Ryan Grim

0:06What's up, everybody? What's up? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I'm very excited for today's show. So let me just get a couple quick plugs out of the way before we start. Guys, me and Robbie the Fire Bernstein will be back on the road doing stand-up comedy all over the country starting June 5th, one night only in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and then June 18th through 20th, Denver Comedy Works. Come on out for that one. That is maybe my favorite comedy club in the country. Comedy Mothership and Denver Comedy Works are the best. So come on out for those. And then I did want to mention very quickly because he's out today, but this weekend, or I'm sorry, Sunday, May 24th, DC Pub Key, 7 p.m., Robbie the Fire, Bernstein.

0:51Go to PorchTour.com for that date. All right. As I've said before, one of the coolest things about my job is that I get to meet and be friends with people who I really admire, who I've learned a lot from. And our guest for today's show is a great example of that legendary journalist, Ryan Grimm. Truly, I mean, some of you may have forgotten that there are some people out there who still do great journalism. Ryan is one of them. You can read his stuff at DropSiteNews.com. um also of course many of you know him as one of the hosts of the excellent uh show breaking points um i will say ryan i know not not only obviously does ryan right there but ryan uh and jared the great jeremy scahill one of the greatest journalists in the world in my opinion um you guys you guys founded drop site news uh together i i will say this i mean i don't give out awards to news organizations.

1:45But if I did, I would give DropSite like the news organization of the year. The coverage of the Iran war has been just phenomenal. I've been, I'm not just singing your praises to your face for everyone who listens to the show. I've been singing you and Jeremy's praises for the last couple months because it's really the firsthand reporting and the coverage you guys have done have really been indispensable to my understanding of this conflict. And I think in a way, it's weirdly almost broken down to like, there's two types of people when it comes to thinking about this war. There's like the people who are reading DropSite and the people who aren't.

2:21And I mean this, I'm not exaggerating only because you guys have been reporting what the Iranian government is actually saying. That doesn't mean that everything they're saying is true, but it does mean that that's a really critical thing to understand if you're going to understand what's going on here. Right. Yeah, no, that's really kind of you to say. And I've thought about that too, especially as I've watched the the market just go flying around at every like axios tweet and and maybe because there's this herd mentality and maybe everybody knows that what axios is posting is wrong but they know everybody else is gonna follow it too so they've got to follow it but i'm always thinking like wow if if the if traders want to know what's actually happening they've got to be reading jeremy and they got to be reading drop site and i've actually talked to a couple um bankers and they're like oh we're all reading drop site like and and it's not because they like necessarily agree with like whatever editorial viewpoint we have which we actually don't even necessarily have one if you notice like we don't do opinion pieces it's just right right it's just straight news but yeah it's you're you're getting actual information and if you've been if you were reading it you were much less surprised by events as they unfolded then apparently a lot of people in the white house trump's like nobody thought they were going to attack all these gulf countries It's like, what?

3:41Like our stuff is free. Like they were saying it on openly. You attack us. We're turning this into a regional war. And they turn it into a regional war. It's like who could have seen that coming? Well, and also and and also the fact that at every stage of this war has essentially been Trump trying to find a way to get the Iranians to capitulate. And they're very loudly saying we will not capitulate. These are our demands. I mean, their demands from the beginning were pretty bold. and so I think a lot of people might have been under the impression like oh Donald Trump's getting to them or several times which we'll get into in a second where it's always he's saying they're on the cusp of a deal but it's like I don't know man if you listen to what the Iranians are saying again not saying that they won't lie too all governments lie and in the middle of a war everybody's in the business of propaganda however in the eight or nine weeks or whatever wherever we are exactly in this war what and i'm just saying this objectively there's many things i like better about united states of america society than iranian society and i'm a libertarian jew i'm not much in the business of like shiite theocracy the fact is this is objective what the iranian government has been saying since the beginning of this war has been far more consistent and far more in the realm of being tethered to reality and truth than what the president of the United States of America and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio and all these guys have been saying.

5:21It's really brain breaking when you start to recognize that. You're like, wow, like we've set a pretty low bar and are not remotely coming close to clearing it. The part that really blew my mind was the back and forth. If you remember where Jeremy reported that Whitcoff kept texting the Iranians, Araqchi and other Iranians, and the Iranians were just leaving them on read, like no reply, nothing. And then a couple hours after he reports that, Axios reports, the Iranians are reaching out to the United States begging for a deal. And so then this becomes actually, oh, this is a falsifiable claim. Like somebody is text messaging somebody.

6:05These text messages exist. And so then the Iranians, they go on the record, because Jeremy had reported sources in the Iranian government, they go on the record with their top officials saying, we have not responded to the U.S. and this is why. So at that moment, if they were lying, and whitkoff is sitting there with a phone full of messages from aragshi begging him to make a deal boom you either show it show it to axio screenshot it you don't even have to publish them but you could prove they're lying and it was just so obvious oh no like one side here was lying and one side was telling the truth and it wasn't our country that was telling the truth all right guys let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show which is the wellness company do Do you have trouble staying focused and remembering tasks throughout the day?

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7:37No caffeine, no jitters, no crash, just clean cognitive support to help stay sharp and focused throughout the day. Visit TWC.health slash problem and use the promo code problem to get 10 % off plus free shipping. One more time, that is TWC.health slash problem, promo code problem for 10 % off plus free shipping for U.S. residents. All right, let's get back into the show. Yeah, well, I mean, Trump publicly announced, what was this, three weeks ago now, that we had a deal. He announced that we had a deal that was, we get all of the enriched uranium. they stop supporting uh hezbollah the strait is open and in return they get nothing and you're just like i don't know man i read jeremy's column from this morning and there this just is not true this is a complete and then of course as it turns out completely not true i want to ask you like more zooming out a little bit i want to ask kind of like a broad question about the conflict and then i want to get into the specifics of what donald trump tweeted the other day and wherever exactly we are.

8:41We're on the third loop, it seems like, of the same storyline of this war. But just zooming out, now, obviously, you know, we don't exactly know where we are right now in the war or whether this is going to escalate or whether this is the extent of it or exactly how the aftermath will shake out. But you have covered a lot of wars, a lot of U.S.-led wars over the last 25 years. And I mean, of course, like, you know, your partner, Jeremy Scahill, I mean, I first found him probably as many people did when I read Dirty Wars back in, what was it, 2013, I think it was. He put out a book on a dirty, phenomenal book and a documentary, like a companion piece.

9:22You really should read and watch the documentary. They both kind of build on each other. And they were about just like the way JSOC was conducting wars in Yemen and Somalia and a couple of incidents in Afghanistan and just really an understanding of how these wars have been conducted. And the war in Iran thus far, it is not, let's say, it's not the humanitarian catastrophe that Iraq or Afghanistan or obviously or Syria or Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Gaza, we've had the US and Israel wars over the last 25 years, we've got quite a track record. And if you pile them all up, It's like millions of innocent dead people when you start adding up all these conflicts that we started.

10:06OK, Iran has not turned into that yet. However, there is something distinctly catastrophic about this war that was not true with any of those previous conflicts. Like Gaza had no meaningful way of actually fighting back against the global economy. Yeah, the Houthis could touch a couple of boats, but it wasn't really disrupting the global economy. I mean, obviously Iraq and, you know, there was nothing they could do really to fight. This is there weren't even drones back then. We didn't have cheap drones in warfare. And of course, Libya just collapsed into itself and Syria took a little bit longer.

10:45And after a brutal civil war collapsed into itself. But Iran, this is really something different. And I really am kind of, I find myself just kind of being in awe of how big this moment is. That in the history of U.S. wars, I don't think I've ever really seen anything like this, where we have essentially taken this relegated, sanctioned, crippled third world country and transformed them into a global power. and this is I don't know it just it feels to me as I'm watching this you're the professional journalist I'm just the comedian but it feels to me like I'm watching the Berlin Wallfall or something like that like oh this is like a moment in history where everything is changing and I'm curious what's your thoughts on on all that yeah we we totally kind of reorganized the Middle East accidentally um you know Obama was you know he Obama kept trying kept saying he was pivoting to Asia, pivoting to Asia and striking the Iran deal was part of his effort.

11:52He's saying, okay, if we're going to move and we're going to focus more on our competition with China and developing our ties with these other Asian countries, then we need to just settle things down in the Middle East. And the way we need to do that is we just need to make peace, normalize our way into some type of decent relationship with Iran. And then we need to just back out of this entire thing. That was probably the most rational thing for the United States to try to do as it's kind of a declining empire, to try to negotiate a way into a power sharing arrangement with the rest of the world down from the hegemony that they had after World War II, which can't last forever.

12:33You know, it's a giant, giant plan. It shouldn't last forever. Like in order to make that last forever, you can only begin to imagine the amount of suffering. Just I'm sorry. I'm sorry to even cut you off. But even Charles Krauthammer called it the unipolar moment. It's a moment. It's a moment. You know, yeah, but I'm sorry. Continue. you. No, that's exactly right. So that was the plan to do this kind of rational negotiated drawdown. It seems like we're going to get to the same place that Obama was trying to get to, which is us leaving the Middle East, except we're getting there in a kind of Afghanistan exit kind of way, you know, with all of these bases just in complete ruins.

13:17Ironically, it's the, you know, after Israel, the fiercest cheerleaders of kind of reentering this conflict. And they were excited about it to begin with. But they are like, if you look at a map, it's like, what are you guys thinking? You're like right across the strait here from Iran and your entire economy. Well, you've got the base of the economy resting on oil and natural gas, but everything on top of that involves all of these expats from all over the world, like enjoying this like lavish, like luxurious fake lifestyle that you're offering, which itself rests on unspeakable human rights abuses, but also rests upon the idea that it's safe.

14:02It's safe from crime on the street, but it's also, it's not a war-torn Middle Eastern country. Kuwait never really recovered from getting invaded in 1991. They were on a trajectory to be a Dubai type of situation, but because they got tagged as this country where that was invaded and occupied uh people you know expats that's not it's not where that's not where they want to go so i so to your point the entire region is going to look different a year from now than it would have looked if trump had just you know focused on other things like getting health care costs down getting grocery prices down, rebuilding manufacturing in the United States or like whatever he could have focused on here.

14:51Instead, yeah, this entire region is, we're not gonna, are we gonna rebuild these bases knowing that like in a week, Iran could just blow them all up again? Like what is the value of a base at this point in this world where ballistic missiles, drones, and even apparently F-5s can get through and just turn them into ashes? Yeah, that's right. It's a giant bluff that's essentially been called. And, you know, one of the things to me that's so interesting about this is that if you really look back, you start tallying up all the wars, all the wars that America's fought, let's say post-World War II, or even, you know, the wars that we've funded, you know, whatever, you know, Israel's destruction of Gaza.

15:39um you know there it's kind of like maybe with the exception of the ukraine war although that's a delicate dance where we're not exactly directly involved but typically we've been what's become the norm is the u.s picking on whatever third world i don't mean that like an insulting way i just mean like essentially the the difference in economic power the difference in size and military power i mean all the wars that we're fighting then and certainly in my whole lifetime but before that you know we just get used to the fact that it's like oh yeah we're fighting guys in sandals who train on monkey bars we're going in with night vision goggles and calling in air strikes and it's just the the you know it's like you read about um world war one or something like that and and for someone of today's you're kind of struck by the parody of the whole thing like oh my god these are like you really don't know who's going to win here these are two evenly matched countries oh they're kind of in a stalemate this like prolonged trench warfare where it's not even clear if the lines are moving and but people are just dying by the tens of millions and um it's almost like this is the first time we picked on like a mid-sized country like not like a giant superpower of a country but a country that has some means of fighting back and we're collapsing like we're just it's just an utter uh um an utter disaster and we are in this weird point where I think we really don't know how bad the economic devastation has gotten for already.

17:07And that's the other element of this that people haven't really grappled with. You know, I certainly, I was talking about this a bit. I was on with Crystal and Sagar the other day, and I was talking about just like, for example, now me and you have different worldviews on economics or in many ways, but say in like 2020, in the summer of 2020, when it was clear that we We had locked down the entire economy. We were pouring trillions of dollars into the economy. I was like, this is clearly going to lead to price inflation. Like you can't do this without prices going up. This is going to happen in the next couple of years.

17:42And yet the market was at an all time high. The market was not pricing in inflation. The market was like this. And so we have a very controlled kind of rigged market. And we don't really know, Ryan. I mean, I don't know. I've read like some economists and try to get some experts takes on this. But essentially, we've now had a canal where 20 percent of the world's oil, a huge percentage of the world's fertilizer has essentially been closed now for, well, a couple months, really the worst in the last month. It's been worse since we blockaded the blockade. Like what? No, I don't have any faith that the market has factored these costs in.

18:24And we really have no idea what we're going to be looking at in four months and five months in a year from this. We might already have created a real catastrophe here. All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Quince. Summer always changes how you get dressed. You want pieces that feel lighter and more breathable, things that are easy but still put together. Well, check out Quince. Quince's European linen pants and shirts are the perfect warm weather upgrade to add to your rotation, starting at just$34. Their tees are soft and easy to wear, and their lightweight cotton sweaters are perfect for cooler summer nights.

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19:42It's quince.com slash POTP, Q-U-I-N-C-E.com slash POTP for free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com slash POTP. All right, let's get back on the show. It's really scary. And I think, yeah, I'm with you on this, like this worry of like, what is the market? Like what is wrong with our market? Like what has gotten into our market that it is not seeing what's going on here? uh you know one major thing that's propping it up besides all of the like manipulation and the on the pumping uh is that you know goldman sachs and jp morgan who who's and whose analyses kind of set the tone for wall street and therefore the rest of the world are are pricing in that the straight of hormuz will be open by like june june july and that then that global kind of oil reserves and will quickly kind of come back online.

20:47And that's a little bit of a disruption. And I feel like they might be just way too optimistic. Like we're drawing down global reserves at an absolutely historic pace. And it's not quite obvious how Trump ends this thing. Like I don't like, I think what's going on is that everybody is saying, this can't go, this can't keep going on. This won't keep going on because it can't keep going on. Like Trump has lost, like he has to, he has to stop that. There is a logic to that. But then again, it doesn't dictate that Trump's going to actually follow that, follow that logic. Meanwhile, the bond markets are starting to actually show some, some real weakness.

21:34I think treasuries hit a peak today at like 5.19%, which is this a 30 year note. So think about that. This is the United States government that has the world's biggest military and one of the world's biggest economies, maybe the biggest economy, depending on how you count it. And the US government has to pay about 5.2 % for a 30 year note. If they're paying 5.2, like what do you what do you you don't you don't have an army like you've got you don't have the biggest economy in the world you're what are you going to pay and that is seizing up business activity it's seizing up obviously the real estate market so people are locked in their covet era 2.75 percent interest rates that they refinance down to so nobody wants to sell and if they do want to sell they can't take their mortgage with them and buy a new house so they So now they're paying double on their new mortgage, which, by the way, is a total policy failure.

22:33Like, there's no reason you can't port a mortgage over. Like, if we had politicians and a political system that gave a rip about the American people, the thing they would be focused on isn't, like, bombing Iran. They'd be like, oh, hold on. We've got this disconnect here where interest rates are, like, in the 6, 6, 5, 6. People have these 2.78 % mortgages. that has frozen the entire housing market. That's not good. Let's solve that. If you talk to housing policy, people are like, yeah, that's, this isn't actually a thing that you can solve. Like you can write laws that say, that's your mortgage.

23:11You have good credit. You can keep that mortgage and use it to buy something else. But it's not even being discussed because it's like the American people's, it's almost, it's almost like you're a weirdo in today's politics if you want to talk about solving the problems of the american public yeah it's like really what you're in the wrong place here buddy yeah i mean it's really it is an interesting point because of course uh that would it wouldn't even be any loss to the bank right they would just hold the same the same uh debt that they were holding um but of course the one person who would take some loss would be people who had like chopped up and sold the mortgage, but you can make them pretty easily.

23:54It's a solvable problem. Well, it's, well, I guess it's, it's not because it certainly isn't in the banker's interest. And so, you know, DC policy is, I've noticed Ryan over the years, it's kind of a common theme. I'm starting to suspect that these big banks have slightly more influence on Washington DC policy than, than the rest of us do. But yeah, I mean, that's, that's a very good point. I mean, I also just think, you know, It's been an intentional U.S. policy to drive up the price of housing for basically my entire life, going back to the 90s. I mean, this has been the official policy. I mean, even to the point that, as you recall well, in the quantitative easing days, immediately after the great financial recession, it was explicitly the goal of the Federal Reserve.

24:40They were buying like$60 billion in mortgage-backed securities every month. Like, their goal was we will not let the housing market go down. And obviously there's a lot of pain associated with housing prices going down. But I think what we're living through is the pain associated with them going up. And we've created we've created a country. I mean, I like I say this all the time now, but I do think there's one statistic that just. You know, the first time house purchaser is 40 in this country, and that is the result of intentional government policies. and this is just it it's not even like from a left wing or a right wing a conservative or liberal point of view no matter what vision of society you look if people can't buy a house until they're 40 it doesn't work whatever your harmonious like vision of society you want to have a conservative society when young people can't start families like or what you want to have like an egalitarian society where young people can't own a home and we're not talking about mansions i'm talking about just like a modest home and for donald trump so much of what kind of characterized the raison d 'etre for donald trump's political existence was this idea of like you know we want to put america's domestic concerns as the top priority and to have him now on camera openly cutting commercials for democrats essentially just saying i don't care about that It really is like it's it's it's shocking.

26:09I mean, I, you know, look, even just the effects of this war, I spent 100 bucks filling up my car as a big gas guzzling SUV because I'm not a left winger like you. So I get to drive things like that. But whatever my wife's car. But anyway, the point is, it was 100 bucks to fill it up. That is devastating for working class people. Just absolutely devastating. And to hear the president say he just doesn't care, openly doesn't care about that. Sorry, we got the Israel lobby's got wars to fight. And the amount of focus he's simultaneously putting on his ballroom and this$1.7 billion slush fund that he just created for himself, basically, and January 6th people, but mostly for himself.

26:52Like, January 6th people, he's like, here, you can have a little bit of your legal fees back, but he's going to take this$1.7 billion if he manages to pull this off. It seems like he might. um but the the the like split screen of all of the the triple digit at the gas pump him saying yeah i'm not actually concerned about uh americans financial situation and then they go to him and they're like hey do you want to clean that up a little bit like when you said you weren't concerned about the american people's financial situations it sounded like you meant that you didn't care he's like no no that's what i meant they're like oh all right well and then going on and on and on about this ballroom it's like bro like it's it's wild a billion dollars for this thing a billion billion dollars and that's this is a thing that was supposed to be paid for out of donations which were complete shakedowns from companies but okay whatever uh and now if a billion dollars is the like initial price tag that they're putting on this ballroom uh you know it's going to be multiples of that and i think we've lost sight of like how much money that is just because we burned through so much money billion dollars is just an absolutely incredible amount of money where schools are like you know scraping to like hold fundraisers so that they can buy you know toilet paper um or or you know have after school activities or it's it's just obscene oh yeah oh yeah i mean what and the cost of like the cost of keeping our we've got all these troops over there right now like it costs almost as much to keep them there as it does to have them fighting like okay we're not shooting off the missiles right now but like the cost of all of that on a daily basis and the and the wear and tear on the aircraft carriers and all and all all these ships and planes is incredible all playing into iran's hands because iran They need as much pain inflicted on us so that we capitulate and back off.

29:03The way that they're creating the pain is by choking off the Strait of Hormuz. They could only do that to the extent that they're able to withstand the punishment of our attacks. But we stopped attacking. So they're inflicting pain on us. They're just sitting there. it really it's it's really an i it's one of the first wars i think where iq is playing like a an actual role like all these phds and engineers over there running running their situation and we got like pete hexeth and dan kane afraid to like speak up um so yeah it's it's bleak yeah i mean i agree the point you made there is just such an important one um about like actually valuing the money.

29:48And because the, you know, because the, the DC budget is like$7 trillion or something like that, then it's easy for, for people to go like, Oh yeah, like we gave Israel 25 billion in this bill, but that what percentage of the budget is that, you know, it's a tiny little percentage of the budget, but just like, like genuinely think for a second, like what you think about your town. And like, if I just gave you a hundred million dollars, how much you could help people. Like if I just gave you a hundred million dollars and said, go just help the people of your town like how much good you could do how many different oh we got a community rec center now and we got a new this we got a new uh uh whatever you know just all these things we got a new daycare class yeah just everything we built three new schools we did that like a hundred million dollars could do so much that okay like well that times a hundred is a billion and then times another 25 is it like that no i'm sorry even if it's a small percentage of our budget that is an enormous amount of wealth that we just squandered that could have been spent Whether you want to do it the Ryan Grimm way and tax people and have the government spend it or you want to do it the Dave Smith way and just cut taxes and let it stay in the economy or whatever.

30:54Either way, that is a lot of money that is not over here now that is now shared between weapons companies and, you know, Israeli, you know, connected people to their government or something. Now, it's appalling. And I think it's also it's part of the reason why we can get away with, you know, like I used to point this out a lot where during the Maidon revolution, which was kind of spun in the West as like an organic revolution. And as I found out, in fact, you you moderated a debate that I hosted once on this. And of course, it always gets brought up. Well, are you saying those people didn't have agency?

31:27Are you saying that those weren't real protesters out on the street? And it's like, well, no, but I'm saying that like the U.S. pouring a hundred million dollars into a street protest in Ukraine, like Ukraine is a very small economy, man, for to pour a hundred million dollars into that country moves mountains. And in this case, it moved Yanukovych to Moscow. And like, that's a very relevant detail. And so we I think the American people really and this is because partially because we're such a rich country, partially because our government wastes so much money or spends so much money that people almost don't like even.

32:03Yeah, what's pouring one hundred million dollars into a street protest over there? And you're like, oh, it's actually a very big deal. Yeah, yes. Yes. The asymmetry of the amount you can buy with that overseas is truly incredible. And meanwhile, what this war has really exposed is, you know, we all kind of knew that the military industrial complex was a scam and was just built, you know, just bilking everybody for money. But we spend a trillion dollars a year on our military budget used to be called defense budget. And I guess it's the war budget. And after 40 days of war, they're like, yeah, we're basically out of ammo and our and our like planes like.

32:44need a break. Uh, the, the, this one aircraft carrier group had to go back. Um, because it's, you know, it's the, the, some undies caught fire in the, the dryer area. Uh, and the Israelis are down to like, as I reported at drop site, double digit ballistic missile interceptors. It's like, and they're, and they have endless 10 and$20 ,000 drones. And they, they even have the, have you seen these like inflatable anti-aircraft and then also painted on flights so we're taking multi-million dollar missiles and in a best case scenario the worst case scenario we're firing at them at elementary schools best case scenario we're firing them at like these inflatable uh you know guys outside of used car dealerships and um blowing them up and now they want a trillion and a half dollars what does that get a 60 days of war right and what like to your point the bluff being called is the most i think significant material change that this besides like a lot of bases getting destroyed but like we had a lot of kind of global capital based on how scary our military was like probably peaked in december or early january when when they went in with the delta force guys and like used different like weird new weapons and left with maduro uh and his and his wife bizarrely um and still have his wife locked up uh that was probably the peak of like this like intimidating character of american military power and there was a lot you could do with that you know kind of you know but you can bully other people into kind of agreeing to things as a result of that, that plus the monetary system.

34:35Now, people are going to be like, yeah, I'm not so scared anymore. Iran kind of stood up to you guys for 40 days and you kind of ran out of weapons. So certainly if you're Taiwan, you're like, oh, I guess we're on our own. Well, this, okay, so this ties into like the latest on this. And I'm really curious to get your thoughts about this. So Trump posted yesterday, of course, we're I mean, it's I've been describing it on the show as we've we've reached the you're fucking with me stage of this war. Like you just can't even believe that we're just doing the same cycle again. But so Donald Trump now and for for art of the deal.

35:16I mean, this is all just so ridiculous. So he's already threatened to end their entire civilization. Their response to that. And I, of course, know this because I read you and Jeremy is reporting. But the Iranian response to that was like, I'd evacuate Saudi Arabia if I were you. And then and then the people went and like formed circles around the bridges like you're going to have to take all of us out with these bridges. So he went ultimate threat. They did not back down. He then backs down, says, I've agreed to the 10 point plan. They're like, OK. And then he's like, no, no, no, I didn't agree to the 10 point.