreverent tone, interlacing serious geopolitical analysis with deadpan humor and running gags. The hosts and guest joyfully deconstruct grandiose defense plans, Wall Street Journal think-tank musings, and the plight of tax-dodging British expats, all while subtly delivering a critique of the contradictions inherent in late capitalism and Western foreign policy.

Throughout, there’s a persistent theme: delusion is no longer a tenable strategy—neither for states nor for the privileged individuals who depended upon the old world order. Reality, no matter how hard one tries to meme it away, asserts itself in the end.

Transcript

[Host]

I want to start out with a question to everyone here. It's Nova, it's Hussein, it's Riley, it's Joseph Burton. Returning champion.

[Co-host]

Returning champion and heroic last second guest as well.

[Host]

That's right. How many layers of Israel are you all on and can you compare to the startup I'm going to start us off with before we get into the news?

[Guest 1]

Yeah, I'm like a nice like eaten. Is it eaten mess.

[Co-host]

The ones with lots of. Lots of layers.

[Guest 1]

Trifle. Like. Like a four or five layer trifle.

[Co-host]

I don't know how many layers of Israel I'm on. I like to think I keep that number relatively low. But like I do own two pairs of white jeans so it's never zero.

[Guest 1]

What I will say is that like am I in a very Israel time in my life? Only in the sense that like lots of people are mad at me.

[Co-host]

It's. You're only at a very Israeli time in your life if lots of people are mad at you because of shit that you are doing.

[Guest 1]

Yeah, that's. That's best. Right?

[Host]

Joseph, how many layers of Israel are you on right now? Because I'm about to give you a startup that's going to be. It will obliterate that number.

[Joseph Burton]

So you know, pretty, pretty low. We like to keep Israel levels. Pretty, pretty low. Kind of at a background level where I am. But I, I don't want to give it away but given my. I'm on a different level of. As a. Speaking as a former Smithsonian Air and Space Museum volunteer, I on some completely other levels with this one.

[Co-host]

Oh yeah. Okay.

[Host]

This is a startup called Moonshot. They're too secretive to have a public facing website.

[Co-host]

Yeah. For security reasons, Israel has to occupy part of the moon. Gotcha. Sure.

[Host]

Oh, oh, you. You read ahead.

[Joseph Burton]

You.

[Co-host]

No, no, this is. I can't keep doing. I don't read ahead. I just say the worst thing and it always happens.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

We found this ancient coin in this new tranquility. It proves that the moon has always been Israel.

[Co-host]

Jesus.

[Host]

We're using our new. Our new moonshot technology to send Burger slap up there. It's going to be the first restaurant

[Joseph Burton]

on spacesuit pants are already white.

[Co-host]

I've always thought that what the valor Marinaras needed was a Jabotinsky street upon which there could be a restaurant named Pizza.

[Joseph Burton]

Wow.

[Host]

Now Joseph, I actually have sent this to Nova. Hussein have not seen this. So this is a company that they've been written about in press and by their investors. This is a. Apparently this is usual for Israeli Defense Tech startups, they like press first and then they have like a website. This is the post from Angular Ventures on the company so not spherical basically that they heard from this entrepreneur, showed them this slide deck and I'm quoting here, for a company he was building called Moonshot, the idea sounded completely crazy at the time. November, could you please switch hats into. Well there's your problem.

[Co-host]

Just for a moment. Okay, sure. I'm putting on the hard hat.

[Host]

Uh huh. An electromagnetics space launch system designed to deliver payloads to orbit at radically reduced costs. Effectively a maglev train to space via a railgun.

[Co-host]

Listen, you don't ever want to be like, the reason this doesn't exist is because nobody's done it this way and nobody does it this way for a reason. Right. Because that I guess would sort of buy you from any innovation whatsoever. But there's a reason nobody else is trying to do this, you know? Yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

Israel killed the one guy who got closest to doing this.

[Co-host]

Picking a note up from that guy's inventory, leaving it in store storage for like 30 years. And now they're like, oh, huh. Moon, moon, moon gun. Gotcha. Sure.

[Host]

We're gonna use a gun to shoot the moon with stuff that we want. So listed as co founder was a woman called Hilla Haddad Shelnik. So she's actually how I found this, which we'll go into later. Hila is a power spouse aerospace engineer who previously held senior civilian government roles in Israel where she oversaw major components of the development of the Iron Dome and Arrow missile systems. The board also contains like former chief engineers for projects called like David Sl. So who's who of ex army scientists. This is from the times of Israel. Space exploration is getting more diverse and more complex than what we want to do involving science, manufacturing and mining. And as any industry that's evolving, there needs to be more than one mode of transportation.

[Co-host]

If you told me, if you gave me a vision of the future in which you are forced to work, having been shot into space, you are forced to work on an Israeli moon mine, I would say that that was a fraud concocted by a czarist officer in sort of like the 1900s.

[Host]

Well, there's a couple ways to look at this. There's the this is a ridiculous idea way to look at it.

[Co-host]

There's no shortage of like ridiculous space ideas for sure. But this is getting up there.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, it's very Spin launch coded like the.

[Host]

It's the same thing. It's a very similar thing to Spin Launch, but instead of having A centrifugal force. They've said, well, we love the Desert Eagle. How can we apply the principle of the Desert Eagle to a space launch? So they say. The concept of a kinetic spacecraft launch has existed since the days of Jules Verne. But now with new technologies, renewable energy and computing power make kinetic launch affordable and achievable to accomplish. So basically, this hardened capsule levitates inside a tube, is propelled by a series of coils.

[Co-host]

Quick question. How, how, how hardened? And can you put anything in it that isn't also hardened?

[Host]

Great question. No, okay.

[Co-host]

Because what you're describing there is like a bullet, functionally, which is. Yes, it's great if you want to, like, you know, show the moon what's up. Right. And get it not to fuck with you anymore. But, like, if you want to deliver, like, your moon miners to the moon, they're going to arrive as, like, marinara. They're going to arrive as, like, some of the ingredients from pizza.

[Joseph Burton]

Wow.

[Host]

Yeah. Well, I mean, pretty good, but, yeah. It exits the tube at speeds of 8km a second.

[Joseph Burton]

How long is the tube?

[Host]

They don't say. I assume probably entertainingly long, I imagine. Probably pretty funny. Buying.

[Co-host]

Buying the sight of the line, you know?

[Host]

Yeah, look, they're not using it. What if the line was the tube and it was like the Israeli space

[Co-host]

gun, just sort of as a country being like, I wonder if these guys are kind of losing track of reality of it and falling to kind of megalomaniacal ambitions. And they're like, we're going to build a gun to shoot stuff at the moon.

[Host]

Yeah, essentially, yes. And what they. They do say, to be fair, this is not for humans. But also, like, this isn't for machinery really or anything you don't want crushed.

[Co-host]

This is a great way of moving. Like, I don't know if you want to get all of your tungsten ingots to the moon.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah.

[Host]

For whatever. Basically, this is saying whenever someone quite reasonably says, hey, you can't really build a civilization on the moon because there's no oxygen or stuff up there. If they say, okay, instead of saying, all right, well, yeah, that's probably right. That's a good point. We can't build a civilization on the moon. We should focus on making the one on Earth habitable. If instead your response to that is, no, no, no, we can use bulk transportation to the moon with a rail gu.

[Co-host]

You go up on the moon and stay there while we shoot supplies at you?

[Host]

Essentially, yes, that's correct. So instead of rocket boosters burning vast amounts of fuel. The energy comes from electricity, which accelerates through the coils. A kinetic launch increases payload capacity by 45% versus a chemical launch because you get rid of the need for heavy fuel tanks.

[Co-host]

Sure, yeah.

[Host]

They say in Israel we have the talent and know how from the defense industry to do it faster and cheaper. We're going to have a little assessment of how the defense industry is going in a, in a little few minutes,

[Co-host]

I guess, I guess, I guess the thing is, right, I've gone in early on, like, this will not work. Right. And I may be wrong about this. Right. I'm not an engineer, but I kind of feel like the only thing worse than it not working, is it working. Because then you have to contend with just any kind of space flight. Just like, oh, by the way, the Israelis are like sort of popping off with the space gun again.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, you want to fly up here too? And there's suddenly like a shipment of gravel that they're shipping to the moon,

[Host]

which is the only thing you could

[Joseph Burton]

do with this space gun.

[Co-host]

I wasn't expecting the ISS to get taken out like this, let's say that.

[Host]

So they say. But this is how I found it, actually. I was looking up.

[Co-host]

You were looking up the ISS joke and you were looking up plausible ways for it to be destroyed and Israeli gravel gun somehow.

[Host]

Yeah, like the, the planet sized version of like a salt bag that goes in a shotgun. Yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

Oh my God.

[Co-host]

It's the dead.

[Joseph Burton]

It's the Dead sea salt people. They're. They're behind this. It's the Dead Sea mall kiosk. They're just like, you need more dead sea salt products on the moon. And we've developed a mass driver that can only fire dead sea salt products up there.

[Host]

So I, I found, I found this article and then I, like from the article, I was like digging around for information on the company. The article I found I had to do a double. Because basically what happened is I got sent this study on the lunar economy from one of these PR people who does not understand the show at all. And he's like, hey, I've got a partner at PwC who'd be great on your show. And it's like, I'm sure you do. He's written this thing about the Lun economy. And I was like, all right, let's look into it. I was like, I wonder if Israel's done anything about this because we got a very like Middle east focused episode today. And I found this article in the Jerusalem Post by Hilla Haddad Shmelnik and this is where Nova. I want to go back to what you said at the beginning. Quote, Israel's role in lunar infrastructure could define space power in the future. The moon will become an extension of Earth's security architecture.

[Co-host]

I'm spooling up in my head the Brianna Wu tweets that the moon is one of the most strategically valuable locations in the solar system because rocks dropped from it could hit with the power of dozens of nuclear bombs.

[Joseph Burton]

So true.

[Co-host]

I do wonder whether, you know, that tweet is in the minds of people in the one country where she's still respected, but no, I just. Okay, sure. Cool. We're going to, we're going to securicize the moon. Why not? We've already securitized everything else, so. Yeah, by sort of by default we have to.

[Host]

Yeah, like what else? What are you going to do? Stop just securitizing things? No. Yeah, come on. So this is, this. I'll read a little bit from this, then we'll go on to our main, our main topic. I just, you know, sometimes you see an article that's like, Israel needs to make the moon into a DMZ and you're like, well, I have to.

[Co-host]

Yeah, of course.

[Host]

I'm sort of contractually complicated.

[Co-host]

It's always nice to know how and why your grandkids are going to be doing total moon warfare.

[Host]

So for decades, the moon was treated as a silent geological museum, a relic of the Cold War space race.

[Co-host]

For decades, legally space was treated as a non military sort of thing. But that was always kind of illusory and now we're dropping the present.

[Joseph Burton]

So, yeah, for per diem purposes, the US government considers the moon to be located in southern Florida, as does the Catholic Church. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's the Archdiocese of Florida. So if you're, if you're filing per diem for a moon trip, it is, it's like Orlando rates. But the moon is Norland. No longer southern Florida. The moon is now Israel.

[Co-host]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's so fucked up that Israel is proposing to annex part of the Archdiocese of Orlando.

[Host]

But you know what? They're going to be fine to do it. She goes on. That era is over. What was once symbolic is rapidly becoming strategic infrastructure. This is not science fiction, it is logistics. And then she goes into what the actual value proposition is. The ability to produce fuel, oxygen and energy directly on the lunar surface, reduces dependence on earth based supply chains in space. Water becomes fuel, oxygen becomes life support, and energy becomes sovereignty. This was AI Shit, yeah.

[Co-host]

I love those pull quotes they use when you research a technology in Alpha Centauri.

[Host]

They say nations that master these capabilities will shape the rules of the CIS lunar domain. Those that do not will operate within frameworks they did not design. So basically there's like, look, with the moon gun, we're going to be able to enable Israel and its allies to get a head start on building a permanent moon base.

[Guest 1]

But.

[Co-host]

But, but why, But.

[Host]

Oh, thank you, November. That's a great question. China might.

[Co-host]

But why though? I accept the whole sort of Chinese moon landing proposition. There's a lot of prestige in it, right? And I don't know, maybe some fucking helium or something. I'm not. All I know is I've seen for all mankind. Right? But like, why go in on this in the first place? Like there's. I just. What are you afraid of losing out on here?

[Host]

Ah, thank you. This article does in fact answer the question. The moon is no longer a distant aspiration. It is an emerging layer of global infrastructure. Participation is not about prestige. It is about preventing strategic marginal marginalization in the next arena of power. So the issue is really Israel has to beat Iran to the moon so that there isn't moon.

[Co-host]

Iran, it seems, doing a kind of like iron sky thing where they put Iran to. On the dark side of the moon.

[Guest 1]

I mean, this also just sort of feels. This feels incredibly low effort. Just also in the sense that like, I feel like if you're an Islamic country, the thing that you probably wouldn't mess around with is the moon.

[Co-host]

Yeah, it's already exploded once before.

[Guest 1]

Well, that's right. Yeah. There are probably lots of reasons why you'd look at the moon and be like, yeah, probably shouldn't tamper with that too much. Also, the moon seems to be important for certain things here on Earth. Like I've heard that from like various woke people, but I imagine we can ignore that, right?

[Co-host]

Oh the fuck. The Israeli moon gun is throwing off the tides because they keep shooting gravel at it and now we're getting flooded.

[Guest 1]

I mean, look, I will also sort of say that like the amount of anti Semitic conspiracy theories will probably not be helped by this endeavor.

[Co-host]

I remember the Jewish space laser bullshit.

[Guest 1]

Maybe someone heard it and was just like, hey, that's actually kind of cool and we should do it just like,

[Co-host]

yeah, why don't we have one of those? And lasers are off the table so it's some kind of like moon railgun.

[Guest 1]

And then you can have these inane debates where it's just like, should Israel build a space laser where if you say no to that, you're called anti Semitic.

[Co-host]

Well, I mean, the real anti Semitic discourse is when they shoot the first gales up there.

[Host]

No, that has to be in moon London.

[Co-host]

Well, actually, the city of London considers the moon to be in Zone 4 for transport purposes.

[Host]

It's so expensive. You got to touch the little pink thing. Look, I wanted that before we go into again our main section. I want to conversely ask, how many layers of America are you on? Because if Israel is like, we built a Desert Eagle to shoot gravel at the moon in case anyone else tries to colonize it, we of course have Newt Gingrich saying, is he still alive? He's still alive. He's still like, is he still with his extreme, like, filtered and retouched? They're the most filtered and retouched couple in all of Italy.

[Co-host]

Okay, but she's an icon for that. Let's be clear. Calista Gingrich in this house, Calista Gingrich is a hero.

[Host]

Newt Gingrich has, of course, also said, Joseph, I don't know if you've seen this. Instead of fighting over a 21 mile wide bottleneck, forever referring to the Straits of Hormuz, let's just cut a new channel flowing through friendly territory. A dozen thermonuclear detonations and you've got a waterway wider than the Panama Canal, deeper than the Suez, and safe from Iranian attacks. So when do you think, Joseph, Iran will be surrendering? Because they realize that the Straits moves can be just bypassed by detonating approximately 12 nuclear bombs in a mountain range in several friendly countries.

[Joseph Burton]

When the belligerent parties to a conflict are doing like April 1945, Wunderwaffe plans about like, secret moon guns and new channels. Three weeks into a war, they're usually winning.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

And I, I, you know, it's a sign that things are going great. It's, it's awesome when people start soft floating. The idea of setting off nukes. Got it pretty locked up. I think they're just doing donuts now.

[Co-host]

Something interesting about this. So this is an bold idea. It's called the Ben Gurion Canal. Right. And sort of Israeli thought, which. It sort of gives you an idea of the sort of level of Israeliness they're on on this one. But it was a US plan originally as part of, I think it was connected with Project Plowshares. Right. Like peaceful uses for atomic weapons. And the reason why nobody pursued it is because the Americans estimate in 1965 was that it would take them 520 nuclear detonations. And then you have the problem of, well, you have a bunch of craters that you then have to sort of like, form a canal by moving a lot of extremely irradiated earth. And the other downside of this, at least in the American conception at the time, is that the sort of Mediterranean end of this would be Gaza or, like, basically directly next to it. So this was sort of considered, this was shelved for, you know, 60 years. But we're back, I guess there's a

[Joseph Burton]

really long wild history of Americans surveying canals through the Negev. I mean, the first people tried to do, like, we're going to do Suez 2 in the 1880s, and it would have just been this, like, complete disaster with 15 locks going into the Dead Sea. And then Plowshares comes up and you have, like, the idea of resettling all Palestinians around the Qatara Depression that you turn into a, like, habitable area by nuking, basically, to brook. Not to brook, there's another part in Egypt, but there's actually a really weirdly long history of this project Plowshare stuff being kicked around in the Middle east, like, precisely for this reason. So I think Newt is just like, face tuned to within an inch of his life and going into some sort of like, you know, like dying man reverie about some briefing he must have saw in the 1970s.

[Host]

So I have to sum up the first segment of the show, which is I'm titling the great ideas segment, the brilliant plans.

[Co-host]

It's the same thing that we've been saying for years, right, which is these people, their politics has led them into a place where they're sort of left looking for things that we know are impossible, you know, things that are nonsensical because all of the sensible stuff is just like, yeah, we can't do it now, I guess.

[Host]

Yeah, well, we've ruled all of it out. We've extremely ruled it out.

[Co-host]

Yeah. I think this is as best symbolized by what we're going to talk about in the rest of the episode, which is wanting to get off Mr. Larajani's wild ride, right, of like. Like, we have, you know, Trump having announced that the US has won the war with Iran five or six times, and still they don't seem to agree.

[Host]

Well, let's get into it, right, because let's start, I think, with President Trump having truthed the following truth. And by the way, I love going on truth social because of the ads. Like, while I was looking for the exact Text of this one, I got an ad that said, gynecologist baffled. Simple stretch prevents bladder leakage.

[Co-host]

Watch. Listen, we don't like promoting the show on Truth Social, but you still gotta be on there. You know, it's. I have a real sort of like, I bought this before he went crazy kind of attitude towards it, but I

[Host]

made this account before Donald Trump.

[Co-host]

I'm on weird Truth Social. You know, I'm just kind of there for the jokes and occasionally I'll like retruth a couple of things. But like, I think it's cool that

[Host]

in like the early days it was like you could be friends with like Greg Gutfeld. I think that was like people like, it was really fun in 2021. Anyway, so this is what Donald Trump truth. Many countries, especially those who are affected by Iran's attempted closure of the Hormuz Strait. Would we say attempted. I think it's pretty close. Will be sending warships in conjunction with the United States of America to keep the strait open and safe. We've already destroyed 100% of the Iranian military's capability, but it's easy for them to send a drone or two, drop a mine, or deliver a close range missile somewhere along or in this waterway.

[Co-host]

Those are military capabilities then.

[Host]

But okay, well, I mean, those are like just guys.

[Co-host]

They're like the kind of like amuse bush of like military capabilities.

[Host]

Yeah, they're like, there's military capability, then there's just guys with like a limpet

[Co-host]

mine who by just such thing as society. There's just people, in fact, families.

[Host]

So hopefully China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK and others that are affected by this artificial constraint will send ships to the area. So the Hormuz Strait will no longer be a threat by a nation that has been totally decapitated.

[Co-host]

Okay, so here's the thing, right? As much as I laugh at the idea, China does have one ship in the hormones strait, well, kind of, kind of near it, which is just there floating around, sucking up everybody's data. They've got one of their intelligent ships just like just locking in on everything. So China is approximate, right? But like firmly on a sort of like, damn, that's crazy kind of role?

[Host]

Yeah, it's crazy that happened. Joseph, as a former diplomat, is it good diplomacy when what you do is you say to most of your ally vassals, hey, I'm going to take over Greenland. And then they're like, please don't take over Greenland. And then maybe some of them start doing military exercises in Greenland. And then you say, just kidding. Please, we have, we have accidentally closed the Hormuz Straits. Oil prices are now a jillion dollars a teaspoon. Please, can you forget about the Greenland stuff and come open the Hormuz Strait? Which, by the way, I don't think they could because one guy with a limpet mine on a speedboat can effectively close the Hormu Strait.

[Joseph Burton]

Right? Yeah, it's super great when you don't tell them you're doing the war and then you start the war and they're like, you need to come over to my war now, even though I almost did the war to you.

[Co-host]

And I'm just thinking about that list as well. So China, France, Japan, South Korea, the UK and others. So, you know, keeping optimistic, right? It's like inviting many, many more inviting people to like a house party on Facebook back in the day, you know. You know, Japan, by the way, Japan, despite being now, you know, prime ministered by Girl Hitler, has pretty firmly been like, no, we're not going to do that shit. And I'd like, Starmer also is like, I don't want to.

[Guest 1]

Well, Starmer's thing is interesting because he's not sort of said that he's unwilling. Like, I saw a list where there were sort of countries in like Europe and around the world that were just like, not participating, not participating. And then the UK was just like, not committing.

[Co-host]

We've got problems with commitments.

[Guest 1]

I think it's like the sort of ultimate Starmer response, which is just like, I don't want to do it, but also I'm gonna reject it in the most annoying way possible. That will make everyone mad because he is in a very Israel time of his life.

[Co-host]

I'm not gonna leave Trump on read, but I am gonna give him a thumbs up react and just piss off everyone.

[Guest 1]

No, like a sort of squiggly, squiggly mouth emoji. And so people are still pissed off with him despite the like. This is arguably the best thing he could do to stop his approval ratings from tanking even further than it already has.

[Host]

So let's first talk about this coalition of the unwilling, as I've seen it called in press. Right. So like, Iran has closed the Hormuz Strait. They are able to keep it closed with a relatively small force, as I pretty pointedly.

[Joseph Burton]

They haven't though. So Arachi is firmly on record saying that we have not made a blanket closure of the Strike Straits and that we are only going to target ships that are flagged for nations that are our enemies. Right. So a Turkish trip trans transited the straits by asking nicely. And I know there was an incident recently where a Chinese tanker sailed through just fine and then a Japanese ball carrier tried to sneak in behind it and immediately ate a shot head. So their, their whole thing is like, I'm not, I'm not closing the straits, like you might think that, but I'm, I'm actually not. They're putting straits blanket, straits closure as like an escalatory step, which I think people don't understand. But of course, Trump is just like, yeah, but they're closing the streets for us, so all of you need to like, get on it.

[Co-host]

It's like slicing the salami really thin to still have like some room for escalation there.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

But yeah, it's also like, still the thing of, like, no, we're still playing chess here. And now Donald Trump has actually been forced into a chess game where he can't just eat pieces. It's just sort of this, this mess.

[Joseph Burton]

And I think the ideal Iranian endgame is a situation where the certain countries have the ability to just, no problems whatsoever, go through Hormuz and everyone else gets immediately blasted into pieces. And then they can just go around to all the Gulf states and be like, well, what's it going to be? Is it going to be having the American air base or is it going to be exporting the commodity that is your whole economy that's not British guys with the worst hands ever doing crypto classes?

[Co-host]

And like, we got into this whole thing with all of that. There's a kind of baked in assumption that Iran is a kind of almost undisplaceable. Undisplaceable in a way that anyone actually wants to do. Sort of like power over the strait. Right. And Trump clearly, as we can tell from all the military and political leaks ahead of time, was warned of this extensively and went, nah, it'll be fine. Did it. And now is having to contend with the fact that everyone was telling him the truth. Truth.

[Host]

And

[Co-host]

I don't know that there was anything more predictable than the way this has worked out.

[Joseph Burton]

Oh, yeah, no. The funny thing is, and I think the core dynamic, if you're looking at the American side of this, is ask anyone who'd be in a position to know and they would tell you, this is exactly how it worked out. Yet it happened like we did it.

[Host]

So let's do a little bit of, let's do a little bit of American Kremlinology here. Right? We have.

[Co-host]

Because we have White House ballroomology.

[Host]

Yeah, let's do the that's east wings coming any day now. They're not just going to keep a little bit of Tyvek Home wrap flapping in the breeze over it. I'm going to scroll down a little bit, but I think we're sort of getting there quite well. I have a quote from a Wall Street Journal article, kind of a bombshell article from today about the internal American decision making processes that went into doing this. And I think it kind of encapsulates better than anything else how the American approach to managing its own awful empire has changed because America is now scrabbling for the kind of support it enjoyed in 2003 and crucially seems to actually need it in a way that it didn't anticipate it did. So I have two quotes here. Suzanne Maloney, an Iran specialist and foreign policy vice president at the Brookings Institute. So this is the Brookings. That is like on the, on one side here.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

But like the guys who still have to like, live in reality a bit.

[Host]

Yeah, like, like you want to do evil effectively, so you have to live in reality.

[Co-host]

Like, and to be clear, right. The level that I'm talking about is, you know, greeted in Iraq as live races, kind of living in reality. That's, that's the kind of ceiling on how grounded we're getting. And this is too much for them.

[Host]

Yeah. So they say there's a striking disconnect between the US And Israeli operational achievements and the disastrous fallout for the global economy and broader US national security interests. The White House can sell Iran's significantly significant military nuclear losses, eviction. But if it comes at the cost of a major recession, it won't mean much for Republicans in the midterms. And the Iranians are likely to outlast the U.S. whereas Kevin Hassett, director of the White House's National Economic Council, said the administration already factored all this energy and economic disruption into their planned decision to attack Iran, saying.

[Co-host]

Sure you did.

[Host]

If Iran thinks they're going to get President Trump to back down because they're going to make our economy weak, they just don't understand economics. He said on Fox and Friends.

[Co-host]

Yeah, it's treat that as like going to Trump as ever. But like, I just, just, it's like if Iran thinks that the things that they can do materially will affect us. Well, have they considered our meme warfare?

[Host]

Yeah, well, yeah. Have they considered that we're epic and we post like edits, which by the way, Iran invented doing that. Hezbollah has been doing that for like a decade.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, they've got the. They've already got the hardest video editor, like, quote pools. I mean, you. You had like.

[Host]

I mean.

[Joseph Burton]

And they're actually delivering hard lines. Like when Arakchi was just like, you know, the CNN guy was like, aren't you scared of a land invasion? He's like, no, we're waiting for. For them. Yeah, come on.

[Guest 1]

Obviously, I'm not a fan of AI animations, but what I will say is that the Iranians are really sick. Like, they're so good. I saw a few just show up on my feed. I won't say who sent them just for security reasons, but I was watching a few of them and I was just like, as far as the AI kind of rendering of Trump and the sort of. And you can tell that they come from a better cinematic culture. The way in which shots are framed.

[Co-host]

Watching hours of Jafar Panay cement in order to make ki propaganda.

[Joseph Burton]

This is a real thing.

[Guest 1]

Thank you for making me not feel like I'm going insane because I've seen the American ones and it's very like, what if you made the worst pastiche of Top Gun and Bloodsport and the various other five films that Trump watches on repeat with just the fight scenes versus this very sort of well made or at least kind of artistically considered AI rendering which echoes not just contemporary Iranian cinema, but also kind of harks back to the religious mythology that obviously underpins a lot of the Iranian strategy are like, at this current moment anyway. And so as a reflection of where the sort of various ideological positions, I do have to say that via AI, the AI animations, rather, the Iranians do go very hard now. Do I wish that they had hired a few of my animator friends who would have done a good job?

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Guest 1]

I feel like someone like Matti could have done like a pretty good. You know, they could have contributed more. Right. But, you know, but we'll work with what you've got, you know, fair play to them. They've done like a pretty decent rendering.

[Joseph Burton]

It is like, it's not like there's an actual logistics pipeline. If you're an Iranian film school and you are just like, I don't want to. No, seriously, if you are like, I don't want to, like, eventually go into exile because my, like, very, like, pensive, gorgeously framed film is going to get censored. You could just do your mandatory military service in the film unit of the irgc. And that's where they got the guy who probably did the AI LEGO generated video of Satan in Epstein's Temple giving Trump the war plans. And then a LEGO IRGC shoots LEGO missiles at the LEGO US Embassy in Saudi Arabia.

[Host]

So I want to talk, though, a little bit about. We're going to get to that, actually, the LEGO version and the real version. But I wanted to talk to, sort of thinking back about, like, these, sort of the Brookings Institution view versus, like, the National Economic Trump Appointee Council, Trump appointee view that there are just these. It appears that, yeah, there's this. This clique of TV hosts and podcasters have essentially seized power. The wrong kind of podcaster seized power.

[Joseph Burton]

It would be.

[Co-host]

It would be pretty bad if we seized power as well. Let's be clear.

[Host]

I think we'd have fun with it for a while, probably more than they're

[Co-host]

having fun with it. It's just that the fun that they're having is evil. We would ideally have, like, fun that is not evil, but, like, it would still be pretty disastrous, I think. Yeah.

[Host]

Okay, fair enough. Yeah, the. The Alden boots for every citizen plan has been very interesting, but I hate

[Co-host]

drinking my mandatory glass of dessert wine.

[Host]

It's giving me diet. I have diabetes. Shut up and drink the dessert wine. I want to talk about, like, the. The balance of power inside the US State because it seems like more than anything on the ground, the US Is just sort of ideologically committed now to continue just grinding away at something that is pretty difficult to shift, I guess. What are the forces inside the US State that are pushing this way and that?

[Joseph Burton]

I would have to say the forces that are the biggest within the US State are the ones that got us to this point, which is the fact that. That the military has been developing these extremely intricate war plans for decades. And I think eventually it got to a point where it was just kind of easier to push the button on that because nobody else knew what they were doing. Like, there isn't. I don't really think right now there's a coherent vision about what is happening absent the kind of tactical operational planning that CENTCOM has done, which is at this point, three, four weeks in, probably winding out their war plans that end with some sort of notional political solution that simply does not exist. I think that there was kind of a perfect storm of people who wanted this, be that, and there's a perfect storm of people who wanted this. And I also think that Venezuela legitimately broke everyone's brains. You know, it was kind of like how the fall of France worked out great, and then basically no one could tell Hitler anything for, like, three years because he was like, who are you telling me that worked so great that

[Co-host]

one time, all of the sort of like Russian hybrid stuff that talked Putin into Ukraine as well? Or it's like, yeah, we can just, we can just fuck around with these people and there are no conscious consequences.

[Joseph Burton]

It's a fake country. They won't fight. Like, they start believing your, you know, your own kind of infowar stuff starts leaking back on you or is used by people inside the administration to lobby Trump specifically. And the whole time they are sent comments saying, like, well, you shouldn't do this. I'm against this. However, we have this giant pre, like, joint war plan with Israel that we could just push the button on and it could start happening right now.

[Host]

Please don't, though. But don't, you know, which is, which

[Joseph Burton]

is the kind of fallacy. The thing I'm constantly on about is the fallacy of like insider resistance or being a civil servant functionary or having a kind of functional role in formal foreign policy is, you know, if you build the tool, they're going to use the tool. And there's a kind of professional culture of, no, we build the tool and then say, Mr. President, sir, please don't do it. You know, I invented the Torment nexus as a contingency plan. Yeah.

[Host]

And we can ask, right. Like, because we talk about a political settlement and these things are intimately connected as to what Trump is being told, how the machinery of empire is being used, who it's being wielded by, for what purpose. The fact that they don't really seem to know what their purpose is, it changes. The last several weeks has shown that the, the American, the Israeli purpose has been the same the whole time, which is to make Iran an uninhabitable series of statelets, maybe one of which can become the new Dubai. I don't know where there is no longer an Iran at all. Not even a friendly Iran will do. But the US Seems to be their goal, seems to be changing all the time. I think partly it's actually because they believe their own infowar, as you say, Joseph, that's Israel is the only democracy in the region. We must support Israel whatever it wants to do, et cetera, et cetera. That's like they've started believing their own

[Joseph Burton]

propaganda about it, their own propaganda, and is also sort of like an accursed erawan smoothie of every reason for war in the past 25 years all blended up together. This will reshape the Middle east to our advantage. This will make me look like a hero. Mr. President, my country yearns for freedom. Every kind of vortex converges, emerged and, and also just the fact of the U. S. Presence in the region needing to justify itself. It's like, well, we, you know, we have to attack Iran to defend our bases in Bahrain and Qatar. Why do we have the bases in Bahrain and Qatar to get ready to attack Iran? Israel's our ally because they're our ally. What do they do for us? Let's not ask that. You know, we fund the, you know, Iranian diaspora opposition groups that in turn then lobby the US Government to take certain policy actions. So it's like I'm, I'm really, really. I, I don't want to say fascinated, but there's sort of this like this weighty kind of disgust about just the sheer recursiveness of American politics right now. Because in, in the White House there's just kind of the same thing circling around and around. And very importantly, with the role the United States plays in the world, this is the first time that the decision maker, the person to end that loop, to exit it is not in Washington. Like you are done when Lara Johnny says you are done. Right. The, the strategic calculus is, is completely in Iranian hands at this point.

[Host]

Yeah. And I mean, if you want to talk about what Iran is doing with that strategic calculus is that they are in fact changing the dynamics of the politics in the Middle East. There have been a series of attacks in Iraq, including what I believe to be the first successful use of a first person view drone to strike at American forces.

[Co-host]

Nothing, nothing too dramatic yet. If you watch the video, the guy's kind of like, you know, mooching around looking for something interesting to bomb.

[Joseph Burton]

Crashes it into a door at the end.

[Co-host]

Yeah, yeah, Just sort of settles for like a half hangar door, but still,

[Host]

please have fuel, please have fuel, please have fuel.

[Joseph Burton]

IEDs can fly now, right? I mean, if you're going to go into war in the Middle East, IEDs can fly and they can see heat and they can hunt you.

[Co-host]

But also, if you're thinking about the sort of like years we've had now of like snuff footage that, you know, John Fetterman can like jerk himself into another stroke with of like sort of FPV drones flying into people or like dropping grenades on people, I don't know how it's gonna go down when people see Americans on the other end of those, which will happen.

[Joseph Burton]

Like there's, there's a coming verdict with like the American spectacle of violence or I think it first of all, like, what's what's very interesting about the non AI generated, like Wii, Wii Sports intro footage that the Pentagon is releasing. It's actually very interesting for operational regions. It's mostly just footage of them, like, blowing up American equipment from the 70s. Like the most spectacular.

[Co-host]

God damn it.

[Joseph Burton]

Like, don't make me cry, Nova. Like, I. Oh, God, I saw an amazing post. There's an Iranian exile organization that is the Imperial Iranian Air Force Aviation Heritage association that's based out of a strip mall in Southern California, and they're actually begging Trump to not blow up the last F4 Phantoms and F14s.

[Co-host]

That's the one. That's the one group we should be supporting.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, the one that's. These are the Imperial Iran nostalgia diaspora orgs that I support. But no, but they're not, they're not interested in producing, you know, spectacular military images. You know, they, they sunk that Iranian frigate off Sri Lanka, which is, had actually really serious repercussions inside Indian foreign policy, but they're not producing a coherent visual spectacle. I also think that Americans are much more deadened to violence. Like, I, to be honest, like the idea of a Marine being hunted by an fpv, it would be shocking. But then I also think about Charlie Kirk and how like, even the Trump supporters are kind of like. And I do think in the next two weeks there's going to be a decision. Point taken. Because the war plans are out of steam. Everything's out of steam. I think one of the options is what I am personally referring to as Zoomer Gallipoli, which would be God. Okay, like, basically some, you know, they've got the Tripoli amphibious group that's going to enter the Gulf and they're either going to try for medium dumb option of occupying Khark island and then getting, you know, we will see the video of Braden dying Ukraine style to an FPV and or landing to street to clear the Strait of Hormuz, which will be like, like, they're all sort of

[Co-host]

like, have me 100 kilometers of like

[Joseph Burton]

cliff faces, sheer mountains.

[Co-host]

Yeah, crazy, crazy stuff. I, I mean, okay, sure. I, I mean, we're gonna get to see like alarmingly high definition video of a guy who like has a Zinn in getting exploded either way.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, it's, it's, it's grim. But I also don't know. That's the thing is there's not even an. I guess what I'm trying to say is there's not really an appreciable bloodlust going on with this. It's kind of like doing it to do it. And so that peak headset, Pete Hegseth can say things that he thinks sound badass that actually have very serious international

[Co-host]

law implications so much.

[Host]

I was actually thinking about this. Right. Because if you wanted to again, comparing someone as more serious and goal oriented in their pursuit of fascism than Pete Hegseth isn't saying they're better than Pete Hegseth. It's merely identifying that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney understood the importance even though their ideology is.

[Co-host]

You say that, you say that. I've seen some kind of post hoc valorization of them as like, oh, at least those guys knew what they were doing. I think back to the Rumsfeld memos that were like what's going on with Iraq? I don't think about Iran lately come back to me with options on this. So no, they didn't know. But there was still enough kind of grounding in reality around them. Right. So there's a version of a US war with Iran that runs to those kind of two week strike plans. Right. In the same way that there was a version of the war with Iraq that sort of of had some kind of military possibility to it. Right. And then it sort of changed into what it became sort of slowly enough that you could sort of plan for that too. This is already sort of wildly out of scope for anything. Yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

And I think there's a difference in kind of signified as signifier where Rumsfeld and all the like Bremer and the completely incompetent figures behind the Iraq war, their vision of what it was they were doing. And by vision I don't mean political vision. I mean self conception is like I'm going to be in a room with the oil guys. I'm going be shaking hands with shakes. I'm going to like have local knowledge. And obviously they were getting conned and fleeced at every turn. Pete Hegass vision doesn't go beyond the spectacle of him making knife hands.

[Co-host]

Pete Hexess's vision very blurry is, is it's very blurry.

[Joseph Burton]

And then it's like he's looking at himself through social media being like, we got to get like we got to get less, you know, we're not woke anymore. And like actually Iran has a problem. Have you thought about that?

[Host]

Or specifically the no quarter thing, which

[Joseph Burton]

is making the no quarter thing.

[Host]

Right. He, he hears no quarter quarter is like, I don't know, maybe something that gladiator from gladiator would say. Right.

[Co-host]

It's very High school football coach to me.

[Host]

Yeah, high school football coach who lives in his car saying no quarter right

[Joseph Burton]

before you are going to introduce American ground troops into the theater is, you know, someone's, someone's going to pay for that. It's not going to be P. Texas,

[Host]

but there is, I'd say, this ability to strike at American military infrastructure in the region that includes not just like doorways in bases, but that includes. Well, I mean it includes a lot of kit, it includes a lot of

[Co-host]

radar installations it's rumbling on. I mean, like the thing is, right when we first started talking about this, I sort of said that it would be unwise to get into the whole intercepted magazine depth stuff which everyone else was doing because we wouldn't know anything until basically now, right. And what we've learned is, is you can't stop Iran or some of its proxies from hitting stuff. And they might get better at that, they might get worse, but so long as there's no off ramp to this, it seems like they really can just keep doing that more or less indefinitely, which is something that the Gulf states and Israel cannot sustain. And this was the sort of, really interesting thing is I think if you wanted to talk about a sort of end to this that was forced on the US, you need to think about what, where the US's interests start to diverge from, particularly Israel's, right? And you see the sort of maximalist Israeli kind of goals of like, oh, we want to fucking invade Lebanon and occupy it, up to the litany, we want to start firing gravel at the moon, whatever it is. And I think the most interesting thing about all of this has been leaks in general. And the thing that struck me was a leak that came from the us, so saying Israel is fudging its numbers on interception rate, which everyone knew but is out there now, and also is running out of interceptors. And that's not something that the Israelis would ever expect the Americans to sort of like part the veil on, you know, and so I don't know where that leads, but certainly we're in a sort of space of confrontation there.

[Joseph Burton]

I mean it is interesting because the only comparable times this has happened is like high Cold War nuclear crisis, right? Except instead of nucle war, this whole idea of escalation ladders and off ramps and our, you know, what is a status quo post bellum look like instead of a nuclear bomb. Like the nuclear bomb is just the global petroleum economy, which everyone knows is like probably already hosed and it is going to be getting worse. And the leaking, the dissatisfaction, the divergence, that's all happening. But what's very interesting is this wave of internal kind of dissent and I told you so comes out of this completely over determined institution. Institution that can't understand that just because they're, you know, putting like warheads on foreheads and being very successful in their tactical objectives. It, if you, that's not going to turn into truth, that's not going to turn into a political outcome that you want. Especially if the political outcome was magically there's a revolution inside of Iran which is also like in criminology moves wild. That Pahlavism is essentially dead on arrival like two and a half weeks into this. You know, Trump has said he's not the guy. His own mother kind of admonished him publicly.

[Co-host]

And of course he still, he doesn't have Rudy Giuliani, a guy who is more dedicated, more brand loyalty to the MEK than anyone has ever had to anything. Yeah, he does.

[Joseph Burton]

He doesn't have it. And I think Trump smelled that smell of a loser. I think that they want, they want a Venezuela style outcome of someone inside the IRGC superstructure from the top ranks basically cutting a deal and taking Iran off the table as a geopolitical threat to the United States, but also, you know, being kind of killing.

[Co-host]

Yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

What happened to all those guys? Interesting. What happened to all the IRGC commanders?

[Co-host]

It's like the smartest, most negotiable guy was the one Trump killed for basically no reason. To start all of this off, the

[Joseph Burton]

counterfactuals coming out of this, as I think about two things, like if Soleimani was alive, I don't even like Iran would not even be in this position. I mean even in their domestic politics. But also if the Iranians had just hit back for real in 2020, we also would not be in that situation. But like the delusion was that this would be easy and it would all just work out and nobody even bothered to create an ideological superstructure for this.

[Host]

I think part of why no one bothers to create that ideological superstructure goes back to understanding that the tale of America is infinitely powerful and infinitely capable. The military colossus that's never been equaled is something that it's important for everybody else to believe, but not. But crucially you can never believe it.

[Co-host]

Yeah, and that was, that was something that US military used to be good at. I know people jerk themselves off about Millennium Challenge. Right. And we're not supposed to talk about it now, but that's a good example of The US Military institutionally trying to learn its own weaknesses, Right? And now that you've got Pete Hegseth in charge of it, a guy who does not want to hear about weakness, a guy who only wants to hear about strengths, you're not going to see that kind of decision making can get enabled.

[Joseph Burton]

There's Nova. I know you've been around these parts of the Internet for so long, I have to. Millennium Challenge guys were always the most annoying dudes in every form. No one is more vindicated than they are right now. Like, absolutely no one.

[Co-host]

The most on dirt bikes.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah.

[Host]

The other thing, right, is I. I want to sort of zoom out a little bit more because there's something that we've been talking about on the show for years, years now, a pattern I think we observed, which is that the long march of the right, and that's the both sort of the leftmost flank of the right in terms of, like, the Labour Party, the Democrats, whatever, and the right itself, so driven by TV and media as it's been, has lost the ability to oversee the oaths it's trying to wrangle, and the oafs have become the overseers. Pete Hegseth was never supposed to be in charge of something. He was supposed to rile up the chuds and get them to vote through the gigantic tax cuts.

[Co-host]

I think there's an interesting parallel here, right, where Donald Trump sort of learned the lesson of, like, I can't just get the person who I think is personally loyal to me and gives good TV because they can get me in serious trouble when he fired Kristi Noem. Right? But there isn't that with this, right? There isn't this sort of version of this. You can't, like, fire Pete Hegseth and install a kind of more conciliatory secretary of defense and then expect the Iranians to. To be like, okay, cool, wool is off.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Joseph Burton]

Well, and. And there's something about that idea of, you can never believe it yourself, the. The omnipotence of American power. And we have entered this point where the people fully believe in the omnipotence of American power, American military power, especially in the Middle east, at precisely the point, really, the first point, that an outside power absolutely has a strategic veto

[Co-host]

on that power and has been forced to exercise it.

[Joseph Burton]

Like, again, I've been forced to exercise

[Co-host]

it, I think about the sort of. Again, I've made these jokes before about the kind of, like, almost pathological level of patience across Iran and its proxies, right? Like, fucking Nasrallah died, he went to his grave with the like, I'm gonna make a sort of hype farming aura moments video about how, you know, they're all gonna fucking suffer and then do nothing. Right? Like, but somehow the like, most difficult to provoke people in the world, world externally have now had their hand forced and clearly the US does not like the result.

[Joseph Burton]

No, I mean it actually is just saying like, well, I'm not going to sit down for you a third time in negotiations for you to bomb me in the middle. And it is what, actually what's interesting is I think they are being in a very erudite and sophisticated way kind of out shutted by the Iranians. And let me hear me out here. I mean obviously their mannerisms are very different. You know, every Iranian official is every statement in English to the President. They all speak very good English. Is, you know, basically doing the Alexis de Tocqueville which I'm sure most Americans have read meme with, with. You know, there is that type of American guy who's like, dude, I'm calm, I love my family, but if you piss me off, dude, I will mess you up. And like, you know, these are guys who are like, I, I love my beautifully composed minimalist films, I love my poetry, but dude, if you piss me off, you don't with me.

[Co-host]

Blow up my curvy brick apartment and it's on like John Wick.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, no, no, I, I think, I think actually they like, they really are going John Wick on this. And it's like, yeah, you brought my curvy brick apartment. Like if you've, if you, you know, all the dust gets into my, my beautifully perfectly cooked crusty rice and it's, it's war to the knife. And you know, there's, there's a lot going on structurally that's in, that's in their corner right now.

[Co-host]

Iran has raised the red flag of John Wick. Chapter one.

[Host]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cry havoc and let slip the wicks of war.

[Joseph Burton]

It is, they are kind of doing John Wick stuff where it is simply like I, I also think that this is the part in the American war plans where they go, ah, surely they give up, right? Surely they cry uncle. And like, I mean they flew a couple 1970s Soviet bombers at like c. Top height and got within two minutes bombers from the 70s at Qatar and got within two minutes of hitting the airport. Right. I mean knowing that they were outnumbered like 50 to 1.

[Host]

Yeah.

[Co-host]

They had one guy get close to enough in like a speedboat to The Ford, like, carrier group that they had to engage it with, like, you know, the gun. So, yeah, this is.

[Joseph Burton]

And I'm not. And I'm not sure how this intersects with, like, the kind of. Right. Psychological developments in the United States where there are two things are, one, we are the manliest manly men ever. And two, we cannot comprehend that we would ever be defeated and they're going to be outshone in both of those fields. And like, I don't. I really don't know where this goes, but, like, we are in year one of this, let me put it that way.

[Co-host]

It's all fun and games until the we love death, as you love life stuff really starts to hit in a way that matters, you know, I want

[Host]

to move on to our final segment here, which is of course a perennial interest of mine now, which is Wither Dubai.

[Co-host]

Well, this is important to us as a British podcast because that's where we keep our strategic CHUD reserve.

[Host]

Yeah, we have. We got rid of Andrew Tate and Samuel Leeds and a number of other people there, and now they're being forced to come back. And Nova, you sent me this earlier as a hilarious little bit of shot,

[Co-host]

and Friday, this is, I think, the most I've smiled reading anything this past month.

[Host]

Yeah. So I have snippets from a few articles, but I want to go through them. This is, of course, wealthy British nationals fleeing Gulf conflict bypass UK to avoid tax bills.

[Co-host]

There is, there is one specific, very fortuitous detail about the timing of this, is that Iran is hitting Dubai before the end of the tax year.

[Host]

And Nova and I talked about this before and we both concur. Probably this didn't factor into the planning of the timing of when Iran was going to focus on Dubai. However, what if it did?

[Co-host]

If it, if it, if it did, then I doff my hat to them because, right, if you're a tax exile, right, if you're what they call a non dom, right, and not in the sort of subway, but in the sort of. Like, you're not legally resident in the uk, the government, you call it a non dom. I know, it's crazy.

[Host]

You people gotta get checked out.

[Co-host]

I know, I know. But it means that the government allows you a certain number of days in the UK a year before they decide, oh, you are a UK resident, you have to pay tax on all your income here. And that can be. It's not a fixed number. It depends on your circumstances. Are you traveling a lot for business? Do you have family in the country? Stuff like that.

[Joseph Burton]

Right.

[Co-host]

But if you exceed those days, you're on the hook for a lot of money potentially. And what I learned from the Guardian is that a lot of tax exiles tend to get those out of the way relatively early and go, okay, cool, that's my days. No flexibility there. Can't come back to the UK until the end of the tax year, which is great, until the fucking port cochere of your apartment building starts getting blown up by. By drones.

[Host]

So I have the quote here. With only about three weeks remaining in the current tax year, as we said, many overseas residents have already spent their allocation of days in Britain without incurring tax liabilities. As November said, some are seeking guidance from HMRC on whether they would be granted an additional 60 days under an exceptional circumstances provision. However, Nimesh Shah, the chief executive of an advisory firm, said, I've had a disproportionate number of calls from people wanting to leave the UAE in recent weeks. I've told them not to rely on. Rely on exceptional circumstances provisions from hmrc. I can't imagine HMRC are very sympathetic here.

[Co-host]

Thank you, Nimash Shah, for the best pull quotes, I think, from a Guardian article I've read recently. It's like, yeah, probably not thrilled about the idea of letting all these guys come back and have like two free months, you know?

[Host]

Yeah. So one very wealthy business owner told the Guardian he was spending time in Dublin until he could Visit London after the 5th of April, saying, I'm happy to pay income tax on investments next tax year, but I don't want the sale of a business I sold years ago to fall within UK capital gains tax again.

[Joseph Burton]

Why?

[Host]

Why is it just because it's a

[Co-host]

while ago, I'm being sort of doubly exiled?

[Host]

You know, I paid for my own travel home, by the way, he added, okay, fine. All right, fine.

[Co-host]

Did you. Did you see the one guy who, like, got on the plane to Dubai like, literally yesterday, fell asleep on the plane, was like, expected to be waking up in Dubai only to find that the plane had turned around at second. He had spent 10 hours flying from Dublin to Dublin.

[Host]

Oh, my. I mean, you know, it's the. It's the. It's the Dubai visitors, really. But there's an article also in the Guardian that talks about how the shine has come off Dubai for people.

[Co-host]

It says, oh, no, that's terrible.

[Host]

Now Dubai faces an existential threat as the war between the US and Israel and Iran is shaking the foundations of the Dubai dream that so many foreigners had bought into.

[Co-host]

My favorite. My Favorite subspecies of these guy.

[Host]

The shine has definitely been taken off, said John Trudinger, a British resident of Dubai for 60 years. Seniors who's head teacher at a school. He employs more than 100 teachers from the UK who say they've been so deeply traumatized and struggling to cope with the sudden arrival of war in Dubai that they've left and won't come back.

[Co-host]

That's a lot of PE teachers coming back to Britain. Listen, I. I have a favorite type of this guy. And my favorite type of this guy is the person who is like, I can't live in London anymore because of the wave of Islamic violence and then moves to Dubai to get potentially, like, killed by, I guess, Islamic violence, if you want to characterize it that way.

[Host]

And I mean, oh, God. What I have as well is there are so many people who are astonished by the fact that, hey, I moved to this, like, absolute monarchy so it would control. It's no, they're coming so close to saying, hey, I wanted a law that protects me but binds the underclass.

[Co-host]

Yeah, well, that. That is the Dubai dream. Right? Like, they're for the same reason. There are people who will like, say, well, with a straight face, that they moved to Dubai from London to get away from Sharia law. Like, it's like, that's smart.

[Host]

That's smart, you know?

[Co-host]

Yeah, exactly.

[Host]

That. That is like, level that. How many levels of Britain are you on? I moved. I moved to Dubai to get away from Sharia law. Perfect. Or like, now people in the Emirates are being charged with cybercrimes for posting videos of missile strikes and being put in actual jail. Not like, oh, the Jeddah jail you go to where the British Consulate calls and it's like, come on.

[Co-host]

I moved to Dubai from London because I was terrified by the kind of repression of free speech ever since. You know, they told me that I couldn't tweet about, you know, burning down micron hotels.

[Host]

Oh, my God.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah.

[Host]

And like, 20 people have now been jailed under these laws.

[Co-host]

Yeah. Because you don't have rights. Right. Your rights are entirely contingent. And you were sold this idea that, like, you get to be. You get to be like Mensahib. Not anymore.

[Joseph Burton]

You do get to be on Mensahib. I think that, you know the kind of caste structure in Dubai. Dubai is the dream of Dubai. Right. And I think that by flying a Shaw head unto into the petrochemical economy that underpins that, or even the hotel that is a symbol of that, it's sort of like, oh, wait, this is all built on, like, this is not real. Like, this is all like a phantasm of just, like, capital just put into one place.

[Host]

I have another example here, which is one American who's lived in Kuwait for more than a decade described the Kafala permission to leave policy as a, quote, hostile hostage system, which. Yeah, it is. It's just all of a sudden.

[Co-host]

But I didn't expect to be the hostage.

[Host]

Yeah, my maid is supposed to be the hostage, not me. You know, and in every case it is. Again, you're talking about self deception, right? An inability to see the world critically because you don't want to. Because the concept of going to Dubai and being able to kind of own someone and, you know, being able to go to the P. F. Changs that's beside the big beach, like, that's a lot of. That's a lot of fun for a second. Certain type of asshole. And so like, to then be like, wait a minute. Because I was sold on the idea that universal rights were inconvenient for me as a, like, sort of comfortable middle class person, I thought that meant that I was going to be on the other end of this. It's like, no, no, no. You just. You had permission for a while, and then the sort of relatively young country that's an absolute monarchy got scared and then is deciding just to shut it all down. Sorry.

[Joseph Burton]

I think it's connected to the larger war in general. I mean, this is the same emotion as. Wait a minute. We're bombing someone who can back. Like, you don't. Wait, wait.

[Guest 1]

My.

[Joseph Burton]

My status here was temporary. Wait. I'm actually, like. Even though I am higher than several rungs, I still need an exit visa. Like, this is all the kind of same thing, which is just a world where basically, you know, whatever you want to call it, Western, Anglo, US Kind of exceptionalism is taking just a huge punch to the jaw right now. And this is. This is actually the psychic shock of that. Like, you know, not. What do you mean, my country isn't coming to get me? No, your country can't. The airports are all getting droned constantly. And we're not flying into that. Like, they're. People encountering the limits of that social power are kind of experiencing psychotic breaks. And considering how those people are fine.

[Guest 1]

Especially if, like, you're in a place that sort of like somewhere like Dubai, but just anywhere in, like, the Gulf, if you're like, a particular kind of like, Western expat immigrant with money, which is that, like, these places are basically designed to give you Like a false sense of, like, higher status. Like, you should be able to kind of do all this stuff, because if you look, live in Dubai, you can basically pay your way into stuff and pay your way out of stuff as well. The whole point is to kind of create a simulation in which you can sort of feel rich and you can feel powerful until the world kind of makes you realize that actually, no, you're not really as high as you thought you were, but you're also somewhere at the bottom when it comes to being saved or being rescued or even being kind of taken to safety. And I think that's like, a difficult thing. The wider, greater thing is also just to kind of try and wrap a lot of points made in this episode together, which is that the fictions that have kind of propped this world up and the things that we have been made to sort of accept, the ways in which we've had to sort of reconcile pretty evil things, are now kind of coming home to roost. And I think there are a lot of people who just don't really know how to navigate or deal with that. They don't really know how to process their place in the world as the order that they was kind of told to believe in or that were sort of made to believe in because it benefited them, sort of begins to crumble.

[Co-host]

Getting shocked out of the Matrix by Iranian Morpheus.

[Joseph Burton]

Well, and they went to escape the Matrix, and they escaped to the Matrix,

[Co-host]

just not the way they thought.

[Guest 1]

But, you know, is this not the way that the Andrew Tate course, like, told me I'd be escaping the Matrix?

[Host]

Well, I have one more thing I want to read before we finish, which is, of course, the people in Dubai who we sort of, you know, actually do care about. So I'll go on here. The Fairmont Hotel, located in Dubai's famed artificial Palm Tree island, home to mega mansions, lavish hotels and upmarket beach club clubs, is also dramatically hit. A taxi driver from Pakistan saw his car destroyed on the strike on the Fairmont. After he parked it while he went to pray, he said, I'm the luckiest person in the world to have survived. But now my family are telling me to come home. I don't want to be in Dubai anymore. There's no business. We're earning nothing since this war. And I don't ever see tourism coming back ever. A lot of the taxi drivers like me, we're thinking, just go to a different country. Now everybody knows that Dubai is finished.

[Co-host]

I'm sure him being quoted with his full name is going to do him a lot of favors as the sort of government decides, oh, what if we just like fucking repress everything?

[Host]

Yeah. So good job, Guardian. So anyway, this is number one. I mean the people who are least protected are still by the, by the government are still people like this guy or like Nepalese laborers. And they're also able to vote, and it's not. Not vote in Dubai, but they're able to vote by being like, well, as soon as I can leave, I'm going to leave. I'm not going to come back. And guess what? I'm not going to say to my cousin, yeah, it sucks for. It sucks. But know you, you do get paid very well and you can send money back home. It's like, no, of course it's not fucking worth it. Right. This is. All of these things are contributing to. I think what we're going to see is Dubai becoming almost like a neom, like monument to hubris essentially. You know, this idea that this kind of place, you know, this, this place of pure evil, not to be too hyperbolic about it, would be able to stand on the force of the belief of some of the most mendacious and corrupt and venal sort of forces in the entire world. And guess what? It couldn't as it seems now it won't be able to.

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, two, two vast and trunkless indoor ski runs.

[Co-host]

No, I think that's it.

[Joseph Burton]

And there's. What's interesting is like, you know, this particular kind of, whatever you want to call it, circuit of capital or, or world historical moment that's, that's clearly ending right with whatever is going to realign in the Gulf. You know, the delusion of what Dubai is or was. It's actually kind of reminds me of like the way people would talk about Hong Kong, Kong or Singapore in the 70s or 80s of like there's a special port city that's just, it's different and it's more vibrant and it's like, well no, it's just where all the money is right now and that money can go elsewhere. I think the question is where is it going to go and how is it going to be delinked from the oil coming out of the ground? Or can it. Or you know, is there a potential for some sort of the Dubai that survives maybe not being a picturesque ruin but being. It's a much crueler, more diminished form of it of like this is just the, the oil reselling, sanctions evading and money laundering place. Like no more. We're not creating any more weird chocolate variants there's no more Labubus. There's no more bottle service. It is, it is just petrochemical related crime. Like I, I like there's, there's some kind of a new face to the Gulf that is like kind of a Terminator mask getting ripped off.

[Host]

And I think that's probably like, I think if we want to say there's a theme to this episode, it is as so many have been recently, seeing things for what they are and the reality of those things being what they are, coming into contact with other realities and things not going well for people who just blithely believed in the mask for a long time. So any case, Joseph, I want to say thank you very much for coming on. It's always a delight to talk to you. Where can people find more of some stuff that you've done if they want to engage with more of it?

[Joseph Burton]

Yeah, I've got some writing up. I hopefully have some writing coming out soon on kind of related topics. I'm at Twitter Instripe Bungle. I around, just around. I'm just around. I'm, I'm around. I'm online. But yeah, always great to be on. You know, we're, we're getting really, we're getting Persian with it today. It's, you know, that's trash Future in Persian, which even sounds nice. And yeah, always a pleasure.

[Host]

Oh well, thanks very much everybody. Don't forget we will have a bonus episode coming later this week. So do look out for that on the bonus bonus feed. And also I'm gonna cross promote another thing that November and I are doing. Are you in London on April 25th and 6th? Well, guess what? So are we. And Maddie Lubchansky, we're doing a three live shows of no gods, no mayors on April 25th. There's one and there's two on April 26th. All three shows different, each of us leading one at a time. And I believe the ticket links will be posted for that on the no Gods, no Mayors episode. So if you do like that and you want to come to that, that do come see us in late April. Anyway, we will see you all in a couple days. Bye everyone.

[Guest 1]

Bye.