1297: Iran | Out of the Loop

1297: Iran | Out of the Loop

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Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:00] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker through long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, spies, CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers, even the occasional Hollywood filmmaker, hacker, real life pirate, or hostage negotiator.

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Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/starts, or search for us in your Spotify app to get started today. A long overdue and long awaited outta the loop on Iran. I've been getting messages for months to cover the protests in Iran, but I'd covered them previously. But I was also in the [00:01:00] Middle East and traveling a heck of a time to go to the Middle East.

Anyway, today we're finally doing it. Iran is one of those countries that Americans think they understand 'cause they heard three things, hostage, crisis, nukes, terrorists. But that's kinda like saying you understand Rome because you watched Gladiator on a plane. Iran is actually four very different stories wearing the same trench coat, an ancient civilization, a monarchy that got jerked around by empires, a revolution that became a theocratic nightmare, and now a modern missile and cyber war with global consequences.

Obviously, we can't dig deep on an ancient nation in civilization in a couple of hours, but we're going to fly through how Persia became Iran, why the US and Britain helped overthrow its government in 1953, how the Ayatollahs ended up taking power, why Iran built a proxy empire with Hezbollah and Hamas and the Houthis.

What Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps actually is why everyone keeps saying they're two weeks away from a nuclear bomb for the last two decades. How cyber war AI propaganda, and old school religious fanaticism are all now mashed together into one [00:02:00] giant geopolitical migraine. If you've ever wondered why this country keeps showing up at the center of every Middle East disaster movie, why nobody seems to be able to stop Iran cleanly, and why every tanker route missile strike and fake TikTok war video suddenly matters to your gas bill and the global economy.

This episode will get you up to speed. Here we go with Ryan McBeth. Welcome back. I don't know, round 10 or whatever on the show. Probably not 10, but close to it.

Ryan McBeth: As long as I'm ahead of Andrew Bustamante, good.

Jordan Harbinger: You? Well, he's only been on twice, so you, yeah, you got that one in the bag. Maybe Ryan Holiday is still beating you.

I'm not sure. He keeps writing bestsellers every year somehow some way. Not exactly a competitor. You're talking about all kinds of geopolitical stuff. He's talking about stuff that happened 3000 years ago, whatever. Let's talk about Iran, man. So I have a lot of show fans in Iran, I guess. I know I do 'cause I see where they download from and Iran is like one of my top 10 markets.

Somehow I'm shocked as to why that's the case, but it is, which is really cool. 'cause I've always [00:03:00] wanted to go to Iran and I think would say I'd never met Iranian. I didn't like, but I lived in L.A. so I bet plenty that I didn't like, but I have never met a dumb one or a lazy one or anything like that, you know?

And I, I gotta say this is a country with a lot of potential. I've always wanted to go there. One of my biggest regrets is missing my 2010 opportunity to do so. And I had a lot of my Iranian fans in Iran and in the DS world saying, why aren't you using your voice for a run this time? You did it before.

There's this protest and they're killing people. And it, and depending on, I don't know, the source slash the day of the week or how much caffeine the person posting has had. It was either they've killed, I shouldn't trivialize this, but they've either killed 3000 people during the protest or like 30,000 people.

And I don't know actually, do we know about that? Because there is that one of those. State run media, you're never going to get a good answer. Deliberately.

Ryan McBeth: We're not going to get a good answer. And I've heard when Micha Almany was murdered, who was a Kurdish woman, and she essentially was wearing a hat the wrong way.

Jordan Harbinger: She was wearing her hijab wrong [00:04:00] and they beat her to death.

Ryan McBeth: They beat her to death.

Jordan Harbinger: Right?

Ryan McBeth: Took her a couple of days to die. But afterwards there were these massive protests, and that's when Iranians started writing me. And they would send me pictures of people who were shot with birdshot. Oh, how familiar are with shotguns. But birdshot is, they used to hunt birds.

So we're not talking rubber pellets, we're not talking stingers, which were these little rubber, um, almost look like the big bullets that come after Mario. They're nothing like that. It's little steel pellets that are designed to kill birds, but they can pepper up a human. And so there's people presenting with x-rays with all of these steel dots in their face and eyes and upper torso, and.

Typically when people present with that, they have IRGC agents there, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps agents there, and they arrest those people immediately once they get their X-rays.

Jordan Harbinger: So they're shooting protesters in the face with shotgun. And then when you go to the hospital for treatment, they say, oh, well he must have been guilty of something [00:05:00] because we shot him in the face with a shotgun.

So we're arresting him.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah. And I've had Iranians email me and tell me this time around, they are just shooting them in the hospital.

Jordan Harbinger: They find the guy who's severely injured in the hospital and they finish the job when he is in the er.

Ryan McBeth: There was another person who said that their classmates had to lift up their shirts, which seems a little odd to do in an Islamic country, but maybe.

And then IRGC came to their school, had them lift up their shirts to see if there were any shotgun pellets, birdshot pellets in their body, any injuries with that. And then if there were, they would take 'em away. These would be kids somewhere younger if they could be with their parents protesting and they just get.

Dinged with a birdshot pellet and now they're in school, they're probably in a little bit of pain, but you don't want to tell anyone. And the IRGC takes you away and God knows where they take you. This is a couple days after the bombing, only about 12 days after the accidental hit on a girl school that killed 175 children.[00:06:00]

Supposedly that was most likely done by the us.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I was going to say, it's not really supposedly right? Like that was just like a,

Ryan McBeth: well, we don't know the numbers. The numbers are up in the air,

Jordan Harbinger: but it was definitely the US I, yeah. 'cause mistakes happen in war, which sucks 'cause this is like a huge tragedy, but I don't want be like, oh, it's a bunch of propaganda and a lie because it's like we need to take LS when they come, or no one's going to believe anything.

Ryan McBeth: Oh yeah. That's the only way you get better. But the, of course you have people reach out to me and go, how dare you support a thing that killed 175 children? I'm like. If you don't like that number, wait till you see what the higher GC has done.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that's been my chief sort of retort when people are like, how do you support something like this?

And it's, oh, that's funny. I didn't see any posts from you when they were mass murdering protesters in the street by the thousands. You're really concerned about this school. Also, you're posting a bunch of weird UK alt media where they say that we're invading because of Israel, wink, wink, not the Jews.

Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Right? It's one of the, [00:07:00] and I'm like, what happened to you, man? I do have a few friends like that where I have to explain that they are just chugging propaganda from whatever crazy left wing regime. That's a separate topic, but most Americans are not that familiar with Iran. When I say like, oh, I've got a great Iranian audience, and the Persians are so smart and I would love to go to Iran, people are like, are you crazy?

And I think it's because one, I wouldn't go now, but most Americans think Iran. Blinked into existence in 1979 when Aya Khomeini took over and they were not old enough to even know, Hey, we had a pretty good relationship with that country for most of, at least our history, and it's been a pretty progressive place up until it decided to go back to the 16th century in the eighties.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah. Iran is an ancient civilization. It is literally older than China. If you want to think of Iran, you kinda have to think of it in like four phases. There's the ancient civilization, there's a 1979 revolutionary regime. Then there's their regional proxy empire and there's, there's [00:08:00] present day with their modern war with missiles and drones and bunker busters and, and so on.

Jordan Harbinger: Iranians cringing that you just divided their history into and ancient civilization. So there's like 5,000 years of that. And then in 1979, this Islamist thing took over and the rest of it happened in the last three years.

Ryan McBeth: That will probably happen. Yes.

Jordan Harbinger: Come on, man.

Ryan McBeth: So Iran wasn't even called Iran until like 1935.

It was always Persia. And the whole idea is that Iran means like land of the s the history goes back like 5,000 years or so, like to the year like five 50 BC at Cyrus. The great. He founded the, uh, iid. Iid, I believe it's pronounced. I've only read it. I've never said it. Yeah. Akim Empire, which stretched from like the edge of Greece to Egypt, to Central Asia to parts of India.

Famous King Darius. He invented Greece. He lost at the Battle of Marathon.

Jordan Harbinger: You say invented Greece.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah. Remember the messenger? [00:09:00] Philippes ran 26 miles to Athens and then he died of to say

Jordan Harbinger: the Persians are coming.

Ryan McBeth: Well, saying that we won. We won. He said Nike, and then he died of exhaustion. I see, I

Jordan Harbinger: see. Yeah.

Ryan McBeth: That's where we get the term marathon. And he didn't even get a finisher medal. Or a t-shirt for that?

Jordan Harbinger: No, he just got one of those live strong bands on his dead body. Yeah. So this is when you hear the Persians are coming and you watch 300 or something and you're like, wait, but Iran is so far away. Well, it wasn't before.

It was a big ass empire and it had advanced science. Nothing by modern standards, of course, but they had modern ish medicine and modern science and it's, it wasn't always a place that was Islamic and decided to go back hundreds of years because something, something Sharia law, that's a relatively new development.

And I always want to be fair to Iran because it must really suck being Iranian slash Persian. And all anyone knows about your country is how screwed up it got in 1979. And it's like, yeah, but we had 5,000 years and everyone was like, shh. No, it's a shit hole now. I'm sorry. No, no, no. You don't [00:10:00] understand. We had a, and just nobody wants to hear it.

It's like the same thing with China, right? They're in this sort of communist phase and there was all this starvation with Mao, and then if you talk to a Chinese person, they're like, yeah, we would like to be famous for all of the other things that we did that were really incredible and the giant empire and the dynasties that go back thousands of years, and it's now, let's just talk about this 30 year period that where you really blew it.

It's not fair. But that's unfortunately what we have to focus on today because that's why we're dropping Bunker Busters on Teran. I still would like to talk a little bit about ancient Iran. I think people probably are into this, so they're fighting the Greeks at Therm Opoly. Again, that's what the movie 300 is based on, very loosely based on, I'm pretty sure not one mi minute of that is historically accurate.

But did Iran get conquered by the Greeks? I don't actually know anything about this era now that I think about it.

Ryan McBeth: Iran got conquered by a couple of people. Uh, the Greeks under Alexander, the Romans, the Arabs, the Mongols, Ottoman Turks, they all came through. But what's kind of weird about Persia is that like [00:11:00] Persian culture survived.

And even when Islam entered Iran in the six hundreds Persian civilization, it didn't just vanish, it embraced Islam. But when you look at like Arab culture, like there is a difference between Persians and Arabs, and a lot of people don't understand that. A lot of Arabs, they're tribal and it goes back to Beto and culture, and that's why you see like when some guy gets elected president, like he makes sure everybody is of his tribe, right?

It has to be to the winners goes the spoils, and my tribe is going to be in power as long as possible. Persian culture really doesn't do that. It's a lot more unified. Again, that goes back like 5,000 years. So Persian cultures actually survived and changed Islam into something they feel works more for them.

And most of the rest of the Arab world is Sunni, which is another sect of Islam, which is the dominant, technically the dominant sect of Islam. I believe 85 to 90% of all Muslims [00:12:00] are Sunni Muslim.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm going to go ahead and guess just by the history of the Middle East that I do know that those two sects do not get along perfectly well.

Ryan McBeth: It's not like Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland. They all consider themselves Muslims, but they disagree on certain doctrine, like who was the true successor of the prophet Muhammad? And that has caused conflict. One thing I've noticed when I personally was in Iraq as a soldier, when you captured prisoners and you put them in jail, the Shia and the Sunni would go to opposite ends of the cell.

So the Shia would hang out with the Shia, the Sunni would hang out with the Seni.

Jordan Harbinger: How do you know who's who do you just ask?

Ryan McBeth: Um, that's an excellent question. So some names are Shia, like Fatima. That should be, that is a mostly Shia name. Could just be by your name. What is your name? Who is your father? And then, oh, okay.

Well, I know that guy is suny, so I'm going to go over here and hang out.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Geez. I don't know. It seems so arbitrary, but what do I know? We do definitely want to talk a little bit about that kind of thing as it is relevant, but I know that we have to jump [00:13:00] ahead literally thousands of years. So let's do that.

So by the 20th century, Iran had a king. Right? The Shah?

Ryan McBeth: The Shah, the Sharan Shah literally means king in Persian. I think it, it's been a word, 2000 or so years, roughly. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's a Muslim country, but it's more or less secular at this point because it's modern. Is that accurate?

Ryan McBeth: It didn't really become modern until the 1960s or so.

The real point where Iran got on the world stage was when British expedition found oil. This was in 1908, there was a British expedition. It was called the Anglo Persian Oil Company. And they discovered oil in southern Iran. At that time, Iran was carved up into spheres of influence where Russia kind of influenced Northern Iran.

Britain kind of influenced Southern Iran, and oil was discovered in southern Iran, and this made the British try to influence a lot of Iranian politics, especially since around that time the Royal Navy [00:14:00] was switching over from coal to oil for their ships. So this was a major resource. Now, by the 1950s, Rand'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 are nationalized, and the United States and UK did what we always do, and we backed the military coup.

Jordan Harbinger: So just to clarify, the US and Britain didn't overthrow the Shah. They overthrew the Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh. He had nationalized the oil fields, which meant

Ryan McBeth: 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.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [00:15:00] you're like, what the heck? What happened to that place? This woman right now is wearing a burka 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 eighties probably was encouraged to cover up more and wasn't allowed to wear that miniskirt anymore and take photos.

Ryan McBeth: 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.

Jordan Harbinger: SAVAK. Yeah.

Ryan McBeth: Yes. That's one of the reasons the Islamic rebels in the 1970s wanted to overthrow the Shah was because of SAVAK.

And, uh, when [00:16:00] these guys were all done, they basically restarted SAVAK again. They, I don't even think they changed the name. They realized you, 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 were going to 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.

Jordan Harbinger: So I see even still today, I've got Iranian friends who I, 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 [00:17:00] dad is like this guy. And so the IRGC or the morality police or whoever, they just don't mess with them. 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. 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 your Lambo with your girlfriend. You are living centuries behind the elite in the capitol.

Ryan McBeth: 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 [00:18:00] posting that scares 'em, which is why right now Ron's internet is essentially shut down.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, 1979. What happens in 79? This is an exciting year for Iran and pretty bad for everyone unless you're an Ayatollah.

Ryan McBeth: Starting in 1979, groups of Iranian students started rebelling.

They, they stormed the American Embassy in Tehran. They took 52 Americans hostage and they held them for 4 44 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 guy for the United States. And that really put the US like we've never forgiven Iran for taking people and holding them for 444 days.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [00:19:00] US 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.

Like it wasn't just this student protest where people showed up to say, Hey, death to America. Women who were covered up had bolt cutters underneath their, what is it called? Like a chador or whatever?

Ryan McBeth: Dishdasha.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, dishdasha. 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. [00:20:00]

Ryan McBeth: Yeah. There was rumor that Iran's previous president, it was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he was in the crowd as well as one of the agitators.

Jordan Harbinger: That to me sounds like the Iranian. IRGC version of, I was at Woodstock, bro. It's, yeah, I was at the US Embassy thing. You should make me president. And it's, bro, you were diapers when that happened. And it's like, nah, don't do the math. Don't do the math.

Ryan McBeth: It certainly could be, I mean, Iran's current elected by the Council of Experts, this guy, he was supposedly Beiji militia who either served or fought, depending on who you talk to in their honor.

Rock wars kind of as his street cred. And a lot of people who served in the besiege militia, these are tro de nine, you know, who were essentially told, go walk that way. Here is a key, but this key in your pocket as 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 [00:21:00] unique worldview 'cause they're all formed at the same time. 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 survive that certainly have a worldview that is unlike any other.

Jordan Harbinger: What is the besiege? What is the IRGC? How's 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 super fast.

Ryan McBeth: 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 A one design. So you can talk about the I-R-G-C-I-R-G-C, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Think of them as the religious army of Iran. They [00:22:00] 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, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: So there's not really a US 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?

Ryan McBeth: 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 is if you have a business, let's say a construction company [00:23:00] 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.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Ryan McBeth: 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 C is no different. Now the other Army, which is a lot poorer but is larger is the ores. The Artes, 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 Artes 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 [00:24:00] 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. 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 Besi. And that's something that during the riots when Michelle, he was murdered, I had people contact me saying like, Hey, my grandfather went back to the besiege to do, uh, riot control because it was some extra money.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez. So you got like a 65-year-old man, 70-year-old man shooting college kids at a riot.

Ryan McBeth: You're shooting them or, or that 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

Jordan Harbinger: shoot some civilians.

That's

Ryan McBeth: crazy. Throw me some reels. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: 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. [00:25:00] We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Bombas. One of the goals this year and all year round is to stay comfy, and Bombas is leading that charge in my house.

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Now, back to Ryan McBeth.

Yikes. Okay, so they take over the embassy, these revolutionaries in 1979. Yeah, they hold 52. Was it Americans for 444 days? Watch the movie Argo. If you want to know how, one of our show guest's husband, we had Jona Mendez on her husband, Tony Mendez was like a legendary CIA officer, and he led that particular operation, which is incredible.

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.

Ryan McBeth: [00:28:00] Yeah, there were some people getting held at the embassy and there were some who were in a different location.

I think it was 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 is 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Crazy.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah. That was a, A fascinating operation. The movie makes it a little more exciting. I, I believe they just flew out of the country on a regular transport. They weren't actually chased through the airport.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Unlikely they were chased through the airport. Yeah. You gotta 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 [00:29:00] after this embassy operation, the US is really pissed off at Iran. Iran decides the US is the great Satan. And why are we still upset about this?

It's been almost 50 years.

Ryan McBeth: 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. So they started supporting Shia groups, including Shia groups in Iraq, including groups like Shia Rebels in Lebanon, which eventually led 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. There [00:30:00] was an embassy where around 250 Marines and about 50, well, not just Marines, but Army as well, and French soldiers and other 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. They could do power projection through these proxy militias. PLO, Yassa Arafat, the day after the Shaw fell, Yassa Aite got on a plane and he flew to Teran and he started talking with the original Ayatollah Khomeini.

So you have Khomeini and Khomeini and then another.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right.

Ryan McBeth: But the original Anto Khomeini offered him help. And this was really weird because the PLO Palestinian Liberation Organization, it wasn't particularly religious, its [00:31:00] 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 a Muslim brotherhood, and this was around 2005 or so. And actually around 1987, the first into faah was the first into faah. 1987 Muslim Brotherhood rises to power in Gaza, and this eventually becomes Hamas.

So now of Iranian. She is supporting Palestinian Sunnis who are more than happy to take their money.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:32:00] And this is happening in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, also maybe the West Bank, or no

Ryan McBeth: West Bank, mainly PLOI would not be surprised. There's going to be some Islamic Jihad inside of the West Bank as well.

Jordan Harbinger: 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?

Ryan McBeth: 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 [00:33:00] wanted more power, and the Christians didn't want that. During the Lebanese Civil War, there were plenty of Christians that were causing atrocities.

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.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I grew up in Michigan. We had a huge Lebanese population that moved there in the seventies and eighties.

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, 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, 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 [00:34:00] 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 kinda skipped over that in the interest of time.

Ryan McBeth: 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 wildly coyote couldn't have come up with a worse plan. Mm-hmm. 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, 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. And then there were other parts of the plant too. They were going to fly the helicopters into Teran. And there was one idea where they're going to fly the helicopters back to another airstrip below them there was another where they're going to fly 'em to the soccer [00:35:00] stadium and then land a C one 30 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 helicopters taking off and it hit a C one 30 with the fuel bladder and it was a big explosion about eight soldiers died.

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.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 to even get there and do this. And now it almost seems like, oh, fly under the radar in Pakistan and a stealth helicopter and kill bin Laden and then get out before Pakistan even has any clue that we're there.[00:36:00]

No problem. I don't know. Is that my imagination? Or we way better at this kind of thing. Now we can go in and grab Maduro and everyone's like, Hey, we'd the president go. It seems like a big leap.

Ryan McBeth: We made a lot of changes to our military after that, creating the uh, 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 of Fort Rucker. Imagine flying a helicopter and you can only see outta two rolled up magazine tubes.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no,

Ryan McBeth: 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 recon has increased. Our ability to look at the weather has increased. All those factors make any kind of mission that we perform a lot more successful.

Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so we tried to rescue the hostages, [00:37:00] blew it, but in the eighties, 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?

Ryan McBeth: 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.

The bath party, which is sad. Hu Sing'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 a Iraq can use to export its soil. So like the next thing they thought was this thing is called the Chatal Chatal Arab waterway. So the idea behind Iran's or 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 Stan Province, which is one of Iran's oil rich provinces.

And this [00:38:00] 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez,

Ryan McBeth: so big waste of money.

Jordan Harbinger: Didn't like a million or more people get killed in this war too. It was a crazy bloody conflict.

Ryan McBeth: I believe you were correct, and I believe there was 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 if he went into one of his palaces, I might be misremembering this, but I'm pretty sure I saw it.

The sconces on the wall were Iranian helmets that have been gold plated.

Jordan Harbinger: Crazy. It says 500,000, excluding numbers from the related on fall campaign. It's the deadliest conventional war ever fought [00:39:00] between regular armies of developing countries. I know that sounds like a limit, but basically, other than world wars and major gray power conflicts, it was the largest casualty.

If they would just consider Russia 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, they've gotta be pushing 500,000 if you add both up with Ukraine and Russia. Right.

Ryan McBeth: It's probably more like 1.5 million.

Jordan Harbinger: Really?

Ryan McBeth: Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh gosh.

Ryan McBeth: I wouldn't be, yeah, we're talking total casualties, not just dead. Maybe five, 500,000 dead. Sounds about right. But. 1.5. Usually for every dead you have, uh, free wounded.

Jen Harbinger: Geez, my God.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 used proxies. It's also what, not just cheap, but they can say, that wasn't us. It was Hezbollah. I don't know.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah, it's cheap. And you get plausible deniability if you [00:40:00] can find a terrorist group and give 'em 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 Debas in Ukraine, which is Dines Lu. 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 is looking at this. They take Crimea and they look at a bunch of unemployed people in Danes Luhansk who are ethnic.

I say, I don't want to say ethnic Russians 'cause Ukraines will get mad at me, but people who identify as ethnic Russian 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 esque and luhansk with Ukraine.

And so there is that plausible [00:41:00] deniability. We did it in Afghanistan. We armed the mujahideen. We gave them stinger missiles. We were friends with Thesal of Bin Laden. When you think about it, right, that one didn't work out too well. Well, you win some and you lose some.

Jordan Harbinger: That's right. Yeah. This proxy stuff can go either way.

And so Iran has different proxies. Hezbollah, the Shia armies or militias in Iraq, they've got the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PIJ, they've got Hamas, they've got the Houthis in Yemen.

Ryan McBeth: The Houthis. Yeah. 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 the cave chewing on cot. The Iranians would call 'em and say, Hey, launch a missile of this location.

Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. [00:42:00] 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.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah, we'll give you some money and some cot. You're good.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 we attacking Iran right now?

Ryan McBeth: That's an excellent question. 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 like, I'm an Intel analyst dude.

I just find him the political guys, 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's situation be different? And the answer is yes.

And regarding uranium, you really only need three [00:43:00] to 5% enriched uranium in order to power a nuclear reactor. This is three to 5% of uranium, 2 35. And these uranians 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

Jordan Harbinger: less. I think 10 kilos, I think.

Ryan McBeth: Okay.

Jordan Harbinger: Actually it's 9.97. I was darn close. 10 kilos.

Ryan McBeth: That is the weight of a large bag of pet food of a 90% rich uranium to make a bomb. That's what you need to make a nuclear bump. 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

Jordan Harbinger: this is a family show.

But continue.

Ryan McBeth: Well,

Jordan Harbinger: that's what you're doing with your hands right now. We're going to have to blur that on YouTube.

Ryan McBeth: 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. [00:44:00] 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 two 20 pounds of nuclear material to make a bomb.

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 Youi 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 [00:45:00] took out all of their facilities, but they still have this nuclear material, and it's relatively close.

Jordan Harbinger: 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

Ryan McBeth: there's been that?

It seems like those protests have been suppressed, but teran, there's a massive water shortage in Teran right now, and a lot of that's due to mismanagement. Toronto's talked about moving its capital and 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Terrorism. No, sorry, what? Almonds.

Ryan McBeth: It's terrorism, almond's, caviar.

Jordan Harbinger: That's gone. And beautiful women. How's that? Did I make up for it? Okay.

Ryan McBeth: And beautiful women. Uh, so almonds are really water hungry. I think it takes 50 gallons of water making almond.

Jordan Harbinger: 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. It's wild.

Ryan McBeth: And Iran needs the cash. So [00:46:00] because of all these sanctions on Iran, because they can't seem to behave, you know, what are they going to sell? We can sell almonds. 'Cause the world market really likes almonds. I don't get as cash. And then all the water is getting sucked up by almonds.

You know, maybe it would be a good idea to sell something else if you need to conserve your water. But they also need a hard currency for their country to stay around.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 US already hates us, but we've got nukes.

Why don't they just give Iran a bomb? Why don't they just do that?

Ryan McBeth: The fingerprints would lead directly back, right,

Jordan Harbinger: but do they care? When does North Korea give a crap about what the US thinks? They're literally needling us every chance they get.

Ryan McBeth: I think that if they did that, we would, not just us, but China would probably clobber North Korea as well.

You know, you've been to North Korea.

Jordan Harbinger: I have, yeah. Several

Ryan McBeth: times. You have a lot more experience inside North Korea than me. The regime's main goal is to remain a [00:47:00] kleptocracy, right? 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?

Jordan Harbinger: Iran has two armies, a global proxy network, cyber units sleeper, sell missile factories, and somehow still manages its economy like a raccoon locked in a vending machine. We'll be right back.

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Now, back to Ryan McBeth.

Jordan Harbinger: The whole country is essentially like a machine to keep the top 0.1% 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 [00:49:00] 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. They're China 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. 'cause 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. 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.

Ryan McBeth: I would [00:50:00] not put that out of reach for the current administration. One of the SI 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 US 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. 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. Let's try to destroy their missiles. We'll destroy some of their oil production. If we can get a friendly regime [00:51:00] in charge and we can tell them you're not allowed to sell oil to China anymore, that's a big benefit. Makes it a lot harder for China than to invade Taiwan.

And China also gets to see our new doctrine, it's called Jado. And maybe that'll make 'em think twice about actually attacking Taiwan because we've proven we will go after you, not your generals, not your soldiers. 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 Jingping wants to live to see these two glorious nations re unified invading might be the last thing he wants to do. 'cause we will find him.

Jordan Harbinger: 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. Yeah. It's not going to be something where you hold out for years, like Hitler or something like that. You're [00:52:00] gone. You're going to be out in the beginning.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah. Our ISR is so good. Our intelligence grounds reconnaissance is so good. You could not pay me to pick up a phone in a run right now.

Jordan Harbinger: You mean if you're working in a mission critical capacity?

Ryan McBeth: 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, then we take out the 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. Why don't you have a generator? Because there's no fuel for the generator. 'cause the fuel truck didn't come or we blew it up.

Jordan Harbinger: We've all heard that Russia and maybe even China, might be giving intelligence information to Iran to strike US sites.

And I know that they've hit as of today something like 17 sites and some of 'em are really expensive radars. And people are like, they destroyed a billion dollar radar and I looked this up and [00:53:00] it's a damage, it's not destroyed. It's not like they leveled this massive concrete bunker building installation.

But yeah, it might cost 3 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. They're not looking at everything in real time.

Ryan McBeth: 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, yeah,

Jordan Harbinger: buildings don't walk around and move. So once you know where it is, that's where it is.

Ryan McBeth: 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 am 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, in Iran's case, if we have destroyed many of their missiles, but not only their missiles, if we have destroyed their command and [00:54:00] 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. 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.

It's moving at 30. So 30 knots, you're moving half a mile in one minute. Where's it going to be? 12 hours?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. It's three countries away now. Yeah.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah. That's not very useful. So the utility of the intelligence is kind of in question, and there might be some Iranian IRGC leaders who have letters of last resort.

They have a letter from their commander that [00:55:00] 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 bank. 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 the submarines and they say, look, if London gets destroyed in nuclear attack, your instructions are in this letter and nobody knows it's in the letter. It could be Return to America and put your missiles under America's Control, or it could be Salva at Russia. We don't know.

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. No one knows it's 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.

Ryan McBeth: 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 'cause it costs a lot of fuel to redirect a satellite.

I don't know if I'm going to spend that on Iran and [00:56:00] especially since I have a war in Ukraine going on. So maybe if they pass over ahead of an American area, they might pass some photography along or some, uh, synthetic ature 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. 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 'cause they're trying to build a nuclear navy themselves with aircraft carriers. I would not be surprised if China's watching what we're doing and learning from that to apply to their own, uh, people's Liberation Army, Navy.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, of course 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 BB net and Yahoo and whoever else on Iranian tv, which must be crazy to [00:57:00] see. Like you're in Teran 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. It's gotta 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 on fire. There's a smoking hole in the middle of it, and they've just gotta sort of admit all of this kind of thing. By the way, the water's off again or whatever. I mean, it's just gotta be absolutely insane to live through something like that.

Ryan McBeth: The big hack was the uh, Baaba 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

Jordan Harbinger: because it's Ramadan. That's right.

Ryan McBeth: Just in general [00:58:00] 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.

Jordan Harbinger: That's crazy. 'cause 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?

Ryan McBeth: 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 jdo or a new doctrine. It's called jdo Joint Domain. Joint Al 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, [00:59:00] any decider, any shooter, and a conflict with China.

It might be you have an Australian special forces guy on an island who calls up an AAC plane and one of those radar planes and says, Hey, I see a Chinese destroyer, and the AAC plane tells a Filipino high Mars 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 airstrikes followed by a massive ground invasion with jdo. You get 1000 tornadoes the first night and you never know we're going to strike, and we're just constantly hitting you and constantly flexing to emergent targets.

Jordan Harbinger: This is what people are expecting, right?

They're like, oh, the US 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.

Ryan McBeth: I think we could put boots on the ground. [01:00:00] 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 artes takes over and essentially they march north to Toronto and they kill everybody, not dressed like them.

Jordan Harbinger: I see.

Ryan McBeth: That's the ideal situation.

Jordan Harbinger: This is the regular army. Just decides enough is enough,

Ryan McBeth: the regular armies, and now whatever comes after that, and maybe the son of the Shah returns and he becomes a defacto leader.

We have to be very careful about that because anybody who comes down the ramp of the C 17 flanked by Marines is not going to be trusted by Iranians. Even the son of the s 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 artes, [01:01:00] they put someone in power temporarily, then they hold elections, they redo their constitution. 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.

Jordan Harbinger: You can vote for this repressive cleric or this repressive cleric.

Ah, you chose wrong. Anyway, the election's over.

Ryan McBeth: You know what's funny is I kinda like it to 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, they're never going to be put on the ballot. So 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. That guy's not going to run.

So they [01:02:00] do have a democracy,

Jordan Harbinger: but he's so hip Ryan, he really vibes with the kids.

Ryan McBeth: Which level of conservative cleric do you want?

Jordan Harbinger: Wow. So there's hacktivist groups, there's other cyber attacks trying to disrupt IRGC, command and control. Like I said, we hijacked Iran 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 sixteens 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?

Ryan McBeth: You do. At some point. This happened in Afghanistan. At some point you're turning big rocks into little rocks. You. We're probably never going to run out of the logistical targets. So ideally, in the scheme here, you strike air defense [01:03:00] targets first.

Absolutely 100%. That's the first to go air defense. 'cause 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? 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. Or. Then you start hitting the air bases, you don't necessarily want to destroy the runways. A lot of people think hitting air bases 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 [01:04:00] 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Geez.

Ryan McBeth: It was extremely dangerous. Mainly 'cause you're flying on a known avenue of approach. So now we just blow up the aircraft and the hardened shelters.

Jordan Harbinger: That makes sense, I suppose. And then you could land your own there if you need to later.

Ryan McBeth: Okay. Now on 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.

Like,

Jordan Harbinger: yeah, thank you people. That's the thing is all the Reddit armchair generals are like, we're shooting down $30,000 Shahe drones, $50,000 Shahe drones with $2 million 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 going to have to sit there and we're going to 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 [01:05:00] 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. 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.

Ryan McBeth: We certainly have a threshold that we don't want to go below. But this has already been priced in. Like 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, there's, I think it's called the Advanced Precision kill kit that goes on to F fifteens.

It's almost like a rocket pod like you've seen on an Apache helicopter and they fire these laser guy rock. It's a perfect for taking out she head drones. So we do have options, [01:06:00] 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. That's one of the reasons Ukraine is getting pounded because we gave them interceptors, 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 firing is down almost 90% from Iran, [01:07:00] 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 hole.

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 ector launcher to fire the missile. And it could be that guys, they're in the wind. They haven't heard from their commanders in months in weeks, and they don't know what to do.

These systems need maintenance, so if you have a missile launcher, you periodically have form 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 muscle. On the launcher truck. [01:08:00] And the other question is, how do you get that thing back to reload?

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And where do you reload it? The warehouse that is now on fire,

Ryan McBeth: 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. This isn't reloading an AK 47. An AR 15, right? It's like launching a fricking space shuttle or a satellite that comes down with an explosive

Ryan McBeth: with rocket fuel isn't so

Jordan Harbinger: that makes sense. My wife is scared that sleeper cells are activated.

Do 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 ABC seven News Bay area that probably just wanted clicks on Instagram.

Ryan McBeth: 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, [01:09:00] that really changed the game when it comes to what a 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 on 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. And it is a possibility that they could do that. The drone possibility exists, 'cause 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. [01:10:00] 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 nine 11 scale disaster. It'll be like the school in Belson, Russia.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that was terrible. Beslan. Yeah.

Ryan McBeth: 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.

Will probably be okay.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Ryan McBeth: It was like 250 kids, and then some people died in a fire afterwards.

It was chein, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: That's terrible. That's a haunting story. [01:11:00] What about all this AI war footage? I mean, you debunked one where it was like, oh my God, there's a 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.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah, the AI war footage thing is only going to get worse as AI gets more realistic. And I can tell you that the 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 either 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, isn't she a doctor? Jill Stein.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Dr. Jill Stein.

Ryan McBeth: She reposted a, an AI generated picture saying they give true 550 American special [01:12:00] forces captured by Iran.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Ryan McBeth: 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 was some, uh, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh, this guy who tells you to buy silver or whatever. [01:13:00]

Ryan McBeth: Tells you to buy silver or tells you the geopolitical situation of the, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: But that could, something like that could break.

That takes a lot of power. You gotta tone it down. Ryan is really handsome as a heavy lift even for ai,

Ryan McBeth: 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 [01:14:00] 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 the tank. 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. 'cause there are a lot of people out there who are just mercenary. I just want content. I don't care if it's true.

Jordan Harbinger: Sure, yeah. Jill Stein seems to be one of those people, uh, 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. Uh, or the big if true, it's like Jesus Christ, Google it,

Ryan McBeth: Jews to the left of them, soonies to the right. Here's Iran Mining the Strait of Horus.[01:15:00]

We'll be right back.

Aya, you guys, we'd be right back now for the rest of my conversation with Ryan McBeth.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I'm surprised there's not fake AI videos of US 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.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah, that'd 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 recorded a video saying, I was the fifth special forces group, and I was captured.

It was just an Iranian dude who grew up in Southern California.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 [01:16:00] sleeper cells, the Iranians in la.

They know a lot of 'em. I've never met a single one that knows anybody that likes the regime, but there's a reason they live in la. They escape the revolution. Almost all of them. They're absolutely not fans of any ayatollah, and I'm sure I don't speak for every Iranian in la, but look, I would feel bad if I didn't stick up for the Iranian Persian homies in Los Angeles right now.

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. Then of course, the US 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?

Ryan McBeth: 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 or something may not be. People thought of James Stockdale during Vietnam. He was Ross Perot's running mate. No,

Jordan Harbinger: no. I am terrible at picking out AI video.

Like I look at it and I'm like, that's a hundred percent real. And people are like, dude, there's an iPhone flying through the air. [01:17:00]

Ryan McBeth: James Stockdale was this pilot during Vietnam. He was shot down. He was eventually an admiral. But this guy, um, he was asked to be in a propaganda video by the North Vietnamese and he said no, they were going to put him in it 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, you know, I mentioned Ross Perell.

You know, during 1979, during the revolution, Ross Perell actually sent a team into Iran to get people out.

Jordan Harbinger: Really

Ryan McBeth: familiar with that.

Jordan Harbinger: No,

Ryan McBeth: 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 [01:18:00] hadn't been paid in a while with the new government. Like people were saying, well, we're not going to pay. And so the Iranian government on the AYA just grabbed these guys and throw 'em in prison. And Ross Perot, essentially they said like, Hey, let 'em go, but you need to eliminate the bill we owe you.

So Ross Perot formed like 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. Essentially in Iran, you could buy shotguns, but you could only buy birdshot for your shotguns.

So they were going to go into Iran, just buy shotguns from the sporting goods store, take out the by ammunition, take out the birdshot, put in the buckshot, and they were going to go to the prison and bust their guys outta prison.

Jordan Harbinger: This is the dumbest plan ever.

Ryan McBeth: Well, it, it actually worked.

Jordan Harbinger: Are you kidding me?

Ryan McBeth: Actually, it

worked

Jordan Harbinger: and Carter couldn't get special forces to Iran, but Ross Perot [01:19:00] sends the accounting department of EDS into Iran and it works

Ryan McBeth: exactly what the

Jordan Harbinger: heck.

Ryan McBeth: These were former operators, but they went in and actually, as it turned out. They didn't have to bust the guys outta prison. The prison was stormed by revolutionaries.

The two EDS employees were in the prison, like afraid to leave. 'cause they're like, we, we don't speak. You know, like, I don't want to go out there.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I probably just sit there and be like, Hey man, I didn't try to escape,

Ryan McBeth: but they went and got 'em. 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 they'd 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 Shaw picture up, or they would put the Isola picture up in the car, and then they'd get to the checkpoint and they'd wave 'em through. Yay. And then, you know, find the next car. Is the next checkpoint revolutionary or. [01:20:00] Shah. And so they put the Shah picture up.

Yeah. Ross Perot got his people out of, uh, an Iranian prison.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 ADA 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 are like, we better get the hell outta here. 'cause there's tear gas and you can hear broken bottles and you can hear the riot guns shooting from everybody.

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 gotta get outta here. I'm a foreign 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 Ed 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, [01:21:00] let us through. And they'd let us through. And then you'd see like a brown sort of guy, but not looking very aggressive.

And I'm, 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,

Ryan McBeth: have you ever thought of maybe staying home?

Jordan Harbinger: 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,

Ryan McBeth: yeah, there's plenty of places in America. I'm going to spring training with my dad next week. Maybe.

Jordan Harbinger: Look, hey, now with the sleeper cells, I might as well go wherever I want. You got sleeper cells here, you got non sleeper cells everywhere else.

What's a big deal? Everyone's like, this is going to escalate into a regional war now it's So there's a war going on in Lebanon with Israel bombing stuff and they're shooting missiles and drones. ATAR in 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.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah, I don't like the term [01:22:00] 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 scraper in 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. There's a reason why they have a lot of fighter planes. It's because like they parade, well, the guys look jaunty in their fighter pilot suit and you can

Jordan Harbinger: bomb the rebel militias really far away without actually sending anybody down on the ground to do it.

Ryan McBeth: 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 [01:23:00] look Cool. You can have them fly by you parades and stuff like that. But one thing you don't have is deep precision strike capability.

Turkey. They kinda lost out on that with the F 35. You take a look at some of the regional players, a lot of them have F sixteens. I think that Saudi Arabia has F fifteens that might be capable of, I think they have the C model. I think of it to most of the air force for Saudi Arabia is set up for just internal air defense, not really for striking Iran.

So when people say, oh my God, it's a regional war, how do you regional war? Tell me how you do it. Nobody can answer that next question,

Jordan Harbinger: but that would be like Qatar decides to go and take one of the Emirates over 'cause they always wanted it. Oman's enclave gets closed off by Saudi Arabia 'cause they're sick of, I don't know, showing their passport at the border.

I, 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.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah. [01:24:00] And they don't have the expeditionary capabilities and logistical capabilities. Saudi Arabia tried to kill the Zide rebels, the Houthis in Yemen, and they could barely do that

Jordan Harbinger: on the border of Saudi Arabia

Ryan McBeth: on the border.

Jordan Harbinger: Exactly.

Ryan McBeth: It's 'cause 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. They don't have that capability, and it's not like Saudi Arabia's going to do that either. They don't have the expeditionary capability to sustain their logistics.

Jordan Harbinger: So why do you think Iran shot all these drones and missiles at other Arab countries?

Was this when 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 [01:25:00] 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.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah. This is one of the reasons I like coming on your show. 'cause you do a lot of research. I can tell. 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. Get

out

Jordan Harbinger: of

Jen Harbinger: our country. We don't want your bases here. They just bring trouble.

Ryan McBeth: Even that guy, professor Zang, I don't know if you've seen him, he runs Predictive history.

Jordan Harbinger: 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 I know that channel.

Ryan McBeth: He went to China 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. Or he could do that and now he hosts a show.

But I can tell you that one of the things he said was that [01:26:00] 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 our ongoing.

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? 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.

Jordan Harbinger: So is Russia going to jump in?

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 Foreign. 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, [01:27:00] China can't jump in, but if they did jump in, it would almost be to maybe keep shipping going through the strait of hor moves because they need the oil to go through there. Let's do a little aside on the strait of horror moves. I actually don't think we've talked about it.

Ryan McBeth: Sure. So straight of horror moves is this little strip of sea that has been a choke point. I want to say it's 12 miles wide. I might be wrong. Maybe 20.

Jordan Harbinger: I think it's either 12 or 21. 'cause I just looked this up this morning. But it's basically, it's, it's small enough you can hit anything that goes through it with a missile if you want to, if you're a run,

Ryan McBeth: assuming you can find it.

And again, we've taken out a lot of Iranian ISR. Intelligence found reconnaissance assets. Oh, I Ron can mine the Strait of Herm with what we've sunk their navy, essentially even the little boats that can distribute mines.

Jordan Harbinger: Oh really? I didn't know that.

Ryan McBeth: Oh yeah. One thing that could be a factor is unmanned surface vehicles, US fees.

Ukraine pioneered that. That's one of the ways they got their last Creole class destroyer in the Black Sea is with these unmanned surface drones that are [01:28:00] basically jet skis that have been repurposed with a GPS receiver that you might have to worry about. Those are really small. Iran may have quite a few of these things.

You load 'em with explosives, you send 'em against a tanker. I could see, it would be kind of interesting. I could see China getting involved, escorting those ships through the Straight As 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 is a type of ship called a frigate.

We got rid of the Oliver Hazard Perry class. Forget, we replaced with something called the Littoral Combat Ship, which isn't particularly good at anything. It, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: So it's soon to be a coral reef near you, I

Ryan McBeth: guess.

Yeah. Yeah. Soon be a coral reef. 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 strai of who moves. But China, yeah, if they want to work with the Americans, that would be new. That would be new. If we could all work [01:29:00] together escorting those tankers, that probably wouldn't be a bad idea.

But pretty soon it might be a question of escort from what? 'cause right now the biggest menace in the, uh, straight of M 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, uh, I think it's called Title 10 or Title 12 War Risk Insurance.

Just say you can buy a pool of insurance from America for cheap and that will insure your ship going through the strain of MOUs. Well, if it solved it tomorrow, 'cause there might still be captains who are reluctant to go.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. Who don't want to hit a mic. They did hit that ship from Thailand today. You saw that, right?

Ryan McBeth: I did not see that.

Jordan Harbinger: They hit it. It's smoking. It's a tanker or a container ship.

Ryan McBeth: Did they hit it with a USV?

Jordan Harbinger: Let's check. Right now. Three ships in straight up four moves hit by unknown projectiles as the BBC. You can see this ship really smoking a lot. Let's see. Traffic through the [01:30:00] strait has fallen sharply.

Thailand's Navy said it was providing emergency assistance after a Thai flag Vessel was hit 11 nautical miles north of Oman causing a fire on board. The ship's crew members are being rescued. Ran 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 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. So, and Iran says they're not going to allow a single leader of oil heading for the US 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 going to blast it and China's going to go, Hey bro, that was ours. You morons.

Ryan McBeth: Every ship has a manifest. And a lot of times those are on like tanker tracker.dot [01:31:00] com where you can see where these tankers are going. Iran is part of the international shipping community that I'm sure they have access into databases of what ships are leaving.

'cause if you have to book a ship, you're going to use that database to see what ships are open, what ships are not.

Jordan Harbinger: So you can see where a ship is headed and they can target specifically based on that.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah, there is something called a IS, although a lot of sometimes people turn a S off.

Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I was going to say, you should probably turn that off if you're sailing through Hormuz right now.

Ryan McBeth: 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, uh, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Ryan McBeth: Yeah, it would certainly seem like it to me. You should advise Sal Matano from what's going on with shipping to talk to you about that. He would be fantastic.

Jordan Harbinger: I'm down. Yeah. Introduce me to him. What happens if the [01:32:00] Iranian regime collapses?

Is this going to be another Libya? That's what people I think are worried about.

Ryan McBeth: I don't think so. And I say that because the Iranian people are, they're not Arabs and they'll have those tribal loyalties and my tribe must be in power and everyone around me must be in my tribe.

Jordan Harbinger: So factionalism.

Ryan McBeth: 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. I think you're either going to see the regime remain in power with severely attributed missile defenses or missile capabilities, or you're going to see the Army takeover and some sort of strong man, [01:33:00] and eventually someone who works in the US and hopefully elections.

So it's one of those two things. But number two is on the Iranian people.

Jordan Harbinger: Look, I am all for a free Iran. Iranians are some of the AMA most amazing people that I've ever met. The civilization's amazing. The history's amazing. I'm just a huge fan of everything other than the hardcore hard line 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?

Ryan McBeth: It certainly can go on for at least another four to six weeks.

Jordan Harbinger: 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.

Ryan McBeth: Thank you for having me.

Jordan Harbinger: Iran is one of those places where the people in the regime [01:34:00] 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. 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 hostages, uranium, and angry clerics living in the 16 hundreds.

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. I love my Persians, my Iranian homies. This one is all for you, and I hope you make it outta 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 [01:35:00] show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well.

That's over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created an association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sidlauskas, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

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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.

Ryan McBeth: If you like this show, there's another podcast you should check out. If you want to stay informed about what's happening around the world without drowning in noise, check out The President's Daily Brief.

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