What's your familiar familiarity with Iran?
Every CIA officer has a handful of countries that they have to understand on a fundamental level, right? China is one of those countries. It runs one of those countries. Can North Korea is one of those countries? Saudi Arabia is one of those countries.
Turkey is one of those countries. Russia is one of those countries. So when it comes to the fundamentals of Iran, I'm there. But what an Iran specialist understands far exceeds my knowledge. For years, decades, maybe since I was a child with the hostage crisis forward, it was
always my understanding that that was the one country that was the most significant
other than maybe Russia and China. But the next country that maybe our relations were poor and the nuclear risk was high and that they were funding constantly funding things around the globe against us. And then we fly over there and we drop a bunker buster bomb on their nuclear enrichment factory, one of them, one of them.
Why was there no retaliation to that? Like I couldn't believe we did it because it was counter to everything that I ever believed that the way that we wanted to handle that situation, but yet we just did it. And I'm interested if there's any insights you have around why we did it. And whether that what that has done with our position with that country.
Remember how I was telling you espionage is a franchise. Everybody does it. Yeah.
One of the key elements of espionage is covert action, meaning you take action that nobody
can see what we did when we dropped those deep penetrating bombs on the Natan's factory, the weapons in nuclear enrichment factory, we did not take covert action. We took overt action right when you don't see response from overt action. It's virtually guaranteed that there is covert action as the response. Okay.
Iran understands that the worst Iran, China and Russia have all learned from al-Qaeda.
“You don't fuck with the United States publicly, right?”
If you think about what these countries have done to the United States in the last 25 years, China broke into our military records database in 2013 and stole every military record of every retired deceased and active duty military member. From the database itself, and got away with it, we didn't do anything against China.
We kept buying their plastic shit, they kept buying our rice and metal shit, right?
Because there was no overt response to their overt attack, everything we did was covert. All of our response to China after that was something that public couldn't see that the government didn't want the public to see it. Because if there was public response, there'd be escalation. Iran is the same way.
They're not stupid back country hillbillies. They're not dumb. They're just prioritizing their responses differently than what we would expect. Americans oftentimes forget we are the wealthiest, most capable military in the world with the most modern technology and weapon systems at our disposal, right?
If you were the big kid on the playground and you went up and you punched some little kid in the face, you really think that little kid's going to come back and try to punch you in the face? No, that little kid's going to bond with other little kids and they're going to be like, hey, how do we play in the guy's milk at lunch?
That's right.
“That's what they're going to figure out.”
So that's what Iran does. You also have to put in context what happened in the months leading up to the bombing of an autonomous facility. Israel had escalated conflict with Iran. They had already flown in cruise missiles and fighter jets.
They had neutralized and destroyed almost all of Iran's counter-defensive capabilities. They've flown up their surface to air missiles, they had knocked down their radar systems. Iran was blind. So the reason the United States, the reason Trump was comfortable flying in, some of our most expensive assets to drop a couple of bombs on a country that was completely sovereign
and technically at peace with the United States, was because he knew that there was no system to respond. The reason Israel took the risk to destroy all that was to get the United States involved in this conflict.
“So there's many, many movements on the chessboard that you have to take into account”
before you think about just the bunker buster. And then in response to the bunker buster, my point here is whatever Iran is doing, they didn't have to do it right away, but right, they don't have to do it overtly. So what is the covert response that they're planning, that they have already put in motion, that maybe has even happened and we just haven't been publicly exposed to it.
Maybe they launched some kind of digital trojan horse against DOD, that's causing absolute
Havoc with space force right now.
If you haven't discovered your natural born spy skills, then somebody else might be using
theirs against you. CIA teaches us that there are only three types of people in the world, those who motivate those who manipulate and those who are being controlled by one of the other two. I created a three minute CIA style quiz to help you unlock your secret psychological advantage and identify your hidden blind spot.
This test was developed to help you weaponize your natural born gifts and use them to get ahead of 99% of people in power, wealth and purpose. It was also designed to make sure that you can protect yourself against those who would use their skills against you.
“All you have to do is click on the first link in the description below or scan the QR code”
on your screen to start your spy quiz now.
I want you to discover your secret spy superpower and use it for good before somebody else
uses their power against you, but it's all covert, so the American public doesn't know it's there. Well, we are already fighting a proxy war in Israel through Humaus and all this other places that are funded by Iran, so it was just a, it was an escalation to already public skirmish that we were fighting through others and think about how long it took before
the American public even recognized that the conflict between Humaus and Israel was a proxy war with Iran. That's two and a half year fight went a full 18 months before anybody any average lay American was like, oh, we're actually fighting Iran. There's some people probably listening to this now that are like what we were fighting
with Iran? Yeah. Yeah. I have some of them deeply interested in your opinion on. You just mentioned the theft of the military records by China.
We've got TikTok installed on hundreds of millions of people's phones, which can provide all kinds of information about the whereabouts and the ongoings of American citizens. You have the ability, there is the ability to literally scrape any device of all of its information at any time without proximity, whether it be laptops, computer cell phones, many of these things and there's just so much information out there.
But from our perspective, the public's perspective, the ability to have artificial intelligence
“to make sense of that mess is new, but is it new for the government?”
No. No. Even when I was at CIA as a new recruit in 2007, AI was already actively being employed. Okay, it's not the generative AI creating fancy videos and deepfakes that we're used to seeing now.
Right. It was precursor to that. But when you think about the head start that CIA had on AI in 2007 versus when AI became a mainstream topic to the American and what 2024, yeah, a huge advantage. Yes.
And that if we had it, all of our allies had it. Brits, the Canadians, the Australians, the New Zealanders, the Israelis, the Turks. And if they had it, then their biggest competitors also had it. The Chinese, the Russian, the North Koreans, the Saudis, the Emirates, the Iranians. So everybody's had a head start.
When I look at the AI race now, we're all 15 years behind. The average American in their opinion is 15 years uninformed about the risk of AI.
“When we look at China now, and we see what their capabilities are publicly now, right?”
We are 15 years behind what their actual capabilities are because they've been investing in it covertly as well. When we look at the generative capability that exists in the United States, we have to hope that our intelligent services are also 15 years ahead of what we see. Otherwise, the race is already over.
Yeah. As an American, is there anything that I have that is secure? No, there's nothing you have that's secure. I tell us to people all the time, and it's a very uncomfortable truth. If you become a target, and unfortunately we live in a world right now where you can become
a political target also, right? If you become a target, there's nothing you can do. It's like you were saying a few seconds ago, there, you can remotely scrape any digital device anywhere in the world.
And if you can do that, I mean, here's what's amazing.
It costs about $30,000 to remotely scrape anyone's technology. I can make a phone call right now, transfer 30 grand, and scrape your entire phone without you knowing about it. It's a scraper personal laptop. You scrape your Netflix account, scrape your smart TV or smart refrigerator, anything.
Is that a public or private resource?
That's a private resource available to anybody.
“Anybody has five figures that they want to spend on it in the phone number.”
And people, people, well, and a phone number or a contact that has close access to your phone.
I don't know if you know this, my phone, and your phone simply by being within proximity, share data.
“They share data if you have certain apps installed, one of those apps is meta, if you have”
Facebook or Instagram on your phone, the proximity of those two phones can actually share
data about the other phone.
“It's something called geo-fensing, totally legit, right, commercial technology, but that”
makes it so I don't even need to know your phone number. I just need to know that she's in the room with us and her phones with her. [BLANK_AUDIO]
