1297: Iran | Out of the Loop

Summary

The Jordan Harbinger Show — Episode 1297: Iran | Out of the Loop

Date: March 15, 2026
Guest: Ryan Macbeth

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Episode Overview

Jordan Harbinger hosts defense analyst Ryan Macbeth for a sweeping, in-depth exploration of Iran—beyond the headlines and hot takes. Their conversation is designed as an “Out of the Loop” catch-up for anyone confused by Iran’s complex, headline-dominating role in global affairs, especially following the recent conflict escalation. The episode weaves through Iran’s ancient history, its turbulent relationship with the West, the Islamic Revolution, proxy warfare, nuclear ambitions, and the latest flashpoints—including cyberwarfare and propaganda. Both host and guest aim to demystify how Iran influences the world stage and why its internal dynamics matter to everyone, from oil prices to global security.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Understanding Iran: More Than a Headline (03:00)

• Multifaceted Identity

  • Iran isn’t just a “hostage crisis, nukes, terrorists” country (“That’s kind of like saying you understand Rome because you watched Gladiator on a plane.” — Jordan, 02:48).
  • Four faces: ancient civilization, monarchy, theocratic revolution, and modern missile/cyber war state.

• Popular Misconceptions

  • Most Americans know little about Iran’s complexities—they think it began in 1979.
  • “Iran is actually four very different stories wearing the same trench coat.” (02:30)

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2. The 2022–2023 Protests and Brutal Crackdown (05:00–08:30)

• Mahsa Amini’s Death sparked massive protests; government responded with severe brutality.

  • Protesters shot with birdshot; seeking hospital care led to arrest or execution (“They are just shooting them in the hospital.” — Ryan, 06:41).
  • The IRGC allegedly targets young protestors, even children, in schools.

• State Misinformation

  • Casualty numbers intentionally obscured by state and conflicting Western sources.

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3. Ancient Persia to Modern Iran (09:00–14:30)

• Timeline Snapshots

  • Ancient Persia (c. 550 BC) survived waves of conquest: Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans.
  • Persian culture proved resilient, even absorbed Islam on its own terms.
  • Distinctions between Persians and Arabs: Persian society more unified, less tribal than Arab cultures.

• Iran Shaped Islam Uniquely

  • Became a center of Shia Islam, contrasting with Sunni dominance elsewhere.

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4. 20th Century: Oil, the Shah, and the 1979 Revolution (14:30–19:30)

• Oil Changes Everything

  • 1908: British discover oil → intervention, modernization, and foreign interference.
  • 1953: Britain and US orchestrate a coup against Prime Minister Mossadegh after his oil nationalization; reinstall the Shah (“We did what we always do—back a military coup.” — Ryan, 15:48).

• The Shah’s Modernization and Backlash

  • 1960s–70s: reforms, social freedoms, economic inequality, and secret police (SAVAK) breed resentment—especially in rural and religious communities.

• Societal Disconnect

  • Tehran’s elite vs. the rest: “You are living centuries behind the elite in the capital.” — Jordan, 18:59

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5. 1979 Islamic Revolution & Hostage Crisis (19:30–23:45)

• Student Uprising → Regime Change

  • US Embassy seized; 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days—massive trauma for the US.
  • Revolution isn't spontaneous: “Women who were covered up had bolt cutters underneath their chador…” — Jordan, 21:10
  • New government forms a hardline theocratic regime, led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

• Birth of Enduring US-Iran Hostility

  • “We’ve never forgiven Iran for taking people and holding them for 444 days.” — Ryan, 20:24

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6. Rise of Proxy Militias and Exporting Revolution (30:40–35:40)

• Supporting Shiite Groups

  • Iran shifts to “protector of all Shia Islam.”
  • Funds and organizes proxy militias: Hezbollah (Lebanon), Shia groups in Iraq, Houthis (Yemen), PIJ and Hamas (Palestinians).
  • “It’s cheap, and you get plausible deniability…” — Ryan, 41:23
  • “They can say, ‘That wasn’t us, it was Hezbollah.’” — Jordan, 41:12

• Proxy Warfare: Cheap Power Projection

  • Iran uses this as a regional influence tool because it lacks conventional military might.

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7. Iran’s Armed Forces and Power Structure (23:45–26:19)

Breakdown:

• IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps)

  • ~125,000, religious army, “insurgents-for-export,” massive business interests.
  • “Also a for-profit organization… construction companies, engineering, electronics.” — Ryan, 24:10

• Artesh (Regular Army)

  • Larger (~300,000), poorly funded, “army of the people,” conscript force.

• Basij

  • Voluntary militia, including child soldiers; mobilized for regime crackdowns, sometimes involving the elderly (e.g., grandfathers doing riot control).

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8. The Iran-Iraq War and Its Legacy (38:24–41:05)

• Brutal Conflict
  • Eight-year war (1980-1988): trench warfare, chemical weapons, massive casualties (500,000+ dead).
  • Borders ended as they began; entire “lost generation” in Iran.

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9. The Nuclear Question and Recent Conflict (43:32–46:36)

• Iran’s Uranium Ambitions

  • “Two weeks away from a bomb” narrative has persisted for decades.
  • Technical details: highly enriched uranium, “The weight of a large bag of pet food” (45:00); enriching and weaponizing are distinct processes.

• The 2026 Escalation

  • Discussion on why the US (under Trump) struck Iran's capabilities—preventing Iran from going nuclear, destroying missile faculties, or as demonstration to China.

• Iran’s Domestic Weakness

  • Widespread protests, water shortage, sanctions, economic mismanagement, and hyper-focus on “hard currency” crops like almonds worsen governmental fragility.

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10. Cyber Warfare, Propaganda, & AI Misinformation (58:12–74:50)

• Cyberwar Highlights

  • Iranian TV and prayer apps hacked to spread messages to defect.
  • “We control everything, including this religious app ... if they're in here, what else are they in?” — Jordan, 59:44

• AI War Footage & Propaganda Concerns

  • Emergence of deep fakes: “The AI war footage thing is only going to get worse… AI is so real now it’s very difficult to tell what is real and what is not real.” — Ryan, 73:04
  • Notable: Dr. Jill Stein shared AI-generated “captured Americans” video; instant debunk due to lack of propaganda videos from regime.

• US Strategic Doctrine: JADO

  • “Joint All-Domain Operations” (JADO): Any sensor, decider, shooter; flexible, rapid, unpredictable strikes.

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11. The Current War: Airstrikes, Logistics, and the Strait of Hormuz (64:11–93:09)

• US Strategy

  • Prioritize destroying air defense, command & control, ISR sensors, then airbases, then missile launchers.
  • “At some point, you're turning big rocks into little rocks.” — Ryan, 64:11
  • US and allies expect to eventually run out of valuable targets.

• Iran’s Counter-Attacks

  • Drone/missile retaliation, but effectiveness and capacity rapidly declining due to targeted strikes and logistical strain.

• Regional Dynamics

  • Arab countries unite against Iran after missile attacks, thwarting Iran’s presumed attempt to create regional pressure on the US to back off.

• Strait of Hormuz Chokepoint

  • Iran threatens oil shipping but faces own limits after naval/ISR losses.
  • “Right now the biggest menace in the Strait of Hormuz is Lloyd’s of London…” — Ryan, 90:26 (Insurance risk now dominates shipping concerns).

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12. The Regime’s Fate & The Day After (93:31–95:20)

• What Happens if the Regime Falls?
  • Unlikely to be another Libya, thanks to Persian collective identity over Arab-style tribalism.
  • Most likely outcomes: regime hangs on with reduced missile capability; or a “strongman”/Artesh coup leading (eventually) to elections.
  • “Number two is on the Iranian people.” — Ryan, 94:35

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13. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Iran’s History:

  “Iran is actually four very different stories wearing the same trench coat.”
  — Jordan (02:30)

• On Modern US-Iran Relations:

  “We’ve never forgiven Iran for taking people and holding them for 444 days.”
  — Ryan (20:24)

• On Proxy Warfare:

  “Plausible deniability. You take a look at the Donbas in Ukraine… Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”
  — Ryan (41:23)

• On JADO Doctrine:

  “With JADO, you get 1,000 tornadoes the first night. And you never know we're going to strike.”
  — Ryan (60:12)

• On Cyber War:

  “The big hack was the Bodhisattva Calendar prayer app… sending defection messages to IRGC personnel.”
  — Ryan (59:23)

• On Iranian Diaspora in LA:

  “Those are the people that are going to murder the sleeper cells… they escaped the revolution.”
  — Jordan (77:16)

• On Future Change:

  “Amazing people, ruled by a horrible government. For now.”
  — Jordan, closing remarks (95:14)

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Important Timestamps

| Segment/Event | Timestamps | |---|---| | The “four faces” of Iran | 02:30–04:00 | | Protests, Mahsa Amini, and repression | 05:00–08:30 | | Ancient Persian history & Arab/Persian divide | 09:00–14:30 | | Oil, Shah, and Western interference | 14:30–19:30 | | 1979 revolution & embassy crisis | 19:30–23:45 | | The IRGC, Artesh, and Basij explained | 23:45–26:19 | | Iran’s proxies & regional meddling | 30:40–35:40, 41:23 | | Iran-Iraq war | 38:34–41:05 | | Iran’s nuclear quest explained | 43:32–46:36 | | Modern cyberwar & AI misinformation | 58:12–74:50 | | Air campaign/phases of targeting | 64:11–69:30 | | Strait of Hormuz/Shipping | 88:37–93:09 | | Post-regime collapse scenarios | 93:31–95:20 | | Closing reflections/support for free Iran | 94:35–95:23 |

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Additional Highlights and Anecdotes

• Operation Eagle Claw’s failure (35:41–38:24): The US military’s failed rescue reinforced later special forces reforms.
• Ross Perot’s real-life “Argo” moment (79:09–81:32): Sent a private team into revolutionary Iran to extract EDS employees.
• US-Iran misunderstanding persists: Confusion between “Iranians” and “the regime” at the heart of much policy debate.

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Episode Takeaways

• Iran is not a simplistic “villain state;” it is a complex, ancient society ruled by a repressive, divisive regime.
• Understanding the split between the people and the government is crucial for nuanced policy or informed debate.
• Iran’s use of proxies, cyber tools, and narrative warfare allows it to “export chaos” beyond its traditional capabilities.
• The regime’s days may be numbered thanks to both internal pressure and relentless outside military and economic attack—but any endgame will rely heavily on the choices of the Iranian people, not just bombs or sanctions.

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If you want to grasp Iran’s real place in the world, why the regime endures, and what comes next as conflict unfolds, this episode delivers history, strategy, and real-world analysis with Jordan’s signature mix of clarity and dark humor. For listeners seeking clarity amid the breaking news chaos, it’s an essential primer.

Transcript

[Jordan Harbinger]

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[Ryan Macbeth]

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[Jordan Harbinger]

Not available in all states. 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 filmmakers, hacker, real life pirate or hostage negotiator. And if you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs these are collections of our favorite episodes on topics like persuasion and negotiation, psychology, geopolitics, disinformation, China, North Korea, crime and cults, and more. That'll help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Just visit jordanharbinger.com start or search for us in your Spotify app. To get started. Today, a long overdue and long awaited out of the loop on Iran. I've been getting messages for months to cover the protests in Iran, but I covered the them previously. But I was also in the 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 because they heard three things. Hostage crisis, nukes, terrorists. But that's kind of 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 and now a modern missile and cyber war with global consequences. Obviously we can't dig deep on an ancient nation and 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 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 Macbeth. Welcome back. I don't know, round 10 or whatever on the show. Probably not 10, but close to it.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 3,000 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 because 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 because I've always wanted to go to Iran. And I think some would say I'd never met an Iranian I didn't like. But I lived in la so I met 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 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 diaspora saying, why aren't you using your voice for Iran this time? You did it before. There's this protest and they're killing people. 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 3,000 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 Macbeth]

We're not going to get a good answer. And I've heard when Misha Al Mani was murdered, who was a Kurdish woman and she essentially was wearing a hat

[Jordan Harbinger]

the wrong way, she was wearing her job wrong and they beat her to death.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I beat her right. 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 bird shot. I don't know how familiar you are with shotguns. The bird shot is used to hunt birds. So we're not talking rubber pellets, we're not talking stingers, which are these little rubber, 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 because we shot him in the face with a shotgun. So we're arresting him.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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's in the er.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 an 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 them away. These would be kids, some were 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, I think about 12 days after the accidental hit on a girls school that killed 175 children. Supposedly that was most likely done by

[Jordan Harbinger]

the U.S. yeah, I was going to say it's not really supposedly. Right. Like that was just like a.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Well, we don't know the numbers. The numbers are up in the air.

[Jordan Harbinger]

But it was definitely the U.S. yeah, because mistakes happen in war. Which sucks because this is like a huge tragedy. But I don't want to 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 Macbeth]

Oh yeah, that's the only way you get better. But the 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 IRGC 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. 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. It's a separate topic. 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 Ayatollah 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 80s.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah. Iran is an ancient civilization. It is literally older than China. If you want to think of Iran, you kind of 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 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 an 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 Macbeth]

That will probably happen. Yes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Come on, man.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 Aryans. The history goes back like 5000 years or so, like to the year like 550 BC at Cyrus the Great. And he founded the Achimid. Achimid, I believe it's pronounced. I've only read it, I've never said it. Yeah, Akima 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 Macbeth]

Yeah. Remember the Messenger, Philippides ran 26 miles to Athens and then he died.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Did you say the Persians are coming?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Well, saying that we won, we won. He said Nike and then he died of exhaustion. Yeah, 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 Livestrong 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 had advanced science, nothing by modern standards, of course, but they had modern ish medicine and modern science. And 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 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 shithole now. I'm sorry. No, no, no, you don't 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 the 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 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 Tehran. 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 Thermopylae again. That's what the movie 300 is based on. Very loosely based on. I'm pretty sure not one 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 Macbeth]

Iran got conquered by a couple of people. 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 Persian culture survived. And even when Islam entered iran in the 600s, 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 Bedouin 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 for 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. And so Persian culture 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% all Muslims 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 Macbeth]

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 Sunni.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How do you know who's who? Do you just ask?

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 Sunni, 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 ahead literally thousands of years. So let's do that. So by the 20th century, Iran had a king, right? The Shah.

[Ryan Macbeth]

The Shah. The Shah of Iran. Shah literally means king in Persian. I think 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 Macbeth]

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 was switching over from coal to oil for their ships. So this was a major resource. Now, by the 1950s, Iran's Prime Minister decided that all the oil companies would be nationalized. A lot of oil revenue was helping. The UK wasn't really getting back to the people of Iran. The oil companies were nationalized, and the United States and UK did what we always do, and we backed a military coup.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Okay, so just to clarify, the US and Britain didn't overthrow the Shah. They overthrew the Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. He had nationalized the oil fields, which meant he took them away from the companies and gave them to the people of Iran. Usa. Brits don't like that. They overthrow this guy and they put the Shah back in power. I was wondering about when this modernized, because one of the sort of trendy things to do now on Reddit is to post a picture of Iran where there's some sort of 20 year old baddie in a miniskirt having birthday party. This is Iran in 1970. And you're like, what the heck? What happened to that place? This woman right now is wearing a burqa and maybe has her eyes uncovered, depending on how her husband or brother feels that day. Wow. Not necessarily every woman in Iran, but a woman of that age during the 80s probably was encouraged to cover up more and wasn't allowed to wear that miniskirt anymore and take photos.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, the modernization kind of occurred in the 1960s. They started implementing things like a Social Security system, buying modern weapons. The Shah actually left the country during this military coup. And then he came back and he had more power than ever. And some of the people who opposed him were on the religious side. So he started implementing these reforms. Women got the right to vote. He attempted to weaken religious power. And one of the ways he did that was he created a secret police organization. Savak.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yes. That's one of the reasons the Islamic rebels in the 1970s wanted to overthrow the Shah was because of Savak. And when these guys were all done, they basically restarted SAVAK again. I don't even think they changed the name. They realized we do need a secret police if we're going to repress people. But SAVAK was basically, they did surveillance and intimidation and torture. And in Iran, if you were in the middle class, you were running around wearing a miniskirt you're on a nice restaurant, 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've met in person. Not just show fans as well, but they'll say like, hey, in Iran, yeah, my friend has like a Lamborghini. He owns a nice restaurant. He has pool parties where men and women go. And I'm like, how do you do that without getting in trouble? And the answer is usually his dad is like this guy. And so the IRGC or the morality police or whoever, they just don't mess with him. And when the girls come over, they're covered and they walk in and then they take that off and they're wearing a bikini in the pool. And like, people take photos, but they don't post it on social media or whatever, or their accounts are private. It's just tolerated because. Because they know that people actually want to have a life, especially in Tehran. But I think to your point, if you live in a rural village where you farm stuff, you're not playing that same game. You're not enjoying nice restaurants and rolling around in your Lambo with your girlfriend. You are living centuries behind the elite in the capital.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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

[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 Macbeth]

Starting in 1979, groups of Iranian students started rebelling. They stormed the American Embassy in tehran. They took 52Americans hostage and they held them for 444 days. And this was a massive international incident. Jimmy Carter was president at the time. He likely lost re election because of this incident. And it showed a level of impotence that the United States could not go in and rescue these guys. It was a big black eye for the United States. And that really put the 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 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 Macbeth]

Dushtasha.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, 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.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah. There was a rumor that Iran's previous president was Ahmad Ahmadinejad. He was in the crowd as well as one of the agitators.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That, to me, sounds like the Iranian IRGC version of, I was at Woodstock, bro. 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 Macbeth]

It certainly could be. I mean, Iran's current. Elected by the Council of Experts. This guy, he was supposedly Basiji militia, who either served or fought, depending on who you talk to in the Iran Iraq wars, kind of as his street cred. And a lot of people who served in the besieged militia, these are children as young as nine, you know, were essentially told, go, walk that way. Here is a key. Put this key in your pocket as a key to paradise. Walk toward Iraq until you hit a landmine. Maybe it'll even help you get up further to heaven. Right? And you'll go right into paradise. The people who served in the besiege have a very unique worldview because they were 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 survived 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 Macbeth]

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 changed the fin design. We call it the A1 design. So you can talk about the IRGC. IRGC, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Think of them as the religious army of Iran. They get about, I think it's $5.7 billion in funding every year. They're relatively small. It's about 125,000 people. But the IRGC is the religious army who protects the state, but they are the insurgents. They go out and they train people. 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 Macbeth]

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. It's if you have a business, say a construction company, and you bid on a project, IRGC related companies will underbid you on that project and you won't get it. And then that money will funnel into the irgc.

[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 Macbeth]

You see that in Egypt too. The Egyptian army owns construction companies. They own soda bottling plants, food processing plants. The Egyptian army is a for profit organization and the IRGC is no different. Now the other army, which is a Lot poorer, but is larger is the Artesh. The Artesh, they have a budget, I believe of $2.7 billion a year. So they have less of a budget than a small organization. They have about 300, a little over 300,000 people. The Artesh is the army of the people. When Iranian mails 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 Artes and they serve two years there and they hate it. It sucks. They just do their time and they get out. And then the Besieged 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 besieged. And that's something that during the riots, when Michael Mani was murdered, I had people contact me saying like, hey, my grandfather went back to the Basij to do riot control because it was some extra money. Jeez.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So you got like a 65 year old man, 70 year old man, shooting college kids at a riot.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, you're shooting them or, you know, he has a shield or he has a baton. Yeah, they probably give the guns to the younger guys and have 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

[Jordan Harbinger]

and shoot some civilians. That's crazy.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Some reals, 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. 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. We love Bombas so much. It's all we wear. We even gift it to our family and our friends and our nanny. We're big fans of the grip socks, so we don't slip around on our floors. Bombas just launched their new sports socks, which are amazing for whatever you're into. Running, golf, hiking. We're planning to do more snowboarding this year. And these things are cushioned, sweat wicking and packed with techy features that make it feel like your feet are finally on your side around the house at night. I'm living in their Sunday slippers, which keep my feet cozy during those cold winter nights. And Bombas also has underwear and tees. Buttery, soft, breathable, the kind of base layers that ruin every other brand for you. Plus, for every item you purchase, Bombas donates an essential clothing item to somebody facing housing insecurity. One purchased one donated over 150 million so far. Head over to bombas.comjordan and use code JORPHDAN for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M B A S.comjordan code jordan@ checkout this episode is also sponsored by Gusto. If you run a small business, your time should go to growth strategy, relationships, the stuff that actually moves the business forward. Not getting stuck at 10pm Untangling payroll and HR busy work. That's why I recommend Gusto. Gusto is an online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in one remote, friendly, genuinely easy to use so you can pay, hire onboard and support your team from anywhere. Instead of juggling five different tools, you got one place for payroll, benefits and hr. It streamlines the annoying stuff. Automatic payroll tax filing, direct deposits offer letters, onboarding docs all baked in. And if you want to level up benefits, they offer options like health insurance, workers comp and 401ks with choices for different budgets. I also like the pricing. Unlimited Payroll runs for one monthly price, no hidden fees. They're trusted by over 400,000 small businesses and ranked number one payroll software by G2 for fall 2025. If admin is draining your bandwidth, Gusto is a smart upgrade. Try Gusto today at G-S-T O.com Jordan and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at Gusto.com Jordan one more time Gusto.com Jordan don't forget about our newsletter. We bit wiser. It's a bite sized gem from us to you from a past episode or something out of our lives. It's an under two minute read every Wednesday. Jordanharbinger.com News is where you can find it. Now back to Ryan Macbeth okay, so they take over the embassy, these revolutionaries in 1979. They hold 52 was it Americans for 444 days. Watch the movie Argo if you want to know how one of our show guests husband we had Jhana 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 Macbeth]

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 has the right scenery. And they handed out passports for people that were going to be brought back to Canada, supposedly as a way to evacuate these guys under the guise of. Oh, this is the production assistant. And this is the so on.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Crazy.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, unlikely. They were chased through the airport. Yeah, you got to add that extra adrenaline there. Yeah. So the movie, Argo, Ben Affleck, probably, and John Goodman. Yeah. Fantastic movie. Really interesting story. Half slash, mostly true. Ish. I don't know. We'll see. Okay, then after this embassy operation, the 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 Macbeth]

That's an excellent question. We'd probably get over the embassy thing. But I think the reason that we're so upset is that after this particular event, Iran decided that they were going to be the protectors of all of Shia Islam. And so they started supporting Shia groups, including Shia groups in Iraq, including groups like Shia rebels in Lebanon, which eventually led to 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 was an embassy where around 250 Marines and about 50. Well, not just Marines, but army as well. And French soldiers. Another 50 or so French soldiers were killed by a car bomb, a truck bomb. And this truck bomb wasn't driven there by Iran, but it was driven there by the militias that were supported and funded by Iran. So Iran essentially wanted to reach its tentacles out. And they were too poor to build an aircraft carrier, but they could do power projection through these proxy militias. Plo, Yasser Arafat. The day after the Shah fell, Yasser Arafat got on a plane and he flew to Tehran and he started talking with the original Ayatollah Khomeini. So you have Khomeini and Khamenei and then another Khamenei that's right. But the original Ayatollah Khomeini offered him help. And this was really weird because the plo, Palestinian Liberation Organization, it wasn't particularly relig its identity was more a Palestinian identity, Marxist, Leninist kind of identity. But they took their funding. Who's going to say no to a check, right? But eventually it wasn't really working because Iran wanted a more religious campaign. And that's when we got Islamic Jihad, which was Iranian funded. And Islamic Jihad and plo, they kind of butted heads occasionally. They would fight Israelis, they would fight each other. Islamic Jihad eventually went to Lebanon. And then there was this other organization that Iran decided to help with. It was the Muslim Brotherhood. And this was around 2005 or so, actually around 1987. The first intifada was the first intifada. 1987, Muslim Brotherhood rises to power in Gaza and this eventually becomes Hamas. So now you have Iranian Shias supporting Palestinian Sunnis who are more than happy to take their money.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And this is happening in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, also maybe the west bank or

[Ryan Macbeth]

no west bank, mainly plo. I 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 Macbeth]

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 and Lebanese Shia and Lebanese Sunni. The Christians got most of the presidential power, I believe. And then as Palestinian refugees started flooding into Lebanon, the demographics changed and now there are more Muslims than there were Christians. And the Muslims wanted more power and the Christians didn't want that. During the Lebanese civil war, there were plenty of Christians that were causing atrocities. 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 70s and 80s. So I basically, if you grew up in Michigan, you grew up with a bunch of Lebanese and you would say, oh, so you guys are Muslim? And they'd go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa pal, no. And you'd go, oh, I didn't know you had Christians over there. So you learn early that not everybody from there is a Muslim, because they will tell you, they will correct you on that one. And then what's interesting is I found a lot of the Muslims and Christians from the Middle east get along perfectly fine in Michigan. They like to shoot each other in Lebanon. But once they get to Michigan, I feel like they're just homesick and they want to make really delicious food and share it with each other, which is kind of a funny, semi tragic reality of the situation. So my dad worked for Ford and it was like one in five of his colleagues were dudes from Lebanon. So that was me growing up just around that all the time. I know we tried to rescue the embassy hostages and that operation failed. I know we kind of skipped over that in the interest of time.

[Ryan Macbeth]

This is one of those bad ideas. It only got worse. So we wanted to rescue the American hostages, so we came up with this. Wile E. Coyote couldn't come up with a worse plan. 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 flats 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 plan, too. They're going to fly the helicopters into Tehran. And there was one idea where they're going to fly the helicopters back to another airstrip below them. There was another where they're going to fly to the soccer stadium and then land a C130 Hercules inside the soccer stadium and then take off again with rocket assisted takeoff. So the plan fell apart essentially the first night before it even started. A number of the helicopters got their engines jammed with sand and they had to haul the whole thing off. And while refueling, one helicopter was taking off and it hit a C130 with the fuel bladder and there's a big explosion. About eight soldiers died. But what we did get out of that was the V22 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 V22.

[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 in a stealth helicopter and kill bin Laden and then get out before Pakistan even has any clue that we're there. 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, where'd the President go? It seems like a big leap.

[Ryan Macbeth]

We made a lot of changes to our military after that, creating the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment just by creating that. People who all they do is fly at night. You take the best helicopter pilots from the army and you say, all right, you're gonna fly at night wearing night vision goggles. Imagine flying a helicopter. I flown a helicopter before. I was at the flight school at Fort Rucker. Imagine flying a helicopter and you can only see out of two rolled up magazine tubes.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, no, right.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That's why these guys are the best, best in the world. So I think our capabilities have increased and our isr, our intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance 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. Blew it. But in the 80s, Iraq invades Iran. What's going on there? I thought Saddam Hussein was our enemy too, and Iran's our enemy. Shouldn't they be friends?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Saddam Hussein, he was afraid of two things. The first was he was afraid of this revolution spreading to Iraq because Iraq has a predominantly Shia population, but it's ruled by the Sunnis and the Ba'ath party, which is Saddam Hussein's political party. There's a little sliver of land between Kuwait and Iran, and that little sliver of land is the only waterway that Iraq can use to export its oil. So, like, the next thing they thought was this thing is called the Shattalab. Shattal 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 Khuzestan province, which is one of Iran's oil rich provinces. And this was an absolute disaster for both sides. We're talking trench warfare, like World War I style trench warfare. Poison gas you had children used in combat, landmines. And it went on for about Eight years. And the borders just kind of ended up where they were at the start.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Jeez.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 Macbeth]

I believe you are correct. And I think there is a statue in Iraq that had Saddam Hussein's hand holding a basket of Iranian helmets. And this massive statue. A basket of Iranian helmets. And if you 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 had been gold plated.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Crazy. It says 500,000. Excluding numbers from the related Anfal campaign, it's the deadliest conventional war ever fought between regular armies of developing countries. I know that sounds like a limit, but basically, other than world wars and major great power conflicts, it was the largest casualty. If they would just consider Russia a developing country, they would be able to beat that with the Ukraine conflict. Probably shouldn't joke about that, but here we are. Because I think those casualties have. They got to be pushing 500,000. If you add both up with Ukraine and Russia. Right.

[Ryan Macbeth]

It's probably more like 1.5 million.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Really?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, gosh.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I wouldn't be. Yeah, we're talking total casualties, not just dead. 500,000 dead sounds about right. But 1.5. Usually for every dead, you have three wounded. 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 Macbeth]

Yeah, it's cheap. And you get plausible deniability if you can find a terrorist group and give them a little money. And they won't always do your bidding, but they will be more inclined to do your bidding. You take a look at the Donbas in Ukraine, which is Donetsk and Luhansk. How did that start? Well, it started in 2014 when the Ukrainian government was a basket case. It was right after the Madan revolution. And Russia is looking at this. They take Crimea, and they look at a bunch of unemployed people in Donetsk and Luhansk who are ethnic. I don't want to say ethnic Russians because Ukrainians will get mad at me, but people who identify as ethnic Russians, and they say, you're poor, huh? How about I give you a rifle And a paycheck. And now you're somebody. I've always said nothing stops a bullet like a job. So Iran was engaged in a proxy conflict with Israel, and Russia was engaged in a proxy conflict by funding these separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk with Ukraine. And so there is that plausible deniability. We did it in Afghanistan. We armed the mujahideen, we gave them Stinger missiles. We were friends with Osama bin Laden when you think about it. Right. That one didn't work out too well. Well, you win some 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 are militias in Iraq. They've got the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, P I J. They've got Hamas, they've got the Houthis in Yemen.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 khat to occasionally launch a missile. Based on your intel information, the interactions between the Houthis and Iran for targeting, that was all Iran doing the targeting. You think there's any Houthis flying maritime patrol aircraft? No, they're sitting in a cave chewing on khat. The Iranians would call them and say, hey, launch a missile. This location, okay, wow.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 Macbeth]

Yeah, we'll give you some money and some khat, 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 my entire adult life anyway. And then President Trump said, we obliterated Iran's nuclear capabilities. Ok, so why are we attacking Iran right now?

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 attack in Iran. I'm an intel analyst, dude. I just find them, 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 situation be different? And the answer is yes. And regarding uranium, you really only need 3 to 5% enriched uranium in order to power a nuclear reactor. This is 3 to 5% of uranium 235. And these Iranians were in a meeting with Americans at the negotiating table and they claimed they had enough material to make 11 nuclear bombs. So you need about 22 pounds or so. I don't know what that is in kilos. 16 kilos, maybe less.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think 10 kilos, I think.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Okay.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

That is the weight of a large bag of pet food of 90% enriched uranium to make a bomb. That's what you need to make a nuclear bomb. It's actually not that hard. You have a plug of uranium and you have a donut of uranium and you fire the donut into the plug and then.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is a family show. But continue what you're doing with your hands right now. We're gonna have to blur that on YouTube.

[Ryan Macbeth]

I didn't think of it that way, but I can see that now. When you get all that urine together at one point, that becomes critical mass. So the whole idea is that we knew that uranium would reach a critical mass back in 1945. So that information, it's already out there. It was so understood that we didn't even test the little boy bomb, which was the gun type design that used uranium. We just knew it would work. Why are we doing it now? Well, it could be that Iran really was close to a bomb. They really did have or 220 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 YUI can destroy all of their missile production ability, they're going to have to take this nuclear bomb and put it on a container ship and float it into some guy's port. There's also the possibility that Iran wasn't even close to a bomb and President Trump just saw this opportunity to attack because Iran is so politically weak. So they could be close to a bomb and then now they're not close to a bomb because we just took out all their facilities. But they still have this nuclear material and it's relatively close.

[Jordan Harbinger]

They're politically weak right now because there's been protests going on for months and months trying to oust the government.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Is that why there's been that. It seems like those protests have been suppressed. But Tehran, there's a massive water shortage in Tehran right now and a lot of that's due to mismanagement. Toronto's talked about moving its capital in order to access More water. And a lot of that is just, again, bad management. They believe one of Iran's major exports is almonds.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Terrorism. No, sorry, what? Almonds.

[Ryan Macbeth]

It's terrorism. Almonds, caviar, and beautiful women.

[Jordan Harbinger]

How's that? Did I make up for it okay?

[Ryan Macbeth]

And beautiful women. So almonds are really water hungry. I think it takes 50 gallons of water to make an 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 Macbeth]

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

[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 Macbeth]

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 Macbeth]

I think that if they did that, we would. Not just us, but China would probably clobber North Korea as well. You've been to North Korea?

[Jordan Harbinger]

I have, yeah, several times.

[Ryan Macbeth]

You have a lot more experience inside North Korea than me. The regime's main goal is to remain a kleptocracy, right? And so if they actually did something that extreme, it would be the end of the regime. And then Kim Jong Un wouldn't be able to sip cognac with his Pleasure Battalion anymore. Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Iran has two armies, a global proxy network, cyber units, sleeper cells, missile factories, and somehow still manages its economy like a raccoon locked in a vending machine. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Simplisafe. Most people don't really think about home security until something happens. A package goes missing, a car gets rummaged through, or worst case, somebody actually tries your front door. That's why I like having Simplisafe. Instead of waiting for something to go wrong and just hoping I catch a notification in time so I know there's an actual system and actual people backing me up 24 7. Because here's the problem with a lot of smart setups. They basically still rely on you. If you miss the alert, you're in a meeting, your phone's on silent, you're asleep, the camera's just filming a crime for you to watch later. SimpliSafe is not just cameras. It's a fully customizable whole home security system with professional monitoring. If something triggers, their agents can call you, check the live feeds, dispatch police if needed, they intervene. So you're not the bottleneck. They protect over 4 million people. They've been doing this for 20 years and there's no long term contract, which I love because it means they have to keep earning your business. Right now, listeners can get 50% off a new system by visiting SimpliSafe.com Jordan that's SimpliSafe.com Jordan. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do. That is take a moment, support the amazing sponsors who make this show possible. All of the deals, discount codes and ways to support the show are searchable and Clickable over at jordanharbinger.com deals if you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't remember a code. Email us jordanjordanharbinger.com, we're happy to surface that stuff for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now back to Ryan Macbeth. 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 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 in 1950. Who the hell would ever want to go there? Who the hell would ever want to live there? But the alternative is they do something about it. And now they have 24 million refugees right on their unprotected border that are all going to come into China because they don't have any food. So they tolerate it because there's a wall there that gets enforced from the inside. Back to Iran here you're thinking Iran was either really close to a bomb or it wasn't close to a bomb. And Trump saw the opportunity to attack because Iran is so politically weak, or it wasn't close to a bomb, but we decided to set back its missile production a couple of decades. Or we're doing it because we can. 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 Macbeth]

I would not put that out of reach for the current administration. One of the side benefits of taking out Maduro is that you've essentially removed a piece from the chessboard that China would have to threaten the Caribbean Sea and threaten the Panama Canal with anti ship missiles and drones. Because when war with China comes, and it will likely come in 2027 or 2028, when that happens, the 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 try to destroy their missiles, we'll destroy some of their oil production. If we can get a friendly regime in charge and we can tell them you're not allowed to sell oil to China anymore, that's a big benefit. Makes it a lot harder for China to invade Taiwan. And China also gets to see our new doctrine, it's called jado. And maybe that'll make them think twice about actually attacking Taiwan. Because we've proven we will go after you. Not your generals, not your soldiers. We will find the commander chief and we will drop a bomb on you. And it doesn't matter where you are, we will find you and do it. And if Xi Jinping wants to live to see these two glorious nations reunified, invading might be the last thing he wants to do, because we will find him.

[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 gone. You're going to be out in the beginning.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah. Our ISR is so good, our intelligence surveillance reconnaissance is so good, you could not pay me to pick up a phone in Iran right now.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 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 because 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 them are really expensive radars. And people are like, they destroyed a billion dollar radar. And I looked this up and it's damaged, 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 Macbeth]

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.

[Jordan Harbinger]

You know, generally, yeah, buildings don't walk around and move. So once you know where it is, that's where it is.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 will not going to be able to get there and steal it. That level of intelligence doesn't help me out at all right now. So in Iran's case, if we have destroyed many of their missiles, but not only their missiles, if we have destroyed their command and control to let them know when to fire those missiles or where to fire those missiles, and 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 and it's moving at 30 knots. So 30 knots, you're moving half a mile in one minute. Where is it going to be? 12 hours?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, it's three countries away now.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, 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 says, hey, if you can't reach higher every 12 hours, then fire your missiles at this city. Let's just go out with a bang. That's a thing the British actually have on their nuclear submarines. There's a letter that's written by the Prime Minister. They get a new one every time a new PM is installed. Yeah. They have it on their submarines. And they say, look, if London gets destroyed in nuclear attack, your instructions are in this letter and nobody knows what's in the letter. It could be return to America and put your missiles under America's control, or it could be salvo at Russia. We don't know.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

That's an excellent question. We track all satellites, just in general. But I would say it's likely that Russia hasn't redirected any of its satellites, mainly because it costs a lot of fuel to redirect a satellite. I don't know if I'm going to spend that on Iran, especially since I have a war in Ukraine going on. So maybe if they pass overhead of an American area, they might pass some photography along or some synthetic aperture radar images along. In China's case, I would be very surprised if they haven't redirected a satellite or two. Not necessarily to help Iran, but to watch how we do things, because they want to see how we perform and they want to see if they can find a carrier quickly and they want to learn from our mistakes because they're trying to build a nuclear navy themselves with aircraft carriers. I would not be surprised if China is watching what we're doing and learning from that to apply to Their own People's Liberation Army Navy.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, I would expect that they are. How much have cyber attacks been a factor in the conflict? Because I heard that Iranian TV kind of got hacked and it had Bibi Netanyahu and whoever else on Iranian tv, which must be crazy to see. Like, you're in Tehran and you're used to watching these ayatollahs give sermons or talk about how you're going to defeat the evil Jews and the Great Satan or the Great Satan and the Little Satan.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Right.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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 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. And by the way, the water's off again or whatever. I mean, it's just gotta be absolutely ins to live through something like that.

[Ryan Macbeth]

The big hack was the Bodhisattva 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

[Jordan Harbinger]

time to pray because it's Ramadan. That's right.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Just in general as well. Right. Like you pray five times a day, especially if you're particularly religious. But yeah, it is Ramadan. Absolutely correct. Sending defection messages to IRGC personnel over their prayer app. That was kind of a good one.

[Jordan Harbinger]

That's crazy, because you have this and you're like, we're a bunch of tough guys. Hey, if you're in the irgc, you should defect now because we control everything, including this religious app that you're using at 4 o' clock in the morning to pray. And it's like, oh, God, if they're in here, what else are they in?

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 Jato. Our new doctrine, it's called Jato. Joint Domain. Joint all domain Operations, a satellite might pick up a signal from someone below. That satellite can tell someone in a command center, hey, this phone just lit up. And that commander can then take a look at all the assets in theater that are available and pick the most survivable asset to fire at that particular target. It's called any sensor, any decider, any shooter in a conflict with China. It might be. You have an Australian Special Forces guy on an island who calls up an AWACS plane, one of those radar planes, and says, hey, I see a Chinese destroyer. And then the AWACS plane tells a Filipino Himars rocket launcher to fire a missile at a target they don't even see. And I've said that the analogy I use is that it used to BE in the first Gulf War, we used a doctrine called Airline Battle 2000, and that was sort of like a hurricane followed by a tidal wave. We had six weeks airstrikes followed by a massive ground invasion. With Jato, you get 1,000 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 Macbeth]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

I see.

[Ryan Macbeth]

That's the ideal situation.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is the regular army just decides enough is enough.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Regular armies, and now whatever comes after that. And maybe the son of the Shah returns and he becomes a de facto leader. We have to be very careful about that because anybody who comes down the ramp of a C17 flanked by Marines is not going to be trusted by Iranians. Even the son of the Shah is a little suspect because, you know, he's been living the dream and living in Paris, so he hasn't shared the hardships that have been shared by the average Iranian. So I could see them not really wanting that. And maybe the Artesh, they put someone in power temporarily, then they hold elections, they redo their constitution. Maybe they get something that's influenced by Islam but is a real democracy. 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 Macbeth]

You know what's funny is I kind of liken 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. You can choose between, like, this Conservative Cleric, this slightly conservative Cleric, but you're never gonna get the liberal cleric. You're never gonna get the cleric with the purple hair. That guy's not gonna run. So they do have a democracy, but

[Jordan Harbinger]

he's so hip, Ryan. He really vibes with the kids.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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's state news agency and government websites. The prayer app. What are we shooting at in Iran right now? I mean, I had to come back early from Saudi Arabia, and that was over a week ago, because there were cruise missiles flying over my campsite, literally. And F16s from the Tabuk Air Base 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 Macbeth]

You do at some point. This happened in Afghanistan. At some point. You're turning big rocks into little rocks. You were probably never going to run out of the logistical targets. So ideally, in the scheme here, you strike air defense targets first. Absolutely, 100%. That's the first to go. Air defense. Because as soon as you take out their air defense, then everything else that you do is gravy. A lot easier to do because you can just fly over a country with absolute impunity. And then in the next phase, you hit command and control, so nobody can give you orders. So you might have a bunch of ballistic missiles, or you might be an army brigade, and you're like, okay, what do I do? And word never comes. And then in the next phase, after command and control, you're starting to hit your sensors. ISR sensors, so radar installations, any kind of communication that allows people to talk to each other and say, go over here, go over there, or figure out where you are, then you start hitting the air bases. You don't necessarily want to destroy the runways. A lot of people think hitting air bases about destroying the Runway. You can repair a Runway in 12 hours. It's actually not that hard. We actually tried doing that during the first Gulf War. The British had this incredibly brave mission where they would literally fly down the Runway as if they were landing, and they're ejecting these cluster munitions out of a special pod. Jeez. It was extremely dangerous, mainly because you're flying down a known avenue of approach. So now we just blow up the aircraft in the hardened shelters.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

Land your own there, right? Absolutely. So then one of the next things you want to do is go after any ballistic missiles, like things that are on launchers. One of the things that I've said, people have said, oh, my God, we're running out of interceptors.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, thank you, people. That's the thing is all the Reddit armchair generals are like, we're shooting down $30,000 Shahed drones, $50,000 Shahed 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 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 gonna go ahead and assume that they've thought about this a little bit.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 areas. They're firing weapons, too, so there's that. The other thing to realize is that we also have alternate ways of destroying incoming missiles or incoming drones. There is a kit, I think it's called the Advanced Precision Kill Kit, that goes on to F15s. It's almost like a Rocket pod like you've seen on an Apache helicopter. And they fire these laser guided rockets. They're perfect for taking out shahed drones. So we do have options. But what I've said is you have to kill the archer, not the arrow. Someone in parliament actually used my phrase which was like, yes, that was pretty cool seeing that. But the idea here is that air defense is not a shield. Think of air defense like the small umbrella you keep in your car for when you have to go to the supermarket on the way home from work and it's raining. You're still going to get wet, but you'll be less wet than you were if you didn't have the umbrella at all. The air defense system buys time for you to go and hit those ballistic missile launchers, those cruise missile launchers. 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. 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 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 erector 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 for maintenance on that missile launcher and the parts to maintain that missile launcher, you have to order those parts and get those parts put on the launcher in order for it to be effective. If you are hiding, that's not that big of a deal if you're constantly moving, which is usually better than just hiding because they can always find you if you're constantly moving. Now you're adding wear and tear on the missile on the launcher truck. 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 Macbeth]

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 AK47, an AR15. Right. It's like launching a freaking space shuttle or a satellite that comes down with

[Ryan Macbeth]

an explosive with rocket fuel isn't.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So that makes sense. My wife is scared that sleeper cells are activated. You have any thoughts on that? Sleeper cells are activated. FBI warns California police that Iran could launch drones against the West Coast. That's an alert on ABC 7 News Bay Area that probably just wanted clicks on Instagram.

[Ryan Macbeth]

They could do that. When you look at Operation Spiderweb, what Ukraine did to Russia when they launched a bunch of drones from essentially shipping containers or really fake hunting lodges, that really changed the game when it comes to what lesser power can do with small, cheap drones. If those cells are in the country right now. And this is one of the reasons I certainly believe I was outspoken about ice. Like, I'm not too worried about the dude hanging out at Home Depot. I'm worried about the Iranians and Chinese who came over the border through a hole in the fence. The actual sleeper cell thing, there's a non zero chance of that happening. Those sleeper cells, they have to be of the mind of I am going to leave this kind of comfortable life I had and go commit some sort of terrorist act. And it is a possibility that they could do that. The drone possibility exists because Ukraine did launch a bunch of drones at Russia. We certainly could do that. Take a van, park it outside of Whiteman, fly a bunch of drones in there and blow up a bunch of bombers. I'm not even sure if Whiteman has any air defenses. Right. For drones. So it's certainly an issue. But the big question is, can they do more than just a little bit of terror? And I don't really think so. If something like that happens, it will be very sad. It's not going to be a 911 scale disaster. It'll be like the school in Belsan, Russia.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah, that was terrible. Beslan.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, Beslan. Yeah. Or a bunch of Russians. It could be something on that scale. And it will be very sad and America will be furious. But this is a very resilient country. We'll probably be okay.

[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 Macbeth]

Yeah, it was like 250 kids. Then some people died in a fire afterwards. It was Chechen. Black widows blew themselves up with suicide vests and 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. What about all this AI war footage? I mean, you debunked one where it was like, oh, my God, there's an oil refinery in Haifa and it's on fire. And then it's like you look at it and it's just not Haifa or real.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

Yeah.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Dr. Jill Stein reposted an AI generated picture saying, Big if true. 550American Special 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. Wouldn't this be insane if it was true? I could use this politically. Screw you, Jill Stein. Sorry.

[Ryan Macbeth]

But come on, 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 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.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 Asian guy saying, ryan is really handsome. It cost me $39, technically $12 to make that video.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Something like that could break that takes a lot of power. You got to tone it down. Ryan is really handsome as a heavy lift, even for AI, but it costs

[Ryan Macbeth]

$36 for me to get the membership and then $12 in tokens to create a video. And that scales really well. Some of these AI Asian guy channels, they're putting out three videos a day as fast as they can make them. So I could see in the future, if we don't get a handle on the spread of AI generated misinformation or even AI generated content. One big issue that was a huge issue during the war in Gaza was that Israel had no idea how to handle public relations. And if you're a content creator, you need content. So you look at Hamas. Hamas is putting out good content every day. And then if you're a creator, you can talk over that content and say, look what Hamas just did with a tank. If there's no equivalent coming out of Israel, what footage you're going to use? You're going to use Hamas footage. So that's how you get all these creators going over to the side of Hamas, just seeing their side of the story every day. With AI, you can generate whatever you want to get that content. And that should be absolutely terrifying because there are a lot of people out there who are just mercenary. I just want content. I don't care if it's true.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Sure, yeah. Jill Stein seems to be one of those people. Provided that what you said is true, I have no idea. I should fact check that. Anybody who spreads that kind of misinformation is just a terrible human being. Or disinformation, deliberately, I should say, is a terrible human. Or the big if true, it's like Jesus Christ. Google it. Jews to the left of them, Sunnis to the right. Here's Iran mining the Strait of Hormuz. We'll be right back, Ayatollah. You guys, we'd be right back. Now for the rest of my conversation with Ryan macbeth. 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 Macbeth]

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 record a video saying, I was the 5th Special Forces Group and I was captured. It's 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 sleeper cells. The Iranians in la, they know a lot of them. I've never met a single one that knows anybody that likes the regime. I mean, there's a reason they live in la. They escaped the revolution, almost all of them. They are absolutely not fans of any ayatollah. And I'm sure I don't speak for every Iranian in 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 Macbeth]

That would be a way of doing it. I mean, you can usually pick out the fakes pretty well. I think that some sort of realism counts for something if you follow James Stockdale. During Vietnam, he was Ross Perot's running mate.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No, no, I am terrible at picking out AI video. Like, I look at it and I'm like, that's 100% real. And people are like, dude, there's an iPhone flying through the air.

[Ryan Macbeth]

James Stockdale was this pilot during Vietnam. He was shot down, eventually an admiral. But this guy, he was asked to be in a propaganda video by the North Vietnamese. And he said, no, they were going to put him in 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 that I think of it, I mentioned Ross Perot. You know, during 1979, during the revolution, Ross Perot actually sent a team into Iran to get people out. Really familiar with that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

No.

[Ryan Macbeth]

This is a fascinating story, not something that a lot of people know about, but Ross Perot, he owned a Company called EDS Electronic Data Systems was working on a piece of software to create a Social Security system for the country of Iran. And essentially, EDS hadn't been paid in a while. With the new government, like, people were saying, well, we're not going to pay. And so the Iranian government, under the Ayatollah, just grab these guys and throw in prison. And Ross Perot, essentially, they said, like, hey, let him 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. And essentially, in Iran, you could buy shotguns, but you could only buy birdshot for your shotguns. So they were gonna go into Iran, just buy shotguns from the sporting goods store, take out the. Buy ammunition, take out the bird shot, put in the buckshot, and they were gonna go to the prison and bust their guys out of prison.

[Jordan Harbinger]

This is the dumbest plan ever.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Well, it actually worked.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Are you kidding me?

[Ryan Macbeth]

Actually, it worked.

[Jordan Harbinger]

And Carter couldn't get Special Forces to Iran, but Ross Perot sends the accounting department of EDS into Iran. And it works.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Exactly.

[Jordan Harbinger]

What the heck?

[Ryan Macbeth]

These were former operators, but they went in and actually, as it turned out, they didn't have to bust the guys out of prison. The prison was stormed by revolutionaries. The two EDS employees were in the prison, like, afraid to leave because they're like, 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 Macbeth]

But they went and got him. 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, say the next checkpoint. Are they revolutionary or are they government? And the guys would say, revolutionary. And then they would put the Shah picture up, or they would put the Ayatollah picture up in the car. And then they'd get to the checkpoint, they'd wave them through. Yay. And then, you know, flying the next car. Is the next checkpoint revolutionary or. Oh, it's Shah. And so they put the Shah picture up. Yeah, Ross Perot got his people out of 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 Intifada officially started, right? So this guy goes up to the Temple Mount and says some dumb crap. Everybody gets super pissed off, and there's a massive riot. I happen to be in the old city, just, like, shopping and hanging out with my roommate who was from Jordan, right? Arab dude. And we're like, we better get the hell out of here, because there's tear gas and you can hear broken bottles and you can hear the riot guns shooting from everybody. 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 out of here. I'm a foreigner, college student. So they would open up and be like, run that way. And then we'd run into a group of Palestinian youth. And my roommate Ahmed would go, we're Arabs, very loudly in Arabic, and he would grab me and we'd run through and we'd see more Israeli cops. And I'd say, hey, let us through. Hey, let us through. They'd let us through. And then you'd see, like, a brown sort of guy, but not looking very aggressive. And we'd look at each other like, do you speak Arabic or do I just yell in English? And it's crap. Just get in the nearest taxi. That was probably the most adrenaline I've ever had.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 Macbeth]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

And you can bomb the rebel militias really far away without actually sending anybody down on the ground to do it.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 suns have a place to go and look cool and you can have them fly by and you do parades and stuff like that. But one thing you don't have is deep precision strike capability. Turkey, they kind of lost out on that with the F35. You take a look at some of the regional players. A lot of them have F16s. I think that Saudi Arabia has F15s that might be capable of. I think they have the C model, I think of it, tornadoes. 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. And nobody can answer that next question.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah. And they don't have the expeditionary capabilities and logistical capabilities. Saudi Arabia tried to kill the Zaidi rebels, the Houthis in Yemen, and they

[Jordan Harbinger]

could barely do that on the border of Saudi Arabia.

[Ryan Macbeth]

On the border, exactly. It's because war is hard. I should say war is hard, but logistics are harder. And in America, we can get more Stuff across the sea than most people can have in their own country. And so when someone says regional war, it really just means people are just going to lob missiles at each other and eventually they'll run out. But it's not like Turkey is going to invade Iran with a 1.4 million man army. They don't have that capability. And it's not like Saudi Arabia is going to do that either. They don't have the expeditionary capability to sustain their logistics.

[Jordan Harbinger]

So why do you think Iran shot all these drones and missiles at other Arab countries? Was this what 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 shooting missiles at us. But it seems like if that was the plan, that did not work because all that did is unite the Arab world against Iran, which they already were. But it was like, maybe they're not messing with it. Nope, they're launching missiles at us. Okay, well, we're not even going to pretend to stick up for you anymore.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah. This is one of the reasons I like coming on your show, because you do a lot of research. I can tell you, you're absolutely right. I think their plan was, all right, we're going to fire these missiles at the Arab world. The Arab world will unite in telling America, no, stop, and then America will

[Jordan Harbinger]

stop out of our country. We don't want your bases here. They just bring trouble.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Even that guy, Professor Zhang, 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 know that channel.

[Ryan Macbeth]

He went to China because he wanted to beat his kid. And I'm serious. Like, he was in Canada, all right, Beat his kid at a swimming pool and then went to China where he could do that. And now he hosts a show. But I can tell you that one of the things he said was that Iran was going to unite the Arab world. These are Shia. They don't give a darn about these guys. I think the Arab world looks at Iran the same way and says, you know what? This is not acceptable behavior. And I think we do have the Arab world on our side because they're looking at Iran going, it really would be nice if they weren't there. That's the rest of the world. Unless you're Russia or China going, you know what? 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? No, they can't. They're tied up in Ukraine. Is China going to jump in? Very unlikely. Because 1. How are they going to do it? They also don't have a very expeditionary military logistical capability. And people go, oh, no, they need the oil through the Strait of Hormuz. But China, as far as I know, had told Iran, hey, don't mine this thing. We need oil going through there. So I don't know. On the one hand, China can't jump in, but if they did jump in, it would almost be to maybe keep shipping going through the Strait of Hormuz because they need the oil to go through there. Let's do a little aside on the Strait of Hormuz. I actually don't think we've talked about it.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Sure. So the Strait of Hormuz 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, might be 20.

[Jordan Harbinger]

I think it's either 12 or 21, because 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 Iran,

[Ryan Macbeth]

assuming you can find it. And again, we've taken out a lot of Iranian ISR intelligence founds, reconnaissance assets. Oh, Iran can mine the Strait of Hormuz with what we've sunk. Their navy, essentially. Even the little boats that can distribute mines.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Oh, really? I didn't know that.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Oh, yeah. One thing that could be a factor is unmanned surface vehicles. USVs, Ukraine pioneered that. That's one of the ways they got their last Kriov class destroyer in the Black Sea is with these unmanned surface drones that are basically jet skis that have been repurposed with a GPS receiver that you might have to worry about. Those are really small. Iran may have quite a few of these things. You load them with explosives, you send them against a tanker. I could see it would be kind of interesting. I could see China getting involved, escorting those ships through the straight eyes, 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. There's a type of ship called a frigate. We got rid of the Oliver Hazard Perry classic frigate. We replaced it with something called the littoral combat ship, which isn't particularly good at Anything. 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 like this.

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, seems to 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 Strait of Hormuz. But China. Yeah. If they want to work with the Americans, that would be new. That would be new. If we could all work together escorting those tankers, that probably wouldn't be a bad idea. But pretty soon it might be a question of escort from what? Because right now the biggest menace in the Strait of Hormuz is Lloyd's of London. Because no ship is going to move without insurance. And the biggest way of getting ships moving again would be for the President to turn on. I think it's called Title 10 or Tight of 12 War Risk Insurance. And just say you can buy a pool of insurance from America for cheap and that will ensure your ship going through the Strait of Hormuz. Well, if it solves it tomorrow. Because there might still be captains who are reluctant to go. Yeah.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

I did not see that.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

Did they hit it with a usv?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Let's check right now. Three ships in Strait of Hormuz hit by unknown projectiles. Is the BBC. You can see this ship really smoking a lot. Let's see. Traffic through the strait is falling 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. Iran 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. And Iran says they're not going to allow a single liter 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 Macbeth]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

Yeah, there is something called AIs, although a lot of. Sometimes people turn AIs off.

[Jordan Harbinger]

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

[Ryan Macbeth]

So you can tell where a ship is going. But I think Ron knows where every ship in the Gulf was at any given point when the conflict started, and they could certainly figure out who was 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 Macbeth]

Yeah, it would certainly seem like it to me. You should invite Sal Matrigliano 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 Iranian regime collapses? Is this going to be another Libya? That's what people I think are worried about.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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

[Jordan Harbinger]

So factionalism.

[Ryan Macbeth]

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. So 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 take over and some sort of strongman and eventually someone who works for 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 most amazing people that I've ever met. The civilization's amazing, the history is amazing. I'm just a huge fan of everything other than the hardcore, hardline Islamist regime. I should probably clarify, but I like the food. I like everything, and I wish them the best. This doesn't seem like it's going to end quickly, so I have a feeling we're going to end up doing another one, an update, because I feel like this is going to go on for several months. What do you think?

[Ryan Macbeth]

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 Macbeth]

Thank you for having me.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Iran is one of those places where the people and the regime are just not at all the same story. And confusing the two is how you end up misunderstanding everything. The civilization is ancient, the government is revolutionary. The military is split. The ideology is paranoid. 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 1600s. It's a layered state with a long memory, a lot of grievances, a dangerous toolbox, and a talent for making everybody else's problems more expensive. All that said, I fully support a free Iran. I really hope we see something like that soon. I love my Persians, my Iranian homies. This one is all for you. And I hope you make it out of this in one piece. If you're listening to this, because the world needs you. All things Ryan Macbeth will be in the show. Notes on the website, advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, [e-mail] deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Don't forget about six minute networking as well. That's [e-mail] I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. This show is created in association with podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tata Sidlowskis, Ian Baird and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. In fact, the greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. If you know somebody who's interested in geopolitics, current events, the Middle east, or just what's happening now in Iran, definitely share this episode with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

[Ryan Macbeth]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game?

[Jordan Harbinger]

Well, with the Name your price tool

[Ryan Macbeth]

from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try [e-mail], progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states.

[Jordan Harbinger]

Your home holds the story of your life. Renewal by Andersen Windows are built to weather every season with you. They frame the little moments and the big ones, from first steps to graduation to new beginnings. While life keeps moving, our window stands strong through every chapter. Let Renewal by Anderson be part of your story. Windows Built to last. Visit renewalbyandersonholm.com to learn more. Quick break to put you onto another show you should be listening to. If you enjoyed my interview with Javier Lieva about romance scams back on episode 1195, you'll want to check out his podcast, Pretend. Javier is an investigative journalist who lives in the world of lies, manipulation, and deception. And but he's still a nice guy. And on Pretend, he doesn't just tell these stories, he gets inside them. He talks directly to scammers, cult leaders, and the people they've conned. And he just has a way of getting them to reveal things that'll make you go, wait, okay, you're just gonna admit that? And the cases are bananas. A cyber stalking story where the victims turned out to be the stalkers. A true crime podcaster accused of harassing victims for content? No, it's not him and Javier spending a day with a cult leader. Yes, including an exorcism. That must have been a fun afternoon. Plus, he digs into the real Frank Abagnale from Catch Me if youf Can. Let's just say the movie took some liberties. Pretend has been featured on Netflix's Don't Pick up the Phone, Spotify tagged it as a breakout hit and it's consistently up there with the top true crime shows. Search pretend wherever you get your podcasts.