Trump’s Iran War: America's Loss Is China’s Win

24:41military facilities in the region say most were hit. And they've been hit regularly. And these are satellite shots that are readily available. Both The Washington Post and The New York Times have done these investigations of them. and they've gone through and said, actually, these hits look more extensive than we realize or than the administration has been saying. So it certainly seems to me that these bases were not as well protected as we think. What's also with the problem is the Trump administration lies and doesn't tell the amount. So they're refusing to say what the costs are going to be.

25:13They just want to say, oh, they're not as bad as you think. So the Trump administration is setting this up. When it comes to what has happened in Iran, in some ways, we are dealing with deep speculation. They clearly were able to hit the Iranian government at the start of the war and kill the Supreme Leader and kill a number of other senior political figures. Since then, we don't really know what has been going on. There does seem to be a new Iranian leadership, which is being very hard line. So they're not acting like they've been devastated. Now, this might be bluff, might be the Iranians are trying to bluff Trump down, but they're not acting like they have been devastated or they feel that their control over the country is being devastated.

25:53being threatened. And there's entirely different narratives about the state of the Iranian military. There were the leaked intelligence reports that said 70 to 75 percent of Iranian missile technology is still there, that they can dig it out and fire again. I know U.S. senior commanders are saying, no, no, it's much worse than that. You know, in some ways we won't know till long after this thing. However, what we see from the U.S. is an inability to get the Iranian regime to give Trump the kind to peace deal terms that he needs. And because he can't get that, he is stuck. And we might, people are saying he might go back to bombing now because he doesn't know what else to do.

26:32And if he's forced to go back into bombing, then we have to assume that, by the way, the Iranians haven't been as damaged as he says they have. Well, as best I can tell, the Trump theory of the war seems to have been based on what happened in Venezuela, which was you had a leader at the top who believes some ideology, who's a direct heir of the regime's founded by Hugo Chavez. He hands it off to Nicolas Maduro. Maduro has some degree of belief in whatever he thought Chavez was doing. But below Maduro, it's all gangsters and crooks. So if you can get rid of the top guy who believes in the old ideology, then you bring to the fore gangsters and crooks.

27:06And the Trump people look at that and say, we love gangsters and crooks. We recognize gangsters. Those are our people. We can do business with the gangsters and crooks, and they'll do what we say in exchange for some kind of financial consideration. And it does look like that's sort of what happened in Venezuela. And they seem to have made a similar assumption about Iran that the next level down to the level below that, those were also gangsters and crooks. So kill the top, what, 40, however many people they killed, and bring to the surface the gangsters and crooks, and you can do business with them.

27:35Yeah. I mean, another thing is Maduro wasn't an ideologist either. Maduro was a gangster and crook extraordinaire. And from what we see in Venezuela, it's simply the Maduro regime without Maduro. Still, his vice president is now president and his very, very nasty minister of justice is, some say, the power behind the throne. So the Maduro regime endures. It's even perhaps a more hard line than before. When it comes to Iran, I don't know what they thought. I mean, I think you were exactly right. He thought I could get rid of the leadership and a new leadership will come up. They won't be nice, but they'll do what I care.

28:08As you say, he doesn't care if they're democratic. He doesn't care if they believe in freedom. He doesn't care what they are as long as they do what he wants. He wants leaders that will defer to him and kowtow to him. And the Venezuelans have done that to a certain degree. The Iranian regime is utterly different. And it's a far more extreme regime, I would argue. And he simply didn't understand what he was dealing with. And they didn't have any real plan in place to get rid of them. They assumed it would be much easier than it is. And now they're left with what most people are saying is a more hard line regime than the one they killed at the beginning of the bombing.

28:47So they probably made the Iranian regime more extreme. They certainly don't seem to have candidates to take over on the ground in Iran. You don't hear that there is a new leadership waiting in the wings of the U.S. to activate. So it's just been a colossal miscalculation. They assumed it would be easy. They acted very much like Putin did in 2022. That's the interesting, most close analogy I can think of. Really, they thought a few days of military action, they'll show their power, the Iranians will fold, and they'll get a new leadership. And that's what Putin thought in 2022. We'll march into Ukraine.

29:23The Ukrainians will fold. They really won't want to fight. They love us. You know, they'll have a new pro-Russian government, and we'll all move on from there. And it just doesn't work out like that. Well, U.S.-Iran is now turning into a true O 'Brien-style war of mutual economic punishment. The intensity of violence has stepped down greatly. But the United States is – Iran is blockading the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the rest of the world. The United States is counter-blockading. President Trump seemed at first to dismiss the significance of the blockade because not very much of the oil comes to the United States.

29:56I don't think he really absorbed the idea that even if 80 % of the oil flows from the Persian Gulf to Asia, there's still only one price in the world. So if the price goes up, it goes up everywhere. He doesn't seem to grasp that, at least at the beginning. He surely grasps it now. So the Iranians are inflicting significant economic damage on the rest of the world, but the United States is inflicting economic damage on Iran. They can't sell their oil, which they need to do. There's actually two deadlines here. We don't know which one will be reached first. I think the American deadline is quite clear, as in what the Iranians are thinking is Trump has to settle this in time to run the midterm elections.

30:29He can't go into the midterm elections in the fall with this war ongoing and fighting, going on, bombing of Iran, a very unpopular war, which will not help him with anybody. So the Iranians are calculating. He's got to settle it in time to run the midterm elections. I think what Trump is calculating about the Iranians is at some point, the enormous economic pressure I'm putting on them by not letting them trade will force them to cut a deal that I want. And really, he has at this point almost minimum demands. I think really Trump would take almost anything if it makes it look, particularly when it comes to nuclear weapons, that he's got a concession.

31:09This is the one thing he sort of has to have. So he's gambling that his economic pressure will force the Iranians down before the Iranians pressure, political pressure forces him down. I think the problem that he faces is that he's dealing with a pretty tough and nasty group and they are willing to suffer pain and they're willing to put their own people under pain to hold out for longer. where the Iranians have calculated they have a much higher pain tolerance threshold than Trump has, which is why more and more you hear, I mean, I can't believe there'd be strategic rationale behind it, that the U.S.

31:48is thinking to go on back to bombing. That is, they're seriously contemplating it now. You know, one of the things that the people around Trump say so often is he never bluffs. And I think if you've been president now for two terms and you never bluff, You don't need a lot of people to say you never bluff. You only need people to say it when, in fact, everyone would say you bluff all the time. And the Iranians have figured that out. The idea that Trump would escalate given his poll numbers, given the price of gas. If he escalates, then the Iranians can hit the opposite shore and all of its energy resources too.

32:21And the price of oil goes up and the price of gas goes up. And Americans who didn't support the war in the first place didn't understand the war, weren't invited to give an opinion about the war. Congress never voted on the war. gas goes higher, and Trump's in even more trouble. The issue he faces is I think he can't wait as long as the Iranians do. I mean, if you had to look at who's going to crack first time-wise, the problem he faces is his deadline is there. The election is November. This has got to be over by the summer. If the war ends with some kind of armistice, where Trump gets some piece of paper with the word nuclear on it, Iran has effective control over the Strait of Hormuz, which I suppose it had before, war, but now it's really proven that it can do it.

33:02And a lot of damage to Iran's nuclear program and Iran's missile program, some damage in turn to the American forces. Who's the winner of that war? China. I mean, the winner of that war is China. Explain. Bill, because basically the Chinese will come out of this as a far more influential force in the region. The United States will come out looking much weakened with a degraded military, an inability to get what it wants the military force and looking capricious and in some ways unable to assert itself over Iran. The Iranian regime will not come out of it in great shape and damaged. It has been damaged militarily.

33:42Certainly the Iranian people will be the losers because they will suffer a great deal of oppression, one assumes, coming out of that. But the Iranians would have survived and the other The regimes in the area are going to have to cut some kind of deals with them. But the Chinese are just sitting there. They are going to be seeing a bastion of stability. They'll get a huge amount of reconstruction contracts. Their ally in Iran will still be there. And one assumes that a lot of the other powers in the region will want good relations with China going forward. So the big winner in the long term is probably China.

34:17The big term winner in the short term right now is Putin because the price of oil is up and it's going to stay up. So the Russian economy has at least been thrown a lifeline by Trump in this war by having Putin. Russian oil revenues are up spectacularly from before this all started. So short term victory, long term victory, Chinese. The Americans are probably the biggest loser of it. I think their regional position would be undermined. And the Iranians won't be big winners, but they will have survived. And that will have given them some kind of leverage going forward. The figure for Russia that I heard from a politician in the area was that the war has added a billion dollars a day to Russian revenues.

35:02And even though they can't export as much, I mean, it's crazy. Even though they can't export as much because the Ukrainians have done a good job of degrading some of their systems. The fact that, one, everyone's buying Russian oil now. Because of the sanctions before that people were buying Russian oil at a discount, that discount's gone. And everyone's buying oil wherever they can. So the Russians are just, you know, whatever they're selling, they're selling at more than twice the price of what they were selling before this. And they're selling whatever they can ship out. So the Russians are doing very well out of it.

35:36I mean, from the point of view of immediate benefit, what Trump has done could not have been better for. Okay, since you've mentioned China, let's pivot to our last great big area of topic, which is we had last week, the week before you and I speak, President Trump and President Xi in China had a summit meeting. There's not a lot of visible output of the meeting. That doesn't mean that nothing happened. But one of the things that was visible was a remarkable weakening of the American line on Taiwan. I mean, President Trump has always been pretty half-hearted in his support for the Taiwan independence.

36:10During the campaign, he said things that questioned whether it was worthwhile. Now he's again said that he's not sure he will fight for the independence of a country 9 ,500 miles from the United States. And he might put on pause the next American arms sale to Taiwan. It's not clear that he got anything in return for those concessions, if they are concessions. Bearing in mind that authoritarian regimes always look stronger than they really are, how would you evaluate the balance between the United States and China? By the way, I can agree completely with your last point. Chinese foreign policy has been a disaster until about American foreign policy got worse.

36:44The Chinese foreign policy for much of the period up from, say, 2000 to 2015, 16, was really bad because it was basically alienating everybody. The Chinese were like, so you might say the United States is now, they were aggressive, threatening. They seemed very dangerous to people around them. And the Chinese were doing a good job of alienating everybody. So Chinese foreign policy has not been brilliant. And I think we have to be understanding of that. The only problem is now is the United States seems to be, and it completely by choice, the United States doesn't have to be weakening itself. The United States is choosing to weaken itself by destroying its alliances, destroying certain other sort of strategic advantages that it had.

37:31That was all on display in China. I mean, it was actually sort of pathetic, what we saw. We saw Trump sucking up to Xi Jinping like she was Miss Universe. And they, oh, my dear friend, and oh, you're wonderful. What we saw from Trump was pathetic. And the Chinese were almost laughing at him. When Xi Jinping talks about the Thucydides trap in two Trumps face, basically saying, you're declining power, we're a rising power. And Trump turns around and said, you know, we have a lot of Chinese food restaurants in America. The Chinese are just wondering, what is this? And then the Chinese say to him, you better be good on Taiwan.

38:12And the next thing they hear is Trump saying, we might not fight for Taiwan. They can see that the Americans are reacting to Chinese demands. And by the way, the Chinese have given the United States nothing. the Trump administration went in saying we're going to convince the Chinese it's in their interest to help us on Iran well they're not getting any help on Iran so I mean I think this is this summit is really important in terms of a historical marker on the road of the U.S. decline that I would say at this point in time at that summit meeting the Chinese had a stronger hand to play than the Americans and they played it sadly I would say better and that's where where we are.

38:52Now, the American position can recover, but from what that meeting saw, the United States is in an inferior position to the Chinese right now. Well, there's a threshold question. Why is the United States do summit meetings with China? In the olden days, when the United States did summit meetings with the Soviet Union, there was a fundamental reason for that, which is one of the things that the United States wanted from the Soviet Union was arms control. The two major nuclear powers had to deal with each other and only with each other on arms control discussions. So there was a necessity to deal one-on-one with the leader of the Soviet Union or the leaders collectively to get toward the arms control agreement that Republican and Democrats alike sought to pursue.

39:30But with China, you would say the agenda should always be, I would think, say, we will never meet you as a G2. We will always meet you with our friends because the United States and China are near peers. But the U.S. alliance, led alliance, and China's non-alliance, those aren't peers. If the United States shows up flanked by Japan and India and Australia and Canada and South Korea and Great Britain and the European Union, then suddenly this is not a contest of equals anymore if you can preserve the unity of the U.S.-led alliance system. If you smash it up first and have to meet the Chinese one-on-one, then it's a discussion of near equals with no reason to talk that way because the arms control agenda of the past is not present anymore.

40:14I couldn't agree. I mean, the United States took a great global alliance system and decided to blow it up in the last few years. And I live in Europe and Greenland, I think, was one of those moments, the Greenland crisis in January. The trust in the U.S. is gone. The Europeans do not look at the U.S. as a reliable ally anymore. My guess is right now the Taiwanese do not look at them. The Japanese do not look at them. The Indians, who are going closer and growing closer and closer to the U.S., have now had a terrible relationship with Trump in the last few months since he gave them special tariffs, which, again, was almost like a gift to the Chinese.

40:54So the United States, when it shows up, as you say, with the Chinese, they have no one with them. They have no reliable states that believe the United States is their ally. They have destroyed this position. And that's why Trump is left begging for the Chinese to buy soybeans and Boeing jets and the Chinese sort of string him along. But the United States will rue this. They will rue this development for the future. because even if the United States has the same leadership in the future, the trust in the United States will take a long time to recover, and it might never recover to the way that it was because the United States' trust was based on the fact that the United States did protect its allies, and it is now not shown itself to be willing to protect its allies, and you don't get over that easily.

41:41Do you think the United States has the capability to protect Taiwan? That's Trump's big idea, I think, on this as well. Taiwan is a goner anyway. So let's not pretend we can do it and let's see what else we can get in return. And anyway, I'm mad at them for selling us too many computer chips at too low a price. The problem that the Chinese would face is that they would have, if Taiwan is properly armed, and you have to really prepare Taiwan well, the Chinese will have great difficulty getting off their own coastline. The threat that the Taiwanese present to China is not that they can fight China one on one, but they control the seas, the sea lanes coming out of China in its most important sea routes, that they have to go within range of Taiwan.

42:24By the way, I think actually invading Taiwan would be almost so difficult to imagine the Chinese would do it. When people talk about a D-Day of Taiwan, that's a really scary prospect with Chinese because the Taiwanese could have a lot of anti-ship missiles. And the Chinese military has not fought a war since 1979, and they lost that. So you would expect an entirely inexperienced military to try a really complex military maneuver. So the way you protect Taiwan is you turn it into a really nasty hedgehog. 1979 war was their war against Vietnam. Against Vietnam, and they lost it. And that was the last time the Chinese military has fought a war.

43:01So the United States could prepare Taiwan to be an incredibly difficult strategic task for the Chinese. And if by making the Chinese think they're going to stand with the Taiwanese, that would be a real deterrent factor. But right now, what the Chinese are, I think, say very much to the Taiwanese, and they probably are, look, the United States isn't going to fight for you. Come back to us. And what the Chinese don't want to do is invade. This is what I hear. What they want is a political connection a la Hong Kong to get the Taiwanese to accept the fact that the Americans are not their friends and say, OK, you know, we're going to let you be two countries, two systems, one country.

43:42Just sign up with us. But as soon as the Communist Party gets their hooks into Taiwan, they'll do what they did to Hong Kong, slowly take it over. You said something a moment ago that I want to put a spotlight on because, again, it draws on so much of your work, which is one of the things that American strategists have worried a lot about in recent years. Chinese could not invade Taiwan, but blockade it, cut off. And Taiwan, of course, depends on trade and it could be isolated. But you just made the point, drawing on the Ukraine example, it's not so obvious that it's just China that could blockade Taiwan.

44:15Using drones, Taiwan could also counter-blockade China, the smaller and seemingly weaker country, if it has enough drones, can cut off the trade links of the bigger and seemingly stronger country. Absolutely. China lives on shipping. And that shipping all goes along the Chinese coast. All the shipping ports from the north of China, most of the shipping goes through the Straits of Malacca. It comes down and around and they have to go by Taiwan. So Taiwan is perfectly situated. I mean, the strategic position of Taiwan cannot be undervalued for both the United States and for China. That with Taiwan pro-American, the Chinese have to protect shipping in a way that would be almost impossible if Taiwan were properly armed.

44:58On the other hand, if Taiwan becomes Chinese, it is over for the U.S. Navy in the Western Pacific. It's done. If Taiwan becomes Chinese, the American naval base in the Marianas, Guam, Tinian, where there are U.S. forces, they become undefendable because Chinese missiles can rain down on the Marianas from Taiwan. Indeed, shipping in most of the Western Pacific then becomes controlled by the Chinese. So the U.S. Navy, if the U.S. Navy, if the United States loses Taiwan, it's back to Hawaii. You're back to Pearl Harbor. And that's the only place you can deploy them safely. And you're basically saying to the Chinese, yep, Western Pacific's yours.

45:39So these are all the lessons of the Ukraine war that you've tried to impart to American audiences. In your work, you travel all over the world. You talk to so many militaries. Is there anyone in the United States who's listening to you? Or is it Europeans only who want to hear what you have to say? There's still some great people. I mean, no one in office, but I think people who might get into office and talk to or people who were in office, they do get it. It's just right now to be an employee of the U.S. government and have any influence and any seniority in that, you have to be incompetent.

46:13That is the number one criteria is loyalty to Trump. You do whatever the president says. And the second criteria is you have to be incompetent at what you do. We see, David, the great fraud in the last few days is, remember we were told the United States can't help Ukraine because it has to face China. It's to reorient to the Pacific. We're seeing now they're not going to reorient to the Pacific. They never were going to reorient to the Pacific. That was just a lie. And it was a lie to provide a fig leaf for not helping Ukraine. They don't want to help Ukraine and they don't want to protect Taiwan.

46:46They basically are handing over a lot of the world to Xi and Putin. The one benefit is Putin's weak enough that he can't take it. Ukraine's showing that that's a flawed strategy. But it is basically the United States empowering dictatorships over democracies. That's where we are. To the extent there's an idea behind all of this, and there may not be, it may just be impulses, but it's something that your historical work would emphasize, which is when President Roosevelt was trying to explain to Americans in 1941 why the United States had a stake in the outcome in the European war. And a lot of Americans, they'd been through the Depression.

47:20They'd been through so much. The world was much bigger in those days, much farther away. Europe was connected to the New World primarily by ship. Airplane travel was new and exotic and not very useful. And so the question is, how does it matter to the United States if Nazi Germany takes over Europe? Roosevelt explained in his summer radio addresses of 1941 that if the Germans win the war, The United States becomes an island within the world with hostile empires dominating most of the world's landmass. The United States will be forced into retreat. It will lose its trade. It'll have to become a more state-controlled economy, more of a planned economy.

47:56And its dreams of relying on enterprise and trade with the rest of the world would be dashed. But what if you start by thinking, that's what we want? What we want is a North American or North America plus Venezuela, a continental empire with a lot of state control, government running everything, a lot of protectionism. Then we have no interest in trading with anybody. Then Roosevelt's nightmare becomes Trump's dream. Yeah, I mean, Roosevelt's example is great because what Roosevelt actually understood is he wanted an alliance of democracies. The real traumatic moment for Roosevelt, which changed his entire outlook, was the fall of France in May, June 1940.

48:32Before May, June 1940, he wasn't going to get that involved in the European war because he believed the British and the French could balance the Germans. The democracies were still in ascendancy. The fall of France changed everything for Lisboa because he's like, oh, my God, democracies could lose. And that's if I think he wanted to get in the European war from the moment France fell. That for him was the real moment. Now, he couldn't do it politically, but the second France fell, he changes his position, and then he waits until he's reelected in November 1940, and then he comes out of the shell.

49:08And he says, okay, lend-lease, rearmament, we're just going to take off here. But it all goes down to the fall of France, and that means, as you were saying, dictatorships are going to run Europe, not democracies, and that is a threat to the USA. If we're going to have a free society at home, we need free commerce with the world. And that means we need a pretty congenial world with which to have that commerce. But if you've decided we don't care about having a free society at home and we're happy to have an unfree economy at home, or at least a state-led economy run by friends of the people in power doing deals with themselves, then it doesn't matter whether there's free trade and then it doesn't matter what the rest of the world looks like.

49:45so trump's authoritarian and kleptocratic model is what leads him to be so indifferent to what happens to everybody else and maybe one of the reasons he identifies so much with putin and therefore hates ukraine so much he loves dictators he really i mean he does he has no affinity to democracy he hates that he hated the result of the 2020 elections which he lost and he's trying to rewrite history as if he wanted so he doesn't believe in democracy philip thank you so much for making time for us today. What an interesting conversation. And I recommend all your books to everybody, but especially your great book, How the War Was Won, which will really just, it'll just change your way of thinking about what wars are about and what really matters and how the United States can prepare to be as safe and prosperous in this current century as it was in the last.

50:32Thanks for joining me today. Thank you. Bye-bye.

50:43Logging off. Rebuilding our attention spans. Trading in smartphones for dumb phones. Why are people trying to get off their screens? And what are they really after? I'm Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic. And I'm Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic. This season, we're exploring the often fraught, always changing relationship people have with technology. And examining the ways our devices affect our connection with one another. New episodes of How to Touch Grass come out every Monday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

51:40It shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time. It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

52:04Thanks so much to Phillips O 'Brien for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top, my book this week is a nonfiction book, What Science Says About Astrology by Carlos Orsi, part of a new series of What Science Says books published by Columbia University Press. When you hear the title, you might imagine that What Science Says About Astrology is pretty negative, and so it is. But Carlos Orsi, a scientific journalist with a punchy prose style, gives a lot of credit to what astrology has meant to human beings over the past thousands of years. He writes, astrology is humanity's longest-lived attempt to make sense of the universe and find patterns and regularities in nature.

52:41He begins his story in ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, where for hundreds of years, astronomers studied the skies or astrologers studied the skies to detect patterns in the universe and to make predictions that could be used by rulers, farmers, and other people. Carlos Orsi describes this observation as the longest continuous research program ever undertaken by human beings. And if you think about it, that's kind of so. Hundreds of years, nightly observations of the skies. And in Mesoamerica, the Mayans were doing the same thing, although we have less record of exactly how long they were at it and exactly what they saw.

53:17But they built calendar systems on their observation, and probably they too were trying to use the stars to foretell the future. From ancient Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, astrology spread into the Greek world, then to the Roman world, then to the Islamic world. It fell into disrepute in Christian medieval Europe, not so much because Christian medieval Europeans doubted its power, but because they saw its power as a threat to God's rule in the universe, and they punished astrologers like other kinds of suicide very seriously. But with the advent of the Renaissance and the rediscovery of Greek texts, astrology came back into its own in the 1600s and 1700s.

53:54Isaac Newton believed it. In its modern form, however, astrology owes much more to recent entrepreneurs than to ancient stargazers. A British writer named William Allen, who took the name Allen Lee, produced in the late 1800s a book called Astrology Without Prediction. At the time, it was illegal in Britain to use astrology and other forms of soothsaying to predict the future. The British authorities, they weren't afraid that it was demoniacal. They were afraid it was a ripoff and cheating customers. So they enforced the laws pretty strictly. You could get three months at hard labor if you use astrology to tell people about the future.

54:27But in astrology without prediction, Alan Leo discovered you could tell people about themselves. And that was not only legal, but in an increasingly individualistic world, very lucrative. People would pay to have their charts read and to be told things about themselves and their personality. And if you were a skilled reader of human nature, you could tell them things that they probably found pretty accurate, especially they were complementary. From this new art of astrology as a way of reading human nature, we get the astrology we know today, horoscopes in the newspapers, and the mass interest in psychology, in astrology as a form of psychological understanding.

55:00Now, what's wrong with this? Well, the ancient rhetorician and jurist Cicero explained, gave as good an answer as any back in the times of Julius Caesar. He observed a great battle in which thousands of people lost their lives. And he asked, did they all have the same horoscope? If astrology predicts our destiny, then if people all die on the same day, we must share our same destiny, but we were born under different stars. So there's your problem right there. There are many other scientific attempts to test the predictions of astrology, and all of them prove that it doesn't work. And that leads Orsi to his conclusion.

55:35Astrology is a system of beliefs that proclaims hypothetical relationships between the cosmos and humanity, theorizes a specific structure for human personality, and offers advice about mundane events and decisions, all without any basis in empirical reality, and, truth be told, in blatant contradiction to well-established scientific facts. So there you go. I read that paragraph to my wife, and she scoffed. Well, you know what Aries are like. Thanks so much for joining me today on The David Fromm Show. It would help so much if you were to like and share this program on social media platforms. If you want to support this program materially, the best way to do that and to support all of us at The Atlantic is by subscribing to The Atlantic.

56:15I hope you'll consider doing that. Thanks so much for watching and listening this week. See you next week. Bye-bye.

56:44This episode of The David Fromm Show was produced by Nathaniel Fromm and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew Edwards. Claudine Abad is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Hi, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Are you looking for a beach read this summer? may I suggest your big wireless bill. It's got suspense, mystery, a slightly flat emotional arc, and a shocking twist where you realize you've been overpaying the entire time. Fortunately, though, Mint's story is better. Every plan,$15 a month, even unlimited.

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