#473 – Iran War Debate: Nuclear Weapons, Trump, Peace, Power & the Middle East

Debate on Iran war between Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz. Scott Horton is the author and director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of The Scott Horton Show, and for the past three decades, a staunch critic of U. S. foreign policy and military interventionism. Mark Dubowitz is the chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, host of the Iran Breakdown podcast, and a leading expert on Iran and its nuclear program for over 20 years. This debate was recorded on Tuesday, June 24, after the Iran-Israel ceasefire was declared. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep473-sc See below for timestamps, transcript, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/iran-war-debate-transcript CONTACT LEX: Feedback – give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey AMA – submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama Hiring – join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring Other – other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact EPISODE LINKS: Mark’s X: https://x.com/mdubowitz Mark’s Podcast: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmEsAFBNkqsMQnt5pypwEX0ul0NyIjd3E The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD): https://www.fdd.org/ Scott’s X: https://x.com/scotthortonshow Scott’s YouTube: https://youtube.com/@scotthortonshow Scott’s Podcast: https://www.scotthortonshow.com/ Scott’s Website: https://scotthorton.org/ Scott’s Books: https://amzn.to/3T9Qg7y The Libertarian Institute: https://libertarianinstitute.org/ Antiwar.com: https://antiwar.com/ SPONSORS: To support this podcast, check out our sponsors & get discounts: Hampton: Community for high-growth founders and CEOs. Go to https://joinhampton.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/hampton-ep473-sc Notion: Note-taking and team collaboration. Go to https://notion.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/notion-ep473-sc Shopify: Sell stuff online. Go to https://shopify.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/shopify-ep473-sc Oracle: Cloud infrastructure. Go to https://oracle.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/oracle-ep473-sc LMNT: Zero-sugar electrolyte drink mix. Go to https://drinkLMNT.com/lex https://lexfridman.com/s/lmnt-ep473-sc OUTLINE: (00:00) – Introduction (00:36) – Sponsors, Comments, and Reflections (08:02) – Iran-Israel War (16:45) – Iran’s Nuclear Program (48:37) – Nuclear weapons and uranium (1:00:40) – Nuclear deal (1:26:14) – Iran Nuclear Archive (1:48:50) – Best case and worst case near-term future (2:24:15) – US attack on Iran – Operation Midnight Hammer (2:47:48) – Nuclear proliferation in the future (3:08:46) – Libertarianism (3:21:35) – Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) (3:37:10) – Trump and Peacemaking process (3:42:08) – WW2 (3:55:08) – WW3

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a debate between Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz on the topic of Iran and Israel. Scott Horton is author and editorial director of antiwar.com, host of The Scott Horton Show, and for the past three decades, a staunch critic of US foreign policy and military interventionism. Mark Dubowitz is a chief executive of the Foundation for Defensive Democracies, host of the Iran Breakdown Podcast, and he has been a leading expert on Iran and its nuclear program for over 20 years. And now, a quick few-second mentionary sponsor. Check them out in the description

• 0:41Lex Fridman?

  or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Hampton for a private, highly-vetted community for founders and CEOs, Notion for team collaboration and note-taking, Shopify for selling stuff online, Oracle for cloud computing, and Element for your health. Choose one of them, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. They're all here in one place. I try to make them interesting by talking about some random things I'm reading or thinking about, but if you do skip, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me, for whatever reason, go to lexfridman.com/contact. All right, let's go.

• 1:25Lex Fridman?

  This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, an incredible community called Hampton. It's a private, highly-vetted community for high-growth founders and CEOs. It is lonely to be a leader. Every CEO I know, every founder I know, especially in the early days, are truly on an emotional roller coaster. So Hampton provides a great community for the founders to meet. Every month, eight founders, face-to-face, having real conversations about daily struggles entailed in being a founder and entailed in being human, quite frankly. Groups are forming in New York City,

• 2:07Lex Fridman?

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• 2:25Lex Fridman?

  If you're a founder who's tired of carrying it all alone, visit joinhampton.com/lex to see if it's a fit for you. That's joinhampton.com/lex. This episode is brought to you by Notion, a note-taking and team collaboration tool that is superpowered by AI. It integrates AI into the note-taking process better than basically anything I've tried. And that's certainly true in the case of Teams. So it's doing things like collecting all the information from the meeting you just had. It captures everything, can make it searchable, summarized, there's transcriptions, all of that. And it's all automatically saved in Notion.

• 3:09Lex Fridman?

  And they do a search across multiple apps. So across the whole Microsoft ecosystem, Google, Gmail Drive, everything. And by the way, they integrate many of the latest language models, Claude, GPT. If you want to try a piece of software that integrates AI extremely well. Like I've said many times, it's not just about the intelligence of the model. It's about the integration of that model into a system, into an interface that actually allows you to maximally leverage that intelligence for a particular set of tasks. Try Notion AI for free when you go to notion.com/lex. That's all lowercase notion.com/lex

• 3:53Lex Fridman?

  to try the power of Notion AI today. This episode is brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great-looking, almighty store. I have a store on there, lexroom.com/store. I'm probably going to be doing an episode on the Silk Road, history of the Silk Road, the actual Silk Road, not the modern-day digital kind. Any history that gives us an inkling of the transformation between the very early humans.

• 4:26Lex Fridman?

  To the more modern, advanced technology humans. Any of that Silk Road is one of those technologies that gives you a glimpse. What was like in the tribal life before? And what was it like in a fully integrated network of cities after? Into the transformational periods of human history. All of that, I love studying it. But humans interacting, whether it's through conflict and war or peacetime, trade. That has always been fascinating to me. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. That's all lowercase.

• 5:05Lex Fridman?

  Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Oracle, a company providing a fully integrated stack of cloud applications and cloud platform services. More and more of the digital intelligence that has taken over our lives and the functions of society is going to be taking up more and more compute. And of course, a large fraction of that, especially for the smaller players, will be in the cloud. So it's great to have companies like Oracle who are delivering a huge amount of compute

• 5:46Lex Fridman?

  and storage in the cloud and doing it affordably. Cut your cloud bill in half when you switch to OCI. That's Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Offers for new US customers with a minimum financial commitment. See if you qualify at oracle.com/lex. That's oracle.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix. I'm going to be traveling a bit and I'm going to bring a bunch of Element with me because it's one of the sources of happiness for me.

• 6:27Lex Fridman?

  Once again, I brought Element packets to the Amazon where the taste of water provided one of the greatest experiences of my life. It's the yin and yang of life. Not having something, craving it, waiting for it, and then finally having it. That's a great feeling. I almost never, no matter the distance, drink water when I run. So especially for the longer runs, it's like 12, 15 miles. When I get back, especially in the Texas heat, you know, I'm a bit dehydrated. So get a cold water bottle, what element in it? Ah, it's a good feeling. Get a free eight count sample pack for free with any purchase.

• 7:11Lex Fridman?

  Try it at drinkelement.com/lex. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or at lexfridman.com/sponsors. And consider subscribing, commenting, and sharing the podcast with folks who might find it interesting. I promise to work extremely hard to always bring you nuanced, long form conversations with a wide variety of interesting people from all walks of life. And now, dear friends, here's Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz.

• 8:03Lex Fridman?

  Gentlemen, all right, it's great to have you here. Let's try to have a nuanced discussion slash debate and maybe even steel man opposing perspectives as much as possible. All right, as it stands now, there's a barely stable ceasefire between Iran and Israel. Let's maybe rewind a little bit. Can we first lay out the context for this Iran-Israel war and try to describe the key events that happened over the past two weeks? Maybe even the... A bit of the deep roots of the conflict.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Sure. First of all, thanks so much for having me on. Great to be on with Scott. I know he and I don't agree on a lot, but I certainly admire the passion and the dedication to stopping wars. So that's something we want to talk about. So let's talk about how we got to this war. So President Trump comes into office and immediately lays out that his Iran strategy is maximum pressure on the regime, and he will not allow Iran have a nuclear weapon. And he makes that clear consistently. He's, I think, made it very clear during his first term, made it clear throughout his career. And thus begins this process with the Iranians, which has kind of multiple tracks, but the one that

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Trump sees most interested in at the time is the diplomatic track. And he makes it very clear from the beginning in a sort of Oval Office remark. Says the Iranians can either blow up their nuclear program under US supervision, or someone's going to blow it up for them. And even though, you know, at the time, we think Netanyahu is really trying to push the president into a military campaign. Well, I'm sure we'll talk about that throughout the podcast. The president authorizes his lead negotiator and close friend, Steve Witkoff, to begin outreach to the Iranians, and thus begun the Oman round. And it's Oman round because it's taking place in Oman with mediation efforts by the Omanis. There are five rounds of negotiations with the Iranians.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And through the course of those negotiations, the US finally puts on the table an offer for Iran. We'll talk about the details of that. The Iranians reject that offer. And we're now into the sixth round, which is supposed to take place on a Sunday. On the Thursday before the Sunday, the Israelis strike. And they go after, in a rather devastating campaign over a matter of now 12 days, they go over and go after Iran's nuclear program, the key nuclear sites. Going after weapons scientists who are responsible for building Iran's nuclear weapons program and also go after top IRGC Islamic Revolutionary Guard commanders as well as

• 10:43Speaker 01

  top military commanders. And yet there's still this one site that is the most fortified site. It's called Fardow. It's an enrichment facility. It's buried under a mountain, goes about 80 meters deep. It's encased in concrete. It has advanced centrifuges and highly enriched uranium. The Israelis can do damage to it, but it's clear it's going to take the United States and our military power in order to severely degrade this facility. And Trump orders the United States Air Force to fly B2 bombers and drop 12 massive ordnance penetrators, which are these 30,000 pound bombs on Fardow in order to, as he said,

• 11:25Speaker 01

  obliterate it more realistically to severely degrade it. So that happens. And then he offers the Iranians, as he's been offering all the way through, you have an option. You can go back to Oman. I told you Oman, and you decided to force me to go to Fardow. But now we can go back for negotiations. And he forces a ceasefire on the Iranians, gets the Israelis to agree. And that's where we are today. That's where, as you say, a tentative ceasefire that just came into effect. And we'll see now if the Iranians decide to take President Trump on his repeated offers, join him in Oman for another round of negotiations. Scott, is there some stuff you want to add to that?

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Sure. Well, he started with January, right? Trump's second term here and the maximum pressure campaign. Essentially, as should be clear to everyone now, all these negotiations were just a pretext for war. Trump and his entire cabinet must have known that the Ayatollah is not going to give up all enrichment. That is their latent nuclear deterrent. Their posture has been. Heavily implied, "Don't attack us and we won't make a nuke." While America's position was, "If you make a nuke, if you start to, we'll attack you." So it's the perfect standoff. But what happened was, and you might remember a few weeks ago, there was some talk about, "Well, maybe we could find a way to compromise on some enrichment.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Maybe they could do a consortium with the Saudis. Maybe there's some way that we..." And then, nope, the pressure came down. No enrichment, zero enrichment. But that's a red line. Everyone knows that there's... And even now, it's probably less likely than ever that they're going to give up enrichment. Sure, they bombed Fordo, but they didn't destroy every last centrifuge in that place. And the Iranians are already announcing that they're already begun construction on another facility under a taller mountain, buried even deeper. And, you know, they figured out how to enrich uranium hexafluoride gas, you know, what, 20 years ago now? And they will always be able to. And this is the slippery slope that we're on with these wars.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Is, in fact, I saw a friend here on TV the other day, he almost, pretty much just implied there, saying, "Well, now Trump has to go in." You know, we were told, "It's just Israel doing it, don't worry." But then, no, Trump has to hit Fordo, or else now they'll break out toward a nuclear weapon. So in for a penny, in for a pound, in for a ton. And now, once we bomb Fordo again, and the Tans again, and the new facility again, then it'll be decided that, nope, as Benjamin Netanyahu said the other day, "You know what would really solve this problem? If we just kill the Ayatollah, then everything will be fine. Then we'll have a regime change, and then what? Then we'll have a civil war with Bin Ladenites again in the catbird seat,

• 14:15Speaker 02

  just like George Bush put them in Iraq, and Barack Obama put them in Libya and in Syria. And we'll have Azeris and Baluki suicide bombers, and Shiite, you know, revolutionaries, and whoever, all vying for power in the new absolute chaos, Stan." If you listen to the administration and Mr. Dewitt, they're essentially just implying that like, oh yeah, mission accomplished. We did it. Their nuclear program's destroyed. Now we don't have to worry about that anymore. But that's not true. Now there's every reason to believe, and we don't know for sure. There's every reason believe that at least is much more likely now that the Ayatollah will change his mind about God changing his mind. And we'll say that actually, maybe we do need a nuclear deterrent.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  That's really what it's been for this whole time is a bluff. We have bullets in one pocket, revolver in another. Let's not you and me fight and escalate this thing. It's the same position, by the way, as Japan and Germany and Brazil. Two of the three of those are under America's nuclear umbrella, I admit, but still. Where they've proven they've mastered the fuel cycle and they can make nuclear weapons. But hey, since nobody's directly threatening them now, why escalate things and go ahead and make atom bombs? That has been their position the whole time. Because after all, they could not break out and make a nuke without everyone in the world knowing about it. And that's why Lex, I'm sure you could vouch for me on this. If you've been watching TV over the past few weeks, you'll hear Marco Rubio and all the government officials and all the war hawks say, oh yeah, 60%, 60%. What do you think they need with that 60%?

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Implying that, oh yeah, see, they're racing toward a bomb. But you see how they always just imply that? They, they won't come right out and say that because it's a ridiculous lie. They've been, they could have enriched up to 90% uranium-235 this whole time. The reason they were enriching up to 60% was in reaction to Israeli sabotage. First of all, assassinating their nuclear scientists and then their sabotage in a times. They started enriching up to 60% just like they did in the Obama years to have a bargaining chip to negotiate away. Under the JCPOA, they shipped out every bit of their enriched uranium to France to be turned into fuel rods and then shipped back into the country to be used in their reactors. And so they're just trying to get us back in that deal. It is an illusion. It is, and I don't know exactly what's in this man's mind,

• 16:26Speaker 02

  but it's just not true that they're making nuclear weapons. And it has been a lie of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party regime. And for that matter, the Katima regime of Ehud Olmert before him, that this is a threat that has to be preempted. When in fact, it never was anything more than a latent nuclear deterrent.

• 16:45Lex Fridman?

  Maybe a good question to ask here is what is the goal for the United States and Iran in relation to the nuclear?

• 16:55Lex Fridman?

  Iran's nuclear program. What is the red line here? Does Iran have this need for a latent nuclear deterrent? And what is the thing that's acceptable to the United States and to the rest of the world? What should be acceptable?

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, Alex, so there was a lot to unpack there. So let's sort of just back up a little bit and talk about, first of all, the regime itself. Islamic Republic of Iran came into power in 1979. It's been declared a leading state sponsor of terrorism by multiple administrations dating back to the Clinton administration, by Obama, by Biden, by Trump. And it is a regime that has killed and maimed thousands of Americans, not to mention, obviously, hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners. It is a regime that has lied about its nuclear program. It never actually disclosed its nuclear sites. All these sites were discovered by Iranian opposition groups, by Western intelligence

• 17:50Speaker 01

  agencies, and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is the UN agency responsible for preventing proliferation, has come out again and again over many, many years in reports, very detailed reports, describing Iran's nuclear weapons program. There have been multiple attempts at diplomacy with Iran. I'm sure we're going to talk about it. Scott mentioned the JCPOA, so we should certainly talk about the JCPOA, which was the 2015 deal that Barack Obama reached with Iran. But multiple attempts to actually get the Iranians to negotiate away their nuclear weapons program. I mean, it's worth mentioning that if Iran wanted to have civilian nuclear energy, there are 23 countries in the world that have it, but they don't have enrichment and they don't

• 18:35Speaker 01

  have reprocessing. We sign these deals called the gold standard with the South Koreans, with the Amoradi's, with others. And we say, if you want civilian energy, you can have power plants, you can buy your fuel rods from abroad, but there's no reason to have enrichment or plutonium reprocessing because those are the key capabilities you need to develop nuclear weapons. Now, the five countries that have those capabilities and don't have nuclear weapons are Argentina, Brazil, Haaland.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  And Germany and Japan. And I think it's the view of many administrations over many years, including many European leaders, that that the Islamic Republic of Iran is very different from those aforementioned countries because that it has been dedicated to terrorism. It's been killing Americans and other Westerners and other Middle Easterners. And it is a dangerous regime. You don't want to have that dangerous regime retaining the key capabilities and needs to develop nuclear weapons. But I but I want to kind of get back more to the present. Mentioned this was around negotiations at Oman. Scott saying that President Trump had said, here's the offer, take it or leave it. Zero enrichment, full dismantlement. Well, in fact, that wasn't the offer that was presented to Iranians at Oman. The offer was a one page offer.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  And it said, you can temporarily enrich above ground. You've got to render your below ground facilities, quote, non operational. And then at some time in the future, three, four years, as Scott said, there'll be a consortium that'll be built, not on Iranian territory. It'll be a partnership with the Saudis and the Amorites. It'll be under IAEA supervision. And that enrichment facility will create fuel rods for your nuclear reactors. So that was the offer presented to Iran. And that offer would come with significant sanctions relief. Billions of dollars that would go to the regime. Obviously, the economy there has been suffering. The regime has not had the resources that it's had in the past to fund its, what I call its

• 20:34Speaker 01

  axis of misery, its proxy terror armies around the world. And it was a good offer. And I was shocked that Khamenei rejected it. He did reject it. And I think he rejected it because I think he believed that he could continue to do to President Trump what he had done to President Obama, which is just continue to squeeze and squeeze and squeeze the Americans at the table in order to ensure that he could keep all these nuclear facilities, all these nuclear capabilities, so that at a time of his choosing, when President Trump is gone, he can develop nuclear weapons. Now, it is a bit interesting to say that Iran has no intention to develop nuclear weapons. And let's examine the nuclear program and ask, does this sound like a regime that's not interested in building nuclear weapons?

• 21:19Speaker 01

  So they they built deeply buried underground enrichment facilities that they hid from the international community and they didn't disclose. They had an active nuclear warhead program called Ahmad, which ended in 2003 formally when the United States invaded Iraq. And we know that because not only has that been detailed by the IAEA, but actually Mossad, in a daring operation in Tehran, took out a nuclear archive and brought it back to the West. And then the IAEA, the United States and the intelligence communities went after this detailed archive, went into it and discovered that this Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei,

• 22:01Speaker 01

  had an active program to build five atomic warheads. And was a very detailed program with blueprints and designs, all of which was designed under Ahmad to build a nuclear weapons program. So again, it's interesting to say that he doesn't have the intention to build nuclear weapons when he actually had an active nuclear weapons program. And we can talk about what happened to that program after 2003, and there's a lot of interesting details. So when you combine the fact that he has an active nuclear weapons program, he has sites that are buried deep underground, he has weapon scientists who come out of the Ahmad program and continue to work on the initial metallurgy work and computer modeling designed to actually begin

• 22:46Speaker 01

  that process of building a warhead. And all of this has been hidden from the international community. He has spent estimates of half a trillion dollars on his nuclear program in direct costs and in sanctions costs. And one has to ask, and I think it's an interesting question, to compare the UAE and Iran. The UAE signed the gold standard. They said, we'll have no enrichment capability or reprocessing. They spent about $20 billion on that, and it supplies 25% of their electrical generation. Khamenei spent a half a trillion dollars, and that program supplies maybe 3%.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Of their electrical needs. In fact, they have a reactor that they bought from the Russians called Bouchere. And that reactor, it's exactly what you'd want in a proliferation proof reactor. They buy fuel rods from the Russians. They use it and they send the spent fuel back to Russia so it cannot be reprocessed into plutonium. So I just think it's important for your listeners to understand just some of the technical nuclear history here in order to unpack this question of did Khamenei want nuclear weapons? What was his goal here? And then we can talk about was this the right operation in order to for the United States to order the B2 bombers to strike these facilities in what again was a limited operation as President Trump has said.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  And in order to drive the Iranians back to the negotiating table and finally do the deal that President Trump has asked them to do since he came into office in January.

• 24:20Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, that is one of the fascinating questions, whether this Operation Midnight Hammer increased or decreased the chance that Iran will develop a nuclear weapon.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Before you ask any more questions, I have to refute virtually everything he just said, which is completely false.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  I mean, really everything? There was not one thing I said that was true? Just one thing?

• 24:37Speaker 02

  I mean, Iran is a nation over there somewhere. You got that part right.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  All right. 22 years of working on Iran and I got that right.

• 24:43Lex Fridman?

  But do you know the population of Iran?

• 24:45Speaker 01

  92 million.

• 24:46Lex Fridman?

  Okay.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  So first of all, they were trying to buy a light water reactor from the Europeans or the Chinese in the 1990s and Bill Clinton wouldn't let them. And put tremendous pressure on China to prevent them from selling them a light water reactor, a turnkey reactor that produces waste that's so polluted with impurities that you can't make nuclear weapons fuel out of it. By the way, they never have to this day had a reprocessing facility for reprocessing plutonium, even their current plutonium waste from their heavy water reactor at Bouchere to make weapons fuel out of that. They have no plutonium route to the bomb under the JCPOA.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  But they had it at Iraq, not Bouchere. There's a difference between Iraq. Iraq is a

• 25:26Speaker 02

  Iraq is where they pour concrete into the reactor and shut it down.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  And the reason they pour concrete

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Under the JCPOA.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Not they, but the Obama administration is right, under the JCPOA. Pour concrete into the Kalindria in order to prevent them from using that reactor to reprocess plutonium. So there's a distinction between Iraq and Bouchere. Scott's exactly right. Bouchere is a reactor, a heavy water reactor provided by the Russians, as I described, for the generation of electricity. It's proliferation proof. Iraq has, is the opposite. It's a heavy water reactor that was built for a plutonium pathway to nuclear weapons, which is exactly why under the JCPOA, they literally had to pour concrete into the, into the middle of it to prevent it from reprocessing plutonium.

• 26:09Speaker 02

  I think we're gonna need a scientist to come in here and split the difference, or maybe we need to go and look up some IAEA documents, because I don't believe that Iraq ever had a reprocessing facility for their plutonium waste. And the deal under the JCPOA, the Russians would come and get all their plutonium waste, which the waste comes out all polluted and not useful. You need the reprocessing facility to get all of the impurities out.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Just to clarify, it could be that I'm wrong about that, but I don't believe that they ever had a reprocessing facility at Iraq that they could use to remove all those impurities and then have weapons-grade plutonium fuel as the North Koreans do. So the Obama administration was very clear under the JCPOA, we are gonna pour concrete into the, into the Iraq facility, as Scott acknowledged, because we are concerned that Iraq can be used for reprocessing plutonium, for a plutonium pathway to a nuclear weapon. Can be used, but we don't know if it was used.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Oh, we know it never was. There never was any reprocessing of weapons fuel.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  But there was concrete poured. I'm happy to-

• 27:15Speaker 02

  There's no indication-

• 27:16Speaker 01

  For your viewers who are interested in not to plug my own podcast, Lex, I apologize, but- It is a very good podcast. I just recently had David Albright on my podcast, who is actually a physicist and a weapons inspector, and goes into a lot of detail about the Iranian nuclear program. Please listen to the podcast. Iran Breakdown, by the way, is the name of the podcast. Yeah, and David's the president of the Institute for Science and National Security. And by the way, spent decades on this. And to his credit, he was one of the deep skeptics of the Bush administration's rush to war with Iraq and-

• 27:45Speaker 02

  That's not true. He vouched for claims that there were chemical weapons in Iraq and later said he was sorry for it.

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Again, I mentioned the Bush administration's rush to war based on their claims that Saddam was building nuclear weapons.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  He did debunk the aluminum tubes, though.

• 27:58Speaker 01

  He debunked it and was a deep skeptic again of the Russia war in Iraq. You know, the argument today, Lex, which I think is the more interesting argument because there are very few people left today who don't believe that Iranians were building the nuclear weapons capability that gave them the option to build nuclear weapons. I already said that. We can debate, we can debate whether they had decided to, and I'm interested to hear Scott's opinion on this, but the recent intelligence that has come out that the Iranian nuclear weapons scientists have begun preliminary work on building a warhead.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Came out from where? This intelligence that came out, who put that into Israeli claims? Not verified by the US and the Wall Street Journal anywhere, right?

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Let's talk, let's just talk about.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Let's talk about all of my list of refutations of all your false claims from 10 years ago.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  The Wall Street Journal did verify this.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  That's a lot of false claims to refute.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  One at a time, one. Lawrence Norman actually wrote a piece, and this was during the Biden administration, because the Biden DNI had actually come out and for the first time in their annual threat assessment, had removed a line that said Iran is not working, currently working on developing any capabilities that would put it in a position to actually deliver a nuclear warhead. And what became the Lawrence Norman piece in the Wall Street Journal was that there actually was initial work done on metallurgy and on computer modeling. And so those actually were defined terms in Section T of the 2015 JCPOA, which defined weaponization in that section.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  And metallurgy and computer modeling were some of the initial steps. So the DNI was very concerned under Biden that these initial steps meant that either Khamenei had given the green light, or nuclear weapons scientists, in order to get ahead of the boss, so they could be in a position, if he decided to move forward on this, were in a position and their timelines were therefore expedited. So it's interesting. I mean, again, you've got the DNI under Biden, you've got the CIA Director John Ratcliffe, you've got Israeli intelligence, you've got the Wall Street Journal, and you've got the IAEA asset. Asking questions of Iran on its past weaponization activities. Why are you denying us?

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Who's the dog that didn't bark there? The current director of national intelligence who issued her threat assessment. Trump's director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who issued her threat assessment in February. That repeated the exact same language that from the national intelligence estimate of 2007. And that the CIA and the NIE, the National Intelligence Council have reaffirmed repeatedly ever since then. Which is that Supreme Leader has not decided to pursue nuclear weapons. He has not made the political decision to pursue nuclear weapons. She testified, uh, in fact, in, in, uh, under oath in front of the Senate in March. And then according to CNN and the New York Times, there was a brand new that, uh, uh, assessment that was, uh, put together. The week before the attack, uh, was launched reaffirming the same thing.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  And at least in history, if you read it in Haaretz, Mossad agreed with the CIA.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  I'd like to just sort of quote CIA Director John Ratcliffe. Cause Scott brought up, brought up the CIA and the intelligence committee. I think Ratcliffe had a good way of looking at this is, and that he said is, you know, when you're in the 99 yard line as a football team. You have the intention of score a goal, quote unquote. And what, what he was, what he was actually pointing to is, let's not talk about this debate about whether Hamene had given the order or not given the order. Because Hamene knows that if he gives an order, the US and Israeli intelligence community will pick up on that order. And that will be the trigger for strikes. What, what Ratcliffe is saying is that Hamene had built the nuclear weapons capability. He's at the 99 yard line. And both the CIA and European leaders, European intelligence community has said for years.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  That if Iran has that capability and they're on the 99 yard line. At that point, it's going to be too late to stop them. Once that decision is made to, to assemble the final warhead, which by the way, is the final piece of what you need for a deliverable nuclear weapon.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  That's not true at all, right? They have to resort to a crude analogy about football yard lines because they can't say the truth. Which is that they had zero weapons grade uranium. They were not producing it. They were trying to get the United States back in the deal that they are still officially within the JCPOA with the rest of the UN Security Council. Wherein they shipped all of their enriched uranium stockpile out of the country to France to be transferred to fuel rods. Their insistence was on their continued ability to enrich uranium. And so this goes to one of the things that he at least sort of brought up that deserves addressing. When Trump came into power in 2017,

• 32:46Speaker 02

  he decided on this Israeli influence maximum pressure campaign. And he said the JCPOA was the worst deal in the history of any time any two men ever shook hands and all these kinds of things in his hyperbolic way, which of course made it very difficult for him to figure out a way to stay in the thing or to compromise along its lines. But the fact of the matter is, if he had just played it straight and said, listen, Ayatollah, we don't have to be friends, but we do have a deal here, which my predecessor struck with you, but I don't like these sunset provisions. And I want to send my guys over there and see if we can figure out a way to convince you that we really wish you'd shut down calm altogether, or this or that or the other thing. And try to approach them in good faith.

• 33:30Speaker 02

  We talk about yard lines and things. We had a JCPOA, okay? So toward peace, we were past the 50 yard line. Donald Trump could have gone to Tehran and shook hands with the Ayatollah as Dick Cheney complained that we had cold relations with Iran back in 1998, when he was the head of Alaberton. And so we can do business with these guys. Donald Trump could have gone right over there and done business. And instead, he gave into Netanyahu's lies in this ridiculous hoax that they had uncovered all these Iranian nuclear documents, which he pretends is legit, where all they did was recycle the fake Israeli forged smoking laptop of 2005,

• 34:13Speaker 02

  which they lied and pretended was the laptop of an Iranian scientist that was smuggled out of Iran by his wife and had all this proof of a secret Iranian nuclear weapons program on it. But every bit of that was refuted, including the thing about the warhead, he said, was refuted by David Albright and his friend David Sanger in The New York Times, that all those sketches of the warhead for the missile were wrong. Because when Mossad forged the documents, they were making a good educated guess, but they didn't know that Iran had completely redesigned the nose cone of their mid-range missiles and had an entirely different nose cone that would require an entirely different warhead than that described in the documents. And why would they have been designing a warhead to fit in

• 34:56Speaker 02

  a nose cone that they were abandoning? And so that was refuted. David Albright completely discredited your claims there, pal. And then they later admitted that it was a CIA laptop. There was no laptop. And they later admitted, Ali Heinonen admitted, who was a very hawkish, one of the, not director, but a high level executive at the International Atomic Energy Agency, admitted that that intelligence was brought into the stream by the Mujahideen e-Kalk communist terrorist cult that used to work for the Ayatollah during the revolution, then turned on him and he turned on them and kicked them out. Then they went to work for Saddam Hussein, where they helped crush the Shiite and Kurdish insurrection of 1991. And then

• 35:36Speaker 02

  they became America, Donald Rumsfeld's and Ariel Sharon's sock puppets, and later Ehud Ulmer's sock puppets, when the United States invaded Iraq and took possession of them. They're now under American protection in Albania. And these are the same kooks who just a few weeks ago, you might remember said, look, new satellite pictures of a whole new nuclear facility in Iran. Isn't it funny how no one ever brought that up again? Didn't bomb it. It was nothing. It was fake. Just like before, when they said, hey, look, here's a picture of a vault door. And behind that is where the secret nuclear weapons program is, except it turned out that vault door was a stock photo from a vault company. It meant nothing. And they had repeatedly, you know, made claims that were totally refuted. Just like I'm about to refute his claim that

• 36:21Speaker 02

  they ever were the ones who revealed, for example, Natanz, he was implying that Natanz and Kham were both buried and hidden until revealed, I think you said, by dissident groups, that is, the MEK sock puppets of the Israelis. But it was your friend, David Albright, not the Israeli Mossad through the MEK, who revealed Natanz facility. Ask him, he'll fistfight you over it. He claims credit. He was first and said, this is a facility. However, they were not in violation of their safeguards agreement with the IAEA. They were still six months away from introducing any nuclear material to that facility. And so...

• 36:59Speaker 02

  When it was revealed, they weren't in violation of anything. And, uh, and then on COM, we had a huge fight about this at the time. The party line came down in, from all the government officials in the media, that they had just exposed the facility there. COM is Fordo, same thing. Uh, when in fact, that wasn't true. The I A, the Iranians had announced to the IAEA, that we have built a new facility here, and we are going to introduce nuclear material into it within six months. So here's your official notification. And then a few days later, they just pretended to expose it. When it was the Iranians themselves who had admitted to it in, in going along with their, uh, obligations under their safeguards agreement.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  So it's just completely wrong. Why do they bury them? They buried them for protection because clearly the Israelis have indicated since the 1990s that they consider any nuclear program in Iran to be the same thing as an advanced nuclear weapons program. You're hearing that today. For them to have a nuclear facility at all is, is equivalent to them going ahead and breaking out and making a nuclear weapon. And so of course, they know that they have to have it buried to protect it from Israel. That doesn't mean that they are trying to get nukes. It does mean, as I already said, that they wanted to prove to the world that they know how to enrich uranium and that they have facilities buried deeply enough where if we attack them, that would incentivize them to making nukes. And then we would, might be unable to stop them

• 38:27Speaker 02

  without going all the way toward a regime change, which they're bluffing, basically betting that we won't go that far, considering how gigantic their country is and how mountainous and populous it is compared to Iraq next door. Now here's some more things that he said that weren't true. So he said Iran has been killing Americans all this time. Well, that's almost always a reference to Beirut, 1983, which you can read in the book By Way of Deception by Viktor Ostrovsky, the former Mossad officer, that the Israelis knew. That they were building that truck bomb to bomb the Marines with and withheld that information from the United States and said that's what they get for sticking their big noses in. And that is in the book by Way of Deception by Victor Ostrowski. And by

• 39:10Speaker 02

  the way, the Israelis were friends with them at with Iran at the time in all through the 1980s. And it was just a couple of years later when Ronald Reagan sold Iran missiles and using the Israelis as cutouts to do so, when he switched sides temporarily in the Iran-Iraq war. And so that's just and that was in 1983. If Ronald Reagan can sell them missiles a year, two years after that, three years after that, then surely the United States and the Ayatollah can bury the hatchet from that. And no one's ever even, I don't believe, ever really proven that Tehran ordered that. It was a Shiite militia backed by Iran that sort of proto Hezbollah that did that attack that killed those Marines. And if there's some responsibility for them, damn them, like if there's direct responsibility

• 39:55Speaker 02

  for that, not just their support for the group, then damn them for that. But that's still no reason in the world to say that we can't get along with them now, when that was in the same year Return of the Jedi came out. Okay. And then the other one, and this is always referred to, you'll see this on TV news today, anyone watching this, turn on TV news and you'll hear them say Iran killed 600 Americans in Iraq War II. But that's a lie. There was a gigantic propaganda campaign by Dick Cheney and his co-conspirators, David Petraeus and Michael Gordon of the New York Times, now at the Wall Street Journal, where they lied and lied like the devil for about five, six months in early 2007,

• 40:35Speaker 02

  that every time a Shiite set off a roadside bomb, these new improved copper cord enhanced, they're called EFPs, explosively formed penetrators. Now, anytime that happened, Iran did it.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Which is what George Bush called short handing it. Yeah, in other words, just implying the lie. What they're saying is Iran backed Muqtada al-Sadr and America attacked Muqtada al-Sadr, who actually they were fighting the whole war for him. He remains a powerful kingmaker in that country this day. He's part of the United Iraqi Alliance. And in fact, as long as we're taking a long form here, he was the least Iran tied of the three major factions in the United Iraqi Alliance in Iraq War II. The other two major factions were Dawa and the Supreme Islamic Council, and they had been living in Iran for the last 20 years. They're the ones who came and took over Baghdad. Muqtada al-Sadr was a Shiite and close to Iran, but he's also an Iraqi nationalist.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  And at times he allied with the Sunnis and tried to limit American and Iranian influence in the country. Was more of an Arab and an Iraqi nationalist. And the Americans decided, they hated him the most, not because he was the most Iran tied, but because he was willing to tell us and them to, to get the hell out. And America was betting that if we backed the same parties that Iran backed in Iraq War II, that they would eventually end up needing our money and guns more than they would need their Iranian friends and co-religionists and sponsors next door, which of course did not work out. And America's had minimal influence in super majority Shiite Iraq ever since the end of Iraq War II. And we can get back later in the show to how Israel helped lie us into that horrific war as well.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  But the fact of the matter is, it was not Iranians setting off those bombs, and it was not even Iranians making those bombs. And I show in my book enough already, I have a solid dozen sources. Enough already? Thank you. I have a solid dozen sources, including Michael Gordon's own colleague, Alyssa Rubin at the New York Times, and many others, where they found these bomb factories in Shiite Iraq. They were being made by Shiite Arab Iraqis. And when David Petraeus was going to have a big press conference and they laid out all the components, all the reporters gathered around and they started noticing that the components said made in UAE, made in Haditha, that is Iraq.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  In other words, there was no evidence whatsoever that these came from Iran. And then they called off. The press conference and Steven Hadley, George Bush's second secretary, uh, national security advisor, admitted that, yeah, we didn't have the evidence that we needed to present that. And I also quote two, one marine and one high level army intelligence officer in there, uh, who were deeply involved in Iraq war, uh, reconfirming that, that there was never any evidence that these bombs were coming across, uh, from Iran, or especially that then even if they were, that that was at the direction of the Quds Force or the Ayatollah. This was all just a propaganda campaign because Dick Cheney and David Petraeus

• 43:34Speaker 02

  were trying to give George Bush a reason to hit IRGC bases and start the war in 2007. And this sounds crazy, but there's like four major confirming sources for it. Dick Cheney's national security advisor, David Wormser, who was the author of the clean break strategy, which we're going to talk about today. David Wormser in 2007 was saying, we want to work with the Israelis to start the war with Iran to force George Bush to do an end run around George Bush and force him into the war. And that was reported originally by Stephen Clemens in the Washington note, but it was later confirmed in the New York Times and by the Washington Post reporter Barton Gelman in his book Angler on Dick Cheney, that there was this huge, this was the end that they were going for, was they were trying so hard

• 44:19Speaker 02

  to force a war in 2007. And it was the commander of CENTCOM Admiral Fallon, who said, over my dead body, we are not doing this. And then a few months later, the National Intelligence Council put out their NIE, saying that there is no nuclear weapons program at all. And W. Bush complained in his memoir, Lex, that in, in his story, it's the Saudi king, his royal highness Abdullah, rather than, um, Ehud Olmert, but he's saying, I'm sorry, your highness, majesty, I can't attack Iran's nuclear program because my own intelligence agency says they don't have a military program. So how am I supposed to start a war with them when my own intelligence agencies say that? This is what Donald Trump just did. Started anyway, had his man Rubio say, well, screw the intelligence. I don't care what

• 45:03Speaker 02

  it says. We can just do this if we want to.

• 45:05Lex Fridman?

  So first, let me say on the cover of enough already devastating Daniel Ellsberg, outstanding Daniel L. Davis, essential Ron Paul. You are respected by a very large number of people. You have decades of experience in this. Same thing with Mark, extremely respected by a very large number of people, experts. There's a lot of disagreements here and we're going to unfortunately leave a lot of the disagreements on the table for the aforementioned nuclear scientists to deconstruct later. So let's not like try to, every single claim does not have to be perfectly refuted. Let's just leave it on the table, the statements as they stand. And let's try to also find things we kind of agree on and try, I know this might be difficult, but to steel man the other side.

• 45:48Lex Fridman?

  There's a thing I would love to ask you, maybe give Mark a chance to speak a little bit, but to try to, for both of you, to try to steel man the other side. So people who are concerned about Iran developing a nuclear program, can you steel man that case? And the same, the people who are concerned-

• 46:05Speaker 02

  I think I did in my opening statement, quite frankly. I'm, I don't carry any brief for the Ayatollah. I'm a Texan. I don't give a damn about what some Shiite deacrat says about nothing, right? My interest is the people of this country and its future and what's true. And so I don't mind telling you, even though the Iranians never said, "We're building a latent nuclear weapons capability." That's clearly what they're doing, is showing that they can make a nuke, so don't make me make a nuke. That has been their position. Their position has not been, "I'm making a nuke so I can wipe Israel off the map." Their position has been, "Look, if you guys don't attack us, we could just keep this civilian program the way it is." And again, there's always the implication that they're just building up this uranium stockpile, but no, they're not.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  That was in reaction to, one, Donald Trump leaving the deal in 2018. Two, the assassination in December of 2020 of the Iranian nuclear scientist Farqazadah, or however you say that. And then in April of 21, the sabotage at Natanz. And there's a Reuters story that says, right after they sabotage Natanz, that's when the Ayatollah decided, "Let's enrich up to 60%." Which, why stop 30% short of 90% to 35%?

• 47:17Speaker 02

  It's because they're not even making a threat. They're built, they're making like the most latent threat, a bargaining chip to negotiate a way. They're trying to put pressure on the United States to come back to the table. That's not the same as racing to the bomb. That's why Marco Rubio says, never mind the intelligence, because the intelligence says what I just said.

• 47:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, point made. Let's try, let's try if possible to keep it to like a minute and two of back and forth.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Except, you know, the problem is we're talking about nuclear stuff, which is all very complicated. And most people don't know much about it, which is what the war party is relying on, that people just hear nuclear afraid and mushroom cloud and, and give the benefit of the doubt to the hawks. And so we gotta get into the details of this stuff.

• 47:58Lex Fridman?

  Details 100%, but I like the tension between two people with different perspectives exploring those details. And the more we can go back and forth, the better. And there's a lot of disagreement on the table. I personally enjoy learning from the disagreement.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  That was a very long list of claims that he made though, where I felt like I had to go down the list as much as I could. Because it was a lot.

• 48:18Lex Fridman?

  I think you addressed like maybe one or two claims and it took 15 minutes. So that's what I'm just commenting on.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Okay, that's fair.

• 48:25Lex Fridman?

  Let's do one at a time. I like the tension of the debate of back and forth. That's, that's all. Mark, do you wanna, do you wanna comment on stuff a little bit here? Which would pick whichever topic you wanna go with here?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a lot there. So just a couple of things I think that are worth your viewers knowing, because Scott's right. I mean, the nuclear physics is complicated and it's also important. So the Iranians have assembled about, we say about 15 to 17 bombs worth of 60% enriched uranium. And I think it's always important for your listeners to understand, what does this all mean? Enriched to 3.67%, to 20%, to 60%, and then to 90% weapons-grade uranium? Like, what, what does this actual process mean? First of all, obviously enriched uranium is a key capability to develop a nuclear weapon. It can also be used for other purposes, civilian purposes and research purposes. You can use it to power nuclear submarines. So let's just, if you don't mind, if I could just break it down.

• 49:19Lex Fridman?

  That's fascinating, yes.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, just, I think it's again, important just to understand the, the sort of basics before we jump into the allegations and claims and counterclaims. So if you're gonna enrich to 3.67% enriched uranium, that's for civilian nuclear power. But when you do that, you've basically 70% of what you need to get to weapons-grade. Right? So you've, you've done all the steps, 70% of the steps in order to get to weapons-grade uranium. If you enrich to 20%, you are now at 90% of what you need to get to weapons-grade uranium. Now, why would you need 20%? You may need it for something like a research reactor.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  Medical isotopes.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Iran has, correct, Iran has a Tehran research reactor for medical isotopes. Now, you can, by the way, you can buy those isotopes from abroad, or you can, or you can produce them at home. If you're going to enrich to 60%, right, then you've done 99% of what you need to get to weapons-grade uranium. And then 90% is, quote, weapons-grade uranium. By the way, you can use 60% to actually deliver a crude nuclear device. That, that has been done in the past, but you want to get to, quote, 90%. That's, that's weapons-grade uranium as Scott's defining it. But just again, clarify, the, these huge stockpiles of 60% that Iran has accumulated, right?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  This 16, 17 bombs' worth of 60% is 99% of what they need for weapons-grade. So I just wanted to explain that.

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, but when you say, you're saying, if you include the mining, the refining of the ore into yellowcake, the transformation of that into uranium hexafluoride gas, the driving of it in a truck over to the centrifuge, and then spinning it, this is where we get this 90% number from, right? In, in place of 90% enriched uranium, or, or 80% enriched uranium, it's 90% of the way on some chart that includes picking up a shovel and beginning to mine, right?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Like, so again, just to clarify, I just think it's important to understand the definition of terms. To get, once you have 60% enriched uranium, you've done 99% of all the steps, including some of the steps that Scott's talking about. You've done 99% of what you need to have weapons-grade uranium.

• 51:33Speaker 02

  That's just meaningless.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  Why is that meaningless?

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Well, as I've already established numerous times here, under the JCPOA, they shipped out every bit of their enriched uranium stockpile. The French turned it into fuel rods and then shipped it back. That's the deal they're trying to get the US back into and were obviously clearly willing to do. And again, the only reason they were enriching up to 60% was to put the pressure on the Americans to go ahead and get back into the deal. And bad bet, it gave him an excuse to bomb based on the idea that people are going to listen to him, pretend that somehow that's 99% of the way to the bomb, when you're including, yeah, driving to the mine and mining it and converting it to yellow cake and all these other things.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  If you're going to have a deliverable nuclear weapon, so you need the weapons-grade uranium. And just to repeat, they have multiple bombs' worth of the 60% enriched uranium, which again is 99% of the steps you need to take for weapons-grade. So they're very close to weapons-grade. It's that 1% more that they need to do to enrich to weapons-grade. The second aspect of a deliverable nuclear weapon is obviously the delivery vehicle, and those are the missiles. And according to the DNI and other incredible sources, Iran has got the largest missile inventory in the Middle East, 3,000 missiles before the war began, and at least the ballistic missiles, 2,000 capable of reaching Israel.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  So there's no doubt that Iran has the ability, once they have the weapons-grade uranium and the warhead, to affix that to a missile and deliver that, certainly to hit Israel, hit our Gulf neighbors, hit Southern Europe. They also have a active intercontinental ballistic missile program, an ICBM program, which ultimately is designed not to hit the Israelis or the Gulfies, but to hit deeper into Europe and ultimately to target the United States. So let's just understand the missile program. I think it's an important part of it. The third leg of the stool, and Scott has already alluded to this, and we've had some debate on this, and I think we should talk about it, what it really means in detail, is you've got to develop a warhead, right, or a crude nuclear device. And according to

• 53:40Speaker 01

  estimates from both US government sources and nuclear experts, it would take about four to six months for Iran to develop a crude nuclear device. This is something that you wouldn't use a missile to deliver, but you would use a plane or a ship. And it would take somewhere in the neighborhood of about a year and a half to deliver or to develop a warhead, and that's to affix to the missile. So it's sort of the three legs of the nuclear stool, right? Weapons-grade uranium, the missiles to deliver it, and the warhead. So I just want to sort of define terms so that when we're having this big debate, your listeners kind of understand what we're talking about.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  If I can jump in here on this point, too, and I'll turn it back over to you. But I actually have a bit of a correction to make for anyone who's seen me on Pierce Morgan or Saagar and Crystal. I actually oversimplified and made a mistake. I've been off of the Iran nuclear beat for a little while doing other things. And so I'd like to take this opportunity to clarify, and I'm going to try to clarify with them on their shows, too, was I have an old friend of mine used to make nuclear bombs, Gordon Prather, and I only just found out that he died two years ago, unfortunately. He used to write for us at antiwar.com and is a brilliant nuclear physicist and H-bomb developer, and he had really taught me all about this stuff. And so I'm not correcting anything you said. What he said essentially is right.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  I maybe add a little more detail. The easiest kind of nuke to make out of uranium is a simple gun-type nuke, like they dropped on Hiroshima as a little boy. It's essentially a shotgun firing a uranium slug into a uranium target, and that's enough. They didn't even test it. They knew it'd work. It was so easy to do, to do the Hiroshima bomb. The Nagasaki bomb was a plutonium implosion bomb. It's virtually always plutonium that's used in implosion bombs and in miniaturized nuclear warheads that can be married to missiles, right? As opposed to a bomb you can drop out of the belly of a plane, as he was saying, right? So gun-type nuke, you can't put that on a missile. That is by far the easiest kind of nuclear weapon for Iran to make if they broke out

• 55:48Speaker 02

  and made one, right? But it'd essentially be useless to them, right? What are they going to do? Drive it to Israel in a flatbed truck, right? They got no way to deliver that. So you have to drop it as a bomb. Yeah, they could test it in the desert and beat their chest, but essentially that's all they could do.

• 56:01Speaker 01

  Or you could drop it from a plane like we did, as Scott said, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

• 56:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, very slim chance of Iranian heavy bombers getting through Israeli airspace. But anyway, but to make an implosion bomb, they would have to do years worth of experiments. Unless the Chinese or the Russians just gave them the software or gave them the finished blueprints or something, which is no indication of that whatsoever. The only people who gave them blueprints for a nuclear bomb was the CIA. Remember Operation Merlin, where they just changed one little thing and gave them nuclear bomb blueprints, but the Iranians didn't take the bait?

• 56:34Speaker 01

  The blueprints were given, just to clarify, it's just interesting, just in the terms of the history of proliferation. So Iran's initial nuclear program, right, which is built on centrifuges, as Scott and I have been talking about, that was actually given to the designs of that were given to them by Aqoon, who was really the father of the Pakistani nuclear program. And he actually stole those designs from the Dutch and handed it to the Iranians. He also handed it to the North Koreans and the Libyans and others. So they were able to illicitly acquire this technology, or at least the blueprints for this technology, from the father of the Pakistani bomb. So I think that's an interesting point. But if you, if you don't mind.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  But as I said earlier, because Bill Clinton clamped down on the Chinese and wouldn't let them sell, or anyone else, wouldn't let them sell them light water reactors. So then they went to Aqoon and bought the stuff on the black market.

• 57:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they obviously bought heavy water reactors from the Russians, which they've been using for electricity. I want to just get to the second thing. I think it's just important for our listeners to know, and then I want to get to JCPOA.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  I was in the middle of saying, though, when you're trying to make a uranium implosion bomb or a plutonium implosion bomb, it's a much more difficult task than putting together a gun type nuke, takes an extraordinary amount of testing. And that's why he repeated, probably unknowingly, some false propaganda about Iran having this advanced testing facility. I think he was implying, correct me if I'm wrong, he was, I'm pretty sure you're implying at Parchin, that they were testing these implosion systems, but that's completely debunked, it's completely false. But they were testing, what they're doing at Parchin with that implosion chamber was making nano diamonds, and the scientist in charge of it was Ukrainian, who had studied in the Soviet Union at this military university. Where they said, oh, see, they study nuclear stuff there. But that wasn't his speciality. His name is Dan Alenko.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  And he was a specialist in making nano diamonds. And that facility was vouched by Robert Kelly in the Christian Science Monitor. Told Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor that that stuff was nonsense. That that facility, that implosion chamber could not be used for in testing, for testing an implosion system for nuclear weapons. And I know from Dr. Prather telling me that when the Americans were doing this, and the Russians too, that they tested all their implosion systems outside. And you have to do it over and over and over again with lead instead of uranium in the core. And then you take all this high speed x-ray film of the thing. And it's this huge and drawn out and incredibly complicated engineering process. And this is probably why the week before the war,

• 59:04Speaker 02

  the CIA said, not only do we think that they're a year away from having enough nuclear material to make one bomb, we think they're three years away from having a finished warhead. That must have been assuming that they would try to make an implosion system that you could put on, in other words, miniaturize and put on a missile as opposed, in other words, skipping a gun type nuke that would be useless to them. So it's very important to understand then that if, if they have a uranium route to the bomb, if they withdraw from the treaty and kick out the IAEA inspectors and announce that now we're making nuclear bombs. They can either, one, race to a gun type nuke that's essentially useless to them. Or they can take their ponderous ass time trying to figure out how to make an implosion system work.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  First of all, I'm glad Scott knows about what's going on in Partridge because the IAEA doesn't and they've been asking the Iranians. That's not true. The Iranians told the IAEA, you can inspect any five out of 10 facilities here. carte blanche, go ahead. And they did and found nothing. Then they made up the lies about the implosion chamber later. And the IAEA, again, Robert Kelly is the American IAEA guy, debunked that in the Christian Science Monitor. All right.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  So I want to just, again, just put it out there for your listeners. They should just Google Ahmad, A-M-A-D, program. And they should learn about the Ahmad program because it's detailed in US government documents, experts in Iran's nuclear program, including David Albright, who actually saw the archive, went in there, wrote a whole book on it. And there's a lot of detail about how Iran had an active nuclear weapons program called Ahmad to build five nuclear weapons. But I want to get to the JCPOA because I actually think that's an interesting discussion for Scott and I to have because I think there's things that we agree on there and things that we disagree on. Right? So this is a 2015 nuclear deal that Obama reaches.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  It's negotiated painstakingly over two years between 2013 and 2015. And it follows the interim agreement that the United States negotiated with Iran. And it's in that interim agreement in 2013 where the United States, for the first time, actually gives Iran the right to enrich uranium. There were five UN Security Council resolutions passed with the support of Russia and China that said Iran should have no enrichment capability and no plutonium reprocessing capability because of the fears that Iran would turn that into a nuclear weapons program. But in 2013, they give that up. 2015, we reached the JCPOA. And under the JCPOA, Iran is allowed to retain enrichment capability and reprocessing capability, but over time. So Scott mentioned these sunsets, and just want your listeners to understand what these

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  sunsets are. Essentially, the restrictions that are placed on Iran's nuclear program. And there's some really serious restrictions placed on it, especially in the short term. And Scott's right. The enriched material has to be shipped out, not to the French, but to the Russians. And there's restrictions on Iran's ability to operate these facilities in Ahtan and Fardo. They're not closed. They still remain open, but there are restrictions on what they can do with it. There's also restrictions on Iran's ability to test and install advanced centrifuges. Now, the reason you'd want an advanced centrifuge rather than the first generation centrifuge that Akku Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, gave to the Iranians is you

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  need a smaller number of these centrifuges to produce weapons-grade uranium. If it's smaller, like, it's easier to hide, right? You can put it in. clandestine facilities without this large enrichment centrifuge footprint. So there's restrictions on these advanced centrifuge R and D. And Iran gets significant sanctions relief as part of this. But the whole assumption here from both an Iranian and American perspective is these restrictions are going to sunset. They're going to disappear over time. In fact, 2025 is the year where some of the significant restrictions on Iran's capabilities begin to sunset. And all of them are effectively gone by 2031. Okay, so in 2031, Iran can emerge with an industrial sized enrichment capability.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  They can, they can emerge with advanced centrifuges that they can install in as many enrichment facilities as they want to build. And Iran can enrich to higher and higher levels. So they can go from 3.67 to 20%. They can go to 60%. There's nothing in the JCPOA that actually prohibits them from going to 90% in Iran. And I think at the time, the Obama administration's theory of the case was, yeah, sure, in 15 years' time, in 15 years' time, we'll be gone. Hopefully, there'll be a different government in Iran. And maybe we can renegotiate a different agreement with that government that will extend the sunsets. So that, that's the JCPOA.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  The reason that critics of the JCPOA, and I was one of them, we objected to the deal is not because it didn't have some short term temporary restrictions that were useful. But that if you got it wrong, and there was the same regime in power in 15 years, that regime could emerge with this huge nuclear program, with the capabilities to develop nuclear weapons in these multiple hardened sites. Iran, we estimated, would have a trillion dollars in sanctions relief over that 15 year period. And if you got it wrong, that it was the same regime in power as had been in power in 2015, then you had some difficulties. Okay, I just wanted to lay out the case against the JCPOA. Now, to steel man Scott's argument, right?

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  I think there's a legitimate argument because I actually didn't support the withdrawal from the agreement.

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  President Trump withdrew in 2018. I did a similar version of what Scott was suggesting was I thought that the United States should negotiate with the Europeans, the French, the Germans in the UK, who were part of the original deal. Extend the sunsets as an agreement between the United States and Europe and then collectively go to the Iranians and say, let's renegotiate this agreement to extend the sunsets. If you don't want a nuclear weapons program, then you should agree that you don't need these capabilities and let's extend the sunsets for another 15, 20, 30 years.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  Somebody give me a screenshot of this. Give me a pound, dude.

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  There we go. Agreement. There we go. That makes my heart feel so good.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  And I think the Ayatollah would have gone for it, too.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Well, so I'm not sure if he would have, but let's just a little bit of history. I think it's just useful for the viewers to know, again, the context, especially when Scott and I agree. Yeah. So a process was begun. I'm loving this so much. By the Trump administration. They, Trump appointed Brian Hook, or Secretary Pompeo actually appointed Brian Hook, who was the lead Iran envoy, and he began a process of talking to the Europeans. And the Europeans actually rejected this idea. And so at some point, Trump said, look, if the Europeans aren't prepared to get on side, then I'm out of the deal. I'm out of the deal. And if you're interested, I can talk about why I thought we should have stayed in the deal because I thought it gave us some important restrictions in the short term, certain leverage. But Trump decides to withdraw from that agreement because he recognizes that the fatal flaw

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  of the agreement, or the fatal flaws of the agreement are one, giving them any enrichment capability, especially at an industrial size within 15 years. And two, are these sunsets, as Scott said, which, under which these restrictions are going to go away, and Iran's going to end up with a massive nuclear program. But I think that's just important. We can talk about the JCPOA, the process and everything else if you're interested.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  I'd like to go ahead and quickly accuse the FBI and the CIA of framing Trump for treason with Russia. And pushing the Russiagate hoax. I'm trying to agree with my friend here because what it is, is that that completely ruined Donald Trump's ability to engage in real diplomacy with Russia for his entire first term. Certainly for the first three years of it, he was completely handcuffed. It was, it was, it was, it was terrible, as I'm sure you're well aware for the future now, our past and current history of Ukraine, as well as for this deal too. Why couldn't Trump pick up the phone? I don't know the details here, but I'll take his word for it, that the British and the French and the Germans weren't being nice to Trump. They didn't like him, they didn't want to do it.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Why couldn't he pick the, pick up the phone and say, hey Putin, I need you to call the Ayatollah for me? And tell him, hey, you'd like to see him lift these sunsets too, and this and that. Why? Because they framed him for treason, so he was completely unable to engage in real diplomacy with Russia. And I bet that he'd agree with me on that one too.

• 1:07:23Speaker 01

  So next, actually, can I just say one thing interesting? And again, I think it's going to be a later topic. And so it's going to be a provocative statement, but I think let's put it on the table. I absolutely agree with Scott. I mean, I think it was a travesty that the, of the accusations against Donald Trump as a Russian agent. I mean, completely debunked, but it did. It, I think it paralyzed his presidency for two, two and a half years. I, I agree with Scott. The idea that you would accuse the President of the United States of being a foreign agent for Vladimir Putin, I think is unfounded. And I, I, I thought at the time disgraceful, and I thought it was really important. I think Scott did really good work in, in debunking that.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  I would say that just a couple of days ago, I was watching a podcast Scott was on and he accused Trump of being an agent for Netanyahu and the Israeli government. So I think again, the accusations that the President of the United States is a foreign agent for some foreign government, I think we should just put all of that aside in any discussion and just say President Trump makes his own decisions, whether we agree with them or agree with them. But he's not working for the FSB and he's not working for Mossad. President Trump makes his own decisions based on American national security.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  No, I was making a point. That's hyperbole making a point, but he did. In fact, could you Google this for me? Because I always forget exactly how many hundreds of millions of dollars that he took from Sheldon Adelson and Miriam Adelson.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  Who are Americans, by the way.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  Who are Americans, who Sheldon Adelson said his only regret in life is that he served in the American Army instead of the IDF and said, America should nuke Iran in order to get them to give up their nuclear weapons. He said, I have one issue, one, Israel. And they gave Trump hundreds of millions of dollars over three campaigns. That's not just a, geez, I really hope you'll think of me in the future.

• 1:09:12Lex Fridman?

  Scott, first of all, a couple of things. So one, there's a lot of people that are friends with Trump and try to gain influence. I believe that Trump is an American, is making his own decisions. Let's, for the purpose of this conversation, just focus on that and see what are the right decisions and what are the wrong decisions. And maybe-

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  I wonder what decisions I could get you to make if I gave you hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 1:09:34Lex Fridman?

  Well, me personally, you couldn't give me, it doesn't matter.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  I couldn't even get you, I couldn't get you to drop in on a ramp or nothing for a hundred million bucks?

• 1:09:40Lex Fridman?

  Nothing. You cannot control my decisions with money.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  It's the American system, Lex. That's how it works. It's money, right?

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  We can go down that-

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  It's the same if we were talking about Archer Daniels Midland Company throwing hundreds of millions of dollars around. They get policies based on their hundreds of millions of dollars. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, right? All that.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  So Lex, I think you're right. I mean, I think Elon Musk spent, what, four hundred million dollars helping Trump get elected. And obviously, there are a number of philanthropists. I think clearly his son, Don Jr., has had a lot of influence in who gets elected in these positions in the Pentagon, in the SEC. I think Tucker Colson has had a lot of influence. So I think, as you say, he surrounds himself with people who have certain ideas, ideologies, policies. The president makes his own decisions. I just want to touch on just one thing, because I don't want to leave this alone. Just out of respect for, for the victims of Iran-backed terrorism and hostage-taking and assassinations since 1979. You know, this is the regime that took our- Took hostages in 79, took our diplomats hostage.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Scott says, you know, 83 was really the only thing that happened and throws out a lot of information, certainly some, some pretty breathtaking accusations that somehow the Israelis knew about this and didn't tell the Americans and.

• 1:10:55Speaker 02

  Some Mossad officers accusation.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  Viktor Ostrovsky is his name.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know exactly who he is and he's been widely discredited and having an ax to grind with, with Mossad. But anyway, not only 83, but all through the 90s, the 2000s, 2010s, 2020s, there have been hundreds of attacks of assassinations, of hostage taking. There are thousands of Americans who have been killed and maimed by the regime.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  Can you be specific what you're talking about?

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I can give you a whole list.

• 1:11:29Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  Literally, I'm happy to pull it up. Lex, I shared it with you. It's a long list of attacks all through the 80s and 90s. I mean, everything from the, you know, Kobar Towers.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  The Kobar Towers with Al Qaeda. That was Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Let him lay it out.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  All right, let's hear him. I got my pen in my hand, go ahead.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  And again, according, again, according to US intelligence findings, it was actually Hezbollah that worked with Al Qaeda, trained Al Qaeda in that attack in the Kobar Towers. They were, they were kidnapping our diplomats in Beirut. They were, they launched attacks against our, our soldiers while in Iraq. The notion that somehow.

• 1:12:11Speaker 02

  Why did you debunk that?

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  No, I don't, I don't think, well, you say you debunked it, you just made your claim. But those were Iran-backed militias backed by the, by Qassem Soleimani, who Scott referred to, who was the commander of the RGC Quds Force, who supplied them with those IEDs or those EFPs, actually, those explosive, well, okay, again, this has been all confirmed by.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Why don't you search Alyssa Rubin, New York Times, EFP factory? Or you can look in the Christian Science Monitor, Operation Eagle Claw.

• 1:12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  Where they found these things. You can, it's, it's easy to find in my book. You can flip right to soda straws and EFPs and you see where I, I have all my citations for the solid dozen American newspaper reporters who were embedded with American soldiers who found these factories in Iraqi Shia Stan. Okay.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Iraqi Arabs work in the machines, not Iran.

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  So I'd like your viewers to Google, not just a couple of sources, but actually Google the US government reports that did a whole after-action report on the Iraq war. All the mistakes were made in the Iraq war and there were legion of mistakes made. But it was very clear that Iran had actually provided the technology, the training, the funding for these Iran-backed militias to kill Americans. I mean, I could see Scott.

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  In fact, they learned a method from Lebanese Hezbollah that got it from the IRA. They didn't even get the technique from the Iranians at all.

• 1:13:40Speaker 01

  So Lebanese Hezbollah, as I'm sure all your listeners know, has been trained, financed.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  That's true, but they got it from IRA. The copper core bombs and that design did not come from Persia.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So again, I think we all admit, Scott admits as well, that Hezbollah was trained, financed and supported by Iran. Hezbollah's been responsible for many of these terrorist attacks.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  Where does Hezbollah come from? It's a reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon where they went after the PLO and horribly mistreated the poor local Iraqi Shiites until they rose up and created these militias to fight in self-defense. That's where Hezbollah comes from.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  Hezbollah was actually created by the IRGC before the Israeli invasion.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  The CIA's Bin Laden unit, Michael Schoyer, says it was Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that did the Kobar Towers attack. And who did they kill? They killed 19 American airmen who were stationed there to bomb Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia under the Israeli insisted upon dual containment policy of Bill Clinton.

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  What's amazing with Scott.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  That came from Yitzhak Shamir, who had sent his man Martin Indic to work for Bill Clinton and push the dual containment policy. Is where that comes from in the first place, the main reason Al Qaeda turned against the United States. And the Kobar Towers attack was Bin Laden and he bragged about it himself to Abdelbari Atwan, the reporter from Al-Quds Al-Arabi in London. And spent days with him and bragged all about it and blessed the martyrs and the rest of that. And is widely discredited, the claim that it was Iranian-backed Shiite Hezbollah that did the Kobar Towers attack. That was what the Saudi government told the US. In fact, there's a great documentary about John O'Neill, who was the head of FBI counterterrorism, who told Louis Freek.

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  Boss, the Saudis are blowing smoke up your ass about this Hezbollah thing. It was Al Qaeda that did it. And then Louis Free got all upset because he used the A word. He's a very conservative Catholic guy, Louis Free, and then refused to listen to another word from John O'Neill about it.

• 1:15:36Speaker 01

  So what we know now from Scott, because he's given certainly a lot of context to how he actually sees things, is here's who lies to you and here's who doesn't. US government lies to you. Israeli government lies to you. The Israelis clearly lie to you. Mendacious bunch. Saudis lie to you. But you know who doesn't lie to you, actually? Hezbollah doesn't lie to you. Al Qaeda doesn't lie to you.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  I didn't cite Al Qaeda.

• 1:16:01Speaker 01

  And the Ayatollah.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Or I cited Osama himself.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  And the Ayatollah of Iran doesn't lie to you.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  I cited Michael Shor, the chief of the CIA's Bin Laden unit, didn't I?

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  So make it clear here.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  That's saying he trusts Hezbollah.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  The Iranians.

• 1:16:12Speaker 02

  Did you get that?

• 1:16:12Lex Fridman?

  Scott, straight up, I hear you, but you're interrupting. Please, just honestly, it's not about the content, but like, honestly.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  How come you're not saying him? Isn't that weird that you just said he trusts Hezbollah, even though he didn't say anything about trusting Hezbollah?

• 1:16:24Lex Fridman?

  I'm not calling out the content. I'm calling out the interruptions. He hasn't interrupted you. It's great. I'm loving the back and forth. It's great, but just a little less talking over each other, that's all.

• 1:16:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, again, the sort of view of the regime in Iran, and I think Scott wisely said at the beginning of this discussion, like, what did you say? I don't have any love for the Ayatollah. I'm a Texan. I don't have any love for the Ayatollah in Iran. And yet, despite the fact Scott doesn't have love for the Ayatollah, and I agree with him, and I think he's being sincere, in every discussion that we've had on every topic, it's always about everyone's lying except the Ayatollah in Iran. He's not lying about having a nuclear weapons program. He didn't actually support all of these terrorist organizations that he founded, financed, and supported to kill Americans. It wasn't the Ayatollah in Iran.

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  He's not lying about his deception campaign against the United States. He's not lying about negotiations with the Americans. It's the Americans' fault all the time. So he's presented all the time, in Scott's conception here, as a sincere actor who doesn't want to develop nuclear weapons, who doesn't actually want to kill Americans. He's just always a victim of American and Israeli aggression. I think it's an interesting conception. I think let's talk about it. And I mean, I'm fascinated by the conception because... It's very contrary to mine, obviously. It's very contrary to, I think, decades of overwhelming evidence that the Islamic Republic has been war with the United States since 1979.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  And, you know, I don't take too much stock in what people say. I take stock in what they do. So, you know, "Death to America, death to Israel" could just be a slogan. It could be just propaganda. But when it's actually operationalized, then you start to ask, well, maybe it's not just propaganda, maybe it's intention operationalized into capabilities. You know, what we're forgetting here, and again, it's this causal relationship. It's we aggress against Iran, and the Israelis aggress against Iran, and Iran is always reacting. I mean, let's give the Iranians their due, because Khomeini made it very clear when he established the Islamic Republic, that there will be a revolutionary and expansionist regime, and they will expand their power through the Middle East.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  And so he built, and to his credit, was very successful until October 7th, this axis of resistance, as he calls it, which are these terror proxy armies, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Iraqi Shiite militias, the Houthis in Yemen, and certainly supporting the Assad regime in Syria. He built a very, very impressive and deadly axis that he turned against the United States and against Israel, which saw its culmination on October 7th. I think after October 7th, that was a huge miscalculation for Khomeini, and we've seen the results of what's happened to his axis of resistance through quite devastating Israeli military capabilities over the past number of months.

• 1:19:23Speaker 01

  But he has an ideology, and I think where I agree with Scott is I'm not sure if Khomeini would actually use a nuclear weapon against Israel, the United States, because I don't think Khomeini is suicidal. But I think what Khomeini wants is he wants a nuclear weapon as a backstop for his conventional power, right? It's very much the Kim Jong-un model of North Korea, right? I'm going to have nuclear weapons with ICBMs to threaten America, but what I'm actually going to do is threaten South Korea with having massive conventional capabilities on the DMZ that I could take South Korea in a week, I could destroy in a week. So you, the United States and South Korea, have no military option. That's Khomeini's view. He can actually, building up this massive ballistic missile arsenal that he's unleashed in the past 12 days.

• 1:20:08Speaker 01

  That according to again, the US and Israel was going to go from 2,000 to 6,000 to 20,000. And from Khamenei's perspective, he didn't need to drop a nuclear bomb on Tel Aviv. What he needed to do was use the threat of nuclear escalation in order to use his conventional capabilities, his missiles to destroy Tel Aviv. And you've already seen the damage from just a few dozen ballistic missiles getting through the kind of damage that he's wrought on Tel Aviv already. That is the conception that Khamenei has. It's a revolutionary regime. It aggresses. And I do think it's interesting and I think we should talk about it.

• 1:20:44Lex Fridman?

  Actually, that's a good cue.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Take a bathroom break?

• 1:20:46Lex Fridman?

  Let's take a bathroom break.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  All right.

• 1:20:49Lex Fridman?

  Okay, we took a quick break and now Scott.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay. So a few things there. First of all, on Ahmad, the pre 2003 nuclear weapons research. The CIA estimate in 2007 concluded that all research had stopped in 2003. And Seymour Hersh reported that the reasoning behind that was mainly that America had gotten rid of Saddam Hussein for them. Now, in Gareth Porter's book, Manufactured Crisis, he shows that the major conclusion that the DIA had made, that the Iranians were researching nuclear weapons, was based on some invoices that they had intercepted for some dual use materials, some specialty

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  magnets and things that they thought, boy, this looks like this could be part of weaponization program, a secret program here. And, you know, Gareth Porter, who's a really great critic of all of these policies and claims, says, hey, this was a good faith misunderstanding by DIA. They were doing their job. But it turned out the IAEA later, when America gave them that information, the IAEA went and verified, oh, there's the magnet and there's this and there's that. And all those dual use items actually were being used for civilian purposes. And so then, as Gareth writes in his book, the only real reason that the NIE said that they even had a program before 2003 was essentially because they didn't want to dispute their last mistaken conclusion. So they said, okay, well, that was right up until then, but that was when that changed.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  And then the other half of their reason for accepting that there ever was a nuclear weapons research program in the country before 2003 was the smoking laptop.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  And I'm sorry, I think I misspoke earlier when I said that the laptop was in 2005. That was just the Washington Post story that had a bunch of stuff about it. That was in 2003 as well, or 2004 possibly. So this was why the, but it was still all, again forged by the Israelis and funneled through the MEK cult, but was obsolete essentially and had nothing in it. At least the accusations and it weren't past oh three. And so there's really no reason to believe that there was actually a nuclear weapons research program even before oh three, which then again, the National Intelligence Council says ended in 2003 and hasn't been restarted since then.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a question? Just not a comment by me, but a question, just your perspective. So just so I understand this, so the, the nuclear archive, this, this massive archive that the Israelis were able to take out of Tehran, bring to the United States, bring to the IAEA, which is very detailed, blueprints.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  It's just the alleged studies documents again. It's the same stuff from the smoking laptop.

• 1:23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So let me just ask you, because it's, it's huge and it's very detailed and it shows clearly that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program, certainly until 2003. And then we can have a discussion about what happened after that. Are you, are you suggesting that that's all been forged by, by Israel?

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  Yes, nothing in this smoking laptop held up.

• 1:23:47Speaker 01

  Not the, not the laptop, but this entire archive that they pulled out with diskettes.

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  You're, you're thinking of like the big photo op with all the, all the folders of documents.

• 1:23:57Speaker 01

  I've seen it. I've seen it. I've seen many, many of the documents. There's thousands of pages. I'm asking, this is not what I'm claiming. Is that all forged by Israel?

• 1:24:06Speaker 02

  Is that, is that not all about the uranium tetrafluoride and the warhead that David Albright debunked and all the same claims that were in the smoking laptop from the Bush years?

• 1:24:15Speaker 01

  David, David, David Albright actually wrote an entire book. It's a very detailed book. Your listeners should Google it. It's, it's David Albright and the archive where he goes in, he went in in detail and he confirms the information in that archive that Iran had an active program under something called Ahmad to develop five atomic weapons. So again, you and I can debate this all day.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Now, this would have been before Natanz was even dug and before a single centrifuge was spinning, right?

• 1:24:42Speaker 01

  Forget all that.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  I'm just making sure everybody understands, assuming that was true, we're talking about a piece of paper.

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  But you, it's not a piece of paper, it's a massive archive. I'm just asking the question, you, you believe Mossad fabricated all of this as a lie to deceive the United States, the IAEA and international community. That's just my question.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  My understanding is that there is nothing significant in the 2018 archive that was not already in the debunked claims from the laptop.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  But my question is, is not that it's debunked, because we can argue about whether it's debunked or not, but are you saying that Mossad fabricated it?

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16Speaker 01

  That's what you're claiming.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the CIA admitted that there was no laptop and Oli Heinonen admitted that he got it from the NEK. He got it from NEK and where did the NEK get it? The NEK got it from the Israelis.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  Scott, I'm not asking about the laptop. I'm asking about this huge archive that was sitting in a warehouse in Tehran, full of-

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  I don't know the truth behind those documents. I don't believe Israeli claims of what they were and where they came from without, for example, reading Albright's book and seeing what he has to say about all of that. I don't take Netanyahu's claims and, and, okay, so what's so significant in there? You say that there's a document that has a plan to, to make five bombs, but isn't the rest of the proof the same? Green salt experiments and the warhead for the missile that David Albright showed was obviously fake, because the warhead was purportedly being designed for a missile that was now going to have an entirely different nose cone on it.

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  No, so David Albright, again, you know, we should bring David Albright here.

• 1:26:14Lex Fridman?

  David Albright is a prominent physicist, nuclear proliferation expert, known for his detailed research and publication on nuclear weapons.

• 1:26:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:20Lex Fridman?

  He has a bunch of books, Peddling Peril, Iran's Perilous Pursuit of Nuclear Weapons, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium, 1996 and so on.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so- Folks should read the book on the archive because David had full access to the archive, all the detailed documents and blueprints. And he writes a book that, again, the conclusion of which is Iran had an active nuclear weapons program.

• 1:26:44Speaker 02

  No, no, no. The conclusion of which was they were researching it right before 2003. They had no nuclear material to introduce into a single machine, right?

• 1:26:52Speaker 01

  Well, they

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  Active program, meaning they had a

• 1:26:55Speaker 01

  They had already built a covert enrichment facility, which was only

• 1:26:58Speaker 02

  No, they hadn't. It was

• 1:26:58Speaker 01

  Disclosed.

• 1:26:59Speaker 02

  Natanz was empty by till the end of 2006, right? They didn't even start spinning centrifuges in there until

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  They had gotten centrifuges for AQ Khan. They'd built a deeply buried underground facility at Natanz. They were putting in place the component parts for a nuclear weapons capability. And Ahmad showed conclusively, unless you believe Mossad fabricated it all, that they actually had the plan to build nuclear warheads.

• 1:27:27Speaker 02

  Again, Seymour Hersh says that it was when

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  Seymour Hersh is not a nuclear weapons expert. David Albright has, you saw the archive.

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  Hersh's sources said

• 1:27:34Speaker 01

  You're claiming that Mossad fabricated it all.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  Invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein for them. That was when they gave up even considering the need for it. Remember, the Iranians held a million man vigil for the Americans on September 11th. The Iranians hated the Taliban. In fact, the Americans thought Iran might invade Afghanistan earlier in 2001, and they hated Saddam Hussein. So they had every reason in the world to want to work with the United States.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  That's a distraction.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  After September 11th.

• 1:27:59Speaker 01

  And the question to you, it's a distraction, my question to you. Let's not go to Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and 9/11, and the Iranians and a million people vigil. Let's just stay on the topic.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  You're asking me what I already answered you was

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  Do you believe Mossad fabricated that entire archive?

• 1:28:13Speaker 02

  I don't take their word for anything. And as far as I understand, the accusations in there are the same ones from the laptop that are already discredited, and I haven't read David Albright's book. You're distracting from me refuting this giant list of false claims that you made previously that I hadn't got a chance.

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  Let's all agree. You're gonna read the book. Maybe Lex, you're gonna read the book. Viewers, you should read the book. I think David Albright has done a meticulous job. It's, by the way, just, just warning, it's a big book, very detailed, hundreds of pages. And he goes through it in meticulous detail in analyzing this archive and showed again that Iran had an active nuclear weapons program designed to build five atomic warheads. Now, we can talk about what happened after 2003 and did they make the decision to totally stop it?

• 1:28:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, God changed his mind after the neoconservatives lied America into war with Iraq for Ariel Sharon.

• 1:29:01Lex Fridman?

  So just to clarify, you Mark and David Albright believe that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon and you Scott are saying they were not before 2003? That's just, just to summarize what we were just talking about.

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  Well, I could tell you that, so Garrett's book came out in 2014, which is before this archive was supposedly revealed in Tehran. But in, in Garrett's book, he shows that the CIA and National Intelligence estimate of 2007, that said that there was a program before 2003 and was halted after America invaded Iraq, was based on, one, the, the DIA's mistaken but sincere interpretation of these invoices for these dual-use technologies, and then the smoking laptop, which was completely fake and funneled into the stream by the Mujahideen e-cult Communist terrorist cult, the same people who've come off with, you know, 10 major hoaxes, the NCI, they just put out,

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  the NCI, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, that's the MEK, they just put out a fake story, what, three, four weeks ago, about a big secret nuclear weapons site in Iran, don't you remember? And then nothing happened with that because it was another lie by the MEK, it happens all the time.

• 1:30:13Speaker 01

  So Lex, maybe we should talk about what happened after 2003. What about this 2007 NIE? What does it mean? Did it mean Iran had now abandoned its nuclear weapons program? Or does something else happen?

• 1:30:23Speaker 02

  They never had a nuclear weapons program.

• 1:30:25Speaker 01

  All right, but let's talk about that. That's interesting, interesting.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  According to the NIE, they had a, a nuclear weapons research program that never made anything at all. So you can try to conflate that if you want, but I think everybody can see what you're doing there.

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  That's not what the 2007 NIE says. What the 2007 NIE says is that, and you are correct, according to the 2007 NIE, is Iran made the decision after the invasion of Iraq. Not to pursue an active nuclear weapons program anymore.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  Because we were putting their best friends in power in Tehran, in Baghdad for them.

• 1:30:57Speaker 01

  Well, because the United States had gone in.

• 1:30:59Speaker 02

  They didn't need to worry no more.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  And in a matter of 100 days, had taken down the Iraqi army.

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  And put in Abdulaziz Al Hakim's faction, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, who'd been living in Iran for 20 years.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  That's why you and I did not publicly support the Iraq war, did we?

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  I publicly opposed it.

• 1:31:16Speaker 01

  Good for you.

• 1:31:16Speaker 02

  As far as I possibly could have.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  And I should have publicly opposed it, rather than just working on Iran in 2003. But you're right, it redounded to the benefit of Iran, that invasion. But, but that's not actually what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is 100 days, the Iranians see that the US military has taken down the Iraqi army, that they had fought an eight-year war with, where almost a million people, Scott, as you know, had been killed. So they were, they were afraid that the United States was going to march from Baghdad to Tehran. So they make a decision to end their active Ahmad program. They make a decision to build up the key capabilities they need to retain an Iranian nuclear weapons option, specifically the enrichment capabilities

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  at Natanz and then Fordo, and at Iraq, giving them the plutonium route. And then what they do is they take the members of the Ahmad program, the nuclear weapons scientists that have worked on this, and they disperse them. So they're now no longer in a formal weapons program. They're put in a, a number of different research centers and universities. And Mosen Fakhrizadeh, who you mentioned earlier, who's in some respects, I wouldn't call him the Oppenheimer of the Iranian nuclear weapons program. He's more like, is it, was it, who was in the Oppenheimer movie? Leslie Grove, the guy who is actually responsible for the organization and the training and the recruitment and the guy that actually ran the program,

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  as opposed to Oppenheimer, the, the sort of brilliant nuclear physicist. This is Fakhrizadeh. So Fakhrizadeh takes control of this program. And now it is dispersed and it is unstructured in that sense because they recognize that if they continue with this, the United States may march to Tehran. And so the NIE says Iran is retaining the key capabilities, the enrichment capabilities, to give them an option for a nuclear weapon. But we, the NIE, have decided, or we have concluded, that they no longer have an active structured nuclear weapons program. However, since then, what have we seen? We've seen them actually do what many suspected they would do, which is build all the key

• 1:33:28Speaker 01

  capabilities that they need so that at a time of their choosing, they can decide to develop a nuclear bomb, whether it's a crude nuclear device, as you described, whether it's a nuclear warhead. We've had that discussion so far. But just, sorry, just to finish. So just understand the brilliance of Iranian nuclear deception, right? I just, I think it's really interesting to get in the minds of the Ayatollah and understand this because he doesn't want to provoke the United States. He doesn't want to see another Iraq-style invasion, this time of his country. He's building this capability on the enrichment side and on the reprocessing side. He is framing this as I'm only building a civilian nuclear program.

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  He's taken the weapon scientists who are building and part of an active nuclear weapons program, and he's dispersing them, putting them under the guidance and direction of Fakhrizadeh and starting to build out these capabilities. I mean, I admire, I have to say, I really admire the way he's played this three-dimensional nuclear chess game. It's very, very interesting. And I think he made a tragic mistake about six weeks ago when he rejected the offer from Trump at Oman and then provoked both an Israeli and then an American strike. But he was playing this game almost perfectly before then in building out these capabilities. And I think what he should have done, if I were him, I would have waited out Trump.

• 1:34:54Speaker 01

  I would have waited three and a half years. I would have taken the offer in Oman, which gave him enrichment capability above ground. This consortium that was going to be built in three and a half years would never be built. And even if it was built, he could just say, I'm not interested anymore. And challenge the next president, whoever that is, Republican or Democrat, to do anything about it. And I think the political calculation should have been, the next president's not going to do anything about this. I'll be able to then be able to complete my nuclear weapons program. But he challenged Trump. He thought Trump was a paper tiger. He rejected that offer at Oman. And, and we've seen what's happened over the past couple of weeks.

• 1:35:30Lex Fridman?

  Two things. One, can you go and respond to certain things that you heard? And two, can we generally move in the direction of the modern day? And trying to see what is the right thing now? Our analysis of the situation now, we've been kind of staying in this, in the context of history, which is really important, but sort of moving in forward. But yeah, go ahead, please.

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  I'm not sure how much time we have. I, I have kind of hoped that we could talk about Israel's role in Iraq War II. And for that matter, in Barack Obama's dirty war in Syria that led to the rise of the Bin Ladenites there. It's all part of America's Israel policy. So I don't want to, I'd rather go back before we go forward. But I, I also do, I need to go back over so many claims that he's made here that I'd like to address.

• 1:36:15Lex Fridman?

  So I strongly prefer we go, because there's so much history, we're going to lose ourselves in it. There's not enough hours. We should take certain moments in history that instruct the modern day. But let's not get lost there, if it's okay.

• 1:36:29Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:36:30Lex Fridman?

  This is such a fascinating conversation.

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  Although we talked about, you know, the JCPOA and the time between then and now, like quite a bit already too. So we, we'll be going back over some of those.

• 1:36:39Lex Fridman?

  Well, no, I mean, modern day, I don't mean JCPOA.

• 1:36:41Speaker 02

  This week.

• 1:36:42Lex Fridman?

  I mean, like this week, there, a lot of stuff happened this week. And a lot of stuff will happen tomorrow and the next week. And we, everyone is, wants to know, like, what is going to happen? What is the worst case? What is the best case? Should we be freaking out? What do we need to understand about today? That's all.

• 1:36:58Speaker 02

  All right. So there's a lot of things to address here. So first of all, something that me and Mr. Dubowitz agree about.

• 1:37:03Speaker 01

  Please call me Mark.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  Mark. Something that Mark and I agree about is that there actually is not a threat of an aggressive first strike by Iran. I'm a little surprised to hear him say that, but I'm grateful to hear him say that. It is honest. I would. You know, advise you for you may be unfamiliar with this, but I can tell you, anyone in America who drives for a living and listens to AM radio have heard claims that Iran was making nuclear weapons probably 50,000 times in the last 25 years. Over and over and over again, we hear this propaganda. They, they still don't have a single atom bomb.

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

  The reason why they haven't been able to cobbled together an atom bomb in this 1940s technology is because they have not tried to. Okay, so people can, you know, just essentially flog this dead horse, pretend there's a threat. Oh, he's gonna break out any day now. But here's the thing about that, as the Ayatollah well knows, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and now Trump again, have all vowed with all sincerity that they would bomb Iran off the face of the earth if they attempted to break out and make a nuclear weapon. Hillary Clinton, when she ran, said they'd be obliterated from the face of the earth.

• 1:38:27Speaker 02

  Barack Obama did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic in 2012 called, "As President, I Don't Bluff." And essentially, the interview is him begging Jeffrey Goldberg to explain to the Israelis that he really, really, really, really means it, that he's trying to negotiate, but if the Ayatollah breaks out for a nuke, I'll nuke him if I have to.

• 1:38:47Speaker 01

  No, they never said that.

• 1:38:48Speaker 02

  He didn't say that, but the implication was.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  By the way, no, no US president ever said they're gonna obliterate Iran. US presidents.

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  Hillary Clinton did.

• 1:38:54Speaker 01

  All, all options are on the table.

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  Anyone can Google her word.

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  She was never our president.

• 1:38:58Speaker 02

  No, I said she was running for president.

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, but she was never our president. But no US president ever said they'd obliterate Iran. Nobody ever said they could drop a nuke on Iran.

• 1:39:04Speaker 02

  The implication was clear under W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump, Biden, and Trump again.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  That they would strike Iran's nuclear facilities.

• 1:39:11Speaker 02

  If they broke out toward a nuclear weapon, America would do whatever it took to prevent that from happening.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  So, strike their nuclear facilities.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  That was, that was always the case there.

• 1:39:22Speaker 01

  But please clarify, just to be accurate.

• 1:39:24Speaker 02

  And I'm almost certain.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  No one's talking about nuking Iran. No one's talking about bombing Iran to smithereens or obliterating or any of that.

• 1:39:30Speaker 02

  I mean, that's really not true. I mean, Barack Obama changed America's nuclear posture to say, because it used to say, "We reserve the right to use a nuclear first strike against any country." And he changed that to say, "No, we, we promise not to use a nuclear first strike against any non-nuclear weapon state, except maybe Iran."

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  Okay, that's true. All right. And so, in fact, that was the threat. And I got more here. Okay. Netanyahu also did an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg back when Ehud Barak was his defense ministers in, I think this is also 2012, it might have been 2014, where the two of them explained that they agreed with what he said, too, that the threat is not of a nuclear first strike. Unlike every AM radio audience has been led to believe that the Ayatollah, as soon as he gets an atom bomb, he will nuke Tel Aviv, and he doesn't care if all of Persia is nuked by Israel's 200 nukes in response. He's trying to cause the end of the world by causing a nuclear war and all these things. Well, Netanyahu himself admitted that that's not true.

• 1:40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's really important. I agree with that.

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  I'm just agreeing with you, so you don't have to stop me.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  But I'm agreeing with you.

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  I know, but I'm agreeing with you, so it's all right. So Netanyahu told Jeffrey Goldberg that he was not concerned about a first strike, that his only concern was that talented young Israelis would move to Miami, that there would be a brain drain. That was his words, a brain drain from Israel. And that also then Hezbollah, as this is what he put it, and I agree with this, that conventional forces would have a bit more freedom of action in the region if Iran was sitting on an A-bomb. Neither of them said that there was a threat of an offensive first strike against Israel. And I would point out, and I'm skipping ahead to Trump, but I'm skipping back here again in a second because I got more things to refute. But Trump just said the other day, when he announced American airstrikes there,

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  that this has neutralized a threat to Israel. He did not even pretend that it was a threat to the United States that he had ended in doing so.

• 1:41:28Speaker 01

  Actually, he said exactly that.

• 1:41:29Speaker 02

  Well, actually, you can Google the state.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  He actually said, President Trump has said that an Iranian nuclear weapon is a threat to the United States.

• 1:41:36Speaker 02

  Not in a statement where he announced his great victory in bombing.

• 1:41:40Speaker 01

  He announced.

• 1:41:41Speaker 02

  Which is what I just said, right?

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  President Trump sends out 20 truth posts a day. So let's look at the many, many, many things that he has said.

• 1:41:48Speaker 02

  So then you have this whole thing about how I always believe Hezbollah, and I always believe the Ayatollah, when in fact, I did not quote the Ayatollah, and I did not quote Hezbollah on anything. I did quote Osama bin Laden taking responsibility for the Gomor Towers attack, which he shared that with Abdul Bari Atwan, anyone can read it. And he agrees with Michael Schoyer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, who also said that it was a hoax, that it was Iranian backed Saudi Hezbollah that did that attack. And again, who did they attack? They killed 19 American airmen, which was the number one complaint of Al Qaeda against the United States, that we had air forces and army stationed in Saudi Arabia in order to bomb and blockade Iraq,

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  which again, and this was the thing that you had asked about before, was part of the dual containment policy in the 1990s.

• 1:42:38Speaker 01

  So Scott, you're saying, no, wait a second.

• 1:42:40Speaker 02

  All right. The fact is, you're sitting here saying that, oh, I, I trust them all so much. Well, what do you think, Lex, what do you think Ronald Reagan meant by trust but verify? He meant, don't trust, but be polite, right? That's what he meant. Verify means we, we know with sensors and cameras and inspections what's going on. No one can find a quote that I said here about how we can trust the Ayatollah because he promised this or that or the other thing. I didn't say that, right? What I'm talking about is the process, they sign agreements, and then we have inspectors to verify their claims. And as anyone can search at IAEA.org, they have continued to verify the non diversion of nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose.

• 1:43:24Speaker 01

  The IA has now said that they actually can no longer do this.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  Because, because America withdrew from the-

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  Before this war started. So, I mean, at the end of the day, let's just be, let's just be factually accurate. And the fact of the matter is, anybody who knows anything about nuclear weapons program knows that we do not have 100% certainty on anything. I mean, Scott is making claims here that the Mossad is fabricating, the CIA is fabricating, everybody's fabricating, but he's also assuming that we have 100% certainty about what Iran is doing inside a country more than two and a half times the size of Texas. As, as Scott rightly said, mountainous, incredibly difficult to monitor, incredibly difficult to surveil. They built underground facilities at Natanz and Fordo without our knowledge. They didn't disclose it. We, we finally found out about it.

• 1:44:07Speaker 02

  I already refuted that an hour ago. You say refute it, but the fact that matters, they did it. It's there. We know the facilities are there. And by the way, you keep saying that I just say lies, lies, lies, but I have explained exactly what I meant. I've cited my sources and I haven't just sat here and say, oh, that's a lie because I don't like it. I sat here and explained to you exactly how I know who was building those EFP bombs in Iraq. Exactly how I know what the IAEA said about the state of inspections here or what Robert Kelly told the Christian Science Monitor about Parchin and the rest and on and on and on. You know, sit here like I'm just saying, well, that's not true because I don't like it. When in fact, I'm explaining exactly why your claims are not true, which they're not. Just like saying that I said, I trust Hezbollah when anyone can rewind that and

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  and break their finger trying to find the part where I said that because I never did. And now you brought up the DPRK. Well, in 2002, when George W. Bush said that they were part of the Axis of Evil, they were part of the NPT. And they had a safeguards agreement with the IAEA. And yes, they had bought centrifuge equipment from AQ Khan, but they had not used it. It was John Bolton's lie that they were enriching uranium to weapons grade and violating the agreed framework. John Bolton and George W. Bush in the fall of O2 then canceled the agreed framework deal that Bill Clinton had struck based on this misinformation. They added new sanctions. And they launched what was called the proliferation security initiative, which was an illegal and unilateral

• 1:45:37Speaker 02

  claim of the authority to seize any North Korean ship on the high seas if they suspected it of proliferation. And then they added them to the nuclear posture review, putting them on the short list for a potential first strike. And it was only then in 2000, in the end of 2002, after these, what, four or five major things that the Bush government did to antagonize them, that that North Korea then announced that they were going to withdraw from the treaty and begin making nuclear weapons, which is what they did. And then, as we know from all the scientists say, every time that they've tested a nuclear bomb, it's been a plutonium bomb. They never tested, not never once used a uranium bomb. There's no evidence that John Bolton's claims there that they were enriching uranium were ever true.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  And they had, you know, Sig Hecker, who's this important American nuclear expert, went and toured their facilities and all of these things. And so we know quite a bit about what they have and it was. Simply Bush pushed North Korea to nukes, as Gordon Prather wrote in his last great article for us at antiwar.com. And it was through this exact kind of belligerence when we already had a deal that we could have continued to work with them on.

• 1:46:42Speaker 01

  But Scott, this is the constant theme in your analysis. And again, I just want to, I want to look at it, maybe steel man it, maybe challenge it. But the constant theme is the United States and Israel and the West, we constantly aggress against North Korea, against Iran, against Russia, against these countries, and they respond to us. And they respond to us in ways that they, they, they build nuclear weapons programs that they're, that are peaceful, but we force them to develop nuclear weapons. They don't actually mean to kill us.

• 1:47:19Speaker 02

  Look, it's not right that I'm saying everything anyone does.

• 1:47:21Speaker 01

  Scott, can I finish?

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  No. Look, you're saying that everything I say is that everyone anyone else does is a reaction, but that's not true. The subject here is what has America done to make things worse rather than better?

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  That's not the subject here.

• 1:47:34Speaker 02

  I'm citing, I'm citing provocations. That doesn't mean I'm saying that everything that happens in the world is only an equal and opposite reaction to an American provocation. And you can't find me saying that. You can only somehow try to paraphrase me claiming that somehow or something like that. But that's what's at issue, right? Is, as I said, for example, there's the Reuters story that says that after Israel did the sabotage, which they bragged about at nahtance in April of 21, that was when they started enriching up to 60%. Okay. So now I'm saying that and I'm just denying the agency of the Iranians or anything. I said that, no, I'm not. I'm just citing the Reuters news, news agency saying that this proactive action by Israel caused a negative reaction by your own lights,

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  a very negative reaction in their beginning to again enrich up to 60% uranium. So that means, oh, I'm just spinning for the Ayatollah, or I believe that no one ever does anything except in reaction to Israel and America. It's that that I'm just citing specific examples of where that's exactly the case. Donald Trump withdrew from the deal. He could have stayed in the deal and tried hard to make it better. He didn't.

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  Well, he thought he did.

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

  America has done, America, the US government has made numerous mistakes in many of these countries.

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  If this podcast is all about the American government and the mistakes it's made, then we can spend four hours on it.

• 1:48:51Speaker 02

  Can we please?

• 1:48:53Speaker 01

  Get to today.

• 1:48:53Lex Fridman?

  Uh, talk about, use everything we just talked about and talk about today. What is maybe Mark, can you lay out what is the best case and the worst case and Scott then lay out the best case and the worst case that can happen now?

• 1:49:06Speaker 01

  So Lex, I think the best case and something I've advocated for, I've been working on this for 22 years, is that the Iranians return to negotiations at Oman, uh, sit down with the United States and conclude an agreement that peacefully and permanently and fully dismantles their nuclear program. They agree to that, which means they, they shut down any remaining facilities. They give up all the remaining centrifuges and enriched material that they could use to develop nuclear weapons. They let the IAEA in, in order to supervise this. They, they actually commit to not rebuilding this nuclear program. And we commit, as we've done with 23 other countries, to helping them provide civilian

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  nuclear energy. Because it seems to me a little fanciful that Khamenei would build a civilian nuclear program under 80 meters of concrete surrounded by rock, uh, and take all the risks he's taken. And by the way, he faces a risk to his regime. Spent a half a trillion dollars to do this, when it, it makes no commercial sense. But let's take him at his word that he wants civilian nuclear energy. Let's build it for him. As long as there's no enrichment or reprocessing that gives him the key capabilities that he could if he decides to build nuclear weapons. That seems to me a thoughtful approach. I think Scott would probably agree with it.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Proliferation proof, he can't build nuclear weapons. And we could do this all peacefully. That's my preference.

• 1:50:41Lex Fridman?

  What can Trump do to help make that happen?

• 1:50:44Speaker 01

  I think what he can do is he can say to the Iranians, look, I made you that offer last time. You rejected it. Now that offer is no longer on the table because that offer gave you enrichment. Now temporarily, but I now see the game that you would have played when I left office to turn that enrichment and enrichment capability into nuclear weapons. So that deal's off the table, but here's the deal that's on the table. It's a one-page deal. You give up your nuclear capabilities. We help you build civilian nuclear energy. I think that's best case. All right. I think worst case is that the Iranians do what they've unfortunately been doing over and over again and rejecting these deals and holding firm that they want to retain

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  this enrichment capability. And then the only reason they want to retain enrichment capability is their option to develop nuclear weapons. Otherwise, they can have civilian energy. Tomorrow makes much more commercial sense to do that, and the entire international community would help them and pay for that. I worry that they're going to just remain intransigent at the negotiating table. And I think if they do that, then what I worry that they're going to do is whatever remaining capabilities they have left, they'll bide their time, they'll wait for the opportunity. Maybe it's not now, maybe it's when Trump's gone, and they will rebuild this nuclear weapons program. And they'll be then inviting further strikes, further war, and further suffering. And I worry that that is the worst case.

• 1:52:13Speaker 01

  And by the way, as part of that worst case in retaining the capabilities, the extra worst case is they take those capabilities and they go for a nuclear bomb. Now, if Scott's right, and the regime has never had any desire for a nuclear bomb, we don't have to worry about that because as according to Scott, all of this has been fabricated, all of this has been a result of US and Israeli intelligence mendacity, and we don't have to worry about a nuclear weapon. I personally worry about it, knowing this regime, looking at two and a half decades of nuclear deception. I worry that they want to retain those capabilities at a time of their choosing. Develop a nuclear bomb. So I think if you're responsible and you're trying to think through

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  the various scenarios, you've got to consider an Iranian nuclear weapons breakout as a possibility and you've got to try to mitigate that. You've either mitigate that at the negotiating table through a full dismantlement deal, or, and that's not, it's the least, well, it's, it's the least good option for sure, is you're going to have to go back in there, either the Israelis and/or the United States, and you're going to have to continue to use both covert action and air power to destroy those capabilities.

• 1:53:26Lex Fridman?

  Can I just even dig in further on the worst case? Do you think it's possible to have where US gets pulled into a feet on the ground, full-on war with Iran?

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  I think one must never dismiss possibilities because as I said, you've got to plan against worst-case options. And I think-

• 1:53:45Speaker 02

  That's what the Israel lobby has in store for you guys. American lives mean nothing to the Israel firsters. They don't care that Israel motivated September 11th and killed 3,000 of our guys. You know, I was at the airport yesterday, had a big American flag with all the red and white stripes made out of the names of the dead of September 11th, who were killed by people motivated by Israel's crimes in Palestine and in Lebanon and enforcing Bill Clinton's dual containment policy from Saudi Arabia. They don't care about that. They don't care about the 4,500 Americans who died in Iraq War II, or the million something people who died in Iraq War II, the half a million in Syria, as long as the Shiite crescent somehow is limited. They'll even celebrate openly, I don't know about him, but I know Ben Shapiro, many other leaders of the Israel lobby

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  in America, celebrated the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria by Abu Mohammed al-Jalani, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq in Syria. Why? Because he's not a Shiite. He's not an Alawite, friends with the Shiites and friends with Iran and friends with Hezbollah. And so that's good for Israel, even though it's the worst thing that you could possibly imagine for the people of the United States of America, those sworn loyal to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, ruling Damascus now, their own ISIS caliphate in our era. And this is why they always pretend, they go, oh, you know, over there, the Muslims, the terrorists, greatest state sponsors of terrorism.

• 1:55:09Speaker 02

  It's Al Qaeda that threatens the United States of America. It wasn't Hezbollah that knocked those towers down. And they have us siding with our enemies against their enemies. And as you just said, well, I guess time will tell Lex, whether we're gonna have to drop the 82nd Airborne in there, whether Americans are gonna have to do a regime change in Tehran.

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  I wish you'd listened and not put words in my mouth.

• 1:55:32Speaker 02

  I heard what he said.

• 1:55:33Lex Fridman?

  I forced them kinda to say what the worst case possibility of a full-on invasion as a thought experiment. And you can let him finish that as opposed to making accusations. Let's just minimize both ways accusations, please. Just talk about the ideas. It's the most charitable interpretation of his ideas.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  Well, I'm from the United States of America, unlike him. And I care about the future of this country, unlike him, who's here to serve a foreign power and make their case at our expense.

• 1:56:01Lex Fridman?

  Scott, and next you're gonna say that I'm un-American.

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, cuz you're an immigrant too, Lex.

• 1:56:06Speaker 02

  Well, you're just hosting the show. I don't know. Seems like you're trying to be fair.

• 1:56:10Lex Fridman?

  No, it's not. No, no, no, it's not about fair.

• 1:56:11Speaker 02

  He has an agenda. He's from the FDD.

• 1:56:14Lex Fridman?

  Stop. It's not about being fair. The implication here is somebody's un-American because where they're from.

• 1:56:21Speaker 02

  I didn't say anyone who's not from here. I'm talking about him.

• 1:56:25Lex Fridman?

  Okay, I think that's a really deeply disrespectful accusation.

• 1:56:30Speaker 02

  Can I ask you, does it bother you that when Naftali Bennett bombed a UN shelter full of 106 women and children in Khanah, Lebanon, in 1996, that that's what motivated Mohammed Atta and Rezky Ben Ashraf to join Al Qaeda and attack our towers?

• 1:56:44Speaker 01

  I came to this country 22 years ago. I became a proud US citizen 10 years ago. I'm proud to be an American. And accusing me or Lex or any immigrants to this country of not being un-American is deeply offensive. So let me answer Lex's question, Lex. Let's get back to your question, cuz I think it's an important question. What are the chain of events that could lead 500,000 mechanized US troops to have to invade Iran, which would be a disaster? And that's something we never wanna see again. That's one of the lessons of Iraq. I think Scott has done a good job over the years in... Demonstrating that we don't want to do that again. So is there is there such a scenario? I think one must never rule it out because there is a scenario, for example, where the regime collapses. Okay.

• 1:57:28Speaker 01

  And the regime collapses and there's chaos inside Iran. Not suggesting that'll happen. There are a whole bunch of scenarios maybe we should talk about with respect to the the collapse of the regime. But you could see a scenario where the United States would have to go in there in order to try to secure military and nuclear and missile assets so that it doesn't end up the hands of warring factional and ethnic groups that Scott referred to. Because again, as he's rightly pointed out, Iran is not Persia. Can't the IDF handle it? So can I can I just finish? Just who can handle it? Who cannot handle it? I think that that it's a potential scenario, which is why I don't think everybody anybody should be advocating for a US decapitation of the regime in Iran.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  I have long been on record as supporting the Iranian people. All right. Providing support to the Iranian people to at one point take back their country and take back their flag. It's very much sort of Reagan strategy that Reagan ran in the in the Cold War of maximum pressure on the regime, maximum support for anti Soviet dissidents. While, by the way, he was negotiating arms control agreements with the Soviet Union in order to try to reduce the number of of nuclear tipped ICBMs that both countries had pointed at each other. So I think the Reagan strategy of providing support to the people is a far better strategy for trying to get transition, leadership transition, government transition inside Iran. But I think the scenario of decapitation strikes, killing Khamenei, taking out the entire government could potentially lead to that scenario.

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  And I think we have to be conscious of that. We have to guard against that. So I think that's important. I think Scott's right. I mean, if it's a scenario happened like that. Yeah, I mean, I think I think the Israelis have demonstrated extraordinary capabilities. And they could go in there and they could secure loose nuclear materials that you would be worried could be Fashion for nuclear weapons. Scott doesn't seem to worry about these materials. I worry about these materials and capabilities in the hands of anybody because they're all capabilities that just the physics of it, you can produce nuclear weapons. So, so best case scenario, negotiation, we fully dismantle their program in Oman. Worst case scenario, right, is having to return for continued military strikes that continue to escalate

• 1:59:43Speaker 01

  the situation. Worst, worst situation is some kind of decapitation strike that collapses the regime and causes chaos. There are a whole bunch of other scenarios we can talk about that are embedded in that. But I think if you're a responsible person and a responsible analyst, and certainly you're a responsible policymaker, you've got to be planning for all of these scenarios and more.

• 2:00:01Lex Fridman?

  Scott, what do you think is the best case and the worst case here?

• 2:00:05Speaker 02

  Well, the best case scenario is that we quit right now and that we, Trump figures out a way to reorder some paragraphs and get back in something like the JCPOA, which was also signed with the rest of the UN Security Council power.

• 2:00:19Lex Fridman?

  Can I ask you, like, is JCPOA a pretty good approximation of what would be a good deal?

• 2:00:23Speaker 02

  Pretty good. It could have been better. As I said at the beginning, Trump could have gone in there and tried to negotiate a better result with the sunset provisions on some of those things. But the, the concept that America is just going to insist on zero enrichment, zero nuclear program whatsoever, when they have the unalienable right, quote unquote, in the Non-Perturbation Treaty to civilian nuclear material and a civilian program. It's a poison pill. It's meant to fail, just like it was a poison pill meant to destroy the talks here. Good enough to start a war. Again, as I quoted from earlier, he said on, on TV last week, well, America has to take out Fordo now because now they're more likely to break out towards a nuke.

• 2:01:07Speaker 02

  I think that's exactly right. So there still is, or there's, there's strong reason to be skeptical, including Israeli and American officials told the New York Times that they thought that the damage was quite incomplete.

• 2:01:19Speaker 01

  Now, the IAA just came out recently, just, just point of fact, sort of interesting. We'll see on the battle damage assessment, but they actually think the facility was destroyed. That the centrifuges, the sensitive centrifuges were destroyed. So I just interesting for the viewers. And it may be, it may be premature.

• 2:01:34Speaker 02

  All the uranium smell, all the uranium mines, all the aluminum smelters so that they can't make any, any more centrifuges. They've already, they know how to make centrifuges. So at this point, you know, in for, uh, it's this why government doesn't work. They make matters worse and create more work for themselves and make things worse and worse and worse. We can make the same criticism about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, making matters worse for themselves and causing them to have to escalate even further. Now America's in this situation where the danger that Iran will now break out to a nuke is so heightened that now we're talking about, well, maybe we'll have to do a full regime change. And I appreciate you, Mark, saying that we should not kill the Ayatollah.

• 2:02:13Speaker 02

  But Benjamin Netanyahu says we should. He said just the other day that if we get rid of the Ayatollah, that will solve all the problems. Which is just crazy to think that they have Israeli officials have been tweeting out pictures of them palling around with the son of the Shah. Talking about reinstalling his royal majesty's monarchy. Sock puppet dictatorship. That's taking back Iran for the people of Iran. Giving them over to a bunch of foreign backed exiles. Try, was that what Trump meant when he gave that speech in Qatar saying, we don't believe in neo conservatism and spreading democracy anymore? He's just setting up because we're going to try to reinstall a monarch.

• 2:02:50Lex Fridman?

  Can you go into the analysis of best case and worst case? You laid out the best case. What's the worst case would be?

• 2:02:55Speaker 02

  The worst case is this.

• 2:02:56Speaker 01

  What was the best case? I, I missed it.

• 2:02:58Lex Fridman?

  Best case is a deal.

• 2:02:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that we quit now.

• 2:03:01Lex Fridman?

  The best, you guys agree on the, on the best case.

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we

• 2:03:03Speaker 02

  Respect their right to a civilian nuclear program and try to negotiate, as I said, back into something like the JCPOA, which again had them exporting their entire stockpile of uranium out of the country. He wants no nuclear program whatsoever.

• 2:03:18Speaker 01

  No, no, that's not what I said. That's not what I said. Be careful what I said.

• 2:03:20Speaker 02

  Well, no enrichment capability. What's our entire dependence on other countries to supply their fuel needs?

• 2:03:26Lex Fridman?

  Can you teach me the difference?

• 2:03:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So let me just step back from this because we agree on some and we disagree on a major issue. And then we both agree Iran deserves a civilian nuclear program.

• 2:03:36Speaker 02

  The Ayatollah is never going to give in on enrichment.

• 2:03:39Speaker 01

  Can I just?

• 2:03:40Speaker 02

  We know that. That's a premise for our whole discussion here. Therefore, what he's saying is we're going to have to keep escalating the war until the mission is accomplished.

• 2:03:48Speaker 01

  Not sure I said that. Scott, I think it's again, important that the distinction here, right? We both agree that Iran deserves a civilian nuclear program. Twenty-three countries have civilian nuclear programs and they don't have enrichment and they don't have reprocessing. Where we differ is I don't think Iran should have the Iran standard. I think that Iran should agree to the gold standard that 23 US allies have agreed to. So have civilian nuclear program, but you don't get to keep the key enrichment and reprocessing capabilities that you need to develop nuclear weapons.

• 2:04:19Speaker 02

  Do you think that Bill Clinton should have just let the Chinese sell them the light water reactor that they wanted to back in the 90s?

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, and America, of course, allowed Russia to sell them a heavy water reactor for the same purpose. But I agree with Scott that I think one of the ways out of this is, yes, whether it's the Chinese or preferably as an American, I prefer the Americans actually sell reactors to the Iranians, the great nuclear industry in this country. Let's do that. But if they can't, the South Koreans can, the Russians can, the Chinese can. I wouldn't want to have significant Russian and Chinese influence in Iran. So better that it be a Western country that does it. Nevertheless, provide those reactors, they're proliferation proof, there's no enrichment and no reprocessing. You buy your fuel rods from abroad, you put them in the reactors, you power the Iranian

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  electrical grid, which is in terrible shape because Ayatollah has spent a half a trillion dollars trying to build nuclear weapons and not trying to provide electricity for his people. Let's help him, let's help his people get electricity. But the key difference in our argument, and it's a fundamental difference, Scott's right. The key difference is I do not want to give this regime enrichment or reprocessing because they have shown over time, for whatever reason, whether you believe it's they intended to or we were lying about it or we provoked them, it doesn't matter. What they have shown over the past number of years is they have gone up from 3.67% enriched uranium for civilian purpose all the way up to 60%, which is 99% of what you need for weapons-grade.

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  Since we've seen them do it before, we don't want to see them do it again. So no enrichment, full dismantlement, full deal. And then there's a peaceful resolution to... What I worry about is positions that are taken that undermine President Trump's negotiating leverage in Oman. Because

• 2:06:07Speaker 02

  Can I ask you, you were saying you supported the JC

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  No, no, I was opposed to JCPOA.

• 2:06:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, you were opposed to withdrawing from it.

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:06:15Speaker 02

  Don't you think that Trump could have gone over there and negotiated to make it better? And would you agree that it was a huge mistake to withdraw? That because they were, as we agreed, shipping out all of their enriched uranium to only be brought back in a form that they could not use to make nukes? The scientists had decided that if they kicked all the inspectors out and beat their chests and started making a nuke, it would take them a full year to have enough weapons-grade uranium for a single-gun-type nuke under the JCPOA, right? So

• 2:06:42Speaker 01

  So can I, let me answer your question.

• 2:06:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  Because you're right. I mean, I'm glad you've pointed out. Because I, I tried to take a nuanced position during the JCPOA debate, and I got hammered by the left and I got hammered by the right. Okay? The, the, the left hammered me because I criticized the JCPOA because its fundamental flaw was twofold. One, it gave Iran enrichment capability that would expand over time as the restrictions sunsetted. Right? And number two, the restrictions, the sunsets were going to kick in and Iran would emerge with this industrial-sized program, which we would not be able to stop. Now, the nuanced position, which I got hammered on by the right, was I said, go negotiate with the Europeans, agree on a common transatlantic position to approach the Iranians and say, look, that deal that we did back in 2015, we think it's flawed.

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  We want to extend that deal. We want to get rid of the sunsets. And we are going to negotiate a deal. Now, does that mean we have to give you more sanctions relief? Yeah, probably. The Iranians are not going to just agree without sanctions relief. What happened is the Trump administration tried to negotiate with the Europeans. The Europeans were opposed because they didn't want to revisit the agreement. We knew from, we knew the Iranians were completely opposed and there was no way they were going to do this if the United States and Europe were divided. And so at that, just a little bit of history. I just think it's interesting history. It was at that point that President Trump decided to withdraw from the agreement.

• 2:08:04Speaker 02

  But what I'm asking you is, if, say you were the national security advisor under the JCPOA, where they are still shipping all their enriched uranium out of the country and all that, which you're, you would be advising him to not leave. In the negotiations to improve the deal, would you have been willing to accept some level of enrichment then? As long as we're still, we have the restriction part where they're shipping it all out of the country? Or to you, enrichment at all is always a red line, essentially equivalent to them being 99% of the way to a nuclear weapon?

• 2:08:38Speaker 01

  Look, enrichment capability is a red line. It has to be a red line and, and

• 2:08:42Speaker 02

  Even though you know it's protected by the NPT, the right to peaceful nuclear technology. They call it a loophole, but they have the right to enrich uranium.

• 2:08:49Speaker 01

  As there's different interpretations of everything, including agreements, there is a, a, a raging debate about whether the NPT actually gives you a right to enrich. In fact, the Obama administration, even with the JCPOA, was not willing to recognize Iran's right to enrich, but they were willing to recognize its de facto reality that they were enriching.

• 2:09:11Lex Fridman?

  Can you explain NPT?

• 2:09:12Speaker 01

  It's the nonproliferation treaty. Iran is a member of it and it is supposed to promote civilian, peaceful civilian nuclear energy. And it's supposed to prevent countries from developing nuclear weapons. I think that's a, a basic summary of it.

• 2:09:25Speaker 02

  And it mandates that non-nuclear weapons states have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA and full of additional protocols and whatever.

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  Which Iran refused to sign, by the way.

• 2:09:36Speaker 02

  Well, no, they had an additional protocol that they were abiding, not even enriching at all while they were negotiating with the E3. And then what the JCPOA really did was add a bunch of additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements and agreements.

• 2:09:48Speaker 01

  Iran refused to ratify the additional protocol. I just want to just be clear on the facts. I mean, it's really important.

• 2:09:52Speaker 02

  At which point in time did they refuse to ratify? Cause they did ratify the JCPOA, which was full of additional protocols and subsidiary arrangements and agreements, they're called.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  There's, there's an important additional protocol that Iran refused to ratify.

• 2:10:05Speaker 02

  Which one was that? The one where they promised not to enrich at all, which they actually did abide by while they were negotiating with the E3 in the W Bush years, before they even started spinning centrifuges at the tons.

• 2:10:15Speaker 01

  You asked me what I would advise the national security advisor of the United States, or if I was the national security advisor of the United States, which I guess I can't be because I'm a foreigner. But the fact of the matter is, is

• 2:10:24Speaker 02

  I think you could still be national security advisor. Zbigniew Brzezinski sure was.

• 2:10:27Lex Fridman?

  I think he was taking a shot back at the fact that you took a shot.

• 2:10:30Speaker 02

  You know what, Lex? I think that you probably would recognize that there are many people who lobby for Israel's interests in the United States, who clearly don't care that much about what happens to the United States of America in, as a consequence.

• 2:10:45Speaker 02

  Because they care about Israel, which is a different country than America, right? It's not part of the fifty states.

• 2:10:50Lex Fridman?

  I think an American, an American citizen cares primarily about America. That is a fundamental belief for me. To make an accusation that they don't requires a very large amount of proof for each individual. I don't care.

• 2:11:03Speaker 02

  Pretend that American and Israel's interests are the same requires a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance by those who support Israel's interests. They say they sponsor terror as though Iran has anything to do with anti-American terrorists.

• 2:11:20Lex Fridman?

  I don't know who is the they that we're talking about, but I believe American citizens care about America first. They may discuss other nations and the interests in the Middle East or in, in Europe and, and those interests might align with their own worldview, whatever. But when it comes, at the end of the day, if everybody starts a war with everybody else, they're America first. Like I, I'm America first. If there's a war that breaks out and we have to pick up guns, I'm fighting for America.

• 2:11:49Speaker 02

  I'll take them on a case by case basis.

• 2:11:51Lex Fridman?

  Case, that's great.

• 2:11:52Speaker 02

  I know immigrants, I know immigrants who are absolutely super patriots, who know American history and love and care about America more than their next door neighbors were from here.

• 2:12:01Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:01Speaker 02

  But that ain't universal. Okay?

• 2:12:03Lex Fridman?

  Sure. Let's talk about case by case then, that's fine.

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I think, I think he's clearly accusing me.

• 2:12:09Speaker 02

  A worse war with Iran. He was, he was entertaining the possibility of putting ground troops in there.

• 2:12:13Lex Fridman?

  Don't take personal shots.

• 2:12:15Speaker 02

  It should be catastrophe for this country.

• 2:12:16Lex Fridman?

  Either of you, you've taken personal shots, let's not do it. You guys are just having fun and I'm having fun listening.

• 2:12:21Speaker 01

  Let me respond, let me respond.

• 2:12:22Speaker 02

  He said that there's a, there's a threat from the missiles, there's a threat from Iranian missiles to America's bases in the Middle East. Yeah, because of Israel and because of this war, the first time Iran ever fired missiles at an American base over there was in response to Trump bombing them.

• 2:12:38Speaker 01

  It's never Iran's fault.

• 2:12:39Speaker 02

  Is that what everybody thinks?

• 2:12:40Speaker 01

  Never Hezbollah's fault, never Iran's fault.

• 2:12:43Lex Fridman?

  Let's bring it back.

• 2:12:44Speaker 02

  What a joke.

• 2:12:45Speaker 01

  Scott, Scott, it's remarkable to me and I just want, I want to reiterate this.

• 2:12:48Speaker 02

  And then Iran shot missiles at Qatar and Iraq.

• 2:12:52Speaker 01

  Scott, you're a patriotic American. God bless you. God bless the United States. Thank you for allowing me to come to this country and become an American. It's a great country. And as a patriotic American, I assume that the United States government and the United States intelligence community and the United States military has America's best interests at heart. However, we have learned from the history and Scott's done a very good job of detailing this during the Iraq war, that the United States gets it wrong. Okay, I don't think the United States lied us into war, but the United States got it wrong. So I think Scott's right. We must make sure that we learn the lessons of Iraq, but not overlearn the lessons of Iraq. I would also say this, there are many lobby organizations in the United States.

• 2:13:37Speaker 01

  There's the China lobby, there's the oil lobby, there's the pharmaceutical lobby, there's the Qatar lobby. I live in Washington, I see all these lobby organizations. Okay, fact of the matter is the pro-Israel lobby, which actually lobbies in support of the US-Israel relationship, is comprised of tens of millions of Christians and Jews and Hindus, and yes, yes, Muslims, who believe strongly in a strong US-Israel relationship. The reason that relationship has been so strong over so many years and that this quote lobby has been so successful is they're pushing through an open door with policymakers, not because some nefarious money influence, but because at the end of the day, the interests align. We counterterrorism together, we counter nuclear proliferation together,

• 2:14:22Speaker 01

  and we believe that the US-Israel relationship is a strong relationship. And these accusations of dual loyalty and these accusations of Israel firsters that Scott's thrown around, I think distract us from the conversation, which I think we should return to. Let's talk about today. We've talked about best case scenarios. We talked about worst case scenarios and we talked about really worst case scenarios. So I think let's, let's talk about the way forward. And I'd be interested in hearing from Scott where he thinks we're going. And I'm certainly, I don't crystal ball these things. It's always difficult to predict. But I think President Trump has done.

• 2:14:57Speaker 01

  A really good job. He has led this, right? He has not been, you know, the at the beck and call of Bibi Netanyahu or Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia or anyone else. He has led this effort. He has made these decisions. This is a man who throughout his entire career, and not just his political career, but many, many years before that, believed that an Iranian nuclear weapon was a threat to the United States of America. Not just to our allies, but to the United States of America. He's been very clear on record. He led this campaign since he started in January. He offered negotiations. He got rebuffed by the Iranians in Oman. He put pressure on the regime economically. He continued to offer negotiations. He offered a very good, something that I thought was flawed.

• 2:15:42Speaker 01

  I mean, Lex, I gotta tell you, the offer in Oman that he gave to the Iranians, I thought it was flawed because I think it allowed Iran to retain this key enrichment capability. The Iranians turned it down. And I think Khamenei, to his everlasting regret, is gonna wonder, why did I turn that down? I could have got the enrichment capability that Scott thinks they deserve, and yet I rejected it. Why did I reject it? Because now, look what's happened in the past 12 days. You know, I've lost Fordo mostly. We'll see what happens on the BDA, the Battle Damage Assessment. I've certainly lost Natanz. I've lost my conversion facility at Isfahan, which converts uranium hexafluoride into, well, converts yellowcake

• 2:16:25Speaker 01

  into uranium hexafluoride to pump into centrifuges. And the most important thing I lost at Isfahan is a conversion facility that takes 90% enriched uranium and turns it into uranium metal. Without uranium metal-

• 2:16:36Speaker 02

  They don't have any 90% enriched uranium. He just means hypothetically, if they did have some.

• 2:16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:42Speaker 02

  To be clear, you know-

• 2:16:43Speaker 01

  You know the 60%? That's 99% of the way to 90% enriched uranium. By the way, you can make a crude nuclear device with 60% enriched uranium. I just wanna put that on the record. But he lost that key conversion facility that turns 90% enriched uranium, or even 60% enriched uranium, into uranium metal. You need uranium metal to fashion a crude nuclear device or a warhead. That's been destroyed. And I just, when I was coming in this morning, I just checked. I thought it was interesting. Been a whole lot of discussion about the fact that about 12 or 16 trucks showed up at Fordo in the days before the US strikes and moved something out of Fordo. Well, according to reports just this morning, we'll see if they're verified. I don't trust single sourcing.

• 2:17:27Speaker 01

  I don't trust what some reporter just says in their stories because reporters got it wrong over and over again, especially all the ones who accuse President Trump of being a Russian agent. But we'll see what happens. We'll see if it's verified. But according to the reports, most of the material remained at Fordo because the Iranians were calculating this was the most heavily fortified facility. They were also calculating that President Trump was not going to strike it because what they had been doing was listening to lots of voices. And we can name the voices or we can just talk to them about a collective who they thought were telling Trump, "Don't do it." And we're telling Trump, "Don't do it." And Trump decided on his own to do it. So they kept the enriched material at Fordo. And if that's the case, it may be that much of it was destroyed.

• 2:18:11Speaker 01

  Again, caveat, it's just one or two stories right now, one in NBC News. And let's see what happens over the coming days. But if that's the case, that material may have been destroyed. One other element that we haven't even talked about at all today, which I think your listeners should be aware of, we talked a lot about nuclear weapons development, warhead development. What the Israelis did was they took out the top 15 nuclear weapons scientists who have been part of, remember I talked about that original Ahmad program? And the development of those five atomic weapons. Well, some of them who are old enough come from the Ahmad program, which was the early 2000s. Some of them are new, but they've been, or not new, but younger, and they've been trained by

• 2:18:56Speaker 01

  the veterans. The 15 top guys taken out. That is akin to, it's January or February 45, and the entire central team of Oppenheimer gets eliminated. Three to four months between the Trinity test, before the Trinity test, where we explode our first nuclear weapon. So I would say significant damage to Iran's nuclear weapons program suggests that we potentially have rolled them back for years. I don't know how many years, and all those technical assessments are still to come, but significant damage. So the question, as I said, is have they retained enough capabilities that they've squirreled away, stored in covert sites, put under deep buried tunnels to break out to nuclear weapons?

• 2:19:40Speaker 01

  That's Scott's concern. It's my concern, like I'm sure it's your concern, that they could do that? Or have they set back the program so significantly that Khamenei then has to decide, will I be inviting another Israeli and/or US attack if I try to break out? And if I do, do I risk my regime?

• 2:19:58Speaker 02

  Who thinks that if they break out and try to start making nukes now, that any hawk supporting this war will take responsibility for driving them to it?

• 2:20:06Lex Fridman?

  So the suggestion you're making is we're actually driving, as opposed to doing the opposite, we're actually driving them to develop nuclear weapons?

• 2:20:15Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:20:16Lex Fridman?

  Can you make the case for that?

• 2:20:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. Previously, he said, let's take the Ayatollah at his word that he only wants a civilian electricity program. Well, let's not take him at his word. Again, I never said in this conversation, trust the Ayatollah. He did. Now he's kind of a snarky.

• 2:20:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you said that the Ayatollah doesn't want a nuclear weapons program, Scott. You were very clear about that.

• 2:20:36Speaker 02

  What I said, what I was very clear about.

• 2:20:38Speaker 01

  The Ayatollah never wanted a nuclear weapons program. Are you going back on that now?

• 2:20:40Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ. What I was very clear about from my very first statement when we sat down was that the Ayatollah was building himself a latent nuclear deterrent, putting Iran as what they call a threshold nuclear weapon state, just like Brazil and Germany and Japan. So everyone knows they have mastered the fuel cycle. They could enrich uranium up to 90%. Don't make me do it. That was his position.

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  None of those countries have a nuclear weapons program.

• 2:21:05Speaker 02

  Did you ever hear me say? Anything about believing the Ayatollah saying he only wanted an electricity program? This is why enrichment is a red line. It's because if all the enrichment is done overseas somewhere, then it's not a latent nuclear deterrent at all.

• 2:21:22Speaker 01

  So it's a red line for you as well as for me? We agree, Scott.

• 2:21:24Speaker 02

  I'm saying it's a red line for the Ayatollah that he's clearly not going to give in on. And it's a poison pill by the Israelis in the West. They know he's never going to give up enrichment 100% because that's the whole point of it. So it's just disingenuous say, oh, let's believe him that he wants an electricity program. He's not saying that. I don't even think that's his official position, or if it is, it's with a strong implication as everyone understands that it's a latent nuclear weapons capability and a potential actual nuclear weapons capability.

• 2:21:58Lex Fridman?

  Your deal will have to include enrichment.

• 2:22:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:22:00Lex Fridman?

  That is a red line. He won't move on.

• 2:22:02Speaker 02

  Yes. And then the thing is too, just like I was saying before, if Trump had come in in 2017 and said, screw this, I hate this deal, and then got on a plane and flown straight to Tehran and said, or you know, sent his guys and said, now, listen here, Ayatollah, I want to fix this deal up better. I think that he really could have. And I don't, I already said, I don't know the details, but I believe Mark when he says that the Europeans were being intransigent on that. And again, I criticized the CIA and FBI for framing Trump for treason, for preventing him from being able to work with the Russians to see if maybe they could put pressure on the Ayatollah to deal with him. But I think that it's clear when the Ayatollah was willing in the JCPOA to, well, first of all, to sign the additional protocol back in the W Bush years for a year, for three

• 2:22:45Speaker 02

  years, he didn't enrich anything under that deal as long as he was negotiating with the E3. And then under the JCPOA where he's shipping out every bit of his declared nuclear material, he's clearly keeping the ability to enrich if necessary to weapons grade if, if a crisis breaks out and he feels like he has to make nukes. But he has, he had no stockpile to enrich this whole thing about 99% of the way there. He had no stockpile. So even if you, you know, count driving, gassing up your truck on the way to the mine as part of this long time scale of percentages here, they were much further from a nuke under the deal, which he agrees, we shouldn't have even gotten out of.

• 2:23:24Speaker 01

  Can I just say technically, just I think again, important for your listeners to understand, under the JCPOA. Iran is allowed to keep a stockpile of a maximum of 300 kilograms, as I remember, of 3.67% enriched material. They're allowed to continue to enrich as long as if they go over that 300 kilogram, they have to continue to send that out to Russia, to Russia to blend down. And so they kept the enrichment capability, the ability to enrich. They did keep a stockpile. Scott's right. They weren't able to, they're not allowed in those early years to go under 3.67%. They would be allowed to go to 20% and 60% and 90% as the restrictions sunsetted,

• 2:24:07Speaker 01

  but they were able to keep all of those key capabilities. So I just want to clarify just technically what the JCPOA actually said and what it didn't say.

• 2:24:14Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. Can you comment on the so-called Operation Midnight Hammer? Now that we can look back at it, what parts were successful, what parts were a mistake? Was the whole operation a mistake that accelerates the Iran nuclear program or the incentives for it? Or is there some components that actually is a decent incentive, disincentive for Iran to develop the program? And then maybe you can comment on the same. It'd be nice just to get comment.

• 2:24:40Speaker 02

  I think we really don't know, right? There's some initial battle assessments and arguments and all that about just how much was destroyed and what. And we don't know exactly what their reaction is going to be. The, you know, there were reports of them saying, hey, we're already starting up a new facility somewhere else. There were reports where they said, hey, a lot of our centrifuges survived and we're gonna start spinning them up right now and this kind of thing. The potential's there. I don't know what the Ayatollah is gonna do. And I think this goes to the larger argument about the apocalyptic threat of the Ayatollah, which Mark has not made, but which Israel hawks often do, that these guys just can't wait to get into a war and all this. In fact, if you look at Iran-

• 2:25:20Speaker 01

  Well, they're in a war, but what the argument I make is they're not gonna use a nuclear weapon.

• 2:25:23Lex Fridman?

  You interrupt me every time. I try to say anything.

• 2:25:26Speaker 01

  Scott, you're mischaracterizing what I'm saying. I need to clarify when you mischaracterize.

• 2:25:29Lex Fridman?

  He's not interrupting every time, but sometimes interrupting, yes. So try not to interrupt as much. Go ahead, Scott. Don't take it personally. Come on. Let's go.

• 2:25:38Speaker 02

  It seems like a deliberate attempt to obfuscate and, and prevent me from just being able to complete a point. You know, he does it virtually every time.

• 2:25:47Lex Fridman?

  No, it's not. As a listener, I'm enjoying this.

• 2:25:50Speaker 02

  Well, look, on the face of it, they blew up a lot of stuff and they made them very angry. So are they gonna now give in? Or they're now gonna double down? Or they're now gonna hold still? We don't really know. As I was trying to explain, from the Ayatollah's position that he's in, what are you gonna do with a problem like the United States of America? Right? They can chant great Satan, this and that, all they want. They have no ability to really threaten this country in any way. And they, and, and they know that America absolutely does have the ability to, in fact, even without nuclear weapons, essentially wipe their civilization off the face of the earth just with B-52s if we wanted to carpet bomb their major cities. And they, so they know, the Ayatollah knows.

• 2:26:34Speaker 02

  He's in a very difficult position. And look at what he did. When they assassinated Soleimani, he sent essentially a symbolic strike at an empty corner of an American base in Iraq. It did cause some concussions and head trauma, but it was, he deliberately did that to not cause casualties. And then Trump let him have the last word. And then also when they shot down the drone, which I think Trump was suspicious that the Pentagon had flown that into Iranian airspace. And they demanded strikes and Trump said, no, it's just a drone. How many Iranians will die at the base you want me to hit? No, I don't wanna kill them. I don't wanna do it. And again, he let the Ayatollah get the last word. Same thing happened again with yesterday's strikes. Iran hit America's, our Central Command Headquarters, the Al Yudid Air Base in Qatar.

• 2:27:18Speaker 02

  And also an American base, I think in Baghdad, and I'm not sure about in Iraqi Kurdistan. Zero casualties so far? Zero casualties so far. So what is going on there essentially is he's gotta do something. He's doing like these symbolic strikes essentially to say like, hey, you can't do that to me. But then he's also telegraphing that, hey, like, I can't do anything about you and I don't really wanna fight. And so in a way, he's like kinda backing down. He's doing, and then what did Donald Trump say? Donald Trump, again, let him have the last word. And in fact, like bragged and mocked and said, hey, thanks Ayatollah for giving us a warning that you were about to shoot missiles at our base so we could be ready to shoot them all down and this kinda thing. And he said, now is the time for peace. In other words, Trump again, letting the Ayatollah get the last word.

• 2:28:03Speaker 02

  Why? Because the Ayatollah... He might be a horrible leader if you live in Iran, but he is not perfectly, but essentially cautious in foreign policy. Because what's he gonna do? He's gonna decimate our naval base at Bahrain? He's gonna slaughter all our troops in Kuwait? And then what's Trump gonna do? And so the Ayatollah knows. So it's the same people who, who, and I don't include him in this, but you hear a lot of hawkish talk about just how easy this has been. These same people talking about what an absolutely irrational, religiously motivatedly and motivated and therefore, you know, crazy and irrational group of people, the mullahs are, and why they can only be dealt with with force.

• 2:28:47Speaker 02

  When in fact, what they're showing is essential conservatism. Trying to hold on to what they got, making a latent deterrent, because they know if they break out toward a bomb, that'll get them bombed. So they were hoping having a latent deterrent would be enough to just keep them at the status quo. That's why it's so disingenuous, just again with Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, saying, forget the intelligence. Because 60%, hey, it's 99% of the way there. Close enough for us. So it doesn't matter if the Ayatollah has decided to make her nuke or not. They're just too close to one as it is. Which is really silly, because they're not much closer than they've been for 20 years, since the W. Bush administration. They proved they've mastered the fuel cycle.

• 2:29:30Lex Fridman?

  That is one of the fundamental disagreements in the room, that you're saying they don't have, they really don't have interest to develop a nuclear weapon, and they're not quite.

• 2:29:40Speaker 02

  Not exactly. I mean, I, what I said was.

• 2:29:42Lex Fridman?

  More towards that direction than Mark is saying.

• 2:29:44Speaker 02

  More toward, but they're saying, look at us. We're a threshold state. Don't push your luck and, and force us to make the bad decision. They, now that's an implication. They have not said that outright, but clearly the implication is that if we force them, then they will go ahead and make a nuclear weapon.

• 2:30:00Lex Fridman?

  What I mean is if left on their own devices, they would not develop. That's the case you're making.

• 2:30:06Speaker 02

  Well, not, not just on their own devices, but if we were to try to negotiate with them in good faith and try to have normal relations with them, that would disincentivize a nuclear weapon even further.

• 2:30:17Speaker 02

  Okay, can you comment on the mission or on the operation?

• 2:30:19Speaker 01

  Sure. Couple of things I think were interesting what Scott said, and I agree with certainly with some of it. I mean, the first thing is I do believe President Trump has negotiated in good faith. I mean, he sent Steve Witkoff, his chief negotiator, for five rounds of negotiations since he came in office. The second is, I mean, we can keep going around in circles, but the fact of matter is, I do believe that Iran and Iran-backed terrorist organizations have for since 1979 killed and tried to kill and maim Americans and taken them hostage. I think it's important for me again to put that on the record. But where I agree with Scott is, and it's interesting, and I don't know if Khamenei has changed in his, you know, he's 86 years old, he's been in power since 1989. And there's a little bit of history that I think is really interesting, Lex.

• 2:31:04Speaker 01

  It was the, it was 1988 and Iran and Iraq had fought this brutal eight-year war, a million people dead. And the United States accidentally shot down a Iranian passenger airline. The United States offered to pay compensation and apologized. And the Iranians didn't believe it. They didn't believe we could accidentally do that. They thought we were going to be intervening militarily on behalf of Saddam. So Khamenei, who's not the supreme leader at the time, he was the Iranian president. He and Rafsanjani, they go to Khomeini and they say, Mr. Ayatollah, we got to sue for peace with the Iraqis because the Americans are intervening and we cannot fight the Americans. We fought this brutal war. We'll continue with Saddam.

• 2:31:48Speaker 01

  We cannot fight the United States of America. I think Scott's right, like that perception that there's no way they can fight the United States of America because that's regime ending potentially. Even if we don't intend to, that could actually happen. And there's a famous line where Khomeini says, all right, I agree, I will drink the poison chalice. I'll drink the poison chalice and I will agree to a ceasefire on pretty tough terms for Iran. It's interesting now, 36 years later, or 37 years later.

• 2:32:18Speaker 01

  Hamanay is now going to decide to drink the poison chalice. Does he agree to a negotiated deal with the United States? Does he agree to a deal that President Trump, and I mean Scott criticizes me for it, but that's President Trump's position is no enrichment, full dismantlement. By the way, that's backed up by 52 of 53 Republican senators and 177 House GOP members and backed by everybody in his administration, including JD Vance, who's been emphatic about that. Does he agree to that deal? Or does he decide, I'm not going to drink the poison chalice and I am going to, I'm going to take other options? Now, I agree with Scott, like going after a US military bases, except in a symbolic way, suicidal. Closing the Straits of Hormuz, 40% of Chinese oil goes through there.

• 2:33:04Speaker 01

  The Chinese have been saying to Iranians, don't you dare. By the way, 100% of Iranian oil goes from Iran and Karg Island through the Straits of Hormuz, so economically suicidal for the Iranians to do that. Terror attacks, absolutely. I mean, that has been their modus operandi for years. So I would be concerned about terrorist attacks against US targets, against civilians, potentially sleeper cells in the United States. So he's used terror cells around the world. He's engaged in a decades-long assassination campaign, including on American soil, by the way, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, including most recently where he went after an Iranian-American three times to try to assassinate her in New York, a woman named Masih Al-Najad.

• 2:33:49Speaker 01

  And so he's got to be calculating, like, what is my play? So if I don't do a deal, how can I actually squeeze the Americans? And Scott's right, like, he must be thinking to himself, you know what? I was literally on the 99-yard line with an entire nuclear weapons capability. I should have crossed the goal line. If I had had a warhead, a nuclear warhead, or multiple nuclear warheads, as they had been trying to build since the Ahmad Plan in early 2000s, there's no way Israel and the United States would have hit me militarily if I had nuclear weapons. Then I would have had the ultimate deterrents to prevent that. And then I would be like Kim Jong-un with nuclear weapons.

• 2:34:30Speaker 01

  I would then build ICBMs and then I'd have the ultimate deterrent to stop that. So he's got to be thinking, maybe now. And I can guarantee you, the Revolutionary Guards.

• 2:34:40Speaker 02

  Do you think that that might have anything to do with the fact that America attacked Iraq and Libya? When they did not have weapons of mass destruction programs?

• 2:34:48Speaker 01

  Can I tell you, the Libya example, I think Scott, is the most interesting one for me, right? Because in the Libya example, it was a big mistake. By the way, Ukraine is another good example of this. We went to the Libyans and we said, you must fully dismantle your program. And Gaddafi said reluctantly, under huge American pressure, okay, I'll do it. And the Brits and the Americans went in there and literally hauled out his entire nuclear.

• 2:35:11Speaker 02

  It wasn't really a program. It was just a bunch of AQ cons junk sitting in crates in a warehouse. They did not have the capability to make a nuclear program at all in Libya. They didn't have the engineers, the scientists or anyone. So Gaddafi had bought that junk just to trade it away. Just to be clear, there never was a nuclear weapons program or a nuclear program of any kind in Libya, unlike what you just.

• 2:35:33Speaker 01

  But that wasn't my point. Okay. My point is, is he had a nuclear program.

• 2:35:36Speaker 02

  Facts are important.

• 2:35:37Speaker 01

  We can debate about, again, how we're debating about whether, again, it's always Gaddafi and Khamenei and all these people. They don't really want nuclear weapons. We just misunderstand them. But that's not the point. The point is, we did a deal with Gaddafi. We pulled out his nuclear program. And then, I don't know how many years later, but it wasn't too many years later. Seven years later, thank you, Scott, we actually took Gaddafi out. And he didn't have a nuclear program, so we took him out in the Libya operation. Now, Ukraine is another great example. The Ukrainians, after the fall of the Soviet Union, you know this. They had the Soviet nuclear arsenal or good parts of it on their soil. So we went to them and we said, all right, well, here's a deal for you. Give up the nuclear arsenal, right, off your territory.

• 2:36:20Speaker 01

  And we, and the Russians and the French, guarantee your territorial integrity and your sovereignty as a country. So the Ukrainians said, fair deal to me, gave up all the nuclear weapons. And then Putin has now invaded Ukraine twice.

• 2:36:34Speaker 02

  That's not what the Bucharest Declaration says, that we promised their security. We promised to respect it and the Russians promised too, and both sides broke that promise. But there is nothing like a guarantee that America would protect Ukraine's sovereignty.

• 2:36:47Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 2:36:47Speaker 02

  They gave up those nukes and they had no ability to use those nukes anyway because they were Soviet nukes with Soviet codes. They belonged to the Soviet military and the Ukrainians would have had no ability to use them or to deliver them. They were married to missiles that were made to fly around the world, not to Russia next door.

• 2:37:03Speaker 01

  But Scott, my point is, and I think this you'll agree with this, my point is if you're Hamanay and you've seen those two examples of Libya, you gave up your nuclear program, Gaddafi gets taken down, you're Ukraine, you gave up your nuclear weapons and the Russians invaded twice. If you're Hamanay thinking to yourself, the only thing that matters more to me than my nuclear weapons program is my regime's survival. And in 12 days of war, the Israelis specifically, because we hit Fordo and Isfahan and the Khans, we, the United States, hit those sites. We, the United States, hit those sites.

• 2:37:37Lex Fridman?

  The gleeful nature, Scott, like, stop, take that out. There's no place here in this room with me, the un-American bullshit. Don't do that. The implication here, man, is that I, me, am un-American. I've been attacked, just like the Russian hoax, for being a Putin shill. I'm an American.

• 2:37:58Speaker 02

  Well, when you talk about Ukraine's war with Russia, do you say "we" or do you say "they"?

• 2:38:04Speaker 01

  I said "we, the United States". We actually-

• 2:38:05Speaker 02

  Well, you added "the United States", but you would just describe Israel strikes.

• 2:38:08Speaker 01

  Israel didn't strike Fordo, Scott.

• 2:38:10Lex Fridman?

  You talked about the US attack. You're speaking to this other people that you've heard that somehow they do say "we" and they talk about, I would say ridiculously, as if, I've even heard some people basically put Israel above US and they're American citizens. Yeah, that's fucking ridiculous, but none of those people are in this room. There are demons under the bed. I'm sure those people exist. There's ridiculous people on the internet. There's ridiculous people in Congress. We can criticize them, make fun of them, say they're fucking-

• 2:38:47Speaker 02

  The Foundation for Defense of Democracy has been the vanguard of the war party in this country for 25 years.

• 2:38:51Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's a different criticism, but I was-

• 2:38:54Speaker 02

  It's an important one.

• 2:38:55Lex Fridman?

  Yes, it is. But no, you just switched. You just switched.

• 2:38:58Speaker 02

  Well.

• 2:38:58Lex Fridman?

  You did, did, did, did, did, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's no un-American, you just switched from the un-American discussion to criticizing policies that that particular institute, fine, criticize the policies, do that.

• 2:39:09Speaker 02

  What is the?

• 2:39:10Lex Fridman?

  Don't do the un-American bullshit.

• 2:39:11Speaker 02

  Lex, the neoconservative movement is the vanguard of the Israel lobby. That's who they are. That's what neoconservatism is about.

• 2:39:19Speaker 01

  Lex, I'm not a neocon.

• 2:39:20Speaker 02

  That's who the war party is.

• 2:39:21Speaker 01

  I'm not a neoconservative, so I don't know who he's talking about, but I'm not a neoconservative.

• 2:39:23Lex Fridman?

  Let's not mix stuff up.

• 2:39:24Speaker 02

  There, there, there is a massive Israel lobby in America, in Washington, that is inseparable from the American war party.

• 2:39:32Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, I've talked to John Mearsham, I respect him deeply. He's one of the most brilliant people speaking on that topic. Great, great. Let's just talk about today and the nuclear proliferation. You guys have been brilliant on this, I'm learning a lot, let's continue.

• 2:39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let's, let's go back to where, where Hamanay may be. I mean, in a bunker, 86 years old, thinking he's gonna drink the poison chalice and agree to a deal with Donald Trump and Oman, or is he gonna do all of the things that Scott and I are concerned about? And one of those, and Scott has pointed this out, rightly so, is he may decide now to, to break out for the nuke, or creep out for the nuke. He may decide not to do it now, he may decide to do it in three and a half years when President Trump is gone, right? And I think that the, the important thing is he's seen, we, the United States, we, took out Fordo and the Tans and Isfahan in one operation with B2 bombers and, and 12, 30,000

• 2:40:30Speaker 01

  pound massive orange penetrators and Tomahawk missiles. So if he doesn't think, if he didn't think that the United States had serious military power before, he now knows we do.

• 2:40:41Lex Fridman?

  So to you, that operation was geopolitically a success. It sends a message of strength that if you try to build, you're going to be punished for it.

• 2:40:49Speaker 01

  So I, I've said online in the past 12 days, and even before that, curb your enthusiasm. Curb your enthusiasm. To all the people.

• 2:40:57Lex Fridman?

  Related to which topic?

• 2:40:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, just this sort of idea that this has been like this unbelievable success and everything's great and everything's gonna be amazing and we stopped the nuclear weapons program and this has been a resounding success. I've just said, kind of curb your enthusiasm. Khameneh remains very dangerous. The regime remains very dangerous. A wounded animal is the most dangerous animal in the animal kingdom. He retains key capabilities to build weapons.

• 2:41:22Speaker 02

  You demanded unconditional surrender on Twitter again last night, right? After Trump said there's a ceasefire.

• 2:41:27Lex Fridman?

  What does unconditional surrender mean?

• 2:41:28Speaker 01

  It means no enrichment, full dismantlement. Yes, exactly right. It's exactly what President Trump, well, I can't.

• 2:41:33Speaker 02

  Not regime change. Unconditional surrender in World War II meant the end of the Nazi regime and the imperialist Japanese regime entirely, right?

• 2:41:40Speaker 01

  But President Trump made it very clear. President Trump made it very clear. Because he made it clear, I don't support regime change.

• 2:41:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, except for that one post.

• 2:41:48Speaker 02

  A few hours earlier, right?

• 2:41:50Speaker 01

  I'll, I'll, I actually, I'll, I'll explain that one because I thought it was really.

• 2:41:53Lex Fridman?

  Can you analyze it like it's Shakespeare? What is it?

• 2:41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:41:56Lex Fridman?

  And what, what did he also mean? We have two countries that have been fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. What's that about?

• 2:42:03Speaker 02

  He was angry that Israel was still attacking after he promised they weren't. He demanded they turn their planes around. He felt that they were doing it in defiance of their agreement.

• 2:42:11Lex Fridman?

  But he didn't say Israel, he says the both countries.

• 2:42:14Speaker 02

  Different quote, different quote. He did say, I demand, I believe it was a tweet from True Social. I demand that Israel turn those planes around right now was how upset he was about it.

• 2:42:23Speaker 01

  I guess Donald Trump doesn't listen to Bibi all the time, does he?

• 2:42:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess he's finding out they respect him about as much as they respect the Palestinian.

• 2:42:30Lex Fridman?

  Well, that's how world leaders. World leaders are interested in their own nation.

• 2:42:34Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 2:42:35Lex Fridman?

  And they fuck you over.

• 2:42:35Speaker 02

  Good, important lesson there, everyone.

• 2:42:38Speaker 01

  But I think.

• 2:42:38Speaker 02

  What does Israel care about? Israel.

• 2:42:40Speaker 01

  Every country, every country that it defend defends its national interests. I mean, that's not unusual for Israel or any other country. But I think to understand.

• 2:42:47Speaker 02

  We're supposed to pretend that, hey, whatever Israel needs, we're here to serve their interests.

• 2:42:51Lex Fridman?

  If those people exist, they're un-American. If people put Israel's interests.

• 2:42:54Speaker 02

  We fight terrorism together.

• 2:42:56Speaker 01

  Well, we do.

• 2:42:56Speaker 02

  Well, we, we generate terrorism together. What are you talking about?

• 2:43:00Lex Fridman?

  But that doesn't mean you put Israel's interest above America's. If you do, you're un-American.

• 2:43:05Speaker 01

  You know how many American lives the Israeli intelligence community has saved? And ask people in the FBI and CIA who work counterterrorism, how many American lives the Israelis have saved because of their intelligence capabilities?

• 2:43:19Speaker 02

  How about when Naftali Bennett?

• 2:43:21Speaker 01

  Well, again.

• 2:43:21Speaker 02

  Bomb that shelter full of women and children and caused the September 11th attack? That's what happened. In fact, I don't know if you know the story, but you could Google this. You like Googling things. It's on Google Books. You can read Perfect Soldiers by Terry McDermott, or you could read The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright, where both of them explain how when Shimon Peres launched Operation Grapes of Wrath, that Ramsay bin Alshib and Mohammed Atta filled out their last will and testament, which was like symbolically joining the army to fight against the infidels, et cetera, et cetera. And when bin Laden put out his first declaration of war a couple of months later, it began with a whole rant about the 106 women and children that Naftali Bennett had killed with an artillery strike in a UN shelter in

• 2:44:03Speaker 02

  in Kana in 1996. And, and he said, we'll never forget the severed arms and heads and legs of the little babies, et cetera. And it was then that Mohammed Atta and Ramsay bin Alshib decided that they would join Al Qaeda and that they, these Egyptian engineering students studying in Hamburg, Germany, would volunteer for this Saudi sheikh to kill 3,000 Americans to get revenge for what Israel was doing to helpless women and children in Lebanon, as well as, of course.

• 2:44:31Speaker 01

  Of course, that ignores the history of Al Qaeda, which for years before that was

• 2:44:34Speaker 02

  Worked for the United States and Britain and Saudi Arabia.

• 2:44:37Speaker 01

  Against the United States, but executing them.

• 2:44:40Lex Fridman?

  You guys love pulling each other into history.

• 2:44:42Speaker 01

  No, no, no. They went out.

• 2:44:43Speaker 02

  The history is America's problem with Al Qaeda is because of Israel.

• 2:44:47Speaker 01

  Israel. America and Israel are terrorist, terrorist states.

• 2:44:51Speaker 02

  They were America's mercenaries that we used in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and Chechnya.

• 2:44:56Speaker 01

  It's all us.

• 2:44:57Speaker 02

  But they turned against us.

• 2:44:58Speaker 01

  God, I mean, America.

• 2:44:58Speaker 02

  They turned against us.

• 2:44:59Speaker 01

  It's all us, Scott.

• 2:45:00Speaker 02

  Anyone could read Michael Schwerer's book, The Former Chief of the CIA's Bin Laden Unit.

• 2:45:04Speaker 01

  We're responsible for our enemies attacking us.

• 2:45:06Speaker 02

  Imperial hubris. And it's about how the number one reason they attacked us was American bases on Saudi soil, the bomb Iraq as part of Israel's dual containment policy. And the second reason was American support for Israel. In their merciless persecution of the Palestinians and the Lebanese. That's the most articulate justification I've ever heard for al Qaeda in my life. But let's. It's not a justification. I'm not saying that makes what they did right. I'm saying that was how bin Laden recruited his foot soldiers to attack this country was by citing American foreign policies that were directly to the detriment of the people of the Middle East and specifically our support for Israel. And I've never heard a pro, in fact, I take that back.

• 2:45:48Speaker 02

  There's one guy, a liberal from the Nation magazine named Eric Alterman is the only pro-Israel guy I've ever heard say, well, that may be true, but I still say we gotta support Israel anyway. The others, they'll just pretend that Terry McDermott never wrote that book, that Lawrence Wright never wrote that book, that Mohammed Atta had no motive to turn on the United States except for Mohammed made him do it, when in fact, what it was is it was the ultra-violence of Shimon Perez and artillery officer Naftali Bennett slaughtering women and children that turned America's mercenaries, America backed the Arab Afghan army in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo and in Chechnya, as I demonstrate in my book. And yet, as he correctly says, they turned on us all through the 1990s.

• 2:46:31Speaker 02

  Bill Clinton was still backing them anyway, after they were attacking us and including at Kobar Towers. And they were doing that is, this was a bin Ladenite plot, not Hezbollah, not the Shiites. This was the bin Ladenites getting revenge against us for support for Israel and being too close to their local dictators that they wanted to overthrow, namely the King of Saudi and the El Presidente of Egypt. Yes. That is the cause of the September 11th attack against the United States. Not the Taliban hate freedom, but the bin Ladenites hate American support for Israel and America adopting policies, Israeli-centric policies like Martin Index, dual containment policy in 1993. I think al Qaeda hates America, Scott. Why? You know what? Yeah.

• 2:47:15Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what, Ali Stefan, you know Ali Stefan, the former FBI agent, counterterrorism agent? He wrote in his book, The Black Banners, that the bin Ladenites said to bin Laden, we don't understand why you're so angry at America. They've been so good to us in Afghanistan, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, and now here in Chechnya. Why do you want to attack them? And Bin Laden attacked America. I have a larger agenda that you don't understand.

• 2:47:38Lex Fridman?

  I disagree with you and you is clear. I've talked to Noam Chomsky twice. This guy, you focus on the criticism.

• 2:47:44Speaker 02

  You should interview Michael Schoyer, although he's gone pretty crazy lately. I don't know, maybe not.

• 2:47:48Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, we're going into history. We're learning a lot. The perspectives differ strongly. Uh, can we look into the, maybe a ridiculous question, but a nuclear proliferation, you already started to speak to both of you. Uh, if you look like 10, 20 years out now, does, does the US attacking Iran, does that send a message? Even to MBS, to other, to Middle Eastern nations, that they need to start thinking about, uh, a nuclear weapon program? It's specifically like, do you think, just in a numbers way, does the number of nukes in the world go up in 10, 20, 30 years?

• 2:48:26Speaker 01

  So, look, I, I think it's a great question. Will there be more nuclear weapons powers in the future? Uh, or less as a result of this decision by President Trump? So I actually think there'll be less. Um, and I'll tell you, uh, it's succinctly as I can. And that is that it's been very clear from the Saudis, from the Turks, um, certainly from the, um, even the Algerians and others. That if Iran gets a nuclear weapon, they too want a nuclear weapon. In fact, the Saudis have gone even further and said, if, if Iran is allowed to retain the key enrichment capability that they have under JCPOA, that we want that too. If there's an Iran standard, we want the Iran standard. We don't want the gold standard.

• 2:49:07Speaker 01

  In fact, that's been the subject of, uh, intensive negotiations between the United States and Saudi Arabia for the past couple of years, both under Biden and Trump as part of the US Saudi, uh, agreement, defense agreement and economic agreement that, that has been underway. It is, it's very clear that there's going to be a proliferation cascade in the Middle East. If the Iranians get a nuclear weapon, and certainly if they're allowed to retain this enrichment capability. I also worry about, we haven't even talked about it at all, this conversation. I mean, the most important area in the world for the United States is not the Middle East, it's China and the Indo-Pacific. And I worry that the South Koreans, the Taiwanese and the Japanese will say, you know, we don't trust in a

• 2:49:49Speaker 01

  any US commitments to stop nuclear weapons. You failed on Iran. We don't trust you. We don't trust your nuclear umbrella. We too. Want nuclear weapons in order to guard our security against China. And so what you would see, I hope it doesn't happen, but I worry about is this kind of proliferation cascade in the Middle East and in the Indo-Pacific, two of the most important areas for American national security. Which is why I think it's very important that Iran's be stopped. Now, whether this attack succeeds in stopping Iran's nuclear weapon or accelerates it, we disagree, but I think neither of us know yet. Hard to predict, but what I think is absolutely certain is that if Iran develops that nuclear weapon

• 2:50:34Speaker 01

  and is allowed to retain the key capabilities to do so, you're going to see five, six countries in the Middle East, at least three, four countries in the Indo-Pacific, asking for the same capability. And then you're going to have a club of nuclear weapons powers that will have an additional five, six, seven over the next 10 to 20 years.

• 2:50:52Lex Fridman?

  What if they don't? What if they're prevented? Doesn't that still send the same message to everybody? That they should build?

• 2:50:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it sends the opposite message, Lex. I think if they see what has happened and that it's successful and it's stopped Iran from developing nuclear weapons. And in addition, Trump was able to negotiate an agreement for zero enrichment and full dismantlement. Then the message to all these other countries is, number one, you don't need it. And number two, if you try to get it, then the United States is going to use American power. Now, I'm not suggesting the United States is going to start bombing the Saudis or the Turks or the Emiratis. Clearly not the Japanese. I mean, these are, many of them are our allies. But I think the United States retains many tools, counterproliferation tools, to prevent these countries from developing nuclear weapons, including sanctions and export controls and many of the things.

• 2:51:44Speaker 01

  And plus, I think those countries, you know, I understand that in the Middle East, despite Scott's focus on Israel, you know, when you talk to Arab leaders, their biggest concern is the threat from Iran. It's not the threat from Israel. They're not concerned with the threat from Israel. That's why you had the Abraham Accords. You know, this is why the UAE and Bahrain and Morocco entered into this peace agreement with Israel. The Saudis will one day and they'll bring many other Arab and Muslim countries in it. They don't say Israel is a threat. They see Iran as a threat. And so if you counter that threat, you eliminate Iran's nuclear weapons proliferation and expansion. Those countries now no longer have to build nuclear weapons capabilities to counter the Iranians.

• 2:52:29Speaker 01

  Now, we've also restored our credibility. We don't bluff. We said Iran doesn't develop nuclear weapons. They won't. And now it's the Japanese who have, as Scott rightly pointed out, they do have reprocessing and plutonium capabilities. The Taiwanese, who used to have a military nuclear weapons program and gave it up. And the South Koreans, who agreed to our gold standard of zero enrichment, zero reprocessing. Those three countries can now say, okay, we rely on the United States, on your word, on your power, and on your ability to actually turn words into action. We don't need nuclear weapons.

• 2:53:07Speaker 01

  So I say, if successful, big if, big if, if successful, then it's going to be a significant guard against the potential of greater nuclear proliferation and we will have less nuclear powers, nuclear weapons powers than we otherwise would have.

• 2:53:26Lex Fridman?

  My favorite thing is when you guys point out when you agree with the other person. Anyway, Scott, what do you think? What do you think everything that's just happened over the past two weeks does to nuclear proliferation over the next five, 10, 20 years?

• 2:53:40Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, I really don't know for sure, but I would think that the, there's a very great danger that it's going to reinforce the lessons of North Korea, Iraq, and Libya, which is you better get a nuke to keep America out and you better hurry before it's too late. Now for the Saudis, they're not going to do that because they're obviously a very close American client state. So it's a different dynamic there. But you know, for any country that has trouble with the United States or is worried about the future of their ability to maintain their national sovereignty, obviously getting their hands on an A-bomb as quickly as possible is, has been, you know, re-incentivized to a great degree. Also, I'm really worried about the future of the non-proliferation treaty, where the

• 2:54:22Speaker 02

  nuclear weapons states promise to respect the right of non-nuclear weapons states to civilian nuclear energy. And where here you have a non-NPT signatory nuclear weapons state, Israel, launch an aggressive war against an NPT signatory that is, was not attacking them and was not making nuclear weapons and with the assistance of the world empire, the United States, another nuclear weapons state signatory to the NPT. And I don't really take this that seriously, but it's worth at least listening to is Myedvedev, the once and probably future president of Russia. He said, oh yeah, well, maybe we'll just

• 2:55:04Speaker 02

  give them a nuke or kind of implied maybe get Pakistan to. Now, for people familiar with like Key and Peele, Myedvedev is sort of angry Obama, right? For Putin, you know, that skit where it's like Obama talks all calm.

• 2:55:17Lex Fridman?

  The anger translator.

• 2:55:18Speaker 02

  Peele goes off like an angry black guy kind of character.

• 2:55:21Lex Fridman?

  He's been going nuts on Twitter.

• 2:55:23Speaker 02

  Myedvedev, he, he goes way out, you know, above and beyond, but I think he's probably acting on instructions to talk that way. And it is a real risk that the NPT could just fall apart when it becomes, when it's treated so callously by the United States who invented it and insisted that the rest of the world adopt the thing to such a great degree.

• 2:55:44Lex Fridman?

  Trump did say, don't use the N-word. He, he talked down to Myedvedev.

• 2:55:47Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah.

• 2:55:47Lex Fridman?

  Don't throw around the, and the nuclear word.

• 2:55:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and, and I appreciate that.

• 2:55:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's good. He's right. He's right in that. It's not, it's a serious thing.

• 2:55:55Speaker 02

  And look, the Pakistanis could give a nuke to Iran, who are their friends, I think, not the tightest of allies. I'm not saying I predict that, but there's a danger of that. Now, when it comes to, you know, Eastern Asia, obviously there's a concern about a Chinese threat to Taiwan, but nobody thinks China's coming for South Korea or Japan. The question of Taiwan is one that's very different because as the American president agreed with Mao Zedong 50 years ago, Taiwan is part of China and eventually will be reunited, although we hope that's not by force. Since then, they have essentially abandoned Marxism, although it's still a one-party authoritarian state, but they've essentially abandoned Marxism,

• 2:56:38Speaker 02

  adopted markets at least to the degree that they've been able to afford to now build up a giant naval force that is capable of retaking Taiwan. And so I think the way to prevent that is not for making a bunch of threats and setting examples in other places about how tough we are, but to negotiate with the Chinese and the Taiwanese and figure out a way to reunite the two in a peaceful way in order to prevent that war from breaking out. Because in fact, we don't really have the naval and air capability to defend Taiwan. We could lose a lot of guys trying and probably kill a lot of Chinese trying, but in the end, they'd probably take Taiwan anyway. We'd have lost a bunch of ships and planes for nothing. So we can negotiate an end

• 2:57:21Speaker 02

  to that. And then even if America just withdrew from the region, we could still negotiate long-term agreements between China, Japan, South Korea, and whoever. There's no reason to think that everyone would make a mad scramble to a bomb to protect them the moment they are out from under America's nuclear umbrella and so forth. And the fact of the matter is that, you know, the greatest threat to the status quo, as far as the nuclear powers go, probably is what just happened. America and Israel launching this war against a non-nuclear weapons state as a member in good standing of this treaty throws the whole, as they call it, the liberal rules-based

• 2:58:04Speaker 02

  world order into question. If these rules repeatedly always apply to everyone else, but very often not to us, then are they really the law? Or this is just the will of men in Washington DC? And how long do we expect the rest of the world to go ahead and abide by that? If, you know, a deal is a deal until we decide, as Bill Clinton said, to wake up one morning and decide that we don't like it anymore and change it. That was a phrase from the founding act of 97. Ah, maybe we'll wake up one morning and decide that we want to do something else entirely. Is that your Bill Clinton impression? No, I'll spare you. That was pretty good. After the show, when we're not recording. Yeah.

• 2:58:44Speaker 01

  Can I respond to a couple of things here? Just really quickly, I'll try to do it quickly. First of all, you know, the notion that Iran is in full compliance of the NPT is just not the case. The International Atomic Energy Agency has made it clear in report after report after report that Iran is in violation of its obligations under the protocols of the IAEA, under the requests that the IAEA have made and under the NPT. So they are a serial violator of the NPT, unlike all these other countries we've been talking about that are our allies. Second is this, this quote, Iran is not attacking Israel. That's quite an amazing quote, which kind of ignores, I think, 50, 60 years of Iranian

• 2:59:28Speaker 01

  attacks against Israel, including suicide bombings and missiles and drones and October 7th. And it's indisputable that Iran has been attacking Israel and they've been, they've been doing it for many years through their terror proxies that they fund and finance and weaponize. And since October 7th, they directly struck Israel with hundreds of ballistic missiles in April and October of last year. So this notion that before 12 days ago, Iranians were just playing nice with the Israelis and the Israelis just came out of the blue. Well, you said, quote unquote, Iran is not, is not attacking Israel. So I mean, it's just not true.

• 3:00:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were not in a state of war until Israel launched a state of war. That's the fact.

• 3:00:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, they were at war.

• 3:00:15Speaker 02

  You go, oh, well, they backed a group that did a thing. Yeah, okay.

• 3:00:18Speaker 01

  That killed thousands of Israelis, maimed thousands of Israelis.

• 3:00:21Speaker 02

  But that attack was not ordered in Tehran. The Wall Street Journal says that US intelligence does not believe that Tehran ordered that attack. They found out about it.

• 3:00:28Speaker 01

  What the Wall Street Journal says and what the US intelligence says. And we can dispute whether they directed it on October 7th. Everybody knows indisputably that Iran financed Hamas, provided Hamas with weapons.

• 3:00:43Speaker 02

  So did Israel.

• 3:00:43Speaker 01

  Well, just a second. Provided Hamas with weapons, that the IRGC and the Quds Force were training Hamas. Hezbollah, backed by Iran, was training Hamas. There were three meetings before October 7th, one in Beirut, one in Damascus, and one in Tehran, where the IRGC, Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were together. There was a meeting in Tehran that was attended by Khamenei, the supreme leader. Now, at those three meetings, right before October 7th, you know, maybe they're discussing the weather, maybe they were discussing Persian poetry. I don't know, but it is hard to believe they weren't discussing something. And the fact that they had armed Hamas, financed Hamas, and weaponized Hamas suggests to me that there is pretty overwhelming evidence that Iran has been at war with Israel for decades.

• 3:01:28Lex Fridman?

  Critics of Israel will say that Benjamin Netanyahu has also been indirectly financing Hamas by allowing the funds, the funds going to.

• 3:01:35Speaker 02

  And they'll say that America backs Israel. So anything Israel does is America's responsibility too, under that same logic, right?

• 3:01:42Lex Fridman?

  I think you started to make a point disagreeing with Scott about that they're not a good member of the NPT.

• 3:01:49Speaker 02

  That's all tiny technical violations. None of that has anything to do with weaponization. It's always, oh, yeah, how do you explain this isotope? And they go, well, it must have came with the Pakistani junk that we bought from Aikkon. And then later that's verified. And they go, yeah, well, we want to inspect this, let us. And they go, no. And then they do a year later and then they find nothing there.

• 3:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's just not the case.

• 3:02:07Speaker 02

  That's the entire history of Iran, of the IAEA's objections to Iran.

• 3:02:12Speaker 01

  So your listeners, I know they're not going to do it because it's a lot of technical reading.

• 3:02:15Speaker 02

  Nothing to do with weaponization.

• 3:02:16Speaker 01

  But just go out, go out and read.

• 3:02:18Speaker 02

  Diversion of nuclear material.

• 3:02:19Speaker 01

  IAEA reports dating back at least 20 years. And you'll see the IAEA meticulously, methodically, dispassionately outlining all of the violations.

• 3:02:31Speaker 01

  That Iran has embarked on of the NPT.

• 3:02:34Speaker 02

  Virtually all those are resolved later. They won't answer this and then later they do. They won't answer that and then later they do.

• 3:02:41Speaker 01

  And many open files are still there. I mean, just again, I just, I just want your viewers to walk away from this conversation thing. Okay, that's interesting. I didn't know that and that I'm going to go fact check Mark and fact check Scott and just kind of see what this is all about, right? Because otherwise it's just he says, she says, or he says, he says. The fact of the matter is, is that Iran has been in violations of its obligations under the NPT, under the additional protocol that never, never ratified, under its safeguards obligations under the NPT. It suggests a pattern of nuclear mendacity.

• 3:03:19Speaker 02

  They abided by the additional protocol without having ratified it. They abided by it for three years and did not proceed with any enrichment at all, as long as they were dealing in good faith with the EU, until W. Bush ruined those negotiations and closed them down. Only then did they begin to install the centrifuges at Natanz.

• 3:03:35Speaker 01

  It's always the Americans that screw things up.

• 3:03:37Speaker 02

  You complain they didn't ratify the thing, but they abided by it for years.

• 3:03:40Lex Fridman?

  So that's an interesting disagreement.

• 3:03:41Speaker 01

  They were in violation of it.

• 3:03:43Lex Fridman?

  But I think a more pragmatic and important disagreement that we already spoke to is how do we decrease the incentive for Iran to build nuclear programs, not just the next couple of years, but in the next 10, 20 years? Well, that's, you're mocking that. There's a lot of people that will, there's neocons that say basically invade everything. Let's make money off of war. But there's people that will say that, you know, Operation Midnight Hammer is actually a focused, hard demonstration of strength, a piece of strength that is an effective way to do geopolitics. I mean, there's cases to be made for all of it.

• 3:04:17Speaker 02

  If we're really lucky.

• 3:04:19Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so it's a big risk is your case.

• 3:04:21Speaker 01

  So here's some practical recommendations that I think the United States should follow. I think the first is. You know, get the Iranians back to Oman, negotiate with them and do a deal. Again, the deal has to be no enrichment, full dismantlement. I, I, I think for the reasons we talked about today, Scott and I passionately disagreed, but that's fine. We, this is, this is a reasonable debate. Neither of us is crazy. Neither of us is rational. It is what would it take to get a deal with Iran? I'd say, I say this is the deal. This has to be our red line. Scott disagrees. That's fine, but we got to get a deal. In that deal, we got to provide them financial incentives. Right? We're going to have to lift a certain number of sanctions because they're, they're going to have to get something in return. Okay. We can argue about exactly how much,

• 3:05:03Speaker 01

  but I think our opening negotiating position is no sanctions relief. And then we'll get negotiated down from that. Right? I mean, Lex, I think a lot of this is about how do you position yourself for negotiation? How do you, how do you come in with leverage? And then how do you find areas of compromise where you, you satisfy your objectives? One is Oman. Two is the credible threat of military force needs to remain. Right? Khamenei needs to understand that the United States of America and Israel will use military force to stop him from developing nuclear weapons. If he didn't believe that before 12 days ago, he now believes that. And I think that's the credibility of that military force has to be maintained in order to ensure that he does not break out or sneak out to a nuclear weapon. I, I think that's absolutely critical.

• 3:05:48Speaker 01

  Third is I think we have to reach agreements with all the other countries in the Middle East to say, hey, listen, we're demanding zero enrichment and full dismantlement from the Iranians. You don't get enrichment and you don't get a nuclear program that is capable of developing nuclear weapons. Our gold standard is the American standard. Civilian nuclear energy, like 23 countries, no enrichment and reprocess. We should be consistent. We should be consistent, not just with American allies, but also very clear with American enemies. I think that's the third important thing we do. Fourth is I think it's really important that we find some kind of accommodation between the Israelis and the Palestinians. We can go down many rabbit holes on that,

• 3:06:29Speaker 01

  but I think that lays the predicate for a Saudi Israeli normalization deal that then brings in multiple Arab countries and Muslim countries. And finally, is, we talked about the Abraham Accords. I think we need to start thinking about what do the Cyrus Accords look like, right? Cyrus was the great Persian king, right? Who, by the way, brought the, you know, the Jews back from, um, from the diaspora to Jerusalem. And Cyrus Accords would be, let's find an agreement between the United States and Israel and Iran. That would be a remarkable transformation in the region if we could actually do that. So imagine the Middle East, and again, I know this sounds fanciful, but I think this is what Trump has in mind when he starts to talk about the things you're seeing in these truth posts,

• 3:07:14Speaker 01

  is actually a Middle East that can be fundamentally transformed, where we actually do bring peace between Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of these countries. I, by the way, completely agree with you on Syria. The idea that we are trusting a former Al Qaeda ISIS jihadist to rule Syria, I think is a big bet President Trump has made. He's made it on the advice of MBS. We'll see how that transforms, or transpires, and see if Syria is transformed. But the notion that somehow we should just be rolling the dice, lifting all the sanctions, and taking this former Al Qaeda jihadist at his word is a big bet.

• 3:07:57Speaker 01

  If we got the bet right, that is actually a remarkable occurrence, because now all of a sudden Syria and Lebanon are brought into this Abraham Accords, Cyrus Accords, structure. And then we actually have what I think that all three of us want, is peace in the Middle East, stability in the Middle East. I don't think we need democracy in the Middle East. I think if the Middle East looked like the UAE, that'd be a pretty good Middle East. I think we'd all be pretty comfortable with that, if, that kind of stability and prosperity. And ultimately, you could put these countries on a pathway to greater democracy, the way that we did during the Cold War, where countries like Taiwan and South Korea, that were military dictatorships, end up becoming pro-Western democracy. So that's kind of stepping back, maybe a little bit Pollyannaish, but I think we should also

• 3:08:42Speaker 01

  always keep in mind what a potential vision for peace could look like. So, Scott, as many people know...

• 3:08:50Lex Fridman?

  Here in Austin, Texas, you're the director of the Libertarian Institute. Let's zoom out a bit. What are the key pillars of libertarianism? And how that informs how you see the world?

• 3:09:02Speaker 02

  Well, the very basis of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle. But which essentially is the same thing as our our social rules for dealing with each other in private life. No force, no theft, no fraud. And keep your hands to yourself. And we apply that same moral law to government. And so, you know, some libertarians are anarcho-capitalists, some are so-called minarchists, meaning we want the absolute minimum amount of government, a night watchman-type state. In other words, just enough to enforce contracts and protect property rights and allow freedom and a free market to work. There's also, of course, natural rights theory, Austrian School economics, and a lot of revisionist history. And

• 3:09:48Speaker 02

  and it's something very key to libertarian theory was is expressed by Murray N. Rothbard, was that war is the key to the whole libertarian business. Because especially in the United States of America, as long as we maintain a world empire, makes it impossible for us to have a limited and decentralized government here at home, as our constitution describes. And so I was gonna crack a joke, but neither of you have called me an isolationist yet, but I was gonna joke that, yes, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Isolation, the same guy, the principal author of the Declaration of Isolation, he said in his first inaugural address, "We seek peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations and entangling alliances with none." And that's the true libertarian philosophy. Think Dr. Ron Paul, the great congressman,

• 3:10:34Speaker 02

  for many years up there. He was opposed to all sanctions, all economic war on the rest of the world, and the entire state of the United States as world empire. And what's strange now is that anyone who wants just peace as the standard is considered an isolationist. And people who are for world empire and a permanent state of conflict with the rest of the world, economic war, coups and regime changes and even invasions, those are considered normal people. It's almost like people who want peace should be called cis foreign policy. Because now we gotta, we have to come up with a funny word to describe a normal state of being.

• 3:11:13Speaker 02

  When no one calls Mexico an isolationist state just because they mind their own business. And is there any faction anywhere in America that calls themselves isolationist? Even the paleo conservatives who favor much more like trade protectionism and that kind of thing than libertarians, they don't call themselves isolationists. They still want to have an open relationship with the world to some degree. When isolation means like the hermit kingdom of North Korea or some crazy thing like that, no one wants that for the United States of America. What we want is independence, non-interventionism and peace.

• 3:11:50Lex Fridman?

  So to you, isolationism is a kind of dirty word.

• 3:11:52Speaker 02

  That's right. It's a smear term invented by interventionists and internationalists to attack anyone who didn't want to go along with their agenda. The term itself is used essentially as a smear against anyone who doesn't want to go to war.

• 3:12:07Lex Fridman?

  So can you actually just deeper describe what non-interventionism means? So how much sort of display of military strength should be there, do you think?

• 3:12:17Speaker 02

  Dr. Paul said we could defend this country with a couple of good submarines, which by the way, for people who don't know, one American Trident sub could essentially kill every city and military base in Russia, just one. So he's absolutely right about that. Couple of good submarines are enough to defend our coast and deter anyone from messing with the United States of America. And then I admit I'm a little bit idealistic about this, that I think of that old William Jennings Bryan's speech, behold a republic, where unlike the empires of Europe, burdened under the weight of militarism, here we have a free country. And where, you know what we could do? We could be the host of peace conferences everywhere.

• 3:13:00Speaker 02

  There are frozen conflicts in the conflicts, in the Donbass, in Kaliningrad, in Transnistria, in Taiwan, in Korea. Virtually all the borders of Africa and Eurasia were drawn by European powers to either divide and conquer their enemies or artificially group their enemies together in order to keep them internally divided. And conquered in those ways. So there are great many borders in the world that are in contention and that people might even want to fight about. And I think that America could play a wonderful role in helping to negotiate and resolve those types of conflicts without resorting to force or even making any promises on the part of the US government, like we'll pay Egypt to pretend

• 3:13:42Speaker 02

  to be nice to Israel or anything like that. But just find ways to host conferences and find resolutions to these problems. And I think quite sincerely that Donald Trump, right now, could get on a plane to Tehran, he could then go to Moscow, to Beijing and Pyongyang, and he could come home and be Trump the great. We in fact, don't have to have, especially the American hyperpower, as the French called it, the world empire. We have everything to give and nothing to lose, to go ahead. And Donald Trump even talked like this, you might remember when he first was sworn in this time, he said, you know what, instead of pivoting from terrorism to great power competition with Russia and China, I don't want to do that. I just want

• 3:14:23Speaker 02

  to get along with both of them. Let's just move on and have the rest of the century be peace and prosperity and not fighting at all. Why should we have to pivot to China? Let's just pivot to capitalism and trade and freedom and peace. That's America first.

• 3:14:38Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I've criticized Trump a lot, but I think, maybe it's just rhetoric, but I think he talks about peace a lot, even just recently. The number of times the word peace is mentioned, and with seriousness, not, you get like a genuine desire for peace from him. And that's just beautiful to see for the leader of this country.

• 3:14:59Speaker 02

  And look, man, there used to be a time when a third of the planet was dominated by the communists, right? So like, I'm not gonna sit here and argue the first Cold War with you. My book's about the second one, and I'm not as good on the first. But since the end of the first Cold War, we have let the neoconservative policy of the Defense Plan and Guidance of 92, and rebuilding America's defenses, and the rest of this American dominance-centered policy, control our entire direction in the world. It's led to the war on terrorism in the Middle East, seven countries we've attacked. It's led to the disaster in Eastern Europe, and it's leading toward disaster in Eastern Asia, when-

• 3:15:41Speaker 02

  There's just no reason in the world that it has to be this way with the commies dead and gone. And again, to stipulate here, the Chinese flag is still red, it's still a one-party dictatorship, but they have abandoned Marxism. I mean, people were starving to death by the tens of millions there. It's a huge, it's probably the greatest improvement in the condition of mankind anywhere ever in the shortest amount of time when Deng Xiaoping and the right wing of the Communist Party took over in that country.

• 3:16:07Lex Fridman?

  Just one more thing, you mentioned the two submarines. What's the role of nuclear weapons?

• 3:16:12Speaker 02

  Well, I would like for America to have an extremely minimal nuclear deterrent and work toward a world free of nuclear weapons. And I know that that sounds utopian. However, I would remind your audience that Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came within a hair of achieving a deal just like that at Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986. And they were, both of them, dead serious about it, complete and total nuclear disarmament. And then Reagan was essentially bullied by Richard Pearl and others on his staff, saying, "You promised the American people that you would build them a defensive anti-missile system, the Star Wars system, which was total

• 3:16:52Speaker 02

  pie-in-the-sky technological fantasy of the 1980s. And if you're getting rid of all the ICBMs, then why the hell do you need a missile shield anyway?" Is the world's probably greatest tragedy that ever took place, that Ronald Reagan walked away from those negotiations. They literally were within a hair. And it wasn't magic, and there was no trust in evil bad guys. This is, by the way, two years before the wall came down. This is when everybody still thought the USSR was gonna last. And Reagan, the plan was that America and the Soviet Union would dismantle our nuclear weapons until we were right around with parity with the other nuclear weapons states who all have right around 200 or 300 nukes. France,

• 3:17:34Speaker 02

  Britain, at that time, Israel and China. India and Pakistan came later. South Africa only had a few then, but gave up whatever they had. And the idea was, we would get down to 200 or 300, and then America and the Soviet Union, both together, would lean hard on Britain, France and China, let's all get down to 100. Let's all see if we can get down to 50, et cetera, like that in stages. Again, Ronald Reagan we're talking about here. Trust, but verify means do not trust at all. It means be polite while you verify. And in fact, America did help dismantle upwards of 60 something thousand Soviet nuclear missiles in the, after the end of the Cold War. And so it is possible to live in a world where at the very least, we have a situation

• 3:18:16Speaker 02

  where the major powers have a few nukes. And potentially can even come to an arrangement to get rid of the rest.

• 3:18:25Lex Fridman?

  We should also just say one more thing, not to be ageist, but most of the major leaders with nukes and those with power in the world are in their seventies and eighties. I don't know if that contributes to it, but they kind of are grounded in a different time. That may, I have a hope for the fresher, younger leaders to have a more optimistic view towards peace and to be able to reach towards peace.

• 3:18:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, underlying so much of what we're talking about here is all this enmity, right? But if America could just work, remember when China cut that pseudo sort of peace deal between Saudi and Iran a couple of years ago, or last year, was it? Well, we could try to double up on that. We should, we could try to come up with ways for Saudi and Iran to exchange as much as possible. You know, um, I know you don't like all the going back too far in history, but it's important, it's in my book, that in 1993, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who the revolution had happened on his watch, Operation Eagle Claw, the disaster of the rescue mission in 79, after the hostage crisis and everything, all that egg was on ZB's face. But in 93, he said, we should normalize relations. We should build an oil pipeline across Iran.

• 3:19:35Speaker 02

  So they can make money, we can make money and we can start to normalize. And Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State, Alexander Haig.

• 3:19:43Speaker 02

  Who had been Kissinger's right-hand man, agreed. They both were trying to push that. But the Clinton administration went ahead with Martin Indic, who had been Yitzhak Shamir's man, and inaugurated the dual containment policy instead. Because the Israelis were concerned that America had just beaten up on Iraq so bad in Iraq War I, that now Iraq wasn't powerful enough to balance against Iran. So, America had to stay in Saudi to balance against them both. And that was the origin of the dual containment policy. It was Martin Indic, who had been Yitzhak Shamir's man, who pushed it on Clinton. And this was not the Israelis. It was the Kuwaitis who lied that there was a truck bomb attempt assassination against H.W. Bush, which was a total hoax. It was debunked by Seymour Hersh by the end of the year. It was just a whiskey smuggling ring.

• 3:20:28Speaker 02

  And it was the same guy whose daughter had claimed to have seen the Iraqi soldiers throw the babies out of the incubators. He was the guy who, two years later, made up this hoax about Saddam Hussein trying to murder Bush Senior. But when he did, that was when Bill Clinton finally gave in and adopted the dual containment policy. Because he had been interested in potentially reaching out to Saddam and the Ayatollah both at that time. But instead of having normalization with both, we had to have permanent Cold War through the end of the century with both. And my argument is simply, it just didn't have to be that way. It's the same thing with Russia. Look at, you know, how determined the Democrats especially are to have this conflict with Russia. Whereas Donald Trump? Nah, not at all. We could get along with them. And so, it's perfectly within reason.

• 3:21:13Speaker 02

  If Zbigniew Brzezinski says we can talk with Iran and get along with Iran, and Donald Trump says we can get along with Russia, then the same thing for North Korea? The same thing for China? And then, and then who do we have left to fight? Hezbollah? Hezbollah's nothing without Iran.

• 3:21:31Speaker 01

  We'll just have Scott and I fighting. That's, that'll be the last remaining two.

• 3:21:34Lex Fridman?

  That's the fun kind of fight.

• 3:21:34Speaker 01

  That'll be fun, fight, peaceful.

• 3:21:36Lex Fridman?

  Mark, you're the CEO of FDD, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It's a DC-based organization that focuses on national security and foreign policy. What has been your approach to solving some of these problems of the world?

• 3:21:54Speaker 01

  So, look, I love the vision that Scott painted. And I agree with some of the libertarian instincts that he has. But my view is that America is the indispensable power. Scott mentioned earlier in the conversation about the rules-based order that is so important and the NPT and all these rules-based agreements that are important to maintain. Well, the rules-based order has been maintained by the United States since World War II. There is no American prosperity to the degree that we have. There's no recovery of Europe. There's no recovery of Asia after the devastation of World War II without American power and the rules-based order that America has led and backstopped.

• 3:22:38Speaker 01

  And I think America first is about American power and deterrence. I think if you want to avoid war, I think you cannot just believe in some fantasy where all the world's leaders are going to get together in some place and are just going to agree to disarm all their nuclear weapons. And we'll disarm our entire military and we'll have one submarine off our coast. And some of all of that is going to lead to peace. I mean, I think what has led to peace in the past has been the American forward deterrence of our military and a belief that our enemies think we will credibly use it. I think if they believe we'll credibly use it, then it's less likely they will challenge us.

• 3:23:20Speaker 01

  And if they're less likely to challenge us and challenge our allies, there's less likely to be war. So for me, deterrence leads to peace. And any kind of unilateral disarmament, any kind of, I think, sort of fanciful notion that somehow they're, our enemies are going to respect the non-aggression principle that is the core fundamental underpinnings of libertarianism, which I think in a personal relationship, I think is very important. But remember, these are aggressors. They don't respect the non-aggression principle. I think we can spend a lot of time, we did over, how many hours now has it been? Talking about the fact that In Scott's view of the world, it's America that provokes.

• 3:24:04Speaker 01

  It's America that provokes. And then it's not America provoking, it's Israel provoking. And oh, by the way, America provokes because we're being seduced or paid or brow beaten by those Israelis and those Jews in America. I mean, I think that whole notion that somehow we are the provocative force in global politics, I think is wrong. I think the fact of the matter is, we make mistakes. We are an imperfect nation. We have made some serious, sometimes catastrophic mistakes. But there is a bad world out there. There are evil men who want to do us harm, and we have to prevent them from doing us harm.

• 3:24:47Speaker 01

  And to do that, we need an American military that is serious and well-supported. We don't need a military-industrial complex that ultimately is going to pull us into wars. We need thoughtful leaders like President Trump, who will resist that and will say at the end of the day, I will use force when it is selective, narrow, overwhelming, and deadly. And that was Trump's operation just a few days ago. He went after three key facilities that were being used to develop the capability for nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the greatest danger to humanity. I totally agree with Scott. Like, I think a world without nuclear weapons, the kind of world that Reagan envisioned

• 3:25:28Speaker 01

  and others have envisioned since, is really the only way we can eliminate the most devastating weapons that could end humankind. But we have to make sure that those weapons don't end up in the hands of regimes that seek to do us harm, and that have done us harm over many, many decades. So, yeah, I mean, deterrence, peace through strength, rules-based order. The foundation for defense of democracies is not the foundation for promotion of democracy. We don't believe in this important concept that we have to promote democracy around the world. I'll speak for myself, because we have many people at my think tank, 105 people, we have different views. I don't personally believe that it is the role of the United States to bring democracy to the Middle East or democracy around the world. I think to the extent we've tried, we failed.

• 3:26:13Speaker 01

  I'm not sure the Middle East is ready for democracy. Now, Iran is interesting because it's not an Arab country. It is a different country altogether culturally. It's a very sophisticated country. It has a long history. It actually has a history where it has had democracy in the past. It is a country that I think could have incredible potential under the right leadership and under the right circumstances. I don't know if the right circumstances are a constitutional monarchy with Reza Pahlavi as the, as the, as the crown prince or the Shah. I don't know whether it's a secular democracy or not. Let, let, let Iranians make that decision.

• 3:26:48Speaker 02

  Have I been pronouncing it wrong this whole time?

• 3:26:50Speaker 01

  Reza Pahlavi.

• 3:26:51Speaker 02

  You know the guy?

• 3:26:52Speaker 01

  I met him, yeah, yeah.

• 3:26:54Speaker 02

  Pahlavi.

• 3:26:54Speaker 01

  Pahlavi.

• 3:26:55Lex Fridman?

  What were you saying?

• 3:26:56Speaker 02

  I thought it was Palavi.

• 3:26:57Lex Fridman?

  Oh, wow.

• 3:26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, it's okay, it's okay.

• 3:27:00Lex Fridman?

  Heartbreaking.

• 3:27:03Speaker 01

  The only thing you've ever gotten wrong is pronouncing a problem wrong. So that's not bad, that's not bad.

• 3:27:07Lex Fridman?

  Pronouncing so many things correctly, I think people will give you a pass.

• 3:27:10Speaker 02

  Can I ask you though, like, I mean, all this militarization has led to a state of permanent war. We've been bombing Iraq for 34 years. We launched, we put a war against the Taliban who didn't attack us instead of Al Qaeda who did, fought for 20 years and the Taliban won anyway. We overthrew, launched an aggressive war against Saddam Hussein, put the Ayatollah's best friends in power. Launched an aggressive war against Libya on this ridiculous hoax that Gaddafi was about to murder every last man, woman and child in Benghazi. Imagine Charlotte, North Carolina being wiped off the map. Barack Obama lied in order to start that war. Completely destroyed Libya, it's now three pieces

• 3:27:52Speaker 02

  in a state of semi-permanent civil war, including, and this wasn't just back then, this is to this day, the re-legalization and reinstitutionalization of chattel slavery of sub-Saharan black Africans in Libya. To this day as a result, the, our intervention, this was not a direct overt war, but America, Israel, Saudi, Qatar and Turkey all backed the Bin Ladenites in Syria, completely destroyed Syria to the point where the caliphate grew up. And then we had to launch Iraq War III to destroy the caliphate again. And so I'm, I'm not seeing the peace through strength. I'm seeing permanent militarism and permanent war through strength.

• 3:28:27Lex Fridman?

  Point well made. He's speaking to the, the double edged sword of a strong military. That what you mentioned that Trump did seems like a very difficult thing to do, which is keep it hit hard and keep it short.

• 3:28:42Speaker 02

  We don't know how this ended yet.

• 3:28:44Lex Fridman?

  But even the beginning part is not trivial to do. Like just hitting one mission and vocalizing, except for one post, uh, no regime change, like really pushing peace, make a deal, ceasefire. Like that's, uh, uh, that's an uncommon way to operate. So I guess you said that we should resist the military industrial complex. That's not easy to do. That, that, that's the double edged sword of a, a strong military.

• 3:29:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, man. Let me say real quick and I promise I'll shut up. Can I? I'm gonna say one thing and then I'll stop. You made your point. Let me, I just, I just want to add, it's a really important point. Okay. Is grassroots effort, there is no Houthi lobby in America. Okay. It was grassroots efforts by libertarians, Quakers and leftists to get war powers resolutions introduced in Trump's first term to stop the war in Yemen, which was launched not for Israel, for Saudi Arabia and UAE by Barack Obama in 2015. That's not a first. Afghan war wasn't about Israel either. Okay. But this Yemen war was. I thought nine 11 was about Israel. Well, it was in great part, but the Af- the decision to sack Kabul and do a regime change and all that had nothing to do with the Likud whatsoever.

• 3:29:57Speaker 02

  Other than, well, we got to keep the war going long enough to go to Baghdad. Oh, okay. So it was Israel's fault. I was in the middle of saying about the war in Yemen, that we got the war powers resolution through twice and Trump vetoed it twice. And his man, Pete Navarro, explained to the New York Times that this was just welfare for American industry. A lot of industrialists were angry about the tariffs disrupting trade with China. And somehow they substituted Raytheon for all American industry somehow and said, industry will be happy if we funnel a lot of money to Raytheon. That's Pete Navarro talking to the New York Times about why they continued the war in Yemen throughout Trump's entire first term. He had no interest in it at all. The whole thing was this, it was Obama's fault.

• 3:30:41Speaker 02

  The whole thing was essentially on autopilot. And what was he doing? He's flying us Al Qaeda's air force against the Houthis, who originally, if you go back to January of 2015, America was passing intelligence to the Houthis to use to kill Al Qaeda. You know, AQAP, the guys that tried to blow up the plane over Detroit with the underpants bomb on Christmas day, 2009, that did all those horrific massacres in Europe, real ass bin Ladenite terrorists. The Houthis were our allies against them before Barack Obama stabbed them in the back. And why did Trump keep that going when he inherited that horrific war from Barack Obama? Why did he do it? According to his trade guy. So that they could keep funneling American taxed and inflated dollars into the pocketbooks of stockholders of Raytheon Incorporated.

• 3:31:22Lex Fridman?

  Right, military industrial complex, the point was made.

• 3:31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe I could respond to that because I mean, again, it's always America's fault, according to Scott.

• 3:31:30Lex Fridman?

  Let's take a jab at it.

• 3:31:31Speaker 01

  No, no, but it's just-

• 3:31:32Speaker 02

  Saudi and UAE asked Barack Obama for permission to start that war and for American help in prosecuting it, and he said yes and then helped them do it.

• 3:31:38Speaker 01

  I'm going to segue into an answer because I, I think it deserves an answer. Military industrial complex is a serious concern because I think you're right. There, you know, the bigger it gets and the more weapons you have, you think the more, the greater the temptation to use it, right? I think that's sort of the, the argument. And then there's also self-enrichment and how much money can be made and, and all of that I think is of serious concern to people. Look, I think Trump is somebody who, it's hard pressed to say that Donald Trump is a great advocate of the military industrial complex or that he is, he is in their pocket the same way that he's in the pocket of the Israelis and in the pocket of the Saudis and in the pocket of everybody.

• 3:32:19Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the one thing with Trump is that Trump has, he has learned the lessons of American engagement over the past few decades. And I think Scott's done a good job of kind of laying out the mistakes that have been made, even though, you know, we can discuss about causal connections and who's responsible and, you know, I, I lean on-

• 3:32:36Speaker 02

  Can we? I want to.

• 3:32:38Speaker 01

  Well, Scott, can I finish? Because, you know, your, your causal connection is always it's America aggressing, Israel aggressing and all these poor people responding to us. But nonetheless, I think Trump has, he's learned the lessons, but he hasn't overlearned the lessons. He, he's not paralyzed by Iraq or Afghanistan or the mistakes made by his predecessors. He understands that at the end of the day, we need serious American power. We need lethal power. We need four deterrents. And he's been very careful and very selective about how he uses American power. I mean, we've talked about it throughout this whole conversation. Trump used American power to kill Qassem Soleimani, one of the world's most dangerous terrorists. He killed Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, one of the world's most dangerous terrorists.

• 3:33:21Speaker 01

  He, he refrained from going after the Iranian takedown of our drone. He refrained from when the Iranians- Fired on Saudi Aramco and took off 20% of our oil, right? He's been very, very selective about the use of American power. He did go after the Houthis, who are Iran-backed, and were using Iranian missiles to go after our ships.

• 3:33:42Speaker 02

  That's not true. Those are North Korean missiles, completely debunked by Jane's Defense Weekly. Nice try.

• 3:33:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, nice try. Anyway, everybody knows that the Iranians have been financing the Houthis. Hezbollah's been training the Houthis. And Iran has given capabilities to the Houthis to develop their own indigenous missile capability. The fact of the matter is, he did, in a way, go after the Houthis much more intensively than Biden did in order to prevent them from continuing to shut down Red Sea shipping, on which both America and our allies depend as a trade route. He actually did it quite successfully, because after a few days of pretty intensive bombing, the Houthis got the message, and they cut a deal with Donald Trump. They're not going to interfere with our ships anymore.

• 3:34:25Speaker 02

  He cut a deal with them. They kept bombing Israel, which is what got him involved in the first place. He completely backed out. Sounds to me like they won and he backed down.

• 3:34:32Speaker 01

  Well, it sounds like, in terms of promoting American and national security interests, it sounds like he did a pretty good job of sending a message to the Houthis and the Iranians, don't mess with the United States. And that gets us to the contemporary reality. He took a decision, one day, on one day, to send our B2s and our subs in order to do severe damage to three nuclear facilities. It was a one-day campaign. It was selective. It was narrow. It was overwhelming. And I think it sends a message to Khamenei. I think it sends a message to regimes around the world, anti-American regimes around the world, that Donald Trump has not overlearned the lessons of the past 20 years, right?

• 3:35:12Speaker 01

  But that, in fact, he is not going to dismantle the US military and dismantle our nuclear program and fly around to all these cities and call peace conferences and hope that these dictators will just sit down with America and say, you know what? All is forgiven, the United States of America. It's all your fault. You did this all. We admit our responsibility, and then we have peace and paradise on earth. I think Trump is much more... Um, pragmatic and in some respects cynical. When he looks at the world and he realizes the world is a dangerous place. I have to be very careful about how I use American military forces. I am not going to send hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

• 3:35:55Speaker 01

  By the way, I mean, it all talk about Israel. I mean, the Israelis are one of the best allies we could possibly have. They fight and they die in their own defense. They fought multiple wars against American enemies. They haven't asked for American troops on the ground. There are no boots on the ground in Israel, defending Israel. The, the, the best we've given them is we've given them a fad system to help them shoot down ballistic missiles that have aimed at, aimed at them. And our American pilots have been in the air recently with our Israeli friends, shooting down ballistic missiles. But the Israelis have had a warrior ethos. We will fight and we will die in our own defense. I would just say, if you're going to actually build out a model where you're going to minimize the risk to American troops, let's find more allies like that, right?

• 3:36:40Speaker 01

  I worry about, I'm like Scott, I really worry about China, Taiwan. I really, really worry about that because the Taiwanese are not capable of defending themselves without US assistance. And the, and we may have to send American men and women to go defend Taiwan. And we can have a whole debate about the wisdom of that. But again, it would be very, very helpful to have more Israels in the world, more countries that are capable of fighting against common enemies and against common threats without having to always put American boots on the ground in order to do that.

• 3:37:10Lex Fridman?

  So you made a case for, if it's okay, if you, you made a case for strength here. Just practically speaking, why do you think Trump has talked about peace a lot? Why do you think he hasn't been able to uh, uh, get to a ceasefire with Ukraine and Russia? For example, if we just move away from Iran.

• 3:37:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:37:28Lex Fridman?

  Without getting into the history of the whole thing, like why? He's been talking peace, peace, peace, peace, peace. He's been pushing it and pushing it. What can we learn about that so far failure? That's also instructive for Iran.

• 3:37:42Speaker 01

  Look, I'm not a Russia expert. I'm not a Ukraine expert. I'm sitting in front of two people who know a lot more about that conflict than I do. I, I.

• 3:37:48Lex Fridman?

  You are, we should say banned by Putin.

• 3:37:51Speaker 01

  I am, I have been sanctioned by Russia and by Iran.

• 3:37:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, sanctioned, yes.

• 3:37:56Speaker 01

  Yes, banned, sanctioned, uh, threatened.

• 3:37:58Lex Fridman?

  Congratulations.

• 3:37:59Speaker 01

  Thank you, thank you. Well, it's, it caused us some difficulties, but anyway. Um, I think the answer to that is that.

• 3:38:08Speaker 01

  For Putin, he needs to understand that, like Khamenei, he has two options here. Right? Option one, which President Trump has signaled over and over and over again, is come sit down and negotiate a ceasefire with the Ukrainians. I don't want to get into the details and the back and forth about who's responsible for the fact there's no ceasefire, Putin or Zelensky. I mean, that's a whole other debate. And I'm sure you guys have a lot of opinions on that. But path one is sit down and let's negotiate a ceasefire. Path two is the United States will use American power in order to build our leverage so that Vladimir Putin understands that he has to do a ceasefire. Now, I'm not suggesting US troops, absolutely not.

• 3:38:51Speaker 01

  What I am suggesting is, there's a package right now of sanctions that have ADA cosponsors in the Senate across party lines. And I think Trump is using that and will use that as a sort of sword of Damocles hanging over Putin and the Russian economy to say, look, Vladimir, we either do a ceasefire or I'm going to have no choice but to have to start imposing much more punishing sanctions on you and on the Russian economy. So I think there's an economic option. I think there's a military option. And I think the biggest mistake Biden made in this whole war, and there's many mistakes in terms of signaling, not having US credibility, you know, Afghan debacle, which signaled to Putin that he could invade without any kind of American response, is he kind of

• 3:39:33Speaker 01

  went in and he tied Ukraine's hands behind their back. I mean, he actually tied one hand behind their back while they were fighting with the other hand, and he refused to give him the kinds of systems that early on in the war would have allowed the Ukrainian military to be able to hit Russian forces that were mobilizing on the Russian-Ukrainian border. And I think if he had done that, I think this war would have ended sooner. There'd be far less casualties. And I think Putin would then understand. Maybe I need to strike a deal. I'm not a Russia expert or Ukraine expert. I don't know what the deal looks like. You keep the Donbass, you keep Crimea, you keep, you know, larger chunks of eastern Ukraine. That's for smarter people than me on this issue to decide what the deal looks like.

• 3:40:17Speaker 01

  But there's no doubt today Putin thinks that he can just keep fighting, keep killing Ukrainians, keep driving forward. Eventually, he's going to wear down the Ukrainians through a sheer war of attrition. He'll throw hundreds of thousands of Russians at this. He doesn't care how many Russians are going to die. That's the way that Russians and the Soviets have fought wars for many, many years. Just endless number of Russian bodies being thrown into the meat grinder. And he thinks he can continue without any consequences. And I worry that as a result of the fact that we are not showing Putin that we've got leverage, it's made war more likely, it's made a war more brutal, and it's going to make a war more protracted.

• 3:40:54Lex Fridman?

  But increasing military aid to Ukraine, in the case that you described, also has to be coupled with extreme pressure to make peace.

• 3:41:01Speaker 01

  Correct. Extreme pressure to make peace.

• 3:41:03Lex Fridman?

  Which Trump hopefully is, appears to be doing now in Iran.

• 3:41:08Speaker 01

  I think Trump is early, I mean, it's interesting you said that because he's early indicators. Again, who knows where the ceasefire goes. But I think it was important. It was, he slapped Khamenei, but he also said to Bibi, enough, enough. And it's like, okay, now we're going back to Oman. There's going to be a temporary ceasefire. Now let's negotiate. And I think that's important. And I think it shows that Donald Trump is leading, not following. It shows that Donald Trump is his own man, not on the payroll of the Russians or the Iranians or the Israelis or all these other crazy accusations that have been made about this guy for many, many years. And he's going to give, you know, as they say, peace a chance. And he's going to give, give a ceasefire a chance. He's going to give negotiations a chance.

• 3:41:52Speaker 01

  But I don't think he's sending the message to the Iranians and he needs to send it to Putin is, if you don't take me up on my offer, all right, I've already demonstrated that I am serious and I will use American power carefully and selectively in the way that I've done in the past.

• 3:42:08Lex Fridman?

  At the risk of doing the thing I shouldn't do. But just to test the ideas of libertarianism.

• 3:42:16Lex Fridman?

  And the things we've been talking about, can we, for a brief time, unrelated to everything we've been talking about, talk about World War II? What was the right thing to do in 1938, 1939? Like, what would you do? Okay, to be clear, World War II has nothing to do with current events. In fact, many of the horrible policies of the United States, in my opinion, have to have to do with projecting World War II onto every single conflict in the world.

• 3:42:44Speaker 02

  Oh, great.

• 3:42:45Lex Fridman?

  But.

• 3:42:47Speaker 02

  Overlearning.

• 3:42:47Lex Fridman?

  Overlearning. But it is an interesting, extreme case. Just to clarify, I'm just like philosophically talking about.

• 3:42:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:42:55Lex Fridman?

  At which point do you hit? Do you do military intervention? And that's a nice case. Maybe you have a better case study, but that's such an extreme one.

• 3:43:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:43:05Lex Fridman?

  That it's interesting.

• 3:43:06Speaker 02

  Are we talking about Germany or Japan?

• 3:43:08Lex Fridman?

  Germany, yeah.

• 3:43:09Speaker 02

  So Japan attacked us and Germany declared war on us. Tough for them, and that's what happens when you declare war on the United States and get hit, but.

• 3:43:17Lex Fridman?

  That was idiotic on the part of Hitler to declare war on the United States.

• 3:43:20Speaker 02

  You know, I never understood why he ever did that. They always said it was just because he was crazy, but what it was is he was trying to get the Japanese to invade the Soviet Union from the east and in order to divide Stalin's forces, which failed. And it didn't work, and it was a huge blunder from his point of view, I guess.

• 3:43:35Lex Fridman?

  Philosophically, from an interventionism perspective, you're saying the United States should have stayed out from that war as long as possible, until they're attacked?

• 3:43:43Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, and look at how powerful they ended up being and the amount of damage that they were able to inflict on the Soviets, better them than us.

• 3:43:52Lex Fridman?

  What do you think?

• 3:43:53Speaker 02

  Look.

• 3:43:53Lex Fridman?

  Is this a useful discussion?

• 3:43:55Speaker 01

  It's interesting. I mean, I think it's interesting of libertarianism or isolationism in practice. I mean, I think the 30s are more interesting to me than what happened between 39 and 45. I think the debate in America was very interesting in the 30s, where there was really a strong isolationist movement, you know, with Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford and Father Coughlin and many.

• 3:44:19Speaker 02

  And Joe Kennedy.

• 3:44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Joe Kennedy. I mean, they defined themselves as sort of America firsters, but it was very much an isolationist strain. And I think, you know, we can talk about that history and.

• 3:44:29Speaker 02

  Coughlin was a New Dealer, not a right-winger.

• 3:44:31Speaker 01

  Anyway, very much an isolationist, talking about America having to stay out, these entangling alliances, this is not our war. Emotionally understandable, right? Because you can also overlearn the lessons of World War I. And I think they overlearned the lessons of World War I, which was a brutal war and a devastating war, mostly for Europe, but obviously for the United States. We lost thousands of American men and women. So the 30s was this big debate between the those who saw the gathering storm of what was happening with Nazi Germany and those who wanted to keep America out. And I think in some respects, it's like today with the contemporary reality with Khamenei, is that because these isolationist voices were so prominent and so vocal,

• 3:45:16Speaker 01

  and in some cases, quite persuasive to American leaders, Hitler calculated that the United States would not enter the war. And so he could do what Scott says. He could focus on the Eastern Front. He could gather his forces and then he could do a kill shot on the Western democracies in Western Europe. And the United States would not intervene. I mean, you're right, that the big mistake he makes is declaring war on the United States after Pearl Harbor. But he believes all through the 30s and before Pearl Harbor, that the isolationist voices are keeping FDR from entering the war, even while Churchill and the Brits and the French and others are imploring the Americans not only to just to provide them with material support,

• 3:46:02Speaker 01

  with weapons, so that they could hold on to the island and defend themselves. And I think Hitler miscalculates. In the same way, I think Khamenei miscalculates. Khamenei heard the debate over the past number of years. He believed that this sort of isolationist wing of the Republican Party, represented, I think, in, you know, by Tucker Carlson and others, who have been very anti-intervention with respect to Iran. I think he believed that that was the dominant voice within Trump's MAGA coalition. And that as a result, the United States would not use military force. So in the same way that Hitler miscalculated the influence of the isolationists on FDR, Khamenei misjudged the influence of the isolationists on Trump,

• 3:46:45Speaker 01

  and both ended up miscalculating to their great regret. So to me, that's the sort of parallel between kind of World War II in the 30s and the prelude to World War II and what we're seeing in the current reality over the past few weeks.

• 3:46:59Lex Fridman?

  To make clear, you mentioned there's a parallel, but mostly there's no parallel. It's a fundamentally different.

• 3:47:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 3:47:05Lex Fridman?

  There will never be a war like that.

• 3:47:07Speaker 02

  It's a real problem too, because they always say everybody's Hitler, all enemies are Hitler, and to compromise with them at all is to appease Hitler, and you can never do that.

• 3:47:15Lex Fridman?

  Agreed.

• 3:47:15Speaker 02

  And they do that to Manuel Noriega, to David Koresh, to Saddam Hussein, to whoever they feel like demonizing and saying is too crazy to negotiate with. When, let's get real, and I think we're agreed about this probably, that, right, in 2002, W. Bush could have just sent Colin Powell, the four-star general, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Secretary of State, to read the riot act to Saddam Hussein and tell him, "Look, man, you helped keep Al Qaeda down, and we'll let you live," and everything would have been fine. And, in fact, just like Saddam Hussein, and there's a great article by James Risen.

• 3:47:50Lex Fridman?

  I don't agree.

• 3:47:51Speaker 02

  Hang on, hang on now. There's, there's an article by James, there's an article by James Risen in the New York Times, and there's another one by Seymour Hersh as well about how Saddam Hussein offered to give in on everything. He said, "You want to search for weapons of mass destruction, you can send your army and FBI everywhere you want. You want us to switch sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict, we'll stop backing Hamas. You want us to hold elections, we'll hold this, we'll hold elections, just give us a couple of years. If this is about the oil, we'll sign over mineral rights." This is James Risen, New York Times. They sent an emissary to meet with Richard Pearl in London. That was who was the chair of the Defense Policy Board and was a major ringleader of getting us into Iraq War II. And then, they, I don't know why, this is a real mistake. You want to talk about Saddam's mistakes. Why does he always send his guys to meet with Richard Pearl?

• 3:48:33Speaker 02

  Because the, there was a Saudi businessman, pardon me, a Lebanese businessman, I think, that they tried to get to intervene as well, who, again, offered virtually total capitulation. And Pearl told him, "Tell Saddam, we'll see you in Baghdad." After he was attempting to essentially unconditionally surrender. The same thing happened with Iran in 2003. Right after America invaded, they issued what was called the Golden Offer, which the Bush administration buried, and they castigated the Swiss ambassador who had delivered it. But in the Golden Offer, and you can find the PDF file of it online, they talk about, "We're happy to negotiate with you." Our entire nuclear program, which didn't even really exist yet, but nuclearization, we're willing to negotiate with you about Afghanistan and Iraq,

• 3:49:17Speaker 02

  because again, they hated Saddam Hussein and wanted rid of him too. So they're perfectly happy to work with us on Afghanistan and Iraq. And they had captured a bunch of Bin Ladenites and they were willing to trade them for the NEK. And that included one of Bin Laden's sons and another guy named Atef, both of whom the Iranians held under house arrest for years. And it was only in, I think, late Obama.

• 3:49:38Speaker 01

  And they're giving refuge to Al Qaeda. And the CIA said, this is a key facilitation pipeline between Iran and Al Qaeda.

• 3:49:45Speaker 02

  They were willing to negotiate a trade between these dangerous Bin Ladenites and the NEK. And America refused to negotiate that. And it was years later, when the Bin Ladenites abducted some Iranian diplomats in Pakistan, that they then traded them away to get their diplomats back. And Atef, I think Bin Laden's son, ended up being killed not long after that, Hamza, and Atef too. But both of those dangerous terrorists were released and were involved in terrorism between then and the time that they were later killed, I think, within a couple of years of that. So the hawks always like to say, oh yeah, Iran gives such aid and comfort to Al Qaeda and all that. There's a great document at the Counterterrorism Center at West Point, where they debunk all of that.

• 3:50:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a 9/11 report by the 9/11 Commission. There's a 9/11 Commission report, people can Google it, which talks about the cooperation between Iran and Al Qaeda.

• 3:50:38Speaker 02

  Only in Bosnia, when they were doing a favor for Bill Clinton.

• 3:50:41Speaker 01

  Beyond that, and CIA released thousands of pages of classified material that they declassified, showing the relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda. The US Treasury Department, under Obama and under Trump, actually designated a number of Iranian individuals for facilitating Al Qaeda. So anyway, I mean, these are important facts.

• 3:51:03Speaker 02

  You mentioned Baghdadi and Soleimani in the same breath a minute ago, when they're deadly enemies. And it was Soleimani's Shiite forces in Iraq War III that helped destroy the caliphate.

• 3:51:12Speaker 01

  Enemy of my enemy is my friend.

• 3:51:13Speaker 02

  With America flying air power for them.

• 3:51:15Speaker 01

  The greatest era that we've made in the Middle East is this. Not the greatest, but one of the greatest is this sort of conceptual era that somehow Sunnis and Shiis don't work together and Iran doesn't work. Well, I didn't say that. I'm not saying you say that, but but many people think that. And of course, they do work. They hate each other, but of course they work together because they hate us more. But can I just say something, Lex? Because I actually think just stepping back from like all of this detail.

• 3:51:38Lex Fridman?

  The more we start to zoom out now, the better.

• 3:51:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like to zoom out a little bit. I look, I think the lessons for me over 22 years on working on these issues is one must learn about the mistakes that we've made in Iraq and in Afghanistan and Libya. Okay, one must learn about the mistakes that we made in Vietnam, mistakes that we made in World War II. So we can make them all over again in Iran this time. Can I finish or? Go ahead. Are you good? Yeah, I'm ready. All right. So I think that what President Trump is trying to do is learn, but not overlearn. I think he understands the mistakes that have been made. I think he's trying to rectify those mistakes.

• 3:52:17Speaker 01

  And he also understands that American power is important. It is been a it is a force for good in the world, even though we have made major mistakes. I think there is a great danger amongst certain people to believe that no power should ever be exercised. That all American power is a bad thing and a destructive thing, and sometimes to confuse major tactical decisions. All right, that have been made, whether it's been made by the Brits in World War II, or the Americans, or us, or whoever it is in whatever war. With the fact that there is a strategic reality that we always have to be conscious of, and that we have enemies.

• 3:52:56Speaker 01

  All right, this is not the Garden of Eden yet. I hope the libertarians create one. I want to go live there when they do, and Scott and I will be neighbors, believe it or not. Living, living in that Garden of Eden together. But there are major threats in this world, and we need to find the right. Balance between the overuse of military power and the underuse of military power. If we want to avoid wars, we have to have serious deterrents because our enemies need to understand we will use selective and narrowly focused overwhelming military power when we are facing threats like an Iranian nuclear weapon. That is a serious threat. It's a serious threat to us. It's a serious threat to the region. It's a serious threat with respect to proliferation around the world.

• 3:53:39Speaker 01

  And I think with that respect, I think President Trump's decision to drop bombs on three key nuclear facilities was a selective targeted military action that I hope will drive the Iranians back to the negotiating table where they can negotiate finally the dismantlement of their nuclear weapons program. They don't have a nuclear weapons program. Again, we've had a four hour debate on this. I'm sure if you want to rewind, you can listen to all our arguments once again. But the fact of the matter is, is that the unwillingness to use power, if we're never going to use power, all that's going to do is send a signal to our enemies that they can do whatever they want, they can violate whatever agreements they want, they can use aggression against anyone they want.

• 3:54:24Speaker 01

  And I think that makes, that puts American lives in danger. And we've seen the results of that, where we delayed and delayed and delayed and we didn't move and we didn't move too early and we didn't preempt and the threat grew and we ignored the gathering storm. And so I think the lessons of, you know, 100 years of American military involvement is if you have an opportunity early on as the storm is gathering, to use all instruments of American power with the military one being the last one you use, then deter when you can and strike when you must in order to prevent the kinds of escalation and wars that everybody at this table, and I'm sure everybody listening in your audience is seeking to avoid.

• 3:55:08Lex Fridman?

  On that topic, question for both of you, Scott. If human civilization destroys itself in the next 75 years, it probably most likely will be a World War III type of scenario, maybe a nuclear war. How do we avoid that? We've been talking about Iran, but there'll be new conflicts. There's Ukraine, China.

• 3:55:26Speaker 02

  Kashmir.

• 3:55:27Lex Fridman?

  Kashmir.

• 3:55:29Speaker 02

  North Korea.

• 3:55:31Speaker 02

  Don't forget North Korea.

• 3:55:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, I mean, there was a time when North Korea was the biggest threat to human civilization, according to.

• 3:55:38Speaker 02

  We could have had a deal except John Bolton ruined it.

• 3:55:41Lex Fridman?

  So that's the bigger question, not so much in the specifics.

• 3:55:45Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, the second time, he ruined the Clinton deal of 94. Then he ruined the Trump deal of 2018.

• 3:55:50Speaker 01

  Maybe the Korean dictator, North Korean dictator ruined it. But again, one doesn't want to blame our enemies for their mistakes.

• 3:55:56Speaker 02

  Well, you know, at the second meeting, Trump sent John Bolton to Outer Mongolia so that he couldn't sit at the table and ruin the deal. But, but what happened then? The Democrats had his lawyer testify against him while he was at the meeting. And they had this huge propaganda campaign that Kim Jong Un is going to walk all over Trump and take such advantage of him. And they made it virtually impossible for him to walk away claiming a victory.

• 3:56:18Speaker 01

  Scott, do you ever blame the enemy, ever? Do you ever blame the enemy?

• 3:56:21Speaker 02

  North Korea is not my enemy.

• 3:56:23Speaker 01

  North Korea is not your enemy?

• 3:56:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:56:25Speaker 01

  Really? They, they, they, they build nuclear weapons, ICBMs that target America.

• 3:56:30Speaker 02

  That's George Bush and John Bolton's fault, I already said that.

• 3:56:32Speaker 01

  Whatever fault it is, the fact of the matter is, do you ever, ever blame an American adversary? Or is it always our fault?

• 3:56:40Speaker 02

  In fact, what happened was.

• 3:56:42Speaker 01

  Is it always our fault?

• 3:56:43Speaker 02

  See, all you can do is characterize, but you don't want to talk about the details. The details are that Stephen Biegen, who worked for, for Donald Trump, gave a speech and said, you know what? We can put normalization first and denuclearization later.

• 3:56:56Speaker 01

  I know him very well.

• 3:56:56Speaker 02

  And then they brought Donald, Donald Trump brought John Bolton to the meeting and he prevented that from being the, uh, from being the, uh, the message of the meeting.

• 3:57:07Speaker 01

  So it's always.

• 3:57:08Speaker 02

  And ruin the deal.

• 3:57:09Speaker 01

  Always John Bolton's fault.

• 3:57:10Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. It's all John Bolton's fault. Because how reasonable does it sound to you, Lex? Give up all your nuclear weapons first, then we'll talk about every other. Other issue, does that sound like a poison pill or that sounds like a reasonable negotiation? Give me a break.

• 3:57:22Speaker 01

  Sounds like a beginning of a negotiation.

• 3:57:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, they got nowhere.

• 3:57:25Speaker 01

  Well.

• 3:57:26Speaker 02

  Because Trump brought John Bolton with him and helped to ruin it.

• 3:57:28Speaker 01

  And maybe they went nowhere because the North Korean dictator, at the end of the day, is a dictator who wants to threaten the United States with ICBMs and nuclear. Listen, you're criticizing the sequential decisions made in negotiation.

• 3:57:43Speaker 02

  I am.

• 3:57:44Speaker 01

  I'm just asking you a serious question out of hours of talking.

• 3:57:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:57:48Speaker 01

  Which I must say, I've really enjoyed. I've learnt a lot.

• 3:57:51Speaker 02

  I enjoyed it.

• 3:57:51Speaker 01

  I think there's been areas of agreement, obviously, real disagreement. But here's the question to you, like, really, I mean, do you ever, ever hold our adversaries responsible? Or do you just don't think we have any adversaries?

• 3:58:04Speaker 02

  This is ridiculous. The topic has been.

• 3:58:08Speaker 01

  Tell me.

• 3:58:08Speaker 02

  From your point of view, it's all the adversaries and all America and Israel trying to do is survive and fix the situation the best they can.

• 3:58:15Speaker 01

  I think I've acknowledged America and Israel's mistakes the whole time.

• 3:58:18Speaker 02

  Bringing up all the things that America and Israel have done to make matters worse. I didn't ever say that Ayatollah is some great guy or that Kim Jong-un is some hero or like any kind of thing to spin for their side.

• 3:58:29Speaker 01

  Are they a threat to America?

• 3:58:30Speaker 02

  No, of course not. As Zbigniew Brzezinski said in 1993. We could have perfectly normalized relations then. You talk about Iranian support for Al Qaeda. Iran supported Al Qaeda in Bosnia.

• 3:58:41Speaker 01

  That's the bottom line.

• 3:58:42Speaker 02

  In 1995 as a favor to Bill Clinton because they were trying to suck up to the United States.

• 3:58:46Speaker 01

  I understand.

• 3:58:47Speaker 02

  Is why they supported Al Qaeda.

• 3:58:48Speaker 01

  Your position, your position.

• 3:58:50Speaker 02

  Yes, my position is whatever you say it is, not what I say.

• 3:58:52Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm just talking.

• 3:58:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:58:54Speaker 01

  I'm trying to summarize.

• 3:58:54Speaker 02

  You know who's the last person who told me I need to beware about overlearning the lessons of Iraq? It was Charlie Savage from the New York Times when, and the subject was his absolute ridiculous hoax that Russia was paying the Taliban to murder American soldiers in Afghanistan in 2020, which ruined Trump's potential, which he was floating trial balloons about withdrawing in the summer of 2020, which would have absolutely prevented.

• 3:59:18Speaker 01

  Scott, you said it.

• 3:59:19Speaker 02

  The Joe Biden, Erica test.

• 3:59:20Speaker 01

  You said it.

• 3:59:21Speaker 02

  And Charlie Savage, who published these ridiculous lies.

• 3:59:25Speaker 01

  Scott.

• 3:59:25Speaker 02

  That were later refuted by the general in charge. The Afghan War, the head of CENTCOM, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the director of Central Intelligence.

• 3:59:32Speaker 01

  You're like flood the zone with as much detail as possible.

• 3:59:33Speaker 02

  He told me, you know what your problem is, Horton, is you have overlearned the lessons of Iraq War II. But it turned out those lessons were perfectly apt for Charlie Savage's hoax. It wasn't true what Charlie Savage said. You know what he resorted to? He said, "Well, it's true that there was a rumor I was reporting on."

• 3:59:50Speaker 01

  Scott, you made it very clear, America has no adversaries.

• 3:59:53Speaker 02

  That's called learning the lessons of Iraq, not overlearning them.

• 3:59:56Lex Fridman?

  All right. So I guess the answer to the question I asked about avoiding World War III is the two of you becoming friends. That's my goal. If you can try to find the light at the end of the tunnel, one last question. What gives you hope? To the degree you have hope about the future, what gives you hope about this great country of ours? And humanity, too.

• 4:00:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, look, there are a million wonderful things about this country, the land, the people, our culture, and our resources and everything. And the kind of society that we could build in a, not with a control system, but with just a pure free market capitalist system in this country, where people are allowed to own their property and prove its value and exchange it on the market and build this country up, we would be living in comparatively a paradise compared to what we have now. And if you look at the opportunity costs just since the end of the Cold War, on all that has been wasted on militarism in the

• 4:00:57Speaker 02

  Middle East especially, but also in Eastern Europe and in East Asia, all of that wealth put here could have gone much more to something like perfecting our society. It's always an unfinished project. So that then we really have something to point to the rest of the world and say, "This is how you're supposed to do it. Not like that." I think it's crucial that for all of the problems that Somalia, Syria, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan have...

• 4:01:28Speaker 02

  The worst thing about those countries is America's wars there. It's what we have done to them is the worst thing about those places. So we're not in much of a position to criticize, you know, whatever horrible and political practices, you know, cultural and, and things about their societies that we would like to criticize, when the worst chaos that's happened to them has been inflicted by our country against them, virtually all in, in wars of choice that were unnecessary from the get go.

• 4:01:59Speaker 01

  What gives you hope? What gives me hope? I think, first of all, I have a lot of hope and confidence in the wisdom of the American people. I think Americans understand, at the end of the day, that they need leaders who are about making America great again. I think they elected Donald Trump, who is flawed in many, many ways. But I think Trump is wrestling with some of the questions that we have been wrestling with for the past five hours. I think that, I think most Americans know that we have adversaries. And, you know, it's just overwhelming numbers of Americans understand that. They may disagree on exactly who is an adversary and how you rank them, but they know we have adversaries. I think the third thing is Americans greatly admire the men and women in uniform.

• 4:02:43Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the institution with the greatest popularity in America still remains the US military, while many of other institutions are failing the American people and are reflected in the, in the polling. I think we've got to be very judicious about how we use this incredibly powerful military. Because most importantly, it comes down to it's not about weapons and technology, it's about the people, it's about the men and women who have sacrificed their lives to serve our country. At the end of the day, if we understand we have adversaries, we're careful about how we use our military, we understand the importance of forward deterrence in order to actually confront threats before they become so severe that we ended up plunging ourselves into war. I agree totally with Scott in terms of how we use our money

• 4:03:28Speaker 01

  and how judiciously we must, we have to guard it. I agree with how we've, we've run out these massive debts and we have to be actually, if we're serious and conservatives are really serious, they need to They need to tackle these massive budgets deficits. And, and you know, it would be really easy if it was just all about the military and we could just kind of get rid of the Pentagon and all of a sudden we'd be running balanced budgets. It's not the case. We have much deeper structural economics, economic problems in this country and everybody knows that. And so we got huge challenges as a country, but I really believe, as I believe since I was a little kid, that America is the greatest force for good in the world and that we do, we make mistakes, sometimes tragic mistakes.

• 4:04:10Speaker 01

  We make huge miscalculations and I think we will be much more clear in how to rectify those mistakes. If we stop obsessing with these boogeymen that are out there, the Israelis, the Jews, the

• 4:04:24Lex Fridman?

  Iranians.

• 4:04:25Speaker 01

  Well, and we start focusing on our adversaries, which are not the Iranians, because the 80% of Iranians despise this regime. And, and you know, Lex, I feel really bad that we, in five hours, we actually haven't even talked about that in any detail.

• 4:04:37Lex Fridman?

  Many of my friends are Iranian, they're beautiful people and, and it's one of the great cultures on earth. Yeah.

• 4:04:41Speaker 01

  And you know, the only place they don't succeed in the world is inside the Islamic Republic. And they come to America and Canada and Europe, they're incredibly successful people and 80% of Iranians despise this regime. And they long for a free and prosperous Iran. And so it's a big question that they're ever going to get there and who knows the right way to get them there. But at the end of the day, I am convinced that the vast majority of Iranians are our friends. But there is a regime that has been trying to build nuclear weapons, has been engaged in terrorism for decades, has killed and maimed thousands of Americans and, and our allies. And it's a regime that has to be stopped. And I think Donald Trump, in the past couple of weeks, I would argue in the past number of months,

• 4:05:24Speaker 01

  has tried to, tried to play a strategy, tried to figure out a way to offer the Iranians negotiations and a peaceful solution to this, but use overwhelming military power recently against Iran's nuclear sites in a very targeted way, in order to send a message to the Islamic Republic of Iran that they cannot continue to build nuclear weapons and threaten America. And so I hope that things will work out. Well on this, I I've always said curb your enthusiasm because we have still a lot of of pieces that still need to fall into place. And this is going to be a windy road as we try to figure this out. I'm hoping for the best, preparing for the worst and want to thank you very much for having me on the show, Scott. It was a real pleasure to meet you.

• 4:06:09Speaker 01

  I enjoyed the debate very lively. I admire your dedication to the issue and your and your intention of detail. And I think all of that speaks well of of you and your commitment and and your passion for this.

• 4:06:21Lex Fridman?

  I am deeply grateful that you guys will come here. This is really mind blowing. Also that you have, it's silly maybe to say, but the courage to sit down and talk through this, through the tension. I've learned a lot. I think a lot of people are going to learn a lot. I'm a fan of both of your work. And it means a lot that you come here today and talk to a silly kid like me. So Scott, thank you so much, brother.

• 4:06:48Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 4:06:49Lex Fridman?

  Thank you, Mark.

• 4:06:49Speaker 01

  Thanks, Lex. Appreciate it.

• 4:06:51Lex Fridman?

  Bam.

• 4:06:51Speaker 01

  Thanks, Scott.

• 4:06:53Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this debate between Scott Horton and Mark Dubowitz. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now let me leave you with some sobering words on the cost of war from Dwight D. Eisenhower. For some context, Eisenhower was the 34th president of the United States. But before that, during World War Two, he was the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force orchestrating some of the most significant military operations of the war with leadership marked by strategic and tactical brilliance. It is in this context that the following words carry even more power and wisdom spoken in 1953.

• 4:07:41Lex Fridman?

  Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of a scientist, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fully-equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.

• 4:08:24Lex Fridman?

  We pay for a single fighter plane with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense, under the cloud of threat near war that is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. And now allow me to add some additional brief excerpts. In 1946 Eisenhower said, "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity."

• 4:09:07Lex Fridman?

  In 1950 Eisenhower said, "Possibly my hatred of war blinds me so that I cannot comprehend the arguments they induce. But, in my opinion, there's no such thing as a preventative war. Although the suggestion is repeatedly made, none has yet explained how war prevents war. Worse than this, no one has been able to explain away the fact that war creates the conditions that beget war."

• 4:09:35Lex Fridman?

  And finally, an excerpt from Eisenhower's farewell address in 1961 on the military-industrial complex. "A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

• 4:09:58Lex Fridman?

  American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now, we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions." This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. "In the councils of government, we must guard against an acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

• 4:10:39Lex Fridman?

  The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

• 4:10:48Lex Fridman?

  Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.