The Munk Debates Podcast
Friday Focus: Iran's window of maximum leverage and a new AI model puts financial systems at risk
01 May 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the current state of the U.S.-Iran relations regarding the Strait of Hormuz?
So this really becomes who blinks first, right? This is the highest game of high stakes poker for the whole world because nobody in the world will be immune to the consequences of this.
Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast for the 1st of May, 2026. I'm Roger Griffiths, bringing spring flowers in Janice Gross-Stein, my co-host, who is laboring under a spring cold. These are the worst, Janice. You know, you go through winter dodging viruses right and left, and then you're in the homestretch, baseball's underway, you're a big baseball fan, and you got a cold.
So all of our sympathies go out to you.
We should be done with all this, Roger. We should be done with cloudy weather and rain and cold. But it is me, the first. Revolution Day.
And how are you feeling about your beloved Jays this year?
You obviously hesitate there. The best way to put it is I remain relentlessly optimistic. They have been felled with a bunch of injuries. The team has not had a fair chance yet to show what it can do. And I am confident.
Okay, well, unlikely fans who are watching the first round of games in the Stanley Cup. One Canadian team left, the Habs. We lost the Oilers last night. I don't know, Janice, if we go through to round two of the Stanley Cup with no Canadian teams, dark days, dark days ahead.
What do you think? What do you think about a trophy for just Canadian teams to end this drought?
Maybe.
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Chapter 2: How is the upcoming U.S. midterm election influencing Iran's strategy?
What can I say to that, Roger, except it's really hard to play hockey in Colorado when the oxygen is so thin in the air that when you rush down the ice, you gasp.
Let's talk about gasping, maybe gasping for air in terms of oxygen to keep this ceasefire alive. Do you like that transition? I really used a lot of alliteration there to get us from hockey to... Really smooth. Yeah, it was an effort. It was an effort, trust me. What's happening here, Janice? It seems this week like positions are hardening. We heard from the Supreme Leader.
of Iran a pretty emphatic statement that the nuclear program is not on the negotiating table at this point. and that the Straits of Hormuz remain, in Iranian eyes, a critical deterrent for the country going forward vis-a-vis the risks of more strikes, more attacks.
The president, on the other hand, doing what the president does, which is kind of all over the map, but I think trending towards, again, some more bellicose language. So I know you are feeling a bit down this week. Maybe you can tell us why.
I think we are locked right here in a long-term stalemate. There's no quick way out here because neither party really wants a quick way out. There is a way out. I mean, the Iranians could say, open the straits, we'll both do it, and then we'll start negotiating right away about the nuclear program. And that would probably be enough for Donald Trump. But
You know, it really is telling Ruddard how strongly they feel about that program and how they take enrichment, the right to enrichment, off the table relentlessly. And this has been the story for, frankly, the last 20 years on and off, except the period when we had the Obama Agreement. So it taps a nerve inside Iran. And we could speculate why, but it really does.
So if you think about this, if this race stays closed another three weeks when the summer season finally starts and people start taking vacations, it's going to hit home. because gas at the pump will be higher. Flights are going to be canceled because of jet fuel. People are really going to start to feel it at the public level.
And we are at the point, Rudyard, if there's not an agreement very quickly, there is a real possibility of tipping into a global recession. We've missed the spring planting season in much of the global south.
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Chapter 3: What are the potential consequences of a closed Strait of Hormuz?
That one's gone already. And so the consequences of this are getting much more serious as the two parties are digging in. That's not a good story, frankly.
Yeah, there are elements, a word we often use on this podcast, polycrisis. You're seeing a huge drought opening up across the U.S. plains. We've seen record temperatures across India, parts of South Asia. Climate is stalking in the background. I've seen recent reports this week that fertilizer prices in a lot of the developed South have doubled in cost.
So imagine that in terms of the yield there. for whatever harvest can be planted. There's talk maybe of a significant El Nino event in the works. We'll know more about that in the coming months. But Janice, it just seems like neither protagonist here, the United States or Iran, is looking down the pipe, so to speak, beyond what I guess is the next couple of weeks. So Why is that?
Why does, on one hand, the president believe that he seemingly can wait Iran out? There's a lot of talk about Iranian oil production running out of storage. And then if they have to shut in their wells, that could do permanent damage to their energy industry. The president seems to be putting a lot of hope.
But the Iranians have talked about the three M's, markets, munitions, and midterm elections as the primary vulnerabilities that this president faces. It's hard. I don't sympathize with the Iranians at all, but it's hard not to.
think that they must be thinking that their maximum leverage is now, that after the midterms, or even as we get closer to the midterms, if the president feels that he can't turn the midterms around, then his attitudes towards Iran and his actions may subsequently change.
But the next few weeks, extending into the next month or so, this, Janice, similarly must be, from an Iranian point of view, the window of maximum leverage.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Rudyard. You have in both places, in Iran and in the United States, the sense that time is in their favor, right? Each side feels time is in their favor and therefore no urgency to get this done. Paradoxically, all the pressure that Donald Trump is under, and I think he is under pressure from his own party, And the midterm says, and that's real.
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Chapter 4: What is the significance of Iran's nuclear program in the current negotiations?
He's doubled down and telling me, no, no, no, I'm not under pressure. I can wait this out. You just made a strong argument why Tehran would wait this out, unless I had one other factor that is becoming increasingly clear now, that the real hardliners are in power now. in Tehran.
You know, the Speaker of the National Assembly, Ghalib Afu, is more pragmatic, functionally sidelined, possessive, and the president doesn't matter. And the Supreme Leader, injured, not very much power, and the hardest of hardliners, Vahidi, who is a Commander of the Revolutionary Guards really making most of the decisions and easy to get a consensus there. So this is the worst recipe.
What's going to puncture that budget? Well, it could become apparent to Donald Trump that the political fallout will be so bad that for his party in the midterms that he swerves. And you and I know that's not the first time we've seen that with him. The Iranians are under real pressure, too. They are not able to export oil. Yes, they're not landlocked.
And you can open landlines to get to other ports.
Trains to China.
Trains. Yeah. And that's not insignificant. But boy, that economy isn't tattered. And there are leaked intelligence reports. How much weight would you put on this, Roger? I don't know. But there are leaked intelligence reports. that the population, particularly in the city of Tehran, is becoming so angry and so desperate because you're seeing the ruination entirely of the middle class.
They're impoverished. You know, people are not are not working. There's no functioning economy. People are this.
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Chapter 5: How does the new AI model Mythos pose risks to financial systems?
It's really interesting because some of the pictures, you know, people are going out to restaurants. And why are they doing that? Because this is the last bit of money they have. And so that incentive to save is gone. because the economic situation inside around the economy is so bad. So this really becomes who blinks first, right?
This is the highest game of high-stakes poker for the whole world, because nobody in the world will be immune to the consequences of this.
Yeah. I think the DNR, the Iranian DNR to the dollar, $1.8 million just this week, an all-time. an all-time low, so hyperinflation has effectively set in.
Yeah. When's the last time we saw something like this? In the 30s. In the 20s, more accurately, in Germany, when people would bring wheelbarrows of cash with them.
Yeah. So as we wrap up this, the complimentary front half of Friday Focus, what do you give the odds that one or both sides reverts to force to break out of this stalemate? Because you could see potentially two scenarios. One, that the blockade, I mean, Iran this week already seems to be telegraphing that they considered the blockade an act of war and that a state of war has continued.
That seems like a bit of pre-positioning on their part, possibly, to try to break out of the blockade. On the other hand, the Americans have indicated that they've deployed Their untested hypersonic missiles, Central Command said those missiles are going into the region in order to provide greater strike depth into Iran.
The president has supposedly been briefed on a kind of strike package that would not be his strum and drang of destroying Iranian civilization, but insteadā but nonetheless not insignificant attacks on Iranian bridges and infrastructure. So it seems like both sides are contemplating plan B actively.
What do you give the potential weighting of that scenario, a plan B scenario where one or both sides decides this is enough, the situation is intransigent, and we're going to act?
Well, you can never rule it out, Richard. And you can't rule out military action. And I don't believe you can bomb your way out of this, either side. You really cannot.
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Chapter 6: What vulnerabilities does the Mythos AI model exploit?
You know, I've been saying for... Two months now, the only way out is some kind of negotiated solution. You cannot bomb your way out of this. And does that mean that one or the other won't try? Just for the reason that you mentioned, Roger, this is lose-lose. Both sides are losing. Iran is, believe it or not, a big loser. It's a loser in its relationship with the Gulf.
It's losing in terms of its capacity to restructure an economy, its oil fields. are on the verge of experiencing significant damage. I don't have to tell you why the United States is losing. So what do you do sometimes? The worst possible thing, you're frustrated, you lash out in order to break the stalemate.
And nobody knows, in all honesty, I don't think, anybody that tells you they know, don't believe, because you have to get inside Donald Trump's head, and who can do that? And even more opaque and more difficult is to get inside now of Vahidi's head, inside Tara, and understand what kind of calculation he'll make. So no one knows.
Okay, let's say goodbye to our complimentary listeners and viewers. Before we do that, though, remind them that next week the public on-sale for the remaining tickets to the May ā monk debate on do not go hunting monsters, a famous quote by John Quincy Adams that a generation of Americans have either chosen to listen to or not.
We're going to debate that on the main stage, 3,000 people gathering in downtown Toronto. Mike Pompeo, former head of the CIA and Secretary of State under the first Trump administration, joined by Victoria Nuland, one of the America's most seasoned and experienced diplomats who played a major role in Ukraine in the years leading up to and after the war.
And on the other side, Stephen Waltz and John Mearsheimer, two wise, thoughtful, considered thinkers on why America might be better off stepping back from the world and not leaning in as hard as it has over the last few decades. So we've got all that debate information for you on our website, www.monkmunk.com. DebatesWithAnS.com, lots of different ticket prices.
We will be offering people 25 and under a $25 ticket because the Monk Foundation, the Monk family are committed to exposing younger audiences to the art of civil and substantive debate.
So
Look for those promo codes on the website next week and head over to Meridian Hall in Toronto in the box office to get your seats before they're gone.
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Chapter 7: How can the lessons from social media inform our approach to AI?
I'm Roger Griffiths. Thanks for listening to this. The complimentary first half of Friday Focus will now join with our Monk donors after this short break. Thank you. exclusive live streams of our main stage debates and all kinds of other great perks and privileges. Simply go to our website, www.monkdebates.com. That's M-U-N-K, debates with an S dot com.
Click on the join button on the top right hand corner of the screen. Again, that website, www.monkdebates.com. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating.
Thank you again for listening.