i think we're at defcon 3 now and i think we're about to go to defcon 2 on this situation. if you look at the debt clock.org website, they show that we have $211 trillion of unfunded liabilities in the united states. and they also calculate that we have $219 trillion of assets, corporate assets, household assets, small business assets. in other words, our unfunded liabilities are virtually identical to all of our assets. and i just get this feeling that if the liabilities -- if the assets -- if the liabilities get bigger than the assets, well, that's kind of like you're running a hedge fund and about to get margin called. it would mean that all of the obligations that we have made, we can't even -- if we sold everything at today's prices, we could just barely cover them right now. so it is like we're the equity holder back before the global financial crisis in a cdo squared type of financing scheme that ended up causing parts of the global financial crisis. we need interest rates to come down or the deficit to come down and neither of those are happening with the fed higher

it totally changes the view you have of how nuclear weapons are handled, how we handle in defcon andhe role of domestic politics in these during the crisis. now it's of course, more complex than simply saying domestic politics drives everything, but it fundamentally changes the way we think about these issues. so i think that's crucial. now i'm grading us for the sake of being provocative. but i also actually believe this. i give us a hard f in the way we the way we've done our work. and i'll say, why, in my experience and course, there's a lot i haven't seen, but in my experience, most of the secrets that are held from the american public are or largely known by the we're trying to hold them from overseas, not known by the american public. there's a reverse ordering to us right. the manhattan project is only one of many, many examples this. but time and again i'm struck in the archive by how much our adversaries know, how much they pick up and how little the public knows. one example of this, one of many examples that i wrote about years ago in 1969, nixon and kissinger decide that

he was willing to go to defcon 3 at the time of the yom kippur war. sent a signal to moscow and they got the message. consistently not only with respect to israel but with respect to ukraine, the biden administration is not being effective. if henry kissinger were still with us, i think he would be inclined to agree. >> martha: great to have you with us today, niall. thank you. >> thank you. >> let's go live to tel aviv. mark regev. good to have you back with us. you hear antony blinken talking about the day after. can you eliminate hamas or whoever could supplant or replace them or be the new hamas if the united states doesn't directly send a very strong signal to iran? are you disappointed that this administration is not speaking more forcefully about the role of iran? >> so its clear, martha, there's an axis of evil. the head of the octopus, if we can use that metaphor, is in iran. and the octopus has tentacles. there's the houthis in yemen, there's hezbollah in lebanon and there's hamas in gaza. if we succeed and we will, in defeating hamas in gaz

this is -- we're on a collision course with this defcon, going to defcon 2, and i believe that we'vetarted a bond rally here. i think we have had such a brutal increase. i think the fed is sounding the right tone. i do think rates are going to fall as we move into a recession in the first part of next year. >> little alarmist there. >> yeah. you know, people come on, the billionaires come on, and they tend to be alarmist. i think that they uniquely keep people who are not making that much money in the market out. they keep them in their 5% cd chains, and it's a shame, because there are people who might have wanted to own amazon because they think it's a good company, and they won't own it because of billionaires who come on our shows, and they do quite often, and basically tell you that, sorry, the door is closed. i dislike that. and i think it's a suboptimal way to think. we can help create opportunity not by telling people that you should buy amazon but -- and i'm using that as paradigm -- but to show there are opportunities that abound for those that are open minded and i think pe