8/26/26: Iran and Oman Defy Trump, Lake America, China Says Screw You

25:45I mean, he needs to go up there in infamy with General Taylor from Vietnam, with any of the other, you know, genuinely like any of the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs. Ironically enough, H.R. McMaster, who was Trump's national security advisor, first term, wrote a whole book about it, which is actually quite good, about how the entire chairman staff failed Johnson on Vietnam and never told him any of the truth. And Cain, who I know has read the book because it's like required reading in military cycles, comes out and repeats the entire thing. Total sycophant. And the one regret I have about the fact that we never got the kind of parade of lies to push us into the war that we got with Iraq is that because of that, we don't have many or almost any public records from these people of where they stood before the war.

26:35Like with Wolfowitz, for instance, we know that he said it would be a cakewalk because he said it in front of Congress with the cameras rolling. So that gets to live in infamy. And it bought us this 20 years of being like, well, let's not start any new wars. It didn't it didn't end the forever wars, but at least it took until Trump to, like, start another giant war. We don't have any clips of Cain talking publicly. All we have is reporting from The Times, reporting from The Journal. You're reporting that and his own spin at the time of saying, no, I was I said a lot about, you know, the material limitations of our capacity at the moment and that, you know, Trump should be concerned.

27:21That was the thing that Cain's people were trying to spin in the media that, no, he said, we got to be careful about our stocks and munitions. It's, you know, we're not sure that we really have everything in the barrel that we're going to need to do this. When behind closed doors, talking to this guy who was, you know, really itching to do this. He's saying, we got you, boss. Don't worry about the naysayers. These same naysayers who told you that you couldn't swoop in and grab Maduro and his wife in the middle of the night, and you went and did it, sir. You know, we are going to make sure that, okay, yeah, maybe what Netanyahu is saying is a little bit over the top, but, you know, and certainly there are going to be some problems, but we got this.

28:06It's the greatest military in the world, sir. Exactly. And, you know, at the same time, just to show you kind of where things are, let's put the next one up here on the screen. It appears now that the U.S. State Department is basically offering$10 million. This is very war on terror-esque, offering$10 million bounties for information on key IRGC leaders, including the new supreme leader. And so they basically have a list here of all of the top leaders from the IRGC and of Iran saying, hey, anybody will pay you$10 million to give us information. The reason why I'm putting these two things together is they are now offering$10 million of bounty for information, obviously for potential assassination purposes, because all of these people are now in power because of the operation.

28:54It fulfills the exact promise or the exact prediction that was made apparently by the U.S. intelligence community. You and I have a lot of smoke for the intelligence community. But even they apparently were like, wow, the Israelis are just black blanket liars whenever it comes to their prescriptions about how this entire thing is going to go. And we cover the day to day over and over again. But the how we got here is vitally important because every single one of these people is still in power. Tulsi aside, I mean, the new DNI is equally as much of an idiot and sycophant. General Cain is still running the war.

29:26Secretary Hegseth is still running the war. I mean, all of these people, they're horrible judgment. And if anything, as we've seen many times in history, they only have even more of an incentive to double down on their previously bad advice to cover up how much of a disaster it's been. And five of these 14, we don't even have photos of. In the pictures, it's like what an incredible collapse of our intelligence and our ability to have any eyes on the ground inside of Iran, a country of 90 million people. 100 million people. With like six to seven major ethnicities, which makes it much more able to be penetrated, where the Israelis are everywhere.

30:04Like they're not sharing the Facebook photos that they have of these guys. And of the 14th, there's a bunch of gray-bearded bureaucrats. You think they don't have gray-bearded bureaucrats who can take their place if we go in and assassinate them? We're going to assassinate Mojitaba coming in? Yeah, well, no. Apparently, the new cope is that he's actually dead. Then take him off the list. Whether he's dead or not, the people who are running the country in his name, they seem to have a hell of a better idea on how to do it than his father did. Or our folks do. Him being dead or brain dead is probably the best case scenario for all of you.

30:39Just be a convenient figurehead and they can run the country in his name. Likely, almost certainly to continue now for many, many years. Okay, let's get to the next 200 years. He certainly will. All right, let's get to Canada. I have been with Rasmussen University since 2013, all virtual. All of my professors throughout the entire journey have been nothing but supportive of making me reach my dreams. Rasmussen professors, they want to see you grow so that you can be what you went to school to be. I'm so thankful for Rasmussen University for being able to make it so easy and seamless. Rasmussen University.

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31:58It's the perfect time to bring everyone together for the getaway you've been dreaming about. Book between July 24th and August 27th and enjoy up to 55 % instant savings. From relaxing beach days to unforgettable moments with the people who matter most, your next vacation starts here. Travel through July 31st, 2027. Start your vacation today at AppleVacations.com or through your travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. President Donald Trump has come back with the ultimate rebuttal in his trade war with Canada. He's going to rename Lake Ontario Lake America. Look out. In any event, here we have the Canadian Minister of Finance.

32:40I love this. Francois-Philippe Champagne with what the Canadian response to the US trade war is going to be. On August 22nd, the United States of America imposed tariffs on 50 % on approximately$28 billion in Canadian goods. Those tariffs will have real consequences for Canadian workers, businesses, and communities across our nation. Canada must respond, And today we are in a proportionate, targeted and strategic way. Today I'm announcing that Canada will match the United States tariffs dollar for dollar, rate for rate. Effective September 8th, Canada will impose counter tariffs of up to 15, 25 or 50 percent on 27.6 billion in imports from the United States of America.

33:41For each product, our tariff would match the American tariff on the same type of Canadian good. And the Canadians said that they're trying to target with precision states that voted for Trump. And so if you live in one of those states, they're going after particular products made in those states because they know they don't have the capacity to kind of break the back or break the economy of the entire United States because they're not big enough. but they can make things very difficult for particular towns and cities in states that voted for Trump. Trump, however, has got your back, and here's how he's going to do it.

34:18Put up B1 here, Donald Trump on Truth Social. The United States is giving serious consideration to changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America in that we don't expect to be doing much business with Ontario any longer. Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. And of course, he also posted a little image, a little AI rendition where he X's out Lake Ontario and replaces it with Lake America. Now, with B3, we can roll through some of the specifics here. So, Canada is talking about, so Trump is saying that he's going to move tariffs on Canadian vehicles up to 50%.

35:02So Canada has come back and saying, OK, well, then we're going to we're going to push tariffs on Canadian vehicles back up to 50 percent. It's a it's a kind of a crisis situation where you have the auto workers in both states and the United Auto Workers represent auto workers in Canada and the U.S. And you have the auto executives begging him not to do this. So the industry that he's fighting for is pleading with him not to do this. He's saying he's going to do it anyway before Honda, which I think like what? Five of their five, like five of the American made five of the top ten like vehicles.

35:47It's one of the top sellers in the United States. And made in the United States, too, and made in North America. Many of them are made in America. They invested very heavily in creating supply chains and factories in the U.S. and Canada. Not out of the goodness of their heart, by the way. Because we forced them to do so. We forced them to do so. We forced them to do it. And so they're saying we might have to raise prices because their supply chains run back and forth across the border. Right. I can explain this, actually. This is part of it. First of all, I just want to say at the top. Obviously, and this is, look, Canadians, you're going to get mad.

36:19But it is actually true. NAFTA was a disaster for us. It wasn't for you. It worked out real well for you. A lot of our manufacturing plants in Detroit and throughout the United States moved to Canada and to Mexico, either for labor arbitrage purposes or for various other access to resources. I get it. I don't blame a multinational for doing that, for taking advantage. But it did not work out for our working class. The way that the cars are made right now is basically NAFTA plus USMCA, which means that many of these cars, and this is what Honda is talking about, the parts in the car in some cases can move across the border.

36:52up to 10 to 15 times. I'm exaggerating. It may not always be that much, but various different types of the car, once it's finally assembled in the United States, there are parts in it that come from all over the world, but particularly move back and forth for machine purposes, manufacturing purposes that eventually make their way into the Honda vehicle, which you eventually purchase in the United States. Honda does this because that's the way that NAFTA and USMCA set out the law. They said there won't be any tariffs that are on those. Again, I don't support this system. I don't think it should be that way, but it is what it is at this point.

37:24So then when the tariff comes into effect, what ends up happening with the way that Trump is doing it is it would increase the cost every time that thing moves across the border. That's why the car manufacturers are freaking out because that would raise the imminent cost of them. If you had to pay that cost even once, imagine 10 times, that explodes the cost of the increment on the actual part. Also, from what I understand, the car makers know the shit's not actually going to last. So most of the time, they'll just keep it in Canada. They're like, look, we're just going to wait for the taco and then we'll move it across the border that time.

37:59But obviously, what does that do? Now, production has to shut down. Now you're going to meet quotas. It causes all kinds of insanity whenever it comes to the vehicle tariff. I mean, even right now, Trump said he was going to double the tariff to 50 % whenever it comes to the Civic sedan, for example. Honda currently assembles the Civic in Canada. It's the second largest vehicle manufacturer by volume. And so a lot of that is eventually sold here in the United States. Again, I don't want to give the Canadians too much credit because when, and this has happened under Biden, so this isn't just TDS or anything.

38:34Under Biden, you can go and read the headlines. There were all of these made in America provisions for the EV manufacturing credits. The Canadians were lobbying the hell out of the government. They're like, how can you do this to us? You can't just make it in your country. Like, you need to make it in an hour. And we're like, no, we want to make it in our country. The Canadians were furious with Biden, and even more so under Donald Trump. So this is kind of a years-long story. Same thing happened in Europe. I get it. They're looking out for their interests. I think we should look out for ours.

39:03Now, is this the way I would handle our relationship with Canada? No. As I said, I don't have any great love for Canada. But what we can see here is even if you were to support this in a vacuum, which is true, Canada needs us a lot more than we need them. We still need them. Top major top trading partner to launch this at a time of massive inflation and to do it in such a manner where the Canadian population is much better positioned to absorb the price increase. Put this up here while I'm talking about it is that their population is 100 percent united. They're like a war footing. They don't care.

39:41Yeah. They're like, all right, we're going to pay more for Tim Hortons. We'll eat grass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. As long as you agree. It was like, so be it. We'll sit there and we're going to take it. Are we going to sit there? And are we going to take it? While you're paying, what's the gas price today? Let me check. $4.10 on average per gasoline? That's like, well, we're sitting here paying high gas, high grocery, and all this other stuff. They obviously have their own problems, but we're the aggressor. And if we're going to be the aggressor, the whole population has to be on our side. Nobody's on there.

40:12They don't care about this at this time. Again, in a vacuum, sure, whatever. You can make a case, et cetera. Even then, you wouldn't probably want to do like a back and forth type of trade war on again, off again, be extremely incendiary. And what you're watching effectively is that the Canadian government right and left is totally united against the United States. I mean Doug Ford is like a national hero in Canada for all of this like kiss my ass stuff. And what you're watching is on our side, nobody wants to pay any of these higher tariffs, also because they don't even think it's going to be paired with a bigger manufacturing push, which now we've had the tariffs for over a year.

40:51We know it's not leading to that, especially because of downward pressure from the overall economy. The diesel price plus the tariff, a lot of these manufacturers are dead in the United States if this continues. And it's also a bit of a sideshow given that electric vehicles in the next decade or whatever are going to sweep the entire country. It would be sort of like— I don't know if it will here. I think that they'll put so much protectionism on gas that— Maybe. Also, look, I've got to save my smoke for the American consumer. Dodge was out here bragging about the Dodge Ram being the number one seller in the country.

41:25There are guys out there taking out 9 % interest car loans over 48 months, buying$80 ,000 souped-up trucks for literally no reason. And so there is a part of that in the American heart which will never go away. Maybe that's right. Right. I look at it as like two different countries competing over the manufacturing of horse and buggies in like 1905. It's a fair point. I mean, gas is always going to be part of our market. Maybe I'm wrong. And you're right that just the construction of our lives and the suburban nature of it and the cultural attachment to the gas guzzlers is going to override pure economics.

42:09We'll see. But you're right. If you were going to redesign the system, you would renegotiate it. Like sit down. Trump had the USMCA that he agreed to. like if if he wanted a different trade policy the massive trade negotiation that was underway was like the place to do it uh this this like ad hoc scattershot tariff war that he likes to do is yeah like because they don't expect it to stick it doesn't have the effect you're right that the reason that honda is here is because of u.s tariffs and because of u.s trade policy And also just enormous amounts of kind of it bordered into xenophobic anti-Japanese.

42:57Right. So the game that everybody knows about the Japanese. But it was long. It was a long game. Right. And so what happened is post 1970s after the, you know, actually Trump was all over Oprah talking about how bad Japan was. I had a point actually at the time because of the undercutting of our market. it. The deal the Japanese made throughout the 80s and 90s, especially post-NAFTA, is we were like, look, we know everybody wants your cars. They're cheaper. They're better than ours. You just got to build them here. The Japanese are like, we don't really want to, but I guess. All right, we'll do it.

43:26And so what I've heard from more recently is inside Japan, their belief is that they would have been better off in the long run just making them Japan and shipping and paying the tariff. They're sick of building here. They hate American work culture. They hate most of the states um i'm dead serious i hate american work culture they hate the government they're they're they think they would have been better off right just building the cars in japan and paying whatever the variable tariff and what have been for deal with these american workers deal with all this bullshit and the state of michigan government right because in japan when the ceo of honda needs something the japanese prime minister is like what do you need all right here you go they're like oh you want 100 billion here's 200 you know make sure that it works out it's not how works here, right?

44:13So basically, look, the TLDR is that while I do think we have major structural problems in our trade with Canada, the way that this has been done, especially the Lake America, I'm like, my God, do you have any original ideas? Sure, it was funny on the first day, Gulf of America and all that. We can all start looking at maps and why Gulf of Mexico is actually a Spanish colonial name. It's actually quite woke to rename it Gulf of America. I support that. It actually is. Yeah, yeah. It's like, why should we be using a Spanish colonial name? But in reality, we all know, number one, this is not going to lead to a better deal.

44:46It will lead to chaos. It will lead to higher prices. It will also lead to worsening relations with Canada, which maybe we could have afforded pre-Iran war. I don't think we could right now with our top trading partner. It's part of a global isolation game. I will say, though, with Canada, you know, it's their their population wants to fight. But remember, Mark Carney gave that whole speech about neoliberalism and and the standing up in the window. Yeah. He's like, we're going to change everything. And then immediately came back and backed Trump on the Iran war and and, you know, became like this NATO, you know, obsessive.

45:23So they need to make up their mind, too. Like, what are you guys going to do? I think we have to live together and we got to work it out. But look, that's not really what either of them. That's maybe what our population wants. I'm not so sure that's what they want. And meanwhile, China is like playing a lot of footsie with Canada. Totally. They have very different rules in Canada. A lot of their Teslas have much more Chinese components from Giga Shanghai. I think maybe 10 % or so. A lot of them are not even allowed to be sold here in the United States. So they have very different rules and relations with China and kind of their engagement with the rest of the world.

45:56So they're doing a balancing act, which they didn't previously used to have to do. They're mostly on the side of the United States. It's certainly not like that anymore. Speaking of China, let's get to China. I think something that makes me well-studded to be a nurse is my empathy. Growing up with a big family, I think I've always kind of been a caregiver. When you care give, you get to know the family and the patient, and you get really close. And Rasmussen University, they did a very, very good job of giving us the resources that we need. So just being able to apply the knowledge that I've retained to my daily life has been so amazing.

46:32Learn more at rasmussen.edu. Discover a spectacular island destination with crystal blue seas, endless sunshine, and the cool Bahamian breeze. Bahamar, located in Nassau, Bahamas, offers your choice of three luxury hotels, over 45 fine dining and nightlife venues, John Batiste's all-new jazz club, the Caribbean's most luxurious casino, and one-of-a-kind experiences for the entire family, like our 15-acre tropical water park, wildlife sanctuary, world-class golf course, and so much more. Visit Bahamar.com today. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. The Summer Savings Event is here at Apple Vacations.

47:13It's the perfect time to bring everyone together for the getaway you've been dreaming about. Book between July 24th and August 27th and enjoy up to 55 % instant savings. From relaxing beach days to unforgettable moments with the people who matter most, your next vacation starts here. Travel through July 31st, 2027. Start your vacation today at AppleVacations.com or through your travel advisor. Apple Vacations, where your story starts. Okay, so as we were talking about speaking about China and the way that they're navigating this entire situation, it's kind of a boon to them, the entire Iran war and even the trade war, honestly.

47:48Let's put this up here on the screen. It comes on the heels of Scott Besant promising economic D-Day. And so how is China responding? Let's take a look. China has vowed to protect its interests after the U.S. announced plans to widen economic sanctions against Iran and its trading partners. Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Zhang said that China was formally opposed to what it called illegal unilateral sanctions and would take all necessary measures to safeguard its rights. This comes after Scott Besant saying that he will announce new measures warning any nation financially partnering with Iran would be isolated.

48:25China buys 90 percent of Iranian oil. And Lin said further, cooperation between China and Iran has always been conducted within the framework of international law and should not be interfered with or disrupted. obviously Besson had said the single greatest financial offensive ever against Iran and then proceeded to release absolutely zero details about the entire thing. And so they're making it clear, and this is part of why the D-Day thing, you and I both know it's not even going to happen. If we were going to target any nation, it's going to be some small piddly nation which buys oil from Iran.

49:00President Xi is coming to the United States, I think next month, sometime in September. Are we really going to center our entire relations with the second largest power on earth, our number one trading partner, our number one unilateral trading partner whenever it comes to China? Such enormous effect on the global economy, on us, on our relations and all that in Asia, which we've effectively abandoned. Are we really going to do it when it comes to Iran? And that's the thing too, even if we did, would it work? I think the fact that we did it to Russia, a second-rate power compared to China, that it didn't work entirely, that it showed that their resilience to a sanction-proof, defectively financial system and weapons manufacturing allowed them to prosper for the entire time.

49:47So I think what we see with China in this entire thing is that the Trump administration is really in a bind because their rhetoric, as you said, remember, D-Day, it's a term that has meaning, I think, in rhetoric, rhetorical influence. D-Day is like all out of offense. It's all out offense. We roll the dice and we go all in and we're going to defeat. But if you don't do that, that's humiliating. If you do do it, it will be a disaster because we know that we don't have the ability to actually compel their behavior on Iran, which they have continued to support for the last six months. If anything, sending them weapons, giving them lots of intelligence, supporting their drone industry, and really bolstering their ability to stand up against the United States.

50:30And on your Russian point, CIA director John Ratcliffe was just in Moscow. Flew there yesterday. The reporting was, and maybe you've heard whether or not how accurate this reporting is, is that one of the messages that he conveyed was, we want you to sever ties with Iran. And if you don't, we're going to do X, Y, and Z. Russia relayed that to Iran, said, don't worry about it. We're not going to do it. And the The threats that they made were not actually that serious. And so that's Russia. Like, as you said, Russia is not China. So I'm curious if you have any insight into why it is that the Trump administration moves publicly forward with these ideas that to any person just casually observing are unworkable.

51:24I think it just makes Trump feel good. What does he love? Words. We talked about Lake America. D-Day. Go out and do the words. Yeah. Besson walks in, sir, economic D-Day. And he doesn't realize there will be a week after the week that he's living in now. And then he's like, well, wait, hold on a second. We can't actually do that. So you announce it, but then nothing actually happens. Like I said, I mean, the prestige to the empire is immense. I mean, if the empire says D-Day, people should be like, oh, shit. Like, we're about to get rocked. Except the Chinese are like, yeah, okay. They're like, go ahead.

51:52Let's see. Let's see how it works out for you. The Financial Times actually wrote this up in a very good op-ed. Let's put this up here on the screen. They talked specifically. In the event, it seemed more like a series of warning shots fired from far offshore. The campaign to turn Iran into an economic outcast is, moreover, not even one that the United States can fully accomplish on its own, but requires cooperation with Tehran's trading partners. The biggest of those, China has signaled little intention to play ball. And as Besant acknowledged, moving too quickly with U.S. secondary sanctions that do not comply would blow up the global financial system.

52:27And especially what they talk about here whenever it comes to China. It says Beijing, which already buys 90 percent of Iran oil, warned that if the U.S., it would retaliate if Chinese companies were included. Any significant increase in U.S. sanctions on China would then torpedo delicate trade negotiations only a month before Trump and Xi are due to meet in Washington. Even if the U.S. did manage to impose a significant new economic pain on Iran, there is no guarantee that it would even force Tehran's capitulation. After two years, after two wars in the past year have damaged industrial capacity and left inflation running at 80 to 90 percent, their economy is in far deeper crisis than when Iran had launched maximum pressure in 2018.

53:08But the regime is now more hardline by the conflict, only increasing its defiance. And so what they call, say here, is the China problem is basically there is no way to compel Chinese behavior, which would not immediately have blowback on the United States, which the Chinese is not going to do. And even if they did do, it probably wouldn't work. And one of the reasons, and I remember now in retrospect, how much criticism we took talking about here about those Russia sanctions. Because I remember, and I said this, I said, if you do this, you need to do it for something which is actually vitally important to the United States.

53:48Because by pulling it out, making Russia the most sanctioned economy on earth, then you show your hand. You show exactly the way that you can use the global financial system to your advantage. And what if it doesn't work? And we know now, four years later, it didn't work at all. GDP is up in Russia. Missile production is up. Weapons manufacturing is there. They're able to pay all of the widows. They can take who knows what the real number is, at the very least, hundreds of thousands of casualties and survive. Their population is fine. There's still food on the shelf in Moscow. Everybody's fine.

54:20In fact, some of them are so rich they can fly to Thailand or whatever these countries will take them. But then you look here at China for the last four years of sitting there studying the entire thing. Oh, here's how the sanction worked. Here's how the bank is. Here's how they implemented it. Here's what they did against Iran. Here's what they did against Venezuela. They're just picking up data points. Then they go in because it's a nation of bureaucrats and they say, how do we make sure this doesn't happen? How do we make sure that doesn't happen? They've had so many years. And lo and behold, let's put the next one up here on the screen, is that China now says, quote, they need U.S.

54:51dollars but is building a hedge against Washington sanctions. And what they specifically laid out is that China's banks are now currently in a position where Beijing can reject the demand, even though some of its biggest lenders still have a strong incentive to preserve access to the dollar. Besant had actually even said if they facilitate transactions that are part of the ecosystem that turns Iranian oil into money, they will be targeted. But the Chinese, what they're doing is they have internal mechanisms to use a different system of banking. It's called the Chinese Cross-Border Interbank Payment System, or CIPS, which allows it to diversify from dollar-centered finance without abandoning it altogether.

55:36PRC built CIPS in 2012, which was apparently the first year that they ever got sanctioned, and they now have 12 years of experience actually using it. They also have put in multiple different systems inside their own banks to be able to trade on different types of currency. I know this is all very technical, but this is the machinery and like the railroad, if you will, which banking systems in China used to work. And they built an alternative pathway to do deals with Russia and with any other country that America doesn't want it to do. They would prefer to use the primary one, but the secondary one is there, battle tested and ready to go if we were to put it against them.

56:13And CNBC notes the symmetry here that it was actually in 2012, we sanctioned a small Chinese bank specifically for doing business with Iran. And so that's why they built this parallel clearance project. So that if we did that again, and it goes back to that old saying, you know, if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank owns you. So if you owe the bank$40 trillion, you own the bank. And it's like Bessett needs to go back and reread his volume three of Marx's Capital, which talks about the way that debt and leverage shape who has control over resources. Because I think he's forgotten the way that this has unfolded.

56:59That goes back to your point that anything that we could do because they own the bank, they own us because of our debt with them, our relationship with them, it blows right up in their face. And so China has announced we will not take this lying down. You know, you can do D-Day if you want. But, you know, if you try to storm our beaches, don't forget you're going to blow up all of your own treasury bonds. We have guns. We can put your economy to the brink. He even said, quote, we have our own tools and we know how to play the game. We've been waiting for these plans for a long time. That's an ominous quote.

57:41Unlike us. We've planned this last week. Yes. And, oh, that was the last thing I wanted to put on up here. I forgot to mention. Put C4 up on the screen. Remember that we've been talking about the only reason that the entire economy did not implode as a result of oil prices was entirely because China reduced its overall oil imports to a low, which we did not even think humanly possible. It remains the reason why that oil continues to be relatively low, despite the fact that there's been this major disruption. And if you're watching our show, the chart in front of you shows why. As you can see, exactly the number of crude oil exports that's sent to an all-time high.

58:23where you can see now is that they're beginning to climb up back to levels that we haven't seen from the very beginning in April and in May. And the reason why that they're beginning to climb up is because it says Asian buyers are snapping up U.S. crude, adding stress to a tight market. And what it means is that with very little oil coming out of the Strait of Hormuz, that everybody has had to readjust and buy oil from where it is available in America, thanks to the shale revolution. Now, immediately, some of this was being bought by Europe, by Japan, and others. But what they point to here specifically is China, and specifically that China is beginning to ramp up slightly its overall buy.

59:05We're not even close to where we are at normal levels. They still think the price is too high. It's very clear that their electric grid capacity, their EV reliance, and their overall strategic petroleum reserve bought them a runway, which nobody even thought possible. But as Asian buyers run through their petroleum reserve, just like the United States, eventually you're going to have to go out and buy. And that's what sends the bid price up. And so as we see right now with the Chinese, they can use their own buying leverage to inflict maximum pain on the United States. They don't even have to necessarily do it on sanctions.

59:40they could easily take a strategic loss by buying oil at a very, very high price, which would send demand skyrocketing in the United States. And they could easily, if they just resumed to their buying where it was pre-war levels, they could send gas prices here up to$5.50 a gallon if they wanted to, which would be a total disaster. I mean, a monumental change, I think, politically. And not only the same with diesel, of which, of course, they also have their own capacity. So I just wanted to flag that for everybody. As the buys continue and if they tick up even more, that$4.10 that we're seeing.

1:00:13I mean, every last two weeks, every time I say something, I'm like$4.02,$4.04,$4.06. I was gone for a couple days,$4.10. It just keeps on ticking up to where things are. And there's not even any real bullets that are flying. God save you if you need diesel. My God, yeah, actually. I can see it in front of me. $5.62 a gallon. and diesel was at$3.70 a gallon a year ago for context and has now been above$5 a gallon for months. And the proportion of Trump supporters who buy diesel versus gas. Oh, it's gotta be immense. Yeah. Right. Like I said earlier about the idiot men out there who live in suburbs who buy these diesel trucks.

1:00:56I'm like, hope it was worth it, buddy. Hope it was worth it so that you can use it to move once every four years. Move your buddy's cash. Or you buy your friend's couch. Somewhere out there, there are a lot of wives saying, I told you so. I told you so. And she was right. She bought a CRV. All right. Let's get to Robert Pape.

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