BVN’s March 5, 2026 episode exposes how Iran’s Strait of Hormuz blockade—triggered by U.S.-led strikes—has slashed global gas output by 20%, crippling Qatar’s LNG and aluminum production while forcing Maersk to halt Gulf shipping. With fertilizer costs surging 54% and food inflation hitting 12–20% in Europe, Iran’s asymmetric warfare targets petrodollar dependencies, destabilizing China (30% gas imports), India (50%), and Taiwan (25%). Meanwhile, Trump’s war risks nuclear escalation as Gulf elites flee via $350K jets while civilians face starvation, and AI disruption accelerates—China’s open-source LLMs like Quentin 3.5 outpace U.S. models, threatening trillions in job losses as corporations replace white-collar roles with error-free automation. The episode frames the conflict as a self-inflicted Western collapse, where energy wars and AI-driven unemployment converge to reshape global power. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to Bright Videos News for Thursday, March 5th, 2026.
I'm Mike Adams.
Thank you for joining me today.
Now, we've got a lot of red alert breaking news here today, plus an interview coming up.
First of all, we have Qatar Energy, which is the company in Qatar that handles the natural gas.
They just declared force majeure, which means they cannot deliver their gas and the supply disruption is absolute at this point.
So the world has just been cut off from at least 20%, maybe more of the global gas production.
And because, of course, of Trump's war on Iran and then Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz and also striking some of the gas production facilities in Qatar.
Now, China relies on Qatar for about 30% of its gas imports.
India has an even larger reliance, something like 50%.
Taiwan, 25% reliance on Qatar.
Japan is in trouble as well.
South Korea is in trouble.
Their markets are crashing as a result of this.
European countries also, Spain, France, the UK, Germany, they one way or another are reliant on natural gas through the Strait of Hormuz.
So this is a huge deal.
And I've got a couple of reports today that talk about the implications of this.
And effectively, this is Iran carrying out what's called asymmetric global economic warfare against the West by shutting down the energy infrastructure where these Gulf nations sell energy in dollars, i.e. the petrodollar, as it's called, which backstops the entire U.S. debt market.
And if you're paying attention, you can begin to see where this is going.
If these energy exports are blocked for an extended period of time, this begins to unravel the financial system of the West.
That is economic warfare.
And that's what, I mean, that's the game of 5D chess that Iran is actually playing here right now.
On top of that, aluminum production is beginning to shut down.
There's a company in Qatar called Qatalum that has shut down its supply.
This is not a huge percentage of global aluminum production.
Maybe it's only 1%.
But the Gulf nations themselves, or what's called the GCC, the Gulf Cooperation Council, as a whole, they supply about 9% of the global aluminum supply.
So, or at least that's what's being reported.
So, as there are more energy disruptions, there will be more aluminum disruptions.
Both of those will have an impact around the entire world, especially in terms of industry.
So, that's happening as well.
Let's see, Maersk, the second largest shipping company in the world, has now also suspended all cargo bookings for the Gulf state nations, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Iraq.
Middle East Censorship Concerns00:04:08
And by the way, this is a good time to review a map of the Middle East because the map really drives this narrative.
Importantly, if you don't understand the map, right, if you don't understand the Strait of Hormuz and where all these countries sit relative to the Strait of Hormuz, then you'll never know why things are happening.
Also, look at where the 5th Fleet Headquarters has been, which is now mostly destroyed, by the way.
Yeah.
But you need to understand the geography of this situation.
Also, there are, well, one video in particular that's been circulating from RT that appears to depict very devastating ballistic missiles from Iran impacting Tel Aviv.
Now, I have no way to confirm whether this video is real.
It looks real, but AI is pretty good these days.
However, the fact that RT is posting this and they have not withdrawn it tells me something that they've checked it out.
So we're going to show it to you, but you can decide whether you think it's real or not.
I want you to pay attention to just the first few seconds of this video because there's a huge, huge, fast incoming missile that happens in the first two seconds, okay?
So don't miss it.
And again, this is supposed to be an attack on Tel Aviv, and you can see the anti-air systems firing away but not being effective.
So check this out.
All right, there you go.
You saw a couple of really hard-hitting strikes coming in.
Apparently missiles from Iran.
Not sure.
Some people think it might be from last summer or something, possibly.
We don't know.
But whenever this was taken, it shows, it appears to show that the Iron Dome defenses are just not working and that Iranian missiles are getting through.
So the fact is that right now Israel has such censorship that no one's allowed to post any footage of any damage anywhere in Tel Aviv.
So it's very unlikely that we're going to see any damage from any sources that are immediately identifiable.
Like CNN won't cover it.
Nobody will cover it because Israel has told them you're not allowed to show anything.
No damage.
It was all censorship, of course.
So the information coming out of the Middle East is sometimes unreliable, obviously, for all these reasons.
So we're doing the best we can.
But Axe is highly censored now.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media is highly censored.
So the truth is we're probably not getting good information.
And even some of the videos you have to wonder as well.
We were told that the U.S. submarine shot and sank an Iranian naval vessel near the Indian Ocean.
And then everybody on Team Trump cheered, yay, we took down the enemy's battleship or whatever.
It wasn't a battleship.
But turns out that was a ship that was invited to a naval ceremony by India.
And they weren't soldiers on the ship.
Veterans' Preparations00:02:45
They were mostly ceremonial veterans, like Iranian veterans on the ship, with a few sailors to run the thing.
And they were just there for a parade.
So it was just a ship coming back from a parade, is my understanding, or on the way to a parade.
And that's what the U.S. brags about sinking, and then they just let them all drown.
So they all drowned and died.
And that's what the U.S. does now.
Just utterly barbaric, completely inhumane, and bombing hospitals, bombing schools, killing schoolgirls by the hundreds.
This is what the U.S. does now.
So the U.S. is functioning like a terrorist state, claiming to be stopping terrorism while actually committing terrorism.
It's totally insane.
But that's where we are.
So anyway, let me get to the reports that I have for you here.
And then today's interview after that.
I've got a couple of reports, maybe, wait, three reports or more coming your way, followed by today's interview.
And I did an interview with Dr. Chris Martinson.
Actually, he interviewed me about AI and the economic implications of AI.
I think we'll be able to play that one for you here today.
If not, I'll bring it to you tomorrow.
But I think that's today's interview, so you definitely don't want to miss that.
Before we get to the special reports here, I do want to mention that this is a great time to get prepared given the insanity that's coming, right?
So what you want to do is go to healthrangerstore.com slash survival.
And there, you'll be able to load up on whatever you want to get at very competitive current prices, which is laboratory tested, certified organic, foods, storable foods, long-term packaged storable foods.
I mean, but healthy, honest food in number 10 cans, freeze-dried, fruits and vegetables in ranger buckets, packed in these, you know, waterproof bricks, we call them.
They're sort of, they're compressed and vacuumed and formed into the bucket to be very, very portable and weather resistant and rodent resistant as well.
So you can get all of those and there's all kinds of different varieties of mega buckets and mini buckets and ranger buckets.
You can find them all at healthrangerstore.com slash survival, including our iodine supplies.
We have potassium iodide as well as nascent iodine and many other products there that can help you get ready for what kind of chaos may be coming.
So check that out and thank you for your support.
Again, healthrangerstore.com slash survival.
All right, enjoy the rest of the show with these special reports and today's interview.
Thanks for listening.
Global Gas Crisis00:11:31
Okay, welcome to this special analysis of global food inflation that has been set into motion by Trump and the United States waging a war on Iran, which of course caused Qatar to shut down its natural gas production because of course it was being struck by Iran, some of the infrastructure there.
And also the Strait of Hormuz is now closed.
So there's no liquid natural gas moving through the strait, which means that anywhere from 20 to 30 percent of the global supply of natural gas has been cut off for an undetermined period of time.
Well, now for people who are just kind of, I don't know, Super Bowl rah-rah, like watching the war and eating popcorn and, you know, rooting for Trump and everything, those level of low IQ people, they don't think about the long-term ramifications of what this war has just set into motion.
But you do listening to this.
And so you want me to look forward and to do the research and to bring you credible numbers about what it means.
And that's exactly what I have done.
So I unleash a swarm of AI research agents, multiple models doing multiple things earlier today.
And we brought back the final answer on how much food prices will go up in 2026 in the United States and in Europe based on what has happened so far and also some projections about 2027.
So let me show you this graphic first here.
It's a projected global food price crisis 2026, 2027 and beyond.
And through AI reasoning, which the reasoning models are very, very good right now, I pulled in about 45 sources of information, including historic information about what other crises have caused in the past in terms of nitrogen shortages or fertilizer shortages, crop yields, etc.
And so let me walk you through this infographic.
Although, if you want to jump to the bottom line, it's that in the United States, probably by the end of this year, food prices will rise 8% to 15% with a six-month lag.
So it's not going to happen tomorrow, right?
It's going to be about six months.
And then in Europe, prices of food will go up 12% to 20%, also with a six-month lag.
And then in 2027, they're going to continue to rise even more in Europe, whereas in the United States, it could be another 3% to 5% of price increases in 2027.
Now, that doesn't even take into account the continued decline of the value of the dollar.
So money printing will make these numbers effectively worse in terms of what prices you have to pay at the grocery store.
But at the very least, where we are right now today is 8% to 15% price increases of groceries in the United States.
And that tells you something, something critical.
You need to learn to grow more of your own food if you can.
And also, quite literally, stockpiling food right now is going to be the discount price version compared to where it's going to be in six months.
That's just a reality of where this is going.
Even our own costs at our store, healthrangerstore.com slash survival.
We've got all our food products there for you to help you stock up for the storm that's coming.
And there's no way that our prices are going to go down.
As our inputs go up, the prices of everything that we offer there, the food buckets, the number 10 cans, the freeze-dried fruits and vegetables, lab-tested, certified organic, everything, all those prices are going to go up.
No question about it.
And that's even assuming that the Suez Canal is operating.
We're not even sure about that.
So let's start with step one.
Let's go back to the beginning here.
Start with step one of this infographic.
And to my editor, if you could just show step one, kind of zoom in on that, or maybe step one and step two together.
Step one is the energy shock.
So Qatar, or really a company called Qatar Energy, has shut down all liquid natural gas production.
That's done.
That was announced yesterday.
Strait of Hormuz is closed.
Global gas prices are spiking.
And the historical precedent says there will be plus 54%.
We're already seeing gas prices spike over 50% in Western Europe.
Not in the United States, because the U.S. has its own domestic gas supply.
The U.S. actually has much more gas abundance compared to Western Europe because Western Europe shut down their gas fields, citing climate change.
As a result, they're going to starve or, well, they're going to pay a lot more for food.
Let's put it that way.
All right, then moving on to step two.
So gas is responsible for 70 to 90% of the cost of ammonia, which of course is the primary input into nitrogenous fertilizer.
So fertilizer production costs now surge.
As a result, farmers will reduce applications of fertilizer either voluntarily or involuntarily, as in we just can't get it or we can't afford to put the normal amount on these crops.
Remember, farmers are always in a poor cash flow situation, and many of them have to turn to financing from one season to the next.
So any higher cost of inputs will really hurt them badly, and in many cases will cause them to use less, use less nitrogen.
So as a result of that, then if you go to step three, it shows that the yield impact is devastating.
Reduced fertilizer causes a 10 to 20% yield decline in staples like corn, wheat, and soy, etc.
Even alfalfa and animal feed products.
So that causes a shrinking of the global supply of these staples.
And remember that what we grow in America, much of it is exported to other countries.
And importers include China, for example.
China imports a huge amount of its food because it can't grow enough to feed its population.
But also the Gulf states, think about Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, et cetera, Kuwait, Iraq.
They import a tremendous amount of their own food.
And as the Strait of Hormuz is blocked, by the way, they won't be able to import food.
They're going to face a whole different level of potential famine or food scarcity there.
But even in so-called food-abundant America, we've got cornfields and we've got natural gas and we've got oil.
But even in America, the reduced yields of the crops is going to result in, of course, a smaller volume of availability.
And then because this is a global phenomenon where nitrogen fertilizer will be in short supply everywhere around the world at the same time, you're going to have reduced yields everywhere, which means other countries will be buying whatever they can find and buying off much of the U.S. supply, causing price increases in the United States.
That's right.
You're going to be paying much more for your glyphosate crackers and glyphosate breadloaf for real.
Okay, and then step four, inelastic demand plus supply shortfall causes inflation that extends through 2027.
So inelastic demand means, of course, everybody has to eat.
And regardless of the price of food, you have to buy it.
So it's not like you're going to buy much less if food gets way more expensive.
Although you might shift from brand name foods to more generic brands if you're buying that kind of processed food.
Or you might shift from one crop to another.
You might choose to have more rice meals, for example, if rice isn't hit by this as much.
Yeah, have fun with that one.
Very few people will eat less, is my point.
They will just, they'll still buy something.
Now, let's go to the bottom of this graphic now called critical risk factors and assumptions.
And these assumptions were the assumptions I fed into the reasoning AI engine that came up with this infographic.
Fertilizer availability.
Clearly, the shutdown of liquid natural gas is going to cause long-term deficits in fertilizer availability.
That's obvious.
Geopolitical contagion, broader petroleum disruption, spike transport costs.
Well, that's also valid because what we're witnessing is a global phenomenon.
In other words, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the shutting down of gas in Qatar, this affects everybody in the world in one way or another.
It's not just a regional impact.
It might be a regional kinetic war, but it's a global economic impact.
This affects almost all the countries in Asia, for example, including China, including Japan, including Korea, etc., even Taiwan.
And what you need to remember is that natural gas is used for so many things.
It's not just fertilizer, it's used for aluminum smelting operations.
And as a result, by the way, I think there's an aluminum manufacturer also in Qatar that has shut down.
It's used in creating chemicals.
So remember, BASIF in Germany that would create about 40,000 different chemicals based on hydrocarbons.
Well, natural gas, that's the feedstock for the hydrocarbons.
So if you don't have natural gas, you don't have 40,000 chemicals that are used in everything from paint and food dyes to medicine and technology and solvents and whatever else.
Adhesives in the medical field, everywhere.
It all starts with natural gas, or much of it does.
In addition, the steel industry uses natural gas typically in order to fire up the large-scale kilns or whatever they are, to melt the iron ore and blend in the carbon and the other minor components for your, you know, for your steel alloys.
Yeah, you're heating that with gas.
You're not heating it.
It's not a wood fire and it's not a coal fire.
They're not shoveling coal.
They're heating it with gas because it's clean and easy to work with.
Well, with all this gas gone now, guess what?
Steel industries are going to go into a shortfall.
And so steel prices are going to go up, which is going to raise the price of commercial construction and automobiles, ships, you name it, anything made out of steel.
Asymmetrical Economic Warfare00:15:27
That's a lot of things.
So the conclusion of this infographic is that this is a perfect storm for global agri-food systems to suffer significant inflationary pressures through 2027.
And we've only just begun, actually, this is just getting started.
This picture can get a lot worse depending on where this goes.
For example, if someone starts rolling out nuclear weapons in the Middle East, which is a possibility, then we don't know where the nuclear weapons are going to end and how much damage they may do to the region, rendering areas semi-permanently unusable for anything.
Now, it's pretty obvious that there is nobody in the White House that is thinking about second order or third order effects of their war on Iran.
They just want to destroy Iran to appease their masters who are the Israeli leaders like Netanyahu.
And they're not thinking about the fact that this is going to cause food inflation.
And remember last Thanksgiving when the White House went out of its way to tell you that all the costs were going down.
There's no inflation.
That your Thanksgiving dinner is cheaper now, even though they were substituting everything with like no-name brands and they reduced the portions and they reduced the number of servings and everything.
It was all just deception, of course, to try to convince stupid people that they're paying less for groceries when everybody can go to the grocery store and they can realize, no, these prices are higher.
The prices are going up.
We can see it.
But imagine how much harder the White House is going to have to work to lie to you when your food prices go up 8% to 15% by the end of this year.
And then maybe even higher next year.
And that's, again, that's on top of whatever dollar devaluation takes place between now and then.
And since there's all kinds of money printing underway, we could be looking at food inflation this year of 20% or by next year, it could easily be 25, 30%, something like that.
Don't be surprised if it hits those numbers.
And so what then?
What kind of BS narrative are we going to get from the White House at that point?
Oh, you're not paying more for food.
You should eat what do they say?
Like a tortilla, a piece of broccoli, and a piece of chicken or something.
And they're saying it's less expensive.
What are they going to tell you in the future?
Soylent green is very affordable or some nonsense like that.
But they have unleashed all of this by starting this war with Iran.
Remember, Israel struck first with the United States.
But by starting this war, Trump, because this wouldn't have happened without Trump, Trump has unleashed second order and third order effects across the world that will cause food scarcity, poverty, famine in some areas, malnutrition in other areas.
That's just part of the cost of what Trump and the Zionists are extracting from the world because they are insane warmongers who just want to kill everybody that doesn't bow down to them.
So these are some of the costs that are going to be experienced by the world, including you.
You will pay more for food because of this.
So you can thank Trump when you're shopping this Thanksgiving or shopping for food this coming Christmas.
You can thank Trump for the new high prices that you'll have to pay.
Now, finally, this analysis did not even consider the higher energy transportation costs.
Because, of course, the Strait of Hormuz being closed off means that oil will also go up in price.
We're already seeing oil markets spike, and that threatens to get a lot worse.
Now, remember, Trump has said, oh, don't worry, don't worry.
We'll cover the insurance for all the ships to go ahead and sail through the Strait of Hormuz.
The problem, and by the way, he's pledging your taxpayer dollars to cover the replacement costs of ships that are sunk by Iran, that are destroyed.
The problem with that plan is that that doesn't bring back the oil or the gas if the tanker is destroyed.
You know, I mean, and also, what if there's a large gas tanker trying to move through?
That thing's like a floating mega-bomb.
If you strike a natural gas tanker with a missile, do you have any idea the level of destruction that that would set off?
I mean, it would be almost like a small nuclear bomb went off, and that ship would be disintegrated.
So even if you can write a check for the insurance, it doesn't bring back the gas, does it?
Doesn't bring back the oil.
So, you know, Trump is realizing the hard way.
You can print dollars.
You can't print natural gas.
Otherwise, they would have been doing so this whole time.
The other plan from Trump is that we're going to have the U.S. Navy escort all these other ships through the Strait of Hormuz.
Well, good luck with that because that's going to bring the Navy just within a few miles of the southern Iranian shoreline and the southern Iranian mountain ranges there from which Iran can fire all kinds of missiles to harass the ships and damage U.S. naval vessels.
Plus, Iran has underwater drones and mines and air drones as well as air missiles and anti-ship missiles.
You know, they've got lots of things to harass ships, including U.S. naval ships.
And the U.S. Navy itself is going to run out of air defense munitions pretty quickly.
They've already been firing, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of them, which means they only have a few more days of ammunition left, probably.
And at that point, then what are you going to do?
You know, then your naval vessel is just a giant floating target out there in the middle of the strait, which isn't very wide.
So your ships can't sail very far away from Iran if they're going to go through the Strait of Hormuz.
This is a geographic choke point that Iran just happened to inherit just, you know, by history and geography, etc.
So since you can't change the geography, you've got to sail through the strait.
And right there, you're a sitting duck.
And Iran is just going to start sinking ships until there comes a point where the ship captains say, no, I'm not sailing through there because I don't want to lose my ship.
I don't want to die.
Which seems logical.
So in other words, Iran is in the driver's seat on this, and Iran can keep the Strait of Hormuz closed as long as they want, and they can keep the natural gas production closed in Qatar as long as they want.
And so Iran is using this as an asymmetrical global economic leverage point.
This is really economic warfare.
Iran is going to cause mass disruptions to the global energy markets that typically trade in U.S. dollars.
And this will reduce dollar demand, and it will cause extreme pain to both Gulf state nations and Asian nations, some of which are U.S. allies, such as South Korea and Taiwan and Japan, but also extreme pain to Western Europe.
Extreme pain.
Western Europe's going to get the worst of this.
I'm talking about France and Spain and the UK and Germany, etc.
So probably what's happening right now, this is my guess, is that all of those nations I just mentioned, every one of them, and maybe on top of it, China too, are calling the White House and screaming and saying you have to stop this war because we cannot survive this economically.
Our industries are threatened.
You know, our farmers are going to be threatened.
How are we going to get the fertilizer that we used to get?
How are we going to get the, how are we going to create steel?
Or even in France, you know, they have glass industries there.
And in Germany, they have optics industries.
Well, how do you melt glass?
You use natural gas, obviously.
I mean, you use heat ovens that use gas to melt glass.
That's how you create optics.
Well, without the gas, you can't do it.
So we're talking about a shutdown of industry across Western Europe.
So these countries are no doubt demanding that Trump find an off-ramp, but Trump doesn't listen to them.
He listens to only one foreign leader, and that's Netanyahu, who is completely controlling Trump, pulling all his strings.
And Netanyahu says, keep bombing and keep dying for Israel.
And Trump says, okay, we'll throw U.S. soldiers.
We'll do everything.
We'll do everything for Israel because the Trump administration is Israel first, America last.
Americans can pay higher prices for food.
Americans can starve for all he cares as long as the Zionists are happy.
You know, the billionaire donor class of Zionists.
As long as they're happy, then, you know, Trump is happy with himself for keeping his loyalties to the Zionists while betraying America.
That's where this is going.
So if you don't want to pay through the nose for groceries later this year, you should maybe join our efforts in trying to demand de-escalation, demand peace, stop this insane war, which was started by the U.S. and Israel, and resume the shipments of energy.
Otherwise, we are all going to pay the price later on this year and all the way into next year as well.
All right, if you want to see this infographic in more detail, well, where can you see it actually?
Oh, I posted it on Brighteon.social and on my Telegram channel as well, which is RealHealthRanger.
You can also read my articles at naturalnews.com, and I do have infographics in those articles as well.
And finally, you can watch more of my videos like this one, podcasts and interviews, at brightvideos.com.
So thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams.
Take care.
All right.
Welcome to this special report on why Trump has already lost the war with Iran.
I'm Mike Adams, and thank you for joining me.
I'm going to explain that provocative title to this in plain language here.
So what do I mean when I say Trump has already lost?
I don't mean that he has necessarily militarily lost, that the U.S. military is, of course, extracting a tremendous amount of damage or causing damage to Iran, and they can destroy a lot of surface buildings.
They're mad bombing Tehran right now.
They assassinated the leader, the Khamenei.
They've killed a lot of other leaders, etc.
The U.S. can do a tremendous amount of damage.
However, the U.S. loses no matter what happens from here forward.
And that's what I'm going to explain in this podcast.
The U.S. loses, and also the Gulf states that are allies with the U.S. also lose.
And finally, Western economies also lose big at the same time.
So Trump loses no matter what happens.
So let me step back and explain this.
First, I want to show you this infographic called the Timeline of Iranian Strikes in the Gulf Region.
And it starts in 2024, but we're going to focus on just the last few days in February and March of 2026.
As you can see from this infographic, on February 28, the first targets from Iran were U.S. military bases across the Gulf states and U.S. radar installations, including that now infamous $1.1 billion radar installation that had a 5,000 kilometer range.
It has been destroyed.
Other radar installations have also been destroyed.
And Iran was using ballistic missiles and just simple drones, low-cost drones, in order to take out these targets, which have blinded the United States military in the region.
It has destroyed the Fifth Fleet headquarters.
At least that's what is being largely reported.
And it has discredited the U.S. in terms of the whole idea where Gulf states would invite the U.S. to have a military base thinking that there would be some aura of protection.
That, oh, if the U.S. is here, then we'll be safe.
Then our cities won't be bombed.
That the U.S. will defend us against Iran.
Well, that didn't happen at all.
In fact, Trump has basically told them, oh, you're on your own and we're just going to get more ammunition for Israel.
And see, that right there is the first loss that Trump has already been handed.
It's the loss of American credibility in the Gulf states.
So even if the United States defeats Iran kinetically or militarily, even if U.S. troops occupy Tehran, which seems incredibly unlikely, by the way, but even if they do, the Gulf states have already learned that it's a horrible idea to have U.S. military bases in your countries and that the U.S. lied to them about offering protection.
But that was just the beginning of what Iran did.
From March 1st through March 2nd, that is referring back to the infographic here, Iran shifted its strikes to focus largely on infrastructure targets.
So in Saudi Arabia, it struck energy facilities that is oil and gas infrastructure.
Although, by the way, for the record, Iran claims that it did not strike those facilities.
And some people think it might have been Israel striking them as some kind of a false flag to turn Saudi Arabia against Iran.
But I guess we'll never know.
Nevertheless, in Qatar, it's very clear that Iran did strike the gas production facilities as well as civilian infrastructure, including hotels and the main airport there as well.
In the UAE and Kuwait, there were explosions in cities, ports, and airports were targeted.
And this was all carried out using drones and missiles.
So what's happening here is that Iran is targeting, number one, energy infrastructure and transportation infrastructure.
Got it?
So In essence, Iran shifted from hitting U.S. bases and military targets and radar targets to now striking infrastructure of the energy economy and the transportation system surrounding that.
What does this do?
Iran's Energy War00:15:04
This denies the Western world access to the oil and gas that comes out of the region.
So this is asymmetrical economic warfare.
This is 5D chess.
For all the people that claim Trump is playing 5D chess, no, he's not.
Trump's actually being very stupid about this because I don't think he's considered any of these long-term effects.
The real strategy is being played here by Iran.
And you can see it in this infographic, how they shifted then to infrastructure targets, knowing that this would cause a huge economic cost to the Western world, which would result in massive pressure from countries like the United Kingdom or Japan or Taiwan or South Korea.
A lot of pressure, even maybe France, to pressure the United States to stop this war because especially Western Europe can't handle the loss of all of this energy flow, especially since the U.S. blew up the Nord Stream pipelines a few years back to cut off Europe from Russia.
If those pipelines were still in place, then the shutting of the Strait of Hormuz would not be a critical emergency for Western Europe.
But since the pipelines were all blown up by the U.S., Western Europe is really screwed here.
They do not have good sources of energy available.
And as I talked about in another report, that also means they can't manufacture fertilizer with the same cost efficiency as before because the gas prices are now over 50% higher in Western Europe, which means that fertilizer is going to go up maybe 50% or more because gas is the single most important cost input into ammonia, which is the precursor to some of the fertilizer chemicals.
And there are many other second order or even third order effects of this that almost nobody seems to be considering for some reason.
But Iran was actually strategically quite brilliant in this by targeting energy infrastructure.
Iran created an economic and industrial crisis across the world as a leverage point to motivate all the other countries around the world to pressure Trump to back off of this.
All right.
Now then, March 3rd, the attacks expanded to hotels and airports and also ports.
And what this caused is it shattered the illusion of safety in countries like Qatar.
And the way it achieved that, of course, is by hitting hotels and airports.
Now, you think about cities like Dubai, which has a reputation of being a very international city, a very safe city.
It used to be you could go to Dubai and you weren't going to get robbed or mugged.
It was a very safe city.
It was a great place to go do even business deals and invest in crypto or whatever you were into.
I've never been to Dubai, but if I were traveling, that would be a city that I would have previously wanted to visit just to see it, you know.
But no longer.
So now the reputation of Dubai is that, hey, if you visit here, you might get bombed.
And also, you probably can't leave.
And there are some wealthy people in Saudi Arabia and other countries, UAE, etc., that are paying reportedly, according to mainstream media reports, they're paying $350,000 to charter private jets to fly them out of those countries.
Can you imagine that?
Oh, I want a plane ticket.
How much is it?
$350,000.
Like, how badly do you want to leave?
You know, right?
Of course, some of these guys that are the princes and royalty there, you know, they're so wealthy that they would probably say, can I pay in gold?
Just, you know, bring a couple of gold bars, hand them over to the pilot, fly me out of here, or whatever.
Yeah, some of them could probably do that.
But this shows the desperation where people who have money are trying to flee.
People who don't have that kind of money are stuck.
Not only are they stuck, they're stuck in a situation where 80 to 90% of their food supply is cut off because the food comes in via ship through the Strait of Hormuz.
On top of that, they're all subject to water scarcity because, of course, the whole region is a giant desert for the most part.
And the water is provided through water desalination plants, which themselves are quite energy-intensive, of course.
But that also means a very limited amount of water that gets distributed to everybody in the region.
And those water desalination plants are easy targets for Iran.
As of right now, I don't have any information on whether Iran has specifically targeted water desalination plants in those countries.
I'm not sure that they will.
Maybe they will, but that would be, you know, that would be a humanitarian disaster because now you're really clearly targeting civilian populations in a desert.
That could cause mass death, technically, right?
So we don't hope for any of that to happen, obviously.
I'm hoping for peace and de-escalation.
I want everybody to do well.
I want people to be safe, have food and water and grow your garden and raise your kids.
But sadly, you know, Trump and Net and Yahoo lost their minds and wanted to start this war for some kind of weird, you know, Zionist, zealotry, end times, apocalyptic cult belief system or whatever they're into.
And they think that they have to destroy Iran, you know, for Jesus to come back or something.
They're just out of their minds.
And so we're stuck with this, unfortunately.
But getting back to the infographic here, what's interesting about all of this is that, you know, first Iran blinded the U.S. military, and then they carried out asymmetric economic warfare by striking the energy infrastructure that the West depends on.
This shows a very deep understanding of the nature of the petrodollar.
It's called the petrodollar because it's tied to oil or petrochemicals, right, or petroleum.
The petrodollar only exists because these Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia, are willing to, or primarily they sell energy in dollars.
This creates dollar demand, and it allows these countries to recycle their dollars back into the purchases of U.S. Treasury debt, which allows Trump and others to print more currency, knowing that there are buyers in the Persian Gulf region who will continue to buy up all the debt, allowing us to print more money.
But that's all based on the flow of energy out of the Persian Gulf.
The flow of energy through the Strait of Hormuz.
In other words, that one strait is the linchpin to the entire economic foundation behind the dollar debt pyramid Ponzi system right now.
That's what Iran has come to realize.
And that's why they are shutting down the strait.
They understand the impact that this will have economically on weakening the dollar, weakening the United States, and also pitting the Gulf states against the U.S.
And what it means is that in the long run, remember how I said that Trump has already lost this?
In the long run here, Trump has lost America's footing in the Middle East.
That American bases have been destroyed, but America's reputation has been destroyed in the Middle East.
And that means that even countries like Saudi Arabia may begin to rethink, hey, what level of support should we have for the United States?
Or should we really encourage buyers to purchase in other currencies, perhaps, you know, BRICS nations currencies, rather than the dollar since the U.S. didn't protect us.
The U.S. kind of threw us overboard, actually, during this whole thing.
And the situation could get even worse from here forward, which means there's going to be a lot of recalibration among these countries.
There's also a risk that some of these countries may not survive with their current leadership in place.
For example, there have already been several riots reported in Bahrain.
And I wouldn't be surprised if there are, as the situation gets worse, there could be many more uprisings, civil revolt in various countries, including in Saudi Arabia, which typically resorts to brutal crackdowns.
But you could also see at some point the people of Iraq rising up against the U.S.-controlled puppet government of Iraq, and also a similar thing in Kuwait.
It's hard to say what Qatar would do.
It has a very deep relationship with the United States.
But I think Qatar is also learning that the U.S. is a horrible friend.
With friends like that, who needs enemies?
So this is going to cause a rethinking and recalibration of the U.S. presence in the entire Middle East, even if Iran is defeated.
But the other option here, or the other outcome, is what happens if Iran survives?
If Iran is not destroyed, and the U.S. has to walk away with its tail between its legs, so to speak.
Well, then that is a massive reputation loss for the United States and the military.
What happens if a ship is sunk?
What happens if a stealth bomber is shot down?
Or what happens if there's casualties of 5,000 U.S. soldiers or sailors?
Or if an aircraft carrier is severely damaged and has to sail back to port because it's no longer usable.
Any of those kinds of events would collapse the credibility of the U.S. military, which currently operates on this assumption that the military is invincible.
That's the way Trump always talks.
We have the biggest, baddest, most beautiful military.
It's unbeatable.
I mean, he talks like a, I don't know, a belligerent, arrogant lunatic all the time about how no one can beat us.
We're the greatest.
We can do anything we want.
Oh, yeah.
Well, how come you didn't defeat Russia then, huh?
Yeah, because you can't.
Because Russia has more artillery than you and better missiles and more industry, etc.
But Trump's always full of bluster.
He's always bluffing.
And he's trying to pretend that the U.S. military is the most capable thing in the world.
All it's going to take is one ship destroyed to end that mirage.
Yeah, a mirage.
A mirage in the desert, no less.
And then the world will rethink.
Whoa, wow, the U.S. military is not invincible.
Their ships are vulnerable.
Their troops are not immortal.
The U.S. can be defeated with better technology or better perseverance in this case.
Just tolerating the bombing and paying the price domestically and loss of buildings and hospitals and schools and residential apartments.
But as long as your people don't break, you still have not been defeated.
So there's that risk to Trump.
So given the two outcomes here, either outcome number one, America defeats Iran somehow, but it still loses influence and credibility in the region because that's already done.
And the U.S. still suffers the economic consequences that are devastating and global, including among U.S. allies, such as the countries I mentioned before, like Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, et cetera, and the European countries.
Or secondly, Iran survives, which is a victory, proving to the world that the credibility of U.S. power projection has now been shattered.
Either way, Trump loses.
I do not see an off-ramp where Trump can legitimately claim victory here.
Now, of course, he will claim victory no matter what.
And the White House spokesperson, what's her name, Levitt or something?
You know, just typical liar.
She will claim victory, but that's just, I mean, come on, those are just quotes for low IQ people.
You know, the vaccinated population that watches Fox News or whatever.
They're incapable of thinking.
But nobody who has a brain is going to buy that.
The U.S. is going to take some major reputation losses, and Trump is going to be seen as weak.
Not strong, but weak and ineffective.
And at some point, they'll be looking for someone to blame for this.
And, you know, maybe it'll be Pete Hegseth, who was never qualified to be the Secretary of Defense, or war, as they now say.
So, you know, maybe they'll sacrifice him, you know, make his head roll, so to speak, and fire him and have somebody else come in, and then they'll claim everything is fine.
But the U.S. is going to take a loss one way or another.
I don't see any way of extraction from this problem without the U.S. losing.
Even if the U.S. comes out of this with a perceived win, there is a global economic cost that's already beginning to be felt and will continue to reverberate through the global economy for a long time to come.
That cost will vastly exceed the cost of the war itself.
In fact, right now, markets have been rattled around the world, including in South Korea, which has experienced maybe a trillion dollars in losses.
I'm just guessing.
But markets are plunging in South Korea.
Markets have been impacted in Japan and other places as well.
We are talking about trillions of dollars in equity asset losses as a result of this war already.
And so there's a cost shifting that's taking place.
Trump can launch a war and drop bombs and claim victory, but then everybody else pays the price for it.
And those people are not happy about that.
And all the industries that are shut down, not happy, etc.
So watch out for the fallout effects of this.
And I would imagine that six months from now, this war is going to be so unbelievably unpopular that all the people who promoted it and supported it are going to be rapidly deleting tweets and pretending like they never supported it in the first place.
This war is going to get very unpopular very quickly.
And Trump politically is in a suicide spiral, is what it looks like.
And the GOP is going to get hammered in the midterms if this isn't turned around.
White Horse Prophecy00:08:21
In fact, from all the early, you know, the voting that recently took place, the primaries, etc., GOP voters are staying home more than ever before.
And Democrat voters are coming out and showing up.
So that's going to have a huge impact in the midterms.
So if you want to see more of my infographics, you can read my articles at naturalnews.com.
And each article there, most of them have an infographic at the end of the article.
In addition, you can follow my reports here at brightvideos.com.
And I've got a lot more coming for you.
Lots of reports, lots of lab tests coming up, as well as interviews and much more.
So stay tuned and thank you for listening.
I'm Mike Adams.
Take care.
So we are now learning that top military commanders in the U.S. military are telling their troops that they are fulfilling the prophecy of the book of Revelation, and that if they defeat Iran, then Christ will return riding on a white horse, you know, flying out of the sky on a white horse to save humanity.
And this is terrifying for a number of reasons.
That, number one, that the troops are being indoctrinated with this false Christian ideology.
And it really shows the dangers of the misapplication or the weaponization of Christianity or passages out of the Bible, and in particular, the book of Revelation, which doesn't say at all what Christians say it says.
And you may recall that it was, what was it, well over a year and a half ago, I actually recorded 104 Bible sermons analyzing the Bible, different parts of the Bible, including a number of podcasts about the book of Revelation.
And even though very few Christians want to admit this, the book of Revelation never describes Jesus as coming out of the sky riding a white horse.
It actually describes a cosmic comet impact event or a series of events that are called the seven trumpets and the seven bulls, etc.
Those are comet impacts.
It's abundantly clear.
And I'm not going to go through all the reasons why right now, but if you honestly read the book of Revelation, there's literally no question that it's talking about a series of comet impacts from the visual attributes.
And by the way, Jesus is not even mentioned as flying out of the sky on a white horse.
That's not at all.
His name isn't even mentioned there.
But the damage on earth, the flattening of all mountains, the shaking of everything, the fireballs, the opening up of earth's crust, etc.
So that's what the book of Revelation actually says.
But Christians like to take it and with their imaginations, they like to add a lot of things that aren't even stated in the book of Revelation.
By the way, the book of Revelation also describes the total destruction of Israel.
And no, God doesn't save Israel because God is not on the side of a satanic regime that murders little children and civilians and women and doctors, which is exactly what Israel does routinely.
So anybody saying that, oh, we're fighting with Israel and God is on our side, they don't know God because they're actually fighting for Satan.
You know, Israel is a, it's the synagogue of Satan.
Everything they do is satanic from their deceptions, their death, their ritualistic abuse of children, the human trafficking, blackmail operations, child rape, you know, you name it.
It's all satanic.
So if you're fighting for a satanic empire, then you're not on the side of God and God is not with you.
You know, if anything, God opposes Israel and the U.S. Empire in this war on Iran.
God would be on the side of halting this violence and stopping the killing of innocents.
And remember, just the other day, U.S. and Israel, they killed, what was it, 160 schoolgirls that were attending school on a Saturday.
They were obliterated on purpose by a missile strike that targeted the school in order to achieve terrorism.
So that's not what God does.
That's what Satan does.
So Israel is a satanic entity.
And anyone who supports Israel is supporting Satan.
It's very clear.
So anyway, when you see these military commanders saying that, oh, we're on the side of God and this is the end times.
And we have to defeat Iran because they're evil and we're the good guys.
And when you hear that, that's a level of gaslighting and brainwashing that's just off the charts insane.
Totally delusional.
Really, it is religious cultism and fanaticism.
And yes, there are Christian Zionist fanatics that are in the U.S. military in high-level roles.
Christian Zionist fanatics run the White House.
They run the current federal government.
They are insane.
They are dangerous.
They are satanic.
And they are really going to get America destroyed in this.
And they're going to get Israel destroyed.
And my, what a shock it's going to be for all of the Christian Zionist pastors when God doesn't intervene and save Israel.
Because it turns out Israel is doing the bidding of satanic forces, right?
So what you're witnessing in all of this is a biblical perversion of the teachings of Christ and of the word of God.
It's a gross perversion.
Christ taught peace and coexistence and tolerance.
Christ taught that we should honor our neighbors and we should help those who are in need.
What the U.S. Empire does is commits decades of economic sanctions to cause poverty and then bombs and murders and kills and deceives and even sacrifices its own people.
Ambassador Huckabee announced today that all those Americans who are trying to leave the Gulf states, trying to leave even Israel, you're on your own.
There will be no government assistance.
The government can't help you leave, even though the government put you in this situation by initiating a war with Iran.
Make no mistake, the U.S. and Israel started this war.
Israel struck first.
And they have no plans for Americans to be able to leave these countries.
So Americans are trapped.
Americans are being killed already.
And many more deaths yet to come.
And no doubt the State Department or the Pentagon is lying about the number of deaths.
They only claim something like four or five soldiers have been killed.
I would imagine at this point, it's easily hundreds of soldiers that have already been killed.
And that number is going to continue to increase dramatically in the days ahead as U.S. air defense munitions run out.
But if you're an American in the region, you're screwed.
Your government is sacrificing you.
And it's actually, it's the perfect narrative to say, oh, well, gosh, all these Americans in Israel have been killed.
And thus we have to go to nukes against Iran.
See, they've killed Americans.
Well, yeah, your own government left Americans there, refused to help them evacuate, told them they're on their own.
Of course they're going to get killed.
So essentially, Huckabee and Trump and Rubio and others, they're leaving Americans behind as bait in order to have them killed, in order to justify escalation of the war with Iran.
Just like 9-11.
You think George Bush didn't know that thousands of Americans were going to die that day?
Blood Ritual Sacrifice00:05:42
Do you think Howard Luttnick knew?
I mean, who knew, right?
Well, some people knew.
Some people knew.
Some people avoided that building that day.
And it wasn't just coincidence.
So, yeah, they know they're going to sacrifice Americans yet again.
And that's part of the demonic ritualistic sacrifice of blood for Satan.
But now it's the sacrificing of American blood for Satan.
And that's exactly what a satanic entity does: it extracts blood, it causes pain and suffering and death, and then deceives everybody into thinking that it, which abides by Satan, is actually following Christ.
So really, Israel is the antichrist nation, and Trump has become the antichrist president at this point, which I could not believe that two years ago or even a year ago, I wouldn't have believed that.
But I have to offer an honest assessment after watching his decisions and his behavior.
Trump is clearly the Antichrist president.
I don't mean he's the Antichrist.
I mean he's the president of the United States with the Antichrist philosophy.
He's doing the bidding of anti-Christian forces.
But he has the support of brainwashed Christians who are running the military and driving the polls and, you know, Fox News and all that.
So that's what's incredibly dangerous about this: is that people, and this is one of the reasons I stopped teaching Bible lessons, is because I found that it didn't matter because very few Christians believe the Bible.
They believe whatever they're told by their false prophet pastors, whatever fairy tales that they're told.
And they will not read the Bible and read what it says.
Even the book of Revelation, they won't read it.
Trust me, I've been through this numerous times.
And if you read passages to most Christians out of the book of Revelation, they will argue with you and say that's not there.
That's not true.
Even though they can turn to chapter and verse and read it themselves, they refuse to believe it.
So modern-day American Christian Zionism has morphed into something that is a complete fantasy that has nothing to do with the teachings of Christ, nothing to do with the Bible, nothing to do with God, and everything to do with supporting and advocating Satanism.
And frankly, the voice with the best clarity on all of this and the expert on this is Aaron Abke, who I've interviewed many times.
He and his partner there have a podcast called The Jesus Way.
I've had them in studio.
And I strongly encourage you, follow Aaron Abke.
That's spelled A-B-K-E.
He's got a channel on YouTube.
He knows all this stuff.
He was raised as a conservative Christian, and he became a pastor in his early 20s, one of the youngest.
I think he went to, I think he went to Oral Roberts University, but I may be wrong about that.
In any case, He understands all of this, and it took me a while to learn all of this.
Now I understand it.
And that's why I'm not surprised that these military commanders are trying to quote the book of Revelation to push their soldiers into mass death and a blood ritualistic sacrifice on the altar of satanic Israel.
It all makes sense once you actually understand what they're doing.
But if you have never read the book of Revelation word for word, honestly, and actually ask yourself, what does this say, then you won't know any of this.
So anyway, bottom line, unfortunately, is that most of modern, at least organized Christianity, is a perversion.
It's antichrist in its teachings.
It has become weaponized and truly satanic.
And that's not what Christ taught.
Not at all.
It's the opposite of what Christ taught.
So I support Christ, and I support real Christianity, and I support the principles of love and compassion and understanding and forgiveness, etc.
The U.S. Empire doesn't have any of those.
It doesn't honor any of those.
And most of the Christian churches in America, the big ones, the organized ones, they don't honor any of those principles at all.
They are truly satanic monsters, brainwashing populations to support Satan's agenda.
That's literally where we are right now in 2026.
Pretty crazy.
But anyway, I encourage you to read, especially, you know, read the New Testament.
Read the book of Revelation.
You know, you could start with the book of Revelation because it obviously stands alone.
You don't even need to read the whole New Testament to get to the book of Revelation because it's completely, you know, totally different vision of what's about to happen.
But read it and give it your honest assessment without all the headings inserted, which is always inserted in the Bibles, these English headings like Christ returns on a horse.
Well, that's not written in the scripture.
That's what some editor put in there because that's their interpretation.
And in fact, Christ on a horse is not even mentioned anywhere in the book of Revelation.
I guarantee you, you can't find it because it's not there.
It's not there unless they added it as an editorial note.
Jobs Replaced By AI00:14:23
So there you go.
Thank you for listening.
can follow all of my podcasts at brightvideos.com and you can find my articles and my infographics at naturalnews.com.
I'm Mike Adams.
God bless you all.
Seriously, I mean that.
God bless you.
We need God in our lives.
We need the teachings of Jesus in our lives because we live in a society that has turned against Christ, a society and a government and a military that has become antichrist.
So pray for Christ in our lives more than ever before.
Thank you for listening.
Take care.
AI doesn't have to be perfect to replace humans.
It just has to be better than humans.
And that's actually not that difficult for most of the workforce.
I'm not trying to demean humans.
Don't get me wrong here.
But we as humans, we tend to overrate human cognition.
AI is either going to be the greatest thing ever or the worst thing ever.
Which is it going to be?
Hello, everyone.
I'm Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity.
Welcome to this Off the Cuff.
I'm here today with Mike Adams of Natural News and his Bradyon Studios.
I'm sure you're all familiar with him.
And it turns out Mike is, amongst all the other amazing things he does, dives into everything he does with both feet.
He's been in deep into AI.
So we want to sort out where are we really in the story, fact from fiction, all of that.
Mike, so good to be talking to you today.
Well, hello, Dr. Martinson.
It's awesome to join you.
Thanks for having me on.
Can't wait for this.
You know, we had a rock and good conversation privately just the other day.
I was like, ooh, we got to have this in public.
So let's start here.
We've seen a lot of hype lately.
Lots of CEOs of AI companies saying, wow, this could take away all jobs or all that.
It sounds hyperbolic.
And I've had people on the other side saying it's not going to be that bad.
You're making too much of it.
LLM's large language models are not all that.
They can't be more than the sum of their parts.
Where are you falling right now in the spectrum of, wow, this is going to be disruptive to this is a shiny toy, but not all that much?
Well, I actually agree with the Microsoft AI CEO who said that this will be capable of replacing most middle manager corporate jobs within 12 to 18 months.
Now, importantly, he said, or at least my understanding is that he said it's capable of replacing those people.
It doesn't mean that 100% of those people will be fired and replaced by their employers because there's going to be pro-human momentum.
Obviously, there's going to be a number of reasons why corporations will keep people.
But as we just saw, and I think this really ends the debate right here, Jack Dorsey just fired 40% of his human workforce all at once in one day at block and openly admitted he's replacing them all with AI, you know, beginning in weeks because they're staying on for a few more weeks.
And then the investors said, we love that plan, and the stock price went up 23%.
That's for a company that earned almost $3 billion in profits last year.
And the road to profitability for a lot of these corporations, especially those in fintech or other areas that are readily vulnerable to automation, the roadmap is going to be mass firings of humans and replacing them with AI.
So Chris, I don't think there's a debate after the last two days.
I mean, this is clearly happening.
We're in what I call the AI doom loop about human jobs, and we can talk about that in more detail however you want.
Well, let's start here, though, because I hear people saying it's not going to be all that much, but we're having conversations today that you couldn't have even had six months ago.
The pace of development is obviously out of hand.
It feels geometric to me at this point in time.
It's almost every day I wake up and there's a new tool, a new thing, a new capability.
Every update to these models is not just a little bit better.
There's square waves.
And there's a chart I could put up which shows the amount of compute time that, say, Claude Opus can manage before it sort of like flakes out.
And it used to be measured in minutes, and I think they're up to 18 hours now.
It's obviously, and the chart just looks like a pure parabola, you know.
It's just like, that's where we are in the cycle.
And what's interesting about that is those are machine hours.
The representative number of human hours that those 18 machine hours encompasses is hundreds of hours.
So for your audience, if they're not familiar with my work and what I do, let me establish a little bit of credibility because I've been building AI systems for about two and a half years now.
I've released my own open source model.
I built single-handedly the world's largest book publishing platform called BrightLearn.ai.
And over 9,000 authors have now published almost 40,000 books there.
And they're all available for free.
It's an open source project.
And you can create your own book for free.
And I still see people on X saying, well, show me that AI has built anything.
And I point them to that.
And well, here's 40,000 books you can download for free.
And they're actually well researched and well-written.
This isn't just, you know, hey, chat GPT, write a chapter.
No, we're talking about research citations for a massive corpus of external research data that I've curated.
We're talking about tens of millions of pages of content, hundreds of thousands of science papers, and over 100,000 published books that are all cited in there and with near-zero hallucinations.
So I did that with no humans, okay?
So zero humans, period.
And that's just one proof among many.
And I even did that before Claude released Opus 4.6.
And I did that before the new Quinn 3.5 just released and before DeepSeek version 4, which has not yet been released.
And what I'm seeing in these models is very clear.
So there's no question they are engaged in actual cognition, actual intelligence, which we can define loosely as the ability to manipulate your environment to achieve goal-oriented outcomes.
Clearly, these models are doing that.
And they're doing it in extraordinary ways.
And by the way, jump in.
This is your show, so interrupt me anytime, but I'm almost finished with this thought.
A lot of people thought for the last few years that this was just an elaborate word prediction engine, that that's all LLMs were.
Well, that's absolutely not the case because I can do things like I can take my code base, you know, 100,000 lines of code, and I can give it to an AI model and ask it, hey, tell me what this code does in plain English.
And it will analyze the code.
It will think about it in a hierarchical structure.
And it will understand the interactions between the various modules.
And it will then explain it to me in plain English what it does.
And it might even say, here are a few ways you can improve it.
Do you want me to proceed to alter the code to make these improvements?
That's what AI is doing now in 2026.
Some people say, oh, you know, it's more of a curiosity at this point because it's not really doing good enterprise-level testing software to make sure it hasn't hallucinated or made mistakes.
What's your experience with its accuracy at this point and how well it's performing?
My experience is that a lot of people don't know how to prompt well, and so they don't know how to overcome the limitations that do exist.
It doesn't write perfect code on the first pass, nor does any human, by the way, not even the best programmers in the world.
And so if you ask it to write a project and it writes it, then you have to go back and say, hey, look at your code again.
Double check everything.
Check all the variables.
Let's look at refactoring possibilities.
So typically I do a three pass when I want AI to write something.
And by the third pass, it's solid and it's error-free.
With humans, that takes 10 passes in 10 weeks.
With AI, it's done in an hour or whatever.
So here's the thing, Chris.
AI doesn't have to be perfect to replace humans.
It just has to be better than humans.
And that's actually not that difficult for most of the workforce.
And I'm not trying to demean humans.
Don't get me wrong here.
I have a pro-human philosophy that we should use AI to augment our capabilities and our mission in life, whatever that happens to be.
But we as humans, we tend to overrate human cognition.
And it's actually not that amazing.
Chris, your audience and you and I, we're among easily the top 0.1% of human cognition.
And yet, our intelligence is easily surpassed on a technical basis by AI engines right now.
Well, it is indeed.
So let's talk about that doom loop very quickly because yes, was that Mustafa Suleiman was saying, yeah, it could replace all white-collar middle management jobs by 12 to 18 months, but that's not the right question.
I saw Luke Roman today ask the right question on Twitter.
He said, the right question is, how many of those people need to be replaced before we get into an economic crisis?
It's not 100%.
Is it 10%, 20%?
Because those are all people formerly had high-paying jobs.
Maybe the people who used to work at block now scrambling to find something else to do.
So what's your doom loop here?
How's that work?
It's very well understood that, of course, discretionary income collapses as these normally high-income human workers are jobless all of a sudden.
And then the difficulty of finding new jobs becomes extremely high.
So their discretionary spending collapses, and then products and services that they would normally consume, those sales tend to collapse.
And then the corporations that offer those things, they tend to lose revenues, and then they have to make cuts.
And of course, the first place they're going to look is automation.
So then they cut their humans and then those humans, you know, so there's the loop.
And that is happening right now.
We are in that loop.
Yeah.
Where does it end?
It ends badly because it's happening so quickly.
I think our culture and our economy could absorb this over time, over five or ten years, but it's not happening over that extended period of time.
It's happening, as you said earlier, in a geometric or even a parabolic event that's taking place with rapid machine cognition capable of replacing human cognition.
And I would just add, by the way, that Quentin 3.5 just released a new medium model called 122B.
A10B, it means active 10 billion parameters on any given prompt.
I was testing that yesterday on some business logistics.
And that model alone, and by the way, I use AI to write an interface app in 30 minutes to be able to talk to that system and have it look at a spreadsheet I'd put together for my own company, you know, because we're in the health and food space.
I had it look at a spreadsheet looking at sales trends for one particular product and the number of vendors that we depend on and then the number of different products that we make that are made out of that raw material.
In this case, it was raw cacao powder.
And I asked it to then project the demand and calculate the lead times of the vendors that we get it from in order to tell us when we should place purchases for cacao and how much we should order at a time.
And guess what?
It did it perfectly.
It took about 15 minutes.
It went through rationally with thinking tokens.
It analyzed the spreadsheet, analyzed the numbers, projections, everything.
That replaces software that could easily be $80,000 a year software right there.
And it did it on my desk for free.
So this is not a joke.
It's not a hoax.
This will revolutionize many businesses.
And by revolutionize, you mean it's going to tank some of them.
We've already seen pretty hefty losses in the SaaS space, software as a service companies.
Was that overblown, do you think?
Or is the market actually finally discounting like it's supposed to?
Well, you know, I believe much of the market is overbought anyway.
You know, so much of it is speculative based off of fiat currency printing.
So I wouldn't be surprised at these corrections.
But yeah, I think that factoring in the loss of revenues for SaaS companies is rational.
There's no question that you can now build many apps like I just described.
You can build your own apps on your own desk.
And what's interesting about this, Chris, is that China is pushing out the open source models that you can run locally on rather modest hardware.
So for roughly $10,000 or $12,000, you can set up a kind of a beefy, high-end, but consumer-grade system on your desk, and you can expose that system over your network to your entire company.
Your entire company can then use that system for not just prompting, but for analysis on things like logistics and so on.
So what we are doing in our company is we are not firing anybody because we've always been short people.
We can never find enough good people, but now we can take the people we have and give them these tools and make one person function as five people.
And you're going to see that happening across the corporate space.
If people begin to get involved in it, so you dove in feet first.
I've had somebody on my side dive in and he did it all on his own, diving in feet first.
But Nick is there too.
And I think he spent the last 24 hours not sleeping because once he got exposed to it, he just called me up and he's like, oh my God, it can do who knows what.
But already he was able to just see what its power was.
So we're scheming all the ways that it's appropriate in our business.
Diving Into Cloud Code00:02:23
But I think that you kind of have to get your feet in the pool, I think, to really know what's going on here, don't you?
Well, absolutely.
I would urge your listeners to consider this skill set to be the single most important thing that you can learn right now in our economy.
That is how to use AI.
And let me give a couple of practical suggestions.
So, number one, you should learn to use Replit.
That's R-E-P-L-I-T.com.
Learn to use Replit.
It's an app-building site.
And even if you can't think of anything to build, just go to Replit and have it put together a PowerPoint presentation just so that you know how to use it.
And then you can ask it to do other amazing things like, I don't know, build a news summarizer or whatever you want to do.
So that's a skill set.
And secondly, you need to download and install Claude Code from Anthropic because Claude Code can answer almost everything that you could think of on a computer, including technical issues.
So for example, right now I'm setting up another Linux workstation at the moment.
And Linux can be a little bit tricky at times.
And so the first thing I do when I'm setting up Linux is I download Cloud Code.
And then I just tell Cloud Code what I want to set up on Linux.
And I don't have to remember all the Linux commands.
Thank goodness, because there's a lot.
And then Cloud Code sets it up.
So literally before I got on the phone with you, I had it set up an environment for LLM training.
I had it set up a PyTorch and CUDA cores for NVIDIA to drive a large GPU on the machine.
And it just set all that up while I was getting ready to talk to you.
So that normally would have taken me, you know, I don't know, hours and hours and frustration.
Now it happens in minutes because of Cloud Code.
So those are two things that every person listening should learn to use those.
And Cloud Code will answer questions about your Android phone, your Mac, your Windows, your everything.
You can ask it questions about any technical thing.
You don't have to have that guy that you always call that knows everything.
You know, we all have a guy like, oh, can you help me?
I don't know how to do this.
You just ask Claude.
It gets it done.
Your productivity will go through the roof.
Wow.
So none of this really seemed possible just six months ago, but here we are.
Geopolitics of Chinese AI00:10:01
Does this level out anytime soon?
Or do you think this just are we going to be surprised in six months from now?
Where's this going?
It does not level out.
And everyone who has predicted that LLMs would plateau has been proven wrong again and again and again.
And here's why.
Even if the same number of parameters is frozen, let's say, just as a thought experiment, you see science papers coming out of China that show that there are very clever ways to do much more with the same number of nodes or parameters or vectors.
I don't know how technical we want to get here.
But anyway, the number of parameters is basically the number of vectors, number of interconnections between nodes that exist in a neural network.
Well, what Chinese scientists have figured out to do, figured out how to do at companies like DeepSeek and Alibaba is they've been able to achieve things like sparse attention or very clever routing of questions through mixture of experts structure.
And sparse attention means that even though you might have a very big model with 100 billion parameters, your question gets routed to only activate the number of nodes and vectors that are relevant to answering your question.
That might only be 3% of the model.
And what that results in is very fast inference speeds.
So you get large model intelligence, but small model throughput, performance, and cost.
And since China released these models for free, the only cost is really the upfront cost of the hardware and then electricity.
So you're basically getting cognition for the cost of electricity, which is near zero.
So the dropping of cognition to zero or effectively close to zero cost, this has never happened before in human history, and it's not plateauing anytime soon.
And I haven't even talked about other science papers like N-gram knowledge storage or manifold constrained hyperconnections and things like that.
But all the best science is coming out of China on this right now.
That's fascinating.
What you described sounds a lot like a brain, right?
A brain doesn't fire up every synapse to answer a question.
It finds the path to get through that.
I mean, nature has been very good at that.
So neural net may be well-named, but it sounds like we're getting pretty good at mimicking sort of the architecture of how thinking happens.
Am I going too far there?
Absolutely.
The human brain, though, of course, is many orders of magnitude more efficient in terms of cognition per power input, right?
The typical human brain only runs on, what, 20 or 25 watts effectively of power.
But also think about the human brain as a mobile computing device.
It has to go with you, probably, I'm guessing, right?
Wherever you go, your head should be attached.
But that has severe limitations in terms of the number of neurons that can be packed into the physical skull.
AI systems don't have those physical limitations.
So even though they're far less efficient in terms of power consumption per cognitive task, they can be scaled tremendously way beyond a human brain.
And that's why AI, the effective IQ of AI, will very clearly vastly surpass human intelligence.
I mean, it's already the case, but it almost renders meaningless trying to say, oh, is your IQ, is it 160?
Is it 180?
When an AI system knows all human knowledge and can reason in multiple threads and can actually, in a sophisticated way, it can model numerous possible futures and simulate the outcomes of those possible futures and then choose the best one, which it's doing right now.
I'm not talking about science fiction.
That's happening now.
Then what does intelligence mean in a human understanding of it?
That's where we're headed.
I've heard about those.
I want to get to that, but first, can we talk about the geopolitics of China quickly?
So, A, a lot of people give me this cope, which is, oh, China, you know, China, they make shoddy stuff and they copy us.
I don't have that sense anymore.
I've lost that since years ago.
I think they're exceeding our capabilities, particularly in engineering, particularly because they have a very strongly merit-based society where if you're really smart, you float.
You go to the best universities and all of that.
But as well, the United States, we sort of went Sam Altman, hundreds of billions, massive compute, proprietary subscription model.
And China seems to be dropping something in the punch bowl by putting out these free models.
I know you had some great thoughts on that.
What are those for our audience here?
So first of all, I'm very familiar with Chinese culture.
I lived in Taiwan.
I speak Chinese.
And I interact a lot with Chinese engineers.
And you're correct.
The perception in the past was that China made shoddy stuff and they ripped off ideas from America.
That is clearly no longer the case.
China is the world leader in almost every area of technology, almost all of them.
From robotics to battery storage technology to drones to, of course, rare earths extraction technologies to telecommunications, just on and on.
Optoelectronics, microchips that run on light, right?
China, oh, and by the way, I just saw, we were talking about this the other day, you and I, China just had another breakthrough on UV lithography, where they can now fabricate even better their own microchips.
And I think that was at a two nanometer scale.
So see, China is a country that graduates 500% more STEM graduates each year than does the United States.
And in the U.S., we have, dare I say, woke universities that penalize Chinese people.
So in the California university system, if you are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, you are penalized for being Asian, which is insanely crazy and stupid, in my opinion, and short-sighted, because you want the best people to get into college and get the scholarships.
I don't care what they look like.
I want the best.
But that's not what we have in America.
In China, like you said, it's a merit-based system and it's rigorous and it's brutal on children.
It's brutal.
Their parents are hammering them, you know, study, study, study, right?
That's Chinese culture.
Every Chinese mom out there listening knows that, right?
But the result is they are churning out world-class engineers, mathematicians, chemists, physicists, scientists at a level that no country can compete with, period.
And now we're beginning to see the results of that.
It's clear.
And as well, they have a very strong business orientation, mercantilism even.
Yes.
And they're clearly I don't know how we're going to compete with our trillions of dollars of spend if they're going to undercut us with their with their better, easier, faster, lighter models that are free open source.
Right.
You know, what else is even really interesting is you saw the rift between the Pentagon and Anthropic, right?
So the Pentagon demanding that Anthropic allow them to use the Claude models for autonomous killing systems or mass surveillance.
And Anthropic said no, to the credit of Dario Amodi, he said no.
So the Pentagon is going to rip Anthropic away from the supply chain.
And the Pentagon is going to lean on all U.S. federal contract suppliers, such as Boeing, let's say, to drop Anthropic.
Well, if you drop Anthropic, what's the next best model to use?
Probably DeepSeek from China.
You could argue, well, maybe it's Google Gemini.
Okay, maybe.
But we're going to find out.
But by dropping Anthropic, the Pentagon may be forcing U.S. companies to move to Chinese models because they're better and cheaper and faster.
You see what I'm saying?
Well, that's crazy.
I just, it was a top of fold Wall Street Journal this morning.
Sam Altman's in conversations with the DOW, as we term it now.
And I can't, I'm like, oh, yeah, the DOW.
Right.
Chat, but come on.
Chat GPT?
Oh, man.
It's woke.
It's full of, it's got so many garbage points in there.
I don't know what to do.
I mean, this is the one, I saw somebody ask it just the other day.
Would you either misgender Caitlin Jennings or would you like drop a nuke?
It's like, oh, I drop a nuke.
You never misgender somebody.
Like, you want that thing making your autonomous kill decisions?
No, definitely not.
And yeah, the Chinese models are very interesting.
They don't have the wokeness in them.
They do have guardrails, but those guardrails can be easily removed because they are open source models.
So there's a library out there that's very well known.
It's called Heretic.
And you can download it from GitHub.
And Heretic will remove all guardrails from all open source models.
So you can just take a model and then just over a period of a few days, you can remove the guardrails.
And then you have a base model that answers anything.
Of course, it's important that we always use it for pro-human, you know, high integrity purposes, right?
We don't want to encourage anybody to use it for writing malicious code or crazy things like that.
But you can take that base model and then you can train it on, for example, Chris, your content.
You can build the peak prosperity language model off of Quinn relatively easily.
It's very doable now to do.
Do you think that, or do you not think that every corporation in America is going to realize the same thing and build their own model to do their customer service, to do their in-house coding or their in-house writing, content production, branding?
Of course they are because it's free and it's customizable.
And OpenAI is not either one of those.
Well, when you put it that way.
Right.
Right.
Well, it's kind of a no-brainer when you look at it.
Yeah.
Predicaments of Progress00:05:06
Yeah.
I mean, I have so many questions.
You know, I'm trying to think, even in my local town here, small town, Western Mass, I'm thinking it's too early for the conversation, but we should be having a conversation, which is that, you know, 56% of our town's budget goes to the local school system.
I can't, in my mind, see how schools can persist in this in the light of what we're talking about.
One, because the job market is so changed, are we even preparing kids for a future that exists?
Answer, arguably no.
Second, AI can do a much better job of individually tailoring education processes and trainings for children, and that's already been proven.
There are market models for that.
So I feel like there's so many lumbering dinosaurs walking around my field of view right now.
What are your thoughts there?
I feel the same way.
Yeah.
I must have stumbled upon a time machine and they sent me back to the prehistoric era.
I don't know.
As a side note, what's interesting is that when you start to work with AI, my saying is that your effective IQ goes up 20 points.
And that's a lot for most humans.
And what happens is you become more frustrated with lower IQ humans.
So there is a, and I've noticed this myself.
And I'm just admitting this right out in the public here.
I have a lot less patience with stupid people now that I work with AI because I'm getting so much better cognition from the language models than I would get from people typically.
Now, you know, I'm usually the smartest guy in the room, so I'm kind of used to that, but I'm just noticing I have a lot less patience.
So I'm wondering, and also there's a sense of urgency.
There's a sense that things are changing so rapidly.
We don't have time to screw around.
I don't have time.
If I'm in a meeting with a bunch of employees and there's one slacker in there, I don't have time to catch you up, right?
I'm like, dude, go spend a weekend, learn what you need to learn.
Stop wasting my time.
Come back on Monday or you're fired.
That's my attitude today.
And it's more curt than it's ever been.
And I'm wondering if this is something that we're all going to trend toward, because I've heard this from other people as well, which is there's less tolerance for shoddy human cognition because we're raising the bar.
What do you think about that, Chris?
I think it's absolutely the case at this point in time.
And I'll tell you why.
So COVID really ripped the band-aid off for a lot of folks, right?
So once you woke up to that, you discovered that there were people out there who were in service of dogmas.
They could have been doctors, hospital administrators, public health officials, doesn't matter.
They were in service to this dogma, which didn't pass basic logic.
Like the logic circuit, even of you have to get vaccinated so that you don't transmit it to somebody else and doesn't stop transmission.
It's like, how's that even a logic circuit?
But I found that I became very short with people who had what I consider to be fried logic circuits.
And I'm not talking like big, right, you know, giant Socratean, like four-hour slugfest.
Like they couldn't do a simple loop, right?
And worse, I felt like being in their presence made me dumber.
So I didn't let them stick it around in my presence.
Right.
Right.
That's called low IQ shedding right there.
Low IQ shedding.
It's a thing.
Don't be trapped in the car for too long.
Well, no, I get that.
But secondarily, we don't have time to screw around right now.
We just don't.
We're facing what I call predicaments.
Problems have solutions.
We face a lot of those too.
We have predicaments now where we have to manage the outcomes.
And either you're busy managing for an outcome or you're going to be busy being a victim of that outcome.
And that's kind of where we're at across multiple sectors.
Yes.
You have just nailed it.
That's right.
Well, let me put it this way.
You take Jack Dorsey's company.
He just fired 40% of his workforce.
That is roughly 4,000 people.
Which 6,000 do you suppose he kept?
Those are the 6,000 who know how to use AI.
Think about it.
I mean, it's self-evident, right?
So if you are listening to this and you're in whatever, a nonprofit, a corporation, government, whatever, if you don't learn how to augment your productivity and your efficiency with AI, you will be on the chopping block, period.
But if you learn how to use AI, you'll be the one they keep.
And the thing is, it's not that difficult to learn how to use AI.
You only really have to be curious.
And I've even told people, some people have told me, I don't even know where to start.
What do I do?
I don't even know what the model can do.
So I say, well, ask it.
Ask it what it can do.
So, well, I downloaded Claude, Claude code.
What do I ask it?
I'm like, ask it what you can ask it.
Let's go another meta-level here.
If you don't know what to do, ask it for its capabilities and then let your curiosity drive you from that point forward.
That's all it takes.
Ask It What You Can00:03:41
Just one spark and then you're off and running.
And then you can't sleep for days.
That's what happens.
Yeah.
Well, Mike, that's a perfect place to leave this, the public portion of this, for everybody listening to this.
If you're a peak prosperity subscriber, we're going to carry this conversation on back over at the website because we have to talk about some existential risks and things that are maybe a little bit more speculative.
And of course, we get to talk. completely freely in that environment.
So thank you very much for listening to this part.
Mike, thanks for being part of this public conversation.
Thank you.
Everybody else, stick around.
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