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unidentified
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In this tutorial video, I'm going to show you how to set up your Rumble wallet to start earning tips in cryptocurrency. | |
| What is going on, patriots? | ||
| This is Tate Brown here, holding it down. | ||
| We are live once again from the great Rumble Studios, and it is fitting as we are a part of the Rumble lineup for today. | ||
| We're taking you into the afternoon of the Rumble morning lineup, and we have a fantastic show for you today. | ||
| We're switching it up today. | ||
| We're switching up our style. | ||
| You know, usually we go news into the interview, but I figured, you know what? | ||
| It's a new year. | ||
| I think it's a new me. | ||
| We should switch up the style. | ||
| And beyond just switching up from a digital interview, we brought in a live guest. | ||
| So obviously, if you've seen the news, if you've been keeping an eye on Twitter, you've seen the launch of the new Rumble wallet. | ||
| It's really some exciting stuff. | ||
| I've been poking around with it all day, and it is a paradigm changer, quite frankly. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| So I was sitting back and I was like, who should we bring on to talk about the Rumble wallet? | ||
| Thankfully, seeing as we are at Rumble Studios, we ran a Maduro-style raid up to Chris Pavlovsky's office and we got him down here and we're going to sit him down and we're going to interview. | ||
| And he is joining us today. | ||
| So, Chris, how's it going? | ||
|
unidentified
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Great. | |
| Thanks for having me. | ||
| Glad to be here. | ||
| Yeah, dude, this is exciting stuff. | ||
| So I am kind of, I'm kind of an idiot. | ||
| There's no question about that. | ||
| So I'm seeing Rumble Wallet and it's really exciting stuff, but can you explain to me specifically how this works? | ||
| Like I'm five years old. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we, this morning we announced that we went live with the Rumble Wallet. | ||
| We've been testing it for about a month. | ||
| Well, we've been testing it for many months, but to the broader public, about a month. | ||
| And the whole idea behind the Rumble Wallet is basically to give you an uncancelable, an untouchable, basically wallet that is completely yours and only yours. | ||
| It's a crypto wallet that allows anybody to buy, hold, or tip creators with Bitcoin, Tether, and Tether Gold. | ||
| So it's the first of its kind. | ||
| I don't think there is a platform of our size. | ||
| There is no platform of our size that is allowing people to send crypto to creators in an ecosystem like that. | ||
| And it's so, yeah, it's a first of its kind. | ||
| And I believe that it's here to change the creator economy completely. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| So you can now, as a creator, receive Bitcoin without any fees from the platforms. | ||
| You'll get fees from like, you know, the gas fees that Bitcoin has when you move Bitcoin. | ||
| There's all these tiny fees that are negligible. | ||
| But if someone sends you one Bitcoin, you're getting nearly one Bitcoin in your Rumble wallet. | ||
| So without any interference from anybody. | ||
| And being that it's a non-custodial wallet, I can't touch that at Rumble. | ||
| If you lose your password and you can't, like, I can't help you. | ||
| This is like your wallet, your money. | ||
| I have no control. | ||
| I can't touch it. | ||
| And I think that's like a big thing. | ||
| At Rumble, we've been about free speech with our Rumble video platform. | ||
| We've been protecting freedom of expression to the best ability that we can. | ||
| And now we want to broaden that ecosystem to be freedom across multiple buckets, whether it's video and media allowing you to say whatever you want to say, not telling you what you can or cannot say. | ||
| Whether it's cloud allowing you to build on top of something that's not going to be canceled for arbitrary reasons, like we saw with Parlor. | ||
| And now it's the Rumble wallet. | ||
| It's digital freedom. | ||
| It's digital financial freedom. | ||
| You now have a wallet that I can't touch. | ||
| I can't go into. | ||
| I can't move your money, freeze your money, hold your money. | ||
| It's money that, you know, if someone wants to give you money, they can give you money. | ||
| And I can't impede on that transaction. | ||
| It's completely on the blockchain and it's completely decentralized. | ||
| And it's something that is completely yours. | ||
| So I think we're building this massive broad ecosystem with Tether, you know, those three buckets. | ||
| And we're going to keep adding buckets of freedom, whether it's AI and allowing you to control your AI and molding your AI the way you want to do, whether we get into browsers and all these other parts of the ecosystem. | ||
| That's the future. | ||
| But we're building an entirely freedom-first ecosystem. | ||
| It's brilliant. | ||
| I mean, the thing that jumps out to me is the no fees. | ||
| Because when I've dealt with crypto, I mean, you're getting rinsed. | ||
| And who knows where that's going? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| So if you want to buy crypto, there's going to be fees if you're bringing it in from a credit card or a debit card. | ||
| If you want to buy crypto, the part that we're rumble, when I say no fees, it's the no fee from the user once they have their own crypto. | ||
| Now, you don't need, maybe you don't need to buy crypto. | ||
| Maybe you have a lot already and you're sending one Bitcoin to Timcast or you're sending one Bitcoin to whoever it may be. | ||
| There's only the fees of the gas fees, the fees that are associated to moving Bitcoin that we all see and all hear about, which are pennies, if not pennies, like less than pennies at times. | ||
| So it's revolutionary for the creator economy and it's real time. | ||
| You don't have to wait for me to pay you out. | ||
| Like someone in the chat can send you money and it will show up in your chat and it'll show up in your wallet in real time. | ||
| Now, Bitcoin takes a little longer. | ||
| It takes like 20 minutes. | ||
| I had to send some, you know, as a test, I sent some to this channel. | ||
| We already got someone in the chat just sent $5 U.S. Tether. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So that's already, you're already seeing it come in. | ||
| I had to set, I sent Bitcoin when this started. | ||
| So about five minutes ago, I sent some Bitcoin to the Timcast channel. | ||
| And with Bitcoin, because it's on the Bitcoin, Bitcoin, it takes a little bit longer. | ||
| You'll see it'll take about 10 to 20 minutes to verify and post. | ||
| If it's Tether or Tether Gold, I'll do it in real time while we're here. | ||
| It'll be like lightning fast. | ||
| So it's the first of its kind. | ||
| Usually when you get a super chat on YouTube, YouTube's got to get the money, verify it, wait to pay you out, send you a check, you know, every 30 days or whatever, whatever the payment terms are at the time. | ||
| So with this, it's instantaneous. | ||
| And the best part is it's multiple different currencies. | ||
| You have multiple different crypto assets. | ||
| You have Bitcoin, which you can receive, Tether, which is tied to the US dollar, and you have XAUT, which is the gold stable coin. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Outside of Bitcoin, in terms of stable coins, my favorite is the XAUT. | ||
| Bitcoin, obviously, is what I hold most of, but XAUT is really exciting. | ||
| And we can talk about what that is because I think that's a game changer in itself, that stablecoin. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, this is exciting stuff. | ||
| What's sort of your long-term vision for this project? | ||
| Because I mean, this just launched and it's already kind of a paradigm changer. | ||
| But, you know, what sort of gaps do you see this really filling? | ||
| What sort of needs do you see this filling, especially for, you know, Rumble viewers? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I see like big tech having complete control of everything. | ||
| They're biased. | ||
| They're censorious. | ||
| They have all this control. | ||
| What we're trying to do at Rumble is do the opposite of that. | ||
| We don't want to be biased. | ||
| We don't want to have control on the creator or the user. | ||
| We're definitely not going to be censorious. | ||
| So we want to give the power back to the user and back to the creator. | ||
| We want to step away from what you should own and what should be yours, your own content, your own speech, your own finance. | ||
| And we just want to be the utility that runs underneath that. | ||
| We want to be the resources. | ||
| We want to be the cloud for you. | ||
| We want to be the platform for you. | ||
| We want to be the apps for you. | ||
| We want to be all the utilities. | ||
| And we think that's enough. | ||
| That's a good business in itself. | ||
| We think a freedom-first business across all points of the ecosystem is better than a controlled style business that Google has or the large tech companies have. | ||
| We think that as we move in the future, 10 years from now, that's going to be something that's going to be desired by most of the world. | ||
| And we're already seeing that. | ||
| Rumble's big because of that. | ||
| So we're already seeing that people want to be able to say what they want to say. | ||
| They don't want someone coming in and telling them what they can or cannot say. | ||
| So yeah, that's where we're going. | ||
| I think we're getting some rants coming in and some tips coming in from the wallet. | ||
| I'm going to take a look. | ||
| I think it'd be cool to send one on the fly here. | ||
| So see the versatility. | ||
| Yeah, I love it. | ||
| I mean, yeah, because that's the thing with the big tech. | ||
| I mean, this is a conversation that's been had for years, but it really is disturbing how we're used to the fact that these big tech companies who are sort of arbiters for the public conversation in many ways are quite open that they have an agenda. | ||
| And it's an agenda that's completely out of step, probably more than just half the country. | ||
| I mean, I would say the majority of the country has an appetite for freedom. | ||
| I mean, that's like a very low bar. | ||
| And, you know, we've been hearing about it for so many years now where I think some people are kind of used to the fact that we have these massive, massive billion dollar corporations that quite literally openly have an agenda. | ||
| And it's just something that's, it's something that like people need to like wrap their head around. | ||
| It's like, we don't have to live this way. | ||
| This is optional. | ||
| Like you don't need to participate in this racket, quite frankly. | ||
| And that's what's so like why Rumble has obviously tapped a nerve, but it's just kind of oxygen in a way where you guys aren't interested in like meddling in people's business. | ||
| You just want to provide them a platform. | ||
| Like it's a very kind of, you know, it's a very simple presentation, but it's, it's so offensive to this, again, this big tech consensus, which is, no, we're going to steer the conversation in the correct direction because we have this overarching agenda, so to speak. | ||
| But that's what's so exciting out now with the wallets. | ||
| I mean, there's obviously a huge, huge gap. | ||
| I mean, for this, I mean, the appetite's going to be insane. | ||
| I mean, we're already seeing it. | ||
| We're already seeing people mixing it up in chat. | ||
| You had mentioned the gold-backed crypto. | ||
| What is sort of the relationship between Bitcoin and gold? | ||
| Because I'm obviously a bit more familiar with sort of silver and gold and we've seen the prices on the rise. | ||
| What is the relationship between that and Bitcoins? | ||
| Because for a lot of people, Bitcoin is this invisible thing. | ||
| It's quite anxiety-inducing to some regard because you can't hold it. | ||
| And it's not necessarily something you can just evaluate with your eyes and hands. | ||
| Yeah, no, I just actually sent while you're speaking right now, I sent XAUT to the Tim Cast channel. | ||
| So XA-U-T, about $100 worth of XAUT is what I just sent. | ||
| And as you can see, it says $99 at the top and 99 cents. | ||
| That's most likely because gold went down in price a little bit. | ||
| You're now holding a gold-backed stable coin in your Rumble wallet. | ||
| So I just sent you $100 worth of gold. | ||
| Now, if gold goes down in price, it's going to go lower. | ||
| It's going to go higher if it goes higher in price. | ||
| And that's now in your wallet in real time as we've been chatting here on stream. | ||
| So what's really awesome about this stable coin is that I love this because up until now, I've been holding a lot of gold in the GLD ETFs. | ||
| I've been holding a lot of gold in my stock accounts. | ||
| But there's a 40 basis point management fee for these ETFs or 30 basis points, depending on which ETF you're holding on, whatever that gold ETF is. | ||
| And you're losing 40 basis points every year for a management fee for them holding gold. | ||
| With XAUT, not only is there no annual management fee for when you buy gold, there's at times you get the price lower than spot. | ||
| Sometimes you get higher than spot. | ||
| Most of the time, you're getting at spot and sometimes lower, but there is no annual management fee on XAUT at all. | ||
| And like that means over 10 years, you're losing like 4% of your holdings to a management fee on the GLD. | ||
| Whereas XAUT, once you buy it, it's yours. | ||
| It moves with spot all day long. | ||
| And even better, you can take your XAUT token and redeem it for physical gold in a vault in Switzerland. | ||
| So you're actually buying real gold. | ||
| There's all these theories of the GLD and all these other ETFs. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've never seen their vaults or their safes, but you can go and see your gold. | ||
| You can get your gold in a safe in Switzerland with your XAUT. | ||
| It is real. | ||
| Every XAUT is representative, has its representative gold as its backing in a vault in Switzerland. | ||
| And to me, that's like owning physical gold, basically. | ||
| But it's digital gold, but it's backed one-to-one to physical gold. | ||
| And for me, that's far better than any ETF out there that's charging a 40 basis management fee, 40 basis point management fee. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I love that. | ||
| With crypto, I mean, maybe to get more into the political philosophical side, so to speak, what do you think is driving so much interest and demand for crypto? | ||
| And in addition to that, maybe a second part of the question, how do you see Rumble specifically kind of channeling this, whatever this motivation is? | ||
| The massive interest in crypto. | ||
| What about crypto makes it a game changer? | ||
| I guess would be the question. | ||
| And then beyond that, where does Rumble come in specifically as we progress forward? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think we started seeing that this morning. | ||
| So the CEO of Tether was rating some streams and sending money to some gamers and some random streamers on the internet on Rumble. | ||
| And a lot of these people didn't even really understand what was Tether. | ||
| What is USDT? | ||
| What did they just receive? | ||
| Is that dollars? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| So Rumble is broadening the audience of crypto today as we've launched this. | ||
| It is broadening. | ||
| The creators are starting to learn that never were crypto enthusiasts, probably never had a crypto wallet. | ||
| And now they have a crypto wallet and now they're receiving income through crypto on their streams. | ||
| They are learning very quickly. | ||
| A whole new cohort of an audience is learning very quickly what crypto is, what USDT is, what XAUT is, what Bitcoin is. | ||
| And that's what Rumble's doing. | ||
| Rumble's taking it to the masses to a segment of audience that has never really seen this before. | ||
| And we're starting to see that today alone. | ||
| And I think that's really exciting because crypto has been very confined to an enthusiast crowd. | ||
| There's a real loyal crypto enthusiast crowd out there. | ||
| It's been growing, but it's been growing slowly. | ||
| I think with Rumble, we can really mainstream this to a whole different world. | ||
| People that are interested in politics, people that are interested in gaming, people that have never really explored the crypto universe are going to get a taste of it for the very first time on Rumble. | ||
| Not only is the creator receiving something and saying on stream earlier this morning, what is that? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| What did I just get? | ||
| And then figuring it out on the fly as people in the chat are helping them, but they have thousands of viewers that are seeing that too and learning with that creator what that was. | ||
| That's a stable coin. | ||
| That's called Tether. | ||
| It's backed by the US dollar. | ||
| That's Bitcoin. | ||
| That's Tether Gold. | ||
| Because I saw the first one come in. | ||
| I was like, is that a Wi-Fi password? | ||
|
unidentified
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What is it? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just the logo of Tether and it's USDT, which is one-to-one to the US dollar. | ||
| So for five USDT is equal to five US dollars. | ||
| So, you know, I think the world will get there. | ||
| I think Rumble will be the lead in letting the world know. | ||
| And I'm just so excited to be a part of that and be the very first large platform to be doing something like this. | ||
| Well, and it's super intuitive because, I mean, again, for guys like me, we're kind of simple simpletons in a lot of ways. | ||
| And the thing with cryptos, it's been so much to digest. | ||
| Like, okay, I understand the importance of it. | ||
| I understand its role. | ||
| I understand why, in many ways, it's the future. | ||
| But I tried to participate. | ||
| And beyond like, you know, the big houses who take these massive cuts off when you try to, you know, purchase them, it's just like you're drinking from a fire hose. | ||
| And what makes the Rumble wallet so refreshing? | ||
| Like, I set my account up in literally like 90 seconds. | ||
| Like, it was very simple. | ||
| I just used a Rumble login. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's super intuitive. | ||
| I mean, it's very, very easy to kind of comprehend and digest. | ||
| And like you said, when there are these moving parts, these different coins coming in or whatever, you can actually sort of it's tangible what the value of it is quite quickly. | ||
| And it's so refreshing. | ||
| No, it is. | ||
| It's, you know, for me, this has been a giant learning experience in the last. | ||
| I've been in crypto for a very long time. | ||
| I think I lost a computer with crypto from probably like a decade ago. | ||
| That's obviously no fun. | ||
| But, you know, building this wallet alongside Tether and Tether being the largest stable coin in the world, the largest crypto company in the world, and the most probably one of the most profitable private companies in the world. | ||
| It's been a huge learning experience, like building this out and getting this out to the masses. | ||
| And it's been super fun. | ||
| And, you know, I'm just really excited to broaden this ecosystem. | ||
| I've been such a proponent of Bitcoin. | ||
| Prior to the 2024 elections, Rumble, you know, didn't really do anything in the crypto space. | ||
| And then after post-2024 elections, when President Trump won, we stepped on the gas. | ||
| We launched a treasury strategy at Rumble. | ||
| We now, Rumble even holds Bitcoin in its treasury. | ||
| And now we're, you know, not only are we holding Bitcoin, but we're creating and broadening this ecosystem by building the wallet and introducing it to creators, introducing it to millions of users that have never touched crypto before. | ||
| So I think this is the first step in what we'll see is crypto kind of taking over Bitcoin kind of taking over the world. | ||
| I really do believe that the banking systems are so archaic. | ||
| Not only do they do crazy stuff like the trucker protesters and shut down their accounts, but like what you cannot do with the Rumble wallet. | ||
| No government, no Rumble, no nobody can shut down your wallet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But like, it's just so much better. | ||
| I can send $1,000 or $100 to you instantaneously with the lowest amount of fees out there. | ||
| These banks are charging fees. | ||
| It's crazy how the world is set up. | ||
| If you want to send like a remittance over to like Africa, they're charging like 15, 20% fees to the poorest countries in the world. | ||
| They're taking the most money from the poorest people. | ||
| And if you want to send, you know, to someone in America, the fees are a little bit lower. | ||
| There's more competitiveness. | ||
| But with like Tether or Tether Gold, it's instantaneous. | ||
| It's the lowest fees you'll ever see out there. | ||
| It's just, it's such a better system. | ||
| It's like, why? | ||
| How do the banks even compete against something so efficient and so good? | ||
| So I'm a big believer that this whole world is going to change and Bitcoin is the way. | ||
| It will lead the way. | ||
| Bitcoin and stablecoins will lead the way of changing finance forever. | ||
| And Rumble wants to be a part of that. | ||
| We want to introduce that to the masses and be the first mover in that. | ||
| Yeah, it's so exciting. | ||
| And everything's on the move right now. | ||
| People are looking for sort of more. | ||
| They want more out of this world. | ||
| And I totally agree. | ||
| I mean, I think this, I'm excited. | ||
| I'm going to be letting some tips fly this afternoon. | ||
| So I'm looking forward to it. | ||
| But I know you have a hard out here. | ||
| So, Chris, I just want to thank you so much for hopping on and explaining to me specifically. | ||
| I was just curious. | ||
| Yeah, no, no problem. | ||
| Super exciting stuff. | ||
| Where can people find you and where can people learn more about Rumble Wallet? | ||
| Yeah, so you can download the Rumble Wallet on the App Store, the Android store, and you can find me on X at Chris Pavlovsky and on True Social at Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Love it. | |
| Awesome. | ||
| Well, thank you so much, man. | ||
| We'll catch you. | ||
| Thank you, thank you for having me. | ||
| Of course, man, anytime. | ||
| All righty, guys. | ||
| Well, that was the Rumble Wallet. | ||
| This is super exciting stuff. | ||
| I mean, yeah, we're entering this, we've been entering this new paradigm, really, in the political sphere, as you guys are well aware, but just culturally, like things are changing. | ||
| Things are on the move. | ||
| This kind of stuff is just, it's necessary because it's got to be intuitive. | ||
| Like he was saying, for the masses to really, you know, sink their teeth into these sorts of things. | ||
| You have to make it tangible, make it like something that anyone can understand right away. | ||
| That was like I was telling him with the crypto. | ||
| You know, I've had a hard time really like digesting a lot of it. | ||
| I mean, I kind of get the idea. | ||
| But as far as presenting something that I can use in my everyday life and it's easy, I can literally just press a button. | ||
| Boom, you got your, you know, USD or T or whatever. | ||
| So really cool stuff. | ||
| I'm thankful for Chris for hopping on. | ||
| With that, we have some stories to get into. | ||
| The first story, obviously, let me get into the news mood now and get into the politics mood. | ||
| As you probably saw and you saw in the title, U.S., this is from ABC News, U.S. seizes Russian-flagged oil tanker in North Atlantic and a second tanker. | ||
| This is really, just, you know what it is? | ||
| It's like, you know, in the NBA and a player just hits a ridiculous three and then he comes down the court, the next possession drills another ridiculous three. | ||
| That's what they call a hot hand. | ||
| And the next shot after you've drained two difficult threes would be called the heat check. | ||
| This is what you call a heat check because it took a huge dub in Venezuela. | ||
| Let's let it fly again. | ||
| Heat check. | ||
| Beautiful, beautiful, beautifully played. | ||
| So we'll read here. | ||
| We'll see what ABC News has to say. | ||
| The U.S. on Wednesday seized two oil tankers linked to Venezuela, including the Russian-flagged Marinera, Marinera. | ||
| Sorry, I was trying to get the pronunciation right before the show. | ||
| Oil tanker, formerly known as the Bella One, that's what everyone calls it, that had evaded a U.S. blockade back in December. | ||
| If you don't remember in the Caribbean, we obviously had set this blockade up around Venezuela. | ||
| Well, the Bella One had actually evaded our Coast Guard and other assets that were in the area. | ||
| So this Bella One ship has been on our radar for quite a bit of time. | ||
| The ship was transitioning in the North Atlantic, according to three sources familiar with their operation. | ||
| The operation was being carried out by the U.S. Coast Guard and other military assets, according to one source. | ||
| Russian military vessels were in the area as the situation unfolded. | ||
| In a post on X, U.S. European Command confirmed the seizure of the tanker in the North Atlantic. | ||
| The U.S. on Wednesday also seized another tanker in the Caribbean, according to Homeland Security Kirstenome. | ||
| So there are two tankers that have been seized. | ||
| So that makes four tankers so far in Operation Southern Spear, which is sort of our pincer movement on Venezuela. | ||
| We'd seized two ships last month. | ||
| And in two pre-dawn operations today, the Coast Guard conducted back-to-back, meticulously coordinated boardings of two, quote, ghost fleet tanker ships, one in the North Atlantic Sea, one in international waters near the Caribbean. | ||
| Both vessels, the motor tanker Bella One and the motor tanker Sophia, were either docked in Venezuela or on route to it. | ||
| So we'll break this down. | ||
| Ghost fleet, you're probably familiar with the term. | ||
| If not, effectively, this is what sanctioned or embargoed countries use to evade sanctions is obviously, as everyone knows, you can kind of play it fast and loose with where you flag your ships. | ||
| So often people use Panama. | ||
| This is a common port that people will, again, register their ships in just because it's favorable for taxes, international law. | ||
| A variety of reasons these companies do this. | ||
| Cruise ships are often registered in Panama. | ||
| This is just quite common. | ||
| Panama has really worked their books around to ensure that they remain sort of the go-to for flagging. | ||
| Well, in this case, ghost ships, as they call them, ghost fleet, Russia's been using it for years because they've been sanctioned quite extensively by the West. | ||
| This is how they're able to move specifically oil around the world is by kind of playing it a little fast and loose with some of the registration. | ||
| And it makes these ships kind of ghosts, so to speak. | ||
| So obviously, this is a huge, huge play here. | ||
| I have the tweet from Kirsty Noam right here where she breaks down. | ||
| Look, she's just chest beating as she should. | ||
| But we do have the video here of the operation in place. | ||
| So obviously you see the chopper rolling up to this massive tanker. | ||
| The Bella One is a fairly large boat, but the Sophia is one of the largest oil tankers in the world, which makes it even more remarkable that these ships are just able to operate with a degree of impunity. | ||
| But as you can see here, we got the video. | ||
| These boys roll up. | ||
| This literally looks like Rainbow Six Siege. | ||
| Like, this is so sick. | ||
| I hope they had AirPods in and they were listening to like Fortunate Sun or something. | ||
| I think that would be necessary. | ||
| But you can see the squad rolling up. | ||
| Comms are looking good. | ||
| These boys just rolling in, using the railing. | ||
| That's what you want to see. | ||
| We don't want any Biden slip-ups on the staircase. | ||
| That would be quite embarrassing. | ||
| But they roll up. | ||
| They do their thing. | ||
| You know, another chopper rolls up. | ||
| These boys dropping in. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Bang. | ||
| Look how many of these boys are on there. | ||
| We love this. | ||
| These guys are having so much fun. | ||
| This is kind of one thing. | ||
| This is tangent aside. | ||
| When you speak to Liptards, they always portray our servicemen as if going to war is like this great tragedy for them. | ||
| And they really don't want to go conduct these sort of operations. | ||
| These guys are loving this. | ||
| I mean, they're probably a little nervy, I would imagine, but they're loving this. | ||
| Like, this is sick. | ||
| This is what they've dreamed of from a small, being a small child. | ||
| As have I, like, part of me has a bit of FOMO watching this, but trust me, these dudes are having a blast. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| But yeah, so this is a massive operation. | ||
| Obviously, we saw the news break this morning, kind of out of nowhere. | ||
| Again, we've been tracking, we've been tracking the Bella One for quite a bit of time. | ||
| The interesting thing that we saw, so there's a couple moving parts here, is the boat, the Bella One, was by all accounts empty, right? | ||
| Which makes it interesting because when we started pursuing the Bella One, let's see if it actually includes this in the article. | ||
| So we see here Russian Maritime Register of Shipping list of the ship, and they painted a Russian flag on the ship's side. | ||
| This was on December 31st. | ||
| They had previously flowed a false Panamanian flag, again, part of their shadow fleet where they kind of just play it fast and loose with the flagging. | ||
| What was interesting is they had Russian submarines flanking the ship. | ||
| So obviously we saw here at the top of the article, Russian military vessels were in the area as the situation unfolded. | ||
| So the question, sorry, a little congestion. | ||
| Maybe I need some tips. | ||
| Maybe you guys can send me some Bitcoin and it'll fix it. | ||
| I actually don't even get the Bitcoin. | ||
| It just goes to the company, but whatever. | ||
| But where was I? | ||
| Yes, so yeah, so there was Russian submarines in the area, obviously, but the boat's empty. | ||
| So the question is, like, why does Russia care about this boat so much? | ||
| That is the question. | ||
| Why does Russia care about this boat so much? | ||
| This is really a fascinating thing to pontificate. | ||
| Okay, what was on that vessel that Russia was so panicked about? | ||
| It's a little bit of an open question. | ||
| I'm sure we'll get an answer to that shortly, but we can speculate a little bit. | ||
| One thing that was interesting is with the seizure of this boat, the UK provided support for us, the United Kingdom. | ||
| As you know, Trump's relationship with Keir Starmer hasn't been the greatest, mainly because Kier Starmer is like a bonehead. | ||
| That's the primary reason. | ||
| He's just like literally his popularity, his approval rating in Britain is lower than Maduro's. | ||
| And the Venezuelan diaspora across the world, you know, was exuberant after he was deposed. | ||
| So the fact that Maduro can literally put his country through hell and Starmer is still more unpopular really shows how much of a bonehead he is. | ||
|
unidentified
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Depressive. | |
| Yeah, it's depressing. | ||
| It's neither here nor there. | ||
| But the fact that the UK suddenly was very keen on working with the Americans, obviously the ship that was seized, the Bella 1, was seized in between. | ||
| I don't know if your geography heads. | ||
| Was seized in between Iceland and Scotland. | ||
| So in the North Atlantic. | ||
| So they were quite a distance away from the U.S. | ||
| So we were going to need some local support. | ||
| So the British obviously provided some support. | ||
| But what's interesting, this was an article that came out November 11th. | ||
| So this was two months ago. | ||
| This was when we began Operation Southern Spear. | ||
| This is when we started conducting operations in the Caribbean to apply pressure to the Maduro regime. | ||
| And what had happened back in November is the UK, we can see the title here, U.S., or sorry, rather, UK suspends some intelligence sharing with U.S. over boat strike concerns and major break. | ||
| So in the Caribbean, the UK, clearly not on the same page with the Trump administration, and they said, look, we're just, we're cutting our deal where we do intelligence sharing. | ||
| You may be asking, why does the UK conduct intelligence operations in the Caribbean? | ||
| Well, they have territory there. | ||
| They own the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Turks and Caicos. | ||
| They have a lot of possessions in the Caribbean that are still British territory for now. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Maybe we'll make a move here soon. | ||
| But jokes, kind of, not really. | ||
| But yeah, so the British do actually maintain some assets in the Caribbean. | ||
| Therefore, it necessitated an intelligence sort of sharing operation with the U.S. | ||
| Well, the UK stopped doing that because they're gay. | ||
| That's kind of the easiest. | ||
| I'm not even real. | ||
| That's not even really hyperbole. | ||
| They're just gay and they don't like seeing the United States impose their will in their neighborhood. | ||
| So they broke this off in November. | ||
| So the question is, if the UK was so, this is why we're focusing specifically on the British aspect here, is if the UK was so opposed to American operations, was so opposed to the way that we are conducting affairs in regards to Venezuela, then why were they working in collaboration with us in seizing this tanker, right? | ||
| And seizing the Bella One. | ||
| Why all of a sudden, even though two months ago they had this hard break with us, were they like jumping right back on board to again carry out this operation? | ||
| Again, it's another question is how come the UK back in November was so adamant that this was the wrong decision, that they had concerns over the legality and that sort of thing. | ||
| But then the strike actually occurs and Keir Starmer doesn't really come out with a, or sorry, rather, the deposition of Nicholas Maduro happens, you know, last week. | ||
| And Keir Starmer's response was not what we saw in November. | ||
| His response wasn't, this is illegal. | ||
| That's what you saw from a lot of EU leaders. | ||
| His response was more measured. | ||
| He's like, yeah, I like international law, but he's like, we weren't involved, but I'm not going to come out and give a full throat of condemnation. | ||
| It's probably because the UK perhaps knows something that a lot of these other European leaders don't. | ||
| Perhaps they understand the larger geopolitical play that has been occurring. | ||
| And again, you're looking at this ship. | ||
| If the Russians are so keen on defending this ship, this random tanker by all accounts, you have to ask yourself, what was on that boat? | ||
| One second, I'm going to throw a Zen up in the upper deck quick. | ||
| I'm just trying to be open and frank with you guys. | ||
| I used to sort of pretend like I was this buttoned up politico, but there's no need for that. | ||
| We're going straight up to the luxury box live on air. | ||
| So this all goes down. | ||
| Obviously, this raid happens this morning. | ||
| The British assist with us. | ||
| But yeah, the question arises, why was the Russians so keen on protecting this ship? | ||
| This was obviously some thoughts here from this poster on Twitter. | ||
| There is no oil in this tanker. | ||
| There is something else, something precious enough to command a submarine export. | ||
| So as we know, the Venezuela operation caught the Venezuelans off guard. | ||
| The Venezuelans were aware that the Trump administration did have an interest in regime change. | ||
| They did have an interest in deposing Maduro. | ||
| They had an interest in seizing the oil assets because those were ours in the first place, and we're not really keen on turning these over to the Russian and the Chinese. | ||
| And Russia is aware of this. | ||
| Russia is keenly aware. | ||
| I made this point yesterday, and I made it on IRL yesterday as well. | ||
| Is Russia's keenly aware that flooding the world economy with Venezuelan oil in many ways grinds their machine to a halt? | ||
| It's going to make it, their goals in Ukraine, far more difficult. | ||
| And sort of the question, obviously, when the Trump administration, Trump administration came in was, what are we going to do about Ukraine, right? | ||
| Is Ukraine really a vital enough asset to the sort of vision that America, that the Trump administration has for our foreign policy, how we ought to conduct foreign policy affairs? | ||
| Is it worth going, you know, balls to the walls, getting behind Ukraine? | ||
| And the Trump administration's calculation was it's not ideal if Russia takes Ukraine. | ||
| This is obviously not like 100% favorable for us, but this isn't worth completely eviscerating our country over. | ||
| This isn't worth starting, potentially starting World War III over. | ||
| This is correctly understood a country, Russia, acting in its self-interest and its sphere and its neighborhood and imposing its will. | ||
| That's what was happening. | ||
| We could go all the way. | ||
| I mean, we've been talking Ukraine for five years. | ||
| The whole conversation about like, oh, well, it's a non-starter to have a Western-aligned country right on their border, especially such a vital part. | ||
| I mean, you have the great plane here, the great European plane from Ukraine, which is basically just a giant funnel into Russia. | ||
| Every time Russia has been attacked, like Napoleon, they use the Great European Plane, again, as a funnel into Moscow to then take Moscow. | ||
| So all this to say. | ||
| The Trump administration had to make a calculation. | ||
| What are we going to do about Ukraine? | ||
| Well, I suspect, they haven't said this aloud, but I suspect along with other people, people far smarter than me, have made this calculation that the Trump administration understands that by settling a score in our hemisphere, by imposing our will in our hemisphere, in our neighborhood with Venezuela, that will actually have a much more tangible impact on Russia's ability to conduct their operation in Ukraine than anything we could send over to Ukraine. | ||
| Because right now, all we've been doing thus far is sort of propping up Ukraine with munitions, with money, like blank checks. | ||
| That's been the UK strategy. | ||
| The Americans realized with the Trump administration, they realized, oh, there's a completely other option here that was not even evaluated by the Biden administration, which is you depose Maduro, you release the oil reserves. | ||
| Again, you just allow private equity to come in and release the oil reserves. | ||
| You will hamstring Russia, right? | ||
| Because Russia's, again, how do they fund everything in Russia through the energy sector, through selling energy to Europe and Central Asia? | ||
| Well, you drop the oil price down to the, I mean, you flood the market, like a 50% increase potentially in oil reserves hitting the market. | ||
| That's going to tank the price of oil. | ||
| Russia is going to have to sell barrels for much, much cheaper, and they're going to lose a lot of income. | ||
| They're going to have a very difficult time generating money, funds for their military operation. | ||
| And that's going to have, again, a much more tangible impact. | ||
| Again, if Ukraine is a priority for you, it's not for me personally, but if it is for you, this is the most amazing operation ever. | ||
| That's why it's so funny seeing Libtards online chastising Trump's decision to depose Maduro because I was under the impression that Ukraine was democracy's last stand. | ||
| That's what they always said thus. | ||
| They were like, if Ukraine falls, then Western democracy, as we know, it's going to fall because Russia is Putler 2.0 and he's going to take all of Europe. | ||
| Well, if that's truly what you believe, you would be clapping like a seal at the fact that Trump has decided to go in in Venezuela because that's going to completely destabilize Russia. | ||
| And by extension, Iran. | ||
| Iran's kind of in a similar position. | ||
| So if you're a pro-Ukraine, if you're a Russia hawk or these sorts of things, this is fantastic news. | ||
| So one thing I thought was funny regarding the operation, this was from a poster, Adam Wren. | ||
| He's an analyst. | ||
| He said, I worked with someone a few years ago on a project tracking these dark fleet tankers used by Iran and Russia, Ghost Fleet, whatever you want to call them. | ||
| They were struggling to find definitive evidence, tying them to specific oligarchs until someone pointed out that they were named after their daughters, Bella, Katya, etc. | ||
| So I think what's been demonstrated ultimately, I think what's been demonstrated ultimately in these last week, the last week or so in regards to Venezuela, in regards to Russia, and if you even turn back the clock in regards to Iran, is that our global adversaries are not terribly competent. | ||
| They're human beings. | ||
| They're not sort of these masterminds. | ||
| I remember when the Russia-Ukraine war kicked off, you saw a lot of people, mainly in like the dissident right-wing circles, who were celebrating this. | ||
| And they were saying, well, we're moving into this multipolar world where American influence will retract a bit. | ||
| And then you'll see these regional powers finally kind of rise up and impose their will in their neighborhood. | ||
| And it'll kind of return to a pre-World War II sort of global playing field, right? | ||
| Board, so to speak. | ||
| I don't think that's the case anymore. | ||
| I really don't see how that's the case because we're just seeing incompetence from our supposed global adversaries. | ||
| I mean, Russia has been a complete disaster. | ||
| They've been grinded to a halt. | ||
| This is embarrassing, quite frankly, what's going on in Ukraine for them. | ||
| I mean, the initial projections when they needed to entrain, including my projection, was this is going to be over in a week or two. | ||
| Like, Ukraine's a minnow compared to Russia. | ||
| And in our heads, we still had Soviet Union-level military. | ||
| Just wasn't the case at all. | ||
| The only military operation they'd really shown any sort of level of their ability in was in the Caucasus, right? | ||
| And their operations in the Caucasus. | ||
| And so we didn't really know what Russia was going to be capable of. | ||
| And we found out not much. | ||
| Like, this operation was so far has been a disaster. | ||
| They've lost a lot of men. | ||
| A tangent with Russia, something that's interesting is Russia already has a huge demographic crunch. | ||
| This is the thing that no one talks about. | ||
| Tim talks about it, to be fair. | ||
| But Russia has a huge demographic crunch. | ||
| So what had happened in World War II, if you look through the history books, the Russians lost a lot of men, a lot of men. | ||
| The Eastern Front was a meat grinder. | ||
| So, you know, the Soviet Union obviously was just, it was cannon fodder. | ||
| They were throwing young men into the buzzsaw that was the Eastern Front. | ||
| And they lost a tremendous amount of men. | ||
| And what you see, if you, if I should have pulled it up probably, but what you see is if you look at a population pyramid, right? | ||
| You've probably seen these before. | ||
| It shows age brackets like every five years. | ||
| And then it shows the width of how many people are in each generation. | ||
| So in the United States, obviously it kind of goes like that because, you know, the boomers had a lot of people and then it's kind of coming back down to earth. | ||
| What you see in Russia is this: boom, boom, boom. | ||
| I don't know if I illustrated that quite well, but that's what Russia has because what happened in World War II is they lost so many men that it actually had an impact on how many people came into the world. | ||
| So they had a baby boom of sorts similar to Western Europe, but because so many men died in World War II, so many Russian men died, they actually have this problem where they call it the echoes of World War II and Russian societies. | ||
| They have these echoes where you get reminded about every 20 years that, hey, we lost like tens of millions of guys in World War II. | ||
| And it's been pretty crippling for Russia. | ||
| If you look throughout Russian history, post-war Russian history, you actually see the time where there's the most political unrest, the times when there's the most upturning. | ||
| It's in these moments of echo, right? | ||
| It's in these echoes, these periods of echoes. | ||
| So they're about to have that again. | ||
| They're about to have that again. | ||
| They're going to have an additional echo added to their country because they've lost so many men in this special operation. | ||
| Many speculated the whole reason they conducted this operation in the first place was to, again, add some people into the country. | ||
| So Russia, and then they have these big issues, like 50% of their country is going to be Muslim by the end of the century. | ||
| And that's because they already had minorities in the country, like Circassians and these sorts of people that were Muslims, Chechnyans. | ||
| So they already have these demographic problems. | ||
| So Russia, you look at Russia and you look at their long-term projections, you look at their military projection, you look at their ability to carry out global affairs, and you're sitting back and you're like, how are they going to compete with the United States? | ||
| It's just the math isn't there. | ||
| And then today they get struck with the most embarrassing blow possible, which is a ship that is theirs by all accounts, that was fairly close to their territory, gets boarded and seized by, from the video, it looks like maybe two or three dozen American troops. | ||
| I mean, what is going on? | ||
| And then you compound that with the fact that whatever was on that ship, they did feel it was worthwhile to sort of posture and defend. | ||
| The calculus you have to run here is there had to be weapons on board. | ||
| There had to be weapons that they were attempting to get to Venezuela. | ||
| Again, the Kirsty Gnome and the American delegation has said that this boat was ported in Venezuela at some point and it was inbound for Venezuela potentially. | ||
| So it's just a total humiliation. | ||
| They can't even defend their allies properly. | ||
| Like America, I think, you know, the money we were sending to Ukraine was insane. | ||
| It was ridiculous. | ||
| All right, we're still sending it. | ||
| But I think it was about 3% to 4% of our actual budget that would have been allocated for that sort of thing. | ||
| So with like 3% to 40% of our military budget, we were basically propping up a state against Russia. | ||
| Meanwhile, Russia, Venezuela, Venezuela goes down, they're in serious trouble. | ||
| And we take it in 88 minutes and there was no Russians to be seen. | ||
| You're seeing a lot of Russian commentators really laying into Putin saying, this was embarrassing. | ||
| This was weak. | ||
| You know, you knew Maduro. | ||
| I mean, we saw the videos when they showed the videos of their military training exercises and it was like these Gordidas, you know, that's what we call them. | ||
| These chunky little ladies running around with guns. | ||
| They don't know what they're doing. | ||
| So surely Putin saw that. | ||
| Surely the Russians saw that and they said, wow, we should probably bolster Venezuela. | ||
| And they didn't and they did not. | ||
| And we took it in 88 minutes. | ||
| So again, just massive disruption. | ||
| I want to read here, this was Russia's statement. | ||
| This was from OSINT Defender. | ||
| This is their first statement following the seizure of that initial ship. | ||
| This was the release. | ||
| On December 24th, 2025, the ship Marinera, I'm just going to call it Marinara. | ||
| Let me get some Mazzis in here, maybe Mozarella sticks. | ||
| I've been calling them Mazzis for years. | ||
| Just a little game for you guys. | ||
| The ship, the Marinera, received a temporary permit to sail under the state flag of the Russian Federation in accordance with Russian legislation and international law and norms. | ||
| Today, around 15 o'clock Moscow time in the open sea outside the territorial waters of any states, U.S. naval forces boarded the ship and communication with the ship was lost. | ||
| In accordance with the norms of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, a regime of freedom of navigation operates in the open sea, and no state has the right to use force against ships properly registered in the jurisdiction of other states. | ||
| Does this language to you sound like a country that is competing with the United States for influence on the global stage? | ||
| This sounds like the press release of like some bootleg country like Slovakia. | ||
| Like after we conducted our affairs in Venezuela and we cleaned up the situation, the prime minister or president or whoever their leader is of Slovakia, he like released this statement where he's whining about international law. | ||
| Because when you're a minnow, that's what you do. | ||
| Because the only thing that's really protecting you, by all accounts, is like other people. | ||
| For example, Canada. | ||
| Like Canada's existence is just contingent on what the United States feels like. | ||
| In many regards, the only reason they exist is because we just haven't decided to take it yet. | ||
| That's the reality of the situation. | ||
| Now, Russia making these appeals, like in their first press release following the seizure, to appeal to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. | ||
| Is that not the most embarrassing thing? | ||
| Like all they can muster up isn't, we're gonna get revenge or we're gonna take the boat back or we're gonna respond, you know, with force. | ||
| That's something Trump would do. | ||
| No, instead, they just say, well, you broke the law. | ||
| You broke this. | ||
| You broke this UN convention that only the UN convention that only Americans can actually enforce, by the way. | ||
| That's what we broke. | ||
| That's what we violated, apparently, which doesn't even really seem to be the case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So. | |
| Just it's just embarrassing. | ||
| And this is what you're seeing all across all across global politics is five years ago, all of us were sitting there thinking, well, you know, maybe we are heading to this multipolar world. | ||
| Maybe American influence is declining. | ||
| Afghanistan was embarrassing. | ||
| Afghanistan was a huge blow to the sort of American hegemony. | ||
| Maybe we aren't this. | ||
| Maybe the unipolar moment's gone, right? | ||
| That was kind of what everyone was saying. | ||
| Everyone was saying, all right, well, it looks like China is going to do their thing. | ||
| Russia's going to do their thing. | ||
| And Iran and France, Brazil, Israel, these countries are going to do their thing. | ||
| And that Trump comes in, and this is not the case. | ||
| We still are the unipolar power. | ||
| China hasn't taken Taiwan. | ||
| I don't even anticipate them doing so, especially after the message we sent in Venezuela. | ||
| Russia still hasn't taken Ukraine. | ||
| Where's our opposition? | ||
| We're still the top dog. | ||
| There's no question about it. | ||
| We're still the top dog. | ||
| We are unrivaled in power. | ||
| We can blackbag the president of a fairly large power, Venezuela, certainly a large regional power. | ||
| We can blackbag their president on a Friday night and be back in Miami for dinner. | ||
| That's the reality of the situation. | ||
| That is the reality of America as it stands in 2026. | ||
| So dramatic departure. | ||
| And speaking of embarrassing global regimes that maybe aren't as influential as we previously thought, we have Iran. | ||
| I mean, Iran is really just another example of a country that has been postured as this potential thorn in the side of American hegemony, has been sort of positioned in the media as sort of this potential disruptor to American-led global order. | ||
| These people that are big advocates for BRICS, they always point to this. | ||
| BRICS in and of itself is hilarious. | ||
| It's a federation of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. | ||
| South Africa was included in the initial charter for whatever reason. | ||
| They don't even have autonomy in their own country, let alone globally. | ||
| But if you look and break apart the name BRICS, the term BRICS, you have like three countries in there that have overlapping land claims. | ||
| China and India claim each other's land. | ||
| So how are you supposed to build? | ||
| And China and Russia have the same strategic interests. | ||
| They both want to dominate Central Asia. | ||
| So how do you even have an alliance, sort of a bloc that is the anti-Western bloc, when those countries aren't even on the same page whatsoever? | ||
| It's an alliance of convenience for them. | ||
| It's an alliance of what they're against. | ||
| And as we know, as we've seen on the global stage time and time again, and as we've seen in every aspect of life, you are going to fail if you define yourself and what you're against. | ||
| You have to define yourself and what you are for. | ||
| And so BRICS is just fundamentally built on this premise of what they're against, and it's going to fail every single time. | ||
| Well, we're seeing in Iran, you know, we struck their Fordow when we caused a serious, inflicted a serious blow to their nuclear capabilities. | ||
| You know, this was last summer. | ||
| And all Iran really responded with was a strike to save face on our base in Qatar, which they told us about so no one even got hurt. | ||
| And some mean tweets from the Ayatollah. | ||
| That's all that really happened. | ||
| Not all. | ||
| That's literally all that happened. | ||
| Just absolute humiliation, again, for our global adversaries. | ||
| And now we're seeing in Iran, you've probably seen on Twitter, if you're on Twitter this morning, there's a lot of people that are saying, you know, Iran, the regime is under serious pressure. | ||
| We have this video, multiple videos coming out of Iran. | ||
| The cities of Abdinan and Malik Shahi. | ||
| I'm trying my best here. | ||
| These two cities have fallen in Iran. | ||
| We have video here. | ||
| This is an older video. | ||
| This is Damascus, but I was kind of looking for the text here. | ||
| But we also see this is a newer video. | ||
| This is from Iran. | ||
| This is what the protests are looking like. | ||
| So you're seeing these massive demonstrations. | ||
| There's a million videos like this. | ||
| I do want to, I want everyone to hold their horses a little bit on this. | ||
| I don't think the Iranian regime is on the ropes right now. | ||
| This was the write-up from Visegrad 24. | ||
| The Islamic regime in Iran is starting to crack. | ||
| There's two things going on. | ||
| One, the Iranian regime has been cracking for like 20 years now, 20 or 30 years. | ||
| Also, these protests are not unique. | ||
| I just looked up the list here to get a glance of major protest movements in Iran. | ||
| We've seen here since the revolution, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve. | ||
| We've seen 12 kind of major protest movements. | ||
| Something else that's worth considering, these two cities, Abdanon and Malik Shahi, are primarily Kurdish. | ||
| And I won't get into the intricacies of sort of Middle Eastern and Central Asian politics. | ||
| But the Kurds obviously are a bit bolstered right now because they've carved out an autonomous region in Syria as Syria has just continued to devolve. | ||
| They successfully, the Kurds successfully carved out a portion of Syria as sort of a Kurdish homeland, so to speak. | ||
| They are operating fairly independently. | ||
| They are operating as an independent country. | ||
| So Kurds who have an overlapping, you know what? | ||
| This would be easier. | ||
| I'll pull up a map here. | ||
| This is kind of my bread and butter here. | ||
| Google Maps. | ||
| It automatically went to Wakanda here, Wakanda, Illinois. | ||
| That is not what we want. | ||
| I'm just going to show you here on the map. | ||
| So the Kurds take up a space, a region. | ||
| Follow my mouse here. | ||
| And this region right here. | ||
| So this is where all the Kurds live. | ||
| And the Kurds, as you can see here by the map, don't have a homeland. | ||
| So when the Sykes-Picot agreement came through and the European powers, so Lebanon, Syria belonged to the French, Israel, Jordan, Egypt belonged to the British. | ||
| Iraq was going back and forth between British and French sort of influence, but it was Western aligned. | ||
| The Sykes-Picot agreement occurred the first half of the 20th century, in which that's how the French and British decided to divide up this land following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. | ||
| And what they tried to do, what they sought to do, was divide up the Middle East along ethnic lines. | ||
| They wanted to ensure that there wouldn't be constant warring occurring, which didn't work. | ||
| But they tried their best to divide these countries up along ethnic lines. | ||
| The problem is there's like a million ethnic groups in the Middle East, and the largest of which that was left without a homeland was the Kurds. | ||
| So again, I pointed out this massive region here that they control or that they are a majority in. | ||
| And they are left without a country. | ||
| They are left without sort of a homeland. | ||
| They're just a transnational group here. | ||
| And so it's caused a big issue, obviously. | ||
| And so the Kurds for years have sought to have a homeland for themselves. | ||
| And so this is why this matters in regards to Iran is because they do smell blood on the water. | ||
| The emperor has no clothes in many regards in Iran. | ||
| The Iranian society is liberalizing quite a bit. | ||
| You can look up, if you go on YouTube or it's probably on Rumble as well, or even TikTok, and you look up those people that'll walk around with a camera and film nightlife. | ||
| If you look up Tehran nightlife, you're going to see the women there wearing what you would expect to see in London or New York. | ||
| Like the women there, a few of them have a jobs on, but the most part, it reflects a pretty secular society. | ||
| And you're seeing actually across the Middle East, you're seeing a lot of secular reforms. | ||
| You're seeing these societies, maybe not liberalize, but certainly secularize. | ||
| I mean, infamously, Saudi Arabia is now letting women drive, which is a huge mistake, in my opinion. | ||
| I think the world should be going the other direction. | ||
| And then we can have the Asian conversation later. | ||
| But we can start with women for sure. | ||
| But it's a joke, kind of. | ||
| Again, not really a joke. | ||
| But you're seeing these secular reforms across the Middle East. | ||
| And so the Ayatollah, in many ways, the Iranian regime, the IRGC, they are on thin ice in a lot of regards. | ||
| The youth in Iran, and really the middle-aged people at this point, are kind of seeking to have a society that resembles the West a little more. | ||
| And again, whatever your opinion on this, it's neither here nor there. | ||
| The reality is with these protests, I want to say this. | ||
| I will consider these protests a viable threat to the Iranian regime if it's contingent on one thing, is if the IRGC, the ruling class in Iran, if you see some high-profile defections from the IRGC, if you see some high-profile politicians or generals or anything defect and back these protests, that's when you can think, okay, Iran might be in trouble here. | ||
| But that's the reason I pointed this out, the amount of protests they've had. | ||
| It's difficult to imagine that this will actually manifest into a full-scale color revolution in Iran. | ||
| But who knows? | ||
| You have Riza Pavla Pahlavi. | ||
| He's the exiled son of the last Shah of Iran. | ||
| Funny enough, he lived in Lubbock, Texas for a little while, and he married a blonde woman. | ||
| So he's kind of a patriot in many regards. | ||
| He's been in America for a very long time. | ||
| I think he lives in California or something like that. | ||
| A lot of these protests going on. | ||
| One thing that's a little interesting about these protests in Iran is they were calling for the return of Riza, Reza, however you say his name. | ||
| And that's kind of an interesting fold, especially seeing Kurdish protesters clamor for this. | ||
| Again, he's a liberal in many regards in the global sense, right? | ||
| Not like our Libtard sense, but he's like an actual liberal, wants to bring free market reform, constitutional rights, these sorts of things. | ||
| And he wants to bring that to Iran. | ||
| So if that ramps up, I mean, who does that favor? | ||
| Well, it favors Israel, certainly. | ||
| I mean, Israel and the Middle East would be unrivaled in power. | ||
| And I think that's kind of been their goal to be unrivaled in power in the Middle East. | ||
| Again, this isn't even like an anti-Israel point. | ||
| This is how every country sort of conducts affairs is they're all interested in dominating their region. | ||
| In Israel's case, they got to clear the playing field. | ||
| The Syria situation hasn't necessarily gone their way or how they expected it to, but certainly removing Assad was more favorable for them. | ||
| And then obviously, Iran is sort of their big adversary to the point where these Abraham Accords, the whole reason the Abraham Accords have come about is the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, even Qatar, share the same regional adversary as Israel. | ||
| Obviously, they're Sunni Muslims, and then Iran is Shia Muslims, which is kind of like Catholicism and Protestantism on steroids. | ||
| Like, you know, how in the 1500s, you had all these wars between Protestants and Catholics. | ||
| Imagine the 1500s today. | ||
| So imagine like, you know, the Middle East and its current iteration is having these sectarian divides, sectarian conflicts. | ||
| That is sort of what's going on. | ||
| And so these Sunni countries view Israel as like, okay, well, you know, I don't like Jews very much, but, you know, Iran is kind of a bigger threat to our, you know, regional stability or these sorts of things. | ||
| And so that's how the Abraham Accords have really come about. | ||
| Is this, again, more of a situation of convenience, shared adversary rather than like, you know, John Lennon's imagine, Kumbaya. | ||
| It's all geopolitics. | ||
| But I'm going to be following, this is kind of my bread and butter. | ||
| So I'm going to be following the situation in Iran quite closely. | ||
| And again, I'll let you guys know if it's actually going to turn into something tangible, something where we can expect to see something exciting. | ||
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All right. | |
| Well, that was today's sponsor. | ||
| Very happy to have Field of Greens on board. | ||
| Great product. | ||
| I actually use it quite extensively. | ||
| It's really good stuff. | ||
| I hope today's episode was sort of useful for you guys. | ||
| The geopolitics, I love the geopolitics. | ||
| I know it's kind of boring to some people, but I hope you found some value in it. | ||
| I would love to talk about it more. | ||
| So if there's some interest in that or some appetite, I think that could be really interesting to get into. | ||
| With that, you can follow me on X and Instagram at RealTate Brown. | ||
| Come give me a follow. | ||
| I'm trying to get the 10K. | ||
| That's what I really want because once you hit 10K, you know, it just looks good. | ||
| That's my only reason. | ||
| It's a purely surface level. | ||
| It's a very shallow reason. | ||
| But yeah, I want to get the 10K. | ||
| I think it'd be really exciting stuff. | ||
| So give me a follow. | ||
| Come hang out. | ||
| Tweet some stories at me. | ||
| I like picking up on y'all's stories. | ||
| Yesterday I used one that someone tweeted at me. | ||
| It was a great story on California. | ||
| We'll be back tonight for 8 p.m. for Timcast IRL. | ||
| We'll see you there. |