Trump Demands Iran’s ‘Unconditional Surrender’

0:00Welcome to Navara Live. I'm Michael Walker with free massive stories for you tonight and we'll begin the show with an interview we've seen at 2C and Iran analyst on the latest in the US and Israel's illegal war on Iran. After that I'll be joined by David Wearing, expert on the Middle East, to discuss the war's economic consequences and how this is all affecting the golf states and we close the show with an interview with Nate Sorrez. He's one of the offers of if anyone builds it everyone dies. That's the argument. An AI, Duma, very, very smart, very intelligent. I'm scarily convinced we'll be putting out a longer interview of him in the coming days but for this show I spoke to him about the Pentagon declaring an anthropic a supply chain risk. Before we begin I wanted to start the show with a thank you and we've had a hundred new paying supporters sign up this week. Often when there's a big news event in the news and people turn to Navara media

1:04that's when people realize how much you value what the team does so we really do appreciate that. Of course it is because in these big moments people sign up to support us that we can properly cover everything that is going on. It takes a big crew to make this show if you're looking for the whole organisation. So please do consider joining. If you're one of those new hundred people thank you so much. Welcome. If you've been a subscriber for Yonks thank you so much thank you for being on this journey with us. If you are an enjoyer of this show but you haven't yet made the plunge to become a financial supporter please do consider signing up at NavaraMedia.com forward slash support. Whatever you can afford is really really welcome. We're really really grateful for it. Donald Trump's war aims in Iran are continuously shifting. At times it sounds like he wants regime

2:11change then sometimes he wants a Venezuela option where he just gets to pick someone from the regime and say oh we can sign some kind of deal it's all a mess it changes from day to day hour to hour which would be entertaining if there weren't so many lives at stake. This afternoon we got another version of what the president wants from this illegal war so this is opposed to truth social he says there will be no deal with Iran except unconditional surrender in caps. After that and the selection of a great and acceptable leader we and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink of destruction making it economically bigger better and stronger than ever before. Iran will have a great future make Iran great again mega thank you for your attention to this matter president Donald J. Trump. So unconditional surrender and basically I will choose your next leader and is what he's saying. Iran's foreign

3:14minister Abbas Aragchi also says actually that he doesn't think a deal is on the cards. We are not asking for a ceasefire and we don't see any reason why we should negotiate with the U.S. but when we negotiated with them twice and every time they attacked us at the middle of negotiations so there is no request for a ceasefire by us and there is no request for the negotiation with the U.S. from us. You have never sent any messages to them. So what will happen if no negotiations do take place? Well for Israel at least state collapse appears to be the preference in a chilling quote to the financial times the leading Israeli expert on Iran summarized the Israeli government's war aims as follows. If we can have a coup great if we can have people on the streets great if we can have a civil war great Israel couldn't care less about the future or the stability of Iran. Now that's an analyst talking about what

4:18Israel's view is but sort of very senior Israeli analyst such as confirming case you sort of shouting at Danny Citrinovich I don't think he's saying that's his position that's what he understands to be the Israeli government's position. A CNN reporter who has entered Iran though despite all these demands for state collapse has found the scene surprisingly calm. Taking a quick break for a coffee along the way we've been driving for several hours there's a couple of things that we've noticed. Number one is that first of all all the shops are open all the shops are really well stock even with fresh things like for instance fruits and vegetables coffee obviously also available as well and then also the gas stations there's no long lines as gas stations fuel scenes readily available and you just don't see any sort of degree of panic anywhere. So he's not in in Iran yet but sort of he was surprised by how you know functioning it seemed as it stands and we'll to discuss the latest in the war on Iran I spoke early to

5:23Senatorsi he's a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and I began by asking and for his response his analysis of Donald Trump demanding Iran's unconditional surrender. Yeah this is typical I mean it's arguably deluded when faced with the realities of the battlefield and what's happening on the ground right now. Like Iran shows no signs of being anywhere close to an unconditional scenario situation you know they're hitting they're continuing to hit back in the region ballistic missiles drones a straight-of-war moves are still closed they've been hitting Israel with more advanced munitions it seems like a lot of these very expensive interceptors at the US and Israel already had very limited supply they already drained upwards of a third of them last summer in the June war that those are being spent if not largely spent and yesterday for the first time there was reports out of Israel that a lot of the sirens weren't going off at the right time people were the bombs were hitting the missiles were hitting without any kind of

6:27alarms and you know Iran is using these more advanced munitions that are seemingly I don't know if they're cluster but they're kind of detaching and there's like multiple warheads that are hitting that makes it even more difficult to intercept at the same time within the country there's no signs of you know regime cohesion falling apart so it's like totally deluded I would argue what Trump is saying and he said similar stuff throughout the course of the 12th day war talking about unconditional surrender and at the end he was screaming at Nathan Yahoo to accept the surrender. Let's um park I suppose the integrity of the regime and whether it's holding together for a moment and focus on this sort of question of military balance because on on Wednesday show we were discussing a press conference at Pete Hegsiff gave with the joint with the with this chair of the joint chief of staff Dan Kane where they were saying that Iran you know it started strong with all of these missiles and drones but actually they're down 86% so they're saying from

7:29from the weekend to Wednesday the number of rockets or missiles being fired from Iran had gone dramatically down and that suggests that they're running out and so the you know time will favor the Americans and the Israelis is essentially what he was saying I mean what's your interpretation of that. So right now you know one of the main battles and equations of this war is this equation of the number of missiles Iran is firing and the number of interceptors of the US and Israel and their Gulf allies have and you know how much Iran could hit these targets. Now from the get go you know as you said Iran was firing larger solvals of missiles and we already know a multiple you know US radar systems have been hit multiple fat missile interception systems which is the most advanced sophisticated US Miss ballistic missile interception system and Jordan has been hit according to CNN and the UAE has been hit so yes the US and Israel are going after the

8:33launchers of the ballistic missiles. Now these launchers are spread out across this big country that is Iran massive country that is Iran they're claiming 50% percent of launchers are however amount have been destroyed and they're hunting them down and these ballistic missiles do give off a signature on radar and other sensors when they're launched they all portable launchers for the most part although the other day there was this video I don't know how accurate it was but there was a video seemingly showing a missile being launched from an underground silo in Iran that could be a big development if accurate regardless Iran has so you know the US claim is that the reason the number of missile missiles launched has gone down is because they're just showing the interceptors that Iranians are saying and this has been in their military strategy and public documents very much telegraphed from Iranians that they are preparing for a long war of attrition and they're not they're going to it was always the plan to initially go high on the number of

9:34missile launches and then go lower but then keep them steady and I think so what's the key thing to to decide for here and to analyze here is not necessarily you know these claims from US and Israeli officials but how long is Ben Gurion airport going to be closed how long is our Israelis you know 10 million Israelis going to be in shelters 24-7 with all the economic costs at that entails because regardless of the reality of how many launchers are being hit that these missiles are still coming these missiles are still hitting the sirens are still going off there's a big censorship regime so it's very hard to say what is being hit what is not but clearly they're being hit and there was hits last night and the same situation is applying in the Persian Gulf region and over there over to be shorter ranges iran's drones which are very sophisticated which has been exporting to russia and other countries the shahid drone those it is in a much more stronger position to actually fire in perpetuity because a they're much cheaper b they can be launched from pretty much like a back of a pickup truck they don't leave any signatures

10:36and they can hit targets accurately with speed and with a heavy payload they can hit tankers they can hit critical infrastructure US bases in the region as we've been seeing they've been hitting a background co-aid UAE and Saudi Arabia so iran still has a lot of capability to hit back and continue hitting back in this war of attrition so that's to my point that Trump's talk of unconditional surrender much like he made that comment during the june war and later sawdice's fire right now it doesn't seem in line with the realities of this war do you think in a way he was responding to what the Iranian foreign minister Iraqi had said because the day before Trump you know made this tweet Iraqi had said to i think it was NBC one of the american networks we don't we don't want to deal we're not interested in a ceasefire deal anyway so is this is almost just Trump saying well we didn't want the deal first is it is it something almost a bit more childish than him actually sort of having a preference and it's more him trying to save face

11:38it very well could be i mean with Trump that often proves to be the case i mean the rhetoric consistently from Iranian officials did that they're not seeking a ceasefire at this stage they're not seeking negotiations at this stage now there's been reporting both suggesting that US officials were like for example as early as last sunday a day into this war israeli why net news i remember reported that through Italy the US was seeking a ceasefire there's been other reporting suggesting that the certain elements of iran have been uh seeking a ceasefire but at the leadership level from the senior officials and iran you know Ali lari johnny the leadership council security you know consistently the message is that they're not going for a ceasefire in that stage and that is actually in line with the broader strategy that iran has had for this war that they prepared for decades and this is also you know US assessments of iranian military strategy have also helped this then iran especially now it can't really afford to come out of this war without a ceasefire

12:41that is favorable to it in so far as preventing this scenario from repeating every six months or every year you know so they need something that can give them kind of security guarantees that can give them economic relief um short of that you know i think with this new leadership in iran i think one thing to watch out for is the nuclear weapons option which hominay the assassinated leader last week had a fauna against they never weaponized even though they could under his leadership they always kept the option open but they never did and what we know about iran's remaining nuclear capability the nearly 500 kilograms of highly enriched uranium most likely they slot many of these advanced centrifuges the i would assess that they still have the ability to covertly and a small poor facility to dash for the bomb so that's another thing to watch out for but i think this war until iran can get a more favorable diplomatic settlement that's going to prevent this from happening again they're most likely incentivized to continue raising the costs

13:42for the u.s so something i mean obviously there's many things that are worrying about this war but something that that worries me in terms of what the endgame might be is is what you've just said there and all the analysis i've read says the same thing which is that if if the iranian regime remains intact then it's going to have a massive interest in racing towards a nuclear weapon because i i'm not sure what security guarantees Donald Trump could give the iranians that they would believe but the flip side of that is that then it's quite possible that the u.s sees no choice but to destroy the iranian regime even if that means state collapse and so i mean whatever or not we see this as sort of israel tricking the united states to adopt their aim so if you say that israel always wanting state collapse they sort of said to trump you know what we could do we could just drop a few bombs and then get a better deal maybe they always knew that a better deal that that was in coherent but the outcome could be that israel has tricked the americans into a war where the only you know quote unquote good outcome for the americans is the complete destruction

14:49of iran which is you know a worrying conclusion if if that does sort of make sense as a description of the the balance of incentives at this point in time yeah israel would no doubt like that and you know it's kind of interest i would argue it's in trapped trump you know the israeli you know netanyahu has had his year many pro-Israel donors and advisors have had trump year trump's year we know he famously doesn't listen to his own military intelligence briefings but on this question of you know the u.s then choosing to escalate to go for like iran's destruction or implosion it's really a question mark how far the u.s can go and you know if it's will and the biggest deterrent to that is just the continued regional costs so right now we're already saying again the straight-of-form moose is closed a lot of the gulf some energy facilities have been targeted they are actually shutting down the cost of the global economy stock markets in the

15:50u.s and elsewhere the price of gasoline in europe and america these are all going up this this is going to create a political cost for trump and so if they want to go i mean towards regime collapse you know first of all like right now we're not seeing regime cohesion being affected by all accounts you know iran had this strategy that again was telegraphed and was you know more or less public of dispersing the military and political leadership and infrastructure in preparation for this war and for every leader having multiple successors and again just spread out across the country and for now you know all the key structures all the key institutions are there like right now you know there's this leadership committee the interim leadership committee they're in the process of selecting the next supreme leader there's a intense competition going on in that regard within the system and the Islamic Republic has mobilized its base and even beyond its base you know many iranians despite the deep-seated grievances and opposition

16:52that does exist amongst you know millions of iranians you know many do not obviously want their country to come under war and the more it hits it goes towards total collapse and fragmentation and you know invasions from kind of separatist groups and you know these things that have been reported that that's only going to i i would argue further unify iranian so the point is that this option of going for the total destruction of iran the there's many the US really has no good options i mean if they want to go and hit all of iran's critical oil and energy infrastructure iran still has the capability and most likely will continue for a long time to have the capability with these drones and these other things to really go and destroy a lot of this because right now they hit like one off strikes and it's more kind of the market itself adjusting to the realities of both to risky for the tankers to go across the straits you know the cattories and coities are themselves shutting down the energy stuff but if they you know that can we can be in a scenario where

17:53there's mutually assured there is a kind of mutually assured destruction vis-a-vis energy infrastructure in the Persian Gulf and then you know short of ground troops in this scenario where this is not iran 2003 where that regime had no base arguably you know the sonic republic for all its faults and all the shrinking legitimacy that has had it had its had in iran over the years in decades it still has a base and again there's this broader iranian nationalism that comes into play in this scenario and there's these are all just obstacles to the US being able to escalate further so i think you know Trump really wanting to quagmire and he has no good options i would argue something i'm finding very difficult as a non-expert you know someone sort of reading the coverage of this war is trying to ascertain who is closer to the truth when they talk about the strength or the brittleness of the iranian regime because there's lots of you know experts on iran many of them iranian who are giving very different accounts so there's a guy Ali Ansari

18:59who's sort of one of the the leading iran experts in Britain who who keeps going out on the media he's sort of a story and sort of saying how brittle this regime is you know people keep acting as if this is a really sort of strong competent regime actually it was a personalistic dictatorship and the whole thing could easily collapse and everyone will get egg on their face who said this was about idea and then there's lots of people on the other side saying actually this is a really sort of not necessarily competent obviously unpopular in many quarters but let's say a deep a regime with deep roots in the country what would your advice be to me as sort of how how should i try and ascertain which of those is more true because obviously there isn't that much access to iran at the moment i mean what do you think of that well we just have to look at the reality of the situation you know that just the facts on the ground so this narrative of iran being a paper tiger a weak you know regime on the brink of collapse it's been challenged not just by

19:59the proven resiliency of the government state also the population by and large for weathering this unprecedented economic warfare that's been wasted against them for decades but especially since 2018 they've withstood that a lot of covert action a lot of that we we know about publicly now through reporting and and then we also the june war that they withstood you know 12 day war that was launched with the intention again of spurring and uprising spurring regime change in that failed this war again in the midst of these narratives that are widespread that really don't i don't think they come as much from let's say the us intelligence agencies which probably you know argue we have a more accurate assessment of the situation in Iran but you see in the public sphere amongst many pro israel lobbying groups and analysts and israeli government which trump again those people have had as ear more and you know he's been looking he's been riding high on the Venezuelan operation on the the one the one offs rights against Iran last summer and he was led

21:02to believe that the he could with taking a hot culminating and with it in this kind of operation the regime was brittle and it would collapse so we're almost a week into this now again the facts are that it hasn't collapsed there's no sign of collapse there's no sign of an uprising which again it doesn't mean that the regime is popular but for a variety of factors including that it has a base including iranian nationalism including all the missteps in u.s. policy that has more you know even the very disaffected iranians more worried than anything um and it's hitting back and it has leverage in the Persian Gulf it has leverage with you know these attacks is doing in the region so i think you know a lot of iran policy and i'm involved in the iran policy debate in Washington dc and you know i've seen and i think in the uk it's similar there's a lot of the typical uh factors that are associated with bad policy making is very prevalent you know group think confirmation bias wish casting people kind of projecting what they want to be the reality

22:06when in reality the evidence has always been there in front of us you know many people have been saying it very you know as loudly as possible and but so i think you know most like the iraq war that was let you know we entered the iraq war also based off a lot of that analysis the iraqis were going to read us as liberators that this is going to transform the region etc etc all the media complicity and that at the time you know but it seems like we haven't learned a lot of the lessons because you know a couple decades later similar thing is happening but i think you know as the evidence reality becomes is just hating us all in the face i think it's also a wake-up call for you know we need a better forum policy establishments you know hope pipeline that is more reflective of reality to prevent our countries from the uk in america from getting in these black mires they're ultimately not in the strategic and any kind of rational definition of American strategic interests and certainly not good for the american people tat payers you know all the

23:12blood and treasure that's going to be wasted i'm still trying to work out where so the the question i'm going to ask about the reporting um familiar in the week about the cia arming the Kurds and obviously you know my initial reactions that's a terrible idea um a terrible idea which is trying to bring about civil war and state collapse in iran so sort of as a plan i don't find it so shocking especially for the israelis they won't state collapse in iran why the hell anyone would brief that to the media to me seems completely bizarre because the only people i can imagine benefiting from that are the Iranian government right because if you're trying to create some some unity among supporters of the regime and you know palovists or opponents of the regime if if you if there's a big story that the israelis in the americans are actively trying to ferment a civil war sort of led by an ethnic minority is that not exactly the kind of story that is going to shore up support for for the iranian government yeah this is why i'm saying like these leaks in and of themselves both from the pentagon last week right in the days leading up

24:17to this war we had reports of all the major u.s publications at the pentagon the chairman of the joint chiefs were concerned were actually the voices against this war were warning about munition shortages interceptor shortages and then we had now days into this war there's leaks of the new york times intelligence officials saying oh you know the policy the prospects of it uprising in iran was always remote or now you know we're seeing all these leaks talking about the u.s cia is trying to arm the courage so i think you know leaks generally serve a strategic purpose in the u.s kind of establishment media and in this case to me it suggests that a lot of these military and intelligence institutions in america are these they thought this was a bad idea and by leaking it they're not making it easier for trump they're making it as you said harder because yes when the the reality of the situation is that most iranians the vast majority of iranians are arguing are not going to like this idea of you know these groups in iran being

25:21armed to come in from western iran and if there's one thing that for better or for worse than unites a lot of iranians it's kind of ethnic minorities that are kind of militarized and they worry about you know separatism and all this stuff that's been a big concentrate in iran's modern history you know going from the monarchists res up half levy supporters red up half up actually last week warned separatists that then you know when this Kurdish coalition got formed before the war he warned them he said the territorial indriders of integrity is a red line and he explicitly called them separatists and these are the same groups that now are potentially going to be involved in this operation which i'm hearing from sources both in in iran amongst iranian Kurdish organizations and in the krg Kurdistan regional government in northern iran they're all against this actually trump is basically it i've been trying to force the Kurds to do this it's a doomed thing and the Kurds have obviously been used and abused many many times whether u.s. governments over the decades from the 70s when they were basically used by you know

26:21hendrick Kissinger and the shawan Saddam Hussein through the 80s and then in the early 90s in iraq where the Kurds were abandoned and you know many many of them were slaughtered after the gulf or to most recently in Syria where they were used and now al-shara these people have taken over that rojava and there's been so many massacres just in the past couple months so it's just very cynical the u.s. policy vis a vis you know this minority group in the middle east the Kurds i'm not sure if you saw the reporting from cnn so they've got a man now inside iran and he gave a report at a petrol station on the way to terran so not quite in terran by that point and he was sort of saying you know it seems to everything seems to be functioning quite well the shops are open i just got a coffee everyone's out doesn't seem like the states about to collapse and i i don't know what you're hearing you know from across the country from your sources about sort of how life is in iran um iran and american i was born there i grew up in the u.s. i still have a lot of family there we've managed to get in touch a few times with this past couple days uh it seems

27:23like a lot of my families are still in terran but you know people are terrified they're seeing these bombs fall they're worried but i've heard something similar that you know life is remarkably and a lot of iranians who are intermittently getting access to the internet it seems like today the internet was on somewhat a lot of people were online that's life despite all these things goes on and people you know there's i've been reading reports of people at coffee shops people at you know restaurants and and it's a very interesting situation but um so yeah i mean i think there's always been a big disparity between how the situation inside iran is portrayed by the dominance kind of western mainstream media and the reality of the situation on the ground and now it seems like that disparity is as big as ever but it's interesting that you know the cnn reporter is in there and he's giving these uh on the ground reports uh let's end on i mean a joke really which is donald trump saying he wants to say in who becomes the next supreme leader um of iran uh i just wanted to get you to sort

28:24of comment on that is this the sign of a man who understands how iran works not at all and it's just striking to me it's like i don't know who has his ear because this is something that's pissing off iranians from again the opposition the monarchy is who are very office you know upset nowadays because he's basically humiliated raza pahlevi and he's talking about working you know with the government to secure another supreme leader um and then you know you have this ethnic minority separatist kind of movements and then it's just total mess um and it's not gonna obviously he's not gonna have any say in this process i mean iranians you know the Islamic Republic as this unpopular regime i would argue what it is ultimately beholden to and kind of similar to trump it's always just double down on its base you know throughout the decades and so it's lost all you know all these other iranians but it's always double down on its base so now it's more than ever needs to double down on its base which is in the streets right now which is that you know

29:26these big friday prayers across the country today and so you know obviously any kind of leader that comes out of this that has the slightest association with trump america i think it will be political suicide for them like that system and again he can't do regime change i mean unless he sends hundreds of thousands of troops into iran um so yeah to me just i don't know who's advising him it's just he's been all over the place um i said we end on that question just one last one briefly which is um there is commentary about who the next supreme leader will be i mean should we be paying close attention to this or do you see this as a bit of a you know is this consequential no yeah it'll be very consequential just for the future direction of iran and the country and Islamic Republic so there's many contenders and there's been many contenders this secession has loomed large over iranian domestic politics for many years now given hominase advanced age he was almost 90 years old um and you know there's hardline candidates there's more moderate pragmatic people there are people who kind of have a certain reformist pedigree um who can arguably um be appealing to a broader

30:32segment of iranian society then just the kind of hardline conservative base but it seems to me this war has kind of empowered you know that those hardline candidates more so it's always been rumored that for example hominase son much that will hominase would be a potential successor in candidate i've always kind of thought that was not really possible i mean he's never had a public profile it was always more in the realm of conspiracy theory but i mean he was always a powerful person in his father's office but now there are these reports i mean we can't say for sure at this juncture that you know he is on the short list or he's one of the main contenders again there's also i'm sure a lot of this information um just to influence his process to destabilize this process because you know someone like him is very polarizing in iran but i think yeah whoever the next supreme reader is it's going to tell us a lot you know we could learn a lot about from the get go depending on who it is if it's one of these more moderate people what direction iran is going to go you know is it going to go is it going to be like a hardline irgc backed person is going to immediately go

31:35for the bomb if not already they're going for the bomb or is it going to be someone who's going to open up things in its various ways so it will be quite significant um before we go on to our next story we've got an event coming up it's no secret the world's billionaires using london as an investment account there are over 11,000 empty homes in west minster and it can be very hard to find out who owns them and so who are the mystery billionaires behind britains decline and should they be made to pay up um daliya gebril and kojo karam will be discussing that question and more and that's live at the earth theater on the 19th of march they'll be joined by the brilliant visor shahin investigative journalist peter gaygan who's had who's had a lot of impact at the moment on his democracy for sales sub stack he's one of the people who really uncovered the labor together scandal and also steffony probably a recovering private wealth lawyer turned activist and tickets available from dice and via the link below

32:48the global cost of the u.s. and israel's war of choice against iran is already being felt in the oil and gas markets and it could be about to get much worse the energy minister of katar has told the ft this today and so he said this will bring down the economies of the world if this war continues for a few weeks gdp grove around the world will be impacted everybody's energy price is going to go higher there will be shortages of some products and there will be a chain reaction of factories that cannot supply and katar is the world's second largest producer of liquid natural gas and it paused exports earlier this week after an Iranian strike against one of its plants and for the global oil market it's what happens at the strait of hummus and that is proving most impactful and so the strait of hummus is a sea passage and connecting the Persian Gulf to the open sea so it connects the oil fields of all the Gulf states and especially oil from Saudi Arabia and then gas from katar and 20% of the world's oil supply passes through it

33:55and this graphic from the telegraph shows traffic in the strait on the 27th of february on the left there and then on the right you can see traffic from on march the third so as you can see it's pretty much completely come to a standstill oil tankers which have attempted to cross the strait have been targeted by Iran you can see one there and now unsurprisingly the insurance for any tanker who wants to make the crossing has become prohibitively expensive following comments from the katar energy minister oil prices today hit almost $90 a barrel up from $65 at the end of february I'm now joined by David Wearing assistant professor in international relations at the University of Sussex and an expert in the relations between Britain and the Gulf states welcome to the show David great to have you back um talk to me about the strait of hall mues and lots of people over the last week will have been sort of reading about it finding out

34:56about it um as someone you know is written a book about the relationship of of Britain to those Gulf states and you know oil plays a big part in those stories um what should we know um about the strait of hall mues i mean it's a jugular vein of global capitalism think about it that way as your graphics show 20% of i think it's 20% of um all this shit by seat and goes for a strait of hall mues and i think it's a similar percentage of look for natural gas um but it's not just those things i mean that's enough right i mean that's a significant proportion of global energy supply and that's energy not just for transport but for um for industrial production but it's not just those things it's also all the derivatives that come from oil and syphetics petrochemicals plastics fertilizers um it's always really the lifeblood of the world economy still unfortunately um and gases significant energy source as well so i mean global capitalism

35:59doesn't function without this stuff for long and um if you have a big sort of disruption to this at a choke point like the strait of hall mues uh in terms of oil for example um that affects to provide the global price of oil which in turn sooner or later it will affect the global price of every effect it'll you know it'll take a few take a little while for it to work through the system but sooner or later it's going to affect everyone hence the um hence the comment from the citarian energy minister which i thought was really interesting because that's the citar is trying to raise the alarm basically that's that's them saying this is a major emergency and trying to put pressure on on the Americans ultimately but also trying to put pressure on on other actors in the in the global system including the Europeans for example trying to galvanize alarm so that that pressure can then come on the Americans to to stop this and and it's not alarmist it's really serious um you know the the global price of oil just before the wall started i think

37:01it was 72 percent then sorry 72 dollars and it has actually gone over 90 dollars at the end of today um so that's just in a week it's gone out by a significant percentage if it gets to 150 and stays there which it probably will um if this will continue then we're talking a major global economic um crisis really serious one when we're only just recovering from the 2022 um the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and what that did to global inflation and i mean this in a way is the Iranian strategy working right this this is what they've decided to do they've said is on america if they're going to go to war with us we are going to raise the cost for the whole world um you know especially american allies in the region but also everyone um with the hope that that will put pressure on the united states and israel to to hold off now i don't think israel are going to be particularly um you know amenable to arguments such as that but donald trump of course he he does care um about inflation or

38:06or the price of gas as they call it petrol going up um because that would that would affect his voter base for the midterm so this is sort of i suppose Iran using a choke point effectively yeah exactly i mean it's uh you know you can see the logic you can see the strategic logic of um of just i mean i'm the the whole response right the attacks on um on Gulf states the attacks on shipping um you know i don't want to i don't want to say it's the jittermer it's a tax on civilian targets are always wrong in my view but it's perfectly predictable um you can see why they would do it and listen i mean i've been following this stuff 20 25 years now and i mean in the mid 2000s people were saying if you if you waste a wall of a question against Iran if you try to topple regime as a near-concerters of the time wanted to do it was it was widely sort of understood that this would be the sort of Iranian response

39:08so when we heard donald trump say a day or two ago that one of the big surprises for him in the war was that the Iranians that carried out these attacks and tried to disrupt the Gulf economically you know i mean you have to wonder who's advising him and you have to wonder why people like here's dharma and and and mertz and um and macaw won't try to waste you along with him as well you could see this wall coming from space and you could see the you know it's widely understood but the response from the Iranians would be so this whole like global economic crisis that's now barreling towards a certain way of knots has been perfectly predictable easily easy to predict and you you have to wonder why more people weren't saying to donald trump before it happened not least care star you have you you can't do this and this is why it would be so disastrous but apparently no one wants to stand up to this guy or very few people do it because it will impact europe and asia more than the americans because they are now an american sorry

40:13they're an oil exporter so well it because oil is a global market it will make oil more expensive for consumers but some of their big companies will profit from this because oil prices gone up and they're they're an exporter i think with gas the europeans will be much more effective effective than the americans because we we're more relying on liquid natural gas than than america is because again they they produce so much of this stuff um it's a little true but remember that these effects work through in stages so it depends how long this wall goes on if it goes on for several weeks into into a couple of months like you you've already felt the direct effects and then the second order and third order effects will come with global capitalism is interconnected so people bloody americans who might think they're insulated will find soon enough that the ripple effects will hit them so um yeah maybe they're overconfident now but it shouldn't be and how pissed off are the golf states gonna be with this because i mean there's the kind of a deal isn't there with the golf states and and especially the americans which is the americans get to keep um you know their their military bases on their territory um you know i suppose until america

41:19became the the export of oil america would buy by their oil um and in return america was supposed to guarantee their security but now the americans have started a war which they're bearing the brunt off you know there aren't bombs falling in the united states of america the bombs are falling in in guitar of a rain so uh for them is this a betrayal yeah so would you agree i mean i've been reading some of the report and i've lost few days that you're not gonna get i suppose sort of outright falseable statements against trump and against net and y'all who in the same way as you've had from say petrous anchors is Spanish prime minister but from what i'm reading in the report and you'll get a lot of the sense that golf officials are briefing aggressively to journalists that they don't like this and you can well understand why i mean you know you do where you put it the deal was that the americans um you know

42:20provide a security umbrella to these golf states the security umbrella is external and internal and one of the reasons the golf states have been doing all this quote and quote modernization which is a problematic term but we'll look at that to one side the reason they've been trying to change their economies diversified economies is to help the regime stay in power keep the public happy diversify the economy liberalize socially if not politically to keep the people happy and help the regime stay in power now this is doing enormous damage to the golf's viability in terms of the economic model they've been trying to develop over the last 10-15 years becoming global hubs becoming willing to connect it attracting tourism stuff like that um the americans have undermined that they've immediately americans have undermined the golf monarch's economic survival strategy just as much as they've undermined their external security by starting this war you know

43:23you you could argue pretty convincingly that yeah of course it's the Iranians who are attacking the golf states but the Iranians are attacking them as a predictable consequence of this American and Israeli absolute question so it doesn't you know the the golf states would be quite justified in thinking this is a protector the americans it's potentially our biggest security for at the moment um and yeah you you can you can sense the demonstration the quote you you put up there from the Qatari energy management energy minister it is a sign of that but there's a lot more of that sort of thing in reporting from anonymous officials saying how concerned they are and your book from 2018 Anglo-Arabia and why golf wealth matters to Britain I mean it was specifically on the relationship between Britain and the golf state so I want to discuss that and I'm bringing up a map as well actually because I keep hearing from sort of UK government officials sort of the reason that this you know that we're now involved in this war even though

44:24we didn't start it is because we've got all of these interests in the region you see we've got a base in in cypress with 4,000 personnel and then much smaller bases I mean a man the UAE Qatar and then Bahrain 300 personnel in Bahrain um now from my understanding sort of a UK base in these regions is a bit like a little area cordoned off on American base because it's the American that's a real military power and we just sort of have have a little zone for ourselves um why do we have these military bases in the Middle East why do we need all of these yeah it's not a sense of of we needing the bases I mean you know David and Mark were everyone watching at higher end don't need military bases in the Gulf um but this is a hangover from from from the British sort of imperial period in the Gulf going up to the 70s when the Gulf states got their got their um got their independence um the British have been trying to cling onto that imperial world just as the British state has been trying to cling onto its power and influence in the world system when we talk about defense in quotes it's difficult

45:29sometimes to disaggregate what is the legitimate defense our defending British citizens in the Gulf that's the German defending the British homeland defending British legitimate interests that's all fine and what's actually just about the British state what it's a project to maintain power in the world system for for its own interests and in terms of like the interests of um of the constructions of capital and class interests a line of the British state and for for me having like major military bases in the Gulf is more about the latter than the former um yeah and I mean does having those bases mean that we do inevitably get brought into a war when this kind of thing happens I mean if if if there is a I mean there there has been some kind of drone attack on Cyprus hasn't there been if if Britain has personnel there and they get killed we suddenly at war with Iran I mean this is this is the danger when you when you're there and you can potentially

46:31be treated as a target um and then kind of credibility almost demands that you that you have a response you know political credibility at home because obviously Starmer has been getting a lot to take from the right over this attack on Cyprus in a British supposedly not being ready to to repel that or to respond to it um yeah so to the more you'll you'll present in a region like that and a volatile region like that and your quote-unquote interests are attacked then the more exposed you are to being dragged into a conflict and whether or not that's that's what you wanted um there's one of many reasons why we need to we need to really rethink British foreign relations we think British you know what what do we mean by defense we try to defend Britain as a country or we're trying to defend our allies in Europe or we're trying to project power on an intercontinental basis which is a hangover of empire and a function of our kind of collaboration of American empire it doesn't uh David Wearing thank you so much for joining me this evening always great to get

47:35you on the show okay in the shadow of power one of the richest cities on earth a man dies homeless and unseen Julie Ramesh died in an underpass on Westminster just meters away from the building for government Britain around him were empty homes dark locked untouched how can someone lose everything in the heart of so much wealth follow that question and it leads to a hidden world of money secrecy and power a system that decides who gets a home and who doesn't this is a kind of place for that relationship between dirty money and the city and the kind of dark money that goes into political machine kind of niche where could this lead where does it end what else can we become desensitized to I'm Kojo Karam writer and researcher since 2018 this story has

48:35haunted me death and Westminster's are four part series from the viral media produced by plan and be productions death in Westminster arrives on the 10th of March in the Navarra media podcast feed um we've been reporting for a while on the simmering route between the AI company Amphropic and the US government over the use of Claude now as we discussed before and they're at loggerheads because the Pentagon wanted unrestricted access to Claude so to use it for whatever they wanted however Amphropic wanted to limit the use of Claude for fully autonomous weaponry so they didn't want it used in weaponry with no human involvement and they didn't want Claude used for spying on American citizens now the Pentagon we already knew had already cut ties with Amphropic over the route and but on first day they went further so it was officially announced

49:38that Amphropic would be deemed a supply chain risk and what that means is it it black lists the company and so anyone that wants to work with the Pentagon has to show that they're not using Claude that they're not working with Amphropic um so Sam Altman and OpenAI have taken advantage of the situation I'm not very honorable people I'm swooping into sign their own deal with the Pentagon saying oh we don't really mind you use OpenAI use chat gbt for whatever you want you can have it will replace will will take um the income um the Amphropic have um foregone um and in the internal memo to Amphropic staff um Dario Amade so the CEO of Amphropic um seemed furious at both the American government and Sam Altman so he said this to all staff members the real reason the Department of War and the Trump administration do not like us is that we haven't donated to Trump while OpenAI and Greg Brockman who's one of the founders of OpenAI have donated a lot we haven't given dictator style praise to Trump while Sam Altman has we haven't support we have supported

50:38AI regulation which is against their agenda we've told the truth about a number of AI policy issues like job displacement and we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce safety theater for the benefit of employees and that's a reference to OpenAI who have tried to say oh we've also uh signed up to to some safety commitments even though they're not worth the paper they're written on um that memo was leaked on first day it was written a week before but after it was leaked Amade apologize for the tone and but he is still taking legal action against the Pentagon because he's saying they they've broken these contracts without good reason and so should we praise Amade for taking a stand for his beliefs and for AI safety is he one of the tech CEO good guys and well the historian Rookha Breggman is among those who think who thinks he does deserve credit so Rookha Breggman says my god finally after all the cowardly law firms universities media networks tech oligarchs bending the knee after all their disgusting sucking up to daddy Trump finally at CEO with a real backbone finally a CEO who shows real moral leadership

51:45Darro Amade thank you and so that's one position has been widely reflected i'm on social media actually because i mean this does seem like someone who is taking a risk um putting some principle before profit which is is only too rare um not everyone is convinced though i spoke to an expert earlier today um who doesn't think that Amade deserves too much praise at all um Nate Sorez is co-author of the book if anyone builds it everyone dies why superhuman AI would kill us all um he and aliased you'd kowski so the co-author of the book are two of the most prominent thinkers arguing that super intelligent AI could escape our control and then cause a truly apocalyptic outcome so as the book says kill us all um really really fascinating book and we're putting out a a longer interview with Nate in the coming days um for now though and i asked him about this this particular story and this was his verdict on and frockic and Dario Amade i think it's great that he is standing up for his principles there uh and i think that that takes a certain type of spine um and it's

52:47it's good to see some people having it you know you you uh you also got to see this in in the context where um you know and frock also has or used to have what they called uh responsible scaling policies where they made uh commitments to you know not release AI's that that might be horribly dangerous in certain ways and in the same week that this was happening you know we can talk about like who knows whether it was quincidence or who knows whether it was uh quietly released doing it during a week where they were showing their principles in other ways uh they sort of announced that they were negging a lot of those uh uh commitments and they're like you know it's and props to them for saying out loud we're negging on our commitments we are decommitting we no longer uh are committing to not releasing models we think are horribly dangerous but if you sort of look at the reasoning about like uh hey you know why are you backing off from those commitments they'll they they the reasoning is sort of like well no one else was doing these commitments and we were

53:49finding it really hard to figure out whether our models were horribly dangerous and we were finding that we had like a lot of internal pressure to uh like tell ourselves our models weren't dangerous when they might be and our answer to this is to uh remove the commitment that we're not going to release a hardly any responsible scaling commitment was to say the moment we think we have a model which we cannot sort of certify as safe we'll shut it down or not release it and they've said oh actually that threshold was a bit too hard yeah yeah and and it's the DOD stuff though I mean because your argument is if we make superintelligence you know we can't guess how it will kill us but it will find a way and does that mean that you're relatively unmoved about whether or not the Department of Defense has unrestricted access to to advanced AI because ultimately if the advanced AI can't kill us with fully autonomous drones um which it's been provided access to by the Pentagon it will find a different way there's is this sort of arranging deck chairs on the Titanic it feels pretty dexterous in the Titanic-ish to me uh you know even if it is given access to to

54:54you know uh Pentagon autonomous drones it might find another way to kill us because uh like the autonomous drones just probably aren't actually the most effective way to do so if you can invent your own technology right like again we're we're sort of talking about automating the thing that lets humans start with their bare hands and wind up with nukes uh you know from an AI's perspective uh you know a very very smart AI that can make lots of copies of self that can run very quickly that can run its own technology that's that's you know in in charge of a lot of robots you know building its own supply chain out probably it's just easier and faster if you know you know so A it might not even worry about killing the humans if it doesn't worry about us too much maybe it just like keeps on building automated factories that produce more robots that produce more factories that produce more robots and it those just spread through the the continents and humans just die underfoot and you know what it just defends itself if we if we sort of like send in humans with guns um you know maybe it doesn't try to actually kill us or maybe if it like worries about the nukes

55:56it tries to actually kill us but it's probably faster to do that with a virus uh once at the point where uh where it doesn't need us than it is to do it with guns that the pentagon happened to hand it so you know uh whether or not it really gets access to pentagon weaponry I think that has very little to do with whether the AI is is dangerous on a civilizational scale that's more about is it really smart yet can it escape the lab can it autonomously reproduce can it make smarter a eyes those are where the the sort of civilization threatening lines are well we can see with uh the DOD stuff is who has what kinds of principles um and you know unfortunately I think it's just a situation where having principles having good intent being willing to to stand up for what you think is right those aren't enough to make the AI happen to really care about what you wished it cared about because obviously I mean I suppose you said Dario Amade looks a lot

56:58better than Sam Altman at this moment because Dario Amade sort of said I've got these red lines I'm not moving them and Sam Altman comes in and says oh okay uh we'll provide you a model with no limits so I mean he is all relative isn't it and he looks braver um or all less sort of purely cynical sure but this is all this is all monkey politics around like who who gets to stand closest to the to the suicide bomb when they press the suicide bomb button right so you sure sure one person's a more moral person who uh or maybe one person is sort of like has more principles and the more principled person presses the kill everybody buttons like okay can we not press the kill everybody button and I suppose I think what Dario Amade should I suppose actually so question I have do you think Dario Amade has a and I'm focusing on him because he seems like the one who most plausibly does have some principles right and Sam Altman I think does seem like potentially just a cynical social path you know I don't know the guy but that's sort of an impression I have formed um Dario Amade seems like a more reasonable person do you think he has an intellectual

58:00disagreement with you you know I think the people who start these companies are selected for thinking they're going to be able to keep control of uh very very powerful AIs um I've I've had a number of debates on this issue with Dario uh it over the years um I'm not I'm not entirely sure whether like how you classify the disagreement you know Dario these days is less skilled than his company's chatbot at summarizing the arguments for why alignment is difficult sometimes he'll write things were like he's like well have will have it under control because of this that or the other and you know you don't need to listen to these concerns because of this or that reason and um you can just go ask Claude his company's chatbot like what might somebody worried about AI alignment say to this and it'll have you know quite a bit better understanding of the difficulties

59:07than Dario writes is this because like Dario has a has a cleanly staked out academic position where he's got like strong counter arguments to the arguments I don't really think so I think it's more like um he doesn't really want to think about it he he's the sort of person who doesn't feel like you need to think about it he you know you're you're you're looking at a selection effect of like the sort of person who can who thinks it's okay the sort of person who buy their own admonition says I think there's 25% chance this goes horribly wrong and thinks it's okay for themselves personally to roll those dice a lot of people don't start a company like that you're looking at a sort of person who does and I mean I've been give I think Dario Amade if if we take your argument sort of seriously which I do I mean we're going to get onto this at the moment I have I think a political problem here is that you know someone like myself I don't feel

1:00:11like I have the expertise or understanding to say I agree or disagree with you all I feel confident saying is I take your argument seriously but we'll part of that for one moment if if your argument is true I actually think that Dario Amade probably of anyone I mean Sam Hartman as well but he's not going to do it has a chance to save the world because I think if he said look I've got hundreds of billions of dollars invested in this company which I own I am worth billions but I think the danger is so great that I am willing to shut my company down I know that my shareholders are going to take me to court because I've you know this is against my judiciary duty I will presume be breaking some contracts because they've signed all these deals with with Nvidia or various companies to buy their GPUs and now they're not going to do that anymore you know he would be he would be making a huge sacrifice by just saying I'm shutting down my company tomorrow but it would be really difficult to dismiss him no one would be able to say oh it's just because you know he's just jealous of Sam Hartman he's because he is running what many people now think

1:01:14to be the leading AI company um he's got billions invested if he were to say I'm throwing it all away I really think that would change the political dial I don't absolutely would say oh okay well I'm for picks out now let's let um Demis Ashabis and Sam Hartman you know battle it out I think people would stand up and say oh my god we need to do something so I think you know if we're to believe your argument he is potentially the most powerful person who has ever lived um I mean I think so a I absolutely I think he has that power uh and this is the sort of thing uh that I recommend people do uh when when some of these live leaders uh still ask questions of me which happens sometimes although more rarely than you might hope um and you know often I even say without throwing away those billions you can and and I think should be begging the world to shut everybody down including you that's sort of like an obvious consequence of uh saying you think there's this

1:02:18huge chance of catastrophe and the fact that they're not doing that I think puts a limit on on like even that even the thing that wouldn't cause this huge splash even the thing that wouldn't cause them to give up a billion dollars they're not even they're not even doing what I consider the basics I think this this puts a bound on how deep those principles actually run um and then you know in in in terms of does that mean you know they that these people are the most powerful people because they could shut their labs down and cause the political conversation you know the way that this would wind up saving us is the rest of the world seeing that as an alarm and putting in place a treaty of we're just not rushing towards super intelligent AI nobody understands this we're nowhere near ready um you would still need the world to react properly you would still need world leaders around the world to say uh we are stopping the suicide race out of fear for our lives in some sense that is uh the the power that saves the world and the power that I think

1:03:21these company executives have is the power to alert the world which I absolutely think they should be using more that was Nate sorrows speaking to me earlier today do look out for a much longer version of that interview we go through all the arguments in his book um I'm gonna have to say I think it is one of the biggest if not the biggest issues facing the world right now is there a technology that's gonna kill us all it doesn't get bigger than that um for now though uh for tonight show my thank yous to senior to see to David wearing and to you guys for watching um we'll keep covering um the story of the war on Iran next week um do come back on Monday at 6 p.m. for now um have a good weekend you've been watching nivari media good night this broadcast is brought to you by nivari media go to nivari media dot com slash support