Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Authoughts podcast.
Speaker 2: I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 2: Joe, do you ever experience a sudden surge in geopolitical
Speaker 2: analysis emails in your inbox?
Speaker 3: Yes, I do. You know, it's funny most years, people like, oh,
Speaker 3: what do you you know at the beginning of the year,
Speaker 3: end of the year, things are going good, and it's like,
Speaker 3: what are you concerned about?
Speaker 4: It?
Speaker 3: Like, I'm concerned about geopolitical tension. It's just one of
Speaker 3: these cliches, A classic as a classic, That's what I
Speaker 3: always say when I have no it's like, well, thanks
Speaker 3: to fine, but I'm concerned. But in some years, clearly
Speaker 3: geopolitical tension, war, et cetera is very real. We recently
Speaker 3: saw the bombing in both directions between Israel and Iran.
Speaker 3: It seems to be paused for now, but sometimes geopolitical
Speaker 3: attention becomes outright geopolitical hostility.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was definitely one of those weeks when we
Speaker 2: both got a lot of emails. Yes, I have a
Speaker 2: confession to make, which is I read all of those
Speaker 2: geopolitical analyzes, but I always kind of wonder what I'm
Speaker 2: supposed to do with that information. You know, if I
Speaker 2: were a major professional investor, if I'm reading a note
Speaker 2: about what is the base case for like Iran versus Israel,
Speaker 2: I am not entirely sure how that influences my own
Speaker 2: decision making.
Speaker 3: Well, I would say I would take it even a
Speaker 3: step backwards and say, like, you know, when we talked
Speaker 3: to Wall Street analysts, say a FED forecaster, I have
Speaker 3: a sort of I think, intuitive understanding of how they
Speaker 3: e They're like, oh, there's going to be three cuts
Speaker 3: in the next year, and then I generally have a
Speaker 3: sort of intuitive understanding of how they might arrive at that. Okay,
Speaker 3: we look at statements from the FED about what they're
Speaker 3: looking for in terms of achieving disinflation. We look at
Speaker 3: the trajectory of the US economy, and then we say, okay,
Speaker 3: we combine the FED statement, their sensitivity, etc. The reaction
Speaker 3: function that's the term I'm looking for, with the data,
Speaker 3: and then we arrive at a forecast. When it comes
Speaker 3: to something like a war, I do not really have
Speaker 3: an intuitive understanding of how the geostrategic or geopolitical analysts
Speaker 3: whose notes flutter inboxes from time to time, always during
Speaker 3: bad periods. How do they arrive at conclusions? Therefore, X,
Speaker 3: we think the war is going to end this way.
Speaker 3: I do not know how that can be done systematically,
Speaker 3: and yet people.
Speaker 2: Try, and actually some of them put numbers probabilities on
Speaker 2: specific outcomes. So I think if I was a geopolitical analyst,
Speaker 2: I would just put thirty percent chance on everything that
Speaker 2: seems reasonable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So it used to be that if you were
Speaker 3: unsure but wanted to sound smart, you say sixty forty,
Speaker 3: But these days you say seventy thirty. Seventy thirty is
Speaker 3: the new sixty forty.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's right.
Speaker 3: But I you know, I don't want to be cynical
Speaker 3: about it. I am curious about how one could derive
Speaker 3: a number from things that seem wildly uncertain and rare,
Speaker 3: because there are not a lot of event studies, and
Speaker 3: every war is distinct, and therefore the idea of trying
Speaker 3: to accurately assess the outcome of some conflict strikes me
Speaker 3: as very difficult. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, I am very pleased to say that we do,
Speaker 2: in fact have the perfect guests to talk about geopolitical
Speaker 2: analysis and how it actually is calculated. I guess are created.
Speaker 2: We are going to speak with Andrew Bishop. He is
Speaker 2: a senior partner and global head of Policy research at
Speaker 2: Signum Global Advisors. So Andrew, welcome to the show.
Speaker 4: Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Why don't we just start with what is Signum?
Speaker 4: So?
Speaker 5: Signum is a political and geopolitical risk advisory firm that
Speaker 5: was founded in twenty eighteen by a gentleman named Charles Myers,
Speaker 5: who was the vice chairman of Evercore i I before
Speaker 5: founding Signam. And Charles had a career in banking with
Speaker 5: a focus on emerging markets, but was always sort of
Speaker 5: one foot in US politics as a fundraiser, as an
Speaker 5: advisor to candidates, et cetera. And he founded Signam essentially
Speaker 5: to try to meld his instincts about how markets work
Speaker 5: with his knowledge about US politics, and from there he
Speaker 5: hired me to help build out the sort of global
Speaker 5: analysis beyond the US.
Speaker 3: So I think I started first becoming aware of your
Speaker 3: commentary recently because Ozon Tarman, who we've had on the podcast,
Speaker 3: over at the Deutsche Bank, he started forwarding some of
Speaker 3: your notes over and so then I started reading this
Speaker 3: stuff and it was like very interesting and compelling. Well,
Speaker 3: why don't you tell us? Okay, you explained what SIGNAM is.
Speaker 3: What's your background? How do you develop an expertise in
Speaker 3: these areas?
Speaker 5: So I joined SIGNAM from the Eurasia Group, which is
Speaker 5: sort of the founding house of political risk. I was
Speaker 5: there for four years. I first joined Eurasia because I'd
Speaker 5: met Ian Bremmer through a previous job at the World
Speaker 5: of Comic Forum. So the DAVS organization and I joined
Speaker 5: as sort of right hand man to their chairman, Cliff Cupchin,
Speaker 5: who really taught me a lot in that firm.
Speaker 4: In that role, I ended up.
Speaker 5: As deputy head of research, and several of the things
Speaker 5: that I learned from Cliff, or for example, not getting
Speaker 5: overly excited by every new headline, right so I think,
Speaker 5: especially when you're at the beginning of good advice for everyone. Yes,
Speaker 5: I mean to me, the best example of that is
Speaker 5: the zero hedge type headline about how the first gas
Speaker 5: contract was denominated or settled the euro instead of dollar,
Speaker 5: you know, or just the bricks more generally. I started
Speaker 5: working when I was twenty two. I'm thirty nine now.
Speaker 5: The bricks have had a glorious future for you know,
Speaker 5: almost twenty years, so that was one of the things.
Speaker 5: The other thing that I learned from Cliff was good analysis,
Speaker 5: Like basically the key is to have a rigorous and
Speaker 5: analytical process, and even if you get the call wrong,
Speaker 5: it's better to have good analysis and a call wrong
Speaker 5: rather than the other way around, right, because otherwise you
Speaker 5: could just be throwing darts and you'd be getting elects,
Speaker 5: you know, fifty percent right half the time, right, which,
Speaker 5: by the way, gets to this question of what you
Speaker 5: mentioned on the probabilities. It's actually harder than just throwing
Speaker 5: darts or or flipping a coin because most situations have
Speaker 5: far more than two scenarios, right, So it really is
Speaker 5: a very very difficult thing to do to predict all
Speaker 5: geopolitical outcomes, which which I'm sure we'll get to, but
Speaker 5: just to close off on, you know, sort of background,
Speaker 5: I joined Eurasia from the World Economic Form and the
Speaker 5: job I had there was really fun because essentially, you know,
Speaker 5: the organization is best known for Davos, but the team
Speaker 5: I was in, which was their Global Risk team, basically
Speaker 5: send their team members throughout most frontier and emerging markets
Speaker 5: to meet with government officials get a sense of where
Speaker 5: their head was at in terms of their country's sort
Speaker 5: of economic future, future economic policies, et cetera. Then meet
Speaker 5: with the opposition and the business community and think tank community,
Speaker 5: and essentially write up scenarios about the future of that
Speaker 5: country at a sort of ten to twenty year outlook,
Speaker 5: not trying to get it right, not trying to predict it,
Speaker 5: but trying to essentially force the country to think twice
Speaker 5: about his business model. As you can imagine, a lot
Speaker 5: of these were resource dependent countries and that led to
Speaker 5: some pretty interesting situations. Like one of the projects we
Speaker 5: worked on, for example, was about the future of Ukraine,
Speaker 5: and that was in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, so the
Speaker 5: project was literally interrupted by the Maidan Revolution. Half the
Speaker 5: people on the board of the project and half the
Speaker 5: people we'd interviewed were, you know, either fleeing or put
Speaker 5: in prison. And I remember we were doing a panel
Speaker 5: to actually introduce parts of the findings in Davos, and
Speaker 5: the Prime Minister of Ukraine his plane was he was
Speaker 5: basically disinvited on the day that the panel was taking place,
Speaker 5: so his plain was circling over Zurich, not being allowed
Speaker 5: to land, not being allowed into the room, you know,
Speaker 5: similarly we had back then.
Speaker 4: He was an MP.
Speaker 5: Petro Borshenko, who later became the leader of the country,
Speaker 5: smuggled in a grenade from the Madan Revolutions into the
Speaker 5: conference hall and sort of held it up to show
Speaker 5: how the brutality of the regime was working. So it
Speaker 5: was a really great way to get first hand exposure
Speaker 5: to to frontier markets.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is definitely first hand exposure. I'm not sure
Speaker 2: how I would feel being in a conference room or
Speaker 2: like a big hall with a grenade. I'm hoping it
Speaker 2: wasn't live, but who knows. Okay, Andrew, one thing I
Speaker 2: wanted to ask, and I alluded to it in the intro,
Speaker 2: is when I get your research nodes, if I am
Speaker 2: a typical client of Signum, what exactly am I doing
Speaker 2: with that information? Why do I want to get this analysis?
Speaker 5: So first thing is about sixty sixty five percent of
Speaker 5: our clients are financial investors, right that Joe mentioned or
Speaker 5: alluded to about thirty five percent or so our corporates,
Speaker 5: and they obviously use this in very different ways, which
Speaker 5: I'll get into. But I think the first topic that
Speaker 5: you all sort of touched on is this idea, you know,
Speaker 5: there's there's a lot of studies that show that you
Speaker 5: have political risks just don't affect markets, right, like, who
Speaker 5: really cares. Frankly, oil's pretty much flat from pre Israel
Speaker 5: Iron War Viks barely picked up. You know, SMP's at
Speaker 5: all time highs et cetera. Obviously I have a you know,
Speaker 5: a bias or I'm rooting for my home team here,
Speaker 5: but I think that that's a little bit short sighted
Speaker 5: for a few reasons. One is, most of these studies
Speaker 5: typically look at S and P in the long term,
Speaker 5: and our clients obviously are not trading the S and
Speaker 5: P in the long term, right, They're trading in the
Speaker 5: short term, and you've got some pretty violent, sharp moves
Speaker 5: up and down for a lot of these assets. And
Speaker 5: they're also trading obviously more niche assets. So I'm thinking
Speaker 5: of the tribal and tourism industry, or I'm thinking of
Speaker 5: the oil and gas industry is rarely shekel, you know,
Speaker 5: things that are far more niche, and if you look
Speaker 5: at it at that level, you've got some major major
Speaker 5: volatility that can be both beneficial or negative depending on
Speaker 5: how good you're at playing it, which is really what
Speaker 5: are our clients are specialists and we're not strategists. We
Speaker 5: don't give investment advice based on the jeblical research we
Speaker 5: put out. The other thing is there's this big, you know,
Speaker 5: talking point, and it was true again last month. There
Speaker 5: were two weeks ago whenever the Israeli ron war ended,
Speaker 5: there's sort of this like oil collapses, right, And that's
Speaker 5: a counterintuitive outcome. A lot of our clients were actually
Speaker 5: expecting that, and so what they were trying to figure
Speaker 5: out was when is this going to end or not end?
Speaker 5: But when is it going to culminate?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 5: When is going to be the peak fear level? And
Speaker 5: that's probably going to be when Iran retaliates for whatever
Speaker 5: the US does. So again, the fact that it actually
Speaker 5: drops on the news is not necessarily surprising to most
Speaker 5: of the folks we speak to. Patreca, you want me
Speaker 5: to get into a little bit how the clients use us?
Speaker 2: Yes, that would be great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, so there's a few ways.
Speaker 5: The first, and I would say least often and least
Speaker 5: sort of savvy or useful way is for the predictions themselves. Right,
Speaker 5: So what I'm saying is basically, most clients don't use
Speaker 5: us for the actual outcome prediction. It's better if we
Speaker 5: get it right. But if they were only going to
Speaker 5: use us for that, they could probably go to prediction markets, right.
Speaker 5: I think their prediction markets are a little bit overestimated
Speaker 5: these days, which we can get into, but they're not bad, right, Yeah,
Speaker 5: So that's not the main reason. The main reason that
Speaker 5: the way that a client put it to me, and
Speaker 5: this was years ago and it stuck, is like they're
Speaker 5: an F one driver and we're helping them on the
Speaker 5: sort of you know the training tracks right like on
Speaker 5: the on the training loops before the actual race, to
Speaker 5: literally memorize every single turn and know when they can accelerate,
Speaker 5: when they've got to cut a corner, et cetera, so
Speaker 5: that when the events start unfolding, they're already prepared to
Speaker 5: you know, hit the brakes or accelerate depending on what's happening.
Speaker 5: The difference here, of course, is that the track is
Speaker 5: not fixed. But the point is, you know, in a
Speaker 5: situation like Israel Iran, you've got multiple calls, right or
Speaker 5: multiple call basically just means prediction. You've got multiple situations.
Speaker 5: So you've got is Israel going to strike, then you've
Speaker 5: got the question. Okay, so we know they're striking, it's
Speaker 5: all over Twitter, et cetera. Is this a shot across
Speaker 5: the bow or is this the big one? Is the
Speaker 5: US actually going to get involved after twelve hours? Is
Speaker 5: Iron going to retaliate forcefully or in a you know,
Speaker 5: some bolock way. Is this war going to last three
Speaker 5: days or is it going to last three weeks? Is
Speaker 5: the US going to get involved at that point?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 5: And so on and so forth. And so they're not,
Speaker 5: like most clients, don't expect us to get every single
Speaker 5: one of those calls right. I mean, that would be insane.
Speaker 5: What they want is for us to lay out arguments
Speaker 5: that are not necessarily just convincing, but that help them
Speaker 5: do the mental gymnastics around all the possible outcomes, and then,
Speaker 5: of course is better if you get it right.
Speaker 3: Wait, I have a very short quick question. Do you
Speaker 3: see anyone in your clients who are actually in the
Speaker 3: prediction markets looking for opportunity there yet because some of
Speaker 3: these are getting to be big sized, or do you
Speaker 3: see this as a future growth area for you? People
Speaker 3: looking for mispriced contracts on the prediction markets.
Speaker 4: So you mean clients that would actually be putting on trades.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you say there's forty percent of X happening, the
Speaker 3: prediction market is sixty percent. Maybe there's an opportunity anyone
Speaker 3: doing that yet.
Speaker 5: So short answer is that I'm aware of NOK and
Speaker 5: the main reason is still liquidity, despite the fact that
Speaker 5: it's getting bigger.
Speaker 4: As you say.
Speaker 5: What's really interesting, of course, is that that with this
Speaker 5: intermediate the market's reaction function.
Speaker 3: So I'm looking back at a note. This is just
Speaker 3: a random one that I'm found in my inbox, but
Speaker 3: there were several that I read in July. Oh sorry,
Speaker 3: Jane June. By the way, I should say we were
Speaker 3: recording this on July first, and given that the world
Speaker 3: is an uncertain place by the time this episode comes
Speaker 3: and I don't know the exact date, who knows what's
Speaker 3: going to happen by the time you're listening to this.
Speaker 3: But I'm reading a June sixteenth note, and you gave
Speaker 3: these odds twenty percent preemptive Iranian capitulation, forty five percent
Speaker 3: Israeli mission accomplished, followed by Iranian capitulation, twenty five percent
Speaker 3: chance US intervention, and ten percent Iranian nuclear breakout. Surprise.
Speaker 3: Why do you go give us through your thinking in
Speaker 3: the middle of June, how you arrived at some of
Speaker 3: these numbers, and then, given where we are today on
Speaker 3: July first, how did you do or what surprised you
Speaker 3: or what didn't surprise you to talk about sort of
Speaker 3: where you were then and where you are in it.
Speaker 5: So the first thing is Tracy was asking about how
Speaker 5: do we ascribe probabilities? And there's I could give you
Speaker 5: a fancy answer about Monte Carlo simulations, et cetera.
Speaker 4: But the reality is neither we, nor as far.
Speaker 5: As i'm where anyone in the sort of market actually
Speaker 5: models this stuff, and the few that do use predictive
Speaker 5: analytics rather than historical data. And the reason is there
Speaker 5: just aren't that many case studies to go off of, right,
Speaker 5: So let's just get that out of the way.
Speaker 4: So the way we.
Speaker 5: Use probabilities, and I'll absolutely answer your question about the
Speaker 5: that specific case study in a second, but there are
Speaker 5: three main ways that I think the probabilities can be useful.
Speaker 5: The first is if you're drawing out scenario trees and
Speaker 5: you're assigning you know, before you publish, right, you're assigning
Speaker 5: probabilities to various sub events before getting to the total
Speaker 5: cumulative outcome. Basically, if the math doesn't add up, that
Speaker 5: can highlight a p in your logic. Right, it's not
Speaker 5: a math problem. Who cares if the math doesn't add
Speaker 5: up from a mathematical standpoint, But if you end up
Speaker 5: with above one hundred or below one hundred or whatever,
Speaker 5: that means that you're probably overstating one aspect of the
Speaker 5: dynamic or understating another.
Speaker 4: That's one.
Speaker 5: A second that can be quite interesting and problem you know,
Speaker 5: not problematic, but useful for the user is clustering.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: So we had a recent scenario or recent situation with
Speaker 5: an election, I think it was in Uruguay where the
Speaker 5: base case was perhaps market constructive, but if you aggregated
Speaker 5: all the non base case scenarios, you actually had a
Speaker 5: more likely outcome of a market negative bottom line.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 4: So that's those are a few of the ways.
Speaker 5: Now, the way that I would approach a situation like
Speaker 5: the Israeli ra on one is basically break it down
Speaker 5: into an equation. So if you're trying to answer the
Speaker 5: question is the US going to intervene in the war
Speaker 5: and bomb for it?
Speaker 4: Out right?
Speaker 5: To me, the odds of that would be start with
Speaker 5: one hundred, and then you take out whatever the odds
Speaker 5: are that Iran is going to capitulate at the diplomatic table.
Speaker 5: So you know, we can talk about how you can
Speaker 5: come up with that view, but the idea is, are
Speaker 5: the Iranians going to take the diplomatic off ramp that
Speaker 5: Trump is giving them on that Friday? Geneva Right, So
Speaker 5: those odds might be low, but they're not zero, So
Speaker 5: you get to say twenty percent. Now that leaves you
Speaker 5: with eighty percent of that The question becomes is Israel
Speaker 5: going to.
Speaker 4: Basically finish the job on its own? Right?
Speaker 2: I e.
Speaker 5: Can the Israelis destroy for it out on their own,
Speaker 5: either through bombing without the most advanced bunker busters or
Speaker 5: through a ground operation like they conducted in Syria the
Speaker 5: previous November, which is something that I and a few
Speaker 5: others had on their radar. And if they can't, then
Speaker 5: presumably the President will intervene. Right now, you were asking
Speaker 5: about scoring myself. That's a perfect example. Those odds get
Speaker 5: you below fifty percent of US intervention. You, on top
Speaker 5: of that have to add the fact that the president
Speaker 5: might want to intervene even if he doesn't have to,
Speaker 5: right because you might see political opportunity and being associated
Speaker 5: with a victory. And that's the part that in this instance,
Speaker 5: for example, I'd underestimated. Now where it gets really interesting,
Speaker 5: and I'll stop here. What gets really interesting is even
Speaker 5: if your take is that the president is actually not
Speaker 5: dying to get involved and that he doesn't really see
Speaker 5: this as a big opportunity, and you therefore only ascribe it,
Speaker 5: you know, whatever thirty percent odds, you're still going to
Speaker 5: end up above fifty percent overall. So that can tell
Speaker 5: you that, because there's so many ways of getting to
Speaker 5: an outcome, you can get tipped over fifty without it
Speaker 5: being your modal scenario. I'm same with odds of regime change.
Speaker 5: You can get regime change through palace coup, you can
Speaker 5: get regime changed through Israeli bombing, you can get regime
Speaker 5: changed through a revolution. Our base case was that there
Speaker 5: would be no regime change in Iran, and I think
Speaker 5: that's that's what played out so far. But the point
Speaker 5: is you've got to compound all those odds because they
Speaker 5: are independent variables.
Speaker 2: Okay, you have the probabilities. I get that. The way
Speaker 2: you just laid it out was very clear, But how
Speaker 2: do you actually come up with, I guess the range
Speaker 2: of scenarios because that's what seems practically unlimited nowadays. And
Speaker 2: also you mentioned Trump just then. In Trump World, I
Speaker 2: kind of feel like anything is possible, right, Like there
Speaker 2: are a lot more tail risks out there that now
Speaker 2: seem plausible in various ways. How do you take into
Speaker 2: account the unpredictability of anything can happen? And then how
Speaker 2: do you actually confine yourself to This is a set
Speaker 2: of realistic scenarios that I'm going to talk about.
Speaker 5: So first thing I'd say is, to me, that's one
Speaker 5: of the reasons why prediction markets aren't that useful yet,
Speaker 5: and especially to clients. They can actually be ironically more
Speaker 5: useful I think, to the analyst than to the recipient
Speaker 5: or user of the final product.
Speaker 4: And what I mean by that.
Speaker 5: Is the prediction markets will tell you where the tariff
Speaker 5: level is going to end up on July thirty first, right,
Speaker 5: But what if the cutoff that's relevant is not July
Speaker 5: thirty first. What if it's you know, a completely different
Speaker 5: date because Trump is visiting. Like let's say that it's
Speaker 5: a ceasefire in Gaza and the cutoff date is Trump's
Speaker 5: visit to Saudi Arabia or whatever. So the point is
Speaker 5: the rigidity of the prediction markets, and it's a trade off,
Speaker 5: right because the reason they do that way is so
Speaker 5: that they can be easily falsifiable and you can compare predictions,
Speaker 5: et cetera. But that rigidity, I think narrows the value.
Speaker 5: So then to your question on how do you even
Speaker 5: frame the issue. That's a major problem for Trump tariff situations. Indeed,
Speaker 5: so if you take July eight for example, you can't
Speaker 5: really and you know, we've struggled with this everyone does.
Speaker 5: It's hard to make a call on whether he is
Speaker 5: going to escalate or postpone his deadline because there are
Speaker 5: sixty countries involved. So first of all, you theoretically would
Speaker 5: have to make sixty individual calls, right or predictions. Second
Speaker 5: thing is what if he says, you know, we're escalating
Speaker 5: the tariffs but they're kicking in on July fifteenth, is
Speaker 5: that a punt or is that him at actually having
Speaker 5: increased the arras and so on and so forth. So,
Speaker 5: I mean, the short answer, Tracy is there is no
Speaker 5: perfect way of doing it. And that's actually been one
Speaker 5: of the issues with Trump, is that framing the initial
Speaker 5: question is almost as hard as predicting his behavior. Trade
Speaker 5: ironically is one of those situations though that we've had
Speaker 5: a pretty good track record with. So I'm happy to
Speaker 5: talk a little bit about how we've tried to like
Speaker 5: get into Trump's brain if you want, please, Yeah. So
Speaker 5: there are a few things. So the first is you
Speaker 5: can observe patterns. Right, So Robert Armstrong had sort of
Speaker 5: this huge success with the taco label that was amazing marketing.
Speaker 5: But I have to say we were a little jealous
Speaker 5: because I think he wrote that in early May, and
Speaker 5: in early April we put out a table with basically
Speaker 5: every one of the Trump threats. I think there were
Speaker 5: like twenty three or.
Speaker 3: So, doesn't matter if you don't market, it's it's all
Speaker 3: about that acronm anyway, keep going.
Speaker 5: I was waiting for the invite, so I think Trump
Speaker 5: had backed down in twenty one out of twenty three
Speaker 5: threats something like that.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: So the first thing is you can identify patterns, and
Speaker 5: in fact, actually truthly be told, we ran that same
Speaker 5: study at the very end of his first term as well,
Speaker 5: and the takeaway was very, very similar. The question I
Speaker 5: think was was he going to be tough for his
Speaker 5: second time around, right, But the point is you can
Speaker 5: identify patterns, So taco is one of them. Where it
Speaker 5: gets complicated, though, is you know, it's almost like the
Speaker 5: Economist or Time magazine cover phenomenon, where by the time
Speaker 5: the Taco thing came out, whether it was from US
Speaker 5: or from Armstrong, it was already fading. It was already
Speaker 5: getting arguably less true because if you look at the
Speaker 5: pattern of Trump's behavior. On jan twenty, he had made
Speaker 5: a bunch of threats against Mexico, Canada, China, et cetera.
Speaker 5: He completely let them go, right, nothing happened, He didn't
Speaker 5: even mention them on Jan twenty. Then he postponed them
Speaker 5: to February one. He went one step further, he actually
Speaker 5: signed the executive orders, but nothing happened. Then March one
Speaker 5: comes around, or March four rather, and he actually implements
Speaker 5: the terrors, but he walks them back after a day.
Speaker 5: Then April two comes around and he walks it back
Speaker 5: after a week on rest of the world and a
Speaker 5: whole month on China. So the point is there a patterns,
Speaker 5: but you've got to constantly be reassessing them because the
Speaker 5: rule that worked yesterday may no longer work to today.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: A second question is or principle, let's say, is we've
Speaker 5: been very We've tried to be very nimble and not
Speaker 5: have a grand theory.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 5: So this gets a little bit to the whole like
Speaker 5: phil tedlock fox versus hedgehog, like not be too attached
Speaker 5: to grand ideas, but look at each prediction individually. One
Speaker 5: of the things that's really driven me crazy is this
Speaker 5: narrative that Trump's.
Speaker 4: Trade approach is all about China. Right.
Speaker 5: That is totally accurate over the course of four years.
Speaker 5: It is totally useless in the short term because if
Speaker 5: I told you that Trump's trade policy was going to
Speaker 5: be all about China, which in hindsight is correct, right,
Speaker 5: China's got a forty five percent tariff, everyone else has
Speaker 5: a ten percent tariff. But if I told you that
Speaker 5: out in January nineteen and you were, you know, running
Speaker 5: a hedge fund, you would have been very, very surprised
Speaker 5: that the first three months of the Trump administration were
Speaker 5: all obsessed with Mexico and Canada. Basically, this whole China
Speaker 5: lens would have been useless up until April. So that's
Speaker 5: a second thing is trying not to take an overarching view,
Speaker 5: but look at it individually and try to figure out
Speaker 5: what's he after in this specific case. So, you know,
Speaker 5: the best example is if you think he's after a
Speaker 5: teriff revenue, then he's by definition not going to back down.
Speaker 5: You can't get revenue if you back down, right, And
Speaker 5: the same country can be affected by completely different motivations
Speaker 5: or you know, confrontations. So Mexico in the first three
Speaker 5: months was affected by fentanyl and immigration concerns, which were
Speaker 5: pretty clearly I mean, it's always easier to say in hindsight,
Speaker 5: but pretty clearly transactional like Trump just wanted to be
Speaker 5: able to say that he had done something about those issues.
Speaker 5: The way that Trump is going to approach Mexico in
Speaker 5: Q four this year to try to get them to
Speaker 5: do USNCAA revisions and open up their energy market and
Speaker 5: change their rules of origin on auto sector issues, that's
Speaker 5: going to be much much tougher, right, So, same country,
Speaker 5: totally different approach. Another is there's this big like talking point,
Speaker 5: you know, don't take Trump literally, but take him seriously.
Speaker 3: We hate there one around here.
Speaker 4: Okay.
Speaker 5: So yeah, so first of all, we know not to
Speaker 5: take seriously because of Taco or you know, signum pre taco.
Speaker 5: But I actually think taking him literally has been reasonably
Speaker 5: helpful him and some of his advisors, those who repeat
Speaker 5: his views. So people like vest and Lutnik, they actually
Speaker 5: don't repeat his views. They kind of freelance. But if
Speaker 5: you take Carolyn Lovett, one thing that really sort of
Speaker 5: struck us was I think it was on before the
Speaker 5: February one deadline rather than the March one.
Speaker 4: But I could be confusing them. She said.
Speaker 5: They're in that press conference the day before, on the Friday,
Speaker 5: she said, there is absolutely nothing that Canada and Mexico
Speaker 5: can do to prevent the present from signing the executive
Speaker 5: order tomorrow. Signing the executive order, they never said they
Speaker 5: were going to actual implement the terraces, right, And I
Speaker 5: know that sounds like a little cute or yeah, but
Speaker 5: there is something to that effect. And if you listen
Speaker 5: to Trump, I think it's quite interesting if you also
Speaker 5: look at how his advisors, how he lets them talk
Speaker 5: like speak, you know what kind of leege they're on.
Speaker 5: They are allowed to say anything, including the craziest stuff,
Speaker 5: as long as they don't reduce his optionality, right, So
Speaker 5: he benefits from them going nuts as long as he
Speaker 5: doesn't get cornered by their comments.
Speaker 3: Let's go back to the recent war and something I'm interested,
Speaker 3: So looking at the cumulative odds twenty percent preemptive Iranian capitulation,
Speaker 3: forty five percent Israeli mission accomplished. When you're coming up
Speaker 3: with those odds, like how much do you really have
Speaker 3: to know about the size and scale and quality of
Speaker 3: the respective weapons systems of Israel and Iran? Because ultimately,
Speaker 3: to some degree, prior to the US intervention, the question
Speaker 3: was the degree to which one side's missiles or their
Speaker 3: missile defense was stronger than the others. So how do
Speaker 3: you learn about that? And how important is it to
Speaker 3: add trually have really high quality information about each side's arsenals.
Speaker 5: So that actually gets a little bit back to what
Speaker 5: is Signum and who we are because I'd say there
Speaker 5: are different types of shops in our industry, right. There
Speaker 5: are shops that are based on intel, right, So it's
Speaker 5: like what we're hearing in Congress, or I play golf
Speaker 5: with you know, Scot Besson or whatever, that's not us.
Speaker 5: We do access events and a bunch of you know,
Speaker 5: really cool stuff. We took clients to Ukraine to meet
Speaker 5: with the Ukrainian government and get a sense of what
Speaker 5: post war reconstruction type policy might be reduce that stuff.
Speaker 5: But it's not part of our research, right, And that's
Speaker 5: because Intel in addition to you know, potentially if you've
Speaker 5: got HIMNPI, et cetera, that gets legally dubious. In addition
Speaker 5: to that problem, it doesn't make for good predictions, right
Speaker 5: because Scott Besson himself didn't know on April eight whether
Speaker 5: Trump was going to back down the next day, he
Speaker 5: knew he was working on him, but he didn't know
Speaker 5: asad was not sure whether he was going to be
Speaker 5: toppled or not. Right, So there's that, and then there
Speaker 5: are shops that are very focused on country xes. So
Speaker 5: it's like, you know, I lived in Venezuela for fifteen years,
Speaker 5: so here's my take on whether Juenguido's kup is going
Speaker 5: to succeed or not. And don't get me wrong, like
Speaker 5: we've got regional experts. We have a Mexico office with
Speaker 5: a Mexican guy leading it, years and years of experience
Speaker 5: from Latin em et cetera. So it's not that we
Speaker 5: don't do that. But the point is where we think
Speaker 5: our value add is is on the process, and we've
Speaker 5: basically adopted like a few principles. One is the fill
Speaker 5: tetlock principle that I mentioned earlier, which is not really
Speaker 5: about who you are, it's how you proceed, right, So
Speaker 5: it's precisely what is your model, like, what is your process?
Speaker 4: And that's where another.
Speaker 5: Guy comes into focus, which is one of the mesquita that.
Speaker 4: A lot of people will know about.
Speaker 5: Political scientists very focused on, essentially the logic of political survival, right,
Speaker 5: Like leaders will always put their own advantage ahead of anything,
Speaker 5: and that's why, you know, you've got situations where like Nitagna,
Speaker 5: who's never going to agree to a hostage deal because
Speaker 5: it would risk his coalition, and why would he risk
Speaker 5: his coalition? Or you know, why would he risk losing
Speaker 5: power just to satisfy Trump. That's where it gets interesting, though,
Speaker 5: is none of these rules is failed proof, right because
Speaker 5: using that logic, one of the pushbacks that got on
Speaker 5: our Ceespire calls in the past was why would Hamas
Speaker 5: ever give up the leverage of hostages?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 5: And that sounds like a conversation under the truth is
Speaker 5: they've given up hostages twice now, right, You've got to
Speaker 5: stay like pretty nimble and humble. There is no like
Speaker 5: perfect answer, but that sort of process approach can be helpful.
Speaker 5: Now to get back to your initial question about like
Speaker 5: how much knowledge you need? You do need technical knowledge,
Speaker 5: but you don't need to have it in house. So
Speaker 5: we don't ever outsource any of our analysis, Like no
Speaker 5: one external has ever come up with a prediction for
Speaker 5: us or written any of our notes. But what we
Speaker 5: do is we break down a big issue into sub
Speaker 5: questions and then we go out and try to find
Speaker 5: the answer. And some of that will be an open source.
Speaker 5: Some of that will be trying to speak with an
Speaker 5: expert on XYZ missile range. So yeah, the answer is
Speaker 5: you do need it, but you can break it down
Speaker 5: and not make it part of your core business model
Speaker 5: and just sort of have it as a research process.
Speaker 2: You mentioned being humble just then, and I'm wondering, so,
Speaker 2: you know, in the Iran situation, you published probabilities and
Speaker 2: your base case and all of that, and I think
Speaker 2: events didn't pan out quite the way you expected. What
Speaker 2: happens when you're just wrong about a particular prediction. So
Speaker 2: you know you've laid out your analysis. Maybe you had
Speaker 2: a really great way of reasoning around scenarios and things
Speaker 2: like that, but nevertheless, something happened that you did not expect.
Speaker 2: What do you do?
Speaker 5: So there's a couple answers to that, Well, there's several.
Speaker 5: The first couple are deflection. The third is the real answer.
Speaker 5: So one is, in any of these situations, you've got
Speaker 5: lots of different predictions, right. So for example, we didn't
Speaker 5: expect that Trump would actually go in and bomb Ford
Speaker 5: out because we expected these reels to do it on
Speaker 5: their own. But we were on the right side of
Speaker 5: the regime change call. We were on the right I said,
Speaker 5: the horror mooze call. We're on the right side of
Speaker 5: Israel staying away from trying to knock out Iranian oil production,
Speaker 5: which looked harry during that first weekend, and so on
Speaker 5: and so forth.
Speaker 4: So that's one.
Speaker 5: The second is you basically have to try to figure
Speaker 5: out why you got it wrong right, and from there
Speaker 5: you can typically learn something for the next time. So
Speaker 5: in this instance, for example, I was far too focused
Speaker 5: on these Raelis capabilities and whether or not the Israelies
Speaker 5: we're going to be able to do this on their own,
Speaker 5: and not focused enough on Trump's appetite to get involved
Speaker 5: for political reasons. Right where it gets really ironic is
Speaker 5: part of the reason I was of the view that
Speaker 5: the Israelis would be able to go out and knock
Speaker 5: out for it on our own is because for the
Speaker 5: previous twelve months I've been telling clients the Israelis have
Speaker 5: the capability to strike on their own, and they are
Speaker 5: going to do it, and it's going to be a
Speaker 5: bolt from the blue. I didn't expect it to be
Speaker 5: exactly when they did it, because the nuclear talks were
Speaker 5: still ongoing. But the point is, back then, the big
Speaker 5: pushback I would get constantly was the Israelis don't have
Speaker 5: the planes to reach are on. They don't have the
Speaker 5: resheeling capability, you know, and.
Speaker 4: So on and so forth.
Speaker 5: And so that gets back to this thing that there
Speaker 5: is no like one rule that you can like, you know,
Speaker 5: to sort of one rule to rule them all, right,
Speaker 5: There is no such thing.
Speaker 4: You've got to constantly be reassessing.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: When we talk to economists and market practitioners, you know,
Speaker 3: one of the terms that comes up a lot is
Speaker 3: regime change. And in this case, I gotta be careful.
Speaker 3: I don't mean literally like the question of whether the
Speaker 3: Iranian regime changes. But this idea of like regime change
Speaker 3: in markets, like does the relationship between bonds and stocks
Speaker 3: change over time or is the fed and inflation fighting
Speaker 3: mode or deflation fighting mode whatever, like these are certain relationships,
Speaker 3: relationships change, and I'm curious, like there are many people
Speaker 3: who perceive and perhaps the medium term future that maybe
Speaker 3: the US Israel relationship is going to change, that maybe
Speaker 3: there are parts of growing louder contingents within the Republican
Speaker 3: Party and both parties really, but within the Republican or
Speaker 3: that do not want to deploy US military assets or
Speaker 3: resources in the same way the same level of support
Speaker 3: to Israel in the past, and who knows how that
Speaker 3: is going to transpire. But I'm curious, like how you think, like, Okay,
Speaker 3: there's some relationship the two countries might have, but all
Speaker 3: relationships could change, and if that relationship does change, then
Speaker 3: it changes the short term expectation on any given war.
Speaker 3: And so I'm curious in your process or internally you
Speaker 3: think about this idea of relationship regime change and could
Speaker 3: at some point down the future, and we don't know when,
Speaker 3: could some of these alliances or partnerships or you know,
Speaker 3: friend relationships change and then that force a calculation change
Speaker 3: when an acute event happens.
Speaker 5: That's a great question, but I would say that there
Speaker 5: is a pretty big difference I think, I mean, I'm
Speaker 5: not in the markets, but I think there's a big
Speaker 5: difference with financial markets, which is the regime changes happen,
Speaker 5: but they happen much more slowly and so you have
Speaker 5: a lot more time to bake them in.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: So you know, you started the podcast by sort of
Speaker 5: talking about how there are these like talking points that
Speaker 5: come up over and over right the world, like jee,
Speaker 5: political risk is going to be big in twenty twenty five, right.
Speaker 5: A big one of those is multipolar world, right, yeah?
Speaker 5: Or jizu a world like this idea that it's like
Speaker 5: the breakdown of global order and so on and so forth.
Speaker 5: So those only happen every twenty or thirty years, Or.
Speaker 3: That the US may not want to be the hedgemon
Speaker 3: at some point, that it may not have the same
Speaker 3: appetite to be a global police. And so for example,
Speaker 3: you know, the Tucker Carlson wing of the Republican Party
Speaker 3: very loud against this idea, like why should the US
Speaker 3: have such a global military footprint? Things like that at
Speaker 3: some point that could be a dominant strain of thought,
Speaker 3: and we if it becomes one, we might not necessarily
Speaker 3: know when the flipping point.
Speaker 4: Is totally agreed.
Speaker 5: But going back to how it's a slow process, I
Speaker 5: think Trump was a really interesting and like, literally what
Speaker 5: happened over the past month was a very very good
Speaker 5: test case for that right. And the fact that Trump himself,
Speaker 5: who is known to be not just isolationists but also pacifist,
Speaker 5: you know, one can chuckle, but like he does have
Speaker 5: a pacifist instinct I think, and pretty stingy in terms
Speaker 5: of use of American power and use of American money
Speaker 5: and resources, et cetera. The fact that even he intervened,
Speaker 5: I think tells us something about how slow that process
Speaker 5: is going to be.
Speaker 2: Sure, Okay, we mentioned cliches a couple of times, and
Speaker 2: I think this is probably a cliche too, But you know,
Speaker 2: cliches can be true. Maybe that's why they become cliches.
Speaker 2: But when it comes to geopolitical risk analysis, do things
Speaker 2: feel more difficult to you nowadays versus when you perhaps
Speaker 2: started in the industry, Does the world seem more complex?
Speaker 2: And I guess given the Trump administration and some of
Speaker 2: the unpredictability that we discussed earlier. Do things seem more volatile,
Speaker 2: more uncertain and just harder to sort of get a
Speaker 2: handle on.
Speaker 5: Yes, I think that is absolutely fair and it really
Speaker 5: does sort of echo back to Joe's question in the
Speaker 5: sense you take something like the relationship between Russia and
Speaker 5: China pre Ukraine War or pre twenty twenty two version
Speaker 5: of the Ukraine War. For fifteen years before that, there
Speaker 5: had been an established talking point amongst pretty much all
Speaker 5: political analysts, which was, it's an alliance, it's an access
Speaker 5: of convenience. Right, they get along, they work together, but
Speaker 5: they don't really trust each other, they don't really love
Speaker 5: each other, and so you knew that when push comes
Speaker 5: to shove, when they had to like put their interest
Speaker 5: above the other, etcetera, you knew which way.
Speaker 4: It was going to go.
Speaker 5: That was very unclear for the first like year, and
Speaker 5: frankly some could argue it's still unclear post Russia invasion,
Speaker 5: right or Ukraine invasion.
Speaker 4: Are they now in it forever?
Speaker 5: And sort of Russia basically China is grooming Russia to
Speaker 5: help it when it goes after Taiwan, or is it
Speaker 5: still very much an access of convenience where the Chinese
Speaker 5: might cut off, you know, drone inputs to the Russians
Speaker 5: for the right price, if there's American export control lifting
Speaker 5: or something like that. Right, And your question, Tracy, the
Speaker 5: fact that so much stuff is changing so fast means
Speaker 5: that you have even less historical background or historical data, which,
Speaker 5: as we said earlier, you're already starting with very very
Speaker 5: small data sets, right, And so the temptation there is
Speaker 5: to kind of just make it up as you go,
Speaker 5: and that's where things get dicey.
Speaker 3: Do you think that's possible, like that China has a
Speaker 3: price for which it would hold back on Russian access
Speaker 3: to drawing materials and such.
Speaker 5: So my answer to that would be, in a way
Speaker 5: that one is actually not that hard because even if
Speaker 5: there were a price, we are so far from being
Speaker 5: willing to pay that price that it's not gonna it's
Speaker 5: never gonna be delighted with day.
Speaker 3: What's the surprise thing that you think is not on
Speaker 3: anyone's radar right now geopolitically that you think we should
Speaker 3: be focusing more on. This is my way of so
Speaker 3: listening ideas for future episodes.
Speaker 5: By the way, Yeah, yeah, no, so I actually I
Speaker 5: love that question because but I hope this is not
Speaker 5: going to be disappointing, but it is. I always say,
Speaker 5: like the whole black Swan thing is irrelevant, Like black
Speaker 5: Swan's almost never happened. This stuff that blows up in
Speaker 5: our face is stuff that is visible pretty far ahead,
Speaker 5: like not necessarily far ahead of time, but that is
Speaker 5: pretty obvious. And the difficulty is for the analysts predicting
Speaker 5: the details right, like in what month is put and
Speaker 5: get invade or whatever, or what part of Ukraine is
Speaker 5: he going to invade? And the other difficulty for clients,
Speaker 5: of course is how to trade that right, given that
Speaker 5: you can get radically different outcomes. But the events themselves,
Speaker 5: I mean, there were four or five months of Russian
Speaker 5: build up in front of Ukraine and in December January
Speaker 5: people were still debating what it's going to happen or not.
Speaker 5: And another example is COVID. People talked about COVID as
Speaker 5: a black Swan. I mean, if you read any of those,
Speaker 5: you know, World of Form global risk reports for the
Speaker 5: past like fifteen years, pandemics were always top ten like
Speaker 5: or even top five. People knew that pandemics were a
Speaker 5: major potential business risk. So again, it's it's more like
Speaker 5: the details rather than something's going to just pop up
Speaker 5: in our face.
Speaker 3: In the next I don't know, five years. Do you
Speaker 3: expect China to invade Taiwan?
Speaker 5: Yes, I mean the word invade is the one that
Speaker 5: bugs me, which is not going to surprise you, because
Speaker 5: I think that it's more likely to be a blockade,
Speaker 5: for example, than an actual amphibius invasion. So that view,
Speaker 5: for example, is pretty I think. But now right, the
Speaker 5: problem is again from the perception of how do you
Speaker 5: manage it. One of the things that I think is
Speaker 5: totally underappreciated is everyone knows that a blockade is a risk, right,
Speaker 5: But the part that's totally under appreciated is that the
Speaker 5: Chinese could roll it out literally overnight. So I think
Speaker 5: what is underappreciated is We're not going to get any
Speaker 5: build up. We're going to wake up one morning and
Speaker 5: it's going to be done. So that's one problem. A
Speaker 5: second problem is a bloodless blockade that lasts, you know,
Speaker 5: three months or six months, that is essentially a continuous
Speaker 5: anaconda squeeze on Taiwan, and the Taiwan's economy could actually
Speaker 5: be far worse from a purely market perspective. Forget about
Speaker 5: you know, normative aspects far worse than a one month war,
Speaker 5: regardless of the outcome, right, because it's the length of
Speaker 5: the eruption for business operations that could be most problematic.
Speaker 5: So again, it's how you look at it. I think
Speaker 5: that they can make a difference.
Speaker 2: Back in college, I wrote an essay slash dissertation on
Speaker 2: the chances of China, you know, invading Taiwan or going
Speaker 2: after Taiwan, and I think I had my base case
Speaker 2: was they were going to do something before the two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight Olympics.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I empathize with the difficulty of timing.
Speaker 2: I totally do. Andrew, that was fantastic. Thank you so
Speaker 2: much for coming on all thoughts.
Speaker 3: Thanks Andrew.
Speaker 1: That was great.
Speaker 4: Thank you, Joe.
Speaker 2: There was a lot to pick out of that conversation.
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that struck me. Okay,
Speaker 2: first of all, you know, he was talking about black swans,
Speaker 2: and this is something that teleb himself pointed out at
Speaker 2: our recent live event, which is we shouldn't really be
Speaker 2: worried about black swans because they are by their very
Speaker 2: nature unknowable. We should be worried about the gracewans like
Speaker 2: a pandemic. I think that makes a lot of sense. Secondly,
Speaker 2: the emphasis on motivation was really interesting to me because
Speaker 2: this is something that I have wondered about the tariffs.
Speaker 2: If Trump needs to have a bunch of tariff deals
Speaker 2: to have his trade war seem to be a success,
Speaker 2: then what does that mean on the revenue side, because
Speaker 2: he has also talked about how tariff revenue is going
Speaker 2: to offset a bunch of tax cuts and things like that.
Speaker 2: So I do think it's important and I still haven't
Speaker 2: figured out that one particularly. And then the other thing
Speaker 2: is he was talking about Trump's advisors, and this is
Speaker 2: something I hadn't realized, but he's right. The one thing
Speaker 2: they can't do is limit the president's optionality. It seems
Speaker 2: like they can throw out pretty much any scenario, any response,
Speaker 2: any possibility that they want, but they can't do anything
Speaker 2: that would box him or pigeonhole into one position. That
Speaker 2: was interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, by the way, just going back to
Speaker 3: Andrew's note that we kept referencing on June sixteenth, he
Speaker 3: had underestimated the odds that the US would intervene as
Speaker 3: he did. However, to his credit, here were his final takeaways.
Speaker 3: US intervention is certainly possible, but still not base case. Okay,
Speaker 3: it did happen, However, he says likewise, regime changes plausible,
Speaker 3: but still unlikely. So he was right on that. And
Speaker 3: then he said the overwhelming majority of scenarios end in
Speaker 3: a negotiated around capitulation with no meaningful damage done to
Speaker 3: global oil supply or golf assets. I think that's a
Speaker 3: pretty good conclusion that at the end of the day,
Speaker 3: because if you figure people care about the markets and
Speaker 3: oil supply more or less, a useful conclusion to have
Speaker 3: been able to make on June sixteenth. I have to
Speaker 3: say the speed with which Andrew answered yes, there is
Speaker 3: going to be something Taiwan that I was like, I
Speaker 3: was hoping that he would hum in Hawe a little
Speaker 3: bit about that, and then this idea that's just going
Speaker 3: to happen so quickly, it'll be overnight, there's we're not
Speaker 3: going to get any signs of it, and then the
Speaker 3: world is going to change dramatically the next morning in
Speaker 3: ways that we don't really know.
Speaker 2: Well. On the other hand, there are people like me
Speaker 2: who have been saying, yeah, with great confidence that this
Speaker 2: is going to happen for a while and it doesn't.
Speaker 2: So maybe that's that's some hope for you, Joe.
Speaker 3: I mean for me, I mean for lots of people,
Speaker 3: certainly hope there is anyway.
Speaker 2: The other thing I was.
Speaker 3: Didn't like how comfortably he was Yeah, in five years, Yes,
Speaker 3: he didn't have seemed to have any doubt.
Speaker 2: The other thing I was thinking, we probably should have
Speaker 2: asked this, but the time frames for things, because you
Speaker 2: mentioned regime change in Iran, like, okay, well it hasn't happened,
Speaker 2: but it's also been two weeks since we had this big,
Speaker 2: big event that happened, and I don't think it's necessarily
Speaker 2: off the table, So I'd be curious to figure out
Speaker 2: how he thinks about like the time frame of possibilities
Speaker 2: as well. But oh well, we already spoke for about
Speaker 2: forty five minutes, so we should probably leave it there.
Speaker 3: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 2: This has been another episode of the Audthlots podcast. I'm
Speaker 2: Chracy Alloway. You can follow me at Chacey Alloway.
Speaker 3: And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the Stalwart.
Speaker 3: Follow our guest Andrew Bishop. He's at Andrew Underscore d
Speaker 3: Underscore Bishop follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez at Carman armand
Speaker 3: dash El Bennett at Dashbot and kill Brooks at Kilbrooks.
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