1297: Iran | Out of the Loop

15:04Jordan Harbinger:So this was a major resource. Now, by the 1950s, Iran's prime minister decided that all the oil companies would be nationalized A lot of oil revenue was helping the UK Wasn't really getting back to the people of Iran The oil companies were nationalized And the United States and UK did what we always do And we backed a military coup

15:30Ryan McBeth:Okay, so just to clarify The US and Britain didn't overthrow the Shah They overthrew the prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. He had nationalized the oil fields, which meant he took them away from the companies and gave them to the people of Iran. USA Brits don't like that. They overthrow this guy and they put the Shah back in power. I was wondering about when this modernized, because one of the sort of trendy things to do now on Reddit is to post a picture of Iran where there's some sort of 20 year old baddie in a miniskirt having a birthday party. This is Iran in 1970. And you're like, what the heck?

16:02Ryan McBeth:What happened to that place? This woman right now is wearing a burqa and maybe has her eyes uncovered, depending on how her husband or brother feels that day. Wow. Not necessarily every woman in Iran, but a woman of that age during the 80s probably was encouraged to cover up more and wasn't allowed to wear that miniskirt anymore and take photos.

16:21Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, the modernization kind of occurred in the 1960s. They started implementing things like a social security system, buying modern weapons. the Shah actually left the country during this military coup, and then he came back, and he had more power than ever. And some of the people who opposed him were on the religious side. So he started implementing these reforms. Women got the right to vote. He attempted to weaken religious power. And one of the ways he did that was he created a secret police organization. Savak, yeah. Yes. That's one of the reasons the Islamic rebels in the 1970s wanted to overthrow the Shah.

16:58Jordan Harbinger:it was because of Savak. And when these guys were all done, they basically restarted Savak again. I don't even think they changed the name. They realized we do need a secret police if we're going to repress people. But Savak was basically, they did surveillance and intimidation and torture. And in Iran, if you were in the middle class, you were running around wearing a miniskirt, You're on nice restaurants. You were getting an education. But if you couldn't access that oil revenue or you were religious and living in a more provincial part of Iran, you didn't necessarily experience that. And that caused a lot of resentment, which kind of brings us to 1979.

17:42Jordan Harbinger:nine.

17:42Ryan McBeth:So I see even still today, I've got Iranian friends who I've met in person, not just show fans as well. But they'll say like, hey, in Iran, yeah, my friend has like a Lamborghini. He owns a nice restaurant. He has pool parties where men and women go. And I'm like, how do you do that without getting in trouble? And the answer is usually his dad is like this guy. And so the IRGC or the morality police or whoever, they just don't mess with him. And when the girls come over, they're covered and they walk in and then they take that off and they're wearing a bikini in the pool. And like people take photos, but they don't post it on social media or whatever, or their accounts are private.

18:20Ryan McBeth:It's just tolerated because they know that people actually want to have a life, especially in Tehran. But I think to your point, if you live in a rural village where you farm stuff, you're not playing that same game. You're not enjoying nice restaurants and rolling around in your Lambo with your girlfriend. You are living centuries behind the elite in the capital.

18:41Jordan Harbinger:If you take a look at the IRGC looking the other way, and you look at rooftops in Iran, you'll see satellite dishes everywhere. Depending on the mood, satellite dishes are illegal or perhaps not illegal, or now they're illegal again. They never seem to come down. You need to give people some sort of way to consume some content. It's the posting that scares them, which is why right now Iran's internet is essentially shut down.

19:06Ryan McBeth:Okay, 1979, what happens in 79? This is an exciting year for Iran and pretty bad for everyone, unless you're an Ayatollah.

19:16Jordan Harbinger:Starting in 1979, groups of Iranian students started rebelling. They stormed the American embassy in Tehran. They took 52 Americans hostage, and they held them for 444 days. And this was a massive international incident. Jimmy Carter was president at the time. He likely lost reelection because of this incident. And it showed a level of impotence that the United States could not go in and rescue these guys. It was a big black eye for the United States. And that really put the U.S. like we've never forgiven Iran for taking people and holding them for 444 days.

19:55Ryan McBeth:Yeah, my buddy went on a trip there in 2010, the one he invited me on. And he said that you can go to the U.S. Embassy building and there's like an American flag mosaic that you're supposed to wipe your feet on and step on. And you can't take any photos there, probably to avoid antagonizing the United States even further. And it's just like a total mess. But you can just walk through this building and it's like, look, this is where we invaded the embassy. I actually know somebody who was there in the crowd during the embassy thing. And he said his take, and I don't know if this is obvious historical fact or just his take, but he said the whole thing was planned.

20:31Ryan McBeth:Like it wasn't just this student protest where people showed up to say, hey, death to America. Women who are covered up had bolt cutters underneath their what is it called? Like a chador or whatever. Distasha. Distasha. Yeah, they had bolt cutters. People were armed. And it's like, oh, where did you get a gun? Come on. This is a repressive society with the Shah. You just happen to have handguns, you know, stuff like that. some of the people there were definitely students or civilians, but some of the people there were definitely trained to take over this embassy. That was like not an accidental.

21:01Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, there was a rumor that Iran's previous president was Ahmad Ahmadinejad. He was in the crowd as well as one of the agitators.

21:09Ryan McBeth:That to me sounds like the Iranian IRGC version of I was at Woodstock, bro. Yeah, I was at the U.S. embassy thing. You should make me president. Bro, you were diapers when that happened. And it's like, no, don't do the math. Don't do the math.

21:21Jordan Harbinger:It certainly could be. Iran's current, elected by the Council of Experts, this guy, he was supposedly besieging militia, who either served or fought, depending on who you talk to, in the Iran-Iraq wars, kind of as his street cred. and a lot of people who served in the besiege militia, these are Chodhichungas nine, who were essentially told, go walk that way. Here is a key. Put this key in your pocket. It's the key to paradise. Walk toward Iraq until you hit a landmine. Maybe it'll even help you get up further to heaven, right? And you'll go right into paradise. The people who served in the besiege have a very unique worldview because they're all formed at the same time.

22:04Jordan Harbinger:They're all around my age, a little bit older, and they all served. And some of them saw combat. And those are going to be the hardliners, right? We walked into Iraq to stop them from taking our country, from destroying our revolution. And so people who survived that certainly have a worldview that is unlike any other.

22:28Ryan McBeth:What is the besiege? What is the IRGC? How is that different from the regular army? there's too many organizations if you're a kind of a newbie to the iran thing this gets confusing

22:38Jordan Harbinger:super fast they like naming things every time they create a new missile they give it a new name which is like if you're into missiles it's oh crap i gotta remember this new name now in the west we give it a suffix we change the fin design we call it the a1 design so you can talk about the irgc irgc islamic revolutionary guard corps think of them as the religious army of iran they get about I think it's$5.7 billion in funding every year. They're relatively small. It's about 125 ,000 people. But the IRGC is the religious army who protects the state, but they are the insurgents. They go out and they train people.

23:19Jordan Harbinger:Hey, this is how you make an IED. Hey, this is how you launch a missile. So they do that with all their proxies. So the IRGC is one kind of military that Iran has. Think of the IRGC as a religious army.

23:31Ryan McBeth:So there's not really a U.S. equivalent, like Secret Service plus the Green Berets in terms of training proxies. And then do they act as secret police domestically as well? Or is that a different organization?

23:41Jordan Harbinger:I believe that is a different organization, but I would not be surprised if they had their hand in that because they have their hand in a lot of other things. They're also a for-profit organization. So they own construction companies, engineering companies, electronics companies. That's one big problem with Iran right now. If you have a business, say a construction company, and you bid on a project, IRGC-related companies will underbid you on that project and you won't get it. And then that money will funnel into the IRGC.

24:10Ryan McBeth:That is so bizarre. They don't have any rules against, hey, maybe the government shouldn't be exclusively involved in every industry. I mean, that's almost like a China thing.

24:19Jordan Harbinger:You see that in Egypt, too. The Egyptian army owns construction companies. They own soda bottling plants, food processing plants. The Egyptian army is a for-profit organization, and the IRGC is no different. Now, the other army, which is a lot poorer but is larger, is the Artesh. The Artesh, they have a budget I believe of$2.7 billion a year, so they have less of a budget than a small organization They have about 300, a little over 300 ,000 people The Artesh is the army of the people When Iranian males are drafted they might go into the IRGC, they might be drafted into the IRGC they might be drafted into the prison service but for the most part they get drafted in the Artesh and they serve two years there and they hate it, it sucks, they just do their time and they get out And then the besiege are like a volunteer militia.

25:10Jordan Harbinger:They're kind of under the IRGC. A lot of times they take children, they take younger people, but you'll see people as old as 70 in the besiege. And that's something that during the riots when Misham Mani was murdered, I had people contact me saying like, hey, my grandfather went back to the besiege to do riot control because it was some extra money. Jeez.

25:32Ryan McBeth:So you got like a 65 year old man, 70 year old man shooting college kids at a riot?

25:38Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, you're shooting them or, you know, he has a shield or he has a baton. Yeah. They probably give the guns to the younger guys and have the older guys do the baton thing. But you imagine being hard up for money that you're like, I'm going to go back to my old besiege unit and shoot some civilians. That's crazy. Give me some reals. Yeah.

25:54Ryan McBeth:Iran has mastered the art of making everybody else pay for its dysfunction, which now that I say it out loud, kind of sounds like the cable company. We'll be right back.

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28:06Ryan McBeth:Don't forget about our newsletter, We Bit Wiser. It's a bite-sized gem from us to you from a past episode or something out of our lives. It's an under two minute read every Wednesday. Jordan Harbinger dot com slash news is where you can find it. Now back to Ryan McBeth. Okay, so they take over the embassy, these revolutionaries in 1979. They hold 52, was it, Americans for 444 days. Watch the movie Argo. If you want to know how one of our show guests' husband, we had Johnna Mendez on. Her husband, Tony Mendez, was like a legendary CIA officer, and he led that particular operation, which is incredible.

28:44Ryan McBeth:I vaguely remember this, Ryan. Wasn't it like we got a bunch of Canadian passports, and they made them for the embassy staff and somehow got them into the Canadian ambassador's house. I mean, it's just this crazy plot that I'm just shocked actually worked.

28:57Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, there were some people getting held at the embassy and there were some who were in a different location. I think there's six people in a different location. We essentially said that some Americans came or some, I believe they're Canadians who say, hey, we're responsible for this big movie production thing. We'd like to shoot in Iran because we think it has the right scenery. And they handed out passports for people that were going to be brought back to Canada, supposedly, as a way to evacuate these guys under the guise of, oh, this is the production assistant and this is the so on. Crazy.

29:32Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, that was a fascinating operation. The movie makes it a little more exciting. I believe they just flew out of the country on a regular transport. They weren't actually chased through the airport.

29:41Ryan McBeth:Yeah, unlikely they were chased through the airport. Yeah, you got to add that extra adrenaline there. Yeah. So the movie Argo, Ben Affleck, probably, and John Goodman. Yeah. Fantastic movie. Really interesting story. Half slash mostly true ish. I don't know. We'll see. Okay. Then after this embassy operation, the U.S. is really pissed off at Iran. Iran decides the U.S. is the great Satan. And why are we still upset about this? It's been almost 50 years.

30:10Jordan Harbinger:That's an excellent question. We'd probably get over the embassy thing. But I think the reason that we're so upset is that after this particular event, Iran decided that they were going to be the protectors of all of Shia Islam. And so they started supporting Shia groups, including Shia groups in Iraq, including groups like Shia rebels in Lebanon, which eventually at the formation of Hezbollah inside of Lebanon. So they started forming all these proxy militias. And Lebanon is really where we got that taste of what Iranian terror could be, because people were getting kidnapped, people were getting murdered, there were bombs going off.

30:57Jordan Harbinger:There was an embassy where around 250 Marines and about 50, well, not just Marines, but Army as well, and French soldiers, another 50 or so French soldiers were killed by a car bomb, a truck bomb. And this truck bomb wasn't driven there by Iran, but it was driven there by the militias that were supported and funded by Iran. So Iran essentially wanted to reach its tentacles out. And they were too poor to build an aircraft carrier, but they could do power projection through these proxy militias. PLO Yasser Arafat the day after the Shah fell Yasser Arafat got in a plane and he flew to Tehran and he started talking with the original Ayatollah Khomeini so you have Khomeini and Khomeini and then another Khomeini that's right but the original Ayatollah Khomeini offered him help and this was really weird because the PLO Palestinian Liberation Organization it wasn't particularly religious.

31:56Jordan Harbinger:Its identity was more a Palestinian identity, Marxist-Leninist kind of identity. But they took their funding. Who's going to say no to a check, right? But eventually, it wasn't really working because Iran wanted a more religious campaign. And that's when we got Islamic Jihad, which was Iranian-funded. And Islamic Jihad and PLO, they kind of butted heads. occasionally they would fight Israelis, they would fight each other. Islamic Jihad eventually went to Lebanon. And then there was this other organization that Iran decided to help with. It was the Muslim Brotherhood. And this was around 2005 or so.

32:38Jordan Harbinger:And actually around 1987, the first Intifada, it was the first Intifada, 1987, Muslim Brotherhood rises to power in Gaza. and this eventually becomes Hamas. So now you have Iranian Shias supporting Palestinian Sunnis who are more than happy to take their money.

32:57Ryan McBeth:And this is happening in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, also maybe the West Bank or no?

33:04Jordan Harbinger:West Bank, mainly PLO. I would not be surprised. There's going to be some Islamic Jihad inside of the West Bank as well.

33:10Ryan McBeth:So Iran is busy destabilizing the Middle East as much as possible by funding militias and terrorism. And they're creating proxy armies because they can't really project power themselves. They really have to use a proxy army on the ground. And this starts, in part, the Lebanese Civil War, correct?

33:29Jordan Harbinger:The Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, I believe. It didn't start the war, but certainly helped make it a little more deadlier. At the time, there was a power-sharing agreement between Lebanese Christians, Lebanese Shia, and Lebanese Sunni. The Christians got most of the presidential power, I believe. And then as Palestinian refugees started flooding into Lebanon, the demographics changed. And now there are more Muslims than there were Christians, and the Muslims wanted more power, and the Christians didn't want that. During the Lebanese Civil War, there were plenty of Christians that were causing atrocities.

34:05Jordan Harbinger:There was no limit of people who were doing horrible things. But then Iran looks at that and goes, you know what, we're going to support the Shia and maybe have some influence if we get concessions from the Christians.

34:15Ryan McBeth:Yeah. I grew up in Michigan. We had a huge Lebanese population that moved there in the 70s and 80s. So I basically, if you grew up in Michigan, you grew up with a bunch of Lebanese and you would say, oh, so you guys are Muslim. And they'd go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, pal. No. And you'd go, oh, I didn't know you had Christians over there. So you learn early that not everybody from there is a Muslim because they will tell you. They will correct you on that one. And then what's interesting is I found a lot of the Muslims and Christians from the Middle East get along perfectly fine in Michigan.

34:47Ryan McBeth:They like to shoot each other in Lebanon, but once they get to Michigan, I feel like they're just homesick and they want to make really delicious food and share it with each other, which is kind of a funny, semi-tragic reality of the situation. So my dad worked for Ford and it was like one in five of his colleagues were dudes from Lebanon. So that was me growing up just around that all the time. I know we tried to rescue the embassy hostages and that operation failed. I know we kind of skipped over that in the interest of time.

35:12Jordan Harbinger:This is one of those bad ideas that only got worse. So we wanted to rescue the American hostages. So we came up with this. Wile E. Coyote couldn't have come up with a worse plan, right? We called it Operation Eagle Claw. A lot of people know it as Desert One. And essentially, we're going to fly helicopters off an aircraft carrier. and we were going to go to this one area of the salt flat called Desert One. And that's where some aircraft were going to land with fuel bladders and they were going to refuel the helicopters there. And then they were going to go to another strip where they're going to pick up the assault team.

35:45Jordan Harbinger:And then there were other parts of the plan too. They're going to fly the helicopters into Tehran. And there was one idea where they're going to fly the helicopters back to another airstrip, blow them. There was another where they're going to fly them to the soccer stadium and then land a C-130 Hercules inside the soccer stadium. and then take off again with rocket-assisted takeoff. So the plan fell apart essentially the first night, before it even started. A number of the helicopters got their engines jammed with sand, and they had to haul the whole thing off. And while refueling, one helicopter was taking off, and it hit a C-130 with the fuel bladder, and it was a big explosion.

36:21About eight soldiers died.

36:23Jordan Harbinger:But what we did get out of that was the V-22 Osprey, because we thought, boy, wouldn't it be neat if we had something that could fly like a plane really far and then land like a helicopter. And if anything good came out of it, it was the establishment of the idea about the V-22.

36:39Ryan McBeth:It seems to me like that kind of mission would never happen. It just seems like our special forces back then were kind of like, wow, this is really a stretch to go in there, even get there and do this. And now it almost seems like, oh, fly under the radar in Pakistan in a stealth helicopter and kill bin Laden and then get out before Pakistan even has any clue that were there. No problem. I don't know. Is that my imagination or are we way better at this kind of thing? Now we can go in and grab Maduro and everyone's like, hey, where'd the president go?

37:05Jordan Harbinger:It seems like a big leap. We made a lot of changes to our military after that, creating the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment. Just by creating that, people who all they do is fly at night. You take the best helicopter pilots from the army and you say, all right, you're going to fly at night wearing night vision goggles. Imagine flying a helicopter. I've flown a helicopter before. I was at the flight school at Fort Rucker. Imagine flying a helicopter and you can only see out of two rolled up magazine tubes. Yeah, no. That sounds terrifying. That's why these guys are the best in the world. So I think our capabilities have increased and our ISR, our intelligence surveillance reconnaissance has increased.

37:47Jordan Harbinger:Our ability to look at the weather has increased. All those factors make any kind of mission that we perform a lot more successful.

37:55Ryan McBeth:Okay, so we tried to rescue the hostages, blew it, but in the 80s, Iraq invades Iran. What's going on there? I thought Saddam Hussein was our enemy too, and Iran's our enemy. Shouldn't they be friends?

38:05Jordan Harbinger:And Saddam Hussein, he was afraid of two things. The first was he was afraid of this revolution spreading to Iraq because Iraq has a predominantly Shia population, but it's ruled by the Sunnis and the Ba 'ath Party, which is Saddam Hussein's political party. There's a little sliver of land between Kuwait and Iran, and that little sliver of land is the only waterway that Iraq can use to export its oil. So the next thing they thought was, this thing was called the Shattel Arab Waterway. So the idea behind Iraq's invasion of Iran was, I'm going to take advantage of the relative instability in the country, and I'm going to take the Khuzestan province, which is one of Iran's oil-rich provinces.

38:56Jordan Harbinger:and this was an absolute disaster for both sides. We're talking trench warfare, like World War I style trench warfare, poison gas. You had children used in combat, landmines, and it went on for about eight years and the borders just kind of ended up where they were at the start. Jeez. So big waste of money.

39:19Ryan McBeth:Didn't like a million or more people get killed in this war too? It was a crazy bloody conflict.

39:24Jordan Harbinger:I believe you're correct. And I think there is a statue in Iraq that had Saddam Hussein's hand holding a basket of Iranian helmets. And this massive statue, a basket of Iranian helmets. And he went into one of his palaces. I might be misremembering this, but I'm pretty sure I saw the sconces on the wall were Iranian helmets that have been gold plated. Crazy.

39:49Ryan McBeth:It says 500 ,000, excluding numbers from the related on-fall campaign. It's the deadliest conventional war ever fought between regular armies of developing countries. I know that sounds like a limit, but basically, other than world wars and major great power conflicts, it was the largest casualty. If they would just consider Russia a developing country, they would be able to beat that with the Ukraine conflict. Probably shouldn't joke about that, But here we are, because I think those casualties have got to be pushing 500 ,000 if you add both up with Ukraine and Russia, right?

40:20Jordan Harbinger:It's probably more like 1.5 million. Really? Yeah. Oh, gosh. I wouldn't be. We're talking total casualties, not just dead. Maybe 500 ,000 dead sounds about right. But 1.5, usually for every dead, you have three wounded. Jeez, my God.

40:36Ryan McBeth:Okay. So back to the proxy armies that Iran puts in the Middle East. I remember when we did our Out of the Loop episode on October 7th, you mentioned Iranian fingerprints were all over the Hamas attacks. That's why they use proxies. It's also, what, not just cheap, but they can say that wasn't us, it was Hezbollah. I don't know.

40:54Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, it's cheap. And you get plausible deniability. If you can find a terrorist group and give them a little money, and they won't always do your bidding, but they will be more inclined to do your bidding. You take a look at the Donbass in Ukraine, which is Donetsk and Luhansk. How did that start? Well, it started in 2014 when the Ukrainian government was a basket case. It was right after the Madan revolution. And Russia was looking at this. They take Crimea and they look at a bunch of unemployed people in Donetsk and Luhansk who are ethnic. I don't want to say ethnic Russians because Ukrainians will get mad at me, but people who identify as ethnic Russians.

41:34Jordan Harbinger:And they say, you're poor, huh? How about I give you a rifle and a paycheck? And now you're somebody. I've always said nothing stops a bullet like a job. So Iran was engaged in a proxy conflict with Israel, and Russia was engaged in a proxy conflict by funding these separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk with Ukraine. And so there is that plausible deniability. We did it in Afghanistan. We armed the Mujahideen. We gave them Stinger missiles. We were friends with Osama bin Laden, when you think about it, right? That one didn't work out too well. Well, you win some, you lose some.

42:09Ryan McBeth:That's right. Yeah, this proxy stuff can go either way. And so Iran has different proxies, Hezbollah. The Shia armies are militias in Iraq. They've got the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PIJ. They've got Hamas. They've got the Houthis in Yemen. The Houthis, yeah.

42:27Jordan Harbinger:Look, easy way to shut down international shipping. You could build a navy to blockade Israel, or you could pay a bunch of guys sitting in a cave chewing on cot to occasionally launch a missile based on your intel information. The interactions between the Houthis and Iran for targeting, that was all Iran doing the targeting. You think there's any Houthis flying maritime patrol aircraft? No, they're sitting in a cave chewing on cot. The Iranians would call them and say, hey, launch a missile this location. Okay.

42:57Ryan McBeth:Wow. Yeah. That's all you need is this sort of people willing to cause chaos. And you say, oh, it's for God. It's all good. Yeah. We'll give you some money and some cot. You're good. So we've all seen footage of people saying Iran is two weeks away from building a nuclear bomb, but they were one or two weeks away pretty much as my entire adult life anyway. And then President Trump said we obliterated Iran's nuclear capabilities. Okay. So why are Are we attacking Iran right now? That's an excellent question.

43:24Jordan Harbinger:The funny thing is someone actually asked me, oh, would you go on a debate about Iran? What are we debating? Well, you're going to be the pro-attacking Iran. I'm an intel analyst, dude. I just find them. The political guy is the ones who decide whether it's a good idea or a bad idea. But I can tell you this. The one explanation I've given to people is that if we had eliminated North Korea's nuclear capabilities 20 years ago, would the world situation be different? And the answer is yes. And regarding uranium, you really only need three to 5 % enriched uranium in order to power a nuclear reactor.

44:01Jordan Harbinger:This is three to 5 % of uranium-235. And these Iranians were in a meeting with Americans at the negotiating table, and they claimed they had enough material to make 11 nuclear bombs. So you need about 22 pounds or so. I don't know what that is in kilos. 16 kilos, maybe?

44:20Ryan McBeth:Less, I think. 10 kilos, I think. Okay. Actually, it's 9.97. I was darn close. 10 kilos.

44:27Jordan Harbinger:That is the weight of a large bag of pet food, of 90 % enriched uranium to make a bomb. That's what you need to make a nuclear bomb. It's actually not that hard. You have a plug of uranium. and you have a donut of uranium and you fire the donut into the plug and then... This is a family show, but continue.

44:47Ryan McBeth:What are you doing with your hands right now?

44:49Jordan Harbinger:We're going to have to blur that on YouTube. I didn't think of it that way, but I can see that now. When you get all that uranium together at one point, that becomes critical mass. So the whole idea is that we knew that uranium would reach a critical mass back in 1945. So that information, it's already out there. It was so understood that we didn't even test the little boy bomb, which was the gun type design that used uranium. We just knew it would work. Why are we doing it now? Well, it could be that Iran really was close to a bomb. They really did have 220 pounds of nuclear material to make a bomb.

45:27Jordan Harbinger:And this was it. If you can't destroy the ability to make the bomb, at least you can destroy their ability to deliver it. if we can destroy all of their missile production ability, they're going to have to take this nuclear bomb and put it on a container ship and float it into some guy's port. There's also the possibility that Iran wasn't even close to a bomb, and President Trump just saw this opportunity to attack because Iran is so politically weak. So they could be close to a bomb, and then now they're not close to a bomb because we just took out all their facilities, but they still have this nuclear material, and it's relatively close.

46:02Ryan McBeth:They're politically weak right now because there's been protests going on for months and months trying to oust the government? Is that why?

46:08Jordan Harbinger:There's been that. It seems like those protests have been suppressed, but Tehran, there's a massive water shortage in Tehran right now. And a lot of that's due to mismanagement. Tehran has talked about moving its capital in order to access more water. And a lot of that is just, again, bad management. I believe one of Iran's major exports is almonds. Terrorism. No, sorry, what? Almonds? It's terrorism, almonds, caviar. And beautiful women.

46:36Ryan McBeth:How's that? Did I make up for it? Okay.

46:38Jordan Harbinger:And beautiful women. So almonds are really water hungry. I think it takes 50 gallons of water to make an almond.

46:44Ryan McBeth:It's crazy. I remember doing a show on this. You need three or five gallons of water. So you use millions of gallons to make almonds for a small demand.

46:53Jordan Harbinger:It's wild. And Iran needs the cash. So because of all these sanctions on Iran, because they can't seem to behave, what are they going to sell? We can sell almonds because the world market really likes almonds. That'll get us cash. And then all the water is getting sucked up by almonds. Maybe it would be a good idea to sell something else if you need to conserve your water, but they also need the hard currency for their country to stay around.

47:18Ryan McBeth:If North Korea wants the world destabilized and they have nukes, why don't they just go, hey, Iran, here's all the stuff you're missing that's going to take you three years to get. The U.S. already hates us, but we've got nukes. Why don't they just give Iran a bomb? Why don't they just do that?

47:33Jordan Harbinger:The fingerprints would lead directly back, right?

47:36Ryan McBeth:But do they care? When does North Korea give a crap about what the U.S. thinks? They're literally needling us every chance they get. I think that if they did that, we would, not just

47:47Jordan Harbinger:us, but China would probably clobber North Korea as well. You know, you've been to North Korea. I have, yeah, several times. You have a lot more experience inside North Korea than me. The regime's main goal is to remain a kleptocracy, right? And so if they actually did something that extreme, it would be the end of the regime. And then Kim Jong-un wouldn't be able to sip cognac with his pleasure battalion anymore, right?

48:10Ryan McBeth:Iran has two armies, a global proxy network, cyber units, sleeper cells, missile factories, and somehow still manages its economy like a raccoon locked in a vending machine. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by SimpliSafe. Most people don't really think about home security until something happens. A package goes missing, a car gets rummaged through, or worst case, somebody actually tries your front door. That's why I like having SimpliSafe. Instead of waiting for something to go wrong and just hoping I catch a notification in time, I know there's an actual system and actual people backing me up 24-7 because here's the problem with a lot of smart setups.

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49:38Ryan McBeth:It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now, back to Ryan McBeth. the whole country is essentially like a machine to keep the top 0.1 percent rich and everybody else enslaved even if they wanted to change things there's no way to do that without collapsing everything and everybody you know massive refugee crisis china just tolerates them i've got experts slash insider sources that say that china is so sick of dealing with north korea but the alternative is worse it's just they're so sick of dealing with them they hate dealing with them they despise them If you ask an average Chinese person, they're like, yeah, they're ass backwards.

50:15Ryan McBeth:They're China in 1950. Who the hell would ever want to go there? Who the hell would ever want to live there? But the alternative is they do something about it. Now they have 24 million refugees right on their unprotected border that are all going to come into China because they don't have any food. So they tolerate it because there's a wall there that gets enforced from the inside. Back to Iran here. You're thinking Iran was either really close to a bomb or it wasn't close to a bomb and Trump saw the opportunity to attack because Iran is so politically weak or it wasn't close to a bomb, but we decided to set back its missile production a couple of decades or we're doing it because we can.

50:49Ryan McBeth:And it's a way to show China that our capabilities to deter them from invading Taiwan are pretty damn good. And they better think twice.

50:56Jordan Harbinger:I would not put that out of reach for the current administration. One of the side benefits of taking out Maduro is that you've essentially removed a piece from the chessboard that China would have to threaten the Caribbean Sea and threaten the Panama Canal with anti-ship missiles and drones. Because when war with China comes, and it will likely come in 2027 or 2028, when that happens, the U.S. is not going to be untouched. We are either going to get hit with cyber attacks or we are going to get hit with drones or some sort of missiles. They just have to do that. They have to. And it makes it a lot harder to do that if Venezuela is no longer there because now you have an ISR and staging base.

51:44Jordan Harbinger:So there might be something inside the administration that's going, you know what, let's make it a lot harder for China to invade Taiwan by trying to destroy their missiles. We'll destroy some of their oil production. If we can get a friendly regime in charge and we can tell them you're not allowed to sell oil to China anymore, that's a big benefit. It makes it a lot harder for China to invade Taiwan. And China also gets to see our new doctrine. It's called Jado. And maybe that'll make them think twice about actually attacking Taiwan. Because we've proven we will go after you, not your generals, not your soldiers.

52:22Jordan Harbinger:We will find the commander chief and we will drop a bomb on you. And it doesn't matter where you are, we will find you and do it. And if Xi Jinping wants to live to see these two glorious nations reunified, invading might be the last thing he wants to do, because we will find him.

52:41Ryan McBeth:So this is kind of a shot across the bow. Your country will survive this because we're not going to nuke everybody, but you will be dead. And everyone you know who's important will also be dead. And it's going to happen in the first couple hours. It's not going to be something where you hold out for years like Hitler or something like that. You're gone. You're going to be out in the beginning.

52:59Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, our ISR is so good. Our intelligence for violence reconnaissance is so good. You could not pay me to pick up a phone in Iran right now. You mean if you're working in a mission critical capacity? capacity? Absolutely. The whole strategy that we have is we take out the air defenses first, and we take out the command and control, and we take out the radars, and we take out aircraft and the ability to communicate with those aircraft. And then we start going after some of the logistics. So now, like, you might have some missiles, right, that you can fire. Let's try firing that missile without a generator.

53:37Jordan Harbinger:Why don't you have a generator? Because there's no fuel for the generator because the fuel truck didn't come or we blew it up.

53:43Ryan McBeth:We've all heard that Russia and maybe even China might be giving intelligence information to Iran to strike U.S. sites. And I know that they've hit as of today, something like 17 sites. And some of them are really expensive radars. And people are like, they destroyed a billion dollar radar. And I looked this up and it's a damaged. It's not destroyed. It's not like they leveled this massive concrete bunker building installation. But yeah, it might cost three million bucks to repair or more and take three months. I don't know. But they're hitting us back. And I know that we probably have Russia and China to thank for that because Iran has two satellites.

54:15Ryan McBeth:They're not looking at everything in real time.

54:17Jordan Harbinger:So there's going to be some data that you have just because you know the area. You've been preparing this fight for a while. So you know generally where the airfields are, you know, generally.

54:26Ryan McBeth:Yeah, buildings don't walk around and move. So once you know where it is, that's where it is.

54:31Jordan Harbinger:Russia might be feeding intelligence to Iran. But the question is, how actionable is it? Like, I know that there's gold in Fort Knox, but I'm not Danny Ocean. I'm not going to be able to get there and steal it. That level of intelligence doesn't help me out at all, right? Now, so in Iran's case, if we have destroyed many of their missiles, but not only their missiles, if we have destroyed their command and control to let them know when to fire those missiles or where to fire those missiles, then that intelligence means a lot less. You also have to look at the OODA loop, Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

55:09Jordan Harbinger:How long is the OODA loop? If the OODA loop is five minutes, it takes five minutes for Russian intelligence to get all the way down to the guy that pushes the button on the missile trailer. That's bad. If the OODA loop is 12 hours, that's not too good for a run because Russia might say, hey, there is an American aircraft carrier that is at this coordinates. And it's moving at 30 knots. So 30 knots, you're moving half a mile in one minute. Where is it going to be 12 hours? Yeah, it's three countries away now. Yeah. Yeah, that's not very useful. So the utility of the intelligence is kind of in question.

55:48Jordan Harbinger:And there might be some Iranian IRGC leaders who have letters of last resort. They have a letter from their commander that says, hey, if you can't reach higher every 12 hours, then fire your missiles at this city. Let's just go out with a bang. That's a thing the British actually have on their nuclear submarines. There's a letter that's written by the prime minister. They get a new one every time a new PM is installed. Yeah, they have it on their submarines. And they say, look, if London gets destroyed in a nuclear attack, your instructions are in this letter. Nobody knows what's in the letter.

56:21Jordan Harbinger:It could be return to America and put your missiles under or America's controller. It could be Salvo at Russia. We don't know. Wow.

56:29Ryan McBeth:No one knows this in the letter. Crazy. I didn't realize that. Okay. So have Russia and China redirected some of their satellites to help Iran, or is it like they're just giving them secondhand information? I don't know.

56:41Jordan Harbinger:That's an excellent question. We track all satellites just in general, but I would say it's likely that Russia hasn't redirected any of its satellites, mainly because it costs a lot of fuel to redirect a satellite. I don't know if I'm going to spend that on Iran, especially since I have a war in Ukraine going on. So maybe if they pass overhead of an American area, they might pass some photography along or some synthetic aperture radar images along. In China's case, I would be very surprised if they haven't redirected a satellite or two, not necessarily to help Iran, but to watch how we do things.

57:21Jordan Harbinger:Because they want to see how we perform, and they want to see if they can find a carrier quickly. And they want to learn from our mistakes, because they're trying to build a nuclear navy themselves with aircraft carriers. I would not be surprised if China is watching what we're doing and learning from that to apply to their own People's Liberation Army Navy.

57:43Ryan McBeth:Yeah, I would expect that they are. How much have cyber attacks been a factor in the conflict? Because I heard that Iranian TV kind of got hacked and it had Bibi Netanyahu and whoever else on Iranian TV, which must be crazy to see. Like you're in Tehran and you're used to watching these ayatollahs give sermons or talk about how you're going to defeat the evil Jews and the great Satan or the great Satan and the little Satan, right? The United States and Israel, respectively. And then suddenly it's like, nope. I assume they're not just putting on Bruce Springsteen videos, but they're putting on something that you just know is not domestic TV.

58:17Ryan McBeth:It's got to be wild to see something like that. Like, hey, we can't even control the airwaves in our own country. And it's, by the way, the Ayatollah's dead. Oh, you don't believe me? Well, here's some proof and here's where his house is and it's on fire. There's a smoking hole in the middle of it. And they've just got to sort of admit all of this kind of thing. By the way, the water's off again or whatever. I mean, it's just got to be absolutely insane to live through something like that.

58:42Jordan Harbinger:The big hack was the Badis Abba calendar prayer app, which basically put out a message urging IRGC personnel to defect. So there's a little calendar app on your phone that tells you, oh, it's time to pray. Because it's Ramadan. That's right. Just in general as well, right? Like you pray five times a day, especially if you're particularly religious. But yeah, it is Ramadan. You're absolutely correct. Sending defection messages to IRGC personnel over their prayer app. That was kind of a good one. That's crazy.

59:10Ryan McBeth:Because you have this and you're like, we're a bunch of tough guys. Hey, if you're in the IRGC, you should defect now because we control everything, including this religious app that you're using at four o 'clock in the morning to pray. And it's like, oh, God, if they're in here, what else are they in?

59:23Jordan Harbinger:Cyber weapons are a weapon. We're in the wires. We're in the air. When you pick up a phone, we're going to know. When you emit a cell signal, we're going to know. That's a neat part about JADO, our new doctrine. It's called JADO, Joint All-Domain Operations. A satellite might pick up a signal from someone below. That satellite can tell someone in a command center, hey, this phone just lit up. And that commander can then take a look at all the assets in theater that are available and pick the most survivable asset to fire at that particular target. It's called any sensor, any decider, any shooter.

59:58Jordan Harbinger:In a conflict with China, it might be you have an Australian Special Forces guy on an island who calls up an AWACS plane, one of those radar planes, and says, hey, I see a Chinese destroyer. And the AWACS plane tells a Filipino HIMARS rocket launcher to fire a missile at a target they don't even see. And I've said that the analogy I used is that it used to be in the first Gulf War, we used a doctrine called Airline Battle 2000. And it was sort of like a hurricane followed by a tidal wave. We had six weeks of airstrikes followed by a massive ground invasion. With JADO, you get 1 ,000 tornadoes the first night.

1:00:37Jordan Harbinger:And you never know where we're going to strike. And we're just constantly hitting you and constantly flexing to emergent targets.

1:00:44Ryan McBeth:This is what people are expecting, right? They're like, oh, the U.S. is never going to be able to invade Iran. After this air supremacy phase, they're going to put boots on the ground. You just watch. It seems like you're saying, no, that's just not how we do things anymore.

1:00:55Jordan Harbinger:I think we could put boots on the ground. I don't really see where that would be an advantage. The ideal situation is these airstrikes cause weakening of the government so that the Artesh takes over and essentially they march north to Tehran and they kill everybody not dressed like them. I see. That's the ideal situation.

1:01:14Ryan McBeth:This is the regular army just decides enough is enough.

1:01:17Jordan Harbinger:Regular armies. And now whatever comes after that, and maybe the son of the Shah returns and he becomes a de facto leader. We have to be very careful about that because anybody who comes down the ramp of a C-17 flanked by Marines is not going to be trusted by Iranians. Even the son of the Shah is a little suspect because, you know, he's been living the dream. and living in Paris. So he hasn't shared the hardships that have been shared by the average Iranian. So I could see them not really wanting that. And maybe the Artesh, they put someone in power temporarily and they hold elections, they redo their constitution.

1:02:03Jordan Harbinger:Maybe they get something that's influenced by Islam, but is a real democracy. And technically, Iran is a democracy, but it's also kind of not.

1:02:12Ryan McBeth:You can vote for this repressive cleric or this repressive cleric. Ah, you chose wrong. Anyway, the election's over.

1:02:18Jordan Harbinger:You know, what's funny is I kind of like it, too, how Harris was picked. Nobody actually got a say in this except the Council of Elders, right? And I got hell for that when I said that. But it's the truth, right? You look at Iran, you have this council, and there is a democracy, but this council approves every single candidate, right? if that candidate isn't sufficiently islamic And they're never going to be put on the ballot. You can choose between like this conservative cleric, this slightly conservative cleric, but you're never going to get the liberal cleric. You're never going to get the cleric with the purple hair.

1:02:55Jordan Harbinger:That guy's not going to run. So they do have a democracy.

1:02:59Ryan McBeth:But he's so hip, Ryan. He really vibes with the kids.

1:03:02Jordan Harbinger:Which level of conservative cleric do you want? Wow.

1:03:06Ryan McBeth:So there's hacktivist groups. There's other cyber attacks trying to disrupt IRGC command and control. Like I said, we hijacked Iran's state news agency and government websites, the prayer app. What are we shooting at in Iran right now? I mean, I had to come back early from Saudi Arabia, and that was over a week ago because there were cruise missiles flying over my campsite, literally, and F-16s from the Tabuk airbase in Saudi. where I was near. So this has been a while. I mean, we've launched how many attacks? Because at some point, and I guess we're not there yet, don't you just run out of stuff to blow up?

1:03:42You do.

1:03:43Jordan Harbinger:At some point, this happened in Afghanistan. At some point, you're turning big rocks into little rocks. You were probably never going to run out of the logistical targets. So ideally, in the scheme here, you strike air defense targets first. Absolutely, 100%. That's the first to go, air defense. Because as soon as you take out their air defense, then everything else that you do is gravy. A lot easier to do because you can just fly over a country with absolute impunity. And then in the next phase, you hit command and control. So nobody can give you orders. So you might have a bunch of ballistic missiles or you might be an army brigade and you're like, okay, what do I do?

1:04:23Jordan Harbinger:And word never comes. And then in the next phase after command and control, you're starting to hit your sensors, ISR sensors. So radar installations, any kind of communication that allows people to talk to each other and say, go over here, go over there, or figure out where you are. Then you start hitting the air bases. You don't necessarily want to destroy the runways. A lot of people think hitting air bases is about destroying the runway. You can repair a runway in 12 hours. So it's actually not that hard. We actually tried doing that during the first Gulf War. The British had this incredibly brave mission where they would literally fly down the runway as if they were landing and they're ejecting these cluster munitions out of a special pod.

1:05:07Jordan Harbinger:Jeez. It was extremely dangerous, mainly because you're flying on a known avenue of approach. So now we just blow up the aircraft in the hardened shelters. That makes sense, I suppose. And then you could land your own there if you need to later. You can land your own there. Right. Absolutely. So then one of the next things you want to do is go after any ballistic missiles, like things that are on launchers. one of the things that i've said is people have said oh my god we're running out of interceptors

1:05:33Ryan McBeth:like yeah thank you people that's the thing is all the reddit armchair generals are like we're shooting down thirty thousand dollars she had drones fifty thousand dollars she had drones with two million dollar patriots and we can only produce three of these a month and we're going to run out and then everybody's going to be a sitting duck and they're just gonna have to sit there and we're gonna have to beg iran to stop launching missiles at qatar and i'm like i feel like smarter people than dudes who play League of Legends all day has thought about this before at some point in a conflict. And you post that and they're like, no, no, no, these guys are used to winning a war in three days.

1:06:05Ryan McBeth:They have no idea what a protracted conflict is like. And I'm like, again, their entire life is this. I'm going to go ahead and assume that they've thought about this a little bit.

1:06:12Jordan Harbinger:We certainly have a threshold that we don't want to go below, but this has already been priced in. We've had smart people at the Pentagon say, this is how many interceptors that we can spare for this particular conflict. And we're not the only game in town. Patriot systems are sold to quite a few countries in that area. They're firing weapons too. So there's that. The other thing to realize is that we also have alternate ways of destroying incoming missiles or incoming drones. there is a kit, I think it's called the Advanced Precision Kill Kit, that goes on to F-15s. It's almost like a rocket pod like you've seen on an Apache helicopter and they fire these laser guided rockets.

1:06:54Jordan Harbinger:They're perfect for taking out Shahed drones. So we do have options. But what I've said is you have to kill the archer, not the arrow. Someone in parliament actually used my phrase, which was like, yes, that was pretty cool seeing that. But the idea here is that air defense is not a shield. Think of air defense like the small umbrella you keep in your car for when you have to go to the supermarket on the way home from work and it's raining. You're still going to get wet, but you'll be less wet than you were if you didn't have the umbrella at all. The air defense system buys time for you to go and hit those ballistic missile launchers, those cruise missile launchers.

1:07:36That's one of the reasons Ukraine is getting pounded, because we gave them interceptors,

1:07:42Jordan Harbinger:but we never gave them the long-range strike missiles to actually hit inside of Russia to take out the stuff that was being fired at them. And we've already seen an incredible reduction, I believe, of firing is down almost 90 % from Iran. And that could be due to them running out of missiles to launch. It could be due to a lot of those missiles are underground and we've found where they are and we've either destroyed them, we've collapsed the hull. It could be that some of the launchers are out of fuel. They just don't have the generator fuel to actually raise the TEL, the transport erector launcher, to fire the missile.

1:08:19Jordan Harbinger:And it could be that guys, they're in the wind. They haven't heard from their commanders in months and weeks and they don't know what to do. These systems need maintenance. So if you have a missile launcher, you periodically have for maintenance on that missile launcher and the parts to maintain that missile launcher, you have to order those parts and get those parts put on the launcher in order for it to be effective. If you are hiding, that's not that big of a deal. If you're constantly moving, which is usually better than just hiding because they can always find you. If you're constantly moving, now you're adding wear and tear on the missile, on the launcher truck.

1:08:57And the other

1:08:58Jordan Harbinger:question is, how do you get that thing back to reload? Yeah. And where do you reload it? The warehouse that is now on fire? The crane that puts the missile onto the launcher, that takes fuel as well. It varies four to six hours to put that missile on that launcher, and then you have to run all the test systems on it. And this isn't Lego, right? You're dealing with a freaking missile. You need to be a little gentle with this thing.

1:09:21Ryan McBeth:Yeah, this isn't reloading an AK-47, an AR-15, right? It's like launching a freaking space shuttle or a satellite that comes down with an explosive.

1:09:29Jordan Harbinger:With rocket fuel isn't so...

1:09:31Ryan McBeth:That makes sense. My wife is scared that sleeper cells are activated. You have any thoughts on that? Sleeper cells are activated. FBI warns California police that Iran could launch drones against the West Coast. That's an alert on ABC7 News Bay Area that probably just wanted clicks on Instagram.

1:09:47Jordan Harbinger:They could do that. When you look at Operation Spiderweb, what Ukraine did to Russia when they launched a bunch of drones from essentially shipping containers or really fake hunting lodges, that really changed the game when it comes to what lesser power can do with small, cheap drones. if those cells are in the country right now and this is one of the reasons i certainly believe i was outspoken about ice like i'm not too worried about the dude hanging out at home depot i'm worried about the iranians and chinese who came over the border through a hole in the fence the actual sleeper cell thing there's a non-zero chance of that happening those sleeper cells they have to be of the mind of i am going to leave this kind of comfortable life i had and go commit some sort of terrorist act.

1:10:37Jordan Harbinger:And it is a possibility that they could do that. The drone possibility exists because Ukraine did launch a bunch of drones at Russia. We certainly could do that. Take a van, park it outside of Whiteman, fly a bunch of drones in there and blow up a bunch of bombers. I'm not even sure if Whiteman has any air defenses, right, for drones. So it's certainly an issue. But the big question is, can they do more than just a little bit of terror, and I don't really think so. If something like that happens, it will be very sad. It's not going to be a 9-11 scale disaster. It'll be like the school in Belsan, Russia.

1:11:15Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, that was terrible. Beslan, yeah. Beslan, yeah, or a bunch of Russians. It could be something on that scale, and it will be very sad, and America will be furious. But this is a very resilient country. We'll probably be okay.

1:11:28Ryan McBeth:Yeah, Beslan was terrible. This is where I believe it was like Chechen rebels basically went in and just slaughtered a bunch of kids in a school. And it was like the worst school massacre on planet Earth, I believe. Just not even close.

1:11:41Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, it was like 250 kids. And then some people died in a fire afterwards. It was Chechen. Black widows blew themselves up with suicide vests and it started a fire. And yeah, there were people showing up. Parents were showing up with rifles, just hunting rifles.

1:11:54Ryan McBeth:That's terrible. That's a haunting story. What about all this AI war footage? I mean, you debunked one where it was like, oh my God, there's an oil refinery in Haifa and it's on fire. And then it's like, you look at it and it's just not Haifa or real. Yeah.

1:12:07Jordan Harbinger:The AI war footage thing is only going to get worse as AI gets more realistic. And I can tell you that one good thing X did recently was they said, if you share AI war footage, or at least if you upload AI war footage, you get demonetized. And it would be better if you get removed from the platform, but maybe they're one step at a time here. Don't make it profitable for people to put up AI war footage. The interesting thing about this AI war footage is that AI is so real now that it is very difficult to tell what is real and what is not real. And you even had Jill Stein, who ran for president.

1:12:48Jordan Harbinger:Isn't she a doctor, Jill Stein? Yeah, Dr. Jill Stein. He reposted an AI-generated picture saying, big if true, 550 American special forces captured by Iran.

1:12:58Ryan McBeth:Yeah, big if true. That's such a cop-out. I haven't looked into this at all, but wow, wouldn't this be insane if it was true? I could use this politically. Screw you, Jill Stein. Sorry, but come on.

1:13:09Jordan Harbinger:I can tell you this. I know that no Americans have been captured by Iran because back in, I want to say, oh, man, maybe a little under 20 years ago, there were some Navy sailors who were in a small patrol boat that were captured by the IRGC. And they almost immediately had interviews with them. They posted videos of them being questioned. And we would see that immediately. If Iran had any sort of prisoners, you would see propaganda videos pop up immediately. The AI thing is really scary because it's so real now and can be generated so quickly. And I recently did an episode on this AI Asian guy that keeps popping up all over YouTube.

1:13:55Jordan Harbinger:Oh, this guy who tells you to buy silver or whatever? Tells you to buy silver or tells you the geopolitical situation of the world. And it's a criminal gang in Pakistan. I try to replicate the AI Asian guy saying, Ryan is really handsome. It cost me$39, technically$12 to make that video.

1:14:12Ryan McBeth:But something like that could break. That takes a lot of power. You got to tone it down. Ryan is really handsome as a heavy lift, even for AI.

1:14:20Jordan Harbinger:But it costs$36 for me to get the membership and then$12 in tokens to create a video. And that scales really well. Some of these AI Asian guy channels, they're putting out three videos a day as fast as they can make them. So I could see in the future, if we don't get a handle on the spread of AI generated misinformation or even AI generated content. One big issue that was a huge issue during the war in Gaza was that Israel had no idea how to handle public relations. And if you're a content creator, you need content. So you look at Hamas, Hamas is putting out good content every day. And then if you're a creator, you can talk over that content and say, look what Hamas just did with a tank.

1:15:08Jordan Harbinger:Like, if there's no equivalent coming out of Israel, what footage you're going to use? You're going to use Hamas footage. So that's how you get all these creators going over to the side of Hamas, just seeing their side of the story every day. With AI, you can generate whatever you want to get that content. And that should be absolutely terrifying because there are a lot of people out there who are just mercenary. I just want content. I don't care if it's true. Sure.

1:15:36Ryan McBeth:Yeah. Jill Stein seems to be one of those people. provided that what you said is true. I have no idea. I should fact check that. Anybody who spreads that kind of misinformation is just a terrible human being, or disinformation deliberately, I should say, is a terrible human. Or the big if true. It's like, Jesus Christ, Google it. Jews to the left of them, Sunnis to the right, here's Iran mining the Strait of Hormuz. We'll be right back.

1:16:03Ryan McBeth:Ayatollah, you guys, we'd be right back. now for the rest of my conversation with ryan mcbeth yeah i'm surprised there's not fake ai videos of u.s soldiers just mowing down young iranian girls in a school somewhere and then also getting taken prisoner by the irgc and confessing to war crimes on a fake ai video i mean i'm surprised actually that we haven't seen that yet yeah that'd

1:16:28Jordan Harbinger:be relatively trivial to implement you don't even need to go that far there are english speakers in Iran. There's people that look American enough, right? You can have an American guy record a video saying I was the fifth special forces group and I was captured. It's just an Iranian dude who grew up in Southern California.

1:16:47Ryan McBeth:The problem is most of those guys hate the regime. I've been explaining this to people right now. They're like, oh my God, there's so many Iranians in LA. Do we have to worry about them being sleeper cells? I was like, those are the people that are going to murder the sleeper cells. The Iranians in LA, I know a lot of them. I've never met a single one that knows anybody that likes the regime. There's a reason they live in L.A. They escaped the revolution, almost all of them. They are absolutely not fans of any Ayatollah. And I'm sure I don't speak for every Iranian in L.A., but look, I would feel bad if I didn't stick up for the Iranian Persian homies in Los Angeles right now.

1:17:18Ryan McBeth:Yes, you might find one that would do the video for a couple of bucks and send it to Iran, but you could just do AI. I mean, why bother making it a real person that they could find goes to USC? Just make a fake one. And then, of course, the U.S. is saying it's a fake person because he's gone and they don't want to have to pay his family or whatever. I mean, it's just easier to make fake people, isn't it?

1:17:38Jordan Harbinger:That would be a way of doing it. I mean, you can usually pick out the fakes pretty well. I think that some sort of realism counts for something. He flew over to James Stockdale during Vietnam. He was Ross Perot's running mate. No?

1:17:50Ryan McBeth:No. I'm terrible at picking out AI videos. I look at it and I'm like, that's 100 % real. And people are like, dude, there's an iPhone flying through the air.

1:17:58Jordan Harbinger:James Stockdale was this pilot during Vietnam. he was shot down, eventually an admiral. But this guy, he was asked to be in a propaganda video by the North Vietnamese. And he said, no, they were going to put him in anyway. So he beat himself in the face with a chair leg. So his face would be all messed up so he wouldn't be in the video. So the Vietnamese thought it was important enough to get a real white person in a video to act as a capitalist that James Stockdale beat himself in the leg. And actually, now I think of it, I mentioned Ross Perot. During 1979, during the revolution, Ross Perot actually sent a team into Iran to get people out.

1:18:38Jordan Harbinger:Really? Am I familiar with that? No. This is a fascinating story, not something that a lot of people know about. But Ross Perot, he owned a company called EDS. Electronic Data Systems was working on a piece of software to create a social security system for the country of Iran. And essentially, EDS hadn't been paid in a while with a new government. People were saying, well, we're not going to pay. And so the Iranian government under the Ayatollah just grabbed these guys and threw them in prison. And Ross Perot, essentially, they said, hey, let them go, but you need to eliminate the bill we owe you.

1:19:14Jordan Harbinger:So Ross Perot formed a special forces team of people from his company, people who had been former army. They went over to Iran through Turkey. Initially, their plan was one guy was going to wear a cast on his arm and he would have a therapy ball. And inside that therapy ball was buckshot. And essentially in Iran, you could buy shotguns, but you can only buy birdshot for your shotguns. So they were going to go into Iran, just buy shotguns from the sporting goods store, buy ammunition, take out the birdshot, put in the buckshot, and they were going to go to the prison and bust their guys out of prison.

1:19:48Jordan Harbinger:This is the dumbest plan ever. Well, it actually worked.

1:19:52Ryan McBeth:Are you kidding me?

1:19:53Jordan Harbinger:Actually, it worked.

1:19:54Ryan McBeth:Carter couldn't get special forces to Iran, but Ross Perot sends the accounting department of EDS into Iran, and it works.

1:20:01Jordan Harbinger:Exactly. What the heck? These were former operators, but they went in, and actually, as it turned out, they didn't have to bust the guys out of prison. The prison was stormed by revolutionaries. The two EDS employees were in the prison, like afraid to leave, because we don't speak.

1:20:17Ryan McBeth:You know, like, I don't want to go out there.

1:20:19Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, I'd probably just sit there and be like, hey, man, I didn't try to escape. But they went and got them. What was fascinating was that as they're leaving, they had two pictures. So they had a convoy, two vehicles, and there were two pictures, one of the Shah and then one of the Ayatollah. And so this is, Iran is still a mess, right? And so they would drive down a road and they would see a car and then flag the car down and say, the next checkpoint, are they revolutionary or are they government? And the guys would say, revolutionary. and then they would put the Shah picture up or they would put the eye photo picture up in the car and then they'd get to the checkpoint and they'd wave him through, yay!

1:20:53Jordan Harbinger:And then they'll find the next car. Is the next checkpoint revolutionary? Oh, it's Shah. And so they'd put the Shah picture up. Yeah, Ross Perot got his people out of an Iranian prison.

1:21:03Ryan McBeth:You know what that story reminds me of? I probably have told you this story. I know I've said it on the show before, but when I was in Jerusalem, I was going to Hebrew University and this is before the second Intifada officially started, right? So this guy goes up to the Temple Mount and says some dumb crap. Everybody gets super pissed off and there's a massive riot. I happen to be in the old city just like shopping and hanging out with my roommate who was from Jordan, right? Arab dude. And we're like, we better get the hell out of here because there's tear gas and you can hear broken bottles and you can hear the riot guns shooting from everybody.

1:21:33Ryan McBeth:And there's like groups of Palestinian youth that are beating people up and there's groups of Israeli police that are beating people up. So I was running and we'd see the Israeli police and I'd be like, I got to get out of here. I'm a foreigner college student. So they would open up and be like, run that way. And then we'd run into a group of Palestinian youth and my roommate Ahmed would go, we're Arabs very loudly in Arabic. And he would grab me and we'd run through and we'd see more Israeli cops. And I'd say, hey, let us through, hey, let us through. They'd let us through. And then you'd see like a brown sort of guy, but not looking very aggressive.

1:22:02Ryan McBeth:And we'd look at each other like, do you speak Arabic or do I just yell in English? And it's crap. Just get in the nearest taxi. That was probably the most adrenaline I've ever had. Have you ever thought of maybe staying home? Yes. Aside from my last vacation to Saudi Arabia where there were cruise missiles flying over my campsite. Yeah, it's occurred to me that I should go on vacation in Italy instead. My wife would love it. But alas.

1:22:27Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, there's plenty of places in America. I'm going to spring training with my dad next week. Maybe.

1:22:32Ryan McBeth:Look, hey, now with the sleeper cells, I might as well go wherever I want. Yeah, sleeper cells here. You got non-sleeper cells everywhere else. What's the big deal? Everyone's like, this is going to escalate into a regional war now. So there's a war going on in Lebanon with Israel bombing stuff and they're shooting missiles and drones at Qatar and Dubai. So, but I don't know. No one else is fighting each other. It's just Iran flailing and launching a bunch of stuff and seeing what they can hit though.

1:22:55Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, I don't like the term regional war mainly because there's really only four armies in the world that can perform the kind of expeditionary operations to actually perform a regional War, and that would be the United States, Great Britain, France, and China. Russia used to be on that list. They no longer have expeditionary capabilities, meaning are they able to leave their country and sustain troops at scale outside of their country? When you look at the armies of the Arab world, for the most part, they're what are called palace guard armies. So these are armies that are designed to just keep your leader in power.

1:23:32Jordan Harbinger:There's a reason why they have a lot of fighter planes. It's because they parade well, the guys look jaunty in their fighter pilot suit.

1:23:40Ryan McBeth:You can bomb the rebel militias really far away without actually sending anybody down on the ground to do it.

1:23:46Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, you can bomb the rebel militias really far away, and people in the Air Force aren't likely to rise up and take you. The strong Air Force is nice because then the wealthy sons have a place to go and look cool, and you can have them fly by and do parades and stuff like that. But one thing you don't have is deep precision strike capability. Turkey, they kind of lost out on that with the F-35. You take a look at some of the regional players, a lot of them have F-16s. I think that Saudi Arabia has F-15s that might be capable of, I think they have the C model. I think of it. Tornados. Most of the air force for Saudi Arabia is set up for just internal air defense, not really for striking Iran.

1:24:30Jordan Harbinger:So when people say, oh my God, it's a regional war. How do you regional war? Tell me how you do it. And nobody can answer that next question.

1:24:37Ryan McBeth:But that would be like Qatar decides to go and take one of the Emirates over because they always wanted it. Oman's enclave gets closed off by Saudi Arabia because they're sick of, I don't know, showing their passport at the border. I mean, whatever. These countries just don't have enough beef with one another to make military moves on each other in a suicidal way because they're not able to do it anyway.

1:24:57Jordan Harbinger:Yeah. And they don't have the expeditionary capabilities and logistical capabilities. Saudi Arabia tried to kill the Zaidi rebels, the Houthis in Yemen, and they could barely do that. On the border of Saudi Arabia. On the border. Exactly. It's because war is hard. I should say war is hard, but logistics are harder. And in America, we can get more stuff across the sea than most people can have in their own country. And so when someone says regional war, it really just means people are just going to lob missiles at each other and eventually they'll run out. But it's not like Turkey is going to invade Iran with a 1.4 million man army.

1:25:37Jordan Harbinger:They don't have that capability. And it's not like Saudi Arabia is going to do that either. They don't have the expeditionary capability to sustain their logistics.

1:25:46Ryan McBeth:So why do you think Iran shot all these drones and missiles at other Arab countries? What do you think their plan was once they get hit, they'll be like, hey, America, you better stop messing with Iran. because look, they're shitting missiles at us. But it seems like if that was the plan, that did not work because all that did is unite the Arab world against Iran, which they already were. But it was like, maybe they're not messing with it. Nope, they're launching missiles at us. Okay, well, we're not even going to pretend to stick up for you anymore.

1:26:10Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, this is one of the reasons I like coming on your show because you do a lot of research. I can tell you, you're absolutely right. I think their plan was, all right, we're going to fire these missiles of the Arab world. The Arab world will unite in telling America, no stop and then america will stop out of our country we don't want your bases here they just bring trouble even that guy professor zhang i don't know if you've seen him he runs predictive

1:26:33Ryan McBeth:history that's like a ccp propaganda channel on youtube right yeah where he tells you how china is great and america sucks and everything we know is lies yes i know that channel he went to china

1:26:43Jordan Harbinger:because he wanted to beat his kid and i'm serious like he was in canada all right he beat his kid at a swimming pool and then went to China where he could do that. And now he hosts a show. But I can tell you that one of the things he said was that Iran was going to unite the Arab world. These are Shia. They don't give a darn about these guys. I think the Arab world looks at Iran the same way and says, you know what? This is not acceptable behavior. And I think we do have the Arab world on our side because they're looking at Iran going, it really would be nice if they weren't there. That's the rest of the world, unless you're Russia or China, going, you know what?

1:27:21Jordan Harbinger:These guys have been thorn in the side of the world since 1979. And this might be our opportunity. If we can't take them out, at least whittle down the thorn a little bit.

1:27:32Ryan McBeth:So is Russia going to jump in? No, they can't. They're tied up in Ukraine. Is China going to jump in? Very unlikely because one, how are they going to do it? They also don't have a very expeditionary military logistical capability. And people go, oh, no, they need the oil through the Strait of Hormuz. But China, as far as I know, had told Iran, hey, don't mind this thing. We need oil going through there. So I don't know. On the one hand, China can't jump in. But if they did jump in, it would almost be to maybe keep shipping going through the Strait of Hormuz because they need the oil to go through there.

1:28:04Ryan McBeth:Let's do a little aside on the Strait of Hormuz. I actually don't think we've talked about it.

1:28:08Jordan Harbinger:Sure. So the Strait of Hormuz is this little strip of C that has been a choke point. I want to say it's 12 miles wide. I might be wrong, maybe 20.

1:28:17Ryan McBeth:I think it's either 12 or 21 because I just looked this up this morning. But it's basically, it's small enough you can hit anything that goes through it with a missile if you want

1:28:25Jordan Harbinger:to, if you're Iran. Assuming you can find it. And again, we've taken out a lot of Iranian ISR, intelligence, violence, reconnaissance assets. Oh, Iran can mine the Strait of Hormuz. With what? we've sunk their navy, essentially, even the little boats that can distribute mines. Oh, really? I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. One thing that could be a factor is unmanned surface vehicles, USVs. Ukraine pioneered that. That's one of the ways they got their last Kriyov-class destroyer in the Black Sea, is with these unmanned surface drones that are basically jet skis that have been repurposed with a GPS receiver.

1:29:01Jordan Harbinger:That you might have to worry about. Those are really small. Iran may have quite a few of these things. You load them with explosives, you send them against a tanker. I could see, and it would be kind of interesting, I could see China getting involved, escorting those ships through the Stradar, as opposed to the United States. And one bad thing with the United States is we got rid of the best ships for doing that. It's a type of ship called a frigate. We got rid of the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate. We replaced it with something called the Littoral Combat Ship, which isn't particularly good at anything.

1:29:34Jordan Harbinger:It can't Littoral, Because it doesn't have the weapons to defend itself and it can't combat because it isn't big enough.

1:29:40Ryan McBeth:So it's soon to be a coral reef near you, I guess. Yeah, soon to be a coral reef.

1:29:43Jordan Harbinger:That kind of thing is we could rely on the British or the French or the Italians, which would be great. They get a lot of their oil from the Strait of Hormuz. But China, yeah, if they want to work with the Americans, that would be new. That would be new if we could all work together escorting those tankers. That probably wouldn't be a bad idea. But pretty soon it might be a question of escort from what? because right now the biggest menace in the Strait of Hormuz is Lloyd's of London, because no ship is going to move without insurance. And the biggest way of getting ships moving again would be for the president to turn on, I think it's called Title 10 or Title 12 war risk insurance, and just say, you can buy a pool of insurance from America for cheap, and that will insure your ship going through the Strait of Hormuz.

1:30:31Jordan Harbinger:well if we'd solve it tomorrow because there might still be captains who are reluctant to go

1:30:35Ryan McBeth:yeah who don't want to hit them like they did hit that ship from thailand today you saw that right i did not see that they hit it it's smoking it's a tanker or a container ship did they hit it with a usv let's check right now three ships in strait of hormuz hit by unknown projectiles as the bbc you can see this ship really smoking a lot let's see traffic through the strait has been fallen sharply. Thailand's Navy said it was providing emergency assistance after a Thai-flagged vessel was hit 11 nautical miles north of Oman, causing a fire on board. The ship's crew members were being rescued. A round later admitted it was behind the attack, saying the ship's crew ignored warnings, which I assume every ship crew that goes through there has to do.

1:31:17Ryan McBeth:A Japan-flagged container ship sustained minor damage after it was struck about 25 nautical miles off the UAE coast and a third cargo vessel was hit around 50 nautical miles northwest of Dubai and the cause of the attacks is being investigated so Iran obviously did that and Iran says they're not going to allow a single liter of oil heading for the U.S. Israel and their partners to pass through the strait my question is how do they know where the oil's headed you got a flag that's got the Cook Islands on it you don't know where that's headed you're just gonna blast it and China's going to go, hey, bro, that was ours, you morons.

1:31:52Ryan McBeth:Every ship has a manifest.

1:31:54Jordan Harbinger:And a lot of times those are on like tankertracker.com where you can see where these tankers are going. Iran is part of the international shipping community. I'm sure they have access into databases of what ships are leaving because if you have to book a ship, you're going to use that database to see what ships are open, what ships are not.

1:32:12Ryan McBeth:So you can see where a ship is headed and they can target specifically based on that.

1:32:16Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, there is something called AIS, Yes, although a lot of sometimes people turn AIS off.

1:32:21Ryan McBeth:Yeah, I was going to say you should probably turn that off if you're sailing through Hormuz right now.

1:32:25Jordan Harbinger:So you can tell where a ship is going, but I think Ron knows where every ship in the Gulf was at any given point when the conflict started. And they could certainly figure out who is going where. If they have the right sensors, they'll be able to target them.

1:32:41Ryan McBeth:Yikes, that's no good if they can effectively target ships. I mean, they hit three today. I don't know how many go through, but three in one day seems like a lot.

1:32:47Jordan Harbinger:Yeah, it would certainly seem like it to me. You should invite Sal Matrigliano from What's Going Out with Shipping to talk to you about that. He would be fantastic.

1:32:54Ryan McBeth:I'm down. Yeah, introduce me to him. What happens if the Iranian regime collapses? Is this going to be another Libya? That's what people, I think, are worried about.

1:33:02Jordan Harbinger:I don't think so. And I say that because the Iranian people, they're not Arabs. And they don't have those tribal loyalties. My tribe must be in power and everyone around me must be in my tribe. So factionalism. Yeah, they don't really have that there. They have Kurds. They have Arabs in the Southwest, some people of, I guess you'd say Pakistani extraction, or I don't remember the actual ethnicity, but they do have some religious minorities, but it's nothing like Iraq with Christians and Shia and Sunni and Yazidi and Kurds all mixed together. They have a collective identity. So I think the most likely course of action would not necessarily be a civil war.

1:33:45Jordan Harbinger:I think you're either going to see the regime remain in power with severely attrited missile defenses or missile capabilities, or you're going to see the army take over and some sort of strongman and eventually someone who works in the U.S. and hopefully elections. So it's one of those two things. But number two is on the Iranian people.

1:34:06Ryan McBeth:Look, I am all for a free Iran. Iranians are some of the most amazing people that I've ever met. The civilization's amazing. The history is amazing. I'm just a huge fan of everything other than the hardcore, hardline Islamist regime, I should probably clarify. But I like the food. I like everything. And I wish them the best. This doesn't seem like it's going to end quickly. So I have a feeling we're going to end up doing another one, an update, because I feel like this is going to go on for several months. What do you think?

1:34:34Jordan Harbinger:It certainly can go on for at least another four to six weeks.

1:34:37Ryan McBeth:Yeah. Oh, man, that's generous. I was thinking it's going to be much longer, but you know more than I do. Hopefully it does end quickly and with less civilian bloodshed than I'm imagining is going to happen. But that's Iran. Amazing people ruled by a horrible government for now. Thank you so much, Ryan. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Iran is one of those places where the people and the regime are just not at all the same story. And confusing the two is how you end up misunderstanding everything. The civilization is ancient. The government is revolutionary. The military is split. The ideology is paranoid.

1:35:09Ryan McBeth:The strategy is cheap, indirect, and vicious. And the consequences of all that don't stay in Tehran. They hit shipping lanes, oil markets, regional stability, American and allied troops, and eventually the rest of us. So if this episode did its job, you now see Iran as more than a headline machine for postages, uranium, and angry clerics living in the 1600s. It's a layered state with a long memory, a lot of grievances, a dangerous toolbox, and a talent for making everybody else's problems more expensive. All that said, I fully support a free Iran. I really hope we see something like that soon.

1:35:43Ryan McBeth:I love my Persians, my Iranian homies. This one is all for you, and I hope you make it out of this in one piece if you're listening to this, because the world needs you. All things Ryan McBeth will be in the show notes on the website. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about 6 Minute Networking as well. That's over at 6minutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with Podcast One.

1:36:14Ryan McBeth:My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogerty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in geopolitics, current events, the Middle East, or just what's happening now in Iran, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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