Well, amidst all of the other concerns with respect to the war in Iran, not to mention the latest talks about potential escalations, including U.S. ground forces.

The financial markets are not exactly thrilled about it, and it's not hard to see why when you see oil prices increasing at this rate.

Plus things like gold dropping, which seems confusing, you start to wonder what exactly is going on and how much worse can this possibly get.

And that's what we're going to discuss today.

We're actually going to explain some of the financial components of this because, again, you want to expect gold to be dropping in a time like this, but there's actually a very specific reason why it is.

Plus, we're going to talk about potential ground operations,

a number of other things, all to try to ask the question,

what exactly is going to happen next, not just in Iran, but in the financial markets.

I'm your host, Nick Fratis, and with me in the studio,

our resident historian, our political prognosticator, the Oracle of Virginia.

Christian Heinz, how you doing, Christian? It is good for us to both be here again.

All right. Let's go ahead and, let's go ahead and jump right into it. What's the first thing

we're looking at, Christian? So in case you've been living under a rock for like the last

month or whatever, there's a war going on yeah i heard about it um

yeah some some big stuff is going on and um long story short it has created a bit of a

situation right because you have this thing called the straight of Hormuz yeah uh where a significant

chunk of the world's oil goes through and it is currently shut down. Yeah.

And we've talked about this a little bit before on, you know, why is it shut down if we've destroyed their Navy? And the reason why is very simple. We don't, they don't need a fully functioning active Navy to be able to threaten oil tankers that are moving through a fairly narrow pass, which is the straight of Hormuz. All they need to do is hit it with a couple of well-placed torpedoes, drones, missiles,

and you sink an entire oil tanker and not only cause major financial issues,

but environmental issues and everything else.

And the bottom line is the cost-benefit analysis doesn't work for all the countries that are trying to transport oil out of there.

So even though we've severely diminished Iran's naval capabilities and even some of their missile

...