I was lucky to have the chance to talk to Robin J Brooks, who is a former FX strategist at Goldman Sachs and formerly the chief economist at the Institute for International Finance. He’s been writing a lot on the oil crisis here on Substack, and we had a great conversation about oil prices, oil shocks, and where things are headed. Here’s the transcript, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

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TRANSCRIPT: Seth Hettena interviews Robin Brooks

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SETH:

All right, everybody. Thank you for joining us. I’m joined today by Robin Brooks. Robin, as most of you know, is a prolific Substacker who has been writing quite eloquently and prolifically about the price of oil and the gyrations in the markets we’ve seen recently. Robin is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He’s also former chief strategist for the financial markets at Goldman Sachs. He has a PhD in economics.

The goal of this conversation is — I’m not an economist — but I’m hoping it will be accessible to people who are well-versed in the financial markets and those who are just interested in trying to understand what’s going on. I’ve kind of designed the chat around that.

Just to get started, let’s start with some basics here, Robin. Because the numbers are confusing. If you’re not well versed in the financial markets and you hear oil is at a hundred, you go on Google and it says 94, 89, whatever it is. What’s going on? Why are there different prices of oil?

ROBIN BROOKS:

Thanks for having me, Seth. This is really fun to do. I, like you, really enjoy Substack, and I kind of believe that there’s a niche or a demand for accessible financial market research. I really appreciate this opportunity to try and promote that and talk about what I think is going on.

So let’s start with oil and how that market works. Obviously, there’s oil drilling that happens all around the world. The United States is a prolific driller. The Europeans, much less so. The UK is a driller. The Norwegians are drillers. And the vast majority of oil is produced in the Persian Gulf.

To give you a rough idea — and I’ll just throw out a few stats on the global market — total production is around 100 million barrels per day. One barrel, I think, is 42 gallons. Of that, through the Strait of Hormuz, which is a passage around 20 to 22 miles wide, about 20 million barrels a day pass, mostly from Saudi Arabia. The Saudis are, I think, 30 or 40% of total traffic, then Iraq, and then a number of other countries like the UAE, Kuwait, and Iran. Russia, to give another example, produces about 10 million barrels of oil per day, of which it exports seven. The U.S. is a humongous producer — it’s the world’s biggest — but since we’re big gas guzzlers, we consume everything here at home, so we’re not big net exporters. We are a net exporter, which I’ll come back to in a second.

So there are, given that geography, three key prices. One is WTI, which is the benchmark price for the United States — that stands for West Texas Intermediate. There are different grades, but you can think of WTI as the reference price for oil traded in the United States. Then there’s Brent, which is the benchmark global price, thought of as a European price, but really it’s a global price — I’ll come back to why in a second. And then there’s oil traded in the Gulf and across Asia: Dubai Fateh oil. That’s a third price.

The reason Brent is this global reference rate is because it sits — and it’s doing it right now — in between Dubai and WTI. WTI has risen the least during this latest oil shock. Why? Because the United States is relatively independent in terms of importing oil. We are a net exporter. The closure or significant impairment of the Strait of Hormuz means that 20 million barrels of oil per day has shrunk significantly, and so Dubai crude has risen much more. Brent sits in the middle, closer to WTI than to Dubai, but it’s risen less.

There’s a fourth oil price that really matters in this conflict: gasoline prices here in the United States. So there’s WTI, Brent, Dubai, and then the average gasoline price at the pump per gallon. Think about it this way — what the Iranians are trying to do, they have no prayer of matching the U.S. militarily. Can’t happen. But they can push up oil prices. The hope they have is that they inflict so much political damage on Trump here domestically that continuing the war just becomes too painful for the president. We have midterms later this year. Those midterms are incredibly important for the president because who knows what might happen if the Democrats win both houses. The Iranian hope is to push up oil prices so much that continuation of this war becomes impossible.

As some people may know, I did a podcast — a similar Substack podcast — with Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, that was published on Saturday. There was a lot of Q&A after that, and I put out a Q&A on oil prices and the energy shock today on my Substack. You can think of WTI since the shock as having risen about 45 to 50 percent, Brent having risen 65 percent, and Dubai having risen around 120%. That gives you an idea of the regional disparities. U.S. gasoline prices at the pump are up around 35%.

That tells you two things. One, the global oil market is global. If oil prices in the Middle East and Asia go up, at some point it’ll become economical to shift oil that would have been consumed in the United States. Outside the United States, you have to cover the transportation costs. The transportation routes are long. But at some point, arbitrage starts to kick in, which is why, even though we are an oil exporter, our own oil prices and gasoline prices have risen. We can’t isolate ourselves completely.

It’s also true that gasoline prices at the pump here in the United States have risen much less than, say, Dubai — like a quarter as much. Do I think the mullahs in Iran have massive leverage on Trump? I think that tends to get overplayed in a lot of the coverage. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the price of a gallon of gasoline rose to around $5 that summer. We are below $4 now — we’re at $3.90. It just isn’t the same kind of crisis that we had back then.

SETH:

Gas prices are almost a political benchmark for presidential popularity in some cases. If you want to follow where gas prices are headed, is WTI the index to watch?

ROBIN BROOKS:

Yes. Since this is all about putting political pressure on Trump — that’s the one card the Iranians can play — it’s really WTI that matters, and really it’s U.S. gasoline prices that matter. Those can differ from WTI because, of course, there are margins. If people feel like they can get away with charging more for gasoline, they’re going to jack up the margins. So there can be differences between those two. But the U.S. is what matters.

SETH:

I want to turn to oil shocks. My first political memory — I’m 56 now — was waiting in line at a gas station in New York and being turned away because they ran out of gas. That was after the ‘73 oil crisis, which was the first major oil shock and perhaps one of the biggest. Oil shocks are really interesting to me. They’re interesting to you, but for different reasons, because obviously they affect the financial markets, but they’re also geopolitical and they presage huge changes in world order sometimes. The ‘73 oil crisis led to our close alliance with Saudi Arabia. The ‘79 oil crisis with Iran — which is being repeated again — led to basically doubling down with Saudi Arabia, ended our relationship with Iran, and led to the U.S. seeing the Middle East as a major strategic asset. That’s why we are where we are today — since then, we’ve had troops and ships and a big military presence in the Middle East.

But you’ve argued that while we’re seeing an oil shock, it’s somewhat contained — comparable to what we saw after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Can you walk us through that?

ROBIN BROOKS:

Let me say a couple of things. Let me start by saying: if you have a shock and disruption in the supply of oil, that doesn’t mean oil prices go to the moon. We’re not in a world where oil prices go to 200, 300, 400, 500. The question is a step change. Are we going from $73 a barrel — roughly where we were before the attack on Iran, February 27th, we all woke up on the 28th going, oh my God, what’s happening now? — to $100, which is where we are right now? Or should they be $150? Or $200? We’re not talking about $1,000. Why? Because $1,000 would cause such demand destruction that oil prices would then fall — you’d have a reverse dynamic. The only reason I’m highlighting this is because this is really a discussion about the magnitude of a risk premium: how much of a level shift does the disruption in the Strait of Hormuz imply? I’ll go through two quick calculations in a second.

The other thing I want to say — and I don’t want to sound too conspiratorial here — is that I did lots of work on Russia sanctions after Russia invaded Ukraine. The thing that drove me completely nuts was Western commodity analysts and journalists — I’m not going to name any names, but they’re very visible, everyone’s going to know who I’m talking about — basically doing the bidding of the oil industry and making apocalyptic forecasts. Often those forecasts were basically lobbying against any kind of U.S. or European sanctions pressure against Russia.

I’ll give you an example. In 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, the West decided to cap the oil revenue that Russia gets from oil prices. It took almost a year to get this done — which is always bad, because one year of design for any kind of policy means you are going to be lobbied really hard. One U.S. investment bank has a commodity team headed by a woman with a very Russian-sounding name. They put out a forecast that summer of close to $400 a barrel, basically saying if the G7 oil price cap on Russia happened, the oil market would implode. Of course, you can rationalize many different oil prices in your analyses. But those assumptions are, in my opinion, completely outlandish. It didn’t happen. And it’s basically lobbying by intimidation. Every politician wants to get reelected. The Biden administration was terrified that oil prices would spike and it would lose the midterms later in 2022, and so they unfortunately went very soft on Russia.

I think here it’s similar. The oil industry hates what’s going on. All this about the dangers of sailing through the Strait of Hormuz, the fact that getting insurance has basically become impossible — this is a major disruption of business. You have all these vessels caught in the Persian Gulf that can’t run. This is a major pain.

Let me run through a couple of numbers and then say what I think all this means for oil prices and where we are.

SETH:

Before we do that, can I give you a little bit of context? This was in the Wall Street Journal. Inflation-adjusted prices of oil: after the Iranian revolution in 1979, $179. When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, $155. After Russia invaded Ukraine, $130.

ROBIN BROOKS:

So I think it’s a really good point. The question is, how big is this shock? And therefore, in inflation-adjusted terms, how big should the risk premium be? Should we be at $130, which is Ukraine, or higher, lower?

Let me give you two ways of thinking about it — super simple back-of-the-envelope calculations that anyone can follow.

First: the Strait of Hormuz carries 20 million barrels of oil per day. Russia exports 7 million barrels of oil per day. That’s 3x. Before this latest drop in oil prices today — we basically went from Brent around 112 or 115 to 100 — oil prices were up around 65% from before the war began. On a similar timescale, oil prices in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were up 20%. So 65 versus 20% — that’s also 3x. To me, that says the Middle East is much more important for the global oil market than Russia, but that’s roughly being reflected in what prices have done. So when people come to me and say Brent should be $150 or $200, I’m not sure that’s the no-brainer many people claim it is, because we already have a big risk premium.

The second calculation gets nerdier, and I’ll try to keep it super simple. This is a supply shock, which means: if total production is 100 million barrels per day, we’ve gone to 80 now because the Strait of Hormuz is largely closed. It’s not quite closed — that’s something we can talk about — but let’s say for simplicity it has gone from 20 to zero. Then nowhere else can you start drilling at short notice. Supply is constrained. Most oil wells, when they’re operating, are operating at close to capacity. You can’t ramp those up either. So demand has to do the adjusting. The way we get demand to fall from 100 million barrels to 80 is to ramp up the price. The way we calculate that in economics is the price elasticity of demand — the downward-sloping demand curve.

Paul Krugman — I mean, I shouldn’t even be in the same room with him, frankly, this is a Nobel Prize winner — was talking about how all these elasticity numbers are super low. If you assume an elasticity of 0.1 — that’s the mapping from prices into demand — and you want a 20% reduction in daily demand, you basically need oil prices to rise at least 200%. It’s a giant adjustment if you assume a small elasticity of 0.1 or lower.

But a colleague of mine at Brookings, Ben Harris, and I have worked on these kinds of things in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. These elasticities tend to be somewhat higher. When you use a reasonable assumption on the Strait of Hormuz closure — that oil out of the Gulf is running roughly at half of what it was before the invasion, so we’ve gone from 20% to maybe 10 — and factor in the pipeline that runs from the north of Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea, which is running at much higher capacity, plus around 2.5 million barrels per day of Iranian exports, plus a handful of individual tankers brave enough to go through the Strait — you get close to 10 million barrels of oil per day. Remember, one supertanker is 2 million barrels of oil. If you assume the shortfall is roughly half, and you use an elasticity of around 0.15, which I think is more realistic, you get that prices should have risen 60 to 70%. We’re kind of there. Paul’s point in our podcast over the weekend is that these numbers are super small and super uncertain.

SETH:

I wanted to ask about that. How do you measure elasticity in oil? You can’t do a controlled experiment and cut off the supply and see what happens.

ROBIN BROOKS:

I’m not an econometrician, so people get extremely complicated with this kind of analysis. There are all kinds of questions about whether it is the oil volumes driving price or the price driving volumes, and there’s a lot of endogeneity that people control for. I am just a consumer of that literature. The citations that Ben Harris and I have worked from are between 0.14 and 0.18. I think a reasonable range for this elasticity is 0.1 to 0.2.

To give you an idea, the investment bank I mentioned earlier — the one that published oil prices going to $400 a barrel — they work with an elasticity of 0.02. So it’s five to ten times lower than a reasonable range. You can obviously generate lots of scary numbers that way. But in my mind, that is just fear-mongering in the name of lobbying.

So when I now think about what the U.S. should do — forget about the Trump administration, forget about the Biden administration — how do we get Iran to a point where they open up the Strait of Hormuz again?

SETH:

Right.

ROBIN BROOKS:

When I talk to people in Washington, people usually say: either we cut a deal with the mullahs, or we escalate and take Khark Island or whatever. I think there is a third option which I’ve been pushing, which is to embargo Iranian oil.

John McCain coined the saying — after visiting Ukraine in 2014 — “Russia is a gas station masquerading as a country.” I love that expression because it is so true about Russia. In my opinion, Iran is a gas station masquerading as an Islamic Republic. If we cut off oil exports — and we don’t need to use any force to do that — we just announce that any ships sailing fully laden from Iranian ports with Iranian oil will be intercepted and seized. We have a giant navy. It’s fearsome. No one is going to test that. It’s going to be words, but they will be believed.

The reason I think it’s not being tested is because the Trump administration, like the Biden administration, is super fearful of oil prices spiking more. But given these calculations, I actually think a lot of it is already priced. I don’t think we would get another 50% spike in oil prices.

SETH:

I want to come back to your point about Russia and the one-year delay driven by fear-mongering from oil companies and investment bankers. This war has dragged on four years now, and that one-year delay may have changed the course of the war. Are we in an analogous situation here where more delays give Iran more time and more chance to wreak havoc?

ROBIN BROOKS:

Back in 2022 — and I work closely with people who were in the administration then, and I deeply admire them — the rationale for the price cap was: well, if we just embargo Russia, then from one day to the next, 7 million barrels of oil will go off the global market and we will have a price spike. Remember, in 2022 we were coming out of COVID. The global economy was booming. Oil prices were at $100 a barrel before all of this shock. The thinking was: keep the incentive for Russia to export alive. Give them, say, $60 for every barrel they export. The cost of production is $10 or $15 a barrel, so they still have an incentive to export — they just won’t get the full price.

The problem with that, in hindsight, is that it’s really complicated. It takes time to negotiate. That makes it vulnerable to coercion, which is what happened with all the lobbying. And there are just endless shades of gray. One of the things I talk about a lot is that the shipping industry is highly concentrated. Oil tankers — the biggest owners are Greek. I like to call them Greek shipping oligarchs. They sold a ton of their ships to Russia, and that’s what’s become known as the Shadow Fleet — ships running Russian oil on behalf of the Kremlin.

The reason I think an embargo on Iran now is a good idea: compared to Russia, Iran is a much smaller supplier. Prices have already gone up a lot and embed a significant probability that Iranian oil goes off the market. It’s around 2 to 2.5 million barrels per day. If that goes off the market and nothing is already priced, assuming reasonable elasticities, that’s maybe a 20% jump — from $100 to $120. And then there’s the insanity of where we are now: Iran is embargoing us. They’ve basically stopped all Western tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz while Iranian ships run freely. That’s bonkers. They’ve done what we were unwilling and scared to do four years ago, and what we seem unwilling and scared to do now. We should give them a taste of their own medicine. People say, well, Iran, Russia, China don’t care about the welfare of their citizens — if you embargo them, the economy goes down the toilet, but who cares. Fine. But it’s worth trying. We’re not even trying.

SETH:

Something else you’ve written about in the context of Russia: oil prices tell a story of winners and losers. You’ve written that Russia is one of the big winners of this latest oil shock. What’s happened to oil revenues in recent weeks, and what does that mean for the war in Ukraine?

ROBIN BROOKS:

We started out talking about different kinds of oil. We didn’t talk about Russian oil, whose benchmark is called Urals. Before big dislocations in the world, most of these prices trade very close to each other — there’s not much difference. But after Russia invaded Ukraine, Urals oil started trading at a big discount relative to Brent. That was markets saying: there’s a real risk that Russia gets embargoed. I don’t want to agree to delivery of Russian oil because I may never get it. I’m only going to buy it at a significant discount. That risk premium has been anywhere from $25 to $40 a barrel.

So just before the war with Iran began, Brent was around $75 a barrel and Urals crude was maybe $35 to $39 — almost a $40 discount. Chunky. What we have seen is that this discount has narrowed massively. Urals has gone from something like $39 a barrel to $85 to $90. The discount has narrowed to $10 a barrel. For every barrel of oil the Kremlin exports, they’re getting a massive windfall.

That was the problem in 2022: we seized Russia’s reserves — a good chunk of them, about half, $300 billion. But because Russia was getting such a massive windfall from oil at the same time, they basically made that money back in one year.

Russia is the single biggest winner in all of this. If I were Putin, I would be sending my best military advisors to Iran, because the longer this thing goes on, the better for Putin. It gives him purchasing power. The same for China — if the U.S. gets bogged down in a conflict with Iran the way we did in Vietnam, China’s going to love it. There are lots of winners here geopolitically. Anyone who is a commodity exporter and doesn’t have to transit the Strait of Hormuz is a big winner — Latin American countries, Malaysia, Indonesia.

SETH:

I want to take a quick question from the audience. Geoffrey Heenan writes: wouldn’t Iran’s response to an embargo be to close the Strait of Hormuz? He means close it even further — there are still maybe 10 million barrels a day squeaking through via pipeline and a few tankers. Wouldn’t they just squeeze that further?

ROBIN BROOKS:

Jeff is two years behind me at the IMF — we started our jobs in October 1998. He’s trolling me here. I’m going to talk down to him because he’s junior to me. I hope you’re listening, Jeff.

My pushback is: the Strait of Hormuz is already closed. The only oil that’s running is Iranian oil. It is a completely perverse situation. If we embargo Iranian oil now, that two to two-and-a-half million barrels per day goes to zero or close to it. Nothing else is going to change. They can’t embargo us more than they already are. We’re already at zero.

There is an asymmetry here we haven’t explored. The Saudi pipeline running at four or five million barrels per day is obviously a major military target for Iran — but so far it’s held. For the West, flows out of the Persian Gulf have fallen from something like 17 million barrels per day to maybe six or seven. But the point stands: Iran cannot close the Strait any further for Western traffic.

SETH:

I know you’re tight on time. Two more questions. There’s a lot of oil backed up in the Persian Gulf right now. If there’s a ceasefire today, Trump declares victory, and the Strait reopens — how long until the system snaps back to normal?

ROBIN BROOKS:

Let me go back a little bit, because the last 48 to 72 hours have been a bit bonkers. On Friday we were talking about de-escalation. Then on Saturday night we all get a Truth Social post saying we’re going to bomb Iranian power plants if the Strait isn’t open within 48 hours. Then this morning we get an announcement that we’re in peace talks with senior figures and the deadline has been extended to five days.

This all reminds me of when Trump was escalating tariffs on China in April 2025. We started 2025 after his inauguration with tariffs on China going up 20 percentage points because of fentanyl. But in April we went all the way up to almost 150% — an insane escalation. When you put the gun to the chest of China and Xi like that, a strong man can’t appear to let himself be intimidated, because otherwise he’ll lose power domestically. So he basically ignored Trump. Trump was left spinning his wheels, escalating, de-escalating, escalating, de-escalating, until he basically backed down. The Chinese were completely silent through all of this. They played it beautifully.

The last 72 hours feel just like that. Trump is basically negotiating with himself. The Iranians have already closed the Strait of Hormuz — they can’t close it anymore. They’re strong men. They can’t give in to this kind of intimidation. They don’t care about civilian losses. So Trump has once again been left spinning his wheels and has de-escalated. The real issue is Trump’s negotiating style: how can you escalate so massively and not give your opponent an off-ramp? Here, people’s only incentive is to sit tight and wait for you to back down — which is what happened with China a year ago and what appears to be happening now.

My second point: do I put a lot of weight on this latest de-escalation? No, I put about the same weight on it that I put on the escalation on Saturday night. Do I think the war will end and Trump will back down anytime soon? I’m not sure. If I thought oil going to $120 or $130 was a stretch, I also think going back down to $90 or $80 in short order is a stretch.

And there’s no guarantee the Iranians comply with any Trump deal. They can keep lobbing drones and rockets at oil tankers in the Strait. A rapid reopening is unlikely. Also because the insurance sector is a whole animal unto itself — just because Trump says one thing does not mean the insurance sector will provide coverage to ships. Even if we got an announcement tomorrow that the U.S. is withdrawing all military forces and it’s over, I am not sure we’ll go back to 20 million barrels of oil per day through the Strait anywhere near three to four months from now.

SETH:

I’ve got one more for you. I want to get to your writings about the debt crisis. But before that, a question from the audience about gold. Usually when you have high inflation and a supply shock like this, you see gold spike. It’s done the opposite — it’s plummeted. What’s going on there? Wouldn’t you expect to see gold be more resilient?

ROBIN BROOKS:

I think you would have. It’s a question mark. Let me say first: I’m not a big gold bug. I’m not sitting on a stack of gold bars and silver bars. My savings are super simple — I just invest in the broadest ETF I can find for the stock market.

Gold has had a crazy rally. Since August, gold is up — even with the current drawdown — 40 to 50%. That’s incredible. Silver, palladium, all these other precious metals are up much more, even though they’ve fallen recently. Silver is up around 100% over the same timeline.

I am really worried about fiscal policy globally — U.S. fiscal policy, but it’s an even bigger mess in Japan, Italy, Spain, France, the UK. When I’ve looked at what sparked moves up in gold, it was always after Fed meetings where the Fed said inflation is kind of high but we’re going to cut anyway. That happened in August last year. The Fed does this big meeting in Jackson Hole every August, and Jay Powell gave a keynote saying, yeah, I know inflation is kind of high, but we’re going to cut anyway. That sparked the rise in gold. I think that legitimately is markets saying: maybe the Fed, because of political pressure or just wanting to be popular, is cutting interest rates when it shouldn’t. I need a safe asset, and that’s gold.

I am a fan of what people have come to call the debasement trade. I think it will run a lot further. I don’t think this drawdown fundamentally changes that. Gold has just had a crazy run-up, so stuff starts trading funky after that. Generally I’m bullish — I think we’re just getting a drawdown because of the crazy run-up.

SETH:

Let’s get to the debt crisis. You’ve argued that while we’re in the grips of an oil crisis, there’s another one lurking around the corner that may be even worse — a global debt crisis. Japan is your case study. Walk us through it.

ROBIN BROOKS:

I’ll be super short and super simple. Japan’s government debt — public debt — is 240% of GDP. For reference, the U.S. is around 100 to 110%, and U.S. debt is projected to go much higher. Italy is around 140%. France is around 110%. The UK is around 100 to 110%. Spain is around 110 to 120%. Japan really stands out. 240% — that’s a lot of debt.

What that means is: when you have a shock that is potentially inflationary — think inflation spiking after COVID — all these central banks start raising interest rates. The Fed raised interest rates. Everywhere else raised interest rates. The Bank of Japan couldn’t. Why? Because if it starts raising interest rates, the government has to start paying higher interest costs on all this debt, and you have a fiscal crisis. So the Bank of Japan was trapped.

Because interest rates were rising everywhere but Japan’s were fixed, that became massively yen-negative — you were compensated less for holding yen and more for holding dollars and other assets. The yen fell like crazy. Debt becomes a weight around your neck that limits your flexibility. A country like Japan has a trade-off: it can either keep interest rates artificially low — the Bank of Japan is still buying huge amounts of government debt every month, capping yields — or it can stop doing that and yields rise massively, which stabilizes the currency but at the cost of a fiscal crisis. In one form or another, many countries are increasingly in this trap. Japan is the most advanced case, and it really limits how you can react.

The Japanese solution is actually super simple. Gross debt is 240% of GDP. Net debt — if you net out all the financial assets the Japanese government holds, stocks, bonds, all this stuff — is 130%. They could bring debt down 110% of GDP if they just sold their assets. But they don’t. The reason they don’t is vested interests. People like managing all these assets. It’s in equilibrium. And it’s going to take things getting worse before they can get better and there’s political consensus to sell those assets.

SETH:

Do you think we’re headed down that path?

ROBIN BROOKS:

Yes. There’s a great analyst, Lynn Alden, on Twitter — I think she’s based in Hong Kong. She has this phrase: “Nothing stops this train.” I think that’s where we are in fiscal policy. We’ve become so entitled. Standards of living have gone up massively. Life expectancy has gone up massively. And a country like France is reducing the retirement age. That’s insane. Lynn tweets frequently after Fed meetings: “Not sure if you missed the Fed meeting. Here’s the short summary. Nothing stops this train.”

SETH:

It’s completely true. Robin, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it. You’re a great educator on the financial markets and keeping things simple. I share your goal of democratizing the financial markets — like the old saying, where are the customers’ yachts? A lot of investors get rich giving advice, and it doesn’t seem to pass through. I know you’re short on time, so I’ll let you go. Thank you all.

ROBIN BROOKS:

Thanks for setting this up.

SETH:

Thank you for joining me. Take care, everybody.

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On March 4, 2002, deep in the snow-covered peaks of Afghanistan, Air Force Combat Controller John Chapman died in one of the most heroic actions of the war. Years later, a grainy, infrared video of his last stand—fighting alone against a superior enemy force—shocked the nation and earned him the Medal of Honor.

But how that video came to light is a story few know.

In this episode of The After Action Report, I speak with Frank Dailey, a former Air Force intelligence analyst who was on the inside from day one. Dailey walks us through the operation that led to Chapman’s death, the initial attempts to bury the video, and the internal resistance from SEALs who didn’t want the narrative to change. It’s a conversation about truth, power, and the quiet battle waged to honor a fallen hero the right way.

If you care about accountability in elite military units, intelligence ethics, and what it really takes to speak truth to power in Washington, don’t miss this one.

🎧 Listen now on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

📌 Andrew Milani's paper on Takur Ghar: Pitfalls of Technology: A Case Study of the Battle on Takur Ghar Mountain, Afghanistan, available at: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA414541

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Title card by Dean Lubensky

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Retired police officer Matt Cubbler opens up about his years-long quest to uncover the truth behind the suspicious death of Navy SEAL Commander Job Price, his high school classmate. Cubbler pulls no punches as he exposes glaring holes in the official investigation, explores the hidden pressures of elite military life, and shines a light on troubling patterns of secrecy and corruption within the SEAL community.

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Before dawn on March 4, 2002, a U.S. special operations team landed on an Afghan summit — and into an ambush. What followed was a brutal firefight, two Medals of Honor, and a decades-long battle over the truth. I’m joined by retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant Rob Harrison and retired Navy SEAL Eric Deming, two veterans with firsthand knowledge of the fight and its impact on the special operations community, to break down what really happened on Takur Ghar.

Email Eric Deming at e.d.215 (at) protonmail.com

Theme music by Ryan Hettena

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Why are we still talking about Takur Ghar, 23 years later?

In this episode of The After-Action Report, I’m joined by Sean Naylor, a seasoned journalist and author who was embedded with the 101st Airborne during Operation Anaconda in 2002. For more than two decades, Naylor has been digging into the battle on Takur Ghar, uncovering the hard lessons and lingering controversies that still shape military thinking today.

We dive into the operational missteps, the impact of command decisions, and the ongoing debates surrounding military honors—including the Medal of Honor awarded to John Chapman. Sean also shares his perspective on the challenges of reporting in military environments and offers insight into his latest work, covering the mysterious Havana Syndrome affecting diplomats and spies.

* Buy Sean’s 2005 book, Not a Good Day to Die, on Amazon.

* Read Sean’s 2016 interview with Britt Slabinski in The New York Times.

* Sean’s explosive 2018 report in Newsweek.

* His report this month is in Air & Space Forces magazine.

* Don’t miss Sean’s explosive report on Havana Syndrome in The High Side.

Credits: Theme music by Ryan Hettena

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theiceman.substack.com/subscribe

In this episode of The After-Action Report, Air Force veteran Rob Harrison recounts his experiences during the 2002 battle of Takur Ghar in Afghanistan, where he witnessed the extraordinary heroism displayed by Air Force combat controller John Chapman.

He sheds light on the controversy surrounding Chapman’s Medal of Honor, the complex upgrade process, and the Navy SEALs’ unprecedented efforts to challenge his recognition. Harrison offers a gripping firsthand account of the battle, the soldiers’ struggles, and the continuing fight to honor Chapman’s legacy.

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Retired Navy SEAL Eric Deming is back to tell all about Marcus Luttrell's training failures and the disastrous events of Operation Red Wings, which became widely known through the book and film Lone Survivor.

If you want to watch the podcast check out the link below:

Operation Red Wings has some eerie similarities to the subject of our last podcast, the Battle of Takur Ghar, better known as Roberts Ridge. Once again, a SEAL team was ambushed after landing a helicopter on a mountaintop in Afghanistan. And just as in Roberts Ridge, a rescue helicopter rushes to the scene and is shot down with even more lives lost. Was it just a coincidence? Did the SEALs fail to learn from their mistakes?

Deming stresses the importance of accountability, leadership's impact on military operations, and the need for transparency within the SEAL community. He also highlights the emotional toll on SEALs and their families from false narratives, advocating for truth to honor fallen heroes' sacrifices.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theiceman.substack.com/subscribe

Retired Navy SEAL Eric Deming joined me on the latest After-Action Report podcast to discuss what happened on March 4, 2002, on Takur Ghar mountain in Afghanistan—events that resulted in the deaths of seven service members and two Medals of Honor, one of which remains hotly contested.

A video version of this podcast is available on YouTube:

It’s also available on

Apple Podcasts:

And Spotify:

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit theiceman.substack.com/subscribe