Are we really at risk of entering a World War 3!? | Brandon Webb

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1:32This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

1:45I'm a real optimistic person. I remember in the depths of the Great Recession in 2008, 2009, I would go on CNBC and I was just super optimistic. And CNBC was almost disgusted with me that I was so optimistic. That's how optimistic I was because everyone else was saying capitalism is dead. And after 9-11 was really, you know, I lived about three blocks from the World Trade Center. I had breakfast at the World Trade Center that morning. And of course, it was very horrible for many, many people there, much more horrible than anything I experienced. But at the same time, out of that, even though it just seemed like the worst thing in the world, there were still reasons for hope.

2:29America had come together. And don't forget, we were in the middle of a bear market then. It was the dot-com bust. And now there was this terrorism on US soil. There were a lot of reasons to be depressed. And in fact, the market itself didn't recover for another almost year and a half after 9-11. And I lost my home during this point because I didn't yet know anything about investing or trading and just made a lot of bad decisions. But I still had hope that when the dust settled, things would get better. And I was very excited about my own opportunities. And right now, we're in a situation where it's pretty scary because I don't know what it is.

3:09Like right now, we're in more wars than ever. And they're all proxy wars. It's not like, oh, the U.S. declares war on so-and-so and so-and-so. Now we're at war. Like as much as I hate the war against Afghanistan and the war in Iraq, the U.S. was fighting for something. But right now, these are all proxy wars. So, you know, U.S. involvement in Ukraine and Israel versus Hamas and Hezbollah. This is all about, you know, obviously Russia and China are fueling Iran, who is providing support and weapons and money to Hamas and Hezbollah. For the past several decades, the U.S. and the rest of the world has been giving aid to Hamas and Hezbollah instead of building a magnificent country like everybody had hoped they would do.

3:58They built weapons and tunnels and so on. And right now, this is the one-year anniversary of October 7th, where Hamas brutally raped and killed many civilians, children, older people. I once said this to somebody on my Facebook feed, a guy I know who has a PhD in whatever and real smart guy. And he was like, oh, you must be just reading fake news. and I'm like, no, they posted videos. Like I actually saw the videos that they posted and everybody acknowledged that they posted these. Hamas acknowledged that they posted these. They posted these on people's, the parents of the victims' Facebook pages.

4:41Like it was really horrible. And yes, obviously nobody wants children dead. I mean, that's a whole other topic. But what I really wanna talk about is, again, what causes these situations? we're entering into World War III. And I don't say this lightly. Like, I think people say this lightly. Oh, we're in World War III, and then the dust clears, and suddenly there's no more news. But it's very odd what's happening. If you follow the news, Israel's not only fighting Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, but also now there's obviously missiles back and forth from Iran to Israel. China and Russia are funding Iran.

5:20The U.S. kind of lightened sanctions on Iran and released a whole bunch of money, which Iran said they wouldn't use on weapons. And for some reason, we believe them. And this is those times when you start to say, regardless of your political affiliation, Republican or Democrat, don't do bad things. Don't do things that are gonna lead to a war. By the way, it's not just the U.S. that hates Iran. It's every other country in the Middle East with the exception of Qatar, hates Iran. And Qatar doesn't hate Iran because Qatar depends on Iran for all the oil money. They ship out the oil the same way Iran does, and they're kind of beholden to Iran.

6:03But if you look at what's happening now, Israel's fighting the Houthis in Yemen also, which are another group of terrorists. And the rest of the Middle East is helping Israel. So there's kind of new alliances happening. Like when Iran sent a bunch of ballistic missiles to Israel, Jordan actually engaged with those missiles and stopped some of them from landing in Israel. And I'm hearing this from my own connections and contacts throughout the Middle East, that the rest of the Middle East wants Israel to wipe out, not wipe out the people, but wipe out the terrorists who are disrupting the oil supply in the Straits of Hamos.

6:44These terrorists, that's the Houthis, but the Hamas and Hezbollah, There's a reason why no other country in the Middle East wants these terrorists inside. It's not all about like, hey, we're all Muslim, so let's band together. No, Hamas and Hezbollah and the Houthis and other Iranian-funded groups are terrorists. So when they go into other countries, they cause problems and they try to take over those countries and they try to disrupt those countries. The other countries don't want that. They want to move beyond the age of oil and create technologies and innovations the way Israel does, the way the U.S.

7:24does. They want alliances with Israel. Don't forget the original reason why Iran wanted Hamas to do what they did last year on October 7th was because Israel was about to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia. That would totally be devastating to Iran. So they did what they're doing. Now, the only problem with any kind of war or invasion of Iran is that 98 % of Iran is secular. They hate their leadership and they're pro-US and pro-Israel, by the way. And so it's a very interesting situation that's happening, one that can either end very badly. We need strong leadership. I am not saying that's Biden and I'm not saying that's Trump.

8:08But you have to look at presidencies in the past where leadership wasn't strong and in a foreign policy sense. Like, for instance, I think Jimmy Carter is probably one of the smartest and kindest people to have ever been president of the United States. But he was a weak president from a foreign policy perspective, like Brezhnev and the Soviet Union walked all over him. And then ultimately, Iran took hostages and just wouldn't release them. Guess what? They released them on day one that Reagan became president. Does that make Reagan a great president? No, but it makes him perhaps a strong president in the eyes of the world.

8:44Like right now, the presidency is in flux. We know that the reason Biden stepped down from the Democratic nomination, not everybody, but a lot of people thought he was like sharp and still had his wits about him, but apparently he didn't. This is not me saying, this is not opinion. All the Democrats said this and they appointed a new nominee. And so we know then, and his own party, his own administration admits this, is that he is not a strong president. And right now that leaves the world exposed a little bit because the U.S. is the police of the world. Now, what happens also is you see all these protests at these colleges and all these woke protests, you know, and I'm saying woke disdainfully, actually, because we know it's a fringe, just like we don't like the fringe right.

9:35Okay. You all have seen the threads on Twitter from, from these fringes, whether it's right or left, they're horrible. As I get older, I find I want the status quo plus improvement. And what I mean by improvement is technological innovations improvement. The stuff you've heard on this podcast about AI melded with healthcare, melded with genomics, melded with, you know, better and better robotics and technology and so on. This is gonna change the world. Not 10 years from now, but literally tomorrow, it's gonna change the world. And if we're bogged out in wars though, wars do not help the economy.

10:15Let me just break that myth right here. Wars are horrible for the economy. The reason why World War II was good for the economy is we had been in a depression for 10 years. From 1929 to 1939, the U.S. was in the Great Depression. Almost anything that hired people would have gotten us out of the depression at that point. This is the longest downturn in U.S. history. And it didn't have to be that long, but we can go policy by policy to see which ones were good, which ones were bad. But Vietnam is a great example where the Vietnam War actually hurt the U.S. economy. me. The U.S. got into so much debt that we didn't have enough money to pay for the war.

10:58And so Richard Nixon took an unprecedented action. Previously, before 1971, the U.S. dollar was backed by gold. You could turn in a dollar and potentially get a dollar's worth of gold for it. The dollar was an IOU. In fact, the invention of paper money, it's interesting, the invention of paper money was when people would take their gold to the goldsmith to store it in the village, and the goldsmith would issue an IOU, like IOU to James. Oh, he gave me$10 worth of gold. And then people would use those IOUs as paper money to buy things. And that evolved into the paper money that was backed by gold until 1971.

11:38We just didn't have enough gold, and we needed more money to pay for the war. So Richard Nixon took us off the gold standard. Of Of course, every country followed. And that's when the real money printing machine took place, which led to a decade worth of horrible, horrible inflation. And so war is not good for the economy. There's a saying, two countries either trade bullets or dollars. And you much prefer them trading with each other and trading dollars because that means the world economy, i.e. capitalism. By the way, I don't even like using the word capitalism. Most people don't realize this.

12:15The word capitalism is not a capitalist word. The word capitalism was written in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. And it basically means people who accumulate capital essentially at the expense of others. What I think the kind of economy that we actually live in is what I will call innovationism, an innovationist economy. We, the US and the rest of the world, does well when we invent things. And we don't do well when we don't invent things. And when you're bogged down in war, the only things you invent are things that help in wars. And I'm hoping we don't get sucked into that. Whoever becomes president next has a real almost sacred responsibility to not get us bogged down in more wars.

13:05Now, I have seen firsthand pretty recently how much money is made by middlemen, like ammunitions, ammo dealers, I forget what you call them, but they make enormous amounts of money when there's a war. Oh, if you could be in the middle when Ukraine or Russia or Iran or Israel is buying all these missiles, you're going to make a lot of money. And these people have a lot of influence in the US. This is not conspiracy theory. We all know this to be true. Anyway, this is a long intro. I had a casual conversation with my friend, Brandon Webb. You might remember Brandon. He runs softrep.com and military content group.

13:45He's a former Navy SEAL. He happens to know a lot. He knows a lot of people in intelligence agencies all over the world. He happens to know a lot about war. He's fought in wars. He has many people working for him who report on the wars that are happening now. And so we just had a casual conversation. Fortunately, Jay was recording it. And Brandon makes up some interesting points about what's going on overseas. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me on Twitter and I will find the right resources to answer them. And also tomorrow, I am super excited about my guests that are coming on, Nate Silver and Maria Konnikova.

14:23Maria Konnikova, you might remember, she's been on this podcast many times, starting from scratch. She learned the rules of poker and quickly became so good that she became a professional poker player. She wrote a book about it called The Biggest Bluff. And Nate Silver, you might know, he is the expert in the United States on elections. We talk about elections and poker and what it means to live a life of making rational decisions based on the probabilities. So that's tomorrow. But today, right now, Brandon Webb. Here we go. Here's our little podcast about, are we really at risk of entering a World War III?

15:04you know speaking of like all what's going on around the world what's your take or what's your company's take on are we in world war three yeah i wrote an article about it this week essentially we're we're in world war three it's like this is the way the new world war is fought like it's in the shadows it's through proxies where's your article is it on soft rep yeah it's on soft rep. And then we wrote, I wrote another one yesterday because two of my sources confirm that Russia is contemplating arming Iran with nuclear weapons just to make it a major player in the region, which would totally change the game with Israel.

15:44I think it probably, given the way Israel is being run by Netanyahu, probably puts them in like a first strike. Like they would probably, if they confirm the intel, they're going to strike. Well, I kind of expect anyway, Israel is going to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities and just take them out. But is that enough to stop them from, I mean, there's probably, I mean, I assume they, why haven't they hit Iran's nuclear facilities before? Well, I think they're focused on, you know, mitigating this, like basically stomped out Hamas and Gaza. and now they've shifted focus to Hezbollah and Lebanon. And what's fucked up is they're using the U.S.

16:31They're using the U.S. and the fact that we don't really have anyone at the wheel of the ship, right? Like Biden's just kind of lame duck and he's checked out anyway. So one of our sources, I haven't wrote this one up yet and I'm trying to piece it together a little bit more, but I heard that Hezbollah wanted to negotiate a ceasefire. And Israel used the American CIA asset, like a CIA guy, to basically say, look, this is what it would look like. Like, we're kind of like pitching this deal. So get together. And so all the Hezbollah leadership and the local handlers from Iran got together. And then that's when Israel just fucking, they just use that.

17:15they use the americans to basically pass this intel on to get hezbollah to meet with all this all the kind of like senior regional leaders to meet in one place and then they just bond the shit out of them in israel and just so so they said yeah we'll do a deal why don't you guys here's the terms you guys figure it out so that got everybody the cias it then said let's all get together and figure this out and then yeah man that genius i know well this was like right after they did the pager and the walkie-talkie explosive, you know? And that was all... And they've got to be scared of Israel. Oh, yeah.

17:50And that's why I think Iran should be scared. But again, it's just like, the problem is it's not Iran by itself, right? It's Iran backed by China and Russia. And that's a problem. But now, like, with Israel taking out the Houthis also, which is even further than Iran... They bombed a Russian base in Syria that was a weapons storage for Hezbollah. So they're not messing around, man. Netanyahu is kind of unchained. In America, no one's doing anything. And to be honest, I had a lunch with my Lebanese friend yesterday who has worked with the UN and high-level contacts and another Iranian guy there at the table.

18:36And basically, he said that Trump is much better for this global conflict that's happening than Kamala. He's like, I can't stand Trump. He's like, the rhetoric and this. But he's like, I would take all that in spite because I know that he's better for global stability. Because Kamala is just like business as usual, right? And that really hasn't worked out very well for America the last 50 years. And Trump is not beholden to any party. He's not beholden to the super hardcore conservative Christian groups. He's not beholden to the hardcore Israel lobby groups. That's why they fucking hate him. And he freaks people out because he's not even, you know, he's totally reshaped the whole Republican Party.

19:28But I do think he's a tougher negotiator. and people don't, they know he's not bluffing, right? He assassinated that Iranian Suleimani. Suleimani, yeah. Funny, yeah. And so from what I hear too, the Arab countries are all supporting Israel. Like, because they all hate Iran, except for Qatar, the whole GCC hates Iran. And Qatar, their wealth depends on Iran, so they can't hate Iran. But they are rooting for Israel to just destroy Iran's leadership and take out the Houthis and do everything they're doing. Yeah, I know. But again, back to the problem, it's not Iran by itself. It's backed by Russia and China.

20:11And Putin's loving this because it just takes all the visibility away from Ukraine. It's great for him. Right. And that's a whole nother like human catastrophe, right? America lost, I think, 56 ,000 lives in Vietnam and Iraq, Afghanistan and the other little conflicts in the last 20 years. We lost maybe, I think, less than 30 ,000 lives. you're talking almost a million lives each side Russia and Ukraine just in this conflict like it is a massive body count man that will completely reshape the demographic yeah they already had a pretty good male to female ratio or you know it was like definitely like two more women than to every man and then Russia and that's even more I'm gonna move to Moscow I'm gonna wipe I know Your next stop is Kiev.

21:31get your job in front of the right people. You get qualified candidates. At the end of the day, the most important thing to your business is the quality of the candidates. And with LinkedIn, of course, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of small and medium businesses say using LinkedIn helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com. slash Altature. That's LinkedIn.com slash Altature to post your job for free.

22:06Terms and conditions apply. We're spending more than ever. I hate my job. The price of everything has gone up. AI is threatening my job. It's crisis after crisis. Nothing is working out. I can't find a job. We're one disaster. Take control of change. I need a change. Disruption is the force of change. Stop the chaos. Stop the madness. Take control. Read James Patterson's Disrupt Everything and Win.

22:56grants access to over a thousand airport lounges. The Venture X Business card. What's in your wallet? Terms and conditions apply. Find out more at CapitalOne.com slash Venture X Business. Why would Putin risk arming Iran? Like he knows that's going to start World War III. Well, I don't know. I mean, why did he invade Ukraine? Why did they invade Israel, actually, knowing that Israel would retaliate? Maybe they thought public opinion would be such that Israel wouldn't be able to retaliate. Well, I think, I mean, I watched a lot of interviews. I think Hamas didn't expect that the fighters would go totally unchained and rape women and like kill civilians.

23:40I think they thought they were like attack military targets. and the sheer extent of like, because I also thought it was a huge mistake for Israel not to release that footage. Like if they had really shown the brutality of like raping, killing pregnant women, raping a ton of women at that festival and just like all the brutality was just not exposed because it was so visceral. But I think, and that's something on the flip side, Hamas does a very good job of exploiting any civilian casualties. But Israel should have released everything and said, look, this is like a massive atrocity. And that's why the reaction was so brutal.

24:22They're just like, this isn't, I mean, I would say, I'm guessing, but 90 % of the Calvites were civilian, not military. They're just killing innocent civilians. And then you add to the dynamic that Netanyahu is kind of being pushed out. And now he's like got a way to stay in power. It's like the old Roman emperor playbook. You want to be in power, go win a war. So I don't know. And so Israel, I don't think Hamas, I think they bit off more than they could choose, is what I'm trying to say. That's the short version. And then they're like, oh, shit. You know, you end up with this situation where it's just like a perfect storm, right?

25:01It's like perfect geopolitical storm with where you have like a weak sitting president, Biden in his prime. You have this perfect political storm where a sitting U.S. president who's now a lady duck, but also like not all there with his mental faculty. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons why it emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine in the first place. It's so funny, by the way. On that, I just want to say I have friends who are liberal Democrats who insist that having a weak Biden is not why Russia invaded Ukraine. Like they just insist. And I'm like, you know, yes, they wanted to invade Ukraine, but do you really think if Trump was there, they would have invaded Ukraine?

25:42They wouldn't have. There's no way. Yeah, no way. So that's the situation. And everyone's kind of now taking advantage, right? Netanyahu's doing whatever he wants. I mean, you can read between the lines in the New York Times. Like, he's frustrating the U.S. Secretary of Defense and everybody because he's just like kind of double talk. And then he just goes and bombs whoever he wants. But I think obviously Iran has always been a major regional proxy supporter of Husqvarna Hamad, and even back to funding Osama bin Laden. And so now it's just like this perfect storm that you have all the components for potentially what I would say we're already in World War III.

26:29I write that in an article. We just don't. It's just like this is the way the war is fought today when you have a global supply chain and all these, you know, interests. Because China is like very good at just kind of playing the game of go, right? It's just like Kwan didn't die. And they run on their own bombs. I mean, you think China will invade Taiwan before Biden gives up? But my personal theory is they've already, they've kind of already have control of Taiwan from probably like a covert intelligence perspective. They already kind of like have their claws in Taiwan, so they really don't need to take it over.

27:14But they could, and the U.S. would do nothing right now. That's the reality. They could do it tomorrow. What does the U.S. do? Nothing. It would be a talking point in the election is all it would be. And it would probably even help Trump more if they did that. Because I generally, it's back to my conversation yesterday with my friend from Lebanon. He's like, I don't like Trump. He's like, I think he's an asshole. But for global security, I think he's better. Like, because he's the one thing that Trump is that I like about him is that he's recognized that we've made kind of a mess the last 20 years with these wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, overthrowing Gaddafi and Libya, just like messing around and causing problems in the world.