Trump Threatened to End Iranian Civilization — What Comes Next?

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“Today's number 80, that's how many years have passed since a nuclear bomb was lost dropped on earth.”

And here's the hoping that by the time you hear this, that will still be true. Welcome to Prof. Markets. I'm Ed Nelson. It is April 8. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices declined through the day, but ended the session flat, oil climbed, and treasury yields were flat. What else is happening?

President Trump has threatened to completely wipe out Iran. Trump set an 8pm eastern deadline on Tuesday for Iran to fully reopen the straight or face strikes on civilian infrastructure.

Trump posted on true social quote, a whole civilization will die tonight never to be brought back again.

As of Tuesday evening at the time of this recording, Iran had ended direct contact with the administration. Though talks with mediators were ongoing, Pakistan's prime minister called on Trump to extend the deadline by two weeks. And for the straight of removes to open during that time, Trump then said he was in quote, heated negotiations. The S&P and the Nasdaq and the Dow all fell as much as 1% through the day as hopes for a ceasefire dimmed but closed roughly flat. So here to help us break down the situation we're speaking with Ian Bremer, President and founder of Eurasia Group Ian.

So much to get into here, we're obviously recording before the deadline, so by the time people listen to this, things might have gone either way and we'll get into that.

But first, I would just love your reactions to what Trump has written here, quote, a whole civilization will die tonight never to be brought back again.

“Have you ever seen anything like this and what do you make of it?”

No, no, I haven't. I mean, if you were to take it at face value, it's threatening genocide. And it's an unhinged post that it shows that Trump is increasingly really angry about how badly this war is going for him about the fact that the Iranians have not capitulated despite his superior military capabilities. And he has no one to blame but himself. So he is in a sense painting himself in a corner. But I also, and again, I'm saying this only a few hours before the deadline. And at this point, the Iranians have given no reason to believe that they're engaging constructively whatsoever with Trump's ultimatum.

And yet I firmly believe that Trump will not make good on his threat. And there are a couple of obvious reasons for that. One is that if he did, the United States would be seen as a rogue state by countries all over the world. And it would, it would devastate America standing influence and power, not least with core allies who would not sit back and tolerate that sort of behavior. It would have a very dramatic impact on the ability of the United States to continue to count on rely on coordinate with share intelligence with allies. That's number one. Number two, it would have enormous impact on the global economy.

Because the Iranians would hit back, they'd hit back in a big way. We've already seen that the Iranians continue to have capabilities to use both ballistic missiles and large numbers of drones, which they can hit critical infrastructure targets across the Gulf States, which can cause a lot of damage.

But we could see a lot more of that. If the desalination plants were destroyed, for example, in Gulf countries, you would have mass exodus from those countries. You would not have the viability economically to continue to support the livelihood of the people that live there. So this is a huge thing.

And ultimately, as much as Trump is angry and narcissistic and short-term oriented and focusing on himself as opposed to the country, you can say all those things.

“But this is still way beyond what one could plausibly imagine that he would do. So that's the constraint side. That's why there may be, there lots of ways he can find to get out of this.”

He can say that the Iranians are actually being more constructive and more tankers are going through, so he's going to give them more time. He can say I'm hitting this one additional bridge or one power plant. I'm not actually going through with my full threat from 8 to 12 o'clock, but I'm getting you one final offer. And now you've gotten till Friday or next week or two weeks or whatever it is, right? So lots of ways he can do it, but the actual threats that have been articulated as they have. He's not going through with those.

I mean, I would stake my reputation on that, right? Even though I have no knowledge of that, it is in my view utterly implausible. Now having said that, two things I would want to really caution you about. And then wherever you want to go, it's fine. One thing to caution you about is that the Israelis have engaged in strikes against at least 10 railroad targets in Iran today. Those are infrastructure targets. They can be used by the military. They are used for civilian purposes too.

The Israelis yesterday blew up a major petrochemical facility in Iran. Second time, they've hit such a facility, causing billions of dollars of long-term damage to Iran's economy.

“So, I mean, if you're Iran, this is even before the deadline, I understand that Israel is the one doing the bombing not the United States, but from Iran's perspective, those bombs kind of feel the same, right?”

So, the reality is they're fighting against the United States in Israel, and Israel is continuing to engage in this level of destruction, irrespective of the timing and the deadlines that the Americans are putting forward to Iran. And then the final point I would raise, the final cautionary point, which is even though I think it is ludicrous to imagine that the US would use a nuclear weapon in this environment tonight. The civilizational destruction, I think it's ludicrous to imagine that, even though I think it is absolutely the case that they will not follow through with bombing them into the Stone Age from 8 to 12 o'clock in the tomorrow.

We wake up, and there's no Iran to speak of.

“It's been guysified. I don't believe that for a second, but I also understand that we are seeing mission creep.”

I understand that every day this war goes on, it becomes a little easier to get a little deeper in, to do more damage, to have more people killed, to risk more American service men and women, to send more troops. I mean, Trump gave his big speech last week. He was saying two to three weeks, but privately he was saying four weeks. And then a few days later he was saying, but if we were just a little more patient than those four weeks, we could take the oil.

And then we've got all of these opportunities, right? This was after the first week of the war, he had a G7 meeting, and he told the G7 heads of state that this war is going to be over within days,

a matter of a few days, and it is just a question of how they surrender. They are preparing to surrender completely. So we are watching these continued expansion, incremental expansion, of America's engagement in this war, in a way that if it continues, we will not only cause unheard of economic damage, could make this war comparable to or worse than the damage that we saw and experienced all of us during the pandemic,

And and those things, I don't think that Trump is thinking about that today. I don't think those are the decisions he is considering taking today.

But I absolutely see the knock on consequences of a few months of this, getting you into an environment where you're well over your head. The tide is dragging you in and you can't swim anymore. So I mean, we should not despite the fact that I feel very confident about what we're going to see this evening,

“I don't feel confident at all about where I think we're heading in the medium to long term.”

And part of why you believe, and by the way, I agree with you, that he won't drop a bomb in the next several hours, is the idea that he hasn't completely lost his mind, like he understands a little bit.

There is a semblance of an understanding of the implications of dropping a nuclear bomb, which I think makes sense.

But I think there would be others who would say, well, this tweet, this truth, social, this statement is proof that he is now completely unhinged. And he actually has lost his mind, which means all bets are off.

“I don't personally think that instinctively, but what would you say to someone who would say that to you that, you know, the guy isn't saying.”

Well, it depends on the tenor of the person who is saying it to me because many of the people that are saying those things are folks that are already so far gone in the idea that this guy is hit the reincarnate.

And the idea that there are no checks and balances on on him, right, so that everything he wants to do, he can just do as if he were an actual dictator.

And how is that not true? I mean, of course, that's not true. What sense is the around him that are they are kissing his ass constantly. And they're telling him things are going better than they actually are. And that is part of the problem. But, but there are still constraints. There are still restraining mechanisms. There is Congress.

“There is a media that actually reports on him. There are polls. There are markets. There are all these things that don't exist in North Korea, right?”

There are all these things that do not constrain an actual dictator that can train Trump. Remember, you know, the United States, we've saw through a significant investigation very well done forensically is responsible for targeting and blowing up a girl's school. And well over 100 Iranian civilians killed. This was not intentional. It was a mis-targeting. The data had not been updated. It wasn't an AI mistake, but it was a mistake. But Trump's response was to blame the Iranians. It wasn't him. Why? I mean, if he doesn't care, and if they're just animals, they're not humans, and if it's all the responsibility of the Islamic Republic, well, then just own it.

Because they don't have human rights at that point. If you're really going down that route, if you think that Trump no longer is unhinged, she doesn't care at all about human life, then many of the things that he would have done, he would have done differently already. But either way, they still got killed. I mean, I think this would be that the response is that there's a little bit of a check in so far as he doesn't want to admit or not admit, but he would say that it wasn't our intention or that it was the Iranians fault.

But either way, I mean, Congress exists, but he's still willing to blow past and make decisions without their approval. The media still exists, and he's still willing to do completely outrageous things despite getting pilloried by people like. Oh, he's doing outrageous things. Yeah. Just again, I am pushing back against genocide. I'm pushing back against a nuclear weapon. I'm also pushing back against the intentional targeting of a goal school, which he did not do. Again, the investigations from the New York Times and other sources were very clear. This was not an order of shock and awe. Let's blow up an Iranian girl school.

They did not intend to do that. They are not trying to maximize civilian casualties. They're just enormously angry that the Iranian regime is not capitulating despite all of their bravado and all of their superior military strength. And it's kind of funny in the sense that what Trump has been saying to the Iranians, again, if you take him at face value, he's been saying, this is not our problem.

They're worried that they can't get their oil through and so they are paying the Iranians $2 million to get their oil through. Trump is dealing with it.

He's worried about oil and gas prices, so he has suspended sanctions on Iranian oil. That's money that's going to the Islamic Republic. Why? Because Trump's reveal preference is I hate these guys. I want them to lose, but I don't hate them so much that I'm willing to take even higher costs for my own gas prices in the United States that I'm going to be punished for.

“So again, at every step, he is showing that he is constrained. He's not showing that he has value, that he values human life. He's not showing that he cares about people other than himself. He's not showing that, but he's showing he's constrained.”

And that is the core rational conclusion from people that are watching what he is doing and not just focusing on his tweets as if they are somehow a reflection of actual reality.

I mean, look, it's hard because we've never had usually presidents don't say very much in their real-time public statements. And Trump obviously says far too much and he's frequently incoherent. He's frequently self-contradictory and he allows his impulses, his id to act in a completely unrestrained way and the people around him facilitate that. So it makes it harder to analyze and assess this guy. And it also makes it harder because if you're on one side or the other politically in the US or globally, and you don't get any benefits from having a nuanced perspective.

Everybody wants you to say that this guy is either America first and no one has ever been president like him, no one's ever accomplished much, or he is evil incarnate. He is literally Hitler, which I mean neither of those two things in my view are true or useful. And so I don't take them as my starting off point, as my starting off point is I'm going to do analysis, I've spent my entire career trying to understand international relations, by the way, not that much on the United States.

“So I look at the US and the context of how other countries act in similar scenarios and how might I apply that to my own country, the Americans, right?”

But and then I tell people what I think. Yes, I'm just it's just honest analysis and if people push back, I'm like, well, okay, I could be wrong, but at least I'm not lying to you. So let's say let's say you're right, people will be listening to this in the morning, let's say Trump doesn't bomb Iran tonight. How will the story play out then? I mean, what we're saying is just a bit, again, the US continues to bomb, but he's not he is not going to make good on the 8 to 12 o'clock end of civilization, all the bridges, all the power plants are getting hit, he will not do that.

People watching us now know he is not done that, right, so let's say he doesn't do that, let's say he doesn't end this civilization go fully nuclear, go totally insane. Well, things play out from then on, because it still seems like something has changed here, he's threatened it. I can't tell whether that means something geopolitically, I have a feeling it does.

“But what does that mean for the Iran situation going forward, how do you think that it will play out?”

Well, look, I mean, the Iranians have called his bluff in so far as after this post, and remember the end of the post was the whole god bless the Iranian people. So even in the unhinged post, he's trying to make a distinction between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people, and I can promise you, everyone that's asked me about this post, no one's brought up the last sentence, because the last sentence doesn't serve the narrative, the first sentence does.

So, not that I care that much, because if the whole thing is unhinged, but if we're really digging into it, we should recognize that he wrote the whole thing. He didn't just write the first sentence.

But when the Iranians saw that, they said, great, okay, we're just, we're not talking, we're breaking off the conversations with the Pakistanis for today. So let's assume that he finds a bit of an off-brand. He gives them some time, or he doesn't go fully ballistic nuclear, and now the Iranians have the ability to come at. They have the ability to engage again, and then you can have some more talks in this slightly more escalated environment.

They're negotiating with lots of countries right now for different things, but not with the Americans. So the one big question for tomorrow, or today when people are now watching this, is or the Iranians now having gone through the deadline and lived to see another day, are they now engaging with the Americans directly or indirectly again?

“And is the United States prepared to engage in that process? I suspect the answer is yes, but we don't know that.”

Absent that. Trump has also said this war is going to be over in two to three weeks. Now that means one to two weeks. Again, I expect that he's going to continue. So I expect that he's, you know, he's pulling back on his maximalist rhetoric, but he's pushing forward on all of the constraints on his time. The problem is that when you tell the Iranians two to three weeks and then I'm done, they're thinking if we just survive two to three weeks, you know, we're golden, you know, that now we've got the influence over the Straits and everything else.

So I mean Trump's he is his own worst enemy in so many ways on this conflict and then and meanwhile for the markets every day we keep talking about this are our weeks that the global economy is going to be experiencing the knock on damage of what's happened. Yeah, I could ask you questions for hours, but I have to let you go. I guess my final question here given what has happened now, would you say that this, it sounds like you believe that this actually extends the timeline. I was wondering maybe we're at the we're approaching the end game here.

“He's now threatening what amounts to pretty much a nuke may be the stories coming to a close or maybe it's just beginning and maybe this actually to your point we wake up was still alive. Let's keep fighting.”

And we've heard explosions on carguer island that seems to me relevant that seems to me looks like it came from the United States. If that is true and I don't have full visibility on that, but if that's true, that's softening military targets while the American troops are getting in place. The one thing we haven't talked about at all in this conversation is the most real thing here actual physical real thing, which is that the Americans have a third aircraft strike force and thousands of additional troops that they have deployed to the region, but they're not all there yet and they won't be until around April 16.

And so it seems to me what I see are American military engagement that is meant to set the table for eventually trump considering using those ground forces.

“I mean he has used the ground forces to rescue an American airman successfully from that F-15 this weekend, but he hasn't used them in any significant way that that could easily change into weeks.”

So for me, I don't think we're close to the end game in part because we haven't yet got to that point in the conflict. The point we're in the conflict we're in right now is just all of this continued escalation in geopolitics by tweet that that's that is where the 21st century is right now and it's it's sad and dystopian, but it doesn't really relate that closely to what's happening in the war.

Ian Brammer, president and founder of Eurasia Group Ian always appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

After the break, an inside look at the most damning salmon investigation yet. And if you're enjoying the show, please follow our new property markets YouTube channel, the link is in the description. Support for the show comes from sofai. Let's face it. College is expensive and how you pay for it really matters. That's where sofai comes in. Sofai helps you refinance at rates as low as 4.24% APR, potentially saving big by lowering your monthly payment. You can even customize variable rates to meet your financial goals, all with no penalties or fees required.

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And here's all the products of our clients and in the action, action, small prices, and sofai. Hi, I'm Renee Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the curiosity shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling and questioning. It's going to be fun. We rarely agree.

But we almost never disagree. And we're always learning.

That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. We're back with Prophogy Markets. One of the most powerful people in tech might also be the least trustworthy. That is the find. They give an 18-month New Yorker investigation into OpenAI CEO, reported by Ronin Farrow and Andrew Morans.

They interviewed more than 100 people, reviewed hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed documents and sat down with Altman himself more than a dozen times. The central question they pose is simple. Can Sam Altman be trusted? One former board members and answer Echoes throughout the piece, quote, "He is unconstrained by truth, here to discuss this investigation. We are speaking with the author himself. Ronin Farrow, Ronin, thank you so much for joining us.

You spent over a year and a half on this piece. You interviewed over a hundred people. I guess it's just start with what were your biggest takeaways from this investigation."

“Well, I think that my interest in this, and I was coming off of a body of reporting about Elon Musk and Musk essentially having acquired in a lot of arena's super governmental power,”

was that sources around that story, including Sam Altman, who was on the record in it. We're talking about AI in a way that had some substantive consequential promise, and then also included a lot of hype. Now, of course, it's Silicon Valley, the entire foundational story. The creation myth is hype, building companies on hype and promise, and often that cart coming before the horse of actual functional value added in America. It was striking to me as I started looking just writ large at what is it in the AI gold rush that is the most in need of additional interrogation.

How even above and beyond that baseline expectation of some disembling from tech CEOs, there was this particular phenomenon around Sam Altman, where a crosses career there have been these claims that he deceives, lies, manipulates are the allegations to an extent that eclipse is even those norms. And so what I set out to examine with my co-author, Andrew Morance, is what are the particulars? Does it actually rise to that level, or is this just criticism from sour grapes competitors? And if it's true, to what extent should we care about it?

And we really did obtain a huge density of interviews with more than 100 people in this piece, documents, many hundreds of pages of documents, and did a forensic look at this. We obtained an reviewed these sort of fabled Ilya Satskiver memos, which was some 70 pages of slack messages and HR documents and explanatory text from him, that was sent to board members before an episode where Sam was actually fired a couple of years ago.

“People in tech probably most of the followers of this podcast will remember that episode.”

The answer is really didn't emerge at the time as to what the basis was, but what is documented in that memo is the phenomenon I was just referring to.

There's a line that says Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of, and then the first item is lying. We obtained 200 plus pages of records related to Dario Amode, including a lot of notes that he kept. And he writes the problem with open AI is Sam himself, and there's a really personal chronicle that we lay out in the piece of how the rift deep in between them, and it's certainly led to the creation of anthropic. Some of the supposed lies documented here are significant. One of the episodes that precipitated the board's firing, you know, was a case in which Sam had assured board members that the most controversial features of a model had been safety tested and then they went out and looked and they hadn't been.

Some of them are interpersonal, you know, over the course of the deepening mistrust between him and Dario Amode.

“There's an episode we described where he calls Amode and his sister Daniela, who is also working at the company into a room and said, you know, I believe you're plotting a coup against me.”

It's on good authority from a senior executive at the company, and they called in the senior executive who said, I never said that, and then Sam right there in the room as this account goes from the documents and other people around this.

He said, oh, I never said that myself, I didn't make the allegation in the first place and Daniela Amode said, you just said it.

So it's something that becomes so pervasive that look, there's a split of opinions on how much we should care about the safety stakes of AI. There's people who say, we're all doomed. You know, AI may kill us all, there could be a Terminator, SkyNet scenario, and therefore the person with the finger on the button needs to have a lot of integrity. But it's not just that. There are just really nuts and bolts pragmatic investors that we talk to in this piece. Board members we talk to who said, this is just too much lying for a senior executive at a major company of this size.

Right. Yeah, some of the, some of the quotes that you had there, we, we mentioned that what we heard about his consistent pattern of lying also he's unconstrained by the truth. You also wrote that a board net, the board member was not the only person who unprompted used the word sociopathic.

You also said that one of his batch mates at why company to said, quote, you need to understand that Sam can never be trusted. He is a sociopath. He would do anything.

And then a senior executive at Microsoft, you wrote said, quote, there's a small bit real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie made off or a Sam Bankman freed level scammer. I mean, the evidence that he is somewhat sociopathic in his tendencies to lie or, I mean, it's very substantial here.

“And I think it raises the question like, why should we care, who does this affect?”

I get the sense that it kind of affects all of us because he is the leader of the most important technology AI company in the world right now. A company that's going to go public at at least a trillion dollars, at least that's the plan right now. I mean, what do you take away on on what this means for us for regular Americans, for people who perhaps interact with AI? I mean, what does this mean for a listener, perhaps? Why does this affect them? Well, listen, first of all, I just want to point out this piece very carefully filters for its competitors like Ahmaday making a criticism.

Yeah, it's people with personal sour grapes. This isn't a hit piece that carries water for any of Sam's opponents. In fact, it's really strenuously generous to him wherever it can be.

And as in any large scale piece like this, there's a lot that isn't included that we learned because we really just wanted to convey the essential things and stay away from sensationalism.

“Yeah. So it's very fair. It's very forensic. It's very measured. I think even with all of that said you're exactly right that there is a pattern here that emerges that is consequential even above and beyond Silicon Valley norms.”

Now, there's the argument that this is just dysfunctional from a business standpoint that I mentioned. And then as you're looting to there are the stakes for all of us. You don't have to buy into the over the top AI will go rogue and kill us all argument, although for what it's worth. That is a scenario that Sam Altman and the co-founders of Open AI fundraised off of and formed the company around that this was a technology as dangerous as nukes. But you can look more immediately for the ways this affects us. Every credible economic projection has millions and millions of jobs exposed to disruption from this and potentially elimination from this.

You have a growing number of economists warning of the risk of a recession if the AI bubble bursts. You know, this is something that you guys have talked about and covered. AI is now propping up US economic growth. The markets are highly dependent on a few companies that are in the view of many people even within them over leveraged. You know, we have a board member in this piece saying of Open AI right now were levered up in a way that is scary. There is an ecosystem around Open AI to sustain the massive spend. This is one of the fastest cash burn rates of any startup ever building AGI and racing to build AGI in the way that these AI labs are now is monumentally expensive.

The way that's being sustained is partners borrowing from each other and there's analysts in this piece saying, you know, there is circular here and someone's going to have to pay the paper. Sam Alman himself has set at various points.

So there's these economic stakes and then there's all of the other stakes. There's the fact that this is being deployed on battlefields already. There are certain concerns about autonomous weapons firing without human oversight. That's not a fantasy. That's there's already what appears to be a documented instance of that.

It is being used to identify chemical weapons at a rate never before seeing it is being used for political disinformation.

There's the whole separate conversation about, you know, suicides and in one case a murder that a lawsuit alleges was a result of chat GPT encouragement. The stakes are real and we have a scenario where we're in this late stage capitalist moment where the individuals and companies who have their fingers on the button here really don't have outside guardrails that are nearly as meaningful as any credible safety activist or advocate says they should be. And those same companies the ones best position to track the dangers and often the ones warning about the dangers have every incentive financially to downplay those dangers and rush past them and ask forgiveness rather than permission.

While the regulatory infrastructure that would be needed to hold the accountable simply doesn't exist.

One of the biggest questions, and then we'll let you go, I know you have other appearances, one of the biggest questions in the markets right now is this question of is AI above all, I mean that is the the trillion dollar question that everyone is trying to figure out right now and some people bulls some people bears and a lot of this show is trying to figure out what is the answer to that question.

“I think that your findings from this investigation shed any light on the answer to that question is there's anything in there that you think perhaps can lead us to an answer.”

Well look the piece is sober on this front too and very even it acknowledges the ways in which AI is not just vaporous it already has consequential and lifesaving applications medical diagnostics are transformed already by AI drug research is transformed already by AI there are some applications like emergency weather warning systems that are transformed by AI these are real not just type. Yeah that said if you look at Sam Altman's language over recent years and in fact even on the day that we put this piece out there was a concerted round of press there were a lot of moves within this company right around this piece coming out.

And one of the things that you see out there from Sam of late is a renewal of his sort of utopian projections right that this is technology that's going to I'm using his own.

What phrases from various blog posts and also recent comments you know put us on other planets cure all forms of cancer lead to a kind of utopian scenario where all problems are solved by everyone being empowered to make their own startups. This was the same answer he provided in our conversations when I talked about the jobs exposed to elimination the less sunny economic projections he his main answer was well you know will have a foundation that does good worth work on that. And also you know chat GPT is going to allow everyone to make startups.

I don't know that that is going to be terribly comforting to people whose jobs are eliminated as a part of this and who need serious.

“The government investment into reskilling and into oversight and this industry you know not just the promise of these private companies saying it's all going to be fine I think on the question of whether it's a bubble.”

The only thing is that some of the most serious technologists in this field are in this piece and are people we had long conversations with in the course of this reporting and say even if you believe some of. The only thing is that they are going to have to do this is that they are going to have to do this projections some of the things he's saying have arrived and this is a guy who we talk about him telling government officials. Often over promises and even these serious technologists saying maybe we believe some of this very often also sounds the note of caution of that could be years maybe even decades away.

So I think people who are watching how this evolves I'm not going to get into prediction but I do think they should be aware of that split of expert opinions and a lot of people saying hey let's tap the breaks this is going to take time.

“Yeah, I think this should honestly be required reading for anyone who's thinking about investing in this company. I mean if you want to invest in a company you need to know the management this this article is it.”

Ronan Farrow we really appreciate your time. You can read the article in the New Yorker it is out now. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you Ed. Appreciate it.

Just a few hours ago the president said that if a deal with Iran isn't reached by a PM then they're quote whole civilization will die.

This essentially sounds like a threat to drop nuclear bombs on Iran but if it isn't that then it's certainly a threat to commit war crimes against Iran he is essentially saying if you don't do what I say I will kill millions of innocent civilians which is the kind of statement that would be made by a marvel super villain which kind of forces us to consider the possibility that maybe he actually is one. I don't know what will happen in the next few hours nor does anyone but my instinct tells me that he won't go through with these threats.

“Ian Bremer agrees I think we will wake up in the morning and the conflict will remain violent but it won't be nuclear either way though.”

The stakes have now changed because as Katie Martin once told us you can't unsay the things that have now been said and we are now living in a world where the president of the United States is willing to make threats of genocide out loud in fact he just has done and that is an entirely new kind of world. And so the question for us is how do we react to this new world does this mean that we should also change in some capacity should we think differently about the world should we behave in a different manner the more pertinent question for this show would be should we invest differently.

But I think the answer to those questions is probably we probably should change something but then the next question is of course even holder and that is what exactly should you change what should you do and my answer is I have no idea and so far that has been the markets answer as well. Stokes were remarkably unreactive yesterday and I don't think that's because investors are downplaying the situation I think it's because they simply don't know what to do.

“We have never seen a situation like this we've never seen a president like this and so to presume that you know what's coming next is kind of to be crazy.”

In other words we're all about to learn about this whole thing together there are practically no authorities on the matter no one on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley or even in Washington who knows more about what's going on in Trump's head than you do we all really know nothing. But it would be my hope that over the next few weeks regardless of what happens here that this podcast will help us to at least begin to understand this new world and this new frontier yes we cannot predict the future.

But we can always try to understand it and we can perhaps try to prepare for it just a little bit more.

Okay, that's it for today. This episode is produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss edited by Joel Passen and engineer by Benjamin Spencer. A video editor is Brad Williams, our research team is down to the line, it's about a pencil, Chris Noodon, if you and Mia Salvario and our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Prophecy Markets from Prophecy Media. If you like what you heard give us a follow on edelson I will see you tomorrow. Support for the show comes from SoFight. Let's face it. College is expensive and how you pay for it really matters. That's where SoFight comes in.

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