Can can you explain this?

Sure, and my thinking here is guided by a book called Albion Seed, which has been out for decades.

It's highly worth reading.

In fact, I think I've now read everything that the author has to say.

Who is, you know, a center-left thinker, but very interesting to read.

Anyway, here's the idea.

That America was settled by people from different parts of England.

once.

And so why don't we start there? What's happening?

So first of all, we need to start with history.

There is a long and special relationship between France on the one hand and Iran on the other.

Ayatollah Khomeini, after the mid-1960s, when he had to flee Iran, first he holed up in Najaf, the Shia scholarly city in Iraq, but ultimately the Iraqis were not comfortable having him there, and he fled to France.

So in France, Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the current regime, while he was in exile, gathers his followers, creates an international network of financial support, possibly including the Soviet Union's various intelligence arms.

But certainly some of the left-wing financial infrastructure comes to get to know him in 1970s France.

He takes a number of minor university positions there and builds a large following.

Can you kind of unpack that for me, please?

Here's a clip from Trigonometry with Richard Miniter.

My father and mother were on the west coast of the United States to do a book signing for my father.

And all flights were canceled.

All flights were grounded on 9-11.

It didn't resume for a long time.

My father had the idea to rent a car and drive back home to upstate New York.

What is that, about 5,500 kilometers, 3,000 miles, right? And it would take days because they thought all the rental cars were going to get booked up.

I mean, it's terrorism of the highest order.

What happened on 9/11, 2001?

On the day itself, twenty-five years ago today, four planes were hijacked, and unlike normal, normal hijacking, they did not i- uh, communicate with the outside world.

They did not demand ransom, and instead they f- purposely flew these planes into buildings on what everyone describes as a clear, perfect, uh, Tuesday sky.

[plane engine roaring] It, uh, they crashed into the, um, the towers, um, within fifteen minutes of each other, two jumbo jets, uh, collided with the World Trade Center towers.

Another plane went into the Pentagon, uh, and we have horrifying voi- uh, voice recordings of people on the phone inside the plane as it slams into the Pentagon.

And then there's the story of Flight 93, the fourth plane, which is hijacked somewhere over Cleveland after having left Maine and was believed headed toward the US Capitol Building itself.

If they had reached that target, roughly five thousand people would have died, uh, including members of the House and the Senate and their key staffs, uh, uh, other dignitaries who were visiting on that day, and the death toll would have been much higher than in the World Trade Center itself.

Why did this happen?

But is there no more complicated story than that? Then there's just this band of people and everybody's concerns about the CIA and all the rest of it's not a thing.

Terrorism exists because it's funded.

Why is it funded? Because It is useful for a group of countries with less power than America to attack America through deniable means.

Wasn't us.

Oh, we're as horrified as you are.

um so use of proxy forces um this is in fact how uh the russians fought the turks um so i'm in no way about to justify the armenian massacre but the reason why the armenian massacre happened is there was about 20 years of armenian terrorism financed by the russians are and then the sultan loses his temper and just says okay enough of these people they all gotta leave right and that was one of the great tragedies human history almost a million innocent people were killed and the western europeans did almost nothing right there are horrible scenes of the armenians being forced into the sea at a city that's now called ismir which st paul visited and uh and they're knocking on the they're swimming out and knocking on the whole hulls of british and french and german ships please bring us up we're drowning in the sea and instead they got a pole shoved at them get away from my boat right so um but as terrible as the turks were they were there's another side to the story, right? There have been people who were blocked inside of mosques and the mosque was set on fire in Western Turkey and burned alive, who had only gone into the quiet and the gloom of the mosque to pray quietly, and now are being burned alive by people they'd never met, these Armenian terrorists.

So terrorism is a technique by which people want to um again stampede and a government or a country in a desired political direction and it is invented by the russians and the germans from extremist left-wing movements anarchist movements and there is an anti-american anti-western sentiment that exists in modern-day iran in russia in china they want to bring us down so i think all of those kind of like 9 11 conspiracies are ridiculous and if you want to spend some time i can give you facts to knock down every single one of them but America and the West generally has rivals and enemies who would either help other enemies bring us down or be silently happy that these bad things had happened to us.

Civilian workforce is enormous, right?

I just wanted to dive into this

... let, let's talk about the global economy for a second.

So there are adjustments that would create downward pressure, but they would take more than a year to a year and a half to arrive.

So one of them is, um, uh, ExxonMobil in Nigeria is looking at getting into the, um, fertilizer production business.

As you know, to make fertilizer you need natural gas, which the Nigerians have large amounts of.

Uh, it would be smart for ExxonMobil to do this because the markets that are most starved for fertilizer are in western s- West Africa, Southern Africa, uh, and, and nearby in South America, right? Uh, the regulatory apparatus in the United States, if it was a, if Trump people were able to get it out of the way, could also make large investments.

Um, and one scenario, uh, which the agriculture people have been speculating about, the Agriculture Department in the United States, is deregulating the production of fertilizer in the US, um, which would mean that the US would become a net exporter of fertilizer.

Mm.

So your idea about the accountable and the unaccountable, how much is this relating to what James Burnham was writing in the 1940s about the managerial revolution?

So what Burnham is writing about is that in the generation before him, and for many generations before him, the people who owned a company ran it.

And in the, at the turn of the 20th century, there was this idea that experts should run everything.

And so in business, this is where we get the business schools, Harvard Business School among them.

Later, the Europeans copy this idea, especially after World War II.

But that they, you would turn out these experts, and experts would be the managers.

They wouldn't own anything.

How?

So is this a regime change war? And if it is, what is the next regime actually going to look like?

Well, is it a regime change? We have to look at, first of all, that Israel and the United States have very different desired end states.

In Israel, they would love to see Reza Pahlavi or someone like him have a constitutional monarchy that focuses Iran on rebuilding its civil infrastructure.

I mean, there are massive water shortages.

70 percent of its provinces are without 24-hour electricity or without ready access to water.

Five of the reservoirs that feed Tehran, which is a city of about 10 million with the surrounding area of about 18 million, five of those reservoirs are at 10 percent or less capacity.

So there's a profound humanitarian catastrophe that was underway before this bombing began, which this bombing will only accelerate.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm

... and it is now unsafe for you to land? Or do we wanna mock these people in Geneva or in, uh, Strasbourg, or what have you? And so these newspapers are quite lively.

They caricature people.

They make sexual and spiritual allegations.

Uh, it's as wild as anything on the internet today.

And you combine this idea of free speech and capitalism, and you get the beginning of news, where you have news outlets that are only accountable to the people who pay for them.

If you start writing about things that people don't trust, don't believe, your audience goes down, and soon your printing costs are higher than your revenue, and you're out of business.

Mm.

So, the history that you told us starts with the English Civil War.

It does, yes.

So the way to understand America is it's four...

It was founded as four separate, co- somewhat coercive, religious utopias that come from different time periods in Britain's past.

So the more you understand the, the past of your country, the more you understand the English Civil War especially, the more you'll understand America.

And consequently, since no one teaches this in schools these days on either side of the pond, um, we're a mystery to each other because we don't understand this vir- very important shared past.

So New England is, which is Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, parts of Upstate New York culturally, is settled by the people, the Puritans, who were primarily from East Anglia, uh, that hump of England that points out into the English Channel at the Netherlands.

So break, break, break all of that down for us in more detail, please.