Maple Syrup and Soft Power

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jacob Shapiro (00:04):
Hello listeners.
Welcome back to another episodeof Geopolitical Cousins.
Marco and I are back at it.
The first hour is a continuationof our last episode.
We complete our geopolitical power draftfrom our last episode and then argue
about whether we needed to make somechanges based on how the selections fell.
Uh, Marco and I get into aheated debate about Canada and
where it belongs on the list.

(00:24):
Uh, from there we turn to the world andtalk about some things that are going on.
Uh, we talk about the big beautifulbudget Bill, what that means.
Some interesting disagreementbetween me and Marco on that.
Um, I basically try to get myselfcanceled by wading into issues related
to Israel Palestine antisemitism.
And then we close with somethoughts about South Africa.
Um, which is in the news forall sorts of strange reasons.

(00:46):
So hope you enjoy the episode.
Uh, we've appreciatedyour feedback so much.
You can keep writing to me atjacob@jacobshapiro.com with more feedback.
I forward it all toMarco and I promise here.
Um, in the next week or two, we will geta podcast specific email so that you can
make sure you send things to both of us.
Uh, really shouldn't take that long, butit's been a crazy, crazy couple of weeks.
So, um, we're so grateful tohave you all along for the ride.

(01:09):
Thank you for listening.
Thank you for leaving a rating.
Thank you for leaving a comment andespecially thank you for sharing
with anybody you think wouldbe interested in this podcast.
Uh, we'll see you at,
take us away, Marco.

Marko Papic (01:25):
Okay, Jacob, uh, great to, um, be recording another podcast with you.
We left off with, uh, the top 20I. Basically geopolitical draft.
For those of you who didn't, uh,listen to our last episode, I
would expect, uh, I would suggest,expect, I would suggest not.
Well,

I, I expect, I expect, what are you doing here if you
didn't listen to our previous twohour long geopolitical mock draft?
Come on guys.

I mean, yes.
Uh, this is gonna be very weirdbecause, uh, we're gonna, we stopped
basically with the 16th draft pick.
So what, what Jacob and Idid, just a little recount.
Um, we picked basically countriesin terms of geopolitical standing
and the current draft board.
I had the first pick.
I picked the United States of America.

(02:12):
Jacob had the second pick.
He picked China.
I then decided to cheat and just takeall of Western Europe as my third pick.
But really, really the way I didit is, I call it the EMU five.
So the five largest economies in theEuropean Marre Union, which is Germany,
France, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands.
I just took them all.

(02:33):
Uh, with the expectation that over thenext 30 years, which is really our time
horizon for this, you know, 10 to 30years, uh, they would integrate further.
Jacob then went, uh, with Turkeyon, uh, with the fourth pick, which
was, I guess the first surprise.
I countered with another pretty, youknow, pretty sort of down the middle
pick of India with fifth Jacob.

(02:55):
I think you surprised again, sixth Russia.
That's what I do.
That's what you do.
Yeah.
You're looking for the, for the projects.
Um, and Russia will belike a reclamation project.
It's like a 43-year-old basketballplayer that's like played in Euro
league and you're gonna bring themback into, uh, into, uh, the NBA.
I then, uh, went through my first, uh,surprise picked South Korea, uh, which

(03:19):
of course, uh, flies in the face ofeverything we know about demographics.
I then proceeded to, uh, shit ondemographics as a tool of analysis,
which I'm sure irked a lot of people.
I. Jacob then went, uh, with a reallynice solid, you know, eight Brazil.
Uh, I countered with my insane pick ofCanada, which clearly is a home bias.
I literally have a BritishColumbia poster right there.

(03:42):
It was a, a little, uh, interesting,uh, deviation from Marco's
nihilist Dlo indifference bybeing a Canadian nationalist.

He does have a heart, ladies and gentlemen.
How about that?

He does, yeah, it's, it's coated with maple syrup, uh,
which would be very bad for my help.
Then you pick Iran, which I love,and so jealous of that pick as number
10, because this is a future draft.
It's just such a smart way togo, like, you know, 90 million
young people educated, uh, greatgeography, great resources.
Why expect it to be a prior state forever.

(04:14):
Marco then kind of did the same thing,but with, uh, Argentina, um, Jacob.
Then a surprise pick went with a citystate Singapore, although I think, uh,
solid one, I ConEd with Saudi Arabia.
Then slipping all the way to 14 is, youknow, Japan and then Icon with Ukraine.
Uh, and now we are at 16 pick.

(04:36):
And it's your turn, Jacob?

It is my pick.
Um, all right, so we're gonna pick upwhere we left off and then maybe do
some, some analysis of, of things, right?
Is that, is that the plan?
Yeah.
Yes.

Like in analyzing the draft and what what it tells us.

Yeah.
I just, I'm, I'm, I already have someof the, criticism is the wrong word.
We got some really niceconstructive feedback from people.
And I just wanna remind peoplethat my definition of power
was, was deceptively simple.
It was, can this country make othercountries do what it wants them to do?
So, like, for instance, Mexico hasa lot of different like components
to it that might make, you wannaput it in a geopolitical mock drop.
But when I sit down and thinkabout, well, can Mexico make anyone

(05:12):
do what Mexico wants them to do?
Eh, like, that's pretty tough 'causethey're so dependent on the United States.
Um, so I, I think actually,um, I, I struggled with this
'cause we're in that sort of.
Weird nebulous space of what happens next.
Uh, but I'm, and I, Ithink this could be a bust.
This is a high, high risk,high volatility pick.
I think I'm gonna take South Africa offthe board here too, and I know we'll

(05:34):
get to South Africa a little bit later.
I like their geography.
I like their resources.
I like their potential.
I like them as a potential regionalleader in Sub-Saharan Africa.
And there's really not an Africancountry on our list quite yet.
And this is where populationgrowth is gonna be happening.
I think the new scramble,like geopolitical scramble
will happen in Africa.
And if there is going to be a regionalleader who's going to like, you know,

(05:57):
uh, take advantage of that, it's probablygoing to be south, uh, South Africa.
Now, the problem is there probablywon't be a regional leader and probably
foreign powers will just use Africalike a check checkerboard and South
Africa's internal socioeconomic cohesion.
I don't know.
It might take more than 30 years, if ever,for that to immers into a, a true nation.
But I'll, I'll take the potentialand I'll take the risk and I'll

(06:18):
take them off the board here at 16.

Alright, that's cool.
Um, so one of the things that Iincorporated into my analysis,
I like your definition.
Obviously that's a classicalinternational relations definition.
It's a really good one.
I, I think you did something morethough, Jacob, your Iran pick was
good because it's not about whatIran can do today to compel behavior.

(06:41):
It's about what Iran is going to doover the next, let's say 10 to 30 years.
So I think that you did more than justsay, you know what I can do today.
And, and I think that thatwas a really good analysis.
I use the quantitative index thatI've created before at BCA research.
It's called the BCAGeopolitical Power Index.
And then I deviated away from it.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, so on this index us is numberone, China's two, India is three,

(07:04):
number four is Germany, number six isFrance, and then Italy is number nine.
Spain is 13, Netherlands is 17.
So as you can see, I, Iactually stuck to that.
So US is first.
Um.
Picked, EMU, third punishedIndia a little bit.
Mm-hmm.

(07:24):
I picked it fifth, uh,but just a little bit.
Uh, I just have somequestions there about India.
Uh, I then ignored, uh,a couple of countries.
I mean, you picked Russia, whichis fifth on our, uh, on this index.
Um, Japan is eight.
It's slipped to 14.
I did pick South Korea seventh,and by the way, it's number 10 on

(07:44):
the BC geopolitical power index.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, not thatmuch of a crazy pick.
You picked Brazil eighth.
It's actually 11th on the index.
Canada is 12th on the index.
So I actually did notpick Canada that far up.
Um, and then we got some, um, criticism,you know, and one of them was Mexico.

(08:07):
We also got criticism for Indonesia.
And I do think that we are missing aSouth Asian, a southeast Asian power.
Now you picked Singapore.
Um, I'm, I'm actually goingto pick Indonesia here.
And, um, I struggle 'cause I have twoother countries that I kind of want.
But I do think that thatcriticism from outside was good.

(08:29):
I have written a lot on Indonesiafor work, uh, for my clients.
I do like it.
I do think it's a very interesting, uh,country And using your own definition.
Jacob, what's interesting is they'vealready compelled behavior from
other states, including from China.
Indonesia famously slappedtariffs on export of raw nickel.

(08:49):
China could have retaliated and said,listen, we need this for our batteries.
Um, so no, we're gonnaslap tariffs on you.
But instead what China did is itmoved $20 billion worth of CapEx to
Indonesia to build them a processing.
Nickel processing industry from scratch.
So Indonesia's now, uh, one of theworld leaders in processing nickel,

(09:10):
and, uh, from what I understand,they're gonna slap tariffs on that too
and compel China to move their batteryproduction facilities to Indonesia.
So it's a country that even Chinacan't ignore and can't really punish.
So I'm picking Indonesia number 17.

I'm jealous.
They, I was between South Africa andIndonesia, so I think we're, we're on
the same, we're on the same page here.
I was hoping to sneak one by you andcome back to Indonesia on the other side.
Um, I know I just said that proviso aboutMexico not being able to force other
people to do things, but with a futurefocus, I'll take Mexico here at 18.
Um, and that's really based on thenotion that yes, today Mexico is.
Uh, the 52nd state, if Canada's got the51st state sort of locked down, but 30

(09:49):
years from now, if you've got US Chinadecoupling and a big trade war and the
United States is that much more dependenton Mexico demographics favorable.
Um, I'll take it.
I, I'm worried about the cartels.
I'm worried about thefuture of Mexican democracy.
Like there's lots ofsort of landmines there.
And I'm also just worried about Mexico'soverall state of dependence on the
United States, but may maybe 30 yearsthey'll have leverage over number one

(10:12):
and that should at least like, getthem some consideration in the top 20.

Alright, well this is my last pick.
That, that's, that's a great pick.
This is my last one and it's a tough one.
Um, because there is a countrythat is ranked seventh on my
quantitative number measure andwe, none, none of us picked it.
Um, do you know whichcountry this is, Jacob?

No, I mean, hold on.
Lemme try to guess for a second.
So guys, you ask, it's not,it's not a European country.
Well, I mean it is.
Yes it is.
Go ahead.
I, I'm not sure what is it?

It's the United Kingdom.
Oh, duh.
Yeah.
Um, it's, it's tough.
You know, this is about thefuture and I do think that the
UK is in an inexorable decline.
But couple of things about the uk, um,I gave South Korea a very high score.
Here it's seventh becauseof its soft power.

(11:08):
I mean, if I'm gonna beconsistent, I mean, the United
Kingdom has massive soft power.
Always has, uh, United Kingdomhas reinvented itself in the past.
Famously, in the 1970s, the UnitedKingdom was begging the EU to let it in
the EEC as it was called at the time.
And famously, Europeans had to wait forCharlotte to gold to die to let the UK in.

(11:33):
But the UK was on its kneesbegging, and then it just, you
know, after basically a post.
World Wari, two decades ofabsolute shocking moles.
It reinvented itself and launched apretty difficult conflict with Argentina,
which for the United Kingdom in 1980s,in 1982 was, was a difficult one to do.

(11:58):
I mean, it was very far the Fal ones.
Mm-hmm.
So, I, I mean, it's a nuclear power.
It's a leader in many technologies andI think the fact that it slipped to 19
is, is kind of, uh, you know, shocking.
But it's also, I think, uh, maybe we'rea little bit of prisoners in the current
moment when it's gotten a lot of flack forBrexit and for being largely irrelevant.

Yeah.
That, that may be our first,I, we need to go back and, and
uh, and analyze some of these.
That might be a mistake.
I'm not sure that the UK should bethat, that that should be that far down.
Although it's, it's tough.
'cause when you think 30 years out,um, you know, it wasn't a couple years
ago we were talking about is the UKeven gonna be the UK in 10 years?
Is Northern Ireland gonna join Ireland?
Is Scotland gonna breakoff and join the eu?

(12:44):
Like, are we getting the return of 17thcentury British politics and not even
being able to dominate the island, letalone like project power in other places.
But they also have nuclear weapons.
Like you said.
They also, I mean the pound sterlingis not what at once was, but it's
still like, has a bigger role.
Yeah.
The world.
A lot of different other current, like,you know, it's, the UK is relevant and
as long as the UK is not gonna fall apartat the seams, like it will probably.

(13:05):
Continue to be relevant and I honestlythink I've revised some of my pessimism
on the UK in the last six months.
I've been very bearish, the UK reallysince Brexit, and it's only in the last
six months with the Trump administrationpushing so hard against Europe that
I've sort of changed my tune a littlebit because it looks like the UK
now can maybe, it can be this middleground between Europe and the United

(13:26):
States, or maybe the UK is gonna bean integral part of whatever European.
Confederation emergence, whetherthat's officially on the inside or some
kind of nascent satellite agreement.
Um, and then that takes away someof the risks of, you know, Scotland
trying to break off or, you know,Northern Ireland, Ireland, well, if
you're all in some kind of EU cohesiveentity anyway, does it really matter?
Like it, it's taken some things offthe board, so we probably need to,

(13:48):
to go back and, and think about that.
Um, for the last pick, I, I'm really,I, I feel like we're not, uh, I
don't wanna insult these countries.
We're not, uh, skimming the bottom ofthe basement, but I mean, there's a
couple different directions we could go.
We still have some nuclear powers onthe table, like Pakistan, hundreds of
millions of people, nuclear weapons.
Uh, we've got Israel on the table, whichtoday, if it was just a geopolitical

(14:10):
power ranking of today, on mydefinition, would have to be much higher.
I'm extremely pessimistic aboutIsrael's medium term future, and I
know we're gonna get into that a littlebit later, but they do have nukes and
they more than anyone have been activein shaping the region around them.
So it's probably notgood to discount them.
Um, and also sitting there staring at me.
Uh, you know, far away fromlots of different problems.

(14:33):
Like, okay, they're not gonna projectpower anywhere besides the South Pacific,
but the South Pacific isn't nothing.
Um, and maybe there's some importantthings there, and maybe that will
become more important over time.
So I, I think, I think gun to myhead, I'm, I'm gonna take Australia
for the last lot, but I don't feeloverly, um, I, I feel like we're
really the, the, the bottom of thebarrel here in terms of the index.

(14:53):
We're thinking about, oh, like, youknow, regional power that can project
power in this very small region, um, andhas a lot of different, um, weaknesses.
Like Australia's biggest defensepartnership, the United States biggest
economic relationship with Chinaprobably can't defend its own sea lanes.
Completely dependent on trade issuesof climate change, blah, blah, blah.
But I'll, I'll takeAustralia 20 to round us up.

I'm glad you did that.
Um, I mean, uh, I do think ifCanada's gonna be nine, I don't think
Australia should be that far down.
Uh, so that's, I think fair.
Um, they are also quite,uh, actually elevated in the
quantitative index as well.
They come in at, let mejust see where Australia is.

(15:34):
20th.
They're actually 20th on thegeopolitical index that I created.
And just as a reminder, the geopoliticalindex actually has six factors in it.
Um, it looks at demographics in termsof the pop population, aged 15 to 64.
It has, um, military expenditureimports and arms exports, um,

(15:56):
GDP, primary energy consumption.
So, um, it's, uh, it's alittle bit more modified.
So population is actually, uh,looking at dependency ratios,
uh, not just young people.
That's what it focuses on.
Uh, economic relevance.
Um, it's, it looks atbasically, um, um, imports.

(16:18):
So the greater, the greaterthe import share, uh, the
greater the bargaining power.
So to your point, ability to compelbehavior by being a consumer market that
obviously benefits the US massively.
Then arms exports.
We don't look at it from aperspective of who has a large
army, because that's irrelevant.
It's more, uh, high tech.
Also, one of the, uh, indicators is r andd spending, uh, which mm-hmm definitely is

(16:40):
the reason that Israel is one spot higherthan Australia on my quantitative measure.
So it's 19th.
Um, so just, uh, uh, to yourpoint, I do think that keeping
Israel off is a mistake.
Um, having Argentina as high as itis, I think that's probably the one.
So I, I guess we shouldjust go into analysis.

(17:01):
I mean, what I would say from thisIsrael not being on the top 20, I
think is a mistake, but it's alsoa call on the future, which I agree
with you on other countries thatwe didn't, uh, put here that are on
the quantitative, uh, index Poland.
Um, although mm-hmm I justbasically assume that Ukraine will.
Effectively, um, you know, actuallyovertake Poland on the index.

(17:24):
Ukraine, by the way, is 23rd onmy index of quantitative measures.
23rd.
23rd.
So not much lower than Poland.
And I do think that it's gonnabenefit massively from both
influx of capital and technology.
Um,

well, and you could be right in the end, maybe
we get the resuscitation of thePolish Lithuanian Commonwealth,
which Ukraine was a major part of.
So technically like that's one big thing.

Exactly.
Um, the other countries,I mean, we, we nailed it.
So the ranking on, on thequantitative, uh, mix of indicators.
US first China, second, India,Germany, Russia, France, uk,
seventh obviously slipped.
Uh, Japan, eighth slipped alittle bit, but not that much.
Italy, ninth South Korea, 10th,Brazil, 11th, Canada, 12th,

(18:07):
Spain 13th, Indonesia 14th.
So we put him in the top 20,Mexico's 15th on the syndicators.
Saudi Arabia is 16th.
I took Saudi Arabia 13th, so not crazy.
Netherlands is 17th.
Poland is, 18th is missing.
Israel's missing 19th.
Australia.
20th.
Iran is 21st.
So Pakistan is 22nd.

(18:27):
Ukraine is 23rd.
Belgium 24th.
Thailand, 25th.
I do feel like Thailand orMalaysia probably could have
made our list of top 20.
I guess You chose Israel with Singapore?
I chose with Indonesia.
What do you think?
Are we making a mistake?

I don't think we're making a mistake because Indonesia is the one
that has the, I know we talked earlierabout, uh, demographics not being.
Sort of an arbiter of, of,um, of future performance.
But Indonesia's demographics are sogood compared to a Thailand, which is an
aging population compared to Malaysia,which is an aging population and also is
extremely overexposed to globalization.

(19:03):
I mean, their dependence on globalizedsupply chains, uh, is massive.
When you look at trade as a percentage of,of GDP, um, that's not true for Indonesia.
Indonesia is still very early on.
They have been, they, you goback and read World Bank reports
or IMF reports from the 2010s.
Indonesia is the redheadedstepchild because they're resisting
the neoliberal world order.
They're doing all these things.

(19:23):
The World Bank and IMF can'tpossibly entertain a sound policy.
Like I'm sure the economist was writingarticles at the time, lambasting them, uh,
but they were preparing for this world.
Like this is the world that now youlook at Indonesia and they're like,
ah, they were sort of forward thinking.
So when you put together allthose things, I think Indonesia
is the big in terms of population.
In terms of like, size of economyand resources is the big play.

(19:47):
And Singapore is, uh, in some ways isan interesting one on the list because
it's about, can a very, very small citystate exert power in a meaningful way?
And I think Singapore can use AI andautomation and relations with China
and financial capital and all theseother different things, a stride,
the right of Malacca to have thiskind of power over what is gonna be

(20:07):
a completely contested trade zones.
But, you know, if, if Singapore getsinto a shooting war with Thailand,
uh, you know, I mean that's not gonnahappen, but like, it's gonna be really
hard for Singapore to defend itself.
So it's a much different sortof indicator of power, I think.

Um, okay, so that's fair.
Singapore was 26th, bythe way, on the list.
So even though it's a small country,uh, and gets penalized, uh, in many
ways for demographics, my quantitativeindicator actually gave them a lot of.
I think props Switzerlandis 27th, by the way.
Um, and I agree with that.
I think it's actually gotsome really compelling and
interesting things about it.

(20:41):
Um, um, I think if it had retainedits neutrality, probably would've
been more interesting to me.
Um, the fact that it has been erodingit, I do think has been a mistake.
Could have maybe ended up on our top20, had it kind of had, uh, something
unique on the foreign policy front.
Bangladesh is 28th, the country thatI really wanted to put on the top

(21:03):
20, but it's really difficult to do.
So, uh, I'm just a huge suite of file.
So, um, Sweden actually comes in the 29th.

One of the most interesting emails we got was from a Swede who said,
you should consider some kind of Nordicunion that Denmark, Norway, Sweden,
maybe Finland will combine together tobe their own sort of mini confederation.
And that, that block wouldbe, um, extremely powerful.
I agree with that.

Yeah.
Let's, let's, let's havea, a group of honorable.
Mentions here.
Uh, I think that Nordic Union,let's put that led by Sweden.
Uh, interesting.
I mean, I take, I did take EMU five.
I did not include, uh, anybody from sortof the Scandinavia slash Nordic world.
I think Israel is definitely an honorablementioned, uh, I think Poland as well.

(21:50):
Um, Thailand, Malaysia, we didn'treally have much of, I mean, I think
both countries have a prospect.
Malaysia's very interesting,particularly if semiconductor, um,
knowhow starts migrating from Taiwanand China to a neutral country.
I think Malaysia.
Should make our honorable mentions.
Um, lemme see, Philippines isat 30 on my quantitative index.

(22:10):
Egypt is 31.
Um, nah, nah, you know.
Yeah.
There's no way.
No way.
No way.

Like for, for some honorable mentions, like I think
you have to think really outside ofthe box to, to start adding more.
Like if like we have Brazil and Argentinahere, could it be like Mercosur emerges
as some kind of EU light of South America?
Like that could sort of changethe rankings and I could see that
happening over the next 30 years.
Really off the beatenpath for me would be, um.

(22:35):
Uzbekistan, um, double landlocked country,but it's literally the country that makes
all the stands connect to each other.
And in times where trade hasbeen threatened, like there
was a reason Uzbekistan was atthe middle of the Silk Road.
Yep.
So if you did have meaningful conflictin the maritime space or meaningful
volatility to where goods couldn'tmove there, that's sort of what
China's belt and Road initiative isall about in case, you know, yeah.

(22:56):
Sea lanes break down, can you movethings over land if that happens?
Uzbekistan I think is actuallyplaced really well to be a sort
of regional leader in Central Asiato use that, but I think that's
a very sort of speculative play.

No, I, I think Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, I think that's a great point.
I mean, there's this, uh, ingeopolitics for those of you who
want to sort of read more about it,there's this constant battle between
the Mahan and the kinder duality.
You know, these are the two, like theYin and the Yang, the Sith and the Jedi.
Uh, Mahan is sort of the operating system.

(23:29):
He wrote, uh, Mahan wasthe, I believe in Admiral.
A naval scholar and he wrote a lot on,uh, the power of the navies and the seas.
Uh, and that is the operatingsystem that the United States of
America operates on, that it, uh,downloaded from the United Kingdom.
Um, the seas are the highways of theworld, and if you control them, you can
pretty much show up in front of anybody'scapital city and threatened them.

(23:53):
You can also trade, you can controltrade routes, but there is an alternative
operating system, which none of ushave really taken seriously since
probably Hitler, and it's the me kinderand the me kinder looks at the world
from the perspective of the worldisland, which is what e erasure is.
So from Ireland to Ka chopcut, there's this world island.

(24:13):
And if you control the world island,you don't have to spend a single cent
on a single ship, like Americans canrun around with their, like fancy
schmancy ships, but you don't care.
You've got all the technology, all theconsumer markets, and all the natural
resources you would ever really need.
There's nothing that you,Eurasia doesn't have.
And, uh, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, if yousuddenly just shift your thinking towards

(24:36):
that kind of a kinder operating system,I think Uzbekistan is not a crazy pick.

Yeah.
Um, there's, there's two others I want tothrow on and I'm curious where they are
in your quantitative index because we,I threw in South Africa at the very end.
Yeah.
Um, and, and Africa's hard to, isharder to think about from this
point of, from this perspective.
'cause I think, like my base caseis that Africa is probably going
to be dominated by external powers.
Not that African nations are gonnabe able to sort of create, uh,

(25:01):
geopolitical power bases of their own.
But let's say I'm wrong about that.
And let's say that some of theseAfrican nations are able to congeal
into nations and sort of project power.
Um, two on my list, one would be Ethiopia.
Um.
On the horn, really young,uh, motivated population.
Uh, you mentioned Egypt, like the Nilebegins in Ethiopia and there's already
been tension between Ethiopia and Egypt.

(25:22):
But so I say that because Ethiopiais damning the Nile, it could
literally control everythingdown river from the Nile.
And if you have control ofthe Nile, you like, generally
speaking, civilizationally, you'vebeen a pretty powerful entity.
And you know, they canproject to the horn.
Now they're technically landlocked.
They're having problems withEritrea and some of these others.
Also, they just fought a civil war inwhich hundreds of thousands have died.
Like there's so many problems with them,but they're one that I think deserves.

(25:45):
Honorable mention, or at leastput them on the watch list.
The other one is, is less acountry, although I have a country
that might benefit from this.
But, you know, going back a hundredyears, people have recognized
the potential of what is todaythe Democratic Republic of Congo.
Mm-hmm.
Just from the perspective of population,resources, water, where it is in
Africa, all these other things.
Now, of course, um, the DRC, whatis today, the DRC, like, it's

(26:08):
the subject of heart of darkness.
It is the subject of all of thesed it's, you know, kingly, upholds,
ghost, all these different terriblethings have happened there.
And that contin, uh, didn't even mentionthe, the Rwanda genocide and the second
African war in the ni uh, world War inthe 1990s, like one of the most deadly
conflicts in the history of human beings.
Um, like all of that is sort of inthere and it's happening again today.
Like there is restiveness and fighting.

(26:31):
Rebels running all over the place,Rwanda, arming rebels, and maybe even
Rwanda military presence on the groundin the eastern parts of the DRC.
So the, the country that's on my watchlist is actually not the DRC because
I'm, I'm, I doubt that the DRC isgonna find that national footing.
Uh, but I think Rwanda deserves anhonorable mention just in the way that
it's changed in the last 30 years.
It's military and, youknow, security capacity.

(26:53):
Some of its investment in like, whetherit's science, like they have some
interesting things going from themand they have shown the ability to
affect things in countries around them.
Um, that's a great pointin a way that Israel has.
So they're on my listtoo, on honorable Mitch.

I like, I like the technology aspect of Rwanda because that's true.
They actually do have, um, aburgeoning tech industry and your
definition of being com able to compel.
So, uh, in terms of where all ofthese countries are in the indicator.
Um, so first of all, as I mentioned in thefirst podcast episode, there is something.

(27:27):
Called the Composite Index ofNational Capability, the CINC, it
was created by political scientistsat the height of, uh, the Cold War.
Mm-hmm.
And that one is much morelike a Cold War era index.
It looks at, um, uh, total population,urban population, iron in steel
production, energy consumption, militarypersonnel, and military expenditure.

(27:51):
And so it's very much,I think, old school.
I modified that with my own, whichemphasizes things like military exports.
Why?
Because that's a way to show that youhave technological capability, that
you have actual, you know, ability tosell something that's sophisticated,
not just buy it 'cause you're big.
But the reason I mentioned this isthat there, there are some African

(28:13):
countries in this one that doesn'tpenalize you for just, uh, not
being technologically capable.
So Nigeria is actually 21st,the Congo's 35th, you know,
to your point, Sudan is 38th.
South Africa's 30thRwanda's on neither one.
Um, but I think that that'sa really nuanced pick.

(28:34):
So I think I like that one.
Ethiopia is also not on eitherone, which is interesting.
Uzbekistan, is it?
But I I get your Uzbekistan point.
Um, if I wanted to add one, I thinkit would be the United Arab Emirates.
And the reason I say that is because you,you mentioned Singapore as a potential
place where AI could really play a role,but I think UAE is probably the one

(28:56):
country that is potentially going tohave the biggest role in AI development.
And you saw President Trump'strip to the Middle East.
He was followed by a lot of peoplefrom the AI community and they
selled a lot of deals, includingwith the UAE company, um, which is
a, uh, front runner in some of this.

(29:16):
Uh, this is the G 42artificial intelligence company
headquartered in Abu Dhabi.
So why.
Because UAE has this very interestingmix of small population, large capital
pool, and an expat population thatno one's going to cry about if they
all get fired due to AI developments.

(29:37):
So when you think about very powerfullobbies in America, like American Medical
Association is extremely difficult.
You try replacing doctorswith ai, good luck with that.
It's not gonna work.
You know, and it's not, not becauseyou and I, like Jacob and Marco
have a problem with AI doctors.
It's because doctors have aproblem with AI doctors, same
with pilots or truck drivers.

(29:59):
Um, there are a lot of, you know,very vested interests, political
interests that are going to preventAI from being deployed fully.
But a place like the UAE, were prettymuch accountants, doctors, pediatricians,
you know, like you name it, arepretty much all expats, non-citizens.
They can all be fired tomorrowif a GI was to be developed.

(30:21):
So I actually think that of allthe countries on the planet, UAE
will be the first to deploy fullAI systems in government and in
education, in medicine and so on.
So that's my, uh, honorable mention.
So we have a good group, Nordic Union.
No, and

I, and I just wanna continue on that too 'cause
I, I think it belongs there.
And this is like Singapore was my stand-infor thinking about like, are city states
even possible like in the future andshould they be on this list in general?
Because when you think about like citystates today, like I count the UAE 'cause
of Dubai, but it's a really small list.
Um, it's Singapore, Monaco, the Vatican.

(30:55):
If the Vatican ever wanted to like getlike more muscular again, like that
would actually be a really sleeper pick.
Like the return of the Catholic, uh, the

papal states.

Yeah, the papal states back, uh, with, you know, their, their
billion Catholics or however many thereare of them, uh, sort of running around.
But I, I wonder if one of the thingsthat's missing on our list, well, first
of all, I wonder if I'm right that.
Geopolitics, the way that we're headingtowards Multipolarity is gonna lead
to the rise of New city states orthe empowerment of city states in
a way that it hasn't in the past.

(31:24):
And then I wonder if what's missing fromour list is some of these city states,
like the, the, this is, this is not awell thought out analysis yet, which good?
You're coming here for entertainment,not for well thought out analysis.
Uh, but like, when I think aboutthe bearishness of the UK, for
example, uh, that bearishness withthe UK was always coupled with, but
London will be extremely powerful.
So if the UK did fall apart,would London sort of become a city

(31:46):
state or like would like aroundEngland or something like that?
Like, could you have the rise of someof these different, uh, mega cities turn
into like city states of their own right.
And might they affect the map of theworld in different ways in the future?
I don't know.
I it's, it's a, it's a veryspeculative concept that, as you can
tell, I haven't developed fully yet,but it's in the back of my head.

Our Congress too.
No, no, I, I've thought about this.
I think city states is one, uh,the other one is also regional.
So the Nordic Union.
Points that are, you know, um,one of our listeners pointed out
is very, very well thought out.
In other words, a multipolar distributionof power does create a need for scale.

(32:24):
So in a unipolar world, you can bea tiny country, you know, you can be
Slovenia and be extremely successfulbecause hey, Americans are in charge.
Just follow the rules and you know, you'llbe fine in a bipolar world, you can be a
tiny country, just pick the right side.
Mm-hmm.
But in a multipolar world,like scale starts to matter.
And so I do think that oneof the failures maybe of our

(32:46):
ranking, we do think of scale.
Like, I like Canada 'cause it's huge andit can import another 40 million people.
Like done.
And suddenly it's a global power.
But like, okay.
But we did not, and you know, we pickedIndonesia but we didn't pick like
Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand corridor,something like, you know, we didn't
get like innovative on that point.

(33:08):
And I think that.
That might be something to think about.
Maybe there will be moreregionalization now.

Well, and and there's also like to, to your point, like, um,
based on a podcast I did earlier thisweek, like a really out there, um,
selection would've been instead of China,like Huawei or Microsoft, like, there
is this narrative out there of technofascism, techno overlords companies
that will become stronger than nations.

(33:34):
And there's precedent for that, right?
Like before there was the British Empire,there's the British East India company.
Mm-hmm.
The Dutch story is like that too.
So we may be missing, like with thecombo of technology and, and some of
these other things like the rise ofcompanies or non-state actors that
affect the world in, in different ways.
'cause there's none ofthat on our list right now.

There isn't.
And I love it.
I I love your point.
You know, Hudson Bay Companybasically created candidate because
people in Europe wanted beaver hats.
Like, there you go.
You know, which is why beaver shouldbe on the flag, not, not a maple leaf.
Um, now.
I wanna do one final thing before,uh, I hand over, uh, the MCTU.
I want you to take a look at this listand I want you to make one change.

(34:17):
Now that we've had some time todigest, take some criticism in.
You can either switch two of your picks,you know, you can basically trade them.
Like, let's say you can sayTurkey at four is too high,
high and South Africa's too low.
So you like, flip them.
Or you can take one of your picksoff the board and put someone else on
like, you made a compelling case forIsrael or Uzbekistan or Nordic unit.

(34:40):
So either one of those.

Yeah, I, I think we need to do a little more postmortem
on, on the list itself too.
'cause you might think that.
In the moment I was most insecureabout my Russia pick at number six.
But I actually feel prettygood about my Russia pick and
we might wanna spar on that.
And like, I'm, I'm lookingat just my choices here too.
Like, I, I wanna get into an argumentargument with you about Canada.
Like, I just don't see it.

(35:02):
I want to, I want to hate on Canadaright now 'cause I don't think it
belongs like, because certainly not inthe top 10, and I'm not even sure it
belongs on this list to be quite frank.
Um, but I, I, when I look at thelist, I think my biggest mistake,
um, is that Japan is likely too low.
Um, and it should probably be slottedlike Japan should probably have been, I. I

(35:23):
don't know if it's before Russia or afterRussia, but it's definitely in the top 10.
It doesn't belong there.
Sort of languishing at the bottom.
And the UK too, like was, was alittle bit of a blind spot for me.
I like some of those honorablementions, but they're too speculative.
Like I like them on the bubble and Isee that they have potential to jump
up, but you know, like an Ethiopia pickor Rwanda pick, um, Nordic Union pick.

(35:44):
Like, I like them but there's not enoughreality there for, for me to do it.
But if I had to pick one, like I wouldboost Japan, probably five or six slots.

Do you wanna do that?

Yeah, so I think I'll, like, for my picks, just imagine I'm
picking Japan right after Russia,so everything else gets bumped down.

Well why not flip Iran for Japan?

Well, yeah.
Well so I, I, 'cause I want Brazilahead of Iran so I would, I would flip
Japan and Brazil, if that makes sense.
And then flip Brazil ahead of Iran.

You can only flip one.

I know.
I can only flip one.
So, uh, well, Brazil, Ican do whatever we want.
We're making, we are thecommissioners of this draft.
Okay.
So you want

Japan where

I just, oh, Nico Harrison just called.
He said, I'm allowedto do whatever I want.
And as a, as, as a, asa thank you for that.
I will get the first pickin the draft next year.
Thank you for that, Nico.
I really appreciate you watching my back.
Um, let's just do that to keep it simple.
So I play by the rules.
I'm gonna, I'm gonnaswitch Japan and Brazil.

Japan and Brazil.
Yeah.
Oh, interesting.
Okay.
So Japan and then Brazil.
Alright.

No, no, no, no, no, no.
I, I have, I have toswitch Japan and Iran.
Sorry.
I'll switch and I, that's what I think.
Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, but that makes sense becausethen Brazil remains ahead of Iran.
Yeah.
You're just putting, you know,Iran 14, it's still a controversial
pick, I think, and it retains that.
I, I picked Argentina way too high.
I I thought you were gonna take it.

Hmm.

Um.
So I picked him 11th.
I think that was kinda ludicrous.
I'm gonna switch Indonesia.
Oh, I'm gonna put Indonesia in the
11th spot and I'm gonna bump, um,gonna bump Argentina down to 17th.
It's still ahead of Mexico,which I feel comfortable with.

(37:33):
Um, but it's below South Africanow and Ukraine and that's okay.
And it's below Iran.
So basically Iran and Argentina, wekind of took them down a couple of
notches because they are speculativeand we're expecting a lot of things
to go right in order for them.
So I think it's fine that they'rea little bit, you know, down.

Um, yeah, and I, I'm very bullish.
Brazil, like my bullish, the levelat which I took Brazil indicates to
you that I'm actually very negativeArgentina, not necessarily from a
market or investment perspective.
I'm actually very optimistic aboutArgentina from that perspective.
But from a power projectionperspective, I think South America
is Brazil's, and I think it's eithergonna be Brazil as a regional power
or some kind of regional union.

(38:12):
Or China or somebody elseis gonna dominate it.
Like I don't see that Argentina isadvanced enough at this state with where
we are with multipolar competition tobe a South American regional power.
Now, maybe they canmake up a lot of ground.
Um, and, you know, certainlyMelay has done some interesting
things from a reform perspective.
But, uh, I don't know.
I need somebody who's not, uh,channeling his strategies from his dead

(38:34):
dog before I, I start getting reallyexcited about a country's capacity to
do things geopolitically in the world.

I think what's interesting about this is, uh, yeah, I mean,
I think, uh, I think that's fair.
And I think Mexico gets penalized in manyways because it's next to America, as
Mexicans will always point out, you know.
Uh, if they were anywhereelse in the world, I think
Mexico would be more powerful.
And that's true.
And similarly, Argentina has appropriatelynow come down relative to Brazil.

(39:02):
Um, okay.
So I'm, I'm ready to defend Canada.
If you wanna, if you wanna take onthe challenge, give it, give it to me.
Yeah.
And,

and, and, uh, well, and just before we take on Canada,
'cause, 'cause Mexico and Canada aresort of two sides of the same coin,
like Canada, well I guess you couldmake this argument for Canada too.
Mexico like does have Central America.
Where it could project power.
If Mexico could ever like, get controlof cartels and be responsible for
regional security and project powerdown all the way through Panama, uh,

(39:31):
and sort of be a leader of the LatinAmerican world in North America,
like that there's, there are rootsfor them to develop their own power.
They've just never done that.
Everything has been northwardfacing for obvious reasons.
So over a 30 year time horizon,is that something they could do?
Like Yes, and that's possible.
And same with Canada.
Like I guess if, if you're making thepositive Canada argument, you can talk
about, uh, the polar ice cap meltingand Canada being the king of the Arctic

(39:53):
and you know, the Arctic is the newMediterranean and Canada is one of the
powers that is gonna benefit most from it.
Uh, but I don't know.
I'm just not buying it.
It seems to me that I, you know,I think that, uh, please separate.
Uh, our president's, uh,demeaning attitude towards Canada,
from what I'm about to say.
'cause I don't think Canada shouldbecome the 51st state, but Canada is
woefully dependent on the United States.

(40:15):
Nobody gives a shit what Canada says.
Think about all the thingsthat have happened to them
in the last couple of years.
China kidnapped their people didn'tgive like, whatever, like nobody
actually helped them or did anything.
They picked a fight with Saudi Arabiaover things like women's rights.
Saudi Arabia was like, cool, we'renot gonna trade with you anymore.
And like, just like, goaway until you apologize.

(40:36):
And eventually they had to apologize.
You know, United States wants topick a trade war with, with them.
They're, they try to fight for it.
United States doesn't care.
Literally the leader of theUnited States is like, great.
So my best offer is that youjust become part of our country.
How, how's that for you?
And the best we can do is like, youknow, globalist Mark Carney coming
in and saying like, no, I'm reallygonna do, like, be tough with them.

(40:56):
Um, like, okay, yes, they canimmigrate a lot of, they can
welcome a lot of immigrants.
They also have lots of faultlines within the society itself.
Like, uh, we've got Quebec, we'vegot, you know, murmurings in the
west that, you know, Alberta willbreak off some of these other things.
Like, it, it just, like, it, it doesn'tlook to me like a coherent power that's
gonna project power in any meaningful way.

(41:18):
They're gonna be tied to the UnitedStates, um, for the long run.
And I don't see a, a world in which, youknow, China, like, imagine this is 20
years from now, is China gonna be afraidof kidnapping some Canadian diplomats
because of what Canada's gonna do to them?
Like, no, like Canada, like China'sstill gonna kidnap their diplomats.

Well, I mean, I think that's, you know, the, the way the
trade value, uh, ranking works in thebasketball world where Bill Simmons
does it, is that you would not tradesomebody below for somebody on top.
Mm-hmm.
So, you know, I mean, it's, it,it's, I don't think China would
care about Japanese diplomatsbeing kidnapped or businesses or.

(42:01):
Singapore, right?
No, no.
I,

I think they would, I think they would with Japan, and I think they
would, I think Singapore, yes, I would.
I would trade them with all of them.
I think there's two different thingshere, and this is something that
you and I talked about before.
If I'm China and I'm drafting whichcountries I want as allies, like if
we just put all politics aside and Ijust want to take pure pieces off the
board to build some kind of ChineseLED alliance that allows me to have a

(42:22):
Chinese LED world order, Canada wouldbe very close to the top of that list.
Right?
'cause they are a really crucial ally.
And for the United States too, they haveto be really at the top of that list.
So I think as like as value isa partner, Canada's really high.
But if we're just talking about likeCanada's ability to shape the world
around it and project power, like I don'tthink it has any juice there whatsoever.

(42:44):
Like I would put it, like I wouldtrade Iran, I would trade Singapore,
I would trade Saudi Arabia, and youknow, I'm not a Saudi Arabia fan.
Uh, I would probably trade, uh.
The uk, Indonesia forsure, probably the uk.
Uh, I would put ahead of Canadatoo if it's just like who I would
trade on the list, like Absolutely.

So I think, I think there's three things that Canada
has that other countries don't have.
First of all, it's a hedge.
So think of Canada as like, you know,like those bunkers that people have where
they're like, everything is just turnkey.
Or like the United States of AmerAmerica has military bases around the
world called lily pad bases, right?

(43:24):
Where you're just like, you turna key and like the Burger King in
the back starts like operating, youknow, the like Dairy Queen, like
ice cream machine starts buzzing.
That's Canada for thewest, it's this bunker.
And the reason I say that is that ifanything bad happens to the United States
of America, like Canada has everythingUS has just like ready to be scaled up.

(43:47):
So if there is any sort of adomestic disturbance in the us,
Canada becomes the US overnight.
Precisely because it is theexact same in many ways.
It's just ready, like if, if the UShad some sort of a calamity, there are
50 million American refugees in Canadatomorrow, and that's just, that's now a

(44:10):
hundred million dollar, a hundred milliondollars, a hundred million people country.
So that's the first thing I would say.
Um, it has institutions, governance.
Those soft things that make Canadainteresting to me are, are that it
has basically Western IP and Westernoperating system is just smaller, is the
size of Spain in terms of population.

Mm-hmm.

The second thing I like about is obviously natural resources, which I
think you're discounting the reason thatyou want to take Canada over Saudi Arabia.
And the reason that Canada will matteris because its food production is just
gonna go through the roof and you're thebig soft ag guy, uh, soft commodity guy,
you know, like Canada, um, will have.
The greatest agricultural outputover the next 30 years because

(44:53):
climate change is happening andclimate change is not always bad.
Canada will will definitelybenefit from it because the growing
seasons will, um, expand and you'llhave multiple growing seasons.
This is the Saskatchewanand Manitoba play.
It's not actually that much aboutOntario or British Columbia.
It's really about those prairiesthat suddenly become extremely good.

(45:13):
It has water, endless water, uh,as water as far as di can see.
It has massive, um,hydroelectric potential.
It hasn't even tapped Quebec as acountry is an exporter of energy,
purely because of what, uh, it'sdone on the hydro side of things.
It just invented hydropower, justbuilt some dams on these lakes that

(45:34):
nobody even really knows how to get to.
There's no roads up there.
Um, so the natural resourcesone is the big one.
And then finally technology.
I think that, uh, you're,you're underestimating just how.
Important Canada has been toWestern technological dominance.
Um, research in mode, in motionobviously doesn't exist anymore.
It's been overtaken by other things, butI think that rim is an important example

(45:58):
of what Canada has done in the past.
It's innovated massively.
The reason we have cell phones thatwork today are rim patents that, um,
are still being used in iPhones andin, uh, modern mobile telephones.
The other issue is nuclear energy as well.
It's another example of how Canadahas uh, uh, punched above its weight.

(46:19):
Quantum and fusion.
Two things that Canada does reallywell and the reason for that is that
it's universities are top class.
Nobody really talks about 'em 'causethey're not fancy and they don't have
sports, but they're very, very good.
And again, it's kind of a hedgeif, if you don't want to live in
the US and you know, you postedon Twitter something interesting.

(46:40):
How many PhDs in the US.
Their performance, I think basedon where they're coming from.
Mm-hmm.

Yep.
Yep.
You know,

like Canadian universities are, are basically just there sitting
ready to take in all this global talent.
So yes, this is definitely basedon the future, but the reason that
I like Canada more than like Iranis that Iran has the people, but
it requires governance to change.
Canada just doesn't have thepeople and I think honestly

(47:06):
it's easier to solve for that.
It is easier to build the infrastructureand have an aggressive immigration
than to fix governance in institutionsthat haven't been modernized for
like, you know, 50, 60, 70 years.
So, um, that's, that's what,that's kind of why I have Canada.
Maybe it is too high at number nine.

(47:28):
I think maybe it shouldget that Iran, Argentina.
Like, uh, yeah,

I just, I would push back a couple different ways because
like, okay, like it's a hedge onthe United States, but that would
be catastrophic for, uh, Canada.
Like if the United States really fellapart into some kind of warring states
version of China or something like that.
I mean, maybe parts of Canadaalso get hid off or are gonna
get negatively impacted by that.
Also, Canada, not to get too,God, I can't believe I'm gonna be
the one who talks about rivers onthe podcast, but like, there's no

(47:55):
Mississippi River Network in Canada.
You don't that shit anymore.
Come on.
It's not the, you definitely do.
You de I'm sitting here at, atthe bottom of the Mississippi.
It still matters, uh, for, in a big way.
What

New Orleans matters 'cause of the Mississippi of course.
Oh, come on.
Well, how much trade A US tradeactually goes down to Mississippi that's
actually been researched by actualresearchers doing actual analysis.

Uh.
Uh, there you go.
Uh, do, do, do, do approximately500 million tons of goods annually.
I don't know what that means.
Uh, 60% of US grain exports,if you're talking about LNG and
things like that, also pretty big.
Um, so like you can count, you cango and count the ships and understand
something about like US agriculturalcomplex and things like that.

I mean, like maybe wheat because it's easy to put on a barge,
but you could also do that by train.

Yeah.
For it's more costly.
Um, in terms of, in terms of, Russia

doesn't have any really useful rivers either.
Like, you know, it's not like the Russiansare really, really using the ulca.

No, but they do have the vulgar.
But yes, there's a reason that Russiahas never been able to succeed and
achieve its geopolitical imperatives.

It's six that are, look Russia and Canada.
Yeah, because they

have, they have a meaningful military and they're
willing to use it and they have greatpower prediction capacity and like a
population that is many times largerthan that of Canada and is not completely
economically dependent on its neighbor.
I mean, it's getting that way becauseof what Putin did with Ukraine.
But I'd, I would definitely rather haveRussia than Canada on the geopolitical
power index even 30 years out.

I think.
I think that's, that's true.
I would too.
That's what Canada's lower.
Um, and as I said, yes, Ithink it could be lower.
Look, I think you shouldn'tover index on the hedge thing.
Um,

I think, well, yeah.
So, so no.
So, so, so the two other points youmade the point about agriculture.
Do you know what the second, um, uh,the second biggest agricultural exporter
in terms of value is in the world?
I. Russia products by value.
Second largest exporter in theworld of agricultural products.
I think Russia.
It is the Netherlands.
Oh, you can do farming with technology andvertical farmings in all other different

(50:07):
sorts of ways if you're willing to do it.
And I think, actually, I think you'reright that Canada geographically is bound
to do well as a result of global warming.
But Canada's institutions, some ofthe mechanisms around its agriculture
are actually fairly antiquated.
And I bet you some Canadian farmerswouldn't mind if some things weren't,
uh, I'm thinking specifically aboutmilk, but like I don't think that
the system is actually that great.

(50:29):
In some ways it's been so easyfor them that they haven't had to
invest in some of these things.
So I would take the flip side and say,yes, they have natural advantages,
but like it's, and um, it's notlike they're the only game in town.
And my list has producerslike Russia, Brazil, um.
Australia.
Like there are some ag producerson here, so I don't discount it.

(50:49):
I just don't think that it makesCanada, um, particularly unique.
I accept your point about institutions.
The biggest argument for Canada, toyour point, is they have institutions.
They could be a beacon for immigrants.
They could get some of the bestand brightest from the rest
of the world to come to Canadainstead of the United States.
The problem with that is just thatI think it's gonna require a lot of
Canadian investment in becoming a leaderin some of these things, and I don't

(51:11):
see the political coherence or willto do that quite yet in Canada Now.
30 years is a long time.
Maybe it pops up and they realize theUnited States is in decline in that sense,
or is abdicating this position and they'reperfectly suited to sort of soak up that.
So I, I take your point there, butI would push back on the first two.

Yeah.
But again, technology, uh, innovationin Canada has been massive, you know,
and I think that's what we're, uh,also missing, um, from your criticism.
I mean, that's, that's beenlike a constant stream of like,
oh shit, Canada invented that.
Um, that I think that it,you know, it, it signifies.
Basically there is something in thecountry that produces innovation.

(51:48):
That's very interesting.
And I think that's because of immigration.
I think it's because of greatschools, because of quality of life.
Um, and uh, the other issue thatI would point out is energy.
You didn't mention anything on energy.

No.
We've got too much oil.
Cool.
The world.
The world has too much oil andCanada's oil infrastructure
is all pointed downwards.
No,

it's

not.

No, but that's an easy fix.
That's an easy fix.
This is where I think you'remissing what's happening.
Like Donald Trump.
That is the one thing, if I could say,of all the things that he's done wrong.
I think for the future of the us thebiggest mistake was that Canada's
a milkshake with one straw in it.
And he's encouraging them to buildtwo straws, two extra straws.

(52:34):
True and Dish, you know, the way thatNDP and the Green Party performed in the
election was a clear rebuke by the, uh,Canadian population against this kind
of like very extreme environmentalism.
Um, where it, it's, it's kindof silly like Canada's gonna
produce these hydrocarbons.
Why limit their export if they'regonna be produced anyways?

(52:54):
Why are they all going to the us?
And so that energy infrastructure,I think is gonna be interesting.
And it could make Canada very, toyour point, that it doesn't really
have a lot of, uh, pool in the world.
It doesn't because all ofits, uh, trade is with the us.

Yeah.
Um, what else on the list?
Is there anything else we needto, by the way, Canada, I, I like
you like, on different lists.
I would have you very close to the top.
It's just in this very narrowlyidiosyncratic way that I'm, I'm
pushing you down, but I like you guysand you shouldn't be the 51st state.
You should be your ownstate forever and ever.

Uh, anything else?
I think Japan, well,we kind of moved Japan.
We got Argentina lower.
I think the honorable mentionsare interesting of, of those,
the Nordic Union, uh, which ofcourse is a play on the future.
Israel, Poland.
Malaysia, UAE, Uzbekistan, Rwanda.
I think Israel, Israel's reallythe one that's the toughest.

(53:49):
Um, I think Aion just becauseagain, to use the quantitative
index, Israel is 19th by the way,if you use the quantitative index.
I created Israel's 19th, the onefrom the Cold War, which obviously
emphasizes just raw things like sizeof military, size of population.
Mm-hmm.
Israel is 40th still pretty good for acountry of, you know, 10 million people.

(54:13):
Still pretty impressive that it makes itnation Yeah, it makes it to that list.
Uh.
Top 40, uh, but it is 19th on thegeopolitical power index I created, um,
using some of this quantitative stuff.
Um, so yeah.
Yeah, I

just, I, I think the thing with Israel is like, um,
it feels like the past, it feelslike it's not gonna be the future.
Like imagine if you and I weresitting here in 1949 creating this
index, we wouldn't have put Israelanywhere close to the top who
should have, let alone the top 50.
But what they did over the courseof the next 30 years was remarkable.
So in some ways, I think we're lookingfor the next Israel, I'm not sure that

(54:50):
Israel's gonna go back and reinventitself the way that it did in 1949.
Now it does have nuclear weapons andit does have institutions and it does
have an existential need to existand all these other different things.
So like I, I see it.
Um, but you know, in some sensetheir need to dictate action in
their regional sphere, um, is.

(55:11):
A sign of weakness andlike they're losing.
Like I think the relationship withthe US is fraying and who is gonna
be like the security guarantor?
'cause Israel has always neededsome Big Mac daddy in the
background who's gonna help them.
Um, they've never done this alone.
And it's, it sure seems like they'restarting to embark on a world where
they're having to do it alone.
And that should be very frighteningfor Israeli strategic decision makers.
But to your point, they've doneit in the past and they do, like,

(55:33):
they're, they're not startingfrom zero like they were before.
So,

you know, my concern, my concern Jacob, is that like, the
future is not about demographics.
Sorry.
And it's not about rivers, sorry toYouTube, but it's not like geography
and humans are being constantly,constantly throughout human history
have been disrupted by technology.
I mean, do you, United Kingdom beingthe greatest example, and please don't

(55:56):
tell me Tames is a fucking river.
You know what I mean?
It's like an tu like no, no.
Grain is being transship by tames.
So the Thames, sorry.
My point is that technology always,always, always, always wins.
You know?
Always wins it.
Like just, it just does.
That's why I picked SouthKorea as high as I did.
'cause I'm betting that their uniquemix of necessities, insecurity,

(56:20):
all this stuff, you know your pointabout North Korea being subsumed
at some point, which is good too.
I didn't even think about that.
But to me, South Korea is numberseven because of technology.
Yeah.
India I think can also do the same.
And then obviously thestandard US China, EMU five.
My concern is when I look at ourlist, some of the countries that I
picked that don't have, oh by the way,Canada too, like my point is Canada

(56:41):
has endogenous technology, greatuniversities, and has done it in the past.
It's proven in the past thatit can actually innovate in
like globally relevant ways.
My concern is when I look at thislist, the countries who haven't
really been able to do that.
Uh, so you are a pick of Mexico?
My pick of Argentina.
South Africa actually has innovatedtechnologically, so it's not like.

(57:03):
That's a silly Ukraine.
I picked Ukraine in the top 20 becausethey've proven in this conflict that
they can innovate, uh, massively.
Some of the, yeah,

we, we got some pushback from, from listeners about Ukraine and my
point about Ukraine was, if you're lookingfor the Israel of the next 30 years,
Ukraine is probably the one, like it hasa lot of weird similarities with Israel.
You know,

late think those were Russian bots at Twitter, you know, like, come on.
Like clearly like, but the, you know,Singapore, okay, so Singapore on that
rubric of technology I think is great,but this is where I worry that yeah, we,
we over index on like Israel's domesticpolitics perhaps, and its demographics.

(57:44):
But what we, I think, I think Israel andUAE are honorable mentions and Nordic
Union Sweden has, I. Sweden punches wayabove any country on the planet when
it comes to technological innovation.
Like you're talking about acountry of 10 million people as
fighter jets that people buy.
Come on.
This is like serious,serious, serious capability.

(58:05):
So anyways, I think thatprobably we should have thought
about that a little bit more.
I, I do worry about myIndonesia picket 11.
You know, I worry about Turkey at four,although they have shown the ability
to innovate and they have absolutely.
Turkey at

four is high.
I'd be the first to admit that and like,it probably should not be ahead of India.
Um, but I go back and forth about India,like some days I'm like, India should
probably be number two on this list.
And then, and then some days I'm like,India will be 25 because it won't
be able to get its shit together.
Like I really, I'm ambivalent

and I'm really, I'm really happy people didn't get
any hit, hit mail on India becauseI thought, well that's probably

just 'cause nobody from India listened.
If they did, I'm sure

we, I think they do.
I think they do.
But I think that they were, uh,appropriately satisfied with it, you know.
I feel like Indian Twitter is kindof like Portland's trailblazers fans.
Like if you are not saying like PortlandTrailblazer fans are famously, like soccer
moms, very productive of their children.
I feel like I thought wewould get hate mail for having

(59:07):
India theft, but we didn't.
I think it's appropriate and theydo have that technology factor.
But anyways, the technology factor iswhat worries me because your example of
19, us sitting, sitting and doing this in1946, if we were sitting and doing this
in 1946, like who would've picked that?
Israel would be one of thegreatest technological, uh,

(59:27):
wellsprings of innovation.
Um, and I think that that's what haskept Israel as high as it has been.
So I do think that that maybe is somethingwe are understating by focusing still.
It's, it's so funny.
We're trying to resist thepool of demographics and
rivers and humans and wheat.

(59:48):
Yet, I mean, Indonesia picket 11,you know, like Argentina, Mexico, a
lot of these picks are based on someof those, maybe a little bit over,
um, stated geopolitical qualities.

Jacob Shapiro (01:00:03):
Well, and it's a, and like this list has to be dynamic.
Like, I think the thought experimentof, if we were trying to do this in 1946
or 1949, like who would be on the list?
Like obviously we can't like, forgetall of our knowledge and really
put ourselves, uh, back in 1946.
We should, we, we should be able to try.
But like if we were doing that andjust, you know, thinking like what was
conventional knowledge at the time?
Like, I wonder what thatlist would look like.

(01:00:23):
It would probably look like us SovietUnion and then what the United Nations
would be third, like Japan wouldn'tbe on there like, uh, German, like all
these different countries that likereally defined the next three decades
would probably not be on the list.
'cause the world just came out froma war and everybody was bombed.
Wait,

Marko Papic (01:00:38):
Jacob, Jacob, Paula, I actually think we should do this.
We should do this in couple,when, when things slow down,

which will never No.
Our, our next draft.
We could do our next draft.

No, but the reason I think it'll be interesting, Jacob, is that if
you and I were in 1946, I think you andI still picked China and India, high

India.

We do, we do.
A hundred percent.
No, no.
Listen, we do.
I swear to you, we do, we do.
Let's put ourselves You'll be smoking.
I'll be drinking heavily, right?

Yeah.

We'll do it.
The the point is not that we wouldn't, thepoint is that we would and we'd be wrong.

That's true.

That's the point.
The point is that youwould've picked Brazil.
Oh, well they avoided World War ii.
I love Brazil.
I'm a soft ax guy.
I know how important this is.
Boom, err wrong.
I would've been like, listen, India,there's a movement for independence.
It's gonna be infusedwith new energy, you know?
Wrong.
Then you would've been like,yo, China, you just wait.

(01:01:39):
You know, they're gonna, like, inindustrialize, I think Miles's gonna
shift from being a guerilla soldierto being a modernizer err wrong.
You know?
And that's what it would'vebeen so exciting to actually do.

Um, it would've, but like the actual, like if, if we were
good analysts, let's assume for asecond we were good analysts in 1946.
If we were good analysts, thelist would be Russia or would
be United States, Soviet Union.
End of list.

End of list.
Yeah.

Like that.
You, you would've had the balls to belike, I reject this entire exercise.
That's that the two get, get out my face.

Nobody cares.
But listen, I think, you know, what I'mgetting at here is that I think when
we talk geopolitics, I think it's abig mistake to use immutable variables.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and that's really, and thatgoes against our training at Stratfor by
the way, that goes against very trainingthat you and I received in our youth.

(01:02:32):
I think it goes against the trainingthat most people think goes into
being a geopolitical analyst.
It's like, well wait, if I use thingslike demographics, which are slow
moving rivers, geography, naturaldefenses, natural resources, I should
produce a relatively correct list.
And that's my point.
In 1946, you would've picked, not you,but like one would've picked fairly,

(01:02:56):
like consistently the same countries,and yet it is the Netherlands and yet
it is Israel, and yet it is some randomSouth Korea that's like barely, I
mean, that was like pushed to the veryEast China Sea, you know what I mean?
Like it, it is these countries thatend up outperforming expectations

(01:03:18):
because true innovation and true,true power and, and true like.
Abilities come out ofnecessity, not the plenty.

Yeah, I, I agree with you.
I'm gonna make one semanticchange to what you say.
'cause I dunno if you saw, we had oneper person who replied to us on Twitter
that said we were taking some shots atPeter and, and George and the godfathers
who, uh, taught us and things like that.
But one of the reasons I'm so frustratedwith, with George and with Peter and
some of those others, and by the way,I. We don't have careers without them.
So everything I say like ifIain to speak about them, it's

(01:03:51):
actually a sign of respect.
If I don't respect you, I probablywon't use your name at all.
Like I have a healthy level of respecteven when I disagree with them.
But I think we were taught actuallythat there are no immutable principles
that rivers can change and thattechnology can be created that makes
what was a previously really strong likelongstanding thing change overnight.
Like the rise of precisionguided munitions and the

(01:04:12):
semiconductor in industry.
And everything that happenedwith it completely revolutionized
geopolitics basically overnight.
And that happens in the late 1950s.
And I think we were actually taughtto be highly attuned to that, that the
hardest part of geopolitical analysisis yes, you're looking for the thing.
That feels immutable today, and whichdefines the center of gravity today.
But you also have to be flexible enoughin your mind to throw it all out of the

(01:04:34):
window tomorrow because you read somearticle in the, you know, Uzbekistani
post that suggests that it's allgoing to change in the next 10 years.
And being able to throw out your oldmental model and embrace a new one and
say, okay, this is the new immutableprinciple for the next 30 years.
Like, that was the training that I got.
And I feel like, you know, geopoliticalanalysts who have started resting on

(01:04:56):
their laurels, that's when they startgoing back to, and the river is here and
the demographic pyramid says this, andI'm just gonna, you know, extrapolate
from this going into the future.
Whereas like the really hard thing,like I said, is for us to be here next
week, let's say some discovery gets madefor fusion, and we look at each other
and we're like, all right, everythingwe've said for the last 10 years to
our clients, it was all fucking wrong.

(01:05:17):
Like, we gotta change everything.
Like we have to start from scratch and youhave to do that exercise like constantly.
Um, in this business, not.

So I'm not sure we were taught that though, because, you
know, I mean like the whole pointof, and, and I think we, we should
dedicate a whole episode just in theconcept of geopolitical imperatives.
Um mm-hmm.
But I, but you know, like forexample, yeah, I'm, I'm not sure
that that was ever effected.
And you know, one of the interestingthings about finance and geopolitics

(01:05:47):
is that the reason you can havegeopolitical trades is because some of
these long-term trends just don't matter.
Mm-hmm.
You know, they just, and they, and they,they might matter on a 30 or 50 year
time horizon, but they don't matteron a five or 10 year time horizon.
Countries do revolt against theirgeographic prisons, against their

(01:06:07):
demographic prisons, and they revoltagainst them through innovation.
Through productivity and throughsurprising, you know, and that's,
again, going back to 1946.
I think we pick a lot of these countriesin 1946 and we end up being wrong.
You know, we, we ignore Europe, weignore the Netherlands, we ignore
Israel, we ignore South Korea.
Um, and we're shocked bywhat, what comes after.

All right.
Well, so we'll do a future episode ongeopolitical imperatives, and I'm gonna
take the reins here and use that asthe perfect segue, because speaking of
revolting against constraints, um, let'sstart sort of our 30 minutes around
the world with this narrowly passedsweeping tax cut bill from President
Trump and the Republicans that is onits way to the Senate, uh, different,

(01:06:53):
you know, independent sources sayingit's gonna add 4 trillion roughly to the
US deficit over the next decade or so.
Um.
Well, I'm not gonna, I'm notgonna pretend to be humble.
I said two things at the beginningof the Trump administration that he
wasn't gonna be able to double downon tariffs, and that there was no way
in hell that this administration wasgoing to be fiscally conservative.

(01:07:15):
Uh, and we've seen ElonMusk has exited stage left.
Uh, he's very chagrined by his support.
And the Republicans and theTrump LED White House are
going to blow out the deficit.
I think that's the news,um, of the week there.
I'll let you cook from there, butI think it, I, I say it's a revolt
against constraints because Iwonder how you think about this.
Like the, the extent of US debt inand of itself has become a constraint.

(01:07:40):
I think you can see that in the waythe dollar's behaving and the way that
US Treasury yields are going and theway that other countries are dealing.
With the United States, with the Moody'sdowngrade, like the debt itself has
become so big that it is a constraint.
And rather than President Trump stickingto the guns that got him sort of elected
with your Elon Musk and your, you know,your fiscal hawks and things like that
in the background, he's going, screw it.

(01:08:02):
Let's do another 4 trillion.
Let's do more than we did withthe pandemic and with the, the
previous tax cuts combined.
I'll let you cook from there.

Well, your math is not really correct.
Great.
Correct.
Correct me.

Yes.
I, I want you to know listeners.
I, uh, I was a member of the Weberschool math team in high school.
I competed with them for three years.
I mostly was there for thefree pizza that came along.
I competed at math competitionsfor three years in high school.
Uh, I did not get a single problem.
Correct in my threeyears in, in competition.

Jacob, Jacob, I got three degrees in political
science, which is three too many.
So like I am not a math guy.
It's just that we need to kind ofthink about the numbers, right?
The pandemic was anorgy of fiscal spending.
It was, you know, 5 trillionin basically four years.

(01:08:56):
So, uh, the current bill that justbarely passed the house is 2.3 trillion
additional, um, deficit over 10 years.
So the rate of change in adding tothe deficit has massively collapsed.
Now, the reason that I don'tthink President Trump campaigned

(01:09:17):
on fiscal conservatism at all.
He campaigned on prophecy.
He, his promises and, you know,various think tanks, like actually
tried to put math behind his sortof, you know, campaign promises that
he would think of in the moment.
His campaign promises, if theywere actually affected, would've

(01:09:38):
added 10 to $15 trillion.
Mm-hmm.
To the deficit.
So let me just put that very clearly.
Let, let's take the low end of that.
'cause let's say 15 trillion wasalways going to be impossible.
His campaign promises would've added 10.
This bill adds 2.3 over 10 years.
So it's a fifth of what he promised.

(01:09:59):
And the reason for that is that thesequencing here, I think Jacob, is that it
was the bond market riot in November andDecember, which many people didn't even
experience, but people who trade fixedincome, they definitely know it happened.
The Fed cut interest ratesa hundred base points.
The fed controls theshort end of the curve.
Usually when the Fed cuts interestrates, the long end comes down too.

(01:10:23):
So you, you are borrowing rates of foryour mortgage or for your credit card.
They get adjusted lowerwhen the fed cuts rates.
That didn't happen in Novemberand December of 2024 for the first
time in 50 years of US history.
In other words, the long end.
Acted the way Brazil's long endwould act after the election

(01:10:44):
of a populist president.
And it was that selloff in the bondmarket in November and December that
forced the house to become a lotmore conservative, or not forced,
but gave them the sort of backing.
They got emboldened, oh, look atwhat the bond market is seeing.
And it forced PresidentTrump to do two things.
He didn't wanna do Doge, he didn'twanna do that, but he did it because

(01:11:09):
of that bond market move in October,November and December as the bond
market was rioting due to his election.
And finally he selected ScottBeson for the Treasury Secretary.
There were rumors that Howard Lutnickhad basically outmaneuvered him
and his call Bestin shows up lastminute and actually calms down the
bond market just by being there.
He the White House, just as a human being.

(01:11:29):
So the sequence is this, president Trumpbecomes a viable candidate in September.
People realize he's gonnaprobably cook Harris.
Bond market startsagitating higher and higher.
It gets to 4.8% of the 10 year yield,and it was that move from 3.6 to 4.8.
That freaks out everyone.

Mm-hmm.

And that leads to Doge Scott, treasury Secretary, and the
House of Representatives becomesemboldened to ask, ask for cuts.
What we have in this bill is somethingthat nobody really expected last
year, which is that there will becuts to offset some of the spending.
And so instead of $10 trillion, additionto the deficit, we get 2.3 trillion.

(01:12:12):
Now, is it fiscal conservatism?
Well, no, because they'readding to the deficit.
But I need to remind you thatextension of 2017, tax cut alone,
just that extension is $5 trillion.
4.8. So the fact that we're only adding2.3 trillion to the deficit over the next

(01:12:33):
10 years is to me a shocking outcome.
Unexpected outcome because itmeans that that $5 trillion bill to
just keep our tax rates the same.
Let me just be clear.
This isn't about cutting taxes.
It's about keeping the current legislativetax base the way it is, that in of

(01:12:54):
itself costs money just to keep thetaxes the same, costs money because
in 2017, they were not paid for it.
Therefore, the reconciliation billrequired it to expire seven years later.
We are seven years later,eight years later, 2025.
The legislation expires at the end ofthis year, that 2017, so we're spending
5 trillion purely on keeping thingsthe way they are, and yet somehow

(01:13:19):
they find enough cuts so that thedeficit only expands 2.3 trillion.
Now, a couple of things on this.
I'm the guy who coinedthe term human steeper.
President Trump is.
Mm-hmm.
Means that there's a sell off.
But that already happened, and Ithink a lot of people look at this
bill and they're saying like, oh,here comes the bond market riots.
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
It was the bond market riot in Novemberand December that got us this bill.

(01:13:42):
So
I'm not sure there's gonna be anotherreally significant sell off in bonds
because look, at the end of theday, the bond market always knew the
2017 legislation would be extended.
It'd always do the math ofit, that it's $5 trillion.
And it always knew that itwould be highly unlikely to find

(01:14:04):
enough cuts to offset all of it.
So the fact that the deficit increasesby 2 trillion is not that much.
Plus the tariff tariff levelof 10% is probably gonna stay.
Right.
I think we all at this point agree,Jacob, that we're gonna have some sort
of a flat tariff of about 10% that bringsin probably a hundred to 200 billion.
So if you actually add that to thisbill, honestly, it's kind of offset.

(01:14:30):
So

you're, you're zagging.
No, I like it.

So, so what I'm saying to you is like, you have a shocking outcome.
You have most of PresidentTrump's priorities that he talked
about during his, uh, campaign.
You know, he talked about lowercorporate taxes, he talked about
lowering corporate taxes and stuff.
None of that stuff is gonna happen, Jacob.
None of it.
All he's gonna get is taxesand tips are gonna go down.

(01:14:54):
Yay.
Alright, cool.
You know, like, I don't seelike how much, whatever.
I'm not gonna perjure myself here.
I was gonna say, if Iwas gonna do tips, I,
I mean you plead a favor.
Uh, alright.
You

heard it here first.
We're, we're now chargingfor our analysis.
Yes.
Just the dollar per, uh,per uh, per appearance.

We got a tip charge, but no, look, here's what I'm seeing.
Like you've got.
The tax cuts from 2017 to to be extended.
I hate the way we frame that.
That's not extending tax cuts.
Let's, let me rephrase it.
It's gonna cost $5 trillion tokeep our tax codes the same.

(01:15:36):
Okay.
So that's what we're gonna do.
We're gonna get some taxes andtips, mortgage, like modify a
little bit, some salt stuff.
And then we're gonna do a bunch of cutsto make sure that it's only 2 trillion.
And then we're gonna add aVAT tax on our consumers also
called the 10% import tariff.
Yeah, let's call that for what it is.

(01:15:56):
It's a federal VAT tax.
Effectively.
I see.
So actually, I think President Trumpis running on a Nikki Haley policy
because they're going to cut Medicaidbenefits, they're going to cut welfare,
they're going to have cuts, and they'reraising consumption taxes on Americans

(01:16:17):
through that 10% import tariff.
And that gets you to very little fiscalthrust, and there's gonna be very little
stimulative effort out of this bill.
It's basically non-existent, that5 trillion, again, we're spending 5
trillion to keep our taxes the same.
We're gonna expand the deficitover the next 10 years.
Jacob byte 5 trillion.

(01:16:37):
And it will have no impact on consumptionor investment in this country.
You are not gonna change your behaviornext year if your taxes the same.
It's not like you actually thoughtthat 2017 tax cuts would expire.
Nobody did.
If Kamala Harris won as the president.
President Harris would'veextended the 2017 tax cuts.
Like obviously no one'sgonna let taxes go back up.

(01:17:00):
That does, like, doesn'thappen in America, you know?

Yeah, no, I, I love the zag.
Uh, and it's good for the listenersthat you and I would take opposite
sides of this a little bit, and,and maybe you're, you're right,
like maybe I'm too far into it.
And also I think it's worth saying like,this still has to get through the Senate.
We could see significantchanges in the Senate, you know.
Is it 2 trillion?
Could it go up to 5 trillion?
What is the cost if you factor inincreased interest rates over time?
Like there's, you know, whatdoes military spending look like?

(01:17:24):
Uh, is the growth real or not?
I think one of my biggest criticismswould be that we're not, the
United States is not settingitself up for meaningful growth.
Like, there isn't meaningful investmentin things like infrastructure or
innovation that is part of the spending.
So this notion that you're gonnagrow your way out of some of these
things, like, 'cause part of this,like they're projecting higher growth
rates along with that, and I thinksome of that growth is kind of empty.

(01:17:45):
Um, I, I think you're also rightto say that, um, Trump did not
campaign only on fiscal conservatism.
He talked out of both sides of his mouth.
So when he was with people, yeah.
You know, he wanted to talk to thefiscal conservatives and he wanted
to talk to the, you know, thepopulace and he merged them together.
Um, but I always said at his core,he, he never wanted anything to do
with the fiscal conservatives, but.

(01:18:06):
In the nod to Doge and to Elon Musk,like he did all of this grandstanding
cutting U-S-A-I-D, cutting innovationfunds, things like that without much
benefit to the budget, actually probablydamaged the US in the long run with some
of these intangibles that the UnitedStates has always been so good at.
And now he's going back to histried and true sort of populace.
I'm gonna blow out the deficit thing.
And no, I don't think that thisshows any sense of, um, of measure.

(01:18:29):
You mentioned Medicaid,they're not gonna cut Medicaid.
Let me get this quotefrom President Trump.
Uh, that, uh, two Republicans anonymous,anonymously told, uh, Politico that he'd
been meeting with, um, some conservativehardliners on the budget who were
pushing for deeper cuts to Medicaid.
And here is the quote fromPresident Trump to them.
Quote, don't fuck around with Medicaid.

(01:18:50):
End quote.
Like, he's not, he's not trying to cut.
I know, but we're like, we stillhave to go to the Senate, like,
and who, who says he is gonna sign,like he's gonna be the one that
was like arbit of getting Medicaid.
I, I don't even know what'sgonna get through the Senate.
Like, I I understand that we'reearly here, but, uh, I don't know.
I I'm, I'll take the other side.

Look, it's 20 20 15 to 2014.
What I would say to you is that ifthis bill gets changed, it will be
changed towards a more conservativeside, not towards the more provate
side, because he Well, that'll be

interesting.

No, no, because he is not a conservative,
so you're right.
He, he wants the bill to be bigger,but the conservative in the house are
the ones that are holding that back andthey will be aided by the bond market.
Mm-hmm.
So what they did overnightis they actually, so the
Medicaid, uh, means testing.

(01:19:43):
So you need to show that you'reworking and so on, or trying
to get a job to get benefits.
That was pulled back by three years from2029 when he's out of office to 2026.

Mm-hmm.

In order to pass the house.
And so my my point is that theydid mess with Medicaid and he
is happy that it got through.
I'm, I'm not sure the Senate isgonna modify the bill that much.
I mean, maybe they will, but Ithink that this people confuse who's
more on President Trump's side.
I think everyone over indexes on 2017experience when it was the Senate

(01:20:15):
that stood against him on Obamacare.

Mm-hmm.

This time around, throughout this entire experience of following
this budget process since January veryclosely it's been the house that's
been resisting him, not the Senate.
So, I mean, if the Senate wants thisbill to pass, they need to kind of pass
it quickly and just like, like end it.
Because I don't think we're gonnaget, this is as profligate, which,

(01:20:39):
if that's a GRE word for anyone,that means this is as that populous
spend heavy as you're gonna get.
Uh, it just cannot, you're not gonnabe able to get it through the house
if you get any more aggressive.
And the bond market is sittingin the sideline right now.
And if you are right and I'mwrong on the politics, then

(01:21:02):
the bond market gets involved.
Mm-hmm.
And then I'm right again because,you know, and we saw this in
January again, the house startedtalking about cuts, not last year.
Donald Trump and his, Cory andhis supporters did not talk
about any cuts on anything.
At any point in the campaign, doge camein and said, oh, we can fire bureaucrats.

(01:21:26):
Oh, because there's so many ofthem and they get paid so much.
No, that's not gonna do anything.
So Doge never seriously contemplated,actually, like anyone who understands how
America works, understands there, like,you cannot cut $2 trillion out of American
spending without going to Congress.

Well, EII think Elon thought he could, but to your point,
I don't think he understands America

well.
Also, how appropriation works.
Like you can't just say like,we're not gonna take the money.
No, no.
It was appropriated by congress, by law.
You know, you gotta take the money,how you use it, you can burn it in api,
but it's been appropriated by Congress.
And so the issue is that the House ofRepresentatives really revolted against
Trump in December when they denied him hisrequest to punt the debt ceiling to 2029.

(01:22:07):
Nobody really paid attentionto that, except for me.
To me, that was a really big momentwhen republicans in his own party after
an extraordinary electoral victoryby the president, said no to him.
And then in January theystarted adding cuts.
And I think that the Trump administrationbasically gave into the cuts at all
any cuts because of the bond marketaction from November to January.

(01:22:31):
And so, unless they want bond yields togo back up to 4.8, where they peaked,
um, and if they wanted to go to five.
Then have a carnage in stock market,which they can't control at that point.
It's not about tariff levels, it'snot about negotiations with China.
This is now bond market saying, we don'tlike your deficits, but you are right.
Deficits will expand.
And actually what I think Jacob justsays to us is the following, the delta

(01:22:55):
in adding to the deficit is collapsing.
You know, we went from adding like mm-hmm.
2 trillion in one year to 2 trillion inone year to 2 trillion over 10 years.
That's a huge delta changetowards conservatism.
But it's not enough because to yourpoint, wait a minute, it doesn't decrease
the deficit over the next seven years.
Exactly.

(01:23:16):
And so what that means is that thedifficult work will be left for either
the last two years of Trump likepresidency or the presidency in 2028.
Whoever gets elected.
If it's a OC, she's gonna nobut, but she's gonna deal with
the deficit one way or another,and she's got a solution to it.

(01:23:37):
You know, it's raising taxes ormaybe it's Nikki Healy and she's
gonna have a solution to it as well.
It's gonna be a little bit different.
It's gonna be cutting spending.
So I think that the US is on an inexorablepath towards fiscal conservatives.
That's like, what's just gonna happen?

Or it's Donald Jr. Um, while we're talking, Marco, I
was just seeing the Economist, uh,uh, release its cover for this week.
It's the remarkable rise of Poland.
I feel so bad for Poland.
I've been bullish Poland too.
God, the economist just jinxedthem while we've been talking.

Well, no, but we didn't put them in 1220.
Yes.

Right.
Yeah, we didn't, we we did it.
We, we did it really good.
Um, okay, second thing, let's turnto, uh, we've talked about the Middle
East quite a bit, so we're only gonnaspend a little bit of time on this,
but I do think it is worth talkingabout this a little bit, um, because
you've had the Trump administrationreally change its messaging on Israel.
Um, trying to get Israel tougheron stopping bombing Gaza into

(01:24:30):
the middle of the middle Ages.
I mean, it's already done that it's,I guess now it's trying to return
them, return them to the Bronze Age.
I don't know.
Um, so, you know, Israel hasstepped up its attacks in Gaza.
I think it sort of sees the writing onthe wall and is doing as much as it can.
You've also had reports, sillyreports, because Israel can't attack
Iran without US support, but reportsthat Israel is considering an attack
on Iran because they're worriedabout some kind of nuclear deal.

(01:24:52):
And then the big news from yesterdaythat two Israeli diplomats were shot,
um, outside an event at Capital JewishMuseum in Washington, dc Uh, the guy
who they suspect did it as he was beinghauled off into custody shouting free
Palestine at, at the top of his lungs.
Um.
And I mean, I, we can cook onthis in a bunch of different ways.
I'm gonna risk getting canceledhere and just point this out.

(01:25:14):
And here's where I'll bathemyself in indifference.
And here's where I'm, uh, honestly,probably more cynical about
this issue than probably anybodyelse you're gonna listen to.
Because there were so many, um, socialmedia posts, official statements
about we condemn antisemitism, thisis horrible, et cetera, et cetera.
Uh, but these, first of all,this was an assassination of
Israeli diplomats on US soil.

(01:25:36):
So it wasn't, they weren'ttargeted because they were Jews.
They were targeted because they wererepresenting the Israeli government.
That doesn't make it okay, but there'sthis line between antisemitism and
anti-Zionism that always gets blurred.
Um, and I think it's just, firstof all, worth pointing that out.
So if you're condemning theassault on these two people,
what you're actually condemningis somebody going after Zionism.

(01:25:58):
Not Jews and a lot of the people whoare criticizing the antisemitism, it's
o it's safe to criticize antisemitism,but it's not safe to, um, criticize
anti-Zionism because Zionism, they're,that's the genocidal maniacs, the
Zionists need to be destroyed, butof course, don't kill the Jews.
It's like, Hey, you, you say thisstuff long enough about one thing,
they're gonna do the other thing.
I don't know if that was veryarticulate, but that that's 0.1.

(01:26:20):
And the second thing I just wantto say here is that no matter how
morally reprehensible you think,what Israel's actions and Gaza or how
morally reprehensible, reprehensible,you think Israel's actions and Gaza.
Are, and I happen to thinkthey are morally gross.
I don't think you can argue any otherway, like the extent to which we're here
now, like it's morally reprehensible.

(01:26:42):
Even if you bathe yourself in adifference, like on an objective
level, um, every time something likethis happens, even the people who
would support criticism of the Israeligovernment, um, on the insider,
like, well, that could have been me.
And so like the strategic logicfor having a safe homeland for
Jews, uh, makes a lot of sense.
And we have to look the other way becauseif we don't, like, they're just, they're

(01:27:03):
just gonna try and kill us all again.
Um, and so it, it excu, itexcuses all manner of sins.
I think I, I'm, I'm not saying thatit does excuse the sins, I'm just
saying that it, like, it creates thisdissonance from the exact people you need.
You need their minds to change.
Like they're also getting attackedin this different vector and so
they're gonna look the other way andcontinue doing what they're doing

(01:27:24):
because they have post-traumaticstress disorder of their own.
So, I dunno, there's a lot inthere that could get me canceled.
But, uh, take it any direction you want.

I am not gonna take it in any direction.
You're not.
Okay, cool.
No, I think this is one of thosewhere you have to cook yourself.
Uh, I think you get a pass.
I'm

cooking myself here.
I don't know why I'm,I'm suggesting something.
I just, there was something that reallybothered me about this reflexive,
oh, we condemn antisemitism andit's like, okay, like bullshit.
Like nobody condemns antisemitism.
I, I dunno.
It just bothered.

Well, no, I think, I think what you're saying is that,
uh, you can't actually, I thinkwhat you're saying is that you
cannot just create these platitudes.
About condemning antisemitism.
If you then don't accept atleast some level of Zionism,

(01:28:15):
you know, let's say, you know what I mean?
If, if, if antisemitism is likefrom zero to a 10, and if we all
agree, then only zero is acceptable.
Only zero antisemitism isacceptable on planet Earth.
Mm-hmm.
You can't be like, oh, wellI'm a two outta 10 antisemite.
Well, that's two outta 10 too many.

(01:28:35):
You know, like, so if only zero isacceptable, then if there's a zero to a
10 on Zionism, you, you have to acceptsome Zionism because Zionism, which is
a very loaded term today, but reallyit was just in my very sort of bizarre

(01:28:56):
nihilist interpretation of what Zionismis, is it's basically 19th century I.
European style nation state movement.
In other words, Jewish, it's Jewish

nationalism.
It's the only nationalist movement in theworld that has a different word for it.
It's like, okay, French nationalismfine, but Jewish nationalism.
Oh, but that's Zionism.
That's poisonous.

I would even say nationalism.
The word nationalism is now alsobeen denigrated in many ways.
But in the 19th century, like Jews aresitting in Vienna, they're sitting in
Minsk, they're sitting in Thessaloniki,they're sitting in all these, uh,
cities in Europe, and they're lookingat Italians creating a country out
of something that's never existed.
Right.
Right.
Mm-hmm.

(01:29:38):
I mean, if you know Italianhistory, what Gary BDI did is he put
together, oh, it looks like a boot.
Let's make it into Italy, likeit was Rome 2000 years ago.
Italy is as much a Zionistentity for Italians.
There were people in the boot that didn'tspeak Italian, for God's sakes, France.

(01:29:58):
What France did.
We today speak I de France French becauseit's completely destroyed different
linguistic dialects, including some thatwere more like Catalan in the South.
So the Jews are sitting in Europethroughout the 19th century looking at
what's going on around them while they'rebeing persecuted every day for being Jews.

(01:30:19):
Right?
I mean, this isn't like a a,a new phenomenon, obviously.
It's not a Holocaust phenomenon,it's a predates it massively.
So if you're Jewish and you're sitting,you're looking at Germans creating
Germany out of nothing, you look atItalians creating Italy out of nothing,
and you look at the French, okay?
It's not fair to saythe France didn't exist.
It did, but it became much moredominated by El de France, French.

(01:30:42):
I think Zionism comes from that history,and so it's simply doing what Europeans
did in Europe, but for Jews somewhere,you know, anywhere it ended up being
Palestine, of course, we're dealingwith the consequences of that decision.
But the point I think is that
I understand your point,that's all I'm saying.

(01:31:03):
Like you cannot, no.
And you cannot just say, well,I'm not, I'm a I, I I delore
anti-Semitism, but you know, Zionismin the Jewish state are evil.
And the point is, well, actuallyone solves for the other.
You know?
And I, and I get that.
The question I have is, is therea pursuit of Zionism that actually

(01:31:25):
is going to create stabilityover the next hundred years for.
Israelis.

Yeah, probably not.
And I appreciate your use of the dials.
'cause what I said was probablya little bit too flippant.
I'm sure the earlier stuff will getaggregated, but like, think of it this
way, if you're a 10 on anti-Zionism,what that means is you think the Jews
should not be allowed to have a state.
Exactly.
And that is anti-Semitism.
Yes.
That means the destructionof the Jews full stop.
Now that's one position you canbe critical of Zionism and say.

(01:31:54):
Jews, like everybody else in theworld, should not commit war crimes.
And if they do, they'll be punishedlike everybody else in the world.
But as a people, they do havea right to a state as legally
defined, blah, blah, blah.
And the thing that I'm going afterhere is I, I'm raise my hand.
I'm in print criticizing Zionism,like a self-critical like person
who has like spent a lot of histime thinking about these things.

(01:32:15):
Like, well, like I said, what Israel'sdoing, God were reprehensible.
But the thing that bothers me isthe people who were saying, I hate
antisemitism, but I know I havethe receipts to say, okay, but you
are also saying there should beno Jewish state, that it should be
Palestine from the river to the sea.
And that like, that, likeyou condemning antisemitism.
Like, I'm not, like, that's what gets me.

(01:32:35):
So no,

I, I think that's perfectly fair.
I mean, and by the way, I do thinkit's anti-Semitic to say that
Israel should not exist, obviously.
Would it not be anti Italian?
Would it not be discriminatorytowards Italians as an ethnic group?
If you said that Italy should not exist,we should go back to, you know, uh, the
papal states, as you and I actually kindof inferred earlier in this podcast,

(01:32:58):
but like, you know, like Italy shouldbe split up into Kingdom of Sicily and
the Papal states and you know, likeVenice should be its own city state.
Like that would be, Ithink, antit Italian.
So I think it's interesting because,you know, what I think confuses a lot
of people is that many people think thatbeing Jewish is about a religion, you

(01:33:21):
know, and obviously I'm, I'm walkingon eggshells heels because I'm not
Jewish, but I think that there is a, um,pretty deep historical ethnolinguistic
component to a Jewish identity.
In other words, you do not haveto be observant Jew to be Jewish.

(01:33:42):
In particularly, in particularlybecause you know, when shit hits
the fan in history, when they cometo get you, they don't ask you
if you can recite from the Torah.

Right.
Yeah.
No, and this goes back to the powerindex and why I'm so pessimistic about
Israel on the power index, because ifyou look back at the history of Jewish
polities in the Middle East, likegetting away from the, the politics
and ideology, now there's a reasonthere haven't been that many of them.
And that's because thisgeography is hard to control.
And it's also because, uh, Jews areall like, are their own worst enemies.

(01:34:16):
They're always at each other's throats.
There's always different factions who hateeach other and won't listen to each other.
And usually they start fighting eachother, and then the Romans or the
Persians or the Babylonians or theOttomans come in and sweep them up
because they can't have a unified front.
Hmm.
And the reason I'm so pessimistic aboutIsrael over the next 30 years is that
you, you're seeing that internally inIsraeli politics right now where you've
got the religious, um, demographicsor increasing the secular Jews.

(01:34:40):
Are kind of dying out.
There's an apathy on the, like theleft hasn't been able to meaningfully
challenge for, you know, um, the Israeligovernment in decades basically died with
the end of the, the peace process before.
There is such a large Arabpopulation now that nobody wants to
work with that it basically meansyou're gonna get center, right?
Governments or the left is gonnahave to work with the Arabs.
And for as enlightened as the left is,it really won't work with the Arabs.

(01:35:01):
It doesn't want to.
So it's just like this, uh, the, theway that Israeli demographics look going
forward, especially if you're gonna add,if you're gonna conquer Gaza and you're
gonna conquer the West Bank too, whichis the path that Israel is on right now.
Like, it just leads to the sensewhere Israeli society itself is not
gonna be able to defend from theexternal threats that are coming.
And that's always been theend of Jewish independence.

(01:35:22):
Uh, see that's an interesting

one.
So in other words, we both agreethat it should be definitely zero on
the zero to tens antisemitism line.
That's a fact.
Um, but what you're saying is that onthe, is existence of Israeli state.
You also, like, you have tobe zero on anti, uh, Zionism

(01:35:45):
to be zero on antisemitism.
But there is some cri criticismof where is this enough.
Mm-hmm.
If I, if I listen to you as anexternal, non-Jewish observer, an
interpreter here, I would say thatyou're seeing, like, look, the risk here
is that Israel in pursuit of securitybasically chews up too much territory
and he can't digest it at some point.

(01:36:07):
And so there is a pointwhere maybe this is enough.
Mm-hmm.
Is that, I mean, and, and I, and Isee what's going on in Gaza and like
that piece of land, I mean, it hasno real benefit at all to Israel.
I mean, you know, like, I meanit's, it's, it's truly, it has
absolutely no geographical benefit.

(01:36:29):
I mean it's,

or to Egypt or to anyone else.
There's a reason nobody wants it.
Nobody.
The only reason Israel's doingthis is because nobody wants it.

Right.
And, and then the other, theproblem is the West Bank.
You know, Jacob?
Yes.
I think the problem is the WestBank because, uh, history, and, and
by this I mean biblical history,you know, it's like very long.
And those are two kingdomsthat Israel did control.
Judea and some, what was the other one

I forgot, but we,

Samaria, which, which one?
Jude and

Sam.
Judea and Samaria.

Judea and Samaria.
So like, my point is, it's like, you know,if that is the long-term goal I do, I do
worry that that extension is problematic.
And it's problematic becauseit would destabilize the, as we
discussed in the last PO podcast.
What I fear is that the eastern borderof Israel has been quite pacified.

(01:37:26):
Jordan is an ally, and I think thatanything that disrupts Jordanian
stability would be a problem.

Yeah.
And by the way, on, on your,on your dials, like Yes.
So zero on anti-Semitism.
I would be willing to grant, youcan be up to a nine on anti-Zionism
and still not be anti-Semitic.
But if you're a 10 on anti-Zionism, Ihate to break it to you're anti-Semitic.
Like that, that's the point.
I'm, that, that's the point.
I'm talking.
What is that?
Yeah.
And I'm willing to, I'mwilling to grant it.

(01:37:53):
I'm talking about the tens.
The tens are, I see sometens out there who are saying
anti-Semitism is deplorable.
Okay.

Just, just to be clear, so what triggered you and the reason
we're having this nice session,and we should have it, I, I'll have

Yes.
Thank, thank you for the therapy session.

No, that's, but what triggered you was that after the
assassination of two Israeli uh,diplomats in Washington DC you saw
basically in the public domain.
In social media and in the publicpeople who say that Israel should
not exist, saying that they deploredthe act because it was anti-Semitic.

Yeah.

Okay.
Yeah, no, that's fair.
I think, uh, I don't know if youcan be nine outta 10, you know,
because that sounds to me likewhat Tel Aviv, a city state.
I mean,

all, all you have to do is say the Jews have
a right to a state like that.
You, you have to at least get to there.
If you can't get to there like you

should, you are anti,
I think that's, that's.
And I think that's, but,and yet not too many people.

Yeah.
All right.
Let's, let's hit one more hot button issuein the nine minutes that we have left.
Um, I dunno if we can get, uh, oo,to put this in the, to splice in the
conversation that, uh, south AfricanPresident Cy Phos had with Donald Trump
and the incredible back and forth about,he's trying to get planes from everybody.
Now, Marco, it's gutter's not good enough.
He is asking the SouthAfricans for a, for a plane.

(01:39:15):
Uh, but this has been somethingthat's sort of been in the background
with the Trump administrationsince the very beginning.
And it's continuing, even without Elondoing the whispering in Trump's ear.
Like, think about this executiveorder from, uh, February 7th,
where the United States decidedit was policy, uh, to not, uh.
To not provide aid or assistanceto South Africa and to promote the
resettlement of Africana refugeesescaping government-sponsored

(01:39:38):
race-based discrimination.
Um, this escalated because in this meetingwith Rama in the Oval Office, um, he
basically was talking about, you know,genocide against whites in South Africa
and putting this ambushing serial, Ramafoso with this, um, he showed him a video
montage that was supposed to prove this.
And not only did, did did he do that?
If you go to the White House, theWhite House has, has a release

(01:40:01):
entitled President Trump is rightabout what's happening in South Africa.
And like, here's the text.
I'm literally reading fromthe White House today.
President Trump showed the world theshocking treatment of white farmers
in South Africa, including with avideo montage that highlighted the
discrimination and violence targetedat the innocent minority victims and
quoting some reputable newspapers,but also a lot of, uh, daily male

(01:40:23):
and Breitbart and some other things.
Apology New York Sun.
Like apologies if you thinkthese things are real.
Um.
We put South Africa on our list, likethere is this weird back and forth with
the United States and South Africa.
Anything you want to add here on this?
'cause it is pretty strange.

Well, I think both sides are being disingenuous here.
First of all, uh, you know, I'm notJewish, but if I were, I'll be extremely
angry at the wanton use of the termgenocide over the past 35 years.
You know, it's just becomelike everybody's being genocide

(01:40:58):
and left, right and center.
So yes, there is no genocideof whites in South Africa.
Please come on.
At the same time,
just because there's no genocide doesn'tmean that stuff that's going on is okay.
And I think that was the point that,um, actually one of the golfers, I

(01:41:20):
don't follow golf, they never will.
Sorry, I, I grew up in the third world.
We use golf clubs for other things.
So I don't golf, but there wasErnie else who I of course know.
Mm-hmm.
The other gentleman did saylike, Hey, my brother has a farm.
And yeah, he's been threatened,you know, by like criminals.
So it's not that great.

(01:41:41):
And so that's the, that's the thing.
We're like, yeah, I do thinkSouth Africa should do better.
Like, sorry, like, yeah.
You can't have, I know that thiswent to the Supreme Court of South
Africa, and, uh, the leader of theeconomic, uh, freedom Fighters, uh,
Malema was, you know, basically,look, it's, it's a free country.

(01:42:02):
It's a democracy, this freedom of speech.
He can sing whatever songs he wants.
And Supreme Court of South Africabasically said something like this,
this song where, you know, there's aline shoot the boar, kill the farmer.
Uh, the Supreme Court basically saidlike, look, it's a protest song.
Nobody actually means thatin today's context, you know?

(01:42:23):
And.
I get that.
I kind of, I understand that, um,given the context and all that,
but there is still a securityrisk to some of these people.
And so I don't see what's wrong with theUnited States of America, putting pressure
on a country to make sure that it'sminority is, you know, treated fairly.

(01:42:45):
Yeah.
Um, I hear you.
And that minority wascomplicit in appetite.
Like Yeah.
That you're like, shit, that, that sucks.
That's, yeah.
But fair.
You,

you know what though?
It, it goes back to what we talkedabout last week, which was last week.
You were talking abouthow wasn't it so, um.
So amazing is the wrong word, but thatit was so, um, unprecedented that here
was a US president who was saying,it's not my job to sit in judgment.
It is my job to defend the interestof the United States and sitting
in judgment over an issue that youobviously know nothing about and

(01:43:21):
which is not strategically significantwith a government and a country that
is very geopolitically important.
If you're thinking about the future ofgeopolitics in a multipolar world and
you're worried about Chinese influencein Africa and all these other things,
it would be really good to have at leastSouth Africa neutral, if not on your side.
Just look at a map like SouthKorea, excuse me, South Korea.

(01:43:41):
South Africa, incredibly importantstrategic real estate, especially if
Africa, in terms of growth and all theseother things is gonna be important,

especially the Houthis keep, uh, shutting down.
Oh, it's a good idea to

bring their leader in and lecture him about these things, and then
also ask for a plane and everything else.
Um, now Osa I thought he was, um, he wasall, I thought he should, he, he was very,
uh, statesmanlike and diplomatic, but Iwas waiting for him to go zelensky on it.
'cause, you know, I think thatZelensky actually did good for himself.
And, and how he pushed back, Iwas waiting for him to do it.

(01:44:12):
He didn't do that.
And that's because he wasthinking strategically.
I think he realizes that it'simportant for South Africa to have
good relations with the United States.
But, you know, we're a week removedfrom President Trump telling everyone
in Riyadh, I don't sit in judgment.
That's for God.
And then here we are literally sittingin judgment in the Oval Office.

I, I, I love nothing more than when I'm pawned P-W-N-E-D by my own.
So I, I slow clap Jacob.
Like, thank you for, uh, slappingme with my own, uh, framework.
I think you're correct.
I think, uh, it was petty.
It was, um.
It was petty and it was, um, you know,um, unstrategic, he should have taken

(01:44:54):
his own advice from the last week.
You're correct.
But I would say that for South Africanfuture, you know, for South Africa for
their own goods, they should not be, youknow, like eliminating a whole minority
of people or making it uncomfortable.
I mean, the whole point of SouthAfrica is it's the Rebo Haitian.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and if you startwith the African, uh, farmers,

(01:45:17):
by the way, you know, there'sa short path from that to Ed.
Mean pushing out the South Asiansout of Uganda, like South Africa
is not just white and black.
There's also South Asians and also anethnic group that they term and they
use the term colored for, which is avarious mixes usually in the south, in

(01:45:39):
the Cape Province, uh, Western Cape.
Uh, the point is there area lot of different groups
in South Africa other than.
Blacks and White African and all of thosegroups contribute to the Rainbow Nation.
I mean, that was Mandela's likegreat contribution to humanity
that he, you know, engendered that.

(01:46:00):
And so I a hundred percent agree with you.
I stand corrected.
Thank you.
President Trump did focus on strategicimperatives of the US at the same time.
He was kind of giving South Africa ahelping hand, quite frankly, because they
need to solve this and they need to makesure that, um, you know, like they're,
they don't go down the path of otherAfrican countries that did turn quite

(01:46:23):
racist towards their well minorities.

They haven't so far.
It's to South Africa's credit thatit basically like, yes, there are
tons of problems in South Africa.
There's violence, there's theinheritance of apartheid, all the
different wealth inequalities,education, inequalities, et cetera.
But they haven't had a genocide.
Yeah, they haven't had a, they haven'thad a civil war like relative to
the other countries around them.
And what they went through, youwould've expected much worse by now.
And maybe it's still coming.

(01:46:47):
Like this story has not been written yet.
But the thing that Mandela didwas truth and reconciliation.
Let's all say what we did and thenlet's figure out a way forward.
And, uh, OSA even in theconversation, said to Trump,
Hey, we need to talk about this.
Mandela said this, likethis is where we need to go.
And that was a moment where theUnited States could have said, okay.
Like, there are these problemslive by your own creed.

(01:47:08):
Let's do truth and reconciliation againbecause you guys need an update to that.
Because if not, you'reheaded in a bad direction.
Well that's, you know, butthat's not what was happening.

No, no.
But Jacob, but Jacob, this is where I,I stand with the criticism of Julius
Malama because he is going back.
I'm not sure that he feels the truth.
Reconciliation was enough.
Yeah.
And this is where, where I'm zaggingfrom you is that what I saw in the
media over the last couple of days isjust every single liberal, mainstream

(01:47:36):
media, um, you know, outlet, basicallysaying discredited news about genocide.
Yes, that is correct, but I don't care.
Genocide is an overused termin truth, it's happened very
rarely since the Holocaust.
Okay.
And again, if I was Jewish, I would beso much more angrier about the use of the

(01:47:57):
word genocide left, right, and center.
Everyone's getting genocide now.
Okay, everybody get in line.
Get your genocide hat and t-shirt on.
No.
Just because there is no genocidein South Africa against the whites
does not mean that they're notbeing discriminated now in sort of
reverse discrimination in some ways.
And I think that that is a mistakethere, there is clearly an exodus of

(01:48:18):
white side of South Africa anyways.
I mean professionals and so on, thatthere has been happening for the 20 years.
I don't think that's a,that's good for the country.
And I do think that Julius Malamashould be pushed on again, a a, a little
bit leaned against a little bit more.
And I think that PresidentRama did a great job.
I agree with you.
But there can be both President Trumpin the right wing of Fri Connors

(01:48:40):
who are talking about genocide.
They can be wrong.
Also South Africa needsto do a lot better.
Yeah.
And when I see the media, everybodyin the west indexed on this issue.
Well, there's no genocide.
It's like, great, you know,like that is not a standard
for how minorities are treated.
Like, are you being genocided?
Uh, I guess not.
Okay, well then you'regood and we're out of here.
You know, like, well,

well, I, I just, I, I agree with you a hundred percent.
I just, I think it's a missed opportunityfor President Trump because I think
he could have actually used hisposition to try and push towards that.
But by doing what he did, Iactually think he made it almost
impossible for Ram OSA to do that.
Like, because now like Ram OSA has togo, go back after having, you know,
like all these clips out and it's like,you think that's gonna cause anybody

(01:49:23):
to wanna sit down around a table?
Maybe I'm over.
I don't know.

I don't know.
You know what?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Because look.
For a country like South Africa, itdoes matter what great powers do.
Right.
And I think that maybe he can go home andbe like, Hey, Julius Malema, thanks buddy.
You know, like maybe that canbe the takeaway from here.
It's like, hey, maybe like to downthe shoot the board, like, you know,

(01:49:48):
thinking maybe like, you know, if,if naidas are not acceptable, maybe
like the celebrating of, uh, ethnicuh, violence is not okay either.
So I think, you know, like, again,I think the, the way we're carrying
this, first of all, everybodyhas A-P-T-S-D from Zelensky.
And second of all, I think justsaying that I can document in

(01:50:08):
many ways how there's no genocidein South Africa or Civil War.
It's like, great, but that's justnot enough, you know, for South
Africa to be a viable state.
I just think that they need to.
Lean into the Rainbow Nation.
And I think that this government,this coalition clearly has done that.
So I'm definitely not criticizinganything the government has done.
What I'm saying is that there is asecurity issue, there is discrimination

(01:50:32):
against some people of different colorin South Africa, and that's, you know,
that's not what the country really was.
Yeah.
Like in the nineties.
No,

I, I, I hope you're right.
I hope, I hope He goes back andhe puts pressure on Ma Layman.
He, he calls also around and says,does anybody have a 7 47 spare?
7 47 to, to spare?
'cause uh, we got a guy who wants one.
All right.
I, I gotta guy outta here andI'm sure you do too, Marco,
this was a really good episode.

I agree.
This was a lot of fun, man.
Awesome.

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