9-12-26 The Weekend Hour 1: The War We’re Already In

0:00Why you deal with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series, Fault Line Haditha, tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00This episode sponsored by HomeBase. HomeBase is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant. With HomeBase, you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing time sheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use HomeBase to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. HomeBase, built for small businesses that do it all. Tonight, Michael Brown joins me here. The former FEMA director, talk show host, Michael Brown. Brownie! Now. Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. The weekend with Michael Brown. Broadcasting live from Denver, Colorado, it's the weekend with Michael Brown. Glad to have you joining the program today. Text line, of course, is always open, 333103, 333103, keyword micro-Michael TMA, or AMA. Tell me anything or ask me anything.

2:00Go follow me on all the social media platforms, xfacebook, instagram, they're all generally at Michael D Brown, at Michael D Brown. And then, don't forget, go subscribe to the hub, to the hub stack, to the sub stack. Yeah, there we go. We'll get ran. We'll get going today. Subscribe to the sub stack. It's at heckofajob.com. Heckofajob.com. Little advice for you today. Go fill your cars up. Go fill your car. Go fill your car. In fact, I'm doing that as soon as the program's over today. Yeah, that's right. Here we go again. Exactly. You have heard of before. Fill your cars up today because somewhere in the Saudi desert yesterday, somebody closed a valve. Let me tell you about this valve. It sits on the pipeline that carries Saudi Arabian oil the long way around. Not just avoiding the straight-over moves, but avoiding the red sea.

3:02So the pipeline goes across the country, East to West, from the oil fields on the Gulf side of Saudi, all the way over to the red sea on the far side. Now, for six months, that pipeline has been the Saudi kingdoms' escape hatch. When the Iranian shut down the straight-over moves back in the spring, that pipeline across the desert is exactly how the Saudis kept selling oil to the world at all. And remember, Saudi was at one time the number one producer of oil in the world. They're now number two behind us. So, if you know, I guess I could just go home right now. My job is done. Go fill your car up because get ready. Now, Friday, they shut that valve themselves. Drones are flying in and hitting the pipeline. And the drones are coming out of Iraq. So the kingdom closed its own last good exit.

4:06Simply as a precaution. And it would not even name or say who was doing the shooting. So keep that picture in your head for a minute. Because I think it's the whole story right there in that way. If we're looking at an old, you know, eight-millimeter movie, that one frame where they would not tell you who was doing the shooting tells you everything you need to know. A country sitting on the largest cheapest pool of oil on the entire planet. And by yesterday, it had almost no safe way at all to get a barrel, a single barrel of it to a paying customer. The front door, straight-of-war moves, had been shut by the Iranians. Now, we could argue a little side note here. We could argue all day long I could give you evidence that says, oh wait a minute. Sent to the US Navy have cleared the straight of mines. Excuse me. And that would be true. And I would tell you also that Lloyds of London, all the insurers and all the reinsurers,

5:11have said, yes, we will ensure your tanker, whether it's oil or it's cheap Chinese crap or whatever it is, going through the straight-of-war moves, we will ensure that for you. But that would be only half the story. The other half of the story is the Iranians, while the straight may be open because of the United States Navy and our blockade, it may be open, but they still have drones. They can still cause damage. And yes, hey, I'll ensure your tanker, but instead of, you know, 1% of the value is going to be 10% of the value. So your costs just doubled, tripled, quadrupled, whatever. So yeah, the straights open, but nobody wants to go through. The side, that's the front door, the straight-of-war moves. The side doors the red sea, and it's being sealed off one island at a time by the Houthis. They've got the, you know, they need to trademark that name. This one of the best names of a terror organization ever, Houthis.

6:12Who are you with? Why Muthuhuthis? It's like some basketball team, right? I'm with the Houston Houthis. The escape hatch across the Arabian desert, hit by drones from Iraq, and has now been shut down by the Saudis' own hands. So I don't think this is a war about to start. I think this is a war that we're already six months into, and that is showing up already in your gas tank. And if you wait until tomorrow, or Monday or Tuesday, or Wednesday to fill it up, you're going to go, ah, Michael Brown was right for one time. I should have filled up my gas tank on Saturday. I got to note this week, and I've had the same feeling in my own gut, that the region is about to go up in one gigantic fireball. So let's walk through where this actually stands. Let's try to separate what's verified from just what's my read, and then answer the real question.

7:12How likely is it that this jumps from bad to catastrophic? I've got all the numbers. I've got all the sources, and you're more than welcome to check my math at any time. The six months, the past six months, we have mostly slept through. Now, I know that you have complained, and the president has talked about, and the Democrats have latched on to, and everybody running for Congress, everybody running for Senate, everybody running everywhere, talks about affordability, they talk about the price of gas, as if the gas was the only price that mattered, which may be true. Let me give you a timeline. February 28th, this year, the US and Israel hit Iran, not awarding a decapitation strike, and the contemporaneous reporting, and the reference records, say those strikes killed Iran's Supreme Leader, Aotelecomin A. He killed also much of his senior command, so the command structure

8:17was pretty much eviscerated. Now, I'll be honest about the confidence level on that specific detail later on, but right now, the big fact is not in dispute. In late February, we and the Israelis started a shooting war with Iran, and we did it without consulting the Gulf states, who were going to absorb the retaliation. What do you think is going on right now? They're having to absorb the retaliation. So that's February 28th, then Iran answers missiles and drones across the region, strikes on the Gulf states, and Iran corked the straight of her moves, the water, the waterway that on a normal day carries about, as we've heard, add Nazim, one in five barrels, 20% of all the oil on the entire planet. Now, let's talk about the cease fires. I would describe the cease fires as cease fires that were not cease fires. A truce in April, dead within weeks. A US Iranian memorandum on June 17 to lift the dual blockades, well, that was dead by July.

9:20And the president himself declared the cease fire over after the Iranians went back to hitting ships. So every time somebody built a floor under this war, somebody shot through the floor. This week, just this week, the US Navy destroyed five Iranian oil tankers, all in the Gulf of Oman, Iran fire ballistic missiles at the US base in Jordan. Jordanian air forces knocked down 18 of them. Nobody got killed. But notice how thin that is? 18 missiles were stopped. And the only reason we aren't holding a funeral this morning is that the interceptors worked that night. So when you tell me, or if you tell me that the Middle East feels like it's about to explode, my honest answer is that your instincts is probably right, right about the danger and maybe a beat behind on the timeline. I think it actually exploded in February. The live question is whether it gets worse and by how much? Let's see if we can address that.

10:21Is the weekend with Michael Brown text lines open 33103 keyword micro-migal? What's next? A shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. Someone opened the door and was the primary sugar. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, fault-line Haditha, tells the story the United States government wants to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children there. Can you tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over a hundred hours of secretly filmed video, the truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of murder at least and you offer immunity to the other four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you're just given immunity to your color. Listen to fault-line Haditha on the Lie Heart Radio app,

11:25Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode sponsored by HomeBase. HomeBase is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant. With HomeBase, you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll, and manage hiring from one easy app. So you can spend less time chasing time sheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use HomeBase to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. HomeBase, built for small businesses that do it all. Welcome back to the weekend with Michael Brown. Glad to have you with me. Text lines open 3, 3, 1, 0, 3, keyword, mic or Michael. Do me a favor and don't forget to download and subscribe to the podcast. Easy to do on your podcast app, whatever you use, search for a podcast with the title, the name, the situation with Michael Brown, the situation with

12:30Michael Brown. Once you hit that, find it, hit that subscribe button, leave a five star review because that helps us spread it out to even more people. And then that automatically download all five days of the weekday program and the weekend program. So go subscribe to the podcast, the situation with Michael Brown. So we're talking about this war that I think we're already in. And just humbly suggesting you might want to fill your gas tank up this weekend. So this week, the US Navy destroyed five Iranian oil tankers in the Gulf of Le Mans, Iran fire ballistic missiles at US Basin Jordan. We knocked down 18 of them, nobody got killed. So when you tell me that the Middle East is about to explode, my honest answer is I think your instinct is probably right, but you know what, you're probably a day late in the dollar short. Let's talk about the choke points and why a valve in the desert will change the price of your

13:32groceries. Oh, the gas stations, that's that's going to be the easy one. Three choke points. You learn these three and you'll understand the entire squeeze more than the average American who's just bitching and moaning about gas prices. And I don't give me wrong. I'm bitching and moaning about it too, but at least you'll understand the why. Three choke points. The straight-ahor moves. That's the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf, roughly 20%. The world's oil normally sails right through that straight. Iran shut it in the spring and they've been fighting to keep it shut or at least dangerous ever since. And this past week alone, the Iranian seized the US underwater drone near the strait and then they announced a new air quote here, exclusion zone. And then they traded tanker strikes with the US Navy. Think about the exclusion zone for a moment.

14:32You know, this is kind of the equivalent of the, you know, occupy Wall Street and the the Antifa groups and everybody else that create these no-go zones within cities, whether it be Seattle or Minneapolis or any other place. The Iranians are trying to do the same thing. An exclusion zone. The international waters. Can you imagine somebody in the Pacific or the Atlantic or the Gulf of America or the Indian Ocean creating an exclusion zone and saying, hey, international waters, yeah, we don't care. We're going to control this. No, not going to happen. So that's number one, the straight itself. The choke point number two, the Bob El Mondab. That's the narrow gate at the bottom of the Red Sea is between Yemen and Africa. About 12% of all global goods pass through that narrow gate. Now, that's the Houthis turf. And over the past several days, they seized part of Moka and a, and a Red Sea island right at the

15:35mouth of that strait. Their spokesman says that shipping will as safe for all companies, except for Saudi vessels. Now, take that reassurance for exactly what it's worth from a group everyone agrees is completely unpredictable and that crap crazy. So there's choke point number two, choke point number three, the East West pipeline. Saudi Arabia's overland bypass from the Gulf oil field to the Red Sea was built precisely so that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would never be a hostage to her moves. It became the main escape valve when her moves closed. Yesterday, drones out of Iraq forced the shot Saudis to shut down the thing they said we would never shut down. Have you left the house yet? You feel like you're tank up with guests? Now, let me give you the number that ties it to your life.

16:38Saudi oil exports to Asia. Rand, these numbers are astonishing. Saudi oil exports to to Asia ran about 3.4 million barrels a day in June. By August, that had collapsed to about 128,000 barrels a day. They've clawed back to about 700,000 this month. That is the largest oil supplier on the planet getting throttled at every exit at once. 3.4 million barrels down to 128,000 barrels. And one story, I'll give you the figure anyway, all the way up to verify it yet. 7,000 barrels. Yeah. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of time. Now, the market you're going to do what markets do. Oil has topped $100 a barrel. That's the highest in months. US regular gasoline is averaging $4.22

17:44cents a gallon, which is a record for September. Diesel, which gets all your stuff to the yield to the wall and water to the sand to the Costco, gets it all to the public, gets it all to the King's supers or the Safeway, gets it all your great everything. Diesel is at a record high. And that's the one I think you should worry the most about because diesel is not a vacation expense. It's the fuel under our entire economy. Every load of groceries, every load of lumber, every Amazon box moves on diesel. One energy executive, then Pickering, was asked when the market should start to worry about diesel. His answer, oh, we've been worrying and we're worrying right now. There are your three choke points. It's kind of a bleak picture, isn't it? Now, if you're listening from here at home in Colorado, the war in the Red Sea actually has an address here in Colorado. Colorado, Colorado, as an example, runs on diesel in ways that a coastal

18:49city, say Los Angeles or New York does not. Our farmers and ranchers, Adelaire Eastern Plains, run diesel equipment through Harvest, which is right now. Our freight comes up Interstate 25 and across Interstate 70 on diesel. The ski country supply runs. The construction fleets, the school bus diesel contracts, they all get reprised when that valved closed in the Saudi desert. So, record diesel is not a headline out here. It's a line item on every operation that feeds and moves this state and it lands hardest on the rural counties that can at least eat it. A war nobody here voted for shows up as a fuel surcharge on the Curzy grain hauler. That's how connected this thing is. And while I use Colorado as an example, I can go to New Mexico, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas. I can go any other state, Iowa.

19:50You name it. I can make the same case. Bill, your car. Yes. Now, here's what I find interesting about this entire story. Saudi Arabia bet everything on the opposite of this war. This is the part that my gut's been reaching for. And I think it's true. Saudi Arabia didn't want this. The Crown Prince, MBS, Muhammad bin Salman, he has spent years in staggering sums of money trying to build the opposite of what he woke up to yesterday. Turn an ultra conservative oil kingdom into a business and a tourism hub. Integrate the region he wanted to make the old war somebody else's history and the money everybody's future. Love the vision or call it a mirage. It is plainly a bet on commerce

20:50and good solid relations with their neighbors and not built on conflict. Our ambassador in Saudi Arabia in Riyadh itself probably said it best. What did he say coming up next? It's the weekend with Michael Brown. Text lines open 3 3 1 0 3. He word Michael. Be right back. A shocking crime and a cover up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. Someone opened the door and was the primary sugar. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, fault line Haditha tells the story the United States government wants to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children in there. Can you tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over a hundred hours of secretly filmed video. The truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally

21:54be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of murder at least and you offer immunity to the other four you better be right about the fifth because if you're not then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to fault line Haditha on the Lie Heart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode sponsored by Home Base. Home Base is built for small businesses trying to do it all. The neighborhood coffee shop, the local gym, the family run restaurant. With Home Base you can schedule your team, track time, run payroll and manage hiring from one easy app so you can spend less time chasing time sheets and more time running the business your customers love. More than 150,000 small businesses already use Home Base to keep their teams on track. Start free at joinhomebase.com. Home Base, built for small businesses that do it all. Tonight Michael Brown joins me here.

22:57The former FEMA director. Talk show host Michael Brown. Brownie now. Brownie you're doing a heck of a job. The weekend with Michael Brown. Hey welcome back to the weekend with Michael Brown glad to have you with me. If you like what we do on the weekend you probably like the weekday program and it's really easy to listen to the weekday program even if you live in you know outside of Denver. On your iHeart app search for station in Denver with the call letters K-O-A K-O-A. It's at 8.50 am 94.1 FM when you find that hit that as a preset and then you can listen to the program live Monday through Friday from 9 to noon mountain time 9 to noon mountain time. Let's do your own time zone calculation. So hit hit that preset today. Back to the Saudis. The former ambassador to Saudi Arabia Michael Ratney. Described the Saudi mood right now is incredibly frustrating. Called it a war they never asked for and said that once it started all of

23:57their worst case scenarios have started coming true. Everyone of them. The numbers what I did I give you earlier or what that sentence was looked like if you put it into a spreadsheet. Now can the Saudis afford this cutoff? They can't. They cannot afford this cutoff. It's math and I don't think anybody understands the math better than they they understand their own math. I went looking for Reod's best option. I came up with a menu. I came up with I think I have three here. I think we got three three options. Listen to these closely. If you're if you're Muhammad bin Solomon if you're the crown prince you've gotten your team together and said what do we do? And they said well we have three choices option number one. Escalate the war in Yemen. Try to blast the hoothies off the Red Sea choke points. Now they tried that between 2015

25:03and 2022. What happened? It stole that on the ground. They killed an estimated 150,000 people and pushed Yemen toward famine before they finally called a ceasefire in 2022. And the upgrade since then is all even worse for Reod. Sherwin Hendrin Ali of the conflict monitor Aqlid notes that the hoothies their weapons are far more sophisticated now. And the Saudis likely have fewer interceptor missiles to defend with because so many got spent fighting the Iranians. So war that they lost once restarted on worse terms. Yeah that's option one I don't think so. Option number two try to cut a deal right always try to cut a deal with the hoothies or with Tehran behind the hoothies. But the hoothies price is lifting the blockade that's kept them contained which just lets them grow stronger for the next time.

26:06And the Iranians I don't think have any interest at all in stabilizing the region for free just to do it out of the kindness of their heart. No Tehran once US concessions and they're going to use every choke point is the lever to try to extract concessions from us. There's option number two not very doesn't seem very likely does it. No how about number three? Set patiently and wait unwashing to. We'll get to something about this in the next section but that door is the one with the coldest draft coming in under it. Neil Quilley and Macheteham House summed the trap up pretty cleanly. Every available option carries significant costs with uncertain outcomes. That's diplomatic speak for checkmate on all three checkmate checkmate and checkmate. Now for decades the Saudi answer to a Friday like yesterday was pretty simple pick up the phone

27:07call Washington. American security guarantees were the bedrock under the entire kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Now that bedrock has moved and I'm not going to try to solve petal it because it's our side. In 2019 when a drone strike knocked out roughly half of Saudi's oil production in one shot we did not retaliate. This past February we attacked the Iranians without consulting our Gulf allies sitting in the blast radius and now with the Saudis getting pounded and Ambassador Ratney says the readout of the White House is that it's well we're not very enthusiastic about getting involved. We have so screwed up for impolicy in the Middle East it is unbelievable. The president told you why himself on Fox News ask about ramping up military pressure he said well maybe I don't want to do that because of the election. Huh? There's the calculation in his own words and on raw politics Trump's reading it right. The war is deeply

28:11unpopular only about 31% of Americans supported and he was elected on a promise to keep us out of exactly what's happening right now and the midterms are just a few weeks away. So if president who would widen the war in September that probably hand his own party a millstone for November so when you feel like we're a half hazard partner over there I don't think you're being cynical I think we're being accurate. The catch is that this restraint is a calculation it's not a conviction and calculations get redone all the time. So go back to my home what kept me up all day yesterday and last night thinking about this. How likely is this whole thing to blow up? Which is the question I really want to answer. Now I'll tell you why it's not a guess a wider regional war is no longer a forecast. In fact the wider regional war is what's been going on

29:15for the past six months. Iran, Israel, the United States, the Gulf States, the Houthis, the Iraqi militias, they're already in it. That box is checked. We're already in a regional war so the question is whether it jumps a tear. Three tears I think sit above where we are right now. Tehran is a deep chokehold. Tehran is America backing with both feet and Tehran is the nightmare. Go back to Tehran, the deep chokehold. Every choke point should at once for sustained stretch with somebody systematically destroying Saudi and Gulf oil infrastructure rather than just harassing it. Oil doesn't touch $100 in settle. It'll blow past $100 and park somewhere north of $100. That's tear number one. tear number two, America backing with both feet. A real US air campaign against the Houthis on top of the Iran fight. American casualties. The thing the President

30:21Trump is working right now to try to avoid. So tear two, I don't know. Their memories already said, well, not why there's an election going on. Tehran three, why about the nightmare scenario? A great power dimension. Or Iran's nuclear question comes off the shelf. I think that has very low odds. You know why? Forget about whether it's blown to smithereens or obliterated or mostly done away with forget all of that. The Iranians are nuts. Totally nuts. But I also think that their supporters, the Chinese and the Russians look at them and tell them, you know what we don't want to engage in civilization grade stakes because that's what we're talking about. If somehow they have a nuclear weapon or they're able to reconstitute it and do something, yes, those are civilization grade stakes. So my read, not fact, but just my read, the lightliest path is the ugly boring path.

31:29We stay about where we are. Grinding it out, tip for tat, tankers burning, choke points, sometimes open, sometimes close, oil very expensive, nobody's able to end it, and nobody's able to win it. I think the best odds sit right there. But tier one is not a tail risk anymore. It's a very live possibility over the next few months and it's rising for one simple reason. There is no ceasefire holding and there's no floor under anything of what I've talked about. Every attempt at one has been shot through within weeks. When you don't have a floor, you don't fall on the schedule. You fall the first time somebody slips and tiers number two and three, they don't arrive by a decision. They'll arrive by accident. Those 18 missiles that Jordan knocked down last week just let one through. Let it kill some Americans. Let a US carrier take a real hit or a pilot that gets captured on video. The president who said, maybe I don't because of

32:35the election will instantly get the calculator out, rerun the math before lunchtime because now the politics is running the other way completely opposite direction. What's holding the lid down right now is domestic politics and mutual exhaustion. It's not peace. It's a lid held down by hand, but it is not bolted shut. I think that's what my gut gets right. Nothing of war is coming. That the distance between here and a far worse war is very, very thin. Thinner than the quiet makes it look. So when I get back, I want to give you four things to watch and tell you what I honestly don't know. Don't watch the speeches. Watch these four things. I'll be right back. A shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps.

33:39Someone opened the door and was the primary shooter. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, Vault-Line Haditha, tells the story the United States government wants to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children there. You got to tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over a hundred hours of secretly filmed video. The truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of murder at least and you offer immunity to the other four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Vault-Line Haditha on the Lie Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to the week-in with Michael Braille, talking about the Middle East.

34:40Last night in this morning, I kind of felt like the Middle East was about to explode. I think the honest correction is that it really exploded back in February and that we've been living inside that blast for six months while the good chunk of the country changed the channel and moved onto something else. The Saudis put yourself in their shoes. They bet their whole future on peace and commerce and they're watching it burning on three sides. Our guarantee to them is running on election year math. And the only thing to keep this keeping this from getting even worse is that the two men who could widen it, one in Tehran and one in Washington, each have a private reason to hold back. Now, reasons change. Peace treaties do not and we don't have one of those. So how likely is a wider war? Isn't the right question because we're already in a wider war.

35:43The right question is whether the lid holding this war to what it is right now holds. And my honest answer, probably through the elections, that I wouldn't bet a nickel on it holding much past that on its own, watch the diesel, watch the red sea, watch all of that to see what happens next. Because I think you'll find that what's really going on here is a lot worse than we ever anticipated. The valve that I talked about, the gut shut yesterday. The politics around it are amazing. I want you to step back, open your mind for a moment and think about where we are. We've always known and if you go back, I bet there's a time that even you at one time said, maybe when Clinton was president, maybe as far back as Carter and the reigning Hossie situation

36:46in 1979, but Carter or Reagan or Bush or Obama, Bush 43, Trump won Biden any of them. You may have asked at some point, why don't we put an end to that madness? We know what they've done blowing up our embassies, making all the IEDs that exploded in Iraq and Afghanistan, actually engaged with their proxies in Afghanistan and Iraq, the USS Cole, the Bay Root, bombing, everywhere you turn, thousands and thousands of people killed because of the Iranians who are hellbent on destroying us, the great Satan, and our partner over here, the little Satan Israel. And people for decades have said, why don't we stop them? And so Trump said,

37:47you know what I will, I'm going to stop the nuclear program. So the Americans and the Israelis put together a plan and either blew to smithereens, obliterated it or set it back. But I don't think that we thought through which Americans seemed to never do. What happens on day two? What happens on the second day? And now we're into the second day, six months, but it's the second day. And we're looking around and going, what's next? We've cleared the straits. Yes, you have cleared the straits, the minds have probably been out there, but we've shifted. We've watched a shift. Now the Houthi still has some ballistic missiles, but we've really moved from what? Ballistic missiles to drone warfare. And so now we're worried about drones just harassing and damaging and damaging tankers that he tried to get through the strait, which is open. But the carriers and the

38:52owners of the ships don't want to spend the amount of money that would take to ensure it. And then you come back home. And now we're in the throes of a midterm election. And everything's on a line for Trump. Everything is on the line for all of us. Because set aside for a moment, this little speed bump, this war, this regional conflict that's going on. If Trump loses the midterms and the Democrats take over the House and the Senate, what do you think's going to happen for the next two years? Well, number one, the presidential election will start almost immediately in November four of this year. For 2028, they will start the maneuvering almost immediately. And if Democrats control the House and the Senate, you can expect that, well, impeachment hearings, maybe, maybe not, that possibly you can expect every attempt in the fake and pull out of their kind of magic tricks to roll back tax cuts, to roll back all of the rollback that we have done

40:00of green energy policies, everything else that you know, the the ability to drill for oil, everything that we've done that has made the country prosperous at the same time that we have this problem with the price of oil and gas, which offsets all the prosperity. Or at least it changes the level that changes the, I used the word, but it changes the affordability question. All of that gets lost in the midterms. Well, then what happens halfway around the world? Does that emboldened or released Trump from whatever political refrains may, restraints may be holding him back right now? And he says, okay, now I'm going for broke. I'm going to finally destroy the regime. And that does forget about tier one, tier two, or tier three. At that point, that regional war blows up and could easily slide into world war three. I don't think the Russians want that,

41:04they're busy. The Chinese don't want that because I don't think they're ready to do anything with tier one. And we certainly don't want that. So the Middle East becomes a conflagration as a way to offset domestic politics. There is a part of me that says, if that's the future and that's going to depend on how many Republicans get elected to the House and the Senate, then do it now. Just do it now and explain to the American people why you're going to do it now because I think Americans would look, I think, maybe wrong, but I think Americans would look at that gas pump. And they would look at the price of groceries. They look at the price of everything else is affected by the price of diesel. And say, you know what, let's put it into this. Let's just put an end to it right now. Let's put an end to the terrorism. Let's put an end to these proxies all the time. Let's put an end to the hoodies. Let's let the Middle East settle down. Let's let Mohammed bin Salman do what he wants to do in terms of maybe signing the Abraham Accords and completely transforming the Middle East. Yes, go for it. Go for it now.

42:11But I don't think anybody will. Domestic politics plays too much of a role. And I think Americans are too afraid to say, are we going to go for broke? Are we going to keep playing tit for tap? And if we keep playing tit for tap and we end up losing the midterm elections and now we have all of this in the Middle East and we have the domestic policy reversals, nobody wants that. Well, nobody within the sound of my voice, I think, wants that. I don't want that. Hang tight. Speaking with Michael Brown, I'll be right back. We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone.

43:12We have a winner. Yes. Listen Armstrong, you get a on demand on the iHeart radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series, Fault Line Haditha, tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.