Speaker 1: And hello, Hello, Hello, how are you welcome to the
Big Podcast. It's Thursday. Today is the seventh day of May.
Year of our Ward, twenty twenty six. My name is
Tom Sullivan. And well we've got we've got the updates
on the war off again, on again, maybe maybe not.
We'll get that sorted out. Plus oil and gas prices.
Oil going down, gas prices going up, not a surprise.
Epstein's suicide notes supposedly. All of that we'll get into today.
But I want to start with something that was widely
publicized yesterday, and that is the death of Ted Turner
at eighty seven years of age. He died at his
home in Montana. An amazing individual, amazing man. I know
a lot of people that worked for him. I know
in fact, the very first broadcast on CNN was June
first of nineteen eighty and two people that I used
to work with at the NBC television affiliate in Sacramento,
Dave Walker and Lois Hart, were the Well I worked
with them, and yes I worked with them at the
NBC affiliate in Sacramento, but they were also prior to that,
they were the first utterance of anything live on the
air from CNN. So I saw them yesterday and they
looked great. Everybody's interviewing them because it's been a long time.
But the other thing about it is, I mean, not
so much about about his death, about the obits, about
all the accolades, and I mean, he really did accomplish
an off love big liberal guy, huge liberal guy. But
I we we've had conversations on this program many many
times over the years about where did we Where did
we go off the rails? Where did we get to
as a country where the left and the right were
separate and further apart and further apart and arguing and
nasty to each other, And where did that start? And
some people go, oh, it was uh, it was Bill Clinton.
That that's what what it was.
Speaker 2: And others go, no, it was Obama and other that
you go through and all that, And I was watching
the o bits on Ted Turner, and it dawned on me.
Speaker 1: He started something new. I know, we all knew that
he started something really new and amazing. It was as
new as the invention of the internet. Twenty four to
seven news on what cable television? You mean, I've got
to subscribe and pay money to a cable company. But
what he did, and again Ted Turner was a proud,
proud liberal man, and what he started was a network,
And not that he was doing anything that was in
there saying you got to do liberal news, not at all,
but that was his background and that's where the people
he hired he liked that were basically like him. And
that was the first time because prior to that, prior
to nineteen eighty, your choices were David Brinkley and chet Huntley,
and Brinkley, chet Huntley and David Wrinkley, and you had,
of course Walter Cronkite, and you had a variety of
different ones on NBC over the years, but it was
it was primarily all of us got the same news
at the same time. There You either watched ABC, NBC,
or CBS, but they were all basically the same. And
I don't remember, I guess you could go back, and
I'm sure people have studied it. I don't remember there
was any particular bias. I don't remember Walter Cronkite's biased.
I don't remember David Brinkley's bias. I mean, those were
those were the days when the news and the information
that we shared we shared together and we got the
same messages and we did not have this back and
forth between each other. So Ted Turner comes along and says,
you know what, I'm going to start a twenty four
to seven cable television network. And so he did in
nineteen eighty and it was up until nineteen ninety six
that both NBC and Fox started cable news. So for
sixteen years, Ted Turner had the world to his own
and he built a huge company, which sadly today their
ratings are way behind both ms now as they call it,
and way behind Fox. In fact, both ms now and
CNN combined do not add up to the audience that
Fox says, But that's another topic. My point is, you
want to know where we got off the rails, and
the left went further left and the right went further right,
or the fact that we became left and right. I
think the germ of that was Ted Turner's beginning of
CNN in nineteen eighty and after that, I mean Fox.
The reason Fox was created was because of the fact
that the media had gone so far left that they thought, hey,
there's an opportunity to have voices on the right. There
are people in this country that want to hear those voices,
and boy did they get success out of that. So anyway,
God bless Ted Turner. But I I never thought of
this before until the old bit last night that I saw,
and it was simply that's where our left and right
bias in the media began. Here's just a couple of
minutes of a little bit of the oh bit that
they ran last night.
Speaker 3: He broke every mold. He changed the world.
Speaker 4: Known as the Mouth of the South and Captain Outrageius.
Ted Turner built a media empire that changed cable news forever.
Speaker 5: I didn't have any upper limits to how far we
could go.
Speaker 4: Champion, philanthropist, environmentalist.
Speaker 5: I don't know how to quit. It's not in my genes.
Speaker 4: But growing up wasn't easy for Ted. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio,
in nineteen thirty eight, his parents sent him to boarding
school when he was just four years old.
Speaker 5: I didn't like boarding school.
Speaker 6: I wanted to be home.
Speaker 4: Ted's little sister, whom he adored, died of lupis at seventeen.
About two years later, Ted dropped out of Brown University.
He'd been studying classics until his father cut off the money.
Speaker 5: He thought I was wasting my time.
Speaker 4: So he went to work for his dad's billboard company,
but tragedy struck again when his father killed himself.
Speaker 5: He went against everything that he taught me, you know,
to be courageous and hang in there.
Speaker 4: Ted took over the family business and hope with the
loss by working even harder.
Speaker 5: He said, set your goal so high that you can't
achieve him in your lifetime.
Speaker 4: When Ted was it working, he turned to the sport
he loved, sailing. We gotta go fast to Tan and
won the sport's top race, the America's Cup.
Speaker 5: I had worked very hard. It took me a number
of years to become a champion.
Speaker 4: He put that same drive into expanding the business. In
nineteen seventy, Ted bought a struggling TV station.
Speaker 3: It was a broken down UHF television station in Atlanta.
He was going to transform UHF television into this new
world of satellite television.
Speaker 4: Ted renamed the station WTBS, and it became the country's
first superstation.
Speaker 3: What Ted made happen was just as important as the
Internet revolution of the nineties and two thousands.
Speaker 4: But starting out, Ted needed content. He bought the Atlanta
Braves and broadcast their games nationwide.
Speaker 1: Let a Brave.
Speaker 4: The Braves became America's teeth.
Speaker 3: When we bought him in nineteen seventy six, they were terrible.
Speaker 4: By nineteen ninety five, ten and his team were World
Series champs. As he built the superstation, he set his
sites even higher. On a twenty four hour news channel.
Speaker 5: I worked till seven o'clock. When I got home, the
news was over, so I missed television news completely, and
I figured there were lots of people like me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So it was a simple thought, I can't see
the news. I come home at seven o'clock. National news
was basically put out by the networks between six thirty
and seven. But that was Wolf Flincher that was voicing
that oh bid. And it started off by saying that
Turner changed cable news. No, he invented it. There wasn't
any cable news. And the other thing that never would
have happened, and that never would have happened if it
hadn't been for the fact that we had something new
in the sky called satellites, so he was able to
beam his and I remember, you've got to be back
a few years to remember the superstation, and it was
stupid because it was Atlanta, and I didn't know anybody
in Atlanta, didn't care about Atlanta. But they broadcast that,
and they broadcast the Atlanta Brave Games. And once he
looked around he had all that in place, and there
were satellites up above. He said, let's start a twenty
four to seven news cable cable channel. So anyway, that's
where I think the bias of what we believe, the
messages and the information we get that used to come
from basically the similar sources, all of a sudden became
from the left and until nineteen ninety six when Fox started,
and then from the right. May he rest in peace,
it was he made eight billion dollars by selling all
of that to Time Warner in nineteen ninety six, and
Time Warner made a huge mistake because that was also,
like I said, the year that Fox and also NBC
along with Microsoft started at MSNBC. He's been suffering with
Louis body dementia for the last ten years, so but
he was I think he was. I don't know why
he sold, because he said he was absolutely devastated after
he sold CNN and now CNN, like I said, their audience.
Speaker 6: Is just.
Speaker 1: A shell of what the others are but in any case,
may he rest in peace. All right, let's get on
to the latest on the war. Last night I went
to bed. We were all set Jack freedom had been
called off. All of a sudden, we p We've got
we've got a deal with the Iranians and a one
pager and that that would open up a thirty day
negotiation period and then peace, love and harmony. And I
yesterday I was railing because I still believe it. I
believe strongly that Donald Trump wants out. He doesn't want
to do this. He's has professed that he's anti war,
and I think that is the real hymn that's coming out.
He doesn't want anything to do with this because if
he uses the military to finish off their job, that
means more people are going to be killed. But after
billions of dollars spent and thirteen of our armed forces
personnel dead, all of a sudden he wants out. So
I'm not happy. I think he's making a huge mistake.
But let's see what. So this morning I wake up
and sure enough, the whole thing has changed again. Yeah. Yeah,
That Wall Street Journal today says decision to restore access
to bases and airspace for the US to resume their
military operations has been granted by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
They lifted restrictions on the US military's use of their bases.
So Saudi Arabia and Kuwait both their borders. They bordered
the Persian Gulf on the western shore of the Persian Gulf.
The other side of the Persian Gulf is the shoreline
of Iran. So I don't know what's going to happen next,
but it looks like the military could be used in
a moment's notice, because Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are now
saying you're welcome to use our bases and our airspace.
So let's check in Brett McGirk, middle East expert. He's
worked for four presidents. Let's find out what he thinks
about all of this.
Speaker 7: I feel like it's punk Satani, it's groundhog Day. But
I think we're farther away now from a deal than
we were days ago. And I'll tell you why. I
think the US administration came out very strongly with Project
Freedom that we're going to act militarily to help ships
get through the Strait, and that was a clear position.
It was reiterated to reinforce from Pentagon just yesterday morning,
and Iran responded militarily. They fired missiles at Uee, they
swarmed our ships, we shot some small boats out of
the water, and then we announced that we're stopping that mission.
And in my experience with the Iranians a very similar
experience like this. I was going to see the Iranians
on January tenth, twenty twenty four, because our forces are
coming under attack all across the region. The morning of
that meeting, the US Navy ships were attacked in the
Red See, the largest most complex attacks in World War Two.
And the Irani's continue to escalate, and we had three
Americans killed about two weeks later from Irani and Drone
and Jordan. Tragically. We then had to turn around very
strong air strikes after that. This is what Iran does.
And if Iran thinks they have the upper hand, I
think they think they do. They are not going to
make the concessions that the administration is demanding. So I think, again,
we're in a very difficult predicament. I think we're stuck.
I don't see a breakthrough coming. The one thing that's
a little different is the President's trip to China. You
know that moves the entire system, our system and the
system in Beijing. And the Iranian four minister was in
China just yesterday, and I'm sure the Chinese would like
to know be the peacemakers and try to broker an arrangement.
That might be something that happens here in the next
couple weeks, But as of right now, I do not
see a deal happening. I think we're actually farther away
than we were a couple of days ago.
Speaker 1: He knows these people, He's dealt with him many many
times over decades, and so if he doesn't think he
thinks we're further away from a deal now because he
doesn't trust the people that are in the regime. And
the people in the regime are still there. They have
not been changed. They've just shuffled some of the people
in the.
Speaker 7: Chairs probably voices. In Tehran, the president, Pajeskian, guys who
have to be responsible, were trying to run this country
saying hey, let's do a deal. But I'm at Vahiti
and the people we've talked about on this program, and
the Revolutionary Guards, they have a very different view. I
doubt they are going to give up what they think
is their control of the of the straight up her mouse.
I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect what's happening or
Pakistan wants to play peacemaker, they're probably putting some spin
on the ball that maybe we're getting closer. I think
the Chinese are engaged. But again, the decision makers in Iran,
whoever they are, we believe it's Vahiti and these guys
who are the real hardliners for them to give up
what they think is their main card right now, the
straight up her moose. I find it very doubtful unless
the president size are just totally cave and say I'm
out of this entirely. You guys have the straight hole.
Can happen? I do not see the US doing that.
I think that'd be a very bad outcome. I think
we said at the beginning of this whole thing that,
going back to claud Switz, if a leader does not
know is clear in his mind what he wants to achieve,
the objectives will be defined for you. That's basically what's
happened now and at the presidents of two minds. He
wants out of this, and he also doesn't just want
to totally walk away. And so even the statement this morning,
do a deal or else we're going to bomb you. Again,
I think we're divided. It's very unclear. But again, who's
going to make the decision around to do a deal
with the United States of America the Great Satan. That's
going to be a difficult decision, I doubt. I hope
this response comes tomorrow and they say here's all the
highly rich ranium we're going to give up in Richmond.
That would be a very good day. I love to
come on on the program and say this is a
great outcome. I just don't see that happening the next
in the near term.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he doesn't believe that they will cave. I don't either.
But he brought up the fact that unless Trump wants
to totally cave's he kind of stuck. He's got to
do something, and he's not willing to use the military.
Here's the latest from the president in the Oval office.
Speaker 8: I think we won now, it's only a question of Look,
if we left right now around it would take him
twenty years to rebuild. You would call that we're in
good shape. Right, fantastic, We're in good shape, and now
we're doing well. Now we have to get what we
have to get. If we don't do that, we'll have
to go a big step further. But with that being said,
they want to make a deal. We've had very good
talks over the last twenty four hours. That is very
possible that we'll make a deal.
Speaker 1: He's projecting. I totally believe he's projecting. He says they
want to make a deal, they want to make a deal,
and I'm thinking, no, he wants to make a deal.
The deal that he would will get would be much
better if he goes ahead and pulls the trigger using
military power, and he proclaimed I think we won no.
That again, that's aspirational. I appreciate that, but well. Brian Hook,
who is a Middle East expert, also weighs in.
Speaker 9: The Iranian regime, you never quite know what you're going
to get. I mean, you could be sitting across from
the foreign minister of a normal country and that person
could speak with authority on behalf of the government. But
in this case Abasarachi, the foreign minister who you showed
earlier meeting with President she it's very hard to know
how much power he has or influence with the Supreme leader.
On top of that, the Iranian regime is talking amongst
themselves with pen and paper. It's taking a long time
to get a response back because they're not on their
cell phones, they're not in the same room. So diplomacy
is taking a long time. To the point that you
made about like the Wall Street Journal, I think President
Trump has amassed the economic and military leverage that he
needs to get a deal to end Iran's nuclear program,
and Iran now faces this choice between diplomacy or escalation.
I think what you could have is a period of
time for diplomacy. Maybe it's thirty days where Iran opens
the strait and there is some opportunity for both sides
to get the straight open. And then during this thirty
day period you essentially the president still maintains all of
his military and economic leverage, but that you then negotiate
a deal that would end Iran's nuclear program and its
missile program. You were never going to get there without
this kind of leverage that President Trump has created. If
talking nicely with this regime worked, they would have solved
it under President Clinton. But this challenge has eluded every
single president since Bill Clinton. Iran's nuclear program, so I
think the president isn't a great position with this naval blockade.
Iran is facing an economic cliff right now. They just
had massive protests with five million people in January that
they're very worried about reigniting, and so I think if
you get some period where the strait is opened and
you start negotiations to end the nuclear program, that could
be a very good path forward.
Speaker 1: The confusion is one expert says that these regime guys
are not ever going to give up their nuclear program nothing, never, ever,
and that you can't negotiate with them. And then this
expert says, well, if you can negotiate with them, the
problem is, can you Some experts say it's impossible, but
maybe the element of the visit with China will change things.
So let's get a military guy in here. Colonel Cedric Layton.
He studies and consults the Middle East military issues. This
is his view.
Speaker 6: There are certain things that the United States has done.
They have in fact estimated to the Iranian Air Force
and the Iranian Navy. But I remember that Iran doesn't
really work in those standard areas when it comes to
measuring its power and its ability to actually affect change
So what the Uranians are doing is they're gaining a
strategic foothold in not only the Straight of hor Moves,
but potentially regionally throughout the Middle East. And what that
really means is that the actual objective of opening the
Straight of Hoe Moves is now in question. So that
was one of the US objectives was to make sure
that the Straight of Woe Moves remained open, or in
this case, is reopened. That is questionable because of this
new toll regime that you mentioned. Then we have the
issue of the nuclear the enriched uranium that the Ranians have.
There's basically nothing that's being talked about in that regard.
We certainly don't have a real regime change. We have
a swapout of people who are part of the same regime.
So in the aggregate, the US really hasn't won this.
That's to you. The best thing we can hope for,
I think at this point is to go back to
the status quo ante in other words, the time before
this war started. But at this moment in time that
even is questionable. Well, I think we have to remember
that hardliners are what we would think of as hardliners,
are pretty powerful in Iran and when you have a
supreme leader who has, based on most reporting, at least
has been wounded, possibly severely wounded, in the attacks on
the supreme leadership. His father has been killed, his wife
has been killed, other family members have been killed or wounded.
That you know, certainly has got to be a factor
in harder making the positions harder on the Iranian side.
So you have that as one example that the Iranian
position itself may be quite difficult to overcome in terms
of softening things up from a diplomatic perspective. And then
you also have people who are naturally averse to working
with the United States or doing any thing that would
result in the United States gaining any type of perceived
victory over this. So this is a very difficult diplomatic issue.
When you look at the difficulty of this, I would
say we're looking at here is we have to basically
work with people who are varying degrees of hardliner, and
in this particular case, there is a possibility of a
kind of tacit agreement with these folks. But remember we're
only talking about to a one page paper that is
supposed to set the stage for further negotiations, and that
is definitely something where there are a lot of details
that would still need to be worked out, and as
they always say, the devil is in those details.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk oil, oil and gas. Oil prices are
going down. Gas prices are going up. Oil is going
down because of the fact that the Wall Street loves
to hope is not a strategy, as they say, but
they that there is going to be a breakthrough here.
So oil prices, well, they've been trading down. In fact,
even there was an eight we got below knotty for
just a few minutes early trading this morning. But right
now the price of a barrel of oil is starting
to climb a little bit, up to ninety six dollars
and some change. Because again there's a lot of people
that are like me that are a little leary about
this actually coming to fruition. It's it's a big leap
to think that this one pager is somehow going to
solve all these problems as far as gasoline prices go.
Taking a look at the Triple A map, the average
price of gas across the country now four dollars and
fifty six cents. That's up three cents from yesterday. It's
up twenty six cents from a week ago. So yeah,
going higher, truckers and farmers, your diesel price. The average
across the country five dollars and sixty four cents. When
you look around the map of the United States, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, Alaska,
and Hawaii are all above five dollars a gallon average
for the cheap stuff in California is six dollars and
seventeen cents. So they still win for the highest highest
gas prices. Chris Wright, the Secretary of Energy, I was
talking about prices earlier today.
Speaker 10: We do not have direct dialogues with the officials in Iran.
You know, I haven't had all this administration obviously through
observation data, I'm watching what's happening with their energy system,
but no direct dialogue with them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 10: Look, the Iran economy has been a train wreck for years,
just to horribly mismanaged economy, you know, and of course
they've terrorized their neighbors and done everything we've heard about.
But they've already it looks like they've likely or he
cut back their production maybe by four hundred thousand barrels
a day. They'll likely continue to ramp down their production
as their storage fills and their inability to export oil
if it goes too long and they have to actually
shut in some of their low pressure mature reservoirs, real
risk and almost certainly some kind of permanent damage and
reduced production capacity. Hopefully that's an additional incentive for RAN
to get to the end that everyone knows we're going
to get to, which is to end the Iranian nuclear
program and to restore flow of traffic through the straits
of Horn Moves.
Speaker 1: That day is coming.
Speaker 6: The question is just with a RANS cooperation or without
a RANS cooperation.
Speaker 1: Well, Chris Wright talking much more tough, I would say,
than the President about this. He seems very certain we're
either going to do it our way or the hard way,
one of the two, but we're going to do it.
I like his positive view on making sure that this
gets done. The other thing is in the reading the
oil analysts on Wall Street a lot of their research papers,
they're saying that the storage problem in Iran is not
a couple of days. The President said that last week
it was within a matter of three days their oil
system would blow up because they don't have anywhere to
put the oil. Most analysts say that they Iron's a
big country and there are a lot of places that
they can store it. They also have other ways to
get it out of the country, but in small amounts,
but that at the very earliest it would be two
or three months before they actually get to a point
where they have to start shutting down. Well, so different
people again calling different shots on how Iron's oil business
is going. The President weighs in as well on oil prices.
Speaker 8: I thought oil prices wou'd go to two hundred, two
hundred and fifty dollars in set one hundred dollars now
and I think you're surprised, and I'm surprised. But even
if it went to two hundred, it would have been
worth it. I understand that we had just set a record,
fifty thousand on the Dow, seven thousand on the SMP,
A record, and I said, I hate to do this,
but we have to make an excursion down to Iran
because we can't let them have a nuclear weapon.
Speaker 1: I'm not quite sure what the Dow and the smp
have to do with Iran's nuclear weapons, but he's right.
We have we've been setting records, but that is specifically
a reflection of corporate earnings. Corporate earnings are absolutely strong
right now. We're going through a very strong corporate earning cycle,
and that's why the stock markets are setting new records.
So let's talk a little bit about the economy. We
got our Thursday morning jobs report. It's actually the first
time jobless claims. First time job is claims exactly two
hundred thousand, up a little from last week. But I mean,
we're running really low on people getting pink slips, not many.
The labor market appears to be very stable, and it
appears that nobody's getting fired. The layoffs are very very low.
Two hundred thousand continuing claims, one point seven million. Productivity
lacking in this report up one tenth of one percent.
Unit labor costs up two point three percent, slightly less
than expected. But the big jobs report for the month
of April comes out tomorrow morning, eight thirty Eastern time.
That's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But as far
as today's report with the first time jobs claims, it's
nice to see that the layoffs are at a very
low number. And finally, the Pope and the fact that
Donald Trump and the Pope are supposedly ad some sort
of tension against each other. The President keeps claiming that
the Pope says it's okay for Iran to have nuclear weapons,
and everybody's gone back and scoured everything that the Pope
has said, and he's never said anything like that. But
here's the president.
Speaker 8: As far as the Pope is concerned, and it's very simple,
whether I make him happy or I don't make him happy.
Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon, and he seemed to
be saying that they can, and I say they cannot
because if that happened, the entire world would be hostage
and we're not going to let that happen. That's my
only message.
Speaker 1: So Cardinal Dolan was asked about this, and it seems
politically odd because of the fact that Catholics by a
sixty percent margin voted for Donald Trump, so he won
the Catholic vote. And I don't know what it is
because Donald Trump is convinced that the Pope said Iran
can have a nuke, and like I said, nobody he
can find the Pope saying anything like that. But here's
the Cardinal.
Speaker 11: I would say the Holy Father would agree with him.
He doesn't think a Ran should have nuclear weapons. I
would also say he doesn't think the United States of
America should have nuclear weapons. We wish we could have
a world without him. Okay, he would ardently work for that,
but not in the hands of fanatics and not in
the hand of the hands of irrational people like we have.
Speaker 1: So it seems like not a big deal, but it
does have political ramifications, and we'll see if the tension
between the President and the Pope goes away. Meantime, Wall
Street today, like I said, started off on a positive,
hopeful note, thinking, Okay, maybe, maybe, maybe we'll get an
endto this war. But I think a lot of people
started looking at a one page deal that is not
going to solve this war. And you can't negotiate with
the regime in Iran and they won't ever give up
their nuclear product. So the market just kept going lower,
down three hundred and thirteen to close it forty nine
thousand and five, ninety six, the S and P down
twenty eight, the NAZDAC down thirty two, Gold went up
twenty seven dollars to four thousand and seven to twenty one,
and oil up From where we started this morning, it
acts like I told you, it actually got down to
hit eighty nine and some change or a minute or two,
but then worked its way back as again the oil
markets are going. It doesn't look like piece is at
hand imminently so up less than a buck today. The
price of a barrel of oil ninety five dollars and
some change. So that's it for today. Thank you for
coming by. We will be back again tomorrow. Big job
report for singing the eight thirty in the morning. Yes
it's Friday, and we'll see you then