The Hundred Year Pivot Ep. 12 – Kamran Bokhari

**Grant Williams** (0:10)
Before we get going, here's the bit where I remind you that nothing we discussed should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So, while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets. And now, on with the show. Welcome, everybody, to another episode of The 100 Year Pivot. Joining me, as always, my co-host and good friend, Demetri Kofinas. Demetri, how the devil are you, my friend?

**Demetri Kofinas** (0:53)
I'm good, I'm good. How are you?

**Grant Williams** (0:56)
Hey, I'm doing great. Another week, another catastrophic situation unfolding before our eyes. So, you know, it seemed like you wait for buses and none come and they will come at the same time. It's the same with these podcasts. We have a couple of months of peace and quiet, sitting there contemplating our navels, and then suddenly all hell breaks loose. And it all kind of fits in with this hundred year pivot theme of ours.

**Demetri Kofinas** (1:16)
Yeah, I feel like we've missed some kind of gathering backlog that we're unaware of, because the number of buses that keep arriving suggest that there was a delay way back somewhere that we all missed.

**Grant Williams** (1:28)
November, yeah. It feels that way, you know. The conversation we had last week with Brian Winter about Venezuela was fascinating. And the feedback I've gotten has been great, which is nice. You know, it was great to have a sane head to talk about these things. And we're going to try and do the same again today with the country of the week, Iran, because the stuff unfolding there is, again, truly extraordinary. And you've done a fantastic job in finding us someone to talk to that will give us that same kind of balanced view that Brian gave us based in experience rather than any kind of click grabbing motivation.

**Demetri Kofinas** (2:02)
Yeah. Yeah. I love speaking with Kamran. He's been on the show many times. He's been to a number of our Genius Dinners as well. And we've covered this ongoing story with him as it's crescendoed. That story being, of course, the Islamic Republic's both external and internal deterioration, the deterioration of its proxy network and its capability to project power in the region, along with the deterioration of its internal political order and the weakening of the IRGC as a domestic political actor. And the October 7th attacks clearly served as a catalyst for both weakening the center of gravity in Iran and exposing the IRGC and its proxies and affiliates in the Greater Middle East as effectively paper tigers. So this broader, crescendoing story is obviously critical to understand, as is the US's own ongoing involvement, its own strategic considerations in the context of the most recent protests that have engulfed Iran, as well as the impact of any further deterioration of the Iranian state for other actors and countries in the region, in particular Turkey, Azerbaijan, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Kurds, and Russia, just to name a few. And I hope that we will at least have a chance to talk to Kamran as well about how this fits into the Trump administration's broader national security strategy and the new evolving multipolarity that the United States seems committed to exploit as a strategic advantage in various conflicts around the world. And I think this is an especially important topic, which has been the source of quite a bit of disagreement, in part because I think so much of what Trump says in public often contradicts what his own cabinet is saying, or in this case the aims clearly stated in the national security strategy. And because of the complexity of a multipolar world, developing a framework that incorporates as many of these new variables and agents with as much fidelity as possible, without becoming overwhelmed by the nuances, is I think it's critical obviously for policymakers, but it's also critical for investors, and pretty much anyone who wants to think critically about these topics.

**Grant Williams** (4:14)
Yeah, and you're right, that is a big problem, because the strategy has been clearly written, but it's contradicted every time the man's supposed to be implementing it, it opens his mouth. So people are left wondering what the hell is it? I mean, obviously not that many people have read the strategy.
Only those whose kind of job depends upon it have read it. So most people are going by what they've read in news outlets or opinion pieces. And then Trump does a great job of just confusing and muddying the waters every time he speaks. So it's really difficult to understand it. So that will be a useful conversation. I also want to chat with Kamran about not just the shah, but the pre-shah Iran, because we've kind of had two revolutions in Iran, the 1979 one being the most recent, but the one back in the 50s. I suspect it's equally important to be curious to hear Kamran's views on that. Because the history of Persia goes back centuries, and we have this Islamist Republic of Iran that's been the country that we've all talked about for our lifetimes, but the years before that, equally important in trying to understand what it is that perhaps Iran is going back to, in terms of its place in the region, but also the kind of power it was.