[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign. [00:00:05] Speaker B: You're listening to casual talk radio where common sense is still the norm whether you're a new or long time listener. We appreciate you joining us today. Visit [email protected] and now here's your host. Ler. [00:00:21] Speaker C: I think I mentioned on a previous episode that I do not speak politics hardly at all. I, I try to avoid doing so. And the long and short of it is that when you have political unrest, and by political unrest, I don't just mean like war, I mean in general, there's just a, even domestic kind of a sense of uncertainty around political and obviously that's a common thing now. We have that now. And when that happened and I noticed that I try to avoid those topics, but it occurred to me that I might be doing a disservice to those listening. By the way, if you're, if you're new, welcome. And I can't avoid all of them and I have to speak to some of them best I can because it occurred to me that some of the information is difficult to kind of wrap your head around because there's so much of it hitting you at once. This is the flaw, I think, of social media. There's so much information, if it comes information overload. Some people waste time, and I'm stressing the words waste time, embedding themselves into taking a side, as in they want to understand who they agree with quickly so they can pick a side. I don't have a side in any of this other than the side of America. You know, I don't choose anyone who's outside of that boundary. So the information I'll talk about simply is the facts of the matter with respect to a high level understanding of and there's a lot more to it than what I'm going to talk about around how we got here with the Iran situation. So if you've been avoiding social media, kudos to you. But if you've been avoiding social media, if you heard Donald Trump for the longest time, not even recent, but for the longest time he has been anti war. He has been critical of past presidents talking about war, sending troops to war. He is adamantly said that he does not want troops having to go to wars, especially those that do not directly impact the United States. Part of the flaw with that stance, it's a clear stance that he had. But part of the flaw with that stance is the idea that when you have international agreements, so you have partnered up with other nations to come to some accord of the way things are going to go, you are now involving yourself in those affairs. And part of the flaw, you might have heard the term nationalist. Nationalist is a, essentially a slur, but it basically says that you only care about your nation, you only care about your borders, your own situation. The counter to those critics is if your house is not clean and your house is not in order, you are not empowered or effective at trying to help other people. To quote the great Jay Z, I can't help the poor if I'm one of them. So there's a group of people who believe, and I happen to be one of them, that you cannot put yourself out to benefit other people. And that's what we've done for many years. This did not start with Trump. It didn't start with Obama. It didn't start with Biden. It started long ago. This then has now hit a fever pitch in the modern era as fallout to decisions that were designed to unravel what happened before. At a point where it was kind of too late, you basically put yourself in a stuck position, and that's what we're dealing with. So this all started a very long time ago. But we're going to focus very specifically on 2002. Just prior to 2002, nations came together and they were trying to make sure that nobody was even thinking of starting up a new war prior then, further back, nations came together wanting to corral or calm down the creation and proliferation of nuclear weapons. There's actually a stockpile up in Washington State. It's, it's. I believe it's north of what they call the Tri Cities. And it's buried. It's like it's literally just buried out there and they don't know what to do to clean it all up. There's all of these stockpiles of, whether they're older weapons or nuclear waste or whatever it is, stockpiles all over the world. All of this together and these conversations with the nations created, all these agreements and treaties and agencies and oversights designed to basically tell the world we're all agreeing that this whole nuclear business is not good and could have catastrophic results if we don't calm it down. Now, Russia at one point had partially agreed to it. North Korea at one point had partially agreed to it. But most of these countries didn't fully commit. It really was just the bigger powers. Fast forward back to the 2002. Then it was determined, or at least alleged, that Iran was doing secret nuclear research underground. And this was in breach of what's referred to as the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty, which most Everybody agreed to, which is, okay, it's not realistic to get rid of nuclear technology, because if you didn't know, nuclear technology is actually used in some medicines, nuclear technologies used in agriculture, nuclear technology is still used for energy production in certain places, but it all goes to the purity of the uranium. When we talk about used, the purity is what governs, okay, how pure is it? And then application of said. So this treaty basically said you can use it for anything that has nothing to do with war or military applications. You cannot use it for development of nuclear weapons. When this is detected, then people were identifying that Iran might be ramping up to some sort of military action. This is again 2002. So over time, so you can go back in your history books over time, this is kind of a boiling pot situation that's about to spill over. Fast forward a little bit and I'll come back to it, but fast forward a little bit. Nations come together and create a plan that says, okay, we've got a new deal that we're trying to do, because we're still trying to wrap this up and we see this as a problem. We got to calm this down. All this negativity is not going to work. And we cannot go back to a world of nuclear nukes, right? Dropped on people, bombs over Baghdad, right? 2018, United States pulls out of the existing deal. Iran is still ramping up what they're doing. And it's detected that Iran had in our ample supply a 60% enriched purity stock of uranium, enough to make weapons if they continue doing it. Now we get into Donald Trump and how he's involved in this in 2010, there allegedly the nations came, talk to Iran, said, you're about to get a whole bunch of sanctions because you, you straight up violated what we talked about. It stopped Iran from selling oil on the international scale. So this is 2010 now. A hundred billion dollars of foreign assets frozen. Iran trashes it's its economy trashes, it goes to, its inflation skyrockets. It's a bad situation. And the reason that all these sanctions were applied with that severity was to force them to stop what they were doing. So then after this fallout, Iran comes back to the table with the big powers, including Russia, and said, okay, this new agreement, we're willing to do what you're saying on this. Let's go ahead and do it. The new agreement took it a step further. It allowed this agency to basically oversee and monitor and make sure that this doesn't happen again, that they're not in violation again, and they're not running secrets. So essentially it's a trust issue. We don't trust Iran to keep its word is what it is. That agreement, this new agreement that they had committed to it. Again, as I described you, it's 2010, okay, it was set to last to 2025. Guess what, we're in 2025. These restrictions then would expire now when Donald Trump's first term, 45, okay. He Remember, he kept talking about all these deals. It's a bad deal, it's terrible deal. A, because certain deals involved more monetary investment from the United States than the others. B, and this one is included. He's talking about agreements where, okay, it sounded good at the time, but it doesn't last. It's going to expire. So it's a bad deal and we should negotiate a new deal. Now here we are in 2025 and you hear rhetoric around Donald Trump and he's imposing sanctions again and he's trying to essentially force Iran to sign a new agreement. That's what got us here. What got us here is way back we saw Iran was kind of stepping out of line. We get them somewhat back in line, it doesn't work. They step out of line again, we punish them to the end. After punishing them, they come back to the table. We cite a new agreement, but the agreement was, was mysteriously non permanent. It was designed to be temporary. It was not designed to have permanent impact on them. So think about it. Why would we create an agreement that is not designed to be permanent when the whole reason that we went to bat in the first place is we didn't trust them? Because that's what happened at first. We didn't trust what they were doing. So that's why we did. The first agreement is because we don't trust you. And we were proven correct, which spawned the second agreement. And the second agreement basically put the boot on their neck, to use the term, to make sure they stay in line. And it was reasonably effective to a point. Now we would learn later that over in Iran, they're then saying, okay, hey, look, we'll talk to you guys us, we'll talk to you. But there will be no military, there will be no forcing of anything. Trump is basically saying, no, you're going to do what we tell you to do or we're going to do what we did before because we're not going to let you sign another bad deal and get away with it. Again, fast forward. And now we have this, the senators in Congress and everybody saying, some are saying this ain't our war. Some are saying we got to do something and they're divided. So now you don't really have a straight up answer. People start speculating, well, what would happen if Iran kept going forward? Well, the truth is that United States can intervene if they need to. Israel does not have enough to intervene. And so Israel is at some risk if Iran runs unchecked. So now that I've given you everything there and I challenge you to go and validate anything I just said, I challenge you to, I want you to do that. I want you to test me everything I just said, test it on what you can use. Please don't use Wikipedia because it's not a valid source. Do your own research, use encyclopedias, use whatever to get valid, justified sources to verify what I just said. Once you do that, you come back and you say, okay, I see the same thing you saw. Now I kind of understand what got us here. Okay, what's the fallout? Well, Trump put out a thing on his true social talking about think it was Tehran. He's like, okay, you need to get out of here. Everybody's in kind of panic mode because they don't know what this means because Israel now is at risk. Iran allegedly is ramping up their stuff, what they're doing. And now we're even outside of this chatter around, you know, Israelites, etc, it's more, it's higher, it's to the point of potentially another war spinning up just like what happened with Russia and Ukraine. This then destabilizes the markets because people are sketchy and nervous around and of course the oil lockdowns and price of things on top of inflation and everything else that's hitting. In summary, and the reason I wanted to talk it out is I don't have an opinion. I don't take a side other than I don't take a side. But it's important that you reconcile that all of these different external factors, they have just as much of an impact on your day to day than when people swear that Donald Trump's tariffs are really hurting you. Multiple things hurt you. Not just tariffs, tariffs will hurt you. But to a small degree, that's called microeconomics. The macro level impacts are when there's a war situation, when there's some sort of supply line cutoff, when there's some sort of assassination. These are macro level events that have macro repercussions. Down to you and the theory, which is yet unproven, but the theory is that this new event that's happening with Iran, I say New, but obviously been going for a while. But the recent fire flare up with Iran and potentially Israel on top of what's still happening with Russia and Ukraine on top of what's still happening with China, China on top of, you know, rocket man out in North Korea doing his thing, everything is starting to fall apart that Donald Trump said he was going to keep in check. It's not his fault that it's falling apart, but it's on his watch. This might cause him to take drastic measures to try to get it back under control, which might further destabilize the market's recovery. Now, you have to consider, if you're at that age where you're looking at your portfolio of whatever it is you have invested, you're seeing red. Consider that a lot of that red is directly correlated to what you're seeing now. As in, your whole life gets affected when these things happen. So you can be a nationalist in statement, but the truth is that you're still impacted by those events, whether you want to be or not. It is perfectly fair, though, to not like the fact that we're involved in the first place. Once again, this is before 2002. This is a long time brewing, and it wasn't thought out a lot of the time. There were people in charge in Iran at the time who might have been amenable to a certain arrangement and leadership shifts where the new leadership is no longer respectful and they're not willing to work with these major players to keep things in check and then things unravel. Which is why it's critically important for our leadership to constantly keep their finger on the pulse to make sure that as these things happen and what has traditionally been the case is they'll try to influence those countries to stay in line. By influence, I'm talking about, you see in other countries, people walking around with skinny pants and all that garbage that came from out here, that. That's not the right answer either. We don't, I say, we don't want to homogenize all these different countries to the way that we do things. I was looking the other day, and this is a side note, and you may laugh, but I was looking the other day. For whatever reason, United States women rushed to this narrative of middle parts in their hair. And it drives me nuts as somebody who did female hair once upon a time. Nobody wants to style their hair differently than a middle part. Nobody wants to do bangs anymore. Nobody wants to really do ponytails or pigtails. I understand the pigtails, but even an older somewhat, you know, Mid age or some odd can make pigtails look decent. If it's done right. You can make bangs look good. If it's done right, you can do sweep hairstyles and make it look good. You can do bobs and make it look good. None of that. None of it. Everybody is middle part such that it looks like somebody took an axe to the top of their head. And it drives me nuts. It also looks lazy. It looks like you just got up out of bed, brushed your hair and walked out, and that's probably what they did. No curls, no wraps, like, nothing. No buns, nothing. Meanwhile, in other countries, I still see the buns and I see bobs and I see pigtails, ponies. I see that they take time to style their hair. I still see bangs, which is good. And bangs can look good if they're done right. I'm not talking the bang that looks like a, you know, a curtain. I'm talking, you know, the occasional strand of hair where you still can see the forehead. It's just not the dominant focus. And the top of your head doesn't look like a hatchet cut. I'm talking where they're styling. That's another of these influence that I refer to situations in the United States. There's things that are happening where we have tried to influence other countries, and for certain of these trends, they've been embraced and other trends they have not. And I like to see that we're not rushing to some of that garbage, and rather we're focusing more on and this is where the nationalism come in. We're not trying to impose our stuff on other countries. We allow them to have their own unique nuances. When you talk about something like Iran and doing what they're doing, a lot of what they're ending up doing is very similar to what North Korea was doing at one point. A lot of North Korea's situation then, they're isolated. They've never been largely at the table for some of this stuff that we're talking about. And yet, despite that, it seems like relations with North Korea were at one point better than those with Iran. Well, how can that be? Because things change. Leadership change, people change, policies changed, appetite change, tolerances change. And that's where we are. And now we have to kind of deal with it. Hopefully that adds a little bit of clarity. I challenge you to go and verify everything I said, but hopefully that adds a little bit of clarity into the chaos that is. And hopefully everything kind of settles down. But in the short term, I do expect disruption in the financial space from macroeconomical level that there are things that they're going to have an impact whether we want them to or not.