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can confirm that the US is withdrawing some personnel from major bases across the Middle East due to heightened regional tensions. And you look at some of this in Qar, that's the Aloud Air Base. You got about 8 to 10,000 US service members. That's one of the larger bases. Got another AR. Yeah. And why would we be withdrawing troops?
Well, that's because Donald Trump is probably just about to teabag. See, I got a green teaag in here. Get it? Teaag Iran. Now, Donald Trump just moments ago told us, you know, I've been told that the killings have stopped. I've been told by the Iranians that there are no plans for any executions. Donald Trump here trying to signal that all is well.
The deescalation has started. But folks, this is exactly what Donald Trump did before Operation Midnight Hammer. Right before we struck Iran's nuclear facilities with two B2 bombers last summer, Donald Trump told us, "Ah, we don't need to attack them anymore. We're having great conversations with them." And what do we know?
24 to 48 hours later, boom, we wake up to the news of the attack. And so given the data that we're seeing now, there are some massive risks that Iran is about to get struck by the United States. And in addition to that, we've got to break down what these risks create for not just the Middle East, but also the United States and the rest of the world.
What this means for markets and for some insight for you, you should know why this stuff is happening in the first place. Why is Iran now being considered at the worst position that it has ever been in since 1979, which is when its last revolution overthrew its government then? The dynastic government that led to the Ayatollah reign today.
Well, let's start by analyzing some data. The first thing that you need to know is we are moving equipment into position. Right here you could see on screen eight US KC135 refueling aircrafts recently pit stopping in Hawaii which is exactly what happened before operation midnight hammer. The same thing that happened last time just like what's happening now is yeah we evacuated about 10,000 military service members from the Alud Dade air base because that is a forward operating base that the United States uses and expects that Iran will try to immediately counterattack after we strike them.
Italy is currently urging people to immediately leave Iran. We have US destroyers and nuclearpowered submarines in the region. Now, while we don't have an aircraft carrier in the region, closest one's about 7 to 10 days sailing time away, we have enough weaponry to mount an attack or precision strike against Iran or multiple Iranian locations.
Diplomats are currently being asked to leave Iran. Britain is withdrawing its troops. Britain's embassy in Thran just shut down. Al Jazer reports that diplomatic contact between the United States and Iran has been absolutely severed which is not exactly lining up with Donald Trump saying ah I'm told the killing is being stopped.
This is classic Donald Trumpism. Donald Trump doesn't want to signal to Iran that he's about to strike them. So he says something to make it seem like he's not about to strike them to catch them off guard. It's strategic to try to protect American service men and women. Now, understand this. All of what's happening here in these positionings, as well as warnings to start expecting canceled flights out of Israel, like Luft Tanza announcing that they expect to cancel flights starting tomorrow, are all exactly the same things we saw before Operation Midnight Hammer last year.
And remember, Donald Trump is the one who told us that help is on the way. He's already instituted a 25% tariff on any goods from any country doing business with Iran effectively immediately. Effective immediately, which of course mostly hits China because China makes up about 26% of Iran's total trade.
At the same time this is happening, Iran is also sharing their propaganda videos on social media showing their beautiful defense and attack systems that they have. problem is most of Iran's equipment tends to be hidden in bunkers and under the cover of dirt because they know these are going to be the very first things that are struck by Israeli and US forces in the event of a strike against Iran which at this point is being rumored to happen within the next few days.
Now, we always have to be careful about when we hear how many hours within, you know, x hours we're going to have strikes or whatever because typically the Pentagon isn't going to exactly forecast when they're going to strike, which is exactly in alignment with Donald Trump's mystery in terms of, oh, you know, I'm told things were getting better.
No, things are not getting better in Iran. Iran has now been somewhere around 7 days now without internet access. You might wonder how is it possible that a country like Iran can not have internet access for 24 hours. And the way Iran actually works is they sort of built their own Chinese firewall uh which China does with the internet as well.
And the whole idea was that they could take control of the internet to protect Iranians from cyber security attacks or threats. But in doing so and essentially putting everything around the Iranian internet behind this Chinese firewall, if you will, Iran essentially has complete control of the internet.
The internet in Iran sits behind what's known as the National Information Network or NIM and it's designed to be the government provided quote safe internet. But in cases of protests, they could just shut it down and then end up killing people in darkness. Now, they've done this before. If you look at the 2019 protests, they also shut down the internet.
The same thing we saw during the 12-day war in 2025 between Iran and Israel. The internet was shut down both times to keep their citizens in the darkness. Now, what are we actually seeing in terms of on the ground? What we're seeing is a lot of people fed up and protesting against the Iranian regime.
These protests seem to be significantly worse than what we've seen ever before, such as in 2009 or 2019. Current official statistics suggest there are over 2,500 protesters who have died and about 100 security officials who have died in Iran from these protests. However, there are some unofficial estimates that we might have as many as 12,000 individuals who have been killed.
Also, the Iranian chief justice is suggesting that the regime in Iran should move quickly to punish people and quell these protests. In the past, they've been able to pull this off. They've been able to shut down protests. They've been able to prevent these from escalating, and they just keep people quiet.
But this time, it looks like Iranians are trying to pull off a too big, too rig style demonstration. Here's footage from January 8th, which sometimes can take as many as four to 5 days to actually get out of the country as people who film the content are being jammed. Their internet access is being cut.
Starlink access is being blocked. Sell services are extremely sporadic. So a lot of these video shots take days to get out if people have the ability to actually get internet access sometimes days later to share it with the world. Now what we know about Iran is that Iran has an authoritarian theocracy.
The whole idea is we are morally superior. The problem is Iran is in a massive economic depression and the people are absolutely fed up. They've run a country under the premise of death to Israel and death to America rather than let's focus on making Iran great. Instead, they can't even keep the water running.
They've got chronic water shortages. They've got power shortages. And they literally police what you're wearing. They blow all this money on a nuclear program that has continuously ended in failure. And now they're hiding somewhere around 4 to 500 kg of roughly 60% enriched uranium somewhere which could be used for a bomb.
Not a good kind of bomb either. We'll talk about those risks in just a moment. But the problem is the Iranian people are pissed and they're tired of this. And so at this point, what we're finding is the Iranians might be trying to overthrow the regime of Iran, specifically the Ayatollah. As a result, Israel is now moving Iron Dome SAM launchers into position, preparing not only their David Sling or the Arrow defense systems, but also their Iron Dome protections against shorter range drones and missiles.
Bomb shelters are opening again. Everything that preceded the attack in the summer of 2025, Operation Midnight Hammer B2 Bombers is happening now. The question is what triggered the collapse of well, frankly this regime so far? Why all of a sudden are these protests occurring and what made them start at the end of December?
Why all of a sudden is everybody so pissed in Iran? Well, part of it might have to do with the fact that their wealth has just absolutely evaporated. You've got to take a look at the currency, the Iranian realale. And so, I'm going to pull up an image here showing you the value of the realale uh compared to the US dollar.
So, let's assume the US dollar is relatively stable during these two or three weeks here. What you have to look at is the magnitude of change of how many realale you get per dollar. And when you see the line go rapidly up and to the right, it means that real currency has absolutely collapsed in value.
And this makes people really poor really fast and almost creates overnight hyperinflation. Think about this on a comparison basis. When you have a let's call it $1,000, $1,000 US worth of Iranian realale, that $1,000 has all of a sudden become worth not $1,000, but rather $38. In other words, imagine the money that you had losing 96% of its purchasing power almost overnight.
Welcome to 2026. You are now 96% poor. So, if you're wondering why there are so many protests, this is part of the reason. But what triggered this? What triggered this was actually a bank collapse back in October. Now, there's this bank called Ayandbe. Now, this bank, which is named quote future in Persian, attracted depositors with really high yields.
But in October, the Iranian central bank called the bank a Ponzi scheme and revoked its license. So in other words, the bank couldn't stay solvent. They were collecting people's deposits, paying out a yield while at the same time funding projects that were money losing projects. not only Iran's nuclear program, but also really lavish malls like the Mall of Iran, which was supposed to be this really opulent and fancy mall, but lost massive amounts of money.
And it was heavily funded by people involved with the very banking industry who were the recipients of printed money in Iran. And so when the central bank finally ended the Ponzi, it's no surprise that this $5 billion bank collapsed. Now you might think, okay, $5 billion, I'm using dollars on purpose to make this relative, right?
$5 billion, that doesn't seem like that much, Kevin, right? But that is about 1% of the Iranian GDP. that to compare it to America would be like a $250 billion bank going under in America. Now, what banks are worth around $250 billion, you might ask? Fair question. How about this? You ever see a Wells Fargo anywhere?
$283 billion. Imagine it going to zero overnight. Goldman Sachs gone overnight. City Bank 200 billion bucks gone overnight. Charles Schwab 182 billion gone overnight. When a globally systemic bank like one of those I just listed fails, the entire world would have problems. Or if a bank like that failed in the future again, which probably at some point will happen again, you'd have major problems.
But comparing this back to Iran, this bank failure being 1% of their GDP is frankly catastrophic. And that's why we saw this sudden, uhoh, wait a minute, contagion. If that bank is bad and that bank was a Ponzi, what if they're all ponzies? What if the whole game is rigged? Yeah, that's actually exactly what the problem is.
See, you don't just face a crisis of one bank failing. You face what's called a crisis of confidence. This is exactly why in America to keep the Ponzi of I mean obviously we've got some different extremes here but let's be real the Federal Reserve in the United States also prints money to prop up banks in the United States.
The reason ours is different is because people trust our central bank more than any other central bank in the world. So the US Fed might potentially be the last Ponzi to collapse, which ironically gives it the greatest faith because people look and go, "Well, of the Ponzies, it's the one I trust the most." Whereas on the other side, the Iranian collapsing Ponzi is the one most would trust the least.
And so as a result, you have potentially millions of protesters in almost every single province. All 31 provinces of Iran experiencing protests, massive protests with millions of individuals protesting against the Iranian regime the way it's established today. So all of this, by the way, got even worse when we took out the head of Venezuela.
See, we've already been restricting the flow of oil and currency via sanctions and tanker seizures to Iran, which already hurts Iran more on an economic level. But now we cut off the Venezuelan oil relationship, but also cut off potentially Venezuela's purchasing of missiles and drone weaponry from Iran.
Both missiles and drones manufactured in Iran and in Venezuela trying to cut apart or separate these countries. So losing Venezuela as a customer is yet another economic woe to the Iranian regime. And so this is where the whole world is watching Iran right now. Not only is the world expecting that Donald Trump is going to end up attacking Iran again with what we've seen with the KC 135 fuel tankers arriving in Hawaii, the positioning of our ships, the closing of embassies, the removal of troops from bases, which again is the same pattern we saw last time, and Donald Trump downplaying it potentially right before the strikes.
same as we saw last time. Others here say, you know, it's time to actually start considering what's really going on. Is this Donald Trump being an imperialist trying to once again meddle in other count's politics to isolate those countries? Some people say Donald Trump just doesn't want to see people die.
Others say Donald Trump is trying to cut the heads off of all the regimes that counter the United States wherever we possibly can. From Venezuela to Iran to terrorists in Gaza, specifically Hamas. Now, we'll talk about Gaza in just a moment because some counter that and say what's happening in Gaza is just abject to genocide.
But we've got problems. And while I'd like to get more insights from what's actually going on in Iran, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the FARS news agency in Iran can't be reached. The IRA can't be reached and the Tehron Times can't be reached. All of them just happen to be offline. Now, some say these are just instigators ringing up protests in the country, which may be true that there are instigators involved in protests, but the reality is the protests are happening and they probably would happen even without instigators.
The Iranian people are sick and tired of their Ayatollah and the religious regime telling them how to live their lives, telling them that everything they're doing is great and everything that America is doing is evil. yet they're the ones suffering an economic depression. It doesn't jive and the people are fed up and they've had it.
We are probably on the precipice of regime change in Iran. Israel could not be more excited. In fact, Israel is telling us right now that they are prepared to help quote bring down the regime once and for all. In a Wall Street Journal editorial uh piece, think tankers suggest the best strategy rather than striking Iran might just be to seize more oil tankers so you could continue to crush their economy.
But the reality is their economy is already crushed. So what are some potential options that the United States has? We've got a few. Number one, we could strike offensive and defensive weapons inside of Iran. striking those missile batteries or any kind of munitions facilities or factories to weaken Iran's military, not just their standing army, but the al but also specifically the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
More on them in just a moment because you could also set up for a civil war. You could also try to take out Kam, the Ayatollah. Maybe you go for a commando raid kind of like what we did with Osama bin Laden or Maduro. But there's a real risk that if we do something like that, we end up not succeeding, which is not what we want to see.
No one wants to see a failure in the Middle East. Again, had too many of those. This is why I personally believe the highest likelihood of attack that we're going to see from the United States and Israel is some kind of coordinated attack against their offensive and defensive weapon base. They'll strike the Ayatollah wherever they think he is.
They'll try to strike the heads of state and then they'll say, "We're negotiating with who's left and we're going to make Iran great again. That's good branding, but what history do we have for actually being able to pull this off?" That's the big question. So, this is where the risks come in. See, the Saudis in the Middle East are worried about a civil war in Yemen and yet another civil war across the Red Sea in Sudan.
Iran has a crap ton of missiles and drones plus about 500 kg of highlyenriched uranium 4 to 500 up to a purity of about 60%. It is highly suspected that that uranium was moved from the facilities that we struck into places like Pickax Mountain where oopsies now the Iranians have access to it. And because weapons inspectors no longer have access to Iran, we've lost track of where that highlyenriched uranium is.
A nuclear weapon takes about 15 to 20 kg of 90% enriched uranium. This suggests that Iran could generate somewhere around 5 to 15 bombs if they wanted to with the 500 kgs of highlyenriched uranium that they have. This isn't good. And this is where if the United States pops in, drops bombs or takes a president and then leaves in this case in Ayatollah, right?
What happens to the missiles, the weapons, the launchers, and the uranium if we pull the same thing off that we did in Venezuela? We're not leaving a Venezuelan state that is close to nukes headless. We are leaving a state close to nukes headless, which is a lot more risky. It's even more risky, I would argue, than what we're doing in Gaza.
In fact, you could end up with a straightup civil war in Iran where potentially the regular army ends up siding with the people against the regime. The revolutionary guard stands for the regime. The artes or the regular army stands for well typically borders and is more sort of your outside army. If the army decides to weaponize the people, the protesters, you could devolve into a real power struggle here.
if this isn't properly thought out. This is why SEB suggests that Iran could be on the brink of an IRGC dominated military dictatorship. In other words, they push out the regular army. They quell the people even more and even more rapidly. Even if the head of state is taken down, the Iranian Iranian Revolutionary Guard takes over and they end up responding decisively to their enemies, getting their hands, if they don't already have it, on that highly enriched uranium.
That would probably be the worst case scenario. But it's a risk if we don't pull this off correctly. Some say that the US would rather try to replace this religious elite in Iran with some kind of political figure maybe controlled by the CIA or United States somehow. That might be best case scenario.
But then we've also been crossing our fingers for best cases, you know, to result in, let's say, Gaza or Venezuela. And it's probably too soon to tell that we can always assume the United States is going to pull off a best case scenario in Venezuela. While Venezuela is quietly handing us 50 million barrels of oil, we don't yet know what's happening with leadership inside Venezuela to potentially combat what just happened.
They clearly condemn it. And while they're feigning interest in working with the United States, will that last? So far, our oil companies have told Trump the bad news that they're not really interested in investing in Venezuela because the investment would be too expensive given the lack of infrastructure in Venezuela.
It's Venezuela. Too soon to tell. Now, Gaza, well, Trump announced a unilateral peace plan, a 20point peace plan on September 29th. And Vitkov today, Secret announced today that we're moving into phase two from demilitarization to reconstruction, which sounds good. But wait a minute, how are we moving from demilitarization to reconstruction when the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, still maintains control of about 53% of Gaza.
And in the 100 days of the peace deal, it's estimated that 440 more Palestinians have been killed in air strikes, drone strikes, or other skirmishes, plus another 2500 2,500 buildings have been destroyed all in the last 100 days. I'm not exactly sure what kind of peace deal that is yet, but again, we could be hopeful.
We can knock on wood, but I'm not sure hope is the best strategy. After all, Gaza is still left with a population where 87% of the people lack basic essentials, 89% have no dependable water, and 77% of families have no income at all. Also, the IDF is still rebuilding roads for their people in the West Bank, pissing off the local West Bank, you know, residents as you get settler skirmishes blowing up.
Just take a look at this. This is a this is a a graphic from January 24 to August 2025, but these same issues are continuing. So the graphic is a little older but this just shows you the West Bank and it shows you where the frequency of these sort of settler attacks have been occurring. Uh and these are continuing to occur.
Uh and in red you could see where the Israeli settlements are. Israel is right here on the west. Uh and then this is the west bank which shouldn't be confused as being west of Israel. It's actually west of the river. You've heard it before right from the river to the sea. That's kind of like a saying for saying, "Oh, all of this should belong to the Palestinian people." River C, wipe out Israel.
This has really been a genocidal argument from both sides, right? The Israeli Jews say, you know, essentially the Arabs are trying to eradicate us. And on the flip side, you've got Palestinians saying, well, look at the death toll. We're the ones getting eradicated here. At the same time all this is going on, a delegate from Hamas did just meet in Iraq to discuss the next phase of the peace plan.
We haven't seen an allout war, which is good, but it's pretty clear we're still seeing substantial tensions in Gaza. So, so far where we're creating peace, we're not really seeing peace yet. There's no peace in Gaza yet, and it's way too soon to say there's peace in Venezuela. But neither of those places have the capacity for nuclear weapons and access to drones and munitions like Iran.
So this makes regime change in Iran particularly concerning. And so maybe it's no surprise that defense stocks, gold, silver, and oil are all jumping. We should take a look at this a little bit more closely. A lot of people are wondering, "Wow, why does gold and silver feel like it's going up every day?" You know, I've been talking about my belief that silver is going to hit the psychological level of $100 very soon.
Uh, and gold's probably going to head to 5,000 because not only do we have issues with our own central bank, which is a problem, but a topic for a different video, but we're also seeing geopolitical strife, which is exactly what you would expect if you're expecting potentially stagflation in the United States with geopolitical turmoil.
gold and silver start looking like really glorious investments. We're also seeing oil rise. If we jump into the international blend for oil, we can see it's up about $6 once this loads here over the last month or so. Let's zoom in here. This is the one year. You can see this spike there on the right side.
We were nicely trending down and we've rapidly shot up here from about 59.996 to about 6437 mostly because and perfectly actually in alignment here with the Iranian protests. Now what else is happening? Well, despite the fact that Donald Trump promised us no new wars, Donald Trump is doing everything in his power to prop up well frankly the US military industrial complex.
Maybe it's no surprise that Loheed Martin then is up at $570, nearly at its all-time ever highs. Rathon is also at massive new all-time highs at nearly $200 per share. Just 2 years ago, it sat at 13 of that value. And then if you look at Rin Metal, Rin Metal, the European defense contractor, just over the last year has shot up from about $700 per share, 3x to about $2,100 per share.
So clearly under Trump, we are expecting more conflict and more geopolitical uncertainty with more funding for defense contractors. This yes can create more volatility but historically geopolitical opportunities or should I say geopolitical conflicts are usually opportunities to buy the dip because anytime we've had geopolitical issues in the past they've usually outside of recessionary cycles which again topic for a different video could be buy the dip opportunities.
So we may see increases in volatility like we're already seeing in the NASDAQ or in MAG 7 stocks. For example, we jump into Tesla stock jumping back down to 433. We see the softness in, for example, Meta. Meta's been declining really since about September, October. Nvidia and AMD peaked out in October as well.
The NASDAQ peaked out October 31st. A lot of this has to do with geopolitical strife, but also of course this idea that maybe it's time to rotate to different stocks like defense stocks or small caps and that the tech trade is over. Oracle CDS is after all credit default swaps are near all-time highs uh at the second highest level that we have seen since 2008 only surpassed by some drama about two weeks ago when we hit a real peak.
So, putting all of this together, what does all of this mean? In my opinion, what this means is Donald Trump is likely going to strike Iran and punish Iran for what's happened here. If the regime collapses, we are going to have yet another part of the world with instability. And we can knock on wood and pray that it's all going to go in our way.
that every single one of these areas, Gaza, Venezuela, and Iran, end up becoming great again and become allies of the United States. Unfortunately, history doesn't agree with tha.
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