PBD Podcast
Trump's Iran Speech + $100 Oil Surge, Dollar Pressure & Fed Under Fire | PBD #768
02 Apr 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Did you ever think you would make it? I feel I'm supposed to take sweet victory. I know this life meant for me. Adam, what's your point? The future looks bright. The handshake is better than anything I ever saw. It's right here.
You are a one-on-one? My son's right there.
I don't think I've ever said this before. OK, so lots going on. We got to react to last night's speech that the president gave. We have Richard Werner here, the godfather of quantitative easing. We got Luke Roman here on macroeconomics and our microeconomics. We have Vincent Oceana here with us as well. A lot happened yesterday. Right. To give some numbers here before we get into it.
Rob, why don't you start off with the clip? Why don't you start off with the clip? on what the president said that made the futures go berserk. This is the exact moment everybody was waiting to see what the speech was going to be. Was there going to be a big announcement? Was there going to be something massive, positive? You know, the Gulf states are going to pay for the war.
What was it at the end when this comment was made? I will share with you what happened to the markets. Go ahead, Rob.
The progress we've made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America's military objectives shortly, very shortly.
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Chapter 2: What were the key points from Trump's Iran speech?
We are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages, where they belong. In the meantime, discussions are ongoing. Regime change was not our goal. We never said regime change, but regime change has occurred because of all of their original leaders' death. They're all dead.
The new group is less radical and much more reasonable. Yet, if during this period of time no deal is made, we have our eyes on key targets.
Okay, S&P futures down 1.48. Dow 1.36. Oil, gas prices right now 1.12. And 17, 112.17. It skyrocketed. While this is going on, at the same time, we're hearing a bunch of other news that took place. And that statement, Bitcoin drop, markets concerned, people are worried. What's going to be happening?
He did talk about the 4 million kids in America right now have that Trump account that's been created, which was some of the good news that he shared. But some people are even speculating that the news was so scary for some people that even the Artemis II that went to space yesterday, because of the speech, the toilet stopped working. Now, that's speculation.
I don't want you to go fact-check me on this and ask Grocker or some of these other things. But people were expecting something else. Richard, why did the market react so negatively to yesterday's speech? Well, in many ways, there was no news. There was no sort of real new announcement. And to the contrary, there was perhaps, well, there was disappointment.
For one, the time scale, the timeline stayed pretty vague. We're told, well, it's going to soon end, but we've heard that before. and the wars that are going to end soon, and they go on for a very long time thereafter. He repeated in this clip, as we saw, he's going to bomb Iran to the Stone Age from henceforth, which is a big task. It's a major country.
And actually, didn't he care about the Iranian people? Wasn't that in the beginning of the story? That's the criticism right now. So all these contradictions, and that's just typically the iceberg, I think. Luke, what do you think? First, what do you think about the speech, too? Why do you think the market reacted so aggressively to Back to Stone Ages? I think...
Exactly what Richard said were the contradictions. I mean, I received texts from institutional clients around the country. One of them said they should have called this speech stuck. Another one said this could have been an email.
But I think why the markets ultimately freaked out and then carried through on that freak out is what he said about the Strait of Hormuz and the contradiction therein, which is. He said something along the lines that it'll open up on its own eventually, naturally, maybe our allies will help us. And the contradiction within that is... But not really our allies will help us.
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Chapter 3: How did the markets react to Trump's speech?
you'd expect that there'd be somebody in Europe who said, well, hang on, hang on, what's going on? We've got to find solutions. And of course, President Trump, in his speech yesterday, did say, well, you know, okay, this is what happened. This is happening. We continue to do our job.
looking at this reform was an energy supply europe that's europe's job effectively you know he's saying so they should take care of that and if there was sort of proper leadership in europe then they could now take the necessary steps and yesterday Actually, April the 1st, there was a great message on social media saying, oh, German government announcement by the chancellor.
We're going to build 15 more nuclear power plants. We're going to rebuild the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. We're going to get energy here. We're going to change our energy policy to make sure we've got all the energy. It was an April Fool's Day joke, you know, listing sensible policies. in Europe has become an April Fool's Day joke. Can you believe it? Because this is not what Europe is saying.
So what is happening? Where is European leadership in this? They're just watching as the European economy gets decimated in a bigger scheme in which President Trump is playing a role. And you could argue he's looking after America because America is going to get a lot of demand now from the world for energy. And he said, you guys can come to us. We have unlimited supply of oil. Yeah, exactly.
And this is something that I think in the current debate still is not really discussed enough. And too few people are aware of this, including, I think, the advisors around President Trump, that essentially what happened is in the whole post-war era, Germany has never become a sovereign country. legally it's still an occupied territory.
The occupation statutes are de facto still valid and are being used by the deep state, the U.S. deep state. And, you know, there's no peace treaty in the U.N. Charter. Germany is still an enemy country. The Constitution is still suspended. It has, you know, what is done for occupied countries, only basic law.
it's not a sovereign country, and the leadership is essentially there to administer the zone for the occupation powers. And, of course, you know, it's the biggest occupation force in the world is stationed in Germany, U.S. troops, 70,000, 80,000 troops. And, of course, it's a major platform also for the Middle Eastern warfares or, you know, via Ramstein and other U.S.
bases, the CIA bases in Germany. They love it because what they do there is, unlike when they do stuff in America. In Germany, they can argue it's legal. When they do stuff here, it's technically illegal because they don't actually see it. It doesn't have the powers. It's using, as Fletcher Prouty showed in his great book, The Secret Team. And he was a critic. He was an insider.
He was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for charge of COVID operations. And And so the deep state has been using this as a power base also against President Trump early on, because in Germany they can do whatever. And as part of this agenda, the EU was created. Now, a lot of people think, well, Europe does all these great democracies. Now, with Germany, you see, it's not true.
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Chapter 4: What are the implications of energy supply cuts?
You think that kind of stuff is a possibility? It looks like that's what they want because there were so many policy decisions actually ahead of this closure of the Strait of Hormuz that already indicated that actually they want to restrict energy usage. This is who? This is you? This is the European administrators. I wouldn't say leaders because they're not really the decision makers.
Who's debating them? Who's arguing with them and disagreeing with them? Nobody's arguing with them because it's a dictatorship. They can do anything. They can put somebody in prison without legal cause. They can sanction people without legal due cause, and that's what's happening already. That's why they're cracking down on freedom of speech, this digital services act. Where do you live today?
Switzerland, spending time in Hungary as well. You feel safe there? So far, yes. But, you know, Switzerland is also under enormous pressure from the US and from the EU to cozy up to them and essentially implement whatever they are doing. There's this, you know, legal framework. Are you seeing friends and family leaving? Are you seeing friends and family leaving EU?
Well, what I see is a lot of people thinking, should we stay within the EU? There's a lot of Germans who want to move away. And also, first of all, they're sending their money out. And it's not because it's some kind of hidden money, black money or anything. No, this is post-tax official money. They just don't want the German government to, and they're talking about it, taking people's money.
That's how bad it is. So... So in other words, yes, what we see is the imposition of controls and restrictions under this excuse. It's almost as if it's welcome that the Strait of Hormuz is now being closed because these administrators in Europe who are running the show for the deep state seem to have been given the task sheet to implement controls anyway.
And it's like, oh, great, we have this fantastic excuse now. Oh, great. It's too bad we're out of kerosene now. And yeah, so now it's just, there's no choice. We have to do this. And of course they will blame it on President Trump. They will blame it on all sorts of other forces, but they love it and they're doing nothing against it. Because literally you could change the situation dramatically
President Putin has repeatedly told the Europeans, you notice that operation that was done, the terrorist attack on the Nord Stream 2, didn't completely destroy all the pipelines. There's one pipeline that is intact. We're happy to open it and deliver, even at the original price that the contract that was made was signed a long time ago, which is super cheap. You know, he said that.
What's the reaction? And essentially, they're not allowed to say yes, please. What advice would you give to President Trump today? If you're in his ear, he asks you a question, what do you tell him? You're with him, you say, hey, Richard, so what do you think I should be doing? Well, I think he should go back to what he promised the American people and what they loved him for.
You know, the things he said originally, that he doesn't want these forever wars. This one has all the makings of another forever war, you know, 20 years Afghanistan. I mean, pretty crazy. So go back to what they love you for. And I believe that's really who you are. That's what you really want. Let's all work together and get the real President Trump back. And there's things he can do.
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Chapter 5: What is the impact of AI on small and medium-sized companies?
Now, do you realize that what we're talking about here with AI replacing these big company jobs – That's entirely unsurprising, I would say, because we know there's over-employment in these big companies. But what is the percentage of companies that are listed even on any stock exchange? It's 0.01%. For sure.
99.9% of companies are small and medium-sized companies that are not listed and are likely never to be listed. Right. And also that's where the majority of employment is. And that's where we have underemployment because the small firms are always liquidity rationed. They usually can't get enough money because they don't have access to capital markets.
Chapter 6: How does employment in small firms compare to big companies?
It's mainly banks that lend to them and the number of banks going down. So we have increasingly a credit crunch affecting small firms. And that's much more important. So you can easily counterbalance The big companies always go through these phases of, okay, we're going to cut, and McKinsey comes in and they cut 10%. That's what they always do.
But that's marginal compared to if you increase employment in small firms and all you need to do there is create more banks, not reduce the number of small banks, but create more small banks. I'm totally with you. I don't think what I'm saying is not against the solution. I'm not against it, and I know the numbers because when I go back, right now, 46%, 45% of Americans work for a small business.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of rising unemployment in high-earning jobs?
Well, you could even say it's more than that, depending on the definition. Sure. Let's just say the definition this is using by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is 45% small business today. Of all employees, work for a small business. Everybody here works for a small business. 50 years ago, it was 60%. 70 years ago, it was 65%. Okay, so what is it doing? The bigger companies are employing more.
The smaller ones are being picked up or whatever. They're going out of business, right? My argument isn't your solution is a bad solution. My argument is why would the people in power and the billionaires not want that? Why would they not want others to create small businesses? The answer is what Luke earlier said. It's about power and control.
Barrier to entry, to have more control, to not allow somebody else to come in to help. To maximize profits. Essentially... These billionaires, they love the central planning because they think they can be the central planners. It's about power. They want to control things, which is actually a betrayal of the American dream of individual freedom. Yeah.
I mean, and this AI thing, to your point, if you're shrinking the banks while you're doing this, because I agree with you, Patrick, which is – There's an order of operations. I agree with what Andreessen's saying, and I found that a lot of the sort of tech billionaire class like Andreessen, they are brilliant, and they also, I think they're a bit disconnected from...
the reality of how this has gone. I live in Cleveland. I live in the US Rust Belt.
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Chapter 8: How is the U.S. national debt connected to current economic policies?
I saw, for me, my working mental model of what AI is going to do to these white collar jobs is what China did to these blue collar jobs, which is to say, A lot of what Andreessen said is exactly what the politicians and the billionaire class were saying about NAFTA and about China going into the WTO.
And from the time China entered the WTO in December of 01, by 08, 09, the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States had dropped by almost 35%. and they never came back, right? So there's an element of... For sure they're not going to come back. Never coming back. You're not going to bring that back. And so there's this assumption of essentially teaching old dogs new tricks, right?
And number one, it's hard to teach old dogs new tricks. You get to 50, 55 years old, it's hard to re-skill. Unless if your name is Tom Ellsworth, because Tom Ellsworth is an exception. Yeah, exception to the rule, of course. There are always exceptions. And so... And he would be even offended. I called him an old dog. Please.
The challenge is this order of operations, the point you made, Patrick, which is... these people took on mortgage loans. They took on car loans. Student loans are less of an issue because they're owed to the government. They can be forgiven. In extremists, they probably wouldn't be, but that's a separate discussion.
But basically, our entire credit-based system is not prepared for a deflationary impulse, a productivity driver, the magnitude of AI. In 38 of 50 U.S. states, the New York Times reported last year, the single biggest employer in the United States is health care. 35 years ago, it was manufacturing. It's health care now. And these aren't doctors and nurses. These are health care.
What's your point? Health care administrators are one of the biggest jobs. So AI is uniquely suited to driving high unemployment among health care administrators. These are good-paying jobs. These are people that have never had to think about what the blue-collar guy has, which is, wow, my job might go to China. Up until two, three years ago, a health care administrator.
What's the average salary on that? Health care administrator, right? What is that? Give me a high low of a health care administrator salary. I bet you it's 80 to 120, let's say. It's not a bad number. You're pretty spot on.
94 to 120.
By the way, and the top earners. make 150 to 200. So you could make it up to a, okay, so you're saying AI is going to replace these guys. These types of jobs, it's very easy to do. And again, if you have the, there's no social safety net big enough. They're going to fall into default on their mortgage loans, possibly. They're certainly, and you can already see that delinquencies and defaults on
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