Iran Gov Broke & Everyone Is Missing the Signs

In this explosive Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins dissect Iran’s baffling wartime decisions in 2026 — from missile strikes on closest allies like Qatar (hitting the massive Ras Laffan LNG facility) to attacks on UAE, Saudi Arabia, and others — while seemingly ignoring Israel and the US in many cases.

What happens when a regime’s “mosaic defense” strategy fractures into regional warlords and fiefdoms vying for power? The Collins argue Iran’s centralized control has collapsed, turning IRGC factions into competing hardliners who bomb expensive targets for headlines and internal legitimacy rather than coherent geopolitics.

They cover:

* Israel’s strike on the shared South Pars gas field and Iran’s bizarre retaliation against Qatar

* The emerging Cold War between Saudi Arabia (centralized states) and UAE (maritime empire/proxies)

* Why this chaos benefits US interests long-term (isolating Iran, hurting China/Europe more via Strait of Hormuz issues)

* Assassination plots against Trump, nuclear brinkmanship, and why nation-building isn’t the goal

* Low-casualty US strategy using vintage B-52s to clear old munitions

A wild ride through Middle East power vacuums, proxy wars, and why Iran’s self-sabotage might be the biggest geopolitical gift the US never expected.Based Camp - What was Iran thinking when bombing its neighbors_

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] What this suggests to me is that the people who are at the regional heads of Iran’s mosaic defense strategy have entirely regionalized their control already.

Simone Collins: Oh, wow. Oh, that would be interesting. So it’s, it’s like, it. It’s descending into fiefdoms.

Malcolm Collins: But what’s important is to these individuals who are playing this game, and you can see this in the president’s reaction here, they actually don’t particularly care about America or Israel or Iran’s long-term geopolitical future.

Simone Collins: Sure. Why would they? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They are vying to be the top dog of the warlords. Mm-hmm.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we are going to be doing a, a series of updates on what’s happening with Iran right now.

[00:01:00] And this situation is absolutely crazy in how it’s setting up the future geopolitics of the Middle East. Iran has been making decisions which appear completely baffling from an outside perspective, which is what we’re going to start with to try to understand why they’re making the decisions they’re making.

But we’re also seeing the set of a new Cold War throughout the Middle East, between Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Oh,

Simone Collins: what? Wow. I haven’t heard anything about this.

Malcolm Collins: Yes, it is very, and, and when I say a Cold War, I mean there’s, they’re already in active killing conflicts in about four or five theaters. The Saudi Arabia and the Yoi right now actively.

Simone Collins: So are we talking about a, a cold war along the lines of nuclear threat? Kind of Cold war or just cold war of like frenemies being

Malcolm Collins: No, we don’t attack each other directly, but we arm troops on opposite sides of conflicts throughout the region

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: To attempt to [00:02:00] create public governments that serve us.

Simone Collins: Wow.

Malcolm Collins: So like a, to get like between each other, they are, I’d say, almost friendly in the way they are acting, and yet people are dying every day in mass in service of this conflict.

Simone Collins: Okay. Frenemies Cold War. Gotcha.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. A, a very odd Cold War, but a Cold War nonetheless. Mm-hmm. And given the way that it’s allowed, it’s also sort of a safer cold work that’s unlikely to escalate as much, but

Simone Collins: that’s nice.

I

Malcolm Collins: wanna, I wanna, I wanna start on the weird behavior of Iran. So if people go back to our episode on Venezuela mm-hmm. My take at the time was I did not think attempting regime change in Iran in the same way we did in Venezuela at least, was a good idea, or really conflict directly in Iran was a good idea.

I said I thought it was incredibly risky. I have since taken the position since this war started and, and this is still where I am today. That. Okay. [00:03:00] I would not have taken this risk even knowing what it appears Trump knew when he went into this conflict.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: However, knowing what has happened since the beginning of the conflict, it was very obviously the right move.

Oh. And the large reason that it turned into very obviously the right move has been bizarre behavior by Iran itself since the conflict started that I wouldn’t have predicted, but maybe I should have.

Simone Collins: Really, because it seems so inane, like them attacking. Their neighbors,

Malcolm Collins: not their neighbor, just their neighbors.

So the attack that was for me, just the most baffling. I mean, they’ve attacked almost every neighboring country at this point except Iraq.

Oh no, they did attack Iraq. They’ve attacked pretty much everyone around them. And when I say everyone one of the most devastating attacks that they did recently was on Qatar.

Now, for people who don’t know [00:04:00] Qatar and Iran are like, Qatar is about Iran’s closest ally.

The children of Gaza are suffering. They have no food or medical supply. But you can help. Please open your heart and make a donation by clicking in the link below.

Fun fact, Israel did find and kill one of these real guys while he was in Qatar in Doha.

[00:05:00]

حار. people of the world.

Malcolm Collins: Al Jazeera is always d of anyone who Iran is funding. That’s just like Al Jazeera’s main thing. For people who don’t know Al Jazeera is Qatari disinformation campaign. Right? Like that’s broadly what it’s known for, but a lot of people treat it seriously as a source of news and stuff like this.

And a lot of like educated liberals I guess are like, I don’t know, they bite the bullet on that because it’s anti-America. anti-Israel

Simone Collins: can confirm. Yeah. They’re like Al Jazeera quality reporting. Well, and to be fair. A lot of, a lot of propaganda news outlets. Do. They’re, they’re only successful as propaganda news outlets.

If they also put out good information, SEO like you, you, you often don’t get good sustainable, like historically speaking, SEO if you don’t provide websites with good content on them like [00:06:00] that is how to sustainably win the game. And this is why you have publications like the Epic Times and Al Jazeera producing good journalism often.

Yeah. ‘cause they won’t able to get people to eat their vegetables if you, they don’t serve actually good food too.

Malcolm Collins: Sometimes the best reporting that you’re going to get is from a bias source when their personal bias isn’t relevant to that story.

Simone Collins: Yes, absolutely.

Malcolm Collins: So you can get great reporting from the Epic Times when it’s not about China.

You can get great reporting from Al Jazeera when it doesn’t have to do with the Middle East.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But if you wanna get an idea of like what I’m talking about when I’m talking about like an attitude flip and Qatar was a real thorn in our side that they were willing to work alongside Iran as much as they were and promote them as much as they were within the region.

Here’s a recent op-ed that was published in, jazeera for an example of, of, of the shift that we’re seeing,

Simone Collins: okay,

Malcolm Collins: the US Israel strategy against Iran is working. Here’s why. Every aspect of Iran’s ability to project regional power is being [00:07:00] successfully degraded. I’m just skipping in a bit here.

But this narrative is wrong, not because the costs are imaginary, but because the critics are measuring the wrong things. They are categorizing the price of the campaign while . Ignoring the strategic ledger. When you look at what actually happened to Iran’s principle instruments of power, its ballistic missiles are null.

It’s nuclear infrastructure, it’s air defenses,, it’s Navy and Proxy Commander architecture. . This picture is not one of us failure. It is one of systematic phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades. I write this from Doha, where Iranian missiles have triggered alerts for residents to take shelter and Qatar Airways has started operating evacuation flights.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So, so like this is, this is where we are in terms of the feeling in a place like Qatar. All right. So, to understand what happened with Qatar, just, just a bit of context here. And this was also a huge d [00:08:00] move on Israel’s part, but. Turned out beneficial. So I don’t know what to think of it.

So Israel ends up bombing the South Pars gas field.

Now there have been conflicting reports on whether this attack was given the go ahead by the United States. But when there are conflicting reports on whether or not Israel effed us over my general stances, Israel probably effed us over. Yeah, my take is, what may have happened is Israel asked Washington for permission to do this and didn’t flag the significance of what they were about to do.

And then are you just having fun with the debate?

Simone Collins: Sorry.

Malcolm Collins: And then Washington decided to give the, give the, okay. Without going through the channels, they would have if they had known how big a deal this is.

Speaker: As a note, what some people are saying, which plausibly could be true, is that Washington and Israel, , Washington did know that this was going to happen, but they’re playing good cop, bad cop with [00:09:00] Washington, pretending that it didn’t know this was going to happen in order to play, , good cop. , The reason why I don’t believe this is, if this was the case, I would’ve expected Washington to have its messaging aligned with Israel beforehand instead of.

Some of the time saying, yes, we allowed this some of the time angrily saying Israel will never do something like this again.

Malcolm Collins: The reason it’s such a big deal is because this natural gas station, or, or this. So, okay.

Little context. This

Simone Collins: is one of the, the major supplies of energy to Iran. And my understanding now is, is already even before this conflict, they had shifted to burning this really, like either unrefined or like this drags of, of oil, I can’t remember what it’s called, but it causes a lot of air pollution.

It’s really not good for the environment or people. And now they’re gonna be burning even more of it. Like they’re just in dire straits now and it’s making things even worse.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So there’s a giant national gas field under Qatar that goes under the, the, the Gulf [00:10:00] there and half of it is in Iran.

And so Iran and Qatar both you mine it for natural gas. Qatar sells that natural gas around the world, and it’s the major source of Qatari income. It’s also why Qatar is on good terms with Iran, because they have to be, because they share the main thing that makes guitar wealthy. Iran does not export this much.

They take it and use it to power their infrastructure.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like they need it to survive

Malcolm Collins: like 90% of the PowerPoint that Iran are running off of this. Mm-hmm. If this goes down, Iran doesn’t have. Power. Most of Iran doesn’t have power.

Simone Collins: Well, and it just went down, presumably, right? Not, it’s not good

Malcolm Collins: anymore.

No, no, no. It was a limited strike. It was more like we could do something really bad. Oh. But it was, it was very limited. And then Iran, in response to this they decided to do a bombing of Qatar’s Ross Lahan, the world’s largest liquified natural gas LNG production concept.

Simone Collins: Wait, so, okay.

Israel attacked sort of a shared [00:11:00] resource of Qatar and Iran.

Malcolm Collins: Iran.

Simone Collins: Iran bombs. Qatar,

Malcolm Collins: yes. Why?

Simone Collins: What? This just seems so inane. The response. Okay. Yeah. Like, so, so don’t you, don’t you wanna like, retaliate against the person who did the thing that makes you mad? Not the person who also got hurt.

Malcolm Collins: I mentioned this in the, in the last episode on this, and some people are just so dumb and cued on this entire war where they’re like, no, China is fine after all this.

And I’m like, no, China is not fine. They’re like, Iran is letting Chinese ships through. And I’m like, no. Iran said that they would think about letting Chinese ships through, but functionally only a small, I think it’s like two 5% of the previous traffic of Chinese ships have been able to get through. And I made this point to point out that when you cut off the straight of vermouth, like what the US is functionally trying to get open is a straight, that doesn’t supply the US at all.

It supplies our geopolitical [00:12:00] rivals China Europe and east Asia as well. Which is why you had the hilarious instance of the Japanese lady who I, who I love, you know, coming to talk with Trump. And she goes, why didn’t you warn us? He goes, why didn’t you warn us about Pearl Harbor? And I was like, Trump, you’re nut job.

But, but what’s important to note is that US has actually been approaching this war with something of our hands not tied behind our back. But when my kids get into fights they really understand how much power to use when hitting their siblings based on like the siblings relative age to them.

And we’re sort of in a conflict like that with Iran. We’re not taking out cog Island, right? We’re not taking out this infrastructure. And people can ask. Why did we not do this? Why did Israel do it? What was the plan here? I’ll get to that in a second, but I, I want to explain this particular incident.

So Israel goes ahead and does this likely, without Washington fully understanding the implications of what Israel was [00:13:00] doing why did Israel do it? From an Israel perspective Israel’s goals in our goals in the war are not exactly the same. We are okay with just seeing a heavily diminished Iran.

Israel wants to keep the war going for as long as it can and aggressively as it can now that it finally has its shot at Iran. And it can use us to make that shot like amplify that shot on its behalf. So it did the thing where, you know, we are, I can say play fighting was Iran, and then it comes in and does an actual sucker punch and Trump had to go.

Israel will do no more like in all caps on su, so so’s attacks on this to do the, like in the middle of the fight. Hey, that’s not cool, man. Like, don’t do that. Right? Like, we’re not attacking infrastructure. But it turned out for the best because it led to the Iranian serious damage of this Qatari facility, which pushed Qatar, [00:14:00] one of the groups that was still trying to stay a little neutral in how it was dealing with Iran further to the other side.

Okay. The question of why is Iran doing this?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Like this, this makes Israel’s actions seem a little bit less dickish, but that doesn’t change the fact that. That, like why would, how could they have predicted that Iran would do that? Right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. So, the important thing to note at the beginning of all of this is you could say maybe this is a grand strategy on Iran, that you are not seeing Malcolm.

And a lot of the news is covering it this way. It’s, we’re gonna hurt the global economy until the United States capitulate. Which is a very stupid strategy because since this war started, the US dollar has gone up, the euro has gone down. Yes, we’ve taken an economic hit, but things will eventually go back to normal.

So it’s just a great time to invest right now. Yeah. Right. Like it’s not actually doing sustained damage to anything of the United States interest, but it’s turning a [00:15:00] lot of powers against Iran that would otherwise be their allies. Like China, right? Like if the US just decides to stop this war right now and Iran decides it’s gonna keep the straight of her moose shut down.

Mm-hmm. This becomes an existential problem for Qatar, the UAE, China and Saudi Arabia. And they would have to get militarily involved. Like, like they, they actually don’t have a choice. If it turned out the United States was just gonna be like, okay, hands off, we don’t care anymore. We don’t have to get involved.

It’s not existential for us. It’s unpleasant economically but it is much more e unpleasant economically for our geopolitical rivals.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So this idea that this isn’t in the heads of Washington right now especially with the talks with China coming up and those being, you know, delayed for Trump to, to finish the war there is nothing China wants more than an end to this war.

Right. And an end. That likely even favors the US given where things are now. [00:16:00] Because if Iran can still control the straight of Haus, this is against China’s best interest. But anyway so you can say, okay. Intelligent strategy from the top. From what we’ve seen in Iran, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Iranian President, Mossad, Pia, yeah. Everyone knows, I can’t pronounce other names said on Iranian state TV after the initial attack started happening he said on my own behalf and on behalf of Iran that he wanted to apologize to Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, et cetera.

I dunno if you even need an et cetera there. And he issued an apology for the attacks. Specifically, he blamed it on the chaos created by the killings of top Iranian commanders in leaders by the US Israeli strikes saying, quote, our armed forces fired at will because their commanders were absent and they did whatever was necessary, right?

So this. Clearly was not ordered from the top. [00:17:00] Right. It was so not ordered from the top that, okay, so suppose you had like two factions in the top, in the board meetings or whatever, was the president and the other people controlling things in Iran right now. And the, like so the new Ayatollah isn’t brain dead, which it appears he probably is brain dead. Or a coma or severely injured or something because it’s weird that he hasn’t shown his face yet and like he easily could do a prerecorded videos. The old one did that all the time.

Right. You know? So it appears he might be incapacitated and he might have been elected explicitly because he was incapacitated, which would allow other people to grab power illegitimately.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you can call it the Biden strategy.

Malcolm Collins: The Biden strategy. Yes. So anyway, if this guy and the other people who are supposed to be running Iran knew that there was a disagreement about why these missiles were being sent at these various infrastructure projects and stuff like that.

Mm-hmm. He wouldn’t have flippantly gone on state TV and just been like, I apologize, this isn’t gonna happen [00:18:00] again. It’s just, you know, it’s disorganized. People are acting on their own. He would be like because he’d know that there was some other faction and he’d explain, you know, oh, this is the discussion we’re having.

Or he wouldn’t say anything at all until he. Argued his point. This is not the, the words of somebody who appears to be aware that this is somebody’s else’s intentional plan. But then what happened he, he said he would try to solve sync through diplomacy, but was in hours the same day after sharp criticism and backlash from Iranian hardliners, hardline clerics, lawmakers, the IRGC officials and conservative media.

He backed up hard. He said he posts up in a following statement and repeated it on state tv claiming Iran had actually never attacked, quote, friendly, or neighboring countries at all.

Simone Collins: Oh. Huh.

Malcolm Collins: Right. So what’s [00:19:00] causing this? Like this is, this is weird. Like that’s a, that’s a weird thing to do. It almost sounds like he was afraid for his life.

Simone Collins: The weird pile is getting so big

Malcolm Collins: right here is my understanding of what seems to be happening on the ground and Iran leading to the weird decisions that we’re seeing.

Simone Collins: Okay. You, you mean like your, your hypothesis as to what is actually going on your conjecture. Yes. Okay. Let’s hear it.

Malcolm Collins: It’s a, it, it, it has to do with governance theory, which we wrote a Wall Street bestseller on

Simone Collins: Darn.

Malcolm Collins: So I ran is uh, ide the governance if you wanna read it. By the way, it actually ended up affecting a lot of like crypto governance strategies and stuff like that, which is really cool.

Which had us on the board of like major crypto things for a while, like some of the largest crypto donation funds anyway. Anyway, so Iran has been practicing something called mosaic defense. Mosaic defense is a form of defense that is meant to be incredibly robust to decapitation [00:20:00] so that you can cut out the leadership and the individual factions can still operate.

Mm-hmm. Now we have another episode where we point out that normally Muslim countries do not do things like this. And the reason why Muslim countries do not do things like this is they typically have coups when they do do things like this. Because Muslims are just way more likely to coup than Protestants.

And in the middle you have groups like Catholics and we go into that episode, why this is but we don’t need to go into that here. It’s just rarely done in Muslim countries, but it hugely decentralized the power was in the military. Okay. Now. What that has created, and keep in mind how little connection the president must have had to the people who are actually making the shots to think.

That the shoot they were shooting at whatever they, they were just firing at will at anything. Mm-hmm. That he thought that that’s what was happening. That he thought that that was [00:21:00] the, on the ground what’s happening, or at least a plausible excuse for what’s happening. Right. This means that he had not communicated through or had the ability to communicate down to the soldier level or to any decision maker’s level at the level of, of these firings in other countries.

Right. What this suggests to me is that the people who are at the regional heads of Iran’s mosaic defense strategy have entirely regionalized their control already.

Simone Collins: Oh, wow. Oh, that would be interesting. So it’s, it’s like, it. It’s descending into fiefdoms.

Malcolm Collins: It’s descending into, yeah. Essentially warlords.

Simone Collins: Whoa.

Malcolm Collins: But the warlords may not have control over territory. It may be over parts of the IRGC or something like that. But what’s important is to these individuals who are playing this game, and you [00:22:00] can see this in the president’s reaction here, they actually don’t particularly care about America or Israel or Iran’s long-term geopolitical future.

Simone Collins: Sure. Why would they? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They are vying to be the top dog of the warlords. Mm-hmm. To control what’s left of Iran after this war is over.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And to have as much influence as they can while the war is happening. And so now the question is, okay, if that’s what’s happening, then. How do you, you know, you’re, you’re one of these guys, how do you signal your legitimacy and authority to the other warlords?

Because it’s not likely going to be one person. It’s going to be a coalition that is going to gain power and be the defacto head if it’s, if the president isn’t the head right now, who, how do we get this new [00:23:00] organic defacto head? Mm-hmm. It’s politicking What? How do you get points within this politicking that’s going on right now?

You need to be as hard line as possible, as crazy as possible, as aggressive as possible against anyone who has ever slighted Iran in any way. Hit what you can with what you have. So, it, it’s been pointed out that since the start of the conflict, countries like the UAE and Qatar have been hit with many more missiles.

Oh, I think orders of magnitudes more in some cases than Israel. How does this make sense from a Iranian tactical perspective or long-term alliance perspective, right? Like, if Israel and Saudi, I mean, if the UAE and Saudi Arabia are beginning to have conflict now, wouldn’t Iran want to be friendly with the UAE.

UAE has a giant Iranian population in it. Right? Like they, they have the potential to be quite friendly. Why are they so aggressive against CUAE, [00:24:00] right? Well, it’s because there are more expensive things that their missiles can actually hit in the UAE than in Israel. Mm-hmm. They’re basically about grabbing news headlines and blowing up expensive things like it’s a video game to win control of the IRGC from the other hard liners within the IRGC.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: That is what I suspect is happening right now. And if you assume that, if you assume, and I think that we can assume that from these quotes from the president if you assume that there actually isn’t any centralized control left in Iran, and remember Israel, there was what was his name? The one guy who is still sort of in charge of things and then. Yes. Ali Laies this guy died March 16th, 17. And he was killed in his Israeli airstrikes along with his son and one of his deputies. And he was [00:25:00] a, a long time power broker and one of the few left was in the regime.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Although, you know, we also had other really important figures that were killed, like Gal Mare Soleimani came command of the Baal paramilitary force, the region’s main internal repression tool.

This was the one that, you know, was murdering people in the streets. The 35,000 protestors. By the way, we’re still nowhere close to 35 ca southern casualties in the war. Actually I wanna go into a separate thing ‘cause I had a fan reach out to me asking me some stuff that I want to address for fans who are.

Just sort of skeptical of all the news that they hear on this. Okay. He’s like, how do we even know that Iran did try to attempt to assassinate Trump? How do we know that this isn’t a post hawk thing made up during the Trump administration, you know, like to justify this war? Like, okay, the war started, we need to make something up.

The core problem with that hypothesis is one, there were two potential assassination attempts and the one that we have more information on most of the information we [00:26:00] have on it was released during the Biden administration when Trump was running against Biden. That does that, that that was against the Biden administration’s interest in releasing in the first place.

Right. And just does not at all look like a, a, a a a a, like a false flag attack or something like that made up after the fact. This happened ages ago. Mm-hmm. And again, when the people are like, you know, you shouldn’t strike back or you should, you’re, you’re, you’re playing to Israel’s hand when you assassinate their leader because they tried to assassinate your leader.

You know, just take it when they try to assassinate your leader if acting with strengths and not like a cuck is going to potentially help Israel’s interest. And I’m like that. I mean that’s, that’s really cucked behavior, man to, to consider so much that this could help the Jews. Therefore we shouldn’t do it.

I see that as just wild. So I from my position, like if I’m ever president and somebody attempts to [00:27:00] have me assassinated, I’m like, okay, I’m probably gonna do something like this, but I wanna go more into this assassination type. I think a lot of people on the right, I dunno, they forgot about it or it wasn’t reported to them.

Simone Collins: I, I didn’t, I don’t think I knew about it. I knew about. The one in Butler I knew about the guy with the at outside the golf course. I didn’t know about the other ones. That, that was only news to me after you brought it up after this conflict started.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, Asif Merchant, he was a 46-year-old Pakistani man who had recently spent a long period of time in Iran receiving training in meetings from handlers entered the United States in 2024.

He attempted to recruit Hitman to assassinate US politicians or government officials explicitly including Trump, although he was also open to targeting Biden and Nikki Haley, according to some accounts. Plan involved document theft, staging protests at rallies and killings. He was arrested July 12th, 2024, all in the Biden administration in Houston as he tried to escape the country.

So, like, this [00:28:00] isn’t like a, a vague thing. He was convicted March 6th, 2026 in Brooklyn Federal Court on a murder to hire attempt. And then the second plot Farhad Shaka Shaka 51 living in Iran was tasked by IRGC officials September, 2024, to surveil and kill Trump. Then a candidate and later president-elect on October 7th, 2024, they specifically ordered him to drop other targets and delivered an assassination plan and deliver an assassination plan within seven days.

I love that. Like he’s a white collar worker. Hey, this is taking too long, this Trump assassination thing. Drop all of

Simone Collins: the target. Didn’t get this report on my desk Monday.

Malcolm Collins: I wanna report Monday next week.

Simone Collins: Yeah. It’s how it, it’s so weirdly bureaucratic. What on earth.

Malcolm Collins: He,

Simone Collins: I thought, you know, in the movies, just like, do it, get it done.

But like, these guys are like annoying. Just see the plan, make sure point. He, he recorded

Malcolm Collins: two US based criminals. Okay. Cari Riviera, AKA pop, 49 of Brooklyn Pop and Donan Lool 36 of [00:29:00] Staten Island who met in prison to help Shakira who remains at large in Iran. In multiple recorded FBI interviews after, oh, by the way, the, the way the FBI got the first time is one of the people he recruited to attempt to kill Trump with an FBI informant.

Like it’s super, the evidence is super big on, on guy number one. So for this one how do we know Shaka directly admitted the IRGC directives, including prioritizing Trump in multiple recorded FBI interviews after initial contact. So they were able to contact him and he admitted this came directly from the Iranian mil.

Okay. I just think it’s important to, to know this, and he was like, how do we actually know that Iran is funding terrorism that is targeting the United States and that that one really got me. That’s just like, that’s Iran’s entire geopolitical strategy for the past decade. This isn’t like a rumor mill.

This is like arguing that China has never said they want to take Taiwan or something like that, right? Mm-hmm. No, it’s true that many of the [00:30:00] groups, you know, whether it’s the, the Huis or Hamas or whatever, also want to kill Israel and that they consider killing Israel higher in their priority lists.

So it is better for Israel than the United States that this has happened. Mm-hmm. But it does not mean that it isn’t also good for the United States. You know, Al-Qaeda had a lot of targets

Other than the United States, but we still had nine 11, right? Like, you just leave groups around to grow and molder that want to kill you for long enough and let them be funded to the tune of I pointed out in the last episode, it’s literally, I think around an average of 3 billion or 4 billion a year from Iran.

Simone Collins: Oh goodness.

Malcolm Collins: Eventually you’re going to get a very big attack. You know, we’re not always gonna be able to stop it as we did in these instances. And I just think to, to be like, oh, I don’t, I don’t care. It actually reminds me. Of my friend. I’ve mentioned this story a few times, but it’s always so visceral for me.

It stuck with me. It was a girlfriend of mines when I was growing up. Grandfather who survived the Holocaust, and he [00:31:00] describes running around like to different houses in his Jewish neighborhood with the book the, the book that Hitler had released, mine Kaf. And he is like, guys, you need to read this.

He says he wants to kill us, like, we need to get out of the country. And they basically treated him like he was crazy and began to blacklist him from things. And he ended up having to break into his girlfriend’s house at night and basically kidnap her and run away. And you know, obviously.

He did well, I, you know, hung out with his granddaughter. I hope she does well. She’s a really cool person.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: But you know, he’s the guy running around, like there’s a group out there that says they wanna kill us. Right. Like, why is everybody acting like this isn’t a big deal? I feel a bit like the people out there who keep saying, yeah, Iran said death to America all the time, but they didn’t really want to kill us.

Right. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: They kind of remind me of those cut Jews who all ended up getting wiped out when they didn’t listen to that guy. Right. It’s like they’re saying it. And the big thing that, that got [00:32:00] Trump. It’s, it’s been reported that in the negotiations to try to get them to give up their nukes. They mentioned in no uncertain terms that they already had the uranium for 11 nukes and could have them made in weeks.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: When Iran was questioned about this what Iran said is they said, well, we didn’t threaten them, but we did tell them how many nukes we could make was the uranium we have right now. You know, like, so Iran admitted that that’s the situation they were in.

Simone Collins: Well, even I’ve, I’ve heard progressive people covering this saying, basically Iran has always been very clear that they don’t have nukes.

They just want all the materials to be able to make them is optionality.

Speaker 12: We are two months away from enriching weapons grade uranium to be used for peaceful [00:33:00] purposes.

Simone Collins: And, and that was as if like a, because of course that’s super reasonable for someone who says, death to America and death to Israel. Yeah, like that. We should be okay with that.

Like,

Simone Collins: I just don’t understand, you know, like, like, oh, they’re never gonna bake the cake.

I mean, they just wanna have all the specialized ingredients to make the cake, and they can make it in like 30 minutes, but they’re not gonna bake it.

Malcolm Collins: I, no, I think a, a better analogy is you catch your wife with husband killing poison.

Simone Collins: Oh.

Malcolm Collins: And you’re like, why do you have husband killing poison? And she goes, I never meant to use the husband killing poison.

I just wanted it as like deterrents. You know, I

Simone Collins: just wanna have it because I hate you.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I mean, later that day you hear her say her prayers at. Please God, kill my husband. Please kill my husband. I want to kill my husband.

[00:34:00]

Malcolm Collins: And then you ask her about that and you go, it’s just like my religion. It’s like a weird regional clerk of, you know, my way of doing things.

And then you believe that, and you’re not the mega cook just because you might accidentally help the Jews by you know, telling her, Hey you know, we need to do something about the husband killing poison lady. Right? But the reason why I’ve become, you know, as I said pro, is because Iran’s reaction to all of this has been to target their former allies, both economically.

And militarily. Right? Which is huge for us because it means that even if we stop bombing right now, right? And I ran Keith to straight of her moose clothes. Yes, we’ll deal with some economic hit, but the bigger economic hit is gonna be China. And then China’s gonna be begging us to start the campaign again so that they can get the straight up her moose open.

And they literally would be like, China would be like on its knees. [00:35:00] Hey, United States let, let’s do a, a joint operation or something. I’m, I’m sure we can make it work now. Europe would be lickety split with those boats down there. And I, I agree with what Trump has said in regards to this, that European leaders, and they did by the way was the first bombing of Iran, was the second said, yeah, go ahead.

Bomb Iran, like this isn’t all of our best interest. But then they refused to send us support and he is like, what’s the point of NATO if it doesn’t mean defense for the United States? Because apparently that’s what it means. When they, they could say, oh, well you guys started this war, whatever, whatever we are now in, in terms of getting the straight of free moves open, that that is about Europe and China.

Okay. Like defending their economic interests. If we just pulled out, the really interesting geopolitical thing that’s going to happen is. If, if Iran does not, if they’re like, we wanna continue to make this hurt from everyone, which they might given this mosaic leadership, they might have yes, we’ll [00:36:00] have a depression but the depression will be focused in Europe and Asia and those countries will be sort of in a position forced to get the United States back in on this and back working on this.

So if I was in trust position, I might even pull out just to force that position because that would be a very interesting geopolitical one. But even if we don’t have that, even if we do get this all over with in Iran, not only is one of our largest enemies geopolitically at all off the stage.

But the, the new Cold War in the Middle East between the UE and Saudi Arabia, which I’ll get to in a second is between two people who are fairly friendly with and are unlikely to, you know, go death to America over this. Although Saudi Arabia does fund a lot of terrorist related groups that do eventually target the United States.

Mm-hmm. So if we’re on one side of that one, we’re probably closer to the UAE side.

Simone Collins: I mean,

Malcolm Collins: imagine if next to Saudi Arabia. But the, the, the point [00:37:00] here, because Saudi Arabia would suck at defending themselves, they’ve shown themselves to be completely militarily incompetent. But that is a whole, and somebody actually did try to attack Saudi Arabia.

They would fall much quicker than Iran for it has to do with how the Royal Family projects power. I don’t

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: that’s, that’s another video that I don’t need to go into. Okay. But right now we’re friendly with Saudi Arabia and, and Saudi Arabia. One of the reasons they keep friendly tides with us is because they are aware of that.

Mm-hmm. Although, you know, keep in mind, nine 11 was fundamentally Saudi Arabia’s fault. At the end of the day. That was from the groups that they fund in the same way that I ran friends groups that want to attack the United States. But if Trump doesn’t do the pullout thing, how else can he realistically end this?

He needs some leverage other than I will stop bombing. The leverage that everyone’s thinking about right now is Car Island.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s what I figured, which is why I assumed that by this point we would’ve had troops basically [00:38:00] holding it, American troops holding it hostage, essentially.

Functionally.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So Car Island is a three by four aisle Mile Island. Mm-hmm.

That makes up approximately 90% of the country’s oil exports. This is because it has deep water shipping lanes next to it and nowhere else in, in that region of Iran has that. And so Iran doesn’t really have any other way to get out oil from its country.

If we destroyed Kag Island which I do not think we should do. Any government that came into power after this was in Iran would be just in poverty for decades. Especially given Iran’s already critical condition in regards to water and infrastructure. It would slit the throat of Iran and lead to a massive refugee crisis in Europe which would be bad.

Now I will note it wouldn’t be as bad as some other refugee crises. [00:39:00] Oh God, how do I say this?

So a lot of the,

Simone Collins: listen, no, I’ll put it this way. I’ll put it this way. And, and I think anyone who’s watching this is well aware of the fact that Iranians are awesome. If you know Iranians in America, if you’re an American, yep. You probably like them. I think what really changed people’s views on Iranians was, oh God, that chef

Speaker 3: , we hung out with a, a bunch of young people who collect, uh. Uh, basically an informal car club of collectors of, of American muscle cars. It feels very much like Southern California or Barcelona and Tehran at times. And a very hopeful place filled with yearning where people every day, particularly women, I think, are in very small ways testing the limits of what is permissible.

Um, trying to define in fits and starts. Who they want to be as a country. What is appropriate? What is okay today that may not be [00:40:00] okay tomorrow? How? Uh, it’s a very interesting thing to see. Did you feel resentment toward using zero American? Zero? Yeah. Zero.

Simone Collins: Who died, who’s, who was really curmudgeonly did an episode in Iran and they were just basically like Americans, like backyard, barbecue, cool based Americans and

Malcolm Collins: yeah.

Simone Collins: Iranians. What changed? Pers changed everyone’s view on Iranians. They were like, oh my God, these are based amazing people.

And. Honestly, like you should be so lucky to have them.

Malcolm Collins: No. So the point, the point is, is Iranians are, are, are Persians. They’re not Arabs. Okay. Most of the problematic Islamic populations and immigration waves that Europe has had to deal with

Simone Collins: mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Are Arabs and Arabic culture, which is very different from Persians and Persian culture.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And traditionally speaking Iranian migrants especially within the United States, I don’t know if it’s been as much in Europe, have been a very positive [00:41:00] immigrant population. Yeah. I, I don’t wanna say like. Model immigrant because they, they definitely have some, you know, aesthetic deficiencies.

As

Simone Collins: for your opinion

Malcolm Collins: as South Park would, would point out

Speaker 15: Boldly stood out in front of their bar to stop the Persians from entering.

Speaker 16: We are coming in redecorating the hell you’re, you can take your blue carpet and go Kurt Rock and shove up your holes. Alright, come on, let stop of us.

Simone Collins: Anthony Bourdain, oh God, that’s where we

Malcolm Collins: have the, the song that Trump is secretly Iranian. Because he’s got the aesthetics of a, of an Iranian No, it’s,

Simone Collins: it’s, it’s, it’s a look that some people, like it was Anthony Bourdain that really turned a lot of people onto Iranians,

Malcolm Collins: Saudi.

But no, no, Trump really is like, if you have had Iranian friends or you know, Trump is Persian. Just

Simone Collins: it’s fines,

Malcolm Collins: it’s fine.

Simone Collins: Perian,

Malcolm Collins: Trump. Comes off culturally, way more Persian than he does waspy.

Simone Collins: [00:42:00] The first Persian president.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And we have our song, the First Persian president because I mean, even the way he does decoration, where like I, if you go to a waspy person’s house, like one of the signs that you always see, it’s like the random picture.

It’s of houses and boats and boats, horses, boat. And he’s got no pictures of No, actually, like, look at Trump’s stuff. It’s, it’s geometric pet. It’s like no horses, no boats, no houses, no every,

Simone Collins: and I feel like there’s, there’s almost like little like, a children’s book game. Like spot the new gold item in the Oval Office.

Every time there’s a new press conference there, can you spot the difference? Where’s the new gold item?

Malcolm Collins: I like gold,

Speaker 9: I love gold. The look of it, the taste of it,

Malcolm Collins: but Yeah. But the, the point being is you shouldn’t expect the same problems from an Iranian refugee crisis that you have with other Islamic refugee crises. It’s not that there wouldn’t be any issues but there wouldn’t be [00:43:00] as bad as say like a, a Pakistani refugee crisis or something like that.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So, it’s a side note over there. So. A lot of people have said so, so if you, if you did that, that’s, that’s what would be the result of that. Okay. And if you cut off their access to the north whatever gas pipeline you’d have, again, a refugee crisis, which, you know, we want to prevent.

And we also want whatever comes next to be able to economically get itself off the ground. You know, our goal is to defang them. It is not to economically cripple them forever and ever and ever. Now, Trump has said that he may bomb car island again just for funsies. Literally he said, just for fun. I may bomb it again.

I cannot believe we have a president who said that in a press conference.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Sort of trying to show that it’s open as a, as a potentiality, but what everyone’s thinking now is boots on the ground doesn’t make sense. If we controlled Cog Island, what the president would likely do is just be like, no, we’ll let you to continue to use it [00:44:00] under US military occupation.

Exactly as you always have. You just need to plain nice, right? You just need to keep the straight open. You need to do everything like that. We won’t even charge a tariff, but we’ll just set up a, a permanent military base here. That would give us a lot of negotiating power, assuming Iran is still actually governed by a single central authority.

Simone Collins: Hmm, however, but you believe that that is just not the case anymore.

Malcolm Collins: I believe that’s not the case anymore. And if Iran is not governed by a central authority anymore, they don’t particularly care that you’ve done this. They might even shoot their own infrastructur