How do you think this plays out over the coming weeks and months? Because at some point, yeah, they might run out of missiles, but that doesn't necessarily mean the war is over. I'm presuming that the US don't want to throw soldiers on the ground in Iran either. So how does this play out and how long? And that's one of the major strategic areas that we made in attacking Iran. They have the benefit of time, not us. They can choose how to react, when to react, in what way to react. We don't know if they have a dirty bomb that they're finishing up in some underground bunker right now. They're just going to sit there and wait until American boots on the ground show up. The fact that you guys think that current nuclear deployments have nothing to do with what's going on Iran, it's... I want to respect that opinion, but to me it shows just a lack of military experience and actual strategic intent to kill. Like, when you look at how military and intelligence operators are trained to think, they're trained to think through a lens of maximum damage. Iran is thinking through the same window right now. And they're watching what we just did in Afghanistan. Don't forget we killed Osama bin Laden, who was an ideological figurehead of al-Qaeda in 2011 and didn't leave Afghanistan until 2022 when we were... when we gave up. That's another 11 years of war after the guy that we were supposed to kill to end the war. How is... Khomeini is different. Khomeini is different. But how different? I don't know yet. And what are we going to do? The new leadership in Iran, what's it going to be? Is it going to be a leadership that kowtows to the United States? That kowtows to Israel? Is it going to be another shadow government like the Shah? Are we going to place somebody else in the Iranian people? Are we going to love it? Or are we leaving a vacuum that China and Russia are going to step into? And now we're going to see a strengthened Iran that's strengthened by our largest adversaries in the world. This is the reality of what we've got to figure out because whether they launch all their rockets in the next two weeks, that doesn't mean that's the end of the fight. For all we know, it's going to come back and bite us in six months when some Hezbollah cell lights New York on fire. We don't know. But when it happens, arguably it's going to be justified. To Andrew's point, Iran can wage a war of attrition. It's harder. A war of attrition is basically low-level warfare. Think of like death by a thousand cuts, right? I'll just keep poking at you enough to eventually wear you down, destabilize you, weaken you. Whereas what you can do is massive retaliation and these big sort of theatrical strikes. War of attrition is basically grinding for the long haul and wearing you down. This is something that, to his point, Iran is capable of doing and is probably willing to do and sees is the only way that it can survive this. Is it war of attrition? The war, it's whatever remnant is left. It's how Russia has survived so long. It's a war of attrition. But I'm like, who's the leader? Or is it just lots of different pockets of people? Time will tell and, you know, Hezbollah's sort of cells around the world will tell us what happens. But I think another way of looking at it, I saw a former member of the National Security Council commenting that like, yes, cells could be activated in America or they could just fade away. And this is where I don't have a crystal ball and I'm just observing what's happening. But I do think that all of this hangs on the razor's edge of public opinion because, you know, time will tell whether or not this regime falls, whether what you're saying, if it's either or. But I don't think that we can know. And we've been here before to some degree. Too many times. Too many times. What is the lesson from history that everyone seems to have forgotten? That we are shitty learners of history. That's what the lesson is. To your point of, you know, who the leadership would be, something else that that philosopher quoted, Eric Hoffer had said that, you know, mass movements, they don't need a God, but they do need a devil. So to that effect, the leader doesn't matter as much as having an enemy does. That is the, so basically, so long as we, the United States, or the Western world is framed as the enemy, that is enough to keep a war of attrition going, absent any figurehead or a charismatic leader. And he was a religious figure versus just a political figure. He was a religious figure. To your point, he was the racketeer at the end. Yeah, I mean, he was running effectively. And everyone in most people in the country knew that. Yeah, absolutely. Thousands of people have gathered in public squares in Toronto openly weep and mourn his death. Roughly 20% of the population are staunch ideological supporters of him. Yeah, 20% and 90 million. Yeah. And it's interesting because you, one can imagine that that 20% might grow, especially if the coming months make their lives worse in some way. They experience, I don't know, poverty or whatever else. And then, you know, friends die because of this war. It doesn't take long for narrative to turn. So that's what everyone's been warning about. You strike Iran, this was a warning last June. You strike Iran, you're going to get rally around the flag. The people that are secularists now are going to turn and they're going to start supporting the regime. And we're going to set back the cause of, let's say, freedom or democracy. If you haven't discovered your natural born spy skills, then somebody else might be using theirs against you. CIA teaches us that there are only three types of people in the world. Those who motivate, those who manipulate, and those who are being controlled by one of the other two. I created a three minute CIA style quiz to help you unlock your secret psychological advantage and identify your hidden blind spot. This test was developed to help you weaponize your natural born gifts and use them to get ahead of 99% of people in power, wealth and purpose. It was also designed to make sure that you can protect yourself against those who would use their skills against you. All you have to do is click on the first link in the description below or scan the QR code on your screen to start your spy quiz now. I want you to discover your secret spy superpower and use it for good before somebody else uses their power against you. It didn't happen. It turns out that basically the people in Iran blamed the regime for their own, for the misery that was put upon them. And so I think that 20% will get even smaller as a result. Not just of this. It would have gotten smaller anyway. As a result of this, I think it will get even smaller still because their salvation is not at the end of a turban or a robe. It basically comes with liberty and freedom that this government, this regime won't give them. And so that is, I think, evident now to the 80% of Iranians, all of whom of that mean that 80% of the population is born after 79. They don't know the old regime. All they know is this one. And what they know is they don't like it. They don't like living under it. And they want anything other than what this is. You feel differently? I think that that's an overly idealistic way of thinking about it. We failed to convert Iraq when we took out Saddam Hussein. We failed to convert Afghanistan when we took out the Taliban. Iran is not Iraq and Afghanistan, though. It is not. I'm not saying it's the same. I'm saying that when you change a government from the top down, that doesn't do anything for the people. No one's changing it. There's no nation building. We're not going in to do it within Iraq. Correct. So what's going to build it? So what's going to build it? What's going to change it? The people? The people that have been slaves for basically the last, what, 40, 50 years? The people who have had no education? The people who have been marginalized? Do you think they're just going to understand how to organize themselves? I think they'll be educated very, very highly. I mean, it's one of the most educated populace in the world. And they are very... The people that are not regime supporters are very Western thinking. I mean, we see this. We see this in the culture they produce, the media they produce, when they go and they speak around the world. So the populace is there. The capability is there. The will is there. All they need is basically not to be, you know, not to be facing the barrel of a gun. We are about to find out if that's true. And that is what we are all writing on right now, is whether this intellectual minority in a poverty-stricken, economically-defunct country is going to even fucking stay there. Or whether they're going to take their brains and their success and their opportunities somewhere else. The diaspora and everything we're hearing says they are... Everything we're hearing... People cannot wait to help rebuild the country. Why do you trust what you're hearing? Well, his family is there. So he's probably... I mean, even worse. The worst thing you can do is trust the people that you have a personal relationship with. They're the least objective people that you can talk to. So who are they? 80% of the population. Who do you talk to? Exactly. Who do you trust? You can't trust anything that you're hearing right now. You can't trust anything that you're reading right now. The information landscape is too tumultuous. Who do you trust? You have to trust somebody, right? It's not paranoid. It's healthy. It is absolutely paranoid to suggest that everything is misinformation. One would believe, at least I certainly believe, that I have a faculty up here to be able to take information and try and discern what might be misinformation and what isn't, and then also be willing to stand corrected. That's a very important part of it. And that goes back to my tribal problem, is once you have a horse in the race and you become convinced, and I am hearing a little convincedness from you, that then I believe you lose your ability to be able to go, oh, wow, maybe I was wrong. Maybe this, and again, I'm not condoning what the administration did whatsoever. I'm just listening to Benjamin and saying, that is, to my eye, a much better source. I'm a journalist. I'm going to listen to what people on the ground are saying. They're certainly family members because their opinion is going to be legitimately, you know, heartfelt and not propagandized. Again, we speak a completely different language. When you talk to me about opinion, heartfelt, and family, and belief, none of those are objective. No, those are based on fact. Rebellions are born on those things, by the way. I agree. And that doesn't make it objectively correct. It was a rebellion that ended up in the Iran that we just saw fall apart. That was a revolution. That was a rebellion. Andrew, where does your skepticism come from? What's it rooted in? Because you did spend almost a decade as an undercover spy for the United States in the CIA. Where is the skepticism coming from? Why shouldn't we believe people on the ground who are saying what they're saying? I have seen this stuff firsthand. I've been trained in how this stuff works. I've had to deploy this in pursuit of American goals and ambitions in the past. And what you're saying isn't inaccurate as to how people react. We just trust the opinion of the people that we trust the opinion of the people we trust more than we trust the opinion of others, only because it's our opinion that they're trustworthy at all. So who do you trust to get your information from? I want to take my information from as far opposite sources as possible and then see where the information confirms itself, where it correlates. Because if you see anti-American people saying the same thing as anti-Iranian people, where their messages are the same has corroboration. The number of dead leaders, as an example. That's a corroborative point because you're hearing both the Iranian state media say that and pro-U.S. Western forces talk about that. But what if it's to your point a black box and you can't get information from the sources you're used to getting from? Well, that's exactly right. It is a black box. So if we know it's a black box, we have to question every source that comes out, every piece of information that comes out. What we're seeing a lot of right now with Iran is called circular reporting. It's one single source of information that comes out that gets multiplied over and over again. We're seeing it happen in the White House too because the White House has kicked out so many journalistic legacy media outlets. So now one story gets multiplied over and over again and we're seeing stuff that's repeated. I have to say something. I am a little bit skeptical about what is true. I'm like the furthest from ever being a conspiracy theorist, but a little bit skeptical of what's true because I did a post about this subject. And obviously I've spent 15 years in social media, so our whole business was scaling huge social media audiences. And what I received in my DMs was like I've never seen before. About what? I've heard people talking about bots for decades. And most of the time, they're actually the wrong. It's something else going on with the algorithm or maybe it's something they don't like, they source or they call it a bot. I received thousands and thousands and thousands of DMs when I posted about this subject matter. And some of those accounts, when you go on the page and you look at their posting history, their engagement, you look at certain patterns, which we've built tools before to kind of spot some of these accounts on real. And I said to my friends, I was like, what the fuck, I posted about this issue. And then I had thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of these accounts DM me, encouraging me to post more about certain things. First time in my life ever I go, oh, that was definitely... It was so... An influence operation. Just so... So what were these spots pushing you to post it on? I'm conscious whether I should say or not because I don't want to infer... By doing so you're... I'm like inferring that a particular... But I'm just saying I've never felt what I experienced then. And I have... I mean, this trailer will come out, we'll see loads of bots, we have systems. But this was in my DMs, it was encouraging someone like me who has a big platform to push a certain narrative. And the only reason I noticed is because of the sheer volume. And then the narrative was almost identical. And I think, well, 1,700 different accounts of all were asking me to do the same thing. So you have final control over the edit of this. So there's no... If you don't want what you say to get aired, then it'll get cut. But one way or the other, whatever you say, I want you to say what you saw. Because if the narrative was anti-Iran, then you were attacked by Western forces, Western bots attacking a known Westerner. If you were pro-Iranian cyberbots, then now you're talking about a cyber capacity, a cyber capability in Iran that nobody's talking about. So one way or the other, and you can see. Or maybe an ally or someone else or whatever it might be. I don't know. But it made... My point was that it's made me skeptical about my own information chamber. And I'll be honest, before I realized what was going on, very persuasive. Very persuasive. You were persuaded by the bots before you realized they were bots. Because they're saying nice things to you, and then they're encouraging you to continue to push a certain narrative. And it just took me a second to pause and thought, actually, maybe wouldn't that be a perfect strategy in these moments to get people who have big platforms to just bomb their DMs and tell them that, you know, like, why aren't you standing up for us? And please use your voice to speak on this particular issue. And I thought, actually, maybe I need my information from somewhere else. Well, I think the point that you're making, which is very important, has to do with, you know, mimetics or popularity. In other words, what we don't know the outcome of the situation yet. We don't know if the Hezbollah sleeper cells will be activated. Are they waiting to see whether what they do will be welcomed or will be demonized? And I think that there's a profound influence in social media. And that is true in this administration and previous administrations about the rise of pushing public opinion. I mean, to your point, that's what you worked on at the agency, or you at least saw happen. The fact is, I'm glad that you're seeing it for yourself. You can't trust what you see. First of all, if you're a single language person, you only see what's in your language. You don't see what's in a different language. And then we all have an echo chamber around us. And the fact that we have so much technology just amplifies our echo chamber. Our algorithm sees what we see, it sees what we like, it sees what we pause longer on than something else. And it gives us more of that. And people become very wealthy and very successful understanding the behavior that people prefer. And you give people more of what they already prefer and then it makes them happier. And they don't even realize they're sitting inside of an echo chamber. So for all of these reasons, I don't trust the information I see. I don't trust information unless multiple sources of conflicting values and conflicting priorities and conflicting goals. Where they say the same thing, I'll give that more credence. And if you can't get those sources because information... Then you can't have a conclusion. So you can have a living assessment, but you can't have a conclusion. So do you not operate if you're a foreign policy decision maker, if you're a president, if you're a national security advisor, you have to give advice and consent. You have to figure out something. You can't say I have a lack of evidence, I have a lack of opinion or lack of information. And therefore, because I can't cooperate or verify, there's no Venn diagram of overlapping views. That's when you have to use time as a tool. You have to use time to be the tool that you use to collect more information. If you give up time, you give up one of your most important tools, which is what we're giving up with this attack. We're giving up time so that we can potentially just fit a calendar, January, February, March. Like, that's why what did we actually gain? How did the United States actually tangibly benefit from what just happened in Iran? If in... The United States, how did we... If in four months from now, before the midterm elections, there is new leadership in Iran, entirely new. If there is regime change, in other words, if there is, by the president's own metrics, victory, will you change your tune on this? What did we gain? What if it's not evident right now? What if it isn't four months? Yeah, it's a living assessment. So, of course, for all we know, the president's decision is gonna work out. But for all we know, it's gonna get worse. For all we know, it won't be four months, it'll be four years of a drought and poverty stricken. And Iranians dying, civilians dying because they can't find food and water. The 79 revolution took two years to happen, really began late 77. And then you had a sort of reign of terror, almost like the Thermadorian Robespierre period in early Iranian in the early 80s, where it took really four or five years for all the dust to settle. But so, the question is, do you want... Where are my results, right? It's only been two years. What are we gaining? What do we even think we're gonna gain? What does the United States think it's going to gain from decapitating the Iranian leadership? Well, that's kind of obvious based on what the president has said. It's that... On what the president has said? I'm just saying based on what the president says. But if you ask what the point was, according to the president, because he's the one who authorized the operation, it was putting an end to Iran's nuclear program and regime change. If you turn... Based off of what the president said, the nuclear program was obliterated in June of last year. But there's an attempt to reconstitue this. Absolutely no way of... Why are you disregarding previous narratives to adopt the current narrative? Because if I've learned nothing from 79, is that the previous narratives were wrong. The assessments were wrong. So I don't trust the assessments either. But there's satellite imagery that shows, oh, there's reconstruction happening at Esfahan or Natanz or wherever. We can see trucks moving, we can see buildings coming up, right? Somebody chose to share that satellite imagery. It's impossible to say. It's impossible to practically say, no, no, no, Iran didn't want a nuclear weapon. They just wanted to have electric power. I mean, nuclear power. You know, that's not really not a plausible assessment. That's what the ODNI put into their official report. How else do you explain that they're going beyond 20% enrichment? Then why are they doing that? They don't need more than 20%. And it was a racket, it is a racket. And we're talking about Tulsi Gabbard as a head of DNI. Exactly, which is a great point. And she's been silent. Well, you have not heard from her. Are we not? Tulsi Gabbard has been a lot of things in her career. Yeah. But do you think there was any risk of Iran developing uranium to the point that they could use that as a nuclear weapon? Because if you look at the timeline here, which I'll throw up on screen, which is just a screenshot, by 2021 they were a dangerous threshold. Iran begins enriching uranium to 60% purity, which is a short technical step away from the 90% needed for a weapon. And by 2023 to 2025, we were told that they were theoretically weeks away from being able to create a weapon, which is when Trump decided to attack. You think that's false. We only know what we're being told. And what we're being told isn't even consistent between what's publicly being released by our own government and what we're being told in mainstream media. So what you think is the... You have an answer to this question. Is it false? I don't know. I don't know if it's false. Well, just look at North Korea if you want to know if it's false. I mean, I interviewed Bill Perry, the Secretary of Defense, who went there and got the guarantee and the promise from the dear leader there was no chance they were going to develop a nuclear weapon. Fingers crossed behind the back, thermonuclear weapon, and look where we are now. And so I think it would be foolhardy for this administration or any former administration to think that Iran wasn't doing the same thing. It has every incentive to do it. If I were Iran, I would absolutely build one. Because look what it did for North Korea. We're getting lost in the wrong question. I'm not trying to say that Iran wasn't creating nuclear weapons. I'm saying that the official stance of the ODNI was that it was not. The official stance they want you to see. Yeah, they did. Now we're getting closer to the same point. Why would the president say something different than what the ODNI is saying to the public? That is a failure in narrative control. So there's an inconsistency there and that's the question. We agree on that. We agree. We absolutely agree on that. If you like that video, you're going to love the next one and I'll see you there. The fundamentals of espionage are exactly the same. No matter how much technology changes, no matter how many countries change, no matter whether they lean left or right or whether they become dictatorships or fallen kingdoms, it's always the same. It's always just dicks and bricks.
