Sam Faddis #1340

0:00So, when I ask, what is Odu? What comes to mind? Well, Odu is a bit of everything. Odu is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth. But you know, some people also say Odu is like a magic bean stock, because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable. But then again, you could look at Odu in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks. I mean, whatever your business needs, manufacturing, accounting, HR programs, you can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company. So, what is Odu? Well, I guess Odu is a bit of everything. Odu is a fertilizer, magic bean stock building blocks for business. Yeah, that's it. Which means that Odu is exactly what every business needs. Learn more and sign up now at odu.com. That's odu.com. Hey y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair, where delivery and setup are as

1:04easy as a few taps on your phone. Picture this. You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app when you spot it, a brand new patio set. Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up. Oh, you need a new grill too? All right, Wayfair's got you covered. With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast expert setup on qualifying orders, life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app. Wayfair every style, every home. What's up, everybody? Quick announcement. All of my conversations are now up on Substack, both audio and video ad-free and early for paid subscribers. So, if you like what I'm doing, want to support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber on my Substack. You'll have no more advertisements, no more interruptions. You can listen to the audio and watch the videos. Thank you very much. All the links are in my show notes and again, I appreciate your continued support. I'm this episode of Coffin on my Sam Fattis as a retired CIA operations officer, published author and national security commentator. He talks to conflicted around why plan A

2:08did not work by the Trump administration, organization of the Iranians, the state of Hormuz, ground troops, the global economic fallout from all this, and much more. Please subscribe, like and share this podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, the mic is on and I welcome Sam Fattis. Sam, I think this is the first time that we haven't spent 15 minutes offline talking because you're on such a time crunch schedule, you know, tight schedule right now, and I'm actually proud of myself that I didn't get caught up in casual conversation with you because it takes away from recording time. So thanks for doing this. I can't imagine what life is, well, why don't I just ask you, what is life like for you right now? It's pretty crazy. I'm on and off the phone or on and off a show all the time trying to make sense of what's going on in the Persian Gulf. So, yeah, it's madness.

3:16Where do you, so describe for me what's in your head right now, what is making sense, what is not making sense, and just your overall view of things? Yeah, well, probably the first place to start, I mean, folks that know me know this, but just for the record. I mean, look, I worked against the Iatola's in the Iranian regime for a very long time in a central intelligence agency and, you know, these guys are monsters and I'll be the first guy to cheer when that horrible regime collapses in the Iranian people, you know, are actually free. So I'm all about that. I'm not sure where we are with this war or that's not accurate. I am sure where we are with this war and I don't feel real good about it. I guess my sense is that we launched this attack,

4:17we launched this war based on the idea that we were going to hit them really hard, really fast, with a particular focus on decapitating the regime. And then the regime was going to collapse in relatively short order one way or the other. Either they were going to quit, the unilateral surrender, there would be a coup, the people would rise up, whatever, however we got there. The Iatola's are gone, the theocracy's gone and, you know, it's springtime in Tehran, not to sound too sarcastic, but and I never believed that. I don't think that was ever in the Cargs. It has obviously not happened. And so now the question is what's planned be, right? Which you would have thought somebody would have asked from the beginning in a military operation, you don't just say, let's assume everything is going to go right. And we win, you know,

5:21honestly, you probably assume exactly the contrary. Okay, that's not. When that doesn't work, or the enemy has the audacity to think for themselves, where are we going next? How to how? And I think the general feeling has been since the onset that the answer to that would be find an off ramp. Let's wind this thing down. Let's be satisfied with having beat the hell out of them. And let's be honest, we have inflicted massive massive damage. But let's be let's be satisfied with that and and acknowledge that at least for now the regime will remain in power, but greatly weakened. And let's move on. The question in my mind right now as you and I are talking today is, is that still actually an option? I mean, we can quit fighting anytime we want, but the question is, really, will the Iranians stop? Will they stop shooting at golf nations? Will

6:26they reopen the Straits of Hormuz? All of these kinds of things. And I don't know the answer to that right now. I mean, I remain hopeful that they will that we will be able to find a negotiated settlement and end this thing and leave them weakened, but without setting the whole Persian golf in the world economy on fire. But that's, you know, that's not a guarantee in my mind. I mean, these guys are there there is the possibility that they basically say let's all let's go let's all go to hell to get other we're setting the whole region on fire and and and torching it and so that you know, that's where we are. That's a very depressing assessment, but that's you know, there's no question we have dramatic we have inflicted massive damage on these guys, but the idea that they were going to just surrender, roll over or that the people were going to spontaneously rise up, it's still a little unclear to me who exactly sold that assessment.

7:34There are a lot of theories floating around, but it was wrong. And so now we're now we're in it and trying to figure out where we go from here. Well, maybe at the end of this conversation, we'll talk about movies for five minutes just to just to lighten up the light. Something man, we need to we need I end up depressing myself when we talk about this and like we need like ice cream Sundays or something to do at the end, I don't know. So and then just for people that are listening or watching today is March 24th from Sam and I recording and it's one PM Eastern just a kind of time stamp it. Why didn't you think in your experience, why didn't you think that this regime would just fall down like a paper tiger initially? Yeah, well, I mean, let me say this again having worked against the Iranians for a long time and when I say worked against them, I mean, recruited sources inside their nuclear program, the IRGC, their their leadership, I mean, you know,

8:39face to face with these guys, anybody who understands them and knows what this regime is about and has been paying attention to their planning and how how they have prepared for an eventual confrontation with the US. Nobody would have nobody who understood it wouldn't. I don't think anybody who really understood them could honestly have believed that that was the case. So, you know, you got some combination of people that don't really understand what they're talking about, some people that I think are engaging the wishful thinking. I don't want to pin this all on the Israelis, but I think, you know, there's a lot of people suggesting I think with some bases that the Israelis really pushed this push this hard and you can reach your own conclusion about to what extent they believed it or what extent they believed that it was necessary to say

9:40that, to get us to jump. I don't know. Part of, you know, I was writing about this just yesterday, part of my question and all of this is, okay, well, that's great. The Israelis can come with intelligence and tell you, our assessment is the regime will collapse if we do X, Y and Z. That's wonderful. And they can say whatever they want. My question is, where were our own, where was our own intelligence on this? I mean, just because the Israelis reach that conclusion, doesn't mean we have to reach that conclusion. And when the Israelis say, we have sources inside the IRGC and they tell us X, Y and Z, we should be in the position of having our own sources of information and either being able to say, yeah, that tracks with what we assess or I don't know what you guys are smoking but that's not what anybody we're talking to tells us. Part of what happened

10:45here I suspect is as sad as it is, we don't have the sources that we need to have. We don't have the intelligence collection we need to have. So you end up in a position where you're the only guys in the room who claimed to know anything or the Israelis. And now their intelligence becomes power if you understand what I'm saying, it's late. They're selling the story that their sources say the regime is a house of cards and we hit it hard and it'll fall over. Well, you know, the job of people in CIA as an example is to have their own independent sources and be able to say, that's bullshit. And if you don't have those sources then they kind of own you. You're stuck with that. So what kind of people in your experience in and I've had numerous conversations with regard to what's going on over there and it changes by the day. But one of the reoccurring

11:47themes that I've heard and I'm going to share with you and you tell me what your thoughts are. The Iranians, they're not stupid people. Like they're not dumb in relation to engineering and physics and so on and so forth. Yeah, the Iranians are no joke. I mean, I worked against Iranian intel, what we call M O I S and IRGC and coulds force in these guys for a really long time. So they are and you know, my caveat as always is look, I'm not trying to tar an entire people or an entire ethnicity with this with this brush. I've also worked with a huge number of Persian patriots who risk their lives and many of them and some of them lost their lives fighting to free that country. So they are a great people. But the guys you're talking about that keep this regime in power. They're really squared away. They're unbelievably brutal. Like there is no limit to

12:48the level of violence they will use. But they are also really sharp, very squared away and very organized. So I worked during the same time frame, I was probably spending a lot of time working against the Iraqis back in the days of Saddam Hussein and against the Iranians. The Iranians were every bit as brutal and violent as the Iraqis, but much more efficient and much more squared away. Like if you had to figure out one adversary that was more dangerous, it was the Iranians because they had their stuff together. So what do you mean by square away Sam? Let me interrupt you. What do you mean by square away? Really, really organized and detailed oriented and they approach things for more like the way we would approach them. The Iraqis might be very, I'm talking in Saddam Hussein's intelligence service. It might be incredibly brutal, but also sloppy, inefficient, cutting corners. The Iranians were never like that and so and they plan ahead

13:53and they think ahead. So for example, I was running operations in the Middle Eastern country working out of an embassy and I had a source who was, he worked for Iranian intelligence. So he was a local guy that worked for Iranian intelligence. He was one of their agents, but he was working for me and telling me what they were telling. He was our penetration of their operations. So they had an existing plan to attack and stage an explosive attack on our embassy. By that, I mean, that plan had been written a number of years before and it sat on the shelf. It was not somebody calling in the middle of the night screaming saying, hey, we want to blow up the embassy. It was, we want a standing plan to be able to take action against American targets, plans to take action against American targets in this country. So go out and prepare those, case those. Same way we would approach it, right? Very detailed oriented photographs,

14:55drawings, casing reports, meaning they've checked out our security and they've got multiple targets in this country. All right. And then periodically they would just update these plans, meaning so for example, they would run an apartment across the street from the embassy, have one of their agents do it. And then they have another guy go and just drop a bag of trash against the embassy wall. And then they have a clock and they're taking photographs and they want to know exactly how long does it take before somebody in our security detects that something has been placed against the wall. And then who comes first to inspect it? And then how long does it take for us to do it? And what resources do we bring? And do we just pick it up or do we bring some kind of bomb sniffing dot whatever they're making book on our procedures? Well, they had done that multiple times before. But every six months or every year,

16:00they just do that kind of thing and update all of their planning. Not because there was an immediate crisis and they were getting ready to blow up that embassy, but because that was one of God knows how many potential targets in the region. And they just are that detail oriented in that focus. So in the run up to this conflict over the last year in Greece, Turkey, Cyprus, Bahrain, I don't know, I'm forgetting some countries. In all of these countries in the region, teams of Iranian assets on the ground casing American targets have been detected and either prosecuted or thrown out of the country. Teams, a guy has shown up, rent and hotel rooms, usually in cash, overlooking, say, Sudabay and Crete, where our ships go in. And then they take photographs and produce sketches and produce reports. And that's not like they didn't have those

17:04reports before. That's just them very methodically updating everything in preparation. And for every one of those teams that gets detected and expelled, you can make your own judgment on how many more teams there are, but that's not the only one, right? That's what I mean by, I mean, this is the way we approach things, right? You don't call the Pentagon and say, we're going to launch an attack on Iran and the guys in the Pentagon say, well, we never thought of that. Let's start thinking, you know what I mean? That plan is in existence and constantly updated with all kinds of subdivisions and all sorts of contingencies. And the Pentagon planners do that all day, every day. That's exactly the way these guys approach us. So, you know, when we start attacking Iran and we use the tactics we do and the weapons we do and we

18:05really fast and precision strikes and attacking leadership, what you can understand from that is nobody in Iran saw that happen and thought, oh my god, we never believed they would do this. All the guys in the leadership in the military had said a long time ago, this is how the Americans wage war. This is how they will hit us and then thought out precisely in advance what they were going to do next and how they were going to respond. They didn't, they didn't all of a sudden break down the tiers and say, we have no idea what to do. They just immediately in a very organized, efficient fashion began to react. So, they knew, you know, it doesn't mean you're not hurting them, it doesn't mean that you can't win the war, it just means you have to have an accurate appraisal of who you're fighting and who you, and what you're talking about. The guys are no joke, so

19:08you better have your act together when you go to war with them. I had, I don't know if you're familiar with his work, but Sal Mercogliano, who's a maritime, he has a show called What's Going On With Shipping, and we were talking about the straight of Hormuz and the psychological aspect of it to where you can't officially close it, but no boats want to travel down it right now in fear of something happening. So, you have, and I didn't look today, I'm assuming it's the same amount of ships, it was over 3,000 that are just stuck, 3,600, 3,200 or something? Yeah, so, right, you're not talking about the U.S. Navy running the gauntlet. You're talking about commercial tankers owned by commercial entities, moving it maybe 12 knots, frigging mile long, through a very narrow straight. Also, understand that the Iranians mined the straits in the past. I mean, the fact that the Iranians would

20:10close Hormuz or attempt to close Hormuz is no shock to anybody who's looked at the problem. I mean, they have threatened it and they have actually attempted to do it on previous occasions. So, anybody going into this would have to say that's a given. As soon as we hit them, they will play that card. It should come as a shock to you. I mean, obviously, the average American has better things to do with his life and spend all his time worrying about the straits of Hormuz and what the hell's going on. If that's your business, if you're an intelligence and military, you know, okay, well, we're going to hit the Iranians. They're going to one way or the other are going to try to close the straits. Again, they don't have to be able to defeat the U.S. Navy. They're not even shooting at the U.S. Navy, really. And they don't actually have to hit every tanker because, you know, if you own a tanker that costs God knows how many millions of dollars and it's carrying a cargo worth millions of dollars, you're not risking it. Plus, the insurance

21:16companies won't give you insurance now. Insurance companies have been canceling their insurance, which means I got all this oil and I got this ship. So, I got millions and millions and millions of dollars tied up. And my insurance company won't pay if it gets hit. In other words, if I run this thing through the strait and they hit it, that's pure loss to me, like my companies got. So, yeah, they're just sitting there. And one of the immediate problems for the crews is they can't dock and they can't go anywhere. And so, they're literally running out of food and water at sea. You got a crew trapped, you know, well, 30 Indian guys or Filipino guys trapped on a tanker sitting there at anchor. They can't go anywhere. And I don't even know how to get food and water to these guys at this point. And you're talking, let's say, simple numbers, 3,000 or 3,200

22:16times, you know, what is the average crew? What did you say, 30, 40 people? Say 30 or 40 guys, yeah. Yeah. So, 30 times 3,000. I mean, that's, it's a lot of guys. So, also, you know, they're only, I mean, they're, they're like endless ripple effects here, right? It's not an infinite supply of oil tankers. Most of them, a huge percentage of them running in and out of the Persian Gulf. Well, a bunch of them are sitting anchored outside the Persian Gulf because they can't go through the straits. There's no point to go in anyway. And there's a big chunk of them that are just trapped in the Persian Gulf. So, that's a tanker that's not moving oil anywhere on the planet because it's sitting there. And this is the, you know, the other conclusion I've come to, based on my conversations, as it's today, is it in Iran's best interest for this to end right now because it's straighter or mus, that's their leverage here, right? Yeah, we'll see this to me as the essence of where we are. Plan A was we're going to shwack these guys really hard and that the

23:18regime is going to collapse and it'll all be over. Okay, that didn't work. So, then plan B, I think for a lot of people was at some point we just say we're done. We beat the hell out of you. We destroyed all kinds of stuff and I don't mean to minimize that. We have done a huge damage and we call it quits. But now the question is, will the Iranians quit? Do they have an incentive to quit? Right? Why would they quit at this point? Because at this point, it's not just that the Straits of Hormuz are closed, which is not inconsequential. You got all these oil production facilities and gas production facility. And we have now already had strikes on both sides hitting this, right? Gutter lost something like 17% of its production capacity. That's going to take three years and 20 billion dollars to put back online. So, it's not just that the Iranians are threatening

24:22to keep the Straits closed. What they're saying very clearly is, if you push us any further, really, we're going to start doing the same thing we did to this one portion of Gutter's gas production to everybody in the region. So, in other words, it's not just Hormuz could be closed for X number of weeks and then reopen. You could take oil and gas fields or refineries or ports offline for years, right? You could blow up refineries in Saudi and other key facilities and then it doesn't matter if you reach a truth tomorrow. They won't come back online overnight and they won't come back online in days. It might take years to bring them back online and unbelievable amounts of money you're talking about. Obviously, are they going to get

25:28smashed if they do that? Obviously, but do they care at this point? People also need to keep in mind that the guys who run this regime in Iran have a very apocalyptic worldview. They believe that this is the end of times. These are the end times and essentially their version of Armageddon is coming. On the other side of Armageddon, they win and they actually believe that it's their job to bring on the apocalypse, like the only way you can get to the end state where they rule by, according to their theology, is you have to bring on the apocalypse. There must be an apocalypse. And if you are guaranteed to win in your own mind, you're not really afraid of the apocalypse. You get what I'm saying. It's like their

26:29interpretation of the Quran says, they are guaranteed to win. But first, there must be the fire and brimstone and the whirlwind and all of that crap. So, we're back to the initial question which is, why would you think that a bunch of guys like that would quit and fold and surrender just because you hit them really hard, right? If you know that the modia is coming and you're going to win and the world will be yours. You don't fear or any of that. Anyway. What is your impression then of, and it's so hard in today's world, right? Where you don't know what to believe, what not to believe, what's circulating. It's unbelievable time we're in right now, Sam, because, you know, I don't know. I mean, I don't know what these videos are. If they're real, if they're from today, three years ago. Yes. I mean, you could show me a burning building in the desert. It could be right down the street from your Arizona. I wouldn't know the difference.

27:31Yes. But the idea of the troops that are being deployed to the mid-East, and again, I'm reading all kinds of different reports of that. What is your assessment of that? My assessment is best I can tell from folks I'm talking to. Is that we want, at this point, we have embraced the idea that we, the regime, we have, we have embraced the idea of plan B as I described it earlier, which is, okay, the regime is not going to collapse. What we need now is a ceasefire. Let's stop the war. And again, having, there's no question we have inflicted massive damage on the Iranians. So it's not like we haven't done anything. Let's let's take this thing on the offering. And so we're trying a variety of things to try to get them to the table. Part of it is, let's pause for a while and give them a breather and try to get some talks going. But while simultaneously, making clear to them that if you don't talk to us,

28:40we're prepared to hit you even harder, right, which makes sense from a psychology standpoint. I'd like to reach an agreement, but I'm not meeting an agreement with you because I can't inflict more damage. I mean, if you're smart, in other words, basically, you'll take the offer. Let's let's do this. That makes sense to me. Obviously, the first question in your mind is, that's cool, man. When they don't take that offer, are we actually going to go through with jumping in the 82nd and landing them Marines or was that all a bluff? You know, you kind of go up this ladder of escalations where you're basically making threats. And then you have to, you have to in advance think, well, when the guy calls my bluff, what am I going to do? Because if you make that statement and then you back down, you're not where you were before. Now you look weak, right? We threatened, but now it looks like you called our bluff and we were afraid and we backed away and

29:46you guys actually won this war. I hope to God, we do not move forward with the idea of putting ground troops into Iran. I think that is just making a bad situation much, much, much worse. You know, that we'll put X number of troops in. We will take significant casualties and then we'll put a bunch more troops in and we will continue to escalate and this thing will not stay contained. It'll just get worse and worse. That is not the road to go down. And honestly, if we have decided this is it and we got to crush the regime, we're not going to allow them to exist. I don't know why we have to invade Iran. I mean, if you can protect the oil and gas facilities in the Gulf, we can blockade the Persian Gulf and just stop the Iranians from selling oil and then through a variety of other mechanisms over time, crush them, which is what I would have recommended

30:49in the first place if somebody said we really got to get rid of these guys. I would say, okay, well, they'll take the time to do this right. Let's isolate these guys, blockade them, crush them. You can see what we're doing in Venezuela and to some extent already in Cuba, which is we found their soft spot. We've put them in a situation where they have enormous leverage and it hasn't, it hasn't taken invading anybody to do that. I think that would have been a smart way to approach this with Iran to start with. Why don't you think they did that, Sam? Because somebody sold the idea that the regime is weak and it will collapse and you're going to do this and it's going to be all over in a week, historic victory, no pain, you know, easy win. And I don't know whether the answer is nobody argued against that or the people that

31:51argued against that were told to shut the hell up. I mean, I'm still trying to sort that out myself, but I think that idea was sold, that was the thing. This is the golden opportunity, man. And the regime is on its last legs. The people are ready to rise as soon as you start bombing and decapitating them and killing the Ayatollah. And it's like this, you know, it's a house of cards. You're going to hit them and they're going to fall over and it's going to be all over but the shouting and in a week will be done. And again, I think that was a horrible assessment. I didn't agree with it from the beginning and I don't know to what extent people's were misinformed into what extent people deliberately did that, you know, like I've been wanting this to happen for a long time and so let's just sell the story. I don't think anybody who ever

32:52who really knew Iran would have ever agreed, would ever have agreed with that assessment. But maybe they were told to shut the hell up and get out of the room. I don't know. All I know is it was wrong. What does your gut tell you about ground troops? Because what is it supposed to be Friday is the deadline? Something like that, I think, Friday? I have a bad feeling about ground troops to be honest with. I mean, at some point the question becomes, are we willing and we being the people at the very top in our government, willing to admit we were wrong? I don't mean wrong about the fact that the Iranian regime is an atrocity where the world would be better without them. That's a given. Everybody knows that. Wrong in that the idea that we could just knock this thing over relatively easily was fundamentally wrong. Like we shouldn't have jumped basically wrong.

33:55If we're willing to accept that, then I think we got all, then there are option. If we're not and the Iranians call our bluff, it will not surprise me to see the 82nd jumping in and Marines landing and all of that, you know, becomes one of these things where. You just keep doubling down and we both know there are way too many examples in American history, relatively recently, where we've done this. I mean, let's, I mean, we'd go back to Vietnam just how the hell did we go from having relative handfuls of special forces, advisors on the ground in South Vietnam to landing the United States Marine Corps to the next thing, you know, 500,000 American soldiers in South Vietnam. But just, you know, it was nobody wants to admit that this was a bad idea and and change course. So we just keep doubling down, doubling down more. You know, I mean,

34:59what's the old adage, right? The first thing you do when you find yourself in a whole stop digging, but we stop, we we don't do that. Anyway, so I will hope to God we don't put troops in there. What I really hope is that the Iranians will you know decide that this is not the time to bring on the apocalypse. Let's make a deal and hopefully we'll get some talks and and we'll find that off ramp before before we make a make this worse and put soldiers and Marines on the ground inside Iran. How many how many troops would it take to do a to do an invasion in Iran? I mean, if you want to invade Iran in the sense that you want to invade Iran and take Iran, depose the government and transform it. You're going to need the US Army and actually you're going

36:02to need a bigger army. I mean, you you're going to need what I mean by that is you're going to need the whole US Army. You're going to have to reactivate divisions that we have shut down in recent years. I don't know how you're going to do that without drafting people. I mean, you're talking hundreds and hundreds of thousands of guys on the ground. So when people talk about this Mew, this Marine Expeditionary Unit, you know, and there's now a couple of them in route and to make landings, you know, all on our where where it's due to the United States Marine Corps, probably man for man the best fighting force on the planet. A Mew, a 2500 guys, is meaningless in the scope of the conflict you're talking about. Again, that's not a reflection on that. It's just the scope of what you're talking about. The scale of it is, I mean, you're talking literally hundreds of thousands of soaps of troops that you would have

37:09to put in there. And there will be huge resistance all over the country. Again, as somebody who would love to see that regime fall, there's just a lot of committed people there, a lot of people who believe what the regime believes. They aren't all going to come out in the street and cheer you as you march in. What do you think the sentiment is in this country right now for this war? Because before you share that, I feel like the public is not in favor of this. What do you think? I agree with you 100%. I mean, I think there are a significant number of people who at this point are cheering for it because they want to support Trump. And you know, and don't want to be seen as doubters, naysayers, so forth. Well, this is like any conflict, right? I mean, it all at first seems like a video game. And it's almost like a sporting contest.

38:14Like a superhero movie, Sam? Yeah, precisely. Exactly. It's that kind of thing. It's like I'm watching on a TV and isn't this cool. And we're swacking these guys and look at the high speed weapons we've got. I get it. I'm not trying to make fun of people. All of that changes in a heartbeat, man, when people start coming home in significant numbers and in coffins, but also, I mean, the essence of this conflict is we're hitting the Iranians. Israelis are hitting the Iranians. The Iranians are firing back at Israel, not really attacking us. I mean, they do attack when they can. They shoot at bases or other places. But what really we hit the Iranians, and they blow something up in the Gulf. They blow up a tanker. They blow up a oil field. They they're now threatening to take out the desalination plants in the Gulf because, you know, 100 million people in the Gulf drink seawater. Right? I mean, the water comes out of the Gulf goes through a plant and it turns into fresh water. They take the salt out and that's what they drink.

39:17So without those plants, 100 million people die of thirst. It doesn't take very long to die of thirst. A couple of days. Precise them. So you're so so this can go like from as you're describing it, which is a good good description. It's like a superhero movie or a comic book or something. This can go to be in a horror show real fast. Like there's 100 million people dying of thirst in the Gulf. Oh, by the way, oil is, you know, gas is not five dollars a gallon. Gas is now $10 a gallon. Then you start looking at the ripple effects because we get hydrocarbons, you know, that come from oil and natural gas are used in everything. I mean, fertilizer, a huge percentage of it is produced from there. We're going into spring planting season. So a lot of pharmaceuticals are, you know, your medicine is actually a big chunk of it.

40:18The ripple effects are friggin everywhere. Plus, countries in East Asia are hugely dependent for all their energy. I mean, most of their energy on oil and natural gas coming out of the person go. We're like, okay, well, when the Japanese can't heat their homes, that's not my problem. Okay, well, leaving aside whether you should care about the Japanese or not, when factories close all over Japan, Taiwan, China, Southeast Asia, that's everything you're consuming all day, every day. Everything you're buying is coming from there. So you're not going to have that anymore. You're not going to have pharmaceuticals. And your gas could be way north of five dollars a gallon. So, you know, back to your original question. Even the folks that are cheering right now, as soon as they start seeing the actual potential cost of this, I think, well, you know, moment they'll be like, what the hell, man, how did we

41:22get here? What are you talking about right now? Inflation is through through. I mean, the fertilizer affects. Think about what happens. I mean, one of the things I read the other day was farmers in the Midwest now overwhelmingly, a huge percentage of them deciding to plant soybeans instead of corn because soy fixes nitrogen itself out of the air basically doesn't need the same fertilizer corn does. Okay, what's corn is in all your food in the supermarket and it's the feed for all that meat that you're eating in the supermarket. So when there's less corn and the fertilizer is more expensive, the cost of all that stuff is going to go through the roof. So the guy who's cheering today, when he's sitting there realizes he can't afford groceries and he can't afford to fill up his car and, you know, I don't think he's going to be cheering anymore. So that's back to my central

42:27point. I think when we started this, literally, the belief was in about a week this regime is going to collapse and we're going to have scored a massive victory and not, you know, be a great wonder as thing if it was true. But now we're experiencing the ripple effects that somehow we thought we weren't going to have to deal with. You know, in the many conversations that you and I've had, I mean, one of the things that's always stuck in my mind is, you know, I don't remember what conflict we were talking about. You and I've talked through a lot of conflicts in our in our relationship. Yeah, but one of the reoccurring themes, this was under the Biden administration, is like, we're just dropping bombs and just figuring out later. And I feel like here, here we are again with this, just drop bombs and there was no plan. Yeah. I mean, I end up having this conversation. I feel like with you and with a number of other people all the time, which is, you know, national security strategy, you don't start a war like you start a playground fight. This is not about

43:31somebody getting a bloody lip. And, and then you shake hands later, right? I mean, it has to be really cold and calculating. And I use this example all the time. If you look at the way we fought the Second World War, the guys who formulated that strategy had that kind of approach. They were not, this wasn't emotional. This wasn't, let's go kick somebody's butt. This was, okay, this, how are we going to do this? So we made common cause with Joseph Stalin and the USSR, not because we didn't know who Stalin was, because we're like, the immediate danger is Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. We're going to have to deal with Stalin down the road. But right now, we're going to make this really hard call with the Japanese and the Pacific. They had like hundreds of thousands of troops in China. We never put anybody really of significant, any significant number of guys on the main,

44:32Asian mainland. We're going to fight this war in the islands because we control the air. We have now acquired naval superiority. They are isolated. We can cut off their supply and island by island by island hop across the Pacific, right? I mean, not that those weren't horrible bloody battles. But it's like everywhere in there, you can just see these are guys in a room thinking this through. They weren't just saying, let's just start balming stuff and assuming it goes our way. Every step was really, really carefully thought out. And yeah, now you get that unsettling feeling that we're in this conflict. And we're just kind of making it up as we go along. You do get that feeling like, and at each step, it's, let's double down. Let's get dragged in a little deep. I hope we can regain control of the situation and get back to, okay, let's think, let's think this

45:38there. Let's stop formulating plans based on wishful thinking. Back to my original point, when the guy in the room is all done telling you that we're going to bomb them real hard and decapitate the regime, and about a week they're going to collapse. The first question in the room should be, well, maybe the first question is, why do you think that? And then the second question is, and when that doesn't work, what are we doing next? Like, when they don't collapse and they have the audacity to actually continue to fight what's your plan? I'm not sure there was one. Who has the upper hand in this right now, Sam? Well, they do, but I don't think it needs to stay that way, right? I mean, I, and I don't even think you need to just, I don't see any need for you necessarily to say, okay, we concede and we're walking away, and this is a bad idea. We have tremendous, tremendous

46:42advantages. Everybody talks about taking Carg Island these days, because that's their export point. You got to take Carg Island so they can't sell oil. We don't need to take Carg Island. If you put oil in a tank or in the Persian Gulf, you have to sail it out into the Indian Ocean. It's useless to you in a tanker. Who controls the oceans of the world, the United States Navy? The Iranians never had a Navy worth anything and they have no Navy now. Let them load the oil in the tankers. Let them do the work. And then every tanker that comes out that's going to sell oil for the Iranian regime, we take the cargo. They're done. No money. They're complete blockade and bargo them. Guys want to sit there? We're, we're cutting your throat. There will be no more cash for you to sell, to buy anything, to support anything, to build anything. Let's put in place defenses in the Persian Gulf to stop their drone attacks and stop their middle missile tackles, protect the

47:44infrastructure, basically wall them off. Let's, you know, I don't want to get lost in the details, but how about we think through this plan, man? Just because we didn't knock them over in a week doesn't mean we have to lose. We certainly don't have to keep it like throwing ourselves on our swords here doing what's before we charge in and win the United States Marines and Iran, how about we recalibrate and get smart? They, you know, we have wrecked them. We control this guy. They're never going to significantly be able to challenge that. We control the sea. We can isolate them, shut them off, starve them to death. I don't mean literally starving every Iranian to death. I mean starve the regime of the funds that needs and crush it. Which would have been kind of my recommendation from the beginning if somebody said, okay, it's time to get rid of this regime. I would have said, okay, then let's take the time to do

48:45this right in a smart way that leverages all our advantages and doesn't start a shooting war in the middle of the Persian Gulf, right? I think, hopefully, we can still get back there, but we'll see. All right, two more questions. What is your concern with the Houthis? And they're, I thought I saw something the last night where they were saying that they are involved. Are they engaging? But again, you know, I don't know what to believe, but not to believe. I agree. You see an assessment. You see an announcement every 24 hours that the Houthis have jumped in and then you fact check it and realize it's video from like three years ago or it was completely AI produced. It's a big issue, right? So, you know, most of the oil and natural gas from these Persian Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, comes out through the Straits of Hormuz.

49:46And the Straits are effectively closed unless the Iranians decide to let you through. On the other side of Saudi Arabia is the Red Sea. And the Saudis built some time ago, I think, at pipeline, it's like 700 miles long across the desert. It's essentially an escape valve. So we can still pump oil out to the port of Yanbu on the Red Sea. Tankers can come into the Red Sea. They can load up oil and oil can get out that way. And it doesn't mean the Iranians can't hit it, but it's a hell of a lot harder to hit. It's 1,000 miles as opposed to, you know, 50 miles. The trick that catches, obviously, to get in and out of the Red Sea, if you look at a map, you got to go past Yemen, which means you got to run past the Houthis, who are Iranian allies. So far, the Houthis haven't started shooting what they could start at any point in time in effectively closed the Red Sea, too. And that pipeline, by the way, to Yanbu across the safety

50:52valve pipeline, is maxed out on capacity now. It is not typically minimal flow. It is now maxed out. The Saudis are doing that right now. And there are, as of a few days ago, last time I checked, there were like 30 oil tankers at this port of Yanbu on the Red Sea, taken on oil. So right now, that safety valve is open. But if the Houthis decide to close it, then you have exactly the same situation you have in the Persian Gulf right now. Why they haven't come in? I don't know. My guess is, I don't know to what extent it's the Houthis are sniffing the wind and trying to decide who they think is going to win. And to what extent the Iranians haven't told them to do it yet because they don't want to play that card yet. Right? There is an element on the side. The Iranians are basically, are there folks that invented

51:52chess? So when you think about their strategy, that probably makes sense. So the same reason, it may be the same reason in my mind that they haven't started blowing things up inside the United States yet. It's not because they can't. It's because they've not yet decided they want to play that card. Probably because if they kill a whole bunch of Americans on American soil, any chance we're going to quit and go home, probably goes, goes away. You know, it's the 9-11 effect. So I mean, everything the Iranians do and all their allies do is that kind of thought process. And all right, two more questions. One will be short. It will both be short. But it's Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai. What is their role in all this and because they're feeling it as well. And yeah. The public statements that they've made are a little inconsistent. I mean,

53:04the Saudis in the last 24 hours are talking about how we need to finish the job. A lot of the other Gulf States have at various points been saying, we've got to find a way to end this. One way or the other, they want it over. They want it over and the shooting to stop. I mean, I guess make it stop. We can't, this cannot be continued. This can't be a protracted thing. I mean, if you go to, if you've been into the Gulf and I've been in virtually all of those countries many times, you know, you're talking about places that are were, you know, deserts, still hard deserts, whose where you have large cities and skyscrapers and malls. I mean, God, you go to Dubai. They got an indoor ski slope in Dubai. I mean, they got a huge like

54:06giant shopping mall sized structure and inside is literally a ski slope with wheels of snow. The entire thing is a giant refrigerator freezer thing. All of it is based on money from oil and gas, right? I mean, if you take, if you crush that industry, they're right back. I mean, Dubai once upon a time was a little sleepy place, you know, and you walk outside of town, take you no time to walk outside of town. It was nothing but desert literally in all direction. So it's all friggin' artificial and it's all fragile as hell. Built on oil and gas and big plants to turn sea water into water. So there's no resiliency, you know. If you start taking down, doing to the other places, what you already showed a taste of with gutter where you took out almost 20% of their production capacity. They don't have a fallback. It's gotta end, man.

55:14A handful of targets in either place being actually destroyed is all you need. You don't need to carpet bomb the place. I mean, all the, you know, all the oil from whatever field is going through a refinery. You don't have to go bomb every well. Just take out the refinery, take out other key nodes, and then what? They're supposed to find $50 billion and wait five years, like they can't. So that's, it is immediate. It's like somebody's got a knife to their throat right now, and they're Russian and Chinese, I'm sorry, saying you direction and the Chinese and all this, you know, their immediate reaction is to help the Iranians because it hurts us, right? So they're gonna give them targeting data into the extent they can, they're gonna help them with weapons. especially for the Chinese at some point, this has to end as well. I mean, again, if there's

56:19any chance to stick it to us and hurt us and to track, they're going to play that card, but they get a huge amount of oil from Iran. Chinese do. So from that perspective, it has to end for them. I think they can't really fill that gap in oil. They can't just find some up. There is no other place that we'll be able to fill that production. Three months from now, Sam, where do you think this all be at? Where I hope we are is that we have found this off ramp that we keep talking about. And we have defused, we have shut down this conflict. And then if we're still focused on getting rid of the Iranian regime, that we now we've begun to do what we should have done from the beginning, which is pursue a long-term strategy to crush that regime and bring around regime change.

57:22And we do that methodically and slowly. I don't really want to think about the other way it goes because there's potential for massive downside here. I mean, the immediate, before we even get into World War III kind of possibilities, which are definitely there, there is the possibility that this just spirals out of control. And before you know it, you're looking at this critical region, right, from the standpoint of oil and natural gas production. And you just realize, well, it basically, we just wreck the place. It's like you went into a China shop and just knocked everything down. And you can't put it back together, right? I mean, whether the Iranian, so that even if the Iranian regime falls, doesn't fall, whatever, it doesn't matter. There's no oil or natural gas coming out of gutter or coming out of Kuwait or coming out of Saudi Arabia or coming out of Iran or coming out of Iraq. And that just,

58:25there's no way the United States just isolates itself from that. It's not like we're, that wrecks the world economy. That's my concern. It just, you wreck the world economy and now we're the implications of that are with us for years and they are catastrophic. That's my real fear. And that comes back to what you said earlier, the person cheering this on doesn't understand the consequences of this. And that's what I've tried to explain to people, like you think gas prices are expensive now, God only knows. And then the fallout, what's the domino effect from it? What's it going to cost you to buy food? What's it going to cost you to buy clothes? Are you going to be able to travel? The airline ticket you buy today for say July, they might not honor it by then. Yeah, jet fuel prices have already doubled. Right? And that we haven't seen anything yet compared to what the potential is. We're sort of dancing along the edge of a cliff.

59:27So what we need to do is not say, you know, let's just go, let's just keep charging ahead, let's just keep digging. We need to hit a pause button. We're not talking about giving into the itals. I'm just saying, okay, wait a second, man. Plan A did not work. Plan B can't be, let's put hundreds of thousands of Americans into Iran and blow the place up. Even bigger. Plan B doesn't have to be surrendering to the Iranians or letting them do whatever they'll do. Just take a step back and think this through like, all right? So what is the plan? Which obviously again, should have been done before we started to fight, but apparently was not. Where could people find you, Sam? The best place to find us is at Substack. So go to end of magazine, andmagazine.substack.com for even more depressing coverage of all of these of all of these

1:00:32developments. We didn't even get a chance to talk about movies. Maybe next time we'll start off. No, we didn't get a chance to do it. We didn't get a chance to do anything fun, man. I have to go have a drink myself after this. Well, the reality, I mean, this is where we're at now. And I know people, I began a lot of heat because I've been putting on my ex account, this is not a superhero movie because I hear people talking about this idea that these are good things behind the scenes that are occurring. I just don't, and I hope, I hate the word hope, but I do hope that things, I want the country to prevail or be successful, but I'm not seeing any evidence of that right now. Right. And as we used to always say in the field, hope is not a plan, man. If I ask if somebody's briefing an ops plan to me back in the day, getting ready to go out on the street, and I ask him a question and they say, well, I hope that doesn't happen, or it should be okay or anything that smells like that. My first response to is, okay, close the door and sit down. Let's, let's review your operational plan in more detail because there's no such thing

1:01:40as should and there's no such thing as we hope it's going to be okay. Not when you're talking about things like we're talking about, you just, you just don't operate that way. You don't say, we're going to do this and it's all going to work great. The first question is always, okay, and when it doesn't, what are you going to do next? And honestly, everything the Iranians have done or should not have been a surprise to anybody. If you follow the region and understand them, you should have known this in advance. Well, I took us off into more depressing territory as you were trying to close out. Sam is always thank you and I look forward to continuing to follow your work and more conversations ahead. All right, man. Thanks. Mike Drop