4/1/26: Russia Breaks Cuba Blockade, Kristi Noem Husband Scandal, Fmr CIA On Trump Bungling Iran War

29:22To be the most generous that we believe is a better government.

29:26Emily Jashinsky:That's favorable to the government that created the conditions that hurt your son. Right. So the specific, there is a purpose to making it so that Carlos dies. And it's to make people angry. And it is, and it's complicated. I think like, because again, we are talking about one of the main hospital, pediatric hospitals in Havana with half the best care. Can you imagine this in the place they just, Batanzas or Baracoa, Guantanamo, Santiago de Cuba, like for their province, countryside, rural areas, that there are more car dealers over there, but with other diseases that are able to be fixed in this 21st century.

30:14And it's crazy that they can't have the medications that they need. One last clip. Most of the people are angry in Cuba, but I think the general feeling is frustration. It's frustration because why do we need to deserve it under these conditions? And I think the Dr. Alios said something that stuck with me. And he put the example of the$100. bucks. If a country only have 100 bucks, they need to be sure that they can help in the most of the people, the majority of the people with this only 100 bucks. And Carlos and other kids and other teenagers and other mother fathers, there are other people that have also specific disease that the Cuban government used to buy medication just for them and now they just sin.

31:10They need to do triage. Okay, we need this specific amount of money. Who we are going to save with this. So sadly, Carlos can't get into the list because as Bray said, it's just a few number of people that have their disease. So this is crazy. So people get sad, get frustrated, get angry. But it's frustration because, okay, this is the medical side, But then the doctors and the nurses have to come back home to don't have electricity. So blackout, so they don't have gas, so they can cook. So they don't have anything. They don't have running water because there is not electricity, of course, to pump in the water.

31:54So this is the same people who needs to be focused the other day and needs to be rest to save other children's and other families' lives. This is crazy, and they need to go through all this. And they say, why? Who is the responsible for this? I can't think about the U.S. government. I can't blame them because they are too far away from us. They are too far away from our life. We need to blame our own government because they need to give us answers. They need to do something to change this situation. They're the ones you're interacting with on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. So we'll keep up with this.

32:36And I'm so grateful to everyone who was able to come together and get Carlos this medication. It absolutely should not have to come to this. And the relief on the face of his mother and father kind of spells out to me the depravity of denying it. He'll probably, you were saying, need to go to the country of Colombia to get some treatment, which is possible. And we're going to, you know, but we'll keep up with this. But ultimately, what the country needs is just to be able to do normal business and trade. But thank you, Brace, co-host of the True Non Podcast, Liz with Valley of the Beast. Thank you so much for everything you're doing and for being here.

33:27Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20 % year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S &P 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks.

33:59Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosures.

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35:58Emily Jashinsky:The Daily Mail dropped a midday bombshell yesterday, revealing, we can put up on the screen, that Kristi Noem's longtime husband, I think they've been married for 34 years, or a high school sweetheart, was leading what the Daily Mail described as a, quote, Secret Double Life. The rest of the headline is Noam's cross-dressing husband Brian, the pouting busty bimbo photos, and trove of explicit messages. Trove is not an understatement. The Daily Mail has its hand on all kinds of screenshots showing what appears to be a very clear fetish for Kristi Noam's husband. Again, this seems to have been happening while she was the secretary of the Homeland Security Department, who is putting balloons up his shirt, sending pictures of himself with cartoonishly large breasts to women, who apparently, he was also into having cartoonishly large breasts.

37:00Emily Jashinsky:He was paying them money, I mean, up to potentially $25 ,000. And this is all coming out now. Christy Noem. What does he do? Where does he get his money? He's an insurance guy. That's his background. So, Kristi Noem responds yesterday after the Daily Mail drops this in the middle of the day. Quote, Miss Noem is devastated. This is her camp's response. The family was blindsided by this, and they asked for privacy and prayers at the time. That's what her representatives told the New York Post. Now, Trump also reacted to this. Going to skip ahead to E5. he told the Daily Mail, wow, well, I feel badly for the family.

37:43Emily Jashinsky:If that's the case, that's too bad. Why does it matter that Trump and Kristi Noem responded in this particular way? Well, it's interesting because as salacious as the story is, this is the Homeland Security Secretary who was clearly vulnerable to blackmail on an enormous scale when these pictures are being sent with her husband's face in them. It's not as though he was trying to hide himself, hide his face. Some of the women he interacted with, apparently that he was paying and interacting with, said that they figured out who he was. They talked to him about it. One of them said she asked him about Corey Lewandowski and his wife having an affair.

38:22Emily Jashinsky:And he said, well, there's nothing that I can do about it. So if Trump and Noem had no idea about this. Wait, one of the sex workers he was engaging with was like... E4. Did you see this? No. Mark Caputo reported how he was, he got a tip. So Mark Caputo is the Trump White House reporter over at Axios. He's in Florida. He said, quote, Yeah, I got a weird lead, a source texted me February 13th. They said an immigrant sex worker, possibly in the country illegally, wanted to go public about Noam's husband using her services online. It was vengeance for DHS's immigration enforcement. I couldn't land the interview.

39:03Emily Jashinsky:Caputo posts a screenshot of his back and forth with that source. He says, sharing because folks sometimes wonder how reporting works. Here, I would have needed to talk to the accuser and verify the info the way the mail did. When we use anonymous sources, they're credible. Sometimes it means someone else gets the story for what it's worth. I understand yet another media outlet had been shown these pictures last year, but declined to run them. A woman then, quote, tweets another post, and Caputo points to it, saying, when this news broke, I recognized him, referring to Brian Noem, as one of my clients because I've never seen a, quote, sissy sub have bigger knockers than him.

39:42But where did they say that the sex worker asked him about the affair between Lewandowski and...

39:49Emily Jashinsky:That's in the Daily Mail story. That's in the Daily Mail story, got it. I thought I'd seen that somewhere. Yeah. So that's the other thing. Yes, you could blackmail her over this. You could also blackmail her over this like widely discussed years long affair with this like de facto chief of staff or maybe like whatever, like whatever you want to call Corey Lewandowski. Why, why, why is she even still married? Like just she's clearly like follow your heart with Corey. It's all very weird. And Corey's married to a 9-11 widow, by the way. It's just a really gross and sad situation. And they've been publicly cheating on their spouses at GOP events for years now.

40:32Emily Jashinsky:Everyone knows about it. Trump apparently thinks it's hilarious. But that's the reporting from behind closed doors. I think the Daily Mail has also gotten that reporting. It might have been the New York Post. But either way, Ryan, the national security implications of this are not like it's not insane to be like, did you have any idea? I mean, now they're saying they're totally blindsided by this. Trump claims to have just learned this from a Daily Mail reporter. I mean, that's the implication of Trump's reaction. I don't know that that I mean, it seems almost impossible for the DHS secretary's husband to be sending pictures of himself like this and to have it not be known.

41:06Emily Jashinsky:It looks like from the screenshots it's on WhatsApp. It seems really wild that that wasn't known at all by his wife or at all by the government. Well, it's only a national security issue if you think that the Department of Homeland Security has anything to do with actually securing the homeland. Yes. And I've seen no evidence of that. They do a lot of things. None of them seem dedicated to that mission. Yeah, well, they have powers. Yes. And she has a lot of horses that she can ride around in those like$150 million ad campaign videos. Yeah, it's pretty interesting that this is coming out after.

41:38Emily Jashinsky:She leaves DHS. I know why it took this source a while to get it published. Absolutely wild story. What's going to happen to the Shield of the Americas? Because isn't that what she's in charge of now? That's right. She's the special envoy for Central and South America, which is amazing because I think Central and South America take their traditional morality a little bit more seriously, apparently, than our traditional moralists here in North America. And so that'll be interesting to see how they react to this sheriff and Lewandowski going around. I mean, it could be another problem for the stories of corruption that have surrounded Kristi Noem over, I would say, like the last five plus years, roughly the last five plus years of her career are it's constant.

42:26Emily Jashinsky:And that's usually where it's where there's smoke, there's fire type of situation. Like it's every several months, it's like there's a possible corruption story coming out of Gnome's orbit. You know, connections that contracts are going to people who are politically connected, personally connected. It's Veep meets Righteous Gemstones. Yes, that's really well said. Oh my gosh, that's very good. and so it's not it wouldn't surprise me if there's more reporting that comes out suggesting that in recent weeks this was known to the Gnome family and the government obviously if reporters are sniffing around it's that wasn't getting back to the Homeland Security Secretary I mean she was just replaced last week she should have just said as everybody knows we have an open marriage that would have been much more leave us alone would have been much more okay cool yes Ryan, should we move on to Bob Baer?

43:25Emily Jashinsky:Let's do it. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20 % year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the S &P 500.

43:57Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokered services by Open to the Public Investing, Inc., member FINRA, and SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors, LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice.

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45:39Emily, we pre-taped this interview yesterday. He said he doesn't actually get up in the morning, which, okay, good for you.

45:48Emily Jashinsky:Nothing but respect for that. Nothing but absolutely. That's my dream. Yes, I aspire to that. And so Bear is a highly respected kind of CIA case officer who is unusual in the sense that he knows of what he speaks in the sense that like he's been all over the world. He's been an undercover officer. We talked about it earlier on the show. He was made famous for a little while because they tried to, U.S., I believe, tried to prosecute him for attempting to assassinate Saddam Hussein. And his defense, effective it turned out, was I was doing this on behalf of the CIA. Don't you understand what, it's the CIA.

46:27Don't you know what the CIA does?

46:29Emily Jashinsky:Wasn't Syriana also roughly based on him? Yes, that's correct. of one of his books was turned into Syriana and the George Clooney character is modeled after Robert Baer. Now, and so he has, he's kind of like the best that the CIA has to offer in the sense of trying to understand

46:55our adversaries.

46:56Emily Jashinsky:And Iran particularly. But that doesn't, and I think I want people to understand that, and Iran particularly, but I want people to think about that as he mentions in our interview he's only been there a little bit and his understanding of iran is surface deep right which he would acknowledge yep and yet he knows it better than most most of the rest of the cia the major thing i took away from the interview is just how screwed the cia is and our intelligence community our intelligence yeah that wow like they they they've they've they're just operating based on caricatures and like what they read and like the propaganda outlets that we finance is dark literally and metaphorically yeah um yeah so we thought we thought it'd be he hasn't done many interviews over the last many months um but he agreed to um come on the show and we thought does not mean any of us agree with everything he said or remotely agree so interesting remotely but it was believe that but uh interesting to hear um you know where he thinks this is going yes uh not not well for the united states yeah put it that way um and he just he just he talks about the samson option multiple times which which is also the name of a uh seymour hirsch book which is a reference to um the this purported israeli strategy that they would rather basically nuke the world than lose a war.

48:22And so that's not what you want to hear.

48:26Emily Jashinsky:It's really not. No. Nor is his speculation, informed speculation, of course, about where the intelligence is likely coming from and how we're, I think this was the most interesting part of the interview from my perspective is how we're making the decisions that we're making. How are those being informed? What intelligence is informing them and how are we gathering that intelligence? So if anyone would know, it would be him. And CIA folks, even former CIA folks are limited in what they can say, obviously, and are sometimes still freelancing. Yeah. But to hear a CIA, former CIA, well, no such thing as former, as they say, former CIA official openly discussing the Samson option, which again, he brought it up.

49:14He brought you're watching this, if you're not familiar with that fairly common reference, it is the idea that Israel's nuclear strategy includes an option to use overwhelming nuclear force rather than lose something strategically, even if that means the obvious kind of annihilation of Israel.

49:34Emily Jashinsky:Well, let's get to it. Well, Bob, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate it. Of course. So let's start with, from your perspective, What do you think is the thing that the U.S. and Israel, or let's go with the U.S., most misunderstood or underestimated when they went into this conflict? I think it's the determination of the Iranians. I wrote a book about this, that if they were under attack, what they would do is bring down Gulf energy supplies, which could be up to 50 percent of proven reserves. Now, think about that. Let's say you can take proven reserves offline for two, three or four years.

50:25it will destroy the world's economy, as it's starting to do. And I think they confused Tehran with Caracas. You just simply can't decapitate the Iranian regime and expect people to pour out in the streets. That's not Iran. I mean, it's so few of these people. I don't know that anybody in the administration has ever been to Iran. They don't understand who these people are. They don't understand. They're the faithful, if you like. I've spent a lot of time there, not a lot, but enough to see that, in a way, let me be politically incorrect, it's a death cult. These people, large segment, are ready to die for their beliefs.

51:17You know, you go to the martyrs cemetery in Tehran and it's genuine. And I've spent a lot of time with the Basij and that's genuine. They're going to fight. We can turn the electricity off if we like. We can destroy their desalinization facilities, all of them. We could turn the country into rubble, but they're still going to come back. And I mean, look at the numbers. You've got 93 million people. If you destroy the economy, turn it into a failed state, and you look across the Gulf at a country like Qatar, which has only got 350 ,000 people, who's going to defend the Arab shakedoms? I mean, I'm not big fans of them, but who's going to defend them?

52:05Are we going to keep a fleet in the... I mean, we can't even put boats in the Gulf right now. It's too dangerous. But are we going to keep boats there? And then what do you do about 93 million armed, desperate people and these fragile countries around? Again, you take off 50 percent of the world's oil resource. Let's say a Syria-like situation where it's total chaos and mayhem. Oil is closed down. The effect it will have on the world's economy will look a lot like the Great Depression. And Emily, I'll let you jump in one second. Let me just follow up on the question of the death cult. People would rephrase that as Iran's, a lot of people in Iran see this as existential.

52:53Like we are fighting them, you know, from Tampa, from Nebraska, from aircraft carriers that are out of range. They are in their country and they see this as an existential fight and are behaving rationally. I think, because I think death cult suggests like a level of... It's a bad word. But I mean, they fought, they lost hundreds of thousand people in the war on Iraq. They were prepared to defend their nation. They have a very strong historical sense, country that goes back 4 ,000 years. Any number of things. And they're also looking at it is, look, they signed off on the nuclear agreement, JCPOA.

53:40and we unilaterally ripped it up. I mean, they were complying with the terms of JCPOA. The two times this administration has gone into negotiations with them, in the middle of it, they attack them. The intent, and I think that you see this on the far right in this country, is to destroy Iran for past wrongs. And that goes back to Lebanon, goes to Iraq and the rest of it.

54:07But they don't see it that way. I mean, look at the attack on Ras Lafon. It followed our attack or the Israeli attack on South Pars. They reply in kind. It's a tit for tat. And they've always done this. And it's not a question of, you know, defending the Iranians. This is who they are. This is our enemy. And we're so bad at misunderstanding our enemy, what they'll fight for and what they won't. I mean, you go back to Vietnam. We had never understood North Vietnam, just American history. We refuse to believe that our enemies have grievances, whether legitimate or not. And so we are fighting their grievances.

54:55But in all fairness, let's say to the CIA, it doesn't have anybody that's been to Iran, understands the Iranians. those people have all retired. They've gone away. Same way with State Department. Farsi speakers, very few of them. The ones, the Iranians we know are exiles. You can never trust exiles. As Machiavelli told us, you can't trust them. So it's a black box we're going into. And I cannot tell you right now who's going to give up first. It could be the Trump administration. It could be the Iranians. We don't know. That's the problem. I mean, what could happen in this next week is what should really worry us.

55:39Emily Jashinsky:Well, Bob, I wanted to pick up on that point because something interesting happened in the beginning of March where Lindsey Graham had made recent trips to Israel, came back, told the American press Israeli intelligence would tell him things that U.S. intelligence was not telling him, which is fascinating and suggests that some information planted to Lindsey Graham is then going into Donald Trump. So what do you believe? Who is giving Donald Trump information on Iran that's basically the information he's basing his own decisions off of? What do we know about that? What can we surmise about that?

56:16Well, I think what's telling is that Trump yesterday said, we don't know whether Mushtaba, the son, is alive or dead. I mean, that tells me we don't know much about the country. It's one thing for the Israelis to target Iranian nuclear scientists because they all have smartphones. They've got apps. You've got cameras in Tehran that can track people. You can track any cell phone. They do a brilliant job at it. I mean, they really do. But the assembly of experts and the people who are making the decision are offline. I've spent time at Qom. these people do not do smartphones. It's very medieval.

57:05On top of that, you have the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which has this mosaic defense. And that's commanded control is not vertical. And they know what to do. And they don't need orders. They don't need communications. And they do it because they've been planning for an attack like this. For a long, you know, back to Reagan, back to the Iran-Iraq war. They've been planning for a long time. We, in the meantime, have ignored them, and the Israelis don't understand the country. You know, I love the TV show Tehran, but trust me, they do not have Mossad officers wandering around, staff officers, Tehran.

57:49It's too dangerous. You know, when I was there, I had an Iranian ID card, and I was stopped. My group was stopped every 15 minutes. We were checked for our IDs. They're very good cars, too. They're not reproducible. So the Iranians, I mean, the Israelis are depending on MEK, the resistance group, the Iranians, you know, criminals and the rest of it. But that doesn't get to the heart of the Iranian regime, which is very much res opaque to us. So if the Israelis are saying, hey, we decapitate the regime, it's a shot in the dark for them. They don't know. And I mean, the Iranians probably, Khamenei wasn't even really the grand ayatollah.

58:41He didn't have the chops for it, the dissertations and the rest of it. He wasn't recognized as one. He was effectively the spokesman for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Now, the people making the decisions in the mosques are, you know, we don't know what they're up to. You know, we just don't. When I went to Qom, I debated an Ayatollah. But I can tell you right now that I didn't walk away from that debate or from going to Qom debating other people. It's smarter. of what they would do. And my limited experience in Iran tells me how little the American government knows. You just simply cannot pick this stuff up from academic papers and the rest of it.

59:33It doesn't work that way. So the Israelis really have leaned into this assassination strategy. You're the perfect one to ask about that. You're the author of The Perfect Kill, which you've got in there, I think it's called 21 Rules for Assassinations or something along those lines. Like when you, when you think about those rules and your, and your career as a CIA case officer, um, how do you assess the effectiveness of kind of U S Israeli, uh, assassination program, whether it's Hezbollah Hamas or, or now as it's rolling out in Iran? Well, when I wrote the book, it was, it was like, I write so much, so much is obvious.

1:00:16Had we assassinated Hitler, had he been assassinated early on in the war, we would have saved a lot of bloodshed. But what we're seeing in Lebanon is the Israelis have assassinated, you know, the leadership of Hezbollah, all of them, people I know, Mugniyah, the rest of them. But now they're in the middle of a quagmire in southern Lebanon because there was a second and third tier of people that may be more effective than the people they got rid of. And, you know, they assassinated Khamenei, but we don't even know whether his son's alive. I mean, I could see the Iranians, knowing he's dead, died in that first attack, yet carrying on with this whole idea of martyrdom in spirit.

1:01:06So I think the proofs in the pudding and assassination in terms of Iran and Hezbollah is not effective.

1:01:15Emily Jashinsky:The Israeli outcome is, if there's regime change, what we know is that they're not concerned so much about utter chaos engulfing Iran. They actually see a weak Iran as a benefit to Israel, even in the long term, from public reporting and statements and the like. Like, what can you tell us about how true that actually is? So if we take Israel's argument at face value, is it actually true that Israel is safer in the long term with Iran mired in chaos? Or does the factionalization actually create an enormously dangerous situation, the likes of which we haven't even seen so far? You know, Israel lives in a bad neighborhood.

1:02:00And I don't think at the end of the day, chaos on your borders is going to turn out to be profitable. I mean, it was, you know, if Oslo had to work, they'd be better off. And now you are going to, once you destabilize, let's say Saudi Arabia, let's take a scenario that tomorrow we hit Karg Island. The next day, the Iranians take out Abqaiq, shut off 7 million barrels a day, take out water supplies. You're going to have an Arab world that's going to fall apart, including Jordan, on their border. And what do you do with all of these people, you know, armed and you're pushing into chaos? And I'm not sure that's not the best solution.

1:02:53Now, what destroyed any chance of a peace was 7 October, of course, which was horrific for the Israelis. And they are responding to it. And this administration is still responding to it. And. But look, Hamas is still in place in Gaza. The West Bank is not getting any better. It's getting worse. And Jerusalem is. and Israeli society is becoming less secular by the minute, which isn't good for, it's not good for Israelis because a lot of Israelis are just going to pick up and leave, the ones that can. And you're going to have this very small state, which is ultimately indefensible if the population is cut way down and you have all this craziness on your borders.

1:03:42So, I mean, we are really into uncharted waters here. You don't take value of what Netanyahu's done. You just see what forces he's reacting to. And then you take the forces that the Iranians are reacting to, and you have two immovable forces here at loggerheads. And the entire world will pay for this. You know, I see these numbers from hedge funds in New York about what this is doing to derivatives in the petroleum market. it, we've yet to feel it. And there's no turning back right now. It can't be fixed. And if Iran controls Hormuz and turns it into a toll booth and it keeps Arab oil from leaving or highly taxed, it's a new game.

1:04:33What's your sense of, if you listen to Trump or Hegseth or Rubio now, the U.S. is just cleaning up and really showing them who's boss. What's your sense of who's winning this war strategically at this point? I still think it's the Samson option. I think that if it continues, Iran will become a failed state. It'd be like Somalia or Syria. Whether ethnic problems, you know, civil war comes to this, I can't tell you. It's unknowable. So I don't think anybody's, you know, winning in this. The point is the IRGC is in place. It's calling the shots. We don't know who the second tier commanders are or the third.

1:05:17We don't know how devoted they are. And trust me, these people, the IRGC, are tough people. I mean, they have no sense of humor. When I was in Tehran, I went and knocked on our embassy door and said, let me in. This guy comes, this officer comes in, I says, go away. You know, I didn't give up. So I pounded again. I'm an American taxpayer. Let me in. I want to see our property. And he just slammed. They are very, very serious, as we know. And they mow people down in the street. I just don't see them giving up. I mean, these people are still, they live by grievances. when the prophet's grandson was murdered.

1:06:03That's foremost in their lives.

1:06:09I just don't see him giving, even if we do take out Kark, I would imagine no one's going to dare surrender. Well, have you noticed the kind of meme war that Iran has been waging? The jokes have been asymmetrically kind of in favor so far, actually, of the Iranian government this time. They seem to be laughing all the way to Samson here. Oh, yeah. I mean, they've been... Look, here's the problem. The Iranian actors from 79 on blamed us for the Shah. Yes, we participated in the corruption, But nothing we did do deserved our embossing being overrun. And in their various terrorist acts that they've conducted that the military hasn't forgotten, they did the Marines in 83.

1:07:05It was them, not Hezbollah. It was Iran who organized that. And I could go on and I could just inflame, you know, with all the attacks that we know they did. And they took the hostages. It was Iran, not Hezbollah. So we have our grievances, but now they're meeting, but the Iranians have this deep sense of justice and injustice, and they think that they're the receiving end of an imperial United States. They look at Israel as, you know, an imperial state, essentially run by the United States. You know that's not true. But the way they look at it in the street is that we are calling the shots in Tel Aviv.

1:07:52It's the way they look at the world. And, you know, there's some sort of, at the end, divine justice, or it's secular, too. And, you know, when I talked to the Basij about suicide bombings in the Iran-Iraq war, they said, no, you people, you have it wrong. It's not because of 72 virgins and they wear the little white keys. it's because you agree with one of your soldiers rushing and dying to take out a machine gun nest in World War II. We're the same way. These people are not stupid, and they know what they're doing, and what they've been hitting, the aluminum facilities in the Gulf and the rest of it, it's pinpoint strikes and damage it's going to be doing to the West.

1:08:39You look at the Islamic State, and they just slaughtered for slaughter's sake. The Iranians are much more focused and have a plan. What is the offer and for Trump? Where does this, what's the best case scenario here? What's the worst case scenario? The best case scenario is he says, look, we changed the leadership. You know, everybody's been assassinated, they're the bad guys. We can deal with these guys and we're going to come to, he's going to declare victory and leave. That's the best solution. I don't think the Iranians are going to surrender to the demands. I don't think Hezbollah is going to surrender.

1:09:21I think that's going to keep going on. So the best is declare victory and leave. You know, we set them back 20 years in their industry and the rest of it. But on the other hand, if they control oil coming in and out of the Gulf, anybody looking at the numbers economically, it'll look like they won. All right. Well, Bob, thanks so much for taking some time. Really appreciate it. Of course.

1:09:48Emily Jashinsky:Well, that's going to do it for us on today's edition of Breaking Points. Please do go to breakingpoints.com to get a premium subscription, support the independent journalism that we're doing here on the show. Help us keep getting guests like Robert Pape and Bob Baer. Also, that Cuba segment. Ryan, thank you so much for bringing this reporting back. Yeah, and if you want to support either Belly of the Beast, the Cuban news organization, U.S.-based but Cuban-powered news organization, Cuban journalists, you can do that or the True or Not podcast. We're on the cusp of 2 million YouTube subscribers.

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