Deep Into 2027: Iran War Leak

Christopher Lloyd is sitting in a truck stop outside of Richmond,

Virginia doing math he already knows the answer to.

In twenty twenty four he bought a flatbed.

New, $187,000.

And that's not really a purchase.

That's a marriage. That's a note that you carry whether the freight moves or not.

Then in February twenty eighth,

twenty twenty six, nine hundred strikes in twelve hours,

Iran. And within weeks, the diesel that he buys is.

The single biggest line item in his entire business is up more than forty percent.

So here's what Christopher Lloyd does.

He stops washing his truck. A wash runs about one hundred thirty dollars,

just gone from his pocket. He starts calling brokers and pushing for extra money

on every load, which is a conversation nobody enjoys and most people lose.

And he starts turning down runs to New England because the fuel math

on that lane doesn't really close anymore either.

He's not going out of business,

but he's shrinking quietly, one decision at a time.

And nobody's coming to help him.

There's no program, there's no line in a supplemental appropriation with

his name on it and a farm bill.

Now I want you to keep him in the back of your mind there for a second,

because here's the part that should make your teeth hurt.

The reason his diesel is up forty percent is a choke point called

the Strait of Hormuz.

And the reason it's only up forty percent instead of a hundred and forty percent

is that oil is still getting out.

Six to ten million barrels a day,

every day, leaking through a corridor along the Omani coast that

the United States Navy is escorting.

Which sounds like good news. It's not good news.

Because that leak is exactly enough oil to keep the global market from panicking.

And a market that doesn't panic is.

Is a market that doesn't force anything to stop.

Not Washington, not Tehran, nobody's phone is ringing off the hook.

The pressure valve is open just wide enough that the pot never actually boils.

As of August 23rd, 2026, the analysts looking at this are using a phrase that should

stop you dead. They say the war could run,

quote, deep into 2027,

not could end.

Could run deep into twenty twenty seven.

So Christopher Lloyd isn't absorbing a shock.

A shock ends. A shock you survive by cutting the trock wash for four months

and then you're back. He's absorbing a condition,

a new baseline, years of it. And the thing you need to hear before anything else

in this episode, nobody decided to do that to him.

That's the horror of it. Nobody sat in a room and

And voted to grind down a flatbed truck operator in Virginia.

It's just what happens when the war becomes comfortable enough to keep.

Welcome to the Overlap. Our show deals with labor politics,

systems of power, all kinds of fun stuff.

I'm Will.

And I'm Joshua. And I'll and I want to start with the word that's doing

all the work in this story because once you hear it,

it's kind of impossible to unhear.

Managed.

Manage disruption specifically,

Exactly.

right?

Manage disruption. And that's the three dollar big brain term.

That's what the energy analysts are calling the Strait of Hormuz right now.

Not blockade, not crisis,

managed disruption. It's like a project timeline.

Like there's a Gantt chart somewhere with Iran war on row twelve and

a green status dot next to it.

It probably is, Joshua, and that's the part that gets me.

Somewhere there is a slide with that term as its title.

There's absolutely a PowerPoint slide.

It has a map on it and the map has an arrow.

So it's the week of August 24th,

2026. Welcome to the week. Happy birthday to my brother out there.

~ almost six months into this undeclared war.

And the reason we're doing this now this week is that the story just changed,

but the headlines didn't. Which is the most dangerous way a story like this

can change. Back in February and March,

this was the biggest thing in the world.

You had strikes, assassination,

Iran's supreme leader dead, mines in the strait,

tankers burning, wall-to-wall coverage.

Twenty four seven and now it's Super El Nino and it's the little oil ticker

in the corner of the business segment.

The war didn't end, it got absorbed.

It always gets absorbed. And so let's be precise about why,

because it's not that people got bored.

People got bored because the price stopped moving.

Gas is really high right now. $4 and up.

And it's been $4 and up for months.

Diesel is over five. That's real money and real pain.

But it's not nineteen seventy-three.

It's not lines around the block.

It's not

Even odd even license plate days.

It's not a shortage you can actually see with your eyes.

It's just expensive. And it's going to be forever.

Does that make us the frog in the proverbial pot?

Well, which by the way is scientifically false,

frogs actually jump out.

Every time. Wouldn't be a lot of frogs around if they didn't.

But

yes, it's a it's rhetorically perfect,

so let's go ahead and keep it.

So the point stands there's no moment,

there's no day where it gets bad enough that the system has to respond.

It's a a gentle slope, not really like a cliff.

And I I want to just name the thing underneath that because this is where this

is actually what makes me angry.

And I don't get angry like I used to,

it takes a little bit more now.

But the crazy thing is a ward that hurts everyone a little

bit forever is politically cheaper than a ward that hurts a few people massively

for a week. That's really the equation.

That's the actual equation. Diffuse pain spread thin across three hundred

and forty million people is survivable for the people making the decision.

Concentrated pain is not. It's like the same kind of ~ reasoning that went into

the the cars that used to explode when you hit them from when they

got rear ended and they their gasoline tanks would might explode.

~ the company has to decide, you know,

is it is it more painful to let a few people die or more painful to replace

all the cars and all the gas tanks?

But here the incentive is not conspiratorial.

~ I think it's just how the machine,

the modern day machine, functions.

The incentive runs toward diffusion,

toward the leak.

Towards six to ten million barrels a day,

squeaking through a mon so that nothing ever gets bad enough to force

a real reckoning.

And here's why we're going to spend the first part of our show

in nineteen eighty seven instead of last Tuesday.

Because this exact arrangement American warships escorting tankers through

a a ~ mined choke point in somebody else's optional

war indefinitely with no declared endpoint,

that's already happened. Reagan did it.

It had a name.

No relation.

No no relation. And the shape of it,

the logic of it, the way it substituted a naval workaround for a political solution,

it's kind of the same shape. Not similar,

like a facsimile.

And the other thing that already happened is the domestic half of this,

right? The truckers like you're talking about back in nineteen seventy three.

That's not a metaphor either. That's an organization that still exists

and a guy who's on the record right now drawing the line himself.

So that's the episode, nineteen eighty-seven,

nineteen seventy-three on one side,

and then Heg Seth's and ultimately Trump's two hundred billion dollar optional

war and ask that Chevron's biggest quarter in company history on the other.

And the Christopher Lloyd guy we talked about,

$130 truck wash, is just kind of sitting right in the middle of it,

where the average person actually already always sits.

Right. Where the little guy always sits.

So 1987, the Persian Gulf. Context first,

because it matters. Iran and Iraq have been at war since about nineteen eighty.

Saddam Hussein started it, and by the mid-80s,

that war has spilled into the water.

Both sides attacking tankers, trying to strangle each other's oil exports.

They

call it the Tanker War, right?

And it it's exactly as ugly as it sounds.

It's merchant ships, civilian crews,

and they're all just blowing up and exploding and burning.

Kuwait's shipping is getting hit because Kuwait is bankrolling Iraq.

So Kuwait goes to Washington with a very clever request.

They basically say, Look, why don't you put your flag on our tankers?

reflagging. I used to do that in Sid Meyer's Pirates.

Reflagging. You take a Kuwaiti tanker,

you run the good old red, white,

and blue American flag up the mast,

you paper over the ownership, and now legally it's a US flagged vessel,

and a US flagged vessel gets a US Navy escort.

That is the entirety of Operation Ernest Will.

And it is, look,

No relation.

it is genuinely clever. It's also

Completely legal fiction wearing a mask.

Nothing about that ship changed except the paperwork.

Same steel, same oil, same owners.

But the paperwork is what lets the United States Navy start escorting convoys

through a war zone without anyone having to say the word war.

Which is the tell. Every time you see an elaborate legal workaround,

ask yourself, what is it a substitute for?

It's really always a substitute for somebody a decision that somebody didn't want

to make out loud.

That's exactly right. And here's how well the workaround worked.

First convoy, july nineteen eighty seven,

the super tanker Bridgeton, Iranian jets come out and take a look at the ship.

Just approach, just a message,

and then the Bridgeton hits a mine.

In a channel the US Navy had escorted the boat into,

Iran had mined the route.

And the detail that lives in

In all our heads rent free, the Bridgeton was the biggest ship in that convoy.

And after it was holed, the Navy warships tucked in behind it,

because it was the only vessel in the group with enough hull

to survive another mine. The escorts hid behind the thing that they were actually

escorting.

Okay, that's almost too perfect to metaphor.

I mean that's a whole foreign policy in one image.

It is the whole foreign policy and in general our foreign policy about

the Middle East in one simple sweep of a pen.

The protection racket where the protector gets in the backseat.

There's a piece of this I want to add because it complicates the villain,

and I think that matters. On the Iranian side,

during that period, the Revolutionary Guard Naval Command had worked up a plan

for a small boat swarm attack on that convoy.

~ you know, fast boats, close quarters,

the thing they're actually good at.

And it went up the chain to Khamani and Ruhalla Khomeini and he vetoed it.

He said no.

He said no. And I don't tell that story to make him sympathetic.

He's not sympathetic.

I tell it because it shows both sides were doing the same calculation.

Iran wanted to bleed the convoys without triggering an actual American war.

The US wanted to escort the convoys without declaring one.

Both parties were managing the disruption.

And you can trace where that logic goes.

And you can of course.

December

6, 1987, a Singapore Singapore flag tanker called the Norman Atlantic gets

set on fire by an Iranian warship in Omani waters,

right by the strait. Not a swarm,

not an escalation to war, just one ship,

one fire.

Calibrated response.

Calibrated, that's the word, and that's the word we'll come back to

in about ten minutes, wearing a brand new twenty twenty six suit.

Sure is. Looking sharp.

So now the domestic side of this,

because Americans experience these things at a pump,

right? Not in a strait, not on a boat,

not with ~ a a warhead, not with mine.

So go back further, nineteen seventy-three,

the Arab oil embargo, fuel shortages,

price spikes, ~ the whole thing.

And in nineteen seventy-three is the year the owner operator independent drivers

association gets founded.

I don't even want to try to pronounce this.

It's the OOIDA. O Ida?

Sure. Formed that year speci

Suddenly I'm hungry for potatoes.

Yeah, it sounds a lot like Orida.

But it formed that year specifically because of what fuel prices were doing

to independent truckers, just like guys with CDLs.

And and that's kind of the structural trap of this,

because it hasn't changed in 53 years.

Owner operators.

They pay for the fuel. And the shipper pays a fixed rate

for that trucker to drive it. And then that rate was negotiated before

the fuel price actually moved.

So then when diesel doubled, the shipper's cost doesn't change at all.

The driver has to eat a hundred percent of it because it's contractualized.

Every single penny of that deal.

And so they have no option to but to shut it down.

And they did. In nineteen seventy three into nineteen seventy four,

the truckers blockaded highways and they parked their their rigs across interstates.

And they do it again in nineteen seventy nine.

And what finally cracks isn't isn't the goodwill,

right? It's the Interstate Commerce Commission,

who is a federal regulator mandating fuel surcharges,

making the pass through a rule instead of a favor.

And this is where Todd Spencer comes in,

who runs O Ida today,

right now in 2026.

Yeah.

And what he's saying this year is that drivers on the road today do

not have those protections. The formal mandated surcharge protections that came

out of 74 and 79, those are gone.

Deregulation happened. The ICC itself doesn't exist anymore.

So the surcharge is now just a negotiation.

Every time with a broker who has 40 other trucks to call.

Which

means Christopher Lloyd in Richmond in twenty twenty six is in

a weaker legal position on fuel costs than a trucker in nineteen eighty one.

exactly what that means. The lesson was learned,

written into a rule, and then the rule was repealed.

And now it's being relearned by individual guys one at a time out

of their own pockets.

Whew, if that is not an American pattern,

I don't I don't really know what is.

We we win something collectively and then it gets dismantled privately

and then we all act surprised.

And Spencer makes one more point that I think most people miss.

He says the fuel cost doesn't stop at the truck and goes into the food.

Every tomato, every gallon of milk,

every case of anything moved by a truck or burning diesel that costs forty percent

more. That cost doesn't just disappear,

it doesn't evaporate. It gets handed up the chain until somebody

re it reaches somebody who can't stand it or can't hand it any further along.

Which is you, which is me, which is all of you listening

Right.

out there, at the register wondering why groceries went up again.

Groceries such a antique word.

And never once connecting it to a straight you can't find it on a map.

So let's let's close the loop from nineteen eighty-seven to now with

one more marker because there is a step in between,

and and it's kind of important to the overall story.

2011 and 2012, the United States escalates sanctions on Iran's energy sector,

like really hard. And Iran responds by threatening the Strait of Hormuz very openly.

So that was the cycle. We squeeze the oil revenue,

they threaten the choke point.

We deploy naval assets, everybody backs off,

nothing's resolved, and then you just repeat that in a decade.

The Congressional Research Service has documented that loop,

and it's in literature, it's ~ a known,

studied, named pattern.

So when it happens again in twenty twenty six,

nobody gets to claim to be surprised.

And nobody really is surprised,

except that this war was optional.

Like we didn't have to do this.

So I I do want to be careful here because we have seen this before can slide into

so it doesn't matter. And it matters more now because

the difference between nineteen eighty-seven and twenty twenty-six isn't the shape.

The shape is the same. We've already established that,

right? Choke point, escort, workaround,

no resolution. The difference

is the scale of the money moving through it and who actually ends up holding

the bag when it does. In nineteen eighty seven,

the bag was mostly held by a naval budget and some insurance underwriters in London.

And now?

Yeah,

now it's a two hundred billion dollars supplemental request,

a s a strategic reserve at its lowest point since nineteen eighty two,

and a major oil posting the largest quarterly profit in

its entire history while calling it discipline.

Let's go there.

February twenty-eighth, twenty twenty six,

you can start the clock. US and Israeli forces launched near nine hundred strikes

on Iran in twelve hours. That's nine hundred in half of a day.

And they kill Ali Khomeini, who was the supreme leader of Iran and and

a dozen of officials that were actually with him at the time.

They also killed about a hundred and seventy people when a missile

hit a girls' school near Bandar Abbas.

A hundred and seventy.

Now we know from you know the movie in the nineteen nineties,

which I just happened to see on a restaurant,

~ a few good men, that a hundred

and seventy people gets written up to you know just the price of war.

We're in war and then and people die and there's gonna be casualties on both sides,

kind of a thing. ~ but I don't want to just gloss over the

These individual people, because it was 170 completely innocent school children

at a school. So near Bandar Abbas,

which is the Iranian port city right along the Strait of Hormuz.

I think that saying that number out loud and remembering it,

because it's important. In six months,

coverage of this war there we're in,

this optional war.

That number has been said out loud a a couple of times.

And I think it should be said kind of every single time because these were just

little girls.

And even if we can't handle the truth,

it should be said every time. And I'll say the thing I always say and always mean,

I don't know how to hold that alongside a discussion of quarterly earnings.

I genuinely don't. But we have to because they're in the same causal chain.

I mean the school and the earnings are all on the same wire.

It's kind of gross actually how how often we have to talk about lives with dollars.

~ but the straight the the Iran basically installed mines

all along it, closes it, and the man running that operation is an IRGC naval officer

named Ali Reza Tangsiri. He oversaw the blockade and the mining

and then Israel assassinates him during the campaign.

Which does what exactly to the mines?

Nothing. Because see mines, once they're placed,

don't really have a chain of command.

That's the thing about the this whole like naval decapitation strategy.

You can kill the the leader of that naval blockade and the admiral,

but the bomb doesn't really give a shit.

Right.

And the US sets up its own blockade going the other way,

and Trump's claim is that the blockade costs Iran five hundred million dollars

a day. And the Defense Department's own estimate was more modest,

about four point eight billion in lost Iranian oil revenue as of may first.

Which doing the math on that is nowhere near five hundred million a day.

Not even close. five hundred million in a day for roughly sixty days from March

to may first would be about thirty billion dollars.

The Pentagon says four point eight.

So the president's number is off by a factor of six,

like multiplied. It's really, really weak when he says things like this out loud.

And I want to flag that not as kind of like a gotcha,

right? But as a data point about how this war is being described.

to the people that are actually paying for it.

Here's where I want to plant my flag,

and this is just my read, it's not a hedge.

The Oman corridor is not a failure of the blockade,

it's actually the design of it.

So six to ten million barrels a day are leaking out of Hormuz through

a corridor the US Navy protects.

That's not seepage, it's not a gap somebody hasn't gotten around to closing.

It's a deliberate volume. Somebody picked that number.

And the reason somebody picked that number is because it holds oil under

a specific price.

The analysts are explicit about this.

The current posture is sustainable through the midterms if crude stays under ninety

to a hundred dollars a barrel.

That's the threshold. That's the actual war aim as it functions today,

whatever it was in J in February.

Not regime change, not denuclearization,

a price ban.

And the policy objective is a number on the screen in Chicago.

And once you see that, everything else lines up.

Why there's no negotiation, why there's no off ramp?

Why nobody's in a hurry.

And Don Alamiryu at Alpine Macro is is the one saying the quiet part,

right? That the corridor eases market pressure and removes the urgency

to end the war. Those are two halves of the same sentence.

The thing that makes it bearable is the thing that makes it permanent.

Dave Wex ~ looking at the same flow and getting the same picture deep into twenty

twenty seven.

And there's an escalation hook in there too,

which is the midterms themselves.

Because the price band is stable right up until somebody dec decides

a war looks better on a ballot than a stalemate does.

Which is the least comfortable sentence either of us will actually say today.

Let's talk about the money. Three buckets.

Pentagon, reserve, profits.

Bucket one, Pete Hegseth,

the Secretary of War, which is what we apparently call it now.

They rename the department. That's incredibly real.

Asks for at least two hundred billion dollars.

In supplemental funding for this war.

That's not a war, that is a war until it's not,

unless it's a war. I I'm really lost on these things,

but on top of a $1.5 trillion budget request

for the fiscal year 2027. And when asked whether the number could go up,

his answer, and I quote, was it takes money to kill bad guys.

Take

That is the quote from the man requesting two hundred billion dollars for

a war that we can't call a war because Congress has never authorized a war.

And I want to sit on that idea of never authorized for one second because

I did the law school thing, and this is the part where the law school thing

is actually useful. ~ there is no authorization for use of military force against

Iran. None. Zero. Zilch,

nada. Not a new one, not a plausible stretch of an old one.

The strikes on February twenty eighth were a pure executive action.

The blockade is an executive action.

The escort corridor is an executive action.

And Congress has noticed twice.

The House passed war powers resolutions in June and July.

June was two hundred fifteen to two hundred eight.

July twenty third was two hundred fourteen to two hundred eight.

Both times with Republicans crossing the the the aisle.

Four of them in July, second time for several of them,

Thomas Massey among them because you know he doesn't have to run

an el another election.

Right, messy. here's the detail that tells you what's actually driving this

politically. The defectors cited gas prices and fertilizer prices.

Not the little girls' school in Iran where a hundred and seventy were dead.

Not the constitutional question,

but fuel and fertilizer.

Fertilizer for anybody wondering,

because nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas.

So an energy shock is a food production shock about nine months later.

It's like a it's like the baby fertili fertilizer shock is is

the oil shock baby nine months later.

Right. You know what the farmers were doing nine months ago.

Right. And and you can ask any farmer in Kentucky,

and they know that because they deal with that.

That is their specialty, that is their career.

Right. And these war resolutions,

these are a concurrent resolution,

which I have to be honest about this.

A concurrent resolution doesn't go to the president and doesn't have

the force of the law. It's Congress clearing its throat,

loudly, on the record, with names named,

but it has value. It doesn't turn off a single ship,

but it has some value.

Then bucket two, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

As of august nineteenth, the SPR,

as we're going to call it from now on,

is at its lowest level since nineteen eighty two.

Like nineteen eighty two. The lowest it's been in my entire lifetime

is right now. It's headed for something like two hundred forty three million barrels

after a hundred and seventy two million barrel release to blunt the fuel disruption.

And it was already spread pretty thin before the war started because

in two twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three,

the Biden administration sold close to two hundred million barrels of

it during the Ukraine price spike.

And it never got fully refilled.

There's a a government accountability office report from june twenty ninth

of this year on the state of the SPR,

including the physical condition of the caverns that we actually hold this oil in.

So bizarre. 'Cause when we think of Fort Knox holding a strategic reserve of gold,

we imagine we walk in there's just this room,

you know, big bank vault full of gold.

Apparently there are caverns just full of oil.

But they also need repair.

You know where a lot of those caverns are?

Yeah, do you know where a lot of those caverns are,

I I've been told? In

Tell

us.

the salt domes around Avery Island,

where a lot of those, like once the salt was mined out of there,

they were

I've heard that before.

Okay.

I ~ skeptical cat is skeptical.

I would have to do some more research on that.

But I have heard that specific thing.

Like ~ my father worked down there at one point on some pumps.

And ~ he was was he went down into the domes.

And I mean, we've seen people die from these dome collapses and things down when

we lived in Louisiana and and hear still about it on the news.

But he never mentioned anything like

giant rooms full of oil. But I I mean it could be in

Hmm. Fair enough.

different ones. But we do know that they need repair regardless.

Both of them.

Right. Which sounds like something in Louisiana.

So so we

Yeah, right.

went we went into an oil war here with the emergency oil supply half empty

and the tanks needing maintenance.

That's right. Not not just maintenance.

Then we drained another hundred and seventy two million barrels of it

out to hold this price band between ninety and a hundred dollars a barrel.

Something tells me that's not what they intended by these originally.

But it but it worked, right? I mean it it kept it down into the rate where it's

not reaching crisis thresholds.

But you only get that shot once.

That that shot's been fired now.

Yes. You only do get to do it once.

That's the whole nature of a reserve,

right? Like it's a one shot pony,

one trick pony. We're firing our one shot to maintain a stalemate that analysts

say runs deep into twenty twenty seven,

which means when something actually goes wrong,

a real closure, a hurricane hitting the Gulf refineries,

literally anything, there's no reserve in the cupboard to reach for.

There's no closure.

you know, dusty can of green beans or a weird,

you know, can of Campbell soup ~ back in the in the wings waiting for you

to put a little bit of water in it.

An energy secretary, Chris Wright,

is the man holding both ends of this.

The drawdown and the refill that has to happen at whatever price

the market gives him, which will not be a good price as we've established.

You sell low, you buy high structurally when you're the government in a crisis.

Look at bucket three where the money went.

Yes, Chevron, second quarter of twenty twenty six,

twelve point one billion dollars in profit.

Largest quarterly profit in the history of Chevron up nine point

six billion year over year. That's a nine point six billion dollar jump

in one quarter against the exact same quarter last year.

And her first while CEO Mike Worth attributes it to stay with me now,

kids, disciplined investment. That's right,

Disciplined investment. Not the war,

not the war.

not

the straight, not the missing barrels,

discipline.

And I want to take that seriously for one beat because I think it's dismissing

dismissing it entirely is a mistake.

Chevron did make capital decisions.

There is a real management story in there somewhere.

Fine. But a $9.6 billion year-over-year swing in 90 days

is not discipline. That is not a thing operational excellence achieves.

That's a price move. Everyone in the room knows it's a price move,

and the reason he says discipline.

Is not because he expects you to believe it,

it's because he needs a sentence in the transcript that isn't,

we made ten billion dollars because a choke point closed.

Because that sentence has a tax attached to it.

That's and it says have a tax attached to it,

and that's the whole reason for the euphemism.

It's legal positioning dressed as modesty.

Exxon and Chevron together twenty six point five billion in the second quarter

of this year in profits. And Wood Mackenzie Energy Research Shop,

not an activist group, like an actual energy research place,

projects a global oil and gas windfall for twenty twenty six of four hundred

and ninety five billion dollars.

four hundred and ninety five billion,

that is nearly half of a trillion unanticipated,

their word.

Hm. Well, and they know that next year they'll have some well hopefully

if we can get things back to normal to somewhat we well next year we'll have some

reserves to top off. ~ but to your point,

unanticipated is doing a lot of work there.

Nobody planned the war to make that money and nobody needed to.

Right. And this is where I wanna kinda head off the conspiracy version of all this,

because the conspiracy version is both wrong and less damning.

Nobody at Chevron drew up the target list.

That's not how this works. And you don't need it to be.

You just need a system where the same event that costs a Richmond trucker

his margin hands an oil major ten extra billion dollars automatically.

No decision required by anyone.

It's not a plot, it's a payout structure,

it's just plumbing.

And the response in Congress is windfall profits taxes.

White House and Kana have one.

~ Sheldon White House's office put out the summary in March,

and it explicitly builds the case on precedent on ExxonMobil's ~ seventy seven point

eight billion dollar profit in twenty twenty two during Ukraine,

which was two hundred and forty nine percent of what they made in twenty twenty one.

Brad Sherman has another bill and there are a couple floating out there.

And will those bills pass?

No.

No, they will not pass. And they won't pass for the same reason

the war powers resolutions are cons concurrent resolutions instead of binding law.

The votes exist to sort of let the objection be known.

They do not exist to change these outcomes.

That's a distinction worth learning to figure out because once

you can actually figure that part out,

you'll see it everywhere.

Well everyone take a bio break if you need it.

When we come back, the people actually paying for all of this.

I want to go back to the truck stop.

Christopher Lloyd, Richmond, Virginia,

owner operator, which means he owns the truck.

He finds the freight, he buys the fuel,

he does the maintenance, he does the books,

he does the compliance paperwork,

and he drives. All of it. He is a company of one with $187,000 capital asset

and no HR department. Probably for the best.

~ and I want to be careful about how I talk about him because there's a

way of doing it that turns a person into a prop.

A sad photo, the face of the crisis.

The Native American on the side of the road with the trash being thrown at his feet.

Look, I hate that. This guy's not a symbol,

he's a guy with a truck and a note.

So let's just look at what he actually did,

decision by decision, because his choices are the most articulate thing

in this episode. He tightened his fuel strategy.

That sounds like nothing. It's not nothing.

That means planning routes around where deep diesel is cheapest.

It means adding miles to save cents,

which means more hours behind the wheel for the same money.

It means running the truck efficiently,

slower, easier on the throttle.

It means his day got longer and his driving got more tedious to preserve

a margin that used to just exist.

Then he stopped washing the truck.

Hundred and thirty bucks a pot.

Yeah. So the we'll stop on the truck wash because when I read that,

I I I thought, okay, I mean that's that's small,

right? Like when it comes to actual profits,

that's a rounding error. And then i it started it kind of s stuck with

me and I started thinking about that.

Like

You know?

It's not about the dirt.

Right. A clean truck is a business asset,

right? Like it's how you look i pulling up into a shipper's truckyard

and whether the broker thinks you're a professional or a guy who's just kind

of surviving, you know, o out there on your own in this dirty,

dirty world.

Appearance is credibility in a business where everybody's kind of a stranger

to each other and reputation moves by phone call.

So cutting the truck wash isn't really frugality.

It's like mortgag mortgaging your credibility to make this month's gas bill,

you know, credit card payment or whatever.

It's the exact kind of trade you make when you're drowning because you're going

under slowly. You sell the future to buy the right now.

Right, like you stop dry cleaning your your shirts or suits for

a white collar worker, you know.

~ basically ~ tightening the straps,

right? Tightening your belt loop,

as they say. And the third thing,

~ Mr. Lloyd is pushing brokers for extra pay on loads.

Now, this is where it really starts to affect your career.

Remember what we said in the first act?

There's no mandated fuel surcharge anymore.

The ICC rule that came out of the 74 and 79 shutdowns,

that world is gone.

So this isn't some form that he fills out to get reimbursed.

This is him on the phone asking a broker for more money,

one load at a time, knowing the broker has a list of other trucks he's gonna call.

And the broker knows he knows.

Right, and that's the whole negotiation.

I mean, it happens in about four seconds and it's decided before it starts.

And the fourth thing is the one that actually maps the damage.

He's rejecting loads from New England.

Think about what that means geographically,

right? He's in Richmond. The Northeast Corridor is his natural market.

Boston, Providence, Hartford. That's where the freight is.

That's where the density is. And the fuel math is it just no longer closes

on those lanes. Partly because New England is expensive to run in.

Partly because of what he'd have to eat on the backhaul.

So his map shrank. A guy with a national capable asset is now running

a regional business because of a straight seven thousand miles away from him.

And nobody recorded that. There's no statistic that captures Christopher Lloyd's

addressable market got smaller.

It'll show up eventually as a rate increase in Boston,

and somebody will write a story about Boston grocery prices,

but it'll never connect back to Mr.

Lloyd.

Yeah, definitely never.

So Todd Spencer is the one trying to make the connection.

He runs Uida. Forgive us if that's ~ Mr.

Spencer

I it makes me laugh every time I see it.

if we're s we're butchering that.

~

the association founded in 1973 for exactly this by drivers who

got flattened by exactly this situation.

And what Spencer's out there saying in 2026 is two things.

One, fuel costs don't stay in trucking.

They ride the freight into this the food supply.

The diesel price is a grocery price with a delay on it.

And two, the harder thing.

Today's drivers don't have the protections their predecessors bled for.

The shutdowns in seventy three,

seventy four, seventy-nine. Guys parked their trucks,

which for an owner operator means voluntarily earning zero dollars for as long

as it takes with a note due. And they won a mandated surcharge.

It was real, and then it was deregulated away,

and now Christopher Lloyd is doing it one phone call at a time.

Yeah, I I I want to be honest about this too,

because I grew up poor and I have a reflex I I don't fully trust.

My reflex is is organize. Get the drivers together,

shut down the I-95, you know, force the surcharge back.

Because it worked before, right?

I mean it's documented. It worked in nineteen seventy four and it worked

in nineteen seventy nine. But it worked in nineteen seventy four

in an industry where a federal regulator existed to make the rules.

And it doesn't now. And the freight market is fragmented in a way that

it it wasn't really fragmented then.

And half of the drivers on the road are on a lease purchase deal where their truck

belongs to the carrier. And shutting down just means losing their their truck.

So an honest version is the tactic that worked has had all

of the preconditions removed. Deliberately.

I mean over forty years. So I'm not gonna stand here and tell a guy

in Richmond to park his truck.

When I know exactly what the note on it costs.

And I think that's the right kind of honesty.

I mean, I guess you what you're telling our our listeners here is that there's

no more federal regulators, so this is really the result of deregulation

in its purest form. This is what everybody wants,

but this is what happens. You deregulate and there's nobody around to make it right.

~ but I want to add a third name from this story because he's on the other side

of the water, and I don't want us to only count Americans.

We have Ali Reza Tangziri, the IRGC naval commander.

He's the man who ran the mining and the blockade of the strait.

He's not a sympathetic figure.

He made choices that burn ships and put civilian crews in the water.

And Israel killed him.

During the campaign

during the campaign and the mines are still there.

So you read these stories about top leaders being assassinated or or killed,

the mines aren't going anywhere.

The corridor still has to be swept and escorted.

Not one single barrel moved differently because that man died.

That's the thing about this decapitation as a strategy.

It is satisfying and it's measurable and you can put it on a slide.

Target is neutralized and the and the the bomb in the water does not know.

And I say his name for one reason.

Because the 170 people near Bandar Abbas who don't have names in the reporting,

I can read. Tangziri does because he was important.

The kids at the school were not important according to the global global metric,

right? Nobody's looking for more news on that.

So they become a number. And that number is 170.

But that's not a rhetorical flourish.

That's just what the record looks like.

And it's worth noticing that the record,

what the record chooses to keep.

It

is. And connected back because it does connect,

Christopher Lloyd's truck wash and a hundred and seventy people near Bandar Abbas

are not the same thing. And I I'm not going to pretend that they are,

but they are the same category of thing in a system that exploits in this way.

The costs don't really appear on the on the bill,

on the ledger that anybody actually reads.

The ledger everybody reads says,

~ well, twelve point one billion,

largest quarter in company history.

It's disciplined investment.

So here's the through line, and I want to state it as plainly as I can.

Choke points don't get resolved,

they get managed. And they get managed at whatever level of pain

the domestic political system can absorb without breaking.

That's it. That's the pattern.

1987 Reagan puts American flags on Kuwaiti tankers,

sends the Navy in to escort them through mined water,

a workaround layered onto somebody else's war,

designed to keep the oil moving without anyone having to decide anything.

2026, the Navy escorts a corridor along Oman that leaks six to ten million barrels

a day. Same architecture, different flags.

And what I've come to, and it took me a while because it's

a little bit counterintuitive,

the workaround is worse than the crisis would have been.

Like if Hormoes had actually closed,

like fully closed, zero barrels of oil at two hundred dollars a barrel,

this war would have been over in a week.

Not because anyone would somehow develop a conscience sitting at the

top of their that executive order,

because the pain

would be concentrated and immediate and completely unignorable,

and phones in Washington would melt.

Crisis creates urgency,

and urgency creates resolution.

The leak prevents the crisis. And by preventing the crisis,

it's preventing the resolution.

So we get years of four dollar gas and five dollar diesel instead of

six weeks of eight dollar gas and then ~ you know a deal gets struck.

The overflow valve that saves you is also the one that traps you.

That's right. And nobody chose that,

except one guy with an executive order.

And I I'll keep coming back to that.

There is no villain who designed the outcome.

There's a villain who made the decision to begin,

but it's an emergent property of a system where diffuse pain

is politically survivable and concentrated pain is just not.

And that's the part I want everyone to hold on to because it's

the part that's hardest to be angry at properly.

We can get angry at Pete Hagsath saying it takes money to kill bad guys.

About a $200 billion request for a war that the Congress never authorized.

That's easy anger, and it's earned.

You can be angry at Mike Worth,

calling a $9.6 billion profit swing disciplined investment.

Also earned, also easy. But the thing actually doing the damage isn't a person.

It's an arrangement in which every individual actor is behaving rationally within

their incentives.

And the aggregate result is a war that runs deep into 2027 because ending

it is an urgent to anybody who could do it.

Second through line, and it kind of stacks right on top of that.

The windfall. Every time a choke point war happens.

A very small number of companies get very rich automatically without doing

a damn thing different. Twenty twenty two Ukraine,

Exxon Mobil books seventy-seven point eight billion dollars,

two hundred and forty-nine percent of the prior year.

Twenty twenty six Iran, Exxon and Chevron together.

Twenty-six and a half billion in a single quarter.

That's just three months.

And Wood Mackenzie says four hundred and ninety five billion globally across this

year. Meanwhile, the same event cost Christopher Lloyd his New England lanes.

And there's a symmetry there that I find genuinely obscene.

And I use that word selectively.

The oil companies get a windfall they did not anticipate and did not earn.

The truckers get a shortfall they did not anticipate and did not earn.

Same event, same mechanism, opposite signs.

And there's no channel between them.

Not one. The money doesn't flow from the winners to the losers

of the identical event, and the bills that would build that channel are gonna

die in committee.

Third one, and this is kind of the cornerstone of all of it.

None of this was authorized. Nine hundred strikes in twelve hours ahead

of state killed a naval blockade one hundred seventy two million barrels

out of the Strategic Reserve, two hundred billion dollars in an IOU,

I guess, and one hundred and seventy people dead in a school in Iran,

and Congress dead.

has

still never voted to start any of it.

What Congress did was vote twice to say that Congress would prefer

if this would stop.

two hundred and fifteen to two hundred and eight,

two hundred and fourteen to two hundred eight,

non binding resolution.

And the bill for the thing they didn't authorize is enormous and mostly invisible.

Linda Bilms, the Harvard economist who did the real accounting

on Iraq and Afghanistan, numbers everyone eventually admitted were right,

puts the direct cost at something north of $71.8 billion within the first 60 days,

excluding fuel. So I had over $40 billion in public fuel costs on top of that.

And then the part that nobody budgets.

veteran's care and interest. Film's entire career is showing that those

two lines are where the real money is,

and they arrived decades later,

long after the vote that nobody took.

So we're gonna be paying for February twenty eighth,

twenty twenty six into the twenty sixties.

That's not hyperbole, that's just how the amortization works.

So put the three together and this is what you get award nobody authorized,

funded by money nobody appropriated in advance,

sustained by an oil leak that keeps it comfortable,

paid for by a trucker and a shopper at a shop at a register in Ohio,

and by the rest of us every time we fill up our car,

and profited from by only two companies that describe the whole thing

as discipline deep into twenty twenty seven.

Deep into twenty twenty seven.

Alright, so here's what you should pay attention to on the news or wherever

you get your your sources from,

w whether that be, you know, insert sponsor here or not.

Watch the barrels. Like specifically,

watch what six to ten million barrels a day through the Omanc corridor looks like.

Because that number is the the real policy.

That's the the litmus test, the dial,

if you will.

If it goes up, the price falls,

and the war gets more comfortable,

and the war lasts longer. If it goes down,

the price spikes and something breaks.

That single figure tells you more about how long this goes on than

any statement out of the White House.

And then watch the number ninety.

ninety to one hundred dollars a barrel.

That's the sweet spot that analysts say has to hold for the current posture

to survive the midterms. So when crude crosses it

A strategy will have to change,

not the values, the strategy.

And I'll just add here, watch the refill.

Because the strategic petroleum reserve is at its lowest since 1982.

That's my whole life as well. And headed toward 243 million barrels.

And at some point, Chris Wright's department has to start buying it back

in a high market with a war on.

Watch who gets those contracts and what price the taxpayers pay

per barrel to restock the thing we just spent to hold gas under five bucks through

an election.

That's where the second theft happens,

not in the drawdown, in the refill.

Now,

are you ready for the most absurd thing in this entire story?

It's not the two hundred billion.

It's not the it takes money to kill bad guys.

Which is a sentence I still can't fully believe that an like a human being that

was appointed by someone that our country elected out loud.

It's this The thing keeping the war going is that the oil is still flowing.

The leak is

Is this whole life support system behind this Iranian war?

If Hormuz would actually close,

this would be done. It would be over.

It's half open, so it's forever,

which Trump specifically said he wanted to stop forever wars.

Hmm. Maybe maybe everybody else's Forever Wars.

Not his own. but we built an overflow valve to relieve the pressure

and the pressure was the only thing that was ever gonna end it.

That's it. That's basically the entire episode in one line.

Three things you can actually do,

and none of them involve a phone call to your senator.

~ one, learn to read the EIA weekly petroleum status report.

Comes out every Wednesday morning.

It's free, it's public. It contains the SPR level,

crude imports, and refinery utilization.

20 minutes with it once, and you'll never again need a cable news talking head

to tell you whether an energy story is real.

You'll see the number before the narrative gets built on top of it.

Two,

and this one's specifically for anybody who owns a small business that burns fuel

or ships anything, trucker, contractor,

caterer, florist, anybody. Put a fuel escalator in your contract,

like write it in. Index it to the Department of Energy's weekly

on highway diesel average published every Monday with a defined trigger

and a defined pass through. Not a conversation you have when the prices spike,

a clause you signed before they did.

That's the nineteen seventy four rule,

basically rebuilt privately one contract at a time,

because the federal version got deregulated out of existence.

We we know that. Christopher Lloyd is negotiating for that on the phone,

load by load, and losing because it's not written down.

It's not in the contract. It's not written anywhere there.

So write it down and put it in your contracts.

it doesn't cost anything. And yeah.

That's the whole trick, I think,

The three? Yeah,

yeah?

I think so. Third and finally,

let's go find the actual text of the supplemental appropriation when

it moves and skip the transfer authority sections.

Not the headline number, the transfer authority,

the language that lets money move between accounts after it's appropriated.

That's where a war that Congress never authorized gets funded by money that Congress

technically approved for something else.

It's boring, it's buried, but it's the whole magic trick.

Congressional

appropriations text is public and searchable and nobody reads it,

which is precisely why it works.

Right, buried in the boredom.

Ugh, tell me about it. Look, so that's it.

you know you can find us on FOF dot foundation.

~ everything that we, you know,

talked about today will be in the notes.

the fortune piece from the twenty third,

the GAO report, you know, war powers roll call with the names,

whatever. ~ make sure that you are telling a friend,

right, that about our podcast if you want us to grow,

or if you want to do us a favor,

rate us five stars there on wherever whatever app you're listening to this on,

right?

Right. And if you're driving while you listen to this and you just watch

the pump roll past ninety dollars for a fill up and felt that little jolt

of resignation.

That's not resignation. That's a data point.

It's the only part of this whole machine you actually get to see with your own eyes.

That's discipline managed refilling.

Take care of

Ugh.

each other, everybody.

See you next week. Bye.

Bye.