Are Iranian Sleeper Cells Already in the U.S.? | EYES ON GEOPOLITICS

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We have Jack Murphy for our resident Irishman, so happy St. Patrick's Day to everybody who celebrates Jonathan Hacken and Andy Milburn. Like going on as usual, we just saw, just like update, like terms and news, we saw the defense ministry get smoked. And around yesterday or last night, I guess they confirmed it. We have a bunch of news actually that happened, and we didn't talk about it beforehand.

But we just saw Joel Kent, he's like head of CT, resigned, and say, because of the Iran War, and that Israel basically dog walk this in.

I really wanted to talk about because I've seen it popping up in the press, and actually talking to regular people. There are a lot of people who are worried about like a possible Iranian sleeper, cell attack, or has below a sleeper, cell attack.

“And I wanted to talk to the experts to see like what the actual, like, isn't actually possible. Is there a real threat?”

We've seen a couple, three actually attacks, one in a synagogue that was 11 East person, whose family died. He rammed into the synagogue and killed a few people. We also saw the tech, the Austin shooter, and the, what was the, what was he at? There's another guy, too, that shot up a bunch of people, and then the cadets stabbed them. Kill them in a university, and there you go.

So we've seen like these lone wolves, as far as we know, it's a lone wolf attack, not like these organized where they could trace it back to like a sleeper cell, you know, Iranian intelligence or Hezbollah. So I have the experts here, so you guys tell me how, how much, how at risk are we in the United States?

“I can go first if you want to, so I was a counterintelligence agent, and this is exactly the kind of stuff we looked at both inside the US and again, serializing partners as well.”

And counterintelligence always looks through the eyes of the adversary, which we call red to understand the red's perception of blue, which is the friendly forces.

So in this situation, I'm looking through the eyes of Hezbollah to think about how do they want to do stuff inside this country. And they have people here, they have ideas, they have, you know, goals that they want to achieve, but there's a missing ingredient for any threat, and that is capability. So they could have intent all day long, they can dream about these big plans, but if they don't have the capability to do it, it's very low threat, right? So that's what we're always looking for from the exploitation side, the neutralization side, as far as counterintelligence is concerned, so the FBI is going to be looking at right now is.

Okay, they have the intent, not much we can do about that, you can't kill an idea, but we can reduce capability on their side. Or we can look at the things they might be interested in and get ahead of them, so that when they go try to use those capabilities, they don't work out the way they expected them to. This is kind of a basic level, and look at this picture.

“When we talk about sleeper cells, it's important to find, what does that mean?”

Because like you mentioned, there might be an inspired lone wolf that just doesn't attack, that's not a sleeper cell. Sleeper cell, like, but definitely is a much deeper, long-term thing, where the person was sent their way ahead of time with a very simple mission statement, and they remain quiet and integrated into the community, working in that community like a normal person for a long time until they receive some form of activation.

That means that years, many years, in some cases, that they have to be doing this, the mission has to be very simple, because things will change over time.

And if you give them two detailed of a mission, that mission might not even exist, that capability might not exist in the future when they're activated.

“And that's important to think about now, because this is kind of a black swan situation where the way the US and Israel are attacking Iran, that's very difficult to predict when and how that would have happened.”

It could have just been something like, if there is a war in Iran, do X, it might be something this simple. And the individual that is a sleeper would not be sent there alone. They wouldn't know the others in the network, but they would not be alone. And this means there's compartmentalization that has to happen, and there has to be a handler overhead that's actually helping to coordinate the activities of these individuals. So that introduces another layer of complexity, and we have seen how Iran has done things in the United States in the past,

and also compared to other countries, it's very different than how they operate in the United States.

I can get into official and unofficial activities.

They've done especially using business cover for commercial activity cover for what they're doing in the United States. But on the whole, they've been pretty amateur in the United States. It's not because they just suck, it's because their capability level, like I mentioned earlier, is low for a variety of reasons.

“Not least of which is its difficult for a handler to get to the United States, which means they typically have to communicate over distance through phones,”

or other electronic means, or through non-personal communications, like leaving notes somewhere or something like this. That's a limitation in their capability. It's a limitation on what they can actually achieve when they're here. The other problem is money.

They're not part of the swift banking system.

They haven't been since 2018, so they either have to use it a hoala, or some kind of other activity to conceal the origin of the money they're using to pay for these activities. There is an example in 2011 when there was around $250,000 they were trying to pay to a cartel member to give a weapon to a gentleman in Texas, who was supposed to go assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, D.C. The cartel member said, "Hey, I'm a cartel guy. I'm going to go tell the DEA that this is going on because I don't want to be involved in your own."

And that's actually how the U.S. found out about that. Just kind of interesting. And that was a very expensive operation that just evaporated because the capability was so low. I'll stop there at that kind of functional level and we can talk more about it.

“But that's how we're kind of like setting the frame around this discussion.”

Yeah, I think that's a great frame too, John. The question of capability is so important. Another example I would make to people that demonstrate where there was a capability, a surprising capability, even when the Russians began the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and these sabotage cells suddenly activated across Russia. You saw military infrastructure, oil infrastructure, really across the breadth of the country going up in flames. So there was an intelligence or intelligent entity or entities that absolutely had a capability.

I mean, they had the people in place, but they had the capability, being there was pre-plane targets, targeting packets were done up, and there were cash-a site locations full of explosives. And those cells were activated through some sort of covert communications method or Covecom. So that's one example of, you know, where you see a capability doesn't come out of nowhere. So when you see a bunch of strikes like that happening, it lends itself to the safe assumption that there is an intelligent entity behind this.

It's not lone wolves, it's not, you know, it's not just dissident groups. I mean, dissident groups don't come out of nowhere with a capability like that. It takes them time to evolve and find their way with those things. So that's one interesting example to look at. The other, I was mentioning to John before the show was, and we get into a little bit in detail,

but the book "Burn Bomb Destroy" about the German sleeper cells that were here during World War I, conducting acts of sabotage, also quite amateurish, but it evolved over time. And they used incendiary devices probably not that different than the stuff that the cells in Russia used, you know, a hundred years later, to destroy ships, you know, ships that were on their way to Europe. And when it really got effective, again, this question of capability was when you're using sleepers,

you're using a surrogate for something of this nature. I've had a CIA officer describe it to me because he tried to, he did do this in Afghanistan. He's like, imagine trying to play pool, and you're sitting on top of overturned trash can ten feet away from the pool table, and you got like three cues that are like duct taped together. And you know, like trying to like hit the ball and knock the eight ball in the corner pocket.

He's like, that's kind of what you're trying to do. The further away from it, you are, the harder it becomes to control those operations. With the German case, you know, they became effective once they got a no shit German intelligence officer into the country to start coordinating and running some of that stuff.

Just a couple things to tag on to what John already illuminated there.

There's one case back in the 1990s. I said to look it up to get the name right. It was Captain Will Rogers three, the skipper of the USS Vincentas in San Diego. There was a bomb found in his van. And to this day, I don't think it's ever been fully explained what that was about.

There's thoughts in the intelligence community or there has been over the years that that was in Iranian plot. But the Iranians also whack people globally. I mean, they're not like cautious about that. There is an Iranian op and just saying Europe that the bomb didn't go off. But when they deconstructed it, it was a very advanced bomb.

It shocked a lot of people in the security community in Europe.

So the Iranians don't have a lot of hesitation with this sort of stuff.

“But now, you know, are these cells in the United States?”

And I think we have some pretty good proof that they aren't. That those cells just don't exist. After the Soleimani strike, you would have expected something to have cooked off. And now we're bombing the hell out of Iran and fixing to do potentially a ground invasion. I mean, if the Iranians are not activating those cells now, then explain to me what the trigger is.

Because they're already in an existential crisis right now. I mean, they're not going to topple easily, but if not now, then one. That would be my question.

And I think that's sort of the counterfactual.

You could look at this to try to determine if these cells even exist. I would say they probably don't. However, there are people in this country. They could be lone wolves.

“They could be, you know, support agents.”

People who are sympathetic towards the Iranian regime who take action on their own. Or maybe at direction from, you know, back in Iran. One thing that I was told about just yesterday is a bunch of suspicious packages have been showing up at McDill Air Force Base. Directed towards SENTCOM, Central Command. The FBI is investigating this.

They're involved. I have not heard that an actual bomb has turned up yet. But I mean, this could even just be a psychological operation to send packages that look like bombs to just, you know, get people on the base, you know, cautious or afraid. So we'll see what happens with that.

I don't know what John is anything I'm missing here that you'd like to elaborate on. I just want to kind of pull on a thread that you mentioned. You mentioned sabotage and a couple of things like this. And again, from that counterintelligence framework. So there are four types of attacks we'd be looking for from a potential sleeper element like you're mentioning.

“And those attacks would be against certain types of targets, right?”

Because you're trying to achieve some objective by doing this thing. The four types of targets are persons, organizations, installations, and then people generally. And there's a specific type of attack that targets each one of these. So for example, attacks against persons are typically espionage related. Attacks against organizations are subversion related.

And then against installations, sabotage. Then against people or other things to get terrorism as that kind of catch all at the end. But when we're trying to protect against these things to produce that capability I was talking about. Like you mentioned, it might be a lone wolf or even a person in contact with some quits force guy overseas. They could have that intent all day long.

But if we can actually go after the person's organizations and installations to defend those categories, we can work precisely, protect them. So even if the adversary had some really good intent, and maybe even a little bit of capability, the target suddenly becomes too hard to strike. And they're going to have to flow around it and go somewhere else. So this is kind of the thing we look at when we're trying to preemptively neutralize these activities as evaluating our own installations like McDill Air Force Base.

For example, we'd be thinking about how to vehicles get in on the base, how the packages go around here. Like where are the cameras, all these things to get these things already ahead of time. So if something like this comes up, the person approaching your vehicle already understands how to evaluate their vehicle before getting into it due to heightened threat environment situations, for example. So these are the things to keep in the back of the mind as a person evaluating what are these actual threats and what is the actual capability.

And I'll mention the Bojanka plot, which was a pre al Qaeda type plot in the 1990s that college shake Mohammed and some others were planning to bring a bunch of aircraft and crash them into buildings, which sounds a lot like September 11. But this was before September 11. The reason they weren't able to do that, they had a really good plan, excellent ideas, and a lot of intent that they had almost no capability to do it. It wasn't until later on that they actually shifted their operations to be able to have the capability years later in 2001 to actually execute such a threat with the capability required to do it.

And I only highlight that because the intent didn't change the entire time, what did change was their ability and the opportunity to do that attack.

And a country like the United States.

There were a few. The Soviets didn't have as many as we probably thought they did, but at the end of the Cold War it was revealed that they did have some sleeper agents. In the Milkbeardens book, the main enemy, he talks about one of them, a check guy who they had placed in the United States.

“And after the wall came down, I think I believe he came forward if I remember correctly.”

And he had just integrated into the community. Like he had a family, he had like kid plane and little league baseball and this sort of stuff. And he was like, yeah, I have like this trunk of like rusty military gear and my basement. If you guys want to come get it, like, I don't give a fuck. And I think this is a problem too with that a country like Iran would have.

You send sleepers to the United States. When they're here for a prolonged period of time, building their cover and building their capabilities, unless they are the most hardcore ideological dude. They are going to start finding a woman. They're going to get a job. They're going to have kids. The kids are going to get into school.

And then when that activation code finally comes 30 years later, they're like, yeah.

Do I really want to like screw up my whole life here and end up in a super max for the rest of my days? Because this authoritarian regime that doesn't give a shit about me wants me to go and kill a bunch of innocent people. So I think that's another dynamic that comes into play when you're trying to use sleeper agents. I actually jack on that. So even not just sleeper agents, but embassy personnel from these countries. I was doing a lot of work in North Africa out of the US embassies there.

And there were there were a few North Korean diplomats that in the countries that have North Korean embassies there in North West Africa. Those diplomats are not allowed to return back to Pyongyang ever. They have to rotate around the embassies in North West Africa because the government, authoritarian government, is worried about the exposure they've had to things like alcohol and parties and restaurants and freedom, even in North West Africa to the extent that they will not allow them to return back to rotate back to the mainland.

That's crazy. What I'd heard is that the embassy personnel from North Korea have to travel around in threes. Yeah, to make it impossible for the agency for CIA to recruit them. We had the same thing with the Chinese as well.

When I was in the defense at Tashae staff, the Russians would always come and appear in a group of three,

the Troika, the Chinese would always be in a group of three. And we wouldn't interact with the North Koreans, but they also would. And so are the Iranians because they know themselves. The government knows this is going to happen. Right.

It's this like mutually assured destruction. Everyone's spying on everyone else. They had to go to the bathroom in threes at any events that we were at. That's wild. Nice to meet you guys.

Andy, Andy, when restart what you were saying, I'm apologize you were muted. Am I muted now? You're good now, you're good now. Andy, you customarily made drinks up. You're yelling at Richie.

Oh. Okay. All right.

“So going back to Iran though, I mean, I think, and John, you know, way more about this than I do.”

But, you know, this term sleeper cell sounds sexy. It evokes Hollywood, it evokes that many series, you know, the Netflix, many series about Russian sleeper cells. But I think it's fair to say. I mean, that's not the way the Iranians operate.

They can't afford to operate that way. As, you know, as Jack pointed out, what put a cell into the United States. And with the instructions to act if a war comes, you know, if war occurs. I mean, neither coups falls nor his baller has that kind of resources, although. And that's just not that modus operandi, right?

I mean, they plan for specific operations. And they insert people for those operations. But they don't, they don't send people to the United States for two or three decades. And have them integrate in American society, apply for green cards. And, and residents all of this, just on the contingency that something might happen.

“And, and I think, you know, although it's say it.”

It, it, there's another factor to this, right? Or the gain. I mean, although this is a, a super sexy topic that's likely to get everyone's attention. If, if you were planning this from an Iranian perspective, Mr. Get tax within the United States are actually a relatively hard target.

You've got plenty of softer targets spread out across, not just Middle East, but globally. U.S. interests overseas diplomatic missions. Military bases, as we've seen, you know, even military bases that should be hardened. In the Middle East, are still subject to attack from, from Iranians where they can cause casualties without all the planning and everything else involved

I mean, very little chance of a Hollywood sleeper cell type scenario. And, and what we've seen is directly a small targeted networks. You know, that, that are, that are put in for a specific mission.

“And we've co, the other thing is, I think we kind of conflate it and, unlike here, you're thoughts on this, John.”

Iranian direct Iranian action, which would be coups force, right, which is the Iran's external operations arm, IRGC-6. And, and proxies like his baller, a host baller does have an overseas, you know, a section that's focused on overseas operations. And I forget what it's called. It's like the IJL or something, John, you're probably from, you know, Yeah, it's a lot of general organization. Yeah, but they, but as far as, I mean, there was an attempt in attack on the Saudi ambassador right back in 2011.

But aside from that, we've seen mainly, you know, fundraising, logistics, procurement. That's kind of the things that they focus on, mostly, and, and integration of criminal networks in the Western Hemisphere. That's a great point. I'm sorry. It's just, go ahead, Jim. I was just going to mention the financial thing you're talking about.

So Latin America, in particular, Brazil, for example, has six million Lebanese people.

There's almost as many Lebanese people in Brazil as there are in Lebanon.

“And many of them are either Jerusalem or Shea descendants from Lebanese diaspora.”

And Hezbollah's main source of money, even though the regime pays them a lot of money. Their main source of money is drug sales. And a lot of those drugs are from South America, especially cocaine being sold in Africa. And Dakar Senegal is the main entry point into all the entire continent of Africa from Latin America, which is a Hezbollah controlled through way.

And actually, in Dakar Senegal, there's a big Hezbollah problem. And there's absolutely an Iranian embassy right down the street from the Hezbollah house that they live in. Our team house was across the street from where the Hezbollah house was when I was there. And it's a very interesting little microcosm of what they're trying to do to fund themselves. And part of the reason they had this Islamic Jihad organization, even though the name of it sounds like an ideological thing,

is actually more of a force protection asset to protect the money and drugs, moving back and forth between these nodes, to make sure that people aren't going to steal it or do something to it. So they can bring it to the Middle East, Saudi Arabia as a huge purchaser of these drugs. So it was Syria. We had a thing in Lebanon when I was there where we had an aircraft that was a Saudi prince's aircraft, that was full of ecstasy pills that Hezbollah had manufactured, and this prince was selling them.

And we found that on his aircraft, you know, it was deflated or deflated and noted. And these drug networks require a lot of strong arm muscle, including these overseas operatives, who may be trained to protect the stuff. But could also be activated in turn to do other things, like we were talking about earlier, they could do sabotage, they could do subversion, they could conduct terrorism if they need to,

especially because they have these networks that can already move in between and in out of between these different countries, especially to Latin America. And we just, I was in decline, like 2013, have a nice new embassy, we just built there. We're just significant, significant Lebanese population in that country. But on that, I would guess, I don't know, I would guess, as follows, external operations capabilities,

likely being degraded compared to about a decade ago. I mean, largely because of, I mean, Syria is very key hub for moving people in equipment. And of course, that environments become much more contested. And, and as Bolla has, that is its own problems on its hands in Lebanon itself. You know, I just, again, it just seems to me a far-fetched, but, but attention grabbing topic that is,

“that is surfaced without any foundation in, in, in, in, in fact, right?”

I'm not, I'm not dismissing the risk. And of course, it's always a risk.

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“It's a minimal compared to real risks facing us, right?”

And continued attacks on U.S. forces and interests and related interests overseas. So, I mean, I don't know if we're ready to shift gears, but I'd love to hear you two guys open and about the view on its way to the Persian Gulf. I was waiting for John to kick it off. But I'm happy to do so.

Yeah, this has been one of the most important developments.

Perhaps not the most of my attention grabbing developments in the last week, because the movement of a marine expedition unit, the 31st marine expedition unit, out of Okanala, a garden spot as those who've spent any time there know. And why is that important? Well, 31st mu has actually lower level of capability than the mu's that are based out

at the United States. You know, I'm not saying that it's being known as a security corporation. Right? I'm going to get beaten up by 31st mu guys for saying that. But it's definitely a lower level of capabilities. My point is that it's an odd choice if you are indeed planning to conduct raids.

It wouldn't necessarily, you know, wouldn't be my first choice of mu.

It's a four-deployed amphibious landing force, but it's very small. You'll hear a lot of talk about 2000 rains. But actually those who go ashore is pretty near a 1200, which is relatively very small.

“So, you know, I think if they do go ashore, it's going to be very quick.”

They're going to hit specific targets, the raids, and then withdraw. They're not going to invade Iran, which is, no, but over the scene, you know. And that's the problem, right? You hear talk about ground force, and people don't understand then you want to say, "So there's certainly the general public."

So in rain expedition units, I mentioned about 2000 rains, amphibious ships, typically three or five. They have helicopters, tilt road or aircraft, limited aviation support, and it's primarily for raids and crisis response. The streets of Hormuz, potentially, targeted raids within the streets of Hormuz, the island's there. Because as we've seen, you know, you can't.

There's a couple of problems with the air campaign. I mean, there are certain things that you, that are, as we've found out, hard to destroy, locate and destroy missile launchers being one of them. The drones, faster tank boats, can be hidden, coastal radar, and mines. You know, all these things can be moved around quite easily.

And although we've seen very optimistic projections about what we've destroyed, the real truth is, as anyone who's dealt with battle damage assessment knows, is that once you get past kind of like an estimated 50% past 50% estimate that you destroy the enemy's capability, it's really difficult to be precise about it.

“And the point here is, at what point do we say, the straight of Hormuz is open for traffic, right?”

Because unless we really show you the limited the risk, well, how you show you a limited the risk, unless you put someone ashore to do that kind of assessment, to conduct raids, to destroy targeted operations, to destroy enemy infrastructure, and then report it. So you know, as I mentioned, I mentioned missile launchers,

on these islands, there's also potential for underground storage of missiles and other weapon systems. Another factor disrupting battle damage assessment in the golf is undoubtedly the arena

continue to do in that conflict.

So what value do they bring? Okay, why would we land them? We split clear tunnel complexes, you know, it's in the side from the missile launches, destroy radar systems, eliminate drone launch sites, and confirm targets and neutralize those are all things.

I know we're going to talk about separately, the enriched uranium problem, but if we're just talking about kind of conventional targeting for raids in the golf, that's more or less what we're talking about. And there's a series of islands, John, I'm going to butcher the names, there's Abu Musa, right? The one right at the entrance to the street.

“I think if we were a, you know, normally we'd have to point these out on a map,”

but we haven't got that far for a technology yet. And then there's like the, I, it's built to you and be toned. A couple of islands over that, which are directly overlooking the shipping lanes, right? And Kesham Island, which is near Bander Abbas, which is major. Of course, you're in it, support, and we know that at least open source intelligence suggests

that that's been supporting drones, drone attacks. So any of those islands could be the target for raids. But of course, you put 1200 Marines ashore, it's not quite as simple as that. You, you're going, it's a major, major operation. You're going to have to have all kinds of support for that.

And of course, you elevate the risk, it's huge. Oh, hey, I mentioned, I forgot Carg Island, which is our favorite topic, right?

It's primary, the rise primary, oil export terminal, a critical to its economy, as we've heard.

“Some back and forth about whether we're going after the oil terminals on that island,”

or whether we want to preserve them, and perhaps the difference of opinion there with the Israelis that we can talk about. So, you know, a rate of seizure of car could disrupt further Iranian oil exports. So that, indeed, that's one of our objectives. But also, again, conduct battle damage assessment, which, which, as I've said, is a significant problem.

So, when you step back, sort of, the immune moving towards the Middle East, all it does is represents more options, right? I doubt, I don't know, I'm speculating. I doubt that they're moving there with a specific mission in mind. They will probably be a series of contingencies, and probably the decision hasn't been made,

whether or not to land them. And by the way, you know, the last thing I'll say on this is immune. I mean, marine expeditionary unit, I explained how small it is.

“Arguably, you get more out of it while it's at sea, right?”

It has kind of an operational impact then, because you could land it anyway. You keep the enemy guessing. Once you've landed it, it becomes very tactical. And you elevate your risk, right? Because now you've sucked into that one location.

And I want to talk about the streets for a minute. There you talked about Andy. And it's really important because when we're talking about measuring how safe are the streets, whether we've reduced to 50%, 90% et cetera, looking at absolute numbers of streets, transits on February 27th,

there were 140 plus per day of oil vessels that has trickled to six over five days, like one per day roughly. There were 11 Iranian vessels in Persian Gulf in the past couple of weeks that were able to transit out and bring oil to China, which is why they're actually selling more oil right now than they were before. The conflict started.

And the only vessel that has actually gone out and exited the streets with oil was yesterday. It was a Pakistani flag vessel that had agreed with the Iranian foreign ministry to allow it to transit through various political reasons. And there were two Indian vessels that are allowed to move back to repatriate some Iranian bodies from the Sri Lanka coastline that were bombed by the submarine few days ago.

So if we're looking at that, it's down below single digit percentages of transit through there. It's absolutely not secured. No reality is it safe to transit through there. And the other challenge is maybe from a military perspective, it's physically safe.

But if you're an insurance company that's ensuring a marriage ship with $300 million

worth of oil on it, you may be very hesitant to ensure that ship. And so this is another political external factor that the military can't really control. It's going to have to be at the political level at this problem itself. Or else these vessels won't feel safe enough and the insurance companies won't feel safe enough to ensure those vessels, even if it is physically safe to pass through.

And from the Israeli side to tell the world that hey, it is actually safe or the US can absorb some of that risk

by promising those insurance companies that they'll almost subsidize that insurance. Kind of like the federal deposit insurance we have for deposits in banks, which is something that has been discussed but isn't fully in place yet. And then on the mu portion of it, you mentioned it's this small, versatile entity. It's actually the smallest of a certain type of marine task organization called a marine airground task force.

Which is something unique to the Marine Corps for listeners who don't know this. This task force is very scalable from that mu size, which is roughly 2200 total people, including logistics and other support and command element, they can move up to a brigade size element and it can move up to a force size element. These are kind of like increasing scale echelon for what a command might need. And by comparison, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there were mues that were there,

but they were part of larger, much larger entities doing a ground force invasion of Iraq, which is arguably a far less complex invasion than the terrain facing the ground forces in Iran,

which would require many, many more units of much higher scale to actually traverse and secure those high terrain features

to safely move into the country from a conventional ground force invasion perspective. So when looking at this mu, people are thinking about boots in the ground, probably if some kind of conventional combat force and it's important to be hesitant there and question, "Well, how much would that mu actually achieve and would it even be safe for it to go a ground?" It would the small size it has because that's not what the mu is for alone. As Andy mentioned, that mu is to do things amphibiously from sea, ship to shore, and then back to ship.

That's really what it's supposed to be for. Like if you're seizing a beach, holding a beach, securing a location for follow-on forces to flow through things like this, they're not supposed to be there long term, and they're not supposed to be the main combat element.

“That's what things like the 80-second airborne and marine divisions are for.”

And we have a great map up here we can see. It's great to form those. Master's of technology. Yep, Jack didn't college with this one. I'm impressed, actually.

You see Crag Island though, it's a little bit more north. So there it says Cark, which is actually spelled. Yep. And that's 100 kilometers from Abadan. And I was reading about this island too today that this has supposedly underground missile facilities on it.

Yeah, you can actually see them on Google satellite imagery. You can see the Russian surface-taire missile, the SA-9. Yeah, usually have like a pentagon formation. You can see those all up and down the island. Have we not been hitting that island?

I'm sure we have. I'm assuming we have been. We, the desalination plant we hit was on that island. And that's kind of messed up like it.

It basically deprived 30 villages of fresh water.

I mean, I don't know. Isn't that a war crime? I'm not a jag, but it sounds like it.

“Well, remember we don't have those silly rules of engagement anymore.”

Oh, yeah, that's right. No more politically correct wars. I'm so excited about that. John's trying to get me triggered, bro, and this is such a good episode. And he's doing this on purpose, I know it.

You know, I mean, it raises a. It raises a point that I don't think is commonly understood. Not even in the military, right? About the enemy's order of battle. And understanding how much you've attracted it.

And even with all the technology, the United States has added disposable. What a difficult task that is made more difficult by, you know, the train. By the fact that when you talk about the nature of what is being potentially could be hidden. And we talked about missile launchers, drones, small boats. So these things that are could significantly remain a threat are easy to disperse and conceal.

So it doesn't matter what you have. So these press conferences where we are tracking out all the things that we have done, don't really answer the mail. The real question is, what does Iran have left? And that arguably could be what Marines are sure could do,

“although personally, I think I would just for a number.”

I mean, I would select different special operations forces to do that. If you, if you, if you, if you, if you, if you're concerned as BDA, and 2000 Marines won't be once once you committed them as I made the point earlier, you committed them, right? It's not something that, I mean, yes, you backload them on ships.

But it's not, it's not as so you can hop all around the streets of whole news using them again and again. Yeah, that's actually a good point. We were on the special operations task force in Iraq in 2016. And we did a lot of strikes. I think it was 30,000 strikes in six months.

And we had to do battle damage assessment after all those strikes to ensure that we are hitting targets right with the right things and all that. And even that, when we were, we had the ability to get inside the denied area and actually measure the BDA.

Because you have human intelligence that's not always accurate.

You have signals and intelligence that only gives you a piece of the picture.

“When you look at the physical infrastructure that doesn't actually tell you about capability, it just tells you about the building, right?”

And if there's bodies in there, we don't know which bodies you have sources of the hospital trying to tell you who they were, but you still don't know. And that's when you're actually physically there. And we don't have that scale of deployment in Iran, which on a much larger scale of destruction already that's going to require precise BDA to actually measure. Did we hit the right things with the right equipment and with the right follow on effects? John one thing that hasn't received much attention though, it's to my surprise.

And certainly in the media and discussions are this time round in Iran's nuclear facilities. I mean, there hasn't been mentioned of destruction to them in battle discussions about all damage assessments.

First of all, what's your take on that?

And secondly, do you think perhaps that's the next phase of this operation? I saw some satellite imagery on January 31st. I believe of some of the facilities and they're basically buried underground by the strikes that we did. And the thing there is you don't know how much is buried or if there wasn't anything buried there. And back in June when we were striking some facilities, the regime had already moved some of the uranium to other facilities.

So it's very difficult without having people in the ground to actually know what's in there. That's not human sources because even the sources might not know because they're not digging in the soil. There might be just guessing and saying, well, it looks like this was destroyed. So I guess that's probably what this is. You would actually need to go there and measure with some technical equipment to figure out what amount of material remains underground.

“And the only way to do that is to obviously dig underground is a very challenging thing to do because these facilities were very deep underground the first place.”

And if you've seen some of the strikes that we did that were the penetrators that went that they basically are very heavy. They hit the ground or deep underground before they explode. They have this little pinpoint hole in the ground before they go in and they do a bunker bus to explosion deep underground. You have no way to measure what the efficacy of that was. Or even if that was the right location in that complex where you should be hitting it because nobody's got a flag there saying the uranium is here.

Even if at the facility, they might have moved it to a different wing. They might be other tunnels. We can do a lot of measurement and signature intelligence or maze it to see what soil was moved where when how much soil was removed. So we can estimate how large the tunnels are based on what the amount of material that's been removed is.

But that doesn't tell you what the configuration of the tunnel is and all these other things there could be some side room that we never knew existed.

So there's a lot of variables and difficulties on top of this even if you had a good human network in the country.

“It's a kind of a black box without actually physically being there with the tools you need to measure this material.”

Yeah and there's no, you know when there's talk about not just damaged the facilities but the potential of securing and rich uranium itself, right? You see that speculation. I mean, one of the core problems is it aside from the fact that as we talked about damaged facilities doesn't necessarily mean that. What we see from damaged facilities doesn't necessarily give us an accurate picture. And trying to track where that material is, what condition it's in, whether it has been moved, whether it can be moved that short notice all those things are questions that are going to be very tough to answer.

If indeed that becomes a mission. And actually that's a great point about the complexity of this because there isn't just like a box of bizarre material in a facility. There are varying ways that this is stored depending on where it is in the process of enrichment and refinement. And the early stages you might have some yellow cake, for example, that is contained in a pretty obvious structural container. But if once you start putting it in the centrifuge cascades, which Iran uses the specialized cascades system of centrifuges, because they're not allowed to get the larger centrifuges that in the particular powered countries have.

So you basically have these very long lines of centrifuges all produced by the German company Siemens. That's another thing to talk about how they got there anyways. They're there. They've got these things all linked together and these very long almost like tubes of many centrifuges, spending at different speeds to try to separate and enrich the uranium. In a particular facility like Natans, for example, they may be thousands of these centrifuges. And they're pretty they're bigger than my head per centrifuge, right? So I mean, if you want to go get these things out, you're not talking about a guy going in with a backpack and just putting the uranium in his backpack and walking out. You're talking about a very long tail logistical requirement to support just the movement, not talking about the safety or these other things, but just the actual logistics of getting this stuff out. How many people would you need? What kind of equipment would you need?

You might even be a thought going on in the decision making process about what if we just physically destroy enough so that nobody can dig down there and get the stuff out.

And I'm sure this kind of discussion is going on right now with the National Security Council and I'm sure Marco Ruby has talking to himself in the different positions that he holds to try to figure out how to advise himself to tell the president about how to get this uranium out.

“Yeah, the hottest part of the mission isn't getting there. It's what you do when you do get that.”

Yeah, a little bit. I'm not going to talk too much about what's actually going on or potentially going on right now in regards to this, but a little bit of historical data that may be useful for to help people think about this. The counter WMD mission. I mean, of course, has been, you know, with Jay Sox since its inception early training exercises. Delta was going up against simulated improvised nuclear devices and having EOD guys come in and disarm them. But then it kicks in a hike here in the 1980s when Gaddafi had an underground chemical weapons facility in Tarhana and Jay Sox was tasked with a mission planning a mission to go in and destroy it and interestingly the way it was planned was that Marine Corps hovercraft would come up over the coast of Libya.

“Come as far as inland as they could. Then they would offload trucks with the Jay Sox guys on it. They would then drive to Tarhana using industrial drilling equipment drilled down from the surface into the facility.”

And then in like basically cement mixer trucks pouring explosive slurry down into the facility and detonate it. So it was a pretty crazy plan. I guess it's for the best that it never had to be executed. And that was that situation was resolved diplomatically and Gaddafi shut that facility down. But that was sort of the beginning of Jay Sox sort of looking at this problem set and it's evolved over the years. It's been called the deep underground mission or the hardened deeply buried target mission.

So over the years that has evolved into essentially, you know, Jay Sox going into conduct WMD sabotage like just going into destroy those facilities. And it could be like chemical weapons vats. It could be physio material, whatever the case may be. And then that evolved, you know, by the time you get into like the mid to late 1990s, it evolved not just into the destruction, but to seize the material and take it out with you. And Jay Sox has done extensive training on this at the Nevada test site and underground tunnels and things like this practicing explosive breaching like breaching heavy vault bunker doors underground.

It's a very technically difficult mission to accomplish and they've done this. And I mean all the way up until yeah, some other stuff I won't even get into right now.

But the CBRN aspect to the radiological material aspect of it makes this mission that much more dangerous, especially if you're going into targets that have already been hit with air strikes. You don't know, like have those vats been cracked open, did they topple over? Is this stuff already in the ground? So it's, it's a very technically and logistically complicated operation to pull off. And I have a question. It's not going to be like some quick like Maduro raid few hours overnight. It's going to take days or weeks. I'm assuming to do this. So there would need to be security.

You know, it's not just a quick enough now, you know, thanks for coming in a foreign, any sovereign hostile country.

“You're going to need a secure perimeter for an extended period of time, right? I mean days to weeks at a secure perimeter control surrounding terrain protection against counter attack, which could come from in any domain, right?”

So as a marine expeditionary unit potentially could provide, could accomplish that mission. I know, let me rephrase that.

That could potentially be a mission assigned to the marine expeditionary unit, but it's never been done before, right?

It's not something specifically that marine's trained for for that period of time. And you can imagine, I mean, so you see, you've got all that inner problems, right? Inside that cord and all the problems that you're going to have to deal with. Locating the material, verifying it, securing it, either destroying it or removing it. And then you've got the external security problem, which is immensely complex too.

And makes you all of which makes you hugely vulnerable.

You know, this is pretty much unprecedented what we're talking about here. And the precedent you would look to, if anything, it's not like the Maduro raid or the bin Laden raid or something like that.

So calm with somewhat involved, but mostly it was Dittra, the Defense threat reduction agency went to a island in Uzbekistan, where the Soviets had a chemical weapons facility back in the day.

“And there were tons and tons of anthrax in the ground. If terrorists wanted, they could just go to this island and digging anthrax out of the ground and that had their sample ready to go.”

So Dittra goes in there with their, all their subcontractors and Raytheon contractors and everyone else. And they destroyed that material. They dug it up out of the ground and destroyed the, I think like 60 tons of anthrax that came out to. Now the difference, of course, is this was a permissive environment. This was done with the cooperation of the government of Uzbekistan. You know, we want to go in and destroy these WMDs and keep the world safe and use Becca stands like, okay, bring your boys in, we do this. It wasn't an armed military operation.

But what we're talking about in Iran would have more in common with what I just described than with like a Maduro raid.

“And plus, we're talking about this as if it's like one facility. There are at least 12 different facilities in different provinces spread all over the place. You have to, you have to repeat this 12 times or more.”

Successfully to achieve the objective that you're looking for. So that means every single time you do it, you're introducing new risk, new layers of complexity, new opportunities for attack. Because let's say you do it like three times. Well, the adversary is going to measure how you did those three times and figure out all kinds of ways to exploit the next nine times you have to do this because you're going to have to keep repeating the same TTPs every time.

And if you reveal your, your, your clandestine methodologies in that first couple of goes and you can't use them anymore in the same way that you did previously.

Yeah, if this was a, what we call a covert brief, right, a course of action brief. You look at, you look at the cons that we've stamped up here. And it's very difficult to think of throws that would balance against those cons. And yes, strategically, Andy, I mean, you look at this kind of operation that we're talking about.

“Explain to me how this brings us closer to victory in Iran. How does this bring us closer to a democratic Iran?”

Okay, you're getting some physio material out of the ground and denying that to the Iranian government, if they ever get back on their feet to the point where they can recover that stuff. But this doesn't really bring us closer to a victory or a win. You're kind of when even that, you know, President Trump seems to desire. I don't think it gets us closer to his own stated objective here. It's similar to desert one, I would go back to Eagle Claw in Iran because this is a very similar thing where there's that risk benefit in the military planning side of it.

And there's the political choice to do it anyway, even though it's extremely risky and a commander would never give this green light unless the president tells him what you're doing this.

And it's the same thing where there's these layers of especially air and logistics capability that they, there's so much complexity in there and it only takes one crash at a fuel bladder in a desert to change the whole thing in a direction that you didn't expect and that the people will not accept. Yeah, they're different from being the rescue of US hostages in Iran, arguably was a strategic imperative, right? And where is securing and reaching the uranium in sights in Iran, it's hard to align with any strategic imperative that would justify the level of risk.

Yeah, especially when it's buried under a rubble, they don't have any access to it apparently. Okay, well, I'm glad we dealt with that one. Let's also not forget that this was the uranium was on the table right before we started bombing Iran. To be sentenced. Well, it gets back to perhaps a lack of coherence and describing what the end state is, the desired conditions are for termination of hostilities, right, and we haven't seen yet kind of a coherent statement.

So we're speculating and I'm sure military commanders, I don't know, but I hope that they are saying, hey boss, we're going, if if our goals are reduction of Iranian capabilities, right, to the point where Iran is effectively neutralized and cannot do X things for X period of time, then these are the conditions that need to exist. And we are one week, two weeks away from achieving those conditions, right, that's kind of the conversation that should take place. But boss, if you wanted to destroy the nuclear facilities and set them back six months, one year, two years, then we need to extend the campaign by X number of time.

Spoiler or they're not. I'm sorry, I'm sorry to be a doomer, Debbie Downer on you, Andy, I don't think those conversations are taking place. Well, you know, one would hope those conversations are taking place in an open forum too, you know, I mean, these these sort of conversations that that's one of the disadvantages with waging more is a liberal democracy and I say liberal little L, right, liberal democracy as in, you know, look it up what it means, not not you guys, I meant for those of our audience who start.

By Lotto, six from the 49th of September, the Tark des Glücks Extragive Indexed.

“The most important thing is that in the world of the two sons of the population, they are the only one million and thousands of thousands of people.”

Let's go, take a look at the hand, and then take a look at the hand. In every way, and then take a look at the E.

There's no name on 18 shows on the highest level of 1,5 million. We can do it right now, and the B-U-K-D-E.

This episode is brought to you by Spreeker, the platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones, you don't need explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives and saying things like, "Sorry, I can't talk right now, I'm editing audio." If this sounds familiar, you are probably already a podcaster. The good news is, Spreeker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreeker distributes it everywhere people listen.

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That authoritarian regime has about the way it wages war. We owe to the American public, normally via their elected representatives and explanation of why we're at war and what the objectives are. Because everyone's aware of the cost, or perhaps they're not at this stage. Which is a good point that I'll finish on really, and I'm not being a hand-ringer here. But I don't think anyone has a clear picture of you over all costs of this war.

I'm not talking about the billions of days that we're defending it. I'm talking about the effects on the global economy, the effect on our alliance networks. Our alliance says, sorry, that was a poorly worded phrase. John, you wanted to talk a little bit about the Iranian elite, like real estate portfolio in the UK. Yeah, it's really fascinating.

So Ali Ansari, who's this individual that's closely affiliated with Ahmadinejad, if I remember this colorful individual from the presidency that caused the Green Revolution in 2009. So he just opened up 33 new luxury apartments in London using investment money that he got from Iran, which is fascinating because they're not partly international banking system. They're not part of the swift banking system.

“And the money was taken from a regime affiliated account, right?”

So that's all opening up.

But that's not even the biggest dollar amount because right now, most of the potentially alive or dead leader of Iran has a 100 million dollar real estate investment in London as well.

That was just talked about a few weeks ago that the British government approved this purchase. It's just fascinating because people think, like, are they heavily sanctioned? Aren't they not part of the banking system? How are they getting this money? The thing is, you know, sanctions have certain levels of efficacy their studies done that say that this is actually not as effective as you think. And they're not really effective against an authoritarian state because that authoritarian state controls the black market.

So it's the regular people that can't access the banking system. And then these small group of elites can get outside of it and go do things outside of the country like we see right now.

“And a great example of that, Andy, I think we were talking about this a couple of weeks ago with how are they selling oil.”

And what they're doing is they have these banks all over the world. Bank Meli is a Iranian owned banks, a state owned bank. Bank Meli has a branch in Hong Kong and has a branch in London. It's got a branch in Hamburg and Paris. And these banks are in those countries. They can actually do business in those countries. So if you sell your oil in China for $300 million per vessel, you take that $300 million.

If you don't send it back to Iran, you bring it over to Bank Meli in Hong Kong and then wire it to London. And then go open up your real estate business in Civil Road. And this is what's going on. It's very interesting because most about, for example, the new Supreme Leader.

He's never worked. He's never earned a paycheck.

And he has a hundred million dollars that he can use to open up businesses in real estate in London.

They're terrible to their own people, but they're also highly corrupt. And this corruption is the thing that you can see outside the country.

You know, Canada, for example, a few years ago, the former Central Bank Director of Iran fled to Canada with $3.7 billion in assets.

You don't bring that into suitcase to Canada. That's wired to Canada. And the government of Canada proves that. We actually have a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who's the son of Masuma Ebtikar. And if you remember during the hostage crisis, there was a woman that was the speaker in English during the hostage crisis. Inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, that was the spokesperson for the new the new Colonel of the regime.

Her son is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. How is that possible, right? Is that reef? Former Foreign Minister went to Ohio State University, right? The more you look at this, the more you realize that these elites, they just escape all of our restrictions. And this is why there's such a problem right now, that disconnect between the people in Iran and these elites, that no matter what you do, they're going to find a way to snake around it, because it's not a democracy.

You know, they can be as corrupt as they want, and the people can't do anything about it, because first of all, they don't have any guns.

We got to add down a good better note. Well, I've got a better note. At some point. And I think I'm in a slight change of topic, but I think it's important.

“And I think a lot of people will learn from this, and this gets back to our discussion of the North Korean policy of the Troika, right?”

Three people wandering around together. And I want to point out that within the Marine Corps, our own research of the Troika has has really revealed that it's ineffective totally. So we used to operate, and this ties in with Okinawa too, because this is the liberty policy in Okinawa. That two Marines used to be the buddy program, right? But then we discovered over the course of, I don't know, maybe four decades.

There were one Marine gets drunk, the others likely also to get drunk.

So the policy became, they had to travel in a Troika. But guess what? We found that the same guy's got drunk. Yes, I've just won. So, and if the North Koreans are having the same problem.

And the other one is vinegar. Yeah, and Jack pulled up an excellent point too. That he talked about way of sleeping cells break down.

“And he said, you know, they, someone finds a woman, right?”

I mean, that's, that's the beginning of the scene. I mean, even, I believe Muhammad Ata, one of the 9/11 hijackers was dating a stripper down in Florida. I mean, these guys get sucked into this stuff. Maybe if that had gone on a little longer, he wouldn't have done what he did. As I was saying, it's only the most committed ideological people that can really stay committed to that.

And I've heard some stories about the Chinese, actually. Not so much sleeper cells per se, but more like espionage, where they're like super committed malice. And they like live a life of poverty, even if they have like an advanced degree, because they're putting all their money into, you know, helping out the fatherland or whatever. It's very weird, actually. Jack, you remember that story?

She's been talking to me about, I'm sorry, Django. I was going to say the Ministry of State Security actually is very unique in the great power of espionage world, because they don't recruit generally, don't recruit non-Chinese people. They'll typically only recruit Chinese citizens from China who are in the target country. Like, for example, they're going to Berkeley, getting a chemical engineering degree, but they're Chinese.

That's who the MSS will go after, because they know they have the very, like, they can measure that loyalty. And it's they don't have to develop it as much as we would have to develop, for example, recruiting an Egyptian guy to work for us in Egypt. Well, it's also that, you know, if they even find somebody who's not a Chinese citizen, but of Chinese ethnicity, and they still have family back on the mainland. I mean, they call the MSS calls them up and says, "Ah, is visiting your aunt, though they're dying?"

I mean, they get the message right away. I mean, they know what they're supposed to do.

“Jack, what was that story about a virologist who's a doctor working in the United States?”

You know, probably make it a decent living. Yeah, I was living in, like, squalor, because he was, like, a friend of mine worked that case where it was a Chinese guy. He had a job working for the government. He was an MD, but he was living out of his van, and he was selling ghost guns at a gun shows. And so there's no, there's as far as I know, there's no proof of, like, a Chinese intelligence nexus. But I've heard enough stories like this over the years. You start to wonder, like, is it really about making money?

Or is it this guy just acting as a chaos agent, like selling ghost guns to Latino and African-American gangs in New York City in this case? All right, great. Now we just brought in China trying to fuck us up too. Great. Well, there's other stuff too. I mean, if you start looking at, like, the order of the nine angles and, like, one of their founders lives in Russia now.

It's, it's like a satinist nihilistic movement that came out of the UK initially.

And those guys go and they do, you know, free shootings and stuff like that sometimes.

“I mean, again, I couldn't prove anything as far as, like, an intelligence nexus, but there's enough things that, like, you're squinting at it. Like, what the hell is going on here?”

What are we going to end satinist fucking shooting sprees? I want you guys to check out the high side Jack Murphy, Sean Naila, that working on a really good article coming out soon. Having to do a J-Soc really interesting with several at this point. Yeah, actually, yeah, multiple, multiple pants on the fire. The with his act, Dorfman, right? He's, he's helping out on one of them. What else? We got Andy Millburn, of course. Andy, give us a flex. Just show us one, one. No, we'll do that after. Yeah, you go me on that for the team house, right?

I want you guys to check out Andy's book that the time we went shut, let's, as well as Frank.

Well, yeah, you did forget Andy. Yeah, it's a classic song.

That's a, I will get you, sure. This again, not drunk. We'll get you shirtless again. We'll get you a John shirtless to drop his reputation a couple notches to. Give me more footer followers that way. Your book when the tap is gathered, incredible book, check that out.

“That link is in the description. John's book, of course, through you of a regular war in a ran shot of weapons.”

All those links are down in the description. I know Andy, you're working on another book having to do with Gaza in Israel, right? Like, that's cooking. So we're looking forward to that one. And of course, Jack's got a new book coming out in June. Very exciting, fiction, the most dangerous man. I read it. It's really good. Yeah, all those links are in the description. Support to show patreon.com/theteamhouse.

You get both eyes on and team house episodes ad-free and early.

And as always, a pleasure, guys. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks, guys. All the best. Hey, everyone. I want to tell you about my new novel, the most dangerous man out in June. It is a novel about a regimental reconnaissance company soldier who gets kidnapped while he's on a mission to West Africa.

And when he wakes up, he finds that he is now being hunted for sport by a group of tech billionaires through the wilds of West Africa. This book is based on stories that I heard over the years about Safari guides taking wealthy clients hunting for poachers on game reserves in Africa. I took that and I took a century old short story, the most dangerous game, and modernized it.

“And the product is this book, which I think will feel contemporary and resonate with audiences today.”

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Explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives.

“And seeing things like, "Sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm editing audio."”

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Start your show today at Spreeker.com. Spreeker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it.

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“And seeing things like, "Sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm editing audio."”

If this sounds familiar, you are probably already a podcaster. The good news is, Spreeker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreeker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple podcasts, Spotify, and about it doesn't apps your cousin swears on the next big thing. Even better, Spreeker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, or more microphones.

Start your show today at Spreeker.com.

Spreeker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreeker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones, you don't need. Explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives.

“And seeing things like, "Sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm editing audio."”

If this sounds familiar, you are probably already a podcaster. The good news is, Spreeker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreeker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple podcasts, Spotify, and about it doesn't apps your cousin swears on the next big thing. Even better, Spreeker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, or more microphones.

Start your show today at Spreeker.com. Spreeker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreeker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones, you don't need. Explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives. And seeing things like, "Sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm editing audio."

If this sounds familiar, you are probably already a podcaster. The good news is, Spreeker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreeker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple podcasts, Spotify, and about it doesn't apps your cousin swears on the next big thing. Even better, Spreeker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, or more microphones.

Start your show today at Spreeker.com. Spreeker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreeker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones, you don't need. Explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives. And seeing things like, "Sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm editing audio."

If this sounds familiar, you are probably already a podcaster. The good news is, Spreeker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreeker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple podcasts, Spotify, and about it doesn't apps your cousin swears on the next big thing. Even better, Spreeker helps you monetize your show with ads, meaning your podcast might someday pay for, well, or more microphones. Start your show today at Spreeker.com.

Spreeker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it. This episode is brought to you by Spreeker. The platform responsible for a rapidly spreading condition known as podcast brain. Symptoms include buying microphones, you don't need. Explaining RSS feeds to confused relatives. And seeing things like, "Sorry, I can't talk right now. I'm editing audio." If this sounds familiar, you are probably already a podcaster.

The good news is, Spreeker makes the whole process simple. You record your show, upload it once, and Spreeker distributes it everywhere people listen. Apple podcasts, Spotify, and about it doesn't apps your cousin swears on the next big thing.

Start your show today at Spreeker.com. Spreeker, because if you're going to talk to yourself for an hour, you might as well publish it.