There we go, folks.

Yeah, so I wish it would be that simple.

And the big picture, Scott, is that we're heading into a very dangerous several months.

It's very dangerous here with respect to the transition of power in the United States and it's very dangerous with the issue of escalation in the iran war it's also very dangerous scott with respect to uh russia's escalation and then iran's i'm sorry uh ukraine's counter escalation with ukraine so we have three very serious dimensions all tracking along um the identical two-month window a 60-day window and unfortunately they can easily interact with each other in not so good ways and that's really the the period so We had a lot of, I would say, a very emotional run-up to the midterms.

And then the midterms were a stunner, a real shock to the system.

And the biggest shocks here I don't think were exactly the numbers in the blue wave.

I think that there was internal White House polling—I mentioned this in some of my substacks—that were projecting pretty close to what happened, which was these were leaked in the last week or two before the midterms, which would be the Democrats would end up controlling 240 or more seats in the House and then 54 or more seats in the Senate.

Does that indicate that he might also be willing to accept an L on

America in this analogy?

This is America.

This is President Trump.

White plays an opening move and red then makes a move.

And what does white do? Takes a pawn.

Now it looks like white is ahead.

Now red makes another move.

And the hope here, the success, as far as Trump would see it, would be that they come to the table to make a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and to vouch never to have nuclear weapons.

So what do you think will happen over the next 60 days? Do you think there's going to be a doubling down on this Iran war?

I do, and I think the risks here are going to rise incrementally every day from today through January 3rd, because this is the period of time of the transfer of power.

This two-month window will be the last two months that President Trump truly controls the political timeline in our country.

Come January 3rd, as long as the Democrats are seated, which we all assume, but may not happen still, but still, on January 3rd, that changes dramatically.

The political timeline now will, at a minimum, have to be shared with democratically controlled Congress and the Democrats here, and with, I suspect...

Quite a bit of support from Republicans will end up driving the timeline, and that timeline will not be friendly to President Trump.

It will likely shatter the Trump presidency, and you will find more and more voices like Vance's getting louder and louder, distancing themselves more and more.

I think.

And

Trump needs a crisis.

Don't give it to him.

So what we see, what we what we see is all the preparations for new strikes on Iran to happen when right when the polls close.

Now, we don't know it'll be that day, excuse me, that hour, but pretty soon right after the polls close on November 3rd.

And then what do we also see? We see violent populist protests breaking out across France.

So what we see is exactly the concerns I have in my new book, Our Own Worst Enemies.

And this is

So at some level, would you say that there's a continuity between the immediate post-9-11 responses to the 9-11 attacks all the way up through what's currently going on between the U.S. and Iran's?

Well, there are a number of continuities, and the most important continuity that helps to explain how the actors get stuck in an escalation trap.

Because keep in mind, what I'm saying is that there's an initial escalation that's tactically successful, but a strategic failure.

And it's seen by the actors themselves within a relatively short period of time, within three to six months for sure.

And then they're stuck in a trap.

Why are they stuck? Let's talk about that.

And let's compare why the Bush administration got stuck in a forever war escalation trap after 9-11 to why we're stuck in this trap now with Iran.

How do we start to break out of this escalation trap that's driving us in... our international affairs and in our domestic policy? What are the ways that we make our system more adaptive, more responsive to the needs of the public so that we can diminish the sense of powerlessness and anger that seems so dominant in our politics

You talk about the evidence of these attitudes that we get from public opinion polls, but in terms of actual violence, have there been examples of actually the American public going from their normal political associations to expressing those associations through violent action?

Sadly, Michael, there have been.

And the book will lay this out in the early chapters.

You see, up until the last six or seven years, you have to go back to the 60s to see the pattern I'm about to explain.

What we saw in 2020... was during the summer of 2020, during the mostly peaceful George Floyd protests, 7% to 10% of those protests, which were 600 protests, went violent.

And that involved hundreds of thousands of Americans engaged in those violent protests, Michael, in over 100 cities in America over weeks.

Then, just a few months later, on the right, January 6th, where we saw thousands, it's literally 1,575, storm into the building to stop the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden, the duly elected president of the United States.

What does challenging the results of this upcoming election, if Trump does that, what are we looking at?

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So the big answer to that is that we have been working with a model of war that is 35 years out of date.

It comes from the first Gulf War in 1991.

And that was the Splendid Victory War.

That was the war in 1991, before many of the people you've described were even born, where in 1991, Saddam Hussein, with a giant army, conquered Kuwait.

and the united states built a coalition and decided it wanted to kick saddam's army iraq's army out of kuwait it's very similar by the way to the problem we have now with iran controlling hormuz almost i i not identical but very very similar What happened in 1991 is the United States for about a decade and a half had been working under the radar on a new precision, not just bomb, but precision military that was fusing the stealth technology with laser-guided and GPS-guided bombs and then satellite information and then other sensors that had not really been used in war before.

That was what's called the first precision revolution.

are their views?

And

Trump needs a crisis.

Don't give it to him.

So what we see, what we what we see is all the preparations for new strikes on Iran to happen when right when the polls close.

Now, we don't know it'll be that day, excuse me, that hour, but pretty soon right after the polls close on November 3rd.

And then what do we also see? We see violent populist protests breaking out across France.

So what we see is exactly the concerns I have in my new book, Our Own Worst Enemies.

And this is

If that were true, what the hell does that mean for the broader context of the war?

That means we're, if it's true, that means we're heading to a truly major phase of escalation beyond what we saw in March.

And I think that that is likely coming.

So I'm not at all surprised about this.

Of course, I wouldn't have intel or so forth, but this is tragic, but fully predictable.

So Peorador since August 1st.

So I just did a big post on my escalation trap today when I went through and the eight correct calls since over the last eight months.

So when you talk about mid-January, is that the general time? What's the time frame that Iran can remain in its maximum leverage?

What do you make of that, Bob? I

think it's exactly the timing that I've been talking to you about.

And where you first got the first credible confirmation of my timing prediction was when the third carrier, the Roosevelt, left port.

Because that we knew was going to arrive around the time of the midterm, somewhere between the 27th, November 3rd.

It wasn't going to arrive in October 15th, and it wasn't going to arrive on December 15th.

It was going, and it looks like it's exactly right that you can just see the mobilization.

And that was weeks and weeks ago.

What distinguishes this moment, the moment we're living in now, from earlier periods of American political violence? Bob? Well,

What do you think would happen if they actually invaded a neighboring country?

Well, it does turn a bit on the context, and I'll say more about that in a second.

But my immediate thought is this is the first real sign that the IRGC might be starting to overreach.

And the reason for that is that any invasion of a neighboring country, let's say it's Kuwait, that would be an obvious one, will involve clustering, concentrating ground forces.

It's hard to attack and invade without doing that.

And importantly, also on road networks.

Well, this is the exact circumstance that's the perfect circumstance for our American military.

Do you think that we should put any faith or read anything into his comments saying that we're not going to use nukes because we have the Moab bomb instead?

And I would bet I want to talk to you

about.

Well, I'd like to tell you a couple of things that I want Stephanie to show a slide.

But before we do that, I think it's really important to understand that.

What the escalation trap is, Mario, and a lot of the listeners now will be familiar with that phrase, is once the strategic loss for the attacker has set in, what the escalation trap is, is essentially domestic politics masquerading as strategy.

And that's why so many people are coming, not just on social media in general, and they're saying, but this can't make any sense.

This makes no strategic sense.

could this get?

We understand you've prepared some slides, which I know the audience loves.

Well, yeah, so everybody's watching what's going to happen on November 3rd.

I'm looking forward.

What are the implications of November 3rd for after November 3rd? And I think they're quite important.

They're very important to put in front of people.

And this is what I'd like to do today.

So the central question is, will Trump roll the dice? You see, people are talking a lot about Trump's incentives, but I don't think they're quite getting it right.

Why do you feel that Trump will will take this moment to escalate? And why would he think that would rescue his political situation in some way?

But in terms of actual violence, have there been examples of actually the American public going from their normal political associations to expressing those associations through violent action?

Sadly, Michael, there have been.

And the book will lay this out in the early chapters.

You see, up until the last six or seven years, you have to go back to the 60s to see the pattern I'm about to explain.

What we saw in 2020... was during the summer of 2020, during the mostly peaceful George Floyd protests, 7% to 10% of those protests, which were 600 protests, went violent.

And that involved hundreds of thousands of Americans engaged in those violent protests, Michael, in over 100 cities in America over weeks.

Then, just a few months later, on the right, January 6th, where we saw thousands, it's literally 1,575, storm into the building to stop the peaceful transfer of power to Joe Biden, the duly elected president of the United States.

What does challenging the results of this upcoming election mean? If Trump does that, what are we looking at?

They, they cannot win if we side with Putin.

Uh, yeah.

I'm, I'm not sure that this is gonna turn out to be true, so...

Look, I...

it will certainly hurt, um, uh, Ukraine.

Uh, but I'm coming at this not as a quick pundit.

Uh, I have been studying war for 30 years.

Wouldn't an armistice though make Putin look weak?

And this is all about the midterm elections, which you've told me is one of the most important midterm elections, if not the most important of our lifetimes.

So for five years, Will, I have devoted over 75% of my time, my life, because my life isn't defined in 40-hour weeks, to trying to understand why we're pulling ourselves apart as a country.

What's really happening? Because I've been tracking political violence for 30 years, done this with air power, done this with terrorism.

That political violence has been over there somewhere.

It hasn't been here.

And I started to get worried that maybe this was going to start to become the dominant problem.

And I've become persuaded it is really the dominant problem.

it hadn't happened yet.

Why do you think we've seen this reaction from him again over the weekend?

What you are seeing is a classic example of bombing as negotiating.

So we're used to thinking of bombing and negotiating as alternatives.

Well, sometimes the very act of bombing or use of force is speaking as if you're negotiating.

In this case, Zelensky does have an audience with Putin.

He's not ignoring that.

After all, he's He's attacking into Russia, but the real audience here, I believe is Trump.

Do we know if any of these deals, any of the pressure that Trump has put on Kiev has brought any concession on peace from the Kremlin or from Putin?

All from Appalachia, from where J.D. Vance hails from?

Just so your public knows, I spent time in person with the editorial boards on several of the groups you just mentioned.

I don't really want to cite them by name, but of those two you just mentioned, I mean multiple in-person meetings with all of the data.

And even the actual journalists who write the stories use our data.

So this is not a case where they don't know the data.

This is a case, I believe, where they created a certain image, which was militia group member, militia group member.

And it's just been incredibly difficult to get this legacy media to update that image.

We haven't seen big demonstrations within the United States against the Iran war.

Um, I know in the overall the- the scheme of things, it's not a great victory, but at least-

Oh, it's, it's a victory.

I, I, I wouldn't try to say a third tier either.

I wouldn't say maybe first tier, but it's, it's more important than I think a lot of people in the public know.

So, uh, Ian, as, as you know, one of my areas has been for decades is studying suicide terrorism and suicide terrorist attacks.

So I've, uh, with, uh, big research teams at the University of Chicago, we have studied over 8,000 suicide terrorist attacks.

We compiled the first complete database of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world.

So I guess if this happens, it'll just be an act of sort of petulant vengeance, uh, that won't work, but may, may give them a bump in the polls, right? Is it-

That may

be enough.

So the last time I mean, with Al Qaeda, let's go back to 9-11.

This is all in my work, dying to win, cutting the fuse.

Those who have clearances, the Intel community will be all over my work on this.

I compiled the first database of all suicide attacks.

In the world, the first complete database around worldwide suicide attacks.

You should have really trademarked the phrase escalation trap.

The report- So

what's happening on your shows and other shows, Mario, across everybody, is the escalation trap.

OK, so you are all seeing it.

Some of you are saying those words, some of you are not, but you are all seeing the escalation trap and you're all seeing the timing of the escalation trap, as I've been telling you, around the midterm season.

So this is not happening three months from now.

It's not happening.

It's happening around the midterms.

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Mm.

Because that is what is the engine for actual political violence, strings of assassinations and assassination attempts, violent protests that go on beyond one particular short-term issue.

Uh, and so what you, what you see is these big social changes are what the book is really explaining, are the diagnosis of what's occurring.

And, and those social changes are really twofold.

Number one, the United States is shifting from a white majority to white minority democracy for the first time in our country's 250-year history.

So yes, we've had immigration, we've had ebbs and flows, but this is a dramatic shift, Freddie.

In 1990, uh, we were still 76% non-Hispanic white as a population, and that number was actually only slightly lower going all the way back to 1776 with all those changes including slavery, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah.

My question, though, is it is difficult for me to understand just coming in naively, thinking about how much bigger the United States is in terms of, um, military power, economic power, how it is that this significantly smaller country can retain dominance in this area nonetheless?

Yeah, so, um, when we look at balances of power in the world, we often will start with aggregate, uh, balances that are very high level, at a crude level.

So if you were to look at, say, raw GDP or GDP as a share of world GDP, so it's a very common metric.

I use it all the time in my classes.

Um, [clears throat] you would have seen that the United States was 26% of the world's GDP before, you know, say, January 2026.

Iran would be about 1.1% of the world's GDP, just to kind of give you some numbers here.

But what that does in that crude metric is true.

And what this leads me to wonder is to what extent is your analysis focused on really just producing an objective analysis of the situation, or are you really interested in trying to figure out the best strategy for the United States to win this war?

the Iran war

... on the edges, yes, and politics is always on the edges, and there are many, what are called maybe half of the people who are gonna vote are what are called disengaged voters, and that means they're only thinly following the news.

And so where do they get a lot of their news from? Truth Social.

Now, you might think, "How could that be?" Well, this is what happens with what we call the disengaged voters.

So if you're Donald Trump and he's doing-- he's stumping every day.

I am, I'm, I'm, I'm very sure he is deep into the politics of this congressional race.

Um, what he is, uh, likely seeing is something we saw.

Now, given what you explore in your, your new book about political intimidation, how dangerous is it when federal law enforcement, you know, investigate one of the president's fiercest credits- critics right before an election? And do you see this, um, as the beginning of something a lot bigger?

But outside of that, how important is that region?

Well, there's two ways the Strait of Hormuz is important, Will.

You put your finger on one and then said, "Let's not talk about that." But let's talk about that way just a little bit.

The thing that's important to know about those gas prices going up and, and you just pointed out, gone up forty percent in s- for six months, so a long period of time, not just a week or two or a few days where we had a scare.

That has not happened in that thirty-five-year period called the post-Cold War period, where we fought a war and American gas prices went up.

Now, we fought a war against Saddam Hussein, Iraq, nineteen ninety-one.

We fought, uh, uh, we intervened in Bosnia in nineteen ninety-five.

What's your take here?