Matt Bracken argues that U.S. military actions in the Middle East, specifically attacks on Iran, have triggered a global energy crisis by threatening 32% of the world's oil supply through choke points like the Strait of Hormuz. He speculates this disruption, combined with refinery sabotage and fertilizer plant attacks, will cause a 16% to 20% global GDP contraction, thrusting hundreds of millions into famine while exposing nations like Australia and Taiwan to catastrophic infrastructure failures unlike resilient Iran. The discussion implicates state-sponsored actors and potential intentional strangulation of prosperity by President Trump, warning of nuclear meltdowns and a collapse into a "new dark age" that necessitates immediate preparedness. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Engineered Energy Collapse00:14:50
Iran's not going to surrender.
Iran, Persia, is one of the richest countries on the planet.
They have, you know, all the minerals, all the brain power, engineering power.
Iran is 80% food independent.
So what we've done is essentially revealed to the world how weak our hand really is.
The Iranians are saying this won't just be restricted to the Middle East, you know, that America will suffer the effects directly.
Welcome to part two of my interview with Matt Bracken.
In part one, if you missed it, it's on Bright Videos.
We talked about the imminent urgency of the situation in the Middle East and how the U.S. Navy is facing just huge challenges and it's not up to the task that we would expect it to be.
But I want to ask you, Matt, about this next thing.
And let me tell my producers, I want you to show my screen.
I put out this infographic and I know you've shared a couple of mine.
This one's called The Engineered Energy Collapse.
And this infographic talks about how the world is on this pillar.
Modern civilization is being held up by this pillar of Cheap, available, reliable energy, everything from transportation, industry, jobs, you know, even data centers, you name it.
And it appears that this is being dismantled, not just from the war, but also we see dozens of cases seemingly all around the world in the last couple of months of refineries blowing up or being set on fire or fertilizer plants in Australia burning down or being damaged.
I mean, is this just coincidence, Matt, or is something more nefarious going on?
Much more nefarious.
And, you know, that.
I have to set this up with kind of like going back to the naval war aspects of it.
The choke points are now, everybody can squeeze a choke point.
The Houthis in the Red Sea can squeeze a choke point.
So our prosperity, global prosperity, the rising of everybody's standard of living, from China to Vietnam, Bolivia, people are living better now than they ever did in history.
I mean, it's a fact.
And with a few exceptions that are like, you know, Haiti or places that just socially just can't figure things out.
But anywhere where there's social stability, people have benefited in the last 50 years from untrammeled sea communication.
If the North Koreans want to trade with the Argentinians, nobody is stopping them.
Anywhere to anywhere, from Russia to anywhere to anywhere, you just have a ship and you go.
That is now all being challenged.
And energy, obviously, is the main focus of this because that's like the blood cells that are carrying the oxygen.
But everything else is being challenged as well the fertilizer, copper, helium, everything that you've named before.
So the prosperity that we've known is going to shrink.
Possibly go into a really bad retrograde phase of humanity.
Some people think, well, you know, America will be fine because we have everything we need.
So we'll be fortress America, like the risk map.
You know, if you have Greenland and Alaska and, you know, South America, you fight over, but let Eurasia fight over Eurasia.
If we're going to go to that, then the prosperity that we've known is going to slip backwards very dramatically.
And just going back to that China thing, we used to have gunboats, British and American gunboats going all the way up the Yangtze and other rivers in China, which would be like the Chinese having gunboats going to Cleveland and St. Louis and dictating the terms of how those cities should run and trade with the superior power.
That stopped a century ago.
And we've still got a sea power Pax Americana, U.S. Navy allowing free trade around the world.
That's all great.
But that's now being blown up because when we attacked Iran, Iran did what they've said they'd always do.
They closed the Strait of Hormuz, and their Shia friends in Yemen can threaten the Suez Canal.
Then we go and we kick the Chinese out of Panama, and then Panama retaliates against Panamanian flagships in the Pacific.
So what we're doing is we're strangling ourselves.
Our prosperity is based on we don't have tourniquets on our body, right?
And the parts pumping all the way to the fingers and toes.
And now we're getting into a war where it's like, oh, you put a tourniquet on this wrist, I'll put a tourniquet on your leg.
How is that going to work out in the long run?
It's going to be disastrous.
And that's where we're going.
Now, the energy obviously is what we're all focused on, but energy and food have to be seen together.
You can say that food is a function of energy.
Food is directly a function of energy.
It takes energy in the form of liquid natural gas to make, like, you know, most fertilizer.
So that's going to be removed from the process.
And there are going to be poor countries that immediately go into famine.
They're all going to point at America as causing it, like this pirate rogue nation.
You know, we can at this point congratulate ourselves for having all the tankers coming to Texas, but the rest of the world is going to point at us and say, you're pirates, you're mafia.
Yeah, that's clearly the way the American empire is operating right now.
And Trump seems to be thinking that he doesn't care if he strangles the rest of the world as long as he comes out on top.
And I want to bring your attention to a couple of statistics.
So, right now, roughly with the Strait of Hormuz mostly non functioning, roughly about 20% of the world's oil supply is offline at the moment.
And according to modern economic theory, that will result in at least a 10% global.
Contraction of GDP and it will thrust maybe 500 million people into extreme poverty and famine.
But Iran has said if Trump continues to attack, that it will bomb a pipeline in Saudi Arabia that carries, I think, around 7 million barrels a day, bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, and also that the Houthis, as you mentioned, will constrict access to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
And those actions combined with the Strait of Hormuz would take about 32% or almost one third of the world's oil supply.
Offline, plus, of course, natural gas and the other things that you mentioned, that would cause at least a 16%, maybe 20% global contraction in GDP, which is serious depression time.
And it could thrust 700 or 800 million people into famine and extreme poverty.
Seems like this is where we're headed, and Trump doesn't mind it, whatever it takes.
Yeah, I think that he's out of his mind.
So you have to think of him in terms of somebody who's demon possessed or demented.
Which means that the generals and staff around him, JD Vance, they have to be thinking about the 25th Amendment for the good of America and the world.
And I'm even setting aside what's breaking today is that the Iranians are saying this won't just be restricted to the Middle East, that America will suffer the effects directly.
And as we have discussed previously, I believe personally that the Metcalf, California attack like 10 years ago was a proof of concept operation.
It was this is what my team can do.
And If you give me the orders, I can do 20 of these and take out the power grid in America.
But even aside from that, if we go back to war, Iran has said, forgetting attacks directly in continental United States, Iran has said, we'll take out all of the petrochemical and electrical power all the way around Kuwait to Saudi Arabia, everywhere we can reach that's operating American bases.
Because, you know, by the UN's own laws of war, if you allow a country to use your bases for offensive attacks, you know, in a war of aggression, a war that they caused, then you are a partner in that.
So you are a target.
UAE, Kuwait, you are a target.
If American planes are landing and putting bombs on your airport, then your country becomes a target.
Well, it took.
Let's just say roughly 50 years to build this oil infrastructure, petrochemical infrastructure, the infrastructure that loads phosphates onto ships, all of this.
These things are huge.
These are things you can practically see from outer space, right?
I mean, you can see these things.
This is like the mega berths for loading oil and gas.
Yeah.
The berths are out at sea because ships can't even get close to the land.
These are mega ports and mega infrastructure.
These are things that are like the Great Wall of China you can see from space.
And it took 50 years to build them.
So, when you, in a sterile, isolated way, you say, well, you know, that strike on Qatar took out 15% of its petroleum refineries, and the next round could take out 80%, because that was a warning shot.
The 15% was a warning shot.
Yes.
Right?
If we take out 80% instead of 15% from Kuwait to Saudi, everywhere in the Persian Gulf, you can't just put a number of months on it, like, oh, that will take 20 months to repair.
Because the world will go into a depression and we won't have the wherewithal.
It took 50 years to build that.
That's like saying if somebody blows up the Golden Gate Bridge, we'll have it fixed in two months.
No, you won't.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore gets hit by a ship, it's still down.
In particular, the LNG trains in Qatar, owned by Qatar Energy, they have said that the damage to the two trains would take right now three to five years to repair.
Best case.
If more, everything goes good.
Best case.
If they lose, what is it, 12 trains or something like that, we're talking 10 to 15 years if everything goes bad.
Maybe never.
But you can't just say two trains is six months.
So the whole thing will be three years.
You can't say that because if you go into a Great Depression, there's no ships going anywhere.
Those engineers from Britain and Turkey and they're not flying in to fix that stuff.
There's no economy left to pay them.
And then there's no air conditioning for the hotels to stay.
Right.
So you go back there living in tents.
Right.
And everybody talks about the decal plants, but the decal plants, which are the easiest target, are hugely energy intensive.
So, if the grid goes down in these countries, you might as well hit the decal plants because with no power, the decal plants don't make water.
You have millions of people living in what's the equivalent of a fish aquarium, right?
It's very pretty.
The fish swim around and it's like a luxury fish aquarium.
They got the coolest fake plants and fake little pirate treasure chests.
Right, bubbles.
But you pull the plug on that aquarium, the fish are all dead.
And that's the Gulf countries.
If you pull the plug on the Gulf countries, those millions of expats and locals and Indian workers and Filipino nurses can't live there.
And they won't even be able to get enough aircraft in, assuming that the war is over and the airport is open.
You won't be able to fly that many people out on airplanes.
They will die in the summer before they can be flown out.
It will be a fish aquarium catastrophe.
Where the you know, the all of a sudden the pH and the temperature of the fish aquarium goes off, you're not going around with a net and scooping them up, they're all just floating dead.
Yeah, and the weather's about to get really freaking hot, also in that region of the world.
But you can't live there.
I want to, I want to direct you back though to the original question who is sabotaging the refineries in you know, in India, in Australia, in Myanmar, or wherever?
Because we keep seeing these explosions or fires, or and I mean, we know the ones in Russia are being hit by.
Ukrainian drones, you know, from America, whatever.
But what about the other countries?
Like, what is going on?
You can't discount that there are sabotage teams.
Like, you know, there is a guy who gets a coded message, you know, Juan has a long mustache.
Okay, that means I got to go blow up my refinery.
You can't discount that.
But I think that there are a lot of people, any work infrastructure job where you have a thousand employees, say, a chemical plant, a refinery, You're going to have, you know, 10% that are like green energy leaning people that believe that the world, you know, even working at a chemical plant, right?
And they've all been trained how to sabotage the plant because the first week that they get the job and then constantly, you know, every, you know, one hour out of every 20 that they work there is safety, right?
Don't do this or the whole plant can explode.
Right, right.
These guys with the badges that are not like just janitors, these are like pretty intelligent people that are working control rooms.
You know, 10% of their job is safety briefings on.
We've just been alerted to what happened over here, and we're going to now spend the whole day on a safety stand down.
Don't ever do this.
The whole plant could burn up.
So they know how to do it.
So it only takes one guy.
There was like a nuclear power plant in France, it's like 10 years ago.
And it's like a disaffected Muslim immigrant.
You can't say, well, no, we're not hiring any Muslims at our chemical plant in Texas.
Sabotage Training Risks00:03:16
Imagine that would be like, oh, ACLUs all over your ass.
So you've got, you know, The guy from Pakistan or Morocco, and now he's just fed up watching Gaza.
He's just fed up.
He's watching Lebanon and he's just, he's done with it.
And he knows exactly how to set that thing on fire.
So, what you're saying is that there could be climate activists or disaffected employees who have philosophical loyalties to these other countries, like you mentioned.
Absolutely.
Either one of those cases could be happening.
And you just have, and you have just the arsonist impetus of, I want to see it burn.
And since everything is burning, you have these contagions in high schools where people think that they're all having a disease meltdown or a suicide wave.
You have a psychological contagion.
So, people that are working at a refinery and see three or four refinery fires say, I hate my job too.
And you know what?
I think that the world's coming to an end anyway.
So, I'd love to see my refinery burn.
We did see that one employee burn up that warehouse in California on video and say, All they had to do was pay us a living wage.
Remember that?
It was toilet paper and paper towels.
A million square feet up in flames, boom, because highly flammable.
And it doesn't have to be an inside job.
These things are very easy to do from outside.
The basic Shawhead drone, the 12 foot wingspan with a lawnmower engine essentially that can carry a 50 pound explosive charge.
I know tons of people that make their own hot rods and off road dune buggies and Everglades airboats.
These are guys that make the whole thing in their garage.
They make it all.
Airplanes, no problem.
So, you're saying there could be DIY approaches here?
You can make the Shawhead drone genie out of the bottle.
It's not like making a Tomahawk missile.
To make something that can go 200 miles with a 50 pound payload is something that a million Americans could do.
I mean, I know people that make their own boats and hot rods that could easily, if you hand them the plan, the plan's online.
Two fiberglass shells, motor in the back.
And to launch, you see the Iranian launcher where it's like in a container, like a 40 or a 53 foot container.
And there's like five of them.
So it tilts up to 45 degrees, but each one has a little rocket assist to kick it out to propeller speed.
Yeah.
But you don't need that.
And Iran does this too, just to give them more flexibility and.
And more potential to continue working even after we've taken out all of their big launchers.
If you put that drone on a pickup truck and you get it up to 70 miles an hour on a straight road, you don't need a rocket.
Yeah.
You know, you've just got the propeller is already turning.
You just go to 70 miles an hour and then cut it loose and off it flies to the refinery.
I'm not saying that's already happened in America, but that genie is out of the bottle.
Economic Terrorism Tactics00:09:51
And something Michael Jan covered, and many others.
Uh, uh, muckraker and others, Anthony Rubin, at the border, you know, it's not just like poor Congolese and poor Guatemalans.
You see, like, you know, 10 guys that are obviously Hezbollah, they're coming through, they're like a squad just coming through the Texas or Arizona border, or the Chinese in San Diego, they got perfect boots.
They're obviously military, they're like majors to sergeants coming through and getting on a bus.
And you warned about this for many years that there were terror cells or groups that were being planted in the U.S. and also staging weapons.
We've seen many reports, for example, of interdicted supplies being shipped in, like night vision or full auto drop in triggers and SEERs for ARs or AKs, et cetera.
So talk to us about that.
And what do you think is prepositioned?
And it's not even what they can smuggle in, it's not even important.
What they're smuggling in is right here.
They're smuggling in Chinese seals and Chinese green berets, you know, and Chinese spooks.
So they're setting up safe houses and they're setting up training areas and they're disciplined.
They're not like your lone wolf, you know, going off Boston Marathon bombing.
We're talking about people that are under military discipline.
Their orders are go to America and await orders.
And when you get the order, this is what you'll do.
You know, you may be told to assassinate somebody or you may be told to take out.
A power transformer.
I just saw, I forgot what country it was in, but they said it was, there was like 30 tons of oil.
Can you imagine in a transformer?
I saw that.
It was a massive explosion.
30 tons of oil in a transformer.
And you just shoot it with a bullet, one at the top and one at the bottom.
And that's it.
Yeah.
So our whole global prosperity or national prosperity, either way, zoom in or zoom out, is based.
Is based on a high trust model.
In Japan, you can leave your bicycle without a lock.
Kids get on the subway in Japan with their school uniform and the school logo, and any adult will make sure they get to that school.
That's a high trust society.
So our whole global infrastructure is a high trust society.
Nobody's going to submarine your freighter.
We don't like North Korea.
And we don't like this country, but if North Korea wants to send a freighter, we're going to let them do it.
That's a high trust world.
And we ended that.
I'm not saying it's the first, but it was definitely the most splashy.
We blew up the North American Navy, blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
Okay, and I could do a whole show proving that.
But the US Navy blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
And not like with a fog man, you know, right at that moment, but we did it.
And that was because we didn't want Russian cheap LNG fueling.
A German economy where Germany was essentially the manifold.
It wasn't just going to Germany, but Germany is where it input into Europe and then it goes out to the rest of Europe.
We did not want Europe and Russia aligning economically.
So we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
We did it.
So we threw our own allies under the bus, NATO allies.
We sabotaged their economies because we'd rather have them suffer than be cozy with Russia economically.
And now all bets are off.
We're going to start seeing tankers explode at sea or U.S.
Yeah, that's where this is going.
I'm really glad you brought up Nord Stream because that was an act of economic terrorism carried out by the United States military against civilian infrastructure.
And I believe the Navy planted those explosives during, what was it, Baltops 22, is what it was?
Yeah, that's right.
They planted them.
And then they could just set them off later.
Exactly.
So we know that there was foreplanning of this.
We know Joe Biden bragged about it being blown up.
Victoria Nuland was celebrating it, et cetera.
I mean, right.
100%.
Applebaum and her, or Sikorsky, her husband, Applebaum, CIA, Atlantic reporter, her husband, Sikorsky, Polish radical Russia hater.
Yeah, we blew up the Nord Stream.
So it's like, sorry, Europe, we'd rather see you poor than prosperous but aligned with Russia.
But is there an element of what's happening in the Middle East now where Trump wants Iran to blow up?
The Persian Gulf infrastructure for the same reason, but completely lacking any foresight about the domino effect.
He may be sold that, like he was sold that the Iranians will rise up and overthrow the regime in three or four days, right?
Admiral Bob Harwood said, the former SEAL, he said before February 28th if we attack Iran, they will fall in a matter of hours, not days, hours.
Hours.
Precision strikes.
This is a country that endured an eight year war where we used poison gas.
We gave poison gas to, and they didn't surrender.
Iran's not going to surrender.
Iran's calculation at this point is if we go through another hard time, and I'm not saying this is like a plebiscite, like we're going to ask all the Iranians, are you ready for martyrdom?
Okay.
But the shot callers in Iran, their thinking is even if we suffer greatly, but we take out the whole West, right?
The whole West collapses, Great Depression.
We have everything we need in Persia.
Iran, Persia, Is one of the richest countries on the planet in terms of self sufficiency.
They have, they have, you know, all the minerals, all the brain power, engineering power.
They've got the, you know, they've got the, they're like 80% food independent, which is a record.
Ireland is 80% food dependent.
Ireland imports 80% of the food they eat.
Right.
Iran only in, and this is one of the, this is one of the, Kickback effects, boomerang effects of sanctions, like putting them on Rhodesia or South Africa or Russia, it forces them to develop their own industry, right?
It's no longer just let's buy it cheap from China.
We can't trade with Russia, so Russia has to build their own drone factory, or Rhodesia has to make their own ammunition now.
So Iran is 80% food independent.
Obviously, that you can't.
When they talk about taking out the Iranian power grid, it's almost a joke because it's so distributed.
It's not like there's five giant nuclear plants running the country.
Something like 90% of Iranian homes have gas piped in.
And it's not piped in from a million miles away.
It's like piped in from the next county, right, where it comes out of the ground.
So Iran is not going to be brought to its knees because we put a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz.
That's like, yeah, it's nothing to them, exactly, Matt.
And I want to mention too, I love the fact that you're a fan of maps, so is Michael Jan, so am I, globes and maps.
And you can't argue with geography.
So, when you look at the Strait of Hormuz and you look at Iran, come on, you need to negotiate.
That's the only way because you're never going to have U.S. troops controlling both the north and the south side of that strait with no Persia sitting right there for thousands of years, you know, the big island at the top of the Strait of Hormuz called Kesham Island.
Just that island is bigger than Okinawa, which took five Marine and Army divisions three months.
Okay.
And the little island that's in the other part of the toll booth called Larocque Island, that's bigger than Iwo Jima.
Okay.
Right.
So we're going to send a few thousand Marines in to do what it took divisions of Army and Marines to do.
I mean, it's not going to happen.
Yeah.
And in World War II, the Japanese didn't have drones either.
They didn't have drones.
Right.
Right.
They had kamikazes, which was like an early, you know, guided.
Uh, cruise missile, right?
But nothing like swarms of drones, right?
So, so what we've done is essentially revealed to the world how weak our hand really is.
We revealed it to the world.
I recommend highly.
I've watched this movie probably five times in my life.
And it was written by a Navy chief who was not actually in the Asiatic Fleet.
It was written by a guy that wrote one book and it won a Pulitzer Prize, I believe.
And the movie won Academy Awards with Steve McQueen, The Sand Pebbles.
But it's about the Asiatic Fleet in China.
And this Navy chief was listening to all these stories.
Of the old guys who were in the Asiatic fleet.
And he wrote this book called The Sand Pebbles.
But this is when America and Britain patrolled deep into China.
And it was like, well, what?
Of course, we're the American Navy.
We got cannons.
Revealed Global Weakness00:10:54
They don't.
We go to their town, we tell them what the deal is, sign here, or else we'll put one through your palace, right?
A five inch shelf through your palace.
That's 100 years ago we got kicked out of China.
And the Chinese love that movie, they think that movie's great.
You know, it's like this is Sun Yat sen.
This is the rise of China, the end of the century of humiliation.
You know, we're chasing the American Navy out.
So it's a great film.
But this is what the world is seeing now.
We used to dominate the Persian Gulf.
We had an air, the Eisenhower was in the Persian Gulf three years ago in 2023.
Now we don't have a single anything in the Persian Gulf.
Well, and it seems like the era of humiliation is now going to happen to the American empire.
Yes.
And that thousand kilometer line around, you know, that's out from Iranian territory, if you extend that all the way around Asia, Japan's got to read the tea leaves.
Australia's going into an energy emergency.
They can't plant this year, they've got nothing for their tractors.
It's like an energy lockdown in Australia.
So imagine what the phone calls that are coming from our allies, Philippines, Japan, Korea, That they're saying you've got to stop this, yeah.
At a high level, it might be okay in America, but it's terrible here.
The head of the Guomintang in Taiwan, a woman, just met with President Xi in China talking about peaceful unification.
And of course, that's the party in Taiwan that supports that.
The DPP does not, but you know, the DPP is the party that shut down all the nuclear power plants and has left Taiwan with no energy options because they're depending on the West.
The West can't protect them and can't deliver energy, they've got no gas.
Power grid's about to shut down in Taiwan.
Yeah, look at Australia.
Australia, I think, is the number two producer of uranium in the world.
I think Canada's number one.
Maybe it might be like Russia, Canada, Australia.
But Australia, pound for pound, is a uranium super producer.
They don't even have a single nuclear power plant.
They went so far on the green climate stuff that they had 10 or 12 refineries.
They closed all but two.
Because they're looking at it like bean counters saying, well, it would be more cost effective and cleaner for our environment if we just buy gasoline from other places.
We'll just buy diesel and gasoline.
But Australia is an island.
So they could have been, and maybe sometime in the future, they could have been like France, a nuclear power company.
We're just going to cut off everything.
We'll have all electric vehicles.
We'll have a nuclear power plant every 100 miles.
Because we got all the uranium in the world, right?
And we got enough engineers.
We're just making new nuclear plants.
Everybody plugs in and screw the world.
Instead, they're screwed because they reduced down to two refineries.
One of them just burned.
One of those mystery fires just happened in Australia.
And again, this is the beach in Thailand, and people on the beach are starting to notice what's that white thing on the horizon?
It looks kind of unusual.
It hasn't hit yet.
The foam on the top of the wave.
Well, and Australia is especially self screwed here because, You said it's an island, but it's a massive continent, but it's a massive.
I mean, the road distances in Australia are huge.
And without diesel, that country shuts down.
Right.
The transportation is huge.
It's the size of the lower 48.
I think it's an island.
They call it a continent.
Either way, it's huge.
It's huge.
But they could have a nuclear power plant every 500 miles.
And they could have just plug your Chinese made EV in, but they're not.
Because they went on this, we're just going to have nice, clean cars and buy our gasoline from Indonesia or somewhere.
And they spent their money building vaccine quarantine camps instead of energy infrastructure.
Right.
And they're going to be punished for their foolishness.
Absolutely.
But this also comes back to the whole Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan Sea Power.
Right, the West, Britain, and then America will dominate the world by having a fantastic navy, and we'll be able to go wherever we need to go and you know, and uh, get the deals we need to make and protect the sea lanes of communication.
And mainly, we just don't want Russia and Germany to ever get together, and we don't want Russia and China to ever get together.
So, that Russia and Germany thing we definitely just saw, which was like you know, another modern iteration was the Nord Stream sabotage.
But now Russia and China are together, and so is Iran.
And Iran, I mean, so the blockade, the Strait of Hormuz to Iran, they don't care.
Yeah, oh, they're not collecting dollars.
Okay, they're not collecting dollars.
Iran feeds itself.
It's in a drought, but they still aren't like going thirsty.
It's not like they're on desal water.
They can last longer than the West.
Way longer.
Yeah.
Way longer.
And they have it straight across the Caspian as Russia.
On the Caspian is Kazakhstan, which is now flipping from the West to China and Russia because they can see the tea leaves.
So, Iran is part of now the world island heartland, the Mackinder thing, which is very hard to break that up because a submarine can't do it.
We can't torpedo.
If we want to start attacking Chinese trains, then you're just saying World War III with China.
So, but our allies under the old, you know, Mahan sea power, our allies look at our key allies.
Ireland was neutral, but it's, you know, for family reasons, Ireland's kind of an ally.
The UK, obviously, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Korea, which is an island because it's only attached to North Korea, Taiwan.
These countries immediately go into a hard depression, much worse than Iran.
Yes.
Much worse.
And they're westernized.
They have a high standard of living.
They're not like in a martyrdom, self sacrifice culture.
It seems like they're only weeks away from hardship, really starting to hit hard.
And lockdowns.
And it'll be a lot like COVID.
It'll be you can't leave your house because you can't get in your car.
You're going to get 10 liters of fuel a week.
And only if you're last.
I remember the 70s was like odd and even days.
If your license plate ends in an even number.
But that was small compared to what's coming.
And because this time it's going to affect planting around the world.
And the crop isn't going to go in, or the crop that goes in is going to be harvested at 50%.
We need 90 or 100% to feed this planet.
We've got a just in time planet that only runs wide open.
We have a just in time planet.
And you can't just say, well, we're going to take away a third of the fertilizer.
Even though that's exactly what's happening.
So the yields are going to be down, and now it's going to, and I call it the great energy world war.
With food as a function of energy.
You know, food and energy are like tied together.
So countries are now going to say, we can't export our rice.
We're going to pass a law that the rice of Thailand stays in Thailand.
Clearly, that's what's coming next.
And that means countries like Pakistan, it's like, what do you mean we can't buy any rice?
Yeah.
Well, it's just like China and Russia have already said, we're not going to export any refined fuels.
Right.
Right.
And what's next is exactly like you said they're going to ban exporting food.
So, what happens to countries like Egypt, where just like, you know, there are those fuel tankers, they are like on a conveyor belt.
You know, if you looked out, zoomed out into space, you'd see like a tanker every two days apart, you know, 12 miles an hour going across the oceans.
You stop all that.
Well, you're also stopping the rice and the wheat ship.
That's right.
But the rice and the wheat ship, this is what Michael Jahn talks about flash the bang.
You know, you see the cannon flash.
And you hear the bang speed of sound later.
Maybe the cannonball is supersonic or not.
So the actual strike could be somewhere in there.
So we're in that flash the bang period where we're still eating the 2025 harvest.
Right.
But the 2026 harvest, if it comes out 50%, we're talking about 2027, countries like Egypt in full revolt because they can't feed their population.
That's right.
For any money.
And they're going to say, We were your ally.
Where is the Ethiopia Somalia relief fund now for Egypt or Pakistan?
And then the Egyptians are millions of people starving.
Then Egypt's going to take the Suez in a hard way and say, You bring us rice if you want your ship to pass through the Suez.
And they won't pass.
The Suez and the Panama Canal are the low hanging fruit of all of this.
Absolutely.
The Gatun Lake.
When they built the Panama Canal, they built Gatun Lake.
People don't understand.
I don't blame them.
I mean, it's not that interesting.
It is to me or you.
But they had to build this artificial lake and let a decade of rain fill it up before the Panama Canal would work.
If you blow up a levee on the Gatun Lake and drop the water level down 20 feet, it'll take a decade to refill.
So the Panama Canal can be taken out.
So we're in a battle now where it's like, you know, Oh, you just put a, you know, you put the tourniquet on my friend's ankle, so I'm going to put a tourniquet on your arm.
Elites Shorting The World00:03:26
And we're all going to suffer.
It's like the, you know, eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
We're all blind and toothless.
We're in a race to the bottom now.
We need a world that has unrestricted, unfettered sea trade to maintain what we've built.
If we go into our cave, you know, I'm going into my cave and, you know, that cave man's going into his cave, there's no more trade.
We're all going back like a century in standard of living.
And importantly, under that configuration that you just described, the world cannot support 8 billion people living.
No.
Maybe, maybe four.
I saw like just one of these random videos that popped up on X, some girl in a car, some lady in a car.
And she was comparing what's going on to the big short.
The elites, they know what's happening.
She said it's a 99 year fiat currency collapse cycle.
You can see it coming, right?
You're experts, they've got no illusions.
So you have to engineer, obviously, a big war to be force majeure, the whole globe, a big war.
But the elites that have run this into the ground, they can position themselves before the big crash.
You know, they've got 10 years worth of diesel in their mansion in Patagonia, Gulfstream jets, mega yachts.
And they think that when it all comes, you know, when it's all done, they can fly back and, you know, whatever's left out of the ashes, they'll be on top again.
You know, that's the plan.
But so they're kind of like shorting the world.
Now we're at the stage where we.
We were instead of the slow decline, we're going to go right into a war, crash the thing into the mountain.
We'll be all right because we're in our house in New Zealand or Patagonia, right?
And we got our mega yachts and our jets.
And when it's all the dust settles, we'll just come back and be on top again.
You know, that's how it's worked in the past.
I don't know if it'll work this time.
Yeah, yeah, good, good, good point.
I'm not sure it will either, but clearly we're going to be facing years of suffering and destitution and famine that's all engineered.
Oh, no doubt.
And, and you know, I, I'm a fan of Catherine Austin Fitz as Michael Jahn.
She has her 12 points of digital control.
All of these, it's like a, I wish I had the graphic ready, but all of the digital control points, the digital control grid is being installed.
That's one way it may turn out.
There's a global noble class.
We're all peasants.
We're all digitally controlled, central bank, digital currency, mark of the beast.
But that's one way it may, that's maybe how the elites think it.
It will go if the plan works.
But we could be in for like a 30 years world or a new dark age.
Right.
When I always use this thing, the elevator analogy, you're on the 80th floor.
You can't just say, oh, wow, we're going to crash.
Let's get off at 1870.
That was a pretty good decade.
Let's get off at 1870.
No, you can't.
1870 had a whole infrastructure built.
You could order a cast iron kitchen, wood fired stove from Chicago and get it sent to North Dakota.
On a train, right, and have a nice wood fired, that's gone.
Planning For A Dark Age00:04:43
You know, the cast iron tractor that you behind your horse team, that's gone.
You can't get off at 1780 or 1885.
Or you can't, if we crash, it might be all the way to the floor.
Like, you know, cannibalism, really bad, a really bad level where, you know, the elevator, you can't just get off the elevator at your favorite century.
Uh huh, right, right, right, and especially since everything is so over leveraged right now, uh, it seems like the crash will be more heavily.
That's the speed, right?
That's the speed.
There were famines in history, but where 80% of the people lived on the land and never moved 10 miles from their house, and there were still famines.
But what we have now, the speed of leverage, when you pull out the diesel fuel and the fertilizer and all the Monsanto's frankincenseeds, farmers don't, I'm sure there are some, but modern agriculture, people buy seeds just like they buy fertilizer.
Yeah.
They don't even know how to take some of their corn and hold it back to grow next year's corn.
That's right.
They are in a contract with Monsanto.
And the seed is delivered just like the fertilizer.
When that stops happening, we're not going to lose 20% of our agriculture.
We're going to lose 80% of our agriculture.
Exactly.
Suddenly.
Matt, you're nailing it as usual.
I want to encourage people.
I'm sorry.
My wife calls me like, you know, Mr. Worst Case Scenario.
I don't know.
No, I think you're just following the evidence, actually, of where this is.
I hope I'm wrong.
I hope to be the village fool.
I want to wear the court jester outfit and have people throw tomatoes at me and laugh at me.
And it's like better than ever.
You know, everything worked out great.
Oh, yeah.
It's going to be a new golden age, Matt.
Don't you know?
It's a golden age.
I want to wear the court jester outfit and have people throw tomatoes at me.
That's my greatest hope.
All right.
In the meantime, how can people follow you on X?
Just Matt Brack, Matt underscore Bracken forty eight.
My website is enemies foreign and domestic.com.
I've written all these many books over the years and people can get, you know, Doomsday Reef.
That's one of your more recent ones, right?
Yeah, Doomsday Reef is my last full.
I wish I was one of these authors that could crank out a book in six months, but I just can't.
But, well, you know, we've all got a front stage seat to history, and as long as the power holds out and we can watch TV and the Internet, you know, we'll at least be here to say.
I told you so, or you were wrong, or I was wrong.
And then we'll be around the fire and the oil drum, you know, staying warm and trying to catch animals to eat.
I hope I'm wrong.
Look, I hope it's all better.
And I hope I'm completely wrong.
What if I said, I think you're an optimist, actually.
What if I said that?
I think there's going to be a lot of available parking in the future and the highways won't be jammed up.
And I want to know what happened to the bees.
Where are the bees?
My fruit trees aren't making fruit because there's no bees.
Yeah, the pollinator collapse is another big topic.
Where is the bee?
What happened to the bees?
Well, that's the neonicotinoid pesticides right there.
You know, it's the chemical gasification.
I don't know.
I mean, it's we are we're under an extermination agenda.
That's what's clear to me.
But we'll save that for a whole other interview.
I think I think that Matt Smith and his friends in Uruguay and Argentina, they might be on the right track.
Yeah, you know, yeah, exactly.
And for one thing that people don't even think about, just as a final optimistic note, if there's a big global Great Depression, all of our nuclear power plants are based on the concept that don't worry, the economy will always be fine, we'll always be paying our engineers, spare parts will always be delivered on time.
If there's a big Great Depression, we have hundreds of nuclear power plants that are 90% are in the Northern Hemisphere that could go Chernobyl.
When the engineers aren't at work.
Yeah.
You know, yeah.
And they can't just be shut off like a light switch.
No.
And that's another reason to maybe think about, you know, Southern Hemisphere.
All right.
South America could be a good spot.
Well, okay.
I've lived there before and I know you've spent time in.
Vitamin D Immune Support00:04:08
But I would not rule it out.
Yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Well, thank you, Matt.
Appreciate you today.
Thank you, Mike.
Thank you for everything and be well.
We'll talk again soon.
See you on the internet.
All right.
Thank you.
There you go, everybody.
Matt Bracken.
Take his analysis seriously, even if, as he says, he hopes he's wrong, but he's usually right, it turns out.
In fact, his books are just foreshadowing things that have come true.
He's usually right.
So, maybe you should plan accordingly.
We all should.
By the way, if you missed part one of my interview with Matt, that's also available here on brightvideos.com.
And thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams, and I'm wishing you the best.
And get prepared, by the way, if you want to get prepared with food and non GMO heirloom seeds and so on, shop with us, healthrangerstore.com.
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